How A Husband/Wife Realtor Team Literally 10x'd Their GCI By Focusing On A Specific Niche

Aaron Rose: Go where people suck. We did that. We did it with FHA and VA because a lot of people didn't want to touch it. We came into this market, we looked at all the volume, and there wasn't any one realtor who was doing 10% of the business. Now, after two years of focusing on this market, in the Wellington section, we recently looked at the numbers, we were involved in 48% of all the transactions. Overall, in general, in Century Village, we're at, what, 14%? 

Sarah Rose: 18%. 

Tim Chermak: This is The Platform Marketing Show, where we interview the most creative and ambitious real estate agents in the country, dissect their local marketing strategy, and get the behind the scenes scoop on how they're generating listing leads and warm referrals. We'll dive into the specifics of what marketing campaigns are working for them, how much they're spending on those campaigns, and figure out how they have perfected what we call The Platform Marketing Strategy. This is your host, Tim Chermak. I'm the founder and CEO of Platform. I love marketing and I talk too much, so let's dive in. 

Tim Chermak: Hey guys, it's Tim Chermak. Welcome back to another episode of The Platform Marketing Show. I'm here today with Sarah and Aaron Rose. Sarah and Aaron, welcome to The Platform Marketing Show. 

Aaron Rose: Hey, thanks for having us. We appreciate it. 

Sarah Rose: Nice to be with you. 

Tim Chermak: Sarah and Aaron are realtors in Palm Beach County, Florida, so the West Palm Beach area, that greater area on the East Coast of Florida on the Atlantic side. They have a pretty cool story. They're solid, successful business people. They actually owned a mortgage company and a real estate brokerage before coming back to the production side of real estate where they became realtors themselves. At one point in their story, they moved up to Cape Cod and actually started a marketing and advertising business for real estate agents. Eventually, they moved back to Florida and became realtors again and rebuilt their business from scratch. 

Tim Chermak: They've experienced what I would say is explosive growth in the last 24 months. We're not talking about going from five to ten deals or from ten to fifteen or from fifteen to 20. They've gone from doing ten deals to 60 transactions a year in less than two years, is when that growth curve happens, so really exponential growth in less than 24 months. Sarah and Aaron, tell me your story of how you got into real estate and how you got to where you are now. I know at one point you moved up to Massachusetts and you eventually moved back to Florida. How did you get to where you are now? Give me the background story. 

Sarah Rose: Since we graduated from college in the late 1980s, we've always been in real estate in one way or another. It's just something we like. We like the transaction. We like everything about the real estate world. As you mentioned in the introduction, Aaron owned a mortgage company. I was a broker here in West Palm Beach, Florida. Things got a little crazy in the mid- 2000s. 

Aaron Rose: We used to do a lot of FHA and VA loans. Our company was always in the top three for Palm Beach County for FHA loans. It was a niche that we specialized in. A lot of people didn't want to do them because they thought they were a lot of work. We specialized in it, became really good at doing that type of loan. What happened in the early 2000s was the property prices started going up, but FHA did not increase their loan limits. It literally put us out of business. We started doing A-paper, we always did a little bit of A-paper, but A-paper is good credit. 

Sarah Rose: At that point in time, that's when a lot of these no-income type programs were coming around and it just wasn't a good fit for us. It wasn't comfortable. We didn't agree with the underwriting or lack of underwriting criteria. We weren't out of business, we're just changing the way we did business, but we didn't like it. 

Tim Chermak: You were not like the mortgage brokers in the big short movie, where you were just doing loans to people that had no business getting a loan. 

Sarah Rose: We didn't agree with that. We had sixteen loan officers at the time. We would caution them that “You really shouldn't be doing a loan for a W-2 employee as a no-income loan.” 

Tim Chermak: You said you had sixteen loan officers? 

Sarah Rose: Yes. 

Tim Chermak: Okay, so this was a legit mortgage company. There's a lot of people who say, “I have a real estate brokerage,” and it's literally them and an assistant. Technically, they're a broker. You guys had a legit mortgage company.

Sarah Rose: We had a very nice office space. We had a processor.

Aaron Rose: We had three processors. 

Sarah Rose: We had a receptionist. It was an official, and you had to be at the time. FHA is a little different now. At the time, we were licensed in Florida as a correspondent lender, we were not licensed as a mortgage broker. We were approved by FHA and VA. Anyway, we weren't comfortable with the way the mortgage business was headed and we wanted to make a change. We also were hit by a couple hurricanes at the time. 

Aaron Rose: Frances, Wilma, and Jeanne. We thought that was going to end our business with the hurricanes. Like with what happened on the West Coast, people do rebuild. It shut us down for a few months, but people still move to Florida. 

Sarah Rose: We just started to evaluate life and whatever. We had a vacation home up on Cape Cod and we were just trying to find something different to do. We came across, it was actually a franchise in print marketing for realtors. We got involved with that and moved to Cape Cod for a couple of years. It's also a niche market that we were attracted to for that business. We like clearly defined markets where we can specialize in something. That's what we did with the marketing company business up on Cape Cod. 

Aaron Rose: We sold that in October of ‘19 and moved full-time back to Florida. We got a real estate license again in the fall of ‘19, and then we took a vacation. We took a really nice vacation. We went to Japan. We were gone for about six weeks. When we came back, right before Christmas, we started with a small company. We started working in real estate on January. I think it was January 20th, right around there, of 2020, and then COVID hit in February. That's when we started with Platform. I had gotten your book prior to coming back to Florida. We read your book and we liked your concept. That first year, even with Platform, it was really difficult. 

