 Inventory doesn't matter to us as agents. Inventory goes down, but guess what? Uh, transactions skyrocket. Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for Ricky! Karoo! He is an investor, a speaker, and soon to be remembered, in my opinion, as a legend in the industry. The cool thing about what he was doing was he was documenting everything. Like, he would post his calls, his work he was putting in, strategies, he was sharing everything. To grow, you have to stair-step your years. And then the wave is going to hit. You're going to wish you would have gotten listed. You're going to be busy. It's going to be great. Well, are you a real estate agent? I mean, what are you doing? Why am I going to set an appointment to go to a house when I don't even know why they're, what they're trying to do and why? Email is social media. Every single lead gen activity works. Every single marketing thing works. Every single script works. Every, every single thing works. You need to treat the agents in your market like their family do. I'm using the properties and excuse to get into a conversation to see if I can connect with someone. All right, you guys. So everyone's super excited, Ricky, to have you here. They're like, hey, how did you get him on this thing? I'm like, he's fast. Nice, Jorge. All right, you guys. Let's see. We've got 18 agents. So yeah, tell me about your group here. So we actually, we just started this mastermind a few months ago, just, you know, wanting to collaborate with agents from different real estate companies in different states. We have people, most of a lot of us are in California, but we do have a lot of people in different states as well. The market is shifting the way it did with interest rates. We just found that like collaborating is just giving people more ideas on how to grow their business, what's working, what's not working and really like trying to help people celebrate their wins just because the markets, you know, definitely changed quite a bit that, you know, we want to make sure people are setting themselves up. And, you know, one of the things that we're trying to do is on bi-weekly bringing speakers to help, you know, navigate through these different times. But a lot of the people here, you know, do a lot of social media. Some people have questions on cold calling or, you know, different areas and email marketing. So that's why I thought it would be good to have you on because you're really big on those, you know, three things. And so I did let everybody know that you wanted this to be somewhat interactive so that you can address some of the questions that we have. And then one of the things that, you know, I'm sure a lot of people have questions on is the big topic on like the NAR buyers agency and stuff. So, I mean, I think, you know, we can open it up to questions or like, you know, if you feel like there's a certain topic that you want to talk about, you know, we definitely want to go with that. So this is agents from all different brokerages all over the country, kind of, that's cool. That's cool. I could ramble for hours about a lot of different things. I think, you know, I think the most important thing is number one, the opportunity that's right in front of us right this second. I'm really here lately been very loud and all in on how busy January is going to be. Every year we see a surge in pending deals and closings, you know, pending's going in the first second week of January and then closings happening the first second week of February. And just right this second with, you know, we're having, I mean, from now we've got two and a half full weeks, full work weeks before Christmas. It's just like most agents are laying down right now and those are the agents that are normally just going to do the same amount of volume every year that they're really going to grow because to grow, you have to stair step your years, which means you have to take advantage of the down part of the year to grow your database. Your business is correlated to the size of your database and how you nurture your database. So, you know, when it's slower, you have to take advantage and build your database bigger. That way the next busy season, you have a bigger database than the last busy season. And so then your income stair steps every year. What you see is people slowing down with the season. So their business just kind of flat lines and they just stay at two or 300,000 forever and they don't know why. Well, it's because they quit building their business. So right now is like the most crucial time. And honestly, in January, everything's going under contract. There's so much pent up demand. We don't even realize it because we're just kind of, it's just so underneath. It's such shadow demand, but everything's going under contract. And so for me, what I would be doing right this second is just stacking as many listings as I possibly can in December. Because on January hit, you're not going to have time to go get the listings. And then the wave is going to hit. You're going to wish you would have gotten listings. You're going to be busy. It's going to be great. But you could have been five times more busy if you would have taken advantage of now. You know, now is the moment to take advantage of what's going to happen in January and February. So that's kind of where I am on the whole thing right this second. I'm just being really loud about that right this second. But yeah, let's open it up. I'd love to hear you guys, where you're running into issues, bottlenecks, problems, robomps, and stuff like that. And maybe I could help you guys or give you some insight. We have Erica Poindexter has a question or. Yeah. My question is where would you spend your time in the next two weeks before Christmas to find those listings? Because our market is like you talk about pent up demand. Like we have, we still have no inventory in Sacramento, like at all. So it's a two part question, right? It's inventory and it's also where do you get listings? OK, so just inventory. Inventory doesn't matter to us as agents. OK, because let's just look at the theoretical world that interest rates come down. OK, interest rates come down. So what's going to happen there? Well, if interest rates come down, say five and a half. OK, let's just think hypothetical come out of five and a half. What happens in that world? What happens is, is all these trade up sellers that have been dying to upgrade their home, they list their home, it adds to inventory, but then they buy a home. It takes a property off of the market. So it's a net even for active listings, but then all the first time home buyers rush to the market and take a bunch of properties off the market without adding anything to the market. OK, so that's a net negative for active listings. So in that world, guess what? The trade up seller created two transactions and the first time home buyer created one transaction and we had a net one negative for every three transactions. You have a net negative one listing, active listing. So it's three transactions to one negative listing and active listings, which means what? Inventory goes down, but guess what? Transactions skyrocket. So like we just, you can't sit around worried about inventory or whatever. The market is going to work itself out and transactions are going to explode while inventory drops. It's going to happen. A lot of people think, well, when rates get down, sellers are going to list their properties. It's going to make inventory go up and prices go down. What about the home that the seller that listed their property is going to buy? It's a net even and then you got first time home buyers out there. It's going to drive prices up and inventory down. But anyway, the answer to that question is who cares about inventory? Closings are going to happen every single day no matter what the market's doing. It's