| Episode: | E163 |
| Show Title: | Inman Connect 2023 Insights and Takeaways |
| Cast: | Aaron Horne & Patrick Berry |
| Show Length: | 21 minutes 44 seconds |
In this episode, we dive into the valuable insights and takeaways from Inman Connect Las Vegas 2023. Despite not being present, we’re bringing the essence of this dynamic event to you. Patrick Berry, Director of 4one4 Property Co., shares three major lessons that have the potential to reshape the real estate landscape. From the rise of AI to relatable professionalism and optimising lead generation funnels, these insights are sure to provide valuable guidance in your real estate journey.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Patrick Berry
So much about selling the houses as it once was like. Every agent can market a home. Every agent has access to the same marketing material. Yeah, I think a lot of where we become valuable now is that lead up in the journey to that point in time when you sell. By giving you that, that information, that inside knowledge, that better understanding.
Patrick Berry
So you can make the right decisions when your time comes to sell. In that going, what’s going to happen?
[intro music]
Aaron Horne
All right, guys, welcome back to the property pod, your weekly engagement into real estate here in the Hobart marketplace. I’m your host, Aaron Horn, and I’ve been trying to fill the seats the last few weeks. I come in today and I have got one empty seat that I didn’t know about.
Patrick Berry
But you’ve got me.
Aaron Horne
I’ve got you back, Patrick. Barry’s back in the studio. Johnny Mack is in Adelaide. Adelaide rattling that last night.
Patrick Berry
Yeah.
Aaron Horne
Okay, well, there you go. I missed him by a day. We are recording a day late, so I’ll give you my leave pass. Right.
Patrick Berry
I think he thought that we were filming yesterday, but it didn’t happen because obviously you’ve your why yesterday.
Aaron Horne
So yeah. No, my weeks are all out of whack at the moment. Mum will be listening to this in Singapore and she’ll say, Oh, I’m so sorry, but I’m looking after my other grandchildren. So shout out, get your priorities right. Exactly right. We’ve got a public plot to record and you’re over in Singapore. Just have everybody in the sun live in the life that they’re writing about the fans and all, I’m assuming.
Aaron Horne
Yeah. And apparently I just live in the pool now, so. Love and lifestyle. Yet Mum’s over there getting set up and you’ve been travelling the world, so everyone’s been away except for my headspace. Basically today all I want to do is break down your trip. As we first went to Sydney to learn from Gary, Vee did.
Patrick Berry
That was very fun.
Aaron Horne
So let’s look, let’s run through it chronologically. Let’s before we get to the big show, run us through kind of what you did. You went to Sydney and what was the focus there?
Patrick Berry
It all started a little bit ago. I got served an ad to see Gary Vee and anyone that follows him online knows that he’s just amazing. Like his videos online and the way he describes scenarios is just different is I think.
Aaron Horne
The first thing you ever showed me was that like he was a multi millionaire guy and he was still going to houses and flipping stuff from garage sale. And I was like, why you like not? It’s good. Keep watching. Yeah.
Patrick Berry
So like this opportunity to speak to him was the first time he I’ve seen him come to Australia apparently speaking before but I’ve never.
Aaron Horne
You went following along then. Yeah.
Patrick Berry
So this opportunity came up and was like, oh this is fantastic. I’ve always wanted to see Bay and then so had to go to Sydney for that. And then I started researching, discovered that Iman and now they a conference that I’ve been to in the past in Las Vegas happened to be on a week later. And I said to Abby, Well, we’re already halfway there.
Patrick Berry
I’ve been in Sydney because it’s two flights to get the two flights regardless.
Aaron Horne
I don’t know if distance wasn’t time wise. It doesn’t make sense to be halfway there, but.
Patrick Berry
I was working on the theory. I’d already done one leg of the flights, so they decided to tap on a full week of learning and head over to Iman as well and do two conferences back to back.
Aaron Horne
Yeah, fair enough. Look, you have expanded your mind. You expanded it here locally with someone from over there and then you’ve travelled.
Patrick Berry
But look, it started off awesome. We went to obviously Sydney first and had Gary and a couple of other speakers as well that were there the earlier speakers in the day with a nice mix of sort of those motivational speakers that are there to pump up your tires. And then there was a lot of talk around funnel advertising, so most people listening to us probably have experienced funnel ever tossing but don’t realise they have.
