Adding Commercial Real Estate to Your Business via Probate, with Sean Murphy of eXp Commercial

0:00 It'll begin when you hit the camera, you know. Welcome to Probate Weekly. And this is one of those recordings where I know the person interview very well. We've worked together over four or five years or so. Been an incredible valuable mentor to me as well as the company involved with. More importantly, helped me make a lot more money as I bridged from purely residential. At the time I knew Sean, he was in growth at eXp Realty which was residential. We launched commercial and today over half of my income, well over half, is non-residential thanks to using probate and eXp's tools and Sean's guidance. So Sean, first of all, on a personal thank you for helping me on my path on building my business. Well, it's wonderful to be here, Bill. And you're one of my favorite people in the company. As I always say, people don't join companies, they join people. And you're Southern Californian like myself, so we tend to spend a lot more time together than others. That's funny. I'm one of my favorite people, too. So, I think we have that in common. So, ESP realy. So, again, when I met you were a vice president for growth for residential and then at some point in the last year or two, you became that position, the VP of growth for eXp commercial. So, how long have you been in that position and what does that entail? So in 2021 and I wanted to come three years before that but in 2021 at May we had 32,538 advisors. When I came here I spent four years three years three and three/4ers years at eXp residential. I built it from 32,500 to 87,000.

1:47 That's when Leo Pareja, our CEO, asked if I'd move over to eXp Commercial and do the growth building there. Commercial had the foundation, but they needed the massive growth and some changes had to happen in order to grow as fast as I or anybody else wanted it. So moved over to eXp Commercial in May of 2024. I've been here for one complete year. So there we go. And I discovered that because I went to the eXpCon and saw you there and you just started that. So let's go back to the beginning. You have you and when I met you at eXp Realty at the time you have tremendous track record success of helping real estate agents build their business primarily in Southern California. You were in San Diego market area but you've you built you initially or the first part of your journey in the business was helping supporting coaching mentoring residential agents growing the business. So, you're familiar with the probate space in particular? Oh, absolutely. You know, my first I've always been with the number one company. Why would you join number two? Nobody goes into the NFL draft saying, "I hope number five gets me." so I've always been with the number one company, but another thing I realized right off the bat as soon as I legally could was becoming a broker and understanding all aspects of real estate. Not just not just trust in probate but I wanted to understand the ARO the short sale I wanted to understand every aspect of real estate so I really focused on let's just call it alternative dispositions not your average transition for commercial or residential real estate so and I found that was my niche just like you are probate trust that's your niche you want to get bigger get smaller so that's where we're So I, you know, like many agents, I started there because I came across a probate once in a while and probably initially it scared me or I went to my broker and I didn't feel confident, didn't get it, and then I got one and I

3:49 Realized that unlike what I had been trained by another system, which was to avoid problems, I found that by attacking problems and solving them, I became a resource to my customers. Talk a little bit about the mindset of the agents that you've seen that have, you know, got over the obstacles of probate and helped them build a business that way. Absolutely. Yeah. And the same with me. I had we had transitioned into the downturn, the mortgage the mortgage debacle in 2006, 2007 and I wanted to be the key resource. I started out as short sales like everybody else, negotiating short sales with bank negotiators and asset managers and then finally moved into being one of the top REO or real estate owned disposition agents in Southern California. And when they said there, oh, those are like five people get everything. We don't like to yell that, but that was the truth. Until you messed up, you were their go-to. And I had some rather large accounts. So I started focusing just on asset disposition for corporations and banks. There is a problem in that. You're not building a lifetime client. The bank when it's all over and the bank, you know, stops selling REOs and stops doing pre-foreclosures.

