Episode Transcript
Welcome back to another episode of the Off Market Podcast. This week we have Craig Hartraft, head of the Craig Hartraft team at Berkshire Hathaway Realty. His team has been consistently ranked the number one real estate firm in Lancaster County for the past six years and number five nationally in Berkshire Hathaway for almost a decade.
More importantly, they have over 500 five star reviews on Google. They're endorsed by Barbara Corcoran and consistently have sold over a hundred million dollars worth of real estate each and every year. In 2023 alone, they sold well over 400 homes worth over 150 million. And if you're looking to buy or sell properties in the Lancaster area or the surrounding suburbs, Craig is your guy, Craig, welcome to the show.
Well, thank you for having me. Look forward to chatting with you.
Yeah. So talk to us about how you got into real estate. I know you had a stint in the air force, you went and joined the police. And then ultimately you got into real estate and been doing it for 30 plus years to talk to us about that journey to becoming a top agent.
I really didn't know much about the real estate business other than realtors help people, uh, help the folks purchased homes. Uh, when I was young in high school, I used to play basketball in this local park and alumni guys would be down there. And this one gentleman handled himself really well, very kind individual, and he was a realtor.
And I always kept in the back of my mind saying, you know what? I'd like to be like him someday. I didn't. So, went off to the Air Force, came out of the Air Force, needed a steady job. So I became a police officer. My wife and I purchased our first home and had a great experience with our realtor. I said, you know what?
This piques my interest. I'd like to possibly get in the business. And, uh, I'm sure my realtor shrugged me off, but she gave me some information and I couldn't afford taking the real estate exams and classes. But As a police officer off duty or downtown, they were building a bank and they needed off duty police officers to direct traffic in the middle of the winter and no one was taking the job.
So I took the 10 hour shifts making 10 an hour and I had enough money to, uh, earned enough money to take my class. and passed my classes and started as a part time realtor working midnight shifts as a police officer coming in and so one house my first six months and my come home one day my wife says I think you should quit.
And I said, okay. And she says, but not as a realtor. I think you should quit being a police officer and commit yourself full time. I spoke to your manager and she thinks you do well, but you just have to be committed. So, um, they always say there's a great lady behind every successful man. Well, my wife's my rock and she's the one that believed in me and the rest is history.
I love it. So take us back to that first deal. You, uh, you sold one deal in six months. I'm sure that deal is still right in the back of your mind as to who it was and how you found it and what that deal actually looked like.
Yeah. It was the South of Lancaster County. And I was cold calling right from the white pages of the phone book. And had someone say yes, they're thinking about selling because they're getting divorced and told my manager, she says, well, let's go and we'll go out to the listing appointment together and I'll show you how a listing presentation. goes. So they were ready to sign, but I was distracted. I'm the one holding the file with the listing, uh, agreement. And she says she had to pry it out of my hands. Like, okay, we need to close this deal and get this listing contract signed. So I think the price back then was 78, 000 for a single home. And now our average sales price is around 350, 000 in our marketplace. So things have changed.
things have changed. Yeah. My my grandparents bought their house in 1950s, 17, 000. And today it's like almost 400, 000. It's wild how it goes in 50 years from less than it costs to buy a car today to now, you know, 20 X as much as it was back then.
My wife and I just talked about that this weekend. We were looking at cars and our first car was $63,000. I mean, uh, I'm sorry, our first house was $63,000 and now you're buying cars 60,000 plus nowadays. So yeah, it's very interesting.
Yeah, exactly. It's interesting how that kind of flips. So, talk to us about the process of becoming a top agent in Lancaster. Obviously you didn't start there. Um, you worked your way up, you sold your first deal, it took six months and ultimately started selling and you finally found your niche. But what did that process actually look like?
Was it you just picking up the phone and cold calling and dialing? Was there a specific process? Was there a specific niche? Like what was your thing that you found really worked to get you started?
two things for me. Um, I was trained how to call for sale by owners and expires. And I really did really well with for sale by owners. And my angle was I would go in and offer to help them at no cost while they're selling their home privately. And what I meant by help providing them brochures, providing copies of blank sales agreements.
Closing cost sheet for the potential buyers like the open house flyers for them to come through and give to the buyers. And I just was very honest with the homeowner saying, I'm willing to share some of my resources and time with you in return. I'm just hoping I impress you enough that when you have someone that comes up to you and says, Oh, I saw you sold your home.
