- 3 days ago
On this episode of the RealTrending podcast, Tracey Velt sits down with Chris Watters for a conversation that challenges one of real estate’s biggest assumptions: most teams don’t actually have a lead problem — they have a conversion and accountability problem.
Watters argues that brokerages spend too much time focused on training and buying more leads, while ignoring the ongoing coaching and accountability systems that actually drive performance. Drawing comparisons to industries like automotive sales, apartment leasing and home services, he explains how top-performing companies “inspect what they expect” through call reviews, ride-alongs and consistent feedback loops — something he says real estate rarely does well because of broker-to-agent ratios and outdated business models.
The conversation digs into why low-intent internet leads are burning out agents and creating massive churn inside teams. Watters says many agents are expected to work hundreds of weak leads just to close a single transaction, leading to frustration, low morale and quiet quitting. Instead, he advocates for focusing on high-intent seller opportunities tied to life events like divorce, probate and foreclosure.
The episode also explores how AI is changing team management. Watters shares how his company uses AI-powered tools to record, transcribe and grade appointments and phone calls, helping agents improve conversion while reducing compliance risk. He believes the future of real estate teams will look more like “enterprise organizations,” where leaders oversee AI-driven systems that handle administrative work so agents can focus on relationships, negotiation and guiding clients through complex transactions.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Most brokerages train agents but fail to reinforce execution consistently.
Low-intent internet leads are creating burnout and poor conversion rates.
High-intent sellers often come from major life events like divorce, probate and foreclosure.
Listening to calls and reviewing appointments dramatically improves conversion.
AI tools are becoming a major advantage for coaching, compliance and operational efficiency.
Teams focused only on recruiting often ignore the real issue: retention and accountability.
The future “enterprise” real estate team will combine strong leadership with AI-driven support systems.
Related to this episode:
Chris Watters' LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriswatters/
Watters International Realty
https://christopherwatters.com/
REALSYNCH
https://www.realsynch.com/
The Million Dollar Real Estate Team
https://www.milliondollarrealestateteam.com/free-book-updated
Watters argues that brokerages spend too much time focused on training and buying more leads, while ignoring the ongoing coaching and accountability systems that actually drive performance. Drawing comparisons to industries like automotive sales, apartment leasing and home services, he explains how top-performing companies “inspect what they expect” through call reviews, ride-alongs and consistent feedback loops — something he says real estate rarely does well because of broker-to-agent ratios and outdated business models.
The conversation digs into why low-intent internet leads are burning out agents and creating massive churn inside teams. Watters says many agents are expected to work hundreds of weak leads just to close a single transaction, leading to frustration, low morale and quiet quitting. Instead, he advocates for focusing on high-intent seller opportunities tied to life events like divorce, probate and foreclosure.
The episode also explores how AI is changing team management. Watters shares how his company uses AI-powered tools to record, transcribe and grade appointments and phone calls, helping agents improve conversion while reducing compliance risk. He believes the future of real estate teams will look more like “enterprise organizations,” where leaders oversee AI-driven systems that handle administrative work so agents can focus on relationships, negotiation and guiding clients through complex transactions.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Most brokerages train agents but fail to reinforce execution consistently.
Low-intent internet leads are creating burnout and poor conversion rates.
High-intent sellers often come from major life events like divorce, probate and foreclosure.
Listening to calls and reviewing appointments dramatically improves conversion.
AI tools are becoming a major advantage for coaching, compliance and operational efficiency.
Teams focused only on recruiting often ignore the real issue: retention and accountability.
The future “enterprise” real estate team will combine strong leadership with AI-driven support systems.
Related to this episode:
Chris Watters' LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriswatters/
Watters International Realty
https://christopherwatters.com/
REALSYNCH
https://www.realsynch.com/
The Million Dollar Real Estate Team
https://www.milliondollarrealestateteam.com/free-book-updated
Category
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NewsTranscript
00:08As a team leader, you tend to buy more leads when business is slow. But today's guest,
00:16Chris Waters, he is the founder and CEO of Waters International Realty. He also is an investor in
00:22several different tech companies, including RealSync, which he does mention on the podcast.
00:28He goes into how to really manage your leads and find those with intent. But he has some really
00:37great information on organizational structure for both brokerages and team leaders. And he also
00:43offers some really cool AI tools and that as well. So I hope you enjoy the podcast. Thanks so much.
