How Richard Adamski went from zero deals in 8 months to over 100 a year by phone

Richard Adamski00:00

Believe it or not, for the first eight months in the business, I did zero transactions. And then it all just clicked randomly from that eight-month mark to the end of the year. I actually ended up doing 27 sales. I had Vulcan7. That was my main dialer. I was getting expireds. I was getting For Sale By Owners.

00:16I was doing circle prospecting. I had pretty much everything. Now it was like, I’m going heavy into the listing side. I had appointments lined up. Then after that, I would do all my CMA preps. After my CMA preps, go on my afternoon appointments. At that time I had a three and a six o’clock slot, and then I’d be home and then I’d just rinse and repeat and do that all over again.

Loida Velasquez00:41

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. So make sure that you have a pen and paper ready, because with today’s guest we’re gonna be talking about prospecting, dialogues, scripts, and so much more.

01:03So with that being said, Rich Adamski, welcome to the show.

Richard Adamski01:07

Thank you so much for having me today.

Loida Velasquez01:09

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

Richard Adamski01:17

So I’ll do the brief version. I got into real estate 14, 15 years ago now.

01:24Started on a team like everybody else. Did rentals, buyers. Now I’m solely just on the listing side and run a small team. Within that career so far, I’ve sold well over a thousand homes. My partner and I also now run a prospecting group where we prospect all day with agents around the country.

01:49We come in there and between him and I, we have over a billion dollars in sales. So we bring you the proven strategies and techniques, not just simply what we think works and what we read somewhere. So that’s it in a nutshell.

Loida Velasquez02:03

That’s awesome. So a question that I like to ask all my guests is, what did you do before you got into real estate?

02:09Or what made you get into this business? Because people come from all walks of life. Some of them have had a previous career and this was a complete change. So what did that look like for you?

Richard Adamski02:20

So I graduated college, did the whole college route. As soon as I graduated, I had a job. I used to work as a financial analyst.

02:28That was very short-lived. I lasted about a year and a half. And then right after that, I worked on Wall Street in New York City. And that lasted about a year. So my whole engagement after college was about two and a half, three years. And then right after that, I decided to get into real estate.

02:46So I realized early on corporate America is just not for me. Being under a microscope wasn’t for me. Having a manager, as crazy as it might sound, wasn’t me. Like yes, we have managers now, but just having somebody say, “You have to do this by this time,” it wasn’t a structured way I wanted to be and live my life.

03:09And I got into real estate. I stumbled upon it, ironically. Walking outside of my house, my neighbor was putting their house up for sale. The real estate agent was putting the sign in the ground. He was the broker of the company. I don’t know what made him talk to me, but he started talking to me. And then he said, “Hey, kid.”

03:25I was 23 at that time. He said, “If you ever wanna make real money, here’s my business card, call me.” And like, I don’t know, six months later I called him, ironically.

Loida Velasquez03:35

So when you did get started and you called him, what was that first year for you like? Was there prospecting involved, like the learning curve?

03:44What was that like?

Richard Adamski03:47

So one thing I would tell anybody out there, if they don’t have a mentor or they don’t have a coach, you really should get that very early on. I did not have any of that. No mentor, no coach. So I kinda just threw myself into the fire. I was doing open houses. I was calling leads.

04:06I was getting whatever I can get my hands on. And believe it or not, for the first eight months in the business, I did zero transactions. I think it was like two or three rentals, which unfortunately was not paying the bills, but I don’t call a rental transaction a transaction.

04:23And then I was faced where I was like, okay, what am I gonna do here? I was looking at my bank account. I didn’t have too much to pay my rent. I think it came down to pay the rent or stay in real estate, and I decided to stay in real estate. And then it all just clicked randomly one day.

04:40I decided to listen to the clients. I just started to kind of become more coachable. I was more on this YouTube kick at that time, just asking a lot of people within the office what to do. Still didn’t get myself a coach. But from that eight-month mark to the end of the year, I actually ended up doing 27 sales, which was just all buyer side at that time.

