Shuggie Bain is the heartbreaking story of a young boy growing up in Glasgow Scotland and being raised by his alcoholic mother. The story highlights the challenges Shuggie faces as he tries to navigate a spiraling home life and a bleak outside world of bullies and economic dispair. Jamey discusses this beautifully written and inciteful book with hi…

In real estate, being a broker is the ultimate dream we’re taught to aspire to, but for most people, it’s a nightmare. If you put the ego and bragging rights aside, you’ll find that most brokers aren’t happy. They work 80+ hours a week, get very little time with their families, and at the end of the day, have very little to show for it financially.…

In an industry that celebrates making rain, GCI, units and volume, it’s really easy to lose sight of why we got into real estate in the first place. Most of us got into this for our families and for freedom to spend time with them. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, we forget and find ourselves working too much, prioritizing the next meeting, …

If you got into real estate 5-6 years ago, you might be forgiven for thinking this business is easy. We didn’t have the low inventory, high interest rates and the commission changes we’re dealing with now. For any agent who started back then, the 2024 market might as well be a whole new industry you have to learn. It was a great time to get into th…

Whether we like what’s happening in the industry or not, we have to learn how to embrace change. Turbulent and uncertain times aren’t as difficult if we can adapt quickly. It allows us to get into movement and momentum a lot quicker and that sets us up for success. When it comes to embracing change, there’s one formula that can guide us. Intention …

One of the key skills of a great salesperson is negotiation, but for the last decade, real estate agents could get away with no having it. Deals were so easy to put together, we didn’t have to fine tune our persuasion and communication abilities. Many agents have never had to do deep negotiation. Even veteran agents who came up in tougher markets n…

Selling real estate in 2024 isn’t at all what it was between 2010 and 2022, and a lot of agents are feeling the squeeze. Most of us built and ran our businesses in low interest rate environments, so this market is completely unfamiliar to us. Running a real estate team is a lot more stressful than it used to be. Deals are harder to put together, we…

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Bob Stewart of community evangelist at Place Inc, and Active Rain before that. Bob’s got a cool story - he’s been in and around real estate for many years. He was a pioneer in real estate blogging, and community building, and also understanding how to drive traffic to websites in the days before Google dominated ev…

Time is finite but so many of us are just not purposeful with it. People plan how they go to a movie better than they plan their life, the relationships they have. It’s amazing how calculated we are about our movies and vacations but we don’t do the same thing in our personal worlds. Hard work is a key to success but what’s the point if there’s no …

A lot of people who would be exceptional recruiters don’t do it because it feels like too much of a burden. The idea of building tens or even hundreds of relationships and nurturing them just feels like too much of a logistical nightmare. And it would be…which is why it’s the wrong way to do it. If you had a recruiting strategy that was based in bu…

In this episode of the One Drink Book Club, Jamey discusses Anything is Good with the New York Times best-selling author Fred Waitzkin. Anything is Good is based on the true story of a brilliant man who becomes homeless and ends up living for 20 years on the streets of Florida. The story gives incredible insights into friendship, family, and homele…

As driven entrepreneurs and hungry investors, we’re always searching for that big idea or once-in-a-lifetime deal. Then we find ourselves in a bunch of random businesses and investments in a bid to increase the odds of success. More often than not, that only leads to a loss of focus and ultimately, a loss of wealth. What if getting to that billion …

This year, for the first time ever, I went to the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting AKA Woodstock for Investors AKA Coachella for Capitalists. Warren Buffett is by far, the world's most successful investor, and I was keen to hear what he had to say about the economy, his investing strategy and his mindset in the wake of the death of his business pa…

There are a lot of stupid people who have been massively successful in real estate. This isn’t an insult, just the reality of how uncomplicated it can be to build a beautiful business. But if you lack in intelligence, there are a few things you can’t lack if you want to succeed. You can’t be impatient, inconsistent, undisciplined and undetermined. …

Ever since hedge funds started bundles of single-family homes, institutional investors have been demonized. They’ve been blamed for ruining affordability, taking homes away from innocent consumers and killing real estate entirely. Reality isn’t quite as dramatic - that narrative is drastically overblown. In fact, many real estate professionals are …

Whatever industry you’re in, marketing is something we all have to worry about. It’s our job to deliver eyeballs to whatever it is we have to offer. The challenge is, the rules of marketing and the platforms that can get us traffic are constantly changing, it’s hard to predict what will work in a few months. What we have to be aware of is that peop…

