 You only have to get it to a certain point. It's not like you have to do this for the rest of your life. I got up to where I was making a million bucks a year, and that was the year I never made another cold call again in my life. But I continued to make a million every year. Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for Ricky! Garoo! He is an investor, a speaker, and soon to be remembered, in my opinion, as a legend in the industry. The cool thing about what he was doing was he was documenting everything. Like, he would post his calls, his work he was putting in, the strategies he was sharing, everything. Most of these people are only talking to one agent, and they're doing the business with them. My job is to sell the listing, and I said, why do you feel like that's your job? Right? Everybody, hold on, stop shopping. Sir, you would? Great. Come right over here, let me get your information. Man, you're a taker, come on over here, let me get your information. Like, this is before it's happening. This is the moment right here. I want you to understand that no one can ever take your skills away from you. Once I crushed real estate, I was like, okay, let me crush social media and understand this game, is you do not want to sell real estate forever, I promise you. And our next speaker, he is a legend in the visionary and we're very, very honored to have him. I watch a bunch of his videos on YouTube, on Instagram. Actually, every day when I wake up, I see his video. So it gets me pumped up. And he has sold over a thousand homes himself as a solo agent in Alabama, and flipped over a hundred homes in his career. And super knowledgeable, I met him at our EXP conference and chat with him privately, saw him speak on stage. And we're just very fortunate to have him share the stage with us and to share his wisdom. So without further ado, that's welcome Ricky Karoo. Hey guys. Hey, good to be here. Good to see all of you. Number one, Ron, that was amazing, bro. I don't know you, but that was really good. And it kind of helped me kind of understand where I wanted to take this talk today because I have really no idea where we were gonna go with it. But he really gave you some nuts and bolts there when it comes to organizing your, Lino Lee Jin, your follow-up. And that was very specific. I really love that. So I'm gonna play directly off of what he just told you to try to maybe fill in the blanks a little bit around some of his stuff. And hopefully between, and I didn't see the other speakers or whoever, you know, Sean's gonna be after me, but hopefully this will kind of help you kind of put it all together. I think that number one, we need to be thinking a lot about how we're communicating with our clients. Okay, we're really trained to close the deal. And I loved what Ron said with, you know, don't ask them if they're pre-qualified and stuff like this. What I want you to think about, okay, I wanna talk about communication. I wanna talk about a little bit of follow-up and maybe help you simplify that process as well as like where this can lead to in terms of your career towards a more residual type business. Because a lot of people think buying leads, cold calls, door knocking, all that stuff. And they're looking at it so singular, right? So, you know, shallow that they're not realizing that if you do this enough to build your database to the point that you're making the amount of money you wanna make, you don't have to do that anymore. Like if you really crush the cold calls, the leads you, the online leads, the social media, whatever it is you do that you're thinking that you do to build your business and grow your database, you only have to get it to a certain point. It's not like you have to do this for the rest of your life. I want you to understand that. The problem is most of us don't like that part so we don't do it as much as we should and it drags out for the rest of our life. But if I can get you to understand how if you go all in and give it three to five hard years, you'll get to a place where you don't have to worry about leads, deals ever again. I got up to where I was making a million bucks a year and that was the year I never made another cold call again in my life. But I continued to make a million every year because I experienced what I'm telling you. So I kinda wanna touch on that as well. One thing I found interesting in some really recent statistics, which I don't know what to believe honestly with statistics anymore. I feel like I'm being manipulated from a lot of the things that I've read here lately. But I'm gonna go with this because I feel like it's more than likely true. 71% of buyers, they went with the very first agent that they talked to, okay, 71%. The study also showed 81% of sellers went with the very first agent that they talked to. I think that could play into this lawsuit and stuff how, you know, sellers are unhappy about things. It doesn't even seem like they're getting a second opinion. Where does the responsibility lie on them? But I don't wanna point fingers. I wanna be the one that says, okay, here's a problem. Let me help you, Mr. Seller, since I realized since I'm in the business, you probably only talk to one agent. Let me help clarify and help you understand all of your options. Totally different conversation. What I'm getting at is that most of these people are only talking to one agent and they're doing the business with them. I want you to understand that and I want you to put yourself in the position to talk to more people than anyone. Do you know that being a real estate agent is predicated on you talking to people that you do and don't know to help them buy real estate? Okay, that is the premise of your job. But you know what your job really is? We were on a Zoom call. I was on a Zoom call just before this and the agent said, I have this overpriced listing, right? And I'm kind of frustrated because my job is to sell the listing. And I said, why do you feel like that's your job? That's not your job. Your job is not to sell the, and I said, this is where we're getting confused as an industry, as agents. That's not our job. Our job is to help the seller or the buyer, whoever we're representing, do