Podcast Episode 51 Transcript

Episode 51: Lights, Camera, Action: How Video Continues To Be A Driving Force In Real Estate

Participant #1:
Just like anything you want to set yourself apart from the competition, whether it's in business or whether it's in a multiple offer situation. So what can I do to set myself apart from all of the other offers that are coming in, whether it's two or whether it's 20 in some situations that we're writing on. And video is the answer. Video is the answer for everything you ask me a question. My answer is going to be video, and then it's something else to explain to you why video is the answer to it.

Participant #1:
Welcome to the Prendamano Real Estate "PreReal" podcast. We're winging it today, folks. I have our trusty. Lovely. Can't find the mute button on. Rebecca, how are you doing, Becks? I'm good. Thank you. We have Petey, this one's for Jman on the ones and twos over in the corner. That's right. And then we have J man, Jeremiah Jman speaks joining us on the podcast today. How are we doing, bud? I'm doing great. I'm glad I'm happy to be here in person. Yes. Right. When I was here last time, I had to come in virtually. It's not the same. I had to picture where you guys were, what you were doing and all that. Yeah, right. We're adding fuel to the fire for those of you who can't see and they're listening. Pete decided to give Jay Man a Red Bull, which needed so it's interesting. But you had said when I saw you in the conference room, like, oh, it's nice to see to meet you guys in person, but we've done these things virtually now. So many times, I felt like I had met you already in person. Yeah, totally. It was the branding of video, right? I see you. I see you. I see you. I watch the podcast. I keep watching it. I'm, like, wait. I've never met James in person. That's so strange. But when I saw you, it's, like, already have a familiarity. I know you guys. I know your personalities. I know the podcast booth here that you guys are always filming in, and it feels like home. I've never been here. It does. So you're the first guest to do a digital and in person. That's right. Yeah. Groundbreaking, folks. You heard it here first. Jman came in virtually and in person. So pandemic. Like, last time we did this, we're going back the height of the pandemic, right? Of the pandemic. We're going back away. So many impacts. So many things have changed in real estate. It almost seems unrecognizable the way that we're doing things today, right? It's just taking this complete right hand turn. And I hear so many people still say things are going to go back to normal and things are going to roll back. I don't think anything is rolling back. This is the new world, right? It's a whole new world. Absolutely. I think a lot of the things that we've implemented, you always have to look at opportunity right through everything that we've been through. And it's like, man, there's so many systems that I'm changing in my business because that's what the clients are used to. Rather than come into the office. We did that for 15 years. I've been in the business 16 years, right? 15 years you come into the office, we meet, we talk about it now. It's like, hey, we hop on a Zoom tomorrow morning or is tomorrow afternoon better for you? Shoot. If I lived here with the traffic and everything you guys have to deal with, talk about condensing time frames and being more efficient. Uptime uptime used to have a little log that you would fill out, and they would encourage the agents to come in and sit at the desks during uptime. We used to call it opportunity time in our opportunity time, right. So agents don't realize that how wonderful it is today. You just have to sit there. And the only lead you got were leads that came in while you were at a desk in order. If the phone rang, you got leads. If the phone didn't ring, you didn't get leads. Wow. Yeah. Becca's got a perplexed look on her face like, wow, that's pretty different than what we do today, that's for sure. So you're doing some really cool things, and Jayman is joining us today. We flew him down to talk to the team to share some of the new tools that he's using in business that we thought would be exciting and great to impart to our people as we continue to try and adapt as quickly as you can. But there's some really cool things that I saw from the last speaking engagement you had. I think it was for the awards. We had a few agents that got awards. I wanted to talk to you about a little bit, so this is as good a form, the messenger thing. You're presenting offers now through video, through video. Yeah. Just like anything you want to set yourself apart from the competition, whether it's in business or whether it's in a multiple offer situation. So what can I do to set myself apart from all of the other offers that are coming in, whether it's two or whether it's 20 in some situations that we're writing on and video is the answer. Video is the answer for everything. You ask me a question. My answer is going to be video. And then