 I took a few courses on doing real estate photography. I bought a, um, about a $4,000 camera set up between the camera and the lens, a really nice Nikon. Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for Ricky! Karoo! He is an investor, a speaker, and soon to be remembered, in my opinion, as a legend in the industry. The cool thing about what he was doing was he was documenting everything. Like, he would post his calls, because the work he was putting in, the strategies, he was sharing everything. So if I need to move fast, I can move as fast as they want. My mornings are, uh, sacred. My mornings are my prospecting time. I don't set appointments for the mornings. I don't know, I mean, you just create a client for life. And when they answer the phone that way, it's a done deal. But like, stay busy, stir the pie, talk to people, and I'm telling you that this is easy. You're making it hard. The more days on market, the more stigmatized property gets, and potentially the lower the offers are gonna be that are coming in once somebody likes it. When I do have a good call, I repeat my name. What up? Yo, what's happening, man? So tell me about these listings. Dude, uh, so January 1, I hosted a big thing in my Zoom room where we kicked the year off right with all of the new expired listings that hit. January 1st is the biggest batch of expired listings you're gonna get on the 1st of any month of the year. And I ended up having, I don't know, 25 or 30 agents that came in. We all made calls together. And on one of the calls I made, I picked up three appointments, and so far, one of those has turned into a listing, which I put on the market two days ago. So it was January 8th. You made these calls on January 1. On January 1. I talked to those people for the first time that day. First time that day, just reached out. And none of them had any calls from any other agent. Matter of fact, I asked that question because I wanted to see how many agents were calling on the 1st of January, or were we still stuck in this holiday feeling where it's like, all right, well, the 1st is a holiday, so I'm not gonna start real estate until tomorrow. And so I got a jump on everybody in my market, which was flippin' hilarious. I love, I love doing the opposite of what everybody else is doing, right? When they're goin' hard, I'm workin' on other stuff. When they relax, I'm crushin' it. Yeah. And so, yeah, yeah, I ended up goin' live with that one. It was 3359, so it was little over the midpoint in my market, and went live on January 5th on that expired. So you called them on the 1st and had it listed by the 5th on the market, so which means you signed the listing, like on the 2nd? On the 4th. How'd you do, how'd you get pictures and do all that so fast to get it on the market? Well, I do all of my own photography, so I went out, last year I got fed up with the quality of pictures I was gettin' from the professional photographers in my area, and so I bought a, about a $4,000 camera setup between the camera and the lens, a really nice Nikon, and took a few courses on doin' real estate photography, and now I have complete control over when that occurs. I also went out and got my drone pilots license, and so I do all my own drone photography as well. It adds another thing to my plate that I have to do, but what it eliminates is I don't have to wait for somebody else's schedule to be able to accommodate what I need to accommodate, so if I need to move fast, I can move as fast as they want. Of course, if I need to move slow, I can do that as well, if they're not ready or, you know, they need time for this, that, and the other. So like, you're, so, wait a minute, so, so you, hold on. So you're telling me, like, you, you know, you prospect, you go get listings, you go to listing appointments, you coach agents, right, and you take your own pictures, and you don't have an assistant, right? No, no assistant. You don't have an assistant, so like, you're literally, okay. You've been after me for a while, man. You're like, you could get so much more done if you got an assistant, and yeah, I probably could. I am. I'm not even going there with it. I'm just mind blown by how much you do. Yeah, yep, yep. I do, I do all of them. It's, how do you do all that? I mean, like, you coach agents. Right. You have a real estate business where you close five plus deals a month, right? How many you close a month? I'm pretty consistent. About five plus? About five, yeah, yeah. Five deals a month. Five deals a month. And you just stay consistent with all of it, and you take your own pictures. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. It comes down to time blocking, right? So my mornings are sacred. My mornings are my prospecting time. I don't set appointments for the mornings. I don't gossip with family members in the mornings. I don't anything. That is my time to grow my business and keep my pipeline full. My afternoons are my appointments. As far as the photography piece of it, any time I had a listing before I did my own photography, I would always meet the photographer there anyway, help with the staging of each room, make sure everything was just like I wanted it so that the photos I got were what I wanted. And so I was spending the same amount of time there. I was just also spending money for the photographer to take the pictures and then take them back and do the post editing and stuff on. That was the hardest part for me, because I'd already been staging rooms for quite a while. I already knew about camera setup, lighting, that kind of thing, time of day and all of the stuff that goes into