Tiffany Freeman: Transaction Coordinator to Top Jacksonville Agent

REE #267 Transcript

[00:00:00] Tiffany Freeman: Everybody has 24 hours in a day, right? And we all have a capacity level that we can handle. And when you're at that capacity level, you've gotta shift something off. And if you don't have a TC, then that's where you can start shifting off. You could get a TC and start shifting off.

[00:00:42] Tracy Hayes: Hey, welcome back to the Real Estate Excellence Podcast. Today, from commanding a world of CEO-level operations to the personal grit of a military family life, today's guest has done more than just navigate the real estate market—she's elevated the entire experience. She's a strategist, a connector, a...

[00:01:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): ...storyteller, and most importantly, a realtor with heart and intention. With a master's degree, a sharp mind for marketing, and a discipline honed as a military spouse, she understands the pressure, the pace, and the emotional weight of moving—because she's lived it herself.

After years of running a successful transaction coordination company, she stepped into the spotlight herself, building relationships, leveraging technology, and creating a concierge-level experience for her buyers and sellers across Northeast Florida. She's now part of one of the most respected teams in the region—The Debbie Tufts Group with Engel & Völkers, where excellence isn't a goal, it's a standard. Get ready for the honest, tactical, and deeply inspiring conversation with a woman who doesn't just sell homes—she builds trust, crafts seamless experiences, and helps people feel at home. Please welcome Tiffany Freeman to the show.

[00:01:51] Tiffany Freeman: Wow, that was—I feel so special. That was awesome.

[00:01:55] Tracy Hayes: I have a little trick to that. I don't hide it. Because I'm really—and it'll...

[00:02:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): ...lead into my lunch and learn that I'm having next week. And hopefully you can attend if you're free at lunchtime on Tuesday.

[00:02:06] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:02:06] Tracy Hayes: Right here in our conference room, down the hall. But I've really focused on putting a lot of the stuff of the show into ChatGPT. I'm using ChatGPT—there's others like Perplexity—but using the AI.

[00:02:17] Tiffany Freeman: Yes.

[00:02:18] Tracy Hayes: And, you know, I always do my due diligence on everybody before they come on the show. I think I've heard podcasts—and I've been on podcasts—where you go live and the host doesn't know anything about you, and they're like, "Oh, tell me about yourself." I'm like, dude, where do I start?

[00:02:30] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah, exactly.

[00:02:31] Tracy Hayes: I was at lunch yesterday with some realtors, and Tom asked me, he goes, "Oh hey, Tracy, tell everybody about yourself." Well, everybody at the table already knows me.

[00:02:38] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah, right.

[00:02:39] Tracy Hayes: So I've been in the mortgage business 20 years. All right, that's what I do. But what I started doing recently—instead of writing my own intro—I said, let me take the bio. And so what I did for you is I went on LinkedIn...

[00:02:51] Tracy Hayes (cont.): ...and there was one other place your bio—you had a bio on. It might have been the website or something.

[00:02:55] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah, somewhere there.

[00:02:56] Tracy Hayes: But I uploaded all the versions—I think one was the bio you submitted...

[00:02:59] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:03:00] Tracy Hayes: ...on the form. So I uploaded that into ChatGPT and I said, "Hey, Tiffany’s coming on the show tomorrow." And it knows everything about my podcast because I upload the transcripts and everything. So I said, "I need a powerful, compelling, inspirational intro." And that’s what it creates.

[00:03:15] Tiffany Freeman: That's awesome. ChatGPT's amazing. I'm like really leaning into it right now. I love it.

[00:03:20] Tracy Hayes: You do. I think—and the one tip I got from this gentleman I got coming next week—it's actually the second time he's done it—AI is looking for AI.

[00:03:28] Tiffany Freeman: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:29] Tracy Hayes: So if you're in the business of real estate or any business where you're using social media and people—you want people searching you and hopefully find you over others—you need to be using AI in all your stuff, including your bios.

[00:03:42] Tracy Hayes (cont.): That was a—you know, go on, you put in there what you type in—your version of your bio—and then say, make, you know, whatever you wanna do, make—put a pizazz on it—and let AI write it, rewrite what you wrote, and then stick it in your bios. Because it's looking for AI language.

[00:03:58] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:03:58] Tracy Hayes: It recognizes its own language.

[00:04:00] Tiffany Freeman: No, that makes complete sense. That's so interesting.

[00:04:03] Tracy Hayes: Which is kind of interesting because it's learning from you all the time to be more like you.

[00:04:07] Tiffany Freeman: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:08] Tracy Hayes: But that's what this AI expert's coming in next week for this lunch and learn. That's so cool. He's actually developing—there's someone, I think someone in Australia that started it—but I know he does—not far—but the only one in the United States right now that we know of. He's actually working on AI home search, where you can have a ChatGPT conversation.

[00:04:28] Tiffany Freeman: Like if we're screening a buyer?

[00:04:30] Tracy Hayes: Yeah, yeah. And you're asking, "Hey, well how many bedrooms do you think you need?" You know, like you just start typing in that and have a conversation and then it starts bringing up listings behind it.

[00:04:39] Tiffany Freeman: That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, that's a game changer, right?

[00:04:42] Tracy Hayes: I forget, there was a stat the other day—I tried to save it—someone put up the amount of people who are now using, or just in the last couple months, are going on the AI instead of going...

[00:04:54] Tiffany Freeman: To Google?

[00:04:55] Tracy Hayes: You know, I...

[00:04:56] Tiffany Freeman: I definitely have been leaning more towards ChatGPT than Google.

[00:04:59] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:05:00] Tiffany Freeman: You just get a more complete answer.

[00:05:02] Tracy Hayes: And we hope it’s the answer.

[00:05:04] Tiffany Freeman: And I love that we get the answer. You get the answer.

[00:05:07] Tracy Hayes: Okay, give me the sources, like, how’d you find that information? And it’ll give it to you. And then I have sources behind it, right?

[00:05:12] Tiffany Freeman: Yes. I love that.

[00:05:14] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Well, and then Lyman is—his name is—coming next week with Deli—that's the name of his company. If you go on usedeli.com—for any listeners—usedeli.com. Or if you are listening to this live or hear this before Tuesday the 27th, you know, text me and come to the lunch and learn. But he's gonna basically explain it. And it's just simply—he calls it a widget. He just sticks it on your existing website. He just does some code in the background. Boom, it’s on there. You don’t have to do a whole new website or anything.

[00:05:47] Tiffany Freeman: So people still have the choice to do the manual...

[00:05:49] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:05:50] Tiffany Freeman: ...search or they can have a conversation.

[00:05:52] Tracy Hayes: Like, 'cause people are migrating over because I think in the next—I'm gonna say three or four years—I don’t think it’s gonna be that long before all your websites are gonna change.

[00:05:59] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:06:00] Tracy Hayes: They’re gonna go on there and just start typing away.

[00:06:02] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. I think it’ll be—it’s much more conversational. And I think that's what people like—is you don’t—you can just say what you wanna say. You don’t have to word it in a certain way for it to understand, really. And it's amazing. And I think that for home searches especially, it'll be really interesting to watch that.

[00:06:15] Tracy Hayes: So here’s some of the snags that it has: AI only knows what’s in the conversation. So one of the examples he uses is like, "I wanna live near the beach." Well, near the beach to you and near the beach to me are two different things.

[00:06:28] Tiffany Freeman: That's a good point. Yeah.

[00:06:29] Tracy Hayes: And so it needs to start—it—so his—obviously he’s out here right now, obviously he’s trying to, you know, raise bigger capital, put bigger people on it. But he wants agents out there to start using it, because the more we start talking to it, the more it’s going to...

[00:06:44] Tiffany Freeman: Train.

[00:06:45] Tracy Hayes: Teach itself. Yeah. Of what "near the beach" is. Because he's from Jacksonville too. He talks about—it doesn’t know the—when you say Avondale...

[00:06:52] Tiffany Freeman: Right.

[00:06:53] Tracy Hayes: ...you know it’s an area of Jacksonville.

[00:06:54] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:06:55] Tracy Hayes: But it doesn’t know the boundaries.

[00:06:56] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. It doesn’t know the boundaries of that.

[00:06:57] Tracy Hayes: Or what—you know—someone may call it Avondale, but it’s a street over.

[00:07:00] Tiffany Freeman: Right. Yeah.

[00:07:01] Tracy Hayes: You know, because—I mean, we all...

[00:07:02] Tiffany Freeman: Do that, right? Yeah. It’s right in Avondale. Kind of.

[00:07:04] Tracy Hayes: Yeah, exactly. We’ll do that.

[00:07:05] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah, exactly.

[00:07:06] Tracy Hayes: So those are the things that it needs to teach itself. So, like I said, I think within the next two to three years, everybody—there'd be—they’re—you’re not gonna do the manual search anymore.

[00:07:15] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:07:16] Tracy Hayes: You’re gonna—everyone’s gonna be doing the AI.

[00:07:17] Tiffany Freeman: I absolutely believe that.

[00:07:19] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. All right. So we got a chance to learn—I got to learn a little bit about you last week at lunch. Tell us a little—tell everyone a little bit about, you know, growing up—what did you envision yourself doing? And then obviously you met your spouse...

[00:07:31] Tiffany Freeman: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:32] Tracy Hayes: ...which kind of probably sent you on a—you know, in the military—sent you on a totally different trajectory.

[00:07:35] Tiffany Freeman: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:36] Tracy Hayes: And then, you know, circle around—just kind of—I always like to, you know, I talked about writing a book—everyone comes from a different background.

[00:07:42] Tiffany Freeman: Yes.

[00:07:43] Tracy Hayes: You know, we’ve had teachers, we’ve had single moms, you know, all that kind of thing. Corporate America type of thing. You’re on a slightly different track. You didn’t spend 20 years in corporate America. You’re still a very young person. So tell us a little bit about how, you know, that early part of your career...

[00:08:00] Tracy Hayes: And then what led the path to, you know, getting involved in real estate? 'Cause you weren't a realtor right away.

[00:08:02] Tiffany Freeman: I was not. Yeah. So I grew up in a real estate family. My mom was a realtor in Georgia when I was growing up. And I always swore I would never go into real estate. I watched my mom and I was like, I want no part of that. Real estate looked a lot different—

[00:08:16] Tracy Hayes: Well, hold on, I gotta ask a question there. So do you do your business similar to the way your mom did her business or do you do it differently?

[00:08:21] Tiffany Freeman: It's completely different.

[00:08:21] Tracy Hayes: Alright. We're gonna have to talk about that.

[00:08:24] Tiffany Freeman: Okay. Yeah, we can talk about it. It's completely different. And I do think part of that—I mean, we can touch on it more—but I do think part of that is my mom was doing real estate in a very small town in Georgia, and I'm doing real estate in Jacksonville, which is very different. But I swore I never wanted to be a real estate agent. I did not wanna be in real estate. I wanted nothing to do with it. I watched her and I was like, that looks awful.

So then I—I really like—I am kind of nerdy and I really loved everything science. So I wanted to go to school to be a physician's assistant. Started my undergrad. My plan was to pre-med my undergrad and then go to physician's assistant school.

Well, my husband and I met in...

[00:09:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): ...high school, but he's a grade younger—or he was a grade younger than me. So I graduated, went to college. He graduated, and he is like, "I'm going into the Navy." And I was like, well, that changes things.

[00:09:13] Tracy Hayes: So you were hoping he was gonna follow you to college? Is that—

[00:09:15] Tiffany Freeman: I was hoping. It didn't work out that way. So he went into the Navy, and I mean, pretty quickly after—we're long distance—pretty quickly after that we’re like, this just isn't—like, long distance kind of sucks.

