Podcast Episode 56 Transcript

Episode 56: Google My Leads: How To Use Google Search Ads To Generate Seller Leads

Participant #1:
We're charging Realtors three $4,000 a month and have no idea what it takes to even be a realtor. How is that fair to your client? You know, it's our job to properly leave the client. Most Realtors do not know how to run a business, and that's OK, because we're not taught that Realtors are really good at doing. Once they have the client Realtors are like it's off to the races. They'll show you 30 houses in a day. They do not care, but there's a front half missing. How do you get that first date?

Participant #1:
Welcome everyone to the Prendamano Real Estate "PreReal" podcast. We're joined today by Khari Harper. This is one of those podcasts that you kind of put a little star next to because it's something where we're working really hard on. We have Pete sitting in today. As many of you know, Pete runs the podcast for us. He's our CMO. He has complete oversight on everything we do here, but we want to welcome Cory to the show. How are we doing today, baby? Can't complain, can't complain. Good. Thanks for taking the time out before we jump into what you do, which to kick it off. Folks, Carry is kind of self described as a client acquisition specialist, and we'll get into what all that means as we get into the show. But you've got a pretty amazing story, your background. We find that there's these common threads in a lot of our serial entrepreneurs. So I was wondering if we can kick it off. Maybe you could share with the audience, Corey, a little bit about your personal life and how you ended up where you are today. All right. Very well. It all started with my mom and dad. That was the beginning of everything. But as I got older, when I turned 18, I graduated high school. I'm 26 right now. Don't let the bald head fool you, but I graduated high school, and I've always been on this entrepreneurial journey. I never really want to work a nine to five. Not that the work isn't hard. It was just more. So I think at that time, when you're young, it's more of an egotistical thing you're like. Why do I have to listen to this person when I know I can do better? Basically, I've quit every job that I ever had and never had a job longer than six months. Kyle Harper has never been employed for more than six months in his life. From there, I did a little odd job, not real estate, landscaping, selling cars, delivering pizzas. And I always told myself, this is like, from 18 to 21, everything I did, I was like, you know what? No matter what job you take, you're going to take pride in it, and you're going to learn something from it to get you to that next level. So delivering pizza before Uber and DoorDash for, like, sending notifications that they're around the block and, like, 20 whatever it was 15. I was texting the people I was delivering pizza to saying, hey, GPS says I'll be there in 26 minutes and giving them the updates and just everything. And it was funny because I was like, this would be a really good idea. Someone created an app where they actually tell you when the food's coming. So trust me, when I saw DoorDash and Uber eats and everything, I was like, There it is, Kyrie. And then from there, more odd jobs. I was homeless. So I was couch surfing from, like, 18 to 22. But I started throwing parties as well for College kids. I never went to College, but I definitely utilized their training grounds. But from there, when I used to throw parties with my friends, I was like, Listen, we can't just be like, these fraternity guys. How do we create an experience? How do we have a marketing Department? How do we ensure and get feedback when people leave the party? How do we make sure everyone is safe? It was just so many things that I've combined. And then I forgot what she I was 22 years old. I was landscaping and throwing parties at this time. My friend was like, hey, I'm going to this fortune builders event. Why don't you come with me? I was like, no, I'm good, man. So I skipped that. But then I saw this party happening in Manhattan, but it was a real estate networking event. And I was like, this is my type of scene. I got, like, $30 in my bank account, Manhattan rooftop. I can afford it. I go there, right? And I'm telling everyone, I work in landscaping and I host events and everything like that. And people are looking at me like, Why are you even here? So I lived in Israel, by the way, I lived there for three years. That's the whole story in itself. So I speak Hebrew, and I hear these guys talking, this guy named Nick talking. He's speaking in Hebrew. So I'm like, listen, nothing's happened here. I just spent my last $30 on the two beers that I bought, so I might as well do something. So I hear this guy, Nick seeking Hebrew, and I just turned around to him and start seeking Hebrew. He's with him and his friends and Nick's an investor in Brooklyn, and he just starts looking at me like, what? So he starts talking all night. He's like, listen, this is what I want you to do. He's like, I want you to call this guy tomorrow. His name is Sean. He's my partner. Sean is actually his cousin, and he was, like, just sit with them and get an interview with them and see if you want to come work with us. And they're doing, like, short sales and everything. So I was like, you know what? No problem. So I did that. And we were doing cold calling, door knocking. And we were doing this in Brooklyn, not Brooklyn as it is now. Brooklyn, as before, really started making that come up. So we were cold calling, door knocking everything in the book. And I loved it because he was like, Sean was 26 years old at the time when he hired me. He was a millionaire. I was like, if he could do it, he came from Israel, and he was a locksmith at first, and then just built everything up once again. That's that mentality. There is no way I can't do it no matter what. There's no excuse. So did that made no money at all. I got deals done. But they were short sale. So they were so long. And I'm living in Jersey at the time, I was like, It cost $30 to just get to the office in Brooklyn. So from there, I started doing my own thing, and that was like, 20, 16, 20, 17. So I go back. I was like, hey, listen, hey, guys, we're just going to part ways. I'm going to do some wholesaling in Jersey first because I was like, if I could do this in Brooklyn and get people to actually talk to me and get to the negotiation table, I could do it in New Jersey because people are a lot nicer in New Jersey. Or at least they were once upon a time. We did that. And then I met this kid named Jordan. When I say, Kid, he's a grown man. He's about ten years older than I am. So he's like, we have him partner up because he had this deal, right? He's