Category: Podcast Episodes

Robin Phelps Hanson of The Phelps-Hanson Group has crossed over 20 million in annual production this year. However, she feels she could have done it much faster! We discuss her rise to being a top producer, challenges she faced, and what she wished she would have known back when she started. This is a perfect episode to check out if you’re interested in what a rising superstar in the real estate industry does on a daily basis to keep moving forward!

Robin Hanson can be reached at robinphelps@atproperties.com or 773.469.5423.

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Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:15
Hello and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the only podcast made by Chicago real estate agents for Chicago real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your host through the show. And if this is your first time listening to the podcast this episode, what we do here is we interviewed top, actually the the very top producers in Chicago There are currently over 35,000 realtors in the Chicagoland area, we literally are only talking to the top 1%. And what we’re doing is asking them how they built their business. How did they become successful? What are they doing differently than other realtors out there and having them share that with you. So I think we’ve started this about three or four months ago, we already have about 30 episodes done and about 5000 of you are listening on a regular basis. So we’re really grateful for that. A couple of ways you can continue to support the show so we can keep providing this to you in the coming year. Tell a friend if you have any other brokers that you think could benefit from listening to these kinds of interviews, shoot shoot them our information, you can obviously subscribe on iTunes, Google Play any Podcast Directory out there, you can find us. Also send us your questions once a month, Carrie McCormack, and I do a show where an episode where we interview, or rather she talks about what’s going on in the market and answers your questions. And we’re also going to be instituting a new regular episode in the next year where we’re going to be doing an investment episode once a month. So send us your questions whether you want to hear from a top producer like Kerry McCormick, or a top investment producer, Eric workman is going to be our regular guest on that show. Send us your questions, and we will answer them live on the show you easiest way to do that you can visit our website, keeping it real pod.com Or visit us on Facebook keeping it real pot. And the other thing that’s really exciting. And I promise I’ll wrap this up in just a moment and get to our great interview with Robin Hanson is that we have our very first sponsor on this episode. So you’ll be hearing those short commercial in a moment right before we get to Robin. And if you are someone who would like to advertise on the show and get in front of 1000s of brokers, every couple, any particular episode, you can do that. So reach out to us and we will give you that information. So thank you so much. This has been really exciting 2017 We have a few more episodes before we finish out the year and we’ll go strong in 2018. And also lastly if you have any anybody that you think we should be talking to any really successful brokers out there who maybe we don’t know about or we haven’t reached out to shoot us that information. We get a lot of our interviews from you guys who give us those suggestions. So thanks so much really appreciate it and on to our interview

this episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by Loftus law. I’m sorry the attorney is busy with something more important is something you will never hear when you call Patrick Loftus of Loftus law. Loftus law is a firm focused on serving real estate professionals and their clients you want your deals to close on time without headaches and Loftus law is the solution. For more information on what Loftis law can do for you and your clients and special pricing of 299 per closing call 773-632-8330 or email Patrick at Loftus hyphen law.com

Today on the show we

have Robin Phelps Harrison and Robin is a Chicagoland native and a broker with at properties. She is the founder of The Phelps Hanson group, a top producing real estate team. Robin has found her niche within the luxury single family market as of late, but equally enjoys working with first time condo buyers and sellers as well as investors. Robin lives in the north center area with her husband, their five year old daughter and 11 year old dog. Welcome Robin to the show.

Robin Hanson 4:22
Thank you so much.

D.J. Paris 4:24
My dog is also nearing that age so but she’s mine’s a little chihuahua. What type of dog do you have?

Robin Hanson 4:30
Okay, so ours is actually part Chihuahua and part rat terrier. So Oh, not unlike yours and she doesn’t have any teeth. She only has a couple of teeth. So we have a lot of challenges in that in that arena.

D.J. Paris 4:45
I do as well. So mine is nine and a half and she has had 13 teeth polled. She has none of all the important teeth are still there as of now but we’ll probably be going away at some point. People don’t realize that chihuahuas in particular, they have too many teeth or they’re live little mouth. So

Robin Hanson 5:01
I didn’t realize that either we’re over 20 Now extracted,

D.J. Paris 5:06
quickly catching up with you. Mine is sleeping underneath the desk here at the office. Okay, so but this isn’t about me and my dog. Let’s talk about you. How did you how did you get involved in real estate? Tell us your origin story.

Robin Hanson 5:19
Okay, so about 15 years ago, I worked at a tech startup company. And I was there a little bit over a year. And then they closed their doors. And they gave all of us a severance. I was single, late 20s. And I decided to take that money and take real estate classes. And I was lucky enough to live with my best friend, Heather, who owned a beautiful condo and said, you know, you can actually even use my car while you’re starting off with clients. Because I didn’t have a car. I took the L downtown to work every day. She had a really nice BMW. So for the first two years of my career, I drove around her in her BMW and everybody thought that was my car, my clients, other agents. Heather would ask to drive her own car. And I would be like, yeah, no, I’m sorry, I need it today. So we kind of, she was very happy when I was able to afford my own car, which was, you know, literally two years into the business. So I was Rookie of the Year, the first year at the habitat company, I literally loved it from day one, loved everything about it.

D.J. Paris 6:37
That’s amazing. And not only getting rookie of the year, but just back up that you have a friend that was willing to give you not her broken down Honda Civic, from 1997. But literally her nice BMW and you got to drive it around, I hope you have done at least sent her a nice bottle of wine

Robin Hanson 6:55
I have and I paid her back for the boot that she got on it for me not paying the tickets. So it was all good. But I, I ended up joining a team that was doing a lot of condo conversions, you know, vintage buildings that they were gutting and turning into these beautiful condos, and they were very affordable for first time buyers. So I was lucky enough to join this team. And literally, I was slipping a contract under the team leader store every weekend, and we were just we were killing it, you know, is 2005 for something like that three, maybe. And it was just an awesome experience learning how to choose the finishes and negotiate. And we were open both days every weekend. So we were meeting a lot of buyers. And I thought that was so valuable. But that was really, when I worked for the habitat company that was the beginning of learning how to pick up a buyer and an open house. You know, convert them to your own client, we were actually getting a lot of sellers out of these. So it was really an awesome opportunity that I was given from the start to join a team like that. And these guys, there were my mentors, and they’re still now there with our properties. And they’re still good friends.

D.J. Paris 8:11
So yeah, it’s amazing. And I know that was a bit of a different time back when there was a lot more development. And it was kind of a feast or famine, a situation if you were a broker and you got in with some of those developments. It was amazing. And then But then But then the market crashed. And how did you like pivot your business or adjust? You know, well due to them?

Robin Hanson 8:33
Yeah, I mean, that was rough. And I feel a connection to all of the brokers that have been in the business through that period, because you’re, you know, doing it if I’m doing a deal with one of them. And maybe I haven’t done a deal before we get to talking. It’s like, oh, gosh, that was such a hard time. I mean, I did a lot of rentals. Just because, you know, it wasn’t a source of income. And a lot of those renters were then converted into buyers later, which of course, is our hope. So, you know, it wasn’t easy, I think my I was lucky enough that my sphere of influence was built up in a way that I had enough people that were still buying and selling. But you know, there were so many foreclosures and so many short sales and and it was it was tough financially and also emotionally because, you know, a client would call me over to speak with them about their home and they’re telling you there underwater, you know, they’re about to go through a short sale, that bank is calling and you’re, you’re trying to be a good advocate for them and give them good advice and you really don’t even know what to say to get them through it. So that was a tough time. It’s it’s, it’s nice to work with clients. It’s nice to be in a market again where people are borrowing money and successfully and you know, putting 20% down or whatever. And, you know, there’s there’s I’m meeting with clients who I can actually come in and say, Wow, you have $150,000 equity, you know, this is going to be fun. So that’s that’s a much, you know, happier way to do business.

D.J. Paris 10:11
Yeah. And you’ve you’ve really had tremendous amount of success recently. You I know you’re closing the year at at a record high, which is awesome.

Robin Hanson 10:20
Yes, thank you. You know, I think so I’ve been doing this, like I said, about 15 years, I’ve been with the app properties for 10. I was always, you know, very comfortable around that seven, 8 million mark. And then, you know, I was lucky enough for two things, I started working with a builder who gave me a few opportunities that were really, you know, very important that I succeeded that I did a good job for them. And I did, and they, they were happy. And we continue to have this relationship, which I’m so grateful for. But, you know, I think that I took the confidence that I built in these situations with them, and, you know, met other sellers and buyers. And I started going into listing presentations, feeling like, I really believed that I was the best person for the job. And I shouldn’t say best, there are so many amazing brokers. But I went in maybe feeling better about myself as a broker. And I, the success just started coming to me. And of course, you know, it was fun and exciting. And I think that you always feel like you could be working harder. No matter how hard you’re working, you always feel like you could be working harder. And I still feel that way. And I think that’s also what’s keeping me going I am not, you know, everybody’s exhausted in this business. But I’m not finishing the day saying, Oh, my gosh, I’m done. I’m just kind of going well, let’s see what tomorrow brings. And that has, you know, changing my own mentality, I think has has helped. So I’m very grateful.

D.J. Paris 12:04
Yeah, one of the things you mentioned before we started recording, which I think is really very honest, and and also humbling, and I like it very much when people are able to say, you know, because I know your closing the year out really, really your high numbers. And you said I really should have got there a few years before? And can you talk a little bit about you know, the shift, and maybe why you think you could have done it sooner I would have done?

Robin Hanson 12:31
Yes, I I think that I am a very strong believer that social media is our best tool. And I started using Facebook for a lot of, you know, for posting listings, and for just kind of posting Hey, everybody, I’m out here, if you need me and me and my, my partner, Amber, we do a lot of just kind of post showing who we are and what we’re up to. And I’ve had people come into my open houses that said, Oh, it’s nice to meet you in person, your face is following me around the internet, which is because I’m using ad works. And I’m purposely following them around the internet. Sure. And all of these tools that are available to us, you know, they obviously they, they grow and they get better and better every year. But I feel like I’m just now sitting down almost daily and saying what’s available? What’s out there, I just attended the national shows, excuse me, National Association of Realtors Conference and McCormick Place. And me and my friend walked around, say, oh my gosh, look at this, look at this. And there’s so many awesome tools out there to help, you know, tell the public about you. And that you’re you’re here and you’re ready to help them. And I just really don’t think I was taking advantage of those like I should. And that’s huge for our business this year.

D.J. Paris 13:52
Yeah, I absolutely agree. There’s definitely ways to do it, I think two that are more effective than than others. I see. I see a lot of realtors maybe only posting hey, here’s my new listing, which I guess is better than doing nothing. But there’s a lot more ways you can engage the the audience. And so it sounds like you’re doing a lot of that. And that’s, that’s really interesting, you know, so we have a lot of people who listen Are you know, brokers who maybe they’re stuck at at their own production level, and they wish they could break out of that whatever ceiling they feel as sort of the is there? Or maybe they’re new to the business not sure what to do. And I know you have a very specific sort of thoughts about working with friends and family and could you share some wish you what you wish you would have known dealing with friends and family?

Robin Hanson 14:40
Oh, definitely. So I mean, your friends and your family are going to be your best referral source. And I was very fortunate to start at, I think I was 27 or 28 and some of my friends had just gotten like the good job, you know, I mean, they had started entry level out of college and they were starting to get the better jobs. and saying, Oh, I don’t want to rent anymore. And I mean, I think I sold eight condos in the first two months to people that were good friends of mine. And, you know, as we I’ve my business has grown, and quite frankly, the dollars amount amounts have gone up. I’ve noticed that, you know, working with your friends, is difficult sometimes because, you know, they’re expecting maybe a little bit more from you than they would from another agent. And maybe you’re in I’m expecting more from them, you know, give me the benefit of the doubt. Yes, yes, I’m doing that, of course, I’m doing that. And I have to stop and think, you know, they don’t know what I’m doing, I need to tell them, I need to tell them every week what I’m doing to sell their house, just like I’m telling Mr. Jones, with the listing down the street, you know, so I think that I have to stop even now and say, okay, you know, they are equally as important. And nothing that I do for another client, you know, I should be doing everything the same for them. And, you know, if you just do that, and you can hang out on the weekends and be social and not talk about work. But when it comes to selling a home for a good friend or family, it’s just I just kind of, you know, proceed like any other client. And I wish that somebody would have told me that it was going to be hard, because, you know, I think when I first started, I thought this is going to be great. I’m going to work with all my friends. And I’m, I continue to be very, very grateful to be able to do that. But it’s, I often have to take a deep breath. Because you you want to almost be offended if they’re asking you what are you doing to sell my house? So so and so sold this and you just want to say, Come on, it’s me, you don’t trust me. But you can’t do that, because it’s professional, and you have to stay professional.

D.J. Paris 16:45
Yeah, I just, you know, you said something really, really important in there as well that are that I thought was a real good takeaway for anyone listening, who’s got clients who are, who are trying to sell a home, or you’re starting to sell their home, which is let them know, every single week what you’re doing, regardless of what happens,

Robin Hanson 17:02
you know, my goal every week is for is to email them or to call them before they call me. And I feel like if they’re calling me and checking in, and I’ve, I’ve failed in that category, because I want to give them the information that I know that they you know, have the right to get before they come to me and say How was Saturday, and I overdo it. I mean, I shouldn’t say overdo it. But when I do a listing presentation, I tell the seller, you know, we’re going to be so close that when this is over, you know, you’re going to really miss me and we’re going to have to get coffee twice a week, because I’m going to tell you, I’m going to give you a lot of feedback. Every time I have a showing and I like to do that I like to report back almost immediately. I’m I probably sent 500 text messages a day. So and I you know, they never have to wonder what’s going on. Because they always know. I’d say

D.J. Paris 17:56
that is an amazing customer service policy. And the I know when when I bought my condo, which was like 2006. And I was in technology doing marketing for technology for I knew nothing about real estate, I still really don’t know too much, even today, but but back then I knew I knew literally knew nothing. And my friend, who was my broker, who is still my friend, he had a policy that I asked him after the fact I he said I never wanted a client to have to call me first. I always thought what a great policy. So it sounds like you have that same policy. So sure. But I was laughing earlier because when when we asked you some questions, which we do to everyone that we talked to we try to get a sense of what they’re all about, so we can bring it up on the show you this one is amazing. I can you please tell us about the sculpture story?

Robin Hanson 18:51
Oh, yes, absolutely. So this was maybe 10 years ago, I did a listing presentation for a family that was selling a home on the north side. And as she was giving me a tour, my eyes kept going to a certain part of the house, this bright white thing and I didn’t know what it was. And then she kind of walked me in and said, you know, my family made this. I know it’s a little odd. But you know, we made this together. And it was a sculpture that was I mean, gosh, the size of maybe a lion. I mean, we’re talking huge and it was made entirely of feminine sanitary products.

D.J. Paris 19:33
Tampons, specifically

Robin Hanson 19:34
campaign specific. You set it up for ads. These are Yeah, yes. And, you know, it was you really couldn’t help but stare at it. And I said to her this is you know, don’t get me wrong. This is just

D.J. Paris 19:47
This is beautiful.

Robin Hanson 19:49
Yeah, I love it. Frankly. No, I mean, I just you know, but however, you know, and it was it just couldn’t be moved. It was on this big stand And so I said, Okay, well, you know, I’m not going to photograph it, but it’ll be here. So every showing I had so, and I thought about hanging Christmas lights on and just, you know, I thought maybe we should play this off, because it’s obviously not going to be missed at a showing. So anyway, any everybody who came through this house would say to me like, oh, Ken, do you mind if I take a couple pictures of the, you know, the crown molding, but I knew what they were taking pictures of show their friends. So, yeah, it was I definitely never had that one happened to me again, or, you know,

D.J. Paris 20:35
were they artists are just Oh,

Robin Hanson 20:37
yeah, they were artist. So and I’m sure at the studio, there were other things, but this was the one that they chose to bring home.

D.J. Paris 20:45
And chose it. Were they surprised when you said, you know, maybe, maybe everyone else’s sensibilities? Might Yeah,

Robin Hanson 20:53
you know, they were surprised just like a seller, if you tell them to take, you know, a picture, a nude picture down of some sort of painting of them topless or something, which of course has happened also. So

D.J. Paris 21:10
that’s, I guess, the same mind that would have that would create that sculpture is not the same mind is the same mind that would be like, What do you mean, why do it? Why would I have to move this? Right? So it’s not like, oh, yeah, we get it. It’s a little odd. Well,

Robin Hanson 21:23
and in this case, it was a hot market. And it was a really nice listing. And I knew that it was, you know, kind of this, I just kind of had a feeling that we could just make it fun. And the eventual buyers, you know, of course, joked about writing it in the contract and things like that. So luckily, we did not, you know, they were able to get to take it with them, because I’m sure they still have it to this day. Well, that’s

D.J. Paris 21:48
not something you throw in the garbage that No, I would say no, it’s it’s literally made of things you throw in the garbage. No, this is true. That’s all that is, that is amazing.

Robin Hanson 22:01
I actually have another one too. They, I had a very, very old home that I was selling. And in the attic, there was just one single rocking chair just sitting there. And it just gave me the creeps.

D.J. Paris 22:18
It was a beautiful start rocking on its own. Yes.

Robin Hanson 22:21
Every time I went up there, I pictured that. And I never ever told the seller that I was you know, creeped out by it. I you know, I never mentioned it. And, you know, he was a funny guy. And he started to kind of mess with me, and move it to different areas of the addict and what’s great. And then he would tell me, you know, I haven’t been up there in like a year. So it was in eventually I said, Okay, you’re gonna need to either come clean, or, you know, I’m not going up there anymore. So that was good.

D.J. Paris 22:54
That is funny. Um, what advice would you have have to brokers who are feeling stuck or stifled or not sure how to take their business to the next level? Is anything come to mind? Yeah,

Robin Hanson 23:07
definitely. I would advise them to get education to take advantage of what the association has to offer or you know, even at their independent brokerage at att properties, they do amazing training, I mean, you can, you can be a one year agent or a 30 year and sit in this training and walk out feeling motivated. But you know, as members of the association, you always have those options. And, I mean, I probably call my managing broker or one of my mentors, at least twice a week and say, Can I run this by you? And, you know, I would say, to try to have a meal with a new person at least three times a week, whether it’s a meal, or a cup of coffee, or something, and even if you sit down, and that person proceeds to tell you about their brother who’s a realtor, and you know, you think, oh, gosh, well I wanted to be their realtor, it really doesn’t hurt. You might learn something, they might tell you something about a piece of land that their brother is selling in their neighborhood and you go wait a minute, my my builder was looking for land over there and then suddenly you’re connecting so you know, it’s it is difficult. We all go through slow times. And the best thing to do is to just get to the office or wherever you feel comfortable working and prospect and you know, call people that you trust and say, you know, what do you do when this happens and everybody’s been through it? And I used to one of my old managing brokers used to say when things are slow go on a trip, and not an exotic trip but you know, go to Michigan or Lake Geneva or something for the weekend and and your phone will start ringing you just need to get your mind off of being slow.

D.J. Paris 24:50
Sure, yeah. Yeah, I have a suggestion for for people listening. One of the things that you can do in particular after you close A transaction with a client is that’s a good excuse a good reason to take them up to coffee or to a meal, just obviously, to thank them for their business. But what you can say, if you really enjoyed working with them, is you can say, hey, you were like the ideal client. I wish I had more clients, just like you have any suggestions for me about how I might get in front of more people just like you? Yeah. And it’s different from saying, Hey, do you know anyone else that’s looking for to buy or sell or, you know, which could be awkward or uncomfortable? Or it could be that they just don’t know anyone? But when you ask them for their advice, I’m like, gosh, if you were me, how would you get in front of more people like you? You know, people will tell you though, they’re flattered that you’re asking for their opinion, which is different from necessarily just asking for referrals, which you can do too. But I love the idea of just saying, Gosh, you know, I you know, I love to meet more buyers or sellers just like you. And if you had any suggestions of how I could, you know, get in front of more people that would really be helpful. And you’ll be shocked at how, especially if you had they had a good experience with you? Would you be the only reason to do this don’t don’t, you know, obviously Oh, for

Robin Hanson 26:06
sure. And to your point, you know, planning a meal after closing is a lot of fun. Because you can, you know, sit down and have a glass of wine. And I you know, I like to get to know, people, if I get any indication that somebody will tell me their deepest secrets than I usually go for it. I just like to really dig in. And I feel like that’s a great time to do that to say, hey, you know, your sister had stopped by that day, we were there. So like, you know, where you guys close growing up. And it’s just fun. Because we’ve closed it, we have some relief. And we can, you know, maybe go over some of the funny things that happened during negotiations, because now it’s done, and everybody knows it’s done. And that’s always a great time Exactly. Like you said, to just kind of say, it was really fun working with you. I wish all my clients were like you, you know, maybe you know some people.

D.J. Paris 26:56
And I wonder how many what percentage of buyers or sellers do not get that invitation from their broker after the transaction, even though just to have coffee, or some sort of, hey, thanks aside for maybe a gift you might send them I’ll bet you 90 Some percent of buyers and sellers do not get that invitation. So even just doing that alone will separate you from just about everyone else.

Robin Hanson 27:20
Definitely. And it doesn’t have to be a big expensive steak. You know, like you’ve said it could be a latte. And you could just say, I just wanted to, you know, say thanks. And you know, have a little time with you. So it goes a long way.

D.J. Paris 27:35
Awesome. Well, Robin, this has been a really fun conversation and not just because of your growth story. But no, but let’s talk about if there are buyers or sellers or investors or renters even who are interested in working with you, what’s the best way that someone can reach out to you?

Robin Hanson 27:53
Oh, yeah, definitely. My email is Robin Phelps. All one word pH. E. LPs, like the swimmer at@properties.com and my phone number is 773-469-5423.

D.J. Paris 28:11
Fantastic. Well, Robin, thank you so much for your time. And you know, best of luck with good and continued success. Your by the way. We should mention Robin is a top 1% producer. I forgot that I forgot. I forgot to mention that in Chicago. And so she is she’s killing it very humbly killing it. But she is she is a big deal. She wouldn’t say that but I’ll say. Anyway, thank you so much for being on the show.

Robin Hanson 28:33
Thank you. This was so fun. I appreciate it.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Top 1% producer Mike Opyd has a bone to pick with traditional real estate firms. He feels brokers are paying WAY too much for the value they receive. At REMAX Next (the firm Mike co-founded) brokers choose their own commission structure and create their own branding. He believes in “disrupting” the established relationship of a broker to their firm, and compensating them higher at the same time. Mike is also a big believer in coaching and mentoring, and talks about how he maintains his own successful individual practice.

Mike Opyd can be reached at 312.929.8910 and mike@remaxnext.com

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Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:13
Hello and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real. The only podcast made by Chicago real estate agents for Chicago real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your host through the show and hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving and relaxing time, and are probably finishing out the year this month. If you’re a broker, you’re probably trying to get some final deals in for the end of the year, or maybe even thinking about what you want your 2018 year to look like. And we are gonna have a ton of episodes in our backlog. So we’ve been accumulating them and then you will we will be cranking them out here in the month of December. So we’re probably on pace to do about three a week. So be on the lookout. Best way you can support us is to telephone and if you have other agents you know that are interested, or that might be interested in learning what the top producers out there are doing. Tell them about the show they can subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or streamed directly from our website. Also send us your ideas and questions. Whether it’s for Kerry McCormick when we do our our monthly Monday market minute and she talks about what’s going on in the real estate world as all and also answers your questions. Or if it’s just hey, you got to interview this person, he or she would be great for the show. And they have an interesting story. We are always open to that. So send us a drop us a message either on our Facebook page, or on our website, which is keeping it real pod.com. Today on the show, we have Mike open, which this is one of my favorite interviews that we’ve done this year because Mike is a disruptor in the real estate industry. And he’s going to talk about how he’s doing that in his own way. So enjoy the show. Tell a friend and thanks for listening.

Today on keeping it real. We have Mike opet, Mike graduated college and after two years of corporate America he quit without having a job to move to. And after a phone call from his cousin he was hooked and started in real estate just as the market crashed perfect timing. For the first few years. He did not do a lot of business. But what he did instead is immersed himself in all the things real estate and was determined to know more than everyone else. And I personally also think that is an awesome, awesome goal. After surviving the crash and working for a few different companies, his partner, and Mike opened up his own firm which is now called REMAX next and they’re in the West Loop. Their goal is truly putting agents first and allowing them to design their business as they want without the limitations of other outdated brokerages. Thanks, Mike for being on the show.

Mike Opyd 3:03
Thank you, AJ happy to be here, man.

D.J. Paris 3:05
Awesome. Well, I would love to hear about the you getting into the business right at the probably the most challenging time in recent history, and sort of how you weathered that storm and also how you learn so much along the way.

Mike Opyd 3:20
Yeah, so you know, when I graduated college, I had a finance and then a master and a degree in management. And I wanted to jump into finance that I would take over, you know that world quickly realize sitting in a desk staring Excel spreadsheets, doing partnership, tax accounting, which is just as sexy as it sounds, was not for me. I stuck it out for two years. And then I just basically just quit without actually a job to come back to. So started looking for a job couldn’t find one. The economy was pretty much in the tanks, or getting the tanks to that point. It really was just a call to my cousin who’s been a top real inner city for a long time. And I was just really asking questions about investing in real estate. I mean, I had no money I saved up a little bit, but was in no position here to invest in it, but just was curious, you know, just from the finance standpoint, really was about a 30 minute phone call. And when I hung up, I was absolutely hooked. I just I saw real estate is something that I think I could take my energies and my inability to sit still and kind of target or focus everything I had into it. So I went out, got my license a couple of weeks later and started off with my cousin as part of her team started doing that for a number of years. Then I end up separating to go off and do my own thing. At this point, you know as part of the team we had switched from Keller Williams to dream town. So then at that point, I was on the Young Professionals Network board at the Chicago Association Realtors I met another person who was starting up a group during that time. So I worked for him for a couple years, about four years. And at that point, it’s you know, it’s always kind of been my goal, to separate and do my own thing and start my own company. And it just so happens as I was nearing the end of my time work. And there, I was kind of gearing up of how I can do that. separated from the group started actually creating my own company. I had the LLC done, the website was getting work done. So all those things were coming into place. And then my partner came up to me and and want to just grab lunch. And little did I know that he was going to introduce me to REMAX. And, you know, my mindset was always that I just when I did my research on all these companies, whether I was going to work for one, or maybe even consider buying one, I just never found one that I really thought was going to fit the profile that I really wanted at a company where we’re allowed to do our own branding or marketing and really customize it so agents can, we could center on just helping agents out, never considered REMAX my partner told me about it, I thought it was too good to be true. Went up to meet with the corporate people, they further emphasized exactly the same thing my partner told me, and a couple months later, we had a franchise and officially opened up last July in the West Loop.

D.J. Paris 6:26
Congratulations. That’s a That’s That’s fantastic. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, and let’s let’s get right into, you know, sort of what your vision is for for your firm. Because you you were you have a very specific sort of feelings about agent training and, and sort of what you’re providing. And I’d love to hear sort of, you know, the frustrations that maybe you’ve had seeing other firms out there and sort of your solution and what what you guys are doing differently because I love firms that are sort of disrupting the industry with just better offerings.

Mike Opyd 7:03
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s actually one of our favorite words to use is to disruption. You know, when I was doing my research, what I found is these brokerages were still living in the era of the 80s and 90s, where no, the Internet didn’t really exist, people would have to have a big brokerage name to work for, because that’s what the consumers want. And that’s what the sellers and buyers were looking for is, you know, the big name real estate companies, people would walk into an office and look at a book that had all the MLS listings of what was available. But you know, times have changed. And now we have the Zillow, the realtor.com, you know the MLS is online. And I think 93% of consumers start their search online. Yeah, but in my but from what I’ve seen, is that these brokers are still living in an era that defined by people walking into an office and needing that big name, to attract agents, and they’re still treating the agents like that big name is a reason why their work in there. And they’re going to they’re going to kind of pay them accordingly or allow them to market accordingly. I’ve never agreed with that. And so one of the things my brokerage is what we’re doing is we’re really giving agents an opportunity to one choose their own commission split, which we have a number of options, and an agent literally decides which one they want to go with which, you know, whatever one they’re going to be more comfortable with, which is unheard of for any brokerage that at least I know all day allows an agent to decide that.

D.J. Paris 8:42
Right? There’s firms typically have depending on your production, you may have some negotiation power, but it’s it’s Hey, we’re willing to offer you this, Hey, can you bump it up a little bit? Maybe a few percentage points here and there. But yes, it is. It is not a choose your own adventure sort of scenario.

