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Realtors basically light money on fire every single month. And you pretend that it's investing. You pretend that it's a wise use of your money. Well, today I'm exposing just what agents are wasting their most money on and what you should be spending it on and doing with it instead. The Massive Agent podcast with lead generation tips and strategies to get you more leads and sell more homes. I love to buy houses. I like to sell houses. It takes brass balls to sell real estate. Wait a minute. The leads are weak. You're weak. Week. I've had better. Better. Oh, have I got your attention? Now? Here's your host, Dustin Brome. What is up, guys? Welcome to episode 401 of the Massive Agent podcast. I am your host, Dustin Brome here in Salt Lake City, Utah. And today I'm back to jumping on toes. I'm not just stepping on toes, I'm jumping on some toes. And it comes from experience, right? I have wasted a ton of money and in my 14 plus year real estate career for sure. And not just like wasted money, but missed opportunities as well. And I'll, I'll, I'll get into that, but really I'm, I see a lot of agents that don't save much money because they're spending it somewhere, but they're spending it on dumb shit. It's just, it's not wisely used. It's not wisely invested. And so my goal today is just to, to help stop that. To get you to take the money that you do have and use it as a powerful tool to grow your business and not just, you know, spending it each month and wondering why you never get ahead. Investing wisely is the key. Not just investing your money and spending your money thinking that it's growing your business, but doing it wisely. So we're going to get into that first thing, first thing that I see agents spending a ton of money on that oftentimes doesn't make sense, and that's buying leads. Leads can be very, very expensive. From Zillow, realtor.com homes.com home light. Like there's, I mean, there's all these referral deals out there that you can do, like Dave Ramsey's ELP program and, and whatnot. Zillow Flex. Look, I'm, I don't, I'm not against buying leads 100% of the time. I'm against buying leads, especially the super expensive ones like Zillow and realtor.com that, you know, a thousand, fifteen hundred, two thousand dollars per lead. That is insane. If you don't have the system, the follow up system in place to support that kind of lead. So with Zillow and realtor.com speed to lead is everything. They expect you, if they're going to keep giving you leads, they expect you to, to respond damn near instantly. So if you are a solo agent and you're wearing all the hats in your business, you don't have an assistant, you don't have an isa, you don't have anyone that could be, you know, responding to these leads for you. And you're out in like you're showing houses or you're doing an open house, or you're, you're at an appointment and you can't respond to a lead for 45 minutes because you're with a client that you just wasted $1500 on the lead. What are you doing? So you have to know where you're at and what kind of system and infrastructure you have in place. Because oftentimes agents who are just hungry and you're like, well, I hear Zillow leads are a good, a good use of money. And they, they are in certain situations. But if you're a solo agent and you cannot support Instant lead response 100% of the time, that's probably not where you should start. So I've done this wrong. Earlier, early in my career, probably year two or something, my, my team, basically this other guy, this other agent who was teaching me the ropes, my mentor, he, we, we went in on Trulia leads. This was before Zillow bought Trulia. And they, they used to be separate deals. And I remember sometimes I couldn't respond to the lead for an hour or more because I was with a client. And so guess what? During that hour they went and found somebody else. And nowadays it's a lot more advanced and that lead just gets routed to somebody else. Like five minutes later the lead's gone. So just know where you're at. I'm not saying you should never invest in buying leads. Just do it intelligently. And sometimes you need to invest in the systems or the people first before you can add that lead flow on top. Otherwise, otherwise you're just pissing money away and pissing consumers off because they're not getting serviced properly. So instead of buying those leads, like I said, invest in people or systems, people and, or systems who can then support more lead flow. All right. I think, I think organic content and investing in doing better and more organic content for most agents is probably the best route to go before you start buying leads. Buying leads is more you start a team, you have a bunch of agents, you have a, you know, you have a decent budget happening and so you can afford 10 grand, 20 grand a month in Zillow lead flow. Because you just need to keep your agents fed, you need to keep them busy, you need to keep their phones ringing. That makes a lot of sense in that situation. It