Stop Being the Hero: Real Estate Marketing Lessons Agents and Investors Need to Hear

Rachel Ferrell (00:00)
Totally. So we all take pictures every day. I like to play roulette with my phone. You know, we’ll sit down and we’ll look at our computers or we’ll look at something and say, I don’t, I don’t know what I’m going to post today. My camera roll has like 16,000 pictures in it. There’s no reason for me to go and reinvent the wheel and find something to post or find something to take pictures of or create assets for today. I already have it in my phone.

Michelle Kesil (01:59)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil, and today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Rachel Ferrell, who is a real estate agent in Tennessee, as well as a marketing and storytelling coach. So, excited to have you here today, Rachel.

Rachel Ferrell (02:18)
Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here.

Michelle Kesil (02:20)
Great, let’s dive in. So first off, those new to your work, can you share what your main focus is?

Rachel Ferrell (02:28)
Absolutely. So I’m a real estate agent in

Tennessee, southern middle Tennessee. And I got into real estate to help people buy affordable houses. I was outpriced in Murfreesboro where I grew up and needed to find a house that was affordable for my family. And we through a dart at a board ended up in Tullahoma. And it was one of the best decisions that we could have made. So fast forward. ⁓

I decided I wanted to get into real estate so I could share that message that affordable housing exists outside of major cities and you can still live the life of your dreams there. And that is, that’s how I got into the business.

Michelle Kesil (03:09)
⁓ and what exactly is the market that you’re serving?

Rachel Ferrell (03:16)
Yes. So we’re

Tallahama, Coffee County. I’m almost on the border of the Alabama. We’re on the Alabama line. like Huntsville would be an area that some agents who serve here could serve. They serve there too, just because it’s so close. ⁓ Definitely in the middle. I’m about an hour from Chattanooga, an hour from Murfreesboro, an hour from Huntsville. We’re like just kind of right smack dab in the middle, but definitely a tertiary market, not like a main. ⁓

know, primary market. So for investors specifically, market like ours is a little bit of a different beast.

Michelle Kesil (03:54)
absolutely. And what is your journey with working with investors?

Rachel Ferrell (04:00)
Yes, so I love working

investors. They’re some of my favorite people just because they’re so practical and they know their numbers really well. I don’t have to coach somebody on ROI and ARV and all of the things. You know, I can just have a conversation about real estate with somebody and try and help them get to the finish line. I started working with investors like five years ago and really enjoyed it. Being able to start on the front end and say, hey, this is

This is what you’ve got in front of you. These are the things that you should do. These are the things I wouldn’t worry about. Specifically, again, in our market, we would have investors come in and say, okay, well, we’re gonna put granite countertops in this house. And I’m like, hold on. You do not need to put granite countertops inside of this house. Save your money there and put it somewhere else, ⁓ just because our buyers have a different kind of taste than some of them in the main markets. Anyway, so working with investors has been…

a lot of fun over the years.

Michelle Kesil (05:00)
Awesome. And are there a lot of investors investing in the area that you’re in?

Rachel Ferrell (05:54)
Yes. So we’ve got, we’ve have a lot of core investors that have been in coffee County, Tallahoma for a long time. Like it’s definitely a legacy kind of market, real estate agents, you know, everybody’s used the same real estate agent for 40 years. And it’s kind of the same way with investors for a little while. If you have a house that you need to sell, but you don’t want to sell it on the market, you call this one person. So there are investors who have been coming from out of area.

prospecting here and they’ve seen a lot of good ⁓ success.

So we have a lot of interesting stuff happening over here. Manchester specifically is on 24. So our main interstate that connects those like primary and secondary markets to this one. Manchester is the first tertiary market that you hit. And in Manchester, there’s a lot of really exciting things happening. We’ve got some mega sites that the state has been developing and trying to sell. I think the Ford

electric plant had considered us for a little bit. But whenever the primary markets got too expensive for the average buyer, I started noticing more investors coming out this way, especially during the big boom in 2021, 2022. They could get something for dirt cheap and flip it for quite a bit more money, whether they held it or wholesale it. They were able to get quite a bit on the other side. The problem with investing in a market like this, though, is that when the going is good,

It’s really good, but the minute the market shifts, it can get really tough really fast. When affordability is a problem, you know, just people don’t really, it hits us harder than it does anywhere else. So we’re very, very clearly in a buyer’s market with six, seven, eight months supply, 11 months in some of our areas of town. But then when you get into the bigger markets,

obviously it goes faster. So if you’re looking for something really quick in a market like we have now, a tertiary market is going to be a little bit more of a challenge.

Michelle Kesil (07:56)
Yeah, absolutely. And are the investors you work with typically also in your area or are they coming from like other states, other areas?

