How to Make $1,000,000 a Year Calling Expired Listings

Most agents think expired listings are the hardest lead source in real estate. Bernie Gallerani built a career proving the opposite.

In this episode, Bernie breaks down why expireds are the cheapest, warmest, most motivated lead you will ever call, the exact daily schedule he ran for 15 years, and the math that turns six hours of prospecting into a seven-figure income.

They already hired an agent. They already agreed to pay a commission. They already want to move. All you have to do is pick up the phone.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, everybody. Bernie Gallarani bringing you an episode of Success is not convenient. Today we're going to be talking to all of our realtor friends out there, and we're going to talk about a topic that I'm actually really passionate about because it's really how I spent most of my real estate career and still do, really, at finding business. One of the things that my mentor, Mike Ferry, has always said is that my job as a real estate agent is to put a buyer and seller together. So if you want to learn a little bit more about calling expired listings, expired listings is one thing that I actually really camped out on and loved. Like I found so much success in that area where I've met agents over the years who've just thought that that was the hardest thing to do. And I actually found that that was the easiest thing to do. And so the really question we want to ask ourselves is why does one agent like myself and many others like me who have found expired listings to actually be the easier way to do business? And other agents find that it's literally impossible for them to get any traction on expired listings. So we're going to talk a little bit about some of the things to consider when calling expired listings. You know, I'm I'm preparing now for uh a guest as a doing a podcast where the the title of this is how to make a million dollars a year calling expired listings. Um I'm gonna go through some of the notes that I'll be working with on that podcast to um try to influence some of you guys that um call it, but maybe you're a little bit stuck at, you know, kind of tipping over the high level of success with expireds. Or maybe you've just never really thought about expireds as an option and um want to consider maybe that as a form of business for you. So that's what this um is all about today. See, the success with expireds isn't really about finding better leads, it's about becoming the person who can consistently convert the leads everyone else gives up on. And that's the reality. I've talked to and coached so many agents about calling expireds, and they get pretty discouraged pretty quickly. And most agents think that calling expireds is like calling anything else, but some lead sources are more challenging through conversation that you have to have a little bit, you know, different kind of skill. Um, the advantage uh is for the person holding the phone and talking to them. And if you're calling an expired listing, you actually have the entire process of getting them to say yes right on the end of your phone. It's called you. And if you got to learn some things about how to talk to people, so write this one down. How do I actually talk to people? How do I get somebody to actually listen to what I'm saying and say yes versus say no? So that's what I want us to focus on today is what you say, how you do it, your schedule, your approach, your attitude, your expectation. All of that is absolutely super important at making a successful run towards calling expired listings. And we can call it expired. Some will say, well, Bernie, I like to call canceled or like to call withdrawans. Perfectly fine. Whatever your rules are in your MLS, we have an expired section and then we have a canceled section. And so we call both of those expired and/or canceled sections. Okay. So the fundamentals of expired listings and having success in that area, right? Number one is it's it's called consistency, skill, discipline to create a million-dollar business. So you have to have a high level of consistency, you have to have a level of skill, and you'll need to build upon that level of skill. And then you need to have a pretty relentless discipline. And I would say the discipline and consistency are key. And I think skill actually shows up in time. So start with something that is very easy for you when you're calling expired listings. So spend maybe an hour, maybe 45 minutes to an hour doing this kind of work just to kind of get things warmed up. I'm gonna go into some of the things that I did to call expired listings on a regular basis. So I've calculated, and this is somewhat of a guess, but I would say that in my real estate career, I've sold about 2,000 expired listings. And what that means is maybe they were expired. I sold their house for them. I may have sold them a house, a buyer, uh, they might have bought a new home that came off the expired. They might have referred me business because I serviced them well. So they might have given me their aunt, their uncle, their brother, their sister, friends, family, co-workers. I might have gotten a lot of referrals from those kinds of things, but it all started with calling expired listings. So when I say I've sold 2,000 expired listings, I've sold 2,000 people that have all stimulated mainly after calling expired listings. See, most agents believe that successful prospecting comes from having the perfect script or the perfect lead source, and it's not. Um, I don't believe that. I believe our industry gives everyone of us, every single person, a credible opportunity to build wealth. The question isn't whether the opportunity exists, the question is whether or not we're willing to become the person capable of taking advantage of the opportunity. And in this case, it's the opportunity of calling expired listings. My mentor, Mike Ferry, has always said that our job is just to connect people, it's to put a buyer and seller together. As I said earlier, that is our job. And so here's the question for us is you have the best opportunity with the lowest cost of expense, and that's called an expired listing because it's coming off the market. And what an expired listing, and a for sale buy owner, even. Both of them are raising their hand and they're saying, Hey, listen, I'm looking for a