SPECIAL INTERVIEW with Jay Kinder – #2 Coldwell Banker Agent in the world.

651 transactions and over $2.6 Million in 2009

BONUS: Video with Jay  “how to make $250,000 THIS year with zero expenses”

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Dean Jackson

Hello everybody, welcome to the marketingmonday.com live Podcast.  My name is Dean Jackson, and we truly are live today, I’ve got a special guest with us, my friend Jay Kinder from Lawton Oklahoma, that international real estate hot bed you’ve all heard about.  So Jay, welcome.

Jay Kinder

Well thank you, Dean.

Dean Jackson

Now I want to give people a little bit of background on who you are, so that it’ll set a little context for some of the things we’re going to talk about, so I’m going to ask you to brag about yourself a little bit here, so we can establish who you are.  How long have you been doing real estate first off?

Jay Kinder

Well I’m going into my thirteenth year now.

Dean Jackson

How old were you when you started?

Jay Kinder

Nineteen, 19 years old.

Dean Jackson

So I was 21 when I started, so we both have that in common, starting young.  So let’s talk a little bit about you, you’ve gone into your thirteenth year, what were some of your numbers from last year, what kind of operation are you running over there?

Jay Kinder

We had one of our best years ever.  We didn’t eclipse our best year, but we had, as far as profit goes we just dialed things in pretty good.  We ended up with 651 transactions in 2009, over $2.6million in total gross commission income into the company, so that was a pretty big year coming off of a pretty slow 2008 I guess you would say.

Dean Jackson

Yeah exactly.  Now you’re with Coldwell Banker right there in Lawton, right.  Where do you rank in terms of all of the Coldwell Banker agents right now?

Jay Kinder

Our team has ranked in the Top 10 for Coldwell Banker for the last I don’t know, probably six or seven years maybe, maybe a little bit longer than that even.  But this year it looks like somewhere around Number 2, Number 2 or Number 3, I don’t think we knocked off the Number 1 spot.  But I kind of like being not Number 1, because that means I’ve always got something to work towards. 

Dean Jackson

So the Avis of real estate agents and the Coldwell Banker, you try harder.

Jay Kinder

You try harder, that’s it.

Dean Jackson

How many agents are with Coldwell Banker?

Jay Kinder

As far as the whole franchise, or just our office?

Dean Jackson

No as far as the whole franchise, you’re Number 2 out of how many?

Jay Kinder

There was I think 120,000 last year, so probably maybe a little bit fewer than that, but probably close to 120,000 I would say.

Dean Jackson

Top of the top of the top.   So that’s exciting, and to see that you’re in a business that’s still growing, when everything else nationally might sort of characterised as slowing down, you’re still being full steam ahead.  Let’s talk a little bit about this 12 year journey, to go from zero at 19 years old, to being the Number 2 or 3 agent out of 100,000 agents, and doing $2.6million, what kind of is the trajectory and the path that you took, going from 19 to where you are today, do you remember when you first got started?

Jay Kinder

Yeah absolutely, I think if you had to draw this out on a graph, it would look like I was lost, back and forth this way, that way, and up here and back over here, and it certainly wasn’t a straight line to where we’re at.  I guess I would say probably my claim to fame is always been I wasn’t the smartest kid in class, but I always sat next to him.  So that was probably what’s propelled me to this level, over the years I’ve never stopped learning.  And at the very beginning, I think probably the thing that really probably was working to my advantage more than anything, and I got this a lot, was the first thing was I was really enthusiastic, I didn’t really know why, but I was always excited, I always kind of enjoyed what I was doing, when I was meeting with people.  And then I think secondarily it’s just I didn’t know what an average agent was supposed to do and what was the limits that were really supposed to be set upon this industry, in terms of averages and stuff like that, I just didn’t believe that there was a ceiling, and I just didn’t know any better.

Dean Jackson

And then what a 19-year-old especially is supposed to be able to do, right.

Jay Kinder

Sure.

Dean Jackson

So what was your strategy when you got started?  So you’re 19, I know you’ve got some sort of family background in real estate, but what was your experience when you first got started, what was your strategy to get off the ground?

