"Listings are king" is what realtor Joshua Nichols was told early on in his career. With only 8 years in the real estate business Joshua Nichols has shown that his lead generation and marketing is down to a science and works so well for him and his team. Listen to how Joshua decided that he wanted to take a different route and reengineer the real estate rollercoaster. No more ups and downs just one steady climb of success.
You can listen to all episodes of Agent Vs Lender on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Google Play. If you love Agent Vs Lender follow us on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram for all bonus content.
"Listings are king" is what realtor Joshua Nichols was told early on in his career. With only 8 years in the real estate business Joshua Nichols has shown that his lead generation and marketing is down to a science and works so well for him and his team. Listen to how Joshua decided that he wanted to take a different route and reengineer the real estate rollercoaster. No more ups and downs just one steady climb of success.
You can listen to all episodes of Agent Vs Lender on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Google Play. If you love Agent Vs Lender follow us on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram for all bonus content.
Welcome to another episode of agent versus lender. And today, we're really excited to have Joshua Nichols with us who is the broker of focus Realty Group at Presidio real estate. And, you know, as I talked to, as I talked to Joshua, he's the real deal. He's not like a guy that sits back and, and waits for stuff to happen. So you're gonna want to pay attention to what he's doing and how he's making things happen. So, you know, Joshua, I'm just gonna, I'm just going to turn the reins over to you and tell us your story. And, and let's see where it takes us. Yeah.
Joshua Nichols:So we were talking before, just, you know, I only started eight years ago, I've only been doing this for eight years. So and it was, you know, after '08 when things were still kind of building up. But when I got into it, like I was telling you before, you know, I just, I hated spending my time. I just know that I hated it. I love spending my time with the clients, but it was just so much of my time was spent looking for a house and finding a house. And when you're doing that, you can only help that one client and then you had to go back on helping somebody else or listing a house and everybody kept telling me listings were king listings were what you wanted to go after, you know, so I started focusing on that not really understanding or knowing the reason why everybody kept saying listings were king. But once I got into it, um, you know, I just kept thinking there's got to be there has to be a better way to do what we're doing. All these agents were going out and they were getting one client and then working with the one client and then I don't know if you've ever heard of the real estate rollercoaster. You know, you.
Ron Pippin:Yeah, cuz it's because it's the mortgage is same way mortgages have mortgage rollercoaster. So yeah, I totally get that. But explain to them explain to everybody what that is.
Joshua Nichols:The real estate rollercoaster is where you sit there and you have you have no deals, right. And you have nothing. So what you do is you're spending your time finding somebody, talking to everybody, you're out there recruiting, doing whatever you need to to get somebody. And then you get somebody, and you forget to go back and continue to spend some time management on still looking for people and you spend all your time with them. Because you're so worried about losing that one deal that you forget about everything else, right. So you work and work and you come all the way up to the peak and you you close the house. And as soon as you close the house, that's, that's it, now you got nothing. So now you go all the way back down the bottom, because now you're looking for somebody again, and you're spending all the time. It's not very good time management. And so when I was thinking, I was like, there's gotta be a better way where we can make this the solid roller coaster up, like no roller coaster, just a solid climb. And so when I started breaking down real estate and how it worked, and how everything came together, you know, I was told a lot and a lot by other brokers that don't do limited agencies, you know, but it didn't make sense in my mind, because when I'd find a listing, and then I'd sell it was done. It was that was it, I made my 3% and I moved on, and I had to go find somebody else. And so I was like, well, let's find a better way. So I found out about early on about mega open houses.
Ron Pippin:So there is a whole lot of second show limited agency. So limited agency, for those that don't know is you're double siding it, right? You're representing both the buyer and the seller. And, and some people don't like that, because it's like, how do you represent both sides fairly. So but you'd like them.
