Okay. What do you bother you over there as well to to be able to hear? Hey. Good morning. My name is Matthew Hodge, executive vice president, here at LPT Realty, joined by Louis Fuhrman, our senior my co VP. I'm about to say senior VP. My co VP, here. And, we're excited to be with you this morning. We've got a special guest, Christina Griffin, who's gonna be joining us here in just a minute. Before we get started, though, I just wanna, you know, take a moment to see how your week has been, man. I ain't seen you all week, bro. I know. Week's been the week's been great. Yeah. It's been busy. Yeah. That is for sure. It it's crazy because every every month that goes by, we keep saying I can't believe it's this time of the year, and some things just never change. Like, I can't believe we're practically into February almost. I know it. You know, Grand Prix is around the corner. We have multiple events coming up. So it's just time is already flying by, which makes you start, you know, remembering that sometimes we gotta slow down time. Like, we gotta make sure we are very organized in our day to day. If not, the days are just gonna get right by me or or anyone, really, because I speak to a lot of people and everyone's saying the same thing. You know, the the time just feels like it's moving faster. But, yeah, man, the the week's been great, ready for the weekend, you know, have some things planned with the family, so it's gonna be fun. Yeah. Awesome. Good stuff. You know, I've got a theory on time speeding up, which is, you know, a year let's say you're thirty years old. A year is a shorter span of your life than it was, like, let's say, when you were two years old. That was, like, fifty percent of your life. So, technically, every year gets a shorter percentage of your life, and it creates this speed up effect. Do you know what I mean? So, anyways, that's just my own personal little Well, let's information. Next week. Real estate first Friday, we'll do a Yeah. Life and time astronomy just throw it on. Vortex of time. Alright. Cool. Well, we are gonna jump in today. I'm gonna go ahead and bring, Christina Griffin on. Dave, if you could pull her in. And, we're gonna talk about a few things. So hey, Christina. Good morning. How are you? Hey. I'm great. Thanks for having me, guys. Oh, fantastic. Good morning. So real quick, I wanna start off with a couple different things. Last week, we did a challenge. We were trying to do it on real on motivational Monday again with Robert. We weren't able to do it because we ran out of time for all of the additional things that we had going on, so we weren't able to fit that in. So we're gonna see if we can do that this Monday. So apologies to anyone who submitted and we didn't get a chance to do it Monday. We're gonna see if we've got time, but there was just many updates we couldn't fit it in on motivational Monday. But, we are gonna kinda take that same theme, for today. So LPT plus, is is after, Real Estate First Fridays, And we've been working on this process of, you know, helping, you know, kind of merge the two worlds. So, as we continue to grow, you know, Real Estate First Fridays will kind of be, like, be the intro to LPT plus, and then the LPT plus members will stay on afterwards. And that is the, you know, subscription version. And we'll go deeper into the topic that we're talking about on real estate first Friday. And so, to kinda start with where we were last week, we talked about being able to explain the market, having that knowledge, and being able to explain the market within thirty seconds. That was the challenge. And so, you know, so you have to think that this time of year, people are if they're thinking about homeownership, are likely planning what that could look like in twenty twenty five. And so the question of what that looks like or how you get there or the strategy or the timing of that becomes more important for someone now than ever. Right? In the middle of the summer when they're maybe already touring homes and now they're just trying to find the right house, that messaging doesn't work as well. Right? But in the month of January, people are in preparation mode. Hey. I'm preparing for the year. I'm preparing to make my moves for the year. Here are my goals. Here are the steps to get there. Like, everyone is kind of in that mode. And for example, like, people are in, you know, dry January. If you're doing that, don't worry. You you're almost there. You're a little halfway there. You are almost to the to the finish line. But my point is that people have these goals that they are they are on, and so goal driven conversations really, really work. Hey. If you're thinking about doing this, here's the best steps to get you started. This is the best way to prepare. Here's a you know, like, you're in the preparation mode. As you get through the year, you're in execution mode. Hey. Now that we are prepared and we're actually doing the function, here's what we are should be doing right now to be successful. We should be looking at houses. We should be, you know, watching MLS feeds. We you know, your your your strategy changes based on the timing of the year. And so we talked about being able to explain that within thirty seconds when someone says, hey. How is it to purchase, you know, in twenty twenty five? And you