Summary
Real estate is a dynamic industry with its fair share of challenges, from fluctuating interest rates to market downturns. In this episode of the Local Marketing Lab, Rick Haase, President at United Real Estate and Chief Operating Officer at United Real Estate Group, reveals the three keys that propelled his brokerage from the 139th largest in the country to the 6th largest in just five years – proving that you can achieve real estate success in any market.
Prioritize improving agents’ financial trajectory. Rick emphasizes that their unwavering mission – to improve the financial trajectory of brokers and agents’ careers and lives – is the driving force behind their meteoric growth. By filtering every decision through this lens and operationalizing the concept of doing more for agents, they’ve created an environment where agents can truly flourish financially, even during market downturns.
Invest in comprehensive training and education. Recognizing that success hinges on equipping agents with the right tools and knowledge, United Real Estate launched a robust Learning Management System. This cost-effective platform enables them to deploy training, education, and development resources to their 23,000+ agents nationwide, ensuring they have the skills to navigate any market conditions.
Generate high-quality, cost-effective first-party leads. In an era where third-party lead sources can charge exorbitant referral fees, Rick emphasizes the importance of helping agents generate their own high-quality, cost-effective first-party leads. Through strategic partnerships and technology integrations, United Real Estate has streamlined lead generation, enabling agents to nurture and convert leads effectively, without sacrificing a significant portion of their commissions.
By prioritizing agent success, investing in comprehensive training, and empowering agents with cost-effective lead generation strategies, United Real Estate has unlocked the keys to real estate success in any market. Tune in to this episode to gain invaluable insights from Rick Haase’s wealth of experience and expertise.
Key Takeaways
Here are some topics discussed in the episode around real estate success in any market:
- The importance of having a clear mission focused on improving agents’ success
- The value of nurturing leads effectively, considering the long buying cycles in real estate
- Tactics for generating high-quality, cost-effective first-party leads for agents
- Strategies for daily prospecting and growing new connections
- Ways for providing comprehensive training and education to agents
We have an axiom here that there’s no such thing as a bad lead. There’s only poor follow up programs that don’t understand the various states of readiness of consumers.
RICK HAASE
Resources
- Connect with Rick Haase on LinkedIn.
- Learn more about United Real Estate.
Other shout-outs
- Check out Orchestra New England.
- Watch “the relative size of planets” on YouTube.
Transcript
Justin Ulrich
What’s up everyone, and welcome to the Local Marketing Lab, where you get real-world insights from industry pros to help you drive local revenue and local for growth. This podcast is brought to you by Evocalize – digital marketing tools powered by local data that automatically work where and when your locations need it most. Learn more at evocalize.com.
What’s up? And welcome to the local marketing lab. Joining us today is an incredible guest with over 30 years of experience in leadership and operations. He leads the 6th largest real estate brokerage in the nation, loves astrophysics, was the president of an orchestra, and has received more awards than we have time to go through today. President at United Real Estate and chief operating officer at United Real Estate Group, Rick Haase. Thanks for joining us in the lab, my friend.
Rick Haase
Glad to be here, Justin, that’s a very dramatic introduction. Thank you for all that.
Justin Ulrich
You did it. You did it. That’s your life in a nutshell. Awesome. That’s right. That’s right. Well, thanks again for joining us. You know, I’m super excited to have you on, not only because you’ve got such an incredible background, you’ve been in the industry for an experienced a lot of growth for many years, but you’ve led multiple organizations through this incredible growth.
So I thought it might be good to kind of take us through, you know, what it was that you’ve done to kind of help guide the team from being the 139th largest real estate group in the country to the 6th, just in the matter of five years.
Rick Haase
Yeah, it’s been an incredible period of growth for us. Five years ago, we were 157th.
Justin Ulrich
Oh, wow.
Rick Haase
Four years ago, we were 139th. And depending on how you measure and who’s doing the measuring and their criteria, we’re six or seven in terms of size by agent count and transaction closed real estate sales transaction count. So we’ve been fortunate.
Justin, there’s an old saying that a rising tide raises all boats. And while that’s true, there’s something going on that’s magic and special here, because if we are all having our boats risen by the same tide, we’d still be 139th or 157th. So we obviously beat the odds and had some tremendous growth.
