Using the Shift to Grab Luxury Market Share with Janie Coffey - Part 2

Welcome back to Real Estate Business Builders. This is Lars Hedinborg, founder of Real Estate B School. This is part two of a two part series with Janie Coffey who is speaking with us about using the shift, whatever you want to call the market that we're in, but using it to grab luxury market share. She is the best of the best when it comes to luxury. She has an expired listing system that she talks about and breaking into luxury can be a little bit intimidating. So, so this part two, hopefully if you missed part one, make sure you go back one episode, but enjoy part two.

If, for example, maybe your spouse is in the medical field, then maybe young doctors would make sense. If you or your something you do is involved in fishing because that's your hobby, that would make sense. Maybe you're an equestrian, so maybe working with equestrian farms makes sense. So first of all, who are you already coming in contact with in your normal life? If you aren't already coming in contact with somebody, what is kind of your passion? Do you love fishing? Do you love golf? Do you love urban living? Kind of giving some thought because again, you have to find something that sparks your, your own excitement around something. Because if you're doing something just as a job, it's not really sustainable over the long term. It has to be fun for you too. You have to kind of get lit up and excited about it. And also you're going to be much more likely to run into people that you end up making friends with because you have a shared thing, whether that's an area that you live in or a hobby that you're interested in or something like that. But you can't just decide a farm based on feelings. You need to really then do some analysis. And the analysis would be you really want to kind of do some trends analysis of a handful of farms that you're considering. But don't pick one until you've done this. Because sometimes I've done the analysis of a farm for myself or for somebody else that I thought was going to make a really good farm. And then all of a sudden I find out these people like never move. Like the turnover is so slow, it doesn't make any sense to put a lot of time and effort into that area because it's just not turning over. Or I find another area, even another. I've seen condo buildings side by side and one turns over frequently, seat frequently and one turns over not at all. And then you want to look at the stats and look at the stats based on, are you focusing first primarily on Buyers, are you focusing first primarily on sellers? That doesn't mean you're not going to work with both. But if we're just getting started or we're making a real solid game plan to build our presence in one area, we want to have an area that has stats that's favorable to the type of people that we want to work with. And so what I mean by that is look at days on market. If the days on market is increasingly getting longer and longer and longer, that's going to be favorable for buyers. So if you're wanting to work with buyers, you want to look at an area whose days on market is getting longer. Conversely, if you're wanting to focus on sellers, you want to get in an area. Ideally, the days on market is staying kind of steady, but not getting longer and longer and longer. And it's not just on one stat. You're just wanting to get a big picture. Is this market more a buyer's market? Is this market more a seller's market? And if you're wanting to work with buyers first to get started, then you're going to want to pick the areas that's a little bit more favorable for buyers, just so that you are putting all the odds in your favor as much as possible. So look at days on market and analyze that. Look at list to sales price ratio. Which way are the trends going? Are they going up or are they going down? Look at how many are expiring. If they're expiring, that's good. If you're working with buyers because you're going to have better opportunity with buyers. It's also good if you're willing to go after expired listings because you're going to have more of an opportunity. And I love expired listings because they're normally a little bit worn out already. They've already kind of lost the wind in their sales for this price point that they thought that they'd be able to get. That might have been wishful thinking, like I think Ken mentioned earlier. And then you want to look once you've done the stats analysis to see if this is more going towards a buyer's market or a seller's market. You're also going and you may be narrowed it down to maybe now one or two farm areas or farm property type kind of groupings. The next thing you want to do is do like a SWOT analysis. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. So take a good look at the competition, the other agents in the market. And I would say a lot of times we think, oh, XYZ agent, they own the market, they're the dominant agent. Very, very, very rarely when you really look at the market is it that somebody is such a strong listing agent that it doesn't make sense to enter that market. And what I mean by that is maybe they have 10% of the market, maybe, maybe they have 20% of the market. But generally speaking, who cares? 