KGCI: Real Estate on Air - PHH with Joe Sinnona and John Tsai

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Welcome, welcome to the power half hour. Every single week we interview a top producing agent, team leader in North America. And this week we have a very, very, very special guest, the coast of coffee talk. Mr. Joe Sonona has been in real estate 35 years. He's been a director of the New York Realtor Board and also the vice president of the Board of Long Island, wealth of knowledge, a wealth of experience and a professional speaker for Sonona seminars. Mr. Joe, welcome. I never imagined that my bio would be so botched up like that.

Thank you, John. How are you, sir? I'm doing great. It's great to see you again. We got a chance to really hang out last week, although it was only about two to three hours, but it was a time of my life in Long Island, New York, New York. New York, New York.

Do we really speak like that? Do we really talk to like that? Yeah, you do. Talk like that, talk. I had a phenomenal time with you at Lead to List for Sonona Speak seminars. I thought you were purifier and they're still talking about you to today. In fact, I got a video from one of the speakers, and you are all out of it. You're edited, out, right out of it. And I'm like, why?

I'm like, this is not about you. This is about everybody. So we're going to fix that soon. So next week we'll have the content ready and up for you. Thank you for inviting me here today. Yeah, I appreciate you coming. Really, you know, last year when we met, Really, I'm sorry, I had no idea who you are.

And as I got to know you, as I got to really, you know, look at your bio, what a phenomenal career already. And you are still out there speaking, inspiring others. First of all, thank you. And second of all, why? Because I feel that we are not finished. I'm not finished with my mission. And that is, you know, my business partner always talks about reducing the failure rate in real estate, the failure rate of what NAR published years ago.

And I believe at that point it was like 80% of all new agents fail in their first year. And I was just astounded by that statistic. Now it's 90%, almost 97% I heard. I was like, what? First year? In the first year. in the first year. Hang on, Joe.

What does that mean? Like, in the first year, let's say 100 come in, 97 leave. In the first year, guys, here there's 97% failure rate in the first year. So that's a statistic that NER puts out. So I don't know if there's a margin for error there. But when I heard that earlier in my career, I said, I got to do something. And that's actually what prompted me to be a speaker. I said, I want to do something that will inspire new agents to stay in the business.

And I started to teach. I started to teach to pre-licensing class. I said, if anybody can do it, it's me. I can do it my way, right? Everybody thinks they have the secret sauce. And I've been teaching now for 22 and a half years, and I've been in the business 35 years. Wow. And I have changed lives.

you started teaching. Yeah. Wow. Okay. And these are really good classes. They're not just about contracts, not just about getting you out of a real estate jail. These,

you know, from what I attended was a phenomenal panel of how to take more listings, how to service clients. So in your opinion, Joe, what do you think is a difference between one that is the 97% and one agent, that wants to belong to the 3% that actually goes on to the second year.

Good question. I believe that people, certain agents have figured it out. Certain agents have not figured it out. And I think the ones that have not figured it out are the ones that don't have a clear cut, you know, precise mindset of what they really want. And I believe that there are certain agents that have a good work ethic. and there are certain agents that don't want to adapt to a good work ethic. And so I had to go on this, you know, journey, if you will, about 10 years ago and say,

okay, what am I going to speak on? Because everyone was saying, well, what are you going to speak on when you get on stage? I said, well, if I want to start somewhere, I better start on with mindset, mindset approaches toward improving your business and then figure out from a psychological perspective, do you really want to be in this business? There are people that, oh, I want to be in real estate. I want to sell houses from a limousine. I want to be that million dollar listing kind of guy, you know. But in truth is, if you don't have that mindset approach, if you're not working beast mode mentality, you're not working the real estate business at all.

You're just fooling yourself and you're fooling others in the path, mainly your brokers, your managers, people that are mentoring you, and then you've invested all this time and all this energy from a mentor's point of view or broker's point of view into that person that doesn't really want it as bad as you thought they did. So it's about the will. Now, can you, in your opinion, can you teach the will or have them self-discover their will or do we have to find people that have the will? I think a little bit of both. I think that if you're not willing to meet someone halfway on your journey, you know, I can only show you as much as I can only if I have someone who's cooperative, someone who wants to do the work.

