Are you a global REALTOR or a local REALTOR now?

Most of us were trained to be a hyper-local REALTOR. We specialize in our market, in our state, which is a good thing, but we might be missing out on as much as 10% of our income by not telling people that we're actually a global REALTOR.

What does that mean?

That means that we can refer people to any other REALTOR in the country, and even in the world, if they're interested in buying in other states, in your state but other areas, or even internationally.

We can earn referral fees, but we're missing that opportunity.

Raise your hand if you missed a referral opportunity in the last 12 months from a friend or family member that told you after the fact that they have purchased a home somewhere else, or they're selling a home somewhere else, and you might have thought, "Well, I guess I just missed that opportunity."

But when you say that, it's really thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars you're missing out on, for no reason...

Hey guys, you may not have heard of Kevin Kelly, but he was the editor at Wired magazine, and he wrote a really interesting article several years ago about having a thousand true fans.

So if you imagine yourself as an artist, maybe a songwriter, singer, someone who paints, a writer, his point of the article is that if you had a thousand true fans — a thousand people who really believed in you and bought everything you produced — you can make a really good living as an artist.

So does this apply to us as REALTORS? The answer is absolutely, positively it does.

Because if you have a thousand people in your sphere of influence, you can absolutely have an incredible income if you’re applying the strategies around managing that sphere of influence that are really critical.

And here’s the strategies you need to embrace: you need to be touching this database 20 to 50 times a year. You also need to have it organized in a CRM system, a client relationship management system of some kind.

Whe...

Hey guys, if you want to have a fantastic phone call with everyone in your database coming into December and January—right at the end of the year and the beginning of the new year—this is what I call the “Real Estate Tune-Up.”

We take our cars in for a tune-up every few thousand miles. We need to do the same thing with our database. The way you do that is by being direct and asking one key question.

Here’s the question.

“Hey, this is Jim. How are you guys doing? I’ve been thinking about you. I’m talking to everyone I know as we head into the new year, just on the business side, and I wanted to ask: is there anything you have on the horizon, real estate-related, for 2026 that I can help you with?”

That’s it. You just put it out there.

“Do you have anything going on in 2026, real estate–related, that I can help you with?”

You’ll be shocked by how many people say, “Actually, yes, we do. We’ve been thinking about something.”

Remember, about 5%—one in 20 people you talk to out in the...