 And they invited you to their house to sit down with you. They respect you. They respect the hustle. They respect the grind. They see you out here grinding on that phone. And they're like, damn, that's the kind of agent I want. Prices never went down. Never had a negative year. We had strong years after that. So you won't do what you need to do to succeed at the highest level. And you don't even know why you won't do it. The only way you can learn to do that is through experience of people telling you one thing and then doing another later. Exactly. It creates a situation where now you're proving to them that you're willing to invest even more time into them and call them back like you said you would and give them the 100% correct information. Deals just fall in your lap. You don't have to prospect anymore. Not another day in your life. I spent the time on what's prospecting, building other businesses on social media, building my brand, building other businesses. And thank God for that. Like, social media changed my life. Like, I'm living the life of my dreams now. Everybody welcome to our Tuesday morning Leaders Edge Zoom. As you guys know, we do this every Tuesday morning, 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Today we have a special guest with us, Ricky Caruth. I'll let him talk a little bit about himself but any of you guys that don't know, Ricky is one of the leading salespeople, team leaders at EXP Realty. And today we've asked Ricky to join us and he's gonna dive into some things that he's implemented, some things that he practices. And Ricky, why don't you take us away? Hey, good to see you guys. I'm sure you guys are from all over the place, so that's good. Yeah, I've been on this call before and I'm sure a lot of you already know my story and what I do and stuff. Let's give the most value possible here. If you guys could put it in the chat or even unmute and tell me what direction you want me to go with this, right? So I can go into market, why the market's so solid, why we're fixing to see a huge explosion, all that good stuff. I can get into prospecting, I can get into attraction, whatever, what direction do you guys want to take this meeting? Cause I don't wanna sit up here and just blab about stuff you guys don't care about. Yeah, I mean, I can tell you what most of us are struggling with here is just lack of inventory, right? Getting listings, there is no inventory. How are, everybody's kind of flushed with buyers, there's really no inventory around. So how do we get those listings, get those sellers to, how do we attract them? What are we supposed to be doing that type of stuff? Yeah, and even how to get people to pull the trigger, whether you have buyers or whether you're working with prospects that are gonna become sellers, how are you getting people to make that move to enter the market? You know, I'd have to dig into the business, right? So, you know, how are we getting leads? Why are we flooded with buyers? Why are we not flooded with sellers, right? It's gonna come back down to how you're prospecting, what your marketing and game plan really is. Like for example, you know, you guys know Levi, he closed $86 million last year all on YouTube. He said 95% of those deals are buyers. You know, if you're focused on a buyer attraction type business, then you're gonna have a bunch of buyers. If you have a lot of buyers, look at how you're attracting these buyers and start figuring out how to get in front of set, the property owners instead of buyers. I've always been a more of a listing agent. Now, I never classified myself as a listing agent or a buyer's agent. I'm a real estate agent and I'm happy to help anybody buy or sell. I've never turned down a buyer or turned down a seller. I've never fired a client. The ones that end up being huge headaches, I just never let it bother me. I just let them just do their thing, talk their stuff and I just get the deals done. But nevertheless, depending on the year, like some years I was 80, 20, you know, listings, you know, more listings than buyers. Some years I was 50, 50 just because that's the way that the year kind of laid itself out. But the big punchline is that I focused on property owners. I didn't really focus on sellers or I didn't think of them as listings. I thought of them as somebody that could list or buy, you know, they could do either. But I found that property owners were the most efficient. Like in my mind, my theory was property owners are the most efficient leads. They're the most efficient clients because they can buy or sell at any given time. So why would I box myself in and only build a business where my lead gen method attracts only buyers into my ecosystem? Why not talk to property owners, right? Not sellers, right? Property owners who may buy or sell create those relationships, see what it is they're trying to do. You know, it's like, when are you looking to do your next transaction? Is it next week, next month, six months, a year, two years, five years, 10 years? When is it? Do you have an agent that you plan on using at that time? And let me create a game plan around what we need to do to help you, you know, with what your timeline is of your next transaction in life. Now, what types of things are you doing to get in front of those potential seller candidates? Property owners. I know it's just gonna sound so crazy, guys, because when I say stuff, it just sounds so easy. But it really is. I just call them. Just pick up the phone, pick the houses you wanna sell, and just call them and say, hi, I'm Ricky, I'm a real estate agent. What can I do to help you today? You're looking to do something soon. Do you have an agent you're working with? I'd love to work with you the next time you do a deal. It's not super complicated. Really easy stuff. We overcomplicate it, A, B, we try to figure out ways not to call people. And this entire business is predicated on you talking to people you don't know to help them buy into our real estate. It's the one thing nobody wants to do. It's like, that's what you signed up for. People say, well, what if I have some, and listen, I don't care if you get your leads on Zillow, realtor.com, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. Doesn't matter where you get the leads, you're gonna have to sit down and call them. So, you know, some team leaders and brokers are like, Ricky, how do I get, you know, I got some agents that just won't make calls. How do I get them to make calls? I'm like, tell them to get a job. Tell them to go out there and get them all nine to five, plus flipping some hamburgers, serving some tables, roofing some houses, you know, maybe they don't want to be a real estate agent. I mean, this is sales, by the way, you know. You got in this business to sell real estate. So, you know, I don't know. Like, if you understand that we're using the platforms, the social platforms, and all this great technology and everything, the whole point of it is just to help you get in front of people so that it creates, what, a conversation to see what it is they're trying to do, why they're trying to do it, so you can help them do it. I think a lot of people just missing, they're just missing the point here and the reason why I built such a massive business is because I got the point of this really quickly and that was that everything you do to try to generate business is just leading right back to just talking to people. And my thing