I recently rediscovered a recording from when I was a guest on the Market Authority Show with Stefanie Lugo. In this hour-long episode, I provide a fantastic overview of my top selling and relationship building methodologies. Whether you need a refresher, or have never seen my videos before, these are tools and tactics you can start using TODAY to take charge of your business and life.
Todd, can you share just a little bit about your story and kind of how you got to where you are today?
Yeah, if I can give you the fast forward version, I was actually gonna be a doctor and I was in my third year of pre-med. And my dad who was paying for my education was also a doctor. My GPA was very, very, non-supportive of his willingness to pay for my education, let’s just put it that way. I think at the end of my second year I had a 1.3 GPA. I was on the ski team, I was playing hard as a skier and I raced competitively for Colorado State University. And my dad had one of those driveway conversations with me, which was absolutely freeing and it changed my life. He said, “You know, you don’t have to be a doctor.” And it was probably the first time I really learned that you wanna always professionally be in your sweet spot.
To ask yourself: What do you really love? What do you really good at? What are your natural gifts? And my dad said, you’re a gifted business professional. You’re a great salesperson. You should get a business degree. So I came home from Colorado cuz he would only pay for Cal State Fullerton. And made a joke that SC and Stanford were the top business schools, but he wasn’t gonna pay for those. Anyway, I graduated with honors and didn’t know what I wanted to do. And my little league coach owned one of the large real estate companies on the West Coast, and I think he had about 4,500 licensed agents in Oregon, Washington, California. So I got into the mortgage business without a plan of attack.
I didn’t even really think that I wanted to be in mortgage, but as I began to look at it and I began to look at my social skills and look and my communication skills, and the fact that I enjoyed people a lot, it seemed to really resonate. The quote bonus was that I would be able to make calls on the real estate agents that worked for his brand, which was Tarbell Realty. And so Don Tarbell got me into the mortgage business. I went to work for the mortgage company that the real estate company owned, and I had 26 offices that I had to call on and I failed miserably. It was like, here’s your phone, here’s your desk. Good luck, Todd, you’re on your own. I had no training whatsoever and I was just told to walk into real estate offices and drop off product sheets and rate sheets and things like that.
It got very old very quickly. Probably two weeks in, I went to the beach. It just seemed like a good idea instead of calling on realtors. And I started thinking, what should I do right now? Cuz this is obviously not working. I called a friend of mine whose father owned a different real estate company. It was a Century 21 franchise. And I said, “Can I just come by your dad’s office this afternoon and watch what happens?” And he said, sure. So I got there at one o’clock. In between one and four, I counted 21 title reps and lenders that walk through the front door. And at the very end of the day, this guy walks in, he’s my height, I’m six five, he walks in with his gorgeous suit on a leather folio. And he says to the receptionist, he said, “My name is John Barnes and I have an appointment with Paula Richardson.”
I didn’t know that Paula was number one in the country for Remax. And I did not know that John was 34 years old and that year funded 440 loans. But I watched him emerge from that meeting and he stuck his hand out to shake Paula’s hand. And he said, “I look forward to a long and mutually profitable relationship.” And was like, I’m scratching my head. I’ve probably called on a thousand realtors. I I’d never used the word relationship once. And so I called him the next day and I said, I was at the Century 21 office. I watched you come in and disappear with Paula. You were with her for 45 minutes. I need to know what you did for 45 minutes because I’ve never experienced that. I’ve only been in lending three weeks. And he said, “You know, I had somebody when I was three weeks into the business that that kind of made the same recommendation to me, and sure, I’d love to help you.”
And I think that’s a give back thing that happens to people. When you get mentored, you feel that you wanna mentor others because it made a difference in your life. And so why not go make a difference in somebody else’s life? And so what happened in our first meeting, so I am three weeks, 21 days into the business, he said, before we get started, you’ve gotta make a decision. And I said, what’s a decision? And he said, you need to choose between transactions and relationships. And I said, I’m not sure I understand. Aren’t they combined? And he said, they’re really not. And Stefanie, this is what changed my life forever. He said, transactions will make you a living, but relationships will make you a fortune. Incredible. I started realizing right then and there that the, the real estate lending business was a business on relationships.
