How Should Real Estate Agents Take Personal Time Off? • Close-ing Time • Chris Linsell

Keeping It Real Podcast • Secrets Of Top 1% REALTORS ® • Interviews With Real Estate Brokers & Agents

Welcome to our monthly feature, Close-ing Time – in partnership with TheClose.com.

In this episode, Chris Linsell from TheClose.com discusses how to make time for yourself and how to notify your clients when you’re away. Chris also spends time discussing what happens ‘when’ the market turns and what it means for properties selling at high prices today. Chris shares tips on how agents can add additional streams of possible income. Last, Chris mentions why agents may want to advise clients to sell now and rent for the next few years.

If you’d prefer to watch this interview, click here to view on YouTube!

Chris Linsell can be reached at [e-mail].

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Transcript

D.J. Paris 0:00
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Welcome to keeping it real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. And today once again, is our monthly series called closing time with Chris Lynn self from the clothes.com. This is a partnership between keeping it real and the clothes.com. And let me tell you about the clothes. Now the clothes.com is the kind of real estate website designed to give agents teams and brokerages actionable strategic insight from industry professionals, they cover real estate marketing, lead gen technology and team building strategies. From the perspective of working agents and brokers who want to take their business to the next level, please visit the closed.com That’s th e c l o sc.com. And subscribe to their newsletter so you can get notified every time they publish an article. It’s a it’s our very favorite website for learning anything related to growing your business in real estate and also just knowing what’s going on in the market with us, as always is Chris Lynn self. He has a staff writer and a real estate coach for the close. Chris is the closes resident expert on real estate topics ranging from marketing, lead generation transactional best practices and everything in between. He’s a licensed agent in the state of Michigan. Chris has been part of hundreds of transactions from modest rural, sorry, modest rural starter homes to massive waterside compounds. And when he isn’t writing, you’ll find Chris fly fishing or performing on the stage of his community theaters production. Chris Welcome once again to keeping it real, we’re excited to have you.

Chris Linsell 2:13
You. Pleasure to see you as always excited to be here.

D.J. Paris 2:17
And we were talking just before we started it is the beginning of tryouts or trot season is officially started. So you have been able to get out there and resume your fishing habit.

Chris Linsell 2:27
I have been in church a total of five times when I say church, I mean the river. And we have been the season has been open nary, I think nine days now. So you know I’m getting those these early season gotta get out there kind of wiggles out of my system. But I’ve got a trip, a trip of five interrupted non cell phone days planned here in about a week and a half. So just wow. Or to being on the water,

D.J. Paris 2:56
five in a row five, consecutive disconnect, detach,

Chris Linsell 3:00
going, going off going getting a cabin on the river, with a friend of mine literally been going to this cabin for 30 years since I was a kid. And we don’t get any cell coverage there. We take a large variety of pickled foods, and books and fish stories and fish all day and, you know, tell tall tales all night. And quite frankly, it’s I look forward to it every year. And I use it as an example all the time with real estate agents because, you know, people, you know, regularly talk about how challenging it is in real estate to have that work life balance that makes sense for people. And, you know, I I tell people every year I’ve been I’ve been going on this trip. In fact, I’ve made I’ve made the trip longer as I have gotten into real estate because I realized when I come back from this trip, I’m much more focused, excited about work excited about being leveling up and being more successful. So you know, agents, especially right now one of the things being as crazy as it is in the real estate market. Gotta find time for balance.

D.J. Paris 4:04
Quick question. So before we get into our topic for today, I’m curious when you do go away, and you are not going to be able to interface with your clients just based on the fact there isn’t cell coverage where you are. How do you notify your current customers in advance? Hey, I’m not going to be available during this time. If or do you have team members that you have as backups? How do you work that because I know right now, as you were saying about crazy, everything is agents are feeling really taxed and stressed about this idea of you know, replying so quickly because things are happening so quickly. So what’s your process there to make sure that your clients don’t feel that they’ve been abandoned for a few days?

