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- [00:00]
Luke Acrey
Foreign.
- [00:06]
Josh Dyke
Sales and marketing podcast on a mission to help you close more deals, keep more clients and build the life of freedom you are working towards. But that can only happen if you take action today. My name is Josh Dyke, Chief marketing officer at Reminder Media, joined as always by Luke Acrey, president of Reminder Media. And our guest today is Adam Boxman. With nearly 20 years of real estate experience, Adam has served over 450 clients, with 90% of his current business coming from repeat transactions and past client referrals. His clients typically see just four and a half homes in their home buying journey and write an average of under one and a half offers, which speaks to the clarity and systems he has built into his process. Adam has taken those systems and created Buyer Agency Pro, an online academy designed to help agents build a referral based business. While actually getting your time back sounds a lot like living a life of freedom.
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Luke Acrey
It does. It sounds like a vision that is so grand that Reminder Media is helping people.
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Josh Dyke
Adam, welcome to stay. Thank you for being here.
- [01:03]
Adam Boxman
I love you guys. You know, it's funny, I got to update that November became 20 years in real estate and okay, it's my. I got to update it. We have 500 families that I.
- [01:13]
Luke Acrey
Well done, man.
- [01:14]
Adam Boxman
In November, man. So, yeah, thank you guys for having me.
- [01:17]
Luke Acrey
Yeah, well done. Super excited to have you here, especially because you're unique. Take everybody wants to work with listings, which I totally get. But you have mastered buyers and that's not something you hear. Yeah, it's not something you hear very much in the industry. So for those listening, buckle up. I've had the chance to listen to Adam speak before and he's phenomenal. He has such a unique take on going after buyers. But Adam, I would love to, you know, pick your brain on why you chose to focus on buyers, like what led you there, and then let's get into kind of the tactics that you use to make it like, what is it, 4.5 homes you said, and then 1.5 in the offer. Like, you know, your stats even where I doubt most of the agents listening to this know how many homes they show on average to a person or know how, you know, offers they make. So what led you into working with buyers vs listings?
- [02:05]
Adam Boxman
So long story short, I married my high school sweetheart and we had, we had not such a great experience buying our first house. We were deer in headlights just like a lot of first time homebuyers. Excited, amped up and we made the mistake of meeting a random stranger and we just had an awful experience and life Events took me to changing my careers. And when I decided to change my career, I just said to my wife, what would happen if I got into that business and gave someone the experience I wished I would have had buying our first house. And so it led me into real estate. And then five years into real estate, I realized I'm not the greatest salesperson on earth, but I love the advocacy and representation of helping people through the most expensive thing they ever buy, emotionally and financially. And so I made this crazy decision with an amazing business partner to take on only buyers going on over 15 years ago and just decided I wanted to not be a salesman and meet people and be their advocate and representative. I wanted to help them climb Mount Everest as their Sherpa. And because of that partnership, I put my head in the sand and just started working with buyers and blessed, like, 500 families.
- [03:24]
Luke Acrey
That's unbelievable. Well, most people don't want to work with buyers because you get a lot of. I don't know what the proper terminology is, but, like, people that are kind of, like, just looking, but they're not committed. Yep. And you're showing them house after house after house. You're driving around, spending your gas money, your time. It's very painful from that perspective.
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Adam Boxman
Yeah.
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Luke Acrey
And so how have you mastered. Or what's your. What do you think that you're doing differently, I should say, working with buyers than the average agent out there?
- [03:52]
Adam Boxman
Yeah, that's. I love that you asked that. So it's funny when I've had. I've been blessed, like, five years ago, I started sharing this message of working with buyers with agents all over the country. It seems to be a niche that, like you said, no one's been spending all of their time on it. And I ask agents, like, give me three reasons why you're in real estate. And inherently, I would bet my entire house that two of those three reasons for real estate is that they wanted to get in for money and they wanted freedom of their time.
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Luke Acrey
Yeah.
- [04:21]
Adam Boxman
And then there's always a third reason, which I love to share. I'll share mine, is that, you know, just wanting to give the epic experience to buyers. But we. We focus so much on money and time as the reason why we get into real estate. And then we start literally judging our success based on money and. And transactions and deals. And we don't really give awards away based on how much time we spend in real estate. And so when I got into real estate, I was leaving the restaurant business, working, like, 100 hours a week, and I realized Man, I'm not going to live long enough and enjoy my life with my wife in that business. So I get into real estate and I get in because of money and time. And then just like everybody else, I'm five years in and I'm making money, but I'm back to missing moments of my life that aren't guaranteed. So I just decided that if I'm going to work with buyers, which is what I really needed to do to make myself happy, I had to find a way to build. You know what I call it? I call it a science fair project. I think in real estate, a lot of agents are showing up at their science fair project the day and working on it the night before. And the science fair project, I mean, is the actual client machine that we're building to help our clients with buyers. You can literally, like you said, waste a lifetime of moments in that car showing homes running around for people that you think are committed to you and in the end weren't following you and weren't committed to you. And so I know you can lose time with buyers. And I just wasn't going to do it. I wasn't going to lose time. And so I just decided to sit down and go, let me map out the buyer experience and build my client machine so that I could be proud of it. And so you do. Again, I was going to say you
- [06:08]
Luke Acrey
do something in the buyer's consultation, which I love, which is like kind of setting the expectation. Can you speak a little bit to that of how you kind of. You prevent, you almost block before it happens.
