We caught up with the brilliant and insightful D. J. Stavropoulos a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, D. J. thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about the early days of establishing your own firm. What can you share?
I thought a real estate agent just sold properties and helped buyers find homes. However, my brokerage (Keller Williams) teaches you to run it like a business. If you’re a solo agent, as I was, you are wearing every hat. It’s akin to a person opening a restaurant all by themselves and having to be the maître d’, waiter, server, busboy, manager, etc. So, you have to initially learn to do everything and then over time figure out what you can leverage out to others. For example, you can hire a showing assistant. You can hire a transaction coordinator to take care of all the paperwork. Your time is very valuable, and you have to figure out where it makes the most sense to spend it. In other words, you want to spend your time on things that drive your business. Completing paperwork doesn’t drive new business. So, from the start, I farmed out all the listing logistics to an in-house company to take care of that. I also pay a professional photographer for all my listings. These are just two of the many examples of work that you can farm out to others.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
I got into real estate in 2017, after my second layoff in corporate America. I had spent years as a project, program, and portfolio manager primarily in financial services (mainly banks) using my BS in computer science and MBA in finance. I have not joined a team, so I’m a solo agent here in Atlanta. I help people buy and sell homes, primarily in Atlanta’s older in-town neighborhoods as that is where I live. I think what most sets me apart is the wealth of professional knowledge I bring to the table, the vast array of skills I have (everything from contracts and negotiation to creative design skills), and my project management experience (which helps me serve multiple clients concurrently down to the last detail). I’m probably most proud of my ability to transition into this new career and utilize such a wide variety of skills after spending so much time in a very narrow space in the corporate world–I had no idea selling real estate would allow me to utilize such a wide variety of skills. I find selling homes to be the more interesting aspect because you have this big tangible thing you have to sell for your client. And since I have such a strong design aesthetic, I’m very focused on what the house looks like in order to make it appealable to the widest audience and sell for the most money. When helping clients buy a home, there is no tangible thing to sell; it’s more of a journey you take with them to find the best fit and get their offer accepted.
How did you build your audience on social media?
I’m pretty much known as a social media expert in my office, to the point that I was asked to teach a class on the subject, which was fun to put together and execute. Back in 2017, I basically created a presence on all the major platforms at the time by creating a business account (separate from my personal account) where possible. These included Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and Twitter. Over the first two years, I developed a process for posting content on all of these so that I repeat it every day/week. I know what I do M-F, what I do Saturdays, and what I do Sundays. My content is a mix of real-life things, industry content, and material and helps potential clients understand the process and what they need to know when buying and selling. Most of my content is free (I create it), or from free sources (e.g., ListReports). I pay for one content creator (Keeping Current Matters), whose content is well worth it (daily posts, weekly videos, and social graphics). I try to reuse content as much as possible; that is, I want the same content to be usable across all of these platforms, so I don’t have to create a separate version for each. For example, when Instagram allowed only square photos, everything I did was square so that I could use it everywhere else. You still run into issues, such as Twitter’s severe limitation on the amount of text. My advice to anyone starting out is to start small with one platform, and once you’ve mastered it, move on to another. But don’t feel that you have to be everywhere. Just as with real estate in general, you cannot be everything to everyone, so don’t try to do the same with social media. If you really don’t like a platform and never use it, then you should feel OK not using it for your business.
What’s been the best source of new clients for you?
The best source of new clients has been word of mouth and referrals from past clients. In real estate, you’re taught a number of different ways to generate leads. These include open houses, door-knocking, geographic farming, communicating with your sphere of influence, etc. While all of these are fine, if you try to do all of them, then you won’t be great at any of them. So, the advice I’ve been told is to pick 2-3 that you’re comfortable with and that work for you and become an expert at them. Word of mouth and referrals are great because people trust their friends more than they trust a complete stranger, so the barrier to entry is much lower. You can try all you want to convince people that they should hire you, but it’s a fine line between being overly aggressive and just helpful enough for them to want to consider you. Word of mouth is just your sphere of influence telling others about you as well as past clients raving about how great you were to work with. So, if you’re really great at your job and you can get people to tell others about you, it can be the easiest way to generate more business. At the start of my career, I randomly ran into a woman in a highrise in Midtown Atlanta. The on-site agent wasn’t very good at answering her questions, so I jumped into the conversation. She hired me to buy a condo and sell her home. She then referred me to another friend, whom I helped first buy a condo and then sell it years later. She then referred me to her cousin, whom I helped by a condo as well. One simple conversation led to 5 transactions.
Contact Info:
- Website: djstavropouloshomes.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/djstavropoulos.homes/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/djstavropoulos.homes/
- Linkedin: https://Linkedin.com/in/djstavropoulos
- Twitter: https://Twitter.com/djstavropoulos
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCki6Zx9R6oBNUovPhVDdRvg
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/dj-stavropoulos-keller-williams-decatur
- Other: https://linktr.ee/djstavropoulos.homes