Chris Linsell 4:42
Sure. So I do two things. The first thing is I typically will strategize my time away so that I am not gone for an entire, like Monday through Friday work cycle. For some reason, psychologically This is more challenging to our clients when they feel like you are unavailable for an entire in their mind week. There, it doesn’t matter what processes you take, you’re going to appear disconnected if you’re gone for that long. But I’m not saying that agents shouldn’t take that that time. But that’s the first thing that I do. Second thing I do is anyone that I’m working with actively, I make sure that they know Hey, I’m going to be out of town, I’m not going to be responding to calls, texts or emails for this period of time, you are very important to me, your needs are very important to me. And then I line up the third thing, which is if you’ve got something that absolutely can’t wait between when I leave, and when I get back, here’s the contact information of the person who’s handling emergencies. For me, this is always somebody who is local. This is somebody who is plugged into my market, and someone who were there to be an emergency like, you know, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but something that required immediate attention. A virtual assistant isn’t going to be able to help somebody boots on the ground, somebody who’s covering for emergencies definitely will. So that’s that’s the last thing I do is I make sure to put something in place. So that there is somebody who could meet me or meet a client at a house on a Thursday at four if they had to. And then the last thing I want to say on this, and I just encourage real estate agents to be thoughtful about this. You can’t be everywhere at once. And it’s not only possible, it’s likely that if you especially if you’re really active in like paid lead generation, that you may have a lead opportunity that you don’t capture as a result of being away. And that’s okay guys, because, you know, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. If you are an accountant, or if you are a teacher, or if you are a firefighter, taking vacation means being out of the office, it means being away from opportunity. You know, it could be that you know, a prestigious client in your accounting office walks through the door, and you don’t get that because you’re on vacation, it could be if you take vacation as a teacher that you don’t have a chance to have that one on one with your principal and this person who’s chartering your professional development, this is opportunity cost guys, this is a reality, this is part of being a working adult. And you can’t be everywhere at once you don’t win every single time. And that’s okay. Because what you get out of that vacation is a benefit to so don’t feel like you have to capture everything, because you simply can’t. And make sure that you’re understanding the benefit of the vacation too, because you can’t serve the people that are important to if you’re not taking time to recharge and kind of restore yourself to

D.J. Paris 7:55
I think that’s really well said, and you had a lot of great tips there. So don’t feel like you can’t disconnect, the most important thing is to communicate advance to the clients that you know that there is a process in place, if all of a sudden they stumble across a for sale sign and want to put an offer on happened, you know, while you’re happened to be gone, you have a backup and that they know when you’re returning and that most I think most people are understanding of the fact that they take vacations. Most professions allow for a certain number of weeks per year, and real estate agents should be afforded that same same luxury. I think it’s all about just communication as as you have so eloquently described on your process. So I was actually thinking about this the other day, because whatever somebody asks so I’m in management at which sounds a lot more impressive than it is. But I don’t I’m not boots on the ground working with clients, I’m more of a business to business kind of person, cuz I’m more on the recruiting side, and helping manage our brokerage business which we have about 740 realtors or so. And so from our perspective, and in looking at the bottom line, boy, it’s never been better. You know, we looked last year we went, Oh my gosh, we we crushed all of our records. This year, we’re on pace to do this and we’re not unique. Most firms, I’m sure are having great years. However, if you were to ask me how it’s going, I’d say this is amazing. However, when I talk to our agents, they’re about as stressed as I’ve ever spoken or ever noticed. And when we send out you know, it’s so odd to have the brokerage doing so well. And agents just being feeling like they’re overworked. They’re stressed because of of course the competitive buying environment that exists. So I know we wanted to talk today about that buying environment and what agents can do to sort of deal with that. And and you know, we understand that it is tough out there right now as a listing agent. It is great and you are just boy seeing the benefits of of having those relationships where people are reaching out to want you to sell their home and getting offers within minutes and and sometimes you know for well over Asking price, but for agents representing buyers, boy, it is it is it is tough right now.

