Episode 55: How we take listings and sell for the highest market value!

Introduction

• Why the Podcast Name?
  • The name emphasizes that agents who focus on listings make more money and build consistent, reliable cash flow compared to buyers' agents.
  • The podcast and book aim to provide a roadmap to success in real estate.

Key Topics Discussed

1. Focus on Listings
   • Who to Target: Sellers.
   • Where to Find Them: Identify seller leads.
   • What to Say: Develop a clear presentation to win their trust.
   • Why Hire You: Sellers have options (traditional agents, discount agents, cash offers) — you must stand out.
2. Understanding Sellers' Priorities
   • Sellers want:
     • Highest Net Price.
     • Speed of Sale.
     • Minimal Hassles and Headaches.
3. The Home Boss System
   • Why It Was Created:
     • Compete with cash buyers and discount agents.
     • Help inexperienced agents present value without relying on personal experience.
   • What It Is:
     • A transparent online real estate exchange designed to:
       • Eliminate traditional selling headaches.
       • Guarantee the highest market value for sellers.
       • Save sellers on commission fees (only 3%).
   • How It Works:
     • Pricing below market value to create demand.
     • 10-day marketing period with a 2-day open house.
     • Offers are transparent, creating urgency and competition.
     • Example Results: Record open house attendance (1,224 visitors).
4. Why Agents Deserve 3% Commissions
   • Real estate agents assume liability for listings.
   • Example: Agents sued for missed water damage, costing $16,000.
   • Agents must establish value to justify commissions.
5. Changing Real Estate Processes Post-COVID
   • Zoom and technology enable agents to list homes without visiting in person.
   • Agents can streamline operations while focusing on the value provided.

Strategies to Stand Out as an Agent

• Use the DUST Formula:
  • Demand: Price homes strategically.
  • Urgency: Set offer deadlines.
  • Scarcity: Limit property access (e.g., only during open houses).
  • Transparency: Make all offers visible to create competition.
• Marketing Tip: Attract hundreds of buyers to listings, increasing competition and price.

Success Stories & Results

• Agents using the Home Boss System achieve:
  • Higher attendance at open houses (e.g., 1,200+ visitors).
  • More offers and higher net proceeds for sellers.
• Example: Two similar homes sold:
  • Traditional agent: $310K.
  • Home Boss agent: $371K with 42 offers.

Key Takeaways

• The industry is under attack (DOJ lawsuits, discount brokers). Agents must raise their value and focus on:
  1. Listings (target sellers).
  2. Referrals (build strong partnerships).
• Real estate doesn’t have to be hard — streamline processes, focus on value, and list more homes.

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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

 

Welcome everybody to the, if you list you last podcast, why did we name it that? Because, if you list, you're going to make more money in real estate than if you're  a buyer's agent, or if you split it in half. So that's why we named the podcast. And that's why I named the book that way so that I could give you.

A roadmap if you will to building a successful real estate business that creates consistent reliable cash flow All right, that should be everybody's number one goal. So let's get started the first thing you have to do is determine who you'll talk to. If you want to focus on listings, it's pretty simple.

Talk to people who are sellers. Then where are you going to find those? And then what are you going to say to them? And finally, why would they hire you instead of any other option? So if you want a copy of that book, you can go get that for free at if you list you last. com. So go and download it.

You're free because here's the facts, folks, the most profitable and efficient real estate business that any agent can create  would be to carry 10 listings. You have 10, you sell six, you replace it with six more. If you did that, could we agree? Your cashflow would be spent. If we know that's the kind of business we want, why don't we build towards that?

Why don't we change our skills towards that? Why don't we change our marketing towards that? Why don't we figure out how to talk to more potential sellers? So we have that as a business. Make sense?  Then the question, and that's what we're going to answer on today's podcast is why hire you? Sellers have options and they can choose any agents and they can negotiate any commission, right?

So think of it. Can a seller. Sell on their own. Of course they had they could well, my question is well, then how did we lose that lawsuit saying that we conspire to keep? Commissions at that you don't even have to use a real estate agent to do it  You could hire a traditional agent. You could hire a mega agent, right?

