How Dan Lesniak won three $1M-plus listings calling expireds 3 hours a day

Dan Lesniak00:00

On prospecting, I really just focus on the expireds. These are people that have raised their hand, they said they wanted to sell, and then for whatever reason it didn’t work out. A lot of them re-list, so it’s a huge opportunity. And I also like it too, because it’s a very transferable skill. If you can do it in one market or one price point, you’ll be able to do it anywhere.

Loida Velasquez00:23

What’s going on everyone? Welcome back to a brand new episode of Vulcan7 Coaches and Mentors, where we bring you some of the best in the industry to share with you their tips and strategies so that you can implement them in your business immediately. Now, on today’s episode, we’re gonna be talking about team building, prospecting and something called risk reversal.

00:43So if you’re curious as to what that is, make sure to get your pen and paper ready. And with that being said, I’m gonna go ahead and bring on today’s guest, Dan Lesniak. Welcome, Dan.

Dan Lesniak00:53

Welcome. Thank you so much for having me today.

Loida Velasquez00:55

Absolutely. So for everyone that’s watching that maybe is not too familiar with you, just go ahead and give us a little bit about your background.

Dan Lesniak01:03

Sure. I got into real estate about 12 years ago. I thought it would be something I was gonna do part-time. I previously was in the Navy. I worked in defense contracting, and I kind of got it as a side hustle, I guess you could call it. And then also I wanted to get more sales experience actually, ’cause I was interviewing for different jobs that wanted more direct sales experience, and they told me to go try sales for a year and then come back.

01:35And the quick story was I did that. I ended up selling about 22 million my first year, so I quit my full-time job within a few months, and then never went back and interviewed for any other jobs. I just kept doing real estate. And year two I started to build a team, and then I built that up to about four or five agents, and then switched brokerages, and that’s where I met my wife, Keri Shull.

02:03And she had a team, and we kind of started off as competitors, and then things happened and we combined our personal and business lives, and we built a really huge team at Keller Williams and then moved, started our own independent brokerage, which we did for like eight or nine years. And then along the way we built some coaching programs and did events for other agents, and then the last two years we’ve kind of been doing the same thing, except we moved our entire brokerage over to eXp Realty.

02:35And we’ve sold, through our team, as much as like 720 million. That was our best year. And right now we have a team of about 40 to 50 agents in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area. And then we coach agents in a lot of different states, and then have agents that have joined us at eXp that we also coach and mentor.

Loida Velasquez03:00

That’s awesome. That’s awesome that you met your wife through real estate. You mentioned quite a few things. I wanna take it back to the beginning, because you mentioned you were doing this part-time. And there’s probably gonna be a lot of agents that are watching this that are doing real estate part-time that eventually want to transition into this full-time.

03:19So for you, I mean, what did that schedule look like for you to be consistent and do the volume that you did?

Dan Lesniak03:26

Yeah, great question. So my job was 9:00 to 5:00, kinda like most jobs. So it wasn’t too difficult, ’cause most people wanted to see homes in the evening or the weekends, and that’s when most sellers wanted to meet.

03:42So it really fit well with that. I had to fit in prospecting around the work schedule, obviously, so that was kind of a challenge. But I was able to do usually an hour in the morning before work and then an hour or two after work. I didn’t do as much cold calling as I do now.

04:06I started off by really focusing on the building that I lived in, so I would prospect a lot in my own building, just through networking, meeting people, doing buyer seminars in the condo for the different people that were maybe gonna move up. And then a lot of what I did back then, we were really in a low inventory market, kinda like we are today in many markets.

04:34And I would kind of find out what a move-up buyer wanted. There would be nothing on the market, and then I would go out and door knock or just call up the sellers or look on Zillow for for sale by owners, or they used to have a make me move category, which they don’t anymore. But I would contact those types of people and just have a conversation like, “Hey, I have a buyer interested in something like this house.

05:00This would be a great fit. There’s not much else on the market. Would you ever consider selling?” And that’s how I put together a lot of deals that first year, was just kind of finding the buyer first and then trying to find the listing off market.