Patrick Berry
Yes, that’s where the internet uses the algorithm to figure out who might be interested in buying a product. You get served an ad.
Aaron Horne
I recorded one the other day and like I know they got me and I read the stats on, you know, like normally it’s not the first time you see the ad that you get falling into the final. Normally it’s not the second time, it’s probably the fourth or fifth time. And it came up was about the fifth time was like, Man, this keeps popping up for me.
Patrick Berry
And it’s normally a product you look at and you’re like, Yeah, what, 2995 for that that e-book on how to be a better real estate agent. That sounds pretty good. Maybe I should buy that. Yeah, and it sucks, you know, and then. Yeah, so we, we spent a lot of time learning about funnels and how they work. And it was quite amusing because this entire conference was sold via funnels.
Aaron Horne
Yeah.
Patrick Berry
So anybody explaining that I was there was because I’d been served the ad and I was coached into clicking on the ad. Yeah. Then from there buying a ticket, which then got me to this event.
Aaron Horne
So you could say like somebody in this space, like if, if someone internationally was coming to Australia, they probably might market through normal means of marketing and otherwise like they might. It might be in the newspaper, it might be a radio ad, or they might go on a press tour or something to say, I’m coming to Australia, come and check out my my show, my show or my conference.
Aaron Horne
This one was primarily or 100% only marketed through digital marketing. Yep. So a funnel to say let me show you that this will work.
Patrick Berry
Yeah. Now I’m assuming some people then found out about it from friends and family. That said I’m going to this and I remember like, oh wow, I want to get on that and see for the link to them. But the majority of tickets sold were somebody sitting in front of a computer saying, Right, who are we going to?
Patrick Berry
Who do we think is going to best suit this conference? Let’s build a profile. Let’s serve the add to that profile and then try to sell out this conference. And they did.
Aaron Horne
You got caught in the net and sold out there about.
Patrick Berry
Aaron Horne
Well, like we’ve played in the Spice with kind of running a seminar or a conference here and there and you know, we’ve gone, oh.
Patrick Berry
We’ve done the one with brands. That was yeah, exactly a similar approach.
Aaron Horne
And yet you’ll put out kind of an organic post to the people that follow along to your marketing in the online space. And you know, three or four people might click on the link and then you’ll find out, Oh yeah, I clicked on the link. Don’t really commit to it, put a little bit of money behind it, target it to a specific table like people have been looking into first time buying them, you know, sell out the whole thing.
Aaron Horne
So it’s kind of finding that spot is interesting. We’re talking about this because I think iOS 17 is just coming in the last week and all of that is changing. Oh, really? This whole week I’ve been looking into. Yeah, what’s going to happen is I’ve been following all these things that are saying it’s all changing. So what we’re talking about now might change.
Patrick Berry
Everything’s always changing though, at the end of the day. So tech is forever evolving, which is.
Aaron Horne
A perfect kind of jumping off point to get onto your next plane and travel across the world.
Patrick Berry
It’s a 14 hours later and I’m in Viva Las Vegas. You. Oh, yeah. So that’s you know, I’ve left Sydney and I’m really pumped and excited. I’ve learnt from the mastermind Gary. I was probably on a plane at the same time. He was heading back to the States probably.
Aaron Horne
Yeah.
Patrick Berry
If not now. He was in Brisbane the day also but yeah. Then we, we then went to a conference called Imaan which look I don’t expect anyone to know it’s sort of a real estate based company.
Aaron Horne
So the first thing he went to wasn’t real estate based. I was just kind of marketing digital marketing online. Whereas Inman is a conference Imaan Connect.
Patrick Berry
Imaan Connect is the conference. Iman is the website that is the back of it, and it’s basically a digital news platform in America that solely specialises in real estate news.
Aaron Horne
And Inman is an acronym for anything you.
Patrick Berry
Guys need branding? Man Yep, that’s correct. But the difference is, is with the conferences that imams connect put on and the way that they run their events, they’re more, in my opinion, they’re more future thinking conferences. So it’s more about, you know, what, what is working for some people and how can they leverage that technology in the future.
Patrick Berry
So they talk a lot about technology. They talk a lot about scripts and dialogues and how to better connect with with clients and what clients are looking for in today’s market. But most of the things I take away from it is not stuff that you implement tomorrow, it’s stuff that you work on implementing over a longer stretch goal.
