EP 19: Control Your Time, Control Your Closings: A Realtor’s Guide to Smarter Growth

In Episode 19 of The Buyer’s Box Podcast, Ally Burnett sits down with Barry Jenkins, author of Too Nice for Sales and Ylopo’s Head Realtor in Residence, to break down a powerful truth most agents overlook:

👉 If you don’t control your time… your business will control you.

This episode dives into how top agents create smarter growth by setting boundaries, managing their time intentionally, and using simple scripts that protect both their business and personal life. 

If you’ve ever felt like:

You’re always “on” for clients…

You struggle to say no…

Your schedule feels reactive instead of structured…

This episode will completely shift how you operate.

Barry shares how setting boundaries isn’t about limiting your business, it’s about creating better relationships, clearer expectations, and more consistent results. 

Inside this episode, you’ll discover:

• Why boundary setting is actually an act of service to your clients
 • How to communicate availability without losing deals
 • Simple scripts to handle scheduling conflicts with confidence
 • How to reduce late-night stress and reactive communication
 • The connection between time control and consistent closings
 • How clarity in your schedule leads to clarity in your pipeline

You’ll also learn why agents who say “yes” to everything…

Often sacrifice the very growth they’re chasing.

👥 WHO THIS EPISODE IS FOR

• Agents feeling overwhelmed or always “on call”
 • Realtors struggling with work-life balance
 • Agents who want more structure in their day
 • Anyone looking to grow without burnout

🎯 WHY THIS EPISODE MATTERS

Growth doesn’t come from doing more.

It comes from doing the right things, at the right time.

When you control your schedule…

You start controlling your results.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Hey everybody, this is Allie Burnett with the Buyer's Box Podcast, a podcast focused for new and even existing agents focusing on all things real estate. And today we have a very special guest, Barry Jenkins.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Hey, how are you? So glad to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Great. How are you?

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Fantastic. Fantastic. Yeah. Just uh the weather's finally warmed up and um finally closing out a bunch of projects. Uh, you know, it's fun when you finally you can finally finish something and you can move on to the next thing you can worry about. So yeah, that's kind of where I'm at.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Yeah, one more thing to the checklist, right?

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Um, so tell everybody a little bit about uh you, your career history.

unknown 0:51

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Yeah, so I actually started in the business when I was 18. So um, you know, uh that's uh 27 years. I'm 45. Um, and uh over the course of that career, um I did so much wrong, but about 15 years ago, I started a team, and now I have two teams. One is 95 agents, another is six agents. Um I'm the head realtor in residence for the last nine years at a company called YLOPO. Got about 25,000 customers across the country, and I help build that product. Um, I wrote a book called Too Nice for Sales that's uh been a bestseller for about three years now, uh four now, um, sold about 30,000 copies. And um, you know, my passion is helping business owners uh in the real estate industry go from where they are to whatever their definition of success is next. It's it's a passion of mine. I'm very good at it. And uh so I'm excited to be here to talk to you and your audience.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Awesome. Thank you so much. And your work history always amazes me. Every time I see you, there's like one more thing that that you tell me, and I I just can't believe it. And 25,000 customers, that's a lot. That's really something to be proud of. Um one thing that Andrew and I kind of talked about on the way into work is he mentioned that um you kind of promote almost like a non-hustle uh work environment, like really focusing on time management. Can you talk a little bit about that? What how are you doing that with your team?

