eXp Trainings and Technology

We bring Brian Ellington from eXp University to share the training, tools, and playbooks that help agents create momentum fast. If you are currently with eXp or thinking about it -- this episode is for you!

We dig into action-based lead generation, open house systems, and social media strategies that turn attention into appointments while staying compliant. 

• Brian’s real estate background plus TCPA and DNC compliance reminders 
• Add edit delete as a simple growth framework 
• Weekly eXp University programming plus KGCI Real Estate On Air as an on-demand learning library 
• FastCap outcomes and why “doing the work” changes the numbers 
• Realty.com tools and lead flow during FastCap plus seller lead focus and cash offer scripts 
• Fast Attract approach for value-driven attraction instead of recruiting 
• Mastermind archives and AI training resources inside eXp University 
• Open house strategies from top producers plus buyer differentiation beyond the MLS 
• Instagram content systems including lead magnets post types and engagement tactics 
• Platform guidance on Instagram for speed and YouTube for search-based leads 
We will put this recording out in the Facebook group. So watch it again if you want to, share it with the people that you know, and post what you’re using in the Facebook group so we can all get better.

Transcript

Welcome And Monthly Call Setup

SPEAKER_02 0:37

All right, thanks you guys for joining us for Minnesota Movement Monthly Call again. Remember, this happens every single month on the third Wednesday, 9:30 Central. So please mark your calendars. We're bringing in guests as well as doing some of our own training of each other. And today we have Chief Learning Officer of EXP University on the call with us, Brian Ellington. And you are definitely going to want to stay tuned and watch this in again and/or for the first time on this recording, if you haven't yet, because there are just a lot of opportunities that you guys could be taking up to grow your business. And he's going to share that with us as well as some things that you could take away with your business and for your business today. So, Brian, I'll let you take it away. Thanks for being here.

