Episode 395 - The Return of Joe Rand - CEO Joe Rand Media and Mayor of the Village of Nyack

00:00:00 - Joe Rand

If I'm a seller, I can put whatever I can offer anything. I could say, hey, I want to sell this property. So I am now offering all the furniture in the property, or I am offering to do this work on the deck before the house gets sold. I am offering to, like, you can offer anything as an incentive to the buyer and saying to, I will offer to cover your closing costs, including your buy side compensation to your agent. You can do that.

00:00:32 - 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.

00:00:56 - Joe Rand

Hi, everybody.

00:00:56 - Bill Risser

Welcome to episode 395 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. I'm going to call this a real estate session shortcut session, because I'm bringing back a guest from the past and a guest from the past that, who has been on this show over 20 times on this podcast. I'm talking about Joe Rand. I wanted to get Joe back on the show because there's nothing better than a fired up Joe Rand talking about what's happening in the world of real estate. And of course, as you know, I'm releasing this episode on August 13. We actually recorded it yesterday on August 12. And a lot is going to change here in the world of real estate with the buyer broker compensation rules that are changing. And it's going to be my pleasure to bring back one of my favorite guests of all time, Joe Rand. Joe, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:46 - Joe Rand

Hey, Bill. How are you? It's been a long time. We used to do this a lot more often. Yeah, we used to have this regular thing, and now you've moved on to bigger and better things, and you don't call me anymore, so I'm so glad to get another chance. Yeah, well, I'll be on the sessions.

00:02:02 - Bill Risser

I don't call you anymore. You're right. I probably need to reach out more. The Yankees are playing well. I think you know that, you know, so that's. That's a good thing.

00:02:10 - Joe Rand

I do know that. I'm aware of that. My son has gotten me back into baseball. He's got me going to games. So I've gone to games with him, and he's. He's excited. So we go to a couple games a year. So, yes, I'm back into the swing of things. We watched all the Olympics, all that. Very good. But Bill, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. And I want to remind everybody your name is Bill Risser and it's The Real Estate Sessions. Your name is not Bill Sessions as I've often referred to you as.

00:02:36 - Bill Risser

Thank you.

00:02:37 - Joe Rand

I was just talking to Bill Sessions and people are like, what? I appreciate that.

00:02:40 - Bill Risser

Thanks. Thanks, Joe. Look, it's, we're recording this episode on Monday, August 12. And you know, the month of August has been a, had a huge, not, not a target, but just this, it was this kind of thing hanging over the real estate industry in the US. And I thought it would be wonderful to talk to. And I'm being very honest here, Joe, to one of the smartest, most direct leaders in the industry. And I just wanted to get your take on what we're headed for, what's being prep, been prepped for, for the last at least four or five months. Should have been a lot longer than that. But I think it's going to be a great conversation because Joe, you don't pull punches. You're going to tell me where we're at with this thing and what we're talking about. I'm sure everyone understands because this is for realtors. It's the buyer broker compensation rules, the MLS changes, all that stuff. And I'd like to get your take.

00:03:38 - Joe Rand

The best way for me to do this is just to summarize it in one word for you. Bill. Bill. It's going to be Armageddon, Bill is what I'm telling you. It's the end of the world as we know it on Friday. Dogs and cats sleeping together, rain pouring from the skies. Locusts. It is. All the great tragedies of all time wound up into one is what's happened to real estate industry on Friday. No, everybody. That is just a little bit of a callback to the old ranting and raving sessions that we did a few years ago where I punctuated everything by just shouting your name and then, you know, spilling nonsense. So that's just nonsense. That's not what's happening. What I think about this is that people are getting overwrought. They do. They have been like spouting stuff like it's Armageddon. It's all. Here's the reality. The reality is there are very significant but technical changes happening in the real estate industry which people are overreacting to.

00:04:36 - Joe Rand

And I'll just lay them out. Number one. Okay, here's the big deal, everybody. You can still make offers of compensation to buyer agents, but you can't communicate through the MLS or through any third party. That's it. You can still do exactly what you were always doing. It's just that there's going to be the added step that a buyer agent is going to have to call the listing agent, say what's the compensation situation here? And the listing agent will say oh, my seller is offering x amount or my seller is not offering x amount.