Mike Opyd 8:59
No. And you know, what I spoke to if we never did was for 10 years, I spoke to a lot of agents that I know some really close friends and it really hit home for me when one of my good buddies has worked at a company for a while. You know, he’s a loyal guy, not a not a major producer, right? He’s probably been there for 10 years does five, 6 million, you know, pretty decent amount of business over the course of the life. He’s been there and he wants to speak to the owner and ask him like, hey, you know, I’ve been here for a while, can I bump my commission up? He got a 2% on. And I’m just like, it may like dead like, you know, pissed me off. I just I could not believe that. And I know the owner of that company, and I was just like, you gotta be kidding me. So loyal client or loyal, essentially a loyal client because that’s exactly who that person is. Right? It’s been to that owner. That’s right. So things like that had pissed me off and I just I see it over and over my partner dealt with it with his old company that he worked for, and he was he’s, you know, a major producer and he went to negotiate his commission split and you know, he’s doing 20 or 30 million they told him he was there long enough to get a higher split ever. Right? Right? Like, you gotta be kidding me, this guy is literally keeping your lights on and eating your pocket. So one of the things we designed is our business around the structure that an agent can take their own commission, something they’re comfortable with. And then they can start to build their business that way, you know, take that extra commission put it into their marketing or their advertising or whatever it is. So that was one of the main things that we focus on. And then the second thing that really ticked us off is, you know, if you drive around Chicago, and you see these signs that agents put up when they have a listing, you know, that brokerage name is plastered all over that sign.

D.J. Paris 10:46
And that’s correct, great advertising for the firm, or the firm.

Mike Opyd 10:49
But the reality is, the firm doesn’t have any relationship with that seller, zero, you know, I can go to an owner and be like, Hey, do you know my seller on 123 Main Street? And they’re gonna be like, No, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Well, then my next question is why the hell is your information all over to sign and mine isn’t? Right. So that’s one of the things that pissed us off too, is that these these brokerages are using you as an advertisement for them when they have no relationship with that seller, or even the buyer if it’s other type of marketing. So we allow these people to design their own marketing 100, like pretty much however they want it is what they do within obviously, legal boundaries. But we’d like to say that, you know, if you’re putting a sign up, you’re 95%, that sign is your face, your image, your whatever, if you’ve a group, your group logo, your information, We’re the 5%, that’s down here at the bottom left hand side, that we’re not going to really see as much as that agents information, then who do you think they’re gonna call, they’re gonna call that agent, they’re not going to call that brokerage that has the brokerages name on it. And number, they’re gonna call the agent, right? So that’s how we feel like agents should be able to grow their business, not because there’s some name behind it, because those times have passed, but I don’t feel these brokerages have really changed their model. And it’s the same over and over. And we’re just really tired of that. So we took kind of some of the pain points that we’ve experienced, and like how do we build a business around really just helping an agent grow themselves and their company, because that’s essentially what they are, they’re their own company.

D.J. Paris 12:25
Right. And boy, you just You said so, so much that that is I agree with and I work at a firm has a very similar philosophy with respect to advertising, it’s like, this is your brand. And ultimately, and ultimately, as a firm, because I’m in the back office, I’m not out there in the field. You know, we don’t want we don’t want the phone calls anyway. Right. And I because those should go directly to the to the listing agent, obviously. And also, the most important thing is, is buyers, they don’t care to see our brand, our brand logo up there either. Like it doesn’t matter to them, they just want to see who do I contact to get more information about this listing. And obviously, we don’t want those phone calls to begin with. But the broker doesn’t want us to have those phone calls either. And so I think that is such an important and well set point. And it’s so funny because the the the firm’s that we’re sort of referencing who do take what we I think we would, we would both you and I would agree or probably more of an agent’s commission than they ought to, are able to justify or one of the ways that they justify it is by saying, hey, our name is really important, and it’s out there and you can see it everywhere. I’m not so sure that I agree that that’s all that important to a consumer and I think you obviously feel the same way. As you know, you put your your company name, which you’re required to have for IDF PR, but you know, just doesn’t say how big it needs to be. And you just kind of hide it away in the corner. Because obviously it defeats the whole purpose for the broker so that I could not agree more with everything you just said, I’m so glad you know, there’s other people out there thinking the same way. Let’s and you know, it’s kind of ironic, too, because, you know, you have all these progressive thoughts and you literally joined the largest real estate company in the world, but they just happen to also be incredibly flexible, you know, with their commission structures. And you know, I know different REMAX offices are structured differently, but it’s sort of a funny thing that just happens to be the biggest one has the most flexibility.

Mike Opyd 14:26
Yeah, and that’s I mean, it was crazy when I started hearing about REMAX because like I said it wasn’t so there’s not a huge presence of REMAX in the city. They’re typically in the suburbs. So it really wasn’t even on my radar when I was looking at other companies. But what I really enjoyed about them is they is that they allow us to create our own brand, right so sure never see like a Coldwell Banker next Keller Williams next, right? They’re not allowed to do that. But we can take a REMAX name which like you said biggest real estate across the entire world. And we could put our branding our logo on it. And then we can use that to you know, brand ourselves however we see fit, you know, we, we have some pretty aspiration pretty big aspirations and goals that this isn’t just going to be a real estate company, we’re going to have multiple different companies. And we could take that next and really use it in a bunch of different ways. Like if we want to start our own janitorial company. I mean, we could just call it janitorial, you know. So those are the things that we were really looking forward to. And when we when we learned that REMAX really is independently owned and operated, and we can make all our own decisions, and, and really create a company based about our passions and our goals. And our vision, it was like a no brainer, you know, we have all that support behind us have the biggest name and all the relationships they’ve built since the 70s When I started, but we can make it our own. And so when we found out that when I found out all this stuff, it was for me is a no brainer to buy a REMAX franchise is like, Well, why would I waste all my time and trying to build relationships? And, you know, and try to find all these people to help my office out when all this stuff is set up for me already. I just gotta pay for it. You know, it’s, it was kind of it was really just like the easiest decision ever at that point.

D.J. Paris 16:21
That’s, that’s awesome. And I think a lot of firms and it must know this, but like your friend, the example you mentioned of your friend who moderate producer asking for an increase in his commission split, and having them say, No thanks. And, you know, they would have to know, and I know, his production level isn’t enough for them to care that much. However, it’s free money for them. And you would think that, obviously, they must know he could leave and go to any other firm who you know, is willing to better that commission split, and every single one of his clients is gonna go right with Him. In fact, he could go to a firm with even the world’s worst reputation, you know, and probably still bring every single client over. And I always marvel at firms. And maybe they just it’s maybe the numbers aren’t big enough to where they care. But I have always found that to be so puzzling. But, you know, I guess you’re right, there is the bit of a kool aid that is still drink today about the brand that you know, the firm that you work at is, you know, they probably think they’re a bit more important to the brokers business than maybe they actually are, at least I would I think you and I both agree that’s probably true. If you’re not getting a tremendous amount of value, you know, for paying for that for that. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, your process of how you guys bring on brokers and what you look for, and, and you know, that and sort of how you treat brokers once they’re on board.

Mike Opyd 17:50
Yeah, so we so that’s one of the things we set up from day one was kind of like an onboarding system to help them out. Because we know the transition is never easy from one brokerage to the other. So, you know, we’re out there, and we’re talking to agents, and we’re explaining to him our concept and who we are showing them our office and things like that, you know, we’re really looking for personal agents that are, can see the vision, I guess you could say, you know, so you know, really the people that I think have been in industry for 4050 years, and maybe they’re just comfortable with the company they’re at, they’re they’re a little bit older, they will get this and we’ve seen that experience, as we brought agents through who are curious about what we had to offer, kind of the older clientele, they just it was to them, they were just they just didn’t really see it as much as we saw it. So we’ve had younger agents come through and the millennial generation is a very entrepreneurial generation. You know, I am a millennial, so one of the first millennials, as you say, I’m not born early 80s. So I can’t say I’m part of the middle of that generation, but I know enough to be dangerous. And I see how we operate. And, you know, because there’s so much material agents are going to want that are joining the industry are going to want that flexibility that these companies have because that’s how our mind test them. So for us, we’re really a brokerage that is going to be really appealing for agents that are maybe a year into the business couple of years on a business doing one to 5 million in production, have kind of seen the industry a little bit learned about it learned or companies heard about other companies, and then they could use us as a comparison of how we are so different than anything that’s out there. So that’s one of the things when it comes to like you know, bringing agents on board and recruiting I guess what I think is gonna be the best for us and what we can offer the most benefits to and then when we get them in the door, we have like I said a whole onboarding system so we sit them down. We get all set up with all the REMAX stuff and everything and REMAX offers their own website, you know, applications, different things like that. So we get them all set up, we get their heads shots done, we pay for them, we get them their own business cards, we pay for that we have them then sit with our marketing director. And she will design whatever they want, whether it’s postcards, mailers, group logos, whatever they can envision, our graphic designer slash marketing director will help them out with, you know, so for us, the the idea is the first you know, let’s say, two weeks or 30 days is to really, really ramp up that business, from what they were doing before and maybe trying to correct some of the errors that are making, you know, we have a bunch of partnerships in place to that can really help them with their marketing, whether it’s sending out postcards for free or, or helping them get exposure in different ways running Facebook ads, different things like that. We’ve created those partnerships with the people that are working with our office to help our agents out. So, you know, one of the biggest focus too is, you know, how do we take these guys or girls who are erzeugen men or women who are, you know, maybe making 2 million or doing 2 million in production, how do we get down to 468 10, you know, if that’s where they want to go, and we try to put these relationships and play so they can, you know, kind of take the money that they’re making, put it back in their business, and at the same time, have all these free things, to supplement them to really grow and build upon what they want to do. top of it. I’m, I’m obsessed with helping agents, I think that’s my biggest passion really, is helping people. So I you know, I mentor a bunch of agents in the office already. And I, that’s one of the things I’m passionate about is you know, if someone needs mentoring, or just need someone to to keep me on track or keep them liable, you know, that’s the type of thing that we want to help them out with as well. So it’s kind of a mouthful, but those are some of the things we’re doing to help our agents.

D.J. Paris 21:53
Yeah, no, that all makes perfect sense. And I think it’s, it’s smart. And it’s, it’s, you know, the idea that you have a marketing. So I’m the marketing person for our firm, but I don’t, I can help people design things, but I don’t specifically do a ton of that. And I think the fact that you guys have that is so important for somebody who’s, you know, in that one to 5 million range, because they probably haven’t designed their own stuff yet. And or if they have it probably could be improved upon. And to be able to offer that as a service when somebody is on board, I think is I’ve never heard of another from doing that. Let’s just put it that way. I think that in and of itself is revolutionary, but I also think it’s a really good idea. So we need to yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s awesome. What I wanted to also ask, is I wanted to make make, just make a reference back to a point you made a few moments or minutes ago. And this is something where if you’re, you know, if you’re at a firm or if you have your own firm, or if it’s just you on your own, and you’re your own managing broker, and or you’re starting out in the industry, and you don’t have the financial resources to do some of the external marketing activities. Like for example, if you wanted to do a mailer, but couldn’t afford it, or, or flyers, or that sort of thing. You know, Mike just brought up something very important, which is, you know, relationships and his firm has built relationships where some of their partners can assist with, you know, the payment. And, you know, you can also build those relationships, some of those as well. So I always think that brokers sometimes miss the bigger picture, like you can reach out to lenders, you’ve worked with attorneys you’ve worked with and said, Hey, can we do a co marketing effort, and oftentimes those lenders and, and various ancillary services to real estate, realtors are more than happy to do that, you know, we’re in the process of getting advertisers for the show. And, you know, we have 1000s of listeners. Now, almost, we assume everyone is a broker. I don’t know, almost everyone’s a broker, for sure. But um, you know, we’re now reaching out going, Hey, do you want to advertise on our show? And, you know, we’re starting to get a good response to that. But that’s, that’s what Mike’s team sort of does for us. They reach out they have partnerships, relationships with vendors, and they’re able to assist and I think that’s, a lot of times brokers don’t need don’t in their firms certainly aren’t maybe offering that too. But brokers themselves don’t always think to do that. So I think that’s really smart. Absolutely. I wanted to ask you just because you wrote us a couple of funny things. I wanted to hear about the time you had seven Starbucks meetings in one day.

Mike Opyd 24:29
Yeah, that was probably the most caffeine and humans ever consumed in a lifetime. It was just happened to be this one day, and I didn’t realize it, but I had a bunch of different meetings set up for different things with partners, buyers, sellers, and a couple of just agent meetings set up. And I saw I didn’t realize that at the time, but I end up setting up seven meetings at Starbucks. And it just so happens that every single time I went every single meeting I had there were a different Starbucks’s. So I was all over the place but every single one I went to the person bought me a coffee there for me and I’m I love the taste of coffee. I’m obsessed with it. I have some next to me right now, for some reason, it’s just one of those things I just love. So I’m not going to turn down a free coffee. I would say by the time I got done with seven coffees that day, I was shaking. I was I realize what’s going on. Like my wife was asked me like, what’s wrong with you? I couldn’t sit still. I went out and I actually bought a fidget spinner. And I’m sitting there on our couch and I’m just sitting there shaking spinning this thing. And it got to the point my wife thought that they’re like I was having a seizure or something like that. So I was like shaking so much and spinning this thing. And my knees were bouncing and I mean, I probably got about two hours of sleep that night. I just couldn’t fall asleep. I kept getting up I kept going out and like reading and math was I don’t know it was just way way way too much caffeine for 124 hour window I highly suggest never doing that.

D.J. Paris 26:07
Yes, it’s funny I don’t drink coffee. So whenever I I mean I do I do a regular episode once a month with Carrie McCormack who’s a properties broker and we do a fun a fun episode and she she and I have met at Starbucks because she prefers to meet there and I don’t drink coffee but she’ll buy me a coffee or I figured while I’m there I might as well get one and I don’t drink a ton of caffeine and so that I always end up the same way and I gosh, I can’t imagine doing seven of those in one in one day. Yeah, and I want I want to make sure we we plug your your office and so if there are brokers out there listing that are interested in learning more about REMAX next, I know they can visit their website which is REMAX next.com What can they Is there a way they can get in touch with you directly?

Mike Opyd 26:58
Yeah, I’m always available. So easiest, probably either shoot me an email Mike at REMAX next.com Or just give me a shout on my cell phone or text me whatever is easiest. 312-929-8910 Of course, also Facebook, I’m all over social media. So reach out to me, you know, if you have questions, happy to answer anything, explain more of what we’re trying to do here. Very, very easy to get a hold of though. Well,

D.J. Paris 27:27
yeah. And definitely, you know, reach out to Mike because I really love firms like Mike’s who are, you know, disrupting the industry and and really providing it, which I what I hear and what Mike has been saying, from the beginning is just offering more value, you know, and, and offering a the commission structure that makes sense for the broker. But you know, what I what I don’t hear Mike saying in any any sense of the word is, you know how much he wants to earn, off off of his brokers he wants to help he wants to provide for them and let them you know, take the lion’s share, which I think is is commendable. Certainly I’m on board with with those sorts of values. And I think as you’re right, as far as who this appeals do, I think it appeals to a lot of people in particular, you know, younger brokers who aren’t so much sold on the fact that the brand is worth 50% of someone’s income, right? Or maybe it is, but I don’t know, I think a lot of people would would challenge that. So firms like Mike are out there to say, Yeah, let’s challenge that.

Mike Opyd 28:30
To further emphasize really quick, what you were just saying, so my partner and I just throw it out there, we don’t take a dime out of this company. And we’re not planning to for a while. So, you know, for us, we’re putting every single thing, every single dime the company makes back into the company and into our agents until at some point, we could step away and start, you know, earning an income off it. But we’re talking two years down the line before we ever do that. So we’re still gonna sell in the meantime to pay our own bills. But, you know, we’re not taking a dime out of this company at all for a while. Well,

D.J. Paris 29:03
I don’t know how many firms can say that they’re doing that. And I would say that is a really important point is would you like to work for a firm who says we’re going to reinvest everything in better off better offerings to our brokers and being able to provide better and better services. So well, well done. I think that is quite commendable and, and very forward thinking. So congrats there. All right, Mike. Well, we appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to be on the show. So Mike, by the way, I would like to mention since we Mike is a very humble person. He is also a top producer. So this is he is also on top of this, you know, doing his own production and he’s incredibly successful there too. So the fact that you’re doing both of this and had time to be on our show is is really something so we appreciate it.

Mike Opyd 29:44
Alright man. Thanks for having me.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Mike McElroy is a top producer that attributes much of his efficiency to systems. He believes in empowering his brokers with these processes to help them grow their own practices. In our conversation, Mike deep dives into his favorite systems, tools, and technology that drive his business. We discuss the importance of mentorship, coaching and how his firm, Center Coast Realty, stresses culture to create an environment for his brokers to thrive.

Mike McElroy can be reached at mike@centercoastrealty.com and 312-561-4095

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Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:14
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real. The only podcast made by Chicago real estate brokers for Chicago real estate brokers. My name is DJ Parris. I am your host to the show. And we are back. So we took a week off to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, and appreciate all of the feedback that we’ve been getting recently. And just yesterday, we got two or three really wonderful messages from listeners with really great ideas of future episode topics. One in particular, just give you an idea of what people are writing us. And maybe that’ll spurn some additional thoughts for our listeners on what we should, you know, work on in 2018 for episode ideas. So we said, hey, I’m really good at doing open houses, but I’m not really sure how to convert those leads from once I they come into the open house, they get their information into actual clients. So I’m going to be talking to Carrie McCormack about that, hopefully this weekend for our next episode. But if you have ideas, please do not be shy, you can reach us on our Facebook page, which is search for keeping it real pod, or on our website, we have a contact form keeping it real pod.com. And today on the show, we have Mike McElroy, and it’s one of my favorite episodes we’ve done because Mike and I are huge tech and systems nerds and we just geeked out for almost an hour about all the systems he used a lot utilizes with his own business and also the brokers that he mentors and coaches. So I think you guys are going to love it. And also remember to tell a friend, if you have other brokers in your office that you think would like to hear what top heavy hitter producers are doing piece, please pass this along to them. And then lastly, if you’re somebody who wants to advertise on our show, and get in front of about 5000 brokers every time we do a podcast, reach out to us and you can you can you can sponsor a show. So thanks so much. We’re glad to be back hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and into the holiday season here. We’ve got so many episodes, we’re gonna try to get through all of them before the end of December. I think I have five that are waiting to be produced. So we’re gonna get those out to you shortly. I’m glad you guys are liking them so much. It really means a lot to us. And again, thanks and undo our interview with Mike.

Today on the show, we have Mike McElroy. Mike is the founder and managing broker of center Coast Realty. He believes real estate is the most accessible and rewarding pathway to personal and financial freedom. And his mission is to help Realtors build rewarding profitable careers. Graduate of Indiana University Mike has served on the Chicago Association of Realtors finance committee, as chair of the association’s award winning Young Professionals Network and on the board of the Indiana University’s Alumni Association, charter chapter. Thanks, Mike for being on the show. Welcome. Thanks, TJ. Good to be here. Well, you were on our very first list of people to interview and in fact, when I saw you at a YPN event on a technology panel that I think you moderated if I remember correctly. You were one of the impetus is actually for me to get this podcast going because for years I had told my boss like that would be really fun to do as a way to give back to the community and certainly even to our own brokers who are always interested in hearing what top producers are doing. And I said, I wrote your name down, you might have been the first or second name I wrote down if people I wanted to talk to you, in particular because of your love of systems and sort of what you’ve done at your firm and, and just how you’ve built your business. So I’m really excited to finally get you on the show here. So thank you so much for your time.

Mike McElroy 3:55
Absolutely. I had no idea and I’m at that’s very gratifying to hear that I was able to be a small bit of inspiration for this awesome podcast

D.J. Paris 4:04
that you’ve put together. Thank you actually say that to everybody.

I was just gonna say

it really is the truth. I was sitting there in the audience and I go, I gotta get I literally was talking about this doing this for years. And then when you started getting specific with with systems, I was like, Oh, this is exactly the kind of information I want to put out there. So anyway, I would love to hear about how you got into real estate and can you tell us that? You know that story? Yeah, absolutely.

Mike McElroy 4:31
So I guess my real estate story really starts back in college when I was lucky enough to get a great taste of entrepreneurship back then. Where I was able to run a franchise. It was actually a franchise painting company where I got to do sales and marketing and recruit and hire and train and basically run an entire company from scratch. So I got the entrepreneurship bug back then, you know, I didn’t make a ton of money, but I learned a lot. And I knew I always wanted to run my own business. But for some reason, after college, I decided to try to work for somebody else. And, you know, that went okay for about two years. But after that, I just, you know, is was actually the middle of the recession. And I was working, this is kind of a dumb story. But for some reason that’s always stuck with me. I was working at a radio station selling advertising in Chicago. It’s a tough job. It’s a tough job. And I had a guarantee, but it’s 100%. Commission to and it’s just, it’s it’s like real estate when it comes to 100% Commission, but with way more oversight. So by the end of it, our station wasn’t doing well, because not a lot of people been advertising in 2008. And I think they had us, you know, signing out on a whiteboard to go on calls just to you know, make sure they knew where we were at at all times. So I remember one time, there was a Starbucks and I was in the AON center. So Starbucks downstairs, was going down for probably my third cup of coffee at 1030 in the morning, because that was sleepy. And I saw these people who are working at Starbucks. And what struck me about those people was, they had been there for my second cup of Starbucks, and my first cup of Starbucks. So they were just hanging out in Starbucks all day. And I was, I thought, Who Who are these people, they’re just they don’t have to go back upstairs to their boss. They’re totally free. This sounds amazing. I want that. But I didn’t know how to get it until a couple of months later, when out of the blue, a friend of mine, from a previous job called me and said his company was growing really quickly, and they were hiring. And they were looking for people to be leasing agents. And I didn’t really know anything about that or real estate at all. But he told me that he set his own hours worked from home sometimes, and made really good money, just meeting people, and probably the least salesy sales job he’d ever had. And I said, Okay, that’s interesting. So I checked it out. It was a really great entrepreneurial company, with a lot of very forward thinking, and they really wanted to change the industry. Or a few, you know, structural things that didn’t quite work for me. And funny enough, back then you didn’t need two years of experience in the business to get your managing broker’s license, which you right? Absolutely, should, absolutely should, but you didn’t really expect them. And I said, even then I was like, You should probably, I need a little more experience. But what the heck, if you’re gonna let me get it, I’ll just get that one. So I did, and after about 10 months in the business, I just struck out on my own. And that’s kind of how I got started.

D.J. Paris 7:50
That’s yeah, that’s really interesting. I think, you know, leasing is a great way to cut your teeth, and just get a lot of sort of face time with with clients. Obviously, it’s a different type of transaction much faster, less, in some ways, less complicated, of course, but what, what so when you when you started your own company, or as as your own managing broker, how old were you? I was 24. That’s amazing.

Mike McElroy 8:16
Still 24 I was 24 when I turned 20, for the week before I got into real estate, and I was still 24 When I started off on my own. So I learned how I learned how to I’m trying to think, you know, I learned all the requirements that the IDF PR has for a real estate office, before I learned, you know how a loan is underwritten, learn things kind of backwards.

D.J. Paris 8:43
In I imagined at 24. Most of your friends weren’t running around buying homes. So are you originally from Chicago or from I

Mike McElroy 8:52
grew up in the west suburbs? Yeah, I grew up out in Naperville.

D.J. Paris 8:55
Gotcha. So how did you know I mean, being 100% on your own? How did you you know, grow your business in the early years? What were some of the ways that you, you know, got in front of prospects?

Mike McElroy 9:06
Yeah, so I did everything. It was kind of, I was kind of wandering around in the real estate, wilderness, just kind of trying all kinds of stuff. So I definitely, I worked with a lot of renters and you know, you can have non exclusive listing agreements with apartment buildings in Chicago, and market those properties and meet renters that way. I also approached a lot of individual landlords who I saw who had their signs up or just had ads on Craigslist, and I said, Hey, you know, you’re doing this all wrong. Probably not getting a lot of exposure, because you’re not on the MLS and you’re not also following a whole bunch of rules that you’re going to need to Why don’t you let me take this for you? And all those people ended up buying or selling or both, eventually, so it was kind of a great way to build a base for my business. Back when, frankly, you know, homes weren’t selling too terribly well, in Oh 920 10 2011. Anyway, so when things finally turned around in 2012, I was in a great position.

D.J. Paris 10:13
I want to I want to back up just a moment, because I think this is an important point that maybe some of the brokers who are listening aren’t as familiar with with respect to leasing. And we get this question a lot in our firm as well, when a new broker comes on board, maybe is younger, or, you know, doesn’t have a lot of sales immediately to close, which would be pretty common to to not have. But what we always tell them is, a lot of times, they’ll go, oh, well, maybe I’ll do some leasing as a way as a stopgap solution before the sales really pick up which I think it makes a lot of sense what I tell them, and I suspect you would likely have have similar thoughts would be about going out and getting your own listings. And so you know, what Mike talked about, you actually said a lot in that previous part, which he basically told you how to go out and get rental listings, which was, you know, and this is something that is largely ignored by the broker community with rental listings in particular, there’s property management companies that will work with many different firms, you mentioned that. But then there’s the ability to go out as a leasing agent or licensed leasing agent or as a broker and getting your own rental listings. And it’s could be as simple as you see a for sale, or for rent sign, and you call them and say, hey, you know, I’m a broker? Are you currently working with a broker to help you get this place rented, I can do that for you. And I charge you know, one month’s rent or whatever it might be, you can also look at Craigslist ads, as Mike said, and start calling and saying, hey, I can help you, you know, with your exposure and get this place rented, it could be on a non exclusive basis, as well. So I apologize for getting a bit off track. But I think what you said was so incredibly valuable right there. For people who do want to do leasing, getting their own listings is I think the way to go, yeah,

Mike McElroy 11:49
absolutely. And just being educated, if you’re gonna go with leasing, and I get it, there’s a times it can be kind of a driver, you just got to look at it as getting paid, you know, if you don’t have money to invest in your business right up front, because we’re just getting started, it’s a great way to get paid, I’ll be at not a ton to network, look at it as networking. And so if you’re gonna do that, make sure you educate yourself on the not just a lot of brokers, especially at what I guess I’ll call traditional firms are familiar with what’s on the MLS, and that that’s kind of all they really have access to a whole universe of luxury residential property for rent out there. And I get it can be a little intimidating if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. So hopefully, your broker or someone in the office can kind of help you out with that. But, you know, it’s actually a little bit more profitable. And more importantly, it’s the other half of the picture for your clients. And when I got started back in 2010, that’s really what I was offering is just, hey, listen, you know, you can go with one of these kind of leasing agencies, and they’re just going to take on the electric department circuit, or you can go with a traditional broker, and they’re going to show you what’s on the MLS, but I got both. So I was able to kind of niche myself that way.

D.J. Paris 13:05
Boy, that couldn’t have been better said that is absolutely the case. So if you’re, if you’re a broker who works at a firm, where you’re only looking at the MLS, for rentals, there is a world of a non MLS apartments that are available to you and vice versa. And the ability to offer both is is you know, obviously the, you’re just you’re just providing a better service at that point as well.

Mike McElroy 13:26
And, of course, they pay better to, like,

D.J. Paris 13:29
Well, yeah, that’s, that’s very true. And so and then you also said something at the very end of that, that was also critical, which was a lot of those people ended up becoming buyers down the road. So you know, it’s a wonderful way to jumpstart the career to get paid more quickly than waiting for your first sale to close not to say that everyone should should do leasing, but it’s certainly not the worst idea, everyone who will not everyone, but almost everyone who’s bought a place was a renter first. So I think that is a very, very smart, smart, smart plan.

Mike McElroy 13:59
And you got to stay in touch to not to keep going down the rabbit hole. But there I always tell people ask, you know, what should I do to get started in real estate and I always say, meet people and stay in touch with them. Or to get a little more specific make real estate connections, that’s I call a real estate connection, the contact information of someone who knows you’re a realtor and what that means. And then you got to organize that in a database CRM, whatever you’re using, and you’ve got to systematically nurture those contacts because that you know, everything you just said, the turning into buyers and sellers, you know, some of it would have happened just because people had a great experience and they remembered me but a lot of it wouldn’t have if I hadn’t stayed in touch with those

D.J. Paris 14:41
people. Well, I am guessing based on my understanding of your love of systems that you never let somebody go to the end of their leasing term without calling them prior going Hey, your leasing your your your lease is coming to in the next two months or you know, are you thinking about what you may want to do is this fact it’s a lot of it’s as simple as that. And I would bet you Most brokers sadly, don’t think to make that call.

Mike McElroy 15:05
Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. And let’s

D.J. Paris 15:09
so that’s a great segue into into systems because I, you know, that’s that’s obviously something that’s really important to you. Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve systemized your business, and then how you even use it in your coaching when you when you work with your brokers in your own office?