real estate agent to help me get my home sold. That's how I see it. Now, a buy owner might be a little bit of a different challenge because they a lot of cases don't like you as a realtor. They think you make too much money, or they just believe they can do it on their own. But an expired has already trusted a realtor. A seller actually said, Hey, I actually hired a realtor. I was willing to pay a commission and I was willing to go through the process. And for whatever unforeseen reason, the home didn't sell. So they're raising their hand, and what they're doing is they're saying, I need help selling my house. See, a lot of times you look at expired listings and you hear the response as, hey, I'm gonna keep my same agent, or I'm gonna take it off the market for a little while, or it's not a good time to sell, and you actually take that for face value. Don't do that. Don't do that. See, every single morning, expired listings wake up needing someone to solve their problem. So if you write this down, you're supposed to solve their concern and their problem. The opportunity is there every single day for each and every one of us. If our job is to put buyers and sellers together, and one of the best lead sources is raising their hand saying, I actually trust realtors. My owner's not doing that, but an expired is, I trust realtors. And yet then they hired a realtor. So we've already solved commission issues in the most cases. We've solved the level of understanding and acceptance of hiring a real estate agent. They're raising your hand. They are the best source of business you could ever want to chase. See, the difference between agents who earn $50,000 and agents who earn $500,000, it's not the leads, it's the opportunity that they have because it there's a lot of ways to get leads. Ton, you can get leads in a lot of different ways, but gosh almighty, isn't it awesome to know that somebody's raising their hand and saying, I'm willing to talk to you, Mr. Realtor, about helping me sell my house. I trust you, I'm willing to pay you. All you have to do is convince me why I should choose you. And that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about the level of your skill, your discipline, your schedule, your level of practice in order to develop a better better skill. It's the willingness to do what most people just won't do. And this is the fun part because in the years that I spent calling expired listings, it isn't hard, but people make it hard. See, opportunity is everywhere for us. There's so much every single day that's coming off the market for you to help somebody sell their home. The question, though, that you need to ask yourself is why aren't you calling them more? Every expired listing represents someone who still wants to sell. They already raised their hand and said yes. They already hired somebody, they already understand that process, they already experienced the disappointment of it not getting sold. They still need help because their house hasn't sold yet. So they still need a great realtor. If there were 500 expired listings every month in your market, how many do you actually need in order to make a really nice living? I'm gonna say this to you again. You have 500 people every single month who are raising their hand and saying, I want to sell my home, I want to move, I already trust a realtor, I'm already willing to pay a commission. 500. How many of those 500 do you think you can get? One, three, eight? How many do you want? In some cases, and even in my market at times, we'll have 500 to 800 in a day, where it'll be like the end of the month, and all these expireds will come off the market. We could have my my one of my uh ISAs was just showing me the other day that we had a thousand forty-eight expireds that came off the market since January. I'm sorry, since June 1st, all the way now to July, mid-July, which is where we are in filming this today. So we're in mid-July. So let's call it six, seven weeks. There were 1,048 expireds still not relisted. Still not relisted. How many of those do you need to have in order to make a difference in your life? How many will change the trajectory of your income? You need one listing per week. Will that change how you live your life? Two listings per week, four listings per week. Guys, I'll tell you this. I would take pretty realist realistically between 20 and 30 expired listings every month. That's right. Between 20 and 30 every single month. You can take two listings, you take four listings per week, but four listings per week creates wealth. Some of it just changes lives. Two listings, maybe they change your life a listing. Four listings a week creates wealth. And what's the difference between two and four? What's the difference between one and four? What's the difference between one and none? Well, the ones that's none is not because you're not calling them. The ones that are one or two, you're calling them, you're just not that good at your skill yet. If you're taking four listings, that's 16 listings a month. How many of those are you gonna sell? Half, 70%, 80% of those listings? If you take 16 of them, are you selling 10? Are you selling 12? If you had 10 of them and your average commission check was X, I'll let you fill in that blank. What is that? What is that number for you? And I want you to look at that number and ask yourself, gosh, why am I not better at this job? If I actually sold one or two or three of these expired listings each and every week or each and every month, how would that change the financial picture for me and my family? The cheapest lead is not simply the lead with the lowest price, it's the lead with the clearest motivation, the shortest distance to a decision, and the greatest chance to becoming a commission for you. Opportunity has never been the problem for agents. You know what's interesting? And I'm gonna stop and pause about this number I just heard recently, it just came out at the end of June. I'm sorry, at the end of July. 84% of every licensed agent in the United States has not even sold a home in the first six months of 2026. 