How Peter Porcelli honed his listing presentation on 10 FSBO appointments a week

Peter Porcelli00:00

Prospect, prospect, prospect. Your job is talking. That’s your job. 95% of your job is talking, so learn to do it well. And so that means scripting, that means talking to more people. Prospecting is like you think about the old days where the guy’s mining for gold. You spend most of your day digging in mud and muck.

00:21That’s what prospecting is, and you have to keep talking to more and more people.

Loida Velasquez00:30

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 in your business immediately. Now, today’s episode is going to be specifically for those of you that are probably newer in the business, or maybe you’re just struggling trying to figure things out.

00:54So if that is you, go ahead and get a pen and paper ready because today’s guest is going to be sharing exactly what it is that you need to do to take control of your business now. So I’m gonna go ahead and bring on today’s guest, Peter Porcelli. Welcome, Peter.

Peter Porcelli01:10

Hello, Loida, thank you for having me. That was a tall order to live up to.

Loida Velasquez01:16

Yes. So for everyone that’s watching, for the audience that maybe is not familiar with you, go ahead and give us a little bit about your background. Let us know kinda how everything started when it comes to real estate and Peter.

Peter Porcelli01:28

Oh, boy. I was born at an early age, and I have an interest in a lot of topics.

01:33I went to college to study business. I wanted to be a stockbroker, and I took a business law class, and the professor owned real estate, and he would discuss it, and we discussed real estate law as part of that class, and I became fascinated by it. And so I thought, “I think I’m gonna be a real estate investor.”

01:50So I went to see the professor in office hours, and he had about 50 or 60 houses. And so I said, “Do you think it would be smart for me to get a real estate license and learn vicariously through clients so I’d make fewer mistakes when I’m using my own money?” And he said, “I think that’s wonderful.”

02:07So I did just that straight out of college. I was 25 years old when I graduated and got a real estate license, and I looked like I was 14. So it became challenging that people didn’t wanna trust this kid to handle their real estate, but I got in with investors right away. I understood the numbers of it, and I liked the non-emotional purchases and transactions.

02:31I was very much drawn to that in the beginning. And eventually, I got into brokerage management. I got into helping real estate agents by recruiting them through coaching and helping grow their business. I would say, “If I can help you make more money, more sales, then would it not make sense to join my brokerage and pay me that fee instead of the broker who isn’t helping you?”

02:55And so at one point I recruited 112 agents in 12 months doing just that, and that’s what led me into doing the coaching thing. All said, I think I’m in my 23rd year now.

Loida Velasquez03:08

That’s awesome. And I know that before we started and pressed record, you were also mentioning you have background in going after for sale by owners and expireds.

03:16So can you just share a little bit about that and how that experience went?

Peter Porcelli03:20

Yeah. So for sale by owners and expired listings are totally different types of sellers. The FSBO is the do-it-yourselfer, thinks, “I don’t need any help,” and the market usually helps correct that attitude. The real trick, in my opinion, is to help them to see where their shortcomings are and express to them that if you’re selling your house, then you’re acting as your own real estate agent.

03:44And then I kind of… I like to use humor a lot when I prospect in my scripts and in doing my business. And I want to express to them that they say that the guy who represents himself in court has a fool for a client. And it’s similar to that in real estate as well. And just pointing out the little tips and things, “Hey, how are you doing this?”

04:06“How are you doing that?” And their answers are not good. And so help them, correct them, and then just stay in touch. I would talk to them two or three times a week, and it would take usually about four weeks before they would list, and some of them never would.

04:19But the big thing about that as well is that a lot of real estate agents start off the conversation with a FSBO with a lie, and I think that’s a giant mistake.

04:28The lie is, “I think I might have a buyer interested in your home. Can I come and look at it?” And what they’re really trying to do is do a sneaky listing presentation, and once the seller figures that out, then you’re a liar and they don’t wanna do business with you. I’ve seen agents who will actually bring another agent with them and pretend like that’s the buyer, and they eventually figure that part out, and then your name is mud to them.

