When it comes down to it, there are only a few ways to make MORE money selling real estate. In this episode, Chris and Garry share three ways that agents can grow their income without having to re-invent the wheel, which are: 

1) Working harder or longer

2) Decreasing the sales cycle 

3) Increasing the average sales price

Chris and Garry discuss the potential for burnout and the importance of seeking help from tools, technology, and services, as well as ways to decrease the sales cycle, such as compressing the time it takes to find a client by using effective marketing. Lastly, they discuss the importance of understanding who the customer is and what they want, and exploring different niches to market to the right person with the right message at the right time. Tune into the video above to dive deeper into these three principles.

Transcript: 

Garry: [00:00:00] There's a gazillion ways to make money in real estate, but really only a few principles of making more money selling real estate. When I started selling real estate in 1997, I tried literally everything to make money. I even had a homeowner call the police on me because I was door knocking in a gated neighborhood.

Now I can tell you this - I have never run so fast or jumped so high in a three-piece suit. The good news is you don't have to ruin a good suit trying to make more money in today's real estate market. We're going to dive into the principles of how you can do this, but before we do, make sure that you like this video and hit subscribe.

Chris: Welcome to the Chris and Garry Show. I'm Chris Scott. I'm joined with my partner in crime here, Garry Creath, and we're gonna talk all things real estate. And we've been around the rodeo or been around the block a couple of times, so we think we have something to contribute. We'll be releasing new episodes every Thursday, so be sure to like and subscribe to our channel. And if you want to take the conversation further, go check out thepaperlessagent.com or find us on Instagram @thepaperlessagent.

Alright Garry, let's get into this because, you've been selling real estate for a really long time, and I know you've done everything from, you know, jump over fences to try and sell more homes, but it really comes down to three primary methods or three primary principles when it comes to trying to sell more or to increase our profit when it comes to selling real estate. Can you tell us what those three things are and then we'll be able to dive and dig into each one of them?

Garry: Sure. Yeah, so number one - you can work harder or longer. You know, put more hours in every day. That's one.

Number two is you can reduce your sales cycle, and you might be thinking like, what does that mean, "reduce your sales cycle"? Well all that means is increasing the rapidity of making closings happen. So you're spending less time with your clients, not more. So that's decreasing the sales cycle.

Chris: That would lead to probably increased transactions at that point, right?

Garry: Increased transactions, correct. Because what it does is it gives you more time. So you're taking time away from being in a car with a client or managing listings, and you're actually taking that time to generate more business and close more deals. So that's number two.

The third one is, increase your average sales price because, you know, if you do the same number of deals this year as you did last year, but your average sales price went up, guess what happens, Chris? You make more money. And by the way, you don't just have to focus on one of these. You can focus on all three simultaneously.

Chris: Well, let's dive into the first one here - working more, working longer. I know that might have a negative connotation to it because the first thing I think of is, well, I have to put more time in, which may be appropriate depending on where you're at. There are seasons, right?

Garry: Yeah. Well, it might be. And so, it depends on where you are in your real estate career. Let's take this for example. What if you're a part-time real estate agent and you have a j-o-b to support your lifestyle right now? Well, if you want to increase your sales, you could certainly improve the number of hours that you're dedicating to your real estate career.

That's one. You can do that. Number two is maybe we're getting a little lazy from time to time and we only work a few hours a day. Well, if you really wanna start increasing your revenue, you can change that. But if you're at capacity and you personally as your own body, you can't do anymore, maybe perhaps it's time to get help.

Chris: Gotcha. Which is also part of that working more, working longer. It may not be you putting the hours in, but somebody has to put the hours in. And I think to your point, some of us may be in a place where we have the time and we have the energy and that's okay, but you’ve gotta be careful because that can lead to burnout and that's horrible, right? Then you don't even want to sell real estate once you hit burnout.

So if you're already at capacity, getting help is a really good option. But I think immediately when you say get help, I think, oh, do I have to hire an assistant? Do I have to bring on buyer's agents? What do you mean by getting help, Garry?

Garry: Well, when getting help the first place I always go to look for help is tools and technology. I'm always looking for more, better, faster technology that will improve my efficiency that allows me to actually take certain things off of my plate. And we've talked about this during our last episode, but using tools and technologies that are available to you to save you a lot of time.

