The First Five Seconds: Mastering Lead Response in Today’s Market

0:00You don't need more sales, you need more connections, you need more relationships. They're not having the intentional conversations that are strategic and focused on who they need to focus on. You're circled by a moat nowadays, caller ID. You got do not disturb, you got no solicitation on your door. All this is because we're being bombarded with this stuff. This is KGCI Real Estate on Air Live. You're a weekly deep dive into the strategies, trends, and tools shaping the real estate industry from market updates to actionable strategies and exclusive interviews with top agents. We are here to unlock your full potential and help you thrive. Thousands of agents trust KGCI every week. Now it's your turn. Let's go live. Here's Ian Wheatley. Hey, good morning. If the first five seconds of your lead follow-up sounds anything like, hey, this is thus and such from that brokerage is now a good time? You probably lost it. But Ian, I'm really good once I get him talking. I'm sure you are, I bet. But how often do you get that lead, that customer,

1:01that prospect past the word hello? Well, in this market attention spans are shorter than contract timelines. Most agents are losing that lead before they've even gotten their name out the mouth. And add in some shifting compensation rules of affordability pressures and MLS changes flying under the radar. It is no wonder that conversion feels like chaos. So today on Real Estate on Air Live we're breaking it all down. The one year after the NAR settlement went into place and what agents still need to be doing and thinking about why affordability is tight, but there's real opportunity. And how to master that first five seconds of a lead response because that is where conversion actually begins. Plus, you're weekly doze. The top five takeaways of Friday focus you're not going to want to miss. And of course, the ever popular real estate confessions because this industry stays unhinged. So I'm to go live. I mean Wheatley, this is real estate on Air Live. Let's go to housing headlines. All right, this one shouldn't have shocked me, but it did. Can you believe that it has been a year since the NAR settlement went into effect?

2:03Now, I had hosted EXP RealT's Big Agent Meeting last week. You did hear it streaming right here on KGCI RealState on Air on Friday, just ahead of the Friday focus. And one of their brokerage leaders, Holly Mayberry, gave a great synopsis of what's happened since and looking ahead to where things are going. You can watch the full show Commission clarity VA dominance and branding power on EXP RealT's YouTube channel. I've got that linked up in the show notes as well. But I had five takeaways from what she had to say. And I thought that right here would probably be a good place to share those because it's all about what agents still need to be doing and why the NAR settlement matters now more than ever. All right, number one, buyer agreements, they're not negotiable. Right? We knew this already, but you got to have that sign buyer agreement before showing any property, right? Including virtual showings. It's not optional. It's not flexible. It's the rule. It's at least created in my practice a stronger client experience and is something, honestly, I wish I had started five years ago.

3:05All right, number two, you're still being watched. Okay. All right, you have my attention, Holly. The plaintiffs in the Sitser Burnett case, yeah, the Sitser Burnett case are now filing to MLS's and associations asking how those rules are being enforced. Okay. Procridious and even individual agents could be next. Right? You've got seven years to get this right. Okay. Start with one consistent workflow and stick to it. Number three, compensation isn't dead. This is different. Right? Sellers are still paying by our agent comp and concessions. And now the FHA, the VA and Fannie and Freddie have confirmed that seller paid compensation doesn't count against concessions. So agents have the green light to negotiate hard and document everything. Number four, state laws are catching up. Right? Example of this is out of Virginia. That state of Virginia, the Commonwealth of Virginia, excuse me.

4:08Now requires fee-for-service agreements for all licenses, including commercial. Expect more states to follow suit. And at number five, MLS rules are changing by September 30th. Right? There's a new delayed marketing status that's coming to many MLS's. Right? This sets seller-limit syndication, but agents must fully explain the risks of reduced exposure. Right? So EXP Realty agents, you all got a form for that. Agents not with the EXP Realty. Make sure you're talking to your broker. So all in all, this isn't about compliance for compliance is sake. It's about positioning yourself as the pro who explains, the pro who negotiates, and the pro that delivers clarity when the rest of the industry is still adapting. Because a year later, then our settlement hasn't gone away. And neither should your systems. Standardize, document, educate, because that's how agents stay out of court and remain in control. And real quick, because this is housing headlines here on real estate on air live.