So all my students that I've ever taught, I always say to meet me halfway, at least trust me a little bit. And it's a lot about trust too because you're putting yourself in the hands of a mentor who has this experience. And yet you don't trust them because you don't trust yourself, you know? So last week we had a guest on and he talked about coachability, like being coachable. Is that related to someone trusting you as well? It's just they have no trust in the coach. Yes. Just the midst of alignment between the coachee and the coach, do you think?

I think people don't understand the word or the definition of being a coach. I think a lot of agents see that as they don't see the value in coaching. All they see is for themselves, they see this person who wants to help. them and yet they they don't want to trust that person you know with their you know their their ways you know i can change somebody's ways of doing things by planting some seeds of of you know this is going to get you there and if you do this this is going to get you there but if you don't trust me you're not going to do any of that that's true so really being coachable is finding a coach that you can actually trust to listen to the advice from,

and then you'll be coachable and taking the action. So for people who are listening to this right now, and they belong to the 3%, they want to get better, they have the will. Joe, what is your advice for them this year, 24, step by step, to succeed? Keep pushing forward. Keep aligning yourself. with, you know, the one percenters that are in the room. You know, for me, I had to align myself with people who are not going to bring me down.

And what I mean by that is, I don't want your misery to love my company. Otherwise, we're going to do wonders for one another and bring each other down. I think what's so important now more than ever is to infuse professional development into your mindset, into your work. Anything that is, you know, like today I was on, I was in your role play room. Why was a guy like me in your role play room? You know why? Because I learned something different about who I am.

And you talked about mindset approaches. And, you know, these are concepts that, you know, in 2024, they're not new concepts. But what happened is, and D.K., your, colleague and our colleague in the business said, you know, people have changed since COVID. Things have gotten so that either your your mental capability is that of a depressed person or one of anxious, right? There's people that are anxious and there's people that are depressed, but that should be no excuse for doing the work and getting out of the funk, you know. So I tend to, you know, to do more professional development in order to help me, my business, my team, just everything about what I do, including the instructing.

That's awesome. So really, it's about professional development every step of the way. Get skilled and be knowledgeable, become the best realtor that you can be and work on. that being the best and push forward every single day is what I'm hearing from you. Okay, so never give up, keep pushing forward and work on your skills on a daily basis. Now, let's go the other side of the token. What do you think will have agents become the 97%? I think if they allow, if you don't mind me saying the bitch voice to take you're in their head.

And, you know, every day we wake up either with a great spirit or maybe a greater depression. Or, you know, I always love that movie Shoreshank Redemption. Get busy living or get busy dying. And they're people to get up with a dying attitude. So I think that that dying attitude lends itself to a dying spirit, a dying motivation. And it doesn't give me that that. to go forward to to be the best I can. What it does is it puts me further into this little, I cannot do attitude.

And then, you know, I can't be like John Psy and Joe Sonona. I can never be that person on stage that gives that kind of advice. I can never be in the top one person. And we talk to ourselves and we talk ourselves out of things. We talk ourselves out of co-calling. And we talk ourselves out of prospecting. We talk ourselves out of doing our business, out of doing our professional development. I can't be a buyer's agent.

I can never have a buyer's contract. Oh, what if the seller says something? That's the bitch voice. Because you know what? It didn't happen. It didn't happen. It's all in your head. How do you get rid of the bitch voice?

Mainly sedation. I think you need a couple of pills. No. I think what you got to do is you have to, like I said, you know, here, I'll give me an example. I'll give an example. You work out every day, almost at 4 o'clock in the morning somewhere around that time. Okay. Around there, yeah.

Okay. So by the time I wake up, which is probably now around six-ish, right? And that's probably killing your day already. But around six-ish, I look at my Instagram and I see the first. person that's John Sy and he has a song that's while he's working out from the karate kid, right? The best, right? Around, right?

