The 5 Things You Must Do if You Want to Make Money in Real Estate

There's so much that you could do, but if you don't make real priorities, you'll get lost in, you know, all of the small stuff and it's not gonna lead you to a point where you're, you've fully realized your potential in the areas of life that matter most.

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, and 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 gotta do the work. Welcome back, real estate business builders. Today we're gonna talk about the five things you must do if you wanna make more money in real estate. The market has changed. What got you here will not get you there. My journey in real estate, if you've been hanging around for a while, was one of, I just wasn't going to accept that the status quo, traditional success in our industry was one of rise and grind. I figured out early on, using one lead source, one script and just doing one activity for as many hours in a day as possible, I figured out how to get really busy in real estate. 27 homes sold, my first 10 months, 44, my first full year, fast forward, you know, five years later or so, I had a fully leveraged business where I was the true CEO owner, sitting in the owner's box, working one day a week in that business, making a seven figure income. And I did it with a lot of blood, sweat and tears. All the good, bad and ugly, I'm not going to cover that, a lot of that today. But these are five things you must do no matter what level you're at, right? I don't care if you're making 50,000 a year now of GCI gross commission income in real estate, or if you're making 500,000 or you're making a million, I still want you to focus on these five things because for everyone there is a next level. And this is prime time. Prime time. As the economy is wonky and shifting and there's so much fear, uncertainty and doubt, this is the time you can step up and make a massive shift in your business and take your unfair share of, of the market. So number one, in terms of the things you must do if you want to sell more real estate and build business that has a life outside of you, that scales systematically is that you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. I've actually, I didn't wear it today. I have a T shirt that says, you know, be comfortable with the uncomfortable. So there isn't a part of growth in, in, in any way, whether it's, you know, bringing, whether it's starting to build systems. Right. People are scared. You know, generally a typical real estate agent is a, is an outgoing personality. They're maybe not good at systems or numbers or you know, that sort of thing. So there's a level of discomfort that you have to enter into if you're going to build a business that has leverage. And I'll get into leverage here in a second. So the first part is just a willingness to get uncomfortable, you know, every point in my journey. So, you know, at this point, real estate B school B stands for business. So I was all about building a business because I didn't want to be an agent in the traditional sense. I wanted to help buyers and sellers and I knew there was a massive opportunity there. But I didn't want to be the one working, you know, every weekend and every evening. So I knew that I had to get uncomfortable. There are six stages to see distinctly six stages when it comes from going from an agent making under a hundred thousand GCI to a true business owner running a leveraged business doing $3 million top line GCI or more and every part of the journey multiple times in each stage, there's just this discomfort all the time. So you have to get used to sweaty palms as you're making those calls to your past clients or you know, putting yourself out there on social media, doing some of the, the, the, the tactics that are getting real conversations going online. Whatever it is, you have to put yourself out there and be uncomfortable. And if it's hiring your first virtual assistant, there are able, willing, you know, folks around the world that are smart, that are willing to work for less than $4 per hour and they'll massively impact your business because they can do all the button clicking while you're doing the, the high dollar productive DPA activities in your business. So that's number one, get comfortable with the uncomfortable. Number two is that you must adapt to change. The market has changed. I think it's going to be a long time before we get back to an environment where things are sort of more balanced. There's just an under supply of housing inventory this year as I'm recording this. 10,000 agents roughly have left the industry. And this is just in the U.S. right? 10,000 agents. There's just not enough income available for agents to do what they used to do. What worked in, you know, 2021 and the first half of 2022 is not going to work anymore. So this willingness to dig deeper and do the activities, do the actual work, that's required to be highly productive real estate agent. You've got to dig in and do it. And, and the great news about this is that most agents are so consumed with the headlines and the fear, the uncertainty and doubt, the fud that's going on right now that you are, you have no competition in this regard. So adapting and pivoting your business, Very few agents are digging in and, and doing the things that they need to do to be successful. When I got into real estate, it was just on the front end of the Great Recession. It was the end of the financial world as we knew it. If you were in real estate back in 2000, late 2008, 2009, 1011, those were rough years. We went from 15,000 agents in my market to 5,000 agents. I think we're going through a similar cleansing now. And it's just a math equation. The number of homes that sell times all those commission checks, you know, divided by the number of agents available. Agents will just have to go back to their