How John Ames planned to grow from 300 to 400 transactions through prospecting

Ren Jones00:00

Welcome to Roadmap: How to Take Three Listings a Week Until You’re Ready for More. Each week we interview a great agent who is consistently taking two, three, four listings each week — in this case, maybe more. Today we have an exciting guest. We encourage you to take notes and apply as much of their knowledge as quickly as you can, and then use the copycat principle.

00:26If you’re watching on Facebook or Vulcan7, you’ll have an opportunity to ask questions during the broadcast. Before I introduce my guest, let me introduce my co-host from San Diego, Carley Hathaway. Hi, Carley. How’s the real estate business?

Carley Hathaway00:44

Hi, everybody. Hi, Ren. The real estate business is great. It’s a hot market. It’s definitely a seller’s market.

Ren Jones00:53

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. We haven’t done the Vulcan7 Challenge in a couple weeks. Let’s do that, and then we’ll introduce our guest.

01:01The Vulcan7 Challenge, as you remember, is once a month shadow a great agent in another market that’s taking two, three, four listings a week. Either drive three or four hours to their market or get on a plane. Get there in the afternoon, have dinner with them if they’re available, get to their office early, shadow them, take notes, write down everything, record, and learn as much as you can. Have lunch with them and then head back home.

01:30Do that once a month, and by the end of the 12 months you’ll have 12 amazing friends who are doing very well, and you will become one of them. That’s the Vulcan7 Challenge.

Carley Hathaway01:43

Yes. And that made many, many, many hugely successful people at a much more accelerated rate.

Ren Jones01:52

I want to remind everybody first that we’re simulcasting the show on the private Lead Gen group on Facebook. They have 47,000 members, so we have a large audience there today as well.

Ren Jones02:09

Let’s welcome our guest today from St. George, Utah. What a great place to live that would be, or to have a second home. Mr. John Ames.

John Ames02:18

Hey, everybody. How are you doing?

Ren Jones02:23

Good. Thanks for being on today. We’re so excited. Now we have to get people to buy a home there. What’s the best way for them to reach you, John?

John Ames02:44

St. George, Utah is one of the top 10 destination retirement communities in the United States right now. If you want to contact the Ames Team, you can go to AmesTeamUtah.com, email us at amesteam@sgremax.com, or call our 800 number, 800-206-1003.

Ren Jones03:10

Wonderful. Everybody that’s thinking about even moving up there should give them a call, reach out, go to their website and learn as much as you can.

03:50How big is St. George?

John Ames03:52

The city proper is a little over 100,000 and then about another 20,000 to 25,000 in the rural outlying area, so we’re about 125,000 to 135,000 population here in the greater St. George area.

Ren Jones04:06

Awesome. I know how successful you are, so I’m guessing your percentage of the market share there is a little on the high side.

John Ames04:15

We average between 7% and 10% of the market on a regular basis.

John Ames04:25

There are about 1,100 agents here in St. George, and the same old rule: the top 20% do 80% of the transactions.

Ren Jones04:39

When you say “we,” I’m assuming you have a team.

John Ames04:42

I do have a team. I have three full-time assistants. I have a listing coordinator that handles everything prior to actually receiving an offer. Then I have an escrow closing coordinator, and she’s my general manager, operations manager for the entire team. She’s been with me for 15 years.

05:05Then I have a full-time operations manager for our buyer-agent team, all of our web marketing, all of our outbound mailing campaigns, and oversight of the buyer agents on a daily basis.

Ren Jones05:21

How many transactions can you do with a group like that?

John Ames05:25

Last year we closed over 300, and this year our goal is to go over 400.

05:38The average price here in the St. George market is a little under $300,000. Right around $280,000 was the average last year.

05:46I need to mention one more person on my team who is a full-time listing agent, and that’s my son Chase, who you’ll get to talk to later.

John Ames06:11

My entire team is trained by Mike Ferry, and we are a phone-centric team. I have my own call center.

07:20One of the signs says, “Meet the person who decides how much you make today.”

Ren Jones07:39

So you really built your entire business on calling, it seems.

John Ames07:45

Absolutely. It is the only thing that we know where you can run your real estate business and have a predictable, repeatable income every single month.

John Ames08:21

A typical day is that we are here at 8:00 making our outbound phone calls. Chase and I will hit first thing with the expired and cancelled from that day.

08:38We go from there to doing just listed, just sold phone calls. We also contact all the FSBOs that come on the prior day or that day. We get any FSBO we can possibly get.

09:08Then we spend time during the day also doing past-client phone calls. That’s our daily program. We’re here at 8:00 and we spend the morning on the phones. Morning is money time, and we avoid appointments in the morning as much as we possibly can.

09:23Then we typically start heading out on appointments anywhere from 11:30 or 1:00.

