KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Corby Goade on Building a Business with Investor Clients

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

Summary:This episode features Corby Goade, a real estate professional who has built a successful business focused exclusively on investor clients. The conversation provides a tactical roadmap for agents interested in this niche, covering how to find investors, the specific value proposition they need, and the importance of understanding the numbers behind a deal. Goade emphasizes that a business built on investors is more scalable and less susceptible to market fluctuations. Listeners will gain a clear understanding of how to pivot their business and create a consistent, long-term revenue stream.

Hey, Real Estate Rockstars. This is Aaron Mucostegi. Hey, you're about to hear the interview that I just did with Corby God from Boise, Idaho. Man, we had a lot of fun chatting. He talked about, you know, what it took for him to get into real estate, you know, how it really started with him buying his first house, turning out into a rental, helping other people do the same and realizing along the way, oh, I should be an agent. Most of his volume is through helping investors. One of the best things about having investors as clients instead of just helping them buy. or sell a house once every three or four years, you could help them buy or sell a house every, you know, three or four times a year. So I think that niche is a great one for any agent out there interested in growing their business. Corby teaches you how he did it and how it can help change your life and your business too. Without further ado, here we go. Well, Corby, welcome to the show. How are you, man? I'm fantastic. Thank you for having me, Aaron. I've been really excited about joining you. I love the podcast. Yeah, no, thanks for being a listener, I was rereading the email when you reached out about everything you've been doing and you're

obviously crushing the game. I think it's perfect to be having you on here. I see, I was just going to ask you where you're from, but I see there's a sign on the wall behind you that says Boise Turnkey. So is Boise Home Base for you? Yeah. Yeah. I grew up here. I've lived here my entire life. And so this is where we do all of our business too. Cool. Well, one of my early mastermind members, Elliot Hoyt is out in Boise. There's five or six Boise people that come out to our mastermind every year out in Austin. So I know Boise is a big city, but I'm sure you have actually rubbed elbows or met with or had conversations with some of the guys that have been on the podcast and also been a part of our mastermind out in Austin. So Boise is a place that we pay a lot of attention to.

Hey, my CPA even lives in Boise still, even though I'm way out here in Texas. So how long you lived out there? I'm 47. I was. born and raised about three miles away from where I'm sitting right now. So I've not gone very far. That's cool. How did you get into real estate? I kind of fell into it. I bought my first house when I was in college. I had a full-time job and I was putting myself through school and just kind of I read rich dad, poor dad, just like everybody and kind of got the idea that I wanted to buy a house and find a way to build wealth. I was studying to be a teacher and I knew that it wasn't going to come from my W-2 job. And so I bought a house.

house and fixed it up and eventually ended up moving out and selling it. And that worked really well for me. And so I kept going. And I just got deeper and deeper into real estate until it just kind of became a no-brainer for me to get my license and start working with other people. But that took a long time. It was about 12 years. I didn't get my license until I was 40. I'm about to turn 48. So I've only been an agent for about eight years. That's wild, actually. So the, so I remember when, so when I was going to school at Cal Poly, we had a teacher that had Rich Dad poured out as required reading. And it wasn't a real estate teacher.

It was like a, it was interesting. It was like a progressive writing teacher. But he was a really interesting teacher with all sorts of different things. But how does read that book? And I remember it being this mental shift difference of how to look at life, how to look at expenses, how to look at growth in business. And it was a pretty cool, life-changing thing. So I could only imagine if you were studying to be a teacher, which is like anti-entrepreneurial.

It is like the opposite of being an entrepreneur as being a teacher and then getting some of that entrepreneur bug. So the, so tell me how you, so you didn't become an agent until you were 40, but you knew at school that you wanted to get into it. So like kind of falling into it seems like there's a lot more to that story in that transition. So by the time you, because you bought your house, you know, you bought your first house in your 20s. And then, and then what was that escalation to go like, okay, real estate, I'm going all, I'm going all in. I'm going to get my license and do this. I'll give you the short version of the story because I know the focus here is talking about agents and processes there. But basically, I build up to them equity in that house.

I moved out and started renting it out and went really well. And so I repeated that process quite a few times. And all my friends were teachers. and they were broke just like I was. And so they started asking me how I was doing what I was doing. And so I started giving them some advice. And of course, I was working with real estate agents at the time and started building up some passive income and a little bit of equity.

