Today on the Listing Agent Lifestyle podcast we're talking with Matt Dunlap from Pleasanton, California.
Matt works with his wife, who's a successful realtor with about 60 transactions a year, and they're at the point now where they're interested in building a team. He had a lot of questions about how to apply our approach to team building, and whether anything would change, how they might do things differently with a team in place.
We also talked about marketing luxury homes, and the value of high end homes in their portfolio.
It was a really great conversation. We covered all the elements of the Listing Agent Lifestyle and I think you're really going to enjoy this episode.
Links:
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Transcript: Listing Agent Lifestyle Ep053
Dean: Matt Dunlap.
Matt: Hey Dean, how is it going?
Dean: So good. How are you?
Matt: I'm great, glad to be talking to you.
Dean: Me too. Where are you calling from?
Matt: Pleasanton, California.
Dean: In Pleasanton California.
Matt: Yeah, east bay over the Bay Area.
Dean: Okay, perfect. I'm super excited, we got the whole hour here and maybe we could start with the Matt Dunlap story and then we can figure out where to take it from there.
Matt: I'm actually the marketing director for a real estate. My wife's in real estate and she's been I it for about 13 years and she's pretty successful. We're kind of at the point where she's starting to start a team, we have two other agents that have joined up with her, so we're moving that direction and her whole business has been built around customer service. Doesn't do a lot of marketing, all of our business comes from referrals so now that she has other agents that are kind of relying on leads, we need to set up a system to basically get them leads.
And so that's how I found you and I really liked the system. We've been implementing the giving value, I believe, the direct, what do you call it? Direct response, and it works great for some areas than others. Some neighborhoods we'll send it, we'll get back in some neighborhoods, we'll send it, we'll get just a huge response. I'm thinking about maybe those areas are high end so maybe I do need to tweak the postcard, maybe the yellow postcard doesn't work for them, but maybe something else will. So we just got to test it out but all in all the idea of offering them something of value is just such a great idea.
Dean: Often what changes is the turnover rate in certain areas like the higher up you go on the price, go up into the luxury or higher end, the turnover is much lower than the middle of the bell curve, so the response rate is not a factor of the high end, doesn't respond to postcards. It's the fact that it's not on their radar to be thinking about moving. Because we use the same postcard for high end ocean front or a mountain view or in the highest end areas and it's still the to go to.
Matt: That makes a lot of sense.
Dean: What I look at those things is the total yield. You know, I look at it for the purpose of it. If we're following the whole listing agent lifestyle, the elements here, the first thing is if you're going to have a listing centric kind of business, which if you're going to build a team, it's a good idea to have that, is to secure the way that you're going to get listings predictably. A lot of times when people are with a referral business and repeat business, it's not as orchestrated often as it could be and having a something that you can drive that side of the business with marketing, that makes a big difference. What kind of volume does your wife do right now, how does the business workout?
Matt: She sells about 60 homes a year and that's all transactions, that's representing both buyers and sellers. I think when I followed your six months to six figures and I think the one I've been missing, I think you had two of them and currently you're in one. I think the initial email that I sent to you for this to be on your podcast was, hey, do you want to start at seven months to seven figures, that's where we're at.
I'm looking at it, I remember I was listening to your six month one, it was a couple of weeks ago and I think you talked about when your team gets big enough or when you start doing a lot of volume, you've got to start automating it. I think that's kind of where we are, she's really busy so the idea of sending out packages of our price report and stuff like we need to learn to how to automate it and really get our followup. We sit here and we'd talk about how also our follow up is and we really need help with that. If we could solve that problem, we could do a lot.
Dean: On the listing side, we just wrapped up in September, the fifth year of our case study with Tony Kalsi, you've probably heard that, it was one of the first episodes we did. The fifth year, what was the most amazing about it is that the revenue over the five years went up to 874,000 and the most fascinating thing was that he had responses like listings and sales from people who had responded in each of the five years. So he had people from 2013, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18, all last year so the cumulative value of the lead portfolio that you're generating there, of even the people who responded five years ago are now listing their homes with them because of the followup, it was really amazing to see just the steepness of the curve on this end of it went from 542, it says 874 this year.
