Kyle Whissel has been in the real estate industry in San Diego since 2002. Since then, he's worked in all aspects of the industry including property management, commercial real estate (apartments and retail), investing, distressed sales (REO & short sale), flipping and residential real estate. Whissel Realty Group has also been recognized as the #1 real estate team in San Diego County by The Wall Street Journal and the #6 team in California by Trulia and Zillow.
In this episode, Kyle and Brian discuss how you can leverage your time and resources so that you can focus on more income producing tasks.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:00:40] Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Brian Charlesworth and I'm the CEO of Sisu and your host of the show. And today I'm here with Kyle Whissel. I've known Kyle from so it's been about just over a year now and Kyle is one of the top team owners in real estate down in the San Diego area. He moved over to XP a while back. And I know he's he's actually built a phenomenal business from that as well. So a lot of exciting things to talk about. I'd like to just give Kyle a few minutes to introduce himself and talk about some of his big objectives for 2020.
Kyle Whissel: [00:01:21] I appreciate you having me on the show, man. I am here in San Diego, California. I started in real estate when I was 20, bought my first property while I was in college, made a ton of money in a few months and got completely addicted to the industry. Never thought a million years I would get into real estate coming from real estate family. I was kind of anti real estate growing up. But when you make like 17 grand in three months while you're in college, it's kind of hard to ignore that. So I made a good amount of money. Got hooked on real estate, got the bug, worked with my dad in the commercial real estate space for about five or six years. You did a lot of stuff selling apartment buildings to people who would gut those and rehab them and resell them individually as condos. That was really amazing. And then that market dried up here in San Diego. And I made the decision at that point to a separate branch out from my dad and start my own thing and moved over to the residential side. Initially, I did a lot of Oreos, a lot of short sales things along those lines. I leverage those to build up a team. And I've been running a team ever since our team. We've consistently been selling 300 plus homes here in San Diego. By the time twenty nineteen is over, we should finish somewhere around three hundred and fifty sales. We're trying to cram as many in as we can before the year's over and finish just under two hundred million this year. So 2019 has been amazing. And then headed into 20-20. We have a very lofty goal to sell over 1000 houses and half a billion in volume. And sure, we'll talk a little bit more about how we're going to do that today.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:03:06] Awesome. Congratulations, by the way. I mean when most people think of selling 350 homes, I don't think they're thinking the 200 million number. I'm usually hearing more like one hundred million. So tell us, what's your price point down there? And how do you sell? I think a lot of people have the mindset that if homes are priced at that price point, that I can't sell it as many. Right. So talk to us about that. And what's the market like down there?
Kyle Whissel: [00:03:34] Yes. So our average price point, we're running about five sixty five is our average price point right now. The median price in San Diego is about six hundred. So we play right about the media and maybe a hair under that median price point. I prefer to kind of play it right around the median just because I've done this long enough now to know that when the market shifts, which I don't know if that's going to happen. Twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty one, twenty, twenty two or when. But whenever a market shifts that median price product still sells. I'll always have this this war wound or just this memory. When we did a lot of RPO and short sale back in the day, I remember pulling up Rancho Santa Fe and at one point there was over five years worth of inventory of multimillion dollar homes for sale. That's just not a market I want to be a part of.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:04:25] You don't want to have 30 of those?
Kyle Whissel: [00:04:29] I just want to be a part of that. I love the consistency and the stability of playing in the median price range or just, you know, on average, we're selling a house a day. I love to play in that range and just be real consistent.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:04:42] So consistency, I think that's a that's a key take away, really. Right now already of the I think a lot of people can get easily stuck in the red here and here in Salt Lake. You know, your average price points around 350. And a lot of people are going after those elephants. Right. The million dollar homes or the seven hundred and fifty thousand and up. And already in today's market, I'm already seeing that those are slowing down. Is that the same way in San Diego where the top prices have slowed down? But if you look at that mean or that median priced home, it's still moving in the first couple of weeks or getting multiple offers. Is that how it is there?
Kyle Whissel: [00:05:25] Yeah. And it's all relative. And we have zip codes in San Diego where the average price is a million dollars. So it's all relative to the specific market. What we're seeing is once you get to about double the median price is where you really start to see a drop off on. When you get three to four times the median, it's really, really tough to sell those properties. So I don't like listing properties. They have a massive outlay of cash and rarely ever sell. I mean, you know, you get in our market into that three, four or five million price range. Those things sell maybe a third of the time with the first agent, that wisdom. A lot of times those things go through two, three, four agents before they actually sell. Well, the expectation on a price point like that is that you're going to do a lot more marketing, which means you're going to spend a lot more money. And a third of the time it's not going to sell. That's just not where I want to play. And you're going to sit on these listings for six months. For twelve months. Right. You know, for us, we're six to twelve days. A lot of the times. And I like that. I don't like having to call my seller, you know, week after week or month after month, telling them, hey, we have no offers. We need to just price hey, we have no offers me to just the pricing. I don't want to have to deal with that. So I love when I get to call my clients and tell them we've got multiple offers, you know, let's sit down. Let's go over our strategy, how we're going to get as much as we can out of these buyers that we've got on the table.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:06:46] And I a hundred percent agree with your strategy? And I think that's great. Take away for anybody listening. Tell us, when was it? You bet. You got into commercial real estate. What year was that?
