what is up everyone welcome to another exciting episode of the team lead talks podcast i am your host out of alexandria virginia andrew becker on today's episode we got real estate richie Richie Hanna out of Gainesville, Virginia. Welcome to the show, man. Awesome. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here, brother. I love that Real Estate Richie. Do you have that on your marketing? I do. I do. I've got it on my website. It's realestateritchie.com. I've got stickers made that say Real Estate Richie. So it's definitely been something I've been trademarking and trying to go with because it does have a little bit of a good ring to it. It's got that easy off the tongue kind of role. So I like it. Whoever came up with that is a marketing genius. Yes. All right. So let's jump right into this, dude. I know you're in my neck of the woods. I'm in Alexandria. You're in Gainesville. My little brother actually lives out there. So I've been out there a few times visiting him. But let's talk about real estate, Richie. Before we get into what you're doing today, give us a little bit of the background, like how you got into real estate and what you were doing before. Yeah. Awesome. So started right off in sales from day one, right out of high school. I was washing cars at a car dealership and college wasn't really my thing. I wasn't a very strong student is when it came to academics. So my mom's like, look, you either get a job or don't come home because you're not going to college, right? So I got this job at a car, at the dealership, started washing cars and they got so busy. It was in the middle of Tyson's. The brand just took off and they needed people to just jump in the car and go on a test drive with people. And, you know, I was young. I was enthusiastic. I love cars. I was a car enthusiast. So I'd get in the cars with these folks and they'd be coming back and go, yeah, we're ready to sign. And they were just selling. I was selling cars, even though I wasn't a salesman. And I was just kind of the washer guy getting in there and knew the product and I'm excited. And that kind of took off to where they're like hired me as a salesperson. I quickly grew to enjoy that all commission sales. I bought my first home at 21 years old off of selling cars. While my friends were taking keg stands in college, I was buying my first home, which was pretty cool. And then, you know, from there I started managing. And then I just saw the wealth grow around Vienna and Tyson's corner area where I was like, there's just more for me than just being here in a dealership. And that's, then I bought my second home and that's kind of when the experience was like, not very good. And I'm like, look, I'm only getting paid a couple hundred dollars to sell cars. If I can get paid thousands of dollars to serve consumers with the home sale, this is something I think I can do better than this guy and he's making good living. So that's what kind of transitioned me from, from selling cars to, to selling houses. Very cool. So you bought your first house at 21. That's quite the accomplishment. That's really cool. And then your second, just to clarify, your second experience purchasing a home did not go well with whoever the agent was. And you thought, hey, if this guy can do it or girl can do it, I don't know who it was. I can for sure provide a little bit better customer service at least than them. And then that's how you got. How old were you at that time, Richie, when you decided to move out of car sales into real estate? 30. 30 years old. Oh, no, no. I'm sorry. 34. 34. So in my 30s, low 30s. Gotcha. Okay. So you decided to move over from car sales that you were comfortable with. You did that for quite some time. And then real estate, how in the heck did you get started? Where did you go? How did you figure out what to do next? Yeah. So I was lucky enough to have a lot of other resources around me that were already doing real estate. And it's funny, I wanted to get into real estate well before I did. And I had, I was dating a girl at the time and she was trying to get into real estate. She worked for a real estate team and she was smart student and she could not pass the test. She said, I took it three times. I couldn't pass it. I gave up. And I'm like, if she can't pass it, there's no way in hell I can pass this thing. So I just completely flat out ignored it. But then I finally started seeing the money. I had more people tell me you would be great at it. I just had a lot of, you know, between God and people and just insight was just like, this is your path. Go work for yourself, do your own thing. So that's what gave me the drive to kind of do it. And my wife at the time, I was recently married. I was about to have a kid, which was the craziest transition to jump in. But I had a nice little nest egg I saved from all those hard years of selling cars and buying homes at a young age. I had some equity and a little bit of support behind me that I could feel like I could take the jump. And my wife was working full time too. So I just jumped all in, man. I went full in, found a great person that was working with Keller Williams. She helped me pass the test. It was a great broker, amazing lady. I'm very grateful to her to this day. And that's kind of what got me into this career. I passed the test finally on my second try and then off it went. Yeah Look at you