whatever it is they're trying to do, right? They may not care if it's said, they may be okay with it being overpriced and not selling. Now our job isn't selling the listing. It's making sure it's on the market if it sells it sells, because that's what the seller wants. So we got to understand what our job is. Our job is to talk to more people than anyone else and if you want to be the number one agent, you just got to talk to the most people. If you do that through social media, online leads, door knocking cold calls, direct mail, I don't care how you do it. You can go to Walmart and say, hey, everybody a technician, right? Everybody hold on and stop shopping, right? I have an announcement to make here. I'm a real estate agent here locally. My name's Ricky. How are you guys doing? You know, get them all to applaud and stuff and be like, let me ask you guys a question. Like, does anyone here, would you guys be interested in a rental property or some really good cash flow if I had one? Sir, you would, great. Come right over here. Let me get your information. Man, you're a taker. Come on over here. Let me get your information. Like I don't care how you do it, but you got to do it. You can't sit and hide behind a desk or hide and make excuses. I'm doing this. I'm doing that. I'm working on my website and getting my business cards just right. I'm writing some letters. Fuck that. We got to go, man. And right now with the market being down, this is as slow as it's gonna get. We're at the down moment of the 10 year market that crashes every 10 years, right? It's been like 15 this time. And we're at the down moment of the yearly cycle. In the fall, price is softened, days of the market go up, listings go up, all the everything that's happening right now happens every year. It's a little more extreme because of interest rates and this, that and the other. But the fact is that this is the down moment of both the 10 year cycle and the yearly cycle. Do you realize the opportunity right now to expand your business? Because have you guys heard of a reverse crash? The housing market is going to explode, all right? How many of you have a buyer or how many of you have 10 buyers or more who say, who want to buy, who are waiting on prices to come to L? Okay, how many of you have sellers who are dying to have a bigger house but they can't because they're locked in the lower rates? Okay, that is pent up demand. It's massive. And rates have come down like 60 basis points in the last week, okay? They're gonna go back up. Okay, they're gonna go back up. They're gonna fluctuate. They may even go back up to eight before they come down for real, for real. Who knows in the short term, but we know long term over the next 12, you know, six, 12, eight, 10, 24 months, like we're gonna get some relief and bro, the longer it takes for rates to come down, the more massive that this way of pent up demand is gonna be released. I want you to be in a position, right now is the moment, right now. Not when the way, when you think it's the best time to take advantage of a massive market swing. While it's happening or before it's happening, before it's happening, okay? What part of the cycle are we in right now? Free happening. This is before it's happening. This is the moment right here that you have to be the one talking to the most people, okay? So let's talk about communication. When you talk to a prospect, here's my rule of thumb. When I'm talking to a prospect, what are the questions I would ask this prospect if they were my mother, if they were my father, if they were Sean Cacosta, if they were my best friend from high school? What, how would I talk to them? Because that's what I, that is how I wanna talk to my prospects. I wanna treat them like they're my mom, dad, brother, cousin, best friend from high school. That's how I talk to my prospects. How are you doing? As in, I really want to know. See, some sales guys will say, don't ask how you're doing because everybody knows you don't care. And you can tell me you really care, but I know you really don't. Well, that's just a totally different philosophy for me. They're in a whole different planet, right? Because you gotta understand that every person you talk to, you're literally not talking to one person about one deal. You may call an expired, and that expired, you may be thinking, listing, I'm not. I'm thinking maybe they wanna buy, maybe they wanna do this or that, but at the end of the day, that relationship with that person, regardless if they buy or sell today or not, is worth 10 to 20 deals to me over the life of my career, over the next 12 years, 15 years, whatever. And the more of those I can stack up, then the closer I can get to knocking down 1,000 deals over the next decade, let's say, as a single agent, or 1,000 deals a year if you're a team, however you wanna slice it up. But it's all gonna come down to the people that know you, that love you, that wanna do business with it. 43%, which was the largest percentage, by the way, of buyers and sellers, picked their agent through a referral. It wasn't online, 14% did it online. They picked their agent online, 14%. 43, it was through a referral from a friend or family. Okay? And what sad is, it was only like, 12 or something like that, like it was repeat business. They went back to the agent they used before. Most everybody wants to get that referral from someone that they trust. The whole game is, how do I make everybody feel like we're family? And how do I scale that? So I hope that kinda helps you. I only have 20 minutes here to kinda like, try to flip your mind a little bit. But hopefully that kinda helps you at least a little bit. I'm happy to answer questions and stuff. The next thing is, can we simplify this entire follow up in terms of building brand? Okay, let's simplify it. For me, and I learned this back in 2007 when I started doing it, if I did a weekly email on the same day of the week forever, that's it, dude. Like, nobody ever forgets who I am. I get a 90% organic reach. I get to tell people my opinions on stuff. Anybody that's doing generic content, you have a company doing the email for you or doing your content for you, with all due respect, you