How Mike Darda adds two listing appointments a week in fifteen minutes a day

Ren Jones00:04

It’s that time. Welcome to Roadmap. How to take three listings a week until you’re ready for more.

00:12Each week we interview a great agent who is consistently taking 2, 3, 4 listings each week and we have an exciting guest today. We encourage you to take notes and apply as much of their knowledge as quickly as you can, and then use the copycat principle.

00:29Let me introduce my co-host from San Diego, Carley Hathaway. That’s CarleyHathaway.com. Hi Carley. How’s the real estate business?

Carley Hathaway00:39

Hi, Ren, hi everybody, real estate is good. People are answering their phones, which is a good thing.

Ren Jones00:44

That’ll work. Before I introduce our guest today, I want to remind everybody that we are also simulcasting the show on the private Lead Gen group on Facebook. They have 52,000 members, so we have a large audience there today as well. We’ll be pausing for a commercial message during the show. So thank you to the Lead Gen folks. Let’s welcome our guest today from Cape Coral and Fort Myers and all through there, Mr. Mike Darda. Hi, Mike Darda. How are you?

Mike Darda01:11

Doing great, Ren. Doing great, Carly. Good to see you guys.

Carley Hathaway01:15

Good to see you too, Mike. We are so excited to have you on today.

Ren Jones01:18

And it’s good to have you back. Everybody learned a lot and it was one, it’s one of our more popular shows that people watch and watch and watch and learn from and we want to learn. There’s a couple secrets we’re excited to learn about. It’s something like 15 minutes of hot somebodies, and I guess we’ll get into that in a minute. What’s the goal for this year, Mike?

Mike Darda01:40

Team goal is 290.

Ren Jones01:43

290 because it’s you and your son and maybe a buyer agent?

Mike Darda01:48

My son and actually my wife and my son’s wife work with us as well, so the four of us.

Ren Jones01:52

Wow.

Carley Hathaway01:52

Nice. That’s fun.

Ren Jones01:53

Nice. Wow, that’s exciting. I got to spend some time with you and your wife in Tuscany there.

Mike Darda02:02

Yeah, yeah, we got out just in time.

Ren Jones02:05

I know we all did, didn’t we? There we go. Good. Oh, wonderful. Well, good.

Carley Hathaway02:10

Mike, so can we get into your daily routine? I know that’s how I like to start and how we want to take bits and pieces from your daily schedule and how important that is for you and your business.

Mike Darda02:21

Absolutely. You can probably set your watch by watching what I’m doing at any given point in the day because it was very structured, so I don’t know how detailed you want to get, but generally doing my role play from 7:30 to 7:45, jump on the phones.

02:38We take a little 15-minute break at about 10:15 in the morning just to get together with the team. We cover just what’s going on with our new listings and negotiations with the team at that point and any hot potatoes and then back on the phones till lunchtime. Take about an hour, hour and a half lunch break, do my personal stuff that I need to get out of the way at that time and a little bit of admin work, and then usually by 3:00, I’m either out on appointments for the rest of the day or if not, I’m back on the phones prospecting or calling sellers for price reductions.

03:17But the key with that schedule, and by the way, I’m done usually by about 5:00, which this, I think call will cover a little bit about what may happen after that. But the key is if you study that schedule, there’s not much more than maybe at the most 15 or 20% of my day that’s not dollar productive. So all my time is spent generating.

Ren Jones03:43

Yeah, to get it all done and several hundred transactions a year and getting it all done by 5:00. I mean, who does that? You do that. That’s a wonderful problem.

Carley Hathaway03:54

It’s amazing.

Mike Darda03:55

It’s a bit

Carley Hathaway03:57

Yeah. So you start at 7:30 with your role plays, is there something specific you focus on during role plays?

Mike Darda04:04

Yeah, unlike a lot of people, I try to role play with people very close to my market because we’re experiencing similar objection handlers at similar times of year. I’m in a second home market, so I will try to role play with other people that are in second home market areas in Florida, or I might stretch out to some other second home markets up and down the East Coast just to stay in the same time zone, but I don’t get as much out of role playing with somebody in the Midwest. They’re just having different objection handlers in spring than I am.

Carley Hathaway04:40

So you find that everyone kind of has the same objections. So once you can get really good at handling those objections, it’s not rocket science.

Mike Darda04:49

Everybody has the same kind of objections, but different markets have them at different times a year. Right? So maybe Ren where you’re at, it’s a spring market everyone, they’re probably thinking of getting their home on the market for that time of year. In my market, it’s a second home market. Everyone’s leaving Florida in spring. So that’s actually the beginning of a transition in our market to a different clientele.

Carley Hathaway05:13

I like it. I like it. And how important is it for you to start your day with role plays?

Mike Darda05:21

It’s critical for a lot of reasons. Number one is accountability. There’s no slide factor. My alarm goes off on my phone at 7:28 because I know my role play partner’s going to be calling me at 7:30 I better be in the car on the way to the office. So it definitely keeps that morning routine tight.

Carley Hathaway05:41

That’s good. And it seems like the morning routine is so important for you to just stay on track so that you can end your day at fi 5:00 and feel good about what you’ve done throughout the day.