5:09 You're kind of out on your own. You did not build a client for life. You're not I know that you've probably done probate for generations of people and that doesn't happen with a bank. That asset manager, he got fired or left five years ago. There's no continue continued business. So I realized very quickly that I needed to transition back into the world pretty quickly. One of the things that you know we have two kind of two tiers of agents on that follow me here. Is those who want to be full-time in probate, which is great. That's what I do. And there other ones who have a successful practice and want to add the probate business that comes their way or use probate as one leg of the stool in their business. So, talk a little bit about agents who want to add some probate business to their business as a real estate agent. In this age of content creation, it seems to me that you can either be the expert or get educated. And if you're getting educated, share that with your customers. That almost becomes as attractive as being the expert, I think. Oh, absolutely. The last question I asked ChatGPT, you know, 4.5 was, is there a program out there that can identify if it's AI content? I was so sick of looking at photos and articles that just easily identifiable as AI content. And because of that, you can't you can't determine if the person behind that content is, you know, is trust trustworthy. Are they any good as an agent or an attorney? Because the AI created the content. So when I'm when I'm looking at my probate and trust business, I'm constantly forgetting and needing to re remember it's not so much the families. The families can recommend when it comes to probate, but it's the attorneys. It's the attorneys and the law firms that are that are assigning those asset

7:12 Dispositions. And making friends with the family doesn't necessarily mean that's what the executive is going to choose as a as a real estate agent. Well, as a business, personally, I've never chased families. I've always I mean I have them that come to me and I feel like I'm a great resource for them. But I've made my target always attorneys, fiduciaries, other vendors that can give me regular business. Maybe their standards even higher because they know more than a family does. Harder to fool yet harder for competitors to beat me because you better be better than me if you're going to go after them. And so the attorneys have really been my source. Now transitioning a little bit the topic when you talk about commercial I imagine commercial business you're talking also to some sort of referral sources more regularly whether it be wealth managers or family offices or attorneys or accountants. So, the real estate agents you see that are successful in the non-residential space, what are the most common referral sources that they get business from? And how do they attack those? Financing sources, lenders, REITs, those are those are your keys to foreclosures. The right now in the and this is the scary in the next six to nine months, $1.8 trillion of commercial loans are going to come due.

8:32 Yeah. The bank has two options there. They can take back and liquidate the property or they can refinance it at a lower rate so that the person can afford it because honestly if there was a better refinancing rate they would have already done it. So they're really limited in what they can do. I think they're going to be holding a lot of upside down notes for a while because they don't want the commercial industry to go through the toilet largely because of large office space that's no longer being used because people decided to at least telecommute part of their jobs and antiquated industrial space. New industrial sells phenomenally. An old industrial is, you know, no internet, no high, no high tension power cables, no there's ESG, which is environmental concerns. You've got to look at all that because old industrial sits and new industrial sells right away. So getting with the REITs, the asset management, asset managers, and the investors is key. We have a really great agent in La Habra, California. Whoa. My That's where I grew up. I know. And, Luis, he focuses on pre-forclosure.

9:55 So, he goes to these he sees the loans coming due, he goes to the person who's holding the note and says, "Let's see if we can get the money required to make this a win-win transaction." you know, so he'll take a pre-foreclosure and market it in a way that he gets the highest and best offer to see if the investor is willing to take that rather than refinancing the note. Wow. Wow. La Harbor, California. Okay. Who would have thought? So, just real quick, not this related to our call at all, but just I love to hear the answer. EXp Realty, the largest real estate company, by transactions in the United States. How much office space do we own as a company? How many office buildings do we own? And how many millions of square feet do we own for our corporate offices and operations? I get what is I think one square foot is our is our is probably technically I it might be a bigger box. We could be two square feet of PO box in Bel rip. So we have eXp as a corporation does not have any physical office space. We license physical office space but we don't have any. That doesn't mean our adviserss and agents don't have significant office space if you want to negate taxes in California. I think investing in commercial real estate is an excellent way to write off your California taxes. So, well, personally, I'm the I have space in Beverly Hills, California, branch manager there. But the company doesn't have any space. I just when you talk about access office space, it's just fascinating compared to other real estate companies.