Next, different services - virtual assistance, contract to close companies. These are a lot of different places where you can very affordably get help to do the things that either you're not good at, or take away too much of your time, [00:05:00] or that you just don't enjoy.

I think for most of us in real estate, we get into this business because we love working with people. We love helping them find solutions. And that does not normally happen as we're sitting behind a computer. It normally happens when we're face-to-face with our clients, so getting more of that time available to us by getting some other things off of our plate.

And then the last one, which is the most expensive way of getting help is hiring staff. You can do this with part-time people or full-time. Perhaps your brokerage has somebody who is working in the office and you can carve out some of their hours for yourself. Another place that is taking a lot of time off of my plate is handing my buyer clients to buyer's agents, because that saves me a ton of time to be able to really leverage myself into my listings.

Chris: You know, Garry, I think you don't even have to have buyer's agents like the traditional team model. You can develop referral relationships with buyers agents where, hey, you know, this person is part of my transaction team, so to speak, and you know they're going to work with you to find that home and then just establish a referral fee relationship with that individual, right?

So you don't have to go hire people. I think that's the thing. Usually when you think of working more, working longer, that can lead to burnout. But we’ve got a few alternatives, right? We can put tools in place. Transaction management, marketing automation is a great one, right? Like to be able to just save time on doing stuff.

We can get VAs, contractors, upwork.com, fiverr.com, those are all places to find VAs and contractors. And there's a whole bunch of industry specific, in real estate contractors or VAs as well. We offer a service–The Agent Marketing Concierge service.

We do part of the marketing for our clients in that regard. But then when you think of getting help from a staffing standpoint, most of us don't want to have to manage people. So I think that's where the VAs and contractors are. It's probably a better option.

But some of us are on that path, right? Maybe you're on the brokerage path, maybe you're on the team path, like the traditional team approach. Then you might be looking at staff, you might be looking at some buyers agents, but I think it's important we don't communicate to you, that's the only way.

No, you can have access to buyer's agents just through referral relationships. And so that's pretty insightful. So that's working more, working longer. Or just putting more hours in and getting that help whether it's you or somebody else.

Garry: One thing I also wanted to add here, Chris, is that one thing we can also really focus on is there is seasonality to our businesses. You know, there are certain times when I can't even get my existing clients on the phone. That typically happens the first two weeks that kids are out of school for summer break. And it happens the last two weeks of summer vacation. So those are four weeks right there that I know I’m pretty much not going to be meeting with anybody because everybody's gone.

Additionally, it's good to look at when you are busiest because if you can dedicate yourself to like 90-day pushes, 90-day sprints, to where it says, you know what, for the next 90 days, this is a high season for me. I'm going to put in six days a week instead of five. I wouldn't go with seven personally because that leads to burnout. But you can do that. And I think psychologically we can do that for a short amount of time, like 90 days, and you set a deadline to it. And when you know that that deadline is out there, you're able to push pretty hard to make things happen during that season.

Chris: A good example of that, Garry, would be a lot of times schools have spring break, but spring is actually a really good time for us to be focused on getting listings that are gonna feed us throughout the summer. But like your point, at the starting point of summer or the end of summer, maybe that's when we're taking our spring break, so to speak.

Maybe we should be focused on it. I think just having an understanding of that seasonality. I think the thing that's a mistake is to say, you know, like for the holidays for example, like December or after Thanksgiving, I think a lot of people make the mistake of saying, oh, no one's going to want to do anything after Thanksgiving, and people tend to shut down. But that's kind of a mistake, right?

Garry: Well, it has been for me, and I'll share this quick story, is that when I first got into the business, I was single. I was working. I just had to make money to pay my bills, and so I literally would work seven days a week. Now, that did lead to burnout for me, but what I realized is that when other real estate agents are hibernating in the winter, because I think we all believe that our clients don't want to sell during the holidays or we want to spend time with our family and we don't want to work.

I think it's important to look at that and say, is this really a time that I need to hibernate or is this [00:10:00] a time where I could really push? Because when other real estate agents are hibernating, guess what? Their buyers and sellers still want to buy and sell real estate. And I’ll share with you, Chris, for most of my career, the winter season, the holiday season, is actually the most productive sales season for me because I'm taking market share.