Chris Linsell 10:05
Yeah, yeah, it really is. You know, I think I think it’s important also, as we’re getting into this conversation to recognize that the vast majority of real estate agents are not just, you know, buyer’s or seller’s basically most agents, unless you’re very specialized, you know, especially in Metro markets, this happens a little bit more in Metro mark and major metro markets. But most real estate agents are both buyers and seller agents. And there is a significant amount of frustration in the professional community in the agents that I’m speaking to right now, around what’s happening in our market, and most of that frustration is coming from the buy side of things, because we’re working with buyers who are not finding what they’re looking for. And when they do find what they’re looking for, they can’t pay the market price for it. And, you know, we as buyer’s agents wind up in this really tricky situation, because it’s our first fiduciary our first responsibility to represent the fiduciary best interests of our clients. And I think a lot of agents listening to this could could probably resonate with the fact that with the way prices are right now, you couldn’t say with confidence that the home that they’re offering 70 grand above asking price, is actually worth 70 grand over asking price, we can’t say with confidence that this is this home is worth this. And that puts us in a tough situation, because our clients need a place to live. But what do we do? I mean, do we tell them not to make an offer? It’s a catch 22? I think,

D.J. Paris 11:48
yeah, I was having an non podcast conversation with a top producer from a completely different company, who I’m friends with. And it’s something so funny, he’s, the person said, I don’t know why anyone’s buying, right? Because it is so competitive rates are so low money is so cheap. And of course, inventory is also is very low. So you you are getting these, these, and especially on the investor side as well, boy, we’re hearing a lot about that for investors are just see investors are really frustrated, because they’re seeing these cash offers for these investment properties that are so beyond what, you know, the numbers sort of pair out to be that, you know, it’s like they’re struggling, you know, traditional home buyers and sellers are homebuyers, rather, are also feeling that that competition, and it is tricky because as an agent, somebody wants to buy something, and they get into the mindset of I want to win this, this offer. I’m in love with this home. And now the bidding war starts and all of a sudden, there’s there’s sort of two major issues as you and I were speaking about before, which is number one, the most immediate one is making sure this appraises and is something that can actually close and we’re seeing I know, at my firm, we’re seeing this happen more and more than we’d like. It’s happening quite a bit. And you know, everyone gets disappointed when that doesn’t happen. Nobody wins. Really. And and then, you know, you were mentioning the more longer term challenge, which is let’s say it does appraise and then you know, what happens if the market turns next several years and all of a sudden, that that appraisal isn’t the reality anymore?

Chris Linsell 13:29
Yeah. And you know, I think I’m gonna I’m gonna amend a little bit of what you just said. You said, if the market turns it’s when it’s when the market turns, you know, like, and I’m not being you know, an alarmist about this, the real estate market, like all markets is cyclical, there is just no two ways about it. If you think that the real estate market I don’t mean us specifically, I just mean in general, if you think that the real estate market is just going to be a straight line up and to the right forever. I don’t know what planet you live on. But I would love to buy real estate now there because that’s that’s the only 100% investment that you’ll ever make. The fact is markets turn and I think you couldn’t throw a rock at a young professionals meeting and not hit somebody who doesn’t say the markets a little overheated right now that that home values are not necessarily lining up with home prices. And this is further reinforced by the significant appraisal gap occurrences that we’re seeing across the country especially in major markets. And so I mean just envision this guys when the market corrects when things start to cool back down. That buyer client that you helped, you know buy a house and wrote a successful offer 70 grand over asking price, if somehow this made it through appraisal Um, you know, if you think that the home is actually worth 500, but you got a got the home through at 570 when the market corrects, and all of a sudden this home was worth 470 or 440, you’ve got a client who is like a third of the way underwater at this point. And have you fulfilled your fiduciary responsibility to them? I would argue no. And I gotta be honest with you, there ain’t no way this person is going to be recommending you to their friends and neighbors, because you’re the person who got them into this mess in their mind. Is that true? No, but we know how our clients minds work. This is the consumer strategy, nobody blames. Nobody blames themselves for making the bad, bad purchase decision, they blame the store and the store. So there are some there are some things to think about here, guys. And I’m not saying don’t write the offers, I’m just saying be thoughtful about where things stand right now.