our job to expand the footprint of our personal brands in our market as big as possible so that as many people know who we are as possible, that way when they decide to do something, they're going to call you. That's the name of the game. Outside of that, like the market and transactions and inventory and rates, we can't worry about that. That's just something we can't. That's out of our hands. Now, where do we get listings? Are you asking like where do babies come from? Where do listings come from? No, what activities would you do in the next two weeks to help you maximize that time? Like what type of leads would I go after? Yeah, like what would you go after that would be faster? Because I think that's my inventory question is that because we don't have a lot of sellers, like our business this year have been deaths, divorce. You do have a lot of sellers. Here's part of the thing, though. You do have a lot of sellers. What you have to realize is that you're building your 2026 business right now. It's not just 2024 or even December 2023. It's like 2026 is what you're planting seeds for. And the more those seeds you can plant now, the bigger your 2026 is going to be. So realize that first, it takes time to like build a relationship, meet the person, great first impression, nurture them. It takes time for all that to mature and blossom into a deal. But where can you get stuff faster? Because a lot of people are sitting on low rates, can't find anything to buy. And so you have to be a little more targeted with what you're doing. One thing that I think could be an opportunity is second home, absentee owner, vacation-type properties. I don't know if you guys are in that kind of market. But those people don't live in the home that you're calling about. And if you have a buyer, find a buyer. It's easy to find a buyer. Say, hey, would you be interested in a great deal on a house? Yeah, great. What would you like? OK, cool. Then go find all the absentee owners that own that type of house and say, hey, I got somebody that might be interested in your house. You interested? They're not living there, so they don't have to move out of the house and sell that house. It's just things like that, creating scenarios that make sense, that you have to be really selective with this right now. Another thing I like is expires, not just new ones, but we've found a lot of success with these two to 18-month-old expires. People that were going to sell at one point for whatever reason, and they didn't, and they never did. I mean, those are gold. And you just say, hey, I see you were trying to sell this house at one point. Whatever happened? And you get them to tell you the story. A good rule of thumb, guys, is when you're talking about it, this is how I think about it. You guys can tell me if you think it's weird. But when I'm thinking about how I communicate with my prospects, listing appointments, things of that nature, I think if this were my mother, what would I say to her? How would I talk? What would my demeanor and body language and tone and speed? How would I communicate if this was my dad, my brother, my uncle? When I realized treating and talking and actually caring about people like they were my family, when I realized that, it was all over for me. My business exploded because it took the transaction out of the equation, and it put in the equation, what is this person trying to do and why and how can I help them do it? Because I know closings are going to happen every day, no matter what, and business is unlimited. So if I just value the people over the money, then I can build a career, which is what I want you guys to do, build an entire 20, 30-year career that you can look back and say, man, I made $100 million, and I'm proud of what I did. Yeah, to answer your question, just be very targeted with trying to create situations. As real estate agents, we can literally create our own demand. You can make your own market out of thin air. You've got a buyer, you can find a buyer anywhere. You can get a Walmart and be like, hey, everybody, announcement, everybody stop shopping for two seconds. I need to let you guys know something. I'm a local real estate agent. Would anybody here be interested in a great deal on a rental property? Now that's kind of extreme, but I'm just making a clear example. You can find a buyer anywhere. People are interested in real estate. Whether they want to pay today's prices or want the type of property, that's something you can work through, but getting the person on the hook is the first part of it. Most agents you talk to, you're like, I'm like, hey, send letter, send handwritten letters to sellers. For all the buyers you can't find a property for, send handwritten letters to all the sellers and say, hey, would you consider selling your home to a prospect of mine? And I'm like, what kind of buyers you got? I don't have any buyers. Well, are you a real estate agent? I mean, what are you doing? The whole premise of your job is to talk to people you do and don't know to help them buy in some real estate. Okay, so if you're not talking to people that you do and don't know to help them buy in some real estate, you're not doing your job. All right. Did that help? Cool. Steven has a question. What's up, Ricky? Hey, bud, how are you? Doing great. Oh, I'm married to Rose. Congrats. Yeah, thank you. She's been an amazing mentor of mine. She's been licensed for a long time. You're married to her, right? Married to her. I'm winning. So she's your wife and your mentor? Yeah, she's been doing real estate since she was in diapers and she's showing me the way. So my, I guess newer agent mindset been about a little bit over two years is do you see that the market's gonna crash? You know, a couple of years ago, do you see what's happening to interest rates? Now they have the trial happening, like we need to prepare. And she would always say, listen, go look at Ricky Karooff, look at his videos. And so I wanna just like praise you for having a different perspective on what's going on. Cause when I watch a video, it's just sometimes when we hear the negative, negative, negative, you can't help but start thinking that way. And then if I can hear positive and someone that could really relay a good message, it makes me realize, oh, it's not as bad as we think and the opportunity is there, right? So that's why I think every single one of us is here is to get better work on our business for next year, the year after, right? And I think we're all planning seeds. So this is what me and Rose have been doing. We kind of went all in on YouTube two years ago, right? So Rose had a lot of success through Instagram, transferred over to YouTube. We have gotten a lot of buyers from that. It's been great. We get listings here and there from like, you know, past clients or referrals, but we need to focus on listings, right? We're buyer heavy, right? We need to prepare for that. I know as a buyer's agent last year showing a lot of resell, now it's more new builds, but resell, I realized that a lot of these agents aren't marketing a house like we have, right? I've only seen the way Rose does it and now that's how I know, but when we go tour, I'm like, wow, there's a lot of agents that aren't really doing what I feel is the proper way to market a house. So I know that there's probably demand for expires, right? Should I cold call? I don't cold call. I haven't learned a script. How do I go about that? Should I doorknock? Like how would you go about going with expires? I think that's a great opportunity. Well, think about it like this. If your mom's house expired, what would you call and say to her? She had it listed with another agent. It expired. What would you call and say? Do you know what you would say if it was your mom? I mean, it'd be easy to talk to my mom. There you go. Yeah, it'd be very easy to talk to my mom. You