 people are gonna call you when they decide to buy and sell something and if you're not talking to people you don't know to help my surreal estate what are you doing? Ladies and gentlemen make some noise for Ricky Garoo. 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, his work he was putting in strategies he was sharing everything. Every year has its own like personality let's say of the market so now we know everything works social media works ill elites work cold phone work everything works go after properties that you feel like you're firing my buy and say hey i've got somebody that might be interested in this five or ten percent of the people that you then follow you actually see your company. The email needs to be the foundation that needs to be like the goal like your job is to collect emails right you gotta realize the connection that you have with these people that you think are strangers like they are your neighbors if you got a buyer then you're you're working a lot because like you're not even gonna present the property to your buyer you have unless there's some something in it for you. Hey Ricky. Good morning. How y'all doing? Good morning. How are you? Y'all looking lovely. Hey Ricky can you send us this recording? Yeah. Do I need to record okay great just uh y'all just email me or whatever and I'll send you a link. Yeah for sure. Thank you sir. Let's see yeah I can allow you to do that. How's your morning starting off Ricky? What's that? How's your morning starting off? Really good. I did my uh my weekly email and um just putting stuff together just being a marketing machine. Yeah so what is it that I can help you guys with today? Well since we well Ron I'll let you start because you had a whole list of stuff. Yeah quite a few you know um 2023 is a has been a you know great year you know a couple of challenges especially um if you're comparing it to the previous market um so you know um let me ask you a question Ricky. What should we be doing to outperform the competition? It's a tough market right now. That's easy as far as like the competition that's easy right now because everybody's laying down um there ain't no competition there's never any competition anyway um but it's even worse right now because a lot of agents are thinking well nothing's happening so what's the point you know why why you know I'll just wait till the market gets better and then I'll get to work well when do you prepare for market surge you know while it's happening or before it happens you know the before yeah the people that really succeeded at a very high level they kind of understand the flows of these cycles um like for example right now we just saw the pending sales report was the lowest that has ever been on record since 2001 and like the harder the pullback the the more explosive the resurgence of the market is it's like when the economy shut down during the pandemic and then what happened 2021 happened and that had a lot to do with stimulus and stuff but I knew that that pullback during the economic shutdown was going to cause this big surge on the back end same thing that's happening right now and every january we see a surge in pending deals first or second week that results in closings the first or second week of february every year I mean I could show you the the charts the data I mean it happens every year nationally so this year is going to be even worse it's going to be way busier than normal in january because of how far back the market has pulled and rates have been up for a year and a half so people are kind of starting to get used to the fact that they're up and people are just every day are hating the house they're in more and more and more you know they've been wanting to move for a year now you know so that they're finally going to get to the point where they're going to put a game plan together whether to do a buy down or get a new construction or just buy the bullet or whatever because you got to think too they've built up a lot of equity in their home as well they can use you know to do a bunch of things so it's easy to outwork the competition now just you know it that just comes down to okay how many people know who you are how many people are you talking to a day to add to your your database and then what do you do to nurture the database as far as like you know this year being tougher than 2021 all that every year is different you know 2017 was different than 18 was different than every year has its own like personality let's say of the market you never know how things are going to swing you know year to year it's totally different market every year you know and you got to get used to that you know and realize that it's a moving target and you can really take advantage if you understand you know number one closings are never going to stop it's just a matter of understanding the ebbs and flows and how do we take advantage like right now i'm super passionate about going all in to just build just get as many listings as you can in december like go harder right now than you've ever went and i'm talking to real estate agents right now right absolutely right now like getting as many listings as you can right this second because january everything's going under contract like it's all going down like it like don't worry about the oh listings aren't selling just stack them up right now because january it's over like there's not going to be any inventory it's just it's all going to go so if you take this time and just kind of chill and say oh what's the what's the use january rolls around and everything explodes and now you're sitting here wishing that you would have stacked more inventory when you had time to actually do that before the surge happens because next month's going to be wild now that's what i think and let's say it doesn't happen like that and you stack up all these listings okay how do you lose you know you still got a bunch of listings to sell let's go let's go sell them even even if it doesn't explode like i think um but i'm just going by data like every year you see it you see pending deals swing up and spike the first second week of january which means people start looking january first that first week your your phone's going to be ringing with people want to see properties and do stuff right and then they're going to make an offer within those first you know that first week or two and go under contract and you'll see the uh the spike of people uh going pending and then 30 days later you see the spike in um closed deals so if you if you can like if we know what's going to happen so now if you can visualize it and go out there and take advantage of the opportunity which is it is slow right now which means you have time to actually do what you need to do to go get listings just focus on that this month focus on getting them sold under contract next month and then get them all closed february see how that works and most people are just kind of very you know singular minded with this and they're just like you know trying to make a check now or they don't they're not even paying attention to how like this mark the market flows i mean they're like looking at december like oh the world's you know ending and stuff and it's like no this is about to be you're about to be busier than you've ever seen in january because there's so much pent up demand we have more 33 34 year olds than we've seen in like 20 years since the baby boomers um massive massive amounts of 33 and 34 years who want to own homes okay then you've got all these trade-up sellers who have been dying to move you know and like january 1st is going to be the month where people start really making some moves regardless of rates and i mean rates we're eight now they're seven where they go from here nobody knows it's not going to matter because you