How The Listings Lab Can 10X Your Business With Jess Lenouvel

REE #316 Transcript

[00:00:00] Jess Lenouvel: If you wouldn't run an ad that said, “I only work with rich people,” then you shouldn't market yourself as a luxury agent. Instead, you should be looking at who's transacting in that price point and speak to those people's pains, problems, fears, and desires, because that's how you're going to attract those people, other than, “Okay, I have a country club membership and I roll in those circles.”

[00:00:54] Tracy Hayes: Hey, welcome back to the Real Estate Excellence Podcast. I'm Tracy Hayes, and today I'm joined with Jess Lenouvel, founder of the Listings Lab, bestselling author of More Money, Less Hustle, and one of the real estate industry's leading voices in modern marketing. Jess built a seven-figure real estate business from scratch, closing hundreds of deals through digital marketing, and now helps agents scale their income, freedom, and impact without burning out. This is a strong one. Let's get into it. Jess, welcome to the show.

[00:01:25] Jess Lenouvel: Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here.

[00:01:27] Tracy Hayes: Thank you. Did I pronounce your last name correctly?

[00:01:30] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah, it's Lenouvel.

[00:01:31] Tracy Hayes: Lenouvel.

[00:01:31] Jess Lenouvel: If we're saying it with, like, the English twang, it's, it's “leh-noo-vel.”

[00:01:36] Tracy Hayes: Okay. Okay. You're doing a lot of things and moving and shaking, and I saw one of your ads popped up on my, I think it was Facebook or something. And what really got me intrigued is, I gotta get her on, because I want to hear what she did. You had one of your clients, obviously on stage somewhere, talking about, you know, I guess he was kind of really a below-average agent, to now just probably doing things he never even dreamed about in real estate?

[00:02:01] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have a lot of success stories, I think, for different people that are really looking for different outcomes. We've got some agents who just really want more business, more business coming at them, more inbound clients. For some, it's, “Okay, I've got a certain baseline of business, but I am now the bottleneck, and I'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off, and I really need systems. I need the back end of the business built so that I am not the bottleneck anymore.” And, you know, we do team building, we do automations building and things like that. It really depends on the outcome. We've got a couple of different levels of programs that serve different agents with different needs.

[00:02:42] Tracy Hayes: Well, there's a topic that I've had, you know, for hundreds of agents that I've had on, and I live with one. My wife's an agent, and she is at that point. She's starting to need some help in leveraging, you know, whatever, systems, assistants, whatever it may be. But everyone reaches this lid, yeah, if they're growing in their production, and they reach that lid and it's like, okay, and they could do that for years, just as far as they can go, when with a little bit of coaching, a little bit of systems and so forth, they can double, triple that.

[00:03:11] Jess Lenouvel: Yep, absolutely. I mean, when I, so, I sold real estate for about 15 years myself before I founded the Listings Lab. So I got into the industry pretty young, and I hit that same bottleneck. I went from, you know, $200,000 a year to a million in six months. I got all of my marketing working, everything compounded really quickly, and I wasn't set up systems-wise to handle that kind of volume. I was a solo agent at the time, and so I had to build the systems and build the team out of desperation, and quickly, because I just couldn't handle the amount of business that was coming at me.

[00:03:48] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:03:48] Jess Lenouvel: So I obviously don't coach people to do it that way. I try to get them to be more proactive about building the systems, making sure that delivery is really dialed in, so that when the marketing does work, they are able to handle the business influx that happens.

[00:04:07] Tracy Hayes: I'm gonna have you just move your camera just a little bit, because you're off to one side. Yeah, there you go. Now you're centered. Good, because we cut reels from this. You want to be centered on there. Um, all good.

Let’s talk about that conversation that you have, probably with a lot of them, and just what you're talking about, because obviously in human nature, whether, you know, we all buy insurance in case we have a car accident, right? Yeah. But you're running your business, and you've got this income coming in, and you're like, “Oh, do I want to pay for this service, or do I want to bring on an assistant or a transaction coordinator or whatever it may be, and it's gonna come out of my commissions?” It's like, “Well, let me wait till I get to that point where I really feel overloaded.” Instead of being proactive, how do you approach that conversation?

[00:04:50] Jess Lenouvel: Well, if somebody is treating a hundred percent of their commissions as personal income, they're not running a business. So that's what I would say. Number one is, you should have business accounts and you should have personal accounts, and you should be paying yourself a salary out of your business. If a hundred percent of that money that you're earning through commissions is, you're making the decision between taking your kids to Disneyland and investing in your business, then fundamentally the business is not set up correctly.

Yeah, so the way that I always look at it is that there's a certain amount of money, there's a certain amount of investment and resource that needs to be dedicated towards the maintenance and growth of any business. Imagine if, like, the CEO of Coca-Cola every single year just took a hundred percent of the profits of the business and just took it home. That's just not how businesses are run, right?

And I think because real estate agents, for the most part, are not naturally, or don’t necessarily have a background in business, a lot of people are, early on, it makes sense. You're not making a lot of money, you're doing a couple deals here and there, and you need that money to live. But once you get to a certain point, once you're hitting that six-figure mark, you need to start shifting the way that you're actually treating the money and you're treating the business.

So every single business has money allocated for growth and for systems, for research and development, for all of the things that make a business a business. So I usually, you know, if I look at things, it's my responsibility in my business, for instance, that every single investment that we make, financially or time-wise, there's some sort of an ROI that comes out of that investment.

And so it's kind of the same thing. A real estate agent, even if it's a solo agent, if if—

If you want, I can continue by turning this into a tighter publication-ready transcript format with paragraph breaks and fewer filler words, while still keeping the timestamps and speakers.

investing in certain things, that money is business money. That’s what that money is set aside for.

[00:06:44] Tracy Hayes: In your coaching at the Listings Lab, do you have a section where you’re talking about financials with them?

[00:06:51] Jess Lenouvel: Yep.

