Andrew Undem, Founder at SURE Group | #1 Brokerage & 120,000,000 Real Estate Sold

Welcome to the Success Story Podcast. I'm your host, Scott Clary. On this podcast, I have candid interviews with execs, celebrities, politicians, and other notable figures, all who have achieved success through both wins and losses, to learn more about their life, their ideas, and their insights. I sit down with leaders and mentors and unpack their story to help pass those lessons onto others through both experiences and tactical strategy for business professionals, entrepreneurs, and everyone in between. With a further ado, another episode of the Success Story Podcast. Thanks again for sitting down with me. Very excited to be sitting with Andrew Undum. He's a real estate entrepreneur. He has over a decade of experience in real estate. He is the founding partner at Sure Sales Group that he has been sort of driving forward since 2014. Their organization now has grown to over 20 agents and staff and their annual sales consistently over $120 million. Now, Andrew is making a name for himself in real estate and not only just through his successes, but he's also very heavy on sales, marketing, branding. To speak through some of the items that he's accomplished over his career, he featured in the Wall Street Journal as a top team. His Sure Group being a top team in the US, he was featured in Bombom as a top video influencer. He received a social media award from Baltimore for obviously the work he's doing in the brand he's building through Sure Group. He's in the Remax Hall of Fame and he has a Circle of Legends Award. He frequently does podcasts, obviously real estate and other. He is a very panel speaker, keynote speaker, certified DRS agent. Obviously, Andrew is not just in real estate. He's a brand. He's a persona and he's doing it purposefully. I want to thank you for sitting down, but I want to unpack where you're at, Zach. You started off how you came to be and why you're doing all the things that you're doing. That was an awesome intro. I've never been introduced with such a litany of bullet points there. I don't think I've been a keynote speaker before, but maybe one day like you, Scott, I could I can now pull that off, but yeah, thanks. It's been a real safe for 10 years. Started out as a finance guy out of college, 2009, some a young guy, 32 and coming out of college in like, you know, after 0809, being in finance, super tough. So I ended up taking a different route and I ended up getting into real estate in the new home sales world. So I worked with one of the top builders in the country, had an awesome experience there. And after about three years of that, I had had about enough and I said, you know, I'm going to start my own thing and get into the residential brokerage world. And it's kind of taken off ever since. And we've been growing every year about the pretty good hockey stick growth. And I attribute it a lot of it is to following guys like yourself and always be constantly learning and improving in each kind of functional silo of your business, whether it's sales, marketing, negotiation, mindset, et cetera. So happy to be here and happy to share anything I can with your audience. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. So first let's unpack like like your story. So like, you know, you said you you went finance real estate. What was like your driver that that brought you into finance and then and made you want to go into real estate? Like, is that something that you've always wanted to do? Or do you thought like a knack for it? You found you were great at sales like, you know, working like retail or whatever. I don't know what's what's your story that sort of led you to to want to jump into real estate? Well, I'm being honest, I was always really motivated by making money. And that's kind of as any good salesperson should be so. I, you know, it's just going up your look around. It's like, wow, money is you're like these like little fun tickets. This is a tool you can use to do things that you want to do and you get a lot of independence from that. And of course, it's not the old piece of shit. It's not the money itself. It's what you can do with the money. What you can do for other people with the money. So I just knew it was a powerful tool and it's kind of what I wanted to pursue. And that's kind of what happened with the finance game. And how I got into real estate's actually pretty funny. Right after I graduated college, I started selling cars just for nine months, short to 10. Couldn't get a job and finance figured I'd sell something. I'd fold cars in the summers in college. Then my parents helped me get a job. So I wasn't sitting around just being a picnic all day. I ended up selling a car to one who was a manager. This person was a manager at Ryan Homes and the R&K, you know, the darling of the new home builders and mall street twirls, big builder. And she said, Andrew, do you like working here? We had such good report at this point like we're buddy, buddy. I said, you know, I actually hate it. Thanks so much for asking. I wake up at nine a.m. I don't leave till nine p.m. It's dark and I get up dark when I get home. I work six days a week, dealerships are open every day. It's on Sunday. But no, I mean, but I had a good attitude about it as she saw it. She said, you should sell houses instead. That kind of, I don't know anything about real estate up into that point. I have some family ties, you know, my mom's family does some real estate stuff up in North Dakota, Minnesota, but nothing for me personally. But it was at that car dealership where I met a guy who was really involved in sales training and sales consulting. And that really changed the trajectory of my career because I started practicing these different sales techniques. You know, someone walks into the dealership. What do you do? You don't just go up into the car. No, you have to be really polished and professional. We are doing Porsche's and Audi's. So I was dealing with really kind of top notch business people, often people that do business with. And so I kind of took a lot of training. I got over to real estate and the rest was kind of history. Then just up up in the light, we went and never took our foot off the gas. So I like that story. And I think that a lot of people that are in sales, there's a gentleman by the name of Rob Jepsen. I consume a lot of his content. He has a sales podcast. And I think one of the things that he says is the quote, what does the quote exactly? Say something along lines of like accidentally involved, but purposefully successful or something like something along those lines like nobody plans to get into sales. But when you're in it and when it doesn't matter if it's