 Hey, what's up everybody? Ricky Caruth here. Welcome back. So the question today is, is Zillow unethical? Is their business model just disingenuous? That's what I want to get into today and I want to hear your thoughts. And yes, I'm talking about their premier agent business model, where literally you can pay, you can pay Zillow a nice hefty amount of money to put your name on other agents listings. That's right. They're going to take your name and just plaster it right on top of someone else's listing. And of course today is Cyber Monday. So there's going to be incredible deals. You can actually have lifetime savings with RedX. RedX is the absolute most incredible thing that ever happened to real estate agents. It is literally how I built my entire business. Use RedX to find property owners, to call them, make friends forever, followed by a weekly email on the same day of the week for the rest of their life. There's absolutely, and I'm asking you right now to tell me if there's a better strategy. Instead of buying leads for hundreds of dollars for a random person's contact information in your market, you can literally pick the exact property owners you want as clients, get their contact information for as little as two cents and just call them up, make friends with them, not even trying to sell them anything. You want to think of yourself like a politician, okay? You want to canvas the market, letting as many people know who you are, what you do and that you're here to help and then build a massive personal brand on the back of a weekly email. If you want to go extremely big in your business, this is how you do it. And for today only, you're going to get massive lifetime savings. I'm going to put a link in the description, guys, go there and take advantage of this huge opportunity. And with that said, let's get into the video. So of course you guys know, I got on real estate back in 2002 and I've tried absolutely everything, everything under the sun to try to build my business, a lot of trial and error, a lot of different things that I tested. And I've been really good at figuring out what works really well and going all in with those things while still continue to test other things to see what else I can find that might work well to add to what is already working well. Okay. This is the kind of mindset you have to have. If you're going to be one of those top 1% of 1%ers out there. So of course when Zillow came on the scene, I wanted to try it. I was probably one of the very first agents to try Zillow leads. So I jumped right on board. I think I got about a six month contract and went pretty big with it because I wanted to see what this thing really did. So I went in, I created an account, talked to one of their, their customer representatives. I got all set up and boom, I started to get leads. I realized after that six month period that this was not efficient. This was not one of those things I was going to test out and I was going to find a winner. So I immediately canceled that account and got right back to what was really working, which was circle prospecting. Circle prospecting is using red X to call property owners. If you want my circle prospecting script, I'm going to put a link in the description for that as well. Since it is Cyber Monday, of course. So since I did that and I tested Zillow out and I realized, no, that's not the route I want to go. I've watched the entire industry evolve because when I jumped on board, this was back in 2011 or 12, something like that. Somewhere around in there, I believe is maybe even earlier than that. Heck, it could have been actually, no, I think it was more like 2008 or nine when I tried this. I can't really remember the exact year, but it was when Zillow first came out and since then I've watched everything come together and I've sat back and I've watched these huge teams. Okay, these huge teams, agents will go out and hire so many agents and then buy Zillow leads for an overly expensive price and then feed those horrible non-efficient leads to their buyer's agents or other agents on their team to get out there and work those leads and then split the commission with them. Now I'm a single agent, so I'm a little biased on this subject of single agent versus team, but when I look at the current climate of how teams actually operate, most teams, not talking about all teams, okay, there's always exceptions. But generally speaking, what you have as a team leader, they bring the buyer agent in, they feed you all these leads and you think, great, I'm getting leads. But what you don't realize is that they're giving you the worst possible leads for the highest possible price and the conversions are so low on these leads, you get out there and what the team leader's hoping is that you get out there, work, work, work, work, work to try to convert these horrible leads and if one goes through, I'll split the money with you. I believe that this is a mirage for most agents that go into those situations thinking this is great, this is not great. You're getting the worst leads, you're getting some experience and there are some positives to this and you're probably going to learn a lot, one thing being that you don't want to be on a team, but at the end of the day, you're not really getting the experience of going out there and creating your own leads and building your own business because on top of everything else, any leads that you get, the team leader is probably going to keep those leads if you were to lead the team. So you're not really building a database, you're not really building a business, you're not learning how to create leads or build your business and when you leave, you can't take it with you. All while paying 50% of your commission for all of this. So I think this is great for some agents who need to get in really quickly and get some experience really fast, but if your team leader that brings you on is really being fair to you, they should tell you the truth and that is hey, this is good to start, this isn't what you need to do long term, let's get you some experience and then let you step up into being your own agent, into being a single agent, into building your own business and to building your own database. The size of your database dictates the size of your income guys and if you don't own your database, you don't own your business. If you're thinking about joining a team or if you need help with anything to do with this subject or any advice, just hit me up on Instagram, I'm still answering all my DMs and I'll be happy to help you. Now to the question of is Zilla being unethical? Are they disingenuous? Okay, I want to reference Andy Florence. Andy Florence is the CEO of CoStar Group, okay? They just acquired Homesnap for $250 million that's set to close by the end of the year and it said that they're gonna be in direct competition with Zilla. In a recent interview with Brad Inman, Andy Florence told him this, the product premiere agent does not resonate with me in any way, shape, or form. The business model strikes me as wrong, so if I go back to the offline world and I'm a residential realtor and I'm excited that I've been selected to list a particular property and I put my sign in the front yard and I'm glad that that sign is there because it's gonna help me sell this home for this family but also I'm very happy that signs out there because other people in the neighborhood will see that I'm active in the neighborhood. In the offline world, competing realtors hammering their signs in the front yard of my client that I have listed right next to mine or obstructing my sign, that's not appropriate behavior so basically what he's saying is that if you list a property and you put a sign in the yard, how would you feel if another agent came through and put their sign right next to it like one inch away covering up your sign? He goes on to say, when you do the same thing in the online world and you sell the ability to put your name on other people's listings, that's not a positive consumer experience. I don't think it's the right thing to do and I also think it's a bad consumer experience because consumers get confused as to who actually has the listing. It actually takes money out of the pocket of the people who actually have the listing and it just feels disingenuous. I 100% agree with that. It happens to me all the time. People are so confused, the public is so confused on who the listing agent really is. Now from day one, just about everything Zillow did did not feel right with me because in the beginning when I was actually buying lease from Zillow, I was looking at it by the end of the six months, I was looking at that situation, I was thinking, wait a minute, they're taking our listings and they're advertising our listings and then getting leads and then selling us back our own leads. He goes on to say that he actually came up with the idea of what Zillow was doing a long time ago, way before Zillow even did it. And he said he thought about it for a day or so and he said, you know what, that's not even right. That's not even, he couldn't figure out a way to make it even feel right. Again, this is Andy Florence, the CEO of CoStar Group that just acquired Homesnap and I'm really excited to see where that goes. And if you haven't watched the video that I released last week about CoStar buying Homesnap, I'll put that in the description as well. Let me know what you think about this subject, Zillow being an unethical company. Is their business model even right? Is it ethical? Is it disingenuous? What is it? I would love to hear your thoughts. And if you're trying to work on your phone script, I posted yesterday an incredible video that not a lot of people watch. So I wanna ask you to watch it right here, but that is where I did a live role play with an agent and gave them advice afterwards. It's very, I think it's gold, so you tell me. With that guys, I'll see you on the next video. Let me know if there's anything in the world I could do for you, if you have any questions. Whatsoever, let's go. I think you need a life for the ideas I'm in the splash zone with the brainwaves I shoot for stars up in Miami street I lay in the sandline in the balesades I'm Ali Baldwin with the angry face