908: RERR Highlights – The Best Real Estate Podcast Clips of May 2020

Aaron Amuchastegui: Rockstar Nation. This is Aaron Amuchastegui. Hey, I wanted to do a special podcast for you guys today. I’m looking back at May and how many awesome people that we’ve had on the show. We thought we want to try something new and try to jam-pack six or seven episodes into one little 20 or 30-minute episode, so you get the best bits and pieces from each show and see if there’s a guest in there that you want to go back and listen to the whole thing.

I hope you guys like it. It’s just 20 or 30 minutes. You’re going to hear all the best stuff and get an idea of what you might be missing out on if you haven’t heard our May podcast yet. Here we go. All right. Let’s go listen to a few minutes of State Of The Market, number 46, more of coronavirus impact on Real Estate Search Patterns.

Speaker 1: Most of our listeners have heard of Carrot, but for the ones that haven’t tell us what Carrot is and how it came to be.

Trevor Mauch: Leading into, let’s say 2014, which is when Carrot started. I had some other businesses in the past. I really learned how do you attract really, really high-quality prospects online, the best ones. The ones who are the most motivated. They are the highest margin clients. They convert the fastest and the quickest and the easiest. How do you get in front of those people? What I had found was, it was always this one method that works the best for me, that was not a hamster wheel, that didn’t wear me out, that actually built momentum over time. It actually got easier over time and more effective over time and it was evergreen. I would do a marketing piece today and it’ll still be working two, three, four years in advance.

It was always content. I would find out what my prospects are searching for online. I’d find out what problems they have or opportunities they’re looking for. I’d create a good piece of content. I put it on a website that works well to get ranked in Google, and then I’d start to get people landing on it like my ideal clients. I figured out how do you make them convert into a lead, and that all became Carrot in 2014.

Today, we have just shy of 7,000 active real estate agents, active real estate investors that we work with all across the country. Generate just shy of 100,000 leads a month, organic leads is most of them. If you were to search, sell my house fast, or any phrase like that, in any city in the country, you’re probably going to find somewhere between three and eight Carrot sites controlling page one in Google and pretty much every market in the country.

Aaron: Tell us a bit about just what you’ve seen on the buyer side, the sell-side statistics-wise.

Trevor Mauch: The stuff that’s interesting for right now with COVID is this, so this is a screenshot from that pane that you just saw there. This is as of today, this morning, I took this shot. This right here is when the shelter in place or stay-at-home orders hit. You can see immediately there was a little bit of a dip and then the next week a little bit more, and that lasted for a couple of weeks. Right there, as soon as that hit, about a 10% dip in traffic is what we saw.

Aaron: Sorry to interrupt for a second. If you guys are just listening on the podcast, you’ll be able to see these slides on the YouTube page. If you’re one of the few people driving in a car somewhere listening, or just listening to it, so Trevor is showing on the screen sessions that are happening and it’s like there’s one day of the week where a lot of people are searching and then it starts to go down again. It seems like it hits that same day of the week again, and everybody searches. What’s that big day of the week that people are searching?

Trevor Mauch: Monday. Monday and Tuesday are almost always the highest traffic pages on our clients’ websites. Social media traffic currently in the past quarter or so converts about 2%. Now, paid search, just below that 1.86%. Organic search all a 5.34%. Almost three times higher conversion on organic versus paid and social. You can get less traffic, less prospects, but convert more and actually make more money with less work in the long-term by putting content online that ranks well in Google.

If you’re adjusting your content, adjusting your message, building authority, trust and credibility right now in your ads, in your videos, on your homepage of your website, we’re finding that is increasing conversion, while everyone else is just sitting there saying, “I’ll wait this out, and hopefully, my click cost will go back down later.” You guys get content out there, it’s making a difference right now.

Aaron: There was so much good info that Trevor just gave us today. One of the great first points he made was there are more people that are interested in selling their house now, that are actively searching saying, “Hey, I want to sell my house now.” More people doing that today than the day before the COVID outbreak craziness started.

Trevor Mauch: You guys keep tapping in Real Estate Rockstars. Follow everything that they say. It’s an amazing community over there. Thanks, Aaron, for letting me join the guests for a little bit.

