How to Train Your Real Estate Agent to Post Property (LA 1743)
How to Train Your Real Estate Agent to Post Property (LA 1743)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Steven, Jill here.
Jill K DeWit:
Hi.
Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to The Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill K DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the Valley of the Sun.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about how to train your real estate agent to post property. What?
Jill K DeWit:
You know, what’s funny? Why do they change too? Have you ever had a, here’s what happens to me? I go on the internet. I’m looking in areas to find good agents that are clearly selling property similar to mine. I can look at their postings. I can look at the closed transactions. I can see what they’ve done. I see good descriptions. I see good photos. I’m like, great. That’s a person that I want. And they start off well. This is a normal how it goes. So I start off great, and then somewhere around deal number three, number four, when I stop looking at their postings, they get crappy.
Steven Jack Butala:
Just like a marriage.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh, why do you do that? I think …
Steven Jack Butala:
Why do real estate agents consistently do a worse job over a better job? I don’t get it, but there’s very few exceptions.
Jill K DeWit:
I got to tell you, truth time here. Today’s not the right day to be bringing up marriage stuff like that. It’s really going to come back to bite you right now.
Steven Jack Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question, a hint taken by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free. Did you know that Jill and I personally instruct a handful of new and existing Land Academy members in a live class call career path, usually between 10 and 20 people? If you’re buying and selling land and it’s your career, or you want it to be, career path might be for you. Call this number (833) 522-5545, or email us as always at support@landacademy to see if this level of involvement is for you.
Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. I want to talk about that for just a second, can we?
Steven Jack Butala:
Sure, sure.
Jill K DeWit:
Because this is wait, this is Monday and it starts on Saturday. This is the first time we’ve ever done a Saturday session, and I’m already telling everyone, this is the last Saturday session. There were a lot of people that wanted it. I moved it from Wednesdays to Saturdays and I thought there were more people that were going to jump on the Saturday schedule. And I think there’s some people that don’t realize it’s a Saturday schedule too. So if you have some time commitments, you need a Saturday and you think you’re going to hold out for me to do another Saturday, you might be holding out for a while. That’s kind of the point I want to get across.
Steven Jack Butala:
So you think that Saturday is harder for people to ice out then Wednesday?
Jill K DeWit:
For some reason, I think.
Steven Jack Butala:
Because it would be for me. It is for us.
Jill K DeWit:
Isn’t that kind of funny? I think people would rather skip work. I’m not kidding. And ditch work for five or so hours every Saturday or, excuse me, every Wednesday then they do on Saturdays.
Steven Jack Butala:
So let’s be super clear, because we’re throwing all these days of the week out. It’s on Saturday.
Jill K DeWit:
It’s on Saturday this time. So it starts April 23rd and it goes for 10 weeks on Saturday. So we had a number of people that asked for Saturday because of their commitments. So we said, okay, we’ll do one as a test and we will continue this as a test. And I know the people that jumped on right now, because they jumped on the very first day. They’re like, “We need this Saturday. Thank you for doing this. We’ve been waiting for it.” So if that’s you, this is it. This is a time. This is career path for Saturdays only, and we are happy to help you. Thank you very much. And how do you learn about this too, by the way? Just go to landacademy.com/careerpath.
Steven Jack Butala:
Look, we’re not in the habit of plugging stuff. This is not a commercial of a career path, but I will tell you we just get glaring reviews and really positive feedback from people that have been through the program and are off on their way to buying and selling land full-time really successfully, so person after person after person, this is the truth, have said to us, “I’ve done other seminars. I’ve gone to other. This is really different.”
Jill K DeWit:
It is. Well, it’s us, so we want to really talk to you guys. Well, that’s what you get is 100% hundred percent us the whole time.
Steven Jack Butala:
We don’t have another hired instructor.
Jill K DeWit:
There’s no fill in. There’s no teachers aid.
Steven Jack Butala:
I really enjoy it, honestly. I mean, I enjoy it enough to give up my Saturday for the next 10 weeks.
Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. Me too, because we really are here to help. Okay. Back to the question. Amy wrote, “Has anyone had a call from an agent wanting to represent the seller? I explained that we,” okay, I got it. I had to think about the situation here. “I explained that we purchased land directly from the owner and then I utilize them sometimes on the sell side. He proceeded to tell me that we would need to claim the transaction as a licensed agent.”
