How to Generate Luxury Listings on Demand Without Cold Calling w/ Janie Coffey — Part 1

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 it 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. What is going on? Real Estate Business Builders. You are going to get a ton out of this next two part series. If you've been following along here, we had an event recently where we had our coaches and past members and current members come in and really just share their best stuff. Janie Coffee is one of those unbelievably, not only just super on her game when it comes to business and real estate, but to build out a business in a way that truly serves her. So she is all about financial freedom and not being tied down by her real estate business which is 100% in line with what we do at Real Estate B school and our million dollar agent method. And she just lays out what that journey looked like for her. Her approach was to go after the luxury side of the business and she has a program and that's what this two part series is about. How to generate luxury listings on demand without cold calling. So this is part one of that training. Janie is an awesome one of my business partners and just an amazing human being and you definitely want to pay attention. This will be a two part training here and if you know you want to have a conversation with my team, the only way to do that is to go to million dollaragent method.com that's million dollaragentmethod.com just book in a strategy session. There's no obligation whatsoever. And without further ado, here's Janie Coffey with part one of how to generate luxury listings on demand without cold calling. So I want you to start off so the topic is luxury expired listings. I want to give like if it's already incorporated in your presentation, then just roll with it. But I definitely want people to kind of hear the story like why expireds, how you got into it, a little bit of that background. Like your journey in real estate is like unbelievably awesome. Kind of your pedigree and your background. So I want to make sure people are listening. So give a little bit of A background if you're not going to include it in your. In your presentation, but the floor is yours. We're recording, so it is all you. Thanks, Jeannie.

Cool. Can you see my screen?

Yep.

And you can see me?

Yeah. And I think we probably let me try to remove the spotlight and I think it'll still. Yep. So the way you have it set up, I think. Can everyone see Janie on her presentation? Scott Stone. Yep. Awesome.