[00:06:51] Tracy Hayes: You know, how to structure this, because I think you’re a hundred percent right. A lot of agents come in—and we know a lot of agents fail, too. All of a sudden tax time comes around and they’re not prepared for it. And obviously, at least here in the States, the test isn’t teaching them any of that. And actually, when I think about it, I don’t even know if there are many classes down at the local real estate board here, or in any area, that really talk about it. They’ve got to go to outside sources or coaches like you to really get down to how they should be budgeting that business.

[00:07:24] Jess Lenouvel: I joke around all the time that when we go to get a real estate license, we get taught how to not get sued.

[00:07:30] Tracy Hayes: Yes. Yeah.

[00:07:30] Jess Lenouvel: Right. And I think that that’s really the basics of it. There’s no running a business. I remember when I first got my license, my mom—my mom has been in real estate for 40 years—so I was very lucky that when I got licensed, all the things that I wasn’t taught, I could go to her for. I could say, you know, “What about this? What about this? What about this?” And then, however many years later, my business surpassed her business, and then I had to go and find other resources and other people who could teach me, who could help me, who could help me structure the systems and the business. And so that’s one of the reasons why I do what I do, is because I was also helped by so many coaches along the way. Even to this day, the Listings Lab has, you know, a quarter- to a half-a-million-dollar budget per year to invest in coaching and training.

[00:08:26] Tracy Hayes: To keep you out in front.

[00:08:28] Jess Lenouvel: Yep.

[00:08:29] Tracy Hayes: Yes. All right, let’s step back just a little bit. So give everyone a little bit of background on where you came from. And I kind of always start like this: I don’t think a lot of people—well, your mom was a real estate agent, so you might have had this vision—but as a young person, what did you envision doing? And then what series of events led you up to, “Hey, I’m gonna go take my license”?

[00:08:49] Jess Lenouvel: To be honest, I never thought I would go into real estate. I went to school for, essentially, human rights, African and Caribbean studies. I really thought I was gonna work for the UN, that I was going to, you know, live in the Sudan. And the reality of that really—you know, I think I had rose-colored glasses growing up, and I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I got my license when I was 21. I was fresh out of school. It was basically my mom saying, “You know, get your license, see if you like it. You know, see what happens.” So I got my license, and my very first deal that I did was, I think, like a $1.3 million property. And I thought, “Huh, this isn’t so bad.”

Right now, I mean, I started at Keller Williams. I still love the Keller Williams brand, but I went to all of their trainings, and every single one of them was, “Work your sphere,” you know, all of the traditional marketing things. Granted, this was, like, 20 years ago. And I remember thinking, “None of these things are gonna work for me. I’m 21 years old. I look like I’m 16. My sphere is all my mom’s sphere. My best friend is about to buy her first property, and she’s using my mom. She’s not using me.” So the reality of all of the trainings was, they weren’t built for me.

I was also, at the time, very, very shy, very introverted, and I had to figure out a way that worked for me. So I built my business on Facebook in 2005. And Facebook at the time was a very, very simple platform. It was your wall and a classifieds section. I started just having conversations. I used to call it “prospecting from my PJs,” because I could sit on my couch with my little laptop and I could have conversations with people. And that’s really, ultimately, how I built my business. This is how I got my first hundred deals in real estate.

And then from there, I learned more about social media and more about digital marketing and more about human psychology. And I started essentially being a student of all of the things that I wasn’t learning from my brokerage. And it wasn’t just Keller Williams. I went to Sotheby’s. I ended up at a Canadian brokerage called Royal LePage. And I traveled around looking for solutions my brokerage wasn’t providing. So I had to figure it out on my own.

[00:11:25] Tracy Hayes: Social media was at such an infancy stage at that point that the brokerages weren’t catching up. Obviously, we joked a little about AI before the show, but, you know, some of them are getting out in front of that. But I imagine there’s a tremendous amount of being behind the eight ball on the artificial intelligence side, unless someone’s coming in and forcing it upon them. But they’ve got to grasp onto that probably much faster than they even did Facebook back when you started.

[00:11:51] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are still agents today—I would say 90% of real estate agents today—who aren’t using social media correctly. So, I mean, even just the adoption of that, let alone what’s happening with AI. I think there are a lot of agents that I’m seeing that are using what we’ll call crappy AI outputs. And because they don’t know the difference between something that’s good and something that’s not, we’re seeing the same thing. We’re seeing the people who are learning the skills and becoming students of the change in the world and what’s happening—their outputs are going to skyrocket. Whereas everyone else who’s just kind of dabbling here and there, I think, is gonna struggle. And I think there’s gonna be a really big gap, or a really big divide, between those agents and everyone else.

[00:12:38] Tracy Hayes: I use the analogy with AI that a lot of people just can’t get their arms around it.

[00:12:46] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah.

[00:12:47] Tracy Hayes: But the reality is, there’s a dark side to the moon. In other words, you can’t get your arms all the way around it. You never—but you have to understand what you’re actually doing. And again, you’ve got to keep drilling down on it, drilling down on it. I was just working before we got on the show. I had to make a correction in one of the chapters in the book. I was, you know, making everyone sign off, because I’ve got 50-some agents that I talk about in there. Not telling their whole stories, but just their—

[00:13:14] Jess Lenouvel: Of course. Yeah, yeah.

[00:13:15] Tracy Hayes: Quotes and stuff. But, you know, I needed to make a correction. I actually needed to take someone from one chapter to another, and it did that. And then I’m like, “Okay, give me a new Chapter 5.” And it, uh, yeah, okay, well, “We’ll give you that, but, you know, before you finalize it, we do need to run another run-through and tighten things up.” That was the word he used. I said, “Well, tighten things up then.” Comes back and says, “Okay, here’s your new Chapter 5. But, you know, before we go on, we need to go over Marissa one more time.” It says to me—I’m like, “Well, go over Marissa and give me the…” I’m still in the manuscript stage. I’m like, but you have to, you have to keep almost—I wouldn’t say like talking to a kid sometimes—but you’ve got to keep asking, “Give me better. Give me better. This has to be better.”

[00:14:03] Jess Lenouvel: And it lies.

[00:14:04] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:14:05] Jess Lenouvel: Until it reaches a point where that’s all it gives you, because it doesn’t want to keep answering those questions.

