Hey guys, what does it mean to go “upstream” with a real estate business?

Well, one way you can look at this is targeting specific people in your community that could send you business, who are also business owners themselves.

But how would you identify them?

Well, one quick strategy is just to ask people already in your social sphere of influence with a question like this:

“Hey, do you have any financial advisors that you would rate a 9 or a 10 in terms of their skill set?”

And when they say, “Yeah, I’ve got somebody,” they raise their hand and say, “This is my person, this is who you should talk to.”

You say, “Great. You know, one of the people that I like to refer to are people that are highly regarded, and obviously I’m dealing with a big financial investment when it comes to housing. So I like to refer great people to great people as well.”

And now you’ve got their name.

Now you call that financial advisor and you say:

“Hey, I was referred by a couple people in my group, ...

Hey, brokerage owners and team leaders. I'm sure you've experienced this because I've experienced it a million times:

As a brokerage owner, later as you get a stream of agents coming into your office and they're always asking the same exact question. Like, "Oh, I got to ask you about this." And you're like, I've answered this like ten times this week. Drives you a little crazy, a little bananas.

But you go through and you do it again, and you think about that time suck of answering the same question over and over and over again.

Let me give you a solution for that.

And that is to create your own little mini university, right?

Your mini university just means you're going to create a recorded answer where you answer this frequently asked question, this FAQ question.

And now you push this out to your office and say, "Guys, I'm getting this question a lot. I just want to answer it en masse."

You put it on your Facebook closed group. Maybe if you had a YouTube channel, a private one,...

Here’s an amazing stat that Redfin just put out, and that is that 39% of listings coming on the market are selling — going pending — in the first two weeks. Isn’t that amazing?

But there’s always a tale of two markets out there.

So you’ve got 39% that are going pending, but what about everybody else? The other 60% of listings are not.

And those are starting to linger on the market — a lot of listings on the market over 30 days and 60 days.

So when we have these listings that linger, what do we do?

Well, when we’re having conversations with our sellers, of course the first step is we’ve got to get them realistic on price. But there’s another side of that conversation as well.

So we talk about price. We talk about incentives. Definitely we want to have those conversations.
40% of the market right now — people on the market — have included some price reduction or incentive already.

But we also need to do one other thing that a lot of agents miss, and that is when we’re doing our wee...

Brokers, owners, team leaders, office leaders, I’m going to give you a little tip for your next office meeting.

So sometimes we start office meetings… I’m going to give you one really good way to make these meetings come alive, and I’m going to give you a second good way to really make them come alive.

One is to have the “Genesis Conversation.” What is that?

Well, when you’re doing your “haves and wants,” people are talking about new listings, sales, closings, and so forth. I want you to follow that up and say, “Hey, tell me, where did that listing come from? What was the genesis point where the lead came from, in other words?”

And people say, “Well, it came from my sphere of influence,” or “It was an open house,” or “It was a sign call,” or “It was an internet lead.”

Great. And then you move on to the next person: where was the genesis point for you?

And everybody in the office is going to now really get tuned into where all the leads are flowing from.

80% of the time it’s gene...

If you're a broker or a team leader, one key thing that's going to make a difference in your ability to keep agents and recruit agents is your ability to deploy AI.

If you're not using AI in your business model, you could be at risk from the brokers and team leaders out there that are really getting heavily involved.

And one of the simplest things we can all do is give our team members AI they can deploy.

What does that mean?

Just a prompt that they can use in their everyday business.

I'll give you an example. We just rolled out an AI prompt for writing ads—super simple—that agents can use to create emotionally compelling ads every time they have a new listing so they can create some amazing ads.

Yeah, it's super simple.

And we just rolled that out to our coaching team.

We also gave them a way to evaluate themselves and how well they are showing up with AEO—answer engine optimization—not just SEO.

We gave them a way to measure themselves on a visibility scale and a 90-day plan...

The late, great Lou Holtz had a way of speaking. If you’ve never seen him speak, I recommend you go check him out on YouTube. Incredible speaker.

But one thing he taught me was that the way people buy is they ask themselves three questions—the essence of these three questions.

First of all, can I trust you?

Can I trust you?

How are you showing that people can trust you? Online reviews. Written recommendations. Testimonials. Can I trust you? Number one question I have.

Second question is, are you good at what you do?

Are you good at what you do? How are you showing that? Are you showing that you're actually getting the job done, or are you getting what I call resistance from your own sphere of influence—not doing business with you or referring you on a regular basis?

Why would that be?

The reason is you're not showing them you're good at what you do. You're not saying, hey, I sold this. I got this pending. I'm out here working every day. I'm working, working, working, and you're...

If you're a brokerage owner or team leader and you're saying to yourself, “hey, who should I target in terms of recruiting in my local market,” I'm going to give you The 20% Rule.

This is something we should all be aware of: There are people that are more likely to move than others in your market area, which falls in The 20% Rule.

Here’s what The 20% Rule means:

People that have had an upswing in their business by 20%, or a downswing in their business by 20% over the past 12 months.

So let's look at the downswing folks. The downswing folks are looking to be rescued. It's a perfect opportunity to be calling them because who do they blame? They never blame themselves.

There's never going to be a time where they say, “well, I didn't do what I was supposed to do.” They're always going to say, “well, my brokerage should have given me better marketing or better support or better training or better leads. It's their fault, not my fault.” It's just a natural tendency of what agents do.

A...

As an office leader, a brokerage owner, is having teams in your building, teams on your roster, a good idea or a bad idea?

So when you look at this from the outside perspective, and I'm somebody that's been in the business for 36 years, I've owned a network of 17 offices, I've run billion-dollar companies, and so I've had a lot of teams working for me over those years.

And I will tell you that teams overall can add a lot to your company because they help you with market share. There's going to be a tremendous amount of market share growth that they're going to bring to the table.

So do you make a lot of money on a team? Usually not. Usually they're on the lowest splits coming to the company. They take up a lot of resources. They can actually take up a lot of real estate in your office.

So on a profitability scale, not great. But on a market share scale, fantastic.

So we have to ask ourselves—we need to have the right mix. We have to run a lawnmower or a piece of equipment that req...

It happened, you were able to set a recruiting appointment.

Now what do you do when you’re going to meet someone for the first time at coffee or lunch? Do you immediately launch into your pitch?

That’s the worst thing you could possibly do in your first meeting with a potential recruit.

The first thing you need to do is build rapport and trust. One of the best ways to do that is by understanding who you’re talking to — doing a deep dive and some intelligence research on the agent before the meeting.

What does that look like?

Obviously, you can Google them. You can look at their social media accounts. You can talk to other people in your office about what they might know.

But here’s an easy strategy most recruiters miss: dive into their current inventory.

Look at their listings. See how long they’ve been on the market. Look at their price points. Where are they focusing? Go back and look at the trajectory of their business. Are they up or down compared to last year at this time?

Hey guys, I want to give you a really easy equation for your business, and it starts with understanding something very fundamental.

Every single listing you take and every single transaction you create will be the result of a conversation you’ve had in the last two weeks.

Hear that: every single listing and every single transaction you create will be the result of a conversation you’ve had in the last two weeks.

By nature, that means if we have more conversations, we’ll have more closings.

That’s the big challenge for many agents out there. They don’t really put numbers to this.

The path is in the math.

When it comes to sales, we often want to think it’s an art form, but it’s not. It comes down to hard work and actually doing the work necessary.

So let’s put some numbers to this.

In our training and coaching, we’ve found that for every 30 conversations you have, you’ll average one closed sale.

So we can really plug some math in here and say, if I want to close 30 transactions ...