However, when it comes to determining how well a team performs, there is one key element that always comes into play – its people.
Real estate is a people business. And for it to be truly successful, team leaders and owners must also concentrate on improving the lives of those within the team.
Brian Charlesworth joins Jake Rockwell, Principal Broker and Owner of Rockwell Real Estate Group, as he shares the lessons he learned from starting several businesses to hitting rock bottom and how he rose up again to start a career in real estate and build the #1 selling real estate team in Southern Oregon.
Top Takeaways:
(01:49) How Jake started several companies and lost it all
(04:41) Why Jake wanted to go into real estate
(06:49) The importance of surrounding yourself with the right people
(09:24) Some of the best decisions Jake made as a team owner
(11:23) How to attract agents to your business
(14:33) How Jake turned his weaknesses into strengths
(18.28) How to find the right expansion partner
(26:11) Jake’s take on the market
(28:42) How to get your agent excited about working harder
Connect with Jake Rockwell
Website: https://www.rockwellrealestate.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-rockwell-25a7463/
About the guest:
Growing up, Jake Rockwell had always been kind of an entrepreneur. In 2004, he started an e-commerce company selling pet products and billiards products to different websites online. He built that company up and it ended up becoming one of the top billiards online retailers in the country.
Three years later, right before the market crashed in ‘07, he sold that company for a couple of million dollars. However, due to some bad decisions he made and the unhealthy lifestyle he had, he ran out and financially crashed after about five or six years.
Then he saw a friend who was successful in real estate and decided to try it for himself. He got his real estate license and was determined to give it his best. He went to the office to make calls and lead generate every day and ended up selling 36 homes in his first year.
Although he has achieved considerable success in the industry, Jake realized that it was taking up too much of his time. To get some of that time back for his family, he started hiring an assistant/buyer’s agent. His team continued to grow until he had 10 agents. Three years later he ended up leaving their brokerage and opening up their own.
Today, Jake Rockwell is a Principal Broker and Owner of Rockwell Real Estate Group | eXp Realty, which is an innovative and technology-driven real estate company with a powerful team approach.
Episode Transcript:
Brian Charlesworth 0:35
All right. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the Grit Podcast. I'm Brian Charlesworth. I'm the founder of Sisu and your host of the show. And super excited to have Jake Rockwell on the Grit podcast with us today. Jake is the owner of the Rockwell group at EXP and Jake has a great story. I've known Jake now for she's I want to say about three years, probably in that range.
Jake Rockwell 0:59
Yeah, maybe even a little longer when we kind of first connected but yeah,
Brian Charlesworth 1:03
Maybe a year or so. So anyway, and I think you've been at exp that that entire time. So you were one of the early people to go over to exp or fairly early.
Jake Rockwell 1:13
Sure, yeah.
Brian Charlesworth 1:14
So anyway, Jake has a great story. I'm not gonna go over his whole bio with this intro because I want you guys to hear this from Jake. So here we are, Christmas week. And, you know, I jumped in this podcast with Jake and he's just wrapping up a team meeting. So here we are, I can tell you these guys are not taking a vacation. They are in the middle of a sales contest. And so I think, I think that's awesome. So before we dive into your business, though, Jake, I really want to go into your background today. So you are in your 30s, I know early 30s maybe you were 30, you had a software company you had an eCommerce company, eCommerce was big at the time right? That's when eCommerce was just taking off. You built this company, you sold it. I don't know how many millions you had. But then you know somehow over a 5, 6, 7-year period you lost it all so tell us about that story.
Jake Rockwell 2:14
Yeah, you know, growing up I'd always been kind of an entrepreneur and wanted to you know, I told my mom that I was going to be a millionaire and all that and so yeah, I started an eCommerce company selling you know, products pet products and billions of products to different websites started those in oh four saw a friend that was being successful online and I jumped in started selling on eBay and all that anyway, um, had built them up to be the builder's company to be one of the top billion online retailers in the country and sold both of those in 2007 right before the crash and yeah, I mean, you know, selling for a couple million and was kind of high on the hog and the next five years I had invested in a Buy Here Pay Here car business that was doing really well high interest, you know, loans, kind of a negative business. But the problem was, I was I had my priorities wrong, I was still living the life of a bar owner 21-year-old and because I had owned a brewery prior to the eCommerce company and just was living a lifestyle that wasn't healthy and generated a lot of bad decisions. And so just blowing through cash and though it was the business that I had at that time was doing well. It was burning, you know, because of lifestyle. So financially crashed in
Brian Charlesworth 3:43
So you sold this business? What did you do after you sold the business? Were you just playing for a few years? Or were you actually working? Or what were you doing?