like, Kyrie, can you sell this? I didn't know, but he was like, I heard that you do wholesaling. Can you sell it? I was like, hey, listen, I'll try. It was this crappy house in Orange, New Jersey, and we sold it to a guy, and I got it done. I got the deal done in, like, three weeks. This is a wholesale deal. So from there, Jordan and I are sitting down like, Bro, can you tell me? Just tell me. I called Colin doorknock. What are you doing? Different. He was like, this is the secret. He's like, I use Google ads, and he's like, I use Facebook ads as well. I was like, what? I was like, advertising online. Okay, sure. Him and I start working together because he has another deal, another deal and another deal. I'm like, how much are you spending on advertising? I pay the company 2000 a month, and I spend around 3000 a month for the ad spend. I was like, okay, he's getting all these leads and they're closing, and it's working. And I was like, Yo, this is nobody's doing this so short. And I we worked together, and me and him just started killing it after that. 23 deals, wholesale deals in six months. And from there, I was like, you know what? I need to get away. And I got my real estate license in 2018 as well. And I basically ran away to Columbia personal problems, depression and everything else when you start making money. But you're not right. Internally, it never works out. So I was just self sabotaging the entire way. I went to Colombia, right? So in 2018, I'm in Colombia, having the time of my life. I'm sure everyone knows what Columbia is like. So I'm there and I see these kids there's this kid named Ravi Abuvalla. He was a big marketer. Now he's a coach, and I'm meeting all these kids. I'm like, how are you guys 21 22, living life like this, and they're saying, oh, you just run ads on Facebook, you run ads for Realtors. We do this for coaches. The concept was always running ads. I met this kid named Roughly. He was special. He was making $50,000 a month, and he was really running. He was running ads, and he has his license. So he was sending out referrals as well while traveling the world. Now he makes $400,000 a month. These numbers were insane. I was like, what? And they still sound insane, but not anymore, because now you see, it's all scalability, but that's a different conversation for it. Later on, I saw Robbie. He told me what he was doing when I came back from Columbia. I was there for three months. I got right to work. Basically, I started running ads. I asked Jordan, that's the guy I was working in the past. I was like, hey, listen, what can you give me? Can you at least give me a landing page or something that I could use? I bought every course out there. I'm literally spending my credit cards. I'm living in Columbia, and I burned out my credit cards to buy courses to learn how to run ads. So that's how it really started the whole advertising process, the advertising journey. So we covered a lot of ground. Then I got a couple of questions for you. So it sounds like from an early age. And again, this is one of those common themes. You had a hard time going through school because the information just didn't seem relevant to you in the moment, right? I remember so clearly being in school in class after class. And it wasn't until later in life when I started getting into the business courses, I couldn't create the bandwidth in my brain to absorb what they were teaching because it just didn't feel right that carries over. And you seem to be problem solver, right? You're looking for better ways to do it. I love the thing about texting the customers when you're delivering pizza, like, well, there's got to be an easier way to do this and keep the customer informed and scale it. And then you graduated up into wholesaling and running ads for wholesaling. Can you explain to the audience what is wholesaling? So wholesaling is basically a simple term for a middle man. You just plug a home seller in who's selling that they can't put their house on the regular market, not the 2021 regular market anytime before this regular market. And then you will bring an investor who will pay cash. And you just put those two together and you'll keep a little fee in the middle. Okay. So now you're the CEO all in R1 estate consultant, and you're starting to scale ways to cut through the noise, if you will, and generate leads for Realtors. So we talked a little bit offline before we started, and it's a big reason why Pete's joining us today at some point over the last maybe ten years or so, deal making wasn't enough anymore, right? You had to become a marketer and a deal maker. Otherwise, it wasn't cutting it anymore. Many of us that are in the industry are not left brain thinkers, right? We don't have that creative side. We don't have that kind of DNA to put the ads together and make it look and feel right. And if you're trying to do things at scale like we are, it's so important for there to be consistency in the message and the branding and everything has got a kind of jive for us. I think our biggest issue is getting the best leads we can in the most efficient way possible and not having the agents give the feedback of, oh, these were bad leads, and then they kind of, like, shut off, right. Right. That's what comes down to it a lot. I mean, we've run a lot of ads now. We do a lot of Google search. We do Facebook ads as well, too. Facebook seemed to be working a lot in the past, but then, like James said, it comes down to the feedback. We can only do so much drive a lot of ads. But you don't know if they're really good. They're really bad, and there's no way to really optimize after that. So I feel the feedback of what the leads are or the quality of them is very important. This way, you can continue to either get more of those or just your strategy to go out and find other leads somewhere else. Absolutely. So you now have put together kind of a complete solution. You even go so far as to bookings. Correct. We go all the way in. So can you give us a roll up of the services from top to bottom? So the premium service I like to call is pretty simple. We create your ads for you, Facebook or Google. I have a live texting team that will attempt to schedule an appointment with the lead. And I also have a call center who's calling the leads as well to try to schedule that appointment or provide a live transfer as they're going to get qualifications and say, hey, Mrs. Realtor, I have Shane on the phone. She's looking to sell her house, three bed, four bath at one two, three Main Street. Can you talk to her right now? Agent will say yes from there. The caller passes the phone that transfers the call to the agent. The agent takes it from there. Seller leads is the Holy grail in our business. Right. So you're doing seller leads as