Aaron: If you want to go hear the rest of that, go listen to State Of The Market 46.

Aaron: Next, we’re going to have a few minute listen with Episode 903, my interview with Dan Rochon, Three Actions to Take When Facing Adversity.

One of our questions, our pre-show question says if you were on stage for how to succeed, what would the name of that panel be? I thought it was great for what we’re going through right now. Your answer said the three actions to take when facing adversity. Right now the world is facing adversity, what are those three actions?

Dan Rochon: Well, first of all, it’s got to be your mindset. First action is more of a being rather than an action. That’s understanding that, however, we deal with this, it’s up to us. For some of us, we’re anxious. Some of us, we’re scared. Some of us, we’re fearful. That’s okay. I appreciate that. I respect that. Yet, what are you going to do in the face of fear. If you’re experiencing fear, right, now, you have a choice of how you deal with that. You can head into it, or you can be scared from it and take no action. That won’t serve you very well.

First action would be really about how you’re being and how you’re thinking. The second action would be to time block. When you block your time you have discipline in there, you get freedom. I booked an hour with my daughter from 12 to 1 every single day, as I mentioned. Well, guess what? I’m spending that time with my daughter every single day. Now, when I’m at work, I’m a 100% in work, and she knows that she’s not going to bother daddy. That allows for me to be productive during the work hours. The second thing would be time blocking.

The third thing would be take action and take massive action. If you thought you had to take action before in a normal marketplace, you got to take more today. You have to care for the people that you’re reaching out to. Don’t get confused and sit there and say, “It’s all about, hey, I just want to see how you’re doing”, because it is about that and you have to be genuine with that. It’s also about making sure because there are buyers and sellers out there, making sure that you’re not missing those opportunities to be able to help somebody because you’re needed more than ever before.

It is even more vital for you to be able to be available for your buyers and sellers today because a buyer and seller they’re going to be scared in a normal time, they’re going to be– Why is someone buying or selling? It’s because they’re getting divorced, they’re getting married, they’re having kids, they’re getting a new job, they’re getting relocated. Whatever the case that be, they’re going to have that anxiety and now you throw on all these other fears, they definitely need the services of an agent today.

Aaron: If there’s a new agent just getting started right now, what advice would you give them during this time? If somebody is trying to go be a listing agent or trying to be a buyer’s agent. They feel they can’t really do– They can’t go sit at open houses, they can’t go do the normal stuff. Any tips or ideas for a new agent on how they can take advantage of this time?

Dan Rochon: There’s options. You could have a conversation. If you’re a new agent, you may want to talk to a sales team in your organization that’s already bringing in business, that can teach you how to service it. I’ve always believed in sales team. I run a sales team. I’ve always believed that the right sales of organization is something to consider. Now, I say that with a disclaimer because there’s a lot of sales teams out there that are not organized, that don’t have a lead generation department, they don’t have an operations department, and then you as a sales agent should be in the sales department. If you choose not to join a sales team then there’s some inexpensive lead generation techniques like advertising on Facebook. You can get some business right now, you can find some buyers right now for relatively inexpensive.

Aaron: Yes. What are you guys doing for lead gen right now?

Dan: Mostly calling our sphere, or our database, rather. I’ve got a database of about 13,000 people in my database and there’s one or three people in there. There’s either a sphere of influence or there is a real estate agent or there’s somebody that, at one point, contacted the buyer, or the seller.

Aaron: All right. As a reminder, if you liked that little clip and you want to hear the rest of it go listen to Episode 903 with Dan Rochon. All right, here was a few minutes to State of the Markets 47, 2nd week in May Airbnb cuts 25% of their staff. Go listen to a few minutes to this one.

There’s another slide on here that you got over there it says, “Major financial institutions are calling for a V-shaped recovery. How do you feel about that slide?”

Dan: That’s why I’m glad that this slide is backed by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo because I’m not sure, to be honest. These are the big boys and they’re the ones doing the hardcore analysis, and it’s very interesting to note that these four giant institutions are really expecting a V-shaped recovery.