So as soon as he got his first permanent orders after all the schooling and stuff, it was to Jacksonville. And at that point we were engaged and we were getting married, and I was finishing my undergrad. I did finish my undergrad in Georgia. And then when we moved here in 2013, I luckily—I mean, that’s a whole other story—but luckily I stumbled into meeting Debbie.

[00:09:49] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And she helped us buy our first house. And I joke and I tell everybody that—I mean, this was 2013 so pricing was different back then—but she showed me every house east of...

[00:10:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): ...295 and north of JTB that was under $200,000. I mean, my file is so thick. We still have it at the office just as like a memory, but it was so thick. And so we ended up finding a house, closing, and a couple weeks after, she’s like, “Hey, I miss you. Do you want a job?”

And I had just moved here. I knew no one. I had gotten a dog because I was like, there's nobody—like my husband was on deployment, so I was like, I don’t have anybody here. And I was like, yeah, I would love a job.

[00:10:26] Tracy Hayes: Well, you mentioned that at lunch and it made me think. So she enjoyed, you know, some of your small chatter, I'm sure, while you guys drove around and looked at houses type of thing. But what—there had to be something that she saw in you to fill this position that she needed. There must have been some skill that you were demonstrating. Were you very organized in what homes you wanted to look at? What was it that you think?

[00:10:50] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah, I'm always—I'm very Type A. So, I mean, I had a spreadsheet. I had my Excel spreadsheet of all the houses, what I liked about them, what I didn’t like about them, pretty quickly had narrowed down what I was looking for. It’s just what I was looking for in the area I was looking for—there was a lot of them.

[00:11:03] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:11:04] Tiffany Freeman: And I really don’t know what she saw in me. I tell people all the time that Debbie has a knack for seeing potential in people before they can see it in themselves. And she saw it in me well before I ever saw it in myself.

And so even when she brought me on, I had no intention of going into sales. And I was very upfront with her about that. I was like, "I'll support you on the admin side. I will plan events, I will do whatever you want me to do. I am not going into sales." And she’s like, "Okay." And I didn’t even plan to get licensed at that point.

[00:11:34] Tracy Hayes: Alright, so I gotta ask this. Was it something about your mom’s business that set you off, to have that attitude that you just expressed?

[00:11:41] Tiffany Freeman: So I think a lot of it was—I sat in the car so many hours when she was doing showings. And when my mom would show a house, she’d be in there forever. Like, I swear it’d be like an hour she was in every house. And I’m like, "Mom, it’s a 3/2. Like it shouldn’t—"

[00:11:55] Tracy Hayes: Exactly. And you could paint a room in an hour. Right?

[00:11:58] Tiffany Freeman: And so—but I mean, I always saw her working. So my mom did new construction for a long time, and then she kind of entered into resales as I got older. But—so she worked, you know, a lot of nights and weekends.

[00:12:09] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:09] Tiffany Freeman: And she was always on the phone. I remember, like, her always being on the phone. And I was just like, I want a job where I, you know, I go to work every day and when I'm off work, I'm off work and I can be off work. And it’s funny 'cause that’s definitely not how real estate is now either. It’s definitely—it’s a hundred percent a 24/7, always-on career.

But I do think it's—I’ve tried to structure it a little bit differently so that I don’t have as much of that as she did. But yeah, I mean, I really think it was just like following her around to showings and all of that that eventually I was just like, I don’t want any part of this.

So then I started working with Debbie, and she taught me everything that I know, really. I mean, she taught me—and luckily at the brokerage that we were at then, they had incredible training programs for new agents, and I went to all of them even though I wasn’t a new agent, because I wanted to know all of the info...

[00:13:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): ...that an agent needed to know so that I could support her better.

[00:13:03] Tracy Hayes: Do you think your mom had what you've had in as far as training and support in the small town?

[00:13:06] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:13:07] Tracy Hayes: And the interaction with other agents, kind of to talk shop and how do they do things a little more efficiently? You know, I think—and we probably, maybe if we don’t, sometimes don’t even think about it—but, you know, if you're that agent that’s spending so many—maybe you don’t have a lot of business, so you can spend an hour on one particular house. You know, obviously maybe you feel the buyer’s gonna fall in love with it, right? The longer you stay there, the longer the buyer wants to stay there. You're thinking, oh, they must like this house.

And then—but when you start to get busy and you're running a business, you gotta be efficient in your time. Especially someone who wants to go, "Hey, I wanna go see five houses today." Well, I can’t spend an hour in every house. You know, it's just gonna wear you down.

[00:13:54] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. I mean, the way that I always describe it to people to kind of put it into perspective is when my mom was selling real...

[00:14:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): ...estate and where she was selling real estate—in, like I said, a small town in Georgia—the Million Dollar Club was an annual award. You were trying to sell a million dollars in real estate in a year.

[00:14:10] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:14:11] Tiffany Freeman: We’re selling multi—there's a lot of sub-hundred-thousand-dollar homes, right? And we are selling multimillions of dollars of real estate a month. So it’s just a different level of real estate. We have to operate differently. We have to be more efficient.

And there was never—like my mom's business was very—very relationship-based. I mean, it was a lot of people that she knew. But because of that, they’re friends. Right? And so it’s like everything is like, "Oh, I’m hanging out with a friend."

[00:14:37] Tracy Hayes: They probably spent half the time gossiping. Right?

[00:14:39] Tiffany Freeman: Right. Pretty much all of my clients become friends by the time we’re done. But one of the things I do upfront is I have kind of like an expectations meeting—buyer consult, listing consult, whatever you wanna call it. But I set expectations kind of upfront of what they can expect.

[00:14:55] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): Because I feel like if they know, okay, every Wednesday I’m gonna get a report from Tiffany that says, "This is how my listing is performing," I'm not getting the 5 o’clock on Friday phone call of like, "Hey, what’s going on this week?" Because they know that they just got the report on Wednesday, and they’re gonna get it next Wednesday.

So I think setting those expectations—it’s just the way that you run the business. Like my mom’s was very—it was like a mom-and-pop little real estate.

[00:15:18] Tracy Hayes: Well, I mean, in many things in life that we do, we wing it. And if you don’t have—if you’re not around others in the trade to talk shop—how they handled a situation or things they're doing to be more efficient, you just keep doing it the way you've always done it.

[00:15:31] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:15:32] Tracy Hayes: Because you don’t know any better.

[00:15:50] Tiffany Freeman: Right?

[00:15:51] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:52] Tiffany Freeman: Like, she loves—she loves going to see houses, like she's a people person. She loves talking to people. So for her, spending an hour in each house with everybody was totally fine. But I don't think she—I don't think that there was ever the desire to grow it into something as large as what we have here in Jacksonville.

[00:15:57] Tracy Hayes: Well, she was making a living.

[00:15:58] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. She was making a living and she was having fun doing it, right?

[00:16:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And it was—she just had it structured very differently. And it really wasn’t until I joined Debbie’s team that I knew that real estate could be run so differently. I mean, in my mom’s real estate business—I mean, they were still doing like cell phone pictures for listings, right? There were no—like in our small town, there wasn’t a real estate photographer that could come take pictures of your listings. So, it was just like—

[00:16:26] Tracy Hayes: And it was cell phones on, you know, the initial—

[00:16:28] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:16:29] Tracy Hayes: Not with the technology today, it was flip phones.

[00:16:31] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah, like the Nextel—that's what it was. Everybody had the Nextels that were like chirping each other. But yeah, no, they were flip phones or Blackberries.

[00:16:38] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): But it wasn’t until I joined Debbie’s team that I was like, oh wow—like, this is real estate at a completely different level. This is not what I know of real estate. So I kind of had to ditch everything that I thought that I knew about real estate and relearn everything Debbie's way, which was incredible and very eye-opening. Like I said, I mean, it was just—it was a business.

[00:17:04] Tracy Hayes: So what happens then that you start actually going, “Well, maybe I can get into sales”?

[00:17:09] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. So I got licensed in 2016, also had my daughter in 2016. So, had a new baby, my husband was going on deployment again, and I was like, “You know, I think I do want to get into sales,” but the timing just wasn’t right at that moment. But I did go ahead and I got licensed because that gave me a lot of ability to support her in licensed assistant activity.

[00:17:30] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): Yeah, like I could start writing contracts, I could start doing those things, which I think ultimately helped me significantly as my career progressed—to have that time to really just focus on, okay, how do we write a great offer? How do we write a great listing agreement?

And then I think that like my husband came home, we got new orders, and it’s like, okay, so now we’re—now we’re moving. And Debbie—I went to work and told Debbie that we were moving, and we just had this like conversation about—I was like, I don’t want to leave Jacksonville real estate.

[00:18:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And I told her about my idea for Beacon and kind of launching this transaction coordination company that would support agents across different brokerages, and that would allow me to stay tapped into Jacksonville real estate while I was not here.

[00:18:13] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:18:14] Tiffany Freeman: And she was like, “I will support you however I can in that. Let’s do it.” And so she—I mean, I never hesitated—was just like, “Let’s go. I support you. I see the vision and let’s go.” So we started working on that. That was 2018. And that turned out—that was an incredible experience. And I think that between working with Debbie and then Beacon, by the time I went into sales—I’d been a part of just over 2,000 transactions.

[00:18:47] Tracy Hayes: From the time working with Debbie and then working with other agents and a combination, you had been a part of a couple thousand transactions. Wow.

[00:18:53] Tiffany Freeman: So that is a game changer.

[00:18:54] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:18:55] Tiffany Freeman: I had seen—I feel like I got to enter sales when we came back, 'cause I entered sales when we came back in 2022.

[00:19:02] Tracy Hayes: So that says something right there. 'Cause I mean, anyone who’s—if you haven’t been in the business long—someone who does 50 transactions is a big producer.

[00:19:10] Tiffany Freeman: Right.

[00:19:11] Tracy Hayes: And the fact that you personally were involved in helping them transact nearly 2,000—you were working with a good array of agents.

[00:19:19] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. We had quite a few agents. I mean, at one point, we had four other TCs working with me.

[00:19:24] Tracy Hayes: Wow.

[00:19:25] Tiffany Freeman: So we were doing a lot. But I feel like when I went into sales in 2022, I just came in with such a head start that I wish every new agent could have—because I had seen so much.

[00:19:36] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:37] Tiffany Freeman: And I feel pretty confident navigating really any situation you can throw at me because I’ve seen it before.

[00:19:45] Tracy Hayes: I want to ask you this 'cause the listeners I think can pick up on this, 'cause I—and I talk about it all the time—there’s a lot of agents out there that have reached their—I call it the lid.

[00:19:54] Tiffany Freeman: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:55] Tracy Hayes: Okay? They’re doing everything themselves, but at some point they max themselves out and they really aren’t growing. If they’re growing, it’s very little because they’re not spending time nurturing the past clients and starting to snowball that referral business or repeat business.

[00:20:10] Tracy Hayes (cont.): They’re just focused on, hey, you know, they're getting referrals, but just staying right there. They’re just hitting that—that lid. And I think it's under 10 million, depending on what level, but I think the average in Northeast Florida—you know, if you're somewhere between six and nine million, you're probably feeling this.

And you know, you’ve done it where—I imagine there were pay-for-play transactions, every—you get so much for a transaction, whatever that is. And there’s a couple good services in town. I’ve had Samantha on—she’s running a—you know, she had great experience there with the Ops Suite. You were on the helping side. You were supporting these agents.

[00:20:50] Tracy Hayes (cont.): Did you see them start to blossom? They called you 'cause they're like, "Oh my god, boy, I'm so busy I can't do anymore." And then you take this load off of them...

[00:20:55] Tiffany Freeman: Yes.

[00:20:56] Tracy Hayes: ...and then just see them catapult?

