Chris Jones the Founder of Guerilla Realty talks about how his family business in real estate started and how he helped grow the business. Chris talks about his own company and the set of free tools they offer for realtors. Chris presents their free tools like Listing Cake, Fizbonanza, and Nerdsheets. Last, Chris talks about their 15min hack to get free leads from Zillow.
Pipeline ProTools offers a promotion with the code DJPARIS.
If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!
Chris Jones can be reached at 910-670-7733 and chris@guerillarealty.com.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:00
This episode of Keeping it real is brought to you by next stop. So check this out. There’s a new platform built to help doctors as they relocate all over the United States. And it’s built by a physician that was fed up with moving for med school intern year residency and the first attending physician without any local resources to help plan these moves. So next hop is creating a one stop resource for all physicians moving needs. From realtors to mortgage lenders to school information and beyond. The platform is called next stop a physician relocation guide. And they are looking for realtors interested in working with physicians and their families as they move from out of town. Now next up is extending its beta pricing for the keeping it real podcast listeners, there is a monthly fee of $100 to be included in the next stop beta, no referral fees none which means you the realtor are keeping the entire commission now they are creating a valuable resource for the physician community while highlighting local realtors. Next up wants to be the go to resource for every physician move Find out more by visiting their website next stop dot guide that’s any x t sto p.gy D And now onto our show
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the largest podcast made by real estate agents. And for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris, I am your guide and host through the show and in just a moment we’re going to be speaking with Chris Jones of Gorilla Realty who’s going to be giving you all sorts of amazing cutting edge technology tips to help you get more real estate business for example, a quick little hack of for Zillow of how to get free leads, which is very exciting. So stay tuned. Before we get to Chris. Just a couple of quick reminders. Number one, please tell a friend think of one other real estate agent that could benefit from hearing from top producers and tech gurus like Chris and send them a link to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done, you can stream right from your browser. Also please follow us on Facebook you can find us@facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod. Not only do we push every episode we’ve ever done onto our Facebook page, we also post a daily broker tip to help you grow your business. So again, that’s facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pod as always, thank you for continuing to support and listen to our show. We couldn’t do it without you. And we are grateful for you right now and forever. And now on to our interview with Chris Jones.
Hey, today on the show, we have Chris Jones from gorilla Realty and also from pipeline Pro Tools. Let me tell you a little bit about Chris. Chris is the founder of Gorilla Realty who is building the world’s best marketing engine for realtors. We believe he believes real estate is the greatest business on Earth. But all agents know that getting consistent clients is difficult. And what gorilla Realty does is makes marketing foolproof for agents no matter their age experience or niche. He teaches amazing webinars that have been featured by NAR the close one of our partners, and CNN among others. Learn more about Chris at gorilla realty.com And I’m gonna spell that is g u e r i l l a realty.com. Chris, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming
Chris Jones 3:49
on. Thanks so much. I’m a I’m a huge fan of the show. And it’s awesome to be here.
D.J. Paris 3:55
We I appreciate that. I’m a huge fan of what you’re doing, Chris and I were just talking before we started because this is a pretty unique episode for us where our listeners a longtime listeners, of course, know that you know, traditionally 99% of our episode episodes are talking to top producers and saying how’d you do that? How do you become successful, we rarely get to talk to marketers who aren’t specifically out there producing real estate but creating tools for agents now we get pitched by all sorts of tech companies that have tools that they want to promote to realtors, but very rarely do I actually ever get to talk to a marketer directly. And that’s really what I do as well in a different way. So I’m really excited to talk with with Chris and this is really just again, a very unique episode for us, which is really exciting for me. I love talking to top producers but I really love talking to marketers, I think even more. So Chris, tell us a little bit about your journey into the world of like real estate tech.
Chris Jones 4:52
Yeah, so you could say that real estate is the family business. So growing up my dad was in automotive repair of all in histories. So he owned, he worked his way up from being a mechanic, all the way up to owning several transmission franchises. Wow. And around the time that I was in high school, I think that the emotional drainage was too much like it’s the job where you can do everything is perfect, everything flawless. And at the end of the day, all your customers still hate you. Right? Because they’re mad that their car’s broke. They’re paying for it. And of course, it’s always an unexpected expense. Right?
