The Massive Agent Podcast, hosted by Dustin Brohm, is the go-to resource for entrepreneurial real estate agents & mortgage loan officers determined to escape the daily real estate grind and instead build a thriving, scalable business. If you’re a burned-out solo agent wanting to make more money, sell more homes, work fewer hours, and gain leverage, this podcast is your roadmap.
Realtors deserve to define their ideal lifestyle and build a business to support it—not the other way around. The Massive Agent Podcast equips you with the mindset, strategies, and systems to make that vision a reality.
Dustin Brohm, one of the most recognized voices in real estate, brings you actionable insights and proven tactics to create freedom in your career. As host of the Massive Agent Podcast, a finalist for the Inman Innovator of the Year award, Dustin is a sought-after speaker who’s shared stages with industry giants at events like Gary Vaynerchuk’s Agent2021, eXpCon, Inman Connect, HousingWire, and more. With a sales organization of over 650 agents across 25 states, Dustin is a proven expert in building successful real estate businesses.
This podcast goes beyond social media and lead generation tips—though you’ll get plenty of those, too. Dustin dives deep into CEO-level thinking, scalable systems, and strategies for creating a business that supports your life. Whether you’re starting a team, streamlining operations, or unlocking new revenue streams, you’ll get the tools and inspiration to achieve more with less.
As founder of the Massive Agent Society, a business-building incubator for agents, Dustin is dedicated to helping real estate professionals stop grinding and start growing. The Massive Agent Podcast delivers fresh, actionable content weekly to empower agents to scale, thrive, and lead in today’s competitive market.
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Are you setting goals that really don't matter to you? For example... # of homes sold. Do you really care about the number of homes sold? Or about net income? If it's net income, then why the hell is your primary goal to sell a certain amount of homes?
See what I mean? Many real estate agents have the wrong primary goal. Realtors are setting goals based on what the industry is focused on, and what they hear other fellow real estate agents talking about and bragging about online.
My goal for this real estate podcast episode is to help you and your fellow Realtors focus on what your TRUE goal is, and then reverse engineer how to get there. It starts with knowing what is really most important to YOU.
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Dustin Brohm, the host of this Massive Agent Podcast, was a finalist for the 2019 Inman Innovator of the Year Award. He’s a Co-Founder of the Industry Syndicate real estate podcast network, and a keynote speaker on all things real estate marketing, social media, podcasting, and real estate lead generation. Dustin Brohm has spoken on stage at Gary Vaynerchuk’s Agent2021, Inman Connect, HousingWire's engage.marketing events, numerous State Realtor Association events & annual conventions, and more. Dustin is a Realtor w/ eXp Realty in Salt Lake City, Utah.
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You know, if you're not completely stoked on where you're at in your real estate business, what if the problem is that you've just set the wrong goal? And here's where it gets kind of crazy. And on this episode, we're going to talk about maybe you need to sell fewer homes. Maybe you need to set the goal of talking to fewer people. Sounds insane, right? Well, I'll explain.
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The massive agent podcast. We need generation tips and strategies to give you more leads and sell more homes.
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I love to buy houses. I like to sell houses. Wait a minute.
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Leads a week. Oh. Have I got your attention now? Here's your host, Dustin Brohm.