You're good. Cool. So thank you. Thank you, thank you. I am so honored and thrilled and excited to be here with you guys. I am a huge fan of Lars and Stacy and all the REBS crew and I am one of you. I've been a longtime REBS participant and student and all the things. In two minutes, I'll tell you my pedigree because I think that is a little bit relevant here. Oh, I've been in business just about 20 years in real estate before that and still am a licensed general contractor. And I got my license only to sell my own flips, but within a few years started to do more residential real estate. Opened my own brokerage, have my own brokerage open through the whole recession, which was super fun and a super good learning experience all at at once. And then Sotheby's came to town and opened. And I joined Sotheby's when they were very small in Miami at that time. We about 40 agents. Within a year, I became a staff person, a managerial person, and eventually worked my way up to executive vice president of what is now one of the largest Sotheby's franchises in the world. Moved up to Northeast florida. I'm in St. Augustine now. Was with Sotheby's up here as well. And that's kind of where my luxury expireds story starts. But after my time at Sotheby's, I was a founding agent at Compass and now I've been at EXP for just short of three years. And I'm the co chair of the luxury division at exp. And I say all that just so that you know, I've been a practitioner, I've been a manager, I've been a coach. I've been all the things, but almost always in luxury. And I, I used everything I'm going to talk about here to start over brand new, fresh in a new market. And that's kind of the story I want to tell here because I think that a lot of people psych themselves out and you don't need to with a little bit of insight and tools and maybe a small mindset shift. But what I'm going to do for the next 45 minutes, or maybe next 40 minutes, I can try to tighten this up so that we can have some Q A at the end if there's time is I just want to tell you the story about why I love explaining expireds and why I love specifically luxury expireds. And I also understand that some of you might not be totally into luxury, which I get, but you might already be selling luxury or like starter luxury, and you don't even realize it. And I'm sure all of you would love to know how to help raise your average sales price. So everything we're going to talk about, you can kind of deploy it in whatever makes sense for you. The type of business you like to do, the type of business you like to run. But I want to tell you this fun story because it is fun. I went from zero to a cold. From. From a complete cold start to a new market. Like I said, I moved to a new market, moved up here to be close to my mom. My mom actually ended up passing away before I physically moved, which was a very unfortunate thing. But I had put all the things in motion. I was like, why not? I'll just start over. I'm excited about it. And. And I did. And I moved up here to St. Augustine or Northeast Florida, but I didn't know anybody. And I was thinking, how am I gonna start my business over from scratch? Because before I was in management at Sotheby's, I was a selling agent. Even though I owned a brokerage, I was still selling. So I had to kind of figure out how am I going to start from scratch? And I. I didn't know I was new to the market. I didn't have any sphere of influence whatsoever. Like, my mom had literally passed away, and the only other people I knew were in my real office. So they were not great prospects for me. But the one thing I did have was I had, like, a really big dream. And I don't know if there's any KW folks in here, but, you know, KW managers, or what do they call them, Market center leaders. They love to reach out to agents when they see them doing well. So I was starting to have a little bit of business. And the KW market center leader reached out to me, and I said, sure, I'll meet with you, but I'm not changing brokerages, just so you know. And he's like, what are your goals? And I was like, well, I want to hit the top 10 in the MLS in my first three years here by the end of my, my third year. And he kind of chuckled because he's like, well okay, but you know, this is kind of a very old boys type of environment here and the people who are doing well or the people have been here forever. And I was like, okay, well you know, I'm going to figure it out. And I didn't know exactly what I was going to figure out but I knew that I needed to have some kind of game plan. Now this was around 2015. We're coming out of the recession. We weren't fully out of the recession, but we're coming out of the recession fairly, fairly well. And I knew to be in the top 10 where we have very high priced properties too along our coast here, Ponte Vedra Beach. High price at that time was 4 or 5 million. Now we have 10 or 20 million dollar properties. But this was eight years ago. But I realized quickly that as a solo agent, or eventually a solo agent with an admin, that high volume wasn't going to get it. Meaning high volume of units that I was going to have to go after big hits like big sales prices so that I could to hit those numbers. And again, I had no idea how I was going to do this. I just knew that's what I wanted to do. But I also was like really interested. I was wanting to manage my time, so I knew that listings had to be the way to go. And I knew I wanted to manage kind of my marketing. So I knew that listings again because you can really leverage listings to get more business in a much stronger way that you can managing buyers. And I knew they had to have a really strong urge to, to sell. So after thinking about it for a little while and putting my head to it, I figured expires was the way to go. Luxury expires specifically. But I'm not a cold caller. That's just not in my DNA. I'm not a door knocker. It's not in my DNA. So, so I realized what I wanted to do was kind of warm the folks up a little bit and get them to feel kind of. I wanted them to call me at the end of the day. I wanted to entice them somehow to call me. I wanted to put enough cheese out there in my bait that they would call me. Because I also realized I was brand new to the market. So I didn't have any name recognition, I didn't have any past sales. But I realized like there's that rubber band effect, right? Like if you chase somebody, you know if each of you holds the end of a rubber band, if you chase somebody, the tension slacks off. And there's not that dynamic. But if you pull a rubber band back and you pull back a little bit, people come to you. So I realized I want to put enough things out there and kind of pull back that they would come to me and feel like I was the solution to their problems. And I realized that would put me in a much better kind of place, negotiation place, when I was at the table. So what I did was