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Adam Boxman
Yes.
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Luke Acrey
The people that are non committal.
- [06:22]
Adam Boxman
So it's led up, by the way, there's a path that gets me there. So the path that gets me to that point of the consultation means that my machine has to have. You have to have a CRM part of your machine where you're literally walking into your day and you know who you're following up with, why you're following up with them, you're genuinely connecting with people. And I think it starts, by the way, if I start from the beginning is the work I did and the work I do in my CRM is meant not to get people to hire me. We work in real estate to get people to hire us in our CRM work. And the goal of my CRM work was always just to get people to interview me, give me a chance to be your professional. And if I did my work in my CRM machine, that's the first part of my machine, then I would get job Interviews. Then the job interview for me became not the listing presentation, it was the buyer consultation. How could I sit down with a buyer so properly prepared and practiced that not only did they hire me at the end of that consultation, which is what we think, we think, oh, we do the job interviews to get hired, I needed to do the job interview so properly prepared and practiced that I actually could listen to the people and affect them and get them to follow me. And the most important part of that, getting them to follow me was how was I going to get my time back in showings? And if real estate, we lose our time in showings, we literally sit at the settlement table and we don't even know that we showed these people 30 hours of our life in showings. I started tracking the number of showings and realizing what was my path to get Those showings from 30 down to four and a half. And the path to that was setting the stage in my properly prepared consultation. So sitting down, if you sit with a stranger in a random, vacant, empty home and you tell them, hey, we shouldn't see these 10 homes because there are things wrong with each of those 10 homes, that stranger is going to think, well, you're just trying to save your time as an agent. I want you to show me those 10 homes. But when you sit down in a properly prepared consultation, sit down with the buyer, show them who you are, show them they can trust you, and show them that you're going to actually go through the properties. And what I do in the consultation is add a filter to the process. I sit down with the buyer and I show them why it would benefit them for me to actually review the property, slow the process down, look at them. And what I do in that process is find what's wrong with it. I point out through a phone call with them before we schedule, everything that I see wrong with the house and what that inherently does, it saves me from standing in that house and wondering, why am I here?
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Luke Acrey
Yeah.
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Adam Boxman
And you know what the cool thing is? We think we give the buyer what they want, and we have for years. We meet them at the house because we think just getting the meet him at the house is going to get us a deal done and make them trust us. The cool thing about what I started 15 years ago by doing the consultation, it gave the buyer what they didn't know they want, but they got, which is their time back. Because instead of them wasting their time seeing 30 homes with me, they were grateful at the end of the experience that I was able to actually Say, well, we didn't look at a bunch of junk homes, we didn't waste our time because Adam was willing. You're the stranger in the, in the house. You're not willing. They don't think you're willing to do anything. They think you're doing it for yourself. But when you set it up in the consultation that you're going to do this work for them, you're going to filter for them, you're going to research for them, you inherently get the win win. I love win win. You get the win win of your life back. And, and they, you know what, what do we want in real estate? We want repeat business and we want referrals. And it's ironic because when you do it the way that you give them an epic experience when you do it this way, helping them buy this house, live in the house they're going to live in, wake up in the morning. When you do it the right way, they look at you as their real estate resource for the rest of their life. And then they refer you like cheerleaders to family and friends because you didn't waste their time looking at the wrong house.
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Luke Acrey
You. Yeah, yep.
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Josh Dyke
Yeah. There's also something smart about that where it's like they're so bought in to you and your process that they don't want to restart that with another agent. What is your. So four and a half is your average number of homes looked at. What kind of time frame does that typically fall in? Because, you know, there's not always the home on the market at the time that you're looking. So sometimes you have to wait for homes to come on market. Do you know the average time frame?
- [10:42]
Luke Acrey
Yeah.
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Adam Boxman
You know what's funny about that? That's all dependent on the market of inventory we have. What matters to me is, and I sit down with the buyer in consultation and I say, I don't care how long this takes. I genuinely, I don't care how long it takes. So do I know exactly, on average how many months it takes? No, because I have a buyer right now. I've been working with them six months. We have looked at, physically one house because the rest of the ones that they wanted to see, we knew weren't the right ones. They love me. In fact, they're the ones that refer me.
- [11:12]
Luke Acrey
That's awesome.
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Adam Boxman
I don't put a time frame on how long it takes because I'm just putting more people in my pipeline. And if the market is like it is now, with low inventory, that means I need more buyers to work with and talk to more people. It also means that I can't be out showing wasted homes while I should be on the phone talking to the next buyer.
