Today on the Listing Agent Lifestyle Podcast, we're talking with Jacob Scott from Lawrenceville, Georgia.
One of the things we focused on is how to identify the best area for you to target and dominate a Getting Listings category. We looked at starting with how people view these areas and the horoscope effect. How can we make something appealing to a very specific set of people because they recognize 'that's me.'
This is where we get talking about neighborhoods versus a town or a school district. We want to get as narrow as we can to where people recognize the area and say 'that's me,' and we walked through the psychology of that reaction, and how to evaluate and compare one area to another by comparing the total yields from these markets.
We ended the conversation talking about how to really enroll your top 150, and get maximized results from the people who you know, and you'd recognize if you saw them at the grocery store, so you get them programmatically thinking about you every time they hear a conversation that involves real estate.
This is another great episode.
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Transcript: Listing Agent Lifestyle Ep103
Dean: Jacob.
Jacob: Mr. Dean.
Dean: How are you?
Jacob: I'm doing great, man. Doing great, but actually, my body's a little sore. I woke up this morning ... Yesterday, I felt like I was getting a cold and I woke up with my body just aching.
Dean: Uh-oh.
Jacob: This weather's crazy here in Atlanta, one day it's 70 degrees, two days later it's 45 or 30.
Dean:Well, there we go. We just went through our winter in Florida, too. Crazy.
Jacob: I'm jealous.
Dean: Here we are, I'm glad you made it. I'm super excited we get to talk for the whole area about you and your business, and what you've got going on. So, maybe tell me a little bit about the Jacob story and what we want to focus on here.
Jacob: Okay. Well, I can give you a quick back story. I got into the real estate business back in 2005 as an appraiser, real estate appraiser. The market shifted, I started flipping properties. A little shortly after that I was doing all of these appraisals and I was talking to these investors and I'm like, "Wait a minute, I'm making $300 and they're making 30,000, all they're doing is putting carpet and paint in the house."
Dean: Right, yeah.
Jacob: I was like, "Wait a minute, this don't make sense." So I got with my grandfather, at the time he had the credit, I had the know-how, he was retired and we got into real estate and started flipping houses. The market crashed in '08 and at the time I was still working corporate, I was still working in my corporate job. I got out of the real estate business as an appraiser and just flipping houses, and 2015 I got laid off from my job and a good friend of mine was like, "Jacob, you've got to get back in real estate, man." She was an agent at the time, she said, "You got me in real estate." I'm like, "I don't know about being an agent, driving people around-"
Dean: Right.
Jacob: She said, "Jacob, you could be a listing agent, you could just focus on that." I'm like, "Hm, interesting."
Dean: I like the sound of that.
Jacob: Yeah, yeah. So at that point I was like, "Okay, let me just go ahead and get my license." I went on and I took my package and I got my license January 2016. First year was tough, man, I didn't think it would be as difficult being that I had real estate experience, but it was a totally different animal.
Dean: Right, right.
Jacob: I sold only four houses the first year, I almost quit the business, I remember I'm like, "This sucks." I'd been studying you for a while, digital marketing, and I was trying to send my way through that back then and I said, you know what? I'm interesting, let's focus strictly on online marketing because this is crazy. One of my mentors, she said, "Jacob, just stick with it, you normally don't make money until the third year." I said, "Okay." I stayed in the business, I got a coach the next year, did a little bit better, sold like 14 houses the following year, just enough to survive, I guess you could say, but still not enough to live. So, got a coach and then I got another coach the following year, one of the big brand coaches, and it went pretty good. My business went from ... Actually, second year I sold nine houses, and then the third year it jumped to like 24 houses, so I did good. During this time, Dean, I was still was into online marketing, learning SEO and got into SEO and Amazon -
Dean: Okay, right.
Jacob: ... still learning digital marketing, but trying to put all the pieces together.
Dean: Right.
Jacob: So then I came across some training on Facebook ads and things like that. It was funny, and I'm giving you this kind of backstory, kind of tell you where I am, leading up to where I am now. I was in the office one day and a good friend of mine, they came up to me after the training, at the time I didn't know who she was, she was like, "Are you Jacob?" I'm like, "Yes." "I used to work with you-, I'm -." I'm like, "Oh hey, how you doing?" Then we got to talking, come to find out she is a big internet marketing person, just kind of making her way, learning, and she had a product on how to start a digital marketing agency of course running Facebook ads.
Dean: Okay, yeah.