[00:14:10] Tracy Hayes: Right, yeah. My little thing on AI—I’m actually amazed. You know, I’m 55. I’ll be 56 in a few months, and I’m deep in it, creating marketing materials and all this other stuff, you know, and researching and using it for all sorts of things. Writing this book—I’ve actually got two books in play—and then I find there’s, like, 30-year-olds. You mention AI and they’re like, you know, “Oh, that’s bad, bad.” You better get on board because it’s gonna—the people around you are just gonna run right past you, in my vision.

So, you get off—I know everyone’s gonna ask, because you made that statement, “my first hundred deals on Facebook.” And to put the rubber to the road, so you’re a young person. You’re 21, 22 years old. Facebook is just there. What are you actually doing in creating these conversations and creating relationships?

[00:14:59] Jess Lenouvel: Well, I mean, what I did back then would never work today. Right? Okay? Okay. So, you know, the strategy completely changes. That was 20 years ago.

[00:15:07] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:07] Jess Lenouvel: I was just having conversations and essentially moving people from stranger to conversation, and being open to things. Most of those deals—most of that first hundred deals—were people who were looking for rentals, who I was educating in terms of the fact that they could probably buy. Like, they could probably buy their first property.

[00:15:26] Tracy Hayes: Now, so you’re making posts and so forth about this to get people to—

[00:15:30] Jess Lenouvel: Engage? It was both. It was posts, but it was also direct—like direct-message outreach.

[00:15:36] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:36] Jess Lenouvel: You know, I was going into different posts in the classified section of Facebook and seeing people who were looking for rentals. You know, at the time, you could say, “I’m in search of a one-bedroom in this area. This is my budget,” these things. And I would reach out. I would start a conversation and just provide value. And then eventually, a lot of those conversations turned into clients because I was educating and I was building trust. Wow. Now, that would never work today. There’s way too much cold DMing happening on all the platforms, or people—getting a cold DM from a real estate agent in 2026 is not gonna go over the way that it did in 2005.

[00:16:11] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:16:11] Jess Lenouvel: So a lot of the strategies that I used back then—you know, even by the time it was 2010, I had shifted and adjusted. But the fundamental foundation of all of this has always remained the same. And the one thing that I think that I did that most real estate agents have never studied is human psychology, and understanding how to take someone from stranger to client in an automated way through messaging, and how and what do you need to put in front of this person in order for them to build a relationship with you without having to be directly in front of that person. And it’s that knowledge, that skill, and that study that has served me for the last 20 years, being able to use digital platforms to create inbound business. I’ve never chased down a deal in my life. You know, I’ve never run an ad and called, called 10,000 times. It’s just not the way that—if you understand psychology—it’s not the way that you generate good-quality business.

So I think that that knowledge and study has really made a huge difference in terms of the strategies that I’ve used and I’ve built over the years, and the strategies that I teach, frankly, now. It’s all built around how to attract business, how to create a personal brand that brings people towards you, brings the right people towards you, and repels the wrong people. And so with that kind of messaging, with that kind of skill set, and putting out that kind of marketing, it’s essentially—the compound effect is unlimited.

So, you know, by the time I stopped selling real estate, I had a very small team. I had three agents, and we were doing, you know, 250, 300 deals a year. And all of that was generated digitally.

[00:18:08] Tracy Hayes: Wow. So if I can just help, there are brokerages right now that obviously have—they have teams of people. You know, a lot of them come in as new agents and they go, “Okay, we’re gonna get on the phone and we want to have 20 conversations today.”

[00:18:22] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah.

[00:18:22] Tracy Hayes: You were actually taking that to social media—

[00:18:25] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah.

[00:18:25] Tracy Hayes: And having the conversations through those programs.

[00:18:31] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah. And even, like, in 2026, if we think about 2026, you can’t dial the same way that you could dial in 2020, even in 2025.

[00:18:41] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:41] Jess Lenouvel: Right? iOS has completely changed the way that cold outreach performs. You know, in 2025, we would do 150 dials and get four decent conversations. In 2026, we’re looking at 250 dials to have two conversations. The results of that kind of chase—like chasing, of outreach—it’s just gonna continue to dramatically drop. And so, again, like my message has always been to agents like, please catch up. If you are still trying to do all of the old-school things and they’re not working—and they will continue to not work, they’ll continue to stop working the way that they used to as the world evolves—if you put your head in the sand, eventually you’re gonna be in a really bad situation where you’re gonna have to get out of the business because you just don’t have any of the skills, and the gap between what everyone is doing and what you’re doing is so wide.

[00:19:38] Tracy Hayes: You mentioned a few moments ago, you used the word “brand,” which, again, we were talking pre-show how often these agents go to these trainings, whether it’s about social media, whatever, and it’s so surface-level lucky, even at the greatest events in Vegas or whatever that they may go to.

[00:19:55] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah.

[00:19:55] Tracy Hayes: And it’s really not, you know, the rubber meets the road. What are you actually doing—steps A, B, and C—when it comes to brand?

[00:20:05] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah.

[00:20:06] Tracy Hayes: Because I don’t think there’s—I hate to ask, say, “What is your definition of brand?” because that’s—

[00:20:12] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah.

[00:20:12] Tracy Hayes: But what is your vision of what a brand should be in today’s modern world? Because I think a lot of people would agree—most people, if not all—that the Keller Williams, the Coldwell Bankers, those big brands don’t actually—the brand itself—move the needle. Their culture may, because you’re interacting with other agents, you know, wherever, at those events, and meaning they may refer you business because you’re with Compass or you’re with one of the—but the actual walking-down-the-street customer, they are—it’s, they’re looking for you. Am I right?

[00:20:42] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah.

