Episode 375 - Craig Grant, Founder - RETI.us and National Speaker

00:00:00 - Craig Grant

All right? And I don't want to say this the wrong way or disrespectfully, because my bread and butter is speaking at events and teaching classes, right? But I think a lot of realtors are kind of done with that educational experience. Like, they don't want to sit there and hear a four hour lecture in a slide deck presentation. Right? They want something different. They want something a little more innovative and more collaborative, like, you know, engaging. And to me, that's what bar camps really are.

00:00:30 - Bill Risser

You're listening to the real estate sessions, and I'm your host, Bill Risser. With nearly 25 years in the real estate business, I love to interview industry leaders, up and comers, and really anyone with a story to tell. It's the stories that led my guests to a career in the real estate world that drives me into my 9th year and nearly 400 episodes of the podcast. And now, I hope you enjoy the next journey. Welcome to episode 375 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend. Today we're going to be talking to Craig Grant. Craig is a nationally known speaker, presenter, trainer. He created the real estate tech institute website that's located at Reti us with over. Well, I'll save for how many pieces of content are on this website to help agents understand technology. I'll save that for Craig. You'll hear it soon. Let's get this thing started. Like I said, really excited to have Craig on the show. Craig, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:31 - Craig Grant

Oh, hey, Bill. Thanks for having me today.

00:01:33 - Bill Risser

It's going to be a lot of the, I've had the chance of the last couple of years to get to know you a lot better. I've known of you pretty much since I got to Florida in 2017. But you're on the other side of the state, and we crisscrossed maybe across conferences and things, but it's going to be a lot of fun. So, first off, you're based over in the port St. Lucie area. Am I accurate there?

00:01:53 - Craig Grant

A little bit south, a town called Stewart. It's kind of in between Port St. Lucie and kind of palm beach.

00:01:59 - Bill Risser

I know you're a gator. You attended UF. So can I assume you're a native Floridian? Are you a Florida man?

00:02:06 - Craig Grant

Actually, no. I was born and raised in New Jersey, lived there till I was about 13, and that's when my family moved to Florida. So I was a kid kicking and screaming, didn't want to leave New Jersey, but 35 years later, very happy as a floridian.

00:02:24 - Bill Risser

Yeah. That's a very early move. Generally speaking, mom and dads don't go until there's grandkids floating around before they make the move to Florida. But your parents were like, no, we're going to make this move now. We're tired of the weather. Or was it a job? What was it?

00:02:37 - Craig Grant

I'm sure the weather had a factor in it, because no one likes shoveling snow and stuff like that. But it was more. My dad had a job chance for opportunity at the time that decided to move us down to Florida. Plus, his parents were already living in Florida. My mother's parents had already relocated to Florida. My aunts and uncles had already located. So it was kind of like that northeastern move. Like we all were in the New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts area, and we all kind of slowly creeped down. So the whole family basically moved to Florida. Yeah.

00:03:08 - Bill Risser

And settled on the east coast of Florida, which tends to be what happens there. Midwest is over here on the Gulf coast, and on the atlantic coast.

00:03:16 - Craig Grant

You can literally draw a line down the state and know where people are from.

00:03:21 - Bill Risser

I like asking this question. It'll be good for you. You've been here long enough. What's the biggest misconception about Florida?

00:03:27 - Craig Grant

That all of us aren't drunken idiots. And the headlines as Florida man on a weekly basis.

00:03:35 - Bill Risser

I like that. Yeah. No, that's so true. How about this? What are you most proud of? Being someone who's. We'll call you a near native of Florida. Yeah.

00:03:45 - Craig Grant

I mean, I'm 35 years later. I can definitely consider myself a floridian at this point. I don't know. That's a good question. I think just the overall vibe of Florida. I'm sure you've been there for quite a while. We kind of march to our own beat. There's a big thing about Florida. It's kind of like, ties into the whole Florida man kind of joke, is we're very independent. We don't like to be told what to do, and we kind of just kind of do whatever we want to do. So that's kind of the way I've always lived my life, is kind of very independent. I've never subscribed, know I have to be part of this group or go to this church or whatever it might be, just kind of doing my own thing. So to me, that's kind of what I love about Florida, is just the people, whether they're here retiring, whether here getting away from something. It's just the way Florida is.

