How To Make Real Estate Agents CEO's

REE #299 Transcript

[00:00:00] Sasha Tripp: Stop planning the actions. Just take an action. Like you're only gonna know 80% of the info. You know, like you're only gonna have 80% clarity on any decision. It's like if you've thought about it a while, if it's surfaced multiple times, if you see a lot of other people doing it, it's working for them—like, just take an action.

Hey, welcome back to the Real Estate Excellence Podcast. If you have been in the real estate industry for any amount of time, you've likely heard of Place, Real Broker, or a high-level mastermind shaping the future of our profession. But behind the logos and the coaching calls, there are a few operators who actually live what they teach.

[00:01:11] Tracy Hayes: They don't just talk of systems and leverage. They build them, refine them, and win with them. Today's guest isn't from Northeast Florida, but she's coming in for the RE Bar Camp One Coast in January to bring national insights straight to our local agents, and you're going to see exactly why she's built one of Central Virginia's most recognized real estate brands. She's spoken on stages across the country. She's led agents, built systems, and scaled teams that deliver. And now she's joined Real, powered by Place, 'cause she understands that you don't grow by accident—you grow with intention. Let's welcome Sasha Tripp of Story House Real Estate to the show.

[00:01:56] Sasha Tripp: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to get to know everybody a little bit before I actually get there.

[00:02:01] Tracy Hayes: Yes, I appreciate that. And I—some of your other facilitators at the RE Bar Camp I've had on before as well and have a couple of the new ones I'm gonna have on here before January. So I appreciate you coming on and bringing some different insight coming from Virginia. Now, I wanted to ask you, because I got confused a little bit with Real and Place, and of course Story House—I love it. Oh my gosh. We could have a whole podcast, podcast differentiator there.

[00:02:28] Sasha Tripp: Yeah. I mean, okay, so I'll give you my whole life story. I used to be an independent company. About a little over a year ago, I ran an independent—so it was just Story House Real Estate.

[00:02:40] Tracy Hayes: Little boutique brokerage.

[00:02:41] Sasha Tripp: Little boutique. Yeah. We had like, at that time, maybe eight agents—seven, eight agents. And I thought I was always gonna be independent, but I started going to all of these different webinars, seminars, conferences. I was just like getting inundated with the technology advancements that were coming in the real estate world and all the stuff with AI.

And I am a big, big entrepreneur. So I get entrepreneurial coaching from Dan Sullivan with Strategic Coach. So, you know, big picture, like not real estate-focused—top-down coaching. And I started to see, like, I don't think I wanna be solo in this giant sea anymore. Like there were so many benefits in the period of time that I was doing it, but it was starting to become outweighed by feeling like, okay, if I'm gonna run a really lucrative, successful business in Central Virginia, I can't also be on the cutting edge of AI and technology and all the massive changes that are happening to our industry right now.

So I decided at that time, okay, I wanna start looking at one of the bigger franchises. The attraction to me for Real was they did have what was called private label, which means I could still brand myself as Story House Real Estate. Not that I didn't wanna affiliate with Real, but the amount of money that you save in not having to rebrand, remarket, redo your signs, redo all of that—it's not available in every single state, but it should be within about a year. So I can still be Story House Real Estate. I slowly add Real logo and branding to everything. I'm fully affiliated with Real. I get all the benefits, all the backend—really nice, like a really amazing platform.

But I did not have to sink in massive amounts of money to change my branding, and I don't lose my brand that I worked so hard to build. So that was the reason I went with Real. That has been an incredible journey. It's only been a little over a year. That has massively helped my business—just the economies of scale of not having to do all of those things on my own like I was doing as an independent.

I ended up saving money, even though I thought I was saving money by having like no commission due. So anyways, right—long story short, that's why I joined Real. And then Place is a platform that powers high-producing teams. So it's not a brokerage, it's not—it's brokerage non-denominational. So any team in the nation that has a profit margin that would qualify can partner with Place.

And it essentially—the best way I can describe Place is it layered like corporate USA and all the backend: onboarding, HR, payroll, accounting, finances, technology—it laid all of that out beneath me being able to run my mom-and-pop shop. Like run my team the way I want to and run my company the way I want to.

So my consumer thinks, “Oh, it's still Story House Real Estate that I always knew and loved.” But on the backend, my agent and my own internal staff has all the power of like a corporate partnership. It's like we were, you know, like the assembly-line ability of a McDonald's with like, “this is how it's done,” it's easily recurrent, it all exists. And now I layer that in, but I still get to have that mom-and-pop-shop feel.

So it's been a great fit for me. It's a layering of a lot of partnerships. But something I learned about a year ago is that I'm going much further in partnership with a lot of people than I was trying to kind of do it solo and save money and save complication. So the partnerships have just been a big—

I love that you asked that question 'cause it's so confusing, and maybe I can use this because I could probably save myself like hours of phone calls with people about it. But yeah, it's really confusing, but it's just like the layering of things that set me up for success. And it's been an incredible—

[00:06:16] Tracy Hayes: Couple of—well, the interesting thing is I—I use ChatGPT for everything. So every show's uploaded, it knows me very well. Yep. It's got so many transcripts that have been uploaded. So when I have a new guest, I take their bios and I upload it all. I just throw it all in there and I say, “Okay, I need an intro.”

And that's what it—so based on your bios, it's pulled it out and translated it in to present it in the way that I just said it. And I actually should have briefed it a little bit more so I had better understanding. But I knew it was—I was going to ask that question, some clarification there.

So is Place real estate?

[00:06:56] Sasha Tripp: All real estate teams. Yeah. So there are probably, at this point, maybe—let's call it 450 teams across the nation.

[00:07:04] Tracy Hayes: All different brokerages?

[00:07:05] Sasha Tripp: Yeah. It doesn't matter. Yeah. You see a lot of people at Real, Keller Williams, RE/MAX, eXp—a lot of representations from the growth brokerages. That end up—it's a great model if you have satellite offices, if you're helping agents in other cities, other states. It's just a really nice model.

But I was getting to the point—and we'll maybe talk about this later—I was getting to the point as a team leader where it was like I'd been five years in. Like we've been doing great things and like every year I'm learning more, I'm getting more experience, I'm becoming a better leader, I'm understanding the industry more. But I still felt like for the last five years I've had the exact same business.

It's like we were making marginal growth, but I was used to like 20% increases year after year and like really nice organic growth, powered on by some, you know, some push campaigns. So I was used to this really tremendous trajectory. And then I feel like for the past five years, it's literally been like—no matter how hard I work, no matter how much experience I have, no matter how much leverage I got—I was just living the same business again and again.

And I was starting to feel like, okay, like that doesn't feel great for anybody. Everybody wants to feel like they're growing, including people on my team. And I started kind of coming up against, you know, how am I gonna keep adding more? I don't wanna be a place that people outgrow. I don't want people to have to go out on their own to have better opportunities.

And so for me, partnering with someone that kind of brought this extreme level of extra opportunity, revenue sharing, ways to diversify my income—it just brought like, again, corporate USA. Like I can give health insurance to my agents if they're at a certain level of production. It just brought all these different ways to grow, without, in my mind, just growing by way of just more and more sales and more market.

[00:08:53] Tracy Hayes: So my curiosity—'cause I don't think I—you know, I've personally—this is not actually rocket science. It's actually brilliant. I don't think enough agents or teams even realize something like this is out there. Or maybe they just fear 'cause maybe it might cost something. But, you know, a lot of things you just—

[00:09:30] Tracy Hayes: …mentioned, like, you know, obviously recruiting and retention—if you're trying to build a team, those are your bookends. I mean, that's what puts it all together. And over time, you know, you—hopefully you're bringing in more and you're retaining more than what's growing and leaving. And to keep 'em in there, you've gotta have some of these other perks, some of this corporate, you know, benefits that you're talking about. And it sounds like Place—that’s definitely something.

I don't wanna be a commercial for Place today. I wanna talk more about you.

[00:09:42] Sasha Tripp: No, it's an awesome—awesome. It's awesome. I do wish more people knew about it. I feel like, you know, teams are a small—like a true team that has somebody that runs operations or you have—it can't just be like, “me and my husband are a team.” It's gotta be a team that has one or two agents. It's gotta have—

[00:10:00] —some administrative staff that has some strength, not like a part-time random VA. It's gotta have somebody that can run the show. But so, when you describe it as that, that narrows down the number of people that would really qualify to fall into that.

But yeah, it's been a great model and I just think a lot of people are gonna have to really re-evaluate their business model. Margins are getting smaller, transactions are getting harder, marketing is getting more expensive. I just—and then it's getting harder and harder to be all things to all people. So I think the solo agent is gonna really struggle. I think the, you know, pairs of like two producing agents that sort of back each other up while they're out of town—I think that's gonna really struggle.

