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Stay Paid Podcast
Hyperlocal Farming, Cookouts & Neighborhood Domination
00:27:44
How do you stay focused when distractions pull you in every direction? In this week’s Stay Paid Q&A, Luke, Josh, and Cody tackle real agents’ toughest questions about farming, focus, and follow-up. Discover why cookouts and partnerships work,...
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A
Foreign.
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Today, we are answering your burning questions in real estate, business, marketing and more. On these episodes, we take live calls from listeners of Stay Paid. And if you want to have your question answered live here on the show, go to remindermedia.com ask and submit your questions there. We'll reach out to you to get you scheduled. Or you can follow us on Instagram at Stay Paid podcast and just shoot us a DM letting us know you'd like to come on the show. My name is Josh Dyke, Chief Marketing Officer at Reminder Media, joined as always by Luke Acrey, President of Reminder Media. And solo this week from the Acre Brothers Realty Team Director of Sales, Cody Smith. Welcome, gentlemen. How's everybody doing?
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C
It is fantastic to be here. Ready to give some golden nuggets to these.
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B
Ready to give some golden nuggets. Our first caller we're going to bring in is Brahm. Brahm, I believe, calling from Maryland. What's up, Brahm? How can we help you?
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D
Hey, I'm doing well. How are you guys?
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C
Good, man. We are doing fantastic. Brown, it's great to have you on the show, man.
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D
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I guess just to jump right into it, I was wondering about how would you guys advertise to, like, hyper local markets? Because, like, you know, the area that I'm in, we have neighborhoods, like, close by, nearby where I live.
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B
But.
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D
But I wanted to learn how to advertise to them, you know.
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C
Okay, so great question. Can you tell me a little bit about your business? How long have you been in the business? What does your business look like this year in terms of how many deals you've done or revenue that you've generated?
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D
Yeah, of course. So I've been in the business for about five years now. Yeah, five years. Yeah. And like this past year, I guess I'm going. I'm not making too much. I'm making about like 35, $40,000, hopefully by the end of this year. And I guess, like, you know, like, I was. I was. I was. When I found you guys on online, I was like, dude, Reminder Media sounds like the perfect thing ever. Like the best thing ever.
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C
So I like the sound of this.
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D
No, I was definitely like, you know what? I definitely want to give it a try. I wanna. And it's. I think it's definitely helping, like, create my influence around certain areas. But I was like, you know what the. I. Instead of focusing on, like, the areas that I. That I desire, I want to learn to, like, cope with the areas that I'm in. So I definitely Wanted to understand.
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C
Yeah, you want to own your neighborhood. How many transactions have you done this year?
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D
I have done eight. Eight.
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C
Yet eight sales this year so far?
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B
About one a month.
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C
Okay, nice.
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A
Awesome.
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C
You're not doing terrible, man. So that's really good. I think eight might be the average that an agent closes all year. So fantastic there. Okay, so you want to try to figure out how you dominate in the local neighborhoods that you live in. I'll give you kind of what we've seen agents do. So at Reminder Media, for those who don't know, we work with tens of thousands of real estate agents all over the country. We have a couple different specialties. One is geographic farming. So we do a lot of work with postcards for agents and then paid advertising through Facebook and Instagram. So we have found that geographic farming is an incredible marketing strategy in order to make you the local expert. The key with geographic farming is you want to take a look at the neighborhoods that you live in. And a couple of things you want to look at. One is you want to look at turnover rate. So turnover rate is essentially the number of homes that sale per year in the neighborhood that you're going after. And here's why. Just because you live close to a neighborhood doesn't actually mean that you should market to them, because what if nobody ever moves out of that neighborhood? Now, you already said you've seen some listings come up, which is a good sign. A good rule of thumb is you should look for neighborhoods that have at least a 6% turnover rate. So that means 6% of the homes that are in that area, they actually transact every year. So that's your market size is you go, oh, if there was 100 homes next to you, let's just say that would mean six of them actually sell every year. And