Struggling in Real Estate? Tom Answers Your Top 6 Questions

So here's the thing. Entrepreneurs, leaders, salespeople, we all want to create consistent, repeatable, and scalable ways to grow our business and our income. And we want to do it better, faster, and more seamlessly. Why? So we can actually enjoy our lives, take vacations, and spend the quality time we want with the people that we love. How do we do all this without spending a fortune or running ourselves ragged? That's the big question. And this show is dedicated to the answer. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for just taking the time out of your crazy life to listen to this. You know, about a month and a half ago, we were doing the success summit and my team did something different. They put a box out, which was hysterical, and it said, if you have a question for Tom, just drop it inside the box. So I did a show on it. I got a lot of great feedback. But what I asked them to do this time was to isolate the questions down to whether it was someone that was newer in the business, like this, this Luke Martin, who's 18 years old and getting his real estate license next month. And he was at the summit, probably with his parents, I would assume, and. Or someone that's just behind in their goals and just not achieving the level of success that they desire. So I've got like five questions I'm to go through that are very much related to that person. And then the sixth question I'll save as a bonus because it's the one question I get more than anything else. And it's the thing that I'm probably the most recognized for. And I don't mean that like in a grandiose, egotistical way. It's just that when people say Tom Ferry, this word usually follows. And I'm gonna help you unpack that as well. So. So let's start right away with Stacy Morris in Atlantis, Georgia. Atlanta, Georgia said, hey, what's the one thing you would tell a semi struggling agent to focus on and work in this market? Well, we know the Atlanta real estate market was the epicenter of foreclosures back in the day. We know it's a marketplace where a lot of hedge funds have acquired tons of sfrs. So I'm going to give you a crazy idea. The first thing I would do is I would identify in marketplace. This would be some homework. I want to identify how many single family residences are owned by individuals. Right. Like people like myself that maybe own two or three or four. Just like something like that versus the private equity and the hedge funds and the Institutions. I have a feeling it's probably going to be a 70, 30 split in Atlanta. Atlanta Metro is pretty big, meaning 70% of the properties are owned by people like you and I that are just our investment property that maybe we bought a long time ago, or maybe we house hacked and bought this one and then fixed it up and took a little money out, rented it out and bought the next one. So I want you to understand your market better. First and foremost, I want you to have a more holistic understanding of what I would call the real total addressable market, the tam. And what this is going to do for you is it's going to make you a more interesting real estate agent to talk to. It's going to give you insights that the average person doesn't know. Hey, would it shock you to hear, did you know, you know 63% of all the properties that are investment properties in Atlanta are owned by X and the balance are owned by Y? It just gives you great insight. But that's not the only reason I want you to do it. The second thing I want you to consider is when you look at the demographic, the age of the average person that's owned investment properties, they, they could be my age, they could be older. I think about my stepmom, God bless her, who's 81, and she's going to punch me for saying that out loud. And you know, she probably owns, I don't know, 75 single family residences. She used to buy shopping centers and then she would sell that and she got back into real estate by buying all these. What I know to be true is once you've owned that property for more than 10 years, if you did any advance tax moves to depreciate the value. It's called a cost segregation study. If you did a cost segregation study, you've already basically taken all of the tax credits you can get from that property. And after 10 years, it's not, it's not that it becomes a dead asset, but then the only game is some level of appreciation and ideally cash flow. But I'm losing the tax advantage. And that's usually when someone's going to sell that Property, do a 1031 exchange, and then rerun the cycle again. Or because maybe they're older and they don't want to pass it on to their kids, right? Maybe they do, I don't know, but maybe they'll sell it. So what I'd love for you to do is do some research to figure out all the single family residences the SFRs in your marketplace to know who are the individuals that own them. I don't care about the institutions, I care about the individuals. And what I would ask you to do in my first part of this, this question is understand the market. Narrow down that list, go to your favorite title exec and say can you pull me a report of everybody that has more than one property under an LLC as an example? And then I want you to start to communicate and market to those people as a value add. And when I say that, I think about my, my brother in law Colin, who has a wonderful real estate brokerage practice. He focuses specifically on a narrow niche called doctors that own their own building. And what he'll do and what my advice to you would be is not just to send them the letters that I get and the, you know, the funny postcards that I get. Have you ever thought about selling your investment property one through four Banana Street? That's lame. Don't do that. It's actually stupid is another way of saying it. Like if you're doing that, stop, right? Instead he might make them an offer to say when was the last time you had someone analyze your lease agreements to see if they're at market or could be improved upon? And what he was doing is saying, why don't I give you the gift of some expertise as a way to earn the relationship with you? Right? That's a much better strategy. And then from there you can then take it to the next step. Review one of their leases, take their lease, put it