Episode 50: "The Power of Listings: Build a Real Estate Business, Not Just a Living"

🔊 Episode 50: "The Power of Listings: Build a Real Estate Business, Not Just a Living" 🔊

Description:

Welcome back, fellow listing agents! In Episode 50, Bob Mangold shares powerful, straightforward insights for those ready to level up in real estate. Today’s focus is on why building a listing-focused business is essential to your long-term success, and why relying solely on buyers can keep you from achieving the financial freedom you’re looking for.

Key Topics Covered:

• Living vs. Business:
  • Living: Chasing closings and inconsistent income, typical of working only with buyers.
  • Business: Establishing systems and processes through listings, creating consistent income and more control over your time.
• Top 10 Strategies for Becoming a Dominant Listing Agent:
  • Differentiate Yourself: Establish unique processes to stand out.
  • Know Your Market: Leverage local knowledge and data to convey expertise.
  • Focus on Seller Needs: Address what sellers value most—speed, net profit, and reduced hassle.
  • Create a Unique Selling Proposition: Develop a listing process that solves sellers’ problems and delivers high value.
  • Offer Seller Options: Provide multiple selling solutions, including cash offers and repair programs.
  • Address Commission Objections: Frame commission as compensation that delivers real value through your process.
  • Let the Market Set the Price: Avoid setting a list price; use market demand to drive a higher selling price.
  • Provide Proof of Results: Show real examples of how your process maximizes sales.
  • Build an Open House System: Drive buyer competition through structured, highly effective open house strategies.
  • Maximize Each Listing: Aim for 3-5 transactions per listing with proactive follow-up and lead capture.
• Mindset Shift: Recognize the difference between having a real estate "job" vs. a sustainable real estate "business." A listing-focused approach is essential for a better lifestyle and reliable cash flow.

Takeaways:

• Resources & Training: Check out Bob’s website, bobmangold.com, for courses and insights on implementing a listing-focused strategy.
• Facebook Group: Join the Real Estate Asset Advisor Facebook group to connect and share your thoughts with other agents.

Closing Message:
Think about these strategies, explore the resources, and take the steps necessary to build a real estate business that lasts. Remember—if you list, you last!

Join our Facebook Group at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/realestateassetadvisors

Visit our website to watch replays of our Wednesday "Elevate Business Briefings" at: www.RealEstateAssetAdvisors.org

Download a copy of my book, "If you list, you last!" at www.IfYouListYouLast.com

Transcript

 Hey, welcome fellow listing agents, Bob Mangold, the listing coach here with episode 50 of the, If You List Your Last podcast. As always, thanks for listening, sharing, and downloading. I'm excited to have you here today because I'm going to share some controversial statements, opinions, and thoughts.

I'm going to just give it to you real today in my opinion.   Today's topic is about making the decision to either focus on listings or just get out of the business. And this doesn't mean you can't make a living working with buyers, but you'll never build a real estate business by focusing on buyers alone.

Now, what's the difference? A living means you're always moving from closing to closing. Maybe you're making 40, 60, 70, 000 a year. That's a living, right? But you're not in control of your time or your income.  As a buyer's agent, you're always going to be chasing money.  A business means that you have systems, procedures, and structure To ensure that you always have a stream of clients and closings by building market share Brand identity and recognition in the area that you choose to work Now the only way to do that is through listings with listings You're chasing freedom of time, not money.

So I'm gonna share 10 ideas, some systems, and opinions around this topic, okay? Now, just a reminder, make sure you join our Real Estate Asset Advisor Facebook group so you can join in on the conversation. Share your thoughts, comments, or questions on any of the topics. I discuss right here on the podcast.

If after listening to this, you think I'm nuts, go ahead, join the group and tell us, tell me. And don't forget, you can always connect with me at www. bobmangold. com. So you're ready to have some fun. Let's get to it. The first step, if you want to become a dominant listing agent, start focusing on listings is you have to differentiate yourself.

You have to stop doing what every other agent does, right? Which the truth is most agents don't do that much. The problem is for most agents, what if you're new or newer to the business? What if you're not a mega producer that you can brag about? You can say oh, I close 300 transactions a year What do you do?

You need to have a process and focus on the process Of what you do now This is going to require you to sit down  And think that through about what you can do now If you go to my website, I have a bunch of classes on there that you can watch You To give you ideas on how we do that and what separates us and that might help you out,  but you have to focus on a process, not on you or your company.

