[00:00:01] Oh, Mr. Jeffcoat in the house, look at that.
[00:00:06] How are you doing, Jeff? Good man. How are you today? I'm doing great.
[00:00:10] It's the man. It's been too long. I used to get to talk to you, like, every week. And now you're like, I don't know, you're famous or something. And I don't think so. I just I just can't get that much of your time anymore.
[00:00:21] Man Well, I miss you, Brian. I would love to be up in Park City with you again sometime soon.
[00:00:25] Yeah, let's make that happen. Let me know when we'll get it scheduled that winter is coming. So might as well enjoy some time on the snow. Right.
[00:00:32] And come on. That's true. I know you guys have a lot of fun. I've seen some really cool pictures on bike trips.
[00:00:39] Bicycling.
[00:00:40] Yes, we we love the mountains. We love mountain biking. And Utah is a great place to do that. So today we jumping around and Jeff, we have a half an hour to hear your vision of twenty twenty one and what you're excited about. And I'm super pumped to hear what you have to say today.
[00:00:59] So, yeah, absolutely. I'm looking forward to chatting with you and talking about our new tech powered hybrid office of the future and what that actually means. And I did.
[00:01:11] And I know from a damn look, we prefer using the direct camping gear because it looks like the laptop.
[00:01:21] Yes.
[00:01:23] Ok, Brian, can you let my colleague in, who's our producer to be the the main camera? The camera I'm on right now is intended just.
[00:01:35] See if you can let there we go.
[00:01:37] Is that what you're asking for? That's exactly what we were asking for.
[00:01:42] Ok, right now you get to see my VR setup, which is perfect.
[00:01:48] All right, cool, I get to see your Yeti, all your stickers on that laptop.
[00:01:53] Exactly.
[00:01:57] So, yeah, so, Jeff, I know you made the move over to KW this year, a big, big move.
[00:02:04] There was a lot of announcements and press and a lot of fun stuff going on there.
[00:02:11] How how is that working out for what is your vision of the future?
[00:02:16] I know you strategically made that move because of where you wanted to take your business. And and I don't think that's everybody's move for their business. It depends on what you want to accomplish in your business. But Jeff has some certain things he wants to accomplish where that makes sense.
[00:02:33] So, Jeff, again, I'm.
[00:02:36] I think I know some of the things that you have in your plans, but I know you have some new things to share and I've gotten a little bit of that V.R., but I haven't seen it in detail. So hopefully we get to see some of that today.
[00:02:47] So we're we're currently in our VERLIE studio, and I have my headset here, which is an HTC Vive pro wireless headset, which gives people the ability to be in six D.
[00:03:01] I'm going to Capozzi one second. I'm getting reverb on this one. I'm talking. I'm sorry, Brian. Are you good? Because we're in twice. So what do I need to say to you or your mom, and do you want me to kick out this other one, Jeff?
[00:03:20] For everyone's like, just leave your laptop at.
[00:03:27] So the mute button in their tack won't let me hit the. OK, I've got your laptop neutered now, Jeff.
[00:03:54] Brian Cage, I can hear you again, do you can you hear me? Do you want me to mute your other microphone?
[00:04:00] Yes, because I'm just hearing myself twice. Hold on. Hold on. Mute the one from my laptop.
[00:04:11] The other one is not on muting for me, so you guys might have to admit that.
[00:04:32] There we go.
[00:04:37] No, I still I still don't hear you.
[00:04:43] All right, how about now? I hear you now, OK?
[00:04:48] And the challenge, as I hear myself to yeah, let me try to move to one. It sounds like your mike is actually not turned on their.
[00:04:58] Try to say something now, Jeff.
[00:05:01] Yeah, the mic is not turned on now try it, Brian.
[00:05:10] All right, try that. How's that? There we go. Oh, good. It keeps turning on your mic. You probably have an echo again, right?
[00:05:21] Luke Luke is telling me that it's because you keep moving him. Of course, the producer is going to blame it on us, Brian.
[00:05:31] All right.
