Ep#93: Build Your Audience and Go Consumer Direct with Your Own Alexa Flash Briefing

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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, listers, welcome to another episode of Mortgage Marketing Radio. Hope you are doing well where I am in Alaska, Vegas, California, summer is officially over. I mean, it's cold outside, baby. And for some of you, depending where you're at, maybe laughing at me when I say this. But at 60 degrees here where I am right now and comparatively that's cold. Where you get down to the 40s at night in the wintertime in Vegas. I don't know if you knew that or not, but it gets really windy as well. So we go from extremes, right? I mean, you're right, from 100 and 510 to 60 degrees. But it's cool, get to break out the sweaters, have a nice little pumpkin spice latte. That's what you're going to, not my drink of choice. I've had them, right, but cozy up by the fireplace. Anyway, speaking of cozying up, let's talk about cozying up with Alexa Flash briefings. What do I mean? Well, maybe you've heard the phrase thrown around that the future of search is voice. How many of you here listening to this right now have some type of an echo dot device in your house, right? The Amazon echo family of devices, including the echo show, the spot, the dot, who knows what's next. And these devices are voice activated, right? Think about Siri voice activated. You can ask Siri to do all kinds of things. Now, I recognize that voice as a search tool, right, is still has its limitations, but don't overlook the opportunity in this episode. Don't overlook what's coming around the bend, just like most technologies that may not start out of the gate as perfect or may not be widely integrated into daily life. Imagine living without your smartphone today. Can you, for a moment, imagine that, I mean, that feels uneasy, even think about it, doesn't it? Yeah, it's freaky. But voice is growing in a huge way. The Amazon dot, the echo dot family of products was the number one seller on Amazon last year for Christmas gifts. And it's only going to grow like crazy Siri handles more than a billion requests per week through speech. Android, one in five searches on mobile apps in the US are voice searches, and it's only growing. So what does this have to do with you and mortgage and real estate and well, if you're not familiar with an Alexa flash briefing, let me take a moment and explain to you what that is because that's what we're talking about on this session here, this podcast. So think of this, right, you're listening to this podcast, this is long form content, right? A flash briefing is like a micro podcast where you can deliver a pre-recorded audio content on a daily or weekly basis. And what's cool about this is this content right now, right? Think about where the echo dots are. They're in people's homes, they're in their kitchens, right? They're elsewhere. And when you set up a flash briefing, right? Here's what's available echo owners, right? They can install a skill, what's known as in the Alexa skills store, right? Then they simply say Alexa play my flash briefing and they listen into their echo and each briefing can be up to 10 minutes long. Think about the implications of this, the opportunities here, right? You can create a flash briefing to offer tips, industry news, hey, be inspirational, be funny, professional insights, and more as a matter of fact, I have my own Alexa flash briefing already set up. So if you want to go to the Alexa skill store and go grab mortgage marketing radio, the Alexa flash briefing, you can do that. There'll be some content on the blog page here for how to set up an Alexa skill. And we're going to be doing some additional content around setting up Alexa skills for those of you that are interested in it. And in the show notes, there's a link for you guys to go grab the opportunity that my guests today are presenting to us. So who are my guests? My guests are homey points. And what is homey points? Who are they? What are they all about? Well, they are two individuals with 20 combined years of real estate in Los Angeles. David Bromante and Kylo Horat saw a shift coming in the market. What does that shift? Well, let's face it, sellers are becoming more tech savvy, right? Using various sites, zeloredfinrealtor.com. What do they want to learn about home value, how to find local professionals, market updates, and more, right? And while at the same time, consumers are using those websites for research, right? They're still relying on real estate agent referrals from friends and family, because that's the number one source that people find a real estate agent is either realtor is using the past or referrals from family and friends, right? And you'll hear a story about what David and Kylo discovered as they went about door knocking in their market in Los Angeles, California, and had a unique application of how to get echo dots into the homes of their farm and their geo target. And just amazing and smart application. They were already successful agents, and we're looking for that slide edge, that cutting edge and this thing just took off. Now, where is this right now? Well, if you go to Amazon, right, and you hit the section of Alexa skills and you type in real estate, what I've come up is right now, and this thing is still so new, there's 157 results for Alexa skills in the business and finance section when I type in real estate. So what does that mean? That means right now there's 157 different people or companies providing an Alexa flash briefing on the topic of real estate. So an example of this would be we've got Atlanta real estate, Berkshire Hathaway Homes, we've got who else do we have here? My real estate advisor, Manhattan real estate, Nashville real estate, Long Island real estate, Denver real estate, Miami luxury real estate Colorado Springs, right? So on and so forth. So how can you use this as a mortgage professional? Well, what do we want to do? We want to get our message, we want to build connection, we want to build trust, we want to be top of mind when people think about buying or selling real estate, not just about home loans, right? Because remember, people don't want the mortgage, they want what? They want the house. But there's another trend that's happening too is more consumers are being savvy and they're going for financing first to get pre-approved before they go shopping for a house. So there's lots of different implications, opportunities around Alexa flash briefings and you know, I'm pretty confident it's only going to