Jay Kinder

Looking back it’s kind of interesting trying to remember what it was like in the early on days.  I know that I didn’t sell a whole bunch of houses right off the bat, I think it took me three months to close on my first deal, and I had to have some help with that one.  So I didn’t just naturally just jump right in and start doing deals, it was kind of an uphill battle.  But the very beginning was, interestingly enough I took my Dale Carnegie course which really helped me I guess in terms of kind of coming out of my shell a little bit, and I went into, taking my GOI, my very first year, and started just really trying to educate myself, because I wasn’t going to college at this point, so I figured I probably ought to learn, and if it wasn’t for my dad; actually nobody in the company, it’s actually a company that we represented a few REO properties, and nobody wanted the listings in the entire company, they were like $40,000, $30,000 listings, and I was like ‘I’ll take them’.  So I picked up a few listings, and kind of had a little bit of fun with that, and did a few deals that way.  And then started learning from; actually the guy, the very first conference I went to was Roger Butcher, if you’ve ever heard of Roger Butcher.  He’s been around, I’ve got his cassette tapes still to this day, and I just started using kind of a 30-day marketing plan, and started building this presentation for listings, and I kind of started going after for sale by owner and expireds, and the only opportunity that kind of really were coming my way, and doing open houses every Sunday, just kind of doing what these mentors told me to do to be successful.

Dean Jackson

Do you remember, because the funny thing is that the very first real estate conference that I ever went to was a Roger Butcher conference.

Jay Kinder

No way.

Dean Jackson

No it’s the truth, and I have never been to any kind of seminar like that, I was young and I’d never been to a ballroom with a few hundred people in it, kind of thing, it’s all new. So I bought all the tapes and listened to them, and the funny thing is I remember immediately going back to the office and I happened to be on floor duty that night, and it was a Wednesday night, which was when the local real estate paper, the weekly paper came out with the real estate section, so that was always like the prime time to be on the floor duty, because everybody back then, this was 1989, and there was no internet, so the Wednesday paper was like the Bible for people looking for a home.  And they would get home from work and they’d open up the paper and they’d circle the ones that they’re interested in, and then they’d start calling.  And a technique that I learned from Roger Butcher, was to tell them to get a piece of paper and write down your name and number, and then tell them about the house that they were calling on, and then I would ask them the question, ‘how would you like it if this was the last phone call that you had to make?’  Tell them, I said ‘I know you’ve got the Wednesday paper there, what other houses have you got circled, because I’ve got all the information right here, and I’d be happy to tell you about them’.  And the guy who called in, he really liked that approach, and the next day I went out and listed his 5 Acres on the outskirts of town, he was going to move into town.  And just from having; and I think this is the most important thing and it’s probably helped for you too, is knowing what to say, just having a new skill, a new ability.

Jay Kinder

Yes, absolutely.   Once you find something that works, you just latch onto it.

Dean Jackson

So your first year you’re doing open houses and learning the ropes with some REOs, and what kind of strategies did you do, advancing there, you were kind of learning and evolving, and what were some of the next things that you tried?

Jay Kinder

I think probably, it’s kind of a blur to me now just going back and looking at what strategies.  I know one thing I wouldn’t have probably called it a strategy, it was just a lot of hit and miss.  I started to really enjoy getting listings, and I’m pretty competitive, so even as a kid in high school I was very competitive and stuff like that.  In fact I know what drove me, one of the things that drove me, we used to have a star board on the wall in the office, and there was this one guy, Tom King, that always had stars all the way across, he was Number 1 in the company, and he always was.  And I just wanted more stars than him, and I didn’t care what I had to do to get more stars, I wanted more stars than him.

Dean Jackson

So what did you do to get a star, did you get a listing?

Jay Kinder

Well a listing, a sale, a listing sold we’d get a yellow star, and then with the referral into rental management I got a star too or something like that, so any way I could get a listing.  And that seemed to be the easiest way for me to get stars, and I enjoyed it, I loved meeting with people, and again it was taking a bit of what I learned from Roger Butcher to say to expires and too for sale by owners, at the time it was better than anything else I had learned and it was working.  And for sale by owners it’s so easy to set up appointments with, they show houses to just about anybody.  So we just started trying to get listings, and I enjoyed that.  And as I started to build a listing inventory, and calls would come in, it just started kind of working that way I guess you could say, and I enjoyed it a lot, so that’s kind of what I focussed on was just getting more listings, I guess I would call that my strategy now.

Dean Jackson

Yeah well that’s interesting isn’t it.  And I love the fact that what drove you was getting the stars, because I think that’s such a common thing, is that we don’t have the; we didn’t have stars in our office, but we did have a big deal board, where every time you got a listing or a sale you got to write it up on the board, and it’s something where it was that recognition.  And I think it was, I forget who told me, somebody said that Napoleon said that what changed his life was realising that men would be willing to die for a blue ribbon, and it’s interesting how we all crave that recognition, it’s funny.  So you’re going along and you’re doing the for sale by owners, are you kind learning the moves on that and developing your approach to it?