Creating a Business Based on Relationships
If you could figure the relationship piece out, you wouldn’t ever have to worry about transaction flow, lead flow or any of that. And so he, he said, that’s what you gotta focus on. I said, it seems to me like I wanna focus on relationships. And he goes, that’s what I would recommend. And he said, then the other thing you have to decide is, are you prepared to gain as much knowledge as quickly as possible about the clients that you serve? Namely realtors. And I said, what does that mean? And he said, you gotta know what your clients do for a living. And I said, great. They sell homes? No, he says, you need to know what they do for a living and how they do it. And so I said, what do you want me to do? And he said, well, I want you to get your broker’s license.
I want you to be able to talk to a realtor as a real estate broker, and I want you to become the best financial advisor you can specializing in mortgages so you can add a ton of value to buyers and sellers. And I said, okay, sign me up. I went to a two week program. I got my training set up four months later. I had my real estate broker’s license and it changed everything. And then my agents and I were able to help 6,000 people buy and sell real estate in 12 years. So about 550 transactions a year. And towards the last two or three years, my company said, would you start doing trainings for the new LO’s that we hired? And then the brokers in the marketplace said, would you start doing trainings for our realtors on how to sell?
And so I started doing that for two years. And by the time two years ended, it was like, okay, my dad graduated with a degree in accounting and became a doctor. I graduated with a degree in business marketing and finance, maybe I’m supposed to be a speaker. So when I was 34 years old, I made a decision to sell my mortgage practice to my team and then venture out doing what I do today. And now we have five and a half million clients around the globe. And I’ve got 17 books out, thankfully, two New York Times bestsellers, this bad boy High Trust Selling being one of them. And now we help millions of agents and lenders and borrowers get financing the right way, sell real estate the right way, build clients for life, build extended pipelines and lead flow, make the referral business more profitable, work less hours, make more money, be more of an authority and an advisor. It’s just, it’s like I scratch myself, I really get to do this for a living. So here we are.
Exceptional. So let’s start with High Trust Selling, and that’s a concept that you’ve pioneered. Can you just give us a little bit of a look into it and how we see that in the works today?
Yeah. Well, I think that anybody watching this and listening would understand, it’s pretty straightforward. If people don’t trust you, they’re not gonna engage with you. They’re not gonna buy from you. And so it seems at, at surface fairly simple, right? Trust matters, but what we don’t know is we don’t know really how to create it by design. And so it’s not a sales strategy, if you will. It’s a way of being. And the thing that makes trust such a powerful word is it has to happen. And the higher it is, the faster the yes. And the longer the relationship. As long as you stay focused on that. And if I can have a High Trust relationship versus a no low or medium, the higher the trust goes, the less tension there is in anybody’s mind, a seller, a buyer, a borrower to do business with you.
And so trust and tension compete against each other all the time. So if we really want less tension, if we want high referability, if we want high convertibility, that’s no to yes and high loyalty, then we have to practice High Trust. And one of the things that we talk about are the laws then that govern a High Trust business practice.
How to Build Loyalty Through High Trust Selling
When I began the training company when I was 34, I took a lot of what I had learned from my mentor and a lot of what I experienced with my team. And I said, we’re gonna build a model that requires trust to be the essence of the selling process. And in that first kind of description, it was like, does it really need to be even a selling process?
I’ve gotta do something. I’ve gotta sell an idea. I’ve gotta sell a listing contract. I’ve gotta sell a home showing. I’ve gotta sell that to a purchase contract. I’ve gotta, but at the end of the day, we really don’t sell. We guide and we help. And to be a market authority, which I love the title of your podcast, we need to be a top advisor. And to be a top advisor, people have to trust us and listen to us. And so when you get to be an advisor, then price as a focal point in a transaction is softened. You still need to be competitive. We still, especially in multiple offer situations, we need to be competitive. But people will pay more for trust and they’ll pay less for less trust. So the lower the trust, the less they’ll pay and the harder they’ll negotiate. So you can do both, right?
