Most real estate entrepreneurs I talk to are doing well on paper and still feel stretched thin, with a pipeline that depends on constant lead spending and a calendar that depends entirely on them. In this conversation, I sit down with Scott Spelker, a former Wall Street currency trader who now leads The Spelker Team at Coldwell Banker Realty in Madison, New Jersey. Scott shares how he built a referral-only business without paid leads, how he and his wife Amy divide the work so each person stays in their strengths, and why he believes the numbers only tell part of the story when it comes to pricing and preparing a home. You will hear real examples from his own listings, including a home that drew 20 offers, along with practical ideas you can use in your own business. Watch the full conversation to hear how Scott thinks about trust, structure, and long-term growth.
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Most real estate entrepreneurs I talk to are doing well on paper and still feel stretched thin, with a pipeline that depends on constant lead spending and a calendar that depends entirely on them. In this conversation, I sit down with Scott Spelker, a former Wall Street currency trader who now leads The Spelker Team at Coldwell Banker Realty in Madison, New Jersey. Scott shares how he built a referral-only business without paid leads, how he and his wife Amy divide the work so each person stays in their strengths, and why he believes the numbers only tell part of the story when it comes to pricing and preparing a home. You will hear real examples from his own listings, including a home that drew 20 offers, along with practical ideas you can use in your own business. Watch the full conversation to hear how Scott thinks about trust, structure, and long-term growth.
Welcome back to another episode. I’m Adrienne Green and today we’re here with Scott Spelker. Here we focus on how real estate entrepreneurs break free of the grind and create the freedom they wanted at the start, and Scott has a fabulous story to that end for himself. So Scott, thanks for joining me today.
Happy to be here.
Now, Scott, I understand you spent twenty five years trading foreign exchange on Wall Street before you made the jump to residential real estate in twenty twelve. That’s quite the story, so I’d love for you to share a quick version of what your business looks like today and what pulled you from the trading floor into real estate.
I would say desperation. No, I traded currencies for 25 years, and most people probably don’t know what trading is all about, but it’s not sales. It’s basically making bets with a bank or investment bank’s money on the value of the US dollar vis-a-vis the euro, the yen, sterling, Australian dollar, Canadian dollar. So I could be buying five million Australian dollars and hoping that they appreciate in value over the next 30 seconds or 30 minutes or three days. It doesn’t matter. And the more money I made trading, the more money I got paid by the company I worked for at the end of the year. After 25-ish years of doing it, I left, not really because of the stress. It got boring. It used to be crazy mayhem. I liked the unpredictability of it, but after a while, it just felt like I was wasting my time, my life. So I went back to school to become a teacher. I got a teaching degree. I student taught, looking to teach US history, world history, personal finance. I really thought I could teach kids a lot about investing and money with my background. But at the time, I think it was 2012 roughly, there were typically 300 applicants for every job. So I wasn’t able to land a teaching job. So after three years of basically being unemployed and hemorrhaging money, I said, I really need to do something. It wasn’t just from a financial perspective, I was too young to be retired. I was like 52 years old. So real estate, I didn’t really jump into real estate. I kind of fell into it. I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it, wasn’t sure if I would be any good at it, had no idea what I was doing, had no skills, no sales background. But I was able to build a pretty successful business. It’s all relative what people think successful is, but to me, I think it’s pretty successful in the sense that I make a good living at it. I have flexibility in my schedule and my life, which I didn’t have for all those years on Wall Street. My purpose in coming on this, as we kind of discussed beforehand, is that it’s not that I think I’m going to get any business out of this. I really am doing it because it’s only a 30 minute commitment. And if in any way I’m able to help some other people out there and maybe something resonates with them, maybe it’s an idea. I used to watch videos when I first started out, and sometimes they’re videos or lectures or Zoom meetings, it could be an hour long. And if I got one really good thing out of it, that was worth it because over time, even if you did one a day, in a week you might have five or six pretty darn good ideas. And this starts to build on itself. I throw a lot of stuff at the wall, and sometimes stuff sticks. So that’s my motivation here, if in some small way I’m able to provide some sort of valuable insight on something, I’m happy to do it.