Every market has them They're on the billboards tv. You name it. You can hire a discount agent Here's another fact. I don't know how the Narder attorneys missed this, but just Google discount real estate agents in whatever city you're in, you'll see there are thousands or millions of results,  or you can accept a cash offer.

So sellers have all these options available to them, but if you don't have those options or you don't have a better way to answer it, can we agree your likelihood of getting hired is. Much lower.  So let's start last week. We talked about Steve jobs and how they designed hardware and software.  They started with the consumer in mind and then built what the consumer wanted.

So when you sell a property or you list property, what do they really want? They want the highest net price, right? And they want it done quickly and they want it with a minimum of hassles and headaches. The dilemma is how do you eliminate hassles and headaches? Cause the minute you put an MLS and you involve other agents, you got hassles and headaches. 

And then how can you guarantee that it'll happen fast, even if it's not that great of a market.  Or that you can get the highest net price. What's the process. What's your presentation sound like to help sellers get what they want. See what most agents do. They go into a listing presentation. They tell them how wonderful they are and how many houses they've listed, how many houses have sold, how long they've been in there.

All this about their company and all the seller wants to know is how are you going to get me the highest price fast and don't give me a lot of headaches and hassles.  So we built a system like that.  A lot of times agents say, ah, the hassles and headaches. People don't really care about that. They just accept that's the way it is.

And you're right. They deal with it, but they don't like it. This is a survey from core logic a year ago, 77 percent of respondents. Listen to that number three out of four sellers said they'd be probably, or maybe  willing to take five to 10 percent less for their home just to avoid the hassle. Of a traditional sale  folks.

If the median price is 400, 000, which is close to that, we're talking 20 to 40, 000. Somebody would give up  three out of four sellers would give up just to avoid the hassles and headaches. When I see that I sit there and go, my gosh, what an opportunity we have  to do better,  but what do you do? So six years ago, I created a process called home boss. 

And I get asked this a lot. Why did I need to create a different way to list market and sell homes? So I thought I'd set the foundation for you. Why I thought that. So I had to solve four critical obstacles at the time. Cash buyers were starting to come in the open doors and offer pads. And we do business in the Phoenix market.

My son is licensed there. And  how are we going to compete with the speed and convenience of the cash buyers? Now, when they first came out. They were giving ridiculously low offers. People were still accepting them simply because they could give them certainty when you closed and when you could move.  And if they couldn't find a house to replace theirs they had time.

They could simply do a lease agreement with them or move when they were ready to do it. How could we, as an everyday agent, Match that speed and convenience.  Now within a year, they had 1 percent market share within two and a half years, they had 6 percent market share.  So they were a force that had to be dealt with and their claim to fame was speed and convenience.

What do you do about that? Second, how do we overcome discounters and keep our three to 4 percent commissions? Oh my gosh, Bob, you can't say that in today's world that you get three or 4 percent commissions. And my answer is yes, I can.  I didn't collude to do it. I simply have to establish value. And as we touched on last week, why do we get paid what we get paid?

And the answer is liability.  The minute we sign a listing agreement, we accept liability for their properties. Let's say you were going to take a 2, 500 commission for a 500, 000 asset and assume all the liability for that.  And you go what liability? So let me give you an example. This is one from one of my agents.

He was extremely distraught. A relative hired another agent to help them buy a house.  So he wasn't getting that deal and he was pretty ticked off about it. About a month after these people moved into the house, he gets a call  and says, Hey.  My floor in my kitchen is really like spongy. It almost feels like we're going to fall through. 

What should I do?  And his answer was, call your real estate agent.  How did he miss it?  It ended up when they pulled up the floor.  That there was eight inches of water in their crawl space,  and it was literally deteriorating the subfloor  from the bottom.  And you may go did they have a home inspection?

