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/RealEstate is a bi-weekly podcast where we chat with agents and experts in the real estate space to find out what strategies are working for them, what tools are powering their business, and how they are maneuvering shifts in the industry. Join host and marketing aficionado Chris Whitling as he uncovers the tips, tricks, and tech ambitious agents can use to take their businesses to the next level.
At some level, you have to feel a little guilty that you're ignoring this. You have to know that you're losing opportunity. You have to know people are gonna call a different agent because you're not really trying to help them. You're not really staying in in front of them. So instead of just losing that and getting nothing for it, why don't just be intentional.
Chris Whitling:Hello, and welcome to Forward Slash Real Estate. I am your host, Chris. This is the podcast where we talk about the intersection between technology and real estate. Today, we're gonna be talking about once you've used that technology to generate all those leads and you've been doing that for years, now what? What are the monetization strategies that is going to help you keep making money from that when you wanna do something like retire, or move to a new new location?
Chris Whitling:So I'm gonna intro our guest Nick here in a second. But first, I gotta give a little bit of FOMO, feel to Todd Tremontae. So every year, we do Real Growth Summit. Used to be named named the, unofficial Rubik's user conference. And for the past two years, we've come away from that conference watching someone on stage and go, oh, wow.
Chris Whitling:We have to have them on the podcast immediately. So second year in a row. Nick, just with that, tell us who you are and what you do. And, it's gonna become apparent real quick to people why we're talking to you.
Nick Krautter:Okay. So I like to start by saying I am a realtor. I just got started in o six in Portland, Oregon. You know, I fell in love with the business. I was working fourteen hour days, six, seven days a week to go from zero clients to 200 over about four years and, had great mentorship and moved to Portland, Oregon in 'five, which was just like a magical time to move to a place that was growing dramatically and and be a part of that story for twenty years.
Nick Krautter:But while we're talking is because during the great recession, a lot of really good realtors in my office started to take other jobs, retire, move. And I figured out how to, what I call, adopt their clients. So I bought their books of business. They endorsed me to their clients. And all of a sudden, you know, I spent four years busting my butt to get to 200 clients.
Nick Krautter:And over the next couple years, I went from 200 to 2,000 clients working way less because instead of getting every client one at a time, I was getting two, three, four hundred clients at a time from my from my deals with these realtors who were retiring, moving, changing careers. And it really opened my eyes to how you could grow way faster and still by referral. And I ended up writing a book about it called The Golden Handoff, and that's why I was at the conference speaking.
Chris Whitling:I was about to say I've got I've got the book right here as well. You know, we're gonna be talking for the audience. We're gonna be talking a lot about, what's in this book. So definitely work first of all, let's just give them a plug right now. Where can they find this?
Chris Whitling:Amazon?
Nick Krautter:Amazon. Yeah. It's the best place to get it. You'll have it in a day or two. Make sure you go to Golden Handoff dot com as well.
Nick Krautter:There's a ton of resources in the book. If you sign up on the website, you'll get a link to download all of those in a format you can edit. So you can grab the announcement letters, contracts, scripts, dialogues, all that, and put it into action, very easily.
Chris Whitling:So we've already set set stage here a little bit because, you know, I think some people are probably hearing, okay. Hang on. This guy is, like, sort of growing by m and a. And then maybe another section of the audience is probably hearing, I'm thinking about retiring. Is this the exit ramp?
Chris Whitling:Like, so if someone's reading this book,
Nick Krautter:like Yeah.
Chris Whitling:What perspective are you who who are you writing it for?
Nick Krautter:It's written for both people. I struggle with that at the beginning because originally, I thought I was gonna write, a a retirement how to book. And I I was talking with a mentor of mine who wrote the forward, a guy named Rick DeLuca, who's like a real estate guru, speaker coach guy, who coached me and my team for a while back when I was starting. And he said, Nick, the audience for all the people that wanna do what you're doing by growing their business way is way bigger than the number of people who are looking for that retirement strategy because hopefully you only need that once. Right?