Jacob: I was like, "Man, I want this," because I - it was like $5,000, I was like, you know what? What can I do? Her and I came up with a strategy, you give me access to it, we partner up, start a little small business, and any clients we get, we just pay your credit card off. That's what we did, we actually booked a client that would talk ... This guy had a school where he taught veterans how to trade stocks. He was spending a hundred dollars a day on ads and I was running around writing all the copy and she was doing all the technical, setting up the automation, doing - and things like that.
Dean: Yeah.
Jacob: That's when I learned how to run ads, how to get people to respond, and we got good at it, we was actually crushing it for this client, getting him more leads than any other source that he was getting.
Dean: Wow.
Jacob: Yeah, he was paying us $3500 to $5000 a month minimum. So it helped sustain and then it dawned on me, why don't I do this for my real estate business?
Dean: Right. Hey, - people, too, that's right.
Jacob: Yeah, but I understood from a real estate standpoint, what we do today typically pays you about 90 days later, right?
Dean: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jacob: I was like, oh, 90 ... I was looking for instant gratification, so I said, you know what though? I'm going to go ahead and get started. So I start running my ads and everything, and didn't have a good CRM in place, was using like a spreadsheet and was getting leads, crushing it, but wasn't really following up properly, didn't have all the systems in place and -
Dean: Right.
Jacob: Honestly, I tell people, it took me a whole year before I closed my first deal, but I never turned my ads off, I've never turned them off, even though I was making no money. I told them that lesson, because immediately after I got the first closing, they just started popping in immediately after that. I started getting more calls, and more calls, and more calls.
Dean: Oh, yeah. Well, part of what's happening there Jacob is that the ... I often talk about it as the difference between taking an expense based approach where you're running the ads and hoping that they're going to be profitable before the credit card bill due at the end of next month, and judging the ad on its effectiveness to make that happen. Versus taking a capital investment approach and thinking about the money that you're investing in the ads as a capital investment and the asset that you're buying is this list, the portfolio of all these people who have expressed some interest in real estate that over the next six months, 12 months, 24 months, longer even, are going to pay off. That's what happens is you just started, when you were doing it for almost a year, and then you do your first transaction, and then like you said, they just start coming, it's because of all of that time you've had to nurture a relationship with them. That asset will continue to be valuable for you even if you stop doing the ads then, because it's not about that. It's about now you've got this list of people.
Jacob: Right, right, yeah. I agree. It was a learning experience for me because a lot of people run ads, it particularly helped me out when I ran ads, it doesn't work or it-
Dean: Right.
Jacob: ... but they don't understand a lot of it, too, is what you say when you get on the phone with the person, one. Two, having followup. Three, how many times do you followup, do you know what I mean?
Dean: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Jacob: Because people don't know you. They don't know you, they see something they like that you got their interest-
Dean: Yes.
Jacob: ... but ultimately they don't really know you, they don't know you-
Dean: That's right.
Jacob: I got pretty good at it to the point where now, even when I'm not saying, unless you ask, this is crazy, if a lead calls in now, it's to the point where I can really get on the phone, talk to a person, build a relationship, qualify them, and now to stay in front of them, re-target them. That's what I'm doing now, but I wanted to generate more listings, even though I just picked up a listing yesterday because a buyer or seller is a buyer first because -
Dean: Absolutely, right. Especially if you're getting the move-up buyers or ... That's why I always love things like the transitional kind of homes because they ultimately do, do more transactions. Yeah. So, good.
Jacob: I'm sorry, go ahead.
Dean: What have you been doing to generate those listing leads? What's your approach?
Jacob: Well, just what the ... Honestly, I just think the same ad is just identifying people who ... Because they have a home, they're looking for another home, so then once I talk to them, I explain, you go, do you have a home that you need to sell first? "Actually, I do." "Okay, great." When you get people like that, like I've got a listing right now that's pending from one of my ads. What happened was, she'd seen my emails that I was sending out-
Dean: Yeah.
Jacob: ... and she responded, "What's this program you've got all about, Jacob?" I said, "Oh, well, let me come over and tell you about it." That's pretty much how I've been getting the listings, but I wanted to really niche down to an area because my ad is kind of broad as far as location-wise.
Dean: It has to be now. We used to be able to do micro-targeting with Facebook where we could narrow it down to a neighborhood of a thousand homes and only show the ads in there, but now the minimum you could do is a 15 mile radius, so you're forced on Facebook to be a little broader from a listing side. Describe the area where you want to get listings? If you could pick any area, what would it be?
Jacob: Yeah. That was one of my challenges because I know here, we have ... I was trying to determine, do I want to focus more on school districts or county ... I live in - county, which is a big county. Then within Gwinnett county you have Lawrenceville, Buford, Grayson, and then within of course those cities you have different school districts.
Dean: Yeah.