Joshua Nichols:I love them. But here's what you have to do when you go into a limited agency situation. You have to be open 100% of both sides and let them know that you are going into the situation that you can no longer tell them anything about the other people like so, for instance before like I always prided myself on calling the other agent and extracting this information of the agent that they shouldn't be telling me it was like a game to me, I loved it, right? But now that I'm in the limited agency situation, I had to tell both sides, hey, I can't tell you what to do, you can tell me what to do, I can give you advice. But I can't tell you anything about the other side. And I've never had a problem, as long as you go into it, letting both sides know that you are now just doing the paperwork, you're really helping them out, right? We've already got it under contract, you got the price that they want it. So there really isn't any issues. In my mind. The issue is like, where you list something, and then you go tell somebody, Oh, I know, for a fact that they'll come down to 280 instead of 290. That's, you just can't do that.
Ron Pippin:Right? So right. So we could actually spend a lot of time and have have multiple people on here talking about the pros and cons and somebody saying, No, I don't like him because of that. So, but let's move on. I don't want to spend a lot of time on that. Let's just say, okay, there's limited agency, it's out there. You love them. Other people don't like him so much. But tell me why you do them and what what's the benefit? Why you do them.
Joshua Nichols:So the biggest, there's lots of benefits for doing them for me. And, like I said, if you just go into it right and have the right mindset, you'll be fine. But the reason why I do them is because when I started doing, it was part of the reason why I started doing mega open houses. And doing a mega open house brought me clients that didn't have agents. Now, if they don't have an agent they come in, that allows me to represent both sides. So and then my whole thought behind this was that I'm making 1% or 3%. And I have a client. And obviously, as an agent, we want to keep that client forever, they sell this house, hopefully we represent them to buy the house. And when they want to sell the house, hopefully they call us, right. So gaining one client, hopefully for life, like on the back of my cards, it says your agent for life, you know, because we want to keep them for life. Every agent has that idea. But if you go a limited agency route, and you do it correctly, now you have one property, but you've also gained two clients for life. And then when they sell and they buy and they're selling sometimes I call it the inception. You got Yeah, have you seen that movie, the inception, I have a. So you know, when we all have contingency, houses on contingency, they are absolutely held to work with my house, I'm limited agency on one house, I'm also representing the person selling the home. And then I'm also representing the seller buying their home. So I got four deals off of the two people. And it was all because of an open house. So now instead of just a 3%, commission, I'm making 6% on that one house, I'm making 3% on the other one, and I'm making 3% on the item. And then I continue to do the same thing and have an open house on this on an open house on now and and try to get even more clients. So it's a perpetual snowball effect that can happen. And I don't even have to go out there and work for people, all I got to do is go to Costco, you buy some hot dogs and put some buns together and catch up. It's 100 bucks less than 100 bucks to throw a mega open house. And you can have hundred people show up and whether they come for food or not. And then here's the other part about open houses. I don't know. If you do, you probably don't do open houses as loan officer, but a lot of agents, they have this acute mindset of they are having the open house to sell the house for the client. Right does them. Okay. Yeah, there is there is a huge big picture here. That if I have the open house to find a buyer for that house, and I have an open house to also show everybody in that neighborhood, what I can do for them when they want to sell their house.
Ron Pippin:Because you know that people from their neighborhood is coming to see that house, you know,
Joshua Nichols:No. On Thursday, So what I do is I'll list the house on Wednesday. Okay. And then on the MLS I put on there no showings until open house on Saturday. And every agent hates you like Oh, we got to get it. We got to get it. I'm like no, sorry, open houses on Saturday, you come in. Then on Thursdays and Thursday and Friday, I take my whole team, and we'll take 200 flyers and we'll each go in a different direction from that house, and we'll knock all the doors by all the neighbors. Okay. Now, there's there's two reasons why I do that. Okay. Number one, we're introducing ourselves to the neighbors and we're inviting them to come over have some free food or tell them bring their kids, those neighbors know somebody, a friend, a family or somebody that they want to live close to. Sure. So I'm increasing my opportunity to have a limited agency on the house and sell it before we even have the open house. Okay. The second thing is I'm also letting him know that I'm having the open house And what I'm doing because if they are looking at selling their house, now I'm in front of them. So the whole purpose of all of us agents and also loan officers, when we're talking to someone on the phone, your whole goal is to get in front of somebody, well, now we're knocking the doors, we have a reason to knock the doors, we have a reason to talk to him. So why not just ask, right? So we're right there. And the ages go around and do all of that. They invite their friends, they invite everybody else. Okay. Now, on the day of the open house, you have potential buyers, not everybody there is going to be a potential buyer. But in the mind of the potential buyer, what is happening in their mind? What do they think everybody there is for?