That's a logical question. They said, yes. But how many guys have ever read your home inspector's paperwork? Where they basically say they have no liability for nothing. None. I don't take any liability. Whatever I say doesn't matter. He missed it.  Can you sue the home inspector? Maybe. It'd be a pretty big miss, right? 

But instead what the buyer did  is he sued the listing agent and the buyer's agent for not catching it.  And we can argue about should the agents have reasonably been able to Determine that was an issue and at least from what I understand. I have no knowledge of the house or anything else It was rampant all through the kitchen So when you walk through the kitchen, you should have been able to feel that both  agents got sued because it cost 16, 000 to fix it up  and the E& O insurance on the buyer side and the seller side agreed to split it  That's why we get paid what we get paid if I would have taken a 2, 500 commission And I had to eat 8, 000. 

I wouldn't be in business long, would I?  Those are real everyday examples folks that happened about 30 days ago  So I don't work for less than three percent  Then we had to deal with the DOJ in the courts all these lawsuits when I first seen that folks I knew we were going to lose that's all I can tell you anybody who knows me long enough knows I've been preaching we were going to lose that but most importantly the reason I did it is I needed to create a process that My son who was 22 years old and had just gotten a real estate license.

How in the world was that kid going to walk into a listing presentation  and not have somebody say to him, Hey kid, how old are you?  How many homes have you sold?  So I knew that I needed to create a process that it didn't matter  that we could talk to him about that process. And that's where we came up with.

I knew I needed to solve that and I had to come up with an answer.  So I created the home boss system where it's how we market, sell, negotiate homes. It's what we do. So what is home boss? I'll give you the corporate answer. Now it's a proprietary, a hundred percent transparent. Remember that's an important word in these lawsuits, transparent, online real estate exchange with a trademark sales process designed to sell real estate without the typical hassles and headaches of a traditional sale.

I thought that was so important. I put it in the first sentence. Of our value proposition in order to attain the highest market value for property guaranteed And most importantly net the homeowner more money at closing by only paying me the listing or marketing agent in the traditional real estate listing the seller will pay five or six percent commission With a home boss listing the total out of pocket commission for the seller It's only 3 percent  and you're going, yeah, but what about the buyers?

We pay buyers. We just do it differently than you do. That's all. So if you've ever sold a HUD VA and USDA home, that's how we do it. Just like them. So if you've never done one, here's how it works. You go to their website and let's say you submit an offer for 300, 000. They go, great. How much do you want to get paid?

And you go 3%, 9, 000. They go, great. We'll send you a contract for three Oh nine. That's how it works.  Here's the downside though.  It works the same as HUD  except.  We do it a little differently. It's a hundred percent transparent.  So we do the commission just like you do.  In a HUD, USDA or VA, except we disclose it.

It's a hundred percent transparent. The properties offers are transparent. The buyer's agents commissions are transparent and the total price is transparent. So the buyer understands how their agents compensation. Impacts the sale of the house or the price of the house.  Go ahead and try that one in court and see how that would work.

So we knew that we had it, right? So this is what it looks like. If you're watching it on YouTube, you can see it. We started out this listing with the first offer was 539, 950. The agent comp was 16, 1 98. The contract would have been written at five 56. So let's fast forward to the end of this on Wednesday night. 

It ended with 32 offers with a net offer to the seller of 680 and they were going to pay our 3 percent out of it, right? 20, 400. The buyer's agent will be compensated 20, 400 and we would write the contract at 700, 400.  We do it just like you do in a normal transaction. We're just transparent about it.

So I get this all the time. What am I going to tell my lender? What am I going to tell my appraiser or my underwriter?  You're going to tell them that the contract price was 700, 400. If you have a highest and best blind offer, do you have to explain how you came up with the price? You don't do yet.

So you don't have to do that for us either. When I did this, I knew that this platform would eliminate the commission objection. So when somebody said to my son how much do you charge? One of the things that. Was brought up in these trials was wait, why does a brand new real estate agent get paid 3 percent in a brand new one gets paid 3 percent in a 30 year experienced agent gets 3%.