You can't tell you how much that has motivated me to be the best person, the best version of myself. And every day that I wake up and I listen to that or I see your story and that's the song. And I'm like, that's why I played it for you last week because I said, you know what, John, you're the best and I'm learning from the best here. So I'm not trying to just give you kudos, you know, and be a brownos or anything. But no, I want to align myself with people that are going to motivate me, read books that motivate me. I go five, four, three, two, one, let's go for the day, you know. This is awesome. I love it because proximity is power.

Yeah. Yeah. And from the start of this call, you've been talking about aligning yourself with people that are doing a lot higher level stuff than you are or simply on the same playing level. Now, I do want to transition to this because, Joe, you have almost a thousand people in your organization at EXP. Congratulations, first of all. Thank you. And you did it in less than four years. This is my fifth year coming up in April.

Yeah. Okay. And how do we become more attractive? Either, you know, we're talking about this, like aligning yourself with people. How do you become more attractive to agents? Because we can, we have the capacity to do so. Or attract clients. How do we become more attractive?

Good question. First, with agents, you have to attract. There is no such word in my language in my dictionary anymore. It used to be. I used to say the word recruit. And then I heard from one of my upline partners, don't ever say the word recruit, Joe. It sounds so distasteful. It sounds like you're just trying to stack the numbers.

You're just trying to build something. And if you build on sand, guess what's going to happen? It's going to just fall apart. But if you build with a nice rooted foundation and you change the verbiage of how you speak to people, That's going to attract people to you and they're going to wonder, how can I be like Joe Sonona? How can I be like John Sy? So that was one of the things that I had to learn, again, in this four-and-a-half-year period, that my words were killing me and killing the spirit around me and the attraction wasn't there.

I also aligned myself with a good partner and I have to give him kudos because he teaches me every day. that, you know what, don't let the negative into your world. And then that will further give people the inspiration that they need in order to be attracted to you. With clients, it's all about the soft sell. You know, I read a book when I first joined real estate called Act Like a Lamb, Sell Like a Lion, by Tom Hopkins. And yeah, that was a very good book.

It still continues to be an excellent bestseller today because we don't soft sell anymore. We hard sell people. And if we're going to build up a nice clientele, we have to learn how to speak, again, changing the verbiage to speak to our clients the way we want to be spoken to. I don't want to be hard sold. When I go into, let's say, a car dealership or even. any one of these shows, you know, a guy comes right at me and says,

hey, how's it going? Come over here. I want to sell you something. I want to talk to you about it. That's hard sell. And I think that acting like a lamb and selling like a lion is the way I want to, you know, continue on with my career

in that soft cell atmosphere. And that's how I attract both agents and I attract sellers and buyers that way as well. Acting like a lamb. Okay. So then if you, that's like an oxymoron, like acting like a lamb and sell like a lion. Then if you act like a land, how do you sell like a lion?

Well, there's a way to gently approach somebody and to talk to them and have a nice conversation with them. And then as you're doing, you are actually selling them. You're actually selling the product, a home. You're actually doing things that a professional would do and stand out as a professional. So when I sell like a lion, I'm selling the volume of my work. I'm selling on volume. I'm not necessarily chasing the money or I'm not going after this big ticketed commission or fee. See?

So I changed the word commission to a fee because I'm, providing a service and I'm not running after the money. I'm not saying, oh, you know what, I'm going to make $3 million on this deal. No, I just keep going and I got to work consciously, unconscious. Consciously unconscious. Yeah, I know. I contradict. I like that.

Well, I think it's called being unconsciously competent. Correct. And when they're working away, it goes away. Like everything else, I'm not thinking about anything else, right? That's right. That's right. So it comes back to professional development guys. Being able to sell like a line, giving the information, having the client become comfortable

because you've given them so much value, so much education, so much valid and important information that they come to you. That's selling like a line. and acting like a lamb so i i like that and joe now that you're 35 years in the business and we know that you want to contribute uh you have thousand people in your organization what's next for you um what's next to me next for me is that i um i don't want to do a brand new transactions anymore i want to live off referral business i've built enough of a referral business over 3,000 clients now in the 35 years.

I'm serving second generation, third generation of family. Yeah, which is awesome. How long it's been? Yeah, because it has.

