“Busy” Isn’t Productive: The Activity Rules That Create Closings with Karlton Utter

Karlton [00:00:00] I have found that every personality can be successful in real estate if you have the right mindset and work ethic behind it. That's the key—is coming into this like you have to want to work, especially when you first get started in the business and it's like you're looking around waiting for somebody to tell you what to do, and that's not necessarily what real estate is.

Karlton You gotta go out and you gotta find people and tell them that you're in the business and you have to be activity driven.

Lauren [00:01:00] Welcome back to the Reside Platform Podcast. I am Lauren Holland, director of Client Experience here at Reside, and today we have someone in the studio who I am really excited to sit down with because this conversation is going to hit different for a lot of you. So if you are an agent who feels like you are putting in the work, but something still isn’t clicking, or a team leader who knows your people have potential but can’t quite unlock it, this one’s for you.

Lauren Our guest today is Karlton Utter. Hi Karlton.

Karlton Hi Lauren.

Lauren He is our head of agent training and development here at Reside, and I just wanna give you all—before we get into it—a little context for who this guy is, because his background is not small. Karlton, if I miss anything, feel free to introduce yourself.

Lauren Sure. He has built sales operation frameworks supporting 450 plus agents across multiple states. Developed national training programs adopted by over 10,000 agents. He’s led Zillow preferred program expansion for one of the top converting Zillow companies in the country. He has launched—I'm not done yet.

Lauren He has launched new markets from scratch, from the assessment all the way through to performance. And he’s done all of this at both the local and national level. Have I forgotten anything, Karlton?

Karlton [00:02:00] It sounds really good when you say it. I’m like, man, that guy did a lot.

Lauren I’m like, I’m gonna take a breath ’cause I’m still going.

Lauren I love it.

Karlton I’ve been very lucky and privileged to be in this industry for a long time now, and I’ve done sales, I’ve managed offices, I’ve done recruiting, training, marketing—I mean, you name it, I’ve probably done it in this business.

Lauren Yeah, well I used to call myself a Swiss Army knife, but it turns out that’s you now.

Lauren So I am handing over the torch to you. So awesome. So now you’re here at Reside and you’re working directly with our agents and teams every single—so, Karlton, welcome to the podcast.

Karlton Well, thank you. I’m thrilled to be here.

Lauren Yay. Okay, so before we get into everything I have to ask—because you’ve worked with agents at every level: local markets, national brands, enterprise operations—what’s the one thing that’s consistent across all of them?

Karlton [00:03:00] The one thing that’s consistent with us when we’re dealing with residential real estate is it’s still a people business, right? Mm-hmm. It’s still about the relationships that the agents form with their potential clients and current clients to create a client-for-life approach. Now, the one thing that I find differs between agents that have found success in the business and those that haven’t is that you need to treat this as a career.

Karlton Mm-hmm. You need to look at this as: “I own a business.” For those that come into it and treat it like a hobby—“I love watching HGTV and I show three houses and they pick one”—that is not how this business is. And the beauty of real estate is that I am a big believer of the DISC profile and understanding your personality, and I think that it’s really important to know what your personality is so you can adjust it to be able to work better with others.

Karlton [00:04:00] And I have found that every personality can be successful in real estate if you have the right mindset and work ethic behind it. That’s the key—is coming into this like you have to want to work, especially when you first get started in the business and it’s like you’re looking around waiting for somebody to tell you what to do, and that’s not necessarily what real estate is.

Karlton You gotta go out and you gotta find people and tell them that you’re in the business, and you have to be activity driven. And the big thing for me is that when I moved into sales, I had already been doing marketing and recruiting in the business, and then I moved into sales and I sat through—at the time—it was a two-week, five-days-a-week, all-day, nine-to-five training program, and they taught you everything from A to Z.

Karlton And I wasn’t going to pretend to know what was gonna work, what wasn’t. I wasn’t one of those that was like, “Oh, I’m not gonna do this. That makes me uncomfortable.” I’m like, “Look, they just gave me the roadmap how to sell real estate. I’m gonna do all of it.” And that’s what really helped me kickstart my real estate career in sales very quickly—is I just jumped right in and I learned from my mistakes and I learned from my successes.

Lauren Mm-hmm. Well, we had a conversation this morning about what gets in the way of getting into that activity. Where did you start for someone that might be stuck or not in production yet?

