Today's Listing Agent Lifestyle Podcast episode is the first in a series of Clubhouse rooms we're recording exploring the five essential pillars for success - getting referrals, multiplying listings, converting leads, finding buyers, and getting listings.
We run through the power of the 50-Minute Marketing Sprint to identify the very best opportunities and use the example of Gamal Aziz's transformation of the MGM Grand Hotel as a way f thinking about the opportunities we're missing.
Finally, we tackle the lead generation strategies like Instant Open Houses with QR codes, effective Facebook advertising and simple nine-word emails and weekly updates to engage buyers.
Links
GoGoAgent.com
Be a Guest
Listing Agent Lifestyle Book
Listing Agent Scorecard
Highlights
1. This podcast episode revolves around strategies to transform your business through the 50-Minute Marketing Sprint and improving referrals, leads, and listings.
2. The 50 Minute Marketing Sprint is a tool to identify significant business opportunities and act on them swiftly to facilitate business growth.
3. Gamals application of the 'working backward' strategy transformed the fortunes of the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. This strategy can be applied to your own business.
4. Referrals are a key element of business growth. By nurturing 150 relationships, you can significantly propel your business forward.
5. Social media platforms like Facebook can help identify the top 150 relationships to focus on for business growth.
6. The episode explores effective lead generation and prospect conversion strategies, such as setting up an Instant Open House with a QR code and cost-effective Facebook advertising.
7. Nurturing leads with a simple nine-word email and a weekly Market Watch Update can improve lead generation.
8. Success in lead generation can be measured through the metric of revenue per unconverted prospect.
9. The podcast discusses the concept of a Listing Agent Lifestyle, focusing on the integration of business results and lifestyle elements like daily joy, abundant time, and financial peace.
10. The episode concludes with a discussion on using a Listing Agent Scorecard to identify growth opportunities and increase the revenue per unconverted prospect.
Transcript: Listing Agent Lifestyle Ep189
Dean: Hello, welcome everybody. We'll let everybody gather in here. Beautiful day here in Florida, looking forward to spending some time with everybody. We'll just let people gather in here and we'll see how it all plays out, but I'm looking forward to sharing. I've been spending a lot more time on Clubhouse in the last little while here and got me feeling like, okay, I need to get involved here and set up my own little room here where we can share our ideas and share the something I've been working on for several years. So I'm excited to see.
I mostly wanted to set up today's session to record so I can get kind of the baseline of everything that we talk about and show you some fast opportunities there are in your business right now. So I'm excited that you guys are all in the right place. We'll give everybody just a minute to kind of introduce or gather into the room here and then this event I'm gonna do I'm gonna do a little talking at the beginning because I wanna kind of set the stage, but this is gonna be an active. You're gonna actively participate in the process here by taking notes and I'm gonna help you calculate, your calculate some of the key metrics that we use here. So let's see let me jump back in here just kind of learning all the moves for how all the running a Clubhouse room works. So I've got Stuart and Diane from my team here up as admins, so we're kind of new to running the rooms. I've been speaking in a lot of different people's rooms as we go. So, as people are gathering in, I'm gonna go ahead and start and walk through the intention of today, which is to do what I'm calling a 50 minute marketing sprint and that's to kind of set the stage and lay the groundwork for you on the fastest acting things that you can do to grow your business right now. And if you're with us here live, we'll have some goodies to give you throughout the, throughout the session here. And if you're listening at the end here, I'll give you a link where you can go and get up to speed with everybody. So we're gonna talk about the five bankable results that we can focus on here and then next week, each day next week, I'm going to do one session on each of these five results. So we talk about these as every piece of business that you did in the last year If we're talking about kind of getting to know your numbers here is came from one of these, these five categories, and there we're gonna focus on the measurements for them, the ways that we can move the knobs and dials to increase the results that you get with them and give you a chance to kind of take a measurement for yourself and see how you're doing in each of these five categories, so collectively.
Starting with, the easiest thing for us to do is getting referrals. That's one of the categories of where your business comes from and how you can take control of it. The next is multiplying your listings, and we'll talk about that. That. Every listing that you take comes with the opportunity to multiply that one listing and get not just one transaction but get multiple transactions. So we'll talk about that. Converting leads is the next thing. Came from you either got a transaction from somebody who came into your world at some point and you did something to keep in touch with them until they were ready to buy or sell with you, and so we'll talk about converting leads and some metrics and strategies for you there. Then, finding buyer we're having a system and a strategy and a systematic way to find all the buyers that you need, but, more importantly, to find the buyers. That will be a catalyst to fuel your listing centric business. So we'll talk about that. And then getting listings and if you're gonna have a listing centric business, you've gotta have a systematic way to get listings. And so all of those things together make up the core of what I call the listing agent lifestyle. And those are the five business elements of that. And the three lifestyle elements are what we call daily joy, abundant time and financial peace. So all of that collectively makes up what we call the listing agent lifestyle, and I've got a book for everybody that I'm going to give you a link for towards the end of the call that you can follow along or go deeper on that as well. So let's dig into this sprint here, because the purpose of this sprint is to identify where the big opportunities are for you right now, where the opportunity for you to take the fastest action to get a result could end up. And so we start with this mindset that I want you to know your numbers as they apply to each of these categories and a really empowering mindset.
