Ultimate Guide to Scaling with Proven Real Estate Systems

So you are in Real Estate Business Builders. You're either in the group here or you're listening to the podcast, or you're seeing this live here because you want to build an actual business. This is the ultimate guide to scaling your business with proven real estate systems. If y' all have been around for any length of time and know anything about my journey, I obsessed over building a business. I know for some of you that's like insanity. Like, I just want to be an awesome real estate agent. An actual business gives you time, money and location freedom and also freedom from stress.

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? Let's get the party started. If you have all the time in the world, you still, you may not have a lot of money, you may be super, super stressed, you may be crushing it in production right now. And there's some agents that are crushing it in production right now. You, even though the market's squirrely, we're in the basically a, it's like a resale unit recession right now. And I think it was in the last 30 years or 28 years, we've never been in terms of a trailing 12 month existing home sales, we've never been lower in the last 28 to 30 years. So that's why you're, you're feeling the pinch right now in terms of production. And if you're not crushing it, chances are you're getting caught up in, in doing all the things that an agent has to do, which you may not even like to do, you may not be good at it and it doesn't pay very well. And so that's the insanity of being a real estate agent. I'm going to show you a question that I asked the trusted chat GPT here in a second. But if you followed my journey, you know that I, in my first 10 months in the business, there were signs of the market turning kind of just like we're going through now where inventory was starting to go up. And I got in March 2007, three months later in my market, inventory shot through the roof. So that's really when there were signs that things are not going to be okay in the economy. And if you remember back, I don't know if you were selling back then, but the great financial crisis, the gfc, it was led by housing, you know, so all the foreclosures and it was just a bad time. I made the decision to put my head down, ignore the fact that we went from 15,000 agents in my market to 5,000 agents and I just did the work. And that first 10 months I did all of the jobs. So I didn't have an admin at that point. I sold 27 transactions in my first 10 months in real estate and I did every single thing myself, which led me to the conclusion that you cannot do everything yourself if you want to maintain any sanity whatsoever ever. I'm going to share my screen here. And this is a question. If you're not using like the basic AI tool, Chat GPT, you have got to use this tool. You can ask it anything, give it a little bit of information and then ask it a question. I didn't even give it any information. I just said, give me all the roles and responsibilities that a real estate. I even said that a real estate has. I didn't even do this right here. I didn't even write agent. But anyway, so. And it did a pretty good job of, you know, of giving some answers here. So let's go through this. And I want you to go through this. The first book I read when I got in the context of the time that we spent together here on this live stream, training is gonna be around building a model to think about your business differently. So as I go through this, I'm gonna point out like, okay, so you've gotta be good at this. You've gotta do all these things, have enough time for them, be. Be good at them. And you're gonna recognize the insanity of what you have signed up for when you're a real estate agent. So without systems. And systems are just, you know, documenting a process that you do over and over and over again. Well, it could be something as simple as when you generate a lead and it's not ready to transact, you have a buyer email and text sequence that's part of lead conversion. 90% of the people you talk to are not gonna be ready to buy a home right now. So you have to get them into your system and into your CRM and send them information on houses that match their criteria. And also Just valuable information from you as their agent of choice. And so they'll be pre sold on working with you. Same thing with sellers. Right around the holidays when I'm you know, doing this training, you know, you may have people that you can't convince that it's great to sell around the holidays. We have the 10 reasons why it is great to sell around the holidays. What are you going to do between now and pre Thanksgiving and the spring to like lock that listing appointment down? Right. And that's a system and that's 90%. That's the biggest hole in most agents buckets. A system for your database. Right. How are you building your database? How are you feeding it on the daily and adding new contacts and how are you communicating with it? And that's what we call our 60 touch database. 60 touch blueprint. All right, so let me go through this list here and as I go through it I want you to say like holy cow, I gotta do that. Client acquisition and relationship building. This is probably where most agents just lose, lose the game. So if you ever want to consider working with us, you just go to milliondollaragentmethod.com there's like a six minute video there booking a strategy session. So we booked in a strategy session with an agent that and they had a conversation with someone on our team before they booked in. And she's coming to us because the 10 other lead sources that she's paid for that haven't worked, they didn't generate as high quality leads as she wanted to and they didn't close as quickly as she wanted to. And she's convinced that she's still looking for a lead gen company. And so when this says generate leads, we have a totally different mindset around that. Ours are all inbound, all organic, no paid, no cold calling. So but one of your jobs, the big job is as much of your day that you can work to acquire clients and build relationship, but generating leads, building relationship relationships. So this goes straight to client