Jake Rockwell 3:52
No, I started a car business a friend of mine was in the car Buy Here Pay Here car goes out that
Brian Charlesworth 3:57
So you were in that business at this time? Okay,
Jake Rockwell 3:59
Yeah, high risk loans. So we would buy cars, sell them at you know, high-interest loans and so I took that money and was putting it on the books at a high interest and, and it was doing really well. It's just the problem is me and that partner were just, were partying really hard. And it just wasn't enough in no way to sugarcoat just making bad decisions and ran out for about five or six years. And as it slowly unraveled, I was kind of getting down to the last of the money that I had and found someone to take that business over right about the same time I was getting my real estate license, I saw a friend of mine that was successful in real estate, you know, he was cashing some big checks. And I was like, you know, I want to get I want to I've always wanted to get into real estate for the investing side. I bought my first house when I was 23. And so I got my real estate license and jumped in. And at that point, I was like, Well, you know, there's obviously a high failure rate to it.
Brian Charlesworth 4:58
What year was this?
Jake Rockwell 4:59
This was 2013 Right, right, right when I had crashed and got the license and made the decision that I was going all in, because I wanted to make sure that if I was going to make it, I wanted to make sure that I gave myself the best opportunity to make it if it didn't work, it didn't work, but I'll know that I at least try it and give it my all went in the office every day making calls, you know, lead generating, and so forth. And, you know, that was nine and a half years ago, and finally, about six months in the momentum ball, you know, started and so 36 songs my first year, and then, you know, it went from there. But it was an interesting time, you know, back then. And you know, hindsight obviously helps determine what happened, what caused, you know, even the successes that you know, successful businesses in the past, and during building those, you don't quite know what it's going to take to get into where they are. But once you've already built on it, you can very easily look back and see pinpoint things that truly were the reason those businesses succeeded. I mean, for all that I had a brewery that was grossing 5000 a month in sales, which most places do in an evening, right? And to be able to make that company work with 8000. In my pocket, we realized what caused that and, you know, built that business up and sold it before the internet stops.
Brian Charlesworth 6:27
Yeah, so I think you said something here that is super valuable. I mean, when you've had these experiences, I look back even on some of the stuff I'm doing today. And, you know, with some of the tech companies I've built in the past, definitely learning lessons and being able to avoid pitfalls and mistakes that I made back then. But I would also say, surrounding yourself with the right people and having mentors, who have also been down that road and built that can make sure to help get you there faster, quicker without having to make the same mistakes that somebody else has made a dozen times. Right. So
Jake Rockwell 7:07
Absolutely.
Brian Charlesworth 7:08
So you sold 36 homes your first year. So you come into real estate and made some money. I have no idea what your price point was. But you made a fair amount of money at 36 homes. And so you decide being a business owner being an entrepreneur, you're going to build a team. Is that kind of what happened here?
Jake Rockwell 7:27
Yeah, well, I sold 36 homes my first year, but it was 80 hours a week. At home, I told my wife, I was like, You know what, I don't care how much money it is. It's not worth it. I'm not I don't know, I just come out of running my own businesses where I had staff and employees. And so I didn't have you know, I might tell people that I've worked more hours as a real estate agent than I did. And anything else I did
Brian Charlesworth 7:50
To be a high-producing agent. You know, a lot of people sell 50 homes a year and they're working a lot right there. They're constantly, weekends, nights. I mean, they're always answering their cell phones. It's just the lifestyle, right?