00:04:34 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I like that good? That's a great answer. I like. So, you know, you are as tech geeky as anyone I've ever met in the business. I'm going to go out on a limb and I'm going to say that this was you pretty early in life. Junior high, high school. You were probably that guy, am I right?

00:04:56 - Craig Grant

Kind of. I mean, not with computers. Computers didn't really happen until a little bit later. But I was definitely like the kid who, if my parents left me alone with a screwdriver and a tv set, they'd come back and it was taken apart because I just wanted to know what was inside and how it worked. So I was always tinkering and kind of messing with stuff. And of course I loved video games and stuff like that as a kid.

00:05:21 - Bill Risser

Sure.

00:05:21 - Craig Grant

But the truth is, when I left for college, I had never truly used a computer. I had a typing class in high school, but I had never used a computer. And I literally had to have my dad sit me down and give me a basic lesson just so I could write papers. But by the end of college, I was teaching classes on it.

00:05:38 - Bill Risser

Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Tell me, what was the driving force behind that decision to become a. That's. There's a lot of schools. There was r1 close to you. That's pretty.

00:05:50 - Craig Grant

One if you're talking about Miami. Miami is a private school. And five x the cost of UF or Florida State or any of the other state universities.

00:06:00 - Bill Risser

Right.

00:06:01 - Craig Grant

So Miami was never on the radar. But when you look at the actual state universities, I mean, Florida honestly is, and I'm not trying to be cocky about this, it was rated the number one public school in the country this year. So it is a really good college now. Could I have gotten into it now? Probably not. But back in 1994 when I got into UF, I was really thrilled to get in because it was a very hard cause to get in back then. Now it's ridiculous. Now the standards are much, much higher. But to me, I was very active in sports and everything. And I had a couple of scholarship offers to small schools, but I wanted the big school, honestly, the party atmosphere that Uf offered. So to me it was the perfect mixture of great school partying, sports, everything. And when I went to uf, it was really the kind know the glory days of their sports. I mean, football was on top, basketball was excellent, like everything in the sports. And I'm a huge sports nut. That was a big factor. The other thing is, most of my friends from high school went to Florida state and my parents did not want me to go there because they figured I'd fail out.

00:07:05 - Bill Risser

Good call. So, scholarships. Now you got me my interest piqued here. What sports are we talking about, Craig?

00:07:11 - Craig Grant

My main sports were basketball and baseball. I mean, you wouldn't guess it with my size. I'm not the biggest of guys. I pretty competitively played basketball and baseball through high school and traveling leagues and everything.

00:07:23 - Bill Risser

So I'm guessing a guard, right? In basketball?

00:07:26 - Craig Grant

Point guard. Totally.

00:07:27 - Bill Risser

A point. Yeah, point guard. All right, so you're the general on the floor distributing the ball, making sure everybody's in the right place. How about baseball? What was your position?

00:07:35 - Craig Grant

Shortstop and catcher.

00:07:37 - Bill Risser

Wow. Awesome. Yeah. It's funny, we've never really chatted about this before, but that's great.

00:07:43 - Craig Grant

Yeah, I'm a huge baseball fan.

00:07:45 - Bill Risser

Well, I knew that part of it. I didn't know you had a love for it growing up and were playing at. That's awesome. Cool. Now, look, I'm going to ask you a question, and I know your family's from New Jersey, which means they're either going to be jets or Giants or Yankees or Mets and all that stuff. Did you bring that down here with you or do you support where you've grown up?

00:08:05 - Craig Grant

None of the above.

00:08:06 - Bill Risser

Wow. Let's hear that.

00:08:08 - Craig Grant

So, yes, my parents were Giants fans and Yankee fans and all that, but I didn't subscribe to that at all. Again, to me, I kind of like to make my own decisions, go my own way. So whoever my first favorite athlete was, that was basically the team I started loving and I've loved my entire life. So, for example, my first favorite basketball player was Larry Bird. I've been a Boston Celtic fan from day one. My first favorite football player was Tony Dorset. I've been a Dallas Cowboy fan from day one. And baseball was Alan Trammel with the teacher at Tigers. So. Oh, yeah, I'm all over the map. It has nothing to do with where I lived. It was just, did I fall in love with a player? And then I stuck with that team forever.

