AIPIS 71 - Toby Salgado – Team-player or solopreneur: Making it big in real estate

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Hey, it's my pleasure to welcome a very dynamic guy and that is Toby Salgado. He is the founder of Super Agents Live. He interviews top producing real estate agents from around the nation. They share their stories, strategies, tactics that will help them be number one in their companies or marketplaces. He's got some great thoughts on this as well as some of the other entrepreneurial adventures he's engaged in and it's great to have him. Toby, welcome. How are you?

I'm, I am great, Jason. Thanks for having me.

Good. Hey, give our listeners a sense of geography. Where are you located?

So I'm in San Diego and I've been here since 89.

So you must have just a wealth of knowledge from interviewing all of these successful agents from around the country. Let's just kind of dive in and maybe you want to profile some of them, share some of their tips and tricks of the trade and kind of what you see out there.

Sure, yeah. No problems. I mean, listen, you know, in terms of, you know, I've done over the last year, this show's been live, I've done 160 interviews. And the people that we talk with, we talk with literally the top people. So we've had the number one KW guy, number one ReMax guy, number one cold banker guy, and all these people, you know, are doing from 400 transactions to 1200 transactions. And you know, as I look at those specific, you know, I think in the, in the marketplace, in terms of an agent, I think people have, there's two, two routes, right? You can go down, you can be sort of that solopreneur agent going out there, you know, banging on the doors. You might have a, a couple of admin people. But the new thing in obviously that you obviously know Jason, and most of your listener is that team Building and having teams is, is the. Is the trend, right. Everybody wants to build a team, and it's amazing that there are teams out there that, you know, you think of a team of maybe 10, right? A few admin people, a marketing person, you know, a couple listing agents and four or five buyer's agents. These new teams that are putting, you know, 900 deals on the board are literally offices. They're 45 people, you know, they're 55 people strong. So I think, I think number one, I mean, I think if somebody's going to go out there and try to crush it, I think that's one of the choices you have to make early on. Do you want to be the solopreneur or do you want to build a team? And those two channels will drive your overall marketing strategy.

That's a good way to put it. So pick out some of the guests, some of your favorite shows that you've done, and let's talk about some of the strategies that these agents have used to become tremendously successful. And by the way, I gotta just comment first how amazing it is how the real estate business has matured so much over the years. Because I remember way back in the old days when I was 24 years old, I was number 59 in the world for ReMax. And guess how many transactions I had to do to get there? I was in Irvine, California. Okay. And I did 70. Yeah, it was 78 deals that year. Okay. I mean, now it is just totally matured. You know, people are doing huge numbers nowadays, whereas back then, I mean, that was amazing to do 78 transactions a year. You know, especially when you're just 24 years old and didn't know anybody in town, you know, you were just new, practically. But, you know, nowadays, I mean, agents are doing huge volumes and they're really. They're like companies within a company.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'll tell you, so for me, I mean, I see it a little bit. I agree with you in terms of how you just express the idea of maturity. Right. And you express that idea of real estate maturity in terms of the industry by the number of transactions an individual agent can do to be and be successful. Number 59 with 78 deals, which is nuts. I mean, that's nothing these days. But in a lot of ways.

Thank you very much.

