 people taking responsibility basically to do it the right way. I think the main goal make agents laugh and entertain them. And then the second goal would be to educate social media wise, how to grow your platform, what type of content to post. And then the third goal would be to kind of bridge that gap for newer agents when they get licensed, make them feel more comfortable in the industry and maybe provide even like a course down the road that's kind of like an introductory of what the hell to expect in real estate. How not to feel like an idiot your first year in real estate, not how to sell more real estate, of course. Yo, yo, yo, what is up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Road to 10,000. I'm your co-host Ricky Carruth. I'm with my guy Juan Carlos. Let me get this, man. Baradichi. Baranache, come on. Yeah, come on. Oh my goodness. Today we're with the broke agent on Instagram. Eric, what's up, dude? What's up, man? Thanks for having me. Nice to meet you. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I do you in person. You just blew up his name, man. Is that a thing? Are you are you out of the the Instagram? What do you call it? Are you allowed to see your name out there? Yes, it was a secret. Oh, yeah, yeah, it was a secret the first six months. But then I spoke at an MN conference in front of my brokerage. And then they found out it was me and then fired me like pretty much right afterwards. No, no, so tell us about that. How did that play out? Well, we spoke at the MN conference. So I started this with a friend named West Pinkston back in 2015. And for the first six months, we were just posting under an alias, the broke agent, because we were scared of what it would do to our real estate careers, of course. The posts were a lot edgier kind of at the beginning. And then we spoke at this conference and the general manager was literally sitting in the front row. He kind of had the idea that it was us beforehand, but he basically sent us a message a couple of days later being like, I don't know if this is necessarily good for the brand. I think you guys should kind of find a different brokerage, which I totally understood. Wow. Okay. So, so was it the broke agent back then? Yeah. Okay. So it was the broke agent. You were posting edgier stuff than you post now. I take it. It was, yes. At the beginning, I was just trying to get attention, obviously just for the brand. So I was trying to be kind of, it was more dark humor, basically. And a lot of it was kind of focused on hating on real estate agents and hating on like the top producer or coaching types, honestly. And that was kind of what initially gave it attention. And then as I progressed in my real estate career, the goal wasn't to just hate on agents because I was an agent, still am an agent. The goal was to just make agents laugh. So, so question, was there a Ricky meme that you had up in there back in the old days? No, I came across Ricky, I don't know, a year ago, a couple of years ago, we DM'd a little and he's been blowing up on social. So, I mean, you're, you're everywhere right now. You're all over. Shit, I wasn't even on social back then. I did, I didn't know until 2017. So, you started BrokeAgent in 14, 15. 15, yep. So, how long have you been an agent? I've been a licensed agent since 2014. Yeah, that's nice. That's, it's good to, it's good to hear the back story there. Kind of how it all came to be. And so, what made you continue to grow that brand? So, you're still selling, right? Barely, but yes. Barely. So, the BrokeAgent brand is kind of overshadowing. It's kind of like your primary business. It has become the primary business within the last two years. So, I was, I am still selling, do three or four deals a year, basically. I'm out here in Brentwood, Los Angeles, and basically selling condos to my friends, you know, starter homes. You're in the top 1% right now in realtors, right? I mean, I could say that, but definitely not. I'm probably, well, maybe in terms of overall sales, but definitely not in volume, that's for sure. But yeah, I'm still selling, but the BrokeAgent has definitely taken over my daily activities for sure. Cool stuff. Yeah, that's a full-time job. Yes. So, I'm just going to, I'm going to share the screen so that the audience could take a look if they want to go ahead and follow you. And right here's the page. So, you're up to, you have more than a quarter of a million followers. You say you started back when? 2015? Yeah. What's that like in the beginning? When you, when you started at zero, you're just posting memes. Obviously, you only have a couple of thousand followers. Like what kind of consistency does it take to just get it to that level? Oh, nonstop. I was posting five times a day, but the, the main growth came from the community engagement. So I was liking photos literally all day. I would like everything hashtag realtor, hashtag realtor, humor, hashtag top producer, any major real estate hashtag. I was blowing up, commenting on, following, unfollowing. And this is kind of back in the day before Instagram really cracked down on that type of thing. So now if you like too many photos at once, you could obviously get your account blocked or at least get that feature blocked or if you comment on too many things. So back then I would seriously like thousands of photos a day. I would post in real estate Facebook groups. I would do every podcast possible, just anything to get the broke agent name out there. I was DMing, you know, the Reinser Hans, the Brad Inmans, the Tom Ferries, just anyone that could potentially repost and networking with them in order to get the following. But from the beginning, it was posting five or six times a day. Anytime I came up with something. Wow. And now you're basically doing this full time at that point, just posting all day, you're engaging with other people on that side. What did the analytics look like when you finally broke like 10, 20, 30 K? Did you start getting a lot of traction from it? And is it like a certain amount that you have to get like 10 K and then it explodes or is it just consistent? Like for the last five years, nonstop, you just pumping it out there. It's pretty consistent. It definitely starts snowballing, not after a specific number. But I'd say once I got to five or six K, I guess that's kind of when a lot of the tags came in and then I started getting recommended on the