I love that, and Scott, we didn’t know each other before so you may not know, but I have a lot of similarities to that, working in finance and then being a teacher before falling into real estate myself. And I will say it may have been a blessing for you that it was a challenge to get a teaching job, because real estate I think is a great opportunity, a place to help people, and it seems like you’ve done well in it. So I’m excited to dive into more of what your real estate business looks like.
Yeah, I say the finance portion of the career too. I’ll just touch on the teaching aspect, because I did teach and I coached. I coached for a combined 35 years in multiple sports. So coaching is very much like teaching. But I will say that the finance background, the trading background, absolutely helps, having sophistication regarding investing and money. That helps my clients. And then the teaching side, the coaching side helps too, because this job to a large degree is coaching and teaching. There’s patience involved and there’s hand holding involved, whether it’s buyers that have zero idea how this whole process works or anything about a house. They don’t know what HVAC even means. They don’t know whether there’s a 200 amp service or one hundred amp service. So you are educating them. When you’re working with sellers, you’re also educating them. So I think it’s a kind of perfect storm between the educational background that I have, the teaching or coaching, and then also the finance side as well. And then if that wasn’t enough, I bring in the real big guns, and that’s my wife, who is a former interior designer. She says she’s left brained. She says I’m no-brained. I figured if she’s left, I must be right-brained with the numbers, but she says, Yeah, I’m no brained. But you put the two of us together and you really get something different because of her creative background and getting houses ready and having vision, not to mention she’s just a way better person than I am. So you take that and then you throw whatever I bring to the table and it’s a pretty powerful team. I was doing pretty, pretty well on my own, but once she came on board, that kind of took it to another level. So shout out to Amy Spelker.
Well, I’d love to follow up on that because I work a lot with my husband and I know a lot of people in the real estate space do work with their spouses. And one thing that comes up a lot in conversation about that is dividing ownership of tasks and specifically decisions, right? And I’m curious if you have any wisdom on how you divide that ownership of responsibilities or decisions so that you have a structure where everybody can run in their own lane and you don’t have bottlenecks or conflict.
We don’t really have it written down. It depends, first of all, whether you’re working with buyers or you’re working on the listing side. So I’m going to assume we’re working on the listing side, we’re selling somebody’s house. It’s not like we have a set formula, like you take care of this, I take care of this. It depends on the situation. We roll with it as it comes. I would say for somebody that’s starting out working with a spouse in maybe any business, ask each other, what is it about what we’re doing, working with buyers, working with sellers, that you absolutely hate? Let’s start with that. So if one of them absolutely hates putting out open house signs, and we both hate doing that, but if somebody really doesn’t like doing that, then one of them says, Listen, let me take that down for you. If there’s something else that you absolutely can’t stand doing, try to take that off the other person’s plate. The things in the business that are really problematic for you. For me, there’s a number of things, but I would say sometimes if a client needs a bit more hand holding, I won’t say being difficult, that’s not fair, but sometimes clients need a bit more hand holding, I just find that my wife is so much more gracious and patient and good at it that I’m grateful she takes that off my hands. She can’t stand doing any of the number crunching. She doesn’t want to do the marketing. She doesn’t like to do the contracts. You’ve got to write up a contract or something like that. I did let her think it took me two hours to write a contract for two years. She thought that it was taking me two hours to write up an offer. And I let her think that, thinking that if I wanted her to do an open house because the Giants game was on, I’d say, listen, you take the open house. After all, I wrote two offers this week. That’s four hours. She finally figured out that it was taking me 25 minutes. So that was a disaster. I was milking that pretty good. But yeah, that would be one of the things I’d say with you working with your spouse. And I’m sorry, I can’t be more specific in terms of, when we do the listing, this is exactly how it works, we have a formula, she does all this, I do all that. But we just fall into it after a period of time. So the photographer, I don’t even go to the photo shoots anymore because for me, they’re professionals, let them do their job. But my wife wants to go through each and every room