was, okay, well, if that's the case, I'm not gonna do all that stuff. I'm just gonna go talk to people, right? So I can get people, I can pick out any subdivision I want with Radax. Let's just say, for example, get all the property owners for less than a penny, cell phones, emails, call, email, tax, hit them on social. I mean, it's just so, it's just not complicated at all. Yeah. Yeah, so a lot of the agents, especially the newer agents, they're afraid of that rejection. They're very nervous about making that phone call and getting hung up on or whatever it might be. So what is your typical, yeah, I don't know. Security, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, everybody's got to stop. Yeah, you ask one of those agents why, right? What do they say? They'll say, I don't know. It's like, well, what are we doing here? Yeah, right. You don't know why. So you won't do what you need to do to succeed at the highest level and you don't even know why you won't do it because of rejection. But what's so bad about that? I don't know. Okay, look, I'm empathetic towards it. But because everybody goes to the stage. But you know what? The future is megatop producers, they bust right through that stage, they make some calls, they get over that and they move right onto the next stage, which is what are we saying to these people, right? Then it's how we say it. Then it's reading the people on the phone to understand what their true motivations are because what they're telling you is not necessarily the real story. You have to learn how to read between the lines in these conversations. And the only way you can learn to do that is through experience of people telling you one thing and then doing another later. And then you start to put two and two together and the next conversation you have, you're like, okay, I've seen this play out before and it doesn't always play out the way that they're talking. And now you can steer the conversation and the situation towards helping them and giving them the best service. But I see the comment lack of knowledge is usually the fear. You can just squash that right this second because you're not there to be a real estate guru, genius, market expert. You're there to help them. So you need to stand behind the fact that you're there to listen to what it is that they're trying to do and that you're gonna do everything you can do to help them do it. If there's some kind of information that I don't know, I can easily look that up and get back to them. I'm never gonna know everything. I'm never gonna know at all. And so when you don't know something, it's almost like you leave them suspended with the return phone call with the information, right? So gives you a reason to reach out to them again. Exactly. It creates a situation where now you're proving to them that you're willing to invest even more time into them and call them back like you said you would and give them the, you know, 100% correct information. But I get asked questions all the time, you know, even now that I have no idea what the answer is. I do have a couple of comments in the chat. A couple of people did wanna hear, you know, prospecting and cold calling for newer agents. Somebody made a comment about, you know, lack of knowledge is typically what drives the fear. I do think that's true. It's lack of knowledge, but it's also lack of experience and it's lack of just, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to accept that this is what you signed up for as you said earlier. And I did sales over the phone for many, many years when I was younger. And, you know, at first it is extremely awkward, but then you become more, you know, you just become smoother. You learn how to talk to people, you know, and the reality is you can really create your own tone of the call. You can have a lot of control over the phone if you know how to do it. But the only way to do that is through experience and trial and error. And then like you said, you could start to read the conversation over the phone through tonality and certain things that the people are saying, you know, when they say they're not ready, maybe they're just not ready right this minute. Doesn't mean that they're not interested or whatever. So like you said, you do have to read between the lines. Someone did ask about attraction. And for any of you guys that are new to EXP or new to the real estate community, attraction can be used in a lot of different aspects, but attraction of obviously prospects and clientele. But then there's also the agent attraction, which is a very popular topic of conversation here at EXP. But do you want to touch on any of that, Ricky? Yeah, it's the same thing, right? If you're going to build an organization of agents using the platform of EXP, it's the same thing as building your real estate business. You have to get out there. You have to talk to agents, just like you have to talk to property owners. You have to build relationships. A lot of these are long-term relationships. Like a lot of the property owners you talked to aren't going to do a deal today. It's going to be more like later this year, next year, the year after. Same thing with agents. They're not going to come over this year. They're going to come over next year, six months, eight months. You have to maintain those relationships. So it's really the exact same game is being a great conversationalist communicator, articulating who you are as a person, right? Giving them that authenticity of who you are. Not reading from a script and sounding like a robot. That's going to devalue who you are. That's not really articulating who you are as a person. Like you're there because you really want to help these people. Property owners, agents, whoever. However, when we come off a little too strong when we're reading from these 1980s, these 1980s scripts makes this sound too selzy, makes this gives us a disingenuous feel. Learn about people. Be more genuinely curious about what's going on with them, what they're looking for, and how you can help them accomplish whatever it is they're trying to accomplish. They said that the, what was it? Zig-Zigleries is the more people you can help, get what they want, the quicker you're going to get what you want. It's true. Super true. Also, your prospect better than you know your own product, you know? Like know what they need by asking them questions, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's a fundamental basis for rapport building. And... Well, Ricky, let me ask you a question. Let's, you know, let's hypothetically here. You have a conversation you call Mr. Property Owner and you wind up having, you engage in a conversation and it's a pretty decent conversation and pretty much the outcome is I have no idea if I'm getting ready to sell. Maybe I will in a year. Cool. Mr. Walsh, do you have an agent you would work with if you were to buy a sale? Right. And how are you keeping in touch with that, that prospect after the fact that you... Because he tells me he does or doesn't have an agent. I say I'd love to work with him when the day he does want to do a deal and would it be okay if I stayed in touch? Great. What's a good email? Is this your cell number? You know, great. I'm gonna stay in touch with you via email. Again, my name is I'm with whatever company and whatever area, you know, I'm gonna stay in touch with you via email. If you ever need anything whatsoever, help move in a piece of furniture, you give