The Top 7 Questions to Help Real Estate Agents Scale FAST

If you generate a lead, even if it's your next door neighbor says that, hey, we're thinking of moving in the spring, you know, right now, it's the fall, they're considering moving six months from now. And what are you going to, how are you going to warm them up, you know, over what technology, what sequence are you going to put them in to nurture them so that they know that you're an authority and you do things differently.

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 gotta do the work. What's up, real estate business builders? These are the seven questions that every real estate agent has to ask themselves if you want, want to scale your real estate business. And so the word scale is easy to say and hard to do when you consider that the average agent you know sells. Even if you get rid of the 50% of agents that sell one, I think it was actually more. 70% this year of licensed real estate agents have sold one home or less. Even if you get rid of all of those, the average agent sells less than 10 homes per year. So when I talk about scale, I'm talking about multiples of that where when you look at the income available after 20, 30, 40 transactions, that's when you're putting cash away each month. That's the only way over 3, 5, 7, 10 years that you'll position yourself for any level of financial freedom. So you can not do the thing anymore. So, you know, I have met more agents in their 70s and 80s than I care to even comment on. And they'll rationalize that I just love real estate. It's sad that, and maybe that's true. So, I mean, I guess I'm passing judgment, I don't mean it in that way, but I want to put you in a position where if you don't want to sell homes into your 60s and you're in your early 50s or mid-50s, my goal here, real estate business builders style, is to put you in a position where you can get out of the grind and, and build a net worth that will allow you to gracefully Exit production. That is the goal here. So today we're going to talk about seven questions every agent must ask themselves if they want to scale. So scale to multiple transactions per month consistently without giving your life away in the process. So my intention here is that you may write some of these down or even like pause this and almost like journal on some of these. These questions are that important. And actually there's only six so I'll make up a seventh. The first question is, and maybe write this down. Are you taking advantage in your real estate business? Are you taking advantage of low cost, high impact lead gen levers? And when I say lead gen lever it is a marketing system that you've installed in the business that is good for multiple transactions per month over time, Right? Are you working on building out marketing systems that will produce one to two plus transactions per month? Could be your database system, it could be your digital footprint, it could be your expired direct response system, your FSBO direct response system, open houses where you can generate sellers. Some of them are no cost lead gen leverage. So that's number one. If you're not working on marketing systems and you're falling into the trap of paying for leads or, or worse yet, paying a referral fee at closing and thinking that that's a good idea, it's way out of economic model and you could never scale your business. And I know agents that are selling over a hundred transactions per year and the majority are coming from referral sites where they're paying 30 to 40% referral fee and they're going backwards financially and they're not living grand lifestyles but they're going back financially, you know, and they're like, oh, I'm doing a hundred transactions. I look at their financials, I'm like what's going on? You're doing a hundred transactions and you' average price point, that's 12,000 per deal, that's 1.2 million. Top line. Says here your top line's 625, you know, and you're spending a whole bunch of money on other stuff that doesn't work, you know. So make sure that you're not falling into the trap that the industry wants you to fall into. So that's number one, low cost, high impact lead gen leverage. Number two, are you using marketing and technology leverage at the highest level? It would surprise you how few agents are employing and we're technology agnostic. But when you consider the fact that, let's say we do install a lead gen lever in your business and it's producing leads but you have no CRM. So a customer relationship management tool. We're technology agnostic. We work with a couple that we know really well and we help our million dollar agent method members installing their business. But 90% of if you generate a lead, even if it's your next door neighbor says that hey, we're thinking of moving in the spring, you know, right now, it's the fall, they're considering moving six months from now. And what are you going to, how are you going to warm them up, you know, over what technology, what sequence are you going to put them in to nurture them so that they know that you're an authority and you do things differently? Right. If you don't have that kind of leverage in your business and you're not using technology. When I mentioned expireds and fizbos, there's a little bit of technology involved that one year I did 750,000 GCI from on just expireds. And when you're starting out on this tech piece, I think it's like $70 per month. Right? So the question is, are you using marketing and technology at the highest level can be hard to compete and hard to scale your business if you're not and if you don't know how to do it, we can help or get with someone that can show you how to use marketing and technology leverage. Okay, so that's number two. Number three are your lead nurture system set up properly when you have someone, let's say you hold an open house and you generate six high quality buyer leads and three high quality seller leads. Our open houses are geared toward a 5050 ratio. The goal with an open house, the way we teach it, is to close a buyer and close a seller from a single open house. So in that scenario where say you generate a bunch of leads on a open house, you put in all the effort to do the open house. Are you putting them into a sequence where you're friending them or following them on social media, you're liking their posts, you're following a daily, really an extension of the database, but you're actually building your authority with them online as well. And are you sending them, you know, videos that might be relevant to their situation, their specific situation as a buyer or seller, or text email sequences, that sort of thing. So lead nurture systems, 90% of your business will come from someone who's not ready to transact today. That's number three. Number four, do you have a system to offload low dollar productive activities? Now this doesn't have to be, you know, the immediate knee jerk reaction when we mentioned, you know, leverage comes with automations or delegations systems essentially where you're handing, you're either automating the system or you're delegating it. It could be as simple as hiring a virtual assistant. So super smart, super motivated. That happens to live in an economy where the wages are lower. They're no less talented. In fact, I know for a fact that they're oftentimes more motivated and, and just as smart, if not smarter. They're just a regular person. Right. We've got relationships with virtual assistant companies where we can deploy a virtual assistant in your business to take 30 to 40 hours of marketing coordination, listing coordination and closing coordination off your hands right away. So do you have a system in place