Tim Chermak: You had basically moved back to Florida after having not been there for several years. You're building a business from scratch because I know that you had been mostly focused on the mortgage side of things before. I would imagine your sphere and a lot of your professional contacts were obviously realtors because that's what you're trying to attract when you build a mortgage company. Now, you move back and it's more consumer facing again, where you're trying to get actual homeowners and buyers and sellers. 

Tim Chermak: Even though you maybe had lived there before, you hadn't been there in several years. You were really starting over from scratch. You start a month before COVID hits in the US. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, your year of 2020 in terms of your GCI and production wasn't very exciting. What did the numbers look like that year in 2020? 

Aaron Rose: We had eight sides and our gross commission was $26,000. 

Tim Chermak: That's probably below the federal poverty line. 

Aaron Rose: Yeah, we got lucky because the person that bought our company up on the Cape made payments to us for a year. That offset the money. 

Tim Chermak: Just kept you afloat, yep. 

Sarah Rose: I have to say, I was actually pleasantly surprised that we even did that amount and was grateful. Through a postcard mailing that the broker we went to did for us, someone who was in our sphere of influence, who was our appraiser of choice back in the day, he got our postcard and he was like, “Hey, I have a friend who's selling down in Palm Beach County and he lives in another county. I don't want to be bothered with it. Will you list the property?” We were all excited that we got a listing as new agents during COVID in the first three months that we were actually working. It gave us something to do. 

Aaron Rose: It was a vacant house. I put a lockbox on it. I didn't trust anybody because I was so brand new that I used to show up for every showing. I didn't realize at the time how weird that was, but I would let the other realtor and the people in during COVID. I had nothing else to do. It was a good half hour trip for us to get up to Jupiter, maybe 20 minutes. It literally gave me something to do. 

Sarah Rose: We really worked that listing. 

Tim Chermak: That's awesome. 

Sarah Rose: Anyway, we had a listing and actually got the buyer on it. We had both sides. We had a few other deals that year, obviously, but that was our first year in real estate. 

Aaron Rose: That was the biggest deal. 

Tim Chermak: It wasn't $126,000 in GCI, it was $26,000 in GCI. It was very slow, obviously, for you guys in 2020. I know that you mentioned that your marketing strategy has evolved over the years where you view it now as a three-legged stool. There's these three pillars that make up your marketing plan now, because now, you've already done 60 transactions this year. You went from doing eight to 60. You're on pace to do probably 70-something by the end of the year. In a literal sense, your business is almost ten times, not doubled or tripled, but it's almost ten times. What's creating that growth is this three-point strategy. 

Tim Chermak: I know the Platform marketing strategy is one of the legs of that stool and the other two for you guys are relationships with probate attorneys. The third is a direct mail strategy using postcards. Can you walk me through how those three work together, and then also what you learned about targeting a specific area versus a super broad geographic area and how that affected your results with Platform. 

Sarah Rose: I think I'll start with that. We actually were at one of your Platform Masterminds in Naples. I forget which year, but not too long ago. 

Aaron Rose: 2020. 

Sarah Rose: Okay, we were focused on our section of Palm Beach County and we were trying to be everything to everybody. We mentioned this at the Platform Mastermind that we really weren't getting the results that we wanted. Most of your clients are very, very successful and some of them took offense to what we were saying. It made us realize that a lot of these people that are customers that are very, very successful, one of the things they have in common is their type of market. 

Sarah Rose: We came back to our market and we were like, “How can we dissect this and find a smaller market within this large area that we have here in Palm Beach County?” We had already been thinking and we had done a few deals in a community that's one square mile with 8,000 condos. It does happen to be a 55-and-older community. We were like, “Let's go all in.” 

Sarah Rose: We had been a little afraid of focusing on this area and being pigeonholed as this community's agent with 55-and-older people, even though we fit into that demographic. We just, at the time, weren't super comfortable with it. We really looked at that market and we saw that there was a tremendous amount of commission coming out of the market, a lot of turnover, and there wasn't one single agent that captured 10% or more of the business in the community. We were like, “Let's go for it. Let's do it with Platform." We rolled up our sleeves with McCall and started doing a lot of content for the community. 

Tim Chermak: Really, you attended that first Platform Mastermind. We're not sugar coating this, to be very clear, you went to that first Platform Mastermind pretty frustrated with the results you had so far. At that point in time, Platform, in your estimation, was not working for you. I think there's two different types of people who go to Platform Masterminds. The first part is someone who's already having really, really great results and they're going for the networking and just to get new ideas and to see the trends coming up, but they're already getting good results. They're happy. They're more so just looking for encouragement and inspiration. 

Tim Chermak: The second type of person goes to a Platform Mastermind because they're doing the strategy, but for whatever reason, they aren't seeing the results yet that some other people are having. You are going there of like, “Hey, what are we doing wrong? What do we need to change? This isn't working for us.”

Sarah Rose: We went there because we totally believed in the concept. We knew people were successful. We love McCall, our account rep. We didn't want to give it up. If we were going to have to make a change, we didn't want to walk away without saying we had looked at everything and had gone to the mass, we had gone all in, and done everything that we could to make it work. 