But in a lot of ways, Jason, you know, the industry is not mature at all. And that's, that's one of the reasons why we have done our show. You know, if you think about real estate, you know, in the 80s versus 2015, what is really different? Except for listings coming online, there's not much different. I mean the businesses is, is, you know, fundamentally the same 100 years ago as it is today. Again, other than the way that, that properties are presented. So, you know, if you're going to be. Here's the funny thing. After talking with, you know, again, 160 people of the MO, you know, the most successful agents in the nation, there's not much difference between the. Look, let me express it this way. You can look at any brokerage and you're gonna find three distinct groups. You're gonna find the top 20% who are killing it. You're gonna find the middle 60% who are holding their own and you're gonna find the bottom 20% that are literally just taking up space. You know, what's the difference? What between the bottom 20 and the top 20? Now, number one, I will tell you the one thing, and you know, I'd love to get your thoughts on this, Jason, but the one thing is in the top 20, 90% of those people will have a coach. They will have someone to keep them accountable. The bottom 20, none of them probably have coaches. I mean, that's just, this is how it works. But in terms of actual marketing strategies, they all have the same. You have your sphere of influence. Obviously, you know, you will have to some varying degree. Well, let me. For a successful agent to be successful, you need to have at least four, five lead generation channels. And I think that's where most agents fail. They focus on one or two. Right? They have and they, and many times because agents for the most part are cheap. It's true, you know, they tend to focus on the free or low cost lead generation channels. And what happens with those free or low cost channels? It affects the quality, right? It affects the quality of that lead, right. The cheaper it is, the lower quality it's going to be. And the other thing too is when you have low quality leads in terms of engagement, the sales cycle gets extended. And you know, if you look at NAR, the stats are that within the first 12 months a new agent, it's something like 85% of new agents will wash out in the first year. Why is that? It's because, you know, they don't, they don't think about having multiple lead generation channels and they don't think about investing. They don't think about selling real estate as a business. They think they, you know, many agents get into the selling real estate because number one, they want financial freedom. They Want time freedom, they abuse their time freedom and they will never ever see financial freedom. So in terms of lead generation strategies, right, you know there's, when you think of leads, there's all sorts of leads, right? There's online, there's offline, there's free and there's paid and successful agents have a, have a mix of online leads. Whether that's sort of a Google pay per click campaign and again typically those are relatively low quality leads. Maybe, maybe from a home valuation site or something with long sales cycles. Many, many of those online leads that you get, even though people are paying for Zillow and truly and all that stuff, you can throw money at that stuff. But realize just like mailers, right the average break even date is 18 months. Whether that's for you know, direct mail in your farm or buying these, those online leads, that's just generally what happens, you know. And then so you have to have a mix of those online long sales like cycles, long gestation period to you know, much more targeted and immediate. You know part of our arm as we, we talked about when we were chatting pre, pre recording is we have a radio advertising agency now that those radio ad leads when we, we, we look for the right audience, we write the right copy and we look for listings people that will pick up the phone go hey look I want to sell my house right now. So I think that's where the big difference between that top 20 and bottom 20 is. Having a varied lead generation strategy and being deliberate about mixing those quality of leads and thinking about sales cycle.

Yeah, good stuff. So doesn't that fly in the face though of the concept of specialization and the benefits of that?

Maybe unpack that a little bit for me. What do you mean by that?

Well, a lot of gurus and success experts will say that you should specialize, do one thing and do it very well. You know for my thing when I was an agent I actually kind of did two things really well. I guess I did farming really well and you know I was in a high end area so my sales prices were pretty high then. I also did new homes really well, you know, working with the Irvine company and new home builders and stuff like that. But five different things. I mean are, you know, aren't you kind of running all over place with like a chicken with your head cut off?

See I again I think this, I think this speaks to that thing that the team concept or the solopreneur concept, right? If you're a solopreneur and it's maybe you and a Couple admin people. Yeah, of course. You want to have a niche, right? Whether that's downtown condos or waterfront or whatever it is, you want to have a farm and you want to work it, right. You want to be the ambassador, the mayor of that, of your farm within your niche. Absolutely. But when you have a team, when you start thinking of selling real estate as a business, you know that nichiness, you can still maybe have a niche. You can maybe still have a farm, but instead of having a 3,000 house farm, right. You're going to have a 15,000 house farm. It's really going to be a business with multiple marketing strategies. Does that make sense?

Yeah, sure it does. Sure does. Okay, go ahead and you know, drill down on some of those if you want. With any specifics or any other thoughts.

Yeah, no, I mean in terms of the. If you're going to have five. Right. You obviously. And again, Legion channels, right. So you want, obviously circle of influence is going to be one. You need to have some sort of online Legion piece, whether that's Google pay per click.

That could be a home value site, right. Where you're buying Facebook ads and driving them to them. And then no matter how big or how small your team is, you should be. Even though it's really uncomfortable for many people, but you know, you should have some sort of networking, you know, piece worked in there. Whether that's, you know, Toastmasters or maybe that's your meetups or whatever you need to have. Fundamentally, the reason why you want to have five different channels is because they're five separate audiences and ideally, right. There's no overlap between those audiences. So. And when you can create that message, right, whatever message you have within those separate audiences, that's when it's, that's when it starts to work for you.

What do you think is the optimum thing for teams? Do you think that, you know, there's sort of an ideal number or ideal size? I mean, when does an agent jump to the point where they should just go out on their own and have their own brokerage?

