Nashville Real Estate: Why Relationships Beat Transactions | Steve Luther

Steve Luther (00:00)
You know, I think if for us internally, it lets us sleep at night ’cause we know we’re doing the right thing. And it’s not about the money. It’s about doing what’s right for the client. If you do the right thing, the money will come. That doesn’t need to be the focus. Obviously we’re a business, we’ve got to make money. But you just gotta keep the focus in mind of doing what’s right by your client. And people see that and they respect it and they keep coming back.

Joseph Crooms (01:55)
Hey everybody, my name is Joseph Crooms. I’m your podcast host. By the way, this is the Investor Fuel Real Estate Pros Podcast. And I am your host. Thank you so very much for joining in. But I am very excited that we have on our program today, Mr. Steve Luther. He’s a titan in his industry. I’m gonna allow him to talk about it and we’re gonna ask him some key experiential type questions he will answer for us. I had a great time meeting him. Also I ask that you keep his wife in prayer. Also, Steve say hello to everyone.

Steve Luther (02:28)
Hello, thanks for having me.

Joseph Crooms (02:29)
All right, great. Before let’s dive in. Steve, for people who may not be familiar with your real estate niche, give us the elevator version on how you describe your business and what markets are you operating in.

Steve Luther (02:44)
Sure. We own a firm called CHORD Real Estate, C-H-O-R-D like the music chord. We operate on Music Row here in Nashville, Tennessee. We kind of serve the greater Nashville area. It’s about a ten-county region. We also serve our clients who are interested in purchasing abroad. Do a lot of international real estate as well. But we formed CHORD really from the standpoint of what we wanted the client experience to be. We’re very focused on relationships, long-term goals for our clients, not as much transactional things. I think a lot of firms are very focused on just kind of churn and burn. Our philosophy has always been building these long-term relationships and helping clients achieve their life goals throughout numerous real estate transactions across their life. We’re very high-touch concierge service. We try to take as much off of our clients’ plates as we can. And we try to do little things to surprise them along the way as the relationship grows

Joseph Crooms (03:38)
Thanks for sharing that Steve. Steve, in the last two years, what is your book of business as far as revenue and volume? What would you say your monthly in the last two years? What is it? Where are you at?

Steve Luther (03:51)
So we’re a boutique firm. We’re definitely not the biggest in town, but we generally tend to do roughly about fifty, sixty million a year in volume. It’s typically like $1.3, $1.4 million in revenue. We’re doing roughly a hundred transactions a year. You can break that up monthly, but—

Joseph Crooms (04:10)
Yeah, I got you. Steve, let me ask you this. Is your business primarily residential or commercial or a mixture of both?

Steve Luther (05:06)
It’s a mixture. It is primarily residential. We started as a residential firm. We actually kind of look at commercial as an ancillary service. A large part of our client base are small business owners, entrepreneurs. And unfortunately, sometimes it’s a little difficult for a small business to get a commercial agent to respond, typically because if you’re leasing a small space, for example, the commissions are not very big. And they are generally more transactional based. For us, it doesn’t matter what that one transaction is going to bring in in revenue. It’s about growing that relationship, being there to help our clients with whatever they need. We’re probably about 10% commercial, ninety percent residential.

Joseph Crooms (05:46)
And what size homes are you helping your residential clients get into?

Steve Luther (05:52)
It’s really kind of all over the board. I mean we’ve got a lot of clients that are first-time homebuyers and we’ve done deals well over five million dollars. Just depends on the client. Again, we look at it as everyone deserves a great experience. And you never know where someone is gonna end up in their life. If someone’s starting out and they’re buying a three hundred thousand dollar condo or whatever, at some point they might be a ten million dollar mansion buyer or they may have a giant firm and need all these commercial services. And we just set out to provide that high-touch rock star experience for our clients. And we’re not really as concerned about what price point they’re at. On average we do tend to serve probably more of the luxury market. But a lot of our luxury clients are investors as well. And they’re often purchasing properties that are not in the top 10% of the market by any stretch.

Joseph Crooms (06:43)
Let me ask you this. What is the, if you have noticed a distinct difference, because I know everybody’s different, but what would you say is different about your residential client’s mindset, whether they’re luxury or just starting out, than those that are in commercial that have approached you?

Steve Luther (07:01)
Well, it depends on why they’re buying the residential. Anybody that’s looking at a residence where they’re gonna live, typically it’s a lot more emotional. There are very strong emotional reasons why they’re making the decisions they’re making. If it’s an investment property or if it’s a commercial deal, it’s definitely much more about the numbers. There’s a lot more analytics and spreadsheets and financials and all those kinds of things that we’re looking at. And you just have to kind of figure out what the motivations are for the client for the particular deal. But there are differences kind of in those regards.

Joseph Crooms (07:31)
After you get past the emotions, you gotta get down to the numbers. Show me how you walk a residential client and how do you get them to the numbers, but also to know why you named your company that you did—CHORD. What kind of music are you playing to?

