Keeping It Real Podcast • Secrets Of Top 1% REALTORS ® • Interviews With Real Estate Brokers & Agents

Haley Ingram is the marketing guru behind Coffee & Contracts and talks about the transition in her career from real estate into creating social media content for realtor estate agents. Haley focuses on the role of humor in social media postings related to real estate. Haley shares tips on how to determine the type of posts you should be doing more of and describes different types of posts she makes for her company’s account that resulted in massive engagement and social shares. Last, Haley talks about the role of video on social media.

Coffee & Contracts offers a coupon code for our listeners under ‘keep it real’ for a $15 discount off the first charge.

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

D.J. Paris 0:00
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I will be your guide and host through the show and in just a moment. We’re going to be speaking with coffee and contracts founder Aly Ingram, one of my favorite companies. I’m super excited to speak to Haley in just a moment. But before we get to Haley, just a couple of quick reminders first, thank you for continuing to listen and support our show. If you haven’t already followed us on Facebook, please join us you can find [email protected] forward slash keeping it real pod. Every single day we find an article written specifically to help agents grow their business, we post it there and also we post our interviews as we’re recording them live so you can find [email protected] forward slash keeping it real pot and last please tell a friend think of one other real estate agent that could benefit from hearing from people like an alien that we’re gonna be chatting with in just a moment and send them a link over to our show. You can have them go right to our website to stream every episode we’ve ever done, which is at keeping it real pod.com Or you can have them pull up a podcast app on their mobile device. Search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button. As always thanks again for continuing to listen, being a fan we appreciate it please send us your feedback. We’re always looking to make the show better. And now on to our interview with Haley Ingram.

Okay, today on the show we have Haley Ingram from coffee and contracts. Let me tell you about Haley I’m really excited by the way about this. We specifically reached out to Haley normally people reach out to us to be on the show we reached out to to coffee and contracts because I’m a subscriber and a huge huge fan. And but let me tell you about Haley Haley Ingram is the marketing group behind coffee and contracts or real estate marketing toolkit and online community when coffee and contracts launched in September of 2019. Haley was a recent college grad for growing a real estate business in St. Pete St. Petersburg, Florida. She quickly found her best leads were coming from Instagram and a light bulb went off social media marketing paid off much better than cold calling, she began attracting the attention of other agents looking for advice with social media marketing. At the same time, she realized she had a talent and a passion for graphic design and decided to put her marketing savvy with her design talent out sorry to pair her marketing savvy with her design talent today. Coffee and contracts has helped 1000s of agents to grow online through the power of social media so that they can unlock more time to focus on their true passion. Helping people find homes, please visit coffee contracts.com. Again, that’s coffee contracts.com And I believe if you do subscribe, and you should because I’m a subscriber and I don’t ever recommend any services other than a few and coffee contracts is one of them. And I believe we have a even a special coupon code for our listeners. But we’ll talk about that in a moment. But first Haley, welcome to our show.

Haley Ingram 4:40
Thank you so much for having me.

D.J. Paris 4:43
I Haley and I were talking all about Florida because she actually lives really close to where my sister is and where my parents are now staying in the winter. So we were wasting time talking about all the fun things around that part of the of that part of Florida that she lives. But before we get Alright, before we get into coffee and contracts, I’d love to hear the origin. See, I just assumed that you were just a marketing person had no real estate under experience, and saw, hey, I can create great content for for realtors for their social media, but you actually started in real estate. So can you talk a little bit about the transition from from college to real estate to coffee and contracts?

Haley Ingram 5:22
Yeah, for sure. So I started real estate a little bit in college, I actually got my license while I was still a senior in college. And I started doing marketing for a small brokerage in Orlando at the time. And I wasn’t really sure about real estate, I didn’t really know what all it entails to be a realtor, because I was kind of like on a team and working with them in that way. And when I moved to St. P, after graduation, I was like, I’m just going to do this thing, full force and jump into a career in real estate. And, and it was a lot more than I expected. But it was a bit of a rude awakening. But I just I really loved the marketing side of it. And I could spend hours in Canva and Instagram, just building my business, just promote primarily on Instagram is where I was focused. So I started kind of generating leads from Instagram and started having agents reach out to me asking for help with theirs. So I kind of transitioned into that, and found that I just love that so much more, too. So yeah, so basically, I started an Etsy shop where I was selling templates for real estate agents, and doing social media for some local real estate agents, and then eventually decided to put it into a subscription model and update it monthly. So that was in September of 2019. When we went live with the website, and then by November, I was doing that full time.

D.J. Paris 6:57
It’s absolutely incredible. We you know what I realized? We haven’t really told our audience what coffee and contracts? Yes. Let’s let’s talk about tell us about the company.

Unknown Speaker 7:05
Yeah. So basically, when you join coffee and contracts, you get access to hundreds of Canva templates, and it’s all in an online toolkit. And you also get access to a Facebook community. So we update the content each month. With the full content, calendar, Instagram stories we have, we work with the broke agent, if you’re familiar with him on Instagram, he creates meme templates for us. So we have that with like captions, video scripts, it’s literally like jam packed with a ton of content that has been poured in there over since 2019. So we haven’t really removed anything. So you can still access things from past months as well. So yeah, it’s kind of like a vaults of all the marketing templates and tools that you need.

D.J. Paris 7:54
And it’s really, really easy to use and customize. What I like about what Hailey and coughing contracts are doing is they’re really introducing a lot of humor into social media marketing for real estate. And this is something that has been notoriously missing from the vast majority of Realtors marketing efforts. It’s a very serious thing. Sometimes it might be a little silly, but it’s usually like the realtor is doing something silly, as opposed to thinking about content that might be fun, funny. You know, engaging and this is the most important part is we know that funny is usually the most engaging engaged content on social media. So Haley’s really built this entire company, providing this to agents so that they can literally just almost drag and drop content right into their social media accounts, and postings. And if you don’t want to be funny, there’s serious ones. There’s informational ones, you know, but there’s also the humor side of it, which is, I think, the coolest part about what you what they provide, and it’s really legitimately funny, cool stuff. It really is. And this we became a subscriber, the company I work at, we’re a subscriber, and we use this a lot because nobody else in the Chicagoland area is not nobody, but almost nobody and there’s 40 Some 1000 Realtors here, I don’t see a lot of funny content from realtors. And so I love that. So can we talk a little bit about the sort of the role of humor and why you sort of decided to make that part of the focus?

Haley Ingram 9:27
Yeah, so I I think it’s important to remember why people are looking on social media in the first place. It’s basically to be entertained, either entertained or get value in some way, like being informed or inspired. I know that when I look at social media, I’m just I save or like or send funny things and that’s what engagement is, is people liking, commenting, saving. So you kind of just have to put yourself in your audience shoes and be like what What is gonna stand out? And also think of it as what would stand out to you like in the thinking of someone in another industry similar to real estate? Who would you reach out to based on their social media? You kind of have to, like, step out of it and look at your profile as if you are like, You know what I mean? Like, looking at it from a different surf pair of shoes. But yeah, so that’s what I feel like humor is so important just because because social media is to be social and to be yourself.

D.J. Paris 10:33
Yeah, it’s so absolutely right. And, and it’s also something that’s kind of lacking in the industry. And so you’re really filling a need. And we did a so we have a, like a recruiting website for our company. And we’re in Chicago, and we have, you know, lots and lots of agents. And we’re the first time I built the website years ago, I made it pretty serious. And then I realized, like, a few years ago, we’re not that serious as, as people who run the company, we’re sort of silly and funny, and whatever. And so I said, Do you think it would be like off putting to my brand to our brand to put some funny sort of parts into our website, recruiting realtors? And I thought, Well, no, I think it’d be okay. But nobody does that. Or at least in Chicago, nobody does that. So we took a risk. And we’re like, you know, what, this is who we are. And it really, really helped. And so it’s not totally silly, but there’s funny parts to our website. And I think as agents, you don’t have to be cracking jokes constantly on social media. But even if you just wanted to introduce a little humor, like we did with our website, we just introduced a little humor. So people get a laugh, and we put our we put my dog on the on the, you know, on our website and says she the mascot and you know, she bites, ya know, funny, funny things like that. And, and we gave ourselves completely silly titles, because because we think it’s better. But anyway, we got a much, much better response. Because of course, you’re right, people do want to be entertained. And they also want to know that you’re human. And I think if if they’re only seeing if you’re a realtor, and I’m not, in any way criticizing anybody’s social media presence online, if it’s working for you, that’s awesome. But whenever I see only people posting just listed or just sold, I don’t I started just don’t even notice it, it just kind of I scroll right by it. I mean, I guess I feel good for a moment for that person, like a good for them. But I don’t look at it, I don’t really care, I just kind of scroll by it, I want something that’s going to capture my imagination, or my or make me laugh or make me think like you were saying informational. And I love that your content really does all of those things. And realtors are busy, right? Like they don’t have time, most of them to really create engaging, awesome content, you guys do that. And for a really low price per month, like it’s incredibly affordable. And even if it just generates like one lead a year, which you’ll probably do a lot more than that, more than pays for itself many, many times over. So I am just a huge, huge fan of your service, I think. Thank you so much.

Haley Ingram 13:02
Yeah, so happy to hear that. Yeah, we try to also I know like a lot of people say, Well, what if like another agent in areas posting the same content as me kind of thing. But we try to a provide so much content that you can really just choose anything. So you can switch it up and go find a post from last year and redo it a little bit and use that. And basically, it’s also a really good place just to get inspiration and ideas. And even like, kind of repurpose it into something else. So like a good example would be just like reels if Instagram reels is taking a caption that we have and turning that into a reel, or something like that. But we also try to give real ideas. So just like literal will reel is the idea of real slash tic TOCs. I know it’s like kind of a little bit complicated. But basically the idea is that when there’s like a trending sound or something, you can just use this down and do what that person did, but put your own spin on it. So we kind of give ideas for that about like trading something into real estate related. And it’s just been we we’ve been loving the real game.

D.J. Paris 14:19
Yeah, I mean, you’re we’re now yeah, there’s video, you have scripts, you have ideas. And again, that’s I think that’s such a great problem to solve for. Because, again, we have almost 800 agents in our own company. And the number one question we get about social media is I need some content ideas. Yeah. So now we’re like, well just go to coffee and contract like it’s, it’s what we did originally at our company is we thought okay, we we we pat we bought a package of like 600 Social media templates that were actually pretty pretty good. And so we found a vendor that was selling these social media real estate templates for Instagram and Facebook, and we patched them into Canva and then we let our agents use it. But they’re not particularly funny. They’re more serious and more business focused. There’s nothing wrong with them. They’re fine. But, but I think that what you what you guys offer is really current, it’s on trend. And you guys are staying abreast of kind of what’s what’s working in the social media world and providing that content for I’ll give you an example. So I reached out to coffee and contracts, just as a subscriber earlier this month, saying, Oh, hey, by the way, it’s Pride Month out in the LGBTQ plus community. Just curious, do you guys have any content this month for that? And they were like, oh, whoever responded was like, Oh, we have tons of content, here’s where you can find it. And I was like, Oh, thank goodness, because our team was struggling to figure out what we should be posting this month. And, and we’ve been using it. So it when I say current, like, really, really current stuff, and they’re just constantly pumping out this content? And to answer the I wanted to address the question you had earlier with? Somebody says, Well, hey, what if someone else has a subscription to this and another realtor? I mean, I wouldn’t worry too much about that, even if you are posting the same stuff. Because I mean, what are the odds that your clients are also following another realtor on Facebook? I mean, it’s possible, I guess, but it’s probably a pretty low probability. And also, what are the odds that someone wouldn’t even remember that? I mean, I guess if you guys released a post today, and everyone started posting it, same day, maybe, but I just don’t think that’s a real major concern, like, people are probably following you. Your clients are following you. And they’re probably not following your competition.

Haley Ingram 16:38
Yeah, I think that’s something that, that we say a lot, too, is like, it’s, nobody’s looking for real estate related topics like nobody’s, if not a real estate is going to notice, when they see like, Oh, she talked about three tips for getting your offer accepted. And now she’s talking about it. But yeah, and another thing is, we offer multiple different like post options for each day. So there’s usually like up to 10 different, like graphics that you can use. And we also recommend dropping in your own photos. If you take your own like branding photos or have like photoshoots with your team, we definitely recommend dropping in photos of you because those always get more engagements too.

D.J. Paris 17:22
Yeah, let’s let’s talk about engagements on on Instagram, in particular, what do you find? Or rather, you obviously have your pulse on kind of what the real estate community is doing? Because you created a company to solve for those issues. But what were the what were the issues you saw, or what you do see in maybe what agents get wrong about posting an Instagram?

Haley Ingram 17:44
Um, I think a lot, there’s a few things. One would be a lot of people think they can just set it up like an automatic post to go out and then just like leave it for the month, and they just so they find a service that like posts for them three times a week. And it just goes out. And it’s like a generic post that gets no engagements. That’s like, kinda goes back to thinking about how you scroll through social media, like, nobody wants to get sold to nobody, nobody’s coming here to get pitched, they, they want to be entertained, or they want to learn about you and like feel like they get to know you. So I think that’s like one of one of the biggest mistakes and also not being authentic and showing up as yourself on social media. A lot of people and I used to do this when I first started coughing contracts, I was like hiding behind the brand. And or hiding behind like the feet, I wouldn’t post pictures of myself or anything. But as soon as I started posting more about me and more about like how coffee and contracts came to be, and also just like showing up on reels and stories, my engagement went crazy. So I think that those are like two common mistakes that I see. But another one is also people overthinking it, I hear a lot of agents say like, Okay, I need to post every day, I need to post stories, I need to go live, I need to do this. And I need to be on every platform, but just like don’t listen to everything you hear. I think it’s just like what feels right for that person. And like, like, if you’re not a funny person and you don’t like humorous content yourself, then don’t like post that kind of stuff. Just do whatever feels right for you, but also get out of your comfort zone a little bit. That’s what I would recommend.

D.J. Paris 19:40
And I think those are great suggestions. One of the challenges that even I have with with our social media accounts and I’m sure a lot of realtors do, too, is sort of trying to understand engagement. You know, I know it can be really disheartening to spend time creating a post We’re even customizing one of yours that is, you know, we think it looks great. We post it. And we really don’t get the response we want. Maybe there are no comments, maybe there’s, you know, not as many likes as we thought we would get. And by the way that happens it sometimes even outside of our control, because of course, Facebook and Instagram and all the social platforms have their own algorithms to determine what content gets seen by WHO and it isn’t always obvious who they’re showing it to. But I’m curious about engagement. Like I know, it can be really disheartening when somebody’s starting out to see very few people seeming, you know, to either like or comment. But But how should someone think about that, because it really is a marathon and not a sprint, right? Like, when I started this podcast, we only had a few listeners for the first I don’t know, handful of episodes, and it took years and years. And now we have a much bigger audience. But there was no real magic formula for us. It was just keep doing good episodes. And hopefully once people start showing up, I’m curious on sort of what your advice is for realtors who aren’t seeing a lot of engagement and maybe what they could do to either adjust their own expectations or just understand how social media works a little bit differently.

Haley Ingram 21:12
Yeah, I think definitely, I think you kind of mentioned this staying consistent, it takes a long time to build up a following. Don’t take the easy way out, don’t try to buy followers or do anything like that, because your account can get taken down. And there could be some bad effects of that. So just be patient and be consistent. But when it comes to engagements, what I like to do is go to your insights on Instagram and look for like the past month, you can set it for the past 30 days, and look at your top posts. So which posts did get the most engagement, and then just try to do more posts like that and keep repeating each month. So see what your audience is reacting to, and then just replicate that. So and like being consistent, it’s just been pretty much the number one thing because I when I started out, I didn’t have very many followers. And now it’s been growing. And as it grows, it actually starts growing faster. I don’t know if that’s that’s been true for me. I don’t know if it’s true for you also. But it seems like they’ve kind of snowballs I guess that’s how it is in real estate too. When you get more clients, it kind of snowballs. But I do, I wanted to share the method that I’ve been using recently. But it caused my account to grow, or the coffee contracts count to grow 4000 followers in like less than two months. There’s just like a little change that I made. But basically what I do is I have five different posts that I do like five different kind of content pillars or categories of posts. This is for the coffee and contracts Instagram. Yeah. Um, so and that’s like, one post is like a funny reel that I like, I take and I make like a real estate related reel. And I have like a steal the reel series where it’s just encouraging agents to steal the reel that I made and copy it and make it their own. And then I have carousel posts, which is like the swipe posts which get a lot of engagements, those are always value oriented. So just providing some sort of value like ideas or insights on marketing and Instagram.

D.J. Paris 23:28
So basically, when we say when we say the carousel, what just to make sure people know those are multiple picture. So where people can can swipe through, so you tend to make those more informational. Yeah, gotcha.

Haley Ingram 23:41
Yeah. So it’s kind of like, here’s the post topic on the first slide, they swipe and then it’s like, number one, number two, number three. And then like a call to action at the end. So almost

D.J. Paris 23:51
like really like a deck or a slideshow. You know, that’s a really I want to pause just for a moment, because that’s something I really don’t see a lot of realtors doing either. So, you know, thinking about all realtors have? Well, most Realtors I think that that had been in the business long enough. Do you have some sort of what we used to call them war Books a Million years ago, but but some sort of presentation. And so this would be like a mini presentation on maybe one topic. And it’s it’s not a it’s not a full 22 slides, but it might be two or three with a couple of good data, you know, bullet points. So that’s a really smart idea.

Haley Ingram 24:26
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So and those also when you use the different types of posts that Instagram provides, that’s what the algorithm likes to see. So if you’re doing like a mixture of reels post carousels, which are the swipe deck type posts, that it shows that you’re using, like their different features and their new features, so they like to see that. But basically, I can designate one day a week to a different type of post. So like, I know that Monday I post a quote Tuesday I posted Tip Wednesday opposed to real Thursday, I post a carousel with value Friday, I do an agent feature. So as soon as I started, I don’t know if it’s just me like, it sounds super simple, but I think it just took the guesswork out of it for me. And also just, it’s just made me so much more consistent. And I’m like, it’s Wednesday. So I’m like, oh, gotta post a real like, if I haven’t. So a lot of people are like schedule, schedule your content advance. And I actually, I recommend that if you’re using the coffee contracts calendar. But for me, that doesn’t really work. I kind of get my like ideas on the fly. And I get excited. And I want to post it. So if it doesn’t work for you to do it, find what works for you and do it. But I recommend trying that method because it’s kept me consistent.

D.J. Paris 25:46
Has there are there have you noticed any differences in time of day when you’re posting? Or do you not pay that much attention to when you post,

Haley Ingram 25:55
I used to not pay attention. But I have noticed, like so much more engagement when I post in the morning. And I don’t I don’t know why. But I’ve just found that when I post in the morning, I get so much more but I kind of have a feel now and I used to not like this has been after like years of posting on Instagram, like trying to post every day? Well, yeah, since 2019. But I’ve now I feel like I know my audience and I know what they like. And I know what I know when a post is gonna get good engagement. And I know before I post something when it’s not going to get good and BH net. So like, I know that reels get amazing engagements. As soon as I started posting reels, which I was scared to do before. I that’s when I growth really started happening. And then also like just value. But I know that if I just post like a generic, like, here’s something in the toolkit or like, here’s me selling or a testimonial, I know that that’s not going to get engagements before I post it.

D.J. Paris 27:01
The other thing too, for agents that don’t have a massive following on on Facebook or Instagram is I know, you know, and I’ll admit to this, it’s a little embarrassing, I don’t know if while you are probably big enough to know where you wouldn’t do this. But for a lot of us, we’re checking to see when we see 55 likes or 100 likes on our image or we might go be going through and seeing who are the people that liked that image. Right. And and especially if we’re a realtor, because we might want to see which one of our clients or sphere of influence people are actually engaging with that. Because, you know, obviously, some people are not going to write comments, but they’ll just like, so I’ve always thought you know, one of one of the ideas I’m curious to get your thoughts on this is to increase engagement, aside from having better content, which your your team provides. also engaging with other people’s content. I know if I’m looking, and I’m not that into who’s liking my posts, but I still look and I suspect if we were honest, we most of us probably look as well, at least for our personal posts. Look, yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay, good. So I don’t feel so so selfish, like a loser. I look right, I look,

Haley Ingram 28:11
supporting you. And then you start even as someone that has, like, I mean, I don’t have that many followers, but I noticed the people that have been there, I especially notice the people that have been there since the very beginning that are still here liking and supporting. But you’ve also noticed other business owners that are like, even in my like, same industry and whatever like that are supporting and not just in, in agents, of course, too, that are members. And that just like leads to me following them and wanting to feature them and talk to them and like interact with them. So yeah, I think definitely in engaging with, with other people. Specifically, one thing that I used to do when I was a real estate agent getting started and I got a few clients from was going to local pages, like the St. Pete Instagram, like the city has an Instagram and then like restaurants, Instagrams, go to their followers, or who’s interacting with their posts and interact with those people. So I got a lot of people that were moving to St. Pete by following through this following St. Pete, because they were because when I moved to St. Pete, I follow their Instagram. Yeah, so I followed those people and they were like, Oh, look a real estate agent. And I actually like met people through that. So that was really cool. I had people reach out in there like I don’t even know why I’m following you, but I want to buy a house.

D.J. Paris 29:35
What you know, that’s, that’s what you just said was really profound. And I want to I want to dissect that for a moment because you just said something really big. And so so here’s what Haley was just saying she was saying okay, yes, you’re gonna notice who your who your followers are who’s engaging with your posts, and yes, you should also engage with their stuff as much as you can just as a reciprocal sort of nature, but she also said she started thinking she started looking for other accounts in this Case St. Petersburg’s Instagram account because she was moving there. And she started to notice who was engaging with their content and said, Well, if they’re engaging with that content, maybe they would be interested in my content. Or maybe I should be, you know, sort of checking in with them and seeing what they’re up to. Right, because these are active people on social media. So maybe maybe they’ll be liking or commenting. Or it just, boy, that’s such a smart thing to do. Because you’re finding people that are already active following other people’s stuff on social media, that is actually a really, really smart strategy that I don’t think we’ve really ever talked about before. Because we’ve talked about we’ve talked about things like, Hey, if you’re a realtor, you know, real estate’s hyperlocal going around to different businesses and saying, Hey, can I feature your business on my Instagram page, which is an awesome idea, everybody should do it, we should also be maybe looking at their followers too, right? Or, or just anything that’s supportive. But like, for example, I know that if I was featuring a local business on like, if I was a realtor, and on my Instagram page, hey, here’s a local business I support, I would want to know which of their followers are active on their page. And I would might even send them a link saying, Hey, by the way, I just featured, it seems like you’re a fan of this restaurant or whatever, I just wanna let you know I featured them. So if you want to spread the word, you know, you can do that. And that would be about you promoting someone else, not yourself, of course. And but but anyway, that’s, that’s a really sorry, I didn’t mean to get us off track. But that is such a great, great, brilliant idea. So thank you for that. And yeah, I also just wanted to ask about I wanted to talk about stories, basically doing video, how important is video, versus, you know, some of the static image posting, like, how do you see that? And I know you sort of do everything, but what’s your take on video do because there’s a lot of realtors who aren’t as comfortable in front of the camera? What are your thoughts on on the role of video and social media? Um,

Haley Ingram 32:00
I think that first stories, I to be honest, I don’t see too much of a difference between doing a video and doing a like just a static post. I think my only the only the bit. I mean, it’s basically the content that’s there. So for video, I think it’s when someone posts a video them talking for like 10 minutes. I like never listened to on. Yeah, so if it’s like something relatable or funny that just happened on a showing or something I would pop on video maybe and do like a quick one slide where you get it in. But and also, I think videos are important for when you’re like showing a house, but don’t overdo it and show like the entire house and make it boring. Remember that our attention spans are so short now. But I think the most important thing is including a call to action. So like especially this was another thing that got me success when I was a real estate agent was when I would go to listings or even just preview listings, because I was a new agent. And I didn’t have that many clients. I would do a quick video of the listing and be like, ooh, in this neighborhood, and then put a question box and be like questions, and I got so many people like what’s the address? And it’s like, Oh, hey, now we’re talking interesting. So let’s address what’s the price? Be sure to like? I don’t know, sorry. Make sure abide by your local regulations. But if if you can, like leave out a little information so that they can ask you.

D.J. Paris 33:36
Well, if it’s not your listing, I suspect you could say, Hey, I just saw this really cool house and there’s a little video of it.

Haley Ingram 33:42
For Sale, I just drove by.

D.J. Paris 33:45
The door was open.

Haley Ingram 33:49
If it’s your house, I’ll sell it.

D.J. Paris 33:51
You know what else? Yeah, I had this idea. I wanted to get your thoughts. This idea and this this. So we were trying to do more video. Again, this is recruiting realtor stuff, but agents could absolutely do this exact same thing. And I was curious to get your thoughts. So I was thinking about doing a daily like little 15/22 You know, video, maybe with a little tip of the day. And that was just getting difficult. We started doing it. And then a couple of weeks went in and we’re like, Okay, now we’re out of tests. We don’t know what to do. And then it was like, it was just too difficult. And I thought, well, you know, maybe what I’ll do is every day I’ll get on and I’ll say here’s my favorite real estate post of the day. And then I’d find somebody’s you know, a post on Instagram, I’d ask their permission, of course, say Hey, can I feature your post, you know, it was really cute or funny or interesting. And I’ll tag you of course and I’ll and I’ll source that you created this. It wasn’t me. And every day I’ll just be like, Hey, this is DJ and here’s this really cool thing I saw from selling so and, you know, I was thinking of doing that and I was thinking that would probably help that other agent, assuming you know that they were interested in that and it would give me content. I would be I appropriately sourcing them. So I’m not stealing their content, but I’m highlighting it. And that would allow me to do daily video content. Or I could take a post from coffee contracts and say, Here’s my favorite real estate post of the day. And and do that. And that could be a 10 second video right there. So if you’re looking for video content, it doesn’t necessarily have to be you coming up with these brilliant ideas. But I’m curious, did you think something like that might be interesting?

Haley Ingram 35:26
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think that’s another thing is like, user generated content. So that’s how I get a ton of my content is from members and featuring members. So I guess where that comes in, for a real estate agent is you featuring local businesses and get creative doesn’t have to just be like restaurants or could be gyms, like, it could be local, local influencers, local. You no small business owners, anything like that. But yeah, that’s a great idea. Because then it’s not about you. That’s like, another thing to start getting comfortable with video is just like, if you have a dog, utilize your dog and their cuteness. That’s like, that’s what I do sometimes. But yeah, I, I think video is a good, a good tool, especially because it’s so easy to just post a story, I think that’s why stories are so great. You can do it so quickly.

D.J. Paris 36:25
And for those who are worried about privacy, or revealing too much of their personal life that they’re maybe not as comfortable with, with whatever boundaries they’ve set around their business and and their home life. If you are, you can still do video that protects that privacy and adheres to the boundaries that are appropriate for you. Because maybe you’re featuring other people in the videos or other services or other businesses or other funny content. And as long as you’re sourcing everything, you know, that’s good. Never obviously don’t steal someone else’s Instagram content and repurpose it as your own. Although I don’t know if there’s laws around that or not, I suspect you probably know more about that, of course, but you’re I’m sure your content gets lifted all the time. And but it’s, but it’s one of those things that you know, you can just ask people, you know, for, for for that, and I’m sure most cases, they probably be thrilled as long as you link to them and and then tag them in the post. But real quickly, is there anything new on the horizon for coffee contracts? I mean, I’m such a big fan. I’m just curious, do you are you guys? Are you guys thinking about expanding into other? You know, other platforms? Are you guys like well, maybe we’ll we’ll start a tech talk thing or which would be much more difficult. But have you started to think about how to how you might expand the business.

Haley Ingram 37:46
Um, we’re always trying to add, we try to keep up with Instagram and anything that they add, and it’s becoming popular. So of course, like reels were a new addition. But we’ve definitely gotten questions about what we do for lenders or title company, there are some talks for things on the horizon regarding that, and kind of maybe bringing the two together. So

D.J. Paris 38:14
I am a part owner and a title company. And I will absolutely subscribe to that the moment you do it, because there is nothing more boring than title stuff, I will tell you, nobody cares about it. Nobody wants to see it on Instagram. And if you can make that fun and engaging, I would pay a huge premium to have that content because we don’t even have an Instagram account for our title company because nobody cares. So I love the idea that you guys might be tackling that and lenders to lenders struggle with with coming up with fun, engaging content. It’s just you know, they’re just kind of dry businesses and nothing wrong. They’re great businesses, they’re just a little tough. And so if you guys ended up tackling that we will be the first will will be a second subscriber to coffee and contracts on the at least on the title side. We don’t have a mortgage company yet maybe one day but so I am super excited to hear that. So by the way, so if you are a lender, we have a lot of lenders that listen to our show, we have a lot of title companies that listen to our show, you know, you can still take the existing content they have repurpose it just slightly because it’s all about real estate, and actually use it as is so it’s not like you have to wait for them to come out with a specific title pillar, or you know, it’s a type of service for title or lending. Like you take their their content is absolutely applicable now. So I love that. So thank you. But I want to also tell everyone, there is a coupon code for all of our listeners. If you do end up subscribing to coffee contracts. The coupon is keep it real, I believe. So go to coffee contracts.com Try it out guys. It’s it’s a monthly membership. It is absolutely there’s no long term commitment. You can cancel it anytime. But keep it real gets them I forgot what

Haley Ingram 40:00
is the coupon for $15 off the first charge,

D.J. Paris 40:04
I did not get $15 off my first charge. So I am, I am I am taking one for the team and everyone else can get $15 No, I am so excited to to help this business grow because I am a huge fan. And I need them to keep growing, because I need them to keep putting out content because I need it for my business. So I am doing this for my own benefits actually very selfish. But I am just the biggest fan. And I’m actually mad because I wish I would have come up with this idea. It’s such a brilliant idea. There’s nothing else like it out there. We don’t promote anything on this show hardly except a couple of services and coffee contracts is one of them. So please, everybody, go to coffee contracts.com. Follow them on Instagram, you can learn about their service, try it out, use the coupon code, keep it real $15 off your first month, which is insanely generous. And trust me, you will not be disappointed. And all you have to do is kind of copy and paste. It’s so easy and customize it. It’s you know if you can use Canva, which everybody can use Canva you absolutely will have such an easy time with us. We love it. And so happy to have you on the show Hayley, and we wish you guys. Yeah, we wish you the very, very best in this. I think you are on that not even that you’re on to something you’re obviously honest, and you have 1000s of clients. But I think this is going to just explode. And so, you know, we’ll probably want to have you on in the future as you guys continue to grow. But for everyone right now go to coffee contracts.com. And also we want to thank Haley for her time she is busy, busy, busy, busy running a company and creating amazing content for realtors. So we know how busy she is. Thanks for spending time with us. On behalf of our audience. We say thank you. And on behalf of Haley and myself, we want to say thank you to the audience, the subscribers, our followers, and please we ask just one thing, please tell a friend, think of one other real estate agent that would like to do more on social media, send them a link to this episode you can if if the person that you’re going to send this to is not a podcast listener, just have them go to keep it real sorry, keeping it real pod.com that you can stream every one of our episodes we’ve ever done right from the browser. They don’t even need a special app for that. If they are a podcast person, just have them pull up their podcast app search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button that would help us continue to grow. So thanks, everyone. Thank you, Haley, and we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Ellie. Thank you

In this episode best-selling author and top producer Paula Pagano from Corcoran Global Living in San Francisco talks about how she started her career in real estate. Paula emphasizes how participating in sales training helped her become the top producer in her office many years in a row. Paula provides tips on how to talk to a client when the relationship is not working. She also emphasizes how important it is for agents to be aware of their strengths and weaknesses and adjusting to those qualities. Last, Paula discusses how to establish a strong emotional bond with the client.

Buy Paula’s book Getting the Property Soul’d here.

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

Paula Pagano can be reached at (415) 860-4209 and [email protected].

D.J. Paris 0:00
Today’s episode is brought to you by Oakley sein.com Realtors across the country choose Oakley sign.com because they offer the widest selection of high quality, affordable custom real estate signs backed by a Best Price Guarantee and free design services. Whether you are a new agent, opening a new office, transforming your brand identity or simply need fresh signs to work for your market. Oakleys real estate and design experts produce signs you will be proud to display get 50% off your next custom sign order when you go to Oakley sign.com forward slash keeping it real or use promo code keep it real at checkout. And now onto our show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Paula pagano from Corcoran global living in San Francisco. Before we get to Paula, just a couple of quick announcements first, please remember, if you want to help us grow, just tell a friend think of one other real estate professional that you know that could benefit from this podcast and send them a link easiest way to send them over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done is you can stream right there. And or if they are a podcast person, just have them pull up their podcast app on their phone or mobile device and have them do a search for keeping it real. And hit the subscribe button. And then second thing is to please follow us on Facebook, we find an article that’s written every single day online and post it specifically about how to help agents grow their business. And we also post all of our episodes as we’re recording them. So you can actually watch live as we’re doing them. So that’s facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod again facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pot as always thank you thank you thank you for continuing to be a part of the show every listener is so important to us. We’re so grateful to have you and now on to our interview with Paula Pagano.

Today on the show our guest is Paula pagano from Corcoran global living in San Francisco Bay Area. Let me tell you a little bit about Paulette originally from New York. Paula began to move to San Francisco in 1980 and became the top sales agent in our office her very first year which is an incredible accomplishment in and of itself, and she has remained a consistent top sales producer for over 40 years, Paula has marketed and sold many unique properties including historic landmarks, large apartment complexes, and celebrity homes. In addition, Paula is a best selling author on Amazon with over 40 rave reviews for her two books, secrets of a top salesperson how emotions make or break the sale and getting the property sold, which is s o u l, apostrophe D. Her books have been endorsed by Barbara Corcoran of Shark Tank and the legendary sales trainer and author Tom Hopkins. To learn more about Paula, please go to her website, Paula pagano.com. And I’m going to spell that p a ulapagano.com. And also, for the two books I mentioned. If you look in the show notes of this podcast, we will have links directly to her books, which we encourage you to go pick up Paulo, welcome to the show.

Paula Pagano 3:46
Hello, everyone.

D.J. Paris 3:49
Paul and I were having a great time chatting just before we started. And then I said okay, we got to start our show because we were having a fun time. And I always love talking to agents in San Francisco because everybody in this country looks to agents in San Francisco. How do you do that, buddy? But tell us about how you got into real estate. We’d love to hear about how you started.

Paula Pagano 4:11
Well, you know, most people in life beyond that they go to high school college and then they have a plan. But oftentimes the plans don’t turn out like you started. So my plan was I was in pre med in college. Wow. Yes. And I was a medical researcher after college. But the thing was, the reason I got into medicine and biology is I love science and I love animals. Well I had to experiment and kill animals. It’s tough. And it just got to I just couldn’t do it. And so actually it here’s a little detour. I wanted to go to California. Mamas and Papas song, California, dreamin and I was in upstate New York and those cold wintry winters it was hard. So I went to California. And I first stopped in Laguna Beach for about a year. I got my license there. I wasn’t very successful. So one tip I’d like to give to real estate agents, who are newbies, be persistent. Keep, you know knocking on doors, handing out your card, networking, whatever you’re doing. And, and if you have a transactions that fall apart, keep on working wake up every day. It’s a new day. You know that song? It’s a new day. I do. Just remember that song. So anyway, I I lived in Laguna Beach, it was beautiful. But then I went on a week vacation to San Francisco. And I fell in love with the city, very cosmopolitan. The architecture was beautiful with the Victorians, Edwardians, and the Marina style, the big mansions it had a little bit of everything. And it’s a very diverse culture. So I felt more at home there because I had traveled a lot in Europe. So I moved up knowing nobody. And I said, You know what, I wasn’t that successful that first year in Laguna. But here, I’m going to take sales training. And that’s what I did. And so I became the top agent in my office the first year, and then I was a consistent top producer for many, many years. And, you know, that’s how I got into real estate. And by the way, why, why real estate? My landlord, and Laguna said knew I was unhappy, and I didn’t want to go back into the medical research field. And she said, I have bought I’m a widower twice, and are widowed twice, and I bought property. And that’s I raised three sons on my own. And that’s how I did it, get into real estate. And that’s what I did. And I have no regrets.

D.J. Paris 7:44
So when you move to San Francisco, that’s incredible story. By the way, when you moved to San Francisco, you had, I’m assuming a very small if not a non existent sphere of influence. So how did how did you start building your business, we’d love to hear that.

Paula Pagano 8:01
So I, I was in the office a lot. And I learned by listening to what other more senior agents were doing, when they needed help. I was right there. So I’d help them whenever I could, I’d have an open house. I was hard working. And I believed in myself, I believed I could do this. And really, I didn’t. Some agents will want to stop at start at the very top top multimillion dollar properties because there’s so much money in it. I didn’t do that. I wasn’t, I’m more an academic person than I am a socialite. And so I just worked hard and studied hard. And that’s how I did it. And people saw that in the office, and some were senior agents, they couldn’t handle all their clients. So I’m getting referrals back and forth from the agents in my office. That’s how I started and then a call would come in, I’d be working late at night, and I’d be the one grabbing the call because no one else was there. So this was obviously before social media and the like, and I advertised the best I could so I put money and I believed in education. So I was taking sales training all the time to learn a little of this a little though that

D.J. Paris 9:34
I’m curious being that you are a pre med student, which is one of the more challenging ways to get through undergraduate. You know, gee at undergraduate degree, at least I was pre med when I started in college. And I made it a year and then I was like, What am I doing? I am not suited for for medicine. And it just wasn’t wasn’t you know, I hadn’t really thought enough about it. Then I switched to something else. And that was a much better fit. But the amount of discipline it takes to to pursue that, you know, that that sort of degree is quite intense. And so I’m curious if, if that helped you, because you mentioned being an academic, which makes sense, if that helped you sort of study the market and really understand, you know, the, the knowledge side of things that maybe a lot of realtors wouldn’t dive as deep into?

Paula Pagano 10:26
Yes. And I’m going to answer that, yes. And no. So this is how I’m going to answer is I am very disciplined. So if people have come up to me, because they know I made good money, and I have a very nice lifestyle. And they said, I want to be a real estate agent, I’m personable. But they don’t have your the real work ethic that you need to have of being a good agent, except there. Like I said, there are people who are so well connected. And again, I was not, that they can have, you know, go to cocktail parties and do transactions and meet all these, you know, and just sell two or three properties a year, and be making tons of money. That wasn’t me. And that’s not the average real estate agent. Okay, those are the exceptions. If you’re in real estate, you got to follow through, you got to work hard, you got to be creative. So that’s something else. I think that distinguishes me from other agents, I like to problem solve. So if buyer and the seller meet head on, and they’re having problems, communicating or coming to an agreement, it is my job to go in. Again, here’s the emotions, soften everything and make it work. Now, it doesn’t work all the time. And if it doesn’t work all the time, then you need to know when to, to cut loose, and move on. And that’s also another important quality for those new agents out there is when do you move on, because some people just are too difficult. And they take up too much. One of my friends says, brain damage. And so it’s just not worth that. And you just have to say bye bye.

D.J. Paris 12:41
Yeah, it’s it’s okay to and I don’t like the word fire, but it’s okay to fire a client, there’s probably a softer word for that. But to to end the relationship and introduce them to another agent, maybe that is a better fit, and maybe even earn a referral commission, I suspect. But yes, the idea of being able to say, hey, you know, I’m not best suited. In fact, let’s talk let’s, we weren’t going to talk about this. But I’m very interested. How do you have the conversation with a client that you’re realizing this is not working? for them? It’s not working for me? Do you have any suggestions about how to terminate that relationship?

Paula Pagano 13:19
Yes. So you, you turn it back? To them. It’s about them. It’s not about you, even though it may be about you. Right? So I am going to give an example. So a red flag happens when clients have fired another realtor, and then they want to see you. Okay, they want to work with you. So that’s automatic, you should be cautious. Sure, why did they not like the other agent? And then ask them why? Meet with them, give them a chance, because some there there are lousy real estate agents out there. So you know that that does happen. But then, you know, dig deeper and find out what their motivation is. Why are they selling so I had this one couple who had the property, their property on the market for a while that got an offer, they didn’t like it. They said our property is worth more. So I went and I met with them. And I knew that they were going to be very difficult. I knew and I thought you know, I just don’t have it in me to fight with people. Yeah, but there was an H and in my office. Oh, I get along without fine. You know, I like her but from a distance. I mean, she’s really really tough. You know? So I thought, Huh? Oh, I bet I don’t want to mention her name. So um, so I bet could do this though. So I called them up. And I said, you know, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. And I realize you want a really high price. And I don’t think I’m the agent for you, because I know a younger agent tooth more aggressive than myself. And I think she could get you your price that you want. And I think that’s a better fit. He was thrilled that I was so honest. He said, Paul, I’m gonna take you out for a drink. That’s so nice. You’re so straightforward. And she did sell them. She did sell the property. And you know, she had to kick in a little commission, because otherwise it wouldn’t have happened. And I got a real good referral, a by the way, I got $10,000 run. And if I had done it, I’m a bit. I can be tough on the outside, but I’m really sensitive. And I think, I don’t think I would have lasted, he was just too difficult for me, for me, not for her, she did it.

D.J. Paris 16:14
I love what you said earlier, as you said, I am a problem solver. And this is another example of you identifying a problem that you and this, this this seller, we’re not maybe the perfect match, you recognize that you recognize that their problem too is they wanted to get a certain price point that you didn’t feel was was in line with reality or what you were willing to do. And you solve the problem for them. And you still, obviously, people just want really honest, good advice. And you did that. And yeah, I imagine that client probably thinks wasn’t your client anymore, but still probably think super highly of you. And I know I would assume probably would still send referrals to you as well being of how honest you are, and it’s so refreshing. It’s so thank you for that that is such a great suggestion for our audience about how to assess a relationship with a client. And if it if it isn’t going well, you know, you can have those conversations. And if he’s long as you solve the problem, say, Hey, I have somebody else that I think would be a better match. Boy, I be I’d be thrilled if I was a seller. And some and my realtor told me that said I don’t think I can do this, but I’m somebody that can, I’d be thrilled to hear that.