And I had so many people coming to me by the time I had done, I don't know, eight or 10 deals asking me how to do it. It kind of was a no-brainer for me to get my license and start giving people, well, getting paid for giving people advice. Right. So you were like helping people buy houses and being like, oh, this would be a good one. you're giving an advice like, oh, this should be one you could buy or something, but then they're going and hire an agent to do it. Yeah, exactly. And I was already having those conversations. There were people

I already had relationships with. And so basically, I mean, my wife in the most loving way, I had skipped from job to job for a while. I had taught for a few years and I worked for some nonprofits for a few years, all pretty low income type jobs. But I'd always struggled because I had an entrepreneurial spirit. I just didn't, I didn't know how to do it. And she, in a very kind way, just pulled me aside. and said, you're a terrible employee. You need to work for yourself. Just because as entrepreneurs, we want to make things better, make things more efficient.

And as a W-2 employee, that's not always a welcome way to behave in a meeting or something like that. And so when I did quit my job and I had support from my family, things really took off for us. Yeah. So that's super cool. So you had learned a lot about investing, but you had learned a lot about investing, but you you'd learned about investing by doing it your way. And it was and it sounds like it started as like

buying a house, living there and then renting it out as you left. And then as you got better and better at that while you had your normal jobs, then you decided to transition into being an agent. But then it seems like investing was your specialty. So then was your first deals that you did? Was it like your first year or two as an agent? Was it helping other teachers by houses? Not necessarily teachers, but I mean, it was investors. And I would, we only market to investors. We mostly work with investors. If, you know, if an opportunity drops in our lap to work with somebody who's cool and they're looking for a primary, that's totally fine. But almost all of our deals are working with investors. And it's kind of a niche that not a lot of real estate agents fill. And so we have,

we've kind of built processes around working with investors and helping them after the deal closes and making sure that that everything is smooth and simple for them and it goes the way that they expect. We're not just cashing a commission check and then out looking for the next person. And so that's worked out really well for us. And as a lot of your listeners know, when you're working with investor, if you can help them find a deal that goes the way that they expect and you communicate really well, they become repeat buyers. And we do deals over and over and over again with clients that have worked with us before. So we don't have to keep going out and drumming up new business all the time. We have a lot of people who come back and do more and more transactions with

that's over and over again. Yeah, I've interviewed several people over the years that was their focus, you know, essentially having investors be clients. And one of the biggest reasons people say that is because if you sell somebody a house they're going to move into, they could be a client for life. And if things go really well, you'll do a deal with them every two or three years. Right. So you might, in 10 years, you might do three deals or four deals with someone who's a,

who's a traditional homeowner or home seller. But if you're dealing with an investor, you could do two or three a month or two or three a year or one every other year because investors don't have a limit. They're not buying or selling at the same velocity of other people. I think there's probably tons of our listeners that are like, man, I would love to start my career as that. Or, hey, my career has slowed down and I want to do that or they want to expand their business to that. So you were able to start as an investor-based agent when you got started. How did you go market and get your name out there for that? Because you said, like, you had teachers and friends that saw you doing it.

So you told them, but how did people know? How did people know that Corby was the agent that could help them get into their investment properties? Well, the biggest thing for us was I kind of skipped over some of the details, but we had started a small property management company when we were investing just really to manage our own property, starting to create a barrier between us and tenants. So it wasn't a personal thing, more of a business transaction. And in Idaho, where we operate, property management is not regulated by the real estate commission. And so anyone can be a property manager.

So for one, we didn't have to have our own licenses. But the benefit of that, in my opinion, is also that there are a ton of really terrible property managers here because there's no barrier to entry. And I always tell people that those other property managers, they do marketing for us. They go out and do a terrible job. They take advantage of their clients. they take advantage of tenants. And we get cold calls all the time from people who have one, two, five, eight units that

have a terrible property manager. And they're looking for somebody else. And so we started taking those on. And as we took them on, I would just build a relationship with those people. And I started talking to them about leveraging their equity, doing 1031 exchanges, all the opportunities that were available to them. And that just blossomed into a lot of business that was dropping in our lap through the property management company.

Okay. So your top of funnel was really starting an ancillary business. So you start a property management company. I own a property management company. I formed mine for the same reason, right? I formed it to manage our own properties. And it got big. And it's not an easy business.

That's not a flashy business. In my mind, it's not even that profitable of a business. Usually it's like a necessary evil. And the reason to own one instead of higher one is really, so you have a little bit more control over like costs and decisions. But it still isn't like really a moneymaker. Now, maybe yours has been different.