04:51So my script was, “If I can show you a way that I could sell your house faster, net you more cash, and I do all the work, would you hire me today?” And the answers were typically, and this was on the first call, the answers were typically, “Well, send me to a website. Tell me over the phone.” And so my script was, “No, no, no.”

05:10“If you wanna see my plan, you’re gonna have to see my face.” And then I got the listing presentation. So they knew I was coming to talk about listing their house. Out of hundreds of those listing presentations, just one listed with me on that first day. The rest of them, like I said, it took an average of four to six weeks.

05:29I also figured out that I had been in the business about five or six years before I tackled FSBOs full-time. That’s all I did, was for sale by owners for about a year and a half, and it took me about 100 listing presentations before I had it down. And I was doing two per day, Monday through Friday, so 10 listing presentations per week.

05:49It took me about three months until I got actually good at my listing presentation. And that was eye-opening for me as well, because a lot of agents go on one or two or three listing presentations a month. I was besting that every week, and it took that long before I felt comfortable, and that becomes challenging for an agent to be a good listing agent and give the good presentation if they’re not getting that many at-bats.

Loida Velasquez06:18

You’re mentioning all of this, the for sale by owners. Did you have a coach or what made you get started with for sale by owners? Because I know a lot of agents are like, “For sale by owners, I’m never gonna go after them. I’m so scared they’re gonna yell at me,” and all of this. But you’re like, “I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna get so good at it.”

06:34So what was that like for you?

Peter Porcelli06:36

When I see a for sale by owner sign in someone’s yard, to me it says, “Please help.” Because I know the statistics and I know the challenges of this business. And so I just saw that as a cry for help. And so I know that they don’t see it that way, and it’s my job to insert myself and demonstrate my value to them.

06:57And like I said, a lot of agents, they look at the scripting part of it as rigid, a soliloquy on a stage like you’re a Shakespearean actor with a skull in your hand. And I saw it more as a conversation. And to try to show, for example, just a simple question, how are you qualifying your buyers? The most common answer, I would say 95% of FSBOs will give you, is, “Well, isn’t that the buyer’s job?”

07:22And I would say, “Okay, let’s say it is. You court a buyer, you go under contract, 30 days later you go to the closing table and the lawyer looks at you and says, ‘This guy doesn’t have any money.’ You just wasted all your time with this person. You could’ve sold it to somebody else. So don’t you think maybe it’s your job to qualify the buyer?”

07:41And then you can hear the light bulb going off in their head over the phone. “Oh.” And so when you ask certain questions like this, then they start to slowly recognize that they are unequipped for this job. And not just that, but most agents who contact a FSBO only will do it once or twice and then give up.

08:01And so they hear from 100 agents over the first three or four weeks, but very few continue. So I’m the guy who’s left hanging on. I’m developing a relationship with the seller, and I’m the last man standing. And sometimes I would call them after four, five, six weeks, I’ve got to know them over the time, and they answer the call and I say, “Just to let you know, Bob, today is National Get Off the Fence Day, so which way you going?”

08:28And they would laugh and say, “Come on over.”

Loida Velasquez08:31

I love that. And a couple minutes ago you mentioned something about humor, and you use humor. And even that line, I think it’s so important when you use humor because then it makes people more like, “Okay, yeah, I’m gonna be more at ease. I’ll listen to you.”

08:45You get a chuckle out of me or a little laugh. Have you always been like that? Or obviously even with you, you are the author of the book, Politically Incorrect Real Estate Agent Handbook. I’m sure there’s a lot of humor in there. What made you make sure to include humor in everything that you do?

Peter Porcelli09:05

A little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down, as they say. The sense of humor that I had was a detriment to me in school. I was labeled the smartass, the one that the teacher didn’t want always raising their hand and asking the smart aleck question or the hole in the logic of the lesson.