Patrick Berry
So it’s not like that, right? This is really cool. They really get you to think about what is coming. And you know, the buzzword at the moment is A.I.. Yeah, it’s a buzzword. That’s what everyone’s talking about. There’s talks that in our industry alone, within the next 24 to 36 months, you know, 30% of our job will be automated by A.I..
Patrick Berry
Yep. And what does that mean? Does that mean people lose their jobs? Does that mean people have more time to specialise and upskill in other areas? And that’s what a lot of the talk was around at the conference. Yeah.
Aaron Horne
So I’ll be really keen to kind of find out more about that next step of it because we’ve kind of played with it here like man, you a right into this like area of being like how can we use some of these tools to become better at what we doing, both on the media side of things? And then?
Patrick Berry
Well, actually one of the speakers talked about AI and digital video editing and they use the exact tool that we use to edit this podcast. Yeah. Okay. So it’s kind of cool that way because you know, you’ve been playing in the space and I’ve been playing in the space that we’re other people using similar tools to us. Yeah, yeah.
Patrick Berry
For people that don’t know Aaron’s filming today what are we to cameras on Tuesday?
Aaron Horne
But normally it’s rainfall.
Patrick Berry
Yep. And we currently use an AI programme to edit the.
Aaron Horne
It’s amazing. It’s such a timesaver for something that would have taken me, you know, three or 4 hours in the past to kind of go through everything, line it up, synchronise, make sure everything plays in. Even before I was using the the stream deck and kind of not concentrating on what we’re talking about and editing on the fly now, it’s literally cutting it up in front of me.
Aaron Horne
This audio part is amazing. And then now they’ve just added another feature where it’ll be cutting out short clips that are recognising, Oh, this is a really good feature. Yeah, you should use this for your social media. So they keep adding on to their product the same way that.
Patrick Berry
Now, I guess my first question is, does that scare you that you’re going to lose your job?
Aaron Horne
You know, look, interestingly, a bunch of the stuff as it comes through, you think I’m going to lose my job and we can even talk about, remember when I was taking the photos, coming back, editing all the photos by myself? I was so hesitant to.
Patrick Berry
Hand that.
Aaron Horne
Over because I was like, I’ll lose my job. I won’t have anything to do. Just get some random bloke off the street to come and take photos with their iPhone and I’ll be out of my arse. But I know pivoted to, oh, now we’re going to kind of advance to that. Let’s do that. And and take it to the next level.
Patrick Berry
I reckon that’s what people probably need to understand the most about is not to see it as a threat, but see it as an enhancement to allow you to do other things. We’re all busy in life every single day and.
Aaron Horne
Getting.
Patrick Berry
Busier and busier and we all want to do more things. A couple of people described Ally as like the digital assistants just to help you out. They all said that I can’t replace the human factor. Like it’s amazing what it can do. It’s amazing and how to help you be more efficient, but it can’t replace you as the expert.
Aaron Horne
Yeah.
Patrick Berry
Yeah, it can help you become an expert faster. So another interesting thing they talked about, for anyone that’s been thinking about getting into real estate with how much technology there is online and how much data there is online, what once would take 5 to 6 years, maybe ten years to become an expert in real estate? Potentially you could upskill to that sort of level in, you know, 6 to 12 months now with the way that I work.
Patrick Berry
Yeah. Yeah.
Aaron Horne
And so I guess any proptech really can kind of yet take you from being like that boots on the ground of letterbox dropping and being like, oh no, let’s like build my community based around like our was a really good example now is it ever in our offices as being someone who’s like, Look, I’m willing to put myself out there and expose myself too?
Aaron Horne
I was literally at a golf day on the weekend and three people said to me that that guy in your office, like, he’s pretty wild, isn’t it? I would never have said it before and I’ll say it again. Used to think he was a real douchebag. Now I’m on to him as a watch if he’s going to be a high flyer.
Patrick Berry
And look, he is a great example of going from nothing to really strong social proof in his backyard. Yeah. Like we’ve seen. What’s he been working two years in real estate. Yeah. And he’s now selling flat out. He’s got so much social proof, so much credibility in the marketplace that works. Coming to him now, he’s not having to search for it as hard as what he once was, but that’s a great example.
Patrick Berry
He went out and he leveraged technology. Yeah, leveraged the understanding of databases and how you can use automation to be able to make your job more efficient.
