 Right? What would you open instead? On the, on the team leader side, you know, the margins are much greater. There are 20 to 30% of you running a good team successfully. Right? So just looking at it from a margin basis today, would I go do what I did? I did it then because I wanted a new challenge and I felt like I had already challenged myself as a team leader and I wanted to do something different. What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of road to 10,000. I, of course, am your host, Ricky Caruth. I've got my guy, Juan Carlos Baradici. Baranachi, what's going on, my man? I'm going to get it one of these days. How you doing? I'm doing good, man. I'm excited because there is so much going on in real estate nowadays. Yeah. Yeah, that's to say the least. That's to say the least, man. Yep. Yep. Yep. I got name one thing. So name one thing. I probably get 55 emails a day about the shortage in the housing market. It's not just a local thing. I'm hearing it in New York, in Florida, in California. It's all over the place and the people are bugging out because the interest rates are at a rock time bottom. There's not enough houses on the market. Stocks are dropping all over on real estate, Zillow, Remax, EXP, the whole bunch of them. And there's a lot of uncertainty in the air. But you know what? I kind of feel pretty good right now. I feel that I'm positioned, my team is positioned. It's all about the Game of Thrones reference. Winner is coming, right? You going to be prepared? Tell me, give me something new, though. You know, give me something new. That's old news, right? Shortages of inventory. Stocks are down. Give me something new and exciting. So you know what? I've been following a lot. I've been following crypto a lot, right? So this whole crypto buzz is booming. We have the Dogecoin jumping to all time highs and then it dropped on Elon Musk when on SNL two nights ago. There's a lot of buzz going on. But something I'm tracking that you probably haven't been looking into. I track luxury cars and luxury goods. So have you seen the cost of a Rolex watch over the last two years? No, but I can only imagine. I mean, everything else is sky high, you know? Everything's a sky high. So I don't know too much about hyperinflation. I'm not an economist. But what I could tell you is the cost of products over the last two to three years, including real estate, is really, really high. And if you factor that all in with people are spending money left and right and people want to buy houses, who knows what we're in? Let's let's let's go back real quick before we bring our guests on here. I want to talk about this uncertainty of the market. What exactly is uncertain? The uncertainty is the following. Number one, how long can this last where these prices keep going up and up and up? It's not like salaries are going up. It's not like income is rising as fast as inflation is rising. So how much longer can it last before it either levels out or? OK, OK, OK, that that's that's the end of the question. So so when and if when when that happens, when it does happen, you know, if it's six months a year, 18 months or whatever, whatever the case may be tomorrow, next week, like that's certain, though, that that's going to happen, right? That's not uncertainty. Now, that's certain. No. Well, the thing is, is this, though, when that does happen, it's going to be so much easier, you know what I mean? So so there's lots of certainty. I don't see any uncertainty in the market. I see only certainty. The only uncertainty is, is when is it going to happen? Right. And right now, right? Real estate agents should be eating this up right now, to be honest with you. This should be like it should be your heyday right now. If you're brand new in the business and you're finding it hard to get your foot in the door, like you're just looking at the business wrong. You should be focused on building your database right now. How many people are you talking to? How many friendships you're creating in the market right now and building that database up of people who know who you are. That's what you need to be focusing on and the effort per relationship created never goes down. So again, give me some real uncertainty here. Listen, the real uncertainty is that I believe agents are becoming more and more dependent on online leads and the same online leads that are being provided to us by these technology companies. I think at some point in the next three or four years, when the market does shift, they're going to restructure their entire model. And when that happens and there's no more online leads coming out and the agents haven't been building their databases. Well, what's going to happen to them? I know what's going to happen to us. We're going to flourish. We're going to do better. We're going to get more market share because the old agents left the business and we're going to take on more clients than ever because our database is going to feed us. So I think there's a transition happening from a lot of people. I think real estate agents should literally just shut down all notifications of all the media outlets and, you know, what interest rates are. And none of that matters at all whatsoever. So we could talk about this all day, man. But who we got with us today? We got Jim Remley on the line with us. And let me tell you, he might be one of our most successful guests to date. We're not talking about your typical realtor. We're talking about a business entrepreneur