I studied all the information that I had on expireds. I've watched a lot of people in the past do well with expireds. I had been a student of burrinos back in the day, if any of you guys remember him. I had done a lot of expireds. I had. I had even, no joke, I had created this whole postcard system that seems really stupid now, but back in Miami, I created this whole postcard sequence of, like, skeletons and made a playoff expired in graveyards. And I never got any calls. And now I realize why I didn't. But I had done a lot of stuff in the past, but now that I was in a new market, I really sat down, took the time, and kind of crafted and engineered my very own what I call now, my no call expired system, which has been evolving ever since, because things that worked then have changed. Things have changed. So I sat down, I crafted this whole system, I put it together in a system, and I started in September of 2015. And I was at it every single day, every single day. It took me a while to build the system. I think I started trying to build the system by June or July of 2015. So it took almost four or five months to. To put my whole system together. But I started deploying it September of 2015, and I went all the way through end of 2015, maybe a few calls. January 2016, February 2016. And what happened was just like jiffy pop popcorn. You know, you put it on the oven and you heat it up and you shake it, and you heat it up and you shake it. That's what basically started to happen with me. It took about four months of doing my work every single day, put the things out there every single day. Monday through Friday. It's not Saturday and Sunday, Monday through Friday. No calling, mailing. If I could find their email, and I'll talk to you about that in just one second. But it was like, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, like jiffy pop popcorn. And all of a sudden, people were calling because I had Been basically pre warming them up through the whole fall. And I don't know if it's this way in your market, but our market kind of peaks out July or August and then things slow down, they really level out. December, January and then February is when people start thinking about putting their homes back on the market. So what I was doing was basically priming the pump through that whole fall and early winter time. So once they started calling, it just became this whole effect. So what my system kind of looks like is a big package, big being relative, you know, 20 something pages probably on the first day sent to them. And then I alternate letter, postcard, letter, postcard every single day for the first two weeks. Then I slow it down a little every three days. Then I slow it down even more every seven days. Then I slow it down Even more every 21 days. And at the end of all my touch points, if they haven't relisted or if they haven't called me or contacted me somehow, then I just put them in my, just listed, just sold. If I can find their email, I'll add in an email kind of sequence on top of that. And that's nothing more than simply what's on the postcards. But that's it. I didn't call me. Maybe I called less than fewer than five people. Like just calling wasn't in, like not comfortable with it and I just didn't want to do it. And I bumbled my way through the five calls and I was like, forget this. I tried other things too. I tried having somebody hand deliver the package. I tried hand delivering it myself. I had Uber hand deliver it. I have my local florists take them flowers. I have my local florist take them like a money plant. That really didn't make any difference because what I did do was track everything and I really understood what was pushing on the lever. Like Lars talks a lot about what pushed on the lever more and really started to create more traction. And what really didn't have much of an effect. So the system that I've laid out that's on the screen, that is really what had the biggest effect. And the materials were like I said, I sent a variety of things. A big package that came kind of customized to them with their home on it, customize to them with a handwritten note card. And it sent in a nice colored full size envelope. Then a sequence of postcards and we can talk about that in a minute too. And then a sequence of letters. So the reason I did it like this was people different People respond to different things, right? So some people love to get letters and open the letters up and read the letters. They. They light to read things. Some people just look at the postcard. They want the visual. They look at that. If I happen to find their email using a couple email tracing systems, a few responded by email as well. Normally, if the people were out of the country, I was much more likely, of course, for them to respond via email because they weren't necessarily getting what was being mailed to them wherever I could find their address. A lot of the people, I am in a second home market, so a lot of the luxury properties are not local folks. They live somewhere else. So that was kind of beneficial as well. But what I found was in sending different types of media, even if when I met with them, they told me they had thrown every single envelope in the trash can, they remembered it because it all looks similar, felt similar. And it was the repetitiveness, it was the consistency of showing up and not going away that kind of won out over the day. You've got to stand out. When people expire, they're being chased by so many people. You guys know this. You might be one of the expired people who call the first day, but they're getting things mailed, they're getting things dropped off at their door, they're having their people knock on their door. And so you really have to stand out with, like, quality, quality materials. And that first day is super important because here in my market, people, the way our MLS is set up, if somebody forgets to renew their property, renew their listing and it expires, they can relist it the next day and it goes back on the market. And so sometimes agents here are a little sloppy and they let them renew. So I want to get that first package off the very first day so that the sellers at least receive my package. They might extend the listing with their current listing agent, and they might give them another month or three months or six months. But I've had plenty of people call me later because they held on to that first package. They only got the first package because I am very meticulous about stopping mailing if somebody relist or extends their listing. I stopped the system for them. So getting that package off into the mail, but being really nice, nice materials, nice graphics, nice everything, the way it touches, looks feels super, super important. I actually had somebody call me, and they had already determined that they were going to list with a fellow agent of mine. They knew that