JD shares his evolution from selling over 1,000 homes as a builder agent to creating and leading a team that’s now ranked in the top five in just three years. How did he do it? JD credits much of his success to the systems and processes he built from the ground up.
JD takes us back to when he worked long days as a builder agent at Salisbury Homes, where he learned the value of grit and consistency. After experiencing significant changes in the builder market, JD decided to start his own team. In his words, "I realized I could make ten times the amount of money by doing my own thing, and that was eye-opening."
The episode dives deep into how JD created a strong foundation for his team, starting with using tools like Sisu and Follow Up Boss to manage accountability and streamline operations. He shares how his focus on building a repeatable system allowed him to transition smoothly into team leadership. JD also touches on his recruitment strategy, which emphasizes hiring young, trainable agents who align with his team's culture of hard work and innovation.
What sets JD apart is his hands-on leadership style. He continues to prospect daily alongside his agents, which has helped his team maintain high performance even in challenging markets. "I still prospect an hour to an hour and a half every single day, including Saturdays," JD explains, showcasing his dedication to staying connected with his team and clients.
Top Takeaways:
(2:29) The secrets behind selling over 150 homes a year.
(7:34) Can you hit your income goals by prospecting every day?
(13:29) Why the right CRM is your new best friend in real estate.
(17:20) Is data the key to a team that never drops the ball?
(18:00) What’s the real edge of 24/7 reporting for agents?
(25:26) What’s the real cost of wearing too many hats in real estate?
(29:43) How did training turn market challenges into opportunities?
(31:31) AI, PPC, and Facebook—How to use all to win.
(34:28) How do open house registrations boost conversions?
(36:07) How do proper SOPs transform lead management?
(38:41) Why Every Real Estate Deal Needs a "Pizza Tracker" System.
Don't miss this insightful conversation as JD explains how to grow a team, foster a winning culture, and consistently push the needle forward. Tune in to learn more about JD's journey and what it takes to build a high-performing real estate business.
About JD Reese
JD Reese is the owner of The Genuine Group and a Utah native, born and raised in St. George. With a background in new construction and experience as a general contractor, JD aims to provide a genuine experience for clients, whether they are buying, selling, investing, or building homes. He founded The Genuine Group to share his knowledge from nine years in real estate and to build a tech-driven, supportive team environment. In his free time, JD enjoys skateboarding, golfing, playing video games, and spending quality time with his wife and their pets.
Connect with JD Reese Today!
JD Reese - Instagram
The Genuine Group - Instagram
Episode Transcript:
Brian Charlesworth 00:34
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the grit Podcast. I'm Brian Charlesworth. I'm the founder of Sisu and your host of the show, and excited for our show today, I'm here today with JD Reese. He's the owner of a somewhat new team called the genuine group out of St George, Utah, baby, and I've been watching JD for these last three years, and he's done some really exciting things. And like for any of you new teams that want to elevate your business and get to that next level, I would say. JD, is definitely someone you guys are going to want to spend some time with. So on that note, JD, what else do you want to share with us? I know you're a family man. I know you have I know you're a dog dad, yeah, I know you're a Porsche.
JD Reese 01:21
I am a Porsche enthusiast, big car guy. I also have a skateboarding nonprofit that we do. I have buddy of mine set that up a while ago. I'm big. I'm actually big into skate culture, but yeah, resident sunny St George, and just loving life down here. But it's hard to not be happy when you live in paradise.
Brian Charlesworth 01:38
So it's a beautiful area down there. We have a home down there, just outside of snow Canyon, yeah. Anyway, just right when you come down, it's just right on the left, right there. And problem is, it's always rented, so don't ever get to stay there. We have Vonda for Vonda for three years, and I think I've stayed there twice, so
JD Reese 01:56
yeah, I mean, the the vacation rental market here is still going strong, so that's good news. It would suck if it wasn't rented, right? Yeah,
Brian Charlesworth 02:03
yeah, exactly. All right. Well, JD, I've got, I've got a lot of stuff I want to ask you about. So, okay, first off, you started a team three years ago. Yeah, why did you start a team?
JD Reese 02:16
Honestly, that's a great question. So really, what came down for me was I was a builder agent for four years.
Brian Charlesworth 02:25
Four and a half years you've been a realtor for nine years total. Is that right?
JD Reese 02:29
Yeah. So four and a half I going on five years I was a builder agent for Salisbury homes, which is a quite a big builder in Utah. If you're from Utah, you've probably heard of them, and it was the one of the most rewarding jobs I ever had and one of the most challenging jobs I've ever had. They paid us flat fee on every home we sold. And so it was a numbers game. Lot of hours worked. And to make the money I wanted to make, I had to sell anywhere between 100 to 150 homes a year with them to really make it work. But they were the ones who gave me a chance to jump into real estate, and I did that for four and a half going on five years before you continue.