who scaled multiple brokerage offices, sold it at the peak and then did it all over again. And I think he's committed his life to educating and helping other realtors, but I think we should ask him ourselves. Jim, what's up? Hey, I'm happy to be here, man. What an honor and privilege to be with you guys. Ricky, you're becoming a living legend in the industry. I've been watching you from the outside. And as somebody's been in the business 32 years, watching somebody rise as fast as you have. It's been, it's been, it's been quite a ride for you. And you're doing amazing things, brother. It has definitely been a roller coaster, bro. I can tell you that much. No, man, it's a pleasure to have you on as well. Tell everybody just a quick little brief background of yourself of how destiny of fate has led you to the road to 10,000. Well, I'm going to give you a quick bio. I know bio is going to be boring. So I'm going to make it really super fast. I'm 32 years in the business. Got in the business when I was 19 as a college dropout. I was, I worked at a lumber mill before I become a realtor. My buddy said, let's get our real estate license. And he didn't finish, but I did. And so I went from the same thing happened to me, bro. The same thing. I've never talked about this, but the same thing happened to me. I was in Tuscaloosa and I failed a history class at the University of Alabama and me and my roommate were like, we're going to go get a real estate license. So we go to our real estate, this real estate class in this community college in Tuscaloosa and I passed it by one point. He failed it by like three points. We were literally traveling, uh, following widespread panic around the country, like not really caring what happened. Somehow I miraculously passed it. Um, and he didn't. So now that that's interesting that that happened to you as well. It's funny. And then I quit my job, my full-time job, making pretty decent money. And, uh, went to work for the first place I pulled off an I five and went into a C 21 office and, uh, struggled for six months, but I was a smart guy and just started learning from everybody around me. And, uh, within a year, I took 150 listings. So I got listed in top 1% of agents and then, uh, grew from there and opened my first company at 24, grew that to 17 offices, sold it. Um, and then taught for NAR for 10 years and then did it again with another company down here in Southern Oregon. We grew this to a billion dollar company in a population base of 80,000. So, uh, you know, we're competing against companies in LA and New York and Atlanta and, you know, the biggest companies in the country. And we're doing in a small little town and we have one of the highest, uh, age of production rates in the country. So that's one of the most proud of, um, and I don't mean to stop you, but there is so much that we could dissect. So jump in anywhere you want to go. Let's go back into year two, because first six months in the business, very same on my end, um, I sold one house in my first six months. And then second year, got a coach, started learning more about what you needed to do in the business, become successful. I broke six figures. I don't think you broke six. Did you just say you went from zero to 150 listings? In my second 12 months in the business, zero to one. What, what, what dynamic or what habit had to shift for you to get that much success that early on? Uh, you know what? I got really focused on the fact that I had to fill my pipeline. And you know, Ricky mentioned it in the intro, but, um, I had to figure out how to incubate a large group of people that would eventually do business with me. Right. So I was, as a 19 year old kid, none of my peers were minors at all. These guys are still smoking pipes and doing what, who knows what, you know, so I needed to figure it out. So what I did is I focused on, uh, for sell by owners, expired listings, um, renters that are owners that own rentals. And then, uh, my big thing was absentee owners. I started, uh, focusing on absentee owners. I'll tell you a three second story about that back in my day, there was micro fish to look up absentee owners. The computer was, were not, uh, or the records were not computerized. I hired an assistant, one of the first assistants in my market, bought her a 356K. If you guys are too young to remember that, but that's what old computers used to be. And she literally trans, she had the micro fish machine here and transferred the data over here, 64,000 records. I transferred the public records in my county before the county did it. And then I mined that information for the absentee owners and crushed the market in absentee owners, uh, in the early nineties. So it was, that was my, uh, one of my, one of my ways to get to those numbers. And then Jim, obviously that's still a really good technique that you can use nowadays. What did you do when you came across the data? Did you now, uh, physically knock on their door? Did you mail them? What was your pitch? So the absentee owners, you can't knock on their door cause most of them don't live here. They live in another area. Right. So, uh, and so for me, it was a mailing and followed by a phone call if I could, if I could white page the number back then. And so the call would be, Hey, I noticed you on a property here in, uh, in my little hometown, Roseburg, Oregon. Um, quick question. Uh, if I could get you the right price for that property, would you have any interest in, in looking at an