Carter Lagana

Alex Jordan

All right, Alex, you and your team are one of the select few agents across the country to have written more than 10 million in GCI. You've been consistently recognized by REB and realestate.com as the number one agent in Queensland and you're McGraw's number one agent nationally. So thanks for doing this.

Oh, pleasure, mate. I'm happy to be with you and I appreciate the opportunity.

100%. If an agent listening to this wants to achieve 30% or so market share within their area, and I wanted to do that within a two or so year timeframe. I think that's a benchmark you've laid out in a previous Aric presentation of yours. The actual strategy and mechanics and principles and formula for getting there are relevant almost if you don't have the right character traits and mindset. If you want the right sort of person to fulfill the strategy, then it just won't get done. And I wanted to take it back to a few anecdotes from the beginning of your real estate career. You didn't have a car when you first started in the industry and you had to commute the best part of two hours via a bus and a train and a bus and a bit of walking just to get to the office. Then eventually you worked your way up to the point of calling seven-year-old open for inspection data and you still managed to reduce opportunity from that. And I think while those maybe weren't the best things to do with your time, they did develop a foundation of character traits and mindset that allowed you to build the success of your career today off the back of. And I just wanted to put to you the importance you place on the probability of an agent's success, the things like delayed gratification, doing the unglamorous work, the door knocking, the hard work, the grit, in terms of being successful in this industry and frankly, earning lots of money because of that.

You're speaking my language. I think emotional resilience is really important in this industry. In any industry, you could say that. There's ups and downs. It doesn't matter what you do, you're going to have good days and bad days. How do you react to that? How do you process that? How quickly do you recover from that? Because that for me defines how you operate. And in our industry, I think it's a lot of psychological up and down. We don't have much physical stress, but things go wrong, you know, contracts crash, opportunities are lost, you miss a listing. And you could easily sort of eat yourself up and spend three days or a week stressing and worrying about what you did wrong. I think to be able to recover quickly is really vital. Going back to your question on I guess delayed gratification, I think that's really vital. This is an industry where sometimes you do the work and you don't get an immediate response or benefit from it. The perception though when people come into the industry is that you put the work in and it comes back to you straight away. And if that's the mindset, there'll be disappointment because you'll do the work and then nothing will happen and you'll think, well, this didn't work, let me try something different. And that chopping and changing of process, I think, is a problem. I think you have to have a formula, you have to have a vision, there's got to be some structure about what you want to do and you've got to give it a chance and a chance is not doing it once or twice but it's doing it probably for one to two years. Then monitor the response, because I find that persistence, in my experience, will pay off eventually, but most people give up too quickly because they didn't get the response they wanted, and they think, well, I've tried that, that didn't work, let me try something else. And I guess the early years in my career, I grew up in housing commission, there's no sort of, I didn't have a good OP, I came out of high school with a very bad OP. I was doing music as a sort of a side hustle, trying to make a living. And I was not living in any sort of, I guess, high standard. It was pretty low standards. But it was good for me. When I look back on those years, I don't think I'd change that. It taught me a lot. Taught me a greater sense of appreciation for what I have now and the life that I live now. And I try not to take it for granted, but sometimes you forget. I've just got to keep reminding myself that I'm very blessed and what I have now is something that I dreamt of. It's probably beyond my dreams, to be honest. I never thought I would get to 10 million GCI. There was never a goal to get to that number. But for me, I guess the foundation of going through the more difficult start to my career, struggling financially, not having a car or owning a suit and making it, life was a bit more challenging. I don't want to exaggerate that because I think anyone that lives in this country is blessed compared to some other countries. What we do every day is much easier than what many other people do. But those lessons for me helped me deal with the rejection, helped me deal with the lack of instant gratification that came from the activities that I did that I didn't see a return from. So it gave me a bit of emotional resilience and the persistence eventually paid off, but it took a very long time for me to get anywhere. In 2011, there were two consequential things that happened in your career. The first thing in the first few months of that year is the Brisbane floods, obviously, which heavily impacted your core trading area. You were already flirting with financial difficulty at that point in your life, and that flood event effectively disabled you from earning commission temporarily. And we'll put a pin in that and revisit that in a moment. What I wanna focus on is in the second half of that year, you were visiting a doctor for a known condition that you had and it was revealed to you, you had another condition which is effectively arthritis of the spine. And you were told by this doctor in 10 years time from that appointment, you would be a hunchback, you wouldn't be able to drive a car, you wouldn't be able to tie your shoelace, and he suggested that you choose an alternate career path because of that. You didn't do that, and I guess the realization from that meeting you had is, as far as you were aware, 10 years from that appointment, you had to set up yourself and your family financially, and it completely changed your behavior, obviously. I mean, sometimes people can do this hypothetical if your life depended on it, and it was, that was your life, you had 10 years to make it happen. I just wanna have you recount that experience, some of the things that went through your head. Playing the long game is one thing, and having the ability to delay gratification is great, but delayed gratification taken to the extreme is no gratification, so you do need to actually make it happen. Long game is complimented perfectly by short game, which is a get things done today mindset, urgency, I must make it happen today, I am gonna be productive today. I just want you to sort of speak to the experience of literally being told you've got 10 years to make it happen financially, and I think you mentioned the next morning you were up at 4.30 planning. I was. That was a time in my life that if you asked me how I am then, I would have said not good. Things are not good. I've only got 10 years left. I took that literally. That was a mini brick wall in my life that I think I had to hit. If I look on reflection and and I didn't experience that sit down meeting with a specialist, would I have changed my business, my focus, what I was doing? Not to any great degree, I don't think. I was cruising. I was not in a good financial position, but I was lazy, to be quite frank. I didn't want to do the hard things, you know, it was just too much. I was like, I'd rather just chill and take it easy and just make a living. But I was struggling financially. I hit rock bottom in 2011. I couldn't afford the rent that I had to pay and all the car repayments. And I went to my parents' hand in hand. And my parents don't come from any money. Like to give you some example, they owed more on their mortgage in 2020 than they did in 2000. So they were borrowing against the equity, living from a line of credit. And they couldn't afford anything. But for me, they'd give everything and they gave me five thousand. I took that, paid off the rent and the cars, repayments and I thought now this is this industry it's just not working out for me like I've got to look at other options. I can't make a living here. I've done this now for over ten years. If there was going to be any success surely it would have shown itself by now and I'm so glad I didn't get another job. It's probably through a lack of qualification and skill that no one offered me anything else. But I probably would have taken one if someone said, hey, I'll give you a job as a, and I was looking at like pharmaceutical rep, you know, what could I do? No education, no degrees, not much experience beyond real estate. I was like, where do I go? It's gotta be another sales role. That's all I really know. I'm glad I didn't get the opportunity. 10 years, that 10 years that he said to me, first was depressing. I took it literally, I thought it's actually gonna be 10 years. I thought this is, I've got 10 years now to make a living in this industry. And time, for the first time in my life, time became a precious commodity. Before then, it was just cruise and do what you gotta do if you have to. But at that point, it was like, dude, you're about to have a family. How are you gonna survive? How are you gonna provide for your family, for your children? What are you gonna do? Like you can't fail at this. Like this has gotta work. So from then on, all of the hard tasks, the ones that I was hesitating to do and procrastinated, became non-negotiables. And it was a fear trumping another fear. You know, the fear of rejection, which everyone has. That's a natural, innate feeling. You don't like to be rejected, I don't. But there was another fear for me, the fear of not being able to function in life, that suddenly trumped the fear of rejection. Before the rejection fear was the highest, so everything downstream was, oh look, that's not as important. The hierarchy is, I don't want to be rejected. And then it was like, uh-oh, you're not gonna be able to function in life, so who gives a shit about anything else below that? And that, I use the words, this is Tom Panos' words, I steal it, the best gifts in life come badly wrapped. And that was the case for me, because the next morning I woke up, probably I had anxiety, but it was channeled in a way that it produced energy. You can say it's a cortisol peak, where you wake up and you feel stressed and still get that every so often. But I was able to channel that energy. It wasn't a lackluster despondent feeling of, oh, I give up. It was like, oh no, I've got to make this work. Like, what do I got to do? And I knew what I had to do, the tasks that I had to do, and at that point, I set up a structure to my business. I interviewed some of the agents that were performing at high levels and saw a pattern in how they're operating. And that was a shift in my career that I needed to have that others don't need to have. You don't need to go through 10 years of failure before you have any success. You could fast track your career to one or two years, as long as you're willing to put in the hard work at the beginning. And that hard work comes with sacrifices. It's not gonna be easy. Good things don't come easily. Those that wanna have a relaxed life in real estate, I don't think that's realistic at the beginning of your career. Maybe later on when you're established and you're an attraction agent and the business is coming to you, maybe you can step back a little bit. But at the beginning you've got to hustle for it and you've got to hustle hard. And that mindset was ingrained in me when I was young, but unfortunately I became lazy as I came into the industry, lack of discipline and process. But then that diagnosis changed my world and from then on it was a different mindset. And it was immediate. It wasn't something that gradually changed. You know how they say you've got to change, it takes time. That was like a bang, that's it. All that stuff that I was doing before, it's not working, something different's got to happen and I'll do whatever it takes. You want me to knock on doors, I'll knock on doors. You want to call people, I'll call anyone you want. So it was an attitude shift.

