KGCI: Real Estate on Air - How to Build a Nationwide Real Estate Network

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

Summary: This episode is a masterclass for top-producing agents and team leaders on how to scale a real estate business beyond local market boundaries. Guest Michael Scanlon breaks down his model for building a nationwide team, focusing on the two key pillars: creating authentic, value-driven relationships with partner agents in other markets, and making strategic investments in systems and technology to support that network. This is a high-level strategy session for those looking to build a truly scalable, national real estate organization.

You're listening to Expansion, the podcast for EXP agents. Expand your skill. Expand your value. Here's your host, Glenn Sanford. Hey, everyone, Glenn Sanford here, founder of EXP Realty. And today on the Expansion podcast, I have Michael Scanlan. He's actually out of the Chicago land area, been in real estate for relatively short. period of time, I think five years is what I have of my notes here, but literally is putting up

some major numbers, kicking butt and taking names in Chicago, has built a great team, and it's going to be great kind of learning what's been working for him and maybe, you know, how, you know, you might look at sort of approaching some of these same approaches to add to your business. So, Michael, thanks for jumping on and great to connect. I don't know if we've met in person yet, but if not, great to meet you. Yeah, no, great to officially meet you as well. I've seen you at EXPCon, but you're a busy man, so I never want to bother you.

But super happy to be chatting. Awesome. So, you know, you've been in business, I say five years because that's in the business. That's about when people start to actually get success in the business, you know, having sort of stubbed their toes and kind of figure out what, doesn't work until they start to figure out what does work. What's been your journey? How have you done? And obviously, how did you get to where you're at, you know, selling, you know,

hundreds of homes a year and building a good-sized team? Yeah, it's funny because I never really intended to sell real estate. I wanted to be an investor and just join DXP on the chance that I might do a couple deals here or there and just do mostly deals for myself. and realized pretty quickly that there was a couple of different niches that I could attack. One, I work with a lot of investors, two to four unit and, you know, the like and single family investors as well. But having been an investor and having my own portfolio, just realized pretty quickly that there's not a lot of people who know how to mentor new buyers on those types of

properties. So that was one aspect. And that's been a large part of my career. But in terms of how I expanded so quickly, a lot of it came from relationships. And I try to tell, I'm a mentor with ex-P as well, I try to push being relationship-oriented and just making as many connections as you possibly can. I can't tell you the amount of people that I've met at EXPCon through workplace, that, you know, when they have questions, I have answers. When they offer referrals, I say yes. I say yes to basically everything. I think, you know, my first two years in real estate, I probably put 50, to 20,000 miles per year on my car, just driving everywhere. It didn't matter if it was a million dollars or $80,000. I was just driving everywhere, doing business for everyone. And that eventually

proliferates. Somebody refers you their cousin and then their cousin has a friend that wants to buy and then that friend has friends that want to sell. And so it's just been, you know, that kind of process of creating my own leads through the relationships that I garnered basically all through EXP and, you know, ways that that EXP has connected me to other agents. Oh, very, very cool. So, so would you, you, you've kind of shared that that's a, now a good portion of your business comes in through that kind of referral relationship.

Is that what I understand? Yeah. Yeah, we do tons of referrals. But, you know, a lot of the business now has come from people that we've met through the referrals. So, you know, John refers me to, you know, his cousin Mike. and then Mike refers me to people because, you know, Mike's just a home seller and then Mike has friends that live in the area that also want to sell. And if I hadn't taken that first

referral and, you know, given up to 25, 30 percent, I would have never gotten the additional deals after that. And now there's so many agents that I've done referrals for that continue to come back and give me new referrals. And so I've always, again, pushed for being very relationship-oriented. I've made good relationships with, you know, people within. EXP within, you know, our revenues department within institutional seller services. And we're doing, you know, a lot of business for those departments at EXP. And a lot of that was just founded in the fact that before those places even existed within EXP, you know, there's a relatively new departments in the last couple of years. I had formed relationships with, with those people and just was always

willing to help when there were, you know, a couple referrals here and there in those departments. And so I've just pushed for every avenue of your life, whether it's your sphere of influence, whether it's other agents, whether it's people hire up at EXP. If you have a chance to create a relationship, do it because it turns into so much more. Right. So when you think about your business, how, and I'm making a guess here, but based on how you described it, it feels like you've got, we'll call it a customer journey or consumer journey that you mapped out for various different personas and you figured out a way to build

that into your team. Is that fair? Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, we've got a couple of different, you know, avenues. And again, we've got the referrals. We've got, you know, the lot of relationships that we've developed with investors. And investors are a great niche because they continue to buy over and over again as long as you get them good deals. And you know, you make sure that they're protected. You know, like I said,

the institutional seller services and revenues department. You know, we've gotten to a point where there's a lot of deals that are coming from stuff that, you know, was originally not organic, but has now started to become organic in a sense. Now, how big is your job? team? How is it structured? So we are at 29 now, mostly in the Chicagoland area, but we do have a couple in Indiana and then one in Florida. So I'm licensed in all three states. And so we've tried to,

you know, carefully expand our footprint as much as we can without going too much over the top. You know, I want to be a bigger team. I know that there are some huge teams at EXP. And, you know, eventually I want to get there, but I didn't want to grow faster than I could handle. And so, yeah, we've tried to expand into areas that we can get leads for our team members. That's one of the biggest things is, you know, we teach them how to be agents and I try to teach them things that I've done. And that's all great, but I still want to be able to provide them leads. So, yeah, for now we're a pretty heavily lead-based team where we give leads to our team members, and then we teach him how to work them.

