We sat down with Michael Fanning, S.V.P Windermere Real Estate, Windermere Real Estate Coach, Master Ninja Selling Instructor to discuss the Infinite Game: Durability of sphere-based approach in a market downturn.
The two discuss the value of tech for an agent, the importance of sphere methodology, and coaching people where they are.
Follow Michael here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldfanning/
TRANSCRIPT
York Baur: Hello, everybody. Welcome to another Real with MoxiWorks. I’m your host, York Bauer, CEO of MoxiWorks, and I’m joined by one, Michael Fanning, Senior Vice President at Windermere Services. Michael, a pleasure to have you as always.
Michael Fanning: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
YB: Yeah, we for, for those of you in the audience who don’t know, Michael is actually kind of the, the OG of, of this whole thing that we call MoxiWorks these days because as some of you may know, we have our origins as a spin out more than a decade ago now from Windermere Services, the franchisor of, of Windermere Real Estate here in the Northwest and on the West Coast. And by way of background, maybe you can start there, Michael. You’ve, you’ve been in and, in and around both Windermere and the technology aspect for some time. So take us back.
MF: Yeah, so let’s go back to 19, late 1996. And I have to give credit to two people Alan Benson and Brian Allen. So Alan Benson was a Windermere agent out of Gig Harbor, actually. And he had this idea of putting listings on a website.
YB: Wait, what? [laughs]
MF: Yeah. Imagine that!
YB: Although back then it was revolutionary.
MF: It was revolutionary. In 96, we had college rule paper and we had Polaroids for listeners that, or watchers that don’t know what a Polaroid is, and we’d glue stick them on to, and you’d see the homes. Anyway, so Alan had this idea to. Pull data from, at that time, the Pierce County MLS. And put it on a website that he had built. And he was doing that and kind of got caught. Because I think they were going in the back door of the Pierce County MLS.
YB: Ah, yes.
MF: And then Brian Allen came along and said, Hey, let’s legitimize this. And which now we know today is known as IDX.
YB: Yep.
MF: Right? Internet –
YB: And you helped co develop that standard, I believe.
MF: Right. So what happened is, Allen called me and said, Hey, you know, we got these, Things gonna be happening where we’re gonna have these browsers and we’re gonna have email and there’s gonna be websites that nobody’s really ever used before and you’re really good at explaining it and training it, we need a team and we’re going to work together. So we started building and it was just basically the two of us at the beginning in 97 and then just kind of grew. And then that’s what morphed into, you know, CRMs and photo gallery and I mean in all these new things. And so, and it just kept growing and I just kept training on those pieces of it. And then here we are today and now MoxiWorks is running with it at a whole other level, you know, a hundred miles an hour.
YB: Yeah. That’s a great story, and I love it because it shows foresight. You know that I have the document to prove that Windermere.com the domain was registered in January of 1995.
MF: Yes.
YB: So, I mean, that’s how far back all that, that goes. And you were obviously a key piece of that.
MF: It was fun! I mean, you know, I was, I think I was telling you this one before we were prepping, is that I have a little book, a book that we were, we would kind of build a mind map, if you will, and we had on there “email” and then we had the question mark next to it that says, will they use it? Number one. Number two, will they pay for it? And then what might we want to charge for it? I think we were going to charge $5 a month for them to have a Windermere email address. And at that time it wasn’t exchange. It was pop – pop servers, right? And so teaching people how to use that was, you know, it was fun.
YB: Yeah, well, and you are the perfect guy. I think then for this segue into our sort of main topic about using sphere of influence because like me, you’re a technologist at heart. I mean, you love the technology, but here we are 25 plus years later and to some degree we, you know, technology is not taken over the world in spite of what the disruptors might have you think. So what is it in your mind? What is the role of the technology, whether it’s Moxi’s or anyone else’s in an agent’s life? Well, you know, try to summarize for us maybe in a sentence what you think the value of technology is for an agent.
