Dominate Expired Listings in Your Market

This is a system, really. I want you to come to this call with. If you're running an expired system, you're going to make it infinitely better from things that you learn on today's call. If you're not running an expired system, holy cow. If they're like you should have been, when's the best time to plant a tree is like 20 years ago. That would have been the best time to put the expired system into place and never stop running it. But this is today. Could not be a better time. I just think as any market shifts, buyers and sellers sort of disconnect and they, you know, sellers like, I like the price of that house over there. That sold nine months ago, you know, but that was a different market. You know, your. Your. Your home is not going to sell. They will list with other agents, and you just need to be okay with it. And the faith and comfort you will have walking away from sellers that are not realistic is like, you will catch them on the flip side. Your expired system will catch them on the flip side. My. My last sale for me in production was the guy was. I was his seventh. Seventh agent, so seventh agent in five years, and it was a 1.2. He started at 2.5. So the first agent was not strong enough to get him to list at the right price. The second agent was a little lower. Little lower, A little low. I told him $1,200,000. He's like, what's this transaction fee? Stacy's heard the story. I'm like, yeah, it's for the paperwork. He's like, the $36,000 commission isn't enough? I'm like, nope, sorry, you got to pay it. Everyone pays it. And he begrudgingly signs it. So we'll have another training, I think. Stacey, we doing transaction fees in September?

Yes. Yep.

Sure are going to be so awesome. But we don't want to blow your mind too much in one call. So anyway, in 2019 and 2020, over a million GCI from expired in. In a time where you would think, let's drop the expired system. So the expired system, we're going to learn today. And our first guest, we have two guests, Curtis Fenn, who I've known. I don't know. I feel like I've known him since I started with Red X, which was forever ago. This was probably the first. Okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna put Curtis Fenn in an uncomfortable situation who hates monthly recurring payments as this. At this point, as a real estate agent, raise your hand. I hate them. I, I went in my, I went on a retreat recently and I went through my credit card statements in the, in the two businesses and I'm like, oh, my Lord. I called Motley fool and I have been paying for something since 2010 and I didn't notice it. And so. But I will say this monthly recurring charge from Red X is probably one of the first ones that I started and one that we never stopped. And a system every, almost every day, five days a week that we've used consistently in the business. So, and this is going to be free, pretty free flow in terms of. And Stacey, I'll let you chat here in a second. If you have anything to add before we kick it off, feel free to ask questions. I'm have Curtis kind of give the latest and greatest in terms of what they're seeing in the market. And then we're going to bring Janie Coffey in, who's outside of Stacy, and my wife, like one of the smartest, most intelligent, business savvy women that I know. Well, my wife's not business savvy, so she's not even in that group. So it's literally just Stacy and Janie. And if you're a chick and you're on here, you're in that group as well. All right, Stacey, what say you before we jump in?

I don't have a lot to add. Besides, I also was a Red X customer and when I was in production and I was not great at calling expireds at all, but Red X made it so much easier instead of having to dig for everything. And I was even in a market where we get the seller's phone numbers like it's right on mls. We call the seller and say, hi, can I show your home? Like, which sounds funny, like I don't know if any of you have markets like that, but we're a little behind in that. We now have showing time though, so, you know, we're, we're getting there. But Red X was still so valuable to me because of the organization and able to label and move and, you know, take all this information in one spot and do a dialer if you want to. So. I love Red X too, and I'm excited to have you talk with us today, Curtis, so you can take it away.

Awesome. What do you got, Curtis?

Thanks for having me. Well, man, I thought you'd ask some thought provoking question, at least get me started here. But I got plenty to talk about.

