914: How 26-Year-Old Realtor Lior Rozhansky Sells $12 Million in Volume Annually

Aaron Amuchastegui: Rockstar Nation, this is Aaron Amuchastegui, and I am back for another episode of the Real Estate Rockstars podcast. Today I get to interview Lior Rozhansky. Lior is from Boston, Massachusetts. He’s done a pre-interview with Curtis. We’ve been looking at all sorts of data. 26-year-old realtor out of Boston, Massachusetts, in his third year of business, that he runs a small team of four agents, we’re going to talk about that. Last year, he personally did 12 million in volume, his team did 21 million, and the unique thing is he also has a $9 million rental portfolio. Again, 26 years old, Lior is really, really crushing it in real estate, and I’m really excited to hear how he got here at such a young age. Lior, thanks for coming.

Lior: Excited to be here, and thanks for having me on here.

Aaron: You’ve been a longtime listener of the Real Estate Rockstars podcast. What is it about our podcast that gets you coming back, listening to more. What do you like about it?

Lior: It’s one of the podcasts I jumped into when I first got licensed. It’s just there’s so much different type of content on the podcast, and it talks about all the different spokes of the business, right from your prospecting to the follow up, building a brand and everything in between. I treat it almost like a mini MBA, in real estate, and I use that to basically launch my business.

Aaron: Yes, we want our podcast to be like a cheap MBA. It’s totally free. We actually have some real estate courses and things like that, but just from listening to the podcast, people can learn so much about what’s out there. One of my favorite things to do is get to interview people that started their career, listening to the Real Estate Rockstars podcast. I get so many people that reach out to me on social media with questions or telling me, “Hey, that was a good episode,” and they’re new in real estate. I always reply back to them and say, “Hey, I can’t wait to get you on the show.”

Today is Lior’s day, and if you are a new listener out there, you add it to your whiteboard, add it your goal list, that you are going to get a ton of volume and come back and get interviewed on the Real Estate Rockstars podcast. Lior’s a unique name. Lior Rozhansky. Where does your name come from?

Lior: It’s actually Israeli. I was born in Israel, and we moved to the States over here when I was nine years old.

Aaron: Did you move to Boston?

Lior: Yes, we moved directly to Boston straight out of Israel.

Aaron: Israeli here, so that is why you have a unique name, and then how did you get into real estate? Why did real estate become the thing?

Lior: Kind of going off of that, for me, it’s a classic immigrant story. We moved over here, parents really, really wanted me to be a doctor, like a lot of immigrants. I ended up going to college, did pre-med, actually submitted my med school apps the year after I graduated, when I was kind of working, and in between job and consulting. Then I started very randomly reading into real financial literacy, real estate, really never had any desire to do any of that, but it grabbed my attention.

Within a year of graduating, I bought my first multifamily, and within a couple days after closing, withdrew my med school apps. Yes, and haven’t looked back since. I ended up partnering with my buyer’s agent who sold me that multifamily, because I was all about investing, but then I had a second thought, and I was like, well, my agent just made a pretty good amount of money. Probably more than what I made in a month, so if I could do that as well, that’s not too bad.

Aaron: You started investing and then you decided you want to become a real estate agent. You had done your four years in college, you were applying to med school, so then you just knew that you were looking for investment property? What what made you think, “Hey, I’m going to go buy this multifamily”?

Lior: It’s funny the year before I bought my property, I actually had a number of buddies who were all talking about going to buy multifamily, and I thought they were just out of their absolute mind, and I told them that. For me it was really random. In between year I just did like everyone does, they do a little research on investing what they can do. Stocks never really appealed to me, but I picked up a book on real estate and it just made sense to me, and ended up kind of pulling the trigger pretty fast. For me, it was a mentality of, “Look, if I’m going broke, I’m 23 years old, what’s the worst case?” I just went for it.