09:38About 40% of our phone calls are non-local phone calls to people all over the United States. We have a lot of second-home buyers here, so we’re calling New York, Atlanta, Denver, San Francisco, Montana, Colorado on a daily basis.

Ren Jones10:02

Say you get a bunch of expireds for that day. How many times in that day are you going to call them if you’re not getting ahold of them?

John Ames10:11

That’s a great question, and I’m going to defer that one to Chase when he gets on the phone with you to talk about our follow-up program.

10:21The most important thing is consistency in your daily outbound calling schedule. You have to dedicate time on a daily basis, and it’s money time. You don’t let yourself get interrupted. You don’t do emails and you don’t take inbound phone calls. You push everything off because anything can wait 2 to 3 hours. This is your time. It’s reserved for you, and you’ve got to protect it.

Ren Jones11:04

You said you’re trying to close 400 transactions this year. It’s toward the end of January, the last day of January. Are you on track?

John Ames11:14

We currently have 48 pending as of yesterday. We’ve taken 16 or 17 listings so far this month, and our goal is to take 220 listings this year.

11:35Our office and our team is very much about not “Can we?” or “Will we?” It’s the attitude of, “I will. What does it take?” If you’re not on a listing appointment, if you’re not out with a buyer, there’s only one place you should be: in your office on the phone.

Ren Jones12:04

You’re going from roughly 300 transactions to 400. That’s an extra eight a month, a little over eight a month. What strategy did you have to add another eight a month?

John Ames12:21

Chase and I are coached by the Mike Ferry organization. We talked about finding minutes in a day, to find another 15 or 20 minutes to make outbound phone calls or to do lead follow-up on past expireds we haven’t been able to get in touch with.

12:45We’ve dedicated ourselves this year to spend one more night a week for 2 to 3 hours and two Saturdays a month for 2 hours, and that will yield us another 100 transactions for the year.

John Ames13:07

On Saturdays we’ll switch it up. Typically on a weekday you’ll catch more people home after 4:00. On the weekends it’s a mixed schedule. Mid-morning, 9:00 to 11:00, and then afternoons 3:00 to 4:00, because after 4:00 a lot of people head out for dinner. Typically in the afternoon between 3:00 and 4:00 is a really good time.

Ren Jones14:34

Do you take any time off, John?

John Ames14:37

Absolutely. We take great vacations. Last year we did 11 days in Israel, we did Europe, we did a couple of California trips.

14:51Everyone on our team is supposed to schedule four vacations a year. There’s actually a vacation board, and we include pictures of destinations on there so as people work during the year, both them and all the team members know. We want their families to know why Dad isn’t there on Tuesday night for 2 hours, why Dad has to go in 3 hours on Saturday, or why Mom goes out again on Wednesday afternoon.

15:23My family knows we’re going to hit hard for 90 days, but we’re going on vacation. Our family, my spouse and our team are all committed to work when you work and play when you play, and don’t mix the two up.

John Ames16:11

Chase and I handle all the listing activities, or the majority of them, on our team. Chase and I manage 95% of the listings, and then we have six full-time buyer agents because we know that you should do one thing and do it really well.

16:34Our buyer agents would serve a buyer far better than I would in terms of real customer service, knowing the market, having seen 16 houses in the last three days and knowing all the houses in a given price range because they’ve shown them over the last three weeks.

16:52More importantly, we have a sales meeting every morning with the entire team. You bring nine people together, the listing agents and the buyer agents, and we always ask, “What do you need today?” If they say, “Three-bedroom, two-bath with a pool under $400,000 on the west side of town,” two other buyer agents will say, “I saw that property two days ago. Here’s the address.” The whole team working together helps us be more efficient.

17:34We tell our clients we’re going to make you homeless, and we do. Yesterday, on Monday, we put six properties under contract. We put two more this morning. One property a day is our goal.

John Ames18:20

Initially, when I got started with prospecting, because I didn’t have all the skills and didn’t know my scripts very well, the thing I focused on was I wanted to make 12 live contacts an hour. That’s 12 live contacts, not calls.

18:35If you get on a schedule of, “I’m going to make X number of contacts today,” that will then yield X number of listing or buyer appointments per day.

18:47After 15 years, I don’t focus on my number of calls anymore. I’m looking for my deal of the day. My job and our team’s is to find at least one deal a day, a listing or a buyer-side transaction that I can hand off to our buyer agents.

John Ames19:20

Almost 30% of our buyers and sellers we’ll never meet, ever. We do the entire listing presentation over the phone.

19:47If you’re role-playing, which if you want to become really good on the phones you have to get role-play partners, 30 minutes a day, five days a week. Our team has role-play partners, and we do live role-play every morning at 8:45 in our call center.

