 How has your life changed? What opportunities have opened up to you and kind of where you are currently? And they go do what they need to do to go help people buy and sell and become one of the best. It's just literally a decision that every single person can either make or not make. I want to go out. I want to be the best. I want to work hard. I want to show the world what I got. I want to be best in the world at something. How can I create a platform where every agent can do business with me in some form or fashion? They say 10% of agents are actually using social media to market theirself and their listings. 90% are not. The name of the game is going to be How big can you build your database? I think there's still plenty of opportunity if you are strategic about what you're doing. The business opportunities that we don't even know about that are three to five years out. That's what's most interesting to me. Welcome back to the real estate agent school podcast. I am incredibly lucky to have the one and only Ricky Kruth on with us today. He doesn't even need an intro. He is the master of real estate. He is the social media king of all things real estate. And I have looked up to Ricky pretty much my entire career. Ricky, thanks so much for being on with us. Yeah, man. My pleasure, bro. Good to see you. Yeah. I remember back when I was a brand new agent, I would DM you questions. And the one thing that stuck with me is you always reply. You've always been one of the kindest people on social media to actually talk to people, which is super, super cool. Cool. You've cared. You've just actually wanted to be a part of real estate agents lives. And so that's, that's kind of what I've wanted to talk about in this episode. I want to get it out of the way for the people that are going to hop onto this video and just watch to see, Oh, Ricky Kruth, what does he do? But in reality, there's your four step thing where it's data collection, conversations, conversion, and pretty much remarketing to those people. And so for the people that are wanting to know the basics, Ricky has thousands of videos on that type of stuff. And really it comes down to just having conversations with people. And so what I would love to know from you is since you've got into real estate, you've been in it now, decades, how has your life changed? What opportunities have opened up to you and kind of where you at currently? Yeah. Well, at all stems, I think from hard work, I grew up roofing houses. So that kind of blood into real estate and just determination to be the best. I think you got a real, I mean, competitive against who mainly yourself, right, just to get better, you know, every year, try to beat your last year. So I'm kind of in competition with myself. I mean, when I was coming up, of course, I saw guys at the top, I want to beat these guys. But there's always going to be somebody higher than you. So having that mentality to try to get better and better and be the best in the world. You know, I was just on a zoom call. And, you know, I just did week four, the six day challenge with everybody. And I was like, you know, or there was a guy that I haven't trouble making calls, you know, getting over the hump of, you know, actually setting the time aside and he's been paying for red X for like four months. He hasn't made one call. And I'm like, this is normal, right? It's normal for everybody to be in that stage and to be, you know, to make excuses and to stay busy doing other things and stuff like that. But he feels a lot of anxiety because he feels like he could be doing more. And he feels like, you know, he's not living up to his full potential and stuff like that. And I said, everybody runs into that, but the future mega producers at that point, they're like, I don't want to feel like this anymore. I'm going to go do. Yeah. Right. And they go do what they need to do to go help people buy and sell and become one of the best. And every single person can make that decision. Like every it's it's literally everybody's decision, whether they become mega successful or not. You know, they choose, hey, I don't want to feel like I'm not living up to my potential. I'm going to go do so that I do live up to my full potential. They make that choice. And then they go take action or the people that stay mediocre and average, they make the decision not to go out there and be the best they can be and, you know, continue trying to get better and strive to succeed at higher levels. It's just literally a decision that every single person can either make or not make. So I was a kind of person that made the decision. I want to go out. I want to be the best. I want to work hard. I want to show the world what I got. I want to be best in the world at something. So yeah, just I made a lot of money. I lost it all. I came back around to I made it. I learned from my mistakes. And then, you know, after I was the number one remix agent in Alabama for a long time, I was like, man, this is the way I did this was so unique. You know, let me share this with as many people as I can. So I wrote a couple books and started speaking, writing and coaching became the world's first completely free coach. And you know, it was like I got bored with real estate. So I wanted to take on this other challenge of more of a global brand because real estate is very local. And I'm like, you know, this local thing's great. I'm making a million a year. But what about this global opportunity, you know, on social media because I didn't touch social media for my real estate business. Yeah. Let me go tackle this global opportunity via social media and see what I can really do worldwide, you know, and then it just came back to okay, I'm kind of starting at the bottom. Let me have the desire to be one of the best in the world at this and continue to get better. I had a lot of times where, you know, I was like, why