Expired?
That is how I picture calling expired listings. BTW, I tried to find the source for that photo but was not able to. I saw it on Facebook and loved the image so I’m using but if it’s yours and you’d like credit for it, please let me know.
I started in real estate in 2003. I was sure my friends and family would use me to buy and sell real estate so I created a database of 300 people I knew and mailed a ‘newsletter’ to them and waited. And waited. And wai… phone rang!! Oh, you want me to advertise on the grocery store shopping carts? How much is that? $4000 for a year!!?? Are you kidding me?
And waited.
I was convinced I could do business by referral but I was struggling. At the end of my 1st year I’d done 7 deals. I guess the average for an agent is 5-6 deals but the reality is about half of the Realtors in the country don’t do any deals. None. NAR says the successful agent does 11 deals a year but let’s move on. That’s depressing when you know you have to pay taxes, expenses and a split out of that.
My team leader said I had to call expired listings and FSBO if I was going to succeed in this business but I just couldn’t agree to do it. I was convinced there had to be a better way.
My recovering engineer had looked at the data. FSBO amounts to 8% of the market and half of those were family deals where you call an attorney, not an agent so it’s a really small number of what seems to be very angry people who don’t want to talk to an agent, ever.
Expired listings are a bigger number at about 12% in my market over the last 6 months but they are about as angry as the FSBO, are likely overpriced, unreasonable to deal with and get bombarded by agents for a few days after the listing expires. (See picture above).
That means about 80% of the transactions happen by repeat and referral and I wanted to be in that end of the pool. There were a lot more opportunities so I stuck to my guns. I learned everyone knows 2 people who are going to do a real estate deal in the next 12 months. If I know 100 people and take really good care of them I had a potential of 200 deals or 400 sides. I know I won’t get them all but I can get more than my fair share if I learned how.
Long story short, I changed offices (not brokers) to find a place more encouraging to my way to doing business, hired a coach to help me stay on track (my 1st coach was not a good fit and I found one after 6 months of continued struggle) and I was off to the races.
I’ve been in the top 20% of my office every year since and last year I was the Number 5 agent in the office out of 250 agents. This way works and I can prove it.
I think it’s wrong to keep teaching the same old systems when 85% of the new agents today will be gone in 3 years or less so I’m trying to do something about it. I have been mentoring agents in my office for a few years and seen some great success. I want to do more of that and this blog and some other tools will let me help.
If this sounds interesting, sign up below and we’ll stay in touch. There is more to come. We’ll send you an eBook and a checklist to get you started. We’ll be in your inbox regularly with encouragement, practical how to articles and some videos are planned soon.
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I don’t think I can change that 85/15 number but I can certainly move a few folk from the 85 to the 15 who make it. If you want to be in that number and do it without cold calling or door knocking, we can help.
Thanks for listening,
Jerry Robertson
678-616-1578 Direct
PS – if this was helpful to you, please share it with your friends and agents you know that would benefit from being a part of this gang. We’d love to connect with more folks. If you sign up below you will get a checklist to start your referral-based real estate business. We’ll stay in touch with more tips, courses, and info. It’s free and you can unsubscribe anytime. Give it a try and see if we can help.
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