[00:05:32] Let's just go with what we had working at the very beginning and we'll be fine.
[00:05:39] Which means we're just going to go off of the laptop, I'm guessing. Yes, or just the laptop mic is not working.
[00:05:51] It's working for him, but I hear myself twice, I hear myself repeating every time I look in.
[00:06:01] Can you say something, Jeff?
[00:06:05] Look really nice in the background.
[00:06:08] Yeah, it's only it's only your laptop, Mike working, Jeff so. OK, perfect.
[00:06:13] Look, we need to just do it off the laptop and shut everything. Yeah. So. I don't know. He needs to probably flip it because I'm getting reverb and he's only hearing our mike from the laptop right now.
[00:06:37] And sorry to anyone on the live audience, that's really annoying for you guys to figure this out. One hundred percent my fault, not his fault.
[00:06:44] So so I think it's just you've got two of you in the room, which is why you're getting an echo. I would just go off your laptop and just unplug your ear, your headset, if you can hear me without the headset. I think that's great. Maybe maybe pull the headset from the laptop or something. Are you still getting an echo?
[00:07:08] All right, let's test it out and see. Let's see. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a little bit. I can hear it now to. All right, so.
[00:07:21] But you have to.
[00:07:26] Actually, yes, was.
[00:07:38] We'd have to go wireless, let's just go off the laptop, so Brian's flip it around so that I'm that it's the other monitor that we're using.
[00:07:49] Try that. Try that, can you?
[00:07:55] I don't hear you say something, Jeff. Yeah, the other mic is not working.
[00:08:03] Just go off the laptops or switch them on the backstage location. Take the back stage and put me on stage instead of this camera. Let's use this camera.
[00:08:18] Something about having a full fledged studio, Jeff.
[00:08:28] Yeah, we thought we got to the second location for a month or so, the normal.
[00:08:42] Brian, on the jump out, come back and start over.
[00:08:53] So you jumped out of the one you're still in with the other. Sorry, guys, technical difficulties. Getting ready to display a lot of technology and obviously he has this whole studio set up there and didn't expect for the multiple logins to create that in his ear.
[00:09:22] Let's see if we can get them added back in here.
[00:09:30] Jeff, can you hear us? Yes, sir. Loud and clear, all right, I hear you. I just don't see you. OK, let's get that working.
[00:09:44] Are you still getting an echo? Nope. Perfect. OK, great.
[00:09:56] I'm just plugging in my fancy webcam.
[00:10:10] Ok, there we are. All right, can we go about that? Welcome back, Jeff Brown to.
[00:10:16] So what I was saying is we had actually switched brokerage's from Berkshire Hathaway on services, which is literally across the street to launch Kabuli Keller Williams. And the intent was building an office that was tech powered, which we just experienced, tech getting in the way to some extent, which I apologize for that. But really, it was the house, our digital marketing hub, which is what we call a studio. And so inside the room that I'm in right now, we can spend a seven from businesses that are all that all reside inside of our news space. So our new office has obviously the element where you have agents and brokers here, but then we have all of the ancillary businesses that run parallel.
[00:11:00] So we've launched a mortgage company, title company, insurance company, an investment arm. Of course, we have our ALLETE real estate systems coaching arm that is located here as well. And so the idea was instead of going having to go out to a third party for all of our digital marketing needs, we'd be able to do a handful of things from here. So if you have a podcast, which I know, Brian, you have a very successful podcast, as do a lot of the presenters today and tomorrow on the summit. I know from a podcast standpoint you have a lot of creative elements that you can then take and place on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube channel. And instead of having to create new content, you can literally just derive that content from the influencers and producers that you're talking to on on a daily or weekly basis. So the hub serves as our marketing arm to try to get our message across both locally for all the local businesses and nationally. We also have tech powered conference rooms and training rooms. We have six conference rooms that all have immersive technology in them, which is bring your own device tech, which means you can screen cast like you would on an iPhone to an Apple TV. You're able to screen cast in the exact same way from any device. So your phone, your tablet, your laptop, and it can be an iPod, Samsung Droid. It doesn't matter what it is.
