893: Give Value and Get the Commission You Deserve with Derek Tye

March 20, 2020
With more agents charging less for the sale of a home, why would sellers opt to work with someone who won’t budge on commission? According to veteran agent and author Derek Tye, the answer is value. If you’re able to communicate and deliver value to clients, you’ll get the commission you deserve. On today’s podcast, Derek shares how he wins listings without cutting commissions and why his clients are always happy when the time comes to close. Plus, he offers advice for new and experienced agents on running a real estate business, tips on building a team, and more.
Derek2 Listen to today’s show and learn:
  • About Derek [1:37]
  • About Derek’s books and the true value of wealth [5:52]
  • Derek’s sales and team standards [17:35]
  • The power of systems [20:43]
  • Derek’s best sources of business today [23:34]
  • Recommended real estate software [27:31]
  • What Derek learned from the 2008 financial crisis [29:11]
  • Derek’s advice for new real estate agents [32:00]
  • Derek’s daily schedule [35:34]
  • How to break through your goals.
  • Plus so much more.
Derek Tye Derek Tye is primarily known for being a successful real estate agent and real estate business owner in the Cincinnati Ohio area. He has also written a book, The Lord’s Prayer For Entrepreneurs, helped found and invest in a Keller Williams Realty Franchise, and owns multiple short term rental homes with his wife Jessica. After graduating Northern Kentucky University with a bachelors degree in Business in 1998 he pursued experience and growth in the corporate world through positions at Hasbro, Cincinnati Bell, and US Bank. In 2004, he started a career in the real estate business. From 2004 to 2019 Derek and his team, The Tye Group Realtors, has sold over 1,350 homes. They are a part of Keller Williams Seven Hills Realty in Cincinnati Ohio. His personal mission is to “build, inspire and love people to live up to their God-given calling and live life to the fullest.” Related Links and Resources: Thanks for Rocking Out Thank you for tuning in to Pat Hiban Interviews Real Estate Rockstars, we appreciate you! To get more Rockstar content sent directly to your device as it becomes available, subscribe on iTunes or StitcherReviews on iTunes are extremely helpful and appreciated! We read each and every one of them, please feel free to leave your email so that we can personally reach out and say thanks! Have any questions? Tweet meFacebook me and ask Pat anything. Don’t forget to head on over to Bare Naked Agent for Pat’s answers, and advice. Thank you Rockstar Nation, and keep rockin!

Adam Roach: Real Estate Rockstar Nation welcome back to another fantastic episode, I’m your host today Adam Roach and boy do we have someone here that deserves the title- Rockstar. Gang let me introduce you to Derek Tye. Derek Tye is out of Cincinnati, Ohio. He’s written two books, one to be launched here in the next couple of days, I do believe. Over 1400 transactions this guy has. I’m super excited to have him on the podcast today because he’s going to bring you a wealth of rockstar information. Derek, welcome to the show why don’t you come on in and tell us what happened? You were born and then what happened?

Derek Tye: Thanks, Adam. Yes, my story is kind of fun. My parents were actually just normal middle class, worked normal jobs. We were kind of the steady-Eddie kind of people. My mom had a job in an engineering firm as a secretary. My dad was a school teacher. He ended up getting disabled, wasn’t able to work full time and get benefits so my mom became the bread-winner in our family. Early on I saw her driving 45 minutes each way to work every day. She wanted to be a stay-at-home mom so that really showed me how disciplined she was to make sacrifices for the family. Fast forward a few years my dad’s giving me career advices like, “Don’t get into sales and don’t become an entrepreneur,” as he had had some major failings in those areas and so what did I ended up doing here years later? Sales and Entrepreneurship. What can I say?

Roach: Yes so what I’m hearing you say is your mom showed you how to be a hard-worker and your dad told you what not to do but you didn’t follow that right?

Tye: Exactly, and my dad was the most generous guy in the world. He died about 20 years ago but he left me with some- he had a huge heart for people. I remember once he actually- it’s kind of a crazy side story for a beginning intro but he actually picked up this homeless guy once and I was sitting in the backseat of the car with one of my friends and we were on the way to go get dinner or something and he literally throws this guy in the backseat with us and he took him to dinner with us. The guy smelled so bad [laugh] and I remember to this day what the guy smelled like. We didn’t have a lot of money ourselves and I’m thinking my dad like “Do we have enough money to buy this guy’s dinner too?” Years and years later one of my friends who was actually in that car that day he’s like, “Do you remember that day, when your dad picked up that homeless guy?” I was like “Yes.” He goes “that was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in my entire life”

Roach: That’s really really cool [crosstalk]

Tye: That was stuck with him all his life you know.

