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Practical SEO Guide for Real Estate Agents in 2025! Unlock strategies to boost your listings, attract clients, and dominate search results.
Are you a real estate agent looking to boost your online presence? Our Effective SEO Guide for Real Estate Agents for 2025 is here to help! This informative podcast/video delves into cutting-edge SEO techniques explicitly tailored for the real estate industry, including keyword research, on-page optimization, and link-building strategies. Transform your approach and attract more clients—tune in now and enhance your digital footprint.
#1 – Keyword Strategies
#2 – Content Strategies
#3 – Leveraging Local SEO
#4 – Technical SEO
#5 – User Experience
#6 – YouTube SEO
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. We will do episode 452 today, and we are deep, profound, deep, deep, deep in my comfort zone. We will talk about how to rank in 2025 for real estate SEO. This is literally what I do for a living. I eat, breathe, breathe it. I have hundreds of clients inside this space, and I’ve worked there for 16 years. Usually, we would call in an expert, but I probably am one of the better people to call if you are ever interested in this subject. So here we are doing an episode inside My Comfort Zone. Now, before we get started, though, my co-host is the person who’s been so generous in setting this up. He chose it. I had nothing to do with it. You can ask him. You know what? Now that I said that, John, please tell the audience, did I have anything to do with this subject?
I thought it was time that we touched it. We skim around it quite a bit, don’t we? I thought it was time we had a bit of a hardcore. But this will be an intro because we could do a series. We could do a whole season on this subject, can’t we?
Yeah, absolutely. So, for those who may not be familiar with you entirely or may only catch one or two of our shows, why don’t you give a little wind to who you are and why we’re doing a Mel Wright podcast in the first place?
Yeah, thanks for that, Rob. Well, I’m the joint founder of mel-right. Com. We’re a very light platform, real geeks, but better, better value; you get better service from us. And we also can give you a fantastic website that you own based on WordPress. So if that sounds interesting, it should go to the MailRight website. I go over to you, Rob.
All right. And my name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound-R-E-M. I got my start in the real estate marketing industry working for Edge and Image. I had been running substantial call centers, and they hired me to lead a new sales division. They gave me my run of the place once we did a little trial, and I decided I wanted to do an online marketing division, and we built one out for Agent Image. So, since the first minute I set foot in real estate, I’ve been doing online marketing, specifically to real estate agents. And most of the online marketing I’ve been selling has been SEO or organic. There have been all sorts of offsets, social like you, John, and all sorts of other things I’ve done over the years, such as video and video editing and stuff like that. But it all comes down to the actual marketing part—real estate SEO, how to rank in 2025. Practical, and I’m reading from what John wrote here, Practical SEO Guide for Real Estate Agents in 2025. Unlock strategies to boost your listings, attract clients, and dominate search results.
It’s funny because we have this exciting intro, yet the actual things we do don’t change much. The subjects and matters John wrote about are still the same; honestly, they will remain the same. It’s not going to be much different. Number one on the list is keyword strategy. Why don’t you talk to us a little bit about… John, you know I can just go. I could do all 30 minutes and barely breathe. I’m giving you a spot to jump in here.
I’m going to attempt to rein in your fascism because this could get techy. We lose most of the audience quickly. So, I’m going to try to control your enthusiasm. So, keyword strategy. Producing content where there’s no search intent, i. E. People are not searching for the content you’re making, which is, to some extent, going to be a waste of time, or you’re not going to get the results you’re looking for. So, you need to research what people are looking for. In a local region, that’s going to be a little bit hard because a lot of the tools, you just won’t have to search for you to make a choice. But on the other hand, you don’t have to be too sophisticated. You can look at the national trends, and I’m sure Robert will give you some tips about finding the correct keyword search terms and strategies. And because most of the people you’re up against, if they’re not hired somebody like Robert and his agency, they’re probably not going to… You’re going to be in the top 20 % anyway because you have listened to this podcast, and hopefully, you’ve listened to some others, and you’ve gone to Robert’s website.
Just knowing about this puts you in the top 20%, I think you would agree with that, would you? Yeah.
I would agree with that. Let’s talk about some of the ways that the search is changing. I just did the search, best places to find a home in Los Angeles, and I got an AI overview at the very top of the page. I got a few links, attributes, attributions where all of the snippets are being taken from the AI. That’s the place that AI is improving is that there’s attribution for the content, at least in Google’s version, which is my favorite version because they’re actually honoring the people creating the content. But guess what? John said I was going to give you a hack for keywords, and I am. Because when you get past the AI snippet and you get past the areas to live in, which is the next thing that’s served up, you do get people also ask, which is something that’s featured in almost every single Google search that there is. Search has gotten so much simpler that because everybody was already trained on a more antiquated way of doing search, when I explain the new way, John, everybody gets confused. Search is now 100% semantic. That just means that Google has broad subjects that it throws most search into regardless of the keywords that you target.
I can’t put it any simpler than that. We can say best places to find a home in Los Angeles, but also finding a home in Los Angeles will yield the same pages, basically. Google just decides what page is best for many subjects and sends everybody there. It’s been pushing for a long time for people to write longer, deeper content and the web complied. Actually, usually one blog post is a good answer for the top 10 places to live in Los Angeles. So people also ask is, where is the best home in Los Angeles? What is the best place to live in Los Angeles? How to get a house in Los Angeles? And where is the cheapest and safest place to live? The people that search best place to find a home in Los Angeles, those are the other keywords that they use. There is no reason for you to do additional research if you were a novice Content creator. There’s just not. You would just find broadly the topic that you’re interested. You type it in and you look at the subsection of subjects and make sure that you write or say or film something that falls into those categories.
I can’t make keyword research any easier for those people listening to the show. Now, when you are a medium to advanced user of the search engine and you have some experience understanding how Google is going to send traffic into content, that is when tools that we could talk about become really useful. There’s many, many keyword research tools that fall into the useful category when it comes to doing research. Some of which will help train you the same way that I’ve done on the podcast. The problem with tools, John, and the problem with the information age in general, because I have 15 things on my list to study right now, and I have I studied none of them because I just want to hit my head against the desk about how much stuff I have to learn as a founder, and it is jaunting. So I haven’t done it. I I know many people are just like me. I’m not alone. So everybody’s like, head desk, when you say SEO, keyword research, whatever, whatever. So my advice is keep it to the simple strategy that I just told you, and that It will take you five minutes to apply it.
You cannot, even I would say, Okay, if I could really do it in five minutes, I’m in. All right? Which leads us very seamlessly into number two, content strategies. I’m going to pick this up and let you go, John, because I’ve got something I’m hot to share right now. Content strategies. Listen, John is probably going to give you the technical version of content strategies. I’m going to I can shock everybody and not give you the technical version. Content strategies to me are like so much of SEO. Google has gotten so much better at rewarding people that make good content with good traffic.
Oh, actually, I was going to say something very simplistic, actually. I’m just throwing them, I apologize. I haven’t done that very often. Give me some slack, Rob. I haven’t got it. I didn’t need to do it. Just through it.
So listen, we’re going to… Content strategy is about… So user engagement is where SEO is at. It is. That’s it. And Google has gotten so much better at rewarding people who are making good content with good traffic, which is what I was trying to say before John interrupted me. All right?
So- For the light comment.
Okay, light comment. And here’s the thing about talking about stuff. You have to be passionate. And if you’re passionate about the subject that you’re talking about, it’s very likely that you’ll make a reasonably good piece of content. And if you like something that people can engage with that they want to hear or see, Krista Maysior and all these people have made a very good living off explaining how to be a funny person and then do funny videos and create interest that way. I never tell my clients to do that. What instead I focus on is what you’re passionate about, whether that’s walking your dog, the neighborhood that you live in, swimming, fishing, flying, boating. It does not matter because so much of real estate is lifestyle-based these days. That’s what people really lean into the realtor’s for. Really, what you’re looking at is, do I have any interests that I can talk about online in the area that I live in? If you have none, I would ask the question, why did you choose real estate? As your profession? Because you should have some interest in the local… And if you didn’t have them when you became a realtor, you should develop them as a realtor so that you then have something to, one, service your clients with better, and two, something to talk about online.
There is so much every single one of you, even like little, teeny, tiny cities like Toubach, which is the smallest city that I serve. I have a client in a city of 5,000 people, and we have so much to talk about. It’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s desert town. You understand what I mean when I say that it’s close to you up there in Reno. There’s not that much to do unless you are a desert lifestyle person, like riding horses, taking pictures of snakes and cactuses, and I can go on and on.
No, I’m not kidding. I take pictures of our snakes all the time. Don’t ever go at me, So that’s my advice for content strategy, is find something that you’re really deeply into.
And it does relate to SEO, because if you can talk about it with some passion like I can for SEO, you will have a very good chance of engaging your audience. All right, Tom, take it away. You’ve been bubbling up at this service. Let’s hear your very simple thing that you wanted to say.
Yeah, it’s called empathy, folks. It’s putting yourself in other people’s shoes. It’s not writing about your achievements. It’s about putting your mind in the mind of your clients and writing down half a dozen things that they would want to know about, and then putting those in search, and then looking at the competition, and then writing something that gives a bit more value than the competition. End of story. It’s a lot more to it, but fundamentally… Well, a lot more, but the fundamental piece is that, and a lot of people overthink it. But you got to put yourself into the mind of your clients. What are the things that they want to know?
If you don’t know that, ladies and gentlemen, and there’s nothing wrong if you don’t, then my first exercise as a realtor would be getting into the mind of people that are buying and selling real estate. I would do that any way possible. I would go to open houses and not with the intent of generating leads. I go there with the intent of meeting people who are buying selling houses and developing a series of questions. For those of you that are younger in real estate, I envy you because you could get away with the, Hey, I’m a student and I’m doing a study. I’m just researching what home buyers are concerned with today. Can I just ask you a couple of questions as long as we’re here? Maybe you’ve got to get the permission of the realtor. I don’t know. But one way or the other, go to model homes, go to developers, go to places where people would be interested in even having a very young, inexperienced real estate salesperson there. Figure it out. Go, hang out on the floor of of your realtor brokerage and stay there and do your homework until somebody walks to the door and then you ask them the questions.
Make sure that you have the opportunity to talk to people. If all of that fails, go to people that were recently bought or sold a home, which you can find. Instead of even trying to sell them a home, you just call them up and you say, Hey, I’m doing a survey. Can you tell me what your recent concerns were as you bought this home? There’s a thousand ways to break the nut of how do I get in touch with people who have bought or sold a home recently and figure out what their concerns are? Because once you know those, you have everything that you need. You can’t assume. You should just ask. If you ask and you figure it out, You’ll be way ahead of where most realtors are. We’re going to go to break, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about one of the most important types of marketing for a real estate agent, full stop of any kind in any vertical, paid or otherwise. So stay tuned. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. It’s episode number 452, and I’m going to instantly deliver on my promise for the next form of SEO, which is local SEO.
All right? Right below that, categorically, because John missed it here. No, never mind. He didn’t miss it. Never mind. I’m going to hold on to it.
You got me worried there. He’s getting his own back for me interrupting him in the first half. He doesn’t like it, folks. He doesn’t like it.
I can’t keep my thought straight when you interrupt me. That’s why I’m not an entertainer. People would joke with me and I’d be like, And I don’t remember what I was going to say anymore. I can only adlib, but my adlib is nontangential. Actually, maybe I could do entertaining, but I certainly can’t try to do education. All right, so, John, we’re going to We’re going to talk about leveraging local SEO. We started talking about this before the show, ladies and gentlemen, and John was talking about how he has been doing some paid SEO and how it differs.
My partner has. I want to quantify that. But we’ve talked a lot, we’ve done quite a few episodes over the last year, haven’t we, about this subject, haven’t we? It’s linked to the other categories discussed in the first half, but it’s its own beast in its own right. We could do a whole series on SEO, and then we could do another whole series of four or five podcasts just on local SEO because it is a totally different beast. Google got a whole different department that deals with local search, and then a sub-department that just deals with real estate. It’s linked to your phone, them tracking your IP address, linking content more locally to your phone. It’s a whole world, isn’t it, Rob?
It really is. It’s a whole world. It’s a whole new source of revenue. It’s a whole new source of development. They’ve been working on local for a long time, all with the intent of eventually getting to what’s called LSA, Local Service Ads. They wanted another vertical to sell, search into, and they wanted one more specific to local business owners because that particular type of business owner was advertising the least in AdWords because it wasn’t as effective to market your garment shop as a big brand or somebody who would put out something on AdWords. It made all the sense in the world, if you’re Sony or whatever, to do ads on Google. Not Not so much if John was still running his dry cleaning business, or I was still running my house cleaning business, which was for both of us 20, 30 years ago, everybody, so it was a long time ago. But still, those businesses Anyway, local service has fixed all that. And local SEO is such a big topic. It deserves its own space. I am not going to try to educate any of you right now on on local SEO. All I’m going to say is this, because it’s so important that you hear it.
I don’t know of any type of search engine optimization, an organic traffic stream delivered to a tool that is as trackable, that is as monitorable, that is as monetizable as local service ads. And you can do what John and his partner do where they really sponsor ads. And we do that, too. We just don’t focus on it as much. It’s like we’ll get you into the ads, but we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. We’re just getting you submitted, and then you’ve got to do the bidding process yourself and all that stuff. We’ll give you some advice. But honestly, you’re usually up there against 100 or 200 agents if you’re in a reasonably busy Metro market. You’ve got this long cycle of people that you’re sorting through. However, having said that, it’s one of the lowest costs of acquisitions for a deal that you’ll ever get, and each agent will probably get one or two per year. You really, just because I’m going, Oh, you’re up again, you still want to be there. That’s the problem. You want to be in the local service ads. You can either do it yourself, you can hire an agency to help you, it doesn’t matter.
But local SEO, the organic ranking, wow, have I seen some agents make so much money? 10, 20 to 1 returns even after they’ve hired us at $500 a month with a set up fee. Massive returns because most people don’t know how hyper local is working. If you were going to focus on one type of SEO and you only had a very limited mindset and budget and all the different things, I am always going to say either local or YouTube. And local is easier because honestly, it’s easier to just hire somebody to do that for you. And it’s a much smaller kernel of SEO, your total knowledge that you need to have is probably two hours a month worth of effort, and you can dominate local. That’s what I got for local, John. Do you have anything you want to add?
No, I think you’re spot on there because I would say almost 90% of your agent competition will not be doing what you’re doing, what Robert’s just outlined. So the return you can get if you listen to this episode and then listen to some of our old episodes, It’s probably the biggest return you can get and the quickest return you can get for doing stuff yourself, isn’t it?
Yes, it really is. Now, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to talk about something that I have made a lot of money off of due to its complexity, which is technical SEO. And shoot, do I hate talking about it? Most SEO guys love talking about it because it gives us a to show you how complicated SEO is. There’s 200 things that Google looks at when it looks at a web page, 200 to this very day. Ai and other tools are definitely shortening that stream. There are things making that so that it’s easier. However, do those things still get looked at? Yeah, they do. They just get measured differently. Google has never stopped looking at the same things on a web page, ever. What’s happened is the way that they rank those 200 things has changed. I tend to stick to the basics. What is important right now? It used to be something called link building was very important, and it still is to us. It Its importance has decreased by about 80 %. It’s not that it’s not important, it still is. It’s just not nearly as important as it has been. User behavior is now the number one signal on web pages.
That’s it. So make making it very easy to say, Hey, let’s do clickable content, and now, bang, bang, bang, bang, we’ll see our SEO skyrocket. We only need a minimal amount of link building, which is a technical signal. On page, internal linking, I can go on and on. There’s lots of stuff that Google looks at on a page, and they still look at it because the page has to be readable. When you look at technical SEO, 90% of it comes down to how readable are the signals. That That’s it. How readable are the signals? Even page structure and link structure and all the technical SEO stuff is really usually so that Google can get two ancillary pages on the website without losing track with the Crawler. So that That’s the link strategy right there. Technical SEO is a bother for you guys, for me, for everybody. My recommendation for those of you interested in technical SEO is to go to Maas or or to Neil Patel. Actually Neil Patel and Maas are beginner level. When you’re done with them, go to Brian Dean. When you’re done with them, go to Nathan Gotch and Adam White.
Okay, that’s it. But that’s my learning Curve. That was my learning curve for the last 10 years. The people that I refer to are geniuses that work with major brands. You want to know how I got to where I’m at. I took what I learned, the little crumbs. I applied it to real And that’s why I keep saying I’m a real estate SEO expert. And one of the best is that I’ve worked on more projects of this kind than anybody that I’ve talked to in a long time. John, take it away. What do you think about technical SEO? You put it on the list. I’m almost a little angry at you because of that.
