No Broke Months For Salespeople - How You Can Grow Your Business by Taking Some Downtime

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

Maria Quattrone is the Owner/CEO of Maria Quattrone and Associates and RE/MAX AT HOME. She's an entrepreneur, real estate expert, investor, speaker, visionary, and philanthropist.Maria is a real estate executive with over 25 years of sales, marketing, and branding experience; aside from being a great salesperson, Maria is an award-winning, recognized leader.  She is a sought-after speaker both locally and nationally.This Wednesday afternoon, Maria and Dan Rochon will discuss How You Can Grow Your Business by Taking Some Downtime!--To find out more about Dan Rochon and the CPI Community, you can check this link:www.NoBrokeMonths.com --Stop 🛑 wasting your time ⏳ or spending too much money 💸not getting the results you want in sales; I would love you to join me for the upcoming 5-Day Listing Challenge.You will learn how to find YOUR Way to having closings every month.www.5daylistingchallenge.com--Get your free copy of the Real Estate Evolution here:bit.ly/RealEstateEvolution_GetYourBookThis book shows you the step by step on how to:Step 1: Believe in your unknown potentialStep 2: Deconstruct persuasion techniquesStep 3: Find a business and get hired consistentlyStep 4: Be proactive in the relationship with your clients.Step 5: Learn and implement the exact steps to hire, train, lead, and train virtual assistants so that they can build, support, and guide a winning team to scale.And if you’d like to have a consistent and predictable income, like this page, and don’t forget to join the Facebook group to network with the top agents:https://www.facebook.com/groups/newbieagents/ To find out more about Dan Rochon and the CPI Community, you can check these links:Website: No Broke MonthsPodcast: No Broke Months for Salespeople PodcastInstagram: @donrochonxFacebook: Dan RochonLinkedIn: Dan Rochon

You are going to be so much happier later if you listen to me now. So the only way to be the next one sold is to be the best price, the best value, in the best condition possible that you can in your particular area. Welcome to the No Broke Months for Real Estate Agents podcast. Working as a real estate agent can be incredibly rewarding and fulfilling, but it can also be frustrating if you aren't making the money you deserve. So if you're ready to end the stressful cycle of working hard for no results,

then get started with a proven step-by-step system so that every month is no broke months. Maria Cuatron is the owner slash CEO of Maria Cuatron and Associates & Remax at Home. She's an entrepreneur, real estate expert, investor, speaker, visionary, and philanthropist. Maria is a real estate executive with over 25 years of sales, marketing, and branding experience. Aside from being a great salesperson, Maria is an award-winning, recognized leader. She is a sought-after speaker both locally and nationally.

This Wednesday afternoon, Maria and Dan Rochon will discuss how you can grow your business by taking some downtime. My name is Dan Rochon. I'm the host of the No Broke Months podcast, which is a show for real estate agents to help you have no broke months. Thanks for joining me. Enjoy the show. Hello, Consistent Predictable Income community. Today, I'm joined with Maria Cuatrone, and we're going to talk to you about how you can grow your business and how you can do so specifically by taking some downtime, but not just by taking downtime. Maria is going to share with us a whole bunch of pointers on helping you to grow your business. So hello, Maria. How are you? Hi, Dan. Thank you so much

for having me on the show today. I'm excited to talk to you about how to grow a real estate business and I'm doing great. Good. And I'm excited as well. So tell me, before we get into the content of the show, I would be really curious to know something about you, Maria. So tell me, tell me a little bit about your journey. So you've been in real estate sales for a really, really long time. So walk me through, when did you get your license? What did that look like? What caused you to get your license? And then we'll talk about how to grow a business here.

I want to know a little bit about you. Absolutely, man. So I decided around 2003, a good friend of mine came to me and said, you've been in this advertising radio sales for 11 years. You don't seem too happy in it anymore. He's like, why don't you think about real estate? And I said, not sure about that, but I did my investigation. That was in October. And I started to investigate November. By December, I decided I was going to do it. Got my license and took the classes in January of 2004, was licensed shortly thereafter. Had my first sale March 31st, 2004.

