What Being In The Top 1 Percent Of Real Estate Agents Was Really Like

How could I be in the top 1% of real estate agents in my market and only make $14 an hour? Like real estate is supposed to be helping someone with their largest financial transaction. And I was making the same kind of money as like a Walmart reader. There's nothing wrong with being a Walmart reader. I just think being a real estate agent should get you paid a little bit more. Let me set the stage for you. This was 2007. I came out of a corporate job making a couple hundred grand, working like 2,000 hours a year, making 100 bucks an hour. Great job, great life. It didn't give me any real freedom, right? I had to take vacation on their terms. I could only make the kind of money that they wanted to pay me. So I got into real estate. This was going to be great. I can go from 100 to like sky's the limit. 2007, that was the number. It was 14 bucks an hour. I worked a ridiculous amount of hours and I didn't make a whole lot of money. And that is traditional real estate success right there. Nobody really talks about how much money we take home, if we're increasing our net worth, if we have any time at all to show for, you know, to spend doing things outside of real estate. And so in today's video, I want to sort of really go into those early days in my business not to tell you, you know, brag about how far I've come more to kind of break down at each stage of my growth, at each phase of, you know, business building, what had to happen for me to go from $14 an hour, top agent, $14 an hour to a few years later, you know, selling a whole lot of homes and, you know, not having to do most of them personally. You know, make sure you stick around to of this training. I'm going to give you a training that will show you the step by step process with a little bit more detail. And if you liked the video, give me a thumbs up. As always, subscribe to the channel. Turn on your notifications so you're the first to know when new videos hit. And please, please, please, please leave me comments. It lets me know you're watching and that you're digging what I'm putting out. And even if you disagree, say it in the comments. As long as it's PG, maybe PG 13, just keep it constructive so I can serve you at a higher level. So looking back at my business growth journey and really most of our most successful members, you know, we had these things in common. We Started at a point where we were doing all of the jobs of a real estate agent and not making the kind of money that a real professional, like a real trusted expert advisor deserves to make. So for me, it was 14 bucks an hour. For some of our members, they're coming in at 20 to 25 dollars an hour. Like the story is always the same. We're doing all of the low level tasks that a real estate agent is required to do. Basically, you know, the public doesn't know this, but a real estate agent, even if they're a solo agent, a solopreneur, they are a business. And so a business has to generate leads, they have to, you know, make phone calls, they have to set up email CPU sequences, you know, text sequences, you know, whatever. Like every part of a business, they have to show homes, they have to, you know, list homes, they have to put homes in the mls. They have to take photographs, design marketing brochures. There's like a hundred things a real estate agent has to do to be successful. And a lot of times we just don't slow down in our businesses to think about what things am I doing that I don't have to be doing. And so as you, you look to make a shift from, you know, maybe you're a top agent, but you're scratching your head on where's all the money? You know, I've achieved what the industry told me to achieve because my local board said I'm in the top 1%. And I have this little plaque on, hanging on my wall, a little trophy on a shelf. Yet there's no, nobody's paying attention to, nobody's talking about, did it lead to like an accumulation of net worth and maybe you're 10 or 20 years in the business and you still have nothing to show for your efforts. So I realized this in my business and my business was having a toll on my personal life and I wasn't willing to have that trade off last very long. I had super honest conversations with my wife about like, what I saw as possible in the real estate industry. The reality of it is that we make a lot of money per transaction and we don't do all the jobs of a real estate agent, like really great. Like most of us, I'm not the best salesperson. A lot of real estate agents are great at sales, yet only 5% of their working hours are spent selling. Right? So 95% of their time they're not doing their superpower. And how can we put that person in a position to do that superpower? Like 80% of their working hours. And that is the game that I committed to playing in my real estate business. I was going to stop doing all the jobs and, like, what are the things I'm really good at? For me, it was systems. Systems that did everything. A system to me is something that can allow somebody else to do the outcome that that system was built to do. So if it's to get a buyer to commit to meet for a consultation, there's definitely a system around that. It is written, we train agents on it when they come onto our team and I don't have to do it anymore. There's a system for generating leads from our database. It is written down in our marketing playbook. I don't have to touch any of it anymore. And it's systematically. Half of our business, probably $1.4 million of gross commission income this year, is generated by a system I put together 10 