got so much buy-down stuff happening and you got so much equity out there you know will you have some people that continue to stay on the sidelines yeah right and that's your future business that's your 2025 business 2026 business you know build that business too you know you need to be focused on your whole career not not just december january or even like 2024 like how do we how do we build a massive career out of this and that kind of comes from what i'm saying getting listings closing them in you know up pending in january close them in february but then also um realizing that everybody you talk to try to make them a lifelong friend like these property owners like they need to be like your lifelong friends where they feel like you're treating them like family and then you can actually build a super massive career where at some point you're just living off your your clientele you know you're not even prospecting anymore so that that's kind of the gist of it of kind of what's happening right now how you should be thanking and how big this thing can really be and um happy to you know share more inside answer questions or whatever i can do to help you guys you know blow this thing out the water yeah that's good stuff right there man like what you said to be honest with you um um especially um relationships so what type what type activity should should a real estate agent be focused on to build those relationships and not sound more salesy right now um whatever works best for them right you can name every single legion activity out there and even the weirdest ones you've ever you know come across and i guarantee there's somebody making a million bucks a year off of that there's not there's not a single legion activity or marketing activity or you know any any strategy i've ever heard that doesn't work even even the ones that i i don't like like the high pressure cells um you know get them closed right now those dudes do well as well as good as well that that's not my style right um but like every single thing you can think of even the things you think don't work even the things you you hate even all that there's people that are making millions of dollars off of that okay so now we know everything works social media work zilla leads work cold call work doorknock everything works it's a matter of figuring out what works best for you right in terms of communicating like your your job is literally like the whole the whole premise of being an agent is is is talking to people you do and don't know to help them buy and sell real estate right talking to people you do and don't know to help them buy and sell real estate and if you're not talking to people you don't know to help them buy and sell real estate what are you doing you're not you're not an agent you're not you're not doing anything you're just um you know you're just here you know you're just you're you're never going to be like you know a very super high producer you're never going to blow it out the water the moment you realize your job is to talk to people to help them buy and sell real estate build that lifelong relationship and then just Do a weekly email on the same day of the week forever to stay in touch with everybody, then you're good. And it's amazingly simple, right? The hard part is doing that for five to 10 years to get to the million bucks a year, where you have that residual business coming in. Because you don't feel like it's working after a couple of months, but what you need to focus on is not necessarily closings, but how many people do you feel like when you talk to them, actually feel the fact that you care about them that are going into your database? Like if you see your database numbers going up, every day, every week, every month, and you're doing that weekly report, and people love you and you're great at making friends, you're going to blow up. People are going to call you when they decide to buy and sell something. So I think right now with a lot of people sitting on 3%, 4%, 5% interest rates that just are kind of sitting on the sidelines and just the way the market is. We're down under 2008 levels of number of transactions and stuff. I think you need to be very intentional and strategic with your prospecting and kind of create situations. Number one, take all the buyers you have and use the criteria of those buyers to prospect. Literally go after properties that you feel like your buyer might buy and say, hey, I've got somebody that might be interested in this. That's the situation. Take listings you have that, let's just, for example, you've got something on a lake, on a river, on the ocean, and you've got it listed, right? Call everybody that owns property across the street that isn't on the water and say, hey, do you want to be, would you like to be on the water? I see you on this house here across the street. Have you ever thought about actually being on the water? Like you need to create these situations where you're calling with the real purpose behind the call. Another thing is like absentee owners and second home vacation owners. They can sell that property, but they don't have to, they're not moving anywhere. Like the people that are sitting tight or primary homeowners that are sitting on like 3.5% interest rates like me, right? Like people that are, they're living in the home that they have like a 4% rate on, they're not moving. But like I own investment properties and I sold one like two months ago. I sold two investment properties this year, right? I don't live in it and I'm just moving money around, right? I did, I did two deals, right? But I didn't move my house. I didn't move where I'm living. I didn't sell my primary. So people that own second homes, absentee owners, right? Think of buyers, like get your buyer list together and then target homes that they might buy that are absentee owner homes and call them up and say, hey, I know you don't live in this home. I don't know if you run it out or whatever, but I got a buyer for that home that you don't live in. Just stuff like that, like calling with situations that make people think, you know, that could possibly create something out of thin air. And then on the back end, now we got the relationship development side of it. The relationship development side of it is is they don't wanna do anything, right? Not interested, whatever, great. Well, listen, let me ask you this. If you were to do something, is there an agent you would work with? No, cool. Well, listen, I'm sure at some point you're gonna do something later on down the road. I love the opportunity to work with you when that day comes. Would it be hard if I just stayed in touch with you then? Cool, what's a good email? Bam, you got them for life. If they say they do have an agent, great. Who is it? I might know them. Oh yeah, you know, Brian's a great agent. You're in good hands there. I tell you what, I'd still love to stay in touch with you. Is that okay? It is? Cool, what's a good email? Bam, you got them for life. People switch agents all the time, whatever. I mean, you're just marketing. So you're gonna have these segregated groups in your database. You've got the loyal ones that will never use another agent because they love you. You've got the group of people in there and that's the smallest group in your database. The next biggest group are the people that will use you but they'll use another agent too if they send them a deal. They'll use you but they're not loyal to you. They may use you this deal, may use another agent next deal, whatever. Then you've got the biggest group of your database for people that will never use you because they either don't like you, they have an agent they're loyal to, whatever, right? I mean, there's a lot of agents out there and they're gonna connect with somebody. There's a lot of different