Like my mentor said, you can make a living pursuing transactions or you can make a fortune pursuing relationships. And so if you wanna have loyalty, you focus on trust. And what trust does is it creates the super glue of a relationship and it’s the superpower of an agent or a lender to be able to create it by design. And the design is really interesting because the design is to ask the questions you’ve never asked to learn the things you’ve never learned. So you can solve and provide solutions at a level that people expect and need, not what you think is the right thing to do or say, and we gotta take the spotlight off of ourselves and put it on the client. So we did a research project and I put a line in the sand and I said, I wanna interview a hundred thousand people and I want the group to be divided in half.
I want the top half of the group to be commissioned salespeople in real estate and lending that make more than a quarter of a million dollars a year. And I want the bottom group to be people in real estate and lending that make less than a quarter of a million dollars a year. And I want a diagnostic and I wanna see where these habits are formed. And so about a year later, we took about 47 different key kind of optics or metrics that agents and lenders get involved in all the time. And we said, if these were to be distilled down to a set of laws, you know, laws that must be followed, and if they are followed, then you have a positive consequence. And if you don’t, then you have a negative consequence. What would be the number of laws? And so a year later there were 14 distinct different laws that govern business and life.
And not only getting the life you want, but but doing business in a way that’s healthy, that’s productive, that keeps an eye on balanced living and doesn’t require you to work more. In fact, the subtitle of the book is How to Make More Money and Less Time With Less Stress. So we’re all about time management and productivity. We’re all about priority management. We’re all about knowing your purpose and knowing your why. And I was one of the first guys ever to write a book on the value of Know Your Why. I think it was in 2000, and we were talking about as soon as you know that you can change your business for the better when you really, really are clear on what’s important to you, then you do things more intentionally and purposefully. And that leads to one of the key elements of the, the book is if we can benefit by that, then what would it be like if we knew what our seller’s why was, if we really knew what our buyer’s why was, like really, what is it about, like what’s important about success to you as a real estate agent?
If I’m a lender: What’s important about selling your home to you? What’s most important about selling your home to you? What’s the one thing beyond anything else that would be most important about selling your home to you? And you start to get into these kind of rhythmic conversations where it’s not about getting the contract, it’s not about pitching, it’s about asking and listening at scale. And most people don’t understand that because they talk too much and they sell too little. So we take the spotlight off of ourselves, we put it squarely on a questioning methodology, that is about the other person squarely. The advice and authority doesn’t come in until either a at the front end where it’s observed by a referral because somebody else says, this person’s the smartest real estate guy I’ve ever worked with. He’s the best advisor. Or it comes at the end of that conversation because then the prospect goes, wow, this has been an amazing experience. And that’s, that’s what High Trusts selling is. So it’s broken into, the life piece, the business planning piece, the time planning piece, and then the Client for Life piece. And those four big blocks are the 14 laws.
I love that. So the questioning process that, that conversation that you’re having across the table that you mentioned, is that the High Trust interview?
Yeah, that’s the High Trust Interview.
It starts with a high impact opening and you gotta get people’s attention. You got probably, depending on who you wanna listen to in terms of like Gallup or Huffington or Purdue or Harvard, you know, they’ve all got studies on psychological influence and you have somewhere between 15 seconds to maybe three minutes to really connect with the client. And so what, what those first words are, are really, really important. And if your words are different and more unique than anything that they have ever thought about, it causes them to begin in their mind going, “Wow, I thought this would be this kind of experience. I thought borrowing money to buy a home would be all all about this, and it could be so much more.” And so you get their attention, that’s the first thing you have to do.
