AIPIS 31 – Craigslist Secrets with Vince Villegas

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My pleasure to welcome Vince Villegas to the show. He is a real estate practitioner in Lansing, Michigan. But he also has had some very good results with Craigslist. And I know many of you out there are thinking how can I make money on Craigslist? There are so many eyeballs, so much traffic on Craigslist and it's such a well known medium but very few agents have really cracked the code if you will for it. And I read an interesting article about Vince and what he did with it and I'm just anxious to learn more myself.

So.

So Vince, welcome. How are you?

I'm wonderful, thank you Jason.

Well good. It's Good to have you on the show. Tell us about your experience with Craigslist. Or maybe just before you do that, Vince, give us a little bit of background on yourself. How long have you been in the business and what's your specialty?

I have been in the industry and been in the business since 2002 as a licensed real estate agent. However, truly real estate's been my entire life. It's all I've personally ever known actually as a 14 year old, I recall encouraging my mother to get her real estate license and she did. And I actually went and was the manager for her office, if you will. So ultimately it wasn't the right fit for her. So she did get out of the business. But as soon as I turned 18, I got my real estate license and got running and just ran successfully with the business. And when I first entered the business, just like everybody else who gets in the real estate marketplace, you look around and you see what everybody else does and you kind of start following them. So I had a pretty tough yet successful run, working 90 hours a week, kind of killing myself, doing the whole floor time and open house thing and geographical farming and everything else and overall built a pretty successful business. But realized I was truly killing myself here. From the hours I had put on tons of weight, I was losing relationships with friends and family because I was so focused on growing the business and I didn't know any other ways to grow my business. In 2008, my business truly completely fell apart. I had went from selling 56 properties in 2007 to only selling eight by October of 2008. Looked around, thought, what in the world am I going to do? I am not really skilled to do anything else. I've got to make this, maybe I'll go work the line. Since I live here in Lansing, Michigan, we're a pretty big GM town. That was kind of my only other option at that time. So it was right around then that I had stumbled across an agent in my office that had said that he posted an ad on Craigslist and got some pretty good results. And I thought, huh, around that time I knew what Craigslist was. I didn't know how I could really put it to use for my business. And I started posting some ads on Craigslist and got some fairly decent results. Also at that time I started kind of changing the way my business was done. As I looked at how I was growing my business and the time that I was investing in to grow the business and kind of all these other things that really weren't On a strong foundation like relying on open houses and floor time and so on and so forth. To grow my business, I started thinking I really need to focus on truly building a list. In the marketing world, it's focused on growing a list, and the more people you have on your list, the more people you have to market to. Around that time, I started understanding the concepts of building a list. So I kind of changed my overall approach and started changing up the types of ads that I was running. As I said, I had only sold eight houses in 2008, so I was near broke at that time. Craigslist was really the only avenue that I could turn to because the ads were free.

I figured out how to generate a heck of a lot of leads so I could then convert those into clients and start making money again in the industry and in the business.

What kind of clients were you getting off of Craigslist? What were you looking for? Were you looking for buyers, sellers? What was the angle?

Well, with Craigslist, a huge amount of people are buyers and investors. Our focus truly was buyers and investors. And then we had a small portion of the ads designed to attract sellers to us, particularly distressed sellers. But as we really started tweaking the ads and as I started honing in and finding out the niches in my marketplace that people were responding to based on the types of people that were searching Craigslist, it truly was the buyer market and the investor market.

What problems do you have with Craigslist? Maybe this is something to talk about later, but I just thought I'd ask it because I know it's an issue with your ads being flagged and removed. Do you have those kind of problems?