I got to share this, Joe, because when you got into real estate in 1989, guys, I was nine years old, and that was my first time in New York.

I just want to put that in. And Joe was exactly 10 years older. I was 19, years old when you were nine years old. So that's crazy, right? So I feel that at this stage of the of the real estate business, I'm more of an instructor. I'm more of a mentor, a teacher, a friend to agents that want or starting to their career. And my advice for those agents is that if I started that young or you could start midstream or midpoint, there is room there to build a business and retire from that business.

You know, some people think that they're going to be 80 years old and be carried out of the real estate business. I don't want to be 80 years old. I want to transition into more speaking time. I want to transition into coming back to this desk and working with the referral business. And being just the general manager of my organization, while someone else is the team leader, you know, because I do have a team.

And, you know, let's put it this way, you're not going to be a team leader forever. You want to go on to maybe I'll write a book. Maybe I'll sing a song. Maybe I'll spend more time with the family, which I've started to do just to, you know, transition a little bit. You can transition from this level all the way to this level in one moment, in one day. It's got to be a gradual transition so that mentally you're not saying the word retire because I'm not retiring. I'm transitioning to other levels, you know? Yeah, that's right.

I just turned 55 years old. I'm not going anywhere yet. Happy belated birthday. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So transitioning from a solo agent to a team leader and now you're actually transitioning out of the team leader becoming a CEO of. of your team.

Yeah. And now becoming the general manager of, you know, the, uh, the organization. What skills do you need to become that to be able to get to where you are? I think you have to stop being a control freak. I've learned over the last five years that you got to stop putting your hands on something or something that matter. and just slowly take your hand out of the equation and just say, okay, now I'm going to be this trusted advisor to the team leader.

Whoever that may be, I don't know yet. I don't have, yeah, I have the plan, but I don't have the person because the people that I'm thinking are lacking the skills, you know, to be team leader. So I don't want to just necessarily give this to somebody who's going to drive the, you know, the car off the course of the road, I have to just at least be the wise counselor and say, hey, this is what I did, this is what I've been doing. Put a little of your flavor in there. Put a little of my legacy in there. And you'll be fine with it.

Letting go is the first thing. Okay. Like take your hands off with things first and foremost. But how do you attract the perfect team leader? How do you attract that perfect agent avatar? I'm in that phase right now, and I have to tell you that it's quite scary the amount of leaders we don't have. It's quite... What do you mean? Well, because of the fact that we're dealing with generational thinking, you know, I don't have someone in any generation that I'm thinking about who is capable or, you know, they're. all want, but they're not capable of leading the charge the way, let's say, I would, you know, and they don't demonstrate any type or any form of leadership just yet.

So I have to be patient, and this will be probably, you know, a good, you know, within a five-year period. I don't want to do this. while I'm 60, 70, 80 years old, I'm not doing that. I've already determined in my mindset that I cannot be a team leader and not have this other vision over here that I have of myself at this age be distorted because I simply didn't make a plan here on this side. So right now I've made the plan. I'm looking for the team leader and I'm scouting the team. talent that emulates at least what a team leader should be. And that is someone who, uh, you know, grows with the team and allows the team to grow without micromanaging it. That's true, guys. Letting go, finding the right leader for your organization. And it's hard to

come by. What do you say, what would you say is the one quality that you look for in a leader? somebody who is not going to allow their power to get to their head where they forget the teammates that they are overseeing. It's not all about the team leader. It's about growing. You know, my father used to have an expression at the dinner table that I took into business with me. He used to say, you see this table, we all eat from the same table. and if you had that philosophy that you know that you could grow this table

and everybody makes money together and everybody wins together wouldn't that be such a great ideal place where you don't have to take the scraps and eat the scraps or the crumbs we had a dog and the only thing that my father would say is we have one dog and that's under this table

there are nobody there's nobody else under this table with us we're going to eat together and we're going to eat as a family, we're going to eat as friends, and we're going to make sure that everybody's happy here. And if anybody isn't happy here, I want to know about it. I want to know that, you know, maybe we can fix some things. I said in my keynote last week, I can't fix stupid, and I'm all stocked up on crazy, you know? So at this stage in the game, at this stage in my career, I've learned to let go of stupid,

and I've learned to stay away from crazy, you know, because, again, you can't fix either one of them because it's just impossible. I love it. I love it. So really, building a team is like, guys, eating at a dining table,

and all your family members are eating together. Nobody's eating scraps. Everybody's eating together. Everybody grows together. The only one that's eating, scraps is the dog underneath the table, guys, and you are not. And even the dog eats better than us. But, you know, when I first met you, right?

