How Mike Darda’s team takes 45 to 55 listings a month in a buyer’s market

Loida Velasquez00:04

So for any agent that’s watching, what would you say would be, like, the top three things that they need to work on or do to become that listing ninja?

Mike Darda00:15

Yeah. So the number one thing in my book is to absolutely master the scripts and skills. So that’s number one. The pre-call script is critical.

00:26The listing presentation, all the objection handlers. So that stuff, you really gotta have some good skills there. And then once you know what to say, now you gotta master the schedule, so that you have a systematic way of having continuous success, with maybe a specific time prospecting every day to set your appointments, and then, of course, specific times that you’ll actually take and go on listing appointments.

00:56And then if you don’t have a lot of back end support, you’re gonna have to learn how to service those listings, right? So that’s the other piece that a good listing agent’s gonna have to have in place. Everything from negotiating offers to getting price reductions, the weekly phone calls, all that stuff.

01:14Very hard to do all that in volume without help. So you’re gonna probably need a really good assistant with that program.

Loida Velasquez01:36

Welcome back to a brand new episode of Vulcan7 Coaches and Mentors, where we bring you some of the best in the business to teach you their tips and strategies so that you can implement in your business immediately. Now, if you haven’t caught up on our previous episodes, make sure to watch them on YouTube or listen to them on your favorite streaming platforms.

01:55Now, with that being said, today we’re gonna touch on how you can be a listing ninja. Perhaps you’ve been wanting to take more listings, or maybe you’re transitioning from working with buyers and want to work with more sellers. Well, get your pen and paper ready, because we have an awesome coach and mentor that will bring you their tips and strategies so that you can start doing this right now.

02:16So with that being said, Mike Darda, welcome to the show.

Mike Darda02:20

Hi, Loida. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Loida Velasquez02:22

Yes, absolutely. For everyone that’s listening that maybe is not familiar with you, go ahead and share with us a little bit about your background.

Mike Darda02:32

Yep. 36 years in the business. A Mike Ferry trained agent for 25 years.

02:37Strong listing agent here in Southwest Florida, Cape Coral-Fort Myers market. And I’ve always been 80% listings, 20% buyers. And we built our company up… pretty much just myself as a solo agent for years. Then I proceeded to grow it to have my son in the business. Eventually, both our wives joined us.

03:02Now we’re actually a team of over 20 agents on our team, and we’re growing our team mainly with a listing focus at this time. So that’s how we’re growing it.

Loida Velasquez03:14

That’s awesome. So I know that we wanna touch on becoming a listing ninja, because prior to us hitting record, we were talking a little bit about that.

03:24So first of all, let’s say I am an agent. I have been in the business for maybe two, three years, and I want to become better at working with sellers and going after listings. What would be the first step, or how do you teach and train your agents?

Mike Darda03:40

So, you know, most of our agents already are familiar with working with buyers, and in our office, anyway, they all prospect.

03:48So it’s just a matter of shifting their focus on what scripts to be practicing and role playing. So if anyone on our team wants to begin taking listings, the first thing they have to do is they have to go through a two-week listing certified course, and I teach the course. We meet every day for an hour for two weeks, and we cover everything about listing a home from A to Z.

04:17I’m talking from filling out a prequalification form, to doing a CMA, to the whole process of what to do and say at the listing appointment. We use the Mike Ferry listing scripts and objection handlers, all the way to how to service a listing after you take it. So once they go through that course, they have to do an exam, and the exam is they have to present to two of us on the team in leadership the Mike Ferry listing presentation.

04:49Full thing, man. They gotta dress in suits or dress nice. They gotta come in, and all the objection handlers. And if they pass, then they become listing certified, and then we start turning them on to listing leads.

Loida Velasquez05:03

That’s awesome. Yeah. And it sounds almost like a boot camp for two weeks.

05:08Rigorous. You’re gonna learn everything, and then from there, I love the hands-on. You’re gonna get together with leadership. You guys are the sellers. The agent has to now perform and almost demonstrate to you that they are ready to take on listings. Because I feel that a lot of times agents say that they wanna work with sellers and they wanna get listings, but when the time comes, they’re not ready for it.

Mike Darda05:33

Yeah, and that’s a whole nother game. You know, passing the course is one thing, but keeping yourself sharp for the listing presentation is a whole nother skill set. So once they’ve passed that course, then they’re still required to meet with me once a week for a listing training that we go through.

05:55And where different agents will role play different parts of the presentation, and then the rest of the group will critique it. So that way we know they’re keeping their skills up, they’re practicing role playing, because they’re out there representing our brand in the field.