The minute you make the listing presentation or the conversation about you, then you open yourself up to the questions. How long have you been doing this? How many listings have you sold? What was the average sales price? If you talk about your company in essence, what you're saying is you're not important.

It's the company that matters. You can't do that. But if you actually have a process,  and you focus on that process, you're going to have a whole lot more success. Now, unfortunately, there hasn't been a different way to market and sell homes. In more than a hundred years, right? We've been doing the MLS forever, right?

I created a process about seven years ago called Home Boss that made it different  And i'm going to talk about how you can help  You know explain that to sellers in a couple of minutes, right? The first thing that you need to do if you want to focus on listings is you have to differentiate yourself So that's just some ideas that you can focus on there.

So number one differentiate Number two, you have to know your market You what does that mean? We hear that all the time. Oh, I must be a market expert. What does that look like? Really?  Here's the good news. You could drop me out of a plane any place in the country, give me access to MLS, and within an hour I'll be an expert on your market.

Now, if you're watching this on video or on YouTube I'm going to put up a graphic of what an analysis looks like. So I have something that I call a zip code and absorption rate. And what it does is I'm able to take and analyze by zip code what's going on in a market. Now, I can dig down even deeper than a zip code.

I could break down into a, or dig down into a subdivision. I could dig down into a school district. And you go who cares about a school district? That's not important. That's not true. If you live in a market like Phoenix, and I'm going to think Las Vegas and, many in Southern California have the same issue.

We have people that sell their homes  just to get their kids in the right high school district where they have good sports programs. So we have people that want to move into the Chaparral High School district because they have such a successful program or they want to move down into Chandler  where Chandler High School has put more football players into the NFL than any other high school.

And people are literally willing to take and sell their homes. To get into those school districts. If I wanted to break that down so that I had a great analysis of it This is what I would do Yeah, I would dig in deeper than just the zip code. But for argument's sakes I tell everybody to do this now or to do this every three months now at this point in time I used to do it every six months, but right now the market is changing And fluctuating so badly  over the really each quarter of the year That you really want to be able to stay in tune with that, right?

So think of it this way I'm recording this in november  back in september interest rates had dropped down to six or just a shade below six percent you've seen the number of mortgage applications for purchase. Tick up you've seen home sales tick up Well now interest rates are about six and three quarters makes a difference.

So every three months. And what we do is we look at the average or median sales price, how many properties closed in the last three months,  the average days on market, how many are current, currently active, how many closed in the last 30 days. And that will give you your absorption rate. So if you're actually watching this on YouTube, you can see in the example I have up there, there's 91 active listings, 56 closed in the last 30 days, Which means you have an absorption rate of one month, 1.

625 months. Call it one and three quarters months. That's a seller's market folks, in that particular zip code. Now these homes sold at an average list to sales price ratio of 96. 2 percent. Meaning they dropped about 3. 8 from where they listed to sell the property. Now it's that good information or bad information that says, gosh you don't take a listing in that market.

But it does tell you what's going on. If you were in your listing presentation, you're a brand new agent. You pulled this out and you said let's take a look at what's going on in the market. And what I'd like to do is I'd like to break this down by zip code for you. And then I'd like to break it down by your subdivision.

And then if it isn't a good school district or whatever, and by school district, and let's look at what. homes in these exact areas are selling for.  And you have this kind of a, of an analysis broken down of the top 10 or 12 zip codes. And you could tell them what the absorption rate was, how many homes are selling a month, how many are currently active, and what the list to sales price ratio is.

Do you think they're gonna ask you how long you've been in real estate? They can see that you clearly understand the market and have the backs the facts and the data to back it up. So you have to be able to talk to people in an, in a way in which you can explain the market to them by doing this. And it takes about an hour roughly, to gather this data.

So four times a year you did this. I promise it's gonna completely change. The way you run your business. Now, the other reason that I have agents do this is  to pick areas that I want to, that I want to find where I want to focus my advertising dollars, right? Here's an area, if you look at the very last zip code on this,  The purchase price is much higher, but only 86 homes sold in the last six months.

Average days on market are 192. Now, I didn't take that out further for this. I just wanted to use it as an example, but I doubt I'd spend any money to market. Would I do direct mail? Would I do, Facebook targeted ads in that zip code? And the answer is I wouldn't. There's not enough activity there.

I had one of my coaching clients a couple years ago said, Hey, I want to focus exclusively on my zip code or on my subdivision. I said, cool. How many homes sold are that in the last 12 months? She goes, I don't know. I said let's find out. She called me back about 20 minutes later. She goes, Oh, nevermind.