There’s a reason people keep gambling even though we know the house always wins. There’s a reason we compulsively open apps on our phone without realizing it. Human beings are prone to falling into the trap of behaviors that feel good in the short term but hurt us in the long-term. It’s the scarcity loop, and some of the ways our world has changed …

A real estate transaction isn’t just a financial process, it’s an emotional one too. And we’re not just talking about the emotions of the seller and the buyer on the other side. From loan officers and appraisers to inspectors and other agents, there can be up to 35 people involved in every real estate sale, and all of them have their own emotions. …

There are two sides to growth, achievement and success - strategies and tactics as well as mindset and self-work. You can know what to do, but not be emotionally, mentally and spiritually prepared for it. This is why the real conduit to business growth is knowing yourself and what makes you tick. The problem is: people tend to camp out on one or th…

The real estate industry has always given people the ability to build a business on their own terms…unless you’re a solo agent who wants to remain that way. Individual agents who want to grow without starting a team or joining a team have always been left out in the cold. There have never been models, structures and supports that allow them to scal…

In this episode of the One Drink Book Club, Jamey discusses Rebel Falls with the author Tim Wendel. Rebel Falls is a historical fiction that takes place during the last gasps of the Civil War and tells the true story of a Confederate plot to disrupt Abraham Lincoln's reelection. Jamey and Tim discuss the spies that haunted the northern border with …

Most of us got into real estate and running our own businesses because we craved freedom and autonomy. The problem is that freedom can be the very thing that leads to us losing our businesses. In order to have both the freedom and the sustained great results, we need to build constraints around ourselves. If we don’t, at any given moment, our busin…

The secret to growing a real estate team can be summed up in 4 words: people move the money. If you’re a team leader or broker owner looking to add more transactions to your bottom line, you can’t avoid adding to your agent count. You could pour more into the agents you do have and try to squeeze more production out of them, but if you’re relying o…

When we look at someone making and posting great content, we tend to overlook one thing. They all had that first crappy post or clumsy video. It doesn’t become polished overnight - it goes through a ton of iterations until it looks amazing. You don’t see the 100 steps the content creator had to go through - the period of being bad at it first, figu…

Real estate may have had its stormy period, but things are really close to being good again. Knowing all this, why are both real estate and mortgage bleeding over 40% of agents and loan officers? Anyone you see leaving the industry right now has learned a brutal lesson - your results can only outpace your effort for so long. If you get used to cash…

As agents, building a database and adding value to our sphere has been drilled into us. We took that same mindset and strategy, and applied it to our peers and agent relationships. Just like we’re told to host events and send gifts to our top clients, we do the same for the agent community. We can attribute getting into this business and succeeding…

In this episode of the One Drink Book Club, Jamey discusses North Woods by Daniel Mason with his guest Billy Jones. North Woods is a novel that follows the stories of successive owners of a house and property in Western Massachusetts over 300 years. Jamey and Billy share some apple-inspired cocktails and also chat about Billy's recent project--the …

Human beings are an aspiration and progress-based species, and money is the currency of this game. We’re always going to chase growth and success, and that comes with a lot of social debt and expectations, but if we’re not careful, that will get us in big trouble. We might find ourselves making decisions based on what impresses others, not what mak…

When you look at high performers, it’s hard to tell exactly what they do differently, but what’s clear is that their results aren’t the same as ours. Many people try to mimic them on the surface - eat what they eat, read the books they read, go where they go, but it doesn’t work. You know what you’re supposed to do, you’ve got the tactics, the info…

The NAR buyer’s agent litigation has been a huge topic and concern for agents across the country for months. Now that the lawsuit has been settled, there’s a lot of panic, knee-jerk reactions, assumptions and worries about what it means. Are we in trouble? Should we be worried about our future? No. It’s just too soon to make a final conclusion on t…

In today’s market, most of us are coming up against the same problem - belligerent sellers who think their home is worth more than everyone’s saying it is. Under normal circumstances, that means no deal, but there’s strategy for these kinds of leads, creative finance. Creative finance is an incredibly simple strategy that many in real estate treat …

In this episode, Jamey discusses The Wager, A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann. This New York Times bestselling book tells the true story of a British Naval ship that wrecks off the coast of Chile in the 1700s. It’s a tale of death, destruction, betrayal, and survival. His guest is Dan Perry who is an avid reader and collector of…

In a good market, the gap between great agents and average agents is virtually non-existent - it’s anyone’s game. When the market turns, the gap between the good and the great becomes so wide, it’s the difference between earning money and leaving the business entirely. Doubling your business in a down market is possible, but it’s not by chance. You…