are likely going to have to dispel some fear and just give them a little bit of crystal ball knowledge in terms of, like, what we saw in twenty twenty four and what we predict that that to mean in twenty twenty five. And so that is gonna be the basis of what we're talking through today, which is how to reach out to your and stimulate your sphere, how to start having those conversations around planning for their homeownership in twenty twenty five. Of course, if someone's in the mode where they're already looking cool, that's a different conversation. But if they're saying, hey. Twenty twenty five is my year to either sell my house and purchase a new one or purchase for the first time or whatever, make that transaction happen. We wanna lay out the strategy of what twenty twenty five is gonna look like. Yeah. It's fun because I was I was talking to an agent earlier this week, and he was, talking to me about, you know, hey. I tuned in to Real Estate First and Motivational Monday, and I did not realize how difficult it was for me to consolidate my thoughts inside of thirty seconds. And what we realized is, you know, all of these thoughts were in there. Right? Like, he's he's heard all these things before. You know, we're in the time of the year for setting goals and, you know, to one buy down and marry the house, date the rate. Like, all of these items, like, they're in there somewhere. But he's never really taken the time to really, like, organize those thoughts, you know, or really understand, like, how to utilize these different things that he has learned over the periods of time of tuning into Motivational Monday or Real Estate First Friday. And by him taking that time to, like, sit down and, like, really understand it, digest it, and then, like, just put it down on paper. It really just it it it connected the dots in a totally different way that at the conclusion of that exercise, like, he even understood those concepts that much more because now he was able to just organize it in a fashion that he never thought through before. So, you know, that's where, you know, as we're using this as building blocks, you know, week after week, there's gonna be new information that you may be receiving. You know, find a way to funnel it through your processes. Final find a way to, you know, interpret these items so you can be much more better prepared for when these conversations do arise when you are communicating with your customers. And, you know, I love that, you know, notion that you also mentioned about, you know, later on in the year is the execution phase, and now it's time to implement a lot of the goals that we have today. One of the things that I do wanna, you know, make sure, you know, our our, you know, our agents understand is, you know, you never wanna create a self inflicted emergency. You know? And what that means is there's a lot of clients that we will interact with over the course of, you know, our interactions, and they're, you know, they're stating, hey. I'm not gonna purchase a house until March, or I'm waiting till April, or I'm waiting till May, but they're not really guided on what are things you can do today to start preparing for that home purchase that happens in March, April, or May. So what happens, March rolls around. You're finally ready to go, you know, tour with this customer. You haven't prepared between now and then, and now there's this self inflicted emergency that arises. So what happens? You start negotiating worse than what you would have. You're leaving money on the table. You're not going in in the same degree that you would have gone in previously, but all of that was due to the fact of going in with a self inflicted emergency. You know, we are the experts. We gotta create that road map for the customer, and the customer doesn't understand what that emergency is because they're not in this every day. They maybe haven't purchased the house ever or last time was five or six years ago. You know, we have to be that expert to help them understand. Yes. Right now, it's very goal driven. Yes. We will be executing possibly in the spring, in March, April, May, whatever the case may be, but here are the things that we can do today to organize that road map on behalf of the customer. Yep. That that makes a ton of sense. And so, I'm gonna kinda throw one last thought over there, then we're gonna turn it over to Christina to go through some some scripting with us. But a couple of different things to think about as we are thinking about the way that you should be maybe describing the market or, you know, in that strategy phase of of, hey. Here's what we should be doing now to prepare for the purchase. One, if someone's asking you about interest rates and you believe that interest rates are negative, right, it is going to translate in the way that you talk about it. If you're like, hey. Unfortunately, rates are still high. You are immediately making it seem less appetizing to purchase. Right? And so what you wanna be able to be able to talk through is say, hey. Interest rates are higher than what they were previously. Right? That's a objective statement. There's no feeling or emotion inside that. It real it real, interest rates are higher than they were previously, which means that they are less people have been moving, which means that there's