Jay Kinder

Well I didn’t have anything else to do, so follow-up wasn’t a problem at that time.  And I always followed up with them on Mondays, on the days that they were disappointed from not selling it over the weekend.  I had a marketing plan, one thing that I had, and I think a lot of agents didn’t have at the time was I had pre-printed; I went down to Staples and bought this paper with the fancy little borders on it, and I would go online and I would try to screen capture different pictures and stuff and put it into this presentation, I had no skill set whatsoever for doing stuff like that, but I tried to make this presentation, and pretty much just did what Roger Butcher or any of the other people that I had bought books or tapes from, and went to courses with, and just took some of that information and put it into a presentation.  I carried Roger Butcher’s little 30-day marketing plan, little binder thing that he sold me, and I just tried to perfect that.  And as I would go to more and learn more, I think I bought Walter Sanford’s stuff, and I think I bought Rick DeLuca, and the next one would have been probably Mike Ferry.  I started taking a little bit from each one, and I was like ‘oh I like this, this works really well’, or I would try something and it would work and I would just stick with it.  But that was the difference maker for me was, and I’d always call and find out, I was kind of amazed that people would list with me, just because I looked like I should be mowing their yard, not them paying me thousands of dollars to sell their house.  But I’d ask them that question, and they would say ‘you know what, you were real enthusiastic, and we just really believed that you can sell our house’.  And I used to beat some of the top agents in the market, on nothing more than a really good presentation, and enthusiasm and excitement.  And I still carry that to this day because I really love what I do and am passionate about it, and I think that’s something that you have to maintain and you have to have in order to be successful in anything.

Dean Jackson

What was the first thing, did you come to a point where you would run into a little bit of a feeling where you kind of realised ‘I can’t continue to do this just on my own’, where it was getting a little busier for you, can you recall what was the turbo fuel for you?

Jay Kinder

Yeah, definitely there was a point at which it got to the point I couldn’t keep up.  And it’s really kind of crazy looking back at how many deals that I did, without any buyer agents or anything, I just didn’t know any of that stuff, I didn’t know anything about building a team, and anything like that, I just knew the level of service that I wanted to provide to my clients was not possible, or if it was I certainly couldn’t communicate it back to them what I was doing.  And it got to a point where I just wasn’t able to stay in touch with them, I wasn’t getting back to my calls, and I felt bad, but you have a deal and someone’s wanting to list a house, or someone’s wanting to go look at houses, do you sit there in the office and make your calls, or do you go write up another one.  And there was a certain point, and I don’t remember exactly when it was, that I brought on my very first assistant, and that poor girl, I still feel sorry for her this day, because I just dumped everything on her plate that I didn’t like doing.  And I started to really just delegate the things that either a) I stunk at and shouldn’t have been doing in the first place, and b) I didn’t like doing, and now looking back I also delegated the things that’s really not productive in terms of dollar productivity per hour, activities that I should have been working on in the first place.  So just started delegating things off to my very first assistant, and that allowed me to be on more appointments and working with more buyers or whatever the case may be.  But whatever it was I was out there in the field, not writing ads, or shuffling papers.

Dean Jackson

And what did that do for your business, would you say that there was an immediate, that that was a trajectory changer, that you were able to handle more because of that, or was it a little bit longer before that started really having an impact?

Jay Kinder

No, and I really wish I could go back and watch this whole thing kind of evolve.  But I went from, I think it was my second year in the business I went from 39 transactions to 72 transactions or something like that.  And that was a pretty good sized growth and I had delegated quite a bit.  And I remember coming back from a Coldwell Banker conference, I was on the aeroplane and I was looking at what I’d done the last year, and I’d been through every one of those little classes at the conference, and had notes everywhere, and I remember my parents were sitting in front of me.  And my dad, he’s a broker, and he never really did a whole lot of transactions himself, he just kind of has always been a broker, and done a few deals here and there.  And I remember showing him that the President’s Premiere for Coldwell Banker was 110 transactions; no it was 100 transactions exactly, and I had broke down this whole formula, how many listings I had to take, because only half of them would sell, and how many buyers I’d have to work with, and this that and the other, and I wrote this whole plan, and I said ‘this is all I have to do to do 100 units’.  And they were like; I remember they looked at me like I was crazy, but they were like ‘okay’.    I saw it though, I saw that there was a plan, I knew what I had to do, now it was just a matter of; I saw it, all I had to do was just make them see it, at that point.

Dean Jackson

You know what’s interesting, I was telling somebody else about this, and kind of talk about you for a second.  Because when we were together in Atlanta, the one thing that struck me about you, is when we were, and you may not even remember this, but when we were at lunch, and we were talking about a website, just giving you an idea of something that you could do about a website, and I remember being there and you’re right beside me at kiddie corner there, and I remember immediately, like within 10 minutes of that idea being planted in your head, you had already implemented it and were already getting results from that.

Jay Kinder

I do remember that.

