Episode 357 – Jim Remley, Principal Broker – John L Scott Real Estate

Starting a career in the real estate industry can be overwhelming. In this podcast, Bill Risser and Jim Remley discuss the importance of recruiting experienced agents and utilizing motivation as a key component to success in the real estate industry. They explain that a good relationship between the broker leader and the agents is essential and that nurses and teachers make great realtors due to their nurturing and educational approach. Technology can help brokers scale their businesses and stay competitive in the ever-changing market, and those who don't embrace it will be left behind. This episode offers valuable insight into the world of real estate and provides a great starting point for anyone looking to dive into a new career.

Episode Outline:

(00:00:00) Oregon Lifestyle Overview

(00:04:59) Recruiting at 24

(00:10:15) Recruiting Experienced Agents

(00:15:04) Recruiting Agents

(00:19:54) Attracting Experienced Agents

(00:24:43) Recruiting Productive Agents(00:29:29) Embracing AI

Episode Links:

https://www.erealestatecoach2.com/

https://www.jimremley.johnlscott.com/

https://www.luxuryhomecouncil.com/

Episode 357 – Jim Remley, Principal Broker, John L. Scott Real Estate

00:00:00 - Jim Remley

And you're looking at your four quartiles, your bottom, your middle bottom, your mid-level, and then your top. And you're saying, how can I move the bottom level up to the next tier and then and that third tier up to the fourth tier. And I'm always coaching them and helping them and saying, what can we do to help get you there? And that takes deep conversations with people and really analyzing their business and saying, hey, listen, let's take a look at where you're at, where you're going. What do you need specific help with? Is it a listing presentation? It's a buyer's presentation? Do you need accountability? What does it happen to be?

00:00:32 - Bill Risser

You're listening to the Real Estate Sessions podcast and I'm your host, Bill Risser, Executive Vice President, Strategic Partnerships with RateMyAgent, a digital marketing platform designed to help great agents harness the power of verified reviews. For more information, head on over to Ratemyagent.com. Listen in as I interview industry leaders and get their stories and journeys to the world of real estate. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 357 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend. And today we're going to go back out to the Pacific Northwest, one of my favorite areas of the country, and we're going to talk to Jim Remley. Jim is with John L. Scott in Oregon. He's a coach, a speaker, a Real Trends top 500 broker. Just an amazing story author. It goes on and on. He's just great stuff and he's going to drop a lot of important information. I think for anybody out there that's in the recruiting side of things, if you're a broker owner or if you're a team leader, you want to listen in. So, let's get this thing started. Jim, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:36 - Jim Remley

Hey. Super excited to be here. Thank you.

00:01:38 - Bill Risser

Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. I had the opportunity to kind of do a little research and wow, you've done some really cool stuff over the last, I'm going to say 25, 30 years. 30 years, yeah.

00:01:49 - Jim Remley

Thank you.

00:01:50 - Bill Risser

The way I start my podcast, every single time, those that listen know it is. I like to find out about you. Let's start out where you grew up and what's that experience you had growing up. And it looks like Oregon is where you were born and raised, am I right?

00:02:07 - Jim Remley

I was born in Long Beach, California, but my family were hippies, and they came up to Oregon and the hippie kind of train and they landed in a little town called Roseburg, Oregon, which is kind of in the middle of the state. And I grew up there. It's a typical, very small town, 25,000 population and very much a typical town in America, kind of circa America.

00:02:32 - Bill Risser

And so, I would guess that train you talk about, I grew up in San Diego myself. There were a lot of people in the 80s making this mass exodus for the Pacific Northwest. Right. This is what you're talking about with the train, right?

00:02:48 - Jim Remley

Yeah. Not a literal train, but people coming.

00:02:51 - Bill Risser

It was a lot of people. In fact, I think the locals up there were getting not upset, but like, hey, wait, what's going on here? This is changing pricing of housing and all kinds of stuff.

00:03:00 - Jim Remley

Right, right. Yeah. There was definitely a backlash. And now I think most people that live here are transplants, but back then there was more of a so let's.