A way to look at this came from an article that I read in Business 2.0 magazine several years ago, and it was about the gentleman who ran the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, gamal Aziz, and the article described the path that he took to really dramatically improve the results at the MGM Grand, and it was a theory or a concept that he calls working backwards. And what he essentially did was he came into the hotel and he looked at all of the money making elements of the hotel, broke them down into categories, just like we broke down your business. Every piece of business that you did in the last 12 months came from one of those five categories that we talked about. Well, in the hotel business, what Gamal did was he looked at the hotel and he said okay, let's look at the restaurants. We make money from dining. We make money from entertainment. We make money from gambling. We make money from the hotel business retail. All of those things all contributed to the total revenue of the hotel.
And he took them one by one and started looking at them with an eye to see how high is high. And that's a great way to think about something. Not, he didn't look at it and say we're gonna improve everything by 20%. He looked at these and said how high is high, what's the most that we could be doing in this category. So he looked at restaurants and their flagship restaurant was very successful, doing $4 million a year.
And but he knew because each evening he would sit in the entry of the hotel and he would see people getting into limos and cabs and leaving the hotel and he would say to people, where are you going? And they would say, well, we're going to Spago or we're going to Nobu or they're going to some destination restaurant. And as he was doing that, it dawned on him if we had a celebrity restaurant, if we had a high-end restaurant we're the largest hotel in the world, 5,000 rooms at the time he said we could be doing $8 million a year in sales and he counted the $4 million difference as a loss. Just let that think in for a second. He looked at that and said we're losing $4 million a year because of our profitable restaurant.
He went into the board, told them his plan. They agreed with him. They shut down the restaurant. They negotiated with Michael Mina. They created a whole new restaurant in the same footprint, same amount of square-based, same location that they were, and in the first year after opening they did $11 million in sales. They went through and did it with all the other elements did it with the show, replaced their long-running effects show with the Cirque du Soleil show and they went from $28 million a year to $120 million a year in ticket sales.
What I've taken from that and I want to convey to you is to listen and look at each of these elements the way that I'm going to describe them, the way I'm going to describe this metric for you, and calculate for yourself the difference between what you're currently yielding in that category and what you could be yielding, and think about that as a loss. Let's get into the thought of the first of these elements, which is getting referrals Write down on a piece of paper, getting referrals at the top of the category, here for you, as we go through this, I want you to do the calculations with me.
I'll explain what do I mean by getting referrals? What category of that? That's every piece of business that you did in the last 12 months that came from repeat. Or referral meaning somebody who you sold them a house before and they came and did another transaction with you. Or referral that they introduced you to somebody. Or somebody called you and said I'm a friend of John and he told me you could help me sell my house. Or in this category we include direct business, meaning a friend of yours or somebody you know calls you up and says, hey, can you help me sell my house? That category right there we put that all under this concept of getting referrals.
Now, you had some number of transactions in the last 12 months. Even if it's zero, you had a number of transactions in the last 12 months that came from getting referrals. I want you to think back and, to the best of your ability, just estimate what that number was the number of repeat, referral and direct transactions that you did in the last 12 months. Go ahead and type that in the chat for us, just to get a sense of where people are. This is a most valuable number that we're going to calculate and a standardized metric for this, meaning a measurement that you can compare in a standardized way against everybody else, is to see how you're doing compared to what other people are doing. It's not enough. Often when people say 80 percent of my business comes from referral, well, that doesn't mean anything in comparison when you say it to other people, because it doesn't account for whether you're doing 10 transactions or 110 transactions. You could have 80 percent of your business coming from repeat and referral and it not be the same compared to somebody who's doing 110 transactions. So the way that we do that is we put a constant in place to measure against, and the constant that we use is 150 people. The reason we chose 150 people is because there's been a lot of research and study that show that the number of relationships that we can manage is 150 people. If you want to look it up, there's a concept called Dunbar's number, postulated by this gentleman in Oxford in England, and he talks about from evolutionary psychology and anthropology standpoint. That 150 people is the number of relationships that we can manage.