I think leverage is gonna be the way to stay relevant. And so as soon as I saw that shift, I was like, well—you know, this may not be the forever answer, but this is an answer that absolutely is super crystal clear to me right now, that it's the way to keep up. And then since joining, it's like I've just been nothing but like—I think it very—

[00:11:00] —well will be the forever answer for us. But I was really looking for like, “How am I gonna stay relevant for the next five years?” You know? And that was the best I could do at that time. So, yeah, it's interesting. And whether it's that or another backend platform that allows you to bring more value to your agents—but also as a team leader, to have a way out. Like, to have an exit plan. To know that the last house you sell isn't gonna be your last piece of income forever, aside from investment properties—that was a big goal that I think just more and more people are gonna start focusing on, as things get a little tighter in the real estate world.

[00:11:37] Tracy Hayes: I think this is kind of a—not just in Place—but it sounds like in your business, you said something actually a few minutes ago, that when you started to—it sounded like you were trying to describe to me—correct me if I'm wrong—delegating off some of these things so that you could be doing the more forward-focusing things in growing your business.

[00:12:00] Right? Has been a great impact to what you've been doing. And would you agree—and now, you know, you're coaching and you're turning agents into CEOs, right? That probably one of the biggest obstacles is that, you know, first hire—transaction coordinator, whatever it may be, and whatever level you're at in the business—that a lot of agents don't grow because they just can't get out of doing everything themselves.

And trying to, right, you know, be the—I don't wanna say one-stop shop, because they're just—they just have an unwillingness to let someone else take on some of them. Thinking, “Oh my God, that's gonna be an expense,” when I think a lot—you know, obviously there's a lot of like transaction coordinators that are paid for play. I'm like, “Well, if you don't do a deal, you don't pay them.”

You know, they gotta—you find other things. But you can—right? That tells us—

[00:12:49] Sasha Tripp: It's not only about the expense, right? There's other layers of issues that are built in, but yeah, that's absolutely right. And I think a lot of people have been burned. Like they tried it. Like, this is not our full-time job. We're good at sales, we're good at talking to people, we're good at building rapport. No one's taught us how to do this.

And then we don't—by the time we go to hire, it's like, we don't have time to study up on how to do this best. So we go to some random coach or we go look online, or now people are probably going to ChatGPT and it's like: “Write me a job description. What should they do? What are their tasks? How do I set them up?”

But no one can teach you how to be a good inter—like ChatGPT is not gonna teach you how to do a good interview and identify the right person to hire. And we're just not there yet. And I think that's what's lacking. So people go in, you have an interview. In my experience—I've coached hundreds of real estate agents—the interview is just them talking about themselves and trying to prove that they're a good company to work for.

And they're not actually really gathering a ton of information about the person on the other side of the table. And then they hire them 'cause they felt like that was a charismatic person that seems administratively skilled or whatever. Or it’s a mini-me, which is typically the worst hire when it’s your first hire, but it's like, “Oh, I could see them doing what I do in the future.”

[00:14:00] So, okay—that shouldn’t be your administrative assistant in most cases, but—

[00:14:03] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:14:04] Sasha Tripp: —neither here nor there. And then they get burned, right? They have a horrible experience, and then they're like, “Oh, staffing's too much. This is terrible. It took too much time, it was too much money, it's a waste of time. No one can do it as well as I can. I'm just gonna keep doing it.”

And it's like, well—none of those things are true. But that seems to be the very common path. Or you get so busy that you're like, “Well, I can't hire because it would just take me more time to train that person to do the task than it would for me to just do it again.”

And that—like, having a platform like Place, or something else, like a great coaching system—Place actually sort of recruits and interviews your staff for you, like does the process. Like gets you to having a staff person with a much better process than you would on your own.

But it's like, having some true systems around how to make that first hire so that they're not adding a whole lot of extra work to you. Like they can shadow you, they can follow you, you can screen-record while you're already doing a task that you are going to be doing anyway. Like if you have templates, if you have onboarding protocol—it doesn't have to be a time suck.

[00:15:00] And it also doesn’t have to be a horrible experience where it’s like, “Oh, I’m probably gonna have to hire three people before I find the right one.” That’s not true. That’s just real estate true, because no one’s trained us to do it and there’s not a real clear path for it.

So yeah, I spend a lot of my time kind of talking about that, trying to get people moved that direction.

[00:15:27] Tracy Hayes: To make that leap—a leap of faith. I've had several ladies, actually, that have broken off. You know, one ran operations for a very large brokerage here and started her own company that provides those services. Wow. She does all the hiring and firing and provides those services.

I wish more agents—'cause I try to talk about them all the time—because I really feel that is like just a ceiling for a lot of agents. Right? They get to a certain level of production, and then they’re doing it all themselves. And then they can’t grow. And then, you know, it comes—you know, comes burnout and then they start fading.

Where obviously the others who are willing to say, “Hey, all right, I need a transaction coordinator.” Everyone has an opinion on who should be hired first—

[00:16:00] —oh right—assistant or whatever, that kind of thing, right? But to realize that there actually are people that are better than you at it, because that’s all they do. Right? And I think you made a great point—why everyone should take those psych tests on what they like to do.

[00:16:23] Sasha Tripp: I mean, all the—yeah, all the DISC testing, the personality testing, the types of working genius—there are so many solutions that I'm just like, wow, you know? Like, we're not dumb. Real estate agents aren't dumb. It's like we just have a completely different skillset and we do this so rarely.

You know, it's like there's just no—there's no real playbook for it until there is, right? And then yeah, there's companies that do it, there's companies that layer it on, there's recruiting folks that'll do it for you. But I always think, like—I came from a very brief time in the HR world and like, you know—

[00:17:00] —turnover, when you really look at the cost of turnover…

[00:17:00] Sasha Tripp: …you can spend 50 to 150% of a person's salary just in the cost of turnover. And so it's like, no wonder we're scared of it. It's like, you do that once and you get burned once, and then you're like, “Oh, this is not the path.”

But yeah, everything I've learned—you know, and Dan Sullivan, who wrote Who Not How, Gap and the Gain, 10x is Easier Than 2x—he is my entrepreneurial coach. And everything I learn from him is like: you're just one who away from your next leveling up. But so many people just get burnt early on and they're like, “I'm not a leader. I don't wanna hire, I don't wanna employ people, I don't wanna have to manage them.”

And that can be a true ceiling forever on their entire career and their life.

[00:17:49] Tracy Hayes: Well, you think—you know, obviously every agent's their own little business. They're all entrepreneurs, they're all 1099. And when you—you know, everyone has a different way they want—

[00:18:00] —to use the transaction coordinator or their assistant, a different way. And knowing, right, there seems to be just a lot of disconnect versus—what I have found talking to over 250 agents—and, you know, whether they were before that ceiling or they’ve broken through that ceiling—it’s the level of communication with whoever you're bringing on.

You know, a transaction coordinator, assistant—“This is how I want you to—you know, how we're going to do business.” You’ve gotta get on the same page versus, “Hey, I hired a transaction coordinator.” You use your transaction coordinator totally different than someone else does. You know?

And I think, like you said, they go, “Oh, that was a bad experience. All transaction coordinators are bad.”

[00:18:47] Sasha Tripp: Yeah.

[00:18:48] Tracy Hayes: No, it’s probably actually you, 'cause you never actually told them how you want it to happen. Right?

[00:18:51] Sasha Tripp: Yeah. And it's tough because again, like—we are typically highest and best skilled at sales, or some—you know, hopefully if you're getting to the point where you need staff, that means you're probably pretty good at that.

Which—like, that skillset is often very opposite the skillset that's gonna be a person that's good at being thorough, having like, you know, SOPs, having really thorough, detailed checklists for people to tell them how to do their job.

But I always remind myself—I used to be a terrible employer. Like, I hired my first assistant—I think I hired like nine people before I placed my first assistant. And there were some people—like, I had this girl, she was so nice. She could not clearly, like, speak a full sentence. And I'm like, “How did I miss that at the interview?”

Like, she was nice, she was good at technology, she really worked hard, but like—her, just her language, her way of verbally communicating with people, like, could never have represented me. And of course I hired her.

And then, you know, when you're new at it and you have a bleeding heart and you don't want to give up on anybody, and you take the—you know, it's like, I always take the blame. Like, there's no bad hires, there's only bad employers or bad bosses.

[00:20:00] And I always had that mentality. But I'm like, well, if you hire completely the wrong person, with the wrong skill set, with the wrong capability—there might be a bad hire. But a lot of people are hired with the right skills and capabilities, and they had a bad manager or bad boss that never helped, that never gave them any feedback.

