Stop Looking For The 'Sexy' Side Of Real Estate Because Success Is More Boring Than We Care To Admit

Welcome back to Real Estate Team Builders. This is Lars Hedenborg, the founder of Real Estate B school and we are going to get into a topic today, the not so sexy side of real estate. If you missed the last podcast episode, Ellie Thigpen who is the director of operations of Dave Friedman team. I got the pleasure of working with Dave from the year he sold 64, four transactions to doing close to 400 transactions and just runs an amazing business in Charleston, South Carolina. And Ellie has been with Dave for about seven years and she launched a second business with Dave called ERS Expert Realtor Services. And it is everything that team builders team leaders do not want to focus on mainly. And what I want to drive down into on this follow up episode, the not so sexy side of real estate is where all the money is made. Let me say that again, the things you don't want to do as a team builder is where all of the money is made. And so Dave had a vision to run a high level real estate team, you know, 4 million plus GCI with very, very rebs real estate B school approved economic model, meaning his profit margins are more than 20%. That's all I'll say in terms of what he's able to take out of that business. It's a seven figure profit. And most teams that are run that do a lot of transactions, a lot of gci, a lot are not run higher than a single digit percentage profit margin. Meaning a $4 million business isn't returning more than four or five hundred grand or it may be returning more. But the team leader has to do a bunch of production to make the kind of money that they want to make. And the team is there just to subsidize some of the overhead while they're just selling homes on their own and they've got this miserable existence. And so the thing I want to focus on today is accountability. And there's two elements of accountability and I'm going to refer you back to the episode that Ellie did because she did a really good job of explaining all the things that need to happen from a lead is generated and what has to happen on that lead in order for you to maximize your chances of getting not just a reasonable return, but the maximum potential return on every dollar you spend in your business. It comes through a variety of lead auditing appointment, auditing agent scorecards, all of that that were covered and just this cadence and rhythm round set, met, signed and the tracking of all of it. And they use a tool called Trello, which we didn't really get into in the podcast episode. But, um, accountability of expenses and people. When I mentioned the word accountability, everybody automatically thinks of like accountability is what you do with or to or really it's what you do with someone or for someone. It's accountability is love. But when I mentioned the word accountability, it's automatically a person to person, very icky sort of relationship that most team leaders cringe. And it's why most teams aren't run very, very efficiently or effectively. But the account of account, the kind of accountability that I'm talking about is accountability of where your money is going. And Ellie made a really powerful point on her episode. Let me think if I can recall it exactly. It was the response of most team leaders when they're not getting enough deals out of a lead source. Let's pick like realtor.com let's say you're not getting enough deals out and you've got agents working those leads. Your agents saying like, yeah, we like realtor.com leads, they return pretty good. You know, challenge is we need more of them. So the team leader, their response is not knowing the numbers at all, not knowing if their agents handle those leads exactly the way they should be handled according to a proven lead management policy. Their response is just to spend more money. And so they go from, you know, $5,000 a month on realtor.com leads which should produce $65,000 a month. So we have a system at Real Estate B school that is proven and it's developed by one of our business coaches, Dan Jones, who was actually an agent on my team back in the day, started his inside sales, moved to outside sales, moved away from my team and launched his own business. 13 times return he gets from realtor.com leads and he has a step by step process scripts and the technology and the systems behind it to put in $5,000 and get out $65,000. And so if you don't have a system in place to be able to do that and the tracking around it and how to treat each lead to hold the input. The input is anyone can call up zillow or realtor.com or do Google pay per click and kind of generate these forced registrations and hope that something comes out the other end and you have closings. It's one thing to do to put 5,000 in and get 20 or even $25,000 out. And when you consider splits to a buyer agent, there's not a lot of money there left to drop to the bottom line. But it's an entirely different level of accountability and tracking to be able to turn a 10x + times return out of every paid lead source. And so if you're not getting the kinds of returns that are possible, it's because you don't have any lead management policy in place, meaning that by lead source you have a predetermined and pre agreed upon with your agents set of activities and tasks that need to happen in order for you to maximize every lead that comes in. Ellie made a comment on the last podcast episode that the average number of calls, I think it's a little over one one call per lead. So it's dialed once and then forgotten about when she goes in and she, she does their initial audit of all the leads in the CRM and it takes like somewhere between six to eight calls in order for conversion to have happen. In addition to text, in addition to a well written email sequence, in addition to video marketing, in addition to like all the stuff. Right. And so that's one element of it, the accountability for expenses. The other element is accountability for people. That is the slightly ickier part of this is, but we have a solution. The solution is to run the business and hold your agents accountable. Agree in advance that this is the way that a lead needs to be handled and this is the position that you're signing up for. So you have a mutual agreement ahead of time that this is, this is the game, this is how we're going to play it, this is what I need you to do as a player. This is how the technology is to be run and how leads are to be handled. And then you have somebody in auditing all of that. And then you have data that you're able to share with your agent on a regular basis to coach them to another level. And you know, we talk about set, met and signed and how many leads you get each month and how those leads are handled and what, what can the technology do and what can VAs virtual assistants do on the back end in order to this massive undertaking of converting these purchased leads into closings? How can we get leverage from VAs and them setting up E alerts and them sending out video emails and all of those sorts of things. So those are the two aspects of accountability. On the one hand it's just holding the money you spend accountable and then on the other hand it's holding the people accountable, getting them to agree to a rules of engagement and how leads to be handled and their position and what they're to do every day to succeed at their position and breaking that into Numbers so they can actually know if they're winning. Those are the two elements. And it's hard to get away from that. You know, it's. You want to think that real estate is something different than that, but it comes down to, like, four main elements. Meaningful conversations, appointments set, appointments met, and appointments signed. And that's like, primarily the game of real estate. It's not about showing homes, it's not about, you know, friending, you know, your clients and just becoming a good friend to your clients. That could be part of how you generate new business. But it comes down to the contact sport of meaningful conversations. How many appointments you set on a weekly basis, how many appointments you meet, and how many new buyer or new sellers signed every week. So if you're not playing that game, set, met, signed, you know, meaningful conversations, set, met, signed, you're not in the game of team building. And so if you want to discuss what it looks like to have a conversation with me and have me partner with you in your real estate business, this is something that is completely new. I've only launched this about six months ago. This is not the EXP show, but I pivoted into EXP as a superior platform to run your real estate business. This podcast will forever and always be here to serve you as a real estate team builder. But if you want to look at EXP and specifically what it would look like to partner with me and get the real estate B school sort of proven set of growth tools with me, navigating those tools with you to push you to grow and expand your business to what's possible. Just go to partner with rebs.com, partner with, with rebs.com that's partner with. I'm just going to make sure the site works. Partner with Rebs.com and on that site, it'll explain the opportunity. You can hit the button, learn the truth, to kind of do your due diligence on what it would look like and what this platform is truly about. It's not what your broker is telling you it's about. And also to book in a call with me. So we'll see you over there. I would love the opportunity to chat with you about really, most importantly, your business, what's going well, what's not going well, and how we can take it to the next level. So much love, much respect. We'll talk to you soon. Be good.