A Little More About The Real Estate Marketing Dude If You Care…

I’m just a normal dude from Chicago who has worked his butt off since I graduated college. I’m married and have the world’s best kids (I’m sure every dad says that). They are my why! They are why I wake up every day to bust my ass training you on how to better your business.

Do you have a “Why” in your life?  Without one, getting on top is pretty tough.

The key to real estate is relationship building because this business is built on networking.  When you are an expert at building relationships, marketing your business becomes easy. People want to make the wisest financial decision  of their life with someone they know, like, and trust.

I will warn you ahead of time that I’m not very polished and sometimes have spelling errors. I don’t like to put on a front for people and shoot from the hip. I will tell you exactly what I think regardless of its political correctness. So don’t be offended by anything on my site or the way I talk. It’s just who I am.

A Long Long Time Ago In A Land In The Middle of America & Far Far Away…

I was 22 years old and needed 3 more hours to graduate from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (Go SALUKIS). One night, during a drunken talk with one of my friends, I was talked into filling those last three elective hours with the real estate course. I just wanted to be done and didn’t realize at the time that my last college elective would be my career path. I could have taken a bowling class for all I know, but the real estate class intrigued me and just happened to fall in place.

After graduating college I passed my state exam and received my real estate license. Real estate is not what everyone makes it out to be. The stuff I learned in class I rarely used in actual practice and didn’t know what was in store for me. Did you ever say to yourself, “this is something I’m so glad I did, but never want to do again”? Yea, that’s me.

I found success through working my ass off and never quitting. I understood very early that if I could get people to talk to me about their real estate problems, that I could WOW them with my personality and win them over as clients. I learned the approach of gaining trust from a complete stranger through educating them vs. trying to sell them.

I didn’t realize I was taking a content marketing approach to my business, which led to me attracting business. Despite my inexperience at the time, the way I “taught” people how to buy and invest in real estate was just the beginning of something big that I later discovered.

The Crash…

In 2007 the real estate market crashed. I had a solid real estate business going, but then these things called short sales started appearing everywhere. I traveled the country and learned from the best of them and became an authority on the subject. There are not many people who know more about short sales as I do to this day. I worked as an investor, wrote a book, created a course, and traveled the country speaking and training agents on how to do short sales. We were only successful because we took on a problem that no one else wanted to do and helped hundreds of families in the meanwhile taking on an education based approach to their housing problems and alternatives to foreclosure.

The key to our success was because we were sharing honest valuable content with others on the short sale process, which led to a ton of business.

Based on a true story…

I used to own a brokerage years ago and it was not easy!  You have million things going on from keeping in compliance with regulations to dealing with accounting. I get it.  You could spend your entire day running the office and not enough time trying to grow it. In a perfect world you would have nothing but non-complaining Top Producers who do nothing but print you money, but we know that’s not how it works.

We wanted to offer agents something no other brokerage could. I developed different lead generation systems and began to share them with agents and host training events for FREE sharing my expertise.

It was on accident that a “marketing dude” position was born. I didn’t realize the HUGE need for this in our industry.

The next few years I spent developing everything you see on this site today along with a software I built called ATTRACKTOR that was built around the very system that helped me grow to success as well as every agent I have shared it with.