Chris: You know, I would also add to it. During the holidays, for example, I'm just gonna pick that as a specific season. And I'm lumping holidays everywhere, you know, between the entire time from Thanksgiving basically through the New Year. So the people who are going to be making those decisions about moving, let's say January, February, March, they are actively thinking about it during that holiday season.

So, maybe you're not transacting during that time, but you should definitely be marketing and making sure that people know that you are available, because that's maybe when they have questions. That's when they're thinking about who they wanna work with. And if you're silent during that time or not showing up during that time, I think that's a huge mistake.

Now you gotta do it tactfully. You wanna do effective marketing, right? We're still professionals, so we have to, during that holiday season, come across a certain way. But being silent or inactive I think is a huge mistake.

Garry: Yeah, I agree. So that's the first way, Chris, that we can make more money in real estate is, for lack of a better term, just working harder.

The second one I love and that is decreasing the sales cycle. And if you don't know what a sales cycle is, a sales cycle is the amount of time, the cycle of time from when you first meet with your customer to the closing. That is the cycle. And so if I can reduce that cycle in time, or at least reduce the amount of hours that I'm spending on that particular client during that sales cycle, it's gonna help me sell a lot more homes. And there are a lot of ways that we can do that.

Chris: Well, I would add to it just for coming at it from a marketer's point of view, if you can compress the time it takes to find that client as well, I consider that part of the sales cycle. I wouldn't advocate for doing the type of marketing where you just do activity, find a client, stop your marketing, and then work with that client. I think you should always be marketing consistently. But if your marketing is more effective at getting people and can find them faster, then it speaks to your point about being able to decrease the average sales cycle. Sell faster ultimately to get to more transactions.

That's why we're compressing that timeframe is so that you can spend less time per deal and do more deals.

So tools and services are a good thing. We kind of touched on that in terms of being able to work more or work longer.

Garry: But this is a little bit different because one thing that I found out in 2010 when the first iPad came out is that, wow, I can use this new technology to be 100% mobile. If I don't have to drive back to my office to write an offer, have my client sign the offer, fax it over to the other agent, you know, all of these things.

Chris: Fax, Garry? Fax it over. I don't even know if everyone remembers what that is­–a fax machine?

Garry: But you know, I think we get so stuck in the way of how things have always been done that if we can take a step back and realize, okay, if I can use technology and apps and use this thing right here, my iPad. I mean, I got it right here. It never leaves my side right there.

If I can use that to transact, to get listings signed at the client's house, to be able to take all of the notes that I need, to be able to show properties and never go to the office to write offers for my buyers from the house that I'm showing them. All of these things.

I mean, if you think about it, you're like, well, so what? Well, driving back to the office, depending on where I am, could take an hour, especially with traffic.

Chris: During certain seasons, sometimes getting that offer in very quickly, it could be like the secret to getting that deal for your customer. So I mean, being able to be fast is really important just from a servicing standpoint.

Garry: Being mobile and being fast using technology as your ally to make sure that you win for your client, that saves me on average two to three weeks of hours of my time, working days, two to three weeks per year, it saves me by being mobile. And so I'm like, wow, what else can I do with that time? Think about that.

Well, so another thing, Chris, and I'm a firm believer that we as real estate agents should not be doing this, and that is transaction management. And here's why–I have never met a real estate agent who was [00:15:00] really, really detail-oriented and super highly organized.

I mean, just go look at your own car as a real estate agent. Is everything where it needs to be? Probably not. And so what I would say is bring in the experts on this and you know, you can get a transaction manager to do this per transaction. A lot of brokerages have them in house. But I would certainly replace yourself there. That'll give you a lot of time back.

Chris: Do you think there's a little bit of ego attached to that? Like, here's the thing. Usually for the most part, those of us in real estate are people-people, right?

Our value that we bring to the table is we're very relational. We like to help people. We want to help people get to the outcomes that they want to have. And the little minutiae, the nitty gritty of this little detail, that little detail is probably not–now, I know there's always exceptions to the rule.