D.J. Paris 5:28
It’s happened to me. And not only is it of course, unexpected, it’s also the most expensive, unexpected op, you know, think for anyone who’s had a drop transmission or somebody who needs to repair it. We all know the pain of that. And hopefully for those of you that don’t know it, you hopefully won’t experience it. But is it expensive, unexpected thing so I can understand now, nobody is going to like, you know, your dad’s business, even though it obviously keeps the car is brought in. Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Jones 5:55
So you’re really good at it, but just realize that he didn’t want to do it for the rest of his life. He’s entrepreneurial. He’s always been this or that. And he had a, he had a friend here in North Carolina, worked for century 21. He said, Matt, that’s my dad’s name met with your business background, you would do great in real estate. And so he decided to take the plunge. And he signed up for pre licensing courses. And you don’t mind my dad, but he’s an extremist. So he’s extremely everything. And so while he was doing the pre licensing course, he was also devouring every single thing that he could get his hands on, on how to grow your business, how to be a great real estate agent, et cetera, et cetera. And so he was reading every book that he could get his hands on taking every seminar books on tape since 2002. When there still were books on tape, right? Sure. I remember riding in the car. I was younger back then. And he’d be listened to this book on tape. And so he’s an extremist. So everything that all the coaches and gurus were recommending that agents do to grow their business at the time. He did it, but he did it like TEDx. So they said, Oh, you’ve got to, you know, call your closest friends once a month, or 30 closest friends once a month, he called 300 people once a month, right? Why? Or a neighborhood of at least 100 houses, he fired a neighborhood of 1000 houses, right? And you got to do direct mail pieces. You know, he did 10x. And he did all of this. And yet, coming from the business it you know, he was making, you know, comfortable six figures coming into real estate, he The truth is he just fell flat on his face. And this is while just just hustling, working 80 hours a week, and everything that everyone said, and just none of it was working for him. And so he said, You know what, before I just decided this whole experiment was a mistake. Let me go out on my own terms, if I’m gonna go out, right. And so he said, When I left the automotive repair business, the thing that I was doing that was working really well for us was just posting simple online ads through like Google AdWords. And there was people to a landing page where I could capture their name, phone number and email address, and then call them up and see if I can help. Right? And so he did that. And overnight, and this is 2002. When no one was doing right. Nobody was doing that. Yeah, unheard of. Right. So he did that. And overnight, he went from famine, to feast like more business than you know what to do with ended up growing a team. This is what he liked. By this time I was I was just getting into college. It took him like two semesters, he said, You know what, Chris, forget about that whole college thing. Why don’t you? Why don’t you come work for me. And so I did, I dropped out, never looked back and got into real estate, and then helped him recruit and grow large team. We had 100 agents, that’s, you know, not much in some bigger cities. But here in North Carolina, is a massive team ended up growing their own business. And all along, he had this germ of an idea that if you could take what he did and make it Cloneable, right. That’s an idea for a great coaching and software businesses. That was the germ of the idea that that my brother and I eventually took and founded gorilla Realty with.
D.J. Paris 8:59
It’s a great story. And there’s there’s a lot to sort of just even digest in your father’s journey there. And, but it is it is interesting, because ultimately, at the end of the day, and this is not of course, this is a known expression, but they say prospecting solves all problems. And it’s probably true in most businesses, maybe all businesses, but certainly, you know, your father was trying everything and then ultimately landed on on sort of a more tech forward model. And but a pretty simple tech forward model, right, like small ads on online to a landing page. And really, the idea is capturing that person’s information and then you can market to them really until they unsubscribe or until they tell you to buzz off. And so it’s it’s it’s still a great I mean, it’s Zillow has essentially the same model, right? I mean, there’s so many different tech providers that that really focus on on customer acquisition and then just capturing information and then of course, marketing. And then what I think you’d have done which I have not seen any other tech firm, specifically around in the real estate realm really do or at least due to the scale that you guys have is you guys have created a series of tools that are completely 100% complimentary, that Realtors could actually use. So typically in the sort of real estate tech space, almost everything that that is really useful is subscription based, you know, maybe there’s one little free tool that you get some functionality with, but then, you know, there’s an upsell and and of course, you guys obviously have have a subscription model as well. But the vast majority of your tools are absolutely complimentary, which I love. And you guys have created a number of them, and you continue to create them. So can you tell us a little bit about you know, Gorilla Realty and some of the tools that you guys the tool set that you guys offer?
Chris Jones 10:49
Yeah, so my, my personal favorite, I’ll lead with that one is a tool called fizz bonanza. So obviously, you’re familiar with the idea of using for sale by owner listings as leads, right. So you ever name number and, and real quick because you said this, but you said prospecting solves all problems. And that’s really the foundation of our company is that if you have a name, and a number of somebody that you know, is likely to be under contract for the next 105 days. And we can talk about statistically why we know that but then that’s gonna solve all problems for you, as long as you’re willing to pick up the phone and ask yourself, How can I deliver some value to this person. And then it’s just a numbers game from there, right. So if you if you call enough of them, you make contact with enough of them, and you have the right strategies, then you’ll never go hungry in real estate. But my favorite tool is fizz bonanza. So we all know for sale by owners, they obviously want to sell their home. And we know that statistically like 60 to 70% of them are gonna end up getting frustrated before the process is over. And they’re gonna hire a realtor, right? So they’re great source of leads. But it costs like 100 $200 to sign up for one of those subscriptions that sends you the leads every month or whatever. And so we realize you know what most of these listings are first, you know, they’re available online somewhere, either public, it’s public information. But the problem is, is that it’s really time consuming to go and collect all that data. And then you have to update it. And so we decided, let’s build fizz Bonanza, where basically you log in, you enter your zip code, and then you choose a radius 510 or 15 miles from that zip code. You say, hey, just show me all the For Sale By Owner listings within this area. And we automatically grab name, if it’s available. It’s not always but phone number, address listing price, how many days on market, et cetera, et cetera. And then you can download from, you know, from CSV and upload it to your contact management system or your CRM. And, and yeah, so just a free source of leads. And we just added a new feature where you can subscribe to the search so that it actually emails you once a week with all the fresh leads that got listed that week.