[00:20:42] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:20:43] Jess Lenouvel: So, here’s something I think people don’t sometimes understand, is that as an agent, your brokerage’s ideal client is you. You are their client, not necessarily the client that buys the property. The client that buys the property is your—the agent’s—client. So the job of a brokerage is not to generate business for you as an agent. It’s to serve you and give you the services and the support that you need in order for you to build your business. So when we’re talking about building personal brands, or we’re talking about building brands for agents, the misconception that I still hear and that I still am shocked that people will spend money on is that they think that a brand is colors, logos, and fonts. And colors, logos, and fonts in 2026 are probably the thing that matter the least. Don’t spend time designing your website or building your visual brand package. Those are the things that are not going to—

[00:21:59] Jess Lenouvel: …you anymore in 2026. When we talk about personal brand, a lot of the time that personal brand is stories, personal beliefs, personal philosophies, personal stories. What do people say about you when you’re not in the room? What are you known for? Over time, what we want to do is, when we’re creating any kind of content on social media, we talk about hooks.

[00:22:19] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:20] Jess Lenouvel: Right? So you have to hook someone when, you know, a reel shows up on your screen. What we’re doing with a personal brand over time is we’re turning you into the hook. We want people to stop scrolling because it’s you. They recognize you, they find value or entertainment or connection with you. So they can be scrolling and scroll past 20 other people, but when your face comes on the screen, they stop and they listen. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to accomplish. And then built into all of that is the psychology that I was talking about, of taking that person from stranger to client so that over time they become an inbound piece of business when they’re ready.

Most real estate agents are only talking to the top 3% of people who are ready to buy or sell. Whenever I see a piece of content that’s like, “If you’re looking to buy or sell in 2026,” I’m thinking you are 100% talking to the wrong people, and that’s why your pipeline is empty. Those people are either already working with an agent or they are the client from hell. You do not want those people who are looking to buy or sell in the next 60 days. Who you should be talking to are the people who are in information-gathering mode, the people who are in problem-aware mode. They’re aware that their current situation, their current property, isn’t serving them. They’re starting to think about, “Maybe this is something that we’re gonna have to change.” And then you start showing up in their feed. You start building that relationship, and then over the next however many months, you continue to show up, continue to give value, continue to build that relationship. So by the time they get to information-gathering mode, they’re choosing you because you’ve given them everything that they needed in order to say, “Yes, this is the person that I want to work with.”

[00:24:06] Tracy Hayes: That’s really solid advice, because you are a hundred percent right. And I don’t think—obviously a lot of people think that way—but in reality, that is what’s happening. If someone’s looking to buy or sell, unless some tragedy happened in their life and now they have to move that they didn’t expect, they’ve been thinking about it for a while. And you want to catch them early in the pipeline.

[00:24:26] Jess Lenouvel: Absolutely. And I think that that’s the new definition of pipeline, right? Pipeline used to be like, “Oh, this person says they’re gonna be ready in six months.” The new pipeline, digitally, is catching those people, getting them to start consuming your content when they’re starting to get problem-aware. None of us move because it’s fun. Moving’s terrible. We move because there’s something that we want to make better in our lives through that move.

[00:24:54] Tracy Hayes: Without giving all your secret sauce, but to our listeners—hopefully we’ve caught their attention here with this—what are some of the things that you’re coaching your people, and kind of give the setting of changing this mindset in their content creation? You know, creating that earlier in the pipeline. I’m gonna just use mindset, ideology.

[00:25:18] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah. I mean, so I think for a lot of people, too, they just need to understand the structure of it. So your content has to speak to, you know, cold, medium, warm, hot. You have to speak to all of them. And so at any point, someone who’s consuming your content could be in any of those stages. They could be in problem-aware mode. They could be in information-gathering mode. They could be in the “I’m ready to pull the trigger” mode, right? And so you have to be able to create content.

Now, that “I’m gonna pull the trigger” mode is only 3% or less of your current audience. So when you’re creating that content, you also have to understand that you’re speaking to a very small number of people. The reason why agents have a really hard time growing their audiences on social media—we see a lot of agents who get stuck in the 300-to-2,000-follower range—a lot of it is because they’re treating social media like a billboard. They’re posting properties. They’re posting just listed, just sold, open houses, things like that. And so you’re only speaking to 3% of the market at any one time.

And so if you’re only relevant to 3% of the market, or less, at any one time, you’re gonna have a really hard time building a relationship because you are seen as a salesperson, and you’re seen as someone who is only relevant during this very short window. If people move every, what, eight and a half years?

[00:26:44] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:45] Jess Lenouvel: So you’re only relevant every eight and a half years, which means that your audience is not gonna compound and you’re gonna have audience churn. So in order to build a brand that is seen as someone who I want to stay connected with, that I want to follow between my moves, that I want to refer to on a consistent basis, all of those things come from speaking to people at different points in their journey and sharing your own personal story.

I hear from agents every day, “I’m a private person. I don’t want to share my life on social media.” And I had a client reflect this to me three weeks ago, and I think it was the most beautiful way of saying it, and she said it way better than I ever have. She said, “You know what I’ve realized? I’m asking people to let me into their homes, to tell me all the things that are happening in their lives, to go through their divorces and death and all of the struggles in their lives with them, and I won’t do the same for them.” Connection goes both ways.

[00:27:53] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:27:53] Jess Lenouvel: So I just thought that was such a beautiful way of thinking about it, because I always say that your page, or your profile, or your personal brand is your home online.

[00:28:06] Tracy Hayes: If you’re gonna resonate with that person when that time comes—you know, “Hey, we like to do these things.” Well, I like to do those things too. And there becomes this just—people attract like kind.

[00:28:18] Jess Lenouvel: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:19] Tracy Hayes: And if you are open and asking them to be open, they’re gonna be open with you. And everybody feels comfortable in the room versus one person talking, the other one not. You know?

[00:28:28] Jess Lenouvel: Absolutely. That’s—and you know, we hear the cliche—

[00:28:31] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:28:31] Jess Lenouvel: We hear the cliche of know, like, trust. Everyone always says, “Oh, you gotta build know, like, and trust,” right? How can someone know you, like you, or trust you if they don’t know anything about you? It’s this professional persona that so many real estate agents are hiding behind on social media that is actually the reason why they’re not getting results.

[00:28:50] Tracy Hayes: I imagine the Listings Lab became before the book, or did the book come after the—

[00:28:56] Jess Lenouvel: No, the Listings Lab was before the book.