Roach: That’s incredible. It sounds like you got a little bit of both. You got your hard-work and drive from your mom and you got your big old heart from your dad?

Tye: Exactly. I got married really young. I was 20, my wife was 18. We bought our first house a month before we got married. This was back in 1996. We’ve been married for over 23 years now. We have five kids and a big part of my story is time blocking out. Being an entrepreneur, a real estate agent, book writing, and all those things but still having time for my wife and kids. I’m home for dinner every night at 6 O’Clock, rarely work on the weekends. I’ve made that a big priority of my life.

Roach: Wow, that’s incredible. Hold on, let me make sure I heard you right. Five kids; married for 23 years; have done over 1400 transactions; have written two books; have your own podcast; your wife has a podcast, could you guys fit anything else into your worlds?

Tye: Yes, we have 80 animals too.

Roach: [laughs] 80 animals? Are you serious?

Tye: Yes I’m serious. Yes. We have a mini hobby-farm and one of my daughters, we adopted from China and she has special needs and one of the things we realized is that there wasn’t any therapy for kids like her. She has a really rare syndrome and she needs a lot of attention. My wife and I decided to sell our suburban home in Montgomery Suburb which is kind of a nice upscale suburb here in Cincinnati. We downsized into a farmhouse with a lot of acreage and land and we had this old barn on the property so we filled it up with 80 animals. I think we have like 86 animals right now or so.

Roach: Now, here’s something silly and fun, do they all have names?

Tye: Yes. Well, a lot of them are poultry so we have like 30 chickens. The kids do name them and then they die, and then they get sad then they name the next one; and then they die but we have chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, alpacas, horses, dogs, cats, bunnies, oh my goodness I’m going to forget some animals, but yes they all collectively add up to into this 80-something range right now.

Roach: That’s incredible. Well, let’s dive into some business real quick, and before we actually get into Real Estate Rockstars section, so before the show you told me you’ve written two books. One of them called the Lord’s Prayer for Entrepreneurs, tell us about that book.

Tye: Basically my faith journey, and I’ve been a Christian my whole life, but I could never reconcile like, “Hey I really want to be an entrepreneur. I want to go out and make an impact on the world through business.” I really want to be an excellent Christian but I also wanted to be an excellent business owner. I wanted to succeed at a higher level and be wealthy but all the traditional Christian messages I’ve heard in Churches are kind of like, “it’s sin to be wealthy.” It’s like “The bad guys are the rich guys.” You watch every single movie, the bad guy is either- he wants to take over the world or he’s a business owner. Every single bad guy, right? You kind of get those indoctrinations in your system. I spent a couple of years researching and reading the bible and trying to figure out, ‘Is it really bad to be wealthy?’.

What about Solomon? What about Abraham? What about these guys? That book in summary is a walk-through the lord’s prayer where Jesus, who’s the wisest man that’s ever walked the earth. It actually goes through a specific prayer that you’re supposed to pray to connect with God, and then there is what God revealed to me in a kind of, I feel it was a divine revelation, is step-by-step in that prayer actually is kind of like a business outline. If you’re going to be business owner and you actually follow the things– whether you’re a Christian or whether you’re not, whether you’re a person of faith or whether you’re not, I don’t want you to be turned off by this conversation.

Feel like there’s something in wisdom. If you truly are a wisdom seeker, some people explore all world religions and all kind of different things. The point is find wise people, learn something from those people and then apply that to your life. I feel like that’s something in this world today that we need to see more of.

Roach: What an incredible story there. Find wise people and apply it into your life. I loved what you said- is it really bad to be wealthy? As you wrote this book- how long has this book been out?

Tye: It’s been out since September of 2019.

Roach: Got you. How do answer that question now?

Tye: That’s a great question. Here’s what I’ve reconciled okay. Reconciliation is a good thing, right? When you have a problem you want to wrestle with it. You want to read about it, you want to study with other people. You want to find wise mentors. A conclusion of that today– now I’m always on a journey just like you are. You’re always on a knowledge journey, a wisdom journey. Today my revelation is this, and through the book, it is, okay so if I asked you, Adam, I said, “How much value do you want to add to this world? Do you have an amount? What would you say?”