Oh, you normally are. One really big tip, folks, whatever site you are building, I think you should build it on WordPress because it’s inherently, if done in the right way, one of the best platforms for a real estate website to be SEO friendly. But a big tip is a free Google product that provides… It’s called Google Search Console. And you really, as soon as the website is built or you’ve built it yourself or you got something, you should link, you should set up a Google Search Console account. You will need a Gmail account, I think, to do it. And it’s free, and you set it up. And then you’ve got to put the UOR of your website in so Google can index the website. And then it will send, if If there’s any really major problems with the indexing of the website, they will send an email that’s linked to the Gmail account. And if you get one of those emails, you really want to look at and try and get it sorted out. But it’s totally free, and you really, really do need that, because if you’ve got a ton of problems showing up, and they’re really the red type that Google’s really shouting about, it’s really important that you sort them out, in my opinion.
I don’t know what you think, Robert.
I I agree with that for the most part. Google has constantly moved the needle, and what they’ve done is they’ve educated people to the point that now they’re starting to talk about contentful paint and it’s either LFP or LCP stuff. And I’m not even 100% sure what that is.
I’m not even sure, right?
They keep moving. So I don’t disagree with you. You use simple tools, and everybody’s got to understand I’m an SEO guy. These days, I do… It’s like, Listen, man, let’s try to get as much as the simple stuff right as we can. Let’s use a font that’s easy to read. Let’s link correctly on the pages. But when we start talking about images that are slightly the wrong side and giving us LCP, which, by the way, are yellow and red problematic areas, which is what you just said, here’s the thing. You got to figure You got to be a goddamn genius to go through and figure out exactly what Google is wanting.
I wasn’t really. I was talking about some of the basics because of the nature of this show, I saw it as a 101 introduction to the subject.
All right. Well, then, yeah, I guess I’ll… Obviously, I’ll agree with quantifiers. So number five, because we’ve got two more subjects in the bonus subject for this show, I think is going to be YouTube, which a lot of people don’t put into the SEO category. But guess what? As you can tell with the drum roll that we’re doing here, we’re putting it into that category. It should be in that category. It’s always been in that category. And we’ll explain why. But before we get to that, we’re going to talk about user experience a bit. What does user experience mean to you, John? I mean, obviously, I go on and on and on about it, but what does it mean to you?
Well, you got to get people to the website, and then you got to provide them content. And it’s how easy is the website to navigate. If it’s really hard to navigate, they’re not going to go and look at other stuff on the website. And Google’s watching all of this. And if they found you in search, what Google wants to see is that they go to the Pacific bit of content that has drawn them to the website, and then And they go and have a look at the rest of the website. That’s what Google… And the longer they’re on your website, the more Google will give you credos, and the more Google will think that your website is a really great resource for those type of people. And so the other content goes up in search. So they’re watching all of this? How long somebody stays on the website? Do they go to other bits of the website? And they’re measuring it all. And so user experience, that’s how I judge user experience in the context of this 101 introduction to real estate SEO.
And I I like that. And listen, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to use an analogy, and then we’re going to move on. And this shocked me. I’m not going to lie to anybody. This surprised me when it happened. We took on an older client, an English lady that I had been talking to for a few years, and had always skipped doing any SEO work because it was too complicated and all the things that we talked about on the show.
Does she drive you as mad as I drive you?
Yes. That’s good. Yes. But she’s also brilliant, just like you are.
All right. There you go. Okay.
So yeah, but be honest, sometimes it’s maddening because she’s so particular in an odd way. She We took her on and she was really expressing a lot of doubt, but she’d reached her place in a career where every form of advertising that she had tried had failed. And she knew that she had to burn the ships behind her and just do what we told her to do. We discovered that while some of her content, like top 10 reasons to move to the city that she lives in Westfield, and she’s made a public case study for us now, so I know I can use this as an example. That content was received okay, but we discovered that she almost practically went viral when we started talking about 10 mistakes that home buyers do. It just the English accent and what you always comment on, John, like the persnickety behavior. People loved it. They loved it.
My dog, Kuba, she shares it, does she?
Oh, God. And what’s more, it’s not just that they loved it. She actually got business almost immediately in the first few months because we’re posting these edited videos to her hyper local Google business profile. And this is where the user experience thing comes in. We posted the one video about five mistakes that buyers make in the city that she’s in, and all of a sudden, her profile just screamed up the ranking, just all the way to the top. That bang, just like that. She got calls, and one of those calls turned into a deal. It’s the calls that everybody wants who’s a realtor right now, John, which is listing calls. She got a listing call from another older lady who, just like her, who commented on, God, I’ve been waiting for somebody to basically be speaking my logic, things that people are going to hate to see in the house, because she got really persnickety about it. Clean the grout in your tile, no funky smells.
Yeah, it is a difficult balance because obviously, most people, if I understand the reasons, most marketing website content is very bland, very unopinioned, because it’s really easy. It’s finding that balance of being opinionated, but not so opinionated that you really rub up the majority of people the wrong way. But on the other hand, just so much content on not only real estate websites, but almost every website is a total-Washed it down. It’s total bull fest, isn’t it?
Yeah, and that’s part of the problem with the internet, is that real opinionated content like the podcast do that causes all these problems. Listen, there’s a massive audience for legitimate and honest, but in order to be legitimate and honest, you oftentimes have to over-embellish parts of your personality to become something that people want to engage with. And I think that Jackie did a very good job, in case she’s listening to the show, of balancing her… She was saying it all with a smile, but she did have a lot of really like, and you do this and this and this and this. I was like, I could see very easily why the video was so popular. Okay, so moving on to the very last little piece of bonus content, and the show has gone long, no surprise. We’ve got about five minutes to make it 40 minutes long. Is It’s YouTube SEO. John, it is stunning to me how many people do not realize that this is an SEO thing. It is a property. It is a Google company. It is a marketing service like any other. It’s the second top search engine in the world.
Eighty % of the content that was consumed last year was video. The only video platform in the world that competes with Netflix at this point is YouTube. So it is a massive platform where the vast majority of the world spends its time. I search for my music there. I search for my movies there. I search for commercials there. I search for knowledge there. I find every expert for every single subject that I look for on YouTube at this point. John, how about you?
Yeah, I don’t. I actually have a television, but it’s not plugged in. I haven’t watched American television for almost eight years, but I do watch stuff, and it’s YouTube. If I’m not working or socializing or outside, I’m normally looking something on YouTube or Twitter or some social media. But it’s just massive. It’s just the numbers are… I have a couple people I know that have got audience of about 200-250,000 subscribers, and I’ve got a tiny audience. I’ve got nothing like that. I’m envious of that. That’s in the WordPress space. I’ve got somebody I know that’s got audience of 250,000. But that’s still nothing. If you’re not in the Minion plus, you don’t even register in the world of YouTube. You got to be over three million subscribers to get into the top 200 list, I think. It’s just mind-blowing.
It is indeed, because so many people are there and there’s so much money to be made on the platform, but all I will say is this, there are 13 to 14 critical things that you can do to a video in terms of allowing Google to categorize it better. The allowing it to categorize it better sets you up with a significant significant advantage over people who do nothing. That is why there is YouTube SEO. It exists, it’s real, and it is actually more complicated. Well, it’s not more complicated. It’s a harder set of work to optimize a video than it is to optimize a blog post. There’s more that goes into it, but there’s more probability of success. Because it is so time consuming to optimize a video, some of the The best YouTubers I know do not optimize, fully optimize video. They understand what they should do. They don’t do it because they understand how much time it takes, like manually closed captioning versus using a service like Rev to do it for you. Everybody uses Rev, but Google doesn’t give you any extra credit for using an automated tool. They give you credit for manually typing out what’s on your video, which, by the way, we at InboundR EM still do, which is why I I always say to everybody, Listen, man, if you want your video to rank, then we are the only game in town when it comes to real estate SEO, specifically, because we are the only ones that I know of that are not using any automation inside the entire process.
It is a very long process. It takes you 30 minutes to shoot the video, and maybe you give us a 5 or 10 minute video. With Jackie, it took us 13 hours per video, John, to work on it. She does not spend 13 hours. It takes us far longer to do the support work than it does to post the video. Youtube SEO is a thing. Whether or not it’s for you is really a question of just how committed are you to the strategy, so on and so forth. For established YouTubers who have already gotten a lead or two off YouTube channel and you’re wondering if there’s some way to improve, YouTube, that’s when a YouTube optimo, like SEO is like, Oh, yeah, you’ll just make 10 times more money. Simple.
Anyway, John, do you have anything to add? What was the other two things apart from the caption? You said there was a couple of other things? What were they?
Oh, there are 13 things. You want me to go? Okay, so it’s- You said about three.
There were three significant things.
Three major. So, video captioning is one, and location tagging is the second. And I don’t mean location tagging because you can do a city or a latitude. Latter longitude is the bonus. Okay, so the city is relevant but not nearly as relevant to Google as the actual latitude and longitude, which connects directly to the Google Maps algorithm. Now, all they know is that they can connect it to the metadata on the video. If the two match, they know that you’ve been honest. That is a big deal. They’re trying to verify the credibility of the video. They throw these little, tricky, hacky things in there. They’re like, Hey, are you real? And are you trying to trick us?
Do you think I’m honest, Rob?
No.
No, I don’t. What’s the third and final thing then?
The third and final thing that would be hacky on videos is probably everybody’s already heard. But I’m going to say anyway, it’s video content like the text in the description. So, 80% of the people who watch your video do not read your description. You should know that everybody knows that. But once they do read the description, the hack that we have found, of course, for content that is current is if you have an Apple phone, specifically an Apple phone, and sometimes Samsung, but you have to install these apps. But installing emojis and making the video index engaging and readable is a massive ranking factor. Massive. So, if you’re doing some extra work inside the description, not just the standard cut and paste, these are all my other social channels, which is what every video producer I’ve ever seen does. Not just that. You handwrite a video description and use emojis and other exciting visuals so that when someone is glancing at it, they immediately notice it’s different.
So I need to become an emoji king, then, Robert.
If you wanted to know How your videos rank on the Mailright channel, yeah.
Yes. That’s my fault for Grace, isn’t it? I haven’t become an emoji. I’m being sarcastic. That’s some of the dark English humor. Oh, for fuck’s sake.
I just cursed. I just added 10 minutes to John’s editing work.
He said 40 minutes of this. It’s going to take him a whole week. It’s going to take him a whole week to recover, folks. That’s what it’s going to take.
All right. Without any further ado, do you have anything else? Those are the three. Yeah. Okay, we’re going to wrap it up, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for tuning in to us today. We appreciate it. John and I are eternally grateful for your ears and your eyes. We hope, more than anything else, that we have been helpful to some degree. It makes a big difference if we have likes, up, and thumbs up our content. Even if it doesn’t make a difference to our business in general, one, it helps us rank better, and two, it gives us a dopamine hit, which John and I both need because all content producers are super needy. All right, that’s it. Have a great day.
That’s bloody. Genuine words were never said.
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With Special Guest Ron Jones, Property Developer
Tips and insights on collaborating with property developers. Unlock the secrets to successful partnerships in real estate today.
Are you looking to navigate the complexities of working with property developers? This show offers invaluable insights and practical tips to empower you in your real estate journey. Learn how to communicate effectively, assess developer credibility, and negotiate better deals that align with your goals. Watch our video today for expert guidance to equip yourself with knowledge that can transform your investment experience.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen—episode number 451 of the Mail-Right Show. We’re here with Ron Jones, and today, we’ve got an exceptional treat for you because we’re going to touch on a subject that many of you have been asking for, but we have not found the right person to have that conversation with. Today, we think we might have with Ron Jones. He is a property developer specializing in the fix and flip genre. We’re going to cover a lot of really cool subjects related to that. For those of you who have an investment side of your business, this is the podcast episode for you. Ron, you are the guest, and John and I do this every week. Most of our listeners are return listeners, so why don’t we let you introduce yourself first?
Sure. My name is Ron Jones. I’m based in Honeyton Beach, California. If you don’t know where that is, it’s about an hour south of Los Angeles. I’ve been flipping properties for about 15 years. I could give you some further background: I was a real estate appraiser for 20 years, and then 2008 happened, and there was no more real estate appraiser industry. I started using my skills as a market valuation expert to find opportunities to flip, basically buy, improve, and sell properties. In 2008 and 2009, the market didn’t climb enough to meet that model. We bought real estate notes nationwide, buying them at discounts and solving their problems. But when the market started climbing, we started buying properties at foreclosure sales, short sales, and REOs. Then now, we do speculation, which is to go into a house and see how we could add value, either through removing and replacing, making lovely, or reconfiguring a floor plan, or solving a structural issue like a cracked foundation or mold or something like that. Then, we identify what we could sell it for and how much it will cost to get us to finish the product and sell it for a profit.
Very cool. Well, you’ve had a lot of challenging years, but right now, If I were to guess and just make a very broad stab, I would say you’re going to be walking into a golden era for your business. Because of the proliferation, Right now, amongst real estate agents, the chatter is almost exclusively about listings. How do we get in touch with people? How do we try to get existing homeowners that are not selling to sell? What’s the mechanism to convince them? Improving and getting out at top value is a compelling discussion at this exact moment in history. Before we get into that, though, or any of my fearless co-host questions, this show was founded and created by an English bloke. For those who don’t know, his name is Jonathan Dinwood. And Ron, if you don’t know, because you might not, John is a legend in the WordPress world, which is a-I would use the word infamy. Okay, so John is infamous in the WordPress world.
Is that good? Is that bad?
I don’t know. Some people, it’s not very good, Ron, but others are okay with me. When you get to our age, Ron, part A lot of you don’t care anymore, do you?
All right. John has established a show called WP-Tonic, one of the top three shows about WordPress. He has had every guest relevant to the WordPress world on his show, including the guy who created WordPress in the first place. WordPress powers 22% of the websites on the web to give you an understanding. It is a massively dominant platform. John has a tremendous amount of development and grassroots connections, and one of his side ventures is Mailright, an all-in-one platform for real estate agents. That is how we got into doing this particular podcast. With that, wind up, John, why don’t you say what I’ve left out and introduce yourself to somebody who may not have heard of you before?
I think you’ve done a fantastic job. I have to hire you to be my promoter, Robert. But it’s just a great platform, folks. You have a CRM landing page, automatic email and text sending out, functionality, a built-in calendar, and a couple of other things all in one platform at a fantastic value price. We love you to go over to mail-right. Com. Have a look and book a chat with me. We love you to become part of the family. Back over to you, Rob.
Ron, I say this to you because it’s easy to talk to a single person, but I’m really saying it to everybody. I am a very niche specialist, but I stand almost alone. I am probably one of the world’s leading residential real estate SEO specialists in the entire United States. I have an agency that I’ve also founded. We do websites and SEO campaigns, but we’ve gone in a different direction. We focus on content and high-quality answers to people’s questions, and we take a long-term view, which when you talk about lead generation, is not popular in residential real estate. But I, too, might be walking into a golden age because with all the challenges as it relates to the buyer side, more and more people are starting to scratch their chins and go, maybe a longer term view is necessary. Let’s dive right into this. One of the questions, and I agree with John, it’s always good to know the who, what, why, when, where of every guest that we have on the show. Property development, you gave us a small windup in the beginning of the show. You did tell us how you got into it.
Sure. I would love to know, give us a little bit of… Let me ask you a question. You get in front of somebody and you’re talking about property development, how often do you actually leverage your 20 years of experience as an appraiser inside those conversations?
Inside the conversations that are social? Not much because usually the recipient, the person I’m talking to is I’m not of that level. I’ll talk to a real estate agent, but real estate agents and appraisers think, and investors think differently. To answer the question of how much do I put my knowledge of valuation into a conversation, very little, but the component of valuation to the business model that I have is enormous. That was a huge advantage I had getting into it because a lot of people struggled getting into flipping properties because one of the major components is really being able to be in with what you’re going to be able to sell that property for when you go to put it online. I was an expert at it, and it helped. That’s not to say you could do it. It just gave me an advantage.
Gave you an edge. I was actually asking about your business edge. You would say, specifically as it relates to business, you felt your 20 years gave you a leg up.
An edge, absolutely. I When I started going to foreclosure sales and buying properties there, I got approached by… Associate, we’ll call him that I used to play basketball 20 years prior, and he calls me out of the blue, and he says, I’ve been going to the foreclosure sales for a year, and I haven’t come up with any. You’re getting them for fairly regular. What are you doing different? One of the biggest things is he really couldn’t get a feel for what the exit value was. He was bidding incorrectly. He wasn’t putting his model together I helped him with it. I helped him buy properties. This guy who approached me had been a real estate expert his whole life, but he was in other facets of real estate. He wasn’t in residential. I had something he didn’t have, and yet the fact that he was a real estate professional.
That’s really fascinating. You, by the way, Ron, and I did some research on you, but I look at your LinkedIn profile, and I didn’t really see if you have a YouTube channel and such, I don’t I know that, but I’m going to tell you right away your level of expertise in the market that we’re in, if you are taking a pass on making evaluation statements on YouTube, you are missing a massive opportunity to promote yourself and become a leading expert. This is such a hot topic right now, and it requires really detailed, disciplined voices. I lived in Huntington Beach. I know where your home base is. That is a tricky Everything on the shore is so expensive. You better have an incredibly good eye because it would be easy to go underwater by a couple of million if you picked the wrong property. Without question. Yeah. So, John, I’ve got a little bit of the who and why. Do you have anything you’d like to add or ask?