Kyle Whissel: [00:06:57] So the first property I bought was a three unit property that was in two thousand. And then I jumped into commercial immediately there after and worked with my dad. And I did that until 2007. 2008 roughly is when I actually made the shift over. So when I moved into residential was at the absolute bottom. But I did it because I saw the opportunity, because what happened is those same investors who were converting apartments into condos when they no longer could do that, they had money that they needed to use. And they would say, hey, Kyle, what about this, you know, REO listing? What about the short sale listing? And I would look up the listing agent now and see, holy, this girl's got, you know, four hundred REO listings. This guy's got 300 short sale listings. Like that's that would be nice to actually have consistency like that because in commercial, they're they're much bigger deals, but they're far less frequent. And, you know, I was in my early 20s at that point. And big checks in your early 20s. They go to bad places, a lot of money spent in Vegas and some good places along those lines. So I saw the opportunity to move over into the residential side and to focus on the distressed properties. And so we moved over initially we went heavy on short sales because those we can market direct to consumer and while we were marketing direct consumer to a lot of direct mail with those. And while we were doing that, I was also working on the relationships with the Oreo companies and or more specifically, the asset management companies. And so those that took probably two years to really break through with those relationships. But those relationships started to grow like crazy. And we ended up having Fannie Mae direct. We had HUD direct and we landed a lot of the really big accounts. And so then we were a very balanced company where we had a lot of short sales and a lot of our yo's. And then with all those listings, there's obviously a lot of leads that come along with that. And so I was able to leverage those leads to build my team into what it is today, which as we head into 2020 is going to be north of 60 people, including salespeople, Atman cioloş team, all of that.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:09:10] So you build a team in your first two years in residential?
Kyle Whissel: [00:09:15] Yeah, I've never worked a day in my life for that as an assistant. So if you don't have an assistant, you are the assistant. I am all about that. Like I just got a call that my car is getting detailed and one of the tires is is completely bald. I can just tell my assistant, hey, call the body shop who did work on it recently. Tell them they need to fix it. Like the fact that I don't have to spend time calling a body shop and sitting on hold and waiting for calls back like that's so nice. So I also today I needed to do something with one of my domains on Go Daddy and I'm gonna have time to call around and search for solutions and and all of this like figure this out. Go like to have somebody who can do that stuff so I can focus my time on doing a podcast like this. It's going to reach agents across the country or, you know, after this, I had a recruiting meeting. After that, I have another video that I'm going to shoot. Those are things that are better usage of my time being. Well, my assistant can take care of some of those tedious things that are going to throw me off track.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:10:14] So let's dig into that a little deeper. So this is something I actually learned from my wife because I used to do all kinds of random things that we're not the best use of my time. And I've since learned over the last five years that if, you know, if I can pay somebody $10 or $20 an hour when I'm making whatever I'm making right, that it's in my best interest to do that and focus on growing the. I mean, talk a little bit more about some of the other things that you've leveraged and maybe add to what I just said on why that's important.
Kyle Whissel: [00:10:47] Yes. So the thing is you need to know the value of your time. So the majority of agents are if let's assume you work 40 hours a week, you take a couple weeks off every year, you work two thousand hours a year. That's what you you're putting in. And let's assume you make two hundred grand. So your time, therefore, is worth one hundred dollars an hour. Maybe you made one hundred grand. OK, your time is worth fifty dollars an hour. Whatever that number is. But in our market, we like to think of our time as being more than at least one hundred dollars an hour as an agent. And some of the mistakes that I see agents make is they do these tasks that they could pay people fifteen twenty dollars an hour for a couple. Those that come to mind is cutting out open house signs like that. Can I come on your show Rico. Can you say whatever you want in saying that agents are out there putting out their own open house sign. So. That's so crazy because one there's people you could pay 20 bucks an hour to do that, 50 bucks an hour or whatever. And instead of you before your open house running all over the place, sweating, you know, dodging cars and dodging traffic and not trying to trip over curves and all of that stuff. Instead of doing that, you're getting to the house nice and early. You getting the lights on, you're getting music on, you're getting, you know, your sensi warmers on. You're getting the stage set for that house and you're getting yourself pumped up. You're spending a little bit of time reviewing what are the other homes that are for sale in the neighborhood and how does this home compared to those homes. And so now, you know, fifteen minutes before the open house starts, it's the houses completely ready. You're ready. Your mind is right. But instead, you're out there, you know, hauling signs for two hours before your open house. And then you show up, you're hot, you're sweaty, you're not in the right state of mind. You're just you're you're all kinds of fucked up and you have an ineffective open house. And honestly, what ends up happening more so is that the agents only put like four or five sides out because they don't want to be doing it. So like, whatever, I'll put a couple signs out. Fuck it. Like why only put a couple of signs up if you're