offer? Every single time people would stop and be like, well, what kind of offer? So, you know, I'm all about success. Let's figure out what that number needs to be in order for you to sell. And it would just start the conversation. And even if they didn't commit to selling right then, it would, it would lead to the conversation of, well, let's park this, let's put a pin in. I know you're not quite ready yet. You mind if I circle back in six months and we'll check again. And, and everybody was like, yeah, do it. And I was the only one reaching out. And I would suggest today that very, very few people are still going after the absentee owners like they shouldn't, right? So it was just a conversation. And it's the, it's the, and I know Ricky preaches this as the tone. It's the way you're coming across on the phone. You're not overselling. You're just kind of getting into relationship with people and then incubating. It's all about incubation. Yeah, bam, bam. So, bro, you, you, you have went deep inside my content, huh? I watched a few times, bro. I watched a few times. Goodness gracious, man. I feel kind of honored here, bro. As you watch that many of my videos to know that I talk about tone. I do. Yeah, you bet. I love your stuff, man. It's great. Reminds me a lot of what I used to do, but you're doing it in a fresh new way now. Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate that. Um, cool. So, so where do you go from there? So for me, it was, you know, I built one of the first teams in my community. So I, I partnered with another guy and we brought in an assistant. We started building it out from there and just kept working on building a structure and systems. And I, when I talked to team leaders today or people that want to grow a team. So, so to speak, the biggest question I get is how to, how do you do that? Right? Like, what's the first step? I'm very fortunate in my company today, we have some of the biggest, most successful teams in America working here and my little company. And, and what we coach them through is, you know, that process of growth and that process of scale is so important. And it, and you, and people come to me all the time and say, Jim, how do I sell a team? And it really, it really relates to how you build a team, right? And what you're building when you have a team is not a Zillow buyer, right? So some team leaders have just become the biggest Zillow buyer in the market and they call themselves a team. You're not a team. That's you're far from a team. If Zillow stops tomorrow, you're out of business. Don't tell me you're a team when you're just buying Zillow leads, right? That's ridiculous. So what we, what we have to do is, is do two things. We have to build a system and it's kind of like a franchise building a system. That's what we're selling, right? And how are we building a system that we can consistently and have a predictable model behind it? And then secondly, we have to have a database. So you're selling your database and your systems. And if you don't have a database or you don't have systems, you don't, you don't have anything to sell. So as I'm building my team, I have to be thinking about that at every level, at every step of my building systems, that somebody could step in and buy from me. And secondly, how big is my database and how much am I contacting my database? How big is that getting? And it's always getting bigger, right? That's the only sellable thing I have. And that's the way I, that's the way I approach it personally. And that's the way I think you have to approach it when you're training and coaching people out in the markets. And now, Jim, you, I was going to say, Jim, you went from building your team, designing the systems to then taking that step and becoming a broker owner, when did that transition happen? Like what was going on in your mind when you said, you know what, it's time for me to actually build an office. For me, you know, that, and that's a great question of people. Team leaders often ask me this question, should I'm a successful team leader, should I now go open a brokerage? My answer to them is universally no. And most of the time, it's not the wise decision because you gotta look at the margins of this business. The margin in our business favors team leaders by a mile, right? Owning a brokerage, your margins, best case scenario are one to five percent. This is a person I've been in 32 years on multiple offices, I can tell you it's one to five percent. So that means after everything's been said and done, you're making one to five percent. And so I should go open a McDonald's or now I'd open a Chick-fil-A. I mean, what would you open instead? On the team leader side, you know, the margins are much greater. They're 20 to 30 percent after you're running a good team successfully, right? So just looking at it from a margin basis today, would I go do what I did? I did it then because I wanted a new challenge and I felt like I had already challenged myself as a team leader and I wanted to do something different and unique, but there's there's a lot of different unique in the market today that people can go out and do. All right, so taking it back to your database, right? Taking it back to just the regular agents and stuff, you built your database and you said that the sellability of that is how big your database is and what you do is stay in touch with the database, right? So how big was your database and what did you do to stay in touch with your database? Good