Mike McElroy 15:23
Sure. So we’ve gone, I’d say we’ve had three major innovations in this in this realm. And I guess I sort of have this, maybe a little bit of an engineering mindset is a nice way to put it obsessive compulsive as another way to put it. So anytime I do something more than once, it should be a system. And it helps me go faster, and actually provide a better and more and actually more personal service to my clients, because I’m focused on them while my my system is running in the background. So the three big things for us, the first one was a system to automate service for clients. And I guess before I talk, I always like to clarify, a system should not be confused with technology. A system is just a term for a repeatable process that you follow that delivers a desired result. Hopefully that makes you work faster, or delivers a better product to your clients. So a system doesn’t have to be a piece of technology, it’s just a process that you follow. Technology helps you follow that process, it helps you organize that process and make it go faster. But those, those two terms get kind of interchanged a lot, and they’re definitely different. So the first, the first thing we did was really document exactly how we go about representing a buyer and a seller and also a renter and a landlord, although we focus mostly on on how to represent a buyer and a seller. And this is something that everyone from Michael Gerber and the E Myth to Gary Keller and Millionaire Real Estate Agent will tell you or Gino Wickman. And traction, all great books, by the way to read is you’ve got to document your systems. And so what we did was we started with just kind of a loose skeleton of here are the steps in a process. Whether you’re working with a buyer or seller starts with the moment you start talking to him, and how you prepare for that present first presentation, how you prepare for your showings, etc. And what we did was we just broke that down into it’s literally hundreds of sub component parts over time. So what would happen is I would get it really took off when I hired an assistant. Because I would say, Alright, I want someone to set up these showings. And my sister would say how would I set up these showings. And rather than explain something to someone five times we just document it. And we write down the exact process for setting up showings to make sure that everything’s confirmed, and I’m show up in the wrong place. And I have all the information that I need when I get there. And having that framework allowed us to build on that. So you know, eventually I had this client and she said I need to live within a half mile of a gym and a grocery store. And I said, Oh, wow, that’s so we started doing all this Google mapping, right? And you’re creating these little Venn diagrams in your brain. Like, I remember where the thing you just searched was and I was like, we need to build this. There’s this thing called Google mind maps, that’s a piece of technology, assist, right technology, and allows you to plot and save a whole bunch of different plots on a map. So we realized that a lot of people had the same issues. And we started doing that before every round of showings. So once we came up with this idea, like a lot of brokers, I think they have these cool ideas like oh, this would this would really improve my service, I should do this. And they do it once. But then they don’t they forget to do it the next time. They don’t execute on it every single time. But once you have a process that you follow, every time that you come up with something new and add it to your process, you just you end up following that every single time you execute, and you learn so much faster and allows you to iterate and really quickly improve the speed and effectiveness of your service.

D.J. Paris 19:28
Yeah, I’m just I’m sorry to jump in the middle. I was we did an interview early on in the in the show’s history, which is still early on in our history, but it was one of our first episodes. I think it was Kim Curtis could have been in a psychologist. Oh, yes.

Mike McElroy 19:42
Right. Yeah, great systems. Okay, good. So I’m pretty

D.J. Paris 19:45
sure it was Kim and one of the things she does and I hope that I’m attributing this to the right person because I have the world’s most horrible memory, which is why I have systems. But she talked about when she works with buyers and sellers. She asks them literally I believe it’s over two 100 questions, and she does it on paper, I suspect if she sits down with them for an hour or two before she ever does anything else. That’s what it is. That’s her system. Right. And I thought, boy, that’s that’s, you know, that’s a very low tech approach to a system but an incredibly effective technique.

Mike McElroy 20:21
Oh, totally. And I’ve done a deal with Kim, I want to say about a year and a half ago, she worked with Jonathan self in our office, but I oversaw it. And you can tell when you’re working with someone else who’s following a process, it goes much, much smoother. And I just like to go ahead, give a shout out. Thank Kim for the awesome contract sheet with all the information on it that she sent out at the beginning, that we now have created a template from us. Oh,

D.J. Paris 20:47
there you go. Wow. That’s amazing. Well, great. Yeah, I’m sorry, but you weren’t you are saying?

Mike McElroy 20:55
Oh, um, yeah. So I guess I’ll throw some technology in there too, because I know, that’s what the people want. So we use a tool, technology tool called Asana as a CNA, just kind of like yoga. And basically what it is, is it’s a really light, flexible, powerful task management system. So a lot of realtors know that they, especially if you’ve been around for a while you have a checklist for certain parts of your process, like you have a new listing checklist or you have a new contract checklist. So what Asana does is it organizes all of your checklists into one place into a project that you simply duplicate every time, you have a new version of one of those projects. So like we have a buyer template. And every time we work with a new buyer, we duplicate it the same thing for sellers, and workflows, you step by step through the entire process from start to finish. It organizes it. So it’s not overwhelming. And it but it goes down to an incredible level of detail. Because every time we make a mistake, or every time you learn something, it gets documented in there. So like, hey, if your buyers buying new construction, make sure that you’re not the first one to close or your underwriting process will be a huge pain. Like that’s a massive value add for our clients to avoid that, that underwriting quagmire. And experienced agents will remember that, you know, most of the time, but when you get busy and you got four or five deals that you’re negotiating at the same time, you know, sometimes you miss stuff like that. So just even me having it written down, I go through it every single time to make sure I don’t miss something, even though I’ve done it over and over again. And for new agents, it’s it’s invaluable. They can kind of just color by numbers, their first couple of real estate transactions with support of course. And for teams. You can assign tasks to people with due dates, keep track everything. So it allows you to scale really quickly and, and bring an assistant up to speed quickly as well.

D.J. Paris 23:04
Yeah, and so just to reiterate, Mike is referring to Asana, which is as a as a add a, it’s free until you start getting into the more premium features. And then it’s a very nominal cost. It’s a very well respected system. For our own workflow, I use a different tool, which is Trello. Mike and I were talking offline. And for certain types of things. Trello is great as well, some project management workflows, it’s okay for, and we use that. But if we if we didn’t have a system, and initially when we started this podcast, we really didn’t. And it just became a huge mess. And with and so it’s it’s really revolutionized our ability to stay on top of things, what other what other pieces of technology are you using to systematize your business.

Mike McElroy 23:48
So the next thing we implemented was a really great CRM, and I couldn’t find a real estate specific sarin that I liked. I feel like the problem with a lot of those is, and I get why they try to just work off the shelf. And the truth is, you need to set a CRM up, you need to spend a lot of time kind of mapping your business to the CRM to make it work. That’s why people pay consultants, you know 10s of 1000s of dollars to implement Salesforce in their business. And so there’s a lot of real estate CRMs are kind of trying to, you know, bridge that gap by just working off out of the shelf, but what they they lose a ton of functionality in that process and they lose a ton of flexibility. So we use HubSpot which is the big the big advantage of HubSpot is it’s integrated and it’s automatic. So it allows you to do a ton of different automations like if you flat if you categorize a certain contact as a buyer, it can sign them opt for a sequence of drip emails that goes out every two weeks that kind of nurtures them with advice about the market buying a home. It can, it can if people click a certain link in a certain email, it can trigger another email or it can say it can send an email to a owner of that contact and say hey, so and so has really taken a good look at your market update yet you just sent out it might be time to follow up. So we love we love HubSpot around here too.

D.J. Paris 25:29
That’s good HubSpot also directly integrates with Asana if I’m if I’m thinking correctly,

Mike McElroy 25:35
I’m not directly. You could do some things with Zapier. Zapier. I

D.J. Paris 25:40
see or if this than that, you know, either Zapier Yeah, yeah, so So that’s also really interesting, too. But what Mike is talking about with HubSpot is is what’s called if this than that, not not the actual system if this than that, but but this idea that when x happens when x event happens, you know why results. So you know, you’re dropping somebody in a very specific marketing track, or you’re dropping them into a particular group, which then receives a different level type of communication. We’re talking about systematizing. You know, the way you you communicate with your clients, your prospects, your closed, you know, contacts as well. Privates previous relationships. If you would, I apologize. I know where I might be getting you off track, you’d mentioned three major things. Were the first to the CRM and Asana or were there other

Mike McElroy 26:28
Yeah, Asana, CRM, and then the last one. So, you know, we started with taking great care of our clients with Asana. The next one was finding more clients with a CRM. And then our most recent one that I’m really excited about right now is planning your business. So a lot of realtors struggle, especially when they’re starting. But even when they’ve got a level of experience, or kind of just running on pure talent, they don’t have a great plan. And by plan, I mean, a sales plan. So if you want to close this many deals this year, exactly how many people do you need to put under contract? Go on showings with meet with? And how many prospects do you need of each of those types of business? And, and you really need to kind of plan that out. So you know, how to approach your year. And from there, you need to track how you’re actually doing? Are your conversion rates, you know, are is the same number of people that you meet with closing that you thought would you know, is that lining up? Or do you need to adjust something. So we built and it’s still kind of in minimum viable product status, but it’s pretty powerful already. It’s just, it’s just a series of spreadsheets, that syncs with our CRM, but what it allows you to do is input a few variables, and it spits out your entire sales plan for the year. So every single month, you know exactly what you’ve got to get out of your chair and go do in order to make yeah, that’s,

D.J. Paris 28:06
that is so so important. And well said I’ll give you a colorable example which speaks to this. I early on in the podcast interview, Josh Weinberg of the of the mutual Jeff’s Weinberg group, which I’m sure you know, those guys. And I asked, and I don’t know if this made it onto the podcast or not, I think it did. But if it didn’t, I’ll just repeat it or share it for the first time. But I asked Tommy what his team’s goals were for the, you know, the rest of the year. And it was interesting, because he’s He says, Yeah, we don’t really think like that. He says, what what we do know is, if Tommy meets 365 new people within the next 365 days, that’s literally that’s our goal is that he goes out and meets 365 new people that we’ve never talked to, basically one a day or, you know, however many that that is, when the AC works. We know we’re going to hit our actual financial goals, we don’t even worry about it because they’ve they’ve systemized systematize that down to he’s got to meet one person today. And if he does that, everything else falls into place because they know their conversions, right. And they trust that everything else has already been figured out. But it all boils down to just one basic activity, which then sets everything else in motion.

Mike McElroy 29:19
Yeah, I love those guys, because they make it so simple. Right? Now, there’s a lot of work that goes into figuring that, of course. But once you’ve got it, that’s the goal. That’s exactly the goal. So once you’ve figured out how many prospects How are you going to meet those people, you know, is it open houses? Is it going to networking events? Is it calling your sphere, and then figuring out exactly what you need to do every day? And that’s perfect. I just need to meet one person. Awesome. Like if that’s something you can just do. Right,

D.J. Paris 29:51
right, that that becomes something that that yeah, it’s right. It’s very, very doable, and I’ve tried to do that in my business as well. And I wanted to luck, you know what we’re what we’re really talking about a lot of this aside from the specifics of Cisco Systems, and also potentially using technology to, to assist those systems. We’re talking about coaching, right, ultimately, and I know that’s really important to you in the, into the culture of your firm and what you’ve built. So can you talk a little bit about the importance of coaching and how you do that with with your own brokers? Yeah, absolutely.

Mike McElroy 30:21
I mean, when you’re out there, just writing contracts and meeting clients every single day, I think brokers, very smart and talented people, they forget to just take a step back and take a look at their business, and actually plan. So I think that’s what coaching really helps with. So I still meet with even our experienced brokers, we meet once a month, and we say, alright, what were your goals from last month? What were the results? What roadblocks Did you run into? What else do you want to workshop, let’s set some goals for next month, and just being forced to take that hour and take that bigger picture view of their business helps them kind of get their head out of the trenches for a second, make sure they’re not not, you know, that they know, they’re running really fast, we just got to make sure they’re running in the right direction. So that’s, I think that’s really valuable. And the other part of it is just accountability. You know, you need even before when it was just me out there, I collected, I organized five or six different people that I just respected. Like my parents, a buddy of mine who is in business, one of my best friend’s dad’s. And I said, Alright, guys, I’m gonna put together a plan, and a whole list of goals, I’m gonna send it to you every month, you don’t need to respond, I just need to send it to you. And if you have anything to say, by all means, let me know. But I just need, I need that accountability. And so I had kind of this advisory council, my first couple years in business, before I got an actual coach myself, because I couldn’t afford one back then. And I think having that accountability is really valuable. So just the perspective, the sounding board, and also the accountability is something I really, I would encourage every broker to go and get.

D.J. Paris 32:15
Yeah, and I’d like to add to that, too. And I’ll tell you what I do, which is probably sounds pretty unusual and silly. But I went to a presentation by a gentleman named Marshall Goldsmith, which people can google him if they’d like, but he’s, he’s one of the foremost experts on leadership. And he’s in the world, he may be the foremost expert. He’s written, like, 60 books, and he’s definitely the guide. And one of the things he said is, is he had said to, to our this group that I went to, he said, The most important thing I’ve learned after, I think, 50 years teaching this in universities, and also to the public was that you need an accountability partner. And also, like Mike had just mentioned, maybe not one that necessarily rewards or or punishes you, but just one that you can report to. And so I got this idea from him. And he showed all this data, he’s a statistician, really, and he showed all this data that says, if you do this, you are way more likely to get more done. And and so what it is, is I have a series of habits, daily habits that are really important to me, like back to the Josh Weinberg story, you know, like, maybe it’s meeting one person a day, that’s not my particular habit, but I have other ones similar to that might be like, Did I eat correctly? Did I go to the gym? Did I, you know, it was nice to the people closest to me, or did I reach out and it was like, good to my clients, etc. There’s a number of habits, you know, and I get eight hours of sleep, you know, that sort of like, and so I pay somebody and just to show you how inexpensive it can be, if you’re not the ability to you know, to hire a really expensive real estate coach, but if you know the habits that you want to take, I pay somebody literally it’s $8 a week, this person lives in Istanbul, Turkey, this is what he quoted me as his price. He calls me every morning at 830. We have a 92nd phone call, he asks me 17 questions that I have written for him. He does not judge whether I did something or not like one of my questions is did you have to chop sugar? Which is one of my questions. Do you have sugar? Well, today I had to say I had sugar yesterday not that big of a deal. I don’t I’m not but you know, most days I tried to say I didn’t have sugar. So he asked me those questions. He report records in a Google spreadsheet and that is literally the extent of our of our relationship. You’ve never met this guy before. I’ve never met him never met him. I’ve been doing it for six months. $8 a week eight using and and so the point is, and I found him just by going to website where you say here’s what I’m looking for. People can bid on the business and he’s was it. Okay, yeah, there’s gonna be we’re gonna say Upwork I’m assuming you upwork.com is a great place. Fortunately, guru.com there’s there’s a lot of places so you can find these and it’s not necessarily an accountability partner, who I mean he doesn’t have any opinion whether I do something or not. He doesn’t care if I walked my dog or I didn’t. But it’s important for For him to ask, it’s important for me to have him asked me to keep it in the front of my mind. So I’ve, I’ve distilled the most important things to my business, and also just my personal life down to a series of habits. And Mike’s talking about this a lot as well. And so if you don’t have somebody who, like Mike did it probably in a more effective way, we found people in the industry who can help them, at least hold them accountable. But if you don’t have that, you know, you can hire somebody for next to nothing. To ask you this. It’s pretty great.

Mike McElroy 35:25
Just to kind of I mean, you know, it’s, it’s those a little bit I love that he just doesn’t care at all. It does. Well, I

D.J. Paris 35:31
have told I have told him not to care, because I said, I told him, I said, I don’t need your judgment. And 30 agree every day, and in a day can never be perfect anyway. So there’s always there’s only 17 questions, he asks me, and I’m going to have not completed one of those tasks. And that’s okay. I don’t beat myself up about it. I just think, okay, I didn’t do that yesterday, I’ll try to do it today. Right. But the point is, it’s just keeping that constant accountability of, you know, of just remembering your daily task, because I think and I’d like to get your thoughts on this. I think oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes brokers, they sort of know what they probably should be doing to grow their business, they know they should write personal notes, they know they should reach out to their friends and family, they should know should they should meet more people and stay in touch, but they oftentimes just find themselves not doing it, they get caught up in the whatever’s coming at them. And by doing by systematizing, you know, okay, every month, I’m writing a personal note to so and so or whatever those habits might be. I imagine your life is a series of habits as well.

Mike McElroy 36:33
Yeah, habits, habits pick you up when your motivation levels drop, because they’re going to your motivation that have fluctuate over time. And your habits are what keeps you going through that. I’m just I’m sorry, I’m still glad my mind is kind of running

D.J. Paris 36:47
reeling from the $8.

Mike McElroy 36:50
Like the data you could get from that, too. You said he puts it in a spreadsheet? Yeah, asked you to rate every day the day before and then can be up all the other. Oh, my God, you’re gonna have so much fun with this. Sorry. Yeah.

D.J. Paris 37:03
I do. And it’s again, it’s never the goal is not to even have a perfect date back the goal that I could have a day where I miss every single one of those. And the goal is not to like, beat myself up, right? The goal is just to this and go, Oh, okay, well, I didn’t quite get things done. And that’s also a nice opportunity to, to have days where you really fall short and to not, you know, beat yourself up and destroy your self esteem. But, um, so that’s a nice opportunity to, but it’s, it’s literally just to remind me because, like, this is embarrassing. I’ll give you one of them. I literally have them asked me did you clean the cat box, I have a cat. And, and I cleaned the cat box twice a day now. And I used to do it like once every three days, which I apologize for anyone listening. They are probably completely disgusted by that. I wouldn’t be too but that’s what I was doing. I wasn’t adding it. And I knew I was supposed to clean it at least once a day. But I wasn’t. And I went. Now I know if I have to if I have to report to somebody, it’s like, I’m 41 This is embarrassing. But if I had to like literally report it every day, I’d probably do it. And so he asks me every day, even though now I do it twice a day, and I’ve never missed. I still will never take that off the list because it gets got me to do things.

Mike McElroy 38:12
Oh, I love that. Okay, stealing.

D.J. Paris 38:15
All right, well, this isn’t about me, this is back to you. Let’s I want to let’s talk about the culture of your office. Because, you know, I’ve always been impressed by sort of the way you you conduct yourself the way you carry yourself how you present. You know your thoughts and ideas. Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve built that into your into center coast?

Mike McElroy 38:33
Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll give you one right off the bat. So we have a team meeting every Tuesday at Two on Team Tuesday. And the first thing we do is we go around the room, we all share one win from the past week. And we share one thing that we learned. And I’m excited because I’ve got my thing for next week already, which is this phone call thing. But yeah, so I actually, I owe a lot to the Young Professionals Network and the Chicago Association of Realtors. Where, you know, we first were, you saw me talk, that’s all got started. And it’s this culture of really forward thinking, growth oriented, just fun people. And I was really lucky to be chosen. I don’t even know how this happened. But they chose me to to be the chair of the Young Professionals Network, say 2014. So after that, I said, Man, I need need, like this. How do I stay? How do I? What can I do with this? And I thought, you know, let’s start a real estate office. That’s exactly the same way. So we really I look for people who are genuine, who are passionate, who are good problem solvers, and most importantly, who are open minded. I find that’s one of the most valuable traits just in a human being in general. And it’s really important to us here at center coast.

D.J. Paris 40:00
Yeah, I and yeah, and I think also the ability for their leader in this case you to have systems to be able to teach, I think is incredibly valuable. I can’t tell you how often and I’m curious to get your opinion on this. And I know everyone does things differently. And there’s certainly no specifically right way to necessarily run your systems. But I’ve heard people say, Well, you go to a listing appointment with a blank sheet of paper. You know, and you listen, and then yes, I agree. That’s part of it. But I think, Boy, I it’s not the way I would do it. Yeah, I’m curious on your thoughts on on that, because I’ve heard that a lot.

Mike McElroy 40:37
Interesting. I haven’t heard that one. No, I show up with a whole bunch of questions. I’ve written out the same questions every time plus the other. Right. I thought that that was prepping.

D.J. Paris 40:49
That’s right. Yeah. But

Mike McElroy 40:51
I think the point is, is you do need to list here’s where I think maybe they’re going with that. And I think this is really valuable. It is easy to show up at that sheet of paper unlisted questions, and just ask them and then wait for the answer, and write down the answer and go. Okay, thanks. And move on to the next one. But that’s not right. I really coach people that you got to dig, and you got to find the why. to these questions. To really figure out what your client’s motivations are, and what’s going to be important to them in the process. Like, I want to find out if a buyer craves a lot of control in their life. You know, because if that’s the case, then we need to talk about some things. Right started. And we will and that will really help the rest of the process. So don’t just ask the questions. Listen, I think is the takeaway there and ask it another question.

D.J. Paris 41:47
Boy, well said, Well, I have kept you long enough. And I could keep talking to you for a while. But you are. You’re a busy person. And so I will, we will let you go. But, Mike, if if there are any? Well, there’s really two things. If there are brokers out there that are interested in learning about your firm, what’s the best way they can reach out to you

Mike McElroy 42:05
drop me an email? My email is Mike at center coast. realty.com. And yeah, I’m always I love you know, I just love this conversation. So I love talking to people who are, like I said, growth oriented and forward thinking. So I’m always happy to talk shop, let somebody pick my brain and vice versa.

D.J. Paris 42:27
Yeah. And also, if you are a buyer seller or a renter, or our landlord, for example, that’s interested in having Mike represent you. You can contact him the same way. Do you also provide your phone number or do you not typically, yeah,

Mike McElroy 42:41
email is probably going to be the best way to get me just in case I’m what I always tell my clients when I’m with them, I’m with them. So email is probably best, but my number is also 773-828-9467.

D.J. Paris 42:55
And also, Mike’s website is center coast realty.com. It’s well built it’s it’s an excellent one of the better sites I’ve seen for for an office. So check that out as well. Well, Mike, thank you so much for being a part of the show. Really appreciate your time.

Mike McElroy 43:10
Thanks, DJ. This was a blast.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Top 1% producers Grace Goro and Julia Brenner have been best friends since 6th grade. In this episode they get specific on how they started their real estate business, why personal notes and pop-byes have been paramount to their success, and why professionalism helps differentiate them from the other 35k real estate brokers in Chicago.

Grace Goro can be reached at Grace@GoroBrennerGroup.com and 312.720.7589
Julia Brenner can be reached at Julia@GoroBrennerGroup.com and 312.720.7589

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Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:15
Welcome to another episode of Keeping it real. The only podcast made by Chicago real estate brokers for Chicago real estate brokers. My name is DJ Paris, I am your host through the show. And coming up in just a moment, we have the interview with the Goro Brenner team, which is Grace Goro. And a Julia Brenner. And first time we ever have had two people are being interviewed at the same time and their best friends and teammates, and it came out really well. In particular, I think you’ll find a lot of really practical ways to grow your business. And they gave a number of examples of how to do that this is also the week of Thanksgiving. So in the spirit of giving thanks, we want to thank everyone who’s listening, we are again, going to finish up the month here at a record high about 33% more listeners this month, and last month. I know you don’t care about those numbers, but it’s very exciting. And I hope it means we’re doing something right. And it’s our way of just giving back to the industry and hopefully helping brokers out there who are looking to hear what the top producers are doing so that they themselves can grow their business, like some of these big hitters. So if you have any one else, one way you can get back to us aside from listening is drop us a line, let us know what you like. And if you have anyone that you we need to interview that maybe isn’t on our radar, let us know you can find us at keeping it real pod.com. And you can also find us on Facebook at keeping it real pod. And please continue to share this podcast if everyone out there just share this podcast with one other broker that they think could benefit from this information, it would double our numbers and we’d appreciate that as well. And lastly, if you’re a company that works with real estate agents, and would like to get in front of about 5000 of them every time we do an interview, you can sponsor an episode. So please reach out to us if you’re interested in getting a lot of people to hear about what you do. So do that as well. And now have everyone have a wonderful Thanksgiving. And now on to our interview with grace and Juliet.

All right, today on the show we have grace Goro and Julia Brenner linquist. Grace is a high end residential real estate specialist out of app properties, their largest office, which is the Goose Island office, and in early years she helped her first team secure a record 42 million in volume before branching out to found her own boutique real estate team the Goro Brenner group today Grace’s business is based on referrals. And although she has experienced across Chicagoland she specializes in high end residential real estate and Chicago’s North Side including Lincoln Park, Old Town River North Lakeview to name a few, and some of the suburbs including her hometown of Park Ridge. Grace serves as the Vice Chair for the 2017 2018 Chicago Association of Realtors YPN. The Young Professionals Network is also a member of our PAC which is Realtors political action committee workgroup. She is also the founder of the prostate cancer league a 501 C three charitable organization dedicated to raising funds and awareness to prevent and treat prostate cancer. Julia Brenner linquist is a Top Producing real estate agent. Also with that properties. She knows that her clients come first values their needs, puts an emphasis on an open and honest business understands the power of proactive marketing. Julio lives and works in the Chicagoland area and keen to the trends of the windy city and its ever changing real estate landscape. Julia works side by side with with Grace at the Goro Brenner group. And it is through this cohesive partnership that the gore Brenner group has been able to double its volume over the last year Julius specializes in Chicago’s near north side, including places similar to Grace like Lincoln Park River, North Old Town, etc. But as well as some suburbs including Park Ridge, her hometown, Glenview, which was my technically my hometown, Evanston, Skokie, Wilmette Deerfield, Highland Park. Julie is an enthusiastic member of her community and a die hard Cubs fan. She’s a member of the YPN as well, I’m sorry, the YPN board. She’s not only a member of the YPN. She’s also on the board forever site Illinois, which is an organization dedicated to preservation and restoration of site. When Julie isn’t working. You can find her biking on Lakeshore trying new restaurants with family and friends or consistently constantly redecorating her home. You are always welcome to redecorate my home as well. So thank you guys, we really really appreciate both of your times and so let’s let’s first identify who’s who can Grace Can you say hello?

Grace Goro 4:48
Yeah, hi, DJ. Thank you for that intro. Sorry. It was a little bit long. I’m sorry that my I sound a little bit nasally right now I’m a little I’m getting over a cold but this is great. So the One who sounds a little nasally it’s great.

D.J. Paris 5:02
Hi. And Juliet,

Julia Brenner 5:03
thank you for the intro to DJ, we appreciate it.

D.J. Paris 5:08
No, and I know how busy you guys are, in particular, not just with your real estate practice, but some of your other charities and organizations that you’re involved in. So believe me, I really, it’s me that appreciates it. More prob. So thank you guys. I’m Grace, I want to start with something that I’m a huge fan of, which is the Young Professionals Network YPN. And I just yesterday gave you guys like a 15 minute commercial to a broker who was in my office. And she had, she was with another firm, and she had started I think, in August. And so it’s just been, what a few months in the business and she feels lost. And I think the office she’s at, not at properties, of course, the I don’t even know where it was, but it was some smaller office where they didn’t have training. And she was taking advantage of she’s a member of car. And so she’s taking advantage of some of the cars training, which is excellent. And she was also saying, what else should I be getting involved in? And I said, Oh, are you familiar being a car member? Are you familiar with the YPN? Or at least you know, the city YPN. And she was not familiar. So I spent like 10 or 15 minutes saying you need to go to all of the events, you know, and so grace, you’re the co chair. So can you talk just real briefly about why everybody should be a YPN member who’s a member of car?

Grace Goro 6:18
Sure, I’d be happy to. So I’m the 2018 Vice Chair, Mo Dodd will be the chair this year. And I’m just so excited when I started. In real estate, I didn’t know anybody else in the industry, except for my dad and his friends and they were on their 60s and 70s. They’re not really somebody you can hang out with and learn from quite so much. So I felt very much alone. And I was introduced to why piano and I started going to their breakfasts. And I realized what a family I could have in this group of people. And so just spend the first couple of years meeting people through there, then I got involved in the board. And this is my third year now coming on as vice chair. And I just think it’s really an amazing place for not for every agent, not just new agents, it’s not necessarily an age specific thing or an experience specific. It’s just for people who want a sense of community and want to be able to learn more about what other people in their industry are doing through whether it’s the you know, the monthly breakfasts or the parties, we throw we do a kickoff mixer and another mid year event, let the last two years it’s been a fabulous boat with open bar, it’s a lot of fun. And just, you know, a lot more several more outings, it’s a way to really get to know your peers in the industry. I love it.

Julia Brenner 7:39
And to echo Grace, I’m on the board this year with her. And congratulations, thank you. This is really it’s a really great way to like she was saying to really get to know people and have more of a sense of family and colleagues and industry that can be really isolating. And on top of it. I think all it does is really benefit the industry by having Realtors know each other and support each other and raise each other up and help each other out. At the end of the day. It just makes the industry a better industry. It helps get deals done. And overall, it’s just a great benefit to get out there and meet people.

D.J. Paris 8:15
Yeah, 100%. And you know, so by the way, what how they can find information about the YPN is you could go to cars website, which is Chicago realtor.com. It’s I think it’s right on the homepage. If not just go to Google type in YPN. Chicago, it’ll come right up. And they also car sends out their schedule. I think once a month or so they’ll send out here’s the next upcoming event. Is there any other way that they can get on a mailing list or is it all through car,

Grace Goro 8:45
it’s mostly through the car website. And once you sign up there to become a it doesn’t cost anything to become a member. And then you can you’ll get notifications about all of the member events that are coming up via email. And then the more you attend to we always give shout outs for our next event. And every year it’s something different our our chair last year, she did this amazing brainchild of this amazing IKEA build out event where we had a warehouse. And we built Ikea furniture for all Chicago, which is an organization that helps people experiencing homelessness. And just had so many new people coming there and that’s something that we really pushed to be at the website too. So that’s probably the best place to learn about it.