Jacob: I want to definitely put something together in Gwinnett county, but I just don't know ... Especially when it comes to direct mail, I don't know-
Dean: Yeah, yeah.
Jacob: I don't know where to go with it.
Dean: Where do you live?
Jacob: I live in Lawrenceville.
Dean: Okay, so let's start right there. Let's start in your own backyard so you don't have to drive too far and you can make it easy on you. If you were looking to get listings in just Lawrenceville, what's the population?
Jacob: That's a good question. Let me look it up so I can tell you exactly. It's probably, let's see, population of Lawrenceville, let's see, I've got my computer right here, I can tell you.
Dean: Okay.
Jacob: Let's see. Lawrenceville.
Dean: Alexa, what's the population of Lawrenceville, Georgia?
Jacob: 29,873.
Speaker: The population of Lawrenceville, Georgia is 29,900 people.
Dean: 29,900 people Alexa said. Okay, so, that's big enough that you've got a variety of things to choose from there. Part of what I look for is, are there any named communities in there that are gated neighborhoods or planned subdivisions kind of thing? What stands out? Is there any of that kind of thing in Lawrenceville?
Jacob: See, not really. I think more than anything what stands out is the schools.
Dean: Right, okay.
Jacob: People say, "Okay, I want to be in Brookwood school district."
Dean: I understand. That's one thing, but it's not the most compelling thing because that's ... It's limited -
Jacob: There are subdivisions that's gated, but I don't know how popular they are as far as in demand or people knowing them, because I don't really ... I know one in Lawrenceville ... Well, it's actually in Swanee, but it's the Country Club of Sugarloaf, and in there you have homes averaging anywhere from 400,000 all the way up to a couple million.
Dean: I gotcha. Are there condos? Are there townhouses? Are there-
Jacob: There's more here, in Lawrenceville, there's more single family, there's not too many condos here.
Dean: Single family homes.
Jacob: Yeah, not too many townhomes either -
Dean: If somebody says to you, what's the most popular thing in Lawrenceville? If somebody ... I live in Winterhaven, Florida, which is in between Tampa and Orlando, and here the best thing is the lakefront homes. There's about 2100 lakefront homes in Winterhaven. Is there anything, are there lakefront homes, are there-
Jacob: No. No lakefront homes.
Dean: Okay. What would be something that people would say, "I want ..." What's the desirable thing about Lawrenceville?
Jacob: Maybe it would be, just depending on the location and the schools, most of my clients want to be ... They're looking at a certain part of ... Lawrenceville's a big city, so they're like, okay ... Most people say, "Hey, I either want to be Lawrenceville or I want to be in Gwinnett county and I'm looking for this school district."
Dean: Okay, yeah.
Jacob: A lot of people, they're looking at school districts is the big thing that people ... That drives the demand.
Dean: Here's the thing is that we're talking about listings right now, right? So, we want to get with the thing that people would associate and say, "That's me." If we were talking about this, I call it the horoscope effect, if I say like I'm born in May, so I'm a Taurus, what's your sign?
Jacob: Scorpio, November.
Dean: Scorpio. So, I bet that when you look at the horoscopes, the first place your eyes go is to Scorpio, right? Do you ever read the Taurus just for fun? You always start with yourself and then you go to your significant other, if your spouse or your girlfriend or whatever is something else, you see what that's all about, or the people close to you, but then you don't really have any interest in other ones because that doesn't have anything to do with you.
So, when I say like I look at the things, if somebody in Winterhaven owns a lakefront home, that's like a horoscope effect type of thing, right?
Jacob: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dean: If I, first of all, select out all the lakefront homeowners in Winterhaven and I mail them a postcard that offers them the January 2020 report on Winterhaven lakefront house prices, that's specifically relevant to me because I own a lakefront house, right?
Jacob: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dean: But if I sent that same list of people the report on condo prices, they're not going to have any interest in it because they don't have a condo. It's like me sending you an offer for everything that's going on for Taurus this year, that's not interesting to you, but you would be interested if I sent you something that tells you what's up for Scorpios, you know?
Jacob: Right.
Dean: All we're looking for is that this is some way to get the people who are thinking about selling their house to raise their hands. By looking at a CAT scan of Lawrenceville, if you said that there's this neighborhood over here called River Oaks and this one over here called Joshua Creek or whatever it is, if they have those kind of named neighborhoods that people will be able to say, "Oh, that's me."
Jacob: Gotcha.
Dean: Even within- Yeah. So, what does that bring up for you?
Jacob: Here's how my thinking is going. We have - subdivisions, multiple subdivisions within, like the city of Lawrenceville would almost be like the neighborhood.