MF: Well, you know, one of the things we teach is when you run a business is to work smarter, not harder, right? And I think that the key word there is convenience. And so you know, I can have a database that lives in Excel and I can spend a lot of time in my day trying to manage it or I can have technology that allows me to see the, the important items we call the 20 percent that are going to give me the 80 percent return that I can see that very efficiently, I can pop it up, I can have it with me, I can have it with me on my device, right? I can take it with me wherever I am, and it keeps me in the forefront or the top of mind of my client. And that is where I see technology benefiting us. And you know, it’s like anything else. We can go down that rabbit hole of all the bells and whistles and all the really cool things it does. But at the end of the day, it really is, is that piece of technology, number one, providing convenience. Number two, is it enhancing your relationships. And if it’s not doing either of those things, then it’s probably not a smart tool to be using.
YB: Yeah, I agree. And I think you made an interesting comment in there, the bells and whistles, you know. We get a lot of requests from, from agents over, over time to, I need the button that does this one thing.
MF: Right.
YB: Generally speaking, the, the best URM is the one you actually use, and it’s probably just because it doesn’t have one button where you want it. It’s probably not a good reason for why you’re not using the CRM. So, but let’s shift gears into the importance of sphere methodology versus lead gen. I mean, you’ve spent, you’re, you’re a certified Ninja instructor, you’ve spent literally now a couple of decades perfecting that and driving that through brokerages. So talk about your view of, of those two modes of, of more of a lead gen oriented approach, whether it’s leads flowing from the broker or being generated by that agent or team versus a sphere methodology. Talk about that.
MF: Absolutely. Well, and I’ll reference the book, The Infinite Game. I don’t know if you’ve read that by Simon Sinek. So, we talk about finite and infinite games. So, the finite game is instant gratification., I need something now, and it’s very transactional minded. Meaning, you’re kind of like a hunter, right? So, you get a transaction, you close the transaction, and now you’ve got to go hunt for another transaction. And they’re not building relationships, and you’re coming from a place of what we call kind of being on accident, if you will.
YB: Right.
MF: And, and yet you can build a business off that, but the challenge is, is that when we look at it, you know. Your business may be doing well, but what’s your life like? Because all you’re doing is you’re at the mercy of that client. You’re at the mercy of that lead that you don’t know very well. And you know, you got to establish that and it’s just hard work. And then you shift gears and you go over the infinite game, meaning the long term game, like not instant gratification. But hey, I’m gonna invest in this person. I’m gonna invest in this relationship and I’m gonna have a relationship mindset and that pays you tenfold because those people that you’re working with that you close that transaction with, they know more people like themselves and you build this evangelistic group that really want to help you, right? And so when we see agents that live in that transactional world, a lot of times they’re on accident, they’re very reactionary and sometimes they hit burnout, but it’s not sustainable. And you see them literally, they’ll have, they’ll have these big ebbs and flows in income, and then, or sometimes they just disappear for six months, right? And then they reemerge and they kind of come back and they’ve got the next shiny object that they paid money for and then you take somebody who’s relationship based and they have this pretty consistent flow of income that’s going up. They also have a life. You know, they’re spending time, their relationships are good. And then the other side of it, too, is that they’re actually coming from a place of being proactive. I mean, they’re running their business like a business. They have time off. They’re pretty, you know, well rounded. And it’s just, it’s just two different people.
YB: Totally. And I think the technology reflects that. Our technology, obviously, is oriented to that latter category. And I think, unfortunately, as an industry, I think, I’m talking about real estate tech now as the industry, I think we sort of perpetrate the, the myth of a lead gen business on people because so much you opened Inman any day. So much of it is about that.
MF: Getting a lead.
YB: Yeah.
MF: Of course.
YB: 82 percent of an agent’s business comes from their sphere. So we’re kind of focusing them by, by all our shiny objectness, focusing on the rocket. You had a great story. You told me when we were getting ready about an agent. Because one of the things that I think is a misnomer too about sphere is that, Oh, I only experienced long term agents have a sphere of influence. Not true. And you had a great story about an agent that that came into the industry. Tell, tell that story.
