How I Transformed My Career: Lessons from a Top Atlanta Realtor

Dylan Silver (00:00.718)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host Dylan Silver and today on the show I have Kami Pyvand, realtor over 21 years based out of Atlanta, Georgia. Kami, welcome to the show.

Kami Pyvand (00:15.755)
Thank you, thanks for hosting it.

Dylan Silver (00:18.132)
Absolutely. I always like to start off at the top of the show by asking, how did folks get into the real estate space? So how did you get in?

Kami Pyvand (00:28.247)
I was a restaurant manager in 2004 in Atlanta and this lender comes in and asks me to sell the house that he has built. And I said, why are you asking me? I am not a realtor. I did not even know how that worked. And he said, well, you seem to know a lot of people. You seem to be good with people. So story short, I sold the house the next day and I called a regular.

diner and I said I need you to help me with writing a contract and she was confused. I gave her lunch, she wrote me a contract and I sold three more four cell phone owners those days in four months, one a month until I realized I need to have a license.

Somebody told me that somebody, sold a porcelain bar owner and the lady next door of this seller was upset that the seller had not listed with a neighbor. And she sees me at the house and she says, which company are you with? I said, I’m a first-time manager. She said, what do mean? You’re not a realtor. I said, no. She said, you have to have a license. I said, I had no idea. So I got a license within.

I think within a month, if I’m not mistaken, I was added. So that’s how I became a realtor.

Dylan Silver (01:48.984)
So going from restaurant manager to realtor, I’m imagining when you first started out after you did those first four FizzBows that you were still a restaurant manager and that it was part time.

Kami Pyvand (02:01.655)
Correct, correct, but as soon as I got my license, I gave my two-week notice to the restaurant and I was gone. I don’t like to do things part-time.

Dylan Silver (02:10.062)
Okay, wow. let’s walk, talk us through that. So it’s a big change, big change, and it’s something relatively new to you. You’ve been doing it under a year. What was the emotions like and what was the process for going full time?

Kami Pyvand (02:23.095)
So I give it everything. I give it all when I do something. do not like half, you know…

Dylan Silver (02:35.436)
Measures. Yeah.

Kami Pyvand (02:36.521)
Measures and measures is better than a SS. I don’t like half measures, right? I do not want it to be Let me see how it goes. I do not want it to be hopefully I give it all my neighbor next door His wife had become a realtor and I told him I said Paul I became a realtor said what about your other job? I said I quit he said you are absolutely out of your mind. I said maybe But I do it like this however, I was at work before 6 a.m. Every day

Dylan Silver (02:39.886)
you

Kami Pyvand (03:06.515)
I left the office literally around midnight, sometimes past until I was told that’s enough of doing all this. You have caught up and some because I thought I’m behind. So first year in real estate, I sold 16 homes, which apparently later on, I realized that it was much more than what most do even in their 10th year of the business. But it was the right mindset. It was, I was like,

Dylan Silver (03:30.478)
We’ll do.

Kami Pyvand (03:36.535)
Tiger, was a go-getter. No to me meant nothing. No to me was like, they’re not ready yet. Let me help them. Let me educate them through this. My mind was not more money. My mind was somebody’s gonna get it done. I wanna get it done. And I’ll get it.

Dylan Silver (03:53.944)
So in that first beginning phase, you already had four FizzBos that you sold, and so you’re going in with this unique experience. Not many people can say that they’ve done that. And then you’re finding your broker, you’re getting settled in, you’re getting into this swing of things. Those first deals as a newly licensed agent, were you…

getting a lot of mentorship from your broker because you had already done those first four deals. It was very much like I had old hat.

Kami Pyvand (04:25.431)
So when I, you know how it is with real estate school, you learn very, very, very basics because I mean, I would say even if you want to buy a pair of sandals for $10, you got to wear them, walk around with them for five, 10 minutes. Are they durable? Do they fit? Are they comfortable? It takes up 10, 15 minutes. Now imagine almost a number of hours they…

Dylan Silver (04:30.944)
Very basic.

Kami Pyvand (04:51.265)
the real estate school teaches is probably about the same number of hours that they teach you to become a Starbucks employee. Thanks to Starbucks employees are fantastic. But my point is that’s pushing some buttons and this one is understanding typography, structure, architecture, design, staging, negotiations, contracts, different types of people, different ethnicities, people’s emotions, NLP.