00:05:03 - Joe Rand

At which point if the seller is not offering anything, then it would behoove the buyer agent to say, well, if I make an offer contingent on the seller reimbursing the buyer for the expenses for their buyer agent, is the seller willing to do that? At which point the listing agent will almost certainly say yes, the seller will look at all offers. They may not accept it, they may not be willing to do it, but I'm obligated to present all offers.

00:05:27 - Joe Rand

So if you present an offer to me that has a condition that the seller is going to pay the buyer agent, then I'll have to present it and then it's up to the seller whether to accept it. The same whether if you made an offer that was contingent on the seller, including the furniture, I would have to present and it would be the seller's decision whether to accept that offer or nothing.

00:05:46 - Joe Rand

That's change number one. Just, the only thing is you can't communicate it through the MLS and you can't communicate a bill through any of these third parties that are setting up and saying oh, we're not an MLS, we're just a way to communicate buyer agent compensation amounts to buyer agents. No, don't do that. Just do it on your own website. Make it a call. It's just a good opportunity for you to engage with your other colleagues in the industry and to ask them their question.

00:06:12 - Joe Rand

So don't people, the worst people in this whole situation, Bill, are the people who are trying to recreate the old system under a different rubric. Like the old system's done, it's over. There's no more formal required offer of compensation. Stop trying to recreate the thing that got everybody in trouble and that got the nar situation in a big mess. That's change number one. Change number two. Now change number one is like to me EHDH so you can't communicate with the mos, you can still make an offer of compensation. Just can't communicate through the MLS. Big deal. All right, number two, you now have to sign buyer agreements.

00:06:50 - Joe Rand

If you're working with a buyer, there has to be some sort of formal written agreement, which is the way it should have been all along. Like this is ridiculous that we didn't have it. And people always say, well, why didn't we have it? And the reason we didn't have it, Bill, this is a very easy explanation, is that buyer agency to this day was still in its infancy, that we only had buyer agency come into the industry in the early, really 1990s, like late eighties, early nineties.

00:07:17 - Joe Rand

That's when buyer agency was conceived. Agents that are relatively new to the business, by which I mean agents that have only been in the business for 30 years have no idea that there was something before that where there was no buyer agency. Everybody worked for the seller, and then we had buyer agency, which is a much better way of doing, because when everybody worked for the seller, there was a lot of confusion. It was a bad situation. It's a much better situation for the buyers that they're now is buyer agency. Okay, so that was a good change back in 1980, 919, 90, whatever it was, depending on your state, okay. But the problem was we've only had buyer agency now for like about 40 years, and we never built the infrastructure to represent buyers properly in the way that we had for sellers. Because you go back 40 years ago, seller agency at that point was 60 years old. Seller agency came into being in the twenties and thirties, 1920s, 1930s, and then by the seventies it had matured and it developed.

00:08:17 - Joe Rand

But when, when I first started working in the industry in the early eighties, there were still situations where sellers were signing open listings. They were signing exclusive agency listings. The whole idea of the seller service representation expanding into maturity. That took time. And people forget that because they only remember that really, it's in the modern era, meaning the 1970s, modern era, every listing agreement has an exclusive right to sell. Every agent signs exclusive rights to sells. We all learned how to do listing presentations. We all learned how to do, you know, we have materials for sellers. We defined our services very thoroughly for sellers because we got the seller. Why? Because the seller paid the commission out of their, you know, out of the proceeds of the sale.

00:09:03 - Joe Rand

We want to make sure we locked up the seller and we didn't do the same thing for buyers. And that was our mistake, that we didn't do that. And then what happened was in the early eighties and or early, early nineties, late eighties, when buyer agency came about, here was the other weird thing that happened, was that prior to the buyer agency, the seller paid both sides of the transaction because both sides of the transaction worked for the seller.