Okay. Now you mentioned, obviously, revenues, internal referrals from agents and your investor community. What's your primary lead generation strategy? Is that it? Or do you have websites or using social media? Are you doing PPC marketing? Are you grabbing Zillow leads?

What's that look like? So it's a mix of three things. One of them is the revenues and institutional services. We're doing a couple hundred listings team in Chicago for some dispositions. The other is referrals. Now that's led to a good amount of business, but it trickles. It's here and there. It's not consistent, but it's relatively common that we'll get referrals.

And then the biggest one, other than those two, has been bigger pockets. And bigger pockets shows up to EXPCon quite regular. particularly been a featured agent. Myself and my partner Jake have been featured agents for them since they started their featured agent program, which they now push at EXPCon. We were there first and we've been able to take leads from them and it's a really good lead source for investors, a lot of high intent and those investors, you know, we pay for those leads. They're not back in referral based and those will turn into sometimes nothing and sometimes

You know, we've had investors that come in and we pay 60 bucks for a lead. And then three months later, they've closed on $6 million worth of commercial property. It's, you know, hit or miss at times. But over time, that has been probably our most successful lead generation source. The other stuff, there's some amazing agents with marketing, with PPC, with SEO. There's so many ways that you can attack this industry. And that's one of the things that I've been humbled by because I don't know. a lot of what I don't know.

And it always amazes me to hear other agents who do things really, really well. That eventually someday I hope to add to my repertoire, but for right now, it's been just grinding it out through those, basically those three sources. Okay. Yeah, no, that's great. And then what's your infrastructure look like? What's your operations team look like and the folks behind the scenes. means. Those are some of the most important people. So I laugh because we had our admin out of town

last week and I feel like we were going to fall apart. We have a full-time admin and then we have a full-time Inside Sales Associate who co-calls for us. But more than that, organizes our bigger pockets leads, speaks to our bigger pockets leads. And those are just the glue that holds everything together. I feel like nothing would get done, especially without our admin, because there's so much day-to-day transaction coordination. There's so much paperwork when you're doing high volume, like our team is fortunate to be doing. And so that is the backbone of everything that we're doing is those two. Okay. Awesome. So you mentioned that the different sources of Ligian. How are you organizing that. What CRM are you using? We use Lofty, which was formerly Chime. We switched over to it

about a year and a half ago, and we also noticed soon after that that EXP had adopted it as one of theirs. I think it's super powerful. It has a lot of features of different things like MailChimp, for example. It has basically all the features of MailChimp, but built into Lofty. There's dialers in there. There's smart plans. There's so many ways that we can track what our clients are doing, what they're seeing, if they're opening emails. It provides a lead score for them. And so that would, we have a, we're probably at 36,000 clients in our database at this point.

And so that is absolutely paramount. We would be completely lost without that. And I think that has been one of the biggest tools for, you know, organizing our client base, especially with investors. When we get pre-market, you know, pre-market, you know, sellers that just don't want to go to market, we, you know, get their permission. We can sometimes blast it to our sphere through there. And we've got everybody segmented into their different buy boxes.

And it's allowed us to do a lot of things that, you know, we otherwise wouldn't have been able to do and make money off of. Awesome. Have you leveraged express offers at all as a lead gen tool? Yeah. Yeah, I was very excited. I think I first got my Express offers certification back in 2020. It was one of the first things I did with EXP.

And so, you know, we, there are some niche buy boxes on there sometimes. A lot of it is fixer upper type properties. And we're often dealing with larger, you know, turnkey, two to four unit type properties. But I think we submitted one maybe four days ago that came in as a lead. And yeah, we've tried to leverage that as much as we can whenever we get, you know, any of the properties that fit the buy boxes of our eye buyers here in Illinois. Yeah, it seems like, you know, and this is just me putting my entrepreneur hat on. But I've given the type of, type of business that you build, it seems like using Express offers

as a lead funnel tool saying, hey, we have, you know, I don't know how many investors there are on the back end of express offers, but there's obviously a number. And then you've got investors. It seems like, you know, between the two, and of course, you can certainly throw in, you know, other eye buyers in there in the mix, but it feels like that could be a way to drive people into a funnel. Hey, we've got access to all all the eye buyers that are exist in the marketplace, plus we have a X number of additional buyers that aren't even that some of whom will pay more than you will get from one of the other eye buyers. If you want to learn more and you're thinking about selling your home, fill up this

form and have it drop into that funnel. It seems like that would be a great way to generate leads. That's what I've always thought of express offers was, is not really the marketplace that we have to build to actually have a legitimate offering, but it's really the front end to be able to generate leads. So have you played with it from that perspective? Yeah. So, you know, again, admittedly, I'm not the best at marketing, but that has always been a part of our conversation. And that's where, you know, the platform has become something that, of course, I want to make sales on there. But the ability to have to have. have a conversation with an investor who, you know, takes a look at their property and says,

