‘Unfiltered’: How a single listing can kick-start your business 

Editor's note: The Real Estate Insiders Unfiltered podcast explores the people and forces that shape the real estate industry. Check out our top takeaways and this episode from NextHome CEO James Dwiggins and Keith Robinson, NextHome's chief strategic officer.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in the Real Estate Insiders podcast belong solely to the podcast creators and guests.

On this episode of Real Estate Insiders Unfiltered, Darryl Davis — a bestselling author, speaker and founder of the "Power Agent" coaching program — cuts through the noise and tells agents and brokers what they should be doing right now to succeed in this market.

His main advice: Be active, be consistent, be committed — and get more listings.

A guaranteed way to get business? "Motion impacts emotion. The best thing agents can be doing is getting in motion about generating their business," Davis said. "We're only as good as the last closing."

And that means prospecting and getting face-to-face with potential clients — "the basic stuff" — and considering this challenge: "What would happen to your business if you spoke to two new people every day? One buyer, one seller. That's it. You can do that, right? That's 60 conversations in a month. If somebody wants to get listings or sales in the next 60 days, if they just did that and nothing else, I guarantee you they would generate at least one piece of business."

Find your thing: For Davis, calling FSBOs and expireds was an effective way to win listings. But agents need to figure out what they're good at and what they enjoy. "Don't listen to anybody" who says there's one right method to generate real estate business, Davis said — "the best one is the one that you're going to commit to and do."

"Some may prefer the telephone, and some may say, 'I'm afraid of the telephone. I'm never going to break through that. I love door knocking.' So as long as you pick the path that speaks to your heart, you'll never be working. You'll never feel like you're sacrificing time. You're going to want to do your job."

How to push through hard times: "It's a tough business," Davis acknowledges, and that means "for real estate professionals, every morning they've got to wake up and recommit, reinvent, and almost think like they're starting from scratch."

The only way to do that is "to know what your why is," Davis says. "When people are clear about what they're committed to, whether it's their personal life and real estate's the tool to help them get there, or it's what they're committed to when it comes to their client — serving them, helping them — commitment is what pushes people through."

What one listing can do for your business: "Especially after the settlement, I think being a listing agent is even more important now than ever," Davis says.

"Every listing can generate several pieces of business, right? It gives an agent an opportunity to promote themselves, their brand, to attract more buyers, to track more listings, etc. So even just the one listing will help that."

How do you get that one listing? Davis made another plug for his tried-and-true tactic of working FSBOs: "If you call 10 FSBOs, you've got 10 potential appointments. You don't have to call a thousand people to get one." And, he added, "if you can master that conversation … I'll show you somebody who's mastered real estate. Everything else is a walk in the park."

Don't offer buy-side compensation: "Unless the broker says something different, just ask for the listing side. And then when the buyer offer comes, then we'll negotiate that. We'll put it into the contract price. The buyer doesn't have to pay it, but it's easy to get listings if you're talking this lower number versus the bigger number."

That strategy, Davis says, is paying off: "My students, they're coming back to me and they're telling me, 'Geez, Darrell, I'm actually getting higher commissions because of this process.'"

Skipping a buy-side offer could also mean less liability for the agent. The antitrust claims, he says, were tied to the fact that listing agents were committing their sellers to a set fee for the buyer agent. "Any agent that's still having homeowners commit to a listing and selling fee [for the buyer brokerage], to me, they're putting a target on their back for the next round of lawsuits."

Brokers need to step up: Whether it's helping agents navigate practice changes or the slow market, brokers should be leading the way. "Agents that come to me, they're telling me, 'All my brokers, they just tell me not to worry about it.'"

Davis' take? "They don't understand. You've got to be a leader. If you're a broker, man, your people come to you to guide them. You have to. The number-one job of a broker, in my opinion, is to have a vision and articulate that vision in such a way that your people will get committed to that vision. I mean, that's the number-one job."