 Your job is to help people buy and sell real estate. There's always going to be closings every single day for the rest of your life, regardless of market conditions. 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. I'm going to go out here and do my job, connect buyers and sellers. That's all I'm focused on. See, this is how I built my business faster than anyone else. Literally, every single lead gen activity comes back to one thing. It's about figuring out what works for you. Every single person you call is the exact same lead. You got to believe in you, you got to believe in the market, you got to believe in your abilities, you're the fact that you're there to help them, what your intentions are. I don't care if somebody lists their property with me. If you're not talking to people that might buy and sell real estate with you during that time, you're doing nothing. Why not just go ahead and have conversations with people right now? All right, what is up, Agent Power Hour Squad? Get ready to blast into 2024 with a session that's going to set the real estate world on fire. First up, let's give it up for our digital maestro, Jim Hund. This guy's AI and SEO skills are like wizardy for your listings. They're pure gold. And we've got the unstoppable force, Kyle Powers himself. This man doesn't just play the game, he owns it. And if there's a real estate challenge, you bet Kyle's already conquered it. And of course, the strategy king, Peter Tulan, Mr. Google Business himself is actually on vacation in the Dominican Republic and we're all super jealous about it. So have fun, buddy, we miss you. And then me, I am in the house as well obviously, as I'm reading this. So if you're ready to unlock the power of AI and CRM for you, well, I'm your guide to guide you through the tech maze straight to the top. So for today's main event, we've got the real estate heavyweight, Ricky Carruth. This guy is a record smashing broker, investor, and coach, crushing over a hundred deals a year for eight years as a solo agent. Yup, that's Ricky. And the mastermind behind zero to diamond, that's also Ricky. So buckle up for a ride with Ricky as he shares his blueprint for success. This ain't just a talk, it's a goldmine of strategies to supercharge your 2024. So let's get this power out of rolling and welcome Ricky Carruth to the show. What's up, Ricky? How you guys doing, man? That was impressive. That's how we start it. Impressive person deserves an impressive intro. So thank you guys so much. So yeah, you guys just kind of let me know what direction you want me to go with this. I can go in so many different directions. You know, I can cover a lot of stuff and then we can hop into some Q&A where I think a lot of the value could actually be for this group. Okay, do have a couple of questions for you, if you don't mind. I guess since we're starting 2024, a lot of stuff been going on with interest rates. It's finally dropping and it looks like, you know, the savings of the households in America are decreased. So might be looking at some more interest rates drops. How do you think that's gonna affect 2024? And is there any comparisons we can draw with 2024 just like previous years? Yeah, so there's two things. There's the outside factor of what interest rates actually do to the world, to the economy, to, you know, whatever the case may be, outside factors, okay? Then there's the inside factor, you as a real estate agent. And you as a real estate agent, none of this matters even for a split second because it's out of your control. There was four million transactions last year. There's gonna be four to five million this year. Even if it goes to 3.5 or goes to 5.5 or whatever it is, it does not matter. You can't do anything about it. There's always gonna be closings every single day for the rest of your life, regardless of market conditions. Forever, when dot com crash happened, 9-11, 2008, the pandemic, all the most scariest times in our economic history, real estate closings are still happening every day by the truckloads. Go back to 2008 and look at the data, right? The scary, that was the most worrisome time ever. I mean, Lehman's brother crashed, it was like pandemonium, people were just losing net worth left and right. Going bankrupt, it was crazy. I went bankrupt back then, sleeping in my car, where a roof and houses serving tables, like after I made a million dollars as a real estate agent. It was a very weird, scary time. And guess what? You go back and look at how many closings are happening in your market and there were truckloads of closings happening, much lower than what they were, much lower than what they, well, I mean, it was the same amount as last year, like 2023 is the same amount of closings as 2008. And you guys are all still here. I mean, like it doesn't get any worse. And if it did get a little worse, what's it gonna do? Go down to 3.5. And that was the fastest rake hide in history and you guys are still selling real estate. Like, I mean, okay, can we, so with that being said, can we quit worrying about as a real estate industry in terms of our success about rates? Yeah, we can worry about rates for our clients and kind of how to advise people and what to say and stuff. But you never wanna try to predict the market to your clients because that's just a losing battle. You'll never get it right. I mean, the biggest mortgage gurus out there were saying that it was gonna be around 5% by the end of last year. Like early last year, they were saying it was gonna get down to 5% by mid to last year. Never even got close. And these guys are like genius gurus, right? And they can't even predict what rates are gonna do. And it doesn't matter. Your job is to help people buy and sell real estate. It doesn't matter what rates are, okay? So there's the outside factors, like I said, it affects people, it affects the world, it affects the economy, blah, blah, blah. I don't care as a real estate agent. I'm gonna go out here and do my job. Connect buyers and sellers. That's all I'm focused on. That's all I'm worried about. Anything else is a distraction that's gonna prevent me from reaching my goals and helping the amount of people I gotta help to hit those goals. So if it doesn't apply or help me get to where I wanna be in terms of the amount of people I wanna help to make the amount of money I wanna make, then I'm not gonna think about it. It's a complete waste of time. Okay. Well, you're ruining this, Ricky, because it's always fun to look back in a year and see how we did on predictions. It is fun, but I didn't know what's fun. It is fun because I'm the word. I predict. Like I used to not predict at all because I didn't care because I was just a real estate agent. Now that I'm a coach and a social media guy, I watched the market a lot more. And so I throw out these predictions because I've been doing this so long, 22 years. I went through 2008. I've seen all the ebbs and flows of a lot of different kind of markets. And to me, realizing that closings happen every day, it's a lot easier just from pure experience to kind of see where the market's going because the market moves in slow motion. You can't, I mean, it's, nothing happens on a dime in real estate. It's all very slow