But if you were even to take it a step further and say, well, where should you be spending your time? Well, should you be spending your time essentially being the main point person to your client, which is what I would suggest you be, as opposed to the person behind the scenes clicking the buttons, doing this and doing that and the other.

I think what happens though is we get caught up in that, well, I wanna make sure that we provide a good experience. I gotta be in control of all the details.

Garry: Well, that's where you interview the transaction coordinators and find somebody who works the way that you want them to work.

But we have to get out of our own way. And if we don't, I'll be honest, I don't know anybody who's doing like 20, 30, 40 million dollars in production and doing their own transaction management.

Chris: I don't think it's physically possible, right? Like you can't do all of that. Even just being able to handle a high volume of transactions you're going to tap out in terms of the amount of hours in a day that you have to do stuff.

Garry: I think it's important to understand is what is your highest and best use of your time? It is not transaction management. Another one that ties directly into that is listing coordination. I should not be in all of the minutia and details of coordinating what happens as we're going to market for a listing.

And as we go up until we get offers, I should not be doing that. And quite often, by the way, a transaction manager can do both. So they can be the listing coordinator and the transaction manager, which actually ends up being a really nice experience for your client because that seller client will have that experience with them as the listing manager and then as they transition into transaction management, it's the same person.

And I get rave reviews from our transaction management team because they're delivering. They are like my representation out there. Now, this doesn't mean that if I get a listing signed, I'm done until closing. No, I'm checking in with my clients every week. So I'm still that point person, but I'm having somebody else do all the minutia.

Chris: Well, I think what happens when we don't have someone do listing coordination, I'm thinking specifically of all the marketing activities that should be done to market a listing well, is if we don't have somebody doing it, and if we get busy, then all we do is we put a sign in the yard, we put it in the MLS, and we pray that that thing sells.

And that is like, a horrible approach to getting that listing sold and trying to generate enough demand to really find enough buyers to be able to support the price that you're gonna ask for to get top dollar for the seller. And so when we take on all of it, which means we may be doing a lot of it subpar right now, no one's gonna tell us we're our own boss. No one's gonna tell us this, but I think we've talked to enough expired listing clients and expired listing prospects, and we've asked them, hey, why do you think your home didn't sell? “My agent didn't do anything. My agent didn't do anything.”

So you take that back to, well, if you were doing the listing coordination yourself, and you were taking on the marketing yourself, and you were busy, maybe that's all you did was put a sign in the yard and put it in the MLS and that, quite frankly, is just not enough to do it well.

Garry: No it's not.

But for some reason in real estate, we think that we should or that we can. And I think that is one of the biggest downfalls to us in our own business and we hurt ourselves. We're not delivering on that experience for our clients really in the way that we should. And I think if we take this a little more seriously and because so many real estate agents let our egos get involved and it's like, well, nobody can deliver this kind of service.

Chris: It's like, yes they can. And there's probably people who could do it better than we can.

Garry: And here's what's counterintuitive is that as we replace ourselves with these minutia things, it opens us up in that time to produce a much better experience for our clients and for ourselves. And the counterintuitive is that as you let these things go, your level of service to your [00:20:00] client increases.

And so it's actually the opposite of what we think. Well, those are tools and services.

Chris: Garry, I think by getting that help–you know, let's talk about transaction management, listing coordination, is you're not just creating time for yourself. You are compressing that sales cycle in terms of your energy and effort and in many cases, maybe even the servicing of it, right?

Like maybe that home gets sold faster as a result of that transaction team support, or that listing coordination team happening, right? People may be more satisfied in less time because you're guiding that help as opposed to trying to do it all on your own. I think that listing coordination actually leads us to the next point where you should, in order to decrease that sales cycle to sell faster and ultimately get more transactions, is decrease the amount of time or the amount of effort that it takes to find that customer in the first place.

Garry: You can, yes. Oh, man, I’ve gotta tell you, I'm a real estate agent. I'm a salesperson. I am not a marketer. And in fact, when I am left to my own devices and I try to market everything on my own and brand myself and stay in touch with everybody, through all of my branding and marketing and advertising, I create major breakdowns for myself and our entire team.