need to pretend like this is your mom call. You need to pretend like it's your mom. Sure. Say the exact same thing. Hey, mom, how you doing? It's Steven, what's up? Yeah. I saw the house, it was for sale, and it went off the market. What happened? So what you're saying is, because there's a lot of scripts out there, but I could just call and have a conversation. Just pick the brain a little bit. You gotta think about the scripts, and this is one reason I got into coaching, because nobody was really saying it like this. But most of the coaching training programs, the scripts are designed to set the appointment, handle objections, go, go, go. And you don't really see anything that's really focused on listening to the prospect. For me, the best way to close the easiest path to conversion for me was to figure out exactly what they're trying to do, because until I know what they're trying to do and why, when they wanna do it, how they wanna do it, all that, until I know, until I have all the data of what their specific situation is, I don't even know what we're doing. Why am I gonna set an appointment to go to a house when I don't even know what they're trying to do and why? The next step in the process might not be to go to the house, but yet that's what we're programmed to do with the mainstream coaching is to set the appointment, get there, da-da-da-da-da-da, which is fine, get there and then figure out the why and all that. But I like to know now, like let me do a deep dive on what's going on here behind the scenes, what's going on in their life that's causing them to make this decision to buy or sell a property. People don't wake up one day and say, I wanna buy or sell a property for no reason. They just don't do it. There's something like their mom died, their kids went to college, they had a baby, they lost their job, they relocated, something's going on, they just want a bigger house. Whatever it is, like there's something bigger going on than just the transaction or just the deal that's happening in their life, this calls them to make that decision to do the deal. So the transaction's kinda like the secondary thing under the actual life decision that's going on with them. And that's the part that I'll take a lot of people skip. I don't even care about the transaction part. I'm trying to get to the life decision thing that's happening in their life and I wanna help them there, which as a byproduct normally makes a transaction happen. But whether it does or not, I don't care because I'm trying to make a lifelong friend with this person. If this person is in my market doing deals, they're gonna do, you know, once I create that relationship lifelong, they're worth 10 to 20 deals to me over the life of my career through repeats referrals and referrals over referrals. So why do I necessarily care about the deal today? Well, because I need money, I gotta eat, I got bills. No, if you're talking to enough people and doing your job to talk to people again that you do and don't know to help them buy and sell real estate, then you're gonna run into people that are doing deals now and then you're gonna have a lot of people that are gonna do deals with you later. But at the end of the day, you're building a career. So that's just been the easiest path of conversion for me is just to treat everybody like family, figure out what it is they wanna do. And then on the back end, I've got the weekly email. So if you have a simple, scalable process of nurturing your database that, you know, does a good job of organic reach and hitting everybody on that database, like social media is like a five or 10% organic reach. You know, it sucks organic reach-wise compared to emails, like a 90% organic reach. I spend 15 minutes a week. And listen, email is social media. Like it's a platform that you, like, okay, when people pull up social media, what are they doing? Scrolling, right? Okay, when they pull up their email, what are they doing? Scrolling. Scrolling, right? It's the same thing. They're looking through a feed, just like social media and they're looking to see what people have posted, AKA email to them. If they see something that stands out, they click on it. Same thing with social media. They scroll through YouTube. They see what everybody's posted. They see something interesting, they click on it. It's the same thing. And so with email, it's scalable. You know, I can have 550, 500, 5,000, 50,000, 500,000. It still only takes me 15 minutes a week to put my thoughts in an email so they know, if you have a company doing it for you, it's not gonna work. It has to be from you, your thoughts, your opinions. And you can scale that and nobody ever forgets who you are. What was the question? I have a quick question, Ricky. For your email blast, how do you come up with a new idea every week and not circling back with the same idea you did about two weeks ago? Dude, I got you right here. I'm gonna put a link. All right, joinricky.com, bam. That's my new coaching. That's my new coaching platform. That's my new coaching platform. Join that. And then there's a section there that's called Scripts and Weekly Emails. Click there. And then you can see every email that I did for a year all the way up to today. And you can look at that and just copy what I'm doing. And also I actually created a four-week email template system where it's four different emails. So it's stats of the month, restaurant of the month, the deal of the month, news of the month. And I created it to where you can just plug and play real easy and just run that back every month. Yeah, because at first I was doing the constant contacts. I called them to get your template and did all that. And I used your discount code and everything, but I just ran out of ideas after that. So now it's in the same place as constant contact, right? It's still constant contact, but I worked with them to create these four email templates and you can just run them back every month. Four weeks, just run them back every month. So it's stats of the month. I've got it plug and play, like where you put number of transactions, average price, whatever. And then you give your opinions on it. And the next one's restaurant of the month, the next one's deal of the month. And you can just run this back every month. That way, that was a problem. People running out of stuff. This makes it easy where if you kind of run into that issue, you can just run this back every month. And then everybody starts getting used to what you're gonna do. Oh, this is his stats of the month, email of the month. This is his restaurant he's gonna recommend this month. Here's the deal he likes this month. And so they're gonna get used to seeing that stuff every month. And that should work really good for you. Hey, Ricky. I've heard you and a few other agents talk about the deal of the week. And I've actually heard, this could be potentially like a good calling expireds as well, where, or for sell by owners, where you could have like a deal of the week with an expired having their information on this deal week and letting them know that you have a flow of buyers. Could you kind of paint a picture with the agents of like how that would look to call an expired do deal of the week for them? And then you're kind of like making it like one big circle of like providing value and stuff. Are you saying like get a deal of the week and then present it to an expired for them to buy the deal of the week? No, that or like even having the expired or the for sell by owner be a deal of the week. So let's say, you know, you have a pull. It's kind of like, I guess your hook to the expired saying that you have a database of like so many people. See, stuff like that for me is just kind of like an afterthought. It's kind of like something under my sleeve. I can use later if I wanna throw something out there to get them to commit or something