pencils for a lot of these big teams. So I know teams personally that are spending a quarter million dollars a month plus and they, because they're making two or three times that when, when it's all said and done. So of course, why wouldn't you do that? But do you have an extra quarter million to do that? And the system that they do, of course not. So buying leads oftentimes is pissing money away for agents when done without thinking it through. Right. So hopefully you hear me there and understand the nuances. Number two, overpriced branding and vanity marketing. Okay, here's what I mean by that. Old school, outdated means of marketing, while not completely useless and completely worthless, wildly expensive compared to the return you get from it. And here's what I mean. Billboards especially like, like traditional billboards where they have to like put like actually put a printed thing up there versus the new digital billboards which could be super cheap. Like digital billboards could be a great use of your money if you need to get branding out there. If you want people to see your face or your message or a certain slogan or a URL or a QR code or whatever. Digital billboards could be great. But traditional billboards probably not. Bus benches, shopping cart ads, magazines with your face. Like those are ego spins. A lot of times those are ego spans. It, it feels great to have your, you know, or advertising with the golf course, to have your, your name and logo on their freaking scorecard or something like that. Yes, those are impressions, but usually it's a waste. Usually the people that they sell those to are not at a place where impressions is going to pour gas on the fire. Hey, just getting more people to see your stuff is not going to help you. You need more conversations to begin with. You need more to have a fire to pour gas on top of. You need to have lead magnets, you need to have systems, you need to have all this stuff. And so you're doing it in the wrong order, right? So like be careful that you're not ego spending on certain things because I just don't believe that people are hiring you because your face is on a billboard. I do believe that it helps brand recognition Name recognition, face recognition, like that's all that's good. But if you're spending a ton of money on this thing that you could have put into Facebook or Instagram ads, or hiring a videographer and doing more organic content, or just getting really dialed in with your email marketing campaigns, like there's so much fifty or a hundred dollars behind an Instagram story ad can get you so much more than 5,000, 10,000, you know, on a billboard or a magazine or whatever. So just be careful. Understand, is it actually going to get you the results that you're looking for and is it worth the money that you're putting out? And how much of your budget is that money? I see agents spend their entire monthly budget or even more than that. They don't even have a monthly budget. They're just like, I just sold a house, so I'm going to take half of it, put it on this thing. And it's almost like you're gambling. It's like you're, you're rolling the dice a little bit, hoping that that's the thing that all of a sudden makes listings and clients rain from the sky. And if that's, if that's where you're at, you're doing it wrong. I know because I was there and I did the same thing. I would buy a course, I'd invest in this thing, this system for like direct mail campaigns because these letters looked fancy and they were magically worded and, and it increased the response rate by 1%. Like these were great letters. I think it was called listing funnels, like really good stuff. It's still, it's still direct mail. You still like, even when you have the colored envelope and an actual stamp versus a, like a pre sorted, whatever they're called, the bulk mail stamps. Right. Even if you hand write the envelope, it's still only a 1 or 2%, maybe 3% response rate on direct mail. And it's costing you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a month. And I just think there's, you can put that there was an agent that I, that I coached years ago that he was spending, I think it was 3,500, maybe it was $5,000 a month on direct mail. And he was getting a deal or so from it. So it looked like, yeah, it probably makes sense and on its face probably did make sense. But if you look at, could you be getting much better results if you invest that money into something different? And when I, when I introduced digital ads and, and even some organic content, what you can get the Amount of reach and exposure and impressions and contact information and leads that you can get for that same 3,500 or 5,000amonth was so dramatically, it was dramatically more than the one or two deals that he got from the direct mail. So you've got to weigh things there. Even though it works like if I spend 3,500 bucks, I'm going to sell a house and make 7,000. So yes, that makes sense. So I'm not saying you should stop that, but what if that $3,500 ad spend could get you two