So what I would say to a borrower as a lending partner for an agent is I would say, “Mr. Jones, I wanted to reach out to you and congratulate you on using Debbie at Century 21 Real Estate. She’s the best agent in town. I’ve done business with her for seven years. She does a brilliant job for all the clients.” And then I just kind of pause and there’s this really kind of good feeling. And then I say, “You know, one of the reasons why Debbie wanted you and I to speak was so that I could help you help make informed choices about your financing options when buying a home.” So what I’ve just done there with that sentence is, I’ve caused a need for my advice and authority, informed choices, financing options, right? Two big deals right there.
And then I pause again. Then this is where I set the hook to really just have a beautiful conversation. So I would say, “A lot of people think I’m in the lending business or the home loan business. I don’t really look at it that way. I don’t really look at that way,” that causes curiosity and it brings the client in. “I don’t really look at it that way. As a mortgage professional and a home loan strategist, I’m helping you create perhaps the largest debt of your life. And unlike most lenders, I feel I have a responsibility to help you proactively manage that debt. I’m gonna help you integrate your mortgage into your long and short-term financial plan, your investment plan, your tax payment, cash flow, and equity objectives. And by the time we’re done, I’m gonna offer you a solution to be your mortgage planner for the next 25 years as you buy and sell real estate. I wanna help you create wealth as you do that.”
And as soon as I say that, it’s like the eyes just go like wide open. And my first question is, so before we get into anything, I’d like to know what’s important about owning a home to you? What are you trying to achieve and what are you trying to experience? And then I just let ’em talk. And, you go from there and that might be a conversation that lasts five or seven minutes and then we get into detailed stuff cuz we already got the emotional connection. And then once I have the detailed stuff, I can begin to make some product recommendations, you know, what, what the best mortgage instrument is and how should we manage that and this, that, and the other thing.
But it’s all tied back to what’s important about owning a home to you. When I sit down with an agent, I’d sit down and let’s say it’s Debbie, who was one of my top agents. And I would say, “Debbie, thanks so much for your time. I know Karen Owens and Escrow company. I know that Karen wanted us to meet cuz she’s really excited about what I potentially might be able to bring you as a real estate professional. But before we get started, I want you to know, I don’t see myself as a lender per se. I see myself as a success coach, a partner to my real estate agents. I want to help them succeed at scale. And the only way I can do that is if I know what’s important about success to them. So before we get into anything as a real estate professional, help me understand what’s important about being successful to you.”
And that question, again, can fill up a seven to 10 minute dialogue. It can even go longer. Because when we start to get below the surface and we start to get that emotional kind of connection going, then what we end up doing is we watch trust flourish. If I can tie everything back in our conversation to something that you’ve told me is really important, then you’re gonna trust me. There was an episode three years ago on, on Million Dollar listing New York, and it was Tyler Whitman and Ryan Sirhan competing for the same listing. They recommended the same price. Tyler was a little bit loosey-goosey and kinda letting the emotion flow and just kinda letting the dialogue go and everything being the same, same property, same price, you know, same location, same market, same everything, right? They show Ryan asking a question, and here’s the question he asked the seller, “What are you passionate about?”
That was it. And by the time the seller described for him what he was passionate about, Ryan tied that all into a Picasso analogy. Looking at a home as a canvas, this guy’s artistic, building it out how an artist would build a painting out and then that artist would hope to sell that painting to somebody so that person could enjoy what he had created. And so as a seller, husband and wife are sitting there and the analogy comes in to Picasso, he said, you’ve created a piece of art here. Let’s sell this piece of art for the most you can get and let’s go find a new canvas aka another home for you to do it again even better than you did here. And it was a just a beautiful analogy of how one question can change everything.
And I think people think that we gotta ask a whole bunch of questions. You really don’t. The fewer questions actually, the better and the fewer in order for them to be better, have to be better questions. Otherwise it just stays on the surface and it becomes kind of that mundane kind of robotic approach. And we tell people, man, the more questions you ask, the less likely you are to really get to the heart of things. Cuz it just stays here. It stays on the economics, it stays on the price, it stays on square footage, number of bedrooms, it stays on all that stuff. That’s all important, but it should not consume the conversation because then the conversations take too long. Yep. What we wanna do is tighten it up and tighten it up, not through manipulation, tighten it up because we’re gonna help you focus on one thing, no matter what house we list, what house we buy, what house we finance, you got one thing that’s important to you.