[00:20:58] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. And that was the most fulfilling part of Beacon, right? So like when we started Beacon—I guess the tricky part is that I had already identified that I really wanted to go into sales, right? And it just—the timing didn’t work out. And that was my—you can't go into sales if you don’t live here. That’s kind of difficult to do. But it was my way to stay in Jacksonville real estate.

[00:21:17] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): But I knew it wasn’t like my long-term goal. But what was the most fulfilling part of it is getting to watch other agents blossom because they had our support. And getting those like late-night text messages of like, “Hey, we got it done. We couldn’t have done it without you.” Like, those were the things that—it was like, it is worth it.

[00:21:34] Tracy Hayes: You don’t get that from a normal job all the time.

[00:21:36] Tiffany Freeman: You do not.

[00:21:37] Tracy Hayes: Because you're not—you know, unless you're in sales you do, if the sale is—you know, whatever—whether it’s a one-day sale or one-hour sale or—you know, you get those immediate feedback transactions that, you know, people say, “Thank you for helping us out. Thank you,” whatever.

[00:21:53] Tracy Hayes (cont.): But the large purchase that they're making, and in fact we’re spending 30–45 days on average with them, if not longer if you take longer to actually look for the homes, you know?

[00:22:00] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:22:01] Tracy Hayes: Right now, some people are really taking some time.

[00:22:03] Tiffany Freeman: They have the ability to.

[00:22:04] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Yeah. And so forth. And to get that feedback—that’s kind of like our high, right?

[00:22:10] Tiffany Freeman: Oh no, it’s absolutely the—I tell people all the time, real estate is the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, right? But that is definitely our high. And I think that we can’t take for granted the fact that for—I mean, I know for us, we’re doing these all day every day, right? We’re cranking them out.

[00:22:28] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): For our clients, they’re not. They’re doing this a handful of times in their lives. And this is an extremely emotional, vulnerable time in their lives, no matter what the circumstances are. I mean, we’re with them through divorces, we’re with them through deaths, we’re with them through births—we’re with them through everything.

And what an honor to get to be along the ride with people while they’re going through those changes, right? I mean, the fact that they’re trusting us to help them through this time in their lives is kind of mind-blowing when you really sit and think about it. And it’s just like—it’s such an honor.

[00:23:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And so when I get those texts, like when I would get those texts and they’re like, “Hey, couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you.” It’s like, oh yeah, that was worth it. Like—and I mean even now when I get them from clients, it's like, “Oh man.”

But then I make sure I turn around and I text my TC and I’m like, “Hey—”

[00:23:16] Tracy Hayes: You gotta share the—

[00:23:17] Tiffany Freeman: —this is about you. Share the love.

Because that is one thing I’ll say: if you are an agent that feels like you are just tapped, you need a TC. And if you have a TC and you still feel tapped, you need a different TC. Because having a—

[00:23:26] Tracy Hayes: Would you agree that some agents—and I’m sure you’ve seen this—some agents...

[00:25:36] Tiffany Freeman: And my mom—my mom did it 'cause she loves it. It works for everybody. I actually think there's a pretty limited number of assistants that can replace a TC. The reason I say that is in my mind, a TC is a specialist, right?

They get that contract, they’ve got that spreadsheet, timeline—they've got it down and they have it nailed down. And they're in that—they’re in transactions all day, every day. And that mindset of being in transactions is a little bit different than the mindset of being an assistant—like setting appointments and, you know, coordinating calendars and working on events.

And I think the shift between the two of those things can be difficult. And my other thing that I've always kind of emphasized to people is when we're doing a client event—if we have an assistant working on a client event—I don't want that to take away from our transactions, right?

[00:26:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And so a couple times a year when we have these client events that take a lot of energy, I don't want our transactions falling to the wayside because that assistant is tied up working on this event. So that's where I think a pay-per-close TC is a great model—because that is somebody that is just completely in transactions 24/7.

[00:26:14] Tracy Hayes: How—what is a—how many transactions can a decent transaction coordinator handle, whether it's they're working with a team and they’re getting everybody on the team, or they're working, you know, with realtors across the board from different brokerages? But how many can they expect to have on their plate at any one time?

[00:26:31] Tiffany Freeman: So it’s gonna depend on their system and—

[00:26:33] Tracy Hayes: And be full.

[00:26:34] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. It's gonna depend on their systems. If you are just using, you know, a spreadsheet to track or something like that—probably 20 to 25. If you have a transaction coordination system—we use Open to Close, I'm a big fan of Open to Close, I think they're exceptional—I mean, you can do 50 pretty easily. 75 a month.

[00:26:51] Tracy Hayes: 'Cause it’s giving you a pipeline report every day and letting you know where every transaction’s at, like, “Oh, you haven’t done anything with this one,” and “The appraisal was ordered whatever amount of days ago.”

[00:27:00] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. So the thing about Open to Close is—you log on, you have like all of your transactions entered there. Obviously, you log on every day. This is your task list.

[00:27:07] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:08] Tiffany Freeman: And it has a task list, and it color-coordinates all your different transactions—and it’s beautiful. But it has your task list, so you can just start going through and checking off tasks. But it also saves all of your email templates. You’re sending emails from inside of that software. You’re not really shuffling between—it has all of your docs in there, so you're doing compliance inside of that.

[00:27:27] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): So you’re not really having to shuffle between different softwares and systems the way that you do when you’re in like a spreadsheet, right? Like, you’re in a spreadsheet, you see that there’s a—you know, you need to check on the appraisal for a file, but then you’ve got to go to your email and send that email, and then you’re going back to your spreadsheet and telling it, “Hey, I sent this email, I need to make sure I get a follow-up.”

Open to Close is doing all that for you. So you’re sending the email from inside the system, and then it’s gonna say, “Okay, in 24 hours, I’m gonna pop this back up on your screen so you can make sure that you got an answer on that.”

[00:28:00] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Yeah, I mean I experienced that. My first part of my first 12 years of my career, I was at Quicken Loans—high volume. Doing high volume loans, and we would get a transaction report every morning. We would get the link 'cause it was pretty big, but it would have all your transactions and where they were at in the process.

'Cause you could easily have 10, 15 transactions going on for any one loan officer. 'Cause it wasn’t a big deal—especially when things were going in the refi boom—to do 30, 40 transactions in a month. So you’ve got to know where that status is at. You know, where’s the appraisal at? Why has this—it’s already been—you know, the processor's already sent to underwriting, why has it been so many days?

[00:29:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): I apologize for that.

[00:29:01] Tiffany Freeman: That’s okay.

[00:29:02] Tracy Hayes: I usually turn that off. But yeah, where it’s at all the time. And so what makes me think—when you were explaining that software—agents, and I hear this complaint, “Oh, somebody told me they used such-and-such transaction coordinator and had a bad experience.” And so they get nervous. They think all transaction coordinators obviously are in this boat, right?

They get a little shut off because they don’t want to interview people.

[00:29:22] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:29:23] Tracy Hayes: I mean, you don’t have time to do that as an agent, right? But now if you hire someone like Ops Suite with Sam—or there’s others—they're doing that interviewing already. Because this is the business, like the business you were running.

[00:29:35] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:29:36] Tracy Hayes: You were doing it—you were interviewing people and their quality and sifting them out for the agents to bring in the best.

[00:29:40] Tiffany Freeman: Right. And I’m a big fan of Sam and Ops Suite. And that was the other thing I was gonna say—Ops Suite does offer other programs as well. I mean, they do offer marketing pieces and things like that as well.

[00:29:48] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:49] Tiffany Freeman: So that can be a great option for agents as well that need more support than just TC support.

[00:29:52] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Yeah. If someone’s out there interviewing—they might be going and talking to Sam at Ops Suite, or the other services out there, or maybe just individual transaction coordinators—for the agents that are listening, what are some of the things that they need to have their radar up for and be either asking or listening for when they're actually talking to some of these services?

[00:30:00] Tiffany Freeman: Are they using a transaction management software? That would be my biggest one. If they’re tracking on a spreadsheet, I would just be—weary of that. I just think—

[00:30:03] Tracy Hayes: Especially in the age of AI, like we were talking earlier, right? It’s like set, move on.

[00:30:06] Tiffany Freeman: And we’re all human, right? Like, we’re just more likely to make mistakes when we don’t have a software that’s doing it for us. Right? So I would ask if they have a transaction management software.

Second—that’s a big one—vacation coverage. Who are they using for vacation coverage? What do they do about vacation coverage? How are you gonna be alerted to vacation coverage? Because your TC is gonna go on vacation—they can’t work all the time.

And also, I mean, operating hours. Do they work business hours? Do they work weekends? Those are important to know. There’s some TCs that only work 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, and they can get their job done in that time. That’s one thing I’ll say to agents—it’s worth noting that your TCs are coordinating a lot with lenders and title, and lenders and title are open 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, for the most part.

[00:30:50] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm. The title people are.

[00:30:52] Tiffany Freeman: But we’re making most of our progress in files during that time, right? That’s when files are getting sent into underwriting, that’s when we’re getting responses from people. Right?

[00:31:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): Your TC can get their job done 9 to 5, Monday to Friday—but you just need to know that so that you have those expectations set. If you’re somebody that—you want a response on a weekend—make sure you’re picking a TC company that can support that.

And then I would also just say to make sure that you talk to the TC that you’re gonna be working with. Because this is a—like, it’s a very personal business, and I think personalities matter.

[00:31:23] Tracy Hayes: That actually spins me into that—and I’m sorry for spending so much time on it—but you have an expertise in this area 'cause you’ve worked both sides, and the advice is huge for anyone listening.

You just—the personalities, which leads into how they want their business to flow. Right? And I know—I think it was Carrie Carpenter that I had on a year ago or so—and she talked about how she loves a long text message.

[00:31:45] Tiffany Freeman: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:46] Tracy Hayes: Not everybody likes a long text message. But she enjoys those long text messages from her transaction coordinator first thing in the morning saying, “Hey, this is where this is at. This is—” you know, giving her basically that pipeline report.

[00:32:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): “This is where everything’s at” kind of thing, so she knows leading into the day. And then obviously if she needs to act on anything. Right? Not everybody likes that. Everyone communicates differently, which I think is the cause why some people say the transaction coordinator didn’t work—because they didn’t sit down and actually work out how they want to communicate.

Because just like every realtor runs their business differently—they want to communicate and handle that transaction coordinator differently.

[00:32:27] Tiffany Freeman: It’s a personal business. Yeah, your personalities have to mesh, and they're not always gonna mesh. Like for me—I don’t love a long text message. But I do love that every Friday at noon I get like a file report on every file that I have with my TC that sends me a status update on absolutely everything—of where we’re at and any notes that I need to be aware of.

And I get that every Friday and I love it. ‘Cause then I go into the weekend—and I’m doing open houses, doing showings, doing whatever—but I’m not worrying about the files that I have...

[00:33:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): ...that are under contract. Because I know as of Friday at noon, everything was where it needed to be. And I also love that I get them Friday at noon, because if there’s anything that needs attention, I have, you know, a few more hours to get it handled before everybody’s checking out for the weekend.

But that’s something that me and my TC discussed, right? And I think it’s just—it’s important to talk to your TC and see if your personalities mesh. And they might not. And if that—it’s better to find that out before you get started.

[00:33:20] Tracy Hayes: Because the transaction coordinator does need to mold to the real estate agent. You know, they are the source. You know, the agent will, I’m sure, tweak a little bit—but the agent, by this time in their business, when they reach a point where they need a transaction coordinator, is probably starting—I wouldn't say set in their ways—

[00:33:34] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:33:35] Tracy Hayes: —but has some sort of rhythm to their business.

[00:33:37] Tiffany Freeman: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:38] Tracy Hayes: And so the transaction coordinator needs to insert—and that rhythm is different for every person.

[00:33:45] Tiffany Freeman: It's different for everybody. But you've also gotta know that your TC can't read your mind.