You mentioned something in 2011, you had borrowed $5,000 from your parents and they borrowed money against their mortgage to do that. And you also mentioned that since they were on interest-only repayments, their mortgage grew in size over the course of the following decade. And there's a story, it got to the point where the bank approached them and said, no more interest-only, you're going to have to start paying down your mortgage, otherwise, you may have to sell the asset in order to make some progress here.

That's right. Westpac.

Westpac, bastards.

Had to name them.

No offense to anyone.

No, no, I guess, look, it's a commercial decision for them, I get it. I'm not here to bad mouth them, but that's exactly what happened. And my parents mentioned it to me, they said, we want to sell the house and we're gonna buy an apartment and that way we can afford it because they had enough equity, but they couldn't afford the repayments and the repayments were gonna quadruple. So they were on this low interest only repayment. It was gonna go to principal and interest, and because they were older, the bank didn't give them a 20, 30 year loan, it was a short term loan, so the repayments were very high. And that's the blessing of our industry, is there's no cap to what you could achieve. In most jobs, firstly you have to have a degree, you have to have 10 years of education before you get the opportunity to earn a reasonable income. Real estate, you could come in as a nobody, like myself, and you could have much more immediate success than I did though, and you could earn more than pretty much any profession out there. I don't know how many other jobs I could have taken to achieve what I have in real estate. So the blessing was from 2011 to, you know, saying to my parents, please help, to 2021 paying off their mortgage in full. And I didn't tell them I'm doing that, I just pretended to go along with it. I said, well, let me talk to my finance advisor and financial broker and see what I can do for you. I'll try and restructure the loan and I need your repayments, I need your bank details, I need what you owe exactly, all the account details. So they gave me it all and I just went and got a check from the bank and went and delivered it to them. And that was, for me, that's a moment that I'll never forget. Like, when you do something for someone else, I think the feeling that you get from it, the satisfaction that comes from it, I think it lasts a lifetime. Whereas if I did anything for myself, went and bought a nice car or something of great value, I find that the feeling only lasts very short. It's maybe a few weeks, a few months, and then it dissipates. But the feeling of comfort that I have that my dad doesn't have to drive the Uber every day and they're not having to worry about the repayments and now they can afford Netflix and all the things that they weren't able to get to, it gives me great comfort and that's the blessing of real estate. It gives you the opportunity to be able to do something like that.

Incredible story. Self-belief is another ingredient that goes into the mix here in terms of to become successful in their career. And there's a few interesting points here, but you were being interviewed at a point in time when you were writing about 3 million in commission. And it was put to you that, what do you think of writing 10 million in GCI? And at that point in time, you said, look, I think it's probable, I think it's possible. And that's going back a few years when you were doing, again, three times less than the number that you did last financial year. You've said previous version of Alex, financially struggling Alex, he wouldn't have believed if someone had told him that he would have been doing multiple millions in commission. And then 3 million GCI Alex, he was confronted with the fact of doing 10. And you've said, yeah, I back myself to do it in a non-arrogant way, but you back yourself to do it. How does that process of catalyzing that self-belief, how did that happen for you? Was it, I know you've spoken about surrounding yourself with high performers, but what was the difference that made you back yourself and go on to actually achieve these heights?

I think the lack of success was why there was a lack of belief. So for so long I tried, it wasn't a lack of intention, I wanted to do well. I was watching the other agents and seeing their success and I was like, hey, I've got the ability, I know how to do the listing presentations, I know how to sell, I know the process fairly well. But I wasn't successful, I just struggled to get any breakthrough. So there was this loss of belief at that point. And when I was writing 400, 450 GCI after 10, 11 years of trying, anyone that said to me, oh Alex, you could write a million or two, I'd be like, yeah, right, mate, I've tried this already. So there was this lack of belief then. Once I started to see a bit of success, where I started to achieve better numbers, and it was going above and beyond what I expected. I never thought I'd get there or here. There's never been this, oh, I'm gonna become number one or get to this number, it just happened organically, and I just went for the ride. But the belief came as I saw the process work. When I saw the return and I saw, okay, hey, I am building market share. Hang on a sec, I am doing well in these suburbs. And I always look at the stats. I'm very statistically driven. I look at things a bit more scientifically. So I actually quantify a suburb and how much GCI is within that suburb. I'll back test it three or five years and do an average. So I knew that in these suburbs, there's this much potential for GCI, and if I had to take a percentage of market share, then I could get to my 10 plus million. So it became a lot more possible because there was a vision, there was clarity, and there was a bit of success to show that I'm on the right path, and that helped. So, and self-belief is vital in this industry. It's such an important element that I have gone up and down in my career with self-belief big time. But I think those that are stuck, that are at the bottom of their career or they're at a low point, I think giving up is probably the worst thing they could do because they will always look back and regret. And if I'd given up in real estate in 2011, and then I watched other agents where my peers succeed and I'm sitting down in a job earning 50,000 a year, you know, working nine to five without any upside, how would I feel? I'd feel a great sense of regret and I'd feel like I could have done better because if I applied that same discipline of the nine to five job to real estate, I probably would have done better than 50 or 60K a year in return.

Yeah, I think maybe a little bit better.

Yeah.

Tangential to self-belief is something that you've spoken about as saying, this practice that you do has some superstitious power that you don't want to overuse and it's freaky how accurate it is.

The visions, yeah.

The visions, it's writing the visions, it's actually writing it down, writing these vivid descriptions of your goals and who you want to be and where you want to get to and you've spoken about how you've done this and put it in the top drawer and revisited it a few years later and you're like, oh, smack that one, smack that one. Can you talk about this practice? This is actually something that you do, so.