But it’s like—I just try to remember, all of these people come to work every day wanting to make you happy, wanting to do a good job, wanting to complete the task at hand. And so, I have to really remind myself that it’s really up to me to pour into them in a way that they're going to be able to do that.

And typically the average hire is really motivated to figure out that path. But if we don't make time for it, if we just keep saying, “Oh, it's easier to just do it myself,” you really never blow past that ceiling, unfortunately, which is where so many get stuck.

[00:20:49] Tracy Hayes: All right. Let's change pace a little bit. Let's just get a little background for the audience. You were in staffing, if I recall correctly, from your LinkedIn, right?

[00:20:56] Sasha Tripp: Yeah.

[00:20:57] Tracy Hayes: You mentioned HR for like a second.

[00:21:00] Yeah. Tell us what led you into real estate, and, you know, kind of give us a little background. You know—was family in it? What attracted you over? And tell us a little about your start.

[00:21:12] Sasha Tripp: It's so funny. It's not a very exciting story. I went to the University of Virginia. I graduated—I was a religious studies major. So I didn't have any background in anything that would have a job opportunity in 2005.

And, you know, it was like—we were going into a pretty bad market. A pretty big recession at that time was just around the corner. So I got my first job out of college. I made like $30,000 a year, and it was working for a temporary staffing firm in Charlottesville. I just took the first job that I was offered.

And it started as like, “Oh, I'm gonna do a temporary placement for an executive assistant who goes on maternity leave.” And that was all fine and good, but after a couple of months, it was kind of like the industrial warehouse requests were starting to pick up, and the admin staff and like desk jobs and, you know, financial people—those requests were down turning.

[00:22:00] So I found myself working staffing for these big warehouses where it would be like me—we had to wear high heels and pantyhose. And this is like 2005. This isn't like the '90s. I don't know—I couldn't believe it. So high heels and pantyhose every day. I was like 22 years old.

And I was staffing all these big warehouses of like forklift drivers, people that were operating all this heavy machinery. And as a temporary staffing person, I wasn't even meeting a lot of them. I'm hiring and firing them over the phone. I'm trying to screen them, trying to figure out their transportation problems, figure out how to get them to work, how to keep them employed if like the babysitter cancels or whatever. Right?

So that was rough. And then, like, I would have to fire them. So there’d be these guys—like, this was the day. This was the end for me.

There was a guy—he was drinking on the job. They found like a bottle—a handle of bourbon in his locker or whatever. And they were like, “Sasha, you gotta go fire him, and you have to do it at the end of the day, 'cause we don't want him to, like, lash out at anybody.”

[00:23:00] So it’s like—it was like January or February. It's pitch black at 4:30 PM. I have to go an hour from where I live, drive out to this book binding warehouse. I'm in there in my high heels and pantyhose as a 22-year-old girl, in pitch black, in a warehouse full of burly dudes. And I have to go fire the guy that’s drinking on the job, that I've never met before.

And I was just like, “Well, this is not how I'm gonna die. So this is my last day.”

So I called in—I was like, “I'll give two weeks’ notice. I'm not doing this again. I'm not doing the warehouses. And that’s it.”

And so, I had no plan whatsoever. But I was thinking about buying my first house soon, 'cause that’s back when you were 22 and you were young, and—even if you made $30,000 a year—you actually could buy a house. So that was a very different time.

But I was thinking about buying a house and I realized—I didn’t know anything. I literally came out of a high-end institution not knowing a thing about how to buy a house: personal budgeting, mortgages, liens, loans, title—I didn’t know anything. Like I didn’t know a single useful thing as an adult financial person.

[00:24:00] So I was like, “Well, if I wanna buy a house, I should learn about it.” So I had no job, and I was like, “Well, I guess I’ll just take the real estate class.” So I took the class. And at the end of it—it’s kind of like they funnel you into the test—I was like, “I might as well take the test.”

So I took the test. I passed it. And then I was like, “Well, I might as well get my license, 'cause I don't have a job.”

And again, this is back in a different time—

[00:24:31] Tracy Hayes: You had no intentions of being a real estate agent?

[00:24:33] Sasha Tripp: No. Oh no. I had no idea. But then—oh my God—my fiancé at the time, his aunt ran a real estate company in Charlottesville, which somehow—until I, I didn’t even know that. And so I passed my license, or I passed my exam. I'm interviewing these random companies in town. I don't know anyone, you know—I have no adult friends, I just got out of college.

[00:25:00] Sasha Tripp: …interviewing random people, and I think it was like my uncle at the time—this was my ex-husband, so my ex-uncle-in-law or whatever, right?

[00:25:04] Tracy Hayes: He—

[00:25:04] Sasha Tripp: —was like, “Well, have you talked to Carol?” And I was like, “About what?” And that’s when I found out that she was the president of a real estate company in Charlottesville. I was like, “I should probably join that one.” So I joined that one.

[00:25:16] Tracy Hayes: Your ex-husband didn’t even connect your—I mean literally—

[00:25:19] Sasha Tripp: Nothing! Like there was no foresight. So I don’t feel like this is really motivational for anybody, but I will say—I had no background skill, right? I had a great mentor, and I had a company that I came into where they were just ethical, by the book, taught you how to write a contract, and they were not gonna let you go out there and do stupid things.

And so I got this really great background in real estate, and the market was horrible. You know, it was ’06, ’07, ’08. So it was slowing down, so there were no houses to be sold. But I ended up, in that time, I was like, “I'm gonna get my ABR, my CRS, my GRI. I’m gonna do all the training. I'm gonna take every class ’cause I have nothing else to do.”

And then by the time the market opened up a teeny bit—and then I went to every networking event in town. You would think that I was on every board of directors. I went to everything in town, and people I think just started to associate—like, they saw me, they knew real estate. I’m at everything.

And one day the market kind of opened up, and I was pretty well educated, so I could talk a big game, even though I had never sold a house. And I think people just thought I was good, and they started calling.

[00:26:21] Tracy Hayes: So you’re like 23, 24, 25?

[00:26:24] Sasha Tripp: Yeah, that's when I started. I had probably started making a little money when I was about 25. 23 and 24—I think my first year in real estate, I made like negative $18,000, because I had expenses and who knows what I was doing. And then my second year, I made like $5,000.

And then the third year is when I feel like—that's the year I realized that real estate is not about houses and design and architecture, and that it's just about people. And when I finally realized that—which one would think would come sooner than that—then things kind of really took off, and then it started—you know, then it got fun really fast.

[00:27:03] Tracy Hayes: Well, you needed some at-bats. Obviously, that time was very thin, so you didn't have enough at-bats probably consistently to really start to put things together. But that is so interesting, 'cause I can only imagine—and I truly believe this is true—that experience that you had there helps you tremendously when you're trying to onboard a fairly new agent or, you know, maybe an agent that's been doing it a while but just hasn't had a lot of success, right?

Your beginning—'cause you mentioned the word “mentor.” Tell us a little bit about your ideology, your mindset when you are coaching some newer people—whether they're just brand new or just some agents maybe been in the business two or three years but just haven’t had any real success yet.

[00:27:48] Sasha Tripp: Yeah, so I mean, yeah—having had like three years of no or negative income I do think makes it a lot more relatable. So I—A, I’m very realistic with people about what it looks like because, granted, we have way better systems now.

You know, I joined a brokerage—it was a great brokerage—but it was a lot of tenured agents. Like, they had nice businesses. It wasn’t really—it wasn’t like I didn’t join a team, I didn’t join a plan. I was still creating my business from scratch.

Now we’ve created this incredible system. It’s very plug-and-play. Like, you go do these activities, and it’s something that I could tell most other young agents—like, you go do these activities with commitment and really do them, and you are going to make money in six months.

But I can also give them that conversation of, like, you’re definitely—well, not definitely—it’s very likely that you're not gonna make money for the first couple of months, because just the logistics of the amount of time it takes to meet a person who wants to buy a house and then get that house to closing—even if they ratify the next day, it's a couple of months.

So I can be very realistic, but I can also say—you need to be mentally prepared. And I can talk to them about what that looks like. And having gone through the trenches—like, it's not for everyone.

There are a lot of people that are great salespeople, they’re lovely people, they're great marketers, they’re really good at books and accounting and administrative—but they will simply fail in this business because they don't have the mindset. They don't have the wherewithal to get through the hard part.

And I think the more we can candidly share that with people, the better. So yeah—being really realistic about expectations, I think, is really big. Having some sort of a plug-and-play system so they don’t just sit at their desk every day and stare at a computer and scroll through their phone trying to figure out what they’re supposed to do with it—that is super helpful.

But also making sure—do they have some mental resilience? Like, are they already flustered just coming to an interview with you? Are they already flustered when you ask them to role-play a very simple scenario on the spot?