[00:33:50] Tracy Hayes: Right, yeah. Exactly.

[00:33:51] Tiffany Freeman: They're only as good as what you tell them. So if there’s a specific email that you want sent out on every transaction at a certain point in the transaction, you need to send that email to the TC—or they're not gonna know to send it, right? Like, they can’t read your mind.

[00:34:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): So I would just say communication is huge—especially those first few transactions. I used to celebrate—it takes three transactions. After we do three transactions together, we’ll be in a groove. But those first three—if you see anything you don't like or anything you really like—tell me.

If there’s anything you don't like, we’ll fix it. If there's anything you really like, we can try to do more of it. But like, it's gotta be that two-way communication. And it works the same way for us because one of the biggest—or when I was with Beacon—it worked the same way for us.

[00:34:29] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): Because one of the biggest things is that agents are really set in their ways. So they’ll be working—and they’re not copying the TC. Well, we’re only as good as the information that we know, right?

[00:34:41] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:34:41] Tiffany Freeman: So if we don’t know that you’ve already figured out a repair agreement, we’re gonna keep harassing you about the repair agreement, right? Because we don’t know that you’ve worked it out.

[00:34:49] Tracy Hayes: Right. And you CC your—on any communication with your customer—just CC your...

[00:34:52] Tiffany Freeman: I CC her on everything.

[00:34:53] Tracy Hayes: So they know the conversation's going on and—

[00:34:55] Tiffany Freeman: Mm-hmm, yep, yep. And then if I get a text from a customer that she’s not copied on, I’ll screenshot it and send it to her if it’s something that she needs to know.

[00:35:03] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:35:04] Tiffany Freeman: I mean, obviously if it’s just like our general chitter-chatter, I don’t send her that. But if it’s something that—“FYI, just got this.”

[00:35:11] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:35:12] Tiffany Freeman: And then I always send—if I text her—I always send the property address too. 'Cause like, I do think it’s important to know that most times your TCs have a lot more files going than you have going. So if you just send them a random text message—and it, you know, has a phone number at the top and doesn’t have anybody—the contact—saved, they’re like, “I don’t know who this belongs to.”

[00:35:30] Tracy Hayes: Oh, I wanna—we wanna get on to your real estate business and your success there. But I want to finish this portion because I think this is so vital. You’re unique in the fact that you’ve come from that and you can look back, and you’ve run it—you weren’t just a transaction coordinator, you actually ran a group of transaction coordinators and all this experience. So that’s why I want to stick on this.

But now that you’re on the agent side...

[00:36:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): ...and you’re looking at—obviously you use a transaction coordinator today—through those agents out there right now that are not, that are procrastinating over this, just really summarize some of the load and some of the things you’re able to do as an agent because you’re pushing this off and entrusting...

Like, there’s transaction coordinators—some of them are licensed—

[00:36:16] Tiffany Freeman: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:17] Tracy Hayes: Right? Obviously, they probably get paid a little bit more if they are licensed, right?

[00:36:20] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:36:21] Tracy Hayes: They can fill in the contract and then send it to you for review. Like, just doing those things while you’re still, you know, driving from here to here or going to another listing appointment. They’re handling that. So when you come out of that listing appointment, the contract’s already done. You’re not going, “Oh, I gotta go home and do this listing—write this offer,” you know—it’s already done and you’re just reviewing it.

“Oh, you know, one little correction—okay, now it’s ready to send.” Boom. But how that just, like, opens your abilities to do just that much more.

[00:36:49] Tiffany Freeman: Right? So, I mean, everybody has 24 hours in a day, right? And we all have a capacity level that we can handle. And when you’re at that capacity level, you’ve gotta shift something off.

[00:37:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And if you don’t have a TC, then that’s where you can start shifting off. You could get a TC and start shifting off.

[00:37:06] Tracy Hayes: And if they can do it just as—I wouldn’t say just as good as you—but if you’re the only one—

[00:37:12] Tiffany Freeman: They can do it better than you.

[00:37:14] Tracy Hayes: Yeah, exactly.

[00:37:15] Tiffany Freeman: I’m a big—I’m a big—Debbie taught me this, and I’m a big believer in “surround yourself with people that are better than you.”

[00:37:19] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:20] Tiffany Freeman: Like, if you are outsourcing anything, you should be outsourcing it to someone who’s better than you at that particular thing, right? You’re not gonna hire a marketing person that’s worse at marketing than you. So you shouldn’t hire a TC that’s worse at doing TC tasks than you are.

But the fact is—a lot of agents are really terrible at doing TC tasks. Like, as far as staying on top of it, sending emails when they should be sent—because we are busy. And everybody has—I mean, a lot of agents have families at home too.

[00:38:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): So like, for me, it’s like—there’s two agents that it really appeals to, right? There’s the agents that are really high-producing that are just tapped, but they don’t want or have the time to bring on an assistant to hire—to offload assistant tasks. So they go straight to a TC that already knows how to TC so that it’s a relatively smooth transition.

And then there’s the people that want time because they have families and they’re figuring out that they’re working all day, they’re going to that showing appointment at five o’clock, and then they get home and they’re like, “Crap, I still have to write this contract.” And that’s time they could be with their family.

[00:38:25] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:38:26] Tiffany Freeman: And so it really appeals to two—or just decompress. Or like, watch a TV show or something. Or maybe even eat dinner.

[00:38:31] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:38:32] Tiffany Freeman: But yeah, so it definitely appeals to kind of two different groups of people. But regardless—I mean, you’re—I think it’s definitely one of the easiest things that you can offload in your business to free up some capacity.

[00:38:38] Tracy Hayes: And to those who are out there listening that are going, “Yeah, this might be me...” You may be doing really good business right now, and people like—you know, they’re giving you good reviews. But what if you actually put that on steroids?

[00:39:00] Tracy Hayes: ...than when you're, you know, 10 transactions deep and you're like, this is the—what would that look like? Can you actually push the needle? Are you getting an 8 out of 10? You know, I don’t know anyone who gets 10 out of 10, but can that transaction coordinator actually make the transaction even better, right?

For your consumer—your buyer or seller, whatever you got there—but then all of a sudden relieve you to go maybe spend some more time on follow-up on those past clients. It's that—the saying is, does a tree in the woods make noise if no one's there to hear it? Right? You don’t know.

Is your rating as a real estate agent—are you getting great reviews because you're asking for it and you're putting your passion into it? There's—I think there's a lot of agents in that area, and they're like, “Oh man, if I bring on a transaction coordinator, will that dull that down?”

[00:39:38] Tracy Hayes (cont.): No. You've probably experienced where it's actually moved the needle higher.

[00:39:40] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. Yeah. And then wait until you start getting reviews that are calling out your transaction coordinator by name. That was like, “It was such a great experience, and I loved working with your TC as well.”

[00:39:46] Tracy Hayes: Because—

[00:39:47] Tiffany Freeman: That’s when you’re like, “Oh wow.” Like, that was part of the experience that they really enjoyed. And that’s when you realize, like, okay, this is elevating my business. It’s not just making it easier for me. It’s really elevating things. And I mean, the biggest pushback is, you know, you're spending—I mean, it depends on the TC, right—but $300 to $500 a transaction on a TC.

[00:40:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And agents are like, “Well, I don’t want to give up $300 to $500 on a transaction.” Okay. Well, what if giving up the $300 to $500 on that transaction meant you could do one more transaction a month?

[00:40:18] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:40:19] Tiffany Freeman: Would it be worth it then? Because the commission on that one extra transaction every month is gonna more than pay for that TC.

[00:40:26] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Let alone what we just talked about. Just—you know, to be able to go home. You know, they’ve already done the offer contract. You review it, boom, and then you go have dinner. And you can, you know, go do what you want to do or go to your kids' ball game without sitting there stressing because they’ve already done the contract.

[00:40:43] Tracy Hayes (cont.): You can come home from the ball game, review the contract, say, “Yep, it’s good, let’s send it out.” That’s okay. You’re not going, “You know, I gotta rush home 'cause I gotta do this contract,” and you’re up till 9, 10, 11 o’clock at night—or later. That sort of thing. It is just a total peace of mind.

So eventually you come back to Jacksonville.

[00:40:55] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. So we came back to Jacksonville in 2022. Knew immediately that my plan was to transition into sales.

[00:41:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): So we—before I ever—as soon as we found out we were coming back, Debbie and I started making that transition plan and what that was gonna look like. Because we were working with so many agents and we had so much access to data, I did not want to enter sales while I was still active in the transaction coordination business.

[00:41:18] Tracy Hayes: Did you just give that up?

[00:41:19] Tiffany Freeman: So I helped—I helped each of our TCs start their own business.

[00:41:22] Tracy Hayes: Oh, okay.

[00:41:23] Tiffany Freeman: Our program—so one thing I love about Open to Close—but one thing is, it is a very manual buildout, at least it was at the time that we started using it. But I gave that to each of them and helped them kind of each set up their own business. Which I think was a good transition.

[00:41:36] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And it’s really—it’s awesome to see now because they still help each other. Like, they do vacation coverage for each other, even though they have their own businesses. So like, it’s really cool to see. And they were all very supportive. They were all great. But I knew that I wanted to transition. So that meant closing Beacon.

[00:42:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And it was a tough decision 'cause that was like my little baby that I was growing up. But it felt like it was the right move. And also at that same time, Debbie’s husband got diagnosed with cancer. So she was needing a lot more hands-on support in her business. And it was just her at that point, and Beacon supporting her in transactions.

So there was just kind of like—all the stars kind of aligned—that was like, it’s go time.

[00:42:23] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:42:23] Tiffany Freeman: And my husband was on deployment. But it was like, we can’t keep waiting for him to not be on deployment—he’s always on deployment at this point. Right?

[00:42:30] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:42:31] Tiffany Freeman: So I started planning for that transition. Made that transition into sales and thankfully it was a smooth transition—I think mostly because of all the experience that I’d had in transactions before then.

[00:42:41] Tracy Hayes: Alright, so you come in—Debbie needs you to, you know—she’s got clients calling all the time. She’s been in the business—

[00:42:47] Tiffany Freeman: Yes.

[00:42:48] Tracy Hayes: —20 whatever years, so you have stuff to do.

[00:42:50] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. No, I—

[00:42:51] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. You’re not starting from scratch. You’re fortunate from that standpoint. What are some of the things that—even working under Debbie though—I imagine there’s some things that you do Tiffany’s way.

[00:43:02] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. So that is one thing—we had that conversation when I first came on. We mesh very well, but in a lot of ways we’re very opposite, right? I love AI. Debbie does not love AI.

[00:43:15] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): We joke because she is solid wisdom, right? She’s been doing this for so long, and I’m the one that pushes her out of her comfort zone a little bit. I'm like, “We should try this—something new.”

But at the same time, when I’m kind of getting overwhelmed, she’s like, “Okay, let’s break it down, back to the basics, and see where we’re at.” So we balance each other out really well there. But yeah—so she was—her husband was really sick.

[00:43:39] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): I mean, he had stage 4 cancer. And so I had to jump right in. And I mean, Debbie will tell you—for pretty much two years, like, I got here and he was sick, he was in Mayo, and pretty much the first two years until last year that I was here, it was me jumping in and running her business.

[00:43:58] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And also growing my business at the same time. But I do think, I mean, obviously having that leg to stand on and being able to support her and her business was wonderful.

[00:44:04] Tracy Hayes: Alright. So I think, you know, one of the—I'm not really gonna get into brokerages, 'cause you followed Debbie. Debbie was your—was more or less your brokerage. A lot of times—I always say on the show—the choice of brokerage can make or break a new real estate agent. I mean, fresh, green, right?

[00:44:19] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. And I do—so our previous brokerage that we were at was excellent for new agents. And I think that new agent—like I said, I went to all of the new agent education 'cause I wanted to know all of it.