00:09:24 - Joe Rand

And then when all of a sudden now the buyer agent has independent representation, it still sort of made sense for the seller to still pay both sides of transaction because the seller had all the money, because the buyer took all the money, gave it to the seller, the seller then distributed to both agents. So that's what got us in trouble. Like if we had never, if we just said, okay, well now that the buyer agent buyer is represented by a buyer agent, the buyer should pay their own compensation.

00:09:47 - Joe Rand

We would have gone through this 40 years ago, but we continued the system that we had during subagency. That's all. You asked me a question. I've gone on for like eight minutes. So I apologize for that. But the basic idea is that the big change, number one was you can't communicate office compensation through the MLS. Big deal, no one cares. That's not a big problem. Number two, we have to get buyer agreements signed, which we should have been doing for 30 years, 40 years, but we didn't because we hadn't really gotten mature in our relationship with buyers. And now we have to in a way that like we have to do it all really quick. Now all of a sudden we got to do stuff we've never done before.

00:10:27 - Joe Rand

But a lot of agents have been doing it a lot of places. They've always had buyer agent agreements, a lot of places in the country. So for them it's not a big deal. And for me it's a good thing. We should have buyer agreements and we should have to justify our compensation from buyers and we should win them over and explain our value and all those kinds of things.

00:10:43 - Joe Rand

So that to me is not a bad change. And then the third change that's happening is just that by now bifurcating, separating out the listing side commission and the buy side commission. We're now going to get discounting pressure on both sides because there was always discounting pressure on the list side, which was a total commission. And in some cases those discounters, what they would do is they would charge x percent, which would be the same amount being charged on the list side.

00:11:13 - Joe Rand

They just wouldn't offer out anything on the buy side. So they were discounting without actually discounting their own commission. They were just not paying out the buy side. Now we're going to get discounting pressure on the list side, discounting pressure on the buy side. And I would counsel every agent that's ever involved in this to say, listen, you should never think about a commission as a number that combines both commissions. There is a list side commission and there is a buy side commission and they should be negotiated separately. Even if the seller is making offers of compensation. It should be, here's the list side and here's the buy side. And the buyer should say, what's the buy side? The buyer agent should say, this is what I need to get paid on the buy side to justify the services I provide.

00:11:52 - Joe Rand

And that to me is that's, you know, that's going to be a challenge, I think, for the industry because discounting does affect revenue and it might be a change that would be good for the consumer because consumer will save some costs, I think it's not good for the consumer for it convinces consumers to go direct to the listing agent because that's not good for the buyer.

00:12:10 - Joe Rand

If the buyer goes direct to the listing agent, they're not represented. They're trying to save money. They're not going to save money because the listing agent has a listing, the seller has an agent and you don't. You're going to get taken advantage of. And it's not even taken advantage of. It's just that the listing agent is going to do their job. They're a fiduciary of the seller. You don't have any representation, so you're going to not get the best deal that you could get. I firmly believe that. So that's not necessarily good. But generally speaking, if the commission rates went down, then that would accomplish what they're trying to accomplish by helping the consumer save a little bit of money.

00:12:41 - Joe Rand

And it's really up to the agents to prove their worth and prove their differentiated value so that they can justify the compensation they feel they deserve. All right, I'm going to take a breath now because I've been yapping and yapping and yapping and you might have other questions.

00:12:56 - Bill Risser

You know, what I've heard and kind of my take as well is I think the big outcry is coming from the fact that what was once just automatic, it was just baked in to everything, which was the cooperating broker. Compensation is now gone. And you added one more piece of negotiating to the buy side and the sell side. They now have to negotiate about a different thing that they had never had to negotiate about before. Is that a fair statement?