moving. So I thought a lot of predictions do and I like this to sit back and see what comes true that I say and what doesn't. So I'm in the same boat. So do you think 2024 is gonna be better or worse than 2023? It depends on what your definition of better or worse is. I mean, you know, like what- Mark, it's always good for somebody, right? Listen, what we think about the future, again, matters zero when it comes to our success. So do I wanna talk about this? Yeah. Do I want the people that are listening to know that it does not matter when it comes to your business? Yes. So when we talk about as real estate agents in these meetings, you know, it's like, I think a lot of agents look at this and they're kind of like, yeah, as we talk about the market, they're kind of like applying it to their business like it matters whatsoever when it does it. But yeah, let's talk about it. 2024, like who knows? There's so much uncertainty with 2024, like election year, interest rates, lawsuits, what's gonna happen? There's a lot of uncertainty, let's say. I think this is one of the hardest years to predict, honestly, you know, ever. But I believe we have historic, historic pent-up demand, more pent-up demand than we've ever had before. There's this thesis out there about the silver tsunami, right? Have you guys heard about that? 10,000 people are turning 65 every day and this older generation are gonna start downsizing, it's gonna add a lot of inventory to the market over the next, you know, three, four, five years. We're gonna have so many millions of people that are, you know, 65 plus by 2030 and it's gonna be this, they're calling it silver tsunami of inventory into the market. You know, I think that's real. I think there's some truth to that. I also believe that there's a lot of these big box investors that weren't around, you know, 20 years ago as well, they're happy to scoop up homes. So do I think there's gonna be a lot more transactions this year? Yeah, I do. I think interest rates could be lower. Again, doesn't matter. I mean, look at last year. I mean, even when rates went from three to, you know, let's just call it seven, still had four million transactions happening. You know what I mean? So better, you know, the difference in 2008 and now just like looking at it, you know, from a 30,000 foot view is prices haven't went down. You know, we've got the same amount of transactions as 2008, but prices are still basically at all time highs, you know, and they're hanging in there. So we'll see. I don't know. I'm interested. It's like watching a soap opera or something, but at the same time, we gotta draw the line between that stuff and the success of our business because it's two completely different things that honestly has nothing to do with each other. Now I think you brought the silver tsunami too, Ricky. I think that's gonna be a huge play in 2024 and going forward for the next few years. As we start to see these older people needing to get assisted living and stuff like that, we have an opportunity as agents to capitalize and helping them with that transition. So kind of taking an outside play on that and not just focusing on, you know, the increase in inventory that's gonna come to the market, but how do we as agents help that generation of clients access their equity to transition into that assisted living and then therefore giving us, you know, listings and helping increase that inventory. Can you know what you're supposed to be doing? Right? What's the number one reason why people choose a real estate agent? Come on guys, somebody else jump in here. Comfortability. They want to get their home bought or sold. No, you only can trust you. That's how they pick their agent. The number one, so they did this huge poll, like Nard did a long time ago, and it was not a long time ago, this is a couple of years ago, and it was overwhelming. This reason was 34% versus everything else is 1% or less. Okay, like Broke Ridge was 1% or less, online 1%, the number one reason was that they had a friend in the business with a great reputation. And so our job, literally our job is to make friends with people. That's your job. And anything that you're doing that doesn't contribute to the overall goal of making as many friends with property owners in the market as humanly possible to build your business, build that brand with them, remarket to them forever, create a great first impression, let them know you love them, you help them, you're here for them, whatever they decide to do something, that's how you help the anybody. I mean, that's how you build anything. If that's what you want your niche to be, which I wouldn't pick, that wouldn't be my pitch. My niche is like going after like 65 and ups. That wouldn't be like where I wanted to live in my business. But hey, if that's where you wanna go, okay? Go talk to all the 65 and uppers all in your market and make friends with them. Probably easy to talk to, so. So we actually have mastermind on this before too because of exactly what you're saying. What are some good ways? Because a lot of us on here, we're kind of all in the same age group and stuff. And we don't like, we're big on social media and AI and tech and everything else. But a lot of the people that's silver age group isn't on there. Do you have any recommendations? I know that's not like your specialty and stuff. Like me personally, how I've done this, I've gotten involved with groups and stuff, my church and stuff. They're all way older than I am. And so that's the only way I've really found out what other suggestions do you have if people do wanna go after them? Get a list of all of their phone numbers and call them. When I go to church, I'm only gonna talk to what? 10, 20, 30, 40 of them? Hell, I can call 10, 20, 30, 40 of them a day. I'm basically doing what you do at church every day. So every day I've went to church. You're going to church, what you accomplish there, I'm doing it once a day. See, this is how I built my business faster than anyone else. Literally every single lead gen activity comes back to one thing. Creating a list of people to sit down and call. If you do social media, you're trying to get to a place where you have a conversation with someone. If you're doing Facebook ads, you're just building up this list of people who are gonna sit down and call. Zillow leads, sit down and call a list. Open house, sit down and call the list of people that came in. It's all comes back to sitting down and calling the list of people. So when I realized that, I was like, why don't I have to do all this stuff that everybody does? You're just prolonging what's gonna eventually happen. Anyway, you sit down and call list of people. I'll just call list of people right now. So literally like, I was getting done in a week. I was calling as many people in a week as most people call all year. Cause they're doing a bunch of marketing and they're spending a bunch of money and they're doing open houses and they're going to meeting people at church and they're doing all the stuff which is just trickling the conversations over the year which I compressed into just a week. So literally every week that went by, I was doing a year worth of the work. The work is how many people did you