 I'm picking up leads and possible deals every cost. I couldn't imagine if I was calling for three hours a day. For me, I wanted to get through that whole prospecting storm and build my business to where I didn't have to prospect anymore as quickly as possible. You're going to pick the one that seems most confident. Not arrogant, right? Not to the level of arrogance, but whoever they feel like is just connects with them the best and it's the most confidence. They do it for 30 days and they look down and they're like, why have 30 videos? One of these has to be good enough to post. Do you feel that the agents who are focused on the money are going to make worse calls and make worse relationships because they don't really care. They're just trying to get to the money. Some of them we're going to get it now. Some of them we're going to get it later. Someone never get it. If it wasn't my fault and the fact that you don't realize that tells me I probably need to go spend my energy on somebody that does understand how this game really works. How can I become friends with every single person in my market? You know, and then build that great reputation. This is episode 18 of the Art of Agency, a Launchpad for Realtors. I'm Jonathan Green with Mallory Pastor and our guest, Ricky Karuth. Ricky is the founder of the Karuth team at EXP Realty Golf Shores, as well as the founder of Zero to Diamond, a social media platform and free coaching program for real estate agents. You've probably seen them around social media. Ricky, welcome to the show. What's up guys? Hey. Yeah, great. Great to have you. I'm going to start off with one that I know you're going to have some answers to. What is wrong with real estate agents in today's market? Yeah, so honestly, they're kind of slowing down with the market, right? The market is slower. There's less transactions, of course. We see that there's less pending deals. And we're seeing more agents drop off really. I mean, we saw the first drop off year over year since the great recession. Yeah. And what's happening is that agents were so accustomed to inbound leads, right? Just things falling in their lap for a while. And it was just really easy. And I mean, even if it wasn't easy, if you had a buyer, an inbound lead, and you still had to compete against a bunch of different buyers, it still wasn't easy. But it was easy to get the lead. The leads were coming in. Yeah. It was easy to get there and then working the leads from there. And now all that's kind of dried up. There's not really a lot of inbound leads, right? So like a lot of repeats and referral business isn't really coming through. There's a lot of people sitting on the sidelines. Buyers are sitting on sidelines because of mortgage rates. Sellers are sitting on the sidelines because of mortgage rates. Yeah, definitely. So there's a lot of sidelines sitting happening. There's more pent up demand than we've ever seen in history from the buyer and seller side. So many sellers want to move, but they feel trapped with their mortgage rate. And so many buyers, more than we've ever seen, want to buy. There's more 33-year-olds than we've seen since the baby boomer generation. 98% of them want to be homeowners. 33 is the first, the beginning age of the average first time home buyer. And we've got a decade and a half of this, more than we've ever seen. So when mortgage rates do ease down, once we get all the, you know, the debt-silling thing figured out and all that, and inflation eases a little, we're going to see better mortgage rates, which is really going to unleash the largest wave, I think, that we've probably seen in a long, long time of buyers. But in terms of agents, they've just grown accustomed to things falling in their lap and the prospecting side. And now they're sitting around, nothing's really coming in. And they're just kind of sitting there saying, oh, it's slow. Yeah. And even if you'll just go get on the phone, you know, like I've been making live call sessions again. And every call session, I mean, I only, it's, you know, it's a good 45 minutes where I'm hand dialing and I only get a good, you know, 10 dial, 10, 15 dials in at the most, sometimes only like seven or eight because I'm talking to people. But I'm picking up leads and possible deals every cost. I couldn't imagine if I was calling for three hours a day, you know, even three days a week. Yeah. Do you feel like with the, as technology and like texting and all these other DMs and those ways have become more popular that agents have forgotten how to use the phone? Yeah. Yeah. They're trying to get around that part of it. When in fact, you know, when they do make contact with someone, they still got to get on the phone with them, you know, so they're just prolonging the inevitable and if they would just take some initiative and be a little bit more, you know, offensive, be on the offense rather than, you know, defense and get to those conversations, just go ahead and let's get to the conversations. It's kind of like a Buffalo. You've heard the Buffalo thing, right? They run towards the storm, right? It's the same thing, you know, like most agents or cows, they, they're running away from the storm. So the storm kind of chases them, it catches up to them and then they're still running, trying to run away while they stay in the storm longer versus the Buffalo. When they see the storm, they just go run straight to it because they just run right through it really fast and they get to the other side. For me, I wanted to get through that whole prospecting storm and build my business to where I didn't have to prospect anymore as quickly as possible. And so the only way to do that is to just hit it head