you know, that's my target market size. I'm going to try to capture six listings out of this neighborhood. And the rule of thumb is 6%. You can do a little less than 6% if the. If the price point is higher because it allows you the money and income to market for longer without getting a deal. But usually you want to try to go for 6% or higher. So I would go look at your MLS and look at, okay, how many homes actually sell in these neighborhoods around me every year. And then you can Google this or you can get this from the US Postal Service, the number of rooftops on an actual. In that actual area that you're going after. And then you take the number of sales over the last 12 months, divide it by the number of rooftops. That gives you turnover rate. Second thing that you want to think about and, and look at is the actual frequency that you're marketing to that neighborhood. So everything in marketing is usually about frequency. And the reason why is because frequency creates familiarity. So how can you keep in touch with this neighborhood consistently enough to where they know, like and trust you and they think of you over the competition? There's this stat in real estate where 81% of sellers interview one agent before they choose that agent to sell their home. So the big lie out there in the industry, and this is something that you should always remember, the big lie is that you have to be the best. You do not have to be the best real estate agent. The big lie is that ultimately they're going to work with this person because it's their brother or whoever. No, no, no. The truth is they work with the people they think of first. And the reason why the brother or the brother in law or whatever gets the deal is not because they're the best. It's because it's not because it's the brother, it's because they thought of that person first. 81% of people choose the first agent they interview. So you need the frequency that gets you first. And I think it was Grant Cardone, the saying is Starbucks doesn't have the best coffee. They're just on every street corner. You've got to be that in the minds of all the people in this neighborhood. So we Recommend at least one touch point a month. So that's 12 touches a year. But ideally, the best agents that we have seen, like Frank Cassoldi, right? $60 million in volume every year. And I think he's, Westfield, New Jersey crushes it as an agent. Jordan Mott out in Silicon Valley does. He's already done 100 million in volume this year and it's only in August. Right. And in he's out in Silicon Valley area, they're hitting their neighborhoods two times every month to Jordan does every three weeks. And so you've got to go, can I afford to hit these homes twice a month? And you might be thinking right now, because you're making, you know, 35, 40,000, you don't have a lot of check equity to spend, so that means sweat equity. So how do you get known? How do you become the local market expert? You need to go door, knock all your neighbors, bro, shake hands and kiss babies. Exactly. Maybe not kiss the babies because that might come across really weird, but you need to shake some hands. Like you need to go door knock every single neighbor, right? And the way you need to approach them. And Cody, I'd love to get your take on this is the way you need to approach them is value centric, right? You can have offer them a free value of their home and you can time it after a postcard is delivered or after a sale happens. So when one of those listings comes up in the neighborhood that you're going, man, I didn't get that listing. You can still be the educator to everybody else in that neighborhood. I'm going to throw it to you, Cody, because I know you and your team, you guys do door knocking, you do circle prospecting, these type of things. What's been your experience in trying to execute on this?
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A
Yeah, there's a couple different ways you can go with this. I'm going to go specifically like with a story from personal experience in my neighborhood. So what I would do is the way to add value is do some type of event as far as like a grilling, like a cookout, a summer, like, hey, I'm gonna do a summer cookout here. Or what we've done because we have kids, is we'll do a night where we all go together of getting candy from neighborhood houses. So we do like a chili cook off and then we go out and do Halloween candy. That just gets people together. And then from there that's you're just building relationship with people. That is what real estate is, right? We're meeting as many people as possible, building relationships with them so we can add value to one of the most important things they can do, which is buy and sell houses. So my encouragement to you in the door knocking, yes, you need to do that. But what's the add value you can give that's even outside of real estate? And that's like, hey, I'm doing a cookout at my house two Saturdays from now. I would love to see you there and just get to meet you and know you and you know, go from there. Because then they're gonna ask, hey, what do you do for work? You know, oh, I do this. And then you're gonna be like, oh, I'm in real estate, I do this, blah, blah. And then you're starting this relationship to then be the person they know like and trust to future use. So that's what I've done. One of my neighbors, he didn't end up selling his house. Cause it wasn't a smart idea just about a year ago, but he was gonna use me for that. He ended up Buying an apartment for an investment property used our team for that. So just from a personal story, that is how you know one. Just cause I'm a very extroverted person. I like to do it anyways.