talk to that now know who you are? You talked to about real estate and how you re-market to. That's the whole game. And I was doing in a week what most people were doing in a year. And that's why I was building my business. That's why I outpaced every single person because I skipped all the minutia and went straight to the actual work that needs to be done right this second. So I would just get a list of the people that are 65 and up and I would call them and say, hi, I'm a Ricky. I'm a real estate agent here in the area. How are you doing today? That's it. And literally my call to action, my entire reason for calling, my entire reason for existence on that call is to know how they're doing today. All these coaches and stuff are like, don't say how are you doing today? That's the dumbest thing in the world. Okay. Well, like I've made millions. Here's the thing about that too. Every single strategy and script and legion activity and silver shiny penny stuff, every single one of them works. There's people making millions of dollars off every single thing. If you look at something and you say, oh, that sounds slimy or that sounds stupid or that's too expensive. There's people making a million bucks a year off of that thing, whatever you're talking about. So understand everything works. You can't talk shit about nothing because it all works. It's about figuring out what works for you and then going all in on that and doing what matters, right? What matters is that more people get to know who you are until you're making the amount of money you want to make and you're remarketing to the entire, to everyone you've ever talked to in a very simple, effective, scalable way. Now, do you think that you've talked a lot about cold calling people and stuff? Now, do you feel like people just need the right scripts or most agents just need to pick up a bone and dial? Both. I mean, listen, the stages of calling is scared to call. Second stage is you made some calls you realized weren't gonna die. Third stage is, okay, now let me hear, let me know what to say. Fifth, four stages, how do I say it? And fifth is how to read people on the phone and the future top producers just blow through those stages where a lot of people get stuck. Some people are scared, they never made the call, they get stuck there and they just stay low producers or they make the calls and learn they're not gonna die but don't learn what to say and a lot of people learn what to say but not how to say it or how to read people on the phone. You gotta progress through that. Here's the thing, man, the leads you guys are calling cold calls are the same exact people that you're getting off Facebook and meeting in church and Zillow leads and it's all the same people. We gotta stop saying, okay, these leads are easier to call or these leads are different than these leads. No, they're not. Every single person you call is the exact same lead. You gotta get that, it's your perspective that's really messing you up. Every lead is the same thing. Hi, I'm an agent. How are you doing? What can I do to help you? I have a buyer or I have a rental property over here that's a good deal or I have a place you can upgrade to. What is it that I can do for you today? I mean, every lead's the same. An internet lead. I saw you were looking at some properties online. What can I do to help you? What you got going on? Tell me your situation. I don't care what kind of lead it is. So if we can, like the people that are scared to cold call, right, but you're okay calling Zillow leads, get a list of every property on your market and just pretend like they're Zillow leads. You'll crush it. Nice. Hey, and then also I had a question here in the chat. What do you think about agents doing market update videos? Do you think those are effective or that just- I think they're really effective. Yeah, I think they're really effective. I don't think they're effective in an email. I don't think email is a video platform. When people check email, they want to get in and out. If you're, if you're trying to make, if you want to try to make them watch a video for a minute or two, they're never going to open up your email ever again. They're trying to get in and out. They literally open sales emails for a second, literally. But for video platforms, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, et cetera, awesome. Yes, do it. What it's going to come down to guys with this is charisma, enthusiasm, you know, don't sound like every other just boring, boring real estate agent. Do it with some pizzazz. Do it with, I mean, are you excited about this or not? You know, get excited about it. Tell people what's up. Be different, stand out. You know, it comes down to one thing, confidence. You know, people can smell lack of confidence a mile away and there's a million agents to choose from. So if you even have an inkling of that lack of confidence in you that they can see, whether you think they can see it or not, they're not going to choose you as an agent. You got to believe in you. You got to believe in the market. You got to believe in your abilities. You're the fact that you're there to help them, what your intentions are. I don't care if somebody lists their property with me. When I'm calling prospects, I'm not trying to sell them anything. I'm just trying to get to know them and see if there's something I could do to help them. That's it. I'm not trying to list. I'm not trying to handle objections. Get them to sign the contract. Now, did you have some things you want to talk about or you want to like field questions from the crowd? Yeah, dude, we can just do Q&A. I didn't, I'm here to help you guys. It's been a nice little while. I love it. You know, I just kind of get on here and scream at you guys a little bit, try to shake you loose, give you guys a different perspective. I don't really have anything prepared, but I'm happy to just dive into anything with you guys. Whatever I can do to bring the most value. Okay, yeah. Let's, if anyone has some questions, I mean, how often you get to ask Ricky Grews a question. So, see what you guys got. Go ahead, Meg. So, I have like my pipeline has completely dried up and I have a lot of people that were telling me we're gonna wait, we're gonna wait, we're gonna wait. Well, it's now been however long and I don't really have anything in the pipeline. What would be your advice for me to kickstart getting some prospects? Like, I will now call, call, but like I was trying to work my sphere, but anyway, I'll shut up. Your choice. So, work your sphere, that only maintains your business. Your sphere, like, are you doing anything to stay in touch with your sphere outside of making calls? I dropped off Christmas presents and like Christmas gifts and stuff like that. Anything on a consistent basis, except for one year, once a year for Christmas? No. Okay, so put everybody in, listen to me. Put everybody in a database and start doing a weekly email on the same day of the week forever. And tell them your opinions on stuff. Send them the new listings, right? And they're gonna say, damn, Meg, it's consistent. She's dependable. She's a hard worker. She's honest. Look at the information she's given me. And she wrote this. She didn't