5:11Affordability is stretched, but it is not collapsing. According to Ivy Zellman, she was talking on CNBC's Squawk Box last week about housing affordability, now being the most stretched that it has been since the early 1980s between sky-high prices and still elevated rates. The situation for today's buyers that they're navigating, it's one of the toughest entry points in decades. And it is a big butt. It's not a collapse. Correction, yes, rebalancing, yes, stress-cess for the industry. Absolutely. But here's what we know, right? July's mortgage applications for new homes jumped 6.8% according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. The link when C's dropped to nearly 4%, 3.93% in Q2, and that's below the historical average. And the average 30-year mortgage rate just hit its lowest level of the year. According to multiple sources, including the Mortgage Bankers Association amongst others. So yes, affordability under pressure. Absolutely. But buyers are still finding ways to act.

6:11They're using buy downs. They're chasing builder incentives. And they're watching the market very, very, very closely. So agents, now is not the time to be pulling back on lead response at all. It's a time to get more precise. Your buyers may be on edge, but they're not off the table. And the ones who do act, they're acting fast. And the ones that don't, they're still watching. And that's a check your housing headlines here on Real Estate On Air Live. I'm Ian Wheatley. All right, so, uh, lifted in behind the curtain here. You know it's summertime when we usually do an interview in this part of the show. But today we're going to do something a little bit different. Something hit me a little sideways while prepping up for this episode. I was a reading this article from Leeds at Scale. It's titled the first seven seconds opening lines that prevent immediate rejection on cold calls. Not a clickbait. It was all hard truth. And their claim, more or less, is you got seven seconds at best to make your prospect trust you.

7:13Care enough to stay on the line and not instinctively hang up. And as I read it, this one line stopped me. If you don't have a reason for the call that benefits the prospect, you've already lost. Intuitively, I knew this, but my brain still lit up anyway. Because I thought about a bunch of past conversations that we've had right here on Real Estate On Air Live. Not the soundbites, not the big interviews, but those moments that stuck with me way after the mic turned off. And it all kind of clicked together. The best agents aren't selling in the first five seconds. They're serving. They're leading with clarity. They're leading with confidence. They're leading with relevance. They're intentional. And they show up with something that actually matters. So this week, doing something a little different, I've pulled five moments from past shows that perfectly capture how real agents win in those first five seconds and earn the next five minutes. And I want to start with Carrie Sove.

8:14She said something a little while back about prospecting that flips the whole idea of follow up on its head. You don't need more scripts. What you need are better reasons to call. So my favorite task that I'm getting realtors to schedule right now that's actually giving the biggest return to kind of tied into what you asked me. What has to be, they're uploading. You've heard of this, you know, you don't need more sales and you need more connections and more relationships, right? That's where it is going. They're not having the conversations or not having the intentional conversations that are strategic and focused on who they need to focus on. So I'm getting them to write a list of like a hundred people that would send them business, you know, or would be repeat customers. They're uploading it to chat to you, PT and asking it every week to give them a list of 20 people from that list who to reach out to with 20 reasons to reach out to them as well.

9:17So now they're, now they're having a hundred conversations and then on Friday, check in with me and ask me how my relates my relationships have bounced. And never, ever give me the same names back to back. So this is actually generating money for agents. I think that's making the biggest impact. That's not lead gen. Okay. That is relationship curation. And that's how you earn, not just the next five minutes, but you earn the next conversation. Next, we head over to coach Randy bird. I go back to this clip often when I'm talking with new agents because the biggest mistake I see is trying to talk to everyone with the same damn message. The problem is agents try to assume and talk to the whole market. The conversation to a seller is completely different than a buyer. Right. And it's not that it's out of integrity. It's just a different conversation. So it really depends who they are. And so the first thing I do is teach them to have those kind of dialogue, understandings so they can really talk to the client specifically to their needs.

10:27And then secondly, find out, be a master of the market. You know, one of the things I say is, you know, business intelligence. You really want to understand what's going on in the market because what I just said could have been said in any market. If I say in its interesting you ask, you know, as a seller, the valuations are up 7.8% last year in 2024. And there are already up 1% this year. So we're seeing even a bigger trend towards increasing valuations. Now the issue for you as a seller is we have low sales. We only had 386 sales in the MLS last year or in January as opposed to 450 last year, which is 27% lower. So I'm given specifics. I'm an industry expert in this moment. So I'm speaking with did a business intelligence to that particular category. That's when you'll set yourself apart. Then the agent just goes, oh, yeah, the business is great. I am so busy right now. And you know, it's just crazy what's going on ever since Trump was elected. It's just been busy, busy, busy. You know, that's just general terms of maybe their impression of the market.

