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Welcome to the August episode of Learn with a Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate! In this episode, Joel discusses why educating new agents in real estate business is crucial and how growing positivity will help them handle stress. Joel also talks about work ethics and the importance of having consistency, setting priorities and discipline and how they lead agents to good relationships with their clients. If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube! Joel can be reached at joel@rate.com and 773.654.2049. This episode is brought to you by Real Geeks. Transcript D.J. Paris 0:00We’re approaching our 500th episode. And I just wanted to say that the number one characteristic that I’ve learned from all of the agents that we’ve had on our show of top producers has been consistency. We’re going to dive into that today. Stay tuned. This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by real geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren’t converting? Well real geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose real geeks as their technology partner. Real geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real geeks also includes an easy to use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest and have great follow up conversations. Real geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod and find out why Realtors come to real geeks to generate more business again, visit real geeks.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And now on to our show. Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Harris, I am your guide and host through the show today once again is our monthly series called Learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Now Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. He’s been doing loans at a high level since 2003. He’s got to that level because of what he does specifically for agents, which is he gives back part of his commission to the buyer on every transaction. In fact, last year alone, Joe gave back over $300,000 in closing costs to buyers who worked with him and that puts Joe’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of all lenders nationwide. In fact, there’s actually 400,000 loan officers in this in the United States. And Joel is currently ranked number 137. Now this year alone, he’s closed. Oh my gosh, I just screwed something up. Joel. My numbers just got screwy. So could you please tell us your numbers? I apologize. My eye numbers are screwy too. It’s crazy. I know. Yeah, right now, I mean, we’re lucky enough to be just under $75 million close DJ for the year in purchase. And that’s 170 closed transactions year to date so far. Yeah, amazing. That really is amazing. It is a tough year, a lot of our audiences probably, you know, feeling the challenges right now in the market. But what we do know is that consistency, hard work and discipline really pays off, it might just feel a little bit trickier today. But everything that people can do today is going to actually, you know, result in some bear some fruit here in the near future. So while it may feel I just want to address this because I run into a lot of realtors. So on my show, when this podcast when I talk to top producers, I’m speaking to the audience here for I just want to make a quick point that I hope resonates with everyone. So when I speak the top 1% producers, they get to where they’ve got by by tolerating market cycles, right? So they’ve been through UPS, they’ve been through downs, especially if they’ve been around, you know, since or the early 2000s. They’ve been through a few of these cycles. And they seem to understand the cycle. And so what I encourage anyone who hasn’t been through some of these cycles, and it’s feeling maybe a little tougher right now is, you know, seek refuge in some of these agents who have been around longer than you talk to them, ask them for the wisdom that they gained through these challenging times in the past, because they’ll give you all sorts of ideas of Oh, I wish I would have done this, you know, from 2008 to 2010, when the market was really, really struggling. And now you know, they’re able to do some of that today. And so if this is your first time going through a tricky market cycle, don’t don’t despair. It’s all part of part of the normal cycle of business. But we want to keep you motivated and encouraged to continue growing your business, which I know can be a little trickier. So Joel and I are going to focus on some things today that we really want to keep you engaged with your business even though you know right now, inventories low rates aren’t exactly where we want them to be. Yeah, that’s the rial Woody, and there’s things you can do to stay on top of it. So anyway, I apologize for that little rambling monologue there. But I did want to, I did want to make that point because we know it’s tough. And if you listen to my show, you know, we talked to these top one percenters. They’re like, everything’s great. This is so awesome. And it is great, because they’ve been through some of these hard times before, and they know