let a company write it for her. This is real. You know what? I'm starting to kinda, Meg is starting to kinda grow on me as a real estate agent. It does all the heavy lifting for you and you can scale that. Doesn't matter if there's five or five million people, it still only takes you 15 minutes a week. There's no reason why you shouldn't do that on the same day of the week forever so that everybody in your database never forgets who you are, what you're about and that you're here to help. That's number one. If you're doing that, you don't have to worry about calling your sphere. They're gonna call you when they get ready to buy or sell. Now it's just a race to how many people can we get in that database, getting that email so they can continue to know who you are based on the first impression you gave them when you met them that you're gonna treat them like family forever and work really hard, right? So back to your question, though. You know, your pipeline is dried up. So it brings me to the question, okay, what are we doing for leads? Well, there's two things. You said the people are saying that we're gonna wait, we're gonna wait, we're gonna wait. You know what they're telling you? We're not gonna do anything ever. See, they tell us what we wanna hear to get us off the phone. Okay, so Meg, let me ask you. When they said they wanted to wait, give me an example of one of them and tell me how long they asked to wait. So I will agree with the one couple who are totally like blowing me off. The other one is a probate. So waiting for the family estate to settle. The other one is an older couple that wanted downsize, but not sure if they're ready yet. So I think, yeah, so. Listen, all those are a nothing sandwich, okay? A nothing burger. If you're working with four active, like possible deals, buyers or sellers, four, that's 0.8 deals on average, statistically. So when you got four possible buyers or sellers, you're working on nothing. And if you're not waking up every day, like doing everything you can do to build your pipeline up to 10 to 15, because if you got 10 to 15, guess what? You're gonna close one deal a week. That's just math. That's just simple math that has happened over and over and over and over again. If you're working with 10 to 15 active buyers and sellers that might buy or sell a property with you in the next six months, you're gonna close one a week. So if you're at three or four, you ain't nowhere. You're nothing. You're not doing anything. Now, so there's that. Now let's move on to Lee Jinn. What are you doing to get leads? Could be working harder on that. Okay, so what do you do all day? Let me ask you this. What do you do all day? Well, I switch in between a couple jobs. So I'm having a couple of part-time. You're doing this part-time. Part. Okay. Okay, well then, that's a, that's a viable excuse. Like you're not doing this full-time. You're working other jobs to keep income coming and everything. However, the problem is, is do you have times throughout the week that you've dedicated 100% to real estate? Yes, and sometimes I don't. It's totally my own fault for consistency, I understand. Okay, so, so this is what you have to do. Okay, when part-time agents come to me and new agents and stuff like that, you have to have these time blocks throughout the week. Like I'm gonna do two hours here and one hour there and three hours there, whatever. And they have to be in stone. Cause if you're not dedicating any time to your business, you're not gonna have a business. So you've got to get dedicated on what time blocks you're actually gonna dedicate to your business. And that has to be in stone. No excuses, you're dedicated to that. Otherwise, you're not gonna be in business. Okay, so then we get past that part. Like I'm just, I'm just chopping down trees with you. Just like, okay, we're done with that part. Now onto what we do during that time. If you're not talking to people that might buy and sell real estate with you during that time, you're doing nothing. Nothing. You're just, you know, you're just, I don't know what you call it. You're floating in the wind. You're just like, you're here, but you're not present. You're, I don't have a word for it, but you're not doing anything. Cause everything you do, let's just say whatever it is that you do, you're only doing it to try to get to a conversation with someone, right? That might buy or sell. Why not just go ahead and have conversations with people right now? There's millions, where market are you in? I'm in London, Ontario, Canada. Is there, are there a million people there? Almost. Okay, there's a million people there. Okay, there's a million people, there's a hundred thousand. Could you even talk to like 5,000 people? There's a million people there. Could you talk to 0.5% of them, 5,000? I could, yes. You could? Then why aren't you? I gotta work on my self-esteem. The number one factor for success in the business is confidence. You gotta walk in like you own the place. You gotta walk in when people are just like, wow, this person knows what they're doing. Even if you don't know what you're doing, you have to exude that. And it doesn't come from not knowing what you're doing. Your confidence, Meg, needs to come from the fact that you're there with the right intentions to help them regardless if you make money or not. If you walk in not caring, if you get the listing, you just wanna hear them out of what they're trying to do and see if you can figure out how to help them do it, then you're gonna win. Now we have to scale that and do that back to back to back to back across as many people as possible. Thank you. I appreciate the advice. I really do. You're welcome. We'll definitely put into action more. Thank you. Just do, just do, do, do, do, do, you know? Don't listen to anybody. Don't care what anybody thinks. Just do stuff. Evan. What's up, Ricky? How you doing? Good, how you doing, guys? Doing really good, man. Doing really good. Couple Canadians here, buddy. Quick question. I know you guys have red X in the States. Are you aware of any programs in Canada that you can use for getting phone numbers or not? My guys up there use tele-listing. Tele-listing. Tele-listing. I think you actually get it for free with the XP if I'm not wrong. Oh, really? I'm pretty sure. I'll have to check into that. I'm pretty sure you do up there. I'm pretty sure. Oh yeah, I got a question too. I got a question for you, Ricky. You talk about cold calling a lot. I know that's a lot of how you built your... Click on their profile and see, oh, they work at wherever or they own this business or they're whatever, right? And you immediately message them and say, hey, thanks for the follow. I see you work at wherever. Tell me about that or if they're an insurance agent, if they're an insurance agent, say, hey, I see you're an insurance agent. Do you do life insurance or homeowners insurance? I'm a real estate agent. See if you can collab with them. If they're in some kind of business, see if you can collab with them on some kind of business thing where you guys can kind of send leads back and forth, right? Referral type stuff. If they're not, like you just figure out, find out something in their profile that you can