D.J. Paris 15:58
And also be thoughtful, it’s the same sort of conversation, I remember, in my real estate class, that that was that was the instructor brought up, which was around dual agency. And at the time, he said, you know, you may, in fact, have a dual agency scenario, where it all works out, but three years from now, if that person all of a sudden has a conversation with someone else and says, Oh, my agent, you know, represented both sides and in a dual agency position. And that person says, well, that’s not right. And then all of a sudden, the instructor says you could still be brought up on an ethics violation even years after. So it’s I don’t know that that writing offers, you know, above asking price necessarily puts you in a similar predicament, but it certainly has a fiduciary responsibility that each agent has to their client, it is something to really consider this is we live in a litigious world and you want to protect your license, you want to protect your, you know, your your brand, as well as you know, your pocketbook. And so sometimes it might make sense. And sometimes the hardest thing to say is oftentimes the most well received, because if you’re going to tell somebody, Hey, I think you’re making a mistake by offering X amount over. I think this isn’t going to be a good decision three years from now. Boy, I mean, I wish I had people in my life telling me things like that. So I think it sort of stinks short term for an agent to forego a particular transaction, because of course, that’s most likely how they’re getting paid. But to do that, to salvage a future relationship, or possibly even a, you know, a possible violation is probably worth thinking about.

Chris Linsell 17:44
Yeah, I completely agree. I completely agree. And, you know, I think, agents, let me just, I guess, reiterate the fact that I, I, it’s not that I don’t empathize with agents who are in a situation where they have to make a decision between recommending that you write an offer, which will, you know, get you paid and paid, you know, keep the lights on and pay the mortgage, and, you know, pay Zillow next month. It’s not that I don’t empathize with that I totally do. But I also would like to encourage folks to remember that if you are in a, I’m living transaction to transaction scenario, then real estate is not a career yet for you. This these are the these are the hallmarks of a job, or honestly more of a hobby. Because if you’ve made a career of this, your life you don’t you don’t live or die by a single transaction. And you know, if this becomes a pattern, like if it’s 610 15 transactions where this becomes the case, then yeah, this affects anybody. But I’m just encourage folks that if you’re living and dying by a single transaction, you have other things to be thinking about, too. There’s there’s business planning that you can do so that you protect yourself against that sort of volatility. Because ultimately, that’s what we’re dealing with. Right now. We’re dealing with some extreme market volatility right now, things are pushing really hard up into the right. But it’s not always going to be that way. So what are you, you know, what are you going to do today? in the best interest of your clients? That’s what you need to be asking yourself every single transaction.

D.J. Paris 19:23
And so I know you had some ideas for agents, because then I’m sure there’s many of our listeners who might be thinking, okay, great, well, easy to say, you know, tell the client not to write the offer, and I’ll just move on to the next customer, but maybe there isn’t a next customer, currently. And so I know you had a few ideas of ways that agents could still stay productive, active and possibly even earning additional streams of income. You know, so let’s talk about that.

Chris Linsell 19:52
Yeah, so two things one, and this is a little bit easier to do if you live in a major match politan area, but licensed real estate agents can get paid on leases and rentals, too. So, if the purchase market is overheated to the point where as a buyer’s agent, you can’t effectively service clients consider getting into the lease space. And I’ll say this for two reasons. One, the typical commission on a lease is one month’s rent. And so even though this isn’t a massive amount of money, leases take a significantly shorter amount of time to close. And so, in the process for getting approved for a lease is significantly easier than the process of getting approved for a mortgage. So you know, leasing agents in New York City, for instance, it is not uncommon for them to close three or four deals in a week. And that’s a pretty typical kind of workflow.