Aaron Rose: We like to give everything we do time to work. Nothing works overnight. We were giving Platform a year, so that we gave it three more months. In that three months, it really did pick up once we started focusing on it. There's a saying, I like it, I'm gonna say it, “The richer are in the niches.” Too many realtors, they want to be everything to everybody and you just can't. 

Tim Chermak: At that point in time, until you attended that Platform Mastermind, you had this light bulb moment, you were running ads to all of Palm Beach County in general. You're like, “Hey, anything in Palm Beach County, let's run ads to try to scoop up business.” What you discovered was like, “We need to be way more niche than that. We need to target a very specific area or a specific community. We can't just target all of Palm Beach County.” You mentioned it's because you noticed one thing a lot of Platform agents had in common who were having the greatest success, was that they were in somewhat smaller towns. They weren't in cities with 5 million people or 10 million people. 

Tim Chermak: I think what you did, honestly, is you created your own small town. You're like, “Hey, we may live in a county with millions and millions of people, but let's create our own small town in the sense that we're going to pick a very specific community and we're gonna create retargeting content just for them so that it looks like we're only focusing on this community.” It would be really difficult to do this before the age of retargeting. With retargeting, and you guys I know combine it with postcards so people are seeing direct mail from you as well as they're seeing content from you on Facebook and Instagram, that's what really made your business take off. When you had that light bulb moment at the Platform Mastermind, Sarah and Aaron, what did you guys start doing differently after that event? 

Aaron Rose: We committed to Century Village. It's one square mile. It's got about 8,000 units. During season, you might get up to 16,000, 17,000 people. It drops to about half of that during the summer. We committed to doing a lot more listing videos. We were doing listing videos before, but it was all over, Palm Beach Gardens, Jupiter, Boca, Boynton, it was everywhere. Once we started just doing listing videos of Century Village, I can't tell you, it happened within a month or two, we started getting phone calls. 

Sarah Rose: It was very, very quick. 

Tim Chermak: It was absolutely noticeable when you made that shift in strategy, that less than 90 days, you noticed your business picked up a lot. 

Sarah Rose: Absolutely. 

Aaron Rose: With postcards, we do a lot of postcard mailings and we've increased them along with all of our advertising budget. When we started, I was going to keep our advertising budget about 20%, 25% of our growth commission. Now, I think we're at 15% and I'm actually trying to find more because I would rather put the money back into advertising than pay the government. I'm having trouble finding anything that really works better than Platform, postcards. We do a little bit of other little time sense. 

Sarah Rose: Finding that niche or small town within our market, then that really helped us with the other things that we do such as the postcards, because you can't mail out a postcard to everyone in half of Long Beach County. Even dealing with the probate attorneys, we're in a 55-and-older community, so there are a lot of estates. That just helped us too. 

Sarah Rose: I know there are agents out there who go after probate attorneys and will spend years developing these relationships, but because we focused on this one particular area, we started encountering or doing deals with certain probate attorneys. It was a very quick way to build that relationship. Plus, going back to the idea that we've been in real estate since we got out of college, we really understand the real estate transaction. We're good at what we do. That's very important when you're dealing with an attorney. They need to be confident that you're going to treat their clients or the estate properly and not mess things up. 

Tim Chermak: Really, their referral is a reflection of them. 

Aaron Rose: The probate attorneys, we have two of them that we work with a lot. We didn't go after them per se, we just started doing business with them and did a good job. They started providing us business. I get a lot of title companies that want to do business with us, but there's no way I'm giving my business to the attorneys because they close the transaction, but then they turn around and give us a couple more. It's been a great relationship. I like them. They're friends.

Sarah Rose: Both with the postcards and with the probate attorney relationships, we've now gotten to a point where we have other agents calling us. We've been called the King and Queen of the Wellington section. Within this community, there are different sections and the Wellington section would be the higher end properties within the community. That's the first section we did the postcards with and very quickly started to dominate the Wellington section. 

Sarah Rose: Now, we get agents calling us up saying, “You're the King and Queen of Wellington. Do you have any listings that will be coming up soon? Will you think of me? I have a buyer.” We had another agent recently call us and say, “I know someone died in this building and so and so the attorney is handling the estate. I would really like to buy this unit. As a professional courtesy, will you let us know when you're gonna list it?” We said, “Don't automatically assume we're going to list it.” She said, “No, they give you all their business.” 

Aaron Rose: “They told me you get all of their business.” That was nice. 

Tim Chermak: That's awesome. 

Sarah Rose: Going back, it was at the Mastermind where we realized we need to have our small town within this bigger area. Everything else fell into place with the Platform videos and targeting and the postcard mailings and the relationships with the probate attorneys. It just all dovetailed very nicely together. 

Tim Chermak: Again, I want to emphasize that by choosing that specific community, you narrowed down your potential market from being basically all of Palm Beach County, which we've said is millions and millions of people, to just this specific area, which is more like 15,000 people. In a sense, it's really no different than just living in a town with 15,000 people. 

Tim Chermak: I think the magic of a strategy like Platform is that you can become famous to 15,000 people in a way that you really can't with 1.5 million people. Unless your budget is hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in advertising, you can't really build a brand with 1.5 million people. If you pick a more realistic number, like 15,000 people, or you just happen to be lucky enough to live in a town with 15,000 people, you can absolutely become a local micro celebrity with 15,000 people via retargeting. If you just focus on those people all the time and create content just for them, it's as if you've created your own small town. That's when things really took off. What did your business look like going from 2020 to the end of 2021? What did you end 2021 with? 

