 Today's video is a recent interview that I did on the Brent Gove podcast and I was asked questions about the current market, how I'm handling it, how agents should handle this current market and the market shift, or we also dive into some strategies and some different things like that. So this is not like a long interview. I think this one is maybe like 20 minutes or so. But I think it's pretty powerful. And you may listen to this interview and you may think, you know, okay, Ricky, I've heard you talk about how great the market is and I've heard you talk about email marketing and, you know, okay, I've heard all this over and over and over again from you. But you really need to listen to this because sometimes I say things a little differently and you never know where that piece of content is going to be within my ecosystem that hits you a little differently where, boom, something actually clicks for you in your business. And this might be that video you never know. Every single day that I wake up, I feel like I'm a new person. I honestly do. I'm gradually changing. I'm gradually, you know, transitioning into, you know, a different Ricky. And that different Ricky is every day trying to get better, right? I'm just trying to get 1% better every day in terms of my skill level, in terms of, you know, my knowledge of the market and looking at trends and understanding human behavior, how to communicate better, you know, just how to be better on all fronts. So although you may say, well, this is the same information, Ricky, but I say it differently. And today might be the video where you actually finally get what I'm saying and it clicks and it's like, boom, I get it. And now my business is changed forever. And that's kind of the point. But anyway, I digress. Enjoy the interview and shoot me a comment. Hit the like button, all that good stuff. And let me know if you have any questions whatsoever. Here we go. The bottom line is, is email has a 90% organic reach and it's really cheap per organic reach. And that's what excites me about it. You value the numbers for the business and how it works and just the pure math of it. Just check in with yourself. Do you know your numbers? And if you don't know your numbers and get with somebody that could help you with the numbers so you can do the proper planning and you know what your daily activities need to look like. You can literally do the whole look up the numbers and call them in like an hour and a half. And that activity that you can now do within an hour and a half took me from nine o'clock in the morning to like nine or 10 o'clock at night every day. Dude, do you realize how much money I'm making off of, you know, my brokerage? You know, I've got, you know, 800 plus agents. I had to make a really nice check every month. Like, do you realize how much money I'm making here? Hi, this is Eric Laugham. I want to welcome all of you to the Brent Gove podcast. And we have another tremendous guest today. We have Ricky Kruth with us today. He has over 20 years of real estate experience, one of the top real estate agents in the world. I'm so blessed, Ricky, that you were able to join us today and share your wisdom with us on the Brent Gove podcast. Welcome to the show. Good to be here, man. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Well, it was great to have you here in Placer County recently when you came out and spoke to Brent's audience. And I've been following you for many years as so many people have. And the first thing I wanted to ask you about, we're in a different market than what we were with COVID. And I wanted to get your insights for, if I'm an agent, what, how should I be responding to this market or any insights you have about this market from your view? Well, there's a lot to unpack. I mean, you know, the, it's just, it's just the cycles, right? This is, we're in this 10-year cycle. You know, we're in the down, the down part of the 10-year cycle. The difference, there's a big difference in 2008. You know, we're going to have about the same amount of transactions as 2008, right? But the difference is massive because there were actually 4 million active listings back then. So it was, it was just a sheer lack of demand back then. I mean, if the demand was there, the listings were there for people to go by. It was just a sheer lack of demand during that time where it's very opposite now. You know, it's like, if we had 4,000 listings, we would have a lot more than 4.2 million transactions this year. It's like the lack of inventory is a big reason of the lack of transactions. And it was just completely opposite situation. There's a lot of demand being suppressed by the interest rates, of course. And there's a lot to be said about the forecast of interest rates and where everything's headed, you know, as far as that's concerned. But at the end of the day, this is just a normal, you know, this happened in 2008. This happened back in the early 2000s with the .com crash. And now we're sitting here on this, you know, post-pandemic stimulated, you know, inflation that caused interest rates to come up, which affected mortgage rates. So, I mean, you should be looking at this like this is just the greatest opportunity ever, because back in 2008, that was when I really made my, I expanded my footprint so much during that time. And this is just the perfect moment to really expand your market share in terms of