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How We Doubled Our Real Estate Revenue Without Buying More Leads

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Show Summary

In this episode of the Real Estate Pros Podcast, Micah Johnson interviews Christopher Watters, a seasoned real estate professional with over 20 years of experience. Christopher shares his journey from starting in retail real estate to building a successful team and developing innovative AI tools to enhance sales performance. He discusses the challenges faced in the Austin market, the importance of lead generation, and how AI has transformed their approach to sales and team dynamics. The conversation emphasizes the significance of adapting to market changes and leveraging technology for business growth.

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    Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

    Christopher Watters (00:00)
    And so the two metrics we improved was face to face conversion from 40 to 53. And then it used to take us 15 leads to get one appointment booked. Now it takes 10. Those two KPI changes doubled our revenue without spending any more money on revenue, excuse me, without spending any more money on lead generation. And so, you know, we went from a $500,000 a month to a million dollar a month by just fixing those two KPIs.

    Micah Johnson (00:14)
    Wow.

    Hello everyone. Welcome to the real estate pros podcast. I’m your host, Micah Johnson. And today I’m joined by Christopher Watters who makes some serious moves in real estate now for over 20 years. Christopher, welcome in man. ⁓ Absolutely. Glad to have you today. I’m excited for our conversation. We were digging in a little bit pre-recording and you’ve built a tool that’s

    Christopher Watters (02:07)
    Hey, thanks for having me on.

    Micah Johnson (02:17)
    It’s leveling up your game, man. And I’m excited for folks to hear about it. So let’s dig in on it for those out there who aren’t familiar with you yet. Tell us some more about yourself and what your main focus is right now.

    Christopher Watters (02:28)
    let’s see, got started in real estate 20 years ago out of college and, always want to be in the investment game, but I didn’t have any money to do it. So, you know, started on the retail side, working with buyers and sellers and then built a team. got that team really quickly to do, you know, let’s see, I think we got up to a thousand closings a year and, then started expanding into building a wholesale team, do an acquisition disposition.

    I’ve kind of lost count how many houses I’ve flipped at this point. I don’t know, hundreds. And I do other things, land development, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, wrote a book. I’m happy to give your listeners a copy of it for free called The Million Dollar Real Estate Team. yeah, eat, sleep, and breathe real estate, Do it, real estate, money.

    Micah Johnson (03:10)
    Awesome.

    Yeah, you’ve got the book for sure.

    Yeah. Yeah. All the things, man. You got a few inches that you got to scratch. Sounds like it. Well, take us to today with something that you’ve been working on. Cause we were talking about a little before you’re in the Austin market and y’all started going through a lot. What’d you tell us a little bit about that and you know what you did to overcome it.

    Christopher Watters (03:37)
    Yeah.

    Well, so, you know, I’ve anybody that’s listening to show, you know, if you spend money on lead generation, right, to find go get deals, ⁓ whether you’re helping buyers or sellers, or you’re trying to find homeowners and you’re trying to, you know, assign contracts or get subject to deals, whatever, you know, it’s all about ⁓ when that lead comes in, are you seeing the right thing on the phone to get the appointment booked? And then when you get face to face with somebody, are you seeing the right thing face to face to win the deal? Right.

    And so our market down here has just gotten completely obliterated. ⁓ I mean, we were just getting our butts kicked. Prices have fallen. You know, they were the average price point in Austin was like 620. And now it’s down to like just over 400,000. So the markets just gotten completely obliterated. And so our conversion rates, you know, we’re getting crushed and we’re spending money on lead generation and we’re trying to like

    Micah Johnson (04:25)
    Wow.

    Christopher Watters (04:35)
    find every little nook and cranny to figure out how to squeeze more juice out of the money we were spending on marketing. ⁓ we tested a lot of tools. had these tools that were like tracking the… So I have team members, right? I’m not out there in the field, but we wanted to track their conversion rates. Like, how many calls did you make? How many those turned into appointments? How many appointments turned into signed deals? And so those like…

    those numbers can kind of tell you a story, right? But it doesn’t tell you the whole story. Those numbers tell you like, they just tell you from a high level, like, you know, what’s going on. And if you can compare and contrast with other people, then maybe you’re like, okay, well, maybe my salesperson needs help face to face converting the deal, or maybe they need help on the phone, or maybe they’re just not even working that hard, you know? And so like,

    Micah Johnson (05:06)
    Right.

    is

    Right.