Aaron Rose: We ended up with 59 transactions and $190,000 and change in growth commission. 

Tim Chermak: This year you're on pace to probably do 70, 70+ transactions.

Aaron Rose: Actually, more. We've done 62 sides and our gross commission is $260,000 for the first three quarters of the year. My goal was $400,000 this year, but I think we're going to hit $300,000. 

Tim Chermak: That's fantastic too, because we're obviously going through a year right now where interest rates have more than doubled. They've actually almost tripled at this point. Obviously, transaction volume across the country is way down. Frankly, even if your business stayed the same from last year, you're doing really, really well. Most realtors are down anywhere from 20% to 40% because just transaction volume is down across the board. If you're actually up this year, that's phenomenal. 

Aaron Rose: Last few months, we've actually been up from last year. 

Tim Chermak: That's incredible. 

Aaron Rose: When you mentioned being celebrities, Sarah had said for a while, she'll say things to me like, “I find people staring at me sometimes.” Last few months, we were in Palm Beach Garden, Sarah had a doctor's appointment and we were sitting in the waiting room, it was a packed waiting room, and a woman halfway across the room says to Sarah, “Are you a realtor? Is your name Sarah?” She said, “Yeah.” She said, “I watch your videos.” 

Sarah Rose: Now, the whole room is talking about the videos and the community. It was a dermatologist, I go in to see the doctor and Aaron stayed in the waiting room. I guess they continued talking. This other woman, who is listening, called her husband and said, “You need to start doing more with Facebook.” 

Aaron Rose: It was funny. Sarah does most of the listing videos, so I don't get recognized as much. I do the restaurant videos.

Sarah Rose: Sorry to interrupt, but by the way, I don't watch my videos. I know that there's a lot of talk about that. I don't watch them.

Aaron Rose: When we shoot the video, all I do is I listen for the sound to make sure that everything was connected. If the sound’s good, then I move on to the next clip. Sounds good, move on to the next clip. Sarah doesn’t even like hearing herself on video. 

Sarah Rose: Aaron does the restaurant videos. We were coming out of a listing appointment in a building here and this woman was walking to her car and she's like, “I love your restaurant videos. You're right, don't let the name fool you,” at this restaurant in Jupiter called Leftovers. She's like, “It's a great restaurant.”

Tim Chermak: Which means she actually watched the video. 

Aaron Rose: I've had people yell out their car window at me, “I love Chicken Salad Chick too.” It's weird. 

Tim Chermak: That's phenomenal because you guys are in a county that has millions of people. It's not like you're getting this recognition out in public only because you're in a small town with 5,000 people or something where you're just going to see the same people over and over again. You are legitimately in a part of the country that is very population dense, and yet because of the way that retargeting works and because of this niche that you've decided to focus on, you've essentially built your own small town. You've created a list of people that are seeing you via retargeting and these postcards over and over and over again. It's just as if you're in a small town and you're creating this branding and saturation just as if you're in a small town. I love that. That's amazing. 

Tim Chermak: Is there a specific retargeting ad, whether it's a photo or a video, that you guys can look back and say, “Hey, that was probably our favorite because tons of people seem to like that one or they commented on it or they told us in real life, ‘Hey, I loved that ad.’” Is there one or two that you can think of that just seemed to connect really well with your audience? 

Sarah Rose: I always liked the Tom Hanks, “Earn this.” 

Aaron Rose: Were they for Veterans Day? 

Tim Chermak: That's one that we did for Memorial Day, where basically, we just took parts of a clip from the movie Saving Private Ryan, and we put some music over it, and we wrote a voiceover just talking about, obviously, the sacrifice that Veterans have made, but specifically people who have given their lives in the line of duty. That's what memorial day is about versus the more generic Veterans Day, which is any service members. We put that together as a video. 

Tim Chermak: It doesn't have anything to do with real estate, doesn't have any call back to you guys. Of course, the point is we're not trying to make it about you, this particular video is all about just honoring those who have fallen in the line of duty. If people saw that and they remembered you then that's cool because that wasn't even the purpose of that ad. It's just a thank you and a tribute to people who have died in the line of duty in our military. 

Sarah Rose: I personally liked that one. People commented on it and liked it. The other one that was another favorite was Doris's Italian Market and the cookies at Christmas time. One of our clients, we had a listing and we sold the listing and the woman loved the Doris Italian, the cookie ad, and Aaron did it. 

Aaron Rose: What it is, is, and you know Tim, but I'll say it anyways, you pretend you're going to be cooking. I even put a little flour on my face. After you set everything up and you've talked about what you're going to do, you say, “My secret ingredient is Doris’s Italian Market. They make the greatest cookies. All this other stuff? Just show them this. Doris will keep your secret. She'll sell you with as many as you need,” and we were doing a lot. That one got a ton of play, I forgot it. 

Sarah Rose: So much so that our client, who we sold her a condo, at the closing, she gave us a gift card to Doris's Italian Market. 

Tim Chermak: That's awesome. 

Sarah Rose: The additional part of it is we happen to know her son. He, still to this day, will say, “My mom still laughs at that video. She thinks it's the most hilarious thing. I'm so tired of seeing your Doris's Italian Market video.” I guess she'll go back, or she saved it or something. She thought it was the g   reatest. 