MF: Yeah, so her name’s Allison Stinsruden. She’s out of Walla Walla, Washington. And so she moved to Walla Walla and knew nobody. And she was, you know, I think she knew two people when she got there. And Doug Simcock, who was her broker there. And so immediately Doug likes all those agents to go through NINJA. Right out of the gate, she goes to Ninja. In fact, she just had a baby, so she comes to Ninja. We are teaching in Bend, Oregon, of all places. So she brings her mom. She’s taking breaks during Ninja to go see her child, you know, and then come back. And you could tell she was really tired, but she takes that. And then it took about six months and she got her first transaction. So in her first year I think she did between eight, eight, I think six to eight transactions, right?
YB: Which is great for a first year.
MF: And then fast forward to year two she doubles it. Year three. She doubles it again. And I think the last time we checked in with her, she was, I believe, and I may be a little bit off on the numbers, somewhere around 56 transactions doing phenomenally well. But when you, when we talked to her, we say, Alison, what was the key? And she said, you know what? Number one, I ran my business like a business. Number two. I wasn’t buying leads. I was building relationships. And so if you look at her daily schedule, right, her note writing, her property reviews, her phone calls, her strategies and her tools, she just dialed it in. And the actions that she did consistently every day generated that business and it will continue. And I think just this, this month, I think she’s got seven listings, right? This month, where we have agents that are in the lead world going, Oh my gosh, it’s impossible to get a listing right now. What do I do? Who do I pay? It’s like, you know what? Well write a note, make a phone call.
YB: And that is the irony of it, because not only is a sphere based methodology a lot more rational and a lot more going to produce a much better long term result, but it is the source of listings. No one’s filling out a form to list their home, right?
MF: Nobody.
YB: So, yeah, that’s… That’s awesome. All right. So now let’s, let’s talk about, and you and I again, when we were prepping touched on this a little bit, it’s that the joke is winter is coming. You know, there’s all this stuff. I was on CNBC this morning and they had their reporter talking about how they, you know, the housing market is slowing and all these things. And it is, but for those of us that have been around, it’s really more a reversion to normality.
MF: Absolutely.
YB: More of a normal market. Talk a little bit about that. And then also talk about the durability of a sphere based. Approach versus a lead gen based approach in a market, you know downturn or a more normal market.
MF: You know, this is great So we have an economist Matthew Gardner and the other day he and I were talking and he said, you know The challenge we see today is there’s a lot of agents. Let’s face it getting into real estate is very low barrier of entry, so we have a lot of people to get into it. Well, we have a lot of people that are in the business now that haven’t experienced a slower market.
YB: That’s right
MF: They’ve experienced a market where you put a sign in the yard and you get, you know, 12 offers, and it goes for 127 percent over asking price, and it’s done, and you just do that again and again and again. And so you’re not having crucial conversations, you’re not having to run your strategies on your, you know, working your business. And so now the market starts to, and it’s just normalizing.
YB: Yeah.
MF: Right? It’s just normalizing. I mean, that’s what’s going on. I mean, typically homes are on the market for 30 to 45 days. I mean, that’s kind of a normal world, but these agents haven’t seen that normal market. So they haven’t had to put those strategies in place. And so that’s why we see this panic a little bit. And the other one that gets me is the interest rates. I don’t know about you, but I owned a house when I think I had a 9 percent interest rate at one point in time on my home. And then I refinanced to seven and I thought it was the most amazing thing. I went from nine to seven, yet we see people today that say, “Are you gotta be kidding me? It’s five or six? This is outrageous”. It’s like, well, no, that’s…
YB: Yeah, and historically, it’s still on the low end.
MF: Historically, it’s still on the low end. And so I, I think that, that’s, that’s a big thing right now. And we have to be really careful of the narrative that we put out there because it’s not panic. It’s not recession. It’s not a depreciating market. It’s just, it’s, it’s normalizing and it’s changing. So we have to shift with that change. When I’m in a, when I’m in a on accident agent that hasn’t experienced that and I don’t have a system and a strategy and I’m running off getting leads, I really can go into a panic mode. Like, where’s my business coming from? And I think we’re going to see a lot of agents just kind of go away.
YB: Yeah.