Because if they’re already flustered by that, I’m not gonna say it’s gonna be impossible to succeed—it’s just gonna be a longer learn. You know? It’s gonna take more time, more effort, and it's gonna have more resistance and friction around it.

[00:29:54] Tracy Hayes: How important do you think it is for—you know, I’m gonna go back to the mentor word you used earlier, ’cause I’m a strong believer—I think the choice of brokerage can make or break a brand new agent.

Some people work through it because they can just survive anywhere. You know, for some people it’s not a big deal. But I think a good majority—why 80% of the agents don’t actually renew their license—is because they stepped into the wrong atmosphere. You know, they’re looking at a broker or whatever—they just don’t know. They don’t know what they don’t know.

And they’re not getting some of the things that you just mentioned: “Hey, I'm gonna make sure that this person’s gonna stay busy for 60 or 90 days. I’m gonna give them a 60–90-day window where they’re doing something every day.” Because the day you don’t have something for them to do, you could lose them.

[00:30:43] Sasha Tripp: Right. For sure.

Well, it's interesting. I was on like a—my whole life I had not really recruited to our brokerage 'cause we were just a little team. It was like we were just Navy SEALs. We would only bring someone in as an assistant to another producing agent when that agent got too busy. We didn't bring anyone new, anyone green.

And now that we've joined Place, and it's like—we have all the onboarding, we have all the systems, we have the CRM, we have video recording of every single thing, so that I'm not teaching—the friction with bringing a new person on and getting them into production is massively reduced.

But like, it took a long time to get to that place. But we spent a lot of years where I didn’t recruit anyone, which meant I got to have—any time I met with other agents, they knew I wasn’t recruiting them.

[00:31:30] And that means I got to have such good, candid conversations with agents about what they were looking at. And I would recommend, like, “Okay, of the couple of places you’re thinking about, this is the one I’d go to.”

And it was astonishing to me how many of them were picking places—they're like, “Oh, they have some pretty marketing.” And I'm like, “Well, it doesn't matter if they can't teach you how to ever get a listing—you're never gonna have a listing to market.”

Or, “They just have the best split.” And I will say—we have the least competitive split in our marketplace. I know that because of everything that we provide to our agents. But we also have, like—if you looked at the top 10 producers in our market, we have three of them. And we only had six agents last year.

So it's like—we have extremely productive, extremely experienced, skilled agents. And we are not offering them the most competitive split.

But people often are choosing—they just go with the best split. They go with the person that has pretty marketing. Or they go with the person that just taught them their real estate pre-license class.

[00:32:33] Tracy Hayes: Right, which—

[00:32:33] Sasha Tripp: —oftentimes, those are lovely people, but oftentimes, those are like career instructors, right? Like, they're not in the trenches selling houses in most cases. They are lovely people. But if their brokerage—if their main funnel of getting new agents to come in is by teaching pre-licensing classes, they might be a great brokerage. They might also just not have any other people coming to them.

[00:33:00] Sasha Tripp: You know, I’m not gonna say that there’s anything against it—because it’s part of my model. Like, if the timing would work and I could line up and I could instruct some of them, I totally would. ’Cause I love it. I enjoy teaching new people. I want them to get a good start.

But I will say a lot of times people just meet a managing broker or a broker that teaches that, and they kind of funnel into the system. They learn about that brokerage, and they’re like, “Well, this one seems as good as any other.”

So when I meet with people, I say: Who is gonna get you into production in six months? And who really, really cares about you?

Like, who's gonna meet with you? If the broker or the managing broker's not your mentor, who is the person in that company that's going to be your mentor? Who else is invested in your success in some way?

Is there someone that you look to—even if it’s as a sponsor—if you're in a revenue-sharing model, like Real or eXp or Keller Williams, you have someone who is responsible above you that is supposed to be providing benefit. Not just, you know, like getting a little side icing-on-the-cake commission if you make any money. They're supposed to be opening doors for you, making sure you're getting to the resources you need.

So in my mind it's like: Who knows the path to get you to production? And then: Who’s actually invested in your success? Like, who cares? And do you feel cared for at all times?

And then I would look behind the curtain and say: Who has a system? Like, who can pull up their tech on a computer screen in front of me and show me, like, “If I got a new friend that wants to buy a house, where would they go in your technology? What would happen next?”

Is there a way that my time gets leveraged so that I can be focusing more on sales? Or am I starting completely from scratch trying to do everything on my own?

Those are the important questions. I would probably ignore commission split. You know—completely ignore it. ’Cause when you're brand new, it doesn’t matter if you're getting 90%, 85%, 70%, 50%. It does not matter if it's a percentage of zero.

So it's like—focus on who's gonna get you into production. And I think very few people are focused on that.

[00:34:53] Tracy Hayes: Well, I think the unfortunate Achilles' heel of this whole process—it's just like when someone calls me as a mortgage lender, I mean, the only question they really know to ask me—

[00:35:00] —is: “What’s your rate? What’s the rate? What’s your rate?” Yep. And when they start shopping, so-and-so—it goes back, I’ve said this numerous times over 300 episodes of my podcast—I always remember, we grew up in a small township on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

And my dad was starting a—he told me this story—that when he was starting his business, he actually went— the town had a panel of other entrepreneurs, businesspeople who were successful in the town, and you could talk to them. And they would, you know, give you advice.

I truly believe that has to be done locally. The local board should have some top agents—it could be brokers, whatever—they're not there to sell themselves, but they're there to give some advice.

Of course, I’d love them to listen to my podcast, ’cause there’s great people like you spilling out great information like this and, you know, to really let them understand, like: How are you going to get your first check? Who is going to walk you through and guide you to get that first client, to get to that first closing?

’Cause that's the most important thing right now. You graduate, you start learning—how can I get a customer? ’Cause you’ve gotta feed yourself. And if you don’t have something in 30, 60, 90 days, a lot of agents I’m sure are out at that point.

[00:36:00] Sasha Tripp: Yeah, for sure.

[00:36:01] Tracy Hayes: And ask the questions of who is going to help me do that? Is it Sasha’s group? Is it Johnny’s group over here? Who’s going to help do that? And unfortunately, those questions are not being asked.

Sasha Tripp: For sure. Yep.

[00:36:28] Tracy Hayes: From that standpoint—I pulled these up here. Some—I call ’em little rapid-fire questions I throw at you for fun here.

[00:36:37] Tracy Hayes: What’s one thing you stopped doing in your business that instantly made it better?

[00:36:49] Sasha Tripp: Stopped doing in my business that instantly made it better?

The top thing… I mean—I don’t respond to most of my emails. Those are delegated out and 90—they’re—I mean, I don’t ignore them, but like, they’re 95% written for me. And there’s a window of time when I—like, right before I was gonna have my baby, I left my laptop at the office and I took my work email off of my phone.

So if it came in after 5:00 PM, for like a month or two, I just didn’t respond to it. And what it trained me to do is just get way more efficient with the 9-to-5. And now I really try not to do all these random, like, shooting off responses at night. I usually don’t open my laptop.

So I would say like—not bringing the work home every day, and then having some of the, like, draft it—like having things done 90%, and then me just finishing them—has been really big for my ability to leverage.

[00:37:47] Tracy Hayes: Yeah, that’s great advice. I actually—you made me recall an agent I had on a while ago—it’s probably been two years ago—but she was talking about how when she did send her emails in the evening, she put a timer on it not to be sent until the morning, so that she could get responses—

[00:38:00] Sasha Tripp: Well, yeah, because it’s like—as soon as you send—I mean, I send stuff internally to my staff ’cause I think like, it’s kind of like—they know I’m just gonna fire random stuff off, but they have no expectation to respond in the night.

But when it’s like your client—that first time you send them something at 11:30 at night, then it sort of communicates to them, “Hey, she’s an 11:30-at-night kind of person.”

So like, I’m gonna send her my stuff at 11:30 at night. So it’s like—you open the door to so much difficulty in your business that we could easily get rid of if we just had some boundaries, I think.

[00:38:32] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. I can’t—trying to think of that new AI software…

Sasha Tripp: Oh yeah, there’s so many.

[00:38:37] Tracy Hayes: …software—oh yeah.

Sasha Tripp: Fixer AI is the one.

Tracy Hayes: Fixer?

Sasha Tripp: Fixer AI. Yeah, that’s the one that does a pretty decent job. There’s so many of them now, but yeah—I’m sure my assistant uses one too, but yeah. It's so much better than what I would write at 11 o'clock at night also—sadly.

[00:38:52] Tracy Hayes: This next question really—I don’t know how your market is versus Northeast Florida here—but I think this is something I know agents are dealing with right now here. But I think in any market, you would deal with it at some level.

Right now we’re getting more, 'cause there’s a sense that it’s a buyer’s market—but what’s your go-to script or line when a client tries to lowball in an offer?

