We have a special guest with us today. Our guest today is the founder and CEO. Of Tom ferry, international the real estate industry’s leading coaching and training company Tom’s ever growing influence impacts professionals in a wide variety of ways from as rigorous accountability coaching to the very popular Tom ferry show to highly engaging training events at legendary keynote speeches during his career.
Check this out. Tom has a mass more than 30,000 hours. Of coaching experience and works daily to help agents and brokers grow a prosperous business while simultaneously balancing and loving their personal lives. Tom is also the number one ranked real estate educator by Swan Pauls power, 200 and the best selling author of life by design as well as mindset.
Model and marketing, Tom. It’s great to see you again. Welcome to the G G mastermind meeting this week. Hey David. Thank you. And hi everybody. And man, I gotta update my, my bio there and maybe shorten it by, I don’t know, a hundred words. Nice to see. Yeah. Nice to see you. I shortened it. I shortened it. Yeah.
Thank you. Thank you. Welcome here. You know, I. I, I was telling you this, we, we actually, our podcast with the run G G podcast is now live with Tom it’s up. So if you want to hear a high level conversation, as it’s been re referenced to a lot of positive feedback on that episode, we break it all down, but we did talk about how Tom is very prolific.
you know, he’s one of the most, you know, the busiest personalities brands in the industry, you know, you got the weekly podcast, Tom, you know, industry events, coaching calls, masterminds like this you’re writing books. Do you take any time off? Yeah, absolutely. and you forgot, 207 business coaches in six countries, clients in 29 countries and about 200 full-time employees.
So, I’m definitely busy, but like every one of you, and I would actually only, cuz I can always see one of three, screens, but I’d be super curious. I’ve been asking everybody basically one question right now. Do you need more time or do you need more? And by money, I mean like repeatable and scalable transactions.
So, so I would love to see in the comments, if you guys would tell me like, like, are you burning the candle at both ends kind of the way I feel oftentimes as a CEO of a company or do you need to generate more business? So I’m looking right now and this is great. Like there’s no wrong answer. Just give me context.
So I see three times in a money time, all day, Justin. I appreciate that time from Cindy. Type it in guys just gives us all context, by the way. It’s a great way for all of us to be listening to this interview or listening to this conversation, like making sure that you’re focused on what you want. I like, I think it was on APO said, I need both.
Right? So both, if you need both, you need money in case you’re wondering. Okay, well, let’s, let’s get into it then. Yeah. Cool. You know, I wanna ask you about, first of all, just, you know, we could start a number of places in the time we have, but, just about, you know, the need or the importance of coaching in general.
we say it all the time, success leaves clues, and as we know the best, you most successful agents, teams, companies, you know, they, they have some form of coaching or mentorship training. You have a fantastic coaching platform. Nathan and I are clients like. For Tom fairy coaching. It’s phenomenal.
We love it. but I want to ask you about your perspective on this. Why is it so important to take advantage of what’s available to you? For example, you know, like I said, you have a great coaching, platform, you know, we are brokerage that offers training masterminds such as this. So why do you need to take advantage and implement the actual coaching that’s available?
Cuz a lot don’t. So, I mean, I’ve been in this game for 31 years. My father and I, helped to pioneer the space going back almost 28 years ago. The first thing I would say to you is not everybody needs a coach. Right. The, if, if you really kinda look at the industry, in Canada, as in the us little different from our clients in Europe, but absolutely the same as our clients in Australia and New Zealand.
If you look at the data right now, it’s like the top 10% of the agents control anywhere between 40 to 50% of the market. They’re doing that much volume in the market. Most of them now we know are teams, right? For the most part, but there’s some very strong single agents surrounded by some admin support that are phenomenal.
if you go down to like the top 20, or excuse me, the top 25% of agents in the marketplace, they’re doing in most cases, Canada, us Australia, New Zealand places where we can get the most accurate data, upwards of 73.5% of all the volume. So the first thing is when you look at the, the bottom 75%, the question is, do they need coaching or do they need training?
And I would argue probably it’s a combination of training and really, truly commitment. Like we’re in an interesting time right now. Like I, I have been in this business for a long time. I was just on the phone with, a bunch of my clients in Toronto, like in a zoom session, about 350 of ’em. And like the Toronto marketplace has been talking about going in the tank for 17 straight years.
And now all of a sudden with interest rates climbing a little bit, now, all of a sudden people are like, oh my God, maybe this is it. And March was the first month where home price appreciation didn’t didn’t grow. Where last year, all of Canada was like 19% year over year acro. And I know everyone’s in a different, province, but like across the board home price appreciation.
So now as the market gets a little more interesting. I would argue, David, that the people that wanna coach are the people that are the same, the same people that would go river rafting and not go. So. Right. Instead, they would be like, okay, I’m in Jackson hole, Wyoming. Somebody just told me to beat you. The water is like 15,000, which means it’s running really fast.
I can put my wife and my kids in this boat and we can cruise down and see what happens, which is what a lot of people in, in this business do. Or I can get a guide who sits in the back and says, when I scream Roe, I mean, Roe, like your life depends on. Because I’ve done this a few times. And when I say go left, I mean, go left.
When, I mean, it’s time to take a break. It’s time to take a break for many people today. That’s what coaching is. It’s that guide the one that says, if you go left, you’re gonna hit a, a shelf and you’re gonna get stuck. And there’s a good chance that your real estate business boat flips in the water. So people that generally speaking, the ones that hire a coach are people that looking for a guide.
And what’s fascinating now is it’s at every level, cuz we have, I was just talking to one of my clients yesterday. So he did. Six years ago, 65 transactions. I don’t care where you are in the world. 65 transactions is a lot of business, right? So 65 commission checks, mostly listing sold some buyer sales last year.
So six years ago to last year, he went from 62 to 125 to 240 up to almost 500, then to 800. And then last year, 3025. Mm. Now the hard part is if you don’t have someone to guide you, how do you get. See, I knew coaching is like training is like motivation. We’re always trying to add what’s that next thing to my business, that’s gonna give me the edge, whether it is more branding, more lead generation, higher conversion, better customer care.
We’re always looking for that. And it, in a case of DJ and Lindsay, I’m referencing. We can look back over the six years and we can see exactly what we added follow up boss versus BoomTown. We started buying, a lot of leads online from Google. We created a more aggressive past client center of influence, repeat and referral campaign.