Karlton [00:05:00] I took an approach that I was a nine-to-five employee when it came to my business. Now, I understood that I needed to show properties and be available on the weekends—’cause quite honestly, that’s when our clients are available.

Karlton But for me, it was making sure that I was prospecting at least an hour or two every single day. And that’s the part that I think a lot of people struggle with: “Well, who do I call? How do I fill my pipeline? I’m uncomfortable. I don’t wanna bother people.”

Karlton I didn’t have leads that were handed to me when I started selling. This was the early 2000s—I’m really dating myself. You used to have to come in the office to get on the MLS because it was only on one computer. It wasn’t like how everything is with you. If there was an offer coming in, you sat by the fax machine, waiting—like, “When is this offer coming in here?”

Karlton And then you’d have to wait for it to slowly print out. And then, of course, the lawyer would run outta ink halfway through and you’re like, “I just need the offer.”

Lauren Right. I don’t think you’re dating yourself. I think many of our listeners right now are laughing along with you because they remember exactly what you’re talking about.

Karlton Yeah, luckily I missed the time of the business when the MLS was in book form.

Lauren Oh.

Karlton God. So I understand that before it moved to the computer, you used to get a book that was sent to the office, and if you had a client for a house and you didn’t want anyone else to see it, you would rip the paper out of the book so nobody else knew it was available. So I missed those days.

Karlton But I was in the office every day, and I was making my calls. I’d come in, get my cup of coffee, say hi to everybody that was in, and I would just start dialing. I called FSBOs, I called expires. I called my people that lived in my neighborhood just to introduce myself.

Karlton I called into neighborhoods to invite people to open houses and to tell them about new listings and to see if they knew anyone thinking of buying or selling. I just found a reason to prospect. And back then, email and text was just getting started, so it was really just about picking up the phone—and I kind of cut my chops doing it that way.

Karlton Mm-hmm. Now you have a much more integrated approach. Marketing is at a whole different level with social media now—you can really showcase a property. We had newspaper ads that were little, tiny black-and-white ads that were abbreviated to the point you had no idea what they were even talking about.

Karlton And the marketing and what we have now to help create those opportunities—I would’ve killed for that in full-time sales. But it was just treating it like a job. And there were days where I would finish everything I needed to by four o’clock. I could have gone home, I could have taken the afternoon off and spent time with my kids, and I would’ve loved to have done that.

Karlton But I said, “No, I’m committed to doing this as a career.” And I stayed until five o’clock. And you know what? It was always—whatever it was I came up with—making a few more calls, sending out a handwritten note to somebody, whatever it was. I did that last hour, and it almost always turned into business for me.

Lauren Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that’s a testament to your growth as well because look at where you’re sitting today—you’ve had your hands working with tens of thousands of agents.

Lauren [00:09:00] Based on your experience—and I wanna go into, because you said a couple of things that I wanna go down a rabbit hole into—but especially with the technology that’s at everybody’s fingertips, especially with AI and the marketing, and you can literally tell AI now the brand colors you want: “Make me a presentation” or “Go make me a graphic.”

Lauren It’s cutting out a lot of the VA work for teams and it’s never been easier, I would say. And I really wanna take this into leads and calling and getting agents into activity because you just highlighted something really good: you had to call people—you didn’t have people handing you leads.

Lauren I’m guessing Zillow flex didn’t exist back then. Correct?

Karlton [00:10:00] So I remember when I was selling real estate, I was so excited to have a website. That website was a realtor.com landing page. Okay. So at the time, realtor.com was really leading the way because it was actually connected with the National Association of Realtors before it went private.

Karlton So we didn’t have Zillow. We had realtor.com. I’m trying to think what other sites we had at the time—maybe Trulia. It was just getting started and that eventually got bought and turned into the powerhouse what Zillow is now when they combined forces. And Yahoo might have had a real estate search or something along that line as well.

Karlton But technology—right around 2007 and 2008—it went to another level for us in the business. I remember when I got my “silver world tour” Blackberry phone. Do you remember Blackberries? You probably never had one.

Lauren I never had one. I went straight to a Razor and then the Chocolate, and then an Android, and now I have the iPhone.

Karlton Okay. So when we went from flip phones right to the Blackberry, that was something special that had Blackberry Messenger on it. But I remember when I got that Blackberry, it was advertised: it comes with the Facebook app. And I’m like, “All right, let me figure this Facebook thing out.”