Mike Darda05:50

Exactly.

Ren Jones05:51

Yeah, what happened to nights and weekends? Isn’t that what realtors do? It’s a dream life and he lives in paradise too. So go ahead Charlie.

Carley Hathaway06:04

So do you say you go on appointments in the afternoon. Have you seen that change at all? Are people wanting to do more phone listing appointments, more zoom listing appointments? What have you seen change?

Mike Darda06:15

If you’re referring to the whole COVID thing, at first I like everybody kind of froze and like, all right, what’s the game plan now? How are people going to react? And I actually made the mistake of calling people too cautiously and the thing we got to about any kind of disaster, whether it’s a hurricane or whatever happens in a marketplace that causes people to freeze, you got to realize only some people are freezing. Others have to do something or don’t feel affected by it, whatever’s going on at all.

06:52So if you tackle everyone, they’re a victim of what’s going on, you’re short-changing yourself, you’re going to miss opportunities with people that are ready to act now and looking for someone to help. So after about a week of really bad results, I said, screw that. I closed the blinds. I just wrote on my notepad every day, business as usual, it’s back to normal. So I just went back to my, no, no new scripts, just using scripts I always have and just acting like nothing’s going on. And it’s amazing the appointments and the listings just came flowing right back.

07:33There’s little different things we had to do, but generally people, I was having probably half the face-to-face appointments I would normally have, which, but it was still substantial. I was still going on at least one or two face-to-face appointments a day. Got one right here this afternoon. I had three yesterday. So there are people that are just willing to meet and want to meet to sell their house. We offer the digital alternative, but that’s only when I sense that maybe they’re an owner occupant and they’re being extra cautious.

Ren Jones08:06

Now you have a fair number of sellers that live out of town. Is that correct or do you?

Mike Darda08:12

Yeah. Yeah.

Ren Jones08:13

So I would mean would think that Zoom appointments are pretty natural for you anyway?

Mike Darda08:19

Actually, I don’t do zoom appointments. I just do them over the phone.

Ren Jones08:23

Gotcha, gotcha.

Mike Darda08:24

But 50% of our listing appointments have always been virtual, not live. So it’s nothing new to us. It just slid a little bit more for a while, that direction.

Ren Jones08:35

Yeah. You weren’t like, how do I do this? Because there were, when this happened for a lot of agents that were 100% in person, they’re like, how do I do this? And at least you were ahead of the game in that regard.

Mike Darda08:47

Yeah, exactly. We knew what we just did more of them virtually like we would’ve if they were up in Ohio and they want to sell their home in Florida. So we just treat it the same way.

Ren Jones08:57

There are a bunch of us and it’s kind of fun. We’re in the mid-May and some people will be watching this in June and July, so a lot could change. But when you thought that people weren’t doing a lot, they weren’t, when you decided things were business as usual, it became business as usual.

Mike Darda09:15

Yeah.

Ren Jones09:15

I mean, if people just embrace the last five minutes of conversation and play that 10 times.

Carley Hathaway09:21

I mean, if that doesn’t speak to mindset, I don’t know what does, right?

Ren Jones09:25

I know, that’s fantastic.

Carley Hathaway09:26

Yeah. So when you are doing the phone listing appointments, do you use the same script? Do you keep it the same? Do you shorten it? What’s different?

Mike Darda09:35

Yeah, it’s usually much shorter. I’ve probably sent them something by email ahead of time. So it’s pretty much gets right down to price and handle their pricing objections and then so you get close for the signature, if they have objections there, you deal with them just like you would live face to face and try to get it signed by DocuSign or one of those programs. If they’re local and they just don’t want to meet. Sometimes I just have my runner just drop the listing off at their porch and tell them to sign it and then we’ll come back and pick it up the next morning or something. And we’ve done a lot of those.

Ren Jones10:16

I like that. Just drop it off on the front porch, take an Uber driver over to get the signature.

10:24Let’s dive into the thing that’s gone a little viral. People are like, what is your 15 minutes of hot somebodies?

Carley Hathaway10:30

I know I’ve been hearing rumors about this. I want to hear about this 15 hot somebodies?

Mike Darda10:35

That can be taken a lot of different ways but lets talk about leads here and the lead follow up.

10:43Actually because of my rigid schedule, I’m prospecting very heavy as you know, from 7:45 to noon and you do that every day, five days a week. And there’s just certain people you aren’t going to reach because that’s not a time slot that they’re answering their phone or available.

11:02So my coach started getting me to do what we call hot 15 minute hot somebodies. And that is just exactly what it says. Taking 15 minutes to call your hottest leads at times outside your normal schedule. So that might be anytime after, say 5:00 in the evening, you take 15 minutes, you call those hot leads, maybe it’ll be a Saturday or a Sunday anytime during the day, for example. You’re going to catch people you normally don’t catch the caveat there is a course if you’re catching them at that time, guess when they usually want their listing appointments? About that time too. So you got to be prepared to deal with that a little bit. But it’s worth it when you look at the numbers. And I can go through those with you, how that is paid out.

Ren Jones11:47

So yeah, what do you think the yield is on that? So I mean, you’re doing it a couple times a week and then the yield is how many much extra business do you think?

