How To Get 50 Plus Transactions In A Year Part 1

Hi, it’s Mike Ferry. Welcome to Mike Ferry TV Monday, January the 9th. Boy, we are off to a fast start. We hope that you are doing the same. I know it’s very difficult when the calendar year changes for most agents to get started quickly. And it’s the holiday season we’ve just completed and it makes sense that we’re starting at zero in terms of most of the work we do. So let’s make sure that we begin at a rapid pace as we possibly can. I asked my marketing department this past week, I said approximately, “How many people on a monthly average watch Mike Ferry TV?” And I was quite surprised. The number came out between 15,000 and 16,000 people per month are watching this, so hopefully you will enjoy the experience as many others are doing the same.

I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks on a very fun topic, in my opinion, and that is how do we get an agent or should I say, how do we get all the agents that want to participate to get to a minimum of 50 closed transactions a year? Now, if you’re a new licensee, the number of 50 probably is a little bit of a surprise and probably will be something that you would do in two to three years. But for a lot of you that do the 10 to 15 transactions a year, you have basic work habits in play, you have basic skill sets in play. And how do we advance those if, of course, you want to become that productive?

The most common thing that I hear and I hear this quite often is “Mike, I don’t want to do that much business.” And I go, “Well, how much business is too much?” You know what? The average price of a home in North America today, having risen as fast as it did in 2021, in the first half of 2022. Commission checks, which went from, say, this size, went to this size, and everybody made a lot more money than probably what they had anticipated with the average commission checks being so large. So with transaction count nationwide being down, because we are back, as you’ve heard me say for the last several weeks, in a much more normal market.

Normal meaning not every listing sells at the price that you listed for listings are expiring on a regular basis For Sale By Owners are not selling quickly. Buyers are not qualifying as fast as they have in the past. When interest rates went from three to seven, now they’re back to six and they should be stabilized someplace in the five range over the course of this year. So we’re back to a normal market. There’s not 23 offers on each listing you take. You know, if you get a couple of offers over the first 90 days, good for you.

Well, how do we increase production? How do we increase transactions with commission checks being so large? And what I want to say to you is it’s an internal thing and an external thing simultaneously. Meaning, you know, everybody talks about the word “motivation”. I have to be highly motivated to accomplish. I have to really have the desire to accomplish. And I agree with that. And if you look at the motivation, the word “motivation”, it’s motive to action, which means we have to have a motive, a goal, something we want to accomplish so we can take action on it each day during the course of our workweeks. So I don’t know what your motivation is.

Hopefully you are you have the desire to improve the quality of your life and your family’s life through the Real Estate industry, which is obviously a big thing that all of us can accomplish. And your motivation is to serve your clients at a higher level in terms of quality of service. You know, your motivation could be simply, I want to make a lot of money and not have to work as hard in the future, and I’m all for it. But the path to that is always going to be increasing your transaction count.

So I wrote a thought here. I wrote down to do 50-plus transactions on an annual basis. There is a series of decisions that have to be made, along with the understanding that everybody who’s listed and sell Real Estate could do 50 transactions in a year. And same time understanding, based on your experience, your length of time in Real Estate, your numbers of transactions you’ve been doing, it could take three to five years for you to get there. And my thought is, if you’re planning on being in the business the next three to five years, which I assume you are, why not plan to increase your production as quickly, as smoothly, as skillfully, as professionally as you can?

Today we have several thousand people that have been in our coaching for a long time, and we have over 800 agents who have been in coaching for 12 to 14 years or more with my company. And these people all average between 50 and a minimum of 100 transactions a year. This is individual productivity, not counting on the teams. And what I did is I said, “What? What are you doing? How are you making this happen?” And these ideas that I’m going to share with you are just some of those ideas. And I’ll do this over the course of the next couple of weeks.

So the first thought that I have for you, I wrote it this way. If you don’t have a database, establish a database and start working on it today. But if you have a database I wrote down, call your database, call your database, call your database. And once you’re done, continue talking to your database. The question is always the same. What is the hang-up we have in talking to people we know about the Real Estate business?

I’ve never quite understood that the most common conversation in North America today is Real Estate. Everybody talks about real estate all the time, and it’s a conversation your friends, your neighbors, your Past Clients. Your Centers of Influence are having. If they’re having the conversation, why don’t we participate in that conversation? And it’s simply a matter of making a list of who you are going to call, who’s in your database, corresponding with them on a regular basis and making sure they understand that you’re there to be of service to them and the people that you know. You should be calling five to six of your database people every day. Having a good conversation about the state of the market in terms of where you live, what the interest rates are today, what the opportunities are for a person to own more Real Estate.

The second thing I wrote down is this to get to 50 plus closed transactions, you’re probably going to need any place from three to five good, solid sources of prospecting. Of which one of those sources probably should be, as I mentioned a minute ago, calling all of your Past Clients, Centers of Influence. But then also doing Just Listed, Just Sold phone calls calling Expired Listings because there is a lot of them today. Calling For Sale By Owners. Well, here’s the point. We know, as I said a minute ago, they’re talking about Real Estate. Why are we participating in that conversation?

I wrote down next thought … if you really want to become strong at doing more transactions or trying to get to 50 or from 50 plus, which I’m sure a lot of you are doing, I would say that you should be looking at doing 60% minimum to 70% to 75% of your transactions coming from listing sold. Which means a lot of us have to change our thinking about listing property. And of course, the challenge is in every market there is 5 to 7, maybe 10 or 15 very strong listing agents who are dominating and controlling the listing inventory possibly in your town. We want you to be one of them and you can be. But the key to listing property is knowing what to say. And that revolves around the prequalifying process to make sure that whoever you’re going to present to has the desire to sell as well as a strong Listing Presentation and then handling the normal questions and objections that you’re going to receive, which are perfectly common.

So what I started asking our clients to do many years ago is to write out by hand every day for 30 days the prequalifying questions. Because you can download them all from MFO, from my company. Then the entire listing script and then read it three to four or five times a day and then rewrite the entire process again the second day. And by the time, if you have the courage of your convictions and you’re strong enough to do this mentally, which I know you are, and you do it for 30 days, you’re going to have the confidence to go into any seller, any time, anywhere, any price range and make a strong presentation.

So let’s get started with these first few thoughts. We’re going to continue this for the next couple of weeks on how to get to 50-plus transactions. It’s early enough in the year, no matter what you’ve done in the past, to improve the quality of your production. So we’re looking at quality and quantity, which brings more listings, more sales and more income to each of you. If you have any questions. Send me an email mike.ferry@mikeferry.com. If not, talk to you next week. Thanks for today.