Karlton And it was like a light bulb went off when I saw that. I was like, “Are you kidding me? This is like the perfect tool for us in real estate.” And that’s when I got heavily involved in—I actually started coaching and teaching and training a lot on social media because I really understood the importance of how to showcase a brand and how to showcase your personality and how to connect.

Karlton To me it was like an instant Rolodex. I started connecting with friends, family, acquaintances, and now—like this—I can get in front of them and share information. And then you started to do business pages and all that fun stuff and it evolved.

Karlton It wasn’t until everything turned into TikTok and Snapchat that I was kind of like, “All right, now this is a little bit past my pay grade here.”

Lauren Yeah. You have a fun Snapchat story too. But let me ask you this with Facebook: because I feel like we can connect this back to AI. You found Facebook—were you doing free trainings or were people paying you to do that? What did that look like?

Karlton [00:12:00] So at the time, the company I was at—I became like an underground trainer. They all wanted to understand it. The company wasn’t really supporting it yet because it was still pretty much brand new.

Karlton And so I started doing that, and then I actually started my own training and consulting company where private companies would hire me to come and teach them how to utilize social media. And I had a graphic designer that I worked with, and we would do a full build-out for them on all of their social sites and get them set up.

Karlton And I remember—I think like an Arbor Club—I presented somewhere for an Arbor Club, and local libraries would hire me and I’d do presentations for local business owners.

Lauren Wow.

Karlton It was a lot of fun.

Lauren That is—you’re expanding out of real estate too. That’s awesome.

Karlton Yeah.

Lauren Cool, because it’s adaptable.

Lauren [00:13:00] So I really wanna highlight this for our listeners because Karlton saw an opportunity in Facebook and he got ahead—because think of everybody: everybody has Facebook now, and if you don’t, it’s just because you’ve chosen not to.

Lauren Everybody has Facebook, and it’s the same with people that are resistant to AI, I think is fair to say, because if we’re not using it—that’s what I mean by it’s at our fingertips. Any piece of information: how do we use it to our advantage to get ahead in the industry?

Lauren Are you doing anything with AI with agents?

Karlton [00:14:00] Yeah, I gotta tell you—like every day, it’s like Christmas morning with AI. Every day I learn something new that it can do to help streamline our business and operationally how we work.

Karlton It’s incredible because my generation, honestly, we wanna use it like Google. We’re like, “Oh, this is like a better Google,” and we just ask questions—and it does phenomenal stuff.

Karlton Like I can go in, I can say: “Here’s my bass guitar, here’s my amp, here’s my pedalboard. We’re learning a new Gin Blossoms song—how do I set it up?” And it’ll tell me: “Here’s how you set up your guitar, your amp, and your pedalboard to sound just like the bass player in the Gin Blossoms on that song.” Like that was eye-opening when that started to happen for me.

Lauren That’s incredible. And in your accolades, I also wanna highlight your music career. Do you wanna tell the listeners about that?

Karlton Oh, I started playing piano at four. Learned saxophone, played that all through high school, learned how to play the bass guitar, and have been playing in cover bands now—geez—since I was 20, so we’re going on 30 years here. It’s a big part of my life. I love music. I love Star Wars. I grew up on Star Wars. You probably see the Star Wars stuff behind me.

Lauren I was gonna save that for the end.

Karlton [00:15:00] We had the best music ever in the ’80s and ’90s. I grew up on some great bands.

Lauren It’s much better quality than today. You never know what you’re gonna get these days.

Karlton Well, geez—AI can write songs for you now.

Lauren I don’t know if you’ve—

Karlton Seen that. It’s crazy. You could go in and say, “Here’s the title I want lyrics, here’s the key we’re playing it in—what should I do next?”

Lauren Mm-hmm.

Karlton It’s pretty incredible.

Lauren [00:16:00] Yeah. So for our agents on the call, let’s circle back because we were talking about leads, Zillow, and technology and how everything’s evolved and getting ahead in the industry.

Lauren So for our teams that might not—so I kind of wanna talk about recruiting. And so when you’re positioning yourself and doubting yourself of, “Oh, well we’re not a flex team, and everyone’s going to the flex team over there”—who do we call? How do we make that not profitable, but appealing to agents to join their teams?