gonna sit in a house for two, three, four hours. Why are you only going to spend five minutes putting two sides out like spend money? Spend 50 bucks. Spend a hundred bucks. Whatever it costs to have somebody go and put signs out. Put twenty five signs out. Put 50 signs up. Put up a hundred signs out. Like open houses are a huge opportunity if you're gonna sit in that house for two or three hours. You should have as many signs out as you possibly can because the more signs you have out one, it's branding you and two, it's going to lead to more traffic coming to your open house, which creates more opportunities for you. But you're too cheap and too stupid to pay somebody. Fifty bucks. A hundred bucks to do your science for you because you're trying to save money. But in reality, you're costing yourself hundreds, if not thousands of dollars as a result of it. Or another one that I'm real passionate about is let's say you are promoting your open house. You know, you want to go use the open house as means to connect with people in the neighborhood. So if you're gonna go out and doorknock the neighborhood, if you're actually going out and physically knocking on doors, have more power to you. That's hard to do. And that's easily a five hundred dollar an hour task. If you if you'll actually go out there, do it. But what I see agents doing all the times, like I'm going to go door knocking. And what they really doing is they just walk up to the door, drop a flyer at the door, walk to the next door, drop a flyer at the door and walk to the next door. I pay $15 an hour for that. But what an agent's thinking is like, oh, well, I'm saving myself $15. It's called 20 dollars. I'm saving myself 20 dollars an hour because I'm gonna do it myself. No. If you're times worth a hundred and you're paying 20, yes, you are saving 20, but you're costing yourself a hundred. The net effect is an $80 loss per hour every hour that you're doing that. But agents, a lot of times they just want to fill their eight hour day or their six hour day or their 10 hour day or whatever it is. They just want to fill it. And they feel fulfilled. If they did stuff for those eight or ten hours. But if it wasn't a hundred dollar an hour activities, what did you really do? Maybe you could have worked instead of an eight hour day. You could outsource two hours of it and you could have gone home and spend more time with your family if you chose to. Or you could. It took those two hours and spent those on income producing activities and made more money. You know your choice. Pick your poison. I choose to get home early. I love spending time with my family. But some people would rather get two extra hours of prospecting in or door-knocking or whatever the case may be. So just be smart. Think about every activity that you do. Is this 100 hundred dollar an hour activity? If not, who can I outsources to? Sometimes you maybe you hire your full time assistant. That's what I would recommend. You will find things for them to do. But maybe that's not, you know, in your wheel. You can find third party companies that will put your signs up for you. You can find companies that'll go drop fliers for you, whatever the case may be.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:15:47] Those are some great examples. One thing that ads along those same lines, 20 year end on showing assistance versus if I'm an agent, should I show my own houses or should I get a showing assistant?
Kyle Whissel: [00:16:01] I would say that depends. That is one hundred dollar an hour activity to be showing houses anytime you're face to face with clients that are looking to buy or sell real estate. That is one hundred dollar an hour activity. So as you scale up, I think there's a time and a place for showing assistance. One of the things that we offer for our team that was the realty group is that we have somebody who coordinates showings for our agents. So let's say you want to go show five properties Saturday at 10 starting at 10:00. You literally just go on and just say, I want to start at 10. Here's the five MLS numbers. And these clients are pretty quick and somebody will coordinate everything for you. So they'll be the one who pulls up the map, figures out what's going to be the ideal route to help these five properties. They'll call the listing. Agents are showing time or whatever service that person is using. They'll coordinate all of those showings. They'll make sure that the times are appropriate. They'll ask that agent, you know, are there any offers on the table? Is there anything special that we need to know about the home, anything important to the seller? They'll ask all of those questions. Then they'll actually print out a whole buyer to work for the agent and for the buyer so that when it's time for the agents to show property, they just don't swing by the front desk. They're going to have all the marketing materials are going to be there. There's gonna be notes on every single property and they just walk out the door and show because in reality, to setup five showings, that's probably an hour worth of work between the back and forth of waiting for the responses from the listing agents talk to the seller seller to go back to listening. Agent, back to you. And all of that, that's probably an hour worth of work. And then also making the buyers who are in all of that, I mean, our maybe two hours or so, we choose to have our agents not waste time on that and let the team handle that for them so they can just focus on setting up more appointments.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:17:55] That's great. One of things you mentioned is open houses and we jumped out. I want to go back to that, because what I know that Kyle, is you actually make money by doing open houses. I see a lot of people who they do open houses. Right. But if you don't do an open house. Right, you're wasting your time. So how do you do an open house? Right. What do you guys do? You talked about 50 signs or even 100 signs. I think it's so common to go to one side and put a balloon on it and think that's going to stop people. Right. So so talk to us about your Open House strategy. I think you guys actually serve wine and stuff like your open houses and you do one for the neighborhood first and then a follow on. Is that right? Is that what you do?