Brian’s Background And TCPA Safety

Add Edit Delete To Grow

Weekly Training Lineup And KGCI

FastCap Action Based Results

SPEAKER_00 1:16

All right, thank you. Thank you, Carrie. Thanks for letting me come play. Hey, everybody. So I'm going to horse trade with you today. If you'll let me share a little bit about what the university is doing, I'll give you some amazing ideas from some of the folks we've been interviewing and researching to build our training. And I'll give you some ideas on open houses. I'll give you some ideas on social media and some other things along the way. Fair deal? All right, cool. Can I share my screen? Do I have that privilege? Are y'all seeing my screen? All right. Let me get you all over here so I have a better view of you. I'd rather look at you than me. Okay, so thanks for letting me complain. A little bit about me. So mom was a realtor for 30 years. And so I swore I was never going into real estate. Hi, Brian Ellington, realtor. Nice to meet you. I've been in this industry for a couple of decades now. Jeez, I'm old. Almost 25 years. I spent 15 years at the Red Kool-Aid Company. I was their chief mixologist of the Kool-Aid. I was their chief products officer, their chief learning officer and COO for their international franchising. I left Keller after 15 years and served out a sentence at Rheilogy for six years. I was head of training coaching. If you're not familiar, they own Colwell, Century, Better Homes and Gardens, Sotheby's, all those brands. So I led the training for all of their companies and left there in 22. Went out on my own, had a non-compete for a year. And then my old friends Glenn and Leo, that I knew from those red Kool-Aid days, said, What are you doing over there? Why don't you come over here and have some fun with us? So I joined in October 23 and have not looked back since. So I work with three teams: the university team, the Elevate Coaching team, and KGCI, which is something that not everybody knows about. And so I'll talk about that. My legally installed shock collar from EXP Legal is going off right now. So I need to remind you, we're going to talk about outreach to consumers in this call. So follow TCP A D and C guidelines. I mean this when I say it. It's not paranoia if they're out to get you, and they are out to get you. There are law firms that specialize in going after you. And yes, I mean you. And they are not cheap. We're talking million-dollar settlements here. And anybody got that kind of money to throw on a bad phone call? We give you dial safe, by the way. So use that. It's a free tool. Put your database through it. It'll easily tell you who's on the DNC. It'll even tell you who's on the litigation lists. So please do use that tool. All right. So I'm going to talk about training. So experienced agents and team leaders, you can probably just tune out, you know, maybe order your Instacart groceries, because obviously you're absolutely happy where you're at. And therefore you don't need to know anything or do anything differently in your business, right? For most of us, though, we're here and we want to get here, right? And to go from here to here really means three things. Add, edit, delete. Add. You're going to have to add things to your business that, you know, if you're a$5 million producer trying to get to a$10 million producer, there are things that a$10 million producer does that a$5 million producer does not do. Edit, you're going to have to tweak things. Maybe put some more money towards certain lead gens, maybe do more of a certain type of lead gen. And then delete. True Kathy Sr., who's the founder of Chick-fil-A, I saw him at a leader cast some years ago, and he said, I have two lists on my desk, my to-do list and my stop doing list. And I can't put anything on my to-do list until I put something on my stop doing list. And there are certainly things that we do at a$5 million production level that would absolutely hold us back from going to a$10 million production level. Now, as I say those things and I tell people, you know, tell me your plans to go from$5 million to$10 million, they go, well, I just need to do X number of deals more. And I'm like, well, we, yeah, that's that's called math. But my question is, how are you going to do that? What proven models and strategies are you going to put into play that are going to help you go from here to here? And if you don't have a great answer for that for your own business, hi, I represent EXP University, and we'd like to apply for the job because we have training at every level, whether it's newbies, team leaders, experienced agents, cappers, icons, we've got to cover, and I'll share some of that with you. Um, first thing, this is our regularly scheduled programming that happens each week. Every Monday we drop level up, which is our icons coming on and doing training as part of getting their cultural credits. Uh, you see KGCI real estate on air. That's our radio station. We drop different different themes on different days, but it is a 24-7 radio station, 60 plus shows of real estate agents talking to real estate agents. I don't care what the topic, probate, commercial, luxury. We have a show on KGCI. We have over 2,400 podcast episodes in our vault and growing. On Tuesdays, the first and third Tuesday of every month, Top Solo Agents, if you're producing 4 million above, you are part of the Elite Solo Mastermind. Every month we do two calls. One is with Leo Pareja and a coach. And then the other one is a different spotlight call where we grab a different kick butt top solo agent and we ask them, tell us what you're what your kick butt at, and then make us understand how to go do that. For team leaders, on Thursdays, the first and third Thursdays of the month, we do the same thing. Every month, Leo does a call with a great coach, John Cheplak, Jared James, you name it. And then every third Thursday of the month, we do a great call with a team leader who comes on. Jeff Jeff Cavender, for example. He got on there a few months back and shared his Indeed recruiting system for agents to his team. Uh Alison Greco, she makes it mandatory that people on her team get at least three deals in the first 90 days, not team-generated leads. And she does that too, by the way. And so she got on and shared how she does that. Again, a different team leader each time talking about great topics. The main thing I want you all to pay attention to, if you can please, on your schedules, uh, are you guys you're central like me, yeah? Okay. So every Friday at 10 a.m. Central, we do the big agent meeting. It is 30 minutes, and we have Leo, Glenn, Holly Mabury. Different executives come on, talk about what's new in the industry, what's new at EXP. We talk about a lot of the things that I by the end of this, I guarantee you you're gonna go, gosh, I didn't know that. We talk about those things and not just training, technology, marketing, all that stuff. 30 minutes. And also, too, we usually have either myself or Leo or Wendy interviewing a top agent who's just kick butt and we ask them to tell exactly what they do and exactly how to do it in those segments. Great, great show. You will never not walk away from that with something new that you can share with your Rev share groups as well. Okay, so I mentioned KGCI. This has become very popular. We started this two years ago. Last year alone, we had over 137,000 listens, podcast downloads and live stream listens. Again, it's on anywhere you listen to podcasts, Spotify, Apple Music, blah, blah, blah. And also realestateonair.fm is our live stream channel. Don't have to listen to Barry Manlow in the car anymore. You can just listen to this instead. And again, you can go on wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can go on expuniversity.com and you can search by topics. And when you do, if you search listings or listening presentation on expuniversity.com, you'll see a little tab that says podcasts. That's hundreds and hundreds of KGCI episodes on those topics. Okay, I mentioned training at every level. Here's a here's a kind of a glimpse, but I'm going to go through some of these. So FastCap. April 1st cohort is open. Now, how many of you have been through FastCap or had an agent go through FastCap? Okay. So we've been doing something a little different. So this is what it's been so far. The column on the left are the people who just complete the program. You've been through real estate training with people who complete the program. You know what that means. The column on the right are the people who actually did the work. And I joke with them, nobody gets a fast cap-issue pickaxe and shovel when they join the class. When I say work, I mean making friends and helping them with real estate, right? We're not digging ditches. And this is just the bare minimum. If you do the bare minimum of what we call real talks, which are real estate conversations each day during a fast cap, it's a hundred over a six weeks period. It's about 3.3 a day. We're not talking like these people are just, you know, setting the world on fire with their cell phone bills. But look at the results. 