- [11:34]
Josh Dyke
Can I ask a clarifying, maybe a dumb question, but you said you work with buyers. If a past buyer that you've helped comes back, do you list their home? If they want you to list their home, we offer,
- [11:45]
Adam Boxman
yeah, I'm a yin yang. I'm just the reverse of what everybody else builds their business. So everybody, every other team has like, you know what? We go the rainmaker that says, okay, I'm the listing side. And then I'll hire buyer agents and I'll run the buyer agents and. And I run the show. I believe that if you have a team, you should run the listing side of your team, and someone should be running the buying side of your team, and someone should be training your buyer agents. Someone should be educating your buyer agents. Maybe if it's not you, it should be somebody specifically for that. And so what we built was, what I just always focused on was, I'm going to run the buying side. When someone wants to list their house, I'm genuinely going to say to them, you don't want me listing your house. You're going to want my partner listing your house, my team member, the person who is the salesperson. And so absolutely, I don't push away my clients to random strangers. And I just built it. So. And I've always said to my clients, I'm not a salesperson when I meet with them in consultation. That's just. That's just how I built it.
- [12:46]
Luke Acrey
Yeah, it's amazing. It's so true too, that what happens, I think, to agents, and I'm curious, your take on, you know, what you would tell them is I think, you know, and just recently did it change in the last couple of years where you have to get a signed buyer's consultation? But it used to be that the sale was, let me show. Let me spend enough time with them to make Josh feel guilty that I've shown him 10 houses. So now he has to use me. Like, nobody wants to say it that way, but that's literally what was happening. What was happening is they would go show these buyers houses knowing that they weren't going to buy it. But that would endear them to that client and the client would feel like they owe that agent something now, and they would stay with them whether they like the agent or not. What do you say to an agent that struggles with saying to their client, hey, you don't want to go see that house? No. You don't want to see that. You don't like telling them essentially, no. What do you say to them?
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Adam Boxman
Well, the first off is this. They have to see the value in having representation in buying a home. It's not saying to them, you should hire me in that conversation. We have to get them to see the value in interviewing an agent and seeing the value in understanding that if the seller is literally interviewing five agents to sell their house, they have to see them see the value in interviewing and from that interview have to decide, okay, I'm going to actually hire this person. And I think in real estate, we try to convince people in those initial conversations to hire us. Here's why you should meet with me. Here's why I'm the best agent. Instead of what I got better at was saying to them, you don't need to self reflect. You're about to meet a random stranger at a house, and you're about to buy the most expensive thing you ever bought in your entire life. Would you ever meet somebody in. In court to represent you being sued for a million dollars? And what we have to get them to see is the analogy that, that I've been using, that I use is that they're about to climb Mount Everest. These buyers are literally about to climb Mount Everest. And you can decide you're going to climb it on your own because everybody can. No one's stopping you. Go climb Mount Everest by yourself. Or you can realize, you know what? I could get hurt financially, emotionally, physically climbing Mount Everest by myself. And so what agents need to start doing is showing in those initial conversations why they need to actually have a Sherpa. And then when they do the consultation, which I got great at, become the Sherpa, not get. You know, man, it's funny, people. I'm like, the kerosene was poured on the fire with the NAR settlement.
- [15:18]
Luke Acrey
Yeah, it really was.
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Adam Boxman
It's like, Adam, wait a second. You've been literally getting buyer agency agreements for 15 years. We need you. You know what the crazy thing is by sitting down with people and giving them what they deserve, which is the plan of how to climb Mount Everest before they start climbing, you actually set the tone as their guide, and they follow you up that mountain. What we've experienced in real estate is, oh, I have to go meet them at the house. Because 75% of people will do a transaction with the first person they meet. And in buying a home, we think that's going to lead to them working with us, it's cool what you said, right. They feel the pressure of working with us over the time we spend. Right?
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Luke Acrey
Yeah.
- [16:00]
Adam Boxman
Well, in real estate, you can decide one of two things. You can decide, I'm going to fight for every deal I do for the rest of my life, or I'm going to give each individual person such a great experience that I don't have to fight for business five, 10 years in because my clients become my referral source. Here's what's crazy. The mass majority of homebuyers are climbing that mountain like you talked about with the person they just met. And the agent feels like, oh, they're going to clearly use me and refer me. I literally had this rocky, horrible climb showing them 40 homes and doing all this work. And like, they think that they love the Sherpa that helped them barely get to the top of the mountain and they got there. And so we think as real estate agents, sending them magnets and things that are going to make them remember us. Literally, there's an epidemic of people that are using random strangers when they go and do it again. Because meeting the person at the house never turned you into what you desire, which is the real estate professional for life, and it never made them refer you. And it's crazy because all I did was slow the process down and say, you know what? You don't want to do this without knowing who you're doing it with. Give me a chance and meet with me. I then perfected the consultation so that when I met with them, I could listen and understand them. And leaving the consultation, it wasn't about getting commitment. Everybody thinks I'm being hired to speak and talk about getting buyer agency contracts. When you actually show somebody through a properly prepared consultation what it looks like to buy a home without a Sherpa, they will never use anybody else. And they will literally sign with you.
- [17:39]
Luke Acrey
Yeah.
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Adam Boxman
In two seconds they will sign with you because they're either going to hire you or they're going to find random stranger. But the thing about it is that when they actually hire you in the consultation, the way I do it has them actually following me. They actually enjoy the filtering. They enjoy the way that they work with my financing person. They enjoy the process. And at the end of it, we get to the top of the mountain and I am their real estate person for the rest of their life. They're never going to climb Mount Everest again without me. And they go, you showed your.