Well, there is one thing I want to kick off with, so I too called one Expired. I mean, literally, I can remember the moment in time he was so mean to me. I vowed to never call expired expired again. So it probably was a good seven years before we call it started calling expired. So I, I used Red X probably in a very roundabout way. I was, you know, essentially marketing to expired, old expireds. I would pull them, run them through the system, you know, make sure they weren't active. And so I probably used it in the whole cascading folders. I don't know if that's still how you manage things, but we would have like, you know, multiple mailers and all of that. So there is a way to generate tons of business from expireds without calling them. But I've gotten an email from you, probably not you, but from you, Curtis, where you've been talking about. And I don't know if it was a webinar, but you're talking about warming up, you know, warming up some of these leads. So it's not because I think people are really, and Janie's going to touch on this as well, but I think agents are like, man, the thought of starting your day, you know, calling a bunch of people that are getting, you know, calls from 20 other agents, you know, maybe some of what you've been marketing in terms of warming them up can, can feed into it. But I want to, I want to touch on that. But then also I saw some kind of statistic that July 1, and you probably know the stat July 1, the expires were up like 12,000% from, you know, this year to last year or whatever. I don't even know what the numbers were, but I would imagine August, September, I would imagine it's going to go straight through the roof. All these sellers that are listing now, you know, these rosy colored glasses, sellers. But so cover a little bit of what you're seeing in the market. Cover. Then we'll maybe start with the market side of it and then we'll get into some of the other stuff that the ways you're seeing your system work at a high level.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me. I could talk about expireds forever. What's interesting is, as we've been in business for 20 years, Expireds is not the biggest part of our business anymore either. And we do so many things outside of expired listings. But the market, what's happening in the market right now has reinvigorated me and our team in what's happening with expireds. Because you're, because you're right, almost, almost 12,000% up 70% up on July 1 from last year with expired listings. So they're way up. Year to date, we're up over 40% in expired listings throughout the whole country. But even before that, let me talk about 2021, when nobody was trying to think about expireds. And, and many people don't understand what was happening in the market even in 2021. And maybe some of you would be very surprised to understand that there was still 1.49 million expired listings in 2021. And that's just expired. That's not counting Canceled or Tron or any other listing taken off the market. In fact, there was over 10 million listings in 2021 and only 6 million sales. So, so there is a huge opportunity for these off market or listings that have been taken off the market because there's a variety of reasons why they come off the market. So it's, it's been an opportunity that opportunities now increasing, which is kind of reinvigorated what, what's happening here. And for those that have not been involved with Red X or follow some of our podcasts or marketing, we are like real nerdy over here and we have big data science teams and we really like the data and we really like to look at what's going on. And so just as Lars indicated that as we look and we predict right now we can predict whether a listing will expire with an 88% accuracy. I wish I could sell that information, but then everybody would, would get in trouble marketing active listings. But we're looking at the forecast of what's happening in the marketplace and that trajectory is exactly as Lars described it. Expired is only going up and we're going to see a huge bump in expireds not just because of interest rates and buyer seller demand. It's the seller perspective is still stuck in what's happening. They're still looking at, well, my neighbor got 30 grand over list price and we're going, well, it's not that. And in fact, now you might have to pay the buyer's closing costs, right? So it's this perspective that takes time for the consumers, the sellers to catch up to what's happening in the market. Which means we're going to see a huge spike in expireds over the next 90 days. And we're going to see those expireds. And then what happens is those people are going to have a dose of reality and those people, then it's a great opportunity to be in front of those people because now they have a realistic expectation of what the market can offer them with price and how they're going to have to list their home and the things they have to do. I mean, you guys know, and many of you maybe are even guilty of this, but think of how so many people even got away from professional photography in the last two years, right? They're snapping a few pics of their iPhone because they're getting 70 offers. And so there's homes that are expiring. So I want to just talk real quick about the homes that are expiring for two reasons. Because this will help you ensure that your listings don't expire, but it will also give you an idea of what you need to do when you are in front of expired to make sure that you can get it sold the second time around. Many people often will tell me it's always price. And I will tell you that. Let me try to find my, my nerdy notes here that if you are in a market that is in a range under 650,000, which is most people, so markets between 250 and 650, that more homes sold the second time around by doing a price increase than a price decrease. And that's because when you look at what people are looking for and it matters, and I know there's always these arguments online, do I, do I do it999 or do I do it at the thousand? And you've just got to look at what your MLS portals are offering in terms of what categories and prices people can list at. Because more often than not the home will sell the second time around if you do a price increase, not a decrease. There is another statistic that your home is much more likely to expire if you have any sort of link in the description of where you're showing that property to take them to somewhere else. So often. And if you're going, I don't even understand what he's saying, it's probably not your market, but often people will put a whole portfolio of pictures on a different URL. And so they'll have the listing, they'll click out of it to go. But if you have any link that directs them outside of the listing of where they're viewing the property, the listing is more likely to expire. Right. If you are in a home over 650, then often a price reduction is what is needed to get the home sold. And that's what we're having in this market, especially where, where people have a realistic expectation where they're going to come in and decrease those expired listings. So there is A there's a huge opportunity. We have so many more things to share that we don't have time for about, about how to get the listings sold and everything. But let me just talk for a second about the opportunity to warm up the expireds like we've never had before. Your brand and reputation. Let me back up. There's, there's really two ways that, that all of you build your business. You either hunt for it, you either go out and get it, you prospect, you cold call, you are out there talking to people, you're going to community events and introducing yourself. You are proactively going out and finding or you build a brand and people find you. Right? And, and a successful business has to do both, right? We have to have this organic brand and reputation and we have to go out and find the business. That's the nature because you often don't go have a brick and mortar store where you have a sign that people are driving by, so to speak. So, so in both of these cases we, you know, Red X and you think have expired solely on that hunt side of the business. But with social media there's more opportunity ever to build a reputation and brand with a target audience for, for less money than you've ever imagined, right? So if you don't know in Facebook, Instagram, every social media platform that you can take all of the expired listings and it turns out that the best way that Facebook knows how to match your list of people is with a good phone number, which is what Red X does. We go out and grab those expired listings and find all the contact information for the homeowner. You can upload those right into Facebook or to Instagram and you can start to boost your content directly to those people. Now that's different than an ad strategy where you can do advertising to those people. But advertising on social media is the same as prospecting on the phone. You're really going after that low hanging fruit, the 3% or so that are ready to make a buying decision right now. That's the ad strategy on social media. The boosting and organic strategy is you just do you and boost a whole bunch of content about you and your reputation. Because a reputation is really built when people can observe you over and over and over again consistent enough that they can form an opinion or belief about you, right? So in social media to be posting about you and, and about who you are, not just the listings you get, not just the successes you have in real estate, people actually don't care about that. You have to sprinkle some of that in there because they need to know that you're a good, you're a good agent. But, but if that's all you post, nobody's watching. So you have to pick things about who you are and what you represent, the corporate core values that you have in your business and then you have to consistently post on those things. And if you do that, then you can upload all of the leads that you have, whether, anywhere, your whole database. But if it's expireds and fizbos and pre foreclosures, which is also coming down at an aggressive rate. So you get those lists of pre foreclosure and people in foreclosure and you upload all of those into your social platforms and you start boosting. Facebook says that boosting is how you build awareness and reputation, not ad campaigns. That's a different type of strategy. So when we are now teaching people, because not everybody wants to call and if you don't want to pick a phone call and if you don't want to do a cold call, then the way that you warm up these lists or the way that you build a reputation with them is by consistently being in front of them over and over and over again. So awesome. Yeah. What else?

