Brett:

I’m excited about our next guest. He is out of the great state of Florida, and he is focused on helping you to feel your real estate business to an amazing life, and it’s about taking intentional actions, and it’s about being focused in his background is a billion-dollar real estate agent, best selling author, investor, developer, and coach. He has lost his real estate career After completing successful careers both as a Naval Submarine officer and defense contractor and his hyperlocal strategy has led to one of the fastest starts in real estate with over 22 million in sales in his first year, and so much more. Please welcome the show with me, Dan. Let’s make sure I pronounced that correctly. I probably butchered that a little bit. Dan, how’d I do this close Lesniak?

Dan:

Lesniak.

Brett:

Welcome to the show and for our listeners to get to know you for the first time, would you tell him a little bit more about your story and your current focus?

Dan:

Thank you for having me on the show. I’m excited to be on here. Help your audience, get more ideas on how to increase your income, whether you’re a real estate agent, investor, or just someone looking to, to do more business because I think the strategies that I applied can work in anything, and you mentioned that my first year I sold 22 and a half million, how did I do it, and it all was based on a strategy of applying the most effort the most focus to the smallest amount of area, that would still give me enough market share. I think that’s where people struggle, they start too wide, too broad, and they’re spread too thin, and they can’t make an impact and they can’t gain market share. You want to come up with a framework to figure out how can you find a marketplace that’s untapped that you can add value to and gain market share. That’s kind of how I got my start back in 2012.

That was my first-year full time as an agent, I started part-time the year before, and build up a business quickly enough that it made it silly for me to stay my job. I did that for a year, started to build out a team after that, and I’ve grown since then, and along with my wife, we’ve built up a real estate team that now has about 80 agents will sell around 1200 homes or this year, all in the DC area, and we’ve also built out a podcast, a coaching program to train agents, the hyper-fast agent program, and now we’re developers as well. We’ve got about 200 condos in our condo doors units in our pipeline, our development pipeline in the DC area, and, we’re It all started though from having this hyperlocal strategy and really being able to figure out how to grow fast in a niche market.

Brett:

We’re gonna talk about that here in a minute, and thanks for sharing that little bit of the background, Dan. Dan will take one other step back, though, before we dive into the topic at hand, and it’s this, perhaps go back to your high school days or your college days, earlier years, and I believe we’ve all been given certain gifts in this life. Some people call them strengths, some people call them superpowers, I believe there are God-given gifts they’ve been given to us to be a blessing and help to others. I’m curious, what are those one or two gifts that you believe you were given? How does it help you help and bless people today?

Dan:

I think it’s the ability to really stay focused on whatever the most important task is to get to whatever goal I’m pursuing at the time. I’m really good at kind of putting on the blinders tuning out things that don’t matter, and just keeping my head down and focusing on the stuff that will make an impact, and I felt like I’ve kind of had that gift. For a long time, whether it’s, high school, high school hall getting better in my position, or taking my next step in my career in the Navy, it’s really what needs to get done.

Brett:

Absolutely love and that’s a big gift, and I think it’s super-powered in today’s world with distractions and a lot of noise and a lot of shiny objects. Now let’s apply that to the topic at hand which is becoming a hyperlocal hyperfast, perhaps even hyperbolic Focus real estate agent. Dan, what’s the first step, the first secret to on to becoming exactly what we just said.

Dan:

I think the key is to take a step back and get an overall plan. A lot of builders start off their career, I think they don’t really have a plan. I learned this framework actually in a business school called STP, which I think they teach everyone like in marketing 101 and business school now, but it stands for segmentation, targeting, and positioning. the first step is to segment your market that can be geographic, lifestyle, occupation, like, figure out how do you if, if the market is a pie, how would you chop it up, and there are lots of ways to do that. But geographic is probably the one that for real estate, at least, that comes the most easily in people’s minds, but there are tons of ways to do it. The next step is targeting. Alright, you’ve got all these different segments. Now you got to pick which 1 am I going to go after? The smaller I think the better when you’re starting out. Most people struggle with, having it, not be too big, or they want to be the agent for their whole city.

If you’ve got a town of 50,000 people, it’s gonna be hard to compete on Google, it’s gonna be hard to compete if you’re, if you’re trying to market to everyone, especially when you compare it to what if you just cut a certain neighborhood? What if you tried to become the real estate agent for all of the doctors in town. In that example, instead of going after 50,000 people who after 500 or 1000 and you’re going to be able to get ads in front of them more cost-effectively, you’re gonna be able to get more direct mail however your marketing you’re gonna be able to reach, 500 or 1000 people a lot easier. You got to pick a target segment that is not too big but it’s it can’t be too small like you don’t want to get a 100% share of five people that’s not enough. Obviously, you got to be a certain size but and then the last step in this framework is positioning, how are you going to position yourself as someone that can add unique value and then communicate that to them in a clear and concise, and consistent manner?

Brett:

We’re gonna apply that to your story and how you did this to start it outright? By the way, you can learn more about Daniel at HyperFastAgent.com. HyperFastAgent.com. Talk about it. You get you to jump right in, and what was your boots on the ground, to niche down and to focus and to do the segmentation, targeting, and positioning.