Nick Krautter:If you do it right. But what what's crazy to me is just that in real estate, people don't have a plan for their business. Right. They like you. We were talking earlier.
Nick Krautter:You know, they buy rentals, you invest in the stock market, you do kind of those traditional things. But then there's this huge blind spot where people forget that their client relationships and their book of business is worth a fortune. But well, they don't do
Chris Whitling:anything to talk about it all the time. You know, whether it's like there's no such thing as a bad lead or there's gold in the old, you know, like. So the concept should be there. And I love that you're pointing directly at the database and, like, there is a monetary value associated with that whole thing.
Nick Krautter:Yeah. And then the I think being aware of that at all is really the start of making a decision of do you wanna do something with it or not? I hope that everyone does because, you know, one of the side benefits that I didn't think of originally was the clients are actually really happy when their agent introduces them to someone else that can help them because they don't want to have to go interview people again and ask for, you know, all their friends at work. If Who do you use? Do you like them?
Nick Krautter:And go have meetings and interview people and try to find a new broker. If you've got someone good and they refer you to someone and say, this person will help you. They're great. Clients are stoked. And so, it's Once you realize that there's value there and once you realize that even if you don't care about that or don't need it, but your clients will value it and that's why you're in this wonderful position is right.
Nick Krautter:They've supported you your whole career and working with you. It The way to unlock it is you have to have someone to do the work. Right? There has to be someone to show the houses, write the contracts, answer the questions, negotiate. There has to be another broker and a realtor involved.
Nick Krautter:And so helping connect those two people is is really the secret. And then it's so easy to deal with the money because it's all based on referral fees. And that's something that every realtor is super familiar with. And it's super fair because you only pay
Chris Whitling:I don't wanna give too much away yet because I wanna give a give people a reason to listen all the way through the episode, because you have some really good answers, on a lot of that stuff. But, you know, maybe real quick we go back because you said you started your career in Portland, Oregon in 02/2006, and then you essentially adopted this, you know, what kinda sounds to me like an m and a type strategy, but you were buying the databases to as the, you know, sort of great recession was, forcing people out. Can you talk to me through, like, when that like, the first time that you bought the first one and the challenges that you ran into on that, you know, transaction, I guess.
Nick Krautter:Yeah. The first one was tricky. They actually said no the first time. And
Chris Whitling:Oh, really?
Nick Krautter:Yeah. Because I was doing pretty good. I was busy. I was starting to build a a team. I didn't have a lot of people.
Nick Krautter:I think I had a buyer's agent and a part time assistant.
Chris Whitling:Yep.
Nick Krautter:I knew I needed to keep growing. Like, we were I was interviewing people and and thinking, you know, those next steps that I needed to take, just because there's only so many hours in the day. Character in the book, she's real. I actually I think we just closed a deal with one of her clients or got a listing last week. And Mhmm.
Nick Krautter:We originally started working together fourteen years ago. But I asked Renee, hey, can I help your clients? I didn't really have a plan. I just Yeah. I knew she had great clients.
Nick Krautter:She worked at, like, really high end stuff, great neighborhoods, referral based. She was a really good broker. She wasn't getting out because she failed. She was getting out because she had a second child and didn't want to have to work the hours it takes to be successful in real estate. And so she originally said no.
Nick Krautter:And she gave her book of business to an agent that was kind of struggling thinking that, oh, he's got way more time. But, you know, I say this joke on stage all the time. You know, if someone's bad at business and you give them more clients, they don't suddenly get good at business. They just do bad business with more people.
Chris Whitling:That's right.
Nick Krautter:But what really happened is there was just no follow-up. Right? Like, he didn't wanna make the calls. When he got appointments, he would ask her to come to the appointment. So now she's working two jobs and splitting the money.