it's software, it's homes, it's cars, people who love it, love it. And they love it for money. They love it for accomplishment. They love it for they love it for controlling like what they have. They held they hold themselves with accountability as to like what they can achieve. Now a lot of people, I think move over to a profession like real estate and they would stop as just a real estate agent. But you're taking it to the next level. You're building out your entire organization, which is now one of the top brokerages in the US. You know, there's obviously some very big names, but in Baltimore, especially like you are like one of the if not the largest brokerages. So how do you, you know, that's an entrepreneur. That's an entrepreneur venture at the end of the day. So how did you move from just selling to building a business? Yes, a good question. It's, you know, there's a lot of good real estate teams involved. And we're happy to be the number one remax team in the state. But there's a lot of really good professionals and residential real estate, great people to learn from. And there's also a lot of people who are just struggling to figure it out. Real States, one of those businesses, I'm sure your audience is aware of anyone can be a realtor. Everyone does 10 real estate agents because the barrier to entry is, if it was any lower Scott, we'd just trip over it. They're not going to eat that. Like anyone can be an agent. And that's the problem. And you know, attorneys and doctors kind of have that different barrier to entry. But in sales general is a kind of typically an eat what you kill environment. They're willing to bring you on and throw you into the deep end. So, but answer your question, how do we kind of start growing this business? What I found is there's only one thing that matters and it's giving the clients exactly what they want. And that's the sales in general. And that means you have to be really good at listening, you have to be really all in on helping people get what they want. And in today's environment with all the technology, you can't sell real estate the way you used to. It used to be a solo operation and there'd be maybe 10 agents over here, they all kind of did their own thing, had a little friendly competition. That doesn't work anymore because you need to deliver so much value to the marketplace if you expect clients to work with you. So, in building out our organization, we realized, hey, we need a full-time in-house videographer with drone capabilities. So, anytime, Scott, if I'm going to go with your condo, I'm going to be circling the drone around the building, getting some sweet b-roll of the gym and all that cool stuff in the condo building. And I'm going to create some compelling content about your own, not just to. And of course, I call it course marketing. Of course, you take the pictures and the signs and the brochures and all the other stuff that maybe even some other agents don't do. And then of course, you're going to have to have someone to handle all the paperwork and do all the back office. And really, you have to put the right people in the right places on the bus, like Jim Collins would say, and let the salespeople just do what they're best at and go out and sell and serve and have a system in the back and the work. So, that's kind of where we're pushing all of our energy into is how do we arm good salespeople, great salespeople with everything they need. So, they don't have to do the $10, $15, $20, an hour work. And they can go do the highest and best activities that are going to lead to, you know, demitting their goals and having a good bottom line. So, you really just got to treat it like a business. And unfortunately, in real estate, because you can get your license and you can go sell your cousin's house and maybe have a little bit of success, that behavior is kind of rewarded so much that people keep coming in and doing it. But there's 1.3 million real estate agents, at least in the U.S. and 50% of them don't even sell a house here. So, that'll give you an idea. So, that all makes sense. The way you build up the business, the way that you make sure that the right people are doing the right job, the customer success, paying attention to the details and whatnot and delivering excellence at the customer well, still enabling the sales individuals and whatnot to sort of be as effective as possible. But that is that something that you found intuitively. Like, how did you, you started trying to draw out is why or not more brokerages doing what you're doing and not just like all these things you're saying are like the bare minimum for most businesses to succeed. But like you said, a lot of real estate agents, they have a little bit of success, but that's good enough or whatever. I don't know. I'm sure there's a lot of top brokerages. Also, do what you're speaking about, but like obviously you're doing it very effectively and very quickly, I find as well. So, how did you come to this conclusion? You've never built a business before. So, what was the sort of like you're guiding like your principles or led you here? Well, I know why a lot of people have gone to it because it's really hard. Managing people is hard. There's in real estate, there's no salaries, no insurance, no nothing. And I know a lot of B2B sales roles, you know, you have this company package, maybe get some base salaries, some bonus, there's a little nut here. In this business, you take on so much because the buck stops with you. People always like to think, oh, but there's no ceiling. You can make unlimited amount of money, which is true. But what they don't talk about is there's also no floor. You can plummet yourself in debt. You can max out these credit cards and just go bananas and just hope it works. But it is a lot of hard work to build organically from scratch. It's very real estate's awesome because anybody can get into it. And with the right attitude, mindset, hustle and entrepreneurial spirit, you can build it, which I love about it. They should let it be semi-easy to join. And I think it works relatively well. We need a lot of people out, 87% of people get out in the first five years, which is a wild statistic. I don't think any other industries like that. Leaving out industry profit, probably not. That's pretty crazy. That means one out of ten, if you look around at all your colleagues, 90% are gone in five years. And then again, and then again, it's every five years. But how we go to, we had a lot of help. And I know when I talked you before, I dropped this word, so I'm going to use it again. But you have to be an auto-died act, which is just a nice poly-syllabic word. If you want to write that down, auto-died act, you just have to be a self-taught