well? Yeah, we do. Buyers and sellers, mainly sellers now, because the market when you're running Google ads, are you running all types of Google ads? Are they search, display, video? What types of ads are they? They are search ads. And we do have it showing on display. But I don't know which one is performing the best one. Pretty sure it's just the main search ads because we use around 98 keywords as well. It's not an overly complicated process. I never want to bore anyone with the details, but if you really want to become good at marketing, you have to understand in the beginning, if you want to become good at marketing, you first have to make a decision. Do you want to build your brand or do you want leads? That's the first question. You cannot do both at the same time. At one point, you guys said all in R1 estate consultant, right? That was my company last year. I just changed it to the real estate robot. But I wasn't focused on branding. I was focused on the results. And just from my experience, a lot of Realtors are like, I need my image here for legality purposes, of course, logos and everything. Yes, I understand that part. But most Realtors haven't made that clear decision. Do they want leads or they want branding? Let's just say that answer is they want leads. Forget the branding. The next question you need to ask yourself is, how are you communicating with these leads? Let's just say I'm only going to provide you guys leads. Right. And people say the leads are bad. Yeah, leads are bad. It just happens sometimes there's no avoiding it. You're not going to be the lucky one that gets great leads all the time. It's not going to happen. But you can be that person with the proper follow up system, and then the person when you are finally talking to a lead, the Realtors need to stop taking. I'm not trying to attack Realtors. I just live this life with them. They need to stop asking the question of when are you looking to sell your house? Where would you want to move to? Why can't the conversation be? Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Seller, I saw that you were interested in selling your home. You said you wanted to sell in three to six months. I'm curious. Why did you decide to choose between three to six months? Is it something urgent or if you didn't sell within three to six months, would you be okay with that? Those are the questions we need to begin to ask. How do we provide the value? First, take second. One of my mentors, said, Kyrie. The way I became a rich man was like, this. He was like, I learned how to divide before I multiplied, and I was like, I didn't get it when he said it. But then he was like, he learned how to divide that pie and share with everybody and give value to everyone. And then it began stacking up. I was like, oh, shit. This is what he meant in 2019 is when you made the shift from all in R1 estate consultants to real estate robot services, right? Yeah. All right. Now, as you've made this shift, are you providing data with these? So the leads come in, they get transferred to an agent. Does the office or does the individual agent get an email or something with the person's information that I called or is the agent responsible for handling that? So once it's transferred, the agent is responsible for handling it, which is like, another gift and curse, because I feel for Realtors as well. They wear ten different hats in a day, and they're expected to run a business. There comes a time when you have to set that line between I'm the marketing company. I'm not the assistant. Okay. And how are you mobilizing this? Do you have a team of virtual assistants that are just, yes, sir. Got it all virtual assistants because I have real estate experience. It's pretty easy. It really gives me a leg up on all my competition because all these other marketers, they don't even know what a co inspection is. Very basic. I'm like, how are you selling something? And you don't even understand the process of what your client is going through. Hence, I take that same mindset that I have with Realtors. And I say, hey, Realtors, how are you going to try to convince someone to let you list their home and you don't even know why they want to sell their home? That's something we have found over and over. That technology bangs up against the real estate world. There are so many products and services out there that are being designed by tech people that don't understand the flow of a deal. They don't understand the nuance of real estate. And while in principle, some of them have wicked good ideas, they just don't translate to reality. Right? There's no harmony between these apps and these third party services and the reality of how we run our business. And I think there's such a disconnect because marketers and Realtors we're looking at each other as if we're different, and we're not. But at the same time, there's another big problem is the people on my side. The marketing side. We're charging Realtors three $4,000 a month and have no idea what it takes to even be a realtor. How is that fair to your client? It's our job to properly lead the client. Most Realtors do not know how to run a business, and that's okay, because we're not taught that Realtors are really good at doing once they have the client. Realtors are like it's off to the races after they'll show you 30 houses in a day, they do not care, but there's a front half missing. How do you get that first date? Can I just follow up on one thing here? You mentioned something before, which is the biggest problem that I see as well is the follow up, right? We could drive all the leads, and it could be a seller lead. But someone's not ready in three to six months or whatever. And you have to continue to cultivate the lead. And I think that's where there's a big struggle for a lot of the different agents. Like I said, agents are different types of people they want now, like, if the regular sell now, I'll take them, we're off to the races and we're ready to go. But if they got to cultivate that or continue to work with that person, that's where I think there's a lot of fall off and something that could be a good lead never ends up becoming that because they don't follow up. So do you have, like, a follow up system? Because what I've been trying to implement is get, like, drip campaigns or something like that just to get the agents to interact with the client or can continue to build that relationship once they have it. But I think if there was something like maybe that you have, like a robot or something like that, it would be very useful for them. We do. We definitely do. But there's one thing I hate saying because I shoot myself in the foot. It doesn't work anymore. Why is that homeowners know that their house is worth a lot of money? Homeowners