Making Agents Wealthy

The #1 Results Oriented System for Women in Real Estate

Karen Coffey

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781947200173
• eBook ISBN: 9781631952432
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Mentoring & Coaching
• Index: Business

Making Agents Wealthy guarantees that if agents follow the step-by-step blueprint Karen Coffey offers they will produce money generating results.

In Making Agents Wealthy, Karen Coffey walks agents (new and seasoned) through a step-by-step process of creating fast money generating results. Throughout its pages, readers sense that she is serious about her motto "Success takes as long as you give it" because Karen proves it doesn't take long when agents apply the right strategies. The systems she shares are based on her first hand success of earning over $100k in her first 100 days as an agent in a brand new market where she knew no one; then finishing off the year working an average of 30 hours a week and earning just under $500, 000 in income for the year. The uniqueness of Making Agents Wealthy comes from the fact that Karen holds nothing back, she shares the tools, templates, and systems that worked for her. She also shares the mindset shifts and beliefs that every agent must have to reach the high levels of success that she is committed to giving readers.

Chapter 1:

FROM HOMELESS TO HALF A MILLION

There’s no mystery about what needs to be done to make the money and live the lifestyle you want except the mystery of why you won’t do it.

—Karen Coffey

It was 10:00 a.m. on a warm Tuesday morning in June. I was sitting at my 1950s-style wooden desk in an office I shared with three other agents at a large real estate boutique firm in the Atlanta, Georgia area. For six months, I had attended trainings, been on agent caravans, tackled the mounds of paperwork required for every transaction, and learned the state and local laws and restrictions concerning real estate. Six months, every day, and I hadn’t sold one home—not one buyer, not one seller, nothing. Zero, zip, nada!

This day could have been like all the others, but it wasn’t. It turned out to be the major turning point in my sales career and in my real estate philosophy. I just didn’t know it yet.

One year prior to this, I had sold a small business to my business partners so that I could pursue my dream and my addiction of a career in real estate. Any salesperson worth their weight in salt will tell you how the adrenaline pumps through your veins in this business. For some it starts from a young age; mine was at age ten drawing house plans with a stick in the dirt-lined swamps of Central Florida. It beat running from the mosquitoes and alligators.

In 1995, I passed the grueling exams for real estate sales and got my license. I had been a stockbroker earlier in my career, and had passed the coveted Series 7 exams, so how hard could the real estate exam be?

Pretty hard, I discovered, but I passed and fully expected to be raking in the money fairly quickly. After all, my friends and family told me I would be perfect as an agent—perfectly ineffective, as it turned out. I’m not sure if any of you have ever experienced that kind of production—the zero kind. It will destroy you or motivate you.

My husband was fully supportive of my new role, and my son, who was twelve weeks old at the time, was being taken care of by a Swedish au pair we hired, whom he loved. My husband’s job afforded us a very nice lifestyle. I obviously didn’t need to make too much money.

Big house, two fancy cars, decorator on call—yes, the decorator had a key and would just leave stuff in my house. If I liked it, I paid for it and it stayed. If I didn’t, she came by in a month or so to pick it up. We were living the suburban American dream with a newborn and not too many cares in the world until that Tuesday morning in June when I heard my name over the intercom system: “Karen Coffey, pick up line two. Karen Coffey, pick up on line two.” That always made me feel extremely important in the beginning of my career because I knew I didn’t have any clients, and the only reason the call was directed to me was because I was the agent on duty that day, and no one else was available.

It was my husband on the phone. He got to the point, short and sweet.

“I’ve been laid off. The company projections aren’t as they anticipated, and my role has been eliminated. I’m packing my things and leaving the office.”

I sat there stunned, not sure what the implications were. Head in hands and tears welling up, I knew better than to ask, “What are we going to do?” I had to figure out a way for us to stay afloat and do it fast or we would lose everything. The truth was that our world was built on sand and over $100,000 in credit card debt, coupled with an immature belief that the money would never run out. The future was incredibly bright…until it wasn’t.

I hung up and took a moment to pray. How will we make it, Lord? Please show me the way. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes went by when finally, in a flash of what seemed like divine inspiration, the solution hit me.