Kyle Whissel: [00:18:39] I'll walk you through the whole system, step by steps if you're listening to this. You're watching this like this is the time you write notes. One thing you'll learn my style is I want to give a very, very tactical information, ideally step by step information, so that you can go and implement this in your business tomorrow. I don't want to just give you things that are going to like motivation, inspire you if that's what you're looking for. Like, I'm probably not your guy. But if you want to know, I'd actually go out, make money. That's my jam. Our team will do over 50 transactions this year, over 30 million in volume just from open houses. So it's a huge part of our business and it's something we really, really pride ourselves on. If I was a brand new agent, I would be doing at least two if not for open houses every single week. I think it's one of the best ways to generate revenue in this industry because it's not just about the open house. It's everything that the open house creates all the opportunities that are created for you. And so we have a whole seven day program that we follow that really attacks all of those opportunities. And now understand, you might not start out by doing all seven days worth of this. Maybe you do two or three. And then as you grow, you add 4 or 5 and 6 and 7 and add all these things on. So don't let these 7 days overwhelm you. Think, Oh, I can't do all of that. Do as much of it as you can and then add another layer. Add another layer and work your way up to it. So the first thing that we do is we start out by mailing invitations to everybody in the neighborhood, which is something that's super unique. It's not just listed postcard, it's not a just sold postcard. It's an eight and a half by eleven fold it. Cardstock, put it in on below like a birthday card size.And those are mailed to everybody in the neighborhood. So just depending if it's in a subdivision, we'll hit everybody in the subdivision. If not, we're heading anywhere from 250 to 500 people. A lot depends on the. Price point up the property so higher priced homes will hit more doors. Lower priced homes will hit less stores, but typically five hundred on average is what I mailed to. And so we mail this imitation. It's super classy. Looks like a wedding invitation. It's something that most people have never seen before. Everybody's gotten postcards from realtors. But how many people have actually got something in an envelope, opened it up and have this formal invitation to come to an open house? Like it's something that's super neat. But most people haven't seen. Well, that's what you need to do to grab attention from sellers that are thinking about doing something and you do the same thing everybody else does. You're gonna get the same results that they get. If you want to get different results, you need to do things differently. And this is a huge differentiator that you can do in your business. If you guys want to see what the invites look like. Just add on Instagram, shoot me a DMM and I will send you that so you guys can see what that looks like that goes out on Monday. So the thought is that goes out Monday. It should arrive at the at the mailbox by Wednesday, Thursday at the absolute latest. So that goes out. Tuesday, we start running social media ads. And now I understand there's some rules that are going to change potentially where you maybe can't run these ads until the properties on the MLS. So you stay within compliance and laws and all that stuff. But currently we start running social media ads on Tuesday. And that is ideally hitting that that home, plus everything that's surrounding it. There's ways that you can do this right now with Facebook. You have to do a 15 mile radius on Facebook. But there's a service called Cold COLB called Realty Resource. You could put a pin on a map, draw circle a half mile around it. You could pull in all the names and phone numbers and email addresses of everybody lives in that half mile radius. And you could then load that up into Facebook and Instagram and you could target it that way. Some people might think that violates their terms of service, of course. Don't do that. I'll give you another solution.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:22:34] How do you spell COLE, Kyle?
Kyle Whissel: [00:22:37] COLE. An alternative that is compliant is you can when you're running a housing ad, it has to be a 15 mile radius. But if you're running an ad about a restaurant, right. We do these restaurant videos. There is no rule that says that has to be a 50 mile radius that I can actually still put a pin on a map. Draw a circle a mile around it and target everybody with that. So what we'll do is if you have a specific farm, create a video about a restaurant in your farm or the golf course in your farm or something in your farm and then post that video, put a good amount of money behind it to make sure everybody in the community sees that video. And then what you can do is build a custom audience off of that video of anybody who's watched at least three seconds of it. So this is kind of a work around if you don't have your accustomed audience of your farm in Facebook. You do a video, target your farm plus a mile and put a good amount of money behind that video to make sure everybody sees it. And then you can build a custom audience on the back end. And anybody who watch three seconds of that video. So it's a little hacked of how to now take that list that you're one mile list. And now you could run housing ads against that list. So if you're not running a radius at all, you're just running into a specific list. So there's a little there's two different ways to do that. One, some people might not like to is totally legal and compliant. So social media ads start on Tuesday. Wednesday is when we go live on the MLS. We're very strategic about when we go live on the MLS because we know that Thursday and Friday are the two busiest days of the week for online search traffic. And whilst the big guys like Zillow, realtor Trulia, they syndicate listings within a matter of minutes, a lot of the smaller guys don't. Well, we need to make sure we're on every website by Thursday and Friday. So by going live on Wednesday, by Thursday morning, after all the sites have updated, now, we're on every single site and we're 0 to 1 day's on market at that point. And most of the sites are ranking you based on days on market. So we want to make sure it's fresh for Thursday and Friday because that's when buyers are actually searching for homes. A lot of people think the weekend is going to be the busiest day. That is actually the slowest days of the week. So we look at the data of when it is the buyers are searching, it's Monday to Friday, nine to five while they're at work. Yes, that's when buyers search. But in particular, Thursday and Friday, the busiest days because they're looking Thursday and Friday for what they want to go see on Saturday and Sunday. They're not actually looking on Saturday and Sunday. That's all been done in advance. So we go live on Wednesday that obviously