grow, especially when you start actually getting used to this, like any other new technology, it's a little bit cumbersome perhaps at first and then it becomes second nature. Case in point iPhone apps, et cetera. Search, I mean, my cable provider Cox has search functionality enabled. I just push a button and I speak what I want and it comes up on the TV. So the trend is only going to grow. The question is, are you going to be positioned to take advantage of it? Are you going to do so? Are you going to be on the lead, right? Be on the forefront of this because the growth is pretty tremendous and the great thing about it is it's not a crowded market yet, but it will be. So I encourage you to listen to this episode with an open mind. If you got questions, want to have a further dialogue about it. Join us in the Facebook group on Facebook, the mortgage marketing radio podcast community. You can always email me podcast at mortgage marketing radio.com instant message me on Facebook and like I said, during today's session, you're going to hear about how homey points my special guest has put together a pretty incredible service offering for real estate and mortgage professionals that gives you the opportunity to lock up your zip codes. If you want to be the only mortgage professional in your zip code that gets inside people's homes with your Alexa flash briefing. This is for you to listen more about. And so I'll put a link in the show notes. But the URL to go there is my Alexa briefing dot com. Once again, if you want to after this episode you listen to this and you want to go ahead and take that next step, it's my Alexa briefing dot com. There's a webpage up there gives you some more details and you can check that out and see if it's right for you. And as I said, we'll be providing additional content training for this. And in particular, it's one of the new content offerings that we're making available for members only of our mortgage marketing pro membership. And you can learn more about that at mortgage market pro. So with that said, let's get excited for this episode of mortgage marketing radio with the founders of homey points. Let's get into this week's show. We're going to search flash briefings. We're going to get into all that, but and I've got some notes for me on my screen here. So what I want to briefly just allow you guys to do your intro, your own version of the intro. Tell me about your quick background or in real estate, and then we'll get into how you got into right this voice flash briefing thing. Yeah, for sure. So I'll do a quick just summary of all my experience. So I've been in real estate for about 15 years and done residential and commercial and done all kinds of really crazy marketing like doorboards and bus benches in Los Angeles looking for the elusive seller lead doing a lot of cold calling and door knocking all kinds of stuff like that. And have still a pretty well known team and silver like an echo park. And so Kayla and I met earlier last year and started working together later in the year and she joined that team as one of the agents. So we were in downtown Los Angeles and then we were there for a couple months and decided to switch over to Venice. So just chart basically go after a completely new market. Totally. Yeah, really see like if we could like after building a team for 10 years, could we do it overnight in a completely different area that's super competitive like Venice. It was a personal challenge of David and not mine to start a new territory and be household names in real estate in 30 days. So I know the area pretty well having lived there for almost 30 years that area. So Cal why Venice just want to live by the beach or what? Yeah, Venice is great. It's the price point. Actually, when we were looking kind of like just as business people, the amount of work that you have to do an echo park and silver like versus maybe in Venice, the price point of Venice homes. Yeah, two to three times easily. So we're like, okay, we could do the same amount of work and we could be making two to three times more money and echo park and silver like super cool. But after over a decade of selling in there, I was a little bored of it. I'm in Venice. I've always because I grew up in LA. I love Venice. So we just thought, well, we can make more money and Venice is super cool. It's a whole neighborhood. It would be great. Yeah, we just like have this amazing idea of a lot of side we can have. Yeah, Venice is a much better vibe than silver like. Yeah, for sure. Awesome. Okay. And you guys were with Keller Williams and you did pretty well if I recall from our last conversation. Yeah, so we were one of the top agent teams. And so we just basically and a lot of people thought we were insane, but we just just jump ship. We were at KW downtown LA and then we went to KW Silicon Beach, which is that brokerage of Venice is within their kind of geographical territory. But they don't have a team that has ever been able to crack the code on how to sell a lot of Venice real estate. There's some smaller boutique brokerages that are dominant over there. So we came in and we fashioned ourselves as the Venice real estate team for that office kind of overnight. And that's what we started branding ourselves. And we started just like hitting the pavement really hard and getting our name out there. So like you said, you did all the traditional things, the advertising, billboards, door knocking, all that stuff. Right. Yeah. So when we left downtown LA, we had about 10 mentees. It was agents that we were training based off of KW's millionaire real estate agent book. It is the thing called the 10 four. So you're supposed to do certain amount of calls, door knocking, previews, notes. So we took all that stuff and we just injected it with steroids. And so kale and I just like peddled to the metal. We were doing a ton of coal calling. We were doing really like an insane amount of door knocking. We were door knocking two to three hours a day in Venice. And just like really cutting other agents off the past who were already having listing conversations and getting involved. And yeah, we're just really, really fast. So because we had coached so many people on the downtown LA office, it was really like, like kale, I was saying a personal challenge. Like, okay, do we really know what the hell we're talking about when we're coaching people? And do we have, you know, the balls that make it happen? So we just jumped right into it. And but we had to do accelerate really fast. We couldn't just do like the basic thing to maintain a business. We had to hold out the business from scratch. We would meet up at 6 a.m. and put the same note on 500 homes in a geographical area of Venice. We'll even woke up and then handwritten notes. Yeah. And then be at the office at 8. Just crazy. Crazy brand. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So did it work? It worked. It was starting to work. Yeah, we got couple listings. Yeah, couple listings right out of the gate. A home in the Silver Triangle, which we're really proud of. We were obsessed with that house. And then we got a little house, at least a small lease. It was like 5k a month in president's row. So these are all like really desirable areas in Venice. If you're local, you know, these areas, but they're all by the beach and really awesome. Wow. Okay, so take me then. How do you take that real estate, you know, career 10 plus years as real estate agent? Tell me about the migration towards, you know, this new venture of yours, homey people. And harnessing the future of search, if you will. Yeah. So what ended up happening, I think it was in early May. I started to get really obsessed with it. I think I was listening to a lot of Vaynerchuk and like rereading a lot of books because I'm like, we, I have to make sure. It's like the team lead that our new venture in Venice is successful. So I was listening to it like a shitload of podcasts and reading books and just like, really, this is the real deal. And I felt responsible for like Kellen or other partner on the team. Like I have to make sure that we're successful. And through that, I started like thinking more about voice and different things like that. And so I came in with, I think it's an echo dot. And I was like, oh, guys, we got to do like skills. We got to do like a podcast. And they kind of like rolling their eyes. We rolled our eyes just a little bit. Yeah. Like, oh, great. Another thing we can do. And in addition to all this hardcore aggressive brick and mortar, old school brokerage stuff, like door knocking, cold calling, like now we're going to do a podcast. All this stuff. And so that's kind of where the conversation was, right? Yeah. You can take it. Yeah. So that was happening on one hand on the other hand, David and I are outdoor knocking twice a day. And we are trying to come up with ways to be for a lack of better terms, more visible to homeowners. And considering wrapping cars and parking them on the street, kind of camping out in front of prospect homes. Living in their home. Catching them at night. Like a horror film. Like just waiting. Because if we could just have the opportunity to speak with you, we think you'd be impressed. So we took that kind of passion and we melded it with this passion that David had for the voice technology. And where we think everything is going in terms of searching and started to brainstorm different ideas for Alexa skills. And how can we take that in our own territory where we really are kicking ass. But be even more influential in homeowners decision making process when started that conversation about realtors. Yeah. So there was a couple of bridges that happened. We started doing the Alexa skill as a weekly podcast. So we started doing that and pushing that out and not getting very much traction. Then we played around with actually doing a full blown podcast and did a couple episodes that got depending on the topic. I got some traction. So what was happening and then the other thing that happened. Yeah, we got seven people to listen to one of them. So that was impressive. I was impressed. And then the other thing that happened while all of this was happening at the same time was we started to think like because we were generating so many leads. Like real seller leads from all this door knocking. We thought, what if we were to sell these leads to other agents because it's near it's nobody has figured out how to find seller leads. It's either through referral or like a relationship, but we were finding them. We were finding a lot of them. And so we're like, how do we monetize? How do we monetize this? Because we've tried everything. We've done Zillow ads. We did even Instagram and Facebook ads. Again, we did like the big bus benches and billboards and stuff. And really nothing proved successful. Maybe you got a lot of fire leads and usually those were kind of all bullshit. It's like, we felt like, okay, we do have this, you know, these seller leads that everybody would want. What would it look like if maybe we partnered or referred out or just straight up sold them his leads? So we did a couple of pretty crazy things. We had so much fun doing this. This was the very, very beginning of where homie points started. We took all our seller leads and we got from door knocking and pulled calling. And we assigned a value to them that was basically a percentage of what we think their... A commission. A commission, I don't know what their list price would be. So we ended up selling those leads on a website that we made to different realtors. And then they bought it. It was like a digital download. And it provided you with all of the homeowner information, all of our notes from our conversation. The name of their dog. Yeah. The kind of homie they like the dream. The weird little thing to say, you knew one, you weren't supposed to do, but two, if you called this person, like you would know what was going on instantaneously. So I'm naturally curious, right? Obvious question is, why didn't you just list them yourself? We want to get out of it at that time. Well, yeah, the thing is, we just feel like the industry is changing, is rapidly changing. Like with Tellerwin's announcing in February that their attack company compass just like on a raise rampage of buying company. Like as we were talking about this, what my feeling was is that the entire realtor experience is going to be shifting very hard on realtors within the next year. So. No way. How do you. I don't know. It's like kind of like when the market was going to tank in 2008, I got the feeling like, okay, something is going to shift really hard. And I owned property at the time. So it was like, well, I think I should sell stuff. I didn't know to what severity, how I was a kid. So right now, I don't think we really understand how it's going to shift. But we definitely think they're we're on the ground floor of voice. Like it's definitely brand new. It feels like a little bit of a gold rush. It's a new technology. And even though Alexa has been out since 2014, I think the real estate market is going to shift hard for realtors in the next year. And I think voice is going to hit critical mass at the exact same time. And it's interesting that like Keller Williams has Kelly. And they're all kind of jockeying for this position as a real estate tech company. Kelly is basically like a serial Alexa for Keller Williams agents only. It's in that where you can ask Kelly your schedule for the day. I think it does a couple. Yeah, it's kind of rudimentary, but everybody they're kind of dabbling with. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that they're totally missing. Well, I think every like the gorilla in the room is Amazon. That they have this huge platform. So I just feel like everybody, especially in the real estate world, they're focusing on compass and Keller Williams and all this like infighting. And who's going to be, you know, there seems to be like there was a catalyst that was. I think Keller Williams announcing their tech company in February was the catalyst for everybody just going for the jugular. Who's going to be the real estate tech company that dominates? Zillow's doing crazy maneuvers. It's like everything is happening right now. And everybody's been saying for a long time real estate is going to change. It's going to change. It's going to change. I've been saying that for, you know, for as long as I've been in it. But now I really feel like, you know, it's going to change pretty heavily. And coincidentally, voice is rolling in very hard at the same Amazon's crazy push with it. So and I think those are going to, they're going to connect. So we want to be part of that. Yeah. That's probably a good pivoting point to get into this whole conversation of voice. And I'm trying to read the statistic here of what it is, you know, for those that know Gary V. Gary Vaynerchak, he, he's the one that I remember saying it out there. But that he believes the next phase of search is voice. Yeah. Somewhere there's a stat in here talking about voice becoming 50% of search. Like very quickly. Yes. If you think about it, speaking is the first form of communication we learned. So it makes the most sense. And it's the easiest. And it's an opportunity for me to speak and think the type. I'm all a lot easier. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because with phone calls, like to get, to get a phone call that you don't want. And then to receive a voice mail now, we were talking, we were joking about that before Kayla. We were, we were like, it's kind of obnoxious to leave somebody voice mail now. Because you have to like go in, you listen, I'm like horrible. I don't listen to voice mail anymore. It's like, you're leaving me homework because you're mad at me. Like, I'm just going to delete it. Texting really undermined phone calls and voice, and voice mail is in a big way, right? Definitely voice mail. So text undermines voice mail out of nowhere. Voice the way we know it, which is kind of like a call back to old time radio. Walkie talkies. Yeah, walkie talkies sitting around the radio. Like seeing my kids interact with the Lexus. I imagine people listening to like the lone ranger, you know, around the radio before there was TV. So it's weirdly voices coming back in a huge way and undermining using your fingers. Because using your fingers is inefficient. It's slower than just using your voice. So it's an interesting shift kind of back to what is faster and voices significantly faster. And voice is going to become prevalent in our lives, much like, you know, the Alexa dot and all that kind of echo that has already done that. We know voice is being installed in cars. Right. Microwaves. So what do you mean microwaves? I mean, what? Hey, reheat these eggs. What the hell am I going to say about microwave? I think Amazon has. I don't know if they, and I don't know what that team initially thought. I think they've been screwing around with voice for a while. And I think I think they may be accidentally realized. Or maybe it was strategic that it seems to me now with how we're interacting with Alexa, Alexa, and like these virtual assistants that are going to be in all kinds of devices like your microwave, or your door knob, or in a paper clip. Like, the where this voice thing can go is pretty insane, but it's going to undermine phones. Like, phones will become irrelevant because using Siri, Siri is horrible compared to Alexa, right? Yeah. So the other round of phone is annoying as fuck. So now all of a sudden, if there's all these Alexa-enabled devices all over your house, you can be brushing your teeth and talking to the sink, right? And go and walk over to your coffee maker and continue the conversation very quickly. It's going to be like that. It's for sure going to be like that. You'll never have to pick up your phone. But what's interesting about Alexa is it is on iPhones and it is on Android. So they're cross-platform. They're like totally cross-pollinating all devices. Yeah. They are SkyNet. Yeah, they are. Okay, so let's talk about how we as marketers, right? Loan officers are mostly this audience, and of course they have realtors as referral partners. And you guys have been in that game, you know it. What's the application for us looking to grow our business to build our brand? How do we leverage something like voice? So we think that voice, like David was saying, is going to be the way that homeowners, people that are looking to buy and sell are going to first engage with the basic questions. You know, how do I refinance? How do I speak to a realtor? How do I get rid of this kind of cabinet that's been here for 50 years that I'm not going to move with? So we will create platforms for all of those agents, realtors and loan officers that when anyone asks those specific questions, it's immediately routed to them and they are able to start those conversations with buyers and sellers. All right, so let me walk me through that for a bit, because since we last talked a week ago, whatever, that was the kind of the impetus for me to get on and create my own flash briefing, which I did. Oh nice. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a little fan still about, I think I don't want to put the whole podcast on there, because it's too long. Right. Because I'm going to move to just briefings. But, okay, so that's cool. I get the briefing thing from an awareness standpoint. So those listening, right, test this out. Hopefully we're firing off all your Alexa's that you're listening to right now. Okay, so let's do that. Let's do that. Yeah. Yeah. Talk about power. All right. So let's back it up for a second. What has to happen? Any special things that have to happen for somebody to have a flash briefing on their current echo device or anything else they might have in their own? So there's two, there's a couple different things that Amazon does. There's flash briefing, which is basically your mic news. So it gives you a little bit of update for all your different interests. And then there's also skills and skills are comparable to apps. So just like you would download an app from an app store, you would enable a skill on your Amazon account. And those skills can be anything from like a learning skill for your kids. Can be games to a skill. So there are these two branches. So you have the skill branch of what they're doing. And then you have the flash briefing. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So the flash briefing is an easy way to kind of dabble into this concept of doing a short. It's interesting, like, because we were putting full podcasts on the flash briefing. Probably can't see this because of the glare, but for those, yeah, the layers no good. So yeah, flash briefing. What I want to do is make sure that those listening, because there are, they're correct me from wrong. So some people have an echo dot in their house, right? That's one of the device they can have. Right. Now, what they may not know is that they can actually do what you and I just talked about, which is enable flash briefings. But to do that, they have to download the Alexa app to their phone, correct? Right. Or they can go through their Amazon dot com account on their computer. Got it. Okay. Which is probably the easier play. But if you're really trying to get into this ecosystem, you should get Alexa on your smartphone. And then also mess around with it on your computer. Okay. Great. Let's step one for just for those who are like, what? How do I get this? Right. And of course, then, then play around with it, right? There's interest. Like you said, you're going to have certain interests. Maybe it's sports. Maybe it's the default one here. I got, you know, ruders news is ruders, writers. I never knew. Today's forecast. Yeah. But then there's things I can actually ask for as a flash briefing, which just to carry this all the way out, which is now I'm standing in front of my, my dot at my house and I can say, hey, Alexa, give me my flash briefing. Right. Yeah. And then it'll, it'll, it'll start playing my flash briefings in the order I've set. Yeah. It'll cycle through like you're, you're listening to a custom radio station or like you're turning the channels on a TV. It'll just go through the different flash briefings. And you can skip them or go back. And it's right. Now you said something a moment ago. I want to come back to you. Is that, let's say, okay, I've got my podcast on there and somebody listens to my flash briefing. Somehow, how's that going to tie back to me other than brand awareness, which is valuable. But is there another way right to drive people into my funnel from that point? I think in the initial thing is just, I think like after playing with it, flash briefing is definitely just a bite size, like injection for like first thing in the morning. So we, we like found people are actually using flash briefing more than we thought. We were justabbling with it, but you know, a friend of ours, he said that he's got custom ones where, so when he is brushing his teeth in the morning, he's like, Alexa, play my flash briefings. And what would be cool for like a mortgage broker is saying what the interest rates are for the week, or if they've done like a big brief fire or like they see some kind of marketing, just doing it really fast, a little bite sized, you know, body tips for buying selling. Yeah, would be incredible. Yeah. So that's a really nice way to deliver that type of content. When they're listening to a flash briefing, they're probably not in the mood or like prepared to listen to like a two-hour podcast. So just being aware of what you're actually delivering on and what the expectation of the listeners, which is why I'm getting that damn podcast off there, but you did it too though. Yeah, it's all experimentation, right? This is so early. But it's like one of the things I'm reading on the website here is, this is what I think goes to your point, is it's voices about convenience and less friction. Exactly. I love that. Because when you think about the standpoint of us as marketers, you as real estate agents, those listening, how do I stay top of mind with my target market? This is a very convenient, very frictionless way to do it. Exactly. And I think just being aware that like when they're listening to the flash briefing, they're probably brushing their teeth. When they're listening to a podcast, they're probably in their car, right? So there's different channels and just being aware of that and really being like, okay, if I was in my pajamas brushing my teeth, what would I want to experience? What would be valuable for me and not annoying and be least, most valuable and least friction? You know, that's what we started to understand as we started experiment with all this stuff. So our flash free things were just really basic. This is how many properties have sold in the last week in Venice in the last month and the average square price per square foot. And maybe we're doing an open house. Yeah, yeah. And we would have a lot of fun with it because I think, you know, showing your personality instead of saying, you don't want it to be like, Reuters, Reuters, whatever the hell it's called, right? You wanted to, you don't want it to sound robotic. You do also want your personality to leak through. And so we started to do that more and more. Like we would laugh, we would have some bloopers. We did our own wave and bird chirping sounds. Yeah. So you don't want to go overboard and be annoying, but you do want to also have your personality center. I love it. Now, and let's not forget, during that flash briefing, you can have a call to action and drive people to a website. Exactly. Yeah. And we started to do that towards the end, too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's like, hey, for more, go check out the whatever app, you know, www xyz.com. Exactly. Or not. Or to do contests, raffles and contests through that. Tell me more about that. So yeah, I know that ideas. You guys want to start sharing that you did using this. Well, we started to link our flash briefing with our open house schedule. And then we would say, hey, because we did a custom event with, like, we did an open house with Tesla at in Venice at that silver triangle home that we had. And so he said, as we were ramping up and just doing the market, like, hey, this is the average. It's average. Right now in Venice is 2.3 million. There's 16 homes for sale and killing. I would jump back and forth. And then we would say, okay, and then this Sunday, we're doing an event with Tesla. Come by, you know, you can test drive a car. You know, we started to link it with real life stuff that would be interesting for the people that potentially the seven people that were listening to our flash break. Well, you wait a minute. You only had seven people listening, but they sold like three cars, right? Yeah, they sold five cars. They sold five cars. They literally sold a car to everyone that showed up. We did not get a commission. We did not think it was going to work out that way. All right. So I'm sure people's wheels are spinning about ideas and content. Let's keep it fun and lively. What would you say? What's the timeframe you basically have for your briefing? The listening window. 