Unlock 7 Secrets to Mastering Real Estate Relationships and Communication

John Harcar (00:01.774)
All right. Hey guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar. I’m here today with Deidre Mazzoni. And what we’re going to talk about besides her journey in real estate is truly the importance of having relationships in, real estate, but pretty much in life. Remember guys, in Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers. I mean all real estate entrepreneurs, two to five X their business by giving tools and resources to not only grow,

and live the business they want to live, but live the life they’ve always dreamed of. So DJ, welcome to our show.

Deidre Mazzoni (00:36.488)
Thank you. I appreciate the invite.

John Harcar (00:39.44)
Yeah, I’m super excited to talk about our topic today. I I truly know or feel the importance of relationships. But before we kind of dive into all that stuff, why don’t you give our audience kind of a little background on you, you know, how you get into real estate, how you got into or what brought you here?

Deidre Mazzoni (00:57.153)
be glad to. Well, I started in real estate officially in 2016. Prior to that, my husband and I had flipped several homes on a personal level. I’d gotten some property for our daughter when she was in college and fixed it up along the way and sold it when she graduated. And it paid for a really nice wedding. So we kind of got the bug. And as the corporate world started doing layoffs and some of the things they were doing, we sort of felt that we were

John Harcar (01:15.96)
Nice. Right. Okay.

Deidre Mazzoni (01:27.896)
kicked out of the corporate world and into the real estate world. And I couldn’t be happier.

John Harcar (01:32.144)
Was there any background or any influences? This is a question I love to ask in all my podcasts. Any influences before you got into doing real estate stuff, like maybe a family member or you, I guess maybe for you it’s probably living and flipping in a house, right?

Deidre Mazzoni (01:50.413)
Yeah, it was really just the opportunities that came along that we happened to be able to make good on those opportunities. We needed a place for our daughter, ended up looking at a foreclosed home in the gated community, someplace very safe for her, someplace that was going to be less expensive than on campus housing. And we thought it would be a lot, a lot better atmosphere for her. And she actually rented out the other room and bathroom to a fellow student and that paid for her mortgage.

John Harcar (02:19.993)
So she did a little house hack right there, which is awesome. So tell us about how you obviously started doing that property. How did you start getting into more properties, building that part of your real estate business?

Deidre Mazzoni (02:33.356)
Well, we actually ended up going to a fortune builders seminar and we’re like, okay, if we’re going to do this, we need education because we’re a firm believer in education. And so we started there, got a little bit of a network, kind of got a little bit of an understanding. You know, just got to talk to people and figure out a little bit more of the business side of it. And then just started networking, meeting people. started going to local RIA groups.

And then we got our first couple of deals, got our feet wet, met a local realtor that kind of liked the way we did business and would bring us deals. And that really helped. And as long our journey, we continued to look for ways to improve ourselves. We had all these tactical tools and really didn’t feel that was everything we needed to know. There just seemed to be a little something missing somewhere.

John Harcar (03:10.83)
Okay.

Deidre Mazzoni (03:28.904)
And in our search for that, we came across the NLP courses. That’s Neuro-Linguistic Programming. And it’s really just about words and how words affect a person all the way back to their childhood. Things that you’re told you can and can’t do, limiting beliefs, negative emotions, things along those lines. And we found in that body of work were some really, really useful, almost tactical ways.

to understand communication, understand people better. And when we started using those tools in our real estate business, we found like just success exploding. It was so much easier to go along with people, so much easier to talk to contractors, and so much easier to negotiate deals. That we actually started doing coaching just for real estate professionals around using this body of work for dealing with, you know, the hurdles of real estate.

the communication hurdles, the people hurdles. Because like I said, you can be great with a tactical, you can know all the things, have all the tools, all the numbers. But if you’re unable to communicate to a private money lender, you’re unable to relationship with a realtor, you’re unable to get a contractor and a team together, your success is gonna be limited. And the ability to communicate and to work with other people is really deep within you.

And you you have the ability, we often communicate. But how we use that is really where my focus is come to be in my real estate journey right now. Helping others.

John Harcar (04:56.847)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (05:04.939)
Okay. Okay. And going back little bit to your real estate journey before we talk about the relationship part, I guess this kind of ties in. How important was it for you or what type of change in your business did it have when you built that relationship with the realtor?

Deidre Mazzoni (05:19.908)
Building the relationship with the realtor was sort of the spark we needed. We obviously work with other realtors, not just one. We find little to ourselves in other ways, but just having someone who had the confidence in us to bring us a deal first, to call and say, hey, you need to come look at this. I just found out about it. They’re going to list it with me. I want you to look at it first. It was just a confidence boost. And it was also.

Obviously, it was a boost our business to get these deals first. And you can’t get any better than the first crack at the new deal. So we found that extremely helpful.

