Listen and learn as serial entrepreneur Raymond Sjolseth shares his journey of opening 45 different businesses during his incredible career. His journey will inspire and motivate you to break through your personal barriers and limiting beliefs by diving deep into what creates truly successful companies. Raymond also shares how he plans to use his skills at business by focusing on simple, repeatable strategies in the real estate business. As an expert in creating scalable, repeatable results in business and for his clients his approach to the real estate industry is something we can all learn from!

What are the five digital tools that buyers want most from us as real estate professionals?

I'm gonna give 'em to you right now:

1. A 3D virtual tour of the homes they're looking at online

There's an interesting study recently by NAR that shows that the average buyer today looks at eight homes over eight weeks before they make a buying decision. But of the eight homes, they look at three of them virtually. And in their minds, they consider that to be that they've seen the house. So three virtual showings kind of crazy, right? I'm gonna talk about virtual showings a little bit more in just a second.

But in order to do that virtual showing, if I'm the listing agent, what do I need to have? I need to do that Matterport tour. I need to do that similar or tour in some form or fashion so people can really feel like they came through the house.

2. A digital floor plan

If you're selling new construction especially. Give them that floor...

Here's a number that we should be talking about with our spheres of influence, our friends, our social media audiences:

And this is 15.9.

Now what's 15.9 represent?

15.9% is the amount that the average renter had as an increase in the rent last year.

15.9%!

And it's likely that this is gonna have again this year or some similar high number, and probably the year after that.

Why?

It's supply and demand. There is high demand and low supply. So it's the same thing that's happening to us in the real estate industry, right? We have low supply, high demand causes prices to rise.

So if renters aren't careful what can happen is if rents continue to rise, they could have rent that's increasing by 10%, a year or more over the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years. They could easily be paying 30, 40, 50% more for rent in a few years.

And they think their rent's high now. Wait another couple years, it's gonna get higher.

So what can they do? What's the...

My wife and I had something exciting happen: We downsized! We moved out of our big house into a much smaller house because three outta four of our kids are out of the house and we want to travel some more.

We're like a lot of people in our generation. We're in that mindset of scaling down. But what's interesting is over the years, in our big house, we received a lot of marketing messages from REALTORS and the marketing messages always focused mostly on the agent getting a listing. For instance, the marketing messages would be a postcard, a door hanger, etc. and it would say something like this:

"Are you considering selling? Call me."
"Would you like to know what your home is worth? Call me."
"I have a buyer who may be interested in your home. Call me."

Now, what are all those marketing messages center on? The agent getting your listing. And I get it. I've been guilty of the same thing.

But what if we changed tactics and we focused on...

Hey guys, quick idea for you. Actually two.

First one is: Have you mapped all the home anniversaries for clients you sold a home to in 2021? Maybe you go back even further. You could go back to 2020, 2019 and map those home anniversaries of those closings, and then give everybody a call as their anniversary comes up.

You can say, "Hey, happy home anniversary. By the way, I did a quick updated CMA on your home for you to let you know what your home is worth and to show you how much equity you've built up over the last 12 months. It's incredible. Let me show you what's happened here."

That will be a value added call. People will appreciate you're making the call and they'll be looking forward to it next year.

Okay. That's a one idea.

Second idea is this time of year, everybody's starting to file their taxes. Get it in front of it. Send everybody you closed a home with in the last 12 months a copy of their HUD and closing statements so their...

This is a podcast that will inspire you! Eduardo Reyes learned how to channel his positive energy to move past rejection in the movie and modeling industry by landing roles in 4 major movies and numerous commercials. Using that same determination and drive he launched his real estate career and in three short years Eduardo has become one of the fastest rising stars in the real estate industry closing an amazing 87 transactions last year alone! Watch and listen as he breaks down his approach to the sales process (it’s completely unique!).

A couple interesting stats are coming out. And they show that we have a new generation that's upon us.

And I'm gonna start with the first stat, which is talking about young adults.

So young adults (adults described as 25 to 34) have come back to live at home. Now in 2020, this hit an all time high —17.8% of young adults, 24 to 30 came back home to live with their parents. That's the highest it's been since 1960 guys.

And last year in 2021, it still was 17%, which was the second highest year since 1960.

So that's one side of what some people are starting to call the "sandwich generation."

Now who's in the middle of the sandwich? Guys like me. People that are 44 to 60 years old—I'm 52 right in the middle. So we got our kids coming home, but who's coming on the other side? Potentially older parents, right?

So parents that are maybe 60, 70, 80 years old also might need to come and be a part of the family, right?

...

A few of you are suffering from what I call referral resistance. What's referral resistance mean? It means you've got a pretty good size database of people, a sphere of influence, and it's not performing well.

In other words, you're not getting a lot of referrals. Your sphere of influence isn't sending you buyers and sellers.

Why?

It's because the people in your sphere don't quite trust you enough. They don't quite see you as the expert that you know you are. And because of that, there's resistance to sending you referrals.

So how can you overcome referral resistance?

I'm gonna give you three quick techniques to help you with that:

1. You have to be the experts in their minds, not yours.

How do you do it? You need to be giving them information regularly about the real estate market. Now, this is super easy to do because you are given information all the time. One of the places you are given information from is your local MLS system....

There's a great book by a guy named Harvey Mackay. He wrote the book Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty.

And in the book, he talks about this $25,000 question, and I'm gonna pose this question to you.

So the $25,000 question kind of goes like this:

Imagine you own a muffler shop or some kind of business. And it's payroll week and you don't have the money to pay your employees. And you know, if you don't pay 'em, they're all gonna walk because everybody's trying to hire right now. So the question mark is it's 2:00 AM you wake up in the morning and you're like, I've gotta come up with $25,000 by tomorrow morning. Otherwise I'm probably gonna lose my business. Who do you call? In your friends list, your personal friends list, right now, is there someone you call and get $25,000 from by tomorrow morning?

If the answer's no, the reason you probably don't have anybody that qualifies in that category is because you haven't helped enough...

In a recent study, it was found that 59 percent of businesses do not have a digital marketing strategy. If you're one of the 41 percent with a plan, congrats! But even if you're doing well with your current strategy, it's always important to explore new opportunities. Matt Muscat is a digital marketing expert- author, coach, and speaker who specializes in working with real estate professionals. Listen as Matt provides his Ultimate Messaging Strategy, the 5 X 5 strategy, and his 5 Personas Technique during this value packed session (side note all of these are zero cost ideas). This is a can’t miss episode!