[00:39:19] Sasha Tripp: Meaning, we have a buyer and they’re gonna try to come in $100,000 less than a reasonable list price?

[00:39:24] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:39:25] Sasha Tripp: You know, I have a lot of candid conversations with my clients. I’m just really open with them. So it really depends on the person.

Like, if they’ve recently sold a house, I always use that as—you know, “If your house—the house that you just sold—for $700,000… You tell me, what would your gut reaction be if someone had brought you an offer of $600,000?”

[00:40:00] If I feel like it will be negative—some of them, like, they just like to play ball. They’d be like, “I wouldn’t be offended. I don’t care. I’d respond at, you know, $699,000 or whatever.” If I feel like that’ll be valuable.

But for me, I also will say, “Hey, we just focus on data.” So we run a lot of stats and numbers. One of the nice things about having a team is that you can collect a lot of data that you can then choose to share, that maybe within a whole brokerage, you might not be able to be as transparent about.

But we run numbers constantly on: list price to sales price ratio, number of offers submitted compared to the final sales price—like, you know, if there were three offers submitted, on average that sold 5% above the list price. If there were nine offers submitted, that sold X percent.

But we also do it for days on market—as days on market extend, how much we're seeing things sell below.

So we have a lot of conversations like, “Hey, you know, Mr. Seller, this house is listed for $600K. I know you wanna offer $500K. All the data would say that—and its tax assessment and price per square foot is pretty in line with what’s going on. One of the recent sales was close to it.”

“All the data would say that it’s probably not gonna sell below $575K.”

[00:41:00] Sasha Tripp: …So if we make an offer—we could certainly make an offer at $500,000. But it would probably be more sound to just wait a little longer and wait for it to reduce, so that we’re not opening up like ill will with them. We’re not offending them. We’re not closing the door to be able to communicate.

But at the same time, like—I’m a negotiator, so I’m gonna try to get the ball. Like, if that’s all they want to do, well, I’m gonna submit it and we’re gonna see. And I’m just gonna say, “Hey, this is what we have for you right now. We’d love to open the conversation.” Because my true belief is: I just want to always leave the conversation in someone else’s hands. I want someone else to be the last one to end it.

If there’s interest on my side, I’m gonna try to keep the interest open as long as possible—because I don’t know, weird things happen in markets like this. But yeah, I try to talk them out of it if it’s just an absolute—like it’s going to be a waste of my time.

I do know a lot of agents that use that as a ploy to just get, you know—like, get a signed agreement in place. So now it’s like, “Oh, we submitted that one offer,” and it’s like—be wary of this as a consumer. Like, “We submitted that one offer just so I could lock this person up into a buyer brokerage relationship, and now I represent them for a year.”

So it was worth my time to submit a really low offer, right? But in my mind, that’s not a great way to do business. And that doesn’t really organically grow. So yeah—you know, just candid conversation, not being scared to be the bad guy.

[00:42:24] Tracy Hayes: Well, you brought up the buyer broker agreement. You’re coming down here to Jacksonville, and obviously every state—some places were already doing it, some people here were already doing some sort of agreement.

It’s been a year—almost, not quite a year and a half yet—since it’s been required. What was going on in Virginia? What was the reaction from your agents with the recommended guidelines from NAR?

[00:42:46] Sasha Tripp: So we were always pretty by the book. It was required in Virginia, but people were reading the definition of the timing of its requirement differently. But we were always getting buyer brokerage.

There would be some times when we’d meet one person and show them one property, and we were using that as like the warmup opportunity. And if we wanted to continue working with them, we were having them sign at that point. But other than that, we were signing buyer broker agreements—aside from maybe with new construction.

So when this happened, for us—we were really ahead. We knew it was coming about a year in advance. We were creating video around it, we were creating our marketing booklet to sort of speak to it directly and what it meant. So our company was really ready for it.

The rest of the market I think was feeling a little paralyzed briefly, but what we have found is that it actually just adds even more protection for us. Because now we at least have a leg to stand on when they find a For Sale By Owner. So it has layered—it has probably—which, you know, the consumer doesn't want to hear this—it’s probably made us more money.

And our average commission rate has also increased. And I believe that is a national average as well. So it didn’t have the intended outcome of like, “Oh, the world's burning down, no one's ever gonna use a Realtor anymore.”

It just had us speaking more candidly with people about what that meant.

If anything, the pressure has become on the seller side—me having to explain to a seller why they should probably still have some open-mindedness to compensating a buyer's agent. And that's been—that was the probably unanticipated outcome.

When that first happened, there were hours and hours of extra conversation we were having with sellers explaining why they shouldn't just offer nothing to everyone and hope for the best.

So yeah, it’s been interesting. But I think it’s a huge win. And it shook us up a little bit, but now everybody just seems—it’s like now it’s just done. And, you know, it's a thing of the past.

[00:44:42] Tracy Hayes: Yeah, for sure. There’s a little bit of—from what I sense here, obviously—you know, I concentrate—my wife’s an agent, so I’m hearing the talk going around.

And just the different—every brokerage has a little slight tweak to how—you know, “don’t post—if they ask you how much is available from the seller, tell them just to make the offer.” I think some of these agents who are on the selling side who lowball their ask for the commission, and then when the buyer comes in and says, “Hey, here’s the deal, and I want 3%,” then they’re like scrambling.

That’s kind of where it gets a little tense, because I think we’ve got a weak listing agent, you know, having a good conversation with their seller and explaining what they should have in there. But it has worked out.

But there are still some that don’t—you know, they just haven’t had enough at-bats, and again, not the right mentor or overlooking their deals or their offers to make sure they’re being submitted correctly.

[00:45:42] Sasha Tripp: Yeah, we created a lot of video around that right when it happened, to give specifically to our sellers—especially for the agents that were a little less comfortable talking about it—that explained like, “We’re gonna do everything we can for you to make that number as low as possible. But here is the average that we’re seeing across our recent sales.”

So it would be wise for you to account for something closer to that average when you’re choosing your price and estimating what your net is gonna be.

But of course, if we can negotiate it to less—if we can end up having it be less—then that’s super. But that’s not a very good point of attack, to be coming at it expecting less.

So lots of conversations around that. I feel like we’re almost to the point where I’m not feeling like I’m having those every day anymore. So—that’s exciting.

[00:46:32] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Well I think, you know, in an area here where it wasn’t required—and I would say the majority did not, probably 90% did not do any sort of buyer broker agreement—it’s made them better agents.

’Cause they’re actually sitting down before—or they are going out with that one. They call it—one of the local title attorneys called it dating—you know, the one-pager. Say, “Hey, we’re just gonna go show this house,” or, “I’m just gonna show you this Saturday. If you like me, then we’ll get married and sign a longer agreement.”

[00:47:00] Sasha Tripp: Yep. Yep. Yeah—which has been great. It’s like, at least let’s outline what this date is supposed to be. Because I mean—we were getting burned on that. Like, we’d show the one house and they would want it and want to go buy it, and then they’d cut us out.

’Cause we—you know, even on the little date—we didn’t have anything in writing. They’re like, “I’ll just go to the seller directly and try to save money.” But then they come back and they’re asking us questions along the way—they wanna know who we—you know, and I’m like—

[00:47:24] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:47:24] Sasha Tripp: So let’s just outline—let’s just understand what it looks like for everyone. And that way there’s no confusion. So yeah, I think it’s really been a good change. But we’re also gonna continue to see fewer Realtors, because a lot of people just never got their arms around that conversation.

[00:47:41] Tracy Hayes: What’s one mistake you see even experienced agents still making today?

[00:47:47] Sasha Tripp: Well, we've—I guess—beat leverage to death. You know, it's like, just not leveraging, not hiring, being scared of that, thinking that they’re better at doing everything than anybody else could ever be.

I think so many people are still—

[00:48:00] —scared to have a personal brand. You know, like—they’re not tying their personal brand together with their business brand. Or they’re like, “Oh, you know, I have separate profiles.” Like I—

[00:48:00] Sasha Tripp: …wanna be a separate entity. I don't wanna mix it up. And like all of their real estate content is just about houses, right?

And I think we're going into the new era of like, you know, we used to—it was a task economy. It was like, who can get the most done the most efficiently, get as much done as possible, and like, you're getting paid for task completion.

I think the new economy is more just like an authenticity economy—because so much is gonna get stripped away. Like, tasks can get done, things can—you know, emails can be written, advice can be given. So like, we're going into this new economy of like: people wanna trust someone. They wanna know who that person is, and they don’t want the entire transaction to be automated out.

And if we wanna continue to have relevance and remain central to the real estate [00:49:00] transaction, I think it's all gonna be about like—who are you? Who is the person, who is the brand that they are hiring?