All these things that we added along the way allowed them to scale. Could they have done it without me? Maybe? Maybe, but there of the opinion, David, like since we’ve done it for so many others, like you guys, that it was easier to say, give me the blueprint, I’ll follow it, make it work for me and let’s go.
But I do wanna, I wanna make the argument, the vast majority of real estate professionals around the world don’t need a coach. They need to make a decision. Are you interested in this business or are you committed? Is this a hobby or is this your must? And sometimes I’m looking at it like Brian H if you just make that decision, Jen, by the way, Jen, I love the glasses.
Right. Jen, I see you. Great glasses. If you just make that decision, that gets you a little extra edge over the vast majority of people, that’s just the entrepreneurial game. So does that make sense, David? Like some people see that and then training to know what to say and how do I convert and how do I get, how do I fight for my commissions and how do I get deals done?
It’s some of that stuff. That’s not coaching though. Well, they, well, let’s, let’s shut off, here. There we go. Okay. Yeah. But listen, they wouldn’t have been able to do it without you. Let’s be real Tom, although you’re being humble. was it because of you? I say so, but you did make a reference there that I think was really important.
Something that we’ve been talking about for a long time is you’re gonna see few and fewer agents, teams, and brokerages doing the lion share of the transactions. There’s a number of reasons for that. and you know, we did talk about it on the podcast. Another thing we talked. You know, on the show was, you know, besides applying the actual coaching, like what do you see the most successful agents doing right now?
Do you see a commonality? Okay. So this’ll be the second time I’ve shared this. I actually, we just synthesized amongst our call it our top 325 clients. So if you were looking for like a blueprint, I’m literally just gonna, I’m gonna read it to you as I share it with our clients. But I do wanna stress like, for my friend who played the one game at hockey.
Remember that was one more game than probably all the rest of us at a professional level. Congratulations. Whether you’re talking hockey or, I was at the super bowl this year with my family. And what I acknowledged there is, it was basically two coaches and a lot of great players at a super high level.
Everybody there had a lot of talent. One team was able to run more successful plays than the other, and that’s why they won. Right. Like, that’s it that in hockey, in basketball, baseball, you name the sport tennis, whoever can run the most successful plays that’s who wins. So when I look at this list, it may sound simple to you, but understand this is synthesizing Tim Smith, the number one, Coldwell banker agent, you know, In, in the entire us, my client, Andy C, who did just shy a billion dollars in sales last year, he did over 400 transactions.
Somebody knows who I’m talking about there. Have you met Andy before? That’s awesome. Andy. Andy said he was gonna be on here today. I’m on here getting outta the shower. Oh, there it is. There’s Andy. Okay. So you know what? Alright, so, Andy, did you just say you were getting outta the shower? What did you just say?
I hope you actually just said that. Give, gimme like five minutes and I’ll put my camera on. Okay, this is so awesome guys, because you know, whether you’re talking about an Andy C or a Tim Smith or a Jill bigs, or my client, Paul, who’s the, number one sort of team Ridge in Otta, Ontario, Canada, Jeff, and his, and his wife, Liz in Toronto, you look at all these people, success, absolutely leaves clues.
So it’s gonna be awesome to have Andy on here, cuz I’m gonna say a couple of these and hopefully Andy will just pipe in and say, let me give you my interpretation of that. Here’s the number one thing that we see if you were looking for like the playbook. Of what these guys and gals do. The first thing is they all have a growth mindset and I don’t mean that to sound like cliche.
Think of it like this. I say to Andy, A hundred years ago. Okay. Andy, if you’re brand new in real estate and you have no budget, here is a phone pick up and start making calls around recent listings and sales. And Andy has a super growth mindset, very committed business. He says, okay, I’m in. Then another coach and trainer says to him, you should do.
And I’m I’m paraphrasing 19 years of brilliance. You should do open houses. He’s like, tell me how to do ’em the person lays out the playbook and Andy. Not only why run that play. I’ll do it even better. Then I wanna say, Andy, correct me if I’m wrong. About 10 years ago, nine years ago, he and I were in a coaching session and I was like, Andy, listen to me, geographic farming, start with a small community and let’s just keep expanding it.
And today is geographic farmers, like all of Saratoga, Los Alto, slow Gotto. It’s like a enormous number of homes that he’s marketing to. When you give someone with a growth mindset. An idea and a playbook that works. They don’t go. That doesn’t work in my market. I’m not good at that. I don’t like mailers. I don’t like email.
I don’t like videos. That’s the fixed mindset. So it may sound simple, but it is context specific. Like you might be growth mindset with your fitness, but in business, if I say call 10 people a day inside your past client list, use this script. If you’re like, I don’t like making phone calls, you’re a fixed mindset and fixed mindset kills growth.
That’s the first one. Andy, are you out there? Can you hear what I’m saying? Yeah, I agree. A hundred percent, Tom, what did I miss there? What do, what do you see when you think about all like the, the, the Josh Rubins all these masterminds we’ve been in the Kirk castles of the world. What am I missing on growth mindset?
I don’t think, I don’t think you’re missing anything. I think the one thing that you know, that you gave me day one, 20 years ago was 3, 2, 1, 3 hours. This some kind of lead generation prospecting, set to appointments, go on one appointment. The magic of that stuff is you build skillset when you do those, you know, things.
Yep. You learn how to objection, handle you learn, you get a tougher skin, you know, you, you learn all those different things so that when you get to the big leagues, it’s like second. Right. Right. So, so any, anybody that’s ever played a sport before gets what he just said there it’s like, you gotta put in your reps and you gotta get a little real, real estate callous, if you will, or calluses, Andy looking good post shower.
and he’s not wearing pants right now, ladies and gentlemen, but he doesn’t show that I’m not. Okay. So let me give you number two. Right? I knew it here’s number two, every single one of them. Is a data nerd on their market. When you talk to the best agents, they, they don’t like look at the MLS and I’m actually gonna paraphrase it.
Something that my buddy, Andy here once said, they look for the correlations on pricing in their market. They look for the correlations on pricing for a lot of reasons first, cuz they wanna be better at their craft. But secondly, it gives them such a degree of separation when they’re sitting down with someone that says, well, here’s what the MLS says versus.
I’ve been, I hired a statistician to actually look at the market and this is what we discovered from it. I know, I know David, we’re gonna talk today about branding and messaging and how do you stand out in the marketplace? So, so Andy share with him what you did and talk pricing correlation just for a second.