Dean Jackson

You do remember that, and I was just like, I thought there’s a guy that, a lot of people are in this environment where they’re learning, and they hear a new idea and they write it in their notebook, then they go back and put it in the pile of all the other ideas that they have in the other notebooks from the other conferences they’ve been to, and here you are right there on your smart phone, implementing the idea you’d heard literally seven minutes ago.  And I think that says a lot about you as a doer, and somebody who I think one of the characteristics of your success is that speed of implementation.

Jay Kinder

I couldn’t agree more.  The only thing I would say as a caveat to that is, and I hear a lot of different folks around the industry that say ‘you’re a typical conference-goer’ or whatever, and I went to all of them.  There’s not anybody that doesn’t have my money – I have bought everything that you can buy.  I’ve taken a little bit from everybody.  There’s not anything that I wouldn’t have bought; the challenge I think sometimes becomes focus, and I think I’ve learned as I’ve gone on, there’s so much good information, and maybe it’s just me but I certainly am not smart enough to remember all the greatest ideas that I’ve heard, so it’s probably going to get forgotten if I don’t start and plan how to implement the idea.  And that’s probably the biggest difference between success and failure in a real estate agent, is not just the innovation or the ideas, but the implementation of the ideas, the doing it, just doing it, that’s all that it takes sometimes for you to come over the edge and the success is right there.  And I agree with you on that, the implementation is something that is key for anyone to be successful in real estate, but saying focussed and planning and looking at the things that are the lowest cost to implement, the easiest to implement, and then that give you the highest return, and focussing on those things first, makes for really giant leaps in your business.  And it was three or four years almost consecutively I had doubled my business and doubled my business and doubled my business.

Dean Jackson

I was just going to say that, I was going to ask you then coming from, so you went from 30 transactions to 72 transactions, you had the realisation that hey all I need to do is get to 100 and I can be at that award level, and we know how much those awards motivate you – so how long was it from the time you had that realisation to the time you actually got to 100 transactions?

Jay Kinder

The Coldwell Banker conferences are in February, so I was trying to figure the dates out.  So if I had done the 70 whatever transactions, that year I completed; the very next year, the same year that I was at the conference I went to 131 that year, and then the next year was my blockbuster year, 233 transactions.  And as I say it was my blockbuster year, I guess I say that because that was where I really became a brand, and started to become a brand in my marketplace, and started to become well known and been around a few years, started to get a few repeat clients and stuff like that.  Then I took off another, doubling virtually in the next couple of years as well.  But that year I didn’t have any buyer agents, and I think I had four staff that I had grown to that year, and I hired my very first buyer agents at the end of that year, I think it was 2000 or 2001, 2001 I think it was.  So I was out in the field running around like a chicken with my head cut off doing transactions.  Certainly going backwards I would; what I would change is I would have put systems in place, because man, my boat had a lot of leaks.  It had lots of leaks.  I still apologise to this day to anyone who did business with me during that year, because I’m pretty sure I probably didn’t take as good of care of you as I would have liked to.

Dean Jackson

Now was there a realisation at some point where, did you start employing some marketing at any point along this trajectory, or did you start realising hey I can leverage myself a little bit with some marketing or some money spent on my business here, what came into play there?

Jay Kinder

Yeah, there was; during the year that I went up into the 200s as far as units that year, was the year that I had started doing some marketing.  I actually had taken out an ad in the newspaper, I was the only agent at that time that started that whole idea.  I started testing some different things.  Again I’m in a small town, I actually started testing radio, and actually I still have the same radio spots, the same position on the radio ever since I started that back in I think 2001.  And that was what really truly started to build my brand was radio.

Dean Jackson

That’s really interesting because, I guess we talked about before that you’re kind of on an island there in Lawton, you’re surrounded by a lot of farmland, so you’ve kind of got a self-contained kind of market there.

Jay Kinder

Yeah, I wish it was an island, but it’s definitely not an island.

Dean Jackson

Yeah, you know what I mean, that whole idea of it’s surrounded by farmland.

Jay Kinder

Surrounded by nothing.

Dean Jackson

Yeah I started up in Toronto in one of the suburbs of Toronto, and everything kind of blends right into the next town, it’s like the one town one side says ‘welcome to Mississauga’ and on the back it says ‘welcome to Brampton’.  So it’s like you’re going back and forth there.  Now what does it look like now for you in terms of your team and the kinds of roles that people have in your business right now?

Jay Kinder

Wow, it’s completely; I’ll say it’s amazing how much I didn’t know.  This whole set up now is, I have much better systems in place, I have much better people in place, I’ve learned a lot about hiring, I’ve learnt a lot about firing, I’ve learned a lot about pretty much every aspect of the business, really taking care of your customers, just better systems.  I think that’s probably one of the main things that we really do truly have a handle on now is that we’re not people dependent, we’re more systems dependent.   I have a great supporting cast around me that helps to leverage me.  And my day consists basically in terms of real estate, when you’re working in the business – I have a very, very strict schedule, it’s almost, I’m kind of proud of that, because I have always been one to just run and jump all over the place like a ball ricocheting.

