KGCI: Real Estate on Air - How to Outsmart a Tough Real Estate Market

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

Summary:This episode features a tactical discussion with Michael and Ben Weisman, who share their formula for thriving in challenging real estate markets. They emphasize the importance of doubling down on fundamentals, such as lead generation and communication, rather than chasing new, unproven tactics. The conversation provides actionable advice on how to use market shifts to your advantage by becoming the trusted, knowledgeable expert and focusing on high-leverage activities that build long-term success.

Welcome to Real Estate Riches, where Kathy Burns empowers realtors to achieve the success they've always dreamed of. Starting her career at 55, Kathy built a thriving business that offers the freedom of time and financial independence. And now she's sharing her journey to help others do the same. Whether new to the industry or looking to level up, this channel is your hub for proven strategies, inspiring stories, and the tools you need to grow your real estate business. Join Kathy each week to explore global opportunities, successful systems. and expert insights to take your career to the next level. Get comfortable. Pick a video and start learning.

Your journey to success starts now. Hey, everybody. It's Kathy Burns here on Real Estate Riches, and I have two exciting guests today, Mike and Ben Wiseman, and I'm excited to have you guys. Hi. Hey, Kathy.

Kathy. So one of the exciting things I've been watching these two, because Ben, he's all, over the place with Google marketing that I see, which has just been staggering because I see the types of groups that are coming to him to learn from young guy, impressive, and here's his dad who's just selling real estate like crazy. So give a little backstory. I'll start with you, Mike. You're the leader of the gang here with the family, father and son, right? Yep, that's right. So like you mentioned, I have six kids. Five are licensed in real estate. And like I say,

jokingly, when they're not killing each other, we sell 75 homes a year or so, which is, there's some truth to that as far as when they're not killing each other, and we do sell a lot of homes. But I started six years ago, another brokerage, was at KW, and made a move about four years ago now over to the XP platform. Yeah. So came into real estate as an investor, got a license, open up doors, but it would be easier. And it was. Then as I got into the process, and I said, I'm a marketing and sales and marketing background. I said, this is something that we could probably build a business on. And I've got these six kids that are growing up.

And Ben and losing the bigger pockets, he said, Dad, you know, real estate is really a big thing. We should look more at it. So we started the investing and they got the license. And then my other son got interested, my oldest son, Ben's older brother. And he was in Jersey at the time. And so he got licensed and joined. And from there, we built up a production team.

So it became one of the top performing teams in our state in Maine. and really grew it. And then Ben joined, think about a couple years in. I don't know how many years ago, he'll tell you when he talks. He brought this Google marketing aspect to what we were doing here, which really was a game changer for us and really moved this from the chasing the leads to people calling us. And so it's been a great ride.

So really. Yeah. That's what I've been so curious about because I see Ben all over the internal workings of the EXP. And I'm like, he's doing something out there. He's really helping agents. And that's really the thing. So, Ben, tell us a little about your backstory, how you evolve, because I know that you've stepped out of production because of it.

Yeah. So actually, I started in Denver. During COVID, we first started, we drove out to Maine to move back, to move to Maine. The plan was, right, go to Maine, you know, get settled. Literally, we know COVID was going to hit. And like many others, you know, plans got changed. We were supposed to go out there and be a locksmith in Maine. didn't work out people were not getting locked out because they weren't going anywhere so they had nothing to do with

in Denver as a locksmith but it's also where I got all the skills and the Google knowledge was from being a locksmith so I came out to Maine and originally I just went to a regular path or regular I say expired

Fisbozer and my dad kind of taught me his world and I think in my dad's first year he closed 22 deals off expired so he trained me up to make these phone calls in Maine I got licensed, we left locksmith behind, moving to real estate, joined the team with my dad, Fisbeau expires, and then probably about half a year into being in the team,

about half a year in, probably three and a half years ago now, almost four years ago now, Google came out with local service ads for realtors. And when I saw this come out, I immediately knew we had to jump on it because I saw what it can do as a locksmith in Denver. I mean, we made all our money off for service ads as a locksmith. I'd work with 10, 15, 30 people a day from Google, inbound calls.