00:13:28 - Joe Rand

Yes and no. Let's just say, first of all, we're not saying the buy side. The offer of compensation to the buy side is going away because it might be that there are lots of sellers and lots of listing agents that will say, well, you know, particularly as we're going into a buyer market which is we definitely are moving into a buyer's market where a listing agent might say to the sell, listen, my commission is x and we have to decide whether we're going to offer anything to the buyer side. Because the buyer side has an agent. Usually if they have an agent, the agent has to get compensated and the buyer has to come out of pocket to pay that agent. And if they have to come out of pocket then they have less money for their down payment, they have less money to pay some of their other transaction costs. So what we vote, what we've done in the past is that the seller will pay the buyer agent's compensation out of the proceeds of the sale because all the money comes from the buyer, the buyer and the buyer's lender gives you the money. And then from that money you could then pay the buyer agent's compensation. If you don't pay the buyer agents compensation, then the buyer is going to have to come out of pocket and it might make the buyer a little more, a little less negotiable on price. It might make the buyer a little bit more leery about getting into a deal with you. The thing that we always had to stay away from is we always had to stay away from the argument that hey, Mister Seller, you have to offer out a buy side compensation or the buyer agents aren't going to show it. That was always the red, that was the red flag. That was the third rail. Don't say that. Don't indicate that the buyer agents, it's fine to say on a positive thing, hey, let's incentivize more people to show this property. But it's a bad thing to say. Well, if you don't offer compensation, the buyer agents won't show it and you can't. That you cannot say. That you not can't say it's not true. Not only is it not true, but it's also just, it's just a bad thing to say. It's a dumb thing to say. But you can say that like anything else that you're offering to a buyer as either a concession or incentive, paying the buyer side compensation is something the buyer might be interested in. Like if I'm a seller I can put whatever I can offer anything. I could say, hey, I want to sell this property. So I am now offering all the furniture in the property or I am offering to do this work on the deck before the house gets sold. I am offering to like, you can, you can offer anything as an incentive to the buyer and saying to I will offer to cover your closing costs, including your buy side compensation to your, to your agent. You can do that. And that's an incentive to the buyer because it saves the buyer out of pocket. A buyer would much rather pay the seller and get the lender to pay the seller all this money. And then in the purchase price is built in the commission to the buyer agent. So it gets financed over 30 years rather than the buyer have to come out of pocket for it. And that's what the real thing is going to be. How do we come up with ways to keep the buyer from having to go out of pocket to pay the buyer agent? Because the buyer doesn't want to do that, right?

00:16:28 - Bill Risser

Yep. Yep.

00:16:29 - Joe Rand

Is there, I mean, the buyer would much rather finance it?

00:16:31 - Bill Risser

Yeah, absolutely. Is there a, in your mind, is there with cash buyers, you know, is there a percentage of buyers who are just going to willingly pay the buyer's broker?

00:16:42 - Joe Rand

I think that they will, yeah. I mean, certainly, I mean, absolutely. There will be some, there will be probably many more buyers paying the buyer agent than we ever had before because it's not automatic, as you say, offer of compensation, which means that without the automatic offer of compensation, the big change is that the buyer agent has to get those buyer agreements signed.

00:17:03 - Joe Rand

Now that's part of the settlement is you got to get the buyer agreement signed anyway. But having a buyer agreement signed that offers you compensation is something you're going to want to do because you never know when they're going to fall in love with the house that doesn't offer any compensation. Don't take your chances that, well, I'm hoping. And don't get into the stuff where like, well, am I going to show you properties that don't offer compensation or don't, don't even, that's such stupid stuff. That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. This idea that I'm going to put a term in my agreement that says that if the seller is not offering compensation, you don't want me to show you those properties. Like don't, that's stupid. Just dumb. Dumb. Trying to hold on to the old regime idea. Here's the way it works.

00:17:45 - Joe Rand

You have a buyer agreement that offers you compensation. If you don't have a buyer agreement that offers you compensation, get out of the damn business. Just leave. Go do something else. Because if you can't negotiate a buyer agreement with your buyer that offers you compensation, then don't. Just get out. And then you say to the buyer, well, listen, we're going to try to get the seller to pay it so you don't have to go out of pocket.