Karlton [00:17:00] Look, if you’re a flex team, you have that lead generation now. I think it’s called Preferred. Zillow changed their name—it’s all right. I still call it flex too. Zillow always had a hard time getting used to it. We went from the one syllable to the multiple syllables. It’s easier to say flex.

Karlton That’s a great opportunity if you are looking to get involved in the third-party lead generation. I will say that Zillow has the best high-intent leads probably that you can connect with. You have a lot of other opportunities—a lot of other resources. You have a lot of companies now that are generating listing opportunities. You have sold.com. You have a whole bunch of other ones that are out there that you can sign up for—you can pay for as well.

Karlton For some companies, that’s not the direction you wanna go in. You don’t wanna have to give up sometimes 40% for each of those leads. In those cases, you really wanna focus on the listings in your area because listings—I remember going to training, they said, “Listings are the name of the game. You get listings, you can go play golf every day. They just sell themselves.”

Karlton So I went and got a bunch of listings and I couldn’t even get through the first three holes without my phone blowing up. So that wasn’t accurate. You still have to work hard with listings.

Lauren Yep.

Karlton [00:18:00] But listings create that power-of-one effect, right? Where you get one listing, and now you instantly become marketable. You have buyers seeing your name and your contact info. You have other sellers seeing your name and your contact info.

Karlton So you guys, for every one listing, you should be looking to do two to five transactions from that one listing.

Karlton Now, can buyers provide that? They absolutely can. You could sell a home to a buyer. That buyer could know people looking to move to the area, or they could be looking to make other investments, or possibly down the road decide they wanna sell and buy something different. But the listings are gonna create immediate business opportunities for you.

Karlton So what I find is that sometimes the Zillow companies have a little bit more of a balance: they work with a lot of buyers because of the Zillow program, and then other companies decide we wanna be a little bit more focused on the listings. And if that’s the case—that’s a lot of hunting. That is tried-and-true activities: getting in front of as many people as possible, not being a secret realtor.

Karlton You’ve gotta tell everybody you know that you are in real estate.

Lauren Mm-hmm.

Karlton And you’ve gotta hand out business cards and do community events and support your local little league and Girl Scouts—anything you can get involved in, you should do.

Karlton Now, the plus side to that is that on listings, you control your income. Now on the buying side, yes, we sign an exclusive buyer agency agreement, but a lot of times what do we do? We say, “I’m gonna try to seek that compensation from the seller,” and whatever that compensation amount is, that’s what we accept. We don’t necessarily go to our buyers and try to make up the difference.

Karlton So if we agreed on three and we’re accepting two and a half—guys, honestly, we should be going and getting that extra half. We do a lot of hard work for that money. But I know we don’t.

Karlton On the listing side, you control your income from the get-go. You tell them, “Guys, I charge three and a half, I charge four, I charge two”—whatever the amount is. But you’re able to control that upfront and know exactly what you’re getting and be able to bank on it when that listing closes.

Lauren [00:19:00] And I think for the agents that are willing to cut their commission in half just to get the deal—what are you doing? Like, how do you have those conversations of not going lower than what you’re worth?

Karlton [00:20:00] You gotta stand your ground. You gotta say no. I used to have people all the time that would try to beat me up on commission, and my answer is just, “No, I’m sorry. This is what I charge and why.”

Karlton And there’s a lot of times that I would negotiate—and look, I’m sympathetic, and there’s times where I would give a portion of my commission if I had to, in dire straits, to get a deal closed.

Karlton But the reality is, when you become a listing agent—especially if you’re farming. For example, I lived in Greenwich Chase in western New Jersey, right on the border of Lehigh Valley, and that was the community that I farmed. It was like 700 homes. I was spending three to $500 a month to make sure that I had touch points—multiple touch points—with those homeowners. So anybody in that community, if they’re thinking of selling, they’re thinking of me.

Karlton If I’m charging 3% on the list side and I have four or five listings or a couple that have sold, and now the next person I list their home for two and a half—are you telling me that they’re not gonna find out?

Karlton I listed that home at a discount. So powerful. And now they’re all like, “Why did you do them at two and a half and why am I at three?” And then moving forward, now you’re stuck at two and a half.