[00:12:15] And you can screen tests. You can have up to four devices at the same time as well in that cast. So if you bring in builders and designers or you just have a buyer and their significant other and the agent, all three of you are four of you can be sharing information at the same time. And our belief was and I was actually asked the question at a family reunion in February, this is pre covid obviously hitting the United States. Gary had me on stage in front of twenty thousand people, along with two or three other agents. And he asked, what's the one thing in our opinion we thought everyone in the audience should be focusing on over the next five years that will impact help impact our business for the good. And my response was that I believe that anyone that offered a physical space should give that same offering virtually. So for your agents and the clients that you serve, they should have the option of coming in virtually. And up to that point, there really wasn't a strong solution for that. And then we saw that as covid and everybody was either quarantined or there was people on and off a quarantine and real estate in some areas got completely shut down. You started seeing people have webinars. I think you and I probably even had an interview or two talking about digital open houses, virtual open houses.
[00:13:24] Facetime had me on their podcast twice talking about how to strategically market our properties virtually to keep our client safe. Well, since twenty seventeen, we had actually been using a company called Verlie. We've now recently partnered with and Verlie standing for virtual reality. And that's the studio that we're in today. Verlaine's main focus was creating Mattapoisett videos and making them look cool. So how do you spell that? It's getting Verlie Dotcom, get Varelli Dotcom and what they've done. Brian, I don't know if the chat works for the national audience, but I can throw some links in here. What they did really well was take a listing and be able to provide a matter for tour on that listing, which for anyone who doesn't know that yet, that's just a three day tour that you can tour and really fancy goggles like the ones I have or something as simple as a computer monitor or a phone. But it's a three day tour where it gives you a three day aspect of 360 aspect of every location that it's spin. And they did really well as they were able to get the list beyond. Blätter Mattapoisett just provides the link to go look at homes. It doesn't market that link very well. And so a lot of agents would use the virtual tour button would be metaphore, which doesn't advertise the agent. So Verlie solution was what we can take Mattapoisett make it look a lot better.
[00:14:38] So they started doing drone fly over, gimbal fly through. Of course the matter poor product had pictures with DSL, our cameras, custom landing pages there. Zillow Optimized are one of the primary producers for video on Brazil, one for the MLS, one for the Asian. And then the fourth thing for Instagram, TV and all of that is two hundred and fifty dollars everywhere in the United States. As long as you have a shooter and you have your own equipment, you can get the all the editing and all the back thing for two fifty. So my. Point being, as we started this in 17, so when the pandemic hit in February 20, 20 and everyone was saying, we don't know what to do, it's not safe to look at houses, we need virtual reality. We need virtual open houses. We already had all of it and we required it at Osili. So our flagship team that went from 70 to 700 sales in six years was requiring, starting in twenty seventeen, that every agent on our team made this available to the public because I believed that the public was going to demand a virtual option. And lo and behold, three years later and of course, I would have never wish upon anyone a pandemic hits, which truly requires a digital option, literally. A month after Gary asked that question, pandemic hits, which truly requires a digital option, and now we can let the consumer vote.
[00:15:51] I sort of studied it. I was on a phone call with Roeg Fitness, ordering some equipment for my outbuilding. They said 50 percent of consumers that were going to a gym based on a survey. I don't know what survey it was, so I don't fact check. Fifty percent of people that belong to a gym said they will no longer belong to a gym and never plan on joining a gym again because they've replaced the equipment that they used in the gym, which most people have there. One thing that stairstep or the elliptical, the weights, they've replaced that now. Morobe Fitness hired six hundred people in the last six months. To replace all of the different demand for that equipment, and so it was very telling that people are they have been forced to go digital and now they're going to have the option to go digital. And so my belief was that every real estate office, every office period should have that option. And now you see all of the big Fortune 500 companies going hybrid where you have a few people that are reporting to work. But most people are working virtual as well. So that's us in a nutshell. I did a lot of talking around it, but I wanted to kind of create the foundation for our conversation. Just to talk about the hybrid element is giving someone the option of going virtual or physical. And then the one stop shop solution that we talk about is putting all the ancillaries under one umbrella, which a lot of people say that they do that.