connect with them on DM. You know, even if they're just like a random, just person. And if you see in there that they do live in your area and it's a real person, not like a bot or something and message them and get into a back and forth with them, about them, right? And at the end of the day, the goal is is to get their data because here's the thing with social media guys. There's a 5% organic reach on social media and there's a 90% organic reach on email. You gotta get them from social to the email. When it goes out every week on the same day of the week, 90% of those people see it in their inbox. So now you own that database. On social media, you can't be guaranteed that when you put out a piece of content, your database is gonna see that piece of content. Only 5% of your followers will see it, but with now with the tick-topification where Reels has the whatever it's called, the for you page and all that, you've got a lot of people that aren't following you that actually see your Reels now, then used to before that even came into play. So it opens up a lot more organic stuff, especially for non-followers. And so it gives you a really awesome platform for free to build audience in your market when you're creating content about your market. Okay, but the problem is is when people do follow you, they're only gonna see your content for a couple of weeks and then you're basically gonna disappear to them. Why? Because if they're not engaging with your stuff a lot, then Instagram or Facebook is gonna quit showing you they're showing them your stuff and then they'll show other stuff to them. And so you know, because you'll see somebody's content and it'll be somebody you've been following for years and you'll see their content out of the blue, you know, like, oh, I forgot about that person, right? It's because Instagram quit showing you their content for a long time because you quit engaging with it. So you have this group of think about it like this. There's a cycle of people that come into your social media ecosystem every couple of weeks. Okay, and they're only there for like a week or so. You gotta get their contact information now. As soon as they follow you, you gotta get that data because they're gonna be gone. Even though they're following you, they're not gonna see your stuff. So you gotta get the data, connect with them immediately. And then like whatever, whatever on social media, but after a couple of weeks when they're not seeing your stuff anymore because of the algorithm, there's gonna be a new cycle, a new group of people that come into your ecosystem, right? And so it's just this constant new group of people. There's the core followers that engage with everything you put out that see every single piece of content, yes. But then there's this other group that kind of gets rotated where it's a new group every couple of days or every couple of weeks. It's like a new group of people. You've got to be active on their DM and the new followers and connecting with them and getting their data and putting them in your database, right? And there's a lot of work that goes into that. You gotta put out content, you gotta DM people, you gotta, you know, and all that, it's a lot, but hey, you know, anything you wanna do is gonna be a lot of work, but that's how you capitalize on it. That's what I do. Ricky, thank you, man. Yeah, that's a really good point. That's the one thing I think that I'm currently missing with doing it the way I do is I'm not grabbing their data right away. And like you said, you end up losing them, and then you don't see their stuff anymore and it just becomes somebody that comes up later on. So grabbing their data is the big point and the big takeaway there, man. Thank you very much. No, my pleasure, man. Good to see you, Bear. Is it, Anna, is this Asia? Yeah, my question, hi. First of all, thank you for coming on the call. We appreciate it. And secondly, you've mentioned a newsletter a couple of times. And apart from call calling, when you meet people in daily life, like you become friends or you have acquaintances, how do you get their emails? How do you ask for that? Because I feel sometimes people might, I don't know, feel weird about it. You just met them and you're asking them for their email. Ask them when you just meet them. You don't ask them when it's a weird moment, right? You connect with them. You know, like you don't just meet somebody and say, hey, you know, I'm Anastasia, you know, how are you doing? What's your email address? I don't know how you do it, right? You talk about stuff, you connect with them. You make friends with them. And then if you can get them talking about them, then you've really kind of got them there. When they talk, they're starting to feel comfortable. And so now you've got something and now you talk to them about non-real estate related stuff. And then it's gonna come back to what do you do? Well, you know, okay, cool. And you know, you connect with them there. You may go deep on a conversation there and then it's gonna come back to you. You know, I'm in real estate. You know, you guys looking to buy or sell anything? No, cool. You know, like not right now, great. Well, listen, I'd love to stay in touch with you. Is it okay if I just stay in touch with you? Yeah, great. What's a good email for you? So it's building the rapport with them, getting into a great conversation. And then the way you ask for it is kind of asking if they're looking to buy or sell anything. And if not, you're like, awesome. I'd love to stay in touch with you for when you might. Is that okay? You get them to verbally say, yeah, it's okay if you stay in touch with me. Then you say, great, what's a good email, right? So after they verbally said, yeah, you can stay in touch, then it's, you know, they've pretty much given you permission to ask for whatever kind of contact information you want at that point, right? Mm-hmm. Right. Got it. Thank you. Mm-hmm. Luca. What's up, Ricky? What up, dude? Nothing much, man. Listen, I'm curious for people who already have the email list, the weekly email going out, that's set, you know, the system is in place. What would you recommend for like next level of the mass engagement for your database? I never really did much more. I did, in the email, I did like giveaways. I would do like restaurant reviews and like reply back for a chance to win $100 gift card. I would have hundreds of people hit me back, just reply back. Hundreds of people hit me back and then I would respond to all of them, get into email back and forth, pick a winner, and then tell everybody else like, you didn't win, but I'll take you to lunch and nobody ever takes you up on it. But you get into these back and forth with how you're doings and what are you looking to do and stuff like that. Listen, dude, like, you know, with all the stuff now where you can do mass texting and all this stuff you can do nowadays, the slide broadcast, voicemail drops, all that, there's a lot of different things you can do to, to throw more stuff at your database these days. But yeah, I mean like the biggest thing is that they can tell that you spent time on the email when you're giving your opinions on things. Like I have a four week template system