[00:44:28] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:44:28] Tiffany Freeman: And it was perfect for where I was at. And then Debbie and I had this conversation when she was moving over to EV. We hit a point at that brokerage where it felt like we were kind of tapped on agent education, right?

[00:44:39] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:44:40] Tiffany Freeman: Like, we were—it’s at this point where it’s like, okay, you’re paying a lot of money to be here, but we feel kind of tapped on what we are actually receiving from that.

[00:44:47] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. The value. Yeah, that’s what I’m—

[00:44:48] Tiffany Freeman: So she moved over to EV, and then I moved over a little bit after her. And there’s another place—we’ll be there.

[00:44:57] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. The mentorship that you got—'cause now you’re coming over. She’s kind of taken away, but you know, your listing appointments—were you guys doing—I can’t remember if I—I'm sure I asked Debbie this—but were you guys doing buyer consultations, as we’re required to do now?

[00:45:14] Tiffany Freeman: Yes. So we were doing them before too.

[00:45:16] Tracy Hayes: You were doing them before. Yeah. So—but having that mentor of working with Debbie, did you feel when you came back you were ready for that? Or you still went together on some of these appointments to work through, get some at-bats of you actually being the presenter?

[00:45:31] Tiffany Freeman: I felt ready. I mean, we definitely would—like, we still even now will tag-team some, just because we like to go together. But I definitely felt ready. I mean, I felt well prepared at that point. But it was a completely different side of sales, right? I was used to sales at Beacon, but I was selling agents on TC services.

[00:45:48] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:45:49] Tiffany Freeman: So it was a completely different side of sales. I’d never done a listing presentation before. I had prepped a gajillion of them for Debbie, but I had never actually presented—done one.

[00:45:56] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:45:57] Tiffany Freeman: So that was a little bit different.

[00:45:58] Tracy Hayes: Well, I imagine with your back-office experience and having done so many transactions and seeing so many—because, I mean, if there’s not an issue with a transaction—I don’t, you know—

[00:46:08] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:46:09] Tracy Hayes: It’s like, does it exist?

[00:46:10] Tiffany Freeman: Right. Exactly.

[00:46:11] Tracy Hayes: There’s always something. I mean, it might be just a minor negotiation over a repair or something.

[00:46:14] Tiffany Freeman: Right.

[00:46:15] Tracy Hayes: But there’s always something—always that bump in the road. How big it is is different on every transaction. But you had seen all this. So when you sit down right now and you have a conversation—as we were talking kind of pre-show about, like, new construction catastrophes and things like that—and, you know, doing inspection reports and stuff, like, you had a lot of experience. Just as a—now a new realtor—but you had enough experience to really kind of tell some of these stories to these...

[00:46:44] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. Customers in front of you. I think it’s different, right? So when you have normal new agents—normal new agents are focusing on their listing presentation and their buyer’s presentation because they’re trying to get clients. And then they get those clients and they're like, “Okay, now what do I do?”

[00:47:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): I was the opposite. I knew what to do once we had the clients. But it was like, okay, we gotta go back and learn how to do listing presentations and buyer’s presentations. And like, I knew how to prep 'em, but I'd never given one.

[00:47:05] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:47:06] Tiffany Freeman: So I was a little bit opposite there. And you know, I came into sales with a broker’s license, 'cause I got licensed in 2016 and I got my broker’s in 2021—I think it might have been 2022. So I came into sales with a broker’s license. Like, I did things very out of order, right? Like, it did not follow the traditional path.

[00:47:25] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): But that initial transition was actually pretty smooth, and I do think a lot of that is because I was—I was confident. Once we had clients, I was like, okay. Once I’ve got somebody, I’m good. I can get 'em to closing. We can do that all. Like—and no matter what bump we hit from here to closing, we’ve got this. We’ve just gotta master getting the clients. Which, thankfully, because I had previous sales experience, was not as rough of a transition.

[00:47:55] Tracy Hayes: Well, did you find yourself being—well, I don’t know, people don’t know to ask what questions—but situations that have come up...

[00:48:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): ...and when you start talking to them in the presentation about your experience—like, “Hey, you know, based on what you’re looking at, we might need to look for this, we need to look for that. You know, you go new construction, you should have an inspector with you—definitely need an inspector,” because you’ve had—and you can speak through experience and confidence. And that bleeds through on your presentation.

[00:48:23] Tiffany Freeman: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I never had to have that experience that a lot of new agents have—of going into a listing appointment or going into a buyer’s consult just completely green.

[00:48:31] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:32] Tiffany Freeman: Right? Like, I went in and I had stories I could tell and I had experience I could lean on. So that’s where I think having—like, any new agent that has the opportunity to work as an assistant or a TC or anything for a period of time—I would jump on that opportunity.

[00:48:47] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And I know that it feels like it’s not a lot of money, but I mean, do it for six months. Just get the experience there. Because having those experiences to lean on when you’re going into those appointments gives you all the confidence in the world.

[00:49:06] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can dive in—like, obviously like a lot of people do—but a young person that might be listening to this who’s going over here to UNF to take, you know, real estate—you know, the degree that they have over there—becoming a transaction coordinator while they’re in school...

[00:49:21] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:49:22] Tracy Hayes: ...taking that and so forth during the time while you're in school would—is a huge experience. Because would you agree, a lot of times—I would imagine some agents let the transaction coordinator solve the problem?

[00:49:32] Tiffany Freeman: Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It was amazing to me in the beginning how much other agents will lean on their TCs to solve problems.

[00:49:45] Tracy Hayes: Especially the experienced ones. You know, I know there’s some new agents that were fortunate enough—they got a TC right away. They were willing to, you know, give that few hundred bucks per transaction because they knew.

But yeah, if you’re a new agent and you don’t have a lot of experience—and maybe you’re on one of these cloud brokerages, so you’re not surrounded by people walking in an office...

[00:50:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): ...like you may at one of the fancy Engel & Völkers offices there, where you have all these smart people around—hire a smart TC that can carry you through. 'Cause there's people—the other thing is, like, as you started, you saw yourself as just being a transaction coordinator. You didn’t think about going into sales.

There’s people that just—that’s what they enjoy doing. They enjoy—whether they’re working at home or in a cube—they like being that project coordinator.

[00:50:29] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. There are career TCs that—it’s a personality type, right? They love that. And they have absolutely no desire to go into sales at all.

[00:50:38] Tracy Hayes: I gotta ask, when you were hiring TCs in your business, did you give them one of the personality tests to see...

[00:50:44] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah, we did DISC profiles.

[00:50:44] Tracy Hayes: ...for everybody?

[00:50:45] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:50:46] Tracy Hayes: To see if they were the type that actually liked working in that cube?

[00:50:49] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. We did DISC profiles on everybody. If you’re a high D, typically you’re not gonna be a good TC.

[00:50:54] Tracy Hayes: Mm.

[00:50:55] Tiffany Freeman: Just because you gotta have that compassion, the patience—

[00:50:58] Tracy Hayes: Don’t have compassion or the patience.

[00:51:00] Tiffany Freeman: Those high Ds typically don’t have it, yeah. But also, I mean, for the personality testing—like, letting your TCs know. Because then, after they learn a little bit about it, they’re kind of placing their agents too, right?

[00:51:10] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:11] Tiffany Freeman: Like, they’re like, “Hmm, that’s a high D. Like that person’s—they’re high-strung, and this is how I need to treat 'em.”

[00:51:15] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Communicate with them, how often—absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

[00:51:19] Tiffany Freeman: But then we had—I mean, back to the new agents—we did have so many new agents at Beacon that would call us. They’d hit a hiccup, and they’re like, “Well, what do we do now?”

[00:51:28] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): 'Cause they don’t know. And it was great to be able to support them through that. But I mean, also as a new agent, if you’re jumping right in, I would consider a TC if you’re able to.

[00:51:36] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): Because if you can get a good TC that’s been doing this for a while, they’re a wealth of knowledge. I mean, the average TC sees so many more transactions than the average agent. They just see more issues come up.

[00:51:52] Tracy Hayes: You—

[00:52:00] Tracy Hayes: I think a challenge that you're always juggling as an agent is quality support. Like from—you know, whether it’s a plumber or obviously a lender or all the other ancillary supports that make the transaction happen around the agent and the transaction coordinator. That experienced transaction coordinator is working with all these other agents, so they know Joe is going to show up and get that done.

[00:52:18] Tiffany Freeman: Right.

[00:52:19] Tracy Hayes: “Let me call him and we will get it done.”

[00:52:21] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. That was—coming into sales—that was, I think, another huge benefit that I had is that I’ve worked with every title company in town. And I’ve worked with a ton of contractors in town. And so I knew, like, okay—steer clear of this title company, steer clear of this contractor. “Oh, I really like this title company,” or, “I really like this lender.” And I knew that going in because I’d had experience working with them.

[00:52:47] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): Where new agents are just having to feel that out—or go with whoever is recommended to them by others in their brokerage.

[00:52:55] Tracy Hayes: I’ve been to a mortgage conference where they actually said, “You know, you ought to become good friends with the title company, because you can be a resource when that other loan officer screws up the deal.”

[00:53:00] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:53:01] Tracy Hayes: And it’s not necessarily screw up the deal—to not be negative—there are loan officers that will screw up. There’s one going on right now that—this company should not even have gotten this loan. And they’re supposed to close today, and they’re—you know, I know someone significant who is part of this transaction. They say, “Oh, we’re not closing today. It’s going to be a while longer.”

[00:53:17] Tracy Hayes (cont.): And I’m like—when they told me who the lender was, I was like, “No, you should not be doing that DSCR loan with them,” because one, they’re a cluster to begin with. Now just doing a standard FHA loan or—yeah, they could do those all day long. But no—you need people who specialize.

But yeah, the deals that fall out—what I’m finding now, and I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, I had one recently—condos. There’s a lot of lenders who don’t really want to do condos right now.

[00:53:40] Tiffany Freeman: Absolutely.

[00:53:41] Tracy Hayes: Especially condos in Florida. 'Cause we’re here in Florida, so I assume it’s condos in Florida. Where others are starting to specialize in it.

[00:53:49] Tiffany Freeman: Yes.

[00:53:50] Tracy Hayes: So, depending on the situation, you need to get—you know—know those people who actually are getting those deals closed.

[00:53:57] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah, no, absolutely. And the transaction coordinator and the title companies are people that know those.

[00:54:01] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. They know those people. And—mm-hmm. I mean, condos are definitely tricky right now.

[00:54:06] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:54:07] Tracy Hayes: But, I mean, that kind of goes back to what we talked about at lunch last week. Those lenders that are starting to specialize in condos—they’re finding opportunity in this chaos.

[00:54:17] Tiffany Freeman: Right.

[00:54:18] Tracy Hayes: They’re finding opportunity in this market. And there’s always a way to find opportunity. But then knowing those specialists—that, “Okay, I have this situation and I know that this person’s great at this.” Like, that’s huge.

[00:54:29] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:54:30] Tracy Hayes: And that—it all relates back to your client experience, right? Because if you’re able to tell your client with 100% certainty—like, “This is your person”—that changes the experience, rather than dragging them through what you just described where, I mean, they’re supposed to close and then it’s like, “It’s going to be a while longer.” And what does that even mean?

[00:54:39] Tiffany Freeman: Right.

[00:54:40] Tracy Hayes: So I’m going to throw one out here for you, because you do have a vast more experience than the average agent. Because again, 2000 transactions. There’s not many agents that do 2000 transactions in their 30-year career.

[00:54:55] Tiffany Freeman: Right.

[00:54:56] Tracy Hayes: Okay? So you having been a piece of that—and me knowing that, because I came from a call center for 12 years—it was based on volume. So the amount of credit reports I’ve seen is far more than any of my non-call center co-parts out there.