[00:28:58] Tracy Hayes: Okay, so let’s start there.

[00:29:00] Jess Lenouvel: Tell us how I wrote the book before AI.

[00:29:02] Tracy Hayes: So it was a labor of love.

[00:29:04] Jess Lenouvel: The book came out, I think, in 2022.

[00:29:08] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm. And for the audience, More Money, Less—

[00:29:10] Jess Lenouvel: Hustle.

[00:29:11] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah. It’s called More Money, Less Hustle: Becoming the Seven-Figure Real Estate Agent. I never aspired to write a book, but it was one of those things that people kept asking me for book recommendations, and I kept saying, “I don’t like any of the books that are out there for this specific situation.”

[00:29:27] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:29:27] Jess Lenouvel: So then—

[00:29:28] Tracy Hayes: Your thoughts—you gotta get your thoughts down on the pages, and people start to see a little bit more of Jess and what she’s all about, right? Because it’s hard to take it all in at one time, I imagine.

[00:29:37] Jess Lenouvel: And it’s been the best thing ever because, yes, I wrote this book. Yes, it went out there. Yes, I’ve got, you know, so many people—so many more people in my world because they’ve read that book. But then AI came out, and the best thing to train AI was my manuscript.

[00:29:54] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:29:54] Jess Lenouvel: So I just put my manuscript into different AI programs and guess what? It has my voice and it can speak like me.

[00:30:04] Tracy Hayes: Exactly. That’s why I was just telling my boss here—there’s a couple other people in our kind of general group of mortgage people with the company here in the area that have written some sort of form of book—and I’m like, “Tom, you’ve been in this business for over 30 years. You need to start recording your stories, everything, these conversations you’re having, and put it in there and start feeding it your transcripts.” And then it becomes you, and now it hears more, you know, it’s—

[00:30:32] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah. So there’s an AI content-creation tool called Echo Me. I think tryechome.com is the website—Echo Me. And I helped Arian, who built it, with it. And it’s unbelievable because, one, it’s closed AI, so it’s not OpenAI, it’s not using ChatGPT or Claude, but it’s trained through a knowledge base of the things you put into it. And then the outputs are unbelievable if you give it enough.

And I’m still one of those people who’s a little skeptical about AI content creation because I’ve seen so much really bad—

[00:31:10] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:31:10] Jess Lenouvel: Content.

[00:31:11] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Content, yeah.

[00:31:11] Jess Lenouvel: Right? And so I’m always a little wary because people will submit things into our programs and I’ll think, “This is slop. This is AI slop,” and we have to send this back to them because they can’t recognize what’s good and what’s not. Over time, we’re all gonna get more proficient at recognizing it all. But it’s just been really interesting to be able to see, with adoption of AI, the people who are using it and the people who aren’t. And when it comes to marketing and social media, you know, I think that there’s—

It used to, you know, a year ago, it was em dashes that was like, “Oh, if there’s em dashes in it, you can tell that it was AI.” But nowadays, it’s not the em dash. There is a writing formula that AI uses. I call it the negative, negative, positive, right? “You don’t need more leads, and you don’t need to be busier. The truth is, you need this,” right? And it’s the same formula that you just see over and over and over again.

[00:32:09] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:32:09] Jess Lenouvel: Right. And I think that every time we see it, I’ll highlight it and I’ll say, “Nope.” So send it back.

[00:32:18] Tracy Hayes: Well, I mean, really the fact that you can talk to it—and, you know, there’s different parts, like writing this book. It said, “Hey, this area needs a little bit more Tracy and it needs a little bit more…” And then it would tell me, “Hey, create a paragraph. Write three or four sentences or whatever talking about this.” Well, I would just get in the mic and talk, right?

[00:32:39] Jess Lenouvel: Exactly.

[00:32:40] Tracy Hayes: It likes that.

[00:32:41] Jess Lenouvel: Exactly.

[00:32:41] Tracy Hayes: It’s hearing your actual voice and, you know, how you say things and so forth, and it just gets better. So what is the “less hustle” in the More Money, Less Hustle?

[00:32:50] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah. It’s the leverage. It’s the systems and the automation and the team. People think, “Oh my gosh, she’s got a team of almost 20 people and so busy,” and all of these things. I’m not so busy. Mm-hmm. I don’t actually work that much. And even when my team was doing, you know, 250, 300 deals a year, none of us were run off our feet. We were taking vacations. We were, you know, going away on a regular basis. We were taking weekends with our partners, had hobbies, and were doing other things because the systems, the automation, and the support team was there to make sure that all we had to do were the things that we had to do. And so your job description becomes very small when you systematize.

[00:33:40] Tracy Hayes: Do you feel a lot of people, when they see what you created or at least have some vision—wow, Jess and her team are doing these things—but they just have this fear of jumping out of the nest?

Mm-hmm. And relying on other people and then relying on technology?

[00:34:00] Jess Lenouvel: So Yuri V. said something really, really interesting at a talk that he gave a couple months ago, and he said, “Nostalgia isn’t a strategy.” And he was talking to real estate agents, and that comfort zone, that nostalgia, the way that it used to be, and the good old days—the good old days of real estate—those aren’t coming back. So when you hold on to the things that used to work for you, that you built your business on, or that is your comfort level, it’s very scary as adults to be bad at something. We’re not used to it. Kids are so used to falling over when they run or, you know, learning something new. As adults, we’re actually terrible at that. We only want to do the things that we’re good at, but the things that we’re good at are not the new things. We have to embrace the suck. We have to be bad at things in order to get good at them.

And so I think that’s really where people get stuck, is they’re like, “I’m scared of making a fool of myself. I’m scared of being bad at something. I am uncomfortable for the first time in my business in 15 years.” But that is—that’s the same boat that everyone else is in too. And so the people who can embrace the suck, who are willing to try something new and be bad at it at first, those are the people who are essentially widening that gap. And they’re going to get a leg up on all of those people who are sitting on their hands and delaying the building of the new skills.

[00:35:35] Tracy Hayes: This is an AI question here created up. I think this is pretty good, though. What is the core philosophy behind the Listings Lab, and why does it work when so many agents are burnt out by old-school prospecting, or this nostalgia that we’re just talking about?

