Steve Hatfield, owner of Epic Florida Realty and Epic Florida Rentals shares his unique real estate journey. From property management to establishing a thriving real estate business near Disney World, he found massive opportunities with the two together.
With over a thousand leads and multiple closings within just a few months, Steve discusses how leveraging CINC's all-in-one lead generation and conversion system has been pivotal to their rapid growth. Steve shares:
Watch the full video to learn more about how his team manages a high volume of leads, personalizes buyer experiences, and capitalizes on the synergy between property management and real estate services.
Steve Hatfield: In our first three, four months, three months of doing this we're already, we're still learning the system to maximize it, but certainly with over a thousand leads in with four closes, five closes already happening. It's it's been a, it's been a success.
I'm Steve Hatfield. I am the owner of Epic Florida Realty. Uniquely, I'm also the owner of Epic Florida rentals, which is a property management company. Originally I had actually bought out three different property management companies about three years ago and to establish a baseline of homes that we have, and I quickly realized that if you have over 60 homes and all of these owners that you needed to have a brokerage with it.
So I might be a little bit unique in the sense that I'm myself, not a realtor. I don't have my license. But I went and I opened up Epic Florida Realty about two years ago with a broker who had over 30 years experience, with the idea that we just originally, we just actually take care of our current owners that were part of the property management side of things.
So when they wanted to buy and sell, and we could do that for them, so they didn't have to go somewhere else. After having it for, gosh, just over a year, it became obvious that there was a huge opportunity when with the property management and the realty together. Just so you know, our area that we're in that kind of makes it a little bit unique is we're right next to Disney World.
So these are short term vacation rentals or second homes for people in the Disney area. So Kissimmee, Orlando, Davenport. All within 30 minutes to Walt Disney World, to Universal Studios, to SeaWorld, so fun, business to be in that way where you have a lot of people vacation and enjoy themselves.
So really just start taking off from there. We started doing quite a few transactions. Brought on another very experienced realtor in the area who had about 20 years of experience and he did over 10 million last year as an example, so we had multiple experienced realtors and the business, the realty sides just started almost growing independently of anything with the, property management.
Then this year we added a second broker on, so we have a compliance broker and Jeff Chase, and then we have. More of the sales side of things with Ryan Green, who has another 20 plus years of experience in a reality. And we've started adding to the team. So as we expanded and grew and, realized that the realty was really going to stand on its own regardless that's when we, and not only that, but we had an opportunity to recruit more realtors.
So now we have nine realtors on the team. We really needed a CRM system was actually where it first started. And I actually had about 20 years experience before I went and bought these management companies. I was formerly the regional president for Wells Fargo and a lot of connections.
My wife's been doing mortgages for over 20 years as well. So Casey had a lot of connections with title companies. Realtors, other people in the industry, and we reached out to those individuals and said, who are the best CRM systems? What have you used before? Why do you like it? We really want to recruit and have the best system to provide to our team of realtors.
Because we really believe that there's opportunity to grow it. And. We did that. We interviewed, I think, three different CRM lead generation systems. I talked to all of them, including CINC, of course, that was on that list and really came to the conclusion that CINC was a little bit more pricey, not lying, than the other options, but it had the full package that we were looking for.
So that was the biggest draw to using CINC, and then certainly has grown from there. We found that this system has been wildly important to our success in the time since joining with the lead generation in particular, helped setting up a home search site that really connected to what kind of business we did.
We've already had quite a few success stories. From that in terms of actual real estate transactions going through and also new customers to our property management side. It's really nice. So we have clients that have come through our website, which is disneyhomefinder.com which is was help from the team at CINC to figure out what our story is and how does that relate to a site that wasn't our name. Cause of course, with the property management side, we're Epic Florida Rentals. We have a website, Epic Florida Real Estate for the real had a website, but I'd say a lower traffic, not highly impactful website for us. Where this is just a little bit different, right? It's a search engine and we're capturing quite a few. And we've just increased our spend on our Google spend. That's because we're, finding a lot of success in it and really enjoying it. And I, think we've barely... we've been doing it, I guess we, we joined CINC at the end of the year. We really got going fully probably so that's the end of 23. We really fully had the leads and everything going maybe February. In our first three, four months, three months of doing this, yeah we're already, we're still learning the system to maximize it, but certainly with over a thousand leads in with four closes, five closes already happening. It's been a, it's been a success.