John Ames20:24

Absolutely. If you’re going to put in a long day, there’s only so many days where you can put six or seven hours in on the phone before you become fried. What we’ll do is come into the call center for 2 to 4 hours, then go out and knock doors.

John Ames21:26

I use a standard Mike Ferry script. You have to remember, I have given over 12,000 listing presentations in the last 15 years.

21:46You’ve got to know what to say, and if you don’t know what to say, print off the listing presentation and role-play and practice it for a while in front of a mirror.

22:02When I go on a listing appointment, I take the script right with me. I’ll say to the clients, “Hey, really important questions. I want to make sure you don’t miss any. Do you mind if I just ask you these questions?” They always say, “Yeah, sure.” Don’t be intimidated about reading the script. Take it with you.

John Ames22:45

It was the better part of about two years where I got really good at it. There was one period with one of my three coaches where I had to write the listing presentation and read it every day for 90 days.

23:10If you do those things, the script becomes second nature. The goal is you’ve got to get them through the script because the script is going to help you get the client to the close transaction and signing a contract. It’s a logical end to a good presentation.

John Ames23:55

I just do it by phone. Every team member has wireless headsets, so by doing that you can write notes and do the things you need to do. Hands-free. Get a headset.

Ren Jones24:20

Chase has been on our team for three years. This last year was his first full-time year. He spent time getting his accounting degree before he came on the team. Let’s put Chase on and you can ask him some questions.

Carley Hathaway24:47

You’ve only been in the business about a year?

Chase Ames24:50

Yes. Full-time a year now.

Carley Hathaway24:56

What was the hardest thing to overcome when you first started calling?

Chase Ames25:02

Rejection, definitely.

25:10In the beginning, I just had no idea what to say and I was getting my butt kicked every conversation. Then I got to where I would start to write down every time I got stumped, and I role-played that situation. I remembered that one, and I always kept rolling forward for any time I got stumped.

25:34I was able to hang with some of the top dogs who ran Wall Street companies and Fortune 500 companies, and I was winning the conversation.

Chase Ames26:05

Stay on the phone. Prospect. Don’t call just one time and give up. You can double call. We’ve got a ton of success.

26:13Think about it yourself. If you get a strange number calling you, a lot of us don’t answer it. If they call again right afterwards, you might think something is up. You probably pick up the phone. Do those double calls.

26:26When you get done through your list of calling expireds or FSBOs, whatever it is, start the list again and call right back to them again.

26:45I met an agent last week at a Mike Ferry event. It’s his third year in the business and he closed 180 listings last year.

26:59He says he actually does very little FSBO. He’s calling expireds 20 times a day for the first five days, and he actually calls them in lead follow-up typically 30 times until he actually gets a listing or the appointment, whatever it is. But he has 20-second conversations for lead follow-up, and he gives them some piece of advice or a tip or something beneficial every time.

Chase Ames28:07

You need to know your numbers. Once you actually break it down to what each new contact is worth for you and what your hourly rate is for prospecting, it changes things.

28:22I cut out a piece of paper and update it every once in a while once my numbers get better. I put on one corner of my computer what each new contact is worth to me. Each new contact is worth $100 to me, whether it’s a slam in the face and a two-second phone call. Typically that’s $100 to me.

28:46Any time I get that creative avoidance, I look at that number and say, “It’s worth making the next call.”

Ren Jones28:54

The other thing I noticed is the environment that they’re in. It’s easier coming into an office like that to do what you need to do than someone with a treadmill next to the washer and dryer. Everybody’s there, they’re making calls, they’re excited, there’s high energy. It’s easier to do it a lot longer there than solo in an environment that’s not designed for it.

Chase Ames29:34

When we walk in here, we know our only goal and the only thing we’re doing here is making phone calls.

Ren Jones30:16

We’re getting near the bottom of the hour here. Any other last things we need to cover?

Chase Ames30:29

I swear by Vulcan. We’ve used all kinds of data sources and lead sources, and Vulcan has the best numbers. We get the fewest aunts and uncles and cousins and relatives than any other lead source that we’ve tried. We get to the real seller, the real contact, quicker than anybody does.

Ren Jones31:35

I want to thank everybody for being here and thank Chase and John. If you get one or two more listings a month as a result of this, you can afford that second home.

John Ames32:39

I just want to mention one last thing. Our businesses have strategic business partners. With Vulcan, the Ames Team has generated over $2 million in income the last 15 years. Thank you for what you’ve done for us. Thank you for all you’re doing.

Ren Jones32:56

John, it’s been a pleasure to know you all this time and to work with you. Keep being successful and inspiring other people to be successful. Thanks for sharing so much today.

33:05I hope there are a lot of people that got four or five or six great ideas, if not more, that can propel them forward no matter where they are in North America. Thanks, everybody.