and it's week one of stats of the month, week two is restaurant of the month, week three is deal of the month, week four is news of the month. As you just rotate that every month, keep it real short and sweet, whatever the subject is and then give you a, you know, like one or two sentences about what you think, they can tell that you wrote it. And like too, like agents, you know, like, oh, I don't know what to say. And I'm like, okay, did you show property in the last week? They're like, yeah, I'm like, how many buyers are like two? I was like, you made an offer? Yeah, one of them made an offer. I'm like, cool. I was like, your email this week could be like, hey, the market's doing great. I showed property to two buyers in the last week and one actually made an offer on something. Dude, your clients now think that you're giving them this inside information about the market that they cannot get on Zillow or anywhere else. This is from you. And they just appreciate that so much. It makes you stand out when you don't have a generic company, right, generic bullshit emails to your clients. If you do that, then you're gonna, your brand gets diminished so fast when you do that instead of just spending a little time that your clients are gonna appreciate. And so when I did it like that, you know, there wasn't much else I had to do. They appreciated it so much after the great first impression where I didn't try to force them into a sell like every other agent that they called me when they were ready to buy or sell. Awesome. So I guess just dive deeper into the email and... Yeah. I just put a link right there. Like you can see like a year worth of my emails that I sent out to my clients right there. All right. You can just look at all of them and just kind of get a feel for what I do and just copy it, copy the structure, the format. Appreciate it, man. Yeah, man. I always come out when Ricky's speaking. Good to see you, my guy. Kyle, what you got? Hey, Ricky, how are you? Up here in Canada as well in the West Coast and Vancouver. I'm big time into AI, ChatTBT, things of that nature. So I'm really good at being consistent with blogs. I do two email mailers per week, but what I've noticed you were kept saying is having your own opinion. I have my ChatTBT. I have like 19 pages of PDFs with my transcript, how I speak. But then, you know, if I take a market report, I'll just take that PDF uploaded. I have my structure for my newsletter. From what you're saying, that's probably not the best way to go about it then. I would. To do your thing, you wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do it at all. Okay. Literally Wednesday is the day that my email goes out. You guys can see my emails there. When I literally sit down, I don't even know what I'm gonna do. Wednesday, when I wake up, I don't know what that email's gonna be. And then when I sit down, I sit down and go through my process of thinking about what I'm gonna say, what it's gonna be about, all that stuff. And it's literally like one or two sentences that's out of my mind spur of the moment, like raw. You know what I mean? And people see that and they're like, they can tell. Right? Yeah. Okay, so are you, with any of your content that you're putting out or resources that you're putting out, how much do you use ChatTPT in your business? Zero. Zero. Zero. Interesting. Okay. I mean, ChatTPT is good, I think, to kind of get you started in the right direction. If you need a direction. For me, I think people like authenticity. And I think any alternation of what's authentic about you is gonna water down who you are. I'm not trying to, like, I'm not trying to make people think that I'm smarter than I am or use bigger words or, you know, have correct punctuate. I don't, I'm not trying to do that. I want people to know who I am. Because like, when you, when you meet me in person, I'm the same person on the Zoom as I am on Instagram, as I am on stage as I am with my mom was like, I'm the exact same person everywhere I go. When you read my email, you can feel the energy. It's the exact same everywhere. So you have this brand, you know, and if you're somebody different on social, then you are in person, then you are in an email, then you are, you know, on, you know, something else. People are kind of like, what the hell, who the hell is this guy? I thought I knew him, but I really don't. Right? And so now your brand is kind of confusing people. That's why I think it's so important that if you are gonna utilize platforms like chat GPT, the first step that you have to take when you do that is you need to program your personality into the bot. 99 out of a hundred agents that are using chat GPT are using it wrong because they think that you can just take an out the box robot, throw in some, some content ideas or have it generate your content ideas and then wham, bam, you've got it. This is why it's so important to spend so much time if you're gonna use AI, use it, right? I personally believe that those of us that don't use AI going forward, especially in 2024, you're gonna get left behind. So learning how to program yourself into the robot, which is much more in deeper than just speech patterns, it's personality, it's hobbies, it's where you come from, where you wanna go, what's your business like? Feeding that information into chat GPT can still keep and maintain your authenticity while saving you the time and creative energy it takes to generate all of this content, right? So like Kyle, for your situation where you're doing market updates and stuff like that, maybe feed chat GPT a little bit more about you, your personal hobbies, where you come from, where you wanna go, what drives you? So you can kind of get that personality injected into that robot and then it can go back to its original purpose, which is saving us time, saving us energy, right? Like for me, I'm Mr. Music, like that's where all my creative energy goes. So the last thing that I wanna do is, and not to say that Ricky's wrong at all, like Ricky, you got your methods right on, but I don't wanna wake up in the morning and try to pound out emails to my different clients and stuff like that. When I basically cloned my personality into my bot and I can just say, hey, what's up for the week? Boom, it spits it out, you make your minor changes and then boom, you're ready to rock. Yeah. And I'm all about simplicity as well and scalability, right? So I don't have emails that goes out to different clients. I got one email that goes to my entire database. So it makes it really easy, simple, scalable, and I'll have to think about a whole lot. I just have to think, okay, how can I bring them the most value today, right? Good stuff. Yeah, no, I totally agree with that too, man. Absolutely. Yeah, that's, all right, let's go on. This is, because yeah, I mean, I actually wrote a couple of newsletters in this time while you guys were chatting about that because I already have a pre-programmed bot. So I was just taking Ricky's newsletters through it in there. All right, change a few things, tweak it. So make sure you read stuff first, make sure it's getting your personality constantly to be tweaking it. Jenny, what's up? Hi, I'm Jenny from Toronto here. I just had a question