I’ll go on to questions. So, Ron, what do you think of some of the biggest misconceptions that real estate agents have in working with you or approaching you or when they find you on your radar? There must be a couple that regularly come up. Do you like to share those with us, Ron?
Yeah. Let me give you a long answer to that question, if you allow me.
Well, I normally do. Robert will go-I’m long-winded. Yeah, right.
The back story to this, and I’m going to get to your answer, Jonathan, is that I am a teacher, and I got To becoming a teacher, when the appraisal industry collapsed, I started investing in notes, as I mentioned, and flipping. I kept my real estate appraisal license going by taking continuing education. In so doing, the teacher who knew I wasn’t appraising anymore says, Well, what are you doing? I said, Oh, I’m buying real estate notes, which I was at the time. He said, Oh, have you considered teaching how to do that? I go, I’m not a teacher. I appreciate it. Thanks very much. Then two years later, I have to take more classes, and he says, What are you doing now? I said, Oh, I’m buying properties at foreclosure sales. He goes, Tell me about it. I did. He goes, You need to teach this stuff. I said, Thank you very much. I’m not a teacher. I appreciate you saying so. Then I wrote these newsletters on teaching real estate appraisers how to use their skills to invest and flip properties in real estate. I sent them to him and he calls me up. He goes, You need to teach this stuff.
I said, Okay, what are we talking about? We got the class approved with the Department of Real Estate Appraisers in California, and I taught it for 10 years. Now I’m leading up to the answer to your question, Jonathan. I was at a Christmas party for this continuing education school, and I was talking to the owner of the company, and he said, If you were to develop a new class, what would it be? I said, We need to teach real estate agents how to think like investors because what they will do is I would be at a social or something, and they would say, What do you do? I said, I’m a real estate investor. They would say, Oh, I wish I knew you. Three weeks ago, I had this property worth $500,000 that I could have gotten to you for 460. They’re thinking that they would have gotten me $40,000 in equity, but they don’t understand that that’s not enough margin to make sense for us. If they did understand how we think and what those margins are, they would be much more efficient at working with investors. Agents, when they become agents, they and they go work for Keller Williams or these agencies, the first thing that they tell you is, Go tell your cousin, go tell your uncle that you’re a real estate agent, and when you look to buy or sell, please use me.
Well, those are one offs, and that’s fine. But if you work with a real estate investor like myself, I do 20 properties a year. When they bring me something that they understand I’m looking for, my next thing is great. Bring me another one, bring me another one, bring me another one. Bring me another one. So if they efficiently were able to understand what we are looking for as investors, and they bring us properties that fit that buy box, not only can they represent us on the acquisition, but then they can list the property when we sell on the back-end. So arguably two commission checks on one project, and you have a client that keeps wanting more and more and more properties.
Yeah, I get the impression that because of your background and Ron provided a very… It’s one of the reasons that I thought he would be a good guest, because Ron provided a very detailed PDF that goes into the whole process in quite a lot of detail. I get the impression that you don’t, like you said before you went live, that you don’t deal with… Gravit. Yeah, it’s wrong. You deal with properties that are still… The structure is still there, but You’re prepared to take on projects that other, let’s use the term, I don’t particularly like it, flippers wouldn’t take on because of your background and your knowledge, you’re prepared to take on more properties that might have more structural, bigger problems. Would I be correct about that?
That’s one of the things. So think in terms of add value, Jonathan. So some add value. In California, if you don’t know, the tenant laws are very challenging for landlords. And in so doing, we get a lot of opportunity that say, We will sell you this house, but you have to take the occupant and you have to deal with them. So a non-cooperative occupant. We’re creating add value in that scenario by being able to take the problem away from the seller. Well, obviously buying it at a price that makes economic sense for us, but we create some add value. So either it being by making the house nice with a new kitchen, new bathroom, by taking on a house that has a non-cooperative occupant that we will deal with, by taking on a house with a cracked foundation, some add value is what we target and measure what it’s going to take to cure the issue versus what the profit margin is and is it worth the risk taking it on?
Back over to you, Rob.
Guys, we’re going to go to break about 30 seconds early because we have a great question coming up, and the question that we’re going to ask, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s a good deal and what isn’t, which I feel is loaded and super broad. But I feel like a guy like you should have a couple of pat answers that you can probably deliver. And I know our audience, the ones that are interested in this subject, will definitely probably want to stay tuned. So with no further ado, we’ll be right back. Stay with us. Three, John, what episode number is it again?
It’s 451.
Okay, 3, 2, 1. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. We’ve just come back from break. It’s episode number 451. We’re here with Ron Jones, who’s unquestionably a property valuation expert. He’s got a lot of other things that he focuses on beyond that, but that is where his history is. Right now, we are going to ask him a question that directly relates to his history, which is if I was I’m looking at a property and I’m trying to figure out, let’s just put this in the shoes of an actual realtor who’s going out with a client to show them a property. I’m going to use your analogy about learning. Let’s say they walk into this property and the client, the person who’s viewing the home, turns to the realtor and says, Is this a good deal or not? How do we What is a good deal or not?
It’s going to be comparable, driven. Well, the first thing any agent would say, if their client asked them that, they would say, Is it good for you? Does this fit your desires? Are the finishes Satisfactory is the garage Satisfactory? Whatever. You’re asking me as an investor, what we do is, one, we never want to be the most expensive house in a neighborhood. So we size up a neighborhood and say, Okay, where are we? Are we going to fit in this area to be a good, attractive, desirable house. So my quick answer to that, Robert, is comparables. You’d measure it against other comps, but you’re never going to get, especially in Southern California, you’re never going to get every house to be exactly the same. So the desirabilities of the typical buyer changes, but we try and capture what be either a friendly floor plan, a view, a big yard with space. It depends on the neighborhood. So I’m giving I do a very broad answer because it is varies by neighborhood and it varies by buyer and it varies by demographic and it varies on a number of levels. But it really is we size up what is the hottest selling house in the neighborhood?
What is it about that house that made it the hottest selling house? How do we capture those virtues of that house?
Let me give you an example because I think I understand an application of this question. I live in a very small house in Van California, which you probably are familiar with Vanhize because you live in Huntington. Okay. But the owner of this property, who’s an immigrant, has taken incredibly good care of the property. He installed a pool, he installed a Jacuzzi, he’s actually done the paint, much Many more times than my neighbors. The home next to me listed at 890. I felt like if I was able to offer 890 to the owner and buy the home at 890, that I’d be getting a great deal because this house feels like it should be worth 10 or 20 100% more than anything else in the neighborhood. Is that a reasonable explanation for what you’re saying?
Well, it sounds like I think what you keyed on is that you feel it’s a good buy, and that’s really what it boils down to because you might feel it’s a good buy, but Jonathan might think it’s, No, that’s not a good buy. So it boils down to… It’s like walking into a clothing store and say, I really like that shirt. Oh, that shirt’s ugly. I like that shirt. It’s really what your desirabilities are and what your needs are and what your buy box, but it really is comp-driven. The thing about single-family residences is that they sell on emotion. That’s a very big thing. We try and capture emotion with a really sexy kitchen, sexy bathroom, whatever. When you start getting into apartment buildings or commercial properties, those are numbers. You just look at the balance sheet. You almost don’t even have to look at the building. You just look at the balance sheet or the rent roll or what have you. Single family residents sell on emotion. If they’re going to sell on emotion, everybody’s emotional The figures are going to vary. You try and capture what the most desirable of that neighborhood is, but you’re not going to appeal to every single person.
You try and check all the boxes the best you can, but you’re not going to check everyone’s boxes.
Got you. All right, John, why don’t you take number 4?
I don’t know if you look at properties nationally or if it’s just in the Western states. If it’s national, this take Florida, though, because of the terrible hurricanes they’ve recently had. But I think the My impression of the Florida housing market, statewide, it looks to be getting really ugly, really quickly, and there seems to be various elements linked to that That’s the statement I just made. So first of all, do you deal with properties nationally? And how does that affect you, like a Pacific state, like Florida, in your How do you see the market going in the next year or 18 months? Because they’re all interwined, the things I’ve just asked you in a way. You got regional differences, and then you got a national outlook. What’s your thoughts, Ron?
I don’t know anything about Florida, Jonathan, but I have recently bought houses out of state in Indiana, South Bend, outside of a University in Notre Dame for rentals, just building a rental portfolio there. I can’t speak specifically to Florida, but if you’re asking me what my opinion is going forward of the housing market, I’m bullish on it. I’m bullish on it in California because I have my ear to the ground in California. But insofar as it’s trace, as you know, it’s just softened, they’re not getting the response in California to the lowering of the interest rates as much as I thought they were going to because I think it’s because elections coming up and people are in a holding pattern. But I think I’m pretty confident the Fed is going to lower the rates again in December. Then when we go into the housing market or go into the buying season, which is what? End of January to probably end of April, I think we’re going to see a flourish. Again, that’s mostly I can’t speak to Florida. If you want me, real quickly, I’d like to talk about the South Bend properties. We are buying out-of-state to buy rentals that cash flow, and we’re buying in areas that have a constant rental demand, outside a university, like the University of Notre Dame.
They’re very appealing. I buy a house for $100,000 and I put 25% down, and I could get close to $1,500 a month rent. The cap rate on that is 11%. There’s a constant demand for housing because of something as positive as the University of Notre Dame. I hope I answered your question. I can’t speak specifically about Florida, but I am bullish about the housing market moving forward, and we do look for rentals in areas that have constant demand for rental properties.
I’m just going to add a little addition. It’s a tough question because you pointed this Ron, and I agree with you. One of my monikers of success, one of the ways I built my reputation is I’ve already had three conversations with realtors today. I have them every single day, one to one, person to person, just like this meeting. I hear a lot of boots on the ground information. I’m probably one of the only CEO and founders that still talks to individual realtors one at a time on a regular basis, and I’ve been doing it a long time. What I’ve definitely noticed is that real estate conditions are really regional and local. I agree with you with what you just said about California. If you start pointing out certain cities in California, I think that the circumstance changes place to place. You go to Beverly Hills, they’re getting regulated into the ground, taxed into the ground, and more people are moving than not. Has Beverly Hills itself changed in terms of lifestyle or quality? Not really. But all these external things have definitely impacted the market and people with wealth are starting to go, It’s not worth it anymore.
So the next question, which I’m going to take is, what are the… Oh, wait, no, sorry. I was looking at the wrong question. This is an interesting one. Do you see John put down AI, and I’m really prickly. Large language models is not yet autonomous intelligence. So I’m going to go, do you see behavioral intelligence or large language models currently changing what you do in some way, any way? Do you see it impacting your part of the real estate world?
Yes. I’m glad you brought that up. I just finished reading a book called Co-intelligence About AI and large language models. If you would have said large language models a month ago, I wouldn’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Large language models is the premise of AI. I do. One of the things we do is we try and get a crystal I have virtual assistants that contact real estate properties that are in escrow. They haven’t closed yet. Once they close, they become public records and everybody knows what it’s sold for. We get to the agent before it closes to find out what it’s going to close for, sell a concession, things like that. I’m confident that we could develop a model using AI to do that. It’s either calling directly or finding out other ways of doing it. Another thing is that we track zip codes, and in those zip codes, we could design an AI to go into a zip code and see the volume of the What is selling? Is it two bedrooms? Is it three bedrooms? How much above or below asking? We could put in formulas that could totally tell us what trends are happening before anybody else sees those trends.
I definitely see a place for AI in that. I’m not smart enough to develop that yet, but it’s definitely someone’s doing it as we speak, I guarantee it.
John, I find that answer fascinating. John, do you have something to add?
No, I haven’t. I think that was quite insightful. I’ll go on to the last question. If you had your own time machine, Ron, and you could go back to the start of your real estate developing career, is there one or two things you’d love to have been informed of that you know now that you didn’t know then?
No, now you didn’t know. Okay, I’ll answer that second one because I was on the questionnaire and I was thinking about that going, That’s a great question. What would I do? One of the things is way back when in the early 2000s, I started buying as many rentals as I can. If you guys recall, the early 2000s, properties were going up in value like crazy. I was locking them in as fast as possible. Because the lending was so loose, I was able to do stated income loans and buy as many as I could. I got up to 17 rentals. Over time, just for various reasons, either having partners that wanted to get out or what have you, I’ve sold many of them. I still have some, but I sold ones that I really wish I never sold. I knew when I started doing it, the premise of never selling real estate, always holding real estate, and I went against what I knew not to do, and I regret that. One of my answers is that I really wish I didn’t sell those properties. I wish I would have fought some of my partners and said, No, we’re keeping the damn things, what have you.
To your audience, if you buy real estate and you own real estate, keep it as long as you can because real estate is a given. When you talk to our grandparents, they’ll say, I bought this house for $77,000, and today’s it’s worth 1.4. I guarantee you guys, 20 years from now, somebody’s going to come back and say, I bought that house for a million dollars 20 years ago. And look at it now, it’s $5 million. It’s going to happen. The great thing about real estate is that you can leverage your acquisition. You could buy it for a percentage down, call it 10%, maybe 20%, and you own that whole entity. You own the whole real estate. If you buy something just to use simple numbers for $100,000 with 10% down $10,000, and it goes up $10,000, you just made 100% return on your money. This is how a lot of people make money. My answering going back in the time machine was, I I wish I would have held true to never selling real estate, always keep it and try and get as much as you can in your portfolio.
I’m going to ask a follow-up question. It’s going to cause you a great deal of pain, and I apologize in advance, but I really want your point that you just made to sink in for the entire audience.
Okay.
If you hadn’t sold, have you ever just taken a glance at the numbers gone, I would be this much wealthier if I hadn’t sold? Can you give us a ball, right?
You’re right. That is painful. You did hit a nerve. I did. I did, Robert. I really tried to lead life to look forward and not back. You learn from the past. It shouldn’t define you. I definitely feel that we’re all on the path we belong on. But yes, to answer your question, I have. And yes, my networth would be significantly higher. How about a percentage?
Without giving us any numbers, how about you just put a percentage to it?
Percentage on how much more?
Would it be worth 30% more, 40% more, 50% more?
I would say 200 to 300% more. Because I was up to 17 properties. Keep in mind, guys, let me give you some gist of the numbers. I bought a house in Ratcha Cooca Munga for $200,000 that I sold it for $400,000. I’m going off a memory here that’s worth probably a million today. Multiplied that times 17. That’s about what it is. They all cash flow. That’s another thing I kick in myself. It’s not like I was writing a check every month. I wasn’t. I was still making money just for various reasons like, Oh, okay, I could get out from underneath this one. It was a mistake, and I regret it. But again, no regrets. Just look forward.
No. I agree with you a thousand %, and everything is not the zeros. But for the people listening to the show, I wanted to make sure that they had some financial tune in to what that would mean. And in this particular case, let’s even take a number off that. Let’s just say 200%. You’d be worth Whatever the number is, you’d be worth 200 % more, which would mean you’d have 200 % more options to do whatever it is you want to do. As a business owner, I always have ideas for other businesses, and I want to reinvest in this business, and Of course, I wish I had whatever, 10 million extra dollars to do it. I wish, and I didn’t have to call a bank or whatever the story is. Anyway. All right, so we’re into bonus time. Do you have five extra minutes to give us?
Of course.
Okay. I have a different question for you. Let’s just pretend that your business was John and I’s, which is our business is marketing. We help people market themselves. You have your skillset. If you had a piece of advice to help a realtor get marketing value out of your skillset, do you think you could come up with something? How would you apply what you How would you do and maybe try to provide value to people that don’t know the realtor? How would you do that?
You mean education? You mean to- Yeah, sure.
What would you learn? What would you tell them to learn? How would you do? What would you say?
Okay, so if you’re a real estate agent and you were to… Okay, so let’s back. I have an e-book. I think I may have mentioned it to you guys. I have an e-book, and the e-book is… Not you? Okay. I think it was in the questionnaire. I have an e-book. It’s called Think Like an Investor, Double Your Income. It’s specifically for real estate agents to understand, just like I was speaking earlier, what it is, how we think. It’s a quick read. I did that on purpose. It’s only 33 pages, but it’s very, very impactful. I would highly recommend I’ll give you my email address and anybody can reach out. It’s free. But if an agent got one nugget out of that thing and it was inspired on one level to go out and find a real estate investor, which in the book, it tells you where to find them, then it’s a win. The whole book gives you how we look at ROI, which is return on investment, how we reconfigure floor plans, how if we were to do a buy and hold, what is it we’re looking for to buy and hold, what margins do we need to see?