And so that's where utilizing marketing automation and organizations that do this for you–like at Paperless Agent, the Agent Marketing Concierge–by me being able to have the Agent Marketing Concierge do those things for me, it frees up, I don't know, maybe 10 hours a month of what I can now go and prospect and by messaging my clients, by messaging my contacts and connections, by doing the things that I need to be doing marketing and branding, I should not be doing that.

Chris: Yeah. I think as real estate professionals, we need to be interacting with the market, right? And that means as much as we can, making communications with the prospects, with past clients, with our sphere of influence, with people, we should be interacting with people. And when marketing is happening and when it's happening well, they already know we sell real estate.

They already know what we do. Like they're aware of us because we've focused on creating that awareness through our marketing activities. So now we get to go in and be people. We get to go in there and interact with the market and I think that's where our highest and best use is.

We are the spokespeople for our own real estate practice, if you want to think that way. And here's the thing. I would much rather have somebody watching this go out. I would rather have you work at an open house than sit behind your computer writing emails that are gonna go out for marketing purposes, right?

Garry: Yep. Because you gotta engage the customers. That's one of the biggest things is how do we convert prospects into clients is by, we must engage with them where they are. And they're not behind a computer, well they might be, but if I need to get face to face with them hosting an open house, I can't think of anything better to do with my time if I'm out there prospecting.

Chris: So I think it's very important that we consider, what are the options? And there's tons of services, there's tons of tools, there's tons of consultants, there's a lot of options out there.

But you have to take the step forward. If your idea of marketing is, oh, I have to do all of it on my own, I'm thinking Garry of like, back in the day, remember when you used to have to lick stamps, stuff envelopes, put a stamp on the envelope. I still taste that glue. You know what I'm saying? From the stamps, the old days.

Garry: I would do it in the evenings and on weekends so it would not interfere with the time that I needed to be with clients. And that was just not sustainable, you know, doing those things in your off time. We gotta take care of ourselves.

So that's another one is with the marketing and lead generation, automating it, using consultants, using different services like Agent Marketing Concierge to do these things for you. That's a huge win.

Chris: Another thing we could do is something that I think you're excellent at, right?

And I think this is something where maybe most of us in real estate don't think quite at this level. Maybe it's because you've had a long career in sales, but you think about business development in terms of being able to sell more, to do more transactions, which ultimately is being able to find customers fast and more in volume.

So talk a little bit about what are channels? How can we develop them? What are some examples of them?

Garry: Yeah, so the different channels that I really work through, I think of more like this is business to business relationship. With me and my client, that's business to consumer.That's B2C.

What I'm thinking about is B2B. How do I offer help to other organizations who might be involved in a real estate transaction? For example, builders. How can I offer help to builders? Where do they need help? And I mean, sitting down with them and asking them these questions–where do you need help?

Where do you think you need help? How can I help? You know, how can we work together? [00:25:00] Lenders and banks. My goodness. You wanna talk about some pivotal points that your consumers are engaging in. If you can help lenders out, they'll help you. It's like, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine. And then, you know, all of these different business relationships that we come into contact with throughout a real estate transaction.

Be thinking about those relationships. Build those relationships. Think about cross endorsing each other. You could actually have written agreements with these different business owners of we're going to endorse each other because here's the thing, it's not really about the money.

What it's about is that the more I can work with people who I trust and who trust me on the business-to-business side, the better overall experience that our clients are going to have. The more likely it is that those transactions are going to close, the more likely it is that they're going to close faster.

So the more I have great relationships with some lenders, the more I know that they're gonna get that loan done quickly to make sure that we get across the line.

Chris: You know, here's one really good affinity relationship to have, or a cross endorsement relation to have right now, I believe are financial planners, and here's why.

So right now, I think it's 52% of sellers, according to the National Association of Realtors are Baby Boomers. And Baby Boomers are probably the most likely people to be working with a financial advisor to plan out the remaining of their financial decisions, right? Maybe that's less of a concern for someone who might be a first-time buyer or whatever, but Boomers are most likely to be working with a financial planner or a financial advisor.

And if they're gonna buy or sell, they're gonna be asking that financial planner, is this a good idea? And if you've got that relationship, then you've got a really good referral partnership there.