Paula Pagano 17:35
So go ahead. Oh, so I want to give another example, because this is a different example. I think it’s important for agents to know who they are, and their own, what their strengths are, and also what their weaknesses are. And that’s what I talk about a lot in the book. Both books, actually. And the because I sometimes struggled with real estate is not an easy business. It’s a very interesting business. It’s a very rewarding business when you’re successful. But I wouldn’t call it an easy job. It it can be I have a love hate relationship, when sometimes it’s just, you know, you get all clients at once or you get nothing. And you don’t have a commission for six months. And you know, the few people you’ve worked with, they’re not loyal, they went to somebody else, you you’re in a recession, nobody’s wants to buy anything, it just goes on. So anyway, it’s important to know who you are and what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are. So I know I’m a dominant personality. So I, I actually really enjoy working with first time buyers because they need a lot of guidance, and they need a lot of patience. And I get a lot of joy out of it. So and right now I’m also working with the senior person who’s very demanding I told my husband today you know what, I just know I’m gonna go to heaven. I listen to her, go on and on. She goes off on tangents and she expects so much reads every line of the contract goes on. She wants to meet with me. I have I have to pick her up from her doctor’s appointments. I mean, it’s amazing. But I’m she has some health problems and I’m making a difference in her life. Yeah, and I think that’s something else. When when people say I want to get into real estate, well why well I want to do it for the money. That’s not enough. That’s not enough, I don’t think, I don’t know, maybe they’re not for me. But remember, I wrote a book Getting the property sold, s, o, u, l, apostrophe, D. Sol Sol has to come into my job for me, it has to prove other people, maybe it’s just money. You know, and if that’s who you are, then I that can work, you know, everyone’s different. And I just wanted to say, another type of personality that I don’t do well with, is when people can’t make up their minds, like the very amiable type people, they smile and smile, but they can’t make decisions. Yeah. And eventually, you got to make a decision. And I finally said to some client, listen, you’ve looked at 50 properties, now’s the time, there’s not, you know, you can, you know, buy now and then wait and watch a property accumulate, or you can wait to buy and never buy, because the prices get too high. And I, if people won’t, you know, sign on the dotted line. I’ll give them a couple months. But if they won’t, then again, it’s time to just let them go. And sometimes it’s not even. It’s just, it’s just a gradual letting go. Or, you know, or sometimes, I might be honest, I don’t think you’re motivated enough to say, I know, you’re lovely person, you know, I’m not don’t mean to hurt your feelings. But I just, I don’t think you’re ready, come back when maybe you’re more ready.

D.J. Paris 21:44
And that also is a very honest conversation to have, and probably goes pretty well, because it’s still respectful of the fact that the buyer is maybe on the fence or, but you’re saying, you know, I’m not sure you’re ready right now. And you can come back when you are. And I think that way, that’s a really elegant and delicate way, I think to to have that conversation with someone that could be perceived as rejecting, but it but it’s not the way that you mentioned it.

Paula Pagano 22:19
So go ahead. I’m sorry. Yeah. Oh, I, if you have another question, I’d love to talk about how I’m Talion Irish, okay, and I have a little, I’m from upstate New York and have a little Mohawk Indian in me to have it tough and a warrior, with the Italian usually takes over. So I’m emotional. And a lot of times that works in my favor, because I’m enthusiastic about a property. I like to connect to people and so forth. Then again, sometimes it gets in my way, I get frustrated, if things don’t go as planned. Like I said, I’m a dominant driver. So I’m always looking for the end goal. Dominant drivers do that. Let’s get to the end goal. So and I mentioned the amiable so I sometimes have a problem with, they’re great to be around. But to do business with them, it can be tough for me. So it’s good, I’m gonna go back to saying, be self aware of your strength, and your limitations, and build up your strengths and try to just tone down your limiting.

D.J. Paris 23:39
And I have a suggestion for our audience. Curious to get Paula’s take on this if you’re maybe not as aware of what your strengths and weaknesses are, if you’re not as self aware, obviously, there’s lots of online resources where you can take tests to determine some of the strengths and weaknesses. And you can also ask your friends and family to give you an honest assessment. And what you could do is if you want to really make sure people feel comfortable doing that, set up an anonymous survey and send it to your to your friends and family and say I really need to know, what are my strengths and weaknesses, you know, what am I good at? Where do I struggle? And what advice do you have for me, it may be as a realtor, or just in life in general and you will be shocked at some of the the answers you get, you will learn a lot about yourself from from the words of others. And again, you’re going to want to send this to people who know and care about you and who were you know, are going to do it in a way that that is, is respectful, but but I think that is such a great thing to learn about your so you boy, you said a lot of good things because I imagine once you have a good sense of your own sort of makeup, your psychological makeup, your drivers, you know how you sort of operate in the world, then you have a better sense of what kind of client is a good fit for you?

Paula Pagano 24:56
Right? And and you know how to communicate Get with others feel that they say, you know, know, know yourself, you’ll know others better, you’ll be able to see them better. And one thing about and why I wrote this book is I wanted to get to know myself better. So, you know, writing is a great way to do that. And also stories and then I could reflect Hmm. Well, and by the way, the book has a lot of raw raw honesty. So sometimes you think, Oh, wow, Paula, you’re the greatest. Gee, what did your

D.J. Paris 25:41
well, but that’s the that’s the truth is we all have wins and losses, we all screw up. We all have victories. And I think, you know, we live especially with social media. Now, it’s so easy to think everyone else. Other realtors, I’m watching on Instagram or Facebook, they’re also perfect. They do everything perfect. Yeah, their food is perfect. Their clothing is perfect. Everything’s easy. And they have just as many challenges as as any other agent walking around any other human being. But it’s sometimes easy to forget, people don’t usually post their failures on social media. So it’s easy to forget that that we’re all we all struggle, but sort of that being having that self awareness of where you struggle is probably so critical. It just helps alleviate some of the suffering. I think, as you grow as you grow your business, let’s talk about the book because I am so impressed with with your book. And we do want to also just mention the the title again, which is called getting the property sold. S o uld. But let’s talk about that. So tell us about the book and I know you mentioned, you know, well I’ll sort of preface this by saying I just purchased a primary residence myself wasn’t my first, but I hadn’t done it in quite a while. And I had forgotten as and I’m in the industry. I’m not a traditional realtor, I don’t practice but I work in an office we have about 800 realtors that our company but I’d forgotten even though I work and live in this how stressful it is to buy a property even when I’m in the industry. And I thought oh my gosh, I had a new really profound respect for realtors dealing with buyers whether they’re first time or I wasn’t a first time and just how stressful it was for me and I have all the resources possible at my disposal. Most P buyers and sellers don’t have these kinds of resources that I have access to. And I’m curious about I just was thinking boy a realtor is is is a good part of their job for people like me as being a stress reliever telling me everything’s going to be fine. Don’t worry, but really having that sort of emotional maturity to be able to call me when I’m freaking out.

Paula Pagano 27:56
Yes. So you know it’s back why why is buying a home so stressful? Well, I think there’s a few are emotional and I think there’s a few reasons. One is it’s probably the biggest investment you’re ever going to make. Another is a lot of people really identify with their houses. So the home set bias extension of themselves. So if a seller selling a lot of times they’re having trouble letting go and then buyers who go in and they get very very attached and and then maybe there’s another buyer out there too who bids higher and you don’t get it it’s an emotional roller coaster. Yeah, and then once you just say okay, The offer has been accepted. And then they think oh, we’re done. No, no, oh, you’re not the roller coasters going around the corner is gonna go down fast and something’s gonna come up. So in a real estate transaction where something doesn’t come up, and usually unforeseen so like one time I was we were about to close and all of a sudden something came up on the title we couldn’t close another time let a lender ran out of money, he couldn’t fun. There was nothing we could do. Another time recently a seller we had an offer accepted and then we went for the inspections the night before the agent called me and said you’re not allowed in. I had like three inspectors scheduled it for nine o’clock the following morning. Yeah, and and the seller had decided she didn’t want to sell gradually over Over a period of a few weeks, I found somebody who knew the agent, because the agent wasn’t communicating to me what was happening. So I was able to, through this other person who was in real estate, find out what was really happening when back to the agent. And somehow we sweeten the deal just a little bit and did a few little things. Oh, she didn’t want to let go. And it was a house with four cottages. So we told her because one of the cottages was vacant, that she could come back anytime and visit. Stay at minimum, you know, maximum two weeks. But if she gave a month notice she could come back that clinched the deal.

D.J. Paris 30:48
Isn’t that something? But that’s a really creative strategy. And I imagine by speaking to the other agent, you probably did you come up with that solution yourself? Or did you know that

Paula Pagano 31:02
my buyers and I did because my buyers really wanted it? So we can’t I don’t know exactly who it was. But and that’s the other thing with real estate, when you have clients, you get an emotion comes into it, how do you connect strongly so that you’re acting as one in a team. And I also tell clients, listen, if you’re unhappy with me, speak up. Or if you think I’m missing something, speak up, so I can rectify it, and do what you want me to do. Then on the other hand, on the other hand, sometimes I’ll say to a buyer, you know, that’s not realistic, we really, you know, that is, that’s not going to go well, with the seller, that’s not going to go well with the buyer, we really can’t do that, you know, we want to keep this do you want to keep what’s your goal, you want to keep this transaction together. And so we communication, the emotional connection, very important.

D.J. Paris 32:02
Let’s talk about how to establish a strong emotional bond with the clients. I imagine. I will you’ve written about this, you have to do best selling books about it. But um, any strategies and tips for once a, an agent has a new client, whether it’s a buyer or seller, ways in which they can deepen those, those connections with with their clients so that they’re able to have more honest conversations and be able to take that sort of feedback.

Paula Pagano 32:33
Okay, so this is, you know, we can talk you know it with people. Okay, we’re very diverse. We have diverse backgrounds. We have different stratas we went to different schools, we might not have gone to college, we might be in the trades, we might be a doctor, we might be a lawyer. So what you do is you look for common ground. Now that could be maybe they have a pet and you have a pet connect on that. You’re going through their their property, a seller’s property or sometimes you meet at a buyers home. You see, they have tennis rackets. Ah, well, maybe you don’t play tennis. I don’t. But my husband does. My husband loves tennis. So let’s start talking about that. They they travel, you see some you see some books in their library. Oh, I read that book. What did you think? Or you know, what do you what are you watching right now? You know, on TV? Do you have any good series, ask and ask open ended questions. That’s another another? Why are you moving? You know, what do you like best about your house? Whether you’re renting it right now and you want to move or you’re selling it and open into questions, they’re the best and have them talk and talk and you know, and you can just get off so easily and different tangents and find a connection. Like I said, this one singer, Lady and I Well, it turns out, she confessed to me, she has some back problems. And I said, you know, I have in the past two and she said, Well, I was thinking of getting a back brace and I said well, I did get one for a while and it really helped me. Well, so now she’s got an appointment and I’m taking her to get fitted for a back brace. I mean, you never know what your good is. You know what’s going to happen? And then we we travel a lot and I told her I was Italian and she said oh well you know the color I painted my house this blue. That was when I went to Italy and I loved the houses that were planted this color blue. You know you never know what you’re going to get Look at you’re gonna find out about people. It’s, it’s really and you think you have nothing in common. But yeah. And this particular woman’s Asian, and she’s, you know, and she’s talked about it, if you listen, you know, she talks about all the trouble she’s having with COVID. And, you know, people, you know, she can’t go to the grocery store because she’s afraid she’s being attacked. You know,

D.J. Paris 35:25
I interviewed recently, and sorry to interrupt, I was gonna say I interviewed recently, the AAPI realtor, I believe the the association is Aria, which is for Asian American realtors, and she’s in San Francisco as well. And she was telling me in San Francisco, in particular, the Asian community, the realtor community, as is, as you said, they’re afraid because of all of the violence. So I’m sorry to interrupt, but that was just reminded me that, that, that if you listen and pay attention your clients, you get to learn about what’s going on in their lives.

Paula Pagano 36:00
Yes, yes. So that’s a lot of it connect, connecting. I also taught a few real estate classes. And sometimes things are pretty simple. I said, you have two ears and one mouth. So you should be listening twice as much as you’re talking.

D.J. Paris 36:20
So a lot of basically, it’s like, get curious, get curious. Yes, clients.

Paula Pagano 36:25
That’s a wonderful, and she and I were just talking about that. And we set curiosity. That’s like I said, that is such a understated virtue of people curiosity, boy, because that’s, it’s a neutral. It’s a neutral word doesn’t turn anybody off. But boy, that is, that is true.

D.J. Paris 36:51
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that most of us are a little, especially in the last year and a half, were a little starved for connection. And now is a really good time to, to reconnect with, you know, your sphere of influence, learn what’s going on in their lives, if you didn’t stay in touch with them, during the hardest times of the pandemic, you know, now’s the time to find out how that was for that. And, and, you know, I didn’t get I mean, outside of my friends and family. I didn’t get a lot of the professional service people that I employ, in my life, calling me asking how I was doing. And realtors have a really interesting bond with their clients, where they can actually ask those questions. You know, it would be a little strange for my accountant. My Account just wouldn’t do that. I love love my accountant, but I don’t think she’s gonna call me and say, How are you doing with the pandemic? Now, I would have appreciated the call, I don’t expect it. But a realtor can really step into that role. And and and ask those non business questions about someone’s life. And I think it’s a really unique industry where most industries doesn’t really lend itself as easily to having those conversations. But real estate does, because it’s such a personal industry.

Paula Pagano 38:09
Yes, it’s very personal. Yes. And I did reach out to my clients, I actually sent them a little small gift, just thinking, especially when the pandemic first hit, because everybody, you know, what are you going to do with your time, and it was just, we didn’t know I was, you know, washing my hands, washing all my food, I was washing all the counters. I was like, I wouldn’t pick up my newspaper. I’d leave it outside for a day. So maybe they weren’t on every single

D.J. Paris 38:40
social. Yeah.

Paula Pagano 38:42
So I sent them a little gift. And you know, it pays off. And people call me who I hadn’t heard from in a long time. And we just talked.

D.J. Paris 38:53
Well, I’d be remiss if I didn’t, didn’t ask about urine. San Francisco is certainly notoriously one of the most challenging real estate markets in the United States, New York and San Francisco kind of battle back and forth for, you know, most most challenging. But right now, I imagine there’s, you know, still probably inventory shortage in your area, you have low interest rates. So there’s lots of buyers out there, people can afford more than they could, you know, when interest rates were higher, but low inventory. So I’m curious on how your, because you work with first time homebuyers. You know, how you’re keeping how you’re navigating that with them and explaining to them that there really is a lot of urgency when you find a property these days and what those conversations sort of sound like?

Paula Pagano 39:44
Yeah. So I’ll talk about this one couple who looked about six months before the pandemic hit. And she had a year old. Well, then she got pregnant again. So now there They’re really they’re in a small apartment now they’re really pushed. Yeah. So we had looked in San Francisco, a little bit in the peninsula. And we said, you know, we got to spread out, you know, San Francisco, you’re not gonna afford just not going to happen. She was a stay at home mom, and he makes good money, but it’s just one income. So we went out to the East Bay, and we looked in the East Bay. And we kept going farther and farther out because it was more affordable. Sure. So we did miss out on one house. And it was an unfortunate thing. So here’s the up and down roller coaster. I just want to talk about this again. Sure, because what happens? So both offers came in close, but one offer came in a little two offers came in one was ours. One was a little higher, and they, but they were so close, and they really liked my buyers. And they liked me. So they called me up and they said, Will you go up to you know, another 20,000? I think it was, or 30,000. And so I called I said, Wait a minute, I call my buyers. So I called my buyers, they thought about it. Then I got that. And they finally said yes. It was about an hour. It took them a while kept pressure, you know? Yeah. And then we went back to the other people, and they said, Oh, we didn’t hear from you. So we took the other offer. Oh, wow. That was you know, and not to give us a chance to sit, you know, and that was heartbreaking for my people. So it’s just to have a lot of compassion. So stuff does happen. I mean, even when you’re, you know, do your best. So we moved out farther that was in Berkeley. So then they found a house in Lafayette. And I said, probably want to see the house. And I said okay, and I went online, you know, the MLS listings and I looked at other available houses. So I took them on a tour and showed them five, the house that they liked was beautiful. Everything was done. Just gorgeous. So they looked at that. And then they looked at another one, about the same price. But the the sellers were living there with three kids, and they had two big dogs and you stepped in their yard, and you have to bypass all the dog poop. It was It wasn’t staged to choke terribly. But the potential was there. So they said to me, Well, what do you think? And I said, well, the property that you call Don, they will get probably 10 offers. It was really underpriced. And so I said, but this other property, you know, if you liked it enough, and they said, you know, we’d like the floorplan better this other property and we can fix it up. And so I said, Well, we should go for that. And so they did, and they got it. Wow. So they didn’t waste their time with the other one with 10 offers that we didn’t think we’d be able to get. So one thing I think I do do and the academic part of me is I study the market. Yeah. And you had asked me before, you know, does that help? Yes, I studied the market, but I don’t study it reading the newspaper and all you know, everything’s going to Yeah, you know, hell no, that’s good. I don’t I don’t listen to bad news. Okay, because that gets negative. But I will look at statistics and I will kind of study it. And then I also have because I’ve been selling and I’m also the sold part. I’m very intuitive. I usually come up with a price in my head. And that usually is what it goes for. And I yeah, I I have had such good luck, even a multiple offer situation. I had one winning streak where nine buyers.

I got into contract nine in a row, just and didn’t have because sometimes you have to prepare your buyers, you know, it may take four or five times. You know, one buyer I worked with it took us eight times before we got into something so you never know. But just to study the statistic. And I’m not saying news. I wouldn’t read too much about news. You know, our politics are divisive, it’s just again Know the you know it’s not a time to sell there’s no properties on the market don’t listen to this we’ll work with what we have. And we we find a property that may be is not a set up my it probably won’t be I say to first time buyers, it probably won’t be your end doll house. This is the stepping stone. So you will eventually get into a house. But if you don’t move now you’re just going to be renting, renting and renting.

D.J. Paris 45:32
Yeah. Wow. Wow, you just said so much. I will encourage once again, everyone listening or watching right now head over to Amazon pick up both of Paula’s books, which is. The first one is secrets of a top salesperson, I certainly would like to know how somebody has been a top salesperson is at top sales woman in a very difficult city to be a real estate agent for 40 plus years. So secrets of a top salesperson is available as well as her newest book, which is getting the property sold. And then again, that’s s o u l, apostrophe D. And also please everyone file, go check out Paul’s website as well, which is Paula pagano.com. And if there is anyone in the Bay Area, whether they’re in the city or somewhere outside, and they are looking to work with a top realtor for four decades, which is an incredible career in this industry, who has the knowledge and the compassion to help you through all of your transaction needs. Reach out to Paul and Paul, what’s the best way someone should reach out to you if they want to work with you?

Paula Pagano 46:44
By my email, which is easy, Paul pagano [email protected]. Or go to my website.

D.J. Paris 46:55
Yeah, go to the website, Paula pagano.com, or email her at her Gmail account, we will also have those in the show notes. Should you want to reach out to Paul, Paul, I could speak to you for many, many other hours. Because this is such a wonderful conversation. And the amount of value that you provide to our audience is is really insurmountable. So I’m going to encourage all of our listeners and viewers once again to pick up her books. She’s a fantastic realtor. And she really talks about, I think one of the most challenging parts of the business, which is the emotional connection and why that ultimately, you know, wins wins the sale. So please pick up her two books. And on behalf of our audience, Polly want to thank you for your time we know how busy you are, especially now with the market the way it is that you were able to take time out of your busy schedule to come on our show and provide some value to our audience. And on behalf of Paul and myself. We want to thank our listeners and our viewers for continuing to support our show and we ask before you sign off on this episode to do just one thing is tell a friend think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing this great interview from Paula and send them a link to our show. Easiest way to do that. If they’re not a podcast person, just send them to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com They can stream every episode we’ve ever done including this one right from their browser. If they are a podcast person haven’t pull up a podcast app on their phone search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button. Thank you to everyone for continuing to support our show. Thank you once again to Paula. This was fantastic and I hope to have you on again. But Paula, thank you so much.

Paula Pagano 48:40
You are so welcome. It really was fun. Thank you

Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.

In this episode, Chris Linsell from TheClose.com talks about the benefits of attending in-person events for real estate agents. Chris also discusses the importance of local associations and how agent can utilize being part of these associations. Next, Chris talks about what agents can focus on when attending large conferences and how to benefit the most from them and also points out the most important conferences to participate. Finally, Chris talks about The Close Pro and what they offer to their subscribers.

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

Chris Linsell can be reached at [email protected].

D.J. Paris 0:00
This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by low Ensign, looking for cutting edge designs and unparalleled support and fast turnaround for all your sine needs. Low and sine has you covered. They produce for sale signs, directionals writers, open houses, anything you need. Signs are produced within three days of being ordered the fastest turnaround time in the industry. Best of all, when you call low and you get a live person ready to guide you to choose the best looking and most effective sign for your real estate needs. Visit low insign.com That’s LOWENS ign.com and find out why top Realtors trust their listings with Lowen and now onto our show

Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and or real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lin sell from the closed.com. Now this is a partnership between keeping it real and the clothes.com. And let me tell you about the clothes the clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals. They cover real estate marketing, lead gen technology and team building activities and strategies. From the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level. Please visit the closed.com That’s th e c l o s e.com And subscribe to their newsletter to get notified every time they publish an article with us as always is crystallin Sal, he is a senior staff writer and real estate coach for the close. Now Chris is the closes resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing lead generation transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s a licensed agent in the state of Michigan. Chris has also been part of a hundreds of transactions from modest rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. And when he isn’t writing, or working with his his buying and selling clients, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage of his community theaters production. Nick, Chris, welcome once again to keeping it real. We’re excited to have you.

Chris Linsell 2:21
DJ, great to be back. Happy Summer, everybody. We’re in it now. We’re innovating.

D.J. Paris 2:27
We are in it. It is 82 degrees here in Chicago today. I am very excited. I imagine it’s comparably warm up where you are.

Chris Linsell 2:35
Yeah, definitely. We’re pushing the 80s into the 90s next week, which kind of feels a little bit like whiplash since I honestly, this is not an exaggeration. I still have hat and gloves sitting on the table in the entryway of my house for my morning dog walks. So the fact that it could be 90 degrees next week, it is a little head spinning. But you know what? I’m not gonna I’m not complaining about it. We’re just gonna roll with it. Say thank you for the warm weather and the green leaves and be on our way there.

D.J. Paris 3:06
Well, my my dog just turned 13 and I were growing up. My mom always said get a small dog if you ever get a dog get a small dog. And I said why is that? She said because small poops. And what I was going to mention about your your early morning dog walk, which you have to do probably all year round, is I have a balcony on in my condo. And I just opened the door and there’s a dog bathroom with astroturf. And it goes into a little cup. And all I have to do every morning in my underwear is just push the door open slightly. And so I I have I do not have gloves and hat nearby. Because I just that’s about the only amount of exercise I have to do in the morning before I get ready for work. But I applaud you for continuing to do that all year round. I have an

Chris Linsell 3:55
easy Yeah, I gotta say this is probably the least I ever expected. Keeping a real podcast to turn towards as far as conversation topics go. So Dog

D.J. Paris 4:05
Dog bathroom, you really have to head with this one. Well, and if you’re watching us, which most of you are listening to us, but if you are watching us, you’ll see Chris and I are wearing almost the exact same shirt, certainly the same pattern. And so we look we look like look like we’re out of some sort of catalog. Well, anyway, so I Chris and I were talking before the show about what we wanted to discuss today. And Chris, I was asking Chris because he’s an actor. I was asking him about his his community theater. There’s communities sort of theater, whether they’ve started opening up and doing doing performances, and he was talking about how they’ve started to do that. And here in Chicago, the same thing and then Chris said, why don’t we talk about that lots of things are now opening up and in particular conferences that Realtors may be invited to whether it’s on the brokerage level, you know, your your firm, if you’ve been particularly if you work for one of the large franchise firms, or Nash General firms may or may not even franchise firms, but they tend to have in person conferences, annual events. I know that there’s, you know, other news outlets that that host events like Inman and we, of course have the National Association of Realtors, you know, conference that a lot of different realtors will attend. So, we’re starting to see these events. And I know you wanted to, you had some thoughts about whether this made sense for realtors to consider.

Chris Linsell 5:25
Yeah, definitely. So let’s, let’s, let’s just start off by saying that I’m gonna, I’m pretty bullish on events for real estate agents, I’ll just put it out there, I think that it’s easy for real estate professionals to get kind of stuck inside their own little circle of this is what I do. This is who I work with, this is my routine, this, this, this, this, this, it’s easy to kind of fall into a repetitive motion that I’m not not not gonna I mean, if it works for you, if you’re making money if you’re able to support yourself and the people that you care about, absolutely nothing wrong with that. But there is more to the real estate life than just the that circle that you travel in there and events, like conferences, you know, professional development events, you know, even the the kind of rah rah motivation events that big brokerages put on. These all can be valuable for agents if you are looking for the things that they’re offering. So I thought maybe we should chat a little bit about that since things are starting to get scheduled. Again, you know, we were on this hiatus this probably 18 1618 month hiatus of events being virtual and nothing wrong with virtual events. But it is a different experience than an in person events. And things are starting to open back up again, there’s a lot of events that are being scheduled, especially towards the the end of 2021. And agents are going to have some opportunities to attend stuff. So let’s see if there are some things that work for agents. And let’s get through that a little bit.

D.J. Paris 7:04
Yeah, I think maybe a good place to start. First is the local level. So everyone listening or almost everyone listening, I’m assuming as a member of a local realtor Association, I know that here in Chicago, we have five or six of them. So depending on the size of your market, you may just have one or they may be many, but odds are you belong to one of them. And probably for the last year, if you’ve been paying attention to whatever events they do host with respect to training or networking. Those events are sorry, more than a year, probably close to two years, like Chris said, have been those events have been virtual. And I know here for the Chicago Association, that and I help with one of the committee’s for what we call the Young Professionals Network. And by the way, for everyone listening, if you are a member of a local association, you should reach out to them to find out what events are happening. I know the Chicago Association, and I’m not trying to be critical, but they I would say could do a better job of explaining, you know, telling their members which we all pay, all of us who are members of an association pay up sizable amount of money to have you know, some have access to some of these events. And we forget or or maybe the association’s themselves aren’t doing a great job of promoting them. So I know that at least with our local association, we are starting to think about doing in person events again starting in the fall. And I suspect your local associations are doing the same. So great opportunity to get reconnected to your local association. Find out what events are happening. I know we have like a kickball event coming up, which which sounds sort of silly, but it’s actually our most popular event of the entire year. Because Realtors like to hang out and have fun.

Chris Linsell 8:47
Yeah, definitely, absolutely there is there’s absolutely a level of kind of professional connectedness that is a major component of these events. And starting on your local level is an important first step, I think because in the same way that we connect that the connections that we make, to our clients are often the most valuable when they are with the people that already know like and trust us. The connections that we make in our professional community are often most valuable when they are made or kind of reengaged with the people who are also working in our community that are going to have a direct effect or could have a direct effect on how successful our you know our careers. So think about it like this. If you are you’re considering a local event that you could go to there very well may be somebody there who you may have a five minute casual conversation with who is going to happen to mention because this is what real estate agents talk about when they get together. Hey, I haven’t have a listing coming up downtown. You know, it’s a four bedroom, three bath condo, I’ve never seen anything like it. But my seller is really anxious to get it on the market because they’ve got to be out of town by X, Y and Z, you may casually have the inside scoop on this once in a lifetime listing that you wouldn’t have if you weren’t standing at that event. Now, should you expect that? Probably not. But you can expect to make these connections and create some some networking that you might not have otherwise. And that’s in addition to the programming of the event itself, the kind of built in positive that the event itself is going to give you whether that’s professional development, whether that’s, you know, contributing to a good cause, whether there’s 100, different things that local events can do. But you have two levels of benefit here. And you know, if it works in your schedule, I always tell people that I’m working with consulting or coaching, local events are an opportunity for you not just to get plugged into your community, but to be a leader in your community, both professionally and otherwise.

D.J. Paris 11:05
Yeah, and I have a really specific practical reason why you may want to consider doing in person local events, meeting other realtors right now, if that’s being offered, or even if it’s only virtual, even still contributing there. Because especially if we’re working with buyers, right now, we know how difficult it is to get buyer offers notice. And I know if we just think sort of, from a human perspective, not an ethical perspective, and not in any way, talking about compliance or doing the right thing. But just as human beings, we know if we get 20 offers on a listing, and we recognize one of the one of the agents names that is going to stand out to us as i like i like that person, or maybe I don’t like that person. And when you engage in these in these local events with other real estate professionals, you can build those relationships. So maybe, maybe it just maybe gives you a slight edge, you know, when you’re working together in a cooperative situation. Now, maybe it doesn’t, and it certainly shouldn’t. But it may just help get your get your offers notice. So I’ve always thought you know, right now everyone’s saying, How do I get my buyer offers noticed? Well, you know, there’s an art and a science to that. But probably the best way is to build strong relationships with other realtors and attending local events is a really great way to do that.

Chris Linsell 12:30
Totally, totally. And you know, I think you’re right on the nose about wanting to make sure that we’re recognizing Where’s, you know, staying within ethical boundaries here. But I don’t think there’s anything out of line in just recognizing the fact that if I send an offer to you, and I follow that offer up with a text message, if my first name is in your phone, and you get that text message, you’re gonna be quicker to sit up and look at what I sent you. Versus if I send you a text message and it comes up as an unknown numbers. It’s just that that is just the reality of things. There’s nothing unethical about that. That is just an understanding of human behavior. So connect with the people that you’re working with. These are your competitors, but then also your colleagues too.

D.J. Paris 13:12
And what they might end up being is referral sources for you if you work in a particular area, and they in another and I you know, it’s funny, I was interviewing once a guy who serves on the Young Professionals Network board for our here at our local association, and I and I asked him, I said, boy, why did you decide to do that? He goes, Well, I really wanted to contribute. And he had all of these altruistic reasons, which is really the reason to get involved if you want to volunteer at the local level there. But he said, I have to tell you, the weirdest thing happened. He goes after volunteering for many years and being a leader in in this particular committee with his local association. He says, I guess people know who I am now. And he goes, I wasn’t my intention. Because I get so many referrals. I goes a third of my business are now referrals from other people who just happen to know me, because I’m at all these events. He goes, I didn’t eat, I would have never anticipated that that was not the reason why I got involved. But it just happened to be a nice sort of side side effect. And so another another good reason but But moving on from the local side. Let’s talk about some some of the more large event larger scale events.

Chris Linsell 14:23
Yeah, so there’s two things I’ll say here. It’s important for us to remember that real estate is this kind of tiered industry with levels of governance. So when it comes to your local level, you’ve got a local association that makes decisions on the ground level. More often than not, that local association belongs to your state association. So every single state in the United States has a a State Association of Realtors, like the Illinois Association of Realtors, the Michigan Association of Realtors, and these organizations have levels of governance through which you can participate. They have events through which you can utilize professional development and places that you can connect. So as an example, Michigan has a an annual conference, and expo every year, it’s in September rotates between a couple of major cities in the state of Michigan. And this conference is like a scaled up version of the sorts of events that your local local Association puts on and a scaled down version of the sorts of national events we’ll talk about in a second. So if you are not feeling like you want to take the plunge and jump into these major, you know, national or international events with 10s of 1000s of attendees, there’s definitely a state level that you can participate in that you can get some interesting professional development and enrichment on. And definitely you can connect with other professionals working in your state, just about every single state has their state level conventions, conferences and expos scheduled for the second half of this year. And I have noticed I’ve been doing some digging on this. Most of the conferences that I am seeing from the major states, as far as realtor population, most of them are live, and most of them are happening in that fourth quarter like September, October, November, December right around there. So you know, if you’re anxious to see what this is all about, you have an opportunity this year to attend an in person event, so you should definitely start checking it out.

D.J. Paris 16:40
And another good reason to consider the state events is that oftentimes, these are the people that are directly influencing our legislatures, legislators, with respect to things like rent control, or affordable housing, or just different laws that may impact home buying Home Selling realtor compliance, these are the people that are directly working at the state level to do that. And if you have very strong opinions about what you think the sort of housing compliance should look like, these are the people that that have the influence to and and they work for you. So you have the ability to to interact with them. In Illinois, rent control has been a big issue recently, and our state, our state realtor board has been very proactive in making sure that that the members know sort of how to get involved. And so by participating in these activities, I know our State Board even does trips down to Springfield, which is our capitol here in Illinois, where they actually visit with lawmakers and have conversations about hey, what do Realtors need? What do their clients need? And this is a way to directly influence that and also just building other relationships with realtors of other areas of the state, which again, maybe a referral source down the road to

Chris Linsell 18:05
definitely Yeah, absolutely. That’s that’s a topic that I think shouldn’t you’re right, that should not be taken lightly is the fact that not only do you have an opportunity for professional development and to enrich your personal career, but you have an opportunity at the state level events, to effect change on issues that are that are important to you. So don’t miss an opportunity to speak up, make your voice be heard, be a leader on issues that matter to you. You know, if we want to take this right back to the base level of business here. Being a leader on these sorts of issues, is an extraordinarily attractive thing. For people who are considering you as a real estate professional,

D.J. Paris 18:48
no question,

Chris Linsell 18:49
if you can add to the gravitas of your business by saying, you know, I take a leadership role in these these three issues. And I’m working actively with our state legislation to do X, Y, and Z. These are things that identify you, as somebody who is demonstrating activity, demonstrating knowledge and demonstrating success, the three pillars of real estate marketing, essentially, these are the things that are magnetic for your clients. So being active there, it’s not just an opportunity for you to get some good done, it’s also an opportunity for you to do well.

D.J. Paris 19:29
And also it allows you to market yourself in a way that isn’t all about you. And what I mean by that is, but really what Chris just said is is exactly the point I’m going to echo in just a slightly different way, which is to say that we know that Realtors self promote, right we see it all over social media print, we see it in billboards, we see it just everywhere. And we know that that that is very common. What is less common. Is a realtor being able to as Chris said, being able to say Oh, by the way, I hold these leadership positions, because it and what that does in the mind of the client, at least it would for me, if I was looking for a realtor, I would say, wow, this person is all in, in their career. And we know that not all realtors, you know, some, some realtors are part time, and that’s fine as well. But I wouldn’t be wanting a professional that is all in. And not only is that person fully in as a realtor, they’re doing something beyond their own needs, but be serving someone other than their own business. And I love hearing realtors that give back in some way. And I know that, as Chris said, very attractive, and it just makes stands, makes you stand out among the competition. And again, not the reason to get involved per se, but certainly a nice, nice benefit to be able to say, Hey, by the way, I’m so passionate about this, I actually, you know, serve on on these committees or boards. But getting involved at some of these events is really the first step meet some of these people see who you connect with. And, you know, it’s funny, I’ve never met somebody who’s gotten involved, who has then said, you know, that really wasn’t a good experience. You know, I just haven’t met that person yet. And I’m sure, you know, everyone could benefit from, you know, learning more at the local or the state level about what your associations can do. And just great, great fun in particular, as well.

Chris Linsell 21:26
100% 100%. So we’ve talked about what I would consider kind of the be the, the the plains and the foothills of real estate events, let’s talk about the mountains, which is the big events, the big ones. Now. The first one, we got to kind of try to get a call out here because it’s it is the it’s not just the elephant, it’s like the herd of elephants in the room here is the National Association of REALTORS annual conference. If you’re in the United States, this is the biggest real estate event of the year. happens once a year, it’s in usually in a big marquee city, you know, I’m really pleased to be able to say that I was offered a spot to speak at this year’s conference, which is happening in San Diego, second week of November this year. So please, if you are making your way to San Diego, we’d love to see you too. I don’t have specific times and dates as to when exactly I’ll be speaking but please keep an eye out for me. I would love to have you guys there. But this is just an example of one of the events that’s going on on a big national level where you’re getting a ton of people together to who are all passionate about the same thing. So a lot of realtors asked me when they’re talking about these big events like Okay, so why should I go to something like this? You know, real estate happens kind of belly to belly? How can I how can I get, you know value from something where I’m just another face in the crowd? And there’s a couple of things I tell people, the first thing is you have to appropriately set your expectations for events, what do you want to get out of an event? Something I suggest to people as far as the things that they’re looking for is you should be looking for sessions to listen to people who are thought leaders in the industry, who are speaking about topics that either a, you know nothing about, or you are already a leader in in your local community. And what you’re looking for here is to either round out your skill set, grow an area of your business where you don’t have a lot of reach, you don’t have a lot of strategy. Teach Yourself a skill so you can get better at it. Or behind sour though the flip side of that coin is go to a session that is about a topic where you are already you already have an advantage or a leader on because you’re looking to press that advantage. And most specifically here, like let’s say you are you crush Zillow leads in your local community. You need to find an expert on Zillow leads, get to their session and most importantly, hang around afterwards. So you can engage them in a one on one conversation. Get yourself a free coaching or consulting session with that person at the tail end of their session. That’s the sort of thing I charge hundreds of dollars an hour for. This is the sort of thing I give away for free at conferences. So go get belly to belly with somebody get that sort of one on one interaction, even though there’s 10s of 1000s of people at these sorts of things. You have an opportunity for one on one interaction with really specialized individuals.

D.J. Paris 24:43
Absolutely. And we should mention the gnar event is this November I think it’s the 12th through the 15th it is if you want to learn more about it it’s really easy website URL it’s conference dot realtor. So conference dot realtor Think Realty, the National Association I think owns that, that suffix. So they’re using it. Conference dot realtor. And you if you look through the conference schedule there, and Chris that is so first of all, congratulations. I know, I know, it’s not the first time you’re, you’re there. But um, congratulations on being a presenter this year. But there are literally hundreds, hundreds of sessions, certainly more than 100. And it is so impressive. So any skill that you want to develop, and you know, that is there, and nor is going to attract that top talent to teach these sessions. This is big to get you know, so this is why Chris and the close being invited to present there is such a big deal because they don’t, they don’t accept most most everyone gets in fact, I’ve even offered to speak there a couple of years about recruiting and I do not hear back. So maybe I could talk about podcasting or something. But but the point is, is there’s so many great sessions by literally the very best in the industry. And how often do you get access to those people? It’s basically you don’t, and this is an opportunity to do it.

Chris Linsell 26:11
Yeah. And that’s, that’s totally true. And DJ, I’ll just say they’re missing out if they’re not of your expertise, shame. Well, thank you. You know, the other thing I wanted to mention, too, is, you know, one of the things that I hear from real estate agents frequently, especially when they’re shopping for new tools, or technology, maybe they’re looking for a CRM, maybe they’re looking for a lead gen platform, one of the things I hear from agents on a regular basis is, you know, I feel like, I feel like I need to know more about this, I just don’t have the, they’re just the way that customer service is set up. I feel like I’m always being sold rather than being taught about this tool. Before I actually sign on for it. Well, conferences are a really interesting opportunity to flip the script here. And let me tell you what I mean, I spent a lot of time at these conferences on the expo floor, because one of my jobs with the close is as a technology analyst, it’s up to me to be up to snuff on all of the different tools, the different platforms, the different places that real estate agents go to, to, you know, build into their business. And so I talked to just about everyone on the floor, have these sorts of events. And conferences are a unique place for real estate agents to be able to literally get shoulder to shoulder with the customer service reps with the sales agents with the actual people who in some cases, founded and bone, the company’s like Zillow, Premier agent, like bold leads, like property base like sink, like I mean, I literally I can, I can name you a dozen different major real estate platforms that I’ve spoken to the CEO of at these conferences just standing at their booth. You can go to these expos. And you can get a hands on teach me, give me a tutorial, answer all of my questions, free session with these people, shoulder to shoulder, they will walk you through the clicks standing next to you and answer all your questions. And you’ll often get conferences specific special pricing just for going and showing up and talking to these people. So if you struggle with that sort of onboarding process, or you’re just not sure how it’s supposed to feel, or you’re just not comfortable with the way you get sold over the phone on the sorts of thing, go to a conference, these expos are jammed with people who want to tell you about their product, you’ll have a chance to try it out with them before making a decision. It really is a win win.

D.J. Paris 28:54
Yeah, I am such a big fan of the expo floor. Because even if you’re not there to purchase any new technology or new services that might impact your business, you might even just by walking around get a good idea. And you know, I will tell you that this podcast was not an original idea of mine. I was this is about 11 years ago, I believe. I was at a blog conference, I used to be a writer. This is prior to being in the real estate industry at all. I was I had a personal blog back when personal blogs were a lot more popular than they are today. And I was at a blog conference Writers Conference and we were talking and somebody was doing a podcast session and I said oh, that’s kind of interesting. And so I sat in on it and he was a this kind of I just think it’s kind of a funny story. He was a roof sale, a roofing shingles salesman, and he worked for a roofing shingle company and that he said, and he was presenting and he said this is the most boring topic that you could ever imagine that nobody would ever want to live Psalm two, nobody would choose this unless you were in the roofing business. Nobody would choose to listen to my roofing shingle podcast because nobody’s going to care about this. Unless, unless that’s your line of work. And he goes, and that’s exactly why I created one. And he created this podcast and he interviews different people in the roofing industry. And he said, You know, it’s never going to be as big as, you know, Joe Rogan’s podcast per se, but, but he has a nice niche. And anyway, I walked out of there thinking, Oh, that’s really, really interesting. And so this podcast was, was born many years later, from a reminder, a memory I had of sitting in there going, I could figure out some kind of podcast to do. And it was all because I went to a conference. And I will tell you that you know, in look, this is a very specific example. But there I mean, there are so many opportunities of a great ideas that are going to be shared at these conferences, like Inman, like the National Association of Realtors, that you really should consider attending. And I’ve always thought if you go and you get just one or two good actionable ideas, or maybe a relationship with another realtor, and you start referring business to one another, you know, it pays for itself, it gets you away from as Chris, you were saying, it gets agents away from their daily grind, which can be taxing and tiring, allows you to recharge, refresh, maybe step away from the craziness. And also not only improve your your your skills, your professional development skills, but also maybe find a new service provider for your business, find a new marketing, you know, angle, or just build some better relationships or more relationships with other realtors. And yeah, so I see it as a win all the way around.