A relationship means somebody that if you saw them at the grocery store, you'd recognize them by name, you'd stop and have a conversation with them and you have a sense of your purpose or your place in their life. You have a relationship with them. That's different than recognizing somebody. We can recognize a lot more people. We don't necessarily have a relationship with them.
In the core of our Getting Referrals division and that's the way I want you to think about it for your business here is that relationship portfolio of 150 people. Now the way we calculate the metric that we call your return on relationship is to take the number of repeat and referral transactions that you got in the last 12 months and we divide it by 150. The gold standard, what we're shooting for here is to get you to a point where you're getting a 20% annual yield from your relationship portfolio. That means that we should be able to generate 30 transactions from that group of 150 people. We know this and have seen this from. I've built and host a great community of agents that are applying all of these strategies at gogoagentcom, our clubhouse leaders the people who have been applying these strategies and are getting the best results are at or over that 20% annual yield. So now, if we look at it for you, if you had five repeat and referral transactions in the last 12 months, that would mean that your return on relationship is 3%. If you had 15, it would be 10%. But that standardized metric is really the key to how you can really measure your progress here year after year.
And we want to look at it now and calculate if you take an average. If we take, I think, in most parts of the country right now for working numbers, we can use $10,000 as one side of a transaction. If we look at the median house price now nationally is over $370,000, that's probably pretty close to a $10,000 per side transaction. But whatever it is for you, just measure that and then look at take that 30 transactions. That we know is the gold standard. If we say how high is high for you, I know it's possible for you to generate a 20% return on relationship because I've seen it happen again and again and I know that there are people and on that listing agent lifestyle podcast there are episodes and episodes of people who that's the outcome that they're getting. So if we take that and we multiply it by what your average commission is and we compare that to the number of transactions that you got in that getting referrals category, how much money are you losing right now by not getting a 20% annual yield on your relationship portfolio. Just write that number down, because I want you to keep a running tally for yourself here and to introduce you to those, these concepts, and I wouldn't introduce it to you if I didn't have a way for you to move the needle to make that happen. So I'm going to share a strategy with you that you can use today to get more referrals or to get yourself headed in the right direction with that.
One of the most valuable things that you can do, and the core of getting referrals, is identifying who your top 150 are. Right, you've got to have a list of a hundred your top 150 Relationships. Now that you're either at a point where you don't have 150 people because you may be thinking you maybe you're newer in the business, maybe you're you're only thinking that you've got to count your top. You know your past clients who qualify for that, but I'm talking about everybody that would Qualify as a relationship the way we described it. If you saw him at the grocery store, you'd recognize him by name and you'd stop and have a conversation.
You definitely know 150 people, and so one of the things we do is we go through an exercise of you just looking at your Facebook and Seeing among your local friends who would you count among your top 150? You know. Open up the front door of your house, go and stand on your driveway, look up and down each direction on your street, see. Who do you know by name. Who are the neighbors that you would recognize by name? Pay attention as you go through your week. Do you golf? Do you have kids that play soccer? Do you go to bingo? Do you Whatever you do you go to the gym? Who are the people that, if you saw them, you'd recognize them by name? We're start gathering those people because they're the core of what we're trying to accomplish here now.
The best thing we can do, once we get those names and addresses and Email addresses if you have them, cell phone numbers if you have them you've got a way now to communicate with the people you have a relationship with. One of the strategies that we use is to take that list and and export them into a Google map where you can create a map layer, a custom map that will drop a pin when each of your top 150 live and to for you to be able to access that at all times on your phone when you're out and about wherever you are, having that ability to recognize and know when you're in a neighborhood where some of your top 150 are. How that becomes valuable for you is to institute, at least weekly, what I had, something I lovingly call market maker Monday. Now the idea is to pay attention To all the things that you've got going on in your week. You know, just look at your calendar and say who am I going to see About selling their house this week, or what? Where am I showing homes this week? And let's say you're showing homes in a townhouse complex called River Run. You bring up your market maker map and you see that you've got a client that lives in River Run. So I might look at it and let's say that Tamara is a client of mine. She's in my top 150. I can send out a quick email or text to Tamara and say hey, tamara, I'm showing houses in River Run this week and there's only a couple for sale. Have you heard anybody talking about selling their townhouse? Maybe we can match them up with this couple from Atlanta. Now, if you took that core message and Every time you're showing homes, you did a quick lookup and you started to see, okay, I'm showing houses over here in Oakwood and you see that Danielle and Michelle live in Oakwood and I could send the same text, same email, to them. Danielle, I'm showing houses. There's only a couple for sale. If you heard anybody talking about selling, maybe we can match them up now. If you just did that Every week for 50 weeks with the people who know you, like you, trust you, giving them an Opportunity to notice when there are referral opportunities in their world, you're going to get more referrals.