like that. First, I'm trying to, oh listen, within the first couple of seconds of the call, you've got to get really good at getting them to drop their guard. How do you do that? You talk to them like they're your dad or your mom. That's it. When they answer the phone, they need to think, who the heck is this? As in not who the hell is this, but oh my God, who is this? They sound familiar. Like this person, is this Johnny? Is this, you know, Susie? Like this person sounds familiar. That's how you want to, that's how you want them to react, right? In their mind, like, do I know this person? They sound so friendly. They sound like, you know, my friend. And then they start to drop their guard. I see the comment, don't ask them how they're doing. I do every single time and that works great. A lot of coaches will say, don't do that because you don't really care. Well, yeah, dude, it's actually all I care about. Like literally all I want to know is how they're doing. That's it. It's not necessarily about what I think. I think that when you do a call and you're saying, hey, Ricky, my name's Amanda, I'm a local agent. How you doing today? Their hair's on the back of their neck stand up. But if you do it in a way that works for you, like to each their own, but yeah, it was just a funny. That's what I've heard. Oh yeah, I know, I've heard it all. And I've even, you know, coaches, some of the like big coaches like call me and they're like, you know, why are you telling people to say that? And it's like, well, listen, here's the thing and it goes right to what you're saying, Amanda. There's so many lead gen activities out there. You can even name the weirdest lead gen activities. And I promise you, there's somebody making a million bucks a year off of that. Every single lead gen activity works. Every single marketing thing works. Every single script works. Every single thing works. You got to figure out what works for you and go all in on it. That's why I'm not really like, I'm really lead gen agnostic. Like I don't care how people do it, but the bottom line is this, if you're not talking to people, you're not doing deals. And every single lead gen activity, right? If you look at social media and open houses and door knocking and cold calling and you know, sphere of influence and every single thing, you know, running ads, getting Zillow leads, every single thing comes right back to the same thing, which is a real life conversation. So when I realized that I was like, well, I don't have to do all this stuff. I don't have to spend money, time and energy on all these things. If it's going to come right back to this same thing anyway, a conversation. I'll just just have a conversation right now for a penny. I'll pick out the exact property I want to do business with and just talk to them. If that's the name of the game, it's conversations, creating friends, building my database, doing a weekly email. Then I can do that all day long. I think it comes down to also Amanda intentions. When it's like for me, when that's all I care about is like how they're doing and what's going on with them. And if there's something I could do to help them, it's a totally different deal than if you're calling with the, how are you doing to go right into, do you want to buy or do you want to sell your house kind of thing? Which is not what I do. So it is to each their own. Absolutely. Go ahead, Miguel. How long is it? How long is too long for a conversation? Let's say hypothetically speaking of somebody. There's not, okay. Let them talk as long as they want. The more they're talk, the more comfortable they are. Well, you're wasting time because they don't want to do anything for three years. The more time I've wasted, AKA invested in people, the more money I've made. Time in front of people, getting to know them better is never a waste of time. Even if they tell you they never want to do anything, why? Because those type of people will call you in three months and say, you know what, I want to buy this. Or their brother says, hey, I need to sell this. Like it just invest in people. Don't be stingy with your time when it comes to people. Give them, give them all your time. I've never lost when it comes to spending time with people. I've shown buyers properties for days spent all, all day every day for, you know, several days in a row with different buyers that didn't buy anything. But guess what? Five years later, they did buy a bunch of stuff and refer people. They refer people to me during the five years. And sometimes they didn't. But you can't, you can't say, well, this one might turn into something so invest time here and this one might turn into something so invest time here. This one, I don't think so. So I'm not going to invest time here. It's like, you don't know. And you're, you know, every situation is not going to pan out. You're not going to bat a thousand. About cold calling and door knocking. I'm a newer agent. I've been an agent for six months. Still haven't dove into that. Where do you go about like finding laws? Or I know there's a lot of people that have do not solicit that kind of stuff. I get kind of worried about that part of it when you dive into that. I mean, I never have worried about it. No, okay. Yeah. I mean, I'm calling as a neighbor. I'm calling as a friend. I'm calling to introduce myself, let them know who I am, what I do and I'm here to help. Not really soliciting anything. Just literally calling as if I'm like taking a survey, if you will, which is legal, by the way. If you call DNC, like with survey, with a survey type scenario, it's totally legal. But I've never had any problems. I'm not calling to force anything down somebody's throat. I'm not calling to get them to do something. Just calling to see how they're doing, see if there's something I could do to help, see if they're looking to do anything that they could use my services for. I've never had any problems. You know, a lot of that DNC stuff comes from, honestly, this kind of plays along with the lawsuits that are happening right now. Those are like money grabs. You know, those DNC lawsuits, those people, those brokerages that they sue, they pay like 40 million bucks and 20 million bucks and stuff like that. I mean, that was just like lawyers going after big corporations that have money to pay them millions of dollars. You know, like an agent doesn't have millions and tens of millions and 20s of millions and hundreds of millions to pay a lawyer. So they don't care about us. They care about, can I sue a big company to make $100 million today? You know what I mean? So, and that's really, honestly, that's the only reason that stuff happened was the opportunity, the lawyers was like, well, I'll sue KW and get 40 million. That's it. Like it was just a straight money grab. And they got them too. Like in that case was over, wrote like, voicemail drops to expires, I think it was. You know, it's like the agents weren't even like calling. It's like they did voicemail drops and like send it out to a bunch of people. Like that's stupid. Call them individually, you know? Like again, back to like, this is your mom, this is your dad, this is your brother, like treat them like family. Like let me call and investigate the situation and see what it is they got going on and what I could do to help them. And DNC honestly is the highest quality numbers. That's gonna be your cell phone numbers. That's gonna be the people that actually answer. Some people like check the box and don't call them and their answer rate goes way down. So it's all a personal decision you guys have to make. I'm not telling you to call them, not to call them to whatever, but I can tell you, I do. Okay, awesome. I used to be a recruiter. So that was my job was calling people to try to recruit them from their jobs. I just, I haven't done it yet. We're in a different ball game. See, we're