Aaron: I hope that more 20 somethings hear that and listen to it. Right? Now’s the time to swing for the fences, because if you miss, you’ll have plenty more times to change in there. We’ve also had plenty of people say, “Hey, it’s never too late to become a real estate agent.” At 50, you can become a real estate agent, because you’ll get to use all of those different relationships you’ve built throughout your life, but if you’re young, you can take bigger risks, take bigger swings for the fences, and yes, worst case is you lose and you go start something else. How did you come up with the money to buy the first multifamily?

Lior: For me, I was pretty diligent about saving. During the year, I was working consulting, I had a pretty good salary, working very, very long hours. 70, 80 hours per week, but I was able to save pretty diligently. My parents, let me live at home, so I didn’t have to pay any rent. But, yes, I ended up saving enough for a low down payment. I took an FHA loan, and went to go buy my first re-family.

Aaron: That is super, super cool, man. Then you saw the closing statement, you saw that your real estate agent made more money than you made in a month, and you felt like you had done some of that. Then you became a real estate agent. What company do you work for now, and what company did you start working for?

Lior: My buyer’s agent, he was a newer agent, but he was pretty rooted into the investor world as well. He was networking with a lot of investors and larger developers. He actually worked for a small brokerage, which was very multifamily heavy. That’s where I went and that’s where I ended up hanging my license. Even though we don’t work at that company anymore, the owner of that company today is actually our business partner in our investment portfolio, so we have great relationship from there. We worked there, and eventually, we got recruited to some larger firms, based on our numbers, and today, we’re at Compass.

Aaron: Are you still partnered with the same agent you hired at the beginning?

Lior: Yes, he’s still my partner. We’re basically 50-50 on the brokerage side as well as the investment side.

Aaron: Your website says Taylor and Lior, so I’m guessing that’s Taylor then.

Lior: That’s Taylor, yes.

Aaron: That’s cool, man. So he was your agent, you said, “Let’s partner.” You started building a team. Then you get 12 million in volume yourself last year, what’s your average price? How many transactions is that? Tell us about those deals.

Lior: I have those notes with me here. It was about 32 homes-ish last year. Our average price point, average is a little bit of a bad word, because in Boston there’s a huge, huge range. We’ve done deals as low as 300, and our biggest one to date is a $5 million deal we have under contract. Average isn’t great one, but I’d say our median maybe, the median word would probably be somewhere around half a million to 600,000. That’s kind of our bread and butter here.

Aaron: You do a lot of deals between 500,000 and 600,000. You’ve done as small as 200,000 or 300,000 and as high as 5 million. That is a big variation. How many deals did you do your first year in real estate?

Lior: First year was definitely a little slower. Our first year we did about 13.5 million, between the two of us. It was probably around 10 transactions each or something. That first year was definitely a little tougher when we were really trying to figure out what our core competencies were, how we were going to grow the business, et cetera. We still ended up putting pretty good numbers up, I think.

Aaron: How did you do those deals the first year? Did you get them from friends and family? How did you get those? Were they mostly listings, mostly buyers, agents leads?

Lior: Being an investor, I really leveraged that. Our two biggest spokes of business is prospecting, which is the expired and the feasibles, as well as working with investors. What I really thought, when I bought my property, for me it was actually like a gold stamp that I could tell everyone like, “Look, I’ve got a property, I’m an investor.” It’s ‘fake it till you make it’ kind of thing. Yeah. I would tell people all about my experience, and what one of our main spokes of business ended up being the blog, BiggerPockets.

That’s how we ended up connecting with a lot of retail investors, a lot of younger people like myself were trying to break into their first deal, and I would just give them my advice, give them my experiences based on what I knew. I ended up building those relationships over BiggerPockets by providing value. Eventually, they became a really big source of business for us.

Aaron: That’s crazy. That’s a forum. We have had Brandon and David, who are the hosts of the BiggerPockets podcast. We’ve had them on here a couple of times. I’m great friends with them. We’re in GoBundance together. We’ve gone and played in Hawaii and in Texas and all sorts of places. BiggerPockets is actually releasing a new book of ours that we wrote in two or three months. I love what they do over there in their forums and I’ve heard of that before.