am I doing this? Why am I coaching? I should be just focusing on selling real estate. Yeah. You know, same thing the guy ran into with why I'm not making calls. But there's just something inside of people who are going to succeed at a high level that they make the decision that they're going to go do and live up to their full potential, you know, and it's kind of an it factor. Some people have that. Some people don't. So anyway, through becoming a free coach and building a global brand, you know, now I travel three times a month and speak, I'm not even going to listing appointments anymore. My dad handles the day to day. I've got brokerage, mortgage, sales, investment and coaching, right? I have five different arms of business, you know, that I run. And it's great because when I started the Ricky Krooth brand, I was like, how can I create a platform where every agent can do business with me in some form or fashion? Right? You want to join my brokerage? No. Do you want to do mortgage with me? No. Do you want to invest with me? No. Do you want to refer business back and forth? No. Do you want to join my free coaching platform so that I can help you guys increase volume? It's like, what where can we work together? And now after six years of social media and building the brand, you now actually have that platform in place where it's tangible. And I can go out here and partner with agents in some kind of capacity, whatever capacity they want. So it's pretty cool. And putting together more platforms as we speak, like I'm working on something right now where basically people can plug and play on like the weekly email because that's a that's a struggle for people to create the weekly email. Yeah, create a platform where people can just answer a couple of questions every week about their market. And then it just automatically creates spits out this amazing Ricky style email for them that they can send out that week. It's going to be really cool working on things in the AI department, right? To kind of teach agents how to use AI in their business and to be more efficient and stuff like that. So yeah, I mean, there's some really cool things on the horizon. I'm excited about, you know, the future of not only, you know, me, but also, you know, the industry in general, the direction is going, it's really cool. Yeah, that's amazing that there's a couple of things that I want to hit on real quick that you said there's the aspect where there's a ton of anxiety in this business that you're trying to alleviate from a lot of real estate agents where they're super like, man, I don't know how to succeed. I don't know what I'm going to do to succeed. And we're out here just trying to tell them it's it's the factor of just going and doing a lot of agents have the content have the tools to just go out and do what is needed to succeed. It's just the factor of actually doing it. And that is when the anxiety goes away is when you're actually working because real estate's not that hard. If you're just having conversations with people to grow your database, grow your reach and actually reach more people. And so with what you're seeing in the industry right now and the things that you're doing, what would you tell agents specifically right now? If you could sit down with every single one of your followers one on one and tell them something? Well, it depends on where they are in their career, you know, everybody's at a different stage in their career. They have different ambitions. They want different things. Not every agent is doing social media. They say 10%, Nar had did a study. They say 10% of agents are actually using social media to market theirself and their listings. 90% or not. I would advise those agents differently than the 10% who are. You're doing podcast. How many agents are doing that? I would say practically zero. You know, some agents are brand new. Some agents are part time. Some agents want to make a million years. Someone I know agents who say, if I can just make 200,000 a year, that's all I want to make. Some agents want to make two million years. Someone to build their own brokerages. Someone to get into investing and developing and different things like that. There's so many different things. So really, it's such a customized situation where you really got to know where someone is in their career, what step of the journey they're in, what has worked up to this point and where they really want to go, and how bad they really want it. I mean, there's a lot of pieces. There's a lot of ingredients there that have to be hashed out before I could really say, hey, this is what you should be thinking about. This is what you should be doing. You know what I mean? So it's kind of a tough question to answer, honestly. I can say that I believe prices are going to continue too. I think we're going to be in a really positive appreciation market for a long time. I don't see, right now, from January 1st to now, we're positive appreciation. I think we'll see double digit this year just because of the supply and demand issue. We've got more 33 year olds now than we've seen in since the baby boomer generation, just based on birth rates in 1990, and that's going to continue for 16 more years. We've got so much demand. This is the beginning age of first time home buyers. We've got so many immigrants coming in to the States. That's also going to be a demand for housing. And you've got sellers who are sitting on 3% rates who don't want to sell and builders who can't keep up. So we're going to be, I believe, in a very appreciation positive market for a while, but it's also going to be a very tight market where there is really low inventory and it's going to be tough to go out there and get listings. It's going to be tough to represent buyers when there's going to be so much competition for every listing. We're seeing more multiple offers now than we saw a couple