00:51Chris, thanks for joining the Real Trending Podcast. I look forward to our controversial episode.
00:57Ah, me too.
00:59Well, we're going to start right in. You kind of made a contrarian argument that most brokerages
01:05and teams don't have a lead problem. They have an enforcement problem. So talk to me a little bit
01:11about that. So I would probably argue that most of the industry, most brokerages do a really good job
01:17with like training and onboarding. And they do a great job with continuing education and these like
01:22weekly Zoom sessions and all kinds of stuff, right? In-person training. Like I think generally
01:26speaking, the industry does a really good job with like training, generally speaking. But you know,
01:32for you to actually learn something first, you, yes, you have to hear it in the classroom,
01:36but then learning adaptation has to occur. And there's a fundamental flaw in our industry,
01:46which is the broker to agent ratio. Before in most and almost every other industry,
01:55when a company hires somebody, yes, they do training, onboarding and continuing education.
02:02But in most high ticket sales type industries, whether that's like, for example, leasing at a,
02:10you know, $300 million apartment complex or, you know, HVAC companies or dealerships or these other
02:19types of industries, they regularly inspect what they expect. And so they have this ongoing feedback loop
02:29to their employees to grade them. And this is after training occurs, right? And they do this using
02:40mystery shoppers. So this has been going on for decades, right? Like mystery shopping has been something
02:46going on for decades. And I mean, lots and lots of companies literally, you know, depending on their
02:52size, you know, some of them spend millions and millions of dollars in mystery shopping, because they want to
02:57mystery shop what the sales person saying on the phone, because they want to make sure what they said matches
03:04with what they're being taught in the classroom. And then they also mystery shop them in person. So like, for
03:10example, at a, you know, one of these, you know, massive apartment complex communities, they send
03:15mystery shoppers in there to meet the leasing, leasing agents in person, dealerships, they do the
03:20same thing, like any high ticket sales, you know, business, mystery shopping is so prevalent. And
03:28in real estate, it's not. And also, the broker to agent ratio is such that it's literally impossible
03:36for the broker or whoever's teaching that class to be listening to calls, and to be doing physical
03:43ride-alongs with salespeople and the agents to make sure they're learning adaptations happening.
03:50And, you know,
03:51Do you think part of that is that some of those are employees and not independent contractors?
03:57I'm not sure about dealerships. I'm not sure how they whether that they're independent contractors
04:03or, or not. But
04:05Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, when you look at when you look at the business models of the largest
04:10brokerages, they themselves create a proverbial cap, like how much money they can earn, right? Like
04:19EXBs, the KWs, there's this like agent cap. And so there's really only so much money, the company can
04:28spend helping these agents because they've created their own proverbial income ceiling. And their business
04:36models are built off of essentially having the same fixed expenses, whether you have 100 agents or 500
04:44agents or 5,000 agents. And so it limits how much they can do to help agents. And when it
04:50comes to
04:50learning, training and onboarding, what's most common in the industry now is the agents pay for it.
04:56Yeah.
04:57So they pay to go through some onboarding, they pay for these coaches, they pay for all these
05:01a la carte classes. And the brokerage incurs no, no expense. But unfortunately, there's been nothing
05:11in our industry to help, you know, brokerages, or coaching companies, ensure that people actually
05:20putting in place what they're being taught in the classroom.
05:22Yeah, absolutely. And so a lot of teams especially respond to slowing conversion by buying more leads.
05:31So why does that model eventually break down?
05:35Well, first off, the biggest challenge for most teams in my from what I've seen is it's not a lead
05:44problem. If you go in their database, they have 1000s and 1000s or 10s of 1000s of people in their
05:49database. The problem is conversion related. And I wrote this book about eight years ago,
05:58about my it was just, you know, kind of like a case study of me growing my team between
06:03a very specific time period. I'm looking for the book, see if I have a copy check from 2010
06:08to 2013. And I had 30,000 plus people buy this book. And they all have real estate brokerages and
06:18teams. And they were messaging me and a lot of an alarming number of them were getting stuck
06:27when the team got to about 150 transactions. And I had hundreds and hundreds of these people fly
06:34down to come see our operation down here in Austin. And what was like, it just dawned on me like,
06:40like, man, maybe one of my biggest epiphanies, I guess, after being in this industry 20 years is
06:48the thing that was unique to us when we were growing like crazy was we were listening like we
06:53just it was like part of our discipline. As like, you know, as a team, we listen to call recordings
07:00every morning for half an hour. And then we gave instant feedback of like what you said good what you
07:04can improve upon. We did that every day religiously. And then we did physical ride alongs with the
07:10agents to go, you know, with them on appointments to make sure they're doing what they need to do.
