The Daily Routine Behind 33 Deals in Year One • Chris Wolfe

Keeping It Real Podcast • Secrets Of Top 1% REALTORS ® • Interviews With Real Estate Brokers & Agents

Chris Wolfe shares his remarkable transition from the collapse of a 12-year house-flipping business in Austin to closing 33 real estate tran

Key takeaways

• Chris achieved 33 transactions and $510,000 in net commission during his first year of real estate.
• 95% of Chris's initial business was generated through two specific methods: open houses and cold calling.

Main topics

• Real estate career pivots
• Prospecting and cold calling techniques

Notable quotes

I'm not going to be that statistic.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a blueprint for new agents to achieve high volum

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Chris Wolfe spent 12 years flipping houses in Austin. Then the market turned in 2022 and he spent the next two years watching that business die. He moved to El Dorado Hills, California, where he knew nobody, got his license in September of 2024, and closed 33 transactions in his first year. We're going to talk about exactly what his day looks like and why. Stay tuned. Speaker 1 (0:22) This episode of Keeping It Real is brought to Speaker 2 (0:24) you by Real Geeks. How many homes are you going to sell this year? Do you have the right tools? Is your website turning soft leads and interested buyers? Are you spending money on leads that aren't converting? Well, Real Geeks is your solution. Find out why agents across the country choose Real Geeks as their technology partner. Real Geeks was created by an agent for agents. They pride themselves on delivering a sales and marketing solution so that you can easily generate more business. Their agent websites are fast and built for lead conversion with a smooth search experience for your visitors. Real Geeks also includes an easy-to-use agent CRM. So once a lead signs up on your website, you can track their interest, and have great follow-up conversations. Real Geeks is loaded with a ton of marketing tools to nurture your leads and increase brand awareness. Visit realgeeks.com forward slash keepingitrealpod and find out why realtors come to Real Geeks to generate more business. Again, visit realgeeks.com forward slash keepingitrealpod. And now, on to our show. Today's episode is brought to you by Corded.io. Are you looking for agents to join your brokerage or team? Now, as a real estate recruiter, I can tell you the answer is always yes. but most agents aren't looking to move right now. So how do you know who to contact? 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Now, if you are looking to grow your brokerage, Corded.io is the best tool out there. Visit Corded.io to schedule a demo. Again, that's Corded.io. And now, on to the show. Speaker 2 (3:07) Welcome to Keeping It Real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I'm your guide and host through the show. And today we are talking to a top producer, Chris Wolfe, from El Dorado Hills in California. I'm going to give you a little bit of background here on Chris and why he's on the show. Chris has been a licensed real estate agent since the end of 2024. So he's newer to the business. His first year in the business, he did 33 transactions, get this, for $510,000 in net commission. Unreal. In his second year to date, because he's kind of in that right now, 40 transactions with a million in net commission. He doubled his business, essentially doubled his commission. Prior to real estate, Chris had a house flipping business that he ran for 12 years. In 2022, the market crashed in Austin. That's where he was building it at the time. And he spent two years losing his business and then trying to figure out what do I do next? He ended up moving to his market, Eldorado Hills, and starting from scratch and just absolutely crushing it. I want everybody to follow Chris on Instagram, Chris Wolfe with an E at the end, Chris Wolfe underscore real estate. And we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Chris, welcome to the show. Speaker 1 (4:34) Hey, thank you, DJ, for having me on. Great to be Speaker 2 (4:37) here. All right. And we're going to jump right into it. So you ran a flipping business in Austin for 12 years. And in 2022, the Austin market turned. It turned really hard, maybe even harder than almost anywhere else in the country. And I know that you spent the next two years losing the business. Speaker 2 (4:59) You know, what did losing it actually look like month to month? What was the first sign? And, you know, what was like the last property you ended up selling? Speaker 1 (5:08) Yeah, it was pretty catastrophic. You know, I got into Austin before it really started blowing up. So I kind of just picked a lucky horse. My sister moved there and she said, you know, can you fly here and then drive my U-Haul back to California? So I'd never been to Austin before, but I was flipping houses in California and doing pretty well. And then I went out there, saw what was kind of going on back in like 2018 and just kind of looking at the opportunity. And so started dabbling there and then eventually like building it very big into a large organization where we were one of the top house flipping developers in the area, you know, and then obviously the great market timing certainly helped with that too. but the interesting thing with austin was it became the hot it was the hottest real estate market in the country and then in like 60 days it became the worst real estate market in the country and so um you know i was very conservative i always saved money bought rentals kind of was doing everything right i didn't live real flashy above my means and i just kind of got to a point where i felt bulletproof you know because i've been doing it for you know i wasn't like an overnight success i was doing this you know gradually building it up for over a decade 12 Speaker 2 (6:19) years yeah yeah Speaker 1 (6:21) yeah 12 years and um it doesn't matter how smart you are uh you know when the market you can't you can't even give property away it's just like it kind of unravels very quickly and so yeah so it was it was a very painful two years between 2022 and the end of 2024 when i finally sold the last property there it was done Speaker 2 (6:42) You know, it's funny. I've been doing this podcast for eight years. Very rarely does anyone start with, here's how my last business failed. And I applaud you, seriously, because we all know that business, that we're all entrepreneurs. Speaker 2 (7:04) I've started businesses well before this that failed as well. And, you know, we don't tend to talk about that stuff. And, you know, the entrepreneurial spirit is, you know, you try something and you had a, yours didn't fail. You had a successful business for 12 years. That's amazing. I mean, that's more than the average, you know, small business owner could imagine. And then it just, things changed. And so tell me about the switch. So you're in Austin. you know, the market changed. And then how did you decide you wanted to go this way into being a realtor? Speaker 1 (7:40) Yeah, so I, you know, at some point, like through 2022, I was selling off the last projects, you know, I was liquidating all everything I had, you know, I had a big retirement account, I had a ton of rentals, and I was just trying to save the business and kind of turn it around. but then it got to a point where the market just continued to decline it wasn't stopping and i had just run out of risk tolerance i was like if i do any more wrong moves now at this point you know my plan a b c d and e had already been gone through and and i didn't really have any way to do to do um any more any more risky deals um so You know, I looked at starting another company, like a product company, but then I was just like, you know, I know how long that takes to build up, you know, like an entrepreneur, you don't make money for years. And, and I had, you know, I had a family, I have a wife and two small daughters, and they're like in school. And, you know, I gotta, I gotta like put food on the table. and coming from an entrepreneur background i'm like well i can't get a job like i don't have a college degree like you know what am i i mean minimum wage in california is pretty good now but you know not enough to support a family um so i just didn't have any options and i remember the last house flip i did it was this huge project i did a great job but it took like eight months it was a ton of money out it was really stressful and i made like thirty thousand dollars on this flip at the end of this eight month cycle and i just remember thinking like man i could sell a house like in my town and make 30 000 with zero risk and so i kind of entertained getting my license and you know my wife's like well you're gonna become a realtor Speaker 2 (9:24) and i Speaker 1 (9:24) was like i guess i don't know you know what i'm gonna do that seems easy you know um and it's not obviously uh but yeah so i just decided you know this is kind of my best option to start making money and i just really committed mentally like i'm not going to fail at this like i've got to make this work i can't like it was already it was kind of embarrassing like starting over like the business had become my identity and then i'm going to jump into real estate and you know i just really didn't want to lose and i really just said i'm gonna i'm gonna make this happen you know And there's a quote, I remember hearing Tom Ferry say like 80 % of agents didn't sell a house in the last year. And I just remember telling myself over and over, like, I'm not going to be that statistic. Like, I'm not going to do that. Speaker 2 (10:08) You know? Yeah, it's actually worse than that because it's the National Association of Realtors statistic. So it's like not even a... maybe Tom Ferry's padding the number to like sell more training courses. No, he's right Speaker 1 (10:22) on. It's actually Speaker 2 (10:24) 85%. It's really, really sad. But when you moved out to El Dorado Hills, did you have a database? Did you have people that you knew there? Speaker 1 (10:38) No, no. And that was one of the real big challenges, you know, because there was all these agents that were doing all this business, but they had been around for 25 years. And, you know, I was brand new to this town. We had never lived there before. So I didn't know anybody. I'm not a social person by nature. So I just don't have, I like still hang out with my four high school buddies. Like that's my thing, you know, Speaker 2 (10:59) which is Speaker 1 (11:01) great. But, you know, so I didn't have this like sphere whatsoever. And, you know, I remember like I started an Instagram and I never had an Instagram. So now I'm Speaker 2 (11:09) a Speaker 1 (11:09) realtor. so i'm like adding people that i knew and i'm telling my wife hey have your friend follow me and it was like a month went by and i had like 13 followers and i'm like all right this is not gonna work you know i gotta get i gotta get out there and so so i did some things to really get out there and get known and just say screw it and i'm just gonna go all in and um but yeah i know so to answer your question i didn't have any kind of sphere and i had to just kind of make the business happen Speaker 2 (11:36) And not only did you survive, you actually thrived. You did incredibly well. Again, new town, no sphere, nobody's referring you business. So tell me how you did it. Speaker 1 (11:51) Yeah. You know, a lot of it started just with watching YouTube podcasts, you know, Googling how to be a successful realtor, you know what I mean? And watching these different things. And so the kind of the two mechanisms that I put into play right away was. doing open houses. You know, I figured that's pretty obvious. You know, people are walking into the house and they want to buy something. So one of them is going to buy. So I did a lot of open houses right out of the gate, which isn't fun. You know, I started in winter and I'm like lugging signs out in the middle of intersections and the rain. And I'm just like rethinking my whole life. Like, what am I doing? You know? But I knew that was a way to get business. I'm meeting people who are in the market right now. So that was a lot of it. And then. The other part was cold calling. One of the YouTube videos I saw said you should cold call for expired listings, circle prospect, notice the default. And that's something that was really hard for me. I mean, I don't like it. Now I sound pretty good on the phone and I do it all the time. But for me,