Karlton [00:21:00] If I ever stopped and looked at my income at the end of the year—and this is something I urge you all to do—at the end of the year, you need to look at how much total did you make, and then you need to look at how many hours did you put into that so you know what your hourly wage is.

Karlton A lot of folks don’t do that. They live and die by each commission check. And it’s, “Oh, I gotta get this closed,” and, “Oh, I made 4,500 on this house.”

Karlton Stop thinking about each commission check and look at: how much do I wanna earn at the end of the year? Then take that amount that you earned and go back and say, “This is how many hours I put into the business and this is what I earned as an hourly wage.” Is it where I wanna be or not?

Karlton Right. And sometimes I would go at the end of the year and I would look and I’d say, “All right, I was really good at holding a 3%. I had maybe like a 2.78 retained commission.” And if that was two and a half or two, that might’ve been another 10 or $15,000 now.

Karlton If you’re like me, that’s a really nice vacation I could take my family on for another 10 or 15 grand. I didn’t wanna give that up. I gotta pay my mortgage and I had to support my family, so I needed to make every dollar I could, and I felt I deserved it. I knew my stuff inside and out. I knew the market. And if folks were hiring me, they were getting a level of service they weren’t getting with anybody else. And that’s why I got paid what I wanted to get paid.

Lauren [00:22:00] You just made a lot of thoughts in my head. So: don’t be a secret agent because people are gonna forget that you’re in real estate. It’s not your aunt’s job to remember. You are the local real estate expert if you’re not telling people about it.

Lauren People wanna work with people that do deals on deals on deals. This could be your first deal—people don’t need to know that. You just need to put it out there. And on social media, you’ll look like you’re selling a bunch of houses—asking for permission, maybe, from an agent in another office: “Hey, do you want me to host that open house?”

Lauren If they just put a new house on the market and they don’t wanna host, offer to host it for them, use their signage and whatnot.

Lauren And then when you’re talking about they aren’t tracking what their commission is and what their hourly rate is and their value—a lot of conversations I have, you’ll see: I don’t really fluff or sugarcoat things. I can be a little direct and I’m working to have a little bit of a filter.

Lauren But when I ask—I’m working with ops or team leaders—I say, “Okay, well how many deals do you have actively under contract right now?” They don’t know. They’re like, “Well, I don’t have it written down. I’m gonna have to go count in the MLS,” and I’m like, “What—you have to go do what?”

Lauren So for anybody listening: if you don’t have a tracking platform, go into Google or Excel—whichever G Suite or Outlook that you have—and just go make a tracking system.

Lauren And then AI—just go give a prompt of, “Hey, these are my last commission checks. This is the last property. Here’s the percentage I took. This is what the brokerage took out,” whatever it looks like. Go plug that into AI and then have it write the code to put into the Excel or the Google Sheet—and then that’s how you track everything, right?

Lauren Yeah.

Karlton I love that.

Karlton [00:24:00] I had a mentor that told me—when I started managing a real estate office—I had a mentor who is also a long-time manager. He said, “Know your numbers.”

Karlton The level that you’re at right now, you have to know your market. You have to know your numbers inside and out. You have to do R&D every day. Go into the MLS, have a picture of what’s happening in your market. Understand the supply and demand. And that’s where I really got into understanding absorption rates and how that plays into what’s going on.

Karlton And it paints a picture so I know exactly: are home values going up? Are they down? Is it a balanced market? How much level of competition do we have? How many buyers do we have over the past 30 days that are interested in those properties?

Karlton So when I’m meeting with a seller, I can have that hard conversation with them. When I say, “Hey, we should price the home between 325 and 350,” and they’re like, “Great—we want 500 for it,” I need to be able to say, “Look—here’s the market that we’re looking at, and this is why.”

Karlton If you’re just like, “Okay, well let’s try it,” you need to be the expert. I always say we need to be real estate geniuses because if you ever go to an Apple store, the folks that work in an Apple store know their product inside and out.

Karlton I used to try to have fun and stump ’em. I’d be like—if you’ve ever seen Back to the Future, you’ll get this reference—I’d walk in and I’d be like, “So what’s the flux capacitor on the new MacBook?” And they’re like, “Sir, you can’t travel through time on our Mac.” But I would try messing with them. They knew their product inside and out.

Lauren Yeah.

Karlton Imagine if you, as the real estate professional, as the expert, knew your products inside and out so you could answer those questions and really guide your buyers and sellers through a transaction—being that real estate genius.