People get on there, they post questions. Really, agents listen to this. If you’re looking on how to go find deal, “Hey, I’m going to go provide value.” You went into the BiggerPockets forum and you would go find people in your area, in Boston, that were looking at investments or just anywhere looking for investments? How do you develop relationships on there that turned into deals?

Lior: It’s a great question. I was pretty focused. You can set up keyword alerts and that way you’ll be notified every time a new forum post goes up. I basically set up post for anything that was related to Boston, investing, multifamily. The other thing I did is I literally had a standing reminder, my calendar every single day just go into the forum and see what’s new. Again, you just provide value. I was specific about the types of forums I went after.

If there was a wholesaling one, I wouldn’t really give my two cents there, because that wasn’t really my gist. Every time someone asked, “Hey, I’m thinking of buying my first multifamily or thinking about buying my first condo investment, where should I buy? How should I do it? What kind of financing?” That’s when I would sprinkle in my value and just give as much as I can, give as much detail. What’s crazy is people see that and eventually they just will start reaching out to you.

Aaron: They see it on there, they follow some of your questions and then they reach out and say, “Hey, Lior, I’m trying to buy a multifamily in Boston. You want to help me?”

Lior: It’s crazy, but that’s how it happens, yes. [laughs]

Aaron: That’s fantastic, man. That is great. We’ve talked a lot lately about social media and going out there, but nobody in the last two months has brought up using BiggerPockets forums or other forums out there. Did you use any other forum-type sites to go answer questions for people?

Lior: BiggerPockets is definitely the most well known one, especially your more newbie investor community. That’s where a lot of newer investors go to find their knowledge. That was honestly really the only forum I focused on.

Aaron: They focus on investors, we focus on real estate agents and we try to help real estate agents become investors over here at ‎Real Estate Rockstars. Let’s back up to the world we’re living in right now. What is Boston like? Every city, every state is different. I live in California part of the time, in Austin, Texas part of the time. Very different responses. Right now, Texas was released from shelter-in-place quarantine a couple of weeks ago, maybe even a month ago. People started going back out to restaurants. Just this week, they started making masks mandatory again in a lot of big cities. What is happening out in Boston when it comes to core quarantining and COVID and things like that?

Lior: In terms of quarantine, we just started phase two a couple of weeks ago, where we have restaurants that can see people outside. Actually, today is the first day we can go into the inside of restaurants. We’re definitely progressing, I’d say, but honestly, it really feels like, I think, a lot of people just had enough. [laughs] There’s a lot of people outside, a lot of people walking around now. I think there’s definitely that hunger to get back to normal around the area here.

In terms of the actual real estate market, for us, it was maybe that first month in March, I think it was a little bit of a shell-shock here. There was a lot of people that hit the pause button just because they had no idea what just happened. Honestly, since probably even April, the market’s just been on fire here. In a lot of places the inventories just so low right now and the demand. Boston’s obviously one of the biggest cities around, it’s super economically diverse. There’s just a ton of demand here. That demand is currently overshadowing the supply which is causing an insane market right here.

Aaron: Did you go to school in Boston?

Lior: I did. Actually, I went to Brandeis University. There’s a small school right outside.

Aaron: Yes, Boston has all sorts of universities. They’ve got small ones, they’ve got large ones. It is quite a place when it comes to your school options that are there. We’ve had a few people on lately that really talked about all of the huge changes that are happening around the country right now with race as well. They’ve had a lot of rioting and marches in Sacramento, California, where I’m from.

Also in Austin, Texas, we’ve seen businesses making big changes for that. I think Compass was one of the companies that recommended people going with more black-owned businesses and things like that. What have you seen in Michigan in regards to that? Because Boston is a big city. Has there been a lot of peaceful protesting, things like that? Is that affecting anything in real estate out there?

Lior: In terms of the general, it’s certainly very present here. We had a few nights at the very beginning that took a little bit of a turn from peaceful, but for the most part, it’s obviously been very loud. There’s been a lot of demonstrations for good reasons. Compass definitely did make that shift when they announced that. In terms of the actual real estate market, I think real estate is a little different because it doesn’t really fall into that. For us personally, we’ve worked with all types of vendors that are owned by all different types of people. One of my photographers that we work with is a black-owned business. It’s definitely forefront of mind right now. Everyone’s paying attention to it, trying to do what they can to contribute.