05:03And then from there, I was like, “All right, now I need a coach.” So the second full year technically, I got a coach. And then from there on, it’s just been year after year. I went from, I think, 41, and then it was 67, then it was 84, I believe. Then I hit the 90s, there was 96, and since then I’ve been breaking 100 year after year.

Loida Velasquez05:25

That’s so awesome to hear. And congrats on all of the success that came in after those eight months, because I’m pretty sure that we have listeners that feel like they might be in the same boat where nothing’s going on, but they might hear you and be like, “Okay, well, if he did it, I know that there’s a way for it to be done.”

05:43And then you completely killed it the following year. So what did your structure look like in terms of your schedule? What were you prospecting? I know you mentioned that after the eight months, most of the transactions were buyers, so did you decide, okay, well, I wanna work mostly listings, or can you share a little bit more about that?

Richard Adamski06:03

Yeah. So I would say year two was all buyer sales. My buyer sales went all the way up until six years in the business, where I only focused on buyers. I was good at doing open houses. I was good at getting the activity from there. And then we had Zillow, where you used to be able to pay and they actually called you direct.

06:23So I was getting a lot of buyer-heavy transactions. And then I was getting buyers from people within the office that just didn’t wanna deal with it. So I was paying referral fees, and my broker was starting to give me buyers because they saw confidence in me. So fast track, year two is when I really understood myself and was like, “Hey, listen, I was getting to the office at 10, 10:30, maybe 11 o’clock, sometimes 12 o’clock, and I realized that you can’t be doing that.

06:52Like if you really wanna treat this as a true job, like if you’re working a nine to five, you have to be in by nine o’clock, and nine o’clock is considered late.” So I put myself onto a schedule. So once I started doing that, I was like, “All right, I’m gonna get to the office at X time.” If I recall correctly, at that time it was around 9:00 AM, which was a big improvement from where I was coming from.

07:12And then slowly I was like, “All right, if I wanna get time back and I wanna leverage myself, what’s the only way I can do it? I can only work on listings.” So by this time, I think it was like three years in, I had Vulcan7, that was my main dialer, I was getting expireds, I was getting For Sale By Owners, I was doing circle prospecting, I had pretty much everything.

07:35Now it was like, I’m going heavy into the listing side, and that’s what I decided to do. I ripped off a bandaid, as much as it hurt and pained me to not wanna work with a buyer, because I knew I can do it. I was like, “I want my freedom and I want my time back.” And from that day on, which is now about seven, eight years ago, I did take a step back in production, but then it propelled me forward to be able to do what I wanted to do.

08:02So now I put myself on a schedule. Now I’m gonna give you the schedule from when I’m more on the top producer side, where I’m starting to leverage. I was in the office by 6:15 in the morning. Before that, I was at the gym, so I was getting to the gym around 5:00 AM, showering, going to the office, getting my affirmations in, getting my role plays in.

08:26By 8:00 AM, I was on the phones from 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM. I was just strictly talking to strangers, outbound prospecting expireds. I’m gonna say it right now, because I don’t know if For Rent By Owner was a thing, but FSBOs, For Rent By Owners, circle prospecting and Just Listed, Just Sold, that’s what I did. And then in the afternoon, I would stop at 12:00, I would eat from 12:00 to 12:30.

08:51At 12:30 to 1:00, I would do all my follow-ups for everybody. I had appointments lined up. Then after that, I would do all my CMA preps. After my CMA preps, go on my afternoon appointments. At that time I had a three and a six o’clock slot, and then I’d be home and then I’d just rinse and repeat and do that all over again.

Loida Velasquez09:10

That’s awesome. And I know that you mentioned earlier that currently you and your partner have a prospecting group, and you’re still doing the prospecting. So what does that look like? I assume the schedule probably hasn’t changed that much since what you just described, but what lead sources are you going after?

09:27What are you seeing currently in the market and with what you’re training your agents on?

Richard Adamski09:32

So yes, I am prospecting, my agents are prospecting. As this is recorded, this minute, I hear people in the bullpen prospecting right now. So it is a real thing. At the end of the day, we teach that you need to be able to make outbound phone calls.