So for the time of the day, we got to do, we got to get on. He was like, nah, I'm making my expired calls. I was like, nah, I'm not so sure about that. Online stuff is. And then so eventually. I think I didn't really ask you, and I just set it up. Yeah. And then had you kind of started doing it.

And then we ticked it on. we started, start implementing the things I learned as a locksmith. Google turned it on and it blew us away. We didn't expect it. I think we'd close like 30 deals in the first six months. 30 deals and six months. And half buyers and half sellers. It was people going to sell and calling to buy. Well, that's what amazed me when we were talking earlier and you said, because I'm thinking it's all buyers. And when you said, no, it's almost 50-50, I'm thinking, wow. Because ideally we want those sellers, right? That's right. Yeah. You got to look at it. Oftentimes, it

sways with the market. Because with a spide and fizzbo, you can go out there and choose to call and reach out with those people to buy or the sellers. With local service ads, whoever's looking for a realtor is who you're going to get. So in a stronger seller's market,

you're going to get more listings, and buyers, you may get more buyers, but either way, it's still, it's 60, 40, 40, 60, 50, 50, but it usually swayes a little bit with the market. Yeah, and you pay based on their clicks, not on like a newspaper ad like used to think of years ago, right? You pay by the call. By the call? Yeah. Oh, the call, not even a click. No, yeah, that's the beauty of it. So Ben describes as like a billboard that you don't pay

for until someone dials your phone number. Oh my goodness. Yeah, it's a new technology at Google developed using a voice number. So they put their number on the front page and it forwards the number you give it. So Google tracks that call. So in most markets, it's like $35-ish a call, $40 a call, but we close 10% of them when they first call in less than 100 days. And it's 40,000 a call. So if you do the math, we're running, we're about 12 times our investment. So if we spend 400 bucks to get to a closing table in our market, you know, it's an average commission check of 8 to 10,000, or $500 is great. That's like a, you know, that slot machine in Las Vegas drop in, 500 bucks and make 10,000. Yeah. Yeah, I can see a non-capping agents, non-hire producing agents feel

fear around that, you know, that 30-some dollars. But a capping agent who's used to treating this as a business will say, you know what, I'm going to invest. I'm going to take X amount of dollars. I'm going to give this a shot and see. And also it becomes your people skills too, which is also part of business. And I think that that's an important piece of it. So you found great success, so much success, Ben, that you actually were able to step out of production because you're teaching people this? Yeah, so it just started off where people would just say, you know, within the brokerage, people would say, oh, who should I talk to?

My Google's broken, who should I talk to? And people just kind of just point to me and say, oh, you know, go talk to Ben. And then people would ask on groups and I respond. And people would have started kind of coming to me for help. And it got to some point where I was helping. people like too many free kind of helps and i was happy to do it but at a certain point it gets really hard to maintain that that's when i saw just a really big a big a big knowledge understanding gap then we saw to fill and we you know we kind of start this thing off

and you know we didn't call it anything at first it was just join our in our google a google program and we set up for you we have coaching and training we teach you how to do these things at first I was doing one-on-one coaching with clients. Again, that got too much. I was running out of time, so we didn't work to group. And it shifted and changed over time. But the main reason why it grew was just because people were just coming to us for help. And we saw an opportunity to help a lot of agents.

And we were very successful with it in Maine. And we started figuring out that we can take what we did in Maine and duplicate it almost anywhere. And in the day, it's an algorithm. It's not rocket science. So if we can help them work with the algorithm, it's a very basic algorithm. Once you get nailed down with our systems, we can help a lot of agents. Yeah. And so it's nationwide.

You can do this. So no matter where, so you basically, because you saw this and you had some experience in this, it really helped you to find your niche, right? And then step out of production, yet you're still with the XP. You can still do outgoing referrals. You have, and you're an asset to the team. Are you still part of your dad? team here?

Technically, I think I am, right? Yeah. Yeah, I run the team. I run the team LSA, Google stuff. And say, I didn't know what LSA was before, so explain that. Yeah, LSA just stands for local service ads. So that's the type of ads. Yeah, so Google local service ads.