07:14And what I realized is a lot of other teams don't do that. And the ones that do, they'll do
07:20it when
07:21the agents knew, but they don't do it on an ongoing, you know, yearly basis. And when you look at
07:28these
07:28other industries that have become large enterprises, dealerships, apartment complexes, large home services
07:35vendors, like whether you've been with the company three months or three years, they're constantly
07:41inspecting what they expect. And it's just, you know, just a natural thing for anybody to like get off the
07:46rails a little bit and start saying the wrong thing or, you know, start coming up with their own script
07:52or
07:52framework on how to do things.
07:53So because of that conversion is, I think the biggest issue. The second thing is, I believe that
08:02the real estate tech space has been brainwashing our industry for the past 15 plus years. And they,
08:12what they found out was like teams, real estate teams and brokerages, they judged those different
08:21tech companies based off of which, which tech company can generate the most leads for the
08:27least amount of money. And so that's been the measuring stick these tech companies have been
08:32using. And unfortunately, these cheap leads are expensive in disguise and they're expensive in
08:41disguise because these leads that they generate are incredibly low intent and you're creating a
08:46proverbial, you know, income ceiling for the agent. Also, the other, you know, thing that I say they,
08:54they brainwashed us with is that it should just be normal to nurture a lead for one to two years.
09:01Like the idea of nurturing a lead for one to two years is completely insane. Like you can,
09:06if you actually did that consistently, you still can only have so many people in your database.
09:12Cause like you can only nurture so many people at one time. There's only so many hours in the day.
09:15And so the second part of the equation beyond the training adaptation and conversion issue,
09:23the second issue is the intent. And unfortunately most teams, you know, don't have marketing backgrounds
09:31and they don't really understand the difference between a high intent and a low intent lead source.
09:36And so they get on this merry-go-round of buying these really cheap leads and, and then their agents
09:46get demoralized because they work a hundred leads and like maybe close one deal. And there was a,
09:52there was a study put out last year by NAR that said right now the conversion rate of like a
09:58typical
09:58lead on Google or Facebook is half of 1%, which means you got to incinerate 200 leads to close
10:05one deal. And so all these teams complain, like my agents won't make calls. My agent won't make
10:10calls. Well, no shit because they called 200 freaking leads and they got one deal. Of course they're
10:15demoralized. Of course they don't want to make calls.
10:17Yeah. So what's the solution to that?
10:19The solution is simple. You, you like, you've got to focus on high intent lead sources.
10:24And how do you decide what those are?
10:26I mean, it's, you know, in every market, it's a little bit different. Like there's
10:29little nuances to each market, but like, for example, like if you want to go get a bunch
10:33of clients on the listing side, you know, the most, um, high intent sellers out there are the
10:39ones going through life events, like major life events, like are the vast majority of sellers.
10:44So they're going through divorce. They're facing financial distress. Like they, they might be facing
10:49foreclosure. Um, they inherited a house and they're like, Oh my God, how am I going to maintain
10:53this house? What about the bills? The taxes? Like none of that goes away when the person dies,
10:57you got to deal with it. So these are like major life event things. And so what's crazy about like
11:02those specific life events is when people experience those things, they have to go through a very public
11:09process. They go file a divorce decree at the courthouse. They go file an application for probate.
11:16The bank files a foreclosure against your house. This is all public information and we can all go out
11:22there and get it. Like you can go, go to the County courthouse and get all this information.
11:26And now you have a very defined set of high intent people that are going to have to sell.
11:30And you don't have to work with those leads for one to two years. Like they're going to need to
11:34transact in the next three to six months. Worst case. Yeah. So I, I'm a, there's a, there's a vendor
11:41out there about to sell.com. Like I used to personally go to the courthouse like 15 years ago and
11:47pull
11:47these records. Um, fortunately now with tech, you don't have to, like we use about to sell.com.