getting really great photos. And so for me, it was just really learning Photoshop and Lightroom Classic more than anything else as far as in the post production stuff. And I'm getting faster and faster with that. So in the beginning, it would take me three or four hours to edit a batch of photos, which was more time consuming than the photos themselves with a prospecting session to create the listing. Now I'm down to the point where it's about 30 or 45 minutes for me to edit a full batch of photos. I'm already spending the same amount of time that I would have been spending anyway on the photo shoot because I would have been there and then just protecting my prospecting sessions. Do you aspire to go to 10 transactions a month? I do and things are gonna have to change because I'm about at the limit of what I can accomplish between the coaching, the photography, the prospecting, the going on the appointments and all that stuff. Now my wife is also a real estate agent. And so I've kind of handed off all of my buyers to her so that she can go do the chasing people around and all that, but that doesn't really keep her busy, busy all the time. And so we have been talking, her and I, about her taking some of the load off my shoulders as far as like the transactions. You know, maybe her picking up the transaction coordination piece, I can spend more time doing the prospecting end of it. But then who's gonna take the buyers? She's gonna do the buyers as well because that's not filling her days up. Now once that starts filling her days up, then together we're gonna probably have to pick up a an assistant. But at that point when we're both at kind of our limit, well then that assistant should have plenty to do. Yeah. And then we can go. She's got plenty to do now. I would think so. But now the other one was a, the other one that I just listed yesterday on the seventh was a FISBO. And I reached out to him the first week of December. And he is a, he's a retired gentleman who likes to pick up properties, renovate them kind of at his own pace and then sell them. So he's not like a professional fix and flipper. He's kind of a hobbyist fix and flipper, but he's picking up nice properties. This one was 350,000. And so I went out and met with him in December. We had a great meeting. He wasn't interested in working with an agent at that point, but we really connected on a bunch of different levels. And he has two other properties that he's just about done on the renovation work on. And he was gonna go FISBO with them. So I went out yesterday, met with them, got all my photos, got the thing uploaded into the MLS last night. He called me this morning and said, hey, I love what you did on the photos, the description and all that stuff. Let's get together this week and go look at the other two and get a game plan for getting both of them listed. So really going deep on the relationship on these things and not worrying about transactions, which is like exactly what you teach. And by doing that, like you really get a lot of goodwill and a lot of, I don't know. I mean, you just create a client for life. So when you go talk to a for sale by owner, did he indicate before you came that like he wasn't gonna work with agents, et cetera? Yeah, well, he specifically said, when I called him, he said, no, I'm not working with agents. I, in the past three years, I've sold a couple of houses for sale by owner and I'm pretty comfortable doing that myself. And I said, well, heck, that's great. Matter of fact, you'll save a lot of money doing it that way. I'd still like to come out and meet you and see the place and maybe I can add something to what you're doing and help you sell it on your own. And he goes, sure. So I went out and met with him. It's funny because I put his call video his call video on my YouTube channel. And in the beginning of the call with him, he was very standoffish, one word answers like he really wasn't giving me anything. I'm gonna forget about it. I'm gonna put the link. Send me the link for that video. Okay. Not now necessarily, but just afterwards. And I will, I'm gonna put it in the description so people can actually go there and watch the actual call that you have. This is the first call that you had with him. First call, yeah. You guys can go watch the very first call Shane had with this guy. He had the call on first week of December. He just listed the guy this week. So took 30 days. He was a guy who wasn't gonna work with agents, already sold for sell by owner, was successful, saved the commission money. Literally one of those leads that most agents would be like, I'm not even gonna waste my time. I'm not even gonna go talk to him. I'm not even gonna, you know, I'm just gonna scratch him off my list. You actually pursued him and said, well, let me come talk to you anyway. Let me come meet you. Let me come see if I can add some value. Yeah. And here we are 30 days later. You've got one listed and two more on the way. I didn't mean to interrupt you. I just wanted to, before I forgot about it, to let everybody know. I'm gonna put that link below so they can watch the actual call that you're talking about. But yeah, so he's given these one word answers, basically like not interested in working with agents whatsoever, how do you, you know, how do you turn that into three listings a month later? Well, you have to really listen. Like on the initial call, where I feel like I turned him around and opened him up to me a little bit. He kept saying, sir, no, sir, yes, sir, whatever. And we live near a military base here. And so I asked him, I said, are you former