MF: Right? But here’s the thing, the ones that have been running their systems and they have their relationship based, because what we know, and you know, Larry Kendall will say this, you know, that lead that lead triangle, that one year lead triangle, we actually call that kind of the mosh pit because that’s where everybody’s fighting to get that, you know, and I will even say when we buy leads and I digress a little bit here, but when we buy leads, what I really believe that to be is we’re buying a broken real estate relationship.
YB: It’s true. Yeah.
MF: Because, because at some point in time, they had a relationship with an agent.
YB: Yes.
MF: And then that agent left them at the closing table and never followed up with them again. And now they’ve fallen into a lead pool and now they’re being sold back to us. So we’re really, if we would have just stayed in contact with them.
YB: It’s a failure ultimately. Yes.
MF: Yeah. So, so you think about somebody who says, Hey, I closed the transaction. Now you go into my flow. Now you go into my client appreciation. Now you’re on my Popeye schedule. Now I’m providing value to you. It’s not even based in real estate, just based in your life. And now I have you, I have equity to you and you’re going to refer me and everybody knows that at least four people every year that they can refer me.
YB: That’s right. And you know, one of the things I know you’re a big fan of and maybe you can talk about the use of the Moxie tech because I know you, you promote this. Of all the things that you can do, and there is a long list of things that an agent needs to do, but in my mind, the thing that is just an absolute travesty that this industry does not do is that thoughtful annual property review. I mean, it’s the obvious thing, right? Your financial planner meets with you routinely, your doctor meets with you –
MF: Right.
YB: And there’s this sense of, I’m going to give you an update. There may not be anything to do, but I’m going to give you an update. And in this case, it’s for their most emotionally significant and typically financially significant asset. Talk about just that one aspect and the use of tech in doing so.
MF: Yeah. So the property review for those of you listening is really simple. It’s, it’s an annual report on typically the biggest asset in your net worth, which is your real estate. And by the way, think about this. We had unprecedented appreciation in the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022. And the challenge we face a lot of homeowners today are under insured.
YB: Right.
MF: Right. And so now all of a sudden my, my financial trust or my real estate trust advisor shows up with this report says, by the way, here’s where you have appreciated to. And by the way, you might want to let your insurance agent know that you need to adjust your binder. You know, you might want to let your financial planner know to change your net worth. But the point is, is that that’s got to be quick and easy. It’s not a CMA and I should be able to crank those out in about five to 10 minutes based on the tool that’s there. And the beauty of it is inside MoxiPresent, in fact, I just did a class on this the other day. Here’s how you do it. Here’s the template. You know, don’t overthink it. Get it done. Because really, it’s just giving them information and then having a relationship and having questions with them. And what I love about it is that, you know, I’ll go to a company and I teach installations outside of the Windermere network and you’ll see companies that look at me and say, well, that’s going to require a lot of work. And I say, well, you don’t have the tool? That just, going back to convenience, right, that just makes it happen. And so the beauty of Moxi is that I can go in there, set my template up, pull my data, pull in Gartner reports if I want, and literally in 10 minutes, I’ve got a really beautiful looking report that’s branded to me that I can email it and then attach it to my contact so it says, hey, you sent it to them. And then it keeps a record of it. So I can go back a year from now and say, what changed, tweak it. And send it again, going back to, I think the original question you asked is how does technology roll into helping me build relationships and that’s one of them. It’s huge. But, to your point, what, 11 percent of agents do property reviews? I mean, have you ever received a property view at your house? I’m curious.
YB: No, that’s, that’s the irony given my role, right? I was just going to say, in my entire multi decades, my wife and I have done more than 20 personal real estate transactions in our lifetime. And never once has this been done for me.
MF: Well, get ready, because now… I was I made that statement, I made that statement on some talk I was on, and somebody seeked me out, found my address, and I received like, I received like two or three property reviews.
YB: We’re thrown down, that’s a challenge out there. Awesome, well let’s, let’s wrap up with maybe more of a brokerage perspective, based on everything we’ve talked about, because obviously you’re advising Windermere franchise owners and other brokers, because like you say, you do a bunch of work outside of the Windermere network.
MF: And we coach.
YB: And you coach.