You know, we do every so often. One of the things people have to realize is that Craigslist is truly a community posting board, and it's monitored by your local marketplace and your local community. And you could have somebody on there who maybe is another real estate agent in your town or another investor or what have you in your town who doesn't like the fact that you're now posting on Craigslist and infringing on their territory, if you will. It's very simple for them just to go on and click the flag button and change their IP address and click the flag button, and after two or three clicks, you can be flagged. It's going to happen. And so one of the things that I did was I put together a system to ensure consistent postings on Craigslist in my business. Truly, what I did was just put together several accounts that would allow me to post on Craigslist, kept track of those accounts and started posting each and every single day. We realized that some of them will be ghosted, some of them will be blocked, some of them will be flagged. That's perfectly okay because success is built off of systems. Just because the one from this morning that we posted might have gotten ghosted or flagged or blocked, we still go ahead and post the one this afternoon. And we just keep moving forward and realizing that not everything's going to stick, but the ones that will stick are going to drive business to us.

And how many ads are you posting on Craigslist? I mean for example, I'm looking through, I guess you have a free report and I want you to give out your website and so forth on the show as well. But it's this swipe file report and just in kind of glancing through it, there are morning, afternoon and evening ads. Are you saying place different ads at different times of the day or. Tell me about that. Yeah.

You know, again, I live in Lansing, Michigan. My marketplace is here. We are the capital city of the state. We are also home of Michigan State University and five world headquartered insurance companies. So because of that we have a very big business center. I shouldn't say very big, certainly not like a New York or anything, but we do have a very big business center here. And so when I put together my ads and I tracked my results and found out what were the best times for me to post and such, I really wanted to spread out my ads. Let's just say for instance that I would have went online and posted three or four ads at 6 o' clock in the morning. Well, by time somebody gets to their office, gets a cup of coffee, sits down and I'd love to say that everybody in.

The business world starts work right away. Usually they spend a little bit of time on Craigslist or Facebook or some other site wanting to take advantage of that. It was important that we posted around that 9:15 mark in the morning and we posted two to three ads in the morning. In the afternoon, right after lunch, we posted two to three ads. And then right before the end of the business day, around 4:45, 4:30ish or so, we posted another two to three ads. That way it ensured that we were getting some ads in when we knew that people were searching the site.

So it's really that critical though, huh Vince, that you, I mean, I guess maybe you can explain this what happens on Craigslist. And you know, I use it a little bit but nothing. You're a pro at it, and that's why I'm glad to have you on the show. So when you put your ad on Craigslist, through time, as the ad is posted and new ads are posted, the new ads go up above you. Pretty similar to how the MLS works, right?

Exactly. The way Craigslist works is it's going to take 100 postings on that first page. So a lot of people are very familiar, for instance, with being on that first page of Google, if you will. Well, on Craigslist, you can be on the first page, but it only lasts for a short period of time because as people continue to add new postings and new listings, your ads are going to start to move down and move off, and then eventually you're going to be off that first page. And it's unlikely that people will search to the second, third and fourth pages of Craigslist. It's very important that the people who are looking on Craigslist and the highest number of eyes that are going to Craigslist, it's important that you're on that first page. Which is when in creating this successful Craigslist system, rather than just posting ads as we got a new listing, for instance, this is something I hear on a regular basis is an agent will say, oh, our office auto posts our properties to Craigslist. That's great, that's wonderful. But realize it's only going to go out once. In order to truly be successful at Craigslist, you want to stay on that first page of Craigslist in order to get the highest number of leads that are generated and coming into your office.

Yeah. So it's important to keep posting new stuff all the time then, right? That's what you're saying?

Yes, we do post new content on a regular basis throughout the day.

Okay. And in terms of like the back end, stuff about Craigslist asking for a cell phone number and, you know, I know sometimes when you place an ad, it has to send you a text to know that you're like a real person and you're not using a bunch of different email addresses. Do you have one Craigslist account or are you using multiple accounts to kind of game the system, if you will? And I don't want to say that's a bad thing, but, you know, you got to do what you got to do to get the word out, right?

Sure, Absolutely.

And be innovative. How do you deal with that kind of stuff?

Well, again, to overcome that hurdle, when I first started, I only had one account. And I was realizing that the account was getting blocked and flagged on a very regular basis. And so I thought, well, you know what? I'm going to take advantage of the free email accounts I can get from Google. So.

What do you have, 100 email.

