FREE Listing Lead Generation

When you are a skills-based agent, you are on your way to being financially free.

Today, we are going to do a deep dive down the rabbit hole of what's really going on along the front lines, courtesy of Tim & Julie Harris' exerience on coaching calls with top producers in the four corners of the country. Remember the headlines and news stories and all that stuff about real estate in general, that's looking at the past. So if you want to really know what's going on, I'm going to tell you exactly what they are hearing from the four corners of the real estate realm and report back exactly what we're seeing. From Julie's calls, they are seeing an absolute hurried, crazy, manic seller's market continuing.

Just when we thought that, you know, there couldn't be any less inventory, it's still starvation for inventory!

When you list stuff that people want, you can basically take that check to the bank. The listing agent wins every time. You have to remember that. So you know the question, and we've had some calls with some very powerful listing agents that typically have their magic number under control and their inventory is being driven down. So everybody's looking for "what's the magic thing to take a listing tonight" right? Okay, here's the deal.

You have to do the same things you always have to do, you just have to do more of them with more urgency and more skill.

There is no "if you just do this one Facebook thing you're gonna be all set", OK? But that's what they feel like they're looking for.

Because when your inventory dries up, let's be honest, you get a little bit panicked. We preach all the time from the highest mountain to learn how to be a proactive generator. If your whole business has been predicated on buying leads, you're going to be suffering at a very grand scale right now. We're actually giving you some specific drill down on exactly what I just said here in a second.

When you're chasing expired listings, don't just assume, and I know this is counterintuitive, but don't just assume the old price was wrong. We see agents who are listing the houses at the old price or getting the property sold. You might not have been in the business long enough to know or not be an experienced enough listing agent to know it, but here's the moral of the story...

What happens when a listing hits the market in modern times? After maybe a week or two, if it hasn't sold yet, the house starts getting this sort of "damaged goods" reputation. In other words, people start making up mental stories of why it didn't sell. It must be over-priced, no one else wants it why should I? Then just think how the MLS works. Think how most IDX search results work where just send you the newest listing, so a new listing is the best thing ever. Everyone's excited about it, but as soon as that new listing is 30 days old, or in some markets, only two weeks old, then nobody asks about, and the showings drop off like a rock. You can see that in the statistics.

So what does that tell you? Maybe when it went on the market, maybe it didn't sell because the seller wasn't allowing showings. Maybe there was some condition issue that the seller hadn't quite remedies. Maybe it was the price, right? Who knows?

But what happens then? It house sits in the market. It passes whatever the local market thinks should have been the reasonable amount of time for the home to sell in, and it just begins to smell a little bit like spoiled milk. Psychologically, it's near it's due date, so to speak. That's the tolerance for what people will have as far as expectations of how long it should take a house to sell.

Then people stop showing it. Now they are in the house. It might be perfect. Everything about the house might be perfect. But let's say, for example, buyers come to the market after the house has been for sale for a month.

They're asking to see it, but all the agents who have seen it not sell are now going to tell those new buyers no, you don't see that one. Supposedly, it's got this problem or that problem.

That's what happens. Unfortunately, that's a lot of bad, unprofessional behavior from real estate folks. However, in the real estate agent's defense, the systems are set up to make older listings look bad. In essence, they they go stale, they start smell like spoiled milk after about 90 days in most markets.

So then what happens is when it expires, you will find that if you just take fresh pictures, right, provide a fresh description and keep it at the same price, the house can bounce back at the same price. I know this might sound wack a doodle, but it's true, you might even be able to raise the price. I've seen some of that, of course, if you're in a superhot market. Sometimes the sellers get frustrated with the agents because the agent didn't sell the home in 60 or 90 days, or 30 days in some markets, and then you pick up that listing. You don't necessarily need to go to war with that seller over price, that's the moral of the story.

So you've got to know your market. Don't just automatically assume. Now take note, this time next year when a house doesn't sell, I promise you we're all going be practicing a lot of price change scripts.

But for now, right for now, just keep your head focused on what the market is going willing to give you.

You don't have to be a super experienced agent to know your market stats. You do have to actually watch. It's a great way to do it. What's cheap and free is to just watch your hot sheets every morning. If you watch that every day and you compare side by side, you can see the price range where you start to see price reductions.

