Why Niching Down in Real Estate Creates More Trust, Referrals, and Long-Term Clients

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (00:00)
Everyone is trying to sell you something, something

market or get your CRM or you need to do this event this this widget will be the dream and you’ll never have to work hard again yes and trying to sell you something that’ll make you feel you can build your business and I remember looking back and trying some of those things and realizing like it doing an Instagram ad is going to get me someone who’s interested

Cody Crabb (00:08)
courses. Yeah.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (00:22)
but that’s a different relationship than the daughter of a client Jeff sold a house to 20 years ago and they still remember him because every single month we do handwritten cards or we do an email or a mailer. That relationship interests like a hundred times a day. I would rather water 10 to that field than put up a billboard.

Cody Crabb (02:15)
Hello and welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast by Investor Fuel. I’m your host, Cody Crabb. And today I’ve got Jeff, Schween and Kelsey McCaffrey from the Schween Group at Compass based in Sonoma County, just north of San Francisco. Jeff’s been in real estate for 36 years and Kelsey’s his daughter who brings a whole new layer to the team, systems marketing, tech, client experience and a brand new fresh perspective. Today we’re going to talk about kind of building in a high complexity, high cost market and what it actually takes.

to serve the people well in the market like Sonoma County. Jeff and Kelsey, thanks so much for joining today.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (02:47)
Hey Cody, thanks for having us.

Cody Crabb (02:49)
Yeah, so just to get started, I’d love to hear, we chatted a little bit about how kind of things got started, but ⁓ it’s not often that I talk to a father-daughter team. That’s pretty neat. And I’d love to hear kind of how that came to be and how you both kind of got to this point now in the business.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (03:06)
Yeah, well my story goes back to Chica. So my first transaction was for my fraternity in college. And it was a fraternity I was a founding member of. So I was like, had to find the house and then had to negotiate the contract. And then I found out I had to actually raise the money for the down payment, which I didn’t know was part of my job too. And that was that springboard into real estate 37 years ago. And then I just fueled the interest in real estate for me.

I’ve been in real estate ever since I got out of college. Kelsey came into my life when she was like 10. And so, you know, her and four sisters, so five daughters in our house in total, two sets of twins and two sets of twins. She’s one half of the older twins.

Cody Crabb (03:44)
Awesome. Do you see it’s two sets of twins? Holy cow.

Gotcha, wow. Okay, that’s interesting. Yeah, usually when you end up with the twins, like, it’s one thing to have twins. I guess it’s a whole other thing to have two sets of twins. ⁓

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (04:00)
Yep. In about five

years of age span between us, there was a point where we had five teenagers all under one roof. Yeah.

Cody Crabb (04:08)
I’m not gonna say like poor man, but like that’s a lot. You came out alive, that’s the good thing. know, that’s good. ⁓ Well, that’s great. Well, and the fact that you’re working together is probably a good sign that things ended somewhat well there. ⁓ So Kelsey, tell us a little bit about you kind of, and then how maybe these worlds kind of joined together.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (04:10)
no, you can’t. I’m here. I’m here. No one went to jail.

Exactly.

Yeah, and I grew up seeing my mom and Jeff working together and I was the kid that they’d pay me like five bucks an hour and I’d fold all their mailers or mom would be doing an open house and I would drop by food from Costco. And so I always saw that piece of them of just the hustle that they brought. But there was always something admirable to me that my mom was always there for field trips or to be like an art docent. And they were always available for our weekend soccer games. And I remember thinking how amazing that was where they worked all the time, but they

also here for us and that was something I always remembered growing up and so when I graduated from college in Chicum they’ve been asking me for years like I should just consider it consider joining the team and going into real estate and I just had to kind of do my own thing at the time I had a professor who recommended me for Teach for America I got in and

to Albuquerque, New Mexico. rank 50th in education and was out there with a few of their ⁓ 50th. New Expo will battle Arkansas or so, 49th and 50th, but there’s a big need for really high quality education out there. You can’t go any further, I don’t think. Yeah. getting lower.