old jobs if there's not enough income available and they're not willing to adapt to change. Number three is getting leverage. This is a critical part of the journey. And leverage comes in a few different flavors. The first part of leverage is systems. A system is anything that you repeat in the business. So there could be things that you do every day that you could build into a system, or a week or month or quarterly or annually. You know, it could be when you run out to meet a buyer for the first time, you know, do you have a buyer packet ready to go that has all the information, all of the collateral, marketing collateral, to be able to present and sign that buyer on the spot to be your loyal client? Same thing on the listing side. When you, when you set a listing appointment, do you have a pre list packet that is ready to go out where the courier has a script that they follow to tee up the process? You know, so it's step by step. Every step is stitched together. So the, the byproduct is obviously to get the listing, but to get, you know, referral after referral from that client, because the whole process was thought through. Properly. So that's an example of leverage through systems. The other example and marketing is all about systems. So you know our lead gen levers, real estate, B school, we have roughly 10 or so lead gen levers. Each are good for a couple transactions per month once fully installed in the business. But they're all systems, right? So you install the system and then you get someone else, even if it's a virtual assistant, to run that system. So it produces leads like clockwork. That's what we want. We don't want you sweating where's the next deal coming from? Because as you're out, you know, servicing clients or as you're meeting with sellers, or you're doing the dollar productive activities in your business, you want leads coming in all the time and then you want your lead nurture sequences, which is another system to, to nurture those leads with video and text and all of that. Right. But it's a system, it has to work like clockwork. We want everything running like clockwork in the business. And then the last part, and I mentioned with the virtual assistants, the biggest form of leverage is, is people. There are so many things we do. Fully 80% of what a real estate agent does is just not dollar productive. Meaning you can get someone to do it for less than $50 an hour. I wanted to make 250, 500, $1,000 an hour. So I had to get everything off my plate. And ultimately it took me three plus years to do it to get everything off my plate. That wasn't making me the kind of money that I want because it was forcing me to work hours that I didn't want to work. So that is another example of, of a form of leverage. Number four is playing the long game. You must play the long game if you want to have a different sort of relationship with time and money in the future. And what I mean by this is I've made all the mistakes. So I, I, I'll do a whole another episode on the mistakes that I've made in this business. But the one thing I did right was that early on I'm talking my first, it was actually my second business plan, but it was the first business plan that I went like crazy town in terms of the, the, the, the detail. I had one side, eight and a half by 11 piece of paper. One side was business, one side was personal. Because I wanted to win at home. You know, I wanted to win in, in real estate, but also win at home. Um, but the long game for me was that I looked out three years, five years and 10 years. And this was back in late 2009. So I wrote a 2010 business plan which had 2012, 14 and 2020. So I pre decided what the business was going to look like, even though I hadn't even hired my first buyer agent yet. You know, I was just sort of figuring out the business and, and you know, how to get busy and you know, I knew there was massive opportunity, but I didn't really know what it was going to look like. Fast forward, you know, 10 years since then and over a million dollars spent on different coaches and masterminds. Yes, over a million dollars spent on different masterminds and coaches. And I think I figured some things out and, and the biggest thing here when it comes to playing the long game, you definitely want to align with folks that are thinking in that way. Right. So the only thing I'll ever offer you here on the podcast, make sure you jump into the free Facebook group now. Now that I sort of reminded myself about it. It's real estate business builders. It's on Facebook. Just jump in there, answer a couple questions. We'll get you, we'll get you access to the group. So play the long game, stop playing this short game where it's constantly focused on, you know, the deal that's in front of you or the minutia of, you know, I took a listing and now I have to do the measurements and I have to, you know, set up this vendor to go out there or I have to get the lockbox or the yard sign or all of that stuff is critically important. But it's not playing the long game. You're not going to win in the game of business and make a massive windfall in terms of income and have a decent work life balance. If you're thinking that's short game, short game is, is the, the tactics, the little details that go into to doing real estate. You've got to think longer term. You have to think in terms of a three year, a five year, and what could this look like ten years from now? The last thing number five must do is that you need to focus on your priorities. There's only so much that we can get done in a given day. And let's envision and I'll just tell my journey. I was newly married. So October 2006, I got married. We had our first born November 2007. Uh, then we had our second child. A couple miscarriages in between, but our second child, April 2010, Anders was our son, born in 2007. Kendall, our daughter 2010 and I, because of a