Mm-hmm.

[00:35:50] Jess Lenouvel: I think that the core philosophy is built on something that doesn’t change. So human psychology doesn’t change. The way that we use human psychology changes. So the tech changes, the social media platforms change, the way that email gets delivered changes, like the nitty-gritty digital things, those things change. But the foundational psychology and the science that everything is built on, that’s been the same for hundreds of years. And so we can rely on that. And once we learn that, we can apply it to the world that we live in and continue to create the evolution of it.

If you don’t have that, it’s not gonna work no matter how much—no matter how many reels you post, or how many—you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall and you’re hoping to get lucky.

[00:36:44] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:36:45] Jess Lenouvel: Whereas when we build the science into it, the platforms and the mediums change, but everything else remains solid. We know that human psychology is there, that that’s the foundation of it.

[00:37:00] Tracy Hayes: Is it the people—you said something a little, probably 10, 15 minutes ago—but something about that, the people, they need to study the psychology. And I know a lot of, you know, Keller Williams is big on the DISC assessment and stuff, and I think the agent I had on the other day, she’s very—she’s with Keller Williams, and she was talking about how they worked really hard on the team that she was on, she had a great leader, about really using that DISC assessment and analyzing their client so they could obviously talk to them correctly. Mm-hmm. You know, whatever, all those things, the psychology about, in your case—you mentioned learning it, but was it more trial and error for you in getting an understanding? It was there.

[00:37:42] Jess Lenouvel: No, it should never be trial and error. So that’s the part that is so important, is market research becomes incredibly important. Also niching down—or niche-ing down. I never know if I’m talking to Canadians or Americans.

[00:37:56] Tracy Hayes: Right.

[00:37:57] Jess Lenouvel: So niching down and, like, being able to say, “This is the person who I speak to.” People niche in the wrong ways all the time. They’ll say, “Oh, I specialize in condos.” I’m like, “Nope. Who are the people buying the condos? Who are the people transacting in the condos? Are they upsizers? Are they downsizers? Are they first-time buyers? Are they seasoned investors? Are they first-time investors? Are they dog owners living in condos?” Who is the person? Who is the person? And then what are the pains, problems, fears, and desires that is driving that person’s move? That is how you create messaging.

[00:38:31] Tracy Hayes: Another brilliant statement there for the listeners. You went one step further. “Hey, I like to—I want luxury.” Okay, well then you need to market to the who. Who are those people? And where I think a lot of their first vision is, “Hey, I wanna do luxury. I wanna be,” you know, here—beaches in Jacksonville and St. Augustine, where I’m at—they want to, that’s what they’re visualizing, and not the actual person who is buying those homes.

[00:38:56] Jess Lenouvel: So I always joke that luxury’s not a niche. If you wouldn’t run an ad that said, “I only work with rich people,” then you shouldn’t market yourself as a luxury agent. Instead, you should be looking at who’s transacting in that price point and speak to those people’s pains, problems, fears, and desires, because that’s how you’re actually gonna attract those people, other than, “Okay, I have a country club membership and I roll in those circles.”

[00:39:22] Tracy Hayes: I think I know the answer to this question up front because of our conversation, but I’m gonna ask it just to put it out there for the audience. For an agent that’s stuck at six figures—because you talk about going from six to seven—yep—stuck at six figures, what usually needs to change first: their mindset, their messaging, marketing, or systems?

[00:39:40] Jess Lenouvel: Usually it’s marketing. Usually we hit marketing first because if someone is in scarcity from a money standpoint, they aren’t in the right mindset or headspace to work on the rest of the business.

[00:39:56] Tracy Hayes: Well, I mean, do you have to—I, because I thought mindset would’ve been the obvious answer to that. You said marketing, but do they have to accept the marketing—or my first thing is, well, are they—so they’re gonna change the marketing from what they’ve been doing, if they’re doing anything. Mm-hmm. Gotta change their mindset to accept the marketing suggestions you may be coaching on or they’re researching on.

Yeah.

[00:40:16] Jess Lenouvel: I mean, there’s a certain amount of openness that I think needs to be there, but also people are either coachable or they’re not.

[00:40:24] Tracy Hayes: Yes.

[00:40:24] Jess Lenouvel: And I run into people all the time who book calls and they’re like, you know, “I’m really interested in your program.” And then I get on a call with them and they just wanna tell me that they know everything.

[00:40:33] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:40:34] Jess Lenouvel: And I’m like, “Okay, great. If you know everything, then why did you book this call?” Clearly there’s a result that you don’t have. And I’ve always said, you know, “If your life doesn’t show it, then you don’t know it.” And if you don’t have the results in your business, then no, you don’t know everything, because otherwise, if you did know everything, your business wouldn’t be stuck where it is.

[00:41:00] Tracy Hayes: Gimme that quote one more time.

[00:41:01] Jess Lenouvel: If your life doesn’t show it, you don’t know it.

[00:41:03] Tracy Hayes: “If your life doesn’t show it, you don’t know it.” I love it. That is actually common sense.

[00:41:11] Jess Lenouvel: It’s common sense.

[00:41:11] Tracy Hayes: We didn’t really think about that.

[00:41:13] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah. But many agents are like, “Well, I already know all this.” I’m like, no you don’t, because I’m looking at your social media right now, and it’s not good, and I know you’re not getting business from this.

[00:41:23] Tracy Hayes: I think that’s that surface level, you know, masterminds we may go into, or trainings or whatever. Oh, I reached out to—I had a gentleman who was doing an AI search, and the agents could put it right on their website, so hopefully driving people to use their websites for a search and so forth. Anyway, but when I called someone and said, “Hey, I’ve got this friend of mine. He is a young guy, but he’s one of these kids that just gets it. He’s a prodigy.” I said, “Would you sit down and chat with him for 30 minutes? He wants to show you what he has.” And they’re like, “Well, I was just at a conference and they were talking about AI. What part of AI are you talking about?”

[00:42:04] Jess Lenouvel: Right. AI is an umbrella.