question. So what I did then is different than what I do now, but what I did then it was, you know, what we've all been trained to do calls, notes, stopping by client for me was a lot of emails and a lot of old fashioned mailings that went out to people. So I would say calls, notes, pop buys, mailings and events for me. That's like my top five things. Today, we would layer onto that when I'm coaching people today is you've got social media, obviously, huge and remarketing and remarketing to your own database. I mean, that's a big missed opportunity that most team leaders and most solo agents aren't doing is just simple remarketing to their own group. That's loading your email address up of all of your age, all your clients into Facebook as an audience so that when you're posting up things, your own people are seeing your own ads, right? And your own marketing, which is such a simple thing. But eighty nine percent, ninety percent of these team leaders aren't doing that simple thing. So I mean, that would be another thing, you know, obviously, the video is huge and video content is huge right now. Audio as well. I mean, all those kind of content channels that we can we can apply today is completely different than the user. It's nice. Nice. Well, I mean, Juan said in the intro there that you built a company and sold it at the peak. What is it? What are you talking about? Like what happened there? How did you time that so well? Who sells something? Who sells a company at the peak? I get well, I'm there's a lot of luck involved. Number one, you're right. There's a lot of luck involved. You know, nobody has a crystal ball, right? No, no, no, this market either, right? So 2006, the one thing I was watching and I would I would encourage people to watch that I think is an indicator and a little bit of a canary in the coal mine situation is when you're watching cap rates on investment properties. So cap rates on investment properties, you know, five years ago, you know, six, you go seven years ago. When I buy a property back then, my cap rate, I wouldn't buy a property or even look at it without a cap rate of seventy, nine percent. That's what I'd be looking for. And I could get it all day long by property all the time. I'm an investor. Today, it's a struggle to find properties that truly cap when you're really looking at it at five percent, right? Those cap rates, if they go too low, like some markets, it's like four percent now or three percent. It's an unsustainable cap rate model, right? So that that kind of is a little bit of a warning sign. Like not that I don't believe we're going over any cliff. I'm not a doom and gloomer. I'm not at all. I do think we'll have a correction like all marks. We have a correction, right? But that when I saw that in my own market, I was looking at gross rent multipliers and cap rates back in 2006. When I saw those go to a cap rate under five percent. And when I saw in my market, gross rent multipliers hitting 16. In other words, taking the annual rent time, 16 was the purchase price. And historically, it had been 10 or 11. It was like, whoa, wait a second, this is out of whack. I think a correction is coming. I sold almost all my rentals before that and I sold my company. So I did get ahead of it a little bit, a little bit of luck, because you don't know when it's going to happen or if it's going to be a small correction or a big correction. Nobody knew what was going to happen, right? That big massive correction. Nice. So, so, so, so, Jim, when you sold, what did you do with the money? Because obviously you're not going to reinvest it back into real estate. The asset that you think is a little bit overpriced. Did you sit on that and wait until something happened? Or what did you deal with it there? It's a great question. You want to you want to hear a crazy story about this? So actually, I did reinvest it because, you know, you took. I had to do a 1031 or the 31. I'm going to get it with a 50 percent tax rate. Basically, you know, it would have been 30 to 50 percent taxes. I wasn't going to do that. So here's a quick, crazy story. One of my own agents lists a an RV park in my community. And this RV park had been a drive in newbie theater. Catch this. So the last I actually went to it as a kid. And the last movie I saw there, this is going to really be was Smokey and the Bandit. My God, Smokey and the Bandit saw this at the end. So this came on the market. I'm like, this is and they turned it into this really luxury RV park. And the end, the thing was still standing. The the screen was still standing. Well, it hadn't been used in years. So I was able to buy that at a 10 percent cap rate. So I buy it at 10 percent cap rate. I come in, I turn the movies back on. I got to deal with the Motion Picture Association. To do a drive in movies. I'm one of the only two in the state of Oregon. One of the few in the country left for drive in movies. So I've got the slightly little gold mine there that I've still owned to this day. I love the thing I'm out there all the time watching driving movies. I think it's the greatest thing ever. So let me tell you why about the RV park. The RV park was a little bit insulated from the downturn in the market because who goes to RV parks? Who goes to RV parks is you have a million dollar motor coach and you're like at the top, you've made it, right? And what do you do? You go on the road, right? And you drive the country and you're in your million dollar coach. But who else goes to