Jennifer O'Connell: Do you mind sharing a couple of those specific stories or just one of the more memorable successes so far, if you don't mind.
Steve Hatfield: Yeah, I'll just use the two. I'll go with the AI story. So obviously AI's Alex uses, it starts interacting with the chatting with the the, with them.
And so we the realtor in this case was Ryan. He reached out to them and she said, I'm already working with Alex. Which was the funny kind of connection there. And he was like, no, Alex is my assistant, he just helps out, get the conversation started. But I'm really a realtor.
That one was a really nice one. So again, we're right here next to Disney. We're in Reunion. That particular buyer was looking for a home in this area. Their son goes to the Leadbetter Academy, which is a golf instruction school. That's right at Reunion Resort. And we were able to connect them with a brand new build home.
And within probably three weeks of the lead coming in to a cash close at over $800,000 on a, home was that story? So that was a really nice one. So in other stories we also have quite a few international buyers or a lot of people coming there to buy these second homes, vacation homes.
So that one was so my wife, who I told you was in lending forever, actually got a real estate license at the end of last year. She's had six or seven closes already this year, and she got a client from Canada who had vacationed here a lot, was looking for a particular community, end up going out and doing a lot of FaceTime showings of the homes because they hadn't, they were up in Canada. That one closed for $575,000, a nice six-bedroom home with a pool. They've come down. We've also now just helped them do remodeling the kitchen because we do all that from the property management side, doing upgrades to they convert garage down here into game rooms. And we've done a lot of things like that with them. And really nice family went out to dinner with them when they came down after their their deal closed.
We, we've just, again, it's just when you, you get the system set up, it's a search engine, you never know what you're going to get, of course, lead generation, you can't expect a hundred percent pull through. You're just trying to find those people who are seriously interested in buying. How do you help them and their different situation where they're moving to this area, which we have a lot of people move to the area too, or if they're buying, in our case a vacation home. So yeah, it's, those are, two of the nice ones. We have several others though, luckily and feel like we're just getting started.
Jennifer O'Connell: Yeah. Just really getting kicked off in February and it being not even quite the end of May, that's...
Steve Hatfield: Yeah. We have another, a nice condo that's under contract. They were great. They came down and played a little golf with them, showed them around. And yeah it's, I think that's the key, right? They're, a lead is a person and just the more we try to personalize the experience and still make it just like it came in through anything else. I think one of the best pieces of advice we got through our training was why we're calling right away is you think of it like your own storefront. They're coming into your business. They're asking questions. They're looking at homes. We're just reaching out to them to connect. And then then try to personalize the experience after that, depending on who it is, what they're looking for, why they're doing it, what their kind of needs are.
We are using a lot of variety of ways. We're trying we're also using an experiment, trying to contact in many different ways. So whether it's emails, texting, calling. I think that's one thing that we've had success because we have really treated these leads like gold, like no matter what, even though the pull through we're hoping for 2 to 4 percent maybe, we're treating 100 percent as if they could be that 2 to 4%.
Jennifer O'Connell: So you said through training, have you attended a CINC U or anything like that? Or just through like implementation and account management?
Steve Hatfield: Just implementation and account management? We've had really good experience with the implementation team. I thought they were fantastic answering questions. We've had even the support line we've called up quite a few times when we don't really know what we're doing. Which it happens, but they're really quick. They're super easy to work with. Whether it was something silly, for me, obviously I'm watching the leads and I'm managing that side of things. Like I, when someone went on vacation, I didn't know how to change, how to put their leads basically on pause and redistribute to others. Or when we brought on we just brought on another realtor, Alex, and how do I redistribute some leads to him? And how does that look? And they go through it all, but it's so much information. It was really easy. So I've used that line myself quite a few times. I know that we're trying the dialer, doing things like that. When we run into issues. We've called up and just said, Hey, what's the best way to do this? So we're not always working with our account manager. They're great, but it's just, there are resources that are pretty easy to jump right into.