[00:42:07] Tracy Hayes: Oh my God. Yeah. It’s as big as the world, really, when you think about it.

[00:42:11] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah, no, I know. And I think that, you know, you hear someone speak for 30 minutes, then they think, “Oh, I’ve got all the information.” No, you don’t. This is like—certain people, this is their life’s work, and they don’t know everything. So I just think it’s so arrogant to be able to say like, “Oh, I already know all of this.” Well, if you already know all of this, you should be the absolute top earner in not only your market, your brokerage, the country.

[00:42:38] Tracy Hayes: Well, people should be seeking you out to come speak to them at lunch rooms, to come and teach it.

[00:42:44] Jess Lenouvel: A hundred percent. Exactly. No, and so—but I—but the same thing, you know, I speak on stages all over the world. I am working with some of the biggest brokerages to build out their training systems for their agents, and I’m still learning. I still have coaches. I’m still taking training. I’m still talking to people who are further ahead than me. If anybody ever says, “I already know all of this,” I’m like, I’m done learning—that in and of itself just shows me, like, I can’t work with that person. And yeah, and that person’s never gonna see the results that they say that they want.

[00:43:20] Tracy Hayes: Yeah. No, I totally agree. You talk a lot about building a business instead of building yourself a job. What does that look like for a real estate agent, day to day?

[00:43:30] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah, it just means that, like, let’s get you out of the day-to-day in the business as much as we can. I think so many real estate agents get into the business and they serve clients. The client-services, the customer-service part of the business becomes the majority of their time.

[00:43:47] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:48] Jess Lenouvel: Now, if you spend 90% of your time serving a customer, you don’t actually have any time to work on the business. And so one of the scariest parts for most agents—but one of the most important parts for an agent wanting to grow, or wanting to grow past their stuck point—is that they need to get client services, client delivery, off their plates, because once you are no longer responsible for serving all clients, this is one of the main reasons why, you know, team—we see team leads all the time that can’t get out of production. And it’s because they haven’t built systems, they haven’t built the standard operating procedures, they don’t have the actual proper processes that they’re training their agents to follow. And so then—and their marketing is all geared around themselves and not their process.

Right? Real estate agents don’t sell property. Real estate agents sell services, and they consult on the sale of real estate. So if you are not really, really good at talking about and selling your process and what it is that you do for clients and what your whole team can do for your clients, then you are gonna get stuck in production. So it’s both a scaling mechanism, but also a marketing mechanism. And it becomes really important to get you out of production so that you can become the CEO of a business and you can work on the business instead of having to work in the business every day.

[00:45:14] Tracy Hayes: Well, you reached that level. We were talking about, you know, you have time today. And this—obviously the great ones, the Gary Vs. and these guys that talk all around the world, men and women—they talk about their meditation time, you know, whatever, getting up in the morning, and they have this whole process before they actually start working in the day, because you have to—would you agree? And it sounds like you’ve reached this level. You have to let your mind, first of all, catch up with all the information you gave it from the day before, and then start to actually think about how you’re gonna implement it into the next day and beyond.

[00:45:49] Jess Lenouvel: You’ll never come up with anything brilliant if you’re busy all day.

[00:45:52] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:54] Jess Lenouvel: If your brain is constantly jumping from one text to the next ask, to the next conversation, to the next, you’ll never create anything really of worth because you haven’t given your brain time to rest and process.

[00:46:06] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:46:06] Jess Lenouvel: And so even Bill Gates—I don’t know if we love Bill Gates right now—but even Bill Gates, you know, he takes these retreats where he goes away, like a cabin in the woods, with no technology and some books for a week at a time to think.

[00:46:24] Tracy Hayes: Yeah.

[00:46:25] Jess Lenouvel: And that’s where the brilliant ideas and the fundamental changes that happen at these companies—that’s where that comes from. It comes from slow thinking time. Your brainwaves when you’re in theta are much more effective than when you’re in beta or alpha and you’re constantly on, or thinking, or talking, or, you know—none of the really, really good stuff is gonna come from that.

[00:46:53] Tracy Hayes: Great. I’m gonna jump ahead, ’cause I know we’re tight. So I want to ask some of these others that I think, again, are rubber-meets-the-road type questions. But right now, what are you seeing with your clients as the biggest mistakes agents are making in digital marketing when they’re trying to attract business online?

[00:47:08] Jess Lenouvel: Still posting just listed, just sold. Like, it’s just—the way that I see it is it’s spam. They’re still spamming their audience online, not understanding the formats that are relevant, right? Static photos on Instagram are not going to get you anywhere unless it’s in a carousel, right? We’ve got two formats on Instagram right now. We’ve got Reels and we’ve got carousels, and anything else is not a relevant format at the moment.

But again, it all has to be built on the framework of psychology, really understanding what does your client need to hear from you today, and what is going to move that person forward in the psychological journey from stranger to client? And then what is the format that I can put in front of them that is not only gonna stop their scroll, but is gonna get them to consume this piece of content that I’m putting out?

The other thing that I think is very underutilized by real estate agents is trial Reels. So if you have over a thousand followers on Instagram, you have access to trial Reels. Trial Reels right now—and I don’t know if they’re gonna keep it going—it’s basically free advertising. I’m posting on trial Reels five times a day right now.

[00:48:11] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm.

[00:48:12] Jess Lenouvel: Because it gets pushed out to your non-followers. So essentially you’re getting exposure for that content to people who don’t already follow you, and we really get to put ourselves and our high-quality content—

[00:48:26] Tracy Hayes: I’m gonna take that away from today.

[00:48:28] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m actually doing a trial Reels workshop on April 8th. If you want to come, you’re welcome to come join me.

[00:48:35] Tracy Hayes: Oh, I appreciate it.

[00:48:36] Jess Lenouvel: And it’s one of the coolest tools that we’ve had in a long time to grow audience and to grow exposure quickly. So that’s also something that’s been really great. The other thing that I think sometimes people don’t really fully understand is we are in an interest-based algorithm. So it also doesn’t matter—you can have 200 followers and your post can still reach 2 million people—

[00:48:59] Tracy Hayes: —if your 200 are engaging, or a good percentage of that 200 are engaging. So it’s saying, “Oh, your audience is liking it. Let me push it out to some more people.”