Julia Brenner 9:25
Yeah, and there’s a ton of charity involved which is really great because as a whole again, giving back to the community only benefits us as realtors and our community and the areas we live in and work in. And every the last Wednesday of every month, correct? Yep, starting starting in February. Every year we do it at Manny’s Deli in the South Loop. So the last Wednesday of every month 9am to 1030. That schedule should be posted online. You do have to sign up for it but just as an update to people adds up. So let’s

D.J. Paris 10:01
come in, we’ll put a link to the website, this specific link in the in the comments, or in the in the description. And I can’t yet I can’t stress it enough too. So this woman that was in my, I was just meeting with her and she and I was saying, you will learn so much. And also, you know, hey, you get a free Manny’s breakfast. And that’s that might that alone is worth going. But in addition, because I used to waste our office was right next to Manny. So in addition to being awesome, because it’s Manny’s, you, there’s just a lot of great information. I know you guys have did panels last year at some of those meetings where it was like technology focused and people just learn, you learn so much. And you get to connect with other brokers who are all about sharing information. So anyway, okay, so I just wanted

Grace Goro 10:45
to about YPN. Amazing.

D.J. Paris 10:48
I know I well, I should I should offer to, to, you know, assist more like there’s a way to I don’t know, when the board stuff is, but maybe in the next year or so I’ll offer some services, you know what I should? Actually, yeah, we’re gonna, you know, what I? Well, you know, what I would like to do is actually build you guys out your own website, if that’s possible, that I think would be really cool. Because it’s car is just such a big website. But maybe that would be neat to have your own specific site, you know, just for that. But anyway, let’s talk about you guys, because I think this is such a cool story that you guys have been friends, basically, since sixth grade, I’m guessing or sixth grade. Yeah. And let’s talk about the origin story of how you guys met and how you’ve grown your business, you know, all the way from when you got together in business.

Grace Goro 11:36
Today, you want to start this.

Julia Brenner 11:38
So we met on a traveling basketball team in our hometown in Park Ridge, we were the two tallest type of girls. So we really stood out to each other because other than that our friends tended to be shorter girls that we had to like bend down to feed to hear them talk. So we became friends playing traveling basketball, we played on our feeder team in Park Ridge. And then we played for our high school until senior year. And our individual groups of friends became one big group of friends. So we’ve been best friends since sixth grade. And it’s really fun because we played on a team for so much of our lives. And it’s really cool that we are on a team again now. And

Grace Goro 12:27
the only thing that’s kind of confusing for people is I think, over the years with friends used to just kind of start to pick up similar mannerisms and wear similar outfits and all that and on a daily basis. If we had a nickel for every time somebody called us the other person, we wouldn’t even need to work anymore. Oh,

Julia Brenner 12:45
I mean, our own family members do it. Our own family members do it. One time her mom took pictures of me playing volleyball that she thought were great. And then my mom got a whole full photo album with pictures of me. You’re welcome. So

D.J. Paris 12:59
yeah, that’s, that’s awesome.

Julia Brenner 13:02
So yeah, we do dress like a lot. We talk like we say the same things a lot. So we do kind of confuse people. But it’s kind of what makes us unique in our team. So

D.J. Paris 13:14
so yeah. And so grace you you got into did you get into real estate first? Because I know you come from like everybody in your family who’s in real estate.

Grace Goro 13:23
Right? You should hear dinner conversations. Yeah, so I I was licensed in 2011. I actually was licensed while I was graduating at the University of Arizona. So I graduated with a degree in broadcast journalism and I went on to work for not very long, just about a half a year at Comcast SportsNet. Downtown while I had my license, and my dad who was at the time the managing broker of Coldwell bankers office in Lincoln Park was pretty insistent that I actually don’t get into the family business. He wanted me to do what my degree was for right and and not waste all that money going to school. Sure, no, I the hours that were brutal in broadcast journalism, I’d be up at two in the morning to get to the studio by four done by like 11am. And then you’re home and you’re sleeping by six, so it just was never going to work. So I ended up convincing him to let me hang my license him him being my Dad, let me hang my license at the Linkin Park office. And I started on a team. And I was there for I think it was maybe three or four years and I was talking to Julia at the time because you know, we see each other on a regular basis anyway. And she was an a nine to five and not all that happy and I was telling her how much I loved it. And I just thought that she had such the personality for it and had enough experience at that point to potentially branch off and start our own thing. And yeah, I was by some miracle she she trusted to make the job.

Julia Brenner 14:53
But no, I was doing marketing. And I also was a broadcast journalism major. And I just found myself In a job that wasn’t really what I even set out to be in, and what I love to do was talk to people and interview people and work with them and help them. And I was telling that to grace. She’s like, well, that’s a lot of what real estate is like. It sounds like you’re talking about something that’s right up your alley. So like she said, she took very little convincing and I got my license and joined the Coldwell Banker office to under Grace’s dad. And right off the bat, we started our own team and we haven’t looked back since.

D.J. Paris 15:31
That that’s amazing. And it’s that Linkin Park Coldwell Banker offices is such a such a history to it as well. I mean, it’s just been around forever. It’s this big behemoth. My, my boss, Nick Patterson started there a million years ago, before he went off on his own. And there’s just been so many great, great people that have funneled through that office and are still obviously at that office. And so, but let you know, and I think that so, first of all, I would like to point out that you guys were both broadcast journalism majors that is this incredibly like, did. Were you guys, how did that happen? That you were both did you guys go to the same college as well? Or

Grace Goro 16:07
I swear, we’re not each other’s only

Julia Brenner 16:10
other friends with other girls

Grace Goro 16:13
with other Yeah, no. But I think that’s a lot of why we gravitated towards each other to be in the same career because we have very similar personalities and interests. Julia went to Wisconsin.

Julia Brenner 16:23
Yeah, I went to University Wisconsin Madison, my mom’s reporter, my dad’s a publicist. So I was kind of make sense. Sure. I don’t know how she got started. She copied you clearly.

Grace Goro 16:34
stumbled my way. I really liked the broadcasting aspect of it at the time and I wanted to do sports specifically. I’m so sorry. I lost my train of thought you asked me where I went. I was at the University of Arizona not too pleased with our terrible rivals ASU.

D.J. Paris 16:56
You Yes. You were in Tempe? Arizona. Have you been to Tucson? Yeah, not? Yeah, not Tempe. That’s the other one. Yes, I so I but I think that’s that’s particularly interesting, because I do think so much of being a good realtor is about and maybe the most important part of it is being a good communicator. Some would say it’s being a good listener, I would say and being a good listener is maybe the most important way of being a good communicator. But but certainly communication is so important. And it’s always, whenever there’s studies that are done on serve service businesses, like financial advisors, or realtors, it’s always you know, what our clients want. It’s, you know, they want somebody who communicates effectively. So I think that’s a really important point. And I also want to, I want to talk a little bit about how you guys complement each other. Because, obviously, you’ve been friends for a long time. And I just interviewed and it may have been Amy Diamond, I can’t recall who who, who told me this. But I interview a lot of of brokers who are on teams, and I think it was Amy. But she she had said, the reason why she built a team was that she knew an 80 hour work week just wasn’t sustainable. And at a certain amount of time. On our own. She was still like, I need some help. So I can, you know, have a reasonably act some boundaries in my life, right? And so I wonder if you guys are complementing each other is one of you more focused in a particular area of the business? are you both doing sort of the same tasks or?

Grace Goro 18:22
So one of the interesting things that I find about our pairing that I noticed right off the bat, we started because we wanted accountability partners, right, and we’re both pretty competitive. So the better Giulia does, the more I want to continue to push myself and vice versa. And our personalities as similar as we seem, when it comes to our careers. And you know, what we’re focused on, we’re actually completely opposite. So we actually recently didn’t and we do the disc test. Yeah, this test and Oh, sure. Opposite. Yeah, I am. And I knew this about myself, I’m a very strong D, with a little bit of eye and you’re like, whatever, the opposite of that as

Julia Brenner 19:05
well. So when we go into listing appointments together, it’s like, Good cop, bad cop.

Grace Goro 19:09
I’m always the bad cop. She’s.

Julia Brenner 19:13
But she can put her foot down about things. And I really, really admire that. And I’m a little bit more of,

Grace Goro 19:18
Oh, okay. You’re the bright side.

Julia Brenner 19:20
But yeah, so I’m the I’m the positive bright side, and she’s the one who’s like, nope, these are the numbers. So we that’s a that’s a way we one way we really complement each other and it works out to our advantage. And then, like Grace is saying, just the way that we push each other. I mean, we’ve been on a team together before for a long time. So we know how to work together as a team and we know how to push each other. So that was really cool having that experience because that came so naturally.

Grace Goro 19:48
I don’t like I find that a lot of people especially when I listened to things similar to this podcasts or interviews, panels, presentations, a lot of times you catch people When they’re, you know very much in the height of where they’ve come from. And I feel like Julia and I are still on that trajectory very much so of where we want to go. So we only recently, maybe three or four months ago hired our first recruit being our Operations Manager, which has helped tremendously. And it’s really helping to shape our idea of team building and where we want to go next and who our next hires are, what when we hire our buyer’s agent, and how it kind of trickles down. So it’s just been interesting being in flux, especially since we moved from Coldwell Banker to our properties, kind of learning, team building time management, structuring, it’s it’s been an adventure.

Julia Brenner 20:39
Yeah, we’ve learned a lot. Over the last couple of years of what works and doesn’t work, we’re still always learning more working with our managing broker, Kevin Banach, and we worked with Grace’s dead Chuck, just to really help us formulate what team is best for us, and how we can work side by side and bring more people on. But like Chris mentioned earlier, it can be such an isolating career and being able to work on a team. I mean, that just makes it 10 times better, and be able to bounce ideas off each other, which we do a lot to run pricing off each other. Of course, the backup is a huge help. And just to be able to have that accountability, and that that, that help in that reference, when necessary, has been awesome.

D.J. Paris 21:26
Agreed. We do get a lot of listener feedback and questions. The most common question we get is from brokers who are feeling stuck either because they’re new and not totally sure what to do to sort of most important things to do in order to grow their business. And I wanted to ask you both what your recommendation would be as as not under not knowing these individual know, these people who have written in anything about their business? Is there anything that you think universally, that everyone could and should be doing to help elevate, you know, increase their production? Or if in particular, if they’re newer?

Grace Goro 22:08
So when I was new, I really started off, I don’t know if you’re familiar, but listening to Brian Buffini? Sure. And, you know, the Tom ferries, Brian Buffini is that these kind of all these people instilled in me the processes that I do today, and I think it’s scary when you’re new, because you really don’t know anybody. And especially if you’re new and young, you a don’t really know anyone, and you be maybe don’t have the confidence in yourself to be like, Okay, why is my parents friends? Why would they trust me to sell my home. So it’s important to just get as educated as you possibly can, and start reaching out to those people regularly, right? Like, we’re all in the relationship as this the better of a relationship you have with somebody, the more honest you can be with them. And the stronger your feedbacks going to be. And the more that they can learn to trust you. Like we we are constantly sending out handwritten notes, making phone calls, doing those lunches, and those lunches are the most painful things that we spot, you know, everybody has theirs and ours are getting those coffees, but you have to do it.

Julia Brenner 23:11
And yeah, and to add to that, I mean, just building your your database was, that was my biggest thing off the bat. I luckily, a lot of my college friends live in Chicago, and all of our high school friends live in Chicago. So it was really nice to be able to have that big database and just grow it and reach out and you start with your first newsletter, and you do it every month. And it might take them three years to come around. But they do come around, especially if you can to continually reach out, remind them you’re in the business, show them your value, show them what you can do for them. And I also think a huge thing that I know some people shy away from, but our rentals my first year, I think I did like 35 rentals, and it added up in income. And it was a lot of work. And it was a lot of grinding for something that might not have turned out it’s a great place to make mistakes too. And exactly that really taught me how to work with buyers. And like I said, it’s a great place to make mistakes. And it’s mistakes that yeah, that aren’t that big of a deal. You learn a lot, you meet a lot of agents, you see a lot of buildings all go into buildings with renters a couple of years back, and then I’m back in them again with my buyers. But I know the building because I’ve been there before so

Grace Goro 24:21
and another thing I would just wanted to add to that little shameless, live YPN plug. But I’ve heard so many times from different agents that you don’t get any business by hanging out with other agents. And I just so strongly disagree with that. And it’s another reason to get involved not just with wipin But just in any car board or any organization that’s going to promote networking within because it’s so great to have your peers know you and promote you and say nice things about you and get you involved in different aspects of the industry. And if you’re new I think that’s a really great place to start. Like I’ll never forget one of my very first listings I had my seller laughed while I was doing an open house and just kind of cased the neighborhood. And he walked into a neighbor’s listing, they were having an open and Aaron Mandel, who’s been on your show, she was doing the listing, she was doing the open house, and he introduced himself and said, Oh, you know, Grace aura was my agent. And she’s like, crazy score, oh, she’s great. You know, we’re great friends, you’re in really good hands. And he came back. And he told me that and I have never been happier, I was so glad to hear a positive comment from somebody and made my client feel really good to to know that, you know, somebody else knew me and had a nice thing to say about me and industry.

Julia Brenner 25:35
And to add to that, to it really helps in multiple offer situations, if you’re you have a buyer. And there are multiple offers. It’s, it just helps just in generally, in general, in situations, it helps to know the other agent, because it makes the process a lot smoother. And if they know you when they know you want to a professional level, and they know they can trust you. And it really puts you in better hands and it puts your buyers and sellers in better hands as well.

D.J. Paris 26:04
I couldn’t agree more with with all of that, you guys just I want to unpack a little bit of what you said, because you said so many great things in the last few moments, few minutes there. And I want to sort of backtrack a bit back to the you mentioned Brian Buffini he if you’re not familiar, and you’re listening, he is basically the largest real estate training platform or system in the industry. He’s been around forever and he has his one of his big things in grace, I believe it was Grace was talked about. Talked about this was some like really good habits like I picked the and you still maintain those habits today. And Buffini had a couple of habits that you clearly you even just mentioned by name, one of which is I know he has a whole thing is called like when the day how do you win the day? Well, one of the ways that one of the ways he says is you meet two to five new people every day, tell them what you do. gather their contact information, write them a handwritten note, and then stay in touch, send out those items of value every month, or get together from to do pop buys and all of the Buffini isms, but all really really good stuff to build relationships. And I wish I wish I got a nickel for every time I promoted Brian Buffini because I I’d probably be wealthier. But the the reality of it is, is that you guys were accountability partners too. And I think that, and I want to talk about that for just a moment. So I apologize, I’m gonna go off on a little bit of a tangent. But you know, Brian Buffini also started one of when he started developing, as a realtor. He he and Joe NIGO, who’s from Chicago became accountability partners, and Brian is in San San Diego or wherever, but Joe’s here, and they were daily accountability partners. And so I have an accountability partner in a different arena. But for habits, I have somebody that calls me every morning at 830 actually pay this person to do this. And we spend a minute or actually about 90 seconds every morning, I pay them very little, it’s very inexpensive thing. But they asked me did you do X, Y and Z and they’re like daily habits, I’m trying to cultivate having an accountability partner you can likely find in your own office. Or if you go to go to places like the Women’s Council of realtors or YPN events, or many of the other types of events that car puts together or different organizations where Realtors congregate, you can find a an accountability partner there as well. And I think that’s really, really important for a lot of brokers who, you know, are struggling to sort of try to figure out how to spend their day it’s get an accountability partner, you know, it’s it’s too hard to do it entirely by yourself. And I think you guys are living proof that working together, you achieve a lot more. Let’s let’s talk a little bit about your your group that the girl Brenner Group. Tell us sort of, you know, you’ve now brought on some additional team members, you know, how is how are you growing your practice at this time?

Grace Goro 28:57
So sorry, we were just looking at this one. So we are big fans of setting really big goals. So this was this past year was a great year for us. We went past our goal, which made us think okay, maybe we’re not shooting high enough. And now we’ve set a new one that for us, you know, basically a two woman team. 50 million is a very big goal for us at the place that we are at right now. But that’s what we’re trying to achieve. So we’re currently putting systems in place. With all of our metrics of you know what we need to do at our price point, we need 155 units. How many is that going to be a month and how are we going to get there? So our first hire four months ago with our operations manager, and she has been unbelievable. Kevin Vanek, our managing broker said to us, you don’t want to touch paper, your job your your time is better spent out talking to people talking to your clients. Prospecting bringing them in. So we hired on Glenn to help us to do all of that. So the paperwork, the back end, the brochures, a lot of I’m systemizing, our prospecting. So once this is all going, hopefully after the winter season, our next step is going to be to hire a buyer’s agent to help us, you know, deal with the incoming traffic that we’re planning for. And sometimes we get a little overwhelmed. It sounds lofty, at least to us, I know there’s probably people listening who are thinking, well, 50 million isn’t that much to them. But for us, for two people, it’s a lot and we need to really prepare and dream it and achieve it and plan it in order to make it successful.

Julia Brenner 30:32
And like Grace was saying, it’s just amazing. It’s just a huge thing that we’ve we’ve been tried and then edited and then scrapped and then tried again, oh, my gosh, so many good ideas and bad ideas, agents out there agents, forming new teams, try to get that system in place and get a good one in place. Right off the bat, talk to your managing brokers ask for some time from some older or seasoned agents. To really get those systems in place off the bat. I watched we watch Tom Ferry videos, like we said, we do Brian Buffini, which isn’t really systems but like the Millionaire Real Estate agent, a real real estate agent. Yeah, books on that. But that’s just what we’re really trying to do is get get in a system where everything, everything has the start middle and end to it so that we can make sure nothing falls through the cracks with our clients, and then we can increase our clientele?

D.J. Paris 31:25
Well, I think that is very well said. Yeah, I would say everybody should read the Millionaire Real Estate Agent, it’s by the gentleman that founded Keller Williams probably knows a thing or two, it’s widely considered one of the one of the basically, it’s the Bible for how to be a real estate agent, or rather, rather not real estate broker. It’s excellent. Gary Keller wrote that, and, and yeah, I mean, you guys just said a lot of great things. And we were talking a little bit offline too, about some, you know, best practices, and maybe some bad habits you’ve seen out in the field, and we were talking about, you know, sometimes listings are maybe not presented as well as they could be on the MLS, maybe people are have bad photography, or no photography, or, you know, the descriptions are goofy. And, you know, I always say, like, you should be talking to, if your own whoever you’re working, if you if your support team or training team, if there isn’t a support team or train team or if they’re not very strong. You know, you can go to some of these events and different organizations and talk to other realtors who, from other firms and they can, they can assist you as well. But you really want to immerse yourself and in, you know, just doing the, to the very best you can. And I think a lot of that information is not always intuitive. And it’s stuff that needs to be taught. And, you know, there’s good news is there’s a lot of people like you guys who are very graciously giving your time even just to this podcast, and I’ll just do a quick plug, if anyone’s listening for the first time to our show. Basically, I only I think I’ve only interviewed top one percenters in the Chicagoland area, most of which have built teams. So if people are like, Well, how do I do that? We have interviews we’ve done with other with other teams who have talked about exactly how they’ve built teams and, and you know, you guys are talking about that as well. So there’s a lot of resources out there to learn best practices. And people like Grayson, Julie, I’m sorry, I was gonna say people like Grace and Julia are obviously very generous with their time. And so there’s lots of people you can talk to.

Julia Brenner 33:29
TJ, I was just gonna say, to add to that, one thing that grace really taught me and her dad taught us is just to really invest in your clients and how they’re your number one priority and your number one. Their happiness, it should be your goal at the end of the day. And so like you were saying, even with like bad practices and things like that, we really want to make sure our clients feel like we care about their home, or homes, like their own homes, and we get professional photography, we take a lot of time writing detailed descriptions, we make sure we have room numbers measured, right and the floors are cracked and things like that. And we have the marketing and whatnot done, because they’re going to be your number one referrer. So if you make your clients happy, that’s the best way to get more clients.

Grace Goro 34:15
Well, no. And also, like, in our industry, we see a wide range of commissions, right so it sure can 5% Some people say a standard I’ve seen people take lower, I’ve seen people take higher and we really push for 6% listings because I think that there is so much value to what we do when it’s done right. And I think that’s a big misconception that a lot of people have in general about our industry I hate that you know you hear people think a realtor sometimes as shady used car salesman, I hate that we provide or we can provide if done right, such a great service. And it doesn’t just have to be you know, your basic photo package. You can go Above and Beyond that, and do all of these wonderful things that I’m seeing all of my peers doing that we try to implement as well the matter ports and the drone videos and the high high end photography, the 3d Digital floorplans on top of it, that it’s just this world that we’re getting into with technology. There’s so many ways to show your craft and show your skill that I’d like to see more of that I if I see one more cell phone picture of somebody’s listing, I’m gonna lose it. It makes us all look bad.

Julia Brenner 35:29
Yeah, it didn’t it brings down our profession. And one thing we also really try to make sure we do is, is handle everything for our clients. So I mean, just the other day grace hired a a a painter to come in to paint her clients

Grace Goro 35:45
and exterminator because there were centipedes in the basement, the basement we always have about that. But yeah, right. We we always offer complimentary cleaning with our cleaning comes with our services, we bring a bottle of wine to the listing appointment, like why would you show up empty handed the somebody’s home when they’ve invited you.

Julia Brenner 36:04
Just things like that, so that the process is easy for the seller. But also because the home shows better and it becomes easier for the buyer, it becomes easier for the buyer’s agent, it becomes easier for the attorneys, I mean, just to have these things done ahead of time just makes the whole deal smoother, and it makes our industry as a whole more professional.

D.J. Paris 36:23
And these are the reasons why you’re able to charge you know, your your clients, what you think you’re worth, and you guys are able to back that up with service that is likely above and beyond maybe what they would get from another broker. And I think that’s incredible. You know, I met a I met a broker just as a as another story a few years ago who met with me, and I think she ended up joining I want to say dream town, but I’m not I don’t remember exactly. But she met with me. Oh, no, I think she was at Berkshire Hathaway well, it doesn’t matter. But anyway, she said, you know, what, can I What can I charge my sellers. And at our firm, we said, well, you charge whatever you want, that’s up to you. And she goes good, because I charged 7%. And she goes in two years, I’m gonna get to 10% when I was like, Whoa, I just was sort of shocked. I hadn’t heard commissions that high and, and she wasn’t laughing at all. And I wasn’t laughing at her. I was just sort of like, whoa, like, sort of shocked. And she looked at me like, why are you looking shocked, I know what I’m worth, here’s what I provide. Here’s why I do I said, Hey, you know, whatever, whatever you decide to do, that’s up to you. But I thought that was in some ways, I was really impressed because she wasn’t crazy. And she but she really had a a very logical and rational explanation for why she charges as much as she does. And she goes, my my clients are thrilled because I go way above and beyond what, you know, the broker down the street might do. So.

Grace Goro 37:45
That’s awesome. I love to hear that she’s pushing 10 Yeah, yeah. That’s great.

D.J. Paris 37:50
I think so too. And, you know, I just, I just love that, you know, it’s, I think, people brokers always need to be able to justify their, their their cost. And you know, if you’re a broker, and you don’t know how to do that you can learn, and you can learn to say, here’s what I offer, here’s why I offer it, here’s why I’m worth what I’m worth, here’s what I do, that’s maybe a bit different. You guys rattled off five or six things, you do that I’m guessing most brokers don’t. So I think that’s pretty, pretty amazing. And I also want to not gloss over something we mentioned the very beginning, which is you guys work largely by referral. So, you know, I think that’s the ultimate result of doing a great job is they tell of course, tell everybody they know. And you know that, obviously, oh, and I want to go back to something real quickly to Juliet mentioned about rentals that, you know, we are sometimes easy to forget, in particular, if you’ve been in the business a while but if you’re newer, it’s easy to sort of gloss over that rentals because not only is it a great place to cut your teeth like Grace mentioned, and make some mistakes, but also it these are people that may and likely will become future buyers right and everyone who’s bought a home almost everyone started out renting right. So this is a great way to build those relationships.

Julia Brenner 39:01
Yeah, I just did a rental in July for my friend’s brother and his girlfriend they got engaged and we’re closing on Friday on their new big single family home in Park Ridge and they’re just going to get a sublet so even just that I mean the turnaround on them right huge. And the thing about that is about everything and about what we Grayson I do with all of our clients is just follow up follow up follow up. How are you doing? How’s your place? Here’s a pop by gift for you enjoy this bottle of wine or sunscreen. You know, whatever season it is. That’s the biggest Yeah,

D.J. Paris 39:35
can you guys give an example of a pop by gift I know you mentioned wine but I know Brian Buffini always has like cute little ones. Have you guys ever done anything sort of on the on the cute side or on the funny side?

Grace Goro 39:46
That’s like our favorite thing to do. We’ve had some big pie fails as well. Yes. Whenever we tried to do like salts and then we tried to make candles and they ended up looking like we were sending bath salts. Yeah,

Julia Brenner 39:58
one time we tried to do This lavender bath salts sent in a mason jar with like a candle and we tied tweed with a key on it. And it was like some little slogan it was so cute. It was no it was a disaster. And it was like the weirdest gifts to give people were like, Why are we yeah to give to people? Oh, some say of three pounds of Bath Salts on my Yeah, we’ve,

Grace Goro 40:20
we’ve since come quite a ways we’re actually trying something new this year that we’re excited about. So for your listeners who don’t know a Popeye is when you pop by somebody’s house with a gift. And you usually just let them know that you’re in the neighborhood you try not to go inside because then they feel like maybe you’re intruding on their time even though they don’t realize it. Just like two minutes Hi thinking about you, here’s a gift. But this year for Christmas, we’re thinking about renting out space at Alliance bakery over in like the Wicker Park area sure inviting all of our past clients to come out. And we’ll probably do a couple of different dates to pick up a pie from us and they can you know, RSVP with the kind that they want. Come out and visit, it’s a great way for us to get face time in the pies cost like, what 15 bucks a pie. And then we’ll give it to them. If they can’t make it, then we’ll drive out and we will see them it’s a nice like excuse for us to stop by. We’re really excited about that. We’re really excited about that. And your bar, your bar ideas good one too.

Julia Brenner 41:17
Oh, we’re also going to do yes, good runner, we’re also doing a bar code class, doing one in the city and one in the suburbs. in Park Ridge, we’re going to invite our friends and family and client list from those areas to come and do a bar class with us. Which is a which is a really popular workout class right now. And that one is actually pretty affordable. And just for people that you know, I know it can be a lot. Zika can be something little you can get a little tough a little tube of sunscreen and drop it off in the summer with a little note that said, you know, I’ve got your back, I’ve got you covered, I

think is what we did. Yeah. And we

sent out umbrellas with our logo on them recently. So you can you can really personalize them as well.

Grace Goro 42:01
That’s really $6 each. Yeah, the umbrellas.

Julia Brenner 42:03
So there’s, there’s things you can do to not have to spend a ton of money. But Brian Buffini really says it doesn’t have to cost anything, you just need to show your face and show that you care. We like to give out some nicer things, especially to our big referrers and our big clients. And so there’s a lot to choose from.

D.J. Paris 42:22
There are and I’ve always thought to for people that are on like really small budgets, you know, you could just and you should keep a list of your clients, their children, you know, relatively their ages. And if you know schools coming up and it’s August or late July, that’s an a great opportunity. If you know if the budget small, just drop off notebooks for your for your clients say hey, that, you know, I know your kids are nearing school. And I just thought that they might find this helpful, right? Like things like that. I mean, again, it doesn’t, you’re right, it doesn’t really matter how much you spend or what the gift is just something thoughtful is

Julia Brenner 42:57
even like dog treats if they have a dog. Don’t bury

me. I mean this. I don’t know if everyone agrees with this. But I know people who do homemade cookies and they wrap them up and they bring them in a tin or in a bag or something like that. I love it. If somebody gave me I would. Yeah, I would do. I like to keep just like $1 $10 bottles of wine from Trader Joe’s in my car. And when I buy a client’s house because we drive by them so often, you know, just run up there with a little note and drop it off and just say, Hey, I was in the neighborhood and I was thinking of you and have a bottle of wine.

D.J. Paris 43:28
Awesome. Well, you guys have said so much and you have generously given your time. So I would like to specifically talk you know if there are buyers, sellers or renters that are out there that are interested in working with the Goro Brenner group, what is the best way? Well, first of all, let’s they can always hit your website, which is girl breader group.com. But what’s another? Can they reach you by telephone by email? You guys plug your your contact? Yeah.