Dean Jackson

Let’s talk about that then, what is your schedule, what does that look like right now?

Jay Kinder

Basically, I have built into my schedule from 7 o’clock to 9 o’clock on Monday through Thursday is what I call flex time, and that’s the time that I prepare for appointments, sometimes if I’m going to be reviewing some kind of a new product that I want to check into, or working on something that needs to be worked on, I’ll build it into that timeframe.  I try to go to the gym every morning and be at the office by 7.00am, it’s not like clockwork I can tell you that.  But that’s my goal, at least to make it at least three times a week into the gym.  So from 7.00am to 9.00am so there’s that flex time, any calls or anything that I need to have with anyone I might try to schedule into these flex times, before the day begins. The mornings are filled with impact zone meetings, which my impact zones for my company are anything really that drives the bottom line, anything that drives what our mission and core values and the things that we’re trying to accomplish, I call them pillars for my business.  And I think we have nine impact zone meetings, not all of them are weekly, some of them are monthly.  And they range from our short sell department meetings, I have one employee in the short sell department that manages all my short sells and those processes, and an REO meeting, I have our closing department meetings, I have a financial meeting obviously, I have a company-generated business meeting – I’m missing quite a few important meetings there, but those are all scheduled in the mornings.  And I schedule those meetings, the listing department, all of those meetings are scheduled weekly, Monday through Thursday, generally before 11.30am or 12.00pm, I’m in and out of those meetings, I think our recruiting and retention meeting is one of them, and a couple of others maybe.  But that’s when I’m working on the business, I’m truly working and I’m taking everything else, and marketing is my biggest one, I nearly forgot a good one.  But those are the things that – how do you forget that one, right?  But those are the things that I do in the morning time, and I meet with the particular people that are involved, along with my CEO that really runs this place, John Kitchens, and we meet in those meetings and take notes, and then we deliver action plans and action steps to implement things and to get things done, and then we follow those on project worksheets every week to see where we’re at with things, and prioritising, and keeping every one of those pillars moving.  And then the afternoons, I plan off for lunch, I didn’t used to do that, I used to work straight through lunch, and I still do that most days, but when I can I take off lunch and I’ll try to go to lunch with one of my agents or someone in the staff or team, or maybe recruit or whatnot.  From about 1.30pm to 3.00pm is more flex time for me, again returning calls, handle anything that needs to be handled, anything that needs to be scheduled in that flex time has to be approved by me.  And the rule in my office is two things, either you have to have my signature if I bought something, and you have to have eye contact if you put something in my schedule during my flex time, because if you just walk in my office and you’re talking to the back of my head, there’s a really good chance that I didn’t hear anything that you said.    But that’s it.  And then from 3.00pm, some days I allow 7.00pm appointments, but 3.00pm, 4.00pm, 5.00pm and 6.00pm are listing appointments only, or a meeting with sellers.  So if I have a seller that I need to get a price reduction on and they’re coming in the office I’ll meet with them only during the hours of 3.00pm, 4.00pm, 5.00pm, 6.00pm, and sometimes 7.00pm, that’s Monday through Thursday, and Friday is pretty much planned time off or just kind of whatever I want to do Fridays, and different things like that, and then weekends off as well for the most part.

Dean Jackson

So basically a four day work week, but a pretty structured four day work week, pretty focussed with built in attention, right.

Jay Kinder

I’ll tell you this, it whips my butt the last couple of weeks.  It sounds like it’s all perfectly structured, but there’s probably 15 files on my desk right now I’m looking at right now that need my attention, in terms of getting them listed.  And I leverage myself so well that I can only do listing appointments, but the problem is my head listing agent that sets the appointments, that’s all she does all day long, she set 77 listing appointments last month, so there’s just not enough time to go on that many, and I don’t have all of the systems perfectly in place for that second appointment in the office, where they come back into the office to do all of those appointments myself – I thought I was super-human, and I’m certainly not, I figured that out in the last couple of weeks.

Dean Jackson

Seventy-seven appointments.  And what do you do, just out of curiosity, in the times if you don’t have a listing appointment scheduled at 3.00pm, 4.00pm, 5.00pm, 6.00pm or 7.00pm, at one of those points, what do you do in that time.