3.8 appointments, 1.6 agreements in six weeks just by completing the course, 6.9 appointments, 3.9 agreements if you actually do the work of the course. And and the question I always ask agents is what did your last six weeks look like? If it didn't look like this, come back. And and those of you who've been through FastCap, that's cool. I went to the gym once in 1987. Turns out that's not how going to the gym works, right? So this is not an education course for somebody whose title is chief learning officer. I actually despise education. I'm a big fan, though, of training. And the difference is action. And this is an action-based course. So if you've been through it once, cool. You now know the moves. Now come back in and let's work on your rhythm and your steps. Okay. So I mentioned that we've done something different. One of the things that that we've learned along the way with, you know, now 21,000 registrations and counting is that it turns out that if you ask a big group of real estate agents to work, there's a lot of them that might not. And and and they don't like you and they tend to run away from you when you ask them to do that. And so we have a lot of people who register for FastCap but don't make it to the inn. Leo Pereja and I were chatting over Christmas and we were talking about this. And he had a great idea. He said, What if we gave them Realty.com's seller pro tool? If you're not familiar, this tool has both buyer cultivation tools and also seller cultivation tools. If you're familiar with fellow or home bot, you know what I mean, right? It's that. You can put your database on a drip, it'll drip on them. It actually sends them three valuations, which naturally begs the question, which one's right. And what we teach FastCap agents is don't wait for them to ask you the question. Call them up and tell them, hey, I just sent you a home valuation. I know it says there's three different home valuations. You're probably wondering which one is right. My answer is none of them are because none of those robots have been inside your home. If you guys have an upcoming move in mind, I'd love to come over, take a look at what you guys have done and remodeling and repair since we sold the home to you and see what it would actually be worth on today's market. But that's the minimum piece of it. The big piece of it are leads. I'm going to talk about that in a second. What we all want for our new agents coming in is to bridge that valley of death that we all go through in real estate that a lot of people don't make it through. 75% is what they say drop out within the first two years. And the big part of that is leads, generating leads and getting to business quickly. By the way, you guys are right there on the border. So just letting you know, we also do a similar deal with Canadian agents. Those of you who have Canadian agents in your RevShare groups, we do it through Zucasa and Ana store. Realty.com is not in the Great White North yet. So here's what we do we give you these tools and these leads for free during FastCat. During FastCat. Now, uh what we say is the second that you drop out, we cut you off. So show up and complete the course. This is us trying to game the system and get more people to complete the course because we know what happens on the other side of that work. It's magic. You get deals. And if you complete the course, we'll give you these tools for a total of 12 months, even after FastCap, on us. We're paying for it. You don't pay for it. By the way, Realty.com, no upfront fees and no referral fees on those leads. Got me? Zuccasa, there is a referral fee on their leads because they're ISA scrubbed leads. I mean, they are just literally handing you business. There is a referral fee for those. They have their internal leads and then they also have partner leads. They are, if you didn't know this, Zucas is actually the only Zillow Flex lead company in Canada. Zillow gives all their leads to them, so do other sources as well. All right, so how'd we do then? We did this in January for the January launch. How'd we do? Well, this is how we did. We give 384 humans 1,930 leads. It's about an average of five per person. Here's something I really need us all to understand. 90% of these are seller leads from sellers who raised their hand and said, I'd like a cash offer on my home. Through express offers, I partnered uh Realty with our Express Offers. We now give you four offers to take to that seller before repairs, as is, so on and so forth. And we teach the agent the script of hi, Mr. and Mrs. Homeowner. I saw that you asked for a cash offer. I actually have four in hand for you right now. And I'd also love to go through those for you, talk about what your goals are, and see also too, if you'd like to understand what your home might be on the open market, if you were just to list it normally, would Wednesday at two or Thursday at four work better for you? We have had new agents take listings in their first six weeks. We have had new agents take two listings in their first six weeks. We have had new agents take million-dollar listings in their first six weeks, at least three that I know of, and counting. A friend of mine, Jeremy Kane, who is an attractor sponsor with the Repshare Group. I was talking to a group of sponsors. He raised his hand and he said, Yeah, Gabrielle Lawson in my Rev Share group, she's in FastCap. She called me the other day, panicked. She had a million-dollar listing league come in and she didn't know what to do. So I went on the listing appointment with her, which is awesome. Guys, be honest, how long did it take you to take your first listing? How long did it take you to take your first two listings? For most of us, we worked buyers until they converted to sellers. That's how we became listing agents. These are new agents with not just a listing, but something to go out and get more buyers and sellers. We are really thrilled about this partnership. And by the way, just so you know, this was the results from about five weeks worth of us giving them a lead. When I say we give you this after FastCap, you might go, yeah, but I bet you dial back the lead sources. The week after FastCap ended, this number went up to over 2,300 leads given out to these individuals. When you do the math on this, that's about five leads per person. Extrapolate that out over a year period, because this was six weeks. We're talking about a run rate of over 40 leads. And again, 90% of them are listing leads. We're very excited about this program. When I say April 1st, the registration is now open. If you have somebody in your life, if you are that somebody who needs to register for this, get in there now. One word, capers and icons, let's let the newbies get into this. Let's let them bridge that valley of death. I know we all like free leads, especially listening leads. It's not what this is about. We're trying to help human beings survive and thrive in this industry. We want to rewrite the history of survival rate in this industry for agents. Okay. Pausing there. Questions, comments, concerns, excitements, disbeliefs.