You can see if everything is selling except condos, and condos are full of price reductions. You can see those trends, but not if you just look at it like every now and then. When you have a listing appointment, you're not going to have a good sense. One of the things that you've got to really learn is how to do drill down on CMAs. Then you're going to need to learn how to interpret it and present it to the seller.

A lot of you rely on these products, the software programs that produce really beautiful CMAs. You're just relying on the shock and awe of the imagery and the graphics and all that to win the seller over. But in a market like this, remember what I'm telling you. Those things are using historical data, and you need to be using data that's more pertinent to things that are happening now, not things that happened the last six months. When you're looking at a subject property, you're not just looking at that historical datak, and you are gonna take that into consideration.

The most recent stuff has the most value and what is pending, right? So I used to do this for CMA's and it might seem like you can't go over $X right? So you've got a beautiful custom home. It's a popular neighborhood, and it seems like I want to price it at $575,000.

But then I look at what's actually pending, and there's nothing more than $550,000 pending, so probably that's more of a $549,000 house. Even though it's got some cool stuff, it seems like there's a ceiling to that. That was an example of how you price in a normal  market, wen average days on the market is more like 100, four months, and the average for the MLS is over six months.

But if you have a market that's turned very aggressively towards being a seller's market, then go back to our previous statements.

So let's travel over to Charlotte, North Carolina, which is one of the hottest markets in the united states for a whole variety of reasons. One coaching client of Tim & Julie Harris set four for sale by owner listings between this and last week from proactive generation. He got on the phone, he used their scripts, and boom, four listings.

Some times we have to fight the urge to look for the easy button and be attracted to the passive lead generation. Agents are still emotionally drawn to hitting the easy button. But wake up and realize that the easy button stuff isn't working now in his marketplace.

So this Charlotte agent got back in the proctive lead generation saddle with the energy and enthusiasm that he should have just last week. Now he's going back and realizing how much more business he could have taken this year had he not even remotely gone down the passive lead generation path. If he had stayed proactive. He thinks he would have made another 50% - 60% more in revenue this year.

That's kind of the experience that a lot of you guys are going to start having. Ask yourself, why is it that what I was doing in the past is no longer working today and won't work in the future?

So here's the big question. I want everybody to be introspective. Are you as a sales professional? Are you CONVENIENT or are you qualified? Are you convenient or are you skilled? How do you know? So here's some questions to ask yourself.

Let's frame this in terms of listings.

Question number one. Do you only have the listing appointment because you know the owner?

In other words, your friends that are in your center of influence database.

Question number two. Do you only have the appointment just because you sold them the house? They called you because you came to mind.

Question number three. Do you have the appointment only because somebody referred that person to you before you have the appointment or because your broker gave the lead to you?

Question number four. Do you have this because you bought the lead, or did you actually earn the right to be there because you have skill? So buying the listing lead again, we're gonna focus on sellers. That could be from a radio ad. That could be from just a host of reasons. But the main thing is you spent money in exchange for that lead, opposed to having skill and having gone out and earned that lead.

Before we go on, I want you guys to be really clear about something. A lot of you are rationalized buying leads because you think it's a better use of your time.

In other words, you think it makes sense for you to delegate lead generation, so it's not skills based, so you go off and do something that's supposedly a higher and better use of your time.

Here's the reality. There are only really five things that pay you in real estate. But there's only maybe three that you need to be really good at....

And these are the things that you should never delegate:

1) proactive lead generation.

2) pre qualifying for your leads,and then obviously

3) going on listing appointments.

You could be terrible at everything else in real estate, and if you're really good at those things, you're gonna rock.

Now, as you try to delegate your listing appointments, what then is going to happen is because that person that you hired to go on listing appointments will not be interested in proactive lead generating. They are not willing to build skills, they are only going to be willing to go on appointments that you have created the lead for them.

In other words, you've had to spend thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars to generate those listing leads. Your profit from the listing started to go away immediately. The business is going to go to pot because of the fact that you are having to buy all your business.

If your business is predicated on buying your business, you're not going to make any profit. Furthermore, when the markets turn around and things slow down, you're going to experience true financial hardship because you're going to build in all these fixed costs, and you're not going to be able to maintain them because of the fact that cash flow stops.

That's what happens. That's what happened back when covid hit. That's what's going to happen again, most likely to a lot of brokerages. That's what's happening to teams. It's not that you guys are bad business people. It's not that you not capable of building a fantastic business.