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What is up, everybody? Welcome to episode 140 of the Massive Agent Podcast. I'm your host, Dustin Brohm. Wow, good show today. I'm going to challenge your thinking, challenge your uh well, I'm I'm gonna give you a different way of looking at things. Sometimes we just have the wrong goals for ourselves. And sometimes the right goals can sound counterproductive, such as maybe you should set a goal of fewer homes sold in a year or talking to fewer people. Uh I'll explain because uh I I think I think you'll understand what I mean here very shortly. This show is a proud founding member of the Industry Syndicate Real Estate's podcast network. We are the first, largest, and only podcast network in our industry that matters. And you can check out our other shows over at industrysyndicate.com. And if you are new to the show and what and listening for your first time, welcome. I hope that we don't scare you away. I'm gonna try my hardest not to, but uh, you know, it is what it is. This is uh, you know, it's a train wreck at times. We have squirrel moments, but I think you'll get some good shit. So stick around with us and uh hopefully I'll prove you right. Um, but my name is Dustin Brohm. I'm a real estate agent in Salt Lake City, Utah. I have been for almost 11 years now. I'm the co-founder of the Industry Syndicate Podcast Network. I'm a national speaker on all things real estate marketing, social media, lead generation, podcasting, and so on and so forth. You get the point. And the founder of the Massive Agent Society lead gen training program and coaching platform. You can check that out at MassiveAgent Society.com. And if you guys are looking to do the one-on-one coaching, I only offer, I only have 10 spots. I can only be doing the one-on-one coaching for 10 people a month. Right now I have eight, and uh I had a call this morning, so I'll likely have nine. Let me know if you're interested in that, or you could find out more at MassiveAentSociety.com if you click on coaching, and that'll show you some info about the one-on-one in addition to the society program. All right, guys, I'm gonna challenge your thinking a little bit this week because um when we get into this business, and this is such a crazy business, there's there's no one right way to do things. There's no uh that like there's so many coaches or uh or brokerages or teams or systems that want to just put you into a box for what's worked with others. And, you know, for the most part, that's pretty good advice. I'm not totally knocking it, but sometimes, well, not sometimes, all the time, we have different strengths and weaknesses, right? You may hate doing video where I love it, or I may hate going door knocking, but you love it. You know, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, desires, likes, dislikes, okay? That's fine. And we really have to embrace that. But there's so much focus put on certain goals, and I feel like a lot of us just we're like, well, that's how you do it. Like it's all about how many homes you sell, or it's all about your production, or it's all about how many agents you recruit, or it's all about this, that, or the other, right? Well, cool, that's fine. If that's what you want, okay? But the if the number of homes you sell in a year, or a month, or a week, or a day, or or how many homes you sell this hour, you know, you know what I mean. Uh they it's just an incomplete metric. It's not complete. And so many of us, so, so, so many of us, including myself, for a large part of my career, I focused on how many homes I sold. Well, what you'll find is sometimes if you sell 20 houses this year and 30 next, okay, you may actually make less money when you sell 30 homes versus the year you sold 20. Well, does that sound crazy? It shouldn't, because what's your price point? Did your price point go up or down? Right? If you sold 30 homes at a lower price point, uh, you may but your 20 homes was at a much higher price point, you may actually make more money selling fewer homes. So in the intro, when I was teasing, maybe you should set a goal of selling fewer homes, you might want to. Guys, it's okay to think and set goals based on revenue and not just revenue, because revenue is nice, but that's top line, right? Like then revenue is before expenses. Well, what do you actually make? What will you actually take home? That's what matters, right? Like if you if you make 20 grand on a deal but have to split half of it with your brokerage or 40% or whatever, uh like that's cool. Maybe your revenue went up, but you're not as profitable as you could or should be, right? Or maybe if you're focused on $150,000 homes when you could be focused on $300,000 homes, you're you're you have to sell so many more homes at $150,000, twice as many to be exact, you have to sell twice as many homes to make the same amount of gross income, gross commission income, from you know, if you sold 300k homes. So why don't you focus on $300,000 homes instead? Um, it really is that simple. It doesn't mean that it's easy, but if in your head you decide I'm gonna target this neighborhood, I'm gonna make this area over here my farm area instead of this lower price point area over here. I I