Ron Pippin:Everybody? They think everybody else is there to buy the house. And exactly. And so you almost get into a I'm a thinking that you almost get into like, an auctioneer mentality. It's just like, Oh, we got to get this house.
Joshua Nichols:Yeah. So what we're changing this is we're changing this into an abundance mentality. So I'm not only holding the open house just to sell this house so I can make 3% I'm holding this house, I'm holding this open house because I have an abundance of people who I want to work with. And I'm going to show them why they want to work with me. And every open house that we've had, we've always received multiple offers. On the day of the open house. I also bring my title company and my loan officer with me. And my loan officer sits right there and pre qualifies people on the spot to buy the house so that they can sit down with one of my agents next to him and then submit that rep suit to me. So perfect. Yeah, I mean, there's no reason why you why you would ever fail. And Utah is not the biggest on mega open houses. They every time someone comes they see the trailer, they see the flags, they see 50 open house signs around the neighborhood, all directing him to my house. I'll even call other Tom Ferry taught me this. I had a meeting with Tom Ferry. And he told me he said, I he said, How many signs you put up at your open house? I said 50. He says good. He goes, do you call other agents with listings in that area? And I said, No. Why? I said, I want them to come to my house. He says yeah, but don't you think they have their own database and their own thing he goes, if you teamed up with three or four other agents that had houses in the same area, say, Hey, I'm holding a mega open house, let's all do it. And that's get everybody over there. And I was like, Oh, my gosh, blew my mind. Another reason. And we've sold houses where someone has walked from a house down the street and said, We like this house better. And they put in an offer. Yeah, we're on my list or any of my marketing schemes. So now I've times it by five, the amount of people that get there, that house is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. And the only way to find someone willing to pay more$10,000 more is to have a huge, huge capacity to bring as many people as possible. But I'm not holding an open house to bring agents who have have clients, they already see that on the MLS. I'm trying to bring as many people from everywhere. I don't care if they're looky loos because they helped me sell the house. I don't care if they're just there for a frickin hot dog. It's a 10 cent hot dog do I mean, thank you for totally, and eating a hot dog and giving the kids balloons I'll give the kids will all bring a tank and give the kids balloons, you know, I mean, make them happy. I'm gaining more clients, I have a list where they sign in, they assigned to one of my agents, my agents will personally walk everybody through. And when they come out, then they get their hot dog on their food.
Ron Pippin:So there's so there's a couple things that you said I want that. One I just want to make a point is, is a little bit earlier you said you just ask. And I think that's really important because most people don't realize that often you don't get the business until you ask. So you have to ask for the business or often you're not going to get it.
Joshua Nichols:Here's here's this is what I teach one of my classes that I teach you. The biggest misconception about sales is people believe that sales is telling. And sales is not telling cells is just asking. That's it. You write people all day long, right? And you will kill the deal if you give out way too much information. I always was that saying keep it simple, stupid, right?
Ron Pippin:Yeah, right?