Three homes sold in this subdivision in the last year.  It doesn't mean she can't market in that subdivision, but it's not going to pay her bills. So you have to know and understand the market. How does that help you differentiate yourself? If you're the only one, if you're the only agent that walks in and it has this discussion and shows them that you're the pro that you broke this down, who's getting the listing?

Make sense? So you got to know your market and how to do that. Number three, the first rule of sales, help the sellers get what they want. It was Zig Ziglar that said, Hey, for you to become rich, help a lot of people get what they want. What does a seller really want? Let's talk about that first.

First is fast. I want this thing done fast. Now the market's going to dictate fast or speed, right? And they definitely want to net the most amount of money. At the end of the day, that's really what's most important to them, right? They'll phrase it as well. I want the highest sales price. Just understand when they're saying that, Okay.

They're really saying I want the highest net price because when we talk about pricing We always say what is it that you need to net from the sale of this house to get you to the next? Property and then finally to eliminate the hassles and headaches Now if you've been on any of my podcasts, you've seen any of the classes that I teach I consistently talk about this core logic survey that did 10 000 home sellers and what they found was 77 of them would be willing to take 5 to 10 percent less in equity just to avoid the hassles and headaches of a traditional sale.

That means that's your process.  See, when I talk to people, I talk about the old fashioned sales process, which is what all my competition, other agents do. I don't use the word traditional. Why? Traditions are good. It's Thanksgiving. It's Christmas. It's 4th of July. It's the holidays. They're traditions. 

Old fashioned is what? Oh, that's bad. So trust me the language we use matter. So here's my question for you. We talked about having a process What does your listing process look like that will solve these problems for people?  What does that look like and then how can you turn that into? I typically will use it as a unique selling proposition.

I got that phrase from dan kennedy in the early 90s What is it that you do that all your other competition doesn't? So how do you take your process and utilize that and use that to formulate a unique selling proposition? So I'm going to share mine with you to give you an idea because you're going to need to have a written one that you could send to them even before you do the listing presentation, right?

So here's here goes my number one priority number one when selling a home is to protect my seller's equity  Using my home boss system. Notice the word I use protect. I didn't talk about selling it I didn't talk about being a good agent. My job is to protect your equity folks  Then I help them when they buy sell and finance their real estate through me pay off their home in seven to ten years So when we do sell this house You  The goal is to get your next one sold in seven to ten years Because my process the home boss process is very simple.

We're going to get your home under contract in 14 days We're going to get the highest market value guaranteed and we're going to completely eliminate The hassles and headaches. And then when we accomplish that,  on the next house you buy, my goal is to help you get it paid off in 7 to 10 years and use the money that you would have paid to the bank and turn that into a retirement fund of at least a million dollars.

Now that'll fund your retirement. Now bear in mind that million dollars is on top of the equity in your property. Ask yourself folks if you actually were talking to people like that. Would you get better results? Certainly gonna have their attention, right? Number four, you have to have options when you're listing properties, right?

Sellers have options,  right? They can sell it on their own. They could get a cash offer. They could hire a mega team. They could hire any other agent. And in all likelihood, folks, most people go, oh, I have a relative who's gonna do it for me and they'll just charge me 500. If they have options, kid, does it make sense that you should have options?

Do you have a cash offer option? You're not a mega team, but how do you compete against the mega team? Did my unique selling proposition before are they going to listen to me or they're going to be more worried about a mega team? So if you don't have options in how you're marketing and selling their house, right?

We run into people all the time that hey if they would only fix up the house They could sell it for 50, 000, more. Do you have those relationships where you could make that happen for them? Do you have the cash offer? Hey, most, most likely they're not going to take it, but you need to have those available to you.

Because when they have all those options, means they could hire any realtor they want. Which one would they want to hire? The one who could sell it fast, 14 days, highest market value guaranteed, eliminate all the hassles and headaches. Or have resources to get the house fixed up, provide the money to do that, and then resell it.

Or maybe just get them a cash offer. You see how when you have all those options available, can we agree you're going to be able to take more listings, and they're going to listen to you? Number five, you have to answer the commission objection, folks. In most cases, it's coming up. You could make an argument a year ago, a lot of people didn't even ask.

They just, okay, cool, six percent, yeah, have a good day. Didn't ask. More and more are now asking after all this lawsuit nonsense. So you have to be prepared for it. So one of the things that the Home Boss process does, it completely takes care of that. So here's our conversation. So folks, what were you thinking about offering in terms of agent compensation?