SPEAKER_02 17:53

I love this. I love this data because I've never had it before. And I think this will help us to share it with those that are newer and getting started or just needs more momentum statistics. Numbers don't lie, so this is fantastic. So kudos to you guys.

Fast Attract Masterminds And AI

Open House Systems That Scale

Instagram Lead System And Engagement

SPEAKER_00 18:07

No, I Lance Cusson, the founder of Realty.com and I were like attached at the hip via text, the whole entire cohort. And I kept like doing this every time he sent me a text. I'm really excited. I was very proud to see how the FastCap people integrated. And I'll also say it too, my bad. We did this so fast that we didn't even have like training in place properly for these agents to cultivate and convert these leads. We fixed that with the February 25th launch. And so I'm really excited to see that. And then the April 1st launch is going to be Austin Chevron with Brandon and Mary Schneider, who are top teams in Houston. I am really excited to see what those guys do with it. Those of you who are maybe hopeful to grow your RevShare group, but you don't want to be a recruiter. Well, I don't want you to be a recruiter either, because that's gross. Instead, what I would love is if you just helped your fellow agents add value to them, help them build their business. And when, not if, when their broker screws up and they always screw up, you will be the person that they call. I I know this, I bring over a friend of mine who's a$40 million producer. I never once asked him to join EXP, just added value to his life. And when he was ready, he came over. He had questions about EXP all along, and I shared with him honestly. Now, if you don't understand the EXP value proposition as well as you can, if there's surprises on today's call with what I'm sharing with you, come and get into Fast Attract. Over a six week period, we will give you value that you can share with people who are prospective people to come to EXP. We will teach you how to help them. We'll teach you what avatars you might want to adopt, an event-based avatar, the coach avatar, social media avatar, whichever. And we'll help you get started on your attraction journey as opposed to a recruiting frenzy. Okay. And that's happening April 27th. By the way, if you've been through Fast Attract, you have not been through Fast Attract. This one, myself, Russ, and just a couple of other people are going to take this one, and we are changing things up. I guarantee you, you will get a lot more out of this one than even some of the past ones that we've done. And they've been amazing. I mentioned this to you all. The top solo agent mastermind and the top team leader mastermind. Those are all available on EXP University. Once you register, you can also go get the archives of the past calls. Speaking of archives of past calls, last November and December, we asked these rock stars to do a nine-session series on AI. AI as your personal assistant, AI for marketing, AI for social media, you name it. It's all up on EXP University. They gave amazing prompts and QR codes with things that you could immediately put into AI to have it do the things that you want it to do well. So do please check those out. Those sessions were awesome. I wanted to just share this. We did this with the Zillow Flex teams. They came to us, you know, they want to minimize the amount of business that Zillow is in their production. You know, 40% referral fee doesn't feel great. And so we decided to do a challenge with them, is one of the things that we're doing. We, over a four-week period, set out the challenge for teams of seven to go out and do conversations. We call it the lucky 7K, 7,000 conversations. Well, here's what happened: four weeks, 15 teams of seven, 13,000 conversations, 658 buyer appointments, 121 listing appointments. Next time you're talking to an agent who wants to tell you, you know, it's not possible to do five real talks a day. Okay. Well, that's funny because Brian Birds did 747 in four weeks. Summer Hoffman did 582. By the way, Summer Hoffman also said 38 buyer appointments in four weeks, friends. One of the team, Kalea, she did 13 listing appointments in four weeks just from this. And these aren't the team leaders, these are team members who went out and did this. Not team leads, generated conversations. So next time you're talking to somebody and they start downplaying or telling you it's just not possible to be consistent with my calls, maybe share some of these stuff. That's with them. I used to have a friend who'd say, build a bridge and get over yourself. Yeah, build a bridge, get over yourself. All right. We've been on a tear recently. We've been going out, so we we've been generating content at every level, right? Newer agents, fast cap, and some of those things. We have the masterminds for our top solo agents and our team leaders, but we wanted to generate formal content at the capper icon level. So we've been going out and interviewing icon level agents on a variety of lead generation topics. Before my team puts pen to paper for any given lead generation methodology training, we go out and we interview at least two dozen icon level agents at that form of lead generation. So we did Sphere of Influence Database first. We interviewed, I think, like 30 Rockstar agents. And we we took their strategies, their tactics, their step-by-steps, and we created an entire 12-month plan. Literally every month, every week, we give you what they were sending for DMs, text messages, phone call scripts, client gifts, client party ideas. And we don't just give you the ideas, we also have playbooks. Those of you who are at expon, you may have seen some of the playbooks. Don't worry, I'll give them to you in a second. But these are literally step-by-step guides of what this top agent did. So this was the sphere of influence database. And by the way, the next one of these is coming up April 14th. April 28th, we're doing open houses. We piloted this last month. It went very well. So we're going to repilot it, or excuse me, relaunch it in April 28th, and we're going to do a 30-day challenge with this. So let me just give you a sense of this. Okay, you guys want to know how to do the perfect open house? You ready? Okay. First, we're going to go doorknock 200 doors around the target property. I just lost 90% of you, didn't I? I did. I did. You're like, no, we're not. We ain't doing that. Well, okay, maybe not. Maybe. But here's the thing: instead of teaching you one way to do an open house, what we decided to do was teach you all the ways that these top folks were doing open houses so that you can pick based on your temperament, your market, your customers, what you're going to integrate into your open house plan. And again, we give you an entire open house plan and let you kind of check boxes. And then we give you step-by-step strategies. So if you are a door knocker, I'll teach you multiple ways in which you can go doorknock. I'll teach you Renee Funk's script. So Renee doesn't want to try to get your contact information and be invasive at all. She's just going