09:50Look, does social media work? Absolutely. Do email campaigns work? Yes. Do text message campaigns work? Yes. But I was brought up that you pick up a phone and you have a conversation with somebody, because a lot of other ways, things get misinterpreted, right? So you wanna put yourself in the best position to land an appointment, for somebody to say yes to you for today or yes to you for another day, and then be able to go on that actual appointment.

10:16So yeah, my schedule has changed dramatically over the years, but there is still that prospecting, and I’m still in the office at a decent time. I still am on the phones by 8:00 in the morning. We’re calling the fresh expireds, the hot fresh expireds that I wanna talk to, the hot For Sale By Owners that I wanna talk to, the hot For Rent By Owners that we wanna talk to.

10:39Right after that, we rip into a quick 30 to 45 minutes of circle prospecting, everybody after that. And then by 10 o’clock, from 10 to 11 AM, it’s strictly database. We talk to our sphere, we talk to everybody that we know, just doing our touch points, what we gotta do. And then from there at 11:00 AM, I kinda start my day, everything else I have to do, running our team meetings, being involved with our team, seeing what they have going on.

11:05And then my appointments are a little bit different now, because now it’s more agent recruitment, it’s more speaking to people, it’s more operations. Taking a look at the business is a little bit different now, but to keep in mind, I am still personally doing over 100 transactions a year, but it’s all through my database now, from everybody I cultivated over the years.

Loida Velasquez11:27

So I know you’re on the Jersey Shore. I was recently talking to agents pretty much all across the country, and they’re telling me in some places there’s low inventory, bidding wars, and in other places homes are taking over 100 days to sell. What is it currently like right now where you’re at?

Richard Adamski11:44

Yeah, so we have the metro market. So we have New York City, and New York City is still always coming over to New Jersey. So we’re actually kinda last; whatever the United States is doing, North America, we’re kinda last to adapt to it. So when everybody’s having slower markets, our market’s still pumping.

12:03But at the end of the day, it’s also up to the individual agent. If you put the work in, you’re gonna see results, right? If you don’t put the work in, you’re not gonna see results. But there are still pockets of our area that are trending under three days. And I kid you not, you still can list it on a Friday, get multiple offers over the weekend and be doing highest and best.

12:23But then there are also pockets of areas where the days on market, the absorption rate, is 45 days, 70 days, and you have to wait till that time period, because guess what? It’s not gonna sell before that. If it does, you priced it extremely well. So we do have a little bit of both, but where it sits a little bit longer, it’s more inland and it’s more, I’ll use the word, rural. But yeah, I mean, our market’s still moving at a very, very fast pace.

12:49We’re only averaging, I think, between 24 to 27 listings on average a month, which is extremely low, and it’s still buyer heavy versus listing heavy over here.

Loida Velasquez13:01

Okay. No, that’s great to know. And it kind of brings me to my next question, which is regarding dialogue. So obviously you mentioned in some places homes are not going as fast.

13:11So what does a dialogue sound like, that way agents can take notes, if perhaps they have a seller that’s saying, “You know what, Rich, I see homes selling in three days and you’re telling me it’s been two weeks and we haven’t gotten anything. What’s going on?” Or at what point are price reductions even considered over there?

Richard Adamski13:30

So for us, the way I train is when you take a listing, make sure that the seller has the exact expectation of what’s gonna happen, right? So we’re prepping pure communication, and this is how we do our price reductions if we need to do it. It’s pure communication. It’s over-communicate to the seller, because a lot of times the seller’s not gonna give you what you’re looking for if they feel like you’re not doing your job, right?

13:56So the way we actually take that information is when we’re on the listing appointment, we’ll say, “Hey, listen, we wanna list this at 1.3.” And then the seller’s like, “Well, my house is worth 1.4.” And then if you go through a series of questions and you know the motivations at a high level and you as an agent decide to take that listing, well, we know that their motivation is so high that eventually if we just over-communicate to them, or we say, “Hey, listen, we’re gonna do an active coming soon.”