Instagram algorithm, of course. So I strategically followed the Ricky Cruz, Tom Ferries, Inman News, million dollar listing, that type of thing. So I could always pop up and real estate agents suggested for, you know, Instagram real estate accounts. So once all the tags started coming in, once I hit, I guess, five or six thousand, that's when it really started to snowball. But recently it's been really picking up, especially because of reels and Instagram stories. Now I'm getting like four or five thousand followers a week, which is awesome. Nice, nice. So, OK, and then where do you take it as far as, you know, making a living off of it? Is it book sales? Is it sponsorship deals? Like what? Where does that go? I need help with this. It's I did a book. I had Commission Impossible, which was a real estate comic book. I'll send you guys some copies. I don't know if you saw it. Kind of cool. Kind of. Yeah. And I sold I sold a few thousand copies. But you don't get rich off of a book. I've tried a lot of things. I tried an animation series. The beginning was a lot of influencer work, and I still do that too. So I do brand deals for brands that are trying to reach real estate agents, which has been great. I've worked with QuickBooks, Planetmatic, Boomtamar, ROI, some of the bigger brands there. And then now the biggest form of monetization has been my template platform. So I have a template platform for real estate agents who don't know what to post on social media. I come up with 30 or 50 funny posts per month, and then they join that platform. It's called Cosplay Contracts. So it's so it's funny posts for real estate agents to help them grow their real estate business. Yeah, to help them grow their real estate social media. But you're only going to use three or four funny posts a month. If you're a real estate agent, you're not trying to be the broke agent. You're not always trying to post funny stuff. So this entire platform has other content as well. I just I'm an affiliate that only contributes to funny content. So it's more like funny, educational Instagram highlights, Instagram real ideas, Instagram story covers, email, templates, buyer guides, pretty much like it's like a one stop shop for real estate social media. Do you offer any like marketing consulting services to like help people build their brand or growth and stuff like that? So that's starting now. So this really came about a couple of years ago. I came out with an Instagram growth ebook that was just kind of like a free download or maybe it was 10 bucks, but it was like a free chapter download and it was basically just how to get to 10,000 followers, which is the name of this podcast or at least the name of this specific podcast. Right, which well, this is well, it's 10,000 agents. Right. OK, OK, so not quite 10,000 something, but it was basically all the Instagram strategies that I used to grow. And the that ebook was extremely successful. Because before I didn't really know what else I could offer agents besides this real estate humor, I was always trying to figure out what is this brand exactly? And then it was like a light went off, basically, when I came out with that ebook because it got like 10,000 downloads or something really quickly and people really start hitting me up for Instagram growth, success, tools, ideas and engagement tactics, basically. What's like what's like a top Instagram growth strategy without giving away what's in your book? I could give it away. I mean, everyone knows these at this point, I think. But I mean, the hashtag strategy, the community engagement that I talked about the kind of Gary V dollar 80 strategy or whatever it is where you're commenting on like-minded accounts. This is something that really helped me grow where you pick five or ten accounts and comment something engaging, not necessarily something just nice. Or it's just saying like the word nice, it's got to be something that attracts them to your profile, of course. But what I've been doing now is Instagram stories has really helped my account explode. So the goal is obviously to basically engage the algorithm very early in the day. I start like six or seven and posting Instagram stories. And then that makes your feed posts more engaging because they're already engaging with your Instagram story content. So anytime you could use all of Instagram features, whether it's votes, you know, gifts, questions, stuff like that, that really starts getting your fans engaged and they're more likely to engage with your feed posts. And that's just recommending my post nonstop that people really helping me get more followers. Just what do you find? Yeah, exactly. It sounds like it sounds like just consistency in work and grinding it out. What do you think is the number one reason why a lot of real estate agents really don't have much success when it comes to social media? Is it some is it what they're doing? Is it that they're not doing it enough? What would you say it is? Well, I think the inauthenticity, inauthentic nature of their posts. And I know that's kind of just a buzzy cliche thing to say, but it's a lot of repeat content for real estate agents. It's all just sold in escrows, just listed kind of motivational quotes, you know, cookie cutter booted and strapped, not strapped, suited and booted real estate agent content that you see. And I think now agents are finally starting to differentiate differentiate themselves with humor and reels and memes and funny music videos for the listing, stuff like that. I just think that there's so many real estate agents out there that it becomes exhausting for their clients to follow because it's just the same type of content. So I think it's it's hard for them to differentiate themselves. But I think as people like, you know, Ricky are posting and I'm posting, they're kind of seeing other ways to go about getting engagement than just posting pictures of their listings and posting pictures of themselves and suits with making fake phone calls, basically. So when you started to now, like I got in late 2017 or so, did you like the like the Instagram algorithm was much more accelerated than it is now? Right? Absolutely. Like you've watched it go from probably maybe even its best around 2014 or so to probably its worst right now. Like what at what point did you see like what year? When when did you see things change? Like what what made you realize that things