It is, yeah, and I do have superstition about it. This is pretty crazy. Maybe I'm just over-analyzing it. My definition of writing a vision is that you write, it might be a few paragraphs, maybe one or two pages, but you write it as if you've achieved the outcome that you wish to achieve. So if I'm an athlete, for example, and I'm writing a vision about me being successful at a 100 metre sprint, I'm actually going to write it as if I'm there already, but I want to connect my senses. I think it's really important to do that. I am a little bit probably spiritual beyond logic, I would say, even though I'm scientific, I'm probably a little bit airy-fairy. I do believe there's an energy that you can't see, and it's something that's contagious, that it connects people. I truly believe that's real. I just can't define it. So for a vision to be effective, it has to connect the senses. So I'm gonna talk about, in my letter to myself, I might say, I'm just standing on the track, I'm stretching my hamstrings, geez, my hamstrings feel really loose, feel really strong in my hammies today. So I'm already connecting a little bit of feeling, and then I'm gonna talk about what I see. I'm looking around and I can see a few people watching in the stand and they might be here to visit their family and I'm going to connect my vision, what I'm hearing. I'm hearing people in the background talking. Some kids are playing in the field next to me so I'm going to connect my hearing. I might even connect the smell. If I could smell the track today, it rained yesterday. So I'm going to connect as many senses as I can to put an emotional or energy footprint of that in my brain that almost tells my brain that it happened. And our brain is similar to a computer. It's malleable, it's plastic. So you can almost trick it to believe something that hasn't happened. And we do that on a negative side where we anticipate a problem. And then we think of all the bad things that could happen and we create the problem in our head. And now our heart's beating faster and the blood's pumping and we're starting to feel a bit of anxiety, nothing's happened. You're like, hey dude, nothing's happened, but you just created this vision that now has a physical manifestation. So there's something going on that you can turn a vision, and everything starts with a vision. Nothing here happened without some vision first. And then it turns, an idea goes into a vision, the vision then manifests into physical form. So if you can connect yourself to all of these senses and pretend that you're there, and then I'd be talking, I did the 100 metres, I just broke my personal best, whatever that is, I don't know what these days, 9.8 seconds, what did they do? And I'm going to talk about the achievement, how great I feel afterwards, I feel amazing, you know, a feeling of accomplishment, I can't believe I achieved this and I'm going to talk to my friends about this and I'm going to connect as much reality to that situation as I can in the vision. And I'll read it back a few times and then I'll put it aside. That energy footprint that I've created is almost real in my mind but not real anywhere else. But I find that somehow, whether it's subconsciously or energy-wise, you will work towards that. I don't know how this works. I can't explain it. I have no real definition of it. But your life will lead you to that vision to a great degree. It doesn't mean you just sit back and watch Netflix and it all comes to you, but I do believe that those visions have a great deal of power and I believe in them so much that I don't want to overuse them. I feel like if I've been given a number of these visions and I feel like if I stuff it up, it's not going to work for me again. So I'll only use it for something that's really important in my life. And that's a superstition that might not need to be there. Maybe it works for everything, but it's been so profound in my life, those visions, they have played out so perfectly that this cannot be coincidence. It cannot be coincidence. I mean, the specifics that what I had written about getting a call from a developer wanting to sell a product worth this much, and then looking back and exactly that happened to that value, something's going on. So I think it's very powerful, but you've got to believe in it too. I believe in it after it worked. Before I wouldn't have believed you if you said, write this, I would have thought, oh, this is just some superstitious stuff. But in practice, it works.

Something to try for those out there. Now before we transition into some tactical strategy tactics, the sort of Alex Jordan formula for dominating an area, you touched on it in what you just said then, but I want to speak about energy. And it's sort of a two-fold phenomena where you have the sort of almost spiritual level energy that you talked about, a vibe. And I think you said in a previous ARAC presentation, they've actually sort of somewhat substantiated this with MRNA protein strands sort of floating off your body. So there is some science behind it, it's not just woo-woo, but it's to the point where you're literally sitting in your car before a listening presentation and you're steadying yourself and you're getting your energy right because you wanna convert and you wanna get yourself set to do that.

That's great. In order to be in a position to do that, you need the physical energy. You actually need to not be sleepy. You need to not have brain fog. You need to be on your A game. You've had to place a disproportionate amount of focus on this because of the health challenges that you've faced. And I just wanted to sort of gauge your practices for keeping your mind sharp, how do you keep yourself energized, what sort of routines, anything in the biohacking space that you do every day in order to make sure you're at your best. And this almost can feel like a luxury to some agents, the overstressed, overworked agent who's barely getting their work done before they go to bed and they feel like they're just getting hit with tidal wave after tidal wave of problem and fire and they're spinning plates and if you told them you just need to meditate and get your foot on some grass, they're going to tell you to jump. But this is, you need to do this otherwise you can't function and it's fuelled you achieving the heights that you have in your career.

Yeah, I'm not a great example of health because I've got bad health, but I have to manage my health. And I research health more than anything else. I've read so much about biohacking and supplements and diets and you name it, in an attempt to manage my issue and try and be more functional. So I don't want to sort of preach to others, this is how health is done, because this is not the example of good health. But there are things that I think for me, if I don't do these things, I struggle to function. My general energy is not high. I don't sleep as well because of the pain. I've got lots of inflammation. My inflammatory markers are through the roof. My C-reactive protein is 40 to 50. I've got a high chance of heart attack with that marker. So my underlying sort of parameters of health, I would say, have been compromised through autoimmune disease. I need to mitigate that with lifestyle decisions. And if I was Alex Jordan from 20 years ago, who went out and partied till two in the morning, three days a week, and got hammered on whatever was in front of me, I wouldn't be able to live, I'd just crumble. Like I don't even drink. You know, I might drink maybe two, three times a year. Do I enjoy drinking? Yeah, I think it's fun, I used to drink all the time. I've become a lot more sociable, I talk more and I'm more interested in people's conversations. But it impacts me for probably two or three days, so I can't afford to do that, not with the job that I do. So I guess my way of managing my disease is through diet. I don't eat any processed foods, I don't eat sugar, I had to cut out gluten, dairy and carbohydrates because of the inflammation, so I'm on a ketogenic diet. I don't preach that that's the right decision for others, because if you've got good health, then continue on your path. For me, that's the way I manage inflammation, because if I eat a bowl of pasta or a pizza today, I'm going to be locked up, not being able to move for a few days, and I'm going to have issues with my bowel. So I'm on a keto diet. I sleep at least eight to nine hours minimum. I go to bed very early. I try not to eat before bed. I do sauna, which I've bought one at home, I do ice baths, which I just fill up the bath and I bought a little tube thing that is this mobile thing that I've gone and bought ice from the petrol station and put it in for my ice bath, so it's a very casual approach. I wake up and do meditation in the morning, I do a guided meditation from a YouTube channel and I do breathing exercises, I get a bit of anxiety. I don't know why, but sometimes I wake up and it's like four in the morning and I'm thinking, oh, jeez, I need to get back to this guy. I'm gonna call this guy. What am I gonna do with this contract? And I'm just analyzing things. That's not a healthy place to be. So I've gotta make sure that I have a very clean diet because the more I eat at night, the worse the sleep is. So sleep is good, as good as I can get it and during the day I've got to make decisions that are going to serve me. So if it's a stressful situation and you get into that in real estate, the only thing I can control is my reaction. It's all I can control. Those things will happen to me. How do I react to it? And I've become a lot better than I was. I used to be very reactive. Something went wrong, I'd be like, oh jeez, what are we going to do? Now I'm like, hey, that's cool. It is what it is. Let's just deal with it. This is what we can do and if they're not happy with that, that's cool, but that's what we can do. So it's lifestyle decisions. I do believe connecting back to nature. I'm a big believer of that. I think we are disconnected from nature. I think as we progress in evolution, we've become more and more disconnected, and I find that the most depressed people are the ones that are most disconnected from nature. When I look at other countries, and you look at third world countries and these kids that don't have anything, no iPads, no TVs, no toys. They're playing with a tire on the side of the road barefoot but they're all smiling and laughing and the parents are happy and there's a sense of community and connection and we're lacking in that. In the Western world, that's lacking. Everyone's very disconnected. And so I go back to what's natural. Natural is barefoot, earth, connect to the earth and that's how we've evolved. There's more nerve endings on your feet than anywhere else in your body. Why is that? We're meant to be connected to the earth. You can actually measure your frequency, your energy frequency, when you're earthed and when you're not earthed. It's the same as a house or electrician earthing your home. It's the same concept. So I find that every time I go to nature, if I, you know, there's a guy called Zach Bush, I'm a big fan of his. He's a doctor, triple board certified doctor in the US. He talks about the microbiome and how that influences your mood. And if your mood is good or bad, it influences how you act and how you act influences your life outcomes. So let's get it right from the, let's go upstream and get it right from the beginning. He talks about diversity. So get out into a rainforest, barefoot, touch the ground, touch every leaf and tree and anything you can touch and breathe in that atmosphere because that will influence your microbiome more than anything else. And the diversity of what you'll get in that space of nature where there's all these different plants and fauna and that will create a different microbiome. Now your neurotransmitters are impacted, your dopamine, your endorphins, your cortisol. So it'll actually shape how you think and then your mood. So all of these things are vital to me. So I, every morning, I try and earth myself, which sounds crazy, but I believe in that too.