know a realtor will do anything to take the listing, including listing at one to 2% on the Commission side. Homeowners are not dumped to what's going on. And the problem is the drip campaign in this current market, when the market changes, the drip campaign is going to say. But if we're talking about 2021 July 1, you need to bring that personality. How do you stand out from the competition? First, you need to be able to generate the leads and not being afraid to spend the money on advertising. You're spending the money regardless, you're going to spend on ads or you're going to spend it on not getting deals. But either way, you spend money. So that's first, the next thing is forget about how many leads are coming in. I'm a positive man. I'm a spiritual fan. I don't care about the nose in my universe. I just care about the yeses. And when someone gives me the opportunity to speak to them, I'm going to over deliver and make sure it's an experience. How do I make this initial conversation experience? How do you make your first date and experience? How do you make raising your first child an experience. That's what people need to ask themselves. When you can do that and cultivate it, you won't need anything automated or anything of that nature. But if you can't, there's going to be a bigger problem. Of course, you're going to be taken out by machines and AI in these tech companies, because if you're giving no personality, AI doesn't give personality either. And they could just do things ten times faster than we can. So you're so spot on here. I try and talk to the agents all the time. You're a connector first. That is your first job. If you think about in our own lives, not many of us are doing business on a regular basis with people we don't like with people that we don't have some sort of connection with, right? There's always some sort of common thread or something that you identify with. And I wholeheartedly believe that if you have the right agent, once they get in there, they're going to drive value in this market. Now we have these things all the time where we pride ourselves on getting top dollar. We're not a discount brokerage. We're professional. We've been here through a whole bunch of difficult times. We were here through 911. We were here through the eight crash. We were here through Super Storm Sandy. We're here through the pandemic. We're professionals, and we go in for listing appointments. And even in this market, we hear time and time again that, well, this number was here. Your number is here. Sometimes it's above, sometimes it's below. But when you put the time and energy into it and you're hitting your marks on your numbers that resonates eventually with the homeowners, right, when you're taking the time to distinguish yourself, we just had a class on this, actually, things that you can do that we guarantee no other agents are doing in listing presentations. And it's still a challenge to impart that stuff because some of it is uncomfortable for the agents to get their arms around. But you're right. If you're connecting with them and you're distinguishing yourself, that's what's going to make the difference. So we believe that we can impart that to our team. And I just want to learn more here like this is a podcast, but it's also kind of an interview. Right. Let's see what kind of business we can do with them. You know what I'm saying? Because we're constantly trying different ways. We're constantly growing. How are your leads coming in? Are you sourcing them? Leads are calling you or are people responding to email by email and then you're calling them what's the lead lifecycle looks like. So it's a pretty simple one. The starting point step one is creating an ad on Facebook or Google. From there, the lead goes to a landing page from a landing page to answer a five question survey, address, name number, email. And there's one more time frame of looking to sell. Then after that on the landing page, they actually have an option to self book an appointment. And then from there we're calling. We're texting. We also tell the agent to call and text, and the lead comes in as well, because we have been cursed out many times saying, why would I work with an agent who can't even call me directly? Absolutely. That's really our process. It's really simple. I have not reinvented the wheel. I'm just good at what I do, because it's a value. I just believe in the people first. So how does your platform work? As far as you're not paying on, at least I don't think your platform is where you're paying a set amount per lead, right? It's not going into a call center. So we want to engage. Kari, what does that look like? So now we have two pricing models. The one we're switching to now is a pay per appointment model. Paper appointment. Yeah. Okay. It's a little different. So there's an annual fee, and the annual fee is only $1,500. It's really not a lot of money for that annual fee. And then the appointment fee is $180 per appointment. We set for you that you confirm that you want to take, and then you would pay your own ad spent. You want to spend $500 a month. Okay. Whatever we can get for that 500, we're going to run ads and do whatever we can for you and try to set an appointment. And then after that, once you set the appointment, you pay for that appointment so we don't deliver on our job. We make no money. Okay. So we want to rock and roll. Right? Let's say we want to hit it hard. What type of ad spend do we need to be in for? I think, to start. I would always say $1,000 a month just to play it safe. If you're using Google and you want the high intent leads and understand that the first 30 days are going to need to be the most brutal days of your life. There will be nothing happening. Like when I say brutal, I'm talking. You guys are in Staten Island, correct? You guys are going to be getting homeowners in the Jersey Shore in the first 30 days, but it's because Google really is optimizing. It is a search based platform. So it's not like Facebook, where it's a pattern interrupt where people are scrolling all day. These are people physically going on. Google and Google is trying to figure out, how do I narrow this in? Yes, they gave me all this information, but we still need time to do right with it. All right. So I need you to talk about that because the agents don't get that. When we try different platforms and you try different ways of doing this right off the gate or off the hop, you get this negative feedback, and then the agents start to pull back because they don't understand. It's like you got to pay your dues to work your way up through the ranks. Can you talk about that process a little bit? Absolutely. So whenever you start on any advertising campaign, one, if you're in real estate, no