00:18:10 - Joe Rand

Regardless of whether the seller makes an offer of compensation or not. When we make an offer, we're going to say, hey, listen, our offer is 500, but that's contingent on you paying the buyer's obligation to the buyer agent of $20,000 for this, for the compensation for the buyer agent fee that the buyer agent would otherwise get from the buyer. Now, the same way that the seller can make whatever concession they want to the buyer, the buyer can put whatever condition they want on an offer as long as it's not a violation of fair housing.

00:18:40 - Joe Rand

If I make a condition to the buyer, if I'm a buyer and I say, you know what? It's a buyer market, I can ask whatever I want. I want the buyer to throw in all the furniture. I want the buyer to throw in that fixture that they wanted to exclude. I want the buyer to clean the pool. I want the buyer, I want the buyer to dance on one leg in a circle and sing the ave Maria as they do it. And if they do that, I want the seller to do that and then I'll buy the house. The buyer can put whatever condition they want. So if the buyer wants to say, listen, for me to give you 500, you got to give 20,000 to my or 30,000 or 5000 or whatever it is, you got to give that to my buyer agent.

00:19:16 - Joe Rand

That's completely legal. It's completely loud. So if I'm a buyer agent, I don't even care if the seller is making an offer of compensation. I don't care at all because I've got an agreement that guarantees me x percent as my buyer or a certain amount as the buyer agent and we make an offer. When I'm making an offer, I'm going to ask the listing agent, hey, is there an offer of compensation? Yes.

00:19:40 - Joe Rand

Is it the same as my buyer has to pay me this? How much are you offering out? But okay, it's the same amount, then we're fine. It's not the same amount. Then I got to make an offer contingent on you offering more. If you're not offering anything, then I'm still going to make an offer contingent on you paying the buyer agent compensation and that's it. And don't worry about whether the seller's offering compensation. And don't say if the buyer says to you, well, I don't want to have to come out of pocket. So don't show me any properties that don't offer compensation. Don't put that in your agreement either. That's stupid. Don't put that in your agreement. Just say to the buyer, don't worry. Even if the seller's not offering compensation, we'll just make it a term of the offer. And if they won't accept the terms of your offer, then they don't accept the terms of your offer. Whether the term of your offer is to pay the buyer agent compensation or to close by August or to include the lighting fixtures.

00:20:35 - Joe Rand

Like, we'll make an offer, we'll put our terms. The seller accepts it or doesn't accept it. That's it. You don't need to, like, worry about whether the seller's offering compensation. Stop worrying about it. Stop being consumed by it. It's dumb. It's the old world. Focus on the new world.

00:20:51 - Bill Risser

This is the Joe Rand I was looking for. This is the man that I know and love.

00:20:57 - Joe Rand

He got me wrapped up. He got me excited. I got excited. I'm talking and talking and talking, and.

00:21:02 - Bill Risser

You weren't pacing back and forth. It really amplified it a little bit.

00:21:07 - Joe Rand

I'm sitting, I'm forced to sit here with where I am right now. And so I cannot get up and walk around and pace the way I usually do, which means all the energy goes right to you, Bill. All the energy gets dissipated by my feet walking around. It's all directed at you and your wonderful listeners.

00:21:22 - Bill Risser

That was great.

00:21:23 - Joe Rand

So that's the basic idea. I think people are getting too wound up in it. I think that they do need to work on negotiation skills. They do have to work on preserving a reasonable compensation for the work that they provide and the service they provide and the value they provided. I think that's all true, and that's, a lot of people have been talking about that, and that's fine. But I think people are getting wound up in all of the esoterica here in a way that I think is non productive.

00:21:54 - Joe Rand

Non productive. And then, and then God help us. With the, with the boards coming, I mean, I've had to correct so many things. People come, the board told us we have to do this. The board tells we have to do that. I'm like, you don't have to do that. Well, the board told me how to do it. No, don't. Don't do it. Don't do it. Just, just don't. Don't stop listening to gnar and all the gnar progeny.

00:22:13 - Joe Rand

Like, that's what got us into these troubles in the first place, is that we listen to, they told us to do something in a certain way. Like how much of this would have been avoided if gnar just said, you know what? Since we allow you in our mandatory offer of compensation, we allow you to offer a dollar. Tell you what, that's so meaningless. Let's just eliminate the mandatory offer of compensation. If they had done that ten years ago, we're not in this problem.