person. You have to be so hungry to figure out what's going to get you to the next level. Because what got you here won't get you there in vice versa. How you saw ten homes is not how you saw 50, 100. And last year we did like 460, a whole different slew of problems at each tier. And I'll tell you what, the other people who are doing it, they're not the people who are going to come in and try to help you rise. They're going to be taken, they're lunch a little bit. So you really have to be just that kind of student mind that go out and just soak up as much knowledge as you can. And it's not just, you know, there's a couple of columns I'd like to think in our business, which is, hey, you have to know how to sell real estate. That's one skill set. Know all the contracts, know the right process, how the whole operation works with buyers, sellers, mortgage company, title company, home inspections, contingencies, lawyers. There's a whole lot of going on here, a whole lot of different personalities and people that have to deal with. That's a tough thing to navigate, which is probably why so many people fail. Because it's not just you telling your friend to house, there's a whole lot of people and everyone's seriously involved and there's a ton of money changing in every transaction. You better be sharp on that. But just because you know how to sell real estate doesn't mean you know how to sell. Sales is its own skill and it's its own thing you need to pursue mastery in. And most real estate salespeople, realtors, whatever you want to call them, have never had any sales training. Now they can navigate the process. Yeah, it's like a dentist. They know how to pull the teeth and do this, but do they know how to actually sell themselves on the service? I think that's kind of missing in the industry. And a lot of ways. There's a whole bunch of great training. Most of it's motivation mindset, get after it. I'm talking hardcore sales trade. I like the stuff you went through and you know what the companies you run. Like you got to learn the sales process. And then after that is the management component. How do we bring this all together and grow it to something bigger than yourself? And that's what gets me excited. Is making it a worthwhile pursuit. I like that a lot. And I like to use sort of double downed on on the proper training to enable people. And that's probably why I'm sure if you named off some stats of people that work with your firm, they're very much not aligned with the rest of the industry in terms of their successes and their retention rate of like your realtors. But what I think is also interesting is you've focused on something that I'm a firm believer in. And that's branding, self branding, marketing, social media. Like I'm looking at this list of things that you've that you've sort of done and places you've been featured in and various publications. Obviously branding is important for both sure and for yourself. And I apologize for calling you a keynote. I didn't mean to. I saw a panel speaker. I just figured, oh, he speaks a lot. He must have done all that. Now I've been invited to a panel long, but it sounded good. Now I have something to aspire to. Listen, like it's coming to say hire me. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, no, listen, you'll, you'll, you'll get it eventually if you keep this up. It doesn't take long for the requests to start coming in. And especially now with them, with everyone's, you know, everyone's sitting at home right now, unfortunately. But people are having all these virtual conferences. And it's, and it's very easy to just, like I get tons of requests just to chat about this that and the other, like, and it's, it's a great easy way to build out your brand because some of these organizations that host these events have big followings and whatnot. And you don't have to travel. You don't have to take four hours of your night. You're just hopping on a Zoom call. You have access to their entire. So, you know, that's one thing that I love doing now. But anyways, that's, that's the sort of getting off topic. So why are you focusing on building out, you know, your brand and also the brand of the company. And why are you so heavy on social media when real estate, which is, I think we can agree is a very, well, obviously it's one of the probably oldest industries that you can, you know, you can, you can think of a lot of these companies, you look at their social media to be quite honest. It sucks. It's just horrible. It's horrifying. What they think is acceptable to post. So, and this is not, there's not so different than a lot of, like, Fortune 100, Fortune 500, like there's very few companies that I find get it. And that's why I think it's so interesting that like these startups or even these solar printers or individuals can build a brand for themselves that is equivalent if not more exciting and engaging than what a Fortune 500 and entire marketing department can do. So, you know, you're, you're doing this properly. And, and why is that? And speak to me about why you, you, you see the, the use for it. Well, you know, the brand is so important if you want to stand out in the crowd of market players. And when, you know, the rise of social media happened. And like Gary Vaynerchuk talks about this a lot, but the playing field just got leveled. Like, you know, Mercedes-Benz can make this a beautiful commercial. Well, I have a camera too. My iPhone X Pro and a little bit of editing, I can make something almost as awesome. And once you realize that you can put out super high quality content, now it's not easy and you're going to mess it up. I've made every mistake putting out a video that known to man, at least as far as I can tell. So, you got to fail for just throw yourself out there, but the branding is so important because if you don't get attention, if you don't get people to know what you do, why you do it, how you do it, why you might be better, then you're never going to get the chance to even have the conversation. So, there's the old age old thing, marketing or sales, marketing and sales. And they're both equally as important because, you know, hey, salespeople like to say, all sales is the king, sales skills, number one, number one. And, you know, I'm kind of in that camp a lot of times. But if you don't have anyone to talk to, if you're not getting opportunities, you can't market, it doesn't matter how great your mindset is and how great your presentation is, if you can't give it to anybody. The same thing by first of all. Like, you got to marry those two together and give them equal amount of energy and effort because if you do, if you are good at marketing, like you said, we spent a ton of time on that, every time we