Yeah, so, so, I mean, while we had the time frame here, we'll probably run with getting all the goodness out of your head and if you guys have any questions, definitely pile on with the questions and we'll get questions answered. Even. You know, I, I retired from my real estate team in November 2020 and we were still running the same systems that I had put in place almost 10 years earlier. You know, handwritten letters and like all the stuff. But what, what, what is, what's changed about the, the core sort of red X. What are the best lead sources that you guys are seeing now? What are the best case studies that you guys are. I mean, you guys are, are good marketers too. So what, what are, what are your most successful clients doing with your data and they're having success with.

So it's an easy question because what I'm talking about, I mean the most successful people have a multi, a multi vertical strategy, multi channel strategy. And that when we do surveys, the people who are making the most amount of money, people making 250,000 or more in GCI a year from these lead sources are going after the group of leads that they have in at least three different ways. And so. And you've already. And that's what you were doing, Lars. Right? Mailing them. We got people Picking up the phone and calling them. You know, maybe people are out there door knocking, which is highly, highly successful in a face to face conversation to door knock expires. But social media is really the big one. It's, it's consistently being in front of them so that if you do call, they go, oh Lars, yeah, you're a real estate agent, right? And they don't, they may not even know. It's that they've, they've just been exposed enough times that you now have some of that real estate mind share in the, in their, in their brain that they, they, they know who you are. Right. Um, so uploading to social media and having both a brand strategy, a reputation strategy, but also an ad strategy for direct trying to generate leads is, is what most successful agents are doing right now. And in terms of lead types, expireds is coming back with the vengeance. So that's, that's where a lot of people are focusing their time in part because, you know, post recession, starting in 2010, so many people started working expireds that it got to the point where it was tough. Right. You would call an expired listing and they go, you literally are the 40th person that has called me in the last 24 hours. Right. And it got hard. Where the opportunity is now is so many people dropped off, they forgot how to hunt or they didn't need to for the last few years. And we're starting to see customers that had been with us for a decade now coming back, going, well, I took a hiatus, but looks like I shouldn't have stopped. I need to start again. And they're reporting back. It's not as saturated the other place where we're having a lot of success because we, despite talking about a market shift and interest rates and there's a lot of doom and gloom, but there's a lot of markets that are still super, super hot. I mean the average days on market drop, everyone's freaking out because the average days on market went up. But in the country it's still below 20. Right. So there's still a lot of opportunity with a hot market out there. And so a lot of people are using the geo leads, the neighborhood searches, where they can, they can pull. And they're kind of reverse prospecting in that they're using our data to go, okay, I want every three bedroom, four bedroom property in this whole area. And they are calling those people specifically saying, I have a buyer for your property.

Right.

And that still is, despite interest rates, that is still a common thing. And we've Done quite a few interviews with, with that. So there's, there's that foreclosures again, is, is going to continue to go up. And what's amazing right now is, is if you've been in the business longer than, you know, pre 2008, then, then, then you often think of foreclosures or pre foreclosures as a short sale lead, but that's just not the case anymore. The equity that everybody has in their home, someone is in foreclosure and they, they Almost all the 9 out of 10 times have equity in their home, which makes it a really easy listing opportunity for you to help them out of a bad situation, put money in their pocket and help them move on with their life. So that is just a phenomenal lead source right there. And then if one of the things that is continually underutilized is vacant rental properties, so, and not just all absentee owners, you can get those lists from us as well. This is specifically people who are trying to find a tenant for their home and they are not using a property management company. Right. We call them for rent by owners because they're trying to rent it by themselves. And this is a phenomenal listing opportunity because most people have no idea what they're doing trying to manage their own property. And most of them have no idea they can hop on Zillow and try to get an idea of value, but that's not great. So it's a really easy, low conflict lead type. You know, expired, there's some conflict, right? They're mad sometimes that the home expired. They're mad at our industry. But, but Furbos is just a business discussion. It's hey, if I could show you how to put more money into your pocket right now versus you continue to try to rent your house, is that worth 15 minutes of your time? And they're saying yes every single time.

That's awesome. We've got a few questions. So Justin had a question. So when you were saying about targeting, using phone numbers, uploading to Facebook, how do you target that list without getting caught up in the housing ad category of Facebook? Anytime I try to target, Facebook kicks it back as a housing ad and doesn't let me target. It's probably operator error, but please enlighten me.

I love that question. That's a great question. So I've got two answers. One is 99% of our ads get rejected and you run them through again and they get approved. So make sure that if they get rejected, you at least try again. That's one. But you're talking about advertising almost always. And the brand strategy is different than creating an ad. It is, is you creating a presence on, on social media. And again, a reputation is built by someone that can observe you over and over and over again. For example, if I'm out in my yard mowing my lawn every Saturday and people are driving by and every Saturday I'm mowing my lawn over time they're like, hey, that guy, really, he's a hard worker, he really likes his yard work. They form an opinion or a belief because they were able to observe me over and over and over again. So if you consistently post content on Facebook or Instagram, a variety of content, video is number one. We have a lot of trainings on how you know what, what you should post and how to do that. But video online allows Facebook. Now it's not housing ad, it's a Lars Hedinburg ad, right? It's a you, you, you are up there just talking about you and building a reputation. You can address real estate related things because that is an important thing to do for, to build your business reputation. But you're not specifically targeting, you know, targeting lists of buyers and sellers to ads. That's where the conflict comes in. So as you do that and you boost the content, not create an ad, but boost the content, then the list of expires or FSBOs or fur bows or whatever lead type you're doing have an opportunity to consistently observe you, to form an opinion or belief about you. So it is a long play. It's not a hunting tactic, it's a farming technique. It's you plant seeds and over time that starts to grow your business with the expired listings. The best is if you combine the two activities and you are farming these lead types and also hunting them and calling or door knocking because that's when they go, I just saw your stuff.