the amount of people in the market that know who you are, right? That's market share. And it's just a massive opportunity to do that, because as we all know, it's 110% chance that the market's going to rebound with a vengeance, right? It's going to be, you know, it took it from, you know, 2008 to 2012 or 13 to get back to 5 million transactions a year. That's not, it's not going to be the case this time. Now, the one thing that's kind of like puzzling, right? The one question mark, and like you, like, I heard the guy from Black Knight was asked this. I heard Robert Redkin from Compass. I heard Glenn Kellerman from Redfin. Like, I've heard so many people get asked on TV, how is, you know, in what scenario is inventory in terms of the amount of active listings going to increase? And they're all just like dumbfounded. It's like the one thing. It's like, where is this, where is the inventory we're going to come from that's going to balance the market out? And really, nobody has the answer for that. You know, when interest rates start to come down, we're going to see sellers who have been on the fence that have just been dying to upgrade who are kind of sitting there low interest rates that just don't want to jump from, you know, four to seven right now. But when it gets down to like five and a half, they're going to be like, oh, okay, you know, I'm ready to do this. And but what that creates is a net even because we're adding inventory, but then that person is also a buyer in the market. So it's going to add a listing, but it's also going to take a listing off the market. So that's a new listing. So we're going to see new listings come up, but we're not really going to see the active listings increase, right? Because there again, when interest rates do come down into whatever that magic number is going to be, whether it's six, five and a half, five, whatever it is. And, you know, we're not going to get there for a while. Maybe we get to five and a half next year. Maybe it's 2025, 26. You know, who knows? I'm not trying to forecast it, but we will eventually get there. And when it happens, we have record amounts of 33, 34, 35 year olds, right? So we've got, we've got this like massive group of buyers who don't own homes yet. These are going to be first time home buyers who are going to enter into the market that have been suppressed and and are ready to go buy a home when interest rates hit a certain amount. It's going to be like, boom, they're going to come out of nowhere. And then you're going to have homeowners who are selling to buy. So it's going to add inventory to the market, but we're going to have more buyers. We're going to be an even worse scenario, right? It's going to be even worse than it is now. Like I, I kind of fear that active listings are going to go from 600,000, which is where they are now in the country to 400,000, you know, when interest rates get down to a certain amount. So we'll kind of see how it all plays out. But at the end of the day, this is just a massive opportunity for you to go out while a lot of agents are sitting on the bench and really make your mark, make your name, build your, build your influence in the market. And as the market rebounds, you know, you're going to be the one, right? The more relationships you have, the more friends you've made in the market, the more business you're going to do. It's a real simple stuff. You know what I mean? And now it's just such the prime time to like get in the business. Like if you can get in the business right now, you're getting in at really one of the most depressed moments, you know, in the market in terms of the cycle. And it's like, if you're introduced into this, then you're really going to love it when the market rebounds. If you've been in the business for a while and right now you're keeping your head above water and you're like surviving and not only that thriving, I know agents that have doubled their business in the last 12 months, you know, it's like, wow, in this depressed market, you're doubling your business. You know, that's just phenomenal. But if you're even just treading water and you're building your database larger, that's a huge win, you know, just a massive win. So look, closings happen every day, forever, no matter what, you can go back through the worst economic times ever and see the closings never stopped. They happen by the truckload. It's like if you went back right now to the 2008 statistics, you know, look at 2007, eight, nine, 10, 11, whatever. And you look at how many closings were happening per day in your market. Okay, not nationally, but take it even a step further and look locally and see how many closings were actually happening in your market. Where prices were, you know, how many listings were hitting the market, so on and so forth. You look back at that and now kind of, and you kind of know kind of how it all played out. You look back at that and say, man, that was an incredible market. I wish, I wish I would have been in business back then, but while we're in 2008, while we're in 2007, eight, nine, 10, you know, it's like, man, this is tough, right? When we look back at it, we're like, man, that was amazing. And so that's what we're going to look at, you know, five, 10 years out from now, the agents that are complaining about today's market or saying how tough it is or whatever. You're going to look back at this market and