I don't want this going on the open market because it's so dilapidated that I'm embarrassed. I don't want other people in the neighborhood to see it. You know, whatever the reasoning, there are people that don't necessarily want to go to the open market or they want just a cash offer before they test the open market. The ability to tell them, well, I can get you, you know, potentially cash offers in the next 24 to 48 hours if you, you know, give me permission because of this platform that we have available to us. And now if it doesn't work out, then, you know, we'd love to talk further about potentially getting this listed on the open market or sending it to our buyer list.

And so we've done that on a number of occasions. I've got tons of properties that I've submitted, you know, into Express offers. And, you know, there's not always going to be a fit for everybody. Some of the I buyers are busy with other projects and they're not available, you know, to purchase certain properties or it just doesn't. fit for them for whatever reason, but it's a way to get a foot in the door a lot of times. And so even though I haven't specifically advertised it, every single time I have a conversation with an investor, you know, a seller that has a property that fits the buy boxes in there.

That is one of the things that I'm able to offer them just because the EXP has it as an offering here. Right. One of the other things that we have, and I need to go back and revisit it with the team because I know that it's changed some of its focus. over the years, but one of the things that we had investors on the back end and actually putting in their buy boxes on the platform. And then anytime somebody bought a property on the back end, whoever brought that investor

in, no matter where the deal got sourced, there'd be a little bit of compensation for basically adding more investors to the back end of express offers. So it sounds like you've got a lot of investors. there's just something to think about and explore and certainly ping me offline if you need some help kind of working through that. Yeah, and that's something that I've talked to Dawn about actually in the past. I, you know, I've always thought it was a great idea. I know that initially because of the platform, you know, and the way that it needed to be built,

there were thresholds for, you know, the amount of capital required and all of that. But yeah, I think there's a ton of further potential in that platform that are in there that maybe do two, three deals a year, but would absolutely buy a lot of the stuff that, you know, some of the bigger buyers just don't have the capability for or the margins don't work for them because they need 60 percent and the smaller buyer only needs it 70, 80 percent. You know, LTV on it, there's so much potential there. About that program so many times over the last few years and thought, you know, there's so many more people I would love to have on there.

Awesome, awesome. Well, obviously you've been successful. You've knocked to the park. You went from investor to running one of the larger teams, certainly in your market, if not all of EXP. And you've done it in a short period of time. What would be a piece of advice that you would give to an agent that says that that's their jam? And what would be some advice that you would give them to help them,

scale their business to potentially become an icon themselves. I think there's two things that I would absolutely tell them. One, your mentor, ESP university, wherever it is, you can learn to become an agent. But the knowledge that you have, if you've legitimately been an investor for years, is going to carry a lot of weight. You know, there's going to be a learning curve, how to write contracts, how to take out clients, how to, you know, do some negotiation with other realtors. But there's so much of that stuff that they've already done that they can learn pretty

quickly. And I think that that allows them to get into a market where they can better advocate for other investors than somebody who maybe has never invested, but, you know, has been an agent for a couple years and has read some books on it. And so that would be, and you just need to learn to become an agent because you can mentor these people read in books. And then the other thing that I would tell them is even though they're an investor or whether you're not, whether you're an investor or not, never say no. I think that that's super important. I've said yes to everything that I've done. I've done deals, you know, in the multi-millions this year, I also closed a $9,999 deal that I did personally. I didn't even hand off to a team member. I think that if you can just say yes to everything,

no matter what source it comes from, whether it's a referral, whether it's a, you know, back-end paid, you know, referral service, whether it's, you know, a friend of a friend, just say to everything. And when I got too busy to handle all of the yeses by myself, that's when I started a team. And I've continued to expand the team because I say yes to everything. And I want to make sure I have people in place. And I take on. But there's nobody that I'm not willing to help. I think everybody should be helped if they have an interest in real estate or if they have a need in real estate. And there's always going to be a way for you to handle all of those. As long as it's within your knowledge base. If you don't work with investors, don't say,

yes to investors. But learn and work with investors. But yeah, I would say that's my biggest thing. So your default answer is yes or yes. Yes. Yes. Yes or yes. Somebody on the team will say yes after I say yes. We will always help. There you go. Well, good stuff. Well, Michael, thank you so much for jumping on. sounds like you're you love to connect with agents you're mentoring them you're helping them how would somebody get connected with you if they wanted to ask a question or check in etc if you're with the xb i'm workplace messenger michael scanlin realtor on insid at my exb email michael dot scanlan at xb realty dot com awesome good stuff michael thanks again for jumping on and thanks everyone for listening.

I know this was inspirational for me just to hear how Michael's knocked out of the park, and hopefully it was for you. And until the next podcast, thanks for listening. You've been listening to Expansion. Tune in every Tuesday for new episodes. Thanks for being the best part of EXP.