Everything we’re talking about, how I ended up on your podcast, was me saying that real estate agents don’t understand how investors think. If they did, they’d work so much more efficiently and make more money, and honestly, they would work less. This book will help get you there. It will inspire you. I chose not to write a $ 200-page book because a 200-page book tends to sit on people’s shelves, and they never get to it. This book you can read in one to two sit-downs, and it will likely inspire you to find intelligent real estate investors to work with and make more money and work a lot less.
Let me ask you a question. I’m going to save it. If you would hold on to… If you would stay for about 60 seconds after the show, I have a question we don’t need to do on air. Okay. John, I think that was a great answer. I hope that people do go and check your book. Where would they find the book if they wanted to see it?
They could email me directly, ronjones, R-O-N-J-O-N-E-S at PWne. Peter, Walter, Nancy, Eric, Capital, C-A-P-I-T-A-L, PWnecapital. Com. And Pwnecapital is my company, just to explain that. Ron Jones@pwnecapital. Com. Email me. I’ll send it for free. If you ask for it, just read it and give me feedback by saying, Yes, I like it. No, I don’t, and any critiques you might have of it.
We’re wrapping up the show now, everybody. Unless John has something else to add, is that also the contact information you’d like to use if somebody were to reach out to you for an inquiry to try to hire you as a consultant? Anything. Yes.
I have Instagram, which is Ron JonesFlipsomes. I think it is. Excuse me for a second because I think we might have changed it, but I’ll check it quickly. Yeah, Ron_pwnee_capital. If you put Ron Jones on Instagram, you’ll find me. I’m not very active on LinkedIn; my website is PWNE Capital.
Okay. John, is there anything you want to add? Or if you don’t have anything to add, why don’t you tell everybody listening to this show how they could reach out and ask you some questions about WordPress for your areas of specialty, the MailRight system for realtors, or any of that stuff?
Yeah, thanks, Rob. I just want to say that we get a lot of properties from developers approaching the show, but I was impressed with Ron’s PDF, and I will attempt to have it in the show notes so you’ll be able to download it and I will have Ron’s email content Contact details in the show notes. However, I think Ron and Robert clearly showed their knowledge and experience in this episode. That’s about what I got to say, Robert. Back over to you.
If anybody should like If you’d like to mention me or get in touch with me, I’m at inboundrem. Com. You can go to my services page and the About page to find many different ways to contact me. I’ve got YouTube, I’ve got all the channels. Find me in any of them; just search for Inbound where I am, but primarily, we educate realtors in marketing. Yeah, this has been highly educational, Ron. I am deeply grateful that John decided to… John handles all the mechanics of the show. I just come on and do the hosting bit. You’re the brief face—something like that.
Jennifer disagrees.
No, we don’t. We get on each other about this all the time. Anyway, he’s the one handling the PDF. I didn’t see it; I didn’t read it. I sent it to you.
It was attached to the email, Rob. It was in your email.
I’m going to read it now. All right. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you’ve enjoyed the show as much as John and I have this time, and we’ll see you next time or hear you next time. All right.
Thank you, guys.
Yeah.
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Don’t let common career-killing mistakes ruin your real estate journey! Explore crucial insights to help you thrive in the competitive market.
Are you a real estate agent looking to elevate your career? Our latest show reveals the leading mistakes that can jeopardize your success in this fast-paced field. We discuss common traps like inadequate marketing and ineffective networking that many agents fall into. Gain valuable insights on how to avoid these errors and boost your business potential.
#1 – Zero Lead Generalization Strategy
#2 – No Video Marketing Strategy
#3 – Relying on One Type of Lead Generation Funnel Supply Technique
#4 – Not Finding Your Niche
#5 – Zero Digital or Social Media Marketing Strategy
#6 – Working With The Wrong Type of Broker Partner
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. We are working on episode number 450. John and I will talk about the leading career-killing mistakes real estate agents make.
I find this. That just rode off your ton.
It’s funny because we all have that chance to take off-ramps. Somebody very central to one of my mentors told me a long time ago, it’s like, listen, you can do eight things. If you have ten things you should be doing for a career, it’s usually great professionals do eight of those things. But they’re great professionals and do one or two primary tasks well. They get good at one or two of the ten things they should be doing. I found that to be true. With him and me, it was two different things. I was diligent about cold calling, and I became a top 10 person, and he was diligent about building relationships. Now, there were about eight other things that were important in that career, and he and I were both shitty at them. Anyway, I am interested in seeing your take on this. John, before I randomly go off here, let me ask you to do us all a favor and introduce yourself. Still, when presenting yourself, why don’t you share a mistake that you made early on in one of your many iterations, like something that you did that caused a big problem in one of your businesses?
And so everybody knows John is a serial entrepreneur, not digitally. So there everybody’s clear. But he’s owned businesses before in England and here and runs businesses. Own is not quite the correct language.
I find four businesses.
It certainly qualifies you to say what was a big fumble for one of those businesses that might have jeopardized the business. Take it away, John.
All right. First of all, I want to say you were missed last week. I forgot my co-host, but I had a good chat with Danny, the agent for Arizona. Okay. So, if you have yet to listen to that episode, my beloved audience, you want to go and have butchers of that. Mistakes. You put me on the spot, as you always do, Rob. Mistakes. Mistakes. Mistakes I want to tell the audience. There have been so many. I think, yeah, I got burnt out, and I got… I didn’t realize it was coming from me. I was doing ridiculous hours, and I had, for some time, had to give up on coding because I had a mental, not a breakdown; it wasn’t that total breakdown, but I just got totally burnt out, and I just had to leave it for over a year. And then I decided to take a pay cut and only do a couple of projects and farm all the rest out. And it’s been that way for about six or seven years because I was huge into JavaScript. It’s a programming language, folks.
I was taking on some significant projects in the early days, and I just got totally burnt out. I couldn’t even look at a keyboard for some time.
What’s the lesson, though? That’s a mistake. Was the mistake taking on too much work? Was Yeah, it was overdoing it.
I don’t know. It’s a difficult one, folks. Most people give up too early, but there’s also you can end up just flogging a dead horse. And it’s a difficult one, but you’ve got to have some people who can be totally honest with you. And you have to understand that you’re giving it your best shot, but it’s time to call it a day. You’re just flogging a dead horse.
I think it’s important that everybody understands that John and I are not claiming to be agents. I think that you all should understand that what we are claiming to be is two guys that have run more than one relatively successful small business. They’ve stayed in business, and sometimes for small business, that is as much as you can ask for it. John and I have both done that. We’re taking some subjects and we’ve done some research. Honestly, many of Many of the things that are on our list are things that would screw up any business owner. Number one on my list that isn’t even on this list is one of the leading mistakes that real estate agents make is they don’t treat their career like it’s their own business. It’s not really on the list. But ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you, the fastest way to put yourself out of being a career salesperson in real estate is not realizing that career salespeople who work mostly on commission are always running their own businesses. Always. I’ve done that my entire life since I was 17. The minute I started to understand that my income was 100% up to me and that it was my business, my life changed a lot.
It was a major deal for me to take responsibility for my performance and to say, This is my business. I’m just contracting my business out to other businesses, and that’s that. John, number one on the The list that you put here, which I appreciate, zero lead generalization strategy. Generalization.
It should be generalization. Sorry, I misspelled that.
We should not be allowed to list subjects makes it neither you nor I can pronounce.
What do I mean by this? I want to see if you think you agree with this. I think obviously there’s a group of agents where a A certain level of income is all they’re looking for. There’s another group of agents that can start getting a certain level of traction through their network of relatives, friends, people in the community that they know, and they can start to get the ball rolling as a real estate agent through those connections, and that’s fine. And it’s similar to other forms of commission-only selling. It’s great and dandy, but there’s a certain point where those connections can be exhausted, that you’ve used up all the initial lead generative possibilities, and there’s nothing to move the game on to the next level. You’re not doing anything that will move the game forward. Is that making sense, Rob?
It is, and it does, and it’s true. Zero lead generalization strategy. Okay, so that means that you don’t have a lead strategy outside of sphere of influence. Is that what you were putting down here?
Yes. Okay. And no strategy. There are strategies out there, as you know, that are about building out that sphere, that one-to-one sphere. But I’m talking about people that haven’t even got a strategy to widen the one-to-one sphere.
Got you. Okay, so that makes a lot of sense. Basically, nobody is taking the time. The way that I perceive this, there is One of the great joys of my career is I’ve taught thousands of people how to sell. You start pretty small, usually in my worlds, because I came from call centers. So what you’re starting with is how to read a script. You’re just like, that’s the basic, right? But then you get into objections, rebuttals, then attitude, mindset. And eventually, a few years later, you’ve got a professional salesperson that you’ve trained from the ground up. But you start with the script, a single microcosm of all the other things that come from selling something. And then if you’re really, really lucky, eventually you get to a point where you don’t need scripts anymore. But the first step is to, I agree with you, 100% is to say, Hey, you need some strategy. I would say, in my opinion, is understand that you can love houses, you can knock on the doors of houses, you can own the house. But until you understand that sales is a huge part of real estate, you’re a million miles behind the eight ball.
Sales and marketing are part of a real estate career, which means that you’re going to have to learn a lot about both in order to be successful. That’s how I’m recognizing your comment here. A lot of agents don’t have training. I’ve never even picked up a book, never even read a sales book. I I’ll be with number one here. Obviously, even the most successful of those agents, when you hit a down market, which we’re in right now, we have had so many years of tailwind, and now I’m getting so many calls where people are just like, Oh, wow, it’s slow, and what do I do? And well, I hate to say it, but when things are really good, smart marketers and salespeople set aside money, time, and energy to consider how they’re going to keep things going when things slow down. Number two, John. Number one, Mistake. Leading career killing mistakes real estate agents make. No video marketing strategy. Why is that so important?
Well, we’re going on last two to probably more than two years. Periodically, we’ve hammered away. I was talking to Danny last week, and he hasn’t really got any digital marketing. He just calls particular people that have removed their property from the market. And that’s who he targets, and he’s very effective at it. But I think you got to… I honestly feel this, Robert. Those that are going to be really successful in real estate are those that combine traditional marketing techniques of building personal networks in their community that can also combine that with digital digital marketing. And I’ve noticed that there’s not many real estate agents that can combine the one-to-one traditional sales, building personal network mythologies and then combine them with digital marketing strategies. But I think in the coming years, the only ones that are going to be really successful are the ones that can combine both together. And one of the key elements of that digital marketing strategy has to be video.
Well, we’ve talked about this so much on the show, and for those of you listening today, go ahead and look. We might as well… We’ve talked about it so much, we should change the name of the show from Mailright to the Real Estate Video Marketing Podcast. We’ve talked about it that much. It’s rare that it comes up on a podcast. It doesn’t come up on a podcast. But I’m going to explain this another way, John. I’m going to do a video series on my own channels, and I started to do the research because You could spend about, let’s call it 200 hours understanding video, 200 hours, which sounds like so much time. And honestly, 200 hours is one month of cold calling at 40 hours a week or three months if you’re going to do 10 hours a week or something like that. It sounds like so much time. But when you start to look at the rest of the efficiencies around video, you will end up saving 75% of the hours that you spent cold calling by producing video. 75%, that would be thousands of hours. There’s just In terms of efficiency, there isn’t anything like doing video, like in putting it on YouTube and getting it promoted.
There’s just nothing like it. The reach that these tools give you, no matter what the investment of your time is, is so dramatic and so extensive, there’s no way that a real estate agent, new or old, should not be leveraging that marketing reach to propel propel their career, or at a minimum, propel their branding message at a minimum. And by propelling your career, it’s getting out there and positioning yourself as an expert in something and then really capitalizing on the lead flow that comes through from doing that and taking a lot of pride and understanding what it is that you’re about and making sure that other people know what you’re about. So video marketing strategy is a major career-killing mistake right now, I think. I agree with that. I agree with that. Number three, relying on one type of lead generation funnel supply techniques I think the addition of funnel and supply is a little interesting in the subject. But let’s just say relying on one type of lead generation technique. Unless you specifically meant a funnel.
No, but I just see it that way. I touched it when we were talking about video. You see a lot of agents that have one power skill, one mythology in lead generation. That might be calling expires, cold calling on the phone Zoom, door knocking, Facebook Adverts, Google Local Adverts, video. I don’t really care what it is, but you get a lot of agents that have one core methodology that generates almost 90% of their leads. And I think it’s dangerous. I think it’s extremely understandable, but it’s extremely dangerous relying on one methodology for generating almost 90% of your leads.
To be fair to most agents, most agents have two. But I would say 95% of agents have two streams. Here’s what they are. Everybody, here you go. The two streams are your sphere of influence, which we’ve already talked about. Then all of you usually feel pretty good if you hire another or take a stab at another lead generation technique, or at least you think you are. A lot of agents buy a website and think, It’s a lead generation tool because they’re sold that, whatever. I’ve got videos up to just saying about the proliferation of this information, some of which, unfortunately, is actually put out there by the companies making these products. But it isn’t… Most likely, you’re not going to have a very strong lead generation strategy unless you’ve really focused a lot on it, spent a lot of time with it. And by the time you’ve done that, that number two strategy, whether that’s a website or buying leads from Zillow, because Sphere and Zillow are two separate lead sources, and everybody’s like, Oh, my God, I have two separate lead sources. Except, obviously, sphere is really only prevalent for people who are working their sphere like it’s a career.
And many of you are not. Just be honest, you’re You’re not calling up the hundred people that you know the best on a regular rotation, reminding everybody in the flow of conversation that you’re a real estate agent. And even those people that are doing that, which are very rare, they are seeing a massive slow down. Usually, you’ve got to have another lead source in place. Zillow would be good. But really, John, when you’re looking at lead sources, it’s like, Video is a channel for us, or Website’s a channel for us, the podcast is a channel for us, and I feel, and local is a channel for us. I feel pretty shitty about my lead generation. Email is a channel for us. That’s five. I’m not feeling great about it because I think I should be focused on… So I’m doing a test on video marketing. You always, as a business, want more leads than you can handle. Do you agree or disagree, John?
Yes, that is the place you want to be. I’m nowhere near that, unfortunately. It’s oscillating, but hopefully, I have some plans for 205 to help with that.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re not there, you just want to keep aiming at it. You’ll know if you’re ever there. Trust me, you’ll know. If you do get there, that’s the time that the business itself requires you to expand. That’s the whole idea of building Sometimes when you do something so well, the business itself points at you and goes, You have to do something different because you can’t handle what’s happening right now. That’s an interesting time when the business starts to dictate to you that you have to grow. I agree with number three entirely. I think that some business courses that I spec out, I’ve never finished college, but I’ve actually spoken at colleges before about the subjects of marketing and sales. I believe that one of those courses used to say that you have to have five to seven ways of generating business for your business, five to seven different channels. So if everybody’s wondering what you should be targeting, I’m going to say 3-7 or 3-5 ways of doing lead generation. Now, keep in mind that if you have an email campaign, that’s way number one. A video strategy, that’s way number two.
There’s a lot of ways to have a lot of different long Lines in the water, a really good website with deep content. To finally use John’s language, Funnel, a direction that you can send people down a rabbit hole that ends with call me. That’s a funnel, a very bad one, but a funnel. All right, number 4.
Shall we go for our break first?
No. Yes. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be right back. Stay tuned. Sorry about that, John.
Sorry.
Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. Jonathan Denwood, master of the learning machine systems, WordPress, and now real estate CRM systems worlds, and I, Robert Newman, real estate SEO guy, guru, are bringing to you our take on lead Leading Career Killing Mistakes That Real Estate Agents Make. For us, this is episode number 450. We would be pleased if you listened to one episode, but we’ve done 450. All right, John, we were just going to break, and when we did, I was about ready to say not finding your niche. Why don’t you jump out of that?
Yeah, I think of all that it’s one of the most important points in this discussion. Because in my own business, finding the right niche has made a big difference with my other business. I think with the Mailright system, it’s a good platform, but I think I need to polish the language. We have made progress in ’24, thank God, but it took a long while for me to really understand who my target audience in the industry was much longer than it should. But I didn’t know actually doing these podcasts and working with you on the podcast has helped with that. Obviously, if I had that knowledge beforehand, but I didn’t. But my other business, the more I aim it at a niche, that really understanding the clients, why they chose my other business, what they find attractive about it. And I think everything I’ve just said will apply if you’re a real estate agent. Obviously, if you’re starting your career the first couple of years, you literally have to take whatever comes your way normally. But the sooner that you get to a level where you can work out what your niche is in the local market and really aim at that niche, you will find things come together much easier and much quicker.
We’ve discussed this video quite a lot, haven’t we, Robert?
