“20 Minutes of Successful Niche Secrets – EPISODE 56,”
Where I help you to see how you can have the best next two quarters in Real Estate
Glenn: Hi! It’s Glenn McQueenie, and welcome to my 25-Minute Success Series Podcast. Today’s kind of exciting, because here we are in the middle of the summer. We’ve just finished two quarters of 2018, and many of you have probably either had the best two quarters of your year, you’ve had the worst two quarters, or you’re right in the middle, where you had one bad quarter and one good quarter.
And I guess I’m here to tell you today, just chill out, depending on whatever level of production you’re at right now. You know, in my experience, I’ve noticed that agents have usually two good quarters a year, and they have two bad quarters. And it could be sometimes front-loaded, like quarter one, from January until the end of March, and then April until the end of June, they will just have the best year ever. They’ll probably do 70-80% of their production. And then they’re the ones who are ready to take some great, well-deserved time off in June. There are other people who just get off to a terrible start at the beginning of the year, and sometimes it lingers. And a lot of that is because you’re working with a lot of what we call “Maybe” buyers and sellers. I love the “Yes” people, because they say, “Yeah, let’s go buy a house or list my house.” And I respect the “No” people, because they tell you, “No. I don’t want to do business with you at this moment.” But it’s the “Maybes” that tend to kill us, and they tend to give us the bad quarters. They’re the people who are always looking for the right home, the perfect home to come up. We show them tons of properties. There’s always a problem with it. Or they’re stop-starting all the time. “Okay, I’m ready to go.” “No, we’re going to hold off for a little while.” And you can fill, sometimes, an entire year and have the worst year of your life if you’re just full of “Maybes.”
So my first piece of advice to you would be to list all of the people you’re currently working with right now and just put a sign next to them. Are they a “Yes?” Are they a “No?” Or do you think they’re a “Maybe?” And even more importantly, if you had a bad two quarters this year, don’t worry, because what’s coming is the next great two quarters of the year. I’ve never really seen an agent have four bad quarters. They’ll usually just seem to be one off, and then they’ll have two on, and one off. Or they’ll have a really good spring, take time off, and then they build again, and then the last quarter from October 1st to Christmas is really the most spectacular one of them all.
This whole notion of, “Oh, I want to do two deals a month” (or five deals a month, or ten deals a month) is a bit of a false pretense when you look at the year. If you just look at the market volumes, typically December, January, and the beginning of February is the lowest volume, and then that’s followed by July, August, and the beginning of September. So to put yourself through the torture of, “I want to do five deals every month” – and then for whatever reason, nothing happens in January and February, and you’re like, “Oh my God. This year’s a write-off” – I think it’s maybe just a bit silly, and maybe in need of you getting a different perspective on it. And the real perspective is, we can’t control what happens in the market. The markets go up and the markets go down. But what we can control – the activities that we do every single day, week, and month – really are what give us the results. So don’t focus on the market; focus on your key activities. In my experience, I’ve noticed that in 30 years of doing this, when I look back from when I first met that person until I actually got paid, it was usually about six months to nine months – actually meeting them to actually closing the deal and getting money in my bank account.
So really, your activities now – what you do this month, in July, is really going to determine how the fourth quarter of the year is, from October to the end of December, and how your first quarter of next year is. A lot of top agents look like they get tons of listings coming up in the spring, but what you don’t realize with these mega-agent teams is, behind the scenes, they’re meeting the people, doing the comparative market analysis, telling them the staging tips in August, September, October, November and December of the year before. So it looks like they’re getting a whole lot of listings (which they are), but it really was the build up. The first contact with these people was now – it was July, it was August, September, October, and then the actual fruits of their labour paid off in the first and second quarter of the following year.
It’s summertime, and people want to take some time off. And you know what? You’ve earned it. If you’ve had a busy year and you’ve done all the right things, take some time off. If you haven’t earned it, or if you don’t want to go into having a whole bunch of bad quarters, now’s the time to really just start reconnecting with your niche market, or going a little bit deeper or discovering more or meeting more people. Let’s see real estate for what it is: a contact sport, and it’s a people business. If you’re just not talking to enough people on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, it’s impossible for you to do a high level of transactions. What I’m finding now as I look through our brokerages and I’m tracking the other agents is a lot of them are going back. They’re going deep into their existing client base. They’re taking this time of the year to really go and do random drop-by visits. A great tip to do is to get a map of your city and just put a little pin where all of your existing clients live right now. Next time you’re showing in that area, just leave half an hour earlier, and just commit to dropping by and seeing three people before you actually meet the client to show the house or go on the listing appointment. There’s nothing that says you’re a successful agent more than when you show up at someone’s door unannounced (and I know people hate this, but that’s the beauty of why these random pop-by visits work so well) and you say, “No, no. I can’t come in. I was just driving by your house and I was just thinking about you. How are you doing? No, I can’t come in. Yeah, I’d love to get together for a coffee. I’m just showing a house around the corner in a few minutes, but I just wanted to say hi.” There’s nothing that reinforces not only that they matter to you, but that you care, that you thought about them, that you didn’t forget about them, and that you’re an active agent in the area more than the random pop-by visits. And they can be absolutely not random – they could be coordinated. “For the next two hours on this Saturday, I’m just going to go by, and all I want to do is get my face in front of past clients,” because once you get your face back in front of them, you get the mental space back in their mind. They’ve forgotten about you. They’ve moved on to doing other things right now, so you’re not top of mind. When a friend of theirs, or even if they’re thinking about selling, it requires more effort for them to go, “Oh yeah, let me find his number. Let me refer.” Sometimes it’s just easier to do nothing, which is why most of them actually do nothing. So a great way for you to build your book of business and get it ready for the end of the third quarter that we’re in right now, going up until the end of September and also into the fourth quarter, is just reconnect with your past clients. This is the time when you can just go back to being that human being that you were, and why you got into this business, which is the reconnection and the service of helping other people hit their goals. When you have that mindset that all of your business is really at your fingertips right now, if I just show up as an amazing person with my past clients, I don’t even have to ask them for referrals. The simple fact that I was there, that my face was in front of them, is probably going to set me up to get a referral in the next couple of days or couple of weeks. I can’t tell you how many agents I’ve been coaching, and when they actually go back and call their past client, they call me back and it’s like, “Oh my God. They just referred me to their sister, who’s thinking about buying a place here and they’ve got another place to sell.”