it's something else to explain to you why video is the answer to it. But we'll present the offer, and I teach the ABR class, the accredited by a representative class where we talk about trying to present your offers in person as much as you can prepandemmic. And I remember when I taught it here in Stanley, and I'm never going to work here. It never works, never happen. And I'm like, you know what? You can drop me out of an airplane right now. Okay? I will parachute in and take over your market with these methods that I'm talking about, right? Like, it got to that point. I don't know if Pete was in that class. You were in the EPO class, but it got to that point where, like, listen, you guys got it. This is what I'm talking about, but it's the same concept where let me present it in person virtually with a video tell the story of the buyer. And I'm not saying buyer love letters are frowned upon depending on where you are and where you are listening to this. And it's not. The buyer loves the house. They have kids, and they grew up in this neighborhood. It's more like, hey, let me tell you a little bit about the buyer. She's gainfully employed. She works at the University. She has literally no chance of getting furloughed or laid off or anything like that. She's not just pre approved. She's actually been to the bank, submitted all of her documents, so she's pre committed. We just need a house to find and get that appraised. And then as far as I go, I have 18 designations. Let me tell you about me, because one important part of the agent in the transaction is the other side to know that I'll get you through to closing, and you have a great agent that you've hired to be your seller's agent, and you want to know there's somebody great on the other side. I'm demonstrating that with the video that I'm putting forth and then everything else that I'm going over with the offer. So few people. John does that in our shop exceptionally well. John slows everything down and really takes his craft very seriously and touches on a lot of the things that we just kind of have a way of glazing over because you've filled out so many offers and you've done this so many times, but it's really important for the homeowner. Chances are this is the one and only one of two or three times in their life that they're ever going to be in this position or have been in this position. So taking the time to slow it down and point out and highlight these other types of things really can be what makes the difference between these multi offer situations which are abound now. Right. We have multiple offers regularly, and unfortunately, you get the complaints no matter what the offer was or how it was presented or how much diligence went into it. The agents that don't get it feel like they were slighted. It was your deal or it was in your office or while you're friendly with that broker. No. Oftentimes it just boils down to the strength of the buyer strength of the offer and the presentation. Right. So taking the time to kind of slow it down, highlight these things. So now you're prerecording these and the whole thing, how does it play out? You record this offer presentation and then what I'm the homeowner who presents that video to me. Do I have an opportunity to ask you questions? Is there any interaction what's happening here? It can be done in a couple of ways, but typically it is prerecorded. I use a program called Bomb Bomb, but many of the CRM nowadays you could just upload a video to YouTube unlisted and then embed that video in your CRM. And so I would just go over everything like I would in person, three minutes or less. Right? Nobody's going to listen to a 20 minutes dissertation about why your offer is so great, but, like, three minutes or less meat and potatoes. Here's what it is. Typically, you'd be sliding that over to the seller if you're there in person, but I'm doing it virtually in the copy of the email. It will say, this is not a buyer love letter. Could you please forward this to the seller? It has important details, terms and conditions in regards to the offer. So on the back end, for those that don't trust, I can track when it's played. I can track when they click it. I can track all of that. And I think once you start doing it and you establish relationships, the real estate market is only so big, right? And that listing agent will be like, oh, yeah. Jay, he did this on the last property that he wrote an offer on. He's not doing a love letter. It's not like a trick. What do you got up your sleeve? What's this? This video you're sending me? I'm, like, just trying to help my buyer out here, but I also copy the buyer in on that email so that the buyer sees man, every time I write an offer, I'm doing everything I can. I'm doing everything I can to make sure you get the home of your dreams, because like you said, two or three times in your life, we're dealing with somebody's dream home. Right? So I'm going to make sure that I do everything in my power because they're going to go to work the next