Addresses and 100 accounts.

I've truly become a man of systems. When my business fell apart, I realized it was because I didn't have success systems in place as I have started to. As I rebuilt my business and got it back on strong financial ground, I realized the importance of systems. Now I'm a guy who has systems for systems. It's kind of crazy sometimes, but in order for this to truly work, I realized I had to have a system in place. The way I did it was I just created seven email accounts through Gmail. Very, very. You know, if you were starting, it could be, for instance, Jason Hartman 1. Jason Hartman 2. And as we went through, we just set up those email accounts. And those email accounts, I put on a spreadsheet and tracked it and said, this is the email account for Monday. And then whatever telephone number seven.

I was wondering, why seven? So it's one for each day of the week.

One for each day of the week. So it's very simple. So now, for instance, I know that it's Monday. We.

Log into our email account that has the number one and two it, and that's the one we use for Craigslist. We get online and now we don't have to worry about trying to figure out, okay, did we post this afternoon ad or that evening ad or what have you from what account? It's literally just one account per day.

Good idea. Good idea. Very simple, but brilliantly simple. That's great. So you use a different account for each day of the week.

So on Monday, for example, with the Monday account you call Jason Hartman one, for example, you're posting three ads in the morning, three in the afternoon, and three in the evening on Monday alone. So nine ads a day, right? Correct. And then Craigslist doesn't hear from you on that account for a whole other week.

Exactly.

Okay, cool. How do you manage responses? Because, well, you know, maybe first you want to talk about how many responses you're getting and how your tracking went. But my question after that is going to be, and I'm sort of the king of the compound question, so I apologize, it's going to be when you get all these responses, sometimes you're, I mean, I guess you're putting links to a website in all of the post all of the Ads and all of the postings. But a lot of times people just email you back and then it's like, what are they emailing about? That ads start to get all mixed up and it just gets confusing.

Sure, sure. You know, and this is something that's incredibly important, especially in the real estate community. Agents always believe that first and foremost that they are there to sell the property. And so, you know, Craigslist is littered with property ads. And I certainly post property ads within Craigslist. But I realized that the most thing I can do is generate leads because the more leads that I generate and the more buyers that I can talk to or somebody from my office can talk to, the higher chances we have of being able to convert that person to an actual buyer for not only one of our listings, but one of the properties that's available in the mls. And so the ads that I created as part of our system were ads that were designed in order to get the lead to raise their hand and say, I am a buyer in the marketplace. Because once we've identified buyers in the marketplace, we knew that we could run with them and convert them to an actual buyer client that then we can turn into a buyer for again one of our properties or another property in the mls. Now I certainly do also post property ads in there. However, I give very vague information because I want people to, you know, I want to include a call to action and I want people to actually reach out to us. And so we will include a link that says, you know, for instance, you know, looking for the best deals in the greater Lansing marketplace, click here, they're going to click on that and it's going to go to what I call a lead magnet website rather than a business card website. Now this is something that is kind of foreign in our industry. There's a number of great templated business card websites out there. And a business card website serves its purpose in the real estate marketplace to let your current customers know, look, you are in business, here's your current inventory, here's a telephone number where they can reach you. However, when it comes to Craigslist or lead generation, if you're sending people to what we call a business card website versus a lead magnet website, your success with Craigslist is going to be virtually non existent. Now let me explain a little more about what a lead magnet website is. A lead magnet website is designed to speak to the particular audience they're searching for. So for instance, if I was looking for investors, everything on that website would be geared towards investors. It'd be very limited, very basic information, all pointing to the call to action, which would be for them to include their name, their email address and their telephone number. And then click Submit for either some kind of a Report or the 10 Best Buys in the marketplace or what have you. That way I can capture their lead information.

Okay, so the lead magnet website, how many of those sites do you have for example, at this time?

Tons.

Yeah, like dozens. Hundreds.