Aaron: Yes. I’m glad you guys are getting closer to business as usual when it comes to real estate and continuing to try to go. One of the guys that we interviewed just a couple of weeks ago said, “It’s really important to acknowledge what’s going on with quarantine, with COVID, with race. Acknowledge it, be there, make sure that your voice is heard, but also the businesses need to do business. We need to work hard to start getting things back to normal.”

Boston has had a huge real estate market, you said. What’s next for Boston real estate? Do you have any predictions about- do you think that your market is going to continue to sustain because the demand is so low? Have you heard about shortages? If people aren’t going back to school in the fall, is that going to affect economics? Any predictions for long term housing market stuff out there?

Lior: I’m a very big believer in Boston. My whole rental portfolio is based very close to the city. In terms of the short-term, there’ve been plenty of announcements of schools saying that they’re going to open doors back for September. That can obviously change, but there’s been some major universities that called that out. Northeastern, which is a massive school. Boston University’s announced that. There’s a few other schools that are still waiting.

I think, overall,, the sentiment here is it’s definitely on the upswing. In terms of the overall outlook, like I said, I think for the long-term value, there’s so much potential. Like you talked about Boston’s incredibly diverse. We have the hospitals, we have biotech, we have pharma, finance, schools. We’re just so diverse that for me, I think any day that I’m not buying property, I’m losing out on future money.

Aaron: That’s great news. How many deals do you have in escrow right now?

Lior: Right now, let’s see, we’ve caught probably about five deals in escrow.

Aaron: Buyers or sellers, Were they deal you’re buying as an investor?

Lior: No, these are just our brokerage escrows, and we’re pretty 50,50. I mean, I’m definitely a little bit more personally heavy on the listing side. My business partner, Taylor, is definitely a little bit more heavy on the buyer side.

Aaron: What would you tell new agents right now, if you’re going to give them advice about how to go crush the market? I mean, you’ve built your business very quickly, the revenue volume that you’re doing is really quickly, especially for being 26 years old, three years in the business, 12 million and 21 million over the last 12 months, what advice would you give somebody to go build their business as quick as they can?

Lior: I think the two big things is, figure out your spokes of business. I mean, it took me a little bit of time to really define that. Once I was able to define like, hey, these are the things that I’m absolutely committed to doing. That’s when you can get super focused and attack it. When I started out, I said, for me, it was working with the retail investors, which was for me through bigger pockets. The other big scope for me was prospect.

I was very prospecting heavy, I was doing probably anywhere from two to four hours of calls every single day, hitting expired fizz bows, circle prospecting. I mean, literally, whatever I could get my hands on, the attitude I took was if I didn’t have anything to do, I would just call. It’s definitely grinding work and it can be grueling but when you don’t really have a database, when you don’t have a brand, I think that’s probably one of the faster ways to develop some book of business.

Then once you get one or two of these, then eventually you’ll be able to learn more. I mean, once we did a lot of retail investors, then we started working a lot with professional investors and developers. That developed into another scope of business, then we also started going towards the branding side, and doing a lot of social media, but you don’t need to figure all of that today. Today, just figure out one or two things that you can absolutely do every single day and that will be enough to get you going.

Aaron: All right, so you had your list of stuff of people you were going to call and you just had it ready. Anytime during any of the days when all of a sudden you had an hour or two, you just say, “All right, I’m going to spend the next hour hitting this list,” and you just had you’re running this, how did you keep track of that list?

Lior: I recently bought REDX, probably within the last year. I didn’t really know about it beforehand, which was probably a mistake. I was doing all of this by hand. I would literally just track it on Excel. I mean, really not a fancy system. I would just every morning download the new Expireds. I’d have some phone lookup software, spend an hour in the morning looking at phone numbers, and then the rest of the day just calling through Expireds, calling to the FSBOs, et cetera.