in a relationship building business. We're not necessarily in sales. We're in a service business where we're trying to build relationships to then helps to service them when they would decide to buy or sell, which might be five or 10 years down the road. So it's a little different than calling to sell a product or trying to recruit them to something. It's more business development than it is sales. Awesome, thank you. I have a quick question, Ricky. What are your thoughts? Every time I drink a sip of fresco, I get a new listing. So I'll just pass it on to you. I didn't go buy a 1224 pack today. All right, that's good. What are your thoughts about SMS Blaster, Ricky? Hate it. All right, how come? They're illegal. If I text an individual person, fair game. But if I do a blast out to people that haven't opted in, now I'm getting in trouble, right? And a text is far more dangerous than a DNC call. DNC call, there's a lot of gray area. That's why I'm not worried about it. There's a lot of gray area. Text is very black and white. You do an individual text, that's pretty safe. You text it for sell by owner. You text and expire. You send somebody a letter and text and follow up. You can even just text somebody out of the blue one on one. I think you're good. Like the way I interpret the law and I'm not a lawyer. I'm not giving you guys advice, but the way that I see it, you're good. You do a text blast to people that didn't opt in to your like text blast. And you're doing like a just a blast, like multiple texts. That's where you could get into trouble. So I would I would stay away from that. What about like, let's say we have a lead generation platform and they give us their phone number. So we had we were running ads depends on when they when they gave me the phone number, if they was actually like a box or some kind of disclaimer there that said, yeah, so like, let's say they saw an ad that we put out and they want, you know, like liked it or wanted to inquire about the house on DM, we were able to get their phone number. Like, hey, we'll have a sales agent reach out to you. So we have they're not I would just I would just say that you're safe. But again, I'm not a lawyer, but I would say that there needs to be somewhere where there's a disclaimer saying that you may receive text messages from us or that they checked a box that said said that they that they that they're OK with, you know, receiving SMS or, you know, there needs to be something there to where you can like show the court of law. Hey, these people opted in. They said that they were OK with receiving these SMSes. Right. If it's a text blast, OK, yeah. So you're really big on relationship building. So even though the text text blast would, you know, it's it's not text blast can do something, right? Because then the people respond, if you send a text, let's just say you kids send text blasts and you send out 500 and, you know, 60 of them respond and then you call them, you know, maybe you go back and forth and then you and then you call them and then you develop a relationship. So it can it can be good. Like it can it can be a starter of the conversation. And then it and then it convert into an over the phone or in person consultation, sure. You know, where then you could really lock in the relationship. Yeah, because I was thinking of like the people who we've gotten leads from. We only have their phone number to possibly do like a text blast of deal of the week. But if that's not you don't have the email. Not yet. OK, so then you need to create another field where you're collecting their emails. Well, that needs to be your bread and butter. There needs to be your foundation of your business. Email when they give you their email, that that email is going to be a 90 percent organic reach to your entire database. You do a weekly email on the same day of the week forever. Just use the four week template system I have. It's just easy. Yeah. And put your thoughts and opinions on whatever you put in there and then and then you're good. Like now you just scale to the moon. Yeah. So I also kind of want to back up a little bit. There are people who know of you and there's some people who don't know of you. And I know that you teach a lot on like collecting emails, building relationship and your email marketing for the people who don't know Ricky. He actually sold 100 homes a year as a solo agent. Can you give them a little summary of like, you know, how you did that as a solo agent? I think it was a lot to do with calling people, building relationship and collecting emails. I think I've heard you say like your job is collecting emails and building relationships. So I want people to see how simple it is because we like overthink everything in this business. I think add on what I'm sorry to interrupt that. Add on what Rose was saying. Can you please talk about how, because I know that your wife is your assistant, right? No. No. OK, I'm sorry. Miss. Miss. No, no. So so the first thing about selling 100 properties a year is that you're not. You're never going to sell 100 properties in a year off of cold leads that year. OK, you know, you you you have leads. Maybe you've called on cold calling, you know, you to Zilla or whatever. And let's say you developed like a bunch of leads, you know, three years ago, you you talk to them, you develop that relationship. You're doing the weekly email. Now you're two. OK, you've got those relationships you created plus the new ones you created year two. OK, then the year three, you've got the new ones you created year three, but then the ones from one and two that that are really getting to know you more and more. Then year four, you've got the new leads from year four, but also the old leads that are continuing to get nurtured and know you more and more from years one, two and three, right? So it builds up. It's a snowball that builds up to the 100 deals. You don't just do 100 deals. It's it's accumulation of people and relationships over time. And that's why the weekly email is so important. It needs to be the foundation like that's the foundation. And then you sprinkle the social media and everything else you do on top of it. And so let's see. So some people don't know me. I got in real estate in 2002. I was 20. I made a million dollars really fast. The market exploded. I started flipping houses, lost it all in the crash. Went back to roofing houses, worked on an oil rig for a while, served tables, sleeping in my car, bankrupt, all that. Got back in the business in 2008. And that's when everything changed because I realized closings happen every day forever and it's about relationships over transactions. And so in 2008 was the easiest time to sell real estate. Everything was half price and there were just tons of inventory and the buyers were just eating it up. It was awesome. And there were basically no agents. So that was kind of the beginning of it for me. I started doing the weekly email, making the calls, doing my thing, building my database. By 2014, I was doing 100 deals a year. I did that for eight years in a row all the way to 2021. And then in 2022, early last year in March, I stepped out of production just to continue to pursue this coaching, writing, speaking career, which I started in 2017 after I made a million bucks that year. That was the first year I did a million in GCI. And I decided, you know what? What I do is different. I want to share this. So I wrote two books, started speaking, writing, coaching, and making, you know, creating content. And the rest is kind of history. So that's kind of how it all kind of came to be with doing 100 deals a year. My, you know, everybody, as we talked about, Amanda, we, like everybody has to kind of figure out what works best for them. Um, for me, it was just picking out subdivisions and condo complexes and doing direct mail, calling those owners, developing