Chris Linsell 31:51
Totally, totally. So if you are thinking about a conference or an event, here’s a couple that you should consider. The National Association of REALTORS annual conference is in since excuse me, it’s in San Diego this year. That’ll be a great one to attend. I if I were you, I would start thinking about your travels sooner than later. Hotels are expensive in San Diego right now. And it’s not going to get cheaper. I haven’t Imagine I have to imagine. You should also you know not to necessarily shout out one of my competitors here but they put on a good event you should consider one of the Inman events. I’m going to be attending the Inman Connect in Las Vegas. It’s in October this year. They always have lots of I mean really, you know, triple A, you know, high quality eight plus speakers, including major CEOs of huge real estate brokerages, lots of really interesting sessions you know like our Haytham, him and has a major presence in our industry, they put on a good event, and we had to close just want to you know, see what’s going on there and see what we can do to continue to up our game to so you should consider an Inman event. And you should also consider an event that is put on specifically by your brokerage, you know, Coldwell Banker has a big Gen blue event every year, I believe it’s in New York City this year, where you get together all of the agents in the years in your specific brokerage, from franchises from across the country and in some cases across the world. So a really cool event, an opportunity to you know, connect with folks in your industry and within your brokerage, learn some stuff you know, get motivated that sort of thing. Coldwell Banker century 21 Keller Williams exp, Exit Realty, all of these Better Homes and Gardens I kept the list goes on and on all of these companies have their own annual events, you should check it out. Even if it’s just once in your career, you got to go and see what it’s all about. See, if it’s something that matters to you and your business, there’s going to be some value for you there. Just got to figure out what it is and get the most out of it.

D.J. Paris 34:01
Yeah, and I think Chris said it best earlier by saying, you know, I really identify what I have found with conferences and I’ve been to many many conferences in many different industries over my career. And there were times where I would walk away disappointed there were times where I walked away feeling like I got so much incredible value. And I realized that the difference between the times I was disappointed and when I walked away feeling really good about spending my time and money at these conferences was setting the correct expectation and really going through and saying okay, why am I attending here? What do I hope to get out of it and be really honest with yourself because what you what you don’t want to happen is you know, you get to the end of the event it’s now Sunday you’re on your way home and go Well that was a waste of time and now I’m it was a waste of a weekend and now I’m you know behind on my clients. And if you can, what I encourage is look through the schedule of of sessions events, look at the expo As the expo participants, the companies that are going to be showcasing their products and services, and if you see anything in there that really attracts you to either learn a new skill or connect with maybe, you know, a type of agent that might be presenting or a company that might be presenting or showcasing a product, you know, I would say go, but but do your research ahead of time so that you know what you’re looking for. And you know that I always just say that because, again, I used to just go just to go and then I’d sometimes I’d walk away going well, what why did I go that wasn’t really a great use of my time. But the good news with these conferences that Chris mentioned, is they there’s so much amazing content there, it would be hard, you’d be hard pressed not to find something that’s of interest to you. But the good news is you can just go online and see all of the different sessions and see, I say if you could find three sessions that you want to attend, it’s probably worth going to

Chris Linsell 35:51
totally and just a reminder, all of these events, I mean, this is this is business travel. So while it’s not free, it is tax deductible, it is something that is a business expense for you. So, you know, I tell this to agents all the time, you need to be investing in your business, if you expect it to grow. And that includes in yourself to invest in your own personal growth, these sorts of events are great opportunities for them.

D.J. Paris 36:15
Yeah, and just a great way to to recharge and who doesn’t want to go to San Diego for the national convention where it’s, you know, 78 degrees and sunny every single day of the year. It’s just a perfect, perfect time to get away. Unless, of course, you already live in an area with great weather. But Chris and myself, we we have limited great weather. So we so I Chris, I think you’ve actually, it was funny, I was talking to Chris, before the show, I said I don’t think I’m gonna go to the National Association. And Chris actually just did the event this this November, I think Chris just talked me into it. Because this is how silly I am, oh, by we have a podcast too, I have a podcast, I should probably walk around and spread the word and talk to other vendors who may want to advertise on our show, or may want to find some great guests on our show from you know, top realtors, and, and so I should be there too. So Chris, you just talked me into it. I will now be booking my travel and my accommodations for the realtor event this November. So the national association rather. So definitely, I guess the point of this, this episode is just get involved, get involved at the local level at the state level if you’re so inclined. And then also the national levels really where the magic kind of the really cool stuff happens. And it’s only happens once a year with the National Association at least. Of course, there’s other conferences I’ve been to the admin I’ve been in before it is it is remarkable what they can do, what the speakers they bring in are great. And there’s, you know, lots of lots of great ones. And then of course, you know, if you are part of a larger national or international or real estate firm, like the ones you mentioned, or compasses is I think they have one as well. They all have these events. And you know, they’re they’re probably worth attending, or at least worth streaming virtually, if that’s all you can do. But anyway, I

Chris Linsell 38:10
find yourself in San Diego in November, my session is five bold predictions from the desk of a real estate technologists for 2022. We’re going to be making some predictions. Some of them are going to be provocative, some of them are going to be spicy, and you’re not going to know what they are unless you come. So come Come Are you with me about them afterwards. I would really like to hear from you.

D.J. Paris 38:31
Well, I think all of our all of our listeners and viewers should consider attending. And again, yes, it’s there’s an expense. Yes, it’s time away from the office and from your clients. But if you come back with just a couple of good ideas, or even just a better way to communicate with your clients, there’s communication strategies, I mean, imagine going and seeing Chris’s, you know, five bold predictions for the following year. And being able to incorporate that into your pitch when you’re talking to buyers and sellers. That seems like a really good idea. Right? So even just coming for that would be obviously great. So we encourage everyone to check out the National Association of REALTORS conferences this fall and also your local and status and also your brokerage conferences. It’s time to start doing stuff in person again, it feels good, it’s good for the it’s good for the soul, I think and and by the way you don’t I want to make this final point you do not have to be an extrovert to attend these events. These events, you know the population is such that a certain percentage of the population are extroverted, which you might think is the only type of people that attend these events. But that is just not the case. There are introverts there I used to go to a lot of writers conferences, and writers tend to be more introverted. The data suggests and we still had a great time and you don’t have to be a party animal who just wants to go and hang out and have drinks after after For words in the in the suites that that exist at these conferences. This is a place where introverts and extroverts alike can interact can mingle can get to know each other. And you know, there’s even if you’re somebody who doesn’t like to go at these events exhausts you, you should still consider attending and then just setting up, you know, some time where you can recharge, because I’m the same way when I go to these events, I get exhausted. And and I have to sometimes run up to my hotel room for an hour to take a nap.

Chris Linsell 40:30
Yeah, that’s true. Gotta pace yourself lot going on. But I’m telling you drinking from a firehose is worth it, because you’re gonna get a lot of good stuff.

D.J. Paris 40:38
Great. And Chris, we should probably I want to finish it. And we always I always forget to mention this. And it’s such an important thing. The clothes.com is such an incredible website, and you guys come on every month, the articles that their editors write, their contributors are so amazing, they really are some of the best content for realtors to learn how to better their business. It’s professional development stuff, it’s marketing, it’s just every part of the business that they think would be helpful to you to grow, not necessarily the sensational headlines of look at the cool gossip of the day with this particular company, which other news organizations in the real estate world focus on? The close is really unique here. And they really hyper focus, and they’re hyper vigilant in one thing, how can we help our readers become more successful, and 99% of their content is totally free, which is really super cool. They’re very unique organization. And we couldn’t be more honored to be affiliated with them. And to have Chris on every month, so everyone should absolutely go to the clothes.com on the regular, I always say, you know, subscribe to their newsletters. So you get emailed every time or if you’re an RSS feed reader like me, I don’t think people much do that anymore. Add them to your to your RSS feed, so you get notified. But Chris, let’s talk about the clothes Pro. We don’t talk about that enough, I think and that’s that’s sort of the paid model for the clothes which provides additional benefits.

Chris Linsell 42:08
Yeah, yeah, close Pro is your opportunity to really take your investment in your your business development to the next level. Like you said, close 99% about what we’ve got there is totally free articles like you know, the best free real estate CRM is the best website builders 10 safety practices to protect you and your brokerage, that sort of thing. You’re gonna find all that stuff on the close. But if you want to take it to the next level, you can get in on the close Pro. This is where we offer one on one and small group coaching every single week. Come get coached up by myself by another one of our coaches, Shawn motori, who’s a 25 years that Keller Williams franchise owner, really knowledgeable in the business. We’d run boot camps every single week, we offer specialized courses that our original to the close, you can’t find this anywhere else. We also offer a huge resource library that includes all of our past boot camps. It includes literally dozens and dozens and dozens of templates of checklists of strategy docs on things like lead gen on nurturing email templates, text templates, phone scripts, I mean, honestly, it just goes on and on. There’s so many resources there. And we’re adding to it every single week, to be part of the closed Pro, it’s 35 bucks a month. If you want to bill monthly, there’s no contract that you can just, you know, check it out for a month. See if that’s what you’re looking for $35 for the month, if you want to commit to the year, it works out to $25 a month. Really nice and easy option. And honestly, the annual cost of that is what one of these courses would cost you just wanted to buy it outright. So really affordable there. And we have like I said, we have a ton of interesting stuff happening every week, including boot camps. Now, also being offered from a couple of our rockstar contributors. We’ve got a boot camp with Beverly Ruffner whose nickname is the conversion Queen talking all about lead conversion strategies. That’s going to be kicking off next week. Super excited about that. That’s June 7 For anyone who’s listening afterwards. But if you if you come into close pro after that you can get the back sessions in the resource library and get yourself caught up. There’s just so much opportunity here to level up your real estate experience. We want you guys to be a part of it. 35 bucks a month for a monthly 25 bucks a month if you want to commit to the annual and can’t wait to see you there. I’ll talk to close pro members every single day and I want to talk to you guys.

D.J. Paris 44:49
Yeah, and guys, the easiest way to really get hooked in is just start checking out the clothes.com as often as possible, read some of their articles. You’re gonna get hooked you No, I will tell you that every tape our producer, I’ll pull back the curtain just just for a moment, then I’ll, we’ll we’ll end the episode because I know Chris has to has to go. But every day we go online and try to find articles written, specifically designed to help real estate agents grow their business, I will tell you that it is such a difficult task to find an article every day that actually has good content. We literally struggle with this every single day, except on the days where the close publishes a new article, because it is actually the only content that I know for sure, I don’t even have to read before promoting, because it is 100% going to be detailed. It’s not, you know, I just am so impressed by your writers. And I’m a writer, myself, and I will tell you, they have just incredible content. And it’s the best content I’ve seen from and I’m a marketer, as well, from a marketing perspective, or just professional development perspective, the closed.com is where you need to be reading, because you will just learn you will learn at least one good tactic or something that you wouldn’t learn elsewhere. You know, online, every time they publish an article, and they do deep dives, it’s not just, you know, here’s five ways to be safe at your next closing. And it’s, you know, the obvious ones that you already know, it’s going to be things that you hadn’t thought about. And that boy they are, they are, as I said, closing I met I met showing, hopefully you’d be safe at closing. But anyway, the point is, is they have great content, so please check them out the clothes.com Chris, thank you so much. Once again, for being on our show, we are so excited that you guys take time out of your busy day to, to come on once a month and share this, these these insights with our audience. So on behalf of the audience, we want to thank Chris for again coming on. He’s been with us for years and hope to be with us for years to come. And also please visit the clothes.com and subscribe, you know to either their just their newsletter or check out their pay model. It’s worth it and it’s month to month and it’s $35 Gosh, that’s a pretty reasonable price. I just paid $35 to test out a video that I’m going to be trying to recruit Realtors with I paid $35 for 110 second video, and that probably won’t even work that well. So I should have probably saved given that money to the close and I would have learned better strategy. So guys, go ahead and check it out the clothes.com Chris Thanks again and we will see everyone on the next episode.

Chris Linsell 47:26
Thanks guys. Have a good one.

Welcome to our monthly feature, Social Bootcamp With Gogo Bethke!

In this episode, Gogo discusses how to use hashtags to build a community who follows you and who may eventually need your services as a real estate agent. Gogo also describes how to to position hashtags and the importance of using your brand as its own hashtag. Gogo emphasizes how crucial it is to stay consistent with hashtags. Next, Gogo gives instructions on how to search for hashtags that you may want to use in your posts. Last, Gogo talks about hashtagging on Facebook vs Instagram.

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

Gogo Bethke can be reached at [email protected] and at her Instagram account.

Purchase Gogo’s Bootcamp by clicking here – Keeping It Real Podcast listeners get a discount!

D.J. Paris 0:00
This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the very best media training program on the planet? Gogo Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country and her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level. Keeping it real listeners receive a special discount so please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee oh gee Oh podcast.com for your special discount and now on with the show

Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and today on the show we have our monthly series social boot camp with gogo Beth key. Now let me tell you about GO GO GO GO came to the United States in 2003. To build her American dream she was broke had no real estate experience no sphere of influence barely spoke English, and only $6 to her name, so that left her with nothing else but Facebook to help build her business which is where she started as she created gogos real estate and began her real estate career and with the power of social media at gogo has sold over 75 million in real estate transactions. That’s probably an old number. She also in her social media, she shares the good, the bad, and the ugly of real estate and her honest snippets into her daily life earned her the nickname of Queen of social media. And after being asked to present at various conferences and events with realtors, she built her own social media Bootcamp for realtors called gogos bootcamp. Today she has a team of over 300 agents nationwide. Her goal is to help as many agents as possible make a name for themselves in real estate utilizing social media. Now if she can do it, this girl from Transylvania, Romania with no formal US education, no sphere of influence, no money, no experience and an accent that anyone else can do it as well. Please follow gogo on Instagram at gogos real estate that’s gogos real estate. And please also consider investing in her bootcamp. gogos bootcamp is the very best social media program for realtors on the market. We it’s the only product we stand behind our podcast, and we encourage everyone to go check it out, you can actually we have a special pricing for our listeners and viewers. So go to Gogo podcast.com. Again, go go podcast.com Go go. Welcome to our show.

Gogo Bethke 2:38
Thank you for having me. But I guess what, what these numbers are so old, you have almost 600 agents now.

D.J. Paris 2:45
That’s, you know, that’s right. And you know, what’s funny is go go. And I have a little bit of a little friendly rivalry because I’ve been recruiting agents for our company here in Chicago for 10 years, and I only have 750 agents. And in just a couple of years, she’s almost to my level now, which is amazing. And what’s even more impressive is she’s doing it the exact same way. She’s teaching agents how to do it through social media, which is I should take some of your own advice and do it my way. And maybe I’d have more people here on board as well. So we’re super excited to have you, you are absolutely the real deal in a, in a, in an industry where anyone can call themselves an expert, you actually are an expert, because you did it with your own business. And now you’re doing it on the recruiting side. And it’s obviously just it’s so amazing. You’ve built this incredible community. So what are we going to talk about today with social media?

Gogo Bethke 3:41
So you and me did a little bit of conversing and talk about today’s the different pool of people that you can target? And then how would you find them with the power of hashtags? You want to do that?

D.J. Paris 3:53
Yep. I love that. Because I know that even when I’m producing episodes for our podcast, I’m always not sure exactly what hashtags to use how many, you know, just sort of how to know what what gets noticed and researched and clicked on.

Gogo Bethke 4:09
Yeah. So let’s cover a few things. First, let’s cover a different pool of people and the different pool of things that we want to target. So then let’s talk about how to look up those those hashtags, how to look them up, to see the traffic on them. Okay, so let’s start with that. So the way I look at hashtags is like a search words. So if I want to go to Google and put in a biomass, which by the way, that’s the next thing I need to Google, because I want to know more about it. I just don’t have the time. But that’s what I wouldn’t be doing. So if I went on Instagram right now, I would put that in the search box biomass. And then I would see all of the things that pop up because I want to see actual people’s opinion on the biomass. How much do they spend, what do they use it for? Does it work does integrals like that kind of stuff? Think of hashtags as search words. What are you looking for? Who are you targeting? So for example, do I want you Our end goal, everyone’s end goal right here, as a realtor is I want people to buy or sell with me correct. I want them to be my lifelong clients that always every time they have a real estate need to reach out to Google’s real estate team. So in order to do that, how do I find them? Who are these people? Where are the act? What do we have in common? So the way you can do that is to target them. Because you think about it. People in average are on the market for about every seven to 10 years, which means in the in between time, they have no real estate needs, but I still have to find them or they have to find me they need to know of my existence. So if and when they finally have some real estate needs, they know exactly who to call. So who are those people, the way I look at it as I am as gogo, how many things do I love and enjoy? And who are the people that love and enjoy the same things? So for example, I’m an immigrant. Okay, so if I am talking about if I’m posting something today about being an immigrant, or, as I like to call it an alien, technically, legally in this country, I’m considered an alien. Yeah. Really, or a naturalized citizen. But my favorite is the alien because

D.J. Paris 6:05
like, I like alien to

Gogo Bethke 6:06
you. I do have a third eye or an alien. I understand I’m from another continent, but I’m not from another planet, right. But somebody there came up with that word. I was like, that is just weird. Yeah. We’ll make it work. So let’s say today, I’m posting about someone and I want to find the other Romanians, Hungarians, immigrants in my neck of the woods, because we have nothing in common. I’d rather work with somebody who’s just like me, because if you’re just like me, then we are going to get along and you’re not going to be an asshole clients who’s my friend, act like you’re going to love me. I’m going to love you. We’re going to smooth sail all the way to the closing table. I’m going to make you the I’m going to get you the best deal. I’m going to make a nice commission. Everybody’s happy in the end of the transaction. What I found you because I’m an alien, and you’re an alien guy. I’m making a post today and talking about hey, I’m from Romania. And you know, I came to this country, blah, blah, blah to allow people to get to know me. I would hashtag Romania, Romanian Romanian girls, I would hashtag Hungarian Transylvania Hungarian from Transylvania. I would hashtag girl I would hashtag immigrant I would hashtag American dream. I would hashtag immigrant realtor I would hashtag un I mean, so everything that goes with that, who you are on the immigrant side of your life, you would want to use a hashtag for because now am I talking to just Romanians? No but would I find somebody who also looking somebody might follow the hashtag Romanian? Sure they have no interest in local real estate. They just happen to find you because you posted something with the Romanian hashtag. They follow the Romanian hashtag now suddenly they follow you as I call them. I didn’t know God was Romanian. I’m not I’m from Romania, but I’m Hungarian but just so you know. But now they’re gonna follow me because you have that in common. So sometimes I post something about my Bulldog. Well, I’m going to do Bulldog lover Bulldog mom. Sure. Bugs American Bulldog, english bulldog, French Bulldog, Boston Bulldog. All of those Bulldogs because I know there is a whole community for Bulldog lovers millions out there so they might not have a need in real estate at this moment, but they are going to follow me because we have Bulldog in common. I’m a bulldog mom. So now they’re gonna be like, Oh my gosh, go where’s the bullet? I didn’t know that. So now they’re gonna follow me because of the Bulldog. They have zero real estate needs at this moment. But they’re gonna continue staying as my follower and then one day when they have real estate needs, they’re gonna be like, there’s that go go check. That sounds real estate. I’m gonna call her. Okay. The other one for me that I do is type one diabetes. My oldest son is type one diabetic. So I tag type one I type type one diabetes T one D, you know, CGM omnipaque, glucagon, like a one C like anything that applies to a type one mom, type one. That’s one of the things so anything that you have because now I’m going to find a whole other type one community that may not have real estate needs at the moment that they’re like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know gogo son has type one diabetes. Now they’re gonna follow me because we have that thing in common. Okay, so now you have to sit down for a moment and write down okay, what are the different things that you stand for? You might be a hiker, you might be a biker, you might be a swimmer, you might be into science, you might be a nerd, you might be a book nerd you might be whatever that that thing that makes you now you want to find the people that make they have that same thing in common with you because those are your people. And I rather work with people that are just like me.

D.J. Paris 9:29
And then the other thing you just said so many great things. You’re absolutely you want to work with people who already have some sort of shared connection. So the other way you can do it is almost reverse engineer it as well. So if you wanted to find out anyone else that hashtags Transylvania or Romania, for example, in your local market, you can search for that. And you could say, you could always reach out to those people. If if there’s if they’re public. If their profiles are public, and you can see their posts. You could actually say, Hey, by the way, I am also from Transylvania, and I always am interested in meeting people who Have our background you know? And yeah, it’s funny you as you were telling that story reminded me of a, of a story of something that happened to me I went to Ireland with with my dad, we had like a father son trip several years ago, which was very, very fun. And we ended up in this one town called Galway, which is one of the towns it’s very popular over there anyway, came but it’s a small town. It’s like a little tiny, small town. And well, it’s not that small, but small enough. And we came back here. And the next day after the trip was over, I went to go get a sandwich at this deli that was down the street from where I lived. And I walked in this woman had an Irish accent. And I said, Oh, I just got back from Ireland yesterday. That’s really funny. I go, where are you from? In Ireland. She goes, I’m from Galway, I was like I was just in Galway, three or four days ago or whatever. And we started talking about Galway. And she said, she goes you know, you’re the first person who I’ve met that’s been to Galway since I’ve been to Chicago. And she goes, I search on social media all the time to try to find all my other Galway people. And I really haven’t found anyone yet. So this is a perfect example of people do search for this.

Gogo Bethke 11:04
Yeah, you can actually follow a hashtag. So if like, I follow the hashtag realtor, because I want to see every time somebody posts like who makes it, why what did they post? What was in that post that made them viral? So then I can copy? You know, I mean, so if you’re not in the business of inventing the wheel, like go follow people that are doing it, and they’re doing an amazing job and then copy and paste. You know, I mean, like, do the same thing. Don’t make it too hard for yourself. But yes, you can absolutely do that you can follow I follow the hashtag Brighton. And because Brighton Michigan is where we do most of our transactions. And I also brighten every time I make a post and story. So there was this guy one day that sent me a message like I’m so freakin excuse my French annoyed with your posts. Do you always have to tag Brighton? He’s like, I’m so sick of seeing your posts.

D.J. Paris 11:49
God forbid.

Gogo Bethke 11:51
Clearly, I’m sorry. My I’m doing my job and it’s working. I said, you have a few options. You can unfollow boy, or you could unfollow me. But here’s the thing, I’m not going to stop doing what I’m doing. Because it’s clearly working. I mean, not to the fact that I’m annoying you that’s not what I’m trying to achieve. But you clearly see my post just because I tag right in.

D.J. Paris 12:13
It’s a great example of being effective. And we should tell people, though, please put your tags Well, if you’re going to do a bank of tags, put them at the bottom of the post, if what about but if you’re going to put hashtags, but you should also feel free to put hashtags in the content in the actual post, you know, text itself. Let’s talk let’s talk about that. Where do you more do you put most of yours at the bottom or

Gogo Bethke 12:41
so most of the time I build it right into what I’m posting. So when I make a post, I type as I speak. So seriously, if I showed you this photo, whatever I will tell you about that photo, or what’s on my mind, is the way I would say it is how I type. Okay, and as I’m talking about, let’s say I’m talking about business mindset, then I wouldn’t be hashtagging business, I would be working in their business mindset, I would work in their social media, I would work in their social media marketing. So all of those as I’m talking about that subject in the body, I will put a hashtag in front of the word that is about. And then usually I do a couple of spaces at the end. And I always hashtag my own brand. So you always want to hashtag your own brand. So what does that mean? My brand is Google’s real estate. And I do hashtag Google’s real estate all one word, hashtag, go go back, you hashtag go go. Because I know if somebody’s searching for me, they’re gonna search by Google, Google’s real estate, or Google Becky, or team Google. So all of those things that I know I created a name and a brand for in the industry, I would hashtag my own. So I strongly recommend, don’t be added into the blah, blah, blah, that you’re talking about. Because that’s not what you’re talking about. But you still need to hashtag that because you don’t know how people are going to search for you. So I always put plug in my own hashtags. Now sometimes lately I try something new, where I take all of the hashtags and plug it into the first comment. Interesting. You see how it does doesn’t do better if it just blank, no hashtags at all. And the comments are in the bottom or in the comment or sorry, the hashtag first comment. Yeah, yeah. What does it do better if my blah, blah, blah, has no hashtags. But all of the hashtags are in a bunk bunch in the bottom? Or does it do better if the hashtags are built into the blah, blah, blah, but there’s no hashtags in the bottom or in a comment? So I just play along with it, because the algorithm changes all the time.

D.J. Paris 14:29
Yeah. And also about any trends about what tends to do better, or does it just is it not conclusive?

Gogo Bethke 14:36
Well, definitely, what does matter is if you don’t post all 30, hashtags, so you can do up to 30. If you do more than 30, it’s going to go blank, it’s your, your, your type is going to go blank, and you’re like, Well, I just typed it up where the heck did it go? Is because you use more than 30 hashtags. So if you use more, they automatically just gonna blank out your account your type up. So you definitely want to use less less than you can use up 230, but I don’t recommend it. The algorithm doesn’t like that. So I would be very specific with the hashtags that you want to use on that post. So for example, let’s say you’re talking about CMAs. You know, your comparative market analysis, you’re not going to hashtag beach office. Right? Right, because it’s not a palm tree, and you’re not 100 sipping mimosas, you are in your office running CMAs for your client out. So because the artificial intelligence, the AI is very smart, it actually Instagram and Facebook AI has picture recognition. And so the AI is strong enough, smart enough to know, oh, there’s a palm tree in the picture, that’s a home office that will either have like Beach offers for the day. But if I do that palm tree, and now I do CMA, it’s going to be like, well, that’s not You’re not talking about what the picture shows. So it’s not going to show it to your followers. So you have to stay true and very specific with your hashtags. So what I would do, I wouldn’t, I would probably narrow it down to like, six, seven, have very specific hashtags to what you’re talking about in that post. And then also leave another three or four to your own personalized brand. So right around 1112 hashtags per post is what I think is the sweet spot is.

D.J. Paris 16:13
Yeah, that makes sense. And I, you just said something really important about the visual picture specifically on Instagram, matching it up to some degree with the hashtags that you’re using, or at least maybe better said is making sure that the hashtags are wildly different from what your what your visual image, because if because Google or I’m sorry, Facebook, who owns Instagram is going to be able to identify objects in a picture. And they’re going to be able to assign context to that. So So that’s, that’s a really, really smart idea. So if you’re like just a realtor, and you’re sitting at your office, and you’re in an office environment, you start hashtagging vacation homes, or, or that may or may not be a good idea, right? Yeah, exactly. Got it. If you’re in it, if you’re in front of a home and you want to take a picture that you’re listing, then you then you can talk about all sorts of home styled tags, tags about home, because Google is gonna see a house in the background and going to make the site Google Facebook is gonna see that and then make the connection and say that’s relevant to this photo.

Gogo Bethke 17:19
Yeah, that so now let’s talk about how do you search for hashtags? What are those things that you should use? Soy lattes, you? Do you want to use the Bulldog one? Sure. Okay. So let’s go on Instagram. When you open up Instagram, you’re gonna see your feed. And then in the bottom, you see this search button right here. That’s the one I want you to click OK. So let’s put in bold dog lover. You’re going to wait, and it’s going to show you hashtags. You see, it shows me there’s 1.2 posts, and posted Bulldog lover. So that’s a good one to tag because there’s a lot more following that hashtag. We’re using that hashtag. Let’s say let’s do Bulldogs zap with an S at the end. Okay. So now I’m going to do you see it didn’t even bring it up. It didn’t even bring it up. So now I have to go and hit tag. You see some new tags on top to take me to Bulldogs tag. So it’s 5.9 million. Huge news. Okay, so now I’m like, Okay, this is a good hashtag to use. Okay, so let’s go back to something funky. I don’t know.

D.J. Paris 18:28
Let’s, let’s say Well, I think baby Bulldogs a good one. That would be a little bit more specific. It’s gonna be a lot smaller, right?

Gogo Bethke 18:36
The Bulldogs so not puppy. We’re gonna do baby. Okay, there you go. Baby Bulldog. It’s only 109,000. So should I be if I need to limit it down to five or six? hashtags? Should I be using baby Bulldog? No, probably.

D.J. Paris 18:51
Probably not. But But if if it was Transylvania, for example. And it was there’s going to be less people doing that. But it’s so hyper specific. See, baby Bulldogs. Isn’t that specific, right. So if you wanted something really, really specific that you’re into, then maybe it does make sense to use a tag with with with less volume?

Gogo Bethke 19:14
Yeah, so if it’s so what I’m trying to say not to not use tags with less volume, I’m trying to say if you’re doing your research, and now you can only post five tags for object. And now you need to decide which tag should you be using because now we’re using these tags because I want to generate those

D.J. Paris 19:30
eyeballs that we want to cast the widest net possible exactly what exactly so imagine

Gogo Bethke 19:34
it that way. So what if I have to narrow that if you’re going to use 30 Go you so you can actually go to a site called all hashtags. I just down all hashtags. You go in there and you put in Bulldog there’s like a hashtag generator in the middle of the screen. You put in a bulldog and in the little stripe there, and it’s literally going to give you the 30 most used hashtags that are tied to the word Bulldog. Right? You can literally take it from there and post it so I can put In real estate, and they’re always gonna give me the 30 most used hashtags for real estate. But I want to teach you all how to search for specific ones that are that your subject that you’re talking about. You can narrow it down based on amount of followers or amount of people who use that tag or follow that tag. So this is how you find you find your target audience on a specific subject.

D.J. Paris 20:24
Yeah, makes it makes perfect sense. All right, let’s talk about that. So, so well, just to recap, I guess. So we basically, in order to find hashtags, there’s really two ways to do it. If you want to see the biggest hashtags, or the or the easiest or related hashtags to one particular keyword, if something you’re interested in all hashtags is a good option, because you can just type it in and you can see. And you can also just pull up your fate your Instagram app and do a search for for hashtags there. And you’ll get a sense of the volume as well.

Gogo Bethke 20:55
Yes, yeah. 30, or you can narrow down based on a specific subject and do your own research and see, okay, I’m gonna use this one. I like it.

D.J. Paris 21:04
What are your thoughts about hashtagging on Facebook versus Instagram?

Gogo Bethke 21:09
So Facebook is totally different, you can still hashtag but I would not recommend us more than five. Gotcha. Yeah. So on Facebook, we use a very limited, I would say probably an average two or three. So for example, we also use a different than we use Instagram. So Facebook is more of my local market. That’s where my listings are just listed just sold open houses we just closed that are those things go. Instagram is more. So my target audience is the agent, we’re on Facebook, my target audience is my sellers and buyers. So we use a totally different. So if I’m posting something on Facebook, and it’s my newest listing, I would use the hashtag just listed. I will use the next hashtag Google’s real estate team because my team is listed it makes sense. And then maybe I will use the hashtags home for sale. And then I’ve used the hashtag home for sale in Brighton. I’ve used the hashtag Brighton I’m using hashtag Michigan. Because those are the five very important things that apply to that one specific listing. exam. So I use it totally different than I use it on Instagram. But I use the two platforms totally different.

D.J. Paris 22:16
Right. Yeah, it’s very interesting. And we should also mention, too, for Facebook hashtagging, that you really should be doing that mostly in your your business page post, right? Because that that’s that’s a public? Well, it I would assume for most people have a business page. It’s a public facing page, you want people to be able to find you who aren’t necessarily your friends, although your your friends will find you as well. But the hashtags are way more important in your business page posts versus your put your personal page post.

Gogo Bethke 22:47
Yes, absolutely. Don’t use a personal page on your site.

D.J. Paris 22:52
I wouldn’t assume you would. But Awesome. Well, I think we should stop there. Because that is why we strive to do too much on on all of my podcast episodes. And then people get like, oh my gosh, they get overwhelmed. This is really important. Guys, this is so easy to do. You’re already posting content, make sure you’re adding hashtags, right? Do your research, you want to cast as wide a net as possible. But remember, too, that if you’re really only focused on your local market, do a search with like your city name, and real estate or real estate city name or you know your city realtor and see what kind of volume you get from that. Or what volume Instagram has for and Facebook has for that. Well, Facebook, I don’t think shows you hashtag volume, but Instagram does. And you can actually see that and make some educated guesses because gogo for example. Her team is nationwide. So she’s going to big do the most broad terms that are specific to real estate agents. But if you’re a hyper local market, like she was saying, she hashtags Brighton, which is where she’s from, for some of her posts where she wants to attract more local people. So you just have to think about what where, where are your people? Where do they live? And what are they searching for. And using the city name or the town name you live in is a good indicator to get a sense of how many people are doing that. And that’s where you can start getting some more followers.

Gogo Bethke 24:13
Absolutely. You know that?

D.J. Paris 24:16
Well, you nailed it. I’ve just repeated it. I just repeated it. Go Go’s got a birthday coming up by the end of this year that we’re talking about this earlier. We won’t mention the actual birthday itself, but that she’s got a whole What’s that? No, we will not mention it. But what we have, she has a lot of exciting things coming up this year before her birthday. She’s speaking at a number of different events. Really, we encourage you to follow everything she’s doing. She has a new home, she’s building down in Florida. All of these things are happening right now. Very, very exciting before the end of the year, so please follow her because her her she’s one of those people that doesn’t just teach how to do this, which is a lot of people who do this aren’t actually very good at social media. They just teach about it. because they realize it’s a lot easier to teach it than to actually do it. She actually does it and she’s recruited, how many agents do you have now?

Gogo Bethke 25:08
Almost extended?

D.J. Paris 25:09
Well, you haven’t recruited any of them. That’s the brilliant part, I recruit agents, I go after agents, they find you through attraction, it’s the same thing you teach your, your students are realtors, how to attract agents through attraction versus cold calling, which is what what I do. So I am a huge, huge fan of hers. She’s actually somebody who gets results and teaches at the same time, which is remarkable. So we’re big, big fans at let’s talk about gogos bootcamp, just for a moment. So explain to our audience what that is and, and what people get with it.

Gogo Bethke 25:43
Sure. So there’s two different courses. One is the social media course. That’s our initial course. That’s how the madness started. And that’s everything social media. So what we talked about here, guys, today, it’s literally inside of course. And then some we are talking probably over 200 different videos right now. What you know, that’s what it looks like on the social media side. So my goal, I’ve never bought a lead in my life, I always talk about, I rather teach you how to fish them to get them to hand you a fish. So I’d rather teach you how to put food on the table fish for your own leads. So you always know where your leads are going to come from. So who is not going to know and have control over your own commissions. And then also build a brand that will allow you if you do this right guy, social media is not just for the next commission, it’s not just for your buyers and seller leads, today, I will have over 20 different sources of income, every single one of them, while 99% of them are passive. And every single one of them comes through some sort of a sort of social media. So then you when you start building an audience, now companies are going to reach out to you. And now you can make affiliate income through those companies. So there’s a million ways to skin this cat skin a cat. And so we talk about brand building, I teach the organic side of social media branding. And then my business partner Sammy teaches the paid advertising of the social media advertising. So if you want to a learn with me organically how to grow the brand is what I’ve done. And then take that and maybe throw some money at it 510 bucks a day, and then target your local audience and get your next leads and constantly have the flow. And then when you have so many leads, and you’re gonna build a team and then build a team. So it just goes on and on from there. And so that’s the social media side of things. So we have organic social media and paid advertising in the same course. That one is 1499 right now, where we are adding on to the course and then the price is going up. I don’t know how much but more than likely more than double. You guys listening to the keepin it real podcast, you guys actually get 10% off. So don’t come directly to my site, go to google podcast.com to get your 10% off for being the keeping the real podcast listener on my side, you’re going to be paying full price. You’re going to keep an a real podcast since that’s what you heard about it. So give DJ some credit.

D.J. Paris 27:44
Thanks. And and and we get a little affiliate spiff as well on that. And that helps us support the podcast. So if you like what you’re hearing, and you want us to keep growing, you know, not only do you get a discount, but we get a little taste of that as well. So and again, it’s literally the only product we recommend. It is so good. We are such big fans, we get pitched just so everyone knows kind of pull back the curtain for a moment, every almost every day. Almost in fact, it happens every day, every day, our zonna who’s our producer gets pitched by publicists who somebody is selling a service or a product or they represent a company that is trying to target agents, we get pitched by them every single day. And this is the only social media product we would we would recommend because it is good. And we know that gogo is the real deal. So we put our entire brand behind that as well. So put your trust in her go to Gogo podcast.com, I assure you, you will not be disappointed it’s worth the money. And just think even if it nets you just one additional sale it more than pays for itself. And it’s going to net you a lot lot more than that. So

Gogo Bethke 28:49
think about what’s an average commission for an agent nationwide, it’s probably five, somewhere between five and 7000. Say my course sucks. All you get is one measly of your life and you never get another one again, while it paid for itself four times over four times what it costed.

D.J. Paris 29:07
I would invest $1,500 To make $5,000 any day of the week. I do that every day. I do it with every last penny I had. So it’s to me, it’s to me, it’s an absolute no brainer. And also please follow gogo on Instagram at gogos real estate you’ll get a good sense of what you should be doing to get more clients. And also you’ll just get a good sense of what an actual agent who’s productive has a ton of business herself, and has built a huge team and this big social media following all at the same time. And she does it all on social media. So check it out at gogo Go Go’s real estate on Instagram and you can find her on Facebook and everywhere else as well. Go go we’ll

Gogo Bethke 29:51
do one thing. So a lot of our students are actually getting now to the point where they aren’t getting the acknowledgement. So property Sparks is one of the companies that acknowledges social media, the realtors efforts on social media. So a lot of our students are number one in their areas. And we’re getting tagged all the time. So I’m very proud of them. I’m, I’ve been number one now two years in a row in the state of Michigan and also in the metropolitan area of Detroit, but also number 16 in the nation and everything that I do and how I got to where I’m at, it’s in that course. The second course that we have is our agent attraction course.

D.J. Paris 30:25
Oh, yes, I’m sorry, we forgot to mention that. And that’s where

Gogo Bethke 30:28
team builders, so agents that are about to build their own teams or broker owners that you’re building, you’re attracting agents to your own brokerage. And that is, so at exp I’m at exp. Here I’ve attracted 148 agents, personally to my frontline, and an almost 600. And my overall will be called organization here. So my, as much as I make it look so simple. I’m very systematized, we have literally an app for it, I have an app for that. That’s what anything from mindset to all of the systems to all of the apps and everything that it takes to do this like clockwork where agents reach out to you, they plug themselves into your calendar, you literally just have to sit down, do your presentation. Next thing you know, they’re signing up. That’s what the agent attraction course is about. That one is $3,000 for lifetime access. But if you want us to set up all of your systems, then it’s $5,000.

D.J. Paris 31:17
And that’s huge. That’s huge, too, because teams are everything right now. And every buddy I know is recruiting. So if you’re looking to expand your team, or maybe you’re looking to build a team, or maybe you’re a broker owner and you want to attract more realtors to your company, Agent attraction, great course as well.

Gogo Bethke 31:37
Thank you. Well, thank you for having me. I’ll see you in a month.

D.J. Paris 31:40
See you in a month. We want to thank everyone for continuing to support our show. Please remember to tell a friend tell one other person you know who’s a real estate professional about our podcast having visit keeping it real pod.com Or just having pull up a podcast app and search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button. And also remember to follow gogo on Instagram, go to add gogos real estate follower, hit the subscribe button on or hit the Follow button on Instagram. Follow her and make and you’ll see all the cool things she’s up to. And you can you can duplicate the same success. Go go. Thank you so much. We’ll see you next month.

Gogo Bethke 32:14
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

In this episode Adam Sheets from The Sheets Team with Re/Max discusses how he started his journey in real estate. Adam describes how he gets about 97% of his business from Facebook describes his strategy in Facebook to better leverage social media without spending money. Next, Adam talks about what agents should include in their Facebook page and on every post and how to use Facebook Messenger as an outreach tool. Last, Adam tells how he got into coaching other agents about social media strategies.

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

Adam Sheets can be reached at (239) 839-6974.

D.J. Paris 0:00
This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by next stop. So check this out. There’s a new platform built to help doctors as they relocate all over the United States. And it’s built by a physician that was fed up with moving for med school, intern year residency and the first attending position without any local resources to help plan these moves. So next up is creating a one stop resource for all physicians moving needs. From realtor’s to mortgage lenders to school information and beyond. The platform is called next stop a physician relocation guide. And they are looking for realtors interested in working with physicians and their families as they move from out of town. Next up is extending its beta pricing for the keeping it real podcast listeners, there is a monthly fee of $100 to be included in the next stop beta, no referral fees none which means you the realtor are keeping the entire commission now they are creating a valuable resource for the physician community while highlighting local realtors. Next stop wants to be the go to resource for every physician move Find out more by visiting their website next stop dot guide that’s any x t s t o p dot g UI D and now onto our show

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, a largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show. And in just a moment, we’re going to be speaking with Adam sheets from Remax by the way, Adam gets 97% of his business through Facebook. And even more incredible than that he doesn’t pay a dime for it, which is just beyond amazing, which is why we’re going to be speaking to him. But before we get to Adam, don’t fast forward. I have just asked you to do two quick things for us. One, please follow us on Facebook find [email protected] forward slash keeping it real pot every single day we find an article that’s written specifically designed to help you grow your business, we post it there. And every time we do an interview, like for example, this one you’re listening to with Adam, we actually had already posted on our Facebook page as we were recording it live. So another great reason is you don’t have to wait for these episodes, you can actually go you know, listen and watch them while I’m recording it. So again facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod. And then the last thing is please tell a friend think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing from top 1% producers like Adam and send them a link to our show, you can send them right over to our website, keeping it real pod.com Or if they’re a regular podcast person haven’t pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. So thank you very much for continuing to listen and support our show and now on to our interview with Adam sheets.