Rachel Ferrell (08:07)
Totally coming from out of town. So most of them are coming from our

Nashville area. And then I have one I’m working with that’s out of Carolina. They are doing land. They do land. So they send the letters and get the response. And then I will help them get to the finish line for their initial purchase. So even though I’m not getting paid to do that part of it, I’m happy to help my investors on the front end. And then

list it on the other side if it makes it to the closing table. I mean, I’m fully aware that there are times where you invest in a project that doesn’t actually close. So I’m happy to help.

Michelle Kesil (08:48)
Yeah, absolutely. And what have been some of the main keys that have allowed your business to grow and run successfully?

Rachel Ferrell (08:56)
Yes, so with real estate specifically in marketing, social media marketing, just trying to be a really great communicator, when it comes to investors specifically as a real estate agent, again, you have to think like an investor. I I try to read the books that my investors are reading and understand just the lingo so that they don’t have to work too hard to talk to me about what they’re trying to do. But the next part is trying to help them close more deals.

value the business that they bring me ⁓ and I want to help them get to the closing table more often so that I in turn can also get to the closing table more often. ⁓ But it really is a lot of knowing how to message things, knowing how to talk to clients, being able to understand that there’s a business side to this and a personal emotional side to any kind of purchase. mean as an investor you are looking to make money.

on the other side. And I want to make sure that you have the ability to make that money. But the person you’re purchasing from or the person you’re selling to,

they’re not just in it to make money. They’re in it to, you know, find home, to be able to grow their family, to sell property that has been in their family for potentially hundreds of years. Like we’re just in a very rural area. So there’s a lot of emotion that goes behind it. And being able to help

both of those ⁓ parties feel and get what they need is a really fun experience for me.

Michelle Kesil (11:07)
Absolutely. And what have been some obstacles or challenges that you had to overcome and learn from?

Rachel Ferrell (11:16)
Yes. pricing, 1000 % pricing strategy. ⁓ I do not want anybody to come to me and ask for an ARV and the ARV be wrong whenever we were listing it. The hardest part of working with investors or the hardest time period of working with investors over the past couple of years was when the market went from really great, let’s sell it right now, to we’re going to sit on the market for six months.

before it sells. And part of it’s just trying to determine timing. Like are we, is it reasonable for us to sit for six months? Do we drop the price? What does that monthly expense look like? Are we bleeding more money than we need to? I think the biggest challenge definitely is making sure that our numbers are conservative. There are very few times where somebody approaches me and says, hey, I want to list it for X dollars.

And I’m like, yeah, sure, that sounds great. I’m going to do the research. I’m going to look and see what buyer behavior is, pricing ratios, and make sure that I’m giving you a range so that you know, worst case scenario, this is where I think is bottom dollar. Best case scenario, we can push it to here. But more than anything, I do not want to be the agent that promises the moon and only gives you the stars.

Michelle Kesil (12:37)
Yeah,

And what are you most focused on solving or scaling to next?

Rachel Ferrell (12:46)
solving and scaling next. mean, I think just continuing to keep the partnerships that I’ve had is important to me, making sure that they’re receiving the value that they get. I would love to invest myself one day, but I also do teaching and training. And the real estate side, there’s just a lot, a lot less risk for me. I like helping people manage their risk, but I’m not always the one to want to put my money into ⁓ having the risk.

But I think just maintaining the relationships, continuing to see the value in the area that I live, even though it’s outside of your traditional investing markets, and helping people see the potential, or possibly the failure. I want to make sure that if I’m being asked questions that I’m telling them, no, I don’t think this is a good one, maybe you should move on.

Michelle Kesil (13:40)
Yeah, definitely. And are there any opportunities or goals that you are excited about?

Rachel Ferrell (13:49)
Yes. So I, outside of invest investing do teach and train. Marketing is my go-to and not just like social media marketing. I did start my business online. Social media marketing was what grew my real estate business back in the beginning. However, marketing is so much more than just Instagram and Tik Tok. And I think that over the past several years, we’ve sort of convoluted this idea that anybody who runs a business also has to be

an influencer and that’s just not true. You do have to be a good marketer though and understanding the principles of marketing can make or break your business knowing who your target market is and you know knowing how to speak to them. So my plan, my goal over the next you know five years is being able to go and share that message with as many people in the real estate industry that I can and I’m excited about doing that.

Michelle Kesil (14:48)
Yeah, amazing. And what are some of the main marketing mistakes you see real estate professionals make?

Rachel Ferrell (15:38)
Man, this is such a great question that I love. ⁓ I am so good at negotiating. I’m such a great negotiator. That’s ⁓ one of my least favorite things that I see online is people talking about how great their skills are instead of giving their clients the credit that they deserve. When I work with an investor, I am not the hero of the investor’s story. I am not the reason why the investor is succeeding. They are. They are the one taking the risk. They’re the one making the decisions.

And if I were to go online and say, hey guys, guess what I did today? I got this investor to XYZ. I don’t know that they would continue to work with me or I don’t think they’d want to continue to work with me. Same thing with real estate agents and just their clients in general. We’ll get online and say, I negotiated $40,000 off of this purchase price for my client.