D.J. Paris 20:52
And, and a pretty great income stream,

Chris Linsell 20:54
and a pretty great income stream. Granted, if you’re living in a place where you’ve got three or four rental closings a week, your cost of living is probably pretty high. But you know, every market is a little bit different on that. So as an example, a place where this, this totally works, is in college towns. Think about places where you have high rental turnover, college towns are massive in their rental turnover, a professional real estate agent can make a nice living off of leases, in college towns, because the cost of living if you don’t go to school, there is pretty, pretty low. And the opportunity for rental turnaround is pretty high. So that’s the first thing I’d say. Consider how to stretch your real estate license in different directions and getting commissions on rentals is one of those.

D.J. Paris 21:45
And I want to give a quick quick suggestion for those who are listening and saying, you know, yeah, Chris, I guess it’s one month’s rent. However, if it’s on the MLS, I’m going to be sharing that with the listing agent. So really, now we’re down to half a month’s rent in most cases. And boy, that just isn’t isn’t a lot of money. And I will tell you what, what we do here in Chicago, which again, is a major, of course, metropolitan market. But I would almost bet, even if you’re in a very rural area that this could possibly work. So in Chicago, of course, we also have an MLS here and a lot of rentals are, you know, are posted there. And of course, those are listed by a listing agent who is going to likely take half a month’s rent as the commission and offer the same to the broker who brings the renter. So you might say okay, well, that’s my MLS doesn’t have a lot of rentals, or they’re just, you know, there isn’t a lot of money there. Well. So what we do here in Chicago, and this is something I think anyone could probably attempt and probably would have some degree of success is if you are in an area and the reality of it is when people come to work at our firm just just stood or diverge for a moment. They’ll ask about rentals. And we’ll say they’ll say, Well, there’s only about 7000 rentals on the MLS, and we say, Oh, we’ve got outside of that we’ve got about 15,000 rentals, not on the MLS in our database. How did we get that 15,000 And to Chris, to back to Chris’s point, those those are management companies that do not list their available apartments or homes for rent on the MLS. But they do work with realtors to get them rented. And they do offer as Chris said earlier, one month’s rent in almost every case. Now, here’s the question, how do you get access to this inventory? Well, I’ll tell you how we did it, which is shockingly simple and almost embarrassingly. So we’ve literally just started calling property management companies about 15 years ago. And we said, hey, we notice you have all these apartments. Do you ever pay a commission? If a broker if a realtor brings you a renter? That was literally what that conversation how it went? And some people said yes, others said no, the ones who said yes, we said, Great. Could you send us on a regular basis, your availability, we there here, we call them hot sheets, that could be called anything, but really just available units. And we get dozens of these property management firms who send us this inventory. Now, you could do the same thing. Here’s an easy way to find these apartments, go on to the apartment rental website, websites that your clients use, and look for some of these management companies and lob a call over to them and say, hey, if I work with renters all the time, they’re looking for places just like this, if I bring you a renter, and if they sign a lease, would you be willing to pay me a commission for that? And some will say yes, and some will say no, I will right now at least here in the Chicagoland area. Almost all of these property management companies are saying yes, we will pay you a commission because here in Chicago, the rental market is really stagnant. So this is I’m sorry, I’m going off on on a long tangent here. But this is a specific way all you have to do is start calling some of these companies and asking them if they’re willing to pay rental commissions. And you’ll probably find more often than not depends how desperate they are to get places rented out. But if it’s like, here it is in Chicago, if it’s if it’s like that in your current area, you’ll probably get a lot of yeses. And all of a sudden, now you have inventory that most other realtors aren’t paying attention to, because maybe they don’t know it exists, or it’s just not on their radar, it’s not really, you know, they’re checking the MLS exclusively, now you have additional inventory, and you can service those clients, and you’re not giving half of the commission away to the listing agent, because there isn’t one. And you know, a lot. So I just I know, I just said a lot there. But I just wanted to give you some tips about how we literally built this huge rental database, we literally just made a bunch of phone calls

