Hey welcome back to the podcast super excited today to have darren marcus of the darren marcus group from las vegas nevada. Darren. Welcome to the show good morning. Hey man, we're excited! We have to have you uh for my listeners out there, whether you're, watching or uh you're, watching a video or you're listening on audio make sure you subscribe hit that notification button share this.

If it brings you some value today - and i know it's going to hey darren so last year, 62 closed transactions, 65 million dollars in volume. We want to talk about mindset. We want to talk about this crazy market that we're in. We want to talk about challenges.

We want to talk about marketing, lead generation, team, building, relationship, building and more you down for that. I'm down awesome so maybe give uh give the listener a little back story like how long have you been? How long have you been in real estate and why did you get into this crazy business? So i've been in real estate uh just over 13 years now and um believe it or not? I was actually worked in a another industry owned another business uh up until 2008.. I was in the sports nutrition industry and had a distribution company here in las vegas uh, distributed to about 300 stores. My business partner at the time was in construction and, as we know, everything in construction and real estate went to hell and uh.

So we closed the business because he pulled all the the money out and closed the bank accounts and was definitely in a panic mode, and so i was left in a situation where i'm like what am i going to do now? Believe it or not. I bartended for two years and as i was bartending, i'm like okay, i can't do this. The rest of my life and friends. All my life have always told me, man, you should get into real estate.

You would do really great and um. So i first year into bartending, i thought you know what i'll go and get my real estate license and i was working graveyard. I'd get off at 7. 00 a.m.

Go to class from eight to one and uh did that for a few weeks and uh passed my test and um and then got into real estate. So for all my listeners out there, here's another service industry, bartender entrepreneur, but better yet and started in 2009. So when did the business? When did the business start to click for you um? You know it took a long time. Tom honestly, you know everybody asked me.

First of all, they asked why why the hell would i get into real estate in 2009, and my my thought, my thought process at that time was i'd rather start at the bottom and learn when it's tough and work my way up and 10 years from you Know then i'd be in a great position and that's exactly what happened and realistically you know very first of all, i was very fortunate. I had a friend of mine from the gym who introduced me to um florence, shapiro and ivan sure and two legends yep yep. Two legends and - and they were the top luxury team here in town at that time - and it's funny the friend of mine who i knew from the gym for years him and i do cardio every day i thought he was a real estate agent - never knew that. He was a developer and worth the amount of money that he was sure and he said: hey i'm.

You know, why are you getting into real estate? This is crazy and i said i'm going to sell luxury and it goes oh okay. He says why are you going to sell luxury and i said well, people with money always have money and whether times are good or bad they're always buying or selling, and so i figured it was. You know it's a great opportunity to get into that business and he says well what team are you joining it and i, i gave him a name of an office and i said he goes. Why are you joining them? I said well in their ad, it says they're number one and he says: oh okay, he goes well they're, not he goes, but let me introduce you to the number one team right florence and ivan so um.

He made the introduction to florence and ivan, and i got to tell you at the time man i i was probably the worst situation. I'd ever been in financially in my life um literally i i tell people all the time i literally cashed in change to have enough gas to get to my uh meeting with florence and ivan um. I was scared to death once i learned who they were, and thankfully they were two of the most incredible people. I'd ever met in my life and um and they brought me in and i started there and they grew me for five years and it was tough man.

I there's no doubt about it. I mean those first five years. I worked multiple jobs and still you know, um was doing real estate at the same time and the one thing i always tell people um, you know they always talk about surrounding yourself with people who will help you succeed and there's no doubt that if i wasn't Around those two, i honestly don't know if i'd still be doing real estate today, so five years in somewhere, it started to click. What happened next so because of my background, i had spent um some amount of time in construction sales.

I sold construction materials to high-end builders, and so i was very familiar with the luxury market and the clientele, and i was what in 2009, when the market crashed. A lot of those builders had bought land to build spec homes, and so they came back to me and they said, hey darren. We want you to list our land and start selling it, because we need to liquidate this and get rid of it. I said great, not a problem um.

I learned quickly that taking the renderings of the homes and putting them in mls as a single family residence increased the eyeballs on the property, and i started having a lot of great success with selling land. So five years in um there was a really large luxury home development here in nevada or in vegas that ivan and florence were managing and it was coming back online. It had shut down in 2009 and they were getting ready to reopen. And florence and ivan pulled me aside, and they said: hey darren, you know what we love your tenacity, we love your, you know, don't give up type attitude.