closings, three closings, foreclosings. You know what I'm saying? Okay. Instead of the overpriced ego spend type stuff, double down on personal brand with video. Okay? Video and social proof. Educate, entertain, be interesting. Deliver stuff that people want or need, like exclusive access to. Hey, here's a list of homes coming on the market this weekend that are not available yet. For example, here's a list of, of new construction homes that aren't on the MLS that you got directly from the builder. That's stuff people want and crave and they're going to trade their contact info to get it. And they're also raising their hand in that process saying, hey, like I'm looking to buy a house, otherwise why the hell would they want that list of off market new construction properties? Double down on the personal brand. Double down on the personal brand. Double down on the personal brand. And so much of the personal brand is not necessarily money you spend, but effort and time. You're gonna, you're going to invest heavily with your time and with your effort. And yes, there's some financial investment along the way here or there for certain things. But you build a brand, everything works better. If somebody gets one of your flyers or your direct mail, a postcard in the mail, and they've seen you all over their feed, it's going to, that direct mail or that postcard is going to work so much better because they're like, oh, I've seen that person. Oh, yeah, yeah. And now they, now you've got their attention. Number three. I see a lot of agents and I, I did this. I, I don't think I overspent on it. I actually underspent. But I saw a lot of agents who overspend dramatically on fancy websites that no one visits. I mean, you're dropping 5,000, 10,000, $15,000 for a custom IDX website that looks all cool, looks all fancy, looks great, but it generates no traffic. You're, you're, you get Zero leads. Because there's a big problem here. Websites are not lead generation without distribution. If nobody actually sees your website, if no one actually lands there, it's not doing anything for you. It's literally worthless. If you have a hundred thousand dollar website that you built, that's just magical and the video that, that's on there that plays in the hero section just makes people weep and they just reach for their phone to, to call you to hire you. Well that's great, but you need people to actually land on that site first. So what, what are you going to do there now? If you also plan in addition to the website, have a great Google Adwords or pay per click campaigns to go with it, that can work really well. But that investment. So just are you, again, it's the ego spend. Are you getting a fancy website? Could you do with a less expensive website like, like I did early on? Could you, could you use this, a less expensive website that still does what you need it to do or do you really need the super fancy Ultra Mega Custom IDX that's $15,000 for setup? I don't think you do. I just don't think you do for the most part. Now you can start with a less expensive one now, but then you graduate. As you grow, as your web presence grows and your traffic grows and your brand grows, you can always invest in upgrading later on. Agents get a lot of this stuff is not necessarily that you're spending it on stupid stuff, but you're doing it at the wrong time. You're doing it too early. You're investing in things, you're spending on things that you're not ready for yet that are really meant for like step two or three or four. But you're on step one or two. So the timing also matters. This is why it's so important to have a good mentor. Somebody that's already done the thing that you're trying to do. Because rather than you trying to figure out this shit all by yourself, you can lean on somebody who's already been down the path. They've already dealt with this, they've already made these decisions, they've already, you know, made the mistakes and learned from them and then you can just leverage their expertise. Having a, having a mentor and, or a coach is the biggest hack in business. It just is. So I, I believe as long as it's a really good coach and you chose well, that's a good use of your money. Not always. I know a lot of agents that get into fifteen hundred dollar a month, three Thousand dollar a month. Five thousand dollar a month. Coaches. And the coaches don't. It's not worth it is all I'm going to say. It's just, it's not anywhere remotely close to worth it for what they get in return for that kind of investment. Okay, so instead of those fancy websites, the website with no distribution that nobody's seeing, therefore there's no leads or anything. Instead some simple landing pages, some, some lead capture pages from your, from your CRM like, like Lofty or kvcore or whatever it's called. Now some, some of these other websites and CRMs that can give you a landing page of homes under 500 with a pool in this certain neighborhood. And then you can just share that and run ads on that and share that in Facebook groups or whatever. Like