00:08:49 - Bill Risser

Trammel, a great shortstop for the Tigers. That was back in the. I think that was one of the 80s where they whooped the Padres in the World Series after starting 35 and five that year. I think in 1984.

00:09:02 - Craig Grant

It was an amazing year.

00:09:04 - Bill Risser

Amazing for you, horrible for me, but that's okay.

00:09:07 - Craig Grant

Yeah, but I mean, they've stunk pretty much ever since, with exception of a couple of years here and there. And now as a Tiger fan, all I get to do is go watch my players be amazing for other teams.

00:09:16 - Bill Risser

Yeah, that's great. I love that. Well, I love that you've got your teams. You followed them, you stuck with them. Big fan of that sort of action. Instead of just, oh, it's where I grew up. And I got to wherever I live, I got a roof of that team.

00:09:27 - Craig Grant

Oh, yeah. No, I wore head to toe Cowboys, a gear in giant stadium, and had sodas dumped on my head as a child. Like, oh, yeah. The worst was the vet in Philly. That was not friendly confines. But, yeah, to me, I love teams. It doesn't have to be where I live.

00:09:46 - Bill Risser

All right, good. We'll get back on track. Now, I know, like many in real estate, it's not the first gig. It really isn't. Generally speaking, you know this because you talk to literally thousands of people every year about this. What was the first thing you were doing right out of school? What was that path? You were.

00:10:07 - Craig Grant

Mean. My actual major in college was marketing and advertising. So while I was still a student at University of Florida, I got an internship at the Gainesville sun, which was at that time a newspaper owned by the New York Times. So I was literally interning in their kind of print sales department. And I was bored one day, and I literally told my supervisor, hey, I'm bored. Give me something to do. And he said, yeah, there's this new thing called the Internet. That old guy over there is trying to figure it out. Why don't you go see if you can help him figure it out? And that's literally how it all started, is I was bored. And literally, the Internet was starting right then and there. At least public Internet. I know it's been around for longer, but I ended up figuring out much better than that old guy and pushing him out of his job. So my true first job out of college was running the Internet division for that newspaper in Gainesville. And then eventually, I kept growing in responsibilities, and they ended up adding in more and more markets under my belt. And eventually I was the national trainer for the New York Times. So that's kind of where it all started, was literally. I was bored as an intern, and the Internet was popping right at that moment.

00:11:18 - Bill Risser

We're talking about the Internet, where there are some people listening that will not understand this. But first of all, it was super slow. It was dial up, and it was 2400 bod. And when you got to some other higher number, 96, you were giddy. It was like, wow, this is a whole new speed. And it really wasn't transactional. I remember distinctly talking to people saying, this will never be transactional. I mean, look, it's a big giant billboard of stuff.

00:11:42 - Craig Grant

Yeah.

00:11:42 - Bill Risser

Read a little bit of information.

00:11:43 - Craig Grant

That's all you can do, right?

00:11:44 - Bill Risser

Yeah. Couldn't have been more wrong on that. So that's great. So you're doing that, but somewhere, then we've got to get you in the world of real estate. You see this obviously a huge need for that, sort of. They need the Craig treatment that the old guy got at the Gainesville newspaper. You decided to do that in real estate. How did that come about?

00:12:05 - Craig Grant

So it actually all ties back to that same job. So one of the things that I did, I was very kind of inventive or entrepreneurial when I was working for the newspaper. So one of the things that I did that no other newspaper in the country was doing is I started my own website development company through the newspaper. So it was very hard for me or my staff to go out and sell online advertising when nobody in town had websites, right? So we would go to a local florist, whatever the business was, pitch them what the. I literally had a flipbook that had to teach them what the Internet was. And then this is what a website is, and here's why your business needs a website. And then I would sell that business, the website and the online advertising at the same time. Sometimes it was one or the other, but once I started building real estate websites and I got my hands on the MLS data feed, it was a game changer. I just started seeing all different ways I could slice and dice it and do different things with it. So most people don't know this, but the Gainesville newspaper was the first newspaper in the entire country where the local newspaper ran the public MLS website for the Realtor association. That was a partnership that I formed. And then once I formed it with Gainesville, then I moved on to other realtor associations that we had our newspapers, and started building out public mlss for different associations around the countries where New York Times had newspapers. So that's where the jump off happened.