Right.

And they don't, they don't know that. They just saw it today seven times because Facebook served it up to them. They just know, they recognize you.

And I'm imagining, I mean, I'm thinking even Facebook messenger might be a good lower key. You know, as they're getting calls, agents may not be messaging them on Facebook. But Mike, so to answer your question, so you may have missed the first part of it. So we're going to go, we're going to talk about the why and, and then we're going to get into the what with Janie. So we're going to get more specific and kind of get in the weeds with Janie. She's going to go through a little bit of her expired system. She has never stopped, runs it at a high level. Same with me. So we'll get into more of that. Couple more minutes here. So I know was it Hannah that. What does it look like to if and, and, and guys, we don't bring just anyone in here. Right, Right. So this, this is a system. If you're, if you're in real estate and you want to be in real estate at a higher level three years from now, I don't see how you can do it without Red X. I'm, I'm already fine financially, but we got Red X to give us a wave on the setup fee. So you guys have access to that. But you have to consider this system and you will figure it out, right? You'll figure out how to use it. You have to be resourceful. There are different things you can sort of utilize. I don't know that anyone taught us the handwritten cards, but we just did it. And that's like the only thing we did for six years. We went from one, the expansion was to three. We used to do just one and done. They came off the market and we would get dozens and dozens and dozens of calls. So it's.

There'S some great comments in here. If I had a couple of minutes or one more minute here. You've got Mike Robbins mentioned our roleplay system also gave away the secret phone number that's customer's owner there. Mike, this is a really cool system because so many people have, they don't want to call. They have a hard time doing this. They, they need to practice their scripts. And so because we don't have long term contracts or anything, but we, we, we only make money as if you, if you continue to use our system, right. We like guys like Lars who see the value and, and pay us money for 15 years. Right. So we developed a role play system. There's no additional call cost to this to our customers, but you can call in and it's a system where it says what do you want to practice expires? You say how difficult do you want the role play to be? Which really means how many objections are we going to throw at you? You choose. And then the phone rings on your end, someone answers and it's somebody on my staff and they answer and they will role play and they will stay in character so well that if you're like wait, wait, did I do that good? They'll go, what are you talking about? Right? It is a real Live role play. At the end they'll give you, they'll give you a couple of points and then you can hit a button and it will send you a recording of your role that you could send to an accountability partner, your coach, trainer to get feedback on that. And we have had people so afraid to actually prospect that they call in to our roleplay system daily for three weeks and then they go and start prospecting real people. And so we have all kinds of tools that help you to learn to prospect. I mean expires is just the data, but we have the platform, we have the scripts, we have the dialer, we have the mail merge features. So you could do those mailings. We have, we have instructions of how to upload that into, into Facebook and everything. So the roleplace is pretty cool. We do have fizbos and fur bows in Canada. Is a question expired is there's some privacy laws in Canada that don't, don't allow anybody to do an expired service up there.

And Daniel had a comment. Uses red X Daily. 11 listings in less than two weeks. So, so when you, when, when you, you know, we had Justin Ford on here, you know, when, when you got a guy that takes like six to eight listings in a week, they've just been using these systems, you know, for longer than you have. That, that, that doesn't mean you can't get to that point, but you won't get to that point if you actually don't dive into a system like this. This is good for, you know, real estate B school we only sort because a lot of it is just bad behavior, you know, stuff that's not scalable. But we only condone lead gen levers that are good for minimum 25 sales per year to 50 plus sales per year. And this is just a system if you're not, if you're not selling minimum 25 homes already or you want to, you want to add a legion lever that can get you 50 legit 50 sales a year. And it depends on markets for sure. But there are tactics and strategies that you know going back and finding the expireds from like 20, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20. I don't know if you guys still can scrub old, old data lists. Yeah. So and all that stuff, that's, that's where we got most of our expireds. We would get most of them off of like you know, writing a, a letter, you know, handwritten letter to somebody that, and, and I'll share some of that stuff with you. I'm like Curtis, go here But I would definitely take advantage of the setup fee. Waived. Anything else? Curtis, sort of a last thought here. I appreciate your time today. I know you're.

No, I appreciate it. You know, we believe in this stuff and we believe fundamentally that expired listings. We believe that good agents need to work expired listings because it helps our reputation. People have had a negative experience, and whether it was the agent's fault or not, they perceive the industry and they had. And, and, and that's bad for us as a whole. And they go, what are those agents doing? Why do they deserve 6%? What's going on here? And you know, and they had a negative experience. And so many times a great agent can come in and change their entire perspective. And that does two things. It helps all of us and our industry, but it also gives you an advocate in your sphere of influence that will continually refer business to you because you, you changed a negative experience to a positive one. So I hope that, that you look at it not just as the grind, but how do you. How do you help the industry as a whole? How do you help these people have had a bad experience and turn that into a great one?

Yeah. Awesome. Appreciate you, Curtis. And we'll be in touch soon. Hopefully we can get some folks started on the system here. And we've got Janie coffee up. So I'll touch base with you soon. We should do a webinar of some kind. Curtis get together again.

Love it. Okay, thanks so much, you guys. We'll see you.

All right. Janie coffee. I just see Curtis Fenn.

Sorry, I gotta, I gotta take Curtis's thing off here. Janie will actually be on in like a few minutes. She had an emergency, she had to quick go do something and she'll be back.