specifically before they shoot it to make sure that there’s not a thing out of order, nothing is not working just right. So she has that level of detail. People will use the word control freak, but I just think details are important to her. So let her handle that. Now, once I get the photographs back, running with the marketing, whether it’s social media, print ads, all kinds of different things that I’m going to do with that marketing, that’s what I do. And she has zero interest in doing that. She doesn’t hate it, but she just doesn’t really want to do it. So we just gradually, as the listing goes on, are doing what we’ve always done. And then there’s times where she’ll say, Hey, listen, I can’t be there for the home inspection, which is a nightmare because that’s usually a two or three hour commitment. Could you cover the home inspection? Yeah, I’ll cover it. Or would you mind doing this or whatever. So it’s just a give and take. It’s a back and forth. But at the end of the day, just try to take off the plate of your spouse the stuff that they really don’t like to do. And even if you don’t like to do it, you say, listen, I can tough that out. And then hopefully they’ll take something off your plate that you don’t want to do.
Well, and something else that I’m hearing as you explain how you do these different tasks is that you really hit on one of my favorite things about moving from solopreneur to having a team, like your husband and wife team: your clients get a better experience. They get a better end product because each of you is able to bring your strengths, your preferences to the table. So in your example, your wife likes to go in when the photographer’s there and fine tune every detail, and then you’re the one who takes that photography and does your piece of the marketing. Overall your clients are getting a better experience than if they had just you or just her by themselves.
I would agree with that. I would say if they just had her, they’d still be doing pretty darn well. With me, they’d be doing pretty darn well, but maybe not quite as good. But you put the two together, there’s no question about it. And it’s true in leadership skills, whether it’s in corporate America or whatever, if people like what they’re doing, they tend to be good at it, which just reinforces why they like what they’re doing. So give people tasks that they’re good at, because then they’re going to like it. And then follow it up with basically praise. People like to be appreciated. I know we do as well. We have clients sometimes who just say, I just can’t tell you how happy I am we chose you, or you guys have done a great job for us. So that feels really good, and I think that’s important. But you’re right, we do bring different things to the table. And sometimes it’s not just her more artistic background. I was an economics major in college. We were at the college together. She was a fine arts major. So her skill set is definitely more geared towards the fine arts and seeing the potential in houses and all these other things. But there’s more to it than that. Her level of detail is a personality thing. I’m a seat of my pants type of person. I get the message out in an email. She’ll bullet point this thing to death, and it looks structured, and I’m like, why don’t you just send them an email and say, listen, bang, bang, bang. I will write everything down, but she will make it look way better, way more professional. She’ll take that additional time. So it’s a different skill set. Marketing, coming up with different ideas for marketing, is not really in her wheelhouse, and I try to blend a lot of different things into the marketing idea, whether it’s humor, sometimes it’s local history. That’s just something I tend to be better at and she just doesn’t have that aptitude. So to your point, it is a way better experience for our clients getting two people. It’s not just one plus one, you’ve got two people with completely different skill sets and personality traits that you want working for you. You want me negotiating with the potential buyer or the other agent. You don’t want my wife doing that. She’s a bad negotiator. She married me. That right there should tell you something about her decision making process, or her judgment on values. But yeah, it’s true. We don’t really push that too much. Maybe we should more with listing presentations when we’re up against other agents or something and say, listen, let me just tell you a little bit about us and why we are a successful team. And don’t take my word for it. I always tell them, you can go to the Zillow reviews, but everybody just assumes everybody’s going to say nice things. I said, I will give you five, ten, fifteen, twenty names of the people we’ve done business for in the last six months, six years, whatever, and call them or text them or email them. I won’t give them a heads up or anything, just ask them, what was the experience like? Did they deliver on what they promised? Did they overdeliver? I think that’s a good way to build confidence, to say to people, listen, talk to other people that have used us and see how it worked out for them. So.