Closing cost sheet for the potential buyers like the open house flyers for them to come through and give to the buyers. And I just was very honest with the homeowner saying, I'm willing to share some of my resources and time with you in return. I'm just hoping I impress you enough that when you have someone that comes up to you and says, Oh, I saw you sold your home.
Would you recommend a realtor that they would consider me? And by going that angle, not asking for the listing, just providing, trying to help them, 80 of them didn't sell their homes privately. So they would call me up and say, you're the only person that didn't tell me I shouldn't be doing this.
You were trying to help me and let's go ahead and hire you. So I went in the soft approach angle and was very successful with for sale by owners and then open houses. We. The brokerage I was working with had some builders and there was this one community I would just sit open houses every Sunday and that helped me build my confidence So after my second I say my second year I think I've sold over 25 homes and then my third year was up in the 30 range And I was back then there was no teams.
We're talking about 1990-91 there was no such thing as teams back then But I knew I needed to have someone to help me out And my brokerage wasn't going to cooperate with me having someone on come on board as an assistant. So, There was a local Remax franchise in the area. I went to them and started working there and One of the owners came up to me says Craig you seem like a young motivated person I want to give you one of these cassette tapes to listen to now again Cassette tapes i'm talking about.
This is back in the 90s And the tape was an interview like what you're doing right now His name was Howard Britton He ran Star Power. He was out of Colorado and what he would do is interview one agent for approximately an hour and he would sell those tapes. I call it star of the month. And so I took this tape and I still remember to this day, the gentleman was Stanley Mills out of Memphis, Tennessee.
And listening to that tape, it was just amazing. He was selling over a hundred homes a year. That was unheard of in my marketplace. I devoured that tape and took that information. The next day I went into my manager and said, Hey, do you have any more tapes? Second tape was Bob Wolf at the time was for Fort Collins, Colorado, but now I think he's in Laguna Beach, California.
He was selling 200 homes back then. And just my mind just exploded. So I went back to my manager. He says, wait a minute. He says, you can buy these tapes. Um, I think we, I think it cost us 300 a year to have 12 plus one bonus tape to listen to. And now you look at these podcasts are all free. Um, but that was his business model.
And Howard would bring all his guest speakers to a conference and have a conference for two or three days. And when I got to that conference, they talked about having agents help you as buyers, agents, and have enlisting agents and the whole nine yards. And I started forming a team, made a lot of mistakes, made a lot of mistakes.
But. It worked out.
Yeah. Maybe you could talk to us about some of those mistakes that you had made or some of the key learnings you had growing up as a single Agent to then inside of a brokerage and then ultimately forming your own team and what that looked like, what some of those learnings were and ultimately what that process actually entailed.
Well, the first mistake was I was scared to delegate. And I felt like I could do the job the best and no one could do it like me. And it took me good 6 months to 12 months after I hired my first assistant and I was not willing to let go. And then. I don't know what happened. A light bulb muscle went off.
I went, I got to be able, or she's not going to stick around. She was being frustrated because she's there to help. And I wasn't willing to delegate. Now, now I'm a super delegator. My present team would laugh if they would hear I'm not a good delegator. Um, but I guess for the audience, if you're thinking of Creating a team or just bringing an assistant.
If that assistant can do the job 80%, as well as you can, I'd rather have someone do an 80 than not have the job done at all and dollar productivity is huge now always looked at it. There was another gentleman that was a mentor and I shouted was Alan Dom of Philadelphia back in the days. He would specialize strictly in high rise condominiums down in down Philadelphia.
He was selling over close to 800, home 800 condos down there. He was called the condo king and his market share was like 80 plus. Um, and I just remember him talking about dollar productive activity. And that's how I look at it. If I'm, if I can hire someone to do something for 15 an hour, 25 an hour, 50 an hour, I know what my value is per hour.
And that really helped me out. So that would be the number one mistake I made was not wanting to delegate in the very beginning. I became an expert in delegation, but that would be the one mistake. And then the second huge mistake is. Coming back from those conferences self promotion was very big back then.
And I spent a lot of money. No one told me what a profit and loss statement was. And I think I went from selling 50 or 60 homes a year to 130 homes a year later. But when it came tax time and I looked at my profit and loss, I barely made anything because I was out of control with my spending. So again, I got very, I was very fortunate to take that under control and did not hurt me too.
Well, too bad. Yeah.