That was really because it becomes more valuable the more leads that you've generated. It's really about just staying the course and doing the execution of it because we've already done all the creative part. We already have written the newsletters and the cover letters and everything that you need to follow up. It's literally just about assembling the pieces along with whatever the market updates are for the last 30 days.
Matt: Okay. So the follow up in that system or that case study out your newsletters and a market report like a recent sales?
Dean: Yes, exactly. So each month what goes out is a cover letter, which highlights one of the offers that we have for people to kind of take the next step, which would be either requesting a pinpoint price analysis or requesting a room by room review, or inquiring about the silent market where we say we may be able to sell your houses list 24 hours without even putting it on the market. That really is an amazing equity builder, the longer that you do it, the more valuable it gets. I just had lunch yesterday with Kenny McCarthy who was also one of the guests on Listing Agent Lifestyle, if you remember, he's in Cape Ann just north of Boston in Massachusetts.
He's been doing ocean front homes on Cape Ann and that's why I say about the postcards either working on the high end of things there like in the three, $4 million range homes on the ocean there and the longevity of it is really where the real value is, it's not so much about um, send out the postcards and then get a listing this month. Although that does happen, it happens that way too but the real value is in the 10 people that responded that didn't list their house this month, but are going to a list their house over the next, at some point over the next 12, 24.
Matt: The price report that you have an example of the south beach homes looks really good but here in our area our neighborhoods are a little bit more boring. We don't have these luxury condos and that's kind of our target. Her target is really the three, two.
Dean: Yeah, absolutely. That's fine. Excuse me, because that's kind of the bread and butter. Like that's the thing, that's the kind of home. What's amazing for like the covers of the reports and stuff that you can do is if you look, there's probably, on flicker, if you did a flicker search, do you know about flicker, the photo sharing?
Matt: Yeah.
Dean: On flicker if you just did a search for Pleasanton, you'd be amazed that there's a lot of who are taking like beautiful pictures of Pleasanton, of things around Pleasanton, whether it's recognizable things or just beautiful things that have a creative Commons license that you would be able to use as the cover of the report. Because it doesn't have to be a beautiful home always and even in south beach we do that often. We did like a lifeguard chair or a palm tree or a beach scene. So it's not about the necessarily the house on the cover.
Matt: Another one you mentioned was, say the luxury home magazines. Instead of advertising a house in there, you would advertise the price guide in there so can come in there and so we're kind of taking that idea. We're trying to find high end renters, people that live in houses that are $800,000 and above that are renting and kind of formally giving them a letter that offers the price guide. Not a postcard, but actual letter saying that here's what you can get if you move over and I'm wondering if you think a postcard would work for that or you would go with what you're-
Dean: I think a postcard works no matter what, especially in lead generation often a letter is going to... you've got to jump through more hoops to get a letter noticed and the thing about a postcard is that it's, there's no opening required and the message is right there so immediately you get 100% conveying the message. If you're doing that, what we're looking for is the people who it's already on their radar, I'm not using ever the postcards or direct mail to convince anybody to do anything. I'm using it to get in front of people who are already compelled to want to do.
Some number of the people who are renting in Pleasanton in the high end homes, some of them are never intending on buying, but some of them are and so I want to get in front of those and what would the people who are renting out be interested in as well, how much are the houses, what can I get for the money. That's why this market data is really... that's the underlying reason and philosophy behind everything that we do is offer people these are market data that somebody who is thinking about buying or thinking about selling would be seeking out, not trying to convince somebody that they should be buying.
The worst thing to see is people trying to like send postcards to renters saying you know, like your landlord called and said thanks for paying his mortgage again, or things that are making people feel like they're stupid for renting. If you think about that, on the other end of that, it may seem cute and stuff, but when you get it, if you get it, what you're really having to now admit is go, "Yeah, I'm dumb. I'm paying my landlord's mortgage. You're right, I should buy." Nobody wants to come from that but if you get it so that there's the market data, the information that they would really want to know if they were thinking about it, that's where you really want to come from.