Notice I didn't say what commission I'm charging. What are what are you willing to pay? What were you thinking about offering in terms of agent compensation? The typical answer is they'd go, hey, I know it's taxing. Six. If we could get it for five, that'd be cool. Four would be even better.

Because of our process, we're able to say great. Why don't we just do three? And then if it's okay, I have a process to be able to take an offer compensation to the buyer's agents. If another agent brings the offer, but it won't come out of your net proceeds, would you be okay with that? Folks, we've been using that for almost seven years and here's what I can tell you.

Nobody's ever said no. I want to pay it out of my proceeds. Again, it's about your process. How are you going to answer the commission objection? How are you going to justify it folks? It is not about running more ads or how long you've been in the business or any of that stuff You need to answer those three questions.

What are you gonna do to sell it fast? Get me the most money at closing  and avoid my hassles and headaches. It's about the process It's not you They don't care if you have three kids and you love cats and dogs and you got two grandkids You They don't care. They care about the money that you're going to put in their pocket.

Your process has to be able to answer that. Think back to what I gave you as our unique selling proposition and ask yourself, is that a compelling conversation for them to have? And if I could literally sell their house, highest market value guaranteed. 3 percent comes out of their net proceeds. I get it done in 14 days.

We don't put a lock box on the house, so we're not having random showing. So we eliminate all the hassles and headaches. Then when you buy another house, I can turn you into cash millionaire. Do you think those are good reasons to talk about it? But more importantly. You think they ever object to commission paying me that money  because of the value that I could bring to them?

And the answer is of course not number six Never ever set the list price. Let's talk about market value What is the market value is whatever a buyer is willing to pay today At this time for this house, that is market value. If you doubt it, folks, think back over the last couple of years of COVID, we had people getting into bidding wars and they're paying 100, 000 more for the house.

And yet somehow they still magically appraised. If you had 10 people submitting offers, is it reasonable that an appraiser could say all these people will willing to pay more than what You know the comps show and those houses appraised. They appraised because that was the market value.

Let the market set the value. So within our process, we let the market dictate the market price. Because the minute you set a price, folks, what's the buyer's agent or the buyer or buyer's agent, right? They don't even need to have a buyer's agent anymore. They never did. But the buyer's job is to take and try and negotiate the price lower, get them to kick in closing costs and all those other things, right?

When you're doing that, think of listing a property like fishing. What does the average agent do? They throw their line in the water. That's called MLS. They hope to snag a fish. Then they negotiate with that one buyer. Who has leverage now? The buyer or the seller? What we do with our process is we throw a net in the water and we get a bunch of people to submit offers. 

So that we create that frenzy to pay more money for the house. Make sense? If you only have one buyer the price is going to get negotiated down  And you can prove that in that analysis that I showed you because the list to sales price  Is always almost less always other than the crazy markets of 2021 Is always less than what the starting price was  The system is built to negotiate down.

I just built a process that the system is built to negotiate up. Make sense? Provide proof. Number seven, provide proof that your marketing produces higher sales prices. Don't tell people, show people. We have proof that it works. We have more than a thousand transactions that we can show that happened with.

We can prove that process works. Number eight is to create competition amongst buyers.  The reason our process works is because we create competition with Yes, even in a slow market. We had one of our agents listings in Michigan.  Had 28 different people submitting offers on the home. That's competition.

Just understand this. When buyers compete, sellers win. What does your process do that creates competition? And if you don't have a process that does that, putting it into MLS, Letting people come one at a time to look at it. It's not a process that creates competition. So I told you today, you're going to have to think about some things.

I didn't say I was going to necessarily make this easy, but you can go to my website, bobmangold. com and click on, I think it's the resources tabs. And you'll see a bunch of classes that I recorded on these things to give you an idea and then figure out what you might want to do. All right.

Number nine, develop an open house system.  Here's the thing folks an open house system. I see this all over Facebook It's like open houses are the biggest waste of times ever when you do an open house from like one to two or one to three and you put two signs out That's a waste of time. Our record open house is 1, 224 people in April of 2023 the house I told you that we just had the 28 offers in Michigan We had more than a hundred people in it.

What is your open house system look like? Do you have a system?  Do you have a checklist of what you can do? Can you sit down in a listing presentation and show a buyer, hey, exactly here are all the steps of what we're gonna do to take and promote this open house, to get that marketing, to create competition. 

Do you have a process that you can show them? Because when you do, you're going to convert more appointments into listings and folks, here's what I really will tell you, it'll Completely change your confidence level, which will change your results. Now, when you have these open houses, what we teach all of our agents to do is videotape the heck out of these things, even if we have to put them together.