Jake Rockwell 8:07
Yeah, and it was it really building the team was out of necessity, you know, where you get a lot of people that coming into the industry that are jumping into the industry to build a team and I kind of did kind of old school way I brought on an assistant slash buyer's agent and, and it just kind of it just snowballed from there. And every year we grew and grew and mouth three years in had about 10 agents, and we ended up leaving that brokerage, and opening up our own brokerage. And it's just you know, it just snowballed. And it was always run as a team. And, you learn a lot, you know, I did a lot of research on teams. And obviously, there's lots of different ways to run a successful team with structure and commission splits and leads and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, we've just kind of evolved over the years to try to really make each section of a team. Good.
Brian Charlesworth 9:02
So what are some of the best decisions you feel you've made as a team owner? What are some of the things that set your team apart?
Jake Rockwell 9:10
You know, we're in a small area. So when it comes to the market, and so forth, you know, I was able to really catapult early on to being kind of a top agent and, you know, we use marketing a lot of that, but I mean, without getting into broker specific, I mean, making the move from into our own brokerage and then making the move to our existing brokerage was a huge turning point for our company, and it and getting myself out of the production to where now our main team focus is, from a team standpoint is to help agents get everything they want. Yeah, not just in production, but in life in general. And so our main focus, we have management meetings, just like how do we make our agents better? How do we get them to where they want to be? Whether it's 10 houses a year, 100 houses a year, whatever. And so that's just it's nice to be able to have that clarity and that focus. That's what our focus is, as a team leader and management team.
Brian Charlesworth 10:14
Okay, so you guys have around 60 agents doing around 500 homes a year, is that right?
Jake Rockwell 10:19
Yeah, a lot of the growth, about a third of that growth came over the last year, something happened. And the culture in our team is just extremely strong. And so that has now spread. We don't do heavy recruiting, even though we're you know, with exp locally for our team, it's just been natural people lining up to be a part of our team, and some new expansion areas have opened up partnering with some people in other areas. So a lot of that growth, Team wise was in the last year. And so now we're gearing up to really see the production side, because it takes a little while to get, you know, agents off the ground, a lot of our growth is from newer agents.
Brian Charlesworth 11:01
There are a lot of teams I know that prefer to recruit new agents over experienced agents so that you can train them to work in your culture. Right. So you had this shift, though, that happened this year, like what was like why are these agents now attracted to your business? Why do they want to be a part of your team?
Jake Rockwell 11:22
Just I think that the culture that we've created, I mean, I've always talked about, I do a lot of talks and training on team building, and so forth. And culture is an important piece of that pie. And I mean, I call it the glue that keeps the team together. And we have so many excited agents on our team that they're spreading that energy out. And we have agents from other companies telling people to come to talk to us about, you know, when they when they're getting into real estate to come to join our team, I think part of it is because we have a really good onboarding and training program, we really work to help those agents get off their off the ground and get their first deal in escrow. And that's part of why we like new agents is because they, we set the right expectation up front, we let them know what the real real estate agent life looks like, not the social media life, you know, of all the fun things that we do. But the work that it takes, you know, there's no, there's no magic bullet, it's just, you know, you get down to business. And there's, there's a, there's a path to success, but it, you know, just that culture has generated the attraction of people to want to join our team.
Brian Charlesworth 12:34
Okay, so you are now I think you've expanded into five markets, you've been focusing on your technology, focusing on automating your business as much as possible. Like what let's talk first about, like, what are the key systems you guys use? What is making a difference for your business there? And then, like, let's talk about these expansion markets. Seeing there's so many teams now that are moving into, you know, expansion markets, we have some customers that have 50 plus expansion markets, which is, you know, huge, right? So,
Jake Rockwell 13:10
yeah, as technology becomes more and more important for that, we were actually in the middle of a pretty big shift technology-wise, over the last nine years, we've had this really strong momentum and growth. And over the last two and a half years, and, and especially this year, obviously, with the little shipping market, you know, I've been waiting to kind of see where the cracks are in our process and our business. And we're starting to see that and now we're diving and diving all in, and really making some big changes to the way we operate the systems and the tech that we use. So we're in the middle of changing CRMs right now, we've been using Sisu this, this window wasn't frosted, you'd see our screen just like yours in the background, rotating, you know, stats of our team, and, and so forth. So we're using Sisu. We're now moving to follow up boss from another CRM. And we use real geeks for a website that may we may add to that we may keep that, but add some other website front-end stuff and Skyslope, which is part of our brokerage, and what else do we use tech-wise?