    Christopher Watters (06:14)
    we had, you know, we had these dashboards and they were super helpful, but we still weren’t.

    you know, really moving the needle to drive profitability and do more deals. And, so we, we built this, app and our, our salespeople, when they go on appointments, it records the face to face appointment, like at the kitchen table. And it’s, you know, it’s essentially like kind of like an AI note taker. it’s, it’s integrated with open AI, but we uploaded over 10,000.

    hours of training content and all of our scripts and our reporting rubrics and you know the AI basically spits out a report after the appointment and said like you know here’s all your notes right about the appointment like what happened all the bullet points and sometimes there’s some like follow-up items in there but then there’s also this section about like hey the three things you did really well and the three things that you need to improve upon and so

    You know, I started getting those reports and you know, my salespeople, I think are some of the best in the industry. They’re doing 60 to 120 deals a year. And like, that’s not a new phenomenon for me. my team members have been hitting those numbers for over a decade. So they’re not, you know, they’re not like rookie or inexperienced. know what they’re doing, even some of my best performers, I was like shocked at what I was learning from the reports that were coming back.

    and the things that they were saying and the things they were doing or not doing. so we, you know, we, again, we track face to face conversion. And I was telling you this before the show, our face to face conversion went from 40 % to 53%. We, by the way, this tool also tracks the phone calls. So, you know what people are saying on the phone. So, you know, ideally they’re converting the leads and saying the right things on the phone to get the leads turned into face to face meetings.

    And so the two metrics we improved was face to face conversion from 40 to 53. And then it used to take us 15 leads to get one appointment booked. Now it takes 10. Those two KPI changes doubled our revenue without spending any more money on revenue, excuse me, without spending any more money on lead generation. And so, you know, we went from a $500,000 a month to a million dollar a month by just fixing those two KPIs.

    Micah Johnson (08:21)
    Wow.

    Christopher Watters (08:31)
    And what’s really cool is, you know, usually, you know, when you have a team and you’ve got

    guys underneath you, guys or gals. Sometimes they can get frustrated because they feel like you’re constantly critiquing them, telling them what to do and why not to do. And so this AI tool is just like, you know, self-serving them the feedback, right? And there’s no emotion in it. And so it’s been pretty cool because it’s helped us like alleviate some of that tension between team members. But just had, you know, I haven’t done anything that’s had this as

    Micah Johnson (08:44)
    Mm.

    Right.

    Christopher Watters (09:05)
    this dramatic of an impact as, as anything else I’ve ever done. used to think just like spend more money to get more leads, spend more money to get more leads. And like, you know, of course, like we train the agents, we go through like a 30 day bootcamp and do team meetings and all training and all that stuff. But it’s like, you know, it’s really hard to inspect what you expect in the, in, that, unless you do ride-alongs and those take forever. So anyways, that’s, that’s been the really

    Micah Johnson (09:13)
    Right.

    Right? Right? And it’s not even the real thing.

    It’s not them in motion, you know, because that’s the value of what I’ve seen you’ve done, is that ability to hear what they’re saying at the table, the ability to hear them because we all know sales is a never ending learning game, just like real estate. Like you got to keep up with it. It’s not kind of a set it and forget it thing. And even the best can get stuck in little ruts, say little things that

    Christopher Watters (09:35)
    Yeah, that’s been a good game for me.

    Micah Johnson (09:59)
    They don’t even realize it’s cost and deals, but it’s literally turning people off where I enjoy the AI tools that for my world that you’re talking about. Cause really what it is, it’s game film. It’s just reviewing your film. It’s going back and seeing, okay, awesome. You did great. You scored a touchdown here, but you fumbled over here. And it’s not about beating yourself. If you take it personal, when you mess up, then you’re never going to get better. So everybody just take deep breath there.