lift a house for sale, I don't care how low the price range might be, I don't care the location, we do everything full blast all the time. So, if it's going to have our brand on it, we want you to know, you're getting world class photography, hundreds of HDR pictures that we're going to take down and maybe use the best 34 year 50. We're going to get the drone out and get some aerial footage. We're going to do a video, whether that's me on a green screen, explaining the house with, you know, the pictures coming up on the background or me physically at the property, giving you the kind of HDTV. Here's all the things you need to know about this top that you might miss if you just looked at the pictures. So, we create all this content and that's very important and let's be honest, that does help sell the seller on you. Now, the only way it's going to help you actually sell the house and deliver on your promise is if you know how to distribute that content. It's got you notice, you put out amazing content all the time and preaching to the choir. But for your audience, it's like, and I know you've had some help. I think your girlfriend's like in the game, you know, as a consultant. No, like listen, like even even she does, she's into like the whole social media scene. She runs a marketing company with her sister. So she's very much like, you know, like a headfirst into the the whole social media. And that's that's what literally her entire business is. Now, it's not my entire business, but it's still, you know, I've been a fan, I'm putting it lightly since I saw the opportunity and I saw the the ability for like the just the individual to make, to have that kind of reach with like very few marketing dollars. That's what I find so incredible. And so the opportunity is right, like really, really fresh still. So. Yeah, I mean, it's fertile soil. And like if you file a scout out, like the book you just put out is going to be awesome. I did order it five times, it hasn't came yet. But this guy's like an amazing influence on like did. And it's because you have to do, you have to create the content. And everyone kind of has a hard time with that is do I look okay? Is what I'm saying good enough? Am I going to be able to impact somebody? Do I need a better guess? And then even if you can cross that bridge and capture this content with some decent audio and video, you have to know how to distribute it. And in my world, that is very important for hyperlocals, real estate hyperlocal. So just answer your question, like we went so big on branding because we want to be known as the people who do it right the first time, get it done. You know, if you think hire enough of an expense and try hire someone else when you have to lift it twice, go cheap and do it twice. Kind of thing. So now now I one thing I like to pull out of this is like, you know, your agents. How comfortable are they selling like this? Because I don't see again a lot of brands doing this. So when they when they join when they join share group, is that sort of like a little bit uncomfortable for somebody who's been selling for, you know, 20 years, 30 years? Yeah, you know, it can be and it's not like we run this Auschwitz camp where it's like you have to do it this way. Yeah, we like to grow people on it and everyone does things a little bit differently. So the way I sell is going to be different the way you sell is going to be different in the way, you know, each agent on our team sells. But what we want to do is we want to give them the canvas and them the right tools. Hey, this is available to you. This is at your disposal and show them a lot of examples like I think that one of the things we've done well at the sure sales group here in Baltimore is we lead from the front. I'm not asking people to do things that I'm not doing all the time myself. And it's very often that when you grow a team that the CEO or probably these realtor's called themselves CEOs all the time, I find it hilarious. I'm just a realtor like everyone else. I happen to you know, kind of manage some of the deep. But what this managing partner will do, we'll take themselves out and just direct everyone else what to do and just collect. And that's okay for a little bit but this market changes so much and industry changes so much just like all of our industries. And if you're not sitting at the kitchen tables, eating what you kill, understanding the buyer and seller personas and how they're changing and different technology comes into the marketplace and different disruptors coming, we're going to fall behind. So all we do is try to we're in it every day and we have a weekly meeting and we share and say what this is what works for me. Like last week I just did a whole presentation on why 2008 crisis is different than this COVID-19 and I had all of the charts and I got like 10 referrals from it. God, it was crazy. I blasted it out to my database. Hey, I wouldn't try to sell anything. This is why we think this is different. There's a lot more equity and homes now. People haven't been borrowing like crazy. The appreciation hasn't been crazy before this. And I just shared that with my team. It said, look, you guys should probably consider doing rip off my presentation, do it yourself. So we do a lot of encouraging but you don't have to do it. But if you're not going to do the behavior that we know leads to results, don't come crying to me that you're not hitting your goals because the I like that the lead from the front. I like the way you put that and I think that's very relevant. It also speaks to there's so many things that you can take out of that. Like you're setting by example, like showing what works, giving them the tools, doing it first and I think that that can be used in any organization right to make employees feel comfortable, use it as a training tool, use it as a non-boarding tool. But I think that a lot of the things that I, you know, when I speak to you and I hear you speak about how you run your firm. In all seriousness, I really enjoy it because there's so many things that you've done whether or not intuitively or through trial and error just iterating and seeing what works with doesn't. You're obviously very self-aware of what works and what doesn't because even leading from the front and doing things before asking people to do them. It seems like such a, you know, common sense thing to do but how many people do you know? Like leaders that don't do that. And they're just saying, you know, do more or do this and they don't even know how to do it themselves. Like it's, I don't know if you have thoughts on on leadership as a, you know, outside of real estate, but I've seen that a lot to be quite honest where people don't take that attitude. And I