Roach: Well, so through our company, I love recruiting, we want to recruit a 100 million people.

Tye: Okay so you have a big vision all right. Huge vision, right? What if I said to the average person on the street, “Do you want to limit the amount of value you’re going to create in the world?” What would they say?

Roach: They will say no.

Tye: No. They want to have unlimited value right? No one wants to cap how much value they’re going to put into the world. Let me challenge you with this. There is a biblical principle that says, “Money follows value”. Here’s the point of that- if we can create massive value to people around us- whether that’s a client, whether that is a vendor, whether that is an employee, whether that is a family member, what’s going to happen is we create massive value, guess what follows that?

Roach: Money.

Tye: Yes. Money. Influence. Success. For us to say the result of what I just said, which is, adding massive value, is bad then we’d have to say creating value is bad. We can’t have one without the other. Here’s another thing, I’ll give you an example. We own five short-term luxury vacation rental properties. That’s our investments that we have right now. I think you and your wife are also doing the same thing, right?

Roach: Yes.

Tye: Let me ask you this- if someone comes to one of my properties, I’m creating a five-star experience for this person. Literally my wife is a hospitality queen. Her gift– from God is she is a great hospitality person. She’s setting iron masks up. She’s giving them candies on their pillow, nonchocolate, by the way, so they don’t know, and she is setting them up breakfast, the best coffee filters, the best coffee, granite counters, high-end mugs, and decorations from the town that we live in. When people walk in the door, the minimum price for one of our properties is $450 a night for one night, plus a $250 cleaning fee.

We have to prove massive value to these people and we’re still getting people that say, if I could give you 10 stars out of five, I would. Let me ask you this. If I said to you, “Hey, I’m charging $600, $700 for a one-night, stay at a property. Is that a good value?” You would say, “Well, I don’t know. It depends.” If I said, “Here’s what I provide. It’s a one-of-a-kind experience in a log cabin in a town where there’s not a lot of hotels and you get a view of a long view of the Valley and you’re getting all these extra things.” Now, is that a good value?

Roach: Absolutely. Sure

Tye: Here’s the point in all this, if we are providing value to other people in commerce and in a free exchange, I’m not forcing anyone to rent my property. I’m not going and grabbing people on the streets, holding them at gunpoint, and saying, “You have to spend $700 here.” They’re on their own free will doing that. They’re leaving with a happy smile, face a memory that will never go away, and in their mindset, “I want to come back here.” I have provided them value. When people say, “I’m going to give back, I want to give back.”The connotation is, I took. See where the problem with that is? When I have to stop myself because I’ve been saying that my whole life until I learned this principle. I always say, “Well, I want to give back someday. I’m going to give back to this charity. I’m going to give back to my community.” The connotation is, is I took something.

One of the philosophers that I love, he’s a modern-day philosopher. His name is Daniel Lapin. He is a Jewish rabbi, not a Christian Guy. I’m not a Jewish person, but I’ve learned so much from this guy. He wrote two books. I have both of these books highlighted in there as must-reads. The first book is Thou Shall Prosper. The second book is called Business Secrets from the Bible. What he does is he basically outlines this philosophy in such eloquent detail both the sinister part of unchecked capitalism, where it’s all about the money and that’s it, and profits and you can see some of that in big pharma and big food and some of these other things. Then you have the responsible capitalism where they’re putting people first, but yet the profits still come.

He does the best job I’ve seen of saying if we provide value to people, the money comes, and then you don’t have to worry about giving back because honestly, the employees that are in my organization, I don’t have to give back to them. They’re receiving from me, they’re receiving wisdom, they’re receiving guidance, they’re receiving a job. I’m helping them pay their bills. They’re there with their own freewill also. We have to get over the mindset in real estate businesses this way, too. If I go for a listing appointment, people feel guilty charging 6% or 7% or 10% or whatever the number is in your community. I’ve charged 20% before. Guess what? That guy gave me the biggest smile at the closing table that you’d ever seen. Was it about the percentage? Nope, it was about the value. I charged him 20% commission and he was the happiest guy I’ve ever seen at a closing table.

Roach: I know I’m supposed to be the host here, but I’m thinking I’m taking more notes just listening to you. I am driving this podcast. This isn’t good, incredible Derek way to go. All of that came from the question of, tell us about your book, Lord’s Prayer for Entrepreneurs.”That was incredible. Real quick, before we go to your next book, where can one get that book?