    It’s okay to fail at it. The point is being able to take the feedback. That’s the skill. Can you look at what it told you and then make adjustments? Because what that does, heck man, you’re talking about reviving. You’re in a market where things are feeling crushed. Team morale starts to feel crushed pretty easy. And now you’re introducing a tool that’s at least bumping attitudes somewhere. You didn’t double the revenue by not closing more deals, right?

    Christopher Watters (11:25)
    Yeah, I mean, it’s one of my best salespeople, one of my best salesperson. She went on this appointment and she, I literally see it in the transcript where she says, I couldn’t find any sales cops. And so she showed up with like no kind of market data to try to like validate, you know, anything related to pricing. And, and I saw that man, I was like, I was kind I was kind of pissed in the moment.

    I’m like, how do you not show up? What’s crazy is she won the deal, right? But what’s frustrating is, and this is what’s been happening to us a lot the past two years, is she won the deal, but then we couldn’t collect on the back end because she took it overpriced.

    Micah Johnson (11:52)
    Wait a second, you’re good at this!

    Right? Right.

    Christopher Watters (12:13)
    And so,

    you know, it’s like, historically, I would have just been like, you know, whatever the seller wasn’t realistic. No, the issue was my, my team member showed up without the data and just, you know, said to the seller, like, Hey, we’ll give it a try at this price and see what happens. And it’s like, you know, you spend a lot of money when you take on a deal, you spend, you spend a lot of time. And so anyways, there’s a lot of self correction or,

    There’s a lot of self correction that happens on our sales team members part now, cause like they see it. They also know we’re tracking it. And so there’s, we’re having, you know, it’s like, I’ve been using this for six months and every single person’s, skills score to basically like, it gives you a skills score, like how good you are basically, or how good you are on the phone. And like, we’ve seen consistently every month, people’s skills scores steadily going up. And it’s like, they’re building this habit.

    of remembering to like ask these key things and remembering like when they get an objection not to just shut down like to go for the close again, right? And, and so anyways, it’s been a, you know, it’s had a dramatic impact on our business. so, yeah, I think anybody spending money on leads that cares about how do you get better? You know, I haven’t found anything else like this for, you know, people in that small to medium business game.

    I’ve seen some, I’ve seen some stuff for, was looking, you know, I was looking at some solutions for like large enterprises and, you know, you need to be some like technical ways to put all this stuff together. and this is like stupid prove your agents just like literally go to the app store and hit download and then hit record. know, two of the biggest things that popped up, when we started using this was like, I had these, I had some salespeople that didn’t want to use it and.

    You know, one of them was like, what about consent? You know, do I have to tell the person I’m doing it? And it’s like, you know, all the people, all the homeowners, when we said, Hey, we have an AI note taker. They were like, well, you know, yeah, it’s great. It sounds amazing. Sure. Or no problem. it was only the agents I was always a little skeptical of were the ones that weren’t hitting record. and, and didn’t want me to like be inspecting, you know, how the appointment was going. And,

    So that was one issue was like people were complaining about consent, which everybody we found like was like amazing, know, homeowners didn’t care. And then the second, the second issue was, the agents didn’t want to feel like it was big brother looking over him. And so most of the report that the agents, the sales team members get,

    It’s like 80 % things that’s going to help them make their job easier. Cause it like reminds them of everything that happened in the appointment. It gives you all these bullet points of like, Hey, don’t forget like post-appointment, you got to do A, B, C, D, E. Like, you know, I saw one yesterday and you know, the seller said they did the roof and they did the foundation and, we needed to get the paperwork about it. Right. And so it, it, it helps them immensely, even post-appointment. So anyways,

    Micah Johnson (16:01)
    Yeah. Well, you said it there. It’s kind of autophobic, your crew inspect what you expect. It’s one of my favorite quotes because you have to. And it’s what I’m looking for. You said this too, being able to your agents and team, being able to see it not coming from you where it feels like you’re beating them up has a draft, drastic difference.

    Christopher Watters (16:02)
    It seems it’s usually the people that.