less inventory. All just factual. You know? So you wanna be able to have those conversations. If you approach it like, hey, man. Inventory sucks. The rates are high. Run away. Right. People are like, I don't I don't wanna be a part of that. That sounds terrible. Right? But the person who can make that objective and just say, so because of these factors, we are gonna approach it with this strategy to ensure that you're successful because what we saw in twenty twenty four is that while, you know, appreciation didn't grow as quick as what we saw in previous years, we are still back to a normalized level of appreciation. So homes will still be more expensive in twenty twenty five than they were in twenty twenty four. So we still wanna help you, you know, be a part of homeownership. Right? Like, it's completely objective when you're doing those things. And so that's how you really wanna be thinking about that, making sure you're taking out all subject subjectivity and making it very objective. And Christina's got some scripts that she's gonna go through with us, and then we'll go deeper on that in LPT plus. We'll actually have some handouts, and we'll gamify some of those things. But to give you the basics of what that sounds like and, again, this builds upon the challenge that we had of explaining the market within thirty seconds. You know, this is gonna be some of that scripting. So, Christina, I'll turn it over to you to kinda walk us through some of the things that you've been working on in teaching LPT plus and how they should be interacting with their their prospects right now. Yeah. Absolutely. And I love that you just said interacting with their prospects. So ideally, not now is the time to interact with everybody that's in your database, and, I'm gonna give you an easy script to be able to engage with them. The more conversations we have and the more, I call it two way conversations, it's gonna help us stay in relationship. Last year, you had a lot of people that probably said, hey. I'm not gonna buy right now. Interest rates are too high. I I'm gonna wait until elections. I'm gonna wait until the New Year. So now is the time that you need to reengage with all of them, to be able to be that person to educate. So I'm gonna keep it simple. So reconnect a simple script. It make ideally, you need to be able to make those meaningful connections, and it's just, hi. My name's Christina Griffin. I'm with LPT. I wanted to check-in and share two key updates. Just two. Keep it simple, guys. Home prices, did a could be a one percent, reduction or they stabilized in twenty twenty four, and we're expecting that trend to continue and interest rates hit. Ideally, you need to look up what the, I call it, the rate is of the day, before you make that call. The interest rates recently hit, let's just say, six and a half percent again, and they're likely to remain steady this year. With this update, I'd love to hear how this might impact your real estate plans for twenty twenty five. What are your thoughts? That's the conversation that you're gonna, call with your entire database, all of your leads that are in your database, your sphere that maybe said, I wanna buy an investment property, your investors, it's just keep it simple and, reengage with them. And the biggest thing I would say to you guys is you want to educate them before someone else does, In addition to your sphere, and your database, ideally think about how you can just ask that conversation to people that you meet. It could be at net networking events and things to that nature. So activity and action is gonna be the most important thing. Now I wanna share just a quick concept with you guys, and I'll go deeper with LPT plus later today, but after you do that, I want you to think about today. Today is the seventeenth of the month. Everyone's business plan should be done. You should know and be fully focused on your activity, And, ideally, what and and one of my favorite concepts, it's called fifteenth protocol. And why I'm introducing this today to you guys, it's the seventeenth, so it's perfect timing. The fifteen fifteenth protocol, it it helps you evaluate progress, adjust strategies, and recommit to the goals mid month. This structured plan ensures consistently generation. So you should know today you should know today that you have hit sixty percent of your goals, and if you have not, it's time to readjust your activity. So that is some that's a concept in sales that you may or may have not heard of before. The biggest thing I would say to you is if you don't know what the sixty percent of your goals are, you need to make that goal and what that looks like, right now. How many listing appointments, how many listings taken, buyer appointments, buyer broker agreements, buyer pendings, and closed transactions. And I'm gonna just keep it simple, and I know we'll deep dive into it later, is if you know that you need to have, by the fifteenth of the month, two properties under contract and you don't have any, now it's time to readjust what you need to do to be able to get into activity. So that script that we shared, that's a great conversation. If you're here today and you know that you haven't hit that sixty percent goal mark, ideally, you you need to know how much readjustment you need to make to be able to have those two way conversations. Does that make sense, guys? Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, one thing that, I I kinda wanna touch upon that piece that you're talking about, which is the goal setting. You know? Even a as a step back, some people may say, well, yeah, I would love to have two houses under contract by the the halfway point of the month or the, you know, maybe the seventeenth. My my sixties sixty percent point. But I don't know how to do that. You know? And so you have to say, well well, let's look at let's do the backwards math on it. We know that it's gonna take x amount amount of conversations, and people's conversion numbers are different. But let's just say it's gonna take an average of thirty conversations to you know, out of that thirty conversations, you may start working with ten people. Out of that ten people, one of those people go to contract. So if I need to have to be under contract, you know, with the two houses, that's my goal, by halfway point through the month, that means I need to have had sixty conversations. I need to have been working with twenty people because out of that, likely, two contracts are gonna happen. So you can backwards math it to understand what your daily activity needs to look like. Okay. Whoop. I need to speak with sixty people. That's twelve people a day. You know, you can start to build your schedule based on those things. And so it becomes very simple where you know every day, hey. If I just follow this formula, I'm gonna hit my goal. Now I will be able to become more efficient. I'll be able to increase my skill set, and that will help expand on these things. But if I just follow these basics, like, I'll at least achieve achieve this right here. And something that you said, Louis, earlier where, the gentleman that you spoke with who said, hey. You know what? I never really tried to organize it all at one time before. Like, I didn't I I know the information, but I never realized that I couldn't, you know, explain it succinctly. And you use, like, the the catch phrases of, like, you know, buy the house, date, the I actually I actually hate that phrase. But what I personally use in that because the concept is still real is that the mortgage is the most, powerful financial instrument on the side of the consumer that has ever existed. What that means is that you purchase a home today. If interest rates go up, they are protected from that. Right? They're locked in on their mortgage. But if interest rates go down, then they can refinance and get a better rate. Like, that is totally pro consumer. And so helping people understand that going into this environment is super important. Like, hey, guys. The strategy is this. You may be fearful of of purchasing a home right now because of this environment, but let me let you know that, you know, interest rates will sometimes they'll go up. Sometimes they'll go down. If it goes down in any meaningful way, then you'll be able to refinance and take the benefit of it. If it goes up more, you are gonna be so excited that you purchased now because, you know, you are blocked in at a better rate than what it is. And so let's get started on your, you know, your homeownership today. Yeah. I mean, you're in the buy game. Right? Like, you know, for a lot of our clients who who may be renters currently, you know, just doing that comparison of where the mortgage would put them today relative to what they're paying in rents today, oftentimes, you can wash that out, and then you have the option play if the rates go down through a refinance. And if it goes the other way, you've had your position. You've now locked it down. You're in the buy game if equity floats up. Now you're also in that buy game where you have liquidity inside of your house. Like, there is just so much power that you can, you know, educate your customers on why maybe today is the better time to buy even though we're seeing all the headlines of rates skyrocketing in one way or not moving, or will there be rates cuts or not? Like, that's just so much convoluted information that we just need to be able to find a way to speak our clients' language. Right. You know, we know what the solution is, but sometimes it doesn't land because we're not communicating it in a way that they are receiving or they or they are receptive to. Now also going back to kind of the goal setting piece of it and Mhmm. You know, yes. You know, one of the biggest, you you know, things that we oftentimes do is say, hey. We wanna have five closings in a month. But we really haven't created that road map to get there. And we really don't have a very organized way to track it, track conversion in each one of those categories, you know, at a very basic level. And granted, we can be much more granular with it. But inside of your CRMs, you need to have certain categories that you move your clients through. And the and the categories aren't, you know, prospecting client and closing. Like, there's so many things in between. But at a minimum, if you're looking at the buyer side of the equation, you should, at a minimum, have closing. Yes. That's the finish line. You should have under contract, which is a step before that. You know, before they go under contract, you have to be negotiating the contract to go under contract. Before you negotiate