Dean: Yeah.
Jacob: I know what you're saying, like in Chicago you have Hyde Park and things like that.
Dean: Yes. Right, that's what I'm looking for, what are the subdivisions in Lawrence Park.
Jacob: Yeah, Lawrenceville.
Dean: Lawrenceville.
Jacob: Yeah, they have multiple subdivisions. Like I live in the Villas of Bethesda subdivision.
Dean: Okay. I like that. So, that's perfect. How many homes in that ... What was the name of it again?
Jacob: The Villas of Bethesda.
Dean: Okay, the Villas of Bethesda, and how many homes are in the Villas of Bethesda.
Jacob: 250 maybe, 200.
Dean: Okay, so now we're getting somewhere. Are there neighborhoods or subdivisions like that, that would be 500 or a thousand homes? Yeah, are there areas like that?
Jacob: Yes, yes, yes. If I was -
Dean: What are the most desirable? That's what I'm looking for. Now you've got the fact that if you're looking, just stacking how you want to get or where you want to get listings, you know that what's going to attract the buyers is this particular school district, so is there a particular school district that people want to be in, in Lawrenceville?
Jacob: Yeah, the Brookwood school district.
Dean: Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Let's say in the Brookwood school district, what would be the most popular subdivisions in the Brookwood school area?
Jacob: I mean, there's multiple ones.
Dean: Yep.
Jacob: I can't really come up with the top of my head because there's new subdivisions that they're building there, some that's been existing for a while.
Dean: Sure.
Jacob: I sold one. My client bought one, what was it called? Holly Hills subdivision I think it was called and she bought a house, it was ... They probably had at least 500 minimum.
Dean: Perfect. So let's talk about that.
Jacob: Okay.
Dean: Let's talk about that for a second. So now, there's 500 homes in Holly Hills, which is in that popular school district, which is in Lawrenceville. Now we're narrowing it down, you see where this is going? We've narrowed it down to Holly Hills and the people living in Holly Hills are going to relate to Holly Hills more specifically than, "I'm in this school district." They may not have any relevance for the school district because they may not have kids that are going to school there or they don't think about that first, that that's the school district they're in. That's more important for buyers, right?
Jacob: Right.
Dean: When we look at this in Holly Hills now, when you look at the homes in Holly Hills, if I'm an owner of one of those homes and I'm sitting there, and I'm thinking, "I think we're going to sell our house this year," that the first thought that I'm going to want to know is, how much is my house worth? What can I get for it? Because if they want to move from Holly Hills to a nicer, bigger subdivision, they want to move up somewhere, like let's say they want to move to the country club, what's going to make that possible or give them a starting point for even contemplating that move is to know how much am I going to get for my house, so I know that if the houses in Holly Hills sell for $400,000 and the house I want to buy is $700,000, that gives me a frame of reference, right?
Jacob: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dean: But if all I know is that the house is 700,000 where I want to go and I don't know how much my house is worth, it's a big mystery, I don't know whether I can make that leap or not, right?
Jacob: Correct.
Dean: No matter what, anybody thinking about selling their house, the first thought that they're going to have is, "How much can I get for my house?" Now we've got the opportunity to mail a postcard just into Holly Hills and offer them the report on Holly Hills house prices. Now that's very specific, much more specific than just Lawrenceville because they're thinking, "Well, that's a big area. I live in Lawrenceville, but that's not going to tell me what my house ... But if I can see all the market data for what's going on in Holly Hills, that would be an advantage for me," you know?
Jacob: Makes sense. Yeah.
Dean: That's how we start. We start with one of those neighborhoods. Start with the best, what would be the ... If I said, "Listen, you can pick a listing anywhere in Lawrenceville," you'd probably say, "Well, I know that this is the popular school district and within that school district this is the premium neighborhood and that's where I would want to take that listing, because it's popular people love it, there's a good turnover rate, people are buying these houses." That's the thinking that we want to have, you know?
Jacob: Right.
Dean: Then you start to investigate and you look at, if I just narrowed your focus to ... Already we've gone from Atlanta, to Gwinnett County, to Lawrenceville, to this school district, to this neighborhood, but let's back it out to that school district again and there may be 20 subdivisions or more in that area, which ones would be the most desirable for you. So you start with where they are. The good news about sellers is that they're stationary, they're in one place. Sellers are visible prospects. You can point to the fact that John Jackson owns the house at 22 Greystone in Holly Hills, that you know who that is, so you can direct your communication postcard, direct mail, directly to your exact prospect.