were changing? Well, recently in August, I want to say when they implemented reels, it really shifted away from unoriginal content and reposts, which hurt me because I am I do a lot of means and reposts to original content. So I think I think it was August, but I saw my engagement completely flattened with memes, completely flattened with video posts because Instagram was pushing reels. Anytime they come out with a new feature, they really make sure that they're only pushing accounts that use that specific feature. So recently, it's definitely I've really started to focus on reels trying to at least do one or two a day almost, because just the meme posts aren't cutting it basically because vertical content is what people are consuming as you can see on TikTok and everything. So yeah, the algorithm shifts all the time and it did this with IGTV. It did this with slideshow posts at any time. Again, they implement a new feature. You really got to hit that. Yeah. So are you are you are you like what all platforms is? Instagram is your main one, I'm guessing, right? And then on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, are you doing anything with the other platforms? Yeah, I'm on them all. So when I first started, I made sure to get the handles on everything. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and it was basically posting the same exact content on each platform. Twitter, I kind of use as a dumping ground for my jokes. So I'll just tweet something out, see how it does on Twitter. If it does well, I'll either put that on a meme, make that into a video or a skit and just kind of test it out there. Facebook's scary just because people get so offended and pissed by everything, especially in real estate Facebook groups. So Instagram is the perfect platform for my content because you're not seeing the comments necessarily that everybody's making. And it doesn't show up in everybody's Facebook feed, right? So Instagram is more intimate where you can just tag someone or say something like, oh, I remember the steal on 43 Stoner Street like this. I relate to this, but on Facebook, everybody sees that. And a lot of people don't want to share broke agent posts necessarily because a lot of it make realtors look like morons. So I get that. And it has a huge, the broke agent watermark on it too. So I do get a lot of shares on Facebook, but I'm also on TikTok. It's just it's hard to post consistently on that because I really got to be in a mood to, you know, film myself and do some sort of like lip syncing or have the right lighting. My girlfriend lives, you know, in this apartment and it's embarrassing as hell to have two o'clock in the afternoon. So that's why like memes and stuff are way easier for me. But yeah, I was on it. I was on a TikTok grind like early quarantine. That's all I was doing. And it's the growth on that is ridiculous. So you come up with all the content, all the jokes, everything was out of your mind. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is submissions too. So I get a lot of people that are finally sending me content. But as I do real estate, there's so much funny content that you could get from every showing, every phone call, every inspection. And then I steal a lot of content from other meme pages, of course. So if there's a concept I could basically just throw at an open house at the end of it, and it's a real estate joke, I always like tag people. But people are finally submitting stuff and it's becoming like a more platform for real estate agents as opposed to just my brain. So you're probably maybe are you the top mean real estate meme page? I think so. Yeah. I'd like to think of the Broke agent is more of a more than just a meme page. OK, but maybe OK. That should be your tagline, man. The Broke agent more than just a meme. I have the key. I have the key to surviving real estate right now. I think that one's pretty good because my logo is a key. Right. What's the what's the future of the Broke agent? What do you want to take this? I want it to be the barstool of real estate, basically, where it's an entire platform of funny real estate content and educational content, merchandise, podcasting and become the biggest real estate media company. I want to overtake in the news. I want it to be kind of BuzzFeed style posts, but that really just help agents help like newer agents feel more comfortable in the business because, you know, you get your real estate license. You have absolutely no idea what to do. You feel like a fish out of water and I feel like there's no education necessarily unless they go into coaching or unless they're brokerage, you know, teaches them and walks them through what happens in inspection, what happens at a show and what happens at an open house and just kind of becomes like the go to platform for that. So if you're going to if you're going to like compete with Inman, then you've got a blog. I did. See, this is the problem is there's so much content to produce. I'm really focused like socially heavy focused. I when I first started the brokerage, I didn't mention this at the beginning. It was very blog centric. So I was doing kind of listicle style, five things to do while you're bored in an open house, not really like ever lead generation tactics or anything because I'll never preach how to become a better agent because I'm not, you know, crushing it myself. It's always kind of like social focus, but I need more writers. I need more content producers. And I've had a lot over the time that it kind of cycled in and out. But my problem has been finding people that want to focus on producing real estate content and not just growing their real estate business. Right. So I need people that are like really fired up about where the brokerage is going and want to become an influencer type of, you know, content producer for the brand. Right. Right. And then so, but that's what you're going to have to do, right? Go back to the blogs. Yeah, absolutely. And we got a guy, Matt Lee and Eddie Nass. So I do the podcast over asked podcast with him and he's always producing content for his own page and for the brokerage and he's absolutely crushing. And he's kind of like the similar mind step to me, too, of creating funny content. But yeah, I need people to be producing blog posts for sure. And kind of real estate news. Yeah. So if anybody's listen to this or watching this that might feel