Jill K DeWit:
Okay. Can I answer this?
Steven Jack Butala:
Sure, sure.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay. That’s not true, obviously. So here’s a deal. It sounds to me like seller got our letter and then calls agent and said, “Hey, these people want to buy my property. Will you help,” and that’s where the agent probably said, “Sure, I’ll represent you and put myself in the middle and take a commission and sell this property,” which is funny because that person’s getting commission for doing nothing because we already have a buyer and a seller. Usually agents are there to find a seller or find a buyer, I mean, but it’s not really needed in this point. So yeah, that’s not true. They’re just inserting themselves and it’s up to you to decide, how bad do you want the deal? Because now that person put there in there and the owner doesn’t know any better and that’s not their fault. So is it good enough a deal to pay them the three percent commission? It might be, or it might not be. You can just say, “Well, all right. I wish you all the best,” and move on.
Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s take a few steps back. You do not need a real estate agent to complete a real estate deal. This is a massive misconception. The National Association of Realtors is one of the top five largest, most donatee special interest groups in Washington, DC, top five in the last 25 years. And so you don’t need a real estate agent to complete a transaction. You don’t need a real estate license. Jill and I do not have real estate licenses. You don’t need a license to complete a real estate transaction for the same reason it’s very similar to you don’t need to buy a car from a dealer.
Jill K DeWit:
You can buy it off Craigslist.
Steven Jack Butala:
You can buy off Craigslist, do the paperwork yourself, get your tags yourself and [crosstalk 00:06:42] transfer and the whole thing
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, I bought this.
Steven Jack Butala:
Is it more time consuming? Heck yes. Is it more difficult and less convenient? Heck yes, but those are the facts. So let’s start right there. There’s a huge misconception largely because of these special interest groups that have changed, especially this generation’s, perception of whether or not you need a real estate agent. So you don’t, so please retain that. And a lot of deals that we, almost all the transactions that we buy, probably all of them, no, all of them, we do not buy with the involvement of a real estate agent.
Jill K DeWit:
Correct.
Steven Jack Butala:
Almost all of them we sell with an agent because there’s enough profit margin to justify the use of that person, and we get to choose them. In this case, the tragedy in this question is the seller chose a real estate agent and you didn’t.
Jill K DeWit:
Right. They didn’t know.
Steven Jack Butala:
And God knows what the quality of that real estate agent is.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. It’s funny. There’s a whole discussion I was reading the other day in Discord within the Land Academy community about a guy in Florida who is also from a career path person, by the way. He was just saying someone said, “Do I have to do this, this and this?” He’s like, “Oh gosh, no.” He’s like, “Look, I’m a licensed agent. It’s not that big of a deal for me to disclose it.” And someone said, “Does it make any difference?” He’s like, “Oh, heck no, it doesn’t.” He’s like, “The only reason I have it kind of active, it’s kind of not, I don’t use it really, but I can get some extra stuff on the MLS here in my state and that’s what makes it great for me.”
Steven Jack Butala:
That question’s coming up later this week.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. Oh, good. Cool. You saw that too.
Steven Jack Butala:
How to train your real estate agent to post property. This is the meat of the show.
Jill K DeWit:
So like Steven was just pointing out. Excuse me, Jack was pointing out, the deals that we’re doing nowadays are worthy of me bringing in an agent to sell it for me. So that’s what the whole point of this is. What the heck am I talking about, jill and Jack? I thought you guys hated agents. I know, back in the day we did and you know why? Well, one, the person here inserted themselves when they’re not really needed. This person just got one phone call. They’re like, “Yippe kiyay, I’m getting commission for doing nothing. I get to be the middle man and I did nothing. I didn’t have to post a property, take pictures, find a buyer, talk to the buyer, negotiate the deal, nothing. This lovely seller called me and said, will you help close this transaction with me and this buyer?” That’s not the right thing.