80% of the market is still wide open to other people. And normally when there is somebody who's the dominant agent and let's say there is 80% by everybody else, all that rest of 80% is like this agent has one or two, this agent has one or two, THIS one maybe has five, but it's wide open opportunity. So only if somebody is ridiculously strong. And what I mean by that is sometimes if you are wanting to enter a community or a condo tower and the original on site salesperson still lives there and is still selling there, that's almost the only time that I found that it's difficult to break into a market. But anything short of that, there's still opportunity. And most agents that I talk to are normally very, very surprised once they look at the MLS and you get that information by going to the mls, going to, you know, active or sold or pending and, and doing it where you actually can see who the listing agent is and then sort by listing agent name and then count, just count how many they have. And like I said, I think you're going to be surprised that the person or people or team that you thought was the dominant agent normally is going to have far less percentage of the market than you thought. What they've done a good job is marketing themselves and creating presence for themselves. But never feel that that doesn't mean there's opportunity for you. And even if there is one, there's normally an inroad there because there's going to be people who just don't like them. I mean, I've gotten lots of opportunities that way. There's going to be people who don't want to work with the person who has the majority of the properties, apparently the majority, because there's opportunity. So just again, this is little data points. No one data point tells the whole story. You need to find out what makes the most sense for you to focus your efforts. Look at turnover. Like I said, you do want to be in an area that's turning over with some decent amount of frequency. Not where somebody moves in or has lived there forever and they stay in their house for 25 years on average. That's just going to mean there's not that much opportunity and then is it easy to sort? And that can be a blessing and a curse. Easy to sort would be community name that comes up in your MLS or a zip code or city name that you can sort in the mls. The good side to that is it's going to be easy for you to get data. The bad side to that is every buyer in their whomever on Zillow or whatever, they can sort to. One of the reasons that I enjoyed when I focused on equestrian properties, it was a lot harder for the average buyer to find equestrian properties because I don't even know that Zillow has like a horse kind of checkbox. So they would have to come to me and I knew all the ways to sort for equestrian properties in the mls so that I always had kind of a running list of what was available. So kind of look at all these things, look at the trends of the days on market, the list of sales price, expiration rate, competition, turnover of how long people are living there on average. And look at all of that to finally come down and to one farm that you're going to focus on to start and then the next thing we're going to do. And I think this is what you're all saying, but how do we find these people? What is your Legion plan? So first of all, I want to say legion for anybody in real estate, but specifically in luxury real estate is really a fingerprint, it's not a blueprint. And what I mean by that is I can't sit here and tell you do X, Y and Z and it's going to work perfectly for you. Why? Because you have to do what's going to work in your market for the types of people you're trying to get in front of in, in a type of way that is exciting to you that you can again get up every day and get on after it and not get bored doing it and not feel like it's inauthentic to you. There's many, many, many ways in real estate to do lead gen and they all work. Every single one of them work. If you do them consistency consistently and if you do them over time long enough for them to finally start to pay off. And what I mean by that, for example, when I moved to my new market, I moved from Miami to Northeast Flor Florida seven years ago now, which is, oh my gosh, almost eight years ago now, which is kind of mind blowing to me. But I decided to go after luxury expireds and I, I didn't want to call the expired people. That's just not my strong suit. So I started a mailing program and I mailed a lot to these people. And I also tracked it and I found that on average, people were being touched by me in some way, shape or form, whether it was a letter or postcard or maybe an email. 