Brian Charlesworth 03:02
How many homes Did you sell? What was your best year with them?
JD Reese 03:06
I did, like, 184 homes one year with on your own, on my own, yep, no assistant, no anything other than the processes that I put in. That was the year right before covid. And all in all, when I was with them, I ended up selling, like just over 1000 homes. It was so 184
Brian Charlesworth 03:26
homes in a year, guys. So again, I just want to bring this up. This is the grit podcast, and if you don't have grit, you are not selling 184 homes.
JD Reese 03:36
So it was a lot of 15 to 20 hour days. I feel like I would wake up and just start working again. So like I said, it was one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. It was also one of the most challenging. They're very tough company to work inside of, just because of the high expectations, but the opportunity that was put in front of me, I just saw it as, like, I'm going to capitalize on this, and I'm going to build a huge database, and I'm going to sell as many homes I possibly can and do it as long as I can. And so I did that. Well, right after covid, we had our huge year. And going in 2021, most builders in southern Utah and Utah in general, decided to go, well, we can't maintain or do build jobs anymore, custom build jobs because we cannot promise the cost of material. So a lot of these builders went to spec homes. Yeah, well, because of that, I wasn't a lead rep. We had three agents in southern Utah at the time, and the manager here, she called me and said, Hey, we're going spec only. And mind you, this was about four months after we ran out of inventory. She called me, we're going spec only. We won't have specs ready till May. So it was like, basically an eight to nine month period of me no longer being able to do contracts. And she's like, I really suggest that you probably start figuring something else out, just because when we do the specs, my team is going to be a part of it, and so we're going to be taking a majority of the specs. And basically at that point, I was already. Kind of feeling like making that next step, but it just didn't know what it was. So I stayed on for about six months in 2021 with them, and finished out like 80 transactions between January to July and between that time, I also struck an agreement with them to finish out my contracts, but also that I could sell real estate outside of the builder industry, and that was fine. So January to July, I sold like 20 homes outside of the builder, and I made 10 times the amount of money than if I would have stayed with the builder. And it was super eye opening.
Brian Charlesworth 05:35
And I was like, Isn't it interesting how sometimes when somebody comes to you with a challenge like they did, right? You've been making all this money with them, selling 184 homes a year. Yes, and all of a sudden you're faced with, you can't sell any homes for the next nine months. And I'm sure your first thought was not, Oh, great. This is, like, the best opportunity ever for me. Like, yeah, it was, it was probably, you know, that fear creeps in. It was, what am I gonna do? How am I gonna do it? So, like, how did you make that transition from, okay, I'm working for a builder to I'm now selling and making more money on my own.
JD Reese 06:12
So originally, it came out of just the opportunity from that first six months of like, I guess I'll look at it and see. So all I really did was nothing much different. I used to prospect we had to sit model homes. And something to generate my business is I wouldn't just sit the model home. I'd prospect our leads we generated. So lender who's actually our in house lender now, his name's Alex Hernandez. He and I kind of build a platform with Salisbury at the time where we were generating online leads for super low cost just based off of videos we were making. And the reason why that came to fruition was because at one point, Rick Salisbury, the owner of the company, he came to us and said, Hey, I don't want you guys listing on the MLS anymore. We're going to offer a discount directly to the consumer so that way we can cut out buyer agents. It was something that he's always attempted, he's always offered, like, a lower buyer agent commission, and but at this point, he was like, we're no longer listing on the MLS. And I said, Okay, so I got to go direct to the consumer. So Alex and I started generating these leads, and I got really good at prospecting and setting up appointments. And so really, all I did was take that prospecting, and all I started doing was calling past clients.
Brian Charlesworth 07:23
So JD, let's stop, let's stop there for a minute, because this is something that I think I look at a lot of teams, including my wife's team, 90 agents here in Utah. And I think that's probably the biggest challenge people have today, is getting their agents to actually prospect. Yeah, you know, I sold real estate for a year and a half, and I had an expectation I had to make a certain amount, which was way more than $100,000 a year, and which is what most agents dream of making, right? Is they come in brand new, because they've never made that much. And so I knew what I had to do to get there. And I'm guessing it's similar with you, like you know you have these income aspirations and know what you need to do to get there. So I I want to know how many conversations were you having a day at that point, and I don't know if you're still doing this as a team leader. Are you still in production?
JD Reese 08:15
Yes, I'm still in production. I prospect an hour to an hour and a half every single day, okay, including Saturdays prospecting an hour and a half a day.