You're going to get more referral opportunities. So that's a simple, low-cost, no-cost way to start Increasing the number of referrals that you get. So I'd love to see in the chat and I'm not going to look at the chat while we're going there, but I want to collect it afterwards of seeing how much are you losing right now if you estimate, by not getting a 20% annual yield on your relationship portfolio. If you're excited about that, I'd love to see your excitement, because that's what we're really talking about is how can we, how can we really gather that up? So next week on Monday, each week, each day, next week at noon, I'm going to do a deeper session on each of these five elements. On Monday, we're going to talk specifically about getting referrals and those. These sessions will be very Interactive because I want to make it real for you. I want to hear what you're doing to get referrals. We're going to answer your questions, talk specifically about getting referrals. So that'll be on Monday at noon.
Now let's keep going through the elements here and then we'll open it up and have a Discussion or answer any questions or here's. You know your motivation around how much money we're going to Recapture for you here. So the next element that we want to look at, the opportunity that you have, is to multiply your listings. Now what we talk about by that. Most of the time when people talk about their listings they talk about that. You know we get all of our listing sell. They sell quickly. They sell for 98% or, lately, a hundred or 101% of asking price, and I just need to price it right, put it on and it sells.
But there's a big opportunity that you're missing out on if you don't also Take advantage of the opportunity that you have to get additional Transactions that are uniquely yours Because you're the only person in the world with that particular listing. So these opportunities are uniquely yours. You don't have any competition for the. You know your own listing. But the five opportunities that you have for every transaction are that you can get the listing sold. That's the baseline, of course. That's what we want to have happen. Number two is you've got the opportunity to find the buyer yourself. Double-ed, find the buyer for that listing. You've also got an opportunity to find a buyer that buys another house. But you met them because you did an open house or you did you. They called on an assigned or they called on an ad. Call you. You got to meet them because of that listing and you ended up selling them another house. You can get the next listing in the neighborhood or another listing from someone who needs to sell a house to buy that one. I and you also get the chance to get a referral from the seller. So there's five transactions there and we take each of those and the way that we measure this, the metric that we create is what we call your listing multiplier index. Now, the way we calculate that is, we take your last 10 listings and we calculate how many points out of a possible 50 points did you get for your last 10 listings. So you could have gotten five transactions for each of them. Times 10 listings is 50. Now, when I do this for the first time with a group, typically what I find is that we end up somewhere between eight and 15 points, meaning you got the listing sold, you found the buyer, you got found a buyer who bought another house. You got another listing, you got a referral from the seller. Some combination of those 50 opportunities amount to eight to 15, typically.
What we find I'd love to see in the chat your listing multiplier index. The way we calculate that is take that number and we divide it by 10 to get your index, like your golf handicap or your bowling average. That means that over the last 10 listings you got 15 points, which means you got a 1.5 listing multiplier index. If you got all your listings sold but you didn't get any of the extra points, your listing multiplier index is 1.0. If you took 10 listings, two of them expired and you got eight sold, your listing multiplier index is 0.8. So when we look at that now, that's a valuable number because every time you take a listing we're going to multiply that listing by your listing multiplier index and that's what you can expect with your current system to yield on the next 10 listings. But our clubhouse leaders on this, the people who've been doing this the longest and applying those strategies are over 3.5 on their listing multiplier index.
So what would that be worth to you? Let's even use 3.0 as a listing multiplier index. How much difference would that make to you if you were able to get three transactions from every listing that you take. How much did you lose on the last 10 listings by not getting it? It could be $200, $300,000, just on the last 10 listings that you got. So surely you're going to get 10 more. But if you don't revere it, take that opportunity. There's certainly opportunity for you to improve in that category. So how do we? What's some of the lowest hanging fruit that you can do to multiply the listings that you get? The first is to start gathering all of the leads that you can because of that listing, and there's some free things you can do and there's some paid things that you can do.