D.J. Paris 12:43
And which, by the by the way, the fact that you’re offering that complimentary is your the I am sure the only service doing that, because there are so many subscription based services that do exactly that for like you were saying, you know, 100 or 200 a month to get those that exact data. So where can they just just to make sure that that our agent, everyone knows it. By the way, fizz bows are really interesting. So Chris just said something that I just want to go back to about about FizzBuzz. Because Fizbo, for sale by owners, for all of our listeners, you, you may have just had an emotional reaction to hear the word Fizbo. Or you might have thought, oh, I don’t want to talk to those people. They’re mean, they hang up on me. They, they, they don’t want to work with realtors, and I Oh, this is a scary phone call. And I’m gonna just you know, get screamed at. And maybe, of course, but but but ultimately what Chris just said is really important is that the, you know, more than half of them ultimately aren’t able to do it ultimately themselves and end up hiring somebody. So we know that that’s true. So sometimes if even if there is a little pain associated with with making that that outreach, ultimately, half of the more than half of those people are going to choose somebody because typically and the most simple reason for this and there’s lots of reasons why people can’t always sell their home on their own, but they probably are just overpricing it right. That may be the most simple way as everyone overvalues their property. We as Realtors know this about our clients, we as Realtors do this for our own property. And so fizz bows are really great leads, they’re just a little tricky. But that isn’t to say that you shouldn’t consider them considering that most of them, more than half of them are going to end up choosing a realtor. So how would they find this tool?
Chris Jones 14:23
Cool. So it’s Fizz bonanza.com, which is fic Bonanza, just a little play on the slang Fizbo. I’m sure you’ll put a link in the show notes, but we won’t check it out. It’s 100% free. And it’s my personal favorite tool that we’ve that we built on last year. I’m really excited about because you mentioned pricing. And so the next tool that we’re going to launch I don’t know if it’ll be launched by the time this episode goes live, but it’s going to be bulletproof CMA. So this is a process we’ve been teaching for about 18 months now that we’ve really gotten dialed in, but we’re going to launch a full scale right now it’s a calculator you can download it nerd sheets.com which is an app that has Basically a briefcase of all of our best real estate calculators, but that deserves a tool of its own. So bulletproof cma.com is going to be my next favorite tool. I cannot wait till we launch. It’s in production right now or in development right now. And we can talk about that if you want.
D.J. Paris 15:16
Yeah, let’s let’s talk about it. So what is what is bulletproof CMA going to do that traditional CMAs struggle with or aren’t able to do.
Chris Jones 15:24
So, this isn’t gonna apply to everyone. It’s gonna apply to a lot of people and I’m gonna hurt some feelings. I’m gonna step on some toes. Oh, that’s okay. Good. I love that. The old traditional CMA method that everyone learned in real estate school are that your broker taught you? It sucks. Okay, agreed, mathematically, it makes no sense. And the truth is like, and here’s the let’s be clear about what the methodology is that I’m talking about. It’s where you get three active comps, if you can, right? If you can find enough, you get close comps, again, if you can’t, if there’s enough, and then you throw out anything that you don’t like, right? Anything that pushes the number in the wrong direction should point out and you call it an outlier, right? You call it an outlier. And then if you’re really hardcore, you might apply some kind of weird voodoo like, millage or finishes or lot size or whatever. And you’ve convinced yourself that you have this like mathematically statistically accurate pricing method, right? You don’t, okay, your sample size is a total of eight properties, which means your margin of error statistically, is going to be well over 30%. Okay. And so really, you’re basically drawing a number out of a hat, and you’re just going almost solely by feel, right. That’s what most agents do, and more art than science. It’s more art than science. And I think what most agents won’t, won’t admit is that they’re not really comfortable with this Mellon methodology. They always kind of feel like, Did I do it? Right? Right, I’m just gonna go with it, right. And they fake it till they make it. But there actually is a good methodology out there that you don’t have to be a math genius to figure out. So what we do is, first of all, we want as many comps as humanly possible. So we want to get that sample size as large as possible, so that our margin of error is very low. And so we actually use three different methods. And then we take an average. And from that we establish a reasonable range of value. But we use the adjusted baseline method, which is where you take a baseline value, it could be recent professional appraisal, which are more common than Realtors admit, you know, like people get refinanced all the time, you could have a professional appraisal that’s less than five years old, and you could adjust for appreciation, right? So it could be a professional appraisal, the last time the house sold, or it could be a tax assessment, I know that depending on the market that Texas has, it may or may not have any bearing on the actual value of the house, but here in North Carolina is actually pretty good. Pretty good measure, okay. And then you calculate appreciation, something else realtors are afraid of right. So we have a appreciation calculator that you can get it nerd sheets.com, and you’re gonna go into the MLS is really simple. You take the subject property, and you run a search for all homes that are like that, right? 10 years ago for one year, right? And then you do it for last year, right? And then you tell the calculator, how many years you’re calculating appreciation for it. And it’ll use reverse comp, because how do most Realtors calculate appreciation? Right? They’re like, well, homes, this neighborhood used to be worth 200,000. Now there were 220. So we had 10% appreciation over five years, we’re going to call it 2%. Sure, right. And that’s not accurate at all right? Right, use the that’s not how appreciation is calculated. So this calculator uses reverse compound appreciation to give you accurate appreciation down to 100%. So super, super accurate. And anybody can do it because the Calculate the calculator does the work for you, right? And so again, you can get that calculator at Narcisa calm, but once you have appreciation, then you can you know how much time has elapsed since that baseline value is established. And you can add appreciation. So that’s just one method. Okay, so that’s one comp, but then we’re going to get active comps, but we’re going to get at least a minimum of 12. I think that if you’re not getting at least 12, that you’re not going to have a great CMA. And so oftentimes that means going outside of this subject, subdivision or neighborhood, right. But sample size is way more important than how how a like the properties are, right? So when you’re looking for comps, you can add and it’s not always geographically based. So you have to you know, use your expertise as a realtor, but it’s like when people don’t move to this neighborhood. What What neighborhood do they do they move to and so you’re just going to add subdivisions until you get to the appropriate number of comps and then finally we do close comps. But this is for me, this is my rock solid base. Right? So close comps, there’s nothing more accurate than this is what houses actually sold for. Right? The problem is most realtors will never go back more than three to six months because they say oh well, houses weren’t worth as much, you know, more than six months ago as they are today. Right? But the cool thing is that we just calculated appreciation down to 100%. Right? And so this calculator or bulletproof CMA calculator takes your your average close comps and no matter how far back you search, and I’ve done searches where I went back 48 months to get the right number of comps, right. It’s going to automate typically add the appropriate amount of appreciation down to the very day. Okay? And then it’s gonna take an average of all three of those methods. And then it’s gonna establish a reasonable range of value, low end, average and high end. And then basically, based on the sellers tolerance, how long they are willing to let the house sit on the market, we’ll choose a price based on that methodology based on that reasonable range. Does that make sense? It really does.