Brian Charlesworth 08:21
How many conversations do you have? Typically, every day in
JD Reese 08:27
my prospecting time, anywhere between seven to 12. Usually I convert it really high rate. I use Sisu for this so I can check my conversion, my conversation to appointment ratio, with the type of business that I run for my personal run for my personal production is like 23%
Brian Charlesworth 08:46
Wow, it's super high. That's as high as I've seen.
JD Reese 08:49
It's very high. In fact, if I pull it up on sisu, it's probably right around there. I have a lot of repeat business. A lot of the people I'm talking to are only people that I really know. So I'm not generally prospecting a new database or new leads. It, for me, it's more like prospecting an existing database and just kind of like dialing into basically this like, well, of opportunity that I built with working for Salisbury homes, and this is why I said it was one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, because without them, I would not have this massive database to prospect. When I started prospecting back with them, I was calling new leads in the model, setting appointments for their product, and that when I was planning on leaving Salisbury those first six months of 21 all I did was just take that prospecting time away from new leads, and I just turned it into working on the people that I had already sold homes to, and basically just worked on making relationships with them, finding out if they had opportunities. I started looking into systems a lot those first six months. Once. Why is that important to you? Well, because I had built the systems for Salisbury homes when I when I got hired with them, they didn't have any systems. They didn't have anything to track the lots available. And so I had quickly found out that if I was going to make a transition somewhere, the systems that I used were really important to the success of my own personal business. But back to your original question. You asked me, why a team? And when I left Salisbury, even though I had had such success in those first six months of like, really getting ready to leave, I had imposter syndrome, so bad when I finally left, it was horrible. I didn't think I'd ever be able to make enough or do enough, or be as successful as I just the amount of sheer amount of work and people I was connecting with, with Salisbury, and so I went on this like adventure, almost like a quest, to find, like, some insight into what other people are doing and what the next big step for me was going to be. And it really came out to be. What really ended up motivating me was I connected with team leaders and people within the industry. Somebody I really look up to, Barry Jenkins. I connected with him. I connected with Dan beer, with the beer home team, like all these people within the industry. And then I started digging into systems, and I just started meeting all these people and seeing the level of production they do and these team leader situations, and in my head, I was like, this is really cool, because I said, I don't really think I'm going to get out of production because I have the time. I may as well do it. And it's a wealth of a lot of opportunity for me, but I really find some motivation out of these team leaders. And just the it's like, checks the box for me on giving back to something. Because I got really good at prospecting, I got really good at sales, and I was like, I can, I could share this information. And that started exciting me. And so from the basically the six months of Salisbury, the the latter six months I was in production, but I was building out the foundation of genuine which was so motivating to me. It just It motivated me every single day to have, like this opportunity to build out these really cool systems and capitalize on it, and then slowly start bringing people into my world and teaching them. And I just It motivated me. It was like a this idea of being able to give back and teach like it just like check the box for me. I don't know exactly why or how, but it motivated me more than just my own production, just because I was so familiar with production and I was like, already doing so many deals that wasn't satisfying me anymore. What really started satisfying me was this culture in my head that I was starting to build, essentially a company that I envisioned in my head that was like, as efficient as what I, you know, the systems I had built for Salisbury. And Salisbury is a very efficient company, but it wasn't a very like, culturally great company to work for. I wanted something that was like, super motivating, that almost was like, kind of like a lifestyle, I guess, if that makes sense. So that ambition to build that is what kind of drove me into making a team.
Brian Charlesworth 13:08
Okay,so you did all this research, went and talked to these top team owners, and Barry and Dan are both great, great team leaders. Love both those guys, and I know you've talked to a lot of others as well. So what did you find out, like, you're all about systems? Well, that was actually coaching people now on systems, yeah. So what did you find out, like, what systems do you use in your business?
JD Reese 13:31
Well, definitely. Sisu. That's why we're here, right?
Brian Charlesworth 13:34
Well, there's a lot of people that come on here that don't use sisu.