So my son who is now a senior in college, when he was in high school, all of his friends would help me drop notepads and flyers. And we had canvas markets. And then by the time they got to be sophomores in college, I said, Hey, what are you guys studying? What are you majoring in? A bunch of ’em were econ and statistic majors.
So I put them to work. I said, let’s just do some real work. I said, let’s correlate the Saratoga market over the last 20 years to everything. S and P 500 interest rates. Google apple E everything. And what we found was we have a 90% correlation to apple stock in the Saratoga market, which makes sense. It’s close by that headquarters and nearby there’s 50,000 employees.
And so the better you understand your market, the better you’ll be able to predict the future and help your clients. So I also know that the real estate market will lag the stock market locally by two to three weeks. So if the market crashes, the prices are still gonna be up for a little while, just like we saw interest rates go up, everybody freaked out and they bought everything right.
So we had this big spike 2, 3, 4 weeks ago, and now it’s starting to come down again and we’re falling. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens next. So, so one thing I would say too, and this is probably not a play that everybody can run, but I’m never shocked by the amount of information the very best agents have memorized in their head, like right down to you’re driving in a car with them and they go.
Oh, I sold that house. It, that person became the CEO of this company. Then they left to here and then they left here and then their mother-in-law bought a house from me over there. Like their ability to recall information about their local marketplace. Is it, it’s almost like a sixth sense, but that’s a, that’s a separate one.
Andy. You’ll appreciate the next one. You’re ready. Every single one of these clients has what I would. The the three pillars of brilliant marketing. So if you’re gonna take notes, you wanna write this down? You ready? All three of them have brand referrals and demand gen brand referrals and demand gen. So brand could be the two billboards in Andy’s marketplace that you see.
And Andy, I dunno if you made a decision on the final billboard stuff that I was looking at the group. But having the fact, and by the way, just to be clear, I’m not saying all of you show get a billboard. Billboard is the last line of defense after you’ve done everything else, then you would do a billboard.
Does that make sense, everybody? You don’t start with that, right? But brand is people know you, people like you, people trust you, and they’ve never met you before. And it shows up in a lot of different ways. It’s what people say about you. It could be the content that you create. It’s the fact that you’ve been doing direct mail for years with one particular slogan over and over and over and over and over.
And they’re like, Andy sells Saratoga. Like we just, we get that right. Everybody’s got a friend of the business, but we gotta call Andy that’s brand versus referrals is your way of working your own database, your past clients and centers of influence. Obvious right versus demand gen, Hey, I’m gonna spend money and I’m gonna get Zillow leads.
Google leads, realtor, not CA leads, whatever it may be, but that’s a demand gen strategy that agents are using. And what I see and Andy, I’d love your input on this is everybody has one that’s super dominant, but they all do all three. Andy thoughts. Yeah. I mean, obviously my business is predicated now on postcards, right?
We I’m mail to 50,000 homes twice a week. So, you know, I’m spending a hundred, $200,000 a month on that. But I also still do like between four and six open houses every weekend. So I’m still doing like the direct, you know, physical stuff, spending my trading my hours for dollars. So. Right. And would you say to anybody that was listening?
Cuz so for, for all my friends out there, Andy, my client, Josh Rubin in New York city who mails 110,000 pieces, Jill bigs, who mails to all of Hoboken and Jersey city. I couldn’t tell you the 60, 70,000 houses. there’s so many of them. Hey Robin, Hey Robin, you need to mute . so I wanna stress you all. and Andy can back me up on this.
If you’re thinking of direct mail as a strategy for listing attraction, it works. If you do it consistently over a long enough period of time. So if you were a brand new agent, you came to me today and said, should I geographic farm? I would say, do you have the budget? Can you afford to do so? Cuz if you can afford to do it for two years and maybe get a transaction I’d.
Awesome. You could get lucky. Many people do, many people do, but I would literally say to you, it takes two years before people go, oh yeah, Taylor Goodin. She’s the one Ida. She’s the one Donna. Got it. It takes that much time. Right. Instead I would say to you, all of you need to think about this. If you all grabbed your phones right now, You looked at the total number of contacts you have in your phone?
There is no doubt. The combination of referral demand gen and brand is all found right here. And when you look at your phone, here’s a fun little fact take your total number of contacts. 6% of them are gonna list their house in the next 12 months, 6%. 6%, 6%, 6%. So if you just stopped for a second and said, wait a minute, okay.
Minus the 350 real estate agents that I’m probably not gonna call. If they’re in my immediate marketplace, call every one of them outside of your marketplace, cuz you can get referrals from them. That’s always good. Every agent I get to commit to call five people today in their database that they know five people in their database that they don’t know, everyone that does that.
Whether they’re texting or making personal phone calls. Every one of them wins at scale. The hard part for all of you is the market has been so good. For so long. I’m not saying you, but a lot of people would become lazy. Y’all hear what I’m saying. I’m not, I’m not busting your chops cuz maybe you’re like, no, no, no.
I’m Hey, I’m on the phones every day. I’m grinding. I’m doing everything. It takes. The vast majority of people would become very lazy as the market continues like this. Andy, Tim Smiths on pace for a billion in sales this year, he did 8 0 6 last year. And. Could you imagine if I would’ve actually made my phone calls every.
Here’s a guy that, you know, 800, $6 million in volume. My friend, the number one agent in for all of Coldwell banker, absolutely monstrous year. And yet he says, coach, hold me more accountable. Cuz when I make my phone calls, that’s when the magic is right. Just calling his database and checking in no salesy stuff.
Just, oh my goodness. Did you see that sale down the street? What do you think that makes your home worth? I’m just checking in how you guys doing what’s going on. Kids spring break life, yada yada. That’s where he kills it. Andy thoughts on the three demand brand and all that. I mean, it’s just about consistency, right?
You just gotta keep doing it. I think that the thing that people forget about, like with, with what I do is like the postcards just generate a phone call. If you don’t answer the phone and know what to say, you’re screwed. If you don’t. You know, accept the appointment you’re screwed. And if you don’t know what to say at the listing appointment, you’re screwed.
So that’s why you gotta do the baby steps to get there. That’s why you and I, we always did the cold calling the beginning. Just go on random appointments if for sale by enter expires, just so you could learn those traits and skills. So you get, you know, better at the big leagues. So that’s, that’s what I would say.
