Cody Gibson on Listings, Listings and more Listings

Cody Gibson discusses how to get more listings, as well as his Expansion Team growth and why he decided to move that way instead of the traditional MREA path for more Keller Williams agents goals. Expansion teams are just catching on so it’s great to hear why he thinks they work and the success he is seeing. I think we’ll be seeing more iterations of Expansion Teams as time goes on. See the transcript highlights after the video if you don’t have time to watch the entire interview!

Transcript Highlights

I was teaching MREA and I decided that I wanted to go do it, and so I decided to start an expansion team and sell 100 homes the first year without ever meeting with buyers or sellers. We did that, we sold 104 homes. Now we have 43 expansion groups in the country. I still teach about 110 days a year and enjoy it.

What made you decide you didn’t want to work with buyers or sellers or go on appointments anymore?

I wanted to do something different in like 2008 and 2009. Gary Keller let me hang out in some of the top agents private Mastermind groups as a team leader. I had recruited a bunch of Mega agents so that is how I talked him into letting me sit in the room, just to learn, he said you can be here but you can’t talk, sit in the corner and don’t ask questions. So for a couple of years I got to listen and Gary was talking about things like expansion and franchising the agent business, which he ultimately said don’t do. But at the time I thought that’s what we were all going to go do! So in 2010 I thought I want to go start this team, and I started in Portland Oregon while living in Vancouver and had only lived there 10 months, so even Portland was kind of an expansion without knowing what we were doing.

I knew at that time I didn’t want to be the next level 7 Mega on stage, with six buyers agents, six listing agents, and administrators, not that that’s wrong, it’s a great accomplishment. I just wanted to do something different and be able to look back and say wow this affected the industry and changed lives. Expansion teams can affect dozens and dozens of lives, impact more, and put me with more high-level people. No restrictions.

With your expansion teams in 43 offices, how many people is that now?

Agent count is 61 or 62 today. We looked at United Home Group like a platform and we’d say alright we can have two to four agents in every Market Center working our platform, working our leads, our distribution, our structure with our administration, and our technologies. We could have 2-4 agents in every office without trying to duplicate the MREA level business. This allows us to have 1200 or 1400 agents across the country if we expand it correctly.

At Family Reunion you did a session called Seven Steps to Abundant Listings and right now probably the biggest challenge our lister’s are dealing with is getting listings. Inventory is really low, are you experiencing the same thing?

100% in the city of Portland is the same problem, low inventory. I think some of it is when our own dialogue gets in the way. An agent called me and said “hey I want to get 10 listings too” and I said well you probably won’t. He said “what?” I said you probably won’t because you’re talking as if you’re going to get them, but you don’t get them… you sign them, you take them. The difference between saying I got 200 listings, and I took 200 listings, boils down to the words that we use. I know that’s picking on it. It ultimately comes down to mindsets. I’m going to go get four listing versus, I’m going to go take four listings or I’m going to earn four listings.

So what is the first thing we need to do?

First pivotal piece is I have to make peace with the fact that I have to lead generate every day until I have an appointment. That can be phone calls, emails, knocking on doors, doesn’t matter. Whether that’s 10 contacts or 48 contacts, I have to go on a listing appointment everyday. There are approximately 22 business days out of the month if I set an appointment everyday. I had a mentor who said “Cody I struggle with these marketing ideas I can do anything, I can’t do everything so I have to zero in on these three.” I never forgot that comment. We go to all these events and say yes we’re going to do these 18 things, probably not. Which ONE am I going to do. The disciplined pursuit of more. What can I bring on, get good at, and then bring on something else. I need to reach stabilization.

So the first step is lead generating everyday until we get an appointment. So out of 20 or 22 appointments for the month, once you prequalify ask all the questions you need to you might end up with 14 or 15 actual appointments for the month. There is enough in there that even if you’re not amazing, you’re going to start listing 8 homes a month, we make it more complicated because we want it to be complicated. If you do this for 4 months or five months, you are going to be really good and getting listing appointments. It’s about improvement and the path of improvement.

Can you write on an index card what it would take for someone to model, to take 10 listings a month?

Might not happen the first month but it will happen. First step is to visit a for sale by owner or expired everyday, leave notes on the door if no one answers, and follow-up. If you leave notes on homes 22 days a month, by month two or three you have left 40-60 notes and someone will actually call you. It’s not a great model but you would get a listing that you wouldn’t have otherwise. Everyone always asks what to say and it really doesn’t matter you can just start with “Hi I’m a real estate agent is there anything I can help you with?” It’s just about getting in front of them and actually doing the work. You maintain a business talking to people you know, and you build a business talking to people you don’t know. There are a lot of ways to do that and the fastest is people that already want to sell so FSBO doors are the best for that.

Everyone gets into real estate for the freedom, flexibility, and financial wealth but what most agents do is they take the freedom, and flexibility, and then they never get the financial wealth. The ones that succeed give up the flexibility and freedom for a little bit in order to get the financial freedom. It’s the freedom and flexibility to work more and can get your inconsequential items done at 5 a.m. so you can do all your cold calling and prospecting and everything by 8 a.m. so that you can actually bring in business. One of the steps is follow up every 7 days, so if you are doing enough lead generation, you’re constantly filling the bucket of future business or future prospects for business. So I believe in follow up Wednesday. Every Wednesday you follow up with every seller that hasn’t listed with you yet, you call them every Wednesday. You keep it simple, the script is “Hey Dave, it’s Cody, I just wanted to call and follow-up, do you need anything real estate related? About 70% of the time you’re going to get voicemail “Hey David, Cody here just wanted to call and follow-up, if you need anything give me a call, sold a couple homes since we talked and I’d love to make yours the third. I’m ready when you are, I’ll call you again in a week.” Don’t ask permission.

Your first couple contacts you use your greatest script and then your second greatest script when in reality you’re just looking for motivation and then what do you say next. You don’t need to say anything you just follow up, it’s a game. Lead generation can get you a sales lead, follow-up gets you a business.

This is the step people like because it’s interesting, and that’s posting on social media. Nobody cares about the posts like “hey call me, the market is hot.” Only your spouse and your mother care. I want you to do a post on Facebook and other social media that says “listen I’m working with the XYZ family, looking at XYZ area, in this price range, who do you know that has a home that would fit for the XYZ family?” And what will happen is you’re telling your database you have all the buyers, you’re the only one telling that story. Sellers want to hire you because they think you have buyer’s so don’t talk about stuff that they don’t care about.