on and just go have as many conversations as you can and build that business and build your database up to the point where you've got so many repeats and referrals coming in that you don't have to prospect anymore. And it can happen really quickly, like within a matter of a couple of years, if you just be the Buffalo versus most agents are just trying to avoid it, which just prolongs that whole process and a lot of them get to a place where they never get into the situation where their business is such where they don't have to prospect anymore, they have to prospect for the rest of their life. Yeah, and I guess if, go ahead, Ma. When they get to that spot, they really don't have the tenacity to prospect. Well, anyway, they're kind of just doing it like a robot. So they're doing bad prospecting even at that point because they don't really want to do it. Well, that was kind of going to be my question. Like, do you think that lack of action, right, is from a lack of confidence? Or do you think they're just lazy and used to things falling in their lap? Or do you think it's a combination of both? Combination of both and getting worse every day. People are just naturally human nature is that we're, you know, scared of rejection and, you know, don't want to talk to people who don't know and stuff like that. But, you know, the whole premise of being a real estate agent is talking to people you don't know to help them buy and sell real estate, you know, regardless where you get your leads from, you know, Zillow, YouTube, you know, social media, well, wherever, it all comes back to talking to them, right? You get a Zillow lead, you get a column, you get a YouTube lead, you get a column. So it all comes back to talking to them anyway. Why am I going to do any of that when I can just get their information for a penny and just call them right now for the exact person I want to do business with? Yeah. So yeah, it's a combination. They're scared of rejection. They're not confident in their self. It's tough, you know, it's tough. So I don't know. That's why the failure rate is so high because honestly, it's just confidence. How do you think agents can build that up? You know, is it just like, I'm very action oriented. So I'm like, I'll just do it, right? But not everybody is that way. So what are some ways you think agents can kind of psych themselves up and build up that confidence to make those calls? Well, you know, confidence is what every client wants. There's so many agents to choose from. Who are they going to pick? They're going to pick the one that seems most confident, not arrogant, right? Not to the level of arrogance, but whoever they feel like is just connects with them the best and it's the most confident. So how do you build that? Well, you know, it's like it's, you can, you know, there's so many different personalities, you know, there's the disc test with all the different stuff. I'm a high D. So I'm just kind of one of these guys that just doesn't care. I'm just going to go wing it. I'm going to go, you know, make it happen. And, you know, I'll make it work kind of thing. Not everybody's like that. A lot of people are scared to make videos. And one thing I've been saying is, is go in your phone and pull up the video, you know, app there. And just make a video a day, right? Do it in front of a house, do it, a market report, whatever. And don't post them. Just make them and have them in your phone and just don't post them. And make one a day, you know, have it, make it a commitment that every day you're going to make one video a day. Whether you post it or not, you're just going to make it. And what happens over time is you end up getting a little better after like a couple of days or maybe a week or two. And you actually create a video. You're like, it's so good. I have to post it, right? And then you kind of start to break through that fear of, you know, whatever the fear was behind making the video. Same thing with calls. I think if you're really, really scared of calls, warm up your call session by calling a couple of sphere of influence people. Yeah, definitely. I know you. You know, call like three people you know before you start calling the people you don't know. I used to do that whenever I was calling. Yeah. You know, I would, I would spend the first four calls like following up with past clients or following up with people that I'm, I'm working with right now that might want to buy or sell just to kind of get in the groove and making the call, being on the phone and going through the conversation. And then I was kind of warmed up and ready to roll for my cold calls. Yeah. So I think just kind of easing into it, whether it's video or calls, have something in place that kind of allows you to make the excuse to do it rather than make the excuse not to do it. Yeah. And those are just reps. I feel like you're saying like, I read that video post and I love it because I really think it's just giving them the reps. And then at some point you're right. They're just going to be like, well, actually, this is like my best one. Why wouldn't I post this? Or they do it for 30 days and they look down and they're like, why have 30 videos? One of these has to be good enough to post. Yeah. You know, it has to, you know, get off it. And even if not, they've at least had 30 days of creating something. I really like the idea of not posting it. I think that people are going to get much more comfort, same with the phone. One thing that I've noticed about your coaching over time is that it's something that both Mallory and I agree with. It's real estate's about relationships. Do you feel that the agents who are focused on the money are going to make