thing. Oh, Becca, what happened with that house? Lost another one. But damn that agent, he did a video. He did this. He did that, and then they're going to go. My agent is not doing that. This is apropos timing. There is a restaurant that we're working with now, and the chef said, I want to be different. I want to do something different. So they're talking about serving the meals in these. They're not crock pots. I forgot what they're called Dutch ovens. Don't correct me, especially not on air. So they want to serve them in these Dutch ovens. Cool. And he wants this to kind of become his thing. Right there's, like a marketplace menu. That's different, of course. But for the entrees, everything's going to come out in these Dutch ovens. And you can kind of take. We went to a tasting, and it was pretty cool. It was different. And he was trying to distinguish himself. Like, I know I have great food, and he has several other restaurants, but there's a lot of us that have great food, right. Especially here on the island. So I want to do something that's different. So that's something we don't think about as agents, right. What can we do to distinguish ourselves? Where when Mr. Or Mrs. Buyer or seller goes to the office the next day and is talking about their experience, something that stands out. Right. So are there other things other than the video that you're doing that kind of you feel like trademark who you are and what you're about as you're going through the normal course of business? No, that's it. That's it. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day. Thanks for coming out. Well, a lot of what I do as far as communication is concerned, like keeping your buyer happy. That all starts in the beginning with creating realistic expectations. Right. If I sit down with the buyer and they go, you know what? I have FHA financing, and I need 6% concessions to buy a home. Well, we're not going to be buying a home right now. My honest opinion is you should probably wait a little bit longer unless you can get money from a relative gift to you or something like that, because one of our fiduciary duties is honesty, right? Relationships over transactions all day. That's how I live my life. And if you need to wait a little bit longer, I'd rather you wait and be happy. Then be frustrated because we were at 25 offers and nobody's taking your FHA minimum down payment with concessions, but then also just educating them on the market realities. Like, hey, we might write a dozen offers and to get it accepted, it might be 20% over asking. So if you're looking in the $500,000 range, you need to be pre approved up to 600. Right. Because the extra 20%, that's another 100K on top of if you bring somebody out and you stretch them to the limit with what they're looking at, they're never going to be successful. Yes. I feel like there's a real lack of that kind of candid, honest discussion, not implying that agents are being dishonest. I think that it's uncomfortable sometimes to have those cold, hard discussions with your sellers with their expectations in different markets. Right. When people think that the home is worth a million too, because they put I literally had a seller once who put granite like, Imagine sheetrock, but being replaced with granite, there was granite everywhere, not the ceilings, but all of the walls. He had this special, like, it was only maybe a quarter of an inch thick, but everything was granted, and it was a townhouse. So as we're going through. But I've got $80,000 in granite on this. My cell phone never works. I don't know. That's great. But nobody in this market is looking for granite walls. Right. So those are hard conversations to have with people sometimes. But it's so important to manage expectations off Jump Street and not enough of us do it. Yeah. And even with the sellers, it's like, hey, anybody that tells you it's not a guessing game and pricing properties wrong. It's an educated guess. I can look at what's sold. I can look at what's active and what's pending and go, you know what? Here's where I feel my finger is on the pulse of what this might sell for. But the market will tell us, right. And if we get multiple offers. Hey, that's a blessing. But if we sell, that's your goal, right? You don't want your seller be disappointed. We only got one offer right for asking. I didn't get over asking. Are you kidding me? It's like, remember when we were happy when properties just sold in a balanced market or a buyer's market, we'd be begging people to come to our properties. But it's like, now, what did we do wrong? We only got two offers on this property and went 10% over asking. Yeah. Also, you get the sellers that are upset. Why did we price it this way? We got six offers. We should have had a higher price, like no sweet spot. Yeah. Market is going to dictate. Like you said always. What's happening in your home market now? Is it crazy? Like here it is. And what's crazy is that? We're not used to that historically, our market, we're called the Steady Eddie. When economists talk about our market, the Steady Eddie of Rochester, New York. You know, we appreciate it like, five to 8% per year. Our median sale price was $154,736. Okay. Wow. Roughly. Exactly. You got to know your statistics. In the last five years, we've appreciated 54.7%. Wow. 54.7%. So when I have a conversation about real estate, exactly. Somebody owns property in the city and we're having issues with the moratorium on Evictions and that kind of stuff. Hey, investor, you have a portfolio of properties 510 20 that you thought was worth 2 million. 