Okay, well, yeah, those. Let me. Those are two different questions. But so, so when you look at teams, and again, I guess we can maybe even substitute the word team for business. Right. When you're actually in real estate as a business, it. Those teams or those businesses are very siloed. They're built like businesses, right. So that means that, you know, you will have a certain amount depending on. Depending. And again, team size, your marketing budget will drive size, right? Because ideally you need to provide Those leads to your buyer's agents. So you know, if you're marketing, if your Google pay per click campaign is eight grand, you know, maybe that's a, that will support a team of five, right? And in order to add another, you need to add another two grand to it. Or so teams, optimum team size is very, very mirrors your budget. So successful teams today are very siloed. So you will have a certain number of buyer's agents. Now what those buyer's agents do, that's all they do, right? So this actually goes back and speaks to your idea of specialization. So within these teams, everybody has a very specific specialty, right? So buyer's agents, all they do is buyers. That's it. If they have a listing, let's say their mom wants to sell their house, those teams, they're made where those buyer's agents must pass on that listing lead, even if it's your mom to the listing people. And again there's, if you have five buyer's agents, normally you might have two listing agents. So and then within those teams there's a marketing person. Let me illustrate this way. This is how it's built. You, you're a buyer's agent, you meet Sally, they meet you at the grocery store and you start talking about real estate and you say, hey, you know, I have an interest in maybe buying, I have an interest in selling. What? So Jim meets Jason, walks into the office and has your contact information, right? They've gotten your name, your email, your cell phone number, whatever it is. They walk in, they give it to Sally and Sally's the front desk person. She goes, okay, who is Jason? Let me enter them into the database. All the stuff that we're real sales people fail at, right? Working, you know, inserting stuff in your database and putting them, putting them on a drip. So Sally puts Jason into to the database and gives him a drip, puts him on a drip campaign similar to whatever he is, right? If you're a listing person, you're going to get a drip campaign that talks about listings and why X brokerage is the best choice for you. If you're a buyer, you're going to get put on a drip toward how this broke. X Brokerage can find you the best house of your dreams or whatever. So again, you have a marketing person, you have a front desk person who puts, you have a copywriter that writes the copy. Because again, you can't just. If Jason gets into the database, you know, you need to touch him at regular intervals, right? With meaningful content. So you need to you know, that's a specialization. Copywriting is important. You know, and again, most of these people, when you think about when you, when these teams, you know, and again, I'm thinking of the person who owns the team, who runs the team, you know, they don't, they think in marketing in terms of campaigns. So if they're going to put a, give you a. On a drip, it's going to be a, let's say a 7 Series drip all around the same, thematically similar. So again, to go back, Jason, there's not an ideal size, your budget is going to drive the amount of bodies that you can support in terms with leads.

Okay, what do you say to newer agents? How should they think of their business? I mean, after owning my own traditional brokerage for many years, I was just constantly frustrated by training agents and you know, how disillusioned they were and how their expectations just were so out of sync, seemingly with reality. Most of them, not all of them, obviously some are, some totally get it and they just dive right in and do a great job. But a lot of them just view it as a job, not an entrepreneurial opportunity, et cetera, et cetera. You know, they want to have coffee all day and, and you know, they treat it like a country club job, you know, rather than like something real, like a real business.

I agree. I mean, and again, I said that earlier, you know, many, many people. Let me say it. So Nara came out with some stats recently. So the average Asian is 57 years old. Right? Think about a 57 year old person. You know, this person is. And again, the vast majority of people in real estate are women. Women, women by numbers, sheer numbers. Out, out. I don't even know the ratio but you know, maybe it's like 70, 30 women to men. But if you look at who's killing it, it's all men. I mean, there are a few, you know, I had Chantelle Ray on the show and she's, you know, she's got a team of like 45 and she'll do 900 transactions this year.

That's impressive. There are exceptions. But you say, yeah, I've always tried to kind of analyze that too. I remember years ago I would always kind of look at what's the kind of the gender makeup of the really top tier agents. So you're saying it's mostly male, huh? Anything you attribute that to in particular? I mean, you know, a lot of women leave the workforce for seven to 10 years to take care of children and so forth. But you know, or are there Other reasons. What do you think?

No, I mean, I think, I think, you know, I think it just comes down to, you know, typical. If you look across the nation, you know, you know, the typical family is still typical, right? I mean, obviously once you get on the east or west coast, you start to have, you know, the typical family makeup start, starts to disintegrate as you go from the middle. Right. If you look at San Francisco or Washington D.C. you have very, very successful women and they're going to be buying their houses on their own.

Whatever.

