A real estate agent walks through building his business from 2000 to the early 2010s, starting with cheap buyer leads from classifieds and scripts. He hired his first admin, Tia, around 2009, then brought on buyer agent Chris from Craigslist who sold 27 homes in his first year. Adopting Boomtown in October 2008 as the 9th customer doubled his lead volume.
Foreign. So let's talk about my early years. So I got into the business in 2000, part time in 2007, just when our market was turning. I didn't really realize it at the time. My first full year was 2008. For all of that time, all I focused on was low cost. Literally no, no branding, buyer lead gen. So I've ran classified ads, you know, free list of homes, short sales and foreclosures. Distress sales were kind of built big back then. I had simple calls to actions. Go to this website and fill out a, just an opt in sort of page. I had a real simple script to call the leads. Got face to face. I offered a gold brick. You know, we talked about some of that in the buyer system. I, I mastered scripts. So the one thing that I see is that agents, you know, wherever they are in, in their, you know, years in the business, but they never really master the buyer side or the listing side like they're a marginal producer. And I don't know, I wouldn't recommend it. Although I don't know if it's even possible to go from a marginal producer to build a team that's selling multiples of hundreds of homes. So mastery at the buyer system level and mastery at the listing system level is super important. So that's sort of a side note there. But I literally lived and breathed lead conversion. For the first 24 months. I was willing to do what most agents were not willing to do at the time. I was coached by someone to. I had three other time blocks, but I was really good about sticking to time blocks for calls and lead prospecting. I did Tuesday and Thursday evenings, had a newborn man, it was the worst thing in the world to go upstairs. And from 6:30 8:30 on Tuesday and Thursday, on Monday and Wednesday I was going out on appointments. So I was working really hard. Every Saturday I had a time block as well. I've since learned, you know, if you haven't seen the MIT lead response study, we talked about it in Module 2. I've since learned that there are way better time blocks like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. From 8am to 9am you can go 8am to 9:30am and then 3:30 to 5 Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Those seven time blocks are way better as far as, you know, dial to actually converting somebody so you don't need to time blocks these, these ridiculous time blocks. But that's what I did in the beginning. Set up simple systems for buyer lead management and top produce. And so after those first couple, actually the first year and A half or so is when I found Tia. She's my first hire. She's served still with my company as our buyer closing coordinator. So I advertised for a part time admin. I probably had 50 responses. And I hired Tia, my do it all admin. Basically she handled everything that I didn't want to handle or I wasn't good at. So every closing, she closed every file. Anytime I took a listing, she took that listing and got it on the market and sort of handled the admin part of listing coordination and management. And she served as kind of getting my expired postcards out, helping with advertising and marketing support. So she really, it wasn't pretty. She worked out of her home when I was out of my home and we would meet sort of in the middle sometimes. Sometimes she send her son down with stuff. He was like. Pierce was 10 or 11 years old at the time. It wasn't pretty at times, but it definitely worked. I was willing to offload everything that wasn't sales related, sales related or business building or team building. And I really didn't care how those things got done. I knew that her heart was in the right place. Even if she did things different than I would have done, I trusted that those things would just get done. So when I talk about the birth of our, the actual team, you know, and many of you are considering or some of you already have buyer agents, but for me, my first buyer agent hire came as a result of having too many leads to follow up with. So in October 2008 I got the Boomtown platform. I was their ninth customer. So I think they're at like 900 plus or something at this point, or even a thousand. I was their ninth customer. So back then there was like realty generator, I think that was it. So there was really no real competition. All the others, the five or six or ten others now that compete with Boomtown have come since 2008. So it's similar direct response principles. But there's a lot of leads. I called leads anytime between 8am and 9pm, sometimes even after 9pm if it was 9:30 and they just registered, I would call them. It didn't matter where I was, what I was doing, but it really got to be too much and I was drowning. I needed help and I went back to Craigslist. I ended up finding Chris, who's still with me today. So he started in August, September 2009. I found him through another agent I found on Craigslist. He was in the business for a year, sold two homes. He swung a hammer before he got into real estate. Just really good work ethic. And he also saw the vision, was willing to trust and follow me. We divided and conquered and just called leads and showed homes and made made it happen. I mean, he busted his butt alongside with me. He wasn't afraid to learn. He's pretty humble. Guy worked his ass off. I truly admire him. He's still with me today and he's having his best year ever. Every year since he's been with me, it was his best year ever. He sold 27 homes his first year with me after only selling two homes without me, so.