Chris Linsell 25:35
100% 100%. And guys like the other thing to think about here, too, and honestly, this seems like it should be a no brainer. But put this into the into the calculus here is when you put a renter into a lease, most of the time, what you’re doing is you’re just extending out the life of this lead cycle by whatever their lease term is, if they’ve in a 12 month lease, you have a built in check in mechanism, and you know, to check in with them on a regular basis. And then when their lease is coming up on. On an expiration, you’re going to know this because you helped put them in there. And you can start the lead process with them right then and guess what this person is assured of your commitment to their financial and fiduciary well being, and this person is going to absolutely follow her advice. If you come to them and say you know what, it’s a great time to buy the market has cooled a little bit, money is still reasonably cheap. I think there are some options right now, that might be great for you, we should start testing these waters. And if you do that 60 or 90 days before the end of their lease, you can absolutely slam dunk this when you think about it, because you know what time, like you know exactly the day that they need to have occupancy and they need to make a decision. You You have now control over their timeline in a way that most real estate agents would literally salivate at. So take advantage of that, be thoughtful about that. Remember, you’re not giving up a commission, you’re just adding a lease Commission, or a potential lease commission, and then extending out the life and nurturing cycle of this particular lead.

D.J. Paris 27:34
100% could not agree more. It’s really it’s an interesting point about you know, their exact entry date and exit date or not even exit date, but the date they need to make another home living situation decision. And you can start to prime them along the along the way of their lease to say, Hey, what are your future plans? You know, I always heard and again, I’m not a boots on the ground realtor. So I don’t know. Exactly. You know, I can’t empathize as much with this expression, but I never liked it anyway, when you hear buyers are liars, right, we hear that a lot. And maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t. But I’d like to, I’d like to encourage all of our listeners and viewers to reframe that to say buyers are former renters, because almost everyone that buys unless they were very fortunate in life and just went straight into homeownership probably rented a place first. And they probably didn’t work with an agent either. So if you want to work with them, even if there isn’t a commission to work with them on the leasing side, and trust me, nobody should have to work for free. But as Chris said, this is a great opportunity to start the relationship now and then develop it over time, and then be that person’s guidance for when they do make that switch over to home ownership

Chris Linsell 28:49
100% 100%. I mean, if anybody is agents, if you’re listening to this, and you have a like a broker maybe chirping in your ear, or a managing broker, if you’re in Illinois, chirping in your ear to say, you know, real estate is easy, you just have to do X, Y, and Z and then you’re just gonna get checks for 1000s or 10s of 1000s of dollars. These people are probably not real estate agents, those people who are chirping in your ear like that, this this career requires a sustained attention to relationships. And there is no better way to build that relationship than by establishing trust in your clients the trust that they have in you that you’ve got their best interests at heart. The second best thing that you can do though, in addition to establishing that they you have their best interests at heart. The second best thing you can do is be proactive in your pursuit of that best interest for them. And one way that you can do that is if there is not listing inventory that satisfies their needs, go out and create it and I know this sounds kind of pie in the sky. But I’ll give you a specific example of something that we’re doing in my local market. For buyer’s agents who have clients that are not being serviced those buyer’s agents, a lot of them, some of whom I’m close with some of whom I’ve done some work for, are literally establishing what their buyer’s needs are. And establishing identifying neighborhoods are areas where those needs could be met. And literally prospecting each house in the neighborhood that meets those criteria and say, look, I’ve got a buyer, this is their budget, your house would be perfect, have you thought about selling. And one of the benefits here is you win on all fronts. The first front is your buyer client thinks you’re a hero, there, totally gonna write you a great review and refer all of their friends and family to you. The second thing is, when you find the right piece of property for that buyer, you get both sides of this commission, granted, you’re probably going to bargain that commission down a little bit, because you’ve got somebody who’s like, I didn’t even want to sell my house in the first place. Well, guess what, now you can do it for four and a half, or four and three quarters percent instead of 3%, you still get nearly double what you would get before, and everybody feels happy with this. And then the last thing here is you’re controlling effectively, a one party exclusive listing that nobody else has access to, you’re not bargaining and bidding against other people, you can create a price point that makes sense for you and your buyer. If the seller takes it great. If not, you’re out, you know, the day that it took to have that conversation. Other than that, you know, no harm, no foul, and you can keep moving on. This is the sort of strategy that is just necessary for success in an incredibly aggressive market. This isn’t going to be the way it is forever. But the people who are really eating at the table right now are the ones who can find the places they can be aggressive, and they’re pushing hard on those spouts. I was thinking