No, probably dozens at this point. We're always testing new campaigns, finding out what's working, what's not working in the marketplace. And sometimes we'll put together a script that we think is awesome and then it doesn't convert. So really the key to Internet marketing and the key to marketing not only with Craigslist, but with any other medium out there is to truly test. We do test. We look at the results and then continue to only run the best performing lead magnet sites.

Okay, great. And any recommendations for how you build your lead magnet websites? I mean these are really simple websites. Do you use like a prefab website? I mean there are all kinds of them out there. Godaddy offers website tonight and all these companies offer different things. Or do you have a web designer build them and spend a lot of money?

You know, I, again, when I, when I was down and out and in 2009, I didn't have a lot of money at that time in order to rebuild my business. So I truly used just a very shoestring budget in order to rebuild. I had found a program that's out there and it had video sales pages and they were formatted the way that the Internet marketing industry, if you will, has already proven and tested. That works with a video in the center, a headline at the top and a call to action at the left.

Yeah, and by the way, I want to mention something, Vince, that's what I noticed right away about your lead magnet website. Because I went and I got your free report, which looks great by the way. And it was just like the Internet marketing industry does. I follow that industry for a long time. I'm going to Yannick Silver's event in Washington D.C. next week. And that whole industry has like, you can really tell what their stuff is. Like, like there are formats that they know that works. Whereas the real estate industry. What a joke, man.

Right, exactly, exactly.

These business card websites that just, they don't. Just don't. They have no.

Well, at that same time, that's when I started studying Internet marketing and started understanding exactly what was it about Internet marketing that made some of These individuals in the Internet marketing world, so successful. And I realized if I'm going to be marketing online, I need to understand Internet marketing. Yeah.

Because the real estate customer is no different than the customer for anything else really. They're just a person and they have the same psychology.

Exactly, exactly. Looking at the marketplace and realizing that everybody else in my industry has all these business card websites that really aren't convincing and really aren't doing much of anything. I always cringe when I talk to an agent somewhere in the country. Just recently I was talking to somebody in San Diego. He said he was spending $1,500 a month on Google AdWords driving people to his website.

Oh, that's just crazy. You can just waste money like crazy on pay per click.

Yeah, it's nuts. I said I'd love to see your website. He showed it to me. It was a standard real estate business card website, something he probably got from realtor.com or something. It's not going to convert. You're going to get very few leads and he's completely throw money down the drain. It's sad when I see that. It's sad when I see that agents are just taking the prepackaged pre boxed information that was sold to them by some company and not taking the time to realize if you're going to be marketing online, you need to understand Internet marketing.

Yeah, no question about it. You do. So do you want to tell people what that site is or is that a secret?

The site that we use for our. You can get the site that we use for our lead magnet websites, our video lead magnet websites by going to website.agentmegasuccess.com so that's just website.AgentMeGasUccess.com and you can actually get the site that I use as far as the overall layout and how it's laid out directly from that link. And then I also have a free gift for your listeners which they can get by going to craigslistgiveaway.com and that's that swipe file that you referenced which is going to include nine of the ads that I run. And when they get that swipe file, they'll realize that this is a pretty unique set of ads. It's not your normal ads that you're going to see in the marketplace, but these ads were designed and crafted in order to generate leads in the marketplace.

So@website.agentmegasuccess.com I'm there now and Paul Culligan has got a testimonial on There. That's geared toward real estate agents then, I guess. Huh. I was sort of surprised that it had the word agent in it.

It's truly geared towards Internet marketers, if you will. We've just taken that and had it crafted as a real estate estate website.

Okay, good. Good stuff. Yeah. Okay, great. So do you want to talk about response rates and your tracking? I mean, you've been very good at tracking things specifically and knowing what's producing and what's not. You want to give the listeners some insights on that?