say, wow, that was a good, good, good market, right? And so we got to squeeze it for every last drop that we can, because it's not going to last, right? This opportunity is going to come and go. The market's going to re-expand with or without you. You know, you should be gathering as much as you can so that the re-expansion not only expands the market itself, but also your business, right? Awesome. I love that perspective. And I want to talk a little bit about expanding your network. And I know one of my things that I love about what you do is your email strategy. And I love the simplicity of it. In my business, I have a sales training company. I'm not a real estate agent, but I do a lot of email marketing. So I resonate with that. And I have my own email list that I built up through the years. So could you just like lay out the strategy and explain, you know, why it's so effective for you? Well, I mean, you've got to build, you've got to have your business set up where anybody you come in contact with, never going to forget about you. Right? And you've got to have a system set up. It's real simple so that you can scale it. If you can't scale it, if there's no volume behind what you're doing, you're not going to have a massive business. So when you look around of all the different ways to stay in touch with people, right? There's phone calls, there's text messages, there's email, there's social media, there's direct mail. What else we got? Can you think of anything else? Door knocking. Okay, door knocking. Referrals. Just staying in touch with people though, not just Lee, not Lee, Jen, just staying in touch. You've talked to them and now we're just trying to stay in touch, right? So when you look at direct mail, expensive, right? When you look at calling your database every month or whatever, there's no way you're going to do that ever in a million years. Never happened, especially the larger database gets. Social media is about a 5% organic reach, although everyone should be and needs to be doing it. It's not mandatory. I never did social media in my real estate business and I still don't do social media in my real estate business, but I crush it. Why? Because I understand what the business really is. It's one-on-one conversation and staying in touch forever. So when I look at email, I think, wow, that's cheap and it's a 90% organic reach. 90% of the people in the database are going to see that in their inbox. Whether they open it or not is a different story, but they see it. That's an impression and that means something. So when I look at all the different ways to stay in touch with people, text messaging, text messaging is great, but used in the right context. I like text messaging for massive holiday text messages or one-on-one in the deal. Like, hey, they came back at 305. What do you want to do? I'm not opposed at all to texting out your weekly email. But text is still kind of a strange place, right? Because it's still kind of that intimate place where it's more friends and family. You've got businesses coming there, but it's still kind of strange, right? It doesn't have that feel where it's like, is this a robot? Is this a robot or is this a person? To me, when a text message comes from a business, but with an email, it's like, I'll craft an email. The reason why my email wins so much is two reasons. One, it's every week on the same day of the week forever, so they see that consistency. Number two, I've got a branded subject. There's a couple of things. Number two, it's a branded subject. You know, it's the same subject every week where they see that subject and they know it's mine. I use the preheader text to draw them into open the email. And then the body of the email is like, here's a ton of value, but also here's my opinion on it. And that's where people are winning and losing. They're doing generic emails. They're doing just cold hard. Here's the numbers, but they're not saying they're not giving their opinion behind the numbers. People want to know what you think about it. When they hear what you think, then they start to kind of connect with you versus just, oh, a property sold for this much. Well, a property sold for this much. And I actually saw the property and it had this, this and these upgrades. And I think it was actually a pretty good deal. So congrats to the buyers. Like just things, right? That's on your mind about whatever it is you're trying to send out. That's what makes content win, right? Same thing with social. It's like, you see the generic stuff that agents do, the higher company, and they get two likes versus people that actually are trying to use the media platforms to spread media, right? Here's, here's, here's something I want to teach you and here's why, right? And it's kind of like, I think we're in this place in the internet where there's a lot of, this is what you should do, but there's not a whole lot of here's how to do it. It's like, you should buy a house right now. You know, well, no, tell me that I should buy a house and then tell me how to buy the house, right? Us as agents, we don't, we just assume people know some of the real basic stuff that we deal with every day when the general public has no idea about, you know, a lot of the general public has no idea like what the process is to buy a house, what to look for an investment property, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, and really trying