But it does seem like, but I never thought of it as a deal flow mechanism. Like for me, it was a necessary evil, but I could actually see agents starting property management companies to do that, knowing that it's going to be hard, knowing that they're going to lose money, but there is a decent chance that if they still perform a good role, that it could turn into, you know, investor leads. And if you end up doing one or two deals a month for investors because you, you know, you lose a thousand bucks a month on your property management building, business or maybe you lose a few thousand bucks a month in your property management business,

but you gain two or three clients every month. I could see that being a really good business plan. So you start in property management. People would come to you and then as a result, you would say, what's your plan with this? Do you want to sell it? Do you want to buy more into other things? And then when they did that, you would kind of help them as an agent to buy or sell. So the, if somebody wanted to go do that, is it, is that really, I guess is it really possible or feasible? If somebody said, okay, I like that idea. I'm an agent. I don't have like, I, I'm not super busy right now.

I want to go try to do that. I guess it was easier when you first started because you had your own houses to like list and rent and things like that. So there was a certain way to stay busy. And then you also said you didn't really try to market as long as long as you're out there and your property. and your name is searchable, people will find you because other property managers do a bad job. I guess what's something about running the property management company you're doing that you would say, like, that you learned or that you would give advice to somebody if they're considering doing that?

Well, a couple things. One, I completely agree with you. Property management is not a terribly profitable business. And ours isn't super profitable either. But I don't look at it as a big income generator. I look at it as passive marketing for transactions. And so we've specifically structured our property management business in a way that's different than other property managers do. As investors, we built it the way we would want to see a property manager operate.

And because of that, we don't make a ton of money, but we build a lot of trust with our clients and we make things really, really simple. And so to me, it's kind of ironic. I know a lot of agents that are listening to this that are out there that might be spending three, five, ten, $15, $20,000 on marketing every month to get themselves two or three new clients. And we have this marketing source through property management that actually pays us a little bit and brings us several leads every single month and high quality leads too. To answer your question directly about if somebody, if an agent were considered doing that because they had time, the property management thing, I would caution people that it's a little it can be difficult to become a property manager because it's a little bit different vibe.

And a lot of agents want to do property management on the side as an extra thing. And it really does demand its own attention. If it's something you're doing on the side and there are emergencies and you're not prepared for those and you know how to deal with them, it can be a huge disaster. And so if you're going to build a property management business, it needs to be its own separate living and breathing thing, not something you're doing on the side. You need to understand the liabilities and how that world works. If anybody's listening to this and they're interested in doing something similar to what we would

done what we've done, I would check into their local Narpum chapter, which is the National Association of Residential Property Managers. It's a very collaborative group. Every major market in the country has one. They meet. They share resources. They'll share anything. They have national conferences. And that really helped us get our feet under us as far as understanding how to run a property management business. So let's change course a little bit on this and go from the client side. So a client comes to you and says, Corby, I see what you're doing. I would really like to get started in investing. How do I get started?

That's got to be the most common thing that an agent, you know, that a customer says or agents that are, you know, that are new out there listening. That's going to be a common question someone's going to ask them. Like how do I get started in investing? So what's your conversation? Well, it changes a little bit based on how the market is. I mean, in 2020 and 2021, when interest rates were two and a half or three percent, it It was really easy to make stuff cash flow, and we had a lot of people just doing conventional

loans, and the sales were really simple back then. And obviously, it's a little bit different now. So it really depends on that person's resources and their goals, and that's one of the things that we pride ourselves on is we understand the, I'm saying weeks, I have a small team, and everybody on my team that's a license is also an investor themselves. And so understanding the different methods, the lowest, lowest barrier to entry, we have a lot of people that come to us that they just want to get started building wealth the same way that I did. They have a low-paying W-2 job and they want to get things figured out.

And so we talked to them a lot about house hacking. And so for the people that are listening, if you may not know what house hacking is, it's essentially just buying a primary residence. So you get a lower down payment. A lot of people can do an FHA or maybe 5% conventional. They can buy a 4plex and put 5% down if they move into one of the units and talk about what that looks like and helping them build equity from there. So we have a lot of people that want to take that as a first step. We also have people come to us that are super high W-2 wage earners and they want to mitigate their taxes a little bit. So we talked to them about short-term rentals

and tax mitigation through cost segregation studies and that sort of thing. A lot of people come to us and they want to invest, they just don't know what that first step is. And sometimes they're multimillionaires and sometimes they're broke. And it's really understanding what resources they have available to them and what the next steps might be.

