Ep #116: How to Be "The Digital Mayor" and Sell a Home Every Week

In today's highly competitive mortgage industry, building profitable relationships with the real estate agents is essential for success. However, finding effective ways to secure agent relationships can be a challenge. With so many mortgage loan originators vying for the attention of real estate agents, it can be difficult to stand out and establish meaningful connections. Our new case study featuring loan officer Chris Cogill is a must-read. Chris has closed a remarkable 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals. And in this case study, he shares his proven strategies for building strong relationships with real estate agents and leveraging those relationships to drive more business. To get your hands on this resource, head over to LOKestudy.com and download your free copy of the case study today. You'll find actionable insights and practical tips that Chris used to close 36 million in funded loans from agent referrals and how you can too. Don't miss out. Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Mortgage Marketing Radio Brought to you by the Mortgage Marketing Institute. Your number one source for truth in mortgage marketing. Hey, everybody, Jeff Simphor welcome to this episode of Mortgage Marketing Radio. I am your chief truth teller. If you're here for the first time, thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you've been here for a while, hey, welcome back, thanks for being here. If you haven't yet taken a moment to leave us a review, that would be incredibly helpful. It's a way for you to perhaps give back to us as we give to you leaving reviews helps us come up in the search rankings and simply reach more people and help make a difference in their lives. And that's what this podcast is all about. So I really appreciate if you leave a review and if you do, I'm going to bring something back. I'm going to restart something that I used to do in the past and that is leave a review and then go to the Facebook page for the mortgage marketing radio group on Facebook and just tag me in there and let me know that you did leave a review. You can even leave the review on the Facebook page itself, if you'd like. And for doing so, I'm going to send you a free t-shirt and I only got two sizes, large and extra large. So if you guys are mediums or smaller, sorry, you're going to have to bulk up and grow into it. Put these shirts at one time, they were so hot. I couldn't keep them in the shelves, they're nice and soft and caught me and high quality. I don't skip on anything around here, only the best for my listeners. So that's how you get your free t-shirt. Leave me a review. Let me know that you did. Tag me, email me, message me on Facebook and we'll get you a mortgage marketing radio t-shirt. And the only thing I ask is that when you wear your swag, tag me with the swag. Do a swag tag out there on the socials, whether it's Instagram or wherever, you can do hashtag, wherever, depending on the channel you're on, for Instagram, it's at mortgage marketing, Facebook, whatever you know what to do, swag tag. That's what it's all about. Okay, so secondly, this episode is brought to you once again by the mortgage marketing.pro membership. And if you're looking to take your business to the next level, you're looking to get more success with real estate agents, you're looking to build your personal brand online, perhaps get started with video marketing, Facebook ads or the like. That's what we do for the community of mortgage loan originators at the mortgage marketing.pro membership. I put up an eight minute video, goes through everything. You can simply go over to mortgagemarketing.pro and check it out. Okay, and of course, if you haven't yet checked out our friends over at the industry syndicate, do so because they are real estate's first media network. It's kind of like the Netflix for real estate, right? You're looking for more good shows, well guess what, that's where to find it. syndicate.com, Google and looking up good peeps over there, good shows, good content. Okay, let's get into my very special guest for this week's episode of mortgage marketing radio. I'm diversifying a little bit. Some of you have told me you do want to hear more real estate agents on the podcast for a variety of reasons. And today, my special guest is Alex Wang, Alex is a superstar rock star media celebrity. If you will, he wouldn't probably tell himself that, but I am. He's really taken, taken to, you know, got a grasp of this whole become the digital mayor, you know, to use Gary Vaynerchuk's term there as a matter of fact, he got that idea from sitting in one of the Asian 2021 conferences and where Gary talked about becoming your digital mayor and producing content. And immediately after that, Alex hired his own videographer, like his own D-Rock and had him follow him around documenting a day in the life, creating content. And now he's got his own YouTube channel with tons of videos, thousands of views. He's built an incredible personal brand and a very competitive market up in Silicon Valley, Palo, Alta, area. And in 2018, his personal branding, his content strategy paid off in a super competitive market. 