10 Oct Interview with Russell Shaw
Russell Shaw shares how he and his team have sold 41x the average agent and consistently sold hundreds of homes in the Phoenix market for decades.
Video Replay of Interview with Russell Shaw
Podcast Replay of Interview with Russell Shaw
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00:00:00 Hey everybody, thanks for joining us for today’s episode of real estate disruptors. Today we have Russell Shaw, the godfather of real estate himself, and he’s here to share how his team’ss consistently selling 41 times what the average agent sells. If this is your first time tuning in, I’m Steve Trang, broker and owner of Stunning Homes Realty, cofounder of the offer fast app, the only app you need for wholesaling. And I’m on a mission to help as many people as I can, so please, if you got, if you need any help with your business at all, please do not hesitate to private message me. I’d love to help you. And if you’re excited for today’s show, please give me a wave or a thumbs up. And as a reminder, I don’t charge a dime for this show. Don’t make any money doing this. So here’s all they asked is the only thing that costs you to listen to the show. If you get value from this today, please tell their friend, either share this episode right now, tag a friend below, or telling it best takeaway from the show later on so that we can all grow together and don’t forget this is a live show and so it’s interactive. Please post your questions and Russell, be very happy to answer them. Ready? I am ready. Alright, we’re gonna. Go with the tough one first. What got you into real estate?
00:01:02 I didn’t want to. I was an ex life insurance salesman and I. Oh, I didn’t know that. I spent five years in the life insurance business and I hated it, which helped me to be unsuccessful in it even though I was mildly a success, but I just was not really. I wasn’t happy and I knew I didn’t want to sell cars and I didn’t know what else to do. To be quite candid, if you said at the time was just my life plan. Nope. I just thought, I’m not sure what else to do. Maybe I’ll sell real estate. Not that’s how I got. That is literally how I started. Almost stumbled in.
00:01:39 Put a lot of people I knew. Huh? You, me and the other 40,000 peers. There you go. There you go. Okay. So then what were some of your early struggles in real estate?
00:01:48 I didn’t have the slightest idea of what I was doing. Um, my mentors were morons quite literally. Um, it’s, they, they, the level of help they gave me was so idiotic that I, I just struggled from deal to deal and I never quite knew my first year. So what I was actually doing to get business. I, I couldn’t, I didn’t have the name for it, so I would just sort of bumble around and get deals. But if you just said, was it some kind of plan? It was so random that it almost defies belief that I survived.
00:02:32 Well, I think a lot of our colleagues probably have very similar stories either before when they started or sell today. Those are listening right now. They’re still struggling. So a toy asked the question, uh, what do you recommend if you’re brand new out of school to be successful?
00:02:48 Well, hopefully you have lived here a while and if you look at how most agents get most of their business, whether they know it or not, once I actually knew the answer to this, it was much easier because sometimes you have people that are doing something that works, but they don’t know the right name for it, and so they. They can’t repeat it repeatedly. They can’t keep doing it because they don’t really know what it was they did. It just seems to them like God was happy with them that or they got lucky or they’re living right or some other idiotic wrong why. And so the trip you took to some external force, there wasn’t any of their own action. So if you look at what most agents get most of their business from, this isn’t most topics. Most top agents get most of their business from geographic farming, but most agents get most of their business by contacting people in there previously met database.
00:03:49 Even if they don’t have a database. But if they were contacting people, they sort of know that’s where they get the biggest bang for the buck. So to speak, and that’s what I was doing that was working, but I didn’t know that’s what I was doing that was working because I just thought it was getting lucky when I would get the business right. But that is what the correct name is w contact people. So if you knew what. Let’s go back to your question specifically. You’re new in the business and you’ve lived here a while. Could you make a list of say 100 people that would recognize you on site? Like if they saw you, they would know it was you. You don’t have to know him. Well, they would just know it was you. So the first problem, a new agent has the say I don’t have or you don’t have.
00:04:38 We get calls almost every day. Someone calling to ask for advice about some issue on real estate because they know we’re in real estate. They know we’re in the house selling business and they might have a question that might seem random, but nevertheless they know what we’re doing. So when you’re a new agent, they don’t really know you. Somebody you don’t know you worked with for years at honeywell or you’re an ex school teacher or whatever you used to do, they still think of you. Is that person who worked at Honeywell? Are they still think of you as that person who used to be was a school teacher and they don’t think of you and go, she’s a realtor. He’s in real estate now, and if you look at what most of the biggest barriers things did they like you and trust you, go call on them, tells them you’re in the real estate business. They’re not necessarily ready to buy something right then. That’s not the point, but come out of nonexistence. Let them know this is what you do now.
00:05:35 It’s like Brian Buffini says, don’t stop being an undercover agent.
00:05:38 There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let them know you’re in the real estate business,
00:05:42 so let’s say we’ve been doing that now. We’ve been letting everyone know it’s been a year now and we’re doing one every other month, right? Not Great, but enough definitely to keep this a sustainable business. Now I want to go to the next level. I want to be a top producer. Well, you’re not going go from six deals
00:05:58 a year to top producer. Let me start with that. Okay. I say that’s not a real target. It really isn’t in that one thing. That idea alone is what causes most agents to invalidate themselves. The mountains. If somebody’s doing six deals a year, the first thing I would do is get them to 12, getting 18, get them to get them 25. Getting them to 100 is not a real target. It’s. It seems unimaginable to them. Right? They somebody doing six deals a year. We’ll look at somebody. They’re there. It’s not a correct view point, but they’re still nevertheless going to look at somebody’s doing 100 deals a year is almost some different type of bean. Yeah, and that’s not true, but it’s still the view they’re going to ask. I feel that way. So in order to achieve any goal, the goal must seem real to the person that tempting to achieve it.
00:06:52 So if you took, if somebody’s doing six deals a year, the first thing you know is they’re spending most of their time working on crap that doesn’t need to be worked on. Sure. That’s obvious. Obvious. It couldn’t possibly have been working on dollar productive activities 40 hours a week or even 20 hours a week and sell six houses a year. It’s not possible. No, no, you’re, you’re doing something that doesn’t need to be done and lots of it. So that’s the first thing I would say they’re, they’re, they’re goofin, but they, they’re doing stupid stuff that they think is sort of a, well I’m working, I’m going to the office or some other. That doesn’t mean a damn thing, right? So dollar productive activities are all that matters. And you’d look at what is a dollar productive activity, getting a new customer, showing a property, writing the contract, but something that you go, if I do enough of this, I’m going to get a lot of business.
00:07:51 Yeah, your money’s coming in. Yes. Eventually that’s a set. That’s a. But you get those sub products before you get the final valuable product. Right? So go back to the guys tell selling six houses a year. The first thing I would say you’d want to want to do matter what stage you’re at, if you don’t already have it, is something you could use for a database like where you could keep a record of a in a computer of every person you’ve contacted, every email address, you have, every phone number you’ve got anything you remember about them, their kids name, their dog’s name, it whatever their birthdate, but some place you could keep information not in your head and not on little notes, some, some, some organized place to have it. Every single time you meet someone Adam to that database and you meet somebody and it just just keep building those that, that, that file of people you know.