And you're genuine. So you're obviously not going to a rainforest, so you're just in your backyard.

We do, on the weekends, I try and take the kids there. We go barefoot. No kidding. We go to whatever we can find in terms of diversity, where there's going to be a lot of different trees and plants, and I take the kids there and we'll picnic there. My wife and I will sit down on the ground, we'll get them to touch the dirt, connect with nature, and I think they'll feel better afterwards, but I believe that will benefit them in the future. So for me, if any time there's nature, I'll take advantage of it and I'll connect with it as much as I can.

Secret to 10 million GCI revealed. Yeah, that's all you've got to do. Touch the dirt. tactics here. The first place to start is selecting an area strategically based on the amount of volume that's available in a given area which is a point that you've touched on a bit earlier in this conversation. Roughly the formula seems to be from things you've said previously you're wanting to identify between 60 to 100 million in volume in a patch of 1,000 to 2,000 homes, roughly?

Yeah, I guess you've got to base it on your area. I mean, a lot of agents that I speak with, there's a lack of process and know-how on how to build market share, but it starts from the beginning. First, you've got to know what's out there in the market. You've got to quantify it before you can start targeting it. And the biggest gap in a lot of businesses that I speak to is they don't know what's out there, so they don't actually have a vision of what's potentially possible. So how do we do that? So I would go and look at, if I'm an agent in Sydney, for example, and I'm looking to set up my business there, I'll have a look at, let's say, a suburb like Balmain, as an example. I'll have a look at the whole suburb, and if it's 4,000 homes, I'll probably say to myself, that's too big for me to start with, because I'm not gonna be consistent with 4,000. I could probably manage one to 2,000 as a standalone agent with an admin support. Anything more than 2,000, it gets a bit difficult, not impossible, but there's more work to be done. So I wanna look at volume per annum, how many transactions, number one, average price, and the most important thing, total sales volume. So, and that's a value, a dollar figure. So if I have a 2,000 home patch and it's got 80, 100 million there, that's enough, that's sufficient. But if I've got a 2,000 home patch and my average price is really low and there's only 40 million worth of turnover per annum, that's insufficient for me to build the business that I want. And the business that I'm suggesting people would want is a million dollar GCI business, that's what I'm working off as a base. So number one, let's find an area that 2,000 homes as a maximum will give us at least 60 to $100 million worth of annual turnover in sales. Once we've got that, that's enough for you to do one million GCI, in my experience. I'm doing a million GCI in a number of suburbs and beyond. Some suburbs are doing two million GCI just in one suburb. So it's out there in Brisbane, it's definitely out there in Sydney and Melbourne, but if you're in Rockhampton or Cairns or Townsville, then you've just got to expand your geographic space so that the total volume per annum gets at least to 60 million. And once you've got that, I think you've got a sufficient business to work with. Now to that consistency, frequency of contact, quality of content, and how do the conversations sound? You know, when you're interacting with the community, what's their impression of you? When they get off the phone, when they leave the meeting, what are they thinking of you? Have you added value to them? And what have you given them? Have you been of service to them? These are important things too, because if we do everything right, but then the conversation's not right, I don't think you're going to get the same level of response from the market.

On that point, and expanding on that point, when it comes to nurturing the area once you've selected it, your catch cry is be the communicator of relevant intelligent information on a consistent basis. Could you sort of unpack what that looks like?

Sure.

So when I say be the communicator of intelligent or relevant information on a consistent basis, it's have a line of communication with the community that's relevant to them. So if you're sharing anything, it's got to make sense to them, it's got to be interesting to them. So not about me. So if I went out and put, I did $10 million of GCI last year, I was number one agent in here or there, I don't see the community responding well to that. As an industry, we're not loved. People think we're overpaid. We drive these flash cars and charging too much. And some of us, I guess, behave in a manner that when they see us, they're not fond of our character. That's an issue. We've got to read the room here. If you've got to read the room and how you approach this. So nothing that's self sort of advertising. It's got to be subtle. So all of my communication, if I'm starting in a new suburb, would be statistics. Top 20 sales over the past 12 months. Growth chart over the past 10 years to show what the growth has been. Showing the volume of transactions per annum, you know, 50 sales last year, 60 sales this year, and so on, and the progression of that, and the value of each home that sold over those years. I want to show them statistics that for them it's not easy to get, for us it's very easy, you go to CoreLogic or you go to Price Finder and you'll find it there, in Google if you get lost. But if you can put that in an intelligent format that makes sense, that's straight to the point, it's clean, it's not clunky and confusing, it's of interest to the consumer. They're gonna pick that up and go, oh, okay, so in 2010, there was only seven sales over a million dollars, but in 2020, there was 75. So wow, that's amazing. Or another example, my suburb went up 30% in the last three years, but my neighbouring suburbs only went up 20. That's interesting. So break it down, break statistics down to something that it might not have been thought of, but it's of interest and relevance to the consumer. And now without any listings, you are standing like the expert, even though you might not have any business to show off. But the assumption is that Carter knows the industry. He knows my area. He knows everything about the statistics. So now that I'm thinking about selling, whether it's today or in three years or five years, and there's a cycle in that, I'm going to be thinking, well, thinking, who knows the area? Who knows the business? If you've been consistent, you're on the shopping list. And that's what we all want to get to, is get on the shopping list. Because when I talk to agents and I ask them, what would you rate yourself out of 10 on listening presentations, I rarely hear someone say less than seven. Like everyone's a seven, eight, nine. So if we're all very good at listening presentations, what are we lacking? We're lacking the opportunity. How do we get the opportunity? You've gotta be consistent in your communication and you've gotta share relevant content. But you've gotta do it in a layered manner. So letterbox drops is one thing, but that's not the be all and end all. Take that content and do it on social as well. Put some sponsored ads geographically through Instagram and Facebook in the areas you're targeting. So now you're visible on their social feed, you're in their letterbox, add a market report to that that's beautifully printed that looks like a coffee table book, and I invest heavily in market reports. And now you're standing out like this guy is operating at a higher level, better quality content, sounds more professional, more intelligent, more educated about the area. I think that'll get you on the shopping list. It has for me. And then it's up to you to close the deal after that. But if we have to reverse engineer a good business, it starts with lots of opportunity. And to get the opportunity, you've got to put in the effort before.

On the market report point that you touched on there, a few years back, you're spending tens and tens and tens of thousands of dollars on those and that's a statistic from a few years ago, so it's potentially even beyond six figures now. Reinvestment in general, you've spoken about in the past how there's a reluctance in the agent community to reinvest back into their business. Marker Reports is one forum for doing that. You've spoken to the social boosting strategy that you do as well. Labour and people and team members is another forum through which to do that. And you've spoken about in the past, you wish you put on an assistant sooner. You could see your assistant money back in six months or even two or three months, you've said.