Now, what you can't get is you can't get a list of people who want to be in this school district as a buyer. They could be coming from anywhere. That could be a family coming from Atlanta, they want to get out of the city, they want to come into Gwinnett, they want to be in this school district, so they're narrowing their focus there. They could be coming from anywhere, those people.
Jacob: Right, right.
Dean: They're harder to find, right?
Jacob: Unless -
Dean: Unless you've got all the listings.
Jacob: Right. Or, what do you think about this, unless I run an ad that's kind of targeting ... Say I run an ad that stretches out 50 miles and then -
Dean: Yes, of course, that is what you want to do. That is what you want to do, at all times. You want to play both sides of this, you want to get in that market maker position where if you're looking in that school district and you've parlayed over a little period of time, you start out in Holly Hills, and just like you did with the Facebook stuff, you start out with one neighborhood, you get a listing and you sell it, and then you expand out to another neighborhood, and another one. Pretty soon, like Tony-, who you may have heard one of the podcasts with him, started out mailing to one small area and now he's up to 20,000 homes.
Jacob: Wow.
Dean: All just parlaying profits. As you start to grow, you can start reinvesting in other areas. The listing game is about picking the long-term thing. If you're taking a three to five year, you're poised to ... You want to get ... If you had 20% market share in a neighborhood within two years, that's a pretty good place to start from, to see what it would be worth for you, you know?
Jacob: Right. When we talk about desirable neighborhoods, I know you had mentioned, I heard you talk about absorption rates and things like that.
Dean: Yeah.
Jacob: How does that work exactly? You look at the number of houses sold -
Dean: Well, so many things, and desirability is an anecdotal type of thing, right? I asked you just because you work with buyers who are looking in those areas and sometimes the best thing is, what do people say? Where do they want to be or what's the thing that they're attracted to? The other thing, the data that we want to look at, the things that you're going to quantify to make the decision, are the turnover rate, that's what we look at there, and the price. It's very simple to compare one neighborhood versus another. Let's say you've narrowed it down and you want to decide between four neighborhoods, four subdivisions. You would look at it and you would say, in the last 12 months ... You can go back two or three years, just to get a sense of the annual turnover. Let's say there's a thousand homes in Holly Hills and that last year, there were 60 homes that sold in there. That would mean that you've got a turnover rate of about six percent. If there were a hundred, you'd have a turnover rate of 10%. That's all we're looking to see, what's the turnover rate? Somewhere in that five to 10% rate is probably the sweet spot, that's what we're looking at, that you're in that.
Now, that's only one piece of the puzzle. The other piece of the puzzle is how much are the houses selling for. If you think about Holly Hills, what's the price range of homes in Holly Hills?
Jacob: Anywhere from 300 to 400,000.
Dean: Okay, so you're in the eight, nine, 10, $12,000 per side for commission on that of the listing side of the commission. So when you do the math on this, you look at it that Holly Hills has a five percent turnover rate, so there were 50 homes sold and the medium price of 350,000, which would be a $10,000 commission, say. So there is $500,000 that was paid, that was the total yield from the Holly Hills neighborhood. Somebody got some portion of that 500,000. Right now, if you look at it that when we look at if you were able to get a 20% market share, which is reasonable in a neighborhood like that if you're dominating it. That would mean that you, within two or three years, that would be a $100,000 a year annuity for you, right? 20%-
Dean: Yeah, you'd get ten of the things at $10,000 is a $100,000. Now, when you look at it that, that's one neighborhood, then you look at the other one and you take another neighborhood and you do the same math. You do the same math, there's this many homes, this was the turnover rate, this is the median price range in there, and that's how much commission it would be. If all of it added up, the total yield from that neighborhood is X, whatever that is, and that's how you can compare the one versus another, if you wanted to say what would we look at. You may find that if you pick a subdivision of lower price homes, of villas, or condos, or townhouses, or something that may be 150,000 versus 350,000, even if it's got a 10% turnover rate, it may seem like that's a better bet, but that just means that even at a 10% turnover rate, the total yield would still be less than it would be for Holly Hills. Does that make sense?
Jacob: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dean: Because instead of the $10,000 commission, it's going to be the four or $5,000 commission. So it has to be double the turnover rate just to yield the same amount of money.
Jacob: Right. Right.
Dean: That's how we -
Jacob: You definitely want to pick and compare, and see which one makes the most sense.
Dean: That's right, because guess what? It costs the same amount of money-
Jacob: Based on turnover rate.
Dean: It costs the same amount of money to send the postcards to the less expensive houses as it does to send to the more expensive houses.
Jacob: Gotcha. Now, how often do you recommend the mail out? Once a month?