There’s a lot that goes on which obviously there’s not enough time in the real estate school to teach you. So now you’re on your own. So very my broker was a very, very nice lady. But within a very short period of time, I realized she doesn’t have more to tell me. She had told me everything she knew and she was great. I still respect her. She’s she was fantastic. But then she didn’t have more. Every question I had, she responded with a question which told me eventually, OK, she doesn’t know anymore.

So then, yes, I got into coaching. So I took any class there was. I started with Mike Ferry and I did anything there was. I did Tony Robbins seminars, Landmark. There’s a program called, later, then I took one on one coaching and I did anything that could improve me, including the right breathing. mean, everything that had to do with improving your person. So then later on I did,

Dylan Silver (06:10.894)
person.

Kami Pyvand (06:14.647)
landmark education, almost all the courses, communication, forum, advanced course, everything, ILP, introduction to leadership programming. And then I did ILP with Coldbanker twice, introduction to leadership. No, IL, introduction to leadership. I think it was ILP because they asked, yeah, something like that. That was 2005 because the president of the company asked me if I wanted to be a broker.

Dylan Silver (06:33.902)
Something like that.

Kami Pyvand (06:41.431)
Which I thought, said, don’t you, aren’t you supposed to be a broker after a few years in the industry? He said, if you want to be a broker, we’ll talk about that. But do you want to? said, I’ll take the class. So anything there was, I took. And then basically, to a point where I might, this point, 20, I mean, I’ve been in business 21 years, like 18 years after all this, I would say maybe in the third year, possibly I could have been ready to.

start coaching maybe I don’t know.

Dylan Silver (07:13.806)
So you got in right around 2005? 2004. OK, so let’s roll back the clock and talk about Atlanta real estate market in 2004. What was the scene like over there?

Kami Pyvand (07:16.449)
End of 2004.

Kami Pyvand (07:29.279)
Most, there were lots of forced-sale-buyers and then discount brokers had come in or had come in before me or had just come in. There were some companies I don’t want to name for certain reason and then they were doing okay and then people started realizing a professional is needed. You don’t pay for service, you don’t get service. You want to save a penny, you end up losing a dollar. I learned that through seeing sellers quickly. Quite honestly,

Somebody in my neighborhood and I’m not gonna say who did the same thing recently. They went with a discounted broker I’m not trying to be mean. It’s just the truth. They lost a lot of money. I’m talking about honestly a Lot like we’re talking six-figure In not getting the house ready correctly and not presenting the house correctly most many things about the house were not presented correctly that affected me as a neighbor and in a

Dylan Silver (08:27.052)
Yeah.

Kami Pyvand (08:28.011)
But then the person, when I told him what offer I had got on my house without even wanting to sell it, he froze and he almost started shaking like he lost a lot of money. My point is, I realize that you have to have, but having said that, sometimes you pay for full service. You may not get full service. However, if you pay, if somebody is willing to reduce their commission,

Dylan Silver (08:48.216)
This is Trump.

Kami Pyvand (08:55.329)
Well, that means that they are not confident. That means they might be desperate. That means they don’t know their own worth. All this goes hand in hand, right?

Dylan Silver (09:03.862)
It’s super critical and I think, know, being in the investment side of things out here in Dallas area and previously living in San Antonio, I saw a lot of flat fee listings, right? So that’s another version of it, right? And to your point, Cam, you get what you pay for, right? So if you’re going into it with the mindset of I just want to get on the MLS, well, then you’re not going to have anybody who’s really going to talk to a whole lot of buyers, right? And so they may be texting.

whoever put it up there and they’re not going to get a response you may get it linked to your phone this was 2005 right so I don’t even really know what they were doing besides maybe getting a voicemail right there wasn’t a whole lot of going back and forth in the same way as far as sending photographs or this type of thing so even probably more limited in scope that they could do back then

Kami Pyvand (09:57.301)
We’re limited however, what has been lacking, I mean, it doesn’t matter if it’s a personal relationship, if it’s a brother and sister, father and son, mother and daughter or a couple. There is almost never enough communication, that’s why we have so many issues. So the same thing happens when those days, people didn’t talk a whole lot. Today, they go through text because a lot of people do not want to pick up the phone. Are they becoming, are people becoming lazy?

Dylan Silver (10:13.326)
Thanks a lot.

Kami Pyvand (10:25.759)
I don’t know, are they losing confidence? I don’t I’m saying, it reminds me of that big fat Greek wedding. I don’t know, I don’t know because nobody tells me nothing. So anyway, so people don’t talk. So people, people even say, talk, call you to negotiate before they send an offer. Realtors like pick up the phone, talk to me. I might want to give you some good information. yeah, communication has been missing.