inside ChatGPT and say, act like the single greatest negotiator on the planet of real estate leases and tell me the three to five holes that this person's missing and where can they get improvement? That's all you have to do. And then you're going to get three or four insights. Because the average person that maybe owns three or four rental properties, they might be managing themselves and they're probably not experts at negotiations or leases. Oftentimes we find ourselves saying, well, Brian's a really terrific tenant, he's been there for four years, so I'm not going to ever raise the rents on him. So all of a sudden I wake up and I'm 3, 4, $500 month behind where the national average is, or at least the local average is, and compounded over 12 months or compounded over several years, I'm making a mistake, but I'm busy. I'm a doctor, I'm a, you know, I got a job, I don't have time for this. So all of A sudden I get a beautiful letter from you, a local real estate expert, telling me, when was the last time you had somebody analyze all of your leases to find any flaws or opportunities or missed profit centers? I'd love to do that as a value add, you know, just to earn your respect and maybe just earn your relationship. And I'm not saying that everyone is going to raise their hand and say, me, yes, please redo all my leases. But how many do you need? 3, 5, 7. And all of a sudden, these 3, 5, 7 are now a part of the future of your real estate business. So that's the first thing. And I know that was a big answer, Stacy, and it's certainly relatable. You could be 30 years in the business and do exactly what I'm telling Stacey to do. And the next time I see you at an event or walking through an airport, you're like Tom Ferry. I did that analysis of all the single family residence owners. I went as far as going duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes. Also, holy crow. I sent them the. When was the last time you took the time to have somebody review all your leases? And I ended up doing three transactions from it. Seven transactions from it. That's what's going to happen because you're taking the right approach, which is, how can I be of service? Not you want to sell your house, want to sell your. Like, that's just. That's dumb. Please don't do that. All right, but the second part, Stacey, remember the question was, what's the one thing. Sorry, I'm giving you two that you would tell a semi struggling agent to focus on and work on in this market.

There's two things you have to have in business. And if you don't have these two things, you should shut it down and go get a job. And if you're not willing to work on these two things, you should shut it down and go get a job. Like leave your independent contractor status and go work for somebody else. And I'm not saying that every worker in the United States or Canada, wherever you find yourself listening to this, doesn't have to have these two things. But when you. When you don't get a check on the 1st and 15th and you don't have these two things in place, you're in trouble. So here's the first one. You got to work on your mindset, which means you need to create daily disciplines and routines. Like going to bed earlier, right? Not having a lot of caffeine at night, staying off your phone and Being distracted, getting a really good night's sleep. You need to have a routine that does something every single day to move my body in a powerful way to break a sweat. Take the dog for a walk, go for a run, do yoga, I don't care. Do something every single day. Because the body, mind connection, when you push the body, the mind also has to function at a higher level, right? And then I would say to you, whether it's daily gratitudes, like I posted this morning, I haven't done it in a while. And I was just like, I just woke up thinking, you know, as hard as life is and as hard as it is to be in business, I'm sitting there staring at, did you guys see the moon this morning? How stunning it was, right? So I live on the 39th floor of this high rise. So I'm like looking directly at this giant moon, and I just had to stop and say, yeah, I might have, like 15 shit burritos going on in business and life and everything else, because that's just called being an entrepreneur, being a human. But I just stopped and I was like, look how beautiful that moon is. And then I was like, I could be grateful for that moon. What else could I be grateful for? Grateful for my health. And all of a sudden I'm just writing out all my gratitudes and just that subtle little shift. Now, I'm not saying st that if just you do your gratitudes one time, you know, oh, you're going to be transformed into this person who has a great mindset. No, it's the book, the Slight Edge, right, by Jeff Olson. If I do it like, if you eat a hamburger today, it doesn't make you unhealthy. If you eat a salad today, doesn't make you healthy. But if you eat a salad like every day for, like, I don't know, a year, you lose weight, you feel better, your skin's better, everything is better. But if you eat a hamburger every day, you're going to put on weight, you're going to be impacting your blood in a negative way. Like, there's just, it's. It's the compound effect. So don't just think doing it once, think about doing it for the rest of your life. I would also say to you, if you're not reading 10 pages of a good book every single day, I don't like reading. Shut up. Learn to read, right? Like, read 10 pages of a good book every single day. And you know what happens at the end of the year? You just read 15 or 16 books. And if you're reading books that benefit you and benefit the second skill you have to have, then all of a sudden you're going to find yourself being a very different version of yourself after 12 months. So what did I tell you? Do gratitudes? Go to sleep a little bit earlier and read. And over time you will change your entire worldview if you read the right books. All right, so those would be the way I would answer that, the second skill. And I know you asked for one thing and I'm giving you a lot here, but Stacey, there's a good chance that someone else needed to hear this too. The second thing is if you don't have the art of persuasion, the art of influence, if you're not an effective communicator, if you don't understand the power of a.