those relationships, doing the weekly email. That was what worked for me. So I went all in with that. I didn't do social media. I didn't do expires. I didn't do for sell by owners. I didn't do internet leads. I didn't do anything else, but do direct mail, call them, develop relationships, weekly email. That was it. I just kind of went all in on it until I, and I was like, this is the path. This is what I'm going to do until I make a million bucks a year. And that's what I did. I didn't do anything else. I got up to the point, took me a while. After I lost everything and came back in 2008 and learned everything I needed to know, it still took me nine years all the way to 2017 to hit that million year, grinding my face off. So it's not easy. But yeah, that, that's the basic like overview path of it. And again, I'm happy to, if you guys have bottlenecks in your business or any detailed questions and stuff, happy to, happy to continue to share some insight here. So when you said you picked out a subdivision, did direct mailing, so it's kind of generally like farming and just getting to know the people. Yeah. Yeah. Very personal love. Yeah. And then put them on it. Okay. I mean, that sounds so easy when you say it, but then getting it. It really is easy. It's the easiest thing in the world. Like, and that's why I went all in on it because it was just so simple. It's just like, oh, I want to sell in that subdivision or that complex. Okay. Boom. Send the postcards, send the letter. Boom. Call them. Boom. It was simple as can be. Yeah. So all the stuff is really easy. Most people are like, it can't be that easy, but it literally is the hard part. Here's the hard part. Being consistent long enough to get there. That's the hardest part. Like the day to day is so freaking easy. When you compare like making calls and like sending emails and postcards to roofing houses or building houses or painting or, you know, sweeping floors or working at 9 to 5 or flipping burgers or any of that stuff, it makes it seem extremely easy. And it is. And that's what you need to think about. Some people are like, well, how do I get my agents to make calls? And I'm like, well, tell them to go get a job and do like a real job for like a week and see if they want to come back and make calls now. You know, it's extremely easy. And people just, I don't know. I mean, the whole premise of this is to help people. You don't, to talk to people you don't, you do and don't know to help them buy in some real estate. So just go do that. Yeah. I love that. That's basic and simple. Just go do it. And let me piggyback on you guys, right? Doing YouTube, getting a lot of buyers. You guys see what's happening here with them? They did YouTube, got a lot of buyers. Now their business is buyer heavy. And what are they saying now? Oh, I kind of want to get into the listing game, right? See, here's the decision that we all have. Every single one of us as agents are going to go out and make money at seven o'clock p.m., all of us. The question is, is are you going to be like me at home eating dinner with my family chilling because eight of my 21 listings are being shown by other agents who do YouTube? Or are you going to be the one on social media who racks up the buyers and has to show property 24-7? Now you either do it yourself or bring on a buyer's agent who wants that, not me. I'd rather just list properties and be super efficient with what I do, have a great quality of life and knock down 100 deals a year on my own. How do I do that? Well, I have a choice. Do I go do YouTube videos or do I just call property owners? Because even if you do YouTube videos, you still got to guess what? Talk to people. You're just doing the videos. So hopefully somebody reaches out and now we're in a conversation. Why don't I have to do YouTube videos and wait on people to reach out to me? I can just pick the property I want to sell and call the owner right now for a penny. Why don't I just do that? Yeah, I'll take that. I think I actually heard one of your videos talking about how people don't want a cold call, but then they buy leads and it's generally the same thing. Oh, it's absurd. It's absurd that thousands of dollars that agents spend on leads to try not to cold call, to turn right around and just cold call them. Because even when you cold call some of the, I'm sorry, even when you call some of these leads, they don't know who you are. Like it's a Facebook lead. You call them. They're like, who are you? You're like, now you're right back to cold calling. Like you can't get around just talking to people that you don't know to help them buy in real estate. So why are we trying to like sidestep the inevitable? Let me just get right to the source. I want to go direct, man. You tell me, give me a list of all the people that own the exact properties I want to sell and let me get to work. I'll show you how it's done. And that's how the top producers think. The people that really make big waves, not the ones saying, how do I not do this? They say, how do I do this? And I want to share with you guys too on that link that Ricky gave on his coaching. I actually have listened to his, I think it's like the re-listings training Ricky. He talks about like the handwritten notes, calling and it's just, you know, just really getting out there. So if you have time, definitely listen to those videos that he has training on them. 100%. So we have a little bit over 10 minutes. Does anybody else have any questions? So quiet. We have the man here. Come on, guys. But just a thank you for taking time out and really making it so simple and removing the overthinking aspect. I truly appreciate that. And we are on a team. We have some of our team members here with Dream Real Estate. And we are really shifting a lot of what we're thinking about of how to approach real estate. And you just said it, treat everybody like family. And that's really our approach. And when you asked the question earlier, like, what would you call if it was your mom? They're like, hey, yeah, I saw it was listed. That agent used their own photos. I'm so sorry that happened. Just being really transparent with them and building relationship because you're going to attract who you're going to work with because you're around like-minded people. So thank you so much for taking the time. Absolutely. But let me piggyback on just one thing because, and thank you so much, number one, and please don't take this the wrong way, but try not to talk so much trash about the last agent because what you need to understand is that that agent is probably even more important to you than the client. That agent is going to help you sell your listings and you're going to sell their listings forever, more than likely. They're in the business for a while, right? And you don't want it to get back to them that you told their last client that they did a shitty job on their pictures. You know what I mean? Because then that creates resentment. You need to treat these- Let me piggyback off what you're saying with the family thing. You need to treat the agents in your markets like their family too. It's not about calling and saying what the last agent did wrong, right? That doesn't matter to you. It should matter to you. They've already decided if they like that agent or not. That's not even- You don't even need to worry about that. Our job is to say, hey, I saw us for sale. Now it's not. What happened? And then let them tell you and then based on what they tell you, dig deeper and dig deeper and dig deeper. They may say they might want to try to sell it again in a couple of months. Great. Do you think you'll go with the agents you had? Were you happy with the agent? Yeah, we were real happy. We're going to go with them. Great. Awesome. Listen, you're in good hands. I'd still love the opportunity to stay in touch with you. Would that be