[00:17:02] I I've heard a lot of brokers say, well, we have those things do. That's wonderful if you have them. But do your agents know how to have conversations around them? My belief, Brian, is that the agent of the future is not an agent, but an adviser, that the agent role is going to be more of an advisory role in addition to buying and selling a home. It's also going to be talking about making sure they have the best mortgage product in place, making sure they have best insurance, quote, making sure that they have financial products like term life insurance to cover the cost of a replacement of the home. Should the high income earner pass away or disability insurance to cover the cost of the mortgage should the high income earner get disabled? And to me, agents right now should be very worried. Thought leaders, industry leaders, owners of brokerages should be very worried that the agent rule is going to get replaced with digital technology the same way Blockbuster was replaced by Amazon. And so if we want to continue to matter in the transaction, we have to do more than just help in that transaction. We have to be a lifelong client services representative that helps with more than just the buy in the sell.
[00:18:05] Ok, so.
[00:18:07] Couple of things, one, you talk about this virtual and how it's one thing to have a virtual office, but when you talk about showings going virtual, possibly closings being virtual, it's possible that everything could happen without actually getting in a home. Do you do you believe that? One hundred percent. OK, so what does that look like in that case? How does the whole transaction happen?
[00:18:33] Yeah, so it could happen. And I have sold 10 years ago I sold houses, walking people through and creating recordings of homes. It could happen, but I don't think that it's going to become the norm. Take a car, for example. Can you go online and buy a Tesla today? Yes. Would somebody go online and buy a vehicle? They've never ridden.
[00:18:52] They've never stepped foot in?
[00:18:55] Probably not. Most people, I don't think would. If you took a survey, would you just go online and buy it without ever stepping foot in it? What I think the virtual application is for is to weed out all the homes that take eight hours or eight days of going all around town looking at all these different properties. You can lead them out so that you can narrow it down to two or three by using the virtual option. That's where I see people doing it for the most part. As far as the virtual transaction at once, you've seen the physical home. I think everything else I know, everything else can be done virtually because that's how we do it.
[00:19:26] Yeah, OK. All right.
[00:19:31] Is there anything you want to show us on the technology side of that, on this or not?
[00:19:37] Yeah, I mean, I can share I can share a link with you. I don't know if that can get included after the fact or if I can put it in chat and have people be able to go access. It's like when I just dropped in to chat right there, that's our six degree of freedom tech. That's actually a 3D render, which offers six D application. If you have an Oculus quest, goggle or pro goggle, you can actually walk that space physically. If you have a cardboard or Oculus goggles or Samsung virtual reality headsets, you can tour that property the same way you tour a matter for except you'd have a remote that lets you drive through it. Think of a video game. If someone's not going to take the time to click on this before you ever build a home, before your client ever builds a home. Our company verlie for twenty five hundred dollars in normal cost and this is five x twenty five hundred. We'll build the 3D, then incorporate all of the digital creative assets. So it includes all of the finishes, fixtures, equipment. So if you hit play, this is something else that's unique and everyone can look at the URL.
[00:20:38] If you want to go check that out on your own. If you hit a we have this video in a cloud. So imagine sending your client this video so that they can go and have access to it on their own. So when the builder gives them the floor plan, it's not just a 2D blueprint, which is what we've been doing for thousands of years. We now can create a virtual render that lets them not only have pictures of the 3D render, but can actually explore that 3D world. From any vantage point. You can literally fly up down like a video game and move around throughout the space. Brian, are you able to click play on that or is it not? I just figure we can show it instead of talking about it. I also was just the news station and Omar just came into the whole story about it. So someone wants to see an example of the VR room. You can just search Jeff Cone six D Channel three. So Jeff Cohen, 60, Channel three.
[00:21:29] There's a ton of videos online about the VR room, but ultimately, is this your new office, Jeff? Yeah, and there's pictures on our Instagram. If you want to go out and check out professional pictures, just follow me at Jeff McHone.