Only two tries Don say that negative stuff about yourself anymore man So you passed the test and now kind of like you been into real estate for quite some time Tell me about your current business. I know you and your wife, you work together, right? Is that correct? Can you tell us like the setup of you and who you have supporting you? And then the big question, dude, is how in the world are you getting business today? That's something that a lot of people are struggling with right now. So let's talk about your team first or your setup, your business model. I love it. Yeah. So I'm a very lean machine. I started off as a solo agent. Beginning, I started off on a team. I think that's a great way to win and learn is to kind of see their system, see their strategy, get the work ethic and kind of learn the tips and tricks. Right. And then I jumped off quickly within one year on my own as a solo agent. And then my wife got her license after I was doing this for a while and brought her on. So she's there as a support staff, marketing, helping me with open houses. We bring some of the kids to the open house too. I'm like, Hey, if I got to work a weekend, so do you. So we get the family involved, but we try to focus her more being on, on a stay at home mom, kind of focusing on the kids. Cause we think at these young ages, they're growing up so fast. We don't want to miss that. Right. And then for my business now, you know, where I kind of always started was old school, you know, coming from car sales, person to person, growing relationships, belly to belly, as they say, really grew me to the professional I am today. So I wasn't scared to make phone calls. And that's where I saw this team I was working with in the very beginning, they would just literally sit at their desk, making calls. And it's not like digging ditches. It wasn't too crazy, right? It's very tons of rejection, you get no all the time. It's hard, but you're talking to people and you're polishing every time you have another conversation. And you know, this business, it's a people and numbers game. The more people you talk to, usually the more homes you sell. And I thought it was just an easy transition for me to make calls while also still working on social media. You can make phone calls and also do something else at the same time. So I was making phone calls when you hopped on here. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Right before we got on, I was, I was doing my follow-up phone calls. That's right. So I think it's very important to stay consistent with whatever you do, but that is how I grew my businesses. I wish it was all social media and fun and my friends all used me, but it wasn't. It was consistently calling nonstop. I want to talk about that ethic, that work ethic, but more importantly, when your wife went to take the exam, did she hire you as a tutor or did she tell you to kick rocks? She is very smart and she can jump in and learn online, pass the test and go. She didn't need you. No. Okay, cool. All right. We'll move on. All right. So yeah, it's really funny. Nowadays, like so many agents are like, I need leads, I need business. And then you talk to them and you're like, well, how many calls are you making? Oh, I'm not making calls. Well, how many this are you doing? Oh, I'm not doing that. But you you're like, man, it's a funny thing. The more dials I make, the more people pick up, the more people pick up, the more conversations I have, the more conversations I have, the more deals. it's like going back to the bedrock principles before all this like ai social media stuff it's like just talk to people real estate richie right so let's talk about how you do that how you stay consistent in that walk us through your process for making outbound goals perfect so do you want me to use software systems i'm using and tools and technology is it okay whatever your goal we're sharing man cool yeah all right perfect so there's programs out there that you can use like a Google map search and gather data. And those data could be phone numbers, emails, and addresses. So in a home, an area or a neighborhood I recently sold a home in, that gives me some confidence to call and say, hey, I recently sold a home in your neighborhood. Or if I have a buyer in that neighborhood, hey, I have a buyer looking in that neighborhood. Those are kind of my pitches to call. And I use a company called Mojo. It's a software system called Mojo Dialer. What you do is you pretty much just grab a group of homes or a neighborhood or a zip code, pops it into some sort of database software system, a CRM looking system, and you literally click a button and it can call one person at a time or can call three people at a time. And then when power dialer, yeah, power dialer, triple dialer, let's go. And once someone, when someone answers, it hangs up on the other ones and it pops up with the person's information and you just talk, have a great conversation and there's a place to put notes in. There's a Zillow tab where I can click Zillow so I can kind of get a quick understanding of valuation, what the home has to offer, because they might ask you those questions. There's a Google Maps, like, you know, do you even know where I live? And you can kind of pinpoint some areas like here right down the street from Starbucks, you know, or whatever, the school, and they'll appreciate that