like they want to, you know, talk to Eric about this. Feel free to reach out to him. Just DM him at the broker agent. Just reach out to him there. Yeah, me and Juan looked at that. We looked at that, you know, like we can do our own enderman. Yeah, kind of deal. And then it took us about it took us about five minutes to realize, wait a minute, that's way too much work than what we really want to do. I called my friend Alexa from college. She's a freelance journalist for like a major media company. I'm like, Alexa, what would this really take to create a multimillion dollar real estate blog? And she's like, well, Juan, you need to hire this person. You need to have three staff journalists. You need to have an oversight manager creating this. You have to create a funnel over here. You have to have a marketing department. It's a whole entire Fortune 5000 game. It's not a walk in the park. Yeah, you're right. I'm actually not going to do that. No, you just said that with the blog. No, I. Yeah, it's serious. It really is. And the blog would never be the focus. It's kind of more podcasting and just being a platform for real estate agents to post funny content and to produce post awesome like marketing videos. So when there's a funny real estate listing video instead of DMing it to me, because I get a lot of DMs. It's hard to see all these things. It'd be great if there was just an entire site where people could kind of scroll through and be like, this is the video of the day. This is someone who's crushing it on reels. This is a real estate agent that is crushing, you know, Facebook ads or something like that. And each one of those is kind of like socially driven posts. But I agree. Creating blog posts and hiring people is a complete nightmare for sure. So you want to do that on a website? Like have it to work like like your own social media kind of deal where people can post stuff on a site? I think so. I could still do that from the broke agent Instagram. I'm just so cagey with the content that it's hard to see all of it. And I'm really focused on making sure the content that I post on there is like the highest of quality. So even if there's an agent content that isn't quite as funny as something as I would post, I would still want people to see that. And I'm trying to think if that's a Facebook group, is that a blog? Like what exactly would that necessarily look like where people can see? Maybe it's an entirely separate Instagram feed. I'm not quite sure. So you're are you don't do Instagram TVs at all anymore, do you? I had a show called the Broken News Network. I don't know if you guys saw it for like six months. Do you see it ever? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Didn't like it. No, I didn't ever really like get into it. Like it's hard for me to really sit down and consume content. You know, but like I saw like I saw it in my videos. Yeah, like I saw that it was there. You know, kind of that's good. Yeah. So what we notice is we I tried to do something called the broke news network. So we started with kind of five to eight minute long real estate news segments. And it was supposed to just be me and this guy Ben Fisher. And we posted funny content that was talking about, you know, religious stock price or, you know, whatever we'd break down like two or three admin articles, basically, but real estate news is not that interesting to me, unfortunately, or to anybody. I don't know real estate market updates and stuff I totally get. But just trying to to break down these articles and make it interesting enough to talk about in IGTV form was very difficult. Yeah. And I also found, like you said, it's hard to retain people's information for that long. So if there's a joke six minutes in and they watch after 30 seconds and they're done, they're not getting the value. And this is costing a lot of money and the production was taking forever. And also IGTV sucks, where if you go off of the platform or you click away from the video, you're not still listening to it. You know how on YouTube, if you click away, you're still listening to it or our podcast or podcast, like that's really important for something like this. Because if you click away, the chances that you go back to it are next to none. Hell, it'd be hard to find it. Yeah, it seriously would, because I don't know if your place even picks up after that. So you don't know. No, there's nowhere to go find it. You'd have to go back to the profile of the person that posted it. Yeah, exactly. Go back on Instagram and go through that whole whole shebang. Unless you clicked the little save button and then went to your saved content and then yes, exactly. So, yeah, we found that that doing the IGTVs, the return wasn't necessarily worth it because I was getting way more views by just posting a stupid real or zillow joke than actually going through all this. But I still think there's something there in the sense of sharing real state news in a funny, more engaging way that isn't just like an in men style article. I like him and by the way, I'm just saying that, you know, any sort of funny twist you could put on something I think could really help agents. And yeah, I think what it means missing is that is that humor side of it because you're right, real estate is actually a pretty funny industry. Yeah, like 99 different things that could go wrong at an open house. Yeah. And it's all kind of like inside jokes where if you show this page to like someone outside of real estate, they're like, what the hell are you guys talking about? But the second you show it to another realtor, it's like, oh, shit, like that happened to me last week. So I think that's where you kind of struck the court. And obviously it picked up because your engagement is off the charge, which is also. Yeah, thank you. And I also thought that originally, too, that only agents would follow this. And I thought I would kind of get capped out at a certain number, but everyone's kind of bought or sold a house at one point or at least worked with a realtor or dealt with inspections. So there's a lot of people I get that follow it even in adjacent industries, whether it's just sales or car sales or whatever the case may be, where it's sales humor plus people that are dealing with housing situations. And that's pretty much everybody. I've also tried to kind of attack, not attack, but attract consumers that aren't in real estate