00:08:52 And Go back to the original thing, contacting people in your previously met database. There’s agents doing 50 deals a year. That’s all they do is just contact people in there previously met database. Right? I’ll just keep doing it. You would have, when you contact them, you’re not calling them every time going, how about it? Do you want a house? You would if you know them, you could call. I don’t know. You see some newspaper article that makes you think of them. You see something in a magazine, you know about some concert coming to town, you know they liked that artist. Call them telling them about something where you would have a reason and once they know you’re in real estate because what you’re looking at, you want to have the more people like you and trust you. There’s A. There’s a young lady that I’ve been helping and she’s making this.
00:09:44 She’s been in real estate for a while, but she hasn’t actually really been in real estate for you should have been doing other crap doing other crap focused. So one of the things that you get all the way in the business. See if you said like my first 12, 13 years I lived from deal to deal. Just literally living from closing the closing, hoping to God I could get it closed in time to pay my rent, that kind of stuff. It was fantastic, but no. What changed? What I did is I actually was working at the time on a career in standup comedy and surprising because you don’t have a great system. I know this is going to shock people, but what was amazing to me is the number of things I was making that transition and started playing in good clubs and stuff like that.
00:10:35 I would have all these things that I wasn’t going to do because I didn’t need to pay $480. That was the real number for refrigerator magnets at the time. If I was going to be on tour is a comedian in a year. Why would I want to waste my money on crap like that? The number of things I decided not to bother with because it had, if you do this in real estate, is only gonna help you in the future in real estate, and I kept eliminating things that there was no reason for me to do and I finally realized if I keep eliminating these, I’m going to be routing myself right out of the real estate business. Right. Whether I ever placed do anything else, and I decided just as an experiment for 90 days to pretend this is really the truth. This is when my life changed to pretend that this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my working life.
00:11:40 This is it. There isn’t some big fantastic thing coming later and I all my career had been. If you’d have asked me when I got in the business, five years in the business, is this what you’re going to do the rest of your life? No. No. What are you going to do? I don’t know, but it’s something fantastic and it’s going to be coming later. What is it? I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. I. I wished I knew and when I finally decided to knock that crap off in this was it. Now what would I do? How would I behave if I knew this is what I was going to be doing the rest of my working life? What would be my attitude? Then it took about two months before I saw it. Oh my God. I have zero interest in doing standup traveling around, living out of a suitcase, a plane to smoke filled clubs with drunks.
00:12:36 I thought, no, I don’t. This is nice. I love this business now. And uh, that’s when I became a lister and decided I wasn’t going to work buyers and got rid of them quite literally. And, and so you, you can decide how you want it, but it’s sort of a thing of like when a new person comes in, most people get into business fail and they fail actually relatively soon. And if you look, this is an interesting stat. If you say, what company, what company has the best without a doubt, success information for agents of any country in the world. Any company. Keller Williams, Keller Williams level of knowledge, wisdom is, it’s not only the best, there’s no close. Second, if rheology had any of that data, it would be a trade secret. They wouldn’t be sharing any of it. Gary Keller shares all of it. Right? And now if you look, what’s the average production of a Keller Williams agent?
00:13:40 Six deals a year. So apparently having the wisdom, which they do, they do, does not necessarily translate into success for each agent. Right. So there’s a, there’s a mental issue there. So the ones that the agents that wind up working with Gary or being coached by Gary, there’s no question those people blossom into monsters with almost without exception. Yeah, he’s magical. But there’s, it’s a mind shift. I’ll give you an example. One time when after the millionaire real estate agent came out and Gary and Dave jenks were in town doing something and I went up to April, went to it just to see, see them and say hi. And I walked up to the stage after they were, it was like an a breaker. They were done, I can’t remember. And Gary asked me how you’re doing, and I said good. And he said, how much did you do last year?
00:14:37 And I said 53 million or whatever. Then it was some number in the low fifties and he said, that’s great. I would expect nothing less from you, you, you should be actually doing twice that much. Yeah, that’s Gary. And that was fantastic. And I did, by the way, I bumped it up because we’ll that one. He’s right. I’m not going to argue with him about dad, but to do that when you’ve already done $50 million is a very different thing than you’re six deals a year. So when you’re six deals a year, you have to start seeing yourself doing 20 slash 25 deals a year. But really seeing yourself doing it just decide that’s what you do.
00:15:15 Well there’s. So there’s two things here that heard those. So the first thing was there is you’re all in mentally, right? So there was a, a kind of a burning of the ships, more or less like it is exactly right. That’s exactly right. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, I don’t know if you remember saying this to me, but there’s many, many years ago you said this to me. All right, so you close your eyes and you’re doing 300 transactions a year. I don’t remember the number, but that’s how I would have said something. Yeah. What does it look like? How many buyer agency, how many listing agents? Yeah. What did you add me to look like? What does the transaction to look like? And that was a powerful message to me because I made a big difference in how I looked at my business moving forward. Yeah, a dozen holiday gas. It’s a great question. What drives you? What keeps you going? Well, I’m not hungry. Like I was like, I don’t have that desperate. I have to get a deal. I don’t have to get a deal. You don’t, but your numbers look like you do, but it’s different now once you, uh, we’re, we’re about to ramp,
00:16:16 but again, when dnr. So did you slow down? Well, it’s, we’ve been coasting, we’ve been coasting it. There hasn’t been any heavy lifting for a while. Yeah. Um, so what, it’s more of the fun and we want the money, like there’s a certain point. See somebody says, well, if you’re a millionaire, you’re rich. I don’t know anyone. And I’ve never known anyone who has a million dollars and thinks they’re rich. I just want me to start with it seems fantastic when you’re looking up at it. Once you’re at that level, it’s not that fantastic. You don’t go, Oh my God, I’m so amazing. No, you’re not. No, you’re not. So in, you know, to achieve a goal, you have to look across or down. You can’t be looking up. Like if the goal seems way up, it’s too big. You have to get to make yourself bigger than that goal to do it.
00:17:18 Sure. So I know that sounds funny, those words, but the English language just there, there isn’t better language that I know of to describe that. I don’t know that I have a certain. Like when you people talk about goals, you have to have a big why. I think that’s nonsense. I think that’s a complete crock of excreta. I don’t know who dreamt it up. It sounds fantastic. Well you need a big reason why it sounds wonderful. I haven’t figured out yet. Well, it’s nonsense. Let’s say a guy decided I’m not making a joke here. He wanted a red corvette so we could get laid a lot. Is that a big why? But say why? What? But, but my, my point is people think this big y has to have some altruistic for the children, for the family, for the. I don’t think any of that’s true.
00:18:04 Could you have a goal tonight? Just want a lot of money. Sure. Yeah. Could you say, I want $10 million cash in the bank. Could you? Could that be your goal? Of course it could. And you could go. What’s the big why? I want it. I want it. That’s the. That’s it. When you want something, see part of a goal. The sequence for getting any goal, achieving any goal would be name want yet? Correct. Technology only smooths out the good part. If you can name it exactly and wanted unconditionally, you can get it. But it’s the issue of the want being confused or dispersed. Like most people, if you ask some of their exact goal, they can’t name it. Well there’s the problem right there. How could you want it? If you can’t name it, you can’t hit it. No, no. It’s argued. You don’t.