That’s a very good point. And that actually leads me to my next question, Scott. I understand that you’ve built a referral only practice with no paid leads. I love that and I’d love you to walk us through the actual system behind that. What has to be true operationally for referrals alone to build a pipeline?
Well, I think in the beginning, twelve years ago, I did pay for leads on Zillow. It was a different structure the way they were doing it back then, and in addition I was doing advertising and things like that. So in the beginning, I made a very heavy commitment. I was fortunately in a financial position that I was able to put about eighty to ninety percent of my gross earnings that first year back into it, basically in marketing and promoting myself. The next year, I still put 50% of what I made back into it. Because I knew those first couple of years were to build a base and get the word out there that you were doing a lot of business. So in that sense, I was paying for some leads early on, but as time went on, I just found that the leads were not great. Everybody’s trying to sell you something in this business. I just got a call today. I get emails: I have a buyer in your area or a seller in your area. It’s lead generation. For some people maybe it works. Maybe in some areas of the country it works. I’m more of the belief, listen, send me your lead, I’ll sign a piece of paper that says if they end up working with me or selling their house with me, I’ll cut you a check for X amount of money. Which would be more than paying for the lead, but they don’t do that, they want their money up front. So a lot of times I find that the leads are not great. So how did I build it with referrals? It just comes with time. It comes with your network too. If I were to move to another town out of state, it would take me way longer because I don’t know as many people. I grew up in this small town in New Jersey. I’ve been here for almost fifty of my sixty three years. So you build up a network over time. Plus, of course, we had children, so you met their friends’ parents, and then I coached for 30-something years in different sports. You meet people that way. I’m involved a lot in local history, so I give lectures and tours on the local history in town. It all just builds on itself. And then, of course, as business comes, if you do a pretty decent job, people will tell people, and it just gradually grows. Plus, if I sell somebody a house eight years ago, and they now get transferred to Houston, there’s a good chance, if I’ve done a good job of staying in touch with them, that they’ll call. Maybe we send them a holiday card, on St. Patrick’s Day we’ll send them a lottery ticket. Hey, we were the lucky ones to have worked with you as a client. Here’s a lottery ticket, a scratch off. So we send that to 300 clients. It’s just a touch. Because most people five years from now, what’s the name of our real estate agent? Remember, there’s an old guy with the wife Amy that looked 40 years younger than him. Remember those two? She’s actually two months older than me, full disclosure. So we’ll send something out once in a while. Sometimes on the holidays we’ll have a painting done at their house. That’s a good gift, whether it’s something selling or buying, have a watercolor done of their house or something like that, and give it to them as a holiday gift. So referrals come because you’ve stayed in touch with former clients and because you’re out there. And that’s really important. You’ve got to be out there. And I know that’s hard. I’m not saying hanging out in bars, but find something that you’re interested in. It could be a workout class. My wife has a workout class where she goes a couple of times a week and it’s the same 10 women. It could be a boot camp class, whatever. And they come up to you and they’re like, hey, how’s the business? How’s real estate? I get asked all the time on the golf course. I golf a lot and I don’t golf for business reasons. I golf because I like it. If I’m out there, I never ever bring up, hey, you want to sell your house? I don’t bring up anything about real estate because I don’t want people running the other direction when they see me, thinking this guy’s going to corner me about real estate. No, they bring it up, and then of course I answer it. So I think that’s a long-winded way of saying that the referrals will come from just doing a good job by people and staying in touch with them and being out and about amongst people in different activities, different clubs, different situations.
That’s a lot of really good points. Now, to shift gears a little bit, I’d like to dive into this math-driven approach, because of course I’m a huge fan of that. You said you bring a contrarian, math-driven lens to real estate. Can you walk us through a real deal example where the numbers told a different story than someone’s gut instinct might have?