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B
But.
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A
But in addition to that for your business, it's. That's how you're starting relationships. Gives you an excuse to knock on the door, right? And that's what you're looking for.
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C
So let's break this down. Let me summarize it for you, Brown. So what you're going to want to do is look at your neighborhoods and make sure first that it's actually worth marketing to them by checking the turnover rate, that there's actually transactions that happen. You pretty much know it because you're seeing them, but you should always confirm that. Then second, you need to lay out a touch point plan. You know, I've got to touch these neighbors. That sounded wrong. I've got to get out there. Yeah, I got to kiss these neighbors. I got to get out in front of these neighbors. Goal two times a month. And so if you can write a little check equity and send some mailers, that's great. That could be one of your touches. If you have no check equity to spend, meaning no money to spend on marketing, that's okay. You can get out there and door knock like Cody just walked through in his experience. You can invite them to an event. Then you have social media and social media. The problem you have is that you don't. You're probably not friends with all your neighbors. That should be a goal when you're door knocking is try to friend the people on Facebook, start a community group with Facebook. But you can be posting and become what I call is the local mayor. Right. Of your town. And the perfect example is what are the restaurants close to you? Give people the top 10 restaurants that you believe are in the area. What are the churches that people should know about in the area? What are the gyms? Where are the local doctor's offices, the parks, the school districts?
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B
What.
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C
What does it cost to buy a home within the neighborhood you live in? That's a social post for you. What's the salary you need to make in order to be able to afford to live in this area? You know how walkable is the area? What's the crime rates in the area? All these are searchable. You can go to ChatGPT. Literally just, you know, basically spell out what I just said and say, hey, create for me social posts that I should be doing and it will create for you options that you can then post. And your goal here is that if you think about this in whole, you're going to be starting to be seen on social. They're going to be seeing you out there door knocking and hustling. That speaks volumes to people when they see someone young and ambitious out there working hard. And the key in all of this is you cannot stop after a month of doing it, two months of doing it, three months of doing it, you have to commit that if you want to dominate this area, you need to be thinking 10 years, you need to be thinking, I am going to put effort into this for years and years and years. So people just end up when they think real estate, they think of me. There's nobody that knows more about real estate in this area than, than Brahm. And that will ultimately get you the business. It just won't happen overnight. A last tip I'll give you is partnerships can help you fund a lot of the marketing that you're doing. So the person that you sent the eight deals to, from a lending perspective or title perspective, an inspection perspective, ask them if they will chip in, give you 50 bucks for that barbecue that Cody mentioned, ask them if they will chip in and advertise with you on a Facebook ad. Facebook's limited to 15 mile radius, so you're not going to be able to zone in just for that market or that neighborhood, but at least you can be running in the community. And then how do you build reciprocity and partnerships? You need to promote them. If you want to get referrals, be a referrer. So you should be referring these local people that you have right in that area and you should be going live with them on Instagram, collaborating, posting about them. Here are the top businesses, the arts and craft store that's local to you guys, whatever it is. And if you do that consistently enough, you will beat the other agents, because we know they're not doing that. We know 99% of them are not doing that. Does that make sense?
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D
Yeah, that does make sense. I open my perspective. I definitely want to try that cookout thing, see if that works out. That sounds like a fun thing for everybody, you know, so definitely want to try something.
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C
Yep, try that. Let us know how it goes. Connect with us on social, man. Let us know how that goes. Go door knock. Normal conversion of door knocking is usually 1 to 2%. So just keep that in mind. So you might door knock 100 doors. You might get, you know, eight people that talk to you, or so four of them might be interested in an appointment one actually might turn into appointment. Right. And you get a 1% out of 100 doors that you have door knocked. So just don't be discouraged. 1% to 2% is very normal. Normal go off rates for appointments in the industry are around 40%. Normal appointments to actual close is 25%. So that just gives you some metrics of like most people just get so discouraged because they go knock a hundred doors and they, they barely get anything. It's like, no, no, no. That's every lead source pretty much, except referrals, because the referrals are given to you with automatic trust built in. But every lead source is going to be a 1 to 2% conversion usually.