Sure, absolutely. You know, it is important when you're running a business to know your numbers and to track your numbers and also to have an understanding of response rates and conversion rates. And it's also interesting, too, because when you start Internet marketing or online marketing, you are going to generate, if you're doing it correctly, you are going to generate a large number of leads. And that is very important in building your real estate list and in building people that you can work with not only today, but also someday. Now, one of the common problems in the marketplace is. And, you know, I recently switched from Coldwell Banker and moved to Keller Williams. And Keller Williams, for instance, has this whole market leader account. Now, I will proudly say I don't have a market leader account. I have no idea how the market leader works. I've seen other ones in my office, and it's not something I'm really interested in because I'm just focused on those lead magnets and getting leads into my office.

What is the market leader? I don't even know what that is.

It's basically a portal that agents can use to advertise. And what happens is the general public can go and register and then search the MLS directly from their account. Right, right.

In other words, it's the prefab Keller Williams account.

It's the prefab Keller Williams account. Exactly. Where people can go in and register and then start searching for properties. And now the agent who shares the wall with my wall, if you will, directly next to my office, you know, I hear him on a regular basis. You know, he's pulling his hair out. He's getting angered and frustrated with all these buyers that he has. And I, you know, I said, hey, do you have a second? And I pulled him into my office. I said, let me just explain to you something really, really quick. I know that he just launched his whole Internet marketing campaign, and he's getting a number of people to register to his accounts and register to his website. I said, you have to realize that everybody who Registers isn't your client. The only people who's your client are the people you've got signed to a buyer agency contract, the people that are truly loyal to you. That's something that's incredibly important in our marketplace because we all believe as agents that if we've got this person in our web, or if we have them registered on one of our websites, or if their lead came through, that now they're ours and you've got to chase them and follow them. And I did that. I did that from 2002 through 2008. And that's what ran myself ragged, working 90, 100, even 120 hours a week, killing myself in the business was because I was trying to chase everybody, not realizing the importance of building a successful business. Truly was generate the lead, convert them to an appointment, meet with them face to face, decide if you want to do business with them or not, and then service them. And that is it. That's exactly how I transformed my business, was realizing that I'm only going to work with the yeses and the no's will stay on my list and they'll get a monthly newsletter or they'll get something from me, but I'm not going to spend any time with anybody unless they are 100% committed to working with me.

Yeah, sure. And the other part about it is, that's interesting is you said they're not your client until they have a buyer's agency agreement signed. That varies market to market. And most of my real estate experience has been in the socialist republic of California. And it's very uncommon for agents to get buyer agency agreements out there. And I have long promoted this idea to the agents that work for me. But how common is that in Michigan? That's interesting that you mentioned that, because are you doing that on a hundred percent of your buyers or. Or just maybe as an aside, that's kind of an interesting point.

It's very uncommon in the entire marketplace, truly everywhere in the nation. Now, truly, from a legal matter and from a legal fact, we all should have a contract indicating that we're representing the buyer. If you're disclosing any information about the transaction or the sale that could hinder the seller, because as we all know, you are a seller's agent until you've got a buyer agency contract in place. So agents all across the contract country, it really comes down to just their fear of getting somebody to commit to them. It happens everywhere. I see it here in my own marketplace. Agents think I'm nuts sometimes. They say how in the world. Are you able to get people to come in, not only meet with me, sign an agency contract, but I also charge upfront retainers to our clients.

Oh, my gosh. Wow. Tell us. That is awesome that you can do that, man. You're a pro.

Well, it's incredibly important that if I'm going to be loyal to a client.

And customer, they got to be loyal to you. I agree. The client really sort of, sort of shoots themselves in the foot a lot of times because when they make no commitment to the agent, the agent doesn't make any commitment to them. They just think, I might get this one, I might not. They're not going to try very hard. And so that's what happened. Let me just ask you about that. What type of retainer do you get and how long is the buyer agency agreement? How long has the buyer committed to you for?

Yeah, all of our contracts are written for a six month buyer agency. These are our buyer agents. It's a six month agreement. The retainer is $395 upfront. That must be paid at the time when the agreement is signed. And that is to retain our professional services. And they get to view 10 properties with us.

Yeah. Okay. Oh, so what does that mean? Only 10? I mean.