56 transactions for about 80 million bucks. So basically, he sells about a home a week, home a week, hey guys, that's pretty damn good, right? So Alex, what we do is we kind of unpack what caught my attention originally about Alex is that, first of all, he's an advocate for the real estate business. This would be an interview you want to share with your real estate agents, right? Because Alex is the real estate evangelist and he's got a great perspective on success as a real estate agent, what it takes truthfully, right? We tell the truth here on the Mortgage Marketing Radio podcast, Alex is telling the truth as well. So we're going to unpack this discussion. We're going to jump into things that, like, personal branding, more about his becoming a digital mayor concept. What should agents be talking about? That's originally how he got on my radar. I saw him talking about that. I'm like, Alex, would you come on the podcast and share what you think agents should be talking about, which is helping you. As a matter of fact, he told me 50% of his 52 transactions, 50% of 80 million dollars, all came online from people finding him searching, googling, finding him on yellow, looking at reviews, all came from online. So we have a nice frank discussion about, right, agents and lenders who have told me, hey, I've been in this business for 15 years. I'm not on Facebook. Why do I need to be online on social media? We're going to answer that question in this conversation. We're going to talk about ranking and Google and locals, and we have a nice frank discussion as well around Zellos and I, there's the future of real estate agents and lenders. And it's a great nice frank conversation. I do you to listen and share this interview with your real estate agents. So without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Alex, welcome to the show. Hey, Jeff. Thanks for having me. You bet, man. You know what's interesting? I'm bringing more and more real estate agents on to this show. It's largely been focused on the mortgage, you know, long officer mortgage community. But what I'm finding is that it's useful to have relevant conversations with real estate agents who are doing some pretty cool things out there like you are. So that's why I wanted to have you on today. So for those listening, give us a brief background on Alex, where are you at? How long have you been in real estate and what do you love about it? Yeah, so I'm at real estate agent here in one of the fastest markets in the world, Silicon Valley. I've been selling real estate for 17 years than everything from being independent agents to joining a team to having a small broker owner of a small boutique firm to having acquired by a larger company to be an leadership team and out running my own team. And so I've done all, I would say not all of it, but I've done a lot of it. And yeah, just love the real estate agent business because it's just a really, really amazing business. You can have 10 successful agents doing it, 10 different and completely different ways and being successful. Yeah, that's interesting. So I want to come back to that actually because there is not, you know, it talks about how you have to be everywhere on social media or you've got to be doing this or that. And I love that we'll come back to that in just a second. Okay. So I'm going to make a note on this here. Let's open it up from from this standpoint. Well real quickly, right? People are always curious. The numbers transactions in 2018. Well, I think like 56 transactions, that's all about a homo week and average volume. I waver in the past couple of years, but anywhere from 80 to 125 million. Awesome. Yeah. And that's a tough market up there. Isn't it competitive? It is extremely competitive. I mean, just when you have everything moving so quickly, and obviously, you know, we have high, very high price points, thankfully, right, that, you know, it does get very, very competitive. Yeah. So you came across my radar originally, I believe it was an interview that I, or a clip I saw of you in a video and what you were talking about is what agents should be talking about. And correct me or maybe guide me a little bit on the context. I assume what you meant by that was in their branding, in their, you know, if they're showing up online and social media, is that what you meant by, you know, what agents should be talking about? Yeah. I think, well, when the things about being out there, being in front of people is, what are you going to talk about? And I think agents have to have their own, understand their own value and then be able to how to promote that to others and explain and not try to pretend they know something that they're not talking about. Or if they're trying to just act as if or try to fake it, I think that, um, that authenticity when you go online and share is super important. And so that, yeah, that's where I was referring to. Do you think they should be talking about, um, do you think they should talk about real stuff? I think it should be a part of it, but I don't think it should be every single week, every single post should be, hey, look at my new listing here. Check out my new Lamborghini, you know, that kind of stuff. Um, I was really disenchanted. I was part of a reality TV show. And um, they came up, crew came up, I said, wow, I'm going to be on TV. I'm so, I was so excited. Who said, make sure you come to the first few day and bring seven changes of clothing. The seven changes of clothing, what do you mean by that? And apparently they shoot the seven days all in one day. And so, so then I take out my, my, my change clothes and shoot again. And then basically looks like it spans the whole seven days. And all of us completely fake. And I just, I was disenchanted. I said, you know, I really want to be able to share it with people what it is. Truly be a roasted agent. I mean, there's so much behind the scenes that people don't know about. And it's not an easy business. I mean, it's simple. It's just not easy. Yeah. And so that's a great transition actually into the other thing I noticed. You're doing on your YouTube channel and stuff. And by the way, we'll put links to everybody listening. If you want to go check out everything we talk about, there will be links in the show notes. But uh, speaking of that, like a day in the life of a real estate agent, you started documenting that. And if I recall was, was the whole Gary V thing, right, document, uh, your inspiration for that? Absolutely. I mean, I started following his, uh, content reading his books, probably 2014 and 15, uh, and then heard him speak at Iman, uh, at, uh, sat in the front row. And so I think it's gosh, this guy really knows what he's talking about. And I can really see the trend towards that direction. And so I ended up hiring a, uh, the DRock or, you know, a videographer to follow me around for a year. And, you know, we're, we're still editing and, you know, putting that content together as we speak. And I'm looking at, oh, really putting it together as we speak. How long have you been working with the videographer? Uh, it's probably about a year and a half. Uh, but, you know, you've taken up so much of a, a bank of content. If he's recording 24 or seven, why don't you 24 or seven, but at least see the 40, 50 hours a week. Uh, that's a lot of sticking with you. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of content to go through. That's the, and I'm looking at, so are you putting that on your YouTube channel? Is that where that goes? YouTube channel, we're cutting up the pieces of micro content on LinkedIn, on Facebook. Um, yeah, those are primarily the main channels. And we're trying to develop an Instagram, um, platform. We're on the Instagram platform, but uh, it hasn't, we haven't launched it yet. And, and what's your intent in doing that as it relates to you and your real estate business? Yeah, so three different audiences. Uh, one obviously is my traditional Alex Wayne group. Is that's my sales team. And so that's just really bringing awareness to people locally in my area where I buy and sell. Uh, second one is mainly the, my own personal brand as it's involved to become the real estate evangelist. I'm big, big, big, uh, promoter on how, how much of a, how honorable a profession this is. And so I want to teach others as well, what I've learned. And, um, and then lastly, I'm working on a, uh, systems, uh, virtual assistance support for real estate agents to stop the crazy real estate agent assistance cycle. Explain what you mean by that. So basically what it happens typically is a real estate agent starts off. If you don't have an assistant, you are the assistant. And so they spend their time, you know, you know, pushing paperwork or doing whatever. Finally, they get to the point where they're selling some real estate. They need to hire an assistant. Yeah, but they're too busy and real estate agents aren't trained to hire and fire and manage agents. They're trained to, you know, we're trained to build relationships and negotiate. And so they, they picked the closest person that can fog a mirror that's next to them or, you know, a junior agent. And that works out for maybe maybe maybe six months, seven months. And then what happens? That person that assistant either, you know, decides to move out of the area or even better yet looks at the agent, go, wow, real estate is really easy. I'm going to do that too. And then, uh, become your competition. And then you got to train and fire and hire again. And so, you know, my goal is to be able to help support agents to try to help them to kind of break that cycle. How many assistants do you have or how many people support you? I have five assistants right now. Wow. Are they some of them virtual or one virtual, but one local and one remote, but still in the US. And they have different roles, obviously. Yeah, and I consider my team members on my team as assistants as well. Just like I am, I'm their assistant sometimes as well. Everybody's all in together, right? That's right. One big happy family. Right. So what's been the impact for you and your business, right? In terms of generating listings, buyers, whatever. When you started documenting, you know, a day in the life and putting it out there. Yeah, it was interesting because I can't really say that I got three more listings or X amount listings, X amount of dollar revenue from, you know, getting my personal brand out there. I can say that definitely it did help with awareness. And you think that agents typically do farming, right? And then they, I don't know if mortgage professionals do, but at least for agents, we farm a certain neighborhood where we carve out that area territory. Say, hey, that is our area. And then every month or even twice a month, we send stuff to them showing that we're the best. And that's typically traditionally what what farming is. I thought I would just take farming to the online. And it helps. I mean, I walk through school, my kids school, and people go, oh, I just saw your new video. Or I get a couple of engagement in LinkedIn. I had a client just yesterday reach out to me. I sold them a townhouse about seven years ago. Haven't been in touch with them at all. I mean, I've sent them invites to my client. I appreciate appreciation parties and stuff, but they've never attended. And then Facebook messages me and says, hey, Alex, I'm looking to sell my house. Can you come by this weekend? And so I don't think it would have been that easy if I wasn't out there on social media. Well, the point of farming is to really stay top of mind. So when that person's ready, you get picked, right? Yeah, exactly. So I think social media is just the same thing. Yeah, yeah. It's just a different medium for that. And the other thing about social media, you know, I hate the question of like, you know, what's the ROI of social media? And I'm sure you heard Gary's response to that, right? The ROI of your mother. Love that. Yeah, it's not like there's a direct line, but there's a dotted line. And I'll give you another example. So I was curious if this happened for you. Somebody else who I interviewed, she'll be on the podcast, released soon, Karen Carr. She's got a big YouTube channel. You guys have a similar follower base. But she gets an average of five organic calls, literally people calling her most of the time, from consuming her YouTube content. Just saying, hey, we've watched your videos. We're ready to buy. Have you had something bubbling up for you? Well, that's amazing. That's amazing. I think I found that YouTube is such a broad audience. I'm not sure what market she's in. Maybe she's specifically hyper-local in her content. Yeah, I've thought about that. And that could be that's definitely on the on the what love to do project list. It'd be specific to my area location. Just be that digital mayor like we've learned in an area. But it is a lot of work. I work on doing a local series. And by the time I was able to finish producing for