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A
And an easy way to door knock an area you don't know is do you want like do an open house in the area the door knocked two days before? And then just telling them about the open house. Um, and then in addition how that got that is they found out their value of their home and you know, obviously it made sense of how much money they made. You know, how much yours is worth. You might be the same boat as them.
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C
That's a great tip. When you see a listing pop up in your neighborhood, if allowed, you should call that listing agent and see if you can run an open house for them. Okay, right. Because a lot, a lot of times you're able to do that, especially if it's the same brokerage that's, you know, definite. You can do that. But yeah, you should do that 100%. Other low hanging fruit. Look for the expired listings in your neighborhoods. Look for the FSBOs in your neighborhoods. Those are low hanging fruit. If there's any fizbos, expired listings, obviously be on that right away. Absentee owners would be a third one. These are people that own houses in the neighborhoods that you're talking about, but they don't live there. Those are natural ones to look at, but you could develop a whole plan. But you gotta be the expert of this neighborhood and know it inside and out.
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A
Okay.
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D
Yeah.
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C
Amazing. Brian, thank you.
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B
You got 50 ideas. Pick one. Take action, brother.
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C
Thanks for listening, man. Thanks for joining the. Yeah, of course.
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D
Bye.
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B
All right, there you go. You can get your questions answered live.
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C
You think I overwhelmed them there? Too many ideas.
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A
I only gave two. Josh.
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B
All right. He liked the cookout, so I think he walked away with one.
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C
Exactly. At least. Hopefully I'll try that.
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B
You can get your questions answered here live on the show. If you go to remindermedia.com ask, we'll reach out to get you scheduled this one was a write in. We couldn't get Jorge on the show, but Jorge asks. I tend to get pulled in different directions and lose focus and can't commit to one or two items to grow my business. How to stay focused.
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C
You need to come on, stay paid so I can give you 50 items.
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B
This could not be a better question.
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A
After.
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B
After.
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C
I just helped our last guest with 50 different ideas. Oh my gosh.
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B
How do you stay focused? How do you eliminate distractions? You know, maybe Cody, if you want to share from your perspective from, from, you know, running a real estate team.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Like where do you kind of be the most effective? Or how do you eliminate the distractions or. Or do you avoid the distractions? How do you kind of operate there?
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A
Yeah. Twofold. One would be pick three core pillars you're going to go after and do them for at least six months. So because you never know if it's going to work out unless you do it for somewhat of a time. So six months is typically the minimum. Maybe three, but six months to a year of try the one thing and do it over and over to see if it actually works. Um, and then what I coach a lot of our agents on because the they come in, they're like what do I do? And they need really specific focus. And so we time block their calendar very specifically for what they have to do every single day. So my encouragement would be to take the three hour spot in the morning from 9 to 12, have it be that one. One of the one pillars you're doing, which ours is mostly like calling online leads and you just do that. You only do that for three hours. Everything else but aside, what's the one thing that's going to move my business forward? And you just focus in for those three hours. You have everything else going on. You're. It sounds like you're really busy, Jorge, and what you're doing and that would change your world if you're able to focus in on that one thing for three hours every day times six months. Good night, dude. Where you could be.
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C
Yeah. It's so well said and you guys do really, really well. I mean you just had a couple new agents join the team that are absolutely.
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A
One guy already has a million.
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C
Never been in real estate before. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy and. But it comes from your years of experience. Our experience is realizing, hey, this is where you need to focus. This is how you need to time block your day. Only thing I would add to that is you need a Cody in your life. So, Jorge, you desperately need a Cody in your life, meaning you need a coach, you need a mentor, you need an accountability partner. Because how often do you meet with the agents, Cody?
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A
Once a week, review and I admission to three morning meetings of like, where's our day at? What are we doing?
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C
Exactly. So it's that accountability coaching that is so critical you can pay for it.