And there are just so many top agents that are so tied up in like, prettier photos, you know, reels that have like drone—you know, like nicer marketing materials, the cooler website. And I'm like, that’s great. It’s working right now, but to what end? You know, what’s it gonna look like with another full year of AI?

[00:49:25] Tracy Hayes: You made me think—I don’t know if you… have you seen that Facebook commercial where they're doing the drawing at the office for who’s gonna buy a gift for who? And this guy draws a gift for—it looked like probably someone more senior, a female. And then he goes on Facebook and investigates and figures out that she’s a KISS fan and ends up getting her these little—have you seen that?

[00:49:52] Sasha Tripp: I haven’t, no. That would require me seeing a commercial, which like—I don’t even know where that would happen unless it’s Super Bowl.

[00:49:58] Tracy Hayes: It just goes, like you said, the [00:50:00] authenticity of it. You know, showing that you're real. Where, you know—the thing out there now is people aren't going out and interacting with each other. They're too busy on their phones.

Well, so if you jujitsu that and use that against—you know, use their weight against it, if they’re gonna be on their phone, then show yourself as being authentic, right? On social media.

And I think Facebook should actually do a commercial with real estate agents being authentic on Facebook and so forth, because people—I love it. You know, I get someone’s name—for instance, the first thing I’m on is LinkedIn, then I’m over to your Facebook, and then I’m over to your Instagram. A lot of times in that order.

And I’m like, “Okay, who is this person? Are they legit? How long have they been in the business? Are they actually doing something?” Obviously, you know—bringing them on the show or whatever. But I think people do that to anyone they don’t know. They’re going on their social media to see how authentic they are.

So the more you are you, I think—you know, I think you would agree—people attract each other. So if you’re being you, you’re gonna attract people like you to do business with, which is a lot easier to do business with.

[00:51:06] Sasha Tripp: Well, and I also think—I had to talk myself into this too. 'Cause I used to look at videos like, “Oh, maybe I’ll just skip that trend. Like maybe I’ll just wait till that goes out of style and I’ll like get on the next one,” because I just really didn’t want to do it. Felt like a lot of time, felt like a lot of effort.

But for me, I’ve started realizing—well, if I’m really gonna try to go deep with a smaller group of people, then video is the only way for me to efficiently kind of keep up in touch with everyone else. And I started thinking about like—you know, video is a platform that moves emotions. Like, you can watch a movie and be crying by the end of it. But I don’t see many people crying at the end of an email, or at the end of a text message, or even at the end of very many phone calls.

So I was like, if I want people to still feel in relationship with me—even as my past client database gets bigger, even as my list of acquaintances gets bigger, the number of people we’re trying to care for gets larger—if I want them to feel like they know me at all, I’m [00:52:00] going to have to use video.

'Cause there’s no other way to do it. Yeah. Like, you can’t go to that many coffee appointments or be on that many boards of directors or have that many client parties. So yeah, I think people are just being really like—they're in denial if they think they're gonna get through the video stage and, you know, still be thriving in a couple of years in the real estate market. I just don’t think it’s gonna happen.

[00:52:25] Tracy Hayes: It’s time. Well, I truly believe—I think it’s out there. I mean, whether someone’s watching you in a video—your brain actually doesn’t differentiate whether they’re actually right there physically in front of you or you're watching the video.

And like you said, you know, emotions are what people remember. If you get ’em to smile, laugh, or cry, they're—you know—marker in there.

Yeah. I'm gonna go back to this. I like this question here: You’ve got 10 minutes to prep for a listing appointment. What do you absolutely do not skip?

[00:52:54] Sasha Tripp: Well, I think I prep less than that for most listing appointments. All I do is look at comparable sales. I typically do plus or minus 500 square feet, plus or minus a bed, plus or minus a bath. Look—start in the elementary school district. If that doesn’t work, bump out to the high school district.

That is literally all I do at this point, personally, to prep for—then pull up the old MLS sheet. And then everything else is prepared for me. So it’s—you know, somebody’s gonna, you’re gonna need that somewhere. I wanna know what the tax assessment is, what the Zestimate is, I wanna know what they bought it for. I wanna look some stuff up online. But I do not do that.

The only thing that I think is important when you walk in the house is to know the comparables. I think a good salesperson can wing their way through every other piece of it. So that’s it.

[00:53:41] Tracy Hayes: Well, so when you go into that appointment—obviously you’ve done it enough times, so you have a great amount of confidence in how you're going to control it or influence it, right?

What are some things that you are trying to—you have a, you know, probably a similar goal with almost everyone you go into: “I need to get this information. I don’t know this about them yet.” You’ve got all the information on the house—you know, maybe you haven’t walked it yet, but you’ve walked the inside.

What are the things you need to know from the seller?

[00:54:14] Sasha Tripp: Yeah. I mean, this got really honed in during COVID because I did all—I was listing a bunch of houses without having ever been in them, which I always thought was impossible. But I was doing a lot of Zoom walkthroughs, and then I ended up having a listing partner, and she was the one going to houses and I was not going to them. But I was still able to list and sell them very successfully.

So yeah, all that meeting is about—it’s not really about the house. It’s just building rapport. Like:

• What are they worried about?
• What has their past experience with this been?
• What steps do they need the most handholding through?
• What’s their level of involvement they’re looking for?

Like, do they want us to be full service, like we’re never even gonna see them again and we’re scheduling the movers and getting the estimates lined up for handyman?

Or is it a super emotional family estate sale where everything has to be very slow, very methodical—they want to have five people involved and we’re just sort of the conveyors of information?

And—how are they going to make their hiring decision? That’s all I wanna know.

It’s like—how are you gonna decide who the right person is to list your house? Because the price is the price, right? Like, you might interview five agents, but the value that the market’s going to pay for this house, if exposed properly, marketed properly—the market can only sustain a certain number.

The price is roughly the price, plus or minus. I think you could do a horrible job and have a lower price, and you can do a stellar job and you might be able to get a little extra win. But there are checks and balances in place that, by and large, keep the price as the price—like what the market is willing to bear for that house.

So it’s like—all you’re deciding is who the person you think—who’s the person that you think is most competent and capable of selling your house?

And so, all I wanna know during that appointment is: How will you make that decision? Is it tenure? Is it marketing? Is it the handholding? Is it a team approach? Is it their track record?

Like, what is the leading factor in how you're gonna decide that?

And then I’m just gonna spend my time trying to make sure that that’s well covered—or that I can follow up to get them data that will make them...

[00:56:51] Tracy Hayes: What would you say—I'm gonna put you on the spot here a little bit. And the reason I'm asking this question is, I believe if someone’s out there interviewing [00:57:00] three agents—they have no, do not know where they—well, I’ll say, I looked them up in the Yellow Pages, but I’m dating myself. It’s just three agents I know.

[00:57:08] Sasha Tripp: I reference the Yellow Pages all the time. And young agents are like, “What’s yellow?”

[00:57:13] Tracy Hayes: So, they put three agents in front of ’em that they have no influence—it’s not, they weren’t referred by a friend or anything like that, it was just three agents. They’re literally grading.

One agent always stands out in that three. There’s something that they say or do. Obviously, you're very successful at what you do. What do you think is your—if we went back and looked at your last year’s worth of listing appointments—why they chose you? What do you think they would say?

[00:57:40] Sasha Tripp: I think I provide them with an extremely clear and concise roadmap to how to get them to success. And then I build their trust in me.

So it’s like—I tell them: here’s the map, here’s the exact plan we’re gonna follow. There’s not a lot of like, “Oh, what about this?” or “Let’s think about this, let’s team brainstorm.” No. Here is the roadmap to success. It has worked for hundreds and hundreds of people before exactly as I’m describing it.

And then, building their trust in me as a person to deliver on it properly.

I think the roadmap is more important than people realize. Like, you can have a great book of business and build great rapport and care about the house and have marketed the most homes in the neighborhood, but if you go in there and you're sort of waffling about like what day it’s gonna be best to market it, should we do photos now? Should we stage it? Should we not stage it?—I think people want you to tell them what to do.

[00:58:38] Tracy Hayes: Be the expert.

[00:58:39] Sasha Tripp: So much information out there. They don’t want to gather information. They want you to tell them, “Of all the information out there, you do this every day.”

And I often find myself saying, “If this were my house, this is what I would do. This is the day I would list it. This is the price I would pick. Of course, this is your house and you can choose a different variation of this. But if this were my house, this is exactly what I would do.”

And I do it to finite detail, which a lot of people don’t want to do, ’cause they don’t want to put their name to that and they don’t want to be called out later for it being wrong.

But for me, it’s like—well, I’m not a fortune teller. I can’t tell you what’s gonna happen in the market or the economy or the political climate. But this is the roadmap. This is exactly what I would tell you to do.