Three second pause to get people's attention, if you don't know how to communicate, if you don't know how to build rapport at an unconscious level with people, then everything else is just harder. And I was so lucky. My first coach shout out to Robert Stover. I was like 19 years old. No, I may, I, I may have been 20. No, I don't know 19 or 20. And this guy knocks on the door at our office and says, hi, I'm a, I'm a neuro linguistic programming sales trainer. Can I talk to the top salesperson? And I don't think I was the top salesperson. I think I was just the one that said, hey, do you want to talk to this guy? Hey, it's Tom Ferry. Question, what's your favorite social media platform? Are you big on Insta? Do you love to tweet no matter where you answer? I'd love for you to connect with me there. All you got to do is just type in at Tom Ferry and follow and let's you and I connect. I want to be able to deliver the right content, the right ideas, the ways to help you grow your business, stay fired up, keep moving, be in action and run plays that work and the platform that matters most to you. So subscribe and I'll see you there soon. We met for like 25 or 30 minutes and I forget even what his pitch was, but I hired him on the spot. $500 a month and I would meet with them every Saturday and we would write sentences. We would write sentences, Sentences that could open the door, sentences that would create a transition, sentences that could handle an objection, sentences that could make the natural ending to a good presentation a yes versus a no for the product or Services that you're offering. Skills are so important. And we know like in the real estate industry, the average person that comes into the industry, per the national association of Realtors, old, old case study, I don't think it's changed. Said like something like 90% of the people come into the industry with no sales, no marketing, no negotiation skills. And I used to take that quote and put it on a PowerPoint and then I put comma, Tom Ferry says and most maintained it. So what am I saying to you? I'm giving you a unique channel of opportunity where you can become an expert and if you grab ChatGPT or. I'm a big fan of Perplexity, use Perplexity. I'm also an investor in Perplexity, Spirit of transparency and with Grok AI, they're all great. If I just said, hey, I'm a real estate agent in Atlanta, Georgia, I want to know everything I can know about someone that owns three to ten single family residences in our town. What are their pain points, what are their concerns, what are their worries, what are their sunk costs, what are their hidden costs? And if I was to review all their leases, what are some of the things I should be looking for? And you just, you just obsess over learning everything you can about this. Like 20 to 23 million homes in the United States that are owned by investors. You're carving out a narrow niche that you can build your entire career around. Right? That's the first one. Second thing, you got to get your mindset right. Right. And thank you for listening today and thank you for answering this question. Right. You have to have the right mindset. I don't mean Pollyanna, I mean solution, focus. Bringing the energy, bringing the joy, changing the energy and the dynamic in a room, being able to deal with pressure cooker situations, dealing with not having a closing for a month or two and not having it completely alter your mindset and have commission breath for every person you talk to. Your mindset matters. The second part of that is you gotta work on your skills. You have to start looking at can I build a rapport with a wide variety of people and can I do it in 60 seconds or less? Can I do it in 60 seconds or less? There's a wonderful book called Instant Rapport. If you haven't listened to it, you can probably go to Perplexity and say, what are the fundamental truths of the book? Instant Rapport. And it's going to tell you things like if you walk into a room and you sit down with somebody one on One or you're talking over the phone one on one. If they talk really fast, fast talkers think slow talkers are stupid, and slow talkers think fast talkers are city slicking salespeople trying to sell them something. So what do you have to do? You got to mirror and mimic their rate of speech. You have to mirror and mimic their tonality. Now, I don't mean like if they have an extreme accent that you try and create an accent around that, but you can give just little hints, like when you travel to Italy versus in Germany versus in Australia. And I, you know, I do seminars and all these places. It does, like, just when you're there, like when I'm in Italy, I just get a little bibbidi boppity boop. And that's all you need to, like, be in some deeper level of rapport with the Italians as an example, broadly speaking. Right? So, you know, it's like living in Newport beach and then moving to, you know, Texas. Right? There's a part of Texas where there's a little bit of a twang. If I do too much twang, then they think I'm making fun of them. But just a little bit just creates what we call unconscious rapport. So I would say that, I'd say handling objections. I'd say the ability to present your unique selling proposition. These are all skills that if you start to work on them. And by the way, I literally just did this with my head of sales the other day. I went on perplexity, I hit the button and said, I want you to act like this type of prospect and I want you to be mean, nasty, cynical, and constantly say, get to the point and see if I can break you in a role play using AI and like, that's the way to do it. You should be working on your skills all the time, because without your skills, you have nothing. You, you don't have, you don't have any ability to get to the. Yes. To solve the problem. And what you'll do is you'll reduce your fees next to nothing, and this business will be an energy sucking vampire for you. That was a long first question