To be clear, V-shaped is a precipitous fall, you hit a point at the bottom and then you do a strong climb out. This is a chart that, I think, that every realtor should have at their fingertips because it comes from independent sources. I like the fact that it doesn’t come from National Association of Realtors, it doesn’t come from the mortgage lending, people that want you to believe that the skies are blue, even if they’re not.

The other thing about this chart, I know, Aaron said it already, but this is a prediction of GDP. This is the entire economy. The big guys think that by quarter four the entire economy will be back to normal, which is pretty astounding.

Aaron: A bigger piece of news. Yesterday I had an email from Airbnb. I’m a super host on Airbnb. You guys have heard me talk about it. I had a special place in my heart out there. They made an announcement that they had to layoff 1900 of their 7500 employees. If you do the calculation that’s 25.01% of their employees, and they said they also know things are going to look a little different, so they’re going to be a more focused company now.

The interesting part about that that I thought was just crazy was, it had this long letter that they sent out where they said, “Here’s what we’re going to do for severance though. Employees in the US will receive 14 weeks of base pay, plus one additional week for every year at Airbnb. Tender will be rounded to the nearest year.” Most of that you could say that’s good news, that’s actually you’re giving somebody four-and-a-half months pay, five months pay and getting them a new job and everything else like, “Wow, how grateful those people are going to be that they worked in a company like Airbnb.”

The other side of this that scares me a little bit is they’re giving away four to five months paid severance, and part of me says, “Hey, if they thought this was going to be a V-shaped recovery, they would just have people work for the next four or five months building out new things and redoing stuff. That’s a lot.” I think in general when people pay multi-month severance is they’re thinking it’s going to take about twice as much to get that back. They think five months from now, it’s not going to be much better, or they would have just kept everybody going and not paid them so much for severance.

If you want to hear the rest of that interview go check out State of The Market 47. All right. Let’s pause for a few minutes now from Episode 904, Kelly Skeval.

Kelly: After I got started and was really having a lot of success and then enjoying it, I said, “I should have started this earlier.” My husband reminded me that earlier when I was younger, when we had just bought our first property, I didn’t have the sphere of influence, I didn’t have the network that I had built over that following seven or eight years. Although, I sometimes think I wish I would have started earlier and I know it would have been beneficial and I would have enjoyed it, I think, I took off so fast because I had spent time cultivating relationships, building a sphere of influence, not knowing how much it would benefit me once I finally became an agent.

Aaron: That is really good advice, too, because there’s people of all ages starting in real estate. Some people are starting when they’re really young and some people are starting as their third or fourth or fifth career, and they could easily get discouraged to say, “I waited too long to get into real estate. I shouldn’t get into real estate,” plus as being able to tell people whatever they’ve done their whole life, the sphere that they’ve grown their whole life, the network they’ve grown their whole life, they can use it now.

What are some things that you’ve learned over the last several years? Do you have any advice for people that for the first time they’re working next to their kids, trying to fit it all in? What advice would you give somebody?

Kelly: Yes. It’s different and it takes an adjustment. My biggest thing is to just give yourself grace. It’s difficult, and it’s an adjustment for everybody. I get up really early before the kids and get what I can done prior to them getting up so that I can spend time with them once they get up. We watch cartoons together every morning, and that’s when I drink my coffee with them. In the busy season, especially, I will often put them to bed. My husband works nights so he’s not home at night so then I put them to bed and go back to work for three or four hours.

I always feed my kids first, too if I want to sit down for a good chunk of time. [chuckles] I don’t know if you guys experienced this but if their bellies are full I can usually get a good 20-minute chunk where I can really bang out some work.

Aaron: That is so funny. It’s such a good point. I haven’t thought about that but you’re right. You get them fed, you get them set and you’re going to [crosstalk] that always slows everybody down, Giving yourself grace is such a great point. My wife and we’ve homeschooled for a long time, we’ve worked from home for a long time, and so many people right now are reaching out to her because of homeschooling and her five-hour school week brand and say like, “Hey, what do we do?” Our biggest thing right now is saying, “Just give yourself some grace. You don’t have to be a perfect teacher, you don’t have to be a perfect anything. It’s all about balancing that relationship right now with your kids and your family.”.

All right, here comes a piece from Episode 905 with Julian Colvart about there’s a key to converting real estate leads.