think that's why a lot of leadership fails. A lot of there's a lot of high turnover in sales. A lot of people leave sales organizations because they feel like, you know, they're just being told to do more and not being told how to do it. If these are all issues that a lot of companies deal with. Yeah, it's like don't tell me, show me. Like I like to say, we play this game called Show Don't Tell. I'm going to show you. I'm not, what happens a lot of these managers will go to a conference or they'd listen to someone like you speak and you drop some really good ideas in it. In our world, we're heavy on video. That's something people are uncomfortable with, you know, putting them in trouble out there. So they go to a conference and say, hey, video's really important. Look at all the leads you'll get if you do this right on Facebook. And they come back to their team and say, you guys got to do all this. You want to get the lead. And anyone can do that. Like any idiot can come in and just give you a good idea. But so where the rubber meets the roads and the execution. And that's another thing that's been beaten to death. Ideas are shit. Executions, everything. But if you peel it back a little bit deeper, you have to be really self-aware and kind of, you have to have your EQ buzzing at a high level on how it feels when you are executing something. You might be able to actually take someone along the ride with you. Like, hey, I know it's uncomfortable. I know that you might not like the way this looks. Let's try it anyway. I'll stand here and give you some lines or I'll leave if that makes you uncomfortable too. Because sometimes it's weird when someone's over your shoulder. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes other people like it. And you just have to, and that's reading from the front. It's given, it's just like we want to give our clients what they want. We want to give our employees and the people who are helping and we're working together. It's given them what they want. But everybody's different. Yeah. I wanted to, I have a couple questions that are actually just more focused on like bringing out your knowledge about like what's going on with, because I think this would be very topical because people want to listen to obviously like the how you built and how, you know, you've built success. But I also want to understand your, I guess viewpoint on what's happening to real estate market with like coronavirus. If you don't mind going down that road, I would love to get some of your thoughts on that as well. But I want it before I do that. I guess for, you know, how you've built this business and where you want to go into the future. Let's close that off. So I think that my question to you would be you've built this agency. You built this successfully. You have the leadership lessons, the sales lessons, the marketing lessons that you've all done and you're sort of, you continuing to do obviously very well. What do you see or what are your goals for the agency? Where do you want to take it? You know, that's a good question. I think about that a lot. And one of the main goals has been and still is that I wanted to get to a point where we're selling a thousand homes a year. You know, it's like three a day, right? Very hard to do. And there's a handful of people who have done it, but everyone who has accomplished that has done it with these teams that are like 100 people, 150 people where, you know, Agent Z doesn't know Agent A and it's just like this kind of huge web. I want to try to do that with like less than 30 people, 30 agents. Now we're at anything staff. And that's doable. Every agent would be having to sell like 36 units a year, three a month. You get 30 people selling three a month to get to a thousand pretty quickly. So that's the goal. And it's going to be very hard to do because if this has happened to us, we've had very low turnover, but people do leave. And I'm proud of them when they leave because it's scary to go out on your own and leave our umbrella to do your own thing. So you have to really have really good retention, but that's the goal. And we want to arm people that, hey, I want to be around other A players. And if you're going to be an A player, you would have to wear with all capabilities to go do this yourself. So I am okay with that. So that's the hardest part is how do I keep 30 Navy SEALs together when they want to go do their own thing. So you really have to be the keeper of the vision and never never take your foot off the gas of that either because it's tough. And if you if the team doesn't follow that vision, they're going to go follow somebody else's vision. Yeah, no, I agree. What I what I wanted to what I wanted to ask I want to get your opinion on this because this is obviously relevant to leadership. And this is you'll it still makes sense. It's relevant to leadership. It's because you're in real estate. I follow I'm sure you know him Ryan Sirhart, Sir Hans, excuse me, like a million dollar listing guy. And he was speaking about an agency that had fired a lot of their real estate agents in in Wake of COVID-19, coronavirus. And I don't know this story. So I'm curious as to what like why would that ever happen in real estate? And and what kind of agency would do that? None of this makes any sense to me to be quite honest. I don't care. A couple of things. I've met Ryan Sirham virtually. He came into our sales meeting at the end of 2019 to give our team a pep talk. And it was awesome. And I get called Ryan Sirham all the time because I'm gray hair I guess or something like that but people always say you look like that guy and it's flattering because he's like a big deal. And I'm not. So Ryan Sirham or anyone who knows Ryan Sirham if he's watching I told him when we were on this conference call million dollar listing I can get to New York in three and a half hours. You show the penthouse. I'll show the first floor. I'll be many Ryan Sirham. I'm like five, ten, six, four. Wear the same suit. It's quality television guy. Million dollar listing. Side note. So what he was talking about was Redson which is the tech company that came into our industry and they have a bunch of salary agents. And they get a little bonus when they sell a house. And a lot of people give them a hard time about it. I think it's an interesting model. I actually bought some of the stock at one point because I thought it made sense. They seemed like smart people running the show. But Ryan went on this diet tribe about how it's so unfair that you're going to just take these people's jobs away. But what he was really doing was bashing at this company, this tech company who thought they could come in when the market was great and use all these people. And then the minute it gets hard, just wipe them out. Which is kind of what I understand. That's also really shitty. That's still a very shitty. Yeah. And he made a lot of good points. I think I was watching the same thing. I think he put it out on LinkedIn as him just sitting in his living room. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, I have, I think I can't remember if I'm like a second connection or if I'm actually connected to him. I've tried to get him. I've tried to message him, get him on the show. He has an answer. I mean, maybe one day, you know, fingers crossed. But no, I remember seeing it. And I just, I was sitting here like from like a person who's not involved. Not a, I enjoy understanding real estate as an investment opportunity. But I'm definitely not as heavily into it as you are. So I just like, I didn't make any sense to be knowing the traditional model for like a realtor was zero, you know, zero dollar salary. So that's what I was trying to say, right? If a realtor needs a salary, you probably don't want them working for you. Because I mean, they're what I call an indoor cat. An indoor cat needs to be fed. They can't go out and kill anything and eat themselves like an outdoor cat. If you're going to go buy or sell, probably maybe your most expensive asset, you know, half million, a million dollars, you don't want the indoor cat. You don't want someone who couldn't make it in the, in the real world. So they took a salary and they're just playing this game with the tech companies, feeding them all the time. You want your agent to be, of course, you have to have empathy and compassion, but you also need them to be, hey, this is cutthroat. If I'm representing you, I will get you every penny we possibly can. I'm going to get the deal done. I'm going to get you what you want. Now, who are you going to go? As somebody who's built a, built a company who has all the resources, a crazy track record, selling hundreds of millions of dollars real to every year. For Sally, she's got a five-star rating on Red Finn. She has a 50k salary. You're in good hands. Good luck. So, of course, people don't, especially in the market, get started. Of course, you're not hiring Sally from Red Finn. You're going to want someone you trust. Someone's going to put their money where their mouth is. Someone who, oh, by their way, you don't give them a penny until they deliver you what you want. So, that makes more sense to me. Now, knowing that their salary is not great, it's always horrible when mass layoffs. I think that anybody who is still working and still making money right now is very fortunate, and they don't have to rely on a stimulus checker in the States, or there's some opportunities where I'm at in Canada. It's very sad, but it's definitely not the same. It's not the same as laying off a whole bunch of individuals who didn't make any money in the first place. So, it makes it makes more sense. But still, what's happening with real estate and coronavirus? Why would they, so a lot of companies are, in my opinion, having knee jerk reactions, but why would a real estate company have a knee jerk reaction? What are they noticing? It's just nothing selling, nothing moving, markets are down. What's the general atmosphere of real estate? Because you obviously see it. You live it every day. Well, we're still pretty bullish, at least here. Now, everything is hyper-local. So, you got to keep that in mind. I'm here in Baltimore. Baltimore is one of these areas that beautiful place doesn't get nationally recognized as a beautiful place, unfortunately. But look, Baltimore City, this is home to, this is some 13 original colony stuff. This is East Coast. You got Iron Man, Cal Ripken, Ravens, Orioles, Inner Harbor, amazing brick row homes, incredible downtown neighborhoods. You don't hear about that. You just hear about crime. Baltimore are up. So, the reason I mentioned that is because over the last three to four years, everywhere else around the country was appreciating really hot. Everything was good. Economics was so strong. Everyone was super bullish, stock market, everything was going up. Baltimore really wasn't. It just stayed the same. So, Baltimore's pretty resilient in the fact that what goes up does tend to come down when things, when shit is within. Baltimore was never up. So, it's also not really going down that much. The value is really stable. So, we're lucky with that. But nationally, a couple of slides, I haven't just looking at them. Here's why people don't really need to freak out in the real estate sector. And I looked at this and I thought it was really compelling. Before 08, home prices were going up insane. Like every year, 10 percent, 10 percent. From 2000 to 2005, it was just jumping. Hasn't done that. So, prices probably not out of whack in terms of appreciation. Two is there's not hardly any inventory in the US. The United States is an inventory shortage of homes. Back when the bubble burst in 08, tons of inventory, that overbuilt tons of options. Because of the reasons that led to the crash in the first place was all this financing giving it to people that couldn't. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was crazy. Everyone was able to get alone. And then even with that, there was tons of inventory in the market. Everything was overbuilt. There's a really bad situation. So, that's another thing that just apples and oranges. We have low inventory now. When you have low inventory, prices tend to go up. Right? If there's not as much, it's a plan. So, it's basic. Third is, the finance thinks cheaper now. And people are making more money. It requires less of your immediate income to buy a house now than it did in the way. That's another thing. And then one of the major ones is people aren't using their homes as ATMs anymore. Back before 2008, people were sucking out on average 200 to 300 billion a year home equity line credit. They're not doing that. There's a ton of equity in homes now. And then finally, here's a real interesting stat. In the last five recession, and we're probably going to go into one, which is why I bring it up. In the last five, home values went up. Three of the last five. 1980 up six percent. 1981 up three and a half percent. 1991 barely down two percent. 