Aaron: There is lots of fancy software but I also like to point out, you don’t necessarily need that. You go into your MLS, all of your agents have access to MLS, you want to download something. You would download the Expireds, a lot of people have talked about the expired leads, the ones that didn’t sell, the ones that have canceled things like that, you put that in a spreadsheet every day, and you figure out how to call those people and you would just say, “Hey, I’m Lior and you want another shot at this?”

Lior: That’s basically it. I mean, I really did not have a fancy system. The one thing I heard, even when I was listening to the podcast, when I was going through this is the big thing is just consistency, I mean, if you do it every single day, and if you’re diligent about follow up, it’s going to happen. I mean, I can’t tell you the number of times I have sellers. I call them up for the sixth time, six months later be like, “Oh, wow, you’re still calling me? All right, let’s make it.” [chuckles]

It’s just that conversation happens so many times, or they will tell me something like, “Oh, wow, you called me a third time, and I really liked your energy, let’s get it going.” If you just keep hitting it, I mean, you don’t even need to be good at it. It’s the persistence and the volume will get you there.

Aaron: I love that point. You would just continue. It wasn’t necessarily about how good the lead was, or how quick you call them the first time. It’s about the fact that you would call them two or three or six times. You would just keep calling them. Some people say, hey, you have to be first, download it and be first. Really for you is like, no, you just have to be consistent because they’re not going to choose anybody for six months anyway. Even if you’re the 10th guy to call, the day the listing cancels six months later, you’re the only one still calling, you with the deal.

Lior: I can only think of maybe one time where I called him the first day and I got an appointment that day, the listing that day, that happened once and it wasn’t even a good list. [chuckles] Other than that, I think every other single lead is minimum, multiple contacts, at least five usually probably on average, 10 to 15, it would probably take a few months before they’re ready to open up and it’s you got to play that game. I mean, if you’re going to go for the gold every day, that’s a tough game to play, I think.

Aaron: New agents, listen to that part right there. You could be two months in and so frustrated, because you’ve called 100 people a day for two months and you haven’t got that appointment, you haven’t got that deal yet. That’s totally normal. What’s more abnormal is actually if on those first calls you succeed. That follow up is where you get it and really, the reason you get the deal five, six months down the line is because you did the five, six months of work to get there.

Eventually, everybody that you have in the hopper, six months from now you’ve got thousands and thousands of people that you’ve been calling for six months. Your odds just start to go up. I’ve heard a lot about people having really slow growth, and then just huge growth when it takes off and when some of those plans continue to go. You do a lot of listings, your partner does a lot of the buy sides. How do you get new leads on the buy-side?

Lior: Buy-side to this day, I will say we still have to get a fair amount from BiggerPockets. We are not quite as heavy into the forums, as we were a few years ago. I just don’t have the bandwidth for that today, unfortunately. One thing that, Taylor, my business partner, has been amazing at doing is he’s incredible at generating client referrals. When he gets a buyer lead, he absolutely treats the clients just like gold. I do as well. I mean, it sounds basic but that’s our philosophy. We really bend over backward, we’ll deal with a lot of stuff maybe other agents won’t necessarily want to deal with, but we’ll provide absolutely gold client service. He’s actually been blowing it up on the referral side within the last year too as well.

Aaron: Yes. We do a questionnaire before you get on the show. It says if you were on stage, what would the name of your panel be and what item are you putting into our investor toolbox? They’re the same thing. It says, what would your panel be, how to blow up your business working with investors and developers from day one and the item that you’re giving us to put into our investor toolbox and I’m sure we’re midway through this podcast, you guys have probably heard that coming on and reminding you now go to the toolbox, go download it, we get these free stuff for you guys, and they truly are free. Your guide is the ultimate guide on working with investors and developers. Tell me about that. Tell me what they’re going to find if they go download that.

Lior: Like I said, that’s the scope of the business to develop as we started working with a lot of BiggerPockets clients. Eventually, what I realized as I was building broker relationships with people, with agents around me, because I was still looking to purchase property as well. One thing that really clicked into me probably right after year one was I was getting all these leads from, mainly brokers really if I had to be honest.