There’s a bunch of other stuff that feed into that one thing, but that’s kind of the essence of it. And we have two papers that your Tribe can download. One is called the High Trust interview and it’s a, a guide on how to do this. The other’s a white paper, 16 pages long called Talk Less, Sell More. And there’s a case study in there about watching real estate agents and lenders go from a hundred words in a pitch to 80 words in a pitch all the way down to 20 words in a question that leads to conversation. And the conversion rate from 80 words down to 20 words goes from 17% to 77%. So download those two documents and it explains everything. And it’s just like I can ask you right now as a real estate professional, Stefanie, how may understand what’s most important to you about real estate? We could go off for five to 10 minutes on that conversation.
It’s not about selling, it’s about connecting and letting the sale take care of itself.
And I think it’s also the strategy that recession proofs any business. And, and I really believe that. I believe you can have your best years. Like people stop working in December and you know, I decided that as a mortgage professional, I would work twice as hard in December, it was a great month to celebrate. Holidays are coming, but if everybody’s taking their foot off the pedal, I’m gonna be in it when everybody else is out of it. And I started realizing that, that to not have competition, you, you literally have to do what they don’t. And you have to go where they aren’t. And you have to create value that they don’t create. And because most lenders and agents are looking for a deal in a commission, they don’t understand this at scale and at scale. I mean, if you emotionally connect with a seller or a buyer, you have 26 and 31% margin increase on your gross closed commissions.
Emotional connection can create that kind of financial lift.
And it also creates 85% sales growth if you know how to activate a referral kind of system. And so I created something as a lender, and I’ll just share it with everybody real quick. You could do this right now with your lender and your lender could do it with you, or you don’t have to do it with a lender. You just have to understand the concept. So I invented something, I didn’t call it what I call it now, but I invented something when I was a loan officer and it was called referral by design. And for me what that meant was I’m gonna make sure that every borrower I sit down with, particularly those referred by an agent, that I do what we now call the high trust interview. Because the only thing that matters is that borrower trusts me whether they’re gonna buy tomorrow this weekend or in a month or two.
So I got all my agents to understand the best time to refer buyers to me is not before the weekend. You’re gonna go show property. The best time to refer buyers to me is weeks, if not months ahead of time. Right? And then I’m gonna fill the funnel with borrowers that already trust you and me. We’re not gonna have cold leads going into the funnel. We’re gonna do that. And then I’m gonna stay in touch with them every single week to make sure when they’re ready to pull the trigger on listing and ready to pull the trigger on making an offer that I send you a reminder and tell you that the Jones are ready to go. And it was my affinity marketing program that allowed that to happen where I was literally taking a borrower, I’ll give you one story that, that, that shows this.
Utilizing the Circle of Cashflow to turn High Trust into Business Referrals
I was taking a borrower, the only thing my team and I wanted to do was to blow that borrower’s mind with regard to their customer experience because we knew that that buyer would be a salesperson for our brand if we did it right. And so we would do an amazing experience, in the office we had a menu for appetizers and drinks. We had a conference room with videos to show you how to get prepared for listing and selling your home if you’re referred by an agent. We had a cross-sell video congratulating the buyer for meeting with us at the actual appointment, making the realtor look good and making the borrower feel, wow, this is really fine tuned. And we would just blow their mind. You know, we advisors, author, we had knowledge, you know, we had trust, we had all that going for us. What we did before they left was a game changer. So I would say to the Johnsons, how’d everything go today? Hopefully they say, great. Have I alleviated all of your fears? Hopefully they’d say yes. Is there any other question you have today that we need to answer? And hopefully they would say no to which I would then say, you’re gonna get a 24 hour update from us tomorrow. We wanna make sure we get you started off on the right track. And before you leave this afternoon, we’d love to ask one question.
