Tom Ferry, real estate’s leading coach and bestselling author, joined Alvaro Erize, CEO of CINC, to deliver a masterclass on thriving in today’s complex housing market. The conversation covered market trends, consumer behavior, AI tools, and practical strategies for lead generation and business growth.
Tom and Alvaro didn’t just talk about surviving a flat market—they laid out a clear, actionable roadmap for agents to win now and dominate later.
Tough Markets Create Great Agents
Easy markets breed bad habits. Today’s challenges are forging a new generation of agents who show up, train, and execute with discipline and creativity.
Massive Industry Consolidation
In 2024, just 90,000 agents controlled 60% of the market, down from 132,000 the year before. The competition is fiercer than ever, and only those in growth mode are gaining ground.
Consumer Behavior Is Shifting Online
More sellers are choosing agents based on online research, reviews, and digital reputation—not just referrals. Agents must adapt their marketing to meet buyers and sellers where they are.
AI Search Is Reshaping Lead Generation
Consumers are using tools like ChatGPT, Grok, and Perplexity to ask nuanced questions like “Who’s the best agent near me for mid-century moderns?” Agents who optimize their bios and profiles for AI visibility are already seeing results—especially in high-value markets.
Reputation Management Is Critical
AI favors structured data and consistent activity. Agents must actively collect and distribute reviews across platforms.
The Six-Step AI Content Strategy
Tom shared a powerful content strategy using tools like AnswerThePublic, ChatGPT, and NotebookLM.
Organic Traffic Is Surging for Those Who Optimize
Tom revealed that his own website saw a 360% increase in organic traffic simply by implementing this strategy—proof that small changes can yield massive results.
Marketing Is a Layered Strategy
Smart agents build their business with layers of marketing—past clients, geographic farming, listing launches, YouTube ads, and more.
Communication Is the Ultimate Differentiator
The top consumer complaints—poor communication, lack of transparency, and unprofessional behavior—are opportunities for agents to stand out. Skilled agents are exceeding expectations and earning more than ever.
Momentum Is a Daily Choice
“You’re either gaining momentum or losing it,” Tom reminded the audience. Agents must choose growth, even when the market feels slow.
Watch the full video here or read the transcript below.
Alvaro Erize: [00:00:00] My name is Alvaro Erize. If you haven't joined one of ours before, I'm the CEO of CINC. I am very appreciative to have you all here, and I'm super excited to have Tom with us. Now, Tom needs no introduction, but in case you're joining us from the Antarctica or something he does run the most successful war leader coaching group in real estate.
He's also a bestselling author of The New York Times, but for me, most importantly for today, Tom always has a great finger on the pulses of the real estate world and market, and more importantly, always has what I believe are very valuable takeaways of what can differentiate you in this market.
So with that, Tom, I'm so grateful for you to join us here and excited to spend the next hour with you.
Tom Ferry: Awesome. Alvaro. Thank you. And thanks for inviting me into the community. I'm a big fan of CINC, big fan of you, my guy Troy over there. I see. Hey, so just Brandon, if you [00:01:00] would open up the chat just for a second.
So would you all be so kind as to share with me if you think about where your business is right now? In comparison to what you set your goal for this year. Are you ahead? Are you flat or are you slightly behind? If you would just tell me really fast in the comments. Just gives me context for the direction I go.
And let's try and make this as there you go. Thank you, Brian. So I can really see it all. Yeah, so slow. Are you behind? Are you flat? Are you slightly ahead? Gimme the scoop. All right. So I'm seeing flat. I'm seeing flat behind. A little bit behind flat, right? A little behind.
Slightly behind flat. Alright. So first of all, I think
Alvaro Erize: behind windstorm from my very scientific analysis of it.
Tom Ferry: So the first thing I would, so let me ask you one more question, then we'll jump in. Could you also share with me, if you wouldn't mind in the comments how many years have you been selling houses?
How many years have you been selling houses? So gimme that number as well. All right, so I [00:02:00] love it. 17, 8, 6, 5, 4, 20, 20. God bless ya. 20 Michael Smith. I love it. 11 years, three months for you. Four years. I didn't see an eight month. Okay, let's keep going there. 10 plus
Alvaro Erize: three months. Congratulations. That right.
Alright. The fact that you are here speaks very highly of you.
Tom Ferry: I love it. Yeah. And then you got 26 years, 12 years, Connie. So congrats Connie. I just, I'm starting my 36 years, so I'm right there with you. First year in the business, four years. Alright, so just, it gives me context. I've got some crazy, unbelievable veterans.
I've got some people that are, I refer to them as the pandemic babies. They got into real estate when money was free and all you had to do is put a mask on and people bought houses from you and boy has the world changed. So Alvar was kind enough to ask me, would I come and share some insights.
And what is unique about this? A it's a nice intimate group where we can communicate and connect on chat and I can kinda get a sense of, who you are and what you're committed to. But also I just. Came out of a week of [00:03:00] finalizing all of the things I'll be discussing on August 26th through the 28th at Biannual Summit.
And what is cool about that is you're gonna be some of the very first people outside of my team to hear some of the insights that we'll be sharing there. So the only thing I'm gonna say to you is. Please give me a little a little grace if one of the slides has a misspelling 'cause that means I definitely wrote it or typed it myself.
Or if they don't look as sharp as I would like them to look, just gimme a little grace. 'cause I just turned them over Alvaro to my design team and said, now make these pretty but you're gonna hear it first, so let's jump into it. So Brandon, what's the best way for me to share my. Oh, that was easy.
Alright, so hey, if we're not connected on Instagram, obviously we would love to connect you there. By the way, Alvaro, it's my birthday month and pretty much every day between now and my birthday, I'm doing a drawing. Like for today, if you go to my Instagram and one where it says, Hey, it's my birthday, I'm paying some, I'm gonna pay an agent's MLS dues.