3 million. Guess what? It's probably worth 50% more than you're thinking. So now is a good time to cash out with these rental laws. Rental laws are changing. And if you got any unhappy tenants that aren't paying or whatever the case may be, and they're not applying for what's out there, cash out. Now roll it into some vacation rentals or something else, maybe in the Caribbean. Similar. So, Staten Island, we're part of New York City. So you would think, Well, it's part of New York, and it's going to follow the New York cycle. It doesn't. So Staten Island always had the same kind of. We've been saying this for a long time. If you're looking to hit a Grand Slam, close your eyes and swing. Don't buy here. If you're looking to consistently hit doubles, singles, doubles and triples. Staten island is the place to be through the 911, the crash, Superstorm Sandy, and now the pandemic. We never had these crazy periods of appreciation, but we also never had the crazy drops. Until now. Things are it is nice for Staten Island for once to kind of feel like we've stepped forward, as we've been telling you all this all time, baby, we want the place to be and the market is just completely bananas. Right. So we have inventory issues. I'm sure you have inventory issues. What are some things you can do to solve for that? How do you shake the tree and you're not allowed to call? A lot of the traditional methods are on pause. Now, how are you shaking the tree and generating listings? A wing and a prayer? It all comes down to predictive analytics and data. I think that's the future of everything. I came into the industry prospecting. I'm a cold calling machine. I love knocking on doors, mainly because the people are home and other people are scared to do it, right. And so when you look at predictive analytics, it will say, Well, I used to knock every door, every door. Now I can say, Well, in this neighborhood, these 20 people out of the 100 doors I would have knocked are more likely to sell based on certain data points. Right. Maybe they had kids, they just had a kid or they're getting divorced or kids going off to College or they have a change in employment. Whatever the case may be, they track the data. Right? Who has a high sell score now? I know, you know, go knock on that door. And if you look at what's illegal, as far as cold calling is concerned, there's a little bit of a Gray area there when it comes to door knocking. Nothing I'm going to say on record. But if you look at the night or website, it does say that door knocking, while not illegal, should be done carefully. And so that's what I would say. And it's like, man again, do the things that other people won't do, right? Agents, I go to office after office. They're sitting there going refresh on their phone, man. No listings coming in yet. Refresh on their phone again. Nothing yet. I'm like, what are you waiting for? You want your ship to come in? Go build it yourself. Right. Take a lesson from Noah. So Red Bull is kicking in. Oh, boy. The predictive analytics thing is interesting. It's something we've toyed with for years. Right. And are you finding that you're pulling together the data points and you're kind of zeroing in or are you using third party software? Third party. That's way beyond the scope of my expertise. I didn't pay attention enough in school to put that stuff together. And you found smart enough to hire an expert. You've found some experts that are good. Yes. So some of the issues we have is as you go through these different. There's always someone who has the latest and greatest secret formula. Right. Shiny Penny. Here it is. We figured it out. We've got the seller leads down, and it's just a little bit of a drain. As you jump from software to software, program to program, you have to educate the agents on how leads are going to come in. And what do these leads mean? And what are the lead score? How does that translate here? And how should you approach these types of leads? And then these types? And then you get two, three months in and 90% of the leads were awful. They feel a little bit deflated. Now you've got to kind of pick up. Hey, we got the next one. Yeah, well, I think sometimes it's like you got to look back and say, we're the leads awful. Or were the conversion methods because they're like, oh, when you don't pay for something, there is an appreciation. When I was paying $1,000 a month for leads. Boy, I am going after every single lead that comes in because I'm like, that's