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Yeah, so uh I actually used a phrase in my opening just a moment ago. Um, whatever success is defined by you. I think that's a really important uh phrase that I used and it really correlates into your question. Um, you know, for me, I I think that everybody that comes into the real estate industry has a different goal. I think all of us would want to make some money, um, but how much we need, um how much we want, and what we're willing to do for it, it changes based on our circumstances. So, for example, if you're uh married or in a relationship and your partner is covering the bills and you just want something for extra money, your definition of success is going to be remotely different than someone with four kids that uh you know is the breadwinner, right? Just the night and day. So what we do is we we go to the agent and we say, you know, what does success look like for you? And then we reverse engineer what success looks like for them and we hold them accountable. And uh by doing that, what we're able to help them do is, and here's the answer to your question we help them learn what they need to be saying yes to and what they need to be saying no to. And because when you say yes to something at 9 a.m. tomorrow, you are saying no to everything else at 9 a.m. tomorrow. So, for example, let's talk about family. Your your child has a basketball game at six o'clock tomorrow night and it's important and you want to go. And your client wants you to show a home to them tomorrow at 6 p.m. and you really need a sale. Well, when you say yes to that client, you're saying no to the basketball game. If you say yes to the basketball game, you're saying no to the client. And it's really, really, really hard, especially who is someone like me who's overcoming approval addiction. I just love approval. I like it's like people please you. I just love it. Oh my gosh. I just like give it to me. I want to, I just want to please everybody. And so for me, uh that it was a double-edged sword. It's what made me a fantastic agent. It's what my in 2011, uh so 2009 to 2011 was rough. The market crashed and I had part-time jobs because I needed to pay my bills. 2011, I had an opportunity and I went all in back in real estate. I I no longer had a I sold 125 houses that year by myself. No staff, no assistant, no transaction manager. Um, I was miserable. 10 to 12 homes a month. Um, I was working 19-hour days. Um, and I just said yes to everything because I was so nervous. So, going back to your original question, I help my agents set healthy boundaries and I give them really good scripts in those moments where their compulsion is to please. So, for example, going back to the basketball game analogy, what I would say to the client is, hey, I've got something uh at six already. Um, it's actually my kids' basketball game. Can we do four o'clock or five o'clock or seven o'clock or eight o'clock or earlier in the day? Give them like an abundance of options. If uh, and that's you know, and and what you're doing there is you're trying to like bring them into your life a little bit. You want to be careful not to overshare. So honestly, saying it's my kid's basketball game with the wrong client is an overshare. So it really depends on the affinity you have with them. Um, because I used to overshare uh in those moments. Uh what we found is most clients are really okay with having some flexibility. Let me use a less uh stringent example. Let's say you want to go, uh you want to call leads tomorrow from 9 to 10 and a client wants to see a home. What I would tell my agents to say is, I have a personal appointment at nine o'clock, I can totally move it. But are you available at 8 or 11 tomorrow morning? So I'm I'm telling them I can move it, but I'm just fighting for the appointment in the moment, just a little bit. And overwhelmingly, when we do that, I've got a personal appointment, but I can cancel it. See if I say I have an appointment, but I can cancel it, I'm accidentally telling them that I might cancel on them last minute. They don't because they don't know if it's a work appointment. They don't know if it's a personal. I don't want to send a message that I'm flaking, right? So I have a personal appointment tomorrow at nine. Are you available at eight or 10? If not, I can move that personal appointment. Most people are going to be fine with you moving the time. And they're going to say, sure, no problem, let's do this time. And then occasionally, if it's not your kids' basketball game, if it's like something that you can have flexibility with, okay, like move it. The idea here is setting boundaries, right? Uh, another example would be when you have a seller client. I teach my agents to have a day of the week that they talk to their current sellers when they're in a market that the homes don't sell quickly. Hey, every Wednesday, do you want me to text you, call you, zoom call, or send you a video with an update? We get ahead of the communication of the homes not selling. What we found is that decreases the late night stressed out text that clients have, like, oh my gosh, like what do I do? You know, uh, the home hasn't sold. We also get ahead of really dumb complaints by doing that. Like we had one that it didn't sell, this was a decade ago, and the client had been mulling over how he wanted the sign in the center of the yard, and the sign guy put it at the corner because it was on a busy street, and he really thought the home hadn't sold because of that. Had I known that that was a concern of his, I could have dealt with it three weeks ago. Sure. And then we tell our I tell my agents, look, if it's an absolute emergency, I'm gonna be available to you at nine o'clock at night, eight o'clock at night, seven o'clock at night. If it's something that's not an emergency, I want you to know that more than likely I won't respond until the morning. So all you need to do is when you text me or you call me, just say, hey, this is kind of an emergency. And I'll know I need to get on it right away. Otherwise, I'm not gonna be responsive late at night. I'm gonna devote my time to my family. People don't care. They really don't. You know, they they like and sometimes they pull out the emergency card, right? But generally speaking, and I I my agents have told me, especially the ones that have been in the business for over a decade, they're like, I've never met a successful team owner that has boundaries like you. I'm like, it's just about communication, right? And partnership. I actually believe I'm partnering with my clients, and so I'm setting expectations ahead of time because I have an approval addiction, and I'm gonna be way more difficult on myself than they are. In my mind, I'm gonna be like, I'm not doing enough. I gotta call them back. They're gonna worry about, they're gonna fire me. Instead, I'm like, let me deal with it all ahead of time so I don't have to stress myself out at 10 o'clock at night. Sure. That was a long answer.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

No, I love it. I love it. And this, I mean, this is a podcast, so you're allowed to talk. But um, you know, I said to someone the other day, you know, boundaries, as much as they are to keep people out, they're also to keep you in. Because I struggle with that same thing. Like, I want to say yes to everyone, I want to make all of our agents happy. Like, and but I think sometimes, especially like in our market, we're second home market. So someone may be down here on their own vacation. Maybe they don't have a whole lot of plans. But we really try, like in our case, we're able to plan things out way ahead of time for when they're coming into town because we know months and months normally before they're coming into town. So then we're booking the appointment for them to, you know, meet us at the office, 10 a.m., this place, this time, and then we're we're good. And then, of course, we follow up and confirm the appointment, that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