syndicates out to Zillow, to realtor, to truly all of that stuff. Very important to make sure you have the open house on all of those sites, because buyers a lot of times are searching for the open houses on those Web sites. So make sure that your opens are on all of these sites. If you're holding a house open for some other agent, make sure by Wednesday that they have that. House up. And don't be afraid to bug somebody if you're doing an open form like, hey, I just checked on Zillow and and realtor and I don't see the open house on there. Can you make sure to put it on the MLS? So it goes to those sites. It's very important. Seventy five percent of our Open House traffic comes from Zillow and Redfin here in San Diego. I know Redfin is not big everywhere, but for us it's huge. So then Thursday, that's when we go and drop invitations to everybody in the neighborhood. So, again, I pay people 15, 20 bucks an hour and they go and deliver invitations to everybody in the neighborhood. They just drop them at the door. Now, depending on where you're adding your business, you either have sweat equity or check equity. You've got to determine what that is for you. I have checked equity. I don't have time or sweat equity, so I pay money for somebody else's time. Some of you guys might not have money, might be newer in the industry. So you don't have money, but you have time to put that sweat equity in and get trece out there, knock on some damn doors, but you're not going to knock pay a money. Let somebody drop for you. No realtor should be out there unless they're knocking. If you're just dropping like no joke. I hope this doesn't come across offensive. But in my old neighborhood, the local realtor paid a homeless guy to go and drop all those those door drops off. Like I would see the homeless guy out there like the same guy I'd see begging for money by the store would then be delivering all these flyers as well. He would do it to make money. Think about that. That's work that a homeless guy's going to do where I pay high school kids to do that stuff. You're real to your time's worth one hundred dollars an hour. What the hell are you doing? So you either knock or pay somebody to do this stuff for you. And then Friday we take that same list we got from Cole Realty Resource to plug that into mojo and we circle dial everybody in the neighborhood. So it's strategic because by the time we're making those dials, they've got something in the mail. They've seen it on social media. If they've been on any of the portals, they've seen it on there and they got something at the doorstep. So now when you make that call, that call becomes a lot easier because now it's. Hey, Brian, I wanted to follow up, make sure you got the invite for the party we're doing over at 1, 2, 3 Main Street.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:27:47] Oh, yeah. I saw that you sent that out. I think I got that yesterday. It's like a warm lead.
Kyle Whissel: [00:27:53] You're open right now. Here's the key. If you were out there, your door knocking, you doing circle dials, the whole point of those is not to get somebody to come to the open house. I could not care less if Brian comes to be open house or not. If I get him out the door or I get him on the phone, I got what I want at that point, which is to be in conversation with Brian. But what I see most agents do is, hey, Brian, I want to follow. Make sure you got the invite to the open house. You're like, yeah, I got it. OK. All right. Well, I'll be there. Cool, man. I'll see you there. How you doing? Like you have, Brian. You have the fish on the line. Like it's real. Women, like, now transition the conversation and say, hey, Brian. Do you know anybody who's looking to make a move into the neighborhood or who, you know is looking to make a move in the area? Oh, I can't think of any better. Really know anyone at this time. Well, how long have you lived here, Brian? Five years. OK. Cool. Have you ever had any thoughts of making a move? No, not really me. But if you did move, where would you go? Well, what is it that would take you there? Just start asking some conversations. Because the open house is the excuse to knock on the door is the excuse to make the phone call. Once you get in conversation, now transition and do your job as a fucking salesperson and sell like that's your job. That's what my license says. It says real estate salesperson sell. This is what you signed on for. You're a salesperson. Like it or not, this is what your job is in California. Your license says salesperson on it sell. So you doorknocked Thursday. You call Friday. We typically depending on the time of year. So right now, we're in the fall, winter time. It's dark at five o'clock here in San Diego. So what we'll do is we'll do a ten to twelve open house for the neighbors and then we'll follow it up with a twelve to two open house for the public. When we do the neighbors section of it, we typically have food and drinks. So this time of year when we're doing breakfast, we do things like donuts and coffee. We do. We've done crepes and coffee. We've done Mary's Donuts and a Moses. We've done like fun, things like that for the morning time. If it's nighttime. So when we get into the spring and summer where it's dark till six, seven, eight o'clock, we'll do them on a Friday night and we'll do fun things like wine and cheese sushi and. We've done tacos and margaritas and, you know, fun things along those lines. So but we do like to separate the neighbors out from the public. So in a perfect world, we're doing the neighbors on Friday night and then we follow up Saturday and do the public open house when we do the openings. We typically have north of 20 signs. We give all of our agents that join our. Twenty five science, because we want them to have at least twenty five out when I have my big ones, there's a lot of times I'll have one hundred signs out for a single open house, because logically the more science you put up, the more people you're going to have show up and the more you're going to brand yourself in the neighborhood. And honestly, the greatest compliment I can get from somebody is when they show up. You think you guys put enough signs out? That's so ridiculous. I say thank you, because when they go to sell their house, they want that shit, too. They don't want, though, the agent with one sign that's falling over. They want the agent to put 100 signs up because that shows people that you hustle. Right. That you do things differently than everybody else. So your signage is part of your calling card. You're auditioning for your next listing every time you're doing an open house. Couple other little things on the opens, too. We always have at least two, if not three people at our opens. So for me personally, the person I pay to put the signs out also works the door for me during the open house. And then they take the science down after the open house. So when somebody comes to the door, they're signing everybody in space, you know, to sign people in. So what I like with space shows, as soon as they sign in, it automatically