And so those are kind of the two ends of the spectrum. In between, for those of your listeners that don't do 1031 exchanges or aren't familiar with that, 1031 exchanges on the buy side are it's gold for a real estate agent you have somebody that needs to buy a replacement property they have a certain time frame they need to do it in and and it's really easy to take those on and and from the agent side of things the transaction isn't any different there's a little bit of complication as far as how title and escrow works and working with an intermediary but from an agent side you have a buyer that's ready to go they have cash and they have to close on something in a very specific time frame and so we do a lot of of those too. There's a lot of different angles. It's just a matter of educating yourself and knowing how to approach each person and treating them with, like anybody else, treating them with dignity and respect and earning their trust. Yeah. How can an agent go learn more about the

1031 process? Oh, man. Well, there are tons of websites out there. There are tons of podcasts about it. I know in my market, and I'm sure it's the same in every other market, there are title companies that do free CE classes on 1031 exchanges. Every title company in my market, they have an intermediary on staff. Some of them have an entire 1031 department. What I did when I was first rolling is I just called a couple title companies I worked with and asked if they could connect me with their intermediary. And those people are doing sales just like the other title reps. I'm sure everybody listening, you get calls from title companies all the time with reps that want to sit down and buy you lunch, talk to you about their services and their resources. The intermediaries, it's the same way.

They will take you out to lunch and they will answer every question you have and give you an overview on how 1031's work. And like I said, the beauty of an exchange on the by side is that from the agent's perspective, the transaction is exactly the same as anything else. It's just you have a very, very motivated client. So as an agent now, how many people are on your team? I have four right now. We had as many as 12 during COVID, but ironically, we're doing more business now with four than we did with 12. We're just becoming more efficient. So what's your average volume? We're doing right now between 75 and 80 transactions a year in our market, that's around 35 to 40 million dollars. The average single family home in our market is about $550,000.

And on the investment side, usually our stuff is more starter side. So we do a lot of transactions on single family homes in that 400 range. Multifamilies usually are 700 to a million. Yeah. So you're averaging about 20 transactions per agent in your group, right? Like the weather one does 30, one does 10, just based on your 75 to 80 and there's four people out there. And then your average price point is probably Boise is probably, you know,

higher than the average market in the country, but not much higher with those numbers that you're talking about for there. If someone wants to run a team like you've done, what's some advice you'd give them that you've learned about working with people? I mean, you had a team of 12, now you have a team of four. Somebody's had their successful year and now they're thinking like, hey, should I start to build a team? What advice would you give them? Well, I made the same mistake. Probably a lot of agents are listening to right now is that I got really busy and I just started taking people on. I had a lot of agents reaching out saying they wanted to join the team or that they wanted to work together and I wasn't very discriminatory and what happened was I ended up spending all of my time coaching people who

weren't motivated and weren't putting in the work. And so I consciously scaled back to to four agents. And I'm sure I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with EOS, Traction, Gina Wickman, that sort of thing. Absolutely. Yeah. So we're, we, we, we, We've implemented a lot of that stuff, and we're very conscious about putting people in the right seat and making sure that it's a give and take that we're providing opportunity for them and they're providing resources for us and that they're winning and that we're winning. But really ensuring that they know exactly what their responsibility is and what they should be doing every single day. So we have weekly team meetings and then I have one-on-ones every week with each person on the team. And it's very dynamic. Sometimes people will, over the course of a month or two, they'll show that they have a really great skill that I hadn't

noticed before and maybe they're not in the right seat and there's a better fit for them. There's other responsibilities that they could fit better into. And sometimes they're not owning up to their end of the bargain and they're in the wrong seat or maybe they're not a right fit. But just, I would say if you're going to build a team being very conscious about bringing somebody on whose personality fits your style and that they're going to treat clients the same way that you would treat the clients. I'm very conscious about that now and working with people who understand what the expectations

are and that we have a spot that. that is proper for them. So running a team, making sure it's the right fit as people come on. And then you talked about EOS, right? And I've heard a couple agents say they're doing EOS. I've read traction. I understand Gino's system. But like, so you mentioned a couple of things.

If we were going to try to break that down to a couple different practices without going deep in EOS, you do a weekly meeting with everybody and you do your one-on-ones. As a team leader, what is that weekly meeting consist of? Like, how long is it? Who's on it? And what are your big things that you guys hit? So our weekly meeting is about an hour. It's all the agents.

And then we have property management staff too. So we have four full-time people in our property management staff. And they're all on the call. Everybody is responsible for two or three very specific data points every single week that they're reporting on. And all of those data points feed in to our team-wide goals. And so we work really hard. Our structure is obviously a little bit different than the standard real estate team because of the property management thing. But we try to make sure that if an agent has a goal,

goal and they're working with investors that they understand how that affects the property management staff and their goals too. And we have team-wide goals as well. And so those meetings, everybody's reporting on their metrics. And if you said you were going to do X this week in front of everybody, you have to stand up and say, I did it or I didn't do it. And here's how it went. And we try to keep it pretty simple and pretty quick. And depending on how people are doing on their metrics and they're reporting, that's what the one-on-ones are for. So we don't call people out in the meeting and say, you know, you're failing or anything like that. We just make a note that, hey, this person's struggling in this area.

