Episode 14: Building a Real Estate Brand That Attracts Clients—Not Just Leads

Chris Cook (00:04):

All right. Welcome Josh. How are you doing?

Josh Decaire (00:06):

I’m good, thanks, Chris. How about you?

Chris Cook (00:08):

Awesome. Good, good. I’d like to make just a brief introduction here, Josh. It’s Josh Decaire, right? Is that how I say it?

Josh Decaire (00:16):

Yep.

Chris Cook (00:17):

Is a founder of Waypoint Media Solutions, somebody that I’ve been working with for almost a year coming up on a year that we’ve been working together, and we’ve had a lot of back and forth about growing your real estate business and using some of the digital levers that are available to us out there. And I think one of the things that a lot of the people that are in my position want to know is how quickly can we get this up and running? What’s the minimum spend that I can have to be able to start generating, not just generating leads, but generating real business? And so these are some of the things that I’d love to be able to chat with you and explore over the next half hour, what your experiences are and how real estate connects to other businesses that you may be connected with and working with.

Josh Decaire (01:17):

Yeah, real estate’s interesting. I think in a lot of ways there’s a lot of similarities with any other type of business, any other vertical, but there’s a lot of ways in which it’s really different. Obviously most of your clients, they’re not going to be clients every year or every six months. It’s a once in a maybe decade type of transaction.

(01:46):

It’s usually the biggest transaction of their lives. But at a foundational level, I think there’s a lot of similarities between realtors and any other type of business, just in terms of coming at things from a strategic point of view and having the foundation set up. And I think you probably see this in a lot of your conversations with other realtors. A lot of people tend to approach marketing as it’s just a set of tactics. It’s like, oh, maybe I should post on Instagram today. Or, oh, this realtor that I know is killing it on TikTok, so maybe I should be there. But they don’t take a step back and think about what am I actually trying to accomplish here? And how do all of these pieces kind of fit together? So

(02:36):

I think that’s one thing that you guys did well, was recognizing that you have to have the foundation in place first. And for me, that’s website, that’s brand identity and that is a CRM. Obviously we work together on the website side of things, but you already had a strong brand identity in place. You guys already had the CRM system in place. And I think that those are the areas that a lot of, not just realtors, businesses in general, but realtors too, they struggle with. They’ve got a crappy website. Maybe it’s just one that their brokerage provided

(03:22):

It’s boilerplate, doesn’t speak to them, their brand, their target audience, maybe they don’t even have any type of visual identity of their own. They’re just relying again on the brokerage for that. And they don’t have the systems in place to manage their leads, follow up with their leads. I mean, how long lead time takes from the time you have a first conversation with somebody to the time the house actually gets listed or there’s a transaction that happens there. It can be a long time. And a lot of the initial conversations you have with people, they’re probably not even in market at that time.

Chris Cook (04:03):

So it’s interesting that you use the word tactic that a lot of people have tactics. I like to define that my definition between the difference between a tactic and a strategy and a tactic is how you react in the moment to something that’s going on versus a strategy, which is a longer holistic vision of what you want this to look like in six to eight, 12 months from now or even longer, that there’s that difference. So I find it interesting that you use the word tactic instead of strategy. Was that on purpose?

Josh Decaire (04:38):

Yeah, for sure. I think a lot of people use them interchangeably, and they’re not, you’re bang on a strategy, it’s figuring out what do we actually want to accomplish, where do we want to be? And in a timeframe that makes sense. And then the tactics are the little pieces that make up how you actually get there. So Instagram might be a part, it might be a tactic that you use to help fulfill your strategy. But I mean, you talk to a lot of business owners, what’s your digital marketing strategy? And they say Instagram, it’s like that’s not a strategy, that’s a tactic that can be a part of a strategy for sure. But what are you actually trying to accomplish here? What are realistic goals, expectations, timeframes, all of those things. So yeah, they’re definitely two different things that often get kind of conflated.

