The Real Estate Q&A That Agents Need This Q4

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 post. This year's success, whether you were with us there or on the live cast, you were just following along on social just. I want to say thank you for being in my community and just being who you are. So one of the things that my team did, if you're watching me on video, if you're only listening, I got a giant box in front of me. It says, questions for Tom. And they handed me just a quick stack of questions that people were asking while we were there. If you follow me on Instagram, you know, I love taking the time to answer personal questions from you. So you, you know, anywhere you're watching this, whether it's on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, wherever, if you've got a question, please ask it, because I'd love to make a difference for you. All right, so I'm going to just rip through a bunch of questions. We'll just see how this goes. My team was kind enough to put it into a couple white sheets for me. So here we go. Question number one. Hey, Tom. Oh, I always love these. If you could only add one new tool to the toolbox for the rest of 2025, what would it be? What would it be? What would it be? You know, that is such a hard question to ask because you know Debbie Miller, who I know you know, God bless you. Love you. If I was a team leader, it's probably going to be something around helping my team convert more at the bottom of the funnel. So I'd probably look at, like, Shiloh, which is a brilliant company. I am an investor in it. But it was created by a friend of mine, Levi Rogers, who has a hugely successful team, about 300 agents in the San Antonio, Texas market, a little also over in Austin. And what he was looking for was, how do I ensure that every client gets the right experience? How do I ensure that my sales team are actually following up and following through and scheduling the next appointment and not just letting these very expensive leads, but human beings fall through the clock, the cracks. So he partnered with another friend of mine, Justin Benson, and they built this beautiful software. I would say that would be the tool if I was a team, if I was an individual agent and I had lots of listings. There is a new piece of tech that was created recently. Shout out to Chris Smith and Jimmy Macken. The company's called Beacon B, E, A C, O N. I don't know if it's AI or IO or dot com, I have no idea. But what it is. If you're an agent that's sitting on 3, 4, 5, 6 listings and you know that on a weekly basis, you've got to communicate effectively the results of your marketing. What's happening in terms of showings, what's happening in terms of just the overall market as it relates to their active listing. Well, Beacon basically takes all the data points and puts it into a beautiful email. We used to jokingly call it the don't fire me report, but we don't want to send it that way. So I would look at Beacon if I was an agent with lots of listings and I was looking for a way to cut maybe 10, 15 hours depending upon how many active listings I have. If it's 20 or 30 or 40, it could be 20 hours a week of just getting all the data points from how many people watched a YouTube video or an Instagram video or how many hearts and likes on all the different portals. So I like that solution a lot. I would say if I was a brand new agent and I needed a tool that could help me between now and the end of the year, be more effective. Hmm. I don't know if it'd be a tool, it might be a tactic. And what I would say is, you know, I would say to you, if you were brand new, I would say you should go through your entire database and you should send every single person an unsolicited CMA on their house. Now, if you're with me at the summit or not, heads up. One of the things that we talked about while we were there is we're now going through, since the 80s, the sixth time in the US real estate market where we've had a dip in terms of either transaction counts. We've been in a trough for, my goodness, a drought for like three years as, you know, or a high interest environment or, you know, an inflation environment or a outright recession. So it's happened six times. And the big insight that I was sharing this year, and I really hope this resonates for you, is the recognition that every real estate cycle, every drought, every downturn, every dip, in home prices always ends in recovery. It always ends, always ends in recovery. Every drought ends in recovery. So if you were a newer agent or just an agent that just needs to get a boost in your business, it wouldn't be a tool, it would be a tactic. And I would tell you, by doing unsolicited CMAs for your customers, you're providing the value. When everyone says provide value, you know what they want to know? They want to know how much equity they have. They want to know what's the future of real estate. They want to know, like, is this the right home for me? So I would be providing that, and I would do it every single person, excuse me, in my database between now and the end of the year, because we know what's going to happen. It's going to start a bunch of very meaningful conversations. So I answered that one question three different ways. I hope you got value from it. All right, this question. What's the one thing agents think matters in 2025 but actually doesn't move the needle at all? Boy, do I want to be controversial here. I'll tell you the first thing that goes through my mind. My shout out to Jason Pantana and my dear friend Mark over at Thousand Watt, Mark Davison. We were chatting before the summit about the evolution of video content and how we've seen some very smart agents do some things that maybe necessarily, you know, might get some views, might get some clicks, might get some laughs, might get some shares. But we sort of universally question, does it really help an agent's brand? And I think, you know what I'm