13% of agents licensed sold between one and four homes. So if you take the 13% and the 84%, 97% of every licensed agent in the United States sold four to zero homes already this year. Only 13% have sold four. That leaves three percent selling the lion's share of all the business. And what's really sad is there's so much opportunities and expired and by owner calling, and yet nobody does it because they don't want to feel uncomfortable, right? Remember, staying consistent is super important. Opportunity is not your problem, it's your lack of skill, desire, and consistency. So let's talk a little bit about a daily schedule that works. And this is one that I worked for many, many years that I highly recommend. And I'm gonna tell you to sell 150, 250 homes a year, you can do it with this schedule, but you got to be disciplined. All right. This is where your experience in understanding how to help people is gonna come in time, but ultimately this will put a seven-figure income in your pocket if you just learn to do it right and you're patient. So let's walk through some of these things that I think are gonna be the most important things for you. Number one is your morning routine. What is your morning routine right now? What does it look like? Do you show up to work every day at the same time? That is a must. Creating a habit for yourself, you know, I I it's a little bit of a pet peeve over the years in coaching and training agents, is like, what time are you gonna show up? Where is your integrity with your time? What's the lie you're telling yourself when you say, I'm gonna show up every day at 8 o'clock and you show up at 8.05 or 8.10 or 8.15? I know. Some of you guys might be saying, Well, Bernie, that's a little ridiculous. Is it? Is money an issue at all for you? Are you living the life of your dreams for you and your family? Are you having all the things you want? Are you coming up with excuses? Are you sitting there going, Bernie, what you're saying doesn't make any sense? What is five or ten minutes? I don't know. Are you making all the money you want to make? Are you having success? What if you tried this? What if you'd actually tried to show up a little bit earlier than what you uh had designed for yourself to do? And you watch what happens. Is your goal to generate each day? And then for how long? How many contacts are you committing to? How many hours are you are you committing to? So here's the schedule that I ran for 15 years and still run it today, just run in a different capacity now that I'm team building. I arrived at the office every single day at 7 a.m., not 7.01, 6.55, most likely. Never late. Because it was my first opportunity that I had to stay in integrity with myself. That usually happens when you wake up in the morning and go to the gym and do all the stuff in the morning. But for my work, that's how important it was. So if you are you one that says, well, I get around their office around seven, take the word around out of your vocabulary. What time do you get the office? I get there at seven. Great. I get there at seven o'clock and I would prepare all my numbers just to make sure that I don't have any technical issues, that I had all my numbers, my prospecting, my my expired, my buy owners, all of that was ready to go. And I don't then I would do is I would start dialing at about 7:45 in the morning. And I would call all the new expires that came off the off the market from the night before. All the new expires. Let's just say there was 25, let's say there was 35, let's say there was 50. Everyone lives in a different market, so you're gonna have a different number, right? But I would call all of those first. That was my normal routine. I'd call all the expires that came off the market first, every single morning for about 45 minutes, as long as that would take. And if I didn't set an appointment, well, it didn't matter if I did, I usually would set two or three appointments every day, then I would go on to the next stage and I would go back seven days on the expired. So every day I would call, I'd go back seven days, the second round. So now I'm calling the first today's expireds first time at 745. Then 45 minutes later, I would get through that. I would go back seven days. Now I'm calling today's expireds a second time, and then I'm calling the seven-day old expireds seven, eight, nine times. Meaning first every day for seven days, I'm calling those expired listings. Here's why you do that. Let's just say you call at eight o'clock or eight, seven forty-five, you get off the phone, you're done calling the new expireds by eight thirty, nine o'clock, somewhere around there. What if a mom or a dad took a son or a daughter to the bus stop? What if they have to go to the grocery store and they forgot their phone in their car? What if they ran out to the mailbox to grab their mail and they left their cell phone in their house and then you just went past it and then you never called them again? So, what I want you to do is I want you to pound hard on those expired listings when they first come out. Be aggressive at making those calls, those calling all of those expireds, and then go back seven days and call them over and over and over and over again. Just because you didn't reach them yesterday doesn't mean you're not going to reach them today. Okay. Make sure you add cancels and withdraws also in that mix. But if we have an agent who got fired from their client and they canceled the agreement, then you should be calling those particular people, right? Now, as far as a withdrawn goes, I would call withdrawans just to because in our market it used to be that our withdrawans were also expi uh canceled. So we didn't know what they were until we called them. Just make sure you're not calling listings that are currently active, because then that's against the law, right? So we can't do that. So what you have to do is you have to keep calling and keep calling and keep calling and keep calling. It's a monotonous work schedule. But if you want to make a seven-figure income, the business gets monotonous. But typically from 7 45 to 8 30-ish, maybe 8 45, I'd be done with my first round. And then I would take a 10-minute mindset break because I just called for like an hour to two hours, depending on what I was calling. So I had to take a little bit of a mindset break. I'd watch a video, I'd go for a walk real quick around the building, just something to clear my mind, right? I might read a couple pages in a book. I might, you know, sometimes I would just go onto a YouTube, the motivational YouTube thing, and just watch that for like 10 minutes, just clearing my mind and making sure that