And I'm gonna give 'em a free coaching [00:04:00] session. I'm sometime over the next, few weeks. I'm gonna pay an agent's mortgage, I'm gonna make their car payment. Maybe I should make their CINC payment. I'm gonna do all kinds of fun things because I'm like, I don't need a birthday gift, but I owe so much to this industry.
Yeah, I wanna do that instead. So make sure you connect with me there. Alright. So when Alvaro and I were talking about this, he said, Hey so what are two of the big things you're working on leading up to this conference? For context, I've been doing this for, this particular event for 23 years.
And every year my job is to come out in front of my constituents, my 6,000 plus clients in the room and, maybe 20,000 watching on the Livecast and basically put the gauntlet down to say, here's what we know, here's where we're at and here's where we're going. Now, I can't give you obviously.
Three days of content. But I am gonna give you a lot to think about starting with these two research pieces that I did. So the first one was, I was looking at this cycle that we're currently in, call it the last three years of six and a half to seven and a half interest rates. We went from, 2.25 [00:05:00] interest rates and 6.9.
Million transactions times two. Buy-side, sell side to this year, another 4 million transactions. Buy-side, sell side, call it eight plus new construction. So many would argue that we are in a very flat and a stalled environment right now because of cost of money and a myriad of other things. But what I wanna share with my clients is if you look back over the last five decades, what the study that I did inside of chatt, gr, and Perplexity and many others was.
Over the last five decades, what caused home price appreciation? HPA, what, what caused it to go up? What caused depreciation and why was it flat for how long? And what should we expect? And if you could imagine with deep research on three different large language models, I've got three 100 page case studies to go through.
What I did is I took all of it and I said, can you compress it down to the five most important lessons that my client should understand? So I share [00:06:00] this with you for the second time outside of my team. Here's what you should understand. The first thing is as you sit here in this, what we would call a stalled real estate market, a stale real estate market, a flat real estate market, and heads up all of you that said you're flat in my book, you're winning.
So congratulations. Obviously we want more. You're ambitious. I respect that. But if you're flat, you're winning. And if you're slightly behind, depending upon the marketplace you're in. One of my clients Phoenix, Arizona. In the last three years, the market's off by 40%. This year it's off about 8%.
He's ahead by 12% year over year, so that's a 20% swing. If your market's off by 15 or 20% on transactions, and you're like 5% off on your goal, technically you're winning. You're beating the market, but I know you want more. So what is the study revealed? The first thing most importantly, is that every downturn ends in recovery Now.
What we know, whether you look back to, so for me, in the early days, [00:07:00] 1991, that recession, we were saying, survive until 95, right? That was the mantra. Just survive until 1995. And guess what? By the time we got to 95, the market started to recover. And then from 96 until the, call it the.com explosion of 2001 and really.
Nine 11, we went on a massive run of recovery. Home prices, skyrocketed, transactions went through the roof, agents made a fortune, and then two things happened and the market slowed again. But if you look most recently from say 2007 to 2009, during the global financial crisis, I think. Especially for a lot of my crafty veterans that are, 18 years, 20 years, 25 years.
You and I both know there was probably a time during 7, 8, 9 that you were like scratching your head, saying, is this ever gonna end? Is the world ever gonna recover? I certainly have those same thoughts. And then by the time we got to 2010, if you really look at the data builders basically slowed building to almost a standstill from 2008 to [00:08:00] 2012, and by the time we got to 2012, the gluttony of extra homes available that investors didn't buy.
Was gone. And from 2012 to 2019, we went on one of the craziest bull runs in real estate we've ever seen. And by the way, heads up for my veterans. The number one thing that consumers said and agents complain about. Was there was no inventory. That was the complaint from 2012 to 2019. And you can argue we haven't stopped complaining about it and depended upon where you are in the US right into the major metros or to the major markets.
If you just took north, south, east, west, in the north, specifically in the northeast, there is no inventory. A nice home comes on the market. They have 5, 6, 8, 10 offers. But if you go down to Florida or you go to a lot of the sand states, it's the opposite. So the thing I wanna stress to you is. We're going to see a recovery.
It's going to happen sooner than you think, and many of the things we'll discuss today if you pay attention and [00:09:00] start to do them now, you're gonna put yourself ahead of the curve versus how everybody else has a tendency to miss it and then have to chase. Now very quickly, the next three or four should be obvious.
Obviously, rates drive growth, and we saw a nice decrease in the rates. Today. I posted about it on my Instagram stories. It's not enough. To get the millions of buyers that are on the sidelines to jump into the market. But it's getting close. It's getting really close. My, my prediction is we're gonna get to 6.26, 6.3 and with buy downs and other ways to, to get properties sold and to help buyers.
We could see rates in the high fives, and when the rates are in the high fives, the wheels come off. But there's a lot you have to do. To be ready for that. Obviously. The third thing is the fundamentals today are phenomenal. 'cause one of the things of course I looked at was. How does this decade compare to the other five decades that we're analyzing and what do we know?
Equity is up through the roof. There's [00:10:00] a small amount of mortgage debt. We have almost no foreclosures. The overall fundamentals are so in our favor that it almost doesn't make sense. And then of course, demographics are on our side, which I'm gonna show you a slide in a minute which really speaks to the fact that between the millennials, the Xers.
And the boomers. There is so much opportunity and so many buyers and sellers that wanna transact, but they're just, they're waiting. You're sensing it. I see the same. Now the last one is obviously we don't have enough inventory. Builders can't build fast enough. Doesn't matter where you are, and the challenge we face.