I mean, obviously, sometimes from my own calling, or sometimes from our own direct mail or something like that, but we were getting so many leads for really good investment deals that maybe didn’t fit my criteria, or maybe I just didn’t have the capabilities of pulling something like that off. What we really started doing is building a really large network of professional investors and professional developers. What I mean by professional investors, it’s not like you’re a person that maybe will buy one house a year or two houses a year.

I mean, this is what these guys do for a living, right? I mean, these guys will crush out 5, 10, 15 houses a month, or they’ll go develop mega, mega projects. We really started focusing on that. Again, being in the investment world, we spoke their language, we understood what they were looking for. We knew how they would look at the numbers and how to run the numbers for them. We really started prioritizing that. I’d say that was probably a good, massive spike in our business, maybe 30%, because we were just generating– We were basically just cashing leads that would cross our desks otherwise, that we wouldn’t really do anything with.

Aaron: You just said a few of those things. Right? You spoke the investor language, so it made a lot of sense. Is there anything else any other tricks or things that you would do or extra value you would provide? I mean, those guys are doing 10 or 15 deals a month, they have agents. They have people that they’ve worked with in the past, how do you convince them to switch to you? What’s the extra stuff that you guys would be bringing?

Lior: Well, let me make this clear. I mean, it could be different other parts of the country here, a lot of professional investors don’t necessarily work exclusively with an agent. It’s not like I actually went to their office and pitch them on being their agent. The way I was actually able to win the business, and the commission for each sale is by deal basis. Here, you really provide value by finding a good deal because the finance, everyone’s got really good financing as everyone can pull off and execute, but it’s really just about finding the right deal with the right numbers.

When I said that I started connecting with brokers, the kind of text I would receive a lot of time is like, “Hey, Lior, I know the seller that’s looking to sell this multifamily. They don’t want to put it on the MLS but if you know someone that would be interested off-market, why don’t you bring them again?” I can look at the deal within two minutes, know if it’s a junker, or maybe there’s something there, and then I know exactly who likes that deal, who likes that area, bring it to them, and I can represent them as the buyer.

Aaron: Okay, so a lot of it is about hustling, and we’ve had a couple of people on lately that have said– Well, one or two guys, in particular, I interviewed maybe two weeks ago, and they talked about to get investors, it really started with the deal. They find the deal first, and then they’d be able to go to people and say, “Hey, I’ve got this deal for you. Do you want it?” That was the way that they were able to convince them. What’s the most difficult part of your business right now? When you think about how everything’s going, you get deals, right now you guys have consistent workflow as you grow. What’s the one thing you’re like, “Man, I wish this was different real estate?”

Lior: The one thing that we’re really putting a lot of attention on right now and that’s my main focus, especially this year, is really on our brand side because like you said, a lot of these sources of business for us are very hustle-based. What stinks is, if you take a day off, your business essentially takes a day off for you. Actually for me, I mean, even this past half a year, I’d say it was my third year in the business.

I started feeling a little bit of that, like, Jesus, it’s a constant workload, and it can get overwhelming. I mean, it’s an intense business between the brokerage and the investing, they’re all hustle muscle. One of the big things I’m really focusing on right now is how do we build an inbound lead machine? Not necessarily something that we have to pay for, like Facebook ads, or internet leads that kind of thing, but really, just how do we become top of mind throughout? For us, it’s been two major components.

It’s been through YouTube, which I know you’ve had a lot of people recently that have talked about YouTube, and I’ve been following a lot of those guys, actually. It’s been YouTube. The other thing for us has been our Facebook groups, so we built that. We’re starting to build out an investor-focused Facebook group, and we have a larger community Facebook group that’s got now about 2,000 members. Again, it’s just a branding game getting our name out there having people be fans of us so that we don’t have to chase business every single day.

Aaron: That Facebook group, is it just your brand, is it how to buy houses in Boston? What’s the theme around your Facebook group?