Joshua Nichols:Is I keep it as simple as possible. I don't give out rates. I don't tell them what I think they could get. I'm like, hey, that is not my expertise. I'm an expert at what I do here in real estate and this is how I'm going to help you. I have a team of loan officers that you can work with call these guys and get qualified you know, I mean, but I don't tell them anything because I don't want to mislead misdirected anything. But all you have to do in sales is just ask for it. That's it. You're never what is what's that one saying? You're gonna miss 100% of the shots, you Never take. Right. Right? Right. If you don't ever ask you, you're not going to ever get a deal. So,
Ron Pippin:Right. So, you know, to go back maybe towards the beginning. So Joshua has a team of 10 buyer agents and three listing agents. He's not, you won't see his paperwork, or you won't see his name on any of them. on any of the, the listings, you won't see his name on any of the buyer. Well, probably, I don't know if it isn't none, or is it like rarely? Well, yeah,
Joshua Nichols:I mean, I'm on some but,
Ron Pippin:But, but rarely. So and, he does that, because he's diversifying, and he's got other, he's got land development, and he's, and he's got land and other developments that he's got going on. But it frees him up, just to do a lot more stuff. Because if I go back to that roller coaster, where you're getting in one or two or three deals, you know, cuz we talked about this in the in the mortgage industry, as well as like, you've got, you know, your you run, run, run, run, run and in your, you get two or three or four deals in the pipeline, and then you're spending all your time closing them. And then the next month, you go, Oh, crap, I've got nothing in my pipeline. So you run, run, run, run, run, you go get three or four more. And then and then you spend your time closing them. It's like, dude, man, get a team, you get a team behind you. And that's, you know, and that took me a long time, I was a one man dude, for, you know, I've been in this 25 years and probably 20 of it. I was a one man guy and I had an assistant, but that was it. Now I have a team. And it's rare that my name goes on alone anymore. Because I do what I what I do best. And that's going out and getting the deals in the door, doing the marketing, talking to people. And I let my team, my team handle it because they are so much better at it. And I don't have that roller coaster anymore. And I think that's what you were talking about, too, is you don't have that roller coaster because you have a team behind you. Right?
Joshua Nichols:Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, in essence, I don't have that roller coaster anymore. But in a way, they still kind of do. But I'm trying to, to train them. I hold trainings every day from one to two. And they come in every day from one to two o'clock and we train on different things, but is I'm training him the time management on how to do that. I'm training him on the phones I'm training on on different scripts and memorizing different things. But yeah, um, that's all it is to cut out that to cut out that rollercoaster, I mean, you're not going to ever get ahead, if all you're doing is just keep chasing your tail. So and to do that it is through leveraging, and you have to leverage everything that you want your knowledge, you have to leverage your time. And you have to leverage your space. And by building a team, it allows you to do a whole lot more. It's the same reason why everybody says, well, who's your builder, I'm like, I don't have one builder. I have six builders, because I can manage 1015 different projects. But if I was doing a project all by myself, I would only be able to do one between a marketing and the signs and taking the pictures and making sure the progress is still there. I wouldn't be able to do it. When they bring in you bring in and you leverage 610 builders. And that's how you get projects from St. George all the way up to Logan.
Ron Pippin:Yeah, that's awesome. So I love Your love your open house strategy because you do them so so much differently. Most realtors that I talked to don't like open houses, they do it because it's expected of them. And they don't really see much results. And I think that's because the results has a direct correlation to the effort that's put in. So you like you're like killing it with open houses. You're like having a party there, right? You're like, Oh, we have dogs. You said a trailer. Is it like a trailer with with hot dogs? Or is it? Or is it like music? I don't know what the trailer is.
Joshua Nichols:No, I just got this I got a 16 foot enclosed trailer and it's wrapped. And then we've got teardrop signs, we've got eight of them that we run along the whole street and then we've got 50 open house signs with balloons that we put with directions all around. I mean, they know that we're there. I always tell the neighbors Hey, I'm going to be playing music from from 11 to two and just so they know that there's going to be cars, there's gonna be music, there's gonna be tons of stuff. And you know, we do we make it fun. We make it easy, we make it relax. It's not it's I don't ever wear a suit. You know? I don't ever you know, wear slacks and and you know, I just let people be themselves and they love it. I've had a lot of clients even from Calif I had a loan officer Call me just was a couple weeks ago. And he's like, I have these clients that they don't like their agent. I said, well, what didn't they like about them? They said, Well, he's just too straight. And I was like, I don't even know what that means. And so he says, I didn't know either. But he said, I asked him, I said, Well, what do you want? And they said, We want a unique buying experience. And we want an agent that's going to be able to give that to us. Now, these were people looking in Park City for $2.7 million. And they were buying cash closing in a week, two weeks. So he said, I have if you want to experience I have the perfect guy for you.