Is everybody wants to live in the major metros where there just is no space. We've dealt with that for the last five decades. That's not gonna change. People are gonna have to drive a little farther for new construction. It is what it is. They buy that first house, then they move in closer and closer to where they want to be.
So that's the nutshell of what the last five decades revealed. But the thing that I wanna point out to you is that only you can generate momentum. And my friend [00:11:00] Al Varone knows this more than many because of his extensive business background, investment banking, and more, there is no standing still in business.
There is no standing still in business. You're either gaining momentum or you're losing momentum. You're either gaining it and you feel it, you know it. You're like, there's just something about this week. It's just, oh man, today I feel it. You're either gaining it or you're like. Oh my God. Will anybody ever buy a house from me again?
Why is it that every leader I call doesn't wanna do anything? So we all go through this, but only you can generate the momentum.
Alvaro Erize: So here's also, Tom, before you move outta that slide. Yes. I wanna make one comment, please. To go back this to the slide before, which is. The rates actually solve a couple of those items, because as you say, exactly, knowing the rates gets buyers on.
But there's a lot of sellers that are refusing to sell and put their house in the market because of the difference between their current mortgage and the mortgage. They would get a hundred percent. So the moment the rates start coming down, you have more buyers and you have more buyers that become sellers, adding more inventory.
But [00:12:00] I would love to see construction pick up and it is incredible as you've been saying that from 2012 to now. The scare was so big out of that one, that construction has been so careful and, but it shows great potential, right?
Tom Ferry: So I think you're spot on and I'm gonna give people a more advanced.
Assignment would it shock you to hear that you can compile the mortgage interest rate data on all the homes in your marketplace and then do an analysis of at what differential of their existing mortgage versus the new rate? Is gonna cause them to transact. So what we know to be true is it's about a 200 point differential.
So if I've got a four mortgage and it gets to six, that's enough for me from a payment standpoint, plus the equity I've gained to get me to transact. Now, I'm not saying by the way that. People with a low rate won't sell. My goodness. I sold a house in Newport where I used [00:13:00] to live that had a 2.25 mortgage on it, and I'm mad every day that I sold it, right?
Forgetting the fact that it also went up in value after we sold it.
Alvaro Erize: If you got a divorce, you still live with your wife, no matter what the payments are happening, there's still, you have to live apart. You cannot survive.
Tom Ferry: That is the constant reminder. My great mentor Steve Harney from many of the company keeping current matters was, yeah, no one's gonna say I'm getting a divorce, but we can't move because we got a 2.3 interest rate.
Alvaro Erize: Exactly. Yeah.
Tom Ferry: But that's the market right now, ro It's the D'S market. It's the death, it's the divorce, it's, that's. That's the market we're in so here's just a snapshot of the population growth, and if you look at whose circumstance are changing, it's clearly the boomers in the silent generation.
That's why, you know what Alvaro and CINC provides the opportunity to market effectively to those people, to get 'em to raise their hand, to get 'em to, especially when you look at the silent generation. I'm gonna say this and it's gonna sound horrible, but please. Take it from the standpoint that I'm actually thinking about the consumers.
Everybody in the silent generation, they have no equity or [00:14:00] no, no mortgage on their house. They got nothing but equity. But their agent died or retired 10 years ago. So there's just this enormous opportunity for you to be thinking from a demographic farming standpoint, we call it the silver tsunami campaign.
I would take a hard look at that. So looking at all these data points and Alvaro, I love your feedback, so please, keep interjecting. What am I really telling you? That whoever does the real work now, that's who's gonna win. The one that isn't sitting on the sideline, waiting for rates, waiting for the economy, waiting for the president to do or do not, none of that stuff matters.
It's about what we do every single day. Now, the second piece of research wait, so
Alvaro Erize: Tom, I, I'll Yes. So one for me, one good example of what you just said. Was 2020, and you can go look back at our webinars of 2020 in April. Everyone was panicking and we kept saying, look, especially on the online lead generation, right game, but all this game, but especially in online lead generation, whoever's putting in the [00:15:00] work now, we'll be the one that if the market recovers in October, will be caching.
Now if it doesn't market, maybe you wasted some. If it doesn't recover, maybe you might wasted some work, but if you didn't do the work, you're gonna miss that comeback. And boy, were there people that missed, that, missed that comeback in 2000 in the second half of 2020, while everyone that put in the work in the right time cashed in big on those relationships that they had generated.
Tom Ferry: So Alvaro, let me, I'll double down on that. And it certainly is relevant to today. We tracked two separate campaigns amongst, call it 15,000 of our clients. One campaign was. How many referrals and transactions did you do during the pandemic from simply calling past clients and sphere and saying, Alro, I just want to check in on you and your family.
Are you okay? Is there anything you need? The group that did that all said the same thing yeah, it took time. Yes, I had a lot of long conversations, but it literally generated for [00:16:00] them tens if not hundreds of transactions, depending upon the size of their database, just from just calling and saying, are you guys okay?
Do you need any help?
Alvaro Erize: Because it's not transactional, right? Because you're coming and establishing your relationship independently, whether they will transact with you, which means that when they do transact, they will transact with you. You got it.
Tom Ferry: But the second one was more interesting. So Alvaro, what do we know?
We know that the very first thing people stopped doing in a flat declining market or an uncertain market, is advertising. So the second thing we tracked was the amount of our clients that we're doing, whether it was Facebook, Google, all the stuff, right? That they were continuing to run ads.
But of course the ads had the change to, is it still safe to buy a home? Five ways to buy a home safely. Three things you need to know about moving during the pandemic. The people that did that. Their business exploded as we got into the summer of 2020 and 2021. They all look back and say, it was [00:17:00] all those early opportunities, those leads that I generated from online advertising then that had one of the biggest impacts of my business.