And then—do you trust me? Have we built enough rapport? When you're looking eye to eye with me, do you feel trust, or do you feel a little bit like, “Hmm, I'm not sure what her motivations are. I'm not sure if she's being authentic. I'm not sure if she’s just saying this to tell me what I want to hear.”

Which is where I think the video and the online—all the branding—is really gonna play in more and more. Because it's like, hopefully they’ve been studying you a little bit, and they’ve already started to form their opinion of whether you're trustworthy or not. And then you’re just sort of solidifying that. And then you're the obvious answer.

So, yeah: What’s the roadmap? And am I competent? Do I trust what she’s saying when she says she can do it?

[00:59:55] Tracy Hayes: Right. Yeah. I think, well—it obviously comes down, the foundation is confidence in going in [01:00:00] there with a plan, but knowing that, you know, you’re not going to run into a brick wall—that you have options should your plan not come to fruition: your price point, whatever it might be, staging, not staging, whatever it may be.

We have a lot of new construction here. A lot of the agents here in Northeast Florida—the builders are giving out huge incentives: buying down interest rates, huge incentives to the real estate agents, paying, you know, twice the normal commission, that kind of stuff.

This is the question here that is the trending question:

New build delays, rising construction costs are common. If you are handling new construction clients, how do you protect them to manage the expectations in today's market?

[01:00:42] Sasha Tripp: Oh, that’s a good one. Well, that’s a sensitive subject.

We built a custom home, and our homebuilder went bankrupt during the process and left us with like $750,000 of liens and an incomplete house. And my husband and I finished it—general contracted it to the finish line.

So I learned a lot. I protect people a lot better than I did before. And I would say—I was very well educated. This was only two years ago. Like, I was very well educated in what could go wrong before then.

I would say it’s all about expectation setting. And I am a realist. I am never a paint-the-rosy-picture kind of person.

And so talking to them about like, “What will you do if this gets delayed by 3 to 6 months? What will you do if the price is increased by 10%? What will you do if—” Because it’s like, if you just put that out there, at least they’ve started to think about it. And they realize that it is a very actual possibility. It may not be highly likely, but it could happen.

And so then—you know, I can’t do the work for the people. I can’t solve every problem for them. But I can tell them what problems could come down the pike so that they are making an informed decision when they’re still deciding to pursue that process and that timeline—and when they’re deciding to make other financial decisions around it.

So I just say—I mean, we just have a lot of candid conversations. And I often talk about the worst-case scenario. And I’m always talking about like, “This isn’t me trying to be negative, I’m not trying to scare you, this isn’t a fear tactic. I’m just trying to make sure that you’re aware of the different things that could happen.”

But we do that in resales too. I mean, there’s just as much that can go wrong in the resale process. Or you find that half the house is built over the property line, or your pool isn’t in your yard, or your septic tank’s caved in. I mean—it really is just expectation setting and making sure that I’m having very candid conversations.

I’m not a “tell people what they want to hear” kind of person, and I think that’s why they hire me. I’m gonna tell them what they need to be aware of.

[01:02:38] Tracy Hayes: Well, there’s nothing—I mean, I put it out there all the time: just ’cause it’s new construction… Because a lot of people, I think, think they’re gonna walk into that site agent—that site agent is just going to take care of them.

And I think there’s some real estate agents that actually bring people to new construction and hand ’em off to the site agent—and then just kind of go hands off. When, especially in these tract builders, you have got to be involved.

And—I mean, I’m a big supporter: you need to hire a home inspector that’s gonna go at the different stages that they should go.

[01:03:17] Sasha Tripp: Oh, for sure.

[01:03:18] Tracy Hayes: …these tract builders. Because—I mean, you really, there’s some—if you talk to these inspectors, there’s some real horror stories that they come across.

[01:03:24] Sasha Tripp: I’m always amazed that like—you need more diligence in new construction.

I’m amazed at how many people don’t use a realtor. 'Cause it’s like, “Oh, that’s just the process. We kind of understood that’s how it worked.”

But like—there’s so much more diligence that you have to have. Like—you know, the contract and the changes, all the alterations to the home, all the things that are included versus not included, all the upgrades, all the finishes…

The paperwork is 10 times as much with new construction. Like—that is not the time to be cutting your representation.

But a lot of people are just like, “Oh, I just thought that was the process.”

[01:04:00] Sasha Tripp: …once you’ve walked in the door, a lot of times you’ve lost the opportunity to bring representation later. But yeah, we highly recommend it. And I would say we typically work more for a new construction client than we do for the average resale client, but you know, that’s not well advertised.

[01:04:09] Tracy Hayes: All right. I want to wind down here a little bit. I want to talk about—I don’t even know what they have you set up for—maybe you know, maybe you don’t. When you come down here, what area of expertise are you going to—you know, if it's whatever they decide that I’m good at, I will chat with people about, right?

The question that—because I put in there, leveraging my ChatGPT, the trending questions, and obviously with your bio: what questions should I ask Sasha? And the question is here—and I think we covered a lot of it—but I think, you know, to tweak it a little bit to the market area:

As a coach and national speaker, what’s the biggest mindset shift or skill gap (not just for newer agents) that needs to be addressed today to succeed long term?

[01:04:59] Sasha Tripp: [01:05:00] I mean—is it overdone at this point to say AI? Like do we feel like everybody’s aware of that now, or do you think people...

Like in my mind, it’s not just AI like “let's just go ask ChatGPT to write our social media post.” It's like—how can AI basically streamline and make more efficient every single part of your business aside from the relationship?

And I just don't think—I'm not seeing a lot of people coming to terms with that. I'm seeing a lot of people that are not utilizing automations very well. They’re not utilizing it as a thinking partner, or they’re just dumping in questions and letting random AI that knows nothing about their goals or their background or their company or their business… give random answers. That’s like—really not that much different than a faster Google.

You know? It's like, if Google was just the new like… what was it, the Dewey Decimal? The library card system? Google just sped that up. Right? It didn’t necessarily give you more information. And then it expanded and then it's like, okay, now there’s false information, there’s mixed information, there’s opinions—it became an expansion of that.

But AI is not going to give you any new information than what’s—or it’s just going to give you information faster than what's on Google unless you pour into it.

And like, I’ve created an AI board of directors that helps guide company decisions that I make. I’ve created—like, so many things that AI can do for you. But it’s got to be a thinking partner. It’s not just a really fast information gatherer.

And I think that I’m not seeing enough people treat it that way yet. And by the time—if they wait a year or two to adapt to that—it will have already adapted further, and people will just get left further behind.

So like—now is the time to become an expert at that.

[01:06:48] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. I feel—I’ve had a couple people on the show who are doing stuff in the AI space, and what I think is—there’s some people who just can’t get their arms around it, right?

And the thing is—you’re never going to get your arms around it. You have to just understand, like you’re saying, how you are asking the question, the information you're putting in there.

If you’re just saying, “How do you do this?” boom—it’s…

Hey, in my setup here, in what’s going to work, and—hey, I’m looking to buy this, and you know, I’m going in there and I’m giving it all the information. Or I’ll tell you what—if you’ve got a problem with your car right now, go in there and put it in AI.

Say, “Hey, I’ve got a 2000-whatever car, blah blah blah, this is the problem I’m having.” You’d be amazed what it tells you. Right?

Because it’s gathering this information throughout the internet that everyone has put in there about that situation.

And you’re right—the information that’s at our fingertips…

But like you said—I think the other thing is, you mentioned, it’s gotta get to know you. Right?

And I think people are a little like, “What do you mean get to know me?” Like, “How do I get…” Right? “How do I…”

You know, type of thing. And I’ve noticed—like I said—I put my entire show through there, so it knows me very [01:08:00] well: my goals, and I talk to it about what I want to do, let alone the guest and so forth.

And it amazes me sometimes ’cause it’ll pop up and talk about a guest I had a while back and go, “Yeah, this is just like so-and-so.” And I’m like—

[01:08:13] Sasha Tripp: Wow.

[01:08:14] Tracy Hayes: Right?

[01:08:14] Sasha Tripp: And you're like, oh yeah—my brain should’ve pieced that together, but I forgot. Like, I’m busy, I’m tired, you know.

And it’s also like—if you save 30 minutes doing that preparation every time you do it, and you can pour that back into sales or income generation or something else… you’re just gonna crush the people that aren’t saving that time. You know?

And then it’s just gonna continue to compound.

So yeah, I think that’s probably the biggest change—that I think people think they’re adapting, but they’re not really. They’re just logging into ChatGPT a little more often. But as you know, that’s not the real picture.

[01:08:53] Tracy Hayes: I've had a guest on—it’s actually been a year, I really need to have her back on—but Marki Lemons…

[01:09:00] Sasha Tripp: Yes.