me a ring. You know, what I was gonna say, what I've also experienced myself over the years is that when I do build a relationship with somebody, obviously there's the end goal in mind that they may, you know, at some point buy or sell a piece of real estate with me. But you're building that relationship and anybody they come in contact with over the course of time that you're, you know, that you have that existing relationship with them, they're a major referral source for you. I mean, they are your spokespeople that are out there, your ambassadors so to speak that are out there speaking your name and that will, let's say, tee you up with another person that they come in contact with that might be ready to act right then and there, you know, more so now than a someday or a never. Yeah. So I think people are excited to the fact. I mean, I've had people in my network that they have a relative, let's say, that's a real estate agent. I know they're never gonna buy or sell through me just because it's their brother's daughter. Well, you don't really know that, right? So that person could get out of the business. That person could do something that that person didn't like. People change agents all the time. So when they tell me that they have an agent, I'll make great, who is it? I may know them. Oh, great, they're a great agent. You're in really good hands. Listen, I would still love the opportunity. I still love to stay in touch with you. That's okay. But it is cool. What's a good email? So I'm putting them in my database and I'm sending them my weekly email just like I do all my clients, right? Every single Wednesday, regardless if they have an agent or not, if they're willing to give me that information because two years down the line, I've forgotten about them, but they've seen my emails, their agent retires or whatever happens. They have a bad experience. And they say, you know what? I'm gonna give Rick a shot. So it happens all the time. I could care less about all of that. I mean, my job is to put my name in as many hats as possible, right? And get put myself in the best position with every prospect to push it to the maximum level of the possibility that we could do a deal one day. And whether it happens or not, it doesn't matter because I'm gonna do my job to build that database up to the largest that I can. So I know I'm always gonna have business, right? The dream is to build such a massive database that deals just fall on your lap without prospecting at all. And everybody trying to run away from talking to people, you're really never gonna get to that place. You're gonna die prospecting. You're gonna prospect to the day you die. And what I wanna see is, is you're running towards, let me talk to as many people as possible as quick as I can to build that database up to the point where in three to five years of that really face down grinding, you can get to a place where your database is so large, you've talked to so many people, you've connected with so many people and you're sending out so much content that deals just fall on your lap now and you don't have to prospect anymore. Not another day in your life. 2017, I made a million dollars for the first time any year as a single agent. I never prospected a day after that ever. And I still continue to make a meal every single year. So that's the dream. And if you guys will just get your head, it's like, if you just wake up and realize this is the game, go out there and play the game as hard as you can for a good three to five, then you're good. If you just trickle the game and just try to avoid the real game, you're just prolonging and literally, I've seen agents literally die where they called expires and for sell by owners until three days before they died on their deathbed, knowing they were dying, still making calls because they want to leave their wife as much as they can. I've seen it happen. And what are you doing? It's not happening anymore. What are you doing other than the calls, Ricky? Obviously the calls is a great way, obviously, but is there any other way you're prospecting or getting these property owners or any other form of- Any other, listen to me, any other form goes right back to calling them. If I get them on Zillow, I got to call them. If I get them on Facebook, I got to call them. Does Instagram call them? YouTube call them. Sphere influence call them, right? Open house, I get a list of people that came in the next day, I call them. It's all comes back to calling them. So I'm bypassing all the stuff that leads right to calling anyway by just calling them. I just pick out the exact property owners that I want to do business with, and I just call them. I could even use the same script. Oh, as a Zillow lead, let's just say, as any of these, as a Zillow lead, okay? Hey, Mr. Hummer, under Ricky Cruth, the expirialty here in Gulf Shores, how are you doing? Me too, I'm enjoying the days, and it's gorgeous. Listen, I want to take it too much of your time. I saw you were looking at properties online here recently, just calling a follow-up with that and see if there's something I could do to help you. What's the chances he was looking online as something in the past six to eight months? Probably 100%. You could literally take any script and call any property owner. Hey, were you trying to sell your house? You could pretend like everybody's unexpired. Were you trying to sell your house at some point? But that's not what I do. I don't just use different scripts for different leads, but you could. If you need to trick yourself into thinking these are Zillow leads or these are warm leads or whatever the case may be, hell, they're selling you the same people that I'm talking about. They're selling you their contact information. It's nuts. Yeah, and guys, everybody that's on this call, so we do these Zooms every week and we always talk about how to prospect, how to do this. But the key thing that Ricky's saying right here is that ultimately all of that stuff leads up, what are we all striving for? We want a call, we want to speak to someone. So really what Ricky's saying is 100% right. I mean, just call them. People just need to break down the mental barrier and incoming call is the same as your outgoing call. Same thing. Those are the same people, as Ricky just said, those are the same people, like what are the chances that they were on the internet at some point looking at houses over the last six to eight months, everybody looks at real estate, right? So if their information was captured and got cycled to, let's say Zillow, then that's the lead that you're buying from Zillow for like two or $300 for that lead. Why not just generate the lead on your own for free by picking up the call, use a dialer, use a service, whatever, get their information for pennies on the dollar based on what you paid Zillow for the same information and just call these people. Cause how many times do you call a Zillow lead? And they're like, I never filled out a form on Zillow. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm not in the business. So you're getting more than $300 too. And you know, in 2021 realtors bought 200 million leads. There were six million transactions. You guys are just buying leads like this is the thing when it's not really. And there's no such thing as bad leads honestly too. You know, like, you know, you get these online leads and stuff. It's not that you're mad that they're bad. I mean, heck, when I, when I call like a list of property owners, I'm going to get a 10% pickup raise. I'm going to do 100 dials. I'm going to talk to 10 people. I'm going to have five great conversations. That's my goal for every 100 dials. And I can blow through those numbers with a dialer or whatever. Well, like if you had 100 internet leads, you're going to have about the same thing, probably 10% pick. You know, like it's not that they're bad leads or just, I'm getting them for a penny over here for the targeted exact people I want to talk to versus other, you know, with Zillow and other things, even like realty.com and Opsody. I mean, you're paying 35% on a deal. They're giving you random people versus over here, I'm targeted for a penny. Over here, we're random and we're paying 35% or we're paying $1,000 for one lead. Even if I'm doing open houses, I'm not going to go spend all that time and energy setting up that house, advertising that house, doing all that stuff. When I can just call a bunch of people, I'm the biggest like social media got me out of sales guys. I literally am like one little pinky toe in production steel. And the whole reason is because or how it's because I started doing social media and building other businesses. Once I got to the mill and I didn't have to prospect anymore, I spent the time on what's prospecting, building other businesses on social media, building my brand, building other businesses. And thank God for that. Like social media changed my life. Like I'm living the life of my dreams now. I'm traveling three times a month speaking. I'm on national television. I'm getting huge interviews and bigger and everything's just getting bigger and bigger. It's all because of social media. I'm the biggest believer in social media. Okay. But when it comes to real estate, I don't need social media because I'm just using social media to try to get to the conversation when I could just have the conversation. So I'm not saying this from a biased standpoint of, you know, you guys should just make calls. No, social media is my thing. That is my thing. What I'm saying is, is I don't use it in real estate because I can just call the people I want to do business with to see what I could do to help them, see if they have an agent, see when they want to do stuff like I can, I can bypass the entire system and go back door on the whole market and hack the entire system doing it this way. Right. So, well, it's just perspective and philosophy and kind of just my mentality. I'm a, I'm a, I want to succeed right now kind of guy. I don't want to prolong this. I don't want to make this a long drawn out process and a really long journey. I want to do it now. I want to, I want to succeed right now. The quit, the quickest, most efficient manner possible. So that's why I do it the way that I do it. It makes a lot of sense because a lot of, we hear from a lot of agents in that and they'll say to me and Chris and they'll say all the time, like, how do we get our phone to ring? How do we get our phone to ring? Now, these are the same people that are also nervous about making these phone calls, but wouldn't you rather make the phone call to a property owner knowing now that you're prepared making that call? Like you already prepared before you make that call. You already know kind of where they're at, where they live. Yeah, you're controlling who you call. Just get that phone call and be like, you're in headlights. Oh, oh my God. This guy just called me and it goes back to initiating the phone call. Then waiting. It's just the better way to do it. Did you guys lose me or did we lose him? Or let's say you get their address from them over the phone. Is it me or is it them? Oh, it's them. Yeah, we lost you guys. Anyway, anybody want to unmute, throw a question at question my way? Like what's on you guys's mind? Hi, Ricky. Hey, what's up, Sarah? I'm good. I'm good. I love all your videos. I follow you. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Ricky, is there like a preferred time to call to for prospecting? Like, do you think the morning is better than like when people come back from work? No, no, no, no, there's not because you say they're coming back from work, but people work on all kinds of weird hours. Trying to like pinpoint exactly when somebody is going to be available is just, I mean, you're calling hundreds and hundreds of people. So some of these people sleep in some of these people work night shift. Some of these people are stay at home mom. Some of the like, how can you, you can't. So what you do is you call when you want to call, right? I like nine to 12 because I like to do it when it's best for me, not when I feel like I might get the best pickup rates because I've tested all kinds of times and I always get the same pickup rates. So you might have a day where you have a better pickup rate at this time than this time, and then the next day you have a better pickup rate on the other. I just quit doing all that and I just make my calls from nine to 12 every day. Awesome. Sounds good. You'll call on the weekend, do you? I never have. I did a Saturday session, maybe two or three times in my career, but weekends for me are for not working unless I'm showing property and going to a listing appointment or negotiating a deal or writing an offer. I'm not going to be working on the weekends. Got it. Sounds good. Thank you so much. I'm a big fan. Thank you. What I was going to ask you before is what is your typical follow up campaign look like when you get information from a property owner? You talked a lot about email follow up, put them on, you know, hitting your database frequently, consistently after the initial connection. What does that look like? Depends on what they want to do and when they want to do it, why they want to do it. Every situation is different. So if they're telling me they never want to do anything or they're just not interested right now, whatever, and that's a more of a nurture lead, then they're just going to see that weekly email every week, every Wednesday. And then they'll call me when they're ready. And then if they if they say, oh, we're looking to buy next month or in six months or in a year, I'm like, OK, now let me go down that rabbit hole. What's got you thinking about selling in six months? What's going on in your life in six months? That's causing you to make this decision to buy or sell something. Then I'm going to go down that rabbit hole and really try to understand what's going on with them in their life. That's causing them to make this decision around that timeline. You know, it's like, do you want to close in six months? Do you want to start the process in six months? You know, oh, your daughter's graduating and you want to downgrade. You don't need the extra bedroom. You guys want to be on the water. OK, great. So I collect all this data and then I start to put together a game plan. So if they're a nurture, it's just a weekly email. If they want to buy or sell something, then I have to dig deeper into the situation and then create a custom follow up around what their situation is. Make sense? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's the only way to do it. I mean, if we're if we're going to be a professional, right, a professional, that's what a professional does. They diagnose the situation, do discovery on what's what's happening. It's like a doctor. When you go to the doctor's office, you say your stomach's hurting. He's going to start pushing on your stomach. He's going to run some tests. They're going to identify what the problem is and then try to figure out the solution in a game plan. It's the same thing. You know, when they tell us something, then we need to dig in, see exactly what this, you know, the problem is the motivations are and then create a game plan around it. Gotcha. Yo, Rick, I got a question for you. What's up, it's Gene. What's up, Gene? What's up? You know, sorry, couldn't get on to them actually moving today. So otherwise I'd be there by right, dude, you're at the beach. I can see it from here. I am well, I'm on my balcony, but I'm not at the beach. What do you call it? Is there is there one? OK, are there like one or two things that you use on a daily basis, whether it's, you know, some kind of tool or anything? Like we all have something that we just can't live without, that we use every day when it comes down to business, you know, technology and app, something. What what is that, you know, one or two things that you can't live without? I don't know. I try. I keep it super simple. I do my weekly email. I make my calls. I have my notebook in front of me like this. This is my CRM, right? Here's my CRM right here. Is that it's a notebook? I don't know. Yeah. Then my daily planner here, my little legal pad with all my notes on it. Yeah, listen, so it's so it's so it's basically old school. It's your notebook, really, because everything's. My thing is, is that I don't want to. I don't want to go into my business and building my business with a with the model of creating a ton of work for myself to do, right? That's like a lot of people. They want to use CRMs to like figure out how to like stay in touch, call everybody once a year, call one of the birthdays, do this and that. I'm like, good God, like that's what you want to do. Like for the rest of your life is like falling up with this dead. No, I want to create something where once a week I do a 15 minute create an email, send it out to my 20,000 people and do 100 deals a year without having to follow up and do all this stuff, right? You want I want to create an easy life. I don't want to create a complicated life. I want everything to be easy. I want to work hard. I want to build it. I want to build it. You know, I mean, obviously I put blood, sweat and tears into it. But my vision was is that eventually I wouldn't have to. It would I could do deals effortlessly where people just call me and say, I want to buy or sell this. Great, let's do it. Sign a contract. Bam. So yeah, I don't have all this complicated stuff. Simple, smarter, right? I don't I don't have a team. I don't have employees. I don't have any of that stuff. I live a really, really fun, easy, simple life, right? And that's why I envision the entire time. That's awesome. That's really, I mean, that's there's a lot to be said about that because Chris and I, you know, we're partners for a long time now. We always talked about implementing systems and whatever. And him and I came to the realization, like, why do we want to manage all these systems? Like it's just it's going to be the effort in time. You're going to be putting into managing all this stuff. We could just like I've always done the notebook. I've always done the notebook. You know, it's just it's crazy, you know? And yeah, it gets while everybody's like inputting data into CRM's. I'm going to close in deals. Right. Right. And the CRMs are expensive. If you are, it's three thousand, five thousand, eight thousand a month. I mean, it's crazy, you know? And maybe I just do it on red X on red X for like 500 bucks a month. I can get like 10,000 leads a month to call automatic dialer to call them. And then constant contacts to send emails is the cheapest thing in the world. I have my notebook here. I mean, I don't need anything else. I don't pay ads. I don't do billboards. I'm not doing any advertising whatsoever at all. I pay my assistant red X, constant contact. That's it. Right. I imagine if you're traveling three times a month, somebody asks us in the chat, you have somebody that covers your business when you're away. Like I said, I have a pinky toe in production. My dad handles the day to day of most of the listings and sales and all that stuff. I'm just, I'm more just building the Ricky Caruth brand at this point, you know, brokerage, mortgage, coaching, investing and sales. So that's the five arms of my brand, right? That the, that the, that my personal brand feeds. And then I just, I'm just building this up to, you know, yeah, whatever. So those three systems, it's, can you say that again to everybody? It's red X constant red X is obviously if you go, if you got a red X discount, R E D X dot discount, I'll put it right here. Red X discount. Dot com. All right. You can go to, oh, shoot up misspelled that. Hold on. You can actually go to, I'll put my scripts here too. Red X discount. Dot com. R C scripts. Dot com. You can download all my scripts. There's also a tutorial of red X, a demo there. And then the weekly email is start my weekly email dot com. So you can go to a start my weekly email dot com and see all of my weekly emails going back to November and just steal my template. Ricky. Yo. Hi. How are you? I mean, I like, I like what I hear from you. I haven't met you. So I'm a newbie in that aspect. I'm 24 years in the business and it's so true what you said. Don't discount people that are, that have family members that are realtors because I listed a house in the contractor saw me how I work with one of my clients. And then his girlfriend is a realtor, but he gave me the listing of keys house. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, no. And also like on red X when you can look up property owners, sometimes people will filter out people that bought in the last year and not call them. It's like, what are you doing? People, people decide to move three months later. I hate this house and I didn't like my agent. People want to buy investment properties. People have properties across town they want to sell. Maybe they bought a year ago and they rented their other house and now they're getting ready to sell it. You don't know what people's situations are. Exactly. I call everybody. Yeah, I agree. A hundred percent. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, I think I think everything that that that you're saying, Ricky, is like, again, it's just simple, right? It's just simple business. I mean, we're in this business to work smarter, not harder. And all of these things are, listen, we're all waiting for that phone to ring. We're all waiting to get in contact with somebody. But everything you're talking about, it's not a long drawn out process, like you said. And, you know, I kind of do a lot of that stuff now. So does Chris, we do other sources of advertising as well. But, you know what, when you sit there and you start to look at it, I'm looking at and, you know, looking at my personal business after talking to you right now and saying, you know what, it's a waste of money. A lot of the stuff that I'm doing right now, I can easily just shortcut everything and do what you're saying. And I'm going to I'm just going to get there faster. That's ultimately what it is. I'm running lean and mean, guys. I don't have any expenses. I don't have any. I'm just, I'm lean and mean, right? I'm working at the highest efficiency, talking to the highest quality prospects for literally