09:24And I had a teacher in the fifth grade who made a deal with me, and she said, “I will let you do five minutes of stand-up comedy after lunch every day if you will keep your trap shut the rest of the class.” And I said, “Fantastic.” So I got my start with public speaking in the fifth grade, and all I would do is get jokes out of the Reader’s Digest or Boys’ Life magazine and go up and recite them.

09:46And so I got good at delivering the lines. When it comes to learning, you have to be uncomfortable to learn something, because what it’s doing is challenging your preconceived notions or what you already think is true. And so some people think that they have an understanding of a topic. Some topics are brand new.

10:06Either way, you can’t be comfortable and learn. It is an uncomfortable activity. And so in my opinion, if you add humor, then it adds a little entertainment value, which makes it go a little easier, and especially humorous examples make the lesson stick better.

Loida Velasquez10:26

So obviously with this episode, you yourself focus with helping agents that are newer or that are struggling.

10:34You have your handbook. So share with us a little bit first the mistakes that you see agents are currently making as to why they’re struggling.

Peter Porcelli10:45

Okay, this is it. This is what it really comes down to, is prospecting. Everyone hates to do it. It’s a dirty word. Nobody likes it. The other thing is that agents do not embrace scripting, and they think that that’s phony baloney.

10:58If you interview 100 agents and ask them, probably 95% of them will say that scripts are dumb, they don’t use them. Even agents that have been in the business 10-plus years, they will say that. And what I think they’re mistaking is that they use scripts every day all the time. They just don’t recognize it as that, because they think scripts is the way that an actor memorizes paragraphs and then vomits words upon the listener.

11:23That’s not what I mean when I say scripting. Scripting could be one-liners. If you are gonna have the same conversation over and over and over again, then you should figure out ways to convey your message in a concise and easy-to-understand way that you can say each time so that the listener gets the same message each time.

11:45So I like to use a one-liner and then fill in the rest, color in the details with your own words. And the more you understand a topic, the more you can do that with analogies or examples or pick up the way the other guy is speaking. So if one guy likes to curse, then I’ll curse back with him. If somebody else is like an old lady at church, then I’m gonna speak to her the way that she likes too.

12:07But I’m still gonna use my scripts ’cause they’re G-rated, mostly.

Loida Velasquez12:12

I love that you’re mentioning that. I remember when I first started calling for sale by owners, and the way that I would say my scripts was not 100% with my communication. I would get for sale by owners that would be like, “Why are you asking me so many questions?”

12:28And then I would get upset because I’m like, “Man, they’re calling me out.” But that just tells me that I’m not good enough, that they don’t know. So then I’m like, “Okay, I have to work on my communication, my tonality, my mirroring and matching.” And then once I did, it got to the point that I have these full-blown conversations, and the person on the other side thinks we’re just chatting, but in reality I have a list of questions that I’m just going down a script and asking.

12:54And the next thing you know, I’ve set an appointment, and that other person thinks we’re now just best friends.

Peter Porcelli13:00

Right. Yeah, and a lot of people get hung up on, “They’re gonna know that I’m scripted. They’re gonna know I’m reading.” So if you’re on the phone, I just have questions that are already written there, and I can fill in their answers.

13:13And it’s really a get to know ya thing. I did about a year and a half of just expired listing prospecting as well, and like I said, it’s a totally different animal. But what I did during this time, this was probably 2010, 2011, a couple years after the market had crashed. People had been on the market for 18, 24 months, seen no lookers, let alone an offer, in months or years.

13:37And so I would call and give an over-the-phone two-minute listing presentation, and I started by asking for their commitment with a couple of questions, and then I would read the script. And it was all about how Americans hate negotiating, but they love competition. “So let’s make your listing a competition.”

13:54“People compete for it.” Without getting into too many details. So I even had a script that was if they would say, “Are you reading?” Then I would say, “Yes, yes I am, because I want to make sure that you get the exact same value-rich information that I’m telling the next guy. I wanna make sure I don’t leave anything out.”

14:14“But like I said in the beginning, this is only two minutes. Would you like me to continue?” “Oh, yes, please, please.” So it’s okay if you… A lot of it is conviction as well, having the nerve to speak the way you think.