consultations, educating clients, market analysis. You need to go from being a relationship person to being a market analyst to those personalities. You may be good at marketing analysis, but maybe you're not good at relationship building. I was more of a spreadsheet guy and a tech guy than relationships. But I surround myself with people that kind of do the heavy lifting for me. So CMAs and staying updated on market trends and all of that. Property conditions and values. So property listing and marketing. So preparing listing agreements. So now we're talking paperwork, now we're talking Preparing properties. So you have to be like a stager. Now we're talking about photography and videography and I think it's still a really low stat of how many agents use photographers. That's not something you should be doing. Creating marketing materials. Now we're a digital marketer, so a digital. Now we're creating print marketing. None of these can be really in the same person. Right? So conducting showings and holding open houses. Okay, so now we're a showing agent and we're also doing open houses. And our, our open house system is crushing it. To get sellers, we have an open house system to generate sellers. Negotiating, advocating for clients. So now you need to be a nimble negotiator. Right? Okay. Transaction coordination. Now you get a deal under contract and you need to manage timelines and paperwork and be a liaison with third parties and schedule. Be a good scheduler and keep track of things. So far, we've got five different personalities and we're only on the sixth. Role and responsibility, compliance and legal duties. You need to make sure you stay up to date on all the legal changes and disclosures and know how to review contracts and then post sale. You need to assist them with moving and vendors and hopefully you've got one. Then professional development, you know, training and all that stuff. And then here, here's the big one I'm gonna spend a second on here is business management. You know, so the, the approach I took was more like let's think about how to grow the business and manage the business. Tracking and evaluating performance. So running your business from the numbers, managing your finances and then setting goals and strategizing. So I bet that the average agent out there, even top agents are spending none of their time here. So my, my whole point here is, and I want to shift gears here, this was the first I didn't learn much about. Let me see if I can make this bigger here. I didn't learn how to do it like the E. Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber was the first business book that I read when I got into, into real estate and like Divine Intervention really. Because I realized quickly that I was doing all the jobs and I wasn't. I didn't even like all of them. I wasn't good at all of them. And they have all different pay grades. So when we jump back over here, you know, and we look at. Let's just pick transaction coordination. Really important that you get to the closing table. But a good transaction coordinators paid 25, 25 to $50 an hour. Let's call it and it's likely that you want to make more than that. So if you're working two 2500 hours a year and you're making, you know, $30 an hour, what is that, $75,000? Take home. We teach agents how to take home multiple hundreds of dollars per hour. So if you're going to put 2,500 hours into your business in a year, you have to take home at least 250, at least $100 per hour. If not 150 to $200 per hour. That's the game you can play when you think about your business in terms of systems. Okay, so let me go through this. We have dozens if not a hundred plus systems built out that we help our clients implement. If you need help with this stuff, that's what we do. The key systems you have to build are typically around lead generation. We teach our database touch blueprint, how to build it, feed it, communicate with it, the agent, brand authority builder, which is your digital footprint. And typically these days we're teaching expireds, FSBOs, direct response, them calling you plus usually about a new construction and open houses. When we implement 4 total lead gen levers, that's those are the systems that are most. And then on the tail end of that, because 90% of the leads that you generate will not transact, transact all of your lead conversion, your nurture sequences, those are the critical systems that you have to focus on building out. But here is the rub. We all have multifaceted, faceted personalities with, with often conflicting straight traits. A business owner is not just an entrepreneur, a manager or technician, he or she is all three personalities rolled into one at the same time. Hence he or she has to deal with their differing tendencies, needs and wants. And I would argue that real estate agents spend all of their time here in the technician role. So this is the person that's doing that is focused on the minutiae of the deal in front of them. And they're in the daily and they're not thinking at all about how to bridge the gap between where they want to be and where they are today. The manager, well, let me flip over to the entrepreneur. So we have all of these in us and it's actually not your fault. The entrepreneur has no time to breathe inside of the world that the industry has created for us. The world the industry has created for us is that we're supposed to do all of these jobs and be good at all these jobs. And it's just God did not create us that way. And it's impossible. And when you try to go back and forth and do all of these different things all of the time, that's where the income roller coaster come from. Where you sell one or two homes one month and then you have a donut and then maybe one or two homes and it's this like constant up and down. So let me switch over to the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur. This is the part of you that wants to dream about building something different for your life in the future. Let's call it three to five years out. And so this is the dreamer, the visionary. And this is something that I really figured out early is that I was so clear that I didn't love the technician work mostly because it didn't allow