00:22:38 - Joe Rand

So I don't know. I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't need. I could figure this out for myself. I'll figure it out for my agents. And, oh, and can we just say, can we just say these agents that go on Facebook and post in these stupid groups and say, oh, I have a question. How do I do this? And then they get 30 answers from 30 other idiots who were spending their time on Facebook answering questions about realtor code and stuff like that.

00:23:01 - Joe Rand

What are you doing? What? Go to your broker. If you go to the, listen, I just made fun of the boards and the fact that the boards can give some advice that I don't agree with, but at least they're the board of, they're your association. You belong to that association for a reason. They should give you decent advice, but go to your broker.

00:23:19 - Joe Rand

Well, I don't think my broker knows how to do this. Then what are you doing working for that broker? What are you doing? Why would you hop, why would you work there if you don't think you're broke? Like, listen, I may be the biggest jerk in the world, but I will tell you right now, I have been talking about this for a year to my agents. I did a seminar two years ago for one of the boards in New York where I said, everyone's got to start getting buyer agreements signed, and here's how to organize your buyer agreement. And I've been saying to my agent since December, after the, I think the lawsuit was finished, but before the settlement, I said, we need to start getting buyer agreements signed.

00:23:52 - Joe Rand

We need to start getting commissions from the buyer, because commissions, the mandatory offer of compensation is going away. I've been saying that since December. To them, it's now August. They're sick of hearing me talk about it. So unless you're sick of hearing your broker talk about it, then your broker hasn't really done the job of advising about what to do in these circumstances. Right? And so, but if the, the solution is get a broker that actually knows what they're doing. The solution is not go get advice on Facebook from a bunch of randos.

00:24:19 - Joe Rand

You know, you're not getting I mean, who's answering those questions for you? Other people spending their day on Facebook instead of selling houses. The people that are selling houses, their own time is spent on Facebook saying, oh, here's, let me give you my advice about how to handle the situation. No, don't do that.

00:24:35 - Bill Risser

This quickly turned into episode 21 of ranting and raving with Joe Belle, which is the best thing to do. It's the best thing that's happened to me this year. This is awesome.

00:24:48 - Joe Rand

Well, I mean, it's just that. But all that, the ranting, raving was, was me getting excited about things and then going and ranting about them. And that's, this has got me very excited. This is, is a really big thing for the industry. And I see so many people making such dumb mistakes. And to me, it's a very simple thing. I mean, is this a good thing for the industry? Well, certainly the lawsuit settlement and the amounts and stuff was not good for the industry. And is it good for the industry that we're going to see a race to the bottom on buyer side compensation, that's not good for the industry. But you know what? We've been dealing with discounters, for those of us who believe in full service and I, and a fair compensation for fair work, we've been dealing with discounters forever on the list side. And so now we're dealing with them on the buy side. So that adds a little bit of work if you want to justify it. But you know what? If people aren't willing to pay you what you think you're worth, then don't work for them. Don't work for them, particularly on the buy side when it's all very speculative. Like, on the list side, people are like, they get this actual house here that has to be sold. And, like, there you go. But like, the buyer, who knows if they're going to find a house to buy, you might take them out for six months. You can take them out for six months for a pittance. Don't do that to yourself. Don't do that to yourself. And if the buyers are listening, buyers, get yourself a buyer agent and pay them fairly. Don't go to the listing agent directly. You're not going to get a good deal doing it that way. I know you think you are, but you're not. You're not.

00:26:17 - Bill Risser

A year from now, August 2025, is this just forgotten? We're all just good with it.