Well, you should say only 10. Yes, that's very important. Because in order for me to be an expert in the industry and for me to truly be able to hand pick and hand deliver to them the best properties that best suit their needs, they have to rely on our professional opinions to be able to appoint them and in a direction that might not be or point them in a direction that is the best for them. And they might be venturing off course, for instance, in the initial evaluation of truly understanding what it is they're looking for, I go to the marketplace and truly look for the best properties that match their needs. Now, we give that to them and we tell them that they must drive by the properties. They must then narrow their list down to the properties that they feel are the most desirable properties in the marketplace. Again, as an industry expert, I'm not going to spend my time as a tech taxi driver driving clients all around town. I certainly don't tell that to my clients face to face. But speaking amongst the industry here, it's very important that we truly understand that we are experts and we have to value our time. Our clients understand and they know that working with us is truly a privilege. I turn the table on that. When I work with customers, I don't interview them. Excuse me, they don't interview me. I interview them. Them to decide if I want to work with them or not. And it's truly, you know, making that mental shift completely changed our business forever.

Sure did. And what is your average price in your market?

Well, here in the Lansing marketplace, the average sales price is currently 102,000. We're up. We're up a couple thousand dollars from last year. My average sales price is $142,000.

And on that buyer agency agreement, what kind of conversion do you get? I suppose a lot of people just say no. You know, I can go next door to the guy who's pulling his hair out in the office next door to you and. Or down the street to the other company. And no one's going to require me to commit to anything or pay any upfront retainer fee. You know, do you hear people say.

That I implemented this policy for myself and for my team in 2009. Since then, we've only had three potential customers that have not agreed to do business with us.

And out of how many did you actually sign up?

Hundreds.

Wow. Now, you know what I call this, Vince? I call this the cappuccino theory of real estate practice, where what you've done is you've created such a big lead machine through your Craigslist, and I assume you have other things you do as well, but we're just talking mainly about Craigslist here. You created such a big lead machine that if someone says no to you, you don't really care because you've got an ample, abundant supply of leads. So it gives you the confidence to do what you know is right for yourself and for your client. I mean, the way the real estate industry works now is so dysfunctional, it's not even funny. I mean, it would be like someone going into. We use marriage as an analogy. Marriage is a great analogy for it. Because think about it. The buyer agency thing is you're saying to the client, look, if I'm going to marry you, you got to marry me. If we're going to be exclusive, let's be exclusive. Whereas the normal deal is is the client gets all the benefits of the marriage, yet makes no commitment to the practitioner. Exactly. And so that's just great. Yeah, I love to hear it. And tell us a little bit about your operation. How big is your staff? I assume you have buyer's agents and you have assistants and so forth.

I do. And actually, I was on a strong path of building a large, big team. And then ultimately I realized that maybe that wasn't really what I wanted, it created more headache, it created more frustration. Babysitting. Not only that, but clients and customers come to you and say, well, this person said this or this person said that. And it became too difficult to manage. So I've actually pared back and scaled back my operation. It's now just myself, one buyer's agent and one customer service client services manager. That's it. I only focus my time today on listings. I made the transition back in the end of 2010, beginning of 2011 to just focus my time on listings and then my buyer specialist strictly works with all of our buyers at this point.

Good stuff. Good to hear. Well, what else did we want to hear about Craigslist? Did you give us all you, did you tell us what you wanted to tell us about tracking and results and that kind of stuff?

Well, I want to talk a little bit about conversion numbers and this is incredibly important that people do understand conversion. Now, the Craigslist plan that I put together and again, your listeners can, can get the day one of my ads by going to craigslistgiveaway.com those ads that I crafted and put together on a consistent basis generate between 100 and 120 leads a month for our business. Now in generating those leads again, we're only focusing on the yeses in the marketplace and the people that we can respond to and those that we don't, you know, that we're not able to get on the phone. I've put together an autoresponder email campaign that I wrote and I didn't want to take one of Those pre formatted realtor.com email campaign or anything like that.