And then when we have our one-on-ones, we sit down and we talk with them about what's going on here, what kind of support do you need? Do you feel like you're in the right seat? Or do we feel like maybe you're not in the right seat? Or do you have some skills that could be used elsewhere? And we start talking about what that looks like in those one-on-one meetings. And so the one-on-ones are kind of split. They're an hour each two.

And I have the agent fill out an agenda before we meet. And so the first half of the meeting is going through whatever top-of-mind struggles they're having that week. It could be very specific in a transaction or with the client that they're working with or it could be a conceptual thing. And then the second half, we talk about where they need to go in the next week or to achieve their goals or to step it up to the next level. Very simple. Half what's working and then what do you need to do to keep your eye on the ball for those goals? When we focus on our goals, we accomplish them and we don't focus on them.

We don't. Right? So that works and that makes sense. It's kind of like just reminding them of, hey, here is the promise. And then if you had a new agent start this week, right? And they said, I don't even know what I should do for my metrics. They're like, my goal is that I want to get more deals. What are the instruct, like what instructions do you give them, hey, for your first week,

you should be, you know, in a normal real estate environment, it might be, oh, take this set of leads and call them or take this set of expireds and call them or go door knock these houses. So what, what instructions do you give to somebody new that they're starting out just this week? Well, we honestly, I do things and our team does things completely differently than most agents. And I think a lot of people are going to hear this. And they're either going to think that I'm a complete idiot or I'm a genius. But we don't cold call people. We don't call expires. We don't knock on doors.

We don't do any of that kind of stuff. Working specifically with investors, one of the goals I have for everybody on the team is every week, they have to reach out to two local investors that they've never met and take them to lunch or take them to coffee. Twice a week. That's it. Start building that pipeline. And, Gary Keller. Let's just restate that for a second.

Yep. So, hey, the prospect is a little different. You have to reach out and find two investors in our market and have coffee with them. That's one of your metrics for the first week. So somebody joined your team or somebody's trying to become an investor agent somewhere else. They could go add that to their to do list. All right. This week, every week I'm going to find two investors, go have coffee.

I love that as a first metric. So sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to actually just break that down and restate. So that is a goal, an actionable goal to do every week. Totally. And it's so simple. And people will be shocked of what conversion rates look like over time doing such a simple thing. I was about to dive into it. Gary Keller in Shift, I don't remember the exact metric, but it's something along the lines of like 82 or 83 percent of consumers choose a real estate agent based on the first person that they have a conversation with. That's it. And so a lot of people get so bogged down in nailing down some sort of script that they're going to. going to use with people or knowing every detail of how things are going to work. And the reality of it is, is people as consumers, even on the investment side, they work with people that they like and that they trust. And it's really easy to build trust with people if you sit down with them and ask them about their life and their goals for an hour. They may not be ready to buy an investment property

tomorrow or next week, but we get calls from people I had coffee with three years ago that I completely forgot about that say, okay, now I'm ready. And if you do that twice a week, over the course of a year, that's 104 people. And even if you're converting 10% of them, that's 10 deals from having coffee twice a week every year over time. It's a very simple, easy way to connect with people. And every market here, there's a Facebook group for real estate investors. There's probably multiple. There are in-person meetups that you can go to and just talk to investors and shake hands with people there. There's infinite opportunities to just, hey, let me buy you a cup of coffee and learn what you're trying to do. And we're very conscious about we don't do. We don't do something. We don't do

sales pitches with people, we just sit down and ask them about their goals and let them ask us questions about investing and what our opinion is on what their next step should be. Just going back to that original question you asked me about when people want to invest what that first step is. So just knowing how to answer those questions and just making it very casual. You know, and I totally agree with you in the sense that there's a lot of time. There's like this ready aim but never shoot. There's a lot of people or methods that can psych themselves out and say, hey, I need to

come up with exactly what I'm going to say or exactly what I'm going to do. Now, there are times in real estate where having a script ready or a plan ready and being very organized is important, right? So a listing presentation where the person, where it's a high dollar house, they want to make sure that you've done your homework that you've earned the right to be there. And so they're going to want to see your listing presentation of why should they hire you and the comps that you've done, essentially the work that you've done ahead of time to get there.