Matt: Okay, sounds good. The next question I have is, you and I and you happen to develop this marketing plan for a team, wat would be the first thing that you do, and I guess you probably talked about this all the time with new agents? I'm wondering if it's different with an established agent. I guess we do have more funds to put towards marketing so should we go after more neighborhoods or?
Dean: Well, here's the thing, how I look at it. Right? So I'm glad you asked that question because this is the perfect time of year to be having this discussion, people are thinking about what am I going to do next year, how am I going to allocate my marketing budget and all that stuff. I look at it, the listing agent lifestyle elements that we talk about, I put them in the order of the way that I address them. If you're going to have a listing centric business, the first thing you need is to a way to get listings and so we want to establish that. The reason that I put it, number one is because it's so easy to get it into orbit and that's what I mean by that is there's a little bit of effort and set up time to get yourself all established there.
Like pick the area, get the list, get the postcards all set up, get your reports all in line, figure out everything for the first time, but then the second time is, is 20% of the effort of the first time and the third time is even easier than that. So getting that in orbit, like committing to a thousand homes or two thousand homes or whatever your budget will allow, focusing on that and saying, I'm committing to this area here over the long term, this is where I want to dominate this area. And getting that set up and rolling, that's kind of a really easy thing to set up and focus on that.
The very next thing that I focus on is multiplying the listings that you already have. If you've already got listings right now, then what we focus on and what I would ask is do you track or have an awareness of what your listing multiplier index is?
Matt: No, it's got to be over one. I'm familiar with what you're talking about, we don't keep track of it.
Dean: When you look at it, that it's easy to calculate because if we're just looking back at your last 10 listings and working to see how many transactions did you do from those listings, whether it was that you got the listing, sold, you found the buyer for it, you found a buyer that bought another house somewhere else, you got another listing in the neighborhood and you got a referral from the seller, those are the five opportunities that we have. Most people, when I do this exercise, like present it to them, typically what we find is that people have out of those out of 50 possible points, they end up with somewhere between 10 and 15 and which gives them an index because we divide it by 10 and an index of 1.5 say if it was 15 points.
What we look for now is our clubhouse leaders are the people who are established and focusing on this are up in the 3.3, 3.4 range of listing multiplier meaning every listing they get turns into three or more transactions. That's the fastest way to make an impact so if you've already got listings, that's a big plus.
Matt: That would be amazing, that would really-
Dean: You just start to look at what the impact of that would be. What's your average commission?
Matt: The prices put here, there hundreds of millions of dollars so it's pretty high end.
Dean: So the 30 to $40,000 range?
Matt: Yeah.
Dean: So you look at that to go from a to go from our listing multiplier index of one to three or even two would be a would be a tremendous thing. I look at this whole thing like when you look at it that if we know that it's possible and there are multiple people who have three plus as their listing multiplier index, that we know that's possible and that if you look at the difference between what you're doing right now and what that could be, it's like I love, I don't know whether you've ever heard me tell the story of Gamal Aziz, the guy who was the general manager of the MGM Grand, but his whole approach to it was he would look at all the components of the hotel and he would break it down by how high is high.
He would look at restaurants and he saw that their restaurant was doing $4 million dollars a year in sales and everybody was happy about it because it was profitable and nobody was complaining. But he would sit in the entrance of the MGM Grand and he would see people leaving each night need, ask them where are you going, and they'd say we're going to Spago, we're going to Nobu, we're going either to all these celebrity destination restaurants in Las Vegas. And he knew that if they had a celebrity restaurant in MGM in the same spot, that they could probably be doing $8 million a year. And so he looked at it that that restaurant, they're losing $4 million a year by not replacing that restaurant.
He did it, got the board's approval, replaced the restaurant, first year out they did $11 million in sales. And so that approach, when I look at it right now, if we took your last 10 and your existing listing multiplier is 1.5, so let's just do the quick math on that. If it was one point five and the minimum kind of average commission is $30,000 for you that would mean that you made $450,000 from that, from that bundle of 10 listings. Right?
Matt: Yeah.