D.J. Paris 20:23
How long? Do you anticipate it taking per comp or per CMA to run? You know, what’s the what do you think the timeline is from start to finish?
Chris Jones 20:33
I actually, even in a webinar, it’s called the bulletproof CMA. And I’ll actually halfway through the webinar, say, Okay, I’m gonna do one live. And it takes 15 minutes, and I just literally walk them through a subject property. And a lot of people think I’m just going to continue using the old broken method, because it’s easy, and it’s kind of comfortable. But as long as you have a calculator that’s going to crunch the difficult calculation in the computations for you. The most important thing is being able to understand it, by the way, when you take this into a listing presentation, right? So you mentioned fizz Bo’s, a lot of times they’re overpriced, right? Because they’re gonna go look at the Zestimate, they’re like, Wow, my house is worth that much less listed, right? And so a lot of times overpriced, but you bring this data in, your credibility is through the roof, right? So you’ll be able to show them look, we literally took every method under the sun, these are the three most well known methods for for valuing a house, we took an average of all of them. And here’s your reasonable range of value at max, here’s the high end of where we can list your property. And no questions asked, like, they already know, okay, this guy knows his stuff. Obviously, I’m just an amateur.
D.J. Paris 21:37
I love it. And will this be? Would this be a complimentary tool? Or is this a subscription model.
Chris Jones 21:41
So this is going to be free. And actually, the calculator that I mentioned, is free, right? Now, you just have to go to Nerd sheets.com, which is an older, older app that we built. It’s 100% free, but it’s got all of our calculators in it. But it lets you download a really cool Google Spreadsheet. But we’re going to take that spreadsheet and turn it into a full blown app, it’ll be available at bulletproof cma.com. That’s awesome.
D.J. Paris 22:01
And you know, for our listeners, or viewers who might be thinking, Well, Chris offers all these great tools, you know, for free, what’s in it for him? Well, ultimately, he does have a subscription model for a completely unique service as well. So I really would be remiss without talking about that as well. So Chris, tell us a little bit about, you know, your your premium model.
Chris Jones 22:23
Yeah, so, pipeline Pro Tools is our flagship product. And it is a collection of software. But I don’t like anyone to think of it as software or tools, I prefer to think of it as a marketing engine. Right. So real estate is and you mentioned this in my my bio real estate, I firmly believe is the greatest business on Earth, right? It’s the only business where you can be a hairstylist, yesterday, or nail tickets or or truck driver yesterday, earning maybe $40,000 a year. And tomorrow, you can get your license. And suddenly, uncapped earning potential, I’ve literally seen it where someone goes from being a nail tech to earning $250,000 In real estate, right. And along the way, you build the ultimate talent stack. So you are going to learn contracts and negotiations, you are going to learn finance, you’re going to learn all kinds of math and business, you’re gonna learn sales and marketing, you’re going to learn it. All right. And so just in terms of, you know, in terms of setting you up for different careers, or different roles, there’s nothing better than real estate. So it’s a fantastic business, but every realtor eventually is going to discover the big problem is that getting consistent clients is really freaking hard. And usually it’s easy in the beginning because like your your answers and your cousin doozy then you realize I can’t manufacture more family, right. And so getting consistent clients is really hard. And every realtor is essentially left to their own to build their own marketing engine from scratch, right. And it’s kind of like, you know, if you were I wanted to drive a car, and we had to build an internal combustion engine from scratch just right, but luckily, somebody a long time ago, I don’t know if this Henry Ford or some other dude gets credit for it, but somebody made it a Cloneable process that can be manufactured all over the world, right. And so that’s what we want to do. We want to make good marketing this lines of clients, we want to make it Cloneable. So that any agent, any market can just turn the key and instantly get client after client after client.