00:03:09 - Bill Risser

I think when people think of Oregon, the first thought is Portland, because that's the big city. That's where everything kind of revolves around. It feels like, however, you're in southern Oregon now, you're in the Pass Medford area. Yeah.

00:03:23 - Jim Remley

Medford, Ashland. Yeah. Right over the border of California, just.

00:03:26 - Bill Risser

North of the border. So how would you explain that to somebody who's never been there, has never been to that part of Oregon? What would we find?

00:03:33 - Jim Remley

Well, first I would say that for the rest of us that don't live in Portland, we don't love the association with Portland. I'll say the rest of the state is actually pretty conservative. Folks that live a know, I wouldn't say conservative, but I should say more of a normal lifestyle. Not what you're seeing on the news in Portland. Right, right. So, when you look at that, what's on the news, it's totally the antithesis of what you see in 99% of Oregon. It's just an interesting dichotomy there. But that's the truth of it. It's a very rural lifestyle and people love it, and it's very much the lifestyle what you'd expect the Pacific Northwest to look like.

00:04:15 - Bill Risser

How big is Medford?

00:04:16 - Jim Remley

Medford is a population base of about 80,000.

00:04:19 - Bill Risser

Okay.

00:04:20 - Jim Remley

So, it's a little bit bigger, but not huge. For sure.

00:04:22 - Bill Risser

Yeah. I have to share a story. My wife and I, she wasn't my wife at the time. She was my girlfriend. We drove up to Canada, to Vancouver for the World's Fair, and on the way back, we decided to come down the entire coast. And so, you would ignore what that route looks like. Right. And one of the little communities we traveled through was called Gold Beach, Oregon. Right?

00:04:43 - Jim Remley

Yeah.

00:04:43 - Bill Risser

Not too far from you.

00:04:44 - Jim Remley

Yeah, that's right.

00:04:46 - Bill Risser

And so, as we're headed down with Highway One or whatever we were going to call it at that time, there was a big giant sign for a pancake breakfast and fire truck and a couple of firefighters that wouldn't let you pass. They said, you're going the wrong way. Go this way to the breakfast.

00:05:05 - Jim Remley

You're having breakfast.

00:05:06 - Bill Risser

So, we did. We turned left and we went down this road into a little parking area and had the best pancake breakfast we've ever had with the Gold Beach Fire Department and a whole bunch of locals. And it was just a great me. That's Oregon, right?

00:05:20 - Jim Remley

It is Oregon.

00:05:21 - Bill Risser

That and the Tillamook County Fair that we went to. One same on that same trip. I take it back to the same trip we stopped. And it was just so cool because I grew up in San Diego, which is a little bigger, obviously.

00:05:33 - Jim Remley

Yeah.

00:05:34 - Bill Risser

So, it was really nice to see that small-town life in the south of Oregon. Good, good. So, let's get to the crux of the conversation here. And you got into real estate really young, right? Because generally, we're going to talk about recruiting and some other things. You know that it's the second and third career for the majority of people you talk to.

00:05:58 - Jim Remley

Absolutely.

00:05:58 - Bill Risser

But I think I read somewhere you were 19 when you got into real estate. Let's talk about that.

00:06:03 - Jim Remley

Well, my buddy, his dad owned a real estate company, and he said, let's go get our real estate license. And at the time, I barely graduated high school, and I ended up working in a lumber mill. And like most kids in Oregon, we worked in lumber mills. So, I was working the graveyard shift in a lumber mill, and I was also going to college at the same time. Actually, ended up flunking out of college because I couldn't work graveyard and go to school at the same time. Wasn't my constitution. But he said, let's get a real estate license. So, I went and studied. I finished. He didn't I did not go to work for his dad, but I did go to work for the first company I drove by after I got my letter in the mail, which was Cinch 21. And so, I was 19 at the time. And just went in and not knowing anything about anything, just thought I was going to come in and crush it.

