How Dominic Nicoli runs a 50 to 70 deal team by prospecting from 8:30 to noon

Dominic Nicoli00:00

So we really wanna be more skillful at asking questions instead of just telling people stuff. Ask the right questions so they can make their own decisions, and that’s how you can really become a compelling salesperson, in my opinion.

Loida Velasquez00:15

What is 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, I have an amazing guest out of California.

00:33I’m gonna go ahead and just bring him on. Dominic Nicoli. Welcome, Dominic.

Dominic Nicoli00:36

All right. Thank you. Yeah, happy to be here with you, Loida.

Loida Velasquez00:40

Absolutely. Yes. So for everyone that’s watching, maybe they’re not familiar with you, just go ahead and give us a little bit about your background and all about yourself.

Dominic Nicoli00:49

Yeah, so I started in this crazy business of real estate, I think in 1996, so it’s been a few years. And I’m in the Bay Area, Northern California. I work for a company called Intero Real Estate Services. I got in in ’96. I got connected with Mike Ferry Coaching relatively early on in my career, which, you know, we’ll talk a little bit about that.

01:15But we started calling expired listings and For Sale By Owners, and door knocking, and just listed, just sold calls and all those things. So I started off doing that, and still have it incorporated in my business to some degree today.

Loida Velasquez01:31

That’s awesome. Yeah.

01:32So what does your business look like today? Is it a team? How many agents? Tell us a little bit about that.

Dominic Nicoli01:38

Yeah. I have a small team. So I have a full-time assistant, a person that does running around for us, and then I have three licensed agents. Two of them are relatively new. They’re just in their first year.

01:50One has been with me for about seven years. And we’ll do between 50 and 70 transactions a year. We’re lucky we have a pretty high price point. My average price is right around $2.5 million. And so we’re in a very competitive market with extremely low inventory. So we’re always looking for great ways to add more inventory and generate business in creative ways.

02:19Yeah. All that kind of stuff, so yeah.

Loida Velasquez02:21

Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. You know, a question that I love to ask our guests is

02:26what did life look like before you got into real estate? Was there a previous career? What made you get into the business?

Dominic Nicoli02:33

So I was in college, and my parents were real estate developers, had a small brokerage about an hour from where I work now.

02:41And I always joke, I only knew one thing when I was graduating college, and that was that I was not gonna get into real estate. That was it. But I ended up, through a quirky series of events, meeting a guy named Gino Blefari, who some of your people will know. He’s now the CEO for Home Services of America.

03:02He was a broker at the time, a manager, and one of the owners of the company. And I ended up going to work as an assistant for him, which I spent about a year and a half doing, and he was the one that was guilty of getting me into this goofy business.

Loida Velasquez03:22

Okay. Yeah. So it was that person.

03:24Was it a big change for you? Was it what you were expecting, or what was that first year like?

Dominic Nicoli03:32

You know, so I had the luxury, which a lot of agents don’t, of being an assistant for a busy agent. So I was involved in a lot of listing presentations and buyer presentations. And so when I started on my own, I was young.

03:44I think I was 24. But I had a year under my belt of at least understanding how the process worked, and then I knew from my background that you had to prospect.

03:55So it’s funny, because I actually went to Gino one day, and I said, “Hey, after I finish my assistant work, is it okay if I go prospect?”

04:03And he was like, “Sure.” You know? And back in those days, we had these really old-fashioned, I think they were Floyd Wickman scripts or something. And I mean, I’m reading the script and I start setting appointments, you know? And so I just knew early on, it was clear that I kind of had an affinity to prospect.

04:23So that just to me was natural. I was in sales. I was like, I know I have to go out and find business, so I really wanted to do that, you know? So the answer to your question is, when I got into the business, I kind of knew what I was getting into. And I was embracing it, really, as a young person, and still to this day, I’m always looking to try to learn and improve, and I needed a lot of learning back then, and still could use some now.

04:56But it was a lot of that.

Loida Velasquez04:58

It’s funny that you mention that you wanted to prospect, because I feel that nowadays, that’s the last thing agents wanna do. It’s like, what do I have to do to not pick up the phone?

Dominic Nicoli05:10

You know, I was gonna talk today about magic answers, ’cause I know that’s what everybody wants, right?

05:14And the only one that I know that works every time is really, really working hard, which is the one that nobody wants to hear, of course. But it’s just true.

Loida Velasquez05:28

Exactly. Yeah. So for someone that’s watching that is saying, “You know what? First of all, I wish that I was in your market,” ’cause you’re saying it’s two and a half million or 2 million, your average price point.