D.J. Paris 31:51
of my while you were speaking of that I was thinking of my parents and their home, which they’ll probably end up getting rid of, and in a few years as they sort of downsize and maybe even move out of their local area. And I was thinking, you know, I imagine that homeowners are always curious on what is my home actually worth? And most of the time, they probably don’t know the answer to that, because that’s just where they’re living. They’re not thinking of selling, they’re not thinking of moving. And they aren’t checking the Zillow Zestimate every couple of weeks, like Realtors do. And so they’re just kind of, it’s kind of out of sight out of mind. And somebody all of a sudden approaches them and says, Hey, you know, I have a client that is looking for a home just like this. I don’t know, if you’ve considered, you know, selling, but if so I’d really love to be able to show my client this property. You know, that is? I don’t know, I can’t imagine unless somebody is absolutely 100% Guaranteed to not want to move, I would be it’s kind of like the Hey, I’ve got this job offer for you. Would you be interested in hearing about it? You know, most people would go, yeah, go ahead. And I’m always interested, I like where I’m at. But you know, hey, if you’re going to offer me something crazy, I might just consider it. This is a good opportunity to get more creative that way. And so the question is like, Well, how do you do that? And that’s that was where the creativity comes in. Because, you know, obviously, with Christmas, I was mentioned, we were talking about this before we started recording, and I said, Oh, great. You could go door knock. And then I was like, then Kristen, well have COVID Oh, of course that that of course would would be would be possibly challenging. But that is one option. You can also you know, try making some phone calls. You know, there are plenty of places that are happy to sell you this information. So you can get in touch with some of these, these homeowners and you know, that are scrubbed from the do not call so you’re not doing anything that violates the can spam acts or FTC regulations. But you can make some of these calls. And you might find, I mean, gosh, I owned I owned a condo for 15 years. Nobody ever once called me and said that. But I would have taken the call and I’d ever came in.

Chris Linsell 33:53
Well, you know, I’m I want to, I want to give away something here because I usually this is a strategy I’ve been kind of saving up but you know what I’m feeling it’s Monday, it’s the first Monday of May, it’s a given day here. I want to just kind of let out into the open here. This the true gangster strategy here. So here’s what you do if you’re struggling with this agents is what you do you go in your local market like DJ set, you call up these rental places that are offering rentals, you find out if they will offer a commission. If you bring a renter who will sign a lease, find out what the what the lease amount is on that. Let’s just say hypothetically, let’s say it’s $2,000 a month is the lease price. Then you go to places that have really desirable homes. And based on tax records, you look up what the mortgage amount is and you estimate what their mortgage amount, what their mortgage payment is. And you’re looking for anybody who’s got a mortgage payment of more than $2,000. Let’s just say they got a mortgage payment of $2,500. You have now got a cohort of homeowners who are paying $2,500 a month, they could be paying 2000 a month if they leased in this really nice spot that you found. So you cold call these folks or you reach out to them via prospecting any any means that you’ve that you’re comfortable with. And you say, Look, right now your home was worth a ton of money, we could cash you out of your home, you’d make a big profit, because prices are so high. I’ve got this lease over here, it’s a really nice place, lease here for 12 or 24 months, save $500 a month, bank all of your profits from the sale of your home. And when your lease is up in 18 months or 24 months, and the market has cooled back down. You can take your proceeds and turn around and buy again, it really is the it’s the situation where you can have them sell high, and then buy low and lease in between and you collect 123 Commission’s

D.J. Paris 35:58
wow, I was I was not expecting that. And that is an amazing, amazing strategy, a tough a tough thing to actually get somebody to do but maybe even getting them to do it isn’t necessarily the point. The point is you have now brought a solution to somebody who wasn’t looking for one, whether they take it or not, you have now established yourself as a trusted or at least maybe not necessarily trusted, but somebody who’s got knowledge. And all of a sudden you become that person’s you know person and you become somebody that they may go to for future decisions. So whether or not you can convince somebody to switch from being a homeowner to a renter, which is absolutely makes all the sense in the world right now. But again, a tough thing to actually execute you at least start that conversation. And that’s probably a conversation that nobody else is having with them. So that is a brilliant strategy.