nothing. Go ahead, a man, Amar, a man, what's going on? It's Armand, but what's up, buddy? Hey, what's going on? So I'm 19 years old. My team leader has been making calls every day every time I go in the office. You're 19. I want that. Yeah. Go ahead. I want to, you know, set up a time to talk to you and to join your program this year. It's a diamond. You don't have to talk to me. It's right there. The free one. The diamond.com at the top is courses or 60 day challenge, but a bang, but a boom. And then my second question was when you're cold calling and when you get someone on the phone that, you know, doesn't like really sound enthusiastic or just giving one word answers. How do you make that conversation flow better? By not caring that they are acting that kind of way. You don't know what side of the bed they woke up on. I don't really care how what they I'm here to help them. There's there's so many people with so many different personalities and they throw up little blocks because they don't know you. So they're, I don't care about all that. I'm trying to get through to them that, hey, listen, I'm here to help you. So and you do that through two things. Number one, the word you say, but also the tone of your voice. If you talk to them like they're like they are your mother, every single prospect, if you talk to them like their mom, dad, brother, cousin, best friend from high school, the tone, right? That makes them feel comfortable. That's the first part of it. And then the word you're saying, you're not trying to sell in my house. Do you want to sell? Do you want to buy all that blah, blah? You're saying, Hey, here's some market information. Is there anything I could do to help you? You looking to do anything now or in the future? What can I do to help you? I'm here. We're here. We're talking, you know, I'm here to help you. What you got? Walking into every situation, not caring what, what happens? Like when I talk to a prospect, I don't care if they buy or sell or not. When you take that transaction out of the equation, it really opens up so many opportunities because now you're open minded to wait. They're an expired, but they want to buy something across town. If you use the mainstream expired scripts, you're just focused on trying to get the expired listing. I don't care about the listing. I'm trying to use that property as an excuse to get into a conversation to see if I can get to know this person and what exactly it is they're trying to do. Makes sense. Hold on. Yes. Thank you. Mohammed. Hi, Nicky. My question is that at what stage do we share the information with the seller? I mean, that the prices of the houses, the comparative and pricing, you know, to give them, you know, what do what's your experience, you know, that you give it to them in the second meeting and the third meeting, you know. Unfortunately, Mohammed, there's no cookie cutter system here. Every situation is going to be different. It depends on why they want to buy, why they want to sell, you know, when they want to buy, when they want to sell, all these things come into play with how we're going to, what we're going to do, what our next steps are. It's never going to be the same, you know, get out of trying to figure out a cookie cutter, do this exactly, follow up exactly in this many days and text this many days and, you know, hit them eight times. If you, if you try to call me and text me eight times and I'm about answering, I'm calling the cops. Don't do it. That's creepy. That, that, that, that stage five clinger type stuff. That's, you know, like we're, you know, we should all be past that stage in our life. Okay. So, no, if somebody's ghosting me after a couple of, you know, like a call and a text and they still aren't answering, I'm out. I got to go spend time on people who want to communicate and do business with me. And as far as what I'm going to give them, like, compared to marketing now, I never, I've never done a CMA. I've never like done comps and said, okay, here's what your house is worth on paper ever, because comps are like 10% of the process for me. 90% of how I price a property is based on why they want to sell. If they want to sell, because, you know, if they can get this price, this crazy price they would sell, that tells me I got to go high and they don't care if it sells. Right. If they're telling me my lease is up and I got to sell this and I got to buy whatever, like it's got to happen quick. I know that we need to price it lower. So what their motivation is, is literally 90% of how I price a property. The comps are like, the comps don't even mean much, guys. How do you think properties sell? How do you think prices go up? Because something sells for more than the comps. That's how prices go up. But to show them that, you know, you are selling yourself at the beginning, you know, you're showing that. I'm selling myself because they feel like I'm part of their family because of the way I'm talking to them. So I want that to say that you create some kind of value in their mind. My value is my voice and the words that I'm saying, that I'm here to help them. And when you, Mohammed, when you ask them why they're trying to sell this property, you know what that does to them? They never had an agent ask them that the way that you're asking them. They might have had, that may be in some kind of script where people run through it and that's part of like this 10 question little survey they try to give sellers. But when you come at them with like complete genuineness around why they want to sell this property and then whatever they tell you, you start digging deeper in on that. And start to relate to them and start to bring it to a more personal level. You, that's it. But they don't know you. They are just, you know, they know you now they know you now. Listen, it you talking about them interviewing other agents? Yes. OK, you say you interviewing other aid that they have somebody in the family that, you know, they're going to refer them, give it to them, you know, for example, but you want to say, look, I have this advantage to that person that they know in the family. Great, they got a family member of this an agent? Yes. Cool. Good luck. I'm not going to sit here and fight over listings. I'm not going to try to I'm not going to try to persuade you not to use your cousin if I meet you and you like me enough to list your property with me over your cousin. Great. If not, what you probably you you pretty much lost that deal before you even walked into the living room. If their cousin is an agent, unless their cousin just sucks. Right, Mohammed? No, I have had the cost. I had clients that, you know, they said that, look, I don't. They I had this with this agent and it was six months in the market and they couldn't sell it. So you want to show that you have some. So so the cousin had it listed for six. So the cousin had it listed for six months. Yes. OK, so the cousins out if they're interviewing other agents, the cousins out. Yeah, Mohammed, I think I think I think what Ricky is saying is in simple terms is you're making it more complicated than it needs to be. You know, they already just they're interviewing somebody else. The cousin already had this for six months. They're already talking to you because that if they wanted to list with the cousin again, they wouldn't be talking. So how do they get to you, Mohammed? How do they get you? How do they find you? I call them, you know, and