of months ago per listing. Days on the market for existing homes are down right now from where we were a couple of months ago. This is just something that's just not going to work itself out any time soon, and we're kind of in this new normal where we're in this low inventory high demand market where prices just continue to stay high, which is really bad for first time home buyers, right? Because they're sitting on the sidelines waiting on mortgage rates to come down. Meanwhile, prices are going up. People who own property, they're loving it. They're just watching the value of their home continue to increase. So it's just a very interesting market that I believe is going to take a decade to really wash out where we do see some inventory at the market. So we'll see how everything plays out, but for the everyday agent out there just trying to build their business, right? Just trying to take it from zero to 100,000 to a million a year from, you know, 200,000 to 500,000 to a million a year or wherever you are in your journey. The name of the game is going to be how big can you build your database? You know, how many conversations can you have with property owners to see exactly what it is they want to do right now? I think that because we are in this tight market talking to second home owners, absentee owners, vacation property owners, Airbnb owners, long term investment property owners, commercial. I think that that's the play because these people can sell that property, but they don't have to move, right? This isn't their primary home. I think that's really going to be the play right now is to kind of try to focus on those owners also for sale by owners, people who have raised their hand and said, you know, I might sell or I would sell or I need to sell. I think those are good opportunities and expires people that actually were trying to sell, right? It's a good opportunity to begin a relationship with that person. See if they still want to sell. If not, is there something you can do to help them stay in touch forever? So on and so forth. So yeah, no, I think there's still plenty of opportunity if you are strategic about what you're doing. I think what was working three years ago is not necessarily working great now, but there are things that are working great now, you know, and I think being a new agent is tough no matter what when you jump in, whether it was in 08, 2015, 2020, 2021 this year, I think being a new agent is always hard and it's going to continue to be hard. And only the strongest going to survive. Yeah, I do feel for brand new agents right now. I mean, it would be extremely challenging. And so that's a question I have for you with the scripts that you've taught in the past of reaching out to homeowners, just seeing their timeline, asking them how you can help them and what you can do for them. But that may take a while to unfold. Are you just pretty much saying, Hey, the name of the game is quantity just have as many of those conversations because it's a it's a numbers game at that point where you'll eventually find somebody that is ready to sell or what are you telling agents that are trying to survive, but also want to build an awesome business and it's taking a little bit longer than usual. Well, like I'm saying, I mean, it's not really going to take you longer than usual if you're strategic about what you're doing. If you're not, you know, if you think about it for a second, like calling absentee owners, second home owners, people that don't live in the property you're calling about at where prices are, there's going to be people like that who are thinking about selling at these higher prices. They have plenty of equity on the table. They need to set they need to take that cash and put it somewhere else or they want to put it somewhere else or whatever. Maybe they want to sell this bad, bad asset, what they feel like is a bad asset and then roll it into a better asset. Maybe they want to sell their portfolio of single family homes and buy an apartment complex or a strip center or warehouse or whatever. You don't know what people want to do till you call them and ask them. So I think being strategic about who we're calling that this could be a potential deal. I mean, if you're calling people, if you're calling primary homeowners who feel like they're locked into their 3%, 4% rates right now and don't really want to sell because they don't want to buy, rebuy into a 6% or 7% rate market at higher prices than what they were, the thing is, is some of these people will sell because the thing is, is they have so much equity built up in their home, they'll have all this money to put down on their next home from what their prices are up so high, they'll be able to put that equity into their next home and really help on the payments. Another thing people don't think about is 28% of the deals last month were cash deals in the US. A lot of these really wealthy people have cash. It's not like every deals in mortgage. No, it's not. More than a quarter of the deals are not mortgage. They're cash and these really wealthy people, they can just bypass the entire mortgage rate situation by paying cash. Yeah. There's just so many opportunities. If you stereotype the market and say nobody's doing anything, then you're dead. If you walk in with the objective to create as many relationships as you can in the market, then you're good because you're going to go out there and create a lot of relationships. You're going to run into people who want to do stuff now and you're going to build a huge database for your 2028 business that's going to be massive. Yeah. That's what I love about real estate is if you're having enough conversations, a lot of the times with just restructuring people's finances and truly seeing if you can help them out, if they do want to move with all this equity or with their cash, there's so much opportunity