military? And he goes, yes, sir, I am. I was a Navy. He said, I was former Navy. He said, you? And I said, no, I was former law enforcement, but when you say sir like that, and I think he might have even used a phonetic, like a whiskey, Oscar Romeo, whatever. Maybe when he was giving me his email address, he might have used a phonetic that caused that question to come up. But by me tapping into listening to that thing that caused me to tap into his past, his history, and then to create some sort of a connection with him, now I wasn't military. I should have been. You know, I was gonna join the Navy. I met a girl, and that's the beginning of like every bad story that you can say. But I was law enforcement for 10 years. And so we use the same military phonetics that they used. And so I was able to make that little connection with them, which then led to an appointment. And on the appointment, we had a great connection. I mean, we ended up doing something that I never do with a client, which is we ended up talking politics and talking about children and raising kids today and school systems. And I mean, we ended up going down a deep path, just on a personal level, just two guys chatting, right? And at the end of that meeting, I felt really good that if things didn't go well for him that I would end up getting the listing. I felt like I made that good a connection. And then I follow up with my FISBOs every Monday. And the Monday follow up calls are the easiest thing in the world. You just reach out, that was your weekend. I had a great weekend, did you have much traction? Get them to talking about something. If they talk about something this week, like say they're going to their daughter's soccer game or whatever, next week, next Monday when I call, hey, how was the soccer game last week? Did your daughter win? Just something to go deeper in the relationship with them. And it's literally in every Monday check-in with every one of the FISBOs I'm working. And by about the second or third week, what will happen? And this is your clue that you've really, really got them. Instead of answering the phone, now I'm ringing them. Instead of them answering the phone, hello, they'll answer the phone, hey, Shane, how was your weekend? And when they answer the phone that way, it's a done deal, right? And let's say sell it on their own, it's my listing. And then at that point, I'm not competing against other agents, right? I'm not going in with the big flashy sales presentation and all that, I haven't done a legitimate CMA in over a year. I never did one. Yeah. Not one single time. Yeah, I did, I used to. I used to go in with glossy, I would print them and go in and try and really wow people. I literally walk in with a couple of active comps and a few documents like a marketing toolkit for FISBOs and an open house sign-in sheet, just some stuff so that I can have reciprocity play a part in our relationship. Yeah, this is one of those things. It's like, just go do stuff. That's it. You know, like stay busy, stir the pot, talk to people, see what you need to help them, right? Yeah. You know, it's so simple. And people might be listening to this saying, oh yeah, you make it sound so simple, you guys are selling all this property, it's not as easy as you make it up. We were where you are right now. And we have coached thousands of agents. I've watched thousands of agents go through this whole struggle and I'm telling you that this is easy, you're making it hard. So going back to that first meeting when you sat down with them and you're talking about all this, that and the other, I got two questions. One, how long was that meeting? And two, we're talking about life stuff and raising kids and everything else. But what converting questions did you ask? Did you talk about if you were to listen, do you have an agent? Or what's the chances you might listen? Or how long are you gonna let this go before you decide you might wanna hire an agent? So how long was the meeting? And what was their point in the conversation where you took it towards the setup to list the property? Yeah, so I bring with me a for sale burner backup plan. It's basically the way that I plan on marketing the property if they end up handing it off. It's there, I'm giving up on it, throwing my hands up plan for them, right? And so the end of all of my calls, I ask them if the property doesn't sell in the next, 30 days, 45 days, whatever, are they gonna look at other options to maybe get it sold? And so I've got that in my notes. And so when I go for my meetings, we're sitting down, we're talking, I'm going over all of the items that are brought with me to help them sell it on their own like the active comp so they can justify the price that they got for it, the open house sign-in sheet, the marketing toolkit. I bring my vendor list with me. The vendors that I use on every one of my closings that I can vouch for 100% because they get me from the contract to close every time. And I say, look, guys, when you get this, and I use Assumptive Language as if they're just gonna sell it on their own. When you get this under contract, if you need vendors, use this list. I got my closing attorney on there, I've got my title company on there, I've got my contractors on there, my loan officer on there, anything you need, these people right here are professionals and they'll get the job done right. And I know that because I've been in it long enough and I've used them long enough to know what kind of product they provide or what kind of service they provide. But use these people and then typically at that point if they haven't