Cody Crabb (05:24)
say 50th? my gosh.

Yeah, I was gonna say once you get past, once you get to that, it doesn’t really matter who’s 50th, it? That’s pretty wild,

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (05:40)
Yeah, and it was a whole

Cody Crabb (05:40)
Yeah, that’s.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (05:41)
new scape for me and I was right out of college and so I started as a kindergarten teacher and taught for a few months before then the pandemic happened and then I navigated teaching five-year-olds via zoom camera which is a whole other kind of Imagine five-year-olds now on zoom and you got 30 of them in your classroom you’re trying to teach them via zoom and they’re at home with their parents. ⁓

Cody Crabb (05:59)
Jeff, Jeff, I have a

seven year old with ADHD. I understand. I, cause I just multiply that. And so I, I, you are a saint Kelsey, because I don’t think I could have handled that. ⁓ this is not about, it’s not an education podcast, but like bless you and people like you because holy cow, that’s the incredible. ⁓ yeah. And especially right at, you’re starting out in the COVID world. mean, that’s, that is pretty.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (06:04)
You got it. Yeah. ⁓

Great. Thank you. It was a lot.

Yep.

Nobody knew what

to do. And so I did the whole six feet apart, you know, plastic little covers for the kids. They weren’t allowed to interact with each other. Did that whole process. Learned really fast and really well. Worked my way up. And by the time I left, I was a principal at the elementary school there. And we had two different campuses that we were founding. And I hit a point where post pandemic was like, I’m feeling so burned out and we didn’t have anybody out in New Mexico. We had a little, burned out after doing seven years there through the pandemic and kids. And my wife and I had just gotten

Cody Crabb (07:34)
Really? ⁓

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (07:42)
And we decided, you know, this is kind of that turning point. We’re ready to start our own family and move back. so that was kind of where we came from. And so we talked about it. was probably a year before we moved back where we had had everything planned. And so I took my classes, got my license while I was still a principal. And then when school got out in May, we packed up our car in a U-Haul and drove out here and probably had a week to unpack and then hit the ground running.

since then that’s been since July 25 coming up on a year of that and really redesigned the team. Everything from the logo, the website, to our client communication, to how we use AI and SEO in the team. And I’ve got this fresh perspective of like, oh yeah, here’s how we do things. And I’m sitting there like, why? Why, why, why do you do things like that? And like, you know what? You’re right. I don’t know why we do things like that.

Cody Crabb (08:27)
the time you just need someone

to actually ask the question, then you’re like, I don’t know why we do that. Yeah.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (08:31)
I know. Yeah.

So I’ve got kind of that perspective. And sometimes there’s those niches in every market there is. But there’s so many niches within real estate of, here’s why this is a popular thing or this and that. So I’ve just been thrown into this world with some of the best mentors ever. I mean, we’re talking a little bit about niches, but this is somewhere someone who has only worked in Sonoma County and has seen it over 36 years of real estate in Sonoma County through the fires, through changes, new, developed everything. And so I feel

Cody Crabb (08:59)
Yeah, let’s talk a little bit about that because I

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (09:01)
Thank you.

Cody Crabb (09:01)
think something that we mentioned kind of before the podcast started was it seems very, ⁓ it’s kind of, it’s counterintuitive, but the more you narrow down, the more you tend to get kind of more clients and better, you you get a better reputation and cause you specialize. so tell us a little bit about that and how that’s kind of benefited you as the Sonoma County guy or the kind of local guy.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (09:24)
Yeah, yeah,

I mean for decades we’d serve clients and kind of use like our own version of concierge program where it’s like, you know, help people fix a house so we can sell it. And so you’re always leaning into different trades people and you have that exposure of timing construction schedules and you’re like, I didn’t know this was going to be part of my job, but kind of evolved that way. And, then, um, you know, what, what 20, 26 years in, we have this calamity of a fire happen and, it’s basically the wheelhouse.