John Harcar (05:53.987)
Yeah, for sure.

John Harcar (06:01.559)
Why do you think so many realtors are afraid or don’t go and build a relationship with investors and then vice versa? Why do you think that there’s that barrier between having those types of relationships? What’s obvious is it can inevitably help everybody.

Deidre Mazzoni (06:20.099)
Well, I think part of it is an understanding and a communication. am most likely they have not worked with an investor. They’ve only heard negative things about investors, which there’s a lot floating out there, unfortunately, and no one’s taken time to sit down and interview them. We’ve interviewed several realtors where they may not have ever worked with an investor before like, Hey, you know, we’re looking for some realtors.

Would you be interested in having a cup of coffee and learning more about working with us as investors? And then really applying some of the techniques we have with being sure that we’re communicating with them in their communication style. It really helps break down some of those barriers and open up their mind to something they may not have considered. And it works best one-on-one. There’s just no way of getting around the fact.

John Harcar (07:10.84)
Okay.

Deidre Mazzoni (07:16.15)
that people like to talk face to face with people. I could send out emails, could send out flyers, I could send out note cards, could send out postcards. It does not seem to get anywhere near the response of picking up the phone and saying, hi, would you like to have a cup of coffee and talk about this? And we all, I’m sorry. And we also all promise our realtors that if they bring us a deal to be rehabbed, that they will be the realtor that gets to sell it when it’s finished.

John Harcar (07:19.055)
Sure, sure.

John Harcar (07:34.541)
Yeah, it doesn’t have, I’m sorry, go ahead.

John Harcar (07:46.391)
Awesome.

Deidre Mazzoni (07:47.075)
So we make sure there’s something in every deal we do for everyone that’s doing the deal with us.

John Harcar (07:53.165)
Reciprocity, I love it. I mean, that’s that’s the best way scratch my back. I scratch yours

Deidre Mazzoni (07:55.107)
It is the value of people, making sure they feel valued.

John Harcar (08:01.323)
Exactly. 100%. What struggles did you have in your real estate business or did you have as you got into doing more coaching on NLP, et cetera?

Deidre Mazzoni (08:11.351)
One of the main things was the feeling that certain people, no matter how much you spoke to them, no matter how you tried to rephrase something, it was always painful, always difficult. There were some people that literally, when their phone number comes up on the little screen, you’re like, man.

John Harcar (08:34.799)
Why is that though? Why do you think?

Deidre Mazzoni (08:38.827)
I actually know now. It is their communication style, their internal representations. What they like to hear first is extremely important. It’s almost like a combination lock. When you know their buying strategy and their communication preferences, changing one or two words in a sentence.

John Harcar (08:41.976)
Okay.

John Harcar (08:58.425)
Hmm.

Deidre Mazzoni (09:08.129)
totally changes whether or not they’re open to hear what you have to say. It’s almost as if using different words you’re speaking a different language. And it also makes them feel heard. There’s a lot of communication of feelings. How does that communication make you feel? Do you feel valued? Do you feel invited? And the words you use for a person’s preference.

John Harcar (09:27.32)
Right.

Deidre Mazzoni (09:35.425)
can change whether or not they feel that invite, they feel that connection or they don’t. And, you know, it saved us $150,000 right off the bat as soon as we learned it. We learned it, we applauded it. We were in the middle of a deal with a realtor who it just seemed we could never quite connect with. just always seemed to miss the mark somehow. And they brought us good deals, so we wanted to work with them.

John Harcar (09:47.758)
How so?

Deidre Mazzoni (10:05.345)
So we’re in the middle of a deal and something just, we couldn’t figure it out. Something was just, I don’t know, it just seemed off. All the numbers were right. All the high level things seemed right. So we went through buying strategies and we also went through the communication styles. And we realized that this person and my husband and I had completely different, incompatible communication styles.

John Harcar (10:32.591)
Hmm.

Deidre Mazzoni (10:33.45)
So we needed to come back and tell them this deal, there’s just something wrong with this deal. We could not do this deal. That wasn’t working for us. And so what we did is we wrote out, we wrote out what we wanted to say in our communication style using our words. And then we went through with our NLP knowledge and we just changed like one or two words in every sentence. didn’t change the meaning. It just changed the words we’re using to describe things. And then we sort of switched the order.

is what we’re going to talk about first, second, third. And we’re like, well, here we go. This is, you know, we’re expecting a really long, painful conversation. So we basically read this to this person after practicing it a few times. It didn’t sound too scripted. and, and literally they went, I’m so glad I was thinking the same thing. I’m glad we’re on the same page. And we were just like, what? We’re never on the same page.

let alone a five minute conversation to come to a decision where we all agreed. So we didn’t do the deal because we felt bad and didn’t want to tell this person no and all these other things. And we came to an agreement quickly, time is money, and also help them bring us better deals in the future because we did convince this person to come to our coaching so that we could teach them what we had learned.