Yeah, I think in terms of investment into your own business, there's this mindset in real estate that if it costs too much, it's not worth it. Like just don't spend the money. I see every other business putting in lots of money to get a return. The example that I've made is in a coffee shop. If you and I started a cafe together and we wanted to fit it out, we're probably going to spend $150, $200k minimum on the fit out, maybe more. We're going to sell $4 cups of coffee to make our money back in two or three years. Now in real estate you could spend $20,000, $10,000 on a beautiful market report, distribute it to a thousand homes and if you get three listings out of it, you've made a profit already. So for me, there's a return attached to these things that I don't think the agents have cottoned on with from what I can gather. There's still this reluctance to invest in your own business. I don't have a set percentage. This year, I'm probably spending close to 5%, probably about 500K into the business. And the majority of that goes into the printed market reports. I see huge value in that. I mean, alone in market reports, my investment's gonna be between three and 400K this year, and they'll go to print next month in August. Now, I wouldn't have done that if I didn't see the return. I didn't start that way. I started very small, probably put in a fraction of that, I think the first one might have been 10 grand or something like that, in total cost. I did the design myself in-house, put the content together, so it was very unprofessional, but it was effective. And as soon as I saw the response and the return, I went, okay, this works. I'm gonna try and do this better next time. And I just did it a bit bigger and better, and now I have such a strong belief that to cement my position in the market, the market report will be something that the consumer picks up and compares it to other market reports or other content they've received from others, and that's, for me, a point of difference. So if I'm starting in Sydney, I do the same thing. I'm gonna do an awesome market report, it's gonna look beautiful, like a coffee table book. And to this day, I go into homes in my BDA or farm area, and they've got these market reports from two, three years ago on their dining table or on their coffee table. And you think, holy moly, look at the brand awareness, top of mind awareness that's created. The others that have come and visited them and might have picked this up and thought what is in here. It's very powerful and to this day all these big businesses that are online are still doing these catalogues, JB Hi-Fi and Kmart and they're constantly doing them. There is this benefit for brand recognition, top of mind awareness for me, but also let's think about this, no one else is doing this. As an agent you will stand out. If everyone was doing this it's not going to be as effective, but they're not. So it's a great opportunity. And for me, there's a lack of investment in that.

Going back to where we started this interview, if a goal for an agent is getting to 30% or so market share in their chosen area, adhering to the parameters that we've set out here within two or so years, that was the sort of benchmark you've laid out in a previous presentation. If I literally took you and I gave you an EA from day one and I dropped you in an area, interstate, that still fits within the guidelines of what we discussed in terms of it has the necessary volume you need, how quickly do you think you could crack a mill GCI? I'll be talking months.

Great question. Probably not, no. I'm no one, no one knows me. Yes.

So I'm going to an area.

And you have 50 grand as well, only. Okay, so I've got 50 grand, no one knows who I am.

Oh but you do have an EA.

I do, I've got an assistant, but they don't know who I am, right? But I've got experience in real estate, I know how to talk the lingo, okay, that helps. I'm going to say it's 18 months minimum, so it's one and a half years to two years to get there. If I had a bit of reputation and recognition, I might be able to fast track it, but if I'm a nobody and I've got no profile whatsoever, it's going to take me probably at least three to six months to get my name out there, and then I'm gonna spend another three to six months building relationships with people, and then the flow on effect of those listings coming on will happen in the next six months. So if I had to break it down into three six month brackets, it's gonna probably take me a year and a half to start making that GCI target.

Becoming the trusted advisor, it's something that's been spoken about in industry for so many years to the point where it's almost become cliched, but there is a lot of value in that phraseology. And I wanted to unpack it because each of those words carries a fair bit of weight that you've got some concepts that sit behind. The word advisor to start with, you have said in the past that there's more skill that agents need to bring to the table. You have a very holistic view of, even just listening in this conversation, some of the topics that you're speaking about, I've never heard a real estate agent speak about ever, but the economy, inflation, cycles, markets, equities, you read and study up on all of these things. You're making sure you're on top of price per square metre rate in your area, just being a lot more scientific and mathematical in general and knowledgeable and becoming a person who knows things that is worthy of advising an asset owner or a homeowner. And I would love to just hear your expanded thoughts on that and practically how agents listening could actually become that person. Like what sources are you reading? What books and podcasts are you listening to?

So I've had an interest in those topics just personally. So it makes it a bit easier. I think if you don't like that stuff at all, then you can probably get to at least the surface level knowledge that allows you to have intelligent conversations with people. I'm quite a critical thinker and I'd say I'm probably fairly judgmental. So if I'm going to see a specialist and they don't know what they're talking about, whether I'm going to see a surgeon, a medical practitioner or someone, a lawyer or some of those professions that should have lots of knowledge behind them, I'm judging them. I'm listening to how much they know and how educated they are. And if they're not skilled and they don't sound like they're way more knowledgeable than I am in their field, I'm probably not trusting their advice. So, trusted advisor. First, you've gotta have the knowledge to be able to give the advice. Where does the knowledge come from? Different sources. Like for me, I watch the financial markets, I watch it every day. Right now, ASX is trading at 7,400 and something, gold is 1,950 US an ounce. So I watch those things closely because I'm fascinated by it. But they all relate back to real estate. We're in an industry that is, it's an asset class. It's an asset class without a recommended retail price. So we have the opportunity to influence or manipulate the value, but it's still an asset class. And it ties in with the financial markets. It connects back to consumer sentiment and confidence. And you've got to have those conversations intelligently, particularly at this time of the world, where there's so much uncertainty and people are looking for that guidance and direction. And you're sitting down, and if you're being a bit fluffy with the conversations and you're not direct and logical, then I don't think you're gonna get the cut through and the confidence that the consumer needs to have in someone. So if I can sit down with them and answer questions with confidence and know what I'm talking about, I think it's well received. I think they go, oh wow, that's refreshing. This guy knows what he's talking about, so when he gives me advice, I'm gonna listen to it because he's educated enough to know what he's dealing with. It's not difficult. I'm not saying I know more than anyone else, but I think you gotta have a very sort of broad understanding of the industry if you wanna do very well. Can you succeed without that? Definitely. You could have surface level knowledge and focus on those and still get through. But I find that if you have a more in-depth knowledge about the industry and the markets, you're going to win business from the higher end market and business people that are looking to have those conversations because they know what they're talking about. Sources, I look at a lot of websites, but I look at Bloomberg, routers, I'm watching what's happening in the US markets to find out what's happening here. I'm reading about the analyst predictions on inflation. We've got our inflation figures due this week in Australia. Most banks are saying 6.1, 6.2%. If that comes in under, that gives confidence that rates will not go up in the next meeting, which is Tuesday, of the first Tuesday of August. We've got a new RBA head, Michelle Bullock, I think's her name, she's replacing Philip Lowe, and all of those things are conversations that I'll have with a person, if it's of relevance to them. If I'm dealing with a person that's got no idea about that stuff, we won't go there. But if they are in business or in the financial markets, then we'll have a conversation about equities and where do you think asset prices are going and how you're positioning yourself right now. You know, what are you doing to hedge against what could come? Do you think we're inflated in values? And what's the PEs look like? What's the yield? Are you going for yield or growth? You know, all of those things are relevant because it gives me an inkling as to where the headspace is and then I can curate the sort of remedy to how we can deal with this. If they're very bearish, if they say, oh Alex, things are gonna get real bad, markets definitely overinflated, P's are not in whack, earnings are gonna come down in the next six months, we're gonna get into a recession, inflation is only temporarily controlled, it's gonna fly again, rates will go up again next year. Okay, that's a very negative sentiment. So I've gotta be careful how I deal with the situation. I'm not gonna be turning around and disputing that because I don't know, maybe they're right, they might know more. Sure, okay, if that's your view, this is the way we would address the problem. Let's move quickly, let's get the property on the market sooner because time is not on our side and if you feel in six months things are going to be much worse, then I don't want you to be exposed to that. I'd rather you start looking at buying opportunities then than starting to sell then. So let's trade now, let's bank the highest outcome that we can achieve. Let's get the money in the bank and go shopping and buy for better opportunities in six or eight months' time. So it's important to know what they're thinking as well and firstly I want to hear them out and then I know how to manage the conversation.