So it really, it was database. Just doing the right thing and then keep your foot on the gas, on your advertising and marketing, because when most people stop the pathway is clear for you to dominate. So speaking of, let's look at this research because it speaks volumes to the same thing we've seen over the last, call it twenty four, thirty six months.
So the competition we're looking at is specifically who won all the listings. So I do this analysis every year. So this is. 2024. And what we did is we tracked the number of listings sold in every MLS across the US with my partners at f and f, fidelity, national Financial, that have access to all the data and they close, call it 40 to 50% of all the escrows in the country.
We looked at all the data and you could see the numbers. 1,111,200 agents had zero listings sold and closed in the first six months of last year. [00:18:00] Now let's call it for what it is, Ruby, my chief of staff, just walked in to hand me some water. If Ruby and I were business partners, we'd only put all of our listings under one MLS id.
So I say that 1,000,001 at 11,000 was probably more like a million. There's probably a hundred thousand between teams and husband and wives and father, son and partnerships, but still. Last year was a pretty challenging year, and a million people didn't have a listing sell, and then you could see all the numbers.
The group that had 2.7 listings sold, or 6.8 or 14, but really that's just giving you a taste. I believe fundamentally, consolidation has been happening in our industry, certainly for the last two decades and there's a clear separation. There's the teams. There's the people that are doing more online advertising, collecting opportunities early.
They're the people that are just great marketers. There's a lot of factors, but if I show you, when I show you. This year, the first six months, you're gonna see some obvious differences [00:19:00] between this year versus last year. So take a peek. The first thing is, again, we had a million plus people, so maybe it was 950,000 that didn't have a listing sell and close, and everybody else that was on that million 65 we a team or a business partner.
But the thing that you wanna look at is that red bar. The very first one, 2.1 agents Last year, that number was 215,000 agents. This year it's 344. What does that mean? It means a lot of people fell backwards this year. A lot of people fell backwards. Now I'm gonna make the argument, if you're watching this, I'm gonna make the argument that the gal that had 2.1 listings sell in the first six months and close, probably did 5, 6, 8, 10 buyer sales also.
She is a great agent in my mind. She's doing phenomenal. Now, the person that had 7.6 which I would be like, I guess seven or eight, that person probably had another 10, 12, 13. These are really good agents. But [00:20:00] again, compare it to last year, that yellow bar was 91,000. This year it's 66, almost 67,000.
The thing that I want you to get to, and I'll give you kinda the punchline, and again, this is one of those, please gimme some grace. This is a very ugly slide. Summary is. In 2024, you had 215,000 agents control, 32% of the market, and 132,000 controlling 68 this year. Only 90,000 agents are controlling 60% of the market.
That is crazy consolidation. Now, what does this mean to you? What are the insights? What are the takeaways? That's really what Alvaro said. Hey, could you share some of this? And the first obvious thing is, hey, good markets create really bad habits. When everything is great, when, when money is cheap, when everybody wants to buy and sell, when there isn't a lot of competition, it creates bad habits, but tough markets create You, my friend, you.
Tough markets. Create great agents. People [00:21:00] that show up like this, do the training and do the work. So here's the four insights. I'll go through 'em relatively high level and then, obviously Alro, we can do a bunch of q and a or whatever you like. Yeah. The first thing is that just to acknowledge consolidation is happening and it is.
More competitive today than I have seen certainly since I've been tracking competition. And I'll give you just some insight. Again, going back to the numbers. If you look at this alro we took the number of transactions, right? Buy side and sell side, and what we looked at. Two things, right? This is the listing one, but we do the buy-side, sell side.
It looks almost identical on the listing sold side. If you go to 2013 where it says one, that was the single year of the last call it, decade and a half, where basically everybody had a listing sell. Everybody did a buy-side transaction. I can't remember. Another time in my 35 years where all 1.5 million NAR members all did a deal, right?
It's more [00:22:00] typically half never sell a house and all the numbers that I've been showing you. But what did we see happen in 2021? In 2021, the consumers shifted. In 2021, the consumers figured out who was hiding under the pandemic rock and who was. Really out there, marketing and executing. And you saw for the first time, certainly in this study, where it became extremely competitive in 22, it became unbelievably competitive in 20 23, 20 24 drop down.
I'm not gonna share the number yet for 2025, but I'm gonna give you a hint, Alvaro, it went outside of the box. It went more competitive than we've ever seen. Now you're looking at this and you're like, yeah, but ferry, what does that mean to me? Let me give you the insight. I study business as much as you study your local marketplace.
What I know to be true, of all the clients I've worked with in my, three and a half decades, 70,000 hours. Of personal private [00:23:00] coaching, not including my 207 coaches and all their millions of hours. What we know is you're only in one of five phases, startup growth, cash, cow, fading, winner, or restructure.
Now if you're a cash cow, you know it, you are rolling in dough deals and dollars are showing up whether you're here or you're not. That's the dream business. Small percentage of the agents. If you're under five years, technically you're a startup. If you're a fading winner, what that means is Gary Keller said a funny line.
He said, you're losing so slowly. You actually think you're winning. The fading winner, Alvaro is half the audience that I show up to every time I do a speech. They've been in the business for eight years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 30 years. They're really good with clients, like they're phenomenal with customers, great negotiators, great client care, great communication, but what they stopped doing was marketing and lead generation in a more relevant way for today's environment.
And that's why they're falling backwards. And then the restructure agent should be [00:24:00] obvious. They've quit the business and haven't told their broker yet. Now the insight for all of us is, and again, we go back to there's no standing still. You're either in momentum or you're falling out of it. The answer is everything points back to growth.