Chris Cook (05:36):

So I mean, you and David had a really, what I would think to be a pretty interesting conversation on Monday, which I’ve had a chance to reflect on. And really what prompted me to say like, oh, we should just do a podcast. We should have this conversation in a podcast type of scenario. So one of the struggles that I have in my business is dealing with leads versus building a brand strategy and having the difference between me pushing myself on somebody else and having them attracted to me because I’ve been doing online lead generation for a very long time, and I’ve come to really hate it because the number of really poor conversations I have to, to be able to get to somebody and really eats up a huge amount of my bandwidth both time and my emotional bandwidth. Sometimes it’s rough to get rejected like that over and over and over again.

(06:47):

And so you had mentioned with the online lead generation, some of these people are very early in the process and there are sometimes 3, 6, 9, 12, 18 months out from actually wanting to engage. And so that’s what we were talking about on Monday. And I’m like, I don’t really want those online leads. I think that that’s just a dopamine hit that gives me the feeling. It gives me some assurances maybe that you’re doing something to generate business for us. It’s something that, well, it’s a dopamine hit, it makes me feel good. But is the result, in your opinion, is the result different than if you were to take that 6, 12, 18 months to build out a proper pipeline to build out more of a poll strategy through your online strategies versus saying, Hey, I’m just going to put my rod in the water and I hope I pull a fish out. I don’t care what kind of fish it is or how big.

Josh Decaire (07:58):

Yeah, I think it’s a balance for sure. And I think all the pieces work together on the typical lead gen advertising side of things. Like if 1% of leads that come through end up being good, that’s pretty good. And then of those, you’re not going to close a hundred percent of them. So it really is a, it’s a volume game, which to your point, can be emotionally draining when you have to have a thousand conversations before you get a couple of quality transactions out of them. And I think that’s where having solid CRM processes comes into play as well. You don’t necessarily have to be personally having those conversations to stay in touch with those leads that maybe they’re not in market today, but they might be in six months if they’re receiving an automated email from you at once every couple of weeks. And I know that’s something that you guys do well as well.

(09:09):

You send out to educational resources, nothing too pushy, nothing too salesy, helps kind of build your authority. And that’s a good way to stay in touch with some of those leads that maybe they’re not ready today, maybe they don’t, they’re not confident in you yet today they don’t know you, they didn’t know you before they saw the ad, but yeah, and that you turn the switch on hope the leads come in kind of approach versus the longer kind of brand building approach that you’re talking about. And we had some conversations on earlier in the week, and I do think ultimately that’s the most effective long-term play for pretty much any business is to figure out how to build an actual brand. And a lot of people, brand’s kind of a nebulous term. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. Some people they think, oh, brand is your logo, but brand’s not your logo. Brand is logo is a part of it. It’s a part of your visual identity for sure. But brand is about who knows you and what do they think about you. And it is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out online. There’s more swimming and content and that’s only going to get worse as the barrier to entry to create content continues to go down. There’s all kinds of tools that make it very easy to create polished content. So having an actual personality, something to say, something of value that just becomes that much more important to cut through the noise.

(11:16):

But you still have to have all the base kind of foundation systems in place to make sure that if you’re capturing leads, you’re following up with them. I dunno, your traditional sales stuff, at the end of the day, it’s still sales. If you’re following up with a prospect once and then you’re letting them go, you’re not going to be successful. You follow up five times, seven times, whatever it is.

Chris Cook (11:41):

So I think there’s a lot of agents that have probably listening to this and they’ve all heard the line is most, if you’re doing online lead generation and you’re going to get a lead come in, first of all, your speed to contact that lead is very important, but also the frequency that you reach out to them. And I know that if I get a cold lead, I get somebody that comes in, I need to call them very shortly after they come in and I’m probably going to move to call them somewhere between eight and 12 times sometimes before I even get them on the fall.

(12:18):

So when I think about this in terms of from a Toronto perspective where we have a lot of people selling online leads and I have not that many active buyers that are out there shopping that would be on the internet. So how many, if I’m calling this person eight to 12 times and my competition who has bought that same lead is calling somebody eight to 12 times, they may be a really well qualified lead and we could even be a good fit, but they’re so annoyed by this process and this is where I’ve come to the thought and this is what we shared on Monday. I was like, I actually think that we got to stop trying to build our business off of these strangers this way. I’ve talked to a few people that also have engaged with online lead generation and all these things. I firmly believe that your money is going to be better spent building that brand and being more strategic and building something where people are going to be attracted to you

(13:34):