everything uh I was keeping this right, right? Without keeping this right, you can't keep things right. You got to keep your brain right all the time. And after my break, um, I'm now about two hours, let's just say into it. So let's say I called 45 minutes, then I went back and called it another hour. So now I got a 10-minute mindset break. So now I'm in at two hours, already in at two hours of prospecting. And then what I would do is I would call all my past clients, all the people that were scheduled for me to call that day. It could have been 10 to 20 past client calls, center of influence, and I'd be asking them for business. Who do you know that's looking to buy uh real estate right now? Anybody at work or church, anybody in your social groups? Who can I help? I'm a real estate agent looking for business. Many of you guys don't like doing that because it makes you sound like, oh, well, gosh, I'm looking like I'm a broke realtor. You are. You are a broke realtor, and you should think of yourself as a broke realtor because broke realtors actually do things that wealthy realtors typically don't want to do, because wealthy realtors always think of themselves as broke, which is why they continue to keep doing it. So consider yourself broke because that will allow you to do the things in expired listings that most people wouldn't do. So after I called center of influence, my past clients, I'm now three hours in. I'm three hours in. So now if I started at, let's call it 7:45, I'm close to 11 o'clock right now. Then what I would do at around 11 a.m., I would call all the for sale buy owners that I could get a hold of. And I would call them for one hour. So from 11 to 12, call all of the buy owners. Set a couple appointments there, one or two appointments with a buy owner. So now I got one or two appointments set with a expired, I got one or two appointments set with a buy owner. It's noon, it's 12 o'clock. Guess what? I get to go to lunch. I just spent four hours lead generating. So I'm gonna pause there for a minute. I don't care what company you have, I don't care what kind of business it is, I don't care what you're selling. Everybody that sells something has to have something to sell to somebody. That's the sales process. So here's my question: What is your lead generation time look like? What are you doing every single day and how long are you doing it to develop a clientele so you can put a buyer and a seller together? See, I think this is the hardest part versus why realtors are broke. It's really actually sad if you heard what I just said. 97%, these are the people watching these videos, probably. 97% of you guys are selling four to no houses. It's pathetic. It's sad because we won't learn the basic conversation of how to get people to uh find value in what we're trying to offer. And then the other thing is just there's just no discipline. The lack of discipline is what creates poverty. So after I'd go to lunch, I'd come back at one o'clock, I'd return all I would return all the phone calls that I missed. All the agents, maybe, who had called me, other people tried to call me while I was prospecting, right? If somebody tried to call me and they call me back for me calling expired, I never called them back until one o'clock. They're returning my phone calls, but I'm still on new hunting. I'm hunting, hunting, hunting. So at one o'clock, I would call those people back, and I'd typically go from about one o'clock to two o'clock. So I would have eight to noon prospecting expired by owners, cancelled, center of influence, past clients by owners. Eight to noon. I always start always start at 7 45, but get the idea. One o'clock, I'd return all the phone calls. All people who called, left voicemail messages, text messages, whatever might have happened. From two o'clock to six o'clock every single day was my listing presentation time. Now let's not confuse this. Listing presentation time, meaning that I wasn't always on listing presentations from two to six, but I blocked out that time because I knew that I was trying to fill up my schedule in the afternoon for listing presentations. None of it, I never went to lunch with friends. I always went to lunch with my wife, or I had lunch by myself in the office. I didn't socialize outside of that. I was I was in working mode constantly, right? You might go, well, Bernie, that doesn't sound like much fun. I don't know. It just depends what you're looking for. You're looking for fun or you're looking to make money. Well, I would like to have both. Well, great. Try to make it both because that having fun is really what goes on inside your head. And to me, helping people that home had their home expired, that another agent, I mean, I thrived. I loved it. I salivated over the opportunity to help an expired where another agent, I'm gonna say this again: 97% sell four or less houses a year. It was like shooting fish in a barrel because most agents couldn't get them sold. And I would come in and show them a plan that would expose the property to get it sold at a high level. Everybody can do it. You just don't care enough to do it. So the question is are you practicing your scripts, your skills, your dialogues, your objection handling? So once I had this block of time from two to six o'clock, then I had some options. I had three options, and this is where they are. Okay, there's three sections of this in the in my afternoon. This is from two o'clock to six o'clock or two o'clock to seven o'clock. And we'll talk about the difference between two between two and six and two and seven, because that's going to make some sense here to you in a minute. Okay. So number one, I'd have what we call an A, B, and C schedule. A was listing appointments from two to six, knocking on doors, if that was option B. If I didn't have a listing appointment, I would knock on expired and buy owner doors, people that I couldn't get a hold of. And the third thing I would do, if I didn't have a listing appointment or knocking on expired and buy owner doors, I would then go back to the office and lead generate again. If I had a listing appointment, let's just say at two o'clock and another listing appointment at six o'clock, and I was 45 minutes from my house, I always had a desk style setup in my vehicle and I would prospect on my computer that I would bring in my car waiting to go to the next appointment. So