possible connections with agents for everybody in the market. So you're not gonna get them all but your job is to make the database as big as possible so that that core group of loyal people continues to grow, right? And then you've got the people who may use you, may use another agent, that's okay. Help them when they wanna use you and if they wanna use another agent, buy a golly, go for it, right? Come back to me, let me know if you need something from me, I'm here. Then you got your loyal people. So you have to understand that it's okay if people wanna use another agent. Awesome, good luck. Congratulations, be happy for them. You know what I mean? And you continue doing what you're supposed to do which is build, continue to build that influence, build the footprint of your market, the people that know you and that you're building these lifelong relationships with. So to answer your question, you gotta figure out what works best for you. When I looked at all the legion activities and I realized that Zillow leads, postcards, door knocking, cold calls, social media and all the different things came right back to the same thing which was talking to people. Like no matter what happens here, you gotta come to the conversation before you get to the possible transaction. So when I realized that, I was like, well, and this is just my personality. I'm like, well, why am I doing all that? When I could just call the exact person I wanna do business with for a penny and go ahead and have the conversation now. Why am I gonna do all this stuff and then wait to hopefully have a conversation when I can just call the person I wanna talk to now and have the conversation today? That's just me, not everybody's built like that. Because I knew that the only thing between me and a million bucks a year was thousands of one-on-one conversations with people in my market. And I wanted to bust through those thousands of conversations as quickly as possible which takes several years to do that. But you can stretch that out over three to five years or you can stretch it out over 10, 20, 30, 40 and some people never even get there because they're doing everything but talk to people. So their career literally gets spread out all the way and they die as a real estate agent and never really get to the upper echelons of their career because they avoided the one thing that would actually get them there while avoiding it, continue to do it because it's like the amount of agents who try to get around cold calling who spend thousands of dollars on leads just turn right around and cold call the leads is absurd. Go ahead, Jasmine. Okay, so my question is I heard you say when we first got on the call that you are working on some things trying to be a marketing machine. And so what does being a marketing machine look like? I know you have your weekly emails. What would you say that has been the most, like yield you the most return on your investment outside of your pipeline? Cause I know you're on YouTube. I know you're here, you're there, you're doing this then the third. Dude, I'm like a walking media company. Like I'll just think of a thought and all of a sudden it's a post and getting thousands of engagement. I mean, where do I begin? Like, okay, send out the weekly email, right? And then I'm going to market the fact that I did the weekly email to the hundreds of thousands of agents that follow me. Here's what I did on my weekly email this week. Click here to start doing your weekly email, right? And then boom, I'm making money on them doing their weekly email using my email template system through constant contacts, right? And so it's the levels of what happens behind the scenes in my operation is just like, it's really mind blowing because I just, I do it all myself. I'm just sitting here in my little room here in my little bat cave and just like cranking out, just like, you know, like I use mini chat and then I'm like, comment this word and then it sends them a DM with a link to the thing I want them to read or watch or whatever, right? I mean, just little hacks, like making a story on Instagram where it's kind of a very interesting paragraph enough, interesting enough to make them put their thumb on the story to stop the story so they can read the rest of it, makes Instagram shoot it to the moon. I went from getting like 2,000 story views to 20,000 story views just without one little thing. Deleting all of yesterday's to where the first one they see is something they have to put their thumb on to stop it and it exposes it to like tens of thousands and more people than it would have. And then the next couple of stories I do get seen by way more people than if I just did the normal stories that, you know, where people kind of like thumb through it or get out of there or exit out of it, well, Instagram isn't going to push that one through the moon. It's just little hacks and stuff per platform. It's kind of like the article ones on Instagram where I'm like, ooh, well, the ooh is to get their attention, but also give them a chance to read the headline before they hear the context I'm fixing to give behind the headline versus me just talking from the first second about my thoughts on the headline. Now they have to read the headline and hear what I'm saying at the same time. People's brains don't operate like that. So like the ooh is intentional to give them time to read what I'm fixing to talk about. I'm giving them a moment to actually see what the subject's going to be. Then they hear me start chiming in on my opinions. It's just, it's little things like that that kind of add up to being able to, you know, like I know so many little hacks, social media-wise and the different platforms. I mean, I got, you know, 10,000 people on my text platform. I've got 8,000 people on a Discord, you know, where like when I tag everyone, everyone gets a push notification on the phone from Discord. It's just little things that I can do to make sure, because when you post on social, and this goes for, you know, being an agent, when you post on social, five or 10% of the people that follow you actually see your content, you know, and even now, so it's not even about your followers. It's about the content itself because everything has been ticked, talkified, where there's the, there's the, there's the for you page basically everywhere now, you know, Instagram has it for reals and YouTube has it for shorts, where you don't have to be like following the people and you're seeing their content, right? So it even comes more down to the content where I even think that might even make it to where less of your followers actually see your content because of that, I don't know that for the fact, but my point is when you post on social, it's great because, you know, you're building your brand there and the whole point of it though is is try to get them into your actual database, which is email, text, whatever, to get them from social to a platform you can actually control. And when you, the one you control, now when you like send an email out, 90% of the people there actually saw it in their inbox, versus 5% of the people following you on social saw the post that you did, right? So everything on social kind of needs to be a kind of a funnel to get their attention and build that relationship to the point that they give you their data so that you can actually market to them because chances are if they see a couple of your posts but they don't like it or engage with it, then Instagram or YouTube or whatever isn't gonna show them any more of your posts for a while and they kind of like forget about you, you gotta get them and get them off the platform into your platform so that they actually see what you're doing on a weekly basis. That's why the weekly email is so important guys because it should