All right, today on the show we have Adam sheets from ReMax Realty Team in Fort Myers, Florida. Let me tell you about Adam. Adam is 30 years old and has been practicing real estate for five years he operates a team with his parents and other agents who have been in real estate for almost 20 years. Adam is a REMAX platinum agent. He’s a five star professional rising star. He’s a REMAX rising star, as well as he has been featured in real producers magazine as a rising star. We love real producers magazine, by the way, and He’s ranked he’s ranking in the top 500 realtors out of over 16,000 agents in his local market. In his free time you’ll find him on the golf course or exploring different parts of the world with his wife. So Adam also coaches over 150 agents nationwide. He’s definitely the youngest coach we’ve we’ve ever had on the show. But he’s talked specifically among other topics about how to leverage Facebook to gain clients without actually spending money doing so please visit Adam at his website, which is sheets team.net. And that’s sh e t s team.net. And also find him on Facebook, which is that at the sheets team or just search for the sheets, and you will find them Adam, thank you so much for being on our show.

Adam Sheets 4:34
Thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to looking forward to doing this. I’ve done a podcast called bet so I’m pumped.

D.J. Paris 4:39
Oh, we are excited when Adam and I were just talking podcasts right before right before the show. So I’ve got hopefully I’ll make this a pleasurable experience for you. But we’re so grateful to have you on. Tell I always like to start and you’re such you’re such a young guy with so much success. We’d love to hear about how you got into Real Estate, would you mind walking us through sort of that journey?

Adam Sheets 5:03
Absolutely. Okay, so it started I’ll try to make this somewhat short. But um, so like everybody else after high school, I was like, Alright, now you go to college. And so all my buddies moved to Orlando, they went to University of Central Florida. And I was like, Okay, I want to go there. But full disclosure, I didn’t have the grades to get into UCF. So I was like, I still gotta move to Orlando, but I’m gonna go to a school called Full Sail University, which is sure for entertainment. And because I wanted to be a movie producer, or an agent, or something along those lines, and it was the closest It was either that or go to like Los Angeles Film School, or the New York, whatever, whatever the equivalent is. And so I did that. And then after about a year, I realized that it was just a cash grab as private university super expensive, but I got to live where all my friends live. So I was like, Okay, now the next step, I’m gonna have to go to a community college here. And then I’m going to have to go and get to UCF after that, so started doing that. But about that time was when all my friends were graduating. So I was already behind the curve, because that year, basically just that was a year wasted that I spent at Full Sail. And I still think to this day, the only thing I learned was that one of my professors was like The Rolling Stones tour manager, and he told me, I can’t remember now but he told us like what the Rolling Stones like and their greenroom before our show.

D.J. Paris 6:24
Who else is a professor there is Oprah’s partner Stedman Steadman is he was he was one of the big professors at full sail, whatever I would see full sail and Full Sail grads have won like Grammys and Oscars like it’s definitely like, it’s definitely got some some some credentials. But But yeah, but understanding that that it’s you know, it’s a trade school, essentially. Yeah,

Adam Sheets 6:47
exactly. And I was just, maybe, maybe it’s because I wasn’t all in I’m not really sure. But so I was a year behind the curve, then all my buddies started graduating. And I was like, Well, I’m way behind. I don’t want to be living up here alone. Because like, I’ve got a very close friend group, everybody was moving back. But when they started moving back and getting jobs, you know, right out of college jobs, I was like, there’s just no way I’m doing that. And, and I got an I like expensive stuff. I like doing fun things. I like traveling. I was like, that’s just not gonna cut it. So, for years, my parents told me, Merson said turn 18 They’re like, just get your real estate license. If you never use it, that’s fine, but at least you have it. And I’m like, I’m not gonna be a realtor. I can literally still hear my friends in high school saying, you know, you’re gonna be a realtor. And I’m like, I’m not doing it. I swear to God, I will not do.

D.J. Paris 7:34
And this is what your parents have always done. Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Sheets 7:37
Yeah. And well, they they had corporate jobs for a long time. And then they got out because they were missing my brother. And I like soccer games and hockey games and stuff. So. So they got into real estate, but they said skate real estate license. So finally, see my friends moved back. I’m like, at this point, I’m a college dropout. Because I moved back home when they all moved back home, I was like, I’ll go home, I’ll figure it out. I’ll just go back to school here, whatever I need to do. And so I got my real estate license. And they, they’re like, Okay, why don’t you want to come work with us for now. And basically, I was like a, an assistant, like a part time assistant, most of my time was spent, like hanging out with my friends that were still in college that lived here. And you know, for spring break, we just party. It was just a fun time. I was like, journey. What’s the I when I got my real estate license, I guess I was 24. But I didn’t start practicing until like late 25, something like that. Yeah. So finally, I decided that I just wasn’t really into the whole school thing necessarily at all. Because I tried to go back to school and I was I just presumed me, I couldn’t do it. I wanted, I knew I was gonna work for myself, whether it was doing real estate or something else, I was gonna do something that made me the schedule of made me be able to make my own schedule and play golf and I wanted to and do stuff like that. So I went to work for my parents. And this whole Facebook game kind of started because the first day I sat down I literally went and spent like my last $1,200 on an iMac as you do because I needed that right I needed real estate. And but I sat down at my desk and of course I’ve got great coaches they’ve been business forever, tons of awards millions and millions of sales. And I they told me UK you need to get your farm areas you need to do some mailers, you know, if you want to door knock, go door knocking or cold call do that to whatever you want to do. Here’s kind of the the list for success in this business. And being just kind of a pompous 25 year old. I was like, Yeah, I’m not doing that. Doors. Yeah, I’m not like I’m just

D.J. Paris 9:45
not doing that. So I’m not going to call expireds or Fizbo. Yeah.

Adam Sheets 9:49
And so, I sat down on my desk with my brand new iMac and I said, Okay, I’ve always been into social media in general. I mean, I grew up in like MySpace was huge. So my generation we’ve been on social media, we’re the first ones really. And so I always knew how to get people to react to stuff, whether it was on MySpace, or like, the early days of Facebook when no one was really on Facebook, but I would could get people to react. So I said, Okay, I’m just gonna do that. But I’m going to do about real estate on Facebook. So within six hours of being, you know, new realtor, I had somebody say, hey, I want to I want to rent a place. And I was like, wow, this is, this is crazy. And that rent that renter within this, as I didn’t really know anything about real estate, I flipped her into a buyer. And so it was literally the first day being a realtor that I got my first contract. And that’s incredible. So that’s what I thought I was like, Oh, my gosh, I was like, This is so easy. This is so easy. This house is like 230 grand, I’m gonna make like 7000 or $6,000, whatever it is. I was like, I’m filthy rich. And and then it took like, five months to get the second sale.

D.J. Paris 11:10
And did that one also come through Facebook?

Adam Sheets 11:13
Yes. So the first year, I sold seven houses, I think all seven came from Facebook, and some pro se. And it was it was literally just just posting information. I mean, it’s the stuff offer value. And you know, eventually people come around, right? That’s kind of the spiel with anything social media, and trying to gain business from it. So, but it took five months. And in that time, I’m in the first first six months of being realtor anyways, you feel like you don’t have you have no idea what you’re doing. Even if you have coaches that have been in the business. 20 years. Sure. I’m just I’m just like, Yeah, I just sit here. I go to the office for four hours day. And then I go do whatever, because I had nothing to do. So the first year seven houses, which I think equaled maybe $20,000 in commission commissions. Yeah. But I just moved back from Orlando. I was living at home. No bills. I I’m literally think I’m rolling in it. Sure. And, yeah, then. So 2000, I guess 2016. January one, I think January, one phone a Monday, that year, somebody’s going to correct that. But I think it fell on Monday, because I’m very big on January one. We go, we raised the we raised the Billboard, and we’re onward to the next year. So leading up to that, like through Christmas season and stuff holiday season. So I said, Okay, I’m gonna, I gotta get a plan together for social media, for 2016 or 17, whichever one it was. And so January one fell on Monday, which is perfect, because you get the start the week and the new year. So I hit it really hard. And I developed the content schedule. And I, I stuck to it. And I started using Facebook as a sphere of influence, because I also didn’t do that when my parents said, hey, get a sphere of influence together. Now, I’m not going to, to this day, I don’t have a sphere of influence a proper sphere of influence through with like Excel, or you know, whatever CRM you want to use, I still don’t have it, because we use Facebook for that. So yeah, and the reason I started using Facebook, kind of back to spending the last total $100 on an iMac, that’s family money, I didn’t have any money to spend on leads and stuff. So that’s kind of how I got into real estate. And because it was almost a it was like a last ditch effort. But it apparently turned out alright. And because I I tell people all the time. Yeah, I wouldn’t do another job. I don’t know what it would be if if, you know, somebody came to me tomorrow and said, Hey, would you do this? I don’t know if I would do anything else now. But that’s how I got into got into real estate. It’s kind of fell into it family business and hit the ground running.

D.J. Paris 14:02
Yeah, well, it’s it’s an impressive story. And it’s the number one. So at our firm here, and we’re in Chicago, we have about 750 agents here at our company. And the number one question we get, and the number one question we get from all of our listeners on the podcast is how do I better leverage social media? And I’m, I really want to pick your brain about this because I think this is so such an interesting thing. Because you get what percentage of your business I don’t want to misquote you, but what percentage of your business comes from Facebook?

Adam Sheets 14:30
It’s just about it’s plus minus 97%.

D.J. Paris 14:35
That’s what I thought but I wanted to make sure because it’s such a astronomical number that it almost sounds not real and I know Israel, but Well, I don’t want to know how you got that. Yeah.

Adam Sheets 14:46
All right. So how it started was an again back to sat down. I said okay, how can I reach most people the fastest I possibly can for free. And so I started using Facebook Messenger as my You’re of influence and way to contact my sphere of influence. So I sat down with a list, and I wrote down 25 names a day that I was going to send messages to, Hey, my name is Adam sheets. At the time I was with Coldwell Banker said hey, I’m Adam sheets with Coldwell Banker. Just so you know, right now you can buy this was when FHA was 3% down, I think I said just so you know, you can buy a house 3% down. So if you’ve thought about renting, 3% may be cheaper than first, last and security. And then I just include my name, phone number, email address website, at the bottom. And for every time somebody would respond out a checkmark next to their name. And then that went into I guess I kind of lied, I do have an Excel file with all these people in it. Now, and I didn’t the first year, I had to go back and do it, which took forever but so I was tracking it. So I knew that basically, for every 250 messages I sent to people that I was gonna get one to two deals per 250 messages. But 20 250 messages, takes 15 minutes. Yeah, base looks a little different now. Because now they taught you, I think they cut you off after like 49 messages, like if they know if they realize what you’re doing. And Facebook’s pretty smart. So they always do, they’ll put you on a 24 hour ban, you go back the next day you started over. So that’s what I was doing for months and months and months to develop this kind of presence with people. And then I paired that with content every single day, whether it was because I mean, some days, or when I started I had the time. But some days, you’re Hey, no, you don’t have a you don’t have the creative juices flowing. So sometimes it would just be like, Would you buy a house if you only had to put 3% down, and the amount of people that I’ve sold houses to because of that simple little post, it’s got to be over 100 people just because of that, wow. And, but it all works together. So they’d see me in their inbox. And then they would see my content on their feed. So even if they didn’t, you know, fully read the message, they know like, I Why don’t know that name. I know him from somewhere. And so I started developing a rapport with all the people I was friends with on Facebook. And when I started, I had 1000 friends on Facebook. So basically what I started doing was I added absolutely everybody I could that was in and around, you know my in around Fort Myers, so Cape Coral, bonita, Naples everywhere. I never added a realtor. And I always tried to add people with multiple with multiple mutual friends. So that I’m just not, you know, Joe Schmo adding them on Facebook,

D.J. Paris 17:38
right, there was there was a connection there that

Adam Sheets 17:41
connection and that little trust almost. Now it’s gotten out of hand, because throughout the years, I mean, I’m not, I’m up to 5000. So like you, there’s really never, there’s not, there’s an endless supply of people you can add on Facebook. Because once I once I add all these people in to my list, and I’ll go through, and I’ll say, okay, this person has an ice because I have a schedule where I’ll message somebody, if they don’t read it, because you can see if they read it, if they don’t read it, I’ll send them another message in three months, another six months, nine months, 12 months, if after 12 months, they haven’t read it replied to it, I delete them off Facebook. And that makes you room for one more person because you’re only allowed 5000 on Facebook. Right? So Right. So it’s a constant cycle of filtering people in and out and in and out. But it’s literally unlimited. Now, I’ve taught this to I mean, there’s, I’ve taught this, I teach this to agents in my office too. So everyone’s doing it, but like, I get friend requests from Realtors all the time. And you know, all my friends do too. Because even in five years, the amount of people that are using social media has gone up substantially, it’s still not to where it should be because everybody should be using it. But for a lot of people, it’s tough to understand, you know, and to come up with, you know, a plan and a content schedule in a list and to make sure you keep it organized. And it can be tough, but if you use it like I always tell people it’s like sending out a mailer. But you don’t know how many people are opening up that piece of mail. I throw any realtor that sends that to my house, I throw it away. Sure, maybe because I’m a realtor, but like I don’t have any interest in reading what they’re what they’re sending, because it’s always the same exact thing. You want to know your value, your home value is Yeah. And the difference with using Facebook like that is so that you can track it you know, who read it, you know who you know, responded to you? I’d say the majority of the message the responses I get are, hey, I don’t like not ready yet but in six months, you know, give me another message. So they literally go into my calendar, six months boom, you’re getting a message and with the way that people so they see the message and they see whatever content I have that comes across their feed and it there’s no limit to it. So my biggest kind of success story with it is one of my clients and now friends Trey. He was one of the first people add on face About five years ago, and last year, he I get a random phone call. Hey, it’s Trey Jones. I’m like, Who? He’s like, Oh, we’re friends on Facebook. We sent like, 5000 friends. And he’s like, You sent me a message in 2015 I wasn’t ready to buy a house then. But now I’m ready to buy a house. And I’m like, Dude, I appreciate the loyalty like, that is crazy, because we’ve never had a conversation before this. He’s like, Yeah, but I’ve been following your stuff. And you’re the only you’re, you’re also one of the only Realtors I know that got into the business is and isn’t now out of the business. Yeah, right. Because sure, you know, like, I’ve been here and I get messages from people all the time. Hey, are you still in real estate? And I’m like, well, one, that means that I’m not doing a good enough job to get my content to you. Because you would know if I saw it. But but to, it’s crazy that there’s this like, there’s this known thing outside of real estate where like, I might not be in real estate, you know, your friend, that’s an agent might not be in real estate tomorrow, they’re back to do in their

D.J. Paris 20:54
old job. So the consistency of doing it as often as you do it just over time solidifies that you’re the guy.

Adam Sheets 21:01
Exactly. And then my, my, you know, kind of content schedule, if you look at my Facebook pages, for anyone that’s gonna listen, I’m just Adam sheets on Facebook. If you look at my page, everything looks the same. It’s all branded with my logo, or our logo. It’s got my phone number. People always say don’t be a secret agent. Right? But that always applies to wearing your nametag at the grocery store. Anytime I hear that said, What’s your the grocery store your nametag and I’m like, Okay, it’s not a 1950 anymore. Although that does work. My mom gets business from wearing your nametag, so I can’t really knock it that much.

D.J. Paris 21:33
Yeah, some some some people do it for sure. And but yeah, but the point is doing that on Facebook, essentially, right?

Adam Sheets 21:39
It’s the same exact thing. Don’t be a secret agent, everyone should know I did when I’m when I’m coaching people, and I’ll show through their Facebook page. And I’m like, I’m I’m five minutes into scrolling down your page, I don’t even know your phone numbers. And they’re like, I guess I should put that on there. I’m gonna Yeah, it should be in your header photo, like it should be right there. Because you have this one, capture somebody’s attention. And if you don’t, they’re gone. If they thought for a second, you know, maybe I’ll message them about buying a house and they weren’t on your page, and you were too difficult to get a hold of, they’re just not getting the path of least resistance, they’re just not going to get a hold of you. So that’s one of the first things I tell people make your cover photo with all your contact information, that should be the first thing somebody sees, and then they should see it again and your bio, and then they should see it on every single post that you have. And that’s another thing that I tell people is that typically, when a realtor uses social media, you will see that when they close on a house just listed just sold. Yes. And they’ll go and they’ll go on Microsoft Paint, and they’ll put sold across. Like, it’s always diagonal. And it’s always in the same disgusting font. And it’s always and absolutely right. And I’m like that is just so bad. And they just post the picture, no information or anything like that. So for me, I see a new listing, that’s three pieces of content from me, because that’s a, it used to be four, but we got rid of coming soon. So we can’t do coming soon anymore. But so you gotta just listed post, you get an under contract post and you get a closed post, the average Joe is not going back on your Facebook profile, and looking back 30 days to say, well, that’s that’s the same house right there just saying, Wow, he sells a lot of houses. And then on the buying side, you know, you get an under contract and enclosed posts. And then for every one of those, I always like to include, you know, if it’s like my kind of claim to fame, if you will, is that I’ve gotten $550,000 In closing costs paid by sellers. So I always add that to every post. I’m like closing costs counter 454 55 500,000. And so I always include like a little bit of a story like what how much like, what did it take to get this buyer under contract? What did you do to make sure this listing stood out above the other 30 homes that were for sale in the same neighborhood? So people have something to read, nobody cares that you closed on a house, but they developed care. They’ll care if you have something to say about stories. Yeah, why? Why are you the guy should hire. So it’s almost like you’re writing your own testimonial. Like I had to do this, this, this and this to get this house list ready? And then you know, we all went under contract in two days prior to all this craziness that’s going on right now. But we went under contract and two days before there were six houses on the market and 30 offers over list price but yeah, so I always like to it’s about informing people and that’s I use my my three and my two for just listing and, and fireside, whatever you want to call it to make sure that everybody knows exactly what’s going on in my real estate career.

D.J. Paris 24:49
And that’s really smart too. Because, you know, we have to realize that people don’t see all of our posts. Facebook does not show every one of our followers All of our posts, in fact, on a Facebook page, if your followers to the page can see 20% of your posts, your superstar like they don’t that does, it’s usually three to 5%. You know so so this idea that everyone sees everything you post is a complete myth or just not. So if you want to post even adjust listed two different times in a week, odds are no one is going to notice that you even did the exact same post twice. You probably shouldn’t, you probably should come up with additional ways to sort of market that. But but it’s not, you know, it’s not something that we should be too worried about. I wanted to ask you about video versus you know, text and picture, text and image postings. Do you do video? Are you mostly text and image guy?

Adam Sheets 25:42
So I do do video I’ve gotten away from video, like, it’s been so busy, so I haven’t had time to put because I’m so my background prior to going to Full Sail is in TV production.

D.J. Paris 25:55
I was gonna say it seems like natural for you. Yeah.

Adam Sheets 25:57
So I mean, 12 I had a video camera and I was editing skateboard videos. And then you know, 15, I was had a few production, like, for the four years in high school and stuff like that. So I’ve always been into it. So video has been very easy. For me always, it’s not like that for most people, most people are scared to death of the camera. But because of that, I will not put out a piece of video content that I don’t think is absolutely perfect, which is tough, because, like, it might take me 10 hours to edit a video, but only two hours that had a video and then 10 hours to say, You know what, that beat just didn’t line up with that transition properly. I can’t put this out, it’s something no one’s ever gonna realize. But when I have put out video, the the feedback is so much greater than just then you know, just listed in closed, and here’s what your down payment, you know, those kinds of posts. But when I was consistently doing video, which would have been last year and years prior to that, you know, the feedback was great. And then with video too, you know, you can tell Okay, 600 people watch this video 700 People watch this video, whereas the the normal posts, you have no idea I mean, you might get. And that’s part of the issue with Facebook in general and bacteria, not everyone seeing everything you post is that you might post something one day, that goes for 60 comments, 10 shares and 150 likes, and then you could post the same thing and the next day, and it goes for absolutely nothing. So back when I was doing video, that’s kind of when I would gauge when to post a video is when my just just normal content wasn’t doing so hot, then I’ll be like, Okay, it’s time for a video and then I post the video up and then the engagement on the other post comes with it. It’s always about just trying to try to tease that Facebook algorithm a little bit to make sure that you know, your front and center.

D.J. Paris 27:56
I want to and I’m sorry, I meant to go back to this earlier. Thank you for that I want to talk about using Facebook Messenger as an outreach tool. This is a particularly interesting, and I don’t really see a lot of other people doing it that way they’ll you know, friends will communicate that way via messenger. But to use it as an introductory point, or at least a hey, you know, here’s a little piece of content that, you know, you may or may not be interested in. Do you automate that? Because there are ways to automate some of those? Or are you doing it all manually?

Adam Sheets 28:28
No, it’s literally copy and paste, pull up 25 chat boxes on the bottom, bang, bang, bang done for the day. But I know on our business page we had on Meishan for a while, but it just wasn’t. It wasn’t the same. I wasn’t I mean, business page is always gonna be different than personal anyways. But doing it from the personal page and having it it felt like I was typing every single message out because it was always her Hey, so and so it wasn’t just Hi there. And I tried the Hi there. Because that was way quicker for a long time. And like nobody was reading the messages. So

D.J. Paris 29:04
I need to know what it’s about. Yeah, exactly.

Adam Sheets 29:08
So now it’s, yeah, now it’s um, I mean, depending on my schedule for a day, I might type out 25 different messages and send them to 25 different people. Hey, just so you got a new dog, cue dog. Also, do you want my house? And it just depends on the schedule, but just the copy and paste simple and quick, because that’s what it was about. It’s about efficiency. And you can sit out 25 and 30 seconds. I mean, not really two minutes. And you know, you do that five times. I know I’m getting one or two deals out of it. And, again, most of the majority of the messages are, you know, I’m not right now. But in six months, give me give me a shout. I’ve never had anybody be rude about a message. I’m sure people who deleted me off Facebook afterwards, but I don’t care. It just makes room for somebody else. So not a big deal. But yeah, Facebook Messenger is just and I tell people all the time it works, it all works together. And I don’t think you can do one without the other. If you’re going to do the messages thing, you got to make sure the content follows. You can do the content day, you got to make sure you hit them in Messenger too. Because and, and kind of back to what you said, I don’t know anybody else that uses Facebook Messenger like that either. And to this day, five years later, I still do it, I still do it. Like it was the first time I ever did it. And I’m still getting the same results.

D.J. Paris 30:25
It’s it’s incredible. And the other cool thing I want to mention about Facebook Messenger is those notifications. People do see, right, so where they might not see all of your posts, because Facebook’s algorithm doesn’t, you know, doesn’t always show everyone, everyone all of your posts, but every time a message comes up, if you’re connected to that person, as a friend, then they will see it. If you’re not a friend, then maybe they’ll see it, maybe they won’t, depending on their their notification settings. So would you encourage people not to do that for people that they’re not already direct connected as friends,

Adam Sheets 30:59
I would say you need to be direct connected as friends just because like I recently went into my like spam folder. And I mean, I had messages from years ago that I’d never seen. And if you’re not friends with that person, they’re never going to see it. I don’t know how Facebook really works that because I’m not huge into the technical side of Facebook, obviously. But only a couple times have I not been friends with somebody on Facebook and gotten their message and actually say that the most recent time that happened was a 21 year old realtor who was doing the same exact thing that I did five years ago. And and now he’s I talked to him all the time now because I was like, Dude, I appreciate this so much because I literally built the business office. And then I told him I said, but just so you know, my game just ramped up because now I know somebody’s competition me five years ago doing the same exact thing. I was blown away. I’m like, Dude, you got this is all you need to do. This is it.

D.J. Paris 31:57
So what’s so interesting is what really you’ve done is you’ve taken what everybody does on LinkedIn. And to very little success, I have to assume so we all know that every day, if we check our LinkedIn, there is somebody has messaged us about something that person that we typically don’t know, maybe we’ve accepted them as a connection. But they it’s a lot of sales pitches. And it’s just my inbox is flooded every day. I don’t even read it. I don’t open it. I don’t care. It’s never anything interesting. But he does that. Yeah, vendor different vendors, different financial advisors, realtors, whatever. But nobody’s doing that on messenger that I’m aware of. And that is such a brilliant idea. Because it’s you see it all the time on LinkedIn, and you just don’t think about it for messenger. So Wow. Well, yeah,

Adam Sheets 32:43
LinkedIn is supposed to be the business tool, right? That’s the business social media. But I don’t know anybody that’s gaining. I mean, I’m sure there’s someone out there someone out there is doing it at a high level getting business from LinkedIn. I don’t know who that person is. But Facebook makes it so easy, because it’s a personal thing. Whereas LinkedIn, it’s like, oh, another person or Northwestern Mutual what’s. Okay, big deal. But with Facebook, I might just be messaging about who knows what, Hey, I like your new truck. But instead, it’s a little sales pitch. With all my contact information there, but yeah, I mean, even and then I also in my 97% is included. You know, somebody messages me back on Facebook says, hey, my dad wants to, you know, buy a house, which happens pretty often, too. That goes into my Facebook stats also, because that stills from Facebook. And I mean, I don’t I tell people all the time, I’ve become a one trick pony, actually, because Facebook’s my guy, I mean, that’s my bread and butter. Like I I’ve tried the mailers thing. Now at this point, I’ve tried just about everything, and nothing gets any results like Facebook does. And I’ll let you just know, like, if it wasn’t for Facebook, I probably sell two houses here. It’s it’s crazy. The the exposure that you get

D.J. Paris 34:06
curious if you also are aside from message using messenger or car connected, you know, you have this 5000 Friends limit. Are you going through your feed and commenting and liking on other people’s posts? I’m curious if that’s part of the strategy too. So

Adam Sheets 34:23
I’m not Yes, I do. But not for the reason of making sure that they you know, the algorithms and stuff will work for me and putting me in front of those people. What I do do about three hours a day. I scroll through Facebook, because every time you refresh, it’s different stuff. I will scroll through Facebook. And a lot of people have this is the part they don’t typically understand when I’m giving this spiel is that I do not use Facebook like a social media tool. I don’t care about a picture of a new dog. I don’t care if you’re getting married. I scrolled through Facebook looking for key things like just had a kid Um, well, I guess marriage isn’t fair because I’ll because if you just got married, if you just got engaged, if I’m seeing these people, they go to the top of my list of who’s getting a message when I’m done doing my, you know, a few hours of Facebook scrolling. So I’m using it as like almost prospecting, okay, who has a life changing event that I need to send a message to you that might be in a position that they need to buy a new house? So babies marriages and engagements,

D.J. Paris 35:24
new job, I’m my job. Yes, exactly.

Adam Sheets 35:27
All that kind of stuff to go to the top of the list. And I’ll immediately send them a message as soon as I’m done. And then another thing that I don’t know why this happens, you may know more than I because you, you, you know, people at Facebook, but I always tend to, when I get on my phone it in the evening, Facebook puts the posts, front and center for me. Hey, who knows a realtor in Fort Myers. They’re always right there. So I probably do 20 deals a year, just because it was the first thing that popped up in my feed. And I’m the first one that you know, hey, I’m a real, you know, my, my hands are shaking. I’m like, I’m a real dude. Yeah, and but it’s, it’s always right there. And the only thing I can think of is that Facebook has figured out that I sell houses. And they know to put that stuff in front of me because real estate is something that, you know, my profile puts out into the cloud that I’m interested in. So that didn’t start happening. I mean, that that was never there before I was in real estate. And now all of a sudden, you know that all of a sudden, I started started selling real estate, and these posts are right there all the time.

D.J. Paris 36:38
And have you have you expanded into Instagram at all? Because realtors are spending all their time on Instagram. Curious if you’ve had success there, or if you stay strictly with Facebook?

Adam Sheets 36:49
No. So all my business posts from Facebook, I do have an Instagram profile, which I was off of for a couple of years, I actually just got back on Instagram. Because I just figured if I can do this on Facebook, I can do it on Instagram, also. And it’s way easier, I think to engage on Facebook, on Instagram. So literally just recently i i took the same formula. I haven’t started the message thing on Instagram. Yeah, it’s also it’s easier to engage. But it’s harder to find people to, you know, send a message to because it’s not like I can just throw out 1000 friend requests in an hour and then hope that 300 of them accept it. And then same thing, I believe Instagram has spam also, which I’ll check done. But oh, yeah, they do. Absolutely. So So I haven’t started the messages on Instagram yet, but I’m still doing the same content schedule. So everything that goes my facebook page goes on my Instagram too. But again, back to nobody cares, the sold a house on social media. My Instagram is more of like a it’s more of like little salt on top of the you know, it’s it’s just to go along with my Facebook because it’s it’s most of the same people. So, yeah, they go on Facebook, they see it, they go on Instagram, they’re like, Okay, there it is, again, Adam, I know you’re the guy, I’m gonna call it when I sell my house. Because, but it’s just, it’s just reiterating like, Hey, I’m here for you. Here’s the content that I’m putting out. Here’s the info that you need. And so I’m just back to being front and center. I’m front and center on all of these people’s social media pages. And I’m not it’s no secret that I’m a full time realtor. Whereas the guy who only posts like, I’ve got buddies there, you know, highly successful realtors, they don’t use any social media at all. And occasionally, I’ll see on their Instagram page, like, hey, sold the house for three and a half million dollars and like, dang, must be nice, but and then they’ll post it up, and then you won’t see anything. They’re doing business behind the scenes. But some people just they don’t they don’t need it. I needed it. And to this day, I still don’t spend any money on marketing. It’s all Facebook and just organic reach through my personal page.

D.J. Paris 39:02
Yeah, I love it. I want to talk about how social media has also built you a pretty successful coaching business. And I Adam was telling me the story before we started. But I would love for you to share the story about how you even got coaching clients, because it was sort of an unintentional thing.

Adam Sheets 39:21
Yeah, so it was a total accident. I’m on these Facebook pages. And one day, there was a there’s an agent that said, for anyone, it was just basically like anyone using social media at a high level of generate business. And I commented and I just said, actually 97% of my business comes from Facebook, and I got 1000s of emails and messages. And I was like well, okay, I’m gonna make some money off this. And so I initially I had my remember my first client name’s dawn. She’s in Toronto, I think and I I did have this just a it was a cheat sheet for, and I charged her 25 bucks. And then that I that was a. So then she was the first one, how do in that same day or within a few days that I was getting just inundated with messages and messages, messages. And so I said, Hey, for 25 bucks, I will send you guys this cheat sheet that I did it for another agent, if you want to take it further, you know, we can definitely talk about it. So here’s the cheat sheet. And then after that, then you know, if I got if I got 2000 emails and messages, I sent them out the cheat sheet which took me like, five days to send out that many emails with a attachment to it. But so I, I, then I took it further with, you know, 1000 of those people and then settled around 150 Finally, that I’m talking to on a consistent basis. And these are people from the guy who is a star on YouTube selling real estate to some to the you know, the 78 year old who’s never ever thought about posting about real estate on our Facebook page. So, you know, it’s super personalized, but we do we do zoom calls and stuff like that. And we always make sure that they’re staying on top of it. And one of the biggest things with with these coaching clients and just real estate professionals in general is making the switch from using Facebook as a social media to like I said earlier, using it as a total business tool. So take out the picture of your grandkids or your kids as your header photo. And, and I get some backlash to this, like I’ve definitely lost clients because of this not actual clients poaching clients. I’m like, get rid of your kids, get rid of your grandkids, get rid of your dog, like why like he was like I, you know, I want my family to see my my family. And I’m like, then we should probably just end this here. I’m not trying to be brash, but this is for a very specific, you know, reason, and it’s because you want to use Facebook to generate more business. And if you’re not willing to do the things that I have done, which are tried and true, then, you know, we just stopped her now. And most of them kind of catch on to it and like, Okay, I’ll you know, give it a try. Some people haven’t, that’s fine. I mean, you can sell real estate if you want to sell real estate, but totally stumbled into it. And it was literally from one message. But now anytime I see somebody post something like that on on any real estate, Facebook page, I, I can do the same thing. And I still get tons and tons of messages. And it starts it same thing starts with sending them the cheat sheet, and then a zoom call and then, you know, Zoom call and texts and you know, whatever else. So it’s just little tips and tricks here and there. Just kind of learn along the way. And there’s so much there’s such a lack of knowledge on how to use it and market yourself on social media, that little effort, you know, start doing if you do an extra five deals a year to two deals a year. It’s worth the effort that it takes to do

D.J. Paris 43:09
it. Yeah, I go, I couldn’t agree with you more. So, so interesting. And we should also promote your your coaching program. So if somebody wants to reach out to you and learn more about what you’re offering with the coaching for social media, what’s the best way that they should do that?

Adam Sheets 43:28
Probably by by text, I respond to texts quicker than email. And that’s just the 239-839-6974 you can also reach me by email, I just like I said, I’ll respond to your texts quicker, which is just add them at sheets team.net And then we’ll figure it out. It’s not it’s not super. It’s not super formal. It’s um, I mean, I’m casual guy, I’m wearing a t shirt. And that’s this is kind of me every day. And I was we have some fun and try to come up with stuff together. And that seems to be working out for people so far.

D.J. Paris 44:03
And I’ve just one last question around your content calendar, which I meant to ask earlier is do you have a general rule of thumb of how many posts a day is it? Is it a certain number per day? Is it different each day just out of curiosity?

Adam Sheets 44:17
So I I like to post a couple times a day I don’t do it on the weekends my weekends are unless I have to show houses I’m I’m off of I’m not but Monday to Friday, you know I tried to just come up with any let me take a step back. My My schedule is technically for my our business page. That’s where I have literally I have like taped to my desk right here. This is my content calendar. Every I know that I’m because I’m kind of a I kind of alluded to it earlier, but some days you don’t have the creative juices flowing. So having a schedule like that is super important. So on Monday for our business page, I know that I’m doing anything we just listed put on your con tractor clothes. So that’s every single Monday, Tuesday I do what’s called sheets eats, and I pick a local restaurant and do a write up of it pictures the whole thing because people love seeing that you’re part of the community. Sure. Food. So cheap seats just and it just kind of goes together. Yeah. And then Wednesday is things to do things coming up this this weekend in Lee County, Thursday, love Local Business Spotlight, which sometimes I switch around sheets eats and Local Business Spotlight.

D.J. Paris 45:33
It’s my Business Spotlight, are you reaching out to local businesses and say, Hey, I have this pretty decent social media following I would love to promote your business and learn the story of your company. And, and you know, and then what’s really brilliant about that, of course, which I’m sort of jumping, I’m sort of stepping on on Adams, the punch line, so to speak. But the the what’s so brilliant about that, is that of course those business owners are also going to share this post with every with all of their customers, which drives more people to Adam.

Adam Sheets 46:02
That’s, that’s why that’s why it started because I was like, Listen, if I, I mean, I know, I know, a lot of business owners. So it’s, it’s, it’s not necessarily like a super formal write up or anything. It’s just hey, if you like, I have a friend that owns a T Shirt Company. And so I did T shirts and pictures of T shirts, but he shared it to his, you know, 3000 Facebook friends, and didn’t from there sure, I don’t even know where that post is. Now it’s probably in California, like, I have no idea. So the exposure, and it’s two birds with one stone, they love that you’re part of the community. And, and then the business owner is like, oh my gosh, this is awesome. Especially during COVID. Like restaurants or restaurants and business owners were loving it. I’ve only had one restaurant ever have an issue with it. And they threatened like a cease and desist letter, it was ridiculous. And wow. And I’ll never eat at the restaurant again. So what they were thinking, I’m like, I literally just give you guys free advertising in a time when no one can go to a restaurant, and you’re going to cause issue about this, like, what are we doing here? But But yeah, so that, then I what I do is all I come up with that on the business page, and then I share it to my personal page. So that can which helps the exposure the business page too, because business pages are tough. And so whatever I can do to make sure that is front and center, you know, as well. So it’s sharing it to the personal page, and then the engagement on the business page goes up, or even just not necessarily engagement, because on our business page, you know, we’re not getting like, if I post up a restaurant review, I’m not getting 100 comments on it, oh my gosh, I love this place. But when I share it to my personal page, I do get those comments. So then, you know, you can see it on the on the posts on the business page, this one reached 3000 people, you know, and so it all again, all works together messages, business page and personal page. It’s just cohesive, and I don’t think you can do one without the other. And then Friday’s end with a win, which is, hey, brag. If you want to brag about something, brag about something come on here and post it. I don’t care what it is. Just to get people fired up. And people like talking about themselves. I mean, let’s be honest, we’ve like saying, Hey, I did this this week, you know, just bought new boat like whatever. Yeah. So that’s, and that’s actually new, this is a new schedule. So Friday will actually be the first and with a win. So I guess we’ll see how that goes. But I stole that from my buddy Chris. He’s a realtor in Austin. So and he gets great, great engagement when he doesn’t. So we’ll see if we did the same thing here.

D.J. Paris 48:42
Well, everyone who is listening or watching should be following Adams business page, at the very least just to see what he’s doing to get a better sense of what you could do to increase your Facebook conversions. So definitely go to the easiest way to do it is facebook.com forward slash the sheets team or just google the sheets team. And it’ll come up and they really are the sheets but it’s forward slash the sheets team. And you can take you get a sense of what he’s what they’re doing. And if you’re interested in learning more about Adam’s coaching program, of course, reach out to him you can reach him right through the business page. He gave his text or cell phone number you can text him. And of course you can also go to his website, the firm website, which is sheets team.net. And all their social media is there as well. And you can contact them easily through email that way too. Adam, thank you so much for being on our show. I hope that a lot of our listeners reach out to you and hopefully get some more coaching clients because this is this is amazing. It’s so funny. We we on the podcast just to pull the curtain back just a little bit is we we’ve now been doing this for I don’t know four or five years. And so we get hit up by publicists every single day with hey, we’ve got this great you know realtor that we want, we want you to feature on your show. And usually it’s a lot of smoke and mirrors. It’s a lot of like, here’s why they’re so great. And sometimes they, they are really great. But it doesn’t always mean it’s going to be a good guest. And a lot of people claim to be social media experts, we also get a lot of non realtors who want to teach social media strategies via our podcast. And where we try to stay away from that as much as possible. We already have an expert that comes on once a month for Instagram, and other platforms. But you’re the first person I’ve talked to who’s a producing realtor who is really getting those kinds of results via Facebook. So I hope our audience will reach out to you because I really believe that all of us could do better in that respect. And there’s so much business there. So much so

Adam Sheets 50:44
much. It’s, it’s actually, it’s crazy how much business is there and people don’t realize it’s literally at your fingertips 1000s of clients. And if they’re not the client, they know someone that can be the client. But yeah, I get the amount of emails I get, Hey, can I or not, hey, learn how to use social media for realtors. And I’m like, Are the amount of seminars I’ve sat through? And I’m like, I was doing this five years ago. What, you know, what are we talking about here? And I know you need to be doing this. And they give you the most basic stuff, which I get. I mean, if you’re just starting out the basic stuff is good. But I’ve sat through these things. I’m like, yeah, that doesn’t work. That just doesn’t work. Like what do you mean? It doesn’t work? I’m like, I’m telling you that that is outdated. And nobody cares. Which hurts the egos a lot. But yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s, there’s so much information out there. But I’m an open book. So if anybody I mean, even if they don’t want to be coached by if you want to call them pick my brain. I’ll just we’ll just chop it up for a little bit. No big deal. Awesome.

D.J. Paris 51:47
Well, Adam, thank you so much for being on our show. We couldn’t be more. Yeah, couldn’t be more appreciate it. so appreciative on behalf of all of our audience, our listeners and our viewers, we want to thank Adam for spending time out of his crazy busy days and credibly successful at a super young age and the way he’s doing it is so impressive to us. So we’re super appreciative that you came on and shared some of those strategies with our audience. And on behalf of Adam and myself, we want to thank our audience for sitting through this episode, and absorbing it. And also, we’re going to ask everyone to just do one thing to help us grow. Tell a friend think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing this great conversation with Adam and send them a link to our website. So whether the person is a podcast person or not, just send them over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done, you can stream right from the from the browser there. If they are a podcast person, just tell them to pull up the podcast app and search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button. That would really help us continue to reach more and more Realtors with great messages like what Adam shared today. So Adam, thank you so much, and we will see everybody. You’re welcome. We’ll see everyone on the next episode. Thanks, Adam. See you guys

Welcome to the May episode of Learn With A Lender with Joel Schaub of Guaranteed Rate!

In this episode, DJ and Joel discuss an article from MortgageNewsDaily which explains how lower-income renters can likely benefit from home ownership. Joel also talks about the importance of educating clients and giving back to your community and how this impacts branding. Joel discusses the importance of developing trust through learning sessions to help your clients understand every step of the process. Joel also suggests that agents find a mentor, find out what they’re doing in order to be that successful and pick their brain for best practices.

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

Joel can be reached at [email protected] and 773.654.2049.

D.J. Paris 0:00
On this episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by Joel Schaub at guaranteed rate. As a realtor it’s important to partner with only the most trusted name in mortgage lending. Joel has 1000s of satisfied clients and gives $1,500 of his commission back to your buyers on every closing. He is known for his ability to close even complex deals start to finish in only 14 days to learn what 1000s of others already know. Make a note to call Joel at 773-654-2049 or email [email protected] Guaranteed Rate is an equal housing lender licensed in all 50 States Consumer Access Number 2611 And now on with the show.

Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I’m your guide and host through the show. And today once again is our monthly series learn with a lender with Joel shop from guaranteed rate. Now Joel is the vice president of lending at guaranteed rate. He has been doing loans at a high level since 2003. And it’s gotten 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. Last year alone, Joel gave back over 291,000 and closing costs to buyers who worked with him and it puts Joe’s volume in the top 1/10 of 1% of all lenders nationwide. out of 400,000 loan officers in the country. Joel is currently ranked 137. Last year, Joel closed 535 transactions, his highest amount ever. But this year even more impressive. Joel has closed almost 300 transactions already 276 to be exact for 108 million we say this to really impress upon you Joel is an expert, we are so thrilled to have him on the show. So if you’re looking for a loan officer, we cannot more highly recommend Joel he’s the very best we’ve ever worked with. Joel can be reached at his email address, which is [email protected]. Again, [email protected]. And you can shoot him a text message or call him at 773-654-2049. Now let’s say hello to the biggest Cubs fan. I know Joel Schaub welcome Joel.

Joel Schaub 2:22
Hey, thanks so much for having me on DJ and all the numbers and accolades. That’s all wonderful, but I love this. I love the ability to come on, give back to agents, and it really helps us all when we give back. We strengthen each other. And I’m excited to be here.

D.J. Paris 2:39
Well, thanks. And I you know, I was thinking for this for this episode to talk about an article that that I saw and that you saw mortgage news daily.com. So want to give them credit, because this really caught my eye and I’m not somebody that that really is, is keyed into mortgage news. All that much other than rates are up rates are down. And I thought this was a particularly interesting article that is a nice reminder of fundamentals of being an agent and a successful agent. And it reminded me of my own journey to homeownership when I got bought my first place in 2005 I believe the only reason I did that is because one day it occurred to me I was renting. Hey, what is it? Like? What is what happens when you buy a home? Like how does it work? I didn’t understand what a mortgage was, I had no idea I truly thought you needed to save up $300,000 If you wanted to buy a $300,000 home, and I certainly did not have that in savings. And I went through maybe there’s another way and I was a bit embarrassed because I have a college degree I don’t think I’m you know, one of the stupid or people that walks around this earth but but boy, I just didn’t understand it. No one ever had explained it to me. And so the only reason I even started looking was I Googled what does it take to buy a home? And I thought what a great opportunity for realtors to, to realize that so many people have never been taught this. They don’t know about it. They don’t understand it, just like me. And you can start having a conversation with renters about you know, what, what would it actually take to purchase a home and this article kind of goes into specifics about it. I’m I can read a little bit from it. But just to get your take on it. So real quickly, I just wanted to cover one part of it, which I thought was really interesting. So in this article from mortgage News Daily, it’s from the May 24. Sort of news, the daily news brief about it, but talks about it this this study that was done. But it’s basically saying in last year in November 2020 If you bought a home for 263,000, even if you financed the entire amount at three and a half percent at a 30 year fixed. You know after all it’s said and done, you’re basically paying just shy of 1500 a month, which would be about $300 less than what comparable rental housing is in this particular study and that’s including, you know some hormone or shift costs, maintenance costs, etc. And I just thought, Boy, I wish somebody would have told me that, you know, back when, in the mid 2000s, when I didn’t understand any of this, and I think there’s just so many people like me out there.

Joel Schaub 5:13
I think the big takeaway, and I’m glad you brought this one up is to be the educator, right? The reason we become successful is that we’re actually taking the next steps. If you’re not a buyer, and you haven’t bought a home before, you’re really looking for a friend, you’re looking for somebody in the industry that can teach you educate you and get you on the right track. And there’s so many more of those people right now that are looking for somebody to take them under their wing and sell them something, but to teach them and help them because they want to take the next step to homeownership. And they want to buy but they don’t want to be sold. So can you take the steps to actually understand the mortgage side, so that you can speak intelligently and your business is going to grow? If you’re the educator in your market?

D.J. Paris 6:02
Yeah, there’s so many Realtors I’ve had on my show that are top producers who have who make their or one of their big marketing pushes to find clients is they do these first time homebuyer webinars or in person events. And it’s you know, there’s a reason why a lot of people do these, right, because they work because most people have never who are renters have never been taught this. It’s certainly not taught in school, or maybe it is now but it wasn’t when I went to school and, and it’s just one of those things where oftentimes to it might be somebody that doesn’t even know that there’s a better path. You know, they just think well, homeownership, I don’t I’m not a rich guy, so I can’t do that, or I’m not a rich woman. And reality of it is is is there’s all these programs right now to make it really affordable. And rates are so attractive right now. And you’re I think you’re right, like whoever educates them, whoever teaches them is probably going to get the business.

Joel Schaub 6:57
You can work your warm sphere and your you know, the people that are around you. But eventually you need to step out and start getting cold people that don’t know you that you can be referred to and close more deals, because if you’re an agent that wants to take it to the next level, you can only work with so many people that you know, and they’ve already been bought a home. So you need to be able to be the person that people come to, because of your education because of the way that you give back and the way that you build the brand. And that’s the thing right now with so much competition out there. The agents that I’m working with, and the agents that I’m not the ones that I see doing so well have have built the brand. And the brand is about education, giving back and being the person that people in the community want to go to for answers.

D.J. Paris 7:45
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And it’s it’s interesting too, because you know, even if somebody hasn’t yet worked with a realtor, and is just exploring mortgage rates online, they’re a renter, they’re, they’re thinking about it, they’re not totally sure how it works. And they find a website where they put in their information. And they get called by three or four different lenders who may be that website has sold the lead to and now they’re getting talked to about rates and pre qualifications. And and because I’ve gone through that experience, too, when I bought my first place all these many, many years ago, I didn’t have a mortgage lender. And so I just filled out one of those forms online. And it’s probably even more sophisticated now. And I just started getting inundated with calls. But it didn’t seem like anybody really wanted to educate me on the process. They just wanted to tell me how, you know, things they didn’t really understand, like the rates and why that was relevant, and it is relevant. But I didn’t have a guide. And I think a lot of people probably do that. And they don’t and they don’t think necessarily to contact a realtor, because I think it’s intimidating sometimes for a renter to pick up the phone and call a realtor and be like, I don’t really understand how this works. Could you explain it to me, I think most people would probably feel like embarrassed to do that, which they shouldn’t. But I bet a lot of people do. So I think realtors have to go first and really proactively reach out.

Joel Schaub 9:05
And you need to be a storyteller. Okay, just calling up and talking about interest rates being low doesn’t do anything for you, you don’t write the interest rate on your check each month you write the payment. So if you can put it into terms of explaining how you’ve helped other people similar to the person that you’re talking to, then you can build the rapport. And you can do it in a genuine way where you’re actually trying to help them. So whenever I’m talking to clients, even though I’m on the mortgage side DJ, it’s not about rates. You don’t hear me saying use me because we have the lowest rates in town or, or even really about the rate because rates are low. But it’s about the education process, and what the payments are going to be and what the process is going to be. And once they’re comfortable with it and you’re the one that’s differentiating yourself from every other person that’s calling, you’ve won the business and that’s what you need to do as an agent is Be the person that’s giving the knowledge, helping them, and you’ll get clients for life.

D.J. Paris 10:05
Well, I’ll tell the audience Joel, what you did when because Joel was was my agent on when I read just recently purchased a property and, and Joel did something that I thought was was very, it’s probably for him to second nature. But as somebody who’s bought properties before, no one had ever done this for me and I don’t think Joel did it because he’s a guest on my show. He does this for all of his clients. But I thought this was really it was almost like kind of formal, and I was almost taken aback by it. But I really do want to mention this to the listeners. And hopefully this doesn’t embarrass you, Joel, but it was really, it really impacted me. And it was really it really solidified just why you’re You’re so popular and successful. Because Joel said, Okay, we need to carve out 30 minutes, where or however much time it was maybe it was 15 to 30 minutes, and I need to educate you on this entire process. And I was like, Okay, we’re, he was and you said no, no, it’s it. You say? Well, I didn’t say no, but I was kind of like, okay, and then you said no, it’s really, really important, because I want you to understand every step of this, and I went great. And and he did it. And I went Boy, that is just not the experience I’ve had with other lenders. So Joel isn’t just giving this good suggestion, he actually lives this and, and it really put me at ease. I was like, okay, good. And every step of the way, you know, you were just constantly reminding me okay, here’s what’s next. You’re good. Don’t worry, because I was freaking out the whole time for my own reasons. Yeah, well, I mean, it’s stressful. It’s stressful for anybody. And I just thought, gosh, you know, I’ve had other lenders before, and no one ever did that. And it’s not, you know, I’m not here just to to sing your praises, although we always do. But it’s really important, I think, realtors the takeaway is, be that person be the one who says before you go on a showing, or before you even take a buyer out or a seller, you know, you go to their home, let them know what the process is going to be and say, you know, we’re going to spend the first I interviewed I interviewed a woman, once one of the top Realtors here in Chicago, I can’t remember exactly who it was at this moment. But she said, before I ever meet with a buyer, I do a two hour meeting I have I asked almost 100 to 200 questions before I and then I say give me a couple of days to find something for you. Because she wants to know everything about what they want. And then, and I was like, That’s brilliant. And I bet a lot of agents, you know, learn from that. Yeah,

Joel Schaub 12:28
they don’t do that. They think right now even hearing that DJ, I know there are people listening to ours, I don’t have time for that. And maybe you don’t need to damn hours, right. But you do need to dedicate time to the education process and building that out as the main component of your brand. Because buyers, believe it or not, are going to talk to other agents don’t believe that just because you spoke to them first that they aren’t going to have other agents in their ear. So the number one thing you can do when you’re building the brand, if you haven’t already done so you need to have education as the cornerstone of any marketing and branding that you’re doing. So that you stand out when somebody else calls that buyer. And they’re just a salesman or a saleswoman. And buyers want to buy, but they don’t want to be sold. And you can tell from a mile away, DJ when somebody is just that fast talking salesperson, because they’re talking, or somebody who’s an educator, because then they’re listening, right? So take that as the cornerstone of any branding that you’re going to be doing for this year and beyond. And make sure that you are the person that’s giving the education, listening to the clients and providing that value. So that when they do talk to somebody else, they come right back to you. This is somebody who’s got my back, they’re going to remember you as the person who’s educating your clients.

D.J. Paris 13:54
Yeah, we see it time and time again. And you know, I, we’ve been, I’ve been doing the show for years now. And it’s, it’s sometimes I always think I keep we keep basically not just not with you job in particular. But on these episodes, when I talk to top producer and say how did you become successful? And oftentimes, they’re very similar stories. It’s, well I did this, I did this, I did this. And here’s here are the daily disciplines. And it almost always comes to education. I mean, it almost always does. So I I oftentimes just think, well, everyone does that. But here’s how I know they don’t. And this is this is more about Joel. So when I was working with before, you know, I for sure was working with Joel. I was like, I should get a couple other quotes. That’s the responsible thing to do. So exactly what Joel said, you know, even though I knew I was gonna go with Joel, I just wanted to make sure that there weren’t anything else out there that was really attractive. And boy, you know, there’s that What’s that book? It’s never crowded along the extra mile, right? Because I was like, wow, I got a lot of phone calls. And then people would drift away and they’d send me an email saying, Great, I want to help you with your mortgage and then they’d fall away and I’d write

Joel Schaub 14:58
no follow up.

D.J. Paris 14:58
No foul. Follow on. And I was I was, and it’s more than that, of course, you do a lot more than that. But I was like, wow, there it is not crowded along the extra mile. So if you just become the educator, and the person who follows up, you know, that’ll just it’s it’s almost sad. What’s what what a lot of other agents and loan officers are doing, because they must eat, they must just be so busy, they don’t have time to write back. I don’t know what’s going on. But I was like, well, here we go. I’m, I’m going to work with Joel regardless, but he’s the only one that’s actually seeming to take an interest in this loan. And I will always go with somebody who wants to take interest in it turns out, you probably did have the lowest rate. But but you know, if rates fluctuate, and that changes, of course, and someone, someone’s always can beat the rate, I guess. But I wanted somebody that I knew is going to take care of me and that I trusted, and you develop that you develop that trust. I mean, I already trusted you, of course. But you know, for people that don’t yet know You, you develop that trust through those learning sessions.

Joel Schaub 15:59
By listening, the number one thing you’re going to figure out is, what is it that the client needs and when you actually are just talking the entire time, and you never actually get to hear it? Alright, so the old phrase, there are two ears and one mouth use them in that order, right? There are two ears. So we should be listening twice as much as we are talking to our clients. And you could always be busy DJ. And I always think of people that are doing even a lot more than me, or people that are doing less than me and wondering, how can he close 50 or 60 transactions every single month, there’s just no way. But I speak to everybody, I take the time, and I listen. And it’s taken years to get there. But even if you’re doing two or three transactions a month, you find yourself being busy, okay. But there are people doing more. So find that mentor, somebody who’s doing just a few transactions more that you want to get to, and then just pick their brain on what they’re doing. And what you’ll find is most of its education.

D.J. Paris 17:01
Yeah, education and communication, you know, it’s listening and making sure the client, their needs are being anticipated. And you you do a fantastic job of both of those of being a good listener, and also being a great guide, and making sure that the client, you know, again, I can speak from experience. And there’s a reason why you’re so successful. And I know this sounds like just a session where I’m lavishing praise on you, but I really am because you’ve gone

Unknown Speaker 17:30
lower. You’re You’re

D.J. Paris 17:33
such a you’re such a great example, though, of, of what you know, this podcast is about which is highlighting the disciplines of top producers, in this case, you know, and on the loan side on the lending side, and and finding out what what you do and there isn’t this magic bullet necessarily. And the magic bullet for some people might think, Wow, if I have the lowest rates, and I’m a loan officer, I’m gonna have the most business. I don’t know, I bet that’s not true in most cases. In fact, that’s I’m sure that isn’t true.

Joel Schaub 18:03
Relationships. Yeah, TJ, you’re exactly right. It’s, there’s always only one person with the lowest rate. But on the mortgage side, most of the rates are about the same, there’s not that much of a difference out there. So it’s all about the teaching and education. And with rates being as low as they are right now. We never thought they would be at this level. So there’s no competition, there’s a plenty of business to go around, find your niche and build that brand more than anything right now. You need to have a brand because there’s so many people out there even in your own market, that people come and they gravitate to something that they understand and know. So be part business, but also personable, especially on the social media. Right now what I’m doing is about a 50 50% on my social media in terms of just me and my wife, and me and my puppy, and then the business guy. And it’s not just every single closing where you’re showing that and that’s the only thing you’re doing, you need to be a real person and build a brand and figure out what it is that is your brand. And make sure that you are not just doing the advertising, but actually building something so that people recognize you on every single post, or the phone calls that you make if it’s something that’s specific to the education piece that I always get back to be the people that they want to go to for the answers.

D.J. Paris 19:30
And you have to earn that and you have to earn that over time. Right? So it’s a consistent effort of reaching out educating and listening. And if you just do those three things consistently, you know, success is in your future is in anyone’s future. For in this business, at least. And but it’s also you know, it’s one of those things too that should be the most fun part of the business is deepening relationships with people and making them feel heard and appreciated and and You know, that’s, that’s that’s the key. And I wanted to ask Joel, you know, you also help agents, partner you do partnership opportunities. I’m curious if you would just be willing to speak to that?

Joel Schaub 20:12
Well, of course, I’ve actually done a lot through the keepin it real podcast, and you guys can always reach out to me and literally just testing me literally send me an email, you’ll see that I personally, am the one making the replies, I am the one that’s actually following up with the phone calls. And people have said, Hey, I just have a question for you. Let me pick your brain. And I’ve gotten on phone calls, because of your show for clients, that are agents in multiple different states, and just help them through branding questions, how I do my events, what my team looks like the number of people that are on my staff, and so that they can then do some modeling based on hiring, and what they do for ad spend, etc. So if you’re an agent that’s out of state, if you’re an agent that’s in state, reach out to me, and even if we don’t formulate a partnership, I’m all about giving back and helping.

D.J. Paris 21:04
Yeah, and he, you know, Boy, you really do and it’s a great model for, which is why you’re such a great fit on the show, because we attempt to do the same thing here by extracting the wisdom of people like yourself. So we are super grateful. And I think that’s a good place for us to pause and, you know, wrap up this episode, and you know, obviously, see what happens in the next month, because gosh, things are moving so quickly right now. But this is a good as just a quick reminder, good opportunity to reach out to everyone who’s a renter right now and say, Hey, I know you probably maybe even say I know you probably already understand how this works. But if you have a minute, I just wanted to go over it with you just to see what your thoughts were for the future. And I bet you’ll find a lot of people would go Gosh, I really don’t know how it works. But Joel is right. Listen, reach out. And, you know, deepen your relationships and just be be the teacher. Teachers are always valued. All right, great well on, we want to thank you all for coming on you guys. She’s been coming on for years. And we are so thrilled to have him and he is he is a real joy on our show. And we are so excited to continue to watch Joel’s success and also all the wisdom that he brings to our listeners and viewers. So on behalf of the listeners and viewers, Joel, thank you for once again, coming on the show. And on behalf of Joel and myself to everyone out there listening and viewing. Thank you for continuing to support our show, please, please, please send. Send us I’m sorry. Let me start that over. So please, I’m a little out of it today just got back from the gym, and sweating and sweat is pouring down. You can’t see it. But please tell a friend about our show. Think of one other agent that could benefit from hearing from people like Joel and send them a link to our website. Easiest way to do that is just have them visit keeping it real pod.com and or pull up a podcast app look search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button and reach out to Joel as well. You can find him at his email address which is [email protected]. Or you can send him a text at 773-654-2049 Guaranteed Rate is licensed in all 50 states. So if you don’t have a great relationship with a lender, or maybe you’re a buyer or a seller and investor or maybe you’re a renter listening to the show, you don’t have an agent and you’re thinking about buying reach out to Joel or if you’re an agent you don’t have a great lender to work with. Reach out to Joel he’s he’s the very best. So, Joel, thank you so much for being on our show. We’ll see everyone next time. Thank you

Avery Carl from The Short Term Shop talks about how she got into real estate and describes how she and her husband started investing in real estate and built up their portfolio. Avery also discusses how she finds properties to invest. Next, Avery discusses the current situation in the real estate market and the difference of managing short-term and long-term rentals. Avery gives tips on what an agent should do first when starting a short-term rentals business. Last, Avery talks about her book titled “Short-Term Rental, Long-Term Wealth” which will be published in September and her coming podcast.

To buy Avery’s book “Short-Term Rental, Long-Term Wealth”, click here!

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

Avery Carl can be reached at 800.898.1498.

D.J. Paris 0:00
Today’s episode is brought to you by Oakley sein.com Realtors across the country choose Oakley sign.com because they offer the widest selection of high quality, affordable custom real estate signs backed by a Best Price Guarantee and free design services. Whether you are a new agent, opening a new office, transforming your brand identity or simply need fresh signs to work for your market. Oakleys real estate and design experts produce signs you will be proud to display get 50% off your next custom sign order when you go to Oakley sign.com forward slash keeping it real or use promo code keep it real at checkout. And now onto our show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. And I have a question for all of the listeners or viewers out there right now. Have you ever thought about adding in short term rentals into your portfolio either in your own personal investments or for your clients? My guess is you probably haven’t thought about it. But today on the show we’re gonna be speaking with Avery Carle. Not only is she a short term investment specialist, she’s also one of the top Realtors in the country. So we’re gonna be speaking with her in just a moment. Before we get to Avery just a couple of quick reminders. Please tell a friend about our show. Think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing from top producers from all over the country. And let them know that we exist send them a link to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com They can stream every episode we’ve ever done right from their browser, or if they are if they’re a podcast person, just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and hit that subscribe button. And second please follow us on Facebook every single day we find an article that’s written specifically designed to help agents grow their business and publish it there. And we also do all of our interviews there as well as lots of other tips and tricks for agents to grow their business so you can find [email protected] forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our interview with Avery Karl.

Paid today on the show we have a break from the short term shop with exp Realty Avery was named one of Wall Street Journal’s top 100 realtors and Newsweek’s top 500 agents last year 2020. She and her team at the short term shop focused exclusively on vacation rentals and short term rental clients. Now Avery herself has sold over 300 million in short term vacation rentals since 2017, and investor herself with a portfolio of over 30 properties. Avery specializes in connecting investors with short term rentals with the highest ROI potential and then training them to manage the short term rentals from their smartphone from anywhere in the world. She has a book coming out this fall on bigger pockets we are huge fans of bigger pockets and Upad. Many of their their people on our show, but this new book is called a short term rental. So all you BiggerPockets fans out there, keep your eyes out for that she sorry, short term rental long term wealth is the name of the book. She also has a podcast coming out very shortly called the short term show. And we’re going to be speaking with her about all things short term rentals and investments. Visit avery at her website, which is the short term shop.com. And Avery Welcome to the show.

Avery Carl 3:46
Thank you so much for having me.

D.J. Paris 3:49
We are Avery and I got derailed because I found out her husband is a Sirius XM DJ and I’m a big serious person and she also a serious DJ for rock and roll channels. And so we were talking rock and roll for about the last 20 minutes. I apologize if I’m keeping Avery from our busy day but and Avery herself is a big rock’n’roll fan as well. But But before we get into the music side of it, which we could really spend the whole rest of the episode talking about. Yeah, I would love to learn about how you got into because you yourself are a musician, but how you actually got into real estate?

Avery Carl 4:23
Sure. So I got into real estate. So I was working. I toured in bands for a while in my early 20s. And then I was working on the business side of the music business as a marketing manager of my mid 20s and got into real estate kind of by accident. I think a lot of people have that same story. So my husband and I moved to Nashville a few years ago or longer than I care to admit anymore actually in 2013 from New York and we want to buy a house and I didn’t have my license yet at the time. Our REALTOR at the time was really trying to get us to buy in the super hip part of Nashville called you He’s Nashville because everything’s appreciating so fast, and people are making so much money in one year on their houses. And we didn’t want to be part of that we came from Brooklyn, we’re good on hipsters, like we just wanted to go out in the country and not have to talk to anybody not have any neighbors. Sure. So we did that we bought a house out in the country, we have a little money leftover, and we thought, hmm, maybe we should buy one of these and rent it out and see what happens. And maybe it will have appreciated enough in 20 years that we can pay for our future children’s college with it. And terrible Do not ever invest based on appreciation as a terrible idea. I got really lucky that mine ended up going really well, I still have it, I mean, a 1031 exchange it this year into an apartment building, and it’s gonna be awesome. But we got the first rent check on that one, we thought, okay, well, this is something that we really want to make a business out of, we need some more of these things. And then we read the books and then we listen to the podcast, you should do that in the reverse of what I did. And so then we started educating ourselves and figured out oh, this is called Real Estate Investing what we just did. So we had like one downpayment worth of capital left, like single family downpayment, and said, Okay, well, what can we buy with this, we’re gonna make the most amount of money the fastest so that we can go buy more. And we landed on short term rentals. And we didn’t want to do that in Nashville, because Nashville is horrible for short term rentals. It’s like you do everybody’s getting their permits taken away. The regulations are ridiculous. So we’re like, alright, where can we go and do this, that it’s just normal for people to go rent a place that is owned by somebody and not a hotel overnight. And we’re like, oh, Smoky Mountains perfect. That’s like three hours from Nashville. So we went and bought a cabin in the Smokies. And this is kind of where me getting my real estate license happen. So when we went to buy a cabin in the Smokies, we knew we weren’t gonna put it on a local property manager, we knew we were gonna do it from Nashville because Airbnb and VRBO, there’s no reason to have to have a property manager anymore. So we bought one, and we none of the agents in that market could really answer any of my questions that were investment related, like, you know, return on investment managing this from Nashville. What do you do if this happens? So around that time, I got my license, mainly because my husband, being a New Yorker is a really bad client, especially to southern people like myself. We don’t do well with the New York thing. So I was constantly having to apologize for him. So I was just like, I’m just gonna get my license. And I’ll do this. And so we scaled that one cabin into five and about a year and a half. And during that time, friends started being like, how much are you making on this cabin? I want to do that, get me one. And then it became their friends. And then it became actual clients. And then it became the short term shop and now we have offices in the Smoky Mountains in the panhandle of Florida. So Destin, Panama City Beach, 38 area, Gulf Shores, Alabama, and Blue Ridge, Georgia, opening up a few other offices here in the next few months as well. And that’s how I got into real estate. I’ve got 42 doors now, not all short terms. Six, seven of them are short terms. 12 unit apartment building, and the rest are long term. Single families and duplexes. So we’ve got a pretty good mix of short term and long terms and Maltese and single families. So what I do,

D.J. Paris 8:22
wow, that is fascinating. You said a lot there. It’s funny, I was thinking about the other short term side, my sister who lives in South Tampa, she has a townhome that they bought and as an investment, and she short term rents that she does Airbnb or, or whatever, I think VRBO or Airbnb, and you know, and I don’t know what the downpayment was and whatever, but she basically only has to rent it out six or seven days a month to cover the cover the not and then the rest is all pure profit. And so you know, and she doesn’t do any of the management either. And that’s on top of you know, paying, you know, the cleaners and everything else. So she has to go over there every once in a while and you know, take a look at things but but it is it’s remarkable and it she’ll never ever get rid of that because Why Why should she and actually it’s appreciated to the level where she might but but you know, she’s like I don’t know it’s she’s like basically it’s free money at this point.

Avery Carl 9:19
It definitely is. I mean, there’s a little work involved in it but you can make you know, short terms will make between three and sometimes up to 10 times more than a comparable long term depending on the market and the management and such but that’s why we started with those we started our portfolio with the short terms and use all that heavy cash flow to go buy some more traditional stuff just to you know, round out the portfolio but the I think every real estate investing portfolio does need a few short terms in it just because they do they are like little cashflow turbo chargers to help you grow faster.

D.J. Paris 9:52
Well yeah, let’s so our audience is predominantly realtors, most of them are not on the investor side or rather, whether they’re an investor themselves or We’re not I don’t really know, because we don’t get the feedback there. But they often don’t work with investors. And so I know there’s a lot of fear around that that agents have around being knowledgeable and sort of just, you know, not knowing enough to really have a better conversation than somebody who is familiar with investments. And so there’s some natural fear there. And I’ve always thought what a great opportunity to learn about investments so that you can have those conversations because investor clients it at least for the brokers that I and I’m sorry, in Illinois, we call everyone a broker. So the same way I know Florida’s agent, and then brokers a different thing. But anyway, um, it just depends, I guess, where but but realtors, we’ll just call them Realtors tend to shy away from that saying, well, investors are tough. And then other people are like, no investors are the best, because they take a motion tends to not factor in as much. And they just want, you know, to look at numbers, and they just want you to find them great deals, and then you know, those can be really great clients. Just curious to get your thoughts on working. Have you ever worked with traditional buyers and sellers? Are you just exclusively working on the investor side,

Avery Carl 11:07
we exclusively work on the investor side, early in my real estate career, I did really wanted to work with a lot of primary homebuyers. And I learned very quickly that that was not for me, like with investors, it’s like, alright, this, this is how much it’s gonna cost. This is what it’s probably going to make, this is what it is. Whereas with the primary home buyers, I’m very much like I buy a lot of times, not all the time, but I have bought several Ugly Duckling houses and added in that value myself by doing a little work. So my, it does not compute with me when somebody is like throwing a fit because they don’t like the paint color, I cannot deal with that. I’m like, just you know, it’s like $2,500 To fix this, just fix it. Everything else is perfect. And you don’t like this one thing, just fix it. But that’s I can’t I can’t operate in that space. And I actually very last primary homebuyer that I took. So I was kind of trying to resist being investor exclusive because I felt like I was going to pigeonhole myself and not have as many clients when in fact, the opposite was true. So after my first year, in real estate, I think I had done like 30 million and investor property like investor clients that year. And I was still like, Oh, I really want some more primary buyers really wants more primaries, I was helping a friend of mines, parents buy something around Nashville, and they ran me all over for weeks on end, and then eventually fired me after I just had this amazing year, because I did not know where to find the serial number on a $50,000 mobile home. Ah, god, like, you know, you can all this experience and all these transactions I’ve done, I clearly know what I’m doing. And you’re firing me because I don’t know where to find this serial number. So I on my way home, I was like, You know what, I’m taking those clients anymore. I’m not taking any primary homebuyer clients, I’m taking the people who value, the knowledge that I have, the knowledge that I have is not where to find the serial number on a mobile home, the knowledge that I have is how to invest in short term rentals. So we’re just doing that now. This is what we’re doing. It was I think it was like two or three days after Christmas that my family was in town, and they run me all over. And it was cold. And I was just not. I was not happy about having spent all that time. And then that happens. It was like we’re just we are an investment team now. And that’s it.

D.J. Paris 13:29
I love it. I mean, it makes it makes perfect sense. You know, and obviously different personalities fit different client types. But I wanted to spell and I always think this is really important because I want I think we have at our firm here in Chicago, we have 750 realtors, and because of the way we do commissions and fees, we attract a lot of investor, the best realtors who are investors. And so I work a lot about, you know, probably a third of our Realtors are investors and the restaurant traditional primary. You know, I work with primary, you know, home buyers and sellers. But one of the biggest myths and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this because maybe you may or may not agree with us. But one of the biggest challenges I hear from realtors that are not working with investors that are what are thinking about it. They’re saying, Well, how do you find investors? And when I’ve ever talked to investors, they say oh, finding investors is the easy part. There’s there’s no shortage of investors and there’s no shortage of capital. But finding the transaction finding the good deal to bring to the investor is is the challenge. I’m curious to get your thoughts on on if that’s proven true for you or if you see it a different way.

Avery Carl 14:36
I would say that it’s not difficult to find investors and I think that is the limiting belief of a lot of real estate agents is they think, okay, if I do want to work with investors, they think investors are like this big institutional money people that they have no access to when investors is like, I mean, if you swing a stick in a restaurant, you’re gonna hit 10 of them. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that these people own hundreds of units worth of apartment buildings and investors just somebody who owns a piece of real estate that they rent out for a profit. So that is the you know, there’s a lot of different levels of that. So finding the investors is not difficult, it really is just learning how to analyze a deal, because it is a lot different in terms of what an investor might be looking for, versus what a primary home buyer is looking for, you know, like a big yard is not as big of a deal if you’re buying an investment property. As you know, if you’re going to live there, well, I have three dogs. So I need I need the space for this. But when you’re you know, it’s when you’re a primary homeowner, you’re your tenant is yourself. That’s one family, one person, when your people are investing they have, you know, their potential tenant is anyone so you don’t, there’s no, it’s not a specific, it really is just learning to run the numbers and like, Okay, well, this property, you can probably get it for this price. And in order for it to make sense. You need to be able to rent it out for this much money a month. The market rent is this, okay? Yes, this makes sense. It’s, it’s not that difficult, but I think people get intimidated by it, and then just choose to stay away from it.

D.J. Paris 16:11
Yeah, it makes it really makes perfect sense. And then the other one of the other myths or I shouldn’t even call it a myth, but one of the challenges is traditional realtors, not not in you know, realtors that work with investors or who are investors themselves often say, Well, gosh, I don’t even know where to find these these deals. Right? So okay, I get it that I can find. I can find investors once I find the deal. But finding the deal itself is there’s an art and science to it because traditional realtors are going to you know, live and die with the MLS and sometimes those properties, those multifamily properties, those investment properties do hit the MLS oftentimes they don’t. So I’m just curious on on with your own portfolio and how and how you teach other investors? Where are you finding most of your properties? Are you finding them on the traditional, you know, MLS is or are you finding them and through other means.

Avery Carl 17:00
So I found buyers before I found deals, kind of like we just mentioned, the places that I focus on. So my markets are a little bit different than big metro markets. The markets that I focus on are regional drivable vacation rental, like vacation dependent tourism dependent markets. So you don’t run into with real estate investing, a lot of times the investors are looking for, oh, I want the off market deal. I want the distressed property where I can pay at 80 cents on the dollar of what it’s worth. Those deals happen because those sellers are in a financial hardship at the time to where they need to sell this and they’re willing to sell it at 80 cents on the dollar. That doesn’t happen as much in the vacation markets, because those properties are mostly owned by either investors or second homeowners. And so if what causes a property to be distressed is financial trouble with the seller, those types of properties that they’re just going to list those at retail well before the trouble ever hits their door. So there’s not as much like distressed off market stuff happening in the markets that we’re in. It does happen, we do a decent amount of that. But just because a property hits the MLS, especially the way the market and the real estate market as a whole is right now does not mean that it’s not going to work for an investor, I have bought plenty of things right off the MLS personally, that have had been some of my best investments. So just because it hits the MLS doesn’t mean that it’s not a good deal. And just because it’s off market doesn’t mean it’s a good deal. So we, most of our off market stuff now is coming from past clients who are either trading up 1031, exchanging things like that, I’ve also got a few. And this is kind of a niche thing to the short term rental markets as well. I have a few developers who I have convinced and like shown my buyer list and said, Hey, I have this list of buyers, I need inventory. And they let me sell their developments to my clients only so nobody else even has has access to them. So I’ve generated some, some inventory that way. You just kind of have to get creative because right now there’s no inventory anywhere. Right? So you have to get as creative as possible. And, you know, just network with people I hate to use the word network because I It sounds so douchey when people are like, let’s network limited, let’s go network with people just be a person just talk to people. But you know, you just kind of have to talk to the people that you know and and see, but you know, like I’ve got a big buyer list. So anybody want to sell I have a great buyer list. And a lot of them are willing to pay more money to keep it from hitting the MLS nowadays than they are you know, 10 years ago. It was like, Oh, well if you don’t want to bother listing that, let me just pay you 80 cents on the dollar and you’ll be done with it. But now it’s like I will pay you more money. Need to not listen and get it in multiple offers and give it to me. So it’s like, a really different time in real estate. I know it’s not exactly what you asked, but my answer to that is you just kind of have to be creative.

D.J. Paris 20:10
Yeah, well, let’s talk. Let’s talk about kind of where we are right now. Because with low inventory, seemingly across the board, with our listeners, and our viewers, and certainly in in most major markets, and even smaller markets, we’re dealing with that because, of course, interest rates are low and a lot of buyers out there. on the investor side is is the inventory, has it been affected quite a bit as well?

Avery Carl 20:35
Oh, yeah. And especially with the mass, California Exodus, even the investment properties, I mean, everybody just comes in and sweeps them up for cash. And it’s, it’s definitely tough. I think everywhere, it’s, there’s not one market that I can think of right now, that is not hurting for inventory.

D.J. Paris 20:55
Yeah, and so do you have to end up getting more creative than to find that inventory in these in these times are like, I know, some investors will, they’ll sell postcards, or they’ll try to find the owners of buildings and call them, there’s a lot of different ways to do that. I’m just curious if those tactics have shifted in the last year or so since the, you know, the whole markets changed

Avery Carl 21:17
it, they haven’t really shifted so much as there’s more people doing it. So I don’t want to say it doesn’t work as well. But it’s just, you really have to do something to stand out. Because whereas people might have been getting one or two postcards a month. Now they’re getting 20. So for me, my biggest source of off markets is my past client book of business, because at the same time that we have all these buyers that want to buy stuff, a lot of people’s properties have appreciated quite a bit. And it’s a great time to 1031 exchange. So I’ve just been going back through my previous buyers and saying, hey, you know, it’s, it’s a really good time to sell, maybe you want to trade up, do you want to buy and one of the other markets that we’re in your property is probably worth this much, and you paid this much. And that’s been my biggest generator of it. Because we’re, we do a lot of volume. So we’ve got a really big past client list. I know that’s probably not gonna work for everyone. But even on a small scale, just getting one listing out of that is worth the time of going through. Yeah.

D.J. Paris 22:17
And as far as your, you know, your clients, I’m curious, how often are the investors that you work with visiting the property prior to putting in an offer? Or are Is that does that never happen? Does it happen half the time? What percentage do they actually go physically stand in the unit or the building and take a look at it,

Avery Carl 22:40
I would say this year, like in the past 12 months 0% It is all videos. And sometimes we can’t even get in there to video until after they’re under contract. Because when it’s an active vacation rental, if there’s a guest in there, Nobody’s allowed in. So there’s a lot of sight unseen, like even video sight unseen offers going on, and we just have the video as soon as the guest checks out.

D.J. Paris 23:02
And I just, you know, you that’s probably music to your ears where you’re not having to shuffle someone around, have them worry about the aesthetic, the all of the emotional feelings people have with, with aesthetics. And you know, you’re just basically finding deals, presenting deals and then putting in offers. I know there’s a lot more to it than that, but at least at least or how much of that are you doing from your, you know, your phone or your computer are you’re probably not out there racing around as much, I’m guessing.

Avery Carl 23:34
Right? You’re not out there racing around as much. But there is a certain expectation that has to be managed, because just like not every investor is like big institutional money. Also, you know, not every investor is going to be able to completely remove their emotions from it, especially when you’re buying a vacation rental because these are fun, like these fine and fun markets. Yeah. And you think oh, man, I never thought for a million years that I would have a house in great Beach, Florida. This is not this is I’m fulfilling my childhood dream. Even though it’s an investment, it’s really hard not to get excited about buying something in a cool mountain market or a beach market. So there is a little bit of still managing their emotions. So that is the thing that i is kind of hanging in the balance of okay, you’re not coming to look at it, we’re taking as thorough video as possible and everything else. But then sometimes they’re still like, Oh, I didn’t realize it was gonna be like this. Or I didn’t realize this back. There’s just kind of an always something there’s always a complaint thing no matter how well you video, so I do kind of miss sometimes the buyers being able to see things for themselves because then it’s on them to have not seen that. Or, you know, it’s sometimes it’s stuff that you wouldn’t think is a problem. Like, oh, yeah, that wall is actually green. Not tacky. Was that a problem? I didn’t realize screen was a problem. So it’s there’s a different set of things to manage. But it is nice to be able to have do it on your own schedule and not have to meet people and drive them around. But there’s definitely one set of issues is replaced by another.

D.J. Paris 25:16
So it’s also one of those things, too, that I’m curious on the properties that your investors in or you purchase, how often they were already short term rentals that you’re just, you know, continuing on that track, or were these more traditional rentals that you’re converting into short term

Avery Carl 25:33
in the markets that I’m in, they are typically something that has already been a short term rental, but it’s just kind of changing, changing avenues. So a lot of them are properties that were on traditional property management companies where you know, they have the on site, brick and mortar property management company, and they’re taking 25 to 40% of your gross, whereas now, most of our clients are self managing remotely through utilizing technology. So it’s just Yes, it’s it was already a short term rental, technically, but it’s just kind of changing from the old guard to the new in a sense,

D.J. Paris 26:10
and the margins are better to self manage, of course, oh,

Avery Carl 26:13
big time. Yeah.

D.J. Paris 26:15
Yeah. What does that add to the bottom line, on average, just in general to go from traditional management, which is taking 25% Plus, to, you know, an Airbnb model where, you know, you’re, you’re paying for cleaners, and you’re doing a few small things, but traditionally, are really it’s just kind of running itself? It’s kind of quite a bit.

Avery Carl 26:35
Yeah, yeah. So the average time that it takes to manage like five properties, or less remotely using Airbnb and stuff is going to be less than two hours a week. And it’s not going to be all at once, it’s just going to be, you know, a message here and there. And the average property management company takes 25% of your gross and to give you an idea, so I own four properties, that gross over 100,000. And if I had those all, and that’s not even all my properties. But if I had just those four, on a property management company, somebody’s making six figures to do something that I can do from my phone. And that is not a six figure gig. So it really stops making. I mean, to me, it doesn’t make sense for one property. But it really doesn’t make sense if you have a property that is, you know, a four bedroom it up in a lot of cases, definitely exceptions to the rule, nobody hold me to this, but a four bedroom and up in the market that I’m in is going to hit that 100,000 mark, typically. So that’s a lot of money. That’s your next downpayment on like two properties.

D.J. Paris 27:37
Yeah, it’s amazing. And then what just out of curiosity, what is how does the wear and tear shift from, from the short term, you know, to more traditional 12 month rental clients, I’m assuming the wear and tear is going to be more severe. But it’s still not so severe that it’s eating into much of those profits of guessing

Avery Carl 27:55
what actually, so we have 30 for long term units, and the short term stay in much better shape, because they have somebody in there cleaning them professionally, several times, you know, several times a week in some cases, whereas my long terms, those tenants are in there doing I have no idea what in the hell they’re doing. For a year, two years, however long they’re there. So I can pretty much guarantee myself that when we have a long term tenant move out that I’m going to have to repaint, I’m probably going to have to do new carpet may have to do appliances. So we’ve seen less wear and tear on our short terms and our long terms just because there’s people in there cleaning it every, every couple of days.

D.J. Paris 28:42
I love that too. I was thinking just because it was on the vacation side, maybe people treat the units more, you know more, they’re more rough on them. But but you’re probably right. It’s the people that are there every day all day for a year, that are probably the roughest, especially if there’s pets and things of that nature. So that’s, that’s really particularly interesting. So how how much of what you do is when you find, you know, your investor list, your your sort of, we call it your client list. How much of those people were investors? Or what, you know, prior to you working with them, they were already real estate investors, or how many of them have you trained, because I know this is this is a very popular thing right now, where realtors are training, you know, people who are traditionally not investors, maybe they were just primary residence, and maybe they started with a house hacking kind of idea where they bought a three flat, they lived in one of the units and they had that client do that. And then they said let’s do more. So I’m just curious, if you’ve done a lot of that where you’ve trained people how to how to really, you know, become investors.