11:35 We have none as a as a corporate entity. I just think it's a fun thing to talk about. So, let's go back now to again using your hat from when you were coaching mostly residential agents. I'm sure at that time you had a huge team in San Diego. Did you also do some commercial? I know at that at that time the company had a division. Did you allow agents to be resome? Did they have to switch over? How did you handle it? And how do you help the agent make their first deal? Because there's a little bit of fear like gee, my customer wants me to do it, but I've never done an office building before. How do I get involved with that? Well, traditional commercial you have a junior or a brand new brand new adviser comes into a commercial real estate firm and they partner up with a junior or senior or team and they're taught over a period of years usually two or three years before you even move up to being able to run your own deal. So, there's a large mentorship period in there. The larger companies tend to give you your prospects and your leads, but they're taking 50 60% from you. So, eXp it eXp Commercial has a lot of experienced independent entrepreneurial brokers. But I still believe in the same thing. You're brand new and this is my last brokerage. You need to work with the team. You can't commercial. You just cannot walk in and go, I'm an expert on retail tenants. I'm an expert in industrial. I can do blue collar business brokering. It there's nothing in the real estate training that you took to get your license that would indicate even where to begin in all of that, right? And you know as well as I do, real estate classes to get licensed in this state have absolutely nothing to do with real estate business. They're legally the everything in it is legal protections for the consumer. Real estate in commercial, it's much different. Analyze

13:39 Analyzing taxes, city codes, development, attending city council meetings. I think the hardest thing in real in commercial compared to residential real estate is in residential you have a 30 60 90day deal cycle and in commercial it's 6 to 18 months. Yeah. So you're not going to get paid right away which means if you're going into this I hope you have a pretty good you know a pretty good savings account or at least you're working in a niche that's going to pay you a lot quicker. Yeah, that is a good point. I personally as I moved into commercial, my pay cycle and probate is already pretty long to begin with as a general rule because you get into some litigation and all of a sudden what could have been a 90 becomes a two-year process, but you build up and you have to keep working on all those. And same more so with the non-residential business. They just everything takes a lot longer. The agents aren't as motivated or as quick and their customers aren't. It's just a different business. And so it required me really to set up some resources financially to set some money aside as well as a line of credit to cover, you know, the longer time period that's helped me grow my business. I think that's really important. So we offered, you know, if I go back in time when I got the first business that was not residential. In that case, it was just some vacant lots through a probate. And the customer said, "I want you to handle it. You know, if you need to partner with a friend, partner with a friend, but I want you to be the person I talk to. I don't want you to refer me as somebody else, and I don't know anybody else, Bill. I want you to handle it. So, at the time we were launching eXp Commercial, we had a phenomenal set of training classes that I took that really gave me a lot of insight into the product and kind of the ways of the business of the product. And so talk a little bit about the training that's available for agents who are considering maybe not ready to make a decision to join commercial, but they're looking to it. They want to build towards that or they just want to be better at their current business. What's offered now

15:41 That helps them be more productive? So, when you're coming into eXp and you're brand new, we have the eXp Academy, which is which is a month-long course that covers a lot of the basics. We're switching over our new head of director of brokerage operations for commercial, John Lerno, is moving us to a video on demand LMS system that will cover everything. It'll even have pieces in there on Bill Gross and probate. So we're yeah, we're able to put everything into the training module because you never know what's going to stick. Somebody came to me and said you know just mentioned development. I was new in the business like two years and I went tell me more and before you knew it I was working on large multi-unit development and it was much more you know much more suited to my style more analytical lot more planning but the payouts at the end I like the big payouts and you can get in on the getting paid from the development and getting paid for the sale of the for the sale of the units. Now for probate it's a little different. In probate, I had a family call me and say, "I know you. I trust you. I'm not really duplicitous. I give my business to the pe the pros in the area." and they said, "I have five buildings." Their father recently passed and as the executive of the trust, we want to liquidate all five buildings. So, I think you being the expert in your field is what's key. And when you're new, you're not the expert in the field. You right, when you start out, you use the statistics of your brokerage or the statistics of your team until you become the statistic. So, if they're thinking of getting into probate, I suggest that they partner up or co-sponsor with Bill Gross and then they can learn probate. They can use Bill's numbers and Bill can help them. But, commercial is not something you can just