Nick Krautter:And so after six months, she came back to me and said, okay, this isn't working. And I should have hired you. And I said, said, okay, this isn't working, and I should have hired you. And I said, well, here's the good news. The market's been terrible.
Nick Krautter:Most people haven't moved. But even in that six month window from when she's worked with someone else before I took over, first thing I promised her is, you know, she's like, hey, this guy didn't call anyone. I said, okay, I will call everyone in this list. I will sit at my desk and call 300 people and I'll do it in like however many days it takes until I am done. And and that's what I did.
Nick Krautter:We found five or six people that were listed or buying with other agents in just that six month period. And that was in a time when the market was pretty slow. Probably similar to where we are now in terms of deal volume. Right? So imagine if the market's going gangbusters like it was a couple years ago.
Nick Krautter:That might have been 10 people that she's already lost because she's not in the game, but no one else is there to, like, talk to these people.
Chris Whitling:Right. And talk about, like, ROI on time spent, you know, like, five or six on 300, you know, contacts. I don't know. Like, 2%, you know, I think that's a that's a three point rate that most people will be pretty happy with.
Nick Krautter:Oh, yeah. And I mean, you look at it, like, in a good database, you know, five to 10% of the people on that list are actively thinking about buying or selling right now. Yeah. Like, in you're listening to this. You've got a database of 500 people.
Nick Krautter:50 of them are going to do something. They're thinking about it. And so it's just the the trick, right, in in what you guys do a good job with. And and and really the secret is, like, how do you manage 500 relationships to make sure you can connect with those 50 people who really wanna talk to you? And that's the part that's hard.
Nick Krautter:Yeah. Right? If you only had to talk to the people that wanted to talk to you, it'd be very easy. Unfortunately, no one's cracked that code completely yet. Everyone's trying.
Nick Krautter:There's billions of dollars being spent on that mystery. But that's why salespeople still get paid to put in the work to call people to to figure out who actually needs me.
Chris Whitling:That's right. So it sounds like the first piece of learning there was really the the person that you do the handoff to matters, which I think is probably intuitive. Like, if you were going to, I'm thinking about the way that a lot of referrals in real estate, manifest where it's like, hey, you know, mister realtor that I've used before, I'm now moving to a new state. Who do you have? And there's a lot that goes into that.
Chris Whitling:Like, it seems obvious that you would also put thought in who you're going to give access to your database because you there's, like, a level of credibility that's transferred between you and the person that's taking it over.
Nick Krautter:Oh, yeah. No. I mean, who you choose to work with. So if you're the agent who's retiring or you're moving and you're going to hand off your your clients to someone, yeah, you want to put a lot of thought into it. There's a whole chapter in the book about how to go through that process and make sure you have the right people.
Nick Krautter:And, you know, I sold my residential business a couple years ago, and I interviewed 10 different agents and teams when I did that. And, you know, for a lot of them, these are people I knew personally, that I had done deals with, that had great reputations. Like half of them didn't want to take on that many more clients Mhmm. Because they didn't have enough people to, like, do it well. So there's a sweet spot, right?
Nick Krautter:Like, you don't want someone that has no business and assume that they've got free time because they're they're doing something wrong if they've got no business. You don't want someone that needed to hire 10 other people and is so far behind the curve that they can't keep up with what they already have because they're gonna be too busy. So there's like kind of a sweet spot of people that have the systems and tools and experience that allow them to take on some growth. Almost have you kind of almost want someone that has a track record of success, but they maybe have more agents than they really need and they can kind of grow into it. That's where
Chris Whitling:you got a little bit
Nick Krautter:of headroom.
Chris Whitling:A little bit of headroom.
Nick Krautter:Yeah. Where, hey, everyone. We're gonna need to call these we just got 500 new clients, and they don't go, oh, no. You want them to go, oh, yes. You know, they're they're excited.
Nick Krautter:Like Yeah. You want people to, like, oh. Which come on.
Chris Whitling:If you're saying oh no to a bunch of new leads, like, might wanna rethink the self talk there.