What I do like about the coffee or the calling or they're just having like I'll get cold calls from people that will just say, hey, I saw that you own investment properties. I'm a new agent. How's that investing stuff going for you? And you'll be amazed at how many conversations are starting to have people and they they'll be like, how did you get so many houses or how do you do that? And so the and it's just these generic conversations, but generic is actually like

positive. They didn't have to prep much. They just started talking and like sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I can see coffee being the same where too much prep is almost, you know, anti. So whether people are door knocking or cold calling or meeting someone for lunch, I also say, don't do the script, you just do the action. You just show up because you're going to have these conversations and you're going to figure it out as you go.

And there's, you know, millions of people in the world. And so you're not going to, you're not going to match your vibe with everyone, but there's going to be plenty that you do by just being you and just being like kind and trustworthy. So those are some of your action items. You review every week. Hey, did you have lunch with your investors this week? Did you have coffee? How did it go?

What else is going on with the market? So I see that being really good. You've been an agent now for seven or eight years. You've been investing in real estate for more than 20. You've built up your own portfolio and your other property management companies and things like that. What's something you wish you would have known when you first got into real estate? that you know now. Like before like the yeah what yeah just anything I was going to say as an agent only but

on the investment side too like what's something that you learned that you're like man I wish I would have known that when I read rich dad poor dad. Oh honestly you already talked about it just that the taking some sort of action is so much more valuable than trying to gather every possible piece of information I talked to so many people newer agents or even investors that they always feel like that that vital piece of information that's going to change their lives is one book away or one podcast away. And that's never true. I mean, the only thing that will change your life is getting out there and taking action. And so the thing I wish I would have known is I wish that I would have taken more action earlier on in both cases. I wish I would have bought more properties

early on when I had, I have three kids and I've got several businesses. And so I have limited resources. And back in the day, I had a lot of time. And I could have been more creative about how I bought properties and done a little bit more back in the day. But that's okay. I'm perfectly happy with where I am, but taking action earlier. And on the agent side, honestly, just that simplicity of just having real conversations with people

and being responsive and honest to me is the number one thing. I run into so many agents that I'm at EXP, and I know most brokerages do, but they have a mentorship program. And so I have new agents come to me pretty often that want to do a mentorship thing. And I don't take them on until we have an initial conversation. And it blows my mind how many people come into this thinking that they're going to immediately make $500,000 a year because they posted on Instagram that they're an agent. And they think everybody's going to use them.

But they ask me about mentorship. And I'll send them a text or an email and say, hey, here's four times in the next two weeks that I can meet you. And it takes them four days to respond to me. I know right away that they're going to struggle because like I'm, mentioned before, people choose their agent based on the first person they have a conversation with. If you're a stranger to that person and they reach out to you and say, hey, I'd like to learn more about what it's like working with you. And you take four days to respond to them. They've already reached out to 10 that are agents. You're done for. It's really important to be fast.

You don't have to have all of the answers. You don't have to have the perfect answer. And I have a little simple trick that I use that when somebody reaches out to me, if I'm on a tour with another client, I'm unavailable for whatever reason and they want information or immediate response, I always respond with a question for them. And so that kind of puts it back on them. But if somebody says that they want to talk to me as soon as possible, I'll respond and say, cool, I'll give you a call as soon as I'm available. Can you give me two talking points that you want to discuss? And that way they've got an immediate response from me and they know I'm going to call them later. Or it might just be as simple as, hey, I got your message. I'm going to dig into that and I'll

respond to you after four or tomorrow at six or in three days, whatever is appropriate. But if people send an inquiry of some kind to you and it goes into a black hole because you think you're doing your due diligence by going out and finding them information but they don't know what's going on they're going to find somebody else yeah yeah quick replies i think is important regardless of what you're doing even if it's like hey i'm i'm yeah i'm at dizzleeland with the kids like the you know so whatever it is i think the quick replies are really really important i have so many people reach out to me in Austin that agents and investors and they'll reach out and say, hey, can we get coffee? Hey, can we talk about stuff? And it's really easy to sort out the, you know,

I guess the good ones from the bad ones are the ones that are worth the time or not. And I actually had a conversation. It was a text conversation that started just a couple days ago where someone was like, oh, I want to introduce you to so and so because they're all, they're an agent, right? And it starts like that. And I, and I'll do enough like of the prompting follow up. And it was like, okay, well, the, and I kind of left it as, yeah, we should, we should do coffee sometime, right? And the, and she immediately went into, all right, I just re-looked at my schedule and next week, I'm going to be gone Wednesday to Friday, so I could do Monday at one or Tuesday at one. And so that was like, we're doing the work. So it prompted me back of, okay, well, I could do