Brian Charlesworth 14:20
So you mentioned something about finding things that are falling through the cracks like you've discovered things this year? What are the things that you've discovered that may have been weaknesses that you're turning into strengths?
Jake Rockwell 14:33
Most of it revolves around leads, lead flow, lead generation nurturing, I believe that the amount of business we did over the last couple of years probably could be close to double what it was, and mainly because of the, you know, we bring in a lot of leads and the front end is pretty good. We got the 10 days of pain we use, you know, we're using Third Party ISA for that, we're going to be integrating more in-house ISA team to really be the pillar of our company. But the longer the other 90%, the other 90% of those leads, we're not getting the right message. So there's just a lot falling through the cracks in the hands of other real estate agents, you know, our competitors, and so forth. And so we're fixing that really implementing a better long-term nurturing messaging, branding, we're diving more back in the community bringing in ISAs to help and technology to bring those opportunities to the surface more and capitalize on and obviously get our agents, you know, back to basics on, you know, routine and time blocking and scheduling.
Brian Charlesworth 15:45
Yeah, so 60 agents, how many ISAs do you have today? Or is this something you're just starting?
Jake Rockwell 15:50
It's new, we used to have an ISA model back in the day. Our agents loved it. But that was when we had 10 agents. And so we've got, we have a third-party ISA company. And I've got another two people that work partially as ISAs. One is part-time and one is one of our main salesperson that used to be our head isa back, you know, early years really good at converting, you know, over the phone, setting up appointments, and that's what we'll get to, but that'll that's a transition that'll take, you know, six months to a year to really dial that in.
Brian Charlesworth 16:25
Okay, well as you get down that road and Sisu. We focused in about two years ago on really providing in-depth reporting for ISAs. So I'm happy to spend some time with you sharing with you how you can leverage that.
Jake Rockwell 16:39
Yeah, we were just looking at that actually, a week or two ago, John, our onboarding trainer hadn't had brought that to us. And so we've been looking at that, so
Brian Charlesworth 16:39
Well if there's anything I can do to help there, let me know. So you, you've now said, Hey, we're going to expand, we're going to do these expansion markets. So if you're going to do an expansion market, I think you have five now, right?
Jake Rockwell 17:01
Yeah, we were in Southern Oregon. We're up in northern Oregon, Salem, Eugene, and Portland area. And then we're in Phoenix, Arizona, we just and then we just launched Vegas, and a couple of areas in Tennessee, and then Denver will be after the first of the year, but we were in Hawaii, our Hawaii person Rockstar actually went back home, which is Tennessee. And so having made that shift, so we didn't really have someone in we've done expansion areas over the years, and, and we haven't had a lot of success with them. And a lot of it came down to having the right person. And having that person in place that really, you know, has the grit, the willingness to really, you know, go after it. And so we're finally starting to see some success up in Salem, we've got a rock star up there we got I think we're three or four agents in Salem, Oregon. And I'm super excited. In fact, yesterday, we got our first deal in escrow down in Vegas, which is exciting for our agent down there. And yeah, expansionary I mean, it just opens up the doors, we're in a small market in Southern Oregon, so the room for growth, it will ultimately be limited. I mean, we've got 1500 agents, and we're in a 200,000, you know, person market. And so expansion is, is I think that I think teams and expansion teams are really a big part of the future of the industry.
Brian Charlesworth 18:29
So how have you gone about finding the right expansion partner? Because I agree with you, that is the most important thing, it's more important than where you go, is who you're working with. So how do you find that right person?