Tye: If you go to derektye.com, all my books, my short-term rental properties the link to my Tye Group Team here in Cincinnati, my wife’s podcast, I put it all in one. I learned this from another, a famous entrepreneur, but you go to his website page and it’s just a list of businesses with pictures and descriptions. I was like, that’s genius and that became one of my vision board things is to have a website someday with all my companies on it. Then I put it together and it’s for real now. It’s like a visualization that’s actually come true.

Roach: That’s really cool. It’s Derek and the last name Tye, tye.com, right?

Tye: Correct.

Aaron: Real estate rock stars, this is Aaron Amuchastegui. As you know, when you’ve been hearing these episodes, so many of our guests give us lots of free gifts and share the tools they’ve been using to become successful. We’ve got free real estate tools, scripts, eBooks, sparking materials, and more. We keep track of everything in our vault, and it’s updated with new items each and every week. If you want to access that stuff, it’s totally free for being a listener. All you have to do is go to agentsuccesstoolbox.com, agentsuccesstoolbox.com and get your free gifts now.

Rockstars, this is Aaron. Hey, I wanted to talk to you about something that maybe you haven’t been thinking about yet. Everybody has home insurance. Most of us, we get that home insurance as soon as we buy our house and we never look at it again, it’s automatically paid for as part of our mortgage, but maybe that’s something that we should look at again. There’s never a bad time to save money, but now more than ever finding smart ways to put some cash back in your pocket can make a big difference. One way to do that is simply to save on the things you already pay for. I’m talking about home insurance. If you own a home reshaping your home insurance rates with Policy Genius could save a good chunk of change. The best part is you barely have to lift a finger to do it. Head over to policygenius.com, you answer a few questions about yourself, about your property.

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The owner cartoon, Policy Genius will compare your home and auto policies across different insurers all at the same time, they can mix and match. They say average customers say customers save on average $1,127 per year doing just that. Here’s what you got to do. If you’d like to put a little cash back in your pocket right now, see how much you can say by reshaping your home insurance rates at policygenius.com.

Roach: Okay. Let’s transition now. Tell us about this new book that’s coming out. I think you said in a couple of days, or maybe.

Tye: Yes. When this podcast goes out, it’ll probably be live. So I’m so excited about this book. I have Linda McKissick, Myra Oliver, Sue Parish, Jeff Lewis, Ricky Cane I’ve, I’ve interviewed a bunch of people. I’ve watched their content over the years. I’ve gone to all the Keller Williams events, the realtor events, National Association of Realtors, local board stuff, read every real estate book that I could get my hands on. I thought, what if I could consolidate 16 years of my knowledge and wisdom in the real estate business, coupled with all these people’s infinite knowledge, Gary Keller, everybody else. What if I could put it into seven levers?

Seven things as a real estate agent, if you do these things, they’re going to create leverage in your life. Most real estate agents understand leverage, or if they don’t actually implement it. That’s the whole thesis of this book is. If you can focus on these seven things, it is literally a blueprint for success in breaking through your next level of real estate sales.

Roach: That would be incredible. It’s called The Seven Levers of Success in Selling Real Estate, right?

Tye: That is perfect. Yes.

Roach: Excellent. Where can they go find it when it is launched?

Tye: Same website, derektye.com. I’ve got links to everything there.

Roach: That’s incredible. Well, Hey, what an incredible intro there. I don’t know how long we’ve been going, but I’m ready to keep going into this. I will tell about your– listen, there’s huge what we just heard. This is real estate rock stars. What we just heard was Derek Tye being a whole life millionaire rock stars what I just heard there from his entrepreneur is to write books and also from a Christian base and then also defining, is it really bad to be wealthy? What an incredible intro way to go man, way to go. Let’s dive into some of your real estate stuff and wouldn’t get into that as we call it here on real estate rock stars, the nitty-gritty. Let’s get down to it. How many houses have you sold in the last 12 months? What’s the volume gross commission, profit margin? Tell us all about that.

Tye: I have my worst year in six years last year. I only sold 101 houses,

Roach: 101 houses. Now let me back up real quick. Do you have a team? Is it just you? Tell us about that.

Tye: It’s a team. I’ve had as many as seven agents at one time. It was the peak of our, our real estate team. As of last week, I was down to one real estate agent on the team plus me plus our operations manager. We went all the way back to zero, almost, started with our foundations, and then we’ve made two real estate agent hires this week for team agents.