tomorrow or I could do Monday and then we booked a time and a place. It was, she took a lot of action really quick, whereas you wouldn't believe how many people say, hey, you know, can we get coffee? say, yes, let's do that. And then they leave it at that expecting that I'm going to reach back out, say, hey, how about that coffee today? You know, those sorts of things. It doesn't take, I think what you're reminding me to with this, and all agents should actually listen. It doesn't take that much to stand out as an agent, right? Meaning, people reach out to you, Corby, and they say, hey, will you mentor me? And you'll say, here's the two dates. And they wait four days to reply. that's probably more than average, more than often, the average agent's response to things of,

okay, this is important, but I'll get to it later, or unorganized or not prioritized. So agents, that's who you're competing with. So if you just did the reply right away, reply right away with a question to keep the conversation going, which gives you a little bit more time on things that also, you know, creates it more interactive. It was also your example, Corby, of how people came to you for property management just because you were pretty good. You didn't have to advertise. It was just other agents, other property management companies were bad. And it could have been with slow replies, with things like that. Even though there are a lot of agents that people are competing with,

it doesn't take much to be in the best 10%, in the most memorable 10%, and the most reactive 10%. like the and so those are just some fun examples of like yeah though the person that actually just replies to a text quickly and thoughtfully will get the job over someone that doesn't yeah it's it's funny it's not rocket science it's like a it's a very simple business it's not easy you have to do the work but the the game plan is pretty simple yeah started investing oh go ahead oh do you have i was going to say i had an agent that through the the mentorship program that reached out to me a couple months ago and wanted to meet with me and the replies every time I would send him a text or an email about getting together, the replies took several days. He finally showed up at my office and came about 20 minutes later

than he said he was going to and wanted to know why he was struggling. I was like, like you said, it's not rocket science. I mean, if you're taking four days to respond to people and you're showing up late for meetings, who wants to deal with that? There's, it may not be 90% of agents, but 20% of agents out there are going to respond right away and they're going to show up when they say that they do. And so you're going to make the decision very easy for them. Yeah. Yeah, there are probably some, man, there's probably a book in there. There's probably like a series of like seven or eight habits that are simple that if all agents followed them, they would get, you know, more business than 90% of the other agents out there. We'll collaborate and start working on our book right after this.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like replying on time, showing up on time. Like the, you know, being focused during the conversations, like not looking at your phone during the conversation. Like there's so many little things that like would succeed, help agents succeed out there where it's simple but not easy is really the real estate transaction. So you've built up your own portfolio. What's that look like now? Our personal portfolio is I think we're around 18 properties in the Boise metro area. Most of them are single families. A few of them are short-term rentals. We have a few small multis too. So pretty relatively modest. But But we're getting a little bit in scratching the surface on some developments here to the city of Boise last year completely rewrote their zoning code.

We've had a lot of growth in the zoning code we had before was causing, well, property prices here to skyrocket because there's just not a lot of building because of all the problems that we had with the zoning code. And so they rewrote that and it's created a lot of opportunities. So we're doing a little bit of that too. as an investor what's something that you've learned now about properties that you wish you would have known you first got started investing oh that's an easy one and it's not going to be a shocker to anybody out there but i spent so much time if we look at a investment property as a business i was spending all of my time working in that business i was i was the one doing all the maintenance i was out there wiring and plumbing and painting and doing all those things and once i stepped back from that it was a how things just really blossomed because I had time to focus on the things I was really good at. I'm not a good painter. I'm not great with drywall. And that's not a great use of my time. And I'm not saying that I'm above doing those things or people who are great at those, those things. It's actually really impressive to me because a lot of those trades are truly,

it's art. I mean, a drywaller, it's not something anybody can just step up and do properly. So learning where my time was better spent because of my personal skill set and focusing on that and stepping away from doing the day-to-day things because I didn't want to pay a handyman 50 bucks to go do something for an hour. It made a huge difference in our trajectory. It was just hiring people who are good at what they do, paying them a fair wage and developing those relationships. And now they take care of us and we take care of them. And it makes life really easy. Yeah. What are your predictions for the real estate market over the next year? Oh, man. I won't pretend to be an expert in any market outside.

side of hours. But I think just speaking broadly, I think that prices are going to be pretty stagnant over the next year. I'm not expecting to see a huge dip in interest rates. Hopefully we'll see something coming down a little bit. I know we had a little bump in this last week. But I honestly don't, I don't worry too much about what's happening in the greater market. I worry about the relationships we have with our clients and taking care of the leads that come in. And our business has been really consistent. You know, sales and transaction volume last year dropped here by about 30%. and our numbers went up. And I firmly believe that's not because we were necessarily better agents, anybody else.