Karlton What does that bring to the table? You’re creating raving fans. Everybody is gonna recommend you if you are that true expert and you’re guiding them through the process. You’re not there to just open the door. You are there to be a trusted advisor through that transaction, and that means having the hard conversations with your clients.

Karlton You’re not there to be their best friend. We all like working with people—that’s why we get in real estate—but you have to have the hard conversations with them sometimes.

Lauren [00:26:00] Well, as we say here—John Shep—lack accountability is the best form of love you can give someone. And a few weeks ago we were at this company retreat in West Palm Beach and we talked a lot about accountability.

Lauren And for team leaders, if you have agents that are calling, but they’re not having real estate conversations—they’re talking about soccer games or a community event that’s coming up, but no real estate pops in—what’s that doing for their business? How are you helping them grow and put money in their bank account to put food on the table for their families?

Lauren Are you creating a world that’s big enough for your people to live in and thrive in and be profitable in?

Lauren So yes—yeah, that was such a great point. What else do you have here?

Karlton [00:27:00] To kind of play off of that, you can’t be afraid to ask for the business.

Lauren Yeah.

Karlton Right? So many times—how many times have you done what I call the parking lot shuffle? You go show ’em five houses and it’s like, “All right, what are we gonna do? Are we gonna write an offer? Am I gonna see you next weekend?”

Lauren Yeah.

Karlton That’s where I used to be like, “All right, guys—we’re gonna meet at the Starbucks. I wanna sit down. I wanna review the five properties. I wanna know which ones you could see yourself living in, which one we wanna make an offer on, and which ones did we learn from—so, which ones do we not wanna see again—to help me understand how to best work with you in the future.”

Karlton I needed closure. When people came through the open houses, I asked every single one: “So, could you see yourself living here? Do you wanna buy this house?”

Lauren That’s great.

Karlton [00:28:00] And if they’re like, “Yes,” I’d be like, “Great.” I’d lock the door—be like, “Let’s write the offer.”

Karlton And if they’re like, “No,” I’d say, “Well, tell me a little bit about what it’s missing or what you’re looking for.” And then they’d say, “Well, we really wanted a four-bedroom. This one has three.”

Karlton I was like, “All right—so you guys love this neighborhood, you like this price point, but you’d really like to have something with the fourth bedroom. I got a house for you—it’s actually right around the corner. Here’s what I want you to do: I want you to go right now, drive past it, tell me what you think. Then I want you to text or call me, and as soon as this open house is over, I’m gonna meet you there and let you through that home.”

Karlton So when you just ask for the business, it allows you to have closure and know what they’re really looking for.

Karlton When people used to say, “Well, we’re gonna think about it,” I’d be like, “I’m not trying to be a pain, but what are you thinking about? What did I not tell you? What did I miss? What don’t I know here to help you guys make a decision?”

Karlton And they’d be like, “Well, we’re just not sure if we really wanna spend that much.” “No problem. I completely understand. But I like to know that—I wanna know what the challenge is—to be able to help those clients out.”

Lauren [00:29:00] Well, you’re creating the ultimate client experience for them because if you’re not asking, you’re assuming, and you wanna get on the same page with them.

Lauren And yeah—there was a term, but my mom brain just went out of focus again.

Lauren You wanna make sure you are on the same page, setting those expectations with the clients. And you don’t wanna waste their time. You don’t wanna waste your time. That doesn’t help anybody.

Lauren You’re not just opening the door like you said because you like watching HGTV and you wanna go look at houses. That’s the number one thing I hear when people are like, “Oh, I wanna be a real estate agent. I love looking at houses.”

Lauren Okay, great. Well, do you wanna make money? Do you wanna help clients buy their home, get under contract, sell their home? That’s awesome—but there’s a lot more legwork that gets into this.

Lauren And then one thing—there’s a term that when I was at Keller Williams, that we used to say: master the boredom of success. And it’s the same repetition every single day.

Lauren At the beginning of this conversation, you were saying you treated it as a nine-to-five. Seven days a week, you would get into the office, get your coffee, talk to your coworkers, and then you would get to work, you would start dialing, and then you would go out and find the leads—door knocking, FSBOs, expireds—all of that.