17:43 Jump into it. My last commercial contract was 150 pages long, written by an attorney in language almost specifically designed to make it more difficult for you. Party of the first part, you know, it's funny you say because I've been in probates and I typically have not dealt with properties anywhere near that big. You know, more my experience is the entrepreneur had a business. He had an extra he had an industrial building, maybe he had a couple lots, maybe. And so we're selling one of the lots for about $200,000. And the attorney who handled this enormous office building was retained to write the contract for this $200,000 lot. And it was like it was 150 pages. Is one of the largest firms in LA. And I just said to my customer, "Look, the guy who wrote this, I'm sure is charging tens of thousands of dollars for this contract that he's redid from his prior transaction. Now, you can hire an attorney to do the same thing or we can just tell him, "Sorry, it's too complicated. We need to use the CR form." And the attorney was on the phone complaining to me, and I just said, "I'm not in the business of reviewing the document." like I probably could, you know, I know enough about documents, but I, you know, I'm not an attorney and I'm also don't have the time to go through all that. And so, I think that's part of it about commercial is sometimes you can, you know, as a listing agent, you kind of force the forms a little bit and sometimes you can't. And I know in addition to car forms, California Association Realtor® forms, we also have air forms which are you know more commonly used in commercial properties and there and you I use them as well. I prefer the car forms just because I'm more familiar with them. Talk a bit about the form. What percentage of the transactions you do are custom? What percentage are C in California? What percentage are AI or some other organization? Well, yeah, there's AIRIR, commercial real estate forms, and we do have AIRIR as one of our affiliated partners. So, you can go to AIRIR and download a form, a purchase and sale agreement or an LOI or offer memorandum

19:48 For any state. What we're doing because we're getting larger. You know, our growth our growth trajectory is we're now doing our own templates, having our attorney create a template that's legally compliant. We found it's called redlining. If you don't know anything about commercial real estate, I send Bill an offer, you know, I send Bill a purchase and sale agreement. He crosses out a whole bunch of stuff and adds a whole bunch of stuff and sends it back to me. He redlines it and sends it back to me. Usually by the time you've you know by the time you've consummated the deal on your vacant strip mall, the contract doesn't look anything like it looked at the start. Everybody's throwing in their pet peeves. It's a it's a lot like it's a lot like a Senate bill. It goes back and forth. Yeah. Probably even for a lot longer. So, we're now creating our own forms, especially in states that required specialization, believe it or not, like Montana and Utah. They require very specialized forms. We will probably have our own forms in all 50 states at some point this year. Where we can give you the template. But again, you're not the one reviewing it for legal compliance.

21:14 You know, a lot of our a lot of our agents employ an attorney to take a look at some of these larger ones. I mean, you're going in a $40 million software company with building. You don't really want to mess that one up. So, a lot of them will have an attorney take a look at it or the buyer or seller representative will have an attorney that takes a look at it for compliance. Our brokers will make sure it's compliant for real estate law, but did you miss something? Was there some equipment that you wanted in the deal? Was there an easement you were unaware of that affects your desiraability? So, it's a different world. It's a lot, you know, a lot more attorneys are involved in commercial real estate. Yeah. That's why it's a six to 18 month sales cycle. And you know commercial real estate compared to residential they boil it boiled it down to in your state you know like 32page contract. I remember in 2004 when it was three pages in California but they've standardized it because there are so many transactions taking place. Right. The best contract in California at least is one that has absolutely no input from the agent or buy or buyer on it. It's the blankst contract possible. It's one that will protect you every time you add something. That's the gray area in a contract. You know, I do think a lot of Realtors®, you know, poo the forms.

22:45 Personally, as practitioner, I think they're great. I feel like I'm a ninja and that's my sword and knives. And you're right, there's a lot of pages there, but the more I can use the template and just put in the data, the more somebody else has thought it through, I don't have to. And so often times I'll say to agents, you know, you don't need to put the property is asis, that's already in the contract as is. And similar, you know, you're just adding potential confusion even and I even argue with attorneys. I'll say I get you want to emphasize asis, but now this clause is in contradiction to the other asis, which is the one that holds if you have a dispute. You're creating more confusion. So, I do think the forms are very powerful. But I think they're only powerful if you know them and use them properly. If you don't, then they're really kind of worthless. So, that brings us back to kind of again the residential agent who's come across an occasional deal. You know, we have a license that allows us to do non-residential commercial. We may have a brokerage that allows us. I know at eXp they allow us. Though we also have very easy access to our brokers to get support. And I have to admit I've had my handheld through almost every non-residential deal by our brokers. They've done a great job supporting me. But we have the ability legally to do that. But the forms are different. The thing I always tell people is at least read the form and at least be familiar with the product. And that's where either you're going to do on your own or you need to partner up.