imports that person into my boomtown account. Right there on the spot. So I love that automation, which then triggers follow up campaigns and all kinds of fun stuff. And then as that door person is talking to them, they're just simply asking, do you live in the neighborhood? If yes, they're going to then walk them over and introduce them to me. If I no, they're gonna walk home and introduce them to whichever buyer's agents hosting the open house with me. Because when I do my open houses, all I wants are the neighbors, because those are also known as sellers. And I want my agent that's working to work with the buyers because I'm I don't work with buyers traditionally and they're going to be much better suited to help them out. One of the cool things when you have three people is we always scout the inventory in the neighborhood prior to the open house. We know what the inventory is and we know what's vacant. So if somebody comes in and that house is in a fit for them, we know about one to three main street around the corner that's vacant. And one of us could jump out and go show that real quick, because we still have two people left at the house. So if we get somebody a good fish on the line, that's hot. We'll be real men and we'll go take them. If this house doesn't work, we'll drive you and show you that house or that house that's vacant. We already have access instructions for. And so we'll bounce him around to those. We also have music. We have food. We have drinks. We we use sensi warmer so that you have the right sense. Like you want to appeal rights, sight, taste, touch, sound, smell like all that stuff. You want to appeal to all those senses. So we make sure that we're appealing to everything throughout the open house.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:33:22] That's great. I mean, that that alone, Kyle, it's just great advice. Anybody anybody wanting. And like you said, new to the industry. What a great way to have an amazing first year in the business. Just just do that one thing, right. How many really? How many people typically come through your open houses in my farm?
Kyle Whissel: [00:33:42] It's grown over time. So the first time I did one of these big events, I maybe had ten or fifteen people. Now it's consistently 50 to 100. And it's a lot of the same people over and over again. But the thing is, they start to become friends. And what's funny is, like in my neighborhood, if it's a wine and cheese, one like the guys now will roll up with like a cooler full of beer or if I do one, that's like a beer focused one. There's like a group of girls are rolled up with like a bottle of wine in hand. Like, it's hilarious how it works, but it's become like a social thing in the community. People love coming out because they know other neighbors are gonna come out and they all socialize and they talk and they hang out. And a lot of times they'll bring their friend and like, oh, this is my friend. Billy is actually thinking about moving in the neighborhood. Oh, how convenient is that? Because the reason we do the neighbor open house before the public is we want that neighbors to know about the house and then they are part of our viral army that's gonna go tell everybody else about it. So we bring, you know, 50 neighbors in. They see this cool house and then they think in their mind, oh, well, Johnny's looking for a house in the neighborhood. Now they tell Johnny and they're like, oh, hey, Johnny, by the way, they're going to have it open tomorrow. You should come by and check it out. It works like clockwork.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:34:58] Thank you for sharing that. A Couple other things I wanted to cover. Kyle, one is eXp, why he eXp?
Kyle Whissel: [00:35:06] Yeah. So I think everybody story's a little bit different on why they came over. So to share my story really quick. I ran my own independent brokerage in San Diego for the entire time I've been in the business. When I was with my dad, he ran his own independent brokerage. So when I left him, I was like, well, this run my own independent brokerage, because that's just what we do. And we had an amazing run. But what ends up happening when you're a high producing agent, you get a lot of brokerages that are calling you, trying to recruit you to come join them. Well, when you run a high producing brokerage, now you get the big. Just calling you and them what they're trying to do is M&A and mergers and acquisitions, and so we started going down the road with some of the biggest brands in the world that had come and approached us about M&A. And we kind of went through the entire process and wasn't really planning on selling or anything at that time. But I was like, these guys are reaching out. Let's explore it. Like, let's see what the opportunities are that are out there. So we kind of ran through that process with them. And what I learned is that my brokerage was freaking worthless because the way that they value a brokerage is off of the evena earnings before interest taxes, depreciation, assets, all of that. But what they'll typically do is they'll remove the production of the broker owner from the equation. Well, a lot of people there were running like brokerage slash teams or they called anti-marriage. Like I was. What ends up happening is the production of all the agents covers the expenses and then the broker owner knee in that scenario was all of the profit. Well, the problem is, once you take me out, there is no profit. The thing ran, you know, almost at a break even. Well, when they value these things, they take that even and they apply some multiplier to them. Two, three, four or five, six percent somewhere in that range, typically. Well, you could multiply zero by a million. It's still zero. So the brokerage I built that I thought was worth millions and millions of dollars was in fact, not. And so what happened is I went through that journey is that I started to get very keen on the idea of getting rid of all the responsibility of being the broker, because these guys sold me so much on on how nice it would be to let them take that weight off my shoulders. And I totally bought into that. Just buying and giving my brokerage away. So at that point, I was hooked on getting rid of the responsibility and the liability. So I was like, OK. Well, doesn't make sense to sell. Maybe we should just go join a brokerage. And so I looked at all the brokerages out there and my entire career. The whole reason I never joined a brokerage, I never saw alignment with what I'm paying versus what I'm getting. The majority, the broker is out there and pay all this money for a brand name. Like, I don't need your brand name. I'm the brand. Right. Like WHISTLE is the brands. I don't need Remax or Century 21 or any of that like. That's not the brand. Whistles The brand. And so it never made sense. I wasn't getting anything for what I was giving. So when I finally came across XP, I saw things kind of tilt to balance, if not an imbalance in my favor, because now I hardly had to pay them any money. But I was getting a ton out of them. And they