11:52They scraped the County courthouse, they enriched the contact information. And I found the most
11:57effective thing is you haven't asked this, but I'm just going to share it. Anyways, we found that
12:00direct mail and cold email are the most impactful way to generate really high, um, high quality inbound
12:07leads. And so, and when I put some metrics behind what a high intent lead is basically, and this is,
12:14these are our numbers is for every two leads we generate, we get one face-to-face appointment
12:19and for every three face-to-face appointments, we get a closing. We're not talking about a hundred
12:25leads. We're talking about generating two leads to get one face-to-face and it's, it's going to take
12:30three face-to-face meetings to get a closing. So I only need six leads to get a closing, not
12:36a hundred.
12:37Yeah. Much easier. Um, I want to kind of go back to the grading. So for team leaders or brokers,
12:43um, you know, how does appointment grading work? Is there like a scale and, and talk to me a little
12:50bit more in more detail about what you did specifically and how you made it work and maybe
12:57some lessons learned through the process of kind of honing it. Yeah. You know, I didn't, I didn't invent
13:04all this stuff. Like the real estate industry, like NAR was formed in 1908, you know, it's been around a
13:09long
13:10time. And I got to a point where I just had failed so much. I like got humble enough to
13:15go like hire
13:15a coach. And so the script that I learned to use on the phone, like, for example, if you're talking
13:21to a buyer is the LP mama script. Have you ever heard about this script? No, no. And the LP
13:28mama
13:28script. I feel like if people are listening to this, I hope they would, some people would know this,
13:32but it's like when you, when you get like, let's say for example, somebody calls the year for sale
13:37sign, the L stands for location. So they call on, they call about this house and you're like, Hey,
13:43tell me about, you know, the, are you, is this the only neighborhood you guys are interested in?
13:48The next one is price. What's the general price range you're looking for? The next one is motivation.
13:54So LP mom is L P M A M A. Okay. So the first M is motivation. What's your timeframe?
14:02How soon are
14:02you guys looking to get into something? The A is, are you, have you guys already seen the inside of
14:07another home before? If they say yes, they're likely working with another agent. The last M is,
14:13have you been pre-approved for a mortgage yet? And if so, like what's the general monthly payment
14:16you're trying to stay around? And then the last A is the appointment. You ask for the appointment.
14:21So like our grading rubric are a little bit different, whether it's an inbound seller versus
14:26buyer, but there's very specific things you need to discover in the phone call, for example,
14:34in order to book an appointment and for it to be a qualified, ready, capable, you know, buyer or seller.
14:41Okay. So tell me about your process a little bit more about your process. So do you go,
14:48do you still do this, um, go on appointments or how do you, you know, how can a, can a
14:53brokerage
14:54actually, um, put this in place? Well, it's probably a team. What's been kind of, I mean,
15:01any, I mean, shoot, you know what I like think about why is there so much churn in the real
15:05estate
15:06industry? I mean, it's like 80% of the population of agents turn over every five years or something
15:11crazy. And like, man, that I, I mentioned earlier, like, I felt like I had one of the greatest
15:16epiphanies of my career and I've been doing this 20 years and it's, I think it's, I think it's
15:23literally, it's nearly impossible. It's, it's been nearly impossible for brokerages to inspect what
15:29they expect. Yeah. Like whether, whether that's like conversion related or compliance related or
15:35filling out a contract or like, it's just like been literally impossible. So about two years ago,
15:42we tried, um, basically what we would do is we'd have our agents use the, like the voice recorder
15:47on their phones and we would, um, have them send us the recordings and we would, uh, two years ago,
15:54we started plugging them into chat GBT and the answers were very, um, it was like, they were very
16:01inconsistent. And what I realized through doing that experience with chat GBT is like chat GBT is
16:07kind of built for the masses. It doesn't have like the context of our industry. It doesn't have enough