an RV park? Who else goes to an RV park is anybody that's down on their luck that has to move into the RV for financial reasons. So now I'm covering both pieces in this RV park. And that's why I love RV parks. I'm actually buying another one right now. Nice, nice. So that ended up being a really good investment for you, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. So thinking about thinking about you or you noticed the market then that things were getting out of whack and it was time to get out. What about right now? Like, how does that compare to the market currently? The market, there is some analogies to the market currently and cap rates are getting lower now and across the country. It is still it's it's hard to find a five, you know, a deal at five percent today, right? For a cap rate. So that is a little bit of a little bit of a red flag. The thing that's different than the now is interest rates are so low that you can actually make that work, because if I'm paying three percent for money and I have a five percent cap rate, I'm still making two percent on the spread, so I can actually make a ton of money. And I have I have a lot of friends are like, this is the best market ever in my lifetime to buy road properties because of that spread, right? And so there's just a different way of looking at it, because we have market dynamics that are different. The iceberg really is the interest rates. And when you talk about our reaction to the market, what we don't have to be afraid of is our reaction to the market. What we have to be afraid of is the politicians reaction to the market. And when politicians decide that they need to turn the spigot down, what's their leverage to turn the spigot down on the economy? And you mentioned it a minute ago, was it was inflation? If they think we're over inflating, the first thing they're going to do is raise interest rates, and they're already talking about it. The Fed chairman last week said, if the market gets overheated, we're going to we're going to turn on this, we're going to turn up interest rates. And that is where that's the iceberg under the water. We often don't want to think that interest rates are going to rise, but if they start to rise, that's where you get pressure on the capital markets. That's where you can have a problem. I'm I still believe the market has legs because of our supply demand, but it is there is some things to think about out there. And I do agree with you, Ricky, that you got to make haywall the sun shines. This is the best market in our lifetimes. Best market I've ever experienced in 32 years, including 0605, that we should be out there just crushing it. There's such a huge amount of opportunity. So, Jim, I have a question for you. Let's say you're a successful real estate investor, right? Maybe you're an agent that turned the investor and you wanted to well, some of your commissions at the properties. Would you cash out on those properties now and hold on for them until after the market corrects itself, or would you just continue investing as normal being that interest rates are sold out? I wouldn't. I probably wouldn't cash out. I would probably I would start to be very selective in what I'm buying. I don't know that I would be leading into this market with the uncertainty. I would be I'd be really cautious of the market because you don't want to be buying into that kind of market. But it's like buying into the stock market right now. So, you know, the stock market is at the all time high. You have to be really know the company you're buying to buy it. You mentioned Dogecoin. My son just bought a bunch of Dogecoin right before the SNL appearance. And then you got to crash. So I was like, why are you buying that coin, man? You got to be buying real estate. Crazy kid. Yeah, nuts. But, you know, one thing I am talking a lot about with people and you guys alluded to them in the beginning of the show is something I call the difference between client share and market share. And so client share and market share to me is this concept of, you know, we've and I get this question a lot is like, how can I move the needle with lead generation? I need more listings. I need more of this out of the other. What can I do? And what's happened is everybody's looking for instant gratification, right? And we're an instant gratification society. So, you know, Amazon's not 24 hours. It's like two hours. My son in college, he's he's actually going to finish college where I didn't. I'm making him do that. But he he's now getting Taco Bell delivered with Uber Eats. That's how instant gratification is taken over, right? But agents are the same way. Agents want instant gratification and they want it in the form of leads served up to them. Like, give me a lead. I don't want to do any work for the lead. I just want you to give it me, right? And so what happens is every there'll always be a market that will serve a need, right? So when that that need came up, Riltor.com and Zillow said, sure, we'll fill that need and made billions of dollars on our backs, right? It's like we've gotten boiled alive. We're the frogs in the pot getting boiled alive by Zillow right now. We're an absolute war with Zillow and nobody really knows it, right? A very few people are waking up to it. And so when I'm when I'm talking to agents, this idea of market share versus mind share, here's the ultimate list litmus test around this is if I come to your market and I sit down with a hundred homeowners in