00:18:59 You don’t see they, they, they, they, they have this. Well, I want to be rich. What the hell does that even mean? What would that mean and what capacity, what, what, what, but just understand this. It’s not a goal you could go because no matter how much you have, you won’t feel that rich. Right? And you could go, I want to be successful again. What does that mean? Yeah. It would have to be to have a goal. And the, by the definition of said of what it means, it would have to be something that you could check off as done. Red Corvette qualifies. I don’t think I’m trying to sell court vets here. My point is if you wanted a red corvette, you would know when you got one right. You wouldn’t know it was done and you could take it off the list. Uh, you could make any goal that you could check off as done could be a goal, but if you couldn’t check it off as done and go, I did it.
00:19:53 It’s not a goal, it’s just some jibberish thought. So going back to the original question, so it’s not money, but you’re having fun. Yes. So is that what’s driving it? Is that you’re just enjoying what you’re doing? Oh, that’s definitely part of it. I actually love what I’m doing. I actually love what I’m doing it. It’s, it’s an interesting thing. I learned years ago from a remax agent, mean Bob Wolf. He said, oh no. Laguna Niguel California. And uh, Bob was doing, he lives out of Fort Collins, Colorado at the time. He was doing about 400 deals a year and he seemed like a god Jimmy I was doing maybe 20 deals a year and he said was it was on what could be delegated. And he made a list of. He took everything he didn’t personally like to do. It’s unfortunate that he couldn’t stick with his own list and wound up going back and taking some of those things back. But it’s
00:20:48 interesting. He, things that I would have never thought of that he saw. You can delegate this, you can delegate that. So I took every single thing I looked at that I had a disagreement with doing. Personally I don’t, I’m not gonna do it. So what’s left is the stuff I actually don’t know. I like doing those things right. And so that’s what I do. Okay. Yeah. Um, so I never actually took the opportunity to share this with you. I’ve shared this other people even on the show, but I don’t know if you remember 2000, 11, 2012. I was doing reo business and short sell business and run a business is easy, right? You just got to go meet a bunch of bankers, get them drunk. You get listen to short sell listings are also pretty easy, right? They don’t care how much they get in for.
00:21:26 Can you sell my house? Yes. Listening sign. There you go. Right. But I went through a transition where I was like, man, I’m going to have to get good at traditional listings. What do I do? So I went out, uh, I, I reached out to, you called your office and I got through to you, which I was shocked by. Right? And asked you. And we had, we had a lunch at a cafe. I don’t remember the name of the diner, but I asked you. I’m looking at these things. I don’t know what to do, but the market is changing. Yes. What do I need to do and ask you? I’m looking at Mike Ferry. I’m looking at Brian Buffini. I’m looking at Craig proctor and I’m open to any other suggestions and you sat down with me I think for like an hour, hour and a half, and you coached me through this and I wouldn’t be doing any of this if you weren’t so kind to take my phone call and sit down with me and I still remember you walking through the doors like wow.
00:22:11 He actually hear any sounds just like it does in a radio. So I just wanted to share that with you because I share that with other people, but you haven’t told you that I didn’t know that I actually had forgotten it, so thank you. Yeah. So one question. This goes back to toy a. How much do you spend in advertising every month? If you feel comfortable sharing, if you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to. I don’t know the monthly number. It’s about 800,000 a year. Okay. I don’t know. It’s not even every month because there’s certain times of the year we spent more in certain times of the year, we spend a lot less like, like for example, in December, we don’t spend a lot of money on paying for it. It’s not a great month to advertise, in my opinion. Yeah. Uh, what most of our advertising is based on getting future business.
00:22:59 I think one of those things that’s sort of an idiotic thing when I see people promoting the concept that you must have a call to action. I go, really? So the consumer is so stupid that they don’t know. As long as they see your phone number, you’re going, if you like, what you see here is how to get ahold of me instead of a call. Now by now. This is the one time this week, it sounds like some idiot. I mean, people buying and selling houses for either for market reasons or for personal reasons. Yeah. Most of my business is based on personal reasons there. They’re selling their house because they want to move or their kids, they want to, they want to buy a different house, but they’re not selling it because of some condition. The marketplace,
00:23:47 so personal reasons means that I’m not going to even remotely influenced when they sell, like we’re not telling them, you have to do this now. They don’t have to do it now. If they want to wait until November to sell, they can wait until nobody’s their house. It’s their movements. So most of the business, most of the ads are not saying you must call today. In actual fact, if you look at what you’re doing with geographic farming when it’s done successfully is you’re becoming the trusted advisor that you’re the one that knows about market conditions in that area, and that’s the number one thing. The public aside from honesty and trustworthiness that the public wants from an agent is market knowledge. So when you’re doing that, you’re telling me you’re letting them know whenever you’re ready, give me a call because I’m the guy. I’m the Gal that knows this stuff.
00:24:43 That’s actually effective marketing and it doesn’t have to have the call to action you have. They have to know how to get ahold of you. They have to know what would they need to do if they wanted to contact you, but it’s got a timelessness to it because people that do geographic finally you might farm an area and five years later somebody who’s been getting those little mailing pieces or whatever. Now they’re ready to sell. We’re going to call Freddy. He’s the one who knows all about this. You know, we’ve seen his mail for five years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s, he, he must be the expert. Right? So that’s the idea and not telling them every time you must call me today. So that’s just a difference. So we, we promote when we believe the market will be most receptive to the promotion. It’s like, I don’t know that sending Christmas cards is going to do anything but get lost in the shuffle.
00:25:39 So that kind of stuff. So in December we don’t, after the first couple of 10 days, two weeks to December, we got off all advertising and farming, every, all of it. We cut it all off. There’s no just no reason in my opinion to do it. Uh, and then January we started getting. Those would be examples. Okay. And as far as your organization, how many support staff do you have right now? Let me sync. I have five, six admin and then I have four, five, six commissioned salespeople. Maybe five, I can’t remember right now. But five or six outside salespeople. And so these outside sales they go to, they work with buyers and sellers or they have one of the only does listings and two of them do buyers and sellers. It gives an interesting thing. At one time I, I believed that having the listings and buyer agents completely separate was the best way to go.
00:26:44 Um, I’ve learned since then that one of the we’ve had, we had, I have like jc has been with me 21 or 22 years. It’s pretty loyal. He’s pretty loyal. Yeah. Yeah. He’s starting to work out for us. And He, all he does is listings. That’s been from day one, but my other two sisters, uh, Eva and Alaine, I was with me 10 years and Elaine’s been with me for years now. And I was amazed at how competent eva became so quickly and I was stunned at how competent elaine became so quickly. And I mentioned dwindle my business partner and she said, will this because their buyer agents. I said, what do you mean? Well, they’re out in the marketplace every day. So if they need to go price a house that’s two 75. They’ve been looking at houses and showing other people houses or to 75, they have a pretty damn good idea of what to 75 miles.
00:27:39 And it’s correct their ability to price a home. That was so astounding to me. So competent so quickly. Well, it’s because they also work buyers. So we then we’ve made a decision, now we won’t have anyone just dedicated as a list or we would convert buyers agents, but see my to, to become a list or on my team has to be someone who has their group hat on thoroughly as well as competent at being a buyer agent. So I want someone who’s competent, see a buyer agent doesn’t have the ability to ruin the organization by bringing in crap because it stopped at the lender if they’re have a crap buyer. Oh, I see a lister who could take a listing that never should have been taken, does have the ability if they’re only self serving, like while I’m here anyway, I’ll just take this when in fact the direct thing to do would be to get up and walk out, walk out and don’t take it.
