Unlock the secrets to building a thriving real estate career with insights from industry veteran, Sonny Moyers, who boasts over 50 years of unparalleled experience.
This episode equips you with some tools to achieve success through personalized service and technology.
Learn the art of creating original content that stands out, and understand the importance of integrating various marketing channels to craft a comprehensive strategy.
We also discuss "The Architecture of the Real Estate Practice," a must-read new book offering a detailed business model and practical advice for aspiring and seasoned real estate professionals alike.
Don't miss this episode filled with invaluable knowledge and actionable tips!
Want to reach out and learn more about Digital Journey? You can email us at kaylee@digital-journey.net or check out our website, www.digital-journey.net.
Unlock the secrets to building a thriving real estate career with insights from industry veteran, Sonny Moyers, who boasts over 50 years of unparalleled experience.
This episode equips you with some tools to achieve success through personalized service and technology.
Learn the art of creating original content that stands out, and understand the importance of integrating various marketing channels to craft a comprehensive strategy.
We also discuss "The Architecture of the Real Estate Practice," a must-read new book offering a detailed business model and practical advice for aspiring and seasoned real estate professionals alike.
Don't miss this episode filled with invaluable knowledge and actionable tips!
Want to reach out and learn more about Digital Journey? You can email us at kaylee@digital-journey.net or check out our website, www.digital-journey.net.
What's up guys? This is Kaylee Johnson here with Digital Journey. If you're a person that's wanting to learn social media, maybe that's just for you personally, maybe it's for your business. This is the right place for you. Hello everyone, today we have Sonny Moyers on the show. Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:
I'm glad to be here. I look forward to our interview.
Speaker 1:
It's going to be great. Sonny graduated from Albine Christian University with a Bachelor's of Science degree in Management and Communications and a Master of Science degree in Psychology, emphasizing human behavioral theory, interpersonal communication theory, organizational design and research methods. He obtained his Texas real estate license in 1971 and his Texas real estate broker license in 1988. Sonny is an award-winning agent who has achieved great success in the real estate industry in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Between 2004 and 2018, sonny was in the top 4% of all real estate agents nationwide, depending on the index used. Sonny was in the top 1% of all real estate agents in Texas for numerous years. This is so exciting to have you on here. Thank you for coming on.
Speaker 2:
I'm excited to be here. I hope we can give some good input for your, some good content for your listeners and your audience, and look forward to spending some time with you.
Speaker 1:
I'm sure it's going to be great. So go ahead and tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today. We all know that's a huge accomplishment in the real estate world. So congratulations, and tell us. How did you get to where you are? Have you always been interested in real estate? What's your journey like?
Speaker 2:
Well, I was listening to your intro there and realized how old I am compared to you and your audience. I've been a real estate agent 50 plus years. I actually got my license while I was in college. Okay, what happened was I had a wife and a baby that I needed to make sure I took care of. I was playing football at Abilene Christian on a scholarship and I didn't want to lose my scholarship and I didn't want to quit school.
Speaker 2:
I covered this in my book, but I decided I needed to do something to make more money. So I accepted a job as an assistant manager of an apartment complex and the man who owned that complex was a real estate agent and a realtor and he was into shopping centers, apartments and residential also, and he hired me as his manager and then he took me on as assistant manager and then promoted me to manager very quickly, and then he asked me if I wanted to be a real estate agent in the summers and I decided that might be better than working construction laying in 105 degree heat in the summer. And so I became a real estate agent and that's how I got started. It was kind of a journey that began with an accident of me needing to make money and ended up being a career.
Speaker 1:
That's amazing, and I know a lot of people that started real estate part-time to earn some money and then they fell in love with it and we're like this is what I want to do. I want to learn how to serve people and they're normally great with people and have awesome social skills and that's super exciting that you jumped on that young.
Speaker 2:
My educational background. It kind of belies the idea of being in real estate, because psychology is not often thought of as a prerequisite of being in real estate, Although communications is extremely important, because I had a minor in management and a minor in communications and then a master's degree in psychology. But I found that working with people. You asked what motivated me to be in real estate. I think it was the different people and the different personalities and the relationships that were built in real estate. Many clients become very good friends and they often work with me for a period of 20 years. Wow, I've had clients that I've worked with for 20, 25 years and I have clients that I've done transactions both in commercial real estate, residential real estate and consulting with. So I've done.