We know that you've got a lot of experience with startups and you've always been an entrepreneur, and you have the experience with land and we think this would be a great fit for you to manage this community, and so the name of the community is ascaya um. It's one of the top luxury home communities here in nevada now, and so they they appointed me out there in 2014. I always tell people it was funny because the most amount of money i'd made up to that point was 50 000 in a year and so when they appointed me as a manager, i'll never forget ivan calling me. I can remember exactly where i was at to this day and ivan calls me says: hey bud, you know they're going to go ahead and hire you.

The developers approved you and he says, um. Let me look at what the salary starts at and in my mind tom i had 65 000. I don't know why and ivan says you're going to start at 130 a year and i pause and i go okay and he said all right man i'll talk to you later and i called him back and i said, ivan sorry man, i i was a little Thrown off um, i wasn't expecting to get paid that much and so um, so they appointed me there. Obviously i started with a great salary um.

It gave me a great opportunity to learn. I was scared to death. My first six months honestly, i was it was a billion dollar project that i was taking on. I had no experience, but you know i had the belief of ivan and florence behind me and so i got in there and i started uh selling and um.

You know we had a great success there in the five years that i was there. We started in 14, which was just starting to ramp up again, and it gave me great exposure and really helped from a branding standpoint for myself to create a name for myself. In the market, and that's really where my career started to launch a hundred percent when for the person that's listening right now, darren, that's going well gosh! I just like how do i find someone like those two to work for and now you know, you're, that guy for other people on your team. What advice do you out for others that need to seek out and maybe build better relationships with agents that are just crushing it, and you know whether it's a mentor-mentee relationship or they join the team? What advice do you have for people that need to find someone like that? You know number one man, i i think really it is mindset you know.

Luckily, i grew up with a father he's a marine um. There was a there's, nothing you couldn't accomplish. Yeah you're not allowed to say i can't do that, and so it was all. I never had any doubt in my mind that i would be in luxury um.

I never had any doubt in my mind, even though there was fears at time i knew. Ultimately, i could do it and you know i think the biggest thing is when i meet new agents. They always ask me: how do you get into luxury and it's almost confusing to me because i think well, you just make up your mind and you do it right, and it really is it's a mindset shift. It's i tell everybody, you just have to start seeing yourself doing luxury, but thinking of yourself in that lower price point, and i'm a big believer in visualization um.

I do it every day, and so that's another big thing for me is that every day i saw myself growing my business and expanding, and i saw myself as an equal, even when i wasn't at the time i saw myself as an equal with the top players. Yeah, seeing yourself as an equal with the top players unpack that um, you know at the end of the day, it's just like with luxury clientele. You know, i think a lot of people are afraid of luxury clients, and i have found that one. Some of them are my best friends now they're the my greatest mentors um most people in the luxury space didn't come from money, they started down and out and they worked hard to get to where they're at, and so they love helping and so from time to Time i'll all set up appointments with clients of mine just to go to lunch and just to learn about their background and what you realize at the end of the day, they're no different, they're, the same people, we've all had this.

A lot of us have all had the same experiences: we've started in the same place and at some point along the way somebody gave them an opportunity and they they ran with it yeah, and that was that was the big thing for me to learn. Was that and these people, whether you know they're worth 50 million or you know a billion um at the core of it? They really are the same as we're all the same yeah and i think that's the biggest thing to realize is that they're not any different, and i think that takes away a lot of the fear as well of working with them. I agree i agree so so. Let's talk a little bit about marketing and lead generation, so you, the development ends, and i assume and now you're transitioning into more retail talk to us about what you did from a marketing and lead generation standpoint to make that transition um number one.

I it was a wake-up call. I thought i was going to leave the development day one and get rolling, and it wasn't like that. It was like going from new home sales back to resale yeah, and so really i had to start my business all over again because during that five years that i was there, i was exclusive, and so i had to. I had to refer all my clients out.