    Micah Johnson (16:25)
    Right. Because it’s literally their behavior reflected back to them. It’s not like it’s opinion. It’s a trained model that understands what’s going on. So I can give it back and that helps them take that feedback a little better. Cause if you, if you can’t take that feedback, that’s where you’re dealing with the person. They don’t want to do it right. They’re not really there to be serious. And that’s where, man, as a team, I love sports analogies. grew up in sports and athletics. And when you get into business, realize, you know, if business was held to the same accountability, a good team is.

    This would look way different there because you can’t tolerate it. you just, someone not pulling their weight, right? That left guard ain’t blocking. That quarterback is hurting. That is not, we can’t have that. Yeah. There’s no LA blocks on this team. Y’all like we all got to do our job and there’s that mentality to it. So it’s, it’s, love hearing about a product because you were talking about a little bit, you gamified it too, right? Cause that’s a big deal now with people is to like,

    Christopher Watters (17:21)
    Yeah, I mean…

    Micah Johnson (17:23)
    What gets them going and participating? Cause these are good people at the positions you’re talking about. These are professional sales folks that, if gave it by correctly, it should jazz them up. I know I do it. I get it. That thing that’s like, okay, okay. I see what you’re doing over there. All right.

    Christopher Watters (17:35)
    Yep.

    Yeah, it’s, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about like the kind of conversational side, right? Like creating the phones in a person. But there’s also like a main dashboard for the agent and the owner. And it tells you how many calls and appointments they made and what those conversion rates are and ⁓ how many face-to-face deals they win, how much revenue they have in their pipeline. And then there’s the leaderboards that shows that salesperson where they rank compared to everybody else.

    So that stuff’s all cool and it’s in there and we use, we use follow boss. And then I have another group in my, in my company that’s on Salesforce and it connects to pretty much every CRM out there. But and you know, all this stuff happens real time. There’s like no manual data entry or like, you know, uploading manual uploading, like it does all this stuff automatically. But it’s, it’s yeah, great for people that are competitive. You can see where, how you rank.

    Man, you know something that was surprising. Another really surprising thing that I’m thinking about is we’ve, we like, we’ll sometimes go out there and like spend money on leads to go find more deals. And we, you know, we’ll test something, right? And usually we got to test it for like three, four, five, six months. And something I’m finding out really quickly because I get the calls in the in-person meetings now, like the notes is like, I’m identifying what lead sources are complete garbage, like really fast.

    Like we were running these campaigns on Meta and we had lots of people coming in and I could hear on the calls pretty consistently, people like, yeah, I saw you on Facebook, but I’m not really that serious about selling. I was just kind of curious what you’d pay. And it just like completely drowned our guys with all these crappy leads.

    and so we figured out real quickly, we’re like, we need to get off of that lead source, you know, ASAP, cause it’s just generating a bunch of junk. And so, you know, one, one thing I is the conversion side, but the other cool thing is, we’ve, we have saved, I mean, the, the amount of money is in the six figures we’ve saved in the last six months on Legion campaigns, because now we know like what is actually bringing in the people that are closing, versus like the stuff that’s just, you know, bogging us down.

    whether on the phone or at the kitchen table. So that’s been another pretty big surprise to us is the lead sourcing. Like lead attribution, we understand at a granular level now, because we’re literally hearing what they say. And back in the day, we used to just have to manually listen to calls, do write-ons, and it’d just take an obscene amount of time. And it’s really hard to do consistently over time. So this does it automatically after every call on every appointment.

    Micah Johnson (19:56)
    Right?

    Right.

    Christopher Watters (20:24)
    and sends us a report literally as soon as they walk out of the door. So it’s been a, yeah, man, it’s completely turned our business around, especially down here in Austin where we’ve been just getting crushed.

    Micah Johnson (20:36)
    And that’s one thing that’s interesting about the hard markets, man. They squeeze the best out of people. They force you to do it. It’s why you make it through them, man. They create things and it’s funny. mean, I’m really into personal development behind everything. We don’t want to change if we don’t want to change. If things are good, we’re not going to adjust, right? We’ll keep doing stuff that seems to be working because it’s what we’re doing. And then life alters itself a little bit and it’s like,

    Christopher Watters (20:43)
    Yeah.