D.J. Paris 24:21
So tell us a little bit about exactly what pipeline Pro Tools does. Like what are some of the features and you know, as a comprehensive marketing solution for agents,
Chris Jones 24:29
yeah, let me give you like the 30,000 foot view. So if you were to if you were to join Pro Tools today, what you would do is you would log into your dashboard, the first thing we want to do is figure out your lead number. And I’ll try to describe what that is. So lead number is a number that we assign you. That’s basically you said good prospecting solves all problems, right or prospecting solves all problems. And I 100% agree with that. We’ve analyzed literally 1000s of different businesses and what we are real estate business. What we found is that there’s always one key predictor of what your income will be. Right and it’s the same Whether you’re a lousy agent, or a rockstar agent, whether you’re a new agent or a veteran agent, it doesn’t matter. This is like the great equalizer. And that number is the number of qualified sales leads that you bring into your pipeline every month. Right? And so, first thing we’re gonna do is figure out, Okay, how much do you want to earn in real estate and let’s, let’s work backwards and figuring out how many qualified sales leads you’re gonna have to bring into your business every single month. In order to make that dream a reality. Let’s like break it down to the constituent ingredients, right? So we will go through a really simple process. There’s another calculator, by the way that’s available at Nerd sheets, there’s all kinds of great resources, and they’re all free. But we’re going to basically figure out, okay, you want to earn six figures, let’s break it down. What are the what do we know about your market? What’s the median sale price? What’s your average commission side? What’s your effective company split? And once we figured all that out, we’re going to break it down. And let’s just say you’re dramatically number is like, 42. That’s really common number, okay, we’re gonna say, Okay, we need to, we need to get 42 names and numbers of people that we know are going to be under contract in the next 105 days, which means they’re entering the search phase of the buying cycle. Yeah. So they’re getting close to where they’re actually going to need a realtor. We don’t we don’t believe in like nurturing business for like two plus years, right? It’s good way to go crazy, good way to hate your life as a realtor. But anyway, so you would log in, you would, you would set up your lead number, right, and then someone on our success team is going to hit and these are licensed realtors that actually still do business, and, you know, and use Pro Tools to do it. And they’re gonna hand you what we call playbook. And the playbook is just our terminology for your go to trick so everyone needs a go to trick in real estate to line up clients. Right? And so, in fact, a lot of people found out that their go to trick didn’t work anymore after COVID. So like if you go to Joe’s open houses, that was a punch in the gut, right if you’re going to trick was cold calling expireds. I have a good friend Aaron Witten Steen. You should interview him by the way.
D.J. Paris 26:51
I know Aaron very well. Yeah. Okay, cool. So
Chris Jones 26:54
Aaron, witness team, New York state declared a state of emergency. And nobody could cold call it was illegal to cold call for like over a year. And I would I would I would message them all the time as hey, if they lifted it. Yeah. He said, No, I’m still illegal. And that guy is a Jedi Master at taking expired listings. But suddenly, his go to trick is gone. Okay, yeah, so you need to go to trick and I always recommend that you stack playbooks so that if one of your go to tricks ever stops working, you have plenty of others to fall back on. And so we’re going to hand you a playbook based on your goals and whether you want to be listing focused or buying focused or whatever, I’m gonna hand you a playbook, which is just a simple step by step formula that you can walk through to go in lineup clients so that you can hit your lead number this month, and then you’re gonna go to work. Make sense? Absolutely. And that’s Pro Tools in a nutshell. And it comes with software back end and, and little, you know, lead origination tools so that you can actually capture the phone number, when it’s important, comes with a great website so that you’re never losing somebody just bouncing off the site, we always want to get their name, phone number and email address, we also capture a lot of CMA requests, obviously, since the bulletproof CMA is a big part of our marketing.
D.J. Paris 28:01
Yeah, and it’s such an interesting tool. And we should also mention there’s there is a money back guarantee, which I am such a big fan of, for any real estate technology that they really are putting their, their, their integrity on the line and saying, Hey, we’re giving you what I believe it’s a 60 day trial, or 60 days, not trial, but a 60 day money back guarantee. So really, you know, again, it’s one of those like, what do you have to lose? And what I love too, is that we’re not talking about necessarily long term nurturing, although that certainly is great as well. But that’s not really what you guys focus on. You’re like, how do we capture the faster deals, people that are already out there searching and are in that position of ready to start maybe even making an offer very shortly? So makes makes perfect, perfect sense. So yeah, we should mention the website while people are listening is pipeline pro tools.com. Definitely great to check out. I also wanted to ask you about your Zillow hack, because this is something that I think is a really interesting idea. So you tell us a little bit about generating Zillow leads without buying Zillow leads. Yeah,
Chris Jones 29:10
so every, every realtor is familiar with this frustration. Right? So you, you take a new listing, or maybe you don’t, but you take a new listing, and it goes live on Zillow, and we all you know, you you click it and refresh it and make sure that all the pictures are lined up, right and you’re like so excited because your listing just went online. And then and of course the page is always changing. But then you like scroll down a little bit you’re like through and it’s got like a listing of like five agents that all appear to be for all intents and purposes, they appear to be the listing agent. Sure. Right. And so, obviously Realtor you join any realtor network or facebook group Realtors talk about this phenomena all the time, right? It’s super annoying. And the reason why is because you know Zillow is charging for ad space for that agent. And so what we do is, is whenever we do that Put a listing online and this is Zillow is changing all the time. So sometimes it’s available sometimes not, you just got to check where you are okay? But what we would do is we would edit our Zillow listing with a really simple call to action so that we put ourselves in front of the lead rather than these agents that are paying, you know, the Zillow premier money, right. And it’d be a really simple like, almost hard to see, but it was like right in the perfect spot. And it’d be a simple call to action, something like for a full video tour, text, this unit code, tada, love that. And the cool thing is, is that Zillow doesn’t mind because we’re delivering an amazing value, right? We’re developed, you know, we’re delivering a, you know, just more value. We’re not like saying, Hey, call us for, you know, call us to use this as your realtor, right? Just delivering value. But we always capture a real phone number, because you can’t text from a fake phone number, right up on it. So we catch real phone. And so we thought, how can you make this even better? And how can we teach this strategy to people that don’t have listings of their own? And then one day, it dawned on me, I said, you know, we love fizz bows. And we’ve never really had a great value add to offer to fizz bows. And so we started working on this on this strategy end up working amazing. Well, we got it really dialed in. And basically, the way it works is that so we’ll download a list of fizz bows, I like to use fizz Bonanza to do that. Sure, I’ll call up the first lead. And the important thing about this is that this is highly tactical and surgical. It’s not, it’s not like just sitting on your phone, you know, with the headset, you know, like a geek just like calling for four hours a day, right? This is a very low volume approach. Generally, you can get a win from just making like two to three phone calls, right? And we test this all over the country comes back and they say, Yeah, I only called three people before I got it. Yes. So here’s how it works. So called the Fizbo. And it was, Hey, my name is Chris. I’m a local realtor. And I was wondering if I could come by and take a video of your house. And they’re like, you know, they’re a little stuff, but they
D.J. Paris 31:56
sure because because by the way, you’re the 10th realtor to call them but you’re the first one to offer this particular, you know, sort of thing that that they now have to consider.