okay? Cool. What's a good email? Go ahead and get them in your weekly email, right? They're loyal to that agent, whatever, but you never know what's going to happen. But I just wanted to say, be super careful with talking smack about the other agents. You know what I mean? Because that could come back on you because then this is somebody local that's probably going to do more deals with you than that client. And you really need to treat even your competition like family. I have a question regarding a cold calling. I know that you say to start off, especially new agents with geo leads. How long do you recommend a new agent to call geo leads to move on to the next? Or it's such as expires, absentee owners, anything of that nature? Listen, right now in this market, I would start out with expires. And I would start with today's expires and I would go back years worth. You know, today call this last week's expires. Tomorrow call last week's expires. The next day call three week ago expires. The next week call a month old expires. And just keep working your way back years worth. I would still recommend red X. Absolutely. Yeah, good. Yeah, use their platform to get the old expires. Just call them when you get it and then say, Hey, I want 10 years worth of expires with drawings and canceled in my market and don't filter out the ones that we sold because you don't care for resold. That's the thing. You're trying to create the relationship. I don't care about the listing. I'm using the properties and excuse to get into a conversation to see if I connect with someone. If I, if this person that I call the expired, if it's sold, like if they sold it, if it expired say six months ago and it resold and I don't have that in front of me, I'm not going to look for it number one. I'm just trying to connect with people and it already sold. I'm like, Okay, great. Where'd you move to? How do you like it? You know, do you like rental properties? You know, I just kind of continue the conversation to dig in and see what it is they might want to do in the future. And if there's an opportunity for me to help them, get their email, get them on my weekly email. I don't care about if the property sold. I don't care nothing about the property. I just care about them. What they're looking to do and why, you know, most of the expires that I helped I represented them as buyers, like they bought properties. I would call expires and I would have these conversations and I would dig in and come to find out. They wanted to buy this property across town, this rental property, this lot or this commercial deal and I would help them buy stuff. I represented more expires as a buyer than I did listing expires in my career. That literally just happened to me Ricky. I was like, I'm going to give this cold call thing a try and I called and I talked to someone and she said, I asked her why her house didn't sell and going through her list. And she said, oh, we're not looking to sell anymore. I was like, cool, if I could at least get your email, I'd like to send you some information. You reach out to me when you get a chance. Real simple, right? And then when she was giving me her email, she's like, actually, if you do see a property, we're looking. So last Friday, I finally got her into Eschgrove and she was, I talked to her for, I mean, a cold call for like 15 minutes and I was able to get her information and now we built relationships. She's in Hawaii. She's texting me pictures. I spent a lot of time with this family and I know I'm going to have a relationship with them forever, right? So the fact that you said that happened to me recently. Yeah. Yeah. It's just talking to people, using the property as an excuse to talk to them as opposed to trying to list the property or sell the property. All the properties, like, even if it's like an internet lead and they were looking at a property online, I'm not calling to try to sell them that property. I'm using that whole situation as an excuse to talk to them to try to see what's going on, to see what I can do to help them through whatever it is they're trying to do. But congrats on that. Okay, Ricky, you have a great perspective on an outlook on a lot of turmoil that's going on in the real estate market. Hold that thought two seconds. Appreciate you, Rose and Steve, for inviting me. This is great. Yeah, we got you. Thank you, Rose and Steve. Thank you. Of course. No. I think the same with Ricky, right? He hopped on this. We just asked him and we've had a mindset of just giving back, right? We want to collab with everybody because we're better together. And Ricky is a perfect example. He's a busy man and he wants to give back. So it's pretty cool to see. Yeah, and he basically, back to what you were telling me the other day, Steve, he gave us collaboration over competition. He did say that we need to have good relationships and treat other agents in the market as family. And I'm sure everyone in this chat is in the same market or nearby. Yeah. Okay, what was it? Love your perspective on things, Ricky. I keep hearing a lot of things are going to be changing in the near future or in the future with possibly how commissions are looked at and, you know, with these trials going on. Like what is the future? I know you've said that you don't have a crystal ball, but you're a good test taker, right? So what does it look like in the future? What do we need to be prepared for? Well, I would just not worry about it. Number one, best case scenario, we get a few more disclosures. Everything stays the same. We still offer by agent fees on MLS and everything stays pretty close to what it is now, which could be a possibility. It's really kind of a coin flip. The other side of it is they basically ban by agent commissions from being offered on MLS. And then it's going to come down to, well, why are we going to post listings on MLS? Well, the reason you would is because it gets syndicated to Zillow and then all the public sees it from there. But Zillow may say at that point, well, if there's no buyer agent, I can't get agents to pay me a fee for sending them buyers because there's no buyer agent fee. So now we're going to shut down the syndication and it's only going to be pay to play. You've got to pay to put your listings on Zillow. So in that world, why would you post anything on MLS? You can't pay the buyer agent and it's not getting syndicated anywhere. So why are we doing it? Well, you're not. And everything now at that point is going to be more of a pocket listing, if you will. And buyers are going to get, you know, it's going to be horrible for buyers because they're not going to be able to see everything for sale. And now what happens? Buyer agents become worth way more money. If you have a buyer, a viable buyer, a ready-willing, enable buyer, you're worth more now in the market because now that buyer can't just go out there and see your house for sale because we don't know where it is. It's not online anywhere or whatever. It might be online here or there, but then you've got to search in 10 different places to see every house for sale. So now as a buyer agent, you're worth more. So I think commissions definitely won't get any downward pressure in that world. However, we would lose like, I would think, you know, 20% to 40% of the agents out there that just don't, it'll scare them off because the current system is really easy. You know, you have a buyer, you buy it, commissions figured in. If it goes the other way, then all the buyer agents and stuff like that, a lot of them will get scared out of the business and the ones that are left will actually do better. They'll make more money because there'll be more market share. Commissions won't see any downward pressure in that world because people are going to need us even more than ever if there's no transparency around all the listings out there. That's