11:35That is not a tactical position of you becoming the expert in the conversation. When you're speaking to everyone, you're relevant to no one tailoring your opening line isn't fluff. It's conversion and staying with Randy for a moment. He also dropped a master class in what I now call the value forward voicemail. Okay. This is how you start strong without sound like a salesperson. You're you're circled by a moat nowadays, caller ID. You got do not disturb you got no solicitation on your door. All this is because we're being bombarded with this stuff. Right. Now when you come from an active contribution or a place of contribution without an attachment, it sounds like this. Hey, ring ring. Hey, Ian. Hello, a Ian Randy bird over exp realty here. And listen, you didn't ask me to call, but I have something I prepared for your home. And it's called a comparative market analysis, a CMA. And I did it. I did on your home without asking, but I did it because we're doing it as part of a bigger CMA and the neighborhood.

12:41So you know, one, two, three banana street recently sold. So we were doing a CMA on that property and we included yours, which is normal. We take, you know, the hundred or 200 homes around it, but I've got this report done already. I was just curious. Would you like a copier? Would you like me to throw it away? I'll take it. Sure. Okay. So that little script changes the dialogue and changes the dynamic of it from asking for something from them to having something for them and you're on attached. That's why I say I could throw it away. It's no big deal. It's already done. Yeah. Now have I done it? No. How do I stay integrity with this? Right? How do I stay in a security? Right. I stay integrity by doing a CMA in that 500 or a thousand home area. Just take a recent closed, do a true CMA, see if it valued out, which what you think it was. And now you've included all the homes within a mile or two or 10 mile radius of that. And then you're in integrity with this. It takes you three minutes to do a cloud CMA. Right. So if somebody like you and says, Hey, I'd love it. I go, Okay, great.

13:46What's the best email? I'll send it over. And it's 45 pages of color photos, all the homes that have sold in the neighborhood. And I'll just do one thing. I'll call tomorrow just to make sure you received it, answer any questions. And then you won't hear from me unless you ask. Hmm. Would that be fair? That's fair. Okay. Cool. What's the best email? Blah blah blah. What's the best number to reach out to you tomorrow? Right. If they give resistance to that, I could still continue on. I get their email. I'm shooting. There's information. But I'm trying to add this to my database. So that would be a great example of a database ad. Right. Talk to Ian. He lives at 123 banana street. The CMA is about 474. Now he's in my web. He's in my web of everything from neighborhood reports to my podcast that I might do with the principal of the school in your area to the fire chief to the whatever. So I become that household name for you when it comes to real estate. And that's that's a process that's very successful right now. All right. There's no pressure there at all. There's just relevance. And that's how you bypass resistance and stay in the conversation.

14:57Let's talk foundation for a minute. The way you show up before the call matters just as much as what you say on it. Tina Belivo put a best here. I am a huge believer in having a CRM from day one and getting everyone you know in there. And then leveraging some kind of high quality email marketing. Good email marketing. That's been a whole journey for me to. So that's like the cornerstone of my email marketing strategy is I send this really awesome newsletter every month that people actually enjoy reading. They like text me and be like include this next month. And it took me a long time to crack the code on email people actually want to read or at least don't unsubscribe from. So you've got to have a CRM you've got to grow your database. You need to get people in there. And then having a thriving social media presence figuring out whatever your you know flavor is of how you're going to do that and where. And then start first you need to build that a bit and then start to use that as a net. You can't win with the first five seconds. If you're not even recognized when the call comes in familiarity creates a conversion space.

16:04And finally back again to Tina because I think this is the mindset agents need to close in my mind there I was like layers of the cake right there's like the cake is the database and the CRM. And then in my opinion the next layers almost always email and then social media your one channel your one place and it doesn't even need to be all of Facebook could just be a group that might actually be enough to have a thriving 20 or 30 unit a year solo agent business. Like you don't need more in a lot of cases you might need more people in your database. And then it's like okay like what am I going to do about that. So I think just moving in a logical order it's so easy to like buy shiny objects and want to like buy like internet leads and then like AI to convert it like all of that and like all of that is so cool. But generally that requires this like level discipline and financial investment that is a little bit more like being like a machine which I've had phases like that in my business but at my core I'm like a relationship person.