out there. I'm a doorknocker. I never really made consistent phone calls and those are the conversations I'm having where people want to move. They just don't necessarily know what the math looks like and there's so many deals to be had if you're just talking to homeowners, which is the incredible aspect of being a real estate agent. Just talk to people. With that being said, what silver lining or motivation can you give real estate agents right now? I mean, you've had insane success as a real estate agent and it's obviously changed your life forever. What do you agents have to look forward to if they commit and actually grind for the next couple of years? What can they expect to see if they really put in the work? Well, same as any era. Let's put it like this. The market surges back, right? A hundred and ten percent of the time. It's always going to surge back. Are we seeing less transactions now? Yes. Why are they suppressed if there's so much demand? Because there's no inventory and also there's a lot of buyers on the sideline because of mortgage rates that when we don't even understand how much pent up demand we have, more in history, I believe, just due to immigration and the amount of 33 year olds that are entering into the market and this just isn't going to go away anytime soon. All that pent up demand is sitting there and it's just going to get worse and worse. It's building. Every day that we have less transactions that we're having now, the amount of transactions now is so much lower than what we've seen over the past 10 years. Every day that goes by that we're at this lower amount of transactions is just building demand. When is that damn going to break? When is the tsunami going to hit? When is everything going to unleash? We're going to see a lot of that when mortgage rates ease down a little over the next 30, 60, 90 days. In my opinion, we'll see if that comes true or not, but I mean, as far as the rates coming down, I'm saying I know that the tsunami is coming. I'm saying my opinion is rates will come down. I don't know that they will. That's just my opinion. If they do, we will see the tsunami come, but that's not really what I'm talking about. That's one type of surge, but what we need is inventory. If you have this five, 10-year vision to build the largest database in your market of people who are getting your weekly email every week on the same day of the week forever and you're doing social media and you're doing all the stuff, then it's just a matter of time. Number one, you're going to have great years. You're going to sell 20 million a year, 30 million a year, all the stuff, but when the market breaks loose and we do see inventory rise for whatever reason, then you're going to see a massive jump in your business for doing nothing different, where you're going to be grinding, grinding, grinding every year. You're in and you're out grinding, grinding, grinding, but then there's this one year where things break loose and you're just still grinding at the same level you have been, but your business like triples. That's just because the snowball effect of you building your business and then that colliding with the market surging back and then everything kind of coming to fruition. But if you let your foot off the gas, then the smaller that surge is going to affect your business. You know what I mean? So it's like go out there and grab as much market share as you possibly can right now for the day that things do break loose because they will in fact break loose. Yeah. And so with your follow up system, like everybody knows, you're sending out your weekly email, you're doing social media, you're trying to just get in front of as many people as possible. Do you feel like there's any change necessary in the message being shared currently to home owners or what do you feel like the consistency should be over the next little while for real estate agents to be marketing to the people that they're trying to gain the business from? I think it's the same man. The email should be used as a media outlet to share market information and where we are, what's going on. Email is a social media platform, right? You go on your phone and check your email how many times a day, right? About the same amount as you check social. And when you go on there, you're scrolling just like you do social media. It's the same thing. And then stuff will catch your eyes. You're scrolling, right? That's your weekly email. It's going to catch their eye. They're going to go in. They're going to get all that local market data that they want. And just keeping them informed of the market, right? Of where prices are. Like a lot of media out there, mainstream media talks about prices are down for the first time in 12 years because it's a little bit down year over year, okay? But prices are up over the last 60, 90 days. And just in every market, it's up over the last 60 days. So it's like sharing people real data around what's really happening, especially in the local market, you know, is critical, I believe, you know, where they're hearing negative stuff when they watch the news or pull up, you know, an article online, you know, but then they're getting reality data, you know, from you, they're a trusted real estate agent. So I think just keeping them up to date, you know, so that they, they know that they have all the information so that they can make the best decisions possible, right? And they're going to appreciate that coming from you. They're going to view you as the expert in the market. And they're going to call you when they decided by yourself. Yeah. I can't imagine the positive impact it would have on not only the market, but the economy in general is if every agent truly applied this to their database and gave them true market information regarding their hyper focus market of, Hey, no, we really are appreciating in the last 90 days. And so