Dan:

I decided to try and become the real estate agent for one condo. I’m in Arlington, Virginia, there’s, I think about a quarter of a million people that live there. Decent size city, not as big as some but still pretty big. I didn’t go after 250,000 people, I went after 200. There are about 190 units in this one condo building, and I think I think another thing too, that with succeeding there was the building was about three years old, and that is an ideal time, I think if you’re an agent who’s new or just looking to expand into new markets if you can find a neighborhood that’s about three years old. turnover is about to start happening, and there’s no established agent in there. Because probably what happened is the builders sold it had an agent that sold it, and they kind of moved on and did something else, and they probably haven’t stayed in touch. There’s no dominant agent yet, and sales are coming. It’s a great way to go compete where there’s not a lot of people, neighborhoods, or buildings that are about three years old.

Brett:

Totally smart. Makes sense.

Dan:

That’s was my reasoning for what I did, and I hit this group of people with, multiple types of marketing, Facebook, Facebook Groups as making Facebook groups back, or pages, I think back then. I did open houses. I did buyer seminars, for the building. I did weekly email newsletters, five or six or seven different ways is networking. I think a lot of times in my book, I talk about, finding gatekeepers. Those are people that know a lot about a certain group of people. In my case, it was the person who worked as the front desk manager, they often knew who was gonna move out and that lead our sales to just knowing that knowing you go, purposely tried to talk to you. All of those kinds of methods, some new some traditional I did it all and it was all focused on two people. Boy and I ended up getting half the sales in that building that year.

Brett:

Really segmenting down to literally one complex. They had about 190 units and focused like a laser by serving that community. Educational, seminars, buyers understanding anything to add value open houses, that community Facebook groups multiple ways to just provide value and in focus like a laser so when did your first sale come when? How did that go down?

Dan:

I think though, the first one was a buyer I found they don’t have this category, I believe on Zillow anymore is on Zillow make me move. That’s a type of listing that used to be available on Zillow it’s not anymore, but it basically was kinda like a for sale by owner but the person really wasn’t selling they were just saying throwing a number out there kind of a high number typically and saying if I get this number hold move you can make me move I’m not looking to sell but I’ll do it for I used to contact all those when I saw them and, these people were looking for our single-family home in the area and help them find that and then I listed their condo it sold really quickly, pretty close to right at the price that their kind of dream price if they wanted on Zillow. I think that was a couple of months after I got my license. It didn’t take too long. I was still working my contractor job at the time. It was I did about two sales. I think before my pipeline got so big that I quit that job.

Brett:

Now let’s apply this perhaps to the investor, the person who’s trying to buy multifamily properties trying to do some targeting to unlock opportunities, maybe off-market. How would you apply that concept to the investor?

Dan:

I think investors are gonna get the best deals if they can find the deal off-market most of the deals that we do now for condo developments that especially the ones that have really high margins, seem to be off-market deals. It’s very rare as an investor that we buy an on-market deal because we get a better deal off-market. If you’re an investor, I think you know, you need to look at the Facebook marketplace, Craigslist, Zillow, for sale by owners. I think knocking on doors have, is a good strategy for networking with contractors, engineers, architects, a lot of times these people know when a good deal is going to come. You can do some Google PPC-type stuff as well to get them to come to you. But I think oftentimes it’s those deals you find through the kind of boots on the ground networking and knocking on doors kind of stuff. Really sweet deals.

Brett:

What’s the next step? Once you’ve done the segmentation, targeting, and positioning, you’re starting to niche down, then you’re starting to focus, you start to get some momentum, what’s the next step to becoming a hyper, hyper-fast hyper-local real estate agent?

Dan:

You got it, you got to take that positioning that you’ve developed and, and come up with a way to market it to people, I think it’s got to be clear, concise, consistent. You have to consistently hit them with that message, your value proposition message, you have to consistently be consistent about it, from the moment they see your marketing to your initial sales meeting to, to you know, even after you’ve closed the deal. It’s got to be the same message throughout, it’s got to be congruent, and I think you got it, you got to come up with a way to convey it to people concisely. You’ve got to be able to explain it to them, and under 30 seconds. If they see it in an ad. They’ve got to understand it’s got to be something they can understand within a few seconds. I think if you don’t meet that criteria, we mentioned earlier in today’s world, there’s a lot of distractions. People aren’t going to take 10 seconds to look at your ad or read your email. They’ve got to get it right away, whatever that value proposition is. To that targeting, segment your targeting. They’ve got to be able to understand it quickly from your marketing and everything you do.

Brett:

Clear, concise, and consistent messaging, and throughout the sales cycle before, during, and after, and that makes sense, and obviously setting up systems and processes to be able to do this, and then to build out teams and delegate, I imagine this is all a part of this as well. What are the other things that perhaps most agents are missing that you could also add to this as well?

Dan:

I think first to start out, have your initial success get to that 100k to 250k level. I think those are the things I’d highlight. To go beyond that. I think you got to really learn how to build out a team, and I think a lot of agents and investors struggle with this, they, they get to a high level of success, a level where they’re making six figures, even multiple, six figures. But they get stuck there, and they have a good situation at this point. The problem is they’re trading time for money, they own their job, they’re self-employed, they don’t own a business yet. Once you kind of get through these steps, get market share, the next step is to expand and scale and you need people, you need to go out and hire admin people service type people first, and then go get more agents. Most agents though, get to this level of income, and for some reason, they won’t go out and hire administrative help, and they get stuck, they get busy and they can’t grow.