But I didn’t sign the dotted line, my client signed it. I knew what levers could be pulled and I advised based off of the scenario, you know, here’s the things that you could possibly do. But at the end of the day, the decision is my client’s. And I want to make sure that however it is that I am marketing myself, my services, you know, the successes of the people that are in my circle, that I’m putting myself in the position that I should be in, which is just as, just as the guide.

My clients are the heroes of their own stories. So that is the number one mistake I see is gloating and believing that you are the be all end all in somebody else’s journey.

Michelle Kesil (17:11)
Yeah, definitely. And do you have any marketing tactics that are quick and easy that someone could implement?

Rachel Ferrell (17:21)
Totally. So we all take pictures every day. I like to play roulette with my phone. You know, we’ll sit down and we’ll look at our computers or we’ll look at something and say, I don’t, I don’t know what I’m going to post today. My camera roll has like 16,000 pictures in it. There’s no reason for me to go and reinvent the wheel and find something to post or find something to take pictures of or create assets for today. I already have it in my phone.

The other thing that I think could really

I wish people would take more advantage of is to stop using AI so much and use it different. We go to AI to create a voice for us when we should be giving AI our voice and having it organize those thoughts into something that can be shared. I can only imagine the number of really interesting conversations that investors have every single day. The people that you talk to, the people that say,

Don’t call me back the people who say, I really need this to go because of this sad situation or this exciting, you know, next step and I need to move fast. And if you take those conversations and make really great notes, transcribe it through some sort of device like, you know, Otter AI is what I will use. I’ll just press record and word vomit for as long as I can. And then I will upload that into chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, whichever AI I feel like using that day.

and I will have it take it apart and say, you know, if I’m creating a new mailer or a new email list, if I want a billboard or a new yard sign, what should I use from this story that would connect with somebody ⁓ in my next post, in my next marketing piece?

Michelle Kesil (19:08)
Yeah, I love that. I think those are some great ideas that most people don’t even think of.

Rachel Ferrell (19:15)
love it.

Michelle Kesil (19:17)
Yeah, and is it real estate professionals that you’re coaching through marketing or what does that process look like?

Rachel Ferrell (19:25)
It’s anybody, really, I say anybody. It’s people in the real estate industry. Service industries, I will help as well. There’s a couple of, ⁓ well, there’s some aesthetics places and ⁓ some hair salons that I will help. But it’s the same kind of service, really, where you’re governed by a government body. And then you have your services 1099 that you are operating through.

But the majority of the people that I work with are in real estate and I will go and do workshops in different offices, different brokerages, but then I also do one-on-one coaching with people where we literally will just go through and I’ll have them keep journals and we will talk through every conversation that they have. We’ll identify who their ideal client is. I mean for me, I would think, you know, my ideal client is a 1.5 million dollar seller in one of these main markets.

But in reality, my main target client is either an investor who is interested in having a real estate agent or a homeschool family 30 to 40 years old relocating from outside of Tennessee. And when I talk to those people on whatever mediums, I usually get really great results. But then the key is to dig into what their real problems are. As the person on this side, we like to try and make up their problems, we’ll manufacture

issues that we think that they have or we’ll ask chat GPT what are the top five problems that buyers are having today and that is not really going to get you anywhere. ⁓ I’m having the conversations already they’re telling me what their problems are and if I will stop and listen and ask more questions then they will reveal you know this might be the problem I might want three bedrooms and two bathrooms but I’m actually really nervous to move four states away and it shouldn’t be this hard.

for me to have to find or be able to find a house in Southern Tennessee for an affordable price. So if I can dig into what it is that they’re concerned about, I ⁓ help them out. So that’s what I do with my clients, with my coaching clients. We go through their clients and get really clear on what they’re saying.

Michelle Kesil (21:40)
Amazing. I can imagine that’s super helpful. So thank you for sharing all of that

Rachel Ferrell (21:45)
Yeah, it’s way fun. I love to do it.

Michelle Kesil (21:48)
Alright, well before we begin to wrap up here, someone wants to reach out, connect, learn more, where can people find you?

Rachel Ferrell (21:56)
Yes, you can go to rachelferrell.com. That’s the easiest link that you can go to. That’s my marketing company. But I have links to the real estate side as well. On there, you can find me @TheRachelFerrell on Instagram. That’s probably where I play the most is on Instagram. But I am also on YouTube. So Moving to Tullahoma is my real estate page. And then Rachel Ferrell is

marketing page. So many pages, but.

Michelle Kesil (22:23)
This

Rachel Ferrell (22:24)
You kind

of need a page for every brand. So that’s where I’m at.

Michelle Kesil (22:28)
Perfect, well, appreciate your time and your story. Thank you for being here.

Rachel Ferrell (22:33)
Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Michelle Kesil (22:35)
Of course. And for the listeners tuning in, if you got value, make sure you have subscribed. We have more conversations with operators like Rachel who are building real businesses. And we’ll see you on our next episode.