Dean: Yeah, once a month. We've got the whole program at Go Go Agent, we've got the whole getting listings program where it's all ... I've already done all the creative stuff, so we've got the postcards, the landing page, the cover letter, the book, "How to sell your house for top dollar fast," the 12 newsletters called, "Get top dollar," 12 cover letters that you send with each month as the followup pieces. All of that whole system that we've got in place there is set up so that you just need to set it and forget it. You just pick the area.
Jacob: Okay. You have it set up where basically, you send out the postcard, the homeowner gets it, if they want information, they go to a website to get the information?
Dean: They go to a website, which I've already created the landing page and everything for you, so you just ... You get a domain name called hollyhillsreport.com and you point it to this landing page in Go Go Agent and people go there, they put in their information, and that automatically feeds into your CRM that's already set up there, so that now you've got ... It flags them as Holly Hills and you can see everybody who's responded, and you mail out the initial package. So we've got an initial package with a cover letter, we have a book that you send along with it that is set up to be authored by you, so it's your information, your stuff on the cover and the inside of the book, so that it's your book that you're sending to them. Along with one of the Get Top Dollar newsletters and the market data of what is on the market and sold in the last 12 months in Holly Hills. To give people that market data, that's all part of it. Then each month all you do is mail the updated market data, meaning here's all the homes that sold, here's the ones that came on the market, only for the last 30 days, and continue to send that to them every month until they call you to come and sell their house. We don't even make any outbound phone calls.
Jacob: It's the direct -
Dean: Yep, everything- They call you. They call you.
Jacob: I like that, that's good. You have a system that does all of that? Right? You have a system -
Dean: That's it.
Jacob: ... for you, right?
Dean: That's it. That's exactly right. Even if you wanted, we have a ... All that stuff is in Go Go Agent that you can download, do everything, and set it all up yourself, or we have an easy button that you can just push the button and we can do the whole thing for you, so all you literally have to do is point on the map and say, "This is where I want the listings," and then we set it all up. We get the list, set everything up for you, the post cards, the book, the newsletters, the whole package, everything that you need.
Jacob: Okay. Sounds good. Okay.
Dean: That whole process, that's where if you listen to ... How long have you been listening to the podcast here?
Jacob: For a while off and on, so I've heard quite a few, but sometimes I miss it [crosstalk 00:42:44]-
Dean: Okay. If you just listen to the first three, the first three episodes are all about the ... It was funny because we started with a five year case study, the guy who's been doing it and we've been documenting it now for, we're into ... It's through six years now. Then the following one episode was someone who got their listing and sold it in the first 30 days, before their ... Everything we do at Go Go agent is a free trial for the first 30 days and so he got his first listing and sold it before the free trial even expired, which was funny. Then the third episode was with Chuck - who's ... I first introduced this getting listings program back in 2006, we've been doing it for that long, amazing, but he was telling me that just last fall he listed a house from somebody who responded to the first Getting Listings mailing he did in 2006. That long ago.
Jacob: Wow.
Dean: Isn't that crazy?
Jacob: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They had probably seen his stuff and like, "Hey, this guy, he's relentless, so give him a call."
Dean: That's exactly what happens, yeah, yeah. We've had people do that for so many different areas, whether it's oceanfront condos in South Beach or oceanfront homes up north of Boston, Paradise Valley, desert homes, mountain homes, it's amazing the variety. Actually, Zach, do you know Zach - in Atlanta?
Jacob: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dean: He's been doing it for a long time, but doing condos downtime, sky rises.
Jacob: Gotcha. Actually, I wanted those, I just got a listing this past Thursday, a condo downtown or midtown.
Dean: Nice. Nice.
Jacob: Okay.
Dean: Well, that's a good thing. Tell me, what are you doing with your referral business in your sphere of people?
Jacob: Not as much as I should be.
Dean: That's free money.
Jacob: I know, man, because my second year is when I was really focused on them and then I was ... I was doing handwritten notes at the time, I was doing a lot of that, just making calls, mostly just handwritten notes and phone calls.
Dean: Yes.
Jacob: Now, I do run a retargeting ad to people who liked my fan page, so a lot of my sphere is part of that, as well. They see my stuff and they see videos and things of that nature. I haven't called, like this past year I wasn't calling as diligently as -
Dean: You don't even need to call, but it would be nice to be in their mailbox, somehow, like be physically in their world, especially with your top 150. Especially with the people who ... We talked about it as if you were to see them at the grocery store, you'd recognize them by name and you'd stop and have a conversation with them. Most people have 150 of those people in their world and that's who we use as the baseline of what to focus on.