looking at my team. All right, let's go to question number two. Let's see if it's an easier one. Two. All right. Hey, Tom, I'm a younger agent building my business in a shifting market. How do I balance each fundamental of real estate call, open house, door knocking, et cetera, with creating a powerful brand online that attracts clients at scale? Well, you will not attract clients at scale. In the beginning, unless you do something extremely controversial or you do something that just gets super viral. But the likelihood of that happening is, is slim to none. So what I would tell you is instead of, by the way, Brianna Kellen in Tampa, Florida, what I would tell you to do is document the journey. I would document the journey. Don't tell me. Show me. Hey, it's Brianna. And today I'm going out knocking on doors. I don't know if you ever. Hey, in the comments, let me know. Have you ever knocked on doors? The reason why I'm doing it is because, see, I've got this buyer who desperately wants to live in this Hooby Doo community, and I promised them that I would go knock on every one of the doors to find out if anybody has any interest in selling their home. So, hey, wish me luck and let me know in the comments. Have you ever knocked on doors before the video ends? And what I'm doing is I'm, I'm showing people that I'm out doing the work to help my clients. Hey, you're not going to believe this. I can't tell you the address, but one person just told me they're thinking about selling. So, hey, when I get this listing and it goes live, let me know, Let me know if you have any interest in da da da da da da. Right. Like, and actually I wouldn't do that because I'm out there working for my buyer, right? So I'd say something different. Hey, I just found something for my buyer. I don't know if it's an opportunity. Hey, I'm curious. Like, what do you do when an opportunity presents itself? What do you do? Let me know in the comments. So what am I doing? I'm showing people I'm doing the work and then I'm engaging them. Like, have you ever done something like this? What's your opinion about this? And, and now what you're doing is you're, you're starting to teach people that you're a really smart, savvy, hard working real estate professional and that you go above and beyond. You do more than the average. Don't tell me, show me. That would be my advice. All right, let's keep jamming. And by the way, keep up the good work. And if I'm ever in Tampa, you should come. All right, number three again, remember I said this. I got like five questions from like, sort of newer produce or people that are struggling. But listen to this one from Nikki Hines in Cabot, Arkansas. Hey, for a new agent, almost four years. Get this. With 21 million close and almost 100 transactions in four years, Nikki.

The future is bright in real estate. Congratulations. She asks, what would you recommend doing or using to stand out and win against agents that are doing 10, 20, $30 million a year, right in. Or no, sorry, 10 to 30 years in the. With $20 million or more. In closing, we're a small market. Average sales price, 250. So I love this question, Nikki, because, you know, I built my business when I got started in, you know, 23 years ago. There were all this sort of, you know, incumbent rock star trainers and coaches, and I was like, okay, how am I going to separate myself from the competition? What is going to be the unique factors that I could reflect on and what I've done in my past and how can I bring that forth? So. So the thing I'm going to tell you first and foremost is it's about storytelling. It's about taking what it is you've accomplished and then the reasons why you went into the business and somehow correlating that back to. For your customer. And what this means to you is because the customer really doesn't care about your background, your history, or your performance. What they really care is what does it mean to them if they decide to hire you. Are you the most qualified? Are you the cheapest? Do you sell the highest, you know, highest number? Do you do it in the shortest amount of time? Do, you know, you take care of all the services? The only thing the consumer cares about is them. So make sure that in your story that the customer is the hero. I think about a gentleman I worked with named Freud Candelario. What feels like a hundred years ago in Los Angeles. The guy built his business knocking on doors. I went out and knocked on doors with him one day, and, you know, we were as we're, you know, driving to the community. He wanted to knock doors in that day, and he took kind of a huge swath of this community to knock on doors. Not saying you have to do this, but, Nikki, listen up. When I asked him, why did you go into real estate? He said, you know, I came here as an immigrant to the United States and I. I worked really hard, and myself and my family, we were able to save enough money to go buy a house. And in this case, I mean, like, cash. Cash, he said, and I met with a real estate professional, not to be named, he said, and that person essentially stole the money. Like, stole the cash. Not. Not like I'm going to transfer money in a wire. Like it Was like, here, cash, like many of my clients in Europe, know what I'm talking about. And the person stole the money. And there's, you know, kind of. It got a little blurry in terms of what the details were following that story. But he said, that's why I went to the business. He said, the consumer deserves a better experience, and I'm going to deliver it. And he basically shaped his entire worldview of selling houses around. Never let this happen to someone else. Take care of your clients in the most sophisticated, special, you know, personalized way you can. So that was the first thing, right? So think about what is the story, Nikki, that set separates you from all those veterans you keep referencing. The second thing I would tell you is a combination of I want content, I want content.