That's the billboard ad. That's, so people often know like paper click, right? Yeah. You see ads, right, that everyone knows. So LSA is just another version of PPC. PPC. So there are companies out there that help run PPC ads. We help agents run LSA ads. Okay, great. It's easy to explain what we do. Yeah. The initials are heard for some of us that have no clue what you're talking about. Yeah. Well, this sounds really exciting. So, and you're saying

that, Mike, that it really took your business off because you've only been in real estate for six years and you're killing it and you this really helped you take off yeah like ben said my first year at kw when i got licensed at you know again i'm in mid-50s so i'm not this is a third or fourth or fifth kind of business i'm a serial entrepreneur right i've never so i'm always starting things and so when we got licensed and it was originally just wanted to get deals right because ben said let's do real estate investing listen to bigger pockets so i got the license to open the doors and then someone said, well, you can do this thing, this thing called expires, and expires, you can call them.

So I come from a marketing sales background. I was a vice president of Morgan Stanley Smith, Corny, which is a financial advisor, which is a fancy way to say a financial salesperson, and I built my business, you know, a $50 million book of business when I left it in 2015 on the phone. Now you can't cold call with selling stocks or bonds anymore. That's pretty much been eliminated as a sector. because of just compliance issues, but it works in real estate. So someone said, here, get this subscription to this service.

It gives you all the expired listings. Here's a script. These people need to sell their houses. They tried once. This is great. So I listed 21 properties in year one, just putting on a headset and dialing the phone for two hours a day, making appointments every afternoon in the morning for the afternoons.

And then, again, doubled that in year two to about 40. And then we wanted to really, I wanted to grow something. bigger, but I also just want them more of my independence, right? So for your folks that are out there and, of course, they're at EXP, that's what for an entrepreneurial thinking person, especially someone, I think in our age, has been through, that's been a career person that's maybe been in corporations in a corporate world. This, although we're a corporation, is not a corporate world. It doesn't.

Right. I never feel like I'm in any kind of bureaucracy or corporate structure. On the contrary, I feel like I own the place. And you probably do too, right? I feel like a CEO. Yeah. And in a very real way, we always. are all CEOs, right? That was, you know, Glenn Sanford's vision, right, that every agent would be

a partner with him. Right. And it really fulfilled that. So that really is getting better and better. Yeah. So brand, we branded ourselves, real property team. We still are branded that way. So we were able to brand ourselves, run that we want to run it, with the support we needed without any kind of overarching, got to do this, this way, got to do it that way. In the contrary, everything we needed to do, as long as it was allowable in our state, we were supported, right? and we had that. So when Ben brought in the, like he said, when he came up here and brought him the Google Local, that's just like, you know, we're able to get, we basically, we peaked at about 100 deals, 97 deals, I think, at the COVID peak when they had all the team running

and unfold. And, you know, the calls would go out to the agents. And it's more than just knowing how to set it up, which is a part of the algorithm. But what we did is we created tools, like ways to handle the calls come in, so they don't get missed and ways to get reviews. they don't get missed. And so, so Ben through you're working with programming, different programs, was able to build us really a system. So it's now it's tools and training, right, that allows an agent. And we've had agents come in with, you know, zero and are literally closing two or three deals a month inside of 90 days. You know, as agents, as agents our age, I'm thinking of like Darren, whatever people come in. He's, you know, didn't have any sales before he started working with Ben.

and now he's a great referral agent and he's got in two states and so it just takes that willingness to like you said put your toe in the water right? Well and for agents that are starting over like I did and you did to be able to have tools

that actually work because we get thrown a lot of stuff I mean I have thrown money at the wall and have wasted my money so much everybody has and I think because we're salespeople we're also I'm easily swayed. Same. Same. I've spent

before I came to the AXP, my tech spend was close to $2,000 a month, $1,500 a month to run my team. And then there was, you know, $1,000 a month going to PPC. I have a database of like 18,000 leads, but they weren't closing because they're all low quality, PPC,

you know, you need an ISA, you need an Insight salesperson to follow up or something. Now, AI is helping with that now, and that's something that we're working with as well. And we are... Oh, I was going to ask you, Ben, I thought you did something with AI as far as your system? Yeah, so we use, we teach more of the AI stuff.