Yeah, we have. So not finding somebody… Continuing to be a generalist. I got off the phone yesterday with a generalist of 20 years, a generalist. I definitely agree with you. A leading career killing mistake is, okay, John and I, really, so let’s really get specific. Beggers cannot be choosers. If you’re cold calling, door knocking, and sitting in rooms, and just praying for a single client. Yeah, you don’t want to specialize. You just want to be looking at all of your interactions with clients and looking for opportunities for things that you enjoy, about the transaction, about the person, about the client type. Do you like working Do you like working with divorce people? Do you like working with single people? Do you like working with probates? Was there something about the scenario? When I say like, was there just like maybe you found yourself in an extraordinarily hard situation, but when you finally managed to solve some problems for the customer, you felt really good about that. It’s not like you loved everything about probate or about somebody that came to you when their parents died and they needed to do something with the family properly authority.
Obviously, there are things about that that would be tough. However, what I suggest, what John and I have always said is, listen, be looking for that thing that you love more than another. John is an amazing example, and I’m not such a bad one either. I never wanted to specialize in real estate, ever. I don’t know what John’s opinion was about it, but he targeted learning management systems, then he targeted real estate systems, and he learned as he went along. Now he’s actually an expert that has paid the price and understands the niche, understands who he’s talking to. And me too. I didn’t get into this 16 years ago going, Oh, my God, I want to serve real estate agents. As a matter of fact, the first two years I spent on the phone with real estate agents. I was like, Why would I ever want to do this full-time? Here I am, 16 years later, I got good at it. I got really good at it. I started to understand my audience, and with that came empathy, and with the empathy came the desire to serve them more. Here we are. Real estate SEO and real estate agents is what I focused my last 16 years of my working career on.
I’ve done a lot of other things. I have. I’ve done e-commerce, I’ve done James Suckling’s website, I’ve done a thousand other things, but I focus a lot of my energy on real estate, and so does John. We’re saying that because in this, I love us as podcasters, John, because in this, you and I have both walked our talk. We are leading by example, both of us. I feel like we are very qualified to talk to everybody who’s listening to the show about finding a niche. I really do. We’ve both paid prices, we’ve both sacrificed, and it has paid off for both of us to some degree. Number 5, zero digital marketing or social media marketing strategy. I think that’s fairly self explanatory, but give us a couple of examples about what you… What is that? What’s the strategy?
Well, it’s linked in your niche, and it’s linked to video, and it’s linked to supply and leads that go to your website. I think with social media, I think if you’re publishing to various social media networks, I think that’s fine. And at Melright, we’ve got a part of the Melright system allows you to do that. But there is only going to be one or two of those social media platforms that really gel with you. And I can’t tell you which one those are, because certain platforms gel with certain types of people, and other people they don’t gel with. But one of the key things, I think one of the key things is people totally misunderstand the volume of posting that you’re going to have to do to get a result. And I’ve been doing tons of work on YouTube, posting a lot of video. I’ve been doing a lot of work on LinkedIn. This is with my other business. Been doing Doing a ton of work on LinkedIn, doing a ton of work on YouTube, and I do a fair bit on Twitter. I don’t particularly… I’m okay in using Twitter. I don’t use it a lot for conversation because part of me despises the platform because I think it encourages some of the worst aspects of social media.
And my My partner, Adam, he’s really big into Instagram and Facebook. I do post a little bit on Facebook, but really, that’s more personal stuff. But there are really more concentration at the present moment has been LinkedIn and YouTube. But I also post to the others. But most of the lead generation is coming through LinkedIn and through YouTube. But you do have to post a lot more than you think. Just posting once a day, you probably won’t. And definitely, if you’re just posting once a week, you’re not going to get much from it.
Yeah, I agree. I’m doing some YouTube advertising, and it bleeds on my Facebook page, but I have an old post there, and I doubt there’s… I really don’t get any conversion off social. But then again, I don’t really use social the way that other people are. I get all my conversion off Google, but I am a Google guy. And of all that conversion, my conversion breaks out to like 80% YouTube, 5 or 10% local. I get a lot of calls off my local profile. Well, not a lot. I get some calls off my profile. And then a handful that never even seen my route, like 5%, never even seen my YouTube channel. They just go to my website, which happens, and then another 5% on email. That’s the way that our lead generation at InboundRAM breaks out. All right, so last up on our list, and I don’t have much to say about that. I’ve said it so I’ve heard it so many times. It’s like, yes, social can be important. It’s a language that people speak. Understand if it’s the language that you want to speak and choose your channels or choose… And I’ve chosen Google.
All right, at least right now, working with the wrong type of broker partner. That’s an interesting one.
Yeah, I think there’s too much emphasis on the split for understandable reasons. I think if you’re a top producer with your own lead generation funnels that have been proven, and you’ve done all the things that we’ve discussed in this episode, the split is going to be the really driving part. If you’re not You’ve got any plans to become a broker yourself, and for legal reasons, you need a broker, the split. We’ve talked about some of the virtual brokerages. Now, for The bulk of agents, the other 90%, I think obviously you’re there to make money. But just the split, I think you’re making a mistake there. I think the culture culture of the brokerage, do you gel with the principle of the brokerage? Do you buy into her or he’s vision? Are they doing anything to help you? In lead generation? Do you fit in to their marketing strategies? Are they marketing really well? These are the things that you should be thinking about. And a lot of agents, they just concentrate on the split.
I agree with you, and I’m going to put this into language that I understand. Thirty years in sales has taught me two important things. For a very long time, John, I worked for other people, and I used to resent myself for it because I am somewhat of an entrepreneur. But as I was working for other people, I realized something important. I was learning something in those environments. There was a lot that the people I chose to work with for any length of time had to teach me. The people that didn’t have to teach me much, I never worked there for very long. Towards the end of my call center career, when I started to be the person telling Sprint and MCI how they should run their call centers and knowing more about the subject than they did, I was like, Yeah, I think I’m at the top of my career, and I was actually a little bit bored. I got into digital marketing and had to learn all over again. I started age and image. But here’s the thing. When you hit the point that the environment or the people that you’re working with have nothing left to teach you, it’s either time to go out on your own if you want to keep your career progressing, or it’s time to change the relationship with the businesses that you’ve been working with because they are no longer providing value to you.
Okay, that’s it. Businesses treat individuals like commodities, but as an individual gets very, very skilled, they can turn around and treat the businesses like commodities, too. If you are really good at something that you do, you actually oftentimes do command a certain market respect. If you can always Please go out and talk. If you get put inside somebody’s home and you walk out with a listing every time, even if that person is only vaguely interested in listing their home, obviously, every broker in the city would want to do business with you. But if you’re so good at doing that, why are you doing business with a broker at all? Just do it for yourself. Establish your own brand name, teach your own salespeople your tricks of the trade, build up a business on your own where you take the percentages and not not brokers. So I agree with this 100 %. However, the opposite is true, everybody. If you are new into a career and you don’t know how to sell, you don’t know how to prospect, you don’t know how to do social, you don’t know how to Do anything in real estate, you just think that you have the gift of gab and you think you might be good at sales, and you chose real estate because you heard there was a lot of money.
All right, you need a strong partner that teaches and trains you all the basics. How loyal you are to that partner once they’ve trained the basics to you is up to you. That’s a personal choice. Choosing that partner can be incredibly relevant. Some partners, like some of the eXPs and reels out there, are attempting to do multi-level marketing stuff. If you do do that, then you might want to pick Ricky Karruth or Kyle Handy people, people that get on the phone with you and actually train you person to person or through webinars or through digital methods, and they really hold your hand. If you find somebody that you feel is really comfortable as a digital mentor to you, then perhaps one of those scenarios would work. But perhaps you’re more of an in-person person, and that’s fine because Keller Williams and other people like that have massive written in-person training in showrooms, and you can go sit at a desk, and you’ve got the discipline of walking out the door, you don’t have to work from home. I couldn’t agree with this more. Working with the wrong type of broken or partner, I think is probably in my opinion, John, I think of everything on this list, it’s one of the number one way that you’re going to kill your career?
I do. Because if you pick somebody who, let’s just say you work better on your own, like I do, but you are forced to go into the office, you’re You’re forced to work with people. You’re forced to follow that broker’s methodologies, and it doesn’t work with you at all as a person. Are you ever really going to get your career off the ground? No, probably not. The second that you do, you’re probably going to bail on your broker partner.
Can I say something to follow through? Of course. I agree with most of what you say. The only point I slightly disagree with you is that there are a group of agents that are very good at what they do, but they don’t to become a brokerage. Because being a principal or brokerage is a lot of hard work. When you’re managing groups of people, Some of them might be direct employees or their subcontractors. These people’s problems become your problems.
Sure.
And a lot of people can be very effective, but they just don’t want the baggage that comes with running a brokerage because they see the toe it is upon those that run brokerages. Because a lot of people Yeah, I was going to say some other stuff, but I think that’s the real point I want to make.
I think that one of those things about everything on this list that we didn’t, that there is no mention of. I think that’s important to have that conversation. You need to understand how much and how hard you want to work on your primary career. I made a decision a long time ago because I’ve spent too many hundred hour weeks working for other people, that I wasn’t going to do that with Inbound Riem. And I don’t. I work about 30 to 35 hours a week, and that’s about what I want to work. And that includes sales calls. And you know what? I like some of the time I waste that extra time, and some of that time I do really incredible things with it, help other alcoholics travel the world. The list goes on. But I open the door to those experiences for myself. And I think that’s part of that conversation around number six and what you just said. If you’re going to progress or you want to hit a different goal than me, retire, let’s say, early, cut your ties with real estate, sell your business. I can go on and on. Every single one of those decisions require that you keep moving up the escalator, that you keep growing your business until you can get off the escalator at a point that that satisfies your needs as a human being.
That’s part of whether you’re going to do the broker thing or not. I just said, Listen, I think that there’s just… Business is not illogical. It’s logical. It’s just you can take it to a certain place or you cannot. Everything Everything that you don’t have is just a set of skills that you haven’t acquired yet. The first thing you need is just the mindset that you can do anything you want. I love that about you, John, because you set your mind, you target something, and you just go do it because you know, I think, that getting lost in the debate about what you should and shouldn’t do is a waste of time. Just go do it. Make the mistakes, do it, and then you’ll learn it, and then you’ll know. Do you agree or disagree?
Yeah, I’m a bit of a slow learner, but I’m a plodder. I used to bother me, but it doesn’t now. I just plod along. As long as you can keep your costs, control your costs, so you got the time to learn, to adjust, that’s fine. The only thing, because of my age, I’m now 61, But it’s in God’s hands. I can’t retire. But on the other hand, even if I could, I would be bored out of my skin. So as long as I can work the hours I want and then do the things that I want to do, I’m a pretty happy, but I’m not an unhappy person, and I’m not that unhappy. I’ve had a couple of really good years financially and everything’s fine. It’s moving in the right direction. As long as you have your health and you’re not losing your marbles, everything’s fine. Yeah.
I love that for you. And honestly, I love that for me, too. And your attitude about it is roughly the same as mine. It’s not so much… Somebody said something that I was watching, and it hit me the right way, which I’ve often said: I don’t live to work; I work to live. But you know what? These little pithy sayings that we say don’t encompass something. You need a purpose, you need to get up, and you need to do something. The question is, how much time do you spend doing it? Guys like Elon Musk are all about what they’re doing: the mission.
Okay, that’s great. Well, I think, to finish off, the mission. I think I have seen people in Silicon Valley, and I have some people who’re not close friends, but some are very wealthy. I’ve got their mobile numbers, and they usually take the call when I call them. But they’re not close, close friends. I’m not going to kid you or the listeners. But then I think they would say I’m a friend, not a close friend, right? And they’re fine, but they’ve introduced me to people. Making money is a good thing; at a certain level, it gives you a degree of freedom, right? But past that certain threshold, I think it becomes an addiction. I think it can become an addiction, like gambling, drinking, drugs, whatever the addiction is. The need to generate money becomes a need to feel devoid.
I agree. That, in some ways, and For those listening to the show, it’s more of an epidemic in real estate than most other industries. Real estate is one of those exciting careers where if you wanted to, if you even had just a couple of listings, you could spend all your time working. You could be over your house, you could manicure the lawn for them, you could wash their windows. There’s no limit to how far you can go if you want to work. But I don’t know. We’ll leave it up to you to decide how vital your mission is rather than how strong John and I think your mission should be. I will just say that the last thing on working with the wrong type of broker partner is important, especially if you’re in the part-time bucket like John.
I couldn’t work for a broker that I despised, didn’t fit into their culture, and didn’t think that they aligned with their marketing messages just because I was earning 2-5% better split.
Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that. With AI and everything else that’s happening right now, guys, training and being able to disseminate all the information on the internet into your inbox is getting easier and easier. You have to learn, watch, review, and then do it. All right. We have given you 10 or 15 extra minutes of complete and utter tangential nonsense. We hope you enjoyed it.
He’s going to. You should not blame me for that. Do you realize that? No, that was mine.
That was mine. That was mine. All right, John, if you would like people to learn more about you or talk to you about… Have a casual conversation about lead generation or anything else, maybe your journey; how would you like them to reach out to you?
I’ll go to the mail-right-mail-right. Could you look at what we got offered on the Com website, book a call with me, and chat? I would love to tell you about Mailright, and then I will leave it. There won’t be any hard sell. It’s just very informal, and that would be great. Back over to you, Robert.
So, ladies and gentlemen, it’s been a weird, challenging year in real estate, which means it’s been a weird and challenging year to be a real estate marketing company owner. And that will help you. I am still taking calls personally, and I usually do so with the contact forms on my website, which is inboundrem. Com. So if, for some reason, you wanted to talk to me about anything, that’s another thing. When it was busy, I was already on the phone 8-10 hours a day and was turning away many appointment requests. It is not so busy right now. If somebody wants to talk with me about something, you could do so by emailing me at [email protected] or going to inboundrem. Com, looking at my services page and filling out the contact form. All right, that’s it, everybody. I appreciate your time. Today’s show has been recorded in October of 2024. If you watch this show in 2025, the industry will probably have changed, and I may not be… You can’t get me on the phone anymore. All right. Everybody has a good one, John.
Thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. Well, I’ll catch you next time.
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Unlock real estate leads with the best podcasts! Discover strategies to leverage audio content for client engagement and growth.
Are you looking for innovative ways to generate more leads in real estate? This show dives into podcasts, showcasing top shows that provide valuable tips, industry news, and expert interviews. We’ll guide you on how to use these resources effectively in your marketing strategy. Elevate your game—tune in now and uncover how podcasts can supercharge your lead-generation efforts.
#1 – Understanding Your Target Audience
#2 – Planning Your Podcast Strategy
#3 – Audio Equipment
USB OR XLR
-a- RØDE – https://rode.com/en-us
-b – Shure – https://www.shure.com/en-US
-c- Audio-Techinica – https://www.audio-technica.com/en-us/
#4 – How To Promote Your Podcast
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 447. Today, we are going to talk about one of the things that my esteemed colleague, who will be introducing himself- Esteemed, I’m getting worried there.
When he calls me esteemed, you’re going to get worried.
His esteemed colleague has been using podcasting to build not one, not two, but maybe even three businesses, depending on how you define a company.
Two podcasts are around the same business as this one.
Okay. This is something that he’s used consistently to build up authority to talk to industry experts, and the list of things he does around podcasting is significant. I want to acknowledge everybody, including my podcasting partner. While I knew it was something I wanted to get into vaguely, if a partner of John’s had yet to contact me, I wouldn’t be doing this podcast. If John hadn’t continued to do most of the heavy lifting for this podcast, I would not be doing a podcast, even though I understood the benefits. John has been instrumental in leveraging this strategy, even for me. I just want to say that he is an authority on this subject. I’m excited to be talking to him about him again. So now that I built you up a bit, John, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself, just in case anybody doesn’t happen to know who you are?
Oh, thanks, Rob. He’s looking better as well, audience. Last week, I had a bit of a China; he looks half-human there. He seems in a cheerful mood. And, of course, his cats are safe as well.
My cats are safe.
Yeah, they have yet to be hunted down and cooked. It’s the pets. Sorry, listeners of yours, I can’t get over it. It’s just cockled something in my heart. I flipped. But thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mail-Right. We’re a platform. We supply a CRM landing page, a great-looking website, and much more aimed at the real estate professional. Back over to you, Rob.
All right, beautiful. I’m just going to share my understanding, and we’re going to jump into the outline that John has provided. To give you all a synopsis. We will talk about target audiences, planning strategy, equipment you can use, and how to Promote Your Contact your show. Those are roughly going to be the things we will talk about. But I want to add some stuff that podcasting has done because this was a new strategy for me, and I’m a lifelong marketer. I wasn’t even a guy who really listened to podcasts before John and I started doing our thing, and now I listen to a few. Once again, that’s John’s influence on me. But here’s what I found: podcasting does. In the brief time that John and I have done this podcast, in the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that many doors have opened, even for me, and I already had a reasonable amount of doors I could step through inside the real estate industry. But it’s staggeringly surprising to me how many people drop everything to come to do a podcast when you say you have one, especially with John and I, who have a few hundred episodes together. He has many hundreds under his belt by himself.