[00:21:43] Jeff, as a mark. And so imagine you've got these goggles on. You put them on your head. And now, Brian, you can just drive around with your up, down, left, right arrows once it loads.
[00:21:56] And he's driving that right now. He's not hitting play. He can go anywhere he wants. So imagine if you're a consumer and you're spending a half a million dollars on your dream home and your builder comes to you and gives you your your cad blueprint and says, what do you think? Good luck trying to figure out your sight lines from a CAD blueprint. Look at that site. I could literally walk you out there right now. I'm next door to that. I'm in the office right next to it. I'd go down that hallway. That's where I am right now, to the right down there to the right to see if we can see Jeff. There I am. So that is literally the room I'm sitting in right now inside my office. So this is the future. And a lot of people say, well, can you do this with existing homes? And yet the camp, the best film is the map or camera can get up about three thousand dollars. And it just is a 360 camera that spins every location you set camera. The difference between six and three is the CD lets you have every vantage point. You can go up and down. And so if you put the goggles on, you could literally look under cabinets, look under countertops, you could stand on your typical gives you perfect frames of reference depending on where you are inside the space. Whereas in 3-D you're forced to only have the vantage point of where the camera was when it was taking the 3D render.
[00:23:07] So 3D is used for existing spaces. Sixty is used for non existing spaces. But where we differentiate ourselves is we actually own the proprietary technology that builds the 60 render. So my company Verlie actually built this sixty render out about a tenth of the cost of what you're going to pay if you try to do this locally. Have you ever seen anything like this, Brian, for new construction applications where someone can actually drive through the house? No. So what you'll see is some developers will have, like Chief is a program that a lot of the developers used to create their 3D images of the elevations and they have VR goggles or a thousand bucks that they can buy, but they still have to bring the consumer into their office to use the goggles. The consumer doesn't want to come to your office, ladies and gentlemen. They want to be able to do it from their bedroom. They want to be able to do it from their kitchen, their office, at their office and at work. They want to have all of the access that they have in a physical space, in a virtual space. So imagine if you're building a home and can send someone a link of the home that's getting created. Then we even include a contract where they can come into our bathroom twice and make changes. So if the significant other comes in, they're like, I hate that black countertop. I want to see what that looks like. Green. We can actually give them a toggle button and the builder can incorporate maybe their top ten finishes fixtures and or equipment and it can change real time just pushing a button. So where we see the future of this is every building in America that builds out model homes instead of building seven models you can do. Build one, and then you can build into that model literally a virtual tour, so someone standing inside the room toggling with a button. So you're able to literally go through and toggle inside of that room all of the different options for fictitious pictures and equipment.
[00:24:46] So, Jeff, what is your timing look like on this, to expand so that this is something that's available for for everyone on this call done?
[00:24:56] So I wouldn't bring it up unless it was available. Get Verlie Dotcom. So I know more about 16.
[00:25:02] All right. So, Ben, I guess that answers your question. So, Jeff, you also talked about the real estate agent becoming an adviser for mortgage title insurance and you name it. Tell us more about that, because I think that's such an important piece of the business, that if you are ignoring it right now, you really need to start paying attention and not only start paying attention, but start preparing for and building businesses in those areas. If you become a real estate agent is at the front of the transaction as the real estate company. That's the beautiful thing about being in real estate.
[00:25:38] You may not make as much as some of these other industries, but you control pretty much where that client goes the whole way through and beyond. So let's talk about that a little bit.