know how this is, because when I got into the business, I looked at where I wanted my farm area to be. And what do you know what I did? I picked one of the lowest price point areas ever because I'm like, well, that's where the deals are happening. Well, there's plenty of homes being sold over on the other side of town where the price point is three or four times higher. Um, you know, uh like why why did I choose this lower end part of town when I could have chosen the higher end part? It was because I didn't think I could do it, or I didn't think I was worthy of it, or I thought I've got to work my way up to selling homes on the east side. You know, like the east side agents, they're they're just special. Well, I can promise you, because I've become one of those agents and I know a lot of them, they're just not that special. Like at all. They just chose to sell homes in a different area than you. Well, maybe you could do the same thing. I want to challenge you guys when you're setting your goals for this year, for this week, for next year, whatever, focus on income. Okay, focus on profit. Because you may find that you're spending more money to acquire a deal, to acquire a client if your farm area is in this area here. But if you move it over here and the price point changes, maybe your your costs to acquire a customer are the same, but your commission's twice as much or 30% more or whatever. Guys, if you just start thinking of your business as uh from a what will I what will I actually net at the end of the year, if that becomes the way you back into your goal setting, your life changes. Your life absolutely changes. But so many of us, we start with uh with like we just start at the bottom. Like, I know that there's agents, I I know that hundreds of homes sell over here on the the east side where you know the price point is 600k, but I'm gonna do it here where it's you know 200 because uh I'm new. Well, it takes the same amount of effort to sell a $600,000 home as a $200,000 one, sometimes less. I mean, if you have more qualified buyers in a nicer part of town, you may actually have less bullshit to deal with. You may actually have more qualified buyers and fewer hiccups and fewer speed bumps and you know conditions on your on the mortgage and all this crap that may derail deals in the lower end part of town. You guys know what I'm saying. So you're the only one, like no one else can pick your the area that you focus your marketing. You have to do that. Why can't you pick a a higher price point part of town? A part of town that will net you more commission than another area. So there's one thing you can do. So set your goals on just selling. Maybe you're selling fewer homes, but if you wanted to make $200,000 this year, okay, but you're you're focused on $150,000 homes. Uh oh shit, I don't have my calculator because my two and a half year old daughter took it outside, left it on the lawn, and these sprinklers came on last night. So my calculator is dead. Uh, I do use an old school calculator, which is like one of these big suckers on my desk. I just like it. I like pounding away on it. Um, I know I could Google it, but whatever. You guys do the math here. If you want to make $200,000, how many homes at $150,000 price point will that take? And I know the amount of commission you charge, you know that factors in as well, which by the way, you can choose to charge more. You know, if if you're charging 2%, well, maybe you just start charging two and a half or three or three and a half or four. Why can't you do that? That's a great way to increase your profit and your income without selling more homes. Okay. But you could actually find that if you want $200,000, if you just change the area that you run your ads in and you do your marketing in and you do your door knocking and you do your postcards and your door hangers and all the all the stuff, all the things, if you do it in a different area where there's $300,000 homes, you now only have to sell half as many homes to reach $200,000 in income than if you were in the $150,000 area. It guys, it it really is that simple. It really is that simple. The problem that you run into is yourself. You get in your own damn way. I know because I got in my own way for a long time. Long time. I still do in certain situations, but you know, you try to be caught uh conscious of it. If if you're like, well, I can't do that because, you know, well, it's harder to sell those homes. No, it's not. Why? Why why is it harder to sell a $300,000 home than a $150,000 home? What, because there's there's fewer of them, maybe? Okay. Well, are there only one are there only two of them? Or are there there's so many homes? You just have to switch your mindset here. And there's two sides to every transaction. Okay? So just let's say there's only 100 homes in your market that are uh, you know, that are $300,000 and you're used to selling $150,000, $150,000 homes and there's thousands of them, but there's only 100, 300k homes. Okay, well, if every one of those sold, I know this is a ridiculous example, but you get the point. If every one of those sold over a three-year period, let's say, makes it slightly less ridiculous, but over a three-year period, every one of those