Lauren So I wanna encourage all of you: if you don’t have flex, if you don’t have some third-party lead generation, PPC, whatever—that’s okay. That just means we gotta get a little scrappy and figure out what that business is and where you’re gonna go get it, right?

Karlton [00:31:00] Yeah—you gotta get to work. I remember my first year: coming out of the end of my first year, I had a whole bunch of transactions hit in the winter and I was like, “Oh man, I made it.” I think I had four or five deals closing in November and December, and I was like, “This is it. Everyone’s gonna come to me. I can slow down the prospecting.”

Karlton They all closed, and then I was literally like—I was out of business. All my business closed. I hadn’t been doing open houses. I stopped prospecting. I stopped making calls because I was busy being busy. I was busy keeping the deals together.

Karlton And I will never make that mistake again. And I warn everybody about that: you gotta time block and figure out what are those dedicated times that I’m going to do prospecting to make sure the business moves forward—and I still need to do the activities to fill that pipeline up.

Karlton And look, nobody loves doing the prospecting calls. It wasn’t my favorite thing to do. It became a habit.

Karlton [00:32:00] But it’s like that old adage of “eat the frog.” If the worst thing you have to do every day is eat a frog, just get it done and over with first thing in the morning, and then all day you’re not worried about it and making excuses why not to do it.

Karlton Because if you don’t like calling FSBOs and there’s three in your neighborhood that you want—if you don’t do it first thing in the morning—the rest of the day you’re just figuring out: how do I make an excuse to not call those FSBOs? And that’s not helping you or your business.

Karlton You gotta look at: if I was running a restaurant, I would be in the hole a lot more than I am in real estate, and I would have to be open and I would have to have a game plan. I’d have to order food and put it all together.

Karlton I couldn’t just, “Oh, it’s a nice day. I don’t know what to do today. I’m gonna kind of blow it off.” I would have to be in the restaurant open. And this is the same thing: you are open for business. Like, you’ve gotta go find it, make it happen.

Karlton You have to market and advertise yourself. You have to do research and operationally you have to back up your business as well and make sure that you’re taking money out for taxes and doing all those important things—and paying your bills on time.

Lauren Mm-hmm.

Karlton All that stuff—it falls on you as the business owner.

Lauren [00:33:00] Yeah. I mean, we all gotta—I've learned—we gotta grow up one day. You gotta start being financially responsible, and it’s hard but it’s necessary.

Lauren And we all can do hard things, and real estate’s not an easy business. The market fluctuates all the time due to world events, what’s going on with rates. So you gotta be able to build up that emotional fitness with the ebbs and flows of the world.

Karlton Yep. No excuses.

Lauren No.

Karlton That term “excuses”—you gotta remove that from your approach because it’s real easy to make it: “Oh, the market’s slow.” “Oh, the rates are high.” It’s really easy to do that.

Karlton [00:34:00] In 2007, we went from two months of inventory to 30 months of inventory. I literally spent every single day meeting with sellers trying to get them to drop their price because if their house wasn’t the next one to go under contract, they could be waiting months and lose another 10 to 30,000 off their asking price.

Karlton But during that time period, agents sold a lot of real estate—like the ones that were like, “Look, this is my job. This is what I do. I’m not gonna make an excuse or let it get to me. I’m gonna have to work a little harder.” But they were still extremely successful.

Karlton And then as the market shifted, they were in a much better position to grow their business because of how hard they worked through that shift.

Karlton So it’s just like that with us: everything you do today, you may not see the results for another two to three months.

Lauren Yeah. Always.

Karlton Which is hard. You don’t have immediate gratification. But that opportunity is there. It’s just—you gotta say: “Today is the day where I’m going all in.”

Lauren [00:35:00] Okay—and I wanna come from the other side of the coin here now, because we’ve been talking about agents that might need a little boost to get into accountability and get into your activity.

Lauren But for the agents that are actually doing all these things and don’t have a production problem—you’re usually the ones that go, “I just wanna remind you: make sure you’re not only just focusing on the current business you have and you’re building your pipeline at the same time.”

Lauren Because usually when we get that busy and have nine under contract, we’re rushing to inspection—excuse me—we’re doing all these things. We forget to still do our calls and do the right activity to make sure you have the same problem—in quotation marks—in the next 90 days.

Karlton Yeah.