matter what, if you guys delivered the hottest leads out here saying, hey, these people want to sell in 45 days, that realtor is going to still need to wait regardless, 45 days plus an additional closing time days to even see an ROI. So any realtor needs to understand if you do real estate marketing, organic or paid, you will not be making money in the first 30 days, maybe not even the first 60, because even after there's multiple variables to just close the deal, as we all know when it comes to optimizing a campaign, though, for those who don't know what it is, I like to say making the campaign finally work. Basically, the leads will be getting generated. And then once they begin getting generated now, it's like, okay, I don't like these leads. These keywords didn't work yet. We have 92 keywords, but only seven of these keywords are performing. This ad worked better than this ad. And now month two. Now we have the data of what was working and what landing page work better. Now we're like, okay, month two, let's begin running these ads. Now, with all the good data we have, get rid of the bad. Month two, let's start generating leads. Now we're generating leads, right? Which is great. But no matter what the platform is, and you cannot pay enough money to get instant gratification leads in real estate, it's impossible. Now it's going to take another 30 days of follow up, and then it's not just follow up. It's timing. You can't blame the marketing company for timing. Google cannot force anybody to sell their home. They can't be like, hey, you went to Google Search and you said, how to sell my house fast. You need to go list it with Lisa right now. You can't do it. And Realtors need to stop believing that it can happen like that. Because all they're doing now is when they say, hey, you guys are generating leads for them. They're only delaying their success because they're stopping, starting, stopping, starting. And when you stop and start online with advertising, Facebook or Google, they're going to look at you and be like, this is not a business. You're not consistent. Your page isn't consistent. You're trying to change things on your landing page. All of a sudden you went from Keller Williams to EXP. Now your domain name is different. That's why I also say, are you going to focus on lead generation or branding first? And when there's so many inconsistencies that people don't when there's so many inconsistencies, you're starting and stopping the campaign, or now you're stressing out the marketer saying, hey, this isn't working. This isn't working. Now. The marketers are like, now they're second guessing themselves. They want to keep you as a client. They know it works and they're going to do whatever they can to make sure you see that it works. Now, the marketing agency is changing things in the back end. And if you do that in the first 30 days, oh, my God. Google and Facebook are going to be like, I need you to go somewhere, go take your ads out for something like that. I remember this. I used to work in advertising, digital advertising. Main focus was driving app downloads, worked with a lot of developers. So their main acquisition was cost per acquisition. Main value KPI was cost per acquisition. The same thing you were mentioning that 1st 30 days. It's all about optimizing. So if you can get past that 1st 30 days, then you've got a pretty good client. You start to see good results. But the CPA, the cost per acquisition will always start out astronomical hundreds or $150 for download or install. And then finally, as you optimize, it starts to come down to 50 2015, but it has to gather that data. But if you don't have the right people or if you don't set expectations correctly, then people will think right away. It's not going to start. I'm spending way too much money and I don't want to do this any longer. Then they stop the campaign like I said. And then they want to come back later on and they got to start all over again with the Optimizer. So it brought back a lot of memories. What you told me, if you want to throw something else in there, people went into scarcity mode. My business. We hit our first. I'm talking. We hit our 1st $50,000 a month in business during code. And that's because everything was for sale. You got leads for pennies on the dollar. Imagine if you went to that marketing company last year like, hey, I'm going to stick it out. I'm just going to stick it out because at the end of the day, you work in real estate. Regardless, you're getting paid Commission. It doesn't matter if it's a pandemic or not. If you eat what you kill, it doesn't matter what the season is. With that, we are generating 500 leads a month on a $500 ad spend for our clients. And were our clients reaping the rewards then? Absolutely not. They're like, Kyrie, we want to quit. There's no money coming. Nothing. I'm like you're going to thank yourself later. Now they're sitting with I have this client. His name is Adam Papa. She's in Kansas City. He's not too happy with me right now. I didn't do anything wrong. He was just not happy, but he's happy with his leads. I just said something to him. I shouldn't have, but we're good friends. He's been doing that for a while. So, Adam, he's been working with us for literally. It's now been 13 months and he's done $170,000 in GCI, and that's all Facebook and buyer leads. Oh, by the way, Adam never gave me a testimonial either. He just said, you guys need to do more, so shout out to you, Adam, if you do watch this, well, now you could just cut this part up. And you could just say, Adam did 130,000, 170,000 and GCI, boom, there's your testimonials. Exactly. Movie magic, baby. But he waited, and that was the thing. He was like, listen, I know I'm not going to see a return, especially not during COVID. He's like, but as long as you guys can deliver on your word and put me in front of the right people, I'm going to do what I have to do. Add them for some of our clients, the good clients we do reactivation campaigns like, we just see leads sitting there like, hey, we're going to personally spend the money to reach back out to them and do everything. We did that with Adam's campaign. We had people texting us back saying, Why are you texting me, Adam? You sold me a house a month ago, or you sold my house. And that's how I found out Adam was doing all these deals. But it's a time thing. I got so many questions, so let's talk about the first 30 days. All right, Carrie, we're going to bring you on board, and we're going to start working together those 1st 30 days, the calls that are coming in, you guys are still vetting them, right? By the time they get to the agent, have you weeded out the person in Point Pleasant and that sort of stuff, or are the agents getting all the calls? We're