Probably 80 % of the business we do was in that fire. So if you know if you’re doing 50 million dollars in transactions a year 80 % of that was all from that base of fire that enveloped everything country clubs and neighborhoods the states it was it was grimacing I mean like because we lived through it we weren’t actually physically our home wasn’t in the fire but we were you right at it and all the living through all the clients going through it seeing the war zone afterwards the melted

Cody Crabb (10:06)
Peace.

Yeah.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (10:22)
engine blocks on the street, steel I-beams that were once rigid, just kind of looking like twisted yarn. And it looked like a war zone. It did look like a war zone. And then I think there’s a combination of inspiration and perspiration that took over. Like we got to do something. Because those were your friends. You had a great story of you at a party right before the fires. Right. We had my 50th birthday party. We did a Havana

Cody Crabb (10:31)
⁓ man. Yeah.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (10:51)
nights party at our house and we invite you know typically 80 to 100 of our clients and that year ⁓ everyone attended and two weeks later this fire happened but there were 70 people at that party that lost houses.

Cody Crabb (11:04)
Wow, that’s crazy.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (11:08)
Yeah, and so these were our friends. They were our family. They were people close to us and there was no There’s no look for what you do when something like that happens And I remember this phrase that you used often what you said it looked like the moon Like it looks like the moon because it was so covered in ash and just desolate. It looked like you were on another planet Yeah, yeah, and it was um, you know

Cody Crabb (11:13)
Yeah.

Mm.

Yeah, I’ve seen kind of the aftermath

of some of those wildfires and it’s just brutal. And when those get into residential areas, it’s like, you don’t even know where you are. It’s like unrecognizable.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (12:16)
We don’t rule like that’s something I think we talked about like in the city limits So it’s not you look around it where it happened. What do you mean a fire? I mean of all the homes that burned about 2400 you’d say it were outside of the city limit in what we’d call Santa Rosa but the county and the other half of all inside the city limits where there’s fire hydrants and curves three lights and all that stuff so

Cody Crabb (12:22)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, we’ve got a similar situation where

I am. It’s kind of like on the edge of it’s not rural by any means, but like the the ruralness starts pretty close to where we are. So wildfires are definitely something to that’s that is that is a lot. ⁓ So kind of what happened after that? I mean, you said you wanted you kind of went into rescue mode a little bit, which is completely understandable if you had that many people that you knew that were affected by this.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (12:56)
Yeah.

Yeah, so we had great connections and friendships over the years formed and I reached out to a couple of them and one of them had recommended.

⁓ insurance litigator that was willing to come up and do a symposium for our clients. And he said, would that be cool if I connected with you? like, uh-huh, yeah, that’d be great. But this is like a day eight after the fire, and the fire’s still going on until about day 1719. And this is a day eight conversation, because you’re like, shock and awe. Ash still falling in the air, neighborhoods you can’t drive into, because they’re…

cordoned off by police and sheriffs and stuff like that. And so what we decided is we wanted to.

to ⁓ help the rebuild effort create something dynamic, unique that would help people build back better than what they had before, but also within a cost diagram because so much of the loss happened with people being underinsured on their properties for what it really costs to build a house. And so we designed this program whereby ⁓ we probably ended up attracting like 40 original applicants that end up with 24

Cody Crabb (14:03)
Yeah.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (14:11)
plus ourselves in a rebuild effort and we would group these rebuilds into like proximity groups for homes in a proximity and you do you know foundation foundation foundation and you do framing framing framing now all these are all custom homes but the idea was to make sure all the structural engineering was repetitive on each of them so it wasn’t like well this is like whole new out of the box what I do at this point now so there’s a lot of value engineering done to create those things a lot of conversations with clients about how to

get the most for what they’re planning to spend but also a lot of effort put into what you know what we would ask clients to do is produce hero images. Images that they that warm them that make them want to live. I want a house that looks like this or it looks like that feels like this feels like that and and then we would also keep them from doing things like listen I want a meditation room like if we can go through the back of my closet I’d love to have a meditation room right there over the living room. I’m like in the best view

⁓

from your property you want the closet there and you want the meditation room ⁓

Cody Crabb (15:14)
How about a window?