15 times on average before they contacted me. But by the time they contacted me after 15 times, they were normally like, okay, just come over, tell me what my house is worth, or condo, I'm ready to list. But most people, when I've talked to people who have a mailing plan for expireds, they give up after three pieces, they give up after five pieces, they give up after 10 pieces. I don't know that I've run across another person that does such an extensive mailing campaign that they even get to an average of 15 pieces. And to get to an average of 15 pieces, that means some people got 20 pieces, some people got 25. It's the same thing in any kind of lead gen. Most people give up before all their efforts, which were cumulatively building up actually work. Like you see that little guy picking, you know, through a tunnel, through a tunnel, through a tunnel, and he's picking that tunnel and you know, right here is where he would have broken through, but he gives up right before. Almost always in real estate, I see agents giving up right before. Whether they're doing door knocking or cold calling or social media or direct mail or open houses, whatever it is, you've got to find two, maybe three kind of things that you're going to be willing to stick with long enough because you're excited to do them. So market reports are the one thing I think everybody should be doing. And we've seen a whole shift of a lot of market reports coming out on social media, strong. Like I've seen quite a bit in the last six months, and I think that's great. And marker reports are something that you can repurpose so many different ways. You can make a video market report like a short. A short video format that can go on YouTube shorts, that can go on TikTok, that can go on Instagram, you can make a longer video, you can put that on YouTube, you can embed that into your blog post. So you're getting all the SEO. You can send it out in postcard format to your farm. You can have it as printout at any open house that you have. You can do door knockers and put them around. You can share it with your local media and news station. So market reports is the one thing I think everybody should be doing. And the more kind of niched down your market report is, the more you're going to draw people in. So again I specialize in St. Augustine historic properties. Over a million dollars. That's a very specialized niche. But I draw people in and the people who are looking to buy or sell that type of property, that's speaking exactly to them. You can get into social media, that can be Instagram, that can be TikTok. LinkedIn is really taking off. Well, you can do Facebook, whatever it is, you're, you're only going to pick. You're going to do market reports and then you're going to pick like maybe two other forms of legion that you're going to do consistently in the frequency that you really need to do. And you have to look up how to do that. You can, I mean YouTube courses, things like that. Direct mail is still very, very, very successful. Mailing to a farm, you can use EDDM for that farm or you can do I, since I specialize in a certain price point in my area. I don't do eddm because I don't want to mail to everybody. I've actually hand curated a mailing list. You can do amazing open houses. That's a huge one. That's like the lowest hanging fruit because you've got buyers coming in the door. You have your, your, the neighbors seeing what a great job you're doing. It gives you an excuse to door knock and just invite people to it. It gives you an excuse to put door hangers out there. Just holding amazing open houses could be one of your main lead gen sources. You can do targeted pay per click. You can do other kind of online lead gen. Not a big fan of Zillow or anything like that, but that's something you could do. Video is huge for especially bringing buyers in. Living in St. Augustine, St. Augustine lifestyle and like doing community things in St. Augustine or wherever it is that you live. Video is great especially if you're putting it on YouTube because YouTube's owned by Google. So if you get good about your titles and your description and then take your video embedded into your blog, that can give again double thing, double kind of impact for your one piece of content you can get good at as you start to build. Make sure not to forget your sphere of influence. Your your database. Love on them, send them weekly updates, market reports, offer to send them a cma. You can host events like Rebs has lots of great training on their client for life module about nurturing long term the relationships you build. That's why I was saying getting in with renters and landlords and is just building your pipeline for the future. So coupling that with Rebs client for Life module is like a double win. Or maybe you're a kind of person who enjoys networking and just getting out there networking again. If you picked your niche to be a specific hobby, whether that's golfing or fishing or equestrian, you know, going to those events, networking with people, always having a card with you or something like that. Lars, before we go on, I see maybe some more questions have built up.