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A
Right?
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C
There's the coaches out there that you can pay for or you can find somebody in your brokerage that will hold you accountable. And maybe you hold them accountable, but you got to have an accountability partner that's going to hold you to what you said because ultimately we all fall down and we need others to call us out on our bs and you need somebody in your life that can do that. So super well said.
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B
Yeah. And then make sure that you are extremely clear on your goal. If you are getting pulled in multiple different directions, it's because you think that this next thing is going to get you to where you want to be. So making sure that you have a clear target to hit and then all of these other things that Cody and Luke align all of those towards that target. And if that's what you're really dreaming of and you can picture what your life would be like when you hit that target, that'll give you the motivation to stay disciplined. On. On the.
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C
It's interesting. I was on a call yesterday with someone trying to get some mentorship. This gentleman has run multiple companies within the industry of real estate and has grown them, you know, at different levels of the business, but has grown some to multi hundred millions, so bigger than we are. And I was just saying, you know, we're trying to get to the hundred million mark. That's the next ladder for us, you know. And he was just asking him about the greatest leaders and how to attract them and what to do and all this stuff. And he shared, he goes, really, really good leaders that are. You're trying to get from, you know, this 50 million to $100 million range. He goes, what they are very good at is seeing the math of the business and replicating that over and over again. And I think that's really applicable to what Jorge's talking about here and you guys are talking about, which is you got to look at the, the goal, find the pillars and then it's just a math equation that you replicate over and over again. And your job is to stay in that zone of genius and see that through. So he was telling me like sales, you know, how many salespeople you need how many leads you need, what generates those leads and you're just, you know, the pull the levers to pull to move those. And the great, great leaders play the math problem and they again, they don't get distracted. Jorge struggling with distraction. But that really stood out to me of going, hey, do I know the math equation for each major thing in my business? And do I have a leader that knows that in order that they are focused on that 100 of the time and tracking KPIs on that and pulling levers based upon that? And that was a great takeaway for me in a mentorship call I literally had yesterday. Love it.
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B
Well, have a fast one here for the end because we had another caller schedule. They weren't able to make it. But we'll go with this one from Soledad. They chatted in. What is your pet peeve regarding client follow up? So what have you, what have you seen Cody in your business? Maybe other real estate agents? Maybe it's something that you guys may have done at one point. But what, what kind of irks you?
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C
Can I have two pet peeves? Go ahead. I have two. No, no, no. Okay, let Cody go first.
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A
Yeah, I would say when I. What I'm coaching agents. Why they don't follow up is because they don't know what to say next. So they don't leave good notes. They don't set expectation at the end of the call for that client to know when they're calling next. So one simple thing you can do is at the end if you don't set the appointment. Go. Awesome. Okay, here's what I'm going to do. You know, I want you to look at a couple houses and I'm going to text you over. I just want to see your, you know, what you think about them, what you like, what you don't like. And then let's plan on a call in three days and just go over those houses together. How's that sound? Oh, well, I'm busy this three next three days. Okay, completely understand. What about next week? Next week? What about two one month? You know, just. I keep, I get rejected like six times. Tell you the follow up. And I learned this actually through I worked at a call center for 10 years. Started as a phone agent, worked up to director. And that is the one of the main things I took away is the follow up is key and communicating to that. So then I'm giving the expectation. So when I call I already know. I set my future self up to let them know I'm going to call. And then number two, I'm going to leave notes of what we talked about so I don't have to spend time listening to the call or figuring out what the heck am I going to say to this person. But instead, I've already talked to them, gave them an expectation, and then I act on it. Because what happens is you're going to get to that file, you're going to go, yeah, I don't know what to do. Hey, I was just checking to see how it's going. They're like, what do you, what do you mean? I don't even.
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B
I love that you gave that tip because that is my pet peeve when people call me and they don't know what to say. This is not my job to carry this conversation.
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C
You felt so good awkward for me for no reason.
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A
Reason.
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C
Right.