This thing where we can talk to anybody has been amazing to me. I’ve spoken to quite a few of my heroes in the marketing industry, all under this podcast. While I don’t know that, it’s been a massive needle mover in directly producing my business. I know it’s been a gigantic needle-mover in my conversations with these other critical people in the industry. I get some of their shared credibility going when people hear me talking to them. It’s been crazy how instrumental that has been in notching up my credibility. That’s what podcasting has done for me. What has it done for you, John, before we get started?
I think it’s expanded the amount of people I know. In the WordPress space, I I tend to really downplay the amount of influence I’ve got in it. But I’ve noticed that if I say something and it’s taken the wrong way, there’s like a thousand twitters triggered, and it gets back to me that they’re not too happy with my little comment. I’m not really somebody that holds grudges, but there’s a couple, there’s a very small group of people that I I really dislike quite intensely. If I can cause them difficulties, I probably would. But it takes a lot of bad behavior to get really on my wrong side. I honestly do not hold a grudge. Probably I’m more forgiving than I should be. But there is a line. I am merciless in my English sarcasm, as you have probably noticed, Robert.
You know what the funny thing is, John? I have a lot of friends that are way worse than you, but that’s okay. I mean, I hang Out in a very sardonic group. That’s what podcasting roughly has done for us. Just to repeat that, what I heard John say, he has a pretty big megaphone, and Certainly in the WP tonic world, in the WordPress world, from an outside perspective, John has a huge microphone. There isn’t anybody that I know of that’s relevant in that space that John hasn’t taken meetings with. We joke on the show on air and off where he’s talked to some people I would die to talk to. Matt from the founder of Typepress, which is the- WordPress. Wordpress, which is basically WordPress, and Ran Fishkin, who I would just probably give my left nut to have a conversation with. Like all these people John has had on WP Tarn because the show is really relevant inside that WordPress space. He’s an English bloke who’s just an entrepreneur here in the US who works out of Reno. Podcasting can really magnify your reputation inside whatever space you’re targeting, as long as you have, one, something to say, and failing that, and this is my opinion, not John’s, failing having something to say.
If you’re really well-organized and diligent and get other people on your show and they really have something to say, then you can still be relevant, even if you weren’t necessarily the expert that you managed to acquire on your show. People people still listen to it. That’s my opinion. Do you have anything you want to add to that, or can we go on to your outline? Let’s go. Okay. So understanding your target audience. Everybody listening to this show should be in real estate, really, most of you. There’s a few that aren’t. But all of those of you who are in real estate, how do you figure out who your target audience is? Because every single person that’s out there that’s listening to the show, because I get this all the time, John, I get this in keyword targeting, I get this in And audience modeling all the time. Who exactly is it that you’re targeting? Well, people buying and selling a home. For those of you that are targeting a certain part of your market where, for instance, you’ve got Homes that are at the upper 10, 20 or 30% of your marketing sphere, then you’re really targeting somebody that is specific.
So how would you target your audience? Well, number one, Facebook and Google have done a very, very good job of identifying people by age, income, and geography. You can target your audience by age, income, or geography fairly easily. It would take you a couple of just a little bit of research to figure out how to do that. I don’t think that’s what we do here, is it, John? We just post to all the platforms.
I think there’s two sides of it. The side you’re talking about is, I’m taking this from the startup world. There’s B2C, business to customer, and then there’s business to business. I think if you’re just aiming at individuals that might become a customer of yours, I would classify that as B2C. If you’re in a major city and you’re talking about a certain type of house, a certain area, that might work. I personally think you’re better off going what I call the B2B route. Basically, that is you interview shakers, movers, business owners in your community to increase your personal network. Now, if you can go to every Every business event, every free business event in your area, and talk to people, and you could email them and say, Love to have a coffee with you. But these people know you’re a real estate agent, so there is going to be some form of resistance. You might be a person that’s already got a very large personal network in your area. A lot of people don’t. If you want to find a really effective way that gets you in front of some of the most important local people in your area, do a podcast and invite them to come on the podcast for interviews.
It’s very unlikely they’re going to say no. Then if you gel with them, it’s very unlikely they won’t agree to have a meeting with you and you can build some relationship with that individual.
I agree with everything you said, and I would just like to add another layer to it. Ladies and gentlemen, everybody listening to the show, this isn’t the most popular opinion. I spent my entire life inside the marketing and sales world, and there are certain elements of it that are like politics. It’s like, all these businesses want you just to sell to everybody. All these businesses want you to do just run the numbers, get the revenue, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just decided a while back that I was going to be a mission guy because I was just tired of it. I became a mission guy, started my own thing. But here’s the thing about having a mission. For those of you who are in real estate, what would a mission be? Do you have anything interesting to say to anybody in your audience? I have realtors that are my clients, and one of the things that we occasionally do is talk to small business owners. Now, that’s a really good group of people to target inside a geographic specific area like your local restaurant owner. You want to create a relationship with businesses that are in your area and basically establish a strong reputation with other influencers inside a local market, a local lifestyle, put them on a podcast.
Talk about being a business owner in that area. If you’re passionate about it. Is there something that you’re passionate about? I’ve got somebody in my database, John, that used to be an accountant before they became a realtor. She’s really passionate about not numbers. She does a lot of numbers crunching for her clientele. I don’t know. She’s definitely not a charisma real estate agent, which is where most focus goes. Everybody’s like, Oh, you got to have a charisma. You got to do this. No, you don’t really. What you have to have is a valuable asset that you can offer your clients. Somebody who’s really going to sit down and really dig into the numbers, really read through your contracts, understand them and want to do that, maybe not the best person to talk to on on the phone, maybe dry and unemotional. But at the same time, if they’re going through your stuff page by page and are really into it, that’s a great realtor, in my opinion. That’s somebody that really has something to offer you. Who cares about charisma? You really need somebody making sure the contracts are right, that your offers are right, that the numbers are looking good, blah, blah, blah.
If she was to say to me, Robert, I want to do a podcast on talking to insurance folks inside the markets I target, I’d be like, That’s a brilliant idea for you, because she’d be really passionate and have a lot to discuss about the numbers, about the way the contracts can be manipulated. Maybe the subject matter is a little dry, but when people are looking For podcasts, they tend to pick a big, broad category. John and I sit with this podcast in real estate marketing, I think. That’s what our target is. Okay. All right. That’s our subject. We cover everything inside real estate marketing, generally with a spend on generating leads, because that’s what realtors really care about. That’s really what everybody wants to talk to us about. Find something that you’re passionate about and then worry about your audience, Because it will come to you if you have something to say. That’s the truth of it. If you have something to share that’s valuable, people will find you.
I think, yeah, that’s one way to approach it. The other way to approach it is to become what is called the digital mayor of your area. And one of the main tools that you can utilize to become this digital mayor is podcasting. It is inviting people that are community leaders, political leaders, business leaders, you start on the edges, and as you keep doing it, you will find that the type of people that you will attract to the podcast will increase. So in the end, you will end up with regional or people, some of the biggest individuals in your community, and that can only help your networking ability. We’re in the digital space, both me and Rob, but I think I’ve said it many times, I believe in the hybrid model. This is a person-to-person business, always will be. You use digital marketing to add gasoline to the fire, but you got to be able to build a personal network as well. And podcasting offers a great way of doing that, Rob.
I do agree. It’s a more personal conversation. It’s a way to get deep, deep, deep into the fabric of a subject, which is really going to make an impression. I’m sorry, John, but I believe that most of your digital marketing, I think it’s gone 99% to influence your style marketing where people want to know you. And if they do know you, they tend to want to do business with you. It’s not the slow, fast, sexy approach to marketing. It’s not producing a great commercial and having a thousand people call you to be a realtor. That’s the sexy stuff of myths at this point in this world that we live in right now. Most people, with all the digital information that we have at our fingertips, actually want a little bit more substance. In my opinion, just in my opinion. All right, planning your podcast strategy. You know what? Before we talk about this, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to take a short break, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about how do you plan your strategy. I’m going to let John pick this one up as soon as the break is over, because there’s no doubt in my mind that as a guy that started two podcasts, and I’ve started zero, that he probably has some really great ideas about planning for a podcast.
That’s it. We’ll be right back. Hit that like button, hit that subscribe button wherever you’re watching or listening to this content. Make sure that you become friends with the distribution channel that you’re hearing us on, and we’ll talk to you in a second. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 447 of the MailRight podcast. Today, we’ve been talking about using podcasting to get more real estate leads. We’re going to talk about planning your podcast strategy. John’s going to pick it up. Take it away, John.
What I mean by strategy is the actual mechanics of how you’re going to do it and how you’re going to fit podcasting and consistently do it week in, week out. If you’re serious about this, I think you’re going to have to do a weekly podcast. You could do it every second week. If you’re looking at just doing it monthly, I question if that’s really going to work. So week to week or twice a month, that might work. And most podcasts, last last about three episodes, and then they fade out. There’s over a million podcasts now in the world, but the majority of them only last about three episodes, and then about another 50% only last about 25. We’re in the top 10%, because we’ve together probably done about 300 podcasts together. So we’re in the top 10, maybe the 5% of all podcasts. The other factor is it’s going to be tempting. I would not suggest, when you’re starting off, to go to other people’s offices. I would attempt to do the podcast testing through Zoom or another platform. There’s half a dozen platforms. We’re using one here called StreamYard. There’s another popular one called Riverside, or you can utilize Zoom as well.
I would do it remotely. You’re going to find the technical side to be much easier to cope with. The only thing is you’re going to be dealing with people on the other side might not have very good audio equipment. That has diminished because of COVID, because people were having to work from their home offices and that people tend now, Especially if there are businesses, shakers or movers in your local community, they tend to have a mic. They tend to do a lot of remote conference calls. So If you’re going to need to get a schedule, that isn’t quite a problem. It is nice to go to somebody’s office, and it is possible, but there is going to be a more technical baggage in doing that. Thirdly, get a scheduling. You book a particular time. I would suggest that it’s in the morning or you can do it in early evening. Then you can send a link to somebody that’s on your radar and they can book a day or time that you’re available to book the actual meeting. Then you can record the podcast. The other thing is you are going to have to have it edited.
There’s loads, you can attempt to do that yourself. I would not recommend that you do that. There’s loads of resources on Fiverr and similar platforms that can edit the audio for you at a reasonable cost, not ridiculous. Or there is, you can do it yourself, and it isn’t that complicated, but I would probably look at getting somebody from Fiverr or some other online resource and do the editing yourself. They do the editing for you.
Awesome. John is a master at this stuff. I do meetings with people, schedule through HubSpot links, calendar links, stuff like that. All this digital calendar stuff is one of the only really interesting innovations for me as an inbound marketer. I don’t have much to say about any of it, but online calendaring saves my life every single day. Having people have a link, be able to check my calendar, being able to refer people to that. As a salesperson, I’ve oftentimes spent no joke, hours of my day in conversations around scheduling. It’s always been one of the most frustrating things about being a salesperson is actually scheduling the appointments and then keeping the appointments, confirming the appointments, blah, blah, blah. Digital technology, people that really want to meet with you, in my experience, there are some people you can chase down, and you can definitely chase somebody down and then convince them or convert them or whatever the case Most of the time, that’s a lot of really hard work. Whereas just sending out somebody a link and letting them schedule with you, by the time they schedule with you and then confirm whatever your automated confirmation is, they usually really want to meet with you.
Just like they really want to do your podcast. We have a very low cancelation rate at Mailright. I’ve definitely noticed that. I have a very low cancelation rate in my personal appointment calendar because I don’t spend too much time trying to convince people to take calls with me. Because everything, the content, everything you’re saying in the podcast is already done, whatever convincing needs to be done. The people that are thinking about being on the show, once you’ve done a couple of episodes, I would say one thing. Actually, you know what? Now that I think about it, launching a business, generally speaking, to get some momentum going in the digital world, you need a plan when you launch, when you start it. Having a handful of guests lined ready to go, people that you’ve talked to physically and personally, will create a lot of the assets that you need to convince the rest of your audience. I would say make sure that you have a few people lined up when you get ready for the show to go. Get those people on the calendar, get that all set up, because by the time you’re in the momentum and you casually mention to somebody else, having a link to a show you’ve already done is a great persuasion tool.
All right, let’s go to- Give a quick tip. Do not book your… Do a couple of live dummy runs. Get a couple of interviews with friends or people. You have some close relationships because it’s The first episode is going to be a bit rough, and maybe the second one. So you don’t want to get your best guest on to launch. You want to do a couple and then bring your best guest in. That’s just a tip because it’s just a reality. The first one or two might be a bit rough.
Right. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to talk a little bit about audio equipment, which once again, I’m going to let John take this up. Everybody can see that I’m using a Plantronics headset. This is a company that I’ve used for 20 plus years when it comes to full-on call center headsets. I wear this one because it’s super comfortable. It’s got cushioning. It is not podcasting. I have an ICE microphone that long ago, John or somebody else recommended to me that I bought for the podcast. Then I used it for a prop in another show that I did and lost it. I don’t know where it is. Anyway, I’m not an audio equipment expert. I have people in my staff and in my circle of friends who buy all of my equipment for me, all of it, lighting, sound, video, everything. As a matter of fact, they’re setting up in another studio because I’m going to another show right after I do this one. John, what are your recommendations for audio equipment? You’ve done this many times. I remember you upgraded your own setup once in the years that we’ve been doing this.
Basically, when you’re starting out, folks, you want to keep it as simple as possible. The easiest way to do this is utilize a USB external mic. Basically, it’s mostly a USB-C now. And most computers, PCs or Macs will have a USB-C. And you plug the mic directly into your computer and it will show up. A USB mic has the electronics in the mic, and when you plug it in, it will show up as one of your sound card resources. Sometimes on the PC, you do have to download a driver, but that’s not so common there. It’s the easiest way to do it. Then you use something like Zoom or StreamYard or Riverside, and it will see the mic when you’re setting up your input and you connect it to earbud I wouldn’t utilize Bluetooth earbud. I would have a direct connection myself because the battery always runs out halfway through the conversation, so I wouldn’t do that. And a mic, there’s three manufacturers that I… There’s loads of them. There’s loads of Chinese manufacturers, but free. I think you can buy a reasonable USB mic between $50 to $70 now. The free I recommend is Road, their Australian company.
They’re Shore, which is a US-based company that’s got over 100 years. They’re based in Chicago. The one I consistently use, I’m on their second mic. I am this week doing a little bit of upgrade, but I’m still waiting for some of the equipment to come in. I’ve bought another mic from them, and that’s a company called Audio Technic. They’re a Japanese company. I’ve been really happy with the USB mics. Next week, if I’m happy with it, I’m going to upgrade. I’m going to move to what is called XLR, which basically you get a little bit better sounds. I haven’t gone crazy on it. I’ve bought equipment that will just upgrade the quality a little bit. The main difference with that is that you need an external sound center. You’re not plugging the mic directly into the PC or You’re plugging the mic into a sound system, and then the sound system is connected to the PC, and you have more direct control over the sound, volume, and quality by utilizing one of these external systems. But you don’t have to bother with that, really. I would recommend that you just buy a USB mic.
Copy you. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to offer the same advice that I’ve always offered about equipment, about everything whenever you’re starting a marketing effort, a business, anything. We all have to evaluate where we are at in our careers and what budget that we have for marketing. I’m still using relatively inexpensive equipment, and I was doing that for the first six years that inbound REN was in business. Then I invested $20,000 to $30,000 to convert one of the rooms into my house into a full studio, complete with a rig on the ceiling to do lighting, a board on the walls. I remodeled one of my rooms in the house. I did a lot. But the reason that I did it is at that particular time, I had an audience, about 30, 40,000 people that are realtors that pay attention to me. I thought that the upgrade in my content presentation might have an impact. It took me another year to get into the cycle of producing content using all of this equipment and this room. There’s pros and cons. It’s not an office building. It’s in my house, and my house is old, so occasionally we have power problems and other things that happen with an old house in the valley, San Fernando Valley, where I live.
Ultimately, it was an iffy investment. Probably will pay me off in the span of 5 or 10 years, for sure, I think. But that’s where you need to be when you start looking at equipment, in my opinion. It’s like you need to look at it from… I wait until it’s so freaking obvious that everybody in my team and everybody is pressuring me to make upgrades. Even then, I sometimes resist. I am going to buy a nice microphone like John’s saying, and I’m probably going to drop it from my ceiling, and it’s going to be better than the remote mix that I have on my studio set up. I might do another microphone inside my little office space, but I have forever really cherished a messy casual office environment. I don’t really like to clutter it up with lots of equipment. I really think that it’s important that everybody listening to this show takes into account what your resources are first. Please don’t go broke.
I think if you do a lot of YouTube watching, folks, you’re going to get a lot of people that’s going to recommend a or shore, but it’s going to be around $300. You don’t have to pay that, folks. I’m using audio Technica mic that cost me $70, and I’ve been using it for seven years. I’ve had people say the sounds pretty good. Those that are really into it, they buy shore, they buy road, or they buy upper-level audio technica. The mic that I’m replacing this one, it’s costing me $150. Hopefully, it will be a bit better and with the external sound deck, give me more control, but I wasn’t prepared to spend… You can spend thousands. But these are people that are professional musicians. They are either semi-pro or professional musicians. They’re looking to build a home studio. You’re looking to do a podcast. There’s a difference.