things. And those are the tools that we have at our disposal that we should be using. This is a very cheap system. It's not crazy over the top. And that helps me stay on top of it because any follow-up phone calls will just be put on this dialer in the future So every day I come in not only am I going to try looking for new business but I have at least 20 to 30 people I talked to over the 10 years of doing this that I have that have raised their hand and said, yeah, I am looking to sell. You talk to me three or four times or four or four or five years, and now we're ready to go. And so that is that what I'm doing mostly is that way. Yep. Very cool. Yeah. I used Mojo way back in the day, dude, like 10 years ago, I had an entire cold calling center based off of Mojo. Just to give you an idea, when I had Mojo, it was $35 a user. I think it's in the triple digits right now. Yeah, 150. You're paying about 150. Yeah, it's a little bit more expensive. So we were able to really get a lot of people on there. Wow. But yeah, Mojo is great, especially for the multi-line dialer. For those of you that don't know, it literally dials. When I was doing it, it was three. Three people at the same time. One person picks up. it kind of knocks off the other two and just an efficiency game there. So you can go through faster. Are you just to give you like the listeners an idea too, you're very like systems oriented guy. Mojo actually spits out data and analytics too. So how are you into that kind of stuff? Do you want to know how many dials you have to make to talk to someone or how many people you need to talk to, to set an appointment or using it to that? Yeah. Awesome. So there's a couple of good data analytics in there. So we do use a reporting system and you can actually see how many calls you make, how many people answer, how many people hung up, and you can track. And so generally the number, because this is cold calling, you're not really going after expireds or for sale by owners. These are just randomly calling, shooting in the dark type of numbers. You'll get sometimes a lot of no's until you get a yes. So sometimes you have to talk to 100 people, 100 no's to get one yes. The better you get, it gets a little bit stronger at that number, but it is a lot of filtering and ciphering through a lot of no's to get the one good yes to kind of get you like, oh, great. I do like doing this. And Richie, when you know that number, you start with like 100 as your benchmark. That is how you're measuring your success on the phone. Right. You start at 100, you guys, your goal is to get down to 90 and then get down to 80. And then over time if you get really, really good, see how far you can get it. But then it's going to obviously plateau at some point on the down, you know, and then at least you'll know, hey, I need to make 45 outbound cold calls to have one really good conversation. And then you can use that math to back out what you want to do. This game that we're all playing, Richie, it's just math at the end of the day. So if you can track it automatically, especially when we're talking cold calling here, that's just how you're going to make improvements over time. for sure and it will also help you not get so down and easy to quit and give up you know you know that it does take a lot of no's to get to a certain thing and then you can track that and see like man this guy was mean this guy was mean but you know what i only got 30 no's i gotta keep going you know and you'll get there but it is it is it is grueling but i hear that all the time from agents i could i could never do that i could never do that i could never do that you know and then they're like hey how are you selling so many homes how are you looking at your listing agent Call people and talk to them. Call people every single day, you know? And consistency is key there for sure. But then having an efficient, optimized system as well, and then taking it one step further and analyzing your results week over week is super important. Let's go to one. Oh yeah, go ahead. And also the data I will use in here with the analytics kind of, it's you can filter out. So I'm instead of calling someone that just bought a home last year, I can go to people that have been in the home for 10 plus years, have a certain amount of equity in the home. So you can actually tweak it and use these tools and data to help get you to someone that's more likely to purchase, sell or do some sort of transaction versus someone that just bought the home like a year or two ago. Yeah, don't call people that just bought a home recently. That probably would be a bad use of time. So let's talk about that because that's where my next question was going to be. Okay. You mentioned like gathering data and this is kind of like if you're a flipper, you guys, the acquisition price is everything. Like that's probably one of the most important things because if you screw up and you're not good at that price, then it's like there's less margin of error. So taking that same concept, Richie, the data acquisition is also super important. So you're not calling people that just moved in six months ago saying, hey, do you want to sell your house? They're like, who the heck is this Richie guy? He just called me and asked me, we just moved in. Does he not know anything? So how are you acquiring data? What kind of data are you looking to