sold, well, there's two sides to every deal. So were there a hundred transactions or two hundred? There were two hundred. Remember that. Okay? It's all about how you look at it. So your goal should if you really do only give a shit about the number of homes you sell, cool. But I would venture to guess that you don't really give a shit about the number of homes nearly as much as how much money you make at the end of the year, how much you actually net at the end of the year. Right? I mean, that's how it is for me. That's all I care about. If I could only sell one home and hit my income goal, I would. Right? I mean I really would, wouldn't you? But but some of us have just convinced ourselves for whatever reason that we need to sell uh we need to sell 40 homes to reach this. Well, change your price point. Or change the commission you charge, or this will blow your freaking mind, or both. Or both. What if you changed the area you market and the area you you get deals from, and you charge more commission? What if you did that? Then then maybe instead of selling 30 homes for the year, you only have to sell 10. Would that buy you more time? Would that give you more freedom? Would that give you more time with your family and fewer nights, late nights that you're working, um, you know, putting offers together and just all the bullshit? It would. There's less work involved to sell 15 homes versus 30 or 40. Guys, these are choices. Okay? So your goal could be completely wrong. I've made the wrong goals before. I'm like, I'm gonna sell this many homes. When all I I didn't care about how many homes, I cared about how much money I made. We are in a business. There's absolutely nothing wrong with you saying, hey, I actually give a shit about how much money I make. I want to make a bunch of money. What's wrong with that? There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. And it maybe you're hanging around with a group of friends or a certain circles on social media that somehow uh like to signal their virtue that, you know, it's not all about the money for me. It's about the impact I make. And it's cool. Like you have to, it's okay to want to make a bunch of money while making a big impact and while helping people. Like, that's where the money comes from. You you can't make the money with unless you make impact and provide value and and you know, help people to buy and sell homes. So they go hand in hand. There's absolutely nothing wrong with saying, I want to help a bunch of people and make a shitload of money. What's wrong with that? I think one of the big problems in our society today is there's fewer people who at least publicly who there's fewer people willing to publicly say that. That's a problem. And it's all about how you do it, right? If you're like, well, I need to buy my Lambo, and you know, here's money that I'm gonna throw over on my mattress and I'm gonna put it on Instagram, like, okay, that's ridiculous. That's douchey. Don't do that. Like, there there is something wrong with that. But that's not what I'm talking about. How much money do you want to bring home so you can go on vacation with your family, you can pay down some debt, you can buy some stock, you can start um investing in your own real estate, you can start a business, you can invest in businesses, you can do whatever the hell you want. You can do whatever you want. You could, you know, if you want to be super charitable, do that. And I I would challenge you to do that. I love I used to just I'm going off on a little tangent here, but if you've been listening to this show for more than one episode, you know that that's pretty much the show. That's pretty much the format of the show is Dustin has his topic and then he just goes all over the place and maybe touches back on it later on, which I promise to do. Anyhow, something that I loved to do, or sorry, something that I used to do was I would I would say, okay, my income, I'm gonna give 10% of my income to charity. And and I'm not saying this is bad. This is this is fantastic if you do this, but I found something that makes me happier. So I used to take 10%, let's say, you know, uh $10,000 commission, so a thousand bucks, uh, boom, send up, send it over to this charity with an online payment. Like there's something about that that I was like, that it was just too easy. Like I know that the money went to a good cause and I researched the charity, and I'm glad that I'm doing something with that 10%, but it just, I don't know, there was something impersonal about it or didn't feel right for me. For me. So what I decided to do is I put that money aside, and then every once in a while, well, you know, I'll go get some hundred dollar bills and I'll tip hundreds. Like I'll just like in a lift ride, I'll give a hundred dollar tip, or at a restaurant where, you know, the it's a thirty dollar check and I tip a hundred bucks or something to where I know that I can have a direct impact on somebody who did something cool for me or who I thought was nice, they did a good job, and I wanted to reward them. That that's what I really like to do. I'd still, you know, like Operation Underground Railroad, I want to give them every cent that I ever make for the rest of my life, and I