Even though I hadn’t sold one house and had made zero dollars in sales at that point, I had been paying attention in those training classes, and I knew there were some downright horrible things I did not want to do. I had avoided all the salesy and embarrassing things so many agents do out of desperation because I didn’t need the money that badly. The pain of embarrassment was far worse than the pain of not having any money.

My life was chill. I was under no pressure to sell. There was nothing pushing on me with enough force to make me do the things I didn’t want to do. But a moment of truth had come in that phone call from my husband, and I had to make a choice. Would I keep trying to do real estate my way, or would the pain of losing everything be enough to push me to the point of doing things differently?

There’s nothing like a little pain to create a freshly opened mind.

What was keeping me stuck, fearful, and broke? In that flash of inspiration, I understood three things:

1. I needed a Big Enough Reason to do the things that were uncomfortable for me but would rocket me to success.
2. My natural talents and abilities would not bring me the amount of business that I needed.
3. I needed something or someone to keep me on track.

My Big Enough Reason had just happened, and I was willing to do anything and everything to get a sale, a listing, a rental—anything! Now I just needed to figure out how to stay on track of it all. I also needed to use my natural talents and gifts in my business, and improve them.

But how does one do that?

I made it a personal mission to dig deep into research. I studied all the avenues of self-discovery that I could find in books, online, and by attending courses and programs so that I could solidly overcome my weaknesses and use my natural talents and gifts to sell more and earn more.

After years of research, I discovered an amazing free resource that allowed me to focus on what I was naturally good at so that I could use my strengths, not my weaknesses, to increase my confidence, skills, and income. This resource was called the DISC Strengths Assessment Test, a quick five-minute assessment I found on the Tony Robbins website.

Those results forever changed the way I thought about my unique talents and abilities. I was able to see what really held me back from achieving success. From that point on, I did everything differently in my real estate business. I communicated more powerfully, and I better understood how to handle other people in a way that was important to them.

My DISC assessment told me I was a High D/High I. I will get into the specifics of what that means in a later chapter, but the following is a summary:

• I’m not good at details, so I should not do detail-oriented tasks.
• I have the attention span of a gnat, so I need to stay focused and present with each client.
• I am never content with the way things are. I constantly strive for the next level.
• I have a natural warmth that others respond to positively.
• I tend to talk too much, so I need to be more of an active listener.
• In my email communications, I sometimes come across as abrupt and rude because I get straight to the point. I need to remind myself to include salutations and pleasantries.

Now that I was aware of my strengths, I needed to create daily accountability in my business, but first I needed to determine what that would look like. Having some available credit on one of my cards and taking a huge leap of faith, I took $1,500 out and—here is the gem, the thing that every right-minded person with zero money does—I hired a part-time assistant for fifteen weeks to sit at my desk to do busywork so that I wouldn’t. I created an environment of no excuses for myself. I knew that if she was sitting there 3.33 hours three days a week, I couldn’t also be in that chair. If she worked ten hours a week at ten dollars per hour, I knew I could afford to keep her for fifteen weeks. If I hadn’t made any money by then, I would have to let her go. To take it even further, I knew that when I came in to work every day, I was not going to sit and stare at her. No! I was going to do all those wonderful things I said I hated, but I was going to do them a little differently so I didn’t feel embarrassed about being a real estate agent.

One ad in Craigslist and three applicants later, I found a wonderful lady who needed part-time work ten hours a week.

Debbie showed up on Monday for her first day on the job, and I had no idea what I was going to have her do because I had no sales, no listings, no buyers, and nothing in my pipeline. I decided that studying the MLS and marketing manuals would be a great place to start, and that’s all I could think of.

I left her alone to get acclimated while I locked myself in the agency conference room to make some dreaded phone calls. I had heard that calling For Sale by Owner (FSBO) listings was a good way to get immediate business, so I made my first call.

Call #1:

Ring Ring

“Hello?”

“Hi, this is Karen Coffey with Northside Realty, and I was calling to see how I could help you sell your home.”

“What? F*** you!”

He hung up.