Yeah, no, there’s a huge difference. I’m just saying in general, I was just sharing my philosophy because I don’t have… You should be trying lots of different marketing things. You should keep the expenses down to the lowest amount of money. I’m a big believer in trying things until you find something that really fits. And that’s That’s what coaches and everybody else is going to say to you in a variety of languages. You find a marketing or sales strategy that works for you. You might try YouTubeing, you might try podcasting, you might try door knocking, you might try calling. You should find something that works for you and Each time you try something different, especially if you haven’t hit a real success, you should keep the cost zero. That’s my opinion. Zero, not low, zero. That way you are making Making sure… If you are going to invest in anything and you’re an early realtor, an early salesperson, an early business owner, my opinion is books and free YouTube videos. That’s it. That’s it. All right, in my opinion. All right, but number 4, how to promote your podcast. This is our bonus section, ladies and gentlemen.
We’re now 34 minutes into this episode. John and I separate out this show in 30 minutes of talking about a topic, and then sometimes we separate out a bonus and we say, Hey, the bonus is going to be on YouTube channel. And so this bonus is going to be talking about how to promote your podcast. I have some ideas about this, John, but why don’t you go ahead and share what has worked for you for all the… I mean, the WP Tonic show is what, 6,000 to 10,000 listeners a month now? Is that right?
No, it’s between 3,000 and 5,000. It varies between the episode, but I think I’m getting… Well, I think, got to be truthful, that’s per month. That’s the direct downloads. But the audience you get, as you know, with most marketing, if you can get both, this is great, but it’s really very difficult. You can get a lot of reach, a lot of watches, whatever matrix you’re using. But a lot of these people might not be actually will never become a customer of yours. Never purchase. Or you might have a smaller audience, but they’re more passionate, they’re more targeted. So there’s more chance that they would purchase. If you can get both at the same time, that’s fantastic, but that’s rare. So don’t get so fixated about how many downloads. It’s who downloading and how much influence you are having with to those people. To promote it, well, that’s one of the reasons why I think interviewing is a good idea, and then utilizing social media to promote the interview. If you’re using something like StreamYard, you could invite people to join you live and ask questions of the person if they’re up for it. That would mean that you also will have to do video as well.
Otherwise, Otherwise, you can just promote the person. If they’re well-known in the area, you can use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn to promote the interview and promote the podcast. If you’re going to do a video, use a webcam. A 4K webcam will only cost you less than $100 now. I’m using more expensive equipment. Equipment I’m using, if you’re watching this, cost me about $1,000. But that’s the way. That’s a great way of promoting it is through the guests and utilizing their network, their name recognition in the local area, and that builds up your name recognition.
For For the record, everybody, the camera I’m using, which is terrible, it’s $35, the Logitech. But that’s for this, the podcast. When I’m doing it in my studio, the camera that my team had me buy there was $2,000, some Sony. It’s different. But I’m just going to say promoting this show, another really beautiful thing about podcasts is that they are what I call a compounding marketing system. And What that means is that by doing the podcast, everybody that participates in it has a vested interest in promoting the show. If you’re lucky enough to gather somebody who has a big audience, usually it’s audience specification is the number one way to promote podcasts. I will go ahead and get the podcast out in front of my audience. You go ahead and get the podcast out in front of your audience. And even if you did nothing else other than do the podcast, you will slowly but surely grow your reach just by making sure that you talk to your guests about promoting it to their audience, and you make sure that you also have the due diligence to promote it to your audience. Something that I am fifty-fifty on myself.
I put episodes of this show onto my website occasionally. When I do, those episodes tend to have high views on YouTube and things like that. But I select the episodes that I think are most interesting to the Then what I do additionally is I take the episodes where I really think it’s valuable. I have a private Facebook group with about 180 movers and shakers in the real estate industry. Those people get my favorite shows that John and I do, and all I got to do is do a link. I actually grab that off John’s Facebook page, generally speaking, and then push it into my private group. Here’s the thing. Whatever promotion I do is simply compounding the idea that you filmed the episode. It’s very low effort, extremely low effort. I spend five minutes, maybe, a month, and you can find somebody who will probably spend 10 minutes and they will be a guest, and they will get you out in front of a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand or 10,000 people, and then you’ll have a few additional listeners. That’s how you grow the audience. This show is slowly grown since John and I have been doing it.
Just over hundreds of episodes, pure diligence. When somebody finds something that you’re saying that they like, I don’t have many of these, but I do have the occasional person that reaches out and contacts me and goes, Oh, my God, I’ve listened to 50 of your podcasts. I’m just like? Oh, wow. They do occasionally do that. When they come through the door, they are customers, not some of the time, every time. That’s another interesting thing about producing digital content in the first place. If you cover enough subjects in enough detail, even though it could be very granular, you’ll eventually find one person where that’s a hop button, and you’re the only answer they can find. Podcasting is the same way. Talk about something that may be relevant to a minimal number of people, but John and I have done hundreds of these episodes. Eventually, Another thing is that sometimes somebody else’s reputation connects to your podcast. When you distribute it, it gets out there, and somebody sees, Oh, my God, you talk to whoever, somebody from Playster, whatever it is. We’ve had a couple of big guests, and one of those big guests, and somebody loves one of those prominent guests.
The minute that you talk to them, they already like you. Now, when you’re talking to them, they’re like, Oh, you’re my guy. Promotion takes care of itself. Now, if you want to do something more than that, or if you ever get a knockout Superstar Guest, Here’s one secret that John and I don’t talk about much because it requires that you have a budget. YouTube views acquired through paid advertising are the meager cost of acquisition. It’s especially if you end up talking about a broad subject that is not an expensive keyword, and you get a Rockstar Guest, and then you can target that guest’s name in your name and maybe some ancillary subjective searches. All of a sudden, you’ve got for 500 bucks, you can get out in front of 50,000 people. That is a meager cost for a very high impact. When you do that advertising, my last thing will be guys, gals, and everybody listening: John, you’re not looking for a conversion. You’re looking for audience acquisition, which could, over a considerable period, end up being conversion because the bigger your audience, the more parent authority that you have, and the more subscribers that you have on every channel that you’re on, the more likely people are going to look at you automatically and say, You must be credible.
There are many reasons one might build up an It’s something I have yet to engage in myself because we are usually maxed out for what I want to produce. But if I wanted to do more, I would throw a few hundred dollars into that paid advertising, grow my audience super fast, and the numbers would eventually happen. I don’t have anything to add. That was more than I thought I had to say on the subject. John, is there anything you’d like to close out with? Because we’re definitely at the end of our scheduled time.
No, we’ve covered the subject. If you have any questions, you can go over to the Mel-Right website and book a chat with me. And I’ll be more than happy to give you additional advice about podcasting. Back over to you, Rob.
Yeah, and for the love of God, everybody listening to the show today, John is the expert on this, not Robert. John, please call and reach out to him, whatever methods he has. If somebody is listening to this show for some reason and there’s an ancillary subject such as social media, SEO, or something like that, I’ve got a lot of resources on the inboundrem. com website. Please look at my service and contact forms and contact me there. You can also email me at robert@inboundrem. Com. John, is there any additional info you’d like to add as we close the show?
No, go over to the Mail-Right. c0m and you can book a chat with me. It’s right on the top navigation. Like I said, do you have any questions about podcasting? I’ll be more than happy to help. Cool.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for listening. We appreciate it so much. We will see you next week at the same time and on the same bat channel, and we’ll be able to have something cool to share with you about real estate marketing.
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Join EXP Realty in 2024. Discover the pros and cons to determine if this innovative brokerage suits your real estate career.
Are you curious if EXP Realty is the right fit for you in 2024? Join us as we explore both sides of the coin.
This informative video highlights essential aspects such as company culture, growth opportunities, and challenges agents may face within this brokerage model. You can give yourself valuable insights.
#1 – Successful And experienced realtors Would Be Successful At Any Brokerage.#2 – You Need To Break The mindset that Your Broker is Your Employer.
#3 – Priorities That You Need From Your Brokerage.
#4 – Comparing EXP Reality to The Main Comparators.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 446. John and I laugh because we talk about how I should explain my massive shiner. And John was suggesting that I go with the angry, jolted lover. It’s an irate customer kind of thing. The truth is, I was moving a piece of heavy equipment into my home office and let it slip. And the dolly and the thing I was moving smacked me in the face and gave me a massive shiner. So anyway.
That’s one hell of a shiner.
Oh my God. Yeah, it’s like half my face. It’s incredible.
It’s a beneficent shiner.
It’s like a Dalmatian, like. For those of you who don’t watch this on video, if you’re curious, please join us on video. You will now see me with half my face, black and white. All right, without any further ado, though, for those of you who might not be familiar with us, in today’s episode, we will talk about why you should or should not join EXp Realty in 2024. Mike, the fearless co-host, researched and came up with the subject in the first place. But some of you may not know him. So, John, without any further ado, please do us the favor of introducing yourself.
Oh, dear. Shock Orin. Nobody knows me. I’m the joint founder of Mel Riot.com. We’re a CRM email text platform that helps you get more leads. Plus, you get a nice-looking website. What more could you ask for, my beloved listeners? Back over to you, Robert.
All right, I’m Robert Newman, the founder of Inbound REM, a content-focused marketing company focused on the core principles of you owning stuff and search engine optimization. All right, without any further ado, though, we’re going to drop into.
I’m tempted to say it’s urgent care cent.
Oh my God. See, this is. This is every once in a while, John; I give you a lot of ammunition. This is one of those days per year that you get a ton. Because I could have called out, I did break my face, but no, I’m here letting you take some shots at me. Listen, ladies and gentlemen, to what you said, I am curious if exp is the right fit for you in 2024. All right, so we can talk briefly about why you selected this subject in the first place. Because we’ve discussed Exp before, this is the second time you brought them up as a subject, just looking.
At what other people were talking about. I thought it would differ slightly from video, Facebook, or Google local efforts. We have a guest next week. I think I’m right. We got a guest next week as well. But I thought it was good timing to have maybe come back. We’ve only discussed Exp once or twice, so I don’t think we’ve overkilled it, have we?
Okay, well, ladies and gentlemen, exp have some competitors. The primary among them is actual. It’s just one competitor that they have. The idea behind real is if they are actual Exp. Other companies like it are very similar to multilevel marketing, which has pros and cons. Before we jump into any of that, though, I will salt those pros and cons through the format of the show that Joe and John described as designed for us. I did take a heavy blow to my head recently, John, so understand when I’m mixing my words up, that could be part of the cause.
Oh, I do that. I don’t need a blow to do that.
So successful and experienced realtors would be successful at any brokerage. That is your number one. It’s kind of like what you put here. So, what did you mean by that? Like, get into that for us?
I think, you know if you haven’t built up a marketing engine, a marketing methodology, whatever techniques you’re going to utilize, you know, one-to-one marketing, more traditional type of marketing, where you just got a small group of people. Still, you’re tight with them, or you’re going to use more digital marketing, or you’re going to use a hybridization approach, which I think is the best. However, a lot of agents seem to struggle to combine both morphologies. They either go with the more traditional, build a small referral group in their community, or they go entirely online. But whatever, whatever your poison is, whatever is working, you gotta, if you’re successful. If you’ve built up that way of getting enough leads and turning those leads into commission checks, you will be successful. Whatever type of brokerage you go to, I don’t think I, apart from when you’re starting, you’ll not have a lot of experience if you’re beginning. , I don’t think any of these online brokerages are probably the right solution for you. Some people would say I’m not right, but finding an experienced agent to mentor you is perfect.
But apart from that, I think whatever type of brokerage, as long as you’ve got that marketing engine worked out, you will be somewhat successful.
I copy you. So I have a different take on this. Successful experience realtors is successful in any brokerage. That broad and general statement I completely and totally agree with. And I just want to say that at that point then for all of you listening to this show, especially for those of you, that rare few that really don’t sweat the details of your business, in other words, maybe you’re very successful at digital marketing of some kind. You really are already a profit engine. And now what you’re doing is trying to figure out how and where you’re going to see the most utilization for the business that you’re surrendering to a brokerage. Because that’s what you’re doing. You’re giving your business to somebody else for a set of services. When you are good enough at your business where the marketing, you’ve done the marketing you’ve created the deal, you manage the transaction, and all of that is seamless. Now you have this massive asset that you can turn over to a brokerage or not. Some agents turn it over for brokers that charge 0% or $4,000 a year for a seat. You all know who the 1% per like percent commission brokers are.
You should okay, all those people pretty much like process your transaction at no charge. So you can keep all of your money from the deal real and exp give you a percentage of their company as part of their end on the transaction. You end up paying about 20% on transactions. 20% of 1%. Okay, so they’re not the lowest and they’re not the highest on the transaction processing side. So you pay for this privilege. But part of what they do is they give you shares in the company, which is what makes their brokerage structure unique as part of your comp plan. Now here’s the interesting thing. They also are one of the very few people that allows you to treat their business like your business. That’s where it’s like multilevel marketing. And in that sense you get to, if you are a guy like Kyle Handy, who has a process that you can put online, that other people can copy and replicate, you could then make them essentially part of your downline, and then you can make a very small piece of their deal as well, and you can make some shares in EXP. Now all of this was much more appealing when the stock price was exploding in terms of stock price position of the shares.
And I am not a stockbroker, this is not financial advice. But in my opinion, you are looking at a better timeframe for real and other companies because Exp has stagnated on the share price for a while. But if for some reason you believe in their model, like a lot, and they’ve got a great model and they are doing really, really good at providing share value. So you need to look at this yourself and say, do I have the five to ten years? And if the answer is yes, in my opinion, Exp is definitely the established player that created the model that everybody else is following in the digital space. And they are the godfathers of it. They also have an incredibly attractive profit to earnings share ratio as opposed to every other provider out there. Now that’s not a guarantee of performance, so. And I don’t know that. Yeah, and it leads really well into what number two is on John’s list, which is you need to break the mindset that your broker is your employer. That’s what you said for number two. And I basically kind of like shared a thought that was very similar to that in that the person who controls the in business is actually in control.
But what do you think about how would you embellish on that? Or what would you say to that yourself, John?
Well, you’re in a partnership. It should be a partnership. The brokers should provide. Obviously, in some states, you know, a lot of states, you got, you got to have a broker or you’ve got to be the broker. It’s a requirement to be a real estate agent in Nevada. You’ve got to have, you got to be part of a brokerage and the broker has to qualify financially and also through additional testing and number of years in business to qualify, qualify as a broker. And they supervise their agents, but they should, they should bring things to the table. But you’ve got, you’ve also got to bring things to the table. You know, unlike there are some real estate brokerages that you are basically just the employee Redfin, but that they changed that model, haven’t they? But because it didn’t work. But you, you are self employed, you are working for yourself in partnership with your brokerage and you’ve got to do your own marketing and you got to do your own lead. Generate a, you know, some boutique power brokerages. They will provide so many leads to their agents. They have a full time digital manager. I think, you know, if you’re starting out, but normally they, they give the best of those leads to their experienced agents, don’t they?
In my experience, yours might be different, but that’s the mindset, you know, it’s a totally different mindset to be the employee, I feel.
Agreed. So, ladies and gentlemen, this is the mindset that you need to break. The mindset that your broker is your employer. I couldn’t agree with that more. It hasn’t been true in a while, and it certainly isn’t true in the digital age. There’s a very small handful of exceptions which mostly exist in the hyper luxury space where Sotheby’s luxury or a few other brand names are still someplace where when you sign up for them, they’re going to be your employer because they built such a strong pedigree into the brand that you’re not going to be able to catch it on your own, in theory, but there aren’t that many of those left, and they almost always exist in a very specific kind of space. There’s also an ever growing number of players that focus on the, the smaller, higher volume mindset. There are quite a few players out there that are appealing to that marketplace and building brands along the idea of doing real estate transactions en masse and providing a reasonably good experience and a lot of training to get those things done. And there’s all sorts of small brokers who are doing that for ExP and others, but those guys have already figured out that the broker is not the employer.
The person that is the employer, the person that can make the demands is the person who controls the business. And in the digital world that we live in, business is more and more defined by process. So if you have a lot of processes, what you say at the opening of sale, close of sale, and you can record all that video or other formats and then test agents on it, and then you have digital formatting, so that when somebody is closing a deal, like a lot of their paperwork is on an iPad, as an example, people are signing documents. You’ve got easy to understand assets that explain the transaction, explain what somebody’s supposed to do, and you’re paying for those, or you paid for the knowledge in the first place, and you have all of that process set up. Most of the time, brokers are not doing that anymore. There’s not very many brokers that do a very good job. One of the few is real and another one of the few is exp. They both have a very large amount of digital knowledge online that you can learn from. You have to decide who’s better real has done a better job on the corporate side.