Jill K DeWit:
So anyway, but the point is, we don’t use them on the buy side, like Jack said, but nowadays with so many of the transactions that we’re doing, not all, but gosh, close to all, they are worthy of higher dollar amounts and it just makes sense to us. I could build my own sales team back up. I have been my own sales team. I could crank this up like nobody’s business, but I like to do this per … And then I have a staff, I’ve got to pay them. I like having per transaction, and I have transactions all over the country that I just seek out really good agents that are now land focused. And there’s more of them too, by the way, it’s changed, that do a really good job. I happily pay them commission and they get the photos and they write the listing and they do all the work and they sell the property. The point of today’s episode is sometimes their postings go stale. Sometimes they don’t do a good job. And it’s about how to train them.
Steven Jack Butala:
Nowhere in any stretch of this concept, do real estate agents, are they trained to market anything in marketing? When a real estate agent goes to school, they take a certain number of hours in a certified course, and the course is entirely and completely customized toward helping them pass the exam. And so whatever questions are on the exam or work on the exam in the past, that’s all they teach. This is going to be on the exam, rememorize this. There’s a fee simple bundle of rights, all stuff that doesn’t matter.
Jill K DeWit:
The different kinds of back steps.
Steven Jack Butala:
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t. I mean, some of it matters, and then they pass a test and then they stand there and say, “What do I do next?” So they don’t understand marketing and they don’t have a flair for it and they’re not required to understand it. And the vast majority of the times, I would say extremely extreme majority, 99%, their designated broker doesn’t know how to market property, especially in a market like this. The reason we’re doing this show right now is because we’re in a market where you post property and it sells. We’re in the hottest market I’ve ever experienced in my entire career. We are buying property, Jill and I, sometimes at 70 to 90% of its actual retail value and then selling it for retail value five days later. So all that fosters massive amount of apathy and laziness on the part of an already inept real estate agent or in a real estate agent concept.
Steven Jack Butala:
So it’s as bad as I’ve ever seen it with real estate agents and they do not know how to post land. And if you want to blow some time this weekend or tonight after work, go on to the MLS, like Realtor.com or Zillow. Realtor’s a good one actually. And look through the quality of the postings for land in your area and you will chuckle. I’ve seen postings out there that have two pictures, they’re Google Earth pictures and maybe two sentences that describe the property with a lot of exclamation points and it’s under contract. So the problem is that they’re getting away with terrible, terrible marketing tactics. It’s really too bad.
Jill K DeWit:
Sad. What’s really sad is, number one, well, sometimes it doesn’t sell because that’s what I’m running up against. It’s taking a long time to sell, because you can tell a good posting and a crappy posting, night and day. There’s one picture or there’s 10 pictures and a drone video. Hello? What do you think? There’s three sentences or there’s a paragraph about how great the area is.
Steven Jack Butala:
Well, four paragraphs.
Jill K DeWit:
And what the property’s already been done to the property. Maybe information about a well, and what’s going on in the area and growth and things coming. Those are all good things to have in a posting. And this is the stuff you need to unfortunately train these people on. We had a funny, one of the things you may or may not know Lori Phillips, we’ve done a couple podcasts with her and she’s in our community and helps us out with other things too, so Lori’s awesome. She said, “I can’t believe I just spent,” there was one time, a couple weeks ago or months ago, she said, “I had to spend an hour or two teaching this agent how to get a Facebook account and post property there. They didn’t even know how to do that. They’re missing the boat.”
Steven Jack Butala:
She has a lot more patience than I do.
Jill K DeWit:
I know. So this is the stuff that we’re trying to make you aware of and let you know that it’s not you, you’re not nuts, and sometimes you really have to help them. I even have an agent right now where we extended the listing, and I said, “By the way, I had to do my own Google search. This property’s marked incorrectly. It’s not showing up in the right feed. You need to fix this. You need to add more.” The address that she put in there dropped it, because it doesn’t have an address obviously, right, because it’s got an APN, but you can get pretty specific to an area with even putting a zero and a street name and things like that. She had it wrong and it was putting the pin way outside this area of this property in Idaho and it’s a great property. And she’s like, “Oh, sorry.” I had to alert her of that, but she got it.