Tim Chermak: It's just a really good example of a retargeting ad that's funny, but also finds a way to feature a locally owned small business in it. It's not all about you as much as it is giving a shout out to a local small business. Again, what that video is, for those listening, is it's a video of Aaron in the kitchen, and he's got all the ingredients laid out in front of him, like the flour and sugar and eggs and chocolate chips and whatever, so it makes it look like he's about to do a cooking show, like he's going to teach you how to make his secret recipe of chocolate chip cookies. Right as he's getting started, he says, “Here's my secret ingredient.” He pulls out a bag of these cookies that were actually purchased from a local small business. “This is my secret ingredient. I don't actually make cookies, I buy them from here.” Obviously, we tagged that local small business in it so that they're getting notified and all their fans start seeing it as well. It's a cool example of a retargeting ad, especially around the holidays, around Christmas time, because that's when often people will buy gifts like that, these cookies. 

Tim Chermak: That doesn't have anything to do with real estate, so when that pops up in someone's newsfeed, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, or even if they see it on YouTube, it doesn't even occur to them that they're being advertised to, because it doesn't look or feel like an ad. It's just you guys giving a genuine shout out to a local small business. In doing so, even though you're not really the star of the show as much as the cookies are the star of the video, they do remember you because you're in the video. I think that's the secret formula for creating memorable video content, is you don't have to be the subject matter. You don't have to be the star of the video as long as you're in the video. 

Aaron Rose: It's actually right. That's why I personally really liked the restaurant videos. We have a Facebook page with the community and they really don't like real estate videos and stuff on the page, but I'll share the restaurant videos and people like them. It's going to this one group of people in the community, and I learned this from you guys, somehow if they click on that video and watch my restaurant video, then they're retargeted on the rest of Facebook, so then they see our listing videos. It's almost like, I don't know what you'd call it. I wouldn't call it a trap.

Tim Chermak: It's basically a video Trojan horse. 

Aaron Rose: Exactly. That's why I like the restaurant videos. I feel like, one, we get to write off the restaurant meal as a business expense because we're advertising it. It helps the restaurant, but it also gets us in the back door on the rest of their Facebook feed to watch our listing videos. 

Tim Chermak: It's a way to promote yourself and promote your brand without making it look like you're promoting yourself because you're giving a shout out to a local restaurant. The video has nothing to do with, “Hey, you should buy and sell your home or your condo with Sarah and Aaron.” It has nothing to do with that. It's all about the restaurant and you just happen to be the host of the video. 

Aaron Rose: People, their guard does go up when they think you're trying to sell them something. By doing a listing video, we have people who say they like them, but if you don't know us, your guard does go up, because you think we're trying to sell you a house or sell your house. In a way, we're really not. We just want you to know who we are and then refer someone who you know is going to be selling or buying. 

Sarah Rose: People will get behind chicken salad or omelets. They'll get really heated about what their favorite whatever is. 

Aaron Rose: Southern Kitchen. 

Sarah Rose: They'll tell you, “If you like this place, go try this place.”

Aaron Rose: We do. We'll not tag them, maybe we tag them too, but in the video, I'll say, “Gary Roberts told me about Maine Lobster truck and we came here for lunch today. Jerry, it was as good as you said it was. I appreciate letting me know about it." He likes the video because we tagged him in it. It really is all about the community. 

Tim Chermak: On a given month, Sarah and Aaron, what are you guys typically spending in the actual ads budget? Are you spending $800 a month or $1,200 a month? Do you know what the typical month looks like? 

Aaron Rose: I think we're right around $1,200. We vary anywhere between around $1,000 to $1,200. 

Tim Chermak: That has basically grown your business almost ten times then, is that $1,200 a month actual ads budget. I think that's important to point out because to grow from doing less than ten deals to now, this year, you're on pace to do probably do more than 80 potentially, it's not as if you've been spending $15,000 a month on ads or something. 

Aaron Rose: No. In fact, I've tried other marketing avenues, companies. I'll try them and then If someone's not working, I'll cut them off and try something else. We spent a total of probably around $4,000 to $5,000 per month in total advertising. I have wanted to increase it because it's only about 15% of our gross commission. Going into this, I wanted to spend 20%, 25% because after selling advertising for close to fourteen years, I'm a big believer in advertising. I just almost don't know where I could put more money. I know that sounds crazy. I feel like in this market that we're in right now, we're getting as much business as I can handle. It's just two of us, and we do work. Sarah, you're complaining sometimes we're working 18 hours a day. 

Sarah Rose: I've had a lot of 18-hour days. This last month or so since Labor Day, we've been incredibly busy. We've worked nonstop since the Labor Day weekend with a lot of 12-, 18-hour days. 

Aaron Rose: We don't work on weekends. We'll work a little bit on Sunday, but we try to take Saturdays off. That's where I'm also a double edged sword. Do I really want to put more money towards advertising and marketing? We've hired an assistant about two weeks ago, so we have her working with us. 

Sarah Rose: It's not just about bringing in more business. It's bringing in more business that you can adequately service. It's not marketing, but kind of marketing, we believe in Rate My Agent, so we use that to send out reviews to people. I'm very cautious about our reputation and how we're able to service people. I don't want to get spread so thin that people fall through the cracks or we're incapable of doing a good job. To me, putting more money just towards marketing to bring in business that I can't really service is not a good idea. 

