We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Karin Carr a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Karin, thanks for joining us today. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry?
Real estate agents are still being encouraged to cold call and promote themselves anywhere and everywhere to find new clients. I really disagree with this mentality. We provide much needed advice and guidance during a very stressful time in a person’s life – buying or selling a home. Yes, you can call 100 people a day to possibly get 5 appointments and hopefully 3 clients who had never heard of you before they answered the phone. But this just doesn’t seem the best way to go about finding motivated clients who are loyal to you and aren’t just looking for the cheapest price. I feel that we need to earn our clients’ business by providing them with lots of information up front that will enable them to determine whether they’d like to work with us.
Karin, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’ve been a real estate agent since 2005, and my husband and I have relocated several times. Every time we moved, I felt like a brand new agent all over again. I had no name recognition, no market share, no sphere, and no database.
In June 2017, we moved from Atlanta to Savannah, and I had to start over in a new market YET AGAIN. With zero clients and zero money coming in, I decided to go all in on my YouTube channel.
I liked making videos, and I figured it would be a good way to get my name out there. So I set out to learn as much as I could about how to grow a YouTube channel. And my business SKYROCKETED!
I now get over 80% of my business from my YouTube channel with ZERO COLD CALLING.
I began coaching other agents in 2018 to see if they could replicate my results, and most of them did. In my program, Video Boss Agent Academy, you will learn what topics make good videos, how to research them to see which titles will get you the most views, how to get over your fear of being on camera, and how to film and edit your videos, how to ensure they will get found in a sea of videos on YouTube, and how to promote them for free.
My favorite part of all this is when clients call me and giggle on the phone because they think they’re talking to a celebrity. The first time it happened, I almost died laughing – I am NOT famous, but these people act like I have my own HGTV show. And in a way, I do. It’s called YouTube!
They ask if I’m accepting new clients right now because I must be really busy. They have already decided to work with me by the time they call, email, or text me. It’s kind of surreal now – when I go on a listing appointment, they invariably say they feel like they know me already and they are not interviewing anyone else.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
I had just moved to Atlanta and was starting my career over for the third time. I took a 7 week class that taught old school marketing methods. The first week we were told to go to the mall and pass out 100 business cards to random strangers. I hated everything about this idea but I wasn’t going to fail the very first week! So off I went to the mall. The second person I approached happen to work in the mall security office. He escorted me to my car, kindly asked me to leave, and not ever to try anything like this again.
The second week we all had to cold call expired listings. I will never forget a gentleman saying to me, “You are the 18th phone call I’ve gotten since 8 o’clock this morning. You realtors are vultures! Do not ever call me again.”
At that moment I realized that people hate being approached by salespeople even more than I hated doing the approaching. I vowed to never do anything like that again to find business. I promptly started a YouTube channel and started making videos that I hoped were valuable to people that were thinking of buying or selling in my area. It took a long time of making consistent videos but the first time I got a phone call from someone who said he found my channel and wanted me to represent him, my business and my life changed forever.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
I 100% practice what I preach. I’ve been making weekly YouTube videos for five years now. I teach real estate agents how to do this for themselves, and when they tell me they are too busy and simply don’t have the time, I point to myself as an example. I am a real estate coach as well as the owner of a real estate team. I am a mom who has to drive kids to and from school and to and from extracurricular activities. I’m a wife, I make dinner, I clean the house, I take care of our chickens and our dog, I go grocery shopping, I take continuing education classes, I speak all over the country on video marketing. I am a busy woman! But we make time for the things that are important. Binge watching new TV shows on Netflix is not important to me. Creating content for my YouTube channel is. Therefore i’ll plan my schedule around the things that are important to me and I stop doing the things that are not.
This really resonates with a lot of people because we all have excuses. We all love to say things like, there aren’t enough hours in the day. But there are plenty of people who get a lot more done than we do and they have the same 24 hours that we have. It’s all about prioritizing what’s important to you. And I think that when people see that if I can do it, it makes them feel empowered as well because there’s nothing special about me. I’m just a real estate agent like them.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://karincarr.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.karin.carr
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/youtubeforagents
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karincarr/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/karincarr
- Other: Join my free community just for real estate agents! https://videobossagent.group/circle
Image Credits
Raylyn Reed Photography