[00:55:09] Tracy Hayes (cont.): So we’ve seen deals get done. We know who to call when we need to solve a problem—whether it’s a repairman or whatever. You’ve worked through that. Or an insurance company—that’s another thing right now.

[00:55:20] Tiffany Freeman: That’s another one. Yeah.

[00:55:21] Tracy Hayes: You’ve got to have your insurance connection. We were talking yesterday about—you know, what if the roof—and the seller doesn’t have the money for the roof, but they would obviously after the house closes. And escrowing the money to get the roof done...

[00:55:33] Tiffany Freeman: I got a roofer that'll let you pay at closing.

[00:55:34] Tracy Hayes: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you need a—well, most lenders should be able to do it. But to escrow it, you know—again, having that contact for the roofer. And obviously these agents had that question about it, which I guarantee—if they’re asking it—that means probably 70–80% of the agents out there have the same question.

[00:55:52] Tracy Hayes (cont.): 'Cause it doesn’t come up all the time. But these are things—you gotta find an insurance company that’s actually going to write the policy so the loan can close, and then put the new roof on a few days later, like 30 days or whatever, and get that done. So you need these people.

[00:56:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): So when you come down to—you’re now on the realtor side. And I’m asking this question because I think one of the biggest failures agents have and run into issues with a lender or other vendors is because they’re into this—choose this handful of people—and they think they’re relieving themselves of some sort of obligation or some sort of, you know, not kickback, in a way that if something bad happened, it would look bad on them, right?

It’s going to look bad on them no matter who it is. Would you agree?

[00:56:38] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. No, it absolutely would. I mean, that’s—I have a pretty vast network of different contractors, vendors, you know, that I’ll use. But each of them have like a specialty, right?

[00:56:50] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): It’s like—this is who I call if I’ve got a fogged window. This is who I’m gonna call if I’ve got your—

[00:56:55] Tracy Hayes: You have a number one guy, you have a second guy—if the number one guy’s in Europe...

[00:57:00] Tiffany Freeman: You got a backup.

[00:57:01] Tracy Hayes: ...you got a backup.

[00:57:02] Tiffany Freeman: But I think—pick, like—and it goes back to, pick specialists, right? Like, pick people that are specialists. Pick people that are doing this full-time. And not just real—like, lenders that are doing this full-time. Pick title companies that are doing this full-time. Pick people that are doing this all day, in and out. Because those are the people that are gonna be able to help you really solve problems when the problems come up.

[00:57:25] Tracy Hayes: Yeah, and the problems are going to come up.

[00:57:27] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:57:28] Tracy Hayes: Well, it goes back—and this is the point I want to get across, and I think you’ll agree with me in getting to know you here in this last hour. If you have that go-to person—that window guy or whoever—whatever service it is, but they know you, that they are your go-to guy...

[00:57:45] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:57:46] Tracy Hayes: They are going to take care of you and take care of your customer with white gloves. You need them on a lickety-split, like, “Hey man, I gotta get this done by tomorrow. This is gonna close, and I can’t get clear to close unless we get this done.” They’re gonna get up early and go do it for you.

[00:58:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): Because you are trying to send any time the business their way. And I think where the agents—you know, if you think about business in general—you have your go-to contractor. If you’re a builder, you know, “This is the guy I’m gonna use to do my drywall,” right? And they do their best because they know you’re looking out for them.

They’re going, “Scratch your back, scratch mine.” And it doesn’t—all these other—you’ve gotta create that. Because it will come back to you in—whether financially or just in the “hey, attaboy” on your review.

[00:58:29] Tracy Hayes (cont.): But if you really want to accelerate your business, you’ve gotta create relationships. And I think too many agents sit back and wait for the vendor to create the relationship.

[00:58:38] Tiffany Freeman: Yes.

[00:58:39] Tracy Hayes: When it’s really the agent—

[00:58:41] Tiffany Freeman: The agent.

[00:58:42] Tracy Hayes: Because—as of me, I’m gonna say, I’m on my side to get the elephant out of the room real-type thing. It’s like, “Hey, do you want to date me?” It’s kind of that thing. And it’s the agent that actually is in charge.

[00:58:56] Tracy Hayes (cont.): Male or female—that has nothing to do with this.

[00:58:58] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[00:58:59] Tracy Hayes: But you’re the agent. You’re in charge. You call the shots. Yeah.

[00:59:02] Tiffany Freeman: Real estate is—it's just a relationship business.

[00:59:05] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:06] Tiffany Freeman: Right? The whole business is relationship-based. I mean, with vendor contacts, client contacts—it’s all relationship-based. So you’ve gotta learn to nurture some relationships or you're not gonna get very far in this business.

[00:59:17] Tracy Hayes: And just to re-hit what you said, you’re not only nurturing with your customers, you’re nurturing with your vendors—the people that do the things that you need to get done sometimes, like right now...

[00:59:29] Tiffany Freeman: Right. I'm not close—like, and do a good job. If I’ve got a buyer that needs a VA loan, we’re not closing without a lender and we’re not closing without a title company.

[00:59:36] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:37] Tiffany Freeman: I am physically not capable of doing those two tasks. Right? Like, I’m not a lender and I’m not a title company. So it’s not a one-man show here. I do think that—like, I absolutely agree with you that it’s on the agent to establish these relationships and nurture those relationships.

[00:59:52] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): But also, agents kind of need to humble themselves a little and be like, “Okay, this is not a one-man show,” even though sometimes it feels like it is.

[00:59:57] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:59:58] Tiffany Freeman: You've gotta nurture those relationships because the fact is, like, your lender’s working with a lot of other agents. You might have a couple of lenders for different situations, right? Like, you might have a DSCR lender or a condo lender. But you're working primarily with a few lenders for different situations, and you need them to be there for you when you need them. So you gotta nurture those relationships.

[01:00:22] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): I mean, at least for me, I always want my clients to have A-plus service, right? So I want those relationships nurtured. So, like you said, when I pick up the phone and call, and I’m like, “Hey, I have this person that’s got this going on. Can you help?”

[01:00:35] Tracy Hayes: Yep.

[01:00:36] Tiffany Freeman: “I'm gonna drop what I’m doing and I’ll—like, right now.”

[01:00:38] Tracy Hayes: No, I mean, there’s many times people call me about situations and I’m like, “You know, I don’t know, but I know others.” Let me get on the phone, and I start making phone calls for them.

[01:00:48] Tracy Hayes (cont.): “Hey, we need someone. This is a unique property. It’s not a conforming loan. We need something totally out of the box,” which I don’t even offer. So I need to call someone who—and you need to have those people on your team.

[01:01:01] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. You gotta have those people on your team. And you’ve gotta nurture those relationships and just know that you can’t do it without them. Right? The deal’s not gonna close without them. So you’ve gotta have just great communication.

[01:01:13] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): I tell people, like, I have two communications degrees, so there’s a lot of communication over here. But communication is really key. Like, when you’re establishing those relationships with a lender—like, I mean, obviously we get reached out to by a ton of lenders and a ton of title companies.

[01:01:27] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): Talk to them. “What can you do that’s different than what my lender currently does?” Because they might have a specialty that you need.

[01:01:35] Tracy Hayes: And they don’t know—like you said—to ask that question, because sometimes they don’t know what you need.

[01:01:40] Tiffany Freeman: They don’t know what we need.

[01:01:41] Tracy Hayes: They just know you’re an agent. They call, “Hey, you got business?” Well, hey, I need someone because my guy over here I use all the time for my lot of other stuff doesn’t really have a great condo team in their operations.

[01:01:53] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. Like we talked about—last week we were talking about VA one-time close construction perm loans.

[01:02:00] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[01:02:01] Tiffany Freeman: Unique product. Not a lot of people offer them. I work with a lot of VA buyers. Right? And we were talking about those. And so that instantly, it’s like, “Okay, now we have a connection over this,” because I know that that is something that you can help me with. And so that’s a relationship I’m gonna nurture now, because I know that’s something I need.

[01:02:20] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): Because that helps my clients. Right? So I think it’s just asking the questions—and being okay asking people the questions.

[01:02:27] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): I mean, I’ve worked with lenders before that—I know a lot about VA 'cause I’ve bought with VA loans, I’ve helped a bunch of VA buyers—I know a lot about VA loans, and I’ve had to correct lenders. I’m the worst at sending a screenshot of the VA handbook and being like, “Actually…”

[01:02:41] Tracy Hayes: Yeah, yeah.

[01:02:42] Tiffany Freeman: I’m the worst. But, if you’re having to do that frequently, maybe it’s time to talk to somebody else and see if they’re more well-versed in the VA product.

[01:02:51] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[01:02:52] Tiffany Freeman: Not everybody does a ton of VA loans.

[01:02:53] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[01:02:54] Tiffany Freeman: Like, every lender’s business is a little bit different. So I think just kind of interviewing—and you said it’s a little bit like dating, like—

[01:03:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): “Well, what do you do a lot of? What do you not do a lot of?” Right? Like, I think having those conversations—and having those conversations early. You need to have those conversations before you need the people. Because once you need 'em, you need 'em then.

[01:03:14] Tracy Hayes: Exactly.

[01:03:15] Tiffany Freeman: Like, you don’t want to call 50 lenders to interview people once you already have a client that needs somebody.

[01:03:18] Tracy Hayes: What mind boggles me is—I still hear the stories today of, “Oh yeah, you know, this person was—” and there’s a lot of agents out there in this category. “I was so nonchalant in my recommendation. Like, well, here’s three.” But then when you do that—yeah, maybe they choose one of the three. But what you do is you open them up to say, “Well, they weren’t really like, this is the best guy for your deal.” They’re going off and doing their own shopping.

[01:03:45] Tracy Hayes (cont.): And then they end up with some brokerage in California who doesn’t know anything. Or in particular cases that we’re kind of working with this morning—DSCR loans, bank statement loans—these alternative lending products are only done by a handful of companies in the country, right?

[01:04:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): So if that lender does not have the ability to do the underwriting of that product, based on that wholesaler’s criteria—you don’t have any control. You’re sending it off to that company. You’re put in a pipeline—boom.

[01:04:13] Tracy Hayes (cont.): Versus that lender—I’ll brag about it—you know, we do here at Atlantic, we do DSCR. Our underwriters have the ability to underwrite that. Now, do they still have to send it off and have that company check off because they’re the ones funding it? Yes.

[01:04:25] Tracy Hayes (cont.): But it’s packaged already. It’s packaged the way they want it. The documents are in order.

[01:04:29] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. And you have an underwriter that you can go talk to. Right? If there’s somebody you can talk to and be like, “Okay—”

[01:04:34] Tracy Hayes: And they got a hotline.

[01:04:35] Tiffany Freeman: Right.

[01:04:36] Tracy Hayes: To get a direct answer because they know—they’ve got that.

[01:04:38] Tracy Hayes (cont.): Don’t do a DSCR loan or bank statement loan with one of these big box lenders. They are volume-based. They do not have time for DSCR loans. And they really don’t want to—they clog up their pipeline.

[01:04:50] Tiffany Freeman: Right.

[01:04:51] Tracy Hayes: So you need to find—we’re, you know—I think we probably even mentioned it at lunch—the local lender that has the stability. And we’re not the only ones in town. But you’ve gotta have that relationship. When someone says, “I want to do a DSCR loan,” “I need to do a bank statement loan”—you need to have someone you know that does these and can stamp them out in a couple weeks, or at least 30 days.

[01:05:20] Tracy Hayes (cont.): You send them off to a big box lender—you call 60, 90 days.

[01:05:23] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. And also—I mean, learning about overlays and what overlays your lenders use. Because VA—it comes up a lot.