Certainly the simplest thing, the thing that is an amazingly go-to strategy, is still using an Infobox flyer. And you'd say it, I'd say it, and people say, oh, that's so old school. Well, I'll tell you what we and we've tested this in today's market, in expensive markets. We had a house eight and a half million dollar house in California that we ended up generating 60 or 80 leads from an Infobox flyer for an eight and a half million dollar house close to the beach in Manhattan Beach or Long Beach one of those two and the you know. But the point to remember is that those things are happening Now. We use simple Infobox flyers with a QR code with the URL. We get the address of the house and we set up what we call a instant open house and it's a simple way we just get. If you got a new listing, let's say 22 Graystone, we set up 22graystonecom as a simple, easy way for people to get all the information about that house. You can actually test that one out, 22graystonecom. You can go there and see what we're talking about. A simple strategy and the Infobox flyer leads don't cost you any more than what the flyers cost. You know, if you put up the Infobox, you're gonna be amazed at how much you get and you think about what that is in terms of a real lead. You know that's somebody who they drove around a neighborhood. They saw that house. They got out of the car, they went to the Infobox. They got the Infobox, they went to 22graystonecom and they voluntarily left their contact information for you. It's an amazing way to start gathering those leads and opportunities. Then everybody that responds, you know whether we're doing the Infobox flyer or whether we're doing a digital Infobox flyer on Facebook. You know we set up the same Infobox flyer and send that out as a Facebook ad and we generate all kinds of leads of people who see it, you know, walking down their digital street. You know, and the great news is that if you're doing this on Facebook as a lead ad, you know it's less expensive than actually printing the flyers. You can get in somebody's digital mail box. You can get in their digital mail box for two to four cents per impression that you have on somebody's mailbox. So on somebody's in Newstream. So that's in a fantastic way for you to start generating leads. But I look at it and say how much are you losing by not getting multiple transactions from each of the listings that you get right now.
The next strategy, or the next category that we talk about is converting leads. Now, if you look at it right now, imagine that if we went through and looked at what was going on for you, that there would be a number of people who have called on your ads come to your open house, clicked on your website. If you're buying Zillow leads, if you're doing anything, how many leads did you generate in the last 12 months, and is there a chance that anybody slipped through the cracks? There's probably a really good chance that somebody slipped through the cracks, and one of the best things that we can do is to gather up all of those leads, gather up everybody that came into your world there and look at it, and just send them a simple nine word email. And the email that we send to all the leads that you've come into contact with simply says Humshell, are you still looking for a house in Denver? Or are you still looking for a house in Winterhaven? Or are you still looking for a beach condo? Or are you still looking for a lakefront, a lake house? Whatever it was that they inquired about?
Just sending that simple nine word email to everybody is going to make an impact on your lead conversion and the measure that we have here, the metric that we use, is something we call your rev pup, and that number came from an adaptation in the hotel business. There's a driving key metric that people use, called rev par, which is revenue per available room. That's how hotels measure their success. So what we want to look at is what is your revenue per unconverted prospect? So you can imagine that the key to having more success converting leads is going to be getting more leads. The more leads you have, the bigger opportunity you have to convert those leads, to gestate those leads, to nurture a relationship with those leads so that, when they're ready, it's easy for them to reach out to you because you're the one who's been providing them valuable information. Now the easiest way for you to do this is to commit to sending a weekly Market watch update, a market watch email Just one time a week, with all the new listings that have come on the market and some interpretation, some insight from you on whether you've seen some of those listings or what the what the market is doing, but simple email Telling people what you've been doing in the last week, what happened in the market in the last week. Here's a link to see all the new listings that came on the market. And then, whenever you're ready, here's three ways we can help you Join us for a daily tour of homes.
We do daily home tours every day, 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock. Come to a homebuyer workshop. We do on the first and third Thursdays of the month. We do a zoom workshop to walk through the entire homebuying process or Get a free home loan report. Each month we monitor hundreds of different loan programs to find the very best Zero downloads, low interest loans, lowest total cost loans and we put all our findings together in a custom Home loan report click here.
So if you just send a weekly email Every single week with those elements a little host chat at the beginning, link to all the new listings and all the sales, a little ps and the super signature offering those people the daily tour of homes, homebuyer workshop, free home loan report if you just send every week and update like that to all of the people who are in your world, who are unconverted prospects, you're going to find that more and more people will end up Converting. There's only two timeframes that we focus on. The only two timeframes that matter are now and not now, and it's okay If it's not now, if you're okay that you've got a way, you've got a minute that's going to that you do your best to Identify the five-star prospects, the people who are willing to engage, friendly, cooperative, know what they want, know when they want it and would like you to help them.