be the foundation and then sprinkle everything else on top in terms of social and postcards and whatever you do but the email needs to be the foundation. That needs to be like the goal, like your job is to collect emails, right? Make great first impressions with people, get emails. That needs to be like job number one, right? Job number one is build the, you know, create a great first impression and see if they wanna buy or sell anything. Either way it goes, get email, right? The total focus and now you're doing your weekly email and now they never forget about you. They remember that great first impression that you gave them and there's a chance that they're gonna call you when they decide to buy or sell something. Will that process get everyone to call you? No, there's no system that's gonna get 100% of people, okay? But this will give you a very good chance, especially if you're doing the emails right, giving your opinions on what's happening instead of just cold data or letting a company do generic emails for you, like recipes and stuff. People are just, you're losing if you're doing that to an agent like me who actually creates the email. Dude, it took me an hour this morning to do my email. Here, I'll show it to you. Let's see. So I haven't even sent it yet, cause I'm not done. But like, this is me working on it right here. So I had to figure out what I was gonna talk about this week, right? And I finally realized because University of Alabama and our local board hasn't updated their data. So I was like, okay, cause I was ready to do one on data and closed sales. So I was like, all right, I'll just update on my 2023 closed sales data, right? So I always got a different picture here. I changed these to buttons, they were just links. I did that today. New condo listings, new home listings, live beach cam. And then I wrote this. And so the only thing I'm missing here, I compared last year to this year in terms of number of sales with condos and homes. And then they can see the full list of the sales here on these links. And then I said, you wondering what yours is worth? I give you a free evaluation today, but the only thing that I'm missing is right here, I'm gonna give my opinions on the above data. I'm just gonna do like one sentence maybe right here. Cause like if I just send them like just this cold, just here's the number of sales the last year and this year, click here to see the list. When I like throw my little two cents in here about it, that adds so much to it. And that's what most agents are missing. Even on social media, like when you're doing stuff on social, it should be like more about your opinions. If you're saying home prices of this or that, right? Well, they could read that anywhere, but what they're not getting from you in that video is what you think about the prices being that way, right? And then give me a call if you wanna talk about buying or selling or whatever. You know, not just saying, here's the data, call me if you wanna buy something, here's the data, here's my opinions on it, call me if you wanna buy or sell something, right? That's what's gonna make you stand out because your opinion is gonna be different than most people's opinions. And even if it's the same, it's gonna come across different because of your tone, of your mannerisms, of your body language, of whatever. But yeah, this is the same stuff every day. It's me and my dad. Dad handles all the day to day. And listings and sales, and I focus on the coaching and building the Ricky Careuth brand and stuff. But yeah, I haven't even sent this because I wanted to add this one last thing, my opinion on the above data before I actually hit send. And then that guy called me and then the Zoom started. But you could actually go, let's see, let me see, okay. So you see this platform here? This is my new coaching platform. So you guys can join this for free. I'll put a link right here. HTTPjoinRicky.com. So you can create an account there. And all this right here is free. So you can click right here and right here are all my scripts. Right there, you can download them. And then right here are the weekly email templates and stuff. So here's a training I did on all this. But then right here, you can click on any of these. This goes back one full year of all my emails. So you can literally see a full year of all my emails and just go there and copy what I'm doing. And then if you want to do the constant contact, then you can click here and sign up for that. Where I have my four-week template system where it's deals of the month, week one, restaurant of the month, week two, stats of the month, restaurant of the month, deal of the month and news of the month. And it's literally just, I have four different templates for you to plug and play and you just run them back every month. That way it's easy for people that we're having a hard time coming up with what to say in their emails. I made the four-week template system where it's like stats, deal, restaurant, news. And you just plug this numbers in there, give your opinions on it, like one or two sentences, put a new picture at the top every week so people feel like it's fresh and put the new listings. There always needs to be a link to the last week's worth of new listings. People love that. That makes people click. Like I wanna see what the new listings are this week and every week they're gonna go back to click to see what the new listings are. So anyway. Excellent. Thanks, Ricky. I see Marquita had her hand up. Marquita, yeah, that's it. You muted like I said. So I actually had two questions. So one, it's kind of something I'm dealing with like right now. So I know social media is not the only way but it's the biggest platform and it's free. You're not gonna really see any other platforms that's free that you can promote your business on. So I was given to, I'm in the season of prospecting. So I'm prospecting, so I'm sending out DMs left and right. And so boom, Facebook flags me. It's like, nah, you can't do it no more. We're gonna put you on Facebook jail for like a day or two. So how do I try to still promote it, trying to get these people in because I'm not from Virginia. I'm from North Carolina. So a lot of my people's from North Carolina. So how do I get these people without having to feel like Facebook gonna stop me because they think I'm a scam or something like that. Well, once you DM them on Facebook, what's the game plan? What are you trying to do? Like you DM on Facebook? So I said, I make them a personal message. I send them a message depending on where I found them at and whatever group. And I kind of be relatable towards them. And I just kind of let them know like, hey, I see you're looking to move. I want to get you set up in my database. Here is my link, but it has my picture and everything. It's not some random link to get them on my email list. And some people hit for it and then some people don't. So I start tracking that way. Yeah. Well, for me, and you can think about this for you, are you gonna give somebody your email address that you've never talked to? Right, right. Right. So you're trying to get them on a DM, but they've never even talked to you before. You could be sending them a link. That could be a fake picture. They don't know. They hadn't talked to you, they hadn't seen you in person. No communication except for a DM. And we all know there's a lot of scams out there using people's pictures and everything else, right? So just think through the process here, right? So my question is, is why don't you just call them? Well, they're on, it's on Facebook, so I'm on a different Facebook. I understand, but there's two things though. One, you could just ask them for their phone number, say, hey, let's hop on a call, right? Hmm, okay. That could be one. And two, you could say, screw