So United Real Estate is today 23,000 plus agents operating in 43 states. We operate under the stars with United Country — hunting, fishing, ranch properties, wide open spaces and lifestyle real estate. And then the larger part of our company today is 12 years old, 13 years old, and just over 20,000 agents in that part of the company in 13 years. So very, very fortunate.
Justin Ulrich
That’s incredible, incredible numbers there. What is it that you kind of attribute the success of the team to? To get those results?
Rick Haase
You know, this is going to, it gets a little ethereal, but people say these kinds of things, but in this case, it’s absolutely dead-on true. Our mission is right, and our mission, our stated mission is to improve the financial trajectory of our brokers and agents careers and lives. And everything that we do filters through that lens. And we genuinely believe and operationalize the concept that if we do more for them, we’ll have all the success that we need.
It’s not getting any easier to be a real estate agent in today’s world, in the real estate world, and we try to ease their path, lower their costs and increase their conversion rate on business opportunities. There’s a lot of conversation in the world today about the market has gone down this or it’s lost 24%.
I was on a shareholder call yesterday. They talked about the market being off 24% a year-over-year basis. And however the measure, whatever the yardstick, in my time in the business, there has never been a marketplace. And I’ve gone through interest rates at 21%. Of course, COVID, the .com bust and boom. I’ve gone through the 2007, 08’, 09’. I mean, in real estate bubble bursting.
And all of those markets, every single one of them carried enough business that our agents could have their best year ever. The question isn’t whether the market has enough business. The question is whether our agents are properly trained and equipped to be able to have that market find them. And so we focus on all things, how do we make our agents more successful? And that’s really what’s driven our growth.
Justin Ulrich
Very cool. Yeah, it’s very interesting to hear throughout all those different time, those are some tumultuous times in the industry that you just rambled off. And to frame it up that way, it’s like as long as you’re armed with the right tools and the right capabilities, and you have the right team and leadership behind you, you can actually be successful no matter what the market throws at you.
So what are some things that you may have put in place to help your agents be the best that they can be?
Rick Haase
Well, from an infrastructure perspective, we launched the learning academy, which is a learning management system that enables us to deploy cost effectively and efficiently all the training, education, development that our agents need. Those three words, training is teaching somebody how to climb the ladder, the technicalities of the job. Education is teaching them why we ask them to climb the ladder in that manner. And then development is tracking them over time as they improve their knowledge and experience and success.
So launching the learning academy is a big part of how we’re able to reach 23,000 plus agents in a cost effective and efficient manner. Because ultimately, in our model, we’re flowing 96% of the gross commission income on a sale to our agents from their first sale forward. In order to keep that happening and to pay off our mission and to deliver on our mission, rather, we have to be able to flow 96% of the gross commission to our agents.
We have to be able to do it in a cost effective way. So learning academy has been a huge part of how we’ve been able to serve our agents as we go through these changing times.
Secondly, I think that we’ve been able to understand and through the use of proprietary technology stack, our proprietary technology stack and partnering with people that really do get it and really understand organizations that add value by letting us, enabling us to bolt their technology onto our dietary stack, that gives us the ability to have some tremendous efficiencies.
One of those is a partnership with your company, lead generation is very interesting, is a very interesting topic, and to really get in and tear it apart, we need hours. But essentially, buyers and sellers will visit 13 or 14 websites before they take action. Buy a house, contract for a house, list a house for sale.
And when they’re doing that, that surfaces a lot of referrals that companies can push out to agents and say, hey, we can charge you for that. Either pay per click, pay per lead online advertising, memberships, or referral fees. And one of the key elements of our success with our agents now is the ability for us to help our agents have a turnkey system for generating online leads and converting those leads to a closed sale.
And when I say a lead, I mean someone who’s actually a real estate intender, someone who intends to buy or sell. That could be four years, two years, three years. They could be, or they could be buying, looking for the right home and they’re ready to buy tomorrow. Most of those buyers are also sellers. More than half of people who are looking for a home today are also home sellers.
So there’s some discussion that usually occurs when you talk about online business. You know, are you getting seller leads or buyer leads? Well, in one sense, it’s kind of an academic discussion, because what’s really happening is you’re talking to someone who could be a lifelong customer. Today they have a house to sell, but they’re inquiring about a house they might want to buy.