Nick Krautter:But I'm telling you, dude, I don't know how many great agents I know that, like, will skip calls one week because they're already so busy. And they're like, I'll I know if I call these people, someone's gonna want an appointment and I'm so busy and I haven't seen my kids and my, you know, I haven't been to the gym this week. You know, people sabotage themselves and again, you do get to a point. The reason why people have teams is because they run out of time.
Chris Whitling:That's true.
Nick Krautter:They're better at getting business than they have the ability to handle it. And, that's a good by the way, that's the problem you want. You don't wanna be, oh my gosh. I've got the best systems, tools, people, but we have no Right. You don't want to talk to.
Chris Whitling:Well, I mean, it's a this is a whole topic for another podcast
Nick Krautter:where
Chris Whitling:it's like, great. You have done all the right things, and now you have the problem where you're sort
Nick Krautter:of checkmated between, you know,
Chris Whitling:I have all this business, but it's requiring all of my time, and I really need to do some, like, deep strategic thought on, like, how to, like, accommodate the growth.
Nick Krautter:Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Whitling:So it sounds like, you know, you were you you've learned a little bit about, like, you know, the business that's receiving the leads, what they need to be. So I guess you must have gone through this first one and said, okay. This works for me. What did you start to look for? Like, how did you how do you find people that are, you know, either on the cusp of retiring or getting ready to move?
Chris Whitling:And then and then what does that conversation look like when you approach them and say, you know, hey, I'm interested in taking over your database?
Nick Krautter:You know, you start with your relationships. So start with the brokers you're friends with that, you know, start at your office. Let your your managing broker, principal broker, know that you're interested in in helping people who are relocating or who are changing careers or retiring. And that's a great that that was, like, a huge resource for me was my team leader was instrumental in letting me know who wanted to talk to me. And to the point where after I worked with Renee and she was getting checks every month, you know, it was a big success story for her.
Nick Krautter:And so I had people coming to me wanting to sell their businesses to me because they saw that, oh, well, Renee's getting a check or two every month. Nick's doing all these calls. He's doing what he says he's gonna do. So I wanna work with him on this. And so it it started to kinda snowball for me.
Nick Krautter:And then we got to a point where I kinda had to say, we don't have enough people to keep up. We can't add 300 clients every six months, not at the speed that the team was growing. We had to, like, kind of hit pause and go, okay, let's just wrap our arms around what we have because I don't want to I don't want to screw the whole thing up by dropping the ball and not keeping our promise Right. To our clients and to those agents. Right?
Nick Krautter:Because those retiring agents become your best clients. They're referring you tons of people. And, I I think that what you so start with your brokerage is is the lowest hanging fruit. And then the people that you co op deals with. And there's a script I use that's very easy.
Nick Krautter:It's funny because when you bring this up, and I before I share this script, people have this crazy anxiety about calling people and asking them about it because they feel like they're gonna get yelled at or people will be mad at them. And you don't wanna call someone and say, hey, I see your production's way down. When are you gonna quit? That would be the wrong way to approach someone. Not a good move.
Nick Krautter:So if that's what you're thinking, don't do that. You should have anxiety about that conversation. The way to approach it that's really productive is to say, hey, Chris, you know, I've really enjoyed working with you on the couple of deals we've done. I've really admired how you've run your business and and had this great career. I'm curious.
Nick Krautter:What are your plans with your business when you're done selling? And what most agents will say is, that's crazy. I don't know. I kinda thought I'd just keep doing this, but I really am burned out or I really want to relocate. But I've got all of these clients here and I don't want to start over again from scratch.
Nick Krautter:And so then you there's your now there's your opening. How can I help solve your problem? Yeah. Now the only person this doesn't work for, right, is if, Chris, you say I'm I'm gonna try to quadruple this business over the next five years, and then, you know, I'm gonna hire more people, and then I'm gonna try to grow it more. And if you've got like this endless ambition.