Facebook. Let me just call property owners. Okay. Right? See, what I gotta do is try to help you understand that the more we try to avoid making calls and talking to people, right? The longer it's going to take us to get to them. Do you want to make a million bucks a year? I love it. Do you have the ambition though? Like, do you really want it? Like willing to do anything, like whatever it takes? Mm-hmm. Then just stay on the phone for eight hours a day until you make a million bucks a year. Fuck everything else. Just stay on the phone for eight hours a day until you're making a million bucks a year because literally the gatekeeper of all closings is just a conversation, right? Once you realize that the whole reason you're doing DM Facebook, like do DM Facebook to get an email, whatever, right? Maybe that turns into something or whatever the case may be. But nothing's going to happen until you actually talk to that person. Now, whether they, you get their email, you send them weekly email and then you talk to them two years later when they want to buy something, awesome. But I'm trying to ramp this up. I'm not trying to do this for a two-year conversation. What I see you doing is trying to prolong the inevitable, which is talking to people. So do you have a fear of talking to people or calling them? No, actually, I am a very personal person. Like, I don't mind being in people face-talking to me. I'd rather do that than be on the telephone to be honest with you. Okay, then I can solve your problem. When you call them, pretend like they're in front of you. It's all my, it's all perspective. It's kind of like, I don't want to call property. I don't want to call property owners. You know, I'd rather have Zilla leads. Call the property owners and pretend like they're Zilla leads. Here's what you need to think to yourself in every situation, okay? Is your mom still alive? Yes. Okay, every situation, you love your mom? I do. Okay, in every situation, I want you to think, what would I say to this person if it were my mom? How would my tone be? What would my body language be? Actually, next time you're talking to your mom on the phone, as you're talking to her, I want you to think about what this conversation, and I want you to take a mental snapshot of that moment, and I want you to think of how comfortable she is with you, how comfortable you are with her, how the speed of your voice, the pitch of your voice, everything about the conversation, right? And I want you to take a mental screenshot and say, this is what Ricky was talking about, and I need to try to emulate this exact same feeling and conversation with every prospect I talk to. Cause if you start talking to every prospect, like they are your mother, you will start winning. Okay. You will crush it. So like these people that are in your market that you're scared to talk to, you'd rather talk to them face to face and all this stuff, you gotta realize that they're your neighbors, like they are a family. Like what are the chances in just today's world, okay? Just today's world of eight billion people in the world, what are the chances that, like what's the population of your town? No, I'm sharing the numbers. 1.7 million around the RVA area. Okay, one point, so two million people, let's say, right? All right, so check this out. All right, you got two million divided by eight billion. Okay, that is point. Let's see, what is that gonna be in percentage wise? Let's see, bam, bam. Okay, that is, okay, let's see, that is gonna be, let me bring that over. That's 0.0025%, like 0.0025% chance that somebody in the world lives close to you. That's just the people that live on earth right now. If you added up all the people that are ever gonna live on earth, now it's like, what are the chances that a human being not only lives close to you, but during the same time that you live? It's like, the chances of that happening are so astronomical, the calculator would burn up, right? You gotta realize the connection that you have with these people that you think are strangers, like they are your neighbors. You need to think of yourself as a volunteer worker doing community outreach to see what you can do to help people using your services. The fact that you're hiding behind a DM instead of trying to be as loud as you can, say, hey, I'm an agent, what can I do for you today? This is who I am, this is what I do, this is what I'm about, right? This is who I am, what I do, how can I help you? The more you're just trying to suppress that, then it's like, what are we doing here? Like, let's be loud with this. This is who I am, this is what I do, what can I do to help you? You're mad at me, because I call when I'm sitting here trying to help you, we know what, fuck you. Let me move over to somebody who actually appreciates the fact that I'm out here trying to bust my ass to help people. And let me tell you something, there's a lot of people like that that appreciate you out there hustling, not trying to sell people. I'm not trying to sell my house today, good. That's not why I'm calling today, sir. I'm calling to see if there's anything I can do for you. Right? Like, look, okay, we figured out what you don't wanna do. Can we move over to what you do wanna do so that I can help you do it? I won't wanna do anything right now, great. Well, look, later on down the road, when you do, is there an agent you would work with? My good sir. No, cool, listen, I'd love the opportunity to work with you when that day comes. Is it okay if I stay in touch with you? Awesome, cool, what's a good email? I mean, people have these barriers up. They have these walls, but it's just a facade. It's just them just, they're just used to the world being weird. And you're not weird, are you? I'm not weird. There you go. So people are gonna love you, right? Do people love you? They do. Then why not, why not give, why not share? I do. Thank you. That's what I'm saying, like if you could get more people to know you, think about how big your business would be. You hiding behind a DM. They're not hearing your voice. See, the reason why people connect with other people is because of the tone of their voice, the sound of their voice, the words they're saying, the body language. You're not giving anybody any of that, DMing them on Facebook, sending them a link that could be fake. It's just not gonna happen like that. The moment you realize this is about conversations and developing relationships will be the moment that you start closing a shit ton of deals. So call people, right, and create situations. Do you have buyers looking for stuff they can't find? Yes. Okay, there you go. Sit down and make a list of those buyers, write down the criteria next to all of them, and then start targeting neighborhoods that fit their criteria and say, hey, I'm your neighbor. How you doing? How you doing today? I'm enjoying the day. Isn't it gorgeous? Listen, I don't wanna take in too much of your time, but I've got a prospect here that would be very interested possibly in your house if you in fact would be interested in selling. You know, is there an agent you would work with if you were to do something? There is? What's his name? Brian? Great agent. You're in good hands. Listen, I'd still love to stay in touch with you. Is that okay? Cool, what's a good email? No, you don't have an agent? Well, listen, I'm sure at some point in the future five, 10 years down the road, maybe. You're gonna do something. I'd love to work with you in that day comes if you're open to it. I'll tell you what, let's just stay in touch. Is that cool? Cool, what's a good email? It's just no one where you're trying to take the conversations. I'm looking for people to tell me that they're not interested in buying or selling something. It's fine if they tell me they're not interested