for Adam and first of all, thank you all for doing this for us. Adam, you mentioned in your videos that there are a video that shows you step by step how to program chat, GPTO, how to use it properly. I've searched and I can't find them. I'm a little, I'm actually very new with EXP and this is where I want to be. I love writing, I love informing people and I just want to launch this platform in the right way. So where can I go to learn this from like zero? So right now I am working on a course, it's not out yet. It will be chat GPT centric. So it will teach you roughly how to program your personality in there. But realistically what you need to do is you just need to jump into chat GPT. I would start a verbal conversation with it. So you need to download the app on your phone and then you're gonna see a little set of headphones to the right side of where we prompt it. Start that verbal conversation and just tell chat GPT that the whole goal of this conversation is gonna be to duplicate your personality and speech patterns, then program yourself into chat GPT and then ask it to ask you 20 or 50 or 100. However deep you wanna go into it, the deeper the better, but ask it to ask you questions that it would need to know the answers to to better be able to duplicate this process and then go through that. And then at the end, you can basically summarize that and put that into your own GPT and then start building and updating that as it goes. But like I was saying earlier, the biggest key is just getting, letting chat GPT get to know you, right? Most of us just think, okay, I can use it to write listing descriptions or I can do this with it, create my marketing and ad copy. But if you want the bot to talk like you, it goes deeper than just speech patterns. It goes into your personality. It goes into your past. What'd you do before real estate? What drives you to wake up and do real estate every morning? When you have this conversation with that robot, then it'll better be able to determine your personality type. And then when you create with chat GPT, it'll be literally indistinguishable between, whether you're creating it or chat GPT is. One of the things that Ricky said, which I think is very key when agents are misusing chat GPT and AI is that you do, you can fuck with your brand a little bit, right? Like you can come across as this different person in one side. And then when they meet you in person, it's completely different. And then that just shows that inauthenticity and really hurts your brand. So focusing on getting yourself into that bot and duplicating that personality, that drive, that is you, it's gonna be key in just making sure that the content that you generate with chat GPT is gonna be authentic to you. And you can always edit it before it goes out anyways. I'm sorry. 100%. Yeah. Hey, I'm gonna put a pin in that one because we're gonna have, after Ricky, we're gonna have a lot of discussions on Fridays at this time. Same link, same call. And we'll dive more into that and deeper. And so also a good plug there on Adam. I'm also releasing a website and a course here soon. So Monday AI. But Ricky, since we're on a subject of AI and everything else, how do you feel that's gonna affect? I know I don't like doing predictions, but this is what's fun. How do you feel it's gonna affect real estate agents with AI? Help them sell more properties in less time, sell more real estate. Just easier to scale. You know what it's gonna do? It's gonna do the same thing that Zillow did, MLS did, electronic signatures did, social media did, it's gonna do the same thing all these other things did. When Zillow came out, what did it do? It helped me sell more property in less time because now I don't have to search for properties for my buyers. They just told me what they wanted to see. It cut out hours and hours and hours in my life. I literally sold more property in less time. When MLS came out, literally post something on MLS, sell it sitting on the couch, doing something other than trying to sell it, it sold electronic signatures. I didn't have to fax stuff anymore. Boom, boom, boom. Same thing with AI. It's just gonna give us tools that we can use to be more efficient and sell more property in less time. Now, do you think that with having the efficiency and stuff, even though we're gonna become more efficient and stuff with that, do you feel that if you're not using it, then your sales are gonna go down? You'll have to use it. You have to use MLS. So you basically have to use electronic signatures. It'll just be part of our tools that we have. It's not like you have a choice. It's gonna be something that you use. It's gonna be something that every single agent uses in their everyday business, in one form or another, depending on what those tools end up being or whatever. You're not gonna have a choice. You're not gonna be like, left behind if you don't use it, you're gonna use it. What's your most controversial viewpoint that you see a lot of these gurus and everything else out there about real estate market and realtors? It depends on what gurus you're talking about. I mean, there's a lot of clowns. And honestly, nobody's right or wrong. But I mean, since the pandemic, I've called the market as far as home prices go every single year. And every year, there's a lot of guys who said it's gonna crash worse than 2008 every year. And I put out content that's all there documented, saying like last year, like in 2022, I said at the end of 2022, I said not only we're gonna hit positive on the year, but we're gonna go to all-time highs. And everybody called me nuts. Even the people who were positive on the market said I was crazy for that one. Well, that's what happened. It was easy for me to see because of the supply and demand situation. When you go back to the pandemic, I said in the 35 day shutdown, I said we're gonna see this massive surge we've never seen before. Because I knew that that was gonna happen due to the pent up demand and stimulus that happened. Easy to see. This stuff was riding on the wall. The real estate market moves really slow. So I don't know, man. I think at this point, I've only been trying to predict the market since the pandemic. And I don't know. It depends on who you talk to, right? But this year, I feel like we're gonna have pretty strong transactions. I'm pretty in line with all the other predictions, like the four and a half range, four and a half mil. And I think prices are gonna be up a little bit, three, four, five percent overall. I think some markets are gonna see double digits. See, when you say three to five percent, that's national averages. What does that mean? That means some markets were like 10 plus and some markets are negative. It's an average, right? So and everything in between. And that's another thing that a lot of people get mixed up on is they're like, I'm like, oh, it's gonna go up three to five percent. Or like this year, I'm like, oh, it's up like three percent, four percent, whatever. Well, you don't know what you're talking about. The market's up like 10% here, like in their market locally, or another guy's in a local market where it's down, you know, and I'm like, dude, I'm talking about national averages, bro. I don't