And the question was, who is in your circle of cash flow? Your circle of influence, your circle of friends, your circle of colleagues that you know are gonna be either listing, buying or both that we could give the same level of service to we’ve given to you today? Any names come to mind. And then sometimes they would have the names. Most of the time they would say, no, not yet. And so we’d say, good. During the process, we’d like to earn your referrals. So every time we call, every time we give you an update, every time you think about how easy this is, if anybody comes to mind, just know that we want to treat them the same way we’ve treated you and that’s it. Right. And so we let it go. So I do loan for a guy who’s a business owner. He’s got 800 employees.
And my realtor, Debbie refers the guy to me. So I’m gonna blow his mind because in my mind, what do I see? I see that he could influence 800 employees and then we go through the whole process gives us the equivalent of a five star review. It wasn’t called that back then, but we got a perfect 10 on the process. And, um, and so I called him to thank him after the loan closed, and he got the keys and they’d moved in and I said, anytime any of your friends need what we just did for you, feel free to give me a call. So two weeks later he calls me and he says, you know what, I was playing golf this weekend with my friend that owns El Dorado Bank, and he and I were talking about you, and he told me, have Todd call me because we don’t do real estate loans at the bank.
We’re just check checking, savings, auto loans, credit cards, you know, deposits, things like that. And he calls me and we have this conversation, and I get fast tracked to sit down with the president of a bank that’s got 3,500 depositors. So in one fell swoop, Debbie, my agent has access now to 800 employees and 3,500 depositors. That’s 4,200 buyers and sellers. She doesn’t have to buy leads, she doesn’t have to pay for advertising, she doesn’t have to do anything. And that’s now called the circle of cash flow. And it’s a patented business strategy. And it’s just like, it’s the biggest no-brainer in the history of mankind. And realtors suck at following up and so do lenders. And you know, one of the laws in here is the law of incubation. And what the law of incubation says is the most profitable relationships mature over time.
We’re one and done. We do a deal and we’re off to the next deal. And we forget to nurture our network, which is the most explosive economic engine we can have in our business. And I mean, just that strategy alone. So listen to this. So in 12 years of doing loans, Debbie sold 432 properties out of one relationship. Wow. So I would just tell everybody to do that. I mean, you live in a city that’s got enough people for you to have a relationship with, to make a fortune. And you don’t have to do it the hard way. You know, you can, you can actually rely on people who love you and trust you to refer you to people that because they know you and love you, the people they refer you to are gonna trust you faster, shop you less, negotiate less. It’s like there’s no pitch. There’s no call reluctance. It’s like somebody so and so told me to call you. You’re the authority. You’re the best. When can we meet? Sounds like a good idea to me.
Well, it’s hilarious. And for me, I like to think of that. And we’ve built our business in the same way, not at the beginning, but over time when we found that our model was not sustainable, we made those pivots into what we like to think of as an attraction based lead, lead model. Right. Love that. Yeah. And I try to teach this to agents. I don’t try to teach us, I do teach us to agents, and at the beginning, a lot of the time, the pushback that I get is I’m just not getting referrals. Like my referrals aren’t coming through for me. And the first thing that I always think of is like, well, have you taught them how to refer you? Have you asked for referrals? Right. And real estate agents are so afraid, particularly agents, just from my experience, are very afraid to put themselves out there and make the ask because they are terrified of sounding salesy or spammy.
But again, back to the way that you’ve approached this, and back to the way that you’ve crafted this, you are doing nothing but making deposits. You are creating a beautiful process that serves the borrower, that serves the homeowner at every step of the way. And truly, that should be our number one main priority. You know, I talk about this a lot, as realtors, our number one job is to protect the public. We’re not here to like ride high on the markets. We’re not here to be tapping into everybody’s equity. We are here to protect the public. And the moment we lose sight of that, the moment everybody wins.