Ron Pippin:Oh, yeah. Well, you know, let's talk about the elephant in the room, dude, man. It's just like, you've got you've got dreadlocks, It's just that you just don't see that. And you right, you don't wear a suit. You know, you've got facial hair. It's just like, talk about relaxed kind of guy. It's just like, you know, this this is this is the guy, right?
Joshua Nichols:I've got everything from the lead singer of corn to Aqua man to everything. So yeah, the team calls me Jason momoa. So it's funny. But yeah, as soon as they saw me, he didn't even I never even said a word. And as soon as he saw me, he just started yelling. I love it. I love it. His wife came out gave me a hug. And we've been we've been friends, they've actually flown me down to their place in Sedona, Arizona, and on the course and we've golf, we've become friends. It's funny, you know, like, it's just, it's different. It's definitely different. Like you said, Nobody. I don't I've never seen any real estate agent with dreads or beard, or, you know, so
Ron Pippin:I probably seen some facial hair just not a lot. But, man, you're like, you're like full. I love the dreads. It's just like, I just couldn't I you know, back. I think we I had talked to you a couple weeks ago, when we talked about being on the podcast, and I told you I was originally a surfer skateboarder dude from California with long hair. And you know, I just I just can't rock that anymore.
Joshua Nichols:Yeah, I grew up and I grew up in Santa Monica two blocks from the beach. Yeah. So
Ron Pippin:yeah, yeah, that's cool. Well, man, you so you, you went from you kind of morphed from just being a real estate agent to doing some other things as well. I think you went from you have some systems in place where you were, you've, you're kind of out of the out of the front in your so to speak the man behind the curtain. But you've also done some other things, too. What what are the things have you done?
Joshua Nichols:Well, um, so once once I had perfected the the open house, I shouldn't say perfected because I don't I think there's always room for growth and learning there. But once I kind of got that down to a science, I, I sat back and I said, Okay, now I've done this, what more is there to do, right. And so I started meeting with the builders and started finding out what I need to do there. And they told me that they could bring me in on deals that they already had going. Now, I'm not talking about big builders, like these production builders, I'm talking about just homebuilders that builds, you know, three, four homes a year. And I would interview and find out if they wanted to go bigger, because if we teamed up, I wanted them to go bigger. So I found a couple guys, and they said, Look, if you find me land, then I can guarantee you this. And so I said, Okay, that's my end. So then I started going around knocking doors of a bunch of old houses in Salt Lake in Utah County and talking to farmers in and doing a bunch of stuff, which is funny, because in talking to the farmers, I actually ended up ended up getting into two water shares, which I don't even know if that's part of real estate or not, but I was flipping Water, water shares, I was buying them for $30,000 a share and selling them to developers, these big developers for 36,000 a share.
Ron Pippin:So water is a big deal, man.