homeowners can truly understand like, Oh, wow, like it isn't doomsday like there is, there is things happening and we're going to be okay. And that would move the market forward if agents would actually just take initiative and actually share this type of stuff. And so yeah, over the next year, five years from a personal business, obviously, since you're still cranking deals as well as your professional and speaking and just your career in general, where are you headed? What, what type of stuff do you see and plan on doing in the future? Well, yeah, that's a good question. So right now I'm just really focused on, I've built out the platforms, right, where all the agents can do business with me in some form or fashion. And so now I'm just trying to deepen the relationships with agents in my network to make sure they're aware of all the different ways they can do business with me or be partnered with me or connect with me so that we can collaborate, right? And it's crazy because through that and I have these ways agents can do business with me or partner with me. Well, then the relationships develop, right? And then we deepen the relationships. And then all of a sudden two years down the road, six months down the road, here's another business opportunity, right, that we can collaborate on and build together. You know, so the business opportunities that we don't even know about that are three to five years out, that's what's most interesting to me. So I'm doing the same thing I'm telling agents to do, same way I built my real estate business, I'm telling agents to go out there and build their database to the moon, right? Massive database, everyone knows who you are putting out content on social and email and everything. I'm doing the same thing in the real estate agent space, you know, I'm building my database of agents who know who I am, I'm doing social, I'm doing email marketing to the real estate agents so that in three years, in three years, I have a massive business in that space. Same thing with real estate agents, build the base, do the email, do the social so that in three years, you're going to have a massive business in the space. It's the same, it's the same formula. And the cool thing is, is am I paying the bills now? Yeah. Will my business be 10x in three years? Yeah. Same thing with agents. Can they, if they do this, will they pay the bills now? Yeah. Will their business be 10x in three years? Yeah. Yeah. That's insane. It's funny how it comes down to pretty much the basic answers every single time. If you're just being consistent, networking with the ideal person that you want to get in front of and just staying in touch with those people and building deeper long lasting relationships. And I know you were saying this one time of just picking your mode to do so. It doesn't really matter how you do it as long as it's a mode where you can have a ton of conversations. And obviously for us, it's about efficiency and effectiveness where there's some methods that you're going to have way more conversations with people than others. But if you're not happy doing those methods, then whatever, just pick whichever one you can be consistent with and successful at and just do it. Just crank that for the next three years and you're going to absolutely crush it. And so, Ricky, I 100% appreciate your time on this, on this podcast and I'm super grateful for you. If they're, what is the last thing you'd give advice to real estate agents right now? Is there any golden nugget that you want to share that you're passionate about or just want to give them a wake-up call for? I think we said it all, man. I think that just being incredibly focused on whatever the two to three things are that you do really well, try not to have anxiety about that you're missing business by not doing this or that or the other, what you're hearing outside. I didn't even realize that there was a market crash in 2008 because I was so focused on my business and making a million bucks. I didn't even realize social media was a thing until I started trying to be a real estate coach. I never used it from a real estate business. That just tells you how super focused and dalled in I was on calling property owners, creating relationships, doing with the emails, and I was doing direct mail at the time. Now, I believe you trade direct mail for social media, you make calls, you do emails, and you do social media. That's the way I would do it in today's world. Then, realizing, hey, at some point in like 15 years, we're not going to want to be in this rat race of selling real estate forever. You're only good as your last deal in real estate. We want to build businesses that can be residual. You can do that on the back of social media. Learn how to build a business on social media through being a real estate agent. Then maybe down the road, you can use social media to build a more national or global brand to go out there and really take things to another level. If in fact, you are ambitious enough to do those kind of things. There's just so much opportunity out there for the people who are willing to work hard to have that long-term vision and to just not make excuses around how they may feel about this or that. But more so, I want to live up to my full potential. Let me go out here and crush it. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for that. The true potential that real estate gives somebody is insane. One, you can make an incredible income doing it, but two, you have all these incredible other opportunities that then open up to you of, of to grow your business and you're never going to have to be stuck potentially in being a real estate agent if you don't want to, because you can take the initiative to grow from there. So thank you so much, Ricky. Grateful to have you on the podcast and we'll catch you in the next episode of the Real Estate Agent School Show.