00:28:38 So I’ve seen that from both sides. So I want a list or someone who has their group hat on as well as their post hat on so that they feel like, well, I’m not going to do that to the organization. It doesn’t benefit the group. So that’s a difference. Um, when’s the last time you went to a listing appointment? That would have been 2001. So you probably wouldn’t be very good at the table today. I don’t think that’s true. I actually, what I’m doing though, it’s interesting. Uh, uh, I think I would be excellent at the table. I’m just not bothering to go. I don’t need to what I do spend the bulk of my time in the office doing his conversions to people who call in that want to talk to find out how much do you charge this, that and the other. And what’s interesting is that’s what I shine at. And so I actually am doing the equivalent of a listing presentation. Well, and I think so this is a really a key point because a lot of guys right now they’re, they’re so adamant about hiring inside sales agents, outside sales agents, compartmentalizing all
00:29:41 this and that. And we were in a meeting when you announced that you’re back on the phones and your conversion rates tripled. It was, it was, it tripled. What was,
00:29:50 I can’t remember. What I know is the person they had doing it was God awful and I hadn’t confronted that and we had been losing a tremendous amount of business because it wasn’t me or windy doing that part and now it’s only me or windy that does. So you’re the only two calling just her or me pure and now it’s different. If someone calls in and let’s say a Cassandra gene answered the phone and somebody says, we’re hoping to get an appointment for 4:00 tomorrow. Well no, that she couldn’t. They just go right ahead and book it and go. I’ll have russell call you when he comes in just to answer any questions you have. That’s fine if they just want an appointment, but someone who needs to be chatted with, I do it or windy does it? Absolutely.
00:30:33 That’s awesome because it shows that you’re not too big to handle any of the tasks and one of the things that we talk a lot about Craig proctor is that the Isa is the hardest job to hire and clearly, right? I mean having Russell to do it, that’s it’s going to be better than having.
00:30:49 There’s some stuff. Here’s, here’s what I can tell you. Yeah, so can almost anything be delegated? Yes, almost, and we’re actually gonna do that was the next question right here almost, but there’s two things that I found you cannot correctly successfully delegate for long. One would be quality control, like any organization that misses the qual division is one headed for a future crash. Yeah. If the quality of surface, if the care factor for the client, that care factor for how things are done isn’t being monitored and the organization and the product will soon turn to crap. That’s just a fact. If you look at companies that are screamingly successful, let’s say apple, one of the things, it’s not just their technology, it’s their surface. If you have a problem with an apple product, just I’m just using that as an example. It’s not an issue of is it under warranty, it’s any of this or that.
00:31:51 You can contact apple and if there’s something wrong, they’re going to work on it and they’re going and they keep working on it until it’s fixed. They don’t have the. Well, you’ve just got a bad one. That’s not part of the equation. Yeah. Same with BMW. Let’s just use that. Have I ever had problems? Yes. Were they fixed? Yes, they were and the factory gets involved and go to, but the point is quality control signal. You don’t try to delegate that. The other one that I have to me and not another I know there’ll be people listening to this that disagree and I don’t care. I think they’re wrong. Don’t delegate. Lead generation. When people are recruiting someone for a team so that they can get somebody else to lead generate. I think if they can successfully lead, generate what in God’s name do they need you for?
00:32:41 Right? Like if if they, if they can successfully lead, generate. Lead generation is one of the skills that an agent must have to be successful, but it’s so much more important than all of the other skills combined that if somebody is good enough at lead generation, they could be awful at a whole bunch of other things and still succeed. If they’re awful at lead generation, it won’t matter how good they are at everything else, they’re going to fail and notice that I’m saying lead conversion is a companion skill. That’s not the same thing, but I believe that if the lead conversion stuff is fairly simple like buyer buyer deals, I’m not interested in personally working on converting buyer leads ever. Not this lifetime. I haven’t been in 20 years and I’m not going to be a because I believe my buyer agents do it every bit as good, if not better than me, but when it comes to converting listings, leads.
00:33:45 I honestly, I don’t know if someone who does it better than me and I’m not saying that out of some idiotic ego statement. I just, this is what I do, right? So if I get a chance to talk to them, I realize now as I used to delegate it completely for years, I couldn’t do it. That was a horrible, horrible mistake. I was giving away huge amounts of money on a sort of an invisible way because if I didn’t talk to them, there were deals we’d had gotten lost opportunities. There you go. Uh, so what is the biggest lesson you’ve learned in your career?
00:34:30 It’s so simple. It would be care. The care factor. If you said like if you looked back in your life when you were in school, you might’ve had one, maybe two teachers that were, that was the best teacher. She was the best. He was the best. And if you look at what made them the best, it wouldn’t be. They were the smartest of all the teachers or the most knowledgeable of all the teachers. It was that they cared the most about the students actually learning. So if you look, what makes a great agent truly is. I’ve met people I what’s going on? She’s really good. She’s really, really good. Is She brilliant? She’s really nice. But she cares about her clients. She cares about the outcome. So if you look what makes a good mom? Somebody who cares. I mean, it’s the same thing. It’s exactly the same thing.
00:35:22 So that care factor and you can get stuff so automated and so I’m not going to touch this kind of thing or I’m not going to do that. You’re get away from the care and you by the way get away from quality control at the time. But I think caring in like when a person stops caring about the outcome of things in their own business or in their own life, they’re on a Toboggan ride down. So I think if I had to pick one thing, it’s caring, but you could come back to, if you say what’s the most important thing in it for anybody? I’m just listening to this because if you say what’s the most important thing in any business? Getting and keeping customers. Any business, any business. Well, what then what, how does that go into that? Totally. Do you care how good you are at getting the jeeping customers,
00:36:12 especially in today’s Day and age with all the online reviews and so on. So, uh, what are your top three or five leads, lead sources like top three or five or lead sources?
00:36:25 Well, probably for us it’s television number one. A radios number two, and we spend more on TV. We spend about 400,000 just on television. Oh really? Yeah, just for TV and about $200 on radio and another 200 on the mailings that the farm areas and the farms probably number
00:36:44 three. And then we probably do 40 to 50. Repeat and referral deals a year. So those would be the pecking order. Okay. Simple enough. And then Jared Johnson, Florida wants to know are there, you already mentioned that at the time of years ago, won’t you won’t advertise. Are the days of the week you avoid being on radio TV or is there like a minimum or maximum frequency when you try to hit?
00:37:08 Yeah, you don’t want. If you’re buying radio or television ads, you do not want to be on the air more than ever. More than once in the same hour because you’re getting the same audience. Yeah. And uh, and you hit diminishing returns. I’ve never found it productive to advertise on holidays to pay if they, if the station say we’re going to give you some free spots, live it up, but in terms of pay paid spots, if you’re advertising yourself as a service company on radio or television, run these spots strictly on news. Do not put it on regular entertainment shows. Uh, in this day and age. Like Ti vo now has a button I can push to eliminate all the commercials in any TV spot. But hardly anyone records the news to watch later, you understand? Nope. Nobody’s recording the news to watch it later. And with a radio it’s the same thing. I have found that a stations that appeal to older people tend to work okay on music. I specifically, uh, like soft rock, soft rock, Classic Rock, classic rock type stuff. Oddly enough, works just fine.