MF: Yeah, we coach.
YB: So what would you say, given the period we’re entering now, what would you say to a broker owner or a managing broker about how they should think about skill development and retention and recruiting still in this period we’re going to enter now, or that we are entering?
MF: Well, I, you know, I was thinking about this this morning in my drive in, and we have a lot of people in our industry that are in management positions or ownership positions, and the way they got there was they were really good real estate agents. And they, they did well, and then they said, oh, I’m going to own a brokerage. Right. And then they buy a brokerage, and now they have to manage people. And I will say this, and this is just, I’m not judging, I’m just reporting. A lot of real estate agents are very entrepreneurial minded, but they’re not good people managers, right?
YB: Sure.
MF: And what they do is they focus on the transaction, they focus on the business, they focus on the bottom line, when the reality of it is, you really need to be a coach. And you need to coach people where they are. Right? So, here’s the challenges you’re having, here’s not what you’re, here’s what you’re not doing, so how can we coach you to get better and then have a resource that you can provide consistently to all your agents. And so right now as we’re going through this change, one of the questions I’m asking a lot of managers and owners is, are you a coach? How invested are you in your people? How much do you know about your person? Do you know what they want to do with their life? And is your office and your system and what you do going to be the pathway for them to have that in their life? And do they know that?
YB: Right.
MF: Right?
YB: And that last part is crucial. That’s crucial. Because you don’t say it. That’s the thing. It’s just to double down on that. You talked about that being specific to real estate. That path of being. A strong, genericizing it, a strong individual contributor, an agent, and then becoming a manager. And I think that’s one of the fallacies generally in American business, not just in real estate. By the way, it’s true in the technology industry. It’s true in banking. It’s true in everything. We go, Hey, Sally’s a great accountant. Let’s make her the manager of accounting. Right. Well, what is, what is being an accountant, a salesperson, a real estate agent, an engineer, whatever your discipline is, how does that somehow magically qualify you to be a good accountant or manager of people which is its own discipline, right? So I think it’s incumbent upon us as whatever industry you’re a part of, to make that investment, not only in our managers, to teach them, to instruct them, to coach them on how to be better coaching managers, but do so for ourselves. And I, I have a, I have a professional, we as an exec team, including me, have a professional coaching organization that we work with for this reason.
MF: I do the same thing. I mean, and that’s the other piece. I think. I think everybody in this day and age, right, if you want to really be the best person you can be and help as many people as you can you, you, you need a coach. You know, when, when you think about when we were, when we were in high school and grade school and we’d do sports or theater or whatever it happened to be, we had a coach. And then we become adults and we go, Oh, I’ve got this. And then you can throw a therapist in there too. I mean, some people have a coach and a therapist, but, but my point is I, I’m same way. I coach with the Titan Academy with Robin Sharman. I coach with Brendon Burchard because those two together allow me to provide more value to the people that I help.
YB: Yeah. And you’re right. I mean, you look at. Like my son in law, for example, is a two time Olympian champion in the U.S. Always had to coach. Yeah, you just, no one does it on their own.
MF: Nobody. All right.
YB: Well with that, I think we’re pretty much at time.
MF: Okay.
YB: This has been a fascinating conversation as always. I appreciate it. And for those of you out there, you know, follow Michael on, on Insta. He’s always got a lot of great…
MF: Yes.
YB: Things to, to comment. And if you do have an interest in, in Ninja, I, there are many great methodologies out there, but that’s a proven one. So, you know, make the investment in yourself and your agents in particular, as we’re going into this next phase of, of the economy, you know, double down on those relationships. That’s what will not only carry you through if history is a guide will allow you to power past everybody in a downturn like this.
MF: So, yeah, and I would add to if you know, if you’re, if your organization offers coaching, take advantage of it. Whether it’s Ninja selling coaching or Windermerecoaching.com or your company has coaching take advantage of that because it is one of the best investments you probably can make.
YB: Yeah, that’s absolutely right.
MF: Yeah.
YB: Awesome. Well, thanks Michael.
MF: Thank you!
YB: And thanks to you all out there for another Real with MoxiWorks. Take care.