- [18:11]
Luke Acrey
Your value. There's this truth in life that I always see in top producers And I see it in people who do really well in public speaking, people who do really well in sales. But across the board, they don't care what the person thinks about them because they believe in their value and they know what they represent, but they care immensely about the person. Like, it's like they don't care what you think about. So whether you use me or not, Josh, it is what it is. Meaning, like, it's like, I don't care. I'm not going to face this whole rejection or anything because I don't care what the crowd thinks about me. But I immensely care about the crowd. I immensely care about the buyer. And that trait is so hard to master because, you know, I've tried to master it in sales and in public speaking and stuff like that. It's really hard because you do care. Like, I want Adam to like me. I want him to choose me. I want to be his agent. I don't want to lose the commission. You get all the me, me, me things in your head, but the key is to go, I actually, you know, I don't need Adam. Like, whether Adam wants to use me or not, that's up to him. I care immensely about Adam, and I know my value, and I want to share with him my value. And that people can sense that, man. They can feel that.
- [19:24]
Adam Boxman
When you do that, I think, well, for me, it became. That's why I don't list homes, because I do believe you have to be able to be authentic and really authentic when you're with people and when you don't feel confident and credible and optimistic when you're in front of people, it's going to come across.
- [19:40]
Luke Acrey
Yes.
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Adam Boxman
In. In your results. So I do think, like, for me, it was. It was that, but it was also when I'm sitting in front of people, I'm so prepared and practiced that we have to start with if you actually want to impact lives. We get to these meetings and we're so focused on how am I going to get them to hire me, how am I going to get them to follow me. Like you said, how am I going to get them to pay attention to me? And we're not even focusing on the most important part, which is who is the actual person that's in front of me. They're not all the same. Now, there's not a buyer that I work with that's ever been the same person. There's never a couple that's ever been the same couple. And so here's what I focus on. I focus on Their personality and who they are. And I do that as early as possible when I'm following up in my CRM, I'm trying to sit here and figure out and almost diagnose what is the personality of the person. Are they a D and I an S? Are they a C personality? Am I able to actually realize, okay, this is how this person loves to be communicated to. This is how this person likes to be educated. This is how I'm going to guide them up Mount Everest. Because if I try to Sherpa somebody up Mount Everest, and that's what agents don't do, we jump into. So what I do to make that happen, Luke, is that I try to get to know the actual people before the consultation. And so when I'm in the consultation, man, you want to be really great. A comedian is great because they know their show and they can adjust on the fly to the people that are in the show. Who's laughing, who's not laughing.
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Luke Acrey
Yeah.
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Adam Boxman
When I'm. So I could do my consultation in a busy intersection with cars flying past me, and I'm going to know at the end of it, what is the personality of the people that I'm with. By the way, husbands and wives and husbands and husbands and wives and wives are never the same. And so that's what we. That's what I think is the first focus. If I say agents, what do you got to focus on first? You got to learn personalities. You got to understand you're either going to decide in real estate, I'm only going to impact people that are like me, like, like, or I'm gonna find a way to get to know all personalities and show my skills and be genuine. Yeah.
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Luke Acrey
Yeah. Be able to empathize and read people is such a skill in an art. And, you know, doing it in a way that is authentic. Like, you can match and mirror in all the pacing and all the stuff that they teach you in sales. But if some people can actually do it naturally, and others, you can tell it's not authentic, it's not real.
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Adam Boxman
Yeah.
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Luke Acrey
And I. I haven't figured out how to train people for it to be real, because part of it, I think, in my personal experience is like, well, you don't actually really care about this person right now, so you're. You're matching and mirroring for the wrong reason. Even though we're both matching and mirroring for the same reason, we ultimately want to earn the business. But it's. It's like that confidence level. And this is why I love old People. Right. Because the older people get, they get more confident. Right. And they are, they just don't care anymore.
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Adam Boxman
That's right. Yeah. They stop worrying about what people think of them.
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Luke Acrey
Yeah, they stop worrying. Yeah.
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Adam Boxman
And here's one though. I do want to say this because everything I do is emotional. I do love the work I do for my buyers. I, I am emotionally attached to, to the helping people climb Mount Everest. I, that's why I work with buyers. But I want to say this. It's done like with a machine in mind. Getting back to the idea that in real estate, I really believe the great agents are literally trying to polish their science fair project at all times. I think if you asked real estate agents, you know what, what would your buyers and sellers think if they came to your office and saw your business in motion? Meaning is your CRM like, I think your client machine should be based on three things. Your CRM, your consultation work and your client experience. That's the client machine. So if your clients came and saw you working in your CRM, would they see a science fair project that was post it notes and pieces of paper and memory and would you be proud of that? Or would they come and see literally a CRM that was filled with database information, reminders and follow ups? And would you be literally a well oiled, polished chrome machine in your CRM? The second part, when we do our job interviews on the, we don't even look at them as job interviews. We look at them as we're meeting with buyers to get them to hire us or we're meeting with sellers to hire us. Those are job interviews and the people are going to hire the most properly prepared practice person. And when we meet with sellers, we seem to be so prepared and we meet and practice that meeting like in the mirror and with our pets, but with the buyers. That job interview is like a meeting at a home. It's, it's a whimsical, get your criteria and sign this piece of paper. And that's not what a great science fair project looks like mine. When you meet with me, it looks like you're meeting with someone who is immensely prepared to listen. And then the last part is the client experience. How great are we at negotiating? I don't even think agents are negotiating and have had to negotiate. And what are we doing to surprise and delight our clients? So I think from a machine standpoint, what I did was sit down and said, I want to work with buyers, but I want to love my life. So how do I build a science fair Project in my CRM and my client follow up and then in my consultation. And then when I did the experience, did I really get good at getting them through? You write 1.4 offers. That's what I do because I'm prepared to write winning offers and the buyers are ready to do it. It's all a machine. It's not just emotional, is my point.
