About a year ago, my wife and I decided to downsize as we hit our fifties. We have four kids, but three of them had already moved out, leaving us with just one. So, we moved from a bigger house into a smaller one. We realized that there are a ton of people just like us all around the country.

Before we downsized, we used to live in a big house near a golf course, and whenever we received marketing from REALTORS, it was always the same thing: The marketing was all about them getting a listing, and we could read right through it.

They just wanted our commission, and it wasn't very effective.

Over the years, we received door hangers, mailers, and all sorts of stuff, but as a REALTOR myself, I couldn't help but wonder if these methods were effective or not. Sure, anything is better than nothing, but what can you do to be more effective?

The key is to focus on the why of someone considering making a move, instead of what you need.

Why...

Hey guys, do you want to be a little bit more assertive, not aggressive, but assertive in your market? Let me give you a technique, a tip, and I love this idea. It came from one of my coaching students, and that is the idea of a real estate resume.

So, you are interviewing for a job when you're working for a buyer or a seller, and how many times in the real world, when you get a real job, you have to turn in a resume almost a hundred percent of the time. But what if you just become proactive and you create a real estate resume and you give it to everybody in your database? And you say, "Hey, I'm accepting new buyers and new listings for the spring market coming up, and I just thought I'd give you my real estate resume that you can share with your friends and family about my background as a realtor and my qualifications to help them with all their real estate needs. Here's a copy of it. Feel free to share it with your...

How old were you when you moved out of your parents' house? And how old were you when you purchased your first home? New information from the National Association of REALTORS shares the latest data with us on the averages in the US. The average age of someone leaving their parents' house today is... drum roll... 26 years old. And the average age for them to purchase their first home is 34.

So I'm gonna challenge you. Put this out on a social media post and ask that question:

When's the first time you moved outta your parents' house? When did you buy your first house? You're gonna get a ton of responses. Then answer the question yourself like I did recently, and I got a huge response on this, and my answer was, I moved out at 17. I bought my first house at 19.

Then you might dig deeper and say, what's preventing you from taking that next step? If you have some people say, well, I'm not a homeowner yet. Get into that...

People that are doom and gloomers that think the sky's following, everything's going wrong, the market's never gonna come back are dead wrong. For one specific reason. And I'm gonna tell you why:

First of all, interest rates are coming down, demand's coming back. There are all kinds of leading indicators that say our spring and summer markets are gonna be incredible. But let me give you just a piece of information, which was shared with me recently, which I thought was absolutely fantastic and got me excited about the upcoming surge of activity we're gonna see in the next 5-10 years. We're gonna have this incredible run that's gonna be starting very soon. And I want you to be a part of it.

It's all about generational population basics. When we look at the baby boomer generation, which when I started in real estate, everything was about the baby boomers because they were just calming through the pipeline, buying up...

I've got a question for you:

How do you win against Zillow and Realtor.com in your local market?

And the reason I ask this question is because it's kind of crazy when you think about it:

Realtor.com and Zillow come to town, their algorithm takes our listings and uses our listings to get buyers to their websites. Then they take these buyers, they capture the information, then they resell the lead back to us.

It is absolutely bananas and nuts that we allowed this in the industry, but here we are. So how do we win against these behemoths, against these massive algorithms that are running 24/7/365 in our marketplaces?

I'm gonna give you the roadmap right now:

The way you win against an algorithm is you have to win mindshare.

Mindshare, not market share, but mindshare.

What that means is, in your community, when people hear the words real estate, what's the first thing they think about?

Is it Realtor.com? Is it Zillow? Or is it your name...

What are the six things that you're gonna get done today?

Now, why do I say six?

The reason is studies show that most working adults can only accomplish six big items a day. Most of the things that they want to get done then are gonna come down to your priority setting. And how good you are at setting true priorities, and how committed you are to getting those priorities done.

So if we think that we're only gonna get six things done in a day, we have to say, how do I prioritize to make sure I get those six things done? Well, the first thing is this understanding when you build your to-do list is prioritizing what's truly important.

Some of us—I've been guilty of this too—create a to-do list that's got 30, 40, and even 50 things on it. It's two or three pages long, and we tend to do the easy things first instead of the important things.

We wanna just scratch off items because we like to see those lines.

But we...

Hey guys, as you're preparing for the new year, you should start to think about what you can do differently for 2023 that you have never done before?

A lot of you have a listing presentation. Some of you have a buyer presentation. Some of you have a pre-listing kit and a pre-meeting buyer kit for buyers. And a lot of you don't have those things.

But if you do have those things and you're saying, what's the next thing I could add to my overall mix of marketing materials?

I'm gonna give you an idea right now:

It's called my "success portfolio."

If you were gonna go to an architect, photographer, or even a baker or wedding planner, when you go into those places and you talk to them about doing business, a lot of times they'll bring out their portfolio. And their portfolio is kind of a graphic representation of what they've done. A visual representation of what they've done in the past for other clients.

So the...

If you're looking for a way to quickly ramp up your business—if you're having a little bit of a slow time, or even if you're not—and you want to lead generate in a simple, easy, and organic way, let me give you the 20 messages a day strategy.

The 20 messages a day strategy is very, very simple.

I'm gonna use my social media account. You can pick your one: Instagram, Facebook, wherever. I'm gonna go to my friend's list of my following, my group, my audience, and I'm just gonna pick 20 people. And I'm generally just gonna start at the A's and work my way down. Or start a Z's and work my way up.

But I'm gonna click on each individual profile of those 20 different people. I'm gonna find something interesting, something they've posted that really catches my interest. Maybe they went to a restaurant, they went on vacation, they went to a certain business that you frequent, they bought something super cool,...

Hey, you know what's interesting? The least interesting thing about you.

And you know what the least interesting thing about you is? That you sell real estate.

I know it's hard to hear, but that's the truth. When people look at you, if you're just one dimensional, and all you talk about is real estate pretty soon they're gonna get bored with you as a person. Why? Well, they're gonna relegate you to noise because every time they listen to you or look at your feeds, they're only gonna hear about real estate. And people get tired of it.

What people want is fresh, new, exciting, and different content. So I want you to think about the five persona strategy.

When it comes to your tombstone, what do you wanna be known for after we're all gone?

You're probably not gonna talk a lot about real estate. You might say you're a REALTOR, but what else was exciting about you? What else was different about you?

Could be that you're...

My guess is that you're somebody that gives back to the community. Now, you might do it in small, subtle ways that people may not notice. But what if you could give back to charity in a way that helped you, the charity, and also helped your business at the same time?

It's a true win-win situation.

How could you do that?

Well, one of the ways is to pick a charity that you really care about, that you're passionate about, and then secondly, tie that charity to closings in the new year.

So here's an example:

What if you sent out an email, a text, social media post, and you said something like this:

"Hey, in 2023, I've set a goal of selling 30 homes. And I want to help that number of families achieve their real estate goals. But I want to go bigger and also help my favorite charity achieve their goals. So for every closing I have between January and March of this year, I'm gonna donate [fill in the blank: $100, $200, $500] for every...