Pointed to the questions that are on the minds of the customers you most want to attract, right? What are the questions that are on the mind? So shout out to Neil Patel. He bought a company called Answer the Public. I've been talking about it for five or six years now. If you went to Answer the Public and you just typed in Arkansas real estate, you might get 3, 4, 500 different questions. So. So for the person that's listening, if you. If you haven't seen this site, what it does is it scrapes the Internet like every second of the day on TikTok, Instagram, Bing, Google, YouTube, and one other, oh, Amazon. So it gets all the questions. So what do we know to be true? Whoever takes the time to answer the questions that are on the minds of their customers becomes the expert. You know, you become the market of one. You separate yourself from maybe the, you know, the guy or gal who's been farming their community forever. And everyone knows who they are, but they just do the same vanilla marketing over and over again, and they never actually answer the questions that are on the minds of consumers. So if you went to answerthepublic.com right, that would be one thing. And then you take those questions and you take them and you say, please convert these into questions and headlines. And either you create blogs with it, you do podcasts like this with it. You then take that information, you put it on your website, on your LinkedIn profile, on your Google business page. And of course, there's GEO associated to this. That's generative engine optimization. And there's search engine optimization. Believe me, you just go inside perplexity and say, I'm writing these blogs and this is what I'm trying to accomplish. I want people to not choose the person that is 10 or 20 or 30 years in the business and instead choose me. Can you please write the blogs in a way that would have me be the hero for them, as the real hero and avoid the people that are mainly just doing the same things over and over again and not modernizing. I'm making all this up their business. So that would be another way. I would do that. I would do that. And then the other thing I'd ask you to consider is direct mail is really a, it's a force multiplier. So if you are, for example, you know, getting a better story and then you are creating the content and answering the questions that are on the minds of the customers, you have to start asking yourself, what are the natural distribution methods that I can, can use with this content? And I would say, look no further than direct mail, because on that direct mail you can say everything from, did you hear about your neighbor? You know, hit this QR code. And that takes me to a landing page. And the landing page tells the story of the home you recently sold or, or a headline that says, does the number of transactions an agent sell impact sales price? As an example. And then you can have a blog that basically explains, assuming the numbers are in your favor, that you've had a hundred closings, right, with $21 million. And if the market was getting. I'm making this up. So, Nikki, know your numbers. If the market was getting say 97.8% of list price and you were getting 99% of, of list price, you could make the argument of does the number of homes you sell annually correlate to higher sales prices? Question mark. Mark, hit this QR code. I've never said this before. That's a really good direct mail piece. Somebody capture that. I need to send it to Jimmy Mackin and listing leads because he's gonna definitely do that. And Jason Pantana with all things AI Marketing Academy. So, Nikki, I hope you take advantage of that and I hope you send me one of those postcards. But at the end of the day, time, time, time, time, time, time, you just got to go knock on doors. You got to spend the time, you got to make those connections. You know, you got to organize your database in a way that those people get marketed to more often in email, in text, in video, in Facebook ads that are, you know, over their whole area. YouTube short form videos. And I, I really like this question. I don't know if it's the question, but does the number of homes someone sells annually correlate to higher sales prices? I think there's a whole video that you could create in 15 seconds or less. Or maybe it's a one minute video. And now you're running that ad in the areas you want to serve right. In Cabot, Arkansas. And everyone that goes on YouTube to see how their favorite college football team is doing the first 15 seconds. Is that question by you on YouTube? That could be very interesting. All right, so let's keep going. I think that was question number three. Are you finding this valuable? Should I do more Q and A? Like, is this insightful for you? Am I giving too much? Am I giving too little? Let me know in the comments, please. All right, number four. I've been waiting for this one. Shout out to Luke Martin, Oak Ridge, N.C. 18 years old, getting his real estate license next month. Which means we need to follow up with Luke and see if he got it because it's like a month ago. What would your best advice be for someone my age? Join a team. All right, question number five. Yeah. Because that's all it is, Luke. Join a team. Why? But, Tom, I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to go out there and kill it. Cool. You know what? I felt the same exact way when I was young, but the gift that I had to go work and play and learn under the tutelage of my pops gave me so much more confidence, understanding, and knowledge to then go start a business. So slow down, brother. Join a team, right? Pick a team.