Dylan Silver (10:46.296)
They don’t.

Kami Pyvand (10:55.219)
one way or another throughout all this. And it is key.

Dylan Silver (10:59.532)
My buddy has a phrase, I’m a realtor here in DFW, newly licensed, but I’ve heard it and there’s some truth to this. He says that as soon as people become a realtor, they lose their phone.

Kami Pyvand (11:10.761)
I call them not real estate agents. They become secret agents. Come back to surface. Come on up.

Dylan Silver (11:15.502)
Yeah, where’d you go? I’d like to talk about scaling a business. So you did, I think you said 16 deals that first year. Impressive numbers, right? And you know the statistics, most agents fall off after two years. You know, they don’t renew or they just don’t engage in any real estate activities after that. My perspective is if someone wants to get into real estate or if they want to learn valuable skills,

The best thing to do, the best thing, and it sounds like you did a lot of this intrinsically, is networking and getting into the rooms. Because you can learn the skills, right? You can go to an online, you know, textbook style discussion. But getting in the rooms and talking to people and utilizing that skill set of that rapport building, of also just meeting new people and presenting who you are.

There’s some magic to that, to that networking that to me, if I had to pick between having a lot of textbook knowledge and then getting the networking component, I’m always gonna say networking first.

Kami Pyvand (12:28.459)
People still like human connections. It is a 300,000 year of evolution. People still like that. Even people who are, they think they are okay on their own and they don’t want to be connected. They still like it when they are connected with others. It’s in our genes, it’s in our blood. Even people who are on their phone all the time, I have noticed that they still feel lonely and like to be connected. They may not know how, but they like to be connected. So that’s where building rapport comes in.

Dylan Silver (12:54.371)
Yeah.

Kami Pyvand (12:58.423)
It’s, if you, if they don’t know you, you, when you’re unknown, you could be a threat. You could be, you could be unreliable. You could be not trustworthy. However, when they see you and they connect with you, the more they think you are of them, the better they would connect and end up working with you.

Dylan Silver (13:24.92)
Kami, you took a lot of courses that are very niche, very unique on communications, on leadership. If there was one, was there one specific one that was a huge game changer for you that you went into it and then it just changed everything after?

Kami Pyvand (13:45.151)
Wow, okay, wow, many. mean, Landmark Education was a huge impact. It’s called Landmark Education. That was the biggest impact. And one of the other impacts was the fire walk with Tony Robbins, which I think a few years after I did it, something went wrong when…

Dylan Silver (14:12.664)
Yeah.

Kami Pyvand (14:13.471)
A lot of people got burnt, like badly burnt. But that shifted a few things in me. Landmark education was another. Yeah. But you know, when you were asking that, when you were mentioning that, I thought you were going to ask what one thing would you think of when you, after all this and

If you had something of the questions you’re going to ask, I would say eventually you would realize is no matter where people come from, no matter what age, color, race, status.

People are people. We are the same. Some people act a little bit tougher for whatever reason. I don’t want to get into that. Some people might feel different, normal, victim, bully. Eventually people are people and emotions are emotions. And once we know that, it doesn’t matter if the person I’m shaking hands with has a very…

low-paid job or the president of such-and-such country. People are people.

Dylan Silver (15:22.474)
It’s almost hearing you say that I can picture you once you’ve seen kind of the. Avatar of this type of person like they have this background you know this type of temperament you can see similarities in other cultures and other geographic areas right and so things start to seem less foreign and I’ve seen this as I’ve hosted more podcasts and as I’ve talked to more people and my limited time as a realtor.

I started to pick up on that, not quite as eloquently as you said it, but I started to see that there’s so many similarities between people that even when on paper they’re so entirely different, you can actually get a good sense of how one person might behave based on a previous experience with something totally unrelated.

Dylan Silver (16:16.718)
You know, can be pivoting a bit here. Let’s fast forward chronologically from 2005. You had 2008 where the market crashed. Then you had the 2010, 11, 12 period where you saw a restoration to today where we’ve survived COVID. And here you are all those years later, having been through ups and downs through, you know, multiple lulls in the market.

and still standing. I like to think that real estate entrepreneurs, realtors, anybody who’s in the real estate space has to be able to adapt to get through these types of time periods. What were some of the adaptations that you employed to help you stay strong during these times and to grow your business?