24:07 Our culture as a company is we partner up very easily whether it be an eXp agent who's experienced commercial or it's an eXp commercial agent who that's their focus or geographically focus other area. That's kind of our culture. Talk a little about how eXp has that culture and what you as an executive do to help maintain or grow that culture. I love the clear separation of duties. If you are a residential Realtor®, article 11 of the N code of ethics specifically states that if you are not a competent professional in your area of expertise, say I was to take a warehouse building in D'vor, California and I was not a competent individual in that specific product type, I'm required by law, by the article, the code of ethics, article 11, to disclose that to my prospect that I am not a professional in that product category. And if you're a residential real estate agent, you're not a you're not a professional in any of the of the commercial stuff. You probably had very little exposure. Not to mention all of you seen the agency disclosure and it says exercise you know exercise reasonable skill in the performance of your duty. That's the first thing it says and that's the first thing an agent who's going for a commission ignores.

25:40 Oh, exercise reasonable skill. Yes. First of all, you're writing you're writing a 40-unit, you know, multifamily complex on a residential real estate form. Oops. And you're thinking you're competent in the performance of your duty. So commercial does not belong to NAR. We do not belong to N. We do not you know we don't have the code of ethics. We have something we have something higher. We have a legal system that actually deems that you are a professional in your field of business. If you don't, it's really easy to sue people, and you're usually dealing with corporations or LLC's that would rather take you to court to settle a dispute than try to work it out. So, residential and eXp, you are allowed to sell the occasional commercial property. I don't recommend it. A mistake. Missing a underground storage tank or missing an easement or not recognizing not recognizing that your tenants have dubious leases and dub different terms or step leases that may not pencil out profitability for you. It can be tragic. I do know this. If they are a commercial real estate agent at eXp, they refer out all of their residential business. I just referred one to a nice a great agent in Ethan in Northern California.

27:17 He closed it. I think he sold it 36 hours. It was a it was a Wow. A luxury property. Sold it in 36 hours for $100,000 over asking price. Wow. And I got paid. And when I got the check, my wife goes, "Well, that it's not the whole check." And I go, "You realize I had to do nothing." Wow. This came in the mail and I had actually forgotten it was even going. So, I believe referrals are the highest possible return on your efforts. If I could be a referral only agent, wouldn't that be wonderful? Just Well, I do more and more referral. And I think again not you know to wave the banner of VXP we have this referral network system that really makes the distribution of referrals really simple in terms of getting paid and the documentation and all that. So the other thing again just to fly the banner one last time on eXp and I only say this because it's been life-changing for me. I mean I have benefited from the multi-level marketing aspect of the attraction system and it's a nice form of income. I've benefited from stock over the years that I closed deals and that's accumulated, but more so just the blocking tackling of real estate has been the number one for me. We've just recently announced a new program that to me allows us to double the support for the person who chooses to join us, which is co-sponsorship. And as I look at it, I didn't do a lot of attracting as I might have. I' made people ask me I never follow up with because I didn't have the resources to help them with all the nonprobate stuff all the basic forms and systems and all that and but I did have the probate piece and now this gives me the chance to team up with a successful attraction group that can handle that and I can bolt on probate and in commercial I think it's the same thing I have no ability to help somebody join I have a friend who joined XB commercial originally he wasn't going to go commercial he went that way because he insisted and he was lost and I was lost trying to direct him where to go. But now we have this the opportunity for co-sponsorship which

29:21 Now this guy's he kind of came in after the deadline but he got snuck in and now he's getting some help. It gives somebody really two people to help them. Talk a little bit about how co-sponsorship works in commercial and how you think that can be a catalyst to help you grow the business. I think it's the biggest thing that's happened at eXp. Co-sponsorship especially for commercial is amazing. We have we have people like Josh Smith who has a podcast, you know, GSD. He's done, the last time I counted, he had partnered 17 times with 10 different organizations. Josh has the systems models and checklists, but is he is he in San Diego, California? No. Is he in Bel Belleview, Washington? Is he in Diamond Bar? No. So, he's smart enough to partner with a local top producer. He realizes he has the system, but does he have the local knowledge and the local support? Doesn't mean it has to be local. I just did a co-sponsorship where the broker was coming in wanted was best friends with a residential agent in Massachusetts. Best friends. He was a commercial agent, a commercial adviser in Florida. They hooked him up with the local top Florida residential team, which was, it surprised me because this team had so many commercial referrals. They said, "You might as well be their inside commercial referral person." It doesn't matter if you're a residential agent or commercial advisor.

