The Ultimate Shift Storm Is Approaching - Is Your Real Estate Team Ready?

Welcome back, Business Freedom podcast listeners. Today I want to dig into a topic, you know, that I've personally been thinking about and I've been working into just moves I've been making in the businesses and in my personal finances. And it's a not the most exciting topic for most and for me it is really exciting. And it's this conversation around a shift. And I like to call it the ultimate Shift Storm, pun intended, is here. Are you ready? And that's the title for today's podcast, the Ultimate Shift Storm. Shift Storm is here. Are you ready? So I am in a mastermind and I'm going to pull up a post here and I'm going to read you part of it. I think it'll be really helpful. So it was a post around the last four, what, five economic shifts. And it was 1980, then 81, 82, and that was the early 1990s, the early 2000s, and then the Great Recession, which was end of 2007 through probably the middle of 2009. And it kind of goes into the length how long the recession lasted and just what tripped up the recession and those sort of things. The economic shift. Here's the thing though. So that's coming. It's just kind of a law. It's just a thing that happens and our economy will shift. The stock market will, all the emotion around that will kind of make its way in the stock market and real estate will have an impact in the real estate business. So, so the economic shift is a guarantee. So the question is, when it just comes to an economic shift, what are you doing? There's going to be six to 12 months of just weirdness. It's going to be a mushy market. Buyers are going to hesitate. Sellers are going to hold on to pricing that's not there anymore. We know this is coming. It's 100% guaranteed timing. Who the heck knows, who knows when this shift is actually going to be upon us? Some said late 2019. Most now are saying 2020 sometime. Just take the economic shift as a guarantee and you have to make moves in your business. You have to track your numbers. You know which half of marketing to get rid of. It's the half that doesn't work. You know, we've over the last three years in preparation for a shift, we have taken our marketing and advertising and lead gen from like 12, 13% to 7% of GCI because we know it's coming. We've just gotten better at serving our clients. And as a result of serving our clients, they're giving us great testimonials and we're using those amazing testimonials in our marketing and creating this virtuous cycle of awesomeness. So economic shift is coming. What are you doing? Are you still spending a gazillion or gobs of money on Zillow leads? Is that, and I say this because I know I'm gonna piss some people off, but is that really your marketing strategy, like giving a whole bunch of money to a company that now is shifting toward, on the low end, charging you 20% for marketing, on the high end, 30 to 35%. The whole referral model is real, right? And now instant offer companies are coming in and charging referrals. If you're paying a 25 to 35% referral, you're losing the game. And so whole different episode. I think I probably covered it five times here in the podcast. Are you ready for the economic shift? Here's the thing I really want to cover, though, is the shift storm is four parts. Only one part is the economic shift. So the economic shift is coming. It's real. How are you preparing? Do you track your numbers in your business? Are you following an economic model? Do you know which half of marketing to cut out? Okay, so that's the economic shift. The next shift has been happening for years and years, and I think it's coming to a head because there's other parts that are shifting that are making it easy for consumers. The consumer shift. And I want to talk real briefly about it, each one of these are worthy of a deep dive podcast episode. And I've talked about the consumer shift before. How are you operating your real estate business? Are you operating it? And if you're running a team, are you just acquiring agents and just throwing them in, hoping that they do a good job? Or is your real estate business truly consumer focused? Like, you're really looking at what buyers and sellers want and you're working hard to give a buyer and a seller what they want, interacted with, interact with them in a way that has them engage with the brand and sort of follow a process to get them to meet with you and to be a committed client and to have that experience feel really great and then serve them at the highest level while they're a client, get them through the contract to closing process and do all that in a way where they're beyond, you know, shouting from the rooftops how awesome your real estate team, how awesome the experience was. The only response to consumer shifting is to go super low end and just give them What a large segment of consumers will want is a discounted technology driven solution to buy and sell real estate. Right. That brings me to the next piece, which is technology shift. But staying on consumer shift here just for another minute. Are you building a business that has consumer front center in the minds of everyone on your team? And are you building systems and processes around your clients getting the best experience possible? There's a whole internal focus to this too. Are you building a real estate team that has people wanting to work for you? That's sort of a separate shift, the team member shift or employee shift or whatever you want to call it. We're not going to get into that right now. So economic shift number one, number two, consumer shift number three is I like to call this business model shift. I don't think it, I'll call it the ibuyer shift. Yeah, it's a little, little, little nicer. So the ibuyer shift is. And it kind of goes in with the consumer shift a little bit. Although I think I want to keep it separate. So let's just call it the ibuyer shift. So there are companies coming in to most of the major markets and now Keller Williams Exp just launched their iBuyer solution. I think Redfin has it. They're like Mark Spain came into the Charlotte market, he offers it. Most of the people that did guaranteed sale now offer a version of like I'll give you an offer in an hour. Then you have all the big players, Zillow, open door, knock. There's a lot of money pouring into that sort of segment of the market. And here's what I don't like about it. Here's what I don't like about a real estate team chasing that or looking to compete with that. We have gone the other way. We've gotten away from any quote unquote