You get into the Oklahoma, and it's still a man and a woman and 2.5 kids. So what you see, what I see is that in terms of that 70% of women in the selling real estate, they're moms and they become mompreneurs. So maybe they did something at the local, you know, bookstore. I don't know, they had some kind of job, they get pregnant, you know, they again revert back to traditional gender roles and the mom at some point has to stay home, you know, and that's the. Then they be again, they go, hey, I want to do something. I still want to raise my kid. What am I gonna do? I'm gonna go get my real estate license. So you have all these people out there with licenses. And again, the go again going back to NAR the typical agent earns less than $40,000 a year. You can't live off that.

It's mind boggling. You know, that is hardly adjusted for inflation at all. I mean, that is just mind boggling. It really is.

I agree. I 100 agree. So again, I think, you know, I, I think it's important knowing who you are. If you go, you know, if you want to win a real estate, I think there's a couple things you got to do. Number one, you need to know who you are, right? What is your personality? Because, you know, if you take a disc profile and be. I'd be interested in knowing what your profile is, Jason.

But entj.

Well, that's not, that's not, that's a.

But it's the same darn thing pretty much.

Okay, yeah, I think that's Myers Briggs. But that's.

Okay, that's Myers Briggs. Yeah, but, but disk is. It's like identical almost.

Yeah, similar. But let me say it this way. So, so, so disc. I'm 99D, which is dominant. 99I, which is gregarious.

Okay. I don't remember my disk. I did take it. No, we used to test all our employees on disk.

So but here, here's, here's my point. So if like for me, with my high D, I, I, I should be a listing agent, I don't have the patience to mess with buyers. I don't want to do it. I'm not, you know, detail focused or whatever. So, so for me, if I got into real estate, I know that I should be, I should be boom on the listing side of it. Whereas somebody, if you're, if you're high S, high C, you know, you're more paternal, you're more, you know, maternal, you are very much suited to being a buyer's agent. So number one, know who you are and get on the right side of the business. And number two, knowing who you are will determine or should give you a guide to a few things. One, should you join a team or not? You know, if you're high S, high C, you know, you're not, you're not a killer, right? So, you know, you, you're much more suited to sitting in a seat and having some, you know, Jimmy pay for Google pay per click and give you leads and you're okay with that. You know, so if you're, again, if you're new, you gotta know who you are. So you are on the right side of the transaction. And two, you know, where should you, maybe you are not suited to be an entrepreneur. You know, maybe you, you need to sell real estate in a sort of, you know, pseudo entrepreneurial way because you're on commission. But, but you know, you really need someone else to provide the structure. You really need someone else to provide the systems. So, so I think that's, you know, if you're out there considering real estate, I think that's the, that's the first place that you start because, you know, knowing who you are is going to drive again, what side of the transaction you're on, number one. Number two, you know, should you go it on your own or should you join a team and have someone else do the heavy lifting for you?

Yeah. Good, good stuff. Well, Toby, this has been very enlightening. Give out your website, tell people where they can find your show.

Yeah, so you can find us on itunes or stitcher radio and it's superagentslive.com and you can go to our website, superagentslive.com, listen to any of the episodes and check us out.

I love what you say that you do the show through the lens of a real estate agent, but really it's just an entrepreneur who happens to be in a certain industry. I used to say that real estate agents should view themselves as marketing professionals who happen to have a real estate license. And it's really more than marketing. Of course there's a lot more to the business than that. But. But that's certainly one part of it that's important.

Oh, absolutely. No, I think that, you know, I'm sorry not to cut you off, Jason, but you know, but real estate agents, they're, they're in the bit, they're in the retail business, right? You're in a business, there's either business to business or business consumer. If you sell real estate, you are, have a consumer facing company. You're in retail and your product just happens to be houses.

Good stuff. Very good points. Good. Well, Toby, any final tips you want to leave our people with? You just got a wealth of knowledge from interviewing all these guests that you interview all day and on your show.

I would just say that, you know, if, number one, if you are in, if you're an entrepreneur, listening to my show can help because, you know, building a business is really all the same, right? Everything is really, you know, real estate is a contact sport. Everything is a contact sports. Going out, meeting someone, putting them in the database. And at some point, whatever product you have, you can market to them. So. So number one, go to my show, listen to it. And number two, if you have any questions, you know, I have a long history in, you know, building other companies as well as investing in real estate. I'm happy, you know, send me an email. I'm, I'm happy to, I'm happy to answer any questions. And on Twitter, I'm @SuperAgentsLive.

Good stuff, Toby. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason. Appreciate it, bud.

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