Justin Stoddart 0:00
Welcome back to The think bigger real estate Show. I'm your host Justin Stoddart, today's episode is going to be a really unique and valuable one, I hope you stay tuned for the entire thing. It's really helping real estate agents move from being salespeople to being advisors, which is where I think the industry needs to go in order to maintain the value to the customer that the customers happy to pay for your services. So excited to have with me a guy who does that naturally. He's always done that. And his name's Nick Krautter. And Nick, thanks for being on the show to them.
Nick Krautter 0:26
Yeah thanks for having me. This is great.
Justin Stoddart 0:27
Yeah, super fun. Nick, and I go back almost five years. And his kind of claim to fame nationally, is he wrote the book, The Golden handoff, which is how to help real estate agents buy and sell their business. And so in addition to that, maybe what he's less well known for, at least nationally, is he really has an economist type brain. And he really goes deep on helping people understand the numbers where they've been and where he believes they're heading, which gives consumers the ability to kind of have a little bit of a crystal ball to some degree, right? To be able to understand what will actually help them build their wealth, which I think is uncommon. And I'm excited to kind of delve into this topic. But before I do, Megan, I am going to be actually speaking at an event together with our friend James Adair called exponential referrals, if you're in the Portland market,
it is I should have had the date, I'm going to put the date in the comments below, you can be able to hear this guy go in depth on the golden handoff and really house the strategy, not just exit the business, but also to grow the business. And probably one of the things we hadn't mentioned, Nick is you're now under the umbrella of your own brokerage city and state.
Nick Krautter 1:35
Yeah, that's a big, that's the big change for us here. The Celtics team decided to start our own real estate brokerage. So we've had the team together for 13 years, we decided to go out and start our own brokerage. It's called the city and state real estate. And we are working in Oregon and Washington right now and looking to expand into new markets. And we can talk about some of why I decided to do that. And a big part of that was exactly what we're talking about today. Which is there's a difference between being a good real estate broker who executes a plan, helping someone better sell something, but are you asking your clients great questions? Are you understanding what they want? And why they're Why are they selling? Why are they buying? Yeah, I often find that people will be buying or selling real estate because they have a goal or a plan. And maybe that process that they're going through is really not the best way to do it. Or maybe they have a different asset, or there's a different way to go about doing it that in the big picture for them would be much better for their family or their future. And it is sometimes that costs us to sail right then as a broker. But I I believe that building those relationships and building trust is is significantly more valuable in the long run, and it's just doing the right thing. And so our brokerage is really set up for our clients to be working with agents who are there to advise them. And then for the brokers that are there to really understand who are their clients and have a plan of action to staying in touch with them. That's very tangible. And then is your business structured correctly as an agent, you know, are you are you saving taxes are you investing do having retirement plan, and then at the at the kind of the top level for our brokers, it's really about looking at investment property and understanding that because there's a lot of great real estate brokers who don't understand real estate investing. They're very good things. And that's fine. But we have great brokers on our company that understand the investment, and I do to inside out, and so we can basically help build folio to build wealth for those agents because we don't get retirement plans. You know, there's no pension in real estate. So it's all about what can you do for yourself and your family. And we're city and state is built specifically to help people know their clients build their business and build their future. But
Justin Stoddart 3:55
you know, what's interesting, that you said, Nick, is, you know, the tech companies, they're looking to really create algorithms that help people buy and sell, and or empower the customer to buy and sell themselves. What is not really accounted for is how will you know a client, right? It even better than the client knows themselves, right? And even start asking questions where the client is learning something about their future plans, because no one's ever asked him that question. Now you can custom tailor a real estate experience that fits really where they want to be. Right, right, which is maybe not even where they thought they could go. But because you understand real estate, you understand real estate investing, you can be guiding them advising them down a path that they didn't know was even there possible for them. I think that's where, again, kind of the low barriers to entry of real estate and all these tech companies even coming and trying to replace agents, all that becomes irrelevant when you offered that level of service.
Nick Krautter 4:49
Yeah, I believe that technology, we use a lot of technology. And I've always been focused on, you know, having the best tools and resources for my brokers and for our clients. I think that, to me, technology is there to supplement and make the relationship part of the business easier and better. Not to replace relationships totally agree. And there are people there's going to, there are always people that want to do things on their own, or who will want to use a new tool, people that are early adopters. The thing is like real estate is a very, very big asset for most people is their biggest asset. And even for people that are buying and selling all the time. It's interesting because they use brokers. And really smart real estate brokers will hire other brokers. So one of the things to me that's kind of one of our badges of honor is how many seasoned real estate professionals hire our team to think for their personal deals, because they know that we're going to be there to be kind of a sounding board and to to double check their plans and their logic. And so it's one of those things. It's crazy. But a lot of times people think, Oh, well that's properties on by a realtor, so they don't need an agent. Well, we work with a lot of those people because they understand that now they might have a blind spot, or they might not be able to negotiate as well for themselves or they might overprice it or underprice it and so to have someone else that you trust, to me, that's like the biggest sign of respect and appreciation. And I think that technology will continue to get better and better. But the problem is real estate is it's not so much about just the value. It's about how you negotiate. And to try to replace human negotiation, I think is exponentially more difficult and figuring out what is the right value for a home. I think technology will continue to help get us to that point where that's better and better. As there's more and more information because every time a home sells now there's more information out there about it, right. So anything that sold in the last 10 years, there's great data available to any of those companies and to us as realtors.
But if someone's you know, we work with a lot of the states, someone has owned a home. Right now we're working on a deal whe...