Chris Whitling:Yep.
Nick Krautter:And you're on this growth warpath, then that's not an opportunity for me to help you as a, you know, take over your business. But the cool thing with the partial handoffs is even if you were like, yeah. I'm kinda burned out. I'm not really digging in and calling all these people. I'm not really marketing.
Nick Krautter:Then I could say, Chris, well, what do you what are the types of clients and the types of work you love doing? And you say, oh gosh, I love listings in these three neighborhoods. Because I know them. I know these neighborhoods better than any other broker. I have a great success rate.
Nick Krautter:I love the price point. But man, I'm so burned down on working with buyers that want to buy in the suburbs, and I'm in the car all day, and in traffic, and I hate it. And then I go, well, Chris, let me help all those buyers. I'm just I'm still growing my business. I I want I'm excited about being in the car all weekend.
Nick Krautter:I wanna help those people.
Chris Whitling:I I love this because we you also just introduced a it's sort of like a third option, you know, because I I think
Nick Krautter:that Yeah.
Chris Whitling:So far our conversation has been kind of binary, you know. It's like either either they're continuing in business or they're not and that's how the conversation is structured. But I love this, you know. It's almost it's almost like a plot twist on like a like an ISA type service or something like that where it's like, hey, I can I can solve this problem for you in this other area? Like, let's talk about the things that you don't like doing, and let me take them.
Nick Krautter:Yeah. No. And that's the thing is, like, this solution has been staring me in the face for, like, ten years. And I thought I was doing a great job by making my list of retiring agents and staying in touch, just like you do with home sellers. Like sometimes you call someone and they're ready to sell, and sometimes they say, hey, my kid just started junior high.
Nick Krautter:Call me in eight years when they're done with school, and we'll be moving. Right. And so you put it in your hey, every year I'm gonna check-in. Hey, do you wanna move school districts? Are you gonna wait the eight years?
Nick Krautter:And then I'll I'll help I'll be here to help you. You know, I literally had clients in my database where I was like, call them in, you know, eight years from now because they'll be ready to sell. The kids will be out of off to college. But the real solution isn't waiting until someone wants to be completely done because two problems. One, it takes forever.
Nick Krautter:And by then, they've probably lost touch with a lot of their people. So if you can find someone when they're in that phase where I'm gonna keep doing this for a while, but I'm not trying to grow, you can find what is that partial handoff option? Right? What is the thing that, Chris, you don't wanna do that I can take off of your plate? Because at some level, you have to feel a little guilty that you're ignoring this.
Nick Krautter:You have to know that you're losing opportunity. You have to know people are gonna call a different agent because you're not really trying to help them. You're not really staying in in front of them. So instead of just losing that and getting nothing for it, why don't just be intentional. You know, make the decision to you know what?
Nick Krautter:I don't wanna work with buyers anymore. I wanna work on these listings. I'm really good at it. It gives me the time to just be with my family and do other stuff. And so I'm not gonna work with buyers.
Nick Krautter:And I'm gonna but but find someone that's excited about helping them. Right? So you either build a team or you can you can kind of hack the team process with a handoff.
Chris Whitling:Maybe just to rephrase, you know, what you're what you're saying there. Like, it sounds like your ideal prospect for for, you know, entering this arrangement is, like, you're looking for someone that is entering a career transition. Right? So Yeah. And and that way, you can you can you as the agent that's trying to assume the business can be fairly well assured that there's, like, some freshness in the in the database.
Chris Whitling:And it's not just cold because they actually quit calling their leads two years ago and now are just kind of, like, living off the off the sort of referrals that are coming out of it.
Nick Krautter:Yeah. If you think of like a career is like a rocket launch. Right. So right at the beginning, like you're just burning fuel and you're going straight up. Right.
Nick Krautter:And that's kind of like when I was new and I was doing fourteen hour days, six, seven days a week and I was loving it. You know, I was super exciting. I was learning the business. I was growing a business. I was hiring people.