Loida Velasquez05:15

So you started to build that pipeline just through your networking and your efforts that you would do in the after hours or even before you started your regular job, right?

Dan Lesniak05:24

Yeah. A lot of it was just through that.

Loida Velasquez05:27

So then as you get to the point where you’re ready to now transition into this full time and leave what you were doing behind, at what point was it that you felt that, okay, you know what? Let’s start building a team, or I can’t do this by myself anymore?

Dan Lesniak05:45

Yeah. So I quit my full-time job, I think about three or four months into the journey, ’cause I had more in my 90-day pipeline than the job was gonna make me in a year. So I thought, this is crazy. Maybe it’s a little bit of a risk, but I think I’ll be able to continue this. But worst case, I have a year of salary already kinda built in.

06:08And then at the end of that first year, I was averaging like three plus deals a month, right around that level. I went out and hired an assistant, and that was kind of step one. And then I went out and got one or two agents that wanted to join the team, right?

06:30But I think the key thing that a lot of people kind of mess up is go get the assistant first, so you can kind of increase your own production and do more personal deals, and then bring on the other agents. ‘Cause if you don’t do that first, then you become the admin for multiple agents, and it’ll make your own production suffer.

06:55So you kind of have to build the administrative backbone first before you go out and add agents to your team.

Loida Velasquez07:04

Yeah. No, definitely. Now, I know you mentioned a couple minutes ago, back then you were not doing as much cold calling. So you are doing it now? Or what does that look like?

Dan Lesniak07:15

Yeah.

07:15So right now, I do about three hours a day, and I really want, A, to always have that skill of being able to generate leads that really don’t cost anything, other than a dialer subscription, right? They’re very low cost when you think of it that way. So I wanna maintain that skill for myself, and then I think that enables me to teach the agents on our team, and that we’re coaching, better if I’m still in the game.

07:47And then, in order to get our team and eXp members doing it, we do a daily session on Zoom where me and a couple of the other leaders that really do a lot of prospecting, we get on and we do role play for 15 minutes, and then at 8:00 we start dialing, and I think this morning there were like 10 of us on Zoom.

08:10So it’s just something to keep my own skills very sharp, bring in a lot of extra deals and teach others, right? And it’s been working really well. The last couple months I’ve taken three listings that are all million dollar plus, just from expireds.

Loida Velasquez08:35

That’s awesome. Yeah, and I was about to ask, as you’re prospecting, so you mentioned you’re going after expireds. What other lead sources are you going after?

Dan Lesniak08:45

Well, on prospecting, I really just focus on the expireds. I do do some circle prospecting around open houses that we have for the team.

08:58So I think there’s value in that. But I think the one I enjoy the most, just because it’s the most now business, I think, is the expireds. These are people that have raised their hand, they said they wanted to sell, and then for whatever reason it didn’t work out.

09:14And I don’t know the statistics off the top of my head, but I think a lot of them re-list, right? So it’s a huge opportunity, and I also like it too, because it’s a very transferable skill. If you can do it in one market or one price point, you’ll be able to do it anywhere.

Loida Velasquez09:37

Exactly. Yeah. I’m glad that you brought that up, because we see that happening a lot of times where agents sign up with Vulcan7, maybe they move from Michigan to Florida, or myself, I moved from California to Florida, and just like you said, if you have the skill, you’re able to have those conversations with these homeowners, that if they still need to sell and you know what to say and how to help them, they’ll probably hire you.

Dan Lesniak10:03

Yeah. I mean, it’s all about repetition and just getting enough at-bats, and eventually you’ll figure it out. You just have to punch through some initial period of uncomfortableness and getting the hang of it. But it’s gotta be one of the best ways to get listing leads.

Loida Velasquez10:27

Absolutely. Yes. Now, obviously you have also mentioned the team building. This is awesome, that you’re tapping in with your team and your agents at eXp, and they can see you prospect and be hands-on. So when it comes to team building, you have been very successful with that, even with your wife.

10:45So can you kind of share what that has looked like and how you have scaled that over time?