On that point, in that particular scenario, the person thought the market was going to go down so you were suggesting let's sell now. The opposite actually was happening a lot in 2020 when you were visiting people and this sort of ties into the trusted element of the trusted advisor. People were saying, we're worried about the market, we think it's gonna go down. You didn't have that opinion, so you shared that with them. And a lot of people relied on that, didn't sell, and then came to you and wanted one or two years time to sell with you uncontested, didn't question the fee, didn't question the process, just took all your advice because you told them something that wasn't in your best interest, they listened and it benefited them, and so they trusted you implicitly from there. There's a quote I really like from a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He says, being ethical is long-term greedy, by a guy called Naval Ravikant. It's tongue in cheek. Obviously, if you're ethical, it doesn't mean you are long-term greedy, but I do find it ironic that if you just wanna make money over as many years as possible, it's actually a good strategy to be ethical. So that's part one. Part two is you've spoken about it in the past. Relationship and being liked sort of goes into being trusted as well. And you've seen it many times where the best skilled or the most skilled doesn't get the listing. It's the person they like. So building a genuine relationship with someone and then actually liking you as a person is a strategy for earning money and winning listings in this business.

Yeah, definitely. At the beginning of a career, it's hard to be the trusted advisor because you're a little bit uncomfortable with the conversation, you're not very skilled in the industry, but most agents after two or three years can easily get to that point. There's a perception in the community that the agent is trying to fast track the outcome. Whether you're dealing with a buyer or a seller, they believe, this is the general mindset in my opinion, is that all you're trying to do is just get an outcome that's gonna benefit you. And I think the behavior of our industry resonates with that, and it is a lot like that, where it's very transactional, it's very short-sighted, and all we talk about and hear in some of these real estate sessions that I listen to is how to fast-track the outcome, get it on the market quickly, get it sold as quickly as you can, so the focus isn't on what's best for the owner or the client, it's what's best for the business or the agent. So if you come in with a bit of a different angle, you've got to look at it selflessly and it's hard to do it if you're struggling financially. And if I give this advice to someone who can't afford their repayments and I'm saying, hey, when you go into that listing, don't convince them to sell, tell them not to sell because I don't think it's the right decision. They were like, dude, how am I gonna live? But I don't think everyone's in that position. I think most people can be honest, completely transparent, and I believe that this comes back to you in multiples. And it's much more comfortable living a life like that. Like you don't have to worry about what you've said, but you have to take a position. You can't be vague. Like my position in early 2020 was I'm not seeing evidence of the market correcting. And a lot of people thought it's gonna crash. And the banks were saying it's gonna come down 30% and all these analysts and economists making these very negative predictions. And the media punching it out and distributing that, amplifying it, and then the consumer panicking. And we went to these very, I would say, luxurious high-end homes, educated business people, and they had formed an opinion the market's gonna crash. I just didn't see evidence of that. But you've gotta be careful with your advice. You can't be too strong in one side, because you might be wrong. I could have been wrong. Imagine if I was wrong and said, hey, I don't think you should sell, and the market went down 30%. That would have been egg on face. So you have to convey things, I think, in a balanced manner. You've got to say, sure, that's a possibility. And it could go down 30%. I can't predict what's going to happen. But from what I'm sensing in the market, I'm not seeing any evidence of that. And if you're selling purely because of that, maybe let's wait and see the evidence of a softening when supply increases or value is starting to come down, and then we can start making a move if we need to. But right now, I'm not sensing we're gonna crash at all. If anything, there's a shortage of supply and there's potential for growth. So maybe all these predictions are wrong and you're gonna sell your family home and go into rental property, and then you're gonna buy back in at a higher price potentially with all the ins and outs. So, it didn't make sense. Now it's a bit different, the conversation's changed. I don't think the market in six or 12 months' time is gonna be better. So I'll be honest with that opinion. But then what happens when a buyer asks you that? Like how upfront are you with the buyer? With our sellers, we're very direct, very upfront. With our buyers, we try and be transparent, but we have to be strategic. You know, I can't have the same conversation with a seller and then say to the buyer, oh look, you have six months' time, things could get bad, you shouldn't buy anything today. Don't buy this home, come back in six months and buy something else. No, I act for the seller, that's my job, that's my moral and legal obligation. But you have to be honest with buyers. I don't think you lie to them, but you just gotta, you select your words and you structure it carefully. But that trusted advisor concept, I think will bring back multiples in business profit as well. So you're not just doing things selflessly, it actually becomes self-serving eventually, but you've got to be willing to let go of that instant gratification. Because when you tell someone, I don't think it's the right time to sell for you, and you don't get the business, you're going to walk away with zero dollars, but I promise you that when they want to sell in six months, 12 months, two years, and eventually they will, they'll come back to you, they'll trust your advice, because every other agent probably went in there and said you should definitely sell straight away, let's get it on the market. And that for me is not honest advice. So I try and build a business on being upfront with people. Sometimes it's to my detriment, but overall long game, I think it's to my benefit.

Managing relationships with your area. I heard you say something which actually caught my attention which is that you of course have a CRM, but you potentially aren't the most active user of it, or at least you weren't at that point in time, a lot of your contact management is done through your iPhone in the contact section. So full name, you'll save them with their full address, you'll have emojis next to it, your pipeline is literally flower emojis. Can you talk about that sort of process for how you actually manage who to speak to, who to tell that this fund just sold, how you feel about doing that?

So you see, when I was struggling as an agent, I used to look at the top performing agents and I assumed that they had everything sorted, like this perfect process and the CRM was awesome and their database was clean and just everything was amazing. That's the only way you could succeed, surely. That's the perception. Reality is no, like my database is a three out of 10. It's that bad. Is it effective? Yeah, it's effective. Are there gaps in it, massive gaps? Is there opportunity loss in it? Yeah, I would say yes. So I'm not anyone to follow in that regard, but I have to make it easy for myself because I went through the analysis paralysis of different databases and CRMs. You went to complete data and box and dice and I've tried all of these different ones and I can just get bogged down in it. Like, you know, I'm sitting there and it's opening all these pages and the interface was all clunky and then I can't get it through my phone, I've got to go on a laptop and it's just not working for me. I just want to have intelligent conversations with people in a quick response time, not take 10 minutes to get the data. So iPhone, I just went back to iPhone and it's all emoji based, it's very, I guess it's very basic, it's not the right method but it works for me. So if you come to me and say, Alex, I wanna buy a house in St. Lucia, and I've got $2 million to spend, I'll just put the right emoji in and St. Lucia in, and I'll see all of the pipeline of people that are considering selling. And then I'll say, okay, great, I've got like 17 here. And then I'll look at my notes. Okay, I've probably, these five are pretty hot to go. Notes within the contact? Yeah, within the contact. Yeah, I'll just make a note within the contact. And you sort of remember, because I try and keep frequency of contact with these people. You know, if I get a result in the suburb, I'll just send a text, you know, hi Carter, I hope all is well, just wanted to let you know, three Birdvale streets offer 1.65 million, we had four offers on it, went for it with a cash on conditional contract. If I can help you with anything, please let me know, cheers Alex, that's it. So I'll just send that text, as soon as I get a result, as long as it's within your suburb, you'll get a message from me. And most people don't respond. I don't get responses. Sometimes they go, thanks Alex, or they'll engage in conversation. Interestingly enough, some of these text messages that I've sent, I look back at the history and I've got like 30, 40 texts over three years. And then finally the guy texts back, oh, we'd like to sell our property, can you come and see us? I'm like, holy dooly, all this time, I thought I was sending it to nobody and now he's finally keen to do something. And I don't even call them that often, unless I've got something interesting to talk about on text messaging most of the time, but if there's something profound, if they came to the inspection and we door knock them to invite them to the open house, then I'll call them and say, hey Carter, great to see you on Saturday, thanks for coming through, just wanted to update you on the outcome of that, it went to this, and it's checking with you, and then I'll take some notes, yep, Carter says probably not selling in the next 12 months, okay, cool. I'm sure there's a way better way of doing this, and we use AgentBox internally, and I put everyone in there, but I don't use AgentBox to bring the data back up. I go back to my iPhone. Everything's in my iPhone, everyone is in my iPhone, and that way I've got efficiency, then I can sit down and make calls from the car, and I'll just go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, call everyone that I think I should speak to, and it's, for me, very effective, and all the text message trails are in my phone. I'm not having to go somewhere else to search what I said before, what they said in response. So I would say if someone can come up with a system that is sort of phone based, the efficiency of it, I think agents will respond very well to that.