Jennifer O'Connell: Is it hard to get buy in from the whole team or you've just hired agents where you're like, this is what we're working in and we know like we're going to...
Steve Hatfield: The agents we're recruiting now, that's the pitch right there. You're going to get leads. This is how it's going to work. Of course, we have some experienced people that it might not be like they're getting business elsewhere. So that might not be there, the full, they may not want the full set of leads. But for the most part, I haven't had issues with that. All they, everyone's had some level of success story already. So once you have success, you don't want more of it.
Jennifer O'Connell: I'm curious. We've talked to, I know you're not an agent yourself. We talked to a lot of people who are like, Interest rates are high, or this lawsuits confusing. We don't want to necessarily go all in with online buyer leads. I'm curious what your take is on that why you're still bullish on this and why you jumped in the CINC when you did when arguably a lot of people are like, no, I'm going to press pause on that and maybe we'll circle Cause I think
Steve Hatfield: the buying cycle for someone is there a lot of people are going to be on the sideline until rates maybe go down, but if they're in our system and we've been advertising to them and we've been, they're getting our realtor's names and they're looking they're now, we've got them on the Etta app, and we got them all these different things. When they go to buy, we're going to have thousands of leads that have been, we've been marketing to, and those are likely the buyers when the rates drop.
Okay. They're not going to just magically that day. We're going to get them. Obviously, the lawsuit and understanding the complexity is okay. If you're having, we're advertising to buyers. That might be a little bit more not as straightforward as it maybe it was before. I still think that my belief is that buyers are still going to need agents because we have people all over the world, they're not even here, just those examples I shared with you were literally virtual tours of homes. So we're going to have to get good at probably once everything's ironed out, maybe sign this just like listing agreements or sign agreements with the being the buying agent and making sure that's laid out there, but they're still needing, there still will be a need for a buyer agent.
.And if you think even longer term, the, for us, I believe everyone who buys with us is going to sell with us, right? So if you really want a pipeline of, listings, The best way to do that is to have a lot of people who came through your system buying I look at our average turn time on a vacation rental as or a vacation home Is about three to five years depending on what the situation is. So that's just that you know It's a little bit different than say all primary residents because people come. They buy. They enjoy it. They rent it out for them and then they decide they want to take that disposal income, And maybe move it somewhere else or they've done the trip a bunch of times and it's no longer Is what they want. Other people keep it for a long time, but there's probably about, I would say 70 percent that are going to fall in that three to five-year cycle. So if we do the buying, three years later, which will pass, and we know that long-term relationships, we're very confident that they'll come back to us on the list side, especially if we're the one who managed the property in the three years in between.
So I'm certainly looking at it and the reason I'm bullish is I look at the long haul for this, the big picture. And if you're in real estate agents and our realty is going to be valuable regardless of the changes.
I just think what's the alternative? You walk away from advertising to buyers because you're unsure of what that relationship and how do you connect with them, then you're just, I think that's a probably a pretty short-sighted view of what the whole lawsuit was about. It was about transparency, I think. And so you have to learn how to do some of the things you'd probably have a skillset to do on the listing side, right? It's just going to be created an agreement upfront and helping those clients out. But the buyers aren't going away.
I think a realty that only did listings is probably not going to have listings forever and you just got to, you got to weed. We'll have to still navigate through it all like everyone else, but that's my view.
Jennifer O'Connell: Can you share a little bit about how you and your team prioritize the right leads to call within the system? Cause I know you said AI, so that helps bubble some things up, but...
Steve Hatfield: I think AI is just a small piece, right? I think it's a nice added piece that we have in there, but really the speed to lead piece that we would get through the training. That's a must. All of our leads are called the same day they come through. We've even tested with the 10 minute reassignment type thing. I think we have enough people. Everyone's calling their leads, so we don't have that problem. So I don't, if you look at our CINC app and you see how many new leads, they're only from last night if they haven't been called. And it's already 11, so they've probably all been called already.
Prior to number one is I think first touch. Those people who are really are interested, you want to touch them right away and be that first point of contact, or at least get the calls going out to them. After that we've been just learning all the different ways. You can see who is probably the highest likelihood to be interested. You can look at the amount of times they've logged in, look at their activity level, how many homes they viewed, who, how recently, and who's viewing the most homes recently. So after that 14 day kind of multiple attempts to the client, then we're really looking at who's still active.