Lior: It’s a community-based group. That’s nothing like how to buy a home or something like that. My Facebook group is called Boston North living. I’d say probably 90% to 95% of my content is non-real estate on there. It’s just a lot of community updates, activities. I do tons of videos where if I’ll go get a coffee, I’ll do a quick 30 seconds spotlight on the coffee shop. What we started doing recently, I’m really excited for is actually I’m creating like programming on the group. I invited yoga teachers, fitness professionals to like live-stream classes on there.

Again, the whole point of it is just to attract so much attention for that platform because the way actually I view it is, I think it’s even beyond real estate. For me, I think we can grow this out and really create a brand. It won’t only generate real estate leads for us, but it’ll just generate fans, and that I think, will lead to opportunities like opening ancillary businesses up because if someone likes you, you can sell them a house, but you can also sell them insurance alone, contracting services, I mean, you name it.

Aaron: Those organic leads too are pretty great. You get to create some content that becomes evergreen, so there’s a video that you make now that two years from now gets you a deal or five years from now. If I was going to just jump on your bandwagon for a second and try to provide extra value with that– Listeners, if you go back and listen to some of our podcasts over the last six months of the year, we’ve had several people come on and talk about Instagram.

Several people come on about how to build their Facebook and their social media, two different interviews lately of people how to go build YouTube. One thing about how to succeed when it comes to building your brand that Lior talked about earlier on, on how to get those deals is that consistency. The other side of that, too, is if it takes you six months to get that agent, or to get that seller to say, “Hey, you can come to lease my house, or you lease my property,” it’s the same thing with social media.

If you’re going to show up every day, or every week, if you’re going to do YouTube, and you’re going to do videos, you got to do it every week. Whatever your timeline is, but be consistent. That same day, every week for six months before you start seeing the progress. Social media, it’s the same thing. My wife’s social media for five-hour school week, she posts something every day and puts it on there. All of a sudden, she just started blowing up, it went from a little bit to the 1000s of new people coming on and commenting all the time.

It takes that consistency. I think the other thing you’re doing with that local community Facebook group is something that any of you agents out there can do. As long as you’re willing to be consistent and do it, you get to start a page for that neighborhood for that network. If it’s your niche, if it’s a certain gated community that you like, I mean, we just moved into a couple of different neighborhoods, but each of my neighborhoods has its own Facebook community. Like homeowners in that neighborhood are part of that one. There are some bigger things too.

So finding a Facebook group that you’re not just talking about real estate, but it’s providing value. We’re talking about providing value, and then also showing up and being consistent. We have a ton of stuff inside, some previous podcasts from that, from people just trying to grow and be consistent, because real estate really is that like well-rounded thing. You have to spend so much time trying to get new deals. When you’re doing that, you have less time to work on the branding.

When you’re calling Expireds it’s like that’s only going to get you one thing. If you get to work on your evergreen long-term stuff, that’s going to get you more deals over time, but doesn’t pay the bills for six months. How are you going to balance that time right now? When you start your day, are you like, “Hey, I’m doing two hours a day on my branding and I’m going to go two hours on this.” What’s your balance?

Lior: Everything you just said I couldn’t agree with more because I noticed that in my own business. I mean, we started putting a number of deals together from YouTube. When I first opened the channel, I didn’t really get that much. Once I committed to doing two to three videos a week now for almost five, six months. Now, I mean, this past weekend, I got three inquiries off of YouTube, which is crazy. I love it.

Aaron: How long have you been doing YouTube?

Lior: It’s probably been about six months now. Four months where I really have been going steadily at it, putting out two to three videos a week. Now we’re really getting.

Aaron: Four months, two, three videos a week, and that you’re recording, but then now this week, you have three people that are turning into a prospect that may or may not become a client.

Lior: Yes. I’ll tell you this, it’s incredible. The people that will reach out to you. I had someone who reached out to me from Saudi Arabia that was looking to buy an investment property. I had someone reach out from Mexico City looking to buy. I’ve had people not only Boston, not only people moving to Boston for half an hour away but literally, people from all over the world are reaching out, which is crazy.