Yes, let's I was just looking over here so Comment on snail mail to luxury. I've got my on it but what do you think versus like email or anything digital?

I love snail mail. I think snail mail is one of the best things you can do. But across the board everything you do needs to look nice. And this is the biggest mistake I see in people transitioning or growing into luxury. They have here's my card. Here's my card. It's very simple. It has a little bit of gold foil luxury on there, but it's very simple. No face, no gazillion. You know, what are those things called? You know, GRI and all that stuff. Designations. The public doesn't know that stuff. They really don't care. So just simple. Simple. This. You can't see it but I mean you can't touch it. But it feels like silk. It's just really nice with a teeny bit of gold. Everything you do has to look nice. So the same thing with your direct mail, same thing with your social media. Not so much clutter with all this stuff. If you're sending direct mail, it should look nice. It shouldn't be like overly crowded with all these things. Clarity, simplicity. When I was with Compass, I will tell you the one thing that Compass has nailed and done really well. Most of their stuff is just very clean. Everything is clean. It's simple. And if you look at any luxury brand, the the the esthetic for most luxury brands is simple and clean. So carry that over in your yard signs in the folders that you take to a listing presentation in your social media, in your weekly newsletter email newsletter in your direct mail. I am a big proponent of direct mail. I'm actually starting up a new eight page. I think it's an eight page monthly market report newsletter to my targeted list of people. But again, really focus, get that aesthetic nailed down before you start so it carries over in everything you do and just Feels simple, clean, elevated. That's really, really important. And I do see agents missing the mark a little bit and they try to bring more bread and butter brand into luxury that doesn't feel luxury. Like they don't up level their aesthetic. So do give some thought.

Real quick, Patty had a question on the 20 mailed items for your like expired. What, what did you experience the cost per lead to be?

Yep. So actually it wasn't 20, the whole total. If somebody went into the expired system and they never relisted and they never contacted me, they actually got 45 touch points, which was a combination of letters, postcards, a big fat package on the first day, emails. If I could find their email, it was about $7 and that's because I had or have. I'm restarting it now because now we have expireds again. Vulcan 7, the cost of the stamps, the cost of the paper, the cost of the ink. I'm going to go real fast and wrap it up and then see if we have some room for questions. So like I was saying, your materials, they have to be nice, they have to look nice, they have to look polished, they have to look clean. And the aesthetic has to come across all platforms, whether it's printed, whether it's your listing presentation, your yard sign, everything. It has to pull together. You have to have really strong market knowledge. I don't care if you're starting in the uber luxury, the starter luxury, the luxury buyers or sellers, you have to know that market. And like an attorney or a doctor, the specialist is always going to make more money than the generalist. So again, me, I've decided to specialize in historic luxury properties. In the past I specialized in equestrian. I do a little bit in Oceanfront, but I don't try to be all things to everybody. I couldn't possibly have that amount of market knowledge in my head to be able to answer somebody quickly. And when they can tell that you understand their market, they're gonna again fight you a whole lot less on commissions, on suggested list price, on terms and all of that. And like I said, consistency is kind of the key to everything. I have a professional decathlete on my team. He's a newer agent, but he is still a professional athlete and he just approaches his legion just like he does with his training. He does what his coach says he has to do in his sport and he does what we tell him to do in his business and he just does it. And he's consistent. He doesn't give himself excuses, he doesn't talk himself out of it. He doesn't say, this isn't going to work. And of all the newer agents that I've kind of funneled through my own team, he's been the biggest winner because he just focuses on consistency and just doing the work. And then like I said, expireds are back big time. So I wouldn't sleep on that opportunity, especially to grow into them. More luxury. So let's wrap it all up. One more secret ingredient, magic ingredient, is confidence. You have to feel confident. Not arrogant, not cocky, but confident. Because if somebody is interviewing listing agents for a luxury property, to sell their luxury property, or even if you're working with a buyer, they want you to be confident. They expect that you have an assuredness, a determination, a strength and excitement. Just like if they're hiring a professional attorney or financial planner or cpa. They expect the people in their lives to be confident and assured about the service they're providing, the knowledge that they have and the experience that they're going to give them to get whatever it is, whether it's filing their taxes or representing them in a lawsuit, they need confidence. So you do have to work on your confidence. And a lot of that just comes from the market knowledge that we talked about. So setting up a hot sheet, looking at the properties every time a new property comes on the market, looking at it, distilling it. If they're having like a broker open house or a caravan, go to those properties so that you can see them. The most important way you can get that confidence is just that you understand your market, you understand the stats, you understand the trends, you know what's going on. So with all of that, I feel like we have just kind of come through that storm, we've come through that overnight blizzard whiteout, and hopefully you guys have kind of come out of that feeling like you're a Serranophile, just like me, and you're kind of excited about it. So you're gonna to get you through this. You're going to determine what luxury is in your market. You're going to decide on your business plan, meaning you're going to go after buyers, sellers, renters, landlords, whatever. You're going to select your focus, your focus area, whether that's a geographic farm, a people farm, a property farm. You're going to select your lead gen systems market reports being one and maybe two more things on top of that, based on your own interest, your own kind of skill set, your own, you know, zone of genius so that you can really hone in on that and you're not going to add on any other legion things until you nail those. And Rebs does a good job of teaching you on that. You're going to study the market, study the luxury market, study what are in these homes, what appliances are hot, what finishes are hot. If you're in a place that has a lot of new construction, who are the builders? Who are the, who are the developers out there? What are the communities? If you can tour those communities, go tour those communities. You're going to develop world class materials, your own personal logo, your business card, your yard sign, your listing, presentation materials so that everything looks unified and has a luxury feel to it, both physically feel and just kind of how somebody feels when they're interacting with that. And it's not uncommon to have one kind of luxury brand like here's my non luxury cards, they're almost the same, but they don't have that luxury part with them because I don't want to be giving my luxury cards to non luxury clients because sometimes they feel, oh well, maybe she's not a good fit for me. I've had that happen plenty of times. So now I have kind of partner brands, one a little more luxury focused and one a little bit more bread and butter focused. But still everything feels nice and aligned. So you're going to work on that and then you're going to pull it all together. And then the final thing is like I want to leave you with like who are you? Like really think about that for a minute. Like are you someone who like let's external input, external events, external things, noise kind of drag you out to sea, or are you someone who takes advantage of opportunities, who prepares, who takes action, who seeks to win in any and all environments? I think that you are actually the latter. You are here, you're devoting two full days of your time to this training. If, if you are the type of person that lets news and all this kind of chatter pull you out to see, you wouldn't be here, you wouldn't be spending two days learning, sharpening your sword, getting out there. So I want you to think about that. I want you to give some thought about who you are, what your identity is. Pull that all together with the luxury training we had. And I think we have a few minutes for any questions. I do have a worksheet. I will send that to Lars so that he can send that out to all the attendees. And if you happen to be watching this, I guess after, I don't know if you're going to have replays available Lars, you can find me on Instagram at Janie C. Or you can, you can email@janie coffee.com but I think that leaves us for maybe one or two questions.