14:28You have to believe what you’re saying. So if I tell you a script and you don’t believe the words, then you shouldn’t use that.

14:39So now it’s my job to help to educate you as to why I think this is true and why this script will benefit and move the conversation forward. There’s a lot of sales that are required before you get a paycheck in real estate. First, you have to sell the person on listening to you, then you have to sell them on meeting with you, then you have to sell them on hiring you, and then you have to sell them on the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, and then you get paid.

15:03It’s a stack of sales, one on top of the other, and they all require scripting.

Loida Velasquez15:08

Exactly. So this handbook that you created, first of all, how did you come up with that title? Because it’s definitely one that people will remember, so just let us know. The Politically Incorrect Real Estate Agent Handbook.

Peter Porcelli15:21

There we go.

15:22I’ve got it here. This is the way it looks. I chose this title because it has nothing to do with politics. What it has to do with is abandoning victimhood and learning for yourself, because what I’ve discovered, after hiring and recruiting all those agents and coaching them for all the years, that most people just listen to what the guy in the next cubicle has to say without understanding why, and it’s generally bad information.

15:49It’s like the telephone game, where you whisper something in one guy’s ear and it goes around in a circle and then they reveal what was said after eight or nine people, and it’s never the same message that was intended. And so that’s kind of the way that the real estate practice works, too. And by the way, that grapevine now is Facebook, and when you go and look at these Facebook groups for real estate agents, it is stacked full of information that is bogus.

16:14And somebody will ask a question, and there will be 300 replies in one hour. Just lots of answers. And I would say about 90% of them are giving the wrong advice, and 10% are giving the correct advice. But what happens is that the 90% with the wrong advice shout down the 10% with the right advice, tell them they’re wrong.

16:35And so now the ignorant party who’s asking the question or any outside observer who’s trying to learn is getting the wrong message. And so the point of this book is to go and find out for yourself. You shouldn’t believe me either. Read what I’ve got here. It says it right in the beginning of the book. I shouldn’t be your only source of information.

16:54I should just be one. If I bring up a topic or an issue that makes you think, “Maybe there is a better way of doing this thing that everybody else does differently,” go ask around and don’t just take the next guy’s answer. Keep asking until you become more well-rounded. It takes years to really figure out how to do anything.

Loida Velasquez17:14

So that handbook is pretty much a step-by-step guide that agents can get, go through. Let’s flip the pages. I mean, we have all these different camera angles. I love it. Let’s see what’s going on in there.

Peter Porcelli17:27

So the majority of the book are these how-to articles that look like this, and they’ve got a little effort meter on it and tells you what you’re gonna need, and then there’s steps one, two, and three.

17:36So like this one says how to get fired. A lot of agents ask, “Oh no, my seller wants to fire me from a listing. How do I do this?” There’s a lot of options that if you ask on the internet, you’re gonna get one reply, which is, “Let them go.” Well, that’s an option, but there are others. So the topics that are in here, the chapters, and you see all the pictures too, I found pictures from the Library of Congress from the early 1900s, and so those are neat.

18:01The end of each chapter has a quiz and a puzzle. They’re all real estate themed. So the topics for chapters are basics. The next one is prospecting, then valuation and pricing, presentations, agency, contracts, and then potpourri, which is all those things that don’t fit neatly in one of the other chapters.

18:29Now, this book is 370 pages long, and I edited out about 100 pages.

18:37Some people say, “When is part two coming out?” And I say, “This took me four and a half years to create, plus about 17 or 18 years of knowledge.” And it really helped me by being a broker and having hundreds of agents that worked under me, because that allowed for me to gain the experience through their eyes much more so than I would’ve ever learned on my own.

19:01Just being an agent out there doing between 10 and 50 transactions a year, you have limited experience as to the different issues that come up. I wanna highlight one thing, though, is that in the back of the book, there are these flowcharts, and at first glance they look crazy. But this is the buyer flowchart, and it starts with you just met a buyer, and then it takes you through all of the different steps of getting a presentation together and delivering it, and then get them under contract, and then go show property, and then a purchase agreement, and go to the closing, and how to amend the agreements and all that.