Roach: Would it be fair to say you blew your team up?

Tye: Yes, basically I, with as much respect as possible to the people that were there that may be listening to this, we had a little come to Jesus moments where we just had to say, “You know what? This is what I’m expecting every day from a discipline, from being in our office every day 9 to 11, making lead generation calls. This is how many deals we need to see every month.” After a year of those performance standards not being held, I feel like. Gary Keller says something, he says standards without consequences is merely suggestions.

Roach: Correct.

Tye: That was me. To be honest with you, I was weak. As I started focusing on some of these scaling things I want to do, writing books, being on podcasts, starting my own podcast. Over the last year, I’ve really learned that I would really like to scale up my influencer part of my life. I’ve done the 16 years and I don’t feel like I need to be in the trenches at kitchen tables anymore. I looked around me and I said, “Okay, how can I build a scalable enterprise going forward to get from a level five real estate agent to a level six where I no longer am doing the day-to-day kitchen table, door knocking, et cetera.” There’s nothing wrong with that, but after 16 years I feel like God’s called me to a new season. I’m my biggest enemy right now.

Roach: Let’s take a pause just for a second with the nitty-gritty because I coach a ton of agents. I coach a bunch of leadership people and they– Let me share this to our audience. There will come a point in time when you’re building a team where you need to, we’ll call it to blow it up, but you need to restructure, you need to really go in and inspect what you expect, and what we just heard from Derek was he did that and he shared that he maybe didn’t blow it up soon enough. Right?

Tye: You’re right.

Roach: If you could go back, what, what would be one thing you would change as it relates to blowing it up or restructuring? Again, setting the expectations that are measurable and holding people accountable to that. What would you do differently?

Tye: I’d say these daily standards and weekly standards and some an automated process to make that happen, where people- I think the more times we have to touch something, the less likely we are to keep it consistently executed. For example, if we can set up things that are, and this is in my book too, we talk about systems and tools. When you have a system in place, the system should do most of the heavy lifting for you. That’s what a lever does, right? The lever, if you think about a log and a piece of wood and you’re lifting something up the lever does the work. In people management, we have to set up systems where people can self-select themselves out of a system too. If they see that they’re no longer meeting standards, it’s not even-

These coaching conversations as you know become a lot easier when we agree on everything upfront, we know what the standards are. We know what the system is, and then when we know as a person being coached that we’re not hitting them, the questions are really simple. It’s like, “Hey, how are you doing right now?” “Well, I don’t know.” “Well, let’s talk about how many sales did you hit this month?” “Not enough.” “Okay. Well, how many appointments did you go on?” “Not enough.” “How many calls did you make?” “Not enough.” There’s always a root problem. I think to answer your question, hopefully, in a shortest way possible, you have to set up a system or checklist or some a way to keep people accountable so that they can do some of the self-regulating on their own.

Roach: Got you. Yes, and I had a coach one time tell me that when you set expectations that are measurable and then you measure them more often than not that expectation removes all the emotion from the conversation.

Tye: That’s a perfect summary because it’s a very unemotional– I’m an emotional guy, cried at Disney movies and everything else.

[laughter]

I got five kids, my little girls get me if I start talking about them, but the thing is, is that it’s an unemotional conversation. If you’re just saying, “Hey, did you meet the standards or not? Why didn’t you? Okay, great. What are you going to do about it? Are you willing to make this commitment?” As you know as a coach, if you can stay in that coaching lane, then that’s great, and honestly, I’ve realized I’m not a good coach. I’m more of a group coach and more of a consultant. If you come to me, I can say here’s all the five things that are wrong with what you just said, but that’s not coaching. Coaching is drawing it out of the other person, and to me, it’s not built that way. I’m more of a teacher than I am a coach.

Roach: Got you. Okay, good. Again, weekly standards and systems to do the heavy lifting is what you said. Again, setting the expectations so that when you do this on a weekly basis, you can remove all emotion from it. I know a lot of our listeners have been in your boat are currently in or have people that maybe they should be higher on their teams right now, and they’re just emotionally afraid to do it. Thanks for sharing that. Let’s go back. 101 homes, 2019, you said it was one of your lower years. Did you say 29 million?

Tye: Yes, about 29 million.

Roach: Got you. Let’s go to the 101. What was the breakdown of buyers and sellers?

Tye: We’re about 60-40, 60% buyers, 40% listings.