The problem is, is that no one's ever told you that the business model that you're depending upon worked in a very tight set of business market circumstances, primarily being a hot sellers market where the velocity of the money, the transactions happened so quickly it essentially covers up for the lack of skill. This is true even if you've got money coming in every single month and everyone is singing your praises, and you're selling lots of units and getting lots of awards, and everyone thinks you're the greatest thing since sliced bread.

It compensates because you're able to meet your debt burdens, and you may able to get everybody paid. You don't take the time to slow yourself down and look at your actual profit because the whole system reinforces you.

Nobody slows you down and says, hey, Bob, you know what? Let's look at all the transactions you've done the past year. Or if you're a big broker, then maybe the past maybe 36 months. Let's look at the actual margins you're pulling out of it. So, having done this numerous times before, here's the story.

Most big brokerages make less than 2% before tax profit, and most teams make less than 2%. Now, teams will obviously obscure their numbers like nobody I have ever experienced. People are people, but most teams are making, at best, they're making maybe 6% to 8% before tax profit. That means that for every million dollars that a team will earn (as who knows what their average expenses are and all the rest of it, and all their fixed costs on buying leads), that means the person running the team is actually netting less than $100,000.

And that's normal now. Now, well, some will run a team where the agent themselves are still going on the listing appointments. They haven't delegated the most profitable aspect, and maybe they still do live. There are pre qualifying, so they're making sure that they are pulling low hanging apples off their fruit tree with regard to the listing leads.

Side bar: Buyers calling on listings might actually having houses to sell, and low skilled agents never going to pull that out. That is a listing lead.

That's the cycle that all of you guys have normalized because you've only been in this business - 90% of you - since 2008 or 2009. If you don't know, and no one's telling you that there's a smarter, frankly, vastly more profitable way to run your business so that you can withstand any sorts of ebbs and flows in market conditions and interest rates and all that, now you know. I am telling you. You no longer have an excuse.

So look at those other questions. Even if you're not buying your leads, which is the biggest black hole, that's why you spend so much time on it, but let's look at these other things...

So you have the appointment because you know them. Your on the appointment because you sold him the house or because it was referred to you or your broker gave the lead to you. None of those four things is predictable or duplicatable in any way, and they don't require you having the skill to compete.

That's right. So let's say that this is gonna be a month where your broker doesn't do that. Most of you only take listings that are walk-in listings where you don't have to compete with another agent, where you don't have to overcome the hard questions because it's basically an easy relationship-based sale.

And some of you, most of you that's what you're going to tell us about how you're supposed to build your real estate business, centers of influence and past clients, right? How many people out there beating you over with his head with a stick telling you that's the business to go after?

That's the business that slows down the fastest when the market starts to change because the sellers start looking for skills-based agents and most of you guys have been spoiled, yes, with basically having relationship-based businesses which are not predictable. You cannot tell me essentially that you will be able to list a house every single day from centers of influence or past clients.

You cannot tell me you're going to be able to do a certain number of transactions from buying your leads. You can't. You are beholden to whether Dave Ramsey is going to send you a lead, or you're beholden to whether or not your paid lead sources going to send you crap leads or good leads. You will never be free financially or emotionally if you don't have a skills-based business.

So the question is, what are you going to do about it? What makes you different? You know, if you're not sitting at your magic number, or worse, if you don't even know what magic number means (which is the number of listings that you need it all times to meet or exceed your monthly financial goals)... How many listings? Why listings? We talk to you about this all the time because listings throw off other business while buyers do not.

So where are you going to start? Best place to start is with becoming very clear that this is an issue for you. Use the Treasure Map, use the 90 Day Massive Action Plan. Get involved so that you're not spinning your wheels on this.

You don't realize that you can have control of business by having skills, right? So an agent that has skill, what does that actually mean? It means that I could drop you off anywhere in the country, assuming you're licensed in that State, and that you actually could take a listing by Friday. No problem, right? That's what skill means now. Does that come from Expired? for sale by owner? Does it come from probate? Does it come from prospecting builders? You have lots of different options. There's not just one because you have skill. That's what it means. You're not dependent on rolling the dice that maybe a past client will resurface. Or maybe maybe your broker will have something they don't want to work and will give it to you today.