saying, there's. I think if you look at content, specifically content that would have consumers find you to be the agent of choice, that you're going to come across as the most responsive, the fastest to follow up, the most reliable, the market leader, the one that really understands their needs, their wants, their desires, their maybe transaction challenges that they know you could overcome it. As an example, we say that, like, 70% of the content we see falls under that category, right? It's market updates. It's, you know, case study examples. But the part that I think that some agents might be missing is what we call vibing videos. Vibing videos are where you're. You're probably looking more to entertain agents, right? Like, you make fun of other agents, which I do not recommend. You make fun of consumers, which I absolutely do not recommend. It's stuff that you're doing that you just want to get clicks, you just want to get likes. You want people to go, oh, she's the best. Oh, did you see that video? And, yeah, might get shared more. But I want to remind you, my mentor, God bless him, passed a couple years ago. His name is Bill Mitchell and he was the group senior vice president for a multi billion dollar business called the Irvine Company in Southern California. And I remember as I got into YouTube back in 2007, and I was so excited to share with him, I got this new company camera and this is what I'm doing. He reminded me to just be sensitive to. You don't want to put any piece of content out that you, you didn't want or don't want on the front cover of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, or whatever other major media publication in your marketplace, because you can hurt your brand very quickly. So I guess I would say that that's, that's one thing I think people think the more shares they get, the more likes they get, the more hearts they get, etcetera, that they think that's going to translate to business. And oftentimes it doesn't. Right. What happens is, you know, you sort of become this, like, personality who makes fun of real estate agents or makes fun of consumers. And I just think, to me, that would be a bad strategy. All right, let's move to the next one. I'm not going to share the other five controversial things. I was thinking the next one was, I like this one a lot. By the way, this is from Gil Zamora in Houston, Texas. Gil's basically asking, hey. He's like, hey, I just had my most successful, highest transaction like listing sell. What else do you recommend in terms of raising my price point or how do I get more listings from that listings? Well, I would say we probably could link up, Brian, the video where we talked about Meredith Fogel's strategy around how do you take one listing and turn into two or three buyers and probably turn into one or two more listings? And I guess the question I would ask Gil and everyone you watching is, when was the last time you took some time to reimagine how you launch a listing, not just to get the most potential buyer opportunities, but also to have that listing for the potential sellers? Say, that's the kind of agent I'm looking for. So I want to say there was eight to 10 different things that we talked about sort of under this, make that listing famous. And in this case, Gil, if the property's already sold, be clear, you can shoot another video about that property and put it out on social. You can shoot another video about the case study of how you sold it. We would call it like the reverse engineer the transaction. Hey, so I'm sitting at 1234 Banana Street. We close this property at a record price or whatever the price may be. 99% of list price, 97% of list price. Got em, you know, $1.7 million. But let me tell you how we did it. And you reverse engineer the process and what you're doing is you're demonstrating to a potential client that you have a method and a process that you can go backwards and forwards with and say, this is exactly how we got it done. I think that'd be very powerful. Obvious. You know, a hand addressed, hand stamped note to every one of the sellers in that neighborhood is also a very good idea. I would also say holding a party for the new buyer, even if you didn't represent them, is a really good idea. Like, hey, I'd like to host Congratulations on buying my listing at 1 through 4 Banana Street. I'd love to host a party for you at your new home to introduce you to all the neighbors. Obviously you could go door knock. I'm just giving you all the ideas. You can go door knock in that community. I think of my little sister, Michelle Ferry Cronin in San Diego. She was at the summit two years ago for the first time. And I think she heard Maureen Fallon, the queen of Queens, New York talk about, you know, when you sell an expensive listing, one of the things that they would do is they literally created like a little gift bag and they gave it to like 75 of the neighbors as a, hey, we sold your property, we raised your price. And here's just a special thank you for maybe the traffic of the open houses that we did or, you know, the fact that so many more people were coming through the community because of our marketing as an example. I think that's another good way. But Gil, if I go back to the sort of bifurcated question, it's also how do I raise my price point? So I haven't talked about this in a while. It whether you want to raise your price point or not, this is an excellent idea. Something I would encourage you to do, and that is to take all of your transactions for perpetuity as long as you've been in the business. Google, I think max is out at 300 on Google Maps. But if you had 300 property addresses, buyer, seller, lease, you know, investor, doesn't make a difference. And you upload them into, I think it's Maps, Google or Google Map, whatever It is, it will will then visualize the map of all the transactions that you've done. Now first of all, that's a really great marketing piece because it shows