Aaron Rose: We have become more selective with the business we take in. We had a listing appointment last night and it's an estate. They were referred to us by a previous customer. One of the daughters, she was just difficult. She basically had the attitude that everything we said to her was a lie. We did finish the conversation, but I'm not going to take the listing. I know that sounds crazy because my attitude has always been, “Take every listing you can possibly get,” but I don't have the time to deal with her if she's coming at me from the jump as I'm somehow going to take advantage of their situation. I'm having a little bit of a difficult time telling her. I think I'm going to tell her no when she calls us back. I hate saying that. I hate even doing it.

Sarah Rose: Likewise, we also have a client who came in and we did take the listing and she was very unreasonable about her list price. We ran the comps and we had multiple meetings in person to discuss the value and our point of view is, ultimately, it's the property owner's asset. If they don't want to listen to us and they want to list it and try it at whatever a higher price, so be it. It's your property. We give them all sorts of guidance, but ultimately, it's their decision. She was difficult for about a good two to three weeks. While she had absolutely no showings, which is what we told her was going to happen, and then today, she had her come-to-Jesus moment and she's going to reduce it into the range of what we told her. She’s a much different person. She's not angry anymore. 

Aaron Rose: My attitude was take every listing and then if they're priced too high, they'll realize. I don't want to become too selective I don't do business. It's a challenge. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around wanting to tell somebody no. 

Tim Chermak: How has the shift this year in the economy affected your guys' business? Has it? 

Aaron Rose: It has not. Our summer was better than last summer. Even the last couple of months, we're probably going to write twelve. We've already written eight contracts for the first part of October, and we're halfway through. I'm thinking we'll do probably twelve because we've got a few people that were the iron and the fire and they're getting ready to list. 

Sarah Rose: The other aspect of this neighborhood, town we selected, it is a 55-and-older community, and that is a growing demographic. It's also a demographic that's starting to get a little real about their situation, and are looking for affordable solutions to their housing, which is one of the things that we do offer. This community here in Palm Beach County is, if you're 55 and older, and you have to be that age to live in here, it is the best bang for your buck. When you look at the prices, what you get, all the amenities, the location, that's helped us a lot. I think that's going to help us for the next several years as well. 

Aaron Rose: When we started, we were taking a class with our first brokerage. It was Chris Leder. We've been out of the business for so long, we didn't know any better. We thought, “We'll sell 500 million-dollar houses and then make $25,000, $30,000 each sale.” The first thing he said was, “You're better off selling four $250,000 houses than one million. You'll do a lot less work, even though it's four times the work.” We've taken that maybe to an extreme because our average price is probably around $180,000.

Tim Chermak: They're mostly smaller condos. 

Aaron Rose: What we lack in volume, we make up in transactions. 

Sarah Rose: Our brokerage, RE/MAX Direct, is the number one RE/MAX office in Palm Beach County, South Florida. Ben has over 200 agents, four offices, and we are routinely in the top ten list for transactions every month for the brokerage. 

Tim Chermak: That's a lot more recession-proof than trying to focus on the high end of the market where you're selling million-dollar homes. Like you said, maybe each commission check might be $25,000. The problem is if you miss out on even one of those or a closing doesn't go through for whatever reason and you were banking on making that $25,000 that month, it goes to zero. Where if you guys are doing, let's say, more like five to seven closings every single month on average, it's not that big of a deal if one of them falls through because you still have five or six others. 

Aaron Rose: That's exactly right. We did that in the mortgage business too, because our FHA loans were always smaller, but you made it up in volume. It's really not that much work. The problem we're having right now is we just have so much business that it's difficult to get out and shoot videos. Yesterday, we had three listing appointments, and they were back to back. Same with the day before. 

Tim Chermak: You've had six listing appointments in the last 48 hours? 

Sarah Rose: Yes. That's why we have these 12-, 18-hour days. I do all the paperwork, so I'm getting up at four o'clock in the morning to get ahead for the day and then when we come home at night, I'm catching up on all the paperwork. I won't hire a transaction agent, I think you could say that. 

Aaron Rose: We hired an assistant so you got to get her up to speed now on app files. 

Sarah Rose: These are first world problems. I'm not complaining. 

Tim Chermak: You're going to have problems either way. Either you're going to deal with the problem of not having not enough business, or you get to deal with the problem of having almost too much business. One of those is a lot better problem than the other. 

Sarah Rose: I'd also like to go back to this idea of picking the hometown or your smaller market. We did that with the mortgage business as well, and we're doing it again today. I look at today, picking a 55-and-older community, very similar to picking the FHA and VA niche as well. They're both areas that aren't very, I don't know if a lack of better word, sexy or exciting. Most people want to do the million-dollar things or the beautiful homes.

Aaron Rose: They're the same. Maybe it's R-rated, you can bleep it out, I think, but it's go where people suck. We did that. We did it with FHA and VA because a lot of people didn't want to touch it. We came into this market, we looked at all the volume, and there wasn't any one realtor who was doing 10% of the business. Now, after two years of focusing on this market, in the Wellington section, we recently looked at the numbers, we were involved in 48% of all the transactions. Overall, in general, in Century Village, we're at, what, 14%? 

Sarah Rose: 18%.