So i had lost a lot of my my touch with my clientele that i had been working with, and so it was getting back up and ramping up again and the biggest thing i'm a big believer in um business to business relationships, especially in luxury. You know the majority of my clientele are all business owners and so i go out and and i create relationships with businesses and i'm i'm a very big believer in um in referring out business but making it a reciprocal relationship. So um. I work with a lot of builders and architects, and you know car dealerships and everything else where i've created relationships and that's where a lot of my business comes from is just from from that clientele, and i make sure that i return the favors i i send Them business as well, yes, um, so that they're motivated to work the opposite way, so so many great businesses and and owners.

I talk to sort of talk about like the the holy trifecta of brand demand, gen and referrals right. So it sounds like you've got a lot of positive things happening with your brand and i'd love to hear more about what you've done, especially sort of post the development to establish who you are credibility. You know why you versus the competition and then referrals right. Clearly, i want to unpack that, but talk to us about demand gen.

What are you doing from the standpoint of whether it's digital advertising, if anything or direct mail, if anything or email marketing, if anything, what else are you doing um? You know the biggest thing for us is that again it's the referral program. We do do digital marketing, yeah um. The crm that i use now has a great um component to it that helps us generate facebook, ads yeah and it's been the first time. Usually i find in the luxury space that a lot of the facebook ads and digital ads that i was running in the past.

I got a lot of unqualified buyers and 15 15 year olds. Yes, the minute they say they want to buy a mansion. I know that it's not a real client anymore right right. Nobody uses that term, but that's uh um.

You know the digital marketing's really strong for us uh, believe it or not relationships with other agents, there's a lot of agents that don't work luxury right and that going back to you asked me one of the first things that i did when i started back. That was the first thing i did instead of calling expireds and trying to compete with 30 other agents, i would call the agent directly and i would say, hey look out of respect to you. I wanted to call you first. Is your client going to be relisting with you or not, and if not, i would love an opportunity to work with you and i'll pay.

You a referral fee if you'll send me that business. My first six deals were referrals from agents yeah, so smart. So when did you transition out of the uh out of the project? What year was that uh 2018 is when i left all right so really from 2018 to just the last few years, you've had like a meteoric rise, so so, if there was a, if someone would sit down with you and say, okay, you build relationships with business Owners right, you use the law of reciprocity. You do a lot of giving to receive right um.

How did you build those relationships because it feels like you must have built them pretty quickly to get your business rolling that fast yeah, i'm very organized with my time. I time block i've done that since i believe it or not, since i was 17 years old, so maybe i'm a bit of a nut case um, but i'm very big in time blocking and so part of my day is my days are very strategic, meaning that I know when i'm calling people i know when i'm going out and meeting people in person one of the things that is funny last year i had my team start doing, was going door-to-door in businesses and introducing themselves and they couldn't figure out. Why and i said, number one 80 percent of those people that own those businesses are going to be your target clientele and number two most people live within the area that they work, and so, if you're, focusing on an area and you're going business to business, that You're going to have a great opportunity to meet those people that live in that area in a um in a non-invasive way, you're not knocking on their door, you're, not calling their house and you're going into a business where most time they're welcoming you there right right. So so give us the the the mindset and then maybe the tactics that you're asking your team to do.

If they're going into these businesses like how? What what are you asking to be thinking about as they're walking in and then what are they saying to these business owners to establish a relationship so number one? You know i i i try to stress to them that you don't this, isn't a car lot! You don't have to close the deal today right, it's all about relationship building, and so you want to go in in a non-threatening way: you're not trying to close them there at the door, yeah um. You want to go in and start building relationships, and so one of the things that i do one of one of my one of my marketing strategies when i started my own team was that i felt a lot of agents, lacked specific knowledge or or were experts In certain areas of vegas vegas at one time was very small, and most agents worked the entire valley, and now it's a very large city, with all these different little suburbs and different areas. And so one of the things that my team does is that each each team, member on my team is appointed in sales territory and it's their job to develop and know that area better than anyone. And so when they go into those neighboring businesses, they introduce themselves.

As you know, hey my name is darren. I just wanted to stop in um, i'm an i'm a local agent here in the area. I specialize in the summerlin area or i specialize in the spring valley area and i just wanted to drop off some some information about what's going on in the market. If you know anybody, that's looking to buy or sell, please have them reach out to me and it's very simple conversation and then i i stress to the agents: don't just do it one time stop in every few weeks or stop in every few months and reintroduce Yourself and talk to them, because that's how you start to develop that relationship right and, as we all know in in real estate, trust is really important and that's how you also start to develop the trust developing the trust talk more about that um.

