I got my license in late 2000, and by 2005 and 2006 the market was at a really high level. I thought I was this baddie doing all kinds of business with my whole 18 deals a year. Part of that business was expired listings. Before I had REDX, I would go into the MLS, pull the tax records, and use the reverse directory. Some of you have no idea what I am talking about. It was literally a physical book.
We would look for the phone numbers, or go and knock on the doors, and talk to people about why their home did not sell. So we had to log onto the MLS in the morning, pull the expireds for that day, look the phone numbers up, and then start calling. It was a huge time block of your day. When Mark approached me at an event and said we have a better way, that we download your MLS, research those, and give you the phone numbers, I could not sign up fast enough.
If you want to go all the way back, my first year in the business I did no deals. I tell this to a lot of new agents. My second year I closed eight transactions, but I was in the business for 18 months before I got my very first deal from this thing called floor time, where somebody would walk into the office and say I want to buy a house. I realized quickly that sitting around and waiting was not going to work for me.
I was doing a lot of open houses, and when we were doing open houses we were door knocking, and that turned into prospecting. Once I got exposed to Mike Ferry and realized that hard work is required to do this job, I was okay with it. I have always been a people person, so I thought, you mean I get to talk to people and get paid for it? Even on a very basic level without many skills, I was able to double my business the next year.
The people I prospect fall into one of three categories. They are going to do something right now, they are going to do something in the near future, or they are just really fun people to talk to and we put them in our database. You cannot only focus on the people who are going to do something right now, because instant gratification is not going to help you grow your database. The database for me is an annuity that renews every year and pays me a quarter of a million dollars every year, year after year.
We drilled back through our sphere to see where each client originated. I may have a client referred to me by another client, referred by their mom and dad, but I called their mom and dad from an expired call in 2009, and because of that one call we have done 17 transactions from that client over time. One of my VIP clients told me, we will never forget the morning you called us after our home had not sold, and you helped us solve that problem 20 years ago. Right now my total database is 6,000 contacts, and I am afraid to answer how many came from prospecting because it is probably 65 or 70%.
I start my day at 7:30 in the morning, right after my role play, and I look at my leads. Vegas is huge, so I strategically shrank my market to the people within five or six miles of my office, because focused energy is better than being dispersed all over the place. I pick up the phone at 7:55 and call the ones on my list for that day. The opportunities between 8 and 8:30 in the morning are so much better than any other time. My favorite intro right now is, I was doing some research in your neighborhood and noticed you were trying to sell your home. I am just curious, why do you think it did not sell?
Knowing what I know now, I would do it all over again, but I would do it faster. I would start practicing faster, start learning the scripts faster, and carve off as much of that learning curve as humanly possible. My advice to an agent sitting where I was is do not give up, and be careful of shiny object syndrome and all the quick fixes. Prospecting does not have to be hard. Learn a few skills, learn how to be interested in people, learn some basic scripts, and learn how to listen. Once you get that dialed in, your conversations have better results now and in the future.