Avery Carl 29:44
I would say it’s a little bit of both some people will come to us and have owned, you know, maybe two or three long terms, but we get a lot of brand new investors and the reason for that I think is because you know, just a regular family who may have 75,000 bucks saved up, that’s not somebody who’s typically, you know, 10 years ago, would have gone and bought a piece of rental property. Because typically, you know, back then before Airbnb and self management kind of came along and presented itself, you’re only making you know, if they were going to buy a piece of real estate, it was going to be a long term rental, and they were, you know, you’re gonna make five 600 bucks a month. Now, that same 75,000 can go buy them a property, not cash, obviously, and finance, of course, that is going to make, you know, 20 503,000 a month, and that’s a game changer that is game changing money for anybody. So we get a lot of people who are new because traditional investments, you know, they didn’t want to spend their whole nest egg to make a few 100 bucks a month, but something like this, they can just do basically exactly what I did is take all that cash flow and either go buy another one and double that, or go you know, buy more long terms or, you know, got go buy a Ferrari, I don’t know, but typically you would reinvest, so we get a lot of newbies, and those are actually my favorite because even though you kind of have to coach them, it’s really rewarding to see somebody change their own life like that, and know that you helped them do that. So a lot of newbies, but we love them.

D.J. Paris 31:17
And then what do you think? And again, no one has a crystal ball but just legislation around Airbnbs? Or, or just you we’ve seen it happen in certain certain markets where Airbnb is less accepted or less tolerated. Other markets embrace it. Are you specifically picking markets to to that are very Airbnb friendly? Obviously, vacation areas tend to be but does that ever? Is that ever an ongoing concern? What if What if the tide shifts? And and now all of a sudden, you know, the government wants to step in? Or, you know, the the the city wants to step in? Or does that happen a lot or have you not really experienced much of that.

Avery Carl 31:54
So that is the number one thing that we pay attention to before we go into a new market, whether it’s starting a new short term shop office there or buying. So the reason that we’re in the markets that we’re in, is because these are areas where people have gone and rented a privately owned property, whether it’s on a property management company or not, you know, it’s owned by an individual on an overnight basis rather than hotels. Also, there’s not a lot of primary homeowners in any of the markets that were in everything. There’s not a lot of industry, not a lot of jobs, everything is tourism dependent. So these are areas where because short term rentals have been a thing for decades and decades, like well, before the internet, the municipalities figured out how to monetize it and regulate that a long time ago. So these they have regulations, but they just been there for so long that it’s not a concern. It’s not a fight. Whereas in the big metro markets like Nashville, for example, short term rentals rather than hotels is kind of a new thing as of the past 10 years. And there is a lot of industry there are a lot of job opportunities outside of tourism, a lot of primary homeowners in a metro market like that, where they don’t want you to come in and open up a mini hotel next to their house. So that’s why we focus on the vacation. I call them mature vacation rental markets because that battle has been fought and they the cities are now so dependent on the income from they need Yeah, they need it so we that’s a big one with us. We make sure like I Will not I know there are tons of people that make tons of money on Airbnb is in Metro markets, I won’t do it because that’s it’s too volatile. For me, I want the tried and true vacation market where people have been coming and renting beach houses or or cabins forever. And there’s very few people who actually live there to have a problem with that. Sure. That’s what we stick to.

D.J. Paris 33:45
Boy, that is such a smart approach. And I did it to you I’m sure that’s just a natural thought. But I’m guessing for a lot of our listeners and viewers, that that is something that they wouldn’t have thought of. And and it’s winter’s interesting too. I always think that Realtors would do themselves a huge favor. If they’re not working with investors, either you really have two paths, well, there’s three paths. One is to just say I never talked to investors, I don’t want to deal with it, and I can’t help you. The second path is I’m going to learn I’m going to spend a couple years I’m going to subscribe to bigger pockets I’m going to you know read the books and listen to the podcasts and really understand real estate investing long long term investing or short term investing and then the third the third category which maybe is even one of the smarter ways to go for agents that this isn’t really their day to day thing is partner with somebody like Avery and when when one of your clients is wanting to is vacationing down in those areas. Say hey, by the way, I know a realtor who does this and you know you guys may want to consider some investment avenues. I mean do you get a lot of referrals from other realtors I’m guessing you would? Because you what you know is so specialized and also everyone vacations right? So you probably just it’s really a quite a brilliant strategy. If it was, I’m assuming you probably get a lot of phone calls from other realtors.

Avery Carl 35:04
Oh, yeah, we do for sure.

D.J. Paris 35:07
Yeah. So is that is that important part of is like networking and keeping those relationships going so that when they have clients, they introduce them to you.

Avery Carl 35:15
Yeah. And I mean, we have a lot of agent clients who are like even agents who are licensed in the state. Yeah, because they’re like, We could totally do this deal by ourselves, but we don’t know what to do once we get the house. So we need you. So we’re happy for you that and that’s a big thing, too, especially with investors is I invest in Chattanooga, I’m licensed in Tennessee, but I don’t do my own deals. Because I don’t know Chattanooga, I’m very happy to pay my agent full price and not even ask for a referral fee. Because when the good deals in Chattanooga come up, I want him to call me first. So here, you take all that money. I don’t want a referral fee, but call me first. And that works out really well. And I tried to be a good client to you and not a pain in the ass. So

D.J. Paris 36:00
well, I What did they say? They say like a doctor who treats himself is got an idiot for a client, right? Or idiot for a patient? So so ya know, it makes sense. And, boy, you’ve said so much. And gosh, I I’m just curious if I was a realtor who was looking to learn more about the short term space to vacation space. And, and really, you know, whether it’s for my own investments or so I can introduce, you know, my clients to this idea. You know, what would you do if you were brand new trying to learn this,

Avery Carl 36:33
I would buy my book in September and listen to my podcast when it launches next

D.J. Paris 36:39
month. So let’s mention that her book is coming out which is published by bigger pockets, and we are huge BiggerPockets fans. It is coming in the fall. And it is titled and this by the way, we did not set up this plug. So this is just a perfect, a perfect, I shouldn’t have pulled back the curtain, but it just sounded a little too polished. But it was really a great a great segue because I do want to talk about the book, which is called short term rental long term wealth, and it’ll be available on bigger pockets. And you can also follow Avery on our website, which is the short term shop.com. And her podcast, which is launching soon, soon called the short term show. And when the podcast and the book launch, we will of course promote that as well. And real quickly, tell us a little bit about the book, the short term rental, I’m assuming it’s a lot of what we just talked about.

Avery Carl 37:26
Yeah, yeah, it is. So it is more for the real estate investor than the agent who is working with investors. But I’m sure it will be helpful either way. I definitely do have some agent skewed perspective on a lot of it. But it’s basically the first half of it is teaching a potential investor how to choose a market and source a deal. And for that we’ll make a good short term rental. And then the second half is teaching how to manage it remotely.

D.J. Paris 37:57
I love it. And then what are it so tell us about the format of the short term show the podcast coming up.

Avery Carl 38:02
So it’s mostly going to be interviews of successful short term rental investors. Some of them are I mean, it’s anybody from Sir other agents on my team to people who invest in faraway markets. I’ve even got somebody on there who manages properties abroad, which is really interesting. So there’s a lot of different types of investors, but it all kind of relates back to how investing in short term rentals has shaped the rest of their portfolio.

D.J. Paris 38:29
I love it. And real quickly since you did mention International and I should have thought to ask this earlier, do you see yourself going into international vacation markets?

Avery Carl 38:39
Probably not. That’s just a lot to a lot of stuff to have to deal with. Because you have to like I would love to buy I would love to buy some stuff like into loom but then you have to also have a local partner and then there’s just like a lot of red tape. There’s there’s a lot of markets to cover here before we go abroad.

D.J. Paris 38:57
Yeah, that makes sense. I was I was in Nicaragua, of all places. You know, I don’t know 10 years ago or so. And we met we met a couple from Australia that was investing in and we were just staying at this sort of surf beach thing. And anyway, and they were investing in this property they were building this property on the beach and they they were all in and they were huge Nicaragua people they would go in every year and vacation and surf and and they were saying that the learning experience was was really was really tough and Nicaragua is also a country with a brutal volatile history and and there’s just you know some some political unrest that that happens surfaces every so often and so they were nervous about about that as well. And so I imagine you know, there’s there’s always those fears for those international investors but but I guess you know, you pick your niche and and you stick to it and you’ve got cash, a number of offices, a number of areas that you guys serve us. So if there are any agents out there that are interested In referring clients to Avery and her and the team at short term shop, or if you’re an investor yourself and you are interested in the short term space, the vacation rental space, you know, talk to Avery and her team. But Avery, what’s the best way someone should reach you?

Avery Carl 40:14
Right on my website at the short term shot.com.

D.J. Paris 40:18
Yeah, go over there. And you can find everything. That is everything Avery short term shot.com. But one thing that we also want to tell you is go to YouTube and do a search for short term shop and hit the subscribe button. Because her channel she’s putting a lot of video up a lot of video content up, which is also investor focused. So visit her on YouTube, just do a search for short term shop and she’ll pop right up. But yeah, visit her website short term shop.com Listen to her podcast coming out soon called short term show and buy her book coming this fall short term rental long term wealth. Avery, thank you so much for being on the show. We really appreciate your time.

Avery Carl 40:56
Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. And on

D.J. Paris 40:59
behalf of Avery and myself, to everyone who’s nice enough to listen or watch, we want to thank you and ask you if you want to continue to help us grow to do just one thing. Tell a friend think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing this great interview that we just had with Avery and send them a link to our website. That’s if they’re not a podcast person, they can stream every episode we’ve ever done right from keeping it real pod.com and also find us on Facebook, we [email protected] forward slash keeping it real pod we post every episode we’ve ever done. They’re also all as we’re recording these episodes, we broadcast them live for early adopters. And on behalf of the audience and myself once again we thank Avery for her time. She’s awesome. She’s amazing. And we’ll talk rock and roll next time because that’s that’s what Avery and I are very passionate about. But for now it will stay with short term rentals and vacation properties. Avery, thank you so much and we’ll see everyone on the next episode. Thank you so much

Welcome to another episode of Coaching Moments With Ryan D’Aprile from D’Aprile Properties!

Ryan talks about the different phases of a real estate’s agent’s business trying to figure out where agents spend most of their time, and how to optimize that time. Ryan discusses the importance of time tracking and scheduling. Next, Ryan reveals how to categorize your prospecting for different channels. Ryan also talks about the difference between lead sourcing and marketing. Last, Ryan gives tips on how agents should organize their day.

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

Ryan D’Aprile can be reached at 312.590.6416 and [email protected].

D.J. Paris 0:00
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Welcome to keeping it real the largest podcast paid by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and today is our monthly coaching moments with Ryan de April. Now if you’re not familiar with Ryan, or if you’re new to the show, Ryan comes on every month to give our listeners and our viewers a coaching moment and a coaching session. So let me tell you about Ryan Ryan de April is a progressive thought leader focused on providing for his agents and staff at deeper properties. His strengths are his motivational skills, his coaching style and his dedication to training. He has 14 offices throughout Chicagoland and he’s also in Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan with hundreds and hundreds of top producers Table Properties is a coaching company with eight strategic coaches who work week in and week out with every agent individually focused on business planning, coaching and accountability. If you’d like to take your career to the next level, or if you’re just not getting the attention you need from your existing firm checkout depot properties, visit D APR properties.com. That’s D AP. Sorry, da p r i l e properties.com. Welcome once again, Ryan.

Ryan D’Aprile 2:02
Thanks, TJ. Thanks for having me. I figured I’d come solo this time, we had a guest pass three times.

D.J. Paris 2:08
Yeah. Well, we’re happy to have you with or without a guest. And you always have a lot to say. And Ryan and I were actually speaking before the we started broadcasting about, you know, what’s going on right now? What are agents facing? And what are eight What are things agents need to keep in mind during these really, sort of active but stressful times? I know, I’ve seen a lot of posts in different Facebook groups with brokers, talking about how you know, wonderful it is if you’re a listing agent right now, and how difficult it is as a buyer’s agent, and how easy it is just to get sort of mark Mayer down in in the stress of that day to day and to maybe lose sight of the overall business plan and keeping things moving forward.

Ryan D’Aprile 2:51
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I was thinking, you know, with our audience here is, let’s see if we can pull them away from their business and look on it and look at maybe the different phases that are in your business, right. And let’s talk about each of those phases. So from lead generation side, to that phase to when you actually get a client to when you’re in contact with the client right to post, but maybe we dabble a little bit on all those phases, and maybe give her a perspective of what they need to do. Because I think personally, the, the, the biggest hurdle with our business is the distraction amount of distractions that are there. Yes. You know, and I think one of the biggest enemies to real estate agents, businesses, their actual clients and their business, not that their clients are enemies. But if your client is controlling what you’re doing during the day, and you are always reactive and not proactive, you can find yourself you know, we say down the highway mediocrity or even outside out of the business. So, and every market is so different, right? I mean, he’s, you know, might you but I started 2005 and went through the great recession, we’ve had a 10 year boom, and now we have this crazy what our you know, it’s an inflationary market, right. I think that’s the next thing that’s coming down our pipeline is inflation. It’s already honest, a piece of plywood was $37 I think it’s $106.

D.J. Paris 4:16
For hits. Yeah, it’s 320. The price of lumber has jumped 320% as from this time last year, and even from January, it’s up 70% Just from the beginning of the year. So things are crazy right now.

Ryan D’Aprile 4:30
It’s absolutely crazy. And it’s just different though to and for all the listeners, you know, and the viewers here on Facebook Live with us understand is like it’s different. It’s always different markets always shift, but your business doesn’t have to shift your business is gonna look different. And you’re gonna handle things different and there’s gonna be a lot of emotions that you’re experiencing. Like, again, like you mentioned, right now if you have a listing, you’re selling it in a day over asking price, and if your buyer you’re ready to ship by contract And you’re losing out, you’re maybe getting, you know, one on every five offers that you’re writing for your buyers and your buyers have been coming really frustrated. That’s all the in the business. That’s all the doing the business, but how do you get there? And how do you grab yourself and pull yourself out? Especially like, the mental gymnasium that we’re living in? How do you pull yourself out of that, that shit? You know what I mean? Like, Hey, I gotta look at my business, I got to look at what I’m doing. I figure let’s kind of chat about that a little bit here. Because we could talk about techniques of how to get that that contract, we can talk about techniques about you know, how to get somebody accepted. That’s a skill set. And those are really important parts. But I think, I think if we think about long term, I don’t know when this is going to pull down. Obviously, I think interest rates are going to go up. Not anytime soon. But when you’re having inflation, maybe even hyperinflation, the only way you control that is by increasing interest rates Once you agree, sure, cool down the economy, overstimulated our economy, that’s why we have this inflation. So but the point is, is now it’s gonna look different. But what really controls all of this is sales is leads, and what are you doing and how you handling that part of your business and how you continue to generate leads? And then what are you doing during the phases to give yourself, you know, that recharge, I posted something on our internal Facebook page this morning to all of our agents and our and, and two group of loan officers as well that I’m coaching. And and I said, you know, your decisions have a ripple effect. And that was kind of the header and said, a lot of individuals in our businesses get burnt out from an incredibly amazing career. And it’s a choice that you’re choosing to get burnt out. What I mean by that is, and what I went on to say in the post is, is that if you’re fielding calls at eight o’clock at night to 1011 o’clock, you’re choosing to feel those calls. And it’s also an addiction. In you gotta be smart about your your mental health, your attitude, 80% of your success is completely built on your attitude. And you don’t have to be a servant or a slave to your business boundaries are not bad. And you don’t even need to express that you’re having boundaries, just power the damn thing off, powered off at 730 at night, and pick it back up at 830. This morning, when you’re ready to get going at it.

D.J. Paris 7:32
Most people, most clients are pretty reasonable. You know, most people I found in this world are pretty reasonable. There’s outliers, there are crazy people out there and and if you have people like that you’re you have a challenge. If those are some of your clients, and you can choose to, you know, continue that relationship or not. But most people can handle you taking a you know, a time off at night to unwind and recharge and not respond instantly to to every text message.

Ryan D’Aprile 7:58
Well, yes, actually. And actually, most people are unaware of what they’re doing. They don’t realize they’re calling you at nine o’clock at the last minute. They called you and went direct to voicemail. They’re gonna leave a voicemail and shoot you a text, you call them back at 830. If they fly off the handle, you know, you just I redirected like, Well, I was I was in bed, or I was reading my childhood story. It’s nine o’clock at night. There’s no fire that can’t be handled between eight in the morning at six o’clock at night, quite honestly. And nothing’s gonna be solved overnight. So, anyway, so let’s talk about the different phases, okay, and start by pulling ourselves out of the business. And remember that distraction, right, as Robin Sharma says distractions, the enemy of progress.

D.J. Paris 8:47
And we are awash in distraction. We carry around a perfect distraction tool, that at any moment at any part of the day, depending on whatever you’re experiencing. You can Yeah, Ryan just put hold up a cell phone, because you can literally distract yourself infinite in it to an infinite degree, almost for free because we all have these devices on them. And it’s very, very dangerous because it doesn’t I mean, it’s a great thing to of course, but it no it well, I just mean it’s it’s great if it’s used correctly, what’s

Ryan D’Aprile 9:23
this app this morning, I was coaching a group of loan officers in a classroom and I think we had about 14 people. And I was highlighting a particular loan officers brand new, I mean six months into the business. And we’re surrounded by you know, $70 million, your producers to brand new veteran, right? Loan Officers. And I was highlighting this one particular ello and I had what we call their dashboard because visual flow, combine the total manufacturing system. It’s one of the keys to your success. One of the reasons what our dashboard is built on is visual flow to see where your businesses and I was teaching you Seeing him as an example, because his kids at $6 million in production, why with what he’s closing when he’s got in processing? That’s great for somebody six months in the business, I mean, yeah, phenomenal. And as I told them, hey, you’re gonna fill in these blanks, and you need to be aware of these different people in the process. And here’s why. I turned and started talking somebody else. And I noticed he was doing this. And I said, Hey, you know, what are you on the phone for, we’re in a coaching session for one hours, and all this insurance agent and returning back to him, I said, you are in a career that can make you want to 378 $100,000 a year, we are here or more, we’re here to learn how to grow your business. And you’re texting an insurance broker right now. You know, and I’m actually highlighting you, I’m highlighting you and not highlighting you like paying it back. I’m highlighting your business to show you what’s going on. Someone’s asked a question. And like, are you taking it? Are you distracted by some insurance broker, you guys, you’ve got to understand how huge of an impact these distractions are having on your finances on your pocketbook. Most of us are missing so many opportunities, because we’re distracted on things that don’t matter. Again, big fan of Robin Sharma. And what he says is, most of us are busy being busy, focused on being productive. Now, we’re probably gonna be productive at best, you know, an hour and a half to two hours a day, right. But most of us choose to not even be productive, most of the time, we wake up, we just jumped into the busy and busy just ain’t gonna get you there.

D.J. Paris 11:39
And the challenge with busy is it tricks us into thinking that we’re we are productive, because writing that that person back, the insurance agent feels productive. It’s like I just closed the loop. I had an open loop, I closed it and awesome, I get a little dopamine hit. And I feel good. But was that really the best use of the time at that moment? No, of course not.

Ryan D’Aprile 12:01
Yeah, right. So I’m going to write on the board here and get into this a little bit for the viewing audience. And if they’re listening on the podcast, they can go and see this live stream, right?

D.J. Paris 12:12
Absolutely. And if you want to watch what Ryan is going to be writing, and we’ll be describing it as well, in the show notes in the podcast episode is the link to the YouTube video.

Ryan D’Aprile 12:23
Right. And so, you know, let’s talk about the different phases. I’m actually just making this up. As we’re talking. I’m just thinking this out loud. Trying to take my thoughts put it on paper. So you have the lead generation part. Let’s call that phase one. Okay, you have the lead generation part, then you have the prospects are let’s call it phase two. Then you have the active clients. That’s phase three. Then you have contract, phase four, and then you have post close. It’s a fifth face. Is that safe to say you’ve been doing this long enough, right? Yep. Okay, so let’s talk about where we’re spending most of our time. Right. Now, if we have, you know, if we’re focused on our working hours, and we break it down to 100%, where do you think most people are spending their time?

D.J. Paris 13:26
Well, they’re spending their time servicing their existing clients.

Ryan D’Aprile 13:30
probably spent the most time in phase three. Is that right? Yeah. Yep. Phase three and probably under contract toe? Yeah. So what percentage of the 100%? Would you say they’re spending their time in?

D.J. Paris 13:42
In the phase three? I’d say, Boy, I’d say almost 50% would be my guess.

Ryan D’Aprile 13:47
Okay. And how about when it’s under contract inspection, meaning appraiser renegotiated deal after the home inspection, and

D.J. Paris 13:54
all that stuff? Right? Probably 20 20% 25%, somewhere in there.

Ryan D’Aprile 13:58
25%. Okay, so we have 100% total, we’ve taken 75%, we have 25% of our time, where we spend the rest of our time. Right? Yeah, it’s a rhetorical question. Yeah. And it’s not for you to answer. It’s for everybody. Right? It’s less retort question and answer. It’s for everybody to kind of ponder and think about what are you doing? Where? Where are you spending your time? Now, if you’re spending half of your time with your active clients, and 25% of your time with your clients are under contract, which is still quasi active in negotiating 75% of your time, right? How many? How many working hours are we spending in a day? Yeah, yeah. What do I say eight, or let’s say,

D.J. Paris 14:39
let’s say eight just to be conservative. So we have, you know, what

Ryan D’Aprile 14:42
can we say? 10?

D.J. Paris 14:43
Yeah, let’s say 10. Real estate agents won’t like me saying, hey, they all work they all work 10

Ryan D’Aprile 14:48
Well, and also I just realized it’s gonna help me with my math, right when I said, Oh, good. Long division there. So so now we have 10 hours in a day and we spent 7.5 hours errors on our actives and our pending deals. Now we got two and a half hours left. I bet you’re most people are just catching their breath minutes. Two and a half hours.

D.J. Paris 15:10
Sure. They’re having a lot. You need some downtime. Yeah.

Ryan D’Aprile 15:13
Yeah, you haven’t lunch. You might be commuting. Yeah, might be in those 10 hours picking up the dry cleaning, picking your kids up from school, maybe you’re on the PTA, maybe a volunteer to be on a podcast or your podcast somebody, right? This is real shit that goes on in our day, right? You got paperwork and everything else you have to do. Maybe you’re in an office meeting. Right? Yep. So so we got five phases, we have five phases of our business. This is what I think all the listeners need to really think about and step back, you know, that want to take their business to the next level, there is a true thing of working less and making more money. That absolutely is true. And if you don’t stop to plan, you’re not going to achieve it. You’re gonna have a couple of those unicorns, those few percenters that this just comes naturally to them. Right? I know, that’s not the majority. You know, there’s 1.6 million real estate agents in the National Association of Realtors. And I think the last time I heard this statistic, 50% of them don’t sell a home all year long. It’s amazing. It’s absolutely amazing. 50% of the agents that are members of the National Association of REALTORS don’t sell a home all year long. So there’s a huge, overwhelming majority of us that are struggling to try to figure out which camera to look at struggling to kind of get ahead. Well, listen, folks, this is not something that you’re born with. Okay, this is a skill set you gotta look work on. And the truth is, it’s all about self exploration. What are you doing? What are you spending time? I just threw this up here right now? I mean, DJ, we’re like, what should we talk about today? Right? It just said, we’ll talk about lead source and marketing versus lead gen, but all this is just kind of coming out. When we say it, we step back, what are we doing today? And I would find it hard that anybody actually, it’s funny that you threw this other would argue that’s where they spend most of their time. And if you shifted this, if you shifted this, and you spent 25% of your time on the actives, maybe 10% of your time over here, and put 50% over here, and 10% over here, right

D.J. Paris 17:31
now. Ryan just put 50% in the lead generation, lead generation bucket and then 10% of your time in prospecting.

Ryan D’Aprile 17:39
You know what, let’s even switch that. Lets even change it. Let’s let’s, let’s change up. Let’s put 20% in lead gen, but let’s do it consistently, five days in a row. Yeah. And then let’s take 10% on our prospects. It’s called converting, one of the biggest reasons agents fail loan officers fail is they don’t track their business. They don’t have tools to track their business to see I’m doing all this stuff. I’m networking. I’m on bus benches. I’m on postcards, and my email marketing. I got people and they’re on a note book somewhere. Right? And you got to really dive you got to really die. Oh, my gosh, you got to dissect how much of your time are you spending on one Jared lead. But the two converting leads, right? By the way, if you’re working 10 hours a day, that’s only one hour. It’s only one hour and converting. And this is only two hours on lead generation. And maybe your lead generation is also organizing your database. Are you connected with them on social media? Are Do you have their home address for your auto flow? Do you have their email address for your email marketing and digital marketing? All of these things are really incredibly important to understand. So we spend now two hours, three hours, two and a half hours. So we’re gonna Matt five and a half hours. Yeah. Right. And then five and a half hours, six hours. I got three and a half hours rest in the working day to do the other things launch a podcast with a friend and Office meeting. All those other activities are incredibly important. So it makes sense.

D.J. Paris 19:18
Absolutely. I think the key to it is tracking number one, what where am I spending my time, but then most importantly, is scheduling, right? Like how important is you know, I’m such a good example of this with respect to exercise. So I just got back from the gym a few hours ago. And for years and years and years, I knew I should work out and I never, I never could do it. I just wasn’t naturally inclined to do that. And we all have parts of our business that we’re not naturally inclined to do. We don’t like doing it, but it’s important. And the moment I realized that I could take time during the day to do that. And that for accountability purposes, I would need to schedule it and so it’s been about a year. I have never now missed a session I’m in the best shape of my life. I still hate ever moment, but it’s the hardest thing I do. But the only reason it gets done is because I scheduled it.

Ryan D’Aprile 20:07
Absolutely. And the hardest thing about this, especially our business is that it is a it’s a it’s a solo sport. Most people don’t treat it as a team environment, they’re out there, and they’re out swinging, and they’re doing it on their own. And you got to figure out some type of accountability partner to have you focus in organizing this stuff. So let’s, let’s, let’s talk about the two phases. I’m going to skip over lead generation for a minute. And I’m going to talk about the importance of seeing your business. Okay, now, again, I’m gonna give you some examples of, of agents that I coach on our dashboard. And what it shows us we have this tab called the prospect tab. Now the tab categorizes our business, okay. And we have warm, cool, and cold. These are not active clients, DJ, make sense. These are people who said they want to buy or sell, you know, they may have a need or want to buy or sell, but they’re not actively listened with you or they’re not actually in the car driving around looking at properties, you get it? Yep. Next to these categories, we have dollar amounts. Some of these agents have anywhere from 4 million to $50 million dollars in different amounts in these categories. Does that make sense? Yep. And then they are able to see who the lead is what the lead source is? Are they connected with the my social media? Do you see email marketing, and the date of last contact? That’s the most important thing that these individuals?

D.J. Paris 21:48
Can we pause for one moment I want to just talk about? So you’re we’re talking about three buckets inside the prospecting are three statuses that it and prospect could be cold, warm, or sorry? Cold, cool or warm? I would like to know if they’re not actively working with these are people you’re trying to convert into clients? How do you estimate what what amount per per like? Do you look at what their current home that they’re if they own a home that they’re living in? And then what they might upgrade to? How do you estimate what that amount might be in production,

Ryan D’Aprile 22:23
it’s a big Delta, it’s within 100 grand. Got it? It’s within 100 grand, hey, let’s just look I’m in the west loop right now that headquarters, and this person is looking for, you know, a two bedroom condo, guess what, it’s $400,000. Right? I’m in Park Ridge. And they’re looking for a four bedroom, three bathroom house, I’m going anywhere between six and 900,000 hours, I’m ready to settle on 650. Because I want to be conservative, got it by 500,000, our house 5 million our house great, it’s a surprise, but at least start building my forecast in visual flow, the dashboard that we built in our company that I have now a company, it’s a technology company to CRM, and I have a slew of software developers, the whole principle behind it is a Toyota manufacturing system. And that takes in Kaizen, which means continuous improvement, you got to continuously be improving your skill, set what you do, and then combine and combine these visual flow. And so this spells all this out. And you can actually see it some numbers, you have to plug in like, hey, that’s an estimate. But boom, it puts it in black, white actually puts it in color for you builds a pie charts, bar charts, and you get that to have an understanding, hey, here’s your business. This is what I’m doing. And we spent well, we should spend one to two hours a day on the lead generation. I should title leads. Now we’re going to categorize them. What am I doing 10% of my day, if you’re working 10 hours a day, it’s one hour. That’s all it’s gonna take. And then you can look at it and maybe this might be 48 leads. And they’re categorized one cold, cold, warm, warm as you are 95% Certain they’re going to transact this calendar year before December 31 of the year you’re in and you’re 95% Certain they’re going to hire you if you’re anything less. They’re cooler to cold. Okay, and most people gravitate to the warms No, the warm is taken for granted and that the worms are

D.J. Paris 24:15
going to the warms are already already in the back during the day. Yes.

Ryan D’Aprile 24:19
So you’re organizing it by cold top cool. And then you’re looking at your data last contact. Holy smokes You better not let more than three weeks go pass now cool is you’re certain they’ll use you but they’re going to transact next year. Cold isn’t going to use you. So you start cold first and you’re going after the relationship not the sale. Right? You’re going after the relationship, not the sale. If you sell you’re chasing. If you sell you’re chasing you get the relationship you’re going to attract. You’re going to track them and people work with people that they know they like they meet flesh and bone. They have a personality you have a personality in your your syncing. That’s typically what your network is going to use your network Trying to work with you. Your network is your net worth. Okay? But you spend time on the lead generation. You know, let’s let’s let’s get it figured out here, an hour a day looking at our prospects just saying look at it and so I got I got DJ Paris, I might connect with him on Facebook. I follow him on Instagram. Do I have him connected on LinkedIn? The date last contact was May 11. Okay, that’s cool. I’m done. I’m moving on the next one. Yeah. Okay. Oh, and the date last contact in the message was, Hey, buddy, I just saw you were in Florida. How was it visiting your sister down there? Something like that. But I know that information because he went on Facebook, he put it on Instagram. That’s my job. I don’t sell houses, I create relationships. selling a house is a byproduct of what I do. Does that make sense?

D.J. Paris 25:46
I almost wonder it makes perfect sense. I almost wonder if prospecting is really just synonymous for deepening relationships.

Ryan D’Aprile 25:52
God gave it to that as well. You know, I wouldn’t say lead generating yet lead generating is for sure. I mean, if we’re going to dive if we’re going to we’re going I did this a long time ago, I think one of our first podcast. Can you see this little triangle drawn? Right? We’re gonna go fishing for buyers and sellers. Okay, we’re gonna go fishing for buyers and sellers. These are three different lakes that they live in. Do you remember this? Yep. Okay, what’s PW L stands for that. Purchase web lead

D.J. Paris 26:23
purchase web leads Zillow realtor.com realtor.com.

Ryan D’Aprile 26:28
By the way, real estate agents. These are not competitors. They’re a vendor to you. Most real estate agents think Zillow is a competitor. They’re not Redfin is a competitor, losing 10s and 20s of millions of dollars a year with publicly traded money. That’s a whole different story. Right working for free. Zillow is a vendor to you. Okay, Zillow, realtor.com. Trulia. Even Redfin, if they shift their BOT model around the price start making money, they should be swimming in this lake being a vendor to realtors and loan officers, instead of trying to compete at lower margins that we’re already working at. Anyways, that’s called purchase web lead. Here’s your conversion rate looks like. Wow.

D.J. Paris 27:06
Yeah, maybe 5%? Yeah, two to 4%. Yeah, two to 4% 5%. If you’re a superstar with us, yeah, two to 4%. And by the

Ryan D’Aprile 27:13
way, agents, if you’re going to be doing this and purchasing these leads, you need to do it the right way, means you got to follow up within 10 seconds, maybe even less, and that you got

D.J. Paris 27:23
to call a lot of times over several weeks, but yeah, so purchase web leads are one one way to, to generate leads

Ryan D’Aprile 27:31
this link to go. Fishing is like prospecting. You could do open houses, you could farm a neighborhood, you can call cancelled expires for sale by owners, you jump up between 10 to 15% conversion rate because they actually meet you, they see you who will be looking to buy or sell your home or sell homes a cancelled listing, they just didn’t do it. Now you’re on the phone with them. You’re it’s higher than somebody perusing the internet looking at homes on Realtor Zillow. So your your capture rate gets little bit higher. And then the last Lake is your network. And your network is your net worth you like your network is your net worth. And your conversion rate here is about an 80% capture. And hold on. This is really important. Your capture of your network is about 80%. If you have a relationship, most people mistake like I’m not getting 80% I’m not converting a person on my network. And then I dial it back and we look at your activities like well, you’re not multilateral with these people. So if you’re not creating relationships, you’re not sending the real estate port. So you don’t have an auto flow program where they get postcards, even marketing every single month. You have court Yeah, right. There’s the right way and there’s wrong way. If you do web leads, and you do them the right way. You’re looking at two to 4%. If you have a network and you do it the right way, you’re looking at 80% I’ve never met anybody who’s done this the right way hasn’t worked out. I’ve met people who’ve done the Hokey Pokey, you know, the Hokey Pokey is left for Dan. Yeah, right foot out. And there’s so many real estate agents. They’re in and they’re out and, and I saw this motivational speaker and I’m in for an hour and then I’m out for four months, and I’m in and then I’m out you got to be consistent. You got to treat it like a business and you need visual flow. You guys see where you’re at? So we’re going fishing. These are three different lakes. Now let’s go gambling. Do you gamble? DJ?

D.J. Paris 29:24
I don’t.

Ryan D’Aprile 29:26
DJ D did you do you have your real estate license? I do. Okay, great. Did you take a real estate class put your real estate license?

D.J. Paris 29:32
I did weigh costs $500

Ryan D’Aprile 29:36
Cool. Are you a member of an association?

D.J. Paris 29:38
I am what is the cost here? $1,400 Somewhere right? You

Ryan D’Aprile 29:42
gamble every single day but that’s true. spending an hour with me? It’s a gamble. I can see right? I could be a flop and midam a flop but you get my point. Everything is a gamble in life. And you’re gambling your money and you’re gambling your time. Yeah So let’s go gambling. Here’s your blackjack tables, right, we’re going down, you know, the, we’re going down the Bellagio, here’s the three different. But here’s the cool thing, though. They’re telling us our odds of winning. Right? Here’s your odds of winning, you know, where are you putting your money. That is what I try to get everybody to kind of focus on. And so if you’re gonna spend most of your time 20% of your 10 hours and working, you should be focusing on generating relationships with your network, then you create this whole bank, cold bank could be from four to $50 million, even more of prospects from warm, cool and cold. Boy, let’s spend an hour looking at these and my cold and like, I’m doing the exact same thing, I’m going over my prospects. I’m just maybe doing it more frequently here, maybe once a week, maybe every other week, I have never worked on a lead that I have converted from an open house, or a farm that said, You know what, you’ve called me all the time. And you’re really bugging me, leave me alone. Never. I’ve had tons and tons of people who’ve got no response from nine wants to say, hey, I really appreciate you reaching out to me, sorry, never circled back. But we’re ready now. And we really appreciate you always reaching out, can we get out and see your home next week? Okay, but you got to look at the phases of your business spend, where are you spending most of your 10 hours a day? Lead Gen relationship building. And then when they come over here, right? Focus on one hour a day of looking at it and converting these people. Okay, then. And then look at the lead source. So if the lead sources or a purchase web lead, your frequency has got to be 10 times higher, if a lead source is an open house 10 times higher, 10 times higher than what right? Then your network? What about a network referral, same damn thing, your communication needs to be 10 times higher and more frequent than somebody that’s in your network that you have a relationship with. You can’t take network for granted. Right? But you are a stranger and you say about Stranger, right? Stranger danger. If you’re a stranger to these prospects, your chances plummet down to the two to 4% range, you have the ability through the decisions you make on your daily actions to increase those ads and understand this. It’s not your brand, your broker, it’s not your company, it’s not your spouse, it’s not your teammate, it all stops, starts and stops with you. It’s all based on the decisions that you’re making. Maybe get a buddy, maybe get a friend, maybe get a CRM, we could see all this, outline it, put a little bit of time and effort into visually flowing and seeing what you’re doing. And watch the results. And honestly, you guys, it does get easier. As the years go on, you do create the compound effect, the snowball effect. But you got to put in the effort, you got to put in the good a couple of years of being consistent day in and day out. Alright, so what else is talking about lead sources versus marketing? So we’re great. All right. So because we’re just talking about lead sources there. And I’m just throwing everything at you guys. Is that okay?

D.J. Paris 33:34
Yeah, it’s great. And while you’re writing, I was just going to mention, you know, if you’re thinking about, okay, how do I work in deepening those relationships from people that aren’t, who don’t necessarily know, like, and trust me yet. And Ryan made a good point by saying, really, you should be spending a good chunk of time, you know, building and deepening those relationships so that they do turn into that 95% That is, you know, likely to use you. But in order to do that, you have to track when’s the last time I contacted them, as Ryan mentioned, and there’s so many opportunities to contact them. And it doesn’t have to be a real estate reach out. We just had Mother’s Day Two weeks ago, you should know everybody in your database, who is a mother who has children. Also, who is a mother, who is a pet, a pet mom, some people you know, consider that mother motherhood. And so those are that’s a perfect reason to reach out and say, hey, you know, Happy belated Mother’s Day or, you know, there’s so many of these opportunities. It doesn’t have to be and let’s talk real estate.

Ryan D’Aprile 34:31
Can you see what I wrote up here on the board? You wrote, it’s a choice. It’s a choice. And the reason I’m saying that you triggered me is you said you gotta open up your your dashboard, our dashboard, a CRM, and you got to record it. And there are many people in coaching say, I’m just not good at recording. Sure. Any one of those individuals that tells me that I tell them that they can give a PhD and a college atmosphere are on how to record something into a CRM. It’s just a choice. And we all got to be real with ourselves, you’re just choosing not to record. And I’m going to tell you, if you choose not to record, then you can’t see what’s happening, let me tell you, the main inspiration of the dashboard comes from the Toyota manufacturing system, which is a it’s a CRM, right? But what it does is, is I’ve worked with so many CRMs in the real estate business, and they were not giving you the visual cues that need and studying the Toyota manufacturing system, they have Kaizen and Kanban, you have to write it, you’ve got to record it. If you don’t, you can’t know what’s going on with your business. It’s just like bringing your car to a mechanic, and they put all the equipment to your car, and it gives up all this data, all this information, and they know how to fix it. If you’re not recording it, then you’re not going to get stuck in your snapshot. And we’re not going to be able to tell you how to bob and weave and how to grow your business. And it all comes down to this. It’s a choice. It is just everything in life do is a choice. And to say yes to one thing is saying no to something else. And to say no to something is saying yes to something else. So I would tell everybody, step back and really listen to what you’re saying. Really, really listen to what you’re saying. And you know, especially for us that are parents that are send our kids to school, then we’re spending $50,000 a year for college tuition. And then we’re saying well, I’m not good at recording what you’re going to spend 200 grand for your kid to go to college, right? Spend the time to record the notes of the last reach out you made to your network. Why? Because it’s everything. And any top producer tell you how incredibly important it is.

D.J. Paris 36:51
And our minds are just not capable of remembering this information. We’re just not it’s not, it’s not something we can do. So you don’t have to worry about it. You just have to record it.

Ryan D’Aprile 37:01
Totally. So okay, go now back to basics, again, trying to benefit all the listeners here. Everybody, whether you’ve been in real estate agent for 30 years, or you’ve been in business for one week, most real estate agents can’t tell me the difference between the two. Okay. And it’s important to know the difference between the two. Why

D.J. Paris 37:22
the two is Ryan has written his lead source versus marketing.

Ryan D’Aprile 37:25
Yeah. And why it’s important to know the difference is I hear people say, you know, I’ve done this and fill in the blanks, email marketing. I’ve done grocery cart ads, I’ve done a billboard, and I never got a lead from it. Right. All right. And my response is, well, then the you don’t know the difference between a lead source and marketing. You got to know the difference between a lead source and market because lead source is where you get business from. Marketing is a channel, it’s an activity that you are directing towards one of those lead sources. Does that make sense? DJ, I’m looking down and all over the place. Got all the cameras over here. Sorry about that.

D.J. Paris 38:09
No, no, no, you’re it’s doing fine. But this is important. Because oftentimes people try one thing that they think is is is a lead source. And what it really is, is a branding exercise, or it’s a you know, it’s just keeping your name in front of someone and it’s not necessarily going to be a direct linear line to a consumer to it to a customer.

Ryan D’Aprile 38:31
Right. So let’s do it together. Okay, let’s let’s let’s go over a lead source. You want to give me a name of a lead source?

D.J. Paris 38:39
Sure. referrals,

Ryan D’Aprile 38:43
referrals. We go one step beyond that in our dashboard for referrals from where

D.J. Paris 38:49
existing clients or past clients will say, network network. Yep,

Ryan D’Aprile 38:54
referrals new network, because an existing client and a past client get categorized in your network. Yep. Okay. Now in your CRM, you should have categories of people in your network. We have network suspects, acquaintances, and then farm, a suspect that somebody had met at Zillow, somebody met in an open house, somebody who is referral from a network, they get put in my network put their suspect until I’m flowing with them, they’re flowing with me. And then I require an algorithm every categorize an acquaintance or network. We’ll get to that a little bit later. Okay. So referral from organs elites, what’s what’s another lead source?

D.J. Paris 39:31
Farming?

Ryan D’Aprile 39:32
Farming? What’s another lead source?

D.J. Paris 39:37
Let’s say bench x, or no, that would be marketing. So yeah, farming, I would say a purchase web leads as a lead source. Yeah, purchase web

Ryan D’Aprile 39:47
lead. And we don’t just say the Z word, say purchase web lead, because there’s many different web lead providers out there. Okay. We’re realtor.com They got upset the lending tree if you’re a loan officer go on and so forth. So purchase web leads. What’s another one?