The, I love it. Yeah. So, yeah. So this is, so you touched on it and I don’t want to, you know, I don’t wanna leave the like, so there’s a lot of new agents on here, right? So yes. You know, Andy sees, you know, they’ve, they’ve built a brand and, and done the, you know, the geographic farming for quite some time now, but.
New agents typically in hot markets. We do see a lot of new agents enter the industry. Right. And they’re just starting out. We’ve seen that, you know, in the last two years, what advice do you have specifically? You said maybe geographic farming. Isn’t a good idea for new agents. So where do they start?
What advice do you give new agents as they get into the business? Andy. You wanna go first? Cuz I got three various. I mean I would always, I’m always, you guys are tag teaming. Yeah, this great. I’m gonna say open house all day long, right? Open house is a warm lead. You, you generate seven days a week. Yeah.
Seven days a week. 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM. And you put signs all over town. You get billboards all over town with your name on it and say, come here, you’re gonna talk to Andy he’s in the house. They’re warm leads. They expect to talk to you about real estate. And then from there, as long as you know your inventory, you’ll bring value to.
That’s the easy one. The, the second easy one is just dropping flyers under doormats. I’m not even asking you to ring a doorbell. I’m just saying drop flyers under door mats. And then after that, if you get brave, just go ding dong, real set, update, and walk away. Ding dong, real set, update, and walk away. I mean that it doesn’t get any easier than that.
I’m not even asking you to pick up a phone. Now, so what’s great. Is Andy. My number three thing was if you’re going solo, pick one scalable lead source and become the best at it. And that could be open houses. It could be shooting YouTube videos. It could be circle dialing. It could be knocking on doors.
There’s there’s a plethora of waste. Watch. I’ll give you another example. One of my clients, he sold 62 homes his first year in the business, which is a remarkable. People go, how did you do it? He goes, I worked really hard and I grinded out. I said, I call. You also spent $8,000 a month on online lead generation.
So you add a ton of inbound buyer leads. You know, whether it’s in the us Zillow or realtor.ca in Canada or realtor.com. You’ve gotta find one thing that you’re gonna say, this is my. I’m gonna become known for this. I’m gonna become the very best of this. That’s actually my third piece of advice, validating what Andy said, but I would go back up the top David and say, if you’re new, assuming you’ve already learned the contracts.
Because the vast majority of agents never take the time to learn the contracts and they’re horrible at it. And you see this in the offers that they write and just, just the mishaps in transactions. So assume you got that outta the way. The number one thing I would say is, are you in this to sell your house?
Is this a hobby or are you committed? Because this industry churn people out. 2% of the entire industry leaves every single month. And that totals, when you talk about new agents, about 87% of people are out of the business within five years now, I would argue the single greatest brand new agents always occur in uncertainty in the marketplace.
I can look back over my 31 years and say, Hey, the agents that got in in 2006, when the market was just firing and then fell apart and had to figure out REOs bank owned deals had to figure out short sales in the us had to how to figure out how to navigate transactions, finding, you know, whether it was developers that were going under or finding investors that wanted to buy.
They had to be so scrappy in that marketplace. That, when it came out, they all became rock stars. The ones that though started in maybe 2000 13, 14, 15, all they’ve done is ride this wave. They don’t have the skills. They’re probably in trouble. They have no reliable lead sources. Andy said, pick one. I agree.
Gotta do that. So you gotta ask yourself, like, am I really in this to win it? And I don’t mean that to be motivational. I mean, like if I don’t sell houses, can I not. If you’re in that position, then I would say to you, your options are, I would say number two, look at joining a team. Look at joining a team, cuz all you have to do is look at the success rate of agents on teams versus individual agents.
And I’m not knocking being an individual agent. I’m saying to you, my second thing is if you’re committed and you can join a team that has leads has infrastructure has training has deal. Doctoring has tech support can help you get started, do that for three or four years. And then if you say, okay, now I wanna go do my own thing.
God bless go do your own thing. But if you really wanna succeed, that’s an obvious choice. And then my number three was Andy you’re. You’re exact, which is pick one thing. We have a guy here in, in town in Dallas. He’ll actually be here tomorrow with me. His name is Levi Levi sold like 70 homes. His first year he and a business partner, right?
Tag, tag, teaming their deals. They did 70 deals their first year right here in Dallas. And all they did was before they went live, they built up like 40 videos. Things like everything you would imagine, people are searching for like moving to Dallas, you know, what are the best schools in Dallas, you know, transfer to Dallas.
Right. You know, what’s the taxes in Dallas, every keyword search, they just shot content on that. They continue to do so every single week they built their entire, their entire business was basically built on YouTube. Now, Dallas is one of those places where there’s a lot of inbound people and they’re looking online.
So it was the right strategy. If you don’t have a lot of inbound people, probably the wrong strategy. Pick one and go all in Andy thoughts on team and thoughts about interested versus committed is Andd C interview . So, you know, one of my top agents, his name is air Famo. He was my assistant four years ago and, he made 1,000,004 by himself.
He was a semifinal on of 30, under 30. And like, that’s take home 10 99, 1 0.4. So you can grow in any kind of environment, whether it’s on your own or with the team. It’s just making sure you’re bringing value. To both clients and your team and, and it works both ways. The team lead has to bring tons of value to the team members.
So you can go. Love it love it. So David let’s keep bouncing well, actually, if everybody’s paying attention there, if you notice there, Tom was referencing it, Andy was talking about it and that was actually nothing replaces the time actually meeting people and generating leads. So, you know, when Andy was talking about me, meeting people face to face knocking on the door, making the calls.
Picking that lane, but actually generating leads by getting face to face with people. So I thought that was a really important takeaway out of that. The next thing I want to talk about, if we can, for a minute here is just about, branding and personal brand. We’ve been kind of, referencing it here.
And this is something that we’ve been focused on for the last two years as a, as a company. When we talk to the agents, a lot of the guests, we have talk about branding, Tom ferry brand. I mean, I love it. You know, it’s, it’s tactical, it’s motivational a lot of focus on mindset, obviously, as I, I, I talk to you about, but what are your thoughts on how an agent and I love your story about this.
You have a client, that you talk about when you were discovering how they should go about. Dis, you know, identifying their personal brand or what that should be right going forward because agents go, okay, what’s my personal brand, you know, especially like new in the industry. we have a phenomenal opportunity to brand ourselves.