Oh, no. All right, so let's, let's kind of touching on Mike's statement. What was it like? Is anyone going to tell us how to do this? Which just a little bit of etiquette when we bring a guest on. He was definitely telling us all the good stuff. But anytime we teach something, you know, we want to teach you the why and then the what. So if we just came at you like, okay, open up, you know, you got to get this system and then you got to buy red X and then you gotta hire like a college student to handwrite these letters. You're like, this is stupid. You know. But the why is that this is. This could be a major part of your business. You know, we've done 600, 750,000 GCI from expireds. I'm in a major metro market, so that could be different in your market. But you will get a system like this and you will work it to the bone because this is the highest leverage thing you could do in your business is find somebody who has, like, geeked out for so many years on one thing, you know, and now you get to step in. And I don't even know what it costs, but I promise you, you'll make a 50x return on it if you actually do the work. And it doesn't have to be just calling. I didn't call expired through someone I hired for like six or seven years in. And so it, you know, I just. I just wanted to figure out how to get them to call me. And I can give you an example of what are simple, simple. And Stacy, you just yell. When Janie comes back, let me pull out and written. I will show you here how complicated this system can be. All right, get ready. Michael, you ready? Got his phone out. Take a picture. I'm gonna share my screen here. This is the system. You guys will not believe it. No calling. Hold on. I'm working it up. It's not going to be that good. All right, can you see my screen? Yes. This is. We would sell. Send one. We would. We would change it, you know, if. If we're going back and doing older, you know, so. So Red X has a way where you can. Basically, so in Sioux Falls, you can. In some markets, you have to give them the data and they just like crunch it. So Stacy could go into her MLS, grab all the expireds from 20, 18, 19 and 20 and run them through, see which ones are still active, which ones are still off market. Send a letter dear. And we would leave it blank. So I would have our admin write this out exactly like this. And then when the expireds came up, all she would do is write in Dear Stacy. So write in Stacy, comma, because it's her handwriting on this core letter. And then she would leave a whole line open for. At 123 Main street, you know, so would you consider selling your home at 123 Main street to a potential prospect of ours? Call me at. And that was a trackable phone number. Either through Ring Central, you can get phone numbers really, really cheap. Highly recommend RingCentral. Others are using CallRail at a pretty high level. And that's it. And the calls would come in and we have. We have like a script, an exact script for this as well. Let me see if I can. I think we. It's literally called isn't it called handwritten letter script, Foreign seller scripts for hand. And I could, I'll drop this in game changers so you guys will have it. So, so now this is someone calling in, you know. Hi, this is Lars with hpa. How may I help you? I received your letter. You know, great. May I ask who I'm speaking to? Okay. You receive this letter because there's a shortage of home for sale in many areas. Price rangers, we have buyers working and you guys can read it. And this is, this is the actual script that we used. So they're calling us now, they're bothering us and we get to just get good at whatever this script feels like for you. The point is to get into their home for a consultation or get them to come to your office. And sellers will even come to your office after they're expired because it's different than the first agent, the way the first agent did it. And that's, that's that simple system. So you've got to have the expired data source, red X expired data source. I recommend you, you find someone that can write those handwritten letters. The envelope has to be a white number 10, not, not obvious. It's coming from a real estate agent. So we want 100% open rate. You'll probably still get an open rate. Open rate if you can address it and you put a first class stamp on it. Even if you have like your real estate team name on the upper left. Janie has a different approach too and I actually believe her more than I believe myself. I'm just telling you what we did and it consistently brought in, you know, just like a unbelievable return because it's not a complicated system but you can't be the one doing the envelopes. And you'll give up on the system very, very quickly. You'll think it's the stupidest idea ever. Although I did it in the early days myself and, and I still, I thought it was stupid, but it worked. Any questions on that little, that little tactic right there? Yes, Ring Central. I use Ring Central as my main, my main number now. I love their app. I text through it. It's really, really good. And I think it's only like $2 and 50 cents for another number. So we had our real estate team set up. We had like 40 different phone numbers. Yeah, it does help if it's good handwriting. We've had like good handwriting and bad handwriting. And this, this example here was really good, good handwriting. Yeah. And, and, and now you can get just good at them calling you and here's another thing. We've tested this as well. I don't remember what we call it. Is it expired letters? There was a guy in my market. This is where you get to have some fun with this. So you've got the core data set. The data set is legit. You. So you could tell that this is a different person, a different person's handwriting with same exact thing. Where was I going with that? There was a guy in my market, Chuck, what's his name? Chuck something. He would sell about 75 homes per year. He would. I think his son would hand deliver like a pretty. A pretty good package of whatever, essentially a resume. We have different examples of stuff you can put in it, but he would so hand deliver it and then he would call them.

So.

So if he would door knock, but. And hand it to them, but then he would call them and just. I just wanted to make sure you got the information that, you know, Matthew dropped off at your house earlier today. Like, yeah, that was. There's nobody doing that. And yes, it is Matthew Hunter that I was talking to. There's nobody else that's doing that. Right. So. So the more effort you put into a system, what I want you guys to understand is that this could be a significant business source for you guys. You know, for us it wasn't, you know, a million a year, but over a couple year period when there was no expireds, we did 1.3 million on expireds. And it's just consistency, right? And we got good at it. We. The systems never. You can see this is a different handwriting because we had a different assistant. This. The system didn't stop just because, you know, Kathy left the team and someone else took over the system, kept running. I was going to pull up one other example here.

Janie is back.

All right, Janie, let me see if I can find it quick. If I can't, then Sol, we tried these thrash letters and we got in massive trouble. Do not do the thrash letters. Agents will call you all sorts of pissed off. All right, it's yours. I'll put some examples in Game Changers, but it is all yours, Peterson.