that you know, the consumers, whether it's on an Instagram video green screen or a direct mail postcard or inside of a blog or on a direct mail piece. The map and all the transactions of all the people you've helped. That's always a really good idea. But in this context I'm going to take first my transactions, then I'm going to take my entire database, really my sphere, Mike. The, the people that potentially I'm close to know like trust and I want to do the same thing. And if I can overlay the two inside of Google Maps, what you're really going to see is where do you have influence? And this is the first thing I say when someone says I want to raise my price point. I'm like, look, you can just say I want to go after, you know, Irvine Terrace in Corona del Mar, California. But you and every other agent is already very clear on those 500 houses and what they sell for. And you know, everybody kind of one offs the transactions. I'd rather you say I'm gonna go after Highland park right here in Dallas, Texas because I know 27 people that live in that community. So I can actually utilize and I can leverage the people that already know me, like me and trust me, whether it's really tight or you know, a little bit afar. And I can begin to use those relationships to meet and introduce and connect or at least when I'm out and about knocking on doors, doing an open house. You know, I was just at the Joneses house. I've been friends of mine forever and hey, I sold you know, 1234 Banana street to buyer EG. It makes you more of the local expert. And when you look at what causes people to succeed in the high end, there's no doubt it's relationship first, first and foremost. Then it's going to be respect and track record and all the things that we know, resourcefulness, reliability. But some is just going to be how well do you know this area and how many other homes have you sold like this? So I think strategies like that make a big difference. I'll give you one just additional insight on this. 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 omferry and follow and lets 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 in the platform that matters most to you. So subscribe and I'll see you there soon. If you were watching this right now and you're like, well, I don't know anybody in those areas, what I would tell you is any method of prospecting, open houses, knocking on doors, making phone calls, you know, expired listings, any method of prospecting is great. One of this, one of the best strategies that I've been teaching for decades and I think of like Randy Burra, New York City agent, phenomenal agent. Randy, if you're watching, I love you and I respect you. Talked to Stevie Cohen this morning, by the way. Randy, really smart with his business coach at Tom Ferry. Gets an expired listing in a building downtown Manhattan and knows that you know what, he's got a shot, but it's not a great shot because it's a price point that he has no track record for, no comps of his own for. And his coach said, you know what you should do? Why don't you partner with another great agent that sells a lot of properties in that building, split the deal 5050 because half a commission is way better than zero commission. And you know what? Randy did that. And he did it a few more times working expired listings in the high end because there's a lot of them right now. There's a lot of them right now. So hear me out on this. And brought in senior agents that maybe had a better brand name and they split the deal and he did all the work. And I think, I don't want to misquote it, Randy, maybe you can put it in the comments if you see this, you know, two, three times after doing this. Now he's the guy, he's done a bunch of transactions in that price range and he's able to leverage his success to do more. So lots of different ways that I answer that. Gil, thank you so much for asking. All right, so Fred Wolf from San Antonio, Clearly I got three Texas questions so far, but the next one coming up is from Springwater, Ontario, Canada. So Fred asks, hey, I set a goal of helping 15 first time home buyers purchase their home in the next 12 months, summit to summit. Love that. What are your top three things I can do to achieve my goal? Well, the good news is if you look at the demand Right now, certainly in San Antonio, being a huge military market, a large Latino market, which we know today is one of the biggest home buyers, potential home buyers in the entire United States, like you kind of have the perfect storm. Plus you got great price points, you got interest rates coming down. So you're solving a lot of the fundamental problems. So to me, Fred, you gotta get out and you gotta market more. So the first thing I would do is, you know, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the different places where you are active on social. I would be telling the world that you're committed to helping 15 people change their life forever by buying their first home. And then I would document meetings and successes and clients throughout the 12 months. So I would tell my customers, tell my friends, this is what I'm committed to. And if you know someone that is looking for this, you know, I'm certainly here and available to support all that. Like I would, I would just be putting that out there to the world. The second thing I would do is I would immediately start doing first time home buyer seminars. First time home buyer seminars. And again, Fred, knowing your marketplace, I don't know if you speak multiple languages. If you speak multiple languages, that's going to give you a huge competitive advantage. At that first time home buyer seminar, you could literally put up QR codes saying if you need to fix your credit, click here and we can get you my, you know, my guy, you know, gal, you know, Susie over there is going to help you get your credit repaired. You can get pre qualified today and go shop for houses tomorrow. Click here. And