Yeah, that’d be good. Yeah.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (15:18)
I’m like and and and and many people like I don’t need a walk-in closet I mean we don’t have anything like are you never not gonna have anything again? you always gonna be the only one that lives in that house? Someone else might want to buy your house one day and you’ll be like where’d my closet go? we didn’t need one when we built it

Cody Crabb (15:28)
It’s true, yeah.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (15:35)
But you know, all these houses, mean, these houses are 3,000, 6,000 square feet, you know, but they have closet sizes of bedrooms. And you you can’t just give someone a wall closet. Like, there you go, there’s your primary suite. And they’re like, that’s not gonna work. So there’s so much counseling, there’s so many tiers, so many hours. I mean, there were four years where we logged it and we averaged 110 hour weeks.

Cody Crabb (15:47)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (15:59)
Like just it’s like 4 a.m. 8 p.m. 4 a.m. 8 p.m. 4 a.m. 8 p.m. and and it just became on almost like functioning on adrenaline and I think it was I honestly like I know I know her mom finally My drill is out and mine finally like about 21 that 2021 2022. I’m like

Okay, I’m ready to bring this down. Let’s slow down to like 80 hours a week. And she’s like, really only 80, right? About, about 40, about 60, you know? I’m like, well, you know, this is like an addict. You can’t go from 110 to flipping there. You get to 90 first and then comfortably get down to 80, you know? And so, ⁓ yeah, it’s been, it’s been, I mean, it was phenomenal because of what came out of it.

Cody Crabb (16:25)
Yeah, let’s really take it easy at 80 hours a week. We’re really pulling back. Ridiculous. Yeah, it’s true. You gotta wean yourself off. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (17:25)
so much got put into it, but there’s so much fruit that came out of that labor that you didn’t see. Like we would work with families so closely and they’re like, you know, this is gonna take a while. We’re not comfortable renting or sharing this house with this other family. Let’s just, we need to buy a temporary house. I go, ⁓

Good idea. So we probably sold 24 temporary houses. And then when all those people moved into the brand new houses, we resold those 24 temporary houses. That was not part of the plan. But if I were coaching someone who lived through something like that, my…

you need to identify this will probably be something that comes out of these relationships, this heightened, heightened connection. These things will happen. It’s a byproduct, know, and we discovered it by accident because we were just in it. But we coached people in Lahaina, we’ve coached people in LA. We’ve been on Zoom calls with our colleagues in those areas that have gone through those fires.

with, you know, here’s what worked, here’s what didn’t, here’s where the pitfalls were, here’s where the rosy picture seemed it was, no, can’t miss, and here’s where it went awry.

And I mean, it’s a real life experience. So it’s like, you don’t need to the notes or note cards or anything to talk about it. It just is super intense, super rewarding too, because in the end of it, we got to design and build our own house and live through that same process all of our clients live through. And that’s a pretty unique thing to do. If you can design your dream home and you go through the 1500 line item.

Cody Crabb (18:46)
Mmm.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (18:52)
things you have to site, knobs, screws, glass, door fronts, drawer fronts, guides, counters, faucets, fixtures, tile, wood, like baseboard, like brando window. I mean, you just keep going.

Cody Crabb (18:53)
Yeah.

At some point you’re just like,

okay, do I need that? We could just do without the cupboard handles or something, so I don’t have to make any more decisions. Yeah.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (19:11)
Yeah.