That doesn't make any sense. And let's be honest, it doesn't,  but what we did is we eliminated that commission objection. So the reason that I say that we go. And we don't do this in the very beginning, right? We're sitting at the kitchen table. So how about if we get the elephant out of the room here  and let's talk about what commission you were thinking of offering. 

So  what were you thinking? And they'll go we know normally it's 6%, but we were hoping to get five and God, if we could get four, it'd be amazing.  And we just simply go, you know what? Why don't we do this? Why don't we do three?  My fee to list, market, negotiate, handle your property is 3%. If another agent brings the buyer,  is it okay if we have their buyer pay them so it doesn't come out of your net proceeds? 

Just so you know, no sellers ever said, no, I don't want to do it that way.  And so we took care of the commission objection. The reality of it is that platform is so powerful now that we can actually take listings without ever going to their house.  We've got a picture up on the screen right now of Robert.

He took four listings on the beach from Cabo, and I'm going to give you an update. He actually just bought a motor home, the big one, right? And he's now traveling across the country. You could see him working in his motor home. What he does, he takes the listings and his buyer's agents do the open houses and they pay him a 25 percent referral fee. 

Is that a better way of doing business folks?  Now, here's the thing. COVID changed the way people look at Zoom. Zoom is now a verb. Why drive out to their house when you can get their property listed without even doing it?  And if you think, oh, that can't happen, you're limiting your beliefs. Cause I can tell you, we have dozens and dozens of agents who don't take listings at the property. 

You're just creating more work for yourself, right? So what's the process look like? We price the house below market value. We market it for 10 days We do a two day open house. We do not put a lock box on the property. Sorry agents. You're not getting in I don't care what you think. I don't care if you turn us into mls  You're not getting in  if you want to turn us into mls We'll simply make it available from 4 a.

m to 4 30 p at 4 30 a. m And when the seller gets the showing time request, they'll reject it and there's nothing you can do about it The offer, the open house ends, we open it up to submit offers on Sunday night, we end it on Wednesday at 7 p. m. That's the process. Here's the formula that we created to be able to explain it.

What we do is we have something called the DUS formula that allows us to back up that guarantee that we gave you. What we do is we create demand through pricing and marketing. We create urgency by setting deadlines. And again, if you think you can come along and at 6. 59 and 55 seconds submit an offer and think that you'll get it, that's not how it works.

We built it so that it extends by five more minutes and everybody has time to think about, do I want to offer more? And that'll continue going on and on  until somebody, till everybody stops. That's how we can guarantee the highest market value.  Once people stop, that's the highest amount of money people are willing to pay.

On that day at that time for your house,  we have some of these that have gone until 10 o'clock at night because they keep upping and going forward. Right now, the good news is if somebody doesn't get the price they want,  they have the right to accept, reject, or negotiate any and all offers. Period. They don't like the offers.

They don't have to take anything. So there's no risk to them. We create scarcity by limiting access to the property. You get to see it on the two day open house. That's it. And then we have transparency where all offers are visible. Everybody gets to determine what they're willing to pay. That transparency part, folks, also psychologically helps people.

They go if I'm willing to pay this, because a lot of times they'll go is it, am I offering too much? And then they see somebody else is willing to offer that they go no, cause this person's willing to offer it.  There's all this psychology that goes into it. So that's the formula that we explain, because at the end of the day, which price is going to attract more buyers, the same house at 800 or the same house at 675  number and goal of your marketing is get as many prospective buyers to come into your listings to get the highest price.

That's how it's going to happen. And we know that when buyers compete, sellers win. So what we do guys, is we leverage pricing to get hundreds of buyers into our open houses, and we get 'em pre-approved on the spot. So at one point, our record was 586 people for Robert. Then it went up to 742, then it went up to 500 on a Saturday, 884 total.

And then April of 2023,  our new record open house is 1,224. Attendees at one open house in one weekend. We had nine agents and three lenders working that Because think about it folks if you've got that many people into the house  Shouldn't all your listings your new listings and your buyers come from those leads if you're doing your job, right? 