- [25:23]
Luke Acrey
Yeah, I love it, man. In those three categories, that is the heart of your business. And sadly, most people. And don't feel bad because you're not alone. You are literally the majority. Most people do not take care of their CRM. They have overdue tasks. They don't track their stuff. So they definitely need to focus on that. Want to ask you, like, no matter how you skin the cat, you have to show people houses. And part of the problem is they work. And so they can only see houses in the evening or, you know, early morning or the weekend. How have you made your life work from that perspective of, you know, you talk about the freedom of your time. Is it real in the sense of like, you, like, how do you structure that? I guess is because it feels like. Yeah, but I still got to go show Johnny the house, you know, because he can only see it at night and I got to go show him that, you know, house.
- [26:15]
Adam Boxman
It's why I'm focusing on the time as the most important thing. Because that showing is. If we actually looked at it like hours of our lives, we would be more critical of it. So. Yeah, how do I work around it? One, I know that when I leave my home and wife and kids that I'm leaving for a reason. To see a home that is worth it. Now, it doesn't mean they're all the perfect house. And by the way, 4.5 Homes is an average. Many of my clients have seen nine and 10 homes and other ones see it and they see it on the first one. So we're never going to get away from not working at all.
- [26:47]
Luke Acrey
Yeah.
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Adam Boxman
What I want to do is make.
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Luke Acrey
Well, AI is coming at him. AI is coming. Robots are coming. No, just kidding. Well, you.
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Adam Boxman
You know what? I still think the AI, the robot ain't opening the door and the AI ain't going to be there. But. Yeah. So I think that, well, we'll come
- [27:01]
Luke Acrey
back to this in five years because I think, I think the AI can open the door. But the human relationship, that I would agree with you. Yeah.
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Adam Boxman
Yeah. Well, again, if we can be replaced, hopefully I'm retired long before we actually are replaced. And I'll Let. I'll let the younger people deal with how they're going to help buyers. Yeah, exactly. I'm super critical of it. Now, here's what ends up happening when you do this the right way. The buyer actually is excited by the filtering that you've set up in the process, Luke. So this is not a struggle that most agents have when I leave the consultation because I've set the expectation of the win win they actually love. Hey, Adam. What ends up happening is the buyer, instead of sending me an email that says, send me, I want you to schedule five homes tonight at 7 o'. Clock. I end up getting an email or text message that says, hey Adam, could you research these homes and make sure these are worth us to go to see tonight? And I'll tell you why they say that, because they might have. They want to sit at home and relax and they don't want to look at the wrong home.
- [28:00]
Luke Acrey
Yeah.
- [28:00]
Adam Boxman
So when you set the tone the right way, the buyer doesn't want to leave the house and waste their time and I don't. And so what ends up inherently happening is when I leave the house, my. I'm excited to leave, they're excited to leave. So it doesn't eliminate showings altogether. That's the first thing. The second thing is this. When you build this the right way. I did this myself. Right. I was helping, I helped 30 or 40 buyers a year. And then I built the team where I brought another team member in and I was willing to actually leverage the most important of my life, my time, and help somebody else grow. So I would bring another buyer agent into the consultation with me and they would become the showing agent that would show the client the homes as I grew.
- [28:45]
Luke Acrey
So that's how you scaled it out to even earn more of your time back. Because realistically, what I like about what you're doing is you're only, you're. When you go work, it's serious work. Like that's how I would frame it. It's like, yes, I might have to go show Johnny a home at 8 o' clock at night. Right. Because I'm here to serve my clients. But it's a serious hour that we're spending. Not a wasted hour, which I absolutely love. And so it's more about that you have made your work matter and which immediately, of course, buys back time because you're not dealing with the, you know, looky lose and the people who are non committal. Yeah. So but you're still. But then to leverage out to really get freedom of the 9 to 5 schedule or not have to go out at night, then having a showing agent that is up and coming. There's another guy that I'm going to interview that I've interviewed for before, Will Penny. He's out of Ohio and He closes like 200 deals a year. He's not necessarily focused totally on buyers, but he had a similar thing where he hired a showing agent, he put them on salary, which was interesting. He put them. He paid them a salary and they would go. And that's how he bought back his time. Is that the.