We teach our agents that in order to convert and really have the highest outcome to whatever you’re spending to generate leads is you have to think about them as a buyer and a seller and think about them over the course of their buying and selling career. That is the customers, not just where are they, and how they approached you and how they’re talking about their real estate needs today.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah, exactly. If you think, I mean more I think than any other business, the buying cycle of a prospect in the real estate space is so long. When I worked at Polaris, it was like we knew it was a nine month buying cycle and people started looking at a vehicle. It’s when they actually pulled the trigger to make the purchase.
But in real estate, it could be two, three, four years that they’re in their home. And how do you keep them engaged throughout that time and provide value to them with valuable nurture content? That’s a challenge that real estate agents have to solve for.
Rick Haase
It is. That’s a great interesting point. If you were selling airliners today, you might have a five or seven year selling cycle to get an airline, large or small, to buy your aircraft. Real estate agents, they tended to be trained in super short selling cycle behavior. If someone’s in a late stage ready to act or buy, they’re going to buy within the next 30 or 60 days or sell list their house within that timeframe.
The real estate industry is pretty good at how to manage that late stage readiness buyer. But if it’s, if they are two, three or four years out, man, that’s a real growth curve that our industry needs to be on. How do you stay in touch? How do you maintain the proper comportment in your communications so that when you’re engaging with a customer that wants to buy three years down the road or ends up buying three years down the road, you’re not annoying them.
They want to unsubscribe. They don’t want to stop engaging with you because you’re acting like they’re ready to act today. The Internet, when the Internet started producing lead flow, everybody, the industry got the lead to an agent. The agent went after it like they were ready to sell their house next week. And that experience, that consumer experience was pretty disconnected. And then the industry wondered why, hey, they didn’t call me back.
Justin Ulrich
These aren’t quality leads.
Rick Haase
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it’s interesting. It’s not a, we have an axiom here that it’s not a, there’s no such thing as a bad lead. There’s only poor follow up programs that don’t understand the various states of readiness of consumers. And if somebody’s ready to act and you act like they’re not going to buy for three years, you’ve lost a sale opportunity.
And if somebody is three years down the road before they buy and you act like they’re ready to buy today, that’s a bad consumer experience. And so they just disassociate and disconnect. So the fine art, the art of that, that interaction is really important. And we teach that and provide the systems to support it over time.
Justin Ulrich
Is that some of the content that you have in your LMS that you give to the agents?
Rick Haase
It’s LMS content and it’s live instruction. It’s recorded instruction. We use experts in the field. And then in addition, it’s the kind of training and education that our principal brokers give our agents every day in the offices in each of those markets that we serve.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah. And to me, that’s so applicable across even multiple industries. If you have a long buying cycle, like you said, the lead comes in and people jump on it like it’s a piece of meat. And it’s like, oh, this is the time to engage with this person. But at the end of the day, it’s like you should be building your own database of folks within your sphere, contacting them regularly with valuable info.
It could be, hey, here’s some cool events that are happening downtown this month. Here’s a calendar of events, here’s some cool discounts we got at some local restaurants. Whatever it might be, you provide that valuable content. Over time, folks stay engaged with you, and then when it’s time to buy, then they come straight to you instead of going onto a portal and putting their information in.
Rick Haase
Yeah, Justin. The sphere of influence, when we talk to our agents about prospecting, there’s really two big swaths of opportunity. One is to connect with your sphere of influence. And all those people who already know, like maybe they trust you already as a human being, and to present valuable, meaningful, relevant information to those people in your sphere of influence. Building ground under the notion that you are the expert in real estate.
And so when they have that question, you’re the go to person. That sphere of influence, stay in touch kind of programming is super important. And then the next is, what are you doing? Are you making sure to create new connections? And we talk about it on a daily basis, meaning you need to be making those connections on a daily basis for new business to grow that sales funnel or to grow the sphere of influence along the way.