JD Reese 13:37
Well, they should be, but no. So I started with follow boss. I looked at every CRM under the sun, and really what settled me on follow boss was how fast it was and just the ability to plug in. Because in my head, I thought, Okay, well, I'm not going to be a catch all. Be all like this is the only system I use business. I want to be able to do all sorts of businesses. So like being able to plug different lead sources in different marketing systems that open API was really attracted to me. So it all really started with follow boss, and then I started looking at like, things that plugged in well. And so I obviously really looked up to Barry and saw what he was doing with him. And so I was like, Okay, well, ylopo seems like a really great system to plug into my business. And it was, it worked out great. And the support there was awesome. The community has been great. And been great. And honestly, being able to just chat with Barry and go speak at their events has been awesome, like just the community alone has been really cool. It's not only helped me build out the foundation for what we do within the team, but it's also given me opportunities. I have a ton of referral contracts written because of the community there. I've had a lot of speaking events that I've been able to go do, and it's, it's really given me more opportunity than I originally thought it would that, you know, just the pursuit of looking at systems. And then as I talked to these guys, I really found that accountability was such a huge word that kept coming back up. And everything that we were, you know, they were trying. To do. And it's always, it's always, the constant thing is, like trying to keep your agents accountable and making sure in my head, too, the other, the other thing that I was looking for was, how do I make sure that when I'm doing all these deals and we're as big as we want to be, how do I make sure things will fall through the cracks? You know, like, what can I build to protect my agents from making mistakes, because it's they're bound to make mistakes. They're humans. And, you know, especially the new agents that we hired. And so accountability and systems to manage those faults has started becoming kind of an obsession for me, and I started implementing it, you know, task oriented systems, things that I can replicate or rehire for really easily, you know, stuff like that. I started building, and then all of a sudden, like, four or five months later, we had this amazing system in place, and I was like, I'm ready to recruit. I'm ready to start recruiting. I think with what I have here, I have no fear of bringing somebody into my business. And so we started recruiting, and we started slow at first, my first year only recruited like, three or four agents, and then I kind of they're still with me, and I kind of used them as guinea pigs, as far as, like, here's a system, let's break it, you know.
Brian Charlesworth 16:13
So before you did that, you had sisu for agent accountability, and you also had it for, basically, call it task management, transaction management. What is it that made you feel like, okay, I'm at a place where I can bring more agents in.
JD Reese 16:30
I felt like, okay, so St George in general, is the biggest small town ever, and when I originally started this whole idea, I was like, I'm gonna go so big. I want to start. I was with real broker. I wanted to build teams all over the US. I wanted to be have like something that was packaged, that I could plug in in different places when I brought on these micro teams. And that's originally why I scaled it and built it the way I did. But then interest rates went up, and so I decided to kind of refocus with the help of who is now my runs my day to day, and he's actually a partner within our business. His name's Nathan. We refocus, and we decided to be more local, hyper local, if you say. And so we took this big idea of being able to plug this, you know, this foundation in, and we just centralized it around the agents itself, and just started figuring out, like, how can we take this smaller team and just make these agents produce at a higher pace? And sisu was, is still something that we have to have to be able to do that. Like, we can't not have that data, and not even just the data from the agent side, the data from our ROI, from our lead sources, our conversion amounts, like, and honestly, at this point too, we can't even run our transaction management the way we built it. It's so automated and dialed in that it's just such a huge part of of not only our accountability side, but that safety net that I talked about where we don't let things kind of fall through the cracks, because it's not missed anymore. I think the secret
Brian Charlesworth 18:00
sauce of sisu, after watching people implemented over the last six years, is really being able to use the system to run your processes so things don't drop through the cracks. And by doing so, you now have real time reporting at your fingertips. 24/7, it's not like you need to go have somebody, have some financial person, prepare a weekly report or a monthly report. It's all just there, because the system you run things through, and it was built to provide you with the data and be your data warehouse, so you have all the information at your fingertips.
JD Reese 18:37
And that's huge for us. We still send out reports to our agents individually every week, you know, so they can see, not only is it up on our TVs in our office, but they get their own individualized reports that come out that are there, where they're at for the week, where they're at for the month, where they're at training for the quarter, and where they're trending for the year. And that report goes out to them every week. You know, that's something that we have put into effect that has been super helpful, but it's real estate's tough as a team leader and somebody who all my agents are young on my team, I have a bunch of young agents. My highest producing agent will do like 3530 transactions this year. He's 25 why young?
Brian Charlesworth 19:15
Why did you choose to go that route? And by the way, most of the top teams that I meet with that's what they choose. You can talk to Greg Harrelson, who is, in my opinion, one of the best leaders in this industry. He's over at C 21 and he'll flat out tell you, I don't recruit from other people because I don't want to pick up their bad habits. I want to activate them my way.
JD Reese 19:38
That's exactly my mindset. I like young, hungry people that are multiple and want to be here full time. And really for us, that's like to access our team. We don't just recruit anybody. We're very particular with who we bring in. In fact, we make them shadow for quite some time before we actually hire them, just to make sure they're going to be a good fit within our culture. It, but we like younger people who are trainable and give us a full time effort, because we found that there's no bad habits, and generally it's just a better fit. We're kind of a younger crowd, like, I dress like this most days, like, I'm not like, Wait, let
Brian Charlesworth 20:14
me see. What are you wearing?