Speaker 2:
My business model was quite different. My book delves into all of those because it deals with relationships and people. It doesn't talk about contracts. It doesn't talk about contracts. It doesn't talk about becoming a millionaire overnight. It doesn't talk about how easy it is to be in real estate and how to make money. It talks about how to build a real estate practice over a long period of time and sustain success for a long period. In 2015, I was lucky enough to be nominated for the Best Realtor in Dallas. It was a.
Speaker 2:
Dallas Builders Association deal and three judges interviewed the final three candidates and I won that award. And I think I won it because of my approach to managing real estate in the sense of managing the business, the real estate business and knowing how much you're involved in technology. Technology is a huge part of the real estate business and knowing how much you're involved in technology Technology is a huge part of the real estate business. It's a very important part of it.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely, and a lot of people don't realize how much technology can help realtors, how much social media can help and even how much knowing a correct CRM can go into that. What do you think about CRMs and real estate management? How much of an important role do you think?
Speaker 2:
that plays Well. I'll give you a quick example. Let's say that you start out in real estate. In the first few years you obtain maybe 30 people that are on your what you might call your P1 list very important people that you're going to try to build relationships with over time. And in that list of those 30 people they might have five or six or 10 contacts or relatives or in their sphere of influence. That should be important in your marketing too. So 30 times 10 is 300 names, and then along the way they get added to your CRM. So very quickly your CRM could grow to a thousand people. Yes, Our CRM had over 5,000 people in it when we were ginning along full speed. It was a lot of different people in our group.
Speaker 2:
We had several people working for us, but we were the only agents we didn't have a business model where we were the primary agents and everything we did in our business was use technology and people to allow us to spend more time with our clients.
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
And so the approach to it was very different than the typical real estate agent who starts to be successful gets overwhelmed with how much information has to be managed, and information management is everything in real estate, because you manage your information about your transactions but, most importantly, you manage information about your clients.
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
And your sphere of influence and how you can reach them. So the way we used a CRM was quite different, kaylee. We used a sophisticated marketing approach with a marketing mix that used a lot of different marketing methods, one of which was social media. A lot of other methods too, but we used that marketing mix and we managed that marketing mix to reach our target audience, which was, first and foremost, our P1, p2, p3, and P4 clients, but it was also to reach target audiences.
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
To develop and grow our business to more people. So what we used it was by coding clients from P1 to P4 and then looking at our marketing mix and how we were going to use our marketing to reach those clients in a special way based upon the client hierarchy. Client hierarchy meaning P1, were the clients that we expected to do the most business with us over time, and so they required more contact and more attention, particularly from the lead agent, than the P4 client, who might or might not do business with us in the future.
Speaker 2:
By understanding hierarchy of clients and understanding how to pay attention to them. The CRM allows you to build a sophisticated marketing program that manages your resource so that you don't waste time and energy and effort on those clients that are not likely to do business with you in the near future.
Speaker 1:
I love that. I think so many people think of a CRM more as like a Rolodex, and there's so much more potential. One of the main things I use my CRM for is, for you know, creating target audiences.
Speaker 2:
Well, let's give an example Account cycling okay, account cycling no-transcript, and you want to contact those people on a regular basis because they're P1. They're the highest priority.
Speaker 2:
Then you have maybe 700 or 800 people in your P2 group. They're people that you know but you don't really know them real well and they may be on vacation, they may be sleeping right now and they need to wake up sometime in the future and when they wake up we want to make sure they know that we're there. So we contact them in a different way, in a less frequent way over time. In the P3 group we might have 2000 people and those are targeted audience, people in a target market, and we want to reach those people in a very different way and they can't be reached in the same personal way that the P1 people are reached, because I don't have enough resources to do that.
Speaker 1:
Right, and that would kind of freak them out if all of a sudden they're like why is this person acting like they know me? What is going on here?
Speaker 2:
Exactly right. So we used account cycling to cycle accounts based upon their contact method and how they were going to be reached during a year a planned year so that we could reach them a certain number of times in different ways and manage our resources to maximize the revenue potential in our real estate practice, and that's how we achieve the success that we got.
Speaker 1:
That's amazing People don't think about when it comes to real estate is even on social media. You have to have a target audience. I have people come into the Digital Journey Group coaching program and be like, all right, I need to be on all these platforms and I'm like hold on, who is your target audience? Yes, you're trying to sell houses but depending on your location, depending on the type of things you sell, you still have a target. Thanks for listening to the episode.