Roach: Got you. Let’s go into some of your sources of, of your business. What’s your number one source for listing leads besides your sphere of influence?

Tye: That keeps changing. 16 years of doing this, it started off as raw internet leads that I got off Google, and back then it was and everything else, Then it turned into Zillow and then it turned into some realtor.com and then I’ve tracked every single transaction. I have 1400 sales in a spreadsheet. I know where every single deal came from, source of business, how much commission we earned. I know everything about the deal, because I’m crazy record-keeper like that, but what I’ve noticed is the return on investment for Zillow went from about 6:1 to 5:1 to 4:1 3:1 to 2:1 to 1:1 with a lender contribution equalling.

Roach: Wow.

Tye: I’m like, we’re losing money on this at this point, because I take the lender’s money seriously like it’s my money. I got rid of Zillow completely. Same thing happened with realtor.com. Went down to zero with them this year. Same thing happened with homes.com and went down to zero with them this year. With Yelp I was spending 3000 to 4,000 a year, went down to zero with them this year. What I’ve found is I’m basically a big fan of Russell Bronson, click funnels, all these guys, and I realized that the direct response marketing is really the where it’s at right now, and content creation. What I did was at the end of last year, I partnered up with a guy in California and we created our own service called marketreadyreport.com. What we did was is we said, well, what’s the number one thing that sellers want to know?

They want to know the value of their home. That’s why they go to Zillow. I’m like, what if we could create an alternative to Zillow where people find our website or we use direct marketing to get them there. We actually created a unique algorithm that only we own that a seller does a 20 question survey and it tells them the market readiness of their home, and it relates to the exact percentage of if their house will sell above-average price per square foot in the neighborhood below or at the norm. We created this system basically to get listing appointments. In 60 days we ended up getting 130 listing leads off of it. That’s been my latest greatest success story there.

Roach: Wait, wait, wait. 60 days, 130 listing appointments

Tye: 130 listing leads.

Roach: Leads.

Tye: Leads, yes. Out of that, we’ve gotten five in-person appointments and we’ve got probably three to four of those that’ll become listings in the next 30 days.

Roach: That’s about a l little less than a 5% conversion rate.

Tye: Which is pretty typical, right?

Roach: Yes, right. It’s good, and it’s yours and it probably doesn’t cost you as much as those supplemental sources of leads does.

Tye: Well, here’s the thing is I’m looking at it too. There’s still 95% of those people that may sell eventually because I believe in the theory that there are no bad leads, there’s just bad timing.

Roach: Sure.

Tye: I nurture my database like crazy. We do a 40 touch program. We do four client events a year. That’s a big part of my book too, is I talk about database and that kind of thing, but once you get them in your system, I can do all kinds of stuff. The first question we ask them is their address before they do anything else. If they give up 50% of the survey, I’ve captured a real seller that’s out there that’s curious about something about their home value.

Roach: Love that, way to go. Love the big brain there. Let’s transition to the buyer side. What’s your number one source of buyer leads?

Tye: Right now it is Sync is what we’ve been- I’ve gotten an abundance of leads off Sync in the last year we’ve probably gotten 40 a week and we’ve probably converted into sales. We started Sync about a year ago. I think we’ve had like five Sync sales. I think it’s more of a long conversion cycle on this.

Roach: Okay. Got you. Let’s go now into the team. I know you’re restructuring the team. You’re rebuilding the team. Talk to us about some teams systems that you’re excited about or you’re excited about.

Tye: I’ve been using Follow Up Boss a really long time. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with them or not, but it’s not the fanciest tool in the world, but I like the way it works and it probably has a lot more features like most of the CRMs do that you would never use. I like it because I’ve gone from Keller Williams to RE/MAX, Keller Williams again, and I’ve worked for a traditional firm before that. As I transferred back and forth between companies, I didn’t have to worry about the CRM that was locked into to the mothership and it was multiple lead sources. We had deals coming in from all those different sources I just mentioned. I was able to put them into one place. I was able to assign them to different buyers agents on my team. When they left the team, I was able to easily transfer them back, and then we can even have an ISA work off of those as well.

Roach: Got you, yes. Follow Up Boss is extremely robust. That’s a great system. Okay. Let’s, let’s transition now to phone apps. What phone app are you most excited about for this year?