Steve Luther (07:45)
I’ll answer that first. We actually hired a marketing firm to kind of help us come up with the name. We knew we wanted to build kind of a sports and entertainment and international brand. A lot of our clients—we’re in Nashville, there’s a lot of entertainment industry and there’s quite a few sports teams here as well. Athletics is a big thing here. This is a big market too for scouts and for trainers and that kind of thing because it’s easy to get to such a large portion of the country pretty quickly. There’s a lot of our clients were kind of in those fields already.

But the marketing firm, we basically gave them the idea of the type of experience that we wanted to create, generally the type of clientele that we typically deal with. And we gave them a list of places to go, just kind of take a look, experience, come back and give us what your ideas are. And there are actually three partners in the firm. It’s myself, my wife, and then we have another business partner who actually comes out of the music industry. But they came back after visiting one of the historic homes here in Nashville with this concept of a cord, C-O-R-D. And there was a biblical reference, “three strands of a cord are not easily broken.” And we just kind of internally got together and came up with the idea of just adding the H. There are three notes in a chord. It became more of a musical mix of three people that are kind of working as one. That’s kind of where the name came from. I forget what the other question was now.

Joseph Crooms (09:45)
Are you playing music to get your customers? I want to deal with—

Steve Luther (09:48)
Right, right. Yeah, yeah. I mean we always want to make sure that our clients are making good decisions. We don’t want anyone to get in a situation they don’t need to be in. We definitely like to get excited with people when they’re excited and the emotions are great, but we always have to take them back. We do market analysis for every home we’re looking at, every project we’re looking at. We go through the numbers with them. There are some times that they’ll want to overpay a little bit for something. We’ll have those conversations with them, like how long are you planning on being here? If it’s going to be a long enough time frame and you understand that if something happens, you might be underwater. It’s still their decision. But we do very much make sure we go over numbers with people every time. As emotional of a decision as it can be, they still need to understand what they’re getting into financially.

Joseph Crooms (10:36)
Steve, tell me a time. The question is normally general, but I want to ask it more specific. Tell me a time when you had to deal with a client over-enthusiastic and had money, but you had to get them to a place where, listen, this is more feasible. Can you walk us through what that looked like? Or what that sound like if I was a fly on the wall? Can you give us an example of a major—

Steve Luther (10:56)
Yeah, again it just gets back to revisiting conversations we’ve had early on about their motivations, what they’re trying to achieve, what the purpose of this purchase is or sale. And it’s just kind of taking them back to, “This is what you told me. I know you’re really excited, but I wanna make sure you’re thinking this through too. Like I don’t want you to be upset in a couple of years down the road because we didn’t bring this up. I want you to be excited. I want you to love what we’re doing. But I also want to make sure that you’re making a good financial decision and we’re keeping your long-term goals in mind. And we’re doing things that you told me you originally wanted to do.”

Joseph Crooms (11:34)
When did you see the change?

Steve Luther (11:36)
Sometimes it’s just a matter of time. It takes more than one conversation. Sometimes it’s just the fact that you have that conversation, people appreciate that. I think unfortunately there’s a lot of agents out there that are transactional, that just see the paycheck at the end, and if the client wants to do it, then whatever. I don’t care. We’ve just never had that philosophy. We’ve always wanted to make sure we’re looking out for our clients’ best interests and we’re keeping their long-term goals in mind. And sometimes just the fact that you’re telling them no, they shouldn’t do something, is enough to kind of get them to go, “Maybe I should think about this.”

Joseph Crooms (12:08)
And Steve, let me ask you this. You’re talking relationships, and you’re finding, and relationships is just not a superficial word. It’s a word that you guys have bought into. What’s been the biggest difference in your philosophy of doing business that you found? What’s been the biggest difference for you guys? And also your success notes.

Steve Luther (12:25)
Yeah, I mean, we get a lot of repeat and referral business. There’s no question about that. It is the bulk of our business. And I think that’s a testament to what we do, that people enjoy the experience and they feel confident and trust us and want to do business with us over the long term.

I think for us internally, it lets us sleep at night ’cause we know we’re doing the right thing. And it’s not about the money. It’s about doing what’s right for the client. If you do the right thing, the money will come. That doesn’t need to be the focus. Obviously we’re a business, we’ve got to make money. But you just gotta keep the focus in mind of doing what’s right by your client. People see that and they respect it and they keep coming back.

Joseph Crooms (13:04)
Ethics is a whole lot. Steve, we’re running out of time. Let me get to a common question. Let me ask you this. What you just talked about describes the type of people who are in it for the long term versus those that are dabbling. Because evidently your philosophy of doing business has worked, kudos to you. Let me ask you this. What do you focus on solving or scaling next? What’s the next real goal?