where you can offload easily 80% of what an agent does in the dozen or a couple dozen jobs that we do? Easily 80% of it is administrative in nature. So still critically important but administrative in nature. And if you don't have a system to offload activities that can be done by someone for a whole lot less than even $10 per hour, you're not going to win the game long term of financial freedom and time freedom because as you sell more homes you'll have more of those administrative tasks to do and they'll just keep dragging you back into, into the low dollar productive activities. And when you look at your income at the end of the year versus the hours that you worked, it's going to dilute all those 80% admin activities, it's going to dilute your overall income and you're just going to either have to work more hours or just make less money and cap your hours. So that's number four. Number five, where can you cut expenses without hurting the business? We have people come in and we have ways to work with members where it's like even less than $500 per month to install our entire not only lead gen system, lead conversion system, all of our sales frameworks even leverage client care less than 500amonth. And they'll say I don't have the money. And we'll ask them well where are you spending money now? And it's like, well I'm paying for this and I'm paying for this and I'm paying for this. Well what does that produce? What deal has that produced? Well you know, it's, I'm branding, it's sending emails out to my database, you know, so I'm making impressions, I'm like, well you know how many database deals did you do last year? Well, I didn't do any. Are you regularly looking at where you're spending money and getting rid of those expenses that don't have a measurable return? We only spend money in our business and we have economic model laws that we live by as we're growing our businesses. You can't just spend money willy nilly and not hold it accountable. It's not going to lead you to any level of financial freedom and definitely not time freedom or freedom from stress. I mean, those are the three freedoms that we're really after. Okay, that's number five. Number six, are you working too many hours without any financial upside? So when I got into the business, you know, I figured out one Legion source, a simple script, and I got to work and I sold 27 homes. My first 10 months I worked out of bounds. I worked a lot of hours to do it. My first full year in the business. I hired an admin early that year because I knew I was doing like 80% of the crap that I'm doing is like $20 an hour work. So I was able to sell 44 homes and in less time than it took me to sell the 27. Even like overall, even though it was only 10 months versus 12 months. And so when you look at, you know, where you're putting your time, if you're not working a full time work week and you don't know what to do, the activities to do, that's a different sort of scenario. But you will typically find yourself that you're capping out on hours. And if you don't have leverage marketing systems or some automations or delegations, and you don't have Legion levers set up in your business and you're just struggling to get the deals going, you're probably working too many hours or you're working out of bounds, as I say, where maybe you're kind of not busy or you're avoiding doing the, the dollar productive activities during the day and then you have something sprout up at night and you don't have leverage, you don't have an admin to handle those things. And now all of a sudden you're, you know, communicating with clients. You know, when you should be at a kid's soccer game or you should be, you know, with your spouse, you know, paying attention and all those things. Are you working out of bounds or are you working too many hours? In real estate B school we talk about business freedom index. And when I look at my journey, my first full year in real estate, I did about $100 per hour. So it was decent money, just about the same money I made at my corporate job, which I left in 2007. But then I went from 100 to 150 in one year, then to 250 per hour, then to 500, then to a thousand, two thousand and four thousand. And my hours came down, like working seven days a week came down to one day per week. And then, you know, so I was making, I was still making more money, but it wasn't only the income increase, it was the fact that my hours were coming down. So I was able to make over $4,000 per hour in a single year. Right. And I had the option to not work with clients at that point. And the point is not to get you to think about like building this big business that was, you know, we were doing three, three and a half million GCI very profitably. But to think about it in a way where, like, where can I get a little bit of leverage right now? That's question number six. Where are you working too many hours with little financial upside. And then the last question I have, this is the bonus because there's only six on my list. The last question I have is probably the most important, important, and this question will allow you, or almost force you to do the things that you might not want to do on the daily. And the question is this. Do you have a vision, slash roadmap in place for three years out? So a three year vision, a three year roadmap that leads you to time and money freedom. I believe at least in the three to five year, three to five years from now, if you take the right steps, you will not even recognize the amount of money that you're making in real estate and you will not recognize the things that you've gotten out of doing in your business. Even without building any sort of complicated business, you know, could be literally just a junior agent, a local licensed admin and one VA and you're doing 6, 700,000 GCI and taking home 500,000 of it and working less than 2,000 hours a year, making 250 to $300 per hour. So these are not complicated businesses that we're building. But do you have the roadmap, the vision in place of how you're going to get there three to five years from now? If you're only taking home 50,000 or 60,000 or 100,000 or less than 200,000, what would it look like to double, triple, quadruple your take? Home income in the next three to five years without having put more hours into the business or even scaling back your hours. And of course that question is a little bit self serving. You guys know that I show up here every week to give you training to embed this thought or mindset around. We are real estate business builders. We're building businesses here. We teach all the tactics, we teach all the scripts. But above all else, I want to coach you guys how to think about yourself like business owners versus real estate agents. And so if you don't have a clear roadmap in place or you have none of the systems in place, the lead gen levers, the lead conversion sequences or even protocols, the sales frameworks, the scripts, how to qualify appointments, if you're at the point where you need to get leverage around hiring a virtual assistant or hiring a showing agent or junior agent or even just setting up your buyer client care process or your seller client care process so you get referrals like clockwork when you work with clients. If all of that is foreign to you, I highly recommend you go to milliondollaragentmethod.com million dollar agent method.com just watch that 7 minute video and book in a strategy session. The heart around everything we do at Real Estate B school is to teach you how to make an unreasonable amount of money in a reasonable amount of time. So go to milliondollaragentmethod.com Much love, much respect. We'll see you on the next training.