05:40There’s some agents, they might be in the middle of nowhere where their average price point is like 100,000. But let’s say they’re like, “You know what? 2025, this is the year I’m gonna pick up the phone. I’m gonna prospect.” Where do they need to get started, first with their mindset and then with a schedule?

Dominic Nicoli05:56

Great question. So I have my team, we work every day on developing and making sure that everybody’s got some sort of a pre-prospecting routine. And it doesn’t have to be real complicated. I think, wake up in the morning, get some form of movement, whether it’s going for a walk or exercising or whatever it is that you do.

06:18I try to read or listen or watch something. I don’t do it every day, but most days I try to put something positive in my brain just to get myself in the right mind space. Eat something healthy, but make sure you show up at the office at a specific time, ’cause I think that’s…

06:39Your first appointment of the day is already set. That’s your prospecting appointment. So you should have one appointment set every day, no matter what, when you start that day. And I recommend, as soon as you can afford it, ’cause I couldn’t afford it when I started, to get involved with coaching.

06:59There are so many great coaches out there, whether it’s Mike Ferry or Tom Ferry, but it just really helped me as a young agent to get some clear direction and to help accountability. But practice what you’re going to say. I play golf. I always go to the driving range before I tee off, right?

07:17It’s the same thing with prospecting. You wanna practice a little bit, and you just gotta do it, and you get better by doing it. And you have to talk to people. And it’s really, we say, simple but not easy. The more people you talk to, the more business you will do.

07:40And we can talk more about who to talk to, but really fundamentally, you gotta be talking to… Especially as a new agent… Back when I started, I would sometimes talk to 50 or 75 people a day, and that was my job. My job is to set appointments and to get people to sign listings and to write contracts.

08:00I mean, that’s my job. So the sooner you figure that out, the better off you’re gonna be.

Loida Velasquez08:06

Yeah. So what kind of people obviously should agents be talking to? Are you still prospecting? What does your daily routine look like?

Dominic Nicoli08:15

Yeah, I still prospect. So pretty much from the time I get in the office, which typically is right around 8:00 o’clock in the morning, I’m on the phones by 8:30.

08:24And I’m generally prospecting till at least 12, and if business gets slow or I don’t have appointments, I’ll a lot of times prospect more in the afternoons. That’s my job. So I am clear, my job is to set an appointment or more every single day, and that’s my goal. So I always say that there’s…

08:45We know that there’s certain people that we already know wanna sell their property. So that would be like an expired listing or a For Sale By Owner. Some of the great people that you can get through Vulcan7. We already know they wanna sell, so I’m not gonna talk to somebody that I don’t know if they want to sell when I’ve already got people that do, right?

09:04So I’m gonna start with those, and then as I progressed in my business over time, now a bigger portion of the people I talk to are people that I already have relationships with, past clients. But in the beginning, it was expired listings, For Sale By Owners, follow up on all my leads, and then I would go around and call around any listing or sale that we had, or if we were working with a buyer that’s looking for a specific neighborhood, that type of thing.

09:30But just talking to as many people as I possibly can. And that’s looking for yeses.

Loida Velasquez09:37

Mm-hmm. Exactly. Yeah. And before we hopped on, I had asked you about Vulcan7, and you mentioned you’ve been using this platform for quite some time. So share with us your experiences, and if there’s any

09:48one deal that stands out that came through, like a lead, anything that you’d like to share.

Dominic Nicoli09:54

Well, so I’ve used it for a long period of time, and quite frankly, for me and my market, we’ve been in a market… I know it’s different than a lot of parts of the country, but we started the year here, in the marketplace that I serve, the county that I serve, with 500 homes for sale out of 400,000 homes.

10:14Which is very little, almost 1 out of 1,000. So when the market’s like it’s been here the last few years, and this is not a new phenomenon, it’s been like this for several years here, we don’t get a ton of expired listings. So they’re pretty few and far between. And so I might get one or two a day on some days, right?

10:33Which is not very many compared to a lot of markets. So you kinda have to know and work and service the opportunities that you have inside your marketplace. Some markets are very, very different. So we use it for, of course, expired listings and For Sale By Owners. A lot of calls, my team will call around listings and sales.

10:53We use the mapping, drawing features, and all those cool tools that we have. One of the things that we’re using it for quite frequently now is just the single property, where we can look up an owner’s information. So we might have a home builder that’s looking in a specific area, and we can then sell them a property, and they’ll give us all the listings of whatever we find, kind of thing.

