Most real estate agents stay stuck at 6 to 8 homes a year because they work solo instead of building a business. Cody Riddle scaled from $300k to $1.5M in annual revenue by shifting his mindset, delegating low-value work, and installing repeatable systems for lead generation.
Questions this video answers
Six to eight homes per year.
About 17,000 agents in the speaker's market.
Approximately 15–20%.
Before: about $250–$300,000 GCI; After: about $1.5 million GCI.
Six stages of growth.
Why is it that the average real estate agent only sells six to eight homes per year? You know, I think most agents don't think of real estate as a career, let alone a business. You know, our industry thrives on the fact that we have millions of real estate agents and not enough homes to transact for any of those agents or for all of those agents to make a good living in real estate. So the sad truth is that most real estate agents are in it, you know, as a part time basis. They're really not professionals. They really don't look at real estate as a career. And the barriers to entry in real estate are really, really low. A few hundred dollars, a few hours in a classroom, and you're now handling the largest financial transaction for, you know, most people in their lifetime. You know, the industry is really jacked up in many ways. And in most markets, you know, take my market for example, there are 17,000 real estate agents in my market, which is like 10,000 too many agents, maybe 12, maybe 14,000 too many agents. You know, we have about 15, 20% of those agents, really do good business, are really good at what they do. And so the industry in many ways is stacked against us. Make sure you stick around to the end of this video. I want to give you an exact roadmap of the stages of growth for a real estate agent turned business owner. Make sure you stick around for that. If you like the channel, make sure you subscribe, turn your notifications on, make sure you comment as well. When I think of someone that has turned their career into a business, I think of Cody Riddle out of Phoenix, Arizona. When I met Cody, she just came out of the great recession years. That's like 2008, 9, 10, 11, 12 or so. Phoenix got hit pretty hard at that point. She was, I think 17, 18 years in the business and she had fallen completely out of love with real estate. So while this was her sole income, her way to make money and support her family was real estate. So she had definitely made the decision that it was going to be a career. She was top 1% in her market. She was doing about 250 to $300,000 in GCI, which is good business. But she was miserable. She was working every evening, every weekend. She was beyond stressed, and she had no love left for real estate. So I started working with Cody. The biggest shift that we had to work on was her mindset to stop thinking about her real estate business as a solo practitioner, sort of solopreneur type mindset, which is what most agents think of their real estate business. To think that she had to do everything in her business. She was the one entering listings into mls. She was the one that was running yard signs around, you know, Phoenix. She was the one that was showing buyers every evening or weekend, Whenever buyers wanted to go see a home, she was available to show those homes. She wasn't treating her business like a true business. And so the things that she was able to do in her business really transformed the way that she was able to earn money, more money, in less time. So fast forward just a few years, three or four years working with Cody. She took her $300,000, you know, career and turned it into a $1.5 million business where she's working about 50% less hours. She's not working evenings, she's not working many weekends. And she's back in love with real estate. And so there's a few things that she focused on that I want to share with you. The first thing that I worked on with Cody when we started back in the day is the fact that she had to make this mindset shift to not be attached to every piece of the job of a real estate agent. It's this thinking that you're the only one that can do a certain thing. Like, I'm the only one that can write MLS remarks for a listing. I'm the only one that can design a brochure. I'm the only one that knows how to show homes to buyers. I'm the only one that knows how to dot, dot, dot. I'm the only one that. This is the typical. I'd say 95% of real estate agents have this mindset. I'm the only one that can whatever it is. Right. So that's number one. I had to break this mindset in coty to realize that there are jobs to do to be successful in real estate and to serve buyers and sellers, but you don't have to be the one to do them.
Right.
Your clients care about the standard of care and. And the service they're provided, not the fact that you're doing every little job of real estate agents. That was the first thing that we worked on. The second thing is this concept of delegating to elevate.
Right.
What are the things that you're working on that you don't need to be working on.
Right.
How do you go from 300,000 to 1.5 million, you know, making probably more than five times take home income, that's gross commission income. And she's working, you know, went from 60 to 70 hours pretty consistently to 40 to 50 hours per week. And she now has agents on her team that she's leveraging.
Right.
How do you make that happen? It's a series of looking at where you're spending your time. So we do time studies which aren't fun yet they're super powerful. So you look at your time and you decide what you can delegate so that you can elevate and just being honest with yourself in a given week. You know, what did I do this week that I could get some leverage around? What activities did I do that a runner could do? Someone that can, you know, run signs out to properties, pick up a check here or there, meet, you know, a buyer over at a property, or drop this off, or pick up your dry clean or walk your dog or like all these things that we get involved in with our time that really don't pay a lot of money and if you don't get joy out of them, you really shouldn't be doing them. So that's the second thing is this concept of delegating and elevating. And the third thing I would say is just a mindset towards systems like what can you put into your business that runs repeatedly that you could leverage, you know, to be able to scale your business? And the most sort of impactful area in our business where we can employ systems is in our marketing. It's not buying leads from Zillow. It's, you know, the lead generation leverage that we can install in our business so that we can scale our business without having to scale our hours. Our lead gen levers in real estate B school, every one of them is good for about 50 deals. And we have eight. We're working on like nine or 10 lead gen levers, fully installable, ready to swipe and deploy into your business. And they're not for everybody yet when you put one in your business, it takes a little bit of time to get it up and running. It is good for, you know, three, four deals per month. And so where are you getting your business right now? You know, ask yourself that question. What are the sources of business right now? Are you thinking about your, your marketing as lead generation levers that you can install in your business? And you can have one to get to 50, you can have two to get to 100, three to get to 150, and so on and so forth. And so if you're at the point in your journey where you wish there was like a step by step, you know, for the different stages, there are actually six, six stages of growth that you'll experience specific stages of growth where you have to look at your business different. You have to ask yourself this different questions you have to put in place, different systems.
Right.
We call this our Real estate Business Growth Navigator. And you can go to realestatebusinessgrowth.com that's realestatebusinessgrowth.com or you can click on the link below and it's a, I think it's like a 16 or 17 page report and it details everything you need to do to essentially through all six stages of real estate business growth. Again, if you like the channel, make sure you hit the subscribe button, turn notifications on and leave me comments. We'll see you in the next video.