3.3% including GST.

What a bargain.

Wow, best agent in Queensland for 3.3%.

Oh, there's others charging that, I think. It's out of suburbs particularly, yeah.

For sure, it's toward the top end of market in Brisbane and I wanna talk about how you consistently earn it and get a green sign on it when you're listing property. It's the first thing a lot of agents will compromise on when they're challenged on it. They will straight away to some degree, whether it's they'll defer to a sliding scale or they'll say, why don't we just reduce it a little bit? They entertain the conversation. I wanna talk about how you earn it consistently. And part of that is about you're demonstrating to them that agent A and agent B likely won't deliver you the exact same sale price. There will be a difference. And it ties back to what you said about there's no recommended retail price for real estate. So based on how the agent negotiates and positions and how they frame things, you know, you've mentioned in the past on a $1 million property, $10,000 can be gained or given up in a single sentence. You're conveying this to owners, you're giving them case studies of, they were listed with this agent and then they listed with me and this was the difference in price, 500,000, the difference in commission was only 30,000, so there was a significant return on investment there. How do you consistently earn 3.3% including GST? Because it's on the higher end. Yeah, it is on the higher end.

I do get pushback on it very consistently. All the sellers comment, oh, you're the most expensive by far, and the other agent said they'll do it for 2% or 2.2. So I am above, I can sense that, but it comes back to self-belief. Do I believe that I'm delivering something of benefit to them beyond the 1% difference that the alternative agent is offering? Yes, I do. I think if they have me on their side negotiating for them and defending their value, I'm going to bank them a lot more than the 1% difference. I inherently believe in that. And that makes it easy to convey. When you believe in something, it's easy to sell. If you don't believe in it, it doesn't sound genuine or authentic, and it's not gonna be easily believed from the other end of the table. But I'll give examples. Storytelling's probably the best way to convey your benefit. Rather than say, I'm at this percent, and I'm this and that, let's talk about someone else's experience, what they went through, what they were quoted, what they paid, what we achieve for them. It becomes easier when they're social proof because if they've seen you do this for a few of their friends and acquaintances and the developer that's building all the brand new homes in their suburb and they're all willing to choose you at this rate, then the conversation becomes easier as you progress. At the beginning it wasn't easy because as soon as the commissions became deregulated and we went off the system of 5% of the first 18,000 plus 2.5% of the balance plus GST. A lot of agents went down in fee, they went to 2.2 or 2.5 inclusive. At that point I thought, well hey there's a correlation between what someone pays and the quality of product or service they receive. I perceive the world that way. So if I wanna buy an item of clothing and I'm online, how do I know which one's better than the other? I'll go price highest first. Like aha, these are the good ones. So okay, now I know. And I just got this perception that if it costs more, it must be better. And with real estate, it's a beautiful industry because as an agent, you actually have the ability to manipulate outcome. You really can push the price. I would say there's a five to 10% swing depending on the agent of choice. Now, if they're looking for the cheapest agent, I would say, Carter, if you're looking for the cheapest agent, I know you've been offered 2.2, but I think I can find you cheaper. There's probably guys out there that'll do it for 1.5. And I'll offer that to them. But do they want that? Because in reality, the 1.5% agent or the 2.2% agent, how good are they at negotiating? And I say that to the seller, I say, what would you rate them in terms of skill level at negotiation? Because in my experience, the agent that's willing to cut their fees and drop their commission and give away their own value is the agent that's gonna give away your value and your price when a buyer starts to question the deal. And yes, you'll save 1%, but I think the loss on outcome, the sale price, is influenced by a lot more than 1%. So this is not a one or 2% decision. However, Carter, if you feel that the other agent can deliver the exact same outcome, they've got the same process, same marketing, the quality of photography, and the negotiating skills, then they're the more compelling option and you should go with them. But what I'm confident is I'll bank you more than them. I'll net you a lot more than them and I can give you some examples of what I've done for others. So for me, who they choose to represent them will have a direct influence on the outcome and their choice of agent is going to have a greater difference than one or two percent. So sure, they can save one percent, they can save more, but what are they losing on sale price? Everything gets attached back to sale price. Same as the marketing pushback of 12 grand is too much or 15,000 is too much. Sure, we can cut that back, but let's talk about the implications. If we take off domain or we don't do social media, we're losing about 20 to 30% of the buyer activity. As long as you're willing to accept that, so will I. But for me, it gets to a point of being pennywise, pound foolish, where we're saving two or three grand and we're potentially leaving 20, 30, 50 on the table. And I'm not willing to do that for my own property, but if this is your decision, ultimately it's your core carder, we'll run with your process. Let them have ownership of it. So none of this, no you have to do this, no sure, let's talk about what that would look like, and then you accept the implications, and if that's the path you wanna take, then you own it, and we go your way. But I promise you that most people will not go that way. They'll come back to your process.

So generally the way that you're earning the 3.3% including GST is it's the storytelling, it's the case studies, it's how much time are you spending on it in the listing presentation generally? Is it quite a brief topic? Are you labouring over it?

So total listing presentation for me, it ranges from one to one and a half hours. So an hour and a half is pretty much the max standard for me. The commission conversation I try and have early on. So we get that over and done with. Otherwise, when you end it like that, it's a bit weird. It's a bit awkward. So we do it through storytelling. I give examples and in that example of storytelling, I tell them what my commission rate is. I charge 3.3%. The other agent was charging 2.2%. They saved $30,000 but we sell for $500 more. And you've got to give these examples so they understand the concept. They'll still question it. You know, today I had two listings that we signed up, both people questioned it. Both said you're the most expensive, are you negotiable? And I said respectfully no. But sometimes I joke around and say sure, how much more would you like to pay? But I think you've got to have a position on that. They've got to see that you're a skilled negotiator and I'd say to the seller, I'd say Carter, why don't you test the other agents and see if they're negotiable on the commission and see what their reaction is. Because for me the best person you can have on your side is someone who's a strong negotiator. That will benefit you more financially than any other skill set. So why don't you test the other agent, call them up and say, look, I'm not happy with your comrade, what else can you do? And let's just hear their response. Because I think most agents backtrack straight away. They're, oh, okay, well, we could probably drop it a little bit, like, oh, what are you thinking, that sort of jazz. But you've got to have a strong position and you've got to have belief, but you've got to be willing to let it go too, because you won't win them all. I've made some mistakes, I still make mistakes daily, and I'll continue to. But I've made some mistakes where I've had a $9 million deal or a $10 million deal, where I stuck firm at 3.3%. The guy said, I'll give you 2.2%. I said, no, I'm not negotiable, and I should have been, because when I looked at the total number of what I would get, it was a lot higher than what I'd normally get for a sale transaction. My average commission is about $65,000 per transaction. That would have been $200,000 plus thousand. But I still said no and I lost the listing. Someone else listed and sold it for $9 million. So that was a good lesson. But I think it's important to take a position and have confidence. But if I backtrack on my fee, and if an agent right now, and I speak to a lot of agents in Brisbane as well, some of my competitors that come and see me and we collaborate and sort of share ideas, some of these agents came to me at 2% plus GST. We've gotten up to 2.75 on some, some of them have got to three. When I look at their business, without changing anything else, without, and this is an instant benefit, they've gone from two to 3%. That's a 50% increase in GCI without changing any other parameter. No volume, no value, it's just a conversation. So let's get really skilled at that conversation rather than try and sell 50% more properties or go into this higher price bracket. Let's get very good at defending value and use that to build our business.