In terms of what? The price of the house? Am I working with the buyer? Am I working with the seller?
Any example that you would have along those lines where the math and that analytical approach led to a different outcome than just going with the gut instinct or emotion?
A different outcome. Yeah, it’s a funny business. Math is a science and it’s exact, isn’t it? Whereas in real estate, there are numbers involved, but I feel like a lot of it is emotion driven and it’s not predictable like math. So I don’t know if this will answer your question, but I’ll do the best I can. I’m a numbers person, but not a smart numbers person like you that’s doing trigonometry and calculus. No, no, no, no. I’m quick with numbers. I always was very quick with just adding numbers or quick percentages. If somebody throws me a number and they say, What’s fifteen percent? I can calculate it very, very quickly. And that helped me as a trader because what I was doing was not rocket science on Wall Street. It was just being very quick with numbers, having an intuitive sense whether something was overpriced or underpriced, which helps in the real estate business. And then also being a little bit, I don’t know if the word insane is right, just being willing to lose and get your head kicked in trading frequently, and delusional, I think is the correct word, and coming back from that. Yeah, I lost a million dollars one day. It wasn’t my money, but I lost a million dollars trading in basically an afternoon. And that was brutal, and thinking that I was going to come back the next day and win it back. It took me three weeks to get it back, but that delusional mentality. But with the math, I would say a prime example might be my brother’s house, which we sold a couple months ago. The numbers, the comps, price per square footage. I run all these different things. I look at RPR, which gives their version of what that house might be worth. Zillow’s gotten better. The estimate’s okay, but I’ll look at those two just to get a ballpark. And then I’m looking at price per square foot, upgrades, all these other things, and coming up with a number that I think is reasonable. You can’t predict it, but you can give them a range. So I said to my own brother, Look, we’ll price it a little bit low, maybe at $875,000 on this house. He goes, You think I can get over a million? I said, yeah. The market is really strong here in northern New Jersey. It has been for the last couple of years. I think it’s highly likely they should get over a million. I just don’t know how much over, and I don’t want to promise, you don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver. I said, I have no control over that. What we have control over, and this is again where it differs from the math, is getting that house looking its best. So after 25 years, he had never sanded the floors and stained them. He did the floors. He painted everything according to my wife’s recommendations. She changed out light fixtures, bought different light fixtures. We staged it. He was moving out anyway, staged everything. He came back to see it and he’s like, I think I want to move back into my own house. He goes, This is amazing. I said, I told you to do this years ago. So that is not math, but the math then came into play where the price per square foot goes out the window because people buy on emotion a lot of times. And sometimes, I’m going to try to choose my analogies carefully, but if somebody else wants something that you want, it makes it almost more desirable. So in the case of housing, if I’m the only one writing an offer on a house, I start to go, is there anything wrong with this place? Why am I the only one who wants to make an offer? But if I find out that it’s multiple people that want this house at this price, that’s telling me that this thing is worth more because there’s a lot of people interested. Well, in his case, there were 20 offers. That’s a lot. Around here, if you get five or eight offers, it’s pretty good. 20 offers is a lot. And it sold for 49, there’s another number for you, 49% over asking. So $875, it went for roughly $1,310,000. Now remember, we were talking about, you think you could get me over a million dollars, that’s what my brother said. And I said, Yes, I do. And he said, If you get me one one, I’ll actually pay you a commission. And when I asked him how much, he said one percent, and he held up a certain finger to represent the one percent, and it wasn’t his index finger. So I wasn’t anticipating getting paid any sort of commission from my brother, but his Christmas gift will reflect the lack of commission. He will not be getting much from me this year. But yeah, he was thrilled. And it just goes to show you that you can crunch numbers all you want and you can be a buyer’s agent and say, Listen, based on price per square foot, blah, blah, blah, this house is worth one point five, and then it goes for one million three. So at the end of the day, it is a numbers business, but it also is driven to a large degree by supply and demand and emotions. I’ve had clients say to me, listen, if we don’t get the next house, my wife’s going to divorce me. She’s at wit’s end. We’ve lost out on five houses. I said, Well, go big or go home. I said, divorce lawyers are about 800 bucks, probably 600 bucks an hour. I said, put that in your budget. I said, you better go big on this next one. But he’s joking, but people do get to a certain frustration point. So the math does help to some degree, being quick with numbers, but it doesn’t always tell the whole story. So I guess that’s my answer.
