Steven David Elliot wants you to buy a pair of shoes.
Specifically, if you’re a new agent and you have $200 to spend marketing yourself. It’s a question Sam DeBianchi asked him in this episode of SamSpeaks! and his answer was unlike anyone else’s.
“Get a great pair of shoes. Put gas in your tank and get out there,” he said. Because for Steven, building a real estate business — or any business for that matter — is about talking to people and creating connections.
Take Steven’s first transaction for example. He’d just been licensed and started at Fathom Realty in Raleigh, North Carolina. While the other new agents were sitting down for phone duty or note writing work, Steven ran errands. His first stop was a hair cut.
“I was just chatting with my stylist, and I mentioned I’m a real estate agent. And I asked if she had any interest in real estate. She said she was hoping to buy a house one day. So I said, “What time do you get off work?” I picked her up at 3pm and we bought a house that day.”
Put the power of your sphere to work in real estate
Today, Steven has taken that model and scaled it exponentially. He creates and hosts massive networking events, in which upwards of a thousand people attend. And he does it all with a savvy, strategic approach to social media.
“I have referral and recommendation Facebook pages that are all branded to me, as well as the event pages themselves. I ask people to help other people. I don’t have to ask for business,” Steven said. “It comes to me.”
To this day, Steven has never paid for marketing. “I do no lead generation. I don’t do any door knocking or calling expireds. I only believe in branding. For example, Adwerx. It works well with what I’m doing.”
This model was what brought Steven to real estate in the first place. His career paths have included social worker and bookstore owner. And it was as the latter that he discovered the power of event marketing. And he took it to real estate as a proof of concept.
Suffice to say the concept has been proven. Watch the interview to see inside Steven’s wildly successful approach.
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