provide so much one taking all that liability off my plate. That was huge and amazing. And it's been so nice now to wear when shit hits the fan or an agent does something stupid. I don't get that letter anymore. I don't get that phone call. I don't deal with that anymore. That all gets passed off to the broker. So that's been amazing because I had things before. We're like an agent gave the buyer keys three days before closing and the buyer demo the entire house before they ever owned it. And the neighbor took a videos, turned it in. And guess who gets the letter, not the agent. I do think that was insane. It was maddening. So to get rid of all that was phenomenal. And initially when I came over, there's a lot of talk about like the stock and the revenue share at ESPN. Explain that stuff was very attractive to me. But what I've learned since coming over is that he expects created something that's pretty magical. And it's because of the stock and the revenue share. It's not the stock and the revenue itself. What the stock in revenue shares created is this culture of sharing that doesn't exist in any other brokerage out there, because in any other brokerage, there is no financial alignment between the agents within the brokerage. If I go help Jodi lay and sell five more houses, she's in my brokerage and she sells five more houses. I get zero financial benefit from that. Addy XP Now I help Jodi go sell five more houses. Now I have a financial benefit via the revenue share. So what's happened is because as we attract agents into this company, when they grow their teams, when they sell more houses, I have a financial interest in that, be the revenue share. So as a result, I pour into my people. Dan Behar's a partner with me. We literally just hired a girl full time just to help to love on all of our people and to provide as much value as we possibly can for them because we have a vested interest in seeing all of those people grow their teams and sell more houses. So we're doing live Q&A every single week. We're doing live training from 50 million dollar producers every single week. We just hired one of the biggest network marketers in the world. We're paying him a thousand dollars an hour just to coach our people there because we know all of the effort. We put in to help everybody sell more homes is going to have a financial benefit for us. So and that's what you're going to see. Company Why did he express everybody so willing to help each other out? Because we actually have financial alignment with the revenue share and the stock because as the company grows, we just pass twenty five thousand agents. The more this company grows, you're seeing the stock grow with it and it's cool to be a part of that.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:40:58] So instead of focusing on just your local agents, you're focusing on agents all over the country?
Kyle Whissel: [00:41:03] All over the world. Yeah. I mean, we're in two countries now and we're working on that. We just opened two more countries up. So it's been amazing.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:41:11] Ok. I know time's gone really fast. I did want to find out. How are you going to get from three fifty to a thousand? And I think this is really a big thing when they hear that. That's like, OK, what's going on here? Yeah, that's that's some growth that most of us can't comprehend. So talk to us about that for sure.
Kyle Whissel: [00:41:29] So two things. One, my entire focus in twenty twenty is purely on people. I have no desire to add any new systems to my business. Any new lead sources to my business. I purely want to focus on people. So we've hired a director of Wow for our group any XP. We're also hiring a director at Wow for our group that whistle and not person sole job is just to provide a wow experience for all of the agents that are a part of WHISTLE as well as all of the people that choose to work with or refer business to WHISTLE. And so they're looking for trigger events in people's lives, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, children, stuff like that, just to show them love to wow them and with with whistle right to oh they just had a kid. Let's send them a nice little gift basket and some cool things that'll help them out. It's their first kid. Or you know, somebody is a brand new client that's working with us. Let's give them a nice little swag bag with some, you know, things like a little gameboard that's gonna help them walk through the process of buying a home, of selling a home. Like let's just do all kinds of amazing little things for our clients, for our agents to really ensure they have a wow experience. So that's a huge, huge focus. John, Kreplach talks about this. And John, I think you stole this from Howard Schultz. I've learned from Starbucks. But, you know, it's we're not a real estate company where people can company. If we take care of our people, our people will take care of the real estate. So we're just all about focusing on the people in twenty twenty because we know the real estate will take care of itself as a result of it. So that part of it. And I would encourage all of you guys to really think about the experience you're providing to everybody who comes in contact with you. And is that a wow experience. And if you guys want to learn more about that. John, glad she was out in Scottsdale, Arizona. Skive learned this friend is amazing. So super stoked to learn from him. Most the stuff I do, I learned from other people and I just take it and run with it. The second thing is that we had the honor of being Zillow's broker partner for the Zillow Offers Program in San Diego. So Zillow is now providing a solution to homeowners that don't want to deal with the traditional sale rounds. They don't want to deal with the repairs, the showings, the negotiations, the waiting for offers. The Open House is a lot of people don't want to deal with that's as old as buying homes directly from homeowners now. And we're partnered up to help them implement that program. So our goal is to see our existing sales team grow from just over 300 transactions to 600 transactions next year. And then for Zillow team to help fit the rest of that bill to help us get over a thousand, there's a a stretch goal to hit two thousand before the year's over next year. And so we're really focusing on on the people and just making sure all of the systems we have in place are dialed in and not constantly trying to add more shit, because the more you add, a lot of times you just cause more work and more stress and more headaches. So less is more for us in 2020.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:44:40] Exciting. Congratulations on landing that. One of the things you talk about, Kyle, is, you know, you when you talk about all these things you've learned, what is the best way? Is there a book that you've read that you think everybody needs to read or what advice you have? What's the best way for somebody, even a top team owner today to learn things, to really take their business, their life and their wealth to the next level?