Nick Krautter:I was making more money than I ever made before. And that rocket goes up and then it kind of reaches like this part where it plateaus. And you can keep going, right? You might have a couple stages in your rocket. You might it might be forty, fifty years.
Nick Krautter:You're just, I'm gonna just I'm gonna have a team of 50 people and we're gonna do a billion dollars in sales. Like, there's people probably listening to this. There's a couple that are like that. But most people, their rocket goes up. They get to some point where they're kinda comfortable.
Nick Krautter:And if you're at a point where you can ignore any clients or say no to business, you're at a point where you should find someone to take all the stuff you don't wanna do. Because that's the sweet spot where, like, you've you basically your last booster's burned out and you're about to start doing this. And at that apogee, right, at that peak, that's when you have, like, the peak engagement with your clients and you can be intentional about, hey, I'm my rocket's gonna do this, but this other rocket's gonna keep going up. Right. And I'm gonna put all my people on this rocket and I'm gonna just take care of what I can handle over here without actually losing it.
Chris Whitling:I wanna switch tracks here a little bit because, like, I I think that, you know, by now, if someone's listening to this and they're not, like, convinced that this is awesome, I don't know. Rewind and listen to it again. But, like, when you're actually yeah. And where I wanna go with this is, like, the actual mechanics. Right?
Chris Whitling:So we we always try and leave people with, Like, this is, like, very practical steps of, like, things that you can go execute on right now. Yeah. So, you know, when when you've got access to this database, someone says yes. Like, hey. I'm I'm in career transition mode.
Chris Whitling:Nick, I want you to take over my, you know, my database. Like, what are your first steps, you know, when you get the, you know well, actually, maybe you can even just tell me. Like, how does this usually manifest? Do they give you a login to their real geeks? Do they give you a CSV?
Chris Whitling:Like or here's a copy of my iPhone. Like how does this unfold?
Nick Krautter:Yeah. So you make the connection. You sign a contract, which is basically like a referral agreement for a lot of people. And I
Chris Whitling:got a bunch of questions about that. We're gonna come back to that.
Nick Krautter:Yeah. Yeah. So I think what's really important is and I like to do this off platform. So whatever platform you're using for your CRM, export it to a CSV where you have names, phone numbers, emails and addresses. So just do a big export dump.
Nick Krautter:I like to print it out. So even if it's like 20 pages long, just print it out and get together with the retiring agent. And you sit down and you go over it together and you take notes. So you're filling out notes on the clients. It is crazy how much the return agent will remember about these people.
Nick Krautter:Yeah. And there will be a ton of people where they go, oh, oh, yeah. I guess I never wrote a note about that, but those folks talked to me about selling this year. I you should call them first. Oh, you know, I've been showing that guy houses.
Nick Krautter:I don't know if he's really gonna buy. I haven't checked with him in a while, but he was looking for x. And so you start filling in the notes. You also see if there's information missing. So you're like, hey.
Nick Krautter:There's no phone number for this person. And they go, oh, it's in my cell phone. I just never updated it. And so you you fill in the gaps. You learn kind of a story of who these people are and what they need.
Nick Krautter:You help identify kind of your top 10, top 20, top 50. Who should you call first and follow-up with the most? You know, in a perfect world, you also have a list of follow-up tasks for these people where, like, the agents has scheduled out in the future, like, the person that's gonna move in eight years when their kids are done with high school. And you can plug that into your system. In a dream world, you've got the same platform.
Nick Krautter:Right? So you're, like, call up real gigs and you say, hey, can you transfer over this list and keep all of the notes in the native format? Or you have a little shared login, or you add them to a team, you know, however you facilitate that. If you don't, obviously, you have to do an export import. You make sure that when you do that, you tag them and source them as these are Chris's clients so that you know which ones you're paying the referrals on and which ones are are your clients.