Julia Brenner 43:55
Yeah, definitely. Our emails are both its grace and gorell Brenner group.com and Giulia at Goro Brenner group.com, which we realize is a really long email. But yeah, through that our names are Goro runner group.com is our website. So our stuff is everywhere. We have a business page with some of our recent listings and closings on there. And we are happy to help even just answer questions give advice one of the things we really like to provide our clients especially those who don’t live in town or who are from out of town I mean, is you know if you need a doctor to go to if you need to know where to get where the nearest Lululemon is or something like that we are from here and we know the city really well. We know the suburbs really well. And we’re happy to just answer any kind of questions.

D.J. Paris 44:42
Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much. And in particular grace, I know you’re not 100% feeling well so I really appreciate both of

Grace Goro 44:51
you for for putting up with me my my voice this whole time I did not have a coughing fit. I know we talked about that earlier. I was I was afraid but we made it through.

D.J. Paris 44:59
I was hoping there’d be a coughing fit it would it would have been fun to hear you struggle on the air but but you didn’t use it. You guys were wonderful. And so I really thank you for being part of the show and hope you guys hit your $50 million goal next year. That’s really exciting.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Kati Spaniak has a goal for each of her Spaniak Team members – to help them become a top 1% producer like her. In our in-depth conversation, Kati discusses the importance of specializing geographically and how starting a Northbrook roundtable meetup group helped supercharge her practice. Kati also talks about how building a team took her business to the next level and freed up time for friends and family!

Kati can be reached at kati@spaniakteam.com or 847-379-8813.

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Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:16
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real. My name is TJ Parris, I’m your host. This is the only podcast made by Chicago real estate agents for Chicago real estate agents. Today, we have an interview coming up in just a moment with Katie Spana. Before we get started, I wanted to, first of all, thank you, again, for continuing to send this podcast to other people in the real estate community, other brokers in your office, or you meet out in the field, telling them about it, sharing it on social media, really appreciate it. It’s why we do this, we do this to help the broker community become more successful by interviewing the people who are already incredibly successful. And we will continue to do this on through the end of the year and into the future. So we’re very, very excited to keep going and really, we’re very thrilled that the reception has been so warm, we weren’t sure that people would be as interested but I guess people are. So also we do need your help to help make this podcast even better. So if you if you’re a broker or realtor and thinking about, well, gosh, I really wish I had more skills around X, Y, or Z. Maybe you want to learn how to do an open house, maybe you want to run a better CMA or market yourself more effectively or get more referrals Right. Or even negotiate more, you know, more and more strongly. We can find people who are already doing this well in the industry, let us know what you would like to hear on the show. And we’ll make it a reality. So the easiest way to let us know is you can always email us or rather these even easier than that, go to our website, keeping it real pod.com There’s a contact form. Or you can email Jen, our producer Jen at keeping it real pod.com. But like us on Facebook, we’re at keeping it real pod. So find us, we publish every one of our episodes there, and you can share it with other brokers there too. So thank you so much for your continued support. As we wrap up the year, we have a few more episodes to go before the end of this 2017. And we’re going to make 2018 even more fun with the show. So more Carrie McCormick by the way she comes on once a month. And if you have any questions for a amazing top producer who’s been in the business for 18 years, she answers your question, so let us know what those are too. All right, gang. Thanks so much for being so supportive, and on to our interview with Katie span.

Today on the show, we have Katie spatty EQ of spinning a team. Katie’s vision is what drives her team. She has a marketing background and is excellent and understanding how to specifically position every listing that she takes her ability to be understanding and compassionate with her clients is one of her greatest strengths. She’s also able to see the bigger picture and recognizes what it takes to run a successful business. It is her marketing knowledge and expertise as well as her connections throughout that make her one of the top 12 agents on the North Shore. And I want to give a few more statistics. Katie is extremely humble, but I want to brag about it for a moment. Katie and her team have grown to be one of the we mentioned the top 12 agents and teams in the North Shore, which is an insanely impressive accomplishment. Also, she has grown to one of the top 120 agents in all of Chicago that puts her if I do the math right at about the top half of 1%. Or slightly better than that. So that’s that’s pretty amazing. And she’s completed over 175 transactions sold over 120 million. So we are thrilled to have

her on the show. Welcome to you very much for having me.

We are excited to have you. First question I typically always ask ask our interviewees is how did you get started in the business? You

Kati Spaniak 4:00
know, so I actually I did get started a while ago. Right? So I had a marketing design firm in the late 90s. And doing great was really successful. And then 911 happened and completely destroyed the business basically. So I ended up shutting that down. And my mom was a real estate agent in Northbrook. And so she said, Well, why don’t you come over and help me with my business? So I kind of took the route of Oh, sure. Let me go get my license. You know, I know how to sell I can do this. And so we partnered up for a few years. And then in about 2007 2008 I decided that it was just too much for me. I had three little little kids, and I couldn’t just could not do it. So I ended up letting my license expire and then actually decided to get back into the business in 2012. So my business really started again in 2012.

D.J. Paris 5:01
That’s impressive what you’ve done since 2012, only really five years back, I guess. So what do you think you did differently? Maybe versus other people that started back then that’s that’s Do you have any ideas of what you think propelled your success?

Kati Spaniak 5:19
Yeah, actually, you know what, I was super motivated. I decided that I was going to treat it like a real business. I wrote a business plan. I decided that I was going to be in the office every Monday, Wednesday, Friday after I dropped off my kids at school. And so I go into the office and I’d sit there and I’d open my computer and I’d think, Okay, what am I going to do today? You know, and I really thought about starting very small with the people I knew because I live in Northbrook grew up in Northbrook. And, you know, I decided that if I could sell 5% Of all the homes in Northbrook, it would be an incredibly high amount of homes. And I thought then why would I go anywhere else? So I started basically, with the 300 people that I knew, started writing them letters, I’d call them I’d see them out. I mean, I was probably maybe everybody knew that I was back in real estate. I mean, really, they knew. And so I would just connect with people. And then what I do is I’d actually see the houses that were coming on the market, and I would see a house on the street that came on the market that I knew somebody lived on. So I would just start proactively emailing those new listings to people that lived on those streets. And then I’d start to do just like market evaluations for people without them really asking.

D.J. Paris 6:42
I love that. So basically, someone’s home goes goes on the market and you email somebody you know, and say, Hey, FYI, so and so’s homes on the market. Yeah. Awesome.

Kati Spaniak 6:51
Yeah. And, you know, I sat open houses. I mean, I was an I, really my first listing. I went knocked on their door. It was an expired listing. And I did I knocked on their door.

D.J. Paris 7:03
Hold the cold mount. I’m expired. Oh, that is a tough knock.

Kati Spaniak 7:08
It was it was and I took the overpriced listing. I ended up I ended up losing the listing. But I did get a couple of great leads through the open houses. And so in my first year, I think I closed like, 4 million in my first year. Yeah, great first year. Yeah. And then my second year was 11, and then 24, and then 30. And so now I’m sort of building my team. So we’re, we’ve stayed 30. This year, we’re going to be about hopefully about 38.

D.J. Paris 7:41
Unbelievable. And by the way, my mother is also a Northbrook, born and bred and went to Glenbrook north and just went to her 50th wedding anniversary 15 high school anniversary. Oh,

Kati Spaniak 7:52
neat. I probably know

D.J. Paris 7:54
what she they don’t live there now. But but about 30 years ago, they moved but my mom you know is that’s where she grew up. And but it’s let’s talk about about the idea of of specializing in a geographic area, because clearly that work for you. How did you at any you’ve already given us some examples, but you know, how did you specifically get to know the Northbrook market where you just start? Were you studying the I know you went to open houses etc. and held open houses also. But were there were aside from studying the MLS. Are there other things you were doing to get active in the community?

Kati Spaniak 8:27
Yeah, I don’t I mean, definitely i i go to broker opens Of course. I spent a lot of time I basically what I did is I built my list around my kids school. So the parents the school and that was actually through St. Norbert church. My kids went to St. Norbert, so I got really involved in a lot of activities. I had served on the village board in Northbrook. So I knew a lot of people as well. And I just I really went on just a communication campaign with these people. I wouldn’t say it was a formalized, 33 touch I was sending them, you know, postcards every every month. But they just started to see me around. Oh, and the other thing that I did, which I love this idea, and I’d love to re integrate it is I did a roundtable I didn’t Northbrook roundtable every month. And so what I’d say is, hey, I’m going to be at Caribou Coffee on such and such day at 830 in the morning, and we’re just going to hang out and talk about Northbrook. And it really I mean, I got some really good leads from that. But it also made me start to really look like the Northbrook ask experts. All of my promotion was free. So I do like in the patch or just send out emails or invite people. And that was really great. I buy them some coffee, but most people didn’t even want me to they just wanted to come and connect. And it was really great. I mean, I you know, there were some pros and cons about it. If you get too many people, it’s hard to kind of have that small intimate conversation. So now I’d like to step in To kind of the next level have more like a discussion a monthly discussion about the real estate market in Northbrook or anything really in Northbrook, you know,

D.J. Paris 10:09
I love that. That’s that’s so brilliant. I just interviewed the episode isn’t up yet. I don’t know if you know, Amy Diamond, who specializes not in Northbrook, but in a in a different suburb, and then in northwest suburbs, and which, and sort of like your hyper focuses, and I think it’s Burr Ridge, but, or I can’t remember exactly, but what she did, and she did a little bit of a different version of what you mentioned, which I think was so smart. And this is many years ago, she was in a new mom. And so she put together I think if it was Burr Ridge, she put together a Facebook group that was like Burbridge mom news. And over time, now she has like 1800 people who have liked or have subscribed to that page. She doesn’t even know anyone who’s subscribed because it’s just, and she doesn’t even really promote her real estate as much. But she’s like, oh, yeah, this year, I got six deals just from people that were like, Oh, you’re the admin of that page. Right? I love the fact that you were doing an in person version of that book. It’s brilliant. Thank you. Thanks. And so I want to talk, I want to also talk about you building a team because that’s, that’s been in the what, in the most last couple of years, you’ve started that or more. Yeah,

Kati Spaniak 11:14
so I started, I got my first admin about right about the 24 million mark. And I love I mean, it, like changed my life, because she helped me with my emails, and, you know, doing contracts, you know, earnest money, keeping track of things like that, which I’m not really super good at the detail work. So I love that. And then I decided, you know, I’m going to, I’m going to start a team because I value my time. And I don’t think that a life as a real estate agent who’s going 24/7, sustainable. You know, when I really felt like, gosh, I need some time, because I was working a lot and wanted to start building my team. So I did start building my team in about 2015. And it’s been a I mean, it’s, it’s a long road, it’s a road to build a team. But I started with a couple of buyer’s agents. And I ended up moving brokerages at that time, and kind of stepped it up a little bit for myself started doing having a lot more goals, a lot more accountability for myself and those on my team. And so we’ve been through some iterations on the team, I feel like I’m in a really great spot right now. Because I have a very strong core admin group, which is super important. And now I really have a fantastic lead buyer specialist as well. And it, it allows me to have a real life. I mean, it’s, that’s really what it is, is that, you know, weekends and evenings, I’m very specific. And when I work on weekends, so like, I’ll only work until about noon on Saturdays. And I don’t work on Sundays. So I mean, it’s once in a while I’ll set an open house, and I do check my computer and things like that. And then weeknights, it’s very rare that I’ll go out during the week at night.

D.J. Paris 13:05
That That sounds like a really a really nice benefit of building the team that you want. And it clearly is working gives you better boundaries, I guess around this around this job we I was we always joke with oftentimes with people I interview who, who will say it’s been said many times on the show from many people is this is one of the least flexible jobs there is even though you’re technically an independent contractor for exactly those reasons, you know, your clients are not necessarily interested in what time you go to bed. And there’s always things things to do. So the fact that you have a team that’s been enabled you to better structure or not better, so much, but just more effectively structure. You know, your free time, I think is huge. What What lessons have you learned as building the team? I imagine?

Kati Spaniak 13:54
Oh, my gosh. It’s hard work. First of all, it’s hard work to build a team, you know, you have to have that vision. But I think I think what I’d say is probably the biggest thing that I did not do is you know, I’ve had people on the team that haven’t worked out and everybody that I’ve hired I’ve really liked, like personality wise. But what didn’t work out clearly was that our expectations were not on the same page. And our expectations were not on the same page, because I did not put them on the same page. I did not put them out in front. You know, I did not say this is what I expect you to do. And a lot of what was happening is I was giving away leads and people weren’t following up with them. Sure. And and so I really felt like I was actually literally losing money because I was paying for these leads and you know, cultivating these relationships and they weren’t closing but they their motivation was different than mine. They didn’t want to work full time. You know, they they were like, Oh yeah, they didn’t understand the significance of a lead. I it was I mean the reason why most of the people haven’t are not on my team anymore is really truly because my My expectations were not clear upfront. So I’ve got, that’s where I’ve gotten to another stage of my team where, you know, I can talk to somebody now about being on my team and say, you know, this is not easy, this isn’t, this is not easy, this is hard work, if I want my buyer’s agents to make at least $150,000, at least, like, if you’re not making $150,000, I don’t think it’s probably a benefit for them to be with me, you know, for me to have them or them to be here. And I know how people can do it, I know what they need to do in order to be able to get that kind of money. And all they have to do is do it. Some people just don’t do it. So my accountability has gotten higher, and my expectations has gotten higher. And it’s made it a better working environment, because everybody understands what those expectations truly are.

D.J. Paris 15:45
Well, I think that is so well said. And I also love something that’s very subtle that you said at the beginning of of talking about lessons you’ve learned, which was, we talked about team members that that haven’t worked out, and by the way, that is extraordinarily common, as you know, and that’s not it, probably any reflection of you, however, you made that really about a something that you feel you you didn’t do a great job of which was expectations versus saying, Ally really just maybe didn’t work as hard as they should have, which may may be the case, too. But I love that the responsibility there of you know, I probably could have been a better done a better job as a leader, which I always think is probably the sign of a really strong leader is taking that responsibility.

Kati Spaniak 16:27
It’s absolutely true. Because if we had had the conversation in the beginning, you know that I expect you to lead generate for two hours every morning. And they would say, oh, you know what, I’m not up for that. I would have said, okay, then we’re not a fit.

D.J. Paris 16:40
Right? Right. And I love the fact that you’re like I, I can get you to a minimum of 150,000. If you please follow these follow the steps in, you know, that’s a pretty simple proposition that I would think Most brokers would be pretty excited to hear,

Kati Spaniak 16:57
Well, it’s hard to actually find any agents is actually hard, you know, the people who are willing to work to put in the time to, because you know, this job really does allow for a lot of part time people, which is fine. But again, my expectations are full time and 150 is probably the minimum I’d like my agents to make, I really want them making 250. And based on the fact that we are in a higher price point, being on the North Shore, that is totally doable. And I don’t want my clients working 80 hours a week, or I don’t want my buyer agents working 80 hours a week.

D.J. Paris 17:29
Right? Because in your opinion, you don’t you feel that’s not sustainable over

Kati Spaniak 17:32
time. It’s not it’s it’s absolutely not. So So I

D.J. Paris 17:36
want to pause for a second because I think this is so important. If you are on a team, and or if you’re not on a team. But let’s just say someone who’s listening, we have 1000s of listeners who are many of which are on teams, you should ask yourself, does your team leader have goals for you for what they would like your production to be? Have they have they communicated that that is a great conversation to have with whoever is in charge of your team and to say, hey, what do we think is reasonable here? And then? And then the that’s that’s the one part then the second part is? Are you willing to do the work to get of course to get there it is that that team leader going to at least give you the guidance, and you have to do 99.9% of it. But are they going to give you that point zero 1%? Which is that here’s what to do, here’s how to do it now please go do it. And we will all come out ahead. I think that is that is really not not to be could not be overstated, and I suspect that most people have never had those kinds of conversations with their team leaders. So I think that’s

Kati Spaniak 18:37
huge. Definitely not. I really think that that needs if you shouldn’t be on a team, there’s no reason to be on a team unless you’re getting a ton of value from that team. Like, why would somebody want to be on my team, if I’m not providing them value, and early in the days, I did not provide a ton of value. You know, I we work together, they got my knowledge, I gave them some leads. But now I can absolutely say that being on on my team specifically is that there is a ton of value that’s given. And if you do, I always say in order to be successful, you have to do the activities and you have to do the education. If you’ve only got one, you’re not going to succeed. So you have to do both. And I can tell if somebody’s doing both, and if they’re doing both, they are going to succeed and we are providing so much value to our agents. That that that’s why I think that teams are the future of real estate is I don’t think there are many, you know, as we get more functioning higher, you know, sales and volume and number of transactions. It’s going to be hard for single agents who are running around dropping off listing paperwork dropping off booties to compete with somebody like me and I have a full time runner who can be it to a house and half an hour.

D.J. Paris 19:50
Right and and also I’m sorry I didn’t I didn’t mean to stop you but it’s like you’re so right and also, just even in a listing presentation. Let’s say you’re up against three other For brokers who maybe don’t have teams, and you’re saying, well, for the exact same commission, you’re gonna pay, you know, someone else who maybe doesn’t have a team behind them. I’ve got 789 people, however big your team is at that point. And here’s what they do. Here’s how each one of them is can possibly can potentially assist you. I think it’s a pretty compelling conversation.

Kati Spaniak 20:19
Yeah, absolutely.

D.J. Paris 20:22
Yeah, you know, it’s funny, I interviewed somebody from Redfin, on the show, Alex harried who’s, who’s a really wonderful producer. And he talked a lot about this. And he’s like, this is the reason why firms like Redfin, who really have this T model down to a completely different sort of science. But he goes, when I talk to my, to my buyers or sellers, he goes, I explained this, you know, you get me for everything important. I’ve got 10 other people that are going to be walking you through every other step of it. And, you know, obviously, they they’ve had a tremendous amount of success recently, with a similar sort of idea. And you you think you have a very strong opinion, you really think teams are? I mean, you’ve already said it, but you really think teams are the almost a necessity going forward?

Kati Spaniak 21:08
I absolutely do. You know, I think that, especially as the millennials get older, and they are maybe doing their second sale, they really are going to expect an extremely high amount of service. And I don’t think they expect their agent to do everything, I think they expect that there would be a team supporting them. I also think that to get into the industry within the next five to 10 years, if you’re not on a team learning, you’re kind of floundering around and you might get some friends and relatives who are going to list their houses with you. But to make it a sustaining career that year over year, you know, you’re going to make at least 100,000. It’s very hard in this industry. And I think that teams are going to offer that structure and that ability for people that do want to get into real estate and maybe who aren’t awesome at paperwork, or who aren’t awesome as cold calling, you know, but they’re awesome at showing homes. And they’re awesome at negotiating deals. So I think everybody’s going to fall into kind of where their lane is in real estate over the next five to 10 years or so.

D.J. Paris 22:08
Yeah, I think that’s right. And I know that even all the top producers I talked to will mention like, Oh, I’m not really very good at x, y or z. So I just try not I have someone on my team that can assist there because I just don’t do a good job of that. So if somebody’s out there who is thinking of maybe trying to find a team, what how would you recommend they go about looking for that?

Kati Spaniak 22:34
Um, gosh, that’s a good question. You know, you can always start with some of the ads. Because the bigger teams are going to be running ads weekly all the time. You know, the bigger the bigger teams, I would just say, make sure you know what you’re kind of getting probably on the big teams, I think they can be absolutely awesome. It’s not as much of a smaller culture, maybe, you know, it all team can be any size, it can really be three people, I think, really, it’s know what you are looking for in your team, and make it very clear. Are you looking for more free time? Are you looking for more money? Are you looking for opportunity, and then go to that team and see if that’s a good fit, you know, it’s super important that I get people especially now when I’ve grown, I want my goals and their goals to be the same. And I have gotten people who I’ve interviewed who I’ve really liked. And I’ve said you know what, I just don’t think our goals are quite the same. And it’s not that they’re bad, or I’m bad or they’re not going to make it. It’s just that make sure that cultural fit is there for you.

D.J. Paris 23:42
I think that is really, really well said and I think a great place to sort of wrap up and and you know if there are buyers or sellers, you know who are interested in working with you and your team, what’s the best way they should reach out to you.

Kati Spaniak 23:58
So you can go to our website, which is spinning ACC team.com. We have a completely searchable website there which is great. And we connect with you pretty pretty quick you sign in, we’re going to be to within at least 15 minutes. You can also call us at 847-379-8813 or you can email me directly which is just Katie K T i at spammy ACC team.com

D.J. Paris 24:25
Katie, thank you so much for your time today. I think this is really really valuable. This team conversation I think is so important. And I really appreciate your your your thoughts on it.

Kati Spaniak 24:35
Well, thank you. This is really exciting. Glad I did it.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Nick Libert wants every broker to ask themselves this question – “What is my brokerage doing for me?” Nick coaches and mentors every agent in their Exit Realty office to help them exceed their sales goals. He also believes in the importance of giving back and currently serves on multiple real estate boards. Over the years Nick has grown his office into the third most successful Exit firm in the country. In addition to all of this, Nick is also a Top 1% Chicago broker!

Nick Libert can be reached at 312.493.0920 and nick@nicklibert.com.

 

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Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:16
Hello and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the only podcast made by Chicago real estate agents for Chicago real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your host, and we have a really fantastic interview with Nick Liburd coming up in just a few. Before we do I wanted to, as I always do when I start the show, say thank you, our numbers continue to grow. We are now going to cross over 5000 subscribers here by the end of the month. So thank you in advance for passing this show along to other brokers in your office or that you meet out in the field that you think could benefit from listening to top producers share their secrets of how they built their business. Also, if you are a lender or an attorney, or have a business that promotes to realtors, you can advertise on our show and sponsor an episode. So if you’re interested in getting in front of 5000 Realtor ears for an episode, you can do that you can reach out to us at our website, keeping it real pod.com or on Facebook. And lastly, what questions would you like to have answered by top producers send us your questions in addition to the people you feel we should be talking to and interviewing for future episodes, but let us know exactly what you want to hear. Maybe it’s a specific topic. If so we can go out and find somebody who’s a specialist in that area and bring them into the show so definitely don’t be shy send us your requests on how to make the show even better and more useful for you and now on to our interview with Nick Libin.

Okay, today on the show we have Nick Liburd. Nick has dedicated his real estate career to empowering lives through real estate his passion for finding his clients. The ideal home or investment property has manifested itself in a rave reviews from his many hundreds of past clients. His depth of nearly two decades of industry experience has made him a sought after sales coach speaking in front of 1000s of real estate agents. I’ve seen him speak He’s great. He has also appeared on nearly every major TV network including multiple stints on HGTV staple House Hunters. Nick owns and operates Exit Realty is a third largest office in America and is the franchise’s number two agent here in Illinois, Nick’s learning base philosophy led to an undergraduate and law degrees from Valparaiso. He Nick is also a Certified International Property specialist and certified Luxury Home Marketing Specialist Onyx personal real estate success. sales success lands him on the Chicago Association of Realtors top producer list basically every single year, and for the past six years in a row, he’s been named a five star real estate agent by Chicago agent magazine. He’s also started a second company, Nick library development which is focused on revitalizing urban properties and beautifying neighborhoods. based in part on these ventures. CS magazine recently named a nick to their real estate visionaries list for the third year in a row. Nick is honored to be currently serving on the Illinois Realtors board of directors and is always ready to engage new connections and mutual growth opportunities. Welcome, Nick, we’re so excited to have

Nick Libert 3:33
you. Well, it’s awesome to be here. I thank you guys for the opportunity. And I think this this is a podcast idea for realtors is amazing. Just kind of bringing everybody together and getting ideas of best practices and stuff. So kudos on the idea.

D.J. Paris 3:47
Oh, well, I it’s funny. I had the idea of five years ago, and I just never did it. So finally, I decided it was it was worth trying. And I was just talking to interviewed someone else earlier this morning. And I said, you know our first episode, and we only got about 50 listens that first week or two and I thought oh, maybe people aren’t interested. And thankfully it’s grown from there, but seems to seems to be resonating. But I always say it’s not because of my sparkling shining personality. It’s of course because we feature people like you. So can you tell us a little bit about how you how you started in real estate?

Nick Libert 4:23
Absolutely. So I started real estate. First of all, this is basically all I’ve ever done as an adult. I was in high school. And my mom and my grandfather both had always said it was a good thing to buy real estate. I would not call them professional real estate investors by any means. But they did own property and from time to time they would sell it. You know, again, by no means on a huge scale but my mom had a little rental house. I remember there was a real estate agent that drove a big car put a sign in the yard. Bout three weeks later the property sold. My mom said do you want to go to the closing with me saw this lady Again, she rolls on with a huge coat, big car again gets a check. And I’m like, wow, that seems really easy. Little did I know that, you know, obviously real estate is not easy at all. And, you know, while the ceiling is there is no ceiling, there’s also very concrete floors, I say no money, if you’re not doing the right thing. So that’s, you know, I got my start in college. Having this idea that I was going to make a ton of money, it would be a great thing to do part time, and that when I was done with college, I’d be actually a TV reporter. And I wouldn’t forget about this whole real estate thing flash forward, almost 20 years later, and I’m still doing it. And it’s my passion. And I love it. And I’ve seen, you know, the great highs of a wonderful year. And I’ve seen the very low lows about no money too. So it’s been an interesting ride. And I know a lot of the listeners can appreciate that, that I’ve also seen the highs and lows.

D.J. Paris 5:50
Absolutely. I I’m a huge, huge fan of yours. And I want to give you a compliment of something I saw that you did. Recently, it was in the last maybe six months, I went to a YPN event down at Manny’s the monthly meetings that they have. And I know you’re very, very present. And I know you’ve served at YPN, which is Young Professionals Network. If anyone isn’t a member, you don’t have to be young to join, of course, but it is it’s an awesome organization. I know you do a lot with them. But next stood up. And I don’t know if you were sponsoring the meeting, or if you were just talking. But I thought you did something that I’ve I’ve never really seen anyone else do and maybe other people do it. But you were the first person I’ve seen to do it in any I’ve never seen anyone do it sends mixed up and talked about his training program for his brokers and he he got specific for a few minutes about what they do. And he said, By the way, you don’t have to be a member of our team to take advantage of our training like anyone is welcome. And I thought you know what an awesome example of giving back and I know that is really important to you how much you’ve given, you know, you serve on boards, you’re very involved in the community. But I just wanted to say like, that is really impressive that you’re you know, I don’t think most firms would, would have a lot of that same policy. And I just thought that was really a cool thing to offer.

Nick Libert 7:05
Thank you know, that’s I think education and coaching, not just training, but coaching has really been the hallmark of, of what we’re trying to build an exit strategy. And what I’ve noticed is that it seems like in the industry, there’s such a closed minded attitude about well, if you’re not at my brokerage, I’m not going to show you what I’m doing. And sometimes even within a brokerage, if you’re not sitting at my desk or on my team, I’m not going to show you what I’m doing. And I’m kind of like my attitude is the more the merrier. It’s the law of attraction, I think if you see people winning and doing well, and sharing, you want to be a part of that, if you see people closed off, and you know, this is my cheese get away from it, you’re not going to want to be a part of that either. And that formula for us has been really successful. We’ve, when I started my office, we had eight agents, and really, quite frankly, not a lot to offer those agents that were there. And every year now, you know, we have over 170 agents and our big thing is, is you know, I just want to share what I know and have a top agent share what they know. And for me myself, I’m a student of the industry. I love listening to other people as much as I love sharing what I know, think I know and don’t know. And it’s just again, that formula has really been successful for us. So you know if there’s anybody out there that has no interest in joining exit doesn’t like the logo or the colors or doesn’t like me feel free to stop come to our stuff, we’re not going to bother you to join and, you know, harass you to you know, be a drink our Kool Aid, so to speak, that’s not the way we work. I want everybody in the industry industry to do well. And you know, we all lift each other up and what, regardless of whether we’re on the same boat or, you know, across the sea from each other.

D.J. Paris 8:36
Yes, and that really seems to be a common theme. I mean, we really only interview the top 1% of producers. In all of Chicagoland for this podcast, maybe one day we’ll run out but so far, that’s, you know, not to, in any way diminish Nick’s individuality because I think this is a hallmark of, of Nick of who you are. But it’s very common sort of theme with top producers, they tend to be extraordinarily generous with their time. And so anyway, I just thought that was really cool. For you to stand up at the meeting and say anyone is welcome. And that is not a common occurrence, you know, a common message maybe by other firms. And and you’re right, there also aren’t any real secrets anymore, either. I mean, it’s, it’s, you know, it all is welcome. So I think that’s really cool. But I do want to talk about, you know, when you got started or rather not so much when you got started. But, you know, when it wasn’t always in particular maybe at the beginning when the market or rather when you were struggling just like any new broker. Can you talk about, you know, that struggle and how you maybe overcame that?