17:04So it's like how do I express that in my business and I think it's those three things database email social media repeat it's boring stay board. Stay board and save your energy and your money. When your systems write your calls aren't desperate their extensions of your value you're not begging you're building. So what's the thread that runs through all of this it's not better tech it's not clever lines it's intentionality it's preparation it's offering value before you ask for time. If you want to win those first five seconds you don't start with bitch you start with purpose. Alright segments over but the conversation continues if you missed any of those clips and you want to steal them feel free to check the show notes I've linked up to that article that kind of started it all. And the full segments of the full conversations are right there in the show notes always available on the always free real estate on your mobile app for iPhone and Android just search KGCI in the Apple App Store or Google Play and be sure to subscribe.

18:05If you're listening to this on demand as podcasts be sure to subscribe to KGCI real estate on air wherever you're listening so you're probably still sitting here thinking cool segment in but what do I actually do with my life now well first off. Chill just relax second I got you let's turn those aha moments into action here the top five takeaways from the first five seconds so that way you can stop losing leads before you even finish saying your name at number one it's personalization over persuasion courtesy a carry so be okay don't blast just connect use targeted outreach to build real conversations with people most likely to work with you at number two stop talking to everyone alright courtesy or Randy bird if you're using the same script for buyers and sellers and investors and everyone under the real estate son you're not building trust you're just blending in right tailor the message to the moment number three lead with the give also courtesy of coach Randy bird flip your intro from can I to here's what I already did for you right when you offer value first people stand the line at number four warm leads come from warm systems courtesy a tea.

19:18Bell of a when you're CRM and email game and that's dialed in your follow up isn't cold it's expected that's when people take your calls and at number five also from Tina boring wins right show up in their inbox show up in their feed and you live in their head every week then when you call they already know who you are and if those take a ways have you rethinking your openers your scripts or just let's be real you're in the middle of the world. And here approach to follow up make sure you're with KGC our real estate on air on Friday for our weekly Friday focus coming up it's the first five seconds how to master the lead response game right we are breaking down exactly what to say when to say it and how to make those first five seconds actually lead to five figures. And then we're going to start with the next calls videos follow up no fluff just strategy but first before we get there before we wrap the show we want to lighten it up a little bit because even when you say all the right things this business does to find a way to humble you it's time for real estate confessions where your wildest client stories take center stage but before we dive in we want to give one thing straight real estate confessions features stories from the wild world of real estate names and details may have been changed to protect the innocent and occasionally we're going to be able to do that.

20:40The not so innocent all confessions are shared in good humor and do not reflect the opinions of KGC I real estate on air its hosts or affiliates no agents licenses were harmed in the making of this segment enjoy responsibly. All right let's go. I have a real estate confessions because in real estate truth is stranger than fiction. I opened what I thought was a hallway closet to show my buyers the storage and instead revealed a man sitting in complete silence in the dark eating cereal. He didn't flinch my buyer whisper do do we leave I said we never speak of this again and then we bought the house. I meant to text my seller let's prep the home for staging auto correct changed it to let's prep the home for sacrifice they responded do you need candles or just the goat I said both we laughed but the home sold in three days coincidence.

21:41My buyer walked into the kitchen looked around and said this is the one I can feel it. Five minutes later she opened the fridge saw almond milk and said never mind I don't trust these people. She was dead serious we left she never looked back. Have a real estate confession of your own be sure to find KGC I real estate on air on Facebook and Instagram drop us a follow and be sure to DM us your confession and who knows. It'll probably be on the air next week. All right that is a wrap on this week's real estate on air live we've covered a lot of year into the now our settlement and you're still being watched so make sure your systems are tight affordability is stretched but the market's not collapsing yet. And if you're fumbling the first five seconds you're not just losing leads you're losing some real momentum but this is what you're here for clear strategy real examples no flood breakdowns from agents who are in the game and if they show spark something in you be sure to share it send it to your team post your takeaways everywhere on social media and you feel free to tag KGC I real estate on air and don't forget to catch this week's Friday focus the first five seconds out of master the lead response game.

22:52We'll show you how to go from maybe next time to let's book an appointment in under 10 seconds flat till then I'm you and Wheatley this is real estate on air live be sure be consistent be the pro that they remember and hey don't forget be good.