Chris Jones 32:05
Right? And they’re like, Well, I’m not a post of video, per se, but I am opposed to realtors, right? Take a video and so they’ll always ask and right. And so we used to say, well, we get out of town buyers all the time, and I like to have a video so I can show them and just saves us a trip and saves you you have an unlock for your house, your house for for someone that’s not really interested. But now everyone has the ultimate excuse, right? COVID most buyers, most sellers don’t want some stranger putting their grubby paws all over everything, right? Sure. Well, you know, with, you know, obviously, with COVID-19 I have some buyers that don’t want to go in and you maybe you don’t want strangers in your house. So just want to take a video. And generally they’ll say, Yeah, I guess I don’t mind. And I always offered to say out, you know, I’ll send my realtor card, you know, just to prove that I am who I say I am. And so you’re protected and all of that. But then they say yeah, I guess I don’t mind. And I said great. I’m gonna get started tomorrow. And here’s the most important part of the strategy that people always overlook. Whenever you say you’re gonna get started tomorrow, do it tomorrow, right? So I know a lot of realtors are a little on the flaky side. They’re like, eventually get to it next week. And by the way, this person will never list their property with you ever. Because you already basically broke your first promise to them, or you show that you’re a flake. Right? So I get started tomorrow. And I go and I take a just take my iPhone, right. So I take my iPhone, I take a couple of snapshots. i When whenever you take videos, make sure you like turn the phone. What is it called? Landscape mode? Yes, yeah, turn it on its side. And I take a bunch of photos and short like 10 to 15 second video clips. And then we have a free app, I’m sure you’ve seen it called listing cake. So listing cake allows anyone to go Listen, kake.com allows you to take these clips and create amazing listing videos in 60 seconds or less. And you can actually do it from your phone. So you can go to listing kake.com from your phone, you can upload them, you can organize them in the order that you want them to appear. I just did this for a listing a couple of weeks ago, organize them the way you want. Choose an overlay just got like your information on it looks super polished, you look like a pro movie producer, even if you know nothing, okay, choose background music, and then download the final cut. And what I do is I call back the next day and say, Hey, I made a video. And I think it came out great. Like, first of all, your house is beautiful. In fact, I’m curious, why are you even selling in the first place? Right? And this is where you know, they’re going to tell you what their motivation is. And it’s not really important what their motivation is, but it is important that you key into so you know, you know, sure, right? So then I say Well, look, the video came out pretty good. Do you want to see it? And of course they’re gonna want to see it. Yeah. Oh, and see you get it. A lot of realtors. Like why would they want to see it? They live there, or they live there. It’s like, it’s like if you took if some photo photographer took photos of your kids playing soccer and then was like, Hey, do you want to see the photos? Of course you want to see and like there’s your baby. Okay, it’s the same with your house. So they say yeah, so look, I’m going to email it over. And by the way I wanted to mention to you
I don’t know if you notice but on Zillow, there’s a bunch of agents listed on your page and I know you’re listed for sale by owner but your informations like all All the way down at the bottom. And trust me, every Phil for sale by owner is like, totally aware of this problem, right? And they’re just as frustrated by it as other agents are and say, Yeah, you know, it really, you know, really, you know, pisses me off or whatever? And so I say, Well look, there’s a, there’s a really simple trick you can use to get in front of the buyer, so that they’re contacting you versus contacting realtors. Is that something you might be interested in? And they say, Well, sure. And so we go to free photo branding.com, we brand it with, you know, like we talked about with the call to action. And we say now we can do it one of two ways, we can either use our text auto responder, so that when somebody texts for a unit, you know, a full video tour, it just automatically sends it over and saves you a bunch of work. Or we could put your information so they’re calling you directly. Now, some people prefer to use ours because it is automated. And then you’re not like being woken up at 3am to text somebody back the video tour. But we’re equally comfortable with either direction, right? 90% of the time they choose to use ours, right? Sure. Now we’re flipping this this for sale by owner listing. So it doesn’t even matter whether they ever list with us or not. Okay, because you guys get the leads, because we get the leads, okay, and generally we’re brilliant, that is brilliant. It’s a steady drip of maybe like two to three leads a week. It’s not, it’s nothing that’s gonna like suddenly make you rich overnight, but it is legit leads. And now we can afford to ask for nothing in return, which is the real secret. So what I do is once a week, I’ll just check in and say, Hey, I just wanted to check in and see how the sale of your sale of your property is going. And this person is super impressed by you because your marketing is on point. Okay, you’re you always keep your promise you do exactly what you’re saying you’re gonna do, and they’ve gotten some amazing value from you. Right. And so when they eventually do get frustrated, which remember 60 to 70% of people do so the first time we did this Tommy was her name was she was the owner of the property. Within two weeks, she actually I didn’t reach out to her for she reached out to me and she said, Chris, we get really frustrated, what would you do if you were in my shoes? And everybody knows that’s like, literally the best listing lead that you can get is when somebody’s pressure, they say what would you do if you’re in my shoes. So the rest of the session, we took the we took the listing, and we got that process super dialed in so that we could teach it as a, you know, a Cloneable strategy?