00:06:52 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I would guess it was kind of lucky. It was Century 21, at least, right? Because for a new agent, they were already in the mode of education training. I mean, they were kind of a great place to start. How long did you stay there?

00:07:07 - Jim Remley

I was with C 21 for five years. I was fortunate. I struggled my first six months getting my feet under me, but I was smart in the fact that I did go to all the classes that they offered, and I did read a lot of books. I attended a lot of seminars, and I just started to take a lot of notes and kind of figure out my own way. And after that first initial six months of struggle, my next year in the business, I took 150 listings and got listed in the top 1% of the nation. Wow.

00:07:36 - Bill Risser

I got to know, is there a special book in there that helped with that?

00:07:39 - Jim Remley

Which book? There are a lot of them. One of my favorite authors at the time back then was Hopkins, Tom Hopkins Art of the Sale, which was a fantastic book, but a lot of those things don't apply today. So, the world of sales has changed dramatically since the late 80s, early 90s. Now we're selling it a completely different way, but at the time it was very effective, and I used a lot of the strategies, but I did learn about for-sale banners and expired listings and working in a sphere of influence and farming from other mentors that I worked with. And I dove deep into those areas and create a lot of success there.

00:08:17 - Bill Risser

So, at the age of 2021, you know what you're doing now, you're enjoying the career. You've chosen that path. And I think it's such a massive advantage to know that early that that's going to be what you're going to do, as opposed to the people that come in later. And then at the age of 24, you make the biggest step. You say, I'm going to have my own brokerage.

00:08:40 - Jim Remley

Yes.

00:08:41 - Bill Risser

So, was there a mentor? Was there some help? How did that come about, especially at that age?

00:08:47 - Jim Remley

Well, what happened was that I and a buddy started working together. There's a backstory behind that, but we became one of the first teams in Oregon, really was me and him and our assistant. And when we started to look at our production level, we recognized pretty quickly that if we had moved out of our own office, we were like number two in the county at our production level, right? So, we're like, well, maybe we should just do that. Maybe we should move out of our office and be our own office. And so, we found a gal that was thinking about selling her little company, and we bought her company, and all the agents left, and it was just me and him and our assistant. And then we started to start to grow from there. I will say that over the next 15 years, we grew from basically nothing to 17 offices and became the largest independent company in Oregon.

00:09:46 - Bill Risser

I want to know what it's like for a 24-year-old gym to talk to someone in their 40s or fifty s and try to explain to them why you were the brokerage I needed to come work for.

00:09:57 - Jim Remley

Well, I'll tell you, I made a lot of mistakes. But I think what it comes down to whether it's me at a listing appointment at 19, my first year, trying to talk a retired couple in a listing with me, which I look like I might be there, old enough to be their grandkid, maybe, or whether it's trying to talk to somebody, trying to recruit it's the same thing. And that is what we're really selling, is a vision of what we can do for you as a human being. And so, it's building a relationship with you on the other side of the fence and saying, hey, listen, here's what I think I can do to help you with your goals. It's not about me. It's about what I can do for you. And I truly believe that I can help you, and I'm going to work harder than anybody else to make that dream a reality. My advantage as an agent, talking to potential agents was I had done it and I was successful. And I would always use that as a competitive wedge and say, I'm not a broker that hasn't done it. I'm somebody that's in the field of doing it every day. That's a huge difference between me and maybe where you're at now. So, I would use that as an advantage, too, as a competing broker at the time. But I will say my number one mistake, which I think is as important as our successes as our mistakes, right? My mistake was, for the first five years we had that company, I thought to myself that I was a little intimidated by recruiting experienced agents. Although I did. My number one goal was to recruit new agents. Because I thought to myself egotistically that I could bring a new agent in and help them create the same level of success that I did. So, I started doing recruiting seminars every month, which I did for five years straight. Where I'd bring it? I'd do advertising, rent a hotel room, do a whole showing, a dance for 90 minutes. Get people excited about getting a real estate license, help them find the school, and then help them get to the school, get them to the other side. And it was a weaning process. You'd have 50 people in the room. You might get two at the end that would actually come to work for you. But what I found and what I teach now was the mistake that I made is I would end up with this basically group of people that I didn't know it at the time, but they had an 86% attrition rate. So, 86% of the people that end up in the business end up out of the business two years later. So as a broker, I'm investing all this time and energy into these people that are eight to nine times out of ten are not going to make it in the business. And it wasn't about me being a good or bad trainer. It was just about them as human beings not being up to the task.