Nick Libert 9:40
Absolutely as a new broker and it was interesting. I started out with Coldwell Banker, again nearly 20 years ago in Northwest Indiana and I had a wonderful managing broker, and just a really cool fun office environment. I still saw my party’s office parties. I want to be like hers. She’s now passed away but um Just an amazing first managing broker. When I started though, I instantly got a kind of almost a sense of panic and dread that I’m like, Oh, I just dropped $800 on this course and signing up. And now obviously, it’s well over $1,200 to sign up and join the board. But I noticed there were some some ladies and gentlemen that had been there a couple of months, and they had, you know, an office that they had a space and a phone and a desk. And I’m like, okay, that doesn’t seem to be like going on at this desk. And it was very obvious that these were people sitting and waiting for the company to do something for them. Sure. And I just had a, you know, again, the sense of dread them like, Oh, I’m gonna make something happen, because it doesn’t look like these people that have been here a couple months, have anything going on from them through the company. And it that’s when I first became, you know, a very independent independent contractor was, as I figured out, wow, no brand, I don’t care who what company it is, you know, the REMAX balloon, Keller Williams exit, no company is gonna make you your money, you’re gonna have to go out there and get it for yourself. And particularly in a day and age where Zillow, Trulia and realtor.com, have the vast majority of traffic, you’re not going to build a website today to beat them. And if you do, God bless you, but I haven’t figured it out, I tried it, it didn’t work. So you know, you gotta go out there and network with the people, you’ve got to go out there and either build relationships that are stronger than these big websites, or play with the big websites and pay them you know, for leads either way, your company, your brand is not going to do enough for you, except maybe give you some dessert, your main course is always going to be what you go out there and catch for yourself. And that sitting in that room filled with people that had been there three to six months and had not had a deal and looked very hungry. And then looking at the top producers and realizing some of them weren’t even really in the office. And it didn’t look like they sat floor time. And I would see these piles of mail going out. So direct mail, and I’d see them at parties and networking events. But again, not sitting at their desk waiting for lead from the company that struck me and that was one of the best things that I could do was to sit there and watch and observe and realize that the company wasn’t gonna do anything for these guys. It was all up to the agents. And again, I was at a great office. I love my office, it was super fun. But the office wasn’t putting food on people’s tables, the agents individual actions were.

D.J. Paris 12:17
Yeah, you’re you’re so right. And anyone who’s who’s had, you know, some amount of time in the industry figures that out, of course, but I you know, I suspect you share this similar grievance to mine, or is that there are a lot of firms that the way they market themselves is like, hey, we do it all for you. And, you know, and then of course, the reality tends to be much different once once you’re on board. So I think you’re right. And that actually leads into a really great question, which or maybe it’s not a great question, but I think it’s an interesting question, which is, so you know, what should somebody look for in a broker, a brokerage firm, you know, what are some of the things you think brokerage firms can do for their brokers?

Nick Libert 12:56
Well, first of all, you’ve got to look at, you know, what that company is going to do with coaching and training. And, you know, I sit there and I go, Okay, guys, first and foremost, a lot of agents run for the best commission split. And you know, here’s the issue 100% of nothing is nothing. And you’ve got to look for a company that is going to provide you with coaching and training. And when I say training, I don’t mean here’s how to fill out a contract. I mean, here’s how to make your phone ring, you’re opening up a business, when you get your real estate license. And as you continue to build your career, your business is going to expand and what is that company’s message? Are they showing new agent how to generate leads? Are they showing experienced agent how to build their business and build a team? Beyond that, then the next thing I tell the people to look for, okay, what’s the training? What’s the technology? What is going to help me in my business, you know, we give out not only a website, but a CRM product and a dot loop account, everything that you’re going to need to do to get that technology out there to the consumer, and work with consumers? What is the message? What’s the marketing of the company? You know, at our at our office, one of our last hires, was one of our best hires, and that was a graphic designer, is that, you know, we had marketing templates and things like that. But we really want to customize the message to the consumer for each individual agent. What’s in that? What’s in that package? And then finally, the last question should be, and again, it’s normally what the first question is that if the agents valid, what’s the commission split? And again, I’m not going to quote our commission splits, you can look up online and follow me on social media to find out what excess commission splits are. That’s not what this you know, podcast is about. But that’s the last conversation you should have. And then at that point, absolutely figure out what’s the best overall deal, but agents jump for odd reasons. And I think the first thing that you should be thinking about is what can this company do to help build my business if you’re just jumping for a commission split that says to me, that you may not have the right business mindset and you may not be generating enough leads because if you’re looking to save money versus build more business, that’s a concern for me.

D.J. Paris 14:57
Absolutely, I couldn’t I couldn’t agree More I think that and then also, I think if firms are promising leads, which, you know, I don’t don’t hear as much anymore. And I’m grateful for that, because I think there was a lot of that going on over, over a long period of time. And I think finally firms have have started telling, you know, telling the truth and more about, about their ability to generate leads for brokers. And, and, you know, but I think Nick’s absolutely right is, is if you know, if you’re going to join a firm that question should be, how are you gonna help me grow my business? What training? What coaching? Or what support? What marketing? Are you going to help me do to build my business? And I think you said that so well, it’s how are you going to help me grow my business? Right. But that which is great, so well said. And, you know, I want to step back just a little bit and ask you about because I know you had some some experience in the past and had some interesting thoughts about when back when you represented asset management companies that were dealing with foreclosures? Can you talk a little bit more about about that experience?

Nick Libert 15:59
Oh, yeah, this was interesting. So you know, when I got in the market, it was a what we call a balanced market, there were buyers, there were sellers, it wasn’t a crazy height, then we get into the, you know, rising up to the bubble, when it seemed like everybody had the real estate license, you could, you know, read into a mirror and get a loan or 10, loans, you know, 0% down, and it was crazy. When the market crashed to be completely frank, I crashed right along with it. I was not prepared. I was in my late 20s, I’d had a real fun time, made a six figure income every year as a real estate agent in my 20s. And really did not fundamentally truly understand the business. And when the market crashed, I’m like, Oh, my gosh, I just turned 30. I just left Keller Williams for Exit Realty, to kind of get into a different business model. And I’m going, Oh, where am I? And I was lucky enough to trip on to a contact for an asset management company. And I knew that, you know, people were losing their homes, people couldn’t, the economy was bad. It wasn’t just real estate. And so I contacted this asset management company, and I said, Hey, I will take anything, do you have any listings? And they’re like, well, give me give us your experience. And luckily, because at the beginning of my career, I’ve represented a lot of investors, I dealt with REO, I just had dealt with REO as a listing agent, they gave me a couple of really interesting properties. I mean, yes, you know, tarps over the roof, people shooting up drugs inside. I mean, I got run out of houses by drug dealers, drug users, it just, it was incredible, some of the stuff we saw, but I sold them, and I sold every single one of them. And then all of a sudden, they started giving me nicer stuff. And that really taught me the value of a hustle. It wasn’t about just driving up at a nice car anymore, because quite frankly, I couldn’t afford my payments on my BMW anymore. I was driving up or whatever car would get me there and to get me safely in and out of that, that property and get the property photos and inspections and things sold. And at really re taught me work ethic that I think I’ve lost in the good years, the golden years, so to speak up 2005 to 2007 Eight. I think a lot of us just got bad attitudes and bad work ethic. And that snapped me right back into waking up at six getting my workout in and going out when there was light out to do to business. Obviously. Now, that’s not the way we you know, we’re not having to do that as much anymore as far as going out and taking pictures and sealing up properties all day. But those of us that are hustling and you know you’ve had some amazing talent on here already, Kate Dolan and I worked together before she was at exit for a number of years, she is just a hustler. And Kate, you know, Kate Nolan with all the money and all the numbers that she’s doing now still is getting up and getting out there early in the morning and getting things done. And you know, now what we’re doing is it’s pounding the pavement, online on the phone, lead generation for two to three hours a day in the morning, and not none of this, like Oh, I’m an independent contractor and I my own boss, so I’ll wake up at 11 or noon. Those Those are the people that probably a are not going to tune into this podcast B are going to execute anything in the in the podcast that we tell them and see what they get in the business. And it’s just sad. You know, if you look at the statistics that are lucky enough to be on the board a car and IR at the same time. And it’s interesting, because we see so many statistics between those two boards, and it’s like, yeah, there’s people making a million dollars. We have, you know, a couple people in our office making 500,000 and up. We also have some people in every brand in this industry that are truly not making a living wage. And a lot of it unfortunately not because it’s a bad business to be in it is because they are not running their business.

D.J. Paris 19:39
Yeah. 100% I don’t know if I’ve shared this story I think I have in a previous episode, but it’s worth repeating because I think you’ll get a kick out of it. I interviewed Josh Weinberg a little bit ago and he’s partnered Tommy Troy who I’m sure you know both those guys. Tommy wasn’t on the call. But I was asking Josh about his goals. I said what are your goals because Josh is a very Goal sort of centric and value centric kind of person. And I, and I wasn’t necessarily interested in what his production goals were, but I sort of probably phrased the question incorrectly. Because he said, Well, we don’t really have those kinds of goals. He said, I’ll tell you what Tommy’s goal is, though. And you know, you know, there are top producers, they’ve been in the business for a while they are not new to the business. And he goes, Tommy’s goal is to meet 365 new people in the next year. And he goes, because we know that if he does that, we will hit every other goal that we have set, you know, so it’s, it really points to the fundamentals of growing your business, treating it like a business, how do I get in front of more people, tell them my story, convince them that I’m the guy to choose when they have a real estate transaction? And I just thought that was what a great message for somebody who’s already doing so well to say, oh, yeah, we just, you know, it’s like, oh, yeah, we do push ups, just like anyone else who’s trying to get fit, you know?

Nick Libert 20:49
Yeah, there’s nothing, there’s nothing different about a top producer. You know, what I found in my office is we always talk, I’ve got a LinkedIn blog, and I say, there’s three different funnels of business. And, you know, there’s my top producers work in one, two, or all three of them, but they’re not doing anything really that different. They’re just consistent with the execution. And that’s, you know, I love Tommy and Josh and, and I think that, you know, their numbers are friggin amazing, and it’s discipline these guys. Yes, we all take vacations, but these guys are machines, Kate’s a machine, I’d like to think of myself as a machine, maybe squeaking sometimes. But that’s, that’s the that’s it. I was just talking with somebody this morning. And they’re like, you know, oh, my gosh, are, you know, you’re always working. I’m like, you know, what, we’re not always working technology allows us to work for some from some pretty cool places. But we’re consistent. And we, you know, we’re on message we’re on point. And we do a good job for our clients. And that’s none of these people that you’ve interviewed or brought up or that I would interview or bring up. I have bad work ethics, they also just don’t have bad ethics in general. You know, there’s some people that have made these top 10 lists, and these top producer lists a timer to, and then they disappear. And the reason why they disappear is yeah, they figured out a way to make their phone ring, but would you ever call them again, you know, that’s the other thing is that as in this wonderful age of technology, it’s still about client service. Because if you do a terrible job, word will get out quicker than ever.

D.J. Paris 22:11
Yeah, 100%. Agree. Speaking of you know, you talked about discipline and you know, making hay while the sun shines. attitude. And obviously, you have this, you live that as well as you know, the other the other people we’ve been fortunate enough to speak to talk a little in really you You are such a, you know, such a well known trainer, tell it can you talk a little bit more about what else you think is really critical for a broker who either is new to the business wants to, you know, really dive in or just wants to take their real estate practice to the next level?

Nick Libert 22:46
Absolutely, you know, I’ll give you a couple of things real quick. First of all, time block calendar, it is so hard as an agent to, you know, figure out what you want to do when and how to do it. And to kind of tune out the noise. So a time block calendar that allows you to do that. Secondly, I use something called a greatness tracker to track that two to three hours a day of lead generation, you have got to get in. I can sit at a desk for two hours. But did I really lead generate for two hours, you got to track that? The third thing is a lead tracker. Okay, I’ve done a good job on my greatness tracker, my lead tracker, what am I actually bringing in a lot of the agents when I sit down and I coach with them from all brands, they actually do bring in they create a lot of leads, but they don’t convert the leads. So they got an issue in their lead funnels, then where we kind of drop off at that point, most people are talking about production. Oh, I did 12 million and 20 million blah, blah, blah, what do you actually take home, I have seen very few agents that pop out of a profit and loss statement to me, you know, they really kind of stopped. They don’t even source their deals, a lot of them so they don’t know where their deals are coming from. They just do a lot of deals. They can’t articulate to me 70% came from referral. 10% came from farming and 20% came from realtor.com and Zillow. I don’t hear those numbers. And you definitely don’t hear I’m spending XYZ to get or not. That is absolutely you know, those are the really big things. And then the final thing I would say to agents to encourage them is once you’re done at the end of the day, you take home your pay, figure out a way to turn around and invest in real estate. You know, I’ve got my little development company on the side. You know, I’ve learned a lot that was kind of a learning curve the same way that my real estate brokerage business has been. But you know, if you’re not turning around and actively investing in real estate, how are you promoting this is such an amazing thing to the consumer. Real estate agents have some of the worst savings rates they have some of the worst financial practices I’ve seen because quite frankly, there is no retirement plan. There is no you know, safety net. There’s no health insurance. It’s like wow, we have got some right at the top of our our financial day. We’re not having taxes withheld. We don’t get insurance. And we don’t have a retirement account. There’s some really big roadblocks that as an industry, which is why I’m trying to promote, you know, especially through these educational seminars and things like that, you’ll hear me right at the end, go. Okay, guys, this is all cool. Now you know how to make your phone ring more? Once you make your phone ring, could you please put something in your bank account? Because the saddest thing I’ve ever seen as an agent that makes, you know, a six figure income and has nothing in their bank account? And quite frankly, I’ve been there, I’ve been that agent. And that is is not a cool place to be. And there’s, there’s no reason for it.

D.J. Paris 25:27
Yeah, you know, it is. It’s so so true. We, I know, I am shocked at how many brokers who are making a substantial living doing real estate. And when I say hey, have you ever talked to your accountant about potentially incorporating and obviously, I can’t give tax advice. But you know, you may want to look at either developing an S corp or, or a C Corp and just explore those opportunities, because it might actually save you, you know, and they just go Yeah, I should do that I never thought to do and I’m like, how have you made to think to do that. And even whether it’s a good idea or not, your accountant will give you some advice there. But I’m, I am shocked about the financial management part not shocked. I mean, I understand it’s, it’s, you have to do it on your own. And it’s a lot of work. But oh my gosh, you can you can save yourself a tremendous headache down the road, if you start to look into different options.

Nick Libert 26:18
You really absolutely can. And I think that that’s so interesting that, you know, a lot of us as brokerages are not sending that message out. We just don’t. And I’m trying to do that in my office. I’m trying to switch to that mindset to say, hey, you know, you’re an entrepreneur, put some money away in the bank. And I think that hopefully the dialogue changes as an industry.

D.J. Paris 26:38
Yeah. And at least know your deductions. And maybe at the end of the year, like you had mentioned, create a p&l statement, but but also Yeah, what what were your expenses? How much does it cost you per deal? What are you actually spending? And in addition to Hey, where did your revenue come from? Was it referral? Was it you know, leads you purchased? Was it through your sphere of influence, you know, but knowing how much do I spend per deal is really, really important. Because like you swats running a business and then obviously, you know, not all of us are good at every aspect of running a business. But boy, those are really important skills to develop. And I appreciate you bringing that up. Can you talk a little bit more about your investment business? I’d like to hear more about that.

Nick Libert 27:20
Yeah, absolutely. So you know, obviously, my primary business is is x at our office, and we love it. And I’m excited by it. I did start to see over the last couple of years, some really great investing opportunities. I had, you know, as I said before, taking kind of a really big financial hit when the market crashed. But through the exit residual bonus program, I started saving up and I’m like, hey, I want to invest in some real estate, not just my primary residence, but some more and I saved up enough of our residual bonuses to turn around and start my second company, which is my development company. What I’m focused on right now is taking some bungalows on the northwest side and some really cool neighborhoods like Portage Park and basically modernizing them keeping the best of the structure. So the vintage details, the you know, the beautiful brickwork the facade on the outside, and turning around and making the second floor truly modern living. So that means a beautiful master suite with a huge master bath and walk in closet. And two extra large special bedrooms that you just can’t get on a regular bungalow with, you know, those smaller dormer windows and things like that, that just doesn’t work the same. So we’re trying to bring some modernization and yet keep that beautiful bungalow historic bungalow that we love so much in Chicago at the same time, it’s been really successful. contractors have been my main issue, you’ll, you’ll a lot of you guys that are investors in the audience, listening will also appreciate that contractors have been the worst of my experience with that, but I found a couple good ones. And we have actually our investors club in our office, we put together an investor’s club because so many of us as agents have tried to dabble in our own and I’m like, Hey, guys, you know, everybody’s kind of making their own mistakes. Let’s learn as a group. And so our investors club kind of puts people together and collaborates, we’ve got a coach, that helps us out and teaches a little bit more about the contracting side. And it’s really cool. And again, it’s another aspect of the business. I don’t ever want to branch out into 20 different businesses, but I think there’s some basic commonalities, obviously, between, you know, a real estate agent, and a real estate agent that may pick up some assets for themselves once in a while, whether it’s buy and hold a property to flip.

D.J. Paris 29:30
Yeah, our owner, Nick, also named Nick, is he’s an active investor and he is always shocked at that everyone who has a broker license is not out purchasing properties, or at least you know, what investment properties like I am, you know, absolutely what a huge opportunity to learn that business, whether it becomes a full time part of your business or just something ancillary. But, Nick, we have had this has been great, great conversation, if if so, I want to give you two different plots. So one of which, of course, is if there’s any buyers and sellers or investors or even renters out there that you know, that are looking for to be represented. What’s the best way they can get in touch with you?

Nick Libert 30:11
Oh, it’s very easy. Actually, we are living in a text based world. So if you just text my last name, l i, B as in boy, e RT. So that’s li B, E, RT 285377. That’s 85377, you will get my digital business card online. Every exit agent has one of those that you actually get it on your cell phone. So just text me second way super easy social media connect with me on social media. I’m on almost every platform, LinkedIn, I’ve got a blog, Instagram, I got some fun pictures, everywhere. Whatever you want to do to connect. I’m at Nick library everywhere. So and I see K li ve as in boy, er T on all social media.

D.J. Paris 30:56
And also if you’re a broker out there wanting to explore exits, what they offer or some of the trading opportunities to the same way should they reach out to you

Nick Libert 31:04
reach out to me directly on again on social media or just download my business card and we will talk to you and see if we can do something for your business. If it’s not a good fit. No worries, but we got some really cool stuff going on. And I’d love to talk. I always love talking real estate with agents.

D.J. Paris 31:19
Awesome. Well, Nick, thank you so much. i You are an incredibly busy person. You serve on a million boards, you run an office, you have an investment business on the side, and we really appreciate your time. And this was this was one of the more fun conversations I’ve had doing the show. So thank you so much.

Nick Libert 31:35
Hey, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. You have a good day.

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Top 1% producer Amy Diamond of the Deal With Diamond Group understands the importance of specialization. Her team focuses in the north and northwest suburbs and are real estate experts in those areas. In this episode Amy discusses branding, teamwork, and how she built a Facebook group (not about real estate) to over 1800 members. Oh, and she’s in the top 1% of brokers in Chicago and also at NRT – the largest real estate firm in the United States!

Amy Diamond can be reached at 847.867.6997 and amy@dealwithdiamond.com.

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Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:16
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the only podcast made by real estate agents for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your host through the show. And first of all, thanks in advanced everyone for listening to this episode and also sharing it with a friend. It’s the best way you can support our efforts here is to let everybody know who’s a broker about this show who’s interested in learning how to increase their production, right. So that is the goal of our shows, we interviewed top producers, almost everyone I think everyone we’ve ever interviewed has been in the top 1% in Chicago of producers. And that’s a big deal because there’s over 35,000 realtors in the Chicagoland area. So we interview only the very top producers and ask them what they do to have done and continue to do to be successful. And in that same vein, I’d like to ask a favor of you, in addition to passing our podcast along, to let us know how we can make the show better. So I have this isn’t so much a confession. But a good thing to know about me is I am technically a broker, but I’m really not right. So I work at a firm I do marketing, I do recruiting, but I’m not out there working with clients. So what I always am interested in doing is making sure that we continue to improve these conversations we have and give you information that can be directly applicable to helping you continue to further your business. So what’s the best way you can do that? Send us your ideas. For example, somebody sent us an idea recently that said, Hey, I would love to for you to interview somebody who’s an expert at CMAs and writing and you know, doing comps and some tricks of the trade. So like, wow, that’s a really good idea. Another suggestion we had just yesterday was, hey, can you bring on a commercial broker and talk about how maybe how residential brokers can start getting involved in commercial? These are all awesome ideas, but we need them from you because you’re the audience. You’re the reason we do this. So the best way to send us your suggestions, or even just questions you want us to ask top producers is to shoot that over or you can email us you can email our producer Jen, which is Jen at keeping it real pod.com You can find us on Facebook keeping it real pod and also our website, you can send it through our contact form, keeping it real pod.com Also let us know who we should be interviewing. We were booked up for the next few months but we are always taking requests and always interested in who you think we should be talking to. So I sit behind the desk all day. I am not out there in the field with you guys. So let us know how we can make the show even better and our audience listenership keeps going up. So I hope we’re doing something right sounds like feels like we are but again I work for you so you let us know what we can do to keep improving the podcast and today we have today’s no exception. We have an amazing interview with Amy Diamond. So that’s coming up in just a few.

Today on the show, we have Amy Diamond Amy is a listing expert and Team Leader Amy Diamond is a licensed real estate broker for state of Illinois, focusing on the northwest and North suburbs of Chicago. After working many years within corporate settings, Amy realized that she would put her passion for real estate to work for her. By the time she was 28 years old. She owned four homes, one primary residence and one secondary residence and two investment properties. Amy chose real estate so she could assist individuals through the buying, selling relocating and investing process of properties. Amy earned her degree in Business Marketing from Indiana University during her first position out of school Amy spent 10 years negotiating multimillion dollar staffing deals with large corporations such as Granger Chase, Bank of America and smaller local firms. Her strong negotiation skills, combined with her ability to build lasting relationships has assisted her with her real estate success. welcome Amy. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks for having me. Well, I want to get right to it because I’m also very by the way Amy in your office is in is it in Arlington Heights? Yes,

Amy Diamond 4:26
our office is in earlington Heights.

D.J. Paris 4:29
That’s where we’re just saying that’s where I was born. But I sadly know very little, very little about it, but it’s supposed to be a lovely suburb. So yeah. Tell us how you got started in real estate. I know you started in staffing. So how did you make that transition?

Amy Diamond 4:44
Yeah, so right out of school. I went into the temporary staffing arena, but I sold the temporary staffing to corporations and I made pretty good money in my 20s and most People when you make good money, they do stupid things with it. And however I started invest in real estate, I just kind of got the bug and started to purchase properties with my bonus monies I was making while the staffing doing temporary staffing. So that’s how I got into the business, initially as an investor. Shortly thereafter, I figured out that this was more of a passion of mine. So I got my real estate license and I dabbled in it part time, met my husband, and then was able to transition into more of a full time, real estate career after that. So that was all in my 20s. And and here I am now. So it’s been very, very fun through the process.

D.J. Paris 5:49
Yeah, and tell us a little bit about what year did you What year did you start your real?

Amy Diamond 5:54
So I got into the business in about 2005. As an investor, I went full time in real estate in 2008. So wow, that that is a tough Yeah, I say that all the time. Because I never really knew what a good market was. And people always told me if you can make it through 2008 and 2009, and you can make it through anything. So I had a what I considered a good year in 2008, according to my broker at that time, and but I didn’t know what good or bad or ugly look like so I figured if I’m able to survive at this time, I should do well when when things are booming. And that’s just really what what happened. So

D.J. Paris 6:44
well congratulations on on your success. And let’s I’m gonna talk also about about your brand because I think, you know, in particular, you have a very, very strong presence with your brand, can you tell us a little bit about what that brand is and how you develop? Sure.

Amy Diamond 7:02
So I first always have to take credit that diamond is not my maiden name, so we have to give credit where credit is due and that I inherited it into a really great name. So I have to acknowledge that so I knew that AMI diamond you know the name itself, I could do something with so started playing with that came up Coldwell Banker has an phenomenal marketing department here and helped me with a lot of ideas and just came up with a deal with diamond as a brand slash logo. As we’ve evolved, and I’ve built my team, I realized that I am no longer just AMI diamond, it is a now it is a team group effort. So we’ve since recently added the group underneath the deal with diamond logo. But branding itself is pretty important especially on a local basis because there’s just so many brokers out here and and having the brand and having the logo out there consistently, I think is generated us some great opportunities here, here locally. So we just keep honing in on that we keep honing in on any place that we can advertise our space and advertise our logo in different spaces locally here. So

D.J. Paris 8:23
in I realized I just forgot to make a really important point about your success and I think this should not be missed, which is you are in the top 1% of not only Coldwell Banker, but also NRT which is like the parent company, which includes Coldwell Banker, let’s just gonna go through a few of the firms they own because we all know these firms, Sotheby’s zip Realty and Barbara Corcoran Group. So this is a lot of real a lot of realtors, and there’s others too. Those are just the biggest names associated with nRT. So you aren’t just successful locally or in in the northwest suburbs, but you know it with respect to all of nRT, which is a huge, a huge deal. So yeah,

Amy Diamond 9:08
well thank you. Yeah, it’s been an that’s something that we’ve been striving towards that’s been part of our goals is to get into that top 1%. So we definitely hit that this past few years. And we’re looking to keep that keep that moving forward.

D.J. Paris 9:22
Back Back to branding, because I love the brand I love the tagline and deal with diamond is by the way her website is deal with diamond.com, which is which is a great site and what I really liked about your website, one of the things I really liked about it was it really goes through your philosophy, what you guys offer what you specialize in, and I think that is particularly unique. There’s, you know, not not uncommon for a broker to have a website but to have one that goes into, you know, the level of of specific specificity, that specificity that you guys have, I think is really important and I let’s Talk a little bit about your team because that is a newer to your career, and you have a pretty robust team. So can you tell us a little bit about how you started to build that team? Why you built a team?

Amy Diamond 10:12
Sure. So we’re gonna just talk about the branding of the team too. So my signs out there in the marketplace, oh, he said, Amy Diamond. And we had all these writers and I would put a deal with diamond writer underneath it. And then my team, let’s say was Beth, she’d have her writer underneath it and just looked awkward. And so what we did is we rebranded the science to it just says deal with diamond group. And so what we’re starting to say that we’re all one, you get Amy Diamond, you get Beth, you get Kathy, you get anyone on our team when you when you partner with us. And that’s the team philosophy that we have, for our, our group, and so on. When I started out in this business, I was always told by people that were my mentors, like your first hire will always be an assistant. So that’s how I’ve naturally grew my team, I hired my first assistant part time that grew into full time. From there, I hired a buyer agent from then I hired a second buyer agent, then a third buyer agent, then I had a part time listing marketing coordinator. Now I have a full time listing marketing coordinator. So it’s slowly organically been growing, as our needs have grown, and it has how I’ve been able to allow my team to survive, I’d never wanted to add somebody on my team, where I didn’t, wasn’t able to give them opportunity. So as as I’ve grown and our businesses grown, I’ve been able to add people and we’re gonna, we’re gonna continue to do that. Moving forward, and that’s how we specialize in different areas is that, you know, I have somebody who just handles the listing piece of our business meeting photographers, and putting lock boxes on handling all the marketing pieces along with it. I have somebody who specializes in once we go under contract, who happens to be my sister in law, Kathy diamond, and she does everything that has to do with the closing. And then I have our buyer agents, but our buyer agents, you know, they know the market there, they’re Arlington Heights, Palatine residents as well. So, you know, we’re, that’s how we get our niche and how we how we brand ourselves here locally?

D.J. Paris 12:20
Well, I think too, and I think that’s very well said, I think it’s, you know, if I think about it from a seller’s perspective, in particular, when you’re doing your, your listing presentation, if it is someone where you do a listing presentation for, and they say, Well, why are you worth, you know, the commission that you’ll be charging, and you can say, well, you get not just me, but here’s my entire team, here’s what each member does, here’s, you know, and I think that is an incredibly powerful conversation and message to have I imagine that you know, is very impressive to to your club. That’s exactly

Amy Diamond 12:54
what we talk about. I never want someone to feel like they’re not going to get me diamond though. So you have to tread lightly with that conversation, especially with the seller. So I really want to make sure they know that I am their their main point of contact. However, everyone on the team is another mirror image of Amy Diamond. And isn’t it another integral part of making sure that there’s success in this transaction, whether it’s bringing in a buyer, who doesn’t have a realtor that we’re going to show the house, whether it’s meeting a photographer to take those best pictures, whether it’s working with the attorneys who needs paperwork, moved back and forth, once we have a contract, we’re all here to make sure that this goes to the finish line. However, you know, there will be one point of contact. So it’s just setting that setting that up from the beginning. And we’ve we’ve won many opportunities because of the robust systems that we have in place. And it’s been, it’s been great.

D.J. Paris 13:49
Yeah, and I also I just want to focus a little, I think that’s so true. And I want to focus a little bit. And I know this isn’t always easy for people who have teams, team leaders to verbalize but, you know, I know it’s really important. And you just mentioned that, that each one of your brokers or your team members is a, you know, a mirror reflection, a mirror image of you. Can you talk a little bit more about how you do that and how that gets trained?