what the other side doesn't get. Like what they're trying to do is, again, a money grab so they don't care what happens to the industry or what happens to the consumer. They're just trying to get that money. But the aftermath of it, if things go through the way that they want for them in order to get that money, is that consumers aren't going to be able to see every home for sale and commissions actually will probably go up in that scenario. So we'll just see what happens, but it's nothing to worry about. I mean, 100% nothing to worry about. The people, if you're worried about it, then you might be in that boat. It's like, what camp are you in? Are you in the camp of worried about it? If that's the case, you might be one of the 20% to 40% that leave the industry when things change. Or are you in the, oh, man, this is going to be fun. If this changes, this is going to be great. This is going to be fun. If you're in that camp, then you're probably going to make more money if this thing does turn. It's going to be really good for the business, like the real business entrepreneurial type agents who are just really business savvy, really good at building their business, as opposed to just order takers, just buyer's agents who just get fed deals. Those kind of agents might have a tough time if things really take a turn. But again, it'll just be a great time for agents like myself who can go out there and really make things happen and know how to put deals together. And if you are one of those order taker type agents now, transition. Like you can just transition right now. You can do it today. You can start being a business savvy, start going through the process of learning how to actually go get listings, negotiate deals, and make it happen. Because those are going to be the agents. I mean, agents like that are going to make it no matter what happens in the world because agents will always be needed. So it's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out. And I am really just over the top excited about whatever happens because regardless of what it is, it's going to be huge opportunity. If it stays the same, great. Because we're crushing it. This is awesome. The world we live in now and the industry is amazing. Love it to stay the same. They'd be great. If it turns the other way, there's going to be such huge opportunities. It's not even funny. Sellers and buyers are going to be coming to us like what do we do? Because they're just going to be lost in the new world. So it's going to be good either way. Nothing to worry about for sure. And if you are one of those that you're only kind of doing one part of the transaction, start to learn the business. Start to learn the business. It's all about perspective, right? How you look at things. Yeah, it's going to be fantastic. I promise you, it's nothing to be scared about. It's something to embrace. You can't control it. Whatever happens happens. But my goodness, it's going to be, either way it goes, it's just going to be so good. The way I see it. And if you're running into that market where a lot of agents leave, I hate it for the agents that leave because the one that stay are just going to, God, they're just going to crush it so much. And I hear you saying a lot that 2024 is going to be amazing. Well, if you look at pending deals in January every year, they spike in the first or second week, which is followed by 30 days later, the first or second week of February, transactions spiking. So today, they just released the pending home sales, which was the worst on record since they've been recording it from 2001, which means worse than 2008. October was the lowest level of pending deals, even during 2008. So we're like, this is worse than 2008, guys. Like you're in it. And so when you see a market retraction, that's just the market priming up for a massive surge. Same thing that happened in the pandemic when the 45-day shutdown happened. It just, it was a pullback. And then guess what happened? Boom, it was an explosion. And during the shutdown, I put out a video in April before the economy opened. I said, when the economy opens, we're going to see the biggest real estate surge we've ever seen. I predicted a lot of this stuff. And right now, I'm telling you that January is going to be busier than any January you've probably ever seen because the pent up demand right now is more than you can eat. Like we have no idea because it's just kind of underneath. It's so deep right now underneath. We can't see it. We can't see the activity. We can't see people searching for homes. None of that is happening. But there's so many people that want to move, that want to buy their first home, etc. That are just sitting there, just waiting. And after the first of the year, we normally see this surge in pending deals and transactions. Well, it's going to be even greater this year just because of the pent up demand. And, you know, rates have been up for a year and a half. 18 months, people are getting used to the fact that we're at higher rates. It's come down from 8 to 7 now. Not to say it won't stay there. Maybe it bounces back to 8. Who knows about rates? But the fact is people are getting more and more used to rates being higher. They're starting to plan around these higher rates. They're getting buy downs, etc. And, man, it's just... Everything is going to go under contract in January. That's what I'm telling you. If you hit the next couple of weeks before Christmas and even that week in between, as hard as you can to get listings. Get as many as you can. 10, 20, 30, 40 listings. Get as many as you can. Because when January hits, it's going to be so busy that you're not going to have time to do the work to go get the listings or build a database or create new relationships. You're going to wish you would have taken advantage of this month. And then the more inventory you can build, the more deals you're going to close in February. Because everything is going under contract in January. And if it doesn't happen, if I'm dead wrong, guess what? You still have more people in your database and you're still building your business up and you've probably got more deals. Even if it doesn't surge like I'm saying, you've still got more business going on in January than you would have if you didn't go all in this month. So it's not like you lose. There's a way you can lose here by what I'm saying. Go all in because you win either way. But what do I believe is going to happen? I think we're going to see just a crazy January. Hey, guys, put in the chat what you thought about today. I want to say thank you, Ricky. You gave us an hour of your time. I know all of us are here just taking it all in. And I really appreciate you. I was super pumped to have you on today. Thank you so much, Ricky. You are more than welcome. You are the man. Yeah, keep doing what you're doing. Let me check this out. Let me just keep working. I just wrote this article. About exactly what I just said with some charts and stuff right there. You guys want to grab that? Here is my coaching platform join Ricky.com. You can also text me 312-8844. If you want to get on my text messages, I send out and stuff and stay up with everything I'm doing. So do you text that number to get on it? Yeah, you can text that number. Yeah, just text me 2024. Okay. And yeah, enjoy spending some time with you guys today. Really good questions and seems like a real motivated group. And I'm excited to see what you guys do. So definitely stay in touch with me and let me know the progress. And maybe we can hop back on and do this again sometime in Q1 or Q2. That would be awesome. And you guys, he also just recently did a business planning. So definitely go check that out. Thank you so much, Ricky. We truly appreciate you. And yeah, we would definitely love to follow up with you again. Thanks so much. Bye, everyone. Have a great day.