Today’s episode of the AIPIS Show features Toby Salgado of Super Agents Live as the guest. With a wealth of knowledge thanks to countless interviews with industry experts in the real estate marketing fields, he’s more than equipped to talk to Jason Hartman about getting the right team size for your budget, how to make the most of leads and why knowing yourself is the first and most important step to success.
Key Takeaways
02.14 – Our perception of a ‘team’ is changing. Now it’s more like a whole staff!
03.30 – Has the real estate business really matured that much? What’s your stance?
05.54 – Know the different types of leads and know what works for your company.
10.28 – Your entire marketing strategy is about getting the message across different audiences.
13.24 – Keeping an updated database is crucial to ensuring interested parties are well-informed.
15.47 – Have you noticed a gender gap in the real estate marketing business?
18.10 – You can’t go into this blindly. Know what your strengths are and work out what’s best for you.
20.33 – Check out Toby Salgado’s show on iTunes or Stitcher Radio, or head to the website: www.SuperAgentsLive.com. Twitter: @SuperAgentsLive
21.35 – Everything nowadays is a contact sport. Go out, make contacts, and send them your content.
Tweetables
The first step is deciding whether to go it alone or to start building a team.
The more people you have working around you, the more marketing strategies you can put to use.
Not everyone is cut out for every job. Take a personality test and figure out your own calling.
Transcript
Introduction:
This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit www.HartmanMedia.com
Jason Hartman:
Hey, this is Jason Hartman. Welcome to everybody from 164 countries worldwide and so many of you listeners on Stitcher Radio. Thank you so much for joining us, we’ve got a great episode today, so let’s dive in.
Announcer:
Welcome to the AIPIS Show, for Accredited Income Property Investment Specialists, and those who aspire to be. If you’re a real estate, mortgage or financial professional, this is the place for you. We’ll explore innovative investment analysis, sales, marketing and income generating strategies for the most historically proven wealth creator: income property. Learn from the experts as they show you how to build a better business and a better life.
Jason:
Hey, it’s my pleasure to welcome a very dynamic guy, and that is Toby Salgado. He is the Founder of Super Agents Live; he interviews top producing real estate agents from around the nation, they share their stories, strategies and tactics that will help them be number one in their companies or marketplaces. He’s got some great thoughts on this, as well as some of the other entrepreneurial ventures he’s engaged in, and it’s great to have him. Toby, welcome, how are you?
Toby Salgado:
I’m great, Jason, thanks for having me.
Jason:
Good. Hey, give our listeners a sense of geography; where are you located?
Toby:
I’m in San Diego and I’ve been here since ’89.
Jason:
So you must have just a wealth of knowledge from interviewing all of these successful agents from around the country. Let’s just dive in, and maybe you want to profile some of them, share some of their tips and tricks of the trade and tell us what you see out there.
Toby:
Sure, no problem. Listen, over the last year, I’ve done 160 interviews, and the people that we talk with are literally the top people. We’ve have the Number One KW guy, the Number One RE/MAX guy, the Number One Coldwell Banker guy, and all these people are doing from 400 transactions to 1200 transactions. I think in the marketplace in terms of an agent, I think there are two routes you can go down. You can be that solopreneur agent, going out there, banging on the doors, you might have a couple of admin people. But the new thing that you obviously know, Jason, and most of your listeners know, is that team-building and having teams is the trend. Everybody wants to build a team, and it’s amazing that there are teams out there – you think of a team and you think of maybe 10 people. You’ve got a few admin people, a marketing person, a couple of listing agents and 4 or 5 buyers’ agents.
These new team that are putting 900 deals on the board or so are literally offices. They’re 45 or 55 people strong now! Number 1: If somebody’s going to go out there and try to crush it, I think that’s one of the choices you have to make early on. Do you want to be the solopreneur, or do you want to build a team? Those two channels will drive your overall marketing strategy.
Jason:
That’s a good way to put it. So pick out some of the guests, some of your favorite shows that you’ve done and let’s talk about some of the strategies that these agents have used to become tremendously successful.
By the way, I’ve got to just comment first about how amazing it is that the real estate business has matured so much over the years. I remember way back in the old days, when I was 24 years old, I was number 59 in the world for RE/MAX, and guess how many transactions I had to do to get there? I was in Irvine, California and I did 78 deals that year. Now, it has just totally matured; people are doing huge numbers nowadays, whereas back then, that was amazing to do 78 transactions a year, especially when you’re just 24 years old and didn’t know anybody in town. I was just new, practically.