And if an agent or if a broker looks at their business from the perspective of what’s the aggregate size of their sphere of influence, and then how many people are hearing a message of value about what you do every day. As an agent, I was very lucky years and years ago to have a mentor that said, what’s your number? He said, you got to know your number. He said, in a hundred different ways. My number as an agent was 25. Monday through Friday, I had to talk to 25 people a day just to soft touch them and let them know I’m in the real estate business.
If I did that, I was moving towards my income goals, my career goals. If I didn’t, my head hit the pillow and I didn’t talk to anybody that day, I was one step farther from success. And if I did 25 a day, I was one step closer to my goals. And I think a lot of people today kind of get this message when they get into real estate that if they just farm online, if they just are out there doing passive prospecting and not making sure that they have those touch points Monday through Friday.
And I say Monday through Friday because that’s kind of the sausage making time of real estate. A lot of stuff still happens on the weekends, open houses and showings and purchases. But during the Monday through Friday, my mission was to make sure that my head didn’t hit the pillow until I talked to 25 people a day. And that strategy supported me whether I was a real estate agent or later on when I joined the C suite of real estate brokerages, I did that relative to mergers and acquisitions, and I still do it.
I know if a week goes by and I don’t talk to somebody who might be great to join our company personally, exploring the idea of whether we’ll be stronger together, then our mergers and acquisition strategy won’t be as effective. I want to be aware, but I was in another city. I’m in Dallas today, but I was in another city yesterday meeting with a fine company. There’s 120 agents, and they’re going to be joining our company because for that very reason, that there was a reach out, a contact, we found somebody in need.
We have the tools and services they need to please their agents to a much higher level, and they’re going to be joining our company. So, you know, two areas, sphere of influence. The people who already like, you know, you trust you, and if you’re talking to them routinely about your expertise, and then there’s the new, you know, the new connections and new opportunities. And if you’re doing that on a daily basis in your career and income unfolds, it just happens.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah. No, that’s incredible. I love that. The tip for folks, like, if you want to change something today to start going in the right direction. Identify your number, set a goal for yourself and hold yourself accountable.
Cause like you said, I could see so many times, even in my own career, when you don’t have that number or goal to whatever it is you’re trying to achieve, your day goes by and you’ve done things. You may not have done the right things to help get you where you need to be in this. In the most critical path possible, but you’ve done things. And so you have activity, you know, at the sacrifice of actually being productive. Yeah, very, very good suggestion.
Rick Haase
You’re exactly right, Justin. I mean, think about Peter Drucker had a saying. I heard it first from Peter. I don’t know if he invented it, but it’s, he said, “there’s no such great of a waste of time and resources to do things with great alacrity that shouldn’t be done at all.”
So you’re really good at doing a lot of things, but those aren’t the things that are going to help you get to where you want to go. So we say, I’m glad you’re doing a lot of things, but are those the things that get you to the top of that building?
Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure. Get you where you want. Yeah. The word alacrity, I’m glad you said that because I’ve never heard that in my life before. So.
Rick Haase
A great a waste of time is do things really that don’t matter.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah, yeah, no, totally makes sense. But you know what I love is that to switch gears just a little bit, you love astrophysics. And I could tell you’re a smart guy. So even when you threw that word out there, I was like, okay, this guy’s bright.
Rick Haase
It was not me. I just repeating Peter Drucker is one of the.
Justin Ulrich
Oh, there you go.
Rick Haase
Brilliant people. But hey, maybe it is with to know who to borrow from, right?
Justin Ulrich
That’s right. That’s right. But one of the things that I also learned about your background is that you were president of an orchestra. Is that right? How long did you do that for?
Rick Haase
Orchestra? Well, I was on the board for five years, but Orchestra New England, I lived in Connecticut for ten years and worked with a great company, William Raveis Real Estate in Connecticut. And during that time, I joined the board.
I was asked to become part of an orchestra. Orchestra New England. And Orchestra New England was, it actually was started as the Yale Chamber Orchestra. And it grew up to be a full functioning, full performing, traveling and they put on a season subscription for, you know, orchestral music.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah.
Rick Haase
And, you know, as you know, I used to think when you’re on the board at United Way or Police and Justice Foundation or the College board or Business Council Crime Commission, in the early days, I thought, wow, I must be pretty smart. Well, it turns out, philanthropic or charitable boards, that you join nonprofits, if you’re willing to do the work, you’ll rise through the ranks. So I did.