00:13:34 - Bill Risser

Honestly, you're like the tip of the spear of shutting down an entire section of the newspaper that everybody loved to open up on Sunday. You're the guy, pretty much.

00:13:44 - Craig Grant

Well, that's the thing. The newspapers. I used to be in all the executive managerial meetings with New York Times brass and be pounding the table, telling them, if we don't put up a paywall now, we don't do these things, you're going to be done. Like I was warning them in the late 90s, early two thousand s that they're going to about to be cannibalized by the Internet and they didn't see it happening.

00:14:06 - Bill Risser

Yeah, and here comes a whole lot of websites. Homes.com, some of the early stuff, but then zillow, it's over. John. Yeah. Wow, that's great. I'm sure you've got some stories just like that one. But looking back, let's say it's 2004, what was the coolest thing you were doing with a website I know that's making you go way back at times 20 years ago.

00:14:27 - Craig Grant

Okay, so aside from building out those association public MLS sites, right. One of the last projects I did for the New York Times was, and you got to think back too, this was in 2003, 2004. One time I was meeting with a broker and he literally offhand made a comment. He said, you see that room right there? And there was like three women in a little glass room in his office. And I was like, yeah, why? He goes, those three women, I pay them a stupid amount of money for one reason, to build your stupid ad for your stupid newspaper every single week. And I was like, okay. I was like, so what you're saying is if I were able to build you a tool that allowed you to build your ad faster, you'd double your spending, right? And he goes, oh, heck yes. And I was like, put that in writing right now. And he was like, and I was like, put it in writing right now. Write it down on a piece of paper that you'll double your spending if I build you a tool that builds your ads. And he was like, okay, I'll sign that. And by the way, he was spending over half a million dollars a year in print advertising with the newspaper. So I literally got him to commit to paying another half a million dollars. And then what I did was, and I brought in a partner to help me build this out. But we built a product that literally automated building out a newspaper ad. It wrote the property descriptions, it automated everything off the MLS feeds. So all he had to do was go in and just approve the ad. And he was able to fire three women for that. Sorry to, but. And that was like one of my last things with the New York Times. I literally told them when I was leaving, if you keep me on, I'll help you get another real estate company or another automobile dealer every few months to help continue paying for this thing. And they just let it die by the vine. So that was amazing technology. I built them in 2004 that just died once I left the newspapers.

00:16:19 - Bill Risser

Yeah. What I've noticed about you in the last five, six years, seven years I followed you as well as seeing you at a couple of different events is you have to really stay connected to what's changing and what's happening in the world of technology, especially at the intersection with real estate, because that's where you make your living. We're going to talk about the real estate tech institute shortly, so that's where that has to stay current. But how do you do it? There's so much going on. You're a very busy guy. You speak over 100 days a year around the country. How do you stay on top of what's changing and the evolution one?

00:17:00 - Craig Grant

And to me any good? Not just like somebody who wants to be an expert in the field, but if you really want to excel in whatever you do, you have to be a lifelong learner and a sponge to me. So I'm just a voracious reader online of different sites and news and everything, of everything going on in the space. And then I do my darn best to stay really connected to the vendors in the industry. Most people that do what I do, they either try to partner with one company that's going to fund them, kind of sponsor all their speaking events and everything, or they're getting kickbacks promoting products. I don't believe in that. What I believe in is having great relationships with vendors, becoming friends with them and knowing that stuff before anyone else knows it and kind of knowing where the puck is going. So I am constantly learning, reading, learning everything I can. Plus having those relationships to me is huge.

00:17:54 - Bill Risser

Nice Gretzky. Pull on the puck.

00:17:56 - Craig Grant

I love it.

00:17:58 - Bill Risser

It's pretty good for a kid from Florida. I like that. Let's talk about real estate tech institute reti us. Obviously for me it's a simple concept. It's like I'm going to make a website where all the training can be there for all the agents and the agents can have access. More importantly, so can associations and MLSs and associate all that great stuff. Talk about the thought that went into building that out, how it's progressed over the years.