that's so much easier and you're going to get better results. Number four, the random tech subscriptions. All the SaaS products that we love to subscribe to because we think that some new platform, some new SaaS platform is going to solve all of our problems. And clients rain from the sky. I see agents all the time that are paying for tools that they logged into once or twice or that they've literally never logged into sometimes CRMs, email marketing platforms, AI tools, Canva Pro that you have, you know, two or three different subscriptions for, for different email addresses that you forget about because you're disorganized. Like I, I see this shit all the time. It's, it's the death by the $49 a month subscription. A few of these add up and pretty soon you're like, oh, like $500 a month is just gone. Fifteen hundred dollars a month is just gone. What if instead that 500 bucks I invested into a coaching program or a course that actually showed me exactly what to do and when to do it and how to do it. That's a good use of your money if you choose well. So audit those expenses quarterly. Look, look at your QuickBooks. Look at your bank statements. Look, look what's coming out of your account. And if you see stuff and you're like, I'm not using that subscription, I'm not using that, I'm not using that. Am I still paying for that app for cut it. I mean, cut the fluff and just be laser focused on the stuff that you actually need and actually use the, the key words here, actually need and actually use. So don't, don't bullshit yourself about what that means because oftentimes we are, we just like, we like the feeling of a new, a new tool, a new system, a new platform because we feel like I'm investing and I'm making progress and things are going to be good. And it, it's fun. Business spending is so easily justified in because you feel it's productive and oftentimes it is, but oftentimes it's not. So just be careful with the random subscriptions to different and, and let me say this too, let me say this too before, before I wrap it up here. If you are getting into free trials, set a frickin reminder before that thing expires. As somebody who has offered in the past free trials to my coaching, I cannot tell you how infuriating it is on multiple levels when I have an agent who just doesn't pay attention. They sign up for a 30 day free trial and on day 30 and a half after they get billed they're like, oh, I need a refund because I'm not using it. Well, well no, that's not how this works. Like that's just not how this works. It's. If you sign up for a treat, a free trial, it is your responsibility to cancel it before the 30 days or whenever the trial expires. If you're not using it, if you plan to use it, keep the like keep it and use it another month. But don't blame the company for your lack of planning and your disorganization. It drives me out of my mind. And so I'm probably saying more than I should here but. And maybe some of you will be pissed off, but whatever. Like I, I got to the point where recently actually where I saw this happening more and more and I just put my foot down, I'm like, I'm no. If you can cancel at any time prior to the 30 days. If you wait 31 days and you get billed for it sucks for you. Now you have another month that you can actually use it. You can actually show up for the classes, you can actually log in and watch the training. You can actually take the fricking action that you said you were going to do in the first. So be careful with the free trials because you should not count on the company giving you a refund. I don't even think you should ask if you, if it's your fuck up. Like if I just think it takes a certain type of person, oh, okay, I got to be careful here. It takes a certain type of person to completely just not pay attention to the free trial you signed up for. Then it bills you because you weren't paying Attention. You forgot about it. You never used it, never logged in. It was just like. And then it bills you, and then you get mad at them, and you get mad at the company. You should be pissed at yourself. Why aren't you using it? Hmm. Anyhow. All right, let me wrap with this. Agents really need to stop confusing spending money with investing money. So just because you are swiping your card, just because you. You got some new subscription, bought something, or even hired somebody, it doesn't mean that you're building a business. You're just. A lot of times we feel like we are. We feel like we're making progress. We feel productive when we've done those things, but we did the wrong things. So audit the decisions that you made and be okay with. With writing something off, as, I shouldn't have done that, and then just cut your losses. Cancel the thing. Cancel the thing. Let the person go. Get rid of the platform or the subscription if you're not using it. I've done this many times before where. Like, far too many times, actually, where I'll use some platform, I'll use it for three or four months, and I'm like, you know what? This actually doesn't. It