00:26:23 - Joe Rand

I don't think it will be forgotten, but I think we'll have adjusted and adapted and things will move along the way, they've always moved along. Maybe commissions will be a little lower, maybe there'll be a few more complicated deals. But I think that we'll very quickly adapt to this new reality and we'll snap into it like it's been coming for a while. And I think people are generally prepared and some people aren't. But once it actually happens, you know, they'll. What's going to happen on Monday morning is that every board in the country, every mls in the country, is going to get a million phone calls from agents saying, what happened to the Baca? Where's the buyer agent compensation offer? And the people at the call center are going to be like, banging their heads right on the table and saying, have you not paid attention to anything that's happening in the industry for the last six months? But we know those agents don't do a lot of deals. So you're not worried necessarily about those agents? The agents that actually do business will figure it out. And here's the thing I will tell you, and when people say, oh, can we adapt to this? Can we adapt to this? I always say, listen, on April 1, 2020, I didn't have five agents in my company. My company has 1200 agents. I didn't have five agents that knew how to use Zoom, not five of them. And by mid April of 2020, I'll bet 90% of my agents knew how to use Zoom, how to do teleconferences, and half of them were trying to figure out clever virtual backgrounds that would really speak to what they were trying to do. So, like, if people are able to adapt to that, if we could go, and remember in New York, we weren't even allowed to leave the house. We weren't allowed to show homes. And yet we still sold half as many homes in April of 2020 and May of 2020 and June of 2020 as we sold in April, May, and June of 2019, half as many without being able to leave the house. So we learned to adapt. We started to show homes virtually. We started to buy homes sight unseen. We did what we needed to do. So if we could adapt to that, if we could adapt to the changes that were wrought by Covid and the COVID precautions, then we can certainly adapt to this. Bill, we can absolutely adapt to this. And we're going to be just fine. We're going to be just fine.

00:28:31 - Bill Risser

Joe, if only there was a couple of books I could suggest that people read where you go into more detail on some of these topics. Would you happen to know the names of those books, Joe?

00:28:42 - Joe Rand

Oddly enough, I do. There are two books go on Amazon. You can buy them right on Amazon. I would say go to your local bookstore there, almost certainly not your local bookstore, unless an agent who has returned them and sold them for $1 back to the bookstore Amazon, two books by me, disruptors, discounters and doubters, which talks a lot about how we have to raise the standards of the industry and then how to be a great agent, which is very practical advice for agents about how to be better at their jobs. And there's a whole chapter in there, and I wrote it five years ago, and there's a whole chapter in there about the buyer consultation, how important it is to do a buyer consultation and get buyer representation agreements signed. And I was saying that five years ago, and I'm in a market where nobody got buyer agreements signed. So, yeah, I proud of the books. And I think that if you're looking for more information of a quality of the discourse that I have provided to you in the last x number of minutes that I've been yapping, then you'll appreciate the books. And if you, if you don't read, be like listening. Can you imagine how the joy of 8 hours of listening to me read my book to you, how fun that would be so you can buy the audiobook? And the audiobook of how to be a great agent is also available on Amazon, on audible.

00:29:52 - Bill Risser

Joe, you know, I promote the hell out of those books. I. You do.

00:29:56 - Joe Rand

And you've been very, you've been very nice. You've been the nicest person in the industry to me. I wish you'd buy as many books as. Just keep buying them every time you talk about them. I appreciate that. Just buy new copies.

00:30:07 - Bill Risser

Well, that ten minutes turned into about 25 pretty quick.

00:30:12 - Joe Rand

This is now no longer a short. It was a short session sort of short, yeah, sessions.

00:30:19 - Bill Risser

Short of shortcut kind of, sort of. But Joe, I can't thank you enough. This is always, it's, it's one of my, I mean, I was so excited. I told my wife this morning, I go, he said yes.

00:30:29 - Joe Rand

He's gonna say no to you. I've never said no to you, Bill, when you've asked me to speak and to you, and I'm happy to do it today, I'm delighted. Always nice to hear from you, but we got to talk more offline, buddy. We got to have more conversations. So reach out, we'll talk baseball.

00:30:42 - Bill Risser

All right, sounds good, Joe. Thanks again.

00:30:44 - Joe Rand

Thank you, my friend. Have a great day.

00:30:46 - Bill Risser

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