00:18:28 - Craig Grant

Sure. I mean, the origin of it is pretty crazy. I actually went to an event one time where another speaker, it was an event for speakers and his title of his topic was how to become a million dollar speaker. And I was thinking he was just going to sit there and talk about how he built up his reputation over years and took his fees from one level to another level and started making more and more money billing and he literally started his presentation saying, I run this membership site, my members pay $20 a month and I have something like 9000 members, right? And he literally on purpose kind of paused and waited for anyone to catch on and he's like, so does that not impress any of you? And I was like, impresses me. And he goes, well, do you know what that means? I said, $1.2 million a year in your revenues, just in those memberships. And he's like, that guy gets it. So I literally went home that weekend and started mapping out the reti site. Not to make a million dollars, but, well, don't be wrong. Yes, I want to make a million dollars, but it was just a way to take what I'm already doing. I'm already doing the stuff in the classroom, I'm already doing the stuff at events. Why not repurpose the same content and make it where it could just become another revenue stream plus help out the industry? Because so many, first of all, realtors can only attend what they can attend, whether it's a class or an event or whatever. And most realtors I know don't have time to spend 4 hours doing anything. They want to jump in and watch a five minute how to video, a seven minute product review or a 30 minutes webinar, right? So that's what the RG site is all about, is really giving the realtor the ability, or the staff member, MLS, whoever they are, that ability to learn what they want, when they want. All in just quick, short junk learning.

00:20:18 - Bill Risser

I put you on the spot here. Roughly how many different pieces of content are sitting on that site right now?

00:20:23 - Craig Grant

Over 3000.

00:20:24 - Bill Risser

3000 different places I can go to get information about.

00:20:29 - Craig Grant

Awesome.

00:20:32 - Bill Risser

You have a couple of partners, I think, as well. But you also have some agents that are helping you, right? You have some agents that are a part of your team that do some of the content.

00:20:42 - Craig Grant

Yes. So we have a team, there are six of us, including me. And honestly, when you say partners, they're revenue share partners. So they get a percentage of the revenue for the site to help and contribute and be part of the team. So I do own and run the site, but these are all industry friends. They're all, to me really good speakers, very knowledgeable people that I'm friends with who I was like, let's do this together, right? And the team has changed a little bit over the years. One or two below has come in and come out, but it's all about just again, if it was just sign up for my content, who knows how marketable it would be? Or especially on the partnership side, most of our members are through association partnerships. To me, when we have a whole team, that makes it a much stronger thing. And each of us has, and I did this kind of strategically. We're all geeks, but we're geeks in different ways. In different, like Warren is all about the business side, Heather's all about social media and being fun, and we're all different kinds of geese.

00:21:47 - Bill Risser

Yeah. You're a believer in bar camps?

00:21:50 - Craig Grant

Absolutely.

00:21:50 - Bill Risser

Seen you at a lot of bar camps. I'm the same way. I was part of the, in 2009 and ten, I was attending bar camps in the west side of the country, right, in Phoenix. And all that talk about the value of that bar camp experience, what makes it a little bit different for you.

00:22:08 - Craig Grant

All right. And I don't want to say this the wrong way or disrespectfully because my bread and butter is speaking at events and teaching classes. Right. But I think a lot of realtors are kind of done with that educational experience. They don't want to sit there and hear a four hour lecture in a slide deck presentation. Right. They want something different. They want something a little more innovative and more collaborative, like engaging. And to me, that's what bar camps really are, is it's not somebody sitting out there with a slide deck. It's much more everyone in the room contributing and solving each other's problems and giving recommendations and tricks they're using and stuff like that. And just a topic expert facilitating that conversation, keeping it going and making sure it's being done right. But I think it's just most adults don't want to sit in the classroom every day. So it's just a very different fun experience where you get a lot out of it.

00:23:04 - Bill Risser

Yeah. And I think. I think Florida does a great job. They have a couple of great ones in Florida. Right. When you talk about what the state's doing each year at the conference or convention, I want to get that know they're doing some wonderful stuff up in Jacksonville with their one coast camp every year as well. So I know you attend both of those and probably more around the think it's. I think you're absolutely dead on. It's just sitting in rows of chairs facing a screen is something that, it's just baked into the psyche of an agent. And I've seen it before. When you bring them to a bar camp and you make the chairs in circles and they're facing each other, there's a little freak out when they walk in at first because what's going on here if they've never been to one.