I think our follow-up and our relationship building is better. And so I know I got off a little bit off track, but I'm a firm believer. And I control what I can control. And so whatever the market's doing is irrelevant to me, because I can control how I follow up with my leads and how I nurture the relationships I have with our existing clients. No, that's that's a brilliant answer. Right? Like you don't care what the market's doing. As long as you're as long as you're focusing on your clients,

then you're going to outperform the market. Totally. It's really easy to say interest rates are high so nobody's buying houses, but that puts me in a victim position where I don't have control over my destiny. And I'm, I don't want to be in a position where I'm not controlling my destiny. So I control what I can control. And that's made a difference for me.

Yeah. I absolutely agree with that. that like the yeah you got a no matter what we're we are dealt this hand this is the rule like we are living inside these rules of the game and so it's about figuring out how to win with the current rules that we're at regardless of that but focusing on your clients I think it's a great thing well this has been this has been a lot of fun I guess um any any final thoughts or things that you think I mean we've you've already you've already hit a bunch of different tips and tactics out there But any last tips that you think every agent should hear or think about if they're trying to succeed as an agent or succeed as an investor?

What's the big parting gift you would give? Yeah. Honestly, we already hit on, but I think the biggest thing really is you don't have to know everything. You don't have to be the best agent. And I mean, obviously not advocating for not being the best possible agent you can and continuing to learn. But just responding to people quickly and with respect. and, you know, to be honest, even as an investor's agent, every once in a while we'll do a deal that doesn't go the way that we thought it was going to go. And so we have a policy with all of our

clients up front that if we do a deal that ends up not working for them in the first two years, that we'll list it for them at no cost. I mean, obviously they're going to pay a buyer's commission, but we'll relist the property. And so everything that we do, we put our skin in the game with our clients and make sure that they know that we want them to win. And if they're not going to win, that we're not going to win. And I don't think that that has to apply only to investors. And every transaction is there, bumps and hiccups and not everything goes perfectly. And if I never want to make money off of something that didn't go great for somebody else. And so, as you guys all know, those referrals are huge in our business.

And so just taking care of clients, responding them quickly and making sure that you're not winning when your client's not. Yeah, that's a great kind of last minute pitch. You have a client ready to buy a house. They start getting nervous. if this doesn't work out. Yeah. And you get to say, no, it might not work out. Sometimes they don't. If it doesn't and you decide you want to resell it, you know, we won't charge your

listing before it. So even though it might, like we'd work for you for free next time. And so we believe that much in it. I could see that being the hump that gets people over and listeners. I hope you're listening to that as a possible way to do that. Corby, you're going to have agents listening to this that are going to want to reach out to you for advice. maybe they have some Boise referrals, maybe they have questions about property management,

or, you know, working for investors. What's the best way they can find you? Yeah, they can just head to our website. It's Boisey Turnkey.com. And that's our handle on Instagram, Facebook. You can DM me or anybody on the team there as well. But Boiseeturnkey.com is the best place to reach us. And I'm a firm believer in giving everything away for free.

So, and that goes for agency. We have clients that come to us and ask a bunch of property management questions, and they're not sure if they want to bring on a property manager, they're self-managing. We give them our lease. We'll give them all the addendums that we use. They can call us and we'll connect them with contractors we use. And I feel the same way about agents.

There's no secret that I have that it's going to harm me to give to anybody else. And so if anybody wants to chat about doing any of the things that our team is doing, I'm more than happy to do it. As a matter of fact, we do free webinars all the time for people to self-manage. And so if anybody wants to reach out to me and ask anything, I will happily share any of my secrets with any. anybody who wants to know. And that's, that is so great.

You know, the, well, listeners, as always, the, you know, this podcast is free. The only thing I ever ask is that you click that little review button to leave a review. If you love us, I love reading those. If you didn't, it's still helpful for me to read those. So go be honest, go leave a review. Tell us what you think about the Real Estate Rockstars podcast and my interview here with Corby. I've also mentioned, too, our real estate rock stars mastermind in Austin in March.

We still have some spots left. I told Corby at the very beginning, I've got five or six agents from Boise that come out every year, including Elliot, who was one of my founding members of our podcast Mastermind. So if you want more information about our mastermind in Austin, go to real estate rockstars mastermind.com. If you want to get on the show, go to Real Estate Rockstars, Network.com and hope to hear from you a lot of different ways. As always, listeners, thanks for listening. Corby, thanks for coming on the show.

Absolutely. Thank you. It's been an honor. I appreciate it, Aaron. All right. Until next time. This podcast is a part of the C-Suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio.com.