06:12The cool thing about the Mike Ferry presentation, at least for me, is I’ve done it for so long, right? I can tell, based on their conversion ratio, what’s wrong. I know, is it a script problem? Is it a pre-qualifying problem? Is it an energy, enthusiasm problem? So it gives a great deal of coachability to what they’re doing.

Loida Velasquez06:34

Yeah. So once they pass this course, what does their schedule typically look like moving forward?

Mike Darda06:39

Yeah, so in our office, first off, when they come here… I still prospect every day. I still take listings every day. So they see that, and I’ve been doing that for years in our community, so I think we actually kind of attract an agent that that’s what they’re looking to do.

07:01If they don’t wanna do that, they generally don’t pick to join our company. So with that culture in mind, a typical agent in our office will prospect anywhere from two to three hours in the morning. We literally have some that do it all day. They’re here before I get here, and they’re here after I leave, by their choice.

07:23And so then they’re setting appointments up for whenever their openings are. We try to encourage them to keep it late morning or afternoons, of course, so they can get time in for their prospecting. Then what they do, in our office anyway, is they turn all that over to our…

07:45We have a department that puts together the CMA for them. We still encourage them to review it and put their spin on the numbers.

Loida Velasquez07:53

Yeah. It’s awesome, and it sounds very organized. So the agent pretty much just has to make sure that once they do get a listing appointment, they perform, obviously work with the seller, and be able to do all of that.

08:07Now, I wanna talk a little bit about you, because I know you just mentioned, and even before we started, you’re still doing a lot of deals yourself, and even agents see that you’re doing that in your office. So can you tell us a little bit just about your schedule? Because I’m sure maybe someone’s watching here like, “How does he do all this, and train, and still do transactions?”

Mike Darda08:30

Yeah, great question. And one I had to learn the process of, because being a great agent, managing your own schedule, that’s terrific and highly profitable, of course. Learning to grow a team is a whole new animal in itself. And so what I’ve always been conscious of is, how do I do that without affecting my personal production?

08:52So what I learned to do right from the start is I learned I needed to hire a couple key people to run our company. So I hired a director of operations to work the administrative side, and then I hired a sales manager to work the buyer side, or agent side, I should say. So with those key people in place, that allowed me to still grow a team and do the personal production that I wanted to do.

09:22It’s not my goal to do it all the time. Like, this year I’ll do probably 150 sales myself, probably 200 listings. So what I’m doing now is I’m training a group of people to replace that production. So agents within our company… we picked out some that were really strong at the listing presentation.

09:45They were doing well on their own with the listing presentation. And I thought to myself, well, if we can get this group, kind of like a squad of elite listing agents that can go kick down any door in town and take that listing, that’s what I’m looking to do. So we had four volunteers for that program, and they are volunteers.

10:07And I meet with them once a week, and we just do nothing but work on their listing game to get them to the goals that they set for themselves. But I’m excited for that group, because I think that group could probably do, just among that core group, maybe 250 deals a year and be very successful, while still working five days a week and being home by 5:00 or 6:00 o’clock every day.

Loida Velasquez10:38

Absolutely.

10:38So for you, whether it’s 150 or 200 sales that you’re doing, obviously you’ve been in the business for quite some time. Can you share, perhaps, is it your database? Is it just referrals, people that know already who you are? Or how are you personally attracting these sales?

Mike Darda10:56

Well, the answer is yes. We do all of that.

10:59And so, database… we’ve got thousands of people that are past clients. I’ve had about 5,600 past clients in my career. I have one person on my team that I train personally. I role play with her once a week, and she does nothing but call our past clients, and she’s fantastic at it.

11:19So she keeps that part going. We have a team now that call all the new expireds, they call the for sale by owners, they call leads that come in on our website. So between that, we got those people… they’re probably making at least 300, 350 dials a day apiece.

11:44So you can imagine there’s a lot of outbound prospecting going on here. And so all of that generates, on any typical day, we probably generate three, four good qualified listing appointments every day. Yeah. So then we go through the whole process, and we’re typically listing right now, as a team, around 45 to 55 homes a month.

Loida Velasquez12:17

That’s great.

12:19So for someone that’s watching this, and maybe they are located in an area where it’s a buyer’s market, and I know we kind of touched on that.

12:27What can they do to get more listings or try to work with more sellers?

Mike Darda12:34

So we’re very much in a buyer’s market. There’s more sellers than buyers in our market.

12:40So getting listing appointments is easier, getting listing leads is easier. The name of the game in our market is accurate pricing. So we spend a lot of time training on getting the right price right from the start, and then we have actually two full-time listing managers on our team.