A guy by the name of John Ryden, who was the head of the publishing arm of Yale, came to me. He wanted me to be on the board. And Marie Weltsing, who was a curator of the British Museum of Art in New Haven, Connecticut, asked me to be part of the board. And if you’re willing to work hard, you know, naturally do more, do more, do more.
But that was a great experience, too, because we put on a season subscription and learned a great deal about people and fundraising. Then later in life, I had a child with special needs, and all of those fundraising efforts were brought to bear in doing some charitable work for the cause. A fragile, very cool. Your life just gets layered, and if you’re smart, you use everything you learn from all those experiences.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah. Being in the marketing side of things, my kid always run for class office, and my daughter just, she won student government president, and a lot of it was, we made some really cool posters and stuff. But I was like, you need to look at this like a marketing problem that you’re trying to solve, and coached her through it, and she won it. She’d run for three years prior to that, so it’s kind of fun.
Rick Haase
Does that mean you were her campaign manager?
Justin Ulrich
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Rick Haase
So, hey, did you use Evocalize to make social media contacts and generate leads?
Justin Ulrich
That would have been hysterical.
Rick Haase
Vote for me. Vote for me.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah, too funny. Well, hey, one, another thing that I learned that you really liked was, you know, you had a love for the theater and specifically, you know, Les Miserables. So I thought it might be cool to show you, as, you know, Jean Valjean from Les Miserables here.
Rick Haase
Oh, my God. You do me a favor. I don’t have time to do AI memes, but if you could send that to me, it would be great. I’ll use it.
Justin Ulrich
100%. I say this all the time, but this is just like an NFT but without the value. So it’s a unique image just for you.
Rick Haase
That soliloquy. Who am I? Jean Valjean is actually, like, metaphoric for the journey that I’ve had through real estate is who do you want to be? You’re tested all the time. From Hurricane Katrina, when 332 of our agents lost their house and everything in it. Or the world’s first oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico when the Macondo well blew up and all that oil was gushing for months.
There’s some really challenging times. In order to be successful and have staying power in this business, sometimes you got to ask, who am I?
Justin Ulrich
Yeah, very cool. Yeah. I love how you tied that into your life.
Rick Haase
Yeah, it is. It totally is. It’s man’s search for meaning. You know, Viktor Frankl’s work. It says a lot. Man’s search for meaning. Anyway, we’re so far off the topic.
Justin Ulrich
That’s it.
Rick Haase
I’m purposely avoiding the discussion of space and time because that’s a minor one. Although I’ll tell you one thing, if you haven’t done it, go on YouTube and there’s a series of them, but click search for “the relative size of planets”. The relative size of planets. It’ll take you down a path that eventually overloads your mind in terms of being able to comprehend it. But it’s kind of a cool eleven minute video. The relative size of planets.
Sometimes I ask audiences that I talk to which is larger, the earth or the sun. And you’d be surprised that 30 or 40% of the audience sometimes doesn’t even know which is larger than the earth or the sun. And you say, well, yeah, okay, great, it is the sun. But how many earths do you think you can fit into the sun? And people guess 30 or 20 or 50 or whatever. 100. 1.2 million earths can fit into the size of the sun. Yeah. So space and time is just an absolute wonderful, wonderful place to spend some time if you want to appreciate relativity in the world.
I’m going to say something to you about the lead flow, though. For me, it’s been an incredible learning experience. When you stay mission focused, we want to improve the financial trajectory of our agents careers and lives. First step, how much of that gross commission is landing in their bank accounts? For us, 96%. And then the market takes a nosedive like it did over the last two years.
Our business model is much more important because if there are fewer sales in the environment, it becomes especially important to make every one count. So you can still make your mortgage payments, send your kids to the right schools, and have the kind of life you want. That’s the 96%.
But if you notice what’s happened over the last 10, 15, 20 years? Third party interlopers, that’s a bad word. But third party companies have been able to put themselves between our agents and their customers and charge a lot of money for those real estate intenders. 25% is so far long gone. Now it’s 35%, 40%. There are several companies that charge 50% for getting you that contact information for consumer, and then they take 50%. Well, if we don’t do anything about that to help our agents manage their lead flow online, then we’re not delivering on our mission.