still going to give them everything because there's no need to waste the opportunity, even if they say no, we're like, we're not going to do that. Okay, so you're speaking to the people. You're going to try and live transfer where you can, right. And the agent is going to get on the call. They're going to talk about it. It's in Philly. It's in South Jersey. It's in Pennsylvania, not for us. That lead gets put to bed, the quality calls that come in where they are able to get in for a listing appointment. How do you know how do you prove this out? What I'm trying to figure out is, is there access to call logs? Are we able to listen and see, is it the agent that's not closing or what's happening? How do you know where these things end? So only I have access to the call recordings because you're actually not allowed to share call recordings if they're not on the call. A lot of people don't know that, but, yeah, it's illegal, but I have access to them not saying I listen to them. But if I have to accidentally press the wrong button, it happens. So once that happens, that's from my team, and once the realtor gets it in hand, and I hate saying this. I don't believe any realtor. My team members aren't lying to me. They helped me build this business, and I'm not, like, a mean business owner. I'm very supportive of all of them, and they're really honest with me. So if the realtor says consistently, like, hey, this lead. Yeah, you booked the appointment, but it wasn't good. You booked the appointment, but it wasn't good. I'm like, okay, you know what? I'll eat that. Don't pay me. No problem. But I'm going to call that lead back. And if it is how I think it is, I'm going to take I was like, you could pay 180, or I could just go get a 30% referral from somebody. Either way, it's mine after that, because it's only fair you didn't pay for it. You stole them. So I need to do something to recoup my investment. So we're only going to be paying for leads that result in appointments in Staten Island, right? Yeah. Wherever your target market is, wherever you want to. All right. So that's on the seller lead campaign. Now, what about different asset classes? So we're a full service brokerage. We do big numbers in residential and in commercial. Do you have a campaign that let's shift to buyers. Now you have a campaign for buyer leads. Let's start buyer residential. I assume you have a buyer residential campaign. All right. And then is it broken down by income or by a purchase price, or is it just general? It starts off as general. And then we begin filtering it down. So we know who your ideal buyer client is, which right now, obviously, is somebody sitting with $200,000 in the bank or more? But, yeah, we break it down that way, and it's still the same process. Live transfers, texting, team, setting the appointment. But buyers are really easy to come by. So we really do a retainer model with that, because we can just blow people out of the water with buyers all day. Okay. Now what about commercial property? No, we do one thing very well. We stick to it the commercial aspect of things. One, I don't like the longevity of converting that lead. And it's a different type of conversation when you're speaking with those type of business owners like that. And it's not a conversation that I could train somebody to have. Fair enough. So the team that you put together these virtual assistants, is it the same virtual assistance you're working with regularly? Or is it like an Upwork thing where as it comes, it comes? Oh, no. These are like mine, like every Friday, someone's getting paid. Got it. We stick fully staffed. There's no outsourcing here. I always wanted control of my entire business. I don't play those. Let me rely on somebody else. I have a sun defeat. I'm not here to play around. All right, so if you had to pick one, is it the seller leads that you're crushing above anyone else, not in volume. I'm talking about in quality. Like, what do you do? Flat out the best. What is carry the best is it buyer leads, seller leads, seller leads all day. Because buyer leads are simple to come by. They're too easy. It's like you step outside and you got a buyer lead. The value isn't there anymore, because even if I bring you a buyer, that said, hey, I'll buy this house cash, $80,000 above asking and close in 48 hours. The next guy is going to close in 24. And I don't want to play that game anymore, because then it's things that are out of the agent's control. And I at least want to have, like, hey, if the agent bonds the listing appointment that has nothing to do. But none of us can control the market. But the listing agent can always get. But the agent can always get better at listing presentations. But you can't control what's going on with the economy. So with your seller leads, what do you think is the thing that sets you apart? Is it the messaging? Is it the targeting? Is it the creative follow up stuff like that? What is it with Google? No, it's really not. It's none of that. Actually, it's calling the lead once the lead comes in, even as the agent just introducing yourself, saying Hi and not making a pitch or anything like that, we really call, like, our first initial call with a seller lead. Well, once we figure out the time frame is, hey, what type of conversation we're going to have? If this leads looking to sell one to three months, the conversation is going to be more aggressive. If they're looking to sell in six months, the conversation is going to be Hi. Just want to make the introduction, let you know who we are. We're the people that you filled out the form on, and that's all we just want to let you know what's going on. That's basically no hard sell, no wanting to get in there with a pitch or anything like that. Just, hey, I want to introduce myself. I'm here to help or provide any kind of value, maybe give us some tips on the market or something else in the neighborhood that's been selling something like that. Exactly. That's really all it is. And we do it in the way, like my callers. They're obviously not salespeople, but they're just saying their script would usually be like, if it's a six plus month out, they're saying, hey, this is Ed calling from Adam package at Kw. I just want to give you a call because you filled out a form on our website in regards to selling your home. Are you still looking to sell or did you sell your house already? Those two questions. They're going to answer something like, no, I didn't sell. And then boom, boom, boom, boom. Now we're going to start getting a little bit more information. So I think so much of what's important here is the way the agent handles the leads at hand off, right. I mean, is that part of your process, too? Do you offer anything to coach the agents up on? Not every lead