So i you know, i think one is consistency right. If i tell a client i'm going to do something doing it and that's how they that's, how i build trust, and that sometimes means even when it cost me money. So maybe i commit to something that i didn't realize was gon na cost me as much as i did, but still doing it and committing to that and not changing my mind, um being consistent with my follow-up with those clients. If i tell them, i'm going to call them on a friday call them on friday, or if i tell them, i'm going to be back in two weeks.

Come back in two weeks, because you know i think they're so used to in today's market. Um being told something and then there's no follow through, and so you know i mean i've won dills in the past, just by a client saying damn man, you are aggressive in this um. If you're this aggressive with me, i know you'll be that aggressive in selling. My home right, and so you know - and i think it's just at the end of the day - it's something i learned from florence.

It was always about just doing what was right. It wasn't about the money, it was about doing what's right. Well, i mean trust and that's your brand. That's that's how people relate to you so um, let's go a different direction.

I was uh in a mastermind meeting a couple days ago in napa valley, and one of the one of the top team leaders made the following statement. He said this market is as hard or as difficult as 2009.. Now he wasn't referring to the global economic meltdown, but he was referring. To fact of you know: lots of sales people, lots of buyer demand, not lots of inventory, so so maybe unpack for us.

What are you doing differently better to help your teammates to help yourself to help your buyers get their offers accepted? One of the key things is responsiveness um, it's one of the big things that i stress with my business. You know i i laugh. Nowadays, everybody promotes the i just sold the house in the neighborhood for the highest price um. In my opinion, if you're not selling it for the highest price or something wrong, exactly everybody every week is selling for the highest price right, that's uh! That doesn't tell me anything about how you sell so yeah.

I think the biggest thing is: is the level of customer service that we provide so two things that i do is that every listing i take, i bring in a co-listing agent from my team. Usually it's that area expert. So no matter where i take a listing at my area experts there with me. They know that market better than anyone and it allows us to respond quickly.

So my role with my team and everyone knows - is that number one um. You must respond within 15 minutes to a showing request and i see every showing request, and so does my operations manager yeah. So they know that we're on it. Number two is that i tell clients that if somebody wants to see your home within an hour, we will have somebody at your home within an hour um that in the luxury market, that time is of the essence, a client could fly into vegas at 10 a.m.

Call an agent up and say: hey: i want to go see these four properties and, if we're not available in that with the limited opportunities that we get, we can very easily lose an opportunity. So on on the listing side, that's what we do. We do something very similar on the buyer's side as well, so i have two things one. I always have a partnering agent with all my buyers so that, if i'm not available, my partnering agent is um and, and the backup to that is, we always have an agent on floor so that if a client calls me right now and says darren, i want To go see this house in the next 30 minutes it just popped up on the market and i don't want to lose an opportunity, we're there in 30 minutes and i'll.

Give you a great example of that. I just closed a deal last last week that was uh just a little slightly over 7 million and um. I was walking my dogs at the park. That morning i have a i set up for all of the communities.

I have um listing alerts and activity alerts. So a property came on the market within 10 minutes. I text my client. It was the perfect home for them.

We were at that property by one o'clock that afternoon, and one of the things that i do also in in in line with responsiveness is that i always tee up my operations manager or my assistant, my tcs, that they have the offer or the listing agreement. Prepped and ready to sign while we're at the property. So while we were standing at the property, i was able to have my operations manager, send that offer to my clients and they signed it right there and before anybody else was even in to see the property. We had already submitted an offer.

That's beautiful, there's a lot to unpack there. So um, i love the partnering agent concept. You see a lot of top uh. You know listing agents that have teams doing the same thing, but hearing that you're also doing it with the buyers.

Where did where did that idea come from and, of course, someone's going to ask how? How does the? How does that other agent feel like if someone else is taking their buyer out? How does the commissions work unpack that? So again, i stress to my team that it's never about us. That's the number one rule with my team is that it's never. I never want to hear a statement that well i wasn't able to or we weren't able to right um, it's all about the client number one first and foremost, and so all the agents on my team and i have to say i've been very fortunate that everybody Is on board with that? They all understand that clients first and so um and we've. We have a really great working relationship with the agents on the team.