with bad real estate picks, which is another account that I have that has almost 60,000 followers. That's basically just bad, literally bad real estate picks. So the goal is to just get more people, you know, on all these other accounts to get as many followers as possible. Wow. What's your do you have like a favorite, like all time, funny piece of content you posted? I had a real estate rap video that I posted in 2015 that's really vulgar and disgusting now, honestly, at this point and should be wiped from the internet. But that did well. And that was just kind of like, OK, I'm going all in on this because I posted it. My dad was like, you got to take that shit down immediately. Like you're going to completely destroy your career. And that kind of that was kind of my mindset was like, I'm going all in with this. So don't watch that video. It's just that was my favorite piece of content for sure. Is that the one that got you fired? Not specifically, no. I think it was along those lines, though, of the type of content where they're like, if this guy's going to be. Was that before or after you get fired? Right around that time, I want to say, I think it was probably before. Yeah, I don't know. Did you and your broker stay in touch or you guys never? Yeah, no, it's very amicable. It's just like Hilton and Highland and Beverly Hills. It's a really like boutique luxury brokerage and very understandably, they were just like, I don't know where this is going. I don't know what you could say next. You know, I was 25 years old and I could have said something that could be potentially damaging for the brand of people found out. It was me that was doing it. So totally get it. No hard feelings were both better without me, without us. Sounds like you sounds like you kind of like we're OK. Well, like you're like, yeah, I get it. Like what I'm doing is absolutely wrong. Yes, 100 percent. I mean, I don't know if it was wrong necessarily, but it was definitely if I was a broker and I care about my and I had a rogue agent that wasn't doing any business that was shitting on real estate agents, I would 100 percent be like, get this guy the hell away from us. But then other. So the bigger it got, the more attractive I actually became two other brokers. So like Nestseekers wanted to hire me right after that. And I went over there and all they cared about, they just wanted me to produce content. Like it wasn't even about real estate. I was just like going into the office and agents like enjoyed interacting with the brand and it was just like fun for everybody. So. Yeah. I don't know, including thought to that. Yeah. OK, man, this is so cool to learn to hear the back story up behind all this stuff. So so do you do anything regarding your real estate career on social? Like, do you have a page that you can you say anything about real estate whatsoever, anywhere like it's like you being a real estate agent, like by house? No one knows I exist in the real estate realm. No, my friends know I exist because of the broke agent. So it's kind of been good to tell people I'm in real estate without having to tell them because they all know I'm the broke agent and they've all used me to buy their first condos and first homes here in West Los Angeles. So that's been great. And then it's also been fun to connect with other agents, whether it's through referrals or it's through just meeting other agents and then realizing that I'm the broke agent. It's kind of giving me a leg up, not necessarily in like a multiple offer situation or something, but where they already kind of feel like they have some sort of rapport with me. So it's helped in that sense, but the tactics that I preach for Instagram growth, I do none of for my personal real estate business. So maybe I'm just a huge hypocrite, but I do it for my I do it for the broke agent brand. I'm the same way. I'm the same way. I don't I don't do any social media for my real estate business at all. Notice that it's all it's all the coaching stuff. You're posting a ton of memes and stuff too. Here and there. I'm trying to mix it up, you know, bring value. You know, here's how you build your business. Here's something funny. Just trying to keep the engagement going, you know? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Ricky, you posted a funny, funny one. I think it was last month. It was like your bobblehead on something in a video. I was cracking up. Yeah. And there were a couple of those where I was doing some kind of playing football or basketball or something. So so so you were probably the first account that started doing this type of content for real in the real estate industry, right? Well, Lighter side of real estate existed in the Facebook realm. I started the broke agent, not knowing they existed, but then quickly found that they did. But they were kind of more what not ebooks. What were the e cards type of humor? I think they're kind of doing memes and stuff as well now. But they were blog posts heavy. They had merchandise and everything, but it seemed to be kind of more safe humor focused on older agents in the industry. And I thought I could kind of out edge them and really kind of go from like a millennial kind of younger mindset, basically, and attack like the Instagram as opposed to Facebook. Right. Cool. And then since then, there's been a lot of people try to basically, I would say, emulate what you're doing. Yeah, there's a few other meme accounts. Actually, agents is really good. There's laughing realtor. There's the drunk realtor, I think a lot of them. I don't see posting consistent, consistently because you get content burnout for sure. Like how many real estate jokes can you possibly make? Like, I mean, the great thing is real estate gives you so much content, of course, when you're actually doing it. But if I don't do any real estate action for a week or two weeks and I'm content dry, it sucks. I don't know what the hell to do. I'm literally like looking through my bank. I'm looking through not my Wells Fargo bank. I'm looking through my joke bank. And then I'm like looking through my submissions. Even today, I don't know what to post. So when finally someone sends it to me, I'm like, thank God. Yeah, you need to have like a hundred ambassadors out there sending you content because there's so much out there. And it's starting now, which is great. But a lot of the content they send sucks. So it's actually