20:15
Just a, just a, oh
Brian Charlesworth 20:17
yeah, you see, everyone should dress in I like that and
JD Reese 20:21
and a hat, and just really casual. I wear Converse like every single day. And it's like a, kind of, like a Soho casual way to do real estate. And it's, quite honestly, if you come to St George, there's not much of that vibe around here. There isn't there's a lot of like stuffy, like suit and tie type real estate that's done here. And we just decided to kind of go the opposite direction, and young just kind of works with it. You know, it attracts, I think, our culture, you know, we have two sides of it. We have the accountability side, which is heavy accountability. Not a lot of people see it. So when we finally do interview people, they're like, Oh, I didn't realize you guys had all this. We just thought you're a cool brand. And it's like, well, yeah, we want to do both the brand, you know, the forefront is intentional. It's, it's supposed to be like that. It's, it's different than what people are used to, and that's on purpose. And that idea came when we decided to go more local. It was like, Okay, well, then how do we stand out within our local community? And that really has been our driving force for the last three years. And funny enough, year three. We are the we are top five of real estate teams in southern Utah, like, easily, year three. Year
Brian Charlesworth 21:27
three. So why do you think? Like, what is it? And you've talked about a lot of stuff you've done, but what is it has made you go from zero to top five in three years? Because that's a massive accomplishment. Congratulations on this
JD Reese 21:51
I think it's just the cost and dedication of trying to just move the needle forward 1% every day that's on our walls. It's we say it every day, every day, just 1% just constantly trying to drive the needle forward, whether it's within our business and our clients or on our business. It's something, you know, if I look at my task list, because I keep a constant task list, there's just little things, you know, like for me, like I do yearly redesign of kind of like our our branding, you know, which keeps it interesting and keeps people kind of engaged with what we're doing. We put on events this year. We already did one event this year, was our summer bash, and we did bounce houses and a dunk tank, and we had this huge, huge event. We had like, 340 or 350 people come, which was awesome, because it's our clients, you know, it's people within the community that we like, people who support our business. In October, we're doing puppies and Porsches, and we're going to do a drive for animals and a car show with live music. You know, we always try to attach some type of charitable event to it, but it's different. Not a lot of people do stuff like that here. And so I think with the constant just accountability that our agents are receiving every day the sales training, which we coach on Socratic selling, I have made it a dedicated effort to not ever put a script in front of my agents. They don't have any scripts. We teach them on how to have proper, empathetic conversations that drive the needle forward for them, and it takes them a little bit longer to learn that process, but once they get it, they convert. I'll take them from a three to 4% conversation to appointment met ratio, and in 90 days, they'll be 10 to 12% conversation to appointment ratio.
Brian Charlesworth 23:33
That's incredible. So you you're basically teaching them how to ask great questions and how to listen
JD Reese 23:38
Exactly. And funny enough, it's what I do in the business now. And I kind of mentioned this, and I'm wearing a lot of hats, you know, we're at the cut, we're at the, like, the near end of the messy middle. My role within the company is branding, marketing. That's still something that I'm heavily involved in. I'm very like, kind of particular on what goes out, especially with our video content, we do a lot of video content. I'm head of, like, recruiting, and I even onboard our agents still for the first day, like they're involved with me. I'm head of sales training. So we have a Tuesday, Thursday role plays that they're they're in. And then every other Wednesday, we have a dedicated sales training. And then Friday afternoons, I'm running a listing class that's open to all agents in southern Utah, and that is basically what I do for the company. Now, why the team runs so efficiently is because right off the bat, when I had the systems in place, I realized that I couldn't be everywhere at all once, so I brought somebody in to run the day to day. His name's Nathan mayo. He's a great friend of mine, one of my best friends, if not my best friend. And I was a little hesitant to bring my best friend into my business, but he had had experience running 2030, person agent team, and I needed somebody that could run that side of the day to day. So contractual questions compliance are a lot. Where our agents are at, the conversations, having all the stuff that needs to be managed. Nathan's running all that day to day, so that I can focus on what I'm really good at, which is one converting at a high rate for my personal business, but then to the bigger picture stuff for the real estate team.
Brian Charlesworth 25:17
Yeah, you talked about the messy middle. You say you're just about out of it, when you talk about the messy middle, what does that mean to you? What is the messy middle means?
JD Reese 25:26
I'm everywhere all at once with not enough time to have wearing all hats.
Brian Charlesworth 25:30
You just described wearing about eight different hats.