Dan Lesniak10:51

No matter how you generate the lead, or if it’s a list in Vulcan, you have to have a conversation, right? So we’ve built up an inside sales agent team. Usually we maintain about five or six people in that role, and their only job is to call our leads.

11:10So we have many, many leads over the years. We’ve been doing this for a decade at a really high level, a lot of homes sold every year. I think our lowest year in the last 10 years was like 300 homes sold. So we have a huge database of past clients, past leads, and at the end of the day, you have to call them and have conversations.

11:30So our ISAs are doing that. Our buyer’s agents and listing agents are doing that as well. So they’re calling leads every day. So no matter what type of business you run and how you get the leads, at the end of the day it really all starts with a conversation.

Loida Velasquez11:50

So I know we mentioned the assistant, right?

11:54That’s something that a lot of agents, sometimes they get, they don’t. At what point would you tell an agent you’re ready to maybe get a buyer’s agent or start adding agents under you? Because sometimes I see agents, they get excited, they wanna build a team, but they don’t even have production going on, or they don’t even know what to do.

12:13So what advice do you have for them?

Dan Lesniak12:17

Yeah, I think you should hire some type of admin support, whether it’s full-time or virtual, when you’re somewhere in the realm of two to three deals per month. And then I don’t really think you should go out and get buyer agents, team members, until you’re at like four or five deals a month at least.

12:40And I think a lot of people skip that step, and they’re doing like one deal a month and they don’t get an assistant. They go get a buyer’s agent, ’cause they’re like, “Well, I can pay them on a commission and have a split.” But you still have all that admin work and tasks to do.

12:55The average hours per listing is 25. The average hours spent on a buyer is like 50 or 60, according to NAR. So there’s a lot of time that you can hire out. And if you don’t wanna start with someone either hourly or full-time, you can go use transaction coordination services, and they’re usually like $400 for a contract to close and then usually $200 for listing prep.

13:28So that money spent buys you back so much more time that you can focus on lead generation, right? Prospecting. So the majority of your time in the business, I think, needs to be spent on lead gen and prospecting, and you need to free up as much time as you can. And then as you start to build the team, now your time needs to be spent really on lead gen, prospecting and recruiting and training and kind of setting the vision for the team.

14:00But most people just skip that step, though, of building the infrastructure and buying back their time, and then their prospecting suffers. So I see that a lot. Agents kind of get together, form a team that’s not really a team, and they don’t have the admin support, and they don’t really have a team.

14:22They just have someone they’re hanging out with, I think, in a lot of cases.

Loida Velasquez14:27

Yeah. And I think sometimes it’s even those agents that end up losing motivation or they get discouraged, because maybe they start comparing themselves to other teams that are excelling, and then it defeats the purpose.

14:40They’re not prospecting or doing what they’re supposed to be doing at that point. So one thing that I brought up in the beginning that I know you talk about is risk reversal. So share with us exactly what that means, and just any details you wanna give us.

Dan Lesniak14:57

Yeah. So we’ve used risk reversal in marketing and in just negotiating buyer and seller agreements upfront.

15:04And there’s things, I think, in a transaction, more often than not on the seller side, but it also applies to the buyer side. There’s these different aspects of it that really create fear for sellers and buyers, and risk reversal is a way to alleviate that, right?

15:23So for years we’ve marketed, “If you buy a home with us, we’ll sell yours for free,” or, “If you buy a home with us, we’ll guarantee the sale of your home.” And there’s different levels and strategies you can do with that. And that marketing generates a ton of interested sellers for us.

15:45It’s also a very effective closing tool when you’re in front of a buyer or seller. If you were prospecting, for example, for an expired listing, a lot of times they’re kind of tired of the whole process. They’re tired of real estate agents, right?

16:03They don’t trust real estate agents. And one way to just add that into your phone script is like, “If I can get you the results you want and show you how I can actually guarantee it or you pay me nothing, right? Would that be exciting for you?” And that’s really just going in. At the end of the day, you go into the listing appointment, and you should know a price that you definitely know it’ll sell for.