Steve Luther (13:25)
I mean, my previous career was in IT, so we’ve always been very tech-focused. A big part of my role is just kind of keeping abreast of what’s going on, not just in the real estate industry, but across all industries. What are the best practices, what are the new tools and things coming out, and how can we bring those into our world and make our client experience better? We look at what’s going on with AI and we try to figure out how that’s best going to be implemented in our business. For us, we wanna make sure that the tech that we’re implementing is not just purely about efficiency. It’s about improving the experience. It almost needs to be invisible to the client. Obviously it needs to provide some efficiencies of operation. There are things that it’s going to be really good at, but it doesn’t replace the human element. And the human element has to stay central to that relationship. In terms of scaling and future growth, I think it really hasn’t changed from what it’s been since I started in this business. It is continuing to develop the efficiencies of your processes, your systems, while keeping that human element and keeping the experience at the forefront of what’s important.

Joseph Crooms (14:31)
Steve, in the next few minutes, let me spend some time on your overseas business. Explain what the concept is and take it away.

Steve Luther (14:40)
Sure. It kind of started just from us personally. My wife and I were always big international travelers. We loved visiting other countries, experiencing other cultures, seeing what life is really like in other parts of the world. And we started going to the Caribbean quite a bit. We were looking at making a purchase in the Caribbean as a place that we could eventually maybe snowbird to. Started getting into all of the citizenship by investment, residency programs, all those kinds of things, all the benefits of mobility and having all these different options that just a lot of people don’t think about. And we started posting about it on our socials. And I’ll try and keep this short, but we had actually narrowed down to purchasing something in either St. Lucia or Grenada. And I ended up getting very sick with COVID, ended up in the hospital for four and a half months on a ventilator, was pronounced brain dead for four days, had all kinds of complications. And coming out of that, we reevaluated and realized healthcare was a very important decision for us. We started looking at where we could get that Caribbean feel, but someplace that had really world-class healthcare. And we ended up landing in Panama.

But just as we were posting like all these things we’re experiencing, all these things we were thinking about, we started having our clients reach out to us saying, “Hey, that’s really cool. We’re interested in that too. Can you help us with that?” And that launched our international business. And basically what we’re doing is we’re traveling abroad like we always did, but we’re developing relationships with vendors in each of those markets. We’ll vet local real estate agents, property management, attorneys that handle the real estate transactions, but also handle residency and citizenship questions. We’re vetting developers, making sure they’re legit, they’re well-financed, they’re finishing the projects that they say they’re gonna finish, and doing it in a very good way and timely and all those things. And that’s one of the hesitations I think a lot of people have abroad is they just don’t know who they can trust, who they can go to. And we’re developing that network and then being there to kind of help walk our clients hand-in-hand through the entire process with our local vendors.

Joseph Crooms (16:47)
Thanks for sharing that, Steve. And I’m so grateful that you’re still here, especially that period of time. Okay. We could be here all day, but we’re on a time constraint. You can’t fake those relationships and everything. And right now, before we wrap up, if someone wanted to contact you, maybe collaborate and learn more about what you’re doing, what’s the best way? And you can break it up into both businesses. Get it on the podcast, you can do it with the foreign as well as the local. And also I’m sorry to do this to you, but do it twice because somebody is looking for a pen while we speak and they’ll finally have it once you get to the end of your how to get in touch with you. It’s on you.

Steve Luther (17:22)
Easiest way is probably go to the website. It’s chordrealestate.com. Again, CHORD is C-H-O-R-D, like a music chord. chordrealestate.com. That’ll get you to pretty much everything. We’re on pretty much all of the social platforms with the username CHORD Real Estate. @chordrealestate on Instagram, same thing on Facebook, TikTok, X, whatever platform you like. And then for international, we actually have another Instagram channel, which is just @chordinternational. And we post a lot of stuff there as well. But website’s the best way. Of course, if you want to reach out by phone, we always love to talk to people in person. Our main office number is area code (615) 988-1001.

Joseph Crooms (18:02)
And can talk to you about both businesses if they call that number? Yep.

Steve Luther (18:05)
Absolutely. Right.

Joseph Crooms (18:05)
Give that number one more time, Steve.

Steve Luther (18:07)
It’s (615) 988-1001.

Joseph Crooms (18:12)
Great, perfect. Steve, thank you very much for joining or listen. I appreciate your time, your story. And like I said, I’m grateful that you are here. We need more people in this space who are doing things the right way. Thank you for doing it not just the right way, but helping communities and broadening their perspective about real estate. And for those of you tuning in, I know that you got some value from this. Make sure you subscribe. We got more conversations coming from operators just like Mr. Steve Luther, here at Investor Fuel Real Estate Pros Podcast. Hey, before we say goodbye and see you at the next episode, Steve, tell everybody, “I’ll talk to you soon.”

Steve Luther (18:48)
Thank you so much for having me and we will see you guys next time.

Joseph Crooms (18:51)
You guys make sure you use Steve’s number. Thank you so much, Steve. And we’re signing off. Thank you very much.

Steve Luther (18:56)
Thank you.