30 seconds. 30 seconds to a minute. Hopefully. Yeah, I think I think you should not be going over. I think you should be concerned if you're going over three minutes. Okay. I think you got to keep. I think also looking at your competitors. If there's somebody else, the people you're listening to, what are they doing? That's really helpful. If you start to listen to other skills, that's why we started to do our own bird and wave sounds. Doing our own bee boxing, which is really low quality. Other skills have a cool intro music. Kind of a little ding, letting you know, ding now for your mortgage update. There would be like a little cool. So you understand, oh, you're moving into a different experience, a different skill with its own style. You guys still have your briefing on Alexa? Yeah, I think that we do. Yeah. What's it called? Venice real estate. Something like that. Yeah, we've been affected, for sure, over the last. Let's see if I can find it just for sure. For sure. What's going on? Yeah, I would think there's a lot of applications for a real estate agent. Loan officer as well. Yeah. Definitely. I think loan, too. Like really talking about a deal that you've done that you recently saved. You know, like, oh, there was this, that was complicated. But good news, like stated income loans now are available. Like knowing that, that's super valuable. Because we'll listen to it, but also homeowners will listen to that. Well, that's the whole thing, right? You know, you know, this is what's the average cycle time before somebody's ready to buy herself. It could be three, six months, 12 months, depending on the person. Which brings me to my next question. So we want to be able to position ourselves as a thought leader and an expert. Engage with them in a fun, unique way. Wow, that really stands out. Holy crap. This agent's on Alexa. Man, they, I'm sure they know how to sell a house, right? What other agents are on Alexa right now? None. But that's going to change, too. So how does then one. I love you guys to tell the story about how you were doing the door knocking. To educate your farm on your new Alexa thing. And this is the bigger question is how do we then let our consumers our target market know that we're on this flash briefing. Yeah, this is the craziest thing is that there's people that are already using it. And you don't know because nobody really talks about it. So there's people who are like already in that world, but it is for sure few. And the big component of what you're doing is not only creating the flash briefing, but letting people know about it. And it's still there's a little friction in getting it installed. So there's that too. But I think that it's going to get it'll get really smooth moving forward obviously. So things we were doing to let people know about it. There's a combination of the natural progression that people will just become more and more familiar with voice technology. And they will start to experience that you can enable these skills on Alexa and then you can, you know, talk to those skills on any device. And then we did a lot of consumer education and we are doing a lot of consumer education. So that's a raffle that we have currently going on like when a dot or an echo dot or an echo. That really gets people interested because we noticed with a lot of our door knocking people are like, oh, when a trip to Disneyland or when a trip to Cabo. And it's like, that's cool, but it kind of feels like 1980 sales. We wanted to do something that was a little bit more 2018 and, you know, forward looking and also just realistic. Yeah, but also if you're talking about a skill like, hey, download the skill and win a trip to Disneyland. It doesn't it doesn't even make any sense. It's like download the skill and you're going to get an echo dot. Well, it's like, okay, that totally makes sense because I'm going to have the dot to play the thing. So, so back to that story, you guys were using handing out like postcards or whatever on that raffle of the Alexa dot when you're door knocking, right? Yeah, which to me is like totally unique and different and it seemed to be the people you were able to meet face to face the engagement was pretty good there. Yeah, it's a weird blend. You're doing literally one of the oldest, maybe found upon style marketing like door to door vacuum salesman. Plus, we're talking about a super high tech thing. It's like voice is completely cutting edge. So we were doing both at the same time. And it definitely was interesting conversation with homeowners as well because it's more, hey, we're here to give you information. If you want to talk to us, here's how you can do it on any Amazon Alexa enabled device and we don't need to knock on your door five times this week to have a conversation with you. Well, that's what I love about it because by the way, there's sometimes there's a lot that makes sense to marry the old with the new as well because it's a space it, right? Fundamentals still have a place and there are as you know agents out there who do or knock and succeed at it. Right. But he is a fun and yeah, all that you put yourself in a certain box, but I love the fact that you combine those two. Because it's like, I mean, I don't know, maybe just me right tech said like somebody knocked on my door high on the local real estate agent. I just want to let you know, hey, we've got we're doing this raffle got an echo dot plus feel free to subscribe to our flash briefing. There's info on the girl like only share the flash briefing. Whoa, that's really cool. It's a real great way to like differentiate yourself in a world where