one of the local bars that I shot a video for, the bar closed down. I had to rethink my content strategy a little bit because yeah, so I'm so sure. Yeah, that's it. You got that video out sooner, man. You're going to see the business. Exactly. That's awesome. All right. So how do you decide, so the day in the life, the documenting thing, how much for thought goes into that or is it just like, hey, you know, do you rock here, grabs a camera and follows you? So it was more so the latter in the beginning, just following. But then the matter of the editor, who's editing the footage has to not only, if they're shooting and editing, they're shooting it, so they're living the time being there with you during that time. And then they could go go back to the computer and live through it again. That's a lot of time. And so I've started to be more intentional in terms of when I record and when I shoot. And because of that, I've actually shot less. But I do have a large bank of content that we're releasing over time. And so I do have that that helps. But yeah, I'm shooting less. I want to go see Gary at the agent 2021. And he's told me straight to my face, hey, Alex, you know, in a couple of years, you're going to have a team of five on your marketing team, right? For editor, for videographer, for copywriter. And so he's right. I mean, it's a lot of work. And it's very, very time intensive. And I mean, the fact that you got this great podcast going, I really want to give you props because it's not easy to even on what platform. Yeah, exactly. And of course, I'm thinking now about, you know, getting onto YouTube and all that fun stuff. You know, people listening, what they're hearing, I think is people who really haven't gone down this road yet of creating video content. I know what they're hearing. I mean, it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. And so all of a sudden, these excuses are coming up, right? How did you get started, man? Did you just like, you know, go full board? Did you dip your toe in the water? And what do you recommend for people? Yeah, I think I just looked at the money that I was allocating towards marketing. Everyone has a different type of budget. And I've got people locally here that are spending, you know, a couple grand for just newspaper advertising a week. Not even a month, but a week, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think the newspapers are only in business because of real estate agents. But that's their branding and their allocation of those marketing dollars towards branding. And so I said, well, I don't do really much of that print marketing. What I will do is allocate my dollars to high and so in full time, you know, full of time, 40 hours a week with benefits, you know, that kind of thing and jumping full, full force into that. And that's really, I mean, I think that you, everyone has a different type of budget. We're looking at, you know, how to allocate that. Okay. That's different. All right. That makes sense. Yeah. So for some people, they don't have the budget. It's just get started. And if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, everybody knows you get started just with this beautiful little thing called your phone. Absolutely. It's that simple. Okay. Oh, you mentioned the newspaper thing. I'm just curious when I hear that. Do you know if those people are getting results from newspapers? Oh, there's, I mean, one of the biggest players in our market. I mean, I was on a listing appointment interview and they said, Alex, I'm looking at this, this local newspaper. And like competitor number one, he's got seven listing ads, seven pages of ads in the newspaper. Wow. Compare number two has three. Alex, you have none. I said, yes, you're right. And then I told them why. But it is working, but it's a propaganda war, and regardless, and you, your personal brand message, and how you're going to get that across the people. And, um, you know, some of that kind of throw, you know, some people don't like being mailed constantly every single month, or, you know, having these large advertisements, but some cater to some, some other audiences do so. So there's a couple of things in there. I want to unpack a little bit. I want to just, I wrote down what you said. It's a propaganda war. I haven't heard it characterized like that. But in reality, it really is, right? Because you're really trying to capture somebody's attention, right? Yeah. And be it online or off? I mean, look at our, our government. We're, who's our president. I don't need to be political. Yeah, right? Well, politics has always been propaganda. Yeah. Okay, so let's go back to the thing I want to, I wrote down for us a circle back on. There's, you know, 10 or more different ways, obviously to do this business. You, and you've just mentioned somebody doing it with newspaper ads. And here's what I love about that. Because I talk to agents every day who are succeeding, like door knocking and, you know, it's like, I get kind of pissed off when people say, you know, this doesn't work. Or you're, you know, what are you? An idiot if you're not on social media or whatever. Those kind of comments, you know? So agent generating newspaper results from newspaper ads, which some people, you know, would be like, what? Guys run a newspaper ads? That doesn't work anymore. What an idiot. Right. Right. And to that, our point earlier about, there's 10 or more different ways to do this business. How does an agent choose, you know, where to be? Yeah, I mean, it's just tough. It's very difficult. I think you have to go alongside what you personally are more comfortable with. It's challenging. I've got an agent on my team in which she's not on Facebook. She doesn't believe it. She, you know, privacy concerns. All the things that I totally, you know, understand. But I feel like in this day and age that if she's not going to do that, that she needs to figure out something else that works for her. And maybe it's being involved in her local schools. Or maybe it's, you know, being, you know, volunteering at some