worse calls and make worse, you know, relationships because they don't really care. They're just trying to get to the money. But how do you train a new agent who does need the money to focus on the person? That's what we're always trying to do. Well, sometimes they have to go through what it feels like to chase the money and how devastating that is to their business before they realize, before it clicks. Sometimes it's not what we tell them or it's not really up to us to try to make that switch. It's up to them of actually going through it and learning it on their own. And then what will happen is we're screaming it, hey, focus on the person, not the property. And they're like, oh yeah, whatever. I'm going to go after this listing and stuff like that. And they get some deals, they lose some deals, whatever. But at the end of the day, when you look back at that whole moment, let's just say it's a year or two that they were prospecting and getting listings and they did pretty well, sales-wise and everything. But if you really sit there and count up every single prospect that they talk to and how many of those prospects are in their database now and love them and want to do business with them for the rest of their life and stuff like that, and you realize how much business was actually left on the table of people because you were so focused on the deal that you were so blinded by the appointment or the deal that you were so focused on trying to get that, you weren't even open to the fact that, hey, this person might want to buy something over here or maybe this person doesn't want to do anything right now, but maybe they will in three years. And if I can understand that and then collect their data and market to them until they do, then I could be their agent for life. If you look at it from that standpoint, that was like what we first talked about. If you operate like this, you get to a place where you don't have to prospect anymore. This is part of it, is working those numbers up of people who love you and your market that want to do business with you when they get ready. If you're always just focused on the deal, even if you're doing the weekly email and building the brand for the future, you're going to lose a lot of people that you were talking to anyway, that you could have collected that would have done 10 to 20 deals with you over the next 15 years. So it could be us just screaming it and then them going out and learning that on their own and then making that adjustment in the next 14 months. Or maybe they hear what I'm saying right now and they're like, you know what? Doing it that way. I could actually close all the business I would have closed now anyway because people like me and if they're going to do deals now, they're going to do a deal with me. And I'm going to get all this business in the future as well. And so I'm building my short-term and long-term business at the same time. Maybe they realize that in this one show and they go start implementing that and the way they're communicating with their prospects now. So everybody's going to be different. Some of them we're going to get it now. Some of them we're going to get it later. And someone never get it. Right? And those that never get it will just be salespeople for the rest of their life. They're all only good as their last sale. Every closing, they're going to have to work hard to go do another closing, another closing, another closing. And hopefully they've saved up some money and bought some rental properties so they can walk away from this thing at some point. But you know, they may or may not ever have like a residual business to the level that they want where they can walk away from prospecting, still close 50 to 100 deals every year in their sleep. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I think those same agents are the ones who they get the closing and then they forget about the client because they're worried about getting their next closing and they're like, well, those, they're seven years away. But what about all the referrals? You know, if you do a great job and you only say you have a new agent and you do five closings and you don't have any inbound leads because it's a little dry, like we said at the beginning, but you just focus on those five people making sure they have everything that they need. Referrals are going to start to come. Do you find that agents are really failing in that area as well as that follow-up nurture for the clients that you already helped? Well, you just do a weekly email to your entire database on the same day of the week forever, make it a custom email. But so that makes everything really easy. But what they really fail to understand is that the person that you think isn't going to do anything for seven years decides in six months, they don't like where they are. Yeah. And they want to sell it. Because they get a job transfer, yeah. You know, or they decide they want to buy a rental property. Or you never know. That person could be the one person that referred you to a $3 million commercial deal in the next four months. So all this filtering out people, like I know agents that filter out, they'll call up a subdivision and they'll filter out the people that bought in the last year. And I'm like, what the hell are you doing? Yeah. Like, you have an auto dialer here. It's only going to take you an extra 15 minutes to call the people you took off the list. Those people may want to buy rental properties or commercial. Or maybe they want to sell this property over there. Or maybe they need a referral to sell their beach condo and Myrtle Beach. Or you don't know what's going to happen. Why are you just saying, oh, well, these