opened the door, right? Now we've already gone through my price recommendation. I've reviewed their Zillow listing and kind of gone over where they can maybe make it better and all this, also go over the difficulty that they have just inherently built into how buyers find their property online, right? Because it used to be on Zillow, when you opened it up, you had right on the main page, if you did a search for a certain city, right on the main page, you would have agent listings and then buy owners or other. And it was two tabs. If you didn't see what you liked under agent listings, which was the preset, then you click on the other one. Last year, Zillow changed that. Now those two tabs are in the menu. They're under the more menu. And so the buyers that are looking online, if they don't know that, if they don't know to go up to more on Zillow and then go to the drop-down menu and then choose other, they never even see it. So a lot of these fizzbos just aren't getting the exposure. They aren't getting the eyeballs on their property and we talk about that. We also talk about days on market and how having a property on for six months, eight months a year, even if it's on for sale by owner on Zillow, it's still hurting them in the long run because the more days on market, the more stigmatized property gets and potentially the lower the offers are gonna be that are coming in once somebody likes it. When we get down to that point, if they haven't opened the door already with a question, like, well, what would it look like if you listed it? Tell me about your commission structure, whatever. If they don't open the door with a question that leads me into a listing conversation, then I'll bring up what they said on the phone call. I'll say, hey, well, you mentioned that you were gonna wait maybe 30 or 45 days and then start interviewing agents. Is it okay if I put in my application now that way when the day comes or if the day comes and you throw your hands up, you already kind of have me in your back pocket and they'll laugh and they're like, yeah, sure. So then I go into what I would do listing their property at them. Wow. So the magic line is I'd like to go ahead and put my application in. Now, absolutely. The magic line is I would like to go and put my application in now. Where do I submit it? That's what I tell you. Where do I put my application in? Because I, like, this is my job here. This is what I wanna do. That's good. And I love when Fisbo's asked me, this is something else, when we're on the phone call, is this is something I don't believe any other agents are doing? When they make a statement, something to the tune of, well, all you want is the listing, right? You hear that every once in a while when you get them on the phone. And it's like, no, actually, I'm looking to help you however I can, but are you looking for a listing agent? Because I can apply for that job. Don't throw something out there because I'll spin it and put it right back on you. You know what I'm saying? It's like, well, that's what you're looking for. That's not actually quite the opposite, but is that what you're looking for? Exactly, exactly. And that will make them laugh. And they're like, oh, crap, I kind of opened the door to this conversation now. Yeah, yeah, that's good. A lot of fun. And then, like, you didn't magically know these lines or nuances or... Having fun. What's that? Having fun on the phone calls, that's all it is. I mean, when you started out, like, you know, were you that good, that smooth? No, no, no, no, I don't think I was anywhere near that smooth. I had... I mean, I sucked. Yes, yeah. I was really, I mean, I don't know. I was probably better than I think I was, better than average, I'm sure, but in my mind, I was horrible on the phone. I guess I'm comparing myself now, to then, we're always getting better, but... I came on your channel back in December of 2020 and I made my first one hour call session with you, my first time ever live on YouTube with anything. And I went back and listened to that a couple months ago and listening to it now, I was like, oh my God, I was bad. Yeah. I had pretty good success. I still connected with people, but it wasn't great. I wish I had a video camera from back when I was doing it back in 2002, 2003. Yeah, right. Yeah. And then 2008, when I got back in making calls and stuff, and I'm sure those were interesting, but yeah. I mean, people hear us talk about, you know, how smooth these conversations go and how it's just putting our hands and it just kind of falls in our lap kind of deal. But what they don't get is that this comes from years and years and thousands and thousands of conversations where each little conversation, you get a little better, you know, than the last one, right? And not as good as the next one. And you just kind of keep going down that path. Every call, you're a little better. You don't realize it, but you're literally molding yourself into this great communicator just from sheer experience and figuring out what the tone and nuance and speed and everything should be that best makes people feel comfortable with you. But then you kind of realize there's no boogeyman. No. You know, every situation is just, you know, basically the prospect blowing smoke. Right. You know, it's like, hey, you know, you're just trying to get the listing. You know, right then that's just, that's a common smoke blowing maneuver, you know? And you just laugh. That's like when people are mean to me on the phone, you know, which is rare, honestly. But when they are, I just literally I laugh out loud and cause it's funny. Cause