Episode 388 - Short Cuts with Eric Sachs, VP/co-Founder - Breakthrough Broker

00:00:00 - Eric Sachs

I think right now, if I was, if I was in front of an audience of realtors, I would ask them, what are you doing to make sure the people you know call you this summer when they have a life event?

00:00:18 - 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 of 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. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 388 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. We're going to do another shortcuts episode where I venture back in time and find a guest that I interviewed years ago and catch up with them and see where they're at today. It's going to be a lot of fun. Today we're going to be talking to Eric Sachs, who's the president and co founder of Breakthrough Broker, a company that I worked with when I was at Chicago. Title. I'm sure in the early teens they've been around. That's when they were just getting their start somewhere in that timeframe. It's just an amazing tool, and really, Eric is an amazing guy. So let's get this thing going. Eric, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:17 - Eric Sachs

Bill, thanks for having me. Last time you had me, I had to beg. I was like, bill, when are you going to have me on your podcast? So I was super excited. I'm also excited again today because it's always a pleasure having a conversation with.

00:01:30 - Bill Risser

You, you know, in these shortcuts episodes, I'm not going to go back and do the whole thing about your, like, you grew up in Denver, your parents were from New York, and, you know, you were a police officer. Very interesting background. If you want to hear that, it's on the other episode that we did. And Eric, do you remember roughly how long ago that was?

00:01:50 - Eric Sachs

It's gotta be at least four years ago.

00:01:52 - Bill Risser

That's exactly right. It's a little over four and a half years. 2019. November. In fact, we recorded it on Halloween, and the kids had a snowstorm. Like the earliest snow ever in a snow day.

00:02:04 - Eric Sachs

I love it.

00:02:06 - Bill Risser

What I like to do here is kind of, let's go forward from November 2019. A lot of times when asked this question, I get answers both on the personal and professional side. But what's the most exciting thing that's happened to you personally and professionally, personally.

00:02:22 - Eric Sachs

We became empty nesters. My youngest is, my daughter is at San Diego State. My son is back home from New York City. I think when we last spoke, he was just out there to go to dance school. He's back now. And, and my wife and I are able to kind of travel the world and see what's out there now that the kids are grown up professionally, I think since we last spoke, breakthrough brokers had quite an amazing journey. We still love what we do. We're super passionate. We hit over 600,000 users on breakthrough broker. We've really ramped up our brokerage platform since we spoke last. We're working with a little over 180 brokerages and breakthrough brokers now getting into working on some cool AI for our users. We're working on trying to create the best content for agents in the world. That's where we're at.

00:03:18 - Bill Risser

Yeah. You talk about the brokerages you work with. Some of them are the largest in the world, and others are just smaller regional operations. It doesn't matter. You've got a solution for both, right?

00:03:29 - Eric Sachs

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. We work with one of the largest brokerages in the world running their global marketing technology. One of the fastest growing brokerages in the world right now, running their global marketing technology. And this morning I spoke with a single agent brokerage. He called me and he said, I want to learn more about how I can leverage your technology to grow my brokerage. And so, yeah, it's fun working with independent brokerages like we were just me and my best friend. One or two agents or huge, huge corporate structures. We can work with both.

00:04:02 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I remember. It was, it had to be. You were just, just getting started, right when we first met at Chicago. Title that it's come so far, the website. Everything has come so far.

00:04:13 - Eric Sachs

Yeah. Before you went to Florida, so, yeah. So long ago, you and I met at least nine years ago.

00:04:20 - Bill Risser

Yeah. Let me ask you this question. I always like to have a little fun. There's always one fun question on these shortcut episodes, and it might hurt a little, but we're just gonna go there anyways. Who do you like in the Stanley cup? The Oilers or the Panthers? Or do you simply not care?

00:04:34 - Eric Sachs

Oh, you know me. Hockey is my favorite sport. I'm depressed that my avalanche aren't there, but since we spoke, we won a Stanley cup.

00:04:42 - Bill Risser

You did? Yep.

00:04:43 - Eric Sachs

I would love to see Canada get their first Stanley cup since 1993. But I think Florida is going to win.

00:04:50 - Bill Risser

They're, they're a tough, no nonsense team. Right. Man, they. Yeah, they took it to the Lightning as well, so. Yeah, in the playoffs, so. Yeah, that's great. Okay. And, you know, like, if living in Florida, even though they're, you know, you'd call them arrival, I think I'd like to see it kind of stick around. That's five straight Stanley cups where it's been. A Florida team, I think you knew that, right?

00:05:11 - Eric Sachs

Yeah. It's crazy, I know.

00:05:12 - Bill Risser

Yeah. No one else in the country likes that but us in Florida.

00:05:16 - Eric Sachs

I'm sure ESPN is not a fan of that, but either way, not exactly.

00:05:21 - Bill Risser

All right, so I want to ask you a question. There's so much happening in real estate. You know, we, you know, the settlement, the whole. There's so much going on, but what has your attention? The world of real estate right now. What are you watching really close and going? Because that's important.

00:05:37 - Eric Sachs

My attention right now is on all the agents sitting on the sidelines. My attention is drawn to all the negative comments in the Facebook groups and the agents who are reacting to the settlement instead of trying to figure out how to get through it. If you want to be in real estate, every profession, every industry has twists and turns and peaks and valleys, and for some reason, ours doesn't react to change very well. So I saw some recent data that came out. It was shocking. And I don't remember the numbers, so you can't take this as factual, but it was something like, really crazy. Like 2500 realtors of the 1.5 million sold 98% of the homes in the last six months.

00:06:38 - Bill Risser

Wow.