what I would do is I'd be lead generating between every single hour that I didn't have a listing appointment. I'd be knocking on a door every single hour that I didn't have a listing appointment. So I had an A, B, and a C schedule. A listing appointments, B knocking on doors, C prospecting. I didn't have a D or an E or an F. There wasn't shopping. There wasn't hanging out with friends. This was business. This is all this was business constantly, making a lot of money, helping people serve them so they can move on to the next stage of their life. My job was being focused on the client. The money just shows up. When you focus on the client, you help the client, you do everything you can to let the client know that you're there to help them and that they don't have to go through this again. Hear me on this. They just had a bad experience with an agent that couldn't get the home sold. If you're one of those agents that expires a lot of listings or have had expired listings, I've had expired listings too. Sometimes I don't get them sold either. But it's also my fault that they're not selling. It's my lack of skill, communication style, my attentiveness to their need, me trying to figure out the solution. So I'm going to take full responsibility for any house that doesn't sell. Do you? So going through all of this, you look at this and go, well, Bernie, how long did you actually spend on the phone? I averaged about six hours every single day prospecting. Now, some of you guys are checking out right now. Some of you guys are going, okay, Bernie, you've just danced over the line and you've you've just lost my uh you know my interest. I get it. Making a lot of money and helping a lot of people isn't for everybody because your want and your desire is one thing. Your action and your discipline are a totally different set of rules. So if you're saying, well, Bernie, I only want to prospect for two hours a day, then what I would just say is that's fine. Prospect for two hours a day, but just stay consistent. No distractions. You must eliminate all the distractions in your life. And there's a lot of them. I coach a bunch of agents now, and the level of distractions that I see from my own group of people is actually nauseating all the excuses people make up. When you go into the office, start prospecting in the morning, you have to eliminate everything email, social media, you no, no meetings at all. Only getting on the phone, calling the leads, creating a business that you and your family can be really proud of. You know, I have a meeting here every week with my management team, and then throughout the day, there's always meetings. And everybody knows me. I don't like meetings. I think they're a waste of time. Meetings should be five, 10 minutes, not 30, 40 minutes, an hour. It's like, well, Bernie, we have to talk about this. No, we don't. We just need to take action. Talking doesn't create action. Talking doesn't help a seller. Meeting doesn't help me help them move. Action. Your action, my action, their action. Move the needle, move the needle, move the needle, create, create a different opportunity for people. And here is here's a way to look at it. Lead generating is how you get clients. It's mandatory that you have lead generating activities to sustain wealth. Some of you guys are going, wealth, Bernie, I'm just trying to pay my bills. The rule still applies, it's the same principle. So here's what's a fun. Let's do some math. If you want to make a million dollars a year selling expired listings from just lead generating itself through expired and buy owners, if you have an average commission check, and I just wrote this down to 15,000, that's the average sales price. Let's put an average sales price of 500,000. So you have an average commission check of 15,000. If you sell 67 homes, you literally lead generate six hours a day, 250 days a year prospecting. That's 1,500 hours every year that you're on the phones. 1,500 hours. Here's the fun part. I love this part. You would make $666.67 per hour. If you prospected six hours a day, you would make $666. $4,000 per day. Fun, right? When was the last time you made $4,000 just working a day? Can you imagine doing that every day? Let's do the math. You have $20,000 a week. How does that change your perspective? How would you like to know that the only reason you aren't making $20,000 a week is because of your lack of skill, desire, discipline, and commitment to your business. Because I can tell you right now, expired listings are the easiest thing you could ever do because they're raising their hand and they're saying, I actually want to sell my house. I'm just trying to interview an agent or find an agent that wants to help me. What makes this fun is if you raise your commission rate even higher, you could sell even less houses. And that is something that I learned is that you don't need to sell 60 plus homes. You can sell 50 or 40 homes and make the same amount of money by just not giving up your commission rate. All right. So now I'm stepping over and some of losing some of you guys. We as agents are so desperate to get a listing that we negotiate our commissions because we don't have any skill associated with holding our value. I want you to understand, could you can you imagine if you learned which I have to look your seller in the face and go, yeah, you know, I charge three and a half or four percent to list the home and they say, Well, will you adjust it? And you say no, do you have any other questions? And still get the listing. So for some of us, it's 60 houses plus, some of us it's 80 houses, some of it's 100 houses because we don't know how to hold our commission rate. Great sellers will pay you for your expertise. The question is, are you confident enough to stand up for your value? Successful prospectors stop because their schedule says stop. Successful prospectors, but also successful agents know what their value is in their commission and they don't accept anything less than that. See, unsuccessful prospectors stop because their emotions say to stop. Their emotions, their emotions tell them, uh, well, I mean, I'm done. I'm emotionally spent. Successful people don't do that. Successful people, what they do is they go beyond what their emotions tell them. They fight their emotional pattern, they fight their emotional desire because they understand right now