00:38:22 Hmm. Interesting. Okay. Um, if you were to start all over again, would you do anything differently?
00:38:29 Yes. I would have become a list or sooner I would have just a started instead of waiting 13 years to go, this is what I’m going to do the rest of my life and I’m going to be allistor. Because if you look at, is it possible to do a huge number of buyer deals and be successful? Yeah. There’s three or four people, maybe, maybe a dozen people in the country doing. But is it a stable as a listing based business? No, because usually the people who are doing a ton of buyer deals like that. There’s a guy out of Melbourne, Florida who does it through Internet leads, a brilliant guy, Mitch, Mitch, Mitch back. Very bright guy. Nice guy. Uh, so Mitch has, he’s doing last. I knew about 330 deals a year. Um, but he, he’s in a resort community so it doesn’t, it’s not quite the same as like for a second homes.
00:39:28 Yes, exactly. Uh, there’s a, uh, a bright guy here in town doing a Jason Mitchell and he’s doing tons of buyer deals. Do you number one, an armless for buyer deals. But the problem there, in my opinion, this is not some snipe snipe at him because I don’t, I have nothing but respect. I wish I was doing that well when I was that young. Uh, it’s a single source and anytime you have a single source that’s not under your direct control, you don’t have complete stability. Like when I had one source, when I first started doing radio ads, I was being given the ads for free in exchange for writing and producing comedy. And that was at Kslx. So the sales manager and the general manager could jerk me around any damn time they want it. All right. Once I was paying for the ads at Kta, ar, I had my.
00:40:24 First of all, my business skyrocketed, but second by the time I went, by the time I had two stations, if one of them want to try to screw me on the rates, I go, good. I’m not mine. And they all buy from them. Yeah. So I was no longer had this single source, but when I first started I did have a single source and that was kslx. That’s a tenuous position. It’s no different than an reo agent who had this one bank that was funneling, oh, I don’t know, a 200 deals a year and all of a sudden they go, we’re not using you. Now. The last mitigator didn’t like your attitude last night. Well, what’s how it exactly how it happened, and all of a sudden somebody who was doing $90 million a years now back to $5 million a year. So if you have a single source for your business that’s not under your direct control is different.
00:41:11 If it’s a geographic farm, just say my farms, how I get my business. That’s different because you can do something about it. Well, that’s listening is again. Yes. So it buyers see hardly any customer is actually ever shopping for an agent. This is an interesting point and it’s usually missed sellers do interview agents because they’re the ones paying for agents, but buyers are seldom interviewing agents. There may be some real company or something, but just you looked at 95 percent of the buyers and everything’s probably 99 percent. I don’t have the right number, but it’s almost all. They’re not looking for a certain age and they’re not looking for someone to love that. No one’s not like, I hope we know we’re going to go buy a new car. I hope we meet a really nifty car sales. They don’t give a crap. They’re just looking for a house and they’re willing to tolerate the agent to get to see the house.
00:42:09 It’s at that point, the good agent converts them into actually liking them and trusting them. When that person then becomes the agent, if you look at Zillow, if you look at all the online lead sources, have they saw caused one single house to sell? That wouldn’t have sold anyway. No, no, but they changed. Who sold it to change to wrote the contract dramatically by by getting the leads and they search and then the agents who were going to sell this lead to you for $43. I’ll take it and the guy sells the house. He goes, I got a good deal. I’m going to keep buying more. But they changed who wrote the offer, but the consumer is not better or worst for it. No, it didn’t change anything, so I hope that in.
00:42:54 Yeah, know whether it was joe or bill or sally. They got the house. I’m okay. How has. Oh, actually no. I want to talk about another topic. You’ve talked how to be a great listing agent. Yes, so Russell, I want to become a great listing agent. What do I have to do?
00:43:10 Go on a lot of appointments. It’s the most important thing of all it stage time. It’s the equivalent of a comedian getting stage time. You can practice in your living room forever. You can do a drills with your fellow agents of handling objections all you want to, but until you actually go into the house for someone that wants to actually sell a house and practice on them, you will not have any real experience. Yeah. All problems in getting listings are either at the table or in getting to the table all. There’s no other type of issue. Yeah. If you have been on less than 50 appointments, that’s my number. If you’ve been on less than 50 appointments, you have an incredibly crappy listing presentation no matter what you think. Okay. If I’ve insulted you too bad, you need to practice more. Yeah. You don’t become world class because you took five listings in a year.
00:44:10 You actually are sloppy at it. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what you’re not doing. Right? Correct. And people who say they list 98 percent or nine out of 10, they’re either working such an incredibly fantastic sphere of influence and only go on the appointment once it’s nailed down that they’re going to list, but it’s a stupid thing to say people. It’s a cretinous thing to say for a couple of reasons. One, the people listening will never be able to match that number and part of the reason they’ll never be able to match that number. It’s just a complete lie. It’s like a cosmopolitan model magazine. Just complete crap. Let me give you some real numbers. In the 15 years running up to the run up in prices, my ratios at the table ran consecutively consistently between 56 and 58 percent. We’ve.
00:45:03 We went on our appointment. We took the listing 56 to 58 percent of the time this year because we have loosened our standards considerably on what qualifies for an appointment. It’s almost what time’s good for you folks? Not Quite, but pretty close. We are running just a little bit under 44 percent and why? Why do I say that? So we’re running between 43 and 44 percent year to date on interviews to listings taken. Because listings, when listings get more scarce. This is always true. They’re easier to sell. When listings are more abundant, they’re harder to sell, right? So right now with listings in the point, the price points that people really want to buy, their listings are actually fairly scarce. Translate. We’ve loosened up considerably on what qualifies for an appointment. They’re interested in talking about selling good. What time will come over. Absolutely. So are we, and people claimed to bat a thousand.
00:46:13 I go, they’re just idiots. I mean when someone says this and it’s an ego based type statement because they have this, they wanted to, they’re sort of proud of. They’re fantastic ratios, but they’re nonsense. If a new agent say, let’s pretend you’ve only listed one or two houses, are you going to hit 44 percent? If you’re talking to strangers, probably not. Probably not. No, and you didn’t fail. Like if you got one in five, good, go keep going to appointments. Because the secret, coming back to the specific question, Steve, how do you get really good? By doing it a lot, I equate it to learning to ride a bicycle. You would never learn to correctly competently to ride a bike by reading books on bike riding. [inaudible] are listening to someone explain it. You have to get on the bike, you have to get on the bike and you’re going to fall.
00:47:08 It’s just the deal and until you’re willing to do that, you can’t learn to do it. Right, and I have seen over the years, I have personally talked to, I know this sounds outrageous, but thousands of agents who say things like, I don’t really like listings. I liked buyers better. That’s a failure viewpoint, number one, but what makes it wrong is they can’t stand rejection. There are people pleaser personality that makes sense. They can’t stand rejection and they find that buyers, since you go to a buyer and you go, I’m going to help you find a good lender, this trustworthy, I’m going to search for you and do everything you need on your schedule by the way folks, and find you a house and walk you through all kinds of things. And if there’s any questions that I don’t know the answer to, I’ll find someone who doesn’t get back to you.