You have to deal with, like, lousy managers, good managers, people that give you lots of attention, people that give you no attention, people that give you leads, don't give you leads. It's all just a learning lesson. Luke. You need all those experiences to understand and shape sort of your perspective on this business. So that would be the thing. And again, I would partner with somebody senior. I would partner with somebody who could be four times, five times older than you are. And what you're going to bring them. Luke, you need to create up, like, a list of the advantages of putting Luke on your team. Right? Like, you're going to go crazy with them on social. You're going to help them with AI. You're going to look for opportunities that they won't. You will call all the people in their database that they never do. If you did all those things and you made up a cheat sheet of all these things that you can do for them, Luke, any smart team leader is going to be like, let's go, partner. And I'm assuming because, you know, you were at the summit, you met a bunch of Other young people. So you do need to create that sort of younger agent mastermind. Steve O Supremo. My son, right. 24 Vincent. I mean we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. And some of them are gonna be mad that I didn't give him a shout out. So you know who you are and you know I love you, right? And they're all over the country, like us, Canada, all over the world, Australia, ET and they all get together, right, because they're the future of real estate. So you want to be in a mastermind, you want to get around those like minds. All right, so that was number four, Number five. And then I'll give you the big question that I get asked all the time. Number five by Cassie Richardson in Indianapolis. And we're like really minus Atlanta in the middle of the country with all these questions. I like it. Well that's not true. Oak Ridge, North Carolina is on the coast. All right, what's the number one skill people should master this year to win more listings?

I would say to you, I'd go back to that whole unconscious rapport. Unconscious trust. That's going to be a no brainer. And then I would say if there was one skill, there's never one skill. There's never one skill. Right. There's multiple skills. So I would say the ability to build rapport deeply, that would be one. Number two, I would say.

Having a pre. Well actually back up the ability to pre qualify the customer to truly understand what their needs, wants and desires are, what their expectations are and their values about selecting a real estate professional. Shout out to my second NLP coach. He taught me value elicitation. It's three questions so we'll, we'll role play. So, so Brittany, you guys, you know we're talking about me coming over and putting your home on the market just so I have a better understanding of your expectations. Here's the value elicitation question number one. What's important to you in hiring a real estate professional? You could put what's important to you in anything after that. I want their value about that. So what's important to you about X in this case? What's important to you in hiring a real estate professional? And, and look, we can only hallucinate what the average consumer is going to say. But I'm pretty certain they're not going to say I want you to charge me a lot and under deliver and never communicate and ghost me. No, they're going to say, well we want really good communic. We obviously want to sell at the highest possible price with the lowest fee structure. And, and what we really want is we just want to know that we can trust you, that you're going to get the job done. Like, if you ask a value question, they share with you their values about selecting a real estate professional. So what's important to you in X2? Write down word for word, everything they say and then feed it back to them. So you said this, this, this and this, this. How is that important to you? Like, help me understand. Well, what that's going to do is it's going to ensure our. La la la la la la la. And they're going to go deeper into their value. They're going to go from surface level values, right? I want someone that's trustworthy, I want somebody that's going to take care of us. I want someone that's going to sell for the highest possible price. These are like the surface level values. When I ask, how is that important to you? They go to a deeper level of their values and that's where they might say, look, we were burned before. And, and I have to be honest, I have a little PTSD with real estate professionals now. I'm getting like some really deep stuff. This actually just happened with me when I was interviewing builders for a house project I was working on. And the guy was like, he didn't know to say what's important. He's like, is there anything I should know about you? I'm like, I have PTSD when it comes to builders. And then, you know what, it changed the course of our relationship, the way that we communicate with each other, because I was being vulnerable with him and he now understands that if he gets a little outside of the lines of contract or he doesn't communicate well, I'm like, dude, you're bringing me back up my ptsd. Like, I don't want to go there again. I don't want to kill you. All right, and then. So ready? What's important to you about? How's that important to you? And then the motherload question of value elicitation. You should do this with every prospect you meet for the rest of your life. So ultimately, what will all this do for you? So ultimately, what will all this. And notice a little FM DJ voice, you know, coming up. Shout out to Chris Von Right cv right there. Ultimately, what will all this do for you? Well, I mean, it's just going to give my spouse and I the peace we need and the assurance we need that we're going to be able to make the move and start the next chapter of our life because we're really excited about it. Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. Now I know exactly how I need to deliver for you guys in the most meaningful way possible. Is there anything else I should know before I come meet with you guys? Tuesday at 5 o'. Clock. Clock. No, that's. That pretty much covers it. I know where they're going, I know who's involved, I know what the decision maker is. I love this question, especially in the state of residential real estate. Again, I don't know your exact market, but I know across the country, hey, if for some reason, if for some unforeseen reason the home doesn't sell, what's your plan B? What's your plan B? That's such a great question that people miss. What's your plan B? Well, what do you mean, plan B? Well, I mean, if it doesn't sell, sell. Would it shock you to hear that right now in your state? And you can get these stats everywhere. Only 11.9% of the homes sell at the original list price. And the vast majority of them sell after multiple price reductions. And in our. And again, you're gonna, you're gonna know the exact number. So I'm just talking out loud here, Kasey. And in our Marketplace, you know, 27% of the homes that get listed for sale, actually the contract expires and cancels because it didn't sell. So I'm very curious, like, is there a plan B in case one of those things impacts us? No, we absolutely have to sell. We got a job transfer, we got this. We got whatever, you know, whatever it is. It's such a great question because you're not boxing them in in any way, shape or form, because what if they say to you, yeah, plan B is we just rent it out. Cool. So should I show up with, you know, what it would take to sell the home in terms of pricing as well as what the rental market looks like? Yeah, that actually would be helpful. Great. I'll make sure I deliver that. And all I'm trying to do in pre qual qualifying is show up in the most professional way possible to answer any one of their questions and to know, like, from a value standpoint, what's important to them. So first skill, build rapport. Second skill, gotta pre qualify. All these scripts, by the way, are available on tomferry.com like, they're all for free. You can go to my YouTube channel. They're all for free. Like everything is out there. I would say the third Thing is the ability to communicate the value that you deliver deliver and why they should choose you versus the competition. And one of the great strategies is if you have the sort of insight on what the local real estate agents do in your marketplace. Hey, the average real estate in our town takes okay, photos. Showcase the house on of course, the of course sites of Zillow and Realtor and Homes and Redfin and everything else. And then they, of course they do an open house. And then of course they'll do a broker preview. And you see, sort of you start to position like everybody does the of course marketing. But what you have found to surprise and delight your clients and to attract more buyers is the what most agents don't do marketing. And to have a list of all the things that you do that the average agent doesn't do makes you stand out. It makes you the natural choice. It makes you, I mean, hey, if fees are fees and one person does these 11 things and the other person does these 36 things, including the 11 seven, like, doesn't it just make sense to go with them? So that's another really important skill. And then I would say to you, you know, the ability to price and you know, price is an art and a science. You have to know the data more than anyone else. And if you really want to nail it, you got to go preview those properties, do history searches on them in the MLS and really get precise on data. So you can speak like, like a doctor who says, you have cancer and this is exactly what we're going to do. Like that level of absolute certainty. Weird example, but you're with me on this. Like a doctor doesn't go, well, you got cancer, what do you think? Right? They don't. Dr. Doesn't say, what do you think? They go, this is the plan. This is what we're going to do. This is going to start. This is how it's going to work and you're going to live. And the more you can be like that, be like a doctor, like the ultimate expert expert. But you can only do that if you study the data, understand their values. You have tons of rapport. You've created some degrees of separation. Why you versus the competition, then you can do that and that's how you're going to win. So that's a long answer to the question of what's the one skill? So I gave you, I think four. All right, here's the last question. And it's so funny. I was playing golf a couple days ago. Shout out to Jeremy Davis. Jeremy's the CEO of a very famous app in real estate. It's called Palm Agent. That's the parent company, you might notice, Chicago agent, fidelity agent, etc. Etc. All the FNF brands. He and I were talking and it was funny. It was kind of later in the afternoon. We were playing golf and it was hot and we're in Dallas, and he looks at me. He's like, I don't know how you do it. And I was like, do what? He's a good friend. He goes, you always have so much damn energy. And I was like, yeah, I think I've always been like, maybe like that kid in the reason why I got kicked out of four high schools. I always have a lot of energy. But the question that I got from, um, let's see, Hanny Navradin. And I know I'm saying that wrong, so Hanni, I apologize. San Antonio, Texas. Love it. She said, can you talk about your routine? You have so much energy. Like, how do you do it? Well, it's not my routine. It's. It's not the fact that I try and get to bed early and, like, turn my phone off. It's not the fact that I sleep on an eight sleep, shout