cold calling, just boom. So so if you cold called them and they invited you to their house to sit down with you, they respect you. They respect the hustle. They respect the grind. They see you out here grinding on that phone and they're like, damn, that's the kind of agent I want. I want somebody out here calling people. That's what we need, cousin Johnny. He didn't do nothing. Mohammed's over here calling people. Hell, if we listen with him, he's probably going to call people to see if they want to buy our house. They've already sold on you, bro. You don't have to sell yourself anymore. Walk into the appointment, assume the listing, figure out why they want to sell price it accordingly and say, let's get started. Here's sign here. It's time to close the deal. Excellent. Excellent. You know, one more question. How do we if the investment properties? How do we invest the property without putting all money down? Do you have any... Invest in properties without putting money down? Yes. You can either raise money from other people to invest in these properties, but why are they going to invest with you if you aren't even putting money into the deal? So sometimes you find the property that they price it. You know, the bank, they price it higher than what they are selling it. So you say, look, these properties, if you appraise it, it's going to be this much. So I'm going to get the less than that, the price of the house. So listen, man, you don't need to be talking about investing right now. What you need to be talking about is getting your sales game right, making enough money to put down on some properties. Well said. Well said. Yeah, hold on, quick question. Ricky, I don't know if you guys covered this because I was in and out, but I think the biggest elephant in the room right now is the challenge that every single agent working with buyers today is facing the rates. They're everybody's like, you know, I'm going to hold off till the rates come down. Now we know what to tell them. The question is, what are you telling your buyers right now that are looking at homes and then they start coming to you saying, you know what, I'm going to wait, I got to wait till the rates come down. Or that's, you know, what are you telling them? I tell them, great. Let's wait till rates come down. Okay. So you just put them on hold and work with somebody else, right? 100%. All right. That's if they want to continue looking at homes, we can continue looking at homes. I don't really care. That's, that's, that's the thing right there. The more, the more time I've wasted on people guys, the more money I've made. Closings are going to happen every single day of your life. Let me show you this guys. I don't know if you guys have seen affordability, right? Monthly mortgage payments from 1989 to 2023. You see how, see how steep this curve is? Can you guys see that by the way? Yep. Yep. Yep. Look at that, right? Look at where we are right now. But what's really cool is, is when you take this chart and you adjust it to inflation. Now look at, this is a much better illustration of monthly mortgage payments because this is adjusted. If you see the first chart, it was around 700 bucks back in 1989. But in this chart, it shows it at about 1700 bucks. What's cool about that is, is it's just adjusting it for inflation of what 700 bucks was back in 1989. And you see how this chart goes? And you see what happened is, is we got really spoiled 2010 through 2015, 16, 17, even 18, 19, was lower than a 1990s. And then it shot back up to here. But if you see, we're not too far off at all for 1989, not at all. And if you look at mortgage payments as a percentage of median household income, we're lower than we were in 1989. And we got spoiled right here. But when rates go down 1%, that's going to lower payments by 300 bucks. And we're literally going to be right here where we were in the 90s in terms of affordability because the payments are 2651 right this second. And I just want to show this before, before we get to the top of the hour here. But look at prices. We started out the year. This is national prices. We started out the year at 350. Now we're at 378. We're up 9% from the beginning of the year. And prices went down right there. Look, they went down in 2022. They went even down in 2021 and picked up at the same time. We actually started picking up a little earlier this year than we normally do price-wise. And it shot to the moon. And guess what? We're about to go positive year over year. And all the people talking all this smack about real estate crashing and stuff, we're in a crash. It's just not a price crash. And you see this wall here? We're going to bust right through this and go positive year over year. We never went negative year over year. A lot of markets agents are leaving the business left and right. We're down 60,000 agents. Why? It's because 4.2 million transactions is what we're on course to do this year. If you go back to 2008, we were at 4.12. We're not too far off from 2008. This is literally 2008 right now. And if you count the number of homes and the number of buyers and sellers in the market and everything, it's probably even... If you do the inflation numbers of transactions comparing this to that, it's probably worse than 2008 in terms of number of transactions. But if you look at inventory, we are... This is in the 80s. We were between 2 and 3 million at any given time, homes for sale. We have 4 million in 2008. We're down to 700,000 homes for sale. We're lower than 2021 and 2022, right this second. I could go through why there's so much demand in the market with birth rates and how many 33-year-olds we have and people that are sitting in their house wishing they could buy another one that are locked into the rates and they just every day they want a new house more and more and more and the amount of immigrants coming into the country and stuff like that. But look at what home prices have done, not only through recessions, but just regular. I mean, like only in 2008 during that time, did prices ever go down. And this chart, this is going back to 1942. This is appreciation of real estate, residential real estate going back to 1942. The green is positive years. You see what I see? In the 40s, we had five years of double-digit appreciation. Everybody said it's going to crash and burn. It didn't. It stayed positive. In the late 70s, we had the run-up to the 18% interest rates. Prices never went down. Never had a negative year. We had strong years after that. In the mid-2000s, we had the run-up to the Great Recession and we had those negative years from 2008. Here recently, we've had two double-digit appreciation years and everybody's like, dude, that's nothing compared to some of these other run-ups that never went negative afterwards. We hit 6% last year and we're at 9% right now on the median home prices right this second, fixing to go positive year-over-year. So, what I feel bad about is first-time home buyers that are getting kind of priced out a little bit. However, if interest rates go down 1% from where they are now, that's going to help out a lot. Median household income is going to continue to increase. We're not in that crazy of a shape when it comes to affordability as what people will lead you to believe. It's not that crazy. I think that we have a lot of people who are as well as me on this. I'm priced out of the market. Get off your ass and go save up some money and go buy a