Nick Krautter:And then there's an announcement letter that comes from you. Right? So it comes from Chris who's the retiring agent and says, hey, I'm partnering with Nick. Here's what's going on. He's great.
Nick Krautter:You know, he sells a billion houses. He does a good job. You know, I'm moving to Florida and, you're in great hands. So whatever it is. So or or, hey, I'm going to be focusing on listings in these neighborhoods.
Nick Krautter:I'm going to continue to help you with that. But if you're thinking of selling somewhere else or you wanna buy a place or invest, Nick's gonna be partnering with me to help you with that. So whatever your scenario is, you explain to people what's gonna happen and who I am. And then I call and introduce myself to all of the people I'm helping. So, hey, this is Nick Crowder.
Nick Krautter:I promised your realtor, Chris, I would call and check-in and see if you had any real estate questions or needs I can help with. That's it. One sentence. And you're not asking them to list their property or go look at homes or tell me what you want to buy today. It's I promised your realtor I would call you and check-in and see if you had any questions or needs.
Nick Krautter:I can help with. And that's how you start. And then if someone says raises their hand and goes, oh, I'm glad you called. We need to move. That's easy.
Nick Krautter:Right? You just go do it. If not, have a couple stats about your market. Have a little bullet point on some trends. And then let them know what's gonna happen next.
Nick Krautter:So I'm gonna you're gonna get my monthly market updates. I do x number of classes a year. We do a client event. We would love to have you come and and meet with the team. And so you let them know what's gonna happen in the future.
Nick Krautter:And from there, you just treat them like you treat your own clients. So they end up getting, again, different marketing lingo, the touches, the the marketing pieces, the however you describe all the different ways you stay engaged, you know, over the course of a year and multiple years. You just treat them like you treat your own clients and you help them out.
Chris Whitling:Yeah. And I mean, these sound like fairly easy calls to make. Right? Because it's sort of, from your perspective, cold. But from their perspective, you know, they have a pre preexisting relationship with that guy.
Chris Whitling:Like, you're taking over the business, you know, and you're not you're not really pressing them for anything. You're just sort of trying to figure out where they're at.
Nick Krautter:Totally. And it's so warm. I remember the first time I did the calls, I was nervous that people would think that, like, they got sold, like, a pallet of old t shirts or something. And and it's not like that at all because remember before I call them, Chris, we've sent them a letter on your behalf on your letterhead with your return address. So, like, you're hyping me up the whole time.
Nick Krautter:Right? So you're you're letting people know what's happening, which most agents don't do. Right? So you're you're positive communication. You're thinking about how to help your clients.
Nick Krautter:You're not just like leaving them high and dry. You're hyping up your adopting agent. You're explaining who I am and why you picked me and and you you didn't just pick a random person down the hall. You interviewed people and you made sure, hey. I like how Nick does business, and he's gonna execute this marketing plan that gives him the best odds of helping my clients as possible.
Nick Krautter:You're never gonna win a %, but you certainly you know, your batting average is gonna be higher if you just put in the work and you do the steps. And and that's really just do the things that made it work in the first place, which is, you know, calling people, emailing them updates, providing information, being a valuable resource.
Chris Whitling:Okay. So you're you're trying to be like be a resource to the people that you're taking over. And this is kind of like a question that I think we've probably talked about in other podcasts. But, I mean, from your perspective, especially with the plot twist that you're taking over someone else's database, like, what does that follow-up cadence look like, especially as those leads, you know, maybe start to get cold?
Nick Krautter:Yeah. I mean, I think it's it's a lot, it's a big lift upfront because you want to have the communication in a couple different ways. And and a lot of times people ask, like, well, how long is this handoff period? Right. Where you're kind of co marketing.
Chris Whitling:That's a great question.
Nick Krautter:It depends on how big your list is. Right? And it so I would say the bigger the list and the more you have going on, you you might co market for, like, a year. Now from the retiring agent's perspective, they're not really doing it. Right?