I think it’s critical. I think you have to, all the platforms have moved to video only, not just video first as we talk about, but video only. So how do you go about creating content that identifies your personal brand and how do you do that? How do you identify your personal. So, so we could spend hours on this.
I I’ll give you some questions. I think all of you should consider asking. And, and when I say asking, like, this is probably stuff that you’re gonna open up a Google doc, and you’re gonna write down the question and then you’re gonna play with it. And what about this? And what about that? Until it lands in, in business, there’s a phrase called product market fit.
If you don’t know that phrase, I would encourage you to write it down. Product market fit, product market fit by definition. the first person I heard talk about was a guy named mark Andreesen, mark Andreesen. Many of you know, he was the first at Netscape and, you know, has now become this prolific investor in all these extraordinary companies.
And, and what makes him so unique is he said, Once a company has product market fit. Here’s what happens. More deals, more money is coming in so fast that you don’t have enough time to hire enough sales people hire enough customer service people hire enough transac, cuz it’s just, you’re just getting overwhelmed.
That’s what happens when you have product market fit? So the first question I would ask, all of you is do you feel like you have product market fit? Do you feel you have to constantly push into the market or do people go? There’s just something about that guy. There’s something about that gal? I like their message.
I like their story. I like what they’re about. You know, they resonate with me. That’s an example of product market fit. So I have a book that I would certainly recommend if you guys have not read this book by Donald Miller, right. Has everybody read this book right. Called building a story brand? Building a story brand, highly recommend it.
You can go on YouTube and probably watch a couple videos, but he breaks down the science of developing a brand. I’m gonna give you a couple questions. You should start with number one. You need to write down the question. What do I do? That’s different. What do I do? That’s different start basic. So, you know, do I work longer hours?
Do I focus on a specific niche? Am I better at a certain type of home? Am I great at this part of town? Am I the best at my kids’ school? Even though there’s other real estate agents there, I’m the one I’m like the one that’s the most social, the most active, you gotta find something that makes you has some differentiating factors.
You with me cuz the challenge that the vast majority of people have in, in the real estate industry, I describe it this way. So you could have imagined visually, like I, I don’t like going to the grocery store, but I’ve also been married for 29 years. So when my wife says go to the store, I’m like, yes, dear.
So she tells me, I want you to go to the store and I want you to get a bag of chips cuz we’re having some friends over and get like some salsa. So I remember going down the chip aisle and looking and it’s just. Rows and rows and rows and layers and layers and layers of chips. And, you know, the green type, the spicy type, the, this type, the lemony type.
And I sat there and I looked at that row and I thought, that’s how consumers seem real estate agents. Right? Like, okay, so you got long blonde hair and you wear a King’s hat and you’re wearing a t-shirt and you know, you got a beanie on, but that’s not enough degree of separation. You with me. So you got, you know, the vanilla chip and you got the spicy chip.
It’s not enough. It’s not enough to stand out in the old days of, of grocery stores and marketing. They would say, as long as your eye level with the consumer, you win mm-hmm right. But guess what it is now, now eye level is looking down, cuz people are walking through the grocery store, staring at their phone.
So. Buying a bag of chips is easy. Selecting a real estate agent is something that the average consumer does every seven to 10 years. What do you do in your life with total certainty and confidence that you only do once every seven to 10 years? The game is my friends. If you don’t do something to stand out, you are lost on the sea of that aisle.
You’re lost in the sea of sameness. So I would ask this question, what could I do in my market that I would be the first at. What can I do in my market where I would be the first person to do X, whatever X is, it doesn’t make a difference. You could be the first one that comes out and says, I am the first agent to submit online for everyone, a plan to buy a home where there is no inventory.
I’ve got a 22 step formula. This is how we do it. This is how it works. And all of a sudden you become known as the gal who has a plan. Because most agents look up here, have no. They don’t present a plan or a solution. I know it’s hard, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We’ll see what we can do. I’ll keep sending you listings that are not on the market by the time you look at it.
So maybe it’s that for me back in. I’ll give you an example. In 2017, I sat down with my team and said, I have been coaching now since like 19 91, 19 92. And there was no great revolution or evolution in the delivery method. So I went to my team and said, I’d be willing to carve out a bunch of money.
Let’s go build a platform. We’ll start everybody on zoom. So all coaching sessions today forward on zoom. This is 2017, really end of 2016, but we operationalize in 17 and I said, a hundred percent. We’re gonna be the first, all video first coaching. And you should have seen the reaction amongst my coaches.
Oh my God, I’m gonna have to shower. I’m gonna have to do my hair. You know, I’m gonna have to like, get good lighting. And there was all this like worry and concern. But when we announced it, we had a whole bunch of people go, I believe in that. And they just called us and said, sign me up. Finally, somebody, they didn’t understand this technology.
Does that make sense? We were able to come out and say, we’re the first, the other one is ready. This is more big branding. If you can say, I am the only agent in town who X. Or we are the only agent in town who, why anybody who could say they’re first or they’re the only immediately gets a massive degree of separation in the marketplace.
So, so what can you say, are you the only agent in town with more than 500 reviews? It could be that, are you the only agent in town who actually answers their phone? Like Andy talked. What can you do that is consumer centric. That makes the customer say finally, somebody’s speaking to me, right? I’ll give you an example.
One of the interesting phenomenons that’s happened recently is agents have started to realize, and you guys see this throughout, you know, north America that not everybody going to your site speaks the same language as you. do you, do you all know who Mr. Beast is? Anybody by a head nod, Mr. Beast, probably one of the most prolific, video first entertainers on the planet.
Mr. Beast was recently interviewed on Joe Rogan show and here’s what he said. Joe’s like, how many different languages are you in? He’s like, I’m in every language. He said, Joe, do you know that only 10% of the world speaks English? Think about that only 10% of the world. So I’m here in Dallas, Texas, an absolute melting pot with so many different languages, so many different backgrounds, so many different cultures.
I think the first agent who creates content for every one of the languages, it could be you every time, but a subtitled voice in now, all of a sudden, you’re the first person to reach all those people versus people that speak English. Just as an example, does that make sense? So David, if you went, to Jason Pantana and looked at my YouTube channel with Jason Pantana, he does a lot on branding, but most of it is something that really requires, like I’m looking at all these, you know, beautiful faces, you looking in the mirror and saying, what are my unique factors?