Chris Linsell 36:51
Well, you know, that’s that’s the thing is if you can get it to work, dream come true three Commission’s you’re in great shape. But if it doesn’t happen, like you said, you have initiated relationships with a leasing company, you’ve initiated relationships with a home seller or with a home owner. And you likely have relationships with buyers who would be interested in making a purchase on that person’s home. So if the whole thing works out, great. You’ve got Commission’s coming in, left and right. If it doesn’t work out in that dream scenario, then you have all these other parties that you can continue to work to connect the dots with. Oh, perfect.

D.J. Paris 37:28
Well, what a great place to wrap up I, I say this probably every month. But I love speaking with Chris, because not only is he incredibly knowledgeable about the industry, and he keeps abreast of trends and news. And he writes, and he coaches but he also is a very tactical, not just strategic. He’s very tactical, sort of coach, because he actually is out there doing some of these things. And all every time we have him on he’s always giving great tactical advice. So please re listen to this episode, if not everything if things went by too quickly, because, boy, this I we’ve been doing. I’ve been doing this for four or five years now. And this was about as chock full of tips and advices as we’ve ever done with an episode. So, Chris, on behalf of the listeners and the viewers, we want to thank you for sharing that great last gangster tip. But all of the other tips that came along in this hour. And on behalf of Chris and myself, we want to thank all of our listeners and viewers, and we want to encourage everyone please go visit the clothes.com it is I and I say this not just because Chris is generous enough to be on our show every month. But it really is my favorite website to learn about what realtors can do. It’s what I send every article to our Realtors we have 700 summit at our firm and they all get these articles, because every article they write is just chock full of great information. And it’s not just five things realtors can do to grow their business and it’s five big tips that anyone could have written and doesn’t really help. These are really in depth long form articles. They also have a subscription model so that 99% of what’s on there is free but they have a subscription model which also Chris can you talk about what the close pros

Chris Linsell 39:11
Yeah, close pros fantastic option for agents who are looking to grow their pool of professional resources, like you said 99% of what is on the close is totally free. Just come read get better. That’s that’s all I tell people. If you want to level up here, we do offer the close pro it’s 35 bucks a month. Or you can get down to 25 bucks a month if you want to go with the annual package. And essentially the close Pro offers you weekly small group coaching. We run a ton of really great masterminds with me, and with other absolute banger real estate professionals in the industry. We have a huge resource library that includes massive strategy guides on everything from farming to CMAs to Have you know literally dozens I probably actually hundreds now that I think about of templates and scripts and and resources for texting, email and phone calling door knocking and literally anything you can think of. And then I also get access to these crazy courses to like the close road has a great course called six simple systems to transform your real estate business. We’ve got one called How to survive and thrive in any market. I mean, just the list goes on and on and we’re adding to it every single week. So come check out the close if you haven’t read it yet. If you love what we’re doing there which we’re sure that you will consider the close pro 35 bucks a month gets you signed up you can give it a try. See what you think $35 You know, that’s it like that’s less than pizza night at my house. So for less than that. You know, come Come see if it’s worth it to you. If it is we’d love to have you and I can’t wait to interact with it because I interact with all of our close pro members on a regular basis. So come on, get in the pool, the water is warm.

D.J. Paris 40:57
Love it. All right. Well Chris, we will see you next month and again to all our listeners and viewers. Thank you so much for continuing to support our show support our guests go to the close.com read subscribe to not only their their newsletter, but also the close pro see if it works for you. And we will see everybody on the next episode. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Linsell 41:17
My pleasure. Can’t wait and see you soon.