- [29:58]
Adam Boxman
The trick is this, though. The biggest mistake agents make is they try to add these things to the mix because it benefits getting their time back. Right. The show, reducing the showings to get their time back. Bringing a showing agent in. Why? To get their time back. The way to make it actually work is to make the client feel like you're bringing people to the table to make it amazing for them so that they don't feel like you're just getting yourself time back.
- [30:24]
Luke Acrey
Yeah, well said.
- [30:25]
Adam Boxman
Like, so when I do this, when I have a showing agent, it's not random people that are meeting my clients. It's the person that my clients know is part of the team. That's part of the whole picture. If you don't. If your clients don't see why they should follow you for their own benefit, they're not going to do it. And the crazy thing is, when you set it right in that consultation, this is what's crazy. The NAR settlement was the greatest thing to happen for real estate agents who want to work with buyers. Because we believe that all these people that we're meeting, all these homes with, we're like, oh, yeah, I'll meet you and I'll. I'll literally leave every soccer game, every musical, I'll leave dinner tables. I want. I definitely want to get back to this, that we believe that it's worth getting up from vacation moments to go make a phone call, because we believe all of that is going to drive our clients to refer and come back to us. And the ironic part about all that, it doesn't. It doesn't do any of it. And they're right. What they really love is the time you save them by giving them the consultation they deserve. And what they didn't want in the beginning, they don't want the consultation. But they need and deserve it, and they always have. So this settlement has brought to the table that you can sit down with a buyer and your life. Like, I'm Just proof. Fifteen years ago, I did what this NAR settlement is making us do. And what I'm going to show agents is that by doing it, the four and a half homes means that when I sit at a settlement with a buyer, they have never missed their kids soccer games to come see a house. I haven't missed my kids soccer games. And when they get to that settlement, they're actually feeling amazing so well that they're going to refer me. And I've actually built this with buyers when most people would say, wait, you have to show a million homes. No, the consultation saved that.
- [32:11]
Luke Acrey
Well, there's something in psychology, I don't know what, but it's like I experienced this in the people I want to use. And there's this idea of brand and credibility. And a lot of ways you build authority is your willingness to walk away, your willingness to say, this is how it's supposed to work. And though I might not like it in the moment, right when you tell me no, or you tell me, hey, this is how I work. These are my hours. As I think about it after the fact. And now the initial awkwardness is gone. I respect the person more because you go, well, they know something I don't know. And buyers buy from people they look up to, people that they think know more than them, that can get them from point A to point B. And a mistake we always try to make is we try to make us equal to the buyer. But people buy from people they trust that no more than them that are more educated, that have more experience, that know things I don't know. And so your role is to be willing to say no. Like, you don't want the doctor to say, well, what do you think? Yeah, what do. Yeah, you imagine that I'm going to operate on your heart. What do you think? Do you think I should go up through your vein in your arm? Do you think. Would you rather go to the. Just know. You want the doctor to literally tell you this is what you have to do. And you don't care about the bedside manner. Now that's you're dealing with your life at that point. But nobody cares about the bedside manner of doctors. They joke about it, but in a way, you kind of want to have that eccentric person because they're operating on you.
- [33:41]
Adam Boxman
Yeah. And you know what's funny? If these people went to list their. Let's talk about the consumer side. When they go to sell their house, they don't just make a phone call and say, hey, I just met you. Could you Put my home on the market, start working for me. I'm going to trust you to represent me in selling my million dollar house. They don't do that. The consumer doesn't do that. That same consumer is picking up the phone and saying, hey, I don't know you, I know nothing about you, but I found this house at 123 Main Street. That's a million dollars. Can I meet you there? So we're. The consumer has been making that error. Yes, but we've been doing as agents. And we'll flip it to the agent side. The listing agent will literally say, yeah, I'm not going to work for you. We're going to meet, we're going to sit down, I'm going to show you what it looks like to work with me. I'm going to become the person that you trust to sell your house.
- [34:28]
Luke Acrey
But you know why that is, though? You saying that just triggered it for me. I'd not thought about this, but it makes so much sense. The reason why the consumer will do that is because of the scarcity of the product. So house hits market. I want house. There might be other people that want house, so I need to get there fast. And it's scarcity. Exactly. I agree, agree. But they don't know the market. Right. So consumers naturally don't know if it's a buyer's or seller market. So they're thinking, this home, somebody else could buy it. I need to get out and see it as soon as possible. I never thought about it that way of like, yeah, why do consumers cross random agents? It's like, because they don't really care about the agent. They care about the product. They want to go get out and see that product.
- [35:12]
Adam Boxman
They want to go climb Mount Everest, Luke. They want to actually say, you know what, I just want to go climb Mount Everest. And they don't realize until they're halfway on the mountain. Yeah, I probably. And in any market, you need a guide representing you. But let's just say the last five years they've been getting on this mountain with the door opener and then realizing, why have I keep falling? Why did my mortgage. Why do I keep losing the house?