either isn't necessary. It's adding complication to what. Where I thought it would make things easier and more streamlined, but it did the opposite. Or it's just like, this doesn't work. Like, I just don't need this anymore. There's been times where I just like, well, I'll keep it for one more month because I will use it. Oh, I will. But I'm going to get back on it. I am going to start using it. And then you waste all this money, and then you're like, I'm just not going to use it. Let the thing go. Have some discipline. Let the thing go. Because if you really do need it, you can get it back. You can buy the thing or you can subscribe to the thing again. So if you're just swiping your card and feeling like you're making progress and building a business, you're just. You're buying this feeling of comfort, and you're hoping that the problem solves itself. So understand, spending money does not equal investing money. It can, but investing is when you do it wisely on certain things in the right order with the right timing. So ask yourself, with every expense, with every new, new thing that you're going to invest in or spend on, does this directly create conversations? Will it help me generate clients? Will it lead to closings? Will this help me, you know, speed up this? Will it help me condense time and give me the answers? Like if it's a social media coaching or training course, is it going to help you figure out the thing that you're, that you need to do much faster? Is it going to save you six months? Is it going to, are you by, by buying a course and then actually doing it? Is that going to save you a year of trial and error? Well, if so, that might be a great use of your time and your money. But just ask yourself, is this actually going to move the needle for me or is it just another thing? Money should amplify what already works and not, not replace effort and action. So just be careful. I, I look back at, you know, the 14 plus years I've been in real estate and had I saved, first off, had I saved some money and invested it, even just investing in the spy, even investing in the qqq, you know, investing in the NASDAQ index, investing in the S P, just buying index funds or ETFs and just watched what that did over 14 years. Like it's, it's crazy. So much wasted opportunity because I spent too much and didn't hold on to enough. Just don't make that same mistake because it sucks when you look back and you're like, wow, I don't have nearly as much to show for it as I could or should because I wasn't disciplined enough or I, I was just had too many years of lean years and didn't make nearly enough and I was just, you know, just coasting on vapors this for years in my life and my business and it's just not a good feeling. So I hope that this message reaches the agents that it's supposed to. I hope that you're able to make the changes that you need to before we wrap. Be the advisor that your clients trust with keeping current matters. KCM gives you easy to understand market insights, ready to share graphics and scripts to keep you looking like a pro. Try it right now for free over@try kcm.com Bam and hey, before you go, before you go, don't turn this off. Don't skip it. You need to, you need to hear this. Bam X I believe if you haven't seen Bam X in the last couple weeks, like literally, if you have not looked into what Bam X is over the last couple weeks, you are, you are missing out. You do not fully understand how powerful it is. I was in some of their content earlier today within BAM X looking at their their content of the week. Absolutely incredible stuff like they give you canva templates, they tell you what to post and how to do it and it absolutely incredible done for you. Content for agents with marketing, with email copy, with email copy and posts and all this stuff. Imagine having the copy for every marketing email scripts and hooks for every social post delivered to your inbox every week. Go to massiveagentsociety.com BAM X massive agentsociety.com BAMX and just go click play on the video that visually shows everything that's included and what you get. With bamx. You owe it to yourself to spend that three to four minutes or whatever it is. You just go watch that video of what's included and I think after you do that you'll see. Holy I've been sleeping on BAMX massive agentsociety.com BAMX incredible community, incredible platform, incredible content and incredible partners. I love being part of the BAM team. Thank you so much for listening. Share this episode with anyone that you think needs to hear it. Anyone who needs a little wake up call financially needs a smack in the ass. Like I wish somebody would have smacked me in the ass many, many years ago and got me to see the light and gave me this perspective that I have only learned through pain and experience. That I hope you learn without the pain and without the experience and you can just, you know, learn. Learn from someone who's made all the mistakes. Thank you for listening. I'll be back next week with episode 402. Take care, Sam.