The goal of that campaign is to get people to again raise their hand and come back to us and say, yes, I am interested in what you have to offer. By putting people through that campaign, we are able to get about a 5% conversion from the total number of leads that we receive now in the industry. When you're Internet marketing, if you are using the pre formatted campaigns and pre formatted programs, you're going to see probably about a 1 to about a 2% conversion overall. But if you're decent on the the phone, you know, I'm not great on the phone, but if you're decent on the phone and you've got a pretty good email response campaign set in place, you can do about a 5% conversion.

Yeah, that's good to hear. And how many leads though are we talking about again?

I generate between 100 and 120amonth.

Okay, well that isn't as many as I thought it would be, to be honest with you. I mean, think about it. You're placing nine ads per day, probably seven days a week because you've got seven email addresses. We know that. And that's 120 leads a month. 120 opt in at one of the lead magnet websites.

Correct. But keep in mind this is Lansing, Michigan. Our population here is about 197,000 people.

Yeah, okay, fair enough. That's a good number. And you've definitely built a great business for yourself. Michigan, which is considered by most to be a pretty tough market. That's good to hear. What else do you want people to know about this? And give out your website if you would, so people can learn more and get your free report.

Sure. They can certainly find more information about my teachings now in the marketplace by going to VinceViegas.com which is first name Vince, last name Villegas V I L L e g a s.com so they can find out more information about what I'm doing now in the marketplace. I've built a successful business here since 2002, had some stumbling blocks, rebuilt, rebuilt on a strong foundation. And now one of the things that I love is education. And I've always been a giver and always wanting to help people. And for a long time I focused on my local community. I've chaired three non boards, done a lot of great work here in my local marketplace. And I realized that I really wanted to go back out and help people in the industry. And so for the last about 12 months now, I've been working with agents all across North America, helping them turn their business around. If it's a struggling business or if somebody has hit a plateau, get them to the next level. Not just with Craigslist, but also teaching them the importance of, of upfront client retainers and how to make sure you're generating enough business and enough leads so you can say to clients, no, just yesterday I was on a listing presentation and I made the decision I didn't want to take on that client. And I'm happy to say that I can make that decision for my business and whether I want to take on that client or not take them on because we do have enough business in the pipeline where I don't have to worry about taking on any one particular person as a client.

That's a great point, Vince. And I'm not sure I really finished my thought on that cappuccino theory of real estate practice. And it is this, it is that you have developed a lead machine that creates so many leads that you're able to go along and skim the cream off the top, you know, the foam off the drink. Right. Well, other practitioners are down there at the bottom of the cup. They're trying to get anything they can because they just don't have enough leads. You've created enough leads to where you can say, no, you can work with the best quality people. And that just makes for a whole happier career and happier life in general. So it's great to hear. So good job. Keep up the good work. Anything else you want to tell people in closing?

No, you know, I'm just, I'm happ to have had this opportunity to be on your show and hopefully to inspire some excitement in an agent out there who maybe, you know, feels like they're either they've hit a plateau or they're stumbling and they want to get back here on track. Very particular. Just recently, actually just last week, I got an email from an agent who's not, you know, has no affiliation with me at all in any way. She had stumbled across a teaching that I had put out there in the marketplace about the importance of getting upfront lead retainer, you know, excuse me, upfront retainer agreements and things like that from clients. And the email I got from her was just awesome. And it was just that she felt that as though now that she understood the importance of this and how to do it and she went out there and successfully did it. Within 24 hours of watching that training, she wrote me back and said, I now feel validated in the marketplace. I now feel as though the work and the energy I'm putting out there is validated. And thank you for that. That's just cool. That's just so much fun to get that kind of information and feedback back. So if any of the listeners happen to download any of the free reports or go to the website, I'd love to hear their success stories and hear what's come of it.

Good job, Vince. Keep up the good work out there and thanks for sharing your wisdom today. Appreciate it.

Absolutely. Thanks, Jason. Take care.

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This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company All Rights Radio. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.hartmanmedia.com or email mediaartmanmedia.com Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own and the host is acting on behalf of Platinum Properties Investor Network, Inc. Exclusively.