Garry: Absolutely. Oh man. And just think about how you can help your own clients by making sure that they have the right financial planner as well.

So those are all different ways that we can decrease the sales cycle, rapidly get more transactions in our pipeline, and get them closed faster.

The third principle that we use to make more money is something that I think almost everybody that I ever talk to in real estate says, oh, I want that. And that is increasing your average sales price.

What if we also combine that with some others and say, you know what, we're going to work harder, get more transactions done, reduce the sales cycle, and increase the sales price? I mean, that's a trifecta right there.

Chris: Let’s talk about this. Let's get into this because increasing sales price, I think the first thing that comes to mind is people might think, oh, should I be selling luxury real estate?

And that’s not really, I mean, that's an example of increasing your average sales price, but that's not the only way to go about it. Let’s say your average sales price is $345,000 and you want to get to $500,000, there's a way to do that, right? There's a specific way to do that.

Specifically, I mean, that's instead of focusing on first time buyers, you're gonna be focusing on move up buyers, right? I mean, there's different strategies that you can use. What are some of the things that you've done? What's the process for increasing average sales price?

Garry: Well, the very first thing that we have to do is we have to understand who our customer is, because a first-time home buyer might be a very different customer with different needs, wants, desires, fears, concerns than somebody who is buying or selling their fourth or fifth home at a much more expensive price, right?

So we need to understand who they are and how do we serve them. And when I say how do we serve them, one of the biggest ways that we can serve them is by understanding where are their knowledge gaps? What did they need to know that I know that I can share with them? That's one of the biggest things.

You know, who are they? What do they want? What do they want to know and what are they concerned about? I think you call this in marketing, finding the right person.

Chris: Yes, Garry. There's a fundamental rule or principle in marketing, which is right person, right message, right time. And when you bring all three of those things together, you have what we call effective marketing, meaning we produce results.

And this is also an example of exploring a niche, right? Let's say you want to focus on second home buyers. And who would be a second home buyer? Well, I was reading a report from National Association of Realtors that a lot of Baby Boomers are interested in second homes.

They're interested in vacation homes. They're interested also in income producing homes. So the idea there is, well, it would be great if I could own a home in a destination area, maybe by the beach or wherever, and I can go there sometime, but I can also make some short-term rental income off of it, right?

So now if I take that person, that individual, and consider that person to be the right person I wanna produce a message for, then to your point, [00:30:00] I can ask myself well, what are they interested in? What are their concerns? What are the gaps in knowledge that they have that I can create marketing for? I can create the right message for that right person.

And I think all you have to do is really explore who those right people might be given the price points that you're trying to get into or that you're trying to level up to.

Garry: No, I totally agree because one of the very first things we should do is explore, where are these people? Where do they hang out? What do they do? Where do they eat? What do they do for leisure, for fun? Where do they work? What kind of careers do these people have? I mean, all of these things we need to understand and then tie in what is their lifestyle like? And I think you were touching on my brother. My brother Jonathan has built his entire career on this.

Chris: Well, your brother is the president of the country club, which he has worked himself to get that position right? And so as the president of the country club, he's got a tremendous influence. He gets to go play golf, go play tennis, go work out, and be hanging out with these prospective clients all the time. And so one might actually think, Hmm, what's more important? Think about it. Because a lot of us might think, well, if I want to get into a higher price point, maybe I should buy that fancier car.

Right? Well, maybe not. Maybe instead of buying that fancy car, buy a membership to the country club because that's where the real relationships are going to be. Now it doesn't have to be the country club. There's all kinds of little areas or spheres of interest that oftentimes that throughout that the right person that you're looking to communicate with, that you're looking to market to, that you're trying to cultivate as a customer so you can increase your average sales price may be right in front of you.

Here's another example. Let's say you move into a neighborhood that is a move up, right? So let's say you have a home that’s worth $300,000–400,000. You sell your home, you move to a neighborhood that has homes worth $500,000–$600,000. Well, maybe it behooves you if you have children, for example, to join the PTA because you're gonna be heavily involved with that community.

Or what are the other things that I can do to get plugged into the community so that I can be like an actual person that they're going to have relationships and cultivate that new network of people. Garry, I think one of the things that you've done really, really well is you cultivated a network of business owners and executives.