a lot of people think realtors and mortgage brokers are a commodity. So the, you know, make yourself seem unique. That's the plan. That's part of the part of the game when now so I'm on Amazon right now and I just there's a search in the search bar. You can search Alexa skills and I just searched real estate flash and there is like I don't know eight or 10 that come up. I'm sorry, there's 186 results. Now, granted most of these are brand new have like very great. The same time too. Yeah. It's just kind of interesting for those listening, you can try this exercise yourself. Try this at home. Agent marketer flash. Oh, yeah, that's what's his face there. Oh, yeah, we see that. We're looking also. The big guy Jason. Yeah. There's so many and they literally have no reviews. I mean, if you see this and you don't see that this is the ground floor, you're missing it. Let me, let me try mortgage. See what's in here. If you do, you should start. If you do, we'll do a little plug, the shameless plug. If you search sell my home. Say it again. Sell my home. Sell my home. I like the skills because you also we're starting to evolve it like maybe people are not going to know the name of your skill, right? Like you were saying voices, the new search, right? I've been saying that. So now you have to be aware of that. That maybe Amazon is going to be the new Google for searching voice. Obviously, here you guys are. Homey points. Find a realtor and sell my home. Nice. So this is the new version we just launched yesterday. All right, let's take a look at this thing here. It's pre to enable of course. One review. Is that your mom? It's me. Uh-oh. Thanks mom. Thanks mom. My mom is next. Exactly. And then I'm next too. Yeah. All right. So I'm in here. And then obviously I can just get enabled. Right. And then asks me to log in because I wasn't technically logged in. Okay. Enable. Okay. Account linking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And now it's just linking to my account. And that's going to be enabled for me. Right. Now I can. For some people it may your browser may be blocking the pop up. I think Amazon. And the pop up there. That's what it did. Yeah. So I just have to enable that. Mm-hmm. I have to just say always allow pop ups and redirects from Amazon. Yes, because they are awesome. Just give in. Right. Because Bezos is going to beat you down. That's true, man. I was reading some. There's some article yesterday about how you know Bezos playing the take over the world. I think I'm very supportive. Let's do it. He's not kidding, man. I honestly with how he's doing this voice thing one day we went on. I think it was less or when we were talking. We went on the homepage of Amazon. Yeah. And only it's like toothbrushes and diapers and like just dog food like basic stuff. Right. And it was just nine different Alexa enabled devices. I'm like, wow, they are going for the gold. They're not messing around anymore. They don't care about toothbrushes and toilet paper dog food. They're like really trying to get it everyone's home. Well, and some people argue that they're actually more powerful than Google. I think that they are. Yeah. I think they will be for sure. I'm trying to bring up the book of, I'll post it in the show notes if I find it. But somebody wrote like a tell all book about Bezos and had I guess unprecedented access to him and all that kind of jazz. And is it good or bad? What's the takeaway? The mix. It's kind of the guys of it was, you know, everybody's in love with Amazon and they're so great and everything. But don't overlook the fact that he has one intention in mind. And that is to sell as much stuff as he possibly can to you. Yes. But in exchange, he's made it very easy. Oh, yeah. No doubt. Like that you can, especially in LA, right? I can just randomly want something and I can get it delivered to me in like two hours. Right. I mean, the guy is delivering. He's like keeping his end of the bargain by doing that. And delivering on Sunday. These are not like talk about marketing. Like this guy has come up with novel things that nobody has like really stepped up and taken care of. You should be able to get shit on Sunday. Come on. Maybe even in Utah. Yeah. I agree. No, I agree. I agree. And he wouldn't be succeeding so well if he didn't do a great job. Okay. So here's the name of the book. It's called the everything store Jeff Bezos in the age of Amazon by Brad Stone. So for those of you listening, you want to get it. It's called the everything store business book of the year by somebody. I can't read it. It's blurry down, but it looks really worth buying for 12 bucks or whatever. We'll check it out. Yeah. Any food. All right. So where do we go from here? For those that are listening, they're curious. How do I get started? What would you say some next steps would be for them to start kicking the tires around on this? I think just have fun and experiment and just jump into the skills ASAP. It's really the best way to like jump. Just jump on the tricycle. Get a little, you know, bruise knee and like figure it out and listen to it and then compare it to what other people are doing. And your mind will start to expand on like how you can improve it and make it more custom to you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think that there's a big loss that people don't connect all of their marketing dots. So I go out and I doorknoc and I'm giving away a raffle to Cabo. But how does that help me six months later when you have questions about refinancing or selling your home? If I'm going away, if I'm going door to door giving a raffle that also in exchange people are enabling a skill or a flash briefing where they're reminded of me daily or weekly or however often they use it. Then I'm really in the network door knocking worthwhile long term and being top of mind to these homeowners and bringing real value to the table. So just jump in, just start creating skills, make mistakes, right? Move, break things, don't have analysis paralysis. Like it doesn't have to be the best thing. It's going to sell. Just go and make really shitty, you know, flash briefings ASAP. They can all be burdened by sales. Yeah, they're going to iterate. Like you're going to iterate when you and you made decide like this is not for me, this is too much. But I think a lot of people once they start to play with it, they're going to get really excited and do it a lot. And they're going to get, they're going to get business from it. Yeah, this has a lot of great implications. I mean, the first and obvious one is just simply that look as, as