Sold a good friend of mine a home right here in downtown Philly for $399. And then my second sale was for $1,050,000, and that was a four-unit building, which $1,050,000 in 2004 was quite a bit fifty in 04 was quite a tremendous amount of money. Yeah. And I was still working at the time in my radio advertising sales career. So I was a dual career person for about 11 months. And, you know, I loved it. I love the industry. When I got into it, I wanted to leave the other industry because I wanted an opportunity not to have a glass ceiling above me income wise. And real estate really does give you that ability to do to just do that, to make as much money as you want. And, you know, I did work more hours than I ever worked in my other, you know, in my other career. But I quickly learned the industry, spent a lot of time studying trends, studying the pricing, you know, going to conferences, going to open houses, touring property, just to get in, just to get a feel for what things should sell for,

what they are selling for. But from a pricing standpoint, how can I speak to sellers about the price and understanding what can have that conviction and confidence that they knew that that was what I was talking about, even though I was only a couple of years in at that time. Love it. So 2007 comes along. What happens then? Well, 2006 came along first. And I saw, I know, but I saw what was happening. Even though I was only in the business a little bit, I'm like, whoa, there's like inventory. And then there's more inventory.

And then by seven, I kept telling people because I grew my business calling Expire Listings. So I would tell them, look, you are going to be so much happier later if you listen to me now. I know you don't want to hear what I'm going to tell you, but I'm going to tell you the truth. And I'm going to tell you that this is the price

that it needs to be at in order to be the next one sold because the inventory is creeping up. We're at 11 months. Then it went to 16 months. Then it went to 20 months in some areas and some areas, the high end, it went higher 10 years of inventory. I said, so the only way to be the next one sold is to be the best price,

the best value in the best condition possible that you can or value for that price in your in your particular area and so i saw it in 06 07 forget it it was like people still didn't want to listen even in 08 after the financial crash people still didn't get it um but you know the ones that did they didn't lose as much money as the ones that didn't and you know it's in today's environment you have areas that are selling like crazy over ass still ridiculous pricing and then you have areas where nothing was nothing selling at all so it's a very interesting time here and um you have that in your market in the philadelphia market you

have like certain pockets where it's like just you and you have 14 offers and then other areas where you're not able to get anything to roll? Yeah. In the suburbs of Philly, single-family homes, there's not enough of them. And so they go generally over ask. It depends on the price point, how many offers you have on the higher end around a million. You know, usually have a good handful on the lower end and the fours. You have a lot, a lot of offers. But most of our business is in Philadelphia County. So we're not contending with that as much as some of the other folks in the other areas. The suburbs sales are down quite a bit year over year because of the fact that

the sellers who would want to sell can't sell or won't sell because they're locked in at 2%, 3%. And then that therefore the new buyers can't purchase because they don't have the inventory to sell. Yeah. So, and in Philadelphia County, the market closed year over year sales is about 30%. Got it. All right. So thanks for a little, I was, you know, just want to hear a little bit about your journey before we jump into the topic. So how can you

grow your business? So tell me, how can I, as a real estate agent, grow my business? Oh, well, there's so many things we could talk about. We could talk about your mindset. We could talk about, you know, right now, I would say it's all about small victories. So what you did last year, the year before, the year before, it doesn't really matter. Because today, it is about just getting the victory for today. And that could be, I got a listing sign. I got a new buyer sign.

