Hustle Humbly Podcast

Would you buy a haunted house if it came with a big discount? Before you answer, you might want to hear what our listeners found behind closed doors this year. It's Halloween week, which means it's time for our favorite tradition on the show. Every October, y'all send us your creepiest, weirdest, and most unexplainable showing and listing stories, and every year we think we'll finally run out. We...

Who gets called a leader in real estate? The agent with the billboard? The one on the magazine cover? The one with the most likes on her latest listing? Sometimes the industry has it a little mixed up. Real estate is a loud industry, and it often rewards the loudest. But visibility and leadership are not the same thing, and we think it's time to talk about the difference. This chat started because...

Your database is the most important system you'll ever build, so start there with our FREE Database Template: hustlehumblypodcast.com/starthere . Want the rest of the tools we mention? They're all on our products page: hustlehumblypodcast.com/products (and that's why there are no ads this week!). The humidity is finally breaking in Louisiana, and with it comes that fall urge to buy pumpkins, clean...

Back in January 2020, we recorded Episode 23, The Three P's of Professionalism, based on NAR's List of Suggested Professional Courtesies. It's not the Code of Ethics, but a complementary, voluntary list, and real estate schools are still sending brand new agents to that episode today. With everyone talking about AI lately, we decided it was time to pull some of our favorites back out and remind ou...

This week we're doing a little podcast therapy of our own, because burnout comes for all of us. We started this episode because we needed it, and if we're honest, we figured a lot of you needed it too. So instead of just handing you a list of quick fixes, we decided to do the harder thing first: name it. Burnout, it seems, can come at us for a lot of reasons. We're breaking burnout down two ways....

What does Trader Joe's know that most Realtors don't? We went down a rabbit hole this week pulling data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index and the results surprised us. We also sourced stories from Trader Joe's, Chick-fil-A, and Disney. So we started asking, what do these brands actually do that makes people love them so much, and how does that apply to our real estate businesses? Turns...

It's Realtor Safety Month, and this year we're taking a different angle: property safety. We've covered personal safety plenty of times before (episodes 317, 216, 161, 112, and 6 & 7 with Carl Carter), but this time Alissa is sharing a story straight from the trenches: the time one of her vacant listings got robbed, mid-listing, appliances and all. Repeat clients moved out of state and handed off...

Happy Labor Day! In honor of all the laboring people out there, we're doing something a little different this week.   We are always surprised to hear of listeners not in real estate at all, and we love hearing how this podcast has still helped your business. So today we're speaking straight to the masses. We made ourselves a rule: no saying "real estate," "realtor," "buyer," or "seller" for the wh...

Have you ever sent an email, assumed it was read, and then found out three days later it wasn't? This week we're digging into where communication breaks down in a real estate transaction, and it's happening more than ever right now. Everyone has a hundred tabs open in their brain, clients are getting information from a dozen different places, and somehow we're still expected to be the ones who kee...

Have you ever gotten a message from a total stranger asking you to show them a house tomorrow? Or, worse, NOW? This episode covers a little bit of everything: client intake, boundaries, and buyer and seller consultations, because honestly this topic touches almost every system we've built our businesses on. Lately we've both had new clients come to us in a completely different state than we're use...

Happy birthday to us! 🥳Hustle Humbly is turning seven this week, and in seven years we still haven't found a better way to build a real estate business than the good ole fashioned database. So we're celebrating the only way we know how: talking database again! If you're new here, this is your sign to go listen to Episode 9, the original database episode, and grab our free database template at hus...

Ever wonder what real estate agents are talking about when nobody's watching? We went straight to the source: Reddit. We dug through the subreddits: r/realtor and r/realestateagent, reading through 2025 and 2026 posts to see what agents are actually saying when they think no one from their brokerage is looking. And y'all, it was a lot. One out of every three posts was a vendor or marketer trying t...