is I'll be there at 02:00 on Tuesday. I mean, do you have something that offers that process or no. I have, like, these little courses that I put together like, I have a course called F, your follow up, showing you the actual way to follow up correctly. And I made them so short, they have, like, two minute videos. So I have them go through that the expectations from an expectation standpoint. My team, like, my sales guys really know what I'm looking for. So we don't really have headache clients that 1st 30 days or whatever. But to answer that question, we have to go through some training. Do they go through it? Some of them do, some of them don't. But when they don't, I already know that three months they're going to be gone. Let's say we want to bring you on and we're going to talk offline because we're constantly trying different ways to generate consistent seller leads. Do I get you for in market representation, or do you work with multiple people in market? How do you kind of figure that out? So you mean as in from a realtor standpoint? Yeah. So let's say we want to bring you on for Staten Island. This podcast is going to air, and maybe you get no phone calls. Maybe you get five from other brokers in the market. Does the quality get diluted, or does it scale up as you add more ad spend? So the simplest form possible to answer that is, I don't think any of us can afford to spend enough to dilute the market with our ads $1,000. It's not even enough to begin. You'll probably reach with $1,000 ad set, and you're probably going to reach around a thousand people, and that's not even people filling out your lead form. That's just like reaching them. And I could be wrong. It's probably less because costs per click in the Staten Island area is like $$6 to $13 a click. So yeah, you're probably going to be reaching a lot less than that. But if your ad spends not, like, $50,000 a month, you'll never have anything to worry about because, Zillow, they're spending $78,000 a month on Google alone. So I think we're good. Got it. Well, this is fascinating, man. Is there anything else that you wanted to touch on that you guys are doing that I didn't hit on. I really think it all boils down to the follow up. I think that agents really need all business owners, not just agents. They need to begin developing SOTs standard operating procedures. So when you have a business, you need to think in terms of if I wanted to sell this right now, could I if I wanted to franchise this right now, could I so standard operating procedure for people? I don't know. It's just a list of how to do things for my callers, how to do a proper phone call, or how to onboard a client. Step one, send them a welcome email. Step two, upload the intro message into Basecamp. Click here for intro message to Basecamp. Step three, book an onboarding appointment. If you can do that with your entire business, it's going to be so much smoother. But then you could begin delegating. The reason why agents are wearing ten different ads. They literally can pay someone three to $5 an hour to do half the stuff, set up the co appointments. Obviously, they may have to pay someone extra to actually sit there. They could pay somebody to do all this extra transaction coordinating stuff if they just said, hey, this is how you fill out a contract. Step one, input the address. Yes, it's going to take you 2 hours to create a standard operating procedure to fill out a contract. Absolutely. But you just do it once. Exactly. Yes, you do it once. And if you don't want to do that, let's just make it easier while you're sitting down, filling out on loop the contract, downloadloom it's free L-O-O-M. Com and just click record and speak out loud. All right, I'm inputting their name, their number, address, et cetera. Offer whatever it may be because listing agreement, whatever you put in there and just do it once and then the person that you hire say, hey, this is how you fill out an agreement. You don't want to follow up with leads. Every agent's excuse. Oh, I don't have time to follow up with leads. Well, one, if you don't have time to follow up leads, you're going to be paying a premium. There's no way around that one. Or you could just build out a nice little follow up system. Like, hey, Mr. And Mrs. Virtual Assistant, this is what I want you to do. Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I want you to text, call and email Susie because she wants to buy a house. And this is the message I want you to send. And this is the number I want you to send it from, and then they're like, okay, there's a lot of blame that goes on in this industry. It's not anyone's fault if you don't have. Sops how are you going to be a good boss? I hate the word boss. I mean, like, leader. How can you lead someone if you don't even know where you're going? Your day to day is so out of whack. And then you're trying to hire a marketing company. Now you're frustrated because you gave them money. So somewhere inside you feel entitled like, oh, they owe me. They work for me. The marketing company doesn't work for you because at the end of the day, the marketing company knows how to advertise online. This is why these tech companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars. Because if we can provide the leads, we can go knock on every single door and just say, hey, why don't you come with us? Zillow didn't pull the rug. 80% of Zillow leads get uncalled and unresponded to what do you think they're going to do? Zillow is paying for those leads. Regardless, they're going to make their money back. They're not going to sit here and be like, this isn't ethically, right? They have a $50 million payroll to give out every single year. You think they're about to wait on Susie because she didn't feel like making a call or bank her. Sops no, they're not. 87% when listing complaints 87%. The first complaint was real estate agents don't call back. And how do real estate agents expect to survive as a collective? Everyone is so willing to be gung Ho. I'm EXP and have this cult like mentality, but nobody is saying when you get paid if you call your leads today. Yeah. So unfortunately, what happens in this business is that people come in, the market is hot, they make some money, then the market cools off and they fall off, and it's just a constant turnover. So what we're working really hard on now is building out a complete Institute that talks about imparting knowledge, but also the process. Exactly what you just said, making videos for everything, how to order a business card, how to get your extension, how to fill out each individual form, literally a how to of the processes, but then also imparting knowledge. Right? How do you distinguish yourself? How do you close that's a whole other separate