Nowadays, agents are doing huge volumes and they’re really like companies within a company.
Toby:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ll tell you, for me, I agree with you in terms of how you just expressed the idea of maturity, and you expressed that idea of real estate maturity in terms of the industry by the number of transactions that an individual agent can do to be successful. You were number 59 with 78 deals, which is nuts, that’s nothing these days. But in a lot of ways –
Jason:
Thank you very much! [Laughs]
Toby:
But in a lot of ways, Jason, the industry has not matured at all, and that’s one of the reasons why we have done our show. If you think about real estate in the Eighties versus 2015, what is really different? Except for listings coming online, there’s not much different. The business is fundamentally the same today as it was 100 years ago; again, other than the way that properties are presented. Here’s the funny thing: after talking with, again, 160 of the most successful agents in the nation, there’s not much difference.
Look, let me express it this way. You can look at any brokerage and you’re going to find 3 distinct groups. You’re going to find the top 20% who are killing it, you’re going to find the middle 60% who are holding their own and you’re going to find the bottom 20% that are literally just taking up space. What’s the difference between the bottom 20 and the top 20? Number one, I will tell you the one thing, and I’d love to get your thoughts on this, Jason, but the one thing is in the top 20, 90% of those people will have a coach. They will have someone to keep them accountable. In the bottom 20, none of them probably have coaches, that’s just how it works.
In terms of actual marketing strategies, they all have the same thing where you have your sphere of influence. For a successful agent to be successful, you need to have at least 5 lead generation channels, and I think that’s where most agents fail. They focus on one or two and many times, because agents for the most part are cheap (it’s true!), they tend to focus on the free or low-cost lead generation channels. What happens with those free or low-cost channels is it affects the quality of that lead. The cheaper it is, the lower quality it’s going to be, and the other thing too is when you have low quality leads (in terms of engagement), the sales cycle gets extended.
If you look at NAR, the stats are that within the first 12 months, something like 85% of new agents will wash out. Why is that? It’s because they don’t think about having multiple lead generation channels and they don’t think about investment. They don’t think about selling real estate as a business. Many agents get into the selling real estate because 1: They want financial freedom, 2: They want time freedom. They abuse their time freedom and they will never ever see financial freedom. In terms of lead generation strategies, when you think of leads, there’s all sorts of leads – there’s online, there’s offline, there’s free and there’s paid.
Successful agents have a mix of online leads, whether that’s a Google pay-per-click campaign and again, typically those are low-quality leads, maybe from a home valuation site or something with long sales cycles. Many of those online leads that you get, even though people are paying for Zillow, and all that stuff – you can throw money at that stuff, but just like mailers, the average break even date is 18 months, whether that’s for a direct mail in your farm or buying those online leads. That’s just generally what happens.
So you have to have a mix of those online long-sale cycles with long gestation periods and then some much more targeted and immediate ones. When we were chatting pre-recording, part of our arm is we have a radio advertising agency. With those radio ad leads, we look for the right audience, we write the right copy and we look for listings, for people that will pick up the phone and go ‘Hey, I want to sell my house right now’. I think that’s where the big difference between that top 20 and that bottom 20 is having a varied lead generation strategy and being deliberate about mixing the quality of the leads and thinking about sales cycles.
Jason:
Yeah, good stuff. So doesn’t that fly in the face, though, of the concept of specialization and the benefits of that?
Toby:
Maybe unpack that a little bit for me. What do you mean by that?
Jason:
Well, a lot of gurus and success experts will say that you should specialize – do one thing and do it very well. When I was an agent, I actually kind of did two things really well, I guess. I did farming really well and I was in a high-end area so my sales prices were pretty high. Then I also did new homes really well, working with the Irvine Company and new home-builders and stuff like that. But 5 different things? Aren’t you kind of running all over the place like a chicken with your head cut off?
Toby:
See, again, I think this speaks to the team concept or the solopreneur concept. If you’re a solopreneur and it’s maybe you and a couple of admin people, yeah, of course, you want to have a niche. That could be downtown condos or waterfront, or whatever it is. You want to have a farm and you want to work it, right? You want to be the ambassador or the mayor of your farm, within your niche, absolutely.
But when you have a team and you start thinking of selling real estate as a business, you can still maybe have a niche, you can still maybe have a farm, but instead of having a 3,000 house farm, you’re going to have a 15,000 house farm. It’s really going to be a business with multiple marketing strategies. Does that make sense?
Jason:
Yeah, sure it does. Go ahead and drill down on some of those if you want with any specifics or any other thoughts.