Jake Rockwell 18:40
Well, we haven't been out looking, you know, to be honest, they just happen to be found. Somehow we get connected, like Mike who was in Hawaii, and now Tennessee, I think I posted something on Facebook, he had reached out for some coaching or some help with something. And we stayed in touch. I could tell that he had it early on, I tried to bring him on, you know, a year prior. And then finally he had reached out. And again, we're not out searching for new locations right now. We're just when they when that when we know, we know. And it's finding the right person that has that work ethic that has the drive to build something special and be a part of a larger organization to help each other achieve what they want to achieve. So,
Brian Charlesworth 19:32
yeah, yeah, it's also I mean, there's a lot of leverage that you can bring as a team owner, where you already have all the systems in place, you have a team in place that they can leverage and just a lot of knowledge and expenses. I mean, you can reduce their expenses tremendously by doing that. So I've seen a lot of value in that. And I think it's a thing it's a path that teams should take as they succeed in their own markets.
Jake Rockwell 19:59
Yeah, we're working on some of the different systems with you know, launching a new team, we've got a person on our team that is now, is our expansion director. So he's working with those team leaders, he's working on processes to improve, you know, when we launch a new area, not that we're gonna go out and launch 10 new areas, I really want to stay focused on making sure those locations, you know, become successful and help them you know, do what they're doing. But you know, there's, it's a constant change. And I remind my team that, you know, when they get upset about change, like changing a CRM, I
Brian Charlesworth 20:34
said, the bad news is we're changing the good news is we're always going to be changing, that's not ever going to change. It's just what we're doing. So you guys have you've had a lot of success attracting people they want to take on new markets, you've had a lot of success attracting agents, I don't know if we ever really, like if you ever really shared like you're not actively recruiting agents. So what is it that makes these agents attracted to your team?
Sisu 21:02
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Jake Rockwell 21:12
Well, I know I'll kind of back up a little bit. Now obviously, we're with exp. So there is a, you know, a recruiting attraction aspect to that company. And it's not
Brian Charlesworth 21:22
necessarily not necessarily attracting to the team, right? I mean, that's,
Jake Rockwell 21:26
There's, I mean, we have, we have agents within our group that are actively having conversations with other agents. And we, we do it a little bit differently than regular recruiting, we're really trying to help people, you know, get to where they want. And if it makes sense, then it makes sense. But, locally, it becomes a word-of-mouth thing. You know, I think that the word has gotten out in our area anyway, that they want to, you know, in when they hear about an agent's experience that's already on our team, they want to be a part of that. And so I mean, there was a point last year, I feel felt like we were interviewing two or three agents a week that are just, you know, showing up but a lot of times those are coming from agents that are in our group already. Hey, I've got a friend getting licensed. They really want to be about, uh, be a part of our team and so forth. Yeah.
Brian Charlesworth 22:11
Yeah, that's, that's a great way to recruit. Alright, so one of the things you did, you've always had an interest in real estate. You bought your first house at 23 years old. One of the things you've done is you've gone out and built an investment company. I believe you have 65 doors now is that right?
Jake Rockwell 22:29
Yeah, yeah, I started, you know, I obviously, had to rebuild after crashing and, and yeah, back in 2003. When I was 23, I bought my first house. I guess it wasn't right out of college, or maybe it was I guess it was shortly after college. But it was an owner carry deal in the classified ads of the paper back when they printed those. And I pulled a $5,000 Cash Advance off of a credit card for the downpayment and didn't own a carry it had a little adu in the back, rented it out and rented all the rooms out this old little house, you know, near downtown in our area and that was the first property that we bought or that I bought and then yeah, just you know, now it's really, I'm really big on the investing side, creating that passive bucket, or long term retirement and growth. And so I do a lot of multifamily. I've kind of got, and I have I do have one short-term rental down in Arizona, but multifamily is kind of what we're into. And then on the side of that, I'm partners with two other guys in a small syndication company where we'll find projects and bring investors in.
Brian Charlesworth 23:36
Okay, so if I'm a team owner out there, which most of our listeners, I think, own real estate teams, or brokerages, so if I own a real estate team or brokerage, or if I'm an agent, what do I do to find those properties? If I haven't bought a property? Like, what are the actions? What are the steps I have to take to actually go find some of these properties to buy?