Do you ever feel like you're working hard in your real estate business, but nothing is actually happening? You might be busy without being productive, and that is exactly what we are digging into today. When you work for yourself, nobody is forcing you to audit your business. You just stay in it instead of working on it. So we decided to hold up a mirror and do a full accountability check in, toge...

You win some, you lose some. So why does losing one always feel like it means so much more? This week we get into what happens after the deal falls through, the client picks another agent, or a friend quietly lists their house with someone else. We talk about the "one day rule" a friend taught us for grieving a lost deal, and why real estate karma means the good and the bad even out over time if y...

Three low appraisals. Ten days. One Realtor who used to be an appraiser herself, with a dad and sister still in the field. If you've been hearing agents in your market say appraisals are coming in low right now, you're not imagining it. In this episode, Alissa walks us through three real, current transactions where the appraisal came in under contract price, and what she actually did about each on...

You want to buy a house. But you can't. Or it's just really, really hard. We've both got buyers right now who are struggling, and it's not because they're not trying. It's because the math has changed. Back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, houses were $20,000 to $40,000 and you needed 20% down. Now that down payment number is basically what a whole house used to cost, and the median price in our market h...

Has a lender ever given you the full court press and you weren't sure how to say no? Or maybe you've wondered why your vendor partners aren't sending you more leads? This episode is going to give you a lot to think about. We've been getting messages from agents on both ends of this spectrum — some wanting to know how to get lenders to back off, and others wanting to know how to find a lender who w...

The market is tough, agents are stressed, and claws can come out. We get it. But being a jerk isn't going to make anything better, and this episode is our loving reminder of that. We are deep in summer and we just needed a little happy boost around here. So instead of another finger-pointy episode about what's going wrong, Katy and I sat down to share some genuine feel-good stories from the field....

Is your brain cluttered with every new tool, platform, and software someone told you that you absolutely need? Same. This episode started as a simple refresh of our tech stack after a listener wrote in asking what we actually use to run our businesses. Spoiler: the list is still shockingly short. But somewhere between Google Sheets and listing descriptions, we took a turn into AI territory, and y'...

Have you ever closed a deal only to find out you had the wrong person on the buyer rep agreement? Or listed a property without confirming who actually has legal authority to sell? This episode is your reminder that verifying identity in real estate transactions is not optional, and the stories in this one will make sure you never forget it. We are diving into a topic that sounds logistical but is...

Have you ever walked out of a listing appointment feeling like you just gave a masterclass... for free? In this episode we are talking about one of the trickiest catch-22s in real estate: you have to provide value to win the listing, but you also cannot give away the farm before anything is signed. This episode is a very honest, very practical chat about protecting yourself on listing appointments...

We've all forgotten something at the worst possible moment. (Alissa forgot $150 worth of Mother's Day cakes at the bakery.) Forgetting a cake stings. Forgetting to check FHA loan requirements for a distressed property can cost your buyer over $1,000 they don't have. That's the difference between a personal mistake and a professional one, and that's exactly what we're digging into today.   This epi...

You got your real estate license. But did you actually build a business, or did you just start collecting transactions? We get messages from y'all all the time, and so many of the problems you are writing about could be solved with one mindset shift: treat your business like a business. So this episode is your pep talk and your reality check, all in one. Real estate has a sneaky way of deceiving y...

Can a solo agent actually take a real vacation and come back to a business that's still intact? In this episode, I'm walking y'all through a real-time case study of taking time off as a solo agent. I just got back from a nine-day trip to Czech and Austria, and Katy is grilling me on every detail of how I prepped, who helped, what almost fell apart, and what I'd do differently next time.   I share...

Have you ever wondered if anyone at NAR is actually paying attention to what's happening out here in the trenches? This one's for you.   We recently had the opportunity to visit NAR headquarters in Chicago for their inaugural Creator Summit, and we walked away genuinely surprised. Not in a cynical way. In a good way. The visit was so eye-opening that we knew we had to bring one of the people behin...