agents is pretty good. Yeah, he's great. Actually, agency and he's been consistent as well. He's coming on the show Wednesday. Nice. Yeah, I like Luca. I've talked to him and, you know, DMS and stuff. He's pretty cool. Ricky, I found him as my favorite meme post you've ever done. Are you kidding, man? That's that. Like that's that's actually the one like I didn't even post that. And then when the dude did post it, I was like, why did you post that? Like, that's actually the only one I don't like. Look at that face. Come on. Yeah, the face parts funny. The messaging is horrible. So you do a great job with your captions and everything. Like your your content's very visual. So yeah, you walk people in the first 10 or 15 seconds and you have the captions and like multiple colors and everything. So that's really important for the IGTV. So the way you're doing it is way better than the way we were doing it with the broken news network. So yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm still posting IGTVs. I try to post one a day and I know that's not what IG wants. I know they want reels. And when I post a reel, I try to do a reel at least once a day too. If I can. And the reels are probably doing four or five times as many views as crazy. But you know, what are you going to do? You know, I just, you know, keep posting stuff. But on the business side, are you physically posting this yourself? Do you have like an in-house social media manager that kind of does the engagement and the posting for you? Are you still hands on? It's all me. So I do all of this. Hopefully, you know, do you edit it too? Do you create it? Yeah, I create everything, edit everything, unless it's a submission or I'm reposting like a Matli and Eddie videos, something like that. But I do, I do all of that. The broke news network network stuff. I wasn't editing, but I post all the stories. I respond to all the DMs, I respond to all the comments, do all the comments. And I'm very protective of the brand. I wouldn't even want to give it to someone at this point because I think the voice is very important to keep consistent. And I kind of have this like sarcastic, not asshole voice, but like I don't want to water down the brand with someone else's voice, which may be a problem in the future, because obviously I want more contributors and people on this platform to create this media company. But kind of like how Barstool start as Dave Portnone. I don't want to compare myself to them, obviously, they're a beast. And he's way funnier and more successful than I am, of course. But they have so many different voices in their brand. They have chicks in the office. They have part of my take. They have all these different podcasts where if people don't resonate with someone specifically, they'll resonate with one of their other talent. Really cool. And now, in regards to tools that you use, like, let's say someone to go out there and start creating humor to add into their posts or edited videos. What do you use? Like Adobe Premiere, Canva? Or do you have any specific software that you take advantage of? Yes, some apps. I mean, the repost app I use, if I want to rip a video from someone for a caption on, there's an app called Memes, which is great for formatting and for searching actual memes. So it's kind of like Giffy in the way that you can search like an emotion and then a meme will pop up. And then I have MoMes, which is another good app for editing and posting captions. So I'd say those three. Cool. Cool. OK. So where do you go from here? Do you have anybody helping you whatsoever right now for anything except for Matt? Yes. Yes. Well, except for Matt. Yeah. Except for Matt. No. Well, I have to get to work, man. If you're going to build a media company, bro, we need to get on board, man. I focused on building the brand first and getting the following to attract people because before it's like, hey, what can I offer you? Am I going to pay you to produce content? No. But now I could at least offer the fact that I could help grow your page. And since Matt has been producing content with me, he's gone from 5,000 to 17,000 followers. And that's that's a value right there. That's huge value. And that's not all because of me, of course. Like this is, you know, his own content and his Instagram strategy as well. But yeah, I've been Fisher, who does the Brook News Network with me and Joey, who does the editing. So there are people in different facets of it. And then we have a merchandise guy now that's helping out with designs because I really want to hit that heavy also. All right. So the goal is to help new agents, right? Kind of navigate the waters and kind of put them in a position where they don't fail, basically because of the because of the lack of coaching and the lack of training and the lack of, you know, not lack, not lack, necessarily, while people taking responsibility, basically, to to do it the right way. Yeah, I think the goal is the main goal, make agents laugh and entertain them. And then the second goal would be to educate social media wise, how to grow your platform, what type of content to post. And then the third goal would be to kind of bridge that gap for newer agents when they get licensed, make them feel more comfortable in the industry and maybe provide even like a course down the road that's kind of like an introductory of what the hell to expect in real estate. How not to feel like an idiot your first year in real estate, not how to sell more real estate, of course, because that. But of course, I would not be qualified to teach. What and what would that be? What do you I mean, as a new agent, you're not teaching them how to sell real estate? How do you feel? How do you help them feel like? How do you how do you give them that feeling? Maybe by showing funny videos of examples of things you shouldn't do at an open house types of interactions that you're going to receive or the types of interactions you're going to have. I remember my first open house, I had no idea what to even say to people when they came in, if they weren't working with an agent or if they were to ask when was this built, what are the other sales like in the neighborhood? I didn't know how to get them to sign in. I didn't know what type of questions to expect because I was a buyer's agent and my team just said, go sit this open house. So I came completely unqualified and scared anytime