Dean: but what the reality is that because you could be doing three, you actually lost $450,000 by not having the systems place that take your listing multiplier index to three. That's the way to kind of think about it.
Matt: That system I believe on your website is coming soon.
Dean: Yeah, we've got-
Matt: What were all the elements to that?
Dean: We have the-
Matt: All the elements for that would be?
Dean: Perfect, we have the instant open house landing page with the property pdf so people can just get all the pictures and the info. The info box flyer is one thing and we've used the infobox flyers on ocean front homes in Paradise Valley on $3 million mountain view homes. Those are really the least expensive highest value leads that we can generate. It's somebody who's driven by, picked up the infobox flyer and went to the incident open house, left their name and email, and then we've got it set up to send them an email inviting them to come and look at the house this weekend, just asking that like conversational emails. So it would be, "Hi Matt, I'm showing the house this weekend, would you like to join us?"
And people say, "Yes, I would, I would like to see it." So that's kind of thing is easy, but then we also have the just listed cards where we can send right around the neighborhood. We've been doing Facebook ads both in that area and in wherever the buyer for that home would be coming from. So there's so many concerted ways.
Matt: Do you have one that you've just listed?
Dean: We have a postcard, there's a postcard in Gogo agent that is a just listed postcard. We send out a postcard that says, do you know what your neighbors at 22 Graystone did last night? And then it's got a picture of the house and then it goes onto explain that they've been plotting for a long time and they decided to list their house and they listed it with Matt Dunlap or your wife's, whatever her name is, talks a little bit about the house and they're set up the instant open house where you can get all of the information at 22graystone.com. That's a kind of done for you kind of a tool. So that combination, when you start thinking about, we have often conversations about this, about sitting down and really looking at it and isolating that objective and starting to think, okay, how would I find the buyers here for this one?
And often what it really comes down to is setting up a system to find the buyers who are going to buy the homes where you're trying to get the listings before you ever get the listings. For example, we do a lot of what we call market making and I'm always looking to see how we can triangulate something here. In Winterhaven, if we are focused on the lakefront houses here that we send the getting listings postcards to find people who own the lakefront homes, get them to raise their hand that they're thinking about selling.
Then we also run homes and land ads with an offer for the guide to lake front house prices for buyers. So we're always looking to match those things up because there's nothing more valuable in a competitive listing situation than you having a buyer already for them, that's really the most valuable thing. That's one of the key things that if you're already doing multiple transactions and you've got listings, that's really one of the fastest wins that can be almost competition proof because when you get a listing, you're the only one that has the opportunity to market that listing.
Matt: To wrap up the listing lifestyle for a team, it sounds like you wouldn't really change anything. You have a system that works for new agents and also for established teams. It sounds like you would do the exact same thing.
Dean: I would, but the other thing, for the team members because the next element is getting referrals, so for the team members, one of the things that we would establish is an open communication line with their top 150 people. Because if somebody is a new agent or coming on as a team member and they don't have a client base right there where they've sold homes to people, where they don't have clients that they're keeping in touch with to get repeat business. They're not going to get repeat business because they haven't done anything yet but what they can get is referral business and business from their direct friends, the people who they know. So with every team member, what I would be focused on is getting them to gather up the top 100 or top 150, ideally, people that they know locally who potentially could be their clients.
The people that if they saw them at the grocery store they'd recognize them by name and have a conversation with them and so getting that together, and this is again one of those things where it takes a little bit of effort to get that into orbit, but the effort is really just sitting down and identifying who the top hundred are and then getting their addresses and once you've got their addresses and everything set up, we've got the tool, we've got the world's most interesting postcard to mail to them every single month and that set it and forget it. That's like, it doesn't require any other effort really because we already write the postcard each month for you.
Matt: We're working on filling that up and we used your nine word email to get addresses.
Dean: Yeah, perfect.
Matt: I'm also a member of the email mastery.
Dean: Perfect, okay.
Matt: I could switch over to that because I do have questions about the followup, when we have buyer leads, so let's say we have this listing and we use the instant open house and we get a lot of emails from potential buyers. I get a lot of emails from you and often I look at him and I wonder, did you write this or is this a copy that you send out to everybody? Maybe you can talk a little bit about that. Like what emails do you right? You said that a lot of emails, I get cheese and whiskers, I get this one, the listing agent and I also get other ones in between, for offers. So which ones do you do right or do you write them all?