Speaker 1:
We're going to take a quick pause, real fast, and I have a question for you Are you overwhelmed and struggling with your business's social media? Are you putting so much? Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We're going to put a quick pause on it and I have a question for you. Are you struggling with social media? Are you overwhelmed by what platforms to be on, what to post? We talked a little bit about how, knowing where you should be, I can help you.
Speaker 1:
Digital Journey is an exclusive group mastermind that teaches you how to grow your social media, to find where your target audience is on, so that you can spend less time on social media and increase your profits and gain new respect from clients and grow your product in general. You deserve that. So if you're interested, I'd love for you to set up a call with me. You can reach out at wwwdigitaljourneynet and you'll be able to find me there. If this is something you're serious about, I want to hear from you If you have a question. Maybe you're still trying to figure out where in the world should I be for social media. Let me help, and we're going to get back to the episode Audience.
Speaker 2:
Social media. I'm on LinkedIn and I have 7,500 people I'm on LinkedIn with. Of those, probably a little less than 5,000 of them are real estate agents. Why am I targeting real estate agents? Because I want to get referrals.
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
And I want to sell property and, more importantly, a significant number of those real estate agents are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Speaker 2:
Even though I want to get referrals from Chicago or from New York or from Memphis, I really want to focus on the people that are here. That's my target audience. So when I do things on LinkedIn, I'm really trying to reach those real estate agents, to connect with them so that we can form an ability to do business with each other. Yes, help me sell my property, may help them sell their properties, and that's how I use social media, particularly on LinkedIn, in my real estate practice.
Speaker 1:
Right, and different platforms are made for different things, so LinkedIn is great to network with other realtors. I looked at your LinkedIn profile and I love how engaging your posts are. I'm used to seeing real estate posts because that's what I do and they were catching my attention because you were using the correct formatting. Then, if you go over to Facebook, you might be more focused on actually reaching buyers, and so it's important to tailor your content for each platform, but people don't realize how simple that can actually be. It doesn't have to be extremely complicated, but it's very important to do.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely, and I think that brings us to a very important topic, which is what I would call copycat marketing.
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
Now copycat marketing is run amok in the real estate world. Yes, An agent sees someone who's doing something that they think is good and they copy it. It's not original content and that causes them to look a lot like other people.
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
And one of the problems in real estate is, you know, there's 1,520,000 agents associated with the National Association of Realtors. Oh my goodness, and that's a couple of years ago and there's 3 million real estate agents in the United States. Now think about this there's 330 something million people in the United States, and not all those are buyers or sellers. In fact, the average family is probably about 2.6 people. So if you take 330 something million and divide it by 2.5, that's the number of households you might reach.
Speaker 2:
Not all those households are people who are ready or need to buy a real estate. But when you have 3 million real estate agents, you look at that, it's about 75 or 80 people for every real estate agent. Now how do you compete? And if you make yourself look like other real estate agents with technology, especially social media, for example, then you start to look like other and that makes you ubiquitous with the world. And when you're ubiquitous, the logical question for a consumer is what, how much do you charge? They can't see a difference.
Speaker 1:
Right, that's one thing we talk about a lot. There are structures to social media posts, but you have to make it your own. Everything is so automated right now and, like you said, so many things look alike that people want to get to know their realtor. Someone used the example of a realtor is like your hairdresser they're hearing about the big moments in your life. They're there for those exciting new house purchases or those emotional selling things. They want to have a connection with you, and so if on your social media, you can present, you know they want to have a connection with you. And so if, on your social media, you can present who you are and almost sell yourself as a brand, that's what's going to make people want to come back to you is by saying this is a person that cares about me, not just about selling houses, like it seems like a majority of the realtors do.
Speaker 2:
Well, and a good example. On my LinkedIn, I wrote about the social butterfly and the social butterfly had to do with a particular niche market where it was a very social environment. Okay, and I wrote about the social butterfly. Now, how many other real estate agents wrote about a social butterfly?
Speaker 1:
Right.
Speaker 2:
They did that to the tribute community in a particular place in our area, so original content is missing today.
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
People copy everything, and they copy it because it's easy and it's cheap, but it's not effective and, as a result, they use up their money investing in things that aren't effective and, as a result, they run out of money and they don't spend money on the things that are most effective.