Yeah, and so so

of that we got so well versed at being able to help people identify People would come to us and say okay. So really I want to build 3,000 square feet. What’s that gonna cost and We could give them an answer but it’d be an answer that starts with well Can you answer a few questions for me? Tell me about the type of roof it that’s house has to have what quality window are we talking about? What series of appliances are we talking just give me a couple key items because I could tell you it’s gonna be 380 to 420 foot or

50 to 650 a foot or 650 to 750 foot I mean depending upon a of those diamonds says the windows we did in our house it’s like 130 grand for our window package but if we had gone from Marvin to Fleetwood it would have been 300 grand and I mean that’s a line item change on a construction order and with all those line items you can’t well Jeff Bezos can Bill Gates can the people can but most most people can’t just go I don’t care I just want that you know

Cody Crabb (20:10)
Well, and that actually points to something really important, is knowing the area, the typical cost, what you actually need versus what the guy totally swears you need that will be, no, with this area, you definitely want the, if someone is just trying to sell me something, it’s hard to know whether they’ve, I’ve kind of, I heard somebody say this on the part, what was that?

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (20:28)
Yeah.

Is this really for me or really for you?

Is this really for me or really for you?

Cody Crabb (20:35)
Yeah,

I had someone on podcast once described to me as commission breath. Like you can tell when someone is just trying to like get something out of it. And even if you can’t, like it sometimes feels that way. And if even if you’re even if you’re kind of giving that off, that is so off putting that will automatically make it’s like when I see too many commercials for something, I’m like, I’m never buying that again. Doesn’t matter if I need it. I’m going to find something else because it’s just on principle.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (20:42)
and bread.

Yeah.

Yes.

Cody Crabb (21:00)
So I’d like to ask you, how has it been for you to kind of be in the, well, I mean, because you’ve been in this market, you know it really, really well by this point. You’ve kind of experienced that. What kinds of, what would you say to someone that’s trying to figure out if they should be more general or more niche? What would you tell them that you’ve gotten from the decisions you’ve made around?

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (21:23)
Yeah, I would say that the key to focus on the depth of the relationships, not the breadth. all the real that you have relationships that can be like very shallow and there can be lots of them, right? But there’s usually very little reward or value. And you might say like a general practitioner as a doctor, you know, is a very shallow breadth of clients. But there’s the eye surgeon that only sees people with eye problems. And that’s all he does.

all day long and there’s only two guys to talk to that do that. ⁓ And that niche, that being so skilled in the niche of not only relationships but how it intertwines.

with the marketplace and what the attributes are within the marketplace to be able to put those pieces of the puzzle together for people to help them understand what they’re really asking for, to help them go on their own journey that’s their journey. But you know, you gotta lead them there. Because I don’t get to sign the check for them. Like, it would be a simple world if I just bought the house and said, I bought you the house, here it is. Just give me the money now, we’re good. ⁓

I know that the house is better for you than you know the house is better for you. ⁓ But yeah.

Cody Crabb (22:35)
Sometimes it seems like it’d

be easier that way for just everybody. But yeah, because it doesn’t work like that yet. Yeah.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (22:38)
Yeah, if

now, now again, I would also say there’s like 10 % of the agents out there that can pull that stuff off.

That’s the other side of it. You only have so many skilled experts that exist. have a lot of people that, their tries, their couple deals a year. I work with my cousin, my sister, my uncle, and then I had no one else to work with. So then I got out of the business. I mean, the trap in this business is if you look at it as a job.

Cody Crabb (22:46)
That’s true.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (23:06)
Because a job kinda, like you go work at Pete’s Coffee. You start at eight, you end at six. When you go home, are you taking Pete’s Coffee work home with you and you’re trying to like analyze the books and come up with a plan for tomorrow? No, you’re not, you have a job. When you have a business, it’s different because there is parts of working in the business and parts of working on the business. And they don’t behold to like, you gotta get this done in 40 hours.

you have to get it done when you get it done and it might take 110 hours. So, yeah.

Cody Crabb (23:36)
Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it. I’ve heard it

phrased as instead of working full time, you work all time. And and I’m like, yeah, it’s very that is very accurate, actually. ⁓ So that’s yeah, I think ⁓ that must be a very. Yeah, that’s a that’s a mindset thing for sure, because ⁓ someone that’s kind of working on that someone that’s working for a company that they don’t have a stake in. Sometimes it’s like you just it’s so easy to just.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (23:42)
Awesome.