2001 home values up six percent. And then, of course, in 2008, it dropped 20 percent. But just because you're in a recession for real estate, that doesn't necessarily mean your asset if you are a property owner is going to go down. And based on those things, I said, hey, there's low inventory. People have equity. People are making more money. The macro fact is pretty decent for the area. Now, what we don't know here in the US is, apparently, it's off 22 million jobs now. It grows every week. Yeah. That's the problem. So, so I just I just wanted to to get your insight on that because I just found that it sort of led me to think about the market itself when I when I saw that clip. But I, you know, so many it's more than just it's more than just people looking at markets and making decisions at this point. I think people are just it's just emotions that are driving a ton of decisions, which is the worst way to do business, as a matter of what it is. But I mean, that's a warm buff. It always says that, you know, when everyone else is fearful, it's time to be greedy. And you get vilified for saying things like that. Of course. But it's not, you know, I can see the it's just true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's I appreciate the insight, man. That's good. Obviously, you're not you're not you're not stressed right now about markets or like you said, Baltimore, but I guess we have to see what happens. Well, you can only focus on what you can control. I learned that a long time ago, all these external factors, job loss, virus, the rate of the spread, the politics, which is just gross. Yeah. All there's all these things. You can't let that impact you if you're a business owner or if you're in sales, your job is to you know, hit your quota or help XYZ customers. You can't let that interfere with you. You got a focus on what you can control. And that is it's a lot more than you think, but it's hard. But very tough to do. Do you find do you find and this is something that I'm I'm finding in my business and in my company, like we're having to try new things. We're having to do different positioning, just iterating on the marketing style, campaign, messaging, you know, the way we reach out the conversations we have when we reach out to be to be quite honest, I found that because of coronavirus, it's made everyone just be a better marketer, a better salesperson, because now you're leading with empathy, you know, 10 to 10 times, which you should have been doing anyways. And I've posted a couple times on this, like how to connect with people when everybody stressed out. And it's really just caring about what matters to them first and being authentic and being empathetic and having and not being like, I don't know, just cheap and the traditional sales vibe that you get from not everybody, but a lot of people when they're selling. So I think that it's just forcing people to be, and you know, like now the marketing campaigns and what I find works and what I am doing now with my own with my own sales and my own marketing is to take out any sort of feel of automation, being very careful about your sending an email blast. Like you can, you can not only, if you're not hitting that right person or if it's not a custom tailored message to that person, it's like it's going to blow up in your face. And I've seen, you know, comments on LinkedIn as a reference point, people saying like, you know, I got this message and because I got this message at this time, while coronavirus, everyone stressed out. Normally, I just delete it, but because I got this insensitive, insensitive, it's probably just like a, you know, like a boilerplate message blast out during this time. I'm not going to do business with you, even when times are good because you're, you know, you're so into whatever. So I think that it's just forcing everyone to be a little bit better, be a little bit more human. That's what I would hope. I think that everyone stressed out, but I think that marketing and sales practice across the board, in my opinion, have definitely just made everyone a better commercial professional. So I'm hoping that that kind of continues. But I was wondering if the way you work with clients, the way you approach clients, what you market to clients, is anything changed for for sure group for, you know, your team. Yeah, and you kind of nailed it. You have, if you're not leading with empathy right now and connecting in an authentic one-on-one level with people that you're showing that you really care, it's probably not going to land. But the caveat is if you try to please everybody all the time, you're going to end up pleasing nobody. So you can't be afraid to still put yourself out there and brand what you feel is true, honest and accurate and a good reflection of the way you do this. So you can't be crippled by the fear that someone on LinkedIn might take a shot at you. That's okay. And that's always, always going to happen. So yeah, we're doing a lot of things differently. A lot, obviously a lot of people don't want to leave their house or go into someone else's house when you're broker and real estate. Back it's really interesting. So we're doing a ton of virtual things. As we talked about before, we're already pretty heavy on the video and some technology. So we've had a leg up here. That's helpful. Yeah. But what I told my team was that imagine, just imagine, Scott, if you could pull a lever and have all your competition take two months off. Can you imagine? What a gift. That's like winning the lottery. If I can pull this lever and all my competition stops marketing, they go into a hole. That's kind of what we have right now. This right now is the best opportunity that we're probably going to see in a long time to really connect authentically with people, put yourself out there, do all the things you know you need to be doing. And you're going to start really catching up to your competition or creating more separation problems. So that's the mindset that you have to have in times like that. Focus on what you can control. Get it done. Your competition, sleep, and you need to be work in twice as hard. I love it. And I love that you mentioned that you pull that lever. Everyone takes two months off. The noise is so significantly reduced right now. So when you come in with an authentic message, that message can be heard. And it could have been authentic before, but it could have been, you know, you look at all the, it doesn't matter what industry you're in, you're just getting bombarded nonstop. And it's very hard. That's the difficulty. That's the game of sales and marketing, right? So now you have the opportunity to deliver that authentic authenticity, your true self, true brand, true company, your true persona as a salesperson and really get in with customers. So you know what? I actually like that. I like that a lot. So now is not the time to to relax. Now is it just a time to and now I still think that if you're selling something that people don't have the attitude or aptitude or ability to purchase or they're just stressed, like I think that now is maybe not the time in some, some markets to focus on on building a connection to sell. I think it could just be building a