And so we launched a joint venture partnership. We got all of the technologies integrated to our Bullseye intranet platform. Once we got all that integration done, and by the way, your team was awesome, Matt Marx, and just that team still are in weekly meetings with us, making sure everything’s going well. Weekly.
Well, we launched on the 9th. Nearly 300 agents have gone to market with 500 marketing programs. So just track that. We’re just scratching the surface. 300 agents have gone to market with their listings with their own brand and launched almost just under 500 individual marketing programs through our partnership with you. And we’ve crossed over 9,100 lead flows into our agents this week. So from January 9 to today, 9,100+ leads have flowed to our agents.
Justin Ulrich
That’s incredible.
Rick Haase
Okay. So, yeah, the other thing about that is they pay no referral fee. None. The way we set it up is they pay no platform fee. So if you think about some of the other engines out there, KvCORE, BoomTown, Realtor.com, Zillow, it’s a very expensive lead generation. Those are very expensive lead generation platforms.
What we’ve been able to do, in keeping with our mission, is to take the cost down, the lead flow up and make sure that we weren’t scraping off 50, 40, 30% of the gross commission income on those sales. Now, the reason I mentioned learning academy in the beginning is a system. Any multi part system will fail. The whole will fail if any of the systems are broken. So training, education, and development on conversion has been a real focus, too.
And once you get the lead flow into the top of the funnel, you have a CRM through Bullseye that can help our agents convert that sale. And then you train and educate, training, education, and development getting better over time. Then you’ve got a three part system that is a home run for our agents. Honestly, I think, you know, you asked about growth. That’s why we’re growing, because we’re doing everything we do is focused on making sure we get each of the components correctly done.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah. No, that’s very, very good. I appreciate you giving us a shout out. I think one thing that really sticks out, too is agents, like, they have to start bringing on their own leads with, you know, first party leads.
If you think that this new change that’s coming with the FCC updates, with the TCPA rules recently, it’s like it’s coming into effect Q4 this year, Q1 next year of 2025. Those leads that they’re getting from portals are going to be a lot more expensive because they, the buyer actually has to say explicitly, I want these individuals to contact me. And so the leads are going to be fewer and further between.
Rick Haase
Yeah. And I know that’s onerous for a lot of companies. And if for some companies who have failed to attend to it, it’s been a very, very expensive learning lesson. Those kinds of experiences, well, I don’t want to get into who’s been sued and what those settlements are, but those, those kinds of experiences for folks who don’t pay attention, TCPA, it can sometimes be a business killer, so.
Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure. Definitely. Definitely. Well, hey, Rick, this was awesome having you on. I appreciate you taking the time. If you’re an agent or a broker, you’re looking for someone to do business with who actually gives you the right support, check out United Real Estate group. They’ve got awesome tools. Their learning management is second to none. Check them out. Rick, thanks so much for joining us.
Rick Haase
Hey, thanks for asking some good questions. And hey, someday we’ll talk about the space and time stuff, but do that. Go do space and time. Go do the relative size of planets and be prepared to have your mind blown.
Justin Ulrich
Awesome. We’ll link it to this episode. Awesome. Thanks, Rick.
Rick Haase
Yep. Hey, if anybody wants to know how to get ahold of us, we’re at either growunited.com or join us on Facebook or LinkedIn. We do a lot of social media explaining about our company and we pay attention to making sure we have our own marketing and communications effort underway. So.
Justin Ulrich
Very good. Very good. Check them out. We’ll have the links in the info of the episode as well.
Rick Haase
Thanks. Thanks, Justin.
Justin Ulrich
Thanks, Rick.
Rick Haase
Good talking. Tell Matt I said hi.
Justin Ulrich
You bet.
As always, thanks for joining us in the Local Marketing Lab. This podcast was sponsored by Evocalize. To learn more about how Evocalize can help you grow your business, visit evocalize.com.
If you learned something from today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook @Evocalize. That’s Evocalize and on X at Evocalize.
And remember, keep innovating and testing new things. You’ll never know what connects with your customers best unless you try. Until next time. Thanks for listening.
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