think you should too. I know that that's not realistic, but I still just, you know, I still send them money. But uh anyways, totally went off on a tangent on charitable giving because I think that that's important. And the way that you feel, if you give someone, if you give a waitress a big tip, if you give like a hundred percent tip, how good does that make you feel? Because you know that they're just like, oh my God, like I should have only gotten five bucks on this, like a 20% tip should have only been five bucks, but they gave me 50 or whatever. Like, how cool is that? You made their day. They're going to remember that forever. They're probably gonna go home and tell their friends, tell their family, they're like, I don't know. I I just love doing that so much. Anyhow, uh, going back to the subject here, maybe you want to sell fewer homes. Um, one of the things, one of the things you could do also that I've heard some agents do is if you find that your costs to acquire a customer, and this is where you actually have to think about your numbers, you actually have to track how much you spend on marketing, how much it costs per closing or per client, right? So first you got to figure those things out. And if you don't know how to do that, go figure out how much you spent on marketing for the year. Okay, how much total? Let's say it's 30 grand for marketing. Cool. And then how many, how many clients did you have? If you sold 20 homes, 20 different clients, just divide um, you know, 30 grand, whatever I said. I can't remember if I said 30 or 40 grand. 30 grand divided by, you know, 20 people. That's your cost per closing. Okay? That's your cost per closing. Um but if you notice that certain people uh cost less, who are those people? Are they, is it your sphere of influence? I mean, it you may very well find out that your past clients are uh the best return on investment. Okay, if you are taking care of them and sending them gifts every once in a while, uh, you know, you do a closing gift and then you know, like you just give them a Christmas gift, you you do a client appreciation event of some sort where you're doing free photography or they can come get pictures with superheroes, or it's uh, you know, bounce houses or an ice cream truck or anything and everything, right? Fill in the blank there. If you do if you spend 10 grand on that event and you have all your past clients come, but you get five deals from that, I mean, you may find out that the ROI on that is better than if you're running ads on Zillow or something like that. Um, you this is where I can't tell you you're gonna have to figure out your own damn numbers and you know, and and figure it out. But you may realize that certain groups of people, maybe in certain areas or people that you went to high school with or whatever, they cost less to turn into a client on average. So then what if you what if you stop spending money on the more expensive people who you don't know and start spending more money on those who do know you? Right? So uh there's I heard a story this week, blew my mind. Somebody cut their their network by about 90% or their uh their database by about 90%. 90%. Okay, how many times do you hear people, you've got to add one new person to your database every single day? Cool, I get that. Like that makes sense if put them on an email list, you know, drip campaigns and stuff so they can see your social media, uh, your posts. Awesome, I get that. That makes a lot of sense. But those that you're spending money on, what if you what if you just reduce that the number of people and really focus on your super fans? Focus on those that that really are they've given you a referral in the past or uh or you believe that they have the potential to and really focus on those people. So reducing the size of your database could actually be a good goal, where some agents have the goal of I only have a thousand contacts, but by the end of the year I want to have two thousand or whatever. And that's their goal. Cool, but again, is your goal the number of homes sold or the number of people in your CRM, or is it profit? Is it how much you're actually gonna frickin' make? For me, this is personal to me, and but I I imagine it's pretty similar for you too. It's probably how much money you make at the end of the day. That's why we're in this business. That's why we do this. So some of the things that that you can do, think about doing if if the goal is to reduce or sorry, if the goal is to increase profitability, aka netting more money at the end of the year, then maybe you spend less on marketing. Okay, to if you're spending money on marketing that you don't necessarily need to because you're getting referrals from certain people, but you're you're spending a bunch of money over here that just doesn't make sense, well, stop doing that. Now you're your outgo completely reduced, and now you're more profitable. That's a great way to make more money uh at the end of the year is just reduce how much your costs are. Reduce the size of your database, which ties into the first one, sell fewer homes, but at a different price point at a higher price point, or and or charge a different commission rate. You can do that. Jeff Cohn on our podcast, uh