How to Become a Real Estate Mogul – With Top Florida Realtors

At this year’s HyperFast Agent Growth Summit in Boca Raton, we featured a panel of top-producing Florida real estate agents, including social media guru Mari Juliette, savvy realtor, and army veteran Nicole Stabra, and luxury real estate specialist Jimmy Branham. They offered tips on scaling a successful real estate business, hiring the right people, and acquiring organic leads to build a sphere of influence.

Mari Juliette has brokerage in Pompano Beach of 20 agents – they just opened about six months ago with a bunch of young agents, mostly women, covering Miami to Palm Beach, with recent expansion to the Orlando and Tampa areas.

Nicole Stanbro is with the Stanbro home team. She has an amazing team of five women in the Jupiter and Palm Beach area and also serves North Palm Beach County and Martin County.

Jimmy Branham is with the Keyes company and his markets are primarily the Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach area. He has a couple of buyer's agents that work with him and two virtual assistants. They are a smaller team under a larger brokerage and do about 60 to 70 transactions each year.

The real estate business has really been growing the past few years, especially since the onset of the pandemic, and all of these agents have been growing their teams.

Nicole said she learned from mentors like Keri Shull about how to grow her team step-by-step, and the most important thing for her was hiring a partner agent and having a solid right hand.

“Most of my business was like 80% paid leads,” said Nicole. “And then it's amazing what they say: after two years of real estate, all of a sudden, the floodgates open and you start getting more referral business.”

Mari transitioned from medical device sales into real estate pretty quickly.?

“I ended up just using the tools that I learned in medical device sales into real estate,” she said. She was able to get all of her clients organically. “So every single person that I've worked with, I've never paid for leads in my career.”

“I got into investing and helping investors buy properties that would make them great returns on their investment and kind of build that trust with investors – also, so that I would get that repeat business,” she said. “I just kind of continued to not think about the purchase price and the commission in my pocket, but more so how I was going to make these clients money, so that they would come back to me and trust me with their purchases and their investments.”

Jimmy talked about wanting to do what’s best for his clients “even if it's going to cost me money, cost me a sale in the short term.”?

“When I'm going to go into price, I look at three different areas,” said Jimmy. “One, I'll track the market trend to see what those comps were selling for about a year ago and then figure out kind of the way an appraiser would figure out the whole overarching market and get that growth data together so they can see that. Then we'll also look at recent comps.”

One important way to grow is to learn directly from others.

“I've always been a huge advocate of finding a mentor in every phase of your life, whether that's for personal, you know, relationship stuff, for kids stuff, for family stuff, whatever, or for your business,” said Nicole.

Networking and building relationships is also important.

“One of the best skills is reaching out to the agents who have the pending and the active under contract listings, and seeing what they will share with you in terms of how close to list price or if they had multiple offers or what the traffic was on that listing, because then those are more real-time that you can use to comp,” said Nicole. “It's all relationships, but finding the mentor and building that village and support staff around you, that will help you succeed.”

Mari said that one thing that she wished she knew when she was a brand new agent was “just to separate your own emotions and feelings about the deal from the deal itself. And the more you can do that, especially when you're dealing with other agents, like when there's egos involved, and sometimes you can get into a situation within negotiations, where you're like, Is this about the client? And the deal? Or is this about me and this agent just butting heads?”

“So I really found that being nice, like you said, networking with other agents. And being the nice agent that people want to work with,” said Mari. “If I had a listing, and there was a listing across the street, instead of saying, ‘Oh, my God, that's my competition, I'm going to avoid them’ I would go to their open house and then say, hey, let's do open houses at the same time, let's try to get the traffic at the same time, and then ended up sending selling both houses.”

Jimmy agreed with this approach.

“I think having great industry relationships is so important,” he said. “I mean, I'm getting referrals from old realtors that I partnered with in the marketplace, and we would do deals together and now they got out of the business and they're sending me leads.” He also uses a gifting program called LOLO that reaches out to other local businesses in the marketplace. “Every month we're sending a free gift – it's not a coupon – to go utilize that local business.”

Nicole also emphasizes the personal touch. “I always do a handwritten note just to make sure that they know that I care,” she said. “Everything's kind of online now. So if you can do things, you know, in writing, people appreciate it.”

You can watch or listen to the entire panel on Episode 348 of the HyperFast Agent podcast.

Available Here:?Apple Podcasts?|?Spotify?|?YouTube