Great point, great point. Before we get to the last question, I wanna briefly touch on negotiation.

Sure.

One or two practical tips that you find yourself consistently deferring to when in everyday use.

I think firstly, okay, dealing with a seller and a buyer, there's probably two different things to discuss. Dealing with a seller, tie everything back to sale price. Anything that's questioned, whether it's your commission rate, whether it's your proposed styling and painting, you know, I'm going in proposing 20 to 30 grand of preparation work before we start the process. And the other agent's going in and saying, you don't need to do anything, I'll sell it as it is. Firstly, make sure that you give options to the seller. Don't be one-sided. Don't say to the seller, this is what you have to do to get to that price. No, Carter, I can sell your home just as it is. You don't have to touch a thing. It'll sell right now. The question is, can we maximize value? And there's definitely opportunity there. So if it was my home, this is what I would do. And this is what I've done for others successfully. And I think everything here that I'm suggesting to you has a return on investment attached to it. So these are the profitable things. There are other things we could do, but they don't make a return, so I won't go there. So not worth doing kitchen or bathrooms these days, but we'll do a paint, we'll do carpets, we'll do external house wash, we'll pressure clean the driveway, we'll mulch the garden beds, we'll re-turf if we have to, we'll do a glass clean at the end, we'll get the building and pest done up front, and we'll get it staged. And that's our typical process. But they might say, well Alex, the other agent said don't do anything, so it's important that I convey that, hey, you don't have to do anything, but I'm suggesting this 20 or 30K investment will bring us a return well beyond 100K. In my experience, you're gonna triple your money on this investment. And you don't have to do that, and it's really important that the agent's not one-sided, because if you be very dogmatic and fixed on that, they're just gonna say, no, I'm gonna go the easy path. And some people choose a hybrid model. So, well Alex, we're not gonna do the painting, but we'll do the house wash and the landscaping, and we'll do the staging, but we don't want to paint. Okay, that's cool. We'll do that. As long as you're giving them options. But any time you get stuck, the practical advice is tied back to sale price. Sure, we don't have to do any of these things as long as we're willing to accept that the outcome won't be the same. It'll be a lower sale price. And in today's world, the consumer, the buyer, is paying a premium for turnkey. Any property that's all done and ready to move into, there's a gravitation towards it because no one wants to deal with the trades, the delays, the costs. So let's get it to that standard and I introduce all the trades. So we'll get all the quotes done, we'll facilitate it all. So for me, tying it back to sale price is vital. If they push back on marketing, push back on commission, sure, we can do it that way as long as we're willing to accept that the sale price might not be the same. And that's with the sell side, on the buy side of things. Buy side, it's important. Look, the typical buy side conversation that I hear in real estate is so irrelevant to the consumer. How does it sound? The buyer says, oh Alex, I think it's worth 1.8 and that's all I'm willing to offer. And the agent says, oh, no, that's way, that's not right. The seller is expecting a lot more than that. Or I think it's worth more than that. The buyer does not care what the seller expects. The buyer does not care what the agent thinks. What's more relevant, as long as it's accurate, is CADA, at 1.8, you're not going to be competitive with the other buyers. The feedback that we've had and the interest that's come back to us is above 1.8. Now I can take you 1.8, and I'm happy to start there if you like, but you won't be competitive with the rest of the market. So it's important that the buyer knows or feels that the other buyers are thinking higher, because if you're talking about what the seller wants or what the agent thinks, they don't care. But what another buyer is willing to pay, they do care. But that has to be genuine. Look, if you don't have any other interests, you could go back and say, Carter, the sales evidence that I've looked at doesn't support a $1.8 million sale price. I've got realistic sellers, they're receptive to information, and if you've got a few sales that you can share with me that aligns with your 1.8 figure, then I'm happy to convey that to the sellers, and I'm sure they'll reconsider their position. But I've studied the market, I've looked at all the sales, I'm not seeing anything trade at 1.8 that would be considered relevant. So could you share with me a few sales that you've looked at that aligns with this 1.8 million dollar opinion? So I'm gonna try and extract that out of them. And I'd say nine times out of 10, they won't be able to answer that question. They'll be like, oh, well, we've seen a few and so it's sort of, so put it back on them. There's a lot of negotiation stuff we could go through. There's so many things. You're trying to get a price before you go into the listing presentation. That's so important. You know, I need to know what you're thinking in your head before I meet with you. There's a way in getting that because ultimately, if you're thinking $3 million and it's worth $2.5, and I go in straight and tell you it's $2.5, you're not going to like me. But if I knew you wanted $3, I can reconfigure that conversation differently. I'd say, Carter, I'd love to get you to three. And to get to three, this is what we would need to do. We'd do the kitchen, the bathrooms, we'd do this and that, it's probably gonna cost two, 300K at least. And you're gonna say, I don't wanna spend that. It's okay, that's cool, I respect that. That's to get to three million. If you wanna look at what the sales evidence is, I think buyers would see value in this range. Now how does that compare to where you would see value? I always put it back on them, because I'm trying to get a bit of a response. Sometimes they don't give you anything but the look on their face or the tone in their response gives you a bit of a cue as to what they're thinking. As an agent, I think you've got to be a little bit quick on your feet to pick up on those

little subtle hints. Final question here. This show is an initiative by ShopFlow which are innovating how real estate residential video is being organized, filmed and produced. And so I wanted to ask you a question about video. What's your opinion, your genuine take on the efficacy of video for the seller in terms of, have you found any tangible impact in it, genuinely improving the sale outcome and for the agent as well in terms of the increased profile and brand that video can generate. What's your take on video?

I think it benefits all three parties, buyer, seller, and agent. Video, if you look at the stats, has higher engagement. When you're dealing with a genuine buyer that's really keen on the home, and you ask them, have you seen the video? I would say they've seen it multiple times, because in the imagery, in the still photography, you miss little areas and connections between spaces where they'll go and study the video and go, oh, that room connects to that, and oh, this is what that window looks out of. I couldn't see that in the photos. And as an agent, you wanna make sure that your marketing is high caliber. And for me, if you don't incorporate video, you're undercooking the marketing. Floor plans are vital. Video, I think, is really important. We would even boost that on social, so we'd sponsor the video. Photography has to be schmick. For me, that's the most important part to get right. You know, I would say all of the external images should be done at dusk, so the house glows. You look at a difference between day and dusk shot on an external and it's profound. So there's a lot of agents that do high end property but they still take their external images of the front facade or the pool and they're all done at day because it's one visit. Photographer comes once, so it's a bit cheaper. But I would always do a two stage approach. Day shots internally, dusk shots externally. But back to video, for me, we probably sell about 130 properties on market every year and about 20 off market. And on the 130 on market, I would say 80 plus percent have video attached to them, so I'm a believer.

Wow, Alex, thanks for your time today.

Really appreciate you sitting down. Pleasure, pleasure, man. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me.

Cheers. Cheers.