house. You can do it, guys. I promise you. But nevertheless, we've got record amount of 33-year-olds coming into the market, immigrants coming in, renting. And even the rent increases are causing home prices to go up because investors are willing to pay more. You just had an investor buy $1.5 billion worth of 4,000 homes from D.R. Horton. I'm buying three D.R. Horton houses right now, closing on to this month and another one in September, as soon as I get through with it, I just closed on an older home. I bought a commercial duplex. I'm buying everything I see that's around $3,000 to $400,000 because I know what's going to happen with prices and rent and everything else. We're about to see an explosion, ladies and gentlemen, of buyers into the market. There's so much. There's more pent-up demand than we've ever seen. And it's going to be unlike anything you've ever seen. The run from 4.2 million transactions to 5.5 million is going to be unlike anything you've ever seen. And what you want to do is stack inventory. Right now, you should be trying to stack inventory to the moon. Take overpriced listings all day long because the market's going up. It'll catch up to it or the seller will come down. Whatever the case may be. But you want to be the one that's sitting on a pile of inventory, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 listings when rates do get closer to 6 because it's going to be just crazy. The market's going to get nuts. And you're going to be sitting there thinking you're lucky stars that you did what you needed to do to get out there and create more relationships with property owners and stack listings and build your database, do your weekly email, do the things that you need to do. Back in, this is an illustration actually of my business. This is just an illustration. But I didn't do anything different here. 2008, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. I didn't do anything different. 14 was the first year I did 100 deals. I didn't do anything different day to day, right? My business exploded with the resurgence of the market. When the market came back, my business exploded with it. Same thing with you guys right now. This is your 2008, but it's not going to take, what is this? Five years to re-expand. It's going to come back with a vengeance really fast and you don't really have the time that I had to get out there and just slow, slow roll, build this thing. I wasn't slow rolling, but you guys can, I didn't have RedX. I didn't have all this stuff. You can get out there and really do some damage. And if you're not, if you're just sitting around trying to figure out stuff, you're doing the wrong, you need to be talking to property owners all day every day, building that database, stirring the pot, making stuff happen. And it may not pay off like you wanted to right this second. You know, you may talk to tons and tons and tons of property owners and you may not get all the listings in the world that you want. But that doesn't matter because those people are going to do business with you next year, the year after, the year after. And they're not going to, you know, when it comes to interviewing a couple agents, you're going to be the one they pick because you've been talking to them for two years and sending them emails and staying in touch and doing all that stuff. This is your moment, guys, where you can go out there and actually make a million bucks. Like this is the moment right here to take advantage of because once this opportunity is gone and the market resurges and everything, it's harder to gain the market share that you need to to go out there and really make this happen. Right now is the time. It's kind of like the stock market, right, Ricky? Back in, you know, the pandemic, everything's getting slaughtered. Everybody's, you know, markets down, it's crashing. And look at all the people that, you know, right now, these, the rich just got richer because they had a plan in place. Same thing with you, right? You're building for the future. They bought all these stocks on the way down because they realized the value was there and it was just down for a reason. That was whatever, geopolitical or, you know, pandemic. And now they're all reaping the benefits. Same thing is kind of what you're saying. Yeah, I'm buying houses. I know how home prices. I mean, the D.R. Horton Homes I put under contract, they've already went up on the prices in those neighborhoods. Rents continue to go up. You know, I can buy right now an investment property at a 7% rate and then I can refinance that rate. If rates go down to six to five and a half or something, I can refinance them next year or whatever it is. But even at 7%, my payments are $1,700. I'm renting these things out for $2,300. The rent is going to continue to go up. I could hang on to that 7% rate and still win big. But in a year and a half, I can refinance at $5 or $5.5. I can do that and lower my payment even more, but I can't go back at that point and buy at today's prices. And today's prices aren't going to be here anymore. That's why I'm buying right now when things are the way they are, because I know I'm not going to be able to come back and buy brand new homes for $325,000, four-bedroom and all this stuff. It's just not going to happen. I tell my customers as well, and I'll tell my clients you buy a $300,000 place. You put down 20%. You're putting down $60,000. Let's say you're making $500 a month. You're making $6,000 a year on $60,000. It's a 10% return on your money. Somebody else is paying your mortgage down for you. Now that $300,000 place is worth $400 or whatever in 10 years and look, right? So it costs you $60,000 for that place and that'll be paid off. It's pretty simple math, right? I'm sure you're doing the same thing. Super simple math. If I buy something for $350,000 and I put 20% down, my payments are $17,000 all in. Payment, interest, insurance, taxes, I'm renting them out for $2,300. What is that? That's $600,000. I put, what, $70,000 down. I'm making a 10% return on my cash on cash. They're paying my mortgage off. I have write-offs. It's appreciating. And the thing is, as rent goes up, 2% to 3% a year for five years, look at what I'm making. Like that cash on cash return increases. It goes to 12%, 13%, 14%. I'm sitting here making 14%, 15% of my money on a single-family home and not to mention whatever appreciation happens. Like, it's insane. The returns are insane, honestly. Think about when that house was paid off. Somebody paid it off for you and it only cost you $70,000. And now all of a sudden, even if the house never appreciates... It didn't just cost him $70,000 within, within like eight years, I got the $70,000 back, right? I got the $70,000 back. It's brand new houses, no maintenance, right? Nothing's gonna go wrong in that house for, you know, whatever, 10 years. Maybe I have to do a little something, something here and there, but like within eight to 10 years, I made my money back, my cash on cash, right? Now I just got property for free all over the place. All these houses I'm buying right now are like free money. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, listen, it's a little past 12. Ricky, I just wanted to thank you on behalf of everybody here. Thanks a lot for your knowledge, your time, and we truly appreciate it. And everybody else, we will see you guys next week, same time, same day, leaders edge Zoom. Thanks, Ricky. Thanks again, Ricky.