and building anywhere where you can build long-term relationships. Personally, for me, in marketing, I've, you know, Seth Goten came out with a book several years back, actually called Permission Based Marketing. And it just made so much sense because the traditionally, when I, when I first start off, is all interruption based marketing. Right. It's always just a door knocking, cold calling. At least in my area now, that stuff doesn't fly. But maybe in some of the markets it does still. It does, yeah. I'm curious about the person who's not on Facebook. But, you know, you were suggesting, you know, the other more traditional methods, right? School, soccer, baseball, whatever. It's funny. I was writing about this actually this morning because I've had that same thing come up. I had a loan officer kind of get angry with me. You know, when he asked if he's the same comment was, Hey, I've been doing this business for 15 years. I'm not on Facebook. Never going to be, you know, why do I need to be online? You know, and basically I just, you know, I was probably a little saucy that day. But I probably, I said something that affective will look. I mean, even if your business is 100% referral, is that right? Okay, great. Well, what's the first thing that referral does before they call you today? Buying letters, they're going to look you up. And so, somebody said to me the other day, I wonder what are you about this? Today online, whether it's Google Yelp, wherever you get found, right? That is the equivalent of the yellow pages 30 years ago. Like, how did you get found 30 years ago, right? Yellow pages, people look you up and it's like, well, if I can't find you in the yellow pages, are you legit? Are you real? And nowadays, I'm wondering, like, with your friend, who's not on Facebook, even though you've got that, like, circle of influence business, we know they're still looking you up. So, does that then play into some doubt or some questions about legitimacy if I can't find you online? Oh, absolutely. And to your point, to that gentleman, or that that loan agent, I would say, do you know Blockbuster and Kodak? I just want to stick with their old old ways. But going back to, yeah, I think social proof is what I call it, right? It's being able to be, you know, proof online. People word of mouth was back in the day. It's like, hey, you got to use Jeff, you know, he's a great mortgage guy. Got to use him and then he tells a friend, hey, an infant has another friend, it's word of mouth. Now, it's word of keyboard. And word of keyboard is by far so much more expansive, right? In terms of people read an online review about you and see what you're doing in the work that you do, that shows credibility and social proof. And then other people are working with you and that reinforces it. And I have competitors in which, you know, I get selected as the agent because they go to the competitors' websites and they both look the same. Exactly. And template, template a website with just a different picture. And, you know, do you want that to be the type of marketing that people use to market your home? Interesting. So what you're saying by that is, you know, that cookie cutter thing, all websites look look the same, but they come to Alex's website. It's clearly, it's thoughtful, it's unique, it's different, it probably highlights you in some unique ways. That's important in getting chosen as well. Yeah, we're not templated, you know, we're not templated real estate agents, right? So we shouldn't be using templated websites. We should use something, you know, really we focused on our own personal brand. Yeah, it's funny. I was just thinking about the personal brand question. Because I've even heard Gary, Gary Vee, I've heard him say two different things, you know, and like, I don't want to get in a sidebar about him, but you know, I've heard the whole comment of like, you know, personal brand is all you have, but then I've heard the comment of like, you know, personal brand is like, not that big of a deal in certain situations, in certain context. Yeah, I mean, he's a dichot, walking dichotomy, right? Exactly. I think it goes down to reputations, like you said as well, right? It's what are you trying to, what kind of a reputation do you have, or trying to convey to others to see? Hopefully it's true. It's not, you know, smoking mirrors, but you know, if you don't put something out there, someone else can put something out there, right? And so you got to kind of control, control the message. And I think that's where we can differentiate. I, whether it be loan agents or real estate agents, how we can, that's how we can differentiate from the competition. Awesome. Okay, so I'm looking at my show notes, and last time we talked for some reason, I wrote down ranking number one in Google Level Search Yelp. And so what that allows me to think is that you do a pretty good job in ranking on Google. Yeah, I mean, if you're going to be typing, I'm here, we're currently here in my office in Paul Alta. And so I say, you know, he's going to Google and go to incognito mode so that, you know, there's no cookies or anything like that. Privately browse and search for Paul Alta real estate agent. And hopefully I'll be there on the first page and hopefully I'm up towards the top of the list. And that kind of, I got very, very into just understanding which websites rank on that list. And to be able to understand if the Zillow is there, that I better be on Zillow. If realtor.com is there, I better be on realtor.com. If the Yelp is there, I better be there. And then building those profiles based upon that kind of reverse engineering search. Yeah, so you are number one in terms of local, like when the map comes up for a local search. Oh, good. For sure. Yeah. And then let me see. You probably have more than one feature. And yeah, then you're like, fourth down as well. We got Zillow popping up Yelp. That's probably a little past the ads. Yes, yes, those organic. And that organic is really where I really wanted to focus on, rather than paid. But now, now if you