Kami Pyvand (17:01.121)
Two things, the one is basics are basics. When something is working, keep it up, do the same thing. Now you can add stuff to it if you wanna add something, but don’t deviate from what you’re doing. If it’s working, if ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Isn’t that what they say? Is that a Texas thing, Texan thing, or is it everywhere? If it ain’t broke, so if it’s working, just do the same thing.

Dylan Silver (17:21.292)
Maybe everywhere.

Kami Pyvand (17:28.023)
If you need to shift a little bit, okay, so you’re doing cold calls, that’s what I used to do. If you’re doing cold calls, if there’s technology, add the technology to it, get an auto dialer to make it faster. But that doesn’t mean totally change your course, which during these 21 years, I have changed courses. And then I realized I shouldn’t have changed courses. I should have stayed on my course, maybe a little shift.

Dylan Silver (17:52.302)
As a realtor when you talk about basics, what are the basics if we go granular? What are the basics as a realtor?

Kami Pyvand (17:58.731)
So.

Kami Pyvand (18:03.031)
My broker used to bring me, I was the poster child, bring me to the, when there was a class, she would always ask me a question or bring me up to the class and would ask the agents to ask, I have your question? Because I was, an agent, I’m selling more than most and I have been in the business very short. It was not that I was smarter than others, it’s just that I did, I was intentional about it. So.

So basics, somebody asked me, this lady said, so, and she is ready to take notes. She thinks I’m going to say something she’s never heard before. She says, so if you were to give us one thing, what would that be? said,

Plan your business, plan your work, and work your plan. And she was disappointed. She didn’t write it down. We have forgotten that those golden rules, we had them a thousand years ago, we still have them today. They do not change. We might have to make a little shift, but it’s the same thing. You change your clothes to a different color, but it’s still clothes. You got…

Basics are you got to treat this as a business right and that’s what I did for a number of years again I have been off track on track, but for a big number of years I was on track the whole time like you mentioned in 2011 when a lot of agents were dropping out of business For eight months in a row. I was number two in the entire coal banker in mitra, Atlanta Right. So so the reason was I was going to work at six in the morning. I would come back home

No sooner than that, no earlier than eight in the evening. I was the first one to go in, was the last one to leave. And then I just exactly did it. My thing was call calling and I did it. Now, would it have made sense that I would also add somebody to help me with the referral network? Yes. Would it have made sense that I would add a system where we would send out postcards out every month and happy birthdays and you know how it is.

Kami Pyvand (20:06.711)
There’s somebody buys a house with you. They like you, but then three years down the road, they want to sell. They talk to a neighbor next door. They forget about you and they sell it with them. And they say, and then six months later, they say, I think Kami was better. Like, okay, but if I had stayed in touch. So basics are those, those things that they teach in any business, they always stay the same. When people ask is the market going up or down and say basics supply demand, where are we with supply? Where are we with demand?

In 2007, there were 40 homes for each buyer. 120,000 homes in the market, 3,000 sales a month. That’s 40 homes for each buyer. Supply demand. House calls on the market for a million, make an offer of 400,000. Who cares? It’s a commodity now. Now, think shift, but still stick with basics. Stick with basics. If you want to do cold calls, do that. If you want to do…

Let’s say you want to use Brian Baffini or not. I’m not promoting Brian Baffini. I’ve never used him. I’m sure he’s good. I’ve never used him. Do that for referrals. Just stick with basics. The same basics that we have always learned and we all know. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (21:15.95)
have a plan and execute, right? It’s about seeing it through. These days, I ditch the pen and paper calendar and I have my Google calendar, which I say is like the only way that I know what’s happening in my day, because if it’s not on the Google calendar, I’ll have no idea what’s going on here. But, Kami, we are coming

Kami Pyvand (21:34.463)
If it’s not on your calendar, doesn’t exist. Remember that.

Dylan Silver (21:39.092)
That’s exactly how I feel. Kami, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to get ahold of you?

Kami Pyvand (21:46.743)
One would be my website firstnamelastname.com K-A-M-I-P-Y-V-A-N-D.com and on Facebook it’s Kami Pyvand, K-A-M-I-P-Y-V-A-N-D and on Instagram same thing Kami.Pyvand, K-A-M-I.P-Y-V-A-N-D.

Dylan Silver (22:09.742)
Kemi, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Kami Pyvand (22:12.983)
Absolutely was great. You are a great host. It did fantastic. Happy to be with you.