How I Sold 453 Homes in a SINGLE YEAR

We will dive deep into how I sold 453 homes in a single year. Now granted, it took a lot of patience and systems building and doing the things in my business that may not be urgent, but they were critically important if I wanted to build a business that gave me massive freedom financially and also with my schedule, the ability to travel with my young family and just an awesome, awesome journey. Today I'm going to dive into the habits that you need to start or stop doing. Specifically if you want to sell even just two to three homes per month, which is the 1% of agents the.

Real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to time and money freedom. Having helped over 5,000 families in my real estate career and coached thousands of agents to scale their businesses, I know.

What works and what doesn't.

And my goal on this podcast is to share all with you the good, bad and ugly of building a highly lucrative lifestyle business so you can focus on what truly matters in life. You won't find any hype or fluff on this show, just real world tactics and strategies that get results.

You just got to do the work. Little known fact, only 1% of agents in the last 12 months sold 25 homes or more. So first thing we're going to get into this, the habits to start and stop. Second thing is what to delegate. 85% of what a real estate agent does is, is administrative in nature. It's critically important that it gets done. But it's very like just task driven button clicking, not the things that make you a ton of money. So I'll spend some time on that. Who to hire, right? If you're not going to do the admin parts of being a real estate agent, your first and second hires are critical. And this goes for, you know, getting to, you know, there are four distinct stages in becoming a million dollar agent and typically it's around a 10,000, $11,000 average commission check across the country. So that's about, you know, eight transactions per month. You may only decide to get to stage two of what we teach, which is two transactions per month, but getting to four is not a whole lot harder than getting to two per month. And then getting to eight is not a whole lot harder than getting to four. So just understand that there are four distinct stages and we'll go through some of that today as well. Systems are the answer when it comes to, you know, automating and delegating. If you don't have a system behind everything in your business, and this is typically where agents struggle, but if you don't have a system, you are the system, right? You've got to do all the hundred tasks involved in taking and getting a listing active or under contract or working with buyers, getting them under contract, even just marketing a listing or just doing social media. Like all everything you do you is a system in your business. And then I'm gonna talk about and end the video today. Like what if I didn't go down this path? I had a conversation with a coaching member of ours recently who is in the whole world of cold calling and door knocking and his sons are coming into the business and just some perspective on what he wants for his sons that he wasn't able to achieve with more of a blood and guts approach to real estate versus what I consider attraction based marketing, you know, inbound warm leads based based on systems and what I call more elegance and ease. All right, so in terms of the habits that you need to start and stop doing the big overarching lesson here and I struggle with all of these things I'm about to share with you. The first one though are distractions. There are so many things like right on our telephone that are there to distract us. Social media, the 247 news cycle and anything that you're finding yourself doing that's taking you off task, like the highly, highly dollar productive activities, those are distractions. And when you have a clear plan, you know, a one year plan, but also a clear three year vision, it's really easy to eliminate distractions. So my piece of advice there is if you don't know what you're building and you haven't really sat down and think of like hey, three years from now in my personal life, in my, in my business, you know, where do I want to be and what do I have to start doing and stop doing in order to get there. So that's number one. Are distractions the second habit that you must start doing or if you're not good at this, stop doing. The opposite of this is time blocking. The things in your business that must get done and typically, and I'll get into, you know, some of what those dollar productive activities are here when, when we talk about what to delegate. But time blocking, you know, when you're meeting with appointments, when you're doing your new business development, when you're checking email, time block, most importantly when you're eating lunch or spending time with family or date nights or church or your morning routine, all that stuff has to be time blocked in your calendar. So that's a habit you have to get into, you know, put them in your calendar as recurring appointments and then just stick to your best self can design a calendar. But in those moments where you're wanting to not stick into that time block, that's when it really matters most. The last habit here is that if you have the desire to be the 1% of the 1%, let's say get to three to four homes for a month, that's typically in most markets where if you get to that level and your business is systems driven and you, you know, integrate some of the leverage points that we'll talk about here today, that's when money is really good, 10, $15,000 of extra cash that you're generating. I can't tell you how many agents, and this is the 1% that are doing 25 transactions per year and they have nothing to show for it financially. So our baseline promise in Million Dollar agent method is to get you to two to three additional transactions per month within three to six months