Cody Crabb (24:04)
Yeah, sure. You kind of phone it in. Things are different. And with that in mind, Kelsey, I’d love to know ⁓ you came into this a little bit newer when you kind of saw this like local vibe, not even local, but just kind of these deep relationship things. Did you see that and go, I instantly get it? Or was that one of those things where it’s like, I hope this works. They seem to know what they’re doing. But because because I feel like ⁓ coming into it, like you might have looked at that like, is this is this how you should do it or?

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (24:33)
Well, and it’s all like I was a nine to five W two worker. the idea of going into something like this was like, I’m a very routine person. I liked my routine and I think as a principal or a teacher, none of that stayed at the school. It always came home with you. So at least I have that coming into it. But ⁓ my God, the relationships, that’s what keeps your business alive. And we always had said things like, you know, when I first started, everyone’s trying to push a lot of product on you, especially as a brand new agent.

Everyone is trying to sell you something, something

market or get your CRM or you need to do this event this this widget will be the dream and you’ll never have to work hard again yes and trying to sell you something that’ll make you feel you can build your business and I remember looking back and trying some of those things and realizing like it doing an Instagram ad is going to get me someone who’s interested

Cody Crabb (25:09)
courses. Yeah.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (25:22)
but that’s a different relationship than the daughter of a client Jeff sold a house to 20 years ago and they still remember him because every single month we do handwritten cards or we do an email or a mailer. That relationship interests like a hundred times a day. I would rather water 10 to that field than put up a billboard.

And that was something as our relationships is, mean, talk about niche, but we have this 36 year old CRM basically of just between Jeff, my mom, Tracy, of building clients and it’s starting to become multi-generational. Their kids, their cousins, their neighbors, just when you build a business based on trust and some of that trust comes with the niching is Jeff can tell you, okay, well, this street, just the street name, I know these houses were built in this year. This is how they’re doing on insurance. Here’s how much road noise they

Cody Crabb (25:43)
Hmm.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (26:12)
get this area gets a little more fog than this area here’s what the mute looks like but you know this was the he can tell you everything and that’s where some of that trust comes in too of I can only hire them because nobody else knows that much about houses like we joke in our industry that Jeff has a photographic memory because a house will be on tour and he’ll walk in like I remember when the kitchen cabinets were this color and this way back in 97 and like he’ll go through these I remember what this looked like back then like seriously this still has the

Cody Crabb (26:37)
Yeah, really?

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (26:41)
scratch and sniff wallpaper from 20 years ago. he remembers and when people see that kind of quality that comes through like how could I go with anybody else? Why would I pick my cousin or so-and-so who does you know two to four transactions in a year? Why wouldn’t I go with somebody who has not only just breadth in this area with Sonoma County but so many roots and depths with relationships and builders and in short like this is a package deal. ⁓ Like we talk a lot about real estate agents

are

like a spoke on a bike, like a bike wheel. And you have the agent at the center and there are offshoots because hopefully you aren’t an expert in HVAC. If you were, it would be weird. If you were buying an AC every few years because you were so good at it, that would just be odd. And so there are things, of course you don’t know the best movers, insurance agents, HVAC, pool service, pain turd. Of course you don’t know that because you don’t do it all the time, but we do. And we have trusted professionals that we use in our own homes, that we use for our own clients.

Cody Crabb (27:33)
Mm.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (27:39)
that’s something people almost miss in that relationship of depending on who you pick as an agent, you could be getting somebody that hits that bar level that really talks to you about the house, or you have somebody who is a community member that is like a community spokesperson. I can be that person like, hey, I need a babysitter. I just moved here. Do you have any recommendations? I’m having a graduation. I need someone catered. And that’s the type of relationships we bring into this business is it’s never just the house. I can’t tell you how.

Cody Crabb (28:00)
Mmm.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (28:08)
many times he gets calls about an attorney I need this and you have quite because they come back to him as an expert in Sonoma County.