Aaron Horne
And and then, as you say, this artificial intelligence stuff’s coming in and he’s able to analyse the data a lot quicker than something like he could do if he was like working through the numbers by himself. Yeah. To then free up his time to be like, oh, how do I leverage this into more sales?
Patrick Berry
Well it’s amazing. The other day everyone’s had a chat, but we’ve been playing around. We connected to the internet.
Aaron Horne
So what? It sounds like they’re building up Skynet.
Patrick Berry
Yeah. Okay. For people that don’t understand how it works, most people probably understand. But chat is just a database of knowledge that’s closed off from the Internet. So I think.
Aaron Horne
September 2021 was the last time it got any new information.
Patrick Berry
Every time you ask it to write something for you, it can reference its own database, but it can’t go out and find new information. No. So we recently plugged hours into the internet by installing a plugin. It sounds so.
Aaron Horne
Dangerous every time you say.
Patrick Berry
No, but it takes.
Aaron Horne
Me back it. If it comes back to the day that the internet was broken, at least two idiots did it.
Patrick Berry
But it’s amazing life. So I just connected mind to read periods. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’ve had mine reading a PDF that came out last night from CoreLogic Up Data, which is our largest data company. Yeah. And I said, you need to summarise this for me so that I don’t have to read the 25 page report. I basically told it, go find the information that is relevant to the Tasmanian marketplace.
Patrick Berry
Yeah, yeah, summarise it for me.
Aaron Horne
And which is really interesting. Like if you’re not selling in Melbourne or Sydney, I might want to know some of the facts about kind of the median there. And you can put in like hit me with the median on these areas, but you want to know what’s happening in your backyard. You want people who are asking you what’s happening in the Hobart marketplace.
Aaron Horne
I’ve got that easy. Oh, did you read the 25 pages? Yeah.
Patrick Berry
So I have time for that. So I’m not sitting here saying that as agents we’re becoming lazy. I’m just saying we’re getting creative on how we are absorbing the knowledge that we need to do exactly to serve our community. Yeah, yeah. It’s been it was really. Yeah. The Allied chats were really interesting around around that. And another big key takeaway that Iman really pushed hard on is what they call long format marketing, which is what we’re doing today, this podcast and really basically as people have more access to the Internet and people have their own ability to research the marketplace, like once upon a time, you know, agents were the way described as gatekeepers of
Patrick Berry
sale prices. Like if you want to know what a house sold, you had to ask me. Yeah, yeah. You can go do all that research yourself. We’ve said it on this podcast before that and buyers that we’re working, we’ve become almost like little mini experts on that little backyard that they’re looking to buy and almost better than what we are.
Patrick Berry
Oh, yes. We’re trying to you know. I know every block of land through $2 million houses, through to every suburb where some of the buyers we work with are just looking at Glenorchy. Only three bedroom, one bathroom. Yeah.
Aaron Horne
And they’ll, they’ll be able to tell you. Oh well one three streets over sold for this much. You die and you like that one slip through my net because my net so much bigger.
Patrick Berry
So a lot of the conference spoke about, you know, where does your value as an agent become and start talking about long format marketing and just giving information and providing people with that knowledge so that when they are researching, that’s that you become the credible source and then they come to talk to you. Yeah. So we’ve been doing it for a while now, but it was nice to know that that’s becoming where we should be.
Aaron Horne
So yeah, like, well, we’ve been on the right track at least. It’s nice to reiterate that kind of even the start of this podcast was let’s like, yeah, unshackle the gates and say, we’re happy to give you the info.
Patrick Berry
Well, I really liked it. I asked tell you when I connected to the internet to reference to write me a market report on Glenorchy. Yep. And it went out and it searched the internet and actually pulled back a blog from our website and.
Aaron Horne
We saw.
Patrick Berry
Data out of our website and it basically read something along the lines of such and such a phone for property globalise, blah blah blah. But it didn’t know that I worked for info and didn’t know that that was my website so I could have been any real estate agent in Hobart asking you to do this script. Yeah, and it went and sourced our site as a reference point.
Aaron Horne
When you called me to tell me you would sound like a giddy little.
Patrick Berry
Girl, I was really excited.
Aaron Horne
Like, Oh dude, you’re not going to believe.
Patrick Berry
This. I was like pretty impressed that it decided that our information was credible enough for it to include it, thought that it was putting together so it’s a really interesting approach now to how you market yourself in real estate and how you hopefully become valuable to the consumers are listening to us. Yeah is more that we need to be providing important information to people so they can make better understanding and better decisions.