Dean: Here's the thing, I do the More Cheese, Less Whiskers podcast and you are on my entrepreneur list, so that would be the all business owners. And you're on my real estate list because you're in the listing agent lifestyle thing, so on the entrepreneur side, you get three emails a week that are one, announcing the new podcast, then two emails that are all articles, little content that are three to 500 words and they're all taken from things that I've said on the podcast. So they're all just one neat, concise lesson or thought and those are written by, I have a writer who takes the transcripts of my podcasts and will find these three to 500 word chunks here, these ideas, and will polish the transcript to make it for a writing so it comes across as one thought.
Those get sent three times a week, on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday. I'm not writing those, I'm air quoting here, I'm not writing them, but I'm authoring them because it's all my words. It's everything, it's what I've said. I'm capturing everything that I say like this podcast right now, we're recording this and from this, at some point there will be an email that will come from something that I said here. Those are all authored by me, written, then what you notice is that the format is that content and then there's a PS that is usually something timely that will be like, you know, I've got a breakthrough blueprint event coming up next week in Orlando, so the last few of those may have been about that. Then I always have my super signature which says, plus whenever you're ready, here are three ways, or here are four ways I can help you grow your business so I'm always leading to the next step.
Matt: For a buyer, if we have a lead and we're going to send out let's say we'd send out maybe one a week, would that be too many?
Dean: That's the minimum. When we talk about converting leads, that's the next thing. We've got to have the flagship way of communicating with buyers who are at any moment could be ready to buy. What I like is sending out a weekly market watch email where we send a little bit of the format is really the short little intro at the beginning of, hey, here's what's going on or talking about something that you're doing, like saying, it's been a busy week, everybody's coming out of the woodwork after Thanksgiving and I was showing the homes in and liberty village this last, this last week, and there's a really great new one at 22 Graystone and here's a link for it. Then we've had 37 new listings this week, here's the link to see all of them.
And that really, that format of there you go, just a little bit of host chat I call it like a personality, insert your personality here, better than just the automatic update of here's the new property data for the week of whatever. That doesn't feel like a person, so we send out a weekly flagship like that with all the updates and we usually do it on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday to leave room to set up for if people want to come out on the weekend or whatever and to give you a chance to update whatever happened and the aftermath or after the weekend and we always include our super signature on those emails saying always leading to the next step. So we might say on the buyer side, plus whenever you're ready, here's three ways we can help you, join us for a daily tour of homes or come to our home buyer workshop, or get a free home loan report, whatever's going to trigger people to the next step.
Matt: The super signature, the offers, do you have them just reply to the email or do you link them to a form?
Dean: Both, booth. We have landing pages for each of those things set up where we have a daily tour landing page so you would set that in, Gogo agent. And we just link somebody right to that page where they can put in their name and their contact info and pick the day that they want to do the tour. Again, it’s not a scheduling software, it's really just an indication and the way I say to people, it's like your schedule is flexible and you base it on the priorities of stuff. If you're an active real estate agent, the highest level thing that you could be doing with your time is negotiating a contract right now with somebody who wants to buy a house. The next thing you could be doing is talking, excuse me, talking to somebody who is about to list their house to hopefully get them to list their house with you.
Then the next thing would be showing homes to a buyer who's ready to buy right now, those are the top three things. There's nothing else that should be a higher priority than that business wise aside from whatever family or personal boundaries you've set for your business but when you're in your business during business hours, those are the big three. Everything else could be adjustable around it and I say to people, if somebody called you up today and said, we're coming into town, we'd like to look at houses tomorrow, you'd probably be able to adjust your schedule to accommodate them. That's all we try and do with the daily tour is we just try and make it easy and we'll make it seem like it's already happening, like people are not asking you to go out of your way.
Matt: The last time I was on this forum you were talking about Facebook ads and you're getting really good results and are excited about that.