Joshua Nichols:And it was it was easy, because I could I was already talking to them about buying their land. And then I found out if they had extra water, most of the farmers have extra water says that they're not even using, they had they didn't know the value of it. If they didn't they they they bought them for a couple hundred bucks, you know, 20-30 years ago now there were $36,000 a watershed. So that was that was something that I did on the side for a while. It was fun. It was just when I talked to him, but then I started writing up the contracts for the land and then taking that contract over to the builders and saying, Hey, I have this at this price. This is what we could subdivide it for and then we would start working together. And then that turned into them actually, which was great is them having the confidence in me on what I could do and I would go to the city meeting so that I could learn what more I needed to on a development, how it worked. And how long would take some of these developments from raw ground to start to dig is two years. It's not a it's not a very productive thing to do for two years. That's something that you want to just go jump into. And only do that because it's not going to pay you for two years. Yeah. And it's the same thing as selling a house. It's just, but it's something that I love to do. And so once the team was going in, once the the open houses were going, this is what I went after. And so now I have builders in St. George, I work with I have builders, all the way up through ni fi and Cedar City. And here in Utah County and solid County, I have three guys that we're working with. We're building. We're building a condo development right on the you. And we're selling him a condo for $800,000. And it's 10 00. And all I did was knocked the door of the house and he's like, yeah, I want to sell this house. And so what I went to the city and we can put a 10 storey condo development on her piece of land, and it's on you, you have you property, you know, and other ones, we have storage unit facilities that we're building out into. And I really like the condos and townhomes. Those are the best projects. But we do have commercial strip mall down in in Payson, we have one out into Willa, we have a project in Logan and one in Ogden. And then, um, you know, those were great, I, what I did is I took those projects, and every time I landed a project, and we got to where we, we could list it, so I had to have the final plat approval, once I had the final plat approval, then the signs go up, the names go on there and the listings go up. So I have a couple secretaries that take care of all the paperwork for me, they'll sit there and put everything together, send it over to the builder, have them sign it, do whatever they need to do, so that I'm not chasing paper and I can go around and do other things. And then then the agents receive the phone calls so that I'm not taking there's 1400 homes right now I would not be able to receive phone calls for projects from St. George's. Here, I have an office in St. George, we have an office in Richfield, I have one here in Pleasant Grove, and then I have one in Salt Lake and then one in Logan, the only way I can make it work is by having an agent in every one of those spots. doing that, while I'm overseeing it. I mean,
Ron Pippin:right. So. So let's break to break this down just a little bit. So you have gotten these, you've gotten these big projects all over the place. Yeah, and most agents don't have that. But the concept is still the same. So if you are an agent, and you want to move from one or two deals a month, two, three or four a month, you have to have help. Because you can't do it by yourself, you have to get a transaction coordinator, you have to have, you've got to get something and you've got to get help. You can't be doing the paperwork. And really what you need to find out is where are you Where do your strengths lie, so that you are only doing the things that you like to do and that you're good at and that makes you money, and then you you off, you're off, offloading the rest of that stuff to somebody else, a transaction coordinator, another agent that that will work with you. And sure you're not getting the entire pie. But I'll tell you what, I would rather have a slice of watermelon slice of a slice of watermelon than a whole grape. So
Joshua Nichols:Well I mean, I'm taking this project for example. I'm like I have a midvale project right here on 7116 townhomes. All I did is knock the door of one house he said itself. I went talk to all the other ones for houses sold. We just tore them down. We're starting to build them right now. So now I just gave it to one of my clients. He has 16 homes that he didn't have before. It's the same thing of buying leads. So I spend $15,000 a month on leads that I give to my agents. And then what they do is a team how a team is set up is they just give me 50% back of everything that they close. That's it. But now I have I'm one upping on every other team out there. And now I'm saying I have build jobs for you too. So not only are you going to be getting leads from me, but now you have 16 listings. The other guy he has I have out in Twitter we have 80 townhomes that we're building out there. And then the one in Ogden is 60 homes that we're building. The Hebrew project is 63 homes that are going to be 800 to a million apiece. I don't even have my name on them. Those ones, I just, I'm just saying, here's this, you do this because I know that I can go out and get another project in the time that that one's been done sold, I could probably pick up three or four more projects. And if I have to, I'll just hire another agent, which I'd love to hire another agent, put them on a project, get them some more leads, and then let's just make some more money. And everybody makes money, I love taking Everybody with me, you know, they I, I call my team, a group, not not a team, it's the focus Realty Group. You know, it's a family, we're all there, we all help out at an open house, whenever we all help out at a listing, we all help out everywhere, we also have everybody shows up, you know, because at one point or another, we're gonna need help, or we're gonna need you know, a lot of agents in the same office, there'll be like, hey, go do this showing for me, and I'll pay you 25 bucks or 50 bucks. My agents, we all do that for free for each other, because we all need it back. Everybody takes a vacation, everybody still has gone have to work. So we're always there for each other. And that's why I actually called it a group and not a team.