JD Reese 25:35
Yeah. So it's a lot, but right now I can for a lot of people, it's not a good place to be it tends to overwhelm them. And I think I'm getting to a point now in my life that it's starting to feel like that. So what we've done is I've started offloading anything that I possibly can, writing contracts, listing acquisitions like, I'll still go on listing appointments, but we're I'm starting to offer I offload writing all my contracts, like, I'm starting to offload inputting listings or prepping listings, like even listing updates, like, as much as I possibly can to take off things, or I'm my time isn't spent well, I'm starting to finally offload those things and hire for them, because we finally got to a place where our foundation is so strong that we can just kind of expect the agents that we've hired to do the job that they've been hired for, and we're not having to babysit them anymore. Yeah, now we're not like letting them run free. We're still expectation accountability. But for example, today, Nathan was gone. He's he's on the last day of his vacation. I came in. I still ran role plays this morning, and I'm happy to do so. It's my company, and I love that part of it. I love connecting with my agents, especially after a long weekend. But the rest of the morning, I knew my agents would be prospecting and working on what they need to work on. And I can peek at what they're doing for the day, and I can see that, you know, they're all prospecting. Every single one of them are prospecting. There's not a single agent on my team that hasn't made over hasn't made over 60 dials already today.
Brian Charlesworth 27:04
So are you looking at that right now as we speak?
JD Reese 27:07
Yeah. So yep, yep, looking at ray or so everyone I was in today, 51 this guy had four conversations at an appointment. So peeking at all those numbers, and I look at them periodically, but most of the time, Nathan's peeking at this and making sure that we are actually hitting those numbers that we're supposed to be hitting.
Brian Charlesworth 27:26
So you guys are living in sisu, living in follow up, boss, and leveraging your systems so that you can, I like to say, when you think of getting out of the messy middle, let me ask you first, what does that? What does that mean to you? Like to be out of that. Of course, you're leveraging, getting, getting as much offloaded as possible right now, which is what you should be doing. What's the next step? What does that look like to be out of the messy middle? It means
JD Reese 27:52
that I can just focus on what I'm good at, really, for me, and what I what I enjoy doing, really, at the end of the day, my business really thrives at the low hanging fruit, like opportunity that's put in front of me. I converted a really high pace, so I'm better off spent converting opportunity put in front of me. So that allows me, you know, things like having a personal assistant set up more appointments for me to go on stuff like that for my production. I don't want to be out of production. I feel like prospecting next to my agents really helps them learn at a higher rate. And so really getting out of the messy middle is just kind of doing the things that I really enjoy doing within my company, and some of the things that I don't enjoy doing, I don't want to be doing compliance and dealing with commission questions. It's like
Brian Charlesworth 28:36
the things you enjoy, which are your passion, which are what you're good at, yeah, yeah. And
JD Reese 28:40
I think my quality life is happier, and I have the time to do what I need to if I have to step in and do it. I don't have any kids yet. My wife and I want them, but we just have our two big dogs, and she works for Utah tech full time, and so we both are just within our careers, and we're working, and we're kind of just building a life that we really love, and we just want to do things that we enjoy so when I
Brian Charlesworth 29:03
got on the phone with you this morning, I asked how you're doing, the first thing you said was, I'm busier than I've ever been. Yeah, yep. Now how could that be like you've been in this business now for nine years. You've been through the ebb and flow of the hard time of 2020, and then the last half of 2020, and 2021, where things were just crazy, right? How are you busier today than you've ever been? Because some people are living out of fear, and they're not that busy right now. So I want you to share like, what are you doing to be busier than you've ever been?
JD Reese 29:39
Well, to comment on that there's not an ounce of fear in my office. There's not an ounce of negativity in there either. It just doesn't exist because we have found that there is a solution to everything. When the NAR stuff came out, we were already trained on it, and we were already coaching our agents on how to handle that. And because we are a smaller, more nimble team, our agents aren't scared. Of it. There was no fear to be had with it. And so I think part of being busier is is understanding that this change that's happening with interest rates and Nan AR and everything, if it does change anything, it's just going to open up more opportunity for us. There's more market share to take over. Now, another huge aspect of being busier than we ever have is they just think that constant approach of just working the database. And, you know, things kind of ebb and flow a bit, but we've gotten way more intentional on working our database and way more intentional about how we're getting connecting with our past clients and connecting with our current, you know, new clients. As far as like our prospecting goes, if I pull up any reports that I have on follow up, boss, I think our average contact attempt on brand new leads for the year is like 22 times within the first three or four days. Like we're very aggressive, and so we've just really honed that skill to be able to convert at a higher pace. I really want to make sure every single one of my agents are producing and living a life they want, and so we've put an intentional focus on really trying to just dial in on each person as much as we possibly can. And I don't ever want that to change, but I think as we grow, which is just a natural case of things we're already at as next Monday, I'm onboarding two more agents, so we'll be at 14 agents for my team, which is the biggest we've ever been. I really want to try to continue to hone that, that intentional one on one opportunity that we give every single person. So I think with that, to kind of recap the one on one intentionalist for each of our agents, the database management that we've really implemented a lot of our systems help this too, especially a lot of our drip systems that we have, seller reports that we go out, our text automations, our AI automations, we just try to hit every part of the business. There isn't just like one source for us, like we're not even a Zillow team. We we don't even do Zillow leads. We are primarily PPC and Facebook, but we capitalize on every single aspect of our pillars that we can, which is like social media, circle prospecting, door knocking, open houses, like we try to do every bit of that business and coach on every little thing, because there isn't like one part of that business is the catch all be all. Every person that we hire is different. I have some agents that really like door knocking, so I got them very good at door knocking and understanding that process a bit better. You know, there's some agents that are that have a great presence on social media, so our team is offered to, hey, if you have content that you want to do for social media, we'll pay for it, we'll brand it, and we'll put it out there, as long as it's within our culture and our brand image. Like, we are happy to do that because it's great for our image. You know, we have agents that love circle prospecting, so we set up times that they get on the circle prospecting after they've done their initial prospecting, and they just, it's in addition to their business. So for us, it's like, really intentional one on one coaching that's helped our business. But then that database management, I think, has been huge for us.