Dean: Yeah, actually I'm going to talk about it today on our Gogo agent call because have you seen the video ads that we've been doing?
Matt: Yeah, I saw it. I didn't see the results though. I saw the ad in the forum.
Dean: What we've been doing is I'm pretty excited because the last three months ago now we reactivated at Diane, her real estate license. She works in my office and I wanted to have like a front line laboratory so we activated her license so that we can do all the things that we do, exactly the way that we recommend. Right? And do you use it as a laboratory to test things. So what we've been doing is we've been doing the getting listings mailings, and then in addition to that, as kind of an amplifier, what we've done is set up a video ad where we actually had Diane go to the front entrance of the neighborhoods that we're doing, and record a video where she's standing in front of the gate for the entrance for Lake Ashton saying, "This is Diane Lightsey reporting live from like Ashton," and talking about the report that people are going to be getting the offer for in their mailbox right now.
We time it so that the ad is running only in Ashley, we do micro geographic targeting so we're only showing the ad to people who live in the thousand homes of Lake Ashton and it arrives or it runs in their newsfeed the same day that the postcards are arriving so it's an amplifier of it. We did it for 24 hours and got nine additional leads for $20, so $2 and 22 cents per listing lead using that model. That's a great innovation, so that's what I love about how we can document everything like that
Matt: I have a big problem with mailing, the reliability. How do you send out a postcard and know that they're going to get it on a certain day or how do you know that they're getting it?
Dean: We can't guarantee a certain day, but we send the postcards first class and we sent them with tracking so we know when they're hitting and that way then we can turn on the Facebook ad to run it at the same time.
Matt: Okay. So I guess if somebody responds to a postcard, you know the postcard was delivered and then you turn on the Facebook APP.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Matt: Okay, because I was trying to mail them to myself. We put our address on there but I wouldn't get it. It's very frustrating, the mailing is just frustrating. I followed one of your direct mail gurus that you were talking about, it might have been like Dan Sullivan or something, watched the video on YouTube and he was saying, never send bulk, never sent Iddm or first class. I'm really trying to figure out. I trust you have another system that I really liked that I want to implement, but again, I'm having trouble with getting the mailing out, which was the getting a just sold postcard to the neighborhood before the agent that actually sold the house sends it out. So we price report so it's kind of like a sales alert postcard.
Dean: Right, the listing next door, we call that.
Matt: Yeah, send that out as soon as we get a listing or a transaction in our neighborhood but it's hard to get those. It seems like whenever you send out a postcard it takes a while to get printed.
Dean: Tony Kelsey's been doing the listing next door. We're wrapping up a case study on that too and what Tony does is he has a runner that he hires who will hand deliver the postcards to the 50 homes around the listings that he wants to target. They may do three or four a day like that and they come and they pick up the postcards, they have the addresses of the ones that they want to deliver to and so he's able to do it the very next day. As soon as it comes on, they're out there with those and he has the runner use the map my walk map or my run APP so they can, he can see that they've made all the steps to deliver to the 50 homes around the listing. They send them a text when they're done and he's got the screen proof that they delivered them and that's how they get paid.
Matt: Is that a door in there? Is that a postcard or a door hanger or-
Dean: That's our postcard, right.
Matt: Do they just put it in the mailbox?
Dean: In Canada if they have mailboxes at the door, I believe that that is illegal in the US to put it. You can't put it in the federal mailbox, so you have to either put it in the door or in the window, however that might work.
Matt: I hope you're all listening to that because I think that's a good idea especially if you have a website that's the price will look for the neighborhood.
Dean: That was based on the fact that I observed on different occasions people who as soon as the sale sign went up that within the next few weeks another home came up where they were my hypothesis was that they were kind of waiting to let that one get out of the way and then put the house on the market.
Matt: You've answered a lot of questions so I'm just thinking.
Dean: I'm glad that you had the questions because it's looking at it this way and you're attaching the metrics to what you're doing really help you kind of establish where you are right now. If we looked at the 60 transactions that your wife does right now, how do those break down, where do those come from? So I would be looking to see. We divide everything into the three units, the before unit, the during unit and the after unit, so if your wife's business is primarily repeat and referral like that, that would be in that the majority of it is coming from the after unit. But how much of it is orchestrated referrals versus just that she's great and that people love her and she's nice to people, you know?