[01:05:29] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[01:05:30] Tiffany Freeman: I mean, the VA handbook itself is actually—I mean, really lenient.

[01:05:34] Tracy Hayes: It’s an open-ended guideline. It’s all up to the lender whether they want to do it or not.

[01:05:37] Tiffany Freeman: “How risky are you?”

[01:05:38] Tracy Hayes: Exactly. “How much risk do you want to take?”

[01:05:40] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. But knowing your lender’s overlays, right? Because—I mean, pretty much everybody will do a VA loan for you, right?

[01:05:46] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[01:05:47] Tiffany Freeman: But doing a VA loan for your clients that have a 780 credit score is a little different than doing a VA loan for your clients that have a 600 credit score.

[01:05:55] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[01:05:56] Tiffany Freeman: So like, you’ve gotta know where your lenders fall with overlays, so you can help advise people. Because how embarrassing to give your client a phone number when they’ve already entrusted you, told you, “Hey, I have a 600 credit score. I don’t know if this is going to work.” And then you give them a lender that has a 620 minimum...

[01:06:15] Tracy Hayes: Minimum.

[01:06:15] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. And then they call, and they’re like, “Your credit score’s not high enough.” That does not feel good for the client. That does not help the client experience.

[01:06:24] Tracy Hayes: No. So you gotta know that the first thing the actual lender should do—because 620 is such a big score in the FHA/VA category—is see what they can do to get that up 20 points. Maybe it’s pay down a credit card—'cause it’s gonna put the borrower in a much better spot.

[01:06:37] Tracy Hayes (cont.): So that is also another thing you want to add on to—are they looking to improve credit, or do something, because that costs money. And they can’t pay for it. We can rescore them, but the lender has to pay for it.

[01:06:48] Tracy Hayes (cont.): You know, do you have a lender—there are lenders in this town right now—and across the country—where their loan officers are paying for their own credit reports. So what they do is they talk to the client and ask the client what their credit score is.

[01:07:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): Well, let me tell you what—you do not know what your credit score is.

[01:07:01] Tracy Hayes: Mortgage companies—we pull it, and that’s what it is. And it’s probably lower than what you think it is or what you're getting from Credit Karma.

[01:07:07] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[01:07:08] Tracy Hayes: Because it's a totally different thing. But they're just talking through it, and not—if you go with the lender who, you know, the company's paying for the credit, it's the cost of doing business—they're gonna pull credit and work with every client that you throw them, wherever they’re at.

You know, do they need credit help? Or maybe they're—you know, 680 is the next score, right?

[01:07:28] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[01:07:29] Tracy Hayes: And you know, if you're at 679 versus 681—there’s a difference.

[01:07:32] Tiffany Freeman: There's a difference.

[01:07:33] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. And to go and find where we can get those two points in the credit score. There’s lenders out there—let’s say lenders, brokers, loan officers—that because they’re paying for the credit report, they’re not gonna get involved in that. ’Cause that’s extra expense.

[01:07:43] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. Well—and your volume-based lenders are not gonna get involved in that because they don’t have time. They’re cranking people out.

[01:07:47] Tracy Hayes: Well, the smart ones have someone like a team they can go send that off to. The thing is—credit reports have gone up a hundred bucks in the 20 years I’ve been in it. It’s a hundred dollars more for the same credit report than it was in 2005 when I started.

[01:07:59] Tiffany Freeman: Crazy.

[01:08:00] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. I don’t know what they’re doing differently—and we have better technology now. You’d figure that actually it’d be easier.

[01:08:04] Tiffany Freeman: You would think.

[01:08:04] Tracy Hayes: But yeah, the cost of those... Now I’ll tell you one thing that hasn’t gone up as crazy is appraisals. If you really think about it—what did we charge for appraisals in 2005 versus today? And the amount of time an appraiser needs to be an apprentice and the hours you gotta put in before they can go out on their own is just unbelievable.

[01:08:22] Tiffany Freeman: It’s crazy.

[01:08:23] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. So, we’ve covered a lot of ground. This was really an informative show because of your unique skill set. And just to reiterate as we kind of close what we were—the last topic we were just talking about: agents, build those relationships. Go out and, like you said, sit down. I think one of the challenges is they don’t know what to ask—and I can respect that. They don’t know what to ask.

[01:08:45] Tracy Hayes (cont.): I mean—well, my wife let this person choose Loan Depot to do their DSCR loan. I’m sorry—Loan Depot is a going-to-the-federal-government type lender, okay? Now, if you just wanted to put 20% down and do a conventional loan—no problem. They can do it all day long, and fast. But to do this DSCR loan—too many people involved, and it’s a bureaucracy.

[01:09:19] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[01:09:20] Tracy Hayes: So she goes, “I didn’t know that.” I said, “Well, now you do.” And hopefully you’re telling other agents. You’ve got to find these—like we said—find your people. Find your tribe. A lot of people use that terminology.

[01:09:32] Tiffany Freeman: Find your tribe. And then—like, my big thing this year has been focusing on: rather than thinking about real estate being a sales industry, let’s think about it being a hospitality industry, right?

[01:09:42] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[01:09:43] Tiffany Freeman: And so, if we’re thinking about it as being a hospitality industry—compare that to, like, your favorite resort. If you’re going to your favorite resort, they’re not sending you to McDonald’s for dinner, right? They’re saying, “These are the best restaurants in town. These are the best places to go get a massage. This is the best service that we offer.”

[01:10:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And keep in mind that when you're sending stuff over to clients—like, sending recommendations, vendor recommendations over—you want it to be the best people in town. Which means you have to talk to people in town. You have to interview them. Because if the goal is to have that gold-standard client experience every single time, you’ve got to, one, understand the client, and two, understand who you’re sending them to.

[01:10:11] Tracy Hayes: Now one of the biggest topics is always the inspector, right?

[01:10:15] Tiffany Freeman: Yes.

[01:10:16] Tracy Hayes: And there’s a price point. And when you say, “I’m gonna send you the best guy in town,” you don’t just say, “Hey, Mr. X is the best guy in town, just call.” You have to prep them a little bit—'cause you know he’s a little more expensive.

[01:10:29] Tiffany Freeman: Yep.

[01:10:30] Tracy Hayes: And it’s like, “Hey, I just want to let you know—this is Mr. X. He is the best guy in town. I’ve used him countless times. He’s going to be probably a hundred dollars more, but I’m going to tell you: your peace of mind is worth that hundred dollars.”

[01:10:43] Tracy Hayes (cont.): You have to prep that. It’s kind of like—I’m a John Maxwell person—and when he’s got the 25 Ways to Influence People, and one of them is introducing them to other people. When you introduce someone to someone else, you kind of talk them up a little bit—“Hey, this is so-and-so,” and you tell them something about that person that obviously might trigger an interest in the person you're introducing them to.

[01:11:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): And you know—you got the million-dollar buyer, they’re probably not worried about that hundred bucks. Or they understand the investment that they’re doing. Plus, they also want to know they’re working with the best.

[01:11:10] Tiffany Freeman: Yes.

[01:11:11] Tracy Hayes: You have that client. Whereas you might have the first-time homebuyer who’s kind of nickel-and-diming—say, “Do not step over the quarter to pick up the nickel on this one. Pay the extra hundred dollars. It’s going to be worth it.”

[01:11:24] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. Okay, my favorite story—I think, like, one of my favorite stories in all of my career so far—is we get a lot of pushback on inspections on new construction, right? People think because it’s new, it shouldn’t need to be inspected.

[01:11:37] Tracy Hayes: Like, “The county’s gonna take care of that for you.”

[01:11:39] Tiffany Freeman: “The county’s gonna take care of it.” Oh gosh, that’s not what we’re doing here.

[01:11:43] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): But—so first-time homebuyer, tight budget, new construction—sent them the inspector, really got a lot of pushback. A lot. Finally...

[01:11:54] Tracy Hayes: Pushback from the actual report, or how much?

[01:11:56] Tiffany Freeman: From the buyer—wanting to do the inspection.

[01:11:59] Tracy Hayes: Uh-oh.

[01:12:00] Tiffany Freeman: Like, “It’s new construction, do we really need this inspection? We have a 12-month warranty. They’ll come back out and fix anything.”

[01:12:08] Tracy Hayes: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:12:10] Tiffany Freeman: Finally, they agreed to do an inspection. We have the inspection done. Inspector comes out, inspects everything. My preferred inspector does an infrared thermal scan as part of their inspection. They’re doing the scan, and a wall in the primary bedroom closet lights up. They put a moisture meter on it—it doesn’t look wet, it doesn’t feel wet—it’s wet.

[01:12:31] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): There’s moisture back there. It’s an exterior wall. It butts up—it's the closet that’s an exterior wall. Well, at some point during the build, when they were framing, a nail had gone into a pipe. And the nail was still in the pipe. So it was just dripping—like one single drip every few seconds.

[01:12:52] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): So it wasn’t enough to create a puddle or enough to saturate the wall.

[01:13:00] Tracy Hayes: Not mold yet.

[01:13:01] Tiffany Freeman: Not mold yet. Not mold yet.

[01:13:03] Tracy Hayes: Gonna be mold.

[01:13:04] Tiffany Freeman: Oh yeah. It was sure gonna be mold. But not mold yet. Builder’s like, “I don’t know what it could be.” I didn’t want to open the wall up, obviously. Finally, we get the wall opened up, and we discover what was going on.

Had we used a cheaper inspector that did not include the infrared scan—we would’ve never caught that.

[01:13:22] Tracy Hayes: Yep.

[01:13:23] Tiffany Freeman: The house would’ve been full of mold. If they had discovered it by 12 months—it’s a primary closet. It’s gonna have clothes in it. So it’s not like—plus it was carpeted—so it’s not like...

[01:13:33] Tracy Hayes: How long would it have taken them to discover that?

[01:13:40] Tracy Hayes: Before it was discovered? Yeah. So—and that’s new construction, right? So I tell people all the time—

[01:13:44] Tiffany Freeman: That story right there—everyone that you consult who wants to buy new construction—just for that story, should be signing on.

[01:13:48] Tracy Hayes: Yes.

[01:13:49] Tiffany Freeman: I don't think I've missed a single new construction inspection since that story. I mean, that would've been thousands and thousands of dollars of remediation.

[01:13:58] Tracy Hayes: Let alone the headaches.

[01:14:00] Tiffany Freeman: The headaches...

[01:14:01] Tracy Hayes: And living in the house while they gotta tear this entire section of the house down to the studs.

[01:14:06] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. And remediate mold and whatever else. And now it’s all—it, I mean, yeah, closing got pushed back, but it got taken care of before they moved in. And we had a reinspection, because obviously my buyers that didn’t want to pay for an inspection are now wanting to pay for a reinspection.

[01:14:22] Tracy Hayes: Right. Right.

[01:14:23] Tiffany Freeman: They’re believers at this point. But it just goes to show that having those relationships—I mean, is it worth paying an extra hundred dollars to save thousands down the road?

[01:14:30] Tracy Hayes: And the priceless headaches. I don’t think people realize the warranty departments in these builders are like trying to get an insurance claim. You know, your house burned down and trying to get... We have a house in our neighborhood where—I don’t—it’s been over a year. They’re just now—I just saw them this morning where they dropped off some pallets of wood and so forth to start reframing. Whatever’s going on, 'cause it’s only a slab there right now.

[01:14:53] Tracy Hayes (cont.): But it’s been over a year, and I’m sure they fought with the insurance company. I guarantee there’s a story there, without even knowing. It’s the same way with these builders’ warranties.

[01:15:00] Tiffany Freeman: Yes.

[01:15:01] Tracy Hayes: They’re gonna fight you—because that guarantee would probably cost them $10,000, especially after you move in. Imagine if there was mold, and a year has gone by and now you’re having to move out of the house because of the mold until it’s remedied. They don’t want to pay that. They’re not gonna say, “Oh yeah, no problem, that’s our fault. Here’s a check.”