Aaron: It is a fascinating world that we’re living in right now. My kids don’t even watch TV shows anymore. They watch everything through YouTube. My daughter was talking to one of her friends and she was like, “Hey, did you see this on Jimmy Fallon, and this and this?” And I had no idea they even watched those shows. They’re like, “No, we watch the clips on YouTube,” because every show now has 10-minute best of or the most popular or the viral stuff. The way that people consume now is so different than running a TV ad. I think that’s got to be the most pointless thing now. TV commercials are probably so obsolete compared to the life that we live now.

Lior: Absolutely. It’s the same thing with the Facebook group, too. The Facebook group, I think I’ve probably struggled with more. I’ve been going with that for a year now. It took a really long time for me to really figure out how to run it, and what kind of content people really like to interact with. Now we’re finally starting to see leads come through as well where I actually got a really hot buyer lead that I was working with from this weekend. I’m only 2,000. I know, a couple of brokers across the country that have groups of 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 members and they’re absolutely crushing it.

That’s definitely where I’m trying to take that as well. Then in terms of your original question where you asked like, “How do you balance it?” I think that’s huge. It’s like with Expired, you have to allocate time for it every single day. For me, I’ll probably spend at least an hour or two between all the different social platforms, everything we’ve got going on two or three times a week, budget in an extra hour or two for video editing. Hopefully, one day, I can outsource that, but I’m not quite there yet. It really just comes down to allocation. I’ve got a couple of hours for social use. I still put at least one or two hours of follow-ups every single day where I hop on the phone and then the rest of the time is either spent on investment showing clients, showing listings, whatever it is.

Aaron: Lior, you have an awesome story, man. You moving to the US when you were 10, 16 years ago, you went to college, your parents wanted you to be a doctor and then you decided along the way that real estate was your thing and you have just been off to the races since you got started. It’s very impressive to see how many deals you’ve done, that you’ve built up so much of your real estate portfolio, and you guys are getting to change so many things. Any last pieces of advice that we haven’t talked about that you think our listeners just need to know?

Lior: I’d say two things. I know we harp on this all show long, but I get DMs all the time and questions about this. It’s what we talked about. It’s, “What can you commit to do consistently?” There is no one strategy that’s going to blow it up to you. I’ve tried a lot of stuff, I spent a lot of money on a lot of leads and at the end of the day, it’s really just choosing that one or two, or maybe top three channels that you will commit to that you can learn all about, that you can go all in on. Everything else, honestly, I would just ignore.

It’s not going to help you in your business, it’s just going to be a distraction, another shiny object, definitely choose that. Then my other piece of advice since I just went through this is, for that person that’s in year two, three, four, that’s really grinding the deals out, it’s all that hustle muscle, I do think it is a little bit of a dangerous game to play. Like I said, I went through a little phase where it took over you. It’s a business that it’s great, but it can certainly take over your life very quickly. Just figure out a way not only to generate inbound leads somehow, and usually people do that through branding, but also take some time for yourself. It sounds like a very simple lesson but trust me, it can save you a lot of pain. [laughs]

Aaron: I totally agree, man. If people want to reach out to you, Lior, what is the best way for them to reach out to you to give you some referrals in Boston or get some advice on how to attack their brand?

Lior: I’m all over social. If you guys look me up, I’m Lior Rozhansky on Instagram, Lior Rozhansky, RE, I’m Lior Rozhansky on YouTube. You can go to my personal website, liorrozhansky.com, where I have links to my broker site, my investment site. We have a new multifamily education outreach there too. That’s my main little hub. Or you can go to tailorlior.com, that’s also our broker.

Aaron: Lior is spelled, L-I-O-R. No matter where you guys are getting this from, if you’re on our website, or on YouTube, you’ll see the link to his name below. It is a tough one. It’s like Amuchastegui. Even if I’m looking at it, I might spell it wrong. You guys can see it there in the show notes. We’ll have some of those links and stuff for you. You’ll be able to get his item in our investor toolbox so you guys can go learn more as well. I’m sure I’ll tag him on my social media as this one comes out. Come find us both on social media, talk to us. Hey, Lior, thanks for joining me today. I think that our rockstars are going to be excited about this one.

Lior: I appreciate you having me out here.