Speaker 1:
The majority of people that come through the Digital Journey Group coaching program use automation, where it's just posting the same type of posts, and it's when we sit down and say you can create your own content and it doesn't have to be complicated. That that's when they start seeing results and say people are reaching out to me because they like my personality, they like my brand, not just because I posted what's the seven best tips you can do to sell a house, exactly, and that's what really makes a person stand apart.
Speaker 2:
And thousands of realtors have posted seven things to sell your home. Yes, you've got to come up with a unique angle, and I love social media in that regard. Now, when you take the CRM and you take social media and you take print media which I still believe in, by the way, particularly luxury magazines and things of that nature and when you take personal contact, and when you take association, involvement, involvement in your community, being a part of a nonprofit you create what's called the marketing mix. What blend of things should I have in that marketing mix to reach the target audience? And that blend might be very different for one person, one realtor, than from another. They're copying someone who may not be trying to reach the same target you're trying to reach and, as a result, they copy them and push themselves and create a negative brand, not a positive brand.
Speaker 2:
And so when you talk about branding, there's too, many people that think of branding and try to copy people, to create brand, and they haven't even created their own. I mean, if you ask a typical realtor, tell me three things that are going to make you different and make you stand out from compared to the other 1,520,000 agents that are affiliated with NAR. Tell me what you're going to do those three things they can't tell you. Tell me what you're going to do those three things they can't tell you. So I wrote my book because I want people to have a better understanding of marketing theory, the use of technology. We went to a technology seminar, kaylee, and this seminar had about 300 real estate agents there, OK, and those 300 real estate agents were all there to learn about emerging technologies. Now, this was 10, 15 years ago, so I'm going back a ways, but the concept's still the same and after a few minutes we realized what they were doing.
Speaker 2:
They were calling us all, dinosaurs Essentially what they said was you're all old, which I was. You're all operating like you used to operate, which we weren't, but they assumed that we were. And they basically said you're all going to. You used to operate, which we weren't, but they assumed that we were. And they basically said you're all going to be extinct in a few years because the customer is not going to need you. Wow, and if you don't adopt new technologies and get on board with these new technologies, you're going to become extinct and you're going to become a dead dinosaur, not a live dinosaur.
Speaker 1:
That's a little aggressive, but all righty.
Speaker 2:
Now, when we left that meeting I said to my wife Judy I said you know we learned a lot today, didn't we? She looked at me kind of confused, like what do you mean? They just basically called us dinosaurs and said we better get on board with all this new technology. And what I said was look, we have to focus on technologies that bring us closer to our clients, our target audience, and that's the P1 and P2 group, because that's where we're going to make the most money in the shortest amount of time and be able to fund our business.
Speaker 2:
Yes, if we did everything they told us to do, we would be moving away from our clients and not toward them, right, do? We would be moving away from our clients and not toward them, right? We want to take the technology that we believe works, as long as that technology works, to have us be a closer relationship with our clients, not further away. And so we went back and recommitted ourselves to be personal contact, to using technology to reach people, but reach people in a personal way, not in a way that is distant. If you're not making those contacts out to the people they know and building networks and building connections with other realtors and prospects, they're going to probably find a point where their business isn't going to grow and isn't going to spread Definitely Well.
Speaker 1:
Thank you so much for coming on. That was amazing valuable information. Where can we find you? What about? You said you have a book out. What's all about that?
Speaker 2:
If I may, this is my book. It's called the Architecture of the Real Estate Practice. It's a hardback, it's 300 pages and, kaylee, it's not your typical real estate book. It's a textbook. Okay, it's not something you can read in one night. It's not something that you can read and go oh, I've got four good nuggets out of here. You know, it's 200 nuggets and it's how to build a real estate practice. Most important part of that book is a sample business model which I actually use to build my business. Wow, and that sample business model is how I did it. Okay, the book is available on Amazon and other retailers. It's also available on my book website at realestatebookorg. Okay, I also am on YouTube.
Speaker 2:
I have probably 18 hours of podcast interviews like this on YouTube. Just look me up and find me. And you can go to my YouTube channel at A-R-E-P-2-0-2-3. That's Architecture Real Estate Practice A-R-E-P-2-0-2-3. That's Architecture, Real Estate Practice A-R-E-P-2-0-2-3. And that's where they can find my channel.
Speaker 1:
That's amazing. We'll have all of that linked down below, so if you're driving doing laundry yard work, don't worry about it, it'll all be linked down below. Well, sonny, thank you so much for coming on. This was a pleasure. I know I learned a lot and I know my listeners did as well. So thank you for coming on, thank you so much for having me on.