[01:15:25] Tiffany Freeman: And also, we’re hoping at that point you haven’t made any exterior changes where the builder could be like, “Oh, that was on you. You did that.”

[01:15:31] Tracy Hayes: Oh.

[01:15:32] Tiffany Freeman: And then you have a whole other can of worms where the builder’s not covering it. So we have to hope there’s no exterior changes too.

[01:15:37] Tracy Hayes: You’re talking about months of headache going back and forth and back and forth. Versus right there and then—“Hey, we’re not closing ’cause there’s a leak.”

[01:15:44] Tiffany Freeman: There’s a leak in the home.

[01:15:45] Tracy Hayes: You’re gonna fix it—no matter who’s gonna buy this home. Unless you can find someone stupid enough to come up here, but you now know it’s there. You’re now liable for it. You should disclose it. So they gotta fix it.

[01:16:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): It is—I mean, yeah. There’s just a huge can of worms in that transaction. And trust me, that story is not the only one I’ve heard. You know, from trucks driving over the sewer pipe coming out of the house, and it didn’t start backing up until much later. If this inspector wasn’t fooling around with his new pipe gadget, where he could put the camera down in the pipe and find that it was crushed—it was only a matter of time before that was gonna back up.

[01:16:25] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[01:16:26] Tracy Hayes: It might have happened in two years by the time enough stuff got clogged up in there to finally shut it off and then—

[01:16:30] Tiffany Freeman: It’s all backed up in the house.

[01:16:31] Tracy Hayes: It’s all backed up in the house. You’re having to dig up the front yard—I mean, that’s not a cheap operation. And good luck getting the builder to come out there.

[01:16:39] Tiffany Freeman: Especially if they’ve moved out of the neighborhood.

[01:16:41] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. It’s one thing if they’re still in the neighborhood—maybe you can get something done. But if they’ve gone, they’ve gone.

[01:16:46] Tiffany Freeman: They’ve gone.

[01:16:47] Tracy Hayes: Tiffany, is there anything else? I think you and I—we could talk for a few hours.

[01:16:51] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah, I think we could.

[01:16:52] Tracy Hayes: But no, I think we’ve covered a lot. I really appreciate it. I think, you know, those listening—the whole—like I said it once before, your experience being the transaction coordinator. I think one of the challenges that agents have—and this would be a chapter in the book—is the challenge of hitting the lid and not realizing there are people out there that really love transaction coordinating.

[01:17:13] Tracy Hayes (cont.): They’re good at it. They’re being trained to do it. They’re being interviewed properly for you. And you need to make some calls—call you, obviously. Call someone like Sam at Ops Suite and amongst the other companies that are out there—and interview ’em. They will open your horizons and really expand your business.

[01:17:30] Tracy Hayes (cont.): I mean, did anyone you know that you’ve ever helped—from the transaction side—ever decline, go down in business?

[01:17:36] Tiffany Freeman: No. If they were at least trying—no. Yeah. Absolutely not. I mean, you know, real estate is—it’s a high-turnover industry.

[01:17:43] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[01:17:44] Tiffany Freeman: And it’s for two reasons. I mean, one, it’s new agents that start and they just never really get traction going. But the other one is high-producing agents burning out. Don’t let yourself get burned out.

[01:17:53] Tracy Hayes: Well, I know this is a question I—’cause I know we had Corey on and he was talking about the support you guys get at Engel & Völkers.

[01:17:59] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah.

[01:18:00] Tracy Hayes: For an agent out there who may be considering looking at another brokerage—you, knowing what the support people do hands-on—'cause you were involved in that—explain a little bit what’s unique about—not saying Engel is the only one doing it—but there are not many other brokerages that are doing... Some brokerages are taking a cut and they’re not giving you anything. What are you getting that really—an agent out there who has maybe hit a lid, doing really good business—might, you know, obviously should be on Corey’s short list, might consider Engel First Coast because of the support staff?

[01:13:33] Tiffany Freeman: And how much mold would've been in that house?

[01:18:26] Tiffany Freeman: So I tell people all the time that the thing that's unique about Engel & Völkers is that Corey expects excellence out of us. Right. The difference is, he prepares us to be excellent, and a lot of that is from the support staff. I mean, if we need a listing agreement, marketing form—plug it in the marketing form. Listing presentation? If we need a listing presentation, plug it in the marketing form. They’ll have it ready for us.

[01:19:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): If we need any marketing—social media marketing, print marketing—I mean buyer consults, anything—we plug it in. The marketing form is on our desk when we get to the office. I can call the office and be like, “Hey, I have this going on and I’m on the road. Can you get a listing presentation prepared for me? I need to drop it off this afternoon.” They’ll have it ready for me. It’s on my desk ready when I get there. And having that level of support as an agent—if you have that paired with a TC—that burden that’s taken off of you is just unbelievable.

[01:19:27] Tracy Hayes: Can you find other ways to accent your marketing? Be more—take some time to really strategize your marketing? 'Cause I think a lot of agents are moving at such fast speed—they’re doing all these things themselves—they don’t really have time to actually plan things 'cause they don’t have time to actually make it happen.

[01:19:42] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can talk to admin at any point in time. They will do social media for you—like they’ll manage your social media if that’s what you’re wanting them to do. We are also rolling out a couple of new programs in the next few months that are just absolute game changers that no other brokerage in the area has.

[01:20:01] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): That are just gonna really change the game on the agent side of things. So, super excited about those. But I think having the ability to just know—I mean, it’s honestly like having an assistant on your team that you’re just paying for as part of your cut. I’m not having—and I only pay my cut if I’m doing business.

[01:20:21] Tracy Hayes: If I’m—

[01:20:22] Tiffany Freeman: If I’m not doing business, I’m not paying my cut. So they want us to succeed, because that’s how the brokerage succeeds. So having that level of support behind you is just incredible.

[01:20:32] Tracy Hayes: Just talking to Corey a few weeks ago when he was on, and understanding—and then I had some people from Real—I think Real is another, you know, if you were looking at cloud-based brokerages—is doing because that person that’s back there, just like Corey and the owner of Real, they’re really thinking: what’s the challenge that agents are having?

[01:21:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): They’re hitting this lid. They need support. Well, if they won’t go out and get their own, I’m going to. If they want to be with me, I’m gonna supply it because I know as a manager—because really what a broker—if he’s managing, if he’s really invested in his agents versus going, “Hey, go out and get some business and I’m just over here if you need me.” He’s actually forward thinking and going, “What obstacles can I get out of the way so you are more forward-facing and spending more time with your clients, spending more time with your follow-ups to get more business from referrals and so forth?” ’Cause you’re nurturing these people.

[01:21:19] Tiffany Freeman: Corey tells us all the time that his goal is to get us more time. Right? He wants us to have more time—however we want to spend that time. If it’s with family, if it’s growing your business more—however you want to spend it, he wants you to have it. And he’s always forward-thinking as to, “Okay, what can I do to give agents more time?”

[01:21:41] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And I also think that a big part of it is like—I can’t imagine ever sitting in Corey’s office and being like, “I feel tapped. I don’t have the support.” Because there’s just so much—like anything that I could possibly need support for, we have it. Like, we have systems in place for client follow-ups and nurturing client relationships. So we just have so many systems in place that are also technology-driven and AI-driven that they’re effortless, right?

[01:22:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): So it takes—that is a huge burden that’s taken off. And I mean, obviously, Corey can give a pep talk like nobody you’ve ever met.

[01:22:10] Tracy Hayes: His locker room talk—

[01:22:11] Tiffany Freeman: His locker room talk—like unmatched. And one thing he said earlier this year at one of our sales meetings was, “It’s personal.” Like everything in this business is personal, right? And so when it feels heavy, it’s because it’s personal. And when it feels great, it feels great because it’s personal. Right? But that’s been like—I’ve kind of carried that with me this year. When we’re doing a high volume of business, it can be really easy to forget that it’s personal. But just centering yourself back on that and remembering how much of an honor it is to be with these people during this part of their lives.

[01:23:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And the support that they give us to make sure that that is just the smoothest transaction—so that in three years, five years, seven years, when they’re ready to sell, there’s no question who they’re calling. Right? Of course they’re calling you back.

[01:23:05] Tracy Hayes: I think the attitude—and I’m gonna steal, you know, in the military to steal, you know, that—and your relationship there, your husband in the military—I’m sure he can relate to this. If you have soldiers out on the front line, which is your agents—they’re out there every day—they’re stressing ’cause they’re not getting paid unless they got a deal.

[01:23:25] Tracy Hayes (cont.): And they’re doing their thing and they need a supply chain. They need to make sure they have the bullets, the marketing support, what’s new coming out, keeping them abreast of what’s going on, keeping all the intel. And if you are not—that is not a robust support that they feel they can go, you could stick your neck out on the front line—you’re not running a successful business. I really wish every broker had this kind of attitude. There’s a handful that do in town—I know them. I’m sure there’s some I don’t know too—but there’s also a lot that are not even anywhere near this type of attitude and mindset.

[01:24:00] Tracy Hayes (cont.): And that’s what really is refreshing to talk to Corey. ’Cause I really feel he is that supply sergeant that’s making sure you have all the right gear, you have the right ammunition, you have the right weapons, and you’re out there on the front line battling it every day. Obviously acquiring clients. And you have a much more level of confidence ’cause you know you’re getting this support—you’re getting what you need.

[01:24:19] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. And he has an absolute knack for just knowing exactly what to say to you when you need to hear it. I mean, like he will just—

[01:24:26] Tracy Hayes: That’s a special trait.

[01:24:27] Tiffany Freeman: It’s a special trait. Especially when you work in a female-dominated industry, right? Like it is an industry where you have—I can see as a man how it would be fair to say and win. But I mean, it’s like—I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked into the office and, like, you know, there’s always an issue going on. I’ll be talking about it and it is like—sometimes he knows that—he’s just like, “Yeah, that’s tough. You’ll get through it.” But then other times, he’s like, “Yeah, life’s tough. So are you. Get a helmet and get in the game.” Like, and it’s like, okay. Yes sir.

[01:25:00] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): So he just knows it—because I mean—

[01:25:01] Tracy Hayes: Sometimes you need that. Sometimes you need that.

[01:25:03] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah. It’s tough. You need to get back in the game. Go.

[01:25:04] Tracy Hayes: You get the moment of recognition and then you get the kick in the butt and you’re back out there.

[01:25:09] Tiffany Freeman: You get the kick in the butt. Okay, go.

[01:25:10] Tracy Hayes: Good. Go.

[01:25:11] Tiffany Freeman: And he just has a knack for knowing exactly what you need to hear, when you need to hear it. But then, I think the most impressive part to me is just how incredibly forward-thinking he is. And he sees the issues that we’re facing—I think—a lot of times before we even know that we’re facing them.

[01:25:30] Tiffany Freeman (cont.): And then by the time we know we’re facing them, he’s rolling out a solution to them.

[01:25:33] Tracy Hayes: That’s leadership.

[01:25:34] Tiffany Freeman: That is leadership. I think that is 100% why the brokerage has been as successful as it is—as quickly as it has. Yeah. Because his leadership—I mean, it is—I mean, he’s 35 years old. Like it’s unbelievable the level of leadership he has for a 35-year-old.

[01:25:45] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:25:46] Tiffany Freeman: Unbelievable.

[01:25:47] Tracy Hayes: All right. I appreciate you coming on today.

[01:25:48] Tiffany Freeman: Yeah, no, thank you so much for having me. Thank—this was so fun.

[01:25:52] Tracy Hayes: Yes. I enjoyed the conversation.

[01:25:53] Tiffany Freeman: I did too. Thank you.