of working with us based on a systems approach. And these systems will be in your business for many years to come. But, but if you're not hitting that, you know, two, three, four home per month run rate, you've got to discipline yourself to not waste time on stuff that's taking you out of that sweet spot. And those are doing the things that you know you need to do, the priorities that must get done for you to be able to grow and even scale your business. All right, so that's number one. Some of the habits I can go into a whole bunch of personal habits around sleep and about exercise and I'll probably save that for another video. But you can, you do need to side note here, you do need to make sure you're taking care of your physical body. You can't hack sleep, you can't have a glass or two or three of wine every night and expect to wake up the next morning ready to get after it. There's a lot of sort of negative personal habits that you might need to think about as well when it comes to achieving not only to high level in your business, but you want to achieve as a husband, as a dad, as a wife, as a mother, as a sister or brother, you know, as a, you know, your parents may be aging, right? There's all these responsibilities we have outside of real estate. So you need to make sure you are dialed in when it comes to the habits personally and professionally. All right, so the next thing is what you should delegate. And this is where I really, I get challenged a lot of times. We had one of our members, I do a weekly call for members of Million Dollar Agent Method and I just coach live and there's one of our members who is a higher end agent and I just find with the higher end agents and I've done high end transactions and our process doesn't change. And I've helped agents, you know, in 2, 3, 4 million average price points get a lot of leverage around their day to day business. This agent though, was making the argument that only he could meet with buyers to show homes. And he was making some argument around millennials and he understood them and you know, these were like friends of his and their kids were, you know, whatever the story was, but making the argument that he didn't have time to work on the systems or you know, generate more business or you know, build out a, you know, client care system that would drive referrals or all the things we ask of our members, like you have to clear out time in your calendar to do it. And you know, he put two multimillion dollar homes under contract in a single week and, and he was trying to argue that he's the only one that can show homes. I said, that's fine, you know, but your mindset around that is the thing that's gonna stop you from actually building a business. I said, when you came into our world, you made the honest admission that you were not where you wanted to be financially and you were not where you wanted to be with the amount of time and effort in the seven days a week. And you've been doing that for 20 plus years. So something has to change. And I challenged him to read the book E. Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. In that book, they talk about the technician, the manager and the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur thinks about the future. They're daydreaming about how awesome would it be to quadruple my business and work only 20 hours per week. And it was all systems driven and all the leads came in organically and they were like super high intent, ready to go. You know, I didn't have to cold call or pay for leads or door knock, any of that stuff. That's the entrepreneur. The manager actually builds the systems to make that vision a reality. Yet the technician is like drowning in the everyday work, right? So in this example, when I was actively coaching mostly around mindset, this existing Million Dollar Agent Method member, the challenge was to think about their business in these three distinct personalities. He was 100% in the technician role and he would probably make an argument that only he can write MLS Remarks that he had to meet every, you know, he also spent three hours on an inspection. Right. So I could make an argument that it's a conflict of interest to be at the home with the buyer and the inspector. And so it's just all mindset, you know and he gets to decide where he's going to create leverage in the business. So in my estimation, and this is how I ran my business, I could delegate and my vision was to delegate everything that wasn't like super high dollar productive. So dollar productive activities DPAs. And there are only five and when you understand that these are the only five and you analyze where your time is being spent and if they're not on these five then we've got a problem. Then you have not figured out how to detach the time you put into your business and the money you get out. So these five are a simple acronym. P, L A N S P stands for prospecting. I like to combine the P and the L and call it new business development. But P is prospecting. That's having first time conversations with would be buyers and sellers or even reaching out to your, to your sqi, your center of influence, your coi, past clients and having conversations. That's just new business development. The L is lead follow up. 90% of folks that come in the front end of your business in terms of leads generated, they're not ready to earn you a commission check in the next seven days, even the next 30 days. So 90% have to be somewhat on some kind of nurture, email, text, video sequence to add value over time. Where when it's their time, they're pre sold on working with you and they're not going to be looking for another agent. So that's the L, the lead follow up. The A are consultations, appointments, appointments with a buyer to sign them or a seller, a listing appointment to sign them as a client. Those are first time client appointments, not inspections, not showings of existing clients. That's