Brett: 

Excellent. So now let's talk about you Spencer. So if someone said, Hey, I want to, I like Spencer, I think I want to. I think I want to hire him or I'm competing. what's the what's the value pitch where you're saying, here's the value of my representation, right? Here's the value of my service. Here's my market knowledge, here's my marketing. What? How do you separate yourself from the competition?

Spencer:

So ultimately, it depends on which side I'm on. Right. So as the buy side, and the sell side is good, the strategy is always very different for both. On the buy side, it's fundamentally my goal as a buyer's agent, which I've helped a lot of people for, especially this year, is to buy it at the lowest price possible, at the same time not risking or losing that opportunity. That's one aspect. The other aspect is ensuring that we're as protected or you know, as much information as you possibly can. Is the kind of the, you know, one beat up the other objective. So how do I do that? I mean, I do that a day. We leverage data and insights as to what is going on with the market. What is the actual competition for this specific house? What is the strategy, so every single house will have its strategy, just because the market is competitive doesn't mean anything. Because at the end of the day, not all homes are going to be the same dynamics. Right. So that's a big aspect of that I do in terms of how I keep people informed, I do a weekly content on my YouTube channel on all my podcasts, which has been fantastic for myself, and my clients, and even people within my network to understand and learn more about the market, they can see the data themselves. So I do a market report every Friday, people can see and pull it up, right um, it's very transparent. You see the data, you see the trends, there's nothing to argue about. It's just what it is. And I break it down by single family, break it down by county, break it down by condos, townhomes. And so you will know what is happening. Because it's, it's, it's being extracted from the back end system. So that's the value add and is the competitive edge. When it comes to the buy side. On the sell side. If you think about it, you know, most people that are selling, they may be selling because they want to do a trade up, they may be selling because they're moving out of the area altogether. You know, there's various reasons for people to want to sell a home. And so what is my value prop at the end of the day, if you think about who's the next person that will be buying that house, you would want somebody like myself that's heavily ingrained in the tech community on your side, because at the end of the day is going to be very, very likely, especially in nicer areas per se, that there are these tech professionals and so the ability to market to them. The ability to think about what they may like. And what they want is very, very important. At the end of the day, the goal on the sell side is to get as much visibility as possible. So the right marketing approach is very important. And the right way to position the house is also very important. And at the end of the day, your goal is to get as many people as you can get, as many people interested, get as many offers, and have them compete with one another. So that's the fundamental strategy when it comes to the sell side. So for me to be able to organize it, the ability to create this strong kind of want for that house, are the reasons why I've been always able to sell houses at record low times, but also for way more than was expected.

Brett:

Beautiful, yeah, very well said so much there. I want to touch on the scaling part now. And touch on building the team, right and in how you are building your team, and align aligning it in a way where, you know, when I was at Marcus and Millichap, I remember I was I felt like I was training my competition, like, someone would come in, I would coach him, I would train them. I give away all my secrets. And I liked it because I like them. And I wanted to see them succeed. But then financially, they were only incentivized to be with me for a couple of deals, and then they're off on their own. And all of a sudden, like, Oh, no, he's, he's wrong. You know, it's a friendly competition, but it's still a competition. But, you know, so talk about how you've structured and you're structuring your business, to make it financially incentivizing to, to, to keep team members around.

Spencer :

So a lot of that has to fundamentally look at you have to look at the root cause and why would people leave? Right? Why would they leave the model? And a lot of it has to do with finances, right? I mean, if you think about it, a split initially may be unattractive. I mean, people may want to do things on their own. So that's very important to understand that model, and how does one make the money in that company? That's extremely important. So I joined eXp Realty, as an example, sometime in late last year. For that reason I was not very big, I'm still not very big on the recruiting side. However, as people see my success, they want to be part of my mastermind, they want to be part of this group, then great, I love to have them on, I love to help them. And quite frankly, it's financially aligned with me too, like, I would make money just like when you make money, if you don't make money, I don't make money, right? Yet, it's not a cut from you. So that's very important. And I'm not taking a fee from that person. It's just because the fundamental business is very different, and is positioned differently. If you think of other models, whether it's like a kW, intro, center, 21, whatever, whatever, their model is very different, right? They have people that own that office. So at the end of the day, those are the people making the money for new agents, and then they claim they may have some sort of quasi profit sharing, which is broken down like, and fed, there are so many layers. So technically, your profits can be extremely low, versus eXp, because there's a lien on, there's no office, and then I'm kind of running my mini office, then there's just a lot more money to be given around to give. And so that has a very, that has a very important aspect of the ability to have people under you, because like I said, I'm not taking anything from them. We're both in the same alignment to do well, we both make money. So I think that's, that's, that's the most important aspect. Now, in terms of how I'm growing the business, I'm not hiring buyer's agents at this time yet, I may do that maybe next year. Right now I do have to show assistant partners that I work with. So I will pay them an hourly amount, I'll do some sort of split, if they end up buying that kind of, you know, buying a house that they've shown. And that's the model that I have today, that's I will continue to increase, especially if I get so busy that I can't be in so many places at the same time. In terms of running a team of buyer's agents, it's more of this recruiting model per se, where they can join my group, I can provide the guidance, and then maybe down the road, that's kind of how I do my trials. I've seen a lot of people. That's how they did their trials where you join first a group, see how you like to work with one another. You can partner on deals, and then maybe it makes sense. You can join the actual team. But it's all going to be case by case. You know, I only want superstars if I were to work on it, but I also have to think about how I add value to the superstar so it's a very, very tricky case by case situation because at the end of the day is still my time back to what we spoke about in the beginning. Like I can either train this person and Hope they do well. And then that way it works better for the group, or I just find more clients myself. Right. So, yeah, I have to figure out on my end, what's more worthwhile?