I think people that are actually connected to the core entity and Exp is doing a much better job at recruiting power agents who do an incredible job at doing it, such as Ricky Carruth and Kyle Handy. They’re pretty much scooping up all of the people that figured out the digital lead generation and digital education side of real estate. And all those guys are going over to Exp. Why? They’re already educating thousands of people. Might as well make a small override on it. All right. Signing them up under their extended downline and then educating everybody en masse is already what they do. Ricky Carwith was already doing that before he ever signed up with Exp. He probably changed zero in his business model and is just collecting shares of his broker’s company to do it with them. So it’s a smart decision past that point. If any of you listening to this show right now are digital creators or headed in that direction, or influencers or educators, and real estate is your space. Exp and real and companies like that are absolutely places for you to look at and measure the long term value of your investment.
There’s cons though, too, and I do want to. I’m going to cover the cons in number three, but we’re going to go to break really quick because we’re right there, we’re right on the money and we’ll be right back. John, I am sorry. Pause. John, I am going to really step up for 1 second. I will be right back in under 60 seconds. Okay, so true. Break. All right. Okay. I’m going to do my countdown then. All right. Okay. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. Today we are talking. Today’s episode number is 446. We just got back from break and we are talking about the pros and cons or why you should or shouldn’t join EXP Realty in 2024. We stopped, we went to break when we covered a second subject, which is you need to break the mindset that your broker is your employer. We’re coming back and we’re going to talk about the priorities that we think might be a good idea for you to look at in 2024 from your brokerage. And this is just our opinion, and these are two guys that haven’t been realtors, but we both have a lot of digital experience and we’re applying that to this equation.
So John, why don’t you go first and run through what you think the priorities would be that you would need from a brokerage in 2024.
Well, I think the main priorities is money support charges. What the split is going to be. I think with Exp, I think they’re. I think their split is 2080, up to $16,000. And then there’s a cut off. I think I’m right about that. You covered the support, the training. You said that they do provide a lot of online training and they do like one or two of their main competitors provide good services when it comes to managing the transaction. Then you got the charges. You know how much they charge. I think by my research, which was at the beginning of 224, they were charging around $80 to $90 a month for their digital package. I think there’s a fourth one which all these are online players. It’s their weakest point is, and I would call it community, I think you can have community online, but I think it can’t compare to a traditional brokerage that has some form of community feel to it. But on the other hand, I’ve known, I’ve known a lot of the kind of bigger franchise brokerages. They don’t have much of a community feel, even though they’ve got a brick and mortar base.
So it just depends on the kind of tradition, what kind of brokerage, the more traditional model that you’re joining. What do you reckon?
So I think that this question is a little tricky because I think priorities that you need from your brokerage are going to depend on the kind of realtor that you are. I am the kind of guy that would really prefer a realtor, like a broker that I never ever, ever had to go into. If I never had to sit down for a real physical in person meeting, that would be the kind of broker that would appeal to me. I just don’t like it. I don’t like driving. Like, I don’t like going from place to place, which would probably make me a bad real estate agent to start with. But my processes would be built very much around getting as much done digitally as I could and then physically meeting only after I’d done a high level of communication qualification and then go show the home, show up an hour early, learn the home really quick before somebody came there themselves, and then walk somebody through the home. Now what does that mean in terms of support? That would mean that the broker that I would work with would have a lot of digital support, a lot of training online, a lot of like a really good internal IDX, really good internal brokerage tools.
Compass might be a selection for me. EXP probably wouldn’t be unless I was interested in creating a downline through like, ongoing education and so money priorities that you need from your brokerage. Now here’s an interesting subject for you. Like in terms of brokerages that invest the most into their agents, the brokerage that probably does the best job of this right now currently is one that nobody ever talks about, which is the agency re. Okay. Mauricio Mansky, who was an agent himself for many years, worked for Hilton and Highland. I do not know personally of any founder that is more dedicated to putting more money back into the brokerage than him. He has an internal marketing department. They send their team out with like, real high quality physical assets along with a fairly strong set of digital tools for the agents to use. So he’s got everything. He’s got physical handouts. He’s got like, they also spend money on the assessment side of properties, which is very rare for brokers. They most of the time hand that cost and that responsibility back over to the agents, not the agent cre. They have an internal marketing department that does all of that for you.
So in terms of a company actually providing physical support in an upper up scale market, the agency re, to me is like a hands down choice. If you happen to be one of those agents that’s like, listen, I’m a top notch professional, but all I really want to do is sell, and I want other people to supply me the marketing stuff. Well, one of the very few selections if you could get in would be the agent Cre, because they do provide so much support. They don’t hire agents willy nilly, which is crazy. They have nothing but super high qualified professionals at the top of their stack. Mauricio Mansky, to this very day, is one of the top producing real estate salespeople in the entire world. You cannot find a more qualified shop. So if that’s your kind of support that you’re looking for, and you already think that you’re an upper echelon guy and you’re willing to give up a bigger piece of your piece because all that shit that I just mentioned costs money. Like, it just does. So the agency re does absolutely take a bigger chunk of your deal than many of the people that John and I could talk about.
So are they really right for you? Who knows? You got to decide for yourself what kind of agent you are. And last but not least, charges. I would be the kind of agent that wouldn’t need any of that shit. I don’t want fancy glossy brochures. I’m going to do the entire sales process myself. I want you to charge me as little as possible. I can go learn my digital stuff by following people like Ricky and other people handy online. I absolutely. And then I’ll test it out with clients. I’ll test it myself. I do not need anybody to support me or tell me whether I’m doing a good or bad job, but I’ve got 30 years of sales experience, so I don’t need any that stuff. So the charges that somebody would have to bill me would be minimal, extremely minimal, John. And I would support like, if I wanted like a digital transaction tool or something like powered by Nile to support my transaction process, I would pay for that out of my own pocket and let that be part of my own internal charges to process the deal. I’d also hire a lot of Vas.
That would be how I would do it. My processes will include anything at all that I didn’t want to do, like posting stuff to social media, which should be done. I wouldn’t do it. I’d hire a va for $5 an hour out of the Philippines and call it a day. Let them post it, create the process once, let them do it. So when the broker or my real estate company came to me and said, oh, Robert, we support you socially, we do this and this and this, I’d probably laugh at them. There’s no way that a broker would be able to support me in a way that would be meaningful to me with my skill and my level of experience. No way. So you better not charge me for that stuff. And last but not least, when it comes to charges, John, I don’t know if you’re aware of this. I suspect very strongly that you are. But at the highest level with the biggest brokerages, some of their main recruitment tools are doing things like buying master licenses to boomtown and KBCor and other services. But that stuff is not free to the agent.
They pass along all the charges to the agent. I see. You want to say something? Join the.
Yeah, I don’t know if, am I right? That EXP KV core is still a main part of their digital package. I don’t think they insisted that use it. I know some of their biggest infant online training influences emphasize that that that’s one of the problems I have with it because I don’t think it’s a very good platform myself, but I would say that, wouldn’t I? But I do honestly believe that. I don’t think it’s particularly, I don’t think you’re you, you love it either.
So I don’t, I mean, it’s the it’s the McDonald’s of the real estate CRM industry. And, and for some people it will work. It’s slow, it’s clunky. It does do a lot of the key things that you needed to do. It’s on the cloud. It’s cheaper than most. Yeah. I think I’ve said this before publicly. I’ll say it again. No, I don’t. I am not in love with KVcore. What I love for KVCore with Exp specifically is that you guys got, you got guys like, like Kyle Handy who have produced very transparent and clear content that very specifically shows you how they are leveraging the platform and oftentimes they leverage it to profit. I love that it is a clear and transparent linear way for you to understand how other people are using it. But here’s the problem. Is it going to work for you the way it works for Kyle? Probably not. Probably not.
That area is this kind of boutique broker who is very good at marketing, that’s built a local, regional brand and you are gaining recognition by linking yourself to that region, that local, regional brand. I forgot your second name. Peter. I asked him back because I think he’s gone. You said he sold his brokerage in. He did, but I think he’s still active.
So he might be. I’m pretty sure. Sure he sold his brokerage to compass. Whether or not he’s active or not, I have no idea.
I still follow him. He, he’s very effective on his marketing. He, he knows what he’s doing or he has people that are working with him that really know what they’re doing.
So John, I would love it if for the audience that’s listening. Peter was a guest that we had that is a former record producer, somebody that a lot of us in LA know. He built up like a team, a real estate team in record time. Like two years, 150 agents. It was crazy. Incredibly successful. And so Peter came onto the show. John, if you remember, maybe you put that other episode in the show notes so that people can go back and reference that other show anyway, so that’s what, that’s what John was talking about. Peter was really cool, very effective social marketer. One of the very few guys that ever came on the show and just said to us all, like to John and I very transparently, hey, we don’t focus so much on CRM systems here. We focus on social marketing. And I just show my team how to do that. That was literally something he said. One of the very few brokers that’s ever come on the show with us and said something like that. To my recollection, do you?
Yeah, I think you’re right there. And he’s very outgoing. You know, he’s very persuasive. You could see that he would probably be very effective in running. And his wife was also a key part of running the business. So I think they run a pre. I got the impression, I don’t know precisely, but I just got the impression they probably run a really tight ship and they knew what they were doing.
Yeah, I did the background research for everybody that’s there. Peter and his wife actually did like 80% of the brokerages production, but they produced 180 million. Peter was already successful and famous off a show that he got onto. And so he pulled in a lot of leads off that show and they closed a lot of the business. But that doesn’t change the fact, ladies and gentlemen, for those of you listening that want to build a team, Peter and his wife, regardless of the team’s production, were some of the best people, builders and leaders that we met. Highly charismatic, moving in the direction of process, moving lightning fast in the real estate business. Got themselves a show, got popular, saw the writing on the wall in terms of how long it would take them to train people to produce as much as he and his wife produced and then sold the brokerage. Peter was very smart in my opinion, John. And since we’re talking to everybody here, our audience as human beings who are business owners, hey, listen, there’s another way to go about this. Not generally the way that John and I talk about, but there’s a way to build up a team, build up some buzz, and then sell everything fast.
And that’s what Peter did. You should listen to the episode because it was a world class get for us as two podcasters. Peter was amazing.
I think if you, if you’ve got a player in your local area, region that is doing that kind of social brand, building a brand, it’s something that you might benefit from joining. But a lot of national franchise brands and to some degree, local or regional, you know, brokerages are a bit stale, aren’t they? I don’t really think unless you’re starting off in your career, they’re offering that much.
Agreed. Keller Williams is. So here’s the recommendations I make. You’re year one. Like year zero through three. Keller Williams is a great place to start. Still have a lot of training material physically that they hand off to their marketing centers. They’re very good at it. They teach you process really well. They came up with a very clever way to basically organize a real estate business. And so it teaches you a lot about process. And then once you’re through year one through three. Personally, if it was me, I probably would look at one of these big digital virtual brokerages. And real, there’s another one, I think, called Realty one. There’s yet another one called Exp, which is what we’re talking about. But we’re going to compare some of these for you. We’re going to do bonus material. Now, we’re at the end of our primary show, so we’re going to do ten extra minutes where we’re going to talk about comparing exp realty to some of its main competitors. Some of the people that I just mentioned. We’re going to run through a small list and we’re going to do a comparison. The big buzz out there right now, John, which I don’t know how much you’ve heard about them, is real.
That’s where a lot of our agents, Matthew Lawson, other people are transferring their licenses to. Have you heard anything about these guys?
No, I’ve heard of them, but I didn’t do much research on them because I. You have mentioned them before, so I was assuming that you would have something to say about them.
Okay, so, yeah, real is, um. I. I have mentioned them before because once Matthew, who I still kind of like, follow digitally, he is the founder of a group. Well, he is a co founder of a group called a YouTube mastermind for real estate agents. At this point, the group has like 12,000 people. Matthew is officially, like, an influencer. I forget how many subscribers he has, but it’s a lot, like, at this point, like, he’s got all the awards and the YouTube gold records and all that shit. He’s become a thing. And in that thing, he also has become the number one recruiter for real. He has influenced more people to join real than any other person around. That is Matthew Lawson. So he’s officially become a truly important influencer for a brand new brand. Through Matthew, I decided to check real out. And what I discovered is that they have a stronger seeming mission. They seem to be wanting to fix some of the mistakes that ExP made. So as ExP grew and grew Willy nilly, they started to develop a lot of the same problems that every other multi level marketing company before them has developed, which is people that get in there to not so much create value around the buying and selling real estate, but basically create value around the idea of recruiting other people who are then going to go out and sell real estate.
I was approached with this very idea myself three different times by three XP people. They all wanted me to basically be an influencer without selling any real estate. I’ve been involved in a lot of multi level marketing things over the years. And while I did see a way that I could make some profit, probably make it easy and big, I learned a long time ago not to attach myself to a brand until I am really, truly integrated into its core philosophies.
Because, well, you know my feet, that because I’ve expressed it to you on the show before and because I come from England, these type of schemes are totally illegal in the UK. You can go to prison by running one of those type of schemes. So my cultural background I would never get involved with. And that’s why I wouldn’t get involved with ExP, not for that reason from my cultural upbringing. I just wouldn’t be comfortable in getting involved with it. Even though it’s totally legal here, isn’t it?
It is, and it’s. I want to be clear, I kind of. I kind of side with John. If John and I are both saying that we wouldn’t sign up for it and we’ve been approached, I think that probably says everything that we need to say as podcasters to you, the audience listening, you want to do what you like, you want to complete your research. I still say, okay, but I will say this. It is a rapidly maturing multilevel marketing model. And before you decide that you’re going to sign up for it, you should do some of your own research on what happens in rapidly maturing multilevel marketing models. There are not that many that are successful, and the only ones that really have, have become more like store owners that are run out of their houses, like Amway.
So, and I think you’re very intuitive in what you’ve just said, because that’s what I’ve heard. And I think what you’re saying about real is it’s attractive as long as it doesn’t become over. The main purpose is no longer selling property. The purpose is to get new recruits in.
Correct.
And that’s the problem. I’ve heard about them, and I think you were. I’ve interrupted you, but only to say you’re spot on. What you’re saying about real is that you feel they haven’t gone down that trap. Is that what?
They have yet to go down that trap. They’ve agreed that they want to grow slower. They have focused their recruiting efforts on particular people instead of just anyone. They are experiencing rapid growth and seem to have better processes and systems. But I say this is a guy who spent about 6 hours researching him and no more than that. And so I do not know that for sure. This should not be, and this should not be, as an endorsement. This should just be heard as. I was curious. I didn’t even; I’m not even a real estate agent. I was just curious because Matthew is so hot on him and, over the years, has been following him. He is a guy that influences me.
I like his content. He has always been really forthright about his successes and pitfalls as a real estate YouTuber. Like, you know, he posts his relationship statuses online; he has wins and failures. He’s one of those people that lets you into his life, John. And because he does let me into his life, wins and losses combined, I grew to trust him as a content producer, so I pay attention to what he’s talking about when it comes to real.
And so far, he has had nothing but good things to say about them, and I have no reason to believe that he would like, even if it was to his detriment, I believe he’d say, wow, this isn’t what I thought I signed up for. He would say that, but he hasn’t done that. It’s been years. Anyway, that’s a good enough point. There are other people to compare, like reality. But honestly, I have not done enough research. I don’t know that John has. So we’re going to leave the comparisons off there. We appreciate you listening to the show. As usual, we’d like to ask you to share thumbs-up comments. It helps the YouTube algorithm a lot. It helps with moral support for John and me. We’ve been doing this for years, and you probably think we will do it no matter what, but it makes our day when all of you comment.
Like sharing, sending love to Rob, and sending him a digital ice pack; he needs it. So send him some love, listeners, and viewers. He looks like he’s been in a prize.
All right, so John, not faithful. All true. John, how would you like him to do that if you wanted people to reach out to?
I’m such a piss artist, so I can’t help. It’s the Englishness; it just comes out, folks. I can’t help it. Thanks, Rob. The best way is to go to the male hyphen write.com website, look at what we offer, and then book a chat with me. I would love to discuss, show you some aspects of the mailrite system, and become part of the tribe. We’re a small platform. You get a lot of individual attention from us. Back over to you, Rob.
I love that Mail-Right is high-touch. That’s very important for some of you, especially. Less experience should equal a higher touch vendor you need in your corner. Okay. Inbound Rem does the same thing, but at a different time; we’re targeting a different client. We’re targeting content producers who are retiring long-term thinkers. We’re targeting, and our website has massive content, like reviews and deep analysis for local, traditional SEO, pay-per-click, and even Facebook marketing. However, though I recommend John’s content, which is probably a little more than ours, we have some. So it’s a one-stop-fits informational place to arrive at these days. Anyway, I so much appreciate everybody. John, I understand you. And he’s not wrong. If you want to amuse yourselves, you should look at me. I’m pretty beat up. All right, without any further ado, take us offline.
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