Like, within our coaching, within our community group and our coaching, we'll teach all about AI as well. It's also one piece that we're passionate about using. It's an AI component, but it's not our focus, but it is becoming a focus in what we're teaching within our community as well. Okay. Yeah, I'm a big fan. I mean, it's nonstop over here going on my other monitor.

Well, this has been great. So what would you say, I think for me, what I've picked up from this is that we've seen someone who started in the industry just six years ago. Sun comes along, recognizes a pattern within Google that he could really help the business with, masters it, and to the point where he can step out of production, how old are you? I mean, that sounds insulting, but you're young. You're fine. I get all the time. I'm 28.

See? 28 years old and steps out of production. I'm 74 and just starting to step out of production. Every agent wants to step out of production. That's right. And you're showing a way to get the business in if they were at EXP, then we could show them another way. But the point is you're really showing them how to get deals.

In one of the really toughest years, this has been, 2004 has been one of the toughest years and 30 years in real estate. So if you could help somebody, this is powerful. Yeah. one of our kind of lines we use were how are we able to still get our clients some of the best deals in even in the worst year in real estate we can still yeah it's been slower right every lease has been slower but it's still we're like our clients are bringing in deals or closing deals off google they're working and it always comes back around so even if you're fearful of

no deals right now or slow right now. All these are aides now, they're all slowing down. It always happens. They slow down. Now is the time to capitalize on these types of lead sources, especially into technology, how it's shifting right now, like going more towards technology. Yes.

It's a perfect time. On top of that, you have so many other regulations now coming in on cold calling, prospecting, expire anything in New York, can't call expired listens anymore. Oh, I did not know that. Yeah. It was put on in COVID, never taken off.

Never taken off, yeah. Yeah. You have to have, if you're calling an expired listing with a certain guideline without like a specific listing that you have. A specific buyer, yeah, signed buyer. A signed buyer agreement that you have to look at the buy house is a huge fine in New York right now. So it's getting more, more important to look for these technologies.

And it's going to get, call expires, it's getting hard and harder. People aren't answering phones. This span of TCPA, 10. DLC, it's all making it much harder. Those buyers and sellers aren't going to stop selling. They'll just find agents and other methods. Where are they going to go? Right. I always tell people, if you need a plumber, Kathy, if you don't know one, where's the first place you go? Well, I have a different source, but I would go to Google if I didn't have that source. Correct. If you ask you for a lawyer, if you didn't have a lawyer, right, almost everyone,

if you remember 100 people and new a plumber themselves, first would be Google in their head. Yeah. That's a lot of our sellers are out of state because they inherit property. They have investment property they bought. They've moved out of the area. So they're going to just, they go on to Google and they search an agent in Maine or search an agent in certain towns in Maine. They find us. They see the reviews, right, which we help our agents collect, and they call us. And so these are people that are not shopping necessarily. Once you get the phone call, you have a good conversation. I've got obviously your ability to have a conversation with them and to demonstrate your value

is important. So we talk about the risk factor. It's fairly low because you're only paying for the phone call. Yeah, that's the big piece. Yeah. If you know it's $40 a call, but national numbers, you know, we have tens of thousands of leads. We've tracked. And we know that it's about 10% closing conversion to the closing table from first call. Well, then you just count in the calls, right? So 40 times 10 is 400. There's a sale in there in the next 95 days because those are reservated to go, bottom of the funnels so it is a way that an agent that can come in with relatively little risk right and be able to scale their business right so i love it i love it well you guys have been great i've been wanting to have you on here i didn't know exactly what we talk about but i loved

everything that we did that's great i'm that you had us on so feel free to reach out of anything for us so thanks everybody for watching and we'll have their contact information in the feed so that you can out to them which I would consider doing. Thanks everybody. Thanks, Kathy. Thanks. So thanks for joining me on this episode of Real Estate Riches. Wasn't that great? I'm sure you've got a nugget or two. I know I did. So if you liked it, please subscribe below, share it with everybody, make some comments. We really find that invaluable. And if you're thinking that you would love to talk about this a little bit more, let's schedule a business strategy call. I'll have the link below. Let's see if we can't mastermind together.

and see if we can't empower each other. That would be great. So until next time, signing off. Hope to see you on the next one.