Yeah. There's two key learnings that you make the mistake once and then you hopefully learn from it. Although I've heard that it's a little bit easier said than done. So talk to us about balancing work with family life. Cause at some point you start a family, you have kids. And and somehow you still manage to become one of the top agents in your area and selling homes at an exponential pace, right?
Yeah. There's two key learnings that you make the mistake once and then you hopefully learn from it. Although I've heard that it's a little bit easier said than done. So talk to us about balancing work with family life. Cause at some point you start a family, you have kids. And and somehow you still manage to become one of the top agents in your area and selling homes at an exponential pace, right?
Accelerating from a few homes to a dozen homes to dozens of homes to a hundred homes to, you know, more than a hundred homes. And so I would imagine even if you are delegating and you now have a family, there's still this, you know, Tension that, that rubs between your work and family life. So talk to us about how you approached balancing that, that work in life.
Well, one of the reasons I wanted to start a team was to help out with balance. And when I have realtors come to me and want to pick my brain and say, help me out here. How, how do I form a team? The first question I asked him, why, why do you want to form a team? And there's a variety of different reasons.
One is leverage your time. So you have a little bit more balance. Other is to leverage your time where you can have increased your income. So there's no right or wrong answer, but you need to really know, why do you want to bring a, why do you want to have a team and how's that going to help you? So one of the reasons I started forming a team that had a little bit of balance, but I'll say this, if you want.
To be a high producing realtor, you're going to have to put your time in the very beginning to get to that, to, to a level. When I say top producing realtor. Let's say if you want to be selling 75 100 homes, 150 plus homes, and you're just starting out, there's not going to be balance. And everyone would say balance.
No, there's no such thing. In real estate, you're on 24/7 and you do have to make sacrifices. And, again, I was very fortunate to have a wife that was such a support. Her father was entrepreneur. He owned some grocery stores. He worked in the evenings. He worked on the weekends, so she wasn't used to someone going to work 9 to 5 and be home for dinner.
So I had that support and that was huge. It was huge because I have team members and past team members where they came on and their spouses or significant others. couldn't understand why they weren't home at 5:30 every evening. Or why did they have to pick up their phone at 7 o'clock at night? Or why do they have to do something on a Saturday afternoon or getting called out last minute?
So it could be very, very stressful if if you're in a relationship and you're not both on the same page. So in the very beginning, there's very little life balance for you in the beginning. After you put your time in, and you just learn to work a little bit smarter, then you can then have a little bit more life balance.
Now I have the life balance. Now I'll work anywhere from 25 to 35 hours a week. I live in Florida, January through March. I just worked virtually from Florida. I have a place down in the New Jersey shore. I'll go down there Thursday nights and come back Monday afternoons. So I have balanced out, but I'm still working from those locations, but I still have balanced where I may be at a different location.
I love it. And that I think is very important to note is it's not going to be a easy battle and it's certainly not something you can do part time. I've heard that a hundred times over again, of people thinking that they can do a part time and work a couple hours a week, and somehow that's going to magically turn into success.
And I think that's why you see all of these realtors that have their license, but don't actually practice or don't sell a single home or can't transact on a single thing. And they can't figure out why, well, they're not putting in the time or the effort required to actually be successful. And I think, Oh, the system is broken.
Well, the system is not broken. You're just not putting in a time required to be successful. And so I've heard that from a number of people from a number of walks of life, regardless of whether they're doing a hundred homes, A couple hundred homes, a thousand homes, five thousand homes.
And my, my pet peeve when I hear newer agents coming into the market and they're struggling. I guess I'm still old school is you have to pick up the phone and call people. You can do social media advertising. You can do self promotion, but it comes down to you have to pick up the phone and make phone calls.
And if you're not willing to make the phone calls. You're not going to do well in this business. And I think we as realtors, I love this career. And we get paid very good in this business. One of the reasons we get paid very well, we're on 24 seven. My, I can't reach my doctor at nine o'clock at night.
I can't reach my attorney at one o'clock in the afternoon on a Saturday. But we as realtors, one of the reasons you're hiring us is our experience, but that we're available for you. We're available for you 24 seven. And again, when you're negotiating contracts, you're going in a Friday night at five o'clock to make an offer that can drag into Saturday and Sunday.
We don't say, well, we'll call you back at eight o'clock or nine o'clock Monday morning. We're working throughout the night work and throughout the weekend. Um, And that's, that's value we're bringing to the client, letting them know we're on top of, we're on top of this transaction for you.