skill set. Because we're building for scale. We want to be able to duplicate this over and over, and we want to have the agents that are going to be here long term. I've got some people who've been with me for 17 or 18 years, but what we're trying to put together now is a scalable way as the new people come in, that they have this infrastructure. And Pete's working on just a state of the art killer CRM that we're so excited for. That's going to automate a lot of this stuff for the agents. You know, part of the problem, Curry, is if they don't call this lead, they know another lead is coming. I sat down and reviewed leads with Pete today. I'm sitting there looking at some agents are getting 50, 60 leads per month that are office generated leads. It's not even their book. Well, if I don't get to this one or I put a half ass attempt into it, I know the next one's coming in a couple of hours anyway. And that's what happens, right? So trying to capture that remarket to them and get them in a system where the CRM that Pete's building is going to look at. How many times did you contact this person. What have you done in business development? How long have people been in the pipeline, right? To track all of that stuff to try and build elite level agents. That's what we're trying to do. How do I say this? Well, son, I'm just going to say straight out, it's going to do more harm than good. You can't give Realtors everything. I know. That's the problem. We don't know. That's the problem. You can't give everyday Realtors. But you can build elite level agents that will crush. Yes. And I see that's where you guys are headed. And it's 100% scalable. And with everything you guys are talking about, I already see exactly how you can scale it literally in, like, twelve months. I'm talking overnight would be the easiest process ever. Once it's built out. It's all about creating irresistible offers. So that's a conversation for a difference. But I like where you guys are headed. We need the next brokerage with individuals like yourselves to become the next Zillow, because Realtors are not safe. Compass is coming for everybody. Yes. Sotheby wherever Ryan Sirhant works for, he is coming. His marketing team is insane. There's this team with exp. I forgot their name. Some Spanish dudes out of California, my friend actually does the marketing for their company. So I get the little inside scoop. They are coming to dominate because they're going to scoop up all the good agents. If we're going to spoonfeed people here, let's spoonfeed the closers and just call it a day. That's it. Everybody want to be an agent. Nobody want to be a closer, though. Well, look, we're excited about what we're doing. We see what you see, and we think that we're going to end up with a product that's going to be pretty goddamn hard to compete with because we also do the commercial side. And there's no franchises out there that are hitting on the commercial side at all. And I mean, we crush with commercial. So we're excited for it. You guys are going to do, like, Airbnbs and stuff like that as well. So someone needs to take over the Airbnb market. You're already doing commercial. We know brick and mortar is going away little by little anyway. Yeah. So let me see if it's no, that's the beauty of it. Is that once you have this kind of model built, there are so many little different veins that you can put a team on to focus within. It's exciting, man. I mean, it's changed, but it's exciting as hell. We're going to look back at this or I don't know how old you guys are, but your great grandchildren or grandchildren are going to look back and be like, what were you doing during that time? You were able to get leads for 2030 or even $100. You could lift your phone up on TikTok and become a celebrity overnight. You did stupid dances. And the next thing you know, you're sitting next to Jay Z and BBC at the MTV Music Awards, and no one realizes that. And when you look back at COVID, I literally went from 2020 in 2019 through half of 2020, I was living in a one bedroom apartment with five other people. I saw the opportunity that I had and the knowledge is just implemented and saw that there was a problem. Everyone was generating leads and nobody knew how to convert them. And it took my business that first year. We did. I think it was like $196,000. And now we did that in the first quarter of 2021. And a wise man once told me, and I'm the wise man that told me to myself,

Participant #1:
the opportunities of today are not promised tomorrow. That's right. It's a unique moment in time, man. And people walking around not quite realizing what's happening here. If you just learned how to get a listing, if you just waited with a marketing company for 60 days, you're selling your house. You guys are in Staten Island. You're probably selling that house $40,000 above market. Yeah. You're getting closings in, like, seven to 14 days. I got three listings in one month back in 2019 through Facebook ads. It took me three months to close the deal, and I was dying. I was like, Whatever you need, seller concessions won't pay the inspection. Just give me. I need the quote. The Realtor now shows up. They could put their feet up. We got to stop with this thing acting like we're doing such a crazy thing right now. We're providing so much value. There are some brokers that are really I've seen some working their ass off getting that $100,000 above ask. But let's just call for the regular Realtor. You're not going to have to do a lot. Go put some stuff on Zillow real quick and then put your little post on Facebook looking to buy or sell. Hit me up and you're going to make 2030 $40,000. So it's just learn the skill to keep that machine rolling. Because once you own the machine, when you own the system, it doesn't matter if the market goes sideways, up, down. It's just a different ad, but it's the same follow up process. It's the same personality. You're showing up the same every time, and that's where you begin winning. There's a huge difference between an order taker and a deal maker. Yes, we're building deal makers here. Absolutely. Listen, Corey Harper, how do people get a hold of you? You can find me on Facebook, and it's just simple. It's going to be. Well, I think my spelling will be at the bottom. K-H-A-R-I and then H-A-R-P-E-R-I say some pretty blunt stuff on there, so, yeah, professionalism it's there. I always deliver all my words, but I do business on Orthodox. You're a fun follower on Instagram. I'll say that for sure. Thank you very much. I just try to be me because there's no point in being a business owner. If you can't be yourself, right? Absolutely. Amen. Listen, man, this is a great talk, and we're going to reach out to you afterwards. All right? Absolutely. Stay safe.