how to navigate through them. So if you’re struggling, don’t you’re not alone. But we’re going to try to help you through that on this on this episode a little bit. And Joel has been around for a long, long time in this business. And he’s seen what top producers do throughout their time in practice to help you as well. So Joel, welcome once again to the show. Well, I love that you’re talking about this. I love the tangent, you call it a rant. But I mean, it’s true. It’s really what we’re doing here is literally educating agents. Because if the negative news is all around, you surround yourself with positivity, I work with agents that right now can tell you what they would have done if they had all the time in the world, right? So if it’s, if it’s slow for you, right, think about what you could do to actually grow the business, right? Because these agents, if you’ve been around for years, we recall when we didn’t have any extra time on our hands. So if you’re sitting there saying, I have all the extra time on my hands, because I don’t have 20 deals closing a month, right? What do you do? Surround yourself, listen to these podcasts, right? Grow your database, right? Make sure that people know that you’re in the business. And so we’re gonna go through a lot of stuff today that will absolutely help you get even one more deal. Maybe it’s a new buyer, maybe it’s a new listing. But by tuning in, you’re really going to grow. So we applaud you for that. I’m going to start with one that that I just heard, because I’ll forget in the next few seconds if I don’t say it now that I just heard from a former guest of of keeping it real. Also Joel, you know this person as well. He was a 30, under 30, National Association of realtor award winner, Jordan Pyle, he’s a local Chicago agent. He’s a, he’s a lovely, lovely guy. And I was talking to him recently, and he was telling me that one of the things he’s been doing with the extra time, as you mentioned, that he has now because he’s not closing 20 deals a month, is it in the sounds kind of it’s actually a really fun one, I think, at least it would be for me. And what he’s doing is he’s spending an hour every day. And that’s a lot of time. So if you have an hour, great if you don’t, you know, maybe you do a half an hour, and he literally is just replying to Facebook posts and Instagram posts for the people in his database. And he’s doing it in an authentic way. And what he’s doing is he’s looking at his his feed, I want to get really specific about this. He’s looking at his feed, when he sees a friend of his or somebody that is in his database, you know, goes on vacation, or maybe has some life event or just you know, goes out to a nice dinner and takes a picture of it. He comments on it. And he says it has to be authentic. He’s not just like, you know, it looks awesome. He he thinks about like a nice comment. He writes it and he goes, I want people to know that I care about their lives. And now I have time to demonstrate that through replying. And he goes, I do. I can’t remember if he does 30 or 50. I think it want to say he does 30 to 50 comments a day, and not not to the same people every day, of course. But and when I heard that, I said, What is that dude, he goes well, he goes, it generates a lot of goodwill. It generates a lot of people going wow, Jordan thought about me. And so that was my little suggestion. Sure, it’s number one, we talk a lot on the show DJ about things that you can do that cost money. And the number one thing here, it’s not the number one thing, but this is one thing that you can do as an agent, if you stay consistent with it. So what is this rule? What is this, putting it into practice taking what Jordan Pyle did, and actually do it for yourself? Really, it costs no money, and your name consistently stays out there. And it’s not like you said, just that looks great. I did that for years, when I looked at listings, and I said, I really liked that color blue in the kitchen. That’s so amazing. Marcia, keep up the great work. And you just do this consistently. People know that you’re in the business, then you’re a realtor, right? If you’re listening to this, you could make sure that you’re out there doing the exact same thing. And how much does that cost? DJ? Zero, it just costs time. All it costs us a little bit of time. And even if it doesn’t, even if it isn’t real estate related, what we’re talking about is building intimacy. We’re building relationships, you know, in the way that you build relationships beyond a sale is you care about somebody and what’s going on in their lives. And you show that you demonstrate that because I think intimacy has to be earned. And the way that you do that is by showing up. Well, you’re exactly right. I mean, we kicked off the show talking about closing over 20 units a month, you know, different homes and I speak to agents daily that are saying I’d like to get to 20 closings in a year right. So if you’re doing 20 20 or 30 closings every single month? How do you have time to do any of this and you can kind of prioritize. So if you’re not at that level yet, and most people truly are, you do have extra time. And it’s all