anybody came in that open house at an inspection. I had no idea how to interact with the inspector at showings. I didn't know how to follow up. I didn't know when I'm calling to schedule a showing that I should ask, does this place have any offers? If you can't show it at this time, when can you show it next? And just kind of, you know, get those questions that you know your clients eventually going to ask you like those. These are very important conversations that you have to have in order to like not have an awkward interaction with your client or feel completely underprepared. Or if you're going to a showing 15, 20 minutes before showing, you might encounter a lockbox problem. You might have a security alarm problem. Like, why should you get there early? Why should you open up all the windows for the the lighting and stuff like that? Like, I knew none of this. And I think a lot of agents don't know any of this. And it's uncomfortable as shit when you go in because you're just like, what the hell am I doing? You almost feel like an actor, you know, at least I always did. I always felt like I was trying to be a real estate agent because I was just so nervous of all the interactions I was going to have that someone was going to call me out on something that I didn't know the response to. Right. So you said you said you spoke at Inman. Yeah. So are you still like once we once we open back up and we're able to do live events? Is that something you're going to get into? Traveling, speaking, stuff like that? Absolutely. Yeah, I'm getting better at it for sure. Before I had no idea what to talk about because because there wasn't really a direction. It was just like, hey, I'm posting funny content trying to grow the brand and maybe sell some t-shirts. Right. I don't really know what the goal of this was. But now that I could actually talk upon social media growth and brand growth and marketing, now I think there's actually direction in the type of stuff that I'm saying. We should we should hook up on that. We should partner up on some stuff like that because as soon as it's open, I'm going on tour. I'm going to be everywhere. I'll be in every single city in the country and outside of the country. And, you know, it might be something cool, you know, broke agents here, you know, tells Joe, tells you how to grow social media for a second. I'm not going to real estate stand up that. I was going to say awful. No, it would be cool if you like made them laugh for a second because that's the goal, right, to make real estate agents laugh. So we could start out with a little something and then you, you know, you follow up with this is how you grow social. And then here comes serious Ricky to fire everybody up and call it a day. I mean, that might be a cool little one to punch. Absolutely. Yeah. I've been I've been doing a ton of these zoom conferences and I've spoken at, you know, numerous real estate conferences. But now, like I said, that there's direction. I feel way more confident in what I'm actually saying, as opposed to just like, hey, I'm posting funny shit and people are following. I don't know what what the next step is. But the speaking game, for sure, is going to be a huge aspect of this. And I've been loving Clubhouse and doing those. Are you on those at all? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't I don't get on there too much because, like, when you get when you go to Clubhouse, you better have like an hour or two or three set aside, you know, because you're either going to listen really intently or you got to, you know, you're speaking. I mean, it's it takes some time out of your day, for sure. There's people in these rooms for like three or four hours. It's crazy. I know. We'll be like, all right, well, we've been doing this for three hours. It's like, well, are you doing any real estate work? Are you doing any? I mean, they're preaching all these all these things about growing your business, but it's like you're talking to 15 agents in a Clubhouse room for four hours a day. Then where is the connection? It's a crazy hours. It's like 1130 at night or 6 a.m. in the morning. They're not stopping. They don't stop. And there was a real estate happy hour the other day where someone was talking about her juice cleanse for 45 minutes. And then she was talking about getting an enema. And it's just like, how are people listening to this shit? But I don't know. There's good networking on there, for sure. I've met a lot of cool people. No, I think I think it's a great platform if you use it right. I just don't have the time to really sit there. I'm going to give a little Q&A Thursday. Thursday, I'm going there for an hour. So like I'll have people reach out to me and say, let's do a Clubhouse together or whatever. And then I'll just say, yeah, and then they'll set it up and advertise it. And I'll just show up and answer questions and stuff. So that's kind of how I've been using it. I haven't really used it like aggressively to try to connect with a bunch of people. But what are you going to do, you know? Yeah, it's good for a brand growth because people click on your profile right after they like hearing you speak, especially for you. If you're doing speaking gigs, yeah, if they like you speaking in a Clubhouse, they're way more likely to sign up for your coaching program or go to your speaking gigs. I just think it's a it's a great way to kind of have an event without having an event. But yeah, and I'm just like ready to go do one for real, man. Yeah, I'm just like chomping, chomping at the Ben. Well, it's coming soon, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like they're supposed to have we're supposed to be able to take a shot. I think they said like May or maybe about the end of April, in April or May. And then from there, I'm either going to I'm going to decide then if I'm going to take it or not. Either way, I'm going to try. I mean, I've got I've got title companies and mortgage companies all over that want to put together the event, sponsor the whole thing, get the venue, advertise, get the agents there. I just fly in, do the event, fly back home. That's how I was doing it before I'll fly in and fly out same day. Yeah, you were doing a lot before. I feel like I was doing like one a week. I had 19 lined up when the when everything shut down that they had to cancel, I had 19 different events and still book on them. Like I was booking them left and right, but they've got a lot of. Huh? I said, were you doing a lot of zoom conferences during the last year? Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I've been doing zooms. Like I've been doing like three or four zooms a week. Yeah. With entire brokerages or events or whatever. They've got me lined up for the Florida Realtors Convention. They do, they're going to do it in person in August. And I've already, they've already got me lined up to do it. So I guess they feel pretty confident it's going to be in person. But 10X growth con just happened. They had like 2,000 people in a room. I know. I saw that. That looked cool. Yeah. The Florida Realtor Conference, that'd be a really fun one to go to. I like to go to the ones that throw the best parties and that are just the most fun cities. Like I went to the Inman in Vegas. That one was great. Just I mean, I was at the casino the entire time and saw like one speaker. But I love the conferences just because the networking, I walk around in a broke agent shirt and, you know, it's good for branding, good for people to actually meet me, put a face to the brand. And they're so fun just to get like obliterated with other agents. If I'm going, if I'm speaking, then I'm going to be there. If I'm not speaking, it's hard for me to just go. I know I need to because like people recognize me walking around, but it's hard for me to go because I've just got so many things to do. So yeah, I need, I need, I need to, you know, I've, I've tried to kind of hook up with Inman a couple of times. I can't believe I'm not on the radar yet to speak or do anything's crazy. Yeah. I was a speaker and an ambassador and then I don't know what happened because they, they don't contact me either for like the last three years. I feel like something happened there. I quit begging a long time ago, man. I quit, I tried with remax. I tried Inman. I tried a couple of different things and I just, I quit asking people long time like, okay, I'll just get big enough on social where they come to me, you know, right? Well, yeah. Once the broke agent becomes, you know, the new Inman, of course, and the biggest blogosphere in the world, then I'll invite you to speak at some of our events. There you go. Yeah. Cool, man. Well, good chatting with you today, bro. I mean, yeah, thanks for having me on. It's very insightful. Good. How can people find you, Eric, aside from DM, how can they find them? Look at they find me. You can find me in my apartment. Talks away from my girlfriend at the broke agent on everything. Email me at the broke agent. No, info at the broke agent.com. Finally have a dot com address. So I was using a Gmail for the last four and a half years, but it's really just time to get official and yeah, just submit shit to me. Let's do stuff. Send them ideas. It's a horrible way to end it. Yeah, just submit stuff. Yeah, send me shit. Exactly. Let's do stuff. Don't use that as a sound out bite for anything, please. Cool, man. Well, yeah, if you guys are listening to this on YouTube, iTunes, SoundCloud, Spotify, whatever, give us a five star review, subscribe, comment, all that good stuff. You can reach me on Instagram at Ricky Caruth. I'm still answering all my messages and Juan is at the Latin. Get this. Juan is that Latino agent, right? Does he? I mean, do you do you see Latino or or do you see Italian when you look at one? Oh, man, what a ridiculous question to ask me. That's I don't know. Juan Carlos, I knew was a Latino. So right, right. But then but then is that but then is real last name. What was the last name? Let's see. Go ahead. Go ahead, Juan. I cannot say it. Ricky, try it out. Try it out. Let's see if you get it one last time. Badadici. Oh, yeah, that's Italian. You look kind of like a combo of both sides. So you're a good looking dude, but you got a nice hairline. Listen, we're all good looking people on this podcast, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. You need to show your face more, though. And is that is that going to be a thing where you start popping in more on the broke agent or not too much? Yeah, I've showed my face a lot. I used to do a bunch of stories where I was talking to the camera and I'd post a lot of like my TikToks and stuff to reels. But I'm definitely going to do more reels. It's just like I said, the the memes and the reels of like the repost videos get so much engagement. It's way easier just to post three or four of those a day as opposed to actually filming it myself. But I know I need to because that's where Instagram's going. So you will be seeing more of me. Well, I mean, back when I started following you, what's that? You will be seeing more. We have we got we need a good sound by tender off on that. You will give us a nice one to punch. Well, back when I was when I first started following you, I saw your face some. Yeah. I remember I thought out there, I think you like we're promoting your book or something or this or that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think I saw your face a little bit. It was kind of weird. Yeah. Well, like nobody knows what you look like. And then when I saw you, I was like, oh, OK. And then I was like, is that him or or not? So yeah, my intern. Now, it also depends on like how my hair looks or face looks that specific day, what my scruff length is. Because if I'm not looking good that day, then I'm not posting myself. You know, that's why clubhouse is great, too, because you could just do it from your bed. Guys, don't know your bed. Yeah, exactly. Come on, Ricky, I need to go. I like you like to go straight from your bed. Yeah, exactly. Well, well, thanks, guys. Hey, appreciate it, brother. We'll we'll see you on the flip side. And let's let's we need to collaborate, man. We need to collaborate on in stone, different platforms and talk about. I'm serious. Let's me let's think about doing some, you know, doing some events together, possibly, you know, because I mean, we really have the same really aligned with what we're trying to do with just trying to help agents. I mean, I'm posting a few memes here and there. So obviously I want agents to laugh and also get a lot of value and help agents understand, you know, the realities of the business and, you know, how simple it can really be. So I think I think I think our vision really lines up. So awesome. Yeah, let's do something cool. Cool. See you guys.