I put the two in Game Changers that you showed already. So Janie is going to. Come on. Janie Coffey, she is out of Florida and has a very unique strategy that she used for luxury expireds and has had such great success. And Janie is a phenomenal teacher on this. So I'm going to spotlight you, Janie, and let you.

Oh, where'd you go?

Did you. Oh, there you are. I can hear you. There we go. So I'll let you take it.

Hey everybody. So first of all, sorry I was on and then I had to jump off because I had an emergency at a listing and got right back. So I'm going to compress everything into the last 15 minutes here. But just like Curtis was saying and Lars was saying, I completely understand how some people don't want to be the person to cold call. And when I move to a brand new market, see seven years ago now it's hard to believe it's been seven years, but I moved to a brand new market seven years ago and I knew I had to hit the ground running and really hit it hard. And I didn't know anybody, I didn't have a sphere, I literally didn't know a single person. I didn't know anything really about the area where I was. But I knew I could go after expireds. And so instead of going after mid price point expireds, I decided to go after the high priced expireds because A, I figured fewer people were doing it, B, I figured they might take longer to decide about hiring a new agent than a mid price person who normally just goes really fast. And so that's exactly what I did. And I created a basically mail only campaign and I did dice it up a little bit with emails if I could find them. And with Curtis's tip, now I'm going to add in the boosting because I think that's awesome because what I did find is people needed to see me in different ways. So I mailed a really fat package the first day and I brought some kind of show and tell a little bit. They're a little bit road weary because I haven't been doing it recently because business has been so good mostly because of all the spin offs from the expire. So literally what I did in year one or year two of my new market, all expireds has kept me full time busy for seven years. I mean it's that powerful. So I mailed them. This is a returned one that's, it's kind of beaten up. But mail them always used because black and whites are color. So always use nice black envelopes if blue.

Jamie, you missed it. I gave opposing advice but I deferred to you on the right way to do it.

Oh, okay. So 100% do not use white paper that I. I've tested everything and if you're using white envelopes gonna get thrown in the mail. If you're using computer printed labels thrown in the mail. So I use black. You can use navy blue, red, whatever color your color is. Go to envelopes, calm, you can get them. But we did black with a white gel pen. And then we did kind of cheat out and made a stamp, like a return address stamp with white, because I got tired of writing this. But also only stamps that aren't the generic like forever stamp. And I know this sounds dumb, but just doing stuff like this, our response rate was so much higher because every once in a while I would have an agent on my team try to use a white envelope and a computer generated thing and the forever stamps or whatever, the generic stamps, and the response rate would go way down. There's something about the different colored envelopes and the different kind of gel pens, handwritten, and the different stamps that make people open it. But we did a combination of a big fat package on the first day, which was like Lars was saying, normally it was a kind of a bio. And then if we had case studies of past expireds, we would put some case studies in there. We would talk about our marketing plan. We would have calls to action. We would also kind of hit on all the things that we know they were feeling. They were probably having listing fatigue. They maybe missed out on a property they were hoping to get or some other thing they were hoping to get. Maybe their agent stopped updating them because their agent either was scared to update them or didn't know to do it, so they felt the agent wasn't doing anything. So we would hit on all those things in the first package so that they felt like we really got them and we understood their pain point. And then for the first week, alternating letter, postcard, letter, postcard, letter, postcard. For a week. I grabbed some of the postcards, just a generic postcard. We would use that to also put our listings out. Or we had some more targeted one saying, was your home marketed like this? And in the back we would say the history, then we'd say what we found. Meaning, what did we find? And like Curtis was saying, it's not always price. Maybe the past photos were terrible. Maybe it was a specialty niche type property and the agent didn't do any niche marketing. Maybe there's a whole host of things. So we would do on each one, this case study exactly what we found, what we did differently. And the results, which of course were sold, otherwise we wouldn't be sending that. And we just hit them up. We had tons and tons and tons of postcards.

And Janie, I remember asking you one time, like, because people are already asking like can you post a sample? And you were like, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter, I can post a sample. But honestly, and, and I'll address that in a second because I just want to say the system and then I'll address that. So we did letter postcard, letter postcard for the first week and then letter postcard, letter postcard every three days for three more weeks and then it dropped to every week and then every three weeks and then finally if at the end of, was about a three month period, if they got every single thing we got. And also like I said, if I could find their email, I would go to Spokeo or one of those sources to get emails if I could find their email. And I, I spent a lot of time trying to find emails, I would go to their business websites, whatever. I would duplicate the contents of the postcard letters in email format too. So they would be getting postcards and some people are very visual or a letter because some people want to read or email and so they're getting it that way. And like I said, I think I'll implement Curtis's boost strategy, which I think is genius. If they got everything, it was about 45 touch points. And of course I had to be very organized. I used top producer 8i, which there's lots of things not to like about top producer 8i, but it is one of the best ones because it has a mail merge system that will mail merge in that sequence that you create. And so it managed. I was able to do it very kind of systematically and organized because that's really important. Just get stuff branded to you. You can get folders, you can get nicer hardcover kind of binders too from COVID Bind or Channel Bind, anything to make you look nice and stand out. Like these are little mini baby brochures I made for some listings and threw our card in there and threw it in the vellum. Sorry, I'm going fast because I want to share all this stuff with you guys. But yeah, the content, honestly it doesn't matter so much because it's the consistency at the end of the day that wins the goal. So if you've had expired listing success, then of course case studies about what you found was wrong because like Curtis said, it's not always the price. And I can basically guarantee that if it expired, their past agent was telling them, price, price, price, price, price. Now it might really be the price, but a lot of times it wasn't. It was just how it was marketed. So we talk about that, we talk about their pain points. And you just break those up into little chunks so that each postcard or each letter is talking about one thing. Maybe it's their communication. We're going to communicate with you on a weekly basis and we're going to let you know what's going on. Maybe it's about how you do professional photos and matterport and video. Just thinking of all the things that likely the last agent didn't do or the perception of what the last agent didn't do. The last agent might have done a great job marketing, but they didn't do a great job telling the seller what they did. I found that a lot of the time, and as Lars was saying, it takes a while sometimes for these high priced sellers who have overpriced the market to kind of come to the realization that it's not the agent's fault while their house isn't selling, it's the the price. But they're never going to come to that realization unless the marketing is on point and they're being told what the marketing is. So when I was heavy into expires my favorite phrase, and I know many of you have probably heard this phrase, but it's like first love, second wife, third listing agent. Because for sure if you're listing it on the third time, you probably have a pretty good chance of getting it sold because by then the sellers are kind of worn out. They really want to sell and they're ready to get realistic. So we only have eight minutes. So now I'll take some questions because I know you might have some and I'm sorry that I missed out the first 10 minutes. I had a little emergency but I'm back so I'll check the chat.