00:48:05 Oh, and I won’t cost you a dime. Would you like to work with me? What’s for them not to like, I mean, seriously from the consumer point of view. As long as you’re presenting. Yeah. Yeah. Don’t smell bad. Have a lockbox, can’t have what? What’s not to like from the consumer point of view. Now let’s be, I don’t know, a, a, an agent on a $300,000 home and just for the sake of conversation, you’d go in and go, hi, I’m going to put a sign in your yard, a lockbox on your house and I want you to write me a check for $18,000. How about it folks? Ready? But get the difference. Well now that customer, consumer, client, whatever, we’re going to see what else other people can do for us, right? Because now they’ve got some because they’re the ones paying. They’ve got skin in the game. Yes. So it’s a very different equation. So does it take more competence to be a listing agent? Yes. Does that make it harder? Not if you know what you’re doing, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s almost impossible in the biggest single barrier to becoming a competent listing agent is factually thinking you already are one.
00:49:21 Yeah. Nothing to learn is the, the day you figured it out as a day, you start slowing down. Uh, so one of the thing that’s come up a lot, um, in fact, Kenny and I, Kenny Claus and I talked about this last week was technology and how it’s impacting everything. And I know that you’ve talked about all these, every time the market’s good, we got the 100 percent clowns coming in and then, or not hundred percent discount plans come in. And then once the tide pulls out, they pull out too. So I want to see, has technology this time impacted your business at all? Well, I don’t think, I think
00:49:56 technology’s the right term. I, I think that technology, uh, first of all, technology in any form in this day and age levels, the plain field more so than gives anyone an advantage because there isn’t much in the way of check knology the most nincompoop agent can’t get. I mean, you could take the poorest, you could take the brokerage firm that has the least agents, the least money and does the lease business. There’s almost nothing in the way of technology that don’t have like the big giants. I mean, so there’s not some, my God, this proprietary software or this something that becomes a game changer like that. Like there was a time, and I know it sounds funny to say it now. There was a time the fax machine changed the game. I’m serious. It was a game changer. Uh, prior to that, it was a game changer that it was, it actually was.
00:50:52 And then email came along and went, oh my God. So the, the uh, the Internet didn’t exist when I started. Fax Machines didn’t exist when I started it. So there’s some technology, but once everyone had effects machine, it was no longer. There was a point, there was a time people would promote, they have a fax machine that sounds insane and stupid today, but the idea, you can fax it to us at this number was my God that companies they have effect, but all of them didn’t. That’s what you have there in the forefront of technology as the forefront of technology. Now I don’t think there is some technology CVSA. We’ll take Keller Williams or Coldwell banker with what the hell can they get in the way of technology that some agent from West Jewish center, homesmart, Canton and go. I’m going to get one too. Yeah. I don’t think there is something.
00:51:49 So I don’t really think it’s the technologies, the issue, what happens, and it’s always happened. It, it was happening when I got in the business in 1978. It was happening. When you have a hyperextended seller market, this is what causes it hyperextended seller market. It always brings out the we do nothing for less crowd. We’re going to charge less. That’s a great name. It is. It’s much better than discounted, by the way, for positioning. We do nothing for less crowd. They sprout. They just simply sprout. When someone brings that up to me, here’s what I tell them. Whatever those companies are charging, and I don’t care why pay that much. Why pay the price? Purplebricks is offering. You can go to Congress realty and they’ll list it for $500 for you or less or less. Is it less now? I think it’s two 99. Well, I just.
00:52:46 I’m still using the number $500, so I’m. I’m out of date, but. But understand they don’t care if if you, if let’s say $300, they’ll put it in mls and you can cancel any time because they don’t care. I’m not picking on them. Right. If you look at historically, when did that company do well in a market where everything was selling anyway, so it’s not something to fear. It’s not something to be spooked by the. They always sprout. I’ll give you a specific example that to me is fantastic. In 2006 I did 104 million and I think it was 406 deals. No reason. I’m telling you this. I’m going to do a juxtaposition with my office me and help you sell. Help you sell at that time. Had 17 offices here in the valley. Oh, that’s just. Here’s what I want you to get. I had an office that was approximately 900 square feet. Help you sell head 17 branch locations, franchise locations here in the Valley and I’m not picking on help you sell. By the end of 2008, my business had been cut in half and it was right around $50, million, 51 and some change.
00:54:08 I was doing more business out of my office than all 17 helped you sell offices combined. Wow. I just want dishes. Let that sink in because this is not to go get a loan. To me, it’s to go get a load of when the buyer, when the. When the market’s so good that the perception is agents are a commodity. If I can get someone to list it for less, I’m going there. Yeah. That goes away almost instantly. As soon as it shifts to a buyer market, it goes away instantly. What’s going to happen here in town, if they want to sue me for this, I want them to be my guest. Purple bricks will will go broke here. Advertising and their margins, they will go broke here. Advertising purple bricks and Homey have each done about 10 or $12 million year to date. Total on the margins they’re working on.
00:55:03 How long does that last and that’s now in a good market. Yes. In the seller market wants the market changes. They’re all gone. They’re all gone. Just like Congress realty went from. I don’t remember. It was some 100 and something million down to like 4 million. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but the point is it goes away because then the consumer is not simply looking for who can do it the cheapest, but who can do it at all? We can do it, right? Yeah, exactly. So do I think this is something like, oh my God, so and so is here now, I don’t care. It won’t matter who those companies, if you say who does open door actually disrupt and put out of business to some degree, it’s not agents, not, it’s not agents at all. It might spook them, but in mechanical, mechanical level, someone like Doug Hopkins, because when he buys a house he actually needs to make a real profit. Yeah. So he’s a good guy. I’m not picking on him. He said he’s a, he’s a good guy. If I point is this business model is his business model, he actually has to buy it cheap enough. He can’t pay what they’re paying now he can’t and he’s not going to. So he just has to pull out of the market until they’re, they’re not doing that. Right. So interesting who coaches Russell?
00:56:23 I don’t know that anyone coaches me per se. I’ve never had a coach in that sense. Um, I’ve had people that helped me immensely. My friend Dean Salvey, Dina and I have been having lunch about once a month for while I would say a little over 30 years now it’s starting to work out and so he and I have sort of mentored each other. It’s been a two way street and I know I’ve helped dean, but dean has helped me at least as much over the years. Super Sharp Guy. Yeah. And so it’s stuff like that and windy my partner because one, it’s harder. I mean I look at Dean sometimes because he doesn’t have someone he can rely on. See if I have a. well, let’s see if Wendy has a crappy day or a crappy week or something happens. I can talk to her and fix it if I do something, if I’m upset about something five, 10 minutes with her and I’m like, oh thank you.
00:57:24 And so it, it when you have someone that you can explain it to and they, you know, they just heard you or they can tell you what, why would you want to work on that? Oh yeah, good point. Yeah, it makes it easier. Um, but a mentor, not really, I’ve been more, I’ve had to figure out so many things on my own because the mentors that I had were idiots a truly and I, I think that it became a benefit to other people that some stuff I had to figure out because I will take pricing, I honest to God assumed that it was something I just hadn’t grasped until I realized that most of the technology talk to agents on how to price the home was complete crap. Uh, the idea, well, let’s take price per square foot if that’s all you had to. No, seriously, if that’s all you had to know was priced per square foot.
