KGCI: Real Estate on Air - JaLynn Manser

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

You're listening to Expansion, the podcast for EXP agents. Expand your skill. Expand your value. Here's your host, Glenn Sanford. Hi, everyone. Glenn Sanford here, founder of EXP Realty. And today I'm talking with Jalen Manser, a three-time icon agent, technically out of Phoenix, Arizona. But I think you're in Spain.

Jay-LIN. That's right. That's right, Glenn. And thanks so much for having me. And yeah, so first, you know, congratulations on your success. It looks like you've got a great team. They're putting up some great numbers, even while you're over across the pond, so to speak. Maybe you could just share a little bit about your background, when did you get into real estate?

Where have you been? And then what led you to EXP? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Glenn. And first and foremost, I wanted to say thank you to my amazing team that I have back home, as well as my husband who is next to me if I couldn't have had the success that I have without any of them. So very blessed to have an amazing team. But a little bit about me in my background, I essentially was a stay-at-home mom for 14 years, didn't have any job skills.

I all of a sudden found myself becoming a single mom with three young daughters to teach. take care of, didn't have a clue as to what I was going to do to support myself. So I thought, well, why not get a job at Starbucks as a barista? That sounds fun, right? Like, who doesn't love coffee? So I got a job at Starbucks. I literally walked in to the Starbucks location. This was in Riverside, California. And I told the manager, I'm like, you're going to hire me today. And he did. So like, maybe I have a way with words. I don't know. But through that experience, I had an encounter. with a customer one day and through that conversation I ended up getting into real estate and about four months later I basically just jumped in with both feet full force I just went

out and talked to everybody that I could and was very successful my first year became rookie of the year I was with Keller Williams back then and just made a choice that I was going to be successful and about a year later after I had joined Keller Williams I was nearing the end of my one-year anniversary with Keller and, you know, quickly realized that I did not want to give them so much of my hard-earned money, right? Paying them $30,000 for a year, too. It just didn't really make mathematical sense to me. And so a good friend of mine who had just left Keller Williams and he said, hey, Jay Lynn, let's go to lunch. And so he took me to lunch and he told me about the EXP Realty platform. And for me, I'm the type of person where I will jump in and then figure it out later.

It just sounded too good to be true. I'm like, sign me up. So I signed up like literally five minutes later. And it's the best decision I have ever made in my life. So thank you for founding this amazing company, Glenn. Oh, no. Thank you for being here. You know, I was with Keller had some reservations myself, which is why I left and went independent.

and then ultimately, you know, at the end of the day, just being an independent brokerage by itself doesn't really do a whole bunch. They call them broker owner, a broker owner for reasons. Right. And so, you know, I wanted to figure out what could truly scale, what can solve the biggest pain points for true professionals in real estate. And that was kind of the mission. So obviously it seems to be working. Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing.

I just wanted to share something with you real quick, just in case it doesn't get asked, but I wanted to just let you know what EXP Realty has done for me and my family because I'm a high producing agent. And with the equity program, the stock awards, I was able to pull out such a large amount of money from my stock account. I actually purchased a home. for my mother in Tucson, Arizona.

And without EXP Realty, I would have never been able to do that, or it would have taken me a lot longer anyway to save up that much money. So I am just so grateful for you in this company. And like, how amazing is that? Yeah, it's, it can be a tearjerker sometimes hearing all the stories of what people have been able to do that might have been, and in some cases, truly would have been out of their reach, given the circumstances they had at their previous brokers.

So, you know, it's pretty awesome. So congratulations on that and to do something there. So you've been kind of involved, I think, a little bit with some of Grant Cardone stuff, the Great American Speak Off. You were a semi-finalist. Yes. How did this all come about? Oh, my goodness.

So I'll try and keep it as brief as possible. but I basically went along to support my husband. I like, mind you, I was petrified kid on stage. I liked that. I wanted no part of that. I definitely don't consider myself to be a public speaker by any stretch of the imagination. Just like thinking about getting up on that stage, I, you know, I felt like I was going to hurl. Basically, like, no, no, no, no.