So, yeah, actually, um, and I talk about this in my next book, which you're the first podcast for me to talk about, but it'll be out this summer. I just finished it called Too Nice for Leadership. And I actually believe that boundary setting is an act of compassion on the people that you're working with. Because I am being intentional about the relationship and framing how we're gonna work together in a way that in a model where they feel secure that they're being thought of. They don't have to wonder if I'm ignoring them. Um they know, you know, if it's after this time. Um, and and again, when I bring up boundaries, I don't say I have a boundary, Mr. Client, right? Like, I'm just like, hey, generally speaking, here's how I run my business. Around 6 p.m., I start to disengage, but I realize that this is the largest financial transaction of your life. There's going to be scenarios that are emergencies. If you text me at 8 o'clock at night or 9 o'clock at night and say, Barry, I have an emergency and I need to deal with it tonight, I'm gonna be there for you. However, if you text me and it's not an emergency that has to be dealt with tonight, I'm gonna respectfully just ask that you allow me the opportunity to deal with it in the morning. I'm gonna work with you, and my clients love this about me that I understand. Um uh and so um, you know, from my perspective, uh my clients love that.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Well, yeah, and you know, I think the other thing too is um you're kind of I don't want to say the word training, but you know, you're just setting the expectations up front. You know, this is how my business operates, this is how you fit into the business, and I think that is really great. And I think that that also helps you be the best version of yourself, right? Everybody knows when you're constantly stressed or you're not getting enough sleep, or you're like whirling in bed at 10 o'clock at night and we're like texting back all these clients for sin later, 7 a.m. You're still, you know, doing the work. But um, I think that that's a really good boundary, honestly.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

Well, and yeah, and you know, this is why you see people experience this measure of success, like my story in 2011. If I could do it all over again, the only change I would have made is I would have learned quicker how to scale so that I could go to it took me two more years to get to 300 homes. Um, the next year I think was 200. I could have gotten to 300 by 2012 had I understood leverage better and scale better. Um, but I think that for us, by taking care of ourselves, having these compassionate conversations with our clients and our family around what we see as a working relationship, and then you give the client space to say, hey, I'm not okay with that. And then you have a conversation about it. What exactly are you not okay with? Well, I want my realtor available 24-7. Well, at that moment, you get to make a decision, right? Is this someone I want to work with? And probably it is. If you're not crushing it, if you're not doing 10 deals a month or five, if you don't have an abundance of cash, you might take it on the chin and regret it the whole time, right? But generally speaking, I would say the majority of people are actually gonna walk away respecting you more. I have found the more I say no in a compassionate and kind way, um, the more success I get to enjoy because what I'm actually starting to do is I'm able to focus my time on things that bring life to me. And so I bring a better version of myself into my business and my kids and my family. I'm a happier person, right? If I was stressed out until 2 a.m. last night on here with you, I wouldn't be this free-flowing, high-energy, smiley person. I'd be like, mm-hmm, yeah, it'd be a hard interview for you, you know, because you you'd be like, so what do you think about that? Well, it's good. Yeah. You know, but here I am, you know, I slept through the night, I'm eating right, I'm taking care of myself. And I think it's hard for small business owners because you're they're gonna grow by saying yes to everyone, and they're gonna be so afraid of setting boundaries because they think somehow it's gonna hurt their business. And I'm just gonna tell you that don't use the word boundaries, use it as a collaborative. I'm excited about working with you, Mr. Smith. Here's how my other clients and I found a great partnership. Right around six or seven, I tend to disengage from my phone. Saturdays, obviously, I'm available. Uh, but in the evening, I try to I try to break away. But I know that this is such an important investment. It's such an emotional process for you. If you have an emergency, just say, I've got an emergency. Can we talk tonight? I'm gonna be there for you. If it's not an emergency, just text me in the morning or text me at night and I'll get with you in the morning. But we're gonna work together. Hi, five, metaphorically speaking, you know, like let's so it it doesn't have to be. In fact, sure, I see it as a positive thing. I see it as an act of compassion, as I've said. So yeah, hopefully the listeners right now, they're seeing that they can actually start that today. And uh, and not just with their family, but with prospecting, because prospecting is the thing that they put off the most because they don't like it. And so they find everything and everything to work on. But if you can carve out that time for prospecting and using the same strategy, your calls will go up, your conversations will go up, and your closings will.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Right now we're in the middle of a 100-day call challenge, and so we have really had to dedicate that, you know, nine to eleven time. Today I'm cheating, don't tell anybody because it's 1030.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

But well, I mean, you're still doing business development. You're this is content.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, and this is you know one of the things that I love doing, you know, putting content out there because there's so many agents that are either not in our market, so there's not an opportunity to be on our team, there's agents out there that are struggling. And so we're able to bring honestly the best industry professionals onto our podcast that are sharing great content. Um, would you say anything else to the agent out there that's struggling to scale or working, you know, that work-life balance? Do you have any other tips?