to break down not just what to do, but how to do it. So I impact a lot there, but the bottom line is, is email has a 90% organic reach and it's really cheap per organic reach. And that's what excites me about it. Yeah. And one thing is to look at the numbers. So if somebody listening right now built up, you know, not a huge email list, but say a thousand person list of people that they know and they built it over time, and they, they did your strategy in the Senate once a week, you know, that's, that's 52,000 marketing impressions at essentially zero cost. And I know you, you know, really put effort into your list and your, your list is much bigger than that. You know, you're probably sending out upwards of a half a million emails at essentially zero cost. And in my sales training company, I do the same thing. It's like, I can send out, you know, thousands and thousands of emails. It doesn't cost me anything. Keeps me in front of my clients and my prospects. And so if you're listening right now and you do not have an email list, it's so simple. And you just do it once a week. It's not a big time commitment. And as Ricky's saying, you know, you got a 90% organic reach. It really is a no brainer. If you take a look at the math on this and what that could mean, can you just speak to what it means in terms of actual transactions? I mean, it's one thing to get the marketing out in the organic reach, but what does it mean in terms of like, how many deals you think you get a year from your email list? 1%. So if you got 1000, you're going to get 10 deals, right? 2000, you're going to get 20 deals. And this is with no prospecting, right? This is just organic referrals, past clients, referrals over referrals. So let's just say you want to make a million bucks a year, right? And you, your average price is 500,000 and you get 2.6% commission. Okay. That's 13,000. Okay. So your average deal is $13,000 commission, you want to make a million bucks? Okay, that's 77 deals. Okay. So we know we're going to close 1% of our database every year without prospecting. We may have to prospect to build the database, but as the database is built and these emails have been going out, we're going to close about 1% of the database every year without prospecting. So in that scenario, when you get your database up to 7,700 people in your database that have been getting this weekly email every week on the same day of the week forever, you're going to be closing 77 deals a year without prospecting. You'll be making a million bucks a year. So you can kind of work the numbers like that. I'm going to close 1% of my database, you know, every year that I'm using this method. It's a very consistent, very consistent results with all the thousands of agents who have went through the program and implemented the strategy. They all rave about it and they all close 1% of their database. Now, the 1% that's closing, if you've got 1,000, you're like, oh, what do you do with 10 deals? Well, that's from the database. You're still prospecting, remember, and you may close 20 prospecting and then you got your 10-firmary database. So that's 30 for the year and you added another 1,000 that year. So next year, you're going to close 20 from the database and another 20 or 30 from prospecting. So now you close 50 the next year and added another 1,000. Then you're going to get 30 the next year from your database and close another 35 from prospecting. So now you got 65, you added another 1,000 and the list goes on and on and on. So you can kind of see how it plays out. And when you get your database up to the number that you're making the amount of money you want to make, then you're done. For me, it was to make a million bucks. So the average price for me was like 400 when I hit that. So I had to have about 100 deals. And so I had, when I got to 10,000 in my database, which is 2017, that was the first year I made a million bucks. And then I quit prospecting. And guess what? I sold 100 properties every year after and I made a million bucks every year after no cold calls, no social media, no checking on people, no direct mail, no client parties, no open houses, nothing. Just weekly email and get two inquiries, close two deals, two deals a week, two deals a week, two deals a week, close two deals a week since 2014, you know, every single week on average. Some weeks I would close 10, some weeks I would close one, on average I would close two a week every week since 2014 until I got out of production, which was about a year and a half ago. So and I still do the weekly email and my dad handles the day to day and we still knock down deals every week. Yeah, probably listening what I loved about Ricky, what you just shared there, like you know your numbers, you were going through that real quickly. And so you're, like you, you value the numbers for the business and how it works and the, just the pure math of it, you know, spending transactions at this average commission, this size email list produces, you know, 1%. And so as you're listening to this right now, just check in with yourself. Do you know your numbers? And if you don't know your numbers and get with somebody that can help you with the numbers so you can do the proper planning and you know what your daily activities need to look like. So that was real gold there. And one other thing I always encourage all of you listeners to listen to the podcast multiple