Everything points back to growth. So when you look back at, you know this, what you saw was smart agents, as the market shifted from 21 to 22, continued to market aggressively, continued to innovate their approach, email, texting, phone calls, open houses, direct mail, online, Google, Facebook. They did everything and that's why they're winning.
And you saw the same in 23 and the same in 24, and we've seen the same in 25. They stay in that growth mode. Now, number two, and again, just giving you kinda high level, the next big one is that consumer behaviors have absolutely changed. So Alvaro, I was just with my friend Damien. He's the CEO of realtor.com.
He sends me this 20 page report that is showing us all the consumer data [00:25:00] behavior changes. I'll be sharing all that with you so you can share it with your community. Yep. Let's do it. I'm also, as I'm in the middle of. About a 300,000 consumer survey with our friends at f and f, fidelity, Chicago, Tyco Lawyers, all the different title companies where they're asking consumers three questions for me.
They're saying, how did you select your agent? Lemme say this, how did you select your agent? Two, what was your expectations and did they deliver? And three, how many stars would you give them? One through five? What changes would you have made if it was less than five stars? We're gonna get a tremendous amount of insight, but the thing that I wanna point out, especially to my veterans, take a look at this, for example.
This was something that Thousand Watt, our friends at Thousand Watt did. And basically what, here's what they discovered when they asked the question. How did you choose your real estate agent to help you, buy or sell your home? In this case sell, you could see 9 34 and six. Are the old traditional, my friend, my, [00:26:00] my former, my buddy referred me.
I didn't know that number used to be alro in the high eighties. Yeah. This industry has been a word of mouth industry for as long as I can remember, and now we're seeing this shift. Towards people getting on their phone, right? I research agents online. I read their reviews. I read their transactions.
I wanna know their history, like I wanna know what people are saying about them. That number jumped almost two x over the last 12 months. We also saw, and I'm gonna give you some insight in this, my friend watching, 15% of them went to an online agent finding matching service. And that's how they got their agent.
And then of course, 7% I saw a piece of advertising or marketing that impressed me so we're seeing this shift in consumers, and I would imagine all of you are, you probably have Grok and Chacha, BT and Perplexity, and Claude and others on your phone. [00:27:00] The biggest shift we're seeing today is people are going from going on Google to do a traditional search.
I'm not saying they're not, Google gets 414 billion uniques a month, but what we're seeing is consumers, instead of going best agent near me, which is a very typical search term in Google, they're going to chat or grok or perplexity, and they're saying. Who's the best agent near me that sells mid-century moderns and seems to get a really high price?
Now that's a more advanced ask that people are using on all these different large language models. And 'em, chat, Gemini, grok, perplexity, copilot, they're all great, right? But here's the thing, and by the way, this is now 60 days old. So Alvaro waiting for the new data on this. We think we just peaked over 10 billion asks between, call it the five or six major platforms.
Now again, Google has 414 [00:28:00] billion. But there's two things you need to be aware of. Actually, three, and I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna give you a really nice gift today. One is the average sales price of the people that are searching on AI tools is 40% higher than the norm. So it's not uncommon when I'm doing an event in Oklahoma where maybe the average sales price is three 50, and I say, how many of you have gotten a client now from a search engine like Chache, bt, gr, et cetera?
I'll get one or two hands. But when I'm in Silicon Valley, when I'm in Miami, when I'm in Dallas, Texas, when I'm in New York City and I say, how many of you got a transaction now from one of the large language models, a third of the hands go up. So there is a correlation, certainly to average sales price.
So if you wanna sell more houses that are more expensive, pay attention. But here's the other thing, what you need to understand is these AI search, that what they favor is specific platforms that are optimized for the way that they, lemme say it [00:29:00] this way. AI is lazy. AI is lazy. So what are they looking for?
They're looking for lists. They're looking for structured data like top 10. So as an example, you might wanna take a screenshot of this if you're not on fast expert, if you are lucky enough to be on the real trends, either America's best list or the top 1000. If you are on Yelp in your marketplace and you're considered one of the 10 best, if you're on home light, Zillow, Reddit, realtor, experts, homes, local sites.
Branded sites, your site and your Google business page. If you are doing the right stuff and you're on those sites, you are more likely to be found. So what am I saying to you? I was just talking to Alvaro, the CEO and founder of Fast Expert. I was like, Hey, drew, do you know that? You're like, that's not,
Alvaro Erize: if it's called Alvaro, that's a very high no.
Tom Ferry: I was saying, Al I'll introduce you to Drew. He's a smart young guy. I said, were you aware that right now you are fast expert? Seems to be. The first site that all the large LANGO models go to, specifically chat, TBT, which gets the most searches. [00:30:00] He's yeah, we've seen a pretty significant spike in traffic over the last two years.
And again, this is like for free, right? Free, my friend. So again, I'm not an investor in any of those companies. I'm a friend to everybody in the industry. So I'm just letting you know. Now, here's the second. I think
Alvaro Erize: Before you go to the next, please. Although, no the bio builds to that too.
I think you made two points that are pretty critical. One, the fact that more people are choosing their agent online than ever before. That is true, and you are showing it even on the seller side. Traditionally people choosing their buyer agent online is three times as likely as chasing their seller agent, which makes sense because they're looking for, of course, not for an agent.
And so they end up working with whoever is there to serve them. But you're showing that even on the seller side, where traditionally people when to people they know, they're starting to trust online more and you got it. And I think the second one here is something we've been trying to hammer home, which is.
Reputation management is more important than ever, right? Like in the end these LLM models are [00:31:00] trying to do what people are trying to do, which is gather all the information out there and find out who is the best, right? That's right. And that's why we would be surprised how many of our agents today, or our clients, even though they have seen all of that, don't have their own site that is collecting reviews and putting them on their behalf.