00:58:23 And people talk about it endlessly, like they know what they’re talking about. Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah. If that were actually a correct way to just use that number to price a home, just just get this one point than zillow would almost always be correct. That’s true. They would almost always be correct. And yet they’re almost always incorrect. And I’m not picking on Zillow. My point is, is that there’s more involved than just robotically taking price per square foot. You can’t make any juxtaposition between two story and single story. If there’s more than a 20 percent difference in size, it must be tossed out. You can’t even use it at all. If you’re crossing busy streets like zillow uses a radius search going out a quarter of a mile you’ve just entered, you may as well just make up a number by throwing darts. Yeah, you’d get just about the same result.
00:59:19 Now, this doesn’t mean it can’t be, so if you made a statement, if the list price sales price ratio in mls and armless is almost always around 97 and a half percent, this says that all the agents that are selling houses, almost all of them, including the ones where you have these jumbo, they listed it for two and a half million. It was really only worth one and a half million. That ratio still cumulatively is at about 97 and a half percent and knowing that if you know that, then you could clearly see most agents do know how to correctly price the home. Yeah. Now that said that was observable to me. The part I couldn’t figure out is how the hell are they doing it because when I first became a list or I thought, I don’t get it, you can’t do that. It doesn’t equate.
01:00:14 Here’s what I know. They don’t know what they know. If they did, they could teach it. Yeah. If they knew what they knew, they could teach it. But when you ask some experienced listing agent, well how do you know that’s the right number? Well, I just sort of know it. Okay. How do you sort of know it? What data exactly are you looking at to know that? Well, you use the price per square foot. No you didn’t. You fit, you looked at that after you figured out the price to understand and that is what I actually figured out. Here’s how it’s done and I’m not going to try to take the time right now, but if somebody goes on my uh, agent blog, if you want to know it, it’s at number one. That’s num B, e r numeral one, home agent.com, number one, home agent.com.
01:01:07 And look for the seminar on how to price a home. It’s about a two hour seminar, but it’s all there. Everything you need to know. How is it? Huh? I didn’t know that. Oh, that’s great. Yeah. Great. Free to take it. Use it. It’s, but it’s, it’s honestly it gets away from the price per square foot because that is not what, when I actually was pricing homes myself, it was interesting. I could tell the difference between the 202, oh, five and 2:10 and be right. And I was right. Correct. Endlessly right up until about 2005, late 2004. I started getting stupid and I continued to be stupid and I, you understand because I had never at that time taken in to consideration supply demand. Yeah. Because it was flat. I just. Majority of your career. It was flat. It was predictable. Yep. So now what I look at first is supply and demand. And there’s no better reference than the book shift by Gary Keller weren’t talks about six months as a balanced supply. Four months would be quote unquote normal supply. Three months shows visible upward price pressure. Two months is a hot seller market, one month or less is an insane seller market and eight months shows downward pressure on prices. That’s all in the seminar. If they weren’t here. So, uh, where do you see your business in three to five years?
01:02:35 At least double if not triple what I’m doing now. And what causes you to say that we want to know, it goes back to seeing the goal. Yeah. Yeah. Wanting the goal. Let’s go back to that, uh, the seeing, wanting and getting because there are a lot of people that want something but they don’t have the motivation or would they don’t totally want it. And that’s the of additional. So when you go to that center, when you go to that website, number one, agent home.com, there’s a couple other, post one. There’s a, there’s a seminar on goals. It’s actually, it might be called find out why, but that’s the seminar around goals. And the other thing I would recommend is in the search box, in the upper right hand corner, uh, put in these two words, enemy line. That’s an enemy and the word line l I N E, and there’ll be two blog posts that will come up once called enemy line, one’s called Ninja Ninja, genius and the enemy, but anyway, read those two post and do the exercise because when a person says, I want x, I don’t know, I want a red corvette, let’s just use that.
01:03:44 I wonder Red Corvette and they can’t get it and they can’t move. Constantly forward toward getting that red corvette. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a red corvette, 20 closed deals a year, 150 closed deals a year or a new shiny home or whatever it is. Doesn’t matter, but I’m just going to use red corvette. When the person can’t move toward the red corvette, they have a conflicting goal or a conflicting thought in their own head. People that drive corvettes are pricks people who are in a corvette. People don’t like. Some of those cars just attract attention of the wrong kind or whatever thought, I’m just using this just head trash. It’s just crap and they’re carting the crap with them, so every time they think of the goal that they claim they want, they’re also mulling over this stuff. That’s just point. It’s just toxic. It doesn’t really matter how it got in their head.
01:04:42 It’s in there now. The answer how it got there. Usually when they were tired or hungry, you know if you’ve had children, you know that 95 percent of the time when the kids squawking about something, you can fix it by feeding them and putting them to bed. I didn’t know that. I know exactly. You seem like a scream. No, I’m joking. So you look and go. I’ve seen agents literally brag that they haven’t eaten breakfast or lunch. They’ve only had coffee all day and it’s three in the afternoon. I’ve actually heard them sort of like our guy a superhuman. Yeah. Just amazing what I’m doing by making sure my blood sugar’s low, might making sure I’ll be easily provoked by the slightest little screwball thing. So actually there’d be something to be said for. And this came out in Gary Keller’s book, the one thing when he talked about it, which I couldn’t go for, recommend that book.
01:05:39 It’s an unbelievable book, just amazing for all the correct technology and mythbusting on goals, but the part where he talked about prisoners up for parole, the ones who were least likely to get paroled was the people that came before the parole board just before lunch or just before closing time when the, when the, when the parole people parole board would be at their lowest blood sugar level. The people most likely to be paroled were the ones that came in first, right after those people that had breakfast or lunch or lunch. And, and so you have this and you go, did it have much to do with the goodness or badness of the prisoner? Nope. So there’s a lesson there. Um, if you have, if you’re rested and fed, you’re going to do better on anything. Uh, then you get into finding those toxic thoughts and those, those, those two blog posts on enemy line or how to isolate the thoughts that you have in your head that are specific to your exact goal.
01:06:43 So if you take your goal and you’ll make it an affirmation that you already have it, I have a red corvette, then you take down and write down every thought that you have. Make a list. And I’ve had people ask me, well, what do you do with that list? You burn it. No. Why would you want to keep a list of negative ideas? Well, how about this, you’re making a list of ideas you’ve had in your own head that will keep you from achieving your goal. How about that? It’s a list of stuff you found that has effectively been working to stop you from achieving the goals you’re telling me you want. Yeah. So you’d want that list in case those thoughts come back and guess when they’re going to come back, when you’re tired or hungry. Interesting. Uh, what will happen to your business if the market took a dip?
01:07:38 The market’s always taking a dip in a surgeon one direction or another. One of the main things I learned from reading shift is it was a wake up to me to see that in the market could shift this wayne than it could shift that way. What I’ve realized since then, thanks to the blessing that came to Phoenix named Michael Lower. What I’ve learned since he’s not here anymore. Well, but he still does. Yeah, he’s. He’s still presences here back in England, but I, he, he’s so wonderful and his data is so spot on and it’s so, so well thought out. I wish I listened to it when the market was going up. When you it at 20 percent. I wish I listened with just your height. My hindsight is perfect too. I want you to know that what I’ve learned is that the market is constantly shifting.