19:33And everything in this book is cross-referenced, so this page contains lots and lots of cross-references. In fact, I will zoom in just a little bit here so that the audience can see this on the page. Whereas right here it says, “Pre-qualify your buyer,” and then you see that little 170. That’s page 170. So if we turn to that page in the book, it says how to pre-qualify a buyer.

19:59And so there’s a flowchart for buyers, there’s one for sellers, there’s a daily flowchart, and then there’s a valuation flowchart so that you can pick out a price or just do a market study and figure out what the market trend is and that kind of stuff so you can speak intelligently about those topics.

Loida Velasquez20:16

I love everything that’s in that handbook because I feel that any agent, you can get that handbook and you can carry it with you anywhere and everywhere. I know that getting it, I’m like, “Okay, I have a question. Peter probably has the answer in the handbook. Let me look for it.” And that’s so cool that you have the pages, even in those flowcharts, so people can reference and go back and read and get educated.

20:40Because something that I see happening a lot of times is agents… I mean, there’s a lot of education everywhere, but sometimes they have to go to multiple different places versus just having that handbook that answers pretty much every single question they might have about pre-qualifying, the presentation, scripts, things to say, the flowchart.

20:59So where can agents find this book? I know it’s on Amazon. Is it also on the website that you have on there, or just go ahead and share with us.

Peter Porcelli21:07

Yes, you can find it at realestateagentbook.com, and that’s gonna be a landing page that you can look through samples of the book there and get a feel for it, and then the link there takes you to Amazon to make the purchase.

21:19And it’ll get printed and shipped to your door. Especially if you have Prime, it’ll be there the next day or the day after. And here’s part of the problem, is that you can’t charge more than 20 bucks for a book. Nobody’s gonna buy it. But the information in this book is worth thousands and thousands of dollars.

21:34And the agents who actually read it… A lot of people will collect books to put on their bookshelf so that they can make a Zoom video with all the books behind them and they look intelligent, but I would bet you that they haven’t read most of those books. And I find the same thing is true when I talk to a real estate agent that has the book, that they ask me questions and I always ask, “Would you be surprised if I told you that the answer to that is in the book?”

21:57“Really?” And I tell them the page number, and then we look it up and we discuss it. “Wow.” And so some of these agents that tell me, “Oh, I’ve read your book three times,” they haven’t read it once. And I understand that people wanna flatter you or say what they want you to hear, but it really would behoove an agent to look through.

22:17It’s a choose your own adventure book really. It’s not something I would recommend to sit down and read from cover to cover, because it doesn’t really flow that way. You could do that, and you would get distracted though, because there’s things in the pages. Like I said, every page has got cross-references all over it, and so you’ll be reading along and say, “Oh, I wanna know more about that,” and you’ll flip to another page in the book.

22:39The next thing you know, you’re going back and forth, back and forth. And so I understand it could be difficult to read everything in this book, but if you did sit down, like just take it in the bathroom with you. Your feet will get numb probably.

Loida Velasquez22:54

Yeah, and you’ll learn. It’s funny you were mentioning people that collect books or buy these books.

23:00What I see sometimes, and sometimes it happens to me too, I get excited about a book and it’s almost like you think by having it on the bookshelf, the information is just gonna come to you or just look at it and feel smart. Exactly. Yeah. No, it’s funny. Aside from the book, do you have any events or coaching or anything else where agents can reach out to you if they do wanna connect?

Peter Porcelli23:21

Yeah. So come to my website. You can see it’s here on the screen on the right-hand side there. Whether or not you just go to join.realestate, that’s the main page. Realestateagentbook.com, that’s the landing page for the book, but that’s also on the same main website, and so you can see everything that I have to offer.