because I'm like, great. Is there an agent you would work with if you did? I'm trying to solidify future business for people that aren't interested and now business for the people that are. You're all interested in doing something? Are you already talking to an agent? Are you talking to an agent right now about the deal that you're wanting to do? No, let's work together. What are you looking to do? Why are you looking to do it? It comes back to mom, right? If your mom wanted to buy or sell a house, what are the questions you would ask her? Mom says, I think I'm gonna sell and move across town. The first thing you say is, why mom? You love your house, you've loved your house. I grew up in this house. Why are you doing this? Same thing you need to ask your prospects. You're moving? Why? What's going on? Understand what's going on above the transaction for them in their life. Now you've got something. Now you're treating them like family and now you're figuring out exactly how to convert them on their terms. Dude, I'll tell you something else on this platform where you can go and get all this stuff for free. This down here is a hundred bucks a month. We're doing a listing challenge every month. Weekly calls, we've got about 200 agents in there right now. Listing leaderboard, we get prizes of the top three agents. The first listing every month and the top three agents every month. The weekly coaching calls on Monday, the 30 day listing challenge. Handwritten letters, follow up with phone calls, create your buyer list. I've got agents, like I got a girl that got 44 listings in the last 62 days. Another guy that got 27 listings and tons of agents that get five or 10 listings a month because we're hitting them with direct mail and then calling them. And so that eases the pressure a little bit because you're calling about the letter you wrote. So it kind of, this is a one-size-fits-all that helps the extroverts, the introverts, people that want to do cold calls, don't, social media, whatever, because we're doing direct mail, follow up phone calls, a video a day on social and a weekly email. You're done. You do that for five years. You are done. Thank you. My second question was, how do you get social to push your stuff out, like to make it go viral or to make more people interact with your page and, you know what I'm saying? I won't worry about it too much because you don't need that. Okay. So you're like, again, you can only have so many conversations a day. So the whole reason for social media is to try to create people to know who you are that you can hopefully have a conversation with. We just call people all day long and keep that, keep your cup full for how many conversations you can have. Do your video a day, whatever comes out of it comes out of it. You know, awesome, whatever. But like for a real estate agent, the name of the game is talking to people. This isn't e-commerce. This isn't, you know, something you can sell online, something you can sell with no face, no personal brand, something you can do without talking to people. There are things you can sell like that, e-commerce, books, stuff like that, courses. You can sell stuff without having your face on it without talking to people. You just advertise and people buy stuff. This isn't that. You have to talk to people and you're a consultant. You're walking them through, you're servicing them, right? So I get the question and the answer is this, the content has to be good. See, before it was about how many followers you have was what made it go viral because they give it to your followers and then if your followers love it, then they'll push it out some. It's not the case anymore. They literally take your content and show it to people who aren't following you the moment that you post it. And if people that you do, that do follow you and don't follow you watch the whole thing, they watch the whole thing, then they push it out to more people. What goes viral are videos that people watch all of. If you make a piece of content that's so good that people watch it all the way through to the end, then it will go viral. That's the secret. That's the whole equation of social media right now is watch time. So if your stuff isn't going viral, it's because people are seeing it and then they're getting out of there. You're not giving them anything interesting enough to stay. Maybe you're not hooking them the right way or bringing them the value the right way or ending it. Maybe you're babbling and then they got value in the first five, 10 seconds, but then the last 20 seconds were just kind of like you babbling and they left after they got the value. Stop it at the end of the value. That way they watched it all and then the value and then boom, it was over instead of value and then babbling for 20 more seconds because then they're clicking out of it after the first 10 of value. And then Instagram thinks, well, people only watched 10 seconds of this. It's a 30 second video where you could have just gave them 10 seconds of value and stopped it in that same video and people watched all 10 seconds and now Instagram's like, damn, people are watching every second of this. Let's blow it up. So right now, Taint your question, even though it doesn't matter for you, for agents, it's the content, how good is it? How much of it do people want to watch? That's what makes it go viral. Thank you. So Ricky Karouf, I got a question in the ask for our team. So I know you have a daily, like check in with the MLS. I've seen one of your videos like how you go in and you show everybody before you start calling. There are certain things that you need to do and look at in the MLS. Can you tell us what those things are? Yeah, I'll show you right here. So here's my MLS. I was just in here making my weekly email data and stuff. So if I go home right here, all right, over here to the far right, I've got this market monitor where I have my hot sheet. So all these red buttons here are different things. So there's six that came back on the market, 19 clothes. This is in the last 24 hours. 13 expired or canceled, hot list. That's like lower the price or whatever. Least, three leased, 44 new listings. There's 37 open houses coming up. There's 29 pending deals happening in the last 24 hours and stuff like that. So first thing I'm gonna do is go to new and I wanna see all the new listings in the last day, right? So if I'm looking at this every day, this is gonna kind of update and I may see a little overlap of some things, but I'm gonna go maybe to city, put it in order of city. So I can kind of scan to the cities I care about. Like I don't care about Atmore, Bayman and Bruton. Daphne, I could be a little curious. It's about 30 minutes away. I could be a little curious there. I might look at the addresses here and see if there's anything. Like I recognize some of these. My mother-in-law lives on this road. So I recognize some of these in Daphne. Alberta's a little closer, but it's real country. Fairhope's kind of a rich, fancy kind of areas, about 30 minutes away. Foley's real close to me. I own a bunch of properties in Foley. So I'm just looking at these addresses and seeing if I see something interesting. Then I get down to Orange Beach. Now I'm looking at condos. Right? This we should be able to market is condos, Gulffront condos. So I'd look at Gulfshores and Orange Beach condos and just really pay attention to the new listings popping up. Like that is Bellaluna. That is Grand Caribbean. I think that is Admiral's, no, that's the Palms. So let's see. I didn't see, oh, here's Gulfshores. So there wasn't anything in Gulfshores on the beach listed. I'm just paying attention to this. So I go here, I'm like, oh, the Palms. Oh, this sparks me interest. So let me click on it. And let me just kind of see what's going on. Let me