marketers, we're all trying to, first of all, get attention. And it's a crowd of noisy space, noisy world. I mean, look at everything that's come on Facebook and running ads and all that kind of just, and they all still have their place. But let's face it, it's harder to succeed on Facebook today. Social media is friggin noisy. So if you've got this opportunity now to be pushed in on a platform like this, and who knows where this is going to go. Like you said, the prevalence of these devices are going to be everywhere. And in a moment notice, you know, hey, give me the Orange County real estate flash briefing. Boom, you know, here's Jeff, ABC Realty. So the market for, you know, all this stuff, it's like, we're building the fence around our target market. And, you know, we're not going to get into a discussion about displacing real estate agents, but you need to, it's the value. I think that you need to be able to offer and bring to the table. You know, and it's the professional services. It's not like, oh, I need you to help me find homes. I don't need that. I need you to help educate me and walk me through the process. And then I need to engage with you. Yes, I want somebody who's built that relationship and trust up over time. Yeah. And that's the thing. It's trust, right? If we really break it down, the reason why someone doesn't sign a listing agreement with you the first time they meet you is probably this trust factor. So if they hear you, if you're constantly bringing knowledge to the table, if you're in their ear on a weekly basis with updates, with market knowledge, they are building trust. They want. Yeah, don't send them. Like we were talking about sending postcards now with like, you know, we were just saying with the flash grieving, we would say the average price in Venice, right? 2.3 million. You know, I mean, that's even really not that valuable considering the fact that they can quickly cancel and figure it out themselves. So like the consumer is not in the dark anymore about that type of data. Like you're saying it's really walking through the process because that part is still. There's a fog of war on how you get from A to Z and doing a transaction or, you know, selling a property or getting alone. And just become in the obvious choice, you know? Yeah. Just think top of mind being obvious. And you engage and make that choice. It's like, I've been listening to these flash briefings for freaking six months. The most tech savvy agent I know is the guy who's on my flash briefing every day. Exactly. Yeah. So there's not. It's the other thing too is it's very rare where a completely new arena opens up and we think voices. It's just like, you know, it's just like it's so obvious that voice is the play to us that is stressing us out that we're not moving fast enough. But it's like, when is there an opportunity where a completely new technology opens up and you're on the ground floor of it. And you can you can really take advantage of it. And whether or not agents are going to get this place, there's definitely going to be significantly less in the near term. Yeah. Well, to do this stuff will be ensuring and like you're saying, they're making a fence around their market. Right. Well, I just want to give you guys a quick shout out. Then we'll tell people how to reach you for more info. But I didn't see this before, but you got a nice shout out from Invin. Oh, yeah. That was awesome. Yeah, man. So what they said, that's on your website, homiepoints.com or net. Your choice. We have both. So whatever you either get to the same place. Anyway, so what what Invin said was after seeing their best sales come to life from real life connections rather than automated leads. Homie points. You guys got the idea to link homeowners with a real human agent through Amazon Alexa voice technology. And the court, Mr. Mr. Keller says there's a race towards technology. Those who embrace it will win. Those who don't are going to suck win. It's pretty much a problem. Yeah, he just said that last week. Yeah, that's actually how Gary talks. Yeah, I dig him. And the first time I saw him on like this guy, where I saw him in person speak. I think it was like six years ago. You know, you it's rare to see these types of people. Oh, yeah, he's brilliant. You know, so. Well, I don't like them because of the whole mortgage play there with GW. Yeah. Sorry. For my LL peeps. Listen. All right. For those who want to dig into more and maybe investigate getting their own flash briefing setup. I imagine you guys can help them do that. Yeah. So we are creating a custom. Page for them to come and figure it out. Right. We're going to give us that URL. Okay. Okay. So it's going to be homie points dot com slash mortgage, dash marketing, dash radio. Okay. And I will put a link to that in the show notes as well. Sweet. Okay. Cool. And that'll be a place where we'll just start like kind of generally showing them how to get started. Again, don't be afraid to experiment. Really have to do that experimental phase to figure out where you're really what briefing is for you. Yeah. And then we'll show us some more technical stuff that we're excited about. Awesome. And of course, you know, we're available for additional questions. Anybody can always email me podcast and mortgage marketing radio. But hey, guys, I want to thank you so much for like, you know, making time. I know you're busy in like full startup mode. So yeah. Thank you so much. It's been fun. Wendy asleep. I don't know. Lots of caffeine. So thanks for watching. And once again, all the links will be in the show notes to check this out. And you guys get on there and make this happen. Start digging in and be. Be one of the first. Be a pioneer, you know, because this is a situation where maybe I think a couple of arrows in the back, but you're going to win. Right? Being a pioneer in this situation. It feels like it's a gold rush right now. So right on. Straight up. Okay, man. Cool. Well, listen, guys. Thanks for being here and listeners. Thanks for watching or tuning in. As always, we appreciate you. And if you like this episode, please let us know. Share some love out on the inner webs on the podcast. Give us a rating. What not? And we'll see you on the next one. Bye for now. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for listening to mortgage marketing 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 of that. You're in a place in your business where you simply need more purchase 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. 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