Karlton [00:36:00] There’s a lot of things: if you’re an existing agent and you’re at a really good, strong level of income and you’re like banging your head as to “How do I grow that?” There’s a lot of opportunities out there.

Karlton Don’t ever feel like, “Well, this is it. This is where my business is. There’s nowhere to go.” You could start to look at how do you get more involved in different niches and how do you become a specialist in a different niche. I say niche—it could be niche, nasha, however you wanna say it.

Lauren Tomato.

Karlton Yep. JC Penney, JC Penne, Target, Targe—it’s all so, like, Nancy. Look, you can look at things like: all right, how do I increase my average selling price?

Lauren Mm-hmm.

Karlton Because that will then translate to a higher income. So how do I maybe go from one farm area to now: how do I add another farm area? There’s a lot of opportunities for people to grow their business if they kind of feel like, “Hey, I’m successful. I’m where I wanna be. I don’t know how to go to the next level.” There’s opportunities there.

Lauren Mm-hmm.

Lauren [00:37:00] And I do wanna be mindful of the time because we could keep going and keep adding value, but we’ll save it for another time because I know you all are loving this and I am too.

Lauren So Karlton will be back on the podcast so we can keep talking about all things production and whatnot. Karlton, I wanna end with this question: what do you believe about agent potential that most of the industry might not?

Karlton [00:38:00] I’ve said this before and it’s very unfortunate that not a lot of folks make it in this business at the level that they wanna be at.

Karlton And it’s just a matter of having the right support system, and that’s why I like Reside—that we are all in on helping agents develop and get to the level that they wanna be in, and helping team leaders with that. It’s working closely with your team leader, understanding all the opportunities, and taking the time to really understand the tools that can support your business to help you grow.

Karlton Because like me—I’m a high I—so I jumped in the business and I’m just like, “Go.” I just started talking to people and working with clients, and then it’s, “Oh man, I gotta learn how to write a contract. I got people wanting offers.” I was like, “I haven’t even looked at the contract,” because my personality—ADHD—I’m like, I just wanna talk to people and start putting deals together.

Karlton It’s just making sure that you’re prepping yourself and your business for long-term success. It’s having a five-to-ten-year plan and goal, and not just day-to-day or month-to-month. It’s setting up strategies and systems that are gonna allow you to succeed.

Karlton It’s having a commitment to the business. It’s saying, “This year I wanna make $50,000 and I am going to do this and this on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Here are the activities I’m committing to,” and telling yourself, “I’m going to have success.”

Lauren Mm-hmm.

Karlton [00:39:00] And I honestly believe that it’s a mindset thing in this business: we very quickly get distracted. We very quickly get discouraged. It’s a very hard business to constantly stay up here.

Karlton Because you got three deals put together and you’re excited and you’re counting the money, and all three of those deals could die and you’re back to nothing. And you’re like, “What am I doing here?”

Karlton But you gotta look past that and look at the long-term opportunity. And again, if that pipeline is full and you’re talking to a hundred people a month and adding a hundred people a month to your database, you are gonna be in a really good place. So when that deal falls through, you’re like, “That’s okay. I got another a hundred people I’m working with.”

Lauren [00:40:00] It’s simple. It’s not easy because when you break it down like that, it’s super clear. Talking to a hundred people a month—we, John will say, talk to have 35 two-plus-minute conversations a week. So I think we break that down: about seven good conversations, two-plus minutes a day about real estate.

Lauren And it’s the same thing for team leaders—or someone that’s just starting a team—we’re talking about recruiting. It’s always have a full recruiting pipeline—that’s gonna solve a lot of your problems for profitability on your P&L.

Lauren It’s the same thing for solo agents or agents on a team that might be listening to this: know the right things to do every single day. I always say: 1% better every day. What is the one thing you can do today to win? And that’s picking up the phone and making some calls.

Lauren Good. Karlton, anything else you wanna leave us with today?

Karlton No, I think I gave ’em a lot.

Lauren You did.

Karlton Sign up for some of our classes. This is the stuff we cover.

Lauren I love it.

Karlton We’d love to see you guys in some of our training classes.

Lauren Yes, for sure. All right, Karlton—well, thank you. And thank you everybody for joining us on the podcast. Again, let us know if there’s any specific questions or topics you want us to go deeper into next time, and we’ll talk to y’all soon.

Karlton Awesome. Thanks, Lauren.

Lauren Thanks.