out to eight sleep and with a cold mattress because we know it makes you sleep better and sleep longer. And we know that. It's not that I wake up early and do gratitudes. It's not that I go to the gym. It's not that I have a tendency to listen to really inspiring podcasts all the time. It's not the fact that I've removed almost all the energy sucking vampires from my life. No. Energy is a choice. That's all it is. No one cares if I'm tired. So why in the world would I show up as Tom Tired? I'm going to San Jose. Seattle. Seattle. Then I'm going to Denver, then I'm coming home and I have a full, you know, crazy couple days of meetings. And then I'm going. I don't even know where else. I'm going to Jersey City. I'm going to Cleveland. I'm coming back here and doing a keynote for my buddy Todd Duncan. And at every one of those events, at every one of those events, there's a good chance I'm staying at a hotel I don't want to be in. There's a good chance I'll be on a flight that's delayed. There's a good chance I won't get regular meals. There's a good chance I'm going to sleep in a shitty bed. Sorry I think I've ever cursed on my own podc. There's just a good chance that everything that would normally go well in my own home environment will not be right on the road. So what am I going to do? Hi, everybody. Thank you for coming to my one day seminar. I didn't sleep well last night. I'm tired, the bed was horrible. But we'll just make it through the day. Hell no. No, you got to bring it. And I think that's just been my gift. I. I discovered a long time ago energy is attractive. Energy is attractive to people. Like, charisma is attractive to people. And if I'm in the people business, which I am, then having energy is a good thing. Even when I don't have it, I can generate it on the fly. I mean, if you've ever seen me speak before, people, like see me walk around the office. Like I could just be like walking to the restroom. And I'm like, I'm just doing, doing this. I'm not doing it because I like snapping it, by the way. I can snap with multiple different fingers just because, just, I don't know, just fun little fact. It's that I realized that when I'm moving, I walk fast. I don't walk slow ever. I hate slow walkers. I just, it just baffles me going through commercial airports and I see people just like aimlessly, you know, if that's you, by the way, I am talking to you, I'm the one that kind of bumps you on your right, bumps you on the left. Because I try and get to where I'm going as quickly as. And efficiently as possible. Possible. So I can then get in the line of getting on an airplane and make my phone calls and do all things I have to do. It's just a choice. I don't know where it came from. My mom is like a Mouseketeer. Super chill. It's not a mouse. She's 80 now. You know, she was a Mouseketeer at Disneyland. She was pulled out of a lineup by Walt Disney because she's got charisma and energy and fun. But you know, at 80, like, yeah, she's just a little more chill now. It's okay. It's okay. I can slow down in those environments. But if I have a choice, when her and I go walking through McMinnville, Oregon, where she lives, shout out to McMinnville. Super beautiful town. When we're there, I slow down and chill. But I Don't. I don't dim the light of my energy. I don't dim the light of my passion, if you will. So I would just say to you, it's just a choice. Energy is a choice. You know the one thing you're never gonna hear me say? I'm tired. I'm tired. You're never gonna hear me, like, get off an airplane and going.

I'm like, hey, it is what it is. Life is lifing along. No one cares that you're tired. By the way, I forget who said it. I think it was Larry Ellison was asked, like, back in, like, the. Like, the early 90s, like, what is it about Bill Gates that most impressed you? Bill Gates started a little company called Microsoft. Kind of sometimes controversial in the news, but forget all that stuff. The thing that I loved is he said, he's young, he's fast, and he's smart. And I was like, yeah, yeah. And you can replace young with the other word he said afterwards, which was, he's ruthless. Like, he's ruthless and not ruthless to hurt people. Ruthless to make Microsoft the single operating system that all computers run on. Because that was his vision. I'm going to create the software company that has all computers operate on it. It. That's a big vision. So I don't know, as you're listening to this, you might be like, you know what I find myself saying? I'm tired all the time. Stop that. Cause who does that serve? I mean, I get it. Like, people that say to me they're tired all the time are usually looking for someone to say, it's okay, you know, maybe you need a nap. Maybe you need to go home early. My response is, no one cares. No one cares. Get off your ass. Let's go. Let's go for a walk. Let's do a little breathing exercise. Like, let's jump on the trampoline for five minutes. Like, let's do something. Because energy is attractive. And as a salesperson, a business person, a leader, people follow and listen and say yes to the person with the energy. So long. Answer your question there, buddy. Buddy. Casey, I apologize. I guess you'd still be my buddy. All right, so that's it. I gave you a bunch today. Let me know in the comments which ones matters to you. Let me know if you picked up on the fact that I cursed for the first time ever on the podcast. I don't know if I'll ever do that again. I was just having a ranty moment. All right, thank you so much for listening and hey, go have more energy and go execute your face off. See you on the next one. If you want more information about this episode, including my show, notes, mentions, links and everything else, make sure you visit tomferry.com podcast that's tomferry.com podcast. Thanks again and talk to you soon.