times. And you know, Ricky, somebody who is, it's not that he read about it in a book or he went to a seminar and learned about he's, he's doing the deal. Like he is the real deal. And so there's some tremendous content that if you listen to what he's sharing, listen to the recording multiple times, share this recording with your organization so they can benefit from this knowledge as well. The last thing that I, and I might have two more questions, but my second, my one next question I want to ask you is about when, back when you were in production and it wasn't just the, like you didn't, you were, when you got to the, the email list to the point where you didn't have to prospect anymore, let's go a little bit for that. You're still prospecting. Like what did a day look like for you? How many hours a day were you working? What time are you getting up? Like what did it actually look like for you? Yeah. So I would hand dial because we didn't have auto dialers, right? So I would hand dial a hundred numbers and I would start calling about nine o'clock and it would take me until about three in the afternoon. There's some people that say they hand dial a hundred numbers in like two, three hours. It's complete garbage. Like I've done it so many times. I know for a fact how long it takes to hand dial a hundred numbers. And so I did that for, that was my day was hand dialing a hundred numbers from nine to three from three to five. I would like follow up. I would write 20 handwritten letters every day. And I would kind of do my follow up and everything. And then like around four or five, when I got through with that, I started the process of looking up the hundred numbers I would want to call the next day. So it would take me from five o'clock to about like eight or nine to do that because I had a reverse lookup and copy and paste addresses and names and white pages.com and Spokio and Bigfoot and all these different websites that I had. Now you can just go on RedAx and just boom. Just click a button and have thousands of phone numbers that are actually way higher quality than I had back in the day. And then hit another button and just auto dial them and just cross through a hundred in about an hour and a half. So you can literally take what used to take me all day and night. You can literally do the whole look up the numbers and call them in like an hour and a half. And that activity that you can now do within an hour and a half took me from nine o'clock in the morning to like nine or 10 o'clock at night every day. And now you can compress a ricky day back in the day into just an hour out one to two hours in the morning and then have your whole day to actually crush whatever I was accomplishing back when I was building my business. It's like in today's world with technology you can literally compress time so much. You can leverage so much now with technology. And the funny thing is nobody hardly anybody really uses it. There's only a small percentage of agents who actually take advantage of the tools that are available for us to go out there and compress that time compared to what it used to be. And really, I mean, you could build a ricky career. It took me 15 years to get to a million bucks a year. You could literally get there in, you know, eight years, you know, like half the time if you took advantage of, you know, the tools that are right there in front of you. So it's interesting, right? So that was my day back then. Okay, so totally different from what it would look like today. Totally different from what you know agents are doing now. You know, now it's like wake up, take advantage of the technology, make your calls all morning, and then work on your marketing all afternoon. I didn't really do any marketing. I did handwritten letters, right? I might have did some postcards here and there. But in today's world, right, you've got social media at your, at your, in the palm of your hand that you can literally for free reach so many people, you know, in your market. So yeah, it's interesting, bro. It's super interesting when you compare like a ricky day back in the day to, you know, what you can do in today's world. Well, Brent and I sure appreciate you coming out to California to speak recently and you've been on Brent's team call before you're here today on the podcast. So thank you from both of us. And is there anything that you'd like to offer our listeners? We have a lot of real estate agents that listen to the show as a next step to connect with you. Listen, yeah, let's see, where can you guys go? Instagram is really kind of my favorite platform. I post there a lot. I not only post like how to for real estate agents, but also just a lot of market information, you know, kind of like a real estate market nerd. I'm always like studying the housing market and trends and stuff like that. But Instagram is a good place. I got YouTube. I got zero to diamond.com where the free coaching program is. And if anybody wants to shoot me a text and ask me a question or connect with me, that's 312-251-312-8844. But yeah, anything I could do to help you guys. I was the first completely free real estate coach for agents out there. Just saw a big need for it. The missions to reduce the failure rate in the industry one agent at a time. And we've accomplished that and we continue to accomplish it, but I'm happy to connect with anybody and do what I can do to help you.