    Thanks

    Micah Johnson (21:03)
    God, I got to do something different now. Are you serious? And it’s like, that’s just the way it goes. But if you’re a good sport about it and realize, okay, this is the opportunity, the challenges, the chance, what can we really do here? Are we serious about it? Cause that’s what I see the best real estate folks do. We all know their cycles. We all know. We never know like exactly how they’re going to hit what it’s going to look like, but it’s been doing weird stuff for the last hundred years and I don’t think it’s going to stop. So it’s that what really helps you

    get more juice for the squeeze if you’re going to do it, man. So I love the fact that you’ve pulled that out there. And now it’s created a product where I see the value in it, man. Like what it can do for people, especially down to that, you just said it lead attribution. That’s one of the harder statistics to get for your business. It’s just difficult to get, especially when you’re doing like you’re doing, you’re everywhere, man. You’re omni-marketing, you’re all over the place. So to get into really hear them say it,

    Christopher Watters (21:35)
    Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (22:00)
    You said it, not wasting money is just as good. That keeps money in the bank as well. And when you can dial that back as fat, used man to be able to do it as quick as you did it. That’s not easy to do in marketing. Usually it takes a lot of data, understand when things are swinging, what to do. And y’all were able to nail it right there. So I love what you built, man. I love it. for those.

    Christopher Watters (22:20)
    Game tape,

    that’s a good way to put it, man. I like that word. It’s like game tape. Yeah.

    Micah Johnson (22:24)
    That’s

    it, man. That’s what it is. Again, I come from it. I’ve been forced to watch all my bad plays many, many times and it taught me to get over it and just, okay, what actually did you do? What were you thinking right there? Why did that seem like a good choice then? And what would you do next time? Right? What should you have done? Those kinds of things. And if you’ll do that, I’m telling y’all as a sales guy who’s still trains actively all the time, just adjust. You can always get better.

    You can always talk to somebody a little better. You can always understand them little better. There’s a skill to sales. And if you can realize that usually you’re missing it because of you, holy cow, you can just start dominating. It changes everything.

    Christopher Watters (23:07)
    You nailed it, man. It’s just diagnosis and then prescribed.

    Micah Johnson (23:12)
    That’s it, that’s it, make the adjustment. Well, Christopher man, I really appreciate your time today, your story, your perspective. For those out there listening in that would like to find out more about the product, possibly follow along with what you got going on, what’s the best way for them to find you?

    Christopher Watters (23:25)
    Yep. So, if you guys want to see like the, just the conversational AI component that we’ve been using, it’s the website is table, like, you know, kitchen table, table, O S dot AI. And, if you guys want to follow me on Instagram, you know, go send me a DM, look me up, whatever. it’s just look up Christopher Watters, Watters with two T’s.

    And I have a, my book’s on Amazon. It’s, you know, I wrote it seven, God, seven years ago, but I’m happy to give people a copy of it for free. You have to go to, it’s a long URL. It’s like a URL we set up for, you know, giving people free copies. You can buy it on Amazon too. It’s themilliondollarteam.com. And you can probably just Google that.

    the million dollar team.com and it’ll pop up. yeah, books free. Cost me a couple dollars to ship it. But if you don’t even want to pay for the shipping costs, we can get you digital copy of it too.

    Micah Johnson (24:29)
    I appreciate that, man. Those listening in and watching, check our show notes. We’ll make sure all the links that David or that Christopher mentioned are there. ⁓ Again, man, thanks for being with us. Appreciate your time today. Thanks everybody out there for listening and watching with us. If you got value out of today’s episode, please like this episode, share it with someone else you think get value out of it as well. And always, if you don’t subscribe yet, please subscribe to our podcast. We appreciate every single one of you that follows along with us out there.

    Christopher Watters (24:41)
    Thank you.

    Micah Johnson (24:56)
    We got more conversations coming up with operators just like Christopher out there building a real business in the industry. Thanks for being with us. We’ll see you on the next episode.

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