It’s Mike Ferry and welcome to Mike Ferry TV the week of February the 8th. How fast did those five weeks go by for all of us?

And the answer is quickly. A couple of kind of fun little events – did the Production Retreat. A couple of weeks ago, we did it again in our studio. We were very lucky. The state approved 50 people in the room, socially spaced, wearing masks and all the rest. But it was interesting because I started the retreat and you may have heard it because you may have been part of it by saying, I’m asked all the time, what is 2021 going to be like? And I started the retreat by saying, I’d like to give you my projection. And I hesitated for a minute and everybody kind of looked at me and I said, we’re going to experience 2021 as an extension of 2020. The only difference is we’re getting more used to this type of business relationship that we have to motivate care for, take care of and service our clients. Yes, it’s not the same, but guess what, those that are working and those that are doing their job are producing at a high level because the demand is so high for the Real Estate transaction today. But then I had fun the Monday after the Production Retreat, excuse me, the Tuesday, I did a small program for one of our brokers in Florida where they’re allowed to have one hundred people in the room. And we had about 90 people in the room. And it was a fun meeting because I said and for those that understand Florida, you’ll get appreciate this. Some of you may not;

I said by starting … My name is Mike Ferry and everybody tells me I’m very old fashioned and I want you to know that I am old. I’m seventy five. Going to be seventy six soon. But in the state of Florida I’m not old so that makes it even better yet because you know some of a lot more, a lot of people retire in Florida and make me look like a youngster. So we had some fun with that. Last Wednesday I did a Zoom webinar with the fellows that are now leading our company in Italy. We have a new company called Mike Ferry Italy, and we’re off to a fast start. I mean, obviously, we’ve been working in Italy for, what, eight or nine years. The partnership was dissolved and we’re moving forward and we’re excited about the opportunity and the two fellows running it, Francesco and Bruno, who, if you’ve been to any of our big events, they were often translators for us in the US when we had Italians in the audience, as well as all of our programs over in Europe. And Francesco and Bruno said, we want to do a webinar. I said, what? What do you want me to cover? They said, we’re going to send you five or six questions that our coaching clients seem to be dealing with and struggling with. I said, send them over, we’ll do a webinar. We’ll answer the five or six questions. And it was kind of fun because when they sent me the questions, I looked at him and I said, well, wait a minute, are these from Italy or Belgium or Bulgaria or Albania or are they just from our North American, Canadian and US clients? Because what they deal with is the same as what we deal with.

You know, I’ve probably shared with you when we first started going to Italy, the biggest change we saw or difference, I should say, was that, you know, in that part of the world and very common to Europe and Russia, when a buyer buys a house, they pay a three percent commission to the buyer’s agent. A fellow or gal that has the listing collects a three percent commission from the seller. So the burden is divided between buyers and sellers. So it’s a little bit different. I personally think it’s a much fairer system, but that’s not how we do it in North America. But the second thing, of course, is they do not have a national or even in most cases regional MLS, which means as you take listings, you better sell them yourself because otherwise the expiration rate is pretty high. But otherwise there are questions very much the same as what we hear. So the first question they asked me and I had to smile on the webinar last Wednesday, I think it was Wednesday or Tuesday or whatever day it was. It said Many agents throughout our country of Italy are reporting increasing shortages of homes to sell. What is your advice to those agents?

And I said it’s a normal and natural cycle of our business. You know, we have sellers markets, we have buyers markets, we have sellers markets, we have buyers markets, we are definitely in today a very strong sellers market. But then I said to Francesco and Bruno, you’re probably not going to be happy or your clients are not going to be happy with my answer. The activities, behaviors, of a real estate agent not only determine the success or lack of success of that agent’s career and future, but it also determines the economic impact inside the community that you work in, meaning if you are talking to people every day, you can get listings in the strongest market known to mankind in a seller’s market, which means the inventory shortage is due to most agents choosing not to list property to work with buyers. You choose to list property. Guess what happens? You get listings. If you’re really good at listing property, you get a lot of listings. I’m getting reports. We’re having what we call February – The National Mike Ferry Coaching Clients Listing Month. And I am telling you, our agents are off to record setting months after just a week because they’re focusing on talking to people to get listings. The second question; I’d like to increase the number of people my database by at least 30 percent each year. What are your suggestions? Boy, did we discuss that a lot at our Production Retreat. Well, first of all, how many people do you really have in your database? Do you have fifty? One hundred. Three hundred … Five hundred?

I don’t know how many this person from Italy has in their database, but I said if you have three people in your database, increasing by 30 percent is to have four by the end of the year. You have 800 people in your database. You’ve got to increase it by two hundred and forty people, which is pretty difficult. So what I said is this: A database should be the people, you know, that are past clients and or people, you know, on a first name basis, people that you do business with, people in your community, you know, you know what that’s all about. But see, here’s what I said to these to answer the question. You should possibly consider having three separate databases, first, of course, past clients Center of Influence not putting anybody in that database that you meet just happened to be while you’re talking at a function or prospecting, the second database should be starting to accumulate those agents around the marketplace and or the city/state, wherever you live, that you can refer transactions to and get referrals in return. One of the greatest strengths, I think, of the Mike Ferry coaching system is the referrals being done agent to agent. That’s the second database. The third database, really … I’ve learned about this really the last several years from a lot of our top agents. They accumulate a lot of leads. And you’ve heard me say time and again, you probably shouldn’t be keeping leads that are outside of the boundary of your definition of a lead. But they keep a lot of leads all the time.

And what they do is they put them in what I call an incubator system. They are a third database, totally separate. They’re sending emails, market updates. They’re having somebody from their team call to see if they’re getting closer to making a decision. They’ve accumulated these leads to their marketing, their branding, their prospecting, their advertising, et cetera. So you can not only improve the quantity of your database, you can also improve the quality by how you choose to respond. The third question, what tricks would you suggest will that will help me to follow my schedule, have a stronger mindset and discipline each day? And I started by saying there are no tricks. I mean, it’s really you need to get three or four accountability partners and every one of you should get three or four accountability partners. It doesn’t matter where they work, where they live. You agree to be on a phone call together at, say, eight o’clock in the morning or whatever time you start, you agree to what you’re going to do for the next two to three hours. You then agree to talk to each other again at that time to share what you did or didn’t do. Accountability partners is how you create the discipline to stay on your schedule. But I also suggested to these people in Italy this morning in Belgium or excuse me last Wednesday, that you might want to consider just tracking your time hour by hour for twenty four days or twenty four hours or a for half a day, just to show yourself what you are or are not doing.

I Take a yellow scratchpad, I arrive at the office at eight thirty, I write eight thirty. Before I put nine thirty and then I go back and I fill in what did I do in that hour. Be honest. You do that for three or four hours or three or four days or three or four weeks. You’re going to learn what is causing your challenges with your schedule. The next question they asked was when are you and Sabrina coming back to Italy? And I kiddingly said last Wednesday we would take the red. I fled to go back that night if the borders were open. Obviously with Covid-19 still in such a major portion of the world and such a challenge that we all face, we’re not coming to Italy. We’re not we’re not even doing any live events of consequence. We’re going to start our live events, hopefully in April. We’re working on doing a live event in Florida where they can put three hundred people socially spaced in a room that holds probably several thousand. And we’re looking at trying to do that first live event. And it’s been a while. So we won’t be in Italy till this covid situation is a little less threatening to everybody, starting with you and I. So thanks for being with Mike Ferry TV today. We have a short month in the month of February, which means we have to be a little more efficient, a little more aggressive and a little bit better than we were yesterday. Thanks for watching. See you next week.