16:28And if the seller agrees, right? It has to be mutual agreement. You’re gonna basically tell them, “If I don’t sell at this price, I’ll sell it for free,” right? “I’ll reduce my commission by the amount of the offer you take, up to the amount of my commission,” right?

16:44And that’s an easy way, I think, for people that don’t wanna do the home sale guarantee, because there’s that level of it too, where you’re actually guaranteeing that you’ll buy it, which we’ve run that program as well. But I think the easiest one for people to adopt is, “Hey, if I don’t hit X price in the next 60 days, I’ll reduce my commission up to the amount that it sells for.

17:09Not to exceed the commission amount.” You can also do it on the buy side too. One thing we offer in our buyer guarantee, ’cause now with the new laws, right, we all need to treat buyer appointments the same way as a seller appointment, which you should’ve been doing all along anyway.

17:29But one of the programs we offer buyers is like, “Hey, we have a love it or leave it guarantee, where if you don’t love your house after you get it, in the next 12 months or two years, whatever you want, we’ll sell it for free for you,” right? We’ll sell it without a listing commission.

17:48And again, these things, people get scared maybe that they’ll lose commission or have to sell a home for free, but it brings you so much extra business, and so many happy clients that leave referrals and lead to more business, that even if every now and then you don’t make commission on the deal, you’re gonna have like a 50X return on it.

18:10So that’s how we use risk reversals.

Loida Velasquez18:14

Okay. Yeah, no, it totally makes sense, and I love all of these different options and ideas. It’s like you’re thinking outside of the box, and just like you said, it’s bringing in more business. Now I know there’s probably gonna be an agent that’s listening to this, they heard you say guarantee.

18:29So whenever you do use the guarantee, do you also write it into the contract, or what steps do you take to make sure that if you guarantee something, that it happens, or if it doesn’t, can you kind of share a little bit about that strategy?

Dan Lesniak18:44

Yeah. It’s just written into the listing agreement or the buyer agreement.

18:47Most states have an other terms section, or you can attach a one-pager if you just have a standard way of doing it. And it really is just problem-solving with the seller to create something that gives them more security, more peace of mind.

Loida Velasquez19:03

Yeah, absolutely. I think at the end of the day, that’s what sellers want.

19:08It’s like, if you put your money where your mouth is, I’m more likely to hire you, type of thing.

Dan Lesniak19:16

Exactly.

Loida Velasquez19:16

So for right now, we’re getting close to the end of the year, starting 2025 soon. What would you say are three things that agents need to be focusing on right now?

Dan Lesniak19:28

Oh, that’s a great question.

19:30Yeah, I think number one, expireds. There’s just more of them coming up, more coming up this time of year as well. So I would definitely focus on expireds. I would definitely focus on your sphere of influence, past clients. A lot of people that list in the spring, they think about it over the holidays.

19:50So get in front of your past clients now, and your sphere of influence now. And then another thing that we like to do this time of year is send out equity reports to past clients. So it can be something as simple as screenshotting Zillow and the Zestimate of their home, and then just printing it out and sending them a note and saying, “Hey, I saw this on Zillow and was thinking about you.

20:18Do you think this number is right, that they have?” And then call them up right after you send it, and that way you’re getting in front of them before the holidays, before they start to talk to friends and family about moving.

Loida Velasquez20:33

Awesome. Yeah. So for those of you that are listening, you might need to rewind the last couple of minutes that Dan just mentioned.

20:41And now Dan, as we wrap up, where can people find you, should they have a referral, wanna learn more about your coaching, your program, your network?

Dan Lesniak20:50

Oh, yeah. You can text me. My cellphone, I think it’s on the thing here, 703-638-4393, or I’m very active on Instagram, so if you send me a message, it’s just thedanlesniak on Instagram.

21:06So just my name with a “the” in the front.

Loida Velasquez21:09

Okay. Awesome. All right, Dan. Well, thank you so much for joining us today on this episode. For those of you that are watching, if you enjoy this, make sure to give it a thumbs up, share with someone else, and we’ll see you on the next one. Bye.

Dan Lesniak21:20

Thank you.