your market, I just sit down and I'm asking this one question. One question only. I say, if you were to think of the words real estate, what's the first company that comes to your mind? And they answer that Zillow, you've lost mind share, which will lead to you losing market share, right? So what happens with team leaders and solo agents is they wanted to get market share, so they'll pay Zillow for market share. But in the process, they lost mind share. So they became transactional instead of relational, right? We have to take over relationship with our own communities and our own database, otherwise every single time people think of real estate, they think of Zillow, we lost. That's the war we're in right now. That's the ultimate list was litmus test rolls. Do you think that, do you think that there's a world where Zillow has most mind share of the market? However, there's pockets where certain individual agents who in this Zillow dominated world have created their own little mind shares in their own little pockets, their own little markets. Whereas, sure, 99% of America thinks Zillow, but in Birmingham, Alabama, there's this one agent where when people think of real estate, they think him, is that possible? Whereas Zillow still does what they want to do, but there's still agents who can get out there even as a new agent and start building up this mind share of the industry. I do think that's possible. And I think that's where we're headed, honestly. I think it's absolutely possible. And I think that's, this is going to get down to an individual kind of ground war where it's going to be individual, like Ricky Sagan, it's going to be pockets of agents that are going to win this. And it won't be companies. It won't be the remixes. It will not be the wind and mirrors or Donald Scott's or the big companies of the world. It's going to be individual agents that are winning this war or losing this war at a ground, kind of boots on the ground level. 1000% I agree. The biggest thing when I'm talking to agents and I'm coaching people is I'll say, who do you think your number one competitor is in your market? And they'll always name some other agent. And I'll say you're absolutely wrong. Your number one competitor in your market is Zillow because that's who's winning the war right now. It's actually theirself though, because it's really competition with theirself to get out there and build that mind share. Zillow has nothing to do with repeat. Nothing to do with. I'm sure you would agree their ability to go out there and acquire as much mind share as they possibly want. Right? I agree. Yeah. Does Zillow have the power to take it away if you want it and you work for it? Um, the only way they take it away is if you are, if they're there when you're not, right? If they're there when you're not, but if you, but if you want it and you do the things you're supposed to and you work for it and you talk to people, real conversations and you build those relationships and you market and you retarget and you do the things that you're supposed to do, Zillow can't take that away from you. They can't, they can't take that influence away from you. But then as far as influence goes, right? Yeah. Now is there something, now is there something deeper there? Is there a price? Is there a price competitive competition going on there where they could like what do you, you've opened up this can of worms here and you've said we're at a war with Zillow and we've got a market share versus mind share. I really want to hear your thoughts on, you know, like where this is going because so many agents are so scared about that what you're talking about. Okay. But not one single person has told me, okay, this is where we are now point A and here's point B where Zillow has completely dominated the market and made real estate agents obsolete. No one's told me how we get from point A to point B. Do you know how we get from point A to point B? Point A to point B, meaning the agents taking back control of mind share? No, I mean to point B. B means Zillow has completely made real estate agents obsolete. Real estate agents don't exist anymore. We haven't seen it yet, but here's where they're starting that path. I'll tell you that because in many areas of the country, you're seeing now the Ibuyer phenomenon and everybody's mistaking this Ibuyer phenomenon for what it is. Ibuyer is not about Zillow buying houses. That is the Bismut misnomer here. Ibuyer is about Zillow winning the war for seller leads. For listings, yes. For listings, right? So you look at like Phoenix where they entered the market, 20,000 people pushed the button and said, yes, we want an offer on our home in the first six months. How many houses they buy? Less than 200. That's less than 1%. What happened to the other 19,800 leads? They were sold to realtors in that market, right? And now they're going to go in a different path. You're looking at where I'm at or let's go around like Portland, Oregon, Seattle, all over the country where they're not even going to now form these out to these other agents. You know why they're not going to they're not going to do widespread distribution like they do by our leads because they think seller leads are too value, right? So now they're going to say we're only going to give them to the top 100 people that we predetermined to receive seller leads in this market. And that's going to be a higher referral fee. It's going to be more like a 50% referral fee. So what happens? You become