00:12:19 - Bill Risser

Right.

00:12:19 - Jim Remley

So, then I eventually pivoted and said, wait a second, we've got to start recruiting experienced agents. And we took a whole different tactic.

00:12:25 - Bill Risser

Yeah, we're going to talk about that. I think that's very cool. That's going to be a great takeaway for a lot of people listening to the podcast, you're with John L. Scott now, which is a big they're not independent. They're a regional, big regional right up in the Pacific Northwest. How did you come to partner with them?

00:12:43 - Jim Remley

So, what happened is I grew this office to 17 offices, and then I got recruited to start teaching for the National Association of Realtors, which I did for many years. I tried all the designation programs, and then I was passionate about teaching and I'm coaching and that kind of thing. So, I did that, and I sold my interest in my company to my partner when I started to do that. And then I got recruited to come down and help another guy who had just opened a company. But he had bought this company, this John L. Scott company in Medford. And he came down and said, Jim, I want you to come down and just consult with me about how I can grow this company because I've known you've grown. Come down and consult with you, but I'm not going to go work for you. Well, he was a good recruiter. He brought me down, offered me a ton of money, and said, Jim, we want you to stay here. So, we pulled the trigger and moved down. A little bit of a short, long story on that is he had bought the company in the Great Recession of 2008, and it was suffering. He had gotten all the way down to 38 agents when I joined, and two agents left the weekend I joined, we were down to like, 36 or 37 agents. We took that company and we, over the next ten years, went from $100 million in business to $1.4 billion in business. Top 500 companies in America. And we're competing with companies that are in Chicago and Atlanta and New Jersey and New York, La. We're in a population base of 80,000, right? So, we're crushing it at that level. That's how I've got into this whole coaching gig, is people have asked me, how did you do it?

00:14:11 - Bill Risser

Yeah, that's fantastic. Let's go down that path really quick with coaching a long time ago. This is almost like in 2000 when you started kind of dabbling on the Internet with coaching.

00:14:28 - Jim Remley

So that was, erealestatecoach erealestatecoach.com.

00:14:32 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I'm sure that sites changed over the years quite a bit. I actually looked at it yesterday and I'm like, oh, this looks very cool. It's a very professional, modern-looking site. I can't even imagine what it looked like when it first launched.

00:14:48 - Jim Remley

Whole story about that, too.

00:14:49 - Bill Risser

Go ahead, let's hear.

00:14:50 - Jim Remley

So, when I started my coaching platform, I thought I had this whole vision of how I wanted to lay out, and I hired somebody to actually design the website, which huge mistake, by the way. Anybody listening? Don't ever do that. That's a big mistake. I spent $150,000 on building this website, and it completely failed. I mean, it was a massive, massive failure. Didn't make a dollar on the site. And then I found a platform that does all the same stuff for $2,000 a year, by the way. So anyway, yeah, it's gone through many iterations. When I started, I was completely focused on agent coaching, and that was kind of my passion. And what I've done for years. I've helped agents go from where they are to where they want to go. And I have one of the highest per-agent productivity rates in the country, where our average agent is doing about $6 million a year, which is when you have 250 agents, that's pretty hard to do. So, people have come to me and said, how do you get to that high level? And it's through our coaching. So, I built that coaching platform to kind of replicate that for agents that wanted to tap in and say, hey, I want to be coached like Jim's coaching, but I can't go to work for Jim because I'm in New Jersey, right, or I'm in Atlanta or know Florida or whatever, but I want the coaching. So that's what I built it for, what it became. Now, as you said, evolution is now our...