years ago. So that is like the first shift I had to make in those early days to identify the things that were like super high leverage, super high impact, that can take me from struggling, ironically struggling financially, but top of the game as the game was defined by our industry. Right. So if you're trapped in traditional success, just think of the things that you could do differently. Fast forward, you know, as I sort of cracked the code on eliminating these things that were, you know, I didn't love doing and I wasn't great at. And they didn't pay very well. You know, my first hire was my administrator, 2008. It took me from 27 sides to 44 sides, and I worked a little less hours. I hired a buyer agent in 2009, went to 58 sides. Three more agents in 2010, and we went from 58 to 118 sides. I still did a big chunk of production, but those agents served as my showing agents. So I wasn't working evenings anymore. I was still the main listing agent. I was working weekends by appointment only. And a little bit more relief on my time, but making more money. So my time money equation was making more sense. And now I was working only with sellers. And so I was less stressed because those transactions are a bit less emotional. Buyers are super, super emotional. Sellers realize it's a business transaction. There's a process, there's an asking price. We're in a market, we're getting showings or we're not. And typically, if we're marketing the property correctly, you know, we'll get the outcome that we want, we both desire, as long as we're open and honest with each other. And so that's a business transaction. I was pretty good at that part of the business. Yet I found out that there were folks better than me at listing homes that didn't want to get paid what I wanted to get paid for my business. And so for 75 to 100 bucks an hour, I could bring in a couple listing agents to take over my entire production. That next year 2012, we did 248 transactions and I did one transaction. I had built the thing from a systems up sort of approach where it didn't rely on me. And now I was like the top team in the market. And my money was not attached to the hours I put into the business or the stress I endured from the business. And I had a business that operated exactly like that. It provided a better service to buyers and sellers than I did when I was a solo agent. That's another point here that I don't want to miss. Most agents fail to scale their businesses. They'll stay top producer status in their market because they think only they can do those jobs right. We had a good friend of ours list their $1.6 million property. This is just recently. You could not take me out of retirement. I haven't worked with anybody even on my own transactions. We moved, we sold and bought. A few years ago. I was not my own agent. I was not going to be the agent on this 1.6 million dollar listing. That's like super high price point in my market. And yet I knew that our system of helping sellers was better than me going out there and just brute forcing it and trying to think I was more important than the system I had built. So I talk the talk, I walk the walk, talk the walk, whatever the expression is, I am willing to do. The thing I'm telling you right now is that build the system and then trust the system is going to allow you to not have to do the job of a real estate agent. And even if you want to stay in production, you love working with buyers and sellers. What are the two or three systems? I'll challenge you right now to think about the two or three systems that will give you the leverage you need to get out of this rise and grind like transaction treadmill, the hamster wheel that is real estate. Just look at your business a little differently. If I was able to do it, I promise that you're able to do it. This wasn't the video where I described all of my failures. I've done that in other videos. Make sure you find those as well, this is the one where I get to tell you like, I sucked at making money in real estate and it was hard and I sacrificed and I let some people down and I committed to doing it differently. And it was a five or six year journey for me where I could go from the weeds making 14 bucks an hour to a handful of years later. I made $2,300 an hour in my real estate business, worked 42 days in a year and do the math on the amount of money I made out of my real estate business. That's when I shift over to showing others how to do this. I'm so passionate about this stuff. I wrote a book on it. So you can go to scaleordiebook.com scaleordiebook.com I lay out my entire journey. Also our members, our most successful members, their journeys and what you can learn from their stories and how they went from overworked, underpaid real estate agent to successful business owner that now is empowering others and they're living life at a different level. So go to ScaleOrDiveBook.com or click on the link below. As always, if you like the video, please give me the thumbs up and subscribe to the channel. And make sure you turn notifications on that little bell, get notifications on, leave comments so we can dialogue, we can have a, we can wrestle with some of these concepts. I love it when you guys challenge me. And if you agree and you're just struggling, you know, make sure you get a copy of the book. And as always, I love just being here with you, serving you in any way that I can, challenging, challenging you and pushing you just to see your business differently and how your business could serve your life and other things that matter to you most. We will see you in the next video.