about what you set for your priorities. Right. So number one, that’s an easy thing to do. And the other one that I wanted to touch base on, of course, is making sure that you have a good database and adding people in refining it, and then doing small reach outs to everybody that’s there. If it’s a postcard, if it’s a pop by things that you can do, because this is still a people business DJ, right until the robots replace us, there’s still going to be somebody that needs to go out and show the homes. And they’re still going to need to be people on the lending, Attorney side title. So there’s real relationships that need to be built here. And it’s just getting back down to basics if you’re not extremely busy right now. Yeah, this is the time to focus back on the fundamentals. When’s the last time that you’ve gone through and pruned? Not so much to remove people from your database? pruned isn’t the right word. When’s the last time you updated your database with information? Like, do you know your your? I won’t say clients necessarily, but but clients and prospects? Do you know their wedding anniversary? Why would you want to know that? Well, because then you can give them a call on their wedding anniversary every year and say, I’m thinking about you grats on year number 17. How many how many service providers are even thinking about that probably very few in there, that client’s life or that prospects life, you know that these are little things you can do that when you have time, you find out the soft parts of someone’s life that are tangentially related to business. You know, I think one of the one of the best ways another little suggestion, if you know where your clients work, or at least you have in your database of their employer, you can set up Google alerts for that employer for the news section. So what this would do is actually send you in real time when Google notices oh, let’s say you have a client who works at Boeing. And you know, some Boeing gets some major contract or something’s and that’s a big huge company. So maybe that’s not the best example. But but you get the ideas. Anytime you know, somebody’s employer is in the news, you then gives you another two, hey, just saw your your employer did this. Cool. Congratulations. Yeah, I love that. That really is true. And one of the things that I’ve been doing for like three or four years now is setting up reminders for clients birthdays, and instead of a phone call or a text, I started doing videos years ago, okay, so I don’t know if you ever saw that website cameo, right? We’ve talked about this offline, right? And so you get celebrities to send a video on on your behalf, right? And so, who’s the bigger celebrity right now, if somebody is getting ready to buy a home Leonardo DiCaprio or you the realtor, you’re more important. Okay, maybe, maybe Leo or one of these top persons are but think about the power of you actually doing just a 15 second video, say happy birthday. And I make mine fun and silly. So I literally start yelling and screaming Happy Birthday and spinning around in the chair and just being real. Instead of being like, that’s just who I am. So I like to have fun with it. And I sing off key and I say it’s a very special birthday message from your favorite lender, Joel shop. And it gets such great replies. So do what’s authentic to you. If it’s heartfelt, do that. If it’s funny do that. But doing something that’s different. I tell you, there’s not a lot of people sending video messages to people on their birthday. And you just set it up every morning, I look at my phone. And I can do it right through Facebook to see how many birthdays are today. And it doesn’t take but more than a few seconds and I shoot the videos and send them out. And it’s a it’s been a big hit. You know, these are the people skills we’re really talking about. I also wanted to touch on the actual hard skills, the hard realtor skills that I don’t say hard meaning difficult, but the important skills I you know, I had a call today, we have a holding company, which is for agents that aren’t actively practicing but want to keep their license active but they’re basically out of the business. They just have a license and are not practicing. And I got a call from one of our holding company agents today’s asking me to run a CMA for comparable market analysis for her particular property. And I said oh, okay, you know, and I she goes, Well, we’re just trying to figure out if we should sell it and I don’t she said I don’t really trust this estimate the Zillow Zestimate. So I wanted to get, you know, DJ, can you run me a CMA? And I said, Well, I’m not particularly good at it, but but I’ll do my best. And, and again, I think this is another huge opportunity for everyone who has a database of people that own homes, whether you are their realtor or not, when they purchased you have the ability to say, Hey, I was going to I’m practicing my CMAs or I’m just running you know, I do this for all for everyone in my database once or twice a year, whatever you however you want to market it and say hi, I was wondering if I You shouldn’t even…
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