Nick Krautter:Like, you and I might record a video like this. In fact, we might record four or five of these in one one shot, that you use throughout the year. And you can segment your database. Right? So that, hey, I'm gonna pull up a list of Chris's three hundred clients, and I'm gonna send Chris video Chris and Nick talk about the market video one.
Nick Krautter:And then two months later, I'm gonna send Chris and Nick video two, and then three and four. And so maybe every other month, we're sending out a video just like this about a topic. And, you know, some of them are gonna be seasonal, some of them are gonna be maybe market specific. I'll probably bug you in January and we'll, like, hey, let's look at the market report from last year and projections for next year or this year, whatever, and and and say, here's what happened and here's what we think is gonna happen. But from the retirees perspective, they really don't have to do that much if they don't want to.
Nick Krautter:With a partial handoff though, the thing that's cool is, like, let's say you're like me and, like, I love talking to my clients about real estate. I just don't wanna have to go do all the showings and go to all the inspections. Right? So I'm happy to have a conversation and and do a buyer consultation and talk to someone and then connect them with the right agent that's going to help them whether they're, you know, a buyer, seller, or investor. You can do that all day long and stay involved and stay engaged in the stuff you want to do but not have to do the stuff you don't want to do.
Nick Krautter:And so that cadence really is Well, one, I think you want to have a marketing plan that is part of your contract that spells out. Like, for me, it was really important that whoever took over my real estate business would call everyone on that list twice a year. And because my list was 800 people, we split it up over four agents so that we could have a good expectation of success as opposed to one agent having to call 800 people twice a year, which is very, very different than having to call 200 people.
Chris Whitling:Right. And this is where I think, you know, I just want to call out for the audience. You know, we're sort of perspective shifting here, you know, because what you just said, you know, and let me repeat just to make sure I have it right.
Nick Krautter:Yeah.
Chris Whitling:You know, when you left so I'm assuming this is when you left the Portland market. You had a healthy size database, and you wanted to make sure that it got the attention that it deserved because you want the, the residual income, from that database. And so you asked for it to be or or orchestrated it to be broken up between several agents so that you knew that it would get the attention that it deserved.
Nick Krautter:So Yeah. There's kinda like how I when I ran my own team, I was I was the one that was, like, kinda the buck stops here. I'm responsible. But at the end of the day, if if if something needs to happen and no one else is at the office, it's gonna be me, you know, answering the call, fixing the lockbox, doing whatever we need to do. But I knew that just from having done it for so long, there is a limit to how many people you can have relationships with and stay engaged with.
Nick Krautter:Because these other agents, by the way, too, you know, this isn't these aren't their only clients. Right? They have other leads and clients and opportunities that they're helping and working with. And, you know, my client list is a part of their success, but it isn't 100% of it. So for me, we felt like about 200 was like a reasonable number that they can handle.
Nick Krautter:And that realistically, if you focus for a week, you can get through that list pretty easily, you know, in in about a week. You know, that's 30 calls a day for seven days. You're done. And, you know, for some people, that might seem like an enormous amount of calls. I lived on my phone.
Nick Krautter:So, like, for me, it was like, man, it seems like it's a normal Wednesday.
Chris Whitling:I I hope. I my my aspiration for our audience is for them to think that that's not a huge amount of calls, you know, because hopefully, you're using, you know, the the online lead generation engine to, you know, really fuel that, which means you're gonna have to make calls. You're gonna have to, like, stay in touch with those leads that, that you're generating. We've kinda set this up, like, okay. You know, you've you've figured out, you know, who you wanna talk to.
Chris Whitling:You've figured out the actual transaction, the the the marketing plan. You're making the calls. You're having those conversations. But now, like, I wanna go back and talk about contract because that's really where, you know, it's like, okay. Yeah.
Chris Whitling:We negotiated the contract upfront, but now we've got this, like, income that's coming from it. And you've hinted at it a couple times that this is essentially a referral, like, transaction split.