00:23:45 - Craig Grant

Yeah. But then the conversations start happening and then they're like, oh, this is really cool. I just think that the average adult, especially if they're a boomer or a Gen X, is just like you're saying. They're programmed for that, sitting at a desk and taking notes. Right. But if you talk to your millennials, your gen Z's, that's not what they're used to. They are much more used to a much more freestyle learning environment. And I don't know about you, when I attend bar camps, the audiences tend to be much younger than what I see in classrooms.

00:24:17 - Bill Risser

I'll agree with that. You're absolutely right. Yeah.

00:24:20 - Craig Grant

Well, don't be wrong. There's a mixer. There are senior people in the room, but it's really hard to get, a lot of times young people to come to classes, whereas they love coming to bar camps.

00:24:29 - Bill Risser

Yeah. Let me ask you a question. Let's talk about 2024. We're just rolling in. We're recording this in January of 2024 as you wrapped up 2023, and you're heading into your next year, what is top of mind for agents? What are they thinking about? What are they asking for? What does it look like to you? What do the agents want to me.

00:24:54 - Craig Grant

I think there's two big things that are on every agent's mind right now, and that's artificial intelligence and the lawsuits and how it's going to impact them and impact the industry. I don't think there's a way to get around either of those two items right now because they are front and center. They're all worried that AI is going to take their jobs or eliminate them. You know what I mean? And the lawsuits is a whole different story of everything that might happen with the industry.

00:25:21 - Bill Risser

Right.

00:25:21 - Craig Grant

So to me, those are the two big hot items that are on everyone's minds now. I don't swear, claim to be a lawyer or have any true.

00:25:30 - Bill Risser

Yes, we'll put the disclaimer in there right now.

00:25:32 - Craig Grant

Yeah. I don't know what's going to happen with the lawsuits. I don't think anyone does. I know there's a lot of fear, apprehension, everything around it, though.

00:25:41 - Bill Risser

Yeah. I'll ask you. Let's chat for a second about that. It seems to me that one thing that's definitely going to happen, and you're seeing more and more in either Riz media, in men, real estate, news from t 360 that we're going to have a serious reduction in the number of agents in the business, at least members of NAR, where we can really track what's going on there. So your thoughts on that? Do you think that's coming our way?

00:26:08 - Craig Grant

My answer is yes, but I think that was going to happen with or without the lawsuits. To be honest, I think that there's already been a shift over the last couple of years more towards teams versus going it alone. I think that aside from that, you know, the stats, what is it? 10% make over 90% of the revenue in this industry and the failure rate in real estate is huge. It really is. Like the amount that can't survive three or five years is really high. So I've always thought, even though it wouldn't benefit people like you and I, that there needed to be a little bit of a thinning of the herd, that the 1.5 million, it can't be supported long term. It says if the average realtor wants to have a good life and feed their families and pay their bills and have a retirement plan, right, which, it's one of the few industries that doesn't have retirement, doesn't have health and all these other things. So to me, it's always been a little bit of a recipe of a disaster of having 1.5 million realtors and the majority not making enough money to do it. So I think what I honestly is, and I say this every time I present on AI, it is going to reduce some of the realtors in this industry. There's no way to get around it. But what I really think it's going to do is create a level of super realtors that are better customer service, better communicators, better lead gen everything, because they're using AI to automate so many processes and create more content and everything that they want to do but don't have time for.

00:27:41 - Bill Risser

Right. I mean, think back, Craig, you were right there in the middle of it. I was in the middle of it. Go back to 2004. Five agents that started killing it with websites understood the power of a website. The ability for people to leave their information on a website dominated markets in this country. It was unbelievable, right? Yeah. Even though, look, and there were tons of agents that were still doing the old fashioned way, they could use the binder they bought every year to keep track of everything, and it worked just fine and they were doing very well. But there were agents on a whole nother level. And I think everything that came through the pipeline since then, social media, there were tons of agents who made it work, while others just said, this is stupid. It's never going to get new business. And on it goes. Now we're just on one that, I'll be honest, it feels way scarier than all the other changes. It is because someone creating something that looked like me and sounds like me and can send a message to my wife that I didn't say is scary, super scary. And that's way possible right now. So I think you're on the right track there, that these super agents are the ones who just adopt it. Look at it, don't just play with it, but go, okay, here are the things I can do that are really going to help my business grow, be super focused or they're going to have great success, right?