What do I do that nobody else does? What could I do that? Nobody else does? What could I be first at? What could I be the only one that does or ready option number six, just market more than anybody else. Just be so recognizable. That’s where I look at. Like Andy or Tim Smith or Jill big, who? I talked to you this morning, this, this crazy gal, Jill in New Jersey, little, you know, one buy by one.
Every single house gets two direct mail pieces. There’s no billboards. She controls all the digital platforms in her marketplace. Doesn’t matter which one you go to. You see her, she’s impossible to not see. DJ and Lindsay, my client sat in Jacksonville, but I mentioned 62 to 3025 transactions. They literally have all of Zillow, all of realtor.com, all of home blight.
They’ve got channel partners with mortgage companies. They have covered everything digitally. Then they started direct mail. Then they put up 50 billboards. They’re so big. They don’t have a lot of differentiating factors, but you can’t miss. The first three or four, I would argue are the inexpensive ways to figure out your degree of separation versus the last one, which is cost you a lot of money.
So you do it over time. David, does that make sense? Oh, totally. I mean, you covered it all. I mean, there was I hope everybody was taking notes. we do get into, on the episode, the run G G podcast episode, we, you talk about. Unique selling propositions in a bit more detail, right? That’s one of the things our company was founded on.
It’s critical and, and Tom covered it there, you know, the importance of USP’s, differentiators, uniques, and then marketing that. But this is where the rubber hits the road. And I think a lot of the agents on here really want an answer to this question. And you did such a phenomenal, breakdown of this, when, when we talked last and that was thoughts on how agents.
Can acquire listings in a low inventory market, tactical advantages. I mean, you talked about how we don’t actually have an inventory problem. Right. We have an execution problem, and I thought that that was absolutely genius. do you mind breaking that down for a few minutes? Cuz I, I mean, fantastic.
Fantastic. Oh, we gotta mute people. This is like, there we go. Yep. Go ahead Tom. Hey, Hey David, just, just for contacts. What percentage of the people on today are from Canada versus the. Oh, probably 75 Canadian, 25 us. Just a guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, so let me start first with a very Canadian specific data point, and I’ll give you a us data point for it as well.
I think one of the single great opportunities right now that agents that are doing it are kind of saying, don’t tell anybody else about this. It’s one of those. So one is in Canada, there’s approximately sub 16 million single family residences in all of Canada. Mm-hmm . If you look at the next number that matters, 4 million of.
Our investment properties, 4 million. Now, if I was in Canada, like if I was in Calgary, I’d wanna go, how many homes are there in Calgary? How many of those are owned by an investor? Why does that matter? Right. Why does that matter? You could be working. What’s called the non-owner occupieds or the investor list.
These people trade properties like others might trade stock a lot less emotion, a lot less, you know? Oh, we raised our kids here. You know, if you called me right now, cuz my broker just did on one of the duplexes I own in Newport beach, he called and he is like, Hey man, it’s now we’re two, one. You bought it for one.
It’ss probably time for us to 10 31 exchange that he didn’t call me and say, how much do you like your. He was like, dude, you bought it here. It’s now worth this. You make all your money, 10 31 exchanging. Let’s put that thing on the market and let’s go buy you a fourplex and APL or something else. Right.
So I think for all of you watching, that’s an opportunity. And David, I have a bunch of like letters you should send scripts, you should use. But if you just use your noodle and say, When do they buy it? What’s the equity. What’s been the appreciation. Certainly over the last two years, you would say, Hey, with home prices where they are today, are you thinking about the possibility as things slow down, hedging this, selling it and rolling into something else.
It’s a very direct conversation and agents that are doing it are killing it. We had a client in Arizona, so just for contacts in, in let’s call it greater Phoenix. Metro, a third of every home there is owned by an I. Right. A lot of Canadians bought there. Right? Same thing in Vegas, same thing into Carolina, same thing in what I refer to as, Southern Toronto, AKA, Florida.
Right. They bought homes like crazy there and they’ve appreciated tremendously. Maybe. Now it’s the time to say you wanna transfer that into something bigger, better, stronger. So that would be the first thing I would ask all you to look at. And then David, I’ll send you the scripts and all the stuff there.
the second one is you cannot, you can’t blow off the obvious. The agents that are willing to text every single person on their phone and go, yo AP, what’s up. Are you really a Kings fan by the way? I’m a NWA, an ice cube fan okay. Cause I was like, really? Really? Yeah. I like, I’m not even a King’s fan and I’m like a Laker fan.
So just for the record. So, so, but for AP to like literally get on his phone and just be like, yo, Justin thinking about you, man. Hey, I’m sure you’re reading the same things. We’re all reading in the news right now. The real estate market may be slowing down. Have you thought about a. What your home’s value is today, B maybe say maybe taking some chips off the table, some conversation to engage them.
Cuz these are people that know you like you and trust you. Just like my broker would call and say, Hey man, the new quarterlies are coming out on this stock. I think it’s time for us to sell right now. Take a little breather from the market and come back in. I think we have a responsibility. To be that person for our database.
Right? We gotta get outta this mindset of all I do is help people trade. You are a consultant for them. They’re calling you and saying, should I do this? Did I miss the market? Should we be waiting right now? How, what, what’s the impact of inflation? What’s the impact of, you know, the lack of inventory? What do I need to do these aren’t objections?
These are help me understand. So one would be non under occupieds two pretty obvious. If you just reached out to every person in your database, you would not have an inventory problem. Right. Three. If I was in the high end, I’m gonna go, I’m gonna bounce a little bit here. If you were in the high end, expired listings are hot right now.
High end is gonna be different for everybody in terms of price point, but there’s a lot of expired happening cuz people just, they just over, over, over price, the market and now those properties are, are expiring and other agents are picking them up. Andy, one of our clients just sold the one for 140 million that was listed for 500 million, then three 50, then two 50 and finally sold it for one 40, still not bad.
and then David, I would say. It’s so hard. Cause cause I’m thinking Canada and us being mindful of regulations. I would say all of you should look at a strategy where you get your mailing. So listen up. At least it appears to be hand addressed, hand stamped letters to clients. So rather than sending out a, just sold today, I would send a hand addressed hand stamped letter to clients.
And if I was in the us, cuz I don’t know the Canadian version of this, so David correct. You know, tell me what it is in the us. There’s a solution called Reine R E M I N E Reine is tied into all the MLSs. I can do search queries. So check this out. I can literally go in and say in south Boston, Show me every home that’s been owned for more than 40 years, that has no mortgage that the homeowners are 80 years plus.