Cody Crabb (28:15)
Yeah,

that’s really interesting. And I feel like ⁓ that’s a skill that is maybe the best possible skill to have in this business is just being able to kind of maintain relationships. And frankly, that photographic memory probably comes in pretty handy there too. ⁓

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (28:32)
You know, I didn’t

ask for it. It just worked that way. There’s other things I’m not good at remembering, but for whatever reason, it comes to houses and people that go with a house or whatever, like it sticks. So I’m in the right field.

Cody Crabb (28:45)
Yeah. Well, so how do you

kind of, ⁓ as we’re kind of winding down here, I’d love to know kind of, it sounds like you really got a great system of like, said, did you say monthly handwritten cards? That’s yeah. Like I would love to hear kind of some of those strategies that you use to, kind of maintain these, relationships. I mean, I don’t even think I talked, I don’t even talk to my friends that often, let alone my clients.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (29:02)
So we’ve worked.

Yeah,

so we I mean I started back in 1990 but in 1998 I met this gentleman named Brian Baffini and he’s that runs it started a coaching company I remember going to the an early early conference that they had in Monterey and Listening to him go god. This is exactly how my business should run It should be a referral based business You should be activating the relations within your sphere those people should believe in you and send you the friends the friends

the colleagues, whatever, the neighbors, because they trust you. To me, that felt natural, right? So then I go, I don’t need to hire you. don’t need to… I can buy notes and I can make phone calls. And then a year later, I’m back. I need a coach. I need a coach that helps me break my plan and then make sure that it’s my plan. And so they’re only reminding me of the things that I wanted to get accomplished. And so you have those accountability conversations.

get those notes done. Only 12? I was supposed to do 20, only got 12 out.

Cody Crabb (30:02)
Yeah.

There’s something about having somebody be like, did you do what you said? And you have to be like, no, I didn’t. Exactly. Yeah. But no, that’s that’s that’s true. Like something about the accountability there, too. Yeah, I’ve definitely definitely felt that for sure. ⁓ Well, this has been really interesting. Thank you so much for all the kind of insights. If someone’s kind of interested in working with you or kind of.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (30:10)
That’s not your partner, right? know, like, you know, Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Cody Crabb (30:32)
Clearly now, if someone’s in Sonoma County, they’re like, okay, now I gotta call this guy. So ⁓ I’d love, how can our listeners get in touch with you if they wanna do so?

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (30:42)
Yeah, they can reach us santarosafinehomes.com That’s us santarosafinehomes.com. I don’t think there’s any trick in spelling that. Um, that’s our website. You can find us there. You can meet the team there. Um, and then my phone number has been the same forever. 707-480-SOLD, which is seven, six, five, three, 707 480 7653. Mike. And one of my clients was a cell phone sales guy. And my first cell phone, I was working with him. was like,

Cody Crabb (30:59)
sold cherry on top there. That’s nice.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (31:09)
Pick the number for you. You’re gonna love it and he tells it tells me the number I’m like, what’s that? He’s like four eight sold four eight zero sold Mike. ⁓ Okay, and that’s

Cody Crabb (31:14)
That’s awesome.

I suppose there’s not a bunch

of risk if you didn’t like it. It’s just say the numbers instead. So yeah, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, hey, thanks again once more. This has been a pleasure. We appreciate your insights from both of you. This ⁓ has been a fun conversation. And thanks listeners for joining us too. If you got something out of this episode, make sure to give us a like, subscribe, comment, all the things so that you don’t miss another awesome conversation like this one. It’s been great.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (31:23)
Right. Right. Okay. Yeah. So that’s been my phone number for 37 years. Yeah.

Cody Crabb (31:49)
Thanks so much for your time today.

Jeff Schween & Kelsey McCaffrey (31:51)
You bet, Cody. Thanks for having Kelsey and I on. Thanks, Cody. pleasure.

Cody Crabb (31:54)
Yeah, yeah, take care.