John Harcar (11:32.696)
Right?

John Harcar (11:43.864)
Right.

John Harcar (11:48.665)
Sure.

Deidre Mazzoni (11:58.726)
And was just like light bulbs went off all over the place when not only did we understand them, but in turn they understood us.

John Harcar (11:58.815)
Awesome!

John Harcar (12:06.809)
So give me a couple examples of like, what do you mean you just changed the words and it changed the meaning in a sense, or not didn’t change the meaning, but it changed the approach.

Deidre Mazzoni (12:14.911)
Something like…

Deidre Mazzoni (12:21.234)
I see that this is a great deal.

Would you like to hear about this great deal?

Deidre Mazzoni (12:29.813)
If somebody is more visual, C is going to pop for them. If somebody is audio, hear, they want the hearing words.

John Harcar (12:33.857)
is in a, yeah.

John Harcar (12:40.473)
So how are you determining whether that you know what type of person they are? Are there like certain triggers, certain things you look for, words said?

Deidre Mazzoni (12:47.453)
There are several things that you can look for. We have a whole list of things that you can go through while you’re talking with someone, little cheat sheet you can have by your phone, you do cold calls, so that you can quickly pick out where this person is wanting to go and go with them. Because the one thing that some people…

John Harcar (13:00.879)
You

Deidre Mazzoni (13:15.814)
tend to kind of get wrong when you ask them, I’ll ask you, who’s responsible for communication? Is it the person who’s communicating the message or the person hearing the message?

John Harcar (13:27.951)
person communicating the message.

Deidre Mazzoni (13:29.921)
Very few people will say that. Almost everyone will say either both or the person the message is going to.

John Harcar (13:36.439)
Yeah, no, yeah, the person I think that is communicating it because you’re the one that’s communicating it to get a response back.

Deidre Mazzoni (13:42.041)
Yep, and if you don’t communicate, if you communicate in your style relentlessly, and that’s not their style, then you’re not communicating and you’re not going to get through to them. And it’s just amazing how much more respected that person feels and how much more willing and open. It just breaks down barriers with just a few words.

John Harcar (14:07.075)
Yeah, man.

Deidre Mazzoni (14:11.758)
Which is great stuff to make.

John Harcar (14:12.297)
Yeah, 100%. How important has this, just tell me that like the light bulb or the big shift or whatever, how important is this once you learn this into your business? mean, how much did it elevate it?

Deidre Mazzoni (14:25.396)
well, it’s hard to put a money tag on it, but I do think we’re getting more deals.

John Harcar (14:31.277)
Well, I guess maybe not money tag, maybe not necessarily money, but as we started implementing these specific NLP tactics, we saw our contract acceptance rate go above whatever, something like that that led to an increase or led to an elevation of your.

Deidre Mazzoni (14:49.986)
Well, the time spent in communication has been reduced. We are able to get our messages across to the folks we’re dealing with much quicker. And we also have found ourselves invited to do more things and open to do more things. We now lead an REI group with another couple. We spend a lot of time talking and interacting with people, a lot more comfort in networking.

you know, just overall all confidence. There’s just a feeling that no matter who I need to speak with, that I will be successful in that conversation. It doesn’t mean that they’ll agree with me, but it will be a conversation. I will, I will feel and they will feel that the message has been conveyed, received and talked about appropriately. And being able do that quickly is invaluable. We spend so much time on the phone and talking to people and

John Harcar (15:31.31)
Mm-hmm.

Deidre Mazzoni (15:47.969)
contract negotiations and talking with sellers and getting to where someone’s comfortable with you getting in that rapport means a lot.

John Harcar (16:00.144)
especially in the real estate business. So talk to me a little bit about where your business is now, kind of what you’re doing, if you’re doing more flips, if you’re doing more coaching, but also more talk about your coaching and how you can help people improve this skill in their business and their life.

Deidre Mazzoni (16:17.334)
Well, our business right now, we are slowly getting out of the rental market and getting into notes because I am a property manager. I love doing property management. I will probably continue to do it for other investors. But as far as for us, we’re looking toward notes, something that’s going to allow us more time because we really like coaching and we do coaching in two different tracks. There is the

John Harcar (16:26.168)
Okay.

Deidre Mazzoni (16:45.723)
Real estate tactical, which I consider the communication styles, the buying strategies, that, the communication tactical. Real estate tactical, we’ll walk properties with people, we’ll help them with spreadsheets, help them with numbers, anything that we’ve learned through our years in real estate, we are glad to help somebody with that. And then we do the more unconscious work, the more in you work. So, negative emotions, limiting beliefs.