If you think about it, one of the best niche markets that you can ever operate in, and actually the best long-term, sustainable business model is keeping closely connected to your past clients and your sphere of influence. And it’s summertime! This is the time when you get to go to barbecues. You get invited to more activities than you would in the winter months or in the colder months. So just take this opportunity to show up and be amazing. And show up with curiosity and wonder – not with an agenda. What I mean by that is, don’t go up there and walk around going, “Hi. I need referrals.” “Hi. I need referrals.” “I need referrals.” Just show up and be you, and be amazing. Start talking to people. And guess what? At some point, they’re going to start talking about real estate, because that’s what you have in common. And then your leadership – how you show up at that moment when they’re asking you how the market is – is really so important to how this whole thing is going to work out. If you show up charge neutral, which is the way I’m talking to you right now (just talking), that’s a very professional approach to have a conversation. Or you can throw up charge negative, where you’re like, “Oh boy, it’s really busy,” “It sucks,” or “It’s been really slow.” Nobody wants to hear from Debbie Downer. And also, they don’t want to hear from Foghorn Leghorn, charge positive: “It’s great! It’s amazing! The market’s so good! You wouldn’t believe it. It’s so crazy!” – because they don’t even believe it. What if you just showed up in the best version of yourself in absolute curiosity and reconnected with your past clients? And don’t even bring up real estate until they actually bring it up. And you know what? They might not even bring it up. But what’s happened is you’ve been able to get top of mind. When they think about real estate in the next week or 10 days, your name is going to pop up. You might even have been able to set up a second meeting to go for coffee. Just be their friend. This is how you build a great referral-based niche business. It’s by always keeping in contact, bringing value, giving, giving, giving. Never ask, because the ask is not even necessary. They will just start sending. People always give back to you at the level that you give to them.
So if you really want to have the best two quarters and make the next two quarters the best of your year, just go out, get reconnected, and chill out a little bit. If you’ve had a bad year, or you’re feeling broke or whatever – well, that’s okay. But when you start scaling it out and go, “Okay. Yeah, I’m a bit broke right now. I need money right now,” the moment you start going, “I need a deal right now,” is the moment you will never, ever get a deal. I don’t know why it works, but every time I’ve wanted a deal, everything I touch falls apart. And the moment I don’t want a deal, or I’m so busy just in the activities of real estate, of meeting people and showing and buying, that’s when the universe seems to just drop more and more surprise business on my lap that I never even needed.
So act like you’ve had the best year ever, because it’s the secret to your refer ability and people sending more business to you. And also, scale out your life. What if it’s a year from now? What if we just said, “Happy New Year! It’s Friday, July 13th. What a lucky day! Over the next 12 months, I want to do 12, 24, 36, 48 transactions.” And then just chill it out a bit! “Maybe in the next quarter I want to do 10% of that goal. In the second quarter I want to do about 30% of that goal. And then in the next I want to do another 30%, and then I want to do another 30%.” It’s time on the task over time that gives you your reward signals. It’s not the start, stop, start, stop, or the focus on short-term money, which I think is becoming an even bigger disease in our industry right now. No one ever built a long-term business with a super short-term focus and short-term action plan. What they do do is they set a great goal over the next year, and then they just break it into each quarter. What are the four or five things, that if I could just get these things done, it will multiply my business forward? And then it’s the momentum of the action and your activities in the business that starts to compound and accelerate, and when that happens, so does the number of transactions you do, and the number of deals that you make. So I just really wish you the best next two quarters, and I hope it’s the most profitable one for you in your real estate career.
So take care, and if you want to be a guest on my podcast, remember, you just have to send me an email at glenn@glennmcqueenie.com. And if you want to hear some more great interviews then we just need a lot more people to interview and get some free coaching from me. Also, in the fall, I will be launching a new real estate coaching program. It’ll be more based on a consulting ticket fee, which is, you can just buy groups of my time in hours, and I’m happy to help you grow your business in any way we can. So feel free to reach out. Email me if you want to come on and be a guest on the podcast. Or, if you’re interested in doing more one-on-one coaching, or if you want to get a group of people together, I’ve got some extra capacity this fall, and I really want to help as many people as I can.
So thanks a million for listening, and we’ll talk to you soon! Okay, have a great day!
