Next Level Agents: The Kevin & Fred Show - Interviews with the best and brightest minds in the real estate industry

In this special roundtable edition of the Next Level Agents podcast, host Kevin Kauffman brings together four industry powerhouses – Chelsea Wright, Brittini Bowers, Katie DeWitt, and Erik Kelly – for a candid conversation about what truly separates consistently successful agents from those caught in cycles of mediocrity. This episode challenges conventional wisdom about real estate success, expos...

In real estate, being a broker is the ultimate dream we’re taught to aspire to, but for most people, it’s a nightmare. If you put the ego and bragging rights aside, you’ll find that most brokers aren’t happy.  They work 80+ hours a week, get very little time with their families, and at the end of the day, have very little to show for it financially. People often say a restaurant is one of the wors...

In an industry that celebrates making rain, GCI, units and volume, it’s really easy to lose sight of why we got into real estate in the first place. Most of us got into this for our families and for freedom to spend time with them. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, we forget and find ourselves working too much, prioritizing the next meeting,  appointment and commission check.    It’s only wh...

If you got into real estate 5-6 years ago, you might be forgiven for thinking this business is easy. We didn’t have the low inventory, high interest rates and the commission changes we’re dealing with now.  For any agent who started back then, the 2024 market might as well be a whole new industry you have to learn. It was a great time to get into the business, but in order to stay in the business...

Whether we like what’s happening in the industry or not, we have to learn how to embrace change. Turbulent and uncertain times aren’t as difficult if we can adapt quickly. It allows us to get into movement and momentum a lot quicker and that sets us up for success.  When it comes to embracing change, there’s one formula that can guide us. Intention + mechanism = results. If we’re not happy with th...

One of the key skills of a great salesperson is negotiation, but for the last decade, real estate agents could get away with no having it. Deals were so easy to put together, we didn’t have to fine tune our persuasion and communication abilities. Many agents have never had to do deep negotiation. Even veteran agents who came up in tougher markets need to brush up on that skill too.  With the way c...

Selling real estate in 2024 isn’t at all what it was between 2010 and 2022, and a lot of agents are feeling the squeeze. Most of us built and ran our businesses in low interest rate environments, so this market is completely unfamiliar to us. Running a real estate team is a lot more stressful than it used to be. Deals are harder to put together, we have stricter and newer rules to get compensated,...

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Bob Stewart of community evangelist at Place Inc, and Active Rain before that. Bob’s got a cool story - he’s been in and around real estate for many years. He was a pioneer in real estate blogging, and community building, and also understanding how to drive traffic to websites in the days before Google dominated everything. Bob comes from a place of contribution,...

Time is finite but so many of us are just not purposeful with it. People plan how they go to a movie better than they plan their life, the relationships they have. It’s amazing how calculated we are about our movies and vacations but we don’t do the same thing in our personal worlds.     Hard work is a key to success but what’s the point if there’s no true balance? So many of us say we work hard f...

A lot of people who would be exceptional recruiters don’t do it because it feels like too much of a burden. The idea of building tens or even hundreds of relationships and nurturing them just feels like too much of a logistical nightmare.  And it would be…which is why it’s the wrong way to do it. If you had a recruiting strategy that was based in building community, it would be so much easier.  A...

As driven entrepreneurs and hungry investors, we’re always searching for that big idea or once-in-a-lifetime deal. Then we find ourselves in a bunch of random businesses and investments in a bid to increase the odds of success.  More often than not, that only leads to a loss of focus and ultimately, a loss of wealth. What if getting to that billion dollar idea is as simple as picking something and...

This year, for the first time ever, I went to the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting AKA Woodstock for Investors AKA Coachella for Capitalists. Warren Buffett is by far, the world's most successful investor, and I was keen to hear what he had to say about the economy, his investing strategy and his mindset in the wake of the death of his business partner, Charlie Munger. As usual, Warren had a lot...