aren't worth calling. Like any human being in your market is worth calling. Yeah. And I think people over complicate it sometimes. Like I had a deal that closed in March and like I texted her Happy Mother's Day and she thought it was like the most amazing thing in the whole world. The fact that your expectations are that low but she was like, thank you so much. Like my old realtor never did that. Like it sounds really silly but people over complicate to your point, Jonathan, of staying in touch with those people, right? Like just because you closed three weeks ago doesn't mean you can't reach out and check in and do things like that. So we've heard so multiple stories from people we've had on the show who clients will just say thank you for answering the phone and you're like, what? You're like, what? Thank you for responding. That's what we're up against. And I mean the podcast is to make real estate agents better so clients get better service. And this can be a trickle down effect that will eventually get to the clients because they need better service. There's just a lot of bad realtors out there. You know, hopefully they'll listen. One thing that you always say also is that real estate is a win-win, something that I agree with. How do you get people to understand that the win-win is involved in the buyer, the seller, the agents, the attorneys, and keeping everybody on the same page and not making it like a competition? Well, give me an example of what an agent would call a loss. Of what an agent would call a loss? I mean, yeah. They're likely to lose in this business. What's the... Well, this will go to one other thing that you said which is when losing deals gives your future time back. Like when a deal fails, agents are like, oh, they start to cry into their bowl of Cheerios, not realizing probably that deal should have failed. It's a good job that the deal failed. It wasn't a good deal. How do you get them to get back on track? Because they feel that's a loss. The deal fails in inspection, say, how do they get that back on the track? Well, I mean, number one, not all deals are going to close. And all this stuff is out of your control. That's the first thing you have to really understand is that when you get the listing, it's either going to sell or it isn't. You could price it exactly right and it just sit there forever. I've overpriced stuff that's sold on a day. There's so many scenarios. First thing you have to realize is that you don't control any of this and that nothing's really promised. Something could fall through the day of... You could be at the closing table and the seller just say, I'm not going to sign it and boom, right? I mean, it's even happened, right? Buyers and buyers like ghost. I've had a couple of deals where the buyers just disappear. They got completely ghost and they never reappear, right? I've had that happen a couple of times. So it's just really out of your control. What we do as agents is we do the best we can do to make the deals happen. But at the end of the day, again, let's just take it back to what we just said and that is we're focused on the person, not the property. So if a deal falls through, that's the property. But what about the person? Do we still have a relationship with them? Are we still pursuing a deal? It's like, okay, do we represent the seller? Okay, we represent the seller and the deal fell through. Great, we still have the listing. We're going to go out and resell it to somebody. They still want to sell it. It wasn't your fault it fell through. You handled it beautifully and they want to proceed with you. You're good. Let's say it was your buyer. Fell out, you said because of inspection. Well, it's not because they got denied on their loan. They could still afford the house. They just didn't like the inspection. Let's go find you a house that you do like that does pass the inspection. It's the relationship. Let's say a deal falls totally apart and the person isn't going to do the deal anymore. Let's say the seller of the listing cancels the listing. He says, hey, I don't like the way you handled the way that this deal went. It's your fault that we lost the deal. And I'm going to go listen to somebody else. Great. I do not want to deal. I don't want to deal with you, because it wasn't my fault. And the fact that you don't realize that tells me I probably need to go spend my energy on somebody that does understand how this game really works. I don't know. I mean, you can spend anything anyway you want. And I just spend it in a really optimistic way in every little situation that you're just not losing. You got to take the money part out of it. What you're talking about is they lost the money. Right. Right. And they didn't even lose the money. They just lost the money on the day it was supposed to close. They're still got the money. They're still going to be a deal somewhere. And also the lifetime of deals through the client. It's just, you just can't lose. If you're talking about one deal, yeah, you can lose. But the one deal, if you're going to have a career and do a thousand deals over the course of your career, you're going to lose probably more than a thousand deals to close the thousand deals, number one. Number two, that one deal, even if it closes, it's so insignificant in the whole scheme of a thousand deal career that it's not like to make or break you anyway, right? I don't know. I could go on and on and on about it. But there's just no way to lose, right? If the market crashes and goes down 50% price-wise, how easy is it going to be to sell properties? Yeah. I mean, if a house right now that's worth 300, right, that I'm buying four of right this second, if those go down to 