And the property is two stories. That’s a person who’s most likely to sell. And we literally use data mining to narrow our focus down to people that are most likely to do something. So whether that is age or you do a little historical, Hey, like show me every person that’s owned a house, but they’ve only owned for seven years.
So they’ve got a study of moving. Ready, we’re looking for those kinds of people. So, David, what do you guys have in Canada? That’s close to that. Listen, Canada is very different. Yeah. Canada’s on lockdown with data. Like I don’t think we can pull that. I it’s, it’s a little bit different here. We can’t, I mean, we can pull, we can pull titles and things like that, but I, it doesn’t give us, you know, the, the, the, the, what’s it called Ricky.
Rema Rema list, reap list, reap, reap. you I’m like reading it all. Yeah. or list depending on whaty, confirm to say it
list. We’re gonna have to work with him on their branding name, by the way, Remi wasn’t that great either, but it was like real estate mining was the concept. the other thing I would say to you guys, is I would do, if I was 3, 5, 7, 10, 15 years in the business, I would do a case study on where have all my listings come from historically mm-hmm and make sure that I’m doubling down on all the areas that I know historically have worked for me.
So, whether that was a community specific or a Highrise condo or an online lead source, realtor.ca realtor.com, whatever it is, what happens is when we start to go like this, okay. What, what should I do next? The number one thing you should do is look back in the past and say, historically, what’s worked now, how can I do more of that?
Can I do it better? Can I modernize it? Can I digital, you know, digitize it? Can I have handwritten notes versus postcards? All these things that by the way, major trend happening right now around the world, probably not gonna have a lot of time to talk about it, but ever should write this down and start doing your research.
Personalization is gonna rule marketing for at least the next decade. Personalization, the more you know, about your customer, what they’re thinking, what they’re all about, what they like, what they don’t like. And the more you speak directly to that, that’s what people want. It’s the reason why, even though Amazon’s prices, aren’t as great.
It’s still the place you go to, cuz it’s just so darn easy and they know everything you’ve already done. I wanna give you guys just very fast, three things I want you to do. Three things I want you to do. And then, you know, David, if you wanna get Andy to jump back in, I lost him a little bit from my screen.
So I think he’s still out there. Yeah, he’s here. Yep. If you, if you asked me if I was playing the long game, what’s the most important thing you would do? The most important thing I would do is I would go to a site called answer the public.com. Answer the public.com. So what answer the public.com does is it tells me by scraping the internet, the questions that consumers are asking, and you could, you can ask for free three questions a day, or do three queries a day.
So literally I could say to Andy, let’s go take a look at what people are asking about home ownership in Silicon valley. Right. You know, how will interest rates affect prices is probably something that’s coming up across the globe right now. So, but instead of just that generic thing, it’s gonna say, well, actually, when we scraped all these sites, they’re asking these variations of that.
And if he could then answer questions directly on what’s on the minds of consumers, he’s doing that personalization strategy. He’s not saying here is my opinion. He’s saying I did some research, 30, you know, 30, eight different people asked this question this way. Let me answer it for you. But I know many of you, you get stuck on that.
How do I write that? So answer the public gives you. That gives you what is on the minds of your customer? The second one is a site called jasper.ai, jasper.ai. I’m a, I was, I was very anti AI. If you would’ve asked me five or six years ago, so I thought robots were gonna take over the world. Now I already know robots are gonna take over the world.
So I’m going all in on AI, jasper.ai. Here’s what it does. It will. You know, somebody takes a listing and instead of having to like write out charming four bedroom, three bath, which you’ve all done 8 million times, and it’s kind of boring. You take three to five interesting things about the property. You put it into jasper.ai under a tab called ready listing description.
And it writes the listing description for you beautifully. And then you just copy and paste. So it’s a time saver. So now I’d say, okay, I’ve got my. What’s on the minds of customers. I go to jasper.ai. Another one of the boxes is video script. So you take your question, you put it into video script and you hit go and it writes the script for you.
How good is that? My friends, man, that’s now what’s script is, I mean, it’s like, like David, I literally tell people I’m like, I have a fourth book already written. I just, I just dunno when I’m gonna publish it. The fifth and sixth books, I’m just gonna write on Jas. I’m literally just gonna type in like, you know, 25 keywords and it’s gonna go, cuz all my content is online.
I could just say what’s Tom Ferry’s opinion on this. It’ll write an entire chapter. It’s that good? So I would do those first two things. And then if I was paying attention to being culturally relevant today, If I was paying attention to being culturally relevant, I would only focus on two things. I’d focus on taking those questions, answering them in 30 seconds or less on TikTok.
Answer those questions in 30 seconds or less on TikTok. Now, before you go, ah, TikTok, the fastest growing demographic of TikTok right now is 45 year old females. And last time I checked, they rule the house and make all the decisions. So I have agents literally that are getting a million, I’ll have 42 of the most successful video.
First marketing agents in studio, a right here tomorrow and the next day for a two day little mastermind. Now they’re all talking about how I shot this one video and got a million views and I’m like a million views are great. Did you get any business? Oh yeah. I got 27 referrals across the country that I sent to other agents.
The best deal ever got a referral fee. Didn’t have to do any of the work. And I got 16, you know, buyers and sellers just from that one video. This isn’t videos for views. This is videos for business. So I would do TikTok. Then I’d take the same TikTok video and I’d repost it on Instagram and Facebook reels.
And if you got game, put it on, YouTube shorts as well, and now you’re gonna touch everybody. And if you’re really good and you know, your marketplace. I’d get a voiceover of a couple different languages that are relevant to your marketplace and spend the extra money to have somebody else do the voiceover Mr.
Beast actually hired. So Andy, get this. He hired on the Spider-Man movies, the, the Hispanic gentleman who played the voiceover of Spiderman and that’s who read the Mr. Bees video. People were literally freaking out like Mr. Beast is, Spider-Man like pretty awesome. So I, I throw that out to you because I want you to make phone calls.
I want you to do direct mail. I want you to do email. I want you to become great. I want you do little stuff, but I know today when you do all of that and you put over the top, all this content, you get, you get more come list calls, period. Man that was a clinic. you, you referenced something actually, that’s super important.