Jay Kinder

Usually something else will get scheduled in there.  The way my schedule is, and I used Top Producer, just for lack of any other better options at this point, but it works pretty well for most of the things that we’re doing.  I block that time off completely, and Dina who is my inside sales agent, she’s the one setting all those appointments, she has the ability to fill in appointments at any point, so she’s kind of the only person that really messes with my schedule.  And then sometimes there’ll be something that comes up, and something that’s a problem in the short sale department for instance, and it’s a deal where I need to get involved, and we’ll schedule that to fill that space.  There is never…

Dean Jackson

You might be out at your 3 o’clock appointment, and while you’re there she fills up your 6 o’clock appointment even?

Jay Kinder

No, that happened, I used to happen and I would ghost the 6 o’clock appointment because I didn’t know, or I didn’t check my schedule or my email, so if it’s within 24 hours of time of the appointment, then the eye contact rule comes into play.

Dean Jackson

I love these little systems, what a great way to, like you said being sort of distractible, like most entrepreneurs are, and able to follow shiny objects everywhere they go, this has been a great way for you to keep yourself focussed, nothing like a meeting that’s scheduled, where other people are sitting there waiting for you, to keep you on task, right.

Jay Kinder

There were times definitely in the last three years that we actually; actually we do, I think we still have it somewhere, I just try not to be late.  But I used to have to put money in a jar whenever I would be late to appointments with staff, just because I was always running and gunning and always late.  In fact we still set to this day set my appointments, and Dina has a very specific script she uses, she says ‘Jay will be coming off of another appointment, so he’ll be there between 4.00pm and 4.15pm’.  So I’m never late now.  That kind of helps that. So it’s definitely hard to stay on schedule, and you’ve got to be careful not to plan things too closely, because you certainly can be late.

Dean Jackson

That’s what the flex time helps you kind of recalibrate and get right on track again.  So you go on a lot of listing appointments then?

Jay Kinder

It’s pretty crazy actually.

Dean Jackson

That’s the key role when you’re working in the business, is being on listing appointments.

Jay Kinder

This is the thing Dean, I have never found anything that makes more money than the listing appointment, because you look at the amount of time that I spend, and I don’t spend more than an hour in the very first meeting with a seller, and I might spend another hour total with them between maybe the closing, and I’m very seldom involved in the offer presentation, I have a listing coordinator that can manage it, she’s a licensed agent, and she’s been with me for about five or six years, she presents all my offers, she’s a certified negotiation expert, she is very good at what she does.  And I explain that, I build that into the presentation as a benefit.  And they understand that, so they don’t expect to see me, they don’t expect for me to be the one that calls, I give them my cell phone, I tell them ‘you can call me anytime 24/7, and I will answer any question for you, but here is what you should expect.  If you do call me, I may not get back to you right away, if you need something right away you should talk to Carla in my office’.  And I just manage their expectations, it’s a lot easier than you think, or especially when you present it as a benefit – you’re not probably going to get a hold of me during the day, very easily if you need an answer to something.  But that time that I pretty much whittled away everything that I do including pulling up the comparables and getting all the graphs and the reports and the package and everything ready – the seller counselling interview is done by Dina, everything is all a process.  And I literally, and I use the dentist, my dentist has a very good system that I think, kind of like unconsciously I may have copied, but he would come in and he would poke his head into the office while I was there with galls of stuff in my mouth and everything and he’d be like ‘hey’ and he’d come in and do his deal, then he’d go to the next office down the hall, and the next one and the next one and the next one, and I could hear him doing all these, working, and he’s got like eight people he’s working on at one time.  And he didn’t make the call and make sure that I was going to be there on time, and he didn’t clean up all the tools, and he didn’t do a lot of the process that kept things going there, but he did the surgery, he came his job and moved on.  And it’s such a great system, and you wouldn’t expect anything different, and I think that it works very well in real estate, getting the things off of your plate that are not the most productive.  For me the average the commission, even in little Lawton Oklahoma, $120,000 deal, it’s over, with the commission that we charge, it’s in excess of $4,000 to $5,000, sometimes $6,000, just on the listings I commission for a couple of hours – there’s nothing I can do that’s going to make more than $3,000 an hour, I can guarantee you that.

Dean Jackson

Right, exactly.  How many listing appointments would you estimate that you’ve been on in your whole career here?

Jay Kinder

Oh gosh.  We tried to figure this out the other day, and it’s probably well in excess of 4,000, maybe 5,000 appointments.  It’s got to be somewhere in there.  And who knows.

Dean Jackson

Would you say that you have learned a few things about being on a listing..?

Jay Kinder

Yeah I’ve learned just about everything, and if not, like I said I’m not the smartest guy, but when you go on that many appointments, you just start to figure things out.  It is absolutely the easiest thing to do once you have done it so many times, and you just kind of know a good method to go by.  There is a lot of things I have learned over the years, but that’s probably the thing that I’ve mastered the best is just understanding that process, and the best way to work through it and get the result that you want, and get the listing.