connection to build a connection, which is something again, is very important in sales, but building a connection to potentially, potentially sell in the future. But if not, it doesn't matter because you're going to be seen as that person that actually cared about your clients. And I saw, I saw something that I actually really liked. It's like right now, there's, there's the best way to separate your sales and marketing activities to divide your client telling the two camps. One of them is the industry that just laid off 200, 500,000 employees, they're going bankrupt, you know, you, they're, they're not doing well. And that's the people that you reach out to you say, Hey, how are you doing? How are you? How's your family doing? Like, let's chat, you know, if you watch Tiger King on Netflix, like what what's going on in your life right now? Like, and not a single word of commercial activity or anything. And that's one camp. And then the other camp is people that can still buy, like, you know, if you're selling to zoom, you're not going to stop selling. If you're selling to Netflix, you're not going to stop selling. You're selling to probably in real estate, a lot of people that still people stop to move, people stop to, you know, you're, you're not going to stop, but you just, it's just starting with empathy. So if you divide into those two camps, I think you're going to be pretty safe, but yeah, you're right, the opportunity is definitely right there. Very, very, I like the, I like the lever analogy. I've never heard that before, but it's valid. This is like, you know, everyone's quiet. Right. Yeah. Um, that's all I got for, for, uh, for casual chitchat about coronavirus and, and real estate, man, I am, you know, you know, this, I'm sure you, you, you, we did this once before, and I screwed it up. And that was my bad. But this is, this is take two. And I'm happy we did it. And I think that I, I hope you're happy with this. I, the, the stuff we talked about and chatted about, we didn't get into the first one. So I'm, I'm happy to be went there. Um, but, uh, the, the way I like to close it off, um, I like to, you know, this is an origin story about you, but how you got to where you are today. So a couple of life lessons, um, to pull like out of you. One question I like to ask, um, is obviously, you know, a lesson that you tell your younger self. You still hear me, by the way, I feel like I hear my, your bot, your pods dying. Can you hear me? I can hear you fine. Yeah, you're good. You're good. Go, go, go. Um, tell my younger self. Um, I forget what I, how I answered this last time. But I think I gave you a good answer. But I think the, the biggest one for me is never stop investing in yourself with the, with the types of training that you're going to need to excel in business. Because there's no better investment in investing in yourself. You can buy all this stuff, you know, stocks, bonds, legitimate investments, but nothing's going to pay the dividends of you trying to get better with your skills, with your technique, with your attitude, with just learning from people standing on the shoulders and giants who've been there before you. So I was lucky that I, I did kind of do that as a 22 year old. I was in like the sales training all the time. And I never stopped. I can only imagine if I started doing that at 18 while I was in college, I would have been that much further along. So like what I look forward to telling my son, who's one years old is investing yourself start now. And of course, no one year old, not half no, most college who don't know what they want to do and they grow up. But when you do now, you go all in and you never stop investing in the training. I think, I think the answer was along those lines to be honest, but it's a good answer. And I think that that's why I remember this. It allowed me to easily dovetail into the next question, which is where do you go to learn? You know mentors, podcasts, books, audibles, whatever doesn't matter. What's what's your go to? Well, I'm on podcasts a lot these days. And I read a lot of books, I have some behind me, but I'm being right now. This is an old one. This is Steve Jobs by I just see here. Thick boy. It's a thick boy. But where do I go to learn? Well, luckily I'm still really close with a bunch of sales consulting friends of mine who see all kinds of unique things from different perspectives. So I like to take what other industries are doing and pull it into my industry, which is a good tactic, not just for sales, but for anything. What's working in, you know, big tech that we could use in our neck of the world. So I like to be around people who sharpen, sharpen the people, sharpen people. But I listen to a lot of podcasts, a lot of sales stuff. I mean, I watch a lot of your content, Scott, which is why I kept reaching out to you and thanks so much for having me. You you hide me off too much on this interview. Well, it's just true. Like I saw your stuff like this guy's on top of his stuff. I want to get on there and just throw myself out there. But like him, Ferris, I'm not sure if you listen to his podcast. You I do. Yeah. I love it. I love it. He's one of my favorites currently. I'd say podcast books and then just being around people who can make it better. Yeah, very good. If people want to get in touch with you, where do they go? Is it, you know, social website? What's what you think? I'm easy to find my kind of hashtag name across all social media. It's just my name Andrew on them. I think I'm hacked on them on Instagram. Well, you can find us at SureSalesGroup.com. And if there's ever anything I can do for anyone watching, if you want to pick my brain up, anything we're doing, I'm always happy to connect because I'm sure there's things I can learn from you too. And I really appreciate the opportunity and the platform was got provided to share a little bit today. Yeah, no, that was good. That was good. That's all I got, man. Thank you so much for doing that again. Home office quarantine edition. That's all for today. Thanks again for joining me on another episode of the Success Story podcast. You can download or stream this podcast wherever podcasts are available, including iTunes, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, and many others. You can also watch this podcast on YouTube. If you haven't already, please subscribe and share this podcast with your friends, family, co-workers, and peers. Please leave us a rating on iTunes. It takes about 30 seconds as it allows other people to find our podcasts and lets our amazing guests reach even more people with their message. And remember, any rating is fine as long as it contains five stars. I'm Scott Clary from the Success Story podcast, signing off.