Toby:
If you’re going to have 5 lead generation channels, obviously your circle of influence is going to be 1. You need to have some sort of online lead generation piece, whether that’s Google pay-per-click, that could be a home value site where you’re buying Facebook ads and driving people to it, and then no matter how big or how small your team is, even though it’s really uncomfortable for many people, you should have some sort of networking piece worked in there. It could be Toastmasters or maybe that’s your Meetups, or whatever.
Fundamentally, the reason why you want to have 5 different channels is because they’re 5 separate audiences and ideally, there’s no overlap in those audiences. When you can create that message, whatever message you have, within those separate audiences, that’s when it starts to work for you.
Jason:
What do you think is the optimum thing for teams? Do you think that there’s an ideal number or ideal size? When does an agent jump to the point where they should just go out on their own and have their own brokerage?
Toby:
Those are two different questions. When you look at teams and again, I guess we could maybe even substitute the word ‘team’ for ‘business’. When you’re actually in real estate as a business, those teams or those businesses are built like businesses. Your marketing budget will drive the size of your team because ideally, you need to provide those leads to your buyers’ agents. If your Google pay-per-click campaign is $8,000, maybe that will support a team of 5. In order to add another, you need to add another $2,000 to it.
Optimum team size mirrors your budget. Successful teams today are very siloed so you will have a certain number of buyers’ agents. What do those buyers’ agents do? That’s all they do. This goes back and speaks to your idea of specialization. Within these teams, everybody has a very specific specialty. Buyers’ agents – all they do it buyers, that’s it. Let’s say their Mom wants to sell the house, those teams are made where those buyers’ agents must pass on that listing lead (even if it’s your Mom!) to the listing people. Again, if you have 5 buyers’ agents, normally you’d have around 2 listing agents, and then within those teams there’s also a marketing person.
Let me illustrate it this way. This is how it’s built – you’re a buyers’ agent. They meet you at the grocery store and you start talking about real estate and you say ‘Hey, I have an interest in maybe buying, I have an interest in selling’, whatever. Jim meets Jason, walks into the office and has your contact information – they’ve got your name, your email, your cell phone number, whatever it is. They walk in and give it to Sally. Sally’s the front desk person and she goes ‘Okay, who’s Jason? Let me enter them into the database’. Of all the stuff that people fail at, it’s inserting stuff into your database and putting it all on drip. Sally puts Jason into the database and puts him on a drip campaign similar to whatever he is. If you’re a listing person, you’re going to get a drip campaign that talks about listings, or why X brokerage is the best choice for you. If you’re a buyer, you’re going to get put on a drip for how X brokerage can find you the house of your dreams, or whatever.
Again, you have a marketing person, you have a front desk person, and you have a copywriter that writes the copy. If Jason gets into the database, you need to get in touch with him at regular intervals and with meaningful content. That’s a specialization. Copywriting is important. I’m thinking of the person who owns the team or runs the team, they think of marketing in terms of campaigns. If they’re going to give you something on a drip, let’s say it’s going to be a 7-series drip that’s thematically similar.
Again, to go back, Jason, there’s not an ideal size. Your budget is going to drive the amount of bodies that you can support in terms of leads.
Jason:
Okay. What do you say to newer agents? How should they think of their business? After owning my own traditional brokerage for many years, I was just constantly frustrated by training agents and how disillusioned they were and how most of their expectations were just so out of sync, seemingly, with reality. That wasn’t all of them, obviously, some totally get it and they just dive right in and do a great job. A lot of them just view it as a job, not an entrepreneurial opportunity etc etc. They want to have coffee all day and they treat it like a Country Club job, rather than something real, like a real business.
Toby:
I agree, I said that earlier. NAR came out with some stats recently: the average agent is 57 years old. Think about a 57 year old person; and again, the vast majority of people in real estate are women. Women, by sheer numbers – I don’t even know the ratio, but maybe it’s like 70:30 women to men. But if you look at who’s killing it, it’s all men. I had Chantel Ray on the show, and she’s got a team of like 45 and she’ll do 900 transactions this year.
Jason:
That’s impressive, and there are exceptions. I’ve always tried to analyze that, too. I remember years ago I would always look at what’s the gender make-up of the really top tier agency. You’re saying it’s mostly male, huh? Anything you attribute that to in particular? A lot of women leave the workforce for 7-10 years to take care of children and so forth, or are there other reasons? What do you think?