Dean Jackson

So what do you think the top two or three things that sellers want are, so your experience of doing that, what do you think that they really want, and how do you ensure that they get that?

Jay Kinder

The sad thing is that, and I don’t really know how to answer this, so the sad thing is is that the seller doesn’t really know what they need to…

Dean Jackson

They don’t even know what they don’t know, yeah.

Jay Kinder

Yeah, it’s unfortunately because I almost would say my presentation, a lot of it goes, if I could just walk in and give you my advice, your doctor doesn’t have to trick you or befriend you and become your best friend and go through a whole bunch of market research on what he’s going to do whenever he opens your mouth and starts working on you, you pretty much take just whatever you tell me to do is what you should do, you’re a doctor, right.  So a real estate agent is not that way, they want to believe that their house is worth more than it is, they want to believe that they have better options than what are right tin front of them, and it takes a lot longer sometimes for me to get to the point where I give advice, because I have to, Number 1 they have to know, like and trust me and believe in me before they’re ever going to listen to me and listen to my advice, and then I have to become an expert – I have to absolutely demonstrate that my knowledge of the market is so much better than anyone they’re going to speak to, so they don’t make that mistake of everything sounds good, they’re all excited and everything, and then you call back and they listed with someone else.  Those are probably two big things that I have to spend a lot of time on, and then going over before, and especially within the days of short sales now, I take all the short sale appointments because I know that no one can explain it better than me, and I just don’t feel comfortable – even if I’m not going to list the house, I do not feel comfortable without having gone through all the options for 30 minutes and explaining what would happen if they do decide to lease, what are the real costs, what is going to happen four months, three years from now when they want to sell that house, that they have to kick the renter out, do the repairs, and it sits on the market and they’re paying $1,000 a month for five months until it sells, and while they were doing the repairs, and it’s got to come out of pocket.  They don’t think about all those things, so I’ve got to paint that whole picture so they see it, and then okay now will you listen to me about the short sale, because this is probably going to be your best solution.  And then they listen.  Otherwise they’re like ‘oh no, I’ll just put it on the market with so and so, they said they could sell it for $30,000 more’, and it’s ridiculous.  But it’s sad, but with sellers you really truly have to follow those steps – if not, what I feel like, and I hope that every real estate agent is the same way, is that I feel like it’s my job to spend as much time as I have to to educate them, because I know that I’m going to give them the best advice.  I don’t know that the next person coming through the door will, but I know that I can.  So it’s my due diligence to spend the time and go through and build a rapport with them, become their friend, understand the situation, really demonstrate that I understand the marketplace and what’s going on out there and what’s real and not real, really demonstrate what they’re going to need to do to sell their home for the most money and in the timeframe that they said is important, so they don’t have more stress in their life.  They just don’t know what happens.  I asked a seller the other day, he said he wanted to be sold, and he wasn’t highly motivated, but he wanted to put his house on the market and he wanted to have it sold no more than a few months kind of deal, and I said ‘what happens if you own this house in October?’  And he looked at me kind of funny, and I said ‘if it hasn’t sold by October, what would you do?’ And he’s like ‘oh well it’s got to sell by then’, because that’s five months longer than he ever even dreamed of selling the house.  And so he mentally, I took him to a place mentally where he was very uncomfortable, and I said ‘what does it feel like?’  Or especially in the summertime like if you’re listing in the winter and you’re talking about mowing the grass in the spring – whoa, they don’t think that far ahead, so that decision of over pricing or that decision of doing something other than what I’m advising, could very well cost you making an October payment.  And that’s that pain that they need to feel unfortunately, not in a bad way, but they need to understand that that’s a very real possibility, that they could be making an October payment.

Dean Jackson

I call that pushing the accelerator pedal and going forward six months, and saying what does it look like here if we are still in this situation.  That kind of thing that you learned and are able to do naturally now, has come from all the experience of having done thousands of listing appointments.  Now you’ve got that knowledge, you take that with you no matter what.  One of the questions I always ask people, if I were for some reason, Lawton was out of the question, you were run out of Lawton and you couldn’t do business in Lawton, and you had to move up the road to Broken Arrow, which is the same population as Lawton, and we dropped you in there with no team, you don’t know anybody, it’s just you right now, how quickly do you think you could get back to the level that you’re at now?  It took you 12 years to get there the first time.