D.J. Paris 40:06
For leads? Let’s see. As a non actively producing broker I’m so I’m struggling here but

Ryan D’Aprile 40:13
I’m putting on the spot

D.J. Paris 40:17
Yeah, network, network.

Ryan D’Aprile 40:21
Network and a referral for your network are two different lead sources. It’s similar but you got to categorize in different, right? You market to your network, you can get referral from a network, but you need to categorize that lead. So referrals from your network your network, a farm, a purchase web lead, have an open houses, sure. Okay, last one, there’s more. Okay.

D.J. Paris 40:44
Maybe just, you know, meeting someone socially, you know, a new introduction that work or if that falls under now, okay. Yeah, I guess you’re okay.

Ryan D’Aprile 40:53
But I’ll say listing lead. And once a listing lead calls you from your for sale side? Sure. Okay. Or they saw your listing on Realtor. You aren’t paying realtor, nor are you paying Zillow for leads. But they saw they scrolled all the way down the listing agent was and they called you direct. Sure. That’s listening. Wait, is this important to know all these?

D.J. Paris 41:20
You know, I want to add one more to that, because I just realized there’s a really important one. And that is referrals from other realtors in other areas. In other words, building relationships with other realtors, especially if you live in an area that people move to or retire to.

Ryan D’Aprile 41:38
Yeah, I do agree. I throw those in my network though. Okay, that makes sense. So that’s a really great point, right? It’s a really good, good point. But I categorize them as Jill with REMAX and Sammy would call the banker and Bill properties. They’re in my network, and I’m with a real estate company somewhere. And then I’m lifelong, because they their referral source for me. Okay, so I get listing leads Open House pretty badly. For me, there’s more but that says, For, do you think it’s important to know where your leads come from?

D.J. Paris 42:09
Oh, my goodness. Absolutely. Why do you think it’s important to know that? Because? Well, I’ll tell you why it’s important for me to know that because I wouldn’t, my brain does not categorize things and, and sort with accuracy. So I wouldn’t ever really know where the bulk of my leads were coming from, I would only know where the last lead came from. Because that’s where my mind. So if I, if I don’t track it, there’s no way my mind would ever be able to just inherently know 20% came from this. And so there’s just no way for me to know unless I had it, well, it

Ryan D’Aprile 42:43
will, it will, it will categorize really, as far as you know, what percentage of your business is coming from your lead sources, right. And then it will help you with the value you have in terms of value to you, which is time and money, you have a choice, and you’re going to spend time and you’re gonna spend money in this business. That’s why I really want to tell everybody listening is golly, if you’re not, if you’re not putting one to two hours a day into life flow, recording it, what are you spending your time and money on? You’re blindly just throwing time and money out there. And let me tell you something, your time is more and more about way more valuable than money ever will be. And we spend time like it’s, we save money like it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s scarce, and we spend time, like we’ll always have it the other way around. Money is always around, there’s always enough money, there’s so much money, be very, very wise with the time you spend. Because when it’s gone, it’s gone. So you have your time and money. And it gets to let you know, where’s my business come from? What’s the easiest form of conversion? And then where am I going to spend my money on marketing. I was with an agent the other day in another state coaching a group of individuals. And she had mentioned to me that she didn’t do shopping carts. And this is an agent in the community. That farms, okay. And he has a auto flow program. And we were just chatting. And I said you got to consider and think about reinforcing your brand through other mediums out there. Shopping carts, not a bad idea. And she said I never got a lead from a shopping cart.

D.J. Paris 44:31
Right, right in. So just just to make a point for all of our non Chicago listeners. There is an agent in Chicago, who is on every one of those dividers in that you know those little dividers you put in on to separate your groceries from others while you’re checking out. And and he’s been doing that for years and years and years. He’s one of the top agents in Chicago. And I bet he would probably say he doesn’t get a lot of phone calls from that either.

Ryan D’Aprile 44:56
You know what absolutely in that particular agent. It’s really interesting because that particular agent is in a in a cold call type of coaching with other agents. And they’re like he’s a cold call. It’s was like bullshit. I know exactly what you’re talking about. He’s in Roscoe village. He supports all the Roscoe village. community events, he sponsoring the schools. He’s very involved. This guy is a network champion. He’s everywhere. He’s and he’s branding himself properly. That’s the right way of doing it. I almost think of the people that are in the coaching with him on the calling to cancel expires like Jesus Christ 80% This guy’s activities is network base with a brand reinforcement to it. And the shopping cart is just a brand reinforcement to it. So she said to me, she goes, I’ve never gotten a call. And then she goes on, she goes, all the calls I get, as my friends call me say, I see you on the shopping cart. And they send these little stupid pictures of me in the shopping carts.

D.J. Paris 45:53
That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s,

Ryan D’Aprile 45:55
yeah, that’s what you’re looking for. And then you look at her business, it all comes from her network, internet worker, firm. And I’m like, This is why you need to record this, and then track where and what you’re doing. So a postcard. Sure. Hey, guys, you don’t get leads from postcards, you send postcards to a farm, you send postcards to maybe a whole bunch of web leads that you acquired over a few years, maybe you send your postcards to your network, okay, you get to pick where you do it. So you don’t get the leads from a postcard, you get the lead from the lead source.

D.J. Paris 46:29
You don’t just want to pause it reminds me of an old, an old joke. I heard. It’s not even a joke of something I heard 20 Some years ago before social media, where all we had was were business cards. And I said, Boy, I’ve handed out so many business cards for this other industry I was involved in, I never got a call back and the person goes, Hey, dummy, no one’s ever they’re gonna throw your card away in two seconds. And they said, that’s not the reason why you hand out a card, they said the reason to hand out a business card is to get one back to get the other person’s information, they’re gonna throw your stuff away, they don’t care about you, but you should care a lot about them. And and so anyway, I was just thinking about that window. So

Ryan D’Aprile 47:05
I’ll digress along at that point for again, for the listeners just trying to be a little nuggets of information. I do have this distraction, my cell phone in my back pocket. And when I engage with some internet, somebody, I start engaging with them. I said, Hey, what’s your information? Now I pull it out. So I’m just gonna text really quick. Did you get my number? I, they got to give me their cell phone number for me to text them, I got them, then record their name, I got their cell phone number, I could do all the rest from at home. That’s the technique that I use. I don’t carry business cards with me ever. But because I focus on, you know, for family Occupation, Recreation, creating a dialogue, building trust, and I say, Hey, I’m going to take some information. Here’s my give me yours, too. That’s a great point that you bring up. Email marketing is a marketing. Yeah, it’s spam.

D.J. Paris 47:55
Yeah, that you’re not going to get a lot of responses if ad to those either. But that’s not the reason to send it. The reason to send it is before they hit that delete button. They are going to say, oh, Ryan just sent me some Okay, delete, but

Ryan D’Aprile 48:07
100% and all they’re seeing you guys is from your name, Ryan. Right? And then subject. Whatever I just sold, here’s a Manhattan recipe. They know what it is. And they deleted but Ryan,

D.J. Paris 48:20
right? They think Ryan Yep. Yeah,

Ryan D’Aprile 48:22
I think Ryan, it’s spam. And that’s why it’s so funny when agents are like die sucking your email marketing. And they’re creating the greatest email marketing campaign that took eight hours of a 10 hour day and neglected what’s going to really move the needle in your business, which is the phase one part over here. Postcard email marketing. Okay, anyways, going on social media, I cannot tell you how many people say I got a lead from Facebook. No, you didn’t. You did not. You didn’t get a lead from as much as you want to think we could peel the onion. And you’re in figured out that it came from a friend of a friend. It came from a network or digital farming campaign that you had running. Social media is a marketing platform. Now. I think social media is better for developing relationships and researching people. That’s a whole other conversation. And then again, we could get on a bus benches, right. Sure. billboards, and shopping carts. They’re gonna figure you know, maybe we kind of stopped there. I don’t want to go over every single phase and cycle and I just thought, Hey, are you spending the one to two hours a day on the lead generation? Then you create this bank business? Do you have a visual flow? Are you seeing it, and then you’re looking at what you needed to be doing? And then you have your auto flow campaign, right, where you’re spending time and money and you are being you’re ridiculing these poor little marketing resources out there because they’re not bringing you leads because you’re you’re familiar that they’re not supposed to. You send them to these lead sources. This is this is who you’re critical. No, I’m not saying don’t do purchase, please. Alright, I’m just doing, I’m not gonna spend money here. Sure I got time I’ll do this, I don’t have any listings, and I’m gonna put all my time in there. So now I have a three legged stool, right? Open Houses network, and I don’t know, farm, I pick two, but you get mature, right. And this is where you, you say, I’m not going to do or I am going to do, then we spend time and money on marketing to these lead sources. And then folks, as we’ve said before, we all overestimate what we can do in a year. And we underestimate, we can do in a decade, don’t do this for two, three months and give up, right? This is a multi this is many years, right? It’s actually a career long activity that you should devote your career to. And I’m telling you take it from me, it gets easier at the end of year two, and three, and you’re five and six and seven. It’s it’s minimal efforts for you to move the needle in your business to get bigger and bigger and bigger. My biggest challenge is motivating people to get through their first year to it, and I work with experienced agents like oh my god, you’re easy to adjust and fix stick with us for four or five months. But again, there’s 80% of us that aren’t going to do it, and you can’t escape it. And this is the last thing I guess for all the listeners to hear. Let’s just say there’s 10 people listening to our podcasts, okay, DJ, there’s 10 people listening to our podcasts, two of the listeners here are going to put this stuff into practice or not. It’s a simple choice the listeners are making, turn off the radio, turn off the podcast, get on the phone, and go through life. And they’re saying, oh my god, I should do that. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. It’s put them in some consciousness takes over. And they’re not clear about what they’re doing and not making a plan. 80% of them just choose not to do it.

D.J. Paris 51:54
Yeah, and if I had to give just one simple suggestion to help kickstart all of this is spend the first 30 minutes to an hour of every day, planning the whole day and planning the rest of the week. But knowing what you’re going to do that day, you know, when are you going to respond to text messages? When are you going to respond to emails because things are going to come at you all day long, all day, and all day long. And you have a choice on how you want to react. And you have to admit to yourself that you might have an addiction in replying to things I know I do. So I have to set boundaries so that I know Okay, did I get my you know, 20% of my day did I spend 20% of my day marketing? Well, if I waited till the end of the day to figure that out, I probably didn’t. If I spent the first you know, even okay, you don’t have an hour in the morning yet. 15 minutes, spend 15 minutes, plan out your day, and make sure that you have all of those different phases covered for the day, you know, and you know, and again, it’s not going to be perfect, you know, life isn’t linear, it’s sort of Jags and goes up and down. But it’s not a linear progression up. But if you can just do your best to every day, look at what you’re going to do that day. Is that going to move your business forward? Is it going to serve your existing clients? Are you reaching out to new prospects? Are you deepening relationships? You know, if you can say you did that every day? I mean, there’s no chance but unless you’re just an awful realtor, you’re going to have a very successful business.

Ryan D’Aprile 53:16
Yeah, yeah, exactly in your business day. So the planning the day that DJ is talking about, you could do that six morning, five in the morning, seven the morning, or the night before or the night before, you should start your workday at 830 in the morning, and your first day in New York at 839 in the morning. Alright, between those 911 and 12, which is between Adrian days when you start the first hour should be pure, reaching out to your network, hi doing checking in researching them at 10 o’clock, turn it off, and go to all the other stuff. If you’re a night owl, it’s not going to work. Don’t do this stuff at night. People don’t just I’m telling you, it’s a choice. Get yourself in the pattern of it’s the first thing you knock out. There’s only a limited amount of willpower that we have. And at the end of the day, you will deplete it. It’s gone. It’s over. So you got to do it starting at nine in the morning and attend at 1030 Eagle and do all the other stuff the wind down and if you follow the advice, maybe you got a plan you know what you’re gonna do at 1030 1130 and 12 Very

D.J. Paris 54:24
awesome. Well, what a great what a great hour we just spent this was fantastic. I know it was valuable for our listeners and our viewers and I want to thank Ryan for spending this time with us Ryan runs a Gosh now I guess for company for companies now. Well, maybe maybe even more than that. Well, we got

Ryan D’Aprile 54:42
the technology right? Yep. So we got the dashboard, title insurance mortgage and

D.J. Paris 54:48
you know, let’s give them a let’s give a plug to your businesses. Obviously we talked about Jaypaw properties if you’re a Chicagoland agent or if you’re in Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, looking for a new firm that does this kind of coaching and teaches you how to act usually build a business. We didn’t funnily enough, we didn’t talk about any tactics around real estate. You know, we talked about business building, and that’s what do properties does. So you can obviously go learn about them and do properties.com. But Ryan, why don’t we talk about just very quickly tell me about your title company, your your lending company, and also this, this new software company?

Ryan D’Aprile 55:19
Sure, sir. So we have a mortgage company, we’re a mortgage bank, we’re licensed in Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Florida, we’re expanding to a couple other markets. We originally close to about a half a billion dollars last year in mortgage lending. And we’re growing. We’re growing quite a bit. And as the mortgage applications are going down, our lenders are seeing their business go up and up and up. Because we run our mortgage company, like we run a real estate company. We’re a coaching organization. So we coach all of our loan officers, we have a marketing plan set up for them, we have a coaching plan for them. We have a software who created dials in and it focuses on real estate agents and, and creating those realtor relationships. Then we have a mortgage, we have a title company, we’re underwritten by fidelity, we’re under written by Stuart. And so we’re full service title company. And we obviously write a lot of our own title work. But we do a lot of external real estate agents and real estate attorneys title business here in Chicago plus, Michigan, and Illinois, our oh my god, Indiana, Wisconsin, what other companies and we have an insurance company. So we do property and casualty insurance, right? So homeowners and auto insurance, it all kind of focuses around the home. So we’re able to, you know, give full service to our clients. And then finally, and really kind of like, one of my most passionate things is we have this technology company, which is the dashboard and a dashboard is built for lenders, it’s built for real estate agents, title agents, and insurance agents. And it takes into consideration the principles on here, it takes into consideration the the Kanban, and Kaizen, like I was talking about continuous improvement, and I focusing on are seeing where your business is. So I have been in the business as a real estate agent as a purchasing real estate agent for Well, since 2015. Late 2004 2000 2005, not 15. Since 2004 2005, I’ve been in the business, and I have worked with many CRMs. And most of them are focused on, you know, web leads search engine optimization, that’s the stuff that gets agents excited. It’s focused on, you know, a website and all that stuff. And ours does that. But it’s ours is more focused on your network is your net worth. It connects you directly to your network through social media, the various social medias that are out there, from Instagram, to LinkedIn to Facebook, it tracks your activities, and then it takes everything and puts in a snapshot and shows, you know different stages of a client where they are a prospect or gesture network and categorizes them and and that’s our dashboard, a company which also accompanies a coaching platform as well. So that’s those are our companies.

D.J. Paris 58:15
Wow, well, it’s a lot that you do. And we appreciate you coming on every month to share some of that wisdom about how you run those companies and how you train those employees, which is the exact same strategies that that you’re showing us on these podcasts. So on behalf of the audience, we want to thank Ryan for for taking time out of his day. And on behalf of Brian and myself, we want to thank our audience for also showing up and continuing to support our show. And the best way you can continue to help us grow is tell a friend think of one other real estate professional or a Lending Officer, a loan officer or a title agent, somebody that is related to this industry that is looking to increase their production and we talked to top producers and we talked to people who coached the top producers like Ryan, so send them a link to our website. It’s keeping it real pod.com They can stream every effort episode we’ve ever done. Or if they’re a podcast person, have them pull up a podcast app on their phone hit look for keeping it real, do a search, hit that subscribe button and keep keep spreading the word it’s we’re so grateful for everyone who continues to do that we spend zero money on our marketing, and we keep growing and growing. So thank you to our guests, Ryan for helping us create this great content. And also thank you for our audience who has been so supportive and keeping us in in the spotlight. Brian, thanks so much. We will see you next time.

Ryan D’Aprile 59:35
All right, DJ, thanks for having me.

In this episode Dan Schepleng talks about his personal journey to his advertising and branding agency, Kapowza. Dan shares best practices that individual realtors can learn from his experience working with Northrop Realty. Dan also discusses the role of humor in content creation and how agents can adjust marketing strategies to be more compelling. Next, Dan advises how to discover your brand and build marketing around that vision. Last, Dan talks about the importance of having a council to help you make creative decisions.

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

Dan Schepleng can be reached at [email protected]

D.J. Paris 0:00
This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the very best media training program on the planet? Gogo Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country. And her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level, keeping it real listeners receive a special discount. So please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee Oh gee, oh podcast.com for your special discount, and now on with the show.

Hello, and welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. And have you ever wondered what the top real estate group in the country who they use for their marketing and branding efforts? Well, we found them. But today we’re going to be speaking with Dan shuffling who is the president and creative director of kapow zone, he’s going to tell you exactly what he does for real estate teams. And before we get to Dan, just a couple of quick reminders. First is to tell a friend think of one other real estate professional that could benefit from hearing from top producers and send them a link to our website, you can find us at keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done, you can stream right from your browser. And also if you’re sending this over to someone who is a podcast listener, have them pull up a podcast app and search for keeping it real and click the subscribe button. And then second, please follow us on Facebook every single day we post an article that we find online specifically designed to help agents grow their business you can find [email protected] forward slash keeping it real pod and now on to our interview with Dan shuffling.

All right, on today’s show, we have Dan Buckley. He is the president and creative director of composer, which is a creative agency based in Baltimore, Maryland. And let me tell you a little bit about Dan. Dan was born in Annapolis, Maryland. He grew up in Pasadena, not the California one but the Maryland Pasadena and he’s been working in creative ever since he was in his mid teens actually since he was 15 and his first job was a commercial editor at a small DC agency. Dan also began his filmmaking career as a composer, and then moved into the director’s chair writing and directing commercials for Capozza. He has served in nearly every facet of the advertising industry and on the real estate side composer has been recognized with many awards for creativity, including an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for the blue block blue box television commercial for Northrop Realty. Northrop Realty, by the way, is the number one real estate team in the entire country. And they hire Capozza. So we’re so excited to have Dan on last year. Northrop, which is a Long and Foster foster company was named number one specialty brokerage in the nation for Team owned brokerages. So we thought what a great opportunity to bring Dan on and learn some of the secrets of what these top teams are doing with respect to marketing and branding. But their non traditional advertising guided by Dan continues to play a key role in their growth. Now you can check out Dan’s work and learn more about couples by visiting their website, which is capozza.co. So again, and let me spell that for you. It’s KPOWZ a dot c o capozza.co. Dan, welcome to the show.

Dan Schepleng 3:44
Hey, thanks for having me. I don’t need to say anything more, you said it all. So I’ll see you like I said it

D.J. Paris 3:47
all I have. And we’re done. I am a marketing person myself. I’ve been in marketing ever since I graduated college, which I didn’t go to school for marketing. But I have been in that industry, my sister is also a branding person. And so this is, this has been in my blood ever since I got out of school. Same with my sister. And I love talking to marketing people, because this is such an important part of any business. And on the real estate side, of course, you know, understanding your market and knowing how to speak to your market is just so critical. And something that just about every realtor I know is always looking to do better. So we’re excited to have you. Well, thanks

so much.

Yeah. Well tell us a little bit about how, you know I spoke a little bit about how you got involved. But tell us a little bit about you know, how couples got started and how you got involved?

Dan Schepleng 4:42
Well, I think most most good things that have happened me kind of just happen by accident. You know, I’m not I’m not really like people that have these plans and all these things. I’m very fortunate. I just kind of fell into some things. My mom were worked at an ad agency in DC. And they needed someone to edit some of their commercials. They weren’t really known for commercials and I happen to make like music videos for fun on the side with their they had an agency camera a little, like an XL two and I used to, I used to shoot little music videos that made absolutely no sense. And my mom being supportive sent the music videos to their creative director. And they were like, well, you know, he can he can edit a thing. Why don’t we hire him? And I’m looking back at it. I was just thinking about can you imagine like, at least some of these are like national accounts like Like, like, Oh, I’m just going to hire this 15 year old to edit my stuff. Because I saw one music video, start to question the creative direction of that company. Now that I’m a little bit more into it. And in so yeah, it was like 334 100 bucks a pop of editing, just videos and commercials, some conference videos. And I remember I I was I was like, Oh man, you know, 1415 or you have a car for 100 bucks a pop to edit a thing? I’m rich, good money. Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s good money for anybody. And so I I took that money and decided I was a rich, rich person. And I needed to play golf. And so I blew like, all the all the stuff on golf clubs, and then like, played twice, and that was my, that was my, that was my one experience being wealthy, it didn’t work for me. And, and now here we are. And fast forward a little bit. You know, I was working at a designer at another agency and started just going freelance, with some of my friends started companies and I would just be their their marketing their creative person. So I do like the design and do some video stuff. And you know, working with like, no budgets, like I remember cutting commercials together, we’re using stock footage and just having just having a ball with it. And it was just, it just grew out of you know, freelance, and then, you know, I got too busy to handle the clients that I had and you know, hired a part time designer. And then from there, hired. Now a partner, Sean Sutherland, our new business guy, and you know, we’re almost nine people now coming up on six years. So, yeah, it was just it just grew kind of organically kind of, you know, almost by mistake. In a sense. We just wanted to do good work. Like I just wanted to do really good work. And I didn’t have the portfolio to prove that. So like no one was going to hire me. So I was like, oh, I’ll just you know, I’ll start an agency and I remember the story I like to tell is this like, I was a freelancer. And then I decided I was an agency. Like I was a freelancer on Friday and Monday I was an agency and I remember telling clients or an agency now what’s the difference? We’re an agency now. That was how it started in the name. Capozza is just as it’s a Simpsons joke, like, yeah, there’s the marketing lady who has says BART has absorbed Capozza and that’s that’s literally that was it. That was the big that was the big business plan. Of

D.J. Paris 8:05
I remember that episode. I forgot that she said Capozza, but I, as you were referencing that they were in like a probably like a like a board meeting or something with television executives. Yeah, it

Dan Schepleng 8:14
was the kids News episode. Yes. All the kids news. Yeah, BART has absorbed Capella. I just love that marketing lady on The Simpsons. She just says nothing. Like she just like in her feedback is just it’s just, it’s just hot air.

D.J. Paris 8:29
She is She She is so perfect for representing. And I, you know, I’ve worked in other industries, where people in marketing departments, sometimes CMO, sometimes others, creative directors, sometimes are a little bit that way. So I think they sort of nailed that part in time where that was that was maybe more more common than,

Dan Schepleng 8:51
you know, a show like The Simpsons that has been on Psalm 3333 years, like, eventually they’re going to write every possible thing. Yeah. Every possible person and archetype in existence. So yeah, yeah. So yeah, that’s, that’s kind of how I got to here. And, you know, it’s really is a credit to the wonderful people that work at Capozza. And the same with the Northrop folks. I mean, there’s a reason they’re there. Number one, like like, that’s not by accident, they, they’re very, very smart and very, very good. I just recently just so been working with him for a while, but having not had much personal real estate experience. I was helping a friend sell a house. And, you know, I asked Craig and the team and wraith are over there. I said, you know, hey, who would you go with to sell this house and then they suggested a guy and they came in and they like redid the whole house and like, and like had contractors come in and like fix the carpets and all this other stuff. And the house sold for like $100,000 More than it was supposed to and it was like we had like 7575 showings the first weekend. They had to cut it off because it was too many people. And it was it was just like they sold in a week. It was It was in my friend is not easily impressed. It’d be like, Wow, they’re doing something right. So yeah, there’s, there’s, there’s a reason they’re number one, that’s that is certainly not a mistake.

D.J. Paris 10:09
Well, we should also mention that because they’re number one, they’re getting called by every agency in the country, let’s, let’s be honest, and they’re chose, they have chosen you guys. And so that is a huge feather in your cap, you’re clearly doing amazing work. And we should mention, for everyone listening or watching, I want you to go to compose a.co. And I want you to take a look at the Northrop work because it is it is really inspiring, it is cool it is outside the box. And it’ll give you a better understanding of what some of the top agents are, in this case, the top agency is doing to, you know, to market and also to brand themselves.

Dan Schepleng 10:44
And that’s really kind Yeah, they’ve, we’ve done almost 10 spots for them now over the last few years. And every time we get to do something new, we get to do something special. And it’s you know, every year when it comes around, it’s kind of one of our favorite things to work on. Because of the the not necessarily the scope in terms of the project, but the scope and the amount of people that see it. And so they really invest in making sure their spots get seen which that is a huge, huge part of why they’re so successful is people know that name. And they know that brand, because it’s out there. And so I know when we make a commercial for them, a lot of people are going to see it, and it’s going to get a lot of attention. We can do other work for other brands, and it can be a good spot in and of itself. But if they don’t have a good media plan, you know, no one’s gonna see it and since and so it’s always exciting to be able to, you know, play on the big stage.

D.J. Paris 11:39
Well, let’s talk about what individual agents can learn from a creative director at a at a top agency who works with top real estate teams. And you know, a lot of people listening, a lot of our audience are going to be individual real estate practitioners who maybe aren’t on a team, or maybe they’re on a small team, or they work at a small boutique firm, and they’re really running the entire business themselves, which includes marketing, arm event. And, and realtors, it’s a tough thing to do, because realtors have, right they have so many different hats, they need to wear just to make money, which include you know, every part of a transaction dealing with the customer. But also, you know, in marketing the home there might be trying to buy or sell marketing that to their client to the public. But also there’s a focus that often gets lost, which is what is the brand I’m pushing out outside of a transaction? What am I projecting out into the universe of potential clients? How am I? How am I what image and What feelings do I want associated with my brand? And how do I actually get that out there. And I would love to spend some time talking about content creation. You know, what I love about one of the things I love about your company is in the name itself is is dynamic and fun. But it’s also funny, right? So it’s a Simpsons reference, which obviously is going to be pushed in the humor side. And humor, I know is really important to you. It’s also something that is noticeably absent in a lot of realtor stuff. Yeah. And, and we and and you know, it’s funny, so we’re affirming in Chicago, we’ve added some humor in our recruiting efforts to try to attract more agents. And, you know, we just because no one else is doing it, and literally nobody does. And that’s kind of who we are. We’re kind of silly guys, too. And that’s not to say that if you’re not that way that you should try to force it in. But I’m curious and what the role of humor is in your sort of content creation.

Dan Schepleng 13:40
It’s really interesting you say that, so when we started working with Northrop, we were really young agency and we mutual friends, as I said, you know, hey, they were looking to do something new. They’re taking pitches, and we went and had a meeting with just Craig back then. And his son will and we just walked them through some ideas that we had and they really responded to a whole bunch of them and in later it came out the there was a write up about the ads in Adweek and they called them like the the anti real estate commercials. And it was it like it was some calculated thing that we were like oh here we go. We’re gonna make the anti real estate but it was truly our ignorance of just you know, that was our that was our voice and that was our take on the industry and so like if we’re gonna make something you know make it interesting make it funny make it make it heartfelt make it feel something move you move the audience do something like and so humor is like humor because it’s so accessible in in you know, it’s it’s pretty universal if you if you strike the right tone and you know advertising humor is certainly different than movie humor and certainly different than like stand up or anything like that. But it it can cross you know, demographics, both male and female, it can cross Age. It’s very shareable, very consumable. It does well on, like, where most of the ads are run, if they’re run on TV, they run on sports, like, like live sports, and it’s just, that’s a good, that’s a good thing to run on sports, because they’re usually louder, you know, more of a spectacle. But the role of humor is, I just think that people are desperate for interesting content, they don’t care where it comes from. And as a brand, you’re already starting in a negative. Because it’s like, it’s like, oh, what are you selling me now, you know what I mean, it’s like, oh, the here comes this guy to tell me or this woman to tell me that, you know, they’re their real estate agencies the best. And that’s why I should go with, there’s a motive behind every piece of creative versus just like funny cat videos you see online, but that’s what you’re competing with. You’re competing, you’re competing with pure entertainment. And, and you’re competing with big entertainment now with like Netflix and, and Hulu and Apple TV, and all of these places that that are just desperate for your attention and truly deserve it. There’s some really great movies on Netflix, and that’s what you’re competing with is the attention. And so, you know, just realizing the playing field that you’re on, you’re not people don’t want to hear from you. Like they’re not looking to hear from you. And I think that’s a mistake we all make in our businesses where, because, you know, I’m an advertising and I think advertising is really interesting. Well, there’s plenty of people that hate advertising and don’t think it’s interesting. And, you know, in, in your industry as well, in real estate, I’m sure there’s tons of stuff about real estate, that you could just listen to all day and read books about but you know, how many dinner, you know, dinner conversations, do you end up talking about real estate where people are just like, Okay, I get it, man, you’re, you’re into it. And but I just think the I wish, you know, in every marketing department around the country, I wish there would be a sign that just says nobody cares. That’s so true. They don’t, they don’t, they really don’t. And like a lot of brands, the biggest mistake I feel like they make large or small is they operate from this, this position of, oh, they’re gonna they’re gonna be interested in this. I remember we had a, we had a client years ago that they were going through a name change, and they wanted to do a campaign about this whole name change. And I remember everyone kind of saying, no one’s gonna care, they’re gonna go, okay, then I got your name good for them. And that was basically what happened. And thank goodness, you know, they didn’t actually run any campaign, but it was talked about and it was just like, that’s just the view that you have, because you’re in it day to day and you think it’s interesting. And so like, I think seeing, you know, for better or worse, I have a really short attention span. So So I think, you know, the realization that if I’m not going to care, you know, who’s this other person and, you know, you can use emotion, it doesn’t always have to be humor, too. You can use we’ve done some some great work for north up that is, you know, heartfelt and I guess sappy is the best word, but heartfelt, probably the more the better word for it. But you know, you can use all these these tools. And the beauty of it now is that you have no excuse with with, you know, you have tons of opportunities with a phone, that you can film your own content. And I know a lot of agents do that. Now, a lot of the big agents at Northrop, they’re great content creators, they make little videos about every listing, and they’re hilarious, like, we have nothing to do with it. I’m just, you know, get to sit on the sidelines as a fan and be like, wow, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s good content, they, they become influencers in and of themselves. And so that’s just realizing the, the field that you’re on that you’re just because it’s commercial doesn’t and you paid for it in you paid to be here doesn’t mean you have my attention or the right to my attention. And you know, thinking about your own buying practices, you know, when a commercial comes on on your phone, what are you doing, like or waiting to hit the skip button, and a lot of times late? Exactly. And most of it for some reason, a lot of brands can’t get out of their own way to think you know, well, I don’t want to see anyone else’s commercial, but they’re gonna love to see ours.

D.J. Paris 19:12
Yeah, it’s really, it’s really a good point, because I think maybe the most accessible, or one of the more accessible examples of this for our audience, would be an AI, please understand the spirit in which I’m saying I’m gonna say this is when I put a big asterisk and say, I’m not saying this doesn’t work. And I’m not saying people who do it are stupid. I’m just talking about how I personally respond to it as a marketing person, not as a real estate person. When I see bench ads, where it says such and such team or when where I see billboards, again, I understand that those are maybe just there as a function to sort of remind people who see them that these people exist and they’re part of this group and it’s just a rapid maybe a repetition thing. But I often don’t, I don’t find those ads typically very compelling, unless they’re doing something slightly outside of what I would expect a real estate ad to look like. So what I’m curious is because you talked about, you know, emotional connection, and how you can do that through content, and whether it’s humor, or whether it’s vulnerability, or sadness, or, or, you know, I find that I tend to connect the most with either things that are funny, or things that move me and make me feel something intense. And it doesn’t have to be a life changing intensity, but something that makes me feel connected to, you know, the people in the advertisement or, and typically, that can be done through vulnerability. You know, it’s some sort of intimacy. But I’m just curious on how, as a realtor, and I know, we don’t have a magic bullet solution, a one size fits all, but maybe how agents can start to think about adjusting their marketing to sort of meet more of that need, because then what you said is so right you’re competing with and now you’re competing with Tik Tok, which is taken over, you know, certainly younger people’s attention span, because these are quick, short, really dialed in videos about how to capture attention within a few seconds. And oftentimes, they’re silly, but they really do work to capture someone’s attention. And I’m not suggesting that’s always the way to go. But but there is, it is tough. And I’m just curious on what suggestions you have, for you know, any of our audience to start thinking about how do I better position my marketing?

Dan Schepleng 21:30
Well, there are a couple of points this the thing you said about the like, the bench heads, in the billboards, like if you go to a baseball game, you’ll usually see a Coca Cola logo, there’s nothing else there’s just a coke logo. And you think anything, you know, there, I saw a tweet once it said, Dear Coca Cola, we’re aware you exist, thank you. But like, what they’re doing is they’re just, you know, it takes seven to eight touches for you to make a purchasing decision. That’s just one of them. If you have the budget to do that, you know, and you can put a bench ad Sure, why not, you know, it could help you know, or a bus ad or something like that. But, you know, dollar for dollar, you get more out of what you said, doing something interesting, and that’s every human, we all connect to the things that are funny or interesting to us or move us in some way. That’s, you know, every every human in history has something like that, that you know, there’s a reason why, you know, we we consume so much content, the reason why podcasts exists and Tik Tok and I love Tik Tok. And I think, you know, it’s, you know, there was a big hole when, when vine left and you know, I need my dose of 15 seconds of humor. But I think the biggest thing that people can do is be honest and be truthful about who they are and what they like to do. If if you can’t hire an agency, or you’re just not there yet. You know, if you like to write, you know, start a Twitter if you if you liked a podcast, to talk, start a podcast, if you’d like to write long form, start a blog, you got to do something, you like to take photos, take a you know, start an Instagram, it’s all free. It’s like, like, that’s the amazing part, you know, 2030 years ago, like, getting all of this content out is would have been, you know, impossible. But it’s all free, like all of it. And, you know, the Craig Northrup himself still is, you know, posting on Facebook and making videos and content and like, you know, he’s still he’s still doing it in like him personally, and, and you think, you know, man, if that guy is still doing it, then you know, who are the rest of who the rest of the agents, you know, who don’t. And I think, you know, just being true of what you like, like Craig is a is a great big personality and a great talker. And so He’s great on video, like, that’s his, that’s his bread and butter. But you know, me like for frost, for example, I like running our Twitter, our Twitter is silly and stupid. And I think my mom’s the only fan of it. But you know, it’s it’s what gets us out there. And, you know, people remember it. We also have a newsletter, that our marketing directors Sean likes to write, because that’s what he likes to do. And so don’t force yourself to do a video if you’re not comfortable on camera. Don’t force yourself to take photos. If you don’t like taking photos, you got to do something, but just be honest with what you like doing. And you can learn like, there’s no, you know, we’re going through a process. We’re hiring a new designer, and just the level of proficiency of portfolios these days is stunning, just absolutely stunning of how, how much further people are than I was at that point in my career. And it’s because, you know, they have access to knowledge, like all of this stuff is free on YouTube, like learn what you like and what you don’t like, because all creativity is is just taste that we’ve all agreed on. And so, you know, the what’s the Even Spielberg likes in a movie, the average person seems to like it too. And in so figure out what your taste is, and do your homework on what you like, and what you know what turns you on creatively, emotionally. And just be honest, don’t force if you’re not funny, don’t please don’t be funny. Like, like, it’s really painful. But maybe you’re inspirational. Like maybe you like giving talks and or maybe you like hosting groups. Like there’s, there’s no excuse to not be a content creator somehow. And in this day and age, you know, if you if you can’t, if you can’t, you know, hire someone to do it, you know, which, which Craig can but he’s still doing it, you know what I mean? Like, it’s so the, I kind of think there’s no excuse not to do something like, maybe you even, you know, you read articles about real estate and share your thoughts about them. Like, like, that’s, there’s there’s no shortage of ideas and opportunities, especially right now.

D.J. Paris 25:54
That’s such a, what you said is so important, and I hadn’t really thought of it is such a wide scope, which is just to reiterate, something Craig mentioned, which is to say, you know, if social media isn’t your thing, then maybe writing is I know, an agent that is considers herself an introvert very successful here in Chicago in what she does is she doesn’t really enjoy doing a lot of social media, because it’s out side of her, you know, sort of wiring her biological and emotional wiring. So she goes, I’m just not comfortable turning the camera around and doing, you know, a fun video. But she’s a good writer. And so what she does is, and I think this is such a brilliant thing. And I’ll just share it just because it came to me as Craig was correct. As Dan was speaking, at that she wants a transaction closes, she writes an article about the couple, for or if it’s or if it’s an individual, just up the person. And or if it’s a family, the whole family, and she takes pictures. And she writes about their life, and she posts it on her website. And then she pushes that out on social media, and says, Hey, we just had this closing, I’d like you to learn about this. Ellen says, you know, and she gets their permission, of course. And she writes this beautiful article about them. And it’s so brilliant, because nobody else does that. And to my knowledge, I don’t know anyone else here locally that does we have 44,000 Realtors here. So guess what, those people are super flattered. And they also share that with everyone because someone just wrote an article about them. How cool is that? And so there’s a lot of different ways to do this. And maybe you’re not a writer, you know, maybe you’re not a video person. And also, maybe you don’t like doing Instagram stories, because you’d like to maintain more privacy than maybe that allows. But as, as Dan says, Pick your lane and what I would recommend. And Dan, I’d love to get your opinion on this. If you’re not sure you know, where you want to publish your content or what kind of content you want. I know we did this recently in a nonprofit that that I helped with, that we reached out to our customer. And we said, hey, where are you hanging out online? You know, where do you spend your time, we actually found that for this particular association, I’m involved with that it was LinkedIn. And we wouldn’t have guessed that. We actually found that more people were on LinkedIn than they were on Facebook and Instagram. And we’re like, wow, that totally shocked us. So now we said, Okay, well, everyone’s on LinkedIn. And now we’re like, Okay, now we know that’s where they’re going to be. And now we’re creating content for them. So that’s something that you can do, you can survey your existing customers your contact list, and just say, Hey, I would love to get your help. I’m working on my marketing plan for this year. Can you talk a little bit about where you hang out online? And then you can start to figure out how to create that kind of content for that, you know, distribution model?

Dan Schepleng 28:36
Yeah, I think, I think that I think, first of all that article thing, what a great idea. Brilliant. And I think it’s less. So if you break that down the idea of writing an article about the people that buy from you, or you sell or, or you work with, isn’t necessarily original, but all true, but it’s true to her. And that’s what makes it so good. And so people get with creativity, they think it’s like magic, and they, you know, have to do something that’s never been done before and have to do something original. And there’s this paralysis of they’re terrified to put something out there. Because, you know, look at all the other stuff that has come before and you know, who am I to write or do anything? But you know, it’s not necessarily an original idea, but it’s good because because it’s what fits her and she keeps doing it. Yeah, the consistency. It like posting one article posting, I would rather have a client or a realtor post, one article a week, that’s average versus for a year versus one brilliant thing and then never post again, like it just doesn’t work that way. It’s about volume, and in being truthful to what you like to do, and also where do you like to hang out online? Like, do you spend your time like I do, I spend my time I love tick tock, I love YouTube and Tiktok. So video is, is how I communicate, or enjoy making enjoy consuming, but I don’t like the camera on my face. And so if we ever do when we do stuff, it’s usually I’m behind the camera or I’m writing. And so yeah, I think I think that’s brilliant, just what she did and just, you know, being honest with yourself, and I hope everyone could like find that find their thing. That’s the that’s just their thing. And everyone knows that that’s what she does. And, and, you know, it’s a great shareable piece of content that all of the people that are friends with the people that bought the house, we’ll all see. And so it’s, it’s, you know, there’s the big commercials, and then there’s just the content that you chip away at. And they all do both like, like the the big brands and the in the the big real estate teams. They’re not they’re not just betting on one marketing horse. Like they’re doing Instagram, they’re doing tick tock, they’re doing YouTube, you’re doing Facebook, they’re doing Twitter, they’re doing Facebook Live Events, they’re doing motivational quotes, they’re doing videos of listings, individual agents are doing walkthroughs. And oh, yeah, they’re doing big commercials. They’re doing the, the billboards, they’re doing everything. And so it’s, it’s more about a little bit of everything at that at that large scale. That gets the gets the results that they’re looking for. And because, again, seven eight touches to for people to remember, and everyone in this market knows who they are. And it’s because you know, they’re there. They’re out there. And, you know, they just painted a whole bus in Ocean City, because they’re opening a bunch of offices down the beach, ocean cities, like out out east.