Tye: Phone app. Actually the Consumer App for Keller Williams I’m actually pretty excited about that. I haven’t played around with it a lot yet. I know it recently just came out. I wouldn’t say I’m not the bleeding edge adopter of technology. I like to see other people fall on the sword and get bloody and then I’d like to be the next guy in line after that. I’d say that’s probably my biggest hope this year that turns out to be pretty awesome.

Roach: Yes, it’s got definitely got a lot of buzzes, it’s got a lot of momentum, I can definitely say that. I haven’t played much with it either. Okay, let’s go into some, let’s get a little vulnerable here. What failure have you had that you look at today as a successful learning experience?

Tye: I’d say the biggest one, I mean, the most embarrassing would be is an almost complete financial meltdown at the last financial crisis. I’ve been around through these cycles now, at this point. In 2007, I was spending so much cash because I was making it, and it was pretty amazing. The market was great. Everything was up. I built this big house, I built a barn, this is a different property, build a barn, built horse fencing, dug a pond, finished the basement, bought a nice car, and I was doing it all with cash. I was seeing a lot of cash. I thought this is going to be awesome. This is the way the markets always going to be from now on. Then one day, it literally just dried up. I mean, literally just like crickets, and it freaked me the crap out.

I’ll fast forward about three years of pain and suffering and me borrowing off of credit cards and family and trying to keep everything afloat. I sold my house for $250,000 less than what I had into it and it hurt like heck. One big lesson I learned was empathy because I used to do short sales and foreclosures and stuff for people. I’d be like, “How could you ever get yourself in a situation like this? How could you ever not be able to pay your mortgage? How could you not be able to do this or that?” After that– that was one of the most humbling experiences because I went from having nothing to having a lot to having nothing again and being in the hole.

I learned the lesson of just man, I had so much more empathy for clients after that. It just changed the way I really, I was a lot less judgmental, I guess, too. Then what it also taught me is to not have all my eggs in one basket. My wife and I were 100% in on the real estate business as salespeople, we had a team and everything else but literally, that was 100% of our income, right? When I realized that there’s got to be some residual income out there, there’s got to be some other buckets. That’s when we made plans over the next 10 years after that, to buy rental properties. We became an investor in a Keller Williams Market Center. My wife started her own business, and that’s in the nutritional space. She’s had a really great podcast, and then she sells products online, cookbooks, things like that. We really learned to diversify our income at that point as well.

Roach: I just wrote down that my note is diversified. Let’s have fun here, fun question. Let’s go back. You’ve been in the business now 16 years. What advice would you go back and give yourself as a rookie agent, knowing what you know today?

Tye: Well, back, I’d buy stock in Amazon and I would buy some. [chuckles]

Roach: Was that not even around yet?

Tye: I don’t know. That’s a good question. 2004. I guess they probably weren’t, Microsoft, then maybe I’d go back to Microsoft. The Apple stock, that’d be good, too. I’d say today I think the probably the more appropriate question for me would be if I was to tell someone today what to do, because that, I mean, the markets changed a lot because me going back in time would not really help anybody out today, because it was so long ago. I would say, in the Seven levers book, I talk about this too. I actually give a roadmap, a blueprint for a new agent. If you were to start over today– but here are some highlights to that. One of the things I would do is I get really good at content creation. There is a TV remote right in front of you right now if you’re listening to this podcast, and it’s called Facebook, and people watch TV on Facebook, whether you call it TV or not. It’s the new TV.

People are scrolling through, you want to stop the scroll, you’re going to watch something interesting. If you can take advantage of even live videos on Facebook, it notifies all your audience you’re on there. Even after you’ve done recording, it is still there for everyone to see. What it does is it becomes instant vulnerability. You don’t have to be perfect on camera. You don’t have to have the best background and you got to give people value, we talked about this earlier. You can’t be like, “Hey, if you know anyone looking to buy or sell a home, check me out.” It’s got to be something interesting like, “Man, I just walked into this 1982 fully time warp fallacy, can you believe this house has never been updated, it’s got the red shag carpet -” Obviously got to get permission from a seller to do this concept. You get the ideas like that becomes interesting.

It’s fascinating. Like, “Oh my gosh, these people still have the original furniture, the plastic chairs that I grew up with.” You’re looking for a box of a captain crunch in the cupboard here something but you got to be interesting to people, right? If they find value in that, then they’re going to stay tuned into you the next time you might be like, “Hey, this time we’re about to list this historic home here. We’re about– this new condo development downtown everybody’s been asking about, I’m just going to give you an inside preview of what that looks like.” Or, “Hey, I’m going to give you a market update. Did you know you can get a 30 year fixed mortgage rate for under 3% right now?” People like, “What. I saw today, a three-year fixed or three-year arm 1.68%, no closing costs?”