I got a buyer agency contract sign. I got rental paperwork sign, but focusing on generating some type of business every single day and only focusing on today and do the most important things that you need to do today, which is lead generate. It's calling past clients, calling prospects, following up on appointments you had a month ago, two months ago, three months ago. It could be from a standpoint of just the small victories, focusing on the micro commitment. So how many contacts do you need to make today? How many appointments do you need to set today? And how many past clients are you

willing to call? And then make a commitment to make the commitment. So if that number is going to be, I'm going to have 12 conversations a day or 20 conversations a day, make sure you do it. And you will see results because we know if you call 8 to 10, say 8 to 12 conversations with this, just say this, expired listings, you should set one appointment. So if you're good, you can set three or four appointments. Are you still doing that today? i that's how i started my business when i was after about two years in the business i found out about

expires because i actually didn't know about them and i started calling them i wanted to get all the listings so i would have so many listings like a lot like more than 50 like 100 listings a lot, like more than 50, like a hundred listings, a lot of listings. And I built my business in, it really, really took off eight, nine, 10, 11, those years, because I had such a wealth of experience in sales from cold calling in radio advertising. And so I, and I also wasn't afraid to tell people the truth, be transparent and not be attached to the outcome of them getting mad at me or, you know, like I have one today. She, the property is worth X. She wants three times as much for it or 2.5 times as much. And I said, you know, nicely ain't going to happen.

Yeah. It's not going to happen, especially since it's an investment property and investors aren't stupid. So go back. Yes. Expired listings. Now today there are expired listings in Philadelphia. So we are, I just went on one a couple hours ago. I went and got one signed. Training the agents

in our company how to do it. One of our agents came in on Saturday with me. Last Saturday, she sent her first expired listing appointment. She went yesterday. She's like, oh, the guy was so nice. He signed with us right away. He liked everything we had to say.

So the thing with expires is, is that you have to call. Okay. So there's the first one third of them will list with the same agent. Another third of them will list with this first or second agent that can convince them that they absolutely know what they're doing to get the property sold. And they'll list within 30 days or less. And then the last group of people will list within the first 120 days of expiring off the market. So they are a great source of business. You really need to understand the mindset of an expired. And they may be masked as a for sale by owner. So they once were on the market with an agent. The agent couldn't get

the job done. They blame the agent for not getting the job done. But in reality, a lot of times, maybe it was the agent, but a lot of times it's pricing and marketing of the pricing based on the condition of the property. But you have to be really upfront with people. And I even tell them, look, look, here's the number we need to be at. We can try it at this. You have two weeks at this number. If not, we have to adjust it. I know within two weeks if this property is going to sell or not. Otherwise we have to make adjustments quick. And sometimes some of our clients, especially our long-term ones who are investors, they always want to go out higher than we tell them. And then, you know, we'll sit there and I'll go,

we had seven open houses, 27 showings, still no offers, we need to reduce the price. Next week, we had more open houses, you know, 10 showings, still no offers, we have to reduce the price. So you have to know who your client is. The people that are investors are willing to sometimes wait a little longer um then homeowners who have already left the house already moved on to the next house

it depends on the motivation right yeah yeah hey there it's dan excuse me for interrupting my own show i just wanted to do so because i wanted to share with you i was having a conversation with with one of my buyer's agents, Lucia, the other day, and she was sharing with me, she had a client that wrote an offer in today's market on 12 different homes. And she did actually end up getting the last offer accepted. So they didn't go and rent, but maybe right now you may be in that same situation and maybe you in that same situation, they did end up renting. And I know that that can be like, that can just suck. Well, let me tell you since 2008, there hasn't been a single month that I've missed a closing in real estate sales on an average of 10. And I want to share with you in the last one year, I've taken 79 listings by attending 93 listing appointments.

I don't say that to brag. I say that to share with you that I know how to take listings in today's market. And I want to invite you if you want to learn how to take listings in today's market. To join me at the 5-Day Listing Challenge coming up, you can visit www.5daylistingchallenge.com and learn how to take listings in today's market without having a cold call, door knock, or beg. That's www.5daylistingchallenge.com. Now, back to the most awesome real estate show ever,, all right. So what I heard you say, Maria, is to be able to grow your business. Some of the tips that you just, that I just heard you say was to be able to,

you know, celebrate wins, to celebrate even small wins, to make micro commitments. And then I heard you talking about a specific strategy, or I guess is a tactic rather than a strategy, a specific tactic of expired listings. Did I did I miss anything there? Does that does that seem about right? What I just said? I mean, there's so many things. Another thing is right now is protecting your mindset. Right. And understanding that what you did over the last five years isn't going to cut it. So if you did X and you got X, now you're going to do X and you're not going to get nothing. You're going to do X and Y and you're not going to get result.