Jake Rockwell 24:02
Well, yeah, I think for me is just always making sure I saw every new listing coming in, and now it is hard to get a great deal that pencils early on, when I was buying rental properties. I didn't analyze them the same way I do. Now I really look at my cash on cash return. And you know, it's just really looking for you kind of have to also think outside the box like you see a property like Okay, on the surface, it may not look like a great opportunity. But then, can you add another unit? Can you break it up? Is there something special about it that you can do? And but yeah, shoot, I mean, the first step is you got to look at the whole shoot, you got to look at everything that's coming on the market. And really my path of getting into real estate was not to become an awesome real estate agent. It was just a path to create revenue to put into my freedom buckets into investing in real estate I wanted to be closer to the action. And so, you know, having lots of conversations, letting people know that you're investing, really looking for those opportunities when they come up and being quick enough to
Brian Charlesworth 25:12
Do you have a team? Or do you have a few agents that when like that you market to potential investment opportunities, and they go out, and their first goal is to get the investment not to get the listings. But the last goal is to get the listing. Do you have that type of model you run or not? Not?
Jake Rockwell 25:31
I don't, I do. I know people that do in our market, a friend of mine does that. No, we just, you know, I mean, we, obviously I'm also working with investors as clients, I have a few of my own obviously, I don't necessarily do the work on there, but I, you know, they reach out when they want to invest and, and I don't compete with them. So if they're looking at a property, most of the stuff that I'm buying myself ends up becoming more off-market stuff, and just different scenarios that, you know, come up and, and so forth. But
Brian Charlesworth 26:06
Yeah, all right. So I think we've, we've heard a lot about your story, I want to hear your take on the market. I think you guys are about the same as what you did in 2021, with COVID, 2020 and 2021 became inflated very quickly. And so that's good. Just being there. I know, some teams have grown their business substantially, and others who have gone down. So being where you were at and 2021 2021. Great Year. Congratulations on that. Now. Where's the market going? What are you doing to make sure you keep that growing in?
Jake Rockwell 26:41
Yeah, I mean, not, obviously, breaking even or, you know, doing the same as last year is fine, but it's not at all what you know, I vision for, I want to see growth every year. And it, you know, moving forward, it's really, you know, it's going to be more work, it's going to be more so most of as I mentioned earlier, most of our agents came in as new agents, and they all came in in the last three or four years. So they were not used to a certain way of doing business. And so move, you know, being that the markets shifted, and volume is down, number of sales are down. I see that continuing throughout next year. I think there's some economic factors that are gonna, you know, keep things to a minimum, but it's still a piece of pie. There's still homes being sold, there's still properties being bought and sold. And, it's a matter of how do we take more of our ticket, take a larger piece of that. And it really comes down to outwork in the competition and, and getting in front of people well, before they're looking to buy or sell and, you know, a lot more follow up more consistent actions.
Brian Charlesworth 27:50
So a lot of these agents that you've recruited over the last couple of years to get to 60 agents. They've just had leads given to them that closed within a week, right? Yeah, a lot of them don't know what follow-up is. I remember my first listing when I got into real estate, I actually had my first listing for a year. Like, a different market, right, I think that was eight years ago. So anyway, a lot of these I've seen, I've seen some of these new agents because I'm very close to my wife's business. Some of these new agents get super stressed about their listing not selling in its first week, right? Yeah. And it's totally different market now. So moving from listings to buyers, you're just talking about, it's a lot of work. And I agree with you, and they are going to have to work harder. How do you instill that in them? What are you guys doing to actually get them to be excited about working harder to go make the same money? Or if they're brand new to go make more money than they've ever made before.
Jake Rockwell 28:53
Survive? And yeah, I mean, well, the option is you either I mean, you're either working for yourself, or you're working for someone else. And so I mean, I'd rather not punch a clock and, and so it's really what I mean, we're using Sisu, even for some of that. I mean, our contest right now is buyer consultation. So we're really focusing on getting appointments. One of the big changes we're trying to do in our company, with the ISA part is we want to take more control of our, of the leads in the business that we're generating, and try to remove parts of the funnel, you know, the top part, the prospecting, follow up for the agents, that obviously takes some time that we think as a company, we'll be able to have a lot more consistency, and it'll create a lot more opportunities for the agents, but on their end, it's a matter I think what we're, what we will be implementing this year is really putting together a dedicated, come into the office or jump on Zoom, lead generation walks for people to as a group, and I'm going to get involved I need to be talking to, you know, just my sphere of influence and just in general, and so we're going to be doing a lot more of that. Just to get people in the habit of being consistent, and I think shifting to a new CRM will help a lot too.