23:41I’ve got videos on there. I’ve got a YouTube channel with different lessons. I’ve got little short videos. I’ve also got some business planning. Let me show you this one. I’ve also got, if somebody wants to really dig deep into all this stuff that I’ve got, there’s something called the box set, which has got eight tools, the handbook being one of them.

24:02So they are these large place mats, is what I call them, and I’ll show you those in a sec. And that you can use for presentations or for scripts. As well as I’ve got a free download on the website where there are eight more tools that come in PDF form, and those are business plans and things to study the market with.

24:23So I think that all that stuff is pretty valuable. All you gotta give me is your email address. I know that that doesn’t make it free, but it’s better than not. And then I’ve also got, like I said, this is one of those place mats. So it’s 11 by 17, laminated on one side. It’s got flow charts. You would show this to a buyer when you sit down with them in a presentation.

24:43I’m trying to get it all on screen here. And so every one of these bullet points is also cross-referenced back to pages in the handbook. It’s kind of like I did it on purpose.

24:53And this, even if you don’t know all of the job, this is another study guide. And so you can look up the pages in the book that reference these things so that when you give your presentation, you know more about what you’re saying, and the buyer is gonna think you’re an expert.

25:08On the backside, it allows you to do a needs analysis with the buyer, and it’s dry erase. So the whole idea was to make it where it’s almost like a business in a box. So if you wanna sell hamburgers, then you can go and start your own Bob’s Burgers. Good luck. But you can get a head start by buying a McDonald’s franchise.

25:31And they don’t have that for real estate agents, where they say, “Here’s your product. Here’s how you sell it. Here’s what you price it at. Here’s the marketing.” And they have that for brokerages. You can buy a RE/MAX franchise, but you cannot do that as a real estate agent. And so I kind of wanted to make some basic business that agents could use until they figure out how to do it for themself.

25:54And also, I would point this out, that agents will say, because look, I designed this, and so it’s got my logo on it. It says it there. Yeah. It’s big, and it says it there. And some agents, they’ll say, “I want my logo on it. Can you make me one with my logo?” And I say, “No, buy a sticker. Buy a sticker and stick it right over the top.”

26:14“Oh, I can do that?” “I don’t care. You paid me for it. It’s yours now. Modify it how you like.”

Loida Velasquez26:21

Nice. That’s awesome. So as we wrap this up, what would be the one thing that you would recommend for agents to be doing right now?

Peter Porcelli26:29

Prospect, prospect, prospect. Your job is talking. That’s your job.

26:3395% of your job is talking, so learn to do it well. And so that means scripting, that means talking to more people. Prospecting is like you think about the old days where the guy’s mining for gold. You spend most of your day digging in mud and muck. That’s what prospecting is, and you have to keep talking to more and more people.

26:55That’s why I gravitated toward the FSBOs eventually, because there was a bunch of potential listings just standing there. And so I said, “Hey, look, I can go and talk to these people. They’re ready to sell right now.” Most agents, they say, “Oh, I don’t wanna do that. I wanna just do my sphere of influence.” Good luck.

27:12It’s gonna take you five or six years before you get that rolling.

27:15It will, depending on how good you are at talking or how many friends you have and whether or not they wanna buy a house right now. So prospect, prospect, prospect. You should be doing it all morning long, and if you don’t have any clients that you’re showing property to or presentations to give or contracts you’re negotiating in the afternoon, then you should spend that time prospecting.

27:36If the sun is shining and you’re neither negotiating, presenting, or showing property, you should be prospecting.

Loida Velasquez27:45

I love it. Awesome. Well, Peter, thank you so much for the past couple minutes. You gave a lot of great information. We’re gonna make sure to put your link in the description box below.

27:54I think everyone needs to go and get that handbook, because if you’re confused, if you’re struggling, this handbook is probably gonna answer most of the questions that you have, and it’s a guide that you can carry with you pretty much everywhere. So Peter, thank you once again. And for everyone that’s watching, we’ll see you on the next one.

Peter Porcelli28:09

Thank you.

Loida Velasquez28:09

Bye.

Peter Porcelli28:10

Bye-bye.