And then you're going to X, Y, and Z, and maybe then you'll start to get results. So expect that you have to do two and three times what you did in the past because in the last five years, there was a lot of free money, two and three percent rates. And there was a lot of free money, 2% and 3% rates. And there was buyers and sellers everywhere. So it was a little bit more like an order-taking business than actually selling real estate business. So I don't know that a lot of people in the last five years really know what it takes to get real estate sold.

We worked our butts off in 6, seven, eight, nine, ten. I was just going to ask you that, Marie. Would you compare the last four or five years to when you started in your career, 2003, 2004, 2005? Well, I didn't really know what that was. Yeah. And I was at a tiny little place, little brokerage with not a lot of people. And I really didn't know what was going on. And I was also working in another career at the same time.

I closed 17 transactions my first, not first year, March 31st until the end of the year. Say I started March one, I got the sale like immediately within like not even a week being in the business. So what was that? In nine months, I closed 17 transactions. And while I also worked somewhere else. And all right, so let's talk. Let's back uh to today so when i say it's when i say that before it was like that me i don't know i know that it was crazy in 2000 and maybe three yeah it was crazy in three because i sold a property then and it sold for a lot more than i bought it for two years ago

and i sold it because i i wanted to make the money and i was like oh what if the market changes but i i bought the property for like 118 and I sold it for 220 in two years. That's, that's, that's insane, right? I mean, well, I also bought it for a four, a third sale by owner and I didn't have an agent and I wasn't in the business yet. So I guess that was my really first sale i represented myself in all right so how what if i don't want to what if i'm not because most agents are really uncomfortable call on expired listings as you know and that's an advantage for those that

are you know willing and able to do that. And most of that comes into, I think there's really two main components to it, but I think the more prevalent one is that the fear of judgment, the fear of rejection. But there's probably also a little bit of a time issue to it as well, because it takes time, it takes effort, and it takes consistency. But let's say if you're somebody

who you're not willing to get comfortable with expired listings and you want to grow your business, what do you have to say to that group of people? Great. So how about video? Okay. And tell me more about that. Tell us more about that. Yeah. So video is a great strategy to grow your business. Doing videos based on either buying or selling real estate, how to get a mortgage, how to save your home. You know, top five ways to get the most money. And creating these marketing videos that are going to go to your clients, your past clients, social media. You can email them out. You can record them and just put them on social.

All you need to do is take your phone, pick up your phone, put it in. I have this little light. You can put it in the light thing or you can just hold it up you don't need anything fancy because your low end production video is better than somebody's new video sure of course so i would say action beats inaction 100 of the time time? You can become your own little superstar by doing the video to your people.

So you do video, is that correct? Yeah. Walk us through that. I do a couple different things. I do videos for real estate agents to educate them about how to be a better real estate agent, how to grow your business, mindset, all these different things.

And I do those live now through StreamYard, and I broadcast to five channels once a day, and they are all off the cuff. Okay. Then I take that and we package it up and then we will send it out through MailChimp twice a week with these tips. How long is a video? So if you're doing this daily, how long is a video typically? Well, seven to 10 minutes. Okay. And then you're sharing information to real estate agents to help them, you know, mindset, lead generation, sales tactics, et cetera.

Giving it all away for free. Okay. All right. So, awesome. Go on. All right. So, you do that for real estate agents. What else do you do? So also for consumers, I will do either a video and a, just a written out email with the image

or two videos depends on the week. And that goes out two times per week okay so on but the so the mail chip goes out four times a week two twice to two different groups and then the videos that i'm doing right now i just started on 14 I think that's every day one one a day and I'm just putting it out and then they're taking it and they're putting it into little clips for reels

and I guess on Instagram whatever it's called over there and so the video is all... You can reach so many more with the video. Then, other ways to use

the video. Okay. You can go into your Facebook list and look to see whose birthday it is today. And you get to record them in a little video and hit send. Sure. Anybody that sent me, that was working.