Tim Chermak: Now, in this community, in this specific section of this community, this Wellington section, you literally have 50% market share of all condos being bought and sold there. That is absolutely incredible. 

Sarah Rose: The next agent down was at 16%. We keep an eye on our numbers, which is also a really important thing to do. We had made this comment in a listing appointment and a guy, the son of this agent father kind of challenged us on it. I went back and I looked at everything and then I gave him a report. He was like, “I always believed you.” I was like, “I needed to do this too, for myself.” 

Sarah Rose: Going back to the listing appointment we had on the phone last night that Aaron mentioned with this daughter, who was very challenging, she kept saying, “What about this property? What about this property?” She'd give us an address and we would say, “We listed and sold that one. Let me tell you about it and how it compares to your mother's unit.” Even with that, and to me, if someone said, “I listed and sold this unit. I listed and sold this unit,” over and over and over again, I'd lay off. She didn't. 

Aaron Rose: She had an idea of what she thinks her mother's property is worth. I can't blame her, but I also won't have to do business with her if she's going to be difficult from the get-go. 

Tim Chermak: How has the Platform strategy helped you guys build this reputation in this community? I know that you combined it with postcards. It's the accumulative effect of these things. Have you filmed specific videos about this community? How have you really customized it to get such great results there? 

Aaron Rose: We're waiting until season starts because we should have done it last year, but we didn't do it much. There’s a lot of clubs, dances, activities in this community, but they don't happen in the summertime. We were going to start doing a lot more filming of those events during the season. That's on our bucket list of things to do. 

Sarah Rose: People like the listing videos. I think they like to see the person that they're going to be. When we get to a listing appointment, they already know us from the video. 

Tim Chermak: That's why it's so important that you're in the video. That's something I'm constantly preaching to Platform clients. It's almost like there's no point in filming a listing video if you're not going to be in the video. If you're holding the phone or holding the camera, but you're not physically in the video, there's almost no point because then you forfeit the entire personal branding of being in the video. 

Tim Chermak: The reason you do it, honestly, is to build a brand for yourself. If they want to watch a video tour of a condo, they're also seeing Sarah or Aaron in the video. Even if Sarah or Aaron isn't the reason they're watching the video, it's that they want to see the condo, obviously. They can't help but get a healthy dosage of Sarah and Aaron because you guys are the host of the video. If you're not in the video, you don't really get any of that benefit because, honestly, they could just look at pictures. 

Aaron Rose: Yep, I'm sorry. You're absolutely right. We've had a complaint by another realtor who said our videos look amateurish. I didn't care. She had only done one video and it was done professionally. It had a lot of zoom shots and I don't even know what they're called, fades and all that, but she wasn't in it. I looked at her number of views and I think it was like 30. She's going to criticize us for our amateur videos. I didn't say anything, but the proof is in the pudding. We'll get 10,000 views on some of our videos. 

Tim Chermak: It's really, really important to put that in context too, because I know that there might be some people listening to this, and they're like, “10,000 views? That's hardly anything. I got whatever. I've seen someone get 100,000 views.” In a community that only has 15,000 people, if you get 10,000 views on a video, that's an incredibly successful level of saturation. It means almost everyone in the community has seen that video tour. That's phenomenal. 

Sarah Rose: We get a lot of people who watch all of our videos. Going back to both the postcards and then to our previous business on the Cape, which was a print advertising magazine business, we had clients, people who would call us up with a magazine and ask us when the next one was coming out. They would have told us that they had saved all the magazines and they had. We've gone on listing appointments here in our community where people have saved all the postcards and they'll pull them out during the listing presentation and they have them clipped together with notes and this, that, and the other thing. 

Sarah Rose: I liken it to when people tell us that “I watch all your videos.” With advertising and marketing, when someone tells you that, believe it because you can't see them saving the video, but if they'll tell you something about a specific video. We have one client, a mother and daughter, who the mother refers to me as the talent and Aaron's the director. She said, “I've watched so many of your videos, I can tell when Sarah likes something in the unit or doesn't like something in the unit because you'll spend more time talking about the kitchen or you'll move very quickly and not really mention the bathroom.” 

Aaron Rose: That particular person is closing next week and then her daughter is closing the week after. 

Tim Chermak: I think listing videos really just are the Swiss army knife of the Platform marketing strategy because you can generate leads but you're also building a brand at the same time. It checks all the boxes of staying top of mind with people, building your authority and your expertise in that specific condo community, all at the same time. Listing videos really check all the boxes of what we want in a marketing campaign. It positions you as being not just an expert, but the expert. 

Tim Chermak: I think a lot of agents can forget that by being in the video, you're almost forcing people to remember you. They're going to forget the specific listing because listings come and go, they get bought and sold all the time, but they remember you because you're actually in the video. You can't do that with photos. 

Tim Chermak: Just think of this as a thought experiment. Imagine how narcissistic and ridiculous it would be if you hired a professional photographer to take photos of the condos and you were posing in all the photos. It's a photo of the kitchen and you're just standing there in the photo in the kitchen, and the photo of the bathroom, you're in the bathroom, and the photo on the bed, you're lying on the bed. It would be incredibly absurd to do that. If you're thinking, “I want to brand myself, so I'm going to be standing awkwardly in all the photos,” it would just be weird. People would think you're a total weirdo. 