No, that’s a great point, and highlighting the importance of investing on that listing side, the multiple that you can get on the money you spend to fix up the house before you sell. I think that’s a great point.
Night and day. Yeah. He was complaining, my brother that is, about, hey, I’m already in for seventeen or eighteen thousand dollars. And his wife goes, Just let them do what they do. We live three doors away. He’s my younger brother. Even his own wife was like, just let them do what they do. I said, Look, I understand putting out seventeen thousand dollars, and there are real estate companies that have programs where you don’t actually have to front the money. They’ll front the money, and then they don’t really charge interest. The contract people that hire the contractors or whatever, they have to be in the system. There’s a little bit of a vig on that. But for the most part, you’re not really paying any interest. It’s so well worth the money. It’s way more work for us as real estate agents to coordinate painters, stagers, all this other stuff. But I always say to somebody, to put out $17,000 to get back 35,000 or 34,000, double your money, to me, I don’t think it’s worth it, and probably to most sellers around here, it isn’t either. But I say, look, to put out 17 to get maybe $150,000 more. And he said, Do you really think that it could provide another hundred grand or $150? I said, Absolutely. Because it’s the difference between somebody coming in and going, okay, I like Madison, I like this house from the outside, it’s a little tired inside, as opposed to coming in and going, wow, this is bright, it’s nice, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’ve seen it so many times. It’s not a one-off, it’s not an anomaly. We’ve taken houses that were purchased in the fall for one million three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Beautiful Victorian house. The guy has to sell it six months later. And we didn’t sell it to him, but he wanted to use us to sell it. And I said, why are you selling it? And he said, I wasn’t able to work remotely. That’s why I moved to Madison. I thought I could work remotely. We’re going to stay where we are in central New Jersey. Okay. I said, well, listen, the commission in this particular case, say five percent, that’s sixty-five thousand dollars. I need to get you one million four hundred and fifteen thousand dollars-ish just to get you even. And remember, you paid the most money of anybody else when you bought this six months ago. All right. So I’m like, my god, what do you suggest? Let me bring my wife in here. We actually videoed this from start to finish. So many times we didn’t do anything, and other times we just took pictures before and after. I said, let’s pay a professional videographer and take it step by step and have Amy in the video talking about the process and everything. So anyway, the usual painting, staging, lighting, et cetera, et cetera. We take this Victorian house from one look to the completely other look, and we sold it for 204,000 more than he paid for it. So he paid a million three fifty. We got him a million, I think it was five fifty-four, about two hundred and four thousand dollars more. And we had people coming in to see that house going, wasn’t this on the market a little while ago? I said, Yeah, it actually was. And this is the reason why he’s selling. And they said, my God, it’s like a completely different house. I said, yes, it is. Now his total outlay for all of that was about twelve thousand bucks. And he not only got out of the deal, he actually made money, which is unheard of. So I’ve seen it multiple times, so many different people. And I said, don’t take my word for it. I’ll give you their phone numbers. I’ll give you ten people that we’ve done this for. But we also respect, and I would say this to your listeners, you’ve got to take your cues from people. And my wife’s a little bit better at this than me, but if you get a lot of pushback, you might want to just back off a little bit. For some people, it’s not just the money, it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of effort, and for some people, it’s a bit overwhelming. So sometimes you just have to pick and choose your spots and say, hey, listen, would you feel comfortable if we just painted this one room or two rooms? Then if they’re on board for that, you may be able to say, hey, listen, while we’re here, what do you think about doing a couple more rooms? And you move in that direction, take it slowly. But at the end of the day, we always say to people, we give you our best advice to get the most money for your house. You’ll make the decision on whether you want to follow that advice. And you really want to tell them sometimes, just listen to us, please, because we’re