Ron Pippin:So that's, that's cool. I, I know that if a lot of agents are probably listening to this, or watching it on YouTube, and they're, they're going this I can't relate to this guy, because he's because he's got so much going on. But really, they really, if you're listening to this, you can relate to this. You just have to scale it back. Because man Joshua didn't start like this. Joshua started just like where everybody else started. He just started. You said, What, eight years ago?
Joshua Nichols:Yeah, I started eight years ago. Yeah.
Ron Pippin:Eight years ago, man, he started where you are right now. He started and, and he just grown this. But the the key is, and you told me that that there was somebody that you are on a first class? flight to Australia, right? Yeah. And he taught you this concept of? You can't do it all yourself. Right? Is that isn't that what you were telling me?
Joshua Nichols:His his concept was the name don't Oh, okay. So in real estate, everybody wants to build their name, they want their name to be out there. And that's fine. That's great. People will call you for your name. But he said, If you really want to go big, and you really want to make a lot of money, he said, don't ever use your name.
Ron Pippin:Okay, so the for those that want that want to start their business, that's really good advice. So if you want to go out and start your own brokerage, or you want to start your own team or your own group, so that's really, that's really good advice. But for those that, that don't aspire to that or that are just starting out, or just saying I you know, I don't I don't I want to I want to build, but I don't want to go that big. It's just like it's the same concept. I've talked to so many agents that just don't have time to go get the next deal. Because they're chasing paperwork, or they're making phone calls to run down an addendum or something.
Joshua Nichols:Or deadlines
Ron Pippin:Right it is not the use of your time. It's just like that's $10 an hour stuff. It's just like, go hire somebody for 1015 bucks an hour. And, and go get another deal. Yeah, that's how you keep that roller coaster from from happening.
Joshua Nichols:Yeah, exactly. I think I have three staff that are here every day. One just does the TC work. One is like my scheduler, she tells me where I'm going to be she tells me what to do every day. And then she also does some marketing. And then I have a scrubber for all the leads that we have she scrubs leads she calls old leads. She's going back, you know, five years ago when I started buying leads, and she's bringing out more deals. And then we're turning those over back over to the agents, but she's getting a commission off of that. So, you know, she's she, she makes bonuses, all the girls here, they make their bonuses off of that, you know, I mean,
Ron Pippin:that's awesome. Actually, probably after some some other time, like I kind of want to talk to you about about your team structure, because you know, ours is growing too. And I always like to see what other people are doing. So we won't bore the people on the podcast, but
Joshua Nichols:Why just guy just to expand even more. I just hired another guy and he works directly with me right now. That was the one that was on the phone when we were talking earlier. When we got on. What he is doing right now is he is only looking for flips. So he's out there knocking doors. He's out there talking to people doing doing some social media working. And we've been buying homes and doing flips. We're on our second one right now. But the first flip we made $115,000 profit.