All we're trying to do is identify those five-star prospects who are?
ready to go now, and if they're not ready to go now, that's okay, because every week we're going to send them a update of all the activity and the super signature will give them an opportunity for whenever it's now For them to reach out now. The great thing about that is the leverage of it Doesn't take you any more time to do that. Whether you've got a hundred people or ten thousand people, getting that email takes the same amount of time and effort to do it. So it's one of those things that leverages itself the more that you feed into that system. And that's what gets you all excited about Generating more leads, which we'll talk about next, finding buyers and getting listings. But these first three things that we've been focused on, these are all things that lay the foundation. Every one of you has an opportunity in those three categories there, and so how we calculated it? Let's say that you, how we calculate your Revenue per unconverted prospect. Let's say that you generated a thousand leads and you've got a pool of a thousand leads that are getting weekly updates, and over the course of the year you sold ten homes. I'm doing round numbers for you here to calculate your rev pop. You had a thousand leads and you sold ten homes and generated a hundred thousand dollars. Okay, that means that each lead in your pool your pond, we call it you're stocking your pond with all of these future buyers that your pond of a thousand unconverted leads turned into $100,000. So that means that your revenue per Unconverted prospect was a hundred 100 times 1,000. Now, if you Realize that by setting up a system like that, you're able to convert at a 1% Conversion rate ten out of a thousand per year, that's an amazing Asset that you're building here and that's about what we're looking at for you here.
If you look at it, that you know the more that you can fill that pond. You know the difference between getting a hundred thousand dollars and getting a million dollars is the number of opportunities that you have. It's the difference between a Thousand leads and ten thousand leads. And that's all doable, but it doesn't require any more work. That's what's exciting about it, right? So I'd love to see if you calculate that what your rev pop is Is by looking and putting that in the chat there. Just put rev pop and put what that number is. But if it's a hundred dollars and we can show you how to get and add leads into that pond for three dollars, five dollars, ten dollars. How much would you spend? Invest to stock your pond with buyers that are going to yield at the rate of 100 dollars per Unconverted prospect per year? It's a pretty good metric, right? So I'd love to see what yours is and how much.
The only thing that you're losing is by not having more leads in your pond. If you've got the way to do that, you know so right now, the action plan for you for that is to start sending. Gather up all your leads, send them the nine word email. Are you still looking for a house in Denver? And then commit to every Wednesday or third, doesn't matter, no magic in what the day is. I like Tuesday, wednesday or Thursday Midweek. Give you time to set things up for the weekend, accommodate for what happened or the last seven days, but get in the habit of every day, every Wednesday at noon, sending out your market watch email and try that for 50 weeks. Just watch what happens. It's amazing. One email a week. It doesn't take you very much time to do it and it doesn't cost you anything. You can just gather up all of the leads, all of the people, and put them in and just send that Now where you can start multiplying.
This is when we start doing the next two things, which are finding buyers and getting listings. I'm going to talk about them in kind of a combined way, and you'll notice that it's curious that I put getting listings as the last thing that I talk about here, and because it is the coinstone. It's the. If you're going to have a listing-centric business, you've got to have a way to get listings and it's important, but it's the thing that all of these other things are going to lead to. So I want to layer that on the foundation of that you're getting all the referrals that you can.
You're multiplying every listing that you take.
You're converting the most of the leads that you get. That way. It's like sealing your leaky bucket here Right when we start pouring new things into that, you've got a system that's going to maximize the investment that you're going to make in finding buyers and getting listings. So, on the buyer side finding buyers the most amazing thing that we can do is start to think in terms of categories. Now, as much as we love being a listing agent, buyers are the catalyst of any market.
Nothing happens until somebody gets their checklist, their checkbook out. You can't cash a listing agreement. Getting listings is one thing, but it still requires a buyer in order for you to get paid. So somebody's got to bring that buyer, whether it's a cooperating agent through the MLS or whether it's you. So we may as well start finding all of the buyers that we can, especially for the category that we want to start getting listings. So let's say, kenny McCarthy is perfect example in Gloucester, a Cape Anne in Massachusetts, north of Boston, he chose oceanfront homes as what he wanted to and, by the way, having a category like this is the perfect entry into a super luxury market. Whatever the highest level homes are oceanfront condos, lakefront homes, golf course homes, country homes, horse farms. Whatever it is, there's a category for it and if you can go about finding buyers who are looking for oceanfront homes, that's going to be an amazing outcome for you. We ran in North Shore Magazine, which is a fancy magazine North of Boston.
And we ran an amazing ad that has beautiful picture of looking out from your home out to the beach, saying if you're looking for an amazing oceanfront home on Cape Anne, read this. And we talked about the guide to Cape Anne oceanfront house prices to show all of the activity and all of what's available on the ocean in Cape Anne. And we started generating all these buyers who were looking for oceanfront homes and at the same time, we were running getting listings, postcards to the 1,000 people, 900 and something homes that are on the ocean on Cape Anne and we started building this amazing triangulation there where you've got the buyers who are looking for oceanfront homes and you've identified people who are, at some point in the future, going to sell their oceanfront home.