like an Uber driver for Zillow almost, you know, on the seller side and you can guarantee that 50% is going to get inched up to 60%, 65%, 70%. You know, it'll start to eat away. And that to answer your question, we're not there yet, but again, we're just getting boiled one thing at a time. Well, here's the thought. Okay. And I think that as soon as digital hit the scene, okay, you had a wave of buyers who chose their agent online. Okay. And I think we've been through a several cycles of that whereas buyers had unsatisfactory service because they picked a random agent they didn't know, and they, they had unsatisfactory service. And now the industry's leaning back heavily back into once they find the property on Zillow or wherever, they're going back to an agent they have a relationship with that they trust to represent them or to help them or to consult them through that, through that transaction or through whatever situation they're going through, they're leaning back from picking their agent digitally to picking their agent that they already have a relationship with. I think that we're having a shift there back, you know, was that way before digital, then digital took it away for a second. Now we're going back. I think that we'll see the same thing with Zillow, iBuyers, whereas the 1900 people that hit that button that realized that the offer was crap, right? They're not going to hit the button again, right? They've been down that road and they've let everybody know online, don't do Zillow instant offers. They're going to offer you 50% of what your house is worth. And we're not going to accept it. We may go through a phase of that, but I don't see how that model is sustainable long term as people realize that they're offering a lot less and then they're just giving your information to a local agent who, there again, quite possibly gives them bad service. They don't know anything about this agent. They would rather deal with their trusted agent, right? That's a good point. I like your point. I think you're right. I mean, it's just a cycle that we're going to go through. It can't last like, of course, yeah, true. They, I mean, they, things could trickle forever. They could trickle, but I don't see where they're going to take that model and that's going to be the new mainstream model. And it's going to completely decimate the industry, you know? So Ricky, to touch base on what Jim was saying before, he said that the agent is becoming the brand. It's not going to be these brokerages or these corporations that own the market share. It's going to be individual agents that dominate alongside with Zillow on a national level. I think what brokers could start doing now to differentiate themselves is they could start competing with Zillow on a local level, meaning Zillow is spending billions in marketing and in advertising on Google, SEO, all these major search engines to gain market share nationally. But why don't agents or team leaders start to get on a local level where you could actually outspend Zillow in your local zip code because no one's going to go that concentrated and focus on their IDX page and number one on SEO and number one on rankings. That's the solution because you don't have to. You literally don't have to the reason why you're doing Google ads and you're doing all this SEO and you're doing all this and that and you're spending thousands of dollars on Google and stuff is just to turn around and get in contact with the property owner. Why not just buy their information for two cents and call them, make friends forever, followed by a weekly email forever on the same day of the week. Yeah, right. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's low cost. I agree. I agree with you. I agree. I think relationship is low cost. Low cost and effective and it's targeted and it gets the exact result that you want for basically nothing. Right. Give me something better. Yeah. There is nothing better. There's nothing better than relationship. Yeah. I agree. Boom. And it costs you zero. It costs you two cents a lead to call and whatever it costs you to send an email out. McDonald's. Their bread and butter is the hamburger, right? They don't make money on all their fancy McRibs and they're all the simple, right? The simple basic stuff is the bread and butter here. One thing, you know, you talk about a danger to the market. You're talking about disruption in the beginning of this. And one other danger of the market that is along these lines is AI, right? So you've got AI rising where if you've got a company like Zillow or maybe a rheology or somebody out there that actually truly invest in AI at a big level. This is where agents have to raise their game to a higher level. I'm not a believer that we should let AI do our work. I think it all comes down to human relationships, 1,000%. But that only works if you're actually doing a human relationship, right? You're actually working a human relationship, making the calls, having the conversations, sending the texts and really having those communications. Where we lose is if there's an AI system out there that Zillow's invested in or realtor.com's invested in that is creating human-like relationships where we're absent from it, right? And I think that's another thing we got to look at as an industry. Like we've got to be really cognizant of the fact that if we're not careful, those kinds of systems can really come up and pre-move on us. I totally agree. I totally agree. I'm not going to be blind to the fact that people said nobody will buy cars online or nobody will buy insurance online. I'm not going to be completely naive to the fact that you can never say never on some of this stuff. 