an entirely different conversations that, that's not anywhere in the acronym plans. So appointments are sitting down with a buyer in a sales conversation to sign them as a client. Same thing with a seller. The, the N stands for negotiations and this is to negotiate a home under contract, not an appraisal issue that you're negotiating, not a inspection issue or repair list that you're negotiating. I could easily argue that in my market I can delegate that. I can create a system around it, train someone and delegate that for around 30, 25 to $30 per hour. I made the commitment in My business, that I was gonna make 250 so to $500 per hour. So when I analyzed all these different activities and I was looking for areas of my business to create a system or automate something, then ultimately delegate either to a virtual assistant or an administrator or even a junior agent in terms of showings or open houses. It was easy for me to make those decisions when I knew that I wanted to make a whole lot of money and I knew I had the ability to. And not everyone has the ability to make the kind of money or the desire to, to take on the risk or work the extra hours to build the systems while you're also selling homes like I was doing. So in terms of delegating, P is prospecting, L is lead, follow up, A are appointments, N is negotiating under contract, and S stands for building systems. Right? So if you're not building systems in your business, you're not in the game of being a business builder. And if you're watching my stuff and you, you've seen me preach and teach and everything I teach is around business building and that those are the time blocks in your calendar that are specified to business building. So literally a time block in your calendar, 60 to 90 minutes, two to three times per week, where you're saying business building time block. And in those time blocks, you're building out the Legion systems, Elite conversion systems, the things that are going to allow your business to run like an actual true business. All right? So that is what to delegate. So then the question, I teased it a little bit here is who to hire? And I'm going to go through the entire journey. In my first 10 months in real estate, I sold 27 homes. That was me doing everything in my business, building out the marketing systems, closing every deal, showing every home. And it was mostly working with buyers. Had figured out a simple ad to run in a newspaper and people were responding to it. And I was selling a lot of homes and surprisingly simple. And I think I stopped doing it for no good reason, But I sold 27 homes my first 10 months in the business. I was in a small brokerage of about 20 agents. I was the top producing agent in 10 months that year compared to 12 months of agents that had been, you know, working five, six, seven years in the business. So I quickly figured out lead generation. And these were, you know, not paid leads. I guess the ad technically was paid, but the amount per lead was like, not like dollars per lead. But I figured out how to become a good direct response marketer. So my first hire all that to say that I was doing all of the admin stuff. And I figured out really quick that everything I did to close those 27 deals from the marketing systems I built, the leads that I generated, the conversations that I had. And you know, I realized real quick that most of the non dollar productive activity came after I signed a new buyer to close like two or three listings that those first 10 months. So if I took a listing, there was a lot of administrative stuff to do to get the listing photographed and marketing brochures and MLS remarks and you know, if they had a pre inspection done and like all of that stuff was obviously really, really important. But it didn't feel like it was hundreds of dollars per hour in terms of like what I could actually hire someone to do that work. So it was like, like two in the morning one night that I ran an ad for a licensed administrator and Tia Wilson responded to that ad. And in a metro, Charlotte, probably in the metro, there's 2 million, 2.4 million, she lived like four houses away from me and she had just stopped working for another agent of seven years. So came in with just a bunch of experience and she was able to come in and take over, you know, administering some of the marketing systems that I had built. All the closing coordination, all the listing coordination, you know, run lock boxes and signs and pick up checks and you know, open a home and show homes if I needed her to, you know, do all of that stuff, take it all off my plate. And I was able to go from 27 my first 10 months to 44 that first full year. I hired her in February 2008. The next year we did 58 transactions. And late in that year, 2009 is when I brought on my second hire, which is a junior buyer agent Chris had sold I think like two homes his first 18 months in the business, but he was willing to follow a process and just do the work. He sold 27 homes his first 12 months with me basically just committing to doing the same thing that I was doing. I had figured out some lead gen systems and he was willing to fall follow the same process, use the same scripts and time block his calendar and just do the work. And no one had shown him how to do that work and what the dollar productive activities were. And he actually got his business up to 85 transactions on my team. And I had a couple agents get over a hundred transactions per year. I had one of my agents, John closed 19 homes in a single month. And it's because he didn't have to worry about the leads coming in. We call that leverage lead generation. And I had built out the client care systems with my admin, you know, at that time, maybe a couple admin, but they didn't have to worry about, you know, the client care issues and getting an active buyer. Once we got them under contract, we could hand them over to the admin team, the operations team. Same