jacked up childhood and alcoholic father and you know him really actively drinking until I was age 15. My mom divorced him when, uh, when I was four years old. So I had a good childhood. It was just a little chaotic, a little uncertain, not the kinds of things I wanted for my family. So I was highly motivated to be a great dad and a great husband. And I knew really early on that to be a top agent would take me a hundred percent out of those two arenas that I wanted to really succeed in. And so the priorities, my stated priorities were family, you know, my wife first and then my children. My faith came a little bit later in terms of an increasing priority and then my physical body. I kind of just scrapped it for honestly the first three, four or five years in real estate. I didn't take care of my physical body all that, all that well. But let's say those are some of your priorities. It's like, yeah, you want to succeed financially, you want to be a good spouse, you want to be a good parent, you want to spend time with your creator, you want to, you know, take care of your physical body, you want to maybe maintain some friendships or you have some parents that you want to take care of or siblings that you want to communicate. There's so much that you could do. But if you don't make real priorities, you'll get lost in, you know, all of the small stuff. And, and it's not going to lead you to a point where you're, you've fully realized your potential in the areas of life that matter most. So focusing on priorities, getting clear on what your priorities are, and then making sure that those priorities are translated into your calendar. Right. So if you say your spouse is a priority, you know, do you have time every day where you connect with your spouse? I do this first thing in the morning. I know that once my day, like once the kids are off to school and my wife is doing her thing, she has this incredibly successful platform, Everyday Miracles podcast, and it is on fire. Once we let everyone out of the bag at like 8:15, she drives them to school. It's like 9 o' clock at night, 9:30, we're both exhausted. We watch a little bit of TV, maybe 15, 20 minutes, she falls asleep on the couch and I'm, you know, maybe watching some YouTube crypto stuff or something random. If, if I didn't make that, that time in the morning, it's about 45 minutes where we do a specific, you know, I read a devotion and then I Read the Bible to her. And then we do a. I read another leadership John Maxwell leadership devotion. And then we do an A meditation and then we pray. If I didn't have that, you know, 30, sometimes 45 minutes with her every day, we'd be disconnected. If I didn't have date night in our calendar every week, I'd forget to book a date night, right. If I didn't commit to, you know, once a quarter taking a trip with her or doing an annual honeymoon where I take her to this amazing place, I surprise her as if it's our honeymoon every year in October. I wouldn't have the kind of relationship with her that I have today. I wouldn't be so sure that there's, there's little chance that this relationship is going to go off the rails because it's one of my priorities. So that's the last thing is you have to focus on your priorities. With my kids, same, same deal. If I didn't have in my calendar time to spend with my kids. My daughter's been working out at the YMCA recently and so I'll get, you know, five days a week we'll drive to the YMCA, we'll get, you know, who knows with a 13 year old how many words you're going to get in, but we get some words in some quality time. My son is training for, you know, he wants to go D1 volleyball and so I work out with him a couple times a week and I'm teaching him how to drive. So we have lots of time in the car driving to and from his club, volleyball and the talking there. I could argue pretty easily that man, I work hard and I'm going to put in all this time, you know, driving, you know, basically four or five hours a day. I'm spending, you know, with my kids actively engaged as much as they'll let me, but their priorities to me, right? So my spouse, my kids, my physical body. So I'll block out three hours every morning from 8 kids get out, you know, they'll, they'll go to school 8, 15, I will spend probably about 60, 90 minutes working some marketing stuff and then I'll spend a full two hours taking care of my physical body. I'll get a weight bearing workout in, I'll get cardio in that, I'll do the infrared sauna, I'll go in the pool to cool off and then I'm at my desk at 12 o' clock so my priorities are clear and they're in my calendar. I probably do a whole episode on priorities. And I may do that. Hopefully this gives you an idea and I'm going to run through these five again. These are the five must do things if you want to sell more real estate. And I know they seem like they're a little bit pie in the sky. These are the things that matter when it comes to long term success, not only in real estate, but in all the areas of life that matter. They are, to summarize, get uncomfortable. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Number two, you must adapt to change. What got you here will not get you there. Number three is that you have to get leverage into your business systems, people, marketing automations, that's all leverage. Number four, play the long game, stop playing the short game and worrying about the deal that's blowing up in front of you. And number five, focus on priorities. Priorities are what we do. Everything else is just talk. Get into my free Facebook group. That's the only thing I've got to offer you. I do a free live stream training in there. It is an awesome community of entrepreneurial minded real estate agents who want to grow and scale without giving away their life, without the grind. We'll see you in there and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye bye.