So I look at this and how I wanna measure this for you is to start to see how are you doing in terms of generating buyers? How are you doing in finding buyers? Have you got a vehicle like a vending machine that finds you all the buyers you want? Now guess what? You can do this, even inexpensively, with things like, or free with things like. Facebook. Marketplace, with Craigslist, is still a great lead generator in terms of finding buyers who are looking for homes. So having those no-cars things are certainly great ways, but having a Facebook lead ads is another great, completely controllable way that you can identify exactly the type of people that you're looking for, or even putting in the time to create your YouTube footprint by documenting everything about the categories that you're trying to make a headway into. So there's some the top level things of what we talk about here in terms of this listing agent lifestyle, but what I would love to do is I've got a couple of things that I wanna share with you. One is coming up now. Next month maybe, stuart, if you can post in the chat here the link to the Tony Calci case study graphic We've coming up now. Next month will be 10 years that we've been documenting a case study for getting listings in Toronto and you'll see we're last year, nine years in we were almost at $3 million generated and we'll be by the time we do this I talked with Tony a couple of days ago by the time we do this, we're well over $3 million now, at a 11 times return on investment. So showing the graphic here to show you how we think about these things, how we measure the success of this hopefully inspiring and then next week, as I mentioned each day, I'm gonna be doing a deeper dive on each of those five elements. So on Friday we'll talk all about getting listings there. So very excited about that.
All of these things that we talk about are all part of this listing agent lifestyle, and so I have a book called the listing agent lifestyle and, stuart, if maybe you can post up a link to the book right now that you can download, we've got a link right to the PDF.
If you live right here, you can just click on the link and download the book there. If you're listening to the replay, you can go to listingagentlifestylecom and you can download a copy of the book and there's I've been doing a podcast series there that you can listen to all kinds of agents applying the listing agent lifestyle elements. And then one last thing that I wanna share with you is our scorecard and so everything that we've been talking about. We created a listing agent scorecard where you can find yourself and see where your opportunities are in applying all of the listing agent lifestyle elements, and we have a PDF to download that you can just click on the link in the chat and that will give you all of that. And if you're listening to the replay, you can get that at listingagentlifestylecom. But that was a 50 minute almost exactly marketing sprint that gives you a good overview of actionable things that you can do right away to increase your business in each of those five categories.
So we're gonna fly without a net right now, this is the first time I'm hosting an event myself, so I know that we can invite you up to speak or you can unmute or raise your hand or some way if you wanna join in on the conversation here. Oh, I see Michelle Brossmer. I'd love to talk with Michelle about we just did a listing multiplying campaign with Michelle where we did some Facebook ads, but does anybody know how to activate you being able to ask questions here? How do I nominate somebody, Stuart? Do you know how to do that?
Stuart: Dean, can you see a young the phone? If you're in the app, there's a little one that popped up next to the check board. On the bottom right hand side. There's a little one that's popped up next to the clipboard that's Michelle raising her hand. So I think if you click into that clipboard you can then unmute Michelle. There you go, perfect. The other way of doing it is you can invite people to speak, so by tapping on their icon you can invite them to speak.
Michelle: That's great. Then it gave me a little pop up bar that said turn on my mic, I'd like to join. And then my microphone showed up and I unmuted it.
Dean: Okay, perfect, look at us. We've got our first speaker of the house here and there we go. Welcome, michelle. So, I was very happy to see you here, especially when I was talking about the Facebook campaigns here in the Instant Open House. So what have you got to?
Michelle: share. So I had Diane do the Instant Open House flyer, but I have to say I didn't use the actual flyer because for some reason there was a communication issue about getting a brochure box at the house. So we'll work hard, we're gonna do it coming up next week that I'll get the brochure box so I can have a hard copy.
Dean: So you literally distributed it through Facebook. We set up the exact, we took a picture, a JPEG, of the Infobox flyer and sent that. We created a lead ad around it. So what happened?
Michelle: I probably got about 35 or 40 leads that actually came in to the actual click through, but then a bunch, you know, either unsubscribed or they gave you that. You know MickeyMoutscom. So I cleaned them all up and I ended up with 28 net leads and I spent about 200 bucks.
Dean: That's great. It's about $7.
Michelle: Right so about $7.
Dean: And.
Michelle: Diane's gonna work on my market watch email list, my newsletter now, because you know that's not quite my forte.
Dean: Well, there we go. But you know, I wanna encourage people with that like that. How much was that? Listing 625. Yeah, 625. So you know, you look at that and you know, do the math on what one transaction side from that would be. And now you've got, you know, 28 people that are looking for a home in that price range in that area. And now every week you've got the opportunity to keep them up to date on everything and we'll see what happens with them over the course of the next. You know I was looking at things as my favorite guiding metric is to take a bundle of 100 leads and calculate the value over 100 weeks. So you wonder, you know, how many of those people are going to buy a home if we were to tag them and see what happens?