I mean, we had David Shing, as a guest speaker, he was also on the podcast go back and listen. What he is known for is taking the, the message of a company and distilling it down to the individual, which is personalization. Right. That’s critical and he’s an absolute expert at it. So that’s, I mean, Tom touched on it.
Success leaves clues, One more question while we got time, maybe two. Yeah. it’s competitive out there, Tom. You know, this it’s competitive. what can agents do to get their offers accepted? Have you seen what, or what are agents doing to get their offers? Accept. Okay. So Andy, get this in Canada.
You can do this. Hi, I’m sitting here with Tom and Kathy fairy. They’re writing an offer on your house. You guys can do that. You know, in the us that has been banned. It is like against real estate rules. Do you guys know that for all my Canadian friends out there, like that’s nuts. So if I was in Canada, that’s the first thing, cuz it’s like, hi, this is the couple.
These are their kids. That’s their dog. We’d love to buy your house, please. So, if you can do that and you’re in Canada, I would do that first and foremost. It’s illegal in the us. I don’t know why, but we can’t do it right. Fair housing. I know why. I’m gonna turn it over to Andy, but I’m gonna tell you the three things I hear the most today.
You ready? One is, if you don’t sit down with your buyer in advance and say, let me show you this email from my broker. Right. And you literally read the email and your broker saying, yes, we surveyed all the agents in the last 45 days. The average agent in our company, 62 agents have written on, on average.
It was the sixth offer that got the house, the sixth offer that got the house. And here’s what the agent said. It was this and this and this and this that finally got him there. So, like, I was just dealing with one of my clients, Paul, I mentioned in Ottawa. So his agents are struggling with the same thing.
So look, escalation, clauses, all the things we know, no contingencies, no appraisal. Right. But the most important thing is when you’re sitting down with the first time buyer or somebody just coming in the market and you’re like, look, your budget is 800,000. That means we you’d be looking at houses, probably in the sixes.
and that freaks some people out because literally talking to my client this morning, he’s like, yeah, he’s like we listed a house 820,000 final sales price, 1.1 million. So if you can’t articulate in case studies and with someone other than you saying it like this third party endorsement of here’s my broker.
And he asked everybody in the company, and this is what everybody said, So you have to ask yourself, Mr. And Mrs. Byer, do you guys wanna go all in the first time or you got, are you guys comfortable being one of the average that ends up finding a house that they love losing it, finding another house that they love losing it, filing a third house that they love losing it before you finally say, okay, what do we have to do?
And something in your buyer consult has to change, especially now with interest rates, but I wanna kick it over to Andy cuz Andy is arguably one of the great deal doctors of all time. So Andy, what are some other things you’re finding that are getting offers accepted in your neck of the woods, which is still super competitive.
I think first and foremost, you need to be calling those listing agents immediately. When that house hits the market, do your homework, make it easy for them. Show them that you’re on top of stuff. Get your disclosure signed. Get your AVIT. Oops. Sorry. Sorry, somebody’s calling me, get your avid signed, which is agent visual inspection for, those that don’t know what that is, but it’s just disclosure stuff.
you know, make sure you know exactly what they can afford. And, and I overdue stuff like in the us, you can only do a 3% deposit. We’ll put a 10% deposit down. We’ll release that deposit to the seller the next day. So it’s in their bank account, you know? I I’ll guarantee stuff with my own bank account.
If I have. I’ve seen, I’ve seen some cool things that buyers’ agents have done. They they’ve paid for the listing agent staging. I’ve seen them, they do all kinds of fun stuff like that, like right upfront, 60 days free rent back for, for the seller, even if they didn’t ask for it. But there’s lots of ways to sweeten the pot.
But I think at the end of the day, it’s building relationship with the listing agent and, and then they’ll help you. And, and it works both ways cuz you’ll help them in the future. can I just mention two things on branding? Mm-hmm yeah, please. If you’re new or anybody, I think the number one most important thing that you wanna be known for is local area expert.
Okay. So it’s not just the city, it’s not the whole city of Saratoga. It’s the golden triangle. It’s prides crossing, right? It’s the Gardner park area. Another cool one that I’m playing with right now is the high school area expert. So the school district area expert, cause it’s a cool campaign. Cause you can, you can sponsor.
You could sponsor all the baseball, football, drama programs. You can do those data nets. I don’t know. Tom knows about that. Cause he taught me it where you could buy all the stuff near the high school thing. That’s kind of cool. and the other one, if you don’t have, that is just be known as the hardest working agent.
Somebody asked me if I went to a new area, what would I put? Cause I can’t put on number one. I would put on every post. Working hard to be your number one Saratoga agent working hard to be your number one Limbrick high school agent. That’s what I would put on. Love it. Love it. Love it. And yes, going back to that, I should have the, it always starts with call the listing agent, but I’m hearing, and I’m curious for all of you, I just heard in the last couple weeks, I’m looking at new listing that are coming on the market.
And a lot of those agents aren’t in our market and they’re like, what do I do? And I’m like, you call and introduce yourself. I don’t care if they’re two counties over and they just listed their mother’s house. You should still get to know them. Take the time to make the phone call, cuz most people won’t.
And again, relationships over everything all day. Yeah. So David. Yeah, I think I have to go. I gotta follow myself. Yeah, absolutely. We’re up against it. that was it. We wrapped it up. That was a clinic. hopefully everybody was taking notes. take a picture of everybody. Take a picture, Tom. Big pose.
Let’s go. There we go. I got, got fantastic takeaways gems as always, Tom. Thanks very much. The, the, if you want to, deeper dive into this, take a, take a listen to the, latest episode of the podcast, Tom, and I chop it up and get into the details and, fantastic takeaways. Thank you very much for the last hour, Tom.
We really appreciate it. Fantastic stuff is always where do you want the people to go? Is a Tom ferry, dot com or where do we sign up for coaching, et cetera, all that. only if you’re interested, but no, I would go to Tom ferry.com and I would just click around. I would look at what is meaningful to you.
We’ve got a number of cool events coming up in Dallas, in Orlando, in Southern California. So love to see you at a live event. Those are always great. And if coaching makes sense for you, click on that coaching button, do a little reading and we’ve got a lot of different programs. So figure out what’s one is right for you.
Click the button and let’s have a conversation. That’d be great. I appreciate it, David. Fantastic. Fantastic. Thanks Tom. It was always wish you all the best. I saw you all soon, Andy. Good to see you brother.