I know that they're just blowing smoke. They're not actually mean. Nobody can actually be that mean to where, you know, they want you to, you know, whatever. So I've got a Jedi mind trick that I do with the mean ones, right? I call them my militant fizzbos, the one call them up and you say, Hey, my name's Shane. I'm a local realtor. Call, I'm calling about your for sale by owner property on Johnson street. Is that, is that for sale by owner? And they'll go, I don't need a realtor. Don't call me and they hang up, right? Yeah. Well, I'll, I'll, I'll pull their name and I'll lock their number in and I'll set them for a two week call back. And I do a Jedi mind trick on them. When I call them back in two weeks, right? Ring, ring, ring the answer the phone. I'll say, Hey, John. Yeah. Hey, this is Shane. I'm that realtor you spoke to a couple of weeks ago. Really enjoyed our conversation, man. Super fun to get to know you a little bit. Just wanted to find out how things have been in the last two weeks. They won't remember the call where they hung up on you. They'll think that you had a great connection and the second call about nine times out of 10. The second call is a great call. Oh my God. Right? Jedi mind trick, man. That's my, that's my, that's my thing. That's hilarious. Yeah. Because, you know, that, that I say, I used to say this all the time. I've said this a long time when you call someone and it was a bad call or whatever. They don't, they don't remember your name. Literally when you say your name and then they say what they, they didn't hear your name. They don't, they definitely did not remember it. Even if they could quite possibly remember it, they're not even sure that they remembered it correctly. Right. Like when you get off the phone, they literally, you could literally call them back the next day and start all over again for like round two. Let's see how this goes. See which side of the bed they woke up on today. Because that's right. It's literally like Groundhog Day, man. It's like we're calling Goldfish here. They, they literally do not remember. They literally do not remember anything. And that's why at the end of the call, when I do have a good call, I repeat my name. Yeah. Yeah. Like, well, again, my name is and I worked with this company and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right, right, right. You know, I reiterate everything that I wanted them to remember, you know, especially my name and everything. Because I know they don't remember my name at all. Right. You know, by the time you get that far in the conversation, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people get off the phone with agents and think, who the heck was that? That was sure it was a nice guy or a nice girl. And I was, who the heck was that? You know. That's right. I don't remember the name. And then they start getting the email or whatever. And they, they're like, I've heard that name before somewhere, but they can't quite put two and two together. That's why it's good to repeat the name. Yeah. Your name, your company, all that good stuff. At the end of the call, okay, you know, okay, cool. We'll see you soon. And again, just, just to reiterate here, you know, here's my name, here's my company, you know, look forward to getting to know you more. But yeah, you could literally have a do-over. You can. The next day on these people, if you wanted to, I never really cared to because I could just call a fresh list and talk to some more people. Right. My mindset was like, new, new, new, new, new, new, new. Mm-hmm. You know, if somebody was mean or didn't answer, I just, and that's another reason why I was never fond of for sale by owners. Because I have to continue to call, continue, you know, you do the calls every Monday. Yep. It's not in my DNA. Yeah. To follow up like that. You know, it, you know, it's not my thing. I like to call, have a great conversation, do a weekly email, let them call me when they get ready to do something. Let me continue on looking for people that are ready to do business with me now. Mm-hmm. So yeah, but that's the way you have to do for sale by owners. You've got to call them once a week, check on them, see how they're doing and continue their relationship until the point they either decided to throw in the towel and list it or they sell it theirself or whatever. That's the only way to win. And I actually touch them twice a week. So I, so I call them every Monday and then they get my weekly market update every Wednesday. And the funny thing is while they're for sale by owner, for the most part, they all open my weekly email every single week, right? Like, like it's instant openers. Right, right, right, right. Oh, that's funny, that's so funny. Cool, man. I'm gonna post a link to that call you did with that guy. The description so you guys can go there, watch that call. You can kind of see how the whole thing started. This is literally the very first moment that he ever talked to this guy, ever in his life, caught on film, boom, watch it. Now you know the story on the backend. He listed 30 days later, so that's pretty cool to know how it all played out. I'll put that in the description. You guys can go subscribe to Shane's channel. He's always making live calls, giving good tips, all that good stuff. So anyway, man, cool. Well, awesome. I'm looking forward to our next little podcast and I can't wait to hear about some more listing stories, man. We need to call this something like listing stories with Shane or something. That's it. That's right. Cool, bro. Talk to you soon, brother. Hey, brother. All right, bud.