11:18So we identify a lot of individual homeowners with properties that match what our clients are looking for. That’s been a really popular one. But over the years I’ve done hundreds of expired listings, and I found also, I’m not paid to do this, but this is just the truth.

11:37We’ve used a bunch of the different companies and services, and I have not found anyone that has better data than the data that Vulcan provides. So we have other companies sometimes that’ll send us lists of properties with phone numbers, and half the time I’m going back into Vulcan because you guys have information on

11:59property owners that some of the other services don’t even have. So kudos to you guys. But for us, it’s a very useful tool that we take advantage of every single day.

Loida Velasquez12:11

Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. No, thank you for sharing. I mean, we hear it all the time, and it’s exciting to hear how you’re using kinda like the neighborhood search and the skip tracing.

12:20Because a lot of agents that are listening, they probably think that Vulcan7 just has the expireds and For Sale By Owners, but there’s so many tools and resources within the dashboard that you can take advantage of.

Dominic Nicoli12:32

Yeah. It’s been a really, really integral part of our team. The whole team is set up to use it, and then of course we track calls and monitor stuff.

12:44So as the team leader, that’s useful for me too, so I can see what people are doing.

Loida Velasquez12:51

That’s exciting. Or not doing, maybe.

Dominic Nicoli12:54

Or not doing. Yeah. For sure.

Loida Velasquez12:56

Yeah. So I have a question for you. Let’s say an agent is watching this, and this is more in regards to the market, because where you’re at, there might be low inventory.

13:06In other places, there might be a lot of inventory. So let’s say I’m an agent watching this, and maybe I’m a newer agent and I’m like, “You know what, Dominic, how do I explain to people when they ask me, what is the market like right now? Is it a good time to buy, to sell? What should I do?” What would you tell an agent?

Dominic Nicoli13:24

I heard a great line. I was just at the one-on-one production retreat for Mike Ferry in January, which we go to every year.

13:34And somebody asked Mike, or Mike had a line that he said, “You know what, what do you say when people ask you how the market is?” And his line, which I loved and I’ve been using, is, “You know what?

13:43I’m so glad you asked. We’re actually right now looking for people that need to sell their house. So who do you know that might need to sell their property? We’ve got low inventory.” So I think that’s great. Other than that, I mean, obviously you could talk about market stats and stuff like that.

14:00“Hey, we’ve got super low inventory. We got a ton of buyers looking. It’s a great time.” But I like that line of, “You know what? I’m so glad you asked. It’s a great time. In fact, we’re looking for people right now that need to sell or buy. Who do you know that might need to do that here in the next 30 or 60 days?”

14:17So I think you can kind of just flip-flop it that way.

Loida Velasquez14:23

Yeah, that’s a good one. That makes sense. That’s good. And aside from that, let’s say an agent does just wanna get educated on the market. What are some of the statistics or things that they need to be looking at on the MLS so that they are an expert in what’s really going on

14:38in their area?

Dominic Nicoli14:40

Really good question. So what I do with my team, we have a meeting every Monday, and so every week I pull just a few basic stats. And I want the team to know these, ’cause when you’re prospecting, you’re talking to people, it’s really important to come across as a market expert.

14:56So you should know how many homes are for sale, how many homes sold the last month, how many are currently pending. And then, depending on the market, for us now, there’s not a lot that expire and cancel, but if I was in a regular market that had a lot of expireds and cancels, I would wanna know those numbers as well for my listing presentations.

15:16And then things like days on market, any of it that’s relevant. When you go meet with a seller, a lot of times what I’ve found is that sometimes the sellers know more about the real estate market than the agent does. You never wanna be in that spot. So when we go on a listing appointment, we study everything about that specific little market.

15:38We work a lot of different markets that are very different, so we have to take some time every time we go on an appointment to make sure we’re educated on all those numbers. And I want the clients to know that I know those numbers, because it’s gonna give me credibility as a market expert, to know the basic things.

15:54So for the really analytical people out there, don’t go overboard, ’cause you’ll lose people. But you should just know a few of the basic things, so you sound like you know what you’re talking about. Really, really important.

Loida Velasquez16:06

Perfect. Yeah. So for everyone that’s watching, they might need to rewind the past couple minutes to just write down some notes on what you just said.

16:14And I have one more question for you. Let’s say I’m a potential buyer, because obviously the price point where you’re at, it’s pretty high. What do you say to potential buyers that tell you, “You know what? I’m waiting for the interest rates to go down. I really wanna buy, but it’s just, everything’s high right now.”