You know it doesn't happen that often you know nine times out of ten the agent's able to attend the showing or they're able to take their client out, but in that rare incident where um they have to rely on someone else on the team. It's it's awesome for them too, because what i stress to them is again it's all about building the relationships and the trust and, if you're not available for your client they're, going to quit. Working with you and to me, i'd rather have 50 of something than 100 of nothing, and so that's how they're able to see it and they see it through through. You know what i do as well um.

They all see that there's times that i i pass deals on that i'm just not able to service, because i maybe at that moment i don't have the time to take that client out and so and they see. Sometimes it can be a big deal that i pass along to them. I i don't i'm not greedy. I don't try to retain that for myself, uh again, it's all about the client.

If they need to go see that property right now, i'm gon na make sure there's somebody there to see that problem. You know i love, i love what you're doing darren and my hallucination is um. If i said the word fatigue or tired at a seminar. A lot of hands go up in the air right, it's not it's, not just buyer fatigue, it's agent fatigue right and it's you know you you and i both know in this business.

If you're wildly successful, like you time, is the most important issue and if you're trying to build your business, it's how do i get deals and dollars so you've got the deals and dollars par. You know you got that part down it's. How do we all get more time so so, like give us a sense of how your team like did? They feel that do they feel a sense of relief because of this strategy, or just unpack it for us? So when i started building my team one of the main things i i actually had the opportunity the last year that i was with ivan, i also managed his team, so we had 30 set 37 agents and 15 admin right and i was still running the skya. So my time was literally down to 30 minute blocks um, and i learned one delegating i had to delegate.

I had no choice um, but when i, when i recruit now one of the biggest things that i've built my team on is not just the services that i provide the clients, it's the services that we provide our agents. My number one goal is that our agents shouldn't have to work more than 50 to 60 hours a week at most. I i mandate that they take time off so i'll push them and make sure that they take time off. I don't want agents working seven days.

A week 12 hours a day, um i ask that they shut their phones off at certain times and forward it to our answering service. So we have an answering service that answers 24 hours a day. If it's an emergency, they will message us that it's an emergency um, but i really am a big believer. You know going back to my fitness days and when i, when i trained and competed you know, you can't work out eight hours a day.

Seven days a week, you'll completely burn yourself out and you and the key to growing and building is recovery, and i believe the same in business that i i think that you need those days off. You need that time off because if you don't i've, seen agents that work that seven days a week, 12 hours a day, pretty soon yeah, they're working but they're really just going through the motions. They're, not sharp anymore. And to me i told the cli.

I told the agents - it's not just about you, it's about the situation you're, putting your client in if you're burned out, if you're, not if you're angry, if you're upset because you've been working the last 30 days straight, you can't negotiate well, you're, not strong enough you're, Not it's! It's like a fighter going in every day, right, fighting seven days a week, they'll never recover. You've got to be able to have that break and step back. I use this. I used the uh analogy last week with my team.

I said it's like boxing right, you box, for three minutes, you give it your all and then you step back and you take a breath and then you come back stronger. You re-strategize and you step back in the ring, and sometimes you have to do that, and so i i with all the systems i have set up number one. I have a marketing director that manages all my team's marketing for them. They do three social media posts for them.

A month a week, uh two emails: our operations manager is there to help them with any paperwork, and then we have two um tc's as well: uh virtual tc's and they're available seven days a week, uh 12 hours a day, basically so that the agents, if they Need to on the weekends or whenever um they can defer out to that person to assist them or have that person help them cover if they're going to be out of office, but you've set up a beautiful business. That is, i mean when you start talking about serving your agents right, not just your clients and like trying to help them work less than 50 hours a week and be as successful as they are um. There could be a few agents in vegas that are calling you because of this podcast, because that's because think about i mean darren, you and i both know. We.

We watch the grind and the hustle of a lot of these agents and they do. They burn themselves out. So what would you say, kind of kind of you know near closing. What would you say to the person that's listening to this that doesn't have a team that is feeling the fatigue they're.

You know they might be in their car racing to a showing right now. Listening to this, what advice do you have for that person to get some time back? Well, i think the number one thing is learning how to delegate and learning that you know. I think that agents by nature - and i think even the consumer - starts to believe this - is that we think it has to be all us. I have to do the paperwork i have to do the marketing.