Versus you doing that outward push. I don’t think that in a crowded market like Toronto, it works that it has the ROI, not just like how much you got to spend to get each lead, but also how much time and phone numbers and rejection that you have to get in order to convert them. And this is where I really think that engaging with somebody like yourself that can help you guide that strategic sort of vision, but also have the understanding that, listen, don’t call me in three months when your business isn’t bursting at the seams because of this work. That it does take a long time to build a proper backend that your branding, maybe it is a website rebuild, maybe it is more videos, more things that are connected, blog posts, whatever these things are. But it does take more than a year in a lot of cases to be able to build something that starts producing fruit. If I was to lay it out like that with, hey, I think online lead generation in terms of just catching as many people as possible today, do you think in a crowded market that’s becoming oversaturated and not worth people’s while?

Josh Decaire (15:07):

Yeah, I think I’d hesitate to say that it’s not worth people’s. While I think it’s a balance, and I think that there are enough tools now that allow us to automate a lot of pieces of the process and just automate the process where it doesn’t actually require you putting in your time, your energy into staying top of mind with these leads. One thing I’ve been thinking about and trying to test out is voice agents and voice call agents that can do some

Chris Cook (15:49):

Of this. I wanted to ask you about that,

Josh Decaire (15:51):

That can do some qualifying and follow up with some of these leads. And that kind of came out of our last conversation where you mentioned that it can be exhausting some of these conversations with leads who maybe not only are they not actually qualified, maybe they’re just trolling, right, and it’s just a complete waste of time. Well, is there a way that we can use some of these voice agents and AI to help address that kind of adequate, another qualification step in there? And then we’re not throwing all of the lead gen away, but I do agree with the better play, if you can be long-term minded, which you guys are, is to focus on that brand building. And ultimately, like I said when we spoke before, you just need people to know and like you, right? Because a lot of this isn’t just in real estate.

(16:54):

A lot of businesses they say the same thing and have, there’s a base kind of level of knowledge and expertise that you expect as a consumer. And when I’m going out into the market and I’m looking for a realtor, I assume that every realtor is able to sell my house. I assume that every realtor is going to make sure it’s listed in the different places it needs to be listed and they’re going to market it appropriately. And they maybe have some relationships with mortgage brokers and insurance folks. All of these things that a lot of realtors put out as that’s their value proposition. There’s nothing unique about it. And I think what it comes down to is people want to work with people they and they know. And I think locally, I’m not in Toronto, I’m down in the Kingston area. When I think of realtors, there’s maybe three that immediately come to mind because they’ve done such a good job of just being where the consumers are, whether that’s online, whether that’s offline and real estate is still one industry where there is a lot of kind of offline that still can work, but people want to work with people they,

(18:20):

And that’s where you build that kind of brand affinity over time, but it takes time. Yeah.

Chris Cook (18:28):

The thing that I’m really quite curious about, because I don’t know enough about it, and you’d mentioned it, is having like a ISA, but a digital ISA AI person that’s going to scrub these leads that’s going to be to make those 12 eight to 1215 calls and get them through. What’s your experience been with that? Have you been fiddling around with it at all?

Josh Decaire (18:57):

Not in a production environment, purely in test environments. I read a lot of stories and social media posts and following people on Twitter X and whatnot, but where they talk about how great these voice agents are, and I’ve yet to figure out a system that works well enough that it doesn’t just piss consumers off.

Chris Cook (19:34):

That’s the right word.

Josh Decaire (19:37):

Especially I think when AI content kind of first hit mainstream, I think in general, most people or a lot of people were, they thought it was cool. It was fun, it was novel. And now we’re so inundated with AI content and AI experiences that people sentiment has kind of shifted a little bit and people feel a little bit negative towards it.

Chris Cook (20:09):

I think if you’re on the phone with ai,

Josh Decaire (20:14):

Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Cook (20:16):

I don’t think that’s a great big mystery. I phoned the one that I saw. I saw one online where they were demonstrating it, and I think it was like to get your oil changed or something, and then the consumer called back or whoever answers the phone, and you knew it was ai, but I’m just getting my oil changed, so I don’t really care that I’m talking to a robot. I got my appointment booked, I didn’t deal with an this person or this AI was really efficient and my appointment got booked and I know that I’m coming in to get my oil changed on Thursday versus I’m interested in a house and I know I’m talking to a robot that actually I think does more to harm your brand than it does to promote and get you more business.