Yeah, I can read them to you if you'd like me to. Richard asked where do you get your folders printed?

Yeah, so I think that these might have been vistaprint. I'll be honest, I'm on the hunt for new folder company because they have this weird thing right here that doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean, I stick our little baby brochures in there, but that's not what it's made for. These baby brochures come from express docs. They're called mini brochures or mini postcards or something like that.

Did you intentionally not include phone calling them?

Yeah, I didn't want to call them. I mean at the very beginning I called a little bit and I realized that really wasn't my thing. And I also, I track everything and since I was Going after luxury, I found out that they relisted. The time from when they expired to when they relisted was a lot longer. And so instead of calling them, I took the approach of just wearing them out and making them feel like they know me and that I can deliver with this mailing system. And the longer they could be in that system of getting content from me before they called, the more likely they were to just call and say, just come over, list my property, tell me what to list at. Not give any pushback on terms or commissions or anything like that. Whereas if you catch them on the phone, especially right when they've expired, they're normally kind of angry. They're angry real estate professionals and a lot of times they're going to want to interview several agents because they feel burned by the last one. So this was my way to be kind of like pull marketing versus push marketing. And it ended up being very, very successful.

Love it. Okay. Whoa. I love these. There's a whole bunch of questions. Okay, Sarah, I think you got your question answered. What the packet looked like. She showed examples of some of that. Josh asked your source for postcards.

You said Express stocks upload your own templates. So you can just have a, like a graphic person create your templates that you can do on Canva, super easy free. And then you can upload them as a PDF into Express Docs.

Very cool. Anthony asked, when you have people that are not staying at the house that expired, I'm assuming you're mailing to their new mailing address.

I mail to the owner's address and I'm in St. Augustine, Florida, so at least a third of the time that's not here. So I do not mail to the home address unless I can see that that's their address.

Perfect.

And REDX has that data. Red X says like mailing address and I mean property address and owner address.

To clarify, you send letter, postcard. Letter postcard every day for a week.

Right. And then every three days and then weekly and then every three weeks. And then at the end it's about a three month total cycle. At the end of that, then they just go into the regular, just listed, just sold. If they haven't relisted, they go into the regular, just listed, just sold. It's getting.

I just have a comment. When we spoke about this one time, you I was surprised with how like you, you want to make sure you understand that this is a property we want to go after. So you're even like, yeah, so, so, but, but. And the Mindset around that is that there's a thirty thousand dollar commission check here, you know, and so this system is not putting out like one dollar bills on the other side. It's, it's turning out 10, 20, 30 thousand dollar commission checks. So when you have that mindset and you can do 10 or 15 or 20 of those a year, then you're going to slow down. But, but talk about how, how your hands are in this to make sure it runs right.

Yeah, so it is definitely the way I have the system. It is a, it's not a complex system system if you do the steps. And that's why I use top producer 8i, because it just tells me every day, mail this postcard to this person, mail this letter to this person. Like I said, it has the mail merge so it works really fast and it can be pretty efficient. But yes, in the beginning I was not looking at all the photos of the properties and just mailing them. And more than one occasion I showed up and I was like, oh, I don't even want this listing. This is a disaster. Or it's just going to be really challenging. So then I did slow down enough to look at the listing photos and also make sure that I felt I really could add some kind of value. A lot of times it was the photography and the videography and the marketing just wasn't well done. Like somebody got lucky and got that high end listing but then they didn't know how to market it properly and they didn't. Or then like you were saying, Lars, sometimes sellers just want this pie in the sky, especially right now. And that's why we're going to have even, even if the market stays kind of good, like I'm in Florida, we still have a good market, there's still going to be more expireds because we do have the sellers from the mindset of six months ago and they're going to be coming on the market as an expired or off the market as expired. And they're going to be looking around like what happened. And so now is the time for us to kind of step in and say let's analyze what happened. We're here to help, you know, we can get this done. And this mailing system over a longer period of time is just so successful with high end sellers because they're able to take the information and look at it and read it, do their research, you know, look you up and things like that before you, they call you and it's, it's just a much more powerful now I Will say that on average I had to touch. Sometimes people would call me after one or two or three contacts. Sometimes people call me after 30 contacts. The average was 15 touch points between postcards, letters, package emails. It was like a total 15 on average. And I point that out because most people give up at one or two touch points or five or ten touch points. But like I said, one or two years of work on this has turned into seven years of basically come list me luxury high end listings. So the work is well worth it and it can absolutely catapult you forever and for good into a higher price point. It takes some work, but everything takes some work. So I'd rather work hard on a 30, 40, 50, 60, $120,000 commission check than or card, you know, for, for a smaller one. Because then it just becomes a cascading self kind of feeding system.