Yes, Joel has a question. So how do you handle the objection going against a luxury name like Sotheby's or England Volkers?

So first of all, I am eight years with Sotheby's, three years with Compass. And in the market I am in, we have England Volkers, we have Douglas Elliman, we have have Compass, we have Sotheby's, we have Berkshire Hathaway, we have local boutique brands. I don't care. You know why? Because just like me and my little bivy sack, I'm prepared when I go there. I have just as nice of a presentation as any of those brokerages normally have it in a nice hardcover bound thing and you guys can get hardcovers yourself. Those little binding machines with a nice listing presentation. I know my market, I know my marketing plan for their, their property. So I'm marketing it. I'm offering to market their property as well as anybody with Sotheby's, anybody with angle Volkers. And at the end of the day, that's really what sellers, 99 of sellers, that's all they care about. They're not hung up on the brand. Every once in a while, you know what, you will run across somebody who is hung up on a brand and that's okay. It doesn't matter to me. Again, I was with Sotheby's, I was with Compass. I coach and train agents at almost all of those brokerages and I come in with them all the time too because they're in my market. I go up against them in listing presentations, against them all the time. I win just as many, if not more because I'm prepared, I have confidence, I have a great marketing plan. My materials look nice, they feel nice and they see me as the sellers, see me as an equal as. So you can't lean on a brand because a brand is not going to sell the property. And that's why I was talking about getting the market knowledge, creating your own brand, creating a great marketing plan for your, your properties. If you're going on listing presentations, that's what sellers really want.

Yeah. And then Megan had a comment. You know, so exp is not a lux barrier in luxury. That's been their impression. I, I think it's mindset over anything else. But Janie, what's your, what's your, your comment on that?