that paying the bills comes with discomfort and building a new person. And a new person is a person who goes and fights through all the emotional thought processes that happen and you stay focused. If you just stay focused on two hours a day, 20 contacts, three hours a day, 30 contacts. I would do 50 contacts a day at six hours, right? So if you if you get to the point, and why it took so long, by the way, is the longer you call older stuff, the less people pick up. So you can go from 15 contacts an hour to 10 contacts an hour. By the time you get to four or five hours, you're probably making six, seven contacts an hour. So that does start to change, just to let you know. Most agents think confidence comes first, and it doesn't. It doesn't come first. Confidence comes from repetition. I want you to write this down. Well, Bernie, I don't think I can do it. Well, you don't do it long enough. I've always said this, you know, I use this in my a lot of coaching and training. When I started selling real estate, I would make 50 contacts every day, except for Monday. Monday was what they call money Monday. I would make 100 contacts on Monday, 50 contacts through the rest of the week. And I remember I would make 267 calls, or not calls, but contacts, just to set one appointment. But here's what's talking about like confidence comes from repetition. Today I can call and setting one appointment for every nine people I talk to. So what's the difference between 267 and nine? Are the people friendlier? No. Are they easier? Nope. Are they more happy than they were 15, 20 years ago? Nope. I'm better. I'm better at communicating. I'm better at having that conversation. I'm better at giving empathy and understanding. I'm better at agreeing with them. I'm better. But you know what I had to do is I had to go through all the repetitious process, 267 conversations for one appointment. And then I'd go on one appointment and I'd probably get it 30, 40% of the time. I just keep going and keep practicing and keep going and keep practicing. And then I would look bring that down to, you know, 200 and then 150 and then 100 and then 9. And then I'd go from taking 30% of the listings that I went on to 50% of the listings I went on, to 60% of the listings I went on, to 70%, to 80%. What was the difference? My confidence, my skill, how I learned how to talk to people. And so what I'm going to ask you, realtors, remember, I, you know, I got 97% of you that are struggling right now. Whether you want to admit it or not, it's the reality. And if you don't think you're struggling, you should be. See, here's the challenge. When you're selling one, two, three, four homes a year, you're not even good enough to even understand what it takes to help people because you're not doing it enough. It's like a baseball player who only goes up and practices in the batter's box four times a year. They're swinging at 40 balls a day, trying to knock them out, warming up. So, how good can anybody really be at any of this expired calling if you're not doing it and you're like, well, that stuff doesn't work. It's too hard. Like, what does your daily script practice look like? Are you role-playing? Are you listening to the recordings of like you're literally listening to yourself and the live call and re and recording that and then listening it back and go, hmm, that was pretty ugly. I need to make some improvements in this area. Are you practicing your objection skills? If you get an objection from a seller that says, hey, I'm gonna just keep it off the market for the next three months and let the market kind of cool down a little bit or heat up or whatever it is the reasons are. Do you say, okay, well, thank you very much and you hang up? Or are you practicing a good objection to make them look at the situation differently? Are you working hard on practicing your closing? You know, one of the things that my mentor always said to me, he says that a good presentation has an expectation for a really great closing in the end. Are you afraid to close? Are you afraid to have those kind of conversations to get somebody to grab a pen and sign that listing contract? One of the things I learned a lot about um helping people and maybe people listening to me at a higher level was how's my tone and how am I delivering my message? If I'm saying the same things, I can say it in a manner that actually has a different tone that is more inviting to people. Are you smiling a lot and being really confident? Right? Are you practicing your pauses? Like, are you just talking like a salesperson or are you actually skilled and understand when to pause? Like these are all the things that I think people need to spend some time on that when they get frustrated, they get frustrated because they're not having the success. And the reason they're not having the success is because they're not practicing any of these things we're talking about. You don't rise to the occasion, you fall to your level of training. And I think this is a training issue. So you're not rising to your occasion, you're actually falling down to the level of your skill. If someone listened to your listing presentation today, would they know you've practiced it and that you're well rehearsed and that you look like a professional? You know, it's so interesting. We'll have like role plays in our company here every single day. And then I get with my management team, you know, had that go, whatever. They're like, oh, that agent is really bad. They've been here for six months and they just act like today's the first day. It's because they don't do anything different to improve. This is a mental battle constantly. I think I think part of this prospecting issue that people have is the fear of rejection. I've said this a lot before that people get rejected every day. You just don't know about it. You get rejected every day. Every day someone's judging you. Maybe they're not saying it to your face, but they might be going, oh, look what they're wearing. Look at that car. Boy, look at that, what an ugly hat. That person needs to lose some weight. That person's too thin. You're getting judged every single day. They're just not doing it to your face. But all of a sudden as soon as they do it to you and you hear it, you curl up and go, I don't think I can do this. Maybe if I do this and I'm just not that good, I have a fear of maybe sounding