your favorite loan officer is now doing an application to get them pre approved. It is a fantastic way for you to basically show and demonstrate your commitment, your service level, your team, your lender, your title exec, your escrow officer, all those people with those first time home buyers. And Whether you have three people show up or 300 people show up, if you do one a month, at the end of the year you're going to cremate this goal. All right, so those would be my first two things. If I had a third for first time home buyers, huh? If I had a third for first time homebuyers, what would I do? I can't help but say if I wanted to get an overwhelming number of opportunities, I would look at like realtor.com as maybe a low cost lead pillar, if it's in your budget, as a way to attract more. I think about one of my clients, one of my best friend's son, who's now a coaching client Vincent Kessel, who didn't go to work with his dad, who is one of the top team leaders in all of Florida For Compass, like 700 transactions, shout out to Kirk and Dwayne, who run that team. But his dad's advice was instead, I'd rather you at 19 years old, now that you got your license, go work someplace else and you know, like, don't, don't work here at the mothership. It's not going to be good for you. Go, go spread your wings. Which I thought was a really, really excellent piece of advice. When Vince called me, he's like, what do you recommend? Because he ended up in Palm beach, kind of a high sales price. 19 year old kid, first time in the marketplace, doesn't know anybody. And I', Vinny, you're first of all, you got to sell your jeep, you're going to cash out, you're going to buy a more reasonable luxury real estate type sedan and then you're going to take some of that cash. And I, I'd invest it in realtor.com I don't want to misquote the number. Vinnie, if you're watching, I think he did like $15 million in sales his first year. And a lot of it came from realtor.com, which were, you know, we know you know, if you got a hundred leads, you're going to close five to seven of them. Right. But for him, at his price point, Fred, it made a lot of sense. So I don't even know if it's available in your marketplace, but I would take a look at that as if not that first time home buyer seminars. Make the public announcement. I think I would go flyer, let's call it like mid to upper tier apartment buildings with a flyer that educates them on, you know, their current rent, could very easily get them a mortgage. Right. Something along those lines. And I'm not giving you the best marketing strategy there, but I think you get the concept right. So that would be the next one. All right, so let's keep jamming. Kathy Corpi from Spring Water, Ontario just says thank you and as a Canadian, we love you. And hey, I love you too. And I was just in Toronto yesterday. All right, so I'm going to do my one last question, maybe two. So I got a question from Rhonda Fisher in St. Louis, Missouri, and here's your question. She's like, tom, what's a great sop? Standard operating procedure or a plan, a strategy to exit the business over the next 10 years. What would that perfect Plan be. Well, the first thing I would tell you is I'd reverse engineer exactly how much money you need to make that a reality. So if you got there in seven years, congratulations, you can leave early. Right? So it always starts with like, you know, what's my debt position? What's my cash flow position? Like, you know what, what is the actual retirement financial strategy look like? So I start there. What kind of lifestyle do I want? Do I want to no longer go on vacation or am I still going on vacation? Do I have a lake house and my primary residence? Am I selling my primary like you? You really need to work through Rhonda, like what is look like and get really clear on the money side. Because that's where most people say, well, I'd like to be done in 10 years. I'm like, what does that look like? They're like, I have no idea. I just know I need to sell a lot of houses. That is not a plan and that is a recipe for disaster. So that's the first thing. Get clear on the finances. The second thing I would tell you is you have to make the decision, are you going to turn the business over to somebody else or just fade off into the sunset? I would encourage you to turn the business over to somebody else. So what does that mean? Well, if I'm sitting here 10 years out and I'm going to start asking myself, who is my most ideal partner, the person I would take on that ultimately Rhonda could take over your business, maybe, you know, over three year tranches, hey, be on my team for three years, maybe as an assistant, then a buyer's agent, and then transition to my listing partner and listing launches and marketing and help them work through every aspect of the business to become great like you have become, so they can naturally take the business from there and you get a sale off into the sunset. I think that's the right strategy. The other thing I will tell you, a partnership we created that we launched at the summit this year if you're in the US is a solution called Live in Here. And the reason why I partnered with them, it's software. And I'll give you in a nutshell what it does for someone like Rhonda. It'll make a ton of sense because it will actually increase the value of her database. So living here in a nutshell, partner with like totality from a data standpoint. Here's what it does. Number one, it cleans up your database. So if you have an email address, that email address almost being like the Unique IP that would give me the unlock. So instead of having like Rhonda and, and maybe Rhonda in my phone, it's Rhonda Dog park. But I don't know anything else about you. The second I get an email, it's now going to say, oh, that's Rhonda Fisher. She's in St. Louis, Missouri and here's her mailing address. And just like that, I've got more database integrity. So that's key, that's