- [35:33]
Luke Acrey
And so here's a scenario then for you. Sorry to cut you off there, but I'm just curious to follow this train of thought through is if I want, if I call you up today, Adam and I go, hey, man, I see this million dollar home in Harleysville, I really want to go see it. Can you, can you get me in it tonight? Are you going to tell me, no, you can't get me in it tonight because you want to sit down as a consultation or are you going to go, hey, I'll get you in it, but I want to sit down with you as a consultation because I want to properly walk you through. Like, are you going to use it as a way to connect or are you going to. Because I would probably transparently use it as a way to connect and tell them I want to set up a consultation, but I wouldn't want to. Just as me personally, I'm trying to think out loud here. I wouldn't want to stop if I call because this person wants to get in that house.
- [36:22]
Adam Boxman
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So, by the way, this is. This is a year's worth of Mondays where we sit down and break down. How do you take a random. Because my life was built on what you just said. Okay. Years ago, my business partner literally decided, I'm going to build it, so I get 150 to 200 Internet leads. So his Google AdWords were ramped up to 200 Internet leads before he had anybody on his team.
- [36:48]
Luke Acrey
Wow.
- [36:49]
Adam Boxman
And so he came to me and said, hey, you want to work with buyers? I was like, sure. I love working with buyers with no skills in any way, shape or form on how to actually take 150 random people that are doing exactly what you just said, which is, oh, I see. 1, 23 Main street isn't your job to just schedule to take me to 123 Main Street? So I was thrown into that fire that you're talking about, but it wasn't. Wasn't one or two a day. It was 150 to 200amonth. Jeez. What. What I learned. What I learned was it took me way too long. I mean, it was probably a lot of failed years of putting myself in that phone booth for three hours a day working on my skills. And my skills really narrowed down to this. It narrowed down to how do I take that person in that initial conversation and build enough trust where they actually want to schedule to meet with me instead of just seeing the house that quickly? And it's. Man, it's a lot of skill. It basically takes what. What I can tell you takes in my mind four things. First, it takes understanding disc. When these people are talking to you, the quicker you can understand their personality, you can convert the relationship into enough trusting where they scheduled a meet with you. The second thing was learning the cornerstones of conversation that Phil Jones talks about. Learning that you have to understand the curiosity and questions will Lead people to the fourth one, which is they do things for their own reason. And so what I would do in those conversations is ask questions that would lead them to going, you know what? Why would I meet you tonight when I don't even know you yet? And so I would start by saying, yeah, I'd love to take you. I'd be happy to take you to that house at 123 Main street and then I would say, but first. And I would ask a question that was easy to answer. So I would take LP Mama, which is my script, and I would say, what's a past question of location? I can ask, hey, where do you live now? Or where did you grow up? And I would guide them and try to basically say to them, you know what? Before we meet, And I get them to understand, before we meet, the best thing for us to do is actually before we see the house, I mean, the best thing we can do is know who you're meeting first. And I got really good at just getting to see the value and see the value in the consultation, not see the value in me. They're hearing from everybody else, they're talking to, oh, you should meet with. You should hire me. You should hire me. I'm a random stranger. And they're talking to them like, agents are talking to them like, well, here's why you should hire me. Here's why you need an agent. And I was just saying, here's why you need to interview somebody.
- [39:29]
Luke Acrey
Yeah, yeah, dude, I love that. So good, man.
- [39:31]
Josh Dyke
Talk about buyer, agency, pro. Why did you create that and what can people get from it?
- [39:37]
Adam Boxman
So it's. It's crazy. Five years ago, I had barely taught anybody and spoken in front of anybody. I come back from an event and I just put my head in the sand. Fifteen years ago, I literally. All the stuff that I talk about now is all the pieces of the puzzle that people help me build my machine with. And so for 15 years, I just kind of dove into Buyer Agency and realized if I wanted to get my time back in every avenue, I had to be better in my CRM, I had to be better in my consultation. I had to be better at being efficient in the negotiation and client experience. And I didn't realize for 15 years that I was building something that most people hadn't been doing with buyers. And so I came back from an event and I said, I'm going to teach a class on the consultation to 10 people. And the lightning bolt of energy that I get that I got by just sharing with people how you can love your life with buyers. And so it evolved into teaching one class to 10 people, into it was one hour class to 50 people. And then it became a three hour workshop teaching not only the consultation, but the whole experience. And I went to Massachusetts one day and there was 150 people in the room. And one guy came to me and said, you know what, you should probably start teaching this in a way where people can actually come together and do Buyer Agency. And I couldn't teach one agent at a time. I was never going to be able to do that. And so I decided I was going to build a group of agents that love Buyer Agency. And as I taught, I was like, you know what, just join this group, join my group. And it became something that became my passion. So that it evolved over five years now into a group of agents that meet three times a week. We do Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, three hours a week. And we, we talk about on Mondays the CRM and how we get job interviews. We talk on Wednesdays about the consultation and how we set the tone as the guide. And then on Fridays we talk about the client experience. And it went from literally not selling anything. It's funny, I'm still never selling anything. I'm working. I hate sales. I don't work in sales. I just decided I wanted to make something available where agents around the country who do want to learn how to work with buyers can get a genuine message. So it's grown literally by me traveling and speaking and talking to agents and then saying people coming to me and saying, hey, how can I join? And now we're, you know, we're up to 50 people in the group and that's awesome. It's, it's easy to access. I do want to say something about this. Real estate coaching over 20 years can be a, a wide array of value to the person that's actually getting the coaching. And the best thing that I did in my life was find coaching that was specific to the area that I needed and not have one person coaching everything I needed. I wanted to find coaches that helped me in the different areas I want to, I'm happy to be the value of coaching for buyer Agency, but I'm not going to coach listings and I'm not going to coach and be that value. So I want people to come to me and be a part of our group for Buyer Agency. And if they want to do listings, they should get coaching from someone who does listings and they should be able to access it and not spend all of their Money out of their pocket on one coach who's trying to coach them everything. So I want to make it accessible. Like there's not a person in real estate that couldn't, that can't join the group.