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A
And so instead, like, you already know exactly what you're gonna do because you left yourself notes, you set up expectation with that client. It's going to be a huge win rate tip. This is confidence. It's the confidence feel of that call. No one wants to make that second call. You don't know what to do, but you know you have to. And then you don't end up doing it because it's too, it's too much pressure, too much stress.
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C
Yeah. Now, so well said. My pet peeve can help you know what to talk about, or at least one thing to talk about. One of my pet peeves is people are calling their past clients and not asking them for referrals. And they dance around the reason of the call. And it's so inauthentic, if that's how you say it. And it, they don't realize that you must ask because if you don't ask, you'll never receive. But the key to asking is you're planting the seed. You're not going to probably get a referral on that call. But when you ask, when you state your intention on the actual call with somebody, you plant the seed. And now every other touch point that you, you follow up with waters that seed. When you say to Josh Dyke, hey, do you know anybody you could refer me to? I'm looking to grow my business and you know, as I think of all kind of my best relationships, you, you pop up in my mind. And yeah, I would love to work with more people like you. I'm just trying to meet more people. You might not know somebody exactly today that's looking to buy or sell, but anybody pop into your mind, I'm planting the seed with Josh that even if he doesn't have anything for me, he knows Luke would love referrals. And now all my other touch points just water that seed. It is such an irritation of mine where it's like, gosh, you don't get any referrals because you never ask anybody. We get maybe 15,000 to 20,000 referrals a year from our client base and we ask for almost all of them and we get 15,000 to 20,000 referrals. And they close at massively high rates compared to our other sources. But we're asking and our clients are happy to give them. But the client isn't thinking about giving you a referral. You got to ask for it. Not every time, but at least a couple times a year. You should be asking your clients. Here's why. Also because one of the best business advice pieces of advice I ever heard was don't rob people from the joy of giving. Do not rob people from the joy of giving. When you give them the opportunity to give a referral to you, they feel good. They feel good. They're helping you out, and so don't rob people of that. Second pet peeve for me is, you know, the touch points of the follow up that we send tends to be all transactional. And then we wonder why people treat us as a transaction. We wonder why they replace us with the next agent and they don't use us is because you're touch pointing with people. You're, you're following up with people and it's purely transactional. And you need to realize that, hey, you know, a cup of coffee, going out for a drink with somebody will do wonders for your relationship with them. And just. I chose my financial advisor by getting beers together. I chose my insurance agent because we first went to Mission Barbecue, right? And he had already been hitting me up on LinkedIn and all this other stuff. But the reality of what made the connection was the human to human relationship. Don't underestimate the cup of coffee. Don't underestimate the relational, you know, touch point that you're sending to people because it might not pay dividends in a direct response way of like, I did a cup of coffee, I got an appointment. But it will do wonders for you in building the ultimate brand and business.
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A
In the long term, which is how I won't take your job right there. That's the personal part that they can't do it. Can't take you to Mission Barbecue.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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B
It'll bring it directly to your house and drop it off.
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C
And yeah, my prediction, people are going to be marrying robots in the future. Ladies and gentlemen, you heard it first here, I swear.
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B
Awesome. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to everyone who sent their questions in brown for calling in. You can get all of the show notes for this episode where you ever listen, wherever you're listening to it, as well as going to staypaidpodcast.com where you can find all of our episodes. If you like this episode and want to show your support, head on over to YouTube. YouTube.com remindermedia make sure you're subscribed to the channel and give this video a thumbs up. And the best way to support the show is simply to share this episode with somebody that you know. You can contact me and luke@podcastremindermedia.com and of course, follow us on Instagram here at Stay Paid Podcast and follow the Acre Brothers on Instagram as well. Acrey Brothers Realty Team at Acre Brothers Realty. I'm looking at Cody. Say Cody. Yes, a creep brother. Okay, thank you all so much for this episode of Stay Paid. I'm Josh Dyke.
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C
And I'm Luke Acre. Guys, remember, the difference between top producers and mediocre producers is you can hear 50 ideas all day like I gave Brahm earlier. But you got to take action. That's what top producers do. Take action on that today.