So we do our job. We've got systems to do that. So let me give you an example because I get A lot of this, no, that's gotta be BS. No, here's the video proof. And if you're watching that video, you can see it. If not, you'll just have to trust me that we're playing a video that shows us. It has no sound.

So I can talk to you while I'm going through it. So imagine that what we do, just one of the strategies, we have flyers that we pass out because when it gets too heavy, you can see the. Agents talking to him and we have one greeting at the door and she lets a certain number of people in, right? What do you think all these people are thinking outside?

You think they're going to pay whatever we started the offer at? They're not.  Then we hand them a flyer that says, Hey guys, on Thursday night,  if you're interested, we're doing a class on how you could use a government rebates to pay this home off in 10 years. If you'd like to go, here's the information.

You can just go register there on zoom  and they do that class and we convert about 20 percent of the traffic.  Into clients,  right? So you can see we're letting them in. We're monitoring how many people are coming in and so forth so when you have open houses like that guys, you don't have to do anything else does does that really work for the sellers?

I get it for us. It works. But what about the sellers? And I want you to know this is pre COVID. This is one of my son's listings  start out at two 55.  It had after eight days in Zillow, it had 10, 370 views and 487 saves. And you go. Big deal. A house six doors away around the corner was on the market for 12 days 2029 views and 110 saves.

And they sold the house for 310. One of the things, if you're looking at this on YouTube, folks, I want you to ask yourself, we talk about a value proposition and being able to take an up your game and be more reputable. Could I ask you what agent in their right mind would use that picture as a thumbnail?

On Zillow.  Now they got 310 for the house, make no mistake about it.  My son got 371, 530.  Same house, six doors away.  Had 42 offers, 350, 500 was the net to the seller. Then they paid our commission or his commission and then a buyer's premium to the buyer's agent at 21, 000 made the contract price at 371, but oh my gosh, it appraised for 350, 000.

What do you do?  Typically you're going to negotiate like anybody else, but they also seen that we had 42 other offers in there.  And this was a seller coming from California. This particular property is at the last exit out of Phoenix before you hit the deserts, go to California. This was a second home for them.

So they paid the difference. So my answer is always better to be lucky than good,  but guess what? If you had to negotiate the worst case scenarios, you sell it, you send it, you have to explain it to your seller. I got so much for your home. I couldn't get it to appraise for that much. That's how good my marketing is.

Is that really such a bad thing? Now, if you want to learn more about how we do that, you can go to  realestateassetadvisors. org, click on the systems tab, and there's a recording of the full class, or you can attend one of our business briefings on Wednesday afternoons, every other Wednesday, so you can go there and get some more information. 

If you want to schedule a call with me again, go to brainstormwithbob. com. And I'm happy to walk you through some different directions to start to look at and how you could build your business differently  by focusing on the value you bring to the client, not on you. They don't care about us. Let's be honest, the purpose of my podcast.

And the reason I started doing this is to create content because guys, we have to help every agent elevate their game right now. It's not just about us, right? We're under attack as an industry. So one of the things I want to do is help raise that for people. If you like the way I list homes and you want to talk about how we could work together, great.

If you want to do a different way on your own, great. It's your call.  All I know is that you've got to start doing things differently.  And you got to start focusing on the value you provide to the client. Make sense?  So with that, I'm going to end today's call  and I look forward to seeing you on session number three.

I'm gonna give you some more crazy ideas about different things that you can do.  Increase your business and start to build that cashflow where it's reliable and consistent, and it's focused on two things. There's only two things. Agents that work with me have to focus on listings and referrals. We're not posting Facebook ads.

We're not doing all that crazy stuff. We're not working all these leads that 1 percent of them could turn into something. We're focusing on who's likely to sell their home, talking to them, building referral partners to get more listings.  So podcast and start. Getting agents to understand it's not, doesn't have to be such a hard business.

So with that, thanks so much for listening. We'll see on the next podcast and have an amazing day. Go out and list some homes.