Dominic Nicoli16:31

Yeah. So that’s very common with buyers and sellers, by the way. “So we wanna wait.” And so the question is… There’s a great book that I have that I highly recommend, it’s called Exactly What to Say to Real Estate Agents, and it’s got a lot of great little tweaks that you can add into your existing scripting.

16:50It’s just little things. But there’s things like, how certain are you that the interest rates are gonna come down? What would happen if they didn’t? If rates go down, what do you think is going to happen to the price of real estate, right? Would you rather buy now at a lower price, or risk that they go down and guess what happens, right?

17:13Prices go up, and then you’re paying more for the property. So why not get in while you can still get a lower price, you know? And then there’s all those great lines, like you date your interest rate, you marry your property, okay? But I think what you wanna be telling people is it’s a huge advantage to buy when the rates are higher, as long as you can qualify for it, as long as you can afford it.

17:34But it’s actually beneficial, because when rates come down, it’ll cause prices to go up, you know? And buyers would much rather, in my experience, get in for a lower price rather than be paying more. The other thing is, again, in a really competitive market, one of our listings that we’ll be selling tomorrow will probably have between 20 and 30 offers on it.

17:59We just have such a constrained supply, we have lots of buyers here, and if the rates went down, that might go to 10 more buyers, right? I mean, so more competition, which is gonna drive prices up. So it’s really beneficial for people to get in. And if they think prices are gonna go up, I always say to people, “Get in as soon as you can, and then

18:25enjoy the equity that you’re gonna build over the next two or three months.” Wouldn’t that be great? And so I think it’s just explaining what it is with them. And I always tell agents too, ’cause I think this is the thing that gets missed a lot, and I know we obviously don’t have much time, but everything we do for our clients, whether they’re buyers or sellers, we wanna make sure we always tell the truth 100%, we gain their trust.

18:52I really talk to my team a lot about this. I think the fundamental part of being a great salesperson is to really gain trust, because the buyers or sellers are not gonna accept your message if they don’t really trust that you’re doing what’s best for them, always. And so be careful about making promises or anything like that.

19:10Just ask questions. “How certain are you that rates are gonna come down? What would happen if they didn’t? If rates come down, do you know what typically happens to prices? They go up. Would you rather buy at a lower price now, or risk buying at a higher price if you think rates are gonna come down?”

19:23And it’s not me promising or telling you anything. I’m just asking questions that are gonna make a compelling case for them to maybe take action when they wouldn’t want to, you know? And so we really wanna be more skillful at asking questions instead of just telling people stuff, you know?

19:44Ask the right questions so they can make their own decisions, and that’s how you can really become a compelling salesperson, in my opinion.

Loida Velasquez19:52

No, I love it. Asking questions, listening, educating them and leading them to make a wise decision that they’re gonna be happy with.

20:01The last thing we want is someone being upset that their agent told them or made them do something.

Dominic Nicoli20:07

Exactly. “Hey, we can wait if you want, but what would happen? What would happen if this happened? What would happen if that happened? Why not buy now?”

20:15Take advantage of the place that we’re at. So…

Loida Velasquez20:19

So for anyone that’s watching, maybe they have a referral for you, maybe they have a listing, because you have so many buyers, right? Tell everyone where they can find you, and also where in the Bay Area you are located.

Dominic Nicoli20:32

Yeah. So we are about 45 minutes south of San Francisco. I think most people probably know what an iPhone is. We’re two or three miles from the Apple campus. We’re right by a lot of the technology companies. We service Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.

20:51So anywhere between San Francisco and San Jose, I’m your guy. Call us, we’ll take great care of your clients and make sure we make you look like a star. And my link to my website is underneath my name there. It’s thenicoligroup.com. And I’ll give you my phone number, too. I know we didn’t put that up there, but it’s 408-892-3122.

21:12408-892-3122.

21:17And oftentimes, too, if you’ve got somebody in the Bay or Northern California, you can always call me, and if we can’t service you, I’ll put you with a really highly qualified, awesome agent that can help you, and I’m always happy to do that.

Loida Velasquez21:35

Awesome. Thank you so much, Dominic, for coming in.

21:37All right. You know, I told you in the beginning it was gonna go by fast. Here we are at the end. It went fast. But you dropped a lot of great information. We’re gonna make sure to put all of your links in the description box below. And with that being said, everyone, we’ll see you on the next one.