my money. I got to make sure that I convert that. But if it's given to me for free, then it's like, oh, I call them. I hope they don't answer because I don't want to hear no, because fear of failure, fear of rejection is what stops me. And then that's it. One call. Or maybe they use something like, slide out and they go right to voicemail. And then they leave a message. Then you get a call back. I don't know what happened. Those leads weren't that great. So how do you deal with that? How do you keep the agents motivated? How do you get them to feel empowered? How do you continue to get them feeling good about banging the drum and dealing with the rejection and dealing with constant. When all comes down to training iron, sharpens iron, you have to practice your craft here in the office so that they came to a point where I'd get to a door and I'd be like, anything you say, anything you say, anything you say, I will overcome. I promise you just let me in the door with for sale by owners. I used to grab the red and white sign and I grabbed it out of the yard and knock on the door like, what are you doing? What are you doing? Oh, I'm here. You want to sell your house, right? Yeah. That's why I'm here today. Yes, this guy. First of all, they're so shocked. What are you doing? Like, you want to sell your house? This is what I do. How much do you want to get? All right. If I could show you a way that my fee for service would be built right in. Can we work together? Yes. All right. Start wiping my feet. Let me come in. Because when you're that confident, nothing can stop you. I want you to say no, because if you're really a jerk and you Slam the door in my face, fantastic. I'm going to go on to the next person. They're not saying no to me personally, right? I'm not saying that rejection. Why would they say no to me? They're blessing in real estate today. That's how I look at it. Like, they're not saying no to me. It's not the right time. They just keep it moving. So what other technologies? We're starting to play around with the Facebook pixels and setting up groups on the website and pulling out the individual pages. There's some really neat stuff that I don't even want to talk about. That we're doing that is super targeted and super neat. Yeah. I mean, when you talk about pixels and then you can create, I don't want to talk about it too much either. If you guys are doing it, but you create custom conversions and say, look, if somebody landed on this page but didn't move forward to that page, I want a different thing. I want them to see something different than the person that went forward to the next one. So I think when people ask me like, oh, I'm getting an ad at the grocery store on the cart. I'm like, Yo, save your money. Put that into digital advertising, right? Or the bus stops. I'm not standing at the bus in the rain going, oh, man, I was thinking about selling my house, and I'm going to call those impressions are the same. You'll have the same result. When you see somebody, I'm going to go, James, like, I know you're from somewhere, right? And you're like, yeah, because I follow you around because of my Facebook Pixel all day until you call me to buy or sell your home. Yes, everything has changed totally. Everything has changed. We literally had someone recently talked about wanting to get the shopping cart at the local shop. Right. And advertise on it. Really? That's what you want to do now back to shopping cards. Somebody sent me. It was a signage in the bathroom. And this guy said, this is no joke. I have it on my Instagram somewhere. I'd have to find it. You're in for a real estate bargain if you call this guy in the bathroom, plan words. But that's not one that I don't want to be associated with the urine. What are you doing? But here you are talking about it exactly. Yeah, but not calling them. I think I had posted it that day, and I was like, oh, no, please call me if you're thinking about doing this in the future because your money can be much better spent. So where are we heading on your people. Where are we going? Is this the rates are going to stay low or is this going to continue? I think even if the rates will increase moderately, but I don't think it's enough to affect affordability. I think it's the market that's affecting the affordability, driving the prices up so far. I know, I've seen it. And as I talk to other agents around the country, where some buyers now, they're just so frustrated. You're going to see the market correct itself. But in a way that we don't want to where buyers are going to say, I'm going to take a break. Really? How many times can I get my heart broken? I motivate people for a living. It's hard to motivate somebody after 20 offers, right? Don't worry. The journeys is just important as a destination. We got you. One day we're going to be sitting around the table talking about how we wrote 20 something offers before you got this one. And then you busted all the cliches. Like, everything happens for a reason. Things are meant to be.