know. The longer you're online, the more haters you got. And in the beginning, when you get the haters, it kind of hurts your feelings a little bit. And then it gets to where it's just hilarious. Every single comment. If you don't have haters, they're not trying hard enough. Jeremy Kane. That's what they say. That's what they say. But until you hit about 100,000 on YouTube, you don't really know what they're talking about. Yeah. Thanks, Jim. What's up, Ricky? Thanks so much for your coverage of the commission lawsuits, kind of stuff like that. You talked a little bit about that on another call I was on. Where do you see those going? What do you see as far as a resolution at some point? I know kind of what you're gonna say. I think it'll go to Supreme Court and get settled out. I think everything will get bunched into the same. Once that happens, we'll know what the consensus is. And I think all these copycat lawsuits will kind of just disappear and get kind of settled out. And I think at the end of the day, it'll be a settle out and new rules where buyer agent commission doesn't get offered on from the listing side. Buyers pay their own commission. Sellers can do so if they choose. If they want to contribute towards that, but not very many of them are going to. And they're not gonna have to. A lot of agents say, well, if they don't offer buyer agent commission, the property's not gonna sell. The buyer doesn't care if a buyer agent commission is offered or not. They're gonna buy the property, even if they have to go directly to the listing agent. It's not gonna slow down the market or anything. So what's gonna happen is the market's gonna adjust. We're gonna go to like a one to three percent. I think there's gonna be people that take listings for one percent. I think we're gonna go to a one to three percent listing side. I think initially the shock of it, buyers are not gonna pay the buyer agent commission. We're gonna have maybe 20% that do, 80% that don't because they're used to the way it is now. So they're gonna go directly to listing agent, figure out what kind of a shit show that is. They're gonna come back and over a couple years we're gonna have 80% of buyers paying for representation instead of 20. And what does that look like? Probably a flat fee. I think buyer agency is probably gonna go to more of a flat fee. And on the listing side, it'll stay a percentage. Whatever it ends up being one, two, three percent. What are you doing right now to prepare for that? And still- Absolutely nothing. First waiting, nothing. I could care less. My job is to create relationships in the market and build my brand and help people buy and sell real estate. That is it. Whatever the new rules are, show them to me and let me show you how I can crush it. I don't care what the new rules end up being. If it is now I'm the listing agent and buyers come directly to me, line them up. If now I don't work with buyers and you don't sign a contract to pay me, I'm gonna walk away with a smile on my face. If you have a bunch of agents leave the business and leave a lot more market share for me, wonderful. I don't know. I mean, I'm ready. I mean, listen, you've always gotta be ready for anything. I mean, it's just like the transaction. Like things turn on a dime in the deals. You gotta be ready to be agile and move around just during just one little transaction. You gotta be ready to be on your toes and move around. Same thing with this. Like you gotta be ready at all times to be able to pivot and make adjustments on anything. So this is no different. This is, you know, I think the commission pool is gonna shrink dramatically, 20, 30% or so. I think all of our incomes are gonna take a hit because now we're not getting that automatic buyer commission. But we'll find out what that new floor is and then we'll build up from there, you know? I think it's exciting. I hate it for the agents that can adapt and have to get out of the business, but, you know, that's life, right? Circle of life. You know, embrace it because I believe it's all but guaranteed. Awesome. Awesome. Love that. Now, I wanna be respectful of your time. I did that for 60 minutes and I really greatly appreciate you being here. Two questions. One, how can people follow you? I know you dropped some links. Sign up for his newsletter. And two, what do you wanna leave here in part upon us? For final words. Guys, go to zero to diamond.com and join our platform there for free. You can DM me there. That's a good place to connect with me. We've got over 6,000 agents. We just started that five weeks ago already got 6,000 agents there. That's incredible. A lot of stuff there. Free scripts, business planning, the email templates, all that stuff is there. So go to zero to diamond.com for that. And as far as just parting words, hey, listen, I hope it says something that struck a nerve or like got you, gave you a different perspective on the business. I think you should be more focused on building your career than building your 2024 business. 2024 needs to be kind of like a foundational year of say, 2026. Whatever you make this year is basically just servicing the seeds you planted last year and the year before. It's already kind of set. Work hard. Like have intentions with everything you do and speak with urgency when you talk to your prospects. Have buyers, y'all have buyers. Call people that have properties that your buyers want. Don't do that, have a buyer thing when you don't call with real buyers. Have rental opportunities, investment opportunities. If there's a big house over here that's newer and bigger than all these houses over here, call all these houses and say, hey, you want to upgrade? I got this bigger newer one over here. Call with urgency and intentions behind what you're doing and have fun. Treat everybody like family, don't care if you get the deal and enjoy the process. It's not getting to a million bucks a year is not luck. It's not luck. It's just a lot of hard work and a lot of time and every single person can do it. So I believe in you guys. All right, go crush it. Awesome, Adam. Awesome guys. Hell yeah, I'll send you guys on out. So that's a wrap up for us folks. Huge thanks to you, Ricky, for joining us on Agent Power. Our man and Sharon, all your mind blowing insights. I think we're not just walking away with strategies but we are leaving here with a new playbook. So thank you very much for that, man. And shout out to the amazing crew. Jim, Kyle and Peter, you guys are always bringing your A game. These guys are the unsung heroes behind our real estate victories. So make sure you give them your thanks. And of course, a huge thanks to all of you guys tuning in. You are the reason that we do this. So remember, it's not just about close and deals. It's about crushing goals and building legacies. So keep the fire burning, keep pushing limits and let's make 2024 our most epic year yet. Stay tuned guys for more Agent Power, our madness and keep smashing those records. Hell yeah, go forth and crush it. Good job. Thank you. Thanks, Ricky. Thank you, Ricky. Thank you very much, man. So appreciated. Thank you. Thank you, man, Ricky. Thank you, brother. All the best. Thank you guys. Good to see you. We'll see you soon.