Brian Charlesworth 30:07
Yeah. Okay, so you talked about the sales contest, but you blew over it pretty quickly. So you have a buyer consults contest describe this to me describe what is the reward? Like, what do they win? What is the competition? Is it half your team against the other half of the team? How have you structured this? Share more. Because I think I think my personal opinion, I'm very biased towards gamification. But I think every team should run a sales contest every month. And I don't think it should be longer than a month because you can't keep their attention span that long. But you have to run a sales contest every month. So I want to hear about the details of your sales contests, if you could, Jake.
Jake Rockwell 30:48
Yeah, we've actually we're running them a little bit longer than a month, we do, I think, maybe eight weeks. And we generally have a couple of different things that are involved to get them points and this one is buyer consultation appointments. So you get a certain amount of points for buyer consultation because we're really pushing to get appointments, we know that if we get face-to-face with people, we're gonna have a lot more success. And then the other item that goes with this contest is the number of days tracked in a row. Because tracking is key. And we've got one, we've got, you know, 5060 people, and it's a matter of, you know, I mean that the amount of tracking that's happening is growing. And something really cool happened last year when we were looking at our numbers for our goal-setting. We have good numbers, is good is what we got in but we have numbers on conversion rates, like conversation to appointment, appointment to client. And that's helped us produce our goals for next year on, you know, reverse engineering those goals in and telling our agents, hey, if you want to do this, this is what you have to do. Right? And so we're pushing tracking, getting more and more people tracking. And so yeah, that contest happens over the course of I think either eight to 12 weeks, and it's about to end here in two weeks. And we have first, second, third I think they get like a, you know, iPad or iWatch or, or an Apple watch or whatever, and getting you know, prizes like that. So and we talked about it every week in our team meetings about where people are.
Brian Charlesworth 32:17
Okay, so you guys did this market slowed. You create this contest to have people prospect or it was a prospect are tracked daily?
Jake Rockwell 32:28
Track daily and appointment set for buyer consultations.
Brian Charlesworth 32:33
Okay, so they're tracking daily by tracking daily, how many points do they get?
Jake Rockwell 32:38
I don't remember, I don't know that. Someone else on that set that someone else
Brian Charlesworth 32:42
set up the contest? Okay. All right. Do you know what kind of increase you've had? From before running the contest to running the contest? Has it increased the number of appointments that you buy or canceled appointments you guys have gotten?
Jake Rockwell 32:56
Yeah, absolutely. I don't know exactly how many it's increased. But you know, in all honesty, and we just starting this sounds bad. I don't know how we got to 500 transactions. But we just started really focusing. I mean, I did it early on as an agent to bring someone in the office. Let's look at the map. Let's, you know, look at MLS listing, and let's get a plan together for their buying journey. And our agents, we really have, we strayed away from that a while back. And now we're really jumping back into making that a point, hey, you know, we find that our clients have the best experience if we take 1520 minutes and really look at your situation, and figure it out and develop a plan to help you accomplish what you're trying to accomplish. And so we're just trying to get people to even if it's a showing and a driveway buyer consultation, or a zoom if it has to be but, it's getting people's, our agent's mindset shifted to hey, we know that if we get in front of them, we have better opportunity.
Brian Charlesworth 33:56
Well, I love what you're doing. I mean, you just said hey, I don't know how we sold 500 houses, we have been doing this. But the reality is everybody got lazy because you could get lazy, right? I mean, you could have success no matter what you did the last two years in real estate. So now you guys are honing in on the skills, which I want to emphasize this because the skills and the hard work and the Grit like that is what it's going to take for the people to come out on top today. And not only gain business today. But if you're training your agents to be experts and to be elevating their skill set, you are going to take massive market share as the market starts to come back over the next year,or two years. So opinion of how long it's going to take the market to come back. I'd like to hear your opinion.