There are a lot of stupid people who have been massively successful in real estate. This isn’t an insult, just the reality of how uncomplicated it can be to build a beautiful business. But if you lack in intelligence, there are a few things you can’t lack if you want to succeed.  You can’t be impatient, inconsistent, undisciplined and undetermined. There’s a reason why the most successful agents c...

Ever since hedge funds started bundles of single-family homes, institutional investors have been demonized. They’ve been blamed for ruining affordability, taking homes away from innocent consumers and killing real estate entirely. Reality isn’t quite as dramatic - that narrative is drastically overblown. In fact, many real estate professionals are missing out on massive opportunities by buying int...

Whatever industry you’re in, marketing is something we all have to worry about. It’s our job to deliver eyeballs to whatever it is we have to offer. The challenge is, the rules of marketing and the platforms that can get us traffic are constantly changing, it’s hard to predict what will work in a few months.  What we have to be aware of is that people are using these marketing platforms to do thei...

There’s a reason people keep gambling even though we know the house always wins. There’s a reason we compulsively open apps on our phone without realizing it. Human beings are prone to falling into the trap of behaviors that feel good in the short term but hurt us in the long-term.  It’s the scarcity loop, and some of the ways our world has changed make it easier for us to get caught up in it. Fro...

A real estate transaction isn’t just a financial process, it’s an emotional one too. And we’re not just talking about the emotions of the seller and the buyer on the other side. From loan officers and appraisers to inspectors and other agents, there can be up to 35 people involved in every real estate sale, and all of them have their own emotions.  That’s why emotional intelligence has to be part...

There are two sides to growth, achievement and success - strategies and tactics as well as mindset and self-work. You can know what to do, but not be emotionally, mentally and spiritually prepared for it. This is why the real conduit to business growth is knowing yourself and what makes you tick.  The problem is: people tend to camp out on one or the other, overly focusing on the tactics or overly...

The real estate industry has always given people the ability to build a business on their own terms…unless you’re a solo agent who wants to remain that way.  Individual agents who want to grow without starting a team or joining a team have always been left out in the cold. There have never been models, structures and supports that allow them to scale without getting away from what they’re good at....

Most of us got into real estate and running our own businesses because we craved freedom and autonomy. The problem is that freedom can be the very thing that leads to us losing our businesses.  In order to have both the freedom and the sustained great results, we need to build constraints around ourselves. If we don’t, at any given moment, our businesses are under the threat of four killers.  No m...

The secret to growing a real estate team can be summed up in 4 words: people move the money. If you’re a team leader or broker owner looking to add more transactions to your bottom line, you can’t avoid adding to your agent count.  You could pour more into the agents you do have and try to squeeze more production out of them, but if you’re relying on that for growth, you’re going to be disappointe...

When we look at someone making and posting great content, we tend to overlook one thing. They all had that first crappy post or clumsy video. It doesn’t become polished overnight - it goes through a ton of iterations until it looks amazing. You don’t see the 100 steps the content creator had to go through - the period of being bad at it first, figuring it out, learning new things and applying them...

Real estate may have had its stormy period, but things are really close to being good again. Knowing all this, why are both real estate and mortgage bleeding over 40% of agents and loan officers?  Anyone you see leaving the industry right now has learned a brutal lesson - your results can only outpace your effort for so long. If you get used to cashing easy checks, in an easy market without the ef...

As agents, building a database and adding value to our sphere has been drilled into us. We took that same mindset and strategy, and applied it to our peers and agent relationships. Just like we’re told to host events and send gifts to our top clients, we do the same for the agent community.  We can attribute getting into this business and succeeding in it to the different agents and entrepreneurs...

Human beings are an aspiration and progress-based species, and money is the currency of this game. We’re always going to chase growth and success, and that comes with a lot of social debt and expectations, but if we’re not careful, that will get us in big trouble. We might find ourselves making decisions based on what impresses others, not what makes our lives better, and that’s the wrong way to g...