suck right now. And that, it's as in, you don't suck. You just suck right now. If you aren't giving your opinions on what's happening in the market, what you think about the new restaurant, what you think about the new development coming in, what you think about prices, if you're not giving your opinions on stuff, people are gonna tune out of you and they're gonna be watching, they're gonna spend that attention on people who are giving their opinions on things. You're gonna lose to the agent that's actually putting in the work to actually create content around who they are and their opinions on what's happening in the local market. That's another thing. People are sending out stuff on national statistics. Nobody cares about that. It's the numbers are so skewed, they wanna know local stuff, right? So let's just back up for a second so I'm like screaming and going a bunch of different directions, right? Let's bring it all together here. Communicating, okay? You gotta talk to the only thing between you and a million bucks a year, I can promise you. It's just thousands of one-on-one conversations with people in your market, digitally or face-to-face or over the phone. It's thousands of one-on-one conversations developing those relationships with people in your market. You can spread that out over the course of 100 years or you can do it in three to five years. Me, I wanted to get it done now so I just got it done immediately. I realized that all the marketing and money spent on direct mail and open houses and all that brought me back and buying leads. All that brought me back to the same exact place which was having a conversation with someone in my market. So when I realized that I was like, I can bypass all the time, money and energy I'm spending trying to market to try to have conversations and I could just go straight to the conversations because I can get people's information for a penny, pick out which properties I wanna sell, call the owners and create lifelong relationships forever. Not everybody's built like that and I understand. But you gotta figure out what your thing is to have thousands of one-on-one conversations with people in your market yesterday. Do 10 a day, 20 a day. But you gotta get there if you wanna get to the mill. It's gotta be about volume at some point. How much time do I have? You don't have seven minutes or so. It's got, at some point, ladies and gentlemen, your business has to be about volume of people that know who you are if you wanna scale. A lot of us chalk up a lot of time spent giving great customer service and you're using that as a crutch and an excuse not to go after the masses and you know it. You're using it as an excuse. I'm giving great customer service. I'm spending all this time and doing all this stuff. When you could have spent one-tenth of the time with that person, gave them the same warm and fuzzies that you're giving them now and spent that same time across 10 people giving them all 10, the same warm and fuzzies you gave the one person. You have to learn how to multiply your time across a lot of people. This is a skill. In terms of skills and like future of industry and lawsuits and technology and blockchain and AI and all of the things out there, I want you to understand that no one can ever take your skills away from you. Meaning that if you go out here and really grind, learn this business, crush it, develop incredible skills in terms of building business, sell skills, marketing, finance, the whole nine yards, no one can ever take that away from you. If you crush it in real estate, this is the hardest industry to get into, period. It's the lowest barrier of entry, but 90% of people fail. It is the hardest industry. If you can crush it in real estate, you can go do any industry you want to do. I promise you, right? You can go and once you do crush it, that's what you will do. You'll go do whatever you want to do because you'll have that superpower. That's what I did. And once I crushed real estate, I was like, okay, let me crush social media and understand this game. And then you see what I did. It just took the same thing I did in real estate and applied it over here. And that's what each and every one of you are gonna do. Another thing you need to think about because I'm just trying to jam as much value as I can into this is you do not want to sell real estate forever, I promise you. You may say you do, but you don't know that you don't yet. Okay, it'll come to you. What I want you to realize is that you need to start buying rental properties now. Your goal should be buying one rental property a year, two rental properties a year, three rental properties a year, one every other year, whatever. It should be a goal of yours that you're always saving up for another rental property and build that portfolio. Start now so that in 10 years, when you're burned out for real estate, you can continue selling, but not because you want, not because you need to or have to because you want to for a little while longer and then you can step out completely. It's the end game. Not everybody can become a social media superstar and build businesses online, okay? But everybody can go out and buy rental properties and build a portfolio and ride off into the sunset over the next decade. And it's something everybody needs to think about because most agents only see that horizon of being the number one agent, but they don't see past that. Make a million bucks a year as an agent, earned income as an agent. They don't see past that. And I want to open up your mind a little bit to seeing past that a little bit, okay? So continuing to recap one last thing. I want to make it really, really clear on this communication part is that stop thinking transactions like the agent that I was on the Zoom with who said his job was to sell the listing. No, it's not. Your job is to help the client do whatever it is they're trying to do. And that's not always to do the deal. So I want you to be more open minded when you're talking to your clients and realize this is a lifelong relationship that I'm trying to build here to not only do this deal with them whenever they decide it's time to go forward but to do the 30 deals behind it through repeat and referral business. Because remember, 43% of people picked their agent through referrals. That's massive. 