see who listed it. What company, commission splits. Let me get down here, maybe look at some things here, see if anything. And then it's like, okay, let me check out the pictures. Cause now I've been in all these buildings. So I want to kind of see, okay, there's some upgrades. This is a nice one, actually. Let's see the kitchen though. Let's see if the kitchen ain't really, yeah, it's pretty nice actually. Like this is a good one actually, you know? So like, I may look at that and I might think, okay, well, I've got three clients in there I've sold to over the last five years. I'm going to call them and say, hey, did you see, which one is this? Did you see 108 South come on the market, you know? And I saw it and it made me think of you, you know, you bought yours for 550, they're asking 725. So yeah, how are you guys doing? How's the family? And then just talk about non real estate stuff. So like this hot sheet will prompt you to like think of clients. Not only will you see stuff that you have buyers for that you call the buyer and say, hey, this just came on the market, but you'll also think of past clients that you can call and reconnect with about current market information, right? It just makes you think. So I can go back home and I can pull up the closed. You know? So you guys kind of see where I'm going with this. I'm just kind of combing through. I'm interested. I want to keep my finger on the pulse. Here's a condo that closed. Okay, let's see what it is. This is Clearwater. Close for 425. It's a one bedroom. I see who sold it. Debbie Fuller, she switched companies. Let's see who the buyer agent was selling agent. Oh, I guess she got on both sides of it. I'm going to check this out. And so now I'm looking at this like, okay, now I know a Clearwater one bedroom sold for 425. I know that, I know that it wasn't fully updated, it needs some furniture and it had some cool stuff. So now I know that in the back of my head and I just second nature know that that happened where I'm talking to other people, they're buildings are close by. It's just, you become like a market expert overnight because you like start like really understanding the ebbs and flow of the market in real time, right? So that's all it is. And you can look at pendings. You can look at all this stuff. You can kind of comb through it. Spend 15, 20 minutes a day looking at that and you'll, after like a week or two, you're just going to have so much market knowledge that's so up to date. It's just not even funny. It gives you ideas for your weekly email. It just sparks activity. Excellent, thank you so much for sharing that. Very helpful. Cool. That's some, anyone else who got a question real quick before I ask? So let's just say it's all about video marketing, Ricky. It's all about video marketing so people can get to know you before they actually know you. What do you say to the agent that's scared or that's nervous? Don't do it. Just call people. I mean, the video is just trying to get you into a place where you have a conversation with someone. Again, when you ask me what you should do to go out there and build relationships, what did I say? Whatever works best for you. I don't care if you do video marketing. I don't care if you cold call, warm call, lukewarm call, it don't matter to me, but you better be talking to someone, right? Whatever you're doing needs to involve conversations because like the Facebook DM thing is fine but use it to get the phone number to call them. You know what I'm saying? Like get to the conversation as quick as possible. As far as video marketing, you know, like you call the person and then text them a video of yourself. That's one thing you could do, Martinica, is send them a video, right? Send them a video of you, right? Where they're getting you, not just a link with your picture, but like an actual video, which that could be fake too, that you could have found that on the internet somewhere. So you're still not quite there yet. You're not out of the woods with, is this a real person or not? Okay, but maybe it gets you a little closer than just a link with a picture. Maybe you can embed a video at the top of that link instead of a picture where it's like, hey, just want you know, I'm a real person, you know, blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff, that might help with what you're doing. But yeah, like, I don't know. I know people that sell hundreds of millions in real estate using Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and I know people that do it. I know even way more people that do a lot of video marketing that don't sell anything. So again, stuff works for some people. It doesn't work for other people, right? But then this thing over here works better for the people that couldn't do, like there's something for everyone. Now, what are my thoughts on that? Well, everyone here is gonna make money as an agent at seven o'clock at night. The only question is, are you gonna be the one at home eating dinner with your family chilling while eight of your 21 listings are being shown by agents who market theirself on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube? My point is, is that most of the social media stuff brings in buyers that now you have to service and I don't want to buy or heavy business. I want a listing heavy business. You can use social media to get listings and the way you do it is you create very engaging videos that people watch all of. So they kind of go viral. You show your seller at the listing appointment, hey, I got 200,000 views across all my channels last month. I'm gonna push your listing on my network and now they're impressed above just an agent putting it on MLS. So that's how you use social media to get more listings is you do well on social media enough to want to brag about it to the sellers and say, hey, I'm gonna market your property on my channels. Then they're like, oh, wow, this person has something extra to give that nobody else has their own channel that gets 200,000 views a month across all the platforms. You can get listings in other ways on social by trying to do more seller heavy type videos, like telling about stuff. And if you want to sell, call me instead of if you want to buy, call me. But it still kind of brings in, what I've seen is a lot more buyers. Like the guys I know that do 100 million a year and sells off YouTube and stuff, it is literally all buyers. Like they told me it's 99% of their deals are buyers. So they had to build this team of buyer agents to handle all the buyers. I don't want nothing to do with that. I'd rather sell 50 million worth of listings and keep all the money while I'm chilling on the couch while everybody else are selling my listings. Now that's the current system. You guys all know that this is something that could be short lived with the way that everything's going with, you know, the lawsuits and stuff with the way that we post. And then we've got all these buyers in the market working together to try to sell the listing. So, you know, that whole thing could change real soon. And when, you know, as there's new rules to the game, show me the new rules and let me go crush it. It's not gonna be anything to worry about whatsoever and just to kind of end on that. The worst case is they don't let us advertise by your commission anymore. So then nobody's gonna post anything on MLS because then Zilla is gonna go to pay to play. You gotta pay to put your listings on MLS. They're not gonna syndicate from MLS. So then there's no reason to put on MLS anymore. And so everybody's gonna have pocket listings. So all the buyers aren't gonna be able to see everything for sale. And now buyer agents become way more valuable. If you got a buyer, then you're worth a lot because it's like you're not even gonna present the property to your