really bad. Well, you only do that because you don't practice your skill. You don't stay in it long enough. You're not focused enough on the result, you're focused more on the emotional, immediate feeling. Sometimes agents sit there and go, Well, I fear like I'm really bothering people. I'm fear of failure. Every successful prospector simply learned to become comfortable being uncomfortable. And I would say that that statement is not more true that you're always gonna be a little uncomfortable calling people you don't know because you don't know the response they're gonna give you, and it's not always joyful. So I think successful prospectors just learn that I'm just gonna be uncomfortable with this and it's gonna be the new me, the new norm. You're changing just really the identity of who you are. And you stop saying to yourself, I'm nervous, I'm not nervous anymore. So I mean, I feel I'm better. Um, or you maybe you say, I am nervous, I am nervous about this. But what you should say is you're gonna be nervous. You're always gonna be nervous until you do something that causes you to build confidence. And if you don't have some success in time, you're gonna always be a little nervous. But I promise you this you are gonna have some success if you work on the due diligence, the behavioral patterns, and the consistency, you're always gonna have a level of success. You're becoming a professional salesperson. The phone never changes, the people never change. I want you to hear them. The phone never changes and people never change. 50 years ago, they were the way they are, 30 years ago, they were the way they are 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and today. They the responses are the same. So, how do you get success from 267 to nine? You change. Was that I think it was Jim Rohn that says, you know, everyone wants it to be um easier. I s and he also says, but what we really need to do is just be better. We just need to be better. So the question is, can you become better at your approach, your attitude, and your expectation? Why don't you write this one down? The numbers never lie. Don't chase the outcome. Track all the activities. I love this one. My daughter taught me this one. I love it, I've said it for years. She taught me this, I don't know, gosh, 10 years ago, maybe. And she says, you know, we don't really have to focus in on the outcomes. We don't have to chase the outcomes. We just have to stay focused on the controllables. So track the controllables, leverage the controllables. The controllables, what that means is things you can control. You can control what time you get up, you can control whether or not you go to the gym in the morning or at night or in the afternoon or however you would do it. You can control what you eat. You can control the time you get into the office every single day. You can control whether or not you choose to get on the phones. You can control how many people you're willing to call. You can control the time hours that you're calling. You can control your attitude. You can't control who's gonna pick up. You can't control whether somebody's gonna be nice to you. You can't control whether somebody's gonna want to set an appointment with you. You can't control whether somebody's gonna sign a contract with you. So why do we sit there and beat ourselves up because everyone says no to us? I would just say this to you: control what you can control. Your attitude, your approach, your expectation. Control how many people you're gonna call by continually just calling people. If you say, hey, I want to make 20 contacts a day, it may take you four hours, but you'll get 20 contacts. If you say, I want to prospect three hours a day, but you and you say, but I want to make 20 contacts. If you get 20 contacts in one hour, do you quit? Or are you fully committed to the three hours? So you can control your controllables. You can track all your activities, you can track your contacts, you can track your conversion rates, your appointments, the listings that you go on, the listings that you take, the contracts that you get signed, how many sales are you gonna make? You can track all of those things and don't obsess over money. Money shows up with the effort. It just shows up. If you help enough people get what they want, you'll end up with what you need to get. Money shows up. Money shows if you if you focus on helping the client, the money shows up. See, success is built backwards. Huh? Crazy, right? Is you want to have success, you got to do the things that money is not about that then cause money to show up. Does this make sense? So, what we need to work on is how do we talk to people? Are we listening to our clients? Are you over talking their point? And so it's about you and not about them. See, top producers, very successful agents, actually listen and ask questions and never do the talking. Where are you moving? When do you want to be there? What's important to you about that? If that doesn't happen, then what? How's that gonna make you feel? What are you looking for? If you were to pick the ideal agent, what kind of agent would you want to work with? What's important about that? What's your time frame? How long do you want this to take? See, these are all questions. That's all they are. You want to be a great salesperson, ask questions, stop talking. Ask a lot of really good questions. Stay curious. Write that one down. Stay curious. Don't be the expert on the conversation, be the listener. Dig deep in the questions. Understand their level of motivation. I love this one and I made this one up. I have to explain it because it confuses people. But I always say this if they have a high level of motivation, you got a really great listing client. So if you know that you have a really great listing client or your job is to see if you have a really great listing client, ask a lot of motivating questions. What if this happens? What if that happens? What if this doesn't happen? What if that doesn't happen? How are you gonna feel about that if it doesn't happen? What position does that put you in? You're gauging their level of motivation. But I love this. Watch this. Motivation is like the translation between what you say and what they're willing to hear. I'm gonna say it again. Their motivation is the translation between what comes out of your mouth and what they choose to hear. If their motivation is very low, no matter what you say to them, they're not going to be paying any attention. If their motivation is high, then what you say actually makes more sense. So without you determining the level of motivation, you can't even get them to understand what you're saying because they already have a preconceived idea in their head of what it's going to take to be successful. And they don't know you're the professional. Don't ever argue with anybody. Always agree. You know, that totally makes sense. I can see why you think that way. Lead people to their own conclusions. You have to allow them to be put in a position that makes them go, oh, well, gosh, I hadn't thought about that before. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to get the person who you're working with to look at the situation just differently. And when that happens, the magic comes together and success happens. Write this one down. The better you listen, the better you win. Salespeople are always trying to do the talking. They're over there flipping their little magazine. Look what ward I got. And I'm number two in my office, and number one in my office. Nobody cares. It's about them. Make it about them. What happens is we just quit too early. We skip the practice. We work with high emotion. You don't protect your schedule. You convince yourself that the leads don't really work. That's such a lie we tell ourselves to protect ourselves, and it's not even true. Instead, we should be asking, how do I become a better salesperson to help the client? That's the question. How do you become better? I have someone recently that was defending something, and I'm like, as long as you continue to keep standing on that belief system, you never can improve. A lot of agents will go, Well, how do I find better leads? I was sharing with one of my agents recently, we're talking about lead distribution. And they're like, oh, the leads are this, the leads are that. And I said, you know what's really interesting? You have a conversion rate of 3.5%. And I have an agent, a lot of agents over here that are converting at 25%, 20%, 18%, 30%. Why do we all get the same leads and yet one converts at three or three and a half and the other one converts at 25%? I can tell you why is the skills better. The attitudes better, the approach is better. Every morning there are homeowners waking up whose houses did not sell, guys. They don't need another realtor. They need someone with confidence, someone who knows what to say, someone who believes that they can help them, someone willing to pick up the phone. Your future income isn't hiding in some secret marketing strategy, some new shiny little object, as my mentor Mike Ferry always says, because people are always trying to find the shiny new object. It's not hiding in there, it's hiding inside the conversation that you're just avoiding having. Build a schedule and protect that schedule. Practice every single day your scripts and your dialogues. Track all of your numbers. Stay consistent always on a schedule. And if you do those four things enough, success stops being a hope and it becomes inevitable in your life. Guys, I can remember the stories that I would tell myself. I remember when I thought I had it all figured out. And I could see these people making millions of dollars, and I wasn't making anywhere near that. And I had to make a decision for myself. I can be right or I can be rich, but I can't be both at the same time. So about 17 or 18 years ago, I looked in the mirror myself and I just go, I'm not as rich, wealthy, or successful as all these people I hang out with because I'm too righteous and what I believe is right. What if I just surrendered it all and just followed what it is that they tell me to do? Guys, hear me. My very first year in real estate, I called expired listings. It took me nearly five months to sell my first house. And yet I still closed 40 homes my first year. How is that possible? Because I called expires and buy owners, sold 40 homes my first year, and made a few, a couple hundred thousand dollars my first year, which was pretty staggering. Because what's really cool is I moved here from out of state and I didn't know anybody here. I didn't have past clients, I didn't have friends, I didn't have family, I had no background whatsoever in real estate because I was brand new in the business. But you know what my coach said? Read this script, practice your tonality, have a good attitude. And he taught me all these things I'm teaching you right now. Do you follow what I'm saying? It doesn't, it doesn't matter how talented you are. Talent is overrated. It only really matters of how persistent you are. I'll take a persistent, driven, motivated person over a talented person every single time. Because in the end, it's the driven, successful person that way that's gonna well outbeat the talented person. I want to share this with you. You guys were not born knowing what to say. And so when you enter into the world of calling expireds or by owners, don't beat yourself up because you don't know what to say. It is a talent that you have to learn. You didn't know how to say it. We're teaching you these scripts and dialogues, we're teaching you how to talk to people. So don't beat yourself up. Give yourself some patience and some time. I want to say this to all of you guys: if you want to build a seven-figure income calling expireds, approach it in a manner that's helpful for them. Don't be discouraged because you don't know what to say. Don't be discouraged because you're not disciplined. Create those disciplines and create that language pattern that allows people to have the best realtor to help them get to their next destination. Because the last realtor that they had couldn't get the job done. You're the difference maker. But in order for you to be the difference maker, you have to be different than the one they had before. And the one they had before was one that put the sign in the yard and just said, good luck. You are a skilled, motivated expertise in your business. If you act that way, you approach it, you walk that way, and you live that way. Making a seven figure income on expired listings is simple. Hope you guys have enjoyed this one today. I know it's a long one, but I want to say thank you. I'd love to hear any comments that you guys have. Everybody have a great day.