to come there and invite you to a 30-minute wine and cheese gathering with the neighbors before the open house starts. You'd be impressed by how many people go, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait. How's the market? But she's not there to try to get your contact information. So if you're if you're maybe a little wallflowery and you're not you're not there to push, that's a great script. You want to push? Okay. Cody White Soul, he's actually trying to get in your house to do a listing presentation. And by the way, he does. He does. He takes listings from door knocking sessions. And if you want to know his approach, cool. We'll give you his step-by-step playbook with his scripts and everything. Teach you exactly what he does. But if you don't want to do that, we'll teach you Smita Singh's methodology. She puts out 40 to 80 branded open house signs all throughout the neighborhood. And she has an entire strategy where she's calling local builders to get properties that aren't even on the market yet so she can differentiate herself to the buyers that come in. And by the way, could you imagine if Smeeta Singh actually doorknocked? I tease her about this. She's a friend of mine. She won't doorknock to save her life. But she puts out 40 to 80 branded open house signs and does multiple open houses each week in the same areas. If she doorknocked, you know what those homeowners would say. Oh my gosh, you're a real person. I see you everywhere. And by the way, when she goes on listing appointments, they're pretty much laid down because they see her everywhere. And we'll teach you all of those strategies and more. This this one's a fun one, Payson Robertson. Payson is the guy there on the left. He looks like he just graduated high school. He's a little older than that, but not much. So he gets into real estate and is like, my sphere of influence is doing keg stands. What do I do? So he decides I'm going to do 100 open houses in 100 days. By day 45, he had 15 deals in transaction process. You want to know what he did? We'll teach you exactly that. And we teach you how to take open houses as from a concept of, you know, something I do whenever I get a listing to something you do every single week, multiple times a week. And we even give you value propositions that you can give to listing agents to let you hold their home open. We've even built an application that we're going to be launching as part of this challenge that will help you find EXP listings that meet your criteria that you can go hold open. So all that and more comes with this course. And that's just the first two. So and I'll share about the social media. Carrie, how am I doing on time? Okay. So let me teach you just one concept that came out of the open house research. And by the way, this is relevant even if you don't do open houses. It's called buyer differentiation. Well, let me guess. You can show me homes on the MLS. Well, so can every other agent in your area. So how do you differentiate yourself? Well, we got this idea from Brian Kelsey, who is just a genius. Now, Brian does four ponds. Mr. and Mrs. Potential Buyer, welcome to my open house. If you'll just please sign in here, I'll give you access to my four ponds. What's that? I'm glad you asked. Well, most agents and their buyers fish out of one pond. We call that the MLS. Every agent in this vicinity has access to it and can give you that. However, I fish out of four ponds. FISBOS, expires, whatever. And I can give you access to homes that aren't on the MLS because you want to see all the homes that are available that meet your criteria, not just the ones that are on the MLS, right? Great. Press here, sign hard three copies. Now, as we were doing this research, we started running into people like SMEDA who are calling builders and all these other agents. So, and by the way, I did this early on in the research. There are actually 10 open house ponds. Want to know what they are? Come April 28th. But I'll give you these eight so that you have those. So, first, active MLS listings, of course. Second, builder inventories. Because SMEDA kept calling builders asking, hey, I've got open house buyers coming on Saturday. What homes do you have that aren't yet on the market that you'd want me to preview early? Because of that, now their builder business is incredible. Builders who list through agents tend to choose her and her part of Houston because she built those relationships. She ever wants to go film social media content, home tours and things like that, just a phone call away and she can go tour those homes anytime she wants. They love her. Listing agents don't sleep on this. I know some of them aren't nice. I know, I know. But here's the thing. Number one, they have buyers. They're listing agents. They have buyers who wanted that last listing that didn't get it. Number two, they can tell you about that last listing. What worked, what didn't, what went wrong, what went right. Number three, you're going to be negotiating against them at some point in the future. Build that relationship. It does matter. And four, when, not if their broker screws up, guess who they'll call first if you've built that relationship. Some of these others are pretty straightforward. Exclusives through Zindless is our off-market property site. If you're not familiar, you can go on to my exp and learn about it there. There's a couple more, but I'm gonna save that one for the 28th. Come see me. All right, I mentioned social media. So on it's actually, sorry, my bad, March 26th. We are piloting Icon Lead Mastery from likes to lead with Instagram. Again, we went out and we interviewed dozens of the top Instagram agents who are generating bulk of their business from that platform. And we're going to show you how to post, what to post, when to post, um, how to set up your profiles, all of that and more. And we're even giving you a post calendar based on what these rock stars are doing. Let me give you an example of what I mean. So we've been interviewing agents across all four platforms, not just Instagram. And I'm going to give you a sense, we as we started, we noticed that these rock stars were all typically doing a mix of about three to five different types of posts. But then we noticed that some people were doing posting types that others weren't doing. And by the end of it, we have 11 and counting post types. Now, in the Instagram class, we take these post types and we teach you how to do reels with these, how to do stories with these, how to do feed posts with these. Let me just give you kind of a generic sense of it. First, I want to teach you what they taught me about creating a lead magnet the easy way. And this is what you do. You go onto Facebook or some other platform if you next door if you if you use that, but a platform that has neighborhood groups of the geographic farms that you work. And you ask questions inside those neighborhood groups because a lot of them won't let you talk about business except a certain day, a certain time of the week, right? But you ask questions like, hey, what's your favorite thing to do for free with kids on the