That is in my mind today, whether you're accelerated or whether you have agents on the buy side. With the advent of buyer contracts, it's become so much more important to you for you to manage your reputation online and have something that these models will pick up.
Tom Ferry: Bingo. So let me make it really easy for your friends Alro that are watching.
So the second thing you need to do is if you grabbed your phone and I don't even know, that's fine. I don't even know where my phone is. How often do we not do that? If you grabbed your phone right now and you went to your Instagram profile, your X profile, by the way, X is also very important. So I hope you're paying attention formally known as Twitter.
If you looked at your Zillow profile, if you looked at all the pro. If your profile looks like most agents' profile and it [00:32:00] says mom, friend, pie lover, dad golfer love to help people sell houses. The AI does not identify you as anything. You have to have very specific language in your bio.
Make it as easy as possible for Theis to say that's the one. She's the one. So I think if you wanna optimize your bio, hit this QR code really fast, and you're gonna get for free, basically all the, this is how you wanna do it. This is the prompt you wanna use. To reimagine your bio across all major platforms, your website, your Google Business page, your Zillow profile, your realtor profile, your homes profile, your Redfin, across every platform.
You've gotta get your bio set up today for how the ais are reading it so you get free leads, so you get selected. Now, Alvaro, what's remarkable? [00:33:00] What's remarkable. Can I move on from that? I'm assuming you guys got it. What I can tell you is this right here, smart agents are committed, right?
They're committed to being first and they're committed to being fast. So I'm gonna take that same thing that I just shared with you and in two weeks, I guess share it with, call it 26,000 agents, and you're gonna see 26,000 agents the first day of my summit in real time change their bios. Make a few slight adjustments and overnight, they've now positioned themselves to be the one that grok or chat or perplexity.
Suddenly they're the ones, and what's even more remarkable, Alvaro, is there's no fact checking. So I'm not saying you should put, I'm the number one agent on the planet. But if you look at your Google map of all your transactions or your Zillow map of all your transactions, and that you're very dominant in 9 2 65, you could say one of the top 10 agents in 9, 2 6, 2 5, helping people in Kran Elm are buy and sell real estate.
[00:34:00] Over 500, five star reviews between my Google, my Facebook, my LinkedIn, and my Instagram page, whatever it may be, and I'm giving you a little insight into what it's looking for. Who you are, where you serve, how many transactions have you done in your career? How many reviews do you have? You could literally, and I'm not saying you can do this, but you could literally lie and say you're the number one agent in the marketplace and you're gonna get free leads.
So don't do that. 'cause some other agent will fact check you. But my point is, Alvaro, it's the wild rest. Like right now, the most important thing is be first and be fast, be first. But I would
Alvaro Erize: also, and be fast. I would add Tom to that, which is Google in general, whether it's the search engine or now the ems, they respect activity above all.
So we had someone out there in the chat asking is it all about the profiles? Or do the reviews matter? Like you could go and upload on your own 50 reviews somewhere. What you need is a lot of different people going and talking about you, right? So whatever, if you are not getting a [00:35:00] review, every two transactions that you make.
You're missing out, right? So every time that you're helping someone, you should get a review every time. But, and whether that's uploaded into realtor.com, whether you have your own website, which does, which you should, or whether you are permeating it to different platforms, the more movement that there is about you, the more that this will be picked up.
Tom Ferry: All right. So can I double down on that? Give you a very, okay. So I probably shouldn't share this, but I'm gonna share it now. I don't have any slides, so you have to write, you have to write my friends. Alro, in the last 45 days, my personal website, tom ferry.com Yeah. Is at 360% Lyft in organic traffic.
Alvaro Erize: Wow.
Tom Ferry: Is that good?
Alvaro Erize: Yes it is.
Tom Ferry: What if I told you I only did one thing? And it's the one thing, it's probably the one of the most important strategies that we talk about at Summit coming up. But I'm gonna give you all a little teaser, but again, you gotta write like crazy 'cause I don't know [00:36:00] slides for it, right?
It's. It, I didn't prepare for it. So here's what I want you to do. Here's the six steps. Write 'em down in order and you can do research to figure out how you're gonna do it. So here's number one. There's a site called Answer the Public. Answer. The public Neil Patel owns that site. If you go to answer the public.
What it does is it scrapes all of the questions being asked by consumers on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. LinkedIn hold on, Google, Bing. And I know I'm missing one. TikTok. So it scrapes all these sites for the questions that consumers are asking. On that same thing, you can then go into the search bar and type in sell home as a key word, sell home, hit enter, and what you will see is anywhere between 1700 to 18,000.
Questions consumers are asking that have the words sell home in, you will [00:37:00] go through that list and you will get rid of the ones like, how do I sell my home on my own? As an example. You'll kill all that stuff. Then what you're gonna do. Is you are going to prompt your favorite AI 50 of these questions at a time.
Write me a 300 to 500 word blog. Make sure you make me the hero of the story. Write it in a way that is factual and data specific to our local marketplace in the areas that I serve. Bing, bang. Maybe you upload some MLS data to this to make it even more specific, and it will then write 40, 50, 6300 to 500 word blogs.
Answering those questions that consumers are asking about sell home, what do you then do? That's step number two.
Alvaro Erize: Tom Moise has asked what was the website again? If you could repeat it,
Tom Ferry: answer the public,
Alvaro Erize: perfect.
Tom Ferry: Answer the public, type in the keywords, sell home into the search bar. You'll get a whole, you'll get, [00:38:00] I wanna say it's 1800 questions.
Albert. Some huge number. And then what are you gonna do? You're gonna take. 50 at a time of those questions, put it into Chachi BT or your favorite AI writing tool and say, write me a 300 to five in a word blog answering this question. Make me the star. Use some of my MLS data. Here you go. And it's gonna spit out these blogs.