16:11memories. It hasn't been uploaded with like specific things. So it'll do like a half decent job, but it's
16:16not like super accurate. Um, and so anyways, the, the tool we use now it's, it's real estate. It's a
16:23real
16:23estate specific AI tool. And, um, we give the mobile app to our agents and they hit record on the
16:29mobile
16:29app. It, so it captures the entire face-to-face meeting, whether it's a buyer seller, it analyzes
16:35it, transcribes it, and then it gives immediate feedback to the agent around what they did good
16:39and what they can improve upon. And this, I mean, I'll just give you some numbers. So when we started
16:47putting this in place, our, um, face-to-face conversion jumped from 40% to 53%. Wow. That may not
16:57sound significant, but for us, that was a couple hundred thousand dollars in commissions every
17:01month for a very small team. So, um, we're that's, we use the real sync mobile app. There's a desktop
17:09version for teams, but, um, like that's how we can now like inspect what we expect. The other cool
17:15thing is, is like, I'm kind of, we've kind of realized over the last six months is it's leading
17:20our salespeople to self-discover. Like we used to get into these like, kind of like some animosity
17:27between like the agent and the sales team lead because you're, you're critiquing them and they're
17:31taking it personally. Right. Now the AI is being very objective and it's like, Hey, you failed to
17:37build rapport with this person. Like you spent all your time talking about numbers and like signing
17:41the agreement, but you never got down to the root cause of why they were selling. I'm, and I've seen
17:46some, I've seen some reports come back where this is so mind boggling to me. Like the, I looked at
17:52one
17:52last week, the agent won the deal. They got the listing signed, but they showed up with no market
17:57data. Like they said, like, Hey, we're in a rural area. I couldn't find any sales comps, but yet they
18:02still want it. Now that sounds great and all, but unfortunately they took the listing over price and
18:07it's probably going to fail itself. So what is the name of this? Is this an app you built or
18:11is this an
18:11app available? Um, so yeah, it's, it's an app that, um, is available to the masses. Um, it's on iOS
18:17and Android and it's called real sync. So it's, it's grading the phone calls and it's also grading
18:23in person face-to-face meetings and it integrates with the CRM. Okay. And so from there, are you just
18:29spot checking different ones or how are you holding the agents accountable to doing this? Um, you know,
18:36and, and continue cause it's really fun at first. Right. And then they get a couple of, uh,
18:41reports back rating and they feel like they, okay, I'm done. How are you holding them accountable?
18:47Well, so what's really cool is like, um, they want to use it. And the reason they want to use
18:51it is
18:52because the average listing appointment is like over two hours. And like when you transcribe that
18:58into text, it's like 600 pages on word, a word doc. Yeah. And so it creates these like amazing AI
19:05notes
19:06that are very specific to real estate for the agent to use, to remind them what they talked
19:10about, to remind them to ask the seller post appointment, to get a copy of the invoice for
19:16the foundation, a copy of, you know, the survey, a copy of their utilities, you know, um, a receipt
19:24about some warranty on the roof. So the, the AI note summary, like basically it, it, it breaks
19:30everything down into impact zones that, um, in the real estate industry, we need to be aware
19:35of like seller disclosure related issues. It flags like financial things in nature. Like
19:40the seller says there's minimal amount of equity. Um, and so like it, it'll flag like, Hey, this,
19:46this is a potential listing that may be a short sale. Yeah. So the AI note summary, like makes
19:51their job so much easier to make sure nothing falls through the cracks after a two hour appointment
19:57when you talk about a million different things. Yeah. Like you hear, you hear the seller talk
20:02about like, I need to go to Florida and like the agent will have forgotten to ask them like,
20:06have you found an agent in Tampa? You know, like, and you can go and the agent can then
20:12be reminded like, Hey, I need to go help them find an agent in Tampa so that they'll find
20:16their next dream house. So they'll forget about this, the one they're living in.