That's called luck, and that is not a business plan. So the hardest part emotionally for you guys moving past a lot of the stuff. This is a normal coaching problem.

You bought in to the belief that you could buy your business through youtube videos. Right? So you've been doing Youtube videos, and you've been following some, you know, makeshift guru's plan for how you'd become somehow a Youtube prince or princess, and you're gonna be the expert and all this balogna, and maybe it's Instagram. Maybe it's whatever right? You're believing that passive works, and the emotionally difficult part of that is the acceptance that you need to quit doing it or you need to de-prioritize it in such a way that because you're not willing to accept the fact that it doesn't work because you don't want it, there's two things that are pulling back and forth the tug of war in your head.

One you don't want to feel like you were lied to and fooled into believing something that wasn't true. And two, the other part of it is your ego saying that if you just stick with it a little bit longer, a little bit longer... If you make your videos a little bit wackier... If you just... So you're not willing to stop doubling down on dumb because here's the real truth, guys. There's a difference between quitting and quitting while you're ahead after you've got enough data points. So let's actually set some parameters around this.

So you need to set a ground rules with any sort of paid lead generation, right? And you don't.

Then you just continue to throw money at this usually horrible idea just until the cows come home because you've not determined how long you're willing to throw money at this idea and what your return on investment should be.

Those are two concepts that are foreign to most agents minds. Brokers, by the way, are going to be least likely for you to want to actually have a set of filters to run their gimmicky ideas through are the ones that are selling you the ideas because they know that if you start holding their gimmicky ideas accountable, that you will wise up quick and realize that it's a dumb thing to start doing in the first place.

But look how these guys sell this, these ideas to you. It's based on your ego. They sell them based on the idea that something's going to magically happen, right? They sell them sell based on fear of missing out.

If you don't do it, somebody else is going to do it. All these different little gimmicks sell through pulling these little emotional levers that they flip in your head, and then you find yourself committing to something. Then a month passes, two years pass, five years pass... and then you figure out how much you never actually stopped to think how much money or time you spent towards that idea that's never working.

So now you just think, well, if I just hold out a little while longer... You're stubbornly holding out for something that really probably wasn't even worth doing in the first place.

So give yourself permission to quit. There's nothing wrong with quitting. There's a difference between quitting and quitting while you're ahead. The quitting while you're ahead part at this point, for some of you, that ship has sailed with some of these gimmicky things. But the reality of it is, is quitting while you're ahead could simply mean that you're not willing to be fooled into believing the easy button things. Going continuously, you know, is ever gonna work.

In defense of your old self who is making the decision for you to do that gimmicky thing, let's give that old self a Hall Pass. Maybe back in the day when that idea came around, it was a good one. I'll give you guys an example... Back in the nineties, google started doing pay per click ads and realtor.com went live. You could absolutely generate stellar leads from paper click. I remember when google launched pay-per-click it was over Christmas break. It worked brilliantly for like 90 days, then all of a sudden google changed it. Other people figured it out. The competition figured it out. A big broker just started doing it. All the things made it so there was no longer viable. And so that was that. That was the window.

But how many other agents stuck with it and are still doing it today, even though they're not getting results, they're not getting tangible closings. You there's a filter you need to employ. If an idea cannot produce actual tangible results in a market like this, in my opinion, in less than 30 days, you need to stop doing it.

It's a gimmick, and by tangible results I mean closed transactions where you're making a profit. So some of you guys will just exchange money for money so you'll spend so much money on generating leads.

You're not even factoring for your time, and then you're basically earn the amount of money back that you spent to generate the leads in the first place, and you think that's a win.

It's not. You're running a non-profit business that's not sustainable. It's not predictable. It's not do duplicatable. It's not the reason you got into real estate - to essentially just have some tech company guru become your boss by deciding whether or not you're going to get good leads your bad leads.

Guys, stop skipping the real work in real estate, which is learning how to be a proactive lead generator. That's where most of you guys fail ~ your refusal to learn how to do the real work.

Now here's an interesting psychological thing that happens once you've accepted what we're saying is true and what you decide you're definitely going to go down the path of being a proactive lead generator, then there's a whole bunch of other new thought patterns and connections that happen along the way to forming that skill set to be a very a consistent proactive lead generator.

You start thinking more like a business person. You start valuing your time more. You start being more organized.