What do you then do? Step three. Very important. Please write it down. You ready? Step three. Read the blog. Do not just publish it. Yes, read the blog. Read your content. Do a little edit. Do a little edit. Step four. Now this is where you gotta pay attention, my friends. I want you to post five. Posts a day on the following platforms, your website.
So five of these blogs per day, not all at once. Think your favorite news site, esp n lakers news.com. They're posting throughout the day. So five blogs posted per day on your [00:39:00] website, on your Google Business page, and inside of LinkedIn. Those three to start those three, five per day. Then you do one on Facebook, one on X, one on Instagram, one on the basics, right?
So you do that every day. 5, 5, 5, 5. And then 1, 1, 1, 1. Then the next step, and I'm gonna make your brain hurt, but listen up, you can then create a short form video. For an Instagram reel or a YouTube short on any one of those questions, and post that, I get asked this question all the time.
Tom, can I sell my home in 19 6 2 5 without having to do open houses? That's one of the questions. Here's the answer. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you post it, and that gets in Instagram and X and Facebook and your business page and your Google Business page. So I'm reinforcing not just the written word, but also on video.
And if I wanna take it one step [00:40:00] further, step six is you can then take it to 11 labs or to Notebook. Lm, take the entire blog, upload it into Notebook lm, and it will create for you. A podcast and now you have your podcast answering all these questions. Now, Alvaro, that may sound like a mouthful.
It's probably the it's probably the single most important thing that we are focusing like our clients at this year's Success Summit.
And it is the most important thing because right now, not only are consumer behaviors shifting search. Versus G-E-O-S-E-O versus GEO could be the most important micro trend, not only of 2025, but certainly of 2026. And I'm looking here, we got 200 ish people. If you SmartyAnts are smart enough.
To be first and fast and to not say, [00:41:00] oh I don't know what exactly what he meant by that. Just you wrote down the six things execute on the first four. If you could do the last two, you're gonna kill it. And what I would say is, if you want more, hit that QR code. Alvaro’s got a crazy opportunity for all of you to join me.
It's in three weeks. So let's. Let's not talk about it. Let's not talk about it yet. Yeah.
Alvaro Erize: But just everybody hit that on your QR code though. But Tom, on this particular subject, I wanna let everyone know because Yeah. It is complex and overwhelming when you say it and people are like, if, so Tom Summit is amazing in general about real estate and about coaching and understanding the value of it.
But one of the very particular things having gone several times is Tom is really invested in AI and there's an. A fantastic job, him and his team Yes. Of really going through it and saying, okay, this is what you're gonna do. Take out your phones, let's do it together. Yep. So if you feel all overwhelmed by that, the, that's the place where you want to be.
You're gonna go there and again, I'm very grateful to Tom, and we'll talk about it again at the end, but he's giving a discount for people that want to join from here. I really [00:42:00] mean if this is picked, you're interested, then you're like, I really want to go hard on ai, on not the AI that CINC can do for me on that, but rather my way of using ai.
This is a fan. There's no place where you're gonna get more practical advice of how to onboard into AI in your own tool. So a hundred percent. I really recommend that.
Tom Ferry: Thank you, my friend. Okay so let's be mindful of everybody's time because we promised 'em an hour. Yes. The next thing you need to understand is.
Number three insight. Looking at the competition report, again, 90,000 agents now controlling 60, 61% of all the business. The market belongs to the people that market. And listen, I've been doing this for a long time. When I left, you guys probably know, my dad is Mike Ferry legend, just celebrated 50 years in the industry.
I was just with him at his annual conference in Vegas. And listen, when I left and I started my own business, at the time I was coaching about 36 agents, and that was the first year that the Wall Street Journal published the top 100 real estate [00:43:00] agents in the United States. 16. Of the people on that list, including number like 1, 2, 5, 7, and nine.
Were all my personal clients, and when I reflected on what was it that made them so special? Yeah, they had great brands. Of course they followed up, but again, we're talking like this is 2003, 2004. This is a long time ago. Facebook didn't even exist. You didn't have an iPhone then, right? Like most agents still didn't have a website.
What made them so special was they outmarketed everybody and they didn't look through the lens of being myopic. They always had seven or eight different ways that they attracted clients. They never let their ego get in the way and say, I don't like X. They're like, those customers need my service. I may not like them.
I don't even know what that even means or who cares. I'm gonna market to 'em anyway. So the concept, and again, I could, I have 50 slides on this. I'm just gonna give you the high level is my mother-in-law, Lola. [00:44:00] Nana, she's 98 years old. She's very Italian. She makes lasagna. She makes homemade raviolis.
She makes, pasta bolognese like she's 98 and she's in the kitchen in her happy place. And when she makes lasagna, she will sometimes do like a 17 layer lasagna. And it makes me think smart agents, what they do is they're like my nana, right? They do layers and layers and layers of marketing.
They are not. Myopic in their approach. So high level, these are a bunch of the playbooks that, that Alro we're gonna give out this year at the summit. How do you go from like marketing to your past clients to actually being the educator and working under what we call homes under management? Then how do you market and educate to your database and your sphere with text, email, blogging, all the stuff we're talking about, geographic farming.
You see the whole list there. Listing launches that generate listings. The silver tsunami campaign, which we talked about, right? The biggest opportunity you can see [00:45:00] right now in real estate is all these people that are 70 years old living in two story houses. You go right on down the line, arbitraging portals, Google Business page, YouTube ads, online ads for Facebook, Insta, Google, and then expert agent required only expired FSBOs and default as an example.
So you got this laundry list of things that agents are doing, and the inside is the. The ones that are marketing right now are the ones that are killing it. The ones that are pulling back are in trouble, so let's keep jamming. You ready? Obviously, you know that the last one, and then we'll open it up for some q and a though I do have an insight.