Amy Diamond 14:20
Well, I think it goes back to the brand, right? So you have your you have your brand deal with diamond group. And I constantly be thinking what does that mean? And what am I representing out there? And so when I hire train and mentor people, I’m looking for people who would represent Amy Diamond in front of other clients because I can’t be everywhere at once. So I’m always I’m always recruiting for that. I’m always looking for that. People, you know, who will communicate correctly to our clients and our vendors who we work with. And through that. It’s just constant training. I mean these anyone that joined to deal with them in group gets a lot of one on one time with me. And it’s, it’s because I want to make sure that one they feel confident and two that they’re doing things the way that I that that I’ve shown success, there’s no reason to reinvent the reinvent the wheel, I, the wheels already been invented, I’ve learned it from other people, I’m still learning, all I’m doing is handing that down and that knowledge and that wherewithal to the to my team so that they can be successful, the team can’t be successful unless they are successful. So there’s a lot of one on one. And I think that what I find is that a lot of agents, whether they’ve been in this business a year, or five years, or just right out of school, I find that people feel like they’re a small fish in a big pond. And they’re like, I don’t even know what to do. I’m told to go to all these trainings, and I need to learn this and learn that. But I’m not getting like real life experiences on what to do in real estate. So I partner with a lot of those people I know not, they’re not might not come on my team, but I mentor a lot of people. And I think that just getting that sense of like, how do they work? How do they handle their clients, then sometimes I hired these people to come on my team. So um, I don’t know, I’m kind of segwaying into another whole piece of what I do, which is the mentorship part. But um, I think that I really spend a lot of time with my team, so that they are another image of what the brand is, that’s the best way to do it.

D.J. Paris 16:34
Yeah, no, I absolutely. Your and your website reflects some of that as well. For example, we talked about making sure everyone is on the same page. You know, your website is very clear on here’s our philosophy, here’s what we do for our clients. Here’s why people hire us. And, and it may seem very obvious to a lot of brokers that well, of course, everyone on your team should should know that. I’ll bet you there are many teams where it is not that clear. And and the roles probably aren’t as well defined either. So I think I think you’ve you’ve obviously you’ve been very precise with that. And I also completed completely different, I just realized a point I wanted to make. And then I want to ask you about another topic, which is when you first got into business, because oftentimes, where I’ll meet with a broker who’s just got their license, and they have no previous real estate experience, obviously, you had investing experience. So I’m sure that helped. But at the same time, at some point, you had your very first client, and I thought, boy, you know, my biggest fear, if I was a new broker would be to have that conversation to say you are my very first client. Certainly, that would be hard for me to want to to tell that client but I if I if I had had your experience, and I think every new broker can think back to their previous experience to leverage some of the skills they learned is you could say, hey, at the end of the day, one of the most important things I do for us negotiate I have been negotiating for 10 years with enterprise level clients and big corporations. I know negotiation. So I was just realizing how powerful of a conversation that would have been for for a new broker, even on your first deal to be able to tell that story, even though it’s not necessarily real estate related.

Amy Diamond 18:20
Yes, no, I that’s definitely something that I you know, when you there’s one of these questions like what distinguishes you from other brokers, it’s my negotiations, and I, I love that piece. I have people who are like, Oh, I can’t stay on the negotiation piece. I’m like, No, I thrive on that. I don’t know what it is. And maybe it’s just because I’ve been in sales, my whole career, my whole life since college, I enjoy the negotiating. And if you can’t back, back, you’re I mean, people are gonna feel that they’re gonna hear the passion, about you know, that you’re going to stand by them and that you’re going to stand by their numbers and stand by their wishes, then all you’re going to do if you can’t explain that during a sales meeting, or during a market analysis with a client, then why would they pick you? I mean, if you don’t, if you are not going to be their advocate, then who is so I think in the advocate only comes in when you’re negotiating, I mean, really, and getting them their top dollar. So I do love that.

D.J. Paris 19:24
Yeah, anyone can put a home on the MLS right for sale. But so I it’s very well set up. Let’s talk about you know, I know, we’ve talked about this before we started, which was about how to be a leader in your market. I know you have very specific thoughts about this. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Amy Diamond 19:42
Yeah, sure. I think that when you first get into this business, you kind of look at your territory as open ended and anyone can you can actually take a listing and take a buyer out anywhere if you’re willing to travel. And I think that that piece is extremely overwhelming for anybody getting into the business. And what I learned from my previous career in the temporary staffing world is that you really have to take this big pie and kind of dissect it into areas that you’re like, Okay, I, I want to start here and I’ll grow it from this area. So what I did is I really just said, Okay, I, I live in Palo Alto, I started my career in the city, I lived right by Wrigley Field, and I was selling the city market when I first got into real estate, but I moved out to the northwest suburbs, and I said, Okay, now I’m transitioning over to this wider network. And how am I going to how am I going to hone in so I took the talents that I’m most familiar with where I grew up, and that’s Arlington Heights in Palatine, I grew up in Arlington Heights, and I live in Palatine. So I said, Okay, how do I target these two areas? Well, you have to know as much as you possibly can in those two areas to market to it, and to talk the talk. So I started going to broker tours and, you know, learning what, what a split level was compared to a raise ranch compared to a colonial like, what is all this terminology because in the city, it’s a condo, it’s a three flat, I mean, there’s a whole different verbiage and learning my market, and then from there saying, okay, every time I go out and meet with somebody, or I’m in a social setting, I have to weave in real estate into every conversation. And it’s very natural for me to be able to do that. Some people feel like awkward, but for some reason, I just say, Oh, where do you live? Oh, I live over here. Oh, I’m in real estate. I know that street, whether I knew it or not like you have to be able to weave in real estate. And then the open conversation about your realtor comes up. I took this big market and totally fine tuned it to Arlington Heights and palatine and said, Look, these are the two areas I’m gonna focus on. And from there, we’ve branded on the Mariano grocery carts. From there, I’m giving back to the community and doing food pantry donations, giving away pumpkins, doing Tree Lighting ceremonies, you name it, we’re in this market now. And I’m trying to make a name. I started a Palatine moms club, Facebook page with 10 of my closest friends. Then I added clients now it’s 1800. Members. I can’t tell you the amount of bandwidth that’s given me. I’ve gotten this year alone six deals just from that. And I was sitting at at my kids swim meet the other day. And this mom and I are talking and somehow I brought up the Pelton palms club page. And she’s like, are you at Diamond? I’m like, yeah, she’s like, Oh, you’re the admin? Oh, you know, so and so. So and so I’m like, No, I don’t know any of those people. She’s like, Oh, they were just talking about you the other day, because they were talking about the page. And I’m like, Oh, I you know, it’s amazing the power of social media. And I don’t know, I’m kind of talking about a bunch of different things here. But, you know,

D.J. Paris 22:47
I want to pause for a second on social media, because I think what what you just said is, is worth spending just a moment of my thought on it. Because it’s so powerful, what, in fact I was we I do a monthly show with Carrie McCormack, who’s an app properties agent. And she gives her sort of state of the state of the market in the city and what’s going on and what she sees. And then we were taught, we just did one on Monday. And then from that, we just do it once a month. And she said, next month, we got to talk about social media, we were talking about it and we both she and I agree that many brokers just do social media, wrong or incorrectly or in a way that isn’t as effective as it could be. And I think what I see from other brokers who are on Facebook, in particular, and there’s other social media platforms, but on Facebook, I see a hey, look at my new coolest app, and that then that might be all that person does. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that. But when it’s all that you do you realize, like most of your your Facebook friends don’t care. You know, it’s just not that interesting. But you know what, Amy, what you’ve done is so important is like you thought how can I actually create value for people and you said, create a moms group for Arlington Heights, right. And by doing that, you’re obviously creating value because there’s 1800 subscribers to that page. And at the same time, of course, you know, ultimately, that furthers your brand. It’s sort of indirectly but you know, what I always tell people for social media is figure out a way to create value outside of just hey, look at how cool I am. I just listed a house. And I think you are like the perfect example of doing that. And obviously, you found a need for that sort of communication in that, you know, in that area and, and then you said, Hey, I just got six deals this year. And I know that wasn’t the reason you did it. But it’s nice that that flows that way too.

Amy Diamond 24:34
Yeah. And I could talk about social media all day every day. Because I am truly passionate about what one free advertising meant. And to be honest, it’s free. But I track I mean, I track where my leads come from which everybody should be tracking where their leads come from to know if you’re spending money in the right spots, but um, that’s another whole podcast but As you know, social media is there’s so many people that want to talk and they don’t have outlets and they don’t know where to go. And and so it’s, I do think there’s a technique to it’s my rule of thumb is to personal to one business. You don’t want to overwhelm people. But there’s also an illusion that people aren’t watching what you’re doing they are. Because when you go out to the next social event, and you run into Bob, we haven’t seen in a year, and they’re like, Wow, you’re killing it with real estate. Bob’s watching what I’m doing, Bob seeing it, whether he comments are not, it’s the perception. It’s the it’s the they’re, they’re just tracking you. So when Bob needs a realtor, I’m hoping Bob calls me so it’s just about constantly dripping the reminder to your people. And I tell all my new agents that I tell them, and it’s got it you got to get you gotta get with the time because that’s a really valuable asset that so many people don’t know about. And don’t use so.

D.J. Paris 26:03
Absolutely. So when I was I just mentioned this on our last episode, that when I our first episode that we did a few months ago, had I think I just looked at had 51 listeners that 51 subscribers, which is I work at a firm that has 600 brokers. So I you know, I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t even get any of our own brokers to to, I mean, I don’t know what percentage, but I’m guessing 40 of the 50 were probably our own brokers. And we were I was worried that even though I knew it takes time to build something like a podcast, but I thought, Well, I hope people be interested in this, but it wasn’t super encouraging. And then what we started doing with all of our guests is, of course, we tagged them in the post, like you’re we’re sort of referencing in Facebook, we do it on LinkedIn, and Twitter, if they’re on Twitter, and you can sort of do it on Instagram, to a degree. But what we’re now at almost gosh, we’re closing in on about 3000 subscribers in just a few months. And it’s not because I’m that compelling. I’d love to think it’s just my wonderful personality, but it isn’t, but what I’ll tell you what, it’s been no surprise to you, I’m sure as the brokers who we feature, you know, who are tagged in it, share it, or at least people who are friends of theirs see it. And it’s that’s been been a huge, you know, that’s that’s the only reason we’ve grown from 50 to 3000. It’s not because of me. Yeah,

Amy Diamond 27:22
it’s all about, it’s all about getting the name out there. And in social platforms. It’s a great, great tool, so everyone should be on it. Yeah, they should,

D.J. Paris 27:34
they should all be taking advantage of it. And I think maybe you are the best representation of that my co host, Carrie McCormack is like the queen of Instagram, and nobody does Instagram better than her and she is just unbelievable at it. And, you know, but it’s, I find that many brokers are could could use a few tips. So maybe in a future episode, and maybe I’ll have you back as a guest. Yeah, just social media, because

Amy Diamond 27:56
video is the next thing too. I mean, everyone needs to be doing. I’m just getting into that I’m doing a lot of impromptu videos, which my team thinks I’m crazy, but I’ll be driving. But I just, yeah, it helps. I mean, it’s amazing how many people watch it. And then it’s also about just giving back some information. I never do it just to talk like I’m always like, here’s the myth, this is what’s going on right now, this is a true myth. Or this is this is why you need to get on the market, or this is what’s going on, if you’re thinking about the Christmas and how you decorate your house and the holidays, and you know, whatever it is people want to know. So,

D.J. Paris 28:37
ya know, and it’s clear that I have always said success, you know, is almost probably it’s never accidental, but it’s certainly if it’s not never, it’s almost never accidental. And it means that you have obviously you’re providing extremely high value to your clients. And it’s enabled you to grow a sizable team, and also a sizable brand. And it’s really I think your that that’s like perfect balance of marketing and and also just high quality. So congrats on all your success. If someone is out there who is interested in working with you, you know, maybe a buyer or seller or maybe even another broker that wants to learn about your team, what’s the best way they can reach out to you?

Amy Diamond 29:20
I would say just reach out through my website or you could just always give me a call on my office line. So do I provide my line now? Yes, let’s see what

D.J. Paris 29:29
their website is deal with diamond.com Get in touch with her there but what’s the best way if someone wants to? Can you give out your email and phone number? Yeah,

Amy Diamond 29:39
yeah, my phone number is 847-222-8741 And then my email is Amy at deal with diamond.com.

D.J. Paris 29:50
And don’t to please if you start getting flooded with questions, I apologize for that in advance but we do have a lot of eager listeners any way out. Thank you so much for being part of the show. This was a fantastic conversation, at least from my perspective. So we’re Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate the time. I appreciate it. All right, we’ll say goodbye. All right, thanks so much.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Top 1% producer Eric Workman of Green Street Homes has built a successful business working with investors. In our conversation Eric shares how he finds opportunities for his team, why every broker should be investing, and how building a property management business has led to even more brokerage transactions. If you’ve ever considered becoming a real estate investor or learning what it takes to work with them, this is the episode for you!

Eric Workman can be reached at 630-408-5582 and eric@greenstreethomes.com.

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Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:14
Hello and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real. The only real estate podcast may buy real estate agents for real estate agents. My name is DJ Parris. I am your host through the show and today we have a great interview with Eric workman coming up in just a few. Also really quickly wanted to say thank you. I feel like I say that most every episode, but we’re really really overwhelmed by how generous every Alba listeners have been. What you’ve been doing is telling a friend telling other brokers in your office about the show, we are coming up be by the end of this month, we will be over 5000 subscribers, which just a few months ago, we had 50 subscribers. And so with basically no marketing at all, you guys have been spreading the word. So continue to do that. Please also feel free to leave a review on iTunes or Google Play about what you like about the show. Also let us know what we can do to make the show better where this show is for you. Right. That’s it for brokers who want to improve their skill set. So let us know. We do a monthly interview with Carrie McCormick, who is a top producer 18 years in the business and she is here to answer your questions. So anything you want to know well, you know, send those questions to us through our website which is keeping it real pod.com Also you can find us on Facebook keeping it real pot. Okay on to the interview with Eric Worre.

A today on the show we have Eric workman Eric is the owner and broker of Green Street homes. Eric is a graduate of the University of Illinois, where he majored in finance and real estate. Eric has been a prominent fixture in the residential investment space since 2010. In his prior positions, Eric structured some of the largest transactions in the history of the Single Family Investment Industry and has been featured in multiple news publications, such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg MarketWatch and Fox News. In his current role, Eric oversees the inventory selection, construction management, sales, marketing and investor relations for Green Street. Eric, thank you so much, and welcome to the show.

Eric Workman 2:29
Oh, well, thank you very much for having me. It’s a it’s an honor.

D.J. Paris 2:33
Well, tell us a little bit about how you got started in real estate, and in particular, how you eventually or maybe even from from the start, but you know, headed down the investment path?

Eric Workman 2:45
Sure. Well, I graduated school in 2004. And like you said, I graduated with a finance degree, but also a concentration in real estate. And not unlike a lot of people who got into real estate in 2004, I went the new construction route. So I came out of school, I went to work for a big national home builder, and was in sales, which at the time wasn’t, wasn’t too difficult of a job. You know, you were pretty young, right out of school, making a lot of money and real estate was pretty easy. Sure, but then four years later, you know, it’s 2008 I had my first child on the way the the market takes a dive, nobody wants a new construction home anymore. And I had to reinvent myself, I had to kind of figure out how I was going to continue to make a living at the level that I was at gotten used to over the prior couple of years. You know, now starting now with a family started, it was it was imperative that I kind of figured that out. And I went back to kind of my roots educationally of why I decided to get you know, a concentration in real estate from from the University of Illinois, and it really had to do with real estate being a wealth building tool. And, you know, I grew up in a small town in central Illinois. I come from a family of firemen and electricians. And I was always very comfortable with construction projects and houses and small apartment buildings. And I never really got the stock market or the equities market or bonds or what have you, but I understood how you could either build a piece of real estate or you could you know, renovate a piece of real estate and how you could create income and and equity from that. And so I I very quickly in 2008 decided to kind of transition myself from focusing on new construction and on the regular brokerage market and focus on working with investors. I had I was given some pretty sage advice at the time as a young man that no matter what What’s happening in the real estate market, there’s always money to be made, you know, even though even though you know, new construction sales aren’t going well anymore, and even though, you know, you can’t just stick a sign in the yard and do a regular resale transaction, there were still 1000s of transactions happening all the time. And so I network myself, just with people that I knew, and kind of let everyone know what my focus was, and was going to be and was, was fortunate to be connected with a couple of investors who, you know, in, in 2008, and 2009, I think, you know, I did 30 transactions in a row with the with the same clients. And from that point, at from that point, the, the focus of mine from a from a career perspective, and also from a personal investing standpoint, was on distressed real estate and on working with investment properties.

D.J. Paris 5:56
Sure, it has the focus of the types of properties, I know you’re you’re a single family home, that tends to be your, your, your specialty, if I’m understanding has it always been that way? Or did you? Have you shifted from different types of investment opportunities?

Eric Workman 6:11
No, I would say single family homes has been 95% of everything that I’ve done. It’s, you know, traditionally, people look at a house as a home, right, and 80% of all single family transactions that occur in the market, are people buying those properties as a place to live for themselves. But what’s what’s staggering is that, you know, close to 20%, nearly one in five of all single family transactions in the United States are for investors, and investors who are buying those properties as investments, you know, as rental properties. And the neat thing, for me in that was, when working with an investor, there’s significantly less emotion, there’s sure quite a bit less time as it relates to, you know, being out on the weekends and driving around to look at different properties and, and, you know, caring whether or not the cabinets are brown, or whether they’re white, or whether they’re gray. It’s a very emotionless, you know, financially based transaction, you know, either the numbers work, or they don’t, the rents are strong scenario, or they’re not the tenant, you know, the type of tenant stability that you have in a particular area is high or it’s not. And whenever you’re able to, to find the right buyer audience or the right investor mix, the projects, when presented properly, can really speak for themselves. And so you can you can dial in the way that you’re managing your time, the type of inventory that go after, etc. And so for me, the single family home as an investment vehicle, and as an asset in and of itself, has been something that, you know, I’ve been focusing on, really since since the downturn.

D.J. Paris 8:07
And do you focus in in a particular geographic area, or does that shift based on market conditions?

Eric Workman 8:13
Well, I would say it does shift based on market conditions. I mean, I’m, I’m only focused here in Chicagoland. You know, I don’t I don’t transact in any other markets. You know, there are there are some brokers, I would say, of similar ilk to myself who will do deals in Dallas or Atlanta, Memphis, you know, some other markets where you have a large number of investors who’ve who’ve come into the market, but for me, it’s always been Chicagoland. And really what you have, what you have, whenever you’re compiling a portfolio of single family homes, is you’re an investor really got to be focused on one of two things either has to have to be focused on cashflow, which is going to be the kind of the net money that you have leftover. You collect the rent, you pay your mortgage, you pay your property manager, you pay your taxes. And what you have leftover is your cash flow. The they’re either focused on having high cash flow, or high appreciation potential. And traditionally, you don’t find both in the same area. So right so you have, you know, you have areas of Chicagoland where prices are depressed, you know, southern suburbs, southern parts of the city, western parts of the city, even northern far northern suburbs, where the price to rent ratios are, are relatively high. And in those areas, you’ll find really strong cash flows. What you don’t tend to find is that for five, six years after buying a property, that the actual value of that property has changed much. And so as an investor, you know, you’re in those areas, you get really great cash flow. But you know, the house that you buy for 150 hasn’t jumped to 210 Sure, or 250. In other parts of Chicagoland, it’s the exact opposite, you’ll have a little bit lower cash flow, but you’ll see quite a bit better home price appreciation,

D.J. Paris 10:16
and the investors you work with are they traditionally are mostly looking for cash flow.

Eric Workman 10:23
You know, I would say that they’re looking for both, a lot of investors who I work with, start off looking for cash flow. And then it’s, it’s not unlike balancing out an equity portfolio, where you, you start off as a young person willing to take a lot of risk. And you know, buying less expensive stocks, and then as your portfolio matures, all of a sudden, you start buying a lot of a lot of blue chips, right, you you own a lot more coal in Walmart than you ever thought that you would. And when you, when you start off with a real estate portfolio, it’s really no different. You know, when you have a high concentration of a particular style of properties, whether that be, you know, cashflow heavy, or appreciation heavy, it’s not a bad idea to balance those out. And when you when you look at a lot of the investors who I work with, and you look at their portfolios, over the course of the last five or six years, and the ones who, you know, 345 years ago started to balance out their hive, their high cash flow properties, with some high appreciation properties, have seen some really significant jumps, appreciation wise. Sure. And, you know, while still maintaining really healthy cash flow in their other areas,

D.J. Paris 11:42
it’s, ya know, it’s, it’s interesting, and it’s funny, you are the owner of our company, he’s an investor and his family’s been buying real estate, mostly buy and hold for almost exclusively buy and hold multi units for many, many years. And our owner himself tries to buy a property every several months. And he has, I think he’s up to 25 or so properties, multi units, he has a specialty. And he he likes Bridgeport, he there’s a few areas that he just seems to find deals and but he’s always said that and I would be interested to get your take on it. He’s like finding the investors is the easy part. Because, you know, whenever you can present a good opportunity to people that are cash heavy, you know, where they can get a some sort of return on investment, assuming they’re looking for cash flow, and maybe also appreciation, but specifically cash flow, where they can get a guaranteed return, or at least a semi guaranteed return, the investors are pretty easy to find. I don’t know, if if you’ve had that similar experience? Is the deal harder to find than the than the cash itself for the event from the investors?

Eric Workman 12:45
Well, it is today. You know, things aren’t really on sale anymore. At least that’s the way that I look at the market, I don’t think there’s a well, you know, a lot of the distress is pretty much gone. And it’s difficult to find good deals yet, because the because the markets done well over the last five or six years, really all markets have done well. Investors and money is not that difficult to find. You know, 678 years ago, whenever everyone was scared, and all markets were taking a pounding, and a lot of people were either, you know, losing their jobs or getting, you know, a reduction in pay or not getting their bonus, it was more difficult to find people who were bullish at that time, you know, than it is today. However, you know, when you find the good investor, when you find that good client, you’re able to typically, you know, provided you can continue to put good deals in front of them, you’re able to, to enact a lot of volume out of one client. You know, I told the story a little bit earlier that, you know, one of my first investor clients, I did, you know, 30 transactions in a row with with your client, and I don’t know how many years it might have taken me to do 30 You know, to do another 30 transactions with, you know, random other people who were either referred to me or who I marketed to and happened to attract. So that’s another that’s just kind of another foundation for why I why I stuck with the investment investment path.

D.J. Paris 14:22
Yeah, sure. And I think, you know, just it’s really becomes you become the deal finder, the deal maker, and, you know, you have people who obviously trust your judgment and are able to, you know, push, push the button on without a lot of emotion attached to that decision. So it seems like the best of both worlds in a lot of ways. Let in I’m not asking you to give up your secret sauce, but I’m just curious. What percentage of the properties that you invest in? Are MLS listed, is it do you have a general idea of how often you find them out? Let’s say the MLS versus

Eric Workman 15:01
in, that I invest in or that I that I transact,

D.J. Paris 15:05
that you transact.

Eric Workman 15:09
On the transaction side, it’s probably 5050.

D.J. Paris 15:13
And how do you, you know, and again, I’m not asking you to give, give all of your technique away, but how do you find non MLS properties? Do you guys proactively reach out to owner saying, Hey, if you ever interested in selling? Are there marketing campaigns you put together? Or are there? I’m just curious on how you find property?

Eric Workman 15:33
Sure, well, we we do that. I mean, we have done that. But one of the, one of the key components to, to our call it brokerage business, has been, has been bringing on property management business. And so sure, yeah, so, you know, part of being a property manager in the state of Illinois is that you have to be a licensed broker, right. So my partner has a tremendous amount of operational and property management, operating experience. And a few years ago, we decided to, we decided to start bringing on property management for others, you know, we, you know, when you’re, when you’re in this business, it’s very difficult, as a, as a broker, to investment deals, to see these deals happening all the time and not getting them yourself. Right. You know, so we’ve, we’ve built our own portfolio of a number of single family homes and some small apartment buildings. And we, we needed a way to manage them. Right. And so we, we got our own property management software, we got a good accounting team in place, we brought on a couple of really great property managers. And, you know, we had they, I should say, they, they had excess capacity, and a number of the investors who we worked with, were looking, you know, they were all looking for a more trusted management experience. Sure, and, and, you know, would, would occasionally reach out to us, and finally, we decided to bring a number of them on. And in bringing those guys on it almost, you know, it just opened up another avenue for people to interact with, with us and with our company. And it brought about significantly more brokerage opportunities. You know, whether it was existing clients wanting to trade out of different positions, or, you know, or other investors or other, you know, brokers throughout the market, who were, who are looking who were looking for, you know, avenues to sell properties into, you know, they found they would find us occasionally through our property management business. So, that’s been a great way for us to Advent, the brokerage side.

D.J. Paris 17:54
Yeah, that makes absolute perfect sense, that would not have occurred to me that that would also not only increase, I mean, obviously, you’re building your property management business, but it would also lead to more brokerage opportunities. Of course, that’s, that’s quite a quite smart. So. So good percentage of the transactions you find are possibly even just people who you’ve interacted with who have opportunities, or can introduce you to opportunities out there in the in the field that you might not be aware of.

Eric Workman 18:23
Yeah, and, you know, when you think about the type of assets that are trading, it’s difficult to list a rented single family home on the MLS Sure, it difficult as actually being kind, it’s nearly impossible. And it’s in it’s very difficult to show because you’re not just coordinating with the salary, also grinding with the tenant. You know, if a tenant has lived there for a while, and doesn’t particularly want to move, they can, you know, it can be difficult in you know, in allowing showings, and, and so a lot of those transactions happen off market. And there are other there are other brokers like myself who are focused in this asset class, who, you know, it becomes it becomes a relatively you know, it’s a it’s a huge market and a small industry. The, you know, the guys who do the most volume tend to know each other pretty well, and they know what types of assets and what types of areas you can sell into, with what brokers and so when, you know, when 100 home portfolio becomes available, you know, it’s not going to go on the MLS Sure, it’s gonna go out to a handful of different brokers and, you know, client of mine swoops in and picks up 70 of them, per se, you know, and there’s, there’s a, there’s a $10 million transaction that that never hits the MLS, right. So,

D.J. Paris 19:50
yeah, I know like our owner who specializes in multi units in Walsall. We also have a property management division tear which was born out of similar system as yours, but a lot of the times, you know, he will, he will do marketing campaigns in his early earlier investing days where he would send out, Hey, if you ever want to sell your property, Mom and Pop who own the multi unit, and now he like yourself finds they doesn’t have to do that as often because those opportunities also come along through the other channels of the property management side. But yeah, it’s very interesting. If there’s obviously we have several 1000 brokers who listen to this, and who are will be listening to this? And do you have suggestions for them? If they’re interested in sort of learning about, you know, they’re, they’re not used to working with investors? Do you have any suggestions of how they could get started to acquiring this knowledge?

Eric Workman 20:49
Well, sure, they’re the the industry has become, I would say more in vogue since 2011. I remember, I remember in, I guess, what, almost be six years ago to the date kind of late October 2011, going to a single family rental or single family, you know, investment property event in Scottsdale, Arizona, and we there were like, 20 of us in the room. And there are there, you know, huge conferences, you know, multiple times a year with, you know, hundreds of attendees. So the there are, there are plenty of courses out there that somebody can take. I think that the bigger pockets website does a great job of putting good data and information out there. But, you know, really an investor is going to want to sorry, a broker is going to want to understand the lingo. You know, investors talking in different terminology, like I was saying, you know, cash flow cap rate, you know, noi, you know, those types of, you’re gonna need to learn that type of lingo. And yeah, there are, there are plenty of different education formats out there, you know, where you can buy this knowledge. There’s a lot of different books on investing in real estate and investing from a cash flow standpoint. And I think I think a place like bigger pockets is a great place to get information.

D.J. Paris 22:22
Yeah, I know that the owner of our firm always says, in particular, to new investors, like pick a specialty, pick some hyper focus in one area of investment, because you’ll go crazy trying to figure it all out, and certainly try to, you know, master one, one avenue. Sounds like you guys, you know, hyper focus as well. And so yeah, there’s there’s so many resources, there’s meetup groups, there’s obviously bigger pockets, there’s lots of programs, and people can learn if they’re really truly committed. And,

Eric Workman 22:54
you know, what, actually the Chicago Ria, the Chicago Real Estate Investors Association, yes. Is a is a good spot. The gentleman who runs ads guy named Andrew Holmes, I think Andrew, Nick, Andrew, does a great job of disseminating the kind of what real estate investing is all about. And if you’re an agent, I would recommend learning it from the investor’s perspective. So that you can then so that then you can mold the investors perspective with your market knowledge in whatever opportunities that you’re presenting. Those are, that would be my that would be my, I guess, kind of the foundation of, of how to get started.