for me to have the type of lifestyle that I wanted. I was a new dad, I was a new husband, and I didn't want to be absent the two most important roles in my life. And I knew early on with that first 10 months selling 27 homes that that was not going to be sustainable for me to have my priorities completely directed toward business there for my family. So chances are you're not spending any time, you know, driving the business to a better place in the future. And we talk about this concept of Business Freedom Index, but it's a really valuable thing to think about. And it's basically the amount of money you make in your real estate business divided by the hours that you work. So let's say you're working a 50 hour work week and let's say there's 50 work weeks in the year that that's 2,500 hours. And let's say you took home 250,000 net, that would be $100 as your BFI business freedom index. $100 per hour. If you work those same hours, you took home 1:25, it's $50 per hour. If you work those same hours and you took home 62,5, it would be $25 per hour. We find that top agents are typically operating in the $40 to $50 per hour. And they want to get to desperately want to get to a hundred, one hundred and fifty, two hundred dollars per hour. That was less than 25 bucks per hour. But then I went to 100, 150, 250, 500, a thousand, two thousand and four thousand the next five years. Because I played this game of systems. That's the game that I want you guys to play. So once you let this entrepreneur and on a call like today, this is the time that I'm giving you to allow yourself to think about these things and do what you need to do. Book out a 30 minute session where you're just going to sit there with your journal and you're going to write like what my vision is for my future. You'll still have to go do all the technical work, but as you're doing the technical work, you'll be thinking about what you want to build in the future. And the manager is the one that builds the systems to bridge the gap. So if you're in the technician and you're selling lots of like on average less than one home per month, you have a lead generation and conversion problem, right? So if you say I don't want to sell one home per month, I want to sell three homes per month, so I want to triple my business in the next two to three years, that's the entrepreneur in you talking. The manager then goes to work on building the lead generation, we call them lead gen levers and the lead conversion sequences and lead management protocol, the sales frameworks, the scripts you'll need to do all of it, even leverage around client care, all of that. That's the work that the manager does. And again, if I were to say the fundamental difference between what we do and what every other coaching organization out there does, every other coaching organization out there teaches you how to be a more efficient technician. They're not going to help you live in this manager space at all. The challenge though, for most like decent, they're wired to be a real estate agent. They could think as an entrepreneur, but they're not wired for building systems. And that's where Million Dollar Agent Method picks up. So million dollar agent method.com even if you never become a private client of ours, I want you to think about this in a way that you have to spend time thinking about what you want the business to look like in the future. The manager is going to. You have those work on business time blocks in your calendar where you're going to bridge the gap between the two of them. I want you to go afterwards and Google, I think I looked up, I went to, I typed in YouTube, the founder, Speedy System, a buddy of mine who helps agents, he's also a coach, sends me when Elon. Regardless of what you think of Elon Musk, the guy's brilliant, right? When that rocket that went up in the air and then he landed it or not, he but his company figured out how to land it back in the, in the thing. I don't even know what it's called, but he says, you know Elon is, is doing this, and we, we're trying to help agents sell more homes. Like so in that video, when he says, you know, it's a GD burger, you know, it's not that any of this stuff is hard. That's the thing. The hard part is that we're not building systems around any of this to make all of these things happen like clockwork. You're not going to have a team of eight people in your business, but you can have a virtual assistant running seven systems in your business. We've got a company that hires virtual assistants for like 10 bucks an hour that are fully trained, ready to offload 40 hours a week. Of all the coordination, marketing coordination, listing coordination, closing coordination. They're virtual, so they can't do run or courier work locally. But that's the only reason why you're not putting all the pieces together is that nobody is teaching how to put all these things together, where they happen so you can get out of parts of the technical work that aren't making you a ridiculous amount of money. So I hope this was super helpful for you. And when I look back on my journey, it was a pivot in my mindset around this concept specifically that allowed me to be able to go from 27 homes to 44 homes, my first full year in real estate. And that year I hired a licensed, local, licensed admin part time, then went full time that was able to take marketing coordination, listing coordination, closing coordination, and run stuff around town. So all of the admin. Like, I knew that in order to grow, I needed someone to take the 80% of that list of responsibilities and all the tasks and duties. That's not even like 30% of what an agent does. We've got a list of like 200 things that we do. Insanity. But the reason I was able to get out of it quickly is I identified it. I had the mindset shift with this whole entrepreneurial myth, the E myth, which I basically just gave you. You don't even have to read the book at this point. And I had that mindset shift and I went to work on building the business. So that's what we do here in real estate business builders. If you know you need help with some of this stuff, just go to milliondollaragentmethod.com and we'll see you on the other side. Much love.