So people will tell me all the time. It's Oh, I think you're lying to me. 1224 people. The good news is we have video proof of it. When you can show your clients that they go, I, I don't think you could get that many people  and you had video proof on all these different listings or you took pictures of the lines of people at your house, provide proof.

Don't promise. See, when you're telling people something, You have a saying when you're telling you're selling and when you're selling you're actually making promises Stop promising people and start proving that what you do works provide proof that your process Delivers so provide proof of your process instead of promises.

It's the three p's So we always tell people to make sure that you're taking pictures and then my last point And what that means is to close or pick up an additional three to five additional transactions from each listing, right? My goal is, we call it five from one.  Our agents who work those open houses, their job is real simple.

Your job is to get five more transactions every month from the open houses that you're working from. Now, that could be five buyers, five sellers, three and two, two and three, we don't care, it's their job. When I say it's their job, that means I have to have some kind of training for them, don't I? And we do. 

And we have to have a strategy of what kind of materials we're going to have available so that we could talk to people, right?  We're going to have a process about what they say, so when people come in, every time I travel, folks, if I'm out on a weekend, I go buy open houses. And I really want to see what agents are saying when you walk in the door.

Hey, how you doing? What brings you in today? That has to be the worst line for an open house that I've ever heard. But that's probably 80 percent of the agents say that. So what brings you in today? What if he asked a question like, Hey folks, you looking for a house to live in or is this going to be an investment?

Stop asking yes or no questions. So a simple strategy would be able to do that. Hey, are you looking to buy a home at retail? Or are you open to take a look at homes where you could get them at a wholesale price? That's going to stop them in their tracks, right? Or what's your strategy to get them to sign in?

Here, sign in. The seller requires that. And then they put in mickey at mickeymouse. com and the phone number is, 305 555 1212. Do you have a strategy to text them information on the house? Hey scan this QR code and it'll take and deliver a flyer and it's going to give you a whole bunch of other information on schools and things like that.

Put together a whole package, just scan that and get it. Guess what? Now I've got their cell phone number. I don't need them to sign it at all. What's your strategy look like? What's your system look like? What's your process? Look so if you were doing those 10 things folks Centered your business around listings and you were able to take and master those 10 things.

What would your cash flow look like? What would your lifestyle look like if you weren't the one working with buyers and you hired buyers agents to work with them? And had them paying you an override What would that look like? But you can't do this working with buyers. You can target the specific areas.

You can do the research. You can find out where homes are selling,  and that's where you want to take a look to build market share, and then you could focus on taking the listings and you could hire agents to work the open houses to work with the buyers. And have them pay you a referral fee. Your cash flow would be completely different, wouldn't it?

And your lifestyle would be a lot better. You're not working seven days a week. You're not working open houses and things of that nature. And that's why the difference, folks, of being a buyer's agent is you have a real estate job. And quite honestly, that job sucks. I don't know a nicer way to say it.

You can end up working 50, 60 hours a week. You're at the whim of a buyer. You're supposed to go out for dinner on Friday, on Saturday night at five o'clock, they call you up and go, Hey, I want to go look at this million dollar house, as well as I do, you're going to drop everything you're doing and go show that. 

So you have a job. A job means you're simply trading time for money.  A real estate business means you're generating money without having to be there doing the work.  If an offer comes in for a million dollars on your listing on Saturday night at five o'clock, do you have to drop everything that you're doing and contact the seller?

You don't, you're in control of your time and you can never do that with a buyer. So I have nothing against buyers. Obviously we need them. God love them. But what if we trained a new generation of agents? On how to deliver massive value to buyers and we gave them a career path where well Let's say we had them work with us for a year Then we started teaching them how to list and we gave them a career path Would everybody in our industry get better  if we were doing things like that?

I would argue we could So my goal today was to give you a lot to think about even some homework And  take it serious about starting to create a real estate business  A business focused on listings is going to last a long time and you can't do it with buyers So that's why everything I always tell you folks If you list you last so until next the next podcast Hopefully I gave you a lot to think about gave you some homework gave you some resources You can go to my website bobmangold.

com and I've got a bunch of stuff in there You know classes and videos that you can watch to learn about those processes And go from there if you ever want to schedule a call with me, you can do that There's a link that you can do it. So folks. I hope that helps I hope I gave you some things to think about maybe look at the business a little bit differently Because I do want you to remember if you list you last take it serious.

We'll talk to you next week