You know, what’s really holding you back? What do you value? And I don’t mean that in a moral way. I mean, what do you value? Is it ROI? Is it income? Is it time with family? And what is driving you? Because internally, the one thing that we have learned through NLP is that motivation is unconscious and motivation is based on what you are valuing at the moment. And that your values can be

changed in the hierarchy on purpose, if you want them to consciously want to value it, but unconsciously you don’t. The great example of that is someone who goes to the gym all the time. There are people who go to the gym, they look like bodybuilders, they’re gorgeous, they love it, they’re so into it. And then, you know, there’s people like me, it takes willpower and that type of thing.

John Harcar (17:49.86)
Right?

John Harcar (18:07.529)
as much energy as you can muster.

Deidre Mazzoni (18:11.575)
And what that really means is that I don’t deep inside me value going to the gym, working out and doing that, or what the other folks do. So if I can get my unconscious and my conscious together, which I just haven’t taken the time to do because I don’t value it, and make that a value, I would be highly motivated to go. Because willpower will get you so far, but it is painful because you’re

conscious and unconscious are fighting each other. And your energy comes from your unconscious and if you don’t have it in the right place, it’s not going to work out for very long. So being able to unconsciously and consciously bring your motivation into the same space, it feels so good. And you don’t have to work on that motivation. You no longer need willpower. It’s just part of who you are. So that’s the other side of coaching we do with the unconscious.

John Harcar (18:41.911)
Yeah, 100%.

Deidre Mazzoni (19:08.786)
as really helping people work on themselves. I like to say that we help people invest in themselves in a way that encourages other people to invest in them. When somebody sees that you’re happy, you’re positive, you know, kind of got it together and they can’t tell why. It’s easy, you’re conscious and unconscious working together, you’re in that zone. You know, people want to come along with you, they want to invest with you, they want to work with you.

John Harcar (19:21.081)
That’s awesome. That’s a good, that’s…

John Harcar (19:28.217)
Hmm.

Deidre Mazzoni (19:36.912)
particularly if you can communicate in the style that works best for them. So, you we like to help people make investments that will help others invest in them. We’re real estate investors. We want people to invest in us and our property.

John Harcar (19:47.407)
That’s awesome.

Right, don’t invest in something. What just kind of basic advice would you give anybody? mean, just to maybe refocus their thoughts, maybe have a different mindset, maybe, you know, just some way they can help themselves be better at relationships, talking to people.

Deidre Mazzoni (20:11.117)
always be present when you’re talking to someone. I mean, as particularly in networking, it’s difficult. Cause you want to go say hi to everybody. want, you really want to tell them about yourself and get your message out. But the best way to do that is to genuinely ask someone, listen and be concerned about what their message is. You know, even when they say, so what do you do instead of immediately going on about what you do.

You may say, well, I will get to that. Tell me about you. What do you do? And most people that just lights them up that you were more interested in them than you were talking about yourself. So that would be the number one thing I would say if you don’t want to do any of the work or any of the investment, just remember how important it is to be concerned about the person you’re talking to and be genuinely interested and present when you’re talking with someone.

John Harcar (20:51.651)
Yep.

John Harcar (21:06.991)
Yes.

Deidre Mazzoni (21:10.07)
even if you don’t know the right words or anything, showing interest, people notice.

John Harcar (21:15.841)
So I always try to tell my daughter be more interested than interesting. Ask more questions. Great talk. I mean, this has been awesome. I can learn so much from you. If folks are on here and they want to listen or want to talk to you a little bit more about some of the stuff that they listen to, how will they get in touch with you? What’s the best way to contact you?

Deidre Mazzoni (21:19.161)
Yes.

Deidre Mazzoni (21:36.192)
a couple of different, couple of different channels. I’m on Facebook. My name is Unique. So it’s Deidre J. Mazzoni. M-A-Z-Z-O-N-I. you’re most likely going to find me, my, my profile has Tahitian flowers on it right now because I to Healy last summer and fell in love. I’m also a travel agent. and another one of my, personal passions. also Anchor Point Properties, P-O-I-N-T-E, AnchorPointProperties.com.

John Harcar (21:53.083)
how cool.

Okay.

Deidre Mazzoni (22:05.892)
There’s a section on that website called ProPoint, which is all our coaching. And then you can just give me a call. I’m available 803-979-0747. So there’s many ways to reach out or out there. I’m also on LinkedIn and all those other things, but.

John Harcar (22:27.024)
Yeah, well, I think you sent me a lot of your contacts and your show information, so I’ll put that in the show notes. Deidre, thank you so much for coming by and sharing all this information. I love it. This has been a fantastic episode. Guys, I hope you picked up some good things too. I mean, if you didn’t, then go back and re-listen to this thing. Deidre, thank you again, guys. I’ll see you on the next show. Cheers.

Deidre Mazzoni (22:41.026)
Thank you.

Deidre Mazzoni (22:47.567)
you

You’re welcome.

Bye.