As brokers and managers, one of our jobs is crisis management, as we all know, right? We're dealing with crises all the time.

Agents that come into your office and they say, “I have a problem.”

They all think the problem is a crisis. So I'm going to give you a little tip on something I learned years ago. I call it the “1-3-1 Approach” for helping agents kind of learn to fish.

In other words, teaching them how to deal with the crisis in an effective way. Even if maybe you're not there to help them, you're going to train them how to address a crisis, address a problem that they're going on.

And this is a great retention tool, guys.

So the 131, here's how it works:

First, when they come into your office, you're going to cut to the chase. You're going to identify the problem. So you can identify one problem at a time, not ten. But let's talk about one problem. So that's the 1.

Then we talk about three possible solutions, three possible ways that we could get this issue solved. And I...

If you have a listing that's been lingering on the market, I like to have a “positional pricing” conversation with my seller.

What does that mean? That's for a seller who's not quite ready to do a full price reduction, but they would definitely look at an offer.

So my conversation looks like this. I'll say:

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"Hey Mr. or Mrs. Seller, I know you're not quite ready to do a full-blown price adjustment yet, but can I give you an idea?

And my idea is this: when we have the next showing or we do the next open house and we have attendees, what I like to do is, with your permission, call that buyer or that buyer's agent and say, ‘hey, my seller's gearing up to do a price adjustment soon. Not quite yet, but we wanted to give you some advance notice, so we are going to make you an offer on this home that is going to be reflective of the price that we're going to be going to in MLS, but that's going to be a little bit off, a ways off.

So here's our price for you:”

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So what are we doing...

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...