geez, I should have looked up the episode number, but the one we did with Jeff Cohn, that's what he talked about. Hey, change, uh, change how much you charge in commission just across the board. If you're like, hey, this is how much it is to work with me, and here's what it includes, and here's why you want to do it. Um, and you now you're getting 3% instead of 2.5 over, you know, another half a percent over 15, 20, 30, 50 deals for the year, that adds up dramatically. So you're not selling any more homes. You're just More profitable every time you do. Talk to fewer new people, maybe, if if that fits in with the whole spirit of this. Shrink your farm area if you're finding that one specific neighborhood or one street or one block or one town is you're getting more deals there. Well, focus on it. It doesn't like just focus on here's what it comes down to, guys. And here's an exercise you can do. We've done this before. We're gonna do it again, we're gonna do it right frickin' now. Where did your last 10 closings come from? Where'd they come from? I want I want you to go back to each one of your last 10 closings and find out where they came from. How did you get that client? Was it a Facebook ad that you've nurtured over a year? Was it a referral from somebody? Was it a referral from a past client or another agent in another market who knows you from social media that referred you a deal? What was it? Find out where those last 10 deals come from. What you'll find is a trend. You're going to notice a trend. If you notice the trend that you're getting a lot of referrals, that seven out of those ten are from referrals. That's kind of a clue that maybe you should focus more on referrals and the source of those referrals. If you find that it's other agents from other markets, well, how do they learn about you? Maybe you do a podcast. Maybe it's a Facebook group that you're a part of that you're really active in. I don't know. For me, it's been both. Um it's it's been the SnapPack Facebook group, it's been um writing some articles uh for HousingWire or Inmin or whoever, it's been my podcast, it's been a bunch of things. So what is it? How do those agents find you? If you can really pinpoint where your deals are coming from, then you can do more of those things. Those are the goals you need to be setting, guys. Okay, those are the goals, those are the productive goals that will move the needle and make you more money. So, guys, audit, audit your goals. Audit the way that you look at your goals. Are they really your goals, or did you set a goal because your CRM says to, or because your team leader says, this is a goal? And look, and let me clarify, okay? And hopefully you know this, but let me spell it out just in case you don't. I'm not saying that it's wrong to have a goal of like how many homes you sell in a year. Okay, that that's that's all part of it. But your primary goal should be profitability, should be how much money you're actually going to get at the end of the day after your split with your broker, after taxes, after expenses, what are you going to actually net? That's what matters. That's what you have to live off of. That's what you have to grow and to, you know, enjoy. So it now part of that is okay, to get to that goal, if I make this much in commission and the average price point is this, then I need this many homes sold in a year to reach it. That makes sense. But how many frickin' times? And maybe I'm talking about you, maybe someone you know, but I've done this before. My primary goal was I'm gonna sell this many homes in a year. Cool. But that that's just not it's just not complete. And if you have incomplete goals, you get incomplete results. Okay? You you you may you may get what you want, but usually like just kind of, or you get close to it, uh, and you're like, well shit, maybe that wasn't the right goal. So audit your goals. Audit your goals, make sure that it's actually what matters to you, and then reverse engineer it into some of those other metrics. Because those metrics matter, but not as the primary goal. I hope that helps, guys. Make sure that you really dive in, understand your numbers, understand your goals, be honest with yourself. My goals are not your goals. Your goals are not mine. Okay? And even if it's, you know, I wanna I wanna make 500k this year, awesome, but what are you gonna do with it? Like, why do you want 500k? If you can just if you can really define not just how much you want to make, but why, what you're gonna do with it, I promise you it becomes so much more tangible in your head. It becomes so much more real, and you're gonna be driven even more on those shitty, shitty days where you have a client that just lost their mind or or lost their job uh the day before closing, or they went and purchased a car two days before closing or whatever. On days like that, you're gonna need to remember why you're doing these things and not just a dollar amount. It's easy to be like, eh, if I make 10 grand less this year, whatever. But if it's a if there's why to it, then it becomes really strong. So be intentional with your goal setting, focus on the right goals, go sell some homes, go close some loans, have a great, great weekend. See you next week.