Right. And that has led to an increase in the average sales price for you because those business owners, those executives, as they have ascended in their career, they've made more money.

Garry: Well, and that's the other thing is I think it's good to get out there and actively do things to increase the average sales price, but don't forget your clients.

I remember my very first clients, they were first time home buyers. You know, that was 26 years ago. And guess what? They're buying multi-million dollar homes now. So it's really, really important here to stay in touch with valuable real estate information on a consistent basis.

Messaging them, staying in touch over the years, because like you said, what's going to happen? These people advance in their career. They want bigger houses, they have kiddos, they have grandkids. They keep buying more and more and more expensive homes. So the activity that we're doing there is just marketing and branding.

Staying in touch with these people, continuing to build trust so that as they escalate their price, I'm there and I get to reap the benefits and increase my average sales price because they're increasing theirs.

Chris: Now if you wanted to accelerate that, here's another good example, is that you could focus on creating information for people who are looking to downsize, right?

They've been in their home for 20 years or however long it's been, and now they're ready to move into something a little bit more manageable, something a little bit smaller. Maybe closer to family, whatever, right? So let's make an assumption there. They've been in their home 20 years.

That thing has an awful increase in value, right? Like in 20 years’ time, that thing has increased in value. There's also probably a tremendous amount of equity, but oftentimes buyers are sellers in disguise, right? So they might be looking to move as, oh, we wanna downsize because we have this home we've been in for 20 years.

And yes, it's increased in price, probably 500-fold over that time. Now, that's an audience that you can go after. That's like a specific segment. That's a specific person to think about how do I produce information, how do I cultivate information and educate and teach that I can be respected in authority?

And just putting that information out there, marketing that so you now become that expert in that area for that niche.

Garry: The last tactic I would share is to [00:35:00] find where the average sales price of homes where you want to focus, find areas, find neighborhoods of those. Then go find who has active listings there and ask them if you can host open houses.

What is a better way to get your sign out, to get branding, to meet those people than to be a representative of the real estate community in the houses that you want to sell? So that's a great way to start building those relationships as well.

Chris: You know, that makes me think of, a lot of times we think of the price point sort of connected to, you know, the neighborhoods.

I've also seen, because I was thinking about one of our clients, Ted Williams up in Portland. There are times when maybe specific types of homes, you know, maybe people want modern homes, or maybe somebody is interested in high-rise condos downtown right now. Those are higher price point products out there.

But it's not speaking to sort of the money aspect of it. It's thinking really about the lifestyle aspect of it. A downtown condo, a modern home, modern styled home. All of these are specific lifestyles and interests, and I think the more you can ask questions about that, even get into that lifestyle or interest yourself, right?

You don't have to own a condo downtown to do that. We live in Austin here, so I could just spend an awful lot of time downtown and creating content and sharing information about the downtown area. And then that's how I can become known in those areas.

I could even do something as simple as drop lots of Google reviews to the places in the restaurants and venues in the area that I want to work, and those people who go search that up are going to see my Google reviews there. I think you know that the local market expert, local guide is what Google has.

Garry: Just the more we can get our name out in the places where the folks are who are buying and selling real estate in the price point that we want, the better.

Chris: I also think that, to your point, if there's neighborhoods that represent that price point, you should be trying to figure out how do you, in addition to open houses, get to spend a lot of time there?

How do you have a physical presence there? I'm thinking of Chip Barkel, you know, up in Canada, and he literally, I mean, he was telling us, he literally walks the neighborhood and says hello to people in the neighborhood so he has a presence in the neighborhood.

Garry: Yeah. Just don't get creepy about it.

Chris: No, I mean, it is like, why is that guy always walking around? I don't know. He's got a walking problem. No, I think you could even do things like participating in community events, participating in school events. When you really start to, if you're assertive, like if you assertively explore and assertively find ways to engage a community, it's there. It's out there. You just have to be assertive about it in finding these opportunities.

Well, there you have it. Those are the three principles for making more money in real estate. If you've found any of this information useful, we hope that you'll share it with somebody who could use it. Comment in the section below, like this video, and subscribe to our channel. See you in the next episode.