going to hit this out of the park for you if you just follow what we advise. But some people have different levels of trust on certain things. It’s not that they don’t trust you not to rip them off. There’s just a trust factor of whether you can deliver. You want me to put out twenty grand? Twenty thousand dollars? What’s wrong with my house? Well, there’s nothing wrong with it, but I’m trying to get you two hundred more. I want you to be blown away by the number so that you’re going to tell half of your dozen friends how great we are. That’s part of the motivation, to deliver some huge numbers. A week ago I put one on this year for 1.2, sold it for 1.8. $600,000 over asking. That was the biggest over asking, I believe, maybe in the history of this town. Again, it was just absolutely phenomenal. So that’s one of the nice things about the job, being appreciated and also being able to deliver news to people that blows away their expectations. I’ve seen people come to tears. I’ve seen key people actually cry because they’ve been in a situation maybe where it could have been a divorce, or there’s some financial hardship maybe, and it was just an absolute relief to them after getting the house ready and whatever they were going through emotionally, to come out and have a number that was going to give them some financial independence and freedom that they’d never expected to be able to have in their life. And that is a really big thing that I enjoyed.
Right, and I love how you are so mission driven with your career here, seeing the impact that you can make on people. And the other thing that I’m hearing here is how so often people who aren’t mission driven, who don’t think that they can lead the market, would see something like a Zestimate or, like you said, the RPR averages, and they’ll be like, well, this is what it projects for the house, this is what we’re going to get. And you instead are saying, Well, I think we can do some stuff to be the industry leader here, right? To be that record breaking, either over asking or price or price per square foot or things like that, by being willing to push maybe some sellers, people in those situations, to make that investment and to make that house unique and top of the market.
Yeah, RPR doesn’t have a camera inside your house, at least as far as we know, and neither does Zillow or Realtor dot com. So they’re taking square footage numbers, and they’re looking at other houses that have sold in the area, but your house may not be as updated as somebody else’s and it may not show the same way. So in the case of my brother’s house, he had cherry cabinets from twenty five years ago. That was expensive. Cherry cabinets are expensive. It wasn’t garbage. But nobody wants that wood look. So we didn’t even paint it white, which we probably would have done five years ago. My wife comes up with these colors. I don’t know what greige is, whatever the heck greige is. But she did something that was a little bit more, for lack of a better word, fashion forward on the cabinetry. Hardware on the cabinetry was cheap, it’s not expensive to change out the hardware. So those types of things do make a difference. We see it also because we work with buyers. We see the way they light up. And it’s not just them. We’re in our sixties, so a lot of these things are just less important in our lives, whether it’s the appliances or the countertops or whatever the heck it is, the cabinets. But even when we go into houses with our buyers sometimes, my wife and I are like, ooh, this is nice. Even we light up sometimes and we’re like, I really like this. And look at how they were creative with the use of space, and this is just really well done. The furniture too, the furniture enhances that whole experience. The furniture is going on a truck, you still get to keep the furniture. But people see that and what a different look that is as opposed to if it was empty or if the colors were something that weren’t very appealing. It’s amazing that we just don’t look past that. It’s the difference between, you may like the house on the outside, you may like the space, you may like the flow, those things. And it gives you something, you like it. But if it’s done right with maybe the color scheme, the furniture, the lighting fixture, all that stuff, that’s what gets your heart going. That’s what gets your heart beating. Because like they say, you don’t buy the steak, you buy the sizzle. It’s true. It’s those things that grab you. And you can see it when your buyers just love a house. It’s all those intangibles that go into it. It’s not just about the square footage. Come on, you know what it is. If your husband gave you a diamond ring, you’re going to get one reaction. If that diamond ring was placed in a Tiffany’s box, which was then inside