Mike Darda11:55

Well, so the 15-minute hot somebodies is a seven-day a week activity. It’s calling usually for me, new expireds, my hot lead follow up, then if I still have some time left over, I’ll get into for sale by owners and the other people we always call. So that’s the goal. Catch them while you’re not in your normal prospecting time and you’re going to get them at odd times when they’re available. So now that’ll add about one to three contacts a day to your contacts, but my ratios have been adding about one to two more listing appointments a week. So you do that-

Ren Jones12:33

Holy crow.

Carley Hathaway12:34

Yeah, that’s a lot.

Ren Jones12:36

You know, for a lot of agents. They could just do that and be rich.

Mike Darda12:40

Well and you can make a living just off of of that. Think about it.

Ren Jones12:43

15 minutes hot somebodies, yeah.

Mike Darda12:46

One or two a week. That’s four a month. Let’s say that turns into three listings taken a month. And let’s say two of those sell, that’s 24 sales. If your average commission’s eight grand that’s an extra, almost 200 grand right there.

Carley Hathaway13:02

I’ll take it.

Ren Jones13:03

I love it. I love it.

Carley Hathaway13:05

Love it. And how long do you spend calling or you’re just calling 15 people?

Mike Darda13:09

I’m just, not 15 people. 15 minutes.

Carley Hathaway13:10

Oh, 15 minutes. Okay.

Mike Darda13:13

Anything for 15 minutes, right? You can work out on the treadmill 15 minutes, you can call your mom, you can even save 15% on your car insurance. Right? So you can do it. 15 minutes. The hardest part of this is just the discipline to actually take the time and do it.

Carley Hathaway13:30

Yeah, I like it.

Mike Darda13:32

I got a couple pro tips for you on that if you want.

Carley Hathaway13:35

Yes.

Mike Darda13:36

So pro tip number one is during the weekdays you either do it before you leave the office, last thing before you leave, or if maybe you’re coming home straight from appointments, do it in your driveway, in your car for 15 minutes. That way when you’re done, it’s out of your mind. You can go hang out with your family and not be thinking, oh shoot, I got to do my 15 minutes.

13:57The other pro tip, on the weekends is get it out of the way early. I mean, you may have heard the term eat the frog, right? When it’s something you don’t want to do, eat the frog. You just do it early and get it over with so you can enjoy the rest of your day. So I’ll typically, 8, 9:00 on a Saturday morning, maybe 10:00 on a Sunday, I’ll bang out those 15 minutes so I can go on my boat, have a couple beers and not worry about having to do some more prospecting, right?

Ren Jones14:25

Yeah. You don’t want to carry it around like a ball and chain. So as soon as you think of it, just go do it. Just, like Nike, right? Just go do it.

Carley Hathaway14:35

Yeah. And I like how you said it, you really can do anything for 15 minutes. You really can.

Ren Jones14:40

What’s really fun is Mr. Mike Darda has a listing appointment as he has one every half an hour. So we’re going to have to let him go here in a minute. Yeah, this is good material. This is strong stuff. Any last nice thoughts for some of our folks out there?

Mike Darda14:58

No. I mean it’s a simple thing to do, but it’s a hard thing to do because it takes discipline. So I mean, I can tell you for me, it’s a moving away from pain thing. I have to do it and get it over with. I know other people like the great Lee Marcus in Chicago does this 15 minutes of hot somebodies all the time and he tells me for him it’s a moving towards pleasure activity. He’s pulled to do it because he knows it’s so productive. It doesn’t matter if that’s what motivates you, as long as you do it.

Ren Jones15:28

It’s all up here.

Carley Hathaway15:31

I like that.

Ren Jones15:31

It’s all up here.

Carley Hathaway15:31

I like it.

Ren Jones15:31

Somebody who’s got mindset figured out.

Carley Hathaway15:33

Yeah. Big time.

Ren Jones15:35

That’s it.

Carley Hathaway15:37

Thanks for letting be on today, Mike, and we really, really appreciate it. I’m sure a lot of people are going to re-watch it many times.

Ren Jones15:42

Good. I know I am. If you watching on Vulcan7, you want to get involved with Lead Gen Facebook group, they are at facebook.com/groups/gotobjections. And finally, if you’re watching on Facebook and you’re not yet involved with Vulcan7, imagine that. Make sure to sign up at vulcan7.com/leadgen for a special deal.

16:02And why does Mike Darda and team, where do they get that mindset from? I’ll tell you where they get it from. They go online to Graeters.com and they find the local store that sells the Graeter’s Mint Chocolate Chip. This is the one for listings and mindset. The other ones like Rocky Road are not about good mindset then it’s mainly working buyers eating Rocky Road. So make sure to get Graeter’s Mint Chocolate Chip at a store near you. Go Graeters.com. Thanks everybody.

Carley Hathaway16:35

Thank you. Thanks Mike. Thanks everybody.

Ren Jones16:35

See you guys next week.

Mike Darda16:37

Thanks Carley. Thanks Ren.

Ren Jones16:38

Thanks Mike Darda. Send your referrals to Mike.

16:38