Michelle: You know, over the course of I've been doing this a really long time, you know that. So they really are consistent with that. You know, I'd say at least half of them buy a house and maybe a quarter of them buy a house with you. So that's all very exciting, I love it and you know it's $7 a lead.
How many text messages do we get every day? You know I'm some referral company out of blah blah blah. We'll send you a relief for 20%. Well, you know how much does it cost to buy a Zillow lead? More than seven bucks.
Dean: Oh, exactly, and I look at that, that I think about these as portfolio things. If we're talking about finding buyers or multiplying your listings, that you know, you look at that. Let's just fast forward that and let's say that you've got an investment of $700 to generate 100 buyer leads. You know net buyer leads like that. So you've got 100 fish swimming around your pond there waiting, and every week you come by and send out all the updates and some one of these weeks, over the next 100 weeks, how many of them are going to be jumping in the boat? You know how many of them are going to be ready to want to go and look at homes, and I think that you know it would be. You could almost not do anything and get one out of 100. So you've got a $700 investment to yield the 10, 12, $15,000 commission, you know. So that's a great way to think about it.
Michelle: Well, the other thing too is, you know, I found over the years that a lot of those people take a year or two to actually pull the trigger. I've had people that came in from some kind of you know like this or market watch or whatever. It took three years to ever really make them. Well, listen, if you look back at the.
Dean: I put it in the chat. I put the link of the Tony Calci case study, we put the infographic of that and we show where all of the leads, how long they were in. So in 2022, tony did a transaction with someone who responded initially in 2013. So nine years later and they ultimately listed their house with Tony. And you see all of that, the building value of it. You know, each year, that pool of unconverted prospects gets more and more valuable. You start to see that each year it's not only the transactions that you're doing right away, but it's also the transactions from the people who responded last year that are now ready. Do you remember Ivan Desjardins? You remember Jesse? Yeah, jesse, okay so Jesse's dad.
We did an experiment in Canada where we ran a. We ran the how to Sell your House for Top Dollar Fast book. We did a half page ad in the newspaper every week for a year. We paid $10,000 for an unchangeable ad, meaning we were we committed to running the same ad every week and we got it for about half price. What rack rate was for the real estate section? So, $10,000 investment in the first year. He did $84,000 in commissions from people who sold their homes and then in the second year he did $80,000 from people who responded the year before. So it continued to build. The value of generating those leads became part of the annuity there. I just had Diane do the research for pre-COVID. We were doing some listing lead generation in some of the neighborhoods here in Winterhaven and we generated 130 something listing leads and I had her go back and look and see how many people actually sold their house and it was almost 40% of the people who responded had sold their home between 2018 and 2022.
You know so that the leads that you're generating are valuable and more valuable to the extent that you have a conversion system in place. That's really what the value is Excited for you to come and share. Thank you, Michelle.
Michelle: You're welcome. I'll come back again and hopefully, you know, be a little bit better at following up on those leads I'm good at doing the way we've done, but the follow-up thing. That's why I got the easy button, because maybe I'll get a little bit better at following up on her Awesome.
Dean: Well, that's good. So I think the great thing now is, if you want to jump up on stage here, if you want to comment or have, we can talk about any of the insights or any direction that you might need for moving forward there. We're kind of learning the moves on how to operate the room, but I think you have a chance to raise your hand somehow and I can bring you up onto the stage here. But mark your calendar for next week. I'm going to do a series of rooms about all of those five elements. So each day at noon Eastern, we're going to, on Monday, talk about getting referrals. On Tuesday, we're going to talk about multiplying your listings. On Wednesday, we're going to talk about converting leads. On Thursday, we'll talk about finding buyers. And on Friday, we'll talk about getting listings. So be a great discussion group. This was an anomaly in that I did most of the talking here, but I wanted to mostly record this for the people coming into the room here, coming into the house. I guess we call it now or the club that this will be a great benchmark. We set up replays, so if you're listening to the replays between now and August 20, whatever next Monday is. Today is the 23rd, so whatever Monday is, you can join us for those sessions. And if you want to get all of the downloads or the samples of the things that we talked about here, you can go to listing agent lifestylecom. Download the book and we'll send you all of the graphics, all the illustrations that we used for today. And if you want to do online your listing agent score, you can go to listing agent scorecom. We have an online process that will walk you through each of the eight elements of the listing agent lifestyle and find out where you know which of these elements is helping grow or slow your business right now.
So, okay, I think we've got the moves. We're just past the top of the hour here. I appreciate everybody that came to this inaugural kickoff event live. So we'll wrap up for now and then we will see everybody on Monday in the listing agent lifestyle Academy lounge. I guess we'll call this. Have a great week everybody. We'll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.