Ron Pippin:Wow
Joshua Nichols:Look, I put six thousand dollars into it, we paid 190,000 hundred 94,000 cash for it. And we were out in three months. So it's just another another avenue to bring in. Yeah, already agents might as well be doing a part. That's why I said earlier. Like, I don't know, if I'm doing anything outside the realm of real estate, every agent would love to have all of that going on. I would hope so. You know, I mean, but,
Ron Pippin:You just learned to manage your time. And then that's what that's what most of us learn to learn is how to manage our time and what what activities should we be doing? And should we not be doing? And so you're doing? You're doing the 300 $400,000 an hour activities, and you're offloading the stuff? That's, that's, you know, 1015 $20 an hour activities? Yeah,
Joshua Nichols:I mean, they I'm leveraging my time. Do my time by leveraging the stuff that I don't need to do. Everybody knows how to do paperwork, paperwork is easy. A work in deadlines is easy to follow you can I have agents that sit here, they do their own deals, they still take leads, but they'll manage their time? And what's leveraging everything that we have, and only focusing on what you know, like what you said earlier is what am I really good at? You know, what am I and I'm really good at getting out there and talking to people. And, you know, when I first started in real estate, I didn't have leads, I didn't have anybody helping me there, everything was call your sphere of influence, and call this and that. And as I'm from California, like, I didn't have the sphere of influence that, you know, the Smiths had here in Utah and everybody else, like thousands of family members, I don't have that. So I actually started calling out of the phonebook and started calling people out of the phonebook and just talking to him. And then I started knocking doors. And then, you know, one of the classes that I teach is people, agents get so focused on a cell and not so much of getting to know the person, when when you when you get to know the person, you'll actually get the cell. And so it's actually versed on how you think. So I would play a game in my head when I would go knock doors of what can I have this person show me like and so, for example, one day I said, I want this lady on the next house to show me all her pots and pans. I know that sounds so random. But as I got her to show me her pots and pans, what does that mean? I'm at? I'm in our kitchen.
Ron Pippin:You are.
Joshua Nichols:Yeah. Right. And being at the doorstep is that's where all the walls are. As soon as you cross the cross that threshold, you are now in their space, and you are trusted. And I ended up getting a sell out of that deal when she showed me her pots and pans because her daughter needed to sell a house and buy a house and I ended up getting that because she's thought I was so nice, you know? So hands on with everything you do is basically my motto. Just have fun. It doesn't matter.
Ron Pippin:Yeah. People do people do business with those they like know and trust. Yes. So you said you said once you cross that threshold, you're in their area, they're in your in their space, and they're gonna bite you in if they don't have some level of trust for you. So I've seen that's a great point.
Joshua Nichols:Yeah, absolutely.
Ron Pippin:So that's great point. Man. I'm like my head's already spinning from all the all the info that you've provided. So. So hey, how can how can if somebody wants to reach out to Joshua, how, what's the best way for them to do that?
Joshua Nichols:So I mean, you can reach me on my cell phone all the time I'm on that. I'm not taking any leads or phone calls. So I'm usually usually available my phone. That's 801-995-2683 or just shoot me an email. It's Joshua dot Nichols. 30 two@gmail.com.
Ron Pippin:Focus Realty Group, right?
Joshua Nichols:Yeah. And then if if anybody's looking for home, I've built a website where people can, it's hooked up to the MLS, it's focused Realty Group utah.com, because I was I put the Utah because I was thinking ahead and I wanted to go to Colorado and Idaho. And I did this as you go to group Utah. And then if it eventually ever goes there, then then it goes there. But focus Realty Group utah.com people can sign in and they can see the MLS and the houses. I'm directly connected ID x updates every three minutes. So it's actually faster than realtor.com and Zillow, and those ones do so
Ron Pippin:by far.
Joshua Nichols:Yeah. Yeah.
Ron Pippin:And you'll get far better you'll you'll get far better advice. Yeah, in some of those other places.
Joshua Nichols:Yeah. We have connections on there. You can see the profiles of a couple of the agents that have put on that website. You can see the loan officers that we're working with as well. Cool. Any questions on anything they can look those up. Awesome.
Ron Pippin:So as always, if you need to reach me or my team, you can reach us at 801-628-7667. You can call or text us there. And we're gonna we're gonna wrap this one up. I appreciate you, Joshua for taking some time today and coming on the podcast. It was it was a real pleasure and honor to have you on here today.
Joshua Nichols:Thanks, Ron. Thanks for having me.
Ron Pippin:All right. We will talk to you guys next week.