[01:09:00] Tracy Hayes: She’s doing a lot in the AI space, but also Kerri Vey—she is eXp’s expert. She actually spoke over in Barcelona a few months ago—I think it was August or September.

She’s actually out of Canada, but she has really gone deep in creating little GPTs for everything in the realtor space.

And I think—when I had a young gentleman on, he’s creating an AI property search that you can put right on your real estate website. So instead of doing the antiquated way, they could start doing natural language and start typing.

And I was trying to explain this to a broker, and she’s like, “Oh, we were just at our international conference and I heard about AI.”

I'm like, no you didn’t. You heard someone blah blah blah from 30,000 feet. But actually—how are you gonna implement it into your business? What things do you need to start?

Because I think, unfortunately—we’re obviously like—it’s like a fire hose, you know? We're getting it jammed down our throat. And then, what are you actually going to break out there?

But you're coming out—have they told you anything?

[01:10:06] Sasha Tripp: No. What camp?

It’s usually—you show up and you sort of tell people what you like talking about, but then the community typically creates the content—of like, what the speakers are. You know, it’s based on community vote.

I mean, I’ve been going there for years. So I have no idea.

I typically teach about leadership, team building, entrepreneurship, profit—running your business more like… like CEO-focused stuff.

I can talk about marketing. I typically don’t want to talk about like, writing better contracts. I can talk about negotiating—but I don’t love… I mean, that’s not what brings me joy.

I like to help people build a bigger business and a bigger future. And then I feel like there are other speakers that are better equipped to talk about, you know, like the very niche pieces of that.

[01:10:56] Tracy Hayes: Blocking and tackling stuff. You want to get out…

[01:11:00] Sasha Tripp: Yeah.

[01:11:00] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. You want to—yeah, no, I agree. I'm gonna—I’ll definitely have my wife come over and chat with you.

[01:11:04] Sasha Tripp: Yes, I would love to see you guys there. I feel like we're not too far away from it, so I'm looking forward to it.

[01:11:09] Tracy Hayes: Yeah, for sure. I think—because one of the topics I talk a lot with the agents is, like I said earlier, they reach that ceiling. And in this area, it’s anywhere from 6 to 9 million in volume is where they start hitting that.

And I’ve really only spoken to maybe a couple of people. There’s one person that comes to mind that I’ve had on—Russell Nicholson. He runs the Keller Williams in downtown St. Augustine—the Old City.

And, you know, where he really focuses on coaching those agents through that ceiling. Right?

And it is that step that you're talking about—becoming the CEO and now running it like… or you should always be running it like a business—but you're only going to grow to a certain point until you really start being the CEO and start delegating and leveraging.

[01:12:00] Sasha Tripp: Yeah. It’s definitely—I mean, we have a couple agents on our team that consistently do 20 to 25 million a year.

And one of them—they’ve been in business less than 10 years. And it’s like—that takes a lot of people a really long time to figure that out. And even when they do figure that out, they’re miserable.

You know, like—all they do is work. They have no coverage, they have no nights and weekends, they have no life balance.

[01:12:45] Sasha Tripp: So yeah, it's a ceiling of complexity, and it's like reinventing a whole new business when you hit that. Like, what works to get you there doesn’t work to get you past there. And I just think a lot of people think, “Oh, I’ll just make these little tiny tweaks and just do the same thing a little bit better.” And that’s typically not the answer at that point. So yeah, just kind of getting people—getting their mind around that. Like, “Oh, we gotta do this all over again.” Right? Like create a business again, which—mm-hmm—and that’s life of the entrepreneur. That’s what we signed up for.

[01:12:54] Tracy Hayes: Well, I’m really—I'm sure this is one of the topics—I mean, 'cause it's obviously one of the greatest concerns is, you know, doing what we're talking about doing and being there. And I always, you know, pop in just to lean against the wall and hear what’s going on—to grab good information and good questions for the next show. Because what's the concern of the agents out there?

To me, I think their biggest thing is that first step. You know, okay, I’m gonna start working out. Okay, at 5:00 AM. Right. Are you gonna get out of bed and do it or not?

[01:13:35] Sasha Tripp: Yeah.

[01:13:35] Tracy Hayes: And it's that first step of—you are either finding someone who's doing it and duplicate what they're doing until you can do it. You know what I mean?

[01:13:44] Sasha Tripp: And even not that far. It's like—just take action. Stop thinking about taking the action. Stop iterating. Stop planning the action. Just take an action.

Like you're only gonna know 80% of the info. You’re only gonna have 80% clarity on any decision. If you've thought about it a while, if it’s surfaced multiple times, if you see a lot of other people doing it, it's working for them—like, just take an action.

And by the time—you know, if you’re just overthinking it—by the time you've taken an action, you could be totally wrong. Could be the wrong action. But you’ll figure that out, and you'll iterate faster than some people will ever have taken an action.

And it’s just like—you don’t have to have the roadmap. But that is the biggest differentiator to success. Stop learning. Stop information gathering. At some point in time, you just have to go do the thing. And I think if more people just went and did something—even if it was the wrong thing—it would get them on the path to the right thing a lot faster. So yeah.

[01:14:33] Tracy Hayes: Well, I totally agree with you. And I think if they thought back, like—how did I get to where I'm at? They did exactly that. They took some sort of action. Sometimes it's a forward… or whatever.

[01:14:43] Sasha Tripp: Yeah. I mean, I’d rather just take an action than—before, you know—you don’t want to wait until your back’s against the wall and you get pushed out the door. You have to go because you have no other choice.

Like, just take an action. And if you’re wrong—okay. That’s what the best entrepreneurial decisions are made on—is the experience and the learning you get from the things that you did wrong, right? Like, you're not gonna be able to avoid it.

So yeah, that’s kind of my advice to people. You're hearing other people that have done the same thing as you before. You’ve seen a couple of those things—follow one of those plans and just go take an action and see what happens.

[01:15:16] Tracy Hayes: Tweak it along the way. I don’t wanna take up much more of your time. I look forward to meeting you face-to-face next month.

[01:15:23] Sasha Tripp: Yes! Thank you so much for doing this. This is a great idea for a lender to do. It is such valuable information. And from a lender, it comes as a little more unbiased. Like you’re not leading realtors towards certain information. I think it’s awesome. And I'm sure it's also just such a great treasure trove of really cool things that people can study and learn from.

[01:15:43] Tracy Hayes: The amount of people I’ve met… and it's become a passion, actually. I truly enjoy doing it. And like I said, the amazing people—because as a top agent like yourself, I’m sure you get calls all the time. You don’t take coffee appointments, but I can get some of the best answers…

[01:16:00] Sasha Tripp: I love to jump on Zoom though. It’s so much easier. I don’t even have to be wearing—I can wear sweatpants. I'm like, if I could do that—this is like the life of my dreams.

[01:16:05] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. I thought about doing more… you know, I’ve had Krista Mashore on—I don't know if you know Krista?

[01:16:08] Sasha Tripp: Uh-huh.

[01:16:09] Tracy Hayes: I’ve had Kerri Vey from Canada. I had Marki Lemons—she was a keynote a couple years ago at our RE BarCamp, right? So—but I did interview her before she came down. Gogo Bethke—I don’t know if you know…

[01:16:24] Sasha Tripp: Yeah, yeah. Those are such awesome…

[01:16:25] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. I mean…

[01:16:26] Sasha Tripp: Those are top people.

[01:16:27] Tracy Hayes: That’d be very hard for me to actually even just—let alone run into them if I was following them around to get a cup of coffee—but to do a podcast?

[01:16:36] Sasha Tripp: Right. But Zoom? Yeah. It's totally manageable—or a lot more manageable—for the average person.

[01:16:40] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Sasha, I appreciate it.

[01:16:43] Sasha Tripp: Thank you so much. I’ll see you—I guess in January? I wanna say I’ll see you in a few weeks.

[01:16:48] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. I forget what the… I forget—is it January 21st or something like that?

[01:16:52] Sasha Tripp: That sounds—that has a ring to it. But yeah, we’ve got time.

[01:16:54] Tracy Hayes: Well, make sure you take time for the St. Augustine Nights of Lights down in the Old City. From basically Thanksgiving through the end of January—the Nights of Lights. So make sure you take—I don’t know how much extra time you’re putting in…

[01:17:13] Sasha Tripp: Okay. I just come in the day before, but I’ll definitely do that. I love stuff like that.

[01:17:16] Tracy Hayes: It's one of the top 10 treasured Christmas-time, holiday things in the world. It clicks.

[01:17:26] Sasha Tripp: Awesome!

[01:17:28] Tracy Hayes: Well, I look forward to seeing you in January. And thank you again.

[01:17:31] Sasha Tripp: Thank you.

[01:17:31] Tracy Hayes: Talk soon. All right. Have a good night.

[01:17:33] Sasha Tripp: You too.