Brian Charlesworth 33:04
When I listen to you, I think the reason you're so busy right now is because you guys are not letting the market control you, but you're controlling the market. You're just doing the things you have to do. One of the things you mentioned that you didn't go into detail on when you talked about your four pillars, really, is open houses. Talk about open houses. How often do your agents are they required to do open houses?
JD Reese 33:26
How often do they do open houses when they're when they're new on our team and we onboard them, we require them to do five within their first month. Okay, but ongoing? What does that look like? There's not necessarily a requirement, but it's more like our culture drives it. So I have every single week our agents are doing some type of open house. Yeah, it's on a Saturday or during the week, like it's just, I keep having to order more open house science. My
Brian Charlesworth 33:47
opinion is that right now, in this market, every agent should do at least an open house a week. Oh,
JD Reese 33:53
I agree. It's been great, but we utilize our systems for it, which I think is I don't know how people do open houses without it, with ylopo, and how they engage the we register all we have, like a 90% registration on our open houses. We kind of, I hate to say it, but we almost kind of gatekeeper open houses a little bit, you should. And so our agents register someone. It's absolutely expected if they do an open house, and I follow up with every single agent on their open houses, it's something that I do intentionally. And they get somebody that came in and they weren't registered. I'm like, Come on, guys, like, this is rule number one. You're not going to be able to do any more open houses unless you register these people. Because it registers them. It sets them up on a home search. It asks for feedback, it gets you in front of them. It puts our brand in front of them. It's just a good experience. And so our open house conversion ratio is high because we're so intentional with trying to get in front of those people. So our agents like them. They like doing open houses. I literally like Friday. Put another order in for 25 more open house signs because we keep running out. So yeah, it's
Brian Charlesworth 34:57
been great, good. All right, so two. More questions for you, and then we'll wrap up one. I want to hear more about your coaching. You're working with teams to help them set up systems and better sales processes. Let's just talk about that a little bit, because I think some of these people here, even though you're a young team, you're now 14 agents, and you're crushing it. How many homes do you expect to to sell this year?
JD Reese 35:21
Well, we have this year. We'll probably do 150 to 180 side somewhere in there. Okay, okay, which for Southern Utah, as far as sides go on real estate teams, that'll put us top three, okay, by the end of the year.