SPEAKER_00 16:25

Yeah, I think um I think finding their uh what they want to focus on within the business. And the challenge with real estate, it's the benefit and the negative. There's so many different ways to make money in this industry. Um, I think that if I was this agent that I was just starting out, or maybe in a new market, my life experience and professional experience tells me that the more clarity a consumer has around what their real estate need is. So they've picked out a house or they know when they want to move, or they know what price they want to sell the home for, or when they want to sell, the more clarity they have, the sooner they're going to transact, and the more difficult it is to find that person. So my marketing activities would probably start with something very simple. It would be an open house. Um, if I was in a new market, I would connect with an agent that has really great listings. I would probably do an open house five or six days a week. Um, I would, as soon as they walk in the door, one of the tools that I built for YLOPO was an open house tool. Um, there's another product called Spacio that is similar but different. But basically they walk in the door. I just say hello. I don't try to convert them as soon as they walk in.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

The homeowner has asked to keep a log of all the attendees that are uh walking in the home. Please register. They put in their name, email, and phone number, they click submit. YLOPO does a search for the, let's say it's a$400,000 home in a specific neighborhood, Salem neighborhood. Um, it's gonna find all the other homes from$375 to$450 in the general area and start emailing those homes to that person. And then when that person clicks on a link, because they knew they wanted to look at a home in that neighborhood. So they're starting to figure out what they want. Well, I just got so depressed with doing open houses, I would just like eat the cheese tray and be like, hey, like, you know, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

Sign the paper.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

Just I'm now I I'm just happy how you doing. And they start using my website, and AI starts texting and calling that person because now they've opted in by using our website. AI starts converting these people. You do five a week, two visitors a week, which nor most people would consider a failure, only two visitors. Um, that's 10 open house visits a week. That's 40 a month. On average, three to five of them are gonna engage in a substantive way in AI. Now, after three months, you're gonna have 10 to 15 people that are having substantive conversations with AI, texting, and calling. And now you're gonna be doing one-on-one buyer consults. And the buyer consult for us shrinks someone's buy and sell timeline from six to nine months down to three to six months. And it's just about empowerment. So that playbook that I just gave to you has never not worked. It always works for an agent that's like, I don't have any business. Okay, here's the play. And it's because clarity, the consumer has clarity enough to go to visit a home. I'm not having to win them over in 30 seconds or less. Oh, where are you from? You got an agent? Like, I'm just like, cool, cool, cool. Hey, you got any questions? No problem. Hey, it was great to see you. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, and then you just get them in your your fishbowl digitally and you uh you start getting those clients. So that was probably a little more tactical than what you were thinking, but I think there's somebody that's listening to this podcast that's gonna uh thank me later.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

No, listen, that was perfect, and uh we haven't put it out yet, but Cole Watkins from Texas, he was on one of our previous podcasts that's gonna uh stream right the week before this one. And so he talks about open houses. He sold 80 80 homes in a year through open houses, and so he talks about circle prospecting, the door knocking, all the things. So this will be perfect. And every episode we have an ebook. So if you haven't seen the ebook, yep, it'll be in the comments. Um, and so we're almost running out of time. And Barry, where can everyone buy your book and when?

SPEAKER_00 20:31

So my first book, Two Nights for Sales, Amazon's the easiest place to get it. Um, and uh, and then the the next book will be out in June, and um uh it'll be on Amazon as well. Um, and um, you know, I've got some really great strategic partnerships with that book. Um, so you know, the first one I didn't really market at all. This time around, I'm gonna do some things a little bit differently and have some more fun. Um, but you know, I think to those that are listening, that are watching this, I think my kind of strong advisement is to look at boundary setting as a way to increase and accelerate your business so that you can focus on the things that are the most meaningful and the most profitable. Um, I live there. Um, you know, I've got I've got a lot of things that I'm doing right now, and they're all I'm passionate about all of them, and they're all wildly successful. And so there's a there's a way to do this and really have a lot of fun. So that would be my encouragement to everybody.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

That's awesome. That's amazing, and I appreciate you so much for coming on our podcast. And if anyone wanted to reach you, how would they reach you?

SPEAKER_00 21:35

I would say the easiest is Instagram. Uh, it's just real Barry Jenkins, R E A L Barry Jenkins. And uh I'll I'll just shoot me a DM and um I will get back to you.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

Awesome. Thank you so much, and we look forward to hopefully seeing you in the future.