And I'll say something personal, if I may, when I first met you and D.K., I saw two people that could really change my way of thinking, right? And I'm not, again, I'm not saying this to butter you up because we're friends. but, you know, I saw two people that changed my way of thinking and had a different work ethic. And I said to myself, if I'm going to create this vision for myself going out, you know, of the transactional business and look to, you know, just speak in my circles, then I have to make sure that I adopt some of their ways, some of their work ethic. Because sometimes, you know, as we get older in this business, our work ethic is not the same work ethic as it was day one. I mean, I'm not as motivated.

I'll be honest with everybody. I keep it real. I'm not as motivated to knock on doors or co-call or prospect the way I did when I was 19. When I was 19, I was like Rocky and I was hungry. I had this cast iron jaw and I would get in the ring with just about anybody. And as Mickey said to Rocky in Rocky 3, but then one time in your life, that one day in your life you become civilized. He goes, and you stop getting hungry and you stop, you know, putting things as important on the table anymore. Now, I'm not saying that I'm fizzling out, but when I meet guys like you and D.K. and everyone else around me, even in our organization, I say to myself, wow, you know,

You just gave me like the charge. You're like the energize of bunnies. And you made it like a charge of latrity through me that I'm remodivated. I'm back to that 19-year-old kid again that's hungry and I'm doing things. Like as if I, like I have this unparalleled energy that I can handle 60,000 things at one time. And I'm 55. And then then I look at this 20-something-year-old who has no energy, who has no life in him. I go, let me check your heart to see if there's, is a life breeding in you because you're dead or you're a meathead from the neck up, you know?

You know what I'm saying? Like, why is it anybody adopting my work ethic? And that, you know what the answer is to that? We're all created unequal, not equal, unequal. And I can never be John Sy. John Syne. can never be Joe Sonona or anybody else for that matter you can't be anyone else all we can do is just take a little bit of your work ethic and put it into my life and i'll put it into your life

and that's what all we can hope for right now absolutely hey stay hungry guys and keep finding people that gives you that energizer bunny energy you know i'm glad that we can do this uh for each other Joe, I'm grateful for our friendship that we developed. And I trust you, Joe. Thank you for everything that you do for the industry, for our company, EXP Realty. We truly appreciate you. How can people reach out to you and find out what you do, Joe? They can either email me at Jason Owner at gmail.com or they can call me and have a conversation

because I like to talk on the phone a lot. Just ask my wife. 5163758162 and we are North Star at EXP Realty. I changed the name because I wanted to give everybody their own individuality. I think that if you reach out and you could also reach out to me on Facebook, Instagram, Instagram under Sonona Speak Seminars, I do a podcast every Sunday night. John, you're welcome to pop in anytime at 8 o'clock Eastern New York time. do a lot of mindset methodologies there as well. And we we give them hope. We give people hope for

the following week and we give them instructions. And I always end my classes with the saying learn only the good habits. Because it's only the good habits that are going to get you far. There's no tricks in this business, guys. There's nobody selling anything out of a limousine and there's nothing that you can do to sidestep your success up that ladder. You must start and eat crap. Like you say, John, all the time. You eat shit and you go up that ladder of success. And when you get to that ladder of success, there's another ladder that you have to climb called success.

And you can keep it. You got to keep it. One step at a time, guys. Now you can see 35 years later, Joe is still. one step at a time. I love you, Joe. Thank you so much for today. And I'm sure we'll have a part two soon. And have me on your coffee talk soon. All right? Definitely. Absolutely. Thank you guys. Thank you, John.