Jacob: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. So you're saying with the sphere, you're saying that the same concept is more or less consistent -
Dean: Well, we have a different approach for those. The whole reason that we're doing it, two things, is you want to establish that certainly everybody who's living in a house that you helped them get, you're the incumbent realtor for them. You're their realtor, so those people should definitely be on your list. The other people who should be on there are all the people that your friends and your sphere and the people that you know, that if they did have a real estate need, that you would hope that they would consider you to be their realtor. You want to adopt people. Those things, the two outcomes that we want that we're kind of engineering towards, are that they do business with you when they have a need directly, or that they refer their friends and family or coworkers or anybody that they know that's going to have a real estate need. We measure those two things in a way that helps you calculate the total yield from what we call your relationship portfolio.
Those 150 people are an asset that are unique to only Jacob. Only Jacob has these 150 people in his world. We look at that, those people, every month ... We have something we call the world's most interesting postcard that we mail as a ... It's the equivalent of mailing a newsletter to those people because it's the same outcome, you get the same amount of things. If you look at just a checklist of reasons that you would send a newsletter to people, you can accomplish the same thing with a postcard for a fraction of the cost, and maybe even get a better result because of it. If you go down the list of saying, "Well, why would you send a newsletter?" Well, number one, it's a contact point, you want to be in contact, that somebody every month holds in their hand something that says Jacob and there's his phone number and there's his contact information, so they're never more than 30 days away from physically holding something in their hand that has your contact information on it.
The number one reason that people don't do business with the realtor that they prefer is that they lost contact with them, right? If you're in front of them and there's your contact information, that's great. Now, you want to have a good feeling that they have about that like, "Oh, that's nice, that's interesting." So, if we take from concentrate just the interesting parts of a newsletter and put it all on one side of a postcard, we put all these ... There may be 14 or 18 different facts and interesting things that are on the postcard, that it's fun and readable and easy to consume, but then on the address side of the postcard, we have a post-it note looking graphic that we write a note in there and we use it to program people to think of you when they hear people talking about buying or selling.
We look at it and now it's January, so on the back of the postcard we may write a note that says, "Hi Jacob, just a quick note in case you hear someone talking about buying their first house this year." January is the time for New Year's resolutions and one of the biggest resolutions that people make is this is going to be the year that they buy a house. So if you hear someone talking about it, give me a call or text me, and I'll get you a copy of my book, "Six steps to home ownership," to give them, it's got all kinds of tips on how to go through the whole buying process and save money. That would be a valuable thing that your clients or friends or sphere would feel good about giving to their friends or anybody that they hear who's talking about buying a house.
Jacob: I would mail that book to my sphere and they would hand it to their sphere?
Dean: No, you mail the postcard to your sphere and say, "If you hear someone, give me a call and I'll send you a copy of my book," but now what you've done is now, the job, the real thing that we want, is that your friends, when they hear someone talking about it, they call you. Now you're in a conversation, you know that they've had this conversation with somebody specific. Part of the thing that happens a lot is that they may be in a conversation with someone who's talking about buying a house, but it doesn't even register in their mind as anything special about that conversation. They may just have the conversation and they're not connecting the dots to you. We want them, what we want to do with these postcards, is make it so that more often people notice those conversations about real estate, they think about you, and then they tell you about the people that they have those conversations with.
It's way better for your client to call you and tell you that they had a conversation with someone who's going to buy their first house, than it is for your clients to tell their friend, "Hey, you should call Jacob, he's great," and then leave it at that, and not tell you that they had that conversation. Which is happening all the time, by the way, people have those conversations and they tell people about you, and then you see them at the grocery store and they say, "Hey, did my friend Johnny ever give you a call?"
Jacob: No, I didn't hear from him. Yeah.
Dean: That's it. Now, that's where we want is that's where this tool comes in. That it's the easiest way, the best insurance policy that you can have. If you listen to last weeks' podcast with Dillon, he sent out the World's Most Interesting Postcard the first time, and two days later got a call from one of his friends who's getting married and they need to sell their house, sell their fiance's house, and they're going to buy a house together. Three transactions, - again because he was in front of them.
Jacob: Versus he hoping that they just remember him or think about him versus -
Dean: That's right or maybe they wander into ... They may wander into an open house or something if they were in contact with him.
Jacob: Yeah. I think definitely that would be good, as well, because those people already know, like you, and trust you.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Jacob: It's just a matter of you, like you said, programming this in on them to think about you and then give you that phone call.
Dean: That's right.
Jacob: Versus saying-.
Dean: That's right. That's two big opportunities.