before it expired, like a fellow agent from my brokerage. But she actually called and she said, I just want to call and tell you I've never received anything as nice and impressive as a package you sent. That's the kind of impression you want to leave with folks, especially at the higher end. Because if they've expired, it may not have been price. We know a lot of times it is price. But what do people normally want to do when their property expires? They find fault with the past agent a lot of the time and they often think the last agent didn't do a great job marketing, they weren't polished enough, whatever. So if you can wow them and get their attention, that brings you so much further. Remember with the rubber band, I want to bring the people further closer to me. More interest in what I have to share with them. So like I said, started off the first four months very quiet, very slow. Once it started to hit like this, I ended up listing like this, like this, like this. And it was just like popcorn. And what happened was within 20 months I had listed over $50 million. 20 months of being in a brand new market. So 20 months from when I arrived in my new market, built the system, deployed the system, 20 months in, I had listed over $50 million of listings with the average price around 1.5, 1.7 million. Where at the time my market average in our MLS was around 200,000. So you can see I really pushed it up quite a bit. And this is for a person who had never sold anything in this area. In fact, I didn't even know how to say a lot of the areas names because they pronounced them differently than than I would have thought. And I hit that goal. The goal I had told the market center leader from KW When I said I wanted to reach the top 10 by my third year in, I actually made it to number nine with at the end of my second year. So moved up there in 27, 2015, and for the 2017 year I made it in in the top nine solo agents. I even outsold my owner brokers at the time. But the bigger effect besides those listings was the snowball effect of how that massively, massively, massively changed my entire business. Because what happened was the expired listings, they led to more listings because the neighbors would see, oh, she sold that property that had been on the market two or three times before. Well, she sold it, I better call them. And then a lot of these folks had either multiple properties themselves or had friends and family to refer me to. So it just became a snowball. Not to mention all these amazing properties. That you can host open houses at, you can get in front of a whole host of other people. Gives you a great opportunity to meet neighbors around each of these houses. And so the whole business just really took off like a rocket because of that luxury expired listing system and also because I was new. The other added benefit was I got to really meet the most amazing people and have doors open that would have not ever been opened for me both personally and professionally if I hadn't really gone after these higher priced properties. This home right here, this is a very well known historic home in downtown St. Augustine. And on the day I gave this, this similar presentation to this that I'm giving right now. A couple years ago, the, the seller had called me and she was expired. She did not want to list her house, she just wanted me to sell it. In the end I met with her, I overcame her kind of concerns about listing and it was, she had a lot of artwork in the house and she didn't want that to be visible in photos. But we, we overcame that. I ended it. I'm in Florida where we can have both sides of the transaction. So I ended up, excuse me, selling it to both sides. So I had happy seller and happy buyers. And because of the marketing I was doing, I ended up doing at least 25% of the sales, ended up having the buyers too. So now I've like double, double my footprint. And what happened on top of that is having these special, different listings rather than, you know, similar listings to every everybody else. Because luxury listings are kind of unique and different. Most luxury properties are either built by the sellers, massively renovated by the sellers, but often very, very different from each other. It leads to a lot of cool things. It leads to you meeting a lot of people you wouldn't have been able to meet otherwise and grow that sphere of influence. A lot of people think you have to have a luxury spher, sell luxury. And that's not it at all. You grow your luxury sphere through luxury real estate. Luxury expires, but it also allows you to get in the media a lot more than you're ever able to specifically. And often for individual homes, you can get them in the media because they're so interesting. This home right here, I was able to have featured in the Wall Street Journal as the house of the day internationally. When you start to build up things like that now you're building kind of your portfolio of your marketing so that when you go on listing appointment you can show them. These are different ways you've been able to have your Listings featured and on top of that you meet really, really cool people. So the folks that bought the house I just showed you have become two of my very best friends in the world. And this is their wedding which they held as a small group as you see here. But this is Highclere Castle where Downton Abbey is filmed. And they rented out the entire castle for their wedding. So we had a, a whole three or four day event in these grounds and around this wedding. And that's just one of the things that have come out with all these amazing listings and, and meeting people and being successful at selling them because now they want to refer you to other people because they have something kind of special in their pocket with you. These are folks who are used to dealing with high end professionals, whether it's their CPAs or their attorneys. And now they have their real estate advisor and they love to refer you. So it becomes snowball effect like I talked about a little bit ago.

All right, so hopefully you enjoyed part one of really just how to get after luxury listings. And if you're not a cold caller. I never was a cold caller, was more of a marketer. Janie took our expired system and just ran with it on the luxury side. And her story is unbelievably awesome in a new market. I think she did like 50 million worth of expired listings in like 24 months or something crazy. And I may have botched that. But hopefully you enjoyed part one here. Stay tuned for part two and you're not going to want to miss it. And if you know, you want to have a conversation with us about your business and what it would look like to earn that MDA that million dollar agent status, go to milliondollaragentmethod.com and book in a strategy session and we'll see you on part two of how to generate luxury listings on demand without cold calling.