Matt: I get what you're saying, she has a lot of referrals and it is because I don't know if they're orchestrating, she's just really a people person and she really cares.
Dean: And that's one of the biggest opportunities, like you've probably seen in the forum we have a thread called market maker Monday and that idea of just paying attention every week to what you've got going on, and realizing that there's an opportunity for you to get in front of people who could help you. One of the strategies that we have is taking your top 150, your clients or sphere, the people that I was talking about that if you saw with the grocery store you'd recognize them by name, those people, and we create a google map layer that will drop a pin on each of their homes, where they live so that you can have a visual of where your people are.
And whenever you are showing houses, so market maker Monday with for your wife or for the team seemed better if it's a team, would be to look and ask yourself who are we showing houses to this week? Like who is legitimately going to be out looking at homes we're making appointments for this week? Then once you've selected the homes that you get to show them from the MLS to then make it this habit that you anchor that behavior to now going and looking at your map layer and seeing that, okay, I'm showing townhouses in River Run and I've got two people that are in my top 150 that live in River Run.
So if you were my friend or client and I was showing those townhouses in River Run, I would be able to send you an email and say, "Hey Matt, I'm showing townhouses this week in river run and there's only two on the market right now. Have you heard anybody talking about selling their townhouse in there? We may be able to match them up with this couple from San Francisco." That is a really super targeted, orchestrated way of really getting more referrals because it gives your clients, your friends, your top 150, it's right in their wheelhouse. We always say that referrals come as a result of conversation and that they are going to be in conversation with some of their neighbors, with the people who live in River Run and they may have heard that their next door neighbor has just found out that they're pregnant again and this is going to be their third child and they're in a two bedroom townhouse right now and they're going to need to get a bigger place.
That's news is just breaking, but they haven't done anything yet and now all of a sudden like an answer to prayer or serendipitously, here comes this opportunity to sell their townhouse without even putting it on the market. When you multiply that by 50 times every Monday doing something like that, and your team. If you've got the team has their top 150 all mapped and in the area, somebody else on your team may have two more people that they know that live in River Run. So you start to look at that as a team supporting, you know what's happening. You're making things happen, you're being a market maker, you're not just waiting passively for the referrals to come.
Matt: I'm excited, got to get this into orbit.
Dean: Well, that's the whole thing, that's really the whole thing. But that's why we have our easy button program, is that whole thing is to get people into orbit because a lot of these things don't take much time like to find and enter 100 people into your Gogo agent. If you write their first name, last name and the city that they live in, and approximate age on the yellow piece of paper and give that to a team, it takes about five hours for them to find that address, enter it into Gogo agent for you and you're done with it, you don't have to do any of it.
That's the kind of thing that we set that up for to because I keep running into that that's a friction point for people because when I say something to people, they start thinking, oh, how am I going to do that? I'm so busy and I don't know where the addresses are and who they are, all these things were how they start asking that question, how am I going to do this? And that's energy draining. What I've discovered is it's really the better question is to start asking who, who can do this for me? And that's what we tried to set up here is where we can be the who for you because once you find the who, we bring the how with us and you don't even need to think about it anymore, you're done.
You just push that easy button, that was easy. You just say, "Hey, here's my top 100 people." And even that we've even gotten to the point where we'll set out a synchronous time. We'll sit with somebody on the phone and guide them through a process to actually get the top 100 people so that you're not kind of procrastinating it, we're doing it synchronous and scheduled. So it's like on Thursday at 2:30 we're going to get together on the phone and we're gonna get your top 100 names and we start with looking at your Facebook and then prompting, what about your neighbors and what about your family that lives in the area, what about your friends that live in the area? By then you've got at least 100 people and that becomes a really good foundation then.
Matt: That's the most interesting postcard, that I can send to orbit. That sounds like it's very important, that's the cornerstone of this.