I have to do all this and i've had agents on my team that they ended up, leaving because they couldn't let that stuff go yeah and - and i had i had a conversation with one age and i told her - i said: you've been doing 12 transactions a Year for the last 17 years and with your current business model, you'll continue doing 12 transactions a year for the rest of your life, and i said at some point. I trust you to let go of my clientele and allow you to handle my clientele. You have to do the same with me and, and i think the agent who's sitting there in the car thinking the same thing that they have to handle everything you don't. I live by the 80 20 rule nothing's ever going to be 100 um.

If it's 80, there i go with it and i can always tweak it and fix it. I'm always about solutions, yeah and fixing problems, and i that's the part that i thrive on. I love solving problems, and so every week when i meet with my admin and my marketing, we look at the week before what struggles we have what problems arise? How do we put solutions and systems in place so that in the future we don't have that issue anymore and that it makes everybody's job much easier, so 100, 100 percent? So where did this mindset come from with you? You know, i think, just years of watching other businesses, like i said, i've been an entrepreneur for a long time and for a long time i always thought it had to be me. I had to handle everything um florence and ivan were a great guidance.

They were two of them most successful people. I'd ever met in my life and two of the most balanced people i'd ever met in my life. They had great family lives. They.

You know they were the two most successful agents in town and they were going to dinner and going to vacations with their family and taking time off and - and that was when i realized - you know what i don't have to work. Seven days a week, 12 hours a day, look what they're doing and they're living an enjoyable life um, and then i learned through their team that okay, i can, if i have an influence, can trust these other people to handle their clients. I can trust them to handle my clients right so right, it's such a growth mindset and you were so blessed to have that that exposure and thank you for giving some exposure to some people today. So as we as we wrap this up darren sort of just you know closing thoughts like if you could just speak to the entire real estate industry.

You know no pressure, but if you speak to the entire industry, what would be your closing message? Well, tom number one: i wanted to point out the whiteboard, because you asked me about that earlier. That is a brand new whiteboard. I just had that installed over the weekend, so i haven't been able to back it all up um but uh. You know i honestly, the white board is a big thing for me.

Yeah i like having things visual. I like having things in front of me and seeing it um. I think the mindset of don't give up trust me. I mean the first five years of real estate every year ivan and florence had to talk me out of quitting because i wanted to quit, because i didn't have the money to keep going and thankfully i i didn't quit and i listened to them um, because now I'm in you know in a nice position and honestly, one of the things i love now is is more than even selling is helping.

Other agents is watching them have the same struggles that i had and coaching them through that and um from a team perspective. One of the biggest things that i've learned this year is that people join my team to learn from me and that i need to be there for them. I had separated myself quite a bit last year. I really created this divide between myself and the team because i needed to be out selling and it really hurt ourselves and so this year.

The one thing that i committed to is that every monday i do a one-on-one with my agents. I spend a half hour with them going over their sales pipeline and helping them develop their business, and i found that one, it's very enjoyable for me. I really enjoy it right, um and number two, i'm really starting to see them flourish from the mentoring now, and i think that's been a really important factor is learning that again. This goes back to about the agent sitting in the car.

It's not all about me. Um, just like it's not all about us with our clients, it's not all about me with my team either, and so i have to focus on my team and and help build the agents up. Yeah you're, awesome, brother, i'm so glad we had you on the show. I mean thanks man.

Your coach was like you got to get this guy on there, man he makes you look like you're, not positive, and i'm like i get it. I get it well tom to your credit, like i told you man. Every morning, i walk my dogs and i watch one of your videos every morning, so this was like the coolest thing and believe it or not. I've visualized this for the last two years of being on your show.

So this is a really cool moment for me um to be here, and i really really appreciate it. Man. It means a lot to me. Well, we appreciate you man, thank you so much for your time and your contribution today.

So all right guys, if you haven't liked and subscribed, make sure you do so make sure you uh search out darren, hey darren. What's your best uh instagram handle or email way for people to connect with you uh in instagram, it's at dmg luxury at dmg luxury. Make sure you give this guy a follow because uh, obviously you can see that his head and his heart are in the right place, so darren thanks. So much brother have an awesome day and we'll look forward to seeing you soon awesome man.

Thank you. Have a great day thanks take care, you.