weekend? Or, hey, who's the best painter in this part of Austin, Texas? Or, hey, what's your favorite thing about your neighborhood? And we don't ask these all at once. But what we do is when people reply, and they will reply, we publicly thank them and we privately DM them, and that's called building your sphere of influence. And what you're doing at the same time is building a lead magnet. The Ellington Home Team, Southwest Austin guide to living in dripping springs, or whatever you want to call it. Now we've got something that we can offer on our social media posting. And in building it, we've been generating leads along the way. Make sense? Pretty straightforward. Now, here are the types of posts, and I'll go through these really quickly. Area overviews. These are local highlights. Now, I want to share something we learned from Jackson Wilkie. What he said was he's had so many agents that he's worked with on YouTube that have screwed up their YouTube channel. And the same, by the way, is true of Instagram and other platforms. Instead of doing a post about what you're going to love about the Beltera neighborhood and integrating fun things to do for date nights around Beltera into that kind of YouTube video, what he saw people doing were posting videos of the top five date night spots in Beltera area or dripping springs. Now you might go, well, what's the problem with that? Well, depends on who you ask. What Jackson shared was what's going to happen is that post is going to get served up to people who don't care about real estate. They just care about dating. And then they go to your YouTube channel and they start looking at your YouTubes, click off in the first few seconds because it's not giving them any more dating advice. It's talking about some stupid builder's home. And now your view count just got screwed up. And now YouTube's going to punish you for it. Now, some agents will tell you, I don't care. I want a big enough audience that they come in and then those people will then sift down. Jackson disagrees with that philosophy because you already have a big enough audience. All of YouTube, what you're trying to do with your posting is target your tribe. So careful how you post the area overview stuff. I'd highly recommend that you do so within the context of real estate. You'll notice too when you go to like Levi's channel, for example, you'll see the top five areas to live in, or top five neighborhoods in Melissa, Texas. Um, when you go to other agents' channels, you'll see the top five neighborhoods to avoid in Northwest Houston. Those kinds of things actually do bring in viewers. But here you're trying to find your tribe. Just be prepared. These are going to generate out-of-town buyers. So have your out-of-town buyers guide, be ready to, you know, spend a whole entire weekend with these folks and that sort of thing, right? Um, social proof. And here Aaron Novello gave great advice. If your social proof looks like I'm the greatest realtor in the world because I helped Bob and Ginny do all this stuff, okay, cool. But who is the hero and who's the guide in that story? In that story, you're the hero. Now, who do your prospective buyers and sellers want to be the hero? You or them. So Aaron's advice is when you talk about social proof, make your client the hero, and you're just the guide. They're Luke Skywalker, you're Yoda. They're Harry Potter, you're Dumbledore. Use your metaphor. I'm out of movie references. But make them the hero. You're their guide. The challenges that they faced and how they faced it, and I was just there to help them along the way. Market reports, local sellers, man, I haven't checked it lately, but 15% of listings went expired in August, 15% went expired in September. And I know the trend has continued. We are seeing a lot of pricing issues. I don't know about your part of Minnesota, but if you're struggling with this, one way that you can make sure that you set yourself up for success is in your posting, talk about the realities of pricing. What's selling, what's not selling, and why. It makes it so much easier when you're at the kitchen table to have that conversation if you've already educated them. And by the way, one of the concepts that all these folks shared, let me guess, you do more social posting, but you don't like the way you look, you don't like the way you sound, and you don't know what to say when the camera comes on, right? Well, build a bridge and get over yourself. And let me tell you why. All of these folks that we interviewed said the same thing. When I go on a listing appointment or a buyer consultation, it is a laydown. I walk in and they act like they know me. And there's a term for this, it's called parasocial relationship. And you know this. If you've ever run into your favorite celebrity or your favorite recording artist, you know everything about them. You know how their kids age and their name, and they're like, yeah, what a weirdo. The same is true with these buyers and sellers. They watch your stuff. And that's the thing that all these agents heard. Oh, I've been watching your videos for a long time. I just recently reached out to you. And it builds that relationship. So I'll I'll teach you an easy method to post where you don't even have to be on camera, but I want you to build a bridge and get over yourself. Yes, you're gonna suck. Name me one thing you've ever mastered that you didn't suck at. Go look at Gary V's old videos, by the way. Oh, by the way, he's gonna be our keynote speaker in Salt Lake City. I'm excited about that. But my point is get through the suck. Get through the suck. Get better at it because you need to be doing this stuff. Home tours, pretty easy. Call your local builders, build those relationships. My listing tours, just a little bit of difference here. This is your opportunity to highlight how you promote listing. So I would do the extra mile here: drone photography, twilight photography, things like that. Buyer tips, seller tips. I always say your next post is sitting in your sent folder or in your text messages. You answer these questions every single day. If they have that question, a lot of people have that question. And as you're learning things, by the way, share that online as well. Personal, keep it professional, uh G-rated. G rated. And by the way, some people say, well, should I have a personal account or a business account? I'd say most of us don't post enough. Think of these algorithms, these platforms like Netflix. Now, if you were going to go pitch Netflix on your new show, and you said, Here's my first episode, and they said, This is awesome. When's your next episode coming? And you're like, I don't know, three months, six months. You think Netflix is gonna pick up your show? Same is true for Instagram, YouTube, all these platforms. They want regular content creators that they can put in front of their audience for adoption, right? So when it comes to your personal stuff, keep it G-rated and mix it in. It makes you more human, it makes people feel like they know you more, and and and it also gives you that post content. I apologize. One second, I'll be right back.