13:02And one of them I work with very closely, training on scripts and a process for getting price reductions. So, for example, any typical month, we’re averaging around 30 plus price reductions a month on our inventory, and that’s just because we are in a buyer’s market. If it was a seller’s market, that stuff would sell in a week or a couple days.

13:28But in our market, the average days on the market is about two and a half months.

Loida Velasquez13:34

Absolutely. So for any agent that’s watching, what would you say would be, like, the top three things that they need to work on or do to become that listing ninja?

Mike Darda13:46

Yeah. So the number one thing in my book is to absolutely master the scripts and skills.

13:54So you gotta master several things to be a good listing agent, which is probably why so many people don’t chase listings, ’cause there’s a lot more to get your skills up on. Primarily, obviously, all the appointment setting scripts: for sale by owners, past clients, expireds.

14:14So that’s number one. The pre-call script is critical. The listing presentation, all the objection handlers. So that stuff, you really gotta have some good skills there. So I’d recommend not only memorizing it… although we don’t require people to memorize it, but I’d recommend memorize it just so you know it well, and role play it with multiple different people throughout the week that are well trained on the same exact presentation that you plan on using.

14:43So that would be number one. And then once you know what to say, now you gotta master the schedule, so that you have a systematic way of having continuous success, with maybe a specific time prospecting every day to set your appointments, and then, of course, specific times that you’ll actually take and go on listing appointments.

15:07And so that would be the first two things. And then if you’re just an independent agent, you don’t have a lot of back end support, you’re gonna have to learn how to service those listings, right? So that’s the other piece that a good listing agent’s gonna have to have in place. Everything from negotiating offers to getting price reductions, the weekly phone calls, all that stuff.

15:30Very hard to do all that in volume without help, so you’re gonna probably need a really good assistant with that program.

Loida Velasquez15:37

Exactly. And I think especially when you have to have maybe the tougher conversations with sellers about adjusting the price, sometimes the agents are a little bit scared about doing that, because they feel that the seller might get upset or will wanna cancel.

15:52So yeah, I think being very well prepared is gonna take any agent to wherever they wanna go in the long run.

Mike Darda15:59

Yeah. And I’ll tell you, I used to be that way too. I used to be like, “Oh, I don’t wanna call this seller and ask them to reduce their price.” And I got over that pretty quick, though, because what I found is they’re not any happier when it expires.

16:15You might as well go ahead and, like a doctor, you gotta tell them what they need to hear to cure what ails them, which is to get it sold. So that’s just something that you gotta get over. Because even if you’re, like, a strong amiable and you don’t wanna call somebody to ask for a price reduction, consider the fact that they’re trusting you

16:39with their biggest sale, and they need your advice, so you owe it to them to make that call.

Loida Velasquez16:44

Yeah. And sometimes I feel like we ourselves, we start playing all these different scenarios, but we end up having the conversation, and they might say, “Well, Mike, you know, you’re the expert, so if you think that’s what we need to do, we’ll do it.”

16:58And we’re like, “You know, that was actually a much easier call than what I thought it was gonna go.” So sometimes you just gotta handle it on the spot, and things will work out the way that they’re supposed to.

Mike Darda17:08

Totally. And you know what, the price reduction call and the negotiating the offer, it’s the same conversation.

17:15You’re talking about somebody to accept the fact that they may be having to sell for a price a little less than they thought they were. So you gotta master that conversation at some point. If it’s not during the price reduction time, you’re gonna have to master it during the offer negotiating time, and you’re never gonna get the offer negotiating time if you don’t master the price reduction time.

Loida Velasquez17:36

Exactly. Yes, yes. So as we wrap this up, go ahead and share with everyone perhaps how they can get a hold of you, maybe more about your coaching or programs or anything that you offer agents.

Mike Darda17:47

Okay. Yep. So we don’t actually coach agents, except for the ones on our team. But I am in the Cape Coral, Fort Myers market.

17:55It’s Mike Darda with the Darda Group, and we’re with Compass. So we’re easy to find online, and we’d be thrilled to help you out any way we can.

Loida Velasquez18:04

Awesome. There you go. Well, Mike, thank you so much for doing this interview. For those of you that are listening, hopefully you were able to take a lot of notes.

18:14And you know, you just gotta get out there, become very good with your skills, with negotiation, with having conversations that you might think are tough, but they’re really not. And with that being said, thank you once again, and everyone, we’ll see you on the next one.

Mike Darda18:30

Thanks,

18:30Loida.