buyer you have unless there's something in it for you. So, do I think a lot of agents will leave the business if that happens? Yup, I think a lot of agents will leave. Do I think the ones that stay, who are very business savvy are gonna make more money than they make now? Yup, because there's gonna be more market share left over from the ones that leave. And I really think we're gonna be in a position where we can actually charge more money on commissions because we're gonna be handling one side or the other. And we're just gonna be worth more because in that world that the consumers wanna go to because agents make too much money and they can do it theirself, well, you can't do it. They're like, oh, well, why do we need you? We have Zillow. We can find our own properties. Number one, we do more than that. You guys know that. But what they don't realize is that by them tearing this system apart, they're not gonna be able to find properties on Zillow anymore. You know, that's the thing. And so like the thing that they think that they've got that they've got this thing figured out and they can just go be their own agent. Number one, they're gonna find out real quickly even if they did find the properties on Zillow and go do it theirself, how much trouble they're gonna get into and how much they're gonna need an agent on the next deal but they're not even gonna be able to find the properties. That's the thing. And so now buy, you know, when you have a buyer you're worth more money than you were before because that buyer doesn't know the property that's for sale and they don't know who your buyer is. Only you do. So they wanna make residential more commercialized and make it to where we're like commercial agents. Let's go. They wanna make this thing where they wanna make this thing where like it's basically like it is in some of these other countries like South Africa and Australia and stuff. Let's go. I'm all about it. You know, let's knock out half the agents that are out there and for the ones that are left that actually are the builders of the industry will make more money. Absolutely. Good stuff, man. Good stuff. Can I ask you a question about general business practices? Yeah. What should real estate agents be doing on a daily basis? You know, as good business practices. Looking at MLS, studying the hot sheet. Well, scheduling their day first, studying MLS second. Check this out too. When you guys go here, this isn't the free section right here, business planning. See this business planning tab? Go here and click this business planning. And this first one, download Ricky's 2020 for a business plan. Click that. There's this video right here. And then I've got this business plan right here for you guys to download and kind of follow through. This is real good stuff. But schedule your day. Five or 10 minutes, go through all your emails or your text messages, think about everything you gotta do. Put it all on a sheet of paper. You know, eight o'clock, 8.15. Look through MLS, study all that. 8.30, figure out who we're calling today. Get all that together. Start out your call session with some follow up calls. Get all your follow up calls out the way, people that you've been working with that you need to follow up with or whatever. Call them first to kind of warm up. You know, warm up to making the calls. Then get into your cold calls. Cold call all the way to 12. So nine to 12, you're on the phone. Then lunch, come back from one to three. Do all your, make your video. Do your handwritten letters. Do your weekly email. Do your social media. All your marketing stuff, right? Spend a couple hours doing that. Then from three to six, do your appointments. You know, some follow up stuff or whatever you need to do. That's kind of a nice little guideline. We all know that things pop up and we gotta like, our schedule gets hectic. But that's another thing, control your schedule. Like a lot of stuff that pops up that you think is a fire you gotta put out right now, you could literally ignore it for like two hours and it's still gonna be there waiting on you while you get this done. You know, it's, think about it like this. That call session, nine to 12, think about it like this. If you were showing property to a buyer between nine and 12 and you were walking through a home with the buyer and your phone starts ringing and you're talking to the buyer about the property, are you even gonna look at your phone? Nope. You ain't gonna look at it. You don't even know who it was cause you're like talking to the buyer about this house that you're walking through. Trying to figure out if they need to make an offer or what they think about it or whatever. You're not even gonna look at your phone. You're not even gonna look at it until you leave the appointment. Let's say you show property for an hour, right? And then you look and you see, oh, it was a situation. You call the situation and guess what? The situation is still there waiting on you. So why is it okay to ignore that during the showing but it's not okay to ignore that during like a call call session or prospecting session, right? It is okay. It's like a lot of the stuff you guys think you gotta get on it right now. Some of it you do, but maybe 10% of what you think. And now when you get to where you're ignoring the things that can be ignored, now you are controlling your business and your business isn't controlling you and you feel in control where before, you feel like you're getting drug all around by a leash and you feel like you're like a puppet to your business. And that's a bad feeling cause you just feel like you don't have a quality of life. You feel like you can't do nothing you wanna do. You start to resent your business, all that stuff. And it's all bad. Versus if you would just do this one little tweak and start ignore, when you look down and say, oh, I'll call them back in an hour when before you would have answered right then, dah, dah, dah, dah, you know, just went crazy and spent an hour on whatever the situation is. Do that later on a lot of this stuff. Now, somebody's calling you with a counter offer. You gotta handle that right then, okay? Here's the four things you can't ignore. Negotiating a deal, writing an offer, going to a listing appointment, or showing property. Somebody called and said, I wanna see this house. I'm dropping everything. Somebody called and said, here's a counter offer, dropping everything. Somebody called and said, well, can you come tell me what this house is worth? Dropping everything. Somebody called and said, I wanna make an offer on this, dropping everything, right? If it's outside of one of those four things, ignore it until you're done with what you need to do. And guess what? You feel so good when you do that. It's just like, you can just breathe. You don't feel like a boa constrictor. It's just like around your neck the whole day. You just feel like your light is a feather. A little bit of stuff, man, I like the value, man. Golden nuggets. Love it, man. We're gonna definitely join Ricky. Join Ricky.com, correct? Yeah. Support that for sure. Anyone else have anything for Ricky? All right, little Ricky, we thank you so much for your time. I know it's been over an hour now. So we wanna respect everyone's time. But thank you so much for all the nuggets and the gems and just the knowledge that you dropped on our team today. And so we really appreciate it. I appreciate you guys. Let me know if there's something I could do to help you. I'm always here. Let me hear from you guys as far as your success and stuff. And let's maybe we can circle back around and next year at some point, do another one of these. See where you guys are. Appreciate you Ricky. Thank you Ricky. Appreciate it. Thank you. See you guys. Thank you. Thank you, man. Thank you. Thank you.