The most exciting deals you worked on. Not always the biggest deal, might not always be the most sexy deal, but sometimes there's a deal that you thought there's no chance it's going through and all of a sudden at the 11th hour it comes through and you're on top of the moon.
So what's one of those exciting deals that really brings you back to One of those really fun times.
I don't know if I have any exciting deals. I can share some unusual deals
So what's one of those exciting deals that really brings you back to One of those really fun times.
I don't know if I have any exciting deals. I can share some unusual deals
Yeah, that works.
or experiences. I was going through this home for a listing appointment and Going through the house and go down the basement and there's animal skulls lying around the property. There's a skeleton over here. Here, the lady, she was a witch and she practiced witchcraft.
And like, I've never experienced anything like that before. So that was very, very interesting. I think I turned that listing down. I think I, uh, turned that listing down and then I had a shelling years later. Trying to open the door and something's blocking me and open the door and here there's a Candle burning with rooster flower rooster feathers.
It was just it was just odd So I think I got I think I got hexed So I
Oh
no situations
yeah. Wow. That that I might expect in Salem, but I wouldn't expect it in Lancaster.
Yes
what what tips do you have for agents that are just starting out that want to be part of the top 1 in their area?
Uh, top 1 percent in their area. First of all, you have to work on the foundation. As I mentioned to you before communication. So, so I, again, you don't, you can't be scared, pick up the phone and make a phone call. You gotta find out what is, you're going to be your number one lead generation tool. One of my business partners. It's been with me, Jim McPhail been with me over 28 years as a team member. He brings this up when we interview people, we say, what do you think?
What does a realtor do? Well, they show houses. And we said, that's part of it, but the number one thing a realtor needs to do and be good at it is lead generation. If you do not know how to convert. and generate leads, you're not going to be successful in the business. I think people get in this business so they like showing homes, they like showing expensive properties, they, they, they just enjoy that part.
That is just a small fraction of what we do. If you don't have the clientele to show those homes or help them sell their properties, you're not going to be successful. So you need to work on the basics and learn how to lead generate. And it's a variety of different types of lead generation. It can be cold calling, it can be prospecting for sale by owners, expires, you can be mailing off in the farm area. It can be your local church that you're, you part of your social marketing. It could be your country club, it could be the PTO. They're all good things. But pick what is best for you. But as. Of top producing agent, you need different pillars for those, that lead generation. And that's where people miss it.
It's like someone can come in here and just have one pillar and they can be very successful with that one pillar, but there's going to be a cap. But if you want to be someone that's selling hundreds of homes, you have to have the different pillars. Um, and some of them are going to cost more than others.
But that's the key thing is when you're getting in the business, look at it as lead, where, how am I going to lead generate? And I think that's why so when it comes in the business, they will be an individual agent or they're going to be a team member and the people that struggle with lead generation will be a good team member and they're, that's, and nothing's wrong with being a team member.
I mean, they can, they can provide great customer service and not have to worry about the lead generation and they can be very, very successful. So there's two ways to go about it.
So if you have five minutes with your younger self and you can tell your younger self, whatever it is that you want. You can give them advice. You could tell them something to avoid. You could tell them something that they need to do. You could guide them in a certain direction. You have five minutes.
You can tell Craig whatever you want. What are some of those things that you tell yourself?
I guess first one would be patient. I always wanted to get to that level fast and sometimes it would be frustration. Another thing, another is just take time to build relationships. Sometimes I was so busy, I was going in and out of the appointments. And to the next deal and may not. And I hurt myself sometimes where when I got to a certain level business, I thought my numbers would speak for themselves.
And when I first got into business, I was really building relationships with those folks for sale by owners, our repeat customers. And then when I got to a certain level, I just try and go and get as much, as many deals as possible. And I wasn't building that rapport with the client. I was losing listing appointments and I was identifying who I was losing the listing appointments to and they were, one was a female realtor I really respected, but she was so likable and I bet she was there for two or three hours just chatting it up with the people and I'm going in there trying to go in and out in an hour to do my next appointment.
So the key thing is, it's all based building relationships. Our number one source of business is past clients coming back to us or us. being referred to their friends and family. And that's why I built building relationships. And that's the key thing. So I would say never forget how important it is to be building relationships with the clients.
Thank you so much for coming on the show, Craig.
Thanks for having me.