Yep! True story. I promptly broke down crying and said I would never be able to do this. What had I done? My husband and I had no money, and like an idiot, I had put myself $1500 deeper in debt and hired someone to help me do nothing!

I got up, walked around the office, grabbed two donuts from the kitchen that a lender had dropped off, cried some more then quit for the day. I told my new assistant to continue studying the MLS documents until the end of her shift, and I would see her Wednesday.

The next day was our company sales meeting and agent caravan immediately after, so I didn’t have time to do any calls that day, right? That was my excuse anyway. An agent caravan is when all the agents in the office carpool and preview homes that have just come on the market for sale. The purpose is to give constructive feedback to the listing agent so that they can best advise their sellers on price, condition, upgrades, and other aspects of the property. You usually see five to eight homes during the agent caravan, and that can take most of the afternoon. Relieved of my guilt for not making phone calls that day, I committed to try it again Wednesday when Debbie would be back in the office doing nothing. Great motivator!

When Wednesday came, I dug out an old-fashioned script that I’d gotten from my office. Every agent in town used this script, so I thought I should too. Some of it works, and some doesn’t. I’ve spent years refining it, but this is what transpired.

Call #2:

Ring Ring

FSBO: “Hello?”

ME: “Um yes…uh, I was calling about your home for sale… um, are you the owner?”

FSBO: “Yes, that’s me. How can I help you?”

ME: “Uh, yes, this is Karen Coffey with Northside Realty, and…um…I was calling to see how I could help you sell your home.”

FSBO: “You can’t! Well, unless you bring me a buyer.”

ME: “Great! So, if I bring you a buyer, you’re happy to pay the commission?”

FSBO: “Yes, but you’re the tenth agent that’s called today!”

ME: (Oh, crap!) “Well, at least ten of us are working!” (He laughed.) “So that’s great you’re paying the commission. Where are you guys moving to?”

FSBO: “Detroit. We have family there.”

ME: “Nice! And when did you want to be there by?”

FSBO: “By the time school starts. Our daughter is seven.”

ME: “Okay…I know you want to save the commission and sell it yourself, and I don’t blame you, but I’m curious—how long do you think you’ll try selling it yourself before you consider using an agent?”

FSBO: “We’ll probably try to sell it for three weeks or so. We’ve sold our other two houses ourselves, so I think we’ll be okay.”

ME: “Awesome, so three weeks. What if there was a way I could net you the amount of money you need to move to Detroit and sell your home in the next thirty to sixty days? Would you be interested?”

FSBO: “Yes, but how?”

ME: “Well, let me do this. I’m going to send you a packet of information on how I get homes sold, not just listed. Take a minute to look at it, and I’ll stop by on Saturday to go over how I can net you that money. Would ten in the morning be okay?”

FSBO: “Yes, that would be fine.”

ME: “Will everyone who’s on the warranty deed be there on Saturday? It’s helpful if everyone sees the values and makes joint decisions.”

FSBO: “Absolutely, we’ll be here. We look forward to the package.”

ME: “Great. See you Saturday!”

I immediately did the happy dance all over the conference room, jumping up and down, punching the air with my fists, resisting every urge to open the door and run laps around the office. I had a choice to make right then and there. Do I stay and continue calling my list of FSBOs, or do I quit while I’m ahead? It was a hard decision to make. In my thoughts, I kept hearing, “Should I stay or should I go, now?” from the song of the same name by The Clash.

I desperately wanted to go back to my office and tell Debbie what I’d just accomplished, but I couldn’t. Why? When I hired her, I told her I was a busy agent who worked hard to get appointments every day, and here I was doing a happy dance around the office after making one appointment. I couldn’t burst her bubble and let her find out that she was working for a clueless agent who had never sold a house!

Then I thought, I could call my husband and tell him.

But my next thought was No! I would stay the course and continue making calls until I went through all the phone numbers on the list, about ten. I didn’t make any more appointments that day, but I did speak to a few people who said they would use an agent at some point. They weren’t ready to list yet, so I told them I would send them some information and check bac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Her Secret Weapon
• Chapter 1: From Homeless to Half a Million
• Strategy #1: Mindset
• Strategy #2: Skills
• Strategy #3: Systems
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Additional Resources