There's lots of questions about your frequency, like can you just go over that again what you send, when you send it, how many?

Yeah, so first day is a big fat package. Then every day, day two through six is letter postcard, letter postcard. Days eight through a little bit is every three days again letter postcard, letter postcard. And then it slows down, then it's once a week, then it's every three weeks. And honestly the content is just take in your head what you think is going to be the pain point for the expired people. One, they're tired of just being on the market and keeping their house clean if they live there. Two, they feel like their previous agent didn't communicate with them very well. Three, they feel like their agent didn't market very well. And these all may or may not be the case, but that's what they're thinking. Four, they're just like plain angry at the whole thing. Maybe they lost something. Five, I mean you have to think about what it was. And then like I said, you can have postcards if you've had successful past expired, you can do case study postcards. Case study, case study, case study. If you don't have expireds you can do other stuff. Like I did a whole series of like how to make sure you're selling at the top of the market. And then I said watch interest rates. This is from like six years ago but and I had a whole series of postcards like this before I had case studies where one was saying, you know, make sure that it's, it's staged nicely. And I just talked about all the different ways to make sure you're catching the top of the market and you're selling for the highest price possible. And I would talk about, just like Curtis was saying, and Lars, you know, price your house properly, especially in this market, because you don't want to be stale. So I talked about, you know, what's the risk of being stale? So just think of all the things. If you're an expensive expired seller and you were all excited to list your house and get 45 over asking and you didn't get it, how are you feeling? What's going to resonate with you to make you want to call an agent? Because you think that person gets me. That's the content. But even at the end of the day, it was just the consistency. I can't tell you how many sellers, when I went to the house, they're like, oh yeah, I just threw your stuff in the trash every time. But it kept coming. And I realized you were very persistent and you worked hard and that's why I called you. So that's why I say it doesn't matter all that much because it's the consistency that wins them over. And the reason I was willing to do that consistency, it was high end price points. So I knew that every commission that I got was a really nice commission.

And are you doing this the first day they expire or are you? Yeah, so just like normal.

I did the first day they expire because a lot of times in my market, in my mls and if an agent forgets and lets it expire and they can just make it active again. So it's very easy. So we have a lot that expire and go back on the next day with the same agent because they just forgot and let it happen. In other mls, if they expire, they have to re enter everything all over again. So they're a lot more careful not to let it expire. But I even sent it on the first day and even if they relisted, I didn't care because a lot of times if somebody's going to extend with the listing agent, they're only going to extend for another 30 days, maybe 90 days, very rarely another six months. And they would hold on to the package if and if it still expired in those 30, 60, 90 days later. And they would call me back and they're like, hey, I got your package. So I was always happy to be able to get one out. And then the other thing I did, Red X also has historic data. So people that expired six months ago, a year ago, two years ago, I made the same system for older expireds. I just Stretched out the frequency because it would be weird if somebody expired a year ago to hit them up with something every single day for a week. That would be weird. But I just stretched that out. So I got something every week for say a month and then went on like that. So Red X is great because you can slice and dice the data so many different ways. Like I do historic high end properties in downtown St. Augustine. I have to search in many different ways. I can't just search by zip or MLS area. So Red X allows you to do that and it also allows you to. The reason I use Red X is it also tells you, okay, if it came back on the market, then I would check and I would stop their sequence. Or you know, if it comes back on the market as listed. Sometimes in the morning I'd be like, hey, I've been mailing to them. And I'd actually realized, oh my gosh, I'm the one that listed it. Like it was having that much success, that everything was blending together.

Yeah, that's awesome. Can you show or tell what's in your. That first packet that you're sending? Again, we got some questions on that.

Yeah, I don't have a copy with me, but it's basically a bio, but I'm focused on them. So what I'm saying is like, I totally understand, Mr. Ms. Seller, that it's frustrating that your house has come off the market. And by the way, I don't use expired. I don't use that word. I say left the market unsold, otherwise it just doesn't sound so nice. So I understand your market. You know, your house left the market unsold. I understand how frustrating that is. You had a lot of excitement to list your house and now you're. And like I said, I hit on those pain points. Then I have a communication kind of. This is how I communicate with my sellers. Because that's like a main frustration with sellers is their agent didn't communicate with them. So I talk about how I communicate and if you have some case stories of success, I would throw those in. If you have a marketing plan, I would throw that in. If you're going after high end properties, you definitely need some kind of marketing plan to show how you're different than their past agent. So that's the kind of stuff I would have. I might have a little bit about my brokerage or just about me, but it's just enough. The main thing is to get them to understand that you understand them. You understand their frustration, you understand their pain. Point and you have the solution to it.

Yeah, that's really good. That's such an important point. And I like how you call it. They left the market unsold. That's awesome.

Yeah.

Okay, we are over. So I want to respect everybody's time on Facebook. We posted the. Sorry. The handwritten letter that Lars was talking about. We posted the script for that. And then, of course, this call is recorded on that Facebook page. So, you know, if you want to go back, it sounds like a whole bunch of people want to go back. They love the training, Janie, so thank you so much. We appreciate it.

Good. I'm.

Yes. All right, we will see you guys next week. Don't forget to join Thursday if that's of interest to you. And we'll see you next Tuesday on the production Mastermind. Take care. Bye.