[00:49:08] Jess Lenouvel: Right. The whole point of these platforms is to keep people on the platforms because they only make money if they can be fed ads. The only way to feed them ads is if they stay on the platform. So if your—

[00:49:09] Jess Lenouvel: …content is engaging enough that people are watching it all the way through, are liking our stuff—not even really liking; likes don’t really matter that much anymore—but they’re sharing it. They’re staying on the platform, and you are contributing to them consuming content and consuming more ads. You’re making the platform money, and therefore they’re gonna reward you with more views.

[00:49:42] Tracy Hayes: I like this question here because we were talking about AI, and it’s always a hot topic and always, always gets views, right? Say something about—mm-hmm—AI is everywhere too. Where do you believe AI helps agents most in marketing, and where does it start hurting the brand?

[00:49:57] Jess Lenouvel: I think that—I’ll start with where it hurts. I think it hurts the brand if you’re just using generic AI anything and you aren’t training it, there’s no knowledge base, and you’re just taking generic AI anything and using it anywhere. I do think that there’s a lot of damage that can be done to a personal brand by not understanding how to train and properly use any kind of AI. It doesn’t matter if it’s OpenAI, like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or if it’s closed, or if it’s more of a closed AI creation system or something like that. The more information you give it, the better the outputs will be.

Now, I think some of the best use for it is for people to not have to start with a blank page, you know? Most people haven’t trained their AI to a point where they can just input, copy, and paste. So that’s okay, but you can at least get to a point where you can have something that is usable, that is, you know, a starting point, and then you can edit it to make it something that is usable for you.

So, you know, if you aren’t super, super, super in-depth, or you haven’t trained whatever platform you’re using for months and months and months, just edit the outputs, make it sound like you, and continue to train it to build that—I’m gonna call it a knowledge base—for it to pull from, and fact-check it. I’ve been seeing agents that have been posting things that are not true.

[00:51:30] Tracy Hayes: Right. Well, one of the things that we were talking about—the search I was talking about the gentleman earlier, Lyman, my friend there doing—is you scan your pictures before you do your listing, have it scan all the pictures of the house and have it create a listing description from the pictures, because it might actually pick up or describe things better than you have, or things that you may not have thought were important. But it’s another person’s eyes, which leads me to a gentleman I was watching just a little clip on, because I always got YouTube on, whether I’m watching news stories or watching content. But he was talking about, you know, like you said, have a conversation with it. Talk to it like you are actually talking to a very smart human being. Like, “Hey, how do I do this? And then where do I go from here? And this is where I want to go. What would be the best ways to do that?” And just have that conversation going back and forth, and it starts to understand your thinking and where you’re at. At least that’s what I found.

[00:52:26] Jess Lenouvel: I joke around that there’s a third person in my marriage now because my husband is constantly talking—I’m—and we call it Judy. So I’ll be like, “Are you talking to Judy?” And, like, my husband and Judy talk more than I talk to him. So, so yeah, talk—I mean, talk to your AI, but also talk to your wife. She misses you.

[00:52:49] Tracy Hayes: All right, there was one question here I saw. Yep. Uh, oh, here we go. Right now, what’s the difference between content that’s getting engagement versus content that gets appointments?

[00:53:00] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah, they’re completely different types of content. So I would say personal beliefs, personal philosophy, personal story, opinions—that’s gonna get engagement. Shares, stories—that’s gonna get engagement. The type of content that converts people: case studies, testimonials, and PR. Case studies are the most underused type of content on social media by real estate agents. Instead of just listed, just solds, you should be using case studies. Use AI to help you build those case studies. Where were they before? Where are they after? What was the process to get them there? Think about HGTV. HGTV is an entire network of case studies, and you watch it and you get pulled into these stories and you live vicariously through these people. Do the same thing with your clients.

[00:53:46] Tracy Hayes: Awesome analogy there. That’s why we watch TV and get engaged with that stuff all the time, is because there’s a story. That’s brilliant. All right, we’re gonna finish up because I know you gotta get on your call.

[00:53:57] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah.

[00:53:57] Tracy Hayes: Tell people why they should reach out to listingslab.com and learn more about you and your services.

[00:54:05] Jess Lenouvel: Yeah, I mean, go to thelistingslab.com or just go to my Instagram. It’s just my name, just @jesslenouvel.

[00:54:13] Tracy Hayes: Mm-hmm. And we can connect—connect too. That’ll all be in the show notes.

[00:54:17] Jess Lenouvel: Yep. Yeah, perfect. And we can connect there too. You can see the kind of content that I create. You can get to know me a little bit better. You can see a little bit more in depth in terms of what I do. I give away a ton of free stuff on my Instagram as well, you know, free assets. I’m always doing workshops and trainings. It doesn’t matter if you are a brand-new agent or you’re a seasoned agent, you’ll find kind of everything that you need there because I’m assuming even the people who are gonna find me who are really seasoned agents—you know, this whole AI content creation, social media, digital world might be new for you, and you need someone who’s gonna kind of hold your hand through the scary process of figuring it all out. And so I’d love to be that guide. My Instagram is kind of a perfect place to start.

[00:54:56] Tracy Hayes: Appreciate you. Hey, make sure you go through and you like me. I’m gonna invite you into the private page where every guest has been on the private Facebook page so you can, you know, post when you’re having some of these trainings and things like that.

[00:55:09] Jess Lenouvel: Perfect. I would love that.

[00:55:11] Tracy Hayes: And attract the agents that are there, and I’ll definitely forward those posts and all that kind of good stuff.

[00:55:14] Jess Lenouvel: You are amazing. Thank you.

[00:55:15] Tracy Hayes: Jess, I appreciate you coming on. Great show. We definitely could have talked for hours. We will see you on the other side.

[00:55:21] Jess Lenouvel: See you soon.

[00:55:22] Tracy Hayes: Thanks. You have a great day.

[00:55:24] Jess Lenouvel: You too. Bye.

[00:55:25] Tracy Hayes: Bye.