So I was encouraged by my husband and by Pete Vargas and a couple of, of other people when we were there at 10x stages. And so they encouraged me to audition. So I went to Dallas. I auditioned. I didn't make it to the next round, but I had the opportunity to go audition again in Atlanta because by that time I had gotten the experience and it was, it was very exciting. Actually, I'm like, okay, I think I can do this. I can do this. So I went to Atlanta. And then from there, I got called to go to the semi-finals in Miami. And it was just such an amazing experience. I remember Pete Vargas.

He called me up. I can't remember how many people were in the semifinals. I think it was like 13. But then they had like a last call or whatever you call it. And so he was like, hey, where's my Bartista? I think he was trying to say barista. I don't know. And so he called me up as kind of like a last chance audition.

And so that was just such an amazing experience. I have some great footage from that. And now I have a lot more confidence speaking in front of people. So it was truly amazing. So the fact that thousands and thousands of agents will be listening to this podcast doesn't give you any nervousness at all anymore. Oh, yeah. I'm a little bit nervous.

Just to be quite frank, I'm a little bit nervous. I'm sweating underneath here. It's a it's all good just a it's just a conversation we're recording and then some people might see it or listen to it maybe we'll see there you go there you go so um so ultimately more confidence and and really just you know obviously good good stuff there so now you're you're doing a lot of business I think so far this year how many how many I mean last year you did what 176 sides yeah something like that that sounds about right yeah okay this year how's twenty three doing 20 this year i think i'm sitting at right at about 120 125 something like that year to date sides so not too shabby not too shabby and then um you know what does your team look like i mean obviously one of the things it sounds like you have an interest in and maybe

being more remote relative to where your team's located. I hear there's a potential interest in living in Spain a little bit of the year. Yes, absolutely. So my husband and I are firm believers in delegating as much as you can. So literally my job is to talk to people on the phone, get them all excited, They'd get them in touch with a preferred lender, get them pre-approved. Once they're ready to go, then I hand them off to one of our local team members. We have a couple of showing agents.

We also have a full-time transaction coordinator, and we have a couple of virtual assistants based out of the Philippines that handle, like, my social media stuff and more of the admin sort of paperwork, following up with emails, things like that. So as long as I have a Wi-Fi connection and access to a cell phone and my laptop, I can literally work from anywhere. And the cool thing about being here in Malaga and Spain, because we're nine hours ahead of where we would be in Phoenix. So we can get up, sleep in late if we want to go out,

you know, mooch around all day, go sightseeing, and the rest of the world is still sleeping. So we really don't have to start our work day until 4 p.m. 5 p.m. Spain time. And then, you know, people go out to dinner here late around 9, 10 p.m. So we're out to dinner, come back, do a little bit more work, go to bed around 1, 2 a.m. and get up the next day and do it all over again.

So it's really perfect for us. I love it. Oh, awesome. So you're during the day in Phoenix, I mean, you're working the phones just like normal. You're connecting various people in the workflow. And so how long have you been doing that? So we've been working remotely for about three years now.

With the recent real estate, I don't want to call it, what do you call it? It's been different. It's been a lot slower than it has been in years past, right, because of interest rates going up. So I would say, you know, the first year that we started doing it was like it was more like practice. We weren't necessarily out of the country. We were more local. And it started out. We were selling business from California.

helping people get into homes in Arizona. So it was a very short jaunt. It was about a five-hour drive. So it started with that, and we just slowly started expanding further out. And people, you know, people that we talk to up front, they already know that we are a team. So the expectation is set up front.

It's like, look, you're not going to be dealing with me throughout the entire transaction. You're going to be dealing with Erica to go out and look at homes. You're going to be dealing with Katie. for paperwork. And so they understand that and they appreciate the fact that we're one cohesive group. Oh, awesome. And how do you work with your team?