Anybody that sent me a video last year on my birthday, I could tell you there was three people. I could tell you the three people. They stood out of the 500 people that messaged me on Facebook and whatever. So how else do we use video? Making your appointment stick. So you have an appointment with somebody. You haven't met with them yet.

That morning of the appointment, you pull. So in our CRM, I would just pull it up. I would create a little video and say, hey, Dan, it's Maria Quattrone. I'm committed to seeing you today at one. I'll see you then. Have a great morning. Bye. Love your commitment.

After you meet with them. Hey, Dan, it was great meeting you today at Thompson Street. I look forward to getting the property sold for you. My office will be in touch as soon as we get the keys from you in the mail. Have a great day. See you soon. Right. So you're doing one-to-one and then one-to-many by going on to social.

And it basically doesn't really cost any money. You can send it out through your CRM. We use MailChimp. It's more efficient for us because the size of our database we're sending it to. What size is your database? There's about 30,000 or so. And then the agent one is around 3,000. Okay.

So 30,000 like consumers, past clients. Yeah. People that at one point in time raised their hand and said they wanted to do something in real estate. Okay. And we don't do pay-per-click or we don't buy buyer leads. So that's just mainly people that called off the sign or emailed or inquired off of a listing or, you know, somebody that wanted to sell and then didn't sell at the time because they didn't like the price or they weren't ready or whatever reason. You already know 87% of all real estate agents fail in this business. And you also know it doesn't have to be that way. If you're a real estate agent and you're looking for consistent and predictable income, I invite for you to get your free copy of Real Estate Evolution, The 10-Step Guide to CPI, Consistent and Predictable

Income for Real Estate Agents. And you can do so when you visit www.therealestateevolution.com. I'll share with you your book that I authored to show you the way. Thanks. So you're sending these emails, you're sending that you're doing the videos, you're creating the one-to-many, but you're also using it for conversion of one-to-one so that you're increasing the communication level. So instead of a phone call or worse, a text or an email, you're actually, Hey, so nice to meet you. You really look forward to taking great care of you.

And now you're elevating the perception of the relationship from their point of view, right? Because now they're going to trust you more so because the better that they start to sort of see you as a person that's there helping them, then the more effectively that they're going to appreciate you. Would you say that that's true? Absolutely. Something else that we also do before we, once we schedule a listing appointment, for example, we have then a video that goes out and it's me in the video. And we have an email that it's a video embedded and then there's words underneath it.

And then it says, click the marketing presentation here. So we ask them to look at the marketing presentation prior to meeting with myself or any member of our group. And then we ask them to play the video. It's only 45 seconds, but I am welcoming them to our company. I, um, you know, talking to them about how we're going to get the property sold. And so that builds, helps to build confidence

in our company prior to the clients ever meeting us for the appointment. So a lot of times what happens then people will then go on, like, we'll say, check out our 500 plus Google reviews. We'll go and check out the reviews. Then they'll go to social. Then they'll see the videos that I'm doing for the agents. So a great recruiting campaign, educational campaign spills over into the you're the expert you're the expert so because i'm training other people let me go to the expert right right right

okay so that's how all that ties in together all right now you mentioned that you have a group i know that you have an apprenticeship program locally in your community tell me more about that if you could absolutely so we had the scholarship program where we were bringing people through and one of the things so any people that were in other industries we would have them we partnered with the school we'd have them go through the school and then we'd bring them in and we do our two-week boot camp rise in real estate well. Well, we did this for like, it's still happening, by the way. It just changed a little bit. But what we found was that the people that ended up being the most successful were an inside sales agent first.

Okay. So we're going to be launching this program where it's going to be like a competition to be an apprentice and they will get paid to work in real estate. So on day one, as soon as they enter, they'll get, you know, they'll be making money on day one as they learn and earn.

And it will be for one year and they have to do whatever we tell them to do. Comps, calls, coffee. Do they have to clean your car? Probably not. My husband handles that. But anything we tell them to do, real estate, go in the basement and go get the files, put them in the system.