SPEAKER_02 40:18

Any thoughts on this? Any questions or ideas? Or just want to have like commentary until I get to the back. I was excited about the playbooks because I actually got a sample of one. So if you guys are curious, I'll just share with you that the playbooks are very in-depth. And instead of going to a training and then, you know, making a few notes and going back and going, okay, now what am I gonna do? It really just lays it out for you. So there's no excuse to not actually go do the thing because you have an entire playbook in front of you after, so you don't have to worry about missing notes and what am I writing, you know, all those good things. So I would just say those are very impressive based on what I've seen.

SPEAKER_00 40:55

Sorry, I locked my wife out of the house.

SPEAKER_02 40:58

That wouldn't be good if you didn't go get her.

SPEAKER_00 41:01

I did that. Okay, so relevant news. This is a good one. Go look at Noah Ward's TikTok. He does green screens where he talks about local legislations or policies and things like that that's going to affect home prices. And then he starts a fist fight in the comment section by asking, What do you think about this? I'm only joking. Careful, we don't need to talk about politics. We got enough of that crap right now, and and and I don't recommend that for you. But engagement is key. And here's something that that one of the agents we interviewed, I think it was actually Jackson, said he talked about he'd been doing posts for the longest time, but he wasn't getting any traction until he realized human beings are simple. If you want them to do something, you need to tell them to do it. So when you're posting, it don't think of it as a one-way street. I'm just giving you information for you to ingest. Think of it as the beginning of a conversation. And just like you would ask a friend, what do you think about that? Have you ever dealt with this? How did you deal with that? Do that in your posting. Ask for engagement. And here's a tip that some of these folks shared with us. When you ask for engagement, you're going to get it. And instead of going on at nine o'clock at night, like all of us do, and just heart, heart, heart, heart, heart. Don't do that. Go through and make one comment back to the person. Maybe a question that invites another comment back and then wait. And a couple hours later, go back and do the next comment from the next person. What you're doing is refreshing the algorithm each time and keeping your post at the top of relevance. Instagram, YouTube, all these platforms see that you're getting engagement over time. And the algorithm says, therefore, I should keep this post in front of people, keep pushing it out in front of people. But engagement is key. When you look at like Halle McCroy, for example, she had one post that went to 185,000 people. She only had like 5,000 followers. And the way you do that is by getting engagement. When the algorithm sees that people are, you know, coming around your post and making comments and other things like that, it teaches the algorithm this person has something that we should be putting in front of more people. Attraction, there's a ton of great agents who use social media for attraction, share advice for newer agents. Some people ask, well, should I do that in a different channel? Hey, listen, if your buyers and sellers see you teaching other agents, what do you think they think about that? Just be mindful of how you talk about customers. I know sometimes we tend to be a little more frank with one another, but be mindful about that. Okay, last one. So speaking of playbook, success diaries. Okay, you got your phone handy? Take a picture of this QR code. Um, by the way, if you take a photo, you can then long press on the QR code on that photo so you can save this for later if you want to share it with people. So I mentioned we're doing this level of in-depth interviewing across every form of lead generation. That includes across four different platforms. We're gonna be doing training on Instagram, training on Facebook, training on YouTube, training on TikTok as well. So we've been going out interviewing dozens and dozens of rock stars. So I've given you a flight here, a sample from each one of the different platforms. I want you to take a look at Bell Tunstall. Take a look at Bell Tunstall's playbook. And you'll get a sense of what Carrie was just sharing, which is the Step by steps that we give you. So here's what Belle does. Now she does regular posts, reels, and things like that. But when you look at Belle's stories, and by the way, Instagram changed their algorithm, late 24, early 25, they now push stories out beyond your followers. When you look at what it takes to succeed on Instagram, you really should be posting daily. Most people struggle with that. You know, filming content, dear God, what do I do? You know, what am I going to say? Here's what Bell does. Think about every step of the transaction. Going on a buyer consultation, just signed a buyer agreement with this lovely couple. Going on our first home tour together. Found a property that they love, putting in an offer, going on inspection, do that before the inspection, not after. We all know what happens after. Going on inspection, closing day, just sign the deal. Every single transaction she does, it looks like she's doing 10 transactions. Because along the way, what she does is she just documents the moment. So for example, I saw a post where she was doing the final walkthrough, same one you and I do, but instead of just doing the walkthrough, she whipped out her phone, put it on the house, not her, 30 seconds, walk through the home. The caption read, Final walkthrough on this gym at 123 King Street. She did one on her way to a buyer consultation, took a picture of the road with the telephone wire, and then kind of bent the text onto the telephone wire. And it said something like, Going to go talk to a lovely couple about buying a home. That's it. And the algorithm loves her. And everybody in her sphere thinks she's doing a crazy amount of production. If you're going to do real estate in this area, you might as well call Belle. It's these types of strategies and more. We'll teach you about a photo bank and other things that we've learned from these folks in these classes. And again, the the Instagram one is March 26th. Now, here's the thing everything that I just shared with you is yours for the low, low price of 999. I'm kidding. It's all free. You already pay for this by being with exp. None of this has a price tag attached to it. It's all just sitting there. But you gotta buy in, right? You gotta actually make the time to come and learn from this. So questions, comments, concerns, excitements, disbeliefs.

SPEAKER_01 47:11

Hey Brian, so I know the answer is long story short, whatever platform you're going to use is the right one for you to go to for social media. However, if an agent is starting off from no social media at a high level, is there one of these platforms over the other that you would recommend or after interviewing all of those agents that would gear more towards success quicker?

