20 Closings from Online Leads in 1st Year: Keith Hinton's CINC Success

Keith Hinton, a seasoned real estate professional with 19 years of experience, shares his journey in the Virginia Beach market and how CINC has transformed his business.

Key Highlights:

• Mindset: Discover how Keith and his team approach making calls with "cynical optimism."
• CINC's Impact: Learn how his team achieved nearly 20 closings within a year, utilizing only 20% of CINC's capabilities. Keith is eager to see what they can accomplish with an even better understanding of the system.
• Exciting Lead Stories: Hear about Keith's $500,000 deal closed within 60 days, proving that not all online leads are 6-12 months out from transacting.
• Future Vision: Keith discusses his plans to use CINC to scale his business and enhance team productivity.

Keith's story is a testament to the power of strategic investment in technology and the importance of mindset in real estate success.

Watch the full video here or read the transcript below. 

Transcript

Keith Hinton: If you do the work, people will, it'll work out and one, I, so I started by leaving a bunch of messages. Nobody ever called me back. So then I stopped leaving messages and then I was calling one night and five o'clock in the evening, this lady called me and she says, Hey, I really apologize.

It's taken me so long to get back to you. I got your message last week. I'm sitting there looking at phone. Like you're the only one who's gone. So anyway, so I sold them a house like 60 days later for about 500, 000. And it was, yeah, there's probably a lot of other cool stories.

[intro]

My name is Keith Hinton. I'm in the Virginia Beach market. We call it Hampton Roads in coastal Virginia, but Virginia beach is like the largest city that people around the country would know. So yeah, I've been real safe for a long time now. I guess I too. It's long. So 19 years, so I got into the very end of five and I went to Keller Williams realty and they're the bulk of the 19 years, 17 of the 19 years.

Yeah, I guess unique. I sold real estate very actively for six years that I made my way to brokerage side of things and [00:01:00] with partners, ransom brokerages and stuff. And then I just got back into the production side of things full time. Coming up on about a year ago now, right now it's myself a COO then three other agent team members.

And we have an ISA based out of Mexico. Yeah. And then what we're trying to, we're growing pretty aggressively, like I think the hope would be that we'd be at probably 12 agent team members by the end of the year and a couple more admin by that time. So yeah. So my experience is probably unique to most.

So I hadn't sold any real estate for 12 years back then. Totally different market. It was right after the crash 2008. So you could, if you wanted to, you probably didn't need to spend any money on marketing or lead generation at all. Just because sellers for sale by owners inspired listings and stuff.

It was exactly opposite market. What is today. So there were people you could call on, and it doesn't mean it was easy to convince them to use you, but like you could get in front of enough people just [00:02:00] by prospecting. So then, this time around, I wanted to, I knew I wanted to build, a fairly large team.

I don't know how large it will be, but somewhat large. And so I knew that for scalability and other reasons, I needed to start investing into internet lead generation, being one of the things that, and the, those lead sources, what I said before, your sale by hours expires. There's a few out there, but not many because it's such a low inventory market.

So yeah. So finding something like CINC was really relevant to me. Of course, over that 12 year span, that whole game had evolved a lot. I didn't even use it back then, but even if it had, it would have changed a ton in over 12 years. Yeah. I found CINC a team that I was an investor in prior, was using them and had a good experience.

So I dove in to learning about them and that's been great. I'm still like learning how to maximize the system. We're probably coming up on about our 20th closing, and that would be our first closing was until probably October of last year. So between then and now. And I say that to say, we're [00:03:00] probably only using it to 20 percent of capability.

Really? We just we still want yeah, it's coming along, it's I really enjoy learning it. So I enjoy like just nerding out about business models and structures, team structures and splits and lead generation models and things like that. So I'm enjoying the process. So yeah.

I plan on it being a really big part of what we're building. I want to make my way to 20. Four ish team members within the next year and a half and them closing on average of 20 to 30 transactions. So to do that, we need a lot of leads to call on, so we're going to have to increase our ad spend along the way.

And I think there's a lot of value. Even if we, even if I had. Enough warm leads from whatever, keep following them. Everybody knows we were in a beach, which they don't like, even if I did that, I see so much value in us doing the activity together, the camaraderie, it creates the every time that somebody, Talks to somebody on the phone when it potentially just, you would [00:04:00] just extend that conversation, they're learning a skillset that helps them a ton with an open house lead with a referral lead, that type of thing.

Obviously I want us to convert business out of it, but part of the value is just. The activity that it creates and, and structure that it's we know our agents every day can win if they want it. Like you can't, you, you don't, you can't guarantee that you're going to have a closing that day for sure.

You can't guarantee that you're even going to have a really productive conversation, but You can say, I am calling 20 people today, check it off on checklists and win. So it's it really sets something to where that can positively impact mindset. Your company has like such a nice group of people.

So I probably, I think I had a very positive interaction, like from moment one. Yeah. I think I made the decision rather easily after that. I don't have a lot to compare it to, but I find it. So I find it easy to navigate and stuff in which I'm not very tech oriented. So that's probably a good thing. I can, somebody like me can say that the biggest correlation is [00:05:00] just us making the calls and stuff.