have the budget doing both, is I mean, just it's just accelerating. It's even more so there's it's called Google. I'm on an expert on this Google local search. I had the guy from Yaks down here. Though a while ago, I should have known that. Google My Business is the program business. Thank you. Yeah, it is free. And whether you are a real estate agent, a mortgage agent or a coffee shop, you better be on there. It's very cool. In fact, here, look at here. You see that little, there's a little blue sign right there. It's one of my reviews. Google actually took the review and set me a big poster of my review. Oh, no, and that's pretty cool. So Google My Business, yeah. Google My Business. Yeah, I think it's google.com slash business or something like that. Google it and you'll find it. And so we just, what do we need to do to kind of get, you know, present to show up and just create a profile, create a profile, add some pictures, you know, basically write a little bit of a copy in terms of your background. It would help to have social proof, which comes from reviews of people that I work with you. I recommend you not try to gain the system and try to, you know, try to tell all 10 of your immediate family members to review you ever at once. Right. Definitely, I think they look at organo or organo or organic reviews. And so let it come organically. And you can at least, you don't have to be, I've got, you know, I don't know, on Yelp, I've got like maybe 115 reviews. You don't have to have, go from zero to that. I mean, it took me since about 10 years. That's all to get there. That's all. That's all. But you can start with just having a couple because I mean, if they're going to be looking at you and the other two competitors are trying to choose somebody, you know, at least you have a couple of reviews shows that credibility and social proof that someone's work with you and they've had a great experience working with you. What's your process for getting reviews? Do a damn good job. There you go. Enough said and ask for the review, right? Yeah, yeah, it's asking. I mean, you're not supposed to solicit reviews. Yeah. And so I encourage if you do such a good job for people that you never have to ask, right? When is the happiest time that the client, you know, for a buyer, the best time for them to, to, that they're happiest is when they get the keys, right? And great opportunity to say, hey, no, I'd love if you could share, refer me to your friends, family members, co-workers or share your experience working with me online. People, I love to. If they had a good experience. Right. Right. But you don't do like the post closing email with pick one, you know what I mean? No, I did that before. But I think now it's just a little bit more. If I do a good enough job, I do remind them in the very beginning, quite often my, my business. And one of the questions that you had was, you know, where most of my business comes from. Yeah, after the comes from online. Half of the comes from online, so explain online. So I have time comes from people who, who I don't know, don't have a relationship with, but they go online and they find me and learn more about me. And a lot of times they already convinced that they want to hire me before I even meet with them because they've read the reviews, because they see the pictures, because they gravitate towards me and my brand. And some people look at me and go, I don't think I could work with that guy. And that's totally fine as well. But that's fine, that's life. Yeah, exactly. Well, that really actually goes to our other point earlier about, you know, the conversation of do I need to be online? Look, you're getting 50% of what the heck was the volume? 50% of 80 million, was it? Yeah, yeah. So 40 million dollars, right? In volume in sales because of your online presence. So for those who are asking, you know, do I really need to be online? You know, it's like, well. ROI. Exactly. And are you doing any like paid traffic or anything? I do, I do Google AdWords behind some of the video content that push out as well. And then we push Facebook ads. We're working with a new campaign to kind of push go even deeper into it. So I'm just really tapping the surface of paid media right now. Just getting started with Facebook ads. How have you found that to be? I think it depends upon what the what the objective is, right? You have a couple goals. If it is for brand awareness, it's been great. If it has, it's been for engagement. It's been good. If it's been for it, it needs. Yeah, but I have to say though, it goes back to the local content, right? Like, I live in a city. I live in Los Angeles just right next right next door here. And to be part of that Los Angeles community, I think there's going to be another. There's a reason to have that kind of digital mayor, local group as well, but separate from your other stuff. Yeah, I'm glad you pointed out the specifics about the Facebook ads, because first of all, I just taught a class to Realtor yesterday on that. And that's the same thing I was saying is like, you know, start with the awareness and the branding and the engagement. And this is to the point about why you should be producing content anyways, you know, online on Facebook, for example. But most people, they just like run right to the lead conversion thing. And you haven't built the base before that. Therefore, you're suffering. Right. Absolutely. I think the agents are too quick to try to find that silver bullet. Right. What is that that perfect? Oh, if I do social media, oh, that's perfect. Then I'll have all this business. I mean, like I mentioned earlier, it took me 10 years to get my social proof to where it's at right now. And still continue to hone it, audit my reviews, audit my people, just, you know, be able to understand where my business is coming from and the reputation I have online. Absolutely. Wow, that's good stuff. And I'm just curious for the Facebook ads, because this is kind of like lately my study. I've been diving deep on this. Are you doing them yourself? Do you have an