D.J. Paris 23:35
And if there are any investors who are interested in working with with your firm, you and your firm directly, how would you recommend they get in touch with you?

Eric Workman 23:45
Well, our website is Green Street. homes.com. And my my email is Eric errc at Green Street, homes.com. That’s the easiest way to get in touch with me. You can also reach me on my cell phone 63040855820 And,

D.J. Paris 23:59
Eric, I wanted to ask you before you left, because I am also from Central Illinois. Where are you from in central Illinois.

Eric Workman 24:05
Do you know where Decatur is? I do a little town called Mount Zion.

D.J. Paris 24:09
Okay, I I know I know the name I you know, I didn’t know where exactly that is. I have been a Decatur I’m from Peoria, Illinois. So not too far away. But for sure.

Eric Workman 24:21
A lot of time playing baseball up around Peoria playing against Pekin and Morton and sure I love the all the little towns around there.

D.J. Paris 24:29
Yeah. That’s That’s us. Well, thank you so much for your time this has is going to be extremely well received by our brokers so I by the people who listen rather, I’m really grateful that you spent a few minutes with us to do this. And thank you so much and best of luck. We wish you continued success. You certainly don’t need that. My well wishes for there but thank you again.

Eric Workman 24:54
Now. Well, thank you for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Superstar Rachel Hausman and The Hausman Team close over 100 million in gross production every year. In our conversation Rachel talks about how she built her business from the ground up – in the first year she closed 18 transactions. Now, she closes 150 deals a year! Her mom, Andee, was the inspiration for starting in the business, and she learned the importance of going the extra mile for her clients, which has resulted in repeat clients and rave reviews. On average she sells a home every three days!

Contact Rachel at 847-217-3019 and rachel@thehausmanteam.com.

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Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:15
Hello and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real, the only podcast made by real estate brokers for real estate brokers. My name is DJ Paris. I am your host through the show and we have some really great interview today with Rachael Houseman. Before we get to that I wanted to give you guys some news. First of all, thank you, thank you, thank you for continuing to support the show the way that you can do that. The way that you have been doing that is by passing this, this podcast on to other realtors that you think could benefit from this information. We are only six days into November and we are already on our on a run rate to cross over 5000 listeners last month, we finished it just over 3000 listeners the month for that 2000 etc. So we’ve only been here about 21 episodes, and we’re already going to hit 5000 of you. So we really, really strongly appreciate it. Also, thanks to all the suggestions of people we should be interviewing. I think we’re all booked up now for till the new year. So please continue to pass this along. And also we have sponsorship opportunities. So if you’d like to get in front of between three and 5000 realtors, you can sponsor an episode and that would include me mentioning you at the beginning of the episode and also reading a live commercial about your service. So we’ve been getting a lot of requests from lenders and and attorneys and just various ancillary products to the real estate practice. So if you’re interested reach out to us you can also of course contact us directly through Facebook at keeping it real pod and also our website keeping it real pod.com Okay, thank you so much for continuing to support us and on to our interview with Rachel.

Okay, today on the show, we have Rachel Houseman, Rachel is a full time real estate professional dedicated to outstanding client service. She loves working with people helping guide them through the buying and selling process. Rachel grew up with her three sisters in the Buffalo Grove area, with her mother leading the top selling team in Northern Illinois. Her knowledge on the construction Neighborhoods and Schools gives her amazing insight and guidance for each of her clients. She’s raising her own family in the area and her husband teaches in the local school system. Her goal is to provide a great experience by consistent communication and a hands on involvement through the entire transaction Rachel learned from the best her mother Andy and cannot wait to help you with your next purchase and sale it also when Rachel is not on HGTV or out with clients, you can find her on the trail with her family making guacamole canning fresh jam and most likely on the phone with her mom. Andy. Welcome, Rachel.

Rachel Hausman 3:02
Hi. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

D.J. Paris 3:06
I just had a just an argument with my girlfriend just this last weekend about the pronunciation of guacamole. I was saying guacamole, which is technically I think correct. But she says she’s like never say that in public. That’s really embarrassing. Nobody’s saying that. I almost just said it in the way I’ve always said it. And then I corrected myself and said it

in the so it’s like Whack a Mole but blockable

it’s technically like Wakka moly. But anyway, I sound ridiculous when I say Yeah, right. Right. Well, anyway, welcome to the show. And let’s talk about Yeah, we are really thrilled to have you talk about how you got into real estate. Tell us your story.

Rachel Hausman 3:49
So um, I always worked at the front desk of a REMAX office through high school and college. I went to school in University of Colorado Boulder and I worked at REMAX of Boulder which was a wonderful office while I was in college there. My mom has been REMAX born and bred for the last 30 something years. And ever since REMAX came about she was all about REMAX. So naturally I always worked in a REMAX office. And then when I graduated, I wanted a big girl job. So I decided to talk to some of our friends at REMAX headquarters and I and I got a job working at the administrative desk there. And it was a cool job I would like people would walk in to our international headquarters and I would give them tours of the building and you know, set up their meetings with some of the higher ups and you know, there’d be people from all over the country and all over the world coming in and they would see my name on the desk and they’d be like, you know, what are you doing here? You know, why aren’t you working with your mom? And so finally Like, the third person said it, who was coincidentally one of my sellers this year. And he and I came home and, and I’ve been working with her since 2009. So, yeah.

D.J. Paris 5:13
And you know, we should talk about just because the amount of production, you know, you and your mom do is truly incredible. I know, you probably you are not somebody that likes to brag, but please do share what what production you guys are doing, because it’s truly impressive.

Rachel Hausman 5:29
So when I first started, I won the Rising Star Award at REMAX Northern Illinois for doing I think was like 18 transactions in a year. And that was like a big, you know, big deal for your first year in the business is that money?

D.J. Paris 5:48
That’s a huge deal. Yeah,

Rachel Hausman 5:50
yeah. And so I don’t know, I talked to my mom the other day, like, you know, did you ever think I would do this with you and be successful with you. And you know, when you’re, when you’re raising your own kid, you think about who they’re going to be when they’re older? And she was like, No, I really didn’t, it never crossed my mind that it was something that would turn into that it was just kind of her job that she, you know, needed to do to raise four kids on her own. So we do about 150 transactions a year, between my mom and I, and my stepdad, Jay, he, you know, he contributes a little bit as well. And then we do over 100 million and gross production. So we’ve been doing that for the last, you know, over a decade. And my goal now with my mom is, you know, I need to get her numbers up, because I think she has like so much potential to keep growing. You know, I’m not satisfied.

D.J. Paris 6:49
That’s a that is I started to laugh because I assumed you were joking, because you guys are obviously doing swell. But I think that is so indicative of a top producers they go, there’s there’s way way more efficient and effective production we could be doing so. Yeah, it’s it lets you know, I’m going to talk about the first year because just for a moment, because there’s a lot of people that listen who are in their first year who would love to do 18 transactions. I know our own the owner of the company that I worked for, he was the car, he was either the rookie of the year, or maybe the runner up, back when he started, which I think was 2003. And, and he was telling me that in his first year, and he ended up being one of the top producers for rookie producers that year in the whole city. And he he didn’t close a deal for us for six months. But then in month seven, I think he closed like six or seven sales, but it is you know, to do 18 In the first year is truly remarkable. How did you do that? How did you grow that?

Rachel Hausman 7:51
Um, to me, it’s all follow up. You know, every every viable breath on the phone is a lead, you know, and you have to treat it that way if you don’t keep asking questions, or if you don’t keep relationships, you know, it’s not the business for you. I mean, I remember my husband now, but he was my boyfriend at the time. He wanted, he needed a job. So he got his license. And it was really hard for him. You know, he was like, I said, Did you follow up your leads today? And he was like, Yeah, I’m sure. Okay, well, then you’re done. You’re out. Like, the UK. You know, now he’s, you know, he’s a teacher now. So, you know, he needs structure. I think people in this business. You know, some people want to have their own schedule. They like the I hate that word flexibility. Like, there’s nothing flexible about this job other than you bend over backwards every single day.

D.J. Paris 8:45
Probably, it’s probably the least free job. There is quite

Rachel Hausman 8:48
flexible job. I mean, yeah, I can have lunch with my daughter on occasion. But then I’m giving up prospecting time. And that’s how I think about it. So right, right. Um, I think success is built on your motivation and your follow up. And I get calls all the time from people that want to join a team. And they want to know, well, what am I going to get? What what’s my split gonna be? What am I going to get? And I’m like, that’s not the question you should be asking. You know, that’s not those aren’t the questions the second year that I’m like, I don’t want to work with you. You know, it’s about how do I help people? How do I build my you know, how do I help build your business? You know, how can I learn and learning and listening is really important. I learned listening to my mom in the car. You know, we didn’t listen to music in the car other than Barbra Streisand. We listened to Howard Britain, you know, motivational speakers, so that’s, you know, you have to listen. And when you first get your license, you know, my stepdad always does Brian Buffini with people. You have to look at your database and if you aren’t involved in something in your or community or in your life, if you don’t have a club or a hobby, you have to have one, you know, you have to be involved in something, because that’s how you build your referrals and your peer database.

D.J. Paris 10:13
Yeah, 100%. And one of the things I love speaking to Brian Buffini is, he’ll, you know, his, one of his big tenants of success is to, for, in particular, for new brokers, but, you know, pretty much anyone broker should and can do it is, you know, right, create your contact list right up every relationship, you know, and he’s very, very specific to say, your contact list is not necessarily your prospect list, it’s a series of relationships, and some of these people will become your advocates, and they’re not necessarily your prospects, because whether or not that you knows, but they are the ones who will go out and, and, and advocate on your behalf. And so he talks a lot about, you know, hey, you need to know who your advocates are, you need to know who your prospects are, you need to know, and then how to deepen deepen those relationships. And, and because a lot of times new brokers will say, Well, I don’t really want to prospect my friends and family. And I say, Well, I understand that, except, well, at least me ask those people to be your advocates, you know?

Rachel Hausman 11:09
Well, yeah, like, the other thing is, is when you first get your license, if you don’t know the area, or construction, or what you’re actually selling, then you don’t have a business doing that as a job. Right, I had a listing last night I got from an open house, which we never did open houses, like it’s never been part of our marketing strategy. And I think they’re coming back, you know, in a different way. And this guy told me, he goes, I met you at the open house. And you know, you knew so much about what you were talking about, and about the market and about real estate that we felt just so in, you know, involved with you and trot we trust you to tell us like it is because that’s how you carry yourself. And we’ve we knew that we wanted to hire you as our agent. They didn’t ask me what my marketing was, they didn’t ask me what my brochures looked like, they knew that I knew what I was doing, and that they wanted to hear the truth. And you have to know that you have to know the area, and you have to know what you’re selling. And my grandfather built houses and my mom grew up with that, you know, you have to know your, your, you have to know what you’re doing. You know, you can’t sell suits if you don’t know anything about a suit. So, you know, these people that just get in it, because they’re like, I love showing houses, it’s like, but what do you like showing about the house? You know, do you know what you’re talking about?

D.J. Paris 12:36
So the good news too, is if you spent an hour every day studying the MLS in a particular area that you’re passionate about, you know, geographic area, suburb or a neighborhood. And you know, within six months, maybe less, you’ll know so much about what’s available in that area, you’ll actually become pretty quickly very proficient and actually not more knowledgeable and very valuable to people wanting to move in and out of those areas. So it’s, it’s totally, and it is like I know when I bought my condo, which was back in like 2006 and I just wasn’t doing marketing in a different totally different industry. My the owner of a company who was my broker, because he was my friend of course, he he’s basic Williams really from Wilmette, but he lives in Lincoln Park at the time. And I wanted to move to Uptown because I really couldn’t afford Linkin Park. And so he he and looking uptown is only two miles from Linkin Park. It’s not that far. And he said, he said, Look, and he was already successful. But he said, I need about a week on this because I don’t know uptown, he goes give me a week because I have to study it. I don’t want to just start showing you homes without really knowing what I’m doing. And and I said, Well, that seems reasonable. And then he came in I wonder, I wonder how many brokers would have said that, you know, and, and I know what it is? Yeah, not many. Right. And I thought I just love that radical honesty. And I know you’re also known for your honesty.

Rachel Hausman 14:01
I mean, yeah, I mean, there’s a scene of me on House Hunters where I said they they edited it so maliciously against me. And and the husband was so funny, I got hate mail, he got hate mail, and it was like, because I was like, you know, this one’s really cheap. Well, you’re gonna like this. And he’s like, one of my best clients now and, and it was like, it was a joke because we me and his wife always joke about how he’s so cheap. He’s so cheap. And they edit it to to that and someone emailed me and they’re like, if you don’t like showing houses then get a new job. And I was like, It’s not that I don’t like showing houses but I like people, they have the right expectation and that’s educating your buyer. You know, I don’t mind showing 30 houses if it’s 30 houses I know there that they would be happy with. You know?

D.J. Paris 14:53
Yeah, well, that’s that’s the problem of of reality television, right. You’re edited to a particular type. have character because it makes for good television not necessarily don’t let the truth get in the good as in the way of a good story. Right? Right. That is, I have a friend who’s a producer. And she’s worked on I think over 30 or 40 reality shows over the past 15 years. And she’s like, she was just she just laughs at the idea that they’re called Reality. She’s like, we set up every scene and every show. It’s not real.

Rachel Hausman 15:25
Yeah, seriously. I think a big a lot of people think, you know, being a top producer, especially when you’re 22 years old at the time. It’s intimidating. And, you know, I got a reputation for being intimidating. And, and it’s, it’s not I didn’t think I was intimidating. I just think I’m honest. You know, you know, don’t. And that’s kind of it’s, you know, you have to be honest, and, you know, there’s no time for, for not being honest, and

D.J. Paris 15:59
I think I don’t think that’s that could even be a larger conversation about gender, right? I think women have it much harder in that capacity. My girlfriend’s a consultant and deals with large enterprise clients and goes in and has to tell them sometimes very difficult things about their business, and she’s very proficient at what she does. And she’s definitely, you know, you could argue may be treated a bit differently than male counterparts simply but you know, so I think women have it, women have a tough in that capacity. But you have some, just to completely switch gears because I don’t want to gloss over, you have some really funny stories. So I want to go through go through about your couch, that one of your clients will tell us the client couch story of you know, the one I’m referencing,

Rachel Hausman 16:50
see, oh, God, this was like, a month ago, I was. This is just one of those moments, you’re like, Oh, this is Saturday morning at 9am. You know, I go to get a listing sign, and I sit on the couch. And immediately, you know, my clients are a little bit older. And immediately after sitting on the couch, I realized I was sitting in urine because my seller had, you know, an accident. And you know, it’s like, I love I love helping, you know, seniors, like make that transition because it is it’s so it’s so hard for people to let go their, their independence, and my dad was an assisted living. So I you know, I totally understand. And so I sit on the couch, and my pants are like soaking wet. And, and I just didn’t say anything. And then I got in my car, and I called my husband, I was like, I’m just across the street, I need to come home, and pee. And like, it wasn’t like, you know, I’ve had stories where you walk in the house and the dog pees on you, or you walk in the house, and, you know, you step in dog pee, and you’re like, This is how you’re showing your house today. You know, those are some of the stories my mom told me one the other day, that was hilarious. She said back in the day, they didn’t have the internet. So you know, you would you would show houses based on these, you know, MLS books that were like 20 pounds. And one time our client drove in, and they, they wanted to see this house. So we picked up the courtesy key and the courtesy key. They went in and they’re they love the house, they want to write an offer. So they’re writing the offer. And my mom’s like, well, you know, they have to get all their stuff out. So, you know, we agreed on this offer and whatever. And so then the people are like, Well, what do you mean? Like? Like, who’s going to take the canary because, you know, nothing was there except the canary. And my mom’s like, they don’t have a canary and they’re like, Yeah, we saw canary in there. And it turns out, they wrote an offer on the wrong unit. Oh, that’s funny. They had thought that they were buying something else the whole entire time. They were at the closing and they’re like, oh, so

D.J. Paris 19:05
like, so wait, so what? So what’s the end of that story? What did obviously the deal didn’t go through? Or?

Rachel Hausman 19:11
No, it was like the same model but on a different floor. So they were okay with it. But it was just hilarious. She’s like, there is no Kinnari I don’t know what you’re talking about. My first my first experience ever though, was my mom told, you know, I was like her errand runner and she was like, Hey, go drop off brochures at Patty’s house. It’s our new listing and, and I was like, okay, sure, I’ll go drop them off. Well, she didn’t tell me that Patty was schizophrenic.

D.J. Paris 19:42
And that’s a critical piece of information for Yeah,

Rachel Hausman 19:46
very critical considering I was alone by myself, and had no idea that I was about to walk into this house and the woman was covered head to toe and white paint. Oh my gosh, she had this really short hair cut and her bangs were cut like Lloyd from Dumb and Dumber. Right. And she was very interesting. And she said, You know, I don’t know who painted my house, but I don’t know what I’m going to do. And I was like, I’m just here to deliver the brochures. And she had literally painted white paint all over her floors all over the hardwood all over the walls all over everything. And so just like, Mom, what is?

D.J. Paris 20:32
Right. Yeah, that’s like this heartbreaking. It’s funny. And also, it’s like, it’s so incredibly sad. Yeah, yeah, that would be a difficult client, I imagine. Especially because what she’s when she’s, she clearly painted the house and, and she’s, like, somebody painted my house. And only told me about the, tell me about the yoga lady. The one that

Rachel Hausman 20:56
oh, so we had this lady and she, you know, we went on the listing and, you know, everything. Like, I used to teach yoga. And so I, you know, she, she really liked that. And she, she thought, you know, she thought we had really good pure spirits and everything, which was, you know, really nice. I think my mom and I do have really nice spirits. And, and then she said, You know, I need you to visualize the sail. And, and I need you to have this positive energy all the time, you know. And so we were like, well, you know, we have positive energy, but, you know, the house hasn’t been touched in 30 years, and your dog was her dog was literally emaciated and like dying on the floor. And we’re like, um, you know, you really need to be at this price. And she was like, no, no, no, like, you need to have this vision. You know, do you have this vision? And so it’s like, yeah, I guess we have this vision, but you know, you’re not being realistic. So anyway, she went through like five other realtors after us and it finally sold for the price that we told her and it was just,

D.J. Paris 22:03
of course, what she’s, she’s a manifester. You just see it in your mind’s eye, and then it manifests into reality. I guess you just didn’t see it clearly enough.

Rachel Hausman 22:12
And exactly. It wasn’t clear enough that

D.J. Paris 22:15
there was, you know, it’s funny. There was a period of many years in this in this country where that was, you know, that was sort of the new agey, cool thing to sort of talk about it. It didn’t seem to work. Yeah, the secret. It didn’t seem to work for anybody. But it’s it was very cool to talk about

Rachel Hausman 22:33
it. Yeah. It was like, that’s funny, because I called my office the other day was like, guys, like, what are some funny stories? And my mom was like, I just don’t know if they’re funny anymore. Crazy. Crazy. You know, I

D.J. Paris 22:48
think they’re funny. But let’s, oh, let’s talk you I want to talk about and again, to shift shift once more, a pivot into a more serious topic where you were telling me before we started, about some thoughts you had about maybe a shift that you’re anticipating or that you’re seeing in the market. Can you talk more about that?

Rachel Hausman 23:09
Yeah, so I mean, I know like, there are some areas that are really hot. So you know, I think the city markets, you know, I don’t know what it’s like, really down there. It seems like it’s pretty stable. But out here. I mean, I’m seeing a shift for sure. And I know, it’s that time of year, it’s fall, although, and I’m sure

D.J. Paris 23:27
Rachel, let me interrupt you Where is out there. Let’s get some kids. I don’t think we mentioned that to the

Rachel Hausman 23:33
show. So like I’m in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. So like Buffalo Grove, Arlington Heights, Lake Zurich, long Grove, Lincoln Shire. And that and, you know, it seems like there’s there’s inventory, you know, there there is some inventory. A lot of the inventory is not in my opinion show ready. And then the stuff that is fixed up isn’t moving. And I’ve seen so many vacant Staged homes, which to me is like alarming how many vacant stage shops there are and people are really pushing the whole staging thing again. And I mean, when 2012 hit and it didn’t matter what your house looked like everything was selling. Now it’s 2017 it’s we’re on the I really think we’re on the brink of another recession and and I last election time so like last year, October, the market really sank down a little and then you know, March April was really busy and then July started to get slow again. You know, we still did a great had a great year but I mean some of my inventory. It’s beautiful. We updated on we we got them already. They’re priced really well like extremely well. And they’re still not good. thing. And to me that’s indicative of, there’s fewer buyers out there. And I think part of that reason is there, a lot of the people that would be moving out to the suburbs or staying in the city longer, you know, they’re not ready to leave the city. The second issue I think, is, you know, the, the Trump’s ban on the h1 visas has really lessened a lot of the immigration population turbine. And those people that would be buying investment property, because a lot of my buyers who bought before with with the visa, they can’t buy investment property, and that’s really hurting them. And then I think, the other thing is, is that people just aren’t maintaining their homes, so they they need to be, and putting them up the way they should. And the population because of the internet, and HGTV and everything else, you know, it teaches you to like a certain style, and nobody wants to put a single drop of work into a house they buy anymore, they want move in ready. I mean, that’s all they all the money, they have a third down payment.

D.J. Paris 26:13
Right? So do you have to? Does that mean you have to have more sort of comprehensive conversations with your buyers and, and also sellers about?

Rachel Hausman 26:22
Yeah, um, we have to hear we have to we give the sellers, I mean, my mom and I come with a whole list of contractors that have, you know, remodel their own homes, they’re reliable, they answer the phone, they’ll send you an estimate in a timely fashion. And we’ve really narrowed down the list and we bring this list and we give everybody homework. And the people that don’t list with us don’t want to do the homework and they don’t sell. And the people that listen and get their homes ready. You know, it shows when you show your home that you took pride in your home, and people feel that, you know positive energy, and then they you know, they want to raise their family there, they don’t want to buy some, you know, house that they can’t even be bothered to replace the carpet or take care of the mold in the attic. I mean, we inspect every attic before we list a home to prevent, you know, income from coming back on the market again, we do things like that, because, you know, it’s a really stressful process, and you have to make it as stressless as possible.

D.J. Paris 27:24
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s I 100% agree. And I also just like the fact that obviously, your mom has been in the business quite a while as well. But just the amount of information that you have, maybe versus other realtors who aren’t is involved in the business, you know. And I think that, you know, obviously, must really resonate with your clients because of your success speaks for itself. What advice would you have for brokers that are? Well, whether they’re new or just looking to increase their business? Because you even were telling me like, we could increase our business? What are some advice, advice you have for brokers who are maybe just getting started?

Rachel Hausman 28:10
Um, I think you have to decide what kind of Realtor you want to be. Do you want to be? Do you want to have your own ego? Or do you want to invest in someone else’s business and grow it? I mean, I had, everyone says, Oh, you got spared a silver spoon and blah, blah, blah. Like, you know, my mom had a database, you know, but she never told me what to do with it. You know, it’s, you have to see, like, I think what a lot of people get their licenses are like, oh, I want to brand myself I want to brand myself I want to brand my company, you know, like at properties is so huge, but I don’t think at properties is really letting people brand themselves. It’s more of the company you’re in, you have to decide, well, what kind of agent do you want to be? Do you want to do want to go with someone else’s branding? Or, or do you want to brand yourself, and if you’re going to brand yourself, you have to know that that’s a huge investment, like huge, my mom’s invested my think over $10 million in branding herself. And otherwise, if it were me, and if I had, you know, a couple of my friends wanted to get into the business, I would say, go find an agent who’s been in the business 20 years, 30 years, who has a database that you can work, you know, maybe it’s not organized, maybe you can help them organize it and start working with them. You know, maybe you’re on a 5050 split, who cares? You’re getting a huge, huge bump up against everybody else. You can work their database. They can teach you how to negotiate like a human, how to learn about, you know the business, how to He’s successful, how are they successful, and take their experience mixed with today’s ways of communication and be successful. You know, that’s the way to do it. And that’s what no one’s talking about.

D.J. Paris 30:15
You’re You’re so right. I interviewed Brady Miller, who works here in Lincoln Park. And he, it with a time when he got he was a music school. He went to music school as a pianist, and then he, you know, graduated and then didn’t want to try to survive as a musician. So he said, his friend said, oh, you should go into real estate. He said, I know nothing about real estate. And so his friend said, Well, I own a firm, and it’s really just me. So why don’t you come on board with me? And so I was talking to him. And I said, What was your training? Like? And he goes training?

Rachel Hausman 30:50
He’s like, I don’t have any training. Yeah, right.

D.J. Paris 30:53
He goes, my like egos I guess is, because I just asked my buddy a lot of questions, because he had already been successful. He was my mentor. He’s my partner. And I just did what he told me. And he goes, here I am, you know, 300 sales later in a few years, or whatever it was, but but it was, he just sort of laughed at the end. He didn’t, he wasn’t saying people shouldn’t go to training. He just goes, that just wasn’t even an option. But what was great was I got to go to work with somebody every day, who knew what they were doing. And I just just, you know, figured it out by watching them. So I think that’s really powerful advice. And, and it is funny, it is funny, too, because I’m sure people, anytime there’s, you know, multigenerational real estate families, they’re like, Oh, I see that person. They just got handed. And it’s like, that’s never how it works. Like it is never, never how it works. Because obviously, I

Rachel Hausman 31:44
think you have to like you like my mom’s always been in a mastermind group. And you have to surround yourself with people with ideas. And you have to surround yourself with people that always want to be learning and growing. And like, even at our next meeting, I’m going to tell all of them, look, you’re 10 years late, you know, you should have found someone 10 years ago, to grow your business, right? Because just sustaining something is isn’t doing anything. No, it takes a lot of effort. I mean, 150 transaction takes a lot of effort, but I’m I feel like it’s that’s not growing. You know?

D.J. Paris 32:24
Yeah, I mean, you it’s funny, we need to hear you say that cuz you guys are at a closing every like four days. So it’s

Rachel Hausman 32:33
a four on Tuesday. Today to today.

D.J. Paris 32:36
My math isn’t very good. But it was probably close. It’s close. Yeah, well, it’s, it’s, again, indicative of all how hard you work, I think more specifically, just how well you treat your clients based on you knowing a lot of stuff. And I think that’s one of the parts of being a realtor that many Realtors don’t take the time to do is really hyper focus and specialize in a particular type of of like you said, what kind of realtor do I want to be? Is there a certain area where you want to be the Arlington Heights person, and it’s like, I’m going to know more about Arlington Heights than anyone else. And it’s going to take a few years, and I’m going to go to every open house and Bob, you know, study the market every day. And if you do that, and you get involved in the whatever the Chamber of Commerce’s and get involved in, you know, make yourself known it takes it all takes time. And, and you honestly, you and your mom and your team have done that and continue to do it. But it is the real

Rachel Hausman 33:28
question is is where is it gonna go in 10 years? Like, what is this going to be like? And no one’s really, none of these companies, all these big companies are really thinking about where the consumers are really going to be like it is it is such a personal transaction that I do think I did a research paper in college about real estate and technology, like, it is such a personal transaction that I think will still be here, but in a different way. And it’s about how are you going to reach those people?

D.J. Paris 33:59
Yeah, well, and you’re right, too, because people are getting married later, which is you didn’t specifically say that, but you were talking about people moving out to the suburbs, later in life, which is probably a lot to do with that as well. I know. I know, my girlfriend, she lives in River North, I’m in Linkin Park. And she has told me she’s like, I will never move to the suburbs, you know? And I was like, okay, and but, you know, who knows what’ll happen? Well, that’s what she says, you know, so I just say okay, and then you know, things change, but, but it is it is. It’s interesting. And you’re right. Nobody really does talk much about where things are headed. But I think that’s the sort of brilliance of what you and your mom and your team do is you guys have those thoughts and those you have opinions about it. I think that makes you very valuable. Whether you know whether all of those opinions come to fruition or not. I think it’s just having that that awareness is really powerful for your clients. Speaking, if somebody if a client does want to work with you, what is the The best way that they can get in touch with you.

Rachel Hausman 35:03
The best way to get in touch with me is to call my cell 847-217-3019 or send me an email and it’s Rachel Ra, ch, EO at the Houseman team, and it’s ha us, man. And our new website is launching in the next week or so, the Houseman team.com And it’s going to be very community focused. I really think that’s, you know, you have to really know why you’re doing, you know, the job that you do. And our our biggest focus is going to be our community moving forward, and just really bringing people together with what’s going on and trying to promote other people’s local businesses and, and everything like that. So

D.J. Paris 35:52
wonderful. Well, Rachel, thank you so much for your time today. And yeah, thank you. Alright, well take care. Thanks. Talk to you later. Bye.

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