Roach: Yes, let’s put a date and time stamp on that is where it was March 6, 2020, at 111.

Tye: It’s insane. Anyway, I guess that would be my advice to new agents is to get good at just being relevant content creation comes from value and contribution. Don’t hire a buyer’s agent until you’ve– I’d say the first 30 to 40 deals you’re consistently doing a year then you hire your first assistant to help you with transaction management. You know what the five key activities are, right? Lead generation, lead follow-up. going on appointments, negotiating contracts, and doing scripts and role-plays. You got to master your time on those things, and then give your assistant everything else. Once you’ve done that, then you might be talking about a buyer’s agent later. I think people start getting all that out of order.

Roach: That was awesome. The next question was going to be what one piece of advice would you like to give the listeners? I think you just gave him five pieces of advice there, that was really good.

Tye: Well, they got to spend 80% of their time and their workday. I believe in time blocking, this is also in the book is the lever of time. I started with prayers, affirmations in the morning, I speak my affirmations out loud five days a week, every day I go into the office, sometimes I miss here and there. I speak out loud my prayers, I speak out loud my affirmations, I speak out loud my goals. I’ve written goals in every area of my life financially, spiritually, business-wise, real estate-wise, with my family, with my wife. How often I’m going to take her out to dinner, how often I mean, yes I have all these things written out, I speak out my goals, I jump into a two-hour session of generation lead follow up. Then I skip script practice, maybe agents that aren’t masters of scripts would still be doing that a half an hour a day.

I’ve got about all the memorized at this point. Then I jump into lead follow-up and then lunch. The second half of the day is all for me. It’s content creation, networking, going on appointments, negotiating contracts, and try to make that second half of the day. I’m done by six o’clock every day. I try to keep my phone, not on me. Then evenings and weekends I reserved for my family.

Roach: Good, and the animals.

Tye: Actually I don’t really like the animals my wife does. I actually don’t have to do farm work. This was one of our deals we made, the married couple deals. If you want these animals, you got to take care of them. I get to chill out the house and read books and stuff like she’s over there scooping horse poop and stuff. She loves it so.

Roach: That’s cool. Well, hey, this has been an incredible podcast is one that we covered a lot of information here, our listeners got a ton of value here. Go ahead, I want to open this up to you from a promotion standpoint, tell our listeners where to go, where to go get your books, how to learn more about you. This is the commercial time, go for it.

Tye: I love Tim Ferriss the four-hour workweek for our body for so I look at myself as a reporter like him, I’ve got some of my own wisdom and knowledge and tools, but I also love people that can curate knowledge and tools and wisdom. I want people to think about this book is not Derek’s viewpoint on the world. I want them to think about it as I’ve gone out there and talked to the Linda mechanics of the world and the mire all over and read all the Gary Keller books.

I’ve done all the dissecting for you for $15 on Amazon when you buy this book. This should be one of those hacks, I got all this condensed down into seven levers. That’s the sales pitch of the book, which I appreciate the opportunity to give that but honestly, I just want to give what I can of the things I’ve learned in my life to the people that really want to know it. There are some people that listen to this, and they’re like, “Oh, that sounds great.” and they’ll never do anything about it. You and I are tailoring our conversations to the doers of the world. The people that actually going to take action. You got number one, buy the book, number two, read it, which most people don’t even read the books they buy. Three put the things that you read into action, and then I would love to hear about. The fourth thing is someone send me, “Hey, you had this one tip in the book. That’s all I got out of it. Great. Here’s what I did about it.” I would love to hear feedback like that. That would be the most consolidated pitch I can give you there.

Roach: Yes, that was a really good one. Again that’s called the Seven Levers for Success in Selling Real Estate. They can go get that well, probably when his podcast launches and drops on derektyre.com that’s T-Y-E.com right?

Tye: Yes, Derektye.com. Yes.

Roach: Perfectly, great. Real Estate Rockstar listeners this has been Adam Roach and Derek Tye. He has brought you an immense amount of value, he is a real estate rockstar, we are super proud and super blessed to have him on this show. Derek if we invite you back will you come back?

Tye: I would love to.

RoTyeach: Excellent. Okay guys, go check him out at derektye, T-Y-E.com. See you later.

Tye: Thank you

 

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