“So I'm interesting but I'm also very intentional about being interested in people. People like that. And because I'm interested, they tell me about what's important to them and I listen for change.” Kendyl Young, Broker/Owner at DIGGS

Here are a few highlights:

• Listen for change when talking with your people.
• Be interested in what people say. Conversations start with F.O.R.D.
• Push through your discomfort and just reach out.

“The thing that we know is in order to sell houses you have to talk to people.” - Kendyl Young

Rather read it? Check out the transcript here:

‍Mike Schneider: Welcome back for another episode of First Person. And I'm really honored to have my friend Kendyl Young here, who owns Diggs.

Kendyl Young: I do.

Mike Schneider: One of my favorite brokerages.

Kendyl Young: I do.

Mike Schneider: And we're gonna be talking about, as we always do, relationships in business. So thank you for being on.

Kendyl Young: You're very welcome.

Mike Schneider: Well, we do this fun little get to know you for people that don't yet know you.

Kendyl Young: Do you promise that it's fun? Or will it be deadly boring and we just call it fun?

Mike Schneider: We call it fun.

Kendyl Young: Okay.

Mike Schneider: We'll find out. You can tell me at the end if it's actually fun. But it will be limited to 60 seconds, so it can't be that painful.

Kendyl Young: Okay. Alright.

Mike Schneider: So, since our company name is First I'd love to hear, what was your first job?

Kendyl Young: Oh good lord. My first job was at May Company.

Mike Schneider: Okay.

Kendyl Young: May Company, which is a department store.

Mike Schneider: Yep. You were selling?

Kendyl Young: It was for the holidays, and I was 15. And I thought it was the most amount of fun, because it was Christmas Eve, people were really, really cranky, and it was my personal challenge to figure out how to get them un-cranky.

Mike Schneider: Make them smile.

Kendyl Young: Yes, exactly.

Mike Schneider: What was your first car?

Kendyl Young: My first car was a recommissioned police cruiser. His name was Ralph. He was white and he had the two spotlights intact on both the passenger side-

Mike Schneider: No way.

Kendyl Young: ... and the driver's side.

Mike Schneider: That's unfair.

Kendyl Young: Yes, yes. He had a modified cam, it was a radical cam, and he could go very, very fast when he had gas. Which was not all that often. But I could go fast.

Mike Schneider: What was your first listing?

Kendyl Young: You're talking the way back machine. My very first listing was a for sale by owner in Sunnyvale, California. And I was looking for a buyer and saw the ad in the classifieds, 'cause they did classifieds back then.

Kendyl Young: And I called them up to see if they would be open to participating in a buyer's agent commission. They said yes, and because it said in the training manual to then follow up with a question of whether or not they were open to talking to me about listing the house, I asked the question and they said yes. And I went to interview for the listing, got the listing, and proceeded to piss off five agents in my office because they had interviewed for the listing too.

Mike Schneider: Wow!

Kendyl Young: And What was I doing getting the listing in one of the most popular neighborhoods in Sunnyvale when I didn't know anything?

Mike Schneider: You young upstart.

Kendyl Young: I was a young upstart.

Mike Schneider: Well that's all we had for 60 seconds. Was it fun?

Kendyl Young: It was just tons of fun.

Mike Schneider: All right. Well the next part, we go straight into relationships.

Kendyl Young: Okay.

Mike Schneider: And you told a little bit about your story. We often ... How you got into real estate. But I'd love to hear, you run your business on relationships.

Kendyl Young: I do.

Mike Schneider: What does that mean? What do you actually do?

Kendyl Young: It means that I'm afraid of talking to strangers.

Mike Schneider: Okay, okay. Yeah, I get that.

Kendyl Young: It means that I'm terrified of rejection, and it means that I like to talk to people who have some sense of why they'd want to do business with me in the first place. Whether it's because they have found me through socials and we started having a conversation. Most of the time not about real estate. Or because I know them through some social networking or boots on the ground networking or some kind of non-profit work that we do. Something.

Mike Schneider:Yeah.

Kendyl Young: Right?

Mike Schneider: So you listed a bunch of things you actually do. You do socials.

Kendyl Young: Yeah.

Mike Schneider: You do non-profit work.

Kendyl Young: I do the socials.

Mike Schneider: What are the things you do that pull people together?

Kendyl Young: I do the do-gooding work. I'm not really much of a do-gooder, but people like do-gooding work and I find that people who do do-gooding work are fun.

Mike Schneider: Yes.

Kendyl Young: Yeah.

Mike Schneider: You like working with them.

Kendyl Young: Yeah, exactly.

Mike Schneider: Cool, so that's how you get started.

Kendyl Young: Yeah.

Mike Schneider: And then how do you build those relationships? What does your ongoing look like? Or what are the ways that you turn someone into a passionate advocate? Like you turn those smiles at May's upside, you know?

Kendyl Young: My entry point is that I'm incredibly amusing.

Mike Schneider: I've noticed.

Kendyl Young: So that puts people into a less combative point of view. Right? So I'm very, very amusing. I'm interested, even though I'm interesting, there's nothing I can do about that, that's I'm just like I'm very animated. So I'm interesting but I'm also very intentional about being interested in people. People like that. And because I'm interested they tell me about what's important to them and I listen for change.

Mike Schneider: Cool.