D.J. Paris 37:11
Wow, I have never, in all I’m just scanning my memory to think if I’ve ever talked to somebody in 11 years of being in this field, who is used for physical. So basically, what you’re doing is creating a virtual open house for fizz bows in a sense, exactly. That’s exactly without ever going to the property other than to take photos without disrupting the seller and trying to convince them that to list with you. And you’re also providing a tremendous amount of value because you’re passing those leads over to the seller as well.
Chris Jones 37:45
Yep, that’s exactly right.
D.J. Paris 37:47
That is that is a really, really insightful smart approach that I suspect has not been done before. So I love that. Because what what those Fizbo owners are getting are a lot of phone calls from realtors, because lots of companies sell those leads, because there’s a huge market for Fizbo leads. And they’re just getting calls saying list with me list with me list with me. I’d like to come by I’d like to drop off paperwork, I’d like to blah, blah, blah. I don’t know that there’s a lot of Fizbo calls that are saying, hey, you know, we have this, I’d love to just shoot a quick video because I get a lot of buyers who aren’t going to be in the area who are going to want to see a tour of this
Chris Jones 38:24
right when in fact, most Fizbo scripts start with a lie. Hey, I have a buyer can I bring them by? Exactly. I can’t believe that in our industry that we like, people wonder why realtor is not the most popular profession in America. That’s why right, because we’re literally trained to liars. Like there’s gurus and coaches out there that teach you to lie to your customers.
D.J. Paris 38:41
Right? Yeah. Yeah, they would do that too, with with with Craigslist leads. So one way to get apartment listings rental listings would be to call people who are posting their own Craigslist leads and start with a lie and say, Hey, I have I have a renter that’s interested in this unit. By the way, are you willing to pay me a commission if I bring you the renter, and they sign a lease blah, blah, blah. Now there’s, there’s a way to save that almost exact same thing. Without that lie. You could say I am working with people who are always looking for places like this. And but there are lots of agents that will just start with the actual lie and just go out well, it’s a little white lie that there’s
Chris Jones 39:18
like a there’s a deeper principle here like, like I’ve never listed rentals or you know, or apartments or condos or anything like that. And so I’ve never used a script like that. But I would almost guarantee if an agent who’s who’s targeting an apartment complex, or a condominium listing, I almost guarantee that if you ask yourself, Okay, what can I do for the seller, that will bring him some value, and ask nothing in return, if they most people aren’t willing to do the work up front. They want to get the listing and then promise them to do the work. Right. But if you were willing to do something upfront that offered amazing value that maybe benefited you in some small way, right. But if you were to if you were to wrack your brain, I guarantee that there’s a strategy there. You got to ask yourself, you know, most Realtors They aren’t willing to do things that don’t scale, right? So everybody wants to put their customers in a, you know, a messenger, chatbot, right, or an email drip sequence or a text sequence, and then they just want to set it and forget it. And the truth is the best marketing is marketing that doesn’t scale where you’re just out there providing value one on one, especially in this business. So
D.J. Paris 40:20
yeah, well, it is still a one to one business, it’s it is still a, you know, people have have built systems to scale by taking some of the interpersonal stuff out of it. And hats off to those companies and individuals and in teams that that have figured that out. But the the highest margin stuff is always going to be one to one, well, not highest margin, sorry, the highest close probability is always going to be one to one. But it’s also it is also difficult, but that but that’s the thing, too, is scaling doesn’t necessarily have to mean volume of activity, it might just mean, you know, the quickness to get to the close. And, and by doing that through more interpersonal ways, which is, which is really your whole system, all of your systems, in fact, your entire business is based around a very similar principle, which is provide value upfront, in this case, to agents, and so that agents can provide value to their clients. And then, you know, over time hope that that, you know, some of those people transfer into premium subscribers, which obviously, you have no problem doing. But it really is one of the the most sort of generous models I’ve seen in the real estate tech space, which I’m sure you already know, because most, most tech companies and real estate just just want to push you immediately into the premium services where as you like, have a whole litany of free products, and you’re still developing free products, because ultimately, that drives up your social proof agents get hooked on your content, which is really not any not dissimilar from what we do on our podcast. I mean, our business model is not that dissimilar, we don’t have a premium product, we have advertisers, advertisers are only going to show up if we have good, you know, good good listeners and viewership numbers, and they’re only going to show up if we provide amazing value. So we’re really doing very, very similar things, you guys have built a much more successful business at it than than my little podcast, but I think it is it is such a great value to the to our listeners and audience and, and just to pull back the curtain just slightly and I said this at the beginning, but we do get calls from and not call so much because we don’t have really have a phone number for the podcast. But we get lots of emails, lots of instant messages from every tech company out there because they want to get in front of our audience and we turned down almost all of them. Chris is a really unique individual who we think is providing so much amazing value that we want to promote his business because we think it does a lot. And so we encourage everyone who is listening to to go to gorilla realty.com Again, Gorilla not spelled like the like the animal but more like guerilla marketing so
Chris Jones 42:58
we don’t do a lot of audio stuff, but it just occurred to me never name your business a homonym right so especially if you’re going to be on podcasts or you’re going to do radio makes it makes it difficult.