acquire? Yeah, so Mojo is a fantastic part of that, which I love. So it's kind of all in-house. You can go farther out and get, they say more accurate information, but I stick with in-house stuff so I don have to go other routes I stay with one software one website one click and I there and I will just pull the data And then from there you can filter age and things like that And that Mojo sells data now Yeah. Well, it's been such a long time. When I used it, it was just a dialer. I didn't even know that. Yeah. We've got a nice geographical map. You can go in there. It's like a Google map and you can do a polygram. You can do a circle radius and then literally two clicks, pulls it all in. You can scrub it on the DNC, all these different things and bam, you got it. Yeah. It's amazing. Richie, is that the only thing you're doing for marketing? No. Like outbound calling? No, no. So I am all very big about testimonials. So I love working hard, providing a high level of service. And in doing such, hopefully people are happy they refer me. Working by referral is my next biggest goal. And my revenue source is referral, word of mouth, sphere of influence type of thing. So whenever I do get a testimonial or I just sold a home, I will not just put like a screenshot copy. I do invest with either a virtual assistant or using Canva and doll it up. Make it look good. Be proud of your work. Be proud of this testimony. And I'll post all this stuff all the time. I have testimonial Tuesday that goes out every Tuesday, shows my newest testimonial. All my just sold. I try to get a picture with my clients holding a sold sign. So instead of just the picture of the home, I'm there with an actual another human being that trusted me with the sale. And people like that. They see like, wow, another one. And you see with another person, he's with some old folks, he's with some young family. You're kind of just they love to see the different stuff instead of just pictures of homes being sold. Yeah, they want to see that you're actually doing what you say that you do. Yeah, you call them and then they go and look you up on Google. That's right. Yep. And then people want to see proof, too. I thought going online, being in sales my whole life, buying a home at the age of 21, that was my credibility. People should just call me and use me, especially my friends, right? Didn't happen. So they need to show that you mean business and you need to show that to them by proof. And that is sales and testimonials and anything that looks credible online that you can present. And that's what I try to do as much as I possibly can is not brag and boast, but show that track record and that we are here doing business at a high level. It's that social credibility. That is much better. It's crazy to me that in today's social media age, I can still look up an agent that like reaches out to me or I hear about and they have no picture, no profile. Like they're hard to find. And you're like, what does that tell you about, you know, that person? But that is a podcast episode on its own, Richie. This time really flew by, man. We normally keep this to around 20 minutes. So I have a couple other questions I wanted to ask you. But if anyone wants to reach out to Real Estate Richie in Northern Virginia after listening to this call to help them buy or sell, how would one get in contact with Real Estate Richie here? Yeah. So please, a phone call. We'd love to make the phone call. So 703-655-9585 is my direct cell. Yeah. Sorry, I cut you off. You can say your phone number again. We'll also include your contact information. Yes. And then always look me up to like a simply Google Richie, Hannah, realtor, and I'll be there. You'll see me on Zillow, realtor.com. I have my own Google business page with 150 reviews. And I'm also very heavily on social media with Instagram and Facebook. You can find me on Instagram at realestateritchie27 and I'll pop up there. Very cool, dude. Last question. So I want you to think of something that you can share, whether it's a resource, a checklist, something real estate, Richie related, it doesn't matter, or a book that anyone listening at the end of this podcast conversation today can use to better their life, to better their community or better their business. Nice. Yeah. So I actually have a book. I'd love this shirt now. It's the Go-Giver. So this is a very short read and this is awesome. And I always thought it was about being slick, looking the best and no, it's not guys. You want to be of service to people. You provide value. You are genuine. you are consistent you do it without expecting something back right and and you treat people like you would your own mom and dad and that that is where you would move move it you know very cool that's i think is what's really important so read this book get humble and do the work yeah the go-giver it's a great book very short and i i think that would be a value i would love to to present to your your followers and awesome man yeah i always hope uh officially i always hope that a book comes up when I ask that question, because I'm trying to fill in the top shelf and a couple over here. Fortunately, I already have that book. It's very popular, yeah. Very cool, man. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story. I loved having you on the show, man. Thank you so much. Take care. All right, you too, dude. Later.