I want them to be able to do all these things. And then they'll be able to, if they have any, say, like rental clients or anything like that, they'll be able to work with those people on the weekends just for some even additional money, but they'll spend the next year really learning how to speak real estate, how to talk to people, how to ask what questions to ask, the right questions to ask. What we have found is the agents that come into the office and listen to us on the phone, it's all about proximity.

Sure. They do the best. They do the best. Well, there's a natural, if they're willing to come into the office and they're also willing to do the work and they're probably going to be more inclined to have some skill. And as they observe somebody that really, truly is a one percent of one percent of one percent of her craft. And, you know, I'm sure that it's not just you within an organization that people are learning from, that it's it's just natural to, uh, to observe a master in, in, uh, in work and, uh, and for that to sort of, you know, for that then to pick up on that. So yeah, Dara Ellis, and there's some other folks that are seasoned professionals that they can

learn from even back office support, Lisa and Clarice, Rachel. So there's- How do I find more about that? Like if I'm somebody in the Philadelphia area and I want to check that out, how do I- You can just call me directly. Call the office 215-607-3535. You can Google us. We come right up.

I mean, we do a lot of sales. So we're popular. We we're popular you can find us you can find us there's opportunity everywhere i said to we have a daily huddle every day at 8 30 on the phone okay okay right and then we meet on tuesdays at 11 to 1 and th Tuesdays at 11 to 1 and Thursdays from 11 to 1. We have a sales meeting and we do a listing meeting. Then we do Thursday sales listing training, how to be a better listing agent. And then we do a closing meeting. The closing meeting is quick.

It's just like getting any updates on any of the deals that are pending. And then on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays, the new agents have a training from 1130 to 1230 so that any of the gaps can be filled in between days. You know what they were working on because this training now is all online. It's videos and it's self-paced. Sure. So this way they can do it and get themselves. Because what we found is anybody can sit in the classroom for two weeks and, like, stare at you. And, you know, we'll do the role play and then peace out after that. But if you have to go and do it, you can come in here and do it or you can sit at home and do it. Now it's up to you the pace. And it's up to you. We can tell, tell like how hungry you

are but how quick you finished it and if you're rather than us forcing you to do the stuff right so if you're hungry you're gonna you're gonna knock it out and if you're not hungry then you're gonna find a reason why you uh you're challenged to not right and then we use slack um so that i say if you have questions put it in the channel somebody on the company everybody helps everybody here so somebody will answer you it's not always going to be it won't be me or dara you know who are doing all the answering the agents help the other agents and we instill that in them on day one we expect everybody to be the solution be be the solution for yourself, for your family, for your clients, for our company.

That's our number one core value. And so our expectation from day one is that you will be a team member and that we will live in integrity here, transparency, honesty, and be a good human. And we're not going to deal with any like criticizing, condemning, or complaining. I love it. Maria, thank you so much for your time today. I really, truly appreciate it. And if you're an agent in the Philadelphia area, or you want to become an agent in the Philadelphia area, or you want to learn about real estate sales through an

apprenticeship program, reach out to Maria. Thank you, everybody. Until next time, have the best day of your life. Be grateful, make good choices, go help somebody and go find a listing. God bless you guys. Thank you, Dan. Thanks so much for listening

to the No Broke Months podcast today. Until the next show, I invite for you to be grateful, make good choices, help someone, have the best day of your life, and go find a listing. I'm very excited about the conversation we're about to have. I want to introduce you to Dan Rochon, who is the owner and co-founder of Greetings Virginia. I am so excited to introduce my next guest. Dan Rochon reads, he writes, he does improv. A frequent speaker and often quoted

about the real estate market. I'm going to bring on a guy that is a winner. We had some really cool conversations before going live with this show. We have Dan Rochon. So I'm going to encourage for you to think big. I'm going to encourage for you to think big. I'm going to encourage you to think big and then multiply it by two and then take huge action. Because whatever you want, you're only five years away from that.