Alvaro, I think your audience will appreciate is that we're in a skills and communication market, and I would even emphasize like skills, of course. Knowing what to say, knowing what to do, knowing how to blog, knowing how to shoot video, knowing how to use ai. Those are all learned skills. Communication though is the real key and when you look broadly at the top five complaints that consumers have about real estate professionals today [00:46:00] and always, to me, I think it's like the biggest opportunity on the planet.
I think if you like, for you as a smart agent right now watching or a team leader watching that, the complaints should be your degrees of separation. So you've all seen the list of the top five things that consumers say. Poor communication, lack of transparency, not prioritizing my interest, lack of knowledge or competence, unprofessional behavior.
These are the things that consumers are repeatedly saying about our industry. They're not saying about you. But they are saying good about our industry and what we know is all of these are marketing opportunities. All of these are a way to communicate and express your degree of separation. It's one thing to say it.
If you show it to 'em in reviews, if you show it to 'em in success stories, if you show it to 'em in action, this is where we went, and you go back to the 90,000 agents, they're not falling short on this stuff. They're over exceeding. Client expectations [00:47:00] when it comes to communication, transparency, prioritizing their best interest.
They have the knowledge, like they've got the insights and of course, professional behavior. So when I think about it like this, obviously I think we trained like 145,000 agents. Leading up to the August 17th, the, from March to August 17th of last year, and then we had the bifurcation of commissions, right?
The commission for the list side and the buy side. The thing that I know is absolutely true. Skilled agents are earning more money than they ever have. Their listing commissions have gone up. Their buy-side commissions have gone up. Their rebates on commissions have gone down, and it just demonstrates that the best never take for granted.
What comes out of their mouth that they can learn, that they can role play with an AI tool before they go on an appointment. That what they express in their marketing and their advertising and their print, all of it matters. We're in a skilled environment today. And there's [00:48:00] a thousand examples. But you know what I'm saying?
I got this slide sent to me by a friend and he said, Tom, I'm just convinced that sales and business is a self-development game disguised as a money making opportunity. So what am I really saying to you here? What I'm really saying to you is, first, thank you for an hour of your time. Of course. But what I'm really saying to you is.
The market's about to go into recovery mode. It's about to get surprisingly good, and whether that is December of this year, probably not likely, we'll probably have another rate cut that's gonna create a bump, but I'm talking like 26 and 27, when it'll feel a lot like 20 17, 20 18, 20 19 for my veterans.
You remember how good that market was, that's what's gonna happen, but it's only gonna happen for the people that get better. It's only gonna happen for the pros. It's only gonna happen for the people that are gonna [00:49:00] change their bio today on Instagram. At the minimum it's gonna happen for the people that blog starting today that don't stop on their advertising, that don't stop on their follow up, that understand longer sales cycles, requires even more follow up and more disciplined today than it ever has.
So I'd make the argument if you're feeling even slightly overwhelmed, and you can use some guidance. Be first and fast, right? I would strongly recommend at the minimum, you take a look at this. I know it's coming up in two weeks and you can have a thousand things that you can say to me that doesn't make sense.
But because of my relationship with Alro, at least you don't have to pay the $699 full ticket price. You guys get it for a remarkable 299 bucks, which is a. Steal. So if one of you joins, it'll be awesome. Make sure you come up and say hi to me and say, Hey Tom, I was on that thing, and by the way, look at my Instagram and look, I'm on fast expert and I'm doing this, and I'm doing that.
Like I love that kind of feedback.
Alvaro Erize: Yeah. And I'd say, so we're, I'm gonna be there. Troy's gonna be [00:50:00] there. We're gonna be, I'm sure I know of a bunch of clients. I know I saw Jessica Duncan who is coming there. Between the audience today, we have a bunch of clients that are coming and we're probably gonna organize a dinner or a party.
We'll see what we do from CINC, but, but I wanna hone in on one thing that you said, which is. Back to, I see such similarity to 2020. Yes. We are in a market where there is a reticence to transact that has slowed down the market transactions are happening and people are succeeding. But it is tougher, right?
Tom Ferry: Yes. But
Alvaro Erize: we have a much better market coming. The issue is. You need to be investing in it now. So going to a summit like this or splitting a legion, but most of them doing the phone calls today is the best investment you can be making. And the one agreed, one extra thing that I'd add. If you're making all the phone calls today, but you're being transactional in those phone calls, then you're not gonna get anywhere.
Because if people are not gonna transact in the next three months, you're wasting your time and breath by [00:51:00] calling them right. Now, if you are calling today to establish a relationship that will pay off six months from now, then you're gonna be swimming in money when that comes. And that's exactly what happened.
Yeah. Anyone that in April of 2020 heard the news and said, oh, I'm supposed to stay home and do nothing, and hide below the bed, missed out on 2021 and on the second half of 2020.
Tom Ferry: Al I couldn't, you said that perfectly. I appreciate you. I can't wait to see you in a couple weeks, Troy, as well. The whole CINC community.
It was a pleasure to hang with everybody today. I'll just leave you with this. You're either gaining momentum or you're losing momentum. So for today, do something that puts you in a state of momentum, like Alvaro was saying, make your phone calls all your leads 'cause that'll get you into momentum fast.
So Alvaro, I'll see you in a couple weeks, my friend. Thank you so much for allowing me to join.
Alvaro Erize: No, my pleasure. Thank you for being here and we'll see you there. I'll be there and I have [00:52:00] a bunch of people that are already. Put it in the chat that they'll be joining us, awesome. Thank you everyone.
Awesome. All right. Appreciate it, everybody.
Tom Ferry: Take care.