[00:25:50] One hundred percent. Thank you. So if you get my business plan, shameless plug. If you go out to grow with us dotcom, we'll give you a free copy of Jeff's business plan, a business plan, dot com as well. And in the business plan, it talks about the step by step progress that we followed to go from 70 to seven hundred sales in six years. We were the fastest growing real estate team in history, to my knowledge. We also were the fastest growing real estate team on the Boomtown platform we launched in 2011 and just grew exponentially. If you look down that list, you'll see Jeff's business plan right in the middle can also download our keynote. We have all of our upcoming events that are listed on there. We actually have a workshop in two weeks here in Omaha. I would love to invite anyone out to check that out. We have 50 percent off discount right now that we're running for that to grow with the IRS dot com. And you're going to find once you register here for access to the business plan, it's going to share with you the strategies that we implemented to scale our business. And the first strategy was creating a vendor list. And we didn't charge anything for the vendor list. We just wanted to give our clients really good recommendations when it came to mortgage title insurance, home inspection, home warranty and the list goes on. There's about two hundred vendors we work with. The second step is once you have tracked every single referral you've given to a vendor partner, you can start to customize how much money you're creating for that entity.
[00:27:07] And it's my belief that a strong business should take 10 to 20 percent of their revenue and put it towards marketing. And so when I saw that I could bring more business than a billboard, I would reach out to these vendors that we were already supporting and invite them to partner with us in the Strategic Marketing Service Agreement, RESPA certified. And I was able to partner with a lot of businesses very early on up to the tune of around twelve thousand to fifteen thousand dollars a month we had coming in. And MSA contributions, well, most teams end up there. They don't go any further. And what I saw was that the challenge of MSA contribution or sorry, vendor partners and creating those mazes. I had people spread all over the city and even though I'm in Omaha, there are a million people here and it's about a thirty to forty five minute geographical footprint. So I didn't want my client to have to go all the way across town to meet with the mortgage lender somewhere else, to go to the title company somewhere else, to go to the financial planner, somewhere else to go to the insurance company. I wanted it all in one place and I wanted to control that experience better. And so I took it a step further. So once you have the MSA created, you show that you can bring value the next step and the highest level that I see some brokers getting into today.
[00:28:13] And Brian, I know we've talked off air a little bit about this, and I know Gary Keller has launched his mortgage company and his insurance company and so have other people that are following suit. And so we launched our own Zabin mortgage, exurban insurance, platinum title in escrow. And we partner strategically with the financial wealth company, Collaborative Planning. And we did this because we wanted the consumer to have access to all of these ancillary businesses in one place. And so you might be thinking, well, what do you do when your agent has their own messes with somebody else or the client's already working with somebody else? Great. Our goal as an agent is do advise, meaning we should always be giving everyone that works with us options. We should make sure that their State Farm insurance policy is better than one of the independent contracts that I'd be able to get them unquote for. And so what we train our agents on when it comes to dialog is that we're not here to replace the relationships that people already have. We're literally here to support those relationships by giving the consumer a second option to ensure that they have the best coverage at the best rate that they have the best mortgage rates that they've reached, that they refinance their mortgage. And if I've lost you up to this point, the challenge question I give an agent is this.
[00:29:23] How many times in this this year rates are at a 50 year low for everyone watching that is sold a house. Your client probably got a mortgage on that. Have you reached out to your client this year to let them know that rates are the best that they either? When somebody purchases a house, do you recommend to them that they should consider taking out a term life insurance policy to cover the replacement cost of that house because that loan essentially is going to do when somebody passes away and a term life policy that might be 20 dollars a month to cover the cost of that. Most agents are having these conversations because their focus is a big dollar sign. Right. They're focused primarily on taking care of the client, putting them under contract, moving on to the next deal.
[00:30:06] But that's not going to survive. Agents that work that way aren't going to be in the business in the next two years agency to move more into that advisory role. And brokerages that want to survive, in my opinion, are going to need to teach their agents how to serve in that advisory role as well.
[00:30:22] Ok, Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:30:28] I know there's a lot of people that want to learn more about this stuff, so maybe you can hang out and chat for a bit and answer any questions that come in around that. And it's always great to catch up. Let me know when you're going to be out here and get a ski trip. Ski weekend.
[00:30:43] That sounds like a plan. Appreciate it, Brian. I love your background. By the way, that's a really cool green screen.
[00:30:47] Yeah. Thank you. A live, live green screen. It's real live. Look, man. Appreciate it, Brian. Have a good one.
[00:30:55] You too. Thanks, Jeff.