Julian: Typically I do 150 contacts a week, 600 a month of the social. I only count the voice context, I don’t count social media context. If we were counting the social media contexts it will go from 30 to 70 because I get about 40 contacts on social media because once I wake up from 6:30 to 7:30, all I’m doing is sending out messages.

Aaron: One of the things you said there, Julian, is you are going to focus on the stuff you can control. You said your goal right now isn’t necessarily how many closings you’re going to get, but you can control how many people you call per day. You can control how many DMs you send on social media. You’re saying, ‘Hey instead of setting your goals for what your production’s going to be, you’re just going to set your goals on the things you can control. You’re going to make sure that you talk to people, make sure you make the phone calls, you reach out to people,” and then it’s all going to come out in the wash anyway.

You’re going to reach out to those fisbos, you’re going to call them in the morning and say, “Hey, do you need help selling your house?” I love the statistic you talked about, too, of if they actually meet you, there’s a better chance of getting them to hire you as their agent. How does that phone call go? What is your script for the guys that you called this morning that were the for sale by owners because right now it’s coronavirus time.

Julian: “I see that your house is for sale. You’re selling on your own, I totally respect that. Just wanted to know, would you be open to working with agents that they can bring you a fully qualified buyer at this time.” They say, “Yes, we will” “Okay, I want to be totally transparent. I’m not calling you because I have a buyer. I’m not going to lie to you. I just want to be here in case the house doesn’t sell and serve as the backup plan. I’m going to be in the area tomorrow, previewing homes. I might as well stop by and share some information with you, to cause the home to sales, some market information and real lab up-to-date stats of what’s going on. I have a for sale by owner backup plan that I could share with you as well. Just in case you want to go that route if it makes the most sense for you.” They’ll say, “No” and they give me some reason. I’ll just repeat what they say. They say the exact same thing over again. [laughs] I’d probably do that two or three times and they’re like– I always ask them, “You’re not going to do anything unless it makes sense to you, right? And they’re, “Right.” I’m like, “Okay, well, I’ll be over there. I’d be in that area. I could probably stop by about 2:00 or 3:00 typically, work better for you. Just give me a time and we’ll meet. Right now, it’s going, like, I don’t want to let anybody out in the house at all, unless there are something to offer. I don’t have to come over the house. I can share that through with you over the phone or I would rather as much show it to you so you can have a better understanding of what was going on. Do you have an Instagram or a Facebook? I can call you through there. You can see exactly what I’m talking about.” Almost always, they’d just say, “Yes, sure”

Aaron: Great tips there. Julian. Thanks for coming on the show, especially as an avid listener, that’s listened to a couple hundred of our podcasts. I am excited that you got to come on here today and share with the people out there. Thanks for joining us.

Julian: Like I say, I have, this is a life milestone for me being all here. [chuckles]

Aaron: Awesome. Check it off the bucket list, man. Thanks for showing up.

All right. If you liked that little hip, that was from Julian Colvard. Remember, episode 905 on the Real Estate Rockstars podcast. All right, here was a fun one, State of the Market 48 with BiggerPockets podcast, host David Greene. Are you stuck in a sales slump? There’s some ways to get more real estate business. Go have a listen. We did have somebody email. Last time we were on here, we said, “Hey, if you need help, send us an email.” There was a gal sent me an email just a couple of days ago and she has hit a stopping block. She’s hit a rough patch. It’s been a few months since she’s been able to get a listing. If you were doing really good, but you’ve hit a stopping point like reassess. Have you experienced that much when it comes to real estate?

David Greene: Yes. What I did is in 2017, 2018, I remember listening to Real Estate Rockstars and it hit me. We don’t need to do everything, we hear everyone else say. We got to figure out the things we’re good at and then figure out, “How do I amplify those things?” I just wasn’t going to go door-knocking. I knew that that’s not my thing. Listening to people tell me all the time, go door knocking wasn’t wise. What I did was I just pulled up my Zillow and I looked at my past sales for that year. I made a little spreadsheet and I put in the address, I put in the client’s name and how I met them, that simple.