I've one agent who really likes to even turn on all of the notifications. So like they're okay with, they got the sift through all of them, but every time someone logs in or does that, so they actually turn that on on every lead they have, so that they're getting notified cause they the names will pop up Oh, okay. That name is probably someone who's more likely to be a serious buyer. And then if they're not a serious buyer, that's okay too. Like we understand we're Buying leads and we're going to have a 90 plus percent of them are not going to end up buying in the first 90 days. So it is a numbers game and it's just about having as many opportunities you can.
So that's, I think that we're still probably can even be better at figuring out. But I think the biggest ones we look at after the 14 days is activity level. That and/or have we contact them and do we have some decent follow-ups in place? So sometimes you'll get ahold of someone day one and they'll be like, I'm not interested or I'm just looking and I'm browsing and just having some follow-ups with those that we've been contacted is the next one.
Cause then that'll probably get you to, it's like 25 to 30%. I would say of leads then fall into this bucket where there's some level of engagement. Either they talked to us the first time we're still using the app there's another 60 to 70 that just maybe it is came across our website or our Google advertisement, they signed up and you can just see that the activity level stops there. They might've wanted to be interested in one home price. Or do something, but. And that's okay. We just focus on what we have the higher probability with.
Jennifer O'Connell: If you were speaking with another team leader or really anybody who is considering jumping in with online lead generation, it doesn't have to be CINC, just in general. What, would you say to them? What's your advice to them?
Steve Hatfield: Yeah, I would say a couple of things. One, if you're thinking about expanding your realty and you want to have more people on your team. Or if you just want to have a really happy team, the one thing you have is you have a sales pitch, you have leads.
The hardest thing to find in this business, whether you're buying them somewhere else and you're paying for them in Zillow or doing your, there has got to be a way you generate people to come to you. And I, so I think this avenue is one of the better avenues because it really emphasizes your team, your brand, what you're doing more so than any other way to go generate a lead.
Outside of word of mouth and referral business, This is the way to get leads from the rest of a sphere that wouldn't exist otherwise. And I'd rather attach myself to something that's ours than attach myself to another, someone like a Zillow or someone else where I'm paying to like tag on with a million, with a lot of other potential realtors in that. And also it differentiates yourself. So when we've been able to recruit people on and show them the system, show them what we're bringing to the table, what they're going to get when they're part of us cause the one thing that I think long term also we haven't we'll gain the benefit from is the CRM aspect of it, right?
This is, you're still going to drip on your clients. And how do you, I would imagine that a lot of others who are thinking about doing something like this. emphasizing lead fact, but the CRM, like longterm holding your clients in a portfolio, not having an Excel spreadsheet somewhere that has their name and numbers and emails in it. Having birthday emails go out, having some kind of consistency that you don't have to even remember, but it's just automated, is a big deal. And it's very helpful for I think retention and of your team and also for the ability to. To market to someone new to bring someone on. And when you, especially when you compare it to what they have, right?
The tools you give a realtor is really all that they're going to decide which team they're on. That and commission splits. It's those are the things that they're, most focused on. Can you help them make money? And do you make it easy to do?
Jennifer O'Connell: To close out, wrapping it up. So if you want to share one, where we can find you online, but also anything else about your team, your market that we should know.
Steve Hatfield: Again, we have an experienced team. So the realty is young, but the experience on the team is, not. So we have we're in that Disney area. So we have our property management at epicfloridarentals.com. We have, which is, if you ever come to the Disney world area and you want a great place, we have up to 12, 14 bedroom homes. They're all themed out and we do some really cool stuff that way. Come check that out if you're ever seen that, but and then you'll see on the other side of the realty side, Disneyhomefinder.com is our CINC site. It really describes exactly what we're doing. People are buying their Disney home, their home near Disney. And it just, I think we found a really, a nice niche there with our name. And then we also have Epic Florida Real Estate for our, just our basic site.
We've been excited with it. It really has been a helpful tool. And I believe that we're only just getting started in terms of its ability to have long term success for us.