Josh Decaire (21:13):

I think it definitely could. And that’s where you have to weigh the pros and cons of what do you gain from pulling yourself out of the manual process that frees up your time and energy to focus on leads that are qualified or nurturing your existing and past customer base, trying to get referrals roles. So you have to balance that with maybe it is going to turn some people off. But right now with where the voice agents are at, I feel like the pendulum is still, it’s a little too much on the pissing consumers off side of things. It needs to go a little bit more the other way. And I think all problems also come in when brands try to pass off AI as human versus when they’re transparent about it. That can cause issues for sure. If you get a phone call from an AI agent and they identify themselves as an AI agent right away, you’re less likely I think to get angry about that than if you start a conversation a lot less and then four questions in, you realize, wait a second, this is a robot. And then you’re just going to feel like you’ve been had, right? So yeah, it’s always a balance and these things move so fast too. And then public and consumer sentiment moves fast as well.

(23:04):

So it’s kind of a moving target. But yeah, it is something that I do see opportunity in to address some of the downsides of the kind of quantity approach to lead gen versus the quality and long-term approach to it.

Chris Cook (23:25):

Well, I think one of the things that I know, I don’t think I know because I fall victim to this, but I talk to a lot of other agents as well, and I think a lot of real estate agents, because of the nature of this business, it does turn when you meet somebody and if they’re ready to buy, things can move very quickly. And I think because of that, a lot of real estate agents have become very impatient with that beginning part of the process. And I think the result of that is that we’re all of us looking for this silver bullet that’s going to fill our pipeline of active business today. And then the other problem that we have is that when our pipeline does get filled, we don’t have any time to prospect. So we get this pendulum that goes, it is a roller coaster, it’s not a pendulum where you’re really busy and you have all kinds of maybe 3, 4, 5, 6 clients that are all active and then they all buy or sell, and you find yourself unemployed.

(24:40):

And while you’re busy, you’re pretty much every waking hour. If you had five or six active clients, especially if they’re buyers, your every waking hour is spent servicing these clients. And that’s something I think that the general sort of public doesn’t really understand is all of the work that goes into the backend to properly service a buyer or seller client, it is a full-time job. It’s a full-time job, five or six clients is a huge undertaking. And so then you’re not prospecting during that time. If you’re doing lead generation at that time, then you’re not calling those people and they’re going by the wayside. Maybe your systems aren’t built out all that well to be able to send information to them to keep them interested and call you when they’re ready. And I even think emails and any of that sort of drip campaigns, they don’t work near as well as a phone call.

(25:48):

And so the issue that we have is that we’ve got a lot of agents that are looking for some sort of silver bullet because either they’re lazy and they don’t want to actually do any work. They just want the reward of selling houses, or they physically don’t have the consistency of time to be able to put in to keep the pipeline generating new business on a consistent basis. So they go through these ebbs and flows of business. And that’s why I think the takeaway from all of our conversations from the last months and for me years of doing online lead generation, is that I think it’s a short term solution to look for Instagram or Facebook leads is more of a solution. But what you’ve got to be doing is looking, you got to be looking to build a platform that pulls people to you if you don’t want or you don’t have the time to put to the consistent calls. Even Instagram is a massive undertaking to record and post relevant information that stays consistent. I think that for me, that’s probably more draining than the phone calls.

Josh Decaire (27:19):

It’s a lot of work. People who haven’t done it before, they greatly underestimate the amount of work that can go into a 32nd reel, especially if you are trying to approach it from a strategic angle as opposed to just, which what most people do is like, oh, I haven’t posted on Instagram in a while. I’m going to talk to my phone now for a minute and hit post. And again, they’re not tying it back to, what are you trying to accomplish here? What’s the goal? What’s your identity? All that type of stuff. But yeah, I think the long-term approach is definitely the right play if you have the ability to do that. And for some agents, they’re not going to have that runway.

Chris Cook (28:17):

Can you elaborate on that? What do you mean?