another box, which was then inside another box, and each box, as you opened it up, was just beautiful wrapping paper, and the ribbon was first class and the presentation was just amazing. And you get to the very bottom and you see this blue box, that Tiffany box, and you open it up and there’s the diamond ring. Is that a different experience for you than if he had put it in an Amazon box? It’s the same ring. Put it in an Amazon box with some cellophane around it or bubble wrap, and you open it that way. It’s the same thing, but it’s just how it was presented. And it applies in so many different ways in real estate. So I always say to people, if you were selling your car, would you leave it outside with a for sale sign in the street with pollen all over it and your kids’ McDonald’s wrappers in the backseat, or would you have it detailed? They said, I would have it detailed or at least go to the car wash. And I said, Well, why would you do that? Well, because it would look good. Yeah, right. And then the people that come to buy it, they’re like, this is beautiful. And they really took care of it. I bet you they took this thing to get the oil changed every three thousand. You could eat out of the ashtray, if they even have ashtrays anymore. But they see how meticulous you were, they think you took care of it because you detailed it, and that gets them excited to think that this is actually a really good deal. And I said, if you’re willing to do that for your car, why would you not do it for your house? A car you’re going to sell for 20 grand, that house you’re going to sell for a million five. So put that little extra money into it and detail your house. And sometimes when I put it in those terms, it resonates with people, because at first they’re kind of like, I don’t have to do anything, I’m moving, why would I paint it? They may want to change the colors. That’s okay. We’re just trying to get as many people in here to write you an offer. That’s it. As many people as we can get through the front door. That’s my job.
Right. I think you bring up a lot of good points for our real estate entrepreneurs to listen to today. And Scott, if anybody listening would like to learn more about your business or reach out to continue the conversation, what is the best way for them to do so?
Just email me. It’s on our website, spelkerteam.com. I’d be happy to help people out. I’ve done other podcasts. I’ve done podcasts with people in Australia. There’s an Australian guy that calls me frequently to do podcasts. I’m like, who am I talking to out here? What is your audience? Am I talking to people in Perth or Sydney? I don’t know if whatever I’m talking about is going to be relevant to what their experiences are. But sometimes it’s more about motivating people or coaching. So yeah, I do get frequent requests to do podcasts or interviews. Sometimes it’s about interest rates and mortgages. Porting mortgages is another thing, they’re introducing legislation in New Jersey where you can maybe keep your three percent mortgage and bring it to the house that you want to trade up to. So anything finance related, a lot of times people have me on their program to talk about that. But the better choice is my wife. You really want to get her on. It’s really hard to get her to come on camera. The thing is, if she’s talking about something like design or decorating houses, if you want to take that angle, she’s the one to bring into the conversation, because as shy as she is, she’s private. She’s not shy. She’s private. There’s a difference. But if she is talking about something that she’s passionate about, which would be interior design, you’ve got something there. She’s got great ideas, and she might be a good person to have. We’d have to both gang up on her, Adrienne, to see if we could get her to, tell her how important it is to the business. I don’t think any of the podcasts I do are necessarily going to lead to any business. If it does, so be it. Sometimes we put these on our website, some of the different stuff, or if I write articles, we’ll put it on there. It does give you credibility that you have real estate knowledge, finance knowledge, whatever. But for the most part, I do it because I just know that I was helped out when I started in my career watching different things like that and getting some ideas. So it’s what do they call it? Paying it forward. Right? Paying it forward, paying it back, I don’t know, something like that. But I appreciate you having me on.
Well, for our listeners, the URL and details that he shared will be in the show notes so you can see them later. Well, thank you, Scott. That is a wrap on today’s episode. Thank you for joining me, and for our listeners, I’ll see you again next week.
Adrienne, my pleasure. Sounds good. I’ll see ya.