Brett:

Absolutely. And I think so well said, when you bring up the point of, you know, being financially aligned, and as well as the model is aligned, right, where whoever the owner is of whatever entities is typically making the most, right, and so if you can kind of have a mini office or mini ownership with the eXp model, then you get to share that it's not a cut from them is just a sharing of, of the overall revenue. So which is pretty neat for the company. So neat. What's the biggest mistake, Spencer, maybe that you've ever made while being a real estate professional? Or what's the one thing you wish you would have done sooner?

Spencer:

I think there are several things. I would say when I look back, I think, number one, when it comes to time, I have been very hesitant. I mean, I've only hired an assistant recently. Right. And it was long overdue. And so should have done that much earlier, clearly had the funds to do it. But I just didn't have the thoughts to do it. I have VHS. I've always had people like doing small things, but not like a full time paid assistant, especially, you know, I've never owned a business before. Well, this scale, per se. And so the aspect of now, having payroll and things like that are just completely new. Right. So I think that should have been done much earlier. That's number one. And then that could have allowed me to have more time to do other things. So that's number one. Number two, I would say not being on top of things as early on. So what I mean by that is, like letting my network everyone know that I do real estate. And I'm the realtor that they want to work with. I think there's always an aspect of people just being kind of shy, like, hey, look, I don't want to tell or push my friends that I'm in the business. They just think I'm some sort of think I'm some sort of, you know, just used car salesman or something. And you can imagine how many opportunities were lost, and they just wrote, I didn't know you were doing this, right, even though you think you've blasted out every day. Like the reality is like, if you think about social media, I mean, I think what are the numbers, because let's say I have 5000 connections on Facebook, and let's say, I don't know, 200, or something can see it just because there's so much activity happening, right? It's all an algorithm. I mean, you think about percentage-wise, it's such a low percentage that sees a post that you may feel is the best post you've ever made. And so you don't know, and also says no, you don't know who gets it. Right. It's not all, not everyone will get it, get that feed. And so it's very important to manually reach out to every single person and consistently remind them, but also add value however you can about what is happening in the business. So if I did that earlier, I would have done even better than I am doing today. Right? But then again, it's never too late, because the database keeps growing. But for any newer agent or anyone that feels kind of stuck. Everybody has a very big goldmine in their database, you don't have to find a new shiny object or new ads. You just need to reconnect with those people to add value and, and you'll find some success pretty quickly.

Brett:

Beautiful, love it. Are you ready for the lightning round?

Spencer:

Sure.

Brett:

All right, if you go back to your 25-year-old self in Switzerland and hotdogs, or maybe your 20-year-old self, what's the one Golden Nugget that you would make sure that you would do?

Spencer :

I would say the Golden Nugget at that age. I am much older than that. So appreciate that in the comments. But when it comes to 25, I would say it, like I said about the kind of the database aspect, whether you're using the database as a business tool, per se, or you're using it just to stay in touch with people. The aspect of adding people to this database should be done at any age, even if you're in college right now, right? If you think about college as a fantastic opportunity to meet a lot of people. And the thing is though, over time, people will forget about each other, right. And so if any you have to be because you can't assume someone else is going to be on top of things, you need to be on top of things. And so you need to create this database with this list yourself. Not from a sales perspective, but just to keep in touch, maybe even write some notes of what you guys talked about. So that way when you talk again, you're almost continuing that conversation and it continues to grow that relationship rather than restarting from scratch, which is almost as if you never had a conversation, to begin with. And so that would be that advice because this is a compounding effect, it grows the list of databases but also deepens those conversations and those relationships. So I think that's very critical.