30:57 If you run into somebody who's from the a different discipline than you or a different area, this gives you the ability to partner with somebody in that area or in that product specialty that can really help them. You can help. If I had anybody that was doing probate trusts or in the Diamond Bar area, you would be my co-sponsor. I'd say I have the best of the best there. I am not. I'm willing to admit I'm not. And the beauty of eXp's co-sponsorship is you get slid into the sponsorship tree to where everybody's making 100% of what they're supposed to make on that level. There's no 50/50 split. I think 100%'s better than 50%. So it somebody said the other day, eXp has silos. And I go, yeah, we are not a participation trophy company. You do not get paid for the inability to excel or innovate. I like the competition that goes on in this company where the best gets rewarded to be better and brings up everybody underneath them. Co-sponsorship was the missing piece though. It is we have done hundreds and hundreds of co-sponsorships to this point. The agents are have more retention. They're more productive and they're a lot happier. We get our NPS scores are going up every single month because of co-sponsorship.

32:25 Yeah. And I think it really is a net add to everybody, right? The track whoever brought the agent in get cut at all. The co-sponsor is additional revenue. Nothing comes out of the pocket of the agent related to this at all. But the agent joining us gets really two teams. It could be one geographical one product. It could be commercial and probate. There's a number of ways to mix it. I think we're all kind of finding the right formula. But at the end of the day, it really is a big victory I think for all of us. I was just on a call before this one with somebody who wanted to join me in probate but joined a team and then I was a co-sponsor and so we had our coaching call and I got to tell you this is the first time because for me in probate it always starts with your database. All marketing does and so I asked a question you know have you been set up on your database yet? And on their team they do that. Now they use a different product called Follow Up Boss that run the eXp one that's given for free but for the reason she's set up so we're now talking about importing into a database we're not me holding her hand getting it set up and walking through the process because they do a great job of setting the agent up on technology which I never really had enough staff to do that and I don't really want to do that but I can get her working on appropriate by downloading all the attorneys she knows and all that kind of information. So it's a big change a game changer I think and I'm not sure who came up with the concept of corporate but somebody should be congratulated I don't know we tried we tried several different iterations of it you know we get pitched all the time on hey this company's doing this maybe we should examine it I mean there was a long time ago where we're looking at the flat fee model and when we sat down and looked at the numbers that there were no flat fee companies that were actually profitable We went, "Wow, I would have bet walking in here we would had some kind of flat fee model." co-sponsorship. We tried a few different iterations. Glenn and Leo came up with this one and honestly, we were in a room with I think 28 executives and it's the punch holes in it time cuz Leo has

34:30 Absolutely no problem. If you know Leo Pareja, this is the one thing that you will absolutely know about him. He has no problem cancelling something even immediately after it's been instituted if it's coming out the wrong way or the desired behavior ends up being wrong. So if at any point a negative aspect of this program came up and we could not rectify it, Leo would just go, "Yeah, we're done with this." if it's not profitable and it's not making people happy and we don't get the intended the intended results that we're going for, I have no problem cancelling it. And I've heard him say that about several things. You know, are we going to continue to do that? And Leo will just go, no, we're not doing that anymore. That did not work out as intended. We have no problem. We are a innovator company. His big statement that he says time and time again, if you're not innovating, you're losing. If you're not willing to throw away everything you've created every three months, you're not innovating. Yeah. Because the speed of AI right now. Told you the last thing I looked up on AI. Is there a program that will spot AI content? So, I can ignore it. AI is progressing faster than we can find programs to identify it. Yeah, I do think, you know, I mean, I've been saying AI quite a bit. I use it in my business every day. I do think that it creates a premium for authenticity where the one thing they can't create is me. They can make something that looks like me, sounds like me, you know, has a video kind of like me, but what they can't do is really replace my heart and my knowledge and experience at a deep level. And I think for all of us in the business that cries out why you have to be an expert. In my case, probate. I know people's case is commercial or your local geography. If we really can hyperfocus on something, the AI is going to knock out the 80% and the 20% of expertise will benefit from those AI