gimmicky USP advertising. I know these companies are buying homes and I think real estate agents and teams trying to position themselves to do it. There's not the same intention that an ibuyer. And I think it comes off as inauthentic. I did guaranteed sale for years and it ultimately felt inauthentic. And I think even more so this instant offer has a tendency and there are some. There are a segment of real estate teams that are offering these instant offers that are legitimate. And so they have investors, they're looking to buy property, they sort of lead with it and then they flip it into a listing. Most though have no intention of buying the home. They have no investors that they've secured and they're just looking to get a listing. So our approach has been to go story brand and I've mentioned it in the letting the consumer shift part. Basically do such a great job for your clients where you get amazing social proof testimonials and you advertise those testimonials that social proof to get more business. Do a great job, get an amazing testimonial which you use as social proof, you know, and it creates this virtuous cycle. We have a thousand five star reviews and that's our focus. That's been the focus of what we do. And so but just know the ibuyer shift is cutting up this pie, most of which is available. You know, there was discounters before and now the pie is, you know, maybe 10% of the market would go for discounters and everyone else was willing to pay a full fee to use a real estate agent that was good at what they do. And so just know that we have to lean more into the consumer experience as the ibuyer shift sort of takes hold and everyone is going ibuyer. And when everyone goes to a certain direction, I tend to think of like let's not do that. Let's be the guy that doesn't do that and let's not be a me too. Let's not rush to billboards and say I'm going to buy your home in a minute as a response to Zillow and Open Door and not coming into our market. And so that's number three. Number four. What is number four? Economic shift, business model shift, consumer shift, technology shift. This one's a little bit more subtle and it really does sort of come in with the consumer shift. It is, there are companies that are offering a technology solution or a technology driven platform as a means to do business with them. Probably the best example of this is Redfin and probably the best real estate team, the best real estate team that's expanded is Redfin. An average redfin agent sells 38 homes. They make a little bit over $100,000. They work a reasonable set of hours. They discount on the list side, they advertise on television in my market, the 1% listing, if you use them on the buy side. And so they're probably, and they're a profit optional business. So they're well back financially. So but a really good model to look at. And they're using technology in response to the consumer shift as part of their solution. Keller Williams. Gary Keller has made it clear that he is putting everything he's got toward AI driven, artificial intelligence driven technology to help agents connect with consumers. And it's using metadata and all these things that I'm just not smart enough to know too much about. And we've got to be aware of it. So the response to all of that really is high value ad services. I've studied the financial advisor financial services industry. So financial advisors are similar to real estate agents in a way. They're looking to get a chunk of net worth, represent that chunk of assets, represent it over time, earn a fee doing it. Like most, my advisor makes 1%. So all the money I put with him, he gets 1% on. He's paid out quarterly. In order for me to feel good about doing that, I need a high level of service and I need to feel like he's truly advising and he's not pushing product and those sorts of things. So that's the response. That's the only way you can respond to how our industry is changing and the shift storm. And so the question is, what will your response be? Are you building out your business in a way that you're really, really confident? Just like financial advisors, their roster has been going down each of the last eight years. And I know financial advisors that are doing really, really well. They focused on folks that really do value and advice and appreciate that high level of care. I could easily take all my assets and shift it over to Vanguard. They've got great tools on there. I've done it before. Personally. I'm at the point where I value service, I value advice. I trust the person that is managing me, my money. He's also a business owner. He runs his practice. And so he has the same challenges that I do with business ownership, with team members, with recruiting, with growth growth, with recessions. And how does he respond? And so look for ways, you know, look for things that are going on around you in other industries as a response to what's going on underneath our feet and what is coming our way with this ultimate shift storm. So if you're at a point in your business where this conversation is like, oh crap, I haven't even thought of this. I don't know which half of my marketing to cut out. I don't track anything. I haven't looked at consumer experience at all. I haven't, you know, considered this or considered that. Lars, what are you talking about? If that's you and you're running and a really solid business, you know, 500,000 GCI minimum, all the way up to we have members at 5 million GCI that are challenged right now with profitability, with systems, with tracking and so anywhere in there, small team to large team, if you're struggling, we need to have a conversation. So just go to realestatebschool.com it's obvious what the next step is. Is a bright orange banner to book in a 45 minute business growth strategy session. On that session we'll talk about where you are today, where you want to be in the future and what's holding you back, what obstacles you see in your way. If a conversation about real estate B school makes sense, we'll have it. We have a 30 day pilot program if you qualify, which takes 100% of the risk off of you and puts it on us. During that 30 days we'll build out a three year picture, a one year plan. We'll land this thing on a 90 day world and we'll talk about weekly measurables and what has to happen on a weekly basis for you to be successful and to achieve that three year picture in your business and the other areas of your life that matter. Man, that was a lot to say. So if that's you, go to realestatebschool.com right now and we'll see you over there.