00:28:59 - Craig Grant

Absolutely. And you kind of nailed it a minute ago. I've been doing this now since 2005. So I was here at the start of social media. I was here at the start of mobile, right? Like every few years there's a transformative tech. The CRM craze in the early two thousand and ten s. Right? Every couple of years there's a different transformative tech where either the realtor gets on the train and uses it, or it's stupid and they kind of get a little bit more and more left behind. And to me, AI is just that next big thing. But it has the potential to do more than the other ones before.

00:29:36 - Bill Risser

Right. Let me ask you, I'm going to twist the question up a little bit. You told me what agents are worried about or thinking about. It's AI and the lawsuits. In your mind, is that the right thing or is there something else they should be thinking about going into 2024?

00:29:52 - Craig Grant

Well, I don't want to say they shouldn't focus on either of those two things because they're both going to have huge impacts. But to me, and I talk about this all the time when I speak about technology, is you can give me every tech little shiny tool on earth, right? The core of this business is still relationships. It all goes back to relationships. So to me, reconnecting and reconnecting with your sphere, if you're not doing it, is to me what they should be focusing on. And it can't just be, I'm going to automate an email four times a year to you. There's got to be real life touches and actual care and customer service if you expect to get repeat business out of your sphere, because the more and more time goes on, people are just getting less and less loyal.

00:30:37 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I love that. I love hearing that. I'm listening to a book right now. Sell it like Sirhant right. Yeah. Ian Sirhant, you've seen him speak at some imminent stuff. And even though he lives in this really wacky world of million dollar and $10 million and $30 million homes, it's all about relationships. Doesn't matter. It's always the same. I love that. Craig, you've listened before to the show. You know that I wrap up the show the same way every time. It's always been with Jay Thompson being the first guy. This final question, which is what one piece of advice would you give a new agent? Just getting started and we may have covered it a little bit. Yeah.

00:31:15 - Craig Grant

Well, I mean, to me, the one thing that I personally wish I could give to every brand new realtor is to the basics of business is probably the best way I can put it. Right. I believe one of the biggest reasons why we have such a high failure rate in this industry is that most realtors come into the business without a true business and marketing background and they don't do the due diligence to build out a marketing plan to create a brand, to understand budgeting and financing and everything. And then they get six months into the business without a closing and they're freaking out. Right. So to me, I wish I could take every realtor back to square one because, and by the way, this is stuff they don't teach you in real estate school. Real estate schools just teach to the test, pass the test to get the license. But if you could just slow down a teeny bit and do the basics of business, you'd have a much better chance to succeed. And then the second thing would be work that sphere. Right. And you're going to need a great CRM. You're going to need some tech tools to help you work your sphere and do it automated and do that. But I think that is the biggest reason why somebody don't get past those first couple of years is they don't work the sphere and they don't have the basics of business.

00:32:30 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I love that answer. Craig, if somebody wants to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to do that?

00:32:36 - Craig Grant

I'll give two ways. One is if they want to hire me as a speaker. My speaker site is my name Craiggrant info. If they're looking more for the educational side like we talked about, the other way would be the RTI website. RTi us each. Both of those sites have contact forms, the ways to get a hold of me and everything on there. But again, if you're interested in me as a speaker, it's Craig. Grant on info. If you just want to jump in there and start learning Rhei us.

00:33:05 - Bill Risser

Craig, this has been great. I really appreciate the time. First of all, my apologies for taking so long to get you on here, because this is awesome. But yeah, I think it's been great to watch you in action. I've seen you present, I've seen you facilitate. I've seen you when we're having drinks, talking about technology, which is, to be brutally honest, where I learned the most from.

00:33:29 - Craig Grant

Mean.

00:33:29 - Bill Risser

It's because, as you know, when you have those connections with people, you kind of get to know what's happening, what's going on, what's being built. I mean, there's absolutely amazing stuff. And I know you and Alex are working on some really cool stuff, right? That's for another episode. Right? We'll talk about that stuff at a later date. But I think it just amazing. So thanks so much for your time today. Really, really enjoyed having you on.

00:33:49 - Craig Grant

Absolutely love being on. Thanks, Bill.

00:33:50 - Bill Risser

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