Do you have a CRM that you prefer? Well, I'm sure you do have a preference and probably not even just a preference. It's probably more than that. But what do you use for managing all of your business contacts and keeping notes and setting up action plans and all that type of stuff? Yeah, that's a great question. And I'm notoriously not great at using my CRM, but I will say that KVCorps is amazing. It's very robust.

There are so many tools available. And so I would say that's the majority of what I use for keeping in touch with people. And we do have a system in place where, you know, for instance, one of my VAs will go through my emails constantly and respond to leads. and she has like a pre-formatted template. You know, we could probably get things set up a little bit more efficiently, and it's still a learning process for us. But I will tell you that KVCorps, I started using KVCorps, by the way, ever since I was in real estate, even with Keller Williams.

Back then, I was paying $400 a month for it, so quite a bit of a difference there. But, yeah, it's absolutely amazing. So on that note, I think I'll have one of my other VAs kind of go in there and do a deep dive and learn how to use it properly because I'm clearly not using it to its full functionality. Well, you know, I think that it's most, even the, well, and you are obviously doing a phenomenal job building, running your team and doing a lot of real estate sides, but I would say even the most efficient teams don't use like more than maybe 60% of a CRM's functionality. It doesn't matter what the CRM is.

There's always more stuff you can do, but it's more of what works for you in your business the way you've got it designed. Exactly. And they say that the best CRM is the one that you actually use. So there you go. There you go. So now what are your lead gen sources?

Where do you generate leads? And running the team remote, does that impact what you can do? for lead gen? So the majority of our leads come from our existing listings that we have. I have a lot of rental listings. And our team, we work primarily with renters and we work a specialized lease with right to purchase program through home partners, which is now ultimately Blackstone, the largest private equity firm in the world.

So I've been working with them since 2017. So that's our primary source of business. right now, I would say. But yeah, we don't, at this point in time, we have not had to do a lot of outsourcing with lead generation other than we do have a preferred lender that we work with. And he's got a a Google pay-per-click ad. And so he's got a lot of those leads routed to us and our team. And so we'll take those leads and convert them either to a buyer or get them into the lease with right to purchase program, something like that. So being abroad in Spain, I would say that it hasn't really affected the lead generation whatsoever, because we do have a constant stream of leads coming in

already from those rental listings that we have. So it's been pretty sweet. Awesome, awesome. Well, last question. So if you could give one piece of advice to an fellow EXP agent, what would what would that be so my one piece of advice is to find something that you're interested in not necessarily passionate about that something that you enjoy and like kind of a niche so to speak and like just really dive in full force and focus on that one thing because I've seen so many agents out there they're trying this they're trying that and they're trying everything and so they're kind of like a jack of all trades and a master of none so myself and my team we've become a master of working with renters and converting them into homeowners.

So that's our specialty. That's our niche. That's what I would recommend, like one piece of advice to EXP agents out there. Focus. Focus. There you go. There you go.

And my old marketing mentor was like, try enough until you find one thing that works phenomenally well and then just go on that. So kind of similar. about the rest. Exactly. It's so good. Oh, go ahead. No, I was just, I think, I think just getting ready to wrap up here.

That was, but, you know, first, thank you so much for spending time with me today, Jalen. And obviously, there were some great nuggets here. And how would somebody reach out to you or learn about your business? Yeah, absolutely. So for all of the EXP agents listening, you can find me on workplace. Hit me up on workplace chat. I'm on Instagram, Jalen Mansor the J group. I'm also on YouTube under Jalen Mansor Shaw.

My phone number, if I'm allowed to give that out, is 480-382-2973. You can just Google my name. You can find me pretty much everywhere. Awesome. Well, great stuff. Jalen, thanks again for being on here. And thanks, everyone, for listening to this podcast. And with that, it's a wrap.

Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Glenn. You've been listening to Expansion. Tune in every Tuesday for new episodes. Thanks for being the best part of EXP.