I went through and I noticed pretty much every single client on that list, I either met them from an open house. They were in my sphere, or they were a referral from another agent that I had met, usually at a marketing thing or a networking event, some people I was speaking, I was teaching people how to flip houses. These agents would meet me there. I realized there’s three places I get leads from. What would happen if I just tripled how often I do those things. If I did three times as many open houses, if I went to three times as many events, and if I talked to my sphere three times, as often as I do right now, that was so simple and scalable and doable, but I didn’t feel overwhelmed. I can’t take action.

Aaron: Two months ago, there was no iBuyers. Now it says Zillow is wanting to come back. The company is bringing on Regina Benjamin, the former US Surgeon General to consult on and develop new safety protocols as it returns to iBuying.

David: I don’t think it’s bad Zillow is doing this, I think, it’s smart that they’re being responsible and they’re looking to how to make people feel safer. I think for the people that are listening, you’re better off to understand that the government can do very little to actually keep you safe from a virus that they can’t control, that this is a part of what happens in the world. We have pandemics like this, where a lot of people get sick and that you’re better off to look at this and say, “Okay, there’s been a shift.”

As agents step ahead and say, “How do people feel and how can I change my marketing strategies or the advice I give people to capitalize on that shift?” This is good for business. When there’s a change in the market, when there’s a change in strategies, it opens up doors for new people. The iBuyers that every agent was talking about for the last two years, “Oh, they’re going to change the industry. They’re stealing all of our business.” They all dropped off the second, the market wasn’t rising. The second that it wasn’t a guarantee that the market’s going to go up, iBuyers dropped out. That’s not really a credible threat to our industry, but we were so worried about it.

Changes like this are good for business in the sense that the big dog, the big company that we feel we can’t compete with, their whole model goes right out the window, as soon as this happens. You heard, I think, Dave Osborne was on your show talking about that. I thought that that was really good. Real estate is always going to be a relationship business. That is your secret weapon. The relationship you have with the client, where you have the opportunity to share information that’s coming out and give them a plan to make them feel better, much like Zillow is trying to do. We can learn from that. We should be doing the same thing in our own businesses.

Aaron: All right. That was just an excerpt from State of the Markets 48 with David Greene. If you liked what he had to say anyway, and you want to hear the rest, go back and listen to that one. This one’s from State of the Market 49. I did with Pat Hiban. He talked about 6 Steps to 7 Figures and the coronavirus impact on commercial real estate. The thing that you said, it was, don’t build from ground zero, get a little bit of a success and then build on that success. [crosstalk]

Pat Hiban: Build up, build up, build up. It doesn’t matter for real estate agent could be you sell a house to a teacher. Well, that should be a success, and then you build from there. You’re like, “Hey, can you post a brochure of the listing in your lunchroom, your teacher’s room?” Or “Can I bring donuts to the teachers?” Or “How can I volunteer at the school?” When you meet another teacher say, “Oh, I sold Sally a house” “Oh, really, you sold Sally a house.” As soon as you sell that second teacher, then you’d be like, “I sold Sally and I sold Margaret a house, you know?” “Oh really? You did”

I did that with cops. I probably sold 30 cops houses and stuff over the years. I always remembered their names. I don’t forget people’s names so easily. I sold so many houses, but I would always remember the cops because that’d be like, “I sold to Officer Thompson, Officer Ledowski, and Officer Schmidt houses, do you know them?” They all know each other. They at least say, “Yes.” It just made it so much easier for them to use me right there. [crosstalk]

Aaron: drop names. They don’t even know and they’re like, “Yes.”

Pat Hiban: Right. It was instant credibility for me. You got to think like that.

Aaron: We actually have the whole course inside Rebus, you could find it on Hiban Digital. It’s about your 6 Steps book. You took your book and then you built this whole course out over it. When you go into your course, do people follow them in order? Do you need to do the one six in order? Is there one that you have a favorite? How did you come up with that?

Pat Hiban: I certainly like the last chapter, invest, because I think that’s how– What enabled me to manifest the lifestyle that I have and it makes me a little bit different than a lot of real estate agents who– A lot of agents set goals and things like that, and track and stuff like that but very few actually get out of the rat race like Robert Kiyosaki talks about. Very few quit or retire, or with any money. Most of them retire with estate and federal tax liens on their house or not much money in the bank, not much investments, things like that.