20:19Yeah. I mean, I think that's, it's yeah. So it offers a benefit besides grading, you know,
20:24their conversation. It provides them kind of a to-do list or, um, kind of a, Oh, don't forget
20:29this. Um, they said this, and you might want to follow up on it or, or whatever. And I think,
20:36um, with team leaders and managers, they kind of run into that wall where they wear so many hats,
20:42they're recruiting, they're managing the team, they're, you know, whatever coaching, uh, you know,
20:49putting out fires. And so something like that to make their job a little bit easier is, um,
20:57definitely I think valuable for time. Um, so where do you see, like, how do you, how do you know
21:05when
21:06you're at the point as a team leader that, um, it's time to change maybe how you're operating
21:13as far as, you know, leads? Cause you know, teams are known for the leads that they give. That's,
21:22you know, that's compared to brokers who don't always provide leads to their agents. The agents
21:29are finding their leads through a bunch of other sources. Um, you know, where do you find the best
21:35leads and how do you, as a team leader, figure out, figure that out to be able to disperse them
21:42to
21:42your team? Well, yeah, a lot of, um, a lot of answers in there or a lot of questions, a
21:48lot of
21:48answers to give. Um, you know, I mentioned the book I wrote and I'm happy to give this book away
21:54for free to your listeners. I've got a, you remind me, I've got like a special landing page where I
21:59send people to get a copy of the book for free, but basically like, as you mentioned, like the sales,
22:05the, the, the team leader, their job is so wide, like recruit, select, train, lead, motivate.
22:12And like the thing that falls through the cracks probably first is that, that, that component of
22:19their job where they should be inspecting what they expect, like listening to the phone calls,
22:24giving them feedback around what they did good, what they did bad, going on appointments with them.
22:27Like they may do it for the first couple of months, but they're not going to do an ongoing
22:31basis because it's one of the first things that falls through the cracks. And then like so many
22:35people preach to real estate teams, keep recruiting, keep recruiting, keep recruiting.
22:40The reason you have to keep recruiting is because you're not inspecting what you expect
22:45and people come get off the rails. They like get off the rails, like meaning whether they don't
22:51follow your process anymore. And then their conversion starts to drop. And then because
22:55their conversion starts to drop, the agent gets demoralized. And so then they, they, you know,
22:59there's like, you've heard this, like the quiet quitters, right? It's like they quietly start quitting.
23:04And so everybody, you know, I keep hearing all these people that have never built teams,
23:08you know, they keep saying, keep recruiting, keep recruiting, keep recruiting. That works good
23:13for like the big brokerage model where you have massive churn, but for the team, for the team
23:18model, like you, you don't want to have massive churn. It's very expensive. All those leads you gave
23:23the agent just got wasted. So anyway, so there's, that's, that's one component. But in the book,
23:29what I mentioned was like, I had all these people read it and all these people tell me they were
23:33getting
23:33stuck around 150 deals. And usually around 150 deals, they had like, you know, five, maybe five
23:40people on the team, five, six, seven people. And so what I found is like, when you, when your team
23:45exceeds about five, six, seven sales people, like your job is way too wide. Yeah. And, and then I've
23:52had multiple people I've partnered with, we're like, literally I put in money, they put in money,
23:56we, you know, did some kind of partnership deal and they, they too hit that wall. And what I told
24:02them to do was you got to hire a sales team leader and they would hire sales team leaders and
24:07the sales
24:08team leaders still hit the same ceiling where they ran out of time of the day. And so the, you
24:15know,
24:15the right, like the physical ride alongs and listening to calls is so important, but so time consuming.
24:20Right. And it's something I realized as I had all, I literally were 500 people fly down our
24:26operation here in Austin. And it just dawned on me. I'm like, man, nobody's doing these things.
24:32They do it in the first couple of months, but not, they don't do it on an ongoing basis.
24:37Instead, they're getting preached to by these people saying, keep recruiting, keep recruiting.
24:41And that's all they do versus like, Hey, let's reduce churn by making sure our agents are consistently
24:46doing the right things. So if you had to leave our audience with, we have a lightning round too,
24:51but this is, I want you to leave them with one strategy to implement today. What would
24:56that be? I would say the number one strategy I'd tell them to focus on is, I mean, I have
25:02to give
25:02two answers. One is focus on high intent leads. Literally like a couple of leads equals one
25:09appointment and a couple of appointments equals one deal. Like if you're not operating under that
25:14basis, you're going to, your people are going to get demoralized and you're going to have high churn.
25:18The second thing related to high churn is the learning adaptation phase. And whether you're a big box
25:25brokerage or you've got a team, you got to invest in inspecting what you expect. Like, Hey, you know,
25:32for big brokerages, their issue is all related to compliance and E&O filings. They get, you know,
25:38insurance filings out the yin yang because they have agents doing stuff because they've only sold
25:42like two deals this year. And so like, you could stop all of that. If you just would get, you
25:48know,
25:48I mean, dude, the tools are available now. Like the AI tools are available.