Participant #1:
It is tough. And what starts to happen is the buyer starts to then measure each one they didn't get against the next one. And while this one had this and this one, and then when you're 510 deep, it gets tough. And they're so jaded. One that told me they wanted to take a break for a little while. And it's like their girlfriend that says, I want to take a break. Are we really taking a break, or are you breaking up with me? Like, what's the story here? I had this listing coming on the market. I'm like, this is great for you guys moving right in your price range. What's wrong with it? They were already there, like, let me know when it hits the market. And if you don't get an offer like they're at that point already. And then I had another one that sat for a little while and they're like, Something must be wrong with it. You don't have 23 offers on it. I'm like, maybe it's just price a little bit high. Sometimes it is the seller's price. So are you able to bring them back around? Not yet. I will, though. Not yet. I started talking about this, like three years ago, but now here we are. Three years later, we've created a whole generation of buyers, by the way, that don't know what real interest rates are. That's a problem. As things start to correct, inflation is coming. This is going to happen when I was a kid, interest rates were the first deal, I think, with 13%, and it was a good rate, right? Yeah. And this is supposed to be a cycle. Rates go up, rates go down, prices go up, prices go down. That hasn't happened in a long time. Well, don't say back in my day, whatever you do. Yeah. Well, that was when I was a kid. Back in my day, we murdered for real estate. I'll tell you what. Well, there's a guy in my office who sold 100 properties in a year, and it was back in the 80s. Okay. He still has a license plate. Sold 100. But whatever the point is, he sold those 100 properties when it went from 18 to that 13 and a half people were coming out of the woodwork, like, interest rates are so low, 13 and a half. And it's like buyers right now, just like you said, they don't know how great they really have it. And they really need to spike up to get that fear of loss to kick in and get them to go. Whoa, hold on. I guess that in combination with the appreciation of the values of properties, we got to take action or else we're not going to live anywhere near the city. Yes. Well, look, as the rates creep up, the prices should level off and start to come down. But it's going to be a difficult period in the transition where it's been so damn long. People who bought homes and are now reselling that seven year cycle rates are still obscenely low. And when they get back to normal, which you would think they kind of have to, right? Yeah. Now what people are seeing 6%. 8%, right. And then you have people that don't want to sell because their interest rates are so low. And how are they going to move up? Not going to move up in a house more of a lateral move it unless it's a school district or something like that. So the bottom line is, you've got to act now. Got to go. The bottom line is, you got to list the last baby. We got all this buyer talk. If you got sellers, you could take care of business. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's what we need more of. And that's what I saw as I was getting more frustrated and writing offers and writing offers and writing offers. Man, if you're representing just buyers right now, you are working harder than you've ever worked in your entire career. I promise you, I've never written so many offers for buyers. And I was like, you know what? You know, who's not having a tough time seller's agents. Why don't I go join that team, right? That's why we have you here today. We wanted to have you come down and impart some of that wisdom to the team on different methods to unlock more listings because inventory is down. I think what was it month over month. It was down 38% or something. Crazy. Numbers closed. Homes are up 70% or 69%, and inventory is down 37%. We need more listings. So with that, J Man speaks today. Yeah, well, we're pushing up on 01:00. We wanted to squeeze in a podcast here again, looking for my phone.

Participant #1:
So we're going to wrap up folks. We wanted to squeeze one in quick, and we're going to go half hour seminar with J Man. And as always, it's a pleasure, my friend. Yeah. Thanks for having me always. How do people get a hold of you? The interwebs. The interwebs. Yeah. Solo Tljman speaks. That's my Link tree. You can get me everywhere. Got it. J. Man Speaks Typically on any of the major social media platforms. Beautiful. Awesome. Good to see you, my friend. And we're going to go get Schmidt Schmidt. I think. Let's do it. Thanks, everyone. Stay safe.

Participant #1:
You.