Yeah, so I mean exp for those of you who are with that brokerage. I'm with that brokerage. There is a luxury division. Like I said, I'm the co chair of the luxury division. We have tools available that equal that absolutely can compete as far as marketing against a Sotheby's agent or Berkshire Hathaway agent more than other brokerages. It doesn't really matter what brand you're with. I just want to share that with you guys. You can be at any of those brands. It really comes because I, I know great agents who are with no name brands. I know not so great agents with those quote luxury brands. Normally the great agent with a great marketing plan, the confidence, the market knowledge is going to win all day long. The brand is not going to win somebody. It might get somebody in the door but it's not going to win a listing appointment because the seller needs to feel confidence that that person is going to be the best person to get them to the finish line which is the closing table. So I wouldn't get hung up on brand. I would get hung up on, let me see, hold on. These things. Selecting your focus, niching down, honing down. Studying the luxury market. So you totally know the market where you are having great materials. And then if you're going after listings, have a really great, not only listing presentation but a marketing plan of how you're going to market their property better and more extensively than the next person. And then you know, talk about your negotiation skills as well.

Awesome. Janie, I was going to text you this but since Richard said it in the chat, your, your training and articulation and it. Your skill set around impacting other agents is rapidly accelerating. It is just. You are so on point and it even makes me like maybe I can be a luxury. Yeah, if I'm gonna sell any homes, I might as well sell the expensive ones. But Janie, so good. Any last thoughts for, for someone that's, you know, probably freaked out by the market in general but making this like leap, quote unquote into the luxury space.

No, I, I mean the last thought would be this is a great time to do it because two years ago or a year and a half ago or even a year ago, it would have been really, really hard to get into luxury both on the buy side or the sell side. On the buy side just because it was like a shark fest. Then on the, on the listing side it was really hard because there was so few listings that only the people who were already for the most part established and known to be strong listing agents were getting the listings. So much, much more opportunity. Now. I do have a course coming up and I'm not here to pitch the course at some point in the future. I'm not saying next month. So you can always message me and I'll add you on my mailing list. I do do a weekly mailing just on mindset and tools and things like that. I'm happy to share with people. I love luxury real estate mostly also because almost my entire friend group has come from clients that I've met selling luxury real estate. So it's really allowed me to craft a great group of friends and connections who have shared interests as me. So I think nobody should think that they can't compete, that they can't do well. I don't care your background, I don't care what brokerage you're with. I don't care about any of that. If you study the market, if you make a game plan, if you have great materials and you just consistently get on after it, you're going to do really, really well.

Awesome. Last question because I want to honor Patricia. What company are you using to prepare and mail your marketing materials?

Yeah, so I've been using Express, not prepare my. I have. I have a graphic person and a staff person who prepares them because again, I want my branding, my look, my feel. And I highly suggest if you're going to go into luxury, that you craft your own stuff so it doesn't look like everybody else's. The one thing I did not like about being Sotheby's encompass, my stuff looked like everybody else's. So get with a graphics person, create your brand. And then I use Express Docs to mail them out. And I'm starting to delve into. I think it's called Real Estate Masters. I don't have it right in front of me that I'm getting with for my new market reports. But Express Docs is available to anybody and they have great quality and are very easy to navigate through. But do spend the time and the money to have someone create that branding. So you're not just sending out stuff that looks like everybody else. That's really important.

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. Janie, you rocked it.

Oh, I just love hearing Janie Coffey teach. She is unlike any trainer I know because she is a player.

Right.

There's a lot of gurus out there that claim they know the thing, but they don't really do the thing. Famous on YouTube, but they don't actually sell homes. Right. We don't like that in real estate. B school we love folks that are playing the game and then they're teaching others how to do it. If you know you want to be part of our community and you just don't know how or what the next step is or if you qualify, just grab a business growth Assessment. Go to rebsgrowthassessment.com you can book into our account and our business growth specialists will help you figure out exactly where you are, where you want to go, what's holding you back, and we'll come up with a plan together. So we'll see you there. And stay tuned for our next episode.