25:52Like go get real sync. It will automatically grade the calls, grade the face-to-face meetings,
25:57tell them what they're doing good, what they're doing bad. And then like you as a, so as a, on
26:03the,
26:03on the user interface, there's this like live feed for the team owner or the broker. And it, it,
26:09it like literally in big red text and like big red thing. It's like, you know, high risk, high risk,
26:15high risk. You know, this agent said something that could get you sued or this agent took a listing
26:20on that's going to fail to sell because they don't have equity and it's overpriced.
26:23So it's like, the system is like alerting you to every single call and every single appointment
26:28where the agent is doing something to put the team or the brokerage at risk.
26:32Okay. That's interesting. Okay. I'm going to do a lightning round. So first thing that comes to mind,
26:39most overrated real estate metric.
26:42Um, most overrated real estate metric, man, either gross commission dollars. Cause that's so
26:50wild, wildly different than net or the number of leads you generated. How many leads?
26:55I was going to say the leads. That's what I thought your answer would be. Um, most underrated behavior
27:01that drives conversion. Um, man, I, I am, I'm feeling like I'm being a, being a dead horse here.
27:08It's the, um, it's the physical ride-alongs or listening to the call recordings. Uh, one standard
27:14every team should enforce immediately. It's in, it's, it's in the realm of inspecting what you
27:20expect. Like when I say inspecting what you expect in a standards perspective is like you need,
27:27like when you think about like the customer journey, you've got like, okay, how many leads came in?
27:31How fast did you get back to them? How many of those turn into appointments? How many of those
27:36turned into clients? So like you should have a standard around what those conversion rates are.
27:42Um, but you know, to get, to get those, to hit those standards, you need, uh, you need
27:49accountability and you need something to help you have accountability. And I think that's where the,
27:54like, I mean, what we, again, what we used to do is the physical ride-alongs and listening to
27:58the calls. I keep, I'm being a, I'm being a dead horse here. So the best real estate teams in
28:03the
28:03next, uh, I put five years, but let's go one year. We'll be the ones that don't say inspect or
28:12whatever. You can't say that. I think there's a new model arising right now in the real estate
28:18space, like an entirely new model. Yep. Gary Keller coined the team model in the late nineties,
28:24right? The next model I see is the enterprise model. Yeah. And the enterprise model is going to
28:30be made up of these, you know, just incredibly talented leaders within the old school real
28:37estate teams. So for example, you have like a head of operations, a head of sales, a head of marketing,
28:42you have these head, you know, people that are like very sophisticated, very talented. Like they
28:47could go get a job probably anywhere, Apple, Facebook, Google, whatever. And these, uh, people
28:53in the, in these leadership roles within the, what I call enterprise model. Um, it's not like they're
28:59going to have, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 employees underneath them. They're going to have AI agents
29:04and they will have, um, AI agents that are doing tasks autonomously and doing a majority of the work
29:10that is very labor intensive, monotonous and administrative in nature. And so I believe in
29:18the next year, the agents and the, excuse me, the, the teams that are going to have the most success
29:23are the ones that adopt AI to help push their business forward and also start taking advantage
29:30of agentic AI, which is when the, you know, the computer literally does the task for you.
29:36Right. And, but that's not at the expense of the agent. You're saying in addition,
29:41doing the tasks that the agent, um, doesn't need to be spending time on, explain that to me,
29:47or is that in place of the agent? I mean, if, if you think about like what agents do that
29:53like
29:53brings the most value, it is being subject matter experts. Like what, you know, what makes real
30:02estate transactions so complicated is you have so many people involved in transaction. You got the
30:05mortgage company, title company, insurance company, surveyor. There's so many people.
30:10And so the greatest value of the agent is being able to navigate that and also like help the buyer
30:15seller. Cause there's like, you know, there's definitely a psychology component of like,
30:19you're like part-time shrink, part-time realtor, um, as you're like helping people navigate this very
30:26complicated, uh, transaction. And so all of those things outside of being like the guide or subject
30:33matter expert, all of the things outside of that can be delegated using agentic AI.
30:38Okay. I thought that's what you meant, but I just wanted to clarify. Um, well, Chris,
30:42thanks so much for joining real trending. This has been a fascinating conversation. I appreciate you.
30:48Thank you, Tracy.
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