agency or are you part of some kind of group? I have an agency that I work with closely, that creative agency on one side and the paid media on the other side and they're working together to put the campaigns together. Okay, awesome. Just curious. Okay, cool. So in the last few minutes, we have back to the notes here. I got to, I guess, have a conversation about Zillow, Ibuyers, just total open conversation. Because that's another one that's, you know, charged with energy and Zillow haters. And this and everybody's saying Zillow's trying to put you out of business. I don't know if you've seen the Tom Ferry interview he did with, was it Greg Schwartz, the president of Zillow? No, that's good. It's not a consignated link to it. It's about a 15, 20 minute interview. And I think it's pretty good. It's real candid, it's straightforward. I've got my own kind of perceptions based on that. But what's your take on that? Do you think Zillow is trying to crush you guys? I think if that crushing us makes the money, I think, yes, for sure. I mean, I advertised on Zillow, I made money on Zillow and I paid a lot of money on Zillow as well to get those leads. But those are leads. Those are not relationships. And I tell agents that I train, I said, hey, guys, stop buying leads and start building relationships. Because that is really where the focus of the real estate business should be. But all these disruptors, quote unquote, disruptors, right? So let's start off the business, you know, with this whole estimate thing, just to get the eyeballs on the internet. Once they got the eyeballs, they've already won. They got the eyeballs on the internet. They got the traffic now. But when I'm working with buyers in this area, they, I explain to them, Zillow is, it's third party data. They're not a brokerage. They're scraping data from another source. And it's not as accurate. Does Zill care? Probably not, because they're getting the eyeballs, right? Eyebuyers is the same thing. I think that, you know, I've got this, there's so many of these startups. I mean, I'm in Silicon Valley, right? There's so many of these startups with the Eyebuyers. And a lot of VC money behind it. This is one very, very successful company. And one of the co-founders was buying a house in San Francisco. And he kept on getting out bid to make an offer to help bid. So he started, he started a new company to really bring, I'm not going to say the name of it, but bring transparency to the real estate offer process, right? Maybe basically like a bidding process. And everyone can see what's going on. Buyers want that. Buyers want that transparency. Sellers don't. Sellers are looking for the one thing. They're looking for the highest possible price, right? I had another listing a few months ago, in which on the market, one offer for one of these Eyebuyer kind of offers, they had a paying significantly amount of money over the asking price. But they were the only one to offer. And that was more so because the agent was not experienced, was not local, did not know the kind of where the market was at. And so I feel like these, yeah, I mean, there's all this disruption happening, but I think that the value of the real estate agent should be, it's even more important, a good real estate agent. Someone who has that local knowledge, that experience, and particularly that negotiation skills. To be able to come in and be able to help represent the buyers or sellers. Are you trying to play the game of get to the customer first? I think speed is super important. Even just being utilized in technology, it's not to replace it with the buying process, but to get in front of them first and be able to be see the getting in front of the client and build that relationship before anyone else does. Let me ask you this though, so we know all the eyeballs are going to Zilla, right? That's the destination for people looking at buying a house, typically, right? 186 million on average together every month. Are you also, I mean, where does your website and your listings play into that? Are you trying to drive people to your, sounds like an obvious question, but I got to ask, right? Drive eyeballs to your own individual page, or how do you, how do you plan in that strategy? So the three main, I mean, I don't have the budget to compete against Zilla. I don't have the budget to compete against Redfin. The IDX searches on websites is dead. And I can, I'll take that to my grave. There's no reason why that there's no, the user interface and technology on on Redfin, for example, is so much better than my site for, for search. So, so I've got clients that, well, let me take a step back. Let's talk about Zillow first. Zillow is great for information about the background of a certain property, but it's not very accurate in terms of, in terms of search, right? It's not accurate. It talks about foreclosures. There are no foreclosures in this area. And yet it talks about all this other information that just wants to gather the eyeballs. So most of my clients actually do not use Zillow. They use it just to kind of have it as a reference point, but then they go to, to Redfin. And the, many of these Redfin is a competitor. And they're a brokerage and they've got some kind of a discount model. But the user interface and the technology is amazing. And so most of my clients are using Redfin, and then when they find the house, then they call me and help them write the offer and negotiate the deal. Why do you think they're not going with the Redfin agent if they're already there? Because that person doesn't have the local knowledge and the experience. I know that the pending sale down the street that just got on the contract yesterday had four offers and it sold for it, you know. Why doesn't the Redfin agent know that? Because they're not, they're not local. Their, their model isn't to be based upon local experienced agents. They're a siloed, they're completely siloed into one agent does this, one agent does that, one agent does this. And so there's not that, uh, that ability to be able to be in the know. And I'm