Dean: This is the thing, we started doing this with Diane, we got her top 150, she sends it out, she's got a listing in Frostproof right now because she sent out the postcard, so it's all happening. I'm using it as the laboratory and then documenting everything so it's all very exciting.
Matt: Yeah, for me I think we're probably getting to the hour here. I think you have other phone calls, I'm probably on them too.
Dean: Okay, perfect. Yeah, great.
Matt: So I'll be listening to you all day.
Dean: I love it.
Matt: Definitely the email.
Dean: Yeah, because today is my email mastery call too, it's all phone call Thursday. That's awesome, I really enjoyed that. Thanks so much Matt. Appreciate that you had all your questions because that makes it nice to kind of go through and knock them off.
Matt: Yeah, it sounds like you just run it off. It sounds like you get these questions all the time so you really got to get this system.
Dean: I've been thinking about this for 30 years, this is the thing. This Thanksgiving Day was actually the exact 30th anniversary of the day I got my license.
Matt: You got it on Thanksgiving?
Dean: No, I mean I got it on November 22nd, which was a Tuesday back then. I remember because it was the day I got my first sale and my first listing of my first day that I had my license, so that was fun.
Matt: Oh, that's cool. All right thank you, I appreciate it.
Dean: Thanks Matt.
Matt: Bye.
Dean: I'll talk to you soon, bye bye. There we have it, another great episode. I really enjoyed that, that was Matt, had some very thoughtful questions. We got a lot covered and I think it's important this time of year, especially as we're coming up to the end of the year, people are really looking to get their marketing plan in place and established for next year and it's also a perfect time to really reflect on what's happened this year. When you look back, how did you do in terms of all of things that we talked about in the Listing Agent Lifestyle? How did your listing getting system workout, do you have one, do you have a way that you know that you're going to get listings automatically that are just coming to you and what is your listing multiplier index? Of all the listings that you got this year, how many extra transactions did you get because you had those listings and when you really think about it, just like we talked about with thinking about it like Gamal Aziz, how much business are you losing?
How much money did you lose this year by not having a systematic approach to multiplying your listings and how many referrals did you get? Out of all of the transactions that you did, how many were repeat or referral business and what percentage of your top 150 was that, do you look at your return on relationship? We look and we know that the gold standard, what we're looking for is a 20% return on relationship meaning if you've got 150 people, which you definitely know 150 people, you should be able to generate 30 transactions from that group. So how close were you to that number and again, if you take that number and you subtract out what you did, how much money did you lose by not having a systematic way to orchestrate referrals, they just happened automatically?
How many leads did you convert this year? How big is your buyer portfolio of, of leads, people who are potentially going to buy a house and do you have a systematic way for finding them, for finding buyers and thinking about what's the best way for you to find buyers who are going to support your efforts in getting the listings in the area that you want to get them? That's a very important thing to think about because it's such a great enhancement for you when you're going into a competitive situation to try and get a listing. If you've got a buyer right now, that's an advantage that nobody else can really compete with so that's really what my hope is for you. And in addition to that, looking at how much are you enjoying the business, what is your joy index?
Do you get daily joy out of being a real estate agent, out of the way you're currently running your business and how much time do you have? Would you say that you have an abundance of time or are you strapped for time all the time, always rushing? How much of your business are you doing to keep everything on the rails? It's kind of a business that could suck up all of your available time, but the good news is, aside from the big three things, negotiating contracts, taking listings, and even showing homes, you can certainly do if you're going to do the three things, but even that you can have other people do you know is let's just focus on how can we float you up to the top of that hierarchy where all you're doing is negotiating contracts and taking listings.
It's possible, it's possible, and that's what we're all about with building this listing agent lifestyle, and that's really where your financial peace comes from, is knowing that you have a business that not only runs without you, but grows without you, that the business creates more business without you. That's an exciting possibility so I really encourage you to come and check out our community, what we're doing to build these listing agent lifestyle businesses at gogoagent.com. Just come on in and introduce yourself and check it out. You get a 30 day free trial, no credit card required, you come in, look around, see if it's for you and I think you're going like what you see, gogoagent.com. That's it for this week, come on back next week and we'll have another great episode.