Tim Chermak: Yet with listing videos, no one thinks anything of it if you're in the video the entire time, because it's just assumed that “We have to have a host of the video. Someone has to show me around the condo.” It's this wonderful exception to where you get to be in the video branding yourself the whole time and no one thinks anything of it. 

Aaron Rose: People like to see the insides of other people's homes. Do you remember the MTV show Cribs? 

Tim Chermak: Totally, yep. 

Aaron Rose: Knocked on the door, Snoop Dogg answered, “Welcome to my home.” You wanted to see how Snoop Dogg lived. It's the same thing here. We walk around, people want to see what the kitchen looks like, what the views out of the back look like, their furniture. 

Tim Chermak: That's actually why, by the way, I think the way that you guys film the videos is the right way. This is something I have to battle with Platform clients sometimes, is they want to hire a fancy videographer and they want to make these super duper highly produced Hollywood-type videos where there's expert drone shots and slow motion and effects and this or that. It basically looks really fancy. Lots of editing, you're not actually in the video, it's just a gorgeous looking, fancy edited professional production. 

Tim Chermak: That's fine, maybe it strokes your ego that you have this really fancy video. The problem is whenever you watch these videos, because they're so heavily edited, you don't really get a feel for what is the floor plan of this house. What does it feel like when I walk in and then this room is connected to this room? You don't really get that spatial awareness and this sense of like, “Okay, here's the floor plan.” 

Tim Chermak: When you film a casual video where you're just walking, “Hey, here's the kitchen, then we walk over here and here's where the master bedroom is or here's the laundry or here's the second bathroom,” whatever, you actually do get to feel like you're experiencing what the floor plan feels like. That's really, really important. You can't really do that if you have one of these super highly produced fancy listing videos, because you don't really get a sense of perspective. It's like, “Where is the master bedroom relative to the kitchen in this house? Based on how this video is edited, I don't really know.” 

Tim Chermak: I think people appreciate the more casual video, which is why we're always telling Platform realtors, “Film more casual videos. They don't need a ton of editing. Just walk through the house and show us the house.” Also, the more casual the video is, the less it looks like an ad. If that pops up in someone's newsfeed, they don't think they're being advertised to because it's just you showing off a quick house or condo. It doesn't look or feel like an ad. Paradoxically, people are more likely to watch the casual listing videos. 

Sarah Rose: Don't underestimate the power of being in the kitchen and saying, “Look at all the pull-outs and the cabinets or the lazy Susan or granite countertops,” and you put your hand over the countertops. People love that. “Pendant lights.” 

Aaron Rose: They do. 

Tim Chermak: All right, we got about one minute left here, guys. What would be your number one piece of advice if there is a Platform real estate agent listening to this and maybe they've been working with Platform for six months or even twelve months, but they don't yet have success yet, so they're at where you were at when you attended the first Platform Mastermind where you were actually frustrated. You're like, “Hey, I'm hearing all of these success stories of people doing really well. Why is it not happening for us?” Eventually, things clicked and your business exploded. What would you tell someone who's in that spot right now where they're waiting for things to really kick in? 

Sarah Rose: I would really sit down and look at whatever market you're in and make sure that you have found the town within your market. It can be condos or townhomes, it doesn't have to be a physical town, but some niche within your market. Platform does work, you just have to figure out how to make it work for your market. 

Aaron Rose: It's shooting enough content and everything is content. There's a machine that I use at Lowe's called Key Hero and it's an automated machine that makes keys and we make about 100 a year there. I'm making a key and I'm like, “Why don't I just shoot a quick video here of why I'm here making keys at this machine, how great it is?” It was silly. It was even borderline odd, but it was content. I got response. Even in my comments, I wrote, “I know it's a silly video, but I use this machine a lot. It always makes great keys.” People were responding to it. It was completely silly. I didn't even know why I was doing it. Just trying to add more stuff. 

Tim Chermak: Always be on the lookout for, “Something that's happening in my life or something that I'm doing, how can I turn this into an opportunity to create content?” Whether it's filming a quick video about what's going on here or even taking a photo and then just writing a little essay about it. 

Aaron Rose: After your audience is watching you and they think they know you, and that was a hard thing to come to grips with too in the beginning because they would act like you were so familiar to them, and you're like, “I don't know you,” and they act like they know you. It's weird, but they are interested in what you're doing. My thing is film videos, film listing videos, film yourself making keys, whatever you do that’s real estate related, or I love the restaurant videos.

Sarah Rose: Decide who you're going to be within your market, and then all of your content will fall into place, in my opinion, rather than running around trying to be in Jupiter, filming a single family home, and then in Boca, condo, and out west of horse property. You're not even really finding your audience with that. 

Tim Chermak: You can't really build a brand if you're trying to be everything to everyone. 

Sarah Rose: Correct. 

Tim Chermak: All right, thank you guys. This was a really, really valuable episode. I think we got into both your philosophy of business as well as really granular specific tactical tips. Aaron, did you have one last thing you wanted to say? 

Aaron Rose: No, I just wanted to say thank you. I do appreciate everything you've done. I haven't got my Platform tattoo yet because I don't have any tattoos, but it has been something we’ve joked about. 

Tim Chermak: That's awesome. Maybe I'll have to hold you to that in the future. I will see you guys in a couple months here at the Platform Mastermind coming up in December. Again, thanks for your time today. I think this was an awesome episode. Guys, we'll see you on the next episode of The Platform Marketing Show.