Toby:
I think it just comes down to typical – if you look across a nation, the typical family is still typical. Obviously, once you get on the East or West Coast, the typical family make-up starts to disintegrate as you go from the middle. If you look at San Francisco or Washington DC, you have very, very successful women and they’re going to be buying their houses on their own. Once you get to Oklahoma, it’s still a man and a woman and 2.5 kids. What I see is that in terms of that 70% of women selling real estate, they’re Moms and they become Mompreneurs. Maybe they did something at the local bookstore, I don’t know, they had some kind of job, they get pregnant, they revert back to traditional gender roles and the Mom at some point stays home.
They say ‘Hey, I want to do something, I still want to raise my kid, what am I going to do? I’m going to get my real estate license’. You have all these people out there with licenses, and again, going back to NAR, the typical agent earns less than $40,000. You can’t live off that!
Jason:
It’s mind-boggling. That has hardly adjusted for inflation at all, that is just mind-boggling, it really is.
Toby:
I agree. I 100% agree. Again, I think it’s important knowing who you are. If you want to win at real estate, there’s a couple of things you’ve got to do.
Number 1: You need to know who you are. What is your personality? If you take a DiSC profile, and I’d be interested to know what your profile is, Jason.
Jason:
ENTJ, well, that’s not DiSC exactly, but it’s the same darn thing, pretty much.
Toby:
Okay, yeah. I think that’s Myers-Briggs, but that’s okay.
Jason:
That’s Myers-Briggs, yeah. But DiSC is like identical, almost.
Toby:
Yeah, it’s similar, but let me say it this way. DiSC, I’m 99D, which is dominant, 99I, which is gregarious.
Jason:
Okay, I don’t remember my DiSC. I did take it. We used to test all our employees on DiSC.
Toby:
Here’s my point. For me, with my high DI, I should be a listing agent. I don’t have the patience to mess with buyers, I don’t want to do it, I’m not detail-focused or whatever. For me, if I got into real estate, I know that I should be BOOM! on the listing side of it. Whereas if you’re high S, high C, you’re more paternal, you’re more maternal and you are very much suited to being a buyers’ agent.
Number 1: Know who you are and get on the right side of the business.
Number 2: Knowing who you are will determine or give you a guide to a few things. One: Should you join a team or not? If you’re high S, high C, you’re not a killer. You’re much more suited to sitting in a seat and having Jimmy pay for Google pay-per-click and give you leads, and you’re okay with that.
If you’re new, you’ve got to know who you are so you are on the right side of the transaction, and two, maybe you are not suited to being an entrepreneur. Maybe you need to sell real estate in a sort of pseudo-entrepreneurial way because you’re on commission, but you really need someone else to provide the structure and the systems. If you’re out there considering real estate, I think that’s the first place that you start, because knowing who you are is going to drive what side of the transaction you’re on, number one and number two: should you go it on your own or should you join a team and have someone else do the heavy lifting for you?
Jason:
Good stuff. Well, Toby, this has been very enlightening. Give out your website and tell people where they can find your show.
Toby:
Yeah. You can find us on iTunes or Stitcher Radio, and it’s at www.SuperAgentsLive.com, so go to our website and listen to any of the episodes and check us out.
Jason:
I love what you say that you do the show through the lens of a real estate agent, but really, it’s just an entrepreneur who happens to be in a certain industry. I used to say that real estate agents should view themselves as marketing professionals who happen to have a real estate license. It’s really more than marketing, of course, because there’s a lot more to the business than that, but that’s certainly one part of it that’s important.
Toby:
Oh absolutely! I’m sorry, not to cut you off, Jason, but real estate agents are in the retail business. It’s either business to business or business consumer. If you sell real estate, you have a consumer facing company, you’re in retail and your product just happens to be houses.
Jason:
Good stuff, very good point. Good, well Toby, any final tips you want to leave our people with? You’ve just got a wealth of knowledge from interviewing all these guests that you interview all day and on your show.
Toby:
I would just say that Number One: If you are an entrepreneur, listening to my show can help. Building a business is really all the same. Real estate is a contact sport. Everything is a contact sport. It’s going out and meeting someone, putting them in the database and at some point, whatever product you have, you can market to them. Go to my show, listen to it.
Number two: If you have any questions, I have a long history in building other companies as well as investing in real estate. Send me an email, I’m happy to answer any questions and on Twitter, I’m @SuperAgentsLive.
Jason:
Good stuff. Toby, thank you so much for joining us.
Toby:
Thanks, Jason, I appreciate it, bud.
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Outro:
This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, all rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.HartmanMedia.com or email media@hartmanmedia.com. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own, and the host is acting on behalf of Platinum Properties Investor Network Inc. exclusively.