the contract, you gotta be touring with the customer. And then you have your prospecting categories, which are likely hot, warm, and cold. You know, at a minimum, those minimum categories inside of your CRM should exist, and you should be moving your clients through those categories. I have a cold client, maybe a warm client, a hot client. Now they're actively touring with me. Now we're negotiating a contract with them. Now we're under contract with them, and then we're ultimately closed. And in each one of those categories, there will be breakage. You know, there is conversion. Not every time you go under contract, it's gonna lead to a closing. Not every warm client that you're communicate with is gonna go touring. But by you organizing it in that fashion, you can have your metricses, your rates of conversion. You can see maybe where you need to focus in a little bit more to increase the conversions in certain areas. Maybe the issue is that we don't have enough in the denominator. We don't have enough awareness that's being created and finding ways to, you know, who are the customers that we should be communicating with. Like, all of those are things that become visible once you have that organized track in front of you. That's right. And so you may say, gosh. That sounds like a lot. And and it is. You know? It it takes a little while to organize that all out. You're not gonna go out there day one and say, hey. I'm gonna I'm not doing this at all, I'm gonna completely switch. Like, take some baby steps. Right? Let's say, hey. Okay. Let's start by just saying, here's everyone that I've been talking to about real estate, and I'm just gonna at least get them into an Excel sheet or whatever fashion you wanna use. Some people are very successful without using CRMs. I'm personally a CRM person. It helps me and my team stay very organized. However, I've know some people who just like to use old school Excel sheets, and they just like to you know, whatever your method is, the ideology is the same, which is that you're tracking your people so that if if you've got a certain group of people who are, let's say, very interest rate sensitive, now you heard, oh, you know what? We cut it by, you know, point two five basis points. Now I'm gonna have a tag inside of there. So anytime there's a little dip in the interest rate, I'm gonna pull up that tag. I'm gonna see everybody who mentioned a concern about that, and I'm gonna let them know just even if it's for the point of a touch base. Hey. Just wanna let you know we saw a little dip in interest rates. It may not be meaningful enough. You know, whatever that looks like, but I just wanna let you know I'm watching the market. I'll continue to let you know as things go. And if it gets to a point where it makes sense for us to start, you know, touring again, let's do that. I also saw a couple different house you're like, you're just guiding them. You're showing them that you're constantly there. Those little things, guys, it makes the difference. You see those people running huge businesses. You're wondering how they do it. You're looking at them on social media, and they're just touring houses. Like, this is the grit behind the scenes. Like, this is what really makes the numbers happen. They post on social media is after all the work is done, and then you could say that's the celebration phase. Hey. I'm with a client looking at these beautiful houses. Like, consider that celebration. But what they took to get there, no one's will tell you. Hey. It was thirty cold calls. It was well, not cold calls. Right? We we have the TCPA coming up, so scratch that. But, you know, it's like cold leads. You know, and it was all this back work to get them there. And so I wanna work on helping people dispel what it actually takes to build the business so that they can decide how much or they want or how much they don't wanna do so they can build their version of success. I really the the first and simplest way is you have to know exactly what your personal bills are and what it takes to run your household and your family. It that that's the simplified, and then what activity it takes. So, what I'm hearing a lot is a lot of agents don't feel like they have enough people to have conversations with. Even if it's and I I just put in the chat a simple app. Even if you just download that app, you export everybody from your phone, and you pick up the phone, and you say, happy New Year. I'm just checking in. Did you know what interest rates? The interest rates are probably not gonna change much this year, and here's where the baseline on equity is going up or down. Do you know anyone looking to buy or sell? Or or is there anything I can help you with? Or just checking in with your people and tracking those conversations. I I promise you that's gonna help you get closer to your goals. And, Louis, I I love how you guys talk through the different categories in your CRM. So it's not just, hey. I'm at sixty percent of where I need to hit by mid month. It's how many potential people if I help them find the right home or help them sell a home, what needs to happen? If we don't have people in our pipeline, we need to increase our activity. That's right. So, Christina, I'll I'll let you, give us a quick teaser. We're just about at time. I hope that you guys