I think that that makes me a little unique. That it, yes, I was able to do real estate. I was able to succeed at real estate, but I was also able to take those commissions. Reality is I would have never been able to buy any houses or any forms of real estate, if I didn’t use real estate commissions from sales to do it. I didn’t have another job. It was the selling of the real estate that enabled me to buy investments, and then it was the investments that enabled me to stop working and to not have to chase fisbos at an older age, and to be beholden to sellers and buyers, who complained about the same stuff you’ve heard a thousand times over. [laughs]

Aaron: That’s the biggest reason for people to look at your book, to read it, to read your book, and take the course because it talks about how you built this business during time, somewhat similar to what we might see over the next few years. You hustle and you work and you invest. What that really did was put you in a place where right now, a lot of our listeners out there are stressed because they have less listings than they did, or they’re going to have to make some pivots and things like that.

The biggest reason that right now, you’re not doing the podcast anymore. You’re not doing all this other stuff is because you were able to invest your way to a place where now you’re just stable and okay. You can do whatever you want. That invest part is the critical part about saying you don’t have to worry about how to do it.

As a reminder. If you want to go back and do the rest of that episode, go check out State of the Market, number 49 with Pat Hiban. Next step episode 906. This was how to thrive through the next recession with Karen Briscoe.

Most people over the last year before coronavirus happened has said, “Hey, we’re at a peak. Hey, this last forever. The prices have gone up for a long time.” I think what everybody was failing to see was what could cause this. Everybody said, “Hey, we’re at a peak, but nothing’s slowing it down anytime soon.” Did you hear much of that or feel that way?

Karen: Again, I thought it was going to be election-related. If you look back at the last recessions, and it’s interesting, because some people– and I’m not an economist, but some economists say the market was ready for a correction that it found COVID-19 [chuckles] or COVID-19 found it. The market was ready for a correction.

Aaron: It just needed a domino.

Karen: Yes. I would say that if you were going to like, “How do I predict the future?” Well, the past performance is the best indicator of future results, even though your [chuckles] financial advisor will say not to rely on that.

That’s why the muscle memory of looking at what’s happened in last recessions and how long these market cycles last, typically. Really, truly nobody can predict the future but we do have signs and indicators that we can look at.

One of the indicators is that when the market gets completely out of balance one way or the other, I track supply and demand on a quarterly basis for a market area. It was a tale of two markets, so in the upper bracket, there’s plenty of supply and not as much demand. When you get down into the more affordable brackets, there was a lot of demand and not a lot of supply. When you have these scenarios, oftentimes, those are indicators that something’s going to happen in the market to shift it. Just think about how fast it shifted? [chuckles] Oh, my gosh.

Aaron: Do you think we’re going to see a price correction like what we saw in 2001 or you think we’ll see a price correction, like what we saw in 2007, or do you think that within a few months we’ll be bouncing along?

Karen: I don’t feel we had a real estate price correction in a one. One was the .com bust. People were impacted, but they weren’t impacted anywhere near [crosstalk] What we experience in most of these markets is really a tight monetary, cash flow lending guidelines becomes stricter, all that kind of thing which, of course, we’re seeing that again right now. I think it’s really a combination of two. The economic crisis of ’07, ’08, now, that was a housing and financial market crash.

This is going to be an economic crisis, not necessarily a housing crisis. What’s different about this is we don’t have any supply. I say we, most market segments where there’s demand don’t have enough supply. They were already going into that. The difference was in ’07, ’08, ’09 is supply kept increasing, and that’s why tracking the numbers on a quarterly basis, I find to be the best way to know which direction the market’s going.

As a real estate professional, we live into the future of the market. Appraisers look back, but we look into the future, we’re trying to predict where the market’s going. When you’re tracking supply and demand, you can see if it’s getting ready to shift over to either buyer’s market or a seller’s market. What I see signs are, we’ll have less buyers but we also still have less sellers, so I don’t think I see prices going down.

Aaron: Again, if you want to go back and listen to the rest of that one, you’re going to go look for Episode 906, How to Thrive through Next Recession with Karen Briscoe.