Patrick Berry
It’s not so much about selling the houses as it once was. Like every agent can market a home. Every agent has access to the same marketing materials. Yeah, I think a lot of where we become valuable now is that lead up in the journey to that point in time when you sell, but giving you that, that information, that inside knowledge, that better understanding so you can make the right decisions when your time comes to sell in that.
Aaron Horne
Yeah, 100% and I think one of the things that for one was always done is been that kind of later and looking forward or tackling that was like you’ve won the Innovation Award here a few times and maybe, yeah, you yeah these look on your face like never want it.
Patrick Berry
Like I thought I couldn’t kind of that’s why it’s like don’t ask me how many flea.
Aaron Horne
Wells out there that you guys that’s a good example of you’ve always been open to innovation and looking forward and not being stuck in using outdated or you’ve never been scared to to push forward and try something new. So rather than being like, Oh, this is the way it’s always worked, this is the way we’re going to continue to do it.
Aaron Horne
It’s this new things coming. Let’s jump on the train while we can. And like like you say, like we’re long for marketing now. We’ve been using the same programme that they’re pumping up at these conferences. We’ve been looking at them early and kind of trying to engage in them. So that’s one strength of kind of why you would choose fall and fall over another agency.
Aaron Horne
If you’re looking to be relevant in the local market, that’s it.
Patrick Berry
And look, I’ve got I’m sure more will come out on that podcast over the coming weeks and months from what Inman has told us. And what knowledge is that I’ve sort of brought away from it. Yet I’ve got pages and pages of notes of things to go through.
Aaron Horne
Yeah, I looked in on that other room before and you had kind of the whiteboard starting to get marked up, and it looked like one of those things where, you know, you connect all the red bits, a string, like you’re trying to solve a mystery, like how does this bit connect to that bit? It’s going to get there.
Aaron Horne
And we always kind of have these mocked up walls where we’re planning.
Patrick Berry
But I do love our boards. Anyone that comes to visit our office will see whiteboards around the place. And it is it’s like that spider graph. You’ve got a central box and then there’s all these little arms coming off it everywhere. And yeah, it’s not unusual for us to have multiples of these happening in at any one time with different projects we’re working on.
Patrick Berry
And it’s to me, that’s what excites me about it is how can we think of the next thing to help our clients and have a better experience in the industry. Oh, like.
Aaron Horne
Aaron Horne
But other people might say, Oh no, I’m too scared to take that risk.
Patrick Berry
And I’ve had multiple people say, What can you learn from an American real estate footprint since I’ve been back? Yeah, I’ve like, why is it any different to an Australian real estate company so. Well, they do things differently, but do they? Yeah. Well, we’re all marketing ourselves as agents. We’re all doing effectively the same thing. Yes, the technology’s different and the way that they interact with their clients might be different, but.
Patrick Berry
But rankings are all the same. If you can.
Aaron Horne
Break down that core stuff and bring it back into your market and be like, I understand my market. I can take these things from the other place and try and maximise what I can do in my space.
Patrick Berry
And not killing it. And that’s it. That’s what I really enjoy out of email is just trying to come away with those small nuggets that a little bit different and outside the square so we can bring them back here and, and hopefully give that extra 5%.
Aaron Horne
Patrick Berry
And kudos to you guys while I was away. You had some cracker episodes while I was gone.
Aaron Horne
Yeah. The one with with rea from don’t finance. Really, really really good stuff. Yeah yeah.
Patrick Berry
That was awesome to say that you can feel the spot we’ve a guest host when I’m gone.
Aaron Horne
Yeah, well, it’s funny because I was just like, man, I’m don apart and we’ve connected. I would tick tock, which was crazy. And then yeah. And then I listen to her podcast, mentioned her podcast on the show while she was here. So Rhiannon from Don’t Finance, it’s called This Busy Life and I found it on Spotify. She was surprised it was still up.
Aaron Horne
She said, Oh, I didn’t realise it was still out, but it is still out there. And if you’re interested in hard working people, yeah, jump on. This is really cool guests on that. So shout out to those people and you be back. We’ll be back next week with even more podcast.
Patrick Berry
Sounds good. See you then, guys.
Aaron Horne
Bye.
[extro & disclaimer]