Kyle Whissel: [00:45:06] It's honestly surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and or are where you want to go. So I'm going to an event next month to put myself in a room with guys like Chris Lindahl out of Minnesota, guys like Gary Ashton out of Nashville, guys like Justin Hammer out of Calgary, guys that are doing two thousand plus deals. If I want to do two thousand plus deals, I need to get in rooms with guys like that and girls like that because. Been there, they've done that. I'm gonna go in, surround myself with those people, because being around those people and learning what they're doing in their businesses is what's going to get me there. The key is I don't just go to the room, though. Like just because I'm around him doesn't mean I'm going to sell 2000. I'm going to sit there and I'm going to be virtually write notes and learn as much as I can and ask questions of these people and do everything I can to learn everything about how they've done it. And then as soon as I get back, I'm going to implement like a motherfucker. Because implementation is the key. Gary, he has a quote, ideas or shit. Implementation is the game like I'm going to implement like crazy. And I think that honestly is what separates the average agent from the agents that are doing hundreds of deals a year if they actually implement this shit. Right. You could go and you could read all these books and go to these conferences and watch these podcasts and webinars and stuff. But if you don't execute on the ideas, there's no point. It's all about execution. So instead of going to next year, I usually go to like two events a month. I'm cutting that down to one event a month because I don't need all of that education. I just need to be more focused. So instead of going to a two day event and then flying out as soon as the events over staying one more day, but then making sure that one extra day is focused on recapping everything I learned the two days before and putting my implementation plan in place. So now adding an extra day to every trip I go on just so I can focus on the implementation part of it.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:47:09] I love it. So if I'm in if I'm running a team, let's just say here in Salt Lake, how do I find out about these events? Right. I mean, thankfully, I've been fortunate enough to be around people like you that introduced me into all the names you just read, you mentioned. And I've been able to do that. But if I'm a team owner, how do I get in front of these types of individuals for sure?
Kyle Whissel: [00:47:34] Well, the three that I'm probably the most stoked on right now. One, my group at XP, because we have tons of amazing people like Jay Kindler and Michael, recent part of my group, like I love to learn from those guys. Right. Jay, he's been on like three thousand listing appointments in his career. That's a guy I want to be in a room with. So, you know, hopefully pop groups like that at the brokerage that you're at, if not, maybe you explore other options. I love John Shepp, like his coaching, especially for team leaders, is totally amazing right now. Tom Fairies amazing. I personally coach with Tom. He has a program specifically geared towards team leaders. So he's awesome. And then there's a group that spring and I are part of that. Frank Closet's puts on call Mastermind Club and those events have been really killer. So there's three ideas. Chet Black Fairy and Mastermind Club. Those have been three groups that I'm gonna be focused on a lot. Twenty. Twenty.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:48:30] Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. Just last thing, how do people get a hold of you, Kyle? I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of people wanting to learn more about some of these things.
[00:48:38] Yeah, two things. One, go to the whisselway.com and you can on there you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and YouTube and you can see all the content that we're creating. You can also join our Facebook group through there. So if you go to waste away, you can join our Facebook group and that's where you can ask us questions and learn all the things that we're working on in our business. Any time we're implementing something that we always share their first. I'd love for you to join us there. And then if you want to just directly message me, don't add me on Facebook. I can't add anybody else. And if you message me, it goes somewhere that I forget about can never find. So follow me on Instagram at kylewhissel and to get D.M. on there. That's the best way to get a hold of me. Mean, like I mentioned earlier, if you want to see the invitation that we use for the Open House is just DMB on Instagram and I'll shoot that over to.
Brian Charlesworth: [00:49:28] Okay. Kyle, thanks so much. We appreciate your time. I know you've got a little longer than we normally do, but it's been great.
[00:49:34] Thank you so much. So there you have it. Thank you for joining us on our podcast. If you have an interest free seven day trial of Sisu, make sure that you use the coupon grit. That's G.R. eyeteeth to waive all your set of fees and receive a 10 percent discount on your subscription if you enjoyed listening to this podcast and want to subscribe. Search Grid The Real Estate Growth Mindset podcast on iTunes. And with that, we'll catch you next time. Take care.