are finding this useful. But I'll let you give a quick teaser. So I know that LPT plus members, you'll have, you know, some scripts that you'll actually be able to to give out to them. You've got a gamifying option. Can you kinda just walk us through what that's like at the deeper level? Yeah. Absolutely. Well, in in LPT plus, we we do have two masterminds a week. We do deep dive with a lot of tools and resources. But with this particular topic, we're gonna gamify activity. So for you, a lot of you may not realize what you need to do to get to the, the contracts or the conversations. So the biggest thing for every one of you is you need to start tracking how how much activity you do to create, the, I'd say the one to one conversations or the opportunity. So here's an example. If I'm fifty percent behind in my goals, you may have to increase your daily, your daily contact count, yes, this is a lot, to forty five. You may have to add three evening call blocks. You may have to distribute a hundred marketing materials, empty a box a week, make ten extra calls to past clients, direct message thirteen people daily on Facebook, send fourteen text messages daily, TCPA compliant to people in your database, hold a six hour open house, send ten thank you cards, or call fourteen of your top clients. Do you know what activity you need to do? Ideally, each and every one of you should know what activity. So ideally, you, you know, I'm a big fan of I'm gonna do whatever it takes to take care of my family, and we give you we give you the road map for that. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you for for breaking that down. So alright. We're gonna cut it here. I hope you guys, enjoyed this. We are gonna see see you guys on LPT plus for those members. If you'd like more information about that, you can find that in Connect two point o. We'll go a little bit deeper in these topics. You know, on real estate first Friday, it's really designed as we're speaking to so many different people. Sometimes we have team leaders on here who have a hundred agents. Sometimes we have, you know, agents who are just starting brand new, and they are like, hey. Where do I get started? I've never even sold a house yet. And so we really try to make it as easy as possible so that everyone can find value in what we're saying. And I promise you that, you know, if you follow these basic principles, you're, of course, going to apply them to what makes sense for you and your business. You know, I will share this. When I first got into real estate, you know, I was, I guess, what, fourteen years ago, I was working full time in corporate America. And I got into real estate because, my wife now, my you know, was was pregnant, and we wanted to make more income. And, you know, and so I was like, alright. I've got this growing young family. You know, my wife is twenty three years old. And so we're thinking like, hey. How can we make more money? And that was my start into real estate. And my goal was, hey. If I could just sell one house per quarter, you know, and make an extra ten thousand dollars or forty thousand per year, that would really be very impactful for me. And so I figured out what I needed to do within my forty hour work week that I was already, you know, corporate America to make that happen. Eventually, ended up being where, you know, my version of success kept changing. And now, obviously, I'm, you know, the vice president of the fastest growing brokerage in history. But that wasn't because that was my version of success then or that I, you know, was trying to do that when it first started. It was because at that time, I understood what I needed to do to make my version of success a reality then, and it was just sell one house per quarter. So I knew I needed to talk to x amount of people, do x amount of open houses. And so you have to apply these concepts to what you are trying to accomplish as your goals. And so one thing that I know it's difficult is that you hear these things and you're like, well, gosh. I don't have time for forty five calls a day. You know? I don't know what your schedule looks like. I just wanna make sure that people know it's the concept of knowing the activity that makes the difference. It's not how much of the activity that you're doing. It's knowing that, hey. I have to do x amount of thing to hit whatever goal I'm planning doing. So just wanna make sure that it's clear because I know we talk about some big numbers. And I wanna just say one quick thing. You you may not have the time, but it may be the leverage, and leverage comes in all shapes and sizes. Right. I was twenty one years old. I got into real estate because my father passed away, and I had to take care of my sister and and a small child. And I had to door drop a hundred, doors a day to get to where I needed. My first year in real estate, I sold fifty. My second year in real estate, I've sold over a hundred homes. So it's it's leverage comes in all shapes and sizes. So that's that's a big concept we talk about in LPT plus. That's right. Okay. Alright, guys. Well, we have you we hope that you have a blessed and prosperous weekend. We will see you at twelve o'clock for our LPT plus members. And if not, we will see you on Monday for motivational Monday. So talk to you guys soon. Have a good weekend.