Kendyl Young: And change often has opportunity wrapped up in it.

Mike Schneider: Yeah, and so you had a concept I think you mentioned in another conversation about being in flow out of flow with people. As you've been successful around your career you have hundreds of past clients and thousands of people you know. How do you manage that.

Kendyl Young: Well, I'm actually terrible at it.

Mike Schneider: It's hard.

Kendyl Young: It's really hard and my concept is that everybody's super busy so I'm not very good about picking up the phone and saying, "So, how you're doing?" I'm on video saying loudly that I'm terrible at chitty-chatty. Right?

Kendyl Young: So I have to have a metric. I have to have something that I am ... a strategy, I have to have a strategy, otherwise I'm not going to do it. Okay? I'm not one of those connectors. Right?

Mike Schneider: You just naturally just-

Kendyl Young: No, no, no, no, I have to have a strategy. So my strategy is to be in the flow of people's lives. When I think about that it's a lot easier to make the phone call and then I'm doing the standard, age-honored forward conversations. Family, occupation, recreation, and dreams.

Mike Schneider: Yes, let's say it one more time 'cause it's so good.

Kendyl Young: Family, occupation, recreation, and dreams. And dreams does not mean, "What did you dream about last night?" Dreams are anything that is-

Mike Schneider: Yes, we can't [inaudible 00:05:30] to be too literal.

Kendyl Young: Right, exactly, dreams are anything aspiration-oriented.

Mike Schneider: Aspirations.

Kendyl Young: Aspirational. So, like for example a great question that we ask in all kinds of situations is, "Do you have any plans for summer vacation?" That's dreams. Right?

Mike Schneider: Right. That's great. And you mentioned something that is really interesting that I'm starting to hear as a theme for people that do this really well. Which is they have a longer time horizon. You're not talking about staying in flow of a conversation. You're talking about staying in flow of their life.

Kendyl Young: Yes.

Mike Schneider: Which means you're thinking about their life and what's going on.

Kendyl Young: I figure that most people need a real estate agent once, maybe twice in a generation. So, I am just really uninterested in trying to figure out how to sell them a house right now. I'm really interested in becoming the real estate agent in their lives, the person they think of. I'm their person. Right?

Mike Schneider: Sure.

Kendyl Young: That's all I want to be. I figure if I'm their person then they'll think of me when something is needed. And sometimes what's needed ... Like I had a deal just not that long ago. This was just last week, actually two weeks ago. A gal called me up and she said that her father had passed away and she needed a date of death statement of value, and that her father had often talked about me and she had seen my signs out there.

Kendyl Young: This is a guy that I'd see when I was door-knocking, which I just call visiting the people in my neighborhood. Right? And we would talk about tennis, and we'd talk about drinking, and we'd talk about stuff. I knew the guy was never gonna sell. I was right, but-

Mike Schneider: But you still stopped at his door and still visited.

Kendyl Young:Because he was a nice guy and he liked talking to me and I liked talking to him and his daughter remembered me, and I did the date of death, and she says, "I'm probably not gonna sell," and I said, "I don't care, I'm fine with doing the date of death." And then a week later she says, "Things have changed and I'm selling, please come and list my house."

Mike Schneider: Wow. Well, I'm sure you've worked through a lot of these hard things. Visiting people is not easy. What's one pro-tip you'd cherish where someone that says, "I wanna invest more in the relationship side of my business." What's a Kendyl Young pro-tip?

Kendyl Young: A pro-tip. Well, being interested is a pro-tip. Being involved in your community beyond ... like I used to do the visiting my neighborhood which other coaches might call door-knocking. I just call it visiting. And that was because I couldn't ... the thing that we know is in order to sell houses you have to talk to people.

Mike Schneider: It turns out you have to have a conversation.

Kendyl Young: It's an immutable truth. And so you can talk to people in a lot of different ways, and so talking to people could be getting a billboard. You just need to ... a lotta people need to pass that door. Right? Exactly.

Kendyl Young: And the highest density way of making a sale is to talk to people face-to-face in real time. You could also do it text real time, if you're a millennial. Right? But as long as it's real time. I talk to you, and then you talk back. That's a conversation. Right?

Kendyl Young: So you could do that oftentimes by being involved in the community with things that you naturally love to do. Right? So if your jam is rescuing dogs, then that's how you do it. Right? If your jam is ... right now I have a jam where I'm talking to a lot of people 'cause we do art shows at Diggs. Right? And it's amateur artists, and I don't know anything about art, I just think art is fun. Right?

Kendyl Young: So it's like I'm not doing it for the snooty-patooty people who are saying, "Well I've got my portfolio, will you look at it?" It's like as long as it doesn't scare me I'm good. Your art has to not scare me and you have to have-

Mike Schneider: That's right, I can appreciate your art, I may not be able to value it.

Kendyl Young: Right, and you have to have non-profit that you want to support with the sale of your art. Those are my two requirements, and that's it. But I get to talk to a lot of people because of that.

Mike Schneider: Great. Well thank you for sharing that. And thanks for being on another episode of First Person.

Kendyl Young: You are welcome. Thank you!

Mike Schneider: Great.

Kendyl Young: I didn't drop a single F bomb. Yay to me!

Mike Schneider: I know. Woo-hoo!

Kendyl Young: Woo-hoo!