thing with a, with a listing. Even when we took a listing, most of getting the listing on the market and then under contract was not handled by the agent. The key hire is that you need to earn the right to hire an admin. I would recommend you go virtual assistant route. Having a local license admin is just a major plus because they can double as your marketing coordinator, your listing coordinator, your closing coordinator, they can show some homes for you, they can attend closings, they can run signs, they can do all of the jobs and the 80% that doesn't make you money, they can take that off your plate right away. And then your job is to double down on the dollar productive activities at that point. So next thing I want to cover are the systems that you need to build. This is critical. I could do an hour, I could do 10 hours of training on this. Simply put though, there are four pillars in the million dollar agent method leverage. Lead generation is pillar number one. Those are the most critical systems. In fact that's what we spend most of the time together in our million dollar agent method program. Go to million dollar agent method.com if you want to learn more about that. So lead generation systems, this is structuring, building your database, expanding your digital footprint or expired direct mail system or FSBO program. Our motivated sellers, our new construction. We've got like 10 or 12 lead generation levers. Then the lead conversion Systems for the 90% that aren't ready to go. What are the nurture and tech sequences that you're sending out? Then the sales process, you know, do you have your buyer packets, your listing packets, your pre list packet, your buyer and listing presentation? You know, are you actually presenting services where you can actually get the kind of commissions that you're worth and also get transaction fees? And then the client care system, do you have a client care system in place that just by virtue of taking them through that process as a client, the byproduct are referrals, right? Not begging for referrals, but you have multiple referrals in hand before that client leaves the closing table. We call this our client care compound effect. Everything is scripted and checklisted and swipeable and deployable in your business. But are you turning every closing into another closing just by way of the service you provide? Is it really a Ritz Carlton or Nordstrom experience working with you as an agent? Most real estate agents do not contemplate this and they barely get their clients to closing. So the last thing I want to share here is a quick story like, what if I didn't go down the path of attraction based marketing? What could my business look like today? And I'll actually use a story directly related to the OG of real Estate Coaching. And this is no disrespect to to Mike Ferry, but I had a conversation with someone coming into our world who was, you know, an elite cold caller and door knocker and built his business on it. And he has his family coming into the business. And it just reminded me of the story of the first webinar I ran when I got into coaching was similar to this video, actually. I ran a webinar how I sold 312 homes in a single year working one day a week. The thing I didn't share is that when I went from 178 deals where I did 66 down to 248 and I did one transaction. So we increased the business by almost like 40% and I went down from 66 to one transaction. And the next year we did 312. That's when I did this webinar. Then we did 453 and I was working one day per week all in there. It allowed me to go launch Real Estate B school and help other agents in this journey of, you know, even if it's, you know, selling two to three additional homes per month or 20 to 30 additional homes per month, whatever your desire is, that's what we do at Real Estate B School. But getting back to the WEBINAR in the 312 homes, I sent out an email to my database and Mike Ferry himself got a hold of this email and he sent an email out to his database saying, if you believe this, I have some swamp land to sell you in Florida. And multiple people sent me the email. So it was legit. Like, you know, but in his, you know, view, his worldview, at least of the real estate market, there was no other way to build your business except smiling and dialing. And it works, right? So I just did a video on how cold calling Is Cold calling dead in 2025? I don't think it's dead, but to me it was soul sucking. And I don't know many people that want to start their relationship with, with like a trusted advisor on a cold call. Right. So I'm not picking on cold callers. If that's part of your business, that's great because we do really well when we come in and we bolster that type of business with our attraction based marketing. Warm, inbound, organic leads from your database, your digital footprint expires, fizbos, motivated sellers, new construction. It's just a different approach to your business. And what my life could have looked like is exactly what this guy's experiencing now is that he's realizing that there aren't many people that can do what he does at the level that he does it. And the business doesn't run like an actual business. And he described it like it's a 90 day cycle. He has to push hard for 90 days and then do a bunch of closings and then he takes a little bit of time off and then he has to resurrect his business from the grave and push for another 90 days to get a bunch of closings. And there's no automation, there's no inbound leads that come in when you're with family or you're on vacation or you're working with clients. The goal here of a business in this space is to build a business that allows for massive leverage, massive financial freedom, and also massive time freedom. So if that sounds interesting to you, go to milliondollaragentmethod.com and we'll see you over there. Much love, much respect. We'll see you over on the next training as well. Be good.