Josh Decaire (28:19):

Yeah, so I mean, you’ve been in business for a while now and you have a lot of relationships. You’ve got a lot of past clients. Most of your business is referral based, which is the case for most realtors. Most realtors, it’s 70% of business is referral based. And the more clients you have over time, the bigger a book you have that you can then draw referrals from. But if you’re brand new and just starting out today, you don’t have that book that you can kind of draw referrals from, and you might not have a year runway, financial runway, you got to pay rent or mortgage today and next month. You can’t wait for your pipeline to fill up a year from now when the brand building pays off. So that’s where some of those shorter term strategies, they kind of do have more of a place. And if you’re an agent in that boat, you’ve probably got the time to follow up with those leads. What else are you doing?

Chris Cook (29:42):

Well, I’m glad that you said that we’re right at the end here, but I love that you actually said that because something that I often, when I talk to new agents and I say exactly that, it’s like, well, what else are you doing? I think a lot of, there’s a lot activities that you can engage in as a realtor that aren’t moneymaking activities, but that make you feel like you are working. And I think at the end of the day, your number one goal, especially at the beginning of your career, is to meet new people as many as possible, as quickly as possible. And that’s why maybe you get some pushback from me on the online lead generation where I’m like, yeah, I don’t want these Instagram leads because I got to call ’em eight to 12 times, and I have a book of other business that I need to actually be taken care of right now that if I do a good job with, we’ll turn into repeat referral, which will feed my pipeline later. So it’s probably no wonder that you’re getting pushback from me on that, but maybe if you’re a newer agent, that’s where you’re going to get some earlier wins.

Josh Decaire (30:51):

For sure. And we’ve been, when we’re talking about meta ads in this conversation, it’s been focused on lead gen specifically, but there’s all kinds of different approaches to meta ads and using it as a awareness and brand building platform instead of a lead generation platform. Your costs for impressions and traffic go way down. As soon as you’re not trying to get meta to give you leads, you’re just trying to get it to give you eyeballs, give you feed time in front of a relevant audience. But realtors and not just realtors, business people in general, they don’t tend to like that because the metrics there are a lot more nebulous. What is awareness? How do we measure awareness? And they don’t see a direct reflection between this many people saw my ad today and then three months later I had a lead come in and that lead only came in because they saw my ad today. Right?

Chris Cook (31:57):

Right.

Josh Decaire (32:00):

It’s tough, but yeah, it doesn’t matter what approach you take, you have to come at it from a strategic point of view and not just a let’s throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Right, right.

Chris Cook (32:17):

Yeah. Okay. Awesome. We’re going to wrap it up here, but I do want to say, first of all, thanks for putting up for me with me and because I’m a realtor. At the end of the day, I’m a strategic person, but I have the tendency like anybody to be reactive and to go more towards the tactics because it feels like you’re doing something today.

(32:41):

But if I was to send a message out to anybody that’s listening to this is the importance of having somebody like Josh to keep you on track on a strategic perspective, somebody that when you get reactive and you say, I don’t want to do this one thing anymore. I want to focus on this. And they said, no, no, no, no, no. We talked about this. This is where you guys wanted to go. Why has that changed? And I think having somebody that you can rely on to be able to drive the strategy behind your marketing pieces is really important.

Josh Decaire (33:16):

Yeah, I agree. Obviously I’m a little biased, but I agree, and I think it also, it helps with the issue that you talked about, about the ebbs and the flows, right? When you’re extremely busy, you don’t have time to do marketing, and then when you’re not busy, all you have is time, but your pipeline’s not full. So it kind of helps balance that out too, right?

Chris Cook (33:39):

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Josh, thanks so much for your time. Appreciate. Yeah, thanks Chris. Appreciate all that you do and then being in here as

Josh Decaire (33:48):

Well. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, appreciate it.

Chris Cook (33:54):

Here’s our top three takeaways from today’s session with Josh Foundations. First, a real marketing engine only works when your website brand identity and CRM are built properly. Second, tactics serve strategy. Posting on Instagram or buying leads is not a strategy and only makes sense when it supports a long-term plan. And last brand beats called leads in crowded markets, building a recognizable presence that attracts people to you outperforms chasing strangers who are not ready to move. Thanks so much for listening today. Please like and share this with somebody that you think would enjoy this podcast. We’ll see you next time on Mind. Your real Estate business. I.