Jake Rockwell 34:46
It's some of it's hard to say because there's so many external factors outside of the housing market, but I mean, I don't see things really starting to jump back up until maybe late 20s. 324 Somewhere in there. I think for investors, there'll be some opportunities that come up over the next year. But for the overall market, you know, for the Rockwell market, I want growth, you know, I want to see 1700 transactions over the next year, but that'll just from work. But, you know, I think later in 2023, again, depending on the big, big stuff that's going on in the world, and just this, there's a lot of other factors, I think, yeah, we're rolling in the housing market, too.
Brian Charlesworth 35:33
So I love your attitude. And not all have this. So again, this goes along with Grit, right? But a slowing market doesn't mean that your market needs to slow, right? So that's something that's controllable based on the activities you do, based on the planning you do, based on the skill set trainings you do. Based on your entire culture, based on running contests. I mean, there's so much that goes into this. So anyway, congratulations on focusing on all the right stuff right now. Jake, thanks. And I'm excited to see you. As we watch your business grow, I'm excited to see you grow. Hopefully, you'll get to seven eight hundred in 2023. What is your actual goal for 2023?
Jake Rockwell 36:17
It's as 750 transactions, you know, and I don't remember the exact volume or average price point and thinks around four and a quarter right now, but be more profitable in, and I think part of that is, is some of the restructurings we're doing? And you know, just kind of controlling, you know, the book side of things.
Brian Charlesworth 36:37
Yeah. Okay. So what would be the last? Like? What advice, what would be the one piece of advice that you'd want to give to all of our listeners before we close out here?
Jake Rockwell 36:48
Well, I would say, you know, for the team leaders, the teams, the brokerage owners, and I think really, it's, it's, you have to, I think one of the biggest success that we've had with our team as a whole is just genuinely pouring into people, pouring into the agents and genuinely wanting their life to be better in every way, you know, that you have control over. And just focusing on that, and then be sure to focus on those. You know, there's, obviously, when you have a lot of agents, you have people to check out, they don't show up, and that can bring a team leader down. Why is that? Why aren't they showing up to the trainings? Why aren't they doing this? We've got to shift our focus to focus on the people that are and really focus, I'm reading a book called The What is it the Pumpkin Plan, and it talks a little bit about this kind of stuff, where it's like, you need to stay focused on what you can control and, and not what you can and staying positive and, and moving forward. And, but I think a lot of it comes down to consistency. And try to you know, not only the team leaders have to be consistent, but that's you lead by example, and show agents, what consistency will do for them.
Brian Charlesworth 38:02
Yeah, I think that's great advice. When you're when your people know you care about them. Yeah, it makes all the difference. So another piece of advice you just gave without even knowing it is, read books and invest in yourself today. Because it's more important than ever that you are growing as a leader so that you can then lead your people to that growth also. So
Jake Rockwell 38:27
I think I've been, yeah, I've probably spent 10 hours a week learning and trying to get better as a person in business. And I share a lot of that with our team members. And we, and that's one of our tracking activities on our Sisu is, is what have you learned what, you know, what have you, you know, done to help yourself over the last.
Brian Charlesworth 38:46
I love that. That's a good one. I love that. All right. Well, Jake, thank you so much for joining us on the show today, what is the best way for people to get a hold of you if they want to?
Jake Rockwell 38:57
You can look me up on social media, just you know, type in my name, Rockwellrealestate.com is our website. But feel free to reach out we meet with lots of agents that just want to mastermind or collaborate or pick our brain on how we do things. We're an open book, we share everything, you know, whether you want to know how we do our onboarding, training, run our team meetings, do our annual, you know, our client or team events, we'll share anything, so people are more, you know, feel free to reach out to us and we can jump on a calendar and chat.
Brian Charlesworth 39:28
Okay. All right, Jake. Again, thanks for joining us on the show today. To all of our listeners. Thank you for listening. That is how I was fortunate enough to get Jake on here today, as he actually happened to listen to one of our podcasts and reached out. So if you guys want to be on the podcast, if you want to share it with others, just let me know. Thank you for listening, and have an amazing holiday season, everyone.
Jake Rockwell 39:54
Yeah, thanks for having me.