SPEAKER_00 47:40

I would I would say Instagram is probably for speed, Instagram. Because and and here's a by the way, Angie, thanks for asking that question. This is an important point. All of these folks that we interviewed, like scores and scores of these agents, all said basically the same thing in their own words. They view social as an extension of their database. And what I mean by that is just like in the in the olden days, we would do pop bys, phone calls, emails, texts, these guys do posts, DMs, comments, likes. And again, if we think about these platforms as a megaphone in a park where we just walk up and start shouting at people, wrong way of thinking of it. What these guys and gals are doing is not just being purposeful about what they post, but then how they engage on these platforms. They purposefully do things like 5-3-1, you know, five likes, three comments, one share. And then do follows as well strategically. Go follow your local business that's an iconic. So here in Austin, Texas, we have the Salt Lake, which is very famous barbecue. Go follow them. Go do posts about the Salt Lake and then collaborate with them. And then you can be pushed in front of their audience when they accept your collaboration. It's those kind of strategies that can make this go faster for you. Now, I'm gonna talk out of both sides of my mouth. And I'm gonna tell you if you're not doing YouTubes, you absolutely should. And here's why. Anyone know what the number two search engine is in the world? It's YouTube. And this is a very different behavior from a TikTok, right? Where you're you just want TikTok to put you in their feed because, by the way, the average person on Instagram goes through 300 feet of posts per day. You better have a great hook, you better have great visuals and some sort of great caption either on your image or below to stop that scroll. And if you're not sure how to do that, come on, we're gonna teach you. And we've got a lot of great agents who gave a lot of great advice about how to do that. But with YouTube, it's a very different behavior because YouTube people go on and search, they go looking for things. And with YouTube, I want you to think about it like have you ever been out to like a wharf or or a pier and seen that that old guy out there with like five different fishing poles? That's YouTube. Because listen, you're not wanting your your videos to go viral because virality does nothing for you. What you want it to do is go tribal. You want it to put you in front of your tribe, whoever that is. Now, YouTube videos that you made two years ago about a part of town or whatever are still going to be relevant and they're still going to pull people in who are doing research out of towners who were like, I don't know anything about Austin, Texas. I want to learn about the neighborhoods. And so each one of those videos acts like a fishing pool. And the funny thing is, when we looked at these YouTubers, they were like, Yeah, you see this video here, I got 40,000 views on it, zero deals from it. You see this video here, I got 32 deals, uh 32 views, I've already gotten three deals from this. Tribal, right? You want to find your tribe. And with YouTube, you can put out more and more fishing lines, and they're more likely to find you because of the search behavior of YouTube. So Instagram for relationship building and relationship cultivation being pushed out from your followers to other followers as well. YouTube for search, but but Facebook has its merits as well. And the cool thing with a lot of these platforms, Facebook and Instagram, are partnered, right? You post on one, it'll push to the other. But each of them have their uses. Speaking of uses, hammers don't build houses. Hammers don't build houses. These are tools. You have to learn how to work them. And if you ever were like, well, I put a video on Facebook five years ago and I didn't get anything from it. Okay, cool. Let's talk about what that video was and let's also talk about consistency of post and building a following online the right way. What else? Did I tell you something you didn't know?

SPEAKER_02 52:18

Yes.

Key Resources And Closing

unknown 52:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 52:20

Big agent meeting every Friday. Every Friday. And get your tribe to show up too. I know a lot of you have great Rep share orgs who probably don't know any of this stuff either, right? Um, so rather than you have to be the conduit of all that information, just be the person who brings them to the party.

SPEAKER_01 52:38

Yeah, and I think this just all this information, it's such a great reminder. And I encourage anyone on this call who has teams or agents, take this recording and have them listen to it because I even saw Chrissy. I mean, we forget how much is available to us, and EXP is always adding to it. So, Brian, I appreciate you so much coming on and revamping and just re-energizing all that's available.

SPEAKER_00 53:03

Oh, I'm always glad to come play. This is like the highlight of my week getting to talk with folks like yourself. So, anytime you guys have questions, too, by the way, don't try to figure it out on your own. Come come ask us. We can help you and figure out what's right for you and share with you what the next available offerings are. But all of what I just shared is on expuniversity.com. And if you haven't seen that in a while, we relaunched that site last year and have been steadily fixing it. When I first got here, expuniversity.com was a link tree. That's a true story. So we fixed that. Um, it is a much better site now. And if you're not familiar, especially those of you who are tractors, you absolutely should get familiar with that class to be able to show people who are looking at exp what all is available to them. Cool. All right. Thank you for letting me come play. If we can help you in any way, let me know. I can't wait to see you guys. Gosh, less than a month, yeah, Carrie?

SPEAKER_02 54:01

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. It was really, really great to have you. You guys, we will put this recording out in the Facebook group. So watch it again if you want to. If you didn't take screenshots, if you need to scan QR code, all that good stuff. So take advantage of this, share it with the people that you know. This is how we keep dominating in our markets because we have so much opportunity to learn and grow. And if something's working for you from this, like post it in the Facebook group and share about it and inspire and encourage each other. That's how we all are going to get better. So thanks, Brian, for being here. We really appreciate your time. Thanks, everyone.

SPEAKER_00 54:32

You got it. All right, guys. Thank you. Thank you.