00:06:39 - Eric Sachs

The big teams who had the pedal to the metal before, who are too big to quit, not willing to quit, are kind of taking over. And I hate that. Not that I don't love the big teams, but I love any person that wants to sell real estate I think can and should succeed in this business. But we as a group, and you probably see it, too, bill, and you're in all the Facebook groups, the complaining, the arguing, and the sitting on the sideline waiting is going to kill us. You know, I think the longer we wait, like take buyers right now, why are we afraid of buyers? We're going to figure out how to get paid, take them. Figure out how to answer the question. My wife, I was. My wife answered for her latest buyer client on speakerphone. She was cooking, so she answered on speakerphone, and I heard her new client, who's buying a home, the wife called her and said, hey, Joe, just a quick question. I saw some things in the news. Do we have to pay you because we love you, but, like, we're using all our money to buy this house. If you're not ready to answer that question, we've got some problems. So I think we need to be articulate. We need to be better than we've been and just keep marketing, keep going out and finding buyers and sellers.

00:08:11 - Bill Risser

Yeah. You know, you put this much more eloquently than I will say it here, but when things get really tough in the world of real estate, when something's just, you know, it could have been the recession, it could have been that what's happening here, or rates started cracking up, ticking up, that is when you just double down, right? Because that's when you can really show your value and your worth and how much you know and how much you care. Yet, like you said, it ends up everyone goes to the sidelines and leaves it for the people that are going to work their butts off. Yeah. I've only got one more question for you. We might chat a little more after this, but I just want to ask you, since we last talked and you mentioned this breakthrough brokers grown exponentially, I've also been listening to stuff you're doing. I know you're working closely with Tom Ferry and his team, which I think is really cool, but for us, can you share an example of the ways your helping agents today? Maybe in connection or in working together with Tom?

00:09:16 - Eric Sachs

Well, I will say I think Tom is the best coach in the industry. And no offense to any of my other coach friends, I think his content is some of the best ideas in the industry. And we were happy to be helping with some of his ideas by creating the content behind the ideas and putting them in breakthrough broker.

00:09:38 - Bill Risser

Nice, nice. So if you had to, even if it's not a Tom Ferry related plan. I know I've heard you talk recently about just some basic things you can do right now, like ways to leverage what breakthrough broker's doing to help that agent get over the hump on something that they're struggling with.

00:09:58 - Eric Sachs

I think right now, if I was in front of an audience of realtors, I would ask them, what are you doing to make sure the people you know call you this summer when they have a life event? I firmly believe that people buying and selling real estate right now are the ones who have to death, divorce, downsize, relocation, marriage, baby inheritance. Now, if we look at the people we know, we know they have connections with other realtors. And my brother, if he's listening to this podcast someday, lost a multi million dollar listing from a person who knew his wife extremely well. And I had reminded him earlier in the year to send a newsletter out. Remind everybody you are the go to realtor. It's not their responsibility. He saw this gentleman. The gentleman said, hey, I'm glad I got to see you. We're moving to northern California. My brother like gave him that disgusted realtor look. It's that scorned realtor look. It's half nausea, half anger, you know. And the guy like recognized it. My brother's like, oh my gosh. Did you list the house already? And he said, yeah, I met a nice lady at an open house in my neighborhood and we hired her. This gentleman hired a stranger because my brother didn't stay in touch with him. So if I'm getting into real estate tomorrow, I'm making sure my sphere or the people I know darn well remember me when they have someone in their life that needs to downsize because most baby boomers right now need to downsize. When someone maybe gets an inheritance and they want to put it into real estate instead of the volatile market, maybe they have a baby and it's time to get out of the condo they're in. But are they going to call you is my question. And so I think breakthrough broker has a huge variety of sphere marketing content from engagement, social posts to automated newsletters. You just upload your sphere and automatically those people get an engaging piece of content every month. So I think that's what we're focusing on at breakthrough broker. We're focusing on automation, sphere marketing, automated listing marketing done for you as realtors, we want, we want to receive a postcard that's already done. I just want to click a button, draw a circle on a map and send it. Yeah, and that's what we're working.

00:12:45 - Bill Risser

I love that, Eric. If somebody's not seen breakthrough broker, which I just think that blows my mind, how do they get there? What should they be doing right now?

00:12:58 - Eric Sachs

Two things. You can go to your title partners first and see if your title partners are partners with us and ask if they have breakthrough broker connections. Get referred by your title partner or just go to www.breakthroughbroker.com. it's open access. Sign up, create a profile. There's a no cost component to breakthrough broker there. Every, every content field has a couple items of free content. So you can use breakthrough broker at no cost. Best way to use breakthrough broker is with breakthrough plus. And this isn't sorry for the shameless plug, but breakthrough is $107 for the whole year and it's plugged into the MLS. It has automated marketing. It's got so many different features for $107 for the whole year. So best way to use breakthroker is through.

00:13:47 - Bill Risser

Plus. Yeah, I never have anyone on that. I won't let them talk about their product. I'm a huge fan. I know that.

00:13:54 - Eric Sachs

So.

00:13:54 - Bill Risser

Yeah, no, thank you, Eric. That's it. That's just. It's a great little catch up. Just kind of see where things have been in the last. You know, we didn't have to talk about the. The whole thing with the pandemic, which is great. And I'm very excited to have to be back, you know, for me personally with one of your title partners, and super excited to have a conversation.

00:14:15 - Eric Sachs

I'm so happy.

00:14:16 - Bill Risser

Yeah.

00:14:17 - Eric Sachs

I'm so happy to be working with you again. You have no idea. Let's do this more often.

00:14:21 - Bill Risser

Sounds good. Eric, thanks so much. Next time you're in Florida, please bring your clubs, please.

00:14:28 - Eric Sachs

All right, buddy. I will. For sure.

00:14:30 - Bill Risser

Thanks, Eric.