And that's something that even CINC can't force somebody to do. So like just the discipline for me and the team members to get in and make those calls. I've really enjoyed. Just learning about internet lead generation and the numbers and the close rates and there's such a mindset around it, you've just got to go into every time you dial a phone, you just have to anticipate that it could be something very viable.

And you have to not be deflated by the fact that there's a high percentage of those aren't going to answer. Yeah. And so it's a, it's really, I find it fun to learn. So a lot of it's like mindset and attitude related, but frankly, I'd like a name for this. I probably stole it from somebody, but it's I call it cynical optimism.

So you have to, which of course is actually one you have to be, cynical enough to know that when you. Dial 20 numbers in a row and not one answers or one answers and says, not interested you. If you're overly optimistic and you think you're going to make three calls and [00:06:00] sell three houses from it, you're going to be devastated, right?

So you have to have realistic expectations, but on the flip side, you have to be optimistic. To know that every single time that you hit send on that phone, that could be the needle in the haystack. So you better be ready, you better be ready, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I'm like very into the psychology of it.

We do it together as a team. So we have a lot of fun doing it. When people are first starting, they're nervous. So they'll say some really silly things, that don't make any sense to the person. When you're nervous, you can't hear what they're saying. You're like worried about what they're saying.

I've seen stuff. So we'll get off the phone and kind of all laugh about it. So we've actually enjoyed it. We've closed multiple deals that started out with bad phone numbers. I've got one right now that I started communicating with them by way of email after they gave me a bad phone number and they're probably gonna buy and sell at some point in the future.

But it's fun. It's even that's fun. It's just fun to get creative, like think of creative ways to, Pay attention to what they're looking for. Grab one thing from the [00:07:00] MLS to provide value to them and say, Hey, I know, so you've seen this, like this shit jumped out and popped into my, or you popped it in my head to it and stuff.

So it's fun to see how you can, gain traction and gain some conversation. What we do with our team is we actually don't assign leads. We all get in. The same pond every day and we call, we basically my most recently logged in and just start calling right down the list.

We focus a little bit more on if it's a newly registered since the last time we were calling, we'll make a point to call those just a little bit. Other than that, we'll go right down and then sometimes we'll just jump back in, just like sort it to one through 100 and click it five times. Now we're into.

Five, six, seven hundred deep of most recently registered that way. And because they haven't heard from anybody for a while, probably so we can maybe rejuvenate some stuff. And yeah and we track dials. Like we, we talk about number of dials all the time, every single week, everybody has a scorecard that they fill out [00:08:00] throughout the week and they have to turn it in at the end of the week.

And if they've made a hundred plus dials, it goes up on this big white board in green with the number. If it's 50 to 99, it's it goes up, like it's a blue. And if it's below 50, it's like a big red X with the number and so we can visually see it's you can just, you don't even need to look at the numbers.

You can just see a lot of green, see a lot of that kind of thing. So it's like soft accountability and you just, somebody hit a hundred the other day last week. And so we've chimed in and yeah, so it's a lot about the activity is the, there's no way to. Get around the activity.

Doesn't matter how good you are on the phone. If you don't make enough calls, I've got multiple stories of if you do the work, people will, it'll work out in one, I, so I started by leaving a bunch of messages. Nobody ever called me back. So then I stopped leaving messages and then I was calling one night and five o'clock in the evening, this lady called me.

And she says, Hey, I really apologize. It's taken me [00:09:00] so long to get back to you. I got your message from last week. I'm sitting there looking at phone. Like you're the only one who's gone. So anyway, so I sold them a house like 60 days later for about 500, 000. And anyway, yeah, there's probably a lot of other cool stories, but we're set up right now to attract mostly by our lead security, most of them are coming from out of town, some from local, but a lot of them from out of town.

We're a very transient market. So we're really huge military population. I think we're the largest so it's not a big second home market. There's some, but it's more of a primary housing market altogether, largely military. So we're lucky, like we're blessed. It's a, it's transient enough to where, we feel it when the market goes down, but not as bad as some places probably, because we always have people coming and going because the military, whenever anything shifts it's not to sound mean, but the people that are more serious about doing this full time, Like a student of their craft and their industry, they're going to do disproportionately well compared to like people that are just really doing it [00:10:00] on a whim and selling a few houses based on people they bump into, and stuff.

So it's not like I have a desire to filter out people or whatever, but The reality is the people that get that much more committed to their activities and stuff will do really well. A lot of things have come up in my 19 years. They seemed like they'd be a threat to replacing real estate agents or like significantly declining their impact and nothing has so far.

It's still, it's pretty neat. If I were to buy something in Atlanta right now, I've been real estate for 19 years. I would hire an agent because I don't know this market well enough. I don't know if I'm putting in a full price offer, if that's no chance because everybody's 40, 000 over or if I've paid 30, 000 too much by doing that.

So I need local knowledge, even though I've been doing this for a really long time.