71% of buyers and 81% of sellers went with the first agent they talked to. They didn't interview three agents. So you gotta be A, a great relationship builder and B, first to market. You need to be the very first agent that buyers and sellers are talking to because chances are 71% buyers and 81% sellers you're gonna be the agent that they pick. But you can't do that if you're hiding behind your computer or chalking it up to whatever it is that you guys do all day. Okay, I'm, I can't breathe anymore. That's awesome. Was that good guys? Does that help? Let me know in the comments if that was helpful and you wanna do a little Q and A and we're gonna do some at the end or what? Would you stay till the end or are you leaving? When is the end? We have another half an hour, 20 minutes, 25 minutes. We'll see, 4.58. I'm not gonna be able to do that. Listen, if you guys, if somebody has one, anybody have like one or two questions you guys wanna ask Ricky? You're gonna ask in the chat too. Anybody? Well, let me just say this you guys, if you're not following Ricky online, just following. I'm telling you, this guy brings, he brings the gold every day. All right, and he's just an implementer and he brings so much content to light. Just follow Ricky, okay? He's a rock star. Oh, question. Now, how to respond to someone like Sean saying that to you guys. There's a questionnaire. Yeah. Yeah, there. You have to turn it on, you have to turn it on. Hi, my name is Lance. Nice to meet you, Ricky. So why is it a good market to buy rental right now? Good market, the market that you live in more than likely. I buy rentals right here where I live. I just bought five new constructions and an existing. I've got about 40 doors, but I just, I'm closing on three acres at the end of the year to build 46 unit apartment complex. It's all like a couple of miles from my house. Yeah, I see not Southern Cali. There's definitely markets where it's not cash flowing because of prices and stuff like that. I'm in Alabama, so I guess it's easy for me to say. So pick some, pick, that's a good question, right? I'd have to do some research and say, okay, like out of the country, where's the, where's the lower end towns and cities that are up and coming, right? That have a low cost of living and, you know, but have a lot of new strut, new construction. People are moving there because of jobs and stuff. I'd have to do some research to answer that. Hey, come invest in Gulf Shores. Like it's fire. All right, thank you. I have an agent there. I know an agent there. Yeah, he's pretty good one too. I can throw in, if Ricky's right, in hindsight, I would have done it maybe a little bit differently. We have to file tax returns in seven different states because of the differential properties that we own. It's really problematic to manage properties long distance unless you have a great relationship with the property management company. Yeah, it's challenging to say the least. And it's hard to go to seventh level with that because you always get sucked back into it, don't you, Ricky? Yeah, yeah, cool, man. You guys got like one more, maybe like a real estate agent business type question. Yeah, one second. One second. Hey, Ricky, for your weekly emails, how do you come up with topics or how do you do it all in a month and you just create it or you do it every week? So I actually simplified this really, really well, okay? Everybody write this number down and just text me at this number. All right, here we go. One, two, three. Three, one, two. Up, sorry, two, five, one, three, one, two. Two, five, one, three, one, two, eight, eight, four, four. Let's see. Two, five, one, three, one, two, eight, eight, four, four. Just text me there and put your information in. You'll get a link and it'll be like a link tree. And one of the link tree links is literally my weekly email. But I have a four week weekly tip. You can actually see every email I did every week for the last year on that link. Just look at it and copy it. But if you want to use my templates, I have a four week template system where you can just rotate it every month. Like week one is stats of the month. Week two is restaurant of the month. Week three is deal of the month. Week four is news of the month. And you just plug and play, put your opinions in there. A new picture every week and boom. So people have been liking it because it made it pretty simple as far as coming up with weekly content. But I'll give you a tip though, a hot tip. People love, people love new listings. Like if you just have the new listings on there every week, like here's the new listings. I have new listings every single week on there. There's a link to it. People love watching the new listings, watching the closings as they happen. You know, that gives you evergreen, like forever content within that as far as the market goes. And then you just add one little thing. A lot of you are doing too much in your email. Just do one subject because people literally look at sales emails for one second. If they can't click and go like this and see what they need to see and get out of there, then you're going to lose. They're not going to open your email ever again. If they have to go like this or put on glasses or re-paragraphs, they're out. So just go there, follow my little thing. If you don't use the template system, just look at my emails I'm doing and just copy what I'm doing. Did you use constant contact to do that or? Yeah. Great, thank you. Hey, enjoy the guys. Sean, good to see you, bro. Let's catch up. Ricky, great to see you, brother. I could listen to you all day long. I was just like, I was getting to tell Jack just, I'll give up my time. Let me do something. All right, well, thank you so much, Ricky. That was so much go there. And if you haven't followed Ricky yet, just go follow his YouTube and Instagram. Like what Sean was saying, a lot of valuable information and you'll wake up with a bunch of energy too. And he actually has a program called Zero to Diamond as well. You can go Google and join his coaching program. He offers free coaching.