All these things and attributes you want come on the other side of knowing that you're going to be proactively lead generating and no longer chasing gimmicky ideas.

You guys understanding what I'm saying? It's the next level for all of you, provided you're actually willing to do it. 

Basically, you either listen to what I'm sharing here, and you become a proactive lead generator, or there are three paths forward:

1) You flouder through your real estate career. You stay in the business, but you never make any real profit because your chasing the latest gimmicky idea, or

2) You're going to fail out of the business, or

3) You're going to learn how to proactively lead generate by being a skill-based agent and make a profit. 

Those are your three paths forward. There's really no, there's no hybrid version. Those three paths. That's the path you guys have to choose which one you're gonna be on.

I beg you to consider being a proactive lead generator and becoming skills-based, and see all the rest of it for what it is. Sure, some of it's fun stuff that might have a place in your business down the road AFTER you've learned how to be a proactive lead generator. Once you become the dominant listing agent or a dominant listing agent in your marketplace, maybe you do want to work on a nice brand for yourself. Or maybe you do want to create a pretty website or who cares? That's fine. But you've already got cash. You've already got a consistent lead flow. At that point, you've built a foundation. If you want to add some of that other stuff, that's strictly optional. Go for it. But don't think you have to do that stuff first.

And then somehow when you do all this, you know, telling your story on Instagram, or doing all this Facebook stuff you guys were told to do, don't think that's going to lead to transactions, right? Don't believe that it's actually gonna work now. Can you create leads off social? Yes, but it's gonna cost you so much.

Are you actually gonna make a profit from it? Doesn't it make more sense that part of the purpose of getting in this business in the first place was to actually have a profit and make in a way in which you can improve the lives of the people you care about, starting with hopefully your family and yourself?

Isn't that the reason you got in the business in the first place? So I get it. Real estate is awash with stories about people doing all this business from social, all this business from buying business.

Nobody talks about net income. Just listen for that. That's another filter when so much presenting an idea to you when you're listening to a goat coach, a guru of whatever.

Run everything through very rigid filters with really the bottom line being the profit margin. If they're not presenting ideas like that to you, you need to realize what they are. They're just selling you easy button gimmicks.

It's qyite possibly because they probably have never learned how to be proactive lead generators themselves.

It's easier for them just to basically follow the current zeitgeist and hop on various youtube channels and listen to various internet marketing social networking whiz bang gurus and just copy what they're saying because all they're having to do is parrot back information they heard from somebody else.

You guys haven't heard this any other place, so you thought it was new information. This guru must know a lot about the internet. Right? And they're telling you all this stuff. In six months from now, they're going to tell you something different because the trend has moved to something else.

And that's the nature of how these guys are continuously selling you guys products with the belief, with the lack of understanding that that is not a sustainable business model.

If you want a sustainable business model, if you want to be a true professional, you have to earn the right to do that in the way you earn. The right to do that is by having the skill set necessary not just to proactively lead generate but also obviously to sell people's houses in all kinds of different situations and solve people's problems. Yes, that comes with time, but it also comes with the mindset that your highest and best purpose on this planet is being of service to other people.

If you accept that, if that becomes your internal barometer for how you conduct yourself on this planet. "I am here to be of service to you. How can I help you? How can I make your life better"... On the other side of that acceptance, not the social networking, not the ego-fuelled stuff that's basically awash with everything in real estate level in the world right now - but if truly being in alignment with your highest and truest purpose, which is being of service to other people... when you stay true to that, on the other side of that, you're not going to be able to allow yourself to do the gimmicks anymore.

You're going to know that if you're going to be in alignment with being of service to other people, that you have to learn how to actually do it, which means you're gonna have to learn skills.

You guys get it. These are the keys that once you essentially put in the lock and turn, and you walk through that door, you're going to find everything on the other side is probably beyond what you'd hoped it would be like, right? That's what you're going experience, and that's incredibly exciting to me. It's what drives me. Your little epiphanies, those little a-ha moments, it's fulfilling to me - personally and professionally.

Allow that to happen for your yourself in your life. If you need me for anything at any time, you can always text me directly at 303-589-2320.

By the way, we're always looking for great agents to become partners with us in our eXp group. If you want to talk to me about eXp at any time, you can obviously just text me directly at 303-589-2320.