number one. Number two, it also tells you who is most likely to transact in your database. Now, there's been lots of solutions like this. And as we enter more and more the world of AI, where AI is the superpower, it is the hack, it is the ultimate time saver. I see this Rhonda as the perfect storm. Where now at least once a month, maybe even every day, depending upon the size of your database, percolating up are these four, five, six people that are most likely to transact now. Is that tomorrow? Is that in six months, Is that in a year? It doesn't make a difference. They're in your database now you know who to narrow your focus on, which again is going to drive more revenue up. It's going to have you do more transactions in less time. But what it really does is it cements your relationship with your database. We all know the numbers, right? NAR puts it out all the time. Like 80 some odd percent of consumers say, I loved my agent, she was totally amazing. But only 1 out of 4 ever transact with that agent again. And that even may be the high. I think it's more like 1 out of 5 ever transact. Why your database is a mess, then it's hard to deliver consistent value over 6, 10, 12, 15 years before they transact again. So the third part of what it does is you actually give the consumer a home hub. Think push a button, magic happens. Instead of having to go to Zillow or another to find out their home prices, they get all the real time data there and it's everything inside of their home on an app branded to you. So you can probably see why Rhonda, I'm a huge fan, right? Huge. Excuse me, huge fan of this solution. All right, so I'm going to do the last one and I got a bounce. All right, so hopefully got some value out of that Rhonda. And congratulations. Start with the finances. How much money? What does it look like? What do you need to have in place? Are you investing now in dividend stocks? Right? Are you like to create cash flow. Are you buying more real estate to create cash flow or are you just going to kind of live off your savings? It's all up to you. All right, so Brian Myers from Effingham, am I saying that right? Illinois says, hey Tom, is it unprofessional? I think always starting a question with things like is it unprofessional? We'll see. Brian, is it unprofessional to reach out to cold prospects on Facebook messenger or Insta? I'm talking cold cold like never met or spoke with them before. Well, Brian, I get hundreds of those on every major platform and somehow occasionally even on my cell phone, so. So it's going to be targeted. Maybe you're going to get like one out of 100, could be one out of 500. That's okay. That's okay. The thing I would ask you to consider is this. If you're going to do this strategy, it's kind of like cold calling, right? It's very random. What I want to be able to do is deliver something interesting and valuable and not come across like a salesperson. So I might take for example, slides from what I did at the summit which you can download or content from my local real estate economist or from getting something from my title exec or something from keeping current matters. And I might take one of those and turn it into an emoji or a meme that I'm going to put inside there that maybe shows home price appreciation or depreciation and then maybe asking a question like, hey, what do you think is going to happen with home prices over the next 12 to 18 months? Right. There was something we shared at the summit this year to be actually interesting guys for us to link up up the page where they can download all the slides. I think that's a really good idea. So congrats, you're going to get that. But inside there there was a forecast done for US real estate only from 2025 to 2029. And I think just that one piece, thinking about what I started with is every drought ends in a recovery. They asked three tranches of real estate economists what they thought would happen to home price appreciation from 25 to 29. And, and you're going to see if I, if I'm off from memory on these numbers, the most optimistic said home price appreciation over the next four years, 27%. It was a huge number and probably you get excited about that. As a real estate professional, I don't think many first time home buyers get excited about it. But that's what the most optimistic said, the most pessimistic said over the next four years, I want to say they said like 7 or 8%. Again, you'll see the slide. So don't quote me on the exact number. And then the biggest tranche, the group in the middle, which is usually the ones that are right. The real conservative ones, they said like, oh, we think it's gonna be like 17, 18%. So. So if I had that data point and I turned it into a meme, if I turned it into a gif that I could then pop in and then ask a question, I think you'd get a better response. But why don't you do me a favor? Why don't you take action on that idea and then send me a DM and let me know? All right? Hey, thank you so much. There's so many more questions I'll be answering and answering for you, but I want to remind you that I'm here for you. So if you've got a question, pop it in. Whatever site you're watching this on, however you're getting it, if you're listening only on audio, I don't know, go to my Instagram, go to my Facebook, go somewhere, Send me a. Send me a tweet on X. Isn't it funny how we say send me a tweet on X Just doesn't make sense to say, send me an X on X. I don't know, something like that. All right. In case you're wondering if this is a live show. All right, well, thank you so much for being a part of my community. I appreciate you. Keep up the good work. We got a lot of opportunity in front of us. The interest rates are going to continue to move in the right direction. That's a good thing for buyers, and that's a great thing for you. So get out there, stay in action, and I'll see you on the next show. Sam Foreign. 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.