selling, I'm selling real estate and I'm helping provide this by real estate all the time. So I'm completely always in my market, willing and dealing knowing what's going on. And then I share that information with others that are doing the same thing. And so we have a really 90, 10 rule in terms of 10% that agents are selling 90% of the real estate. Sure, yeah, it's becoming more and more of the case. So then is the game for the, for the buyer journey, kind of what you just laid out there is, is, is, you know, we know people starting that awareness to use the Facebook terms, their awareness, then consideration stage. And when they're in that consideration stage, they're bouncing around to multiple destinies. They're going to Zillow Red, then they're going to come across your content. And they'll be like, oh, cool, Alex has got some awesome content. Let me save him. So they're like, it's like all the metaphor or whatever I use is like planes and LAX. They're all like hanging out there. When they're ready to call that plane in, they're gunna. Is that kind of a similar thing? In terms of, like, use your business name. Yeah, I think that for, for these buyers, they're going to, they're no at some point. They're going to need an agent. And so they're assessing to see what their options are. They can definitely go with the I buyers, which are kind of the more of the discount model. Which generally is like, a lot of buyers think they can do it yourself. Just like, you know, they don't need an agent to help them. And there's that type of buyer. But majority of buyers in this market, particularly I'm talking about Silicon Valley, where we have a lot of multiple offers on property, not enough housing to go around. And competing buyers, more than saving money, buyers just want to be able to buy the house that they want. Right. And so who's going to help them to get that? Is it going to be the agent that just kind of a part-time agent? Is it going to be the agent that doesn't have as much of an experience or do they want the really veteran agent that can make sure they give you the best chance to get the job done? And so when they look for that, that's really where I want to be. Is that part of that consideration or hiring process? So it comes back to trust then. Absolutely. It comes back to trust and trusting that, you know, the right real estate agent is going to add that value by their local knowledge experience and negotiation skills to get you the house. And you're leveraging content, your personal brand, your personality, being a real and authentic. And that's how you're creating that trust with people online. Get found. People like what you do. And they're like, I think I'm going to choose Alex. Yeah, absolutely. That's pretty much what it is. Awesome. Okay, cool, man. Listen, I know you're busy. I got another meeting pending here. Last question I guess, closing out is, what are you trying to do different in 2019? What are you, you know, adding to your mix of marketing? I think I'm going to be diving deeper into those three various channels that I mentioned, right, targeting real estate agents, but locally as well for my real estate business, and then just continue to help help other agents be better. So I'm really changing my role. I make real estate evangelists, right? So I am a, and I am a evangelist of the real estate industry. And why it is such an amazing job to be a real estate agent and a honorable profession. And so I'm just going to continue on that path and kind of see where it leads me. That's awesome. We're going to put links in the show notes to everything for you in terms of your online properties. Is there anything you want to give us additionally though if people do want to connect with you? No, well, I mean, it's probably easiest way just to tweet me at Alex Wayne on the Twitter, so all right. Yeah. Love it, man. Well, listen, appreciate you making time very much. And listeners, as always, thank you for tuning in. We appreciate you. And if you like this episode, you know what to do. Leave us a little love out on the socials. And we'll see you on the next one for now. Radio one more truth in mortgage marketing. Get more free training and resources at mortgagemarketinginstitute.com. Hey guys, what's up real quick? You've heard about the mortgage marketing pro membership before. And I just want to quickly remind you if that you're in a place in your business. Where you simply need more purchased loans. You need to fill your pipeline with purchase business. Let's just face it, agents are still a solid pillar of business and sources of purchase business for you. Well, good news. Our mortgage marketing pro membership helps loan officers like you close more loans without the hassle of chasing agents or cold calling. Done for you agent classes, expert training videos, a marketing automation platform that automates the entire process for you. Everything you need to build your personal brand in your local market. Attract and convert agents into referral partners. Plus done for you proven marketing materials and plug and play content to make promoting your class, getting agents, butts and seats, partnering with affiliates. Real easy, but that's not all. You'll also get access to our weekly mastermind calls with top elbows, authors, speakers and coaches to learn the best strategies to grow your business right now in today's market. And as an extra bonus for limited time for all new members, you'll get access to a database of 200 agents in your local market that have closed anywhere to from eight to 50 transactions in the last 12 months. And we'll provide that list uploaded into our platform for you. So you can get off to a fast start in reaching actually productive agents. So what are you waiting for? You can check out more at mortgagemarketing.pro. See more of the success stories there. And if you feel compelled to do so, book a call. We'll have a chat. We'll see if it's a fit. Don't miss out on this opportunity to take your mortgage business to the next level right now. Head over to mortgagemarketing.pro.