- [43:10]
Luke Acrey
How much is it to join the group?
- [43:13]
Adam Boxman
It's literally 59amonth to be a part of.
- [43:15]
Luke Acrey
Oh yeah, that's awesome. And you meet three times a week.
- [43:19]
Adam Boxman
Yeah. So this is the best part. Everybody thinks I'm crazy, but when I started a year ago, there was five people, it was three hours a week and I got to pour everything I did to those five people.
- [43:30]
Luke Acrey
Yeah.
- [43:31]
Adam Boxman
Now it's 50 people and it's three hours a week and I can pour my message into 50 people in those same three hours. The greatest part about this is the value that those people are now bringing to the group. Those first five people are now adding to the group and they're now actually sharing their experiences. And instead of doing amazing one on one coaching, it's many people saying sharing their experiences in the comments.
- [43:54]
Luke Acrey
You've really built a community which is really neat. Like crowdsourcing experience, crowdsourcing knowledge with a great, you know, vision and leadership in what you're doing. Man. I freaking love it. Great stuff.
- [44:05]
Adam Boxman
I want to. And by the way, they can cancel any time. There is no one. When I, when buyers hired me, I always gave them the right to fire me if they didn't feel like I was the right agent. When they hire me, I say, if I'm not the right agent, you can end the relationship. I don't want you stuck with me. So when I built the group of agents, I said, well, I'm not going to sell it. I just want to be a magnet for people that want to work with buyers. But I also want them to know if you join and it's not working for you, you can cancel and you literally are just not paying 59amonth anymore. Yeah. Accessible, man.
- [44:35]
Luke Acrey
Where do they go to find out about it? How do they.
- [44:38]
Adam Boxman
Buyeragency pro.com okay. And then also just so everybody knows, man, I love giving away free stuff. The one thing I know about building a community without selling it is share, just share everything. People literally shared with me for 15 years how they work with buyers, which helped me get to this point. So on April 9th, I'm going to host a. I'm hosting a free 90 minute webinar called how to Make Six Figures in Real estate and still love your life. Love that it's 90 minutes on going through the client machine. How do you Fine. Tune your client science fair project on every angle and we'll be sharing a lot of what I did today. But I'm going to do it for 90 minutes for free on April 9th and I'll get you guys. There's. If you go to my Instagram in the profile there's a link to go and register for that.
- [45:26]
Josh Dyke
And what's your Instagram handle?
- [45:28]
Adam Boxman
It's Adam Boxman. As simple as it gets. I also have a stand store that literally has all my free. I have a whole bunch of free materials. I call them freebies. There are a bunch of things that I use, tools that I use that I just give away because people gave them to me and I. And I feel like I have to give it away.
- [45:46]
Luke Acrey
That's awesome, Adam.
- [45:48]
Josh Dyke
Well, I appreciate you so much coming on here and sharing your story and all of your knowledge. I know people are going to take a lot away from that. And also thank you to everybody who is listening. You can get all of the links that we mentioned in the show notes of this episode. You can go to staypaidpodcast.com to get those as well as the videos. If you enjoy this episode and want to show you support, go to YouTube.com reminder media. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and as well as give this video a thumbs up. And if you want to get hold of me or Luke, you can email us@podcastmindermedia.com or shoot us a message on Instagram. We're at Stay Paid podcast for this episode of Stay Paid. I'm Josh Dyke, guys.
- [46:25]
Luke Acrey
I'm Luke Acre. Adam, Fantastic man. I love your take on it because so many people are focused on listings but yet there are so many agents that serve so many buyers and nobody really is coaching that much on them. So I think it's really, really practical stuff. I hope people go check it out and get your free resources. Join your group. My action item for everybody listening to this is what I think is so powerful that Adam has done, which you should do in your business is he's actually tracking how many homes he shows to people. And that's where it starts. You can't improve that which you don't measure. And so you got to actually track this stuff and so track how many offers, track how many homes you sell to somebody. And then if you really just break down and go, oh my goodness, you know, he has his whole CRM machine that he is obsessed about. He has his consultation and then he has the whole client experience and what a great way to think about your business in terms of what you're doing. But I would encourage you, action item wise, you can start today. It doesn't take anything but energy and action, which is start tracking your numbers. Remember, the difference between top producers and mediocre producers in every business is top producers take action. Take action on that today, Sam.