36:33 Tools and be more productive. At least that's how I see it for my business so far. Our marketing people and if you know a lot of the big real estate coaches like Jon Cheplak and our marketing team have both identified that we're going the other direction for marketing where we were going from the mailbox to the inbox to social media. Now social media is inundated because everybody can consistently deliver AI augmented social media posts. Right? Social media is getting inundated. The email box is still full. Is now going full circle to where the best most authentic and highest open rate and result is coming from the mailbox. Wow. I mean, if you got if you got a handwritten letter in the mailbox, now that's considered special. Wow. Yeah. I mean, people send me It's interesting. I have a podcast on reverse mortgages. So for whatever reason people in that space create books and you get a book with a handwritten note it's like wow this guy really that was really nice you know very personal and it's obviously handwritten you know they took the time to do it so I do think you're right the personal touches I think are really important and can't be created as easily as the stuff can be so well Sean look obviously you're have tremendous breadth of experience in real estate a tremendous resource now I also know you host some available public training classes on a regular basis. I know I've stumbled in a couple times to them.

38:06 Talk a little about how where you're available for somebody want to learn more about you and see you online. What are some of the things you're working on? Oh, we're starting again on the 7th. Summer is always fun in real estate. You would think, you know, real estates are entrepreneurs. They're self-employed. They work year round and squeeze in a vacation sometime in the end of December, but no. Starting on July 7th, we will have commercial attraction lab. It will start out from the very beginning. You've never done attraction. And I will I will actually will be posting that in workplace, Slack, and social media where to go to get that. We had a social media platform that wouldn't hold the number of people that wanted to come. Wow. We'll start out from I don't know how to do attraction or even what the differences between attraction and recruiting and the rules of the game ethically, and legally. And then we're going to move into a huge 12 weeks of commercial attraction. And we're going to we're going to kick it off with the orientation and the rules defining your agent prospects. Social media and mass attraction strategies, co-sponsorship and the power of partnership, discovery calls, presenting the model, overcoming objections, nurturing relationships, onboarding, which is huge. Leveraging local, national and growth events, building your personal attraction brand and then the mastermind with the top attractors in the industry, the mastermind and how to sustain your momentum because I have found going to as many events as you get about a five to seven day boost where like I'm ready to go and then you kind of go back into your old habits. You know, I always say if you stretch a rubber band, you can hold it for a while, but eventually it's going to go back to its original shape. So,

40:11 Well, there's a lot going on. EXp Commercial is the website. Sean is the vice president of growth and I'm going to be on the call Monday at noon Pacific time. EXp attraction. And I think the thing about attraction, you know, it's not just recruiting multi-level. If you're building a business, quite naturally, there are other people you want to work with. There's a way to do that XP without digging in their pocket to get paid, which is if they join the company and you bring them in, you get paid. Or if you co-sponsor them now, you get paid. And so that's where I think anybody building a business should look at that as a as an opportunity as well. If you want to get more of Sean, you can reach out to him. Growth expommercial.com is the center where he has an assistant who will book time with you if you want to meet with him in person. Sean, I just can't thank you enough for your time here today. Like I said, your mentorship and support in my business growth has been fantastic and critical and on behalf of the company. What you're doing what you did with us before you left XP Realy and then now that you're with the XP Realy's commercial division, what you doing there is phenomenal. Thank you for all you do for the company as well. Thank you, Bill. You have a wonderful week. Fantastic. And again, for the rest of you, this is Probate Weekly. We get together every week and talk about how to build your probate business. And as you see today, it's not just about getting data and cold calling. It's really about building a business. One way I've done that is expand my product into commercial or non-residential and expand it by attraction. And Sean's been a key piece in that if that can help you. If you want to continue the conversation, go to probateweekly.com.

41:38 It's our Facebook group. We about 3 or 4,000 members there. If you're looking for referrals, you have an attorney or an agent need outside of your area, post it there. Or if you have questions, we'll continue to have the conversation. As always, if I can help you, like, subscribe, put a comment in here. If you know somebody I should I should be interviewing, put it in there as well. As always, make today your best day