Steven Jack Butala:
Later this week on Jack Thursday, I’m going to talk a little bit about this, but it’s worth bringing up now. You either take some pride into what you do or how you walk around this planet. You’re either proud about stuff or you’re not. And real estate agents are, you don’t have to have a high school diploma to be a real estate agent.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s true. I hadn’t thought about that.
Steven Jack Butala:
And so the most of the real estate agents are very, very, that I’ve ever met, very proud of how they look and that’s it.
Jill K DeWit:
Well, this has changed.
Steven Jack Butala:
Or what they drive. No, there’s a few. I’m not.
Jill K DeWit:
I mean, not all of them.
Steven Jack Butala:
Let me preface it. We’re almost done here.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay.
Steven Jack Butala:
There’s a few that are great.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, we have some great ones.
Steven Jack Butala:
We have some great real estate agents that we work with, but the ones, the vast majority and the norm is just this apathetic approach to it. Yeah. I mean I’m owed this money anyway and it doesn’t matter how good of a job I do to representing anyone. I’m proud of myself and my clothes, but the quality of posting has no real reflection on me, which couldn’t be more opposite.
Jill K DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). They should take pride. Here’s the end for me. The big picture is the better the posting, the better the offer price, the more commission they get. So it really does behoove them to make these spectacular.
Steven Jack Butala:
So the title of this topic is how do you train them to do this, and here’s my answer. If you have to train your real estate agent to market and do some type of presentation for real estate, you’ve just got the wrong real estate agent. They should already, and it’s real clear to see that, Jill brought up. Jill brought it up at the beginning of the episode. You can see their other postings, and if they don’t know how to do it, they should hire somebody. It doesn’t cost that much. Just like everything right now, I just outsource somebody who’s great at doing graphics and the four or five pieces it takes to do a great land listing.
Jill K DeWit:
I won’t call them.
Steven Jack Butala:
And sub them out.
Jill K DeWit:
By the way, if they don’t have a good posting, then that’s not their thing, they’re not even on my short list.
Steven Jack Butala:
So training a real estate agent is probably not, and the vast majority of the time is just find another one.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, fine. Pick the right one. Interview them. You can tweak them and that’s it. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here on The Land Academy Show.
Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on The Land Academy Show is called, why not to accept a low ball offer too soon. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. It’s tough not to do an episode or the show about real estate agents and I always sound insensitive.
Jill K DeWit:
You do still pick on them a little bit. I don’t know why. I think, come on. Well, you know what? You should work with my team, because the majority of mine are good. They’re responsive. They take my critiques and some of them ask for it, which is really nice. They’re like, “Here’s a link to the posting. Tell me what you think.”
Steven Jack Butala:
You know where all this venom comes from? We spend, Jill and I spend, it has to do all Land Academy members or anybody who’s a serious land investor or land flipper. A lot of time on data, on education, money on education, getting mail out correctly, pricing, property hours and hours and hours perfecting the systems that are surround all this stuff, we get the right people to answer our phone. We take on partners who are extraordinary, like Jill, at the stuff that maybe we’re not good at, and then we buy it cheap, because we know what we’re doing. So there’s this huge thing that goes on that I’m proud of, and then you turn it over to somebody who lies and doesn’t tell the truth, and it’s like the ball’s on the five yard line. I see this up. If property couldn’t be priced better, and then you slap a couple of copy and pasted description paragraphs or sentences for description and a couple of Google Earth shots and post it.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s not going to work.
Steven Jack Butala:
It doesn’t compliment, doesn’t complete what I’m trying to complete.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s what you’re trying to say. Yeah. We get stuff, because we work so hard to get great property price and it does break my heart when it’s not properly conveyed. That’s the point. Thanks for tuning in. Hey, by the way, don’t forget. We recently released our newest and latest up to date product. It’s education product. It’s Land Academy 3.0 or Catching Up With Land Academy. For more information, check out landacademy.com. We are Jack and Jill.
Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill. Let’s try it again.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay. We are Jack and Jill. And inspiration.
Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
If you enjoyed the podcast, please review it in Apple Podcasts . Reviews are incredibly important for rankings on Apple Podcasts. My staff and I read each and every one.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me directly at steven@BuWit.com.
The BuWit Family of Companies include:
I would like to think it’s entertaining and informative and in the end profitable.
And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.