14:24I know that’s kind of changing with some people in their market. Our market is still allowed to do that. We do an active coming soon and I’ll be like, “Hey, Mr. Seller, Mrs. Seller, when we list the property, so today is February 26th, if we’re listing on March 1st and we’re doing a coming soon, if I only had one or zero people reach out to me in this coming soon activity, we’re gonna give it only seven days and we’re gonna see what the activity is like.

14:48We’re gonna take a look on Zillow, on our social channels, all the marketing efforts we have. And if these numbers are low, we’re gonna have to do a quick price adjustment right away.” And we actually put that in writing to them, saying, “Listen, we’re suggesting 1.3, you’re at 1.4, let’s see what the market’s gonna say.”

15:04But the way we also do that is we tell them everything we’re doing. I’ll make a quick two-minute phone call: “Hey, you know what? We just got ready. The listing’s getting ready to go on the MLS. We’re doing the descriptions right now. The pictures are done, this is done, that’s done.”

15:19Boom. Next day, “Hey, listen, it’s now listed on the MLS. We’re gonna see what the activity is. My staff’s gonna reach out for feedback. I’m gonna call you tomorrow for the first wave of showings.” You call them the next day. “Hey, listen, in our pre-listing packet, if you remember, what we’re gonna be doing is I’m gonna be circle prospecting the area.

15:35So these are how many people I talked to, these are how many people are potentially interested. This is how many people reached out to us through our efforts.” And then I’ll wait like two or three days and you make the next call. So you’re just providing so much value to them. And then by the time a week passes by, you’re like, “Listen, all right, the listing should have sold within the seven-day window.

15:54We’re not there. We’re gonna give it one more weekend.” If not, always ask for a price reduction greater than what you want. So if you’re like, “Hey, listen, I want 1.3,” and you’re at 1.4, you should typically ask for probably like 1.25, because the worst that they can say is, “I’m not gonna give you 1.25, but I’ll give you 1.325,” so you’re in a better position than where you were the first time around.

16:17So they always try to cut you in half, so I’ll always ask for a little bit greater. Rule of thumb, what we try to do is around 10%, but you don’t always get that. If somebody’s gonna say, “Listen, let’s reduce it 5,000 or 10,000,” then I’m just gonna say, “Listen, let’s hold off,” because that’s not gonna change algorithms, that’s not gonna change whether anybody’s gonna wanna go from there.

16:37But we kill it with many, many conversations.

Loida Velasquez16:41

That’s awesome. I think everyone’s gonna have to rewind this whole entire piece that you just mentioned, because I think that is gold. And I’m glad that you’re talking about communication, because sometimes, unfortunately, even when I’m calling expireds and For Sale By Owners, they tell me that their last agent, they didn’t hear from them, they kinda fell off the face of the earth, and it’s better for agents to over-communicate.

17:02A seller’s not gonna be like, “Stop calling or texting me,” because they wanna know what’s going on and why they’ve hired you. So I’m really glad that you brought that up and kinda broke it down as to what you guys are doing. But as we wrap up, I know that you mentioned you have a prospecting group.

17:16How can agents get ahold of you, or what can you tell us about your coaching in case anybody does wanna get involved?

Richard Adamski17:23

Great. It’s called Phone Warriors. You can just search it in Facebook, join the group, and you can see all the information that’s on the page. There’s people on there all day, every day, on the active Zoom, and there’s people that are always engaging, sending referrals.

17:40As far as the coaching goes, myself and my partner, we do coach people individually. So if you wanna inquire a little bit more about that, just drop me a quick DM, or reach me on Phone Warriors and we’ll reach out to you, myself or my partner. We’ll talk a little bit more about that.

17:58But it’s at Phone Warriors on Facebook, and if you wanna go to phonewarriorszoom.com, that’s how you get the information for the actual Zoom.

Loida Velasquez18:08

Awesome. All right, Rich, thank you so much for hopping on here on the Vulcan7 Coaches and Mentors. And for everyone that’s watching, we’ll make sure to put all of his links in the description box below, and we’ll see you all on the next one.