Brian Charlesworth 35:35
So let's talk about what you do to how did it come about that you're now helping other teams, you know, set up their systems, and I
JD Reese 35:45
think it just kind of came out organically. It's just something that we do privately. It's not something that we're super loud about or like publicizing. But I have a lot of companies that reach out to me and and essentially just kind of say, Hey, I have this person interested. Could you give us? Could they ask you questions or give you insight, and within those conversations, of those questions being not, you know, asked, I have found that it's so many teams are so lost on like how their flow of leads should be, or how their follow up should be, or like what proper follow up looks like, or how to motivate their agents to use their tools, or even just accessing things for the most part to make it easy. So a lot of the stuff we coach on is like, I'll generally start with SOPs. I'll ask most team leaders. In fact, I just had a guy reach out to me who is looking into getting into he already has sisu, but he's looking into switching into follow boss. And Kyler from sisu reached out to me to kind of say, Hey, could you give him some insight on how this looks. And I said, Great, yeah. And a lot of the conversation I talk about is, hey, do you have SOPs? You know, have you ever thought about building SOPs, or what those look like? You know, we coach on how to establish SOPs and and we've, it's kind of funny. So a lot of people use Slack for their business, for communications, we use discord, which is a gaming app, but it syncs a little bit better than slack does. So we've built all of our SOP channels and all of our communication channels through discord. And so we coach on setting stuff up like that, setting up their follow up, boss, setting up, you know, answering questions regarding their syncings, setting up, even coaching on how we set up our client portals for sisu. I've had so many agents reach out to me and be like, Hey, how are you guys keeping your clients updated? We noticed that you're sending out videos. I said, Yeah, we send out videos, and they're part of our client portal within sisu on our 10 step process. And here's how we do it. And if you'd like to have something set up similar to that, you know, we will charge a fee, but we help people, and we coach them on getting it done. And it's been primarily just like a private thing that we do just kind of help generate business and just build the community up a little bit. So it's nothing that I've had much time and intention to put towards. But I think, as we have this, people reaching out, it's been rarely consistent that I think will eventually probably capitalize and probably build genuine coaching or something like that, on systems and sales ability and processes so
Brian Charlesworth 38:11
- JD, if somebody wants to learn more about that and talk to you about that, what's the best way for them to reach you?
JD Reese 38:16
They can email me. JD, at genuine utah.com
Brian Charlesworth 38:19
Okay. JD, genuine utah.com. If you guys are watching this, you'll see genuine on the hat. There it is. You mentioned the client portal there. I wasn't planning on asking you this question, so I said two more questions, but now I I just had another one come up, because I just want to know, like, what are you leveraging the client portal for? And what is the client portal. I mean, sisu has this client portal. Yeah. Let's talk about that for a minute. Because my opinion is that this is the next decade of real estate, like, I don't care what it is that you order. For me, I like to use DoorDash as the example, because my kids order DoorDash every day, and they know when the DoorDash shows up on the steps without anybody ringing our doorbell. Yeah, let's talk about that. What does the client portal mean to you as far as your real estate team and how you deliver to that client?
JD Reese 39:07
It's the pizza tracker for your real estate deal. That's what it is. It's like it tells you where everything's at. And for us, I'd mentioned it before, but I was really trying to figure out a way that nothing fell through the cracks, yeah. And so if we ever have clients that are like, Oh, we didn't know what the process was, I was like, that's not true. Here's why we sent you the emails. We showed you where you're at in your process, and you've had access to this, and we automate all the emails. We invite them to it, and it's used. They really appreciate it. And so for me, it was, it was primarily a way to be like, hey, I want to make sure our processes are outlined and that even our new agents who are doing deals their clients understand that where they're at, even if the agent doesn't understand the level of cadence they need for their follow up. So for us, that's been a big part of our business, for sure.
Brian Charlesworth 39:55
So it is key to have great communication. Yeah,
JD Reese 39:59
it's. It's been a big communication.
Brian Charlesworth 40:03
Yeah, cool. All right, last question I have for you, you're a Porsche enthusiast. We need to drive together. But that's not my question. That's what is your favorite Porsche?
JD Reese 40:14
I would say a 964, but it has to be Superman's. That's my favorite. If I think of like the best looking dream horse show would be like, super mint, blacked out, 964, just an older like 1990 like a 91
Brian Charlesworth 40:33
does that mean you're talking like RWB, or are you talking like a Gunther works or
JD Reese 40:38
Gunther works amazing. But honestly, like anything, I would love to just build it out myself. They made the 964 in 1993 which is when I was born. And so, like, I guess my year date, 964 would be,
Brian Charlesworth 40:51
Oh, that would be cool. Those are, those are amazing, amazing cars. They're beautiful. I
JD Reese 40:57
used to really like the 990 threes, but I think I I had just overall, of the nine, six, fours, they're they're so sick. Dream Car for sure. I'm gonna get one
Brian Charlesworth 41:05
soon. So just like you guys, listen to JD, about real estate, what he's doing there. Listen to him about Porsches too, because he knows what he's talking about. All right. JD, it's been fun. Thanks for joining me on the grit podcast. For all you listeners, thanks again for joining and listening. Again. You guys, listening is what allows me to get guests like JD on the show. And there's so much to learn from these guys, so take advantage of it. They're open to sharing and like. If you want help with your systems, if you want help with sales processes, don't hesitate to reach out to JD.
JD Reese 41:38
Come hang out with us. Just come fly to St George and you can come hang out with our team for a few days. We're we're an open door so, and
Brian Charlesworth 41:44
St George has some of the best mountain biking and golfing in the world. So got the PGA now, let's go exactly. That's right next to my house down there too. So yeah, it's a great spot. All right, thanks everyone. We'll catch you next week. JD, thanks again.