Jacob: Right. Once they call me, I say, "Okay, great. Great, dude, thank you for the referral. What I'm going to do, I have a book, 'Six steps to moving up and buying your next home -'"
Dean: Yeah. You say to them, "Yeah, you know Johnny," you say, "Should I mail the book right to Johnny with a note, would you like to make an email introduction? You send an email to three of us right now and then I can jump in and say, 'Hey, nice to meet you,' and, 'I'll send you the book.'" That way you're in the conversation and now the conversation is about, how can we get Johnny and Anita the help they need, you know?
Jacob: Yeah, that's pretty good. I like that. You call it orchestrating referrals, right?
Dean: Orchestrating referrals, that's what we're doing. That's exactly right.
Jacob: Okay.
Dean: I think we've hatched two evil schemes for you today.
Jacob: Yeah, yeah, I like those.
Dean: You've got the listing side and getting these referrals, that's going to be a ... Those are two easy things to get in play. Once you get them in orbit, it's just a matter of the consistency of them happening, you know?
Jacob: That's the key, just doing it unconsciously -
Dean: That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
Jacob: The key to this, just like - we don't know when this is coming, but it's coming.
Dean: That's right.
Jacob: We do know that when it do come, the ROI is going to be greater than -
Dean: That's exactly right. That's right. Now you're thinking like an investor, that's exactly right. We want to think about it like an investor, not a gambler, right?
Jacob: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, Dean, I like that. Yep, yep. I'm going to implement that because it just makes sense. It makes sense and the system's already in place, so I like that even more.
Dean: Well, exactly, think about all the time it saves. That's exactly right.
Jacob: Well, that definitely clears some things up for me, man. My biggest thing was identifying the area, neighborhood or whatever - that. That was-
Dean: Now you know. That's going to be helpful for a lot of people to ... That's why I went through it in such detail with you because that's the number one thing that people wonder about, how do I choose the right area, so that was good to explain it for people.
Jacob: Man, Dean, I appreciate you, man. I appreciate all that you do. I love this, I love your More Cheese Less Whiskers, I like that -
Dean: Oh yeah, yeah. I love that, too.
Jacob: Yeah. With that, you hit different businesses from all different perspectives and often times, you take things from other businesses and apply it to your own business.
Dean: That's the truth, because you know what? Here's the thing, I'm taking things from real estate and applying them to other businesses, that's the essence of what it is. I've been doing real estate longer than anything. I've been doing real estate for over 30 years now, so a lot of these things that I'm apply to other businesses are things that I learned and established in the real estate business and now you get to hear how I'm applying them to other businesses. You're right, marketing is marketing, you get great ideas everywhere.
Jacob: Yeah. Man, I'm a fan. I appreciate your time, Dean.
Dean: Love it.
Jacob: Thank you for allowing me to come on with you and connect with you, it's an honor, man.
Dean: Awesome.
Jacob: Yeah.
Dean: Thanks, Jacob.
Jacob: One last thing -
Dean: Yeah, yeah.
Jacob: ... I remember before I got into real estate, I was listening to the marketing podcast, this was before I even got my real estate license, and I was like, "Man, that guy, if he was a real estate agent, I'm sure he got some evil schemes up his hat that he can, shit, that he can go to."
Dean: That's exactly ... Yeah, yeah. Now you've found the spot here. Here it is.
Jacob: Yeah. Yeah. Cool, man.
Dean: Awesome, man. Well, dive in and I'll see you in the Go Go Agent forum because we've got lots of people that are going through the same thing. You've got a free trail, just go and try it out, and we'll help you get established.
Jacob: Will do. Okay, Dean, if I have any questions once - I can just reach out to you guys -
Dean: Absolutely, that's right. Yep.
Jacob: Okay. Sounds good.
Dean: Perfect.
Jacob: I love it. Thanks, Dean. Appreciate you, man.
Dean: Thanks. I'll talk to you later. Thanks, Jacob.
Jacob: All right. Bye-bye.
Dean: There we have it, another great episode. If you'd like to continue the conversation, you can go to listingagentlifestyle.com, you can download a copy of the Listing Agent Lifestyle book, the manifesto that shares everything that we're talking about here, and you can be a guest on the show if you'd like to talk about how we can build a listing agent lifestyle plan for your business. Just click on the, "Be a guest," link at listingagentlifestyle.com.
If you'd like to join our community of people who are applying all of the things we talk about in the Listing Agent Lifestyle, come on over to gogoagent.com, it's where we've got all the programs, all the tools, everything you need to get listings, to multiply your listings, to get referrals, convert leads, and to find buyers. And you can get a free, truly free, no credit card required trial for 30 days at gogoagent.com. So come on over and I will see you there.