You Have to Nurture Your Database Consistently
When you have this community, you know, so we had close to 8,000 people in our database that we were adding value to. We were doing mortgage reviews every single day. When you were a year out from closing on your home, you got an anniversary gift and you had a mortgage review. And one of the questions in the mortgage review was, even though you’ve been in the home for a year, what do you think your real estate goals and dreams are for the next three to 10 years? And they would tell us stuff that the listing agent or the selling agent would not have ever even asked them. Which then, like if they say, you know, we’re gonna start building a family and hopefully we’ll get pregnant fast and we’re gonna need to move from a two bedroom to a at least a three, maybe a four in a couple of years.
Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Right? And so if you’re doing reviews every day and you build the practice around consultation, you’re not making cold calls, you’re, you’re not dialing expireds, you’re not doing any of that stuff. You’re working this database and this database, if you work it, it works for you. And you know, I’m gonna call Debbie and say, “Hey, you know, Brad and Stefanie, they’re gonna get pregnant in the next couple months. He’s telling me that they’re gonna need a bigger home in the next two to three years. Let’s make sure we stay on top of that.” And we would do that every single day. I’ve got a client right now that his team makes 150 mortgage review calls a day. Wow. And when you think about that and you think about the agent benefiting from that, that’s the engine. Right? If you’re not in touch, you’re outta touch.
And if you want your clients for life, you gotta talk to ’em during their life. And at some point you have to be able to step away and go, you know what? That business model right there is gonna create a million to 2 million a year in cash flow. Yep. Automatically easy. I don’t even have to, I don’t have to do anything except love on them. Right? Yep. And if I love on them, they’ll love on me. And there is nothing better for my perspective as a lender to put commissions in the hands of my real estate agents, nothing was more enjoyable than watching them benefit. I think the last year, and this would’ve been in ’93, the last year, my agents made an average of $372,000 in commissions from my database, but it involved a family tree from them. And you know, and I think right now with consumer direct, I think also with a lot of the IBUs and things like that, if you don’t wanna get taken out by a technology play, you gotta have relationships.
And the other thing I’d say to any agent, going, listening or or viewing this podcast is, man, make sure your local lender knows what they’re doing because buyers are talking to lenders before they’re talking to agents today. And so make sure you have a plan so that you can make everything happen through that other referral conduit. Because if you’re one of my key agents and buyers are shopping, lending solutions online, and I get buyers during refinances, you know, I would always ask every buyer, do you have a relationship with a professional realtor? And when they said no, I would market as a referral because when they were gonna be ready to buy, they needed a relationship with a real, a realtor. If I’m having any conversation today with anybody on being able to qualify and buy a home, I’m gonna ask him, have you selected a professional real estate agent?
And they’re gonna say no part of the time, and they’re gonna say, I’ve got one part of the time. And then the ones that don’t have one, I I’m gonna get involved and I’m gonna be the bridge. And I’m gonna go, “I’ve got an agent that is the best in the business I’ve done business with every seven years. Now that we know what home you want, let’s see if we can get somebody involved to help you make the right decisions with contracts and offer parameters and things like that.” So it, it’s win-win all the way around. But this database is monstrous and the the bigger and more engaged the database, the less you really have to worry about leads.
Thank you, Todd, I am so grateful that you’ve shared your knowledge, perspective, and stories. You have a lot of experience to share with the industry and I’m really appreciative that you chose to do that here. Where would you point people who want to learn more?
I would take everybody to Todd duncan.com and, my social media. My social handle is Todd Duncan Official on everything but Twitter, Twitter’s, Todd’s Tweets. That’s how to stay engaged and hang out with us. I mean, we’re into tribe building. That’s all we want to do is help people win and fall in love with their life and do business well so that they can enjoy, you know, both life and, and the, the impact the business has. We’re going into a new market. There’s a lot of stuff on the horizon that we can’t control. But what we can control is how much value we bring to the market we’re in. And so if we can help you out, just let’s do it.
If people are looking for a more personalized approach, I highly recommend Todd Duncan Coaching. Our Todd Duncan Coaches will provide you with the framework you need to set and accomplish your business goals. During a complimentary consultation, our Coach Concierge, Chris Pollard, will help you break down your business goals and determine your next steps so you can start earning what you’re worth. Schedule Your Free Coaching Consultation Here.