01:08:32 It never stopped shifting. It’s always dipping or some part of it. So you could have had a few short years ago, Arcadio was booming and then you have these areas around. There’s something always happening and it’s always in one direction or another, and that never stops. There’s the appearance. See that you could go, well, this is very stable now. It can seem that way, but there are still areas that are having shifts in one way or another. There’s some parts of the valley being developed. Some other parts are bidding neglected. It’s not even. Yeah. There’s no national market. There’s no what’s happening in ames. Iowa isn’t what’s happening here. I mean, I have people I know people there, but I don’t need to study it just here. Yeah. That’s the one that matters. Uh, what is your superpower? My superpower? Probably. Besides the sense of humor.
01:09:31 It’s besides something, my sense of humor. It’s the recognition that one, I don’t know. Something being aware that I don’t know. That actually helps me a lot because there’s some stuff that I’m extremely knowledgeable about and I’m very certain that my data and there’s other stuff that might seem to some casual observer. Well, that’s not the same as that. No, no. And I don’t know a damn thing about it. In fact, I have very little information that I’ve evaluated and I don’t know, I don’t know. And so I find myself the more I do know, realizing more what I don’t know. Uh, it’s, it’s not a fatter have been stupid, but there are areas not. Okay. How smart someone is that you go, I don’t know. And that’s the answer. And I think that uh, this was hard for me to learn on prices because at one time I thought, well, I know the price of a house right up until the point where it was hitting me in the face.
01:10:35 Like, I don’t know, the price of the house, it looked to me like it was worth two and a quarter, but we just sold it for two 75 cash. That was 2005 and I thought it seemed too high at two and a quarter to even be listed and yet to 75 and it was done all cash. This is unbelievable. And I just took that attribute. What’s unbelievable? I don’t have to believe it, but eventually I’m going, this is happening. This isn’t anecdotal data anymore. So when I see some trend happening, when we see some market moving in a certain direction, like our saving grace in 2006 was we had our listings on big, big boards in the office and when our contract, when, when our listings ballooned in early 2006, probably around April, our boards were full. We had to keep adding new listing boards because we had so many listings or contract board wasn’t booming proportionately and that told us that once or bringing crap in the door are overpriced.
01:11:39 We need to tighten up on prices and this was when listed in a price. It’s fine. No, it’s not. They’re not selling. They’re not selling the market slowing and we’re doing a lot of business, but it was by looking just at those two, two things we could clearly see were overpricing listings we have to tighten up right now, which is why we had such a good year by being able to see that. Yeah, that’s. That’s amazing. I would definitely say that is a very valuable superpower. So I haven’t seen you promote your seminars as much and I want to take this opportunity to hear if you’re. Are you still doing them? I am not doing. No, you’re stopped doing them because I was on a course of scientology course that was taking so much of my time and after I wrapped that up I had some physical problems, which I’m now are all completely behind me.
01:12:29 Okay. Surgery. And it was, but I was in the hospital a couple of times and so I just never got back to it. And what I’m now looking at doing is I just because I haven’t had time to, to, to physically do them because they’ve just been so busy. What I’m going to do is something. This is going out that facebook live I presumed. Oh yeah, we’re live right now. So do what? It’s on facebook and I’m going to start doing something like that. I don’t know even mechanically how to do it, but I thought it won’t take me that long to learn. Right. And so I’m going to start doing some kind of the seminars, uh, via facebook live. I just ready to start doing, be peppy. Great. But my point is it’s going to be easier for me to do that than to a what we’ve moved the office and I used to have the uh, uh, we, we upstairs that John Hall in Realty One and we had that key for room which we had pretty much full run of whenever we needed it.
01:13:22 And I was like a courtroom. It was really beautiful. Just beautiful. So the office real team one is now downstairs and so on my, I have my own private office as a separate thing. I’m a branch manager now. Congratulations. Thank you. It’s a big deal for me. It’s like my name for right on the door, but we don’t really have a great space unless I were to go over to a older public title which is like three buildings over. And I said, ah, that’s going to be a pain in the ass and the summer walking over there. And so I just, it just came to me about 10 days ago. The thing to do would be to do the seminars online via facebook and that way people from all over the country could come to him anyway and if they could ask questions live while we do them, just like you’re going getting that now.
01:14:08 Uh, which was always part of the success of those seminars that when I gave them live because otherwise there’d be no, I could just, I have video there all, I have them all on my blog. No has a number one agent.com, but some trans people would hear something and they just didn’t quite get it. They just, they, they almost had it. And it was the advantage of them being able to go, wait, wait a minute, can you help me understand blah, blah, blah. And I, I remember one time, uh, I was given a talk. It was on the conditions in. It’s a wonderful talk. And, and there was a guy there, he’s a very big agent and this was his third time at that seminar. And he said there was something I said, and I don’t remember what it was, but he said, well, I know what you’re saying is correct because you’re saying it.
01:14:58 And uh, I, he said, but I don’t, I don’t quite get it. And he wasn’t making a joke and he was sincere and I said, no, you don’t know. It’s correct because I’m saying what you know is that I said it and you might know that I said it in fat. Actually, you might know that I said it with complete conviction, but that doesn’t make it correct. There are a lot of information. People are blathering that they’re quite convinced of, uh, the, uh, the validity of it and it’s complete crap. So you don’t know. It’s, you know, what’s true when you couldn’t observe it to be true, then you know it. And so one of the things I really liked about those talks, I could actually see the people that I could understand the question and I can sort of anticipate where you’re trying to grasp x.
01:15:46 yes. Okay, well good. Then I could explain it because I wasn’t talking about something they didn’t understand, I was talking about something they didn’t understand. It might be a talks that I’ve given 50, 60, 70 times, but this is their first exposure to it. And so I realized probably the simplest thing is to do a facebook live type of situation and people can then get it. I mean, and I can disseminate it more widely. So that’s probably what I’m going to do next. Okay. Yeah. So thanks for asking. Yeah. Because that was helpful for me. You know, I went to them, uh, many, many years ago. So, uh, what will be the best way for our listeners to get ahold of you besides calling you and your commercials of. Well, don’t please don’t all call me because I won’t be able to tell. I don’t know how many people are listening right now.
01:16:34 If there’s 300 or $200, 500 normally by the end of this we have somewhere in the hundreds or thousand plus. Yeah. So it sounds and people called me. I won’t be able to mechanically respond to a thousand phone calls. Um, but, but I am going to be doing that online thing, uh, and, and starting certainly in the next 60 days and, and so, uh, that’s something I absolutely am going to do and um, it, but if you have a specific question, if you can save it for that because I promise I’ll answer any if it’s an answerable question. I mean, sometimes the answer has to
01:17:10 be, I don’t know. Right? Yeah, that is the only answer I have. I don’t know. Okay. So save the questions in Russell’s going to be doing seminars on facebook live, which is awesome. Absolutely. I’m excited for that. Um, and again, guys, if you liked the show, please share this episode right now. And don’t forget we are doing the meetup tomorrow night. I make fake brewing by Scottsdale Mcdowell or Mr ttp brand daniels will be speaking 5:00. Don’t be late or you’d be standing either standing in the room. We’re standing outside the room and next week we do have josiah grimes with Kigali. Uh, so do come back for that. And thank you Russell. It’s always sure. It’s really a pleasure, Steve. A lot of fun.
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