100%, 100%. However, however, I don't know. I mean, at some point, you got to have a conversation, right? I believe someone's got to consult somebody through something. And whether there's a robot talking to you and then they hand it over to a real person with the conversation, as long as that transition there is pretty seamless where it feels real, then I guess, what does that have to see how it all plays out? I think that if you're an agent and you're calling property owners, see what you can do to help them to build your brand, I don't know. I don't know. And if it comes down to price, maybe you do have to cut your price at some point to compete with some of these AI, new technologies, and whatever people charge for this or that. But I do think that through that, you're going to have a lot of unhappy customers and they're going to want real people. I think we're going to go through phases and cycles with some of this stuff, just like we did with the buyers picking agents online. And I think that it's going to be funny to watch the industry yoyo back and forth between digital, real people, digital, real people. So it's going to be funny to watch. Well, they've been predicting the death of our industry since I've been in business for 30 years. Every year it's like, oh, the industry is going to fade. It's going to, you know, the internet never happens because they're going to crush us. Exactly. The best analogy I give to agents is, you know, it's like you go to WebMD, right, and get misdiagnosed. How many of us have been to WebMD, right? But we would never trust WebMD to really diagnose us. Yeah. It's the same thing. I mean, if we really want a human involved with our biggest financial asset. Yeah. I mean, that's the biggest question. Like, are we on the same level as a doctor, you know, or is real estate on the same level as, you know, people wanting as much care, you know, and as much consultation and service as they would a doctor, you know, you know, are they willing to risk their bodies, with WebMD? No. Are they willing to risk their finances and their, you know, and their financing, you know, livelihood with Zillow? I guess that's yet to be seen, right? Is that question not answered? I don't think that question is 100% answered yet, but that's the question, I think. Well, I think that's the question. I think that's what it's going to boil down to. Are we doctor-like? Another category is lawyers, right? Because everybody said legal zoom, lawyers not going to be around. Lawyers are just as well off as ever. You know, they haven't went anywhere. Are we on that level of doctors and lawyers? What do you think, Jim? This is your time to shine. Here's the difference between where there's been industries that have been disintermented. Disinterminated, they're called that, where like travel agents have been disinterminated. Technologies basically replace travel agents, right? To the largest degree, people that sell stocks to haven't been disinterminated to a large degree. I still have a stockbroker, but a lot of people don't, right? So that's where you have the very webbable chunks of a transaction that can be very easily done online. A real estate transaction is not like that. Every single house is unique. I haven't got a friend that sells used cars, and he says it's like a used car. Every used car is different. A new car, you can do it online because every new car is exactly the same. A used car, as soon as it rolls off the lot, it's all game over, man. That car is worth it different for every single situation. And a house is different. The people are different. The situation is different with every single real estate transaction. That's why I don't think our industry will ever be completely just a web-ized transaction. People do buy used cars online, though, huh? Yeah, but I think it's not the same as a new car. I don't think they buy as many as they can. And Ricky, I actually have a used car broker. So my guy, I call him up. I tell him what I want, and he'll go out there and he'll get me a better deal than what the used car guys or whatever it is online could offer you. Yeah, right, yeah. I think it's all on those lines. Yeah, yeah. Well, cool, man. This was a really incredible conversation. Really appreciate you coming on here and sharing your insights, man. You're 32 years' worth of knowledge and sharing with our audience today. Absolutely. My pleasure, man. Great to talk to you guys. Tell us where everybody can find you or where your coaching program is or whatever's going on here with you. Okay. So you can find me anywhere and everywhere at E-Real Estate Coach if you're on Instagram, Facebook. LinkedIn. Now I'm on TikTok. Just made the crossover to TikTok. So you can find me there and subscribe. We also have our coaching platform. First two weeks is free to hop on. One of the most affordable coaching platforms in the country over at e-realestatecoach.com. 16 weeks of intensive coaching every single day and then 150 live coaching sessions a year. So I'd love to have you check that out. It's interesting for you. Phenomenal, Jen. Thank you so much for coming on. We're looking to have you on in the future. Love it. Love to be here, guys. We'll stay in touch. And yeah, be on the lookout for the next episode. All right. Thank you.