D.J. Paris 31:45
I know it real quickly. My sister when we weren’t, we’re in college, her after her freshman year, she moved to Ocean City, Maryland for the summer, too, because she saw it in the back of an advertisement that said, hey, students come out here. And we went to school in Ohio. And her and her best friend worked at a crab shack at some sort of crab restaurant, they’d come home smelling terrible everyday from from what I love crab, but you know, what do you work at? And maybe not? It’s not so fun. But so I do know, Ocean City? I’ve not been there personally, but my sister lived there for some time, though. Yeah,

Dan Schepleng 32:17
they have a lot of students that come and a lot of students from overseas, it’s really cool. Like, like, I don’t get I don’t know how the hiring process works. But yeah, it’s there’s definitely a lot of students. But yeah, like, they have no shortage of opportunities for you to know who they are as a brand. Yeah. And, you know, if you look at it as like, like everyone likes, like, the food pyramid is like a constant thing, like the the big commercials that are running regionally on the Super Bowl that we make, and the campaigns that we work with them to make, they have an incredible marketing team that’s doing everything below the tiny point of the pyramid, we’re just that tiny point of the pyramid, that is the key piece of content. But there are, you know, tons of people in that organization that are working to make that stuff happen. So it’s certainly not all of us. We’re, we’re, we’re just the tip of the spear, when it comes to the commercials and the creative, but you know, they really keep that brand going. Because of the in house team as they have,

D.J. Paris 33:19
I would love to talk about the idea of telling the story. And that sort of what that means in advertising in branding, and how agents can start to think about how to do that. And I’ll give you just a quick example. Just yesterday, I was interviewing someone for our podcast, who’s one of the top eight luxury agents in the country. And we were talking about story, story selling, which is maybe an antiquated term. But this idea that she’s now working with people who this is usually their fourth to fifth home, this is not their primary residence. These are ultra mega net worth people who have whole teams that they travel with. And it’s, it’s a whole different world that I live in, they play yeah. It’s and she has to serve all these different and appease all these different people. But what she said is she goes when I you know, show a home, or when I introduce a home to to a possible client, I have a whole story. She goes it’s almost an act, or a play in three acts in my mind, and she has a bit of a theater background, but she says this is a performance I and it’s an authentic performance, but she says I really want them to understand the story of this home, and how they can see themselves in it. And and I want to talk about just you know, the that’s just one small micro example of storytelling, but to talk about how that that can be done authentically, in you know, taking your phone, turning it around, if that’s what you’re comfortable with and doing a 15 second Tik Tok video or a 92nd You know, or 62nd Instagram video where you know in in dance, it’s something else Just want to really quickly before I forget, point is that make a step on this point a little bit, because it’s so important is the consistency. And whatever you decide to commit to with content creation, whether it’s videos, podcasts, you know, articles, tweets, you know, memes, funny memes, whatever your thing is, you have to really commit to it for at least a year and do it consistently. And, and, and what Dan said is so important is, don’t let perfection get in the way, because it’s not really what people always need. In fact, I think most people don’t care about perfection. So in other words, if the lighting isn’t perfect, if you stammer a bit, as long as you’re putting out quality content, and you’re checking to see what kind of results you’re getting, are you getting good feedback? I would say don’t what do they say Perfection is the enemy of just getting things done, or I forget what the end of that expression is. But, but just the idea of not having things because you work at an agency where you have, you know, oftentimes budgets to make things look perfect, which is amazing. But the rest of us do don’t have that. Maybe we can we talk a little bit about why that’s

Dan Schepleng 36:06
so so the interesting thing is people are willing to forgive quality, if they understand the expectations. So when we put a commercial on TV, there’s a certain expectation of quality, because at the beginning before that commercial exists in their mind, and after that commercial exists in their mind, there’s a there’s a set expectation that these are going to be professionally lit, professionally shot, professionally acted, directed, written or edited. And all of those things, when you turn a cellphone camera around, the content that you’re around IS and IS is honest, and amateur, and people expect that amateur look and feel and there’s nothing wrong with that. We actually made a commercial two years ago that was shot entirely on a phone, it’s like one of my favorite things we’ve ever done is for Cancer Foundation. And it was like, it was just shot on a cell phone and we just follow I follow people around us filming on this phone, and then we cut it together. And it’s really it’s really powerful. And there was no expectation because it was clear that the cellphone was part of the story. So So you know, as long as you’re honest with the audience, and you’re not trying to do something that is obviously not true. Like for example, the apple’s ads about shot on iPhone stuff, I think are a little disingenuous, because because they weren’t perfect. Well, they’re shot on iPhone, but what’s around that iPhone, right? Like, who’s shooting with that iPhone? Because like, if, you know, Rian Johnson, you know, takes your iPhone and starts filming, it’s gonna be different than like someone else taking your iPhone and filming. So, but yeah, perfectionism is is really an enemy. I think it’s, we’ve grown up with this feeling that creative people are meant to be our tours. And they’re meant to be you know, these geniuses that toil away in a cabin and that, you know, creative is this, this elusive thing, but it’s more craftsmanship than it is anything else. No one asks a plumber, where do they get their ideas? Where do they you know, where do they where does it come from? Like, how do you plumb? I don’t think that’s the right word. But you know what I mean? But yeah, and creativity is very similar to that it’s chipping away at an idea. And it’s it’s puzzles, it’s problem solving. And, you know, even going down to writing a commercial scripts, like, Okay, I need to get this couple from here to here. And they need to do something in the middle that does this. And it’s in, it’s just, it’s just craft and a certain point, it’s not magic. It’s not like pulled from thin air, you’re stumped for a while, and then you figure it out. Same with any other problem solving that you do. It’s just, you know, the thing that we’re selling is emotion, not, you know, correctly running pipes. And I think it’s a real shame. Because I think correctly, pipes are probably just as important as I look at the pipes around me. So yeah, I think people just need to get out of their own way. And it’s really hard. Because, you know, and this is saying, So as someone that you know, we have a Twitter account that I’ve been posting consistently on for the last two years. And it still doesn’t have that great of an audience. But damn it, I love the content on our Twitter account, and I have fun doing it. It’s, it’s really funny, it’s really silly. And and it’s a nice creative outlet for me, and I enjoy it. And I have no idea how many people follow us, because I enjoy the creation of the content. And that’s why, you know, our Twitter account may be big one day, it may never be big, but doesn’t matter. I’ll keep doing it because it’s fun. And I do enjoy it. And so, you know, again, back to that theme of of what do you enjoy and where it what makes you happy? Like what turns you on?

D.J. Paris 39:46
Yeah, and I would love to, to just talk a little bit about discovering your brand and just, you know, any sort of simple suggestions for our listeners or viewers who might be thinking, Gosh, I don’t know We have a brand I mean, I don’t know what I what I wanted. So maybe we should just define what that is, and maybe give some suggestions about how to discover or how to rediscover maybe even what your brand does.

Dan Schepleng 40:11
What’s the same thing as like, what’s the story? What’s the brand like? Like? The the, it’s a moving target of a definition. And if you ask someone that is a branding expert, they’ll give you a very specific detailed answer. But if you ask someone in a supermarket store, though, you know, the point of the cereal box and say, well, Captain Crunch, that’s a brand. Sure. And the crazy part is they’re both right. You know, the brand is basically you know, is your personality. And we all have a brand, whether we like it or not. And when we come into a room, how we’re dressed, how we talk, how we think how we communicate, and most importantly, who we’re communicating to, in that room, is all our brand. And so your companies are doing the same thing, just on a different kind of more disconnected scale, it’s not one room, it’s dozens a room, it’s not one person, it’s dozens of people. And, you know, thinking about the person you had on yesterday, you know, she is selling to very high net worth individuals, they’re buying their fourth or fifth house. And that is that right there, we can already picture the brand, we already have an idea in our head, that it’s very white glove, very buttoned up. And you know, this is disposable income purchases here, this is not a starter home. And it’s a different experience than someone buying their first home, in, you know, Calgary, Michigan. And so you know, the who you’re talking to is a big part of your brand that you already have it already. That and how people think of you is is, is a big part of that. And I think, you know, there’s a lot of exercises you can do. But one of my favorites is to just on a whiteboard, list, every single word that you think of when you describe your company, every single word in a lot of them will be redundant. You may say smart, intelligent, crafty, creative. And you could all start grouping those things together. And eventually, what you’ll do is you say you have like a, like 50 words. And you’ll find that there’s like three themes, like you’re saying the same thing over and over again, highlight those themes, and that’s usually close to what you think your brand is. Now the trick is, if you do the same, the same thing with employees, team members, or partners or customers, and if that doesn’t line up, you have a miscommunication of what you think your brand is, versus what your brand actually is. And that’s almost always the case, how we view ourselves is very different, and how other people view us, oh, I’m too fat. I’m too I’m too. I’m too short. I’m too, you know, my voice is nasally. Like, we but people, you know, will will meet you and say I don’t think you’re fat, I don’t think you have a nasally voice. So your perception of your brand is very similar to how your perception is as a person. And so the easy thing, you know, is to ask, you know, how are we into really look, how are we viewed in the market? And I think that is the benefit of hiring an agency, you know, is the outside perspective, because it’s really easy for us to look at you look at it, look at a brand and go okay, well, they’re obviously they’re selling to luxury homes. Look, what are other luxury home people doing? Okay, this is how they fit in there, the more accessible Okay, they’re selling to Silicon Valley people. So that, you know, these are, you know, $500 jeans, people, not Armani suit people, and that’s a different kind of brand. And, you know, maybe this maybe this realtor drives a Tesla instead of a Bentley, because it’s more eco friendly, because you just you just go down this rabbit hole of who they’re talking to, and, and what they need to say. And so just being again, it comes back to honesty, all good advertising, and all good creative work is honest. And, and we and we as humans have a really, really good lie detector for when someone’s being inauthentic. So when something like pop music, if it feels too polished, you know, you’ll like it to appear to a certain age, and then you get a little older and you’re like, Hmm, I can hear the auto tune in that. And in maybe that’s something you enjoy. And that’s something you’re willing to, you’re willing to prioritize another honesty in that work. But, you know, we tend there’s a reason why acoustic albums are always, you know, are still a thing. They’re still popular, like, because we like the honesty and that’s why that’s what’s a great thing about a phone is that a commercial made on a cell phone looks more honest. Because it’s it’s made in a more humble way. Because we we are such consumers of content, and especially video and just compared to you know, when I was a kid, you know, there was AOL, and that was about it, and there was TV and then you went to the movie theaters.

But now I’m probably watching eight hours of video a day in some way, shape, or form. And just the absolute, the advancement of the audience because of that constant barrage of content, you just have to be at a higher level and honestly, is the first place to start. And that

D.J. Paris 45:20
goes a lot to, you know, I don’t want to say anything controversial or to upset anyone, but why not alters his tone? Historically, realtors historically have been very concerned about their physical appearance in advertising. And certainly not to suggest that physical appearance isn’t important. Of course it is. But there’s an over seem to be an overly concerned effort to appear perfect. You know, we all can joke about and know realtors who, you know, have their photo that they’re using as their headshot, and it’s 20 years old. I think we’re to a point now because of social media, in particular, the accessibility of video and how easy it is to create that I think people are, I would guess this is just a guess what I would think people are respond a lot less to to perfection, and a lot more to authenticity. I mean, I think that’s kind of an obvious thing to say. But what I’m what I’m really saying is that this polished look, I think is is more of an outmoded idea for small brands, maybe for bigger brands, it’s more important, I don’t know, but, but certainly, as an individual we don’t, the individual person walking around doesn’t relate to perfection and we relate to, to you know, that’s the Oliver Cromwell warts and all, you know, we relate to imperfection. Vulnerability

Dan Schepleng 46:43
is what we relate to. And I would say it depends there are no hard and fast rules, like you know, if your brand is perfection, and you know, there’s there’s some great brands that are known for their perfectionism, Apple among them like that, that p but you’re talking about small things. I never I always like to say that, you know, with anything there is there’s always an outlier. There’s always something that I that we could you could bring up that disproves the future. So the idea that videos need to be seven seconds, 30 seconds, 15 seconds, I’ve seen seven minute commercials that are that get crazy views and blow everyone’s mind. It’s because it’s good. And that’s all people really care for? Is that, that it’s good. So if your brand is being a perfectionist, then you know, that’s that’s you be honest, do but you know, and you can have a lot of fun with that perfectionism. But you’re right, like the vulnerability, I would say, the honesty, the being a real person, like, what do you like, when you meet a person? Like, do they? Do they speak from the heart? Do they? Are they? Are they rude? Or are they nice? It’s the same with brands, like, you know, you the role of any kind of creative agency is just a doll, the edge, you know, you know, a bank is not a, it’s not something we would think of as heartfelt. We wouldn’t, we wouldn’t think as the bank is huggable. It’s kind of like hugging a steel ball. But there’s some bank commercials that have bring you to tears. And that’s by design, because you need a kind of a, you know, a rubber coating on that steer steel ball to keep the wheels of commerce going. I asked to boss I had years ago, you know, when I was first getting into this industry, I was like, What are we doing here, like all of this work? What is the point and is just like what with with, and I slowly realized that it’s kind of like the grease of the gears. Because of you know, it can take any kind of company down to the heart of what a real estate transaction is. It’s paperwork, its you know, its its laws and its paperwork. And it’s not an insurer, you know, there’s a side of it, that is romantic. But if you can, if, you know, none of our ads, you know, mentioned any kind of, you know, closing process or anything like that, it’s all about like, hey, you know, look at the look at the life that you could possibly have. And so, most good, most good work is about you’re selling an ideal, you’re selling a dream. I saw a billboard once about retirement. And it was just this old couple sitting on a porch, like a stoop of a porch drinking coffee, and they were retired. And I think about that ad like once a month. It was not that it might have been a stock photo, but it just resonated with me. I was like, Man, I want a porch and coffee and sitting like, that sounds nice. And so you know, it’s all selling some kind of ideal. And I think that, you know, the, the way the way that most brands present themselves is just the ideal that we wish our that we wish for ourselves sometimes.

D.J. Paris 49:46
Yeah. And, you know, back to branding for a second I was you know, Dan was was giving the exercise about listing all of the sort of characteristics that you think that that you think you are able to to delight Varane with your customers, and, you know, feelings and experiences. And then Dan also mentioned, well, gosh, you know, we’re so we’re almost too close to ourselves to know, the objective, sort of third party view, which is how to other people view us. And we may be right, we may not be accurate. So you need to find out. And I think, one way to do that, just as a quick little tip, Dan, maybe you have a, an additional suggestion, or or maybe this is a decent one, but it is to send it anonymous surveys to to your customers and say, hey, you know, I was in the process of going through a branding exercise. And here are here are sort of the, you know, the, the, the words that I want associated with my brand, but I want to make sure that that my customers or my clients feel this, that this is authentic to me. And if it isn’t, I really need to know that. And you can do it, you know, from an anonymous perspective, where they’re not giving their personal information, they can, you know, feel the need to be more honest about it. But I would think that would might help marry some of the what do we think and what, you know, the public thinks about us?

Dan Schepleng 51:06
Yeah, I mean, that is the basis of any, any good marketing strategist, that’s where they start it’s surveys. And any kind of strategy is usually built upon that. And I think we’re all terrified to do that as business owners, because, you know, we’ve never sent out a survey, because it’s like, oh, gosh, what are we going to hear? You know what I mean? Like, we get testimonials through the site called clutch, which is really interesting, because they’re like, curating testimonials. And it’s interesting to see what people say, and what people value. But yeah, I mean, look, the hardest thing I remember my first commercial, I was directing, it was what was like the second or third, but the first like real one. And, you know, you go through the script, and it’s three or four drafts of the script. And then you go through, you go through casting, and then shot lists, and then you got the shoot day, and there’s multiple takes there, then you have the Edit, then you have post production. And at that point, you don’t even know what’s funny anymore, right? And you’re too close to it. Yeah, and the client might not know either, because, you know, we’ve all heard the punch line three or 30,000 times that flames come out of the sink, and it’s like, is that even funny anymore? And it’s really hard, because you have to you have to try and disassociate yourself as best as you can, to, to put your yourself in the eyes of someone seeing this for the first time. And that takes that’s a that’s a real skill, you just, I just I was bad, I have to develop it, but having good honest friends in the in the industry, and then friends outside of the industry, you know, every single commercial that we make gets sent to about, you know, five to 10. Friends and colleagues, for different kinds of notes. Like I know, if I send a commercial to a filmmaker friend, he will say, This looks good. But the color correction is off between 10 seconds and 15 seconds, by sending it to a business person or business friend, they’ll say, cool, but what are they selling here, and you just you just, you know, it’s about getting good feedback. And that’s where good creative comes from, it’s the really important thing is it’s not magic, it’s structure and feedback. And it’s actually, you know, more boring than, you know, than the the Italian villa, where you’re reading, you know, the great American novel, it’s structured and feedback. And so, if you can have some honest friends, and you know, honest that you say, Look, you know, I want to know if, you know, my pants are down in public, like, you know, that’s always my biggest fear. Like, every, every artist in the history of artists, and I wouldn’t go so far as to call us artists, I think it’s probably a little pretentious. But the the idea of someone that makes creative stuff, all has something on their record, that they it was just a miss. And was it a mess? Because they didn’t care? Or was it a miss because they just didn’t, they didn’t, their their tastes didn’t line up with what was what everyone was gonna like. And good friends and friends that are inside industries and outside industries, the best feedback can come from, you know, someone totally outside of the demographic you’re going for it because because, you know, it’s really interesting to see how that what they think and what they point out. And so you can we do the same thing with work. So we get feedback as much as we can. Like, it’s really, really important. And especially for something you know, millions of people are gonna see this thing, you know, oh, my goodness, like, what if something is offensive, you know, and comedy is tough it like, like, and you know, you have to ride this line of like, will there be something that you know, you blindside that you totally didn’t see coming? Fortunately, we’ve never had that happen, because we get a lot of people looking at scripts. A lot of very aware people within the agency are also like, I think the thing that makes me most proud of the agencies that were very diverse. And I think that’s important for both ideas and Know those blind sides? And so yeah, do the same thing with your brand, you know, you know, if it’s not a survey, take a friend at lunch that is in the industry or someone that has that has used your services. And you know, how do you see us and let them unless let them talk, people love to talk. And so like I’m doing here,

D.J. Paris 55:16
I also love to be helpful to, especially if they like you. And so assembling this council of people that can give you honest feedback, as Dan was suggesting is so important. And then you have to be willing to turn your will over to, to at least receive their feedback and and understand that many things are misses. And as you create this content, there may be as many misses as there are hits, you might find somebody might say, you know, this just isn’t good enough. And here’s what I would do to make it better. And, and that’s okay. I mean, gosh, you know, you know, everyone learns from experience experience usually comes from making bad decisions. Also good decisions, too. But I learned a lot more from from the mistakes I’ve made. So assemble a counsel that it’s really important and and if you’re unwilling, if that’s too scary for you to do face to face, then do it anonymously, send it out to your clients and say, I don’t want you to feel that you have to tell me, You know what I want to hear just, here’s what I’m thinking of, here’s a particular direction I want to go, do you think that fits? Does that fit with your experience of me, and then you can adjust from there. And it’s funny that, as you were saying that, I realized we’re in the process of rebuilding our recruiting website for recruiting realtors to join our firm. And even though we have 750 Realtors here, I was struggling with this with this brand idea, you would think by now I would know, what is our brand? And what and I had to go to my owner. And I said, Well, here’s the seven words I want associate and he goes now only really for those work. And I said, Well, I don’t know, I think seven at first I had 30. And I said let’s do all 30. Wouldn’t that be kind of fun just to have 30 different things. And we could do something neat with that. He goes, No, it’s too much people get confused. And I was a little disheartened because I’d put all this work into it. But it was a mess. It was just wrong. It was the wrong approach. And he says we’re going to narrow it down to these four. And it was training support family, because we’re family, business and fun. And I said, that’s it, those are the four. And I would have as a creative person, I would have loved to do all 30. And I had a really cool idea. But it wasn’t really the right idea. So I have a counselor as well, you should also do the same. And you know, once you narrow down what what those experiences are those words, you want to associate it with your brand? Well, then that gives you such good direction. And it really, as Dan was saying, and really probably doesn’t matter as much what the distribution model is. In other words, how are you getting that content out, there’s a million ways to do it. And whatever fits with with your sort of personality is what you can go with. But I would say do that before you do anything else. Otherwise, what I did for the first many, many years here at our company is I just tried a whole bunch of stuff without testing it and threw it against the wall. Thankfully, none of it, you know, torpedoed our company, but a lot of it just was a bad idea that I didn’t ask other people about at a time, and it would have saved me a lot of headache over the years. So that’s that’s such a great suggestion. And I also want to mention, too, that kapow, is a dance company, they are looking to always expand their business. And if you know they work with what the top team in the country now and we have we interview Top realtors and so I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that if you are a brand, whether you’re a real estate into you know, an individual or a team or a brokerage, and you want to really take your branding and marketing to the next level, you know, check out couples or look at their work, if that seems to fit with with what you want for the vision of your company. And, you know, gosh, other award winning agency, they certainly have a lot of cool accolades, and they will take great care of you. But if you’re interested in learning more about them, please go to their website, take a look at their the content they’ve created for other clients, which is couples a.co, which is k p o w z ey.co. And Dan, do you mind sharing your email in case anyone wants to reach out to you directly?

Unknown Speaker 59:06
Yeah, absolutely. It’s just [email protected]. And yeah, please reach out I’d be happy to I mean, stuff is really interesting. It’s fun to talk and it’s fun to brainstorm and it’s fun to it’s fun to help help people and so yeah, I mean if anyone wants to reach out there’s also you know if you if you want to join the literally dozens following the us on Twitter it’s Capella CO is the Twitter but yeah, I think my mom’s the only one that that actually follows that

D.J. Paris 59:37
Well, I I will tell you just a funny Twitter story as we wrap up only because this will make you feel a lot better. So years ago prior to me getting into real estate i i would just write jokes on Twitter and there were my own jokes. I wasn’t appropriating them which I have always a big issue with I see on Instagram. Everyone just steals everyone else’s content and because it’s way much easier And I just personally, I don’t like whatever people can do whatever they want. But I never did that. And I was able, and this is not this is kind of gonna sound like I’m bragging. But the reason I’m saying it is it is absolutely not a brag. So I amassed a pretty large Twitter following, or at least I thought it was I did about 100. And I don’t know, 30,000 Twitter followers, which sounds amazing. And, and just so that, you know, everyone understands, it really did nothing for me, as far as from a business perspective, maybe I didn’t learn how to monetize it or use it to my advantage to get other opportunities. But, but but I would have, you know, a lot of good feedback, which was nice. But But certainly, and now I don’t post it all on Twitter, and not because I’m like, Oh, well, I don’t need to do that anymore. I just stopped being able to come up with the great jokes. But what I will tell you is whether it’s dozens, or in my case, I had a lot more. The reality of it is is it’s still always hard to get noticed, I kind of maybe got lucky because I got some people who tweeted out things that I had tweeted. And so I got a lot of attention that way. It wasn’t just like I struggled. But and it took seven years to get to that point. So it was a seven year process. And I wish it would have happened overnight, but it didn’t. But the point is is is you know, whatever you want to do, whether and by the way, again getting 100 Once I got 130,000 Twitter followers, I realized oh or Yeah, I was like, Oh, this doesn’t really do anything for me personally. For other brands. That would be amazing. Like, if well, it felt it was yeah, it I guess it did it felt good. But then I realized it didn’t. I was like, Well, I’m really great at things that don’t make money. Isn’t that awesome? I devoted my life to something that doesn’t make any.

Dan Schepleng 1:01:36
You sound like a musician? Yeah, well, yeah,

D.J. Paris 1:01:39
I do play guitar as well that for the last 30 years. And that hasn’t made me a penny either. But, but it is fun to do. And, you know, I think that if you can have fun with your branding, and do something that’s authentic to you, and think of it more, you know, in line with, am I meeting my customers needs? Am I giving them what they want? Am I being true to myself, that you really can’t lose? Whether you have a few people that follow you on Instagram, or you know, 1000s and 1000s as long as it’s authentic, and fun people will the people who you want to work with will probably connect to that. And we could spend a whole nother hour talking about how do you get in front of those people? How do you get those eyeballs or, or ears to see or listen, but But you know, for now just focus on the content. You know, try to think about something fun that you would is exciting for you. And, and just push it out in and I would just say commit to whatever you want to do at least for a year doing it regularly, and see what happens.

Dan Schepleng 1:02:38
Well, and the reality is you’re gonna you’re gonna keep doing it, whether somebody is listening or not because you enjoy it. So like so and so yeah, I’m on. I’m on year, one of the Twitter account. And so we haven’t we haven’t had that. But you know, it’s, you know, add a huge following us, which I thought was cool. That’s awesome. Yeah. But it’s like, 200 I just looked it’s like tuna and some people, but I enjoy it. And, and, you know, you know, I hope eventually to get to that 100 and some 1000. But, but but, but I’m not waking up every day going. Okay, how do I get my Twitter account? 100 something right, right, right. I just like, oh, this is funny, I should post about this, oh, this is fun. And it’s just, you’ll keep doing it because you like it. And it’s the same with being a real estate agent, you know, you know, not to, you know, keep going back and namedropping Craig, but he really likes it like, you know, he probably doesn’t have to I don’t know much about him personally, but he probably doesn’t have to sell homes anymore. Like directly that agency is big enough. He could probably spend his time. But you call North a realty he’ll pick up the phone. And he’s a real estate agent, like he’s still really gets a kick out of it. Like Saturday morning, he is selling homes. And like he could spend his you know, he could fly to Beverly Hills and, and just play tennis all day. But you know, he’s still really likes it. And that’s why he’s been so successful. And I guess it’s the same for us. We just really liked doing this. Like it’s really fun. You know, writing and trying to figure out funny things to do with brands and just an or heartfelt things and telling stories. And and working with people. It’s just really fun. And it’s what gets us up in the morning.

D.J. Paris 1:04:13
I love it. Well, you have given us such amazing value today. And what a great conversation I’m, I’m a marketing person. So this is what I love to talk about. And I appreciate, you know, talking to someone who’s outside of the what well works within the real estate industry, but also other industries and just providing our audience with some suggestions. And so you have done that in spades. And we are super grateful for you to have come on today. So on behalf of the listeners and viewers, we want to thank Dan and the composite team for taking time out of their incredibly busy day to spend time with us on the show and provide our audience with with some some good ideas. And on behalf of Dan and myself we want also thank the audience for tuning in for listening right now. We could not do this or would not do this without you. So we certainly apprec She ate it. And all we ask that if you want to, you know, support us? Well actually, first you want to support Dan, please go visit couples a.com Take a look at their creative. See if it’s something that fits with what you’re looking for and reach out. They’re super accessible and will always be able to give you some good good ideas. And then if you want to support our show, the easiest way to do that is just tell a friend, I think of one other agent that could benefit from, you know, watching or listening to our podcast, this particular kind of great conversation about branding with Dan, and send them a link to our website. If they’re not a podcast person, they don’t have to be they just go to keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done is streamable right from the site. It’s super easy to navigate, or at least I hope it is I built it. I hope it’s easy. But either way it’s they don’t have to, you know, download a podcast app, but if they are a podcast person, then just have them pull up a podcast app search for keeping it real and ask them to hit the subscribe button so they can get this content. Thanks, Dan, so much. Really appreciate your time today and we will see everybody on the next episode.

Dan Schepleng 1:05:59
Thanks so much for having me.

In our May episode of Monday Market Minute, Carrie McCormick from @Properties discusses current trends in the market that you can use in your business. Carrie also talks about the creative ways buyers are using to stand out and she provide tips on how to present them to the other side. Carrie also shares tips on how she uses bullet-point cover letters to send to summarize the contract. Last, DJ shares his late-Mother’s Day tip.

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

Carrie can be reached at [email protected] or by phone at 312.961.4612.

Please follow Carrie on Instagram by clicking here.

D.J. Paris 0:00
This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by gogos bootcamp Are you a real estate agent looking for the very best media training program on the planet? Gogo Beth key is considered the top Instagram Realtor in the country and her step by step training program will take your social media game to the next level. Keeping it real listeners receive a special discount. So please visit Gogo podcast.com That’s Gee oh gee Oh podcast.com for your special discount and now on with the show

Welcome to get real, the largest podcast made for real estate agents and also by real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show and today on the show is we have our monthly series called The Monday market minute with Carrie McCormick from the Carrie McCormick Real Estate Group here in Chicago at at properties. Carrie is a top 1% producer in Chicago with over 20 years of experience helping buyers sellers and investors. In fact, in the past 12 months out of 44,000 real estate agents in the Chicagoland area, Carrie is ranked in the top 15 in production not 15%, the top 15 Out of all 44,000 agents. She’s a true superstar and an expert in everything from first time homebuyers, veteran investors and luxury properties. She also works with a lot of developers like the place I just moved into that was one of Kerry’s relationships. And she is often chosen to represent these high end developments, please visit Carrie at her website, which is Carrie McCormick, r e.com. And also follow her on Instagram at Carey McCormick real estate. Carrie once again, welcome to the show.

Carrie McCormick 1:52
As always, I love being here. I’m glad that our markets keeping up with with everything that’s going on in the world. So it’s been very busy here in Chicago and all the listeners I’m sure it’s busy in your market as well.

D.J. Paris 2:05
Yeah, we hear from listeners every day. And everyone’s just saying how how active the market is. And there’s a lot of frustrated people representing buyers and a lot of really happy people representing sellers, right so so there’s there’s just a lot going on. And but very exciting times rates are still low. And a lot of people want to want to buy and guess not as many people want to sell, but we’re still seeing a lot of selling activity.

Carrie McCormick 2:31
Yeah, so we all are seeing and saying the same thing. And one tool that I use quite a bit for those that are here in Chicago is the Chicago Association of Realtors. And I’ll put it on my screen for those that are listening or viewing. The Chicago Association of Realtors puts out at a forum called fast stats which is very useful and helpful just kind of gauging the market from a data standpoint for those who’ve got data driven clients. And just reading this report of what they just put out, and again, we all are feeling the low inventory push right now and it’s creating a lot of stress and frustration on the buyers right now. And we just have to remind our clients who are buyers, everyone’s in the same boat it’s not just them. We’re seeing our buyers having to submit multiple offers on multiple property I should say multiple offers but there were submitting offers on multiple properties. And you know, it’s taking a little bit of time to get something under contract just because there’s so many buyers right now and in addition, there’s so much cash in the market which is unbelievable so we’re seeing a ton of cash buyers and for those who need financing or have financing we’ve got to be very creative in structuring their their offer one one that I saw that was really cute. I mean everyone’s kind of going to the extreme when you’re a buyer is you know what can you offer the seller of course price is always going to be number one. But then there’s some also there’s other creative things of course taking the house as is, you know, maybe doing an inspection but telling Mr. or Mrs. Seller, we’re not going to be asking you for anything. So again taking the home as is waiving mortgage or appraisal contingency is another big thing that we’re seeing. I’ve seen some extremes as as far as paying the sellers last year tax bill pay, moving fees, paying closing costs fees for the seller, paying to clean their house when they move out. I mean there’s all these scenarios and as I see offers come in and you know making a chart of you know what offer number one is giving you what offer number two is giving you what to offer number three is giving you and so on. And I’m constantly creating these columns of like what these buyers are willing to give Have, and some of them are getting even very personal. One interesting one that I saw recently was a video, you know, you know, a lot of write letters to the sellers explaining who they are, and you know what their situation is, which is great. But now we’re starting to see video testimonials or video letters to the sellers. There was one where the girl started crying. You know, she’s saying to the sellers, I just, we just got married, I just had my first baby, we sold our house, we have nowhere to go, you know, we’re presenting you this offer over asking price, we’re taking it as is we’re doing this for you, you know, A, B, and C, you know, we hope that you select US and then tears, you know, so it’s like, there’s, you know, stuff that I’ve never had 20 years in this in this market, I’ve not seen, you know, stuff like that happen. And it’s just it’s getting created creative, but it also is very frustrating for the buyers that are out there.

D.J. Paris 5:59
So I have a question. That’s, I’m so glad we’re talking about this. So you know, you had mentioned all these creative ways that buyers can stand out. And instead of just doing credits, to be able to say, hey, we will take the house as is, you know, we’ll we’ll pay moving costs or closing costs or taxes or, you know, a cleaning and how, as a buyer’s representative a buyer’s agent, how do you? How is what how do you think the best way to communicate that to the listing agent is to sort of stand out? Do you? Is that a phone call where you say, Hey, we have a bunch of creative ways that we we really want to stand out in this? Or do you just put it on the actual offer itself? Or what would you recommend to really make sure that the listing agent sees all these cool things that you want to offer?

Carrie McCormick 6:45
I think you’ve got to cover all of your bases, I think you want you definitely have to put it in the offer. Maybe it’s an addendum to the offer, because everything needs to be in writing, right? You know, it can’t be just me saying that we’re going to be doing XY and Z, you want it definitely to be in the offer in writing. So as it’s presented to the seller, they do receive it. So I do three things. One, it goes in the offer for sure it goes on an addendum, and it’s signed by the buyers. So again, it’s part of the offer package. Number two, when I submit the offer to the seller side, I create sort of a cover letter, if you will, which it’s you know, think about the old resume days when you’re searching for a job. It’s kind of giving a summary, a quick summary of the offer. I’m a bullet point kind of gal. So I like just to do a quick bullet points of what we’re offering. And some you know, some of the extras, and then I follow up with the phone call. I think, you know, communication is absolutely key people like to do business with people that they like, it’s important in our industry, you know, to have these relationships. And that’s why it’s important for, you know, people like myself that that happened in the market for a long time. And we’ve got these good rep reputations and relationships with other brokers, we know you know how the deal is going to go. So there’s a lot involved in it right now. But you just have to remain professional put your best foot forward in obviously.

D.J. Paris 8:17
So question. So as a as a listing agent, how often because the whole idea of a cover letter is such a great idea. I’m curious as somebody who’s who’s been doing this quite a long time and also doing it right now, when you have listings, how often do you get those sort of bullet point cover letters? I don’t I’m curious how common that is?

Carrie McCormick 8:38
Um, not that often, I have to say, I mean, that’s just something it’s really kind of stemmed from, you know, just me trying to be organized and doing a summary and just how my brain operates. So I kind of invented that for myself. But when I see offers come over from other brokers, you know, everyone operates very differently, right? It’s right or nothing’s wrong, it just again, it’s very preference. But what I find too, is that some brokers will give, you know, a little summary of the offer, but it’s really just, you know, price closing date, and I don’t know, financing or something like that. But you still have to go through the offer. And then I find, you know, oh, wait a second. It’s contingent on the sale of their home. Oh, wait a second, they want a warranty. Oh, wait a second, you know, yes. Like the broker doesn’t list all kind of the negatives. And their summary they only list the positives. You know, so I do think is just again, putting a nice cover letter together really just helps streamline and make the process a little bit more easy. And that’s what everyone’s looking for.

D.J. Paris 9:41
Yeah, it’s such an awesome it’s such an amazing idea. I don’t know why we’ve never I’ve never had this conversation on the show before. But what a smart idea to list out all of the here’s what we’re offering. Here are the challenges we have and putting them in a bullet point format is so great because we Looking through a contract, or looking through an offer or, you know, contract, it is it’s it’s frustrating it none, none of its organized, it’s all over the place. It’s written in legalese. And, of course, the listing agent is going to have to double check everything in there. But if you can list everything out on that, on that front page, I know just from an organizational perspective, visually, it’s so much easier just to see I mean, it seems like a small thing. But I think for listing agents that are dealing with all of these multiple offers, boy that would make that would make a buyer’s offer stand out a bit.

Carrie McCormick 10:31
And I’ll give you another little tip that I came up with. And I think it’s important for a seller to understand the strength of the buyer. And you know, of course, all buyers are writing these love, like calm the love letter to the seller. But it’s great to hear again, the buyers story of you know who they are and where they live, and what their plans are, and how much they love the house. But everyone’s doing that everyone’s facilitating these incredible love letters. And it’s, it’s really, to me, it’s kind of lost its purpose to some degree. So what I’ve added on to the love letter is, you know, again, it’s the nice things about the home, but the the end of it is what’s truly important, is the team behind this buyer, the team consists of the real estate broker. So I say, like this buyer has is working with me, of course, in has a broker of 2021 years, I’ve navigated all the ups and downs, I know how to have a smooth transaction. In addition, we’ve got this lender, lender X has x, you know, years of experience, this is our pre approval letter, they you know, I’ve got a relationship with the lender, you know, you can be assured that, you know, we’re going to we have a smooth process. And then we’ve got the attorney, you know, here’s an introduction door attorney. So I’ve created this little team atmosphere, if you will, to say to the seller, listen, we’re all connected in this side, we’re a team here with this buyer, we will get it across the finish line. We’re all just not meeting for the first time. This is, again, a team effort. So I’ve included that in my offers as well. Again, I don’t know if some sellers appreciate that or not. But the truth of the matter is, we’re in a challenging environment with appraisals and, you know, quick closes and high tensions and frustrations. It’s really important to have an incredible team to help navigate the process.

D.J. Paris 12:30
Yeah, I wouldn’t want to I wouldn’t be as comfortable working with an attorney who wasn’t specifically a real estate attorney right now. Right? I wouldn’t want to work with a mortgage lender who I didn’t know, personally and who didn’t have quite a bit of experience because right, you’re right, right now it is a high stress time to get things closed. And also I wouldn’t, I don’t know that if I had a choice of, you know, if if two offers were identical in price and terms, and one broker has 20 years experience and another has to well, you know, my buyer might select the one who or my seller might select the one who has 20 years because they do have that experience. So I think that’s a really strong point. highlight your strengths right now. And and also Yeah, and I think also just giving the listing agents, some comfort that you will get this over the finish line is is really, really important. And, yeah, it’ll stand out. I think you’re right about the love letters. I know, there’s even some controversy around love letters where maybe some people, some firms say oh, maybe that’s not even a good idea, because it might violate fair housing, there’s, you know, personally, I don’t, I don’t know that it’s that big of a deal. But it is it is something that everyone’s doing. And so if you want to stand apart, love letters don’t even really make you stand that much apart anymore. But, but videos are such a great idea and, and just highlighting everything that you as the agent can do for that for that seller, I think in the listing agent is really the most important thing. So I had a quick thought about Mother’s Day, which was just obviously this this while two weekends ago, and it was a two week at two weekends ago. Things are moving so fast. I forgot when Mother’s Day was so anyway, I was I did a tip. I do a little tick tock and Instagram thing where I do a little 15 Second tip. And so prior to Mother’s Day, I did this tip, but it didn’t get published correctly. So the tip actually didn’t happen until like, late on Sunday on Mother’s Day, which was I was telling Realtors how to sell it how to celebrate Mother’s Day with for their clients. And I realized my tip didn’t didn’t really go out in time for anyone to take action on it. So I thought about it. And I thought well, you know, who are the most unappreciated members of society? Well, I mean, that’s a debatable topic, but certainly mothers are up there at some capacity. Mothers are oftentimes not paid for all the work they do and it’s a full time job and it’s we all know how difficult it is. And so I was thinking well, okay, I had to send this Mother’s Day tip out late mother’s day night, people were really gonna be taking action on it. So I made a video the next day that said, hey, just because it’s the day after Mother’s Day, doesn’t mean you still can’t say and everyone, you know, a happy belated Mother’s Day, you know, because you were probably, you know, our listeners were probably celebrating if they’re lucky enough to still have their mother around, probably celebrating with their mother, or maybe their wife or anyone, you know, in their life, who’s a mother. But so we’re probably busy on that Sunday anyway. But what if we had a second Mother’s Day, right, and, you know, there’s never, never a bad idea, there’s never a bad reason to have another celebration of how important mothers are. And so I was thinking, as a realtor, if you missed a Mother’s Day, and if you didn’t send out an email or text or, you know, tell your clients who are moms or, or whether they have children or pets, I think really doesn’t matter. But doing something to sort of honor them as mothers, you can do it again, you can have a second Mother’s Day in it, it could be a week later, it doesn’t have to be, you know, six months from now. But I think it would be fun to reach out to everyone and say, hey, you know, moms only get one Mother’s day a year. I know it was a few weeks ago, I’m having another Mother’s Day and I’m gonna maybe drop by a little second Mother’s Day gift, or I’m going to just whatever, it doesn’t even have to be a gift. But something like that have a second Mother’s Day and do something for your your mom clients, because they really should be celebrated more than once a month, once a year anyway. And so I just thinking that was a cute little idea. If you missed a Mother’s Day, and you feel like oh, crap, and I have to wait all the way till next April to do this again. Or may. You know, now you can do something a week from now. So it’s unexpected, and people will be really excited and flattered.

Carrie McCormick 16:41
That’s cute. I like it.

D.J. Paris 16:44
Awesome. Well, for everyone, by the way, who is listening who is in the well, it really well, wherever you are in the country as a realtor. If you have clients that are moving to Chicago, Carrie would love to speak with them. Carrie works with clients of all types. And she is been doing this for a long time. And she is very well respected. But also for anyone out there who was looking for a realtor and looking to work with Carrie she represents all all over Chicago and has vast knowledge of all the different neighborhoods and suburbs. But Karen, what what’s the best way that either a realtor could reach out to you to team up? Or to send some referrals your way or any one of our listeners who might be looking for a new agent? How should they reach out?

Carrie McCormick 17:28
Yeah, thank you. Anyone that knows me knows I work 24/7 I’m very much phone gal. So please call me at 312-961-4612. Or of course, if you want to email me carry ca RR ie [email protected].

D.J. Paris 17:49
And we should also mention that you take a look at Kerry’s website, I’ve always recommend to our audience too. If you’re going to put a website together as a, you know, online calling card or online business card, it really should look cool. And I know that not everyone’s aesthetic tastes are the same, but I really liked Kerry’s website. So take a look, Carrie McCormick r e.com. And also, for another look at her aesthetic. Take a look at her Instagram account. She is widely considered as having one of the most effective real estate Instagram accounts in Chicago. And it’s Carrie McCormack real estate and she is constantly putting great content on there. And she does it all herself too, which is even more amazing where a lot of people, you know, simply just hire firms to do it. She does it herself. And she does an exceptional job of it. And she has a huge following there. So take a look, Carrie McCormick real estate on Instagram. Carrie, thank you once again for being on the show. All these years Carrie has been coming on and we are so grateful to have her because her insight into how to navigate this kind of market is so valuable to our audience. So I’d be half of Carrie and myself. We want to thank the audience for continuing to support and watch and listen to our show, please tell a friend think of one other agent that could benefit from listening to our podcast and send them a link over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com. Again, keeping it real pod.com Or just have them pull up a podcast app, we’re on all the major streaming platforms and podcast apps and search for keeping it real and hit the subscribe button that’ll help us keep creating new episodes. And on behalf of the listeners and myself, we want to thank Carrie for taking time out of her incredibly busy day to help our audience learn more about how to become a better realtor. So Carrie, thank you so much.

Carrie McCormick 19:42
You think thank you.

D.J. Paris 19:44
Alright, we’ll see you next month.