D.J. Paris 43:10
I’ll do one even better for you never name your podcast a name that has already been used by about four other podcasts so stupid me discovered that oh like a year and that’s how out of 300 You realized Yeah, yeah, I’m like hey, because I would just tell people search for keeping it real and they’d go which one and I go so and I can’t change it now and the name is dumb anyway I really should change it but but thankfully we’ve risen above all of the other real shows I think they’re all like defunct out and they had nothing to do with real estate anyway. But so I I completely understand but gorilla realty is g u e r i l l a realty.com. And there probably is a gorilla Realty the animal gorilla Realty which is not Chris’s company. So so find the keeping it real podcast that’s, that’s that I am hosting DJ and find gorilla Realty with a Gu e r i l l. A. But Chris, this has been so helpful. And I do want to also mention that we Chris and I, we haven’t figured out exactly what this is going to be. But we do want to offer a discount to the keeping URL podcast listeners and subscribers for the premium service that Chris offers. So we have it for pipeline pro tools.com. And by the way, go to pipeline pro tools.com. Check out their services. What they offer is so incredible. We talked about it a bit on the show. They also have a 60 day money back guarantee. So really, how can you lose, but we’re going to offer some sort of discount. We haven’t figured that out yet. So if you’re listening to this through a podcast app, not live on Facebook at the moment, just look in the show notes, and we’ll have the offer in there and a direct link for it. So, Chris, thank you again and again. Let’s mention Chris has two websites that we want you to visit guerrilla realty.com and also pipeline Pro Tools Calm, there’s tons of free tools here on both websites. So definitely check them out, get hooked on Chris’s content, consider subscribing to their premier service. And again, just think about agents. You know, the hardest part of your business is likely the marketing client acquisition, you’re busy, you know, servicing clients, you’re busy doing all of that step, all of those steps. And that’s probably seven out of the eight hours of your, you know, if you’re, if you’re working eight hours, days, that’s seven hours of your day, find a system that can automate some of this and the things Chris has mentioned in this in this episode, again, it sounds like I’m almost being paid to promote Chris, which I have not, but I am so impressed as a marketer, as somebody who who’s a marketer, I am really, genuinely and authentically impressed with with what you offer, so I could not be bigger supporter of your business. So pipeline pro tools.com is the premium model again, we’ll have some sort of offer. So check out the show notes or just reach out to us and, and we’ll, we’ll send you what that information is. But Chris, thank you so much for being on our show. Really appreciate your time. I think what you’re doing is remarkable. And even the Zillow hack alone, which also is kind of a Fizbo hack to is is just brilliant, and what a smart idea. And anyone can take that and immediately run with it. I’m so on behalf of the audience want to thank Chris, for coming on the show and talking a little bit about these tools, making them available to our audience. And also on behalf of Chris and myself. We want to thank the audience for sticking around listening to the show. Yeah, and we would ask that everyone just do two quick things after visiting guerilla marketing, guerrilla Realty and pipeline pro tools.com. Also tell a friend about our show, think of one other agent that could benefit who’s maybe marketing isn’t as where they want it to be for the real estate business, and send them a link to this episode. Easiest way to do that, just send them over to our website, which is keeping it real pod.com Every episode we’ve ever done is streamable right there. Or if they are a podcast, subscriber to other shows, have them pull up that app search for keeping it real pod, or just keeping it real look for the one that says DJ, that’s me, and hit that subscribe button. And I should also mention our Facebook page, which just today, Facebook and by the way, they come on our show once a month, so I need to ask them about this. But Facebook corporate just today sent us a notice saying all of our episodes are now going to automatically be featured in on our Facebook page. So this is a new thing that Facebook is offering to sort of integrate with podcasts. Yeah, it’s brand new. So go to facebook.com. And I don’t know if it’s live yet on our on our on our page. But it will be if it isn’t today, hopefully in the next week. But facebook.com forward slash keeping it real pot. I mean, we post all of our episodes anyway. But you’ll be able to literally go to a tab in Facebook on our page, and it just has all of our episodes automatically listed there. So yeah, it’s just kind of like I’d never thought about Facebook doing that. And as soon as they got the email I went, Oh, that makes sense. So facebook.com forward slash keeping it real, Chris, thanks again for being on the show. And we will see ya we’ll see everyone on the next episode. Thanks, Chris.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