Adults don’t need to be instructed, they simply need to be reminded. Pain will always be the leader in the lessons of our lives. If you chase the pain, you learn the lessons quicker. Chase the pain of growth, the pain of the next level. The things you have avoided will always show up on your doorstep like a bill collector. The better you get in you…

In our industry, owning a brokerage has always been seen as the pinnacle of success. But for many owners who love what real estate offers but not running a brokerage, it’s a necessary evil. Owning a brokerage is a doorway to many great things, but what happens when that starts to hinder your excellence in the areas you really care about? That’s whe…

In this episode Jamey talks with Washington legend Rick Snider, author of Presidential Pours. It’s a great selection for the One Drink Book Club because it highlights the favorite drinks of every US president going back to George Washington. Rick Snider is a long-time Washington journalist, tour guide, and history buff who has covered DC Sports and…

Making a change, whether it’s to a belief system, a business model or brokerage is something many people won’t do, even if it would benefit them. Only people who think critically and aren’t caught up in ego are willing to shift how they see things when presented with new information. Being willing to change our beliefs publicly means people remindi…

Profit - it’s the whole entire point that we run businesses. For such a critical, and even fundamental topic, agents will talk about everything else but whether or not they are making a profit, and there’s a reason. Staying on top of your numbers requires a scary level of maturity. Whatever financial decision we make has an impact on the bottom lin…

In the conversation about scaling our real estate businesses, systems come up a lot, but that’s not the first and most important thing. Systems come a distant second to people, because ultimately, how can we step out of specific roles and tasks if we have no one to hand them off to? Because we don’t put the necessary premium on hiring and people, w…

Jamey talks with friend David Lyles about Barbara Kingsolver's gripping book Demon Copperhead. Demon Copperhead is the story of a resilient and charismatic boy growing up in southern Appalachia who is constantly dealing with poverty, drug addiction, abandonment, foster homes, and death. This modern-day David Copperfield is engaging, depressing, and…

Intro Paragraph/Email Without a doubt, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are 2 of the greatest investing minds of all time. Because they’ve been at it for so long, they’ve seen market highs and market lows, and built a massive holding company where the main share trades at $538k. These guys have got to know a thing or two about how to build and kee…

Anytime an agent gets an appointment from a cold call, it’s like walking into a war zone. They don’t know you, like you or trust you, so they aren’t exactly warm and fuzzy when you go and meet them…unless they’ve already viewed a ton of your content online. Having a YouTube channel can take people from not knowing who you are to rolling out the red…

In real estate, agents, teams and business models don’t fit in one box, but we constantly fall into the trap of doing things one specific way. People start teams because it’s the next indicated step, what everyone else is doing or an ego boost, not because it’s what works for them. If ego, identity and emotion weren’t part of our decision making, t…

We may not see it this way, but real estate isn’t as risky as we think. In fact, in many ways, we’re conditioned against taking risks, and that’s why leverage is such a hard concept for the majority of our industry. Think about the restaurant business - leverage is built in from day 1, you know that you’ll need a manager, front of house, chefs and …

In this episode, Jamey and his guest Kathy Hoekstra discuss Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep. The book covers the true crime murder of an Alabama serial killer, and how author Harper Lee couldn't find a way to finish a book about it. Find drink recipes and more information on the book at OneDrinkBookClub.c…

“The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.” On any given day, we’re walking a tightrope between success and failure, but when we’re in a good market and a time of abundance, we don’t see how thin that line is. Right now, we’re in a time where our bad decisions, bad business practices and bad habits are being exposed. …

2023 was rough for a lot of people. Agents and teams were selling less homes. Pending transactions hit their lowest number in 2 decades, and most pipelines were drier than ever before. On top of that, the NAR lawsuit verdicts shook things up for the entire industry, so many agents feel like they are getting hit from different directions. There is g…

At this time of the year, people tend to get more reflective about the last 12 months. December 31st hangs over our heads, and this imaginary finish line forces us to really think about what we’ve accomplished, and what we want for ourselves next year. This is especially true in real estate, considering what the market has been like and how it has …

Jamey and returning guest Suzy Wagner give gift suggestions for all of the readers on your list! Suggestions include books for those who like history, drama, thrillers, romance, music, and mysteries. They also share their holiday-inspired cocktails.Par Jamey Bowers

With most of the people I see who have over 30 years in the business, it shows on their faces. I’m excited everyday, I look forward to my day, I look forward to meeting great people in the business everyday. -Rick Geha I’m reminded of how exciting life can be if you’re willing to do the boring basics and the things that are uncomfortable so you can…