Jay Kinder

That’s a good question.  To get to where I’m at now I don’t know how many years it would take, and there’s the question of would I really do this all again?  I think I could do it a lot faster, but I think I could probably monetise my business better than I did during the building it to this point.  But without a doubt, we both know the answer to this question, the thing that I; the most valuable thing, and I say this all the time, you could strip away everything from me, as far as my business goes, but the one thing that’s the most valuable and I would never want to lose, is the knowledge, it’s the skill, because mastering that skill has allowed me to get where I’m at.  And if I go to another market, and it’s only because I’ve been mastering this skill over and over and over, going to conferences, going to places, role playing, listening to the CDs, learning it and learning it and learning it, still to this day, I’m still running my credit card every week for something, just trying to gain more knowledge about anything that has to do with anything, looking outside the industry now even more than ever.  And that’s what I take with me, and that’s what’s going to be what builds me back up.  And real quickly what I would do is I would get a presentation put together, and I would have a lot of the documentation, and the same system that I have now in terms of market, I would start learning the market, I would do everything I could to learn as much as I could about every house on the market, every sale going over the last two years.  Broker Metrics is a great product for agents and brokers for graphs and statistics and stuff like that, I love that program, it’s amazing.  You can put up so many graphs, you could make anybody think that you’re a genius just by having all this market research done.  It’s amazing, but it’s really good stuff, and then when you start really to understanding it and learning it, it’s just incredible how you use it.  But that’s what I would do first.  And then obviously, no budget, the first thing I would be going after is a for sale by owner and expireds, they’re free, they raise their hand.  And I say this all the time too, for sale by owner and expireds are the easiest thing to go after, there’s nothing else that you’ll ever do marketing dollar wise that will put you in front of, percentage wise, as many people that are motivated.  So if you had to mail to people or anything that you had to do to spend money on, you’re going to reach a whole lot more people, but how do you find 100 people that have already pretty much raised their hand and said ‘I’m interested in selling’.  Expireds and for sale by owners are waving the flag saying ‘hey look at me, I want to sell my home’.  And a lot of agents they don’t do it – just do it, just go out there and make it fun and just go out there and just try something, try anything.  And once you get one and you get the taste, it’s just like man this is so much easier than I thought it was going to be, and then you just go after it.

Dean Jackson

It’s funny you said something about making it fun, and how a lot of times people, they won’t go and put themselves out of their comfort zone to go and talk to a for sale by owner, or call an expired, yet they don’t think anything of going to the golf course and being frustrated about their game, if you’re looking at it it’s no different, where it’s a game and you’re with other people, it’s a cool mind set to have when you’re looking at it, just look at it with fascination and not frustration.

Jay Kinder

Yeah, that’s how I look at golf too though.  Golf is the most frustrating sport on the planet, even basketball I can hit 7/10 free throws left-handed, golf I can’t hit the ball down the fairway 1/10 times.  But it’s just one slight little minute change in degree that crushes the ball down the fairway.  And that’s all it is in learning the process of working with expireds or anything, it’s a skill, it’s just a matter of mastering it, changing just a little bit, just enough to nail it, and that’s when the reward comes.  It’s just with golf it doesn’t seem to come often enough for me.

Dean Jackson

And you over the years, that’s the thing, developing the ability to know what to say, how to say it, and when to say it.

Jay Kinder

Exactly.

Dean Jackson

Well Jay, I told you we’d say on for about 30 minutes, we’re coming up on an hour now.  That’s great, I think there’s a lot of learning here. What would you say in summary of, take you on a journey back to your 12 years, or 13 years, what would you say to people right now who may be struggling, maybe haven’t figured it out yet, what kind of encouragement would you give people?

Jay Kinder

The one thing that I think is out of; there’s so many things that you can latch onto that are going to help take you to success, but the one thing that you have to have is, you have to have your own why, and deep down inside you have to have a reason that you wanted to do this, you have to have a reason to want to succeed, and go and find that.  Go and find out what it is that really drives you, what it is that makes you want to achieve success, and hopefully you’ll love this industry, you’re passionate about it, even if it’s not, the market may not be what you want it to be, adapt, learn what other agents are doing and implement, and set goals, build a plan, and just do it.  Just make it happen, follow your dream.  This is no secret, like I said I certainly didn’t invent anything ingenious here in this marketplace, I just learnt…

Dean Jackson

But you do have the advantage of being in that international real estate hot bed of Lawton, Oklahoma.

Jay Kinder

Yeah.  Unfortunately if you’re just not in; I really don’t want to name my marketplace, I don’t want a bunch of realtors moving here just to get into this market.  For all the agents that used to make fun of me because of my average sell price, I think we’re about even now, so I don’t get to sell $600,000 homes, in fact there’s not a home on the market above I think $650,000 in my entire market.  And there’s only one like above $450,000.  So I just sell a bunch of small ones.

Dean Jackson

Well Jay, I really appreciate your time, I think there’s some great lessons in here for people, just even from the mind set and implementing and doing it.

Jay Kinder

I appreciate it Dean, it was my pleasure.

Dean Jackson

Thank you again.