150, how easy is it going to be to sell $300,000 homes for $150,000? Yeah. Let's say it goes down to 220 or 250. It'd be like crazy easy to sell those properties. And I know this from experience. I was in the market in 2008. Things were down 50%. And I was selling them like hotcakes in 2008, right? You can't lose. It's just a win-win no matter how you chop it up. The catalyst of it, though, is to work every day. It's to work every day and stay busy and do the things that matter. Yeah. Absolutely. I know we're good at six more minutes with you. I want to get your take on this because it's obviously one of the hottest takes. Should a new real estate agent join a real estate team? And what factors do you think they should look at? I mean, it's such an overriding topic in the business right now. What are your thoughts on that? I think it doesn't matter because wherever real estate agent starts, they're not going to finish. Statistically, I don't think anybody is at the company they started with at the end of their career. Most agents, regardless of how... If they could join the best company in the world and they're their first company and they just don't know what they don't know. So they'll hear from another company and they'll think, is the grass greener? They're going to have this grass is greener moment even if they become a success. Now, 90% of agents aren't going to make it at all. That's just statistics. So 90% of them aren't going to make it. And then the 10% that do, if they come in and start selling some properties and find some success, they're going to start looking around and say, okay, where else can I go that's a better deal or going to give me something better or going to give me higher producers to be around or whatever they're looking for in terms of growth. So I don't think it really matters. You come in, if you join a team, I think the advice I would give is, don't sign a piece of paper saying, I'm going to stay here for a certain amount of time. Don't take any signing bonuses and you're going to be here for two years. Don't sign any team agreements that you got to, I mean, something for a year, I guess, is okay for a team agreement. You know, I'm going to stick it out here for a year. But even that's not that great because if you get in the situation and two months in, you realize, man, they're treating me bad and this isn't fair. And they're not even teaching me how to write contracts and you want the ability to walk away from that. So I would say just close your eyes and pin a tail on a donkey and pick whatever brokerage or team you want. Get in there, learn what you can, get your feet wet. And then if you feel like you're at a good place, stay. And if you don't, move somewhere else. I've been with seven companies and every time I move, it's because I outgrew the company. I learned all that they had to offer. I was plateaued out on what I could learn and how much I could produce based on my knowledge. And it had to go somewhere where there were higher producers to learn from. Every single time it was, I need more. I need somewhere else where I can learn something new. So I think when you're new, you don't know anything. You can start anywhere, learn whatever that company has to offer and then decide if you want to stay or move or whatever. But again, the whole team versus this, that or the other, it's just personal preference. You're not going to end up where you start. And people are doing business with you because you're you, right? Like that's what I tell people. If you switch to four brokerages in your first year, that's okay. People are going to do business with you because you're you, not because you're with one of the people. People don't care what brokerage you're with. I agree. I don't think they have any, especially buyers have no clue because there's no sign. They have no idea. When I left Remax, I had to do listing change addendums for 30 listings I had. And two of them were like that I called them. I was like, Hey, I'm switching companies and all this. And I sent it to them. I'm like, cool. I didn't even know you're with Remax. So the signs there, they literally said that. Well, no, like these are condos. There's no signs. Like they literally told me they didn't even know. And I was with Remax for 10 years. They literally said, I don't know. NAR did a study. And the number one reason why people choose an agent is because they have a friend in the business with a great reputation. And brokerage, all the other reasons, that was like a 30 something percent response. Everything else was 1% or less, including what brokers they're at or online or this, that or the other. It was all 1%. And then the outlier was this 33% or some odd number of people who said, because they had a friend in the business with a great reputation. So that needs to be the objective for every single agent. How can I become friends with every single person in my market and then build that great reputation? Awesome. Well, we're going to stick to our 30 minutes. Ricky, I really appreciate you making the time for us. The best place for people, if they're interested in your coaching program, is zero to diamond.com. Yeah, zero to diamond.com. And you can follow me on Instagram, Ricky Careuth and YouTube, all that good stuff. Yeah, Ricky has 238,000 followers on Instagram, so you can just hop into that. You give a ton of great advice. We both appreciate it. We're always watching your videos. So it's a pleasure to have you on. Thanks for making the time. My pleasure. Pleasure's all mine. Thank you guys. Thanks. Have a good day. That was episode 18 of The Art of Agency, a launch pad for realtors with our guest, Ricky Careuth. We'll see you next week.