Karin Carr is a Realtor in Savannah, Georgia. She is a proud military wife and Certified Military Residential Specialist. She’s built a business and attracted many relo clients by promoting Virtual House Hunting on social media and even local media. She is a frequent guest on real estate blogs, podcasts and webinars. She has also garnered a large following on her YouTube Channel and is the Amazon best selling author of “YouTube for Real Estate Agents – Learn How To Get Free Real Estate Leads and Never Cold Call Again”
By being on the forefront of Virtual House Hunting she has built her business and team in Savannah from the ground up after moving there not long ago. The interview below articulates from Karin’s perspective and experience how Virtual House Hunting is an easy, game changing decision for your business too.
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Lauren Taylor
Hey everyone! Lauren Taylor here. I am so excited because I have one of my good friends, Karin Carr, from Savannah, Georgia who is talking with us today a little bit about her experience with virtual reality house hunting. I’m just really excited because you were one of the first people that when we came out with this, you’re like, this is amazing…I’m gonna run with it! I’m interested in hearing about what’s changed in your life since you’ve been doing our program for 90 days?
Karin Carr
Well, thank you. Yeah, you know, I had been showing properties through FaceTime for years. I had a lot of people that were moving into the area, and I would just do it with FaceTime and it worked…but you know, it has its downsides. You have to be live on the phone with them at the time. If you don’t have a good signal, it drops the video and they can’t record it. They can’t watch it again. So it was okay, but it wasn’t ideal. Then 360 cameras come out and they started becoming the new thing and people were playing with them on Facebook, but it never even occurred to me to use it for this purpose. Until you started talking about Savvy House Hunting. I was like, she’s freaking brilliant. That’s what we’re gonna do!
Lauren Taylor
We started in San Diego with FaceTime. I mean, it, it made sense, right? If they can’t make it, maybe my schedule is a little different and I can get out, give them a little bit better service and turns out people loved it. And then it’s like, I tell people that you can’t, you know, you can’t go back to ordinary once you know, extraordinary exists, right? So once you take that first little, like, dip toe into video house hunting, and now it’s just like, just run with it.
Karin Carr
I know. So now when I get a new buyer lead, I haven’t even come into the office. I say, you know, if I’ve got him on the phone, I’m asking him all my qualifying questions, I’ll just say, well, when can we get together for 15 or 20 minutes so I can take down exactly what it is that you’re looking for in a house. Then I tell him I have a new program that’s totally gonna blow you out of the water when you see it. It’s completely free of charge, and I’ll show that to you when you come in. So they come in, I do my typical buyer presentation. I’m going to help them get pre approved, I’m going to help you find the house, I’m going to help you write the offer, I’m going to negotiate on stuff, I’m going to hold your hand, all of this stuff is not going to cost you a penny. But then I launch into the whole Savvy House Hunting part of it. If they’re there physically in front of me at the office, you know, I just pull out my phone, and I pull up a video and I start swiping around showing them and then I stick it in the goggles, and I hand it to them. Once they start, they’re like, Oh, my God, this is so cool. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of times, I’ve had long distance buyers where we’re not face to face. So we’re doing it just like this through zoom, I share my screen with them and I go into the Savvy House Hunting portal and I show them how it’s going to work. And when I start clicking and dragging with the mouse spinning the room around, they’re like, this is so cool. So then when you say,
Lauren Taylor
Oh, sorry, I totally cut you off. I like love to watch you do it because I feel like you’ve also been one of our best agents. It’s not just virtual house hunting, right? It’s a space you know, you’re in this private, social house hunting space. You can look at videos, they can reply back to it, you’ve custom branded it to like show your brand, not ours. I mean, that’s gonna be pretty neat to see them kind of start realizing that..they can socially interact in a space that’s like not in person.
Karin Carr
Right? I mean, it’s really cool when there’s the video in the portal and underneath that he says, I think we can skip this one. I don’t like how close it is to the next door neighbors or I love this one. When I come to town next weekend, I really want to see this one in person. And you’ve got this whole chain of yes, no, Yes. No. Yes, no. And it makes it so much easier to keep track of. So when you come to town next weekend, these are the ones that we’re going to go see.
Lauren Taylor
Yeah, and it’s like a second showing. That’s the thing is that what we started to realize is that all these people who are previewing via video, our second showing to offer ratio just went through the roof because they already knew what they were looking for. It helped them, you know, create the context that they didn’t have before they experienced it via video.
Karin Carr
I’ve been telling my colleagues about this and they’ll say, well, doesn’t that take a lot of time? I say, well, I’m going to the house anyway. I’m either going to go there with the client or I’m going to go by myself and, trust me, if I go by myself it’s a lot faster.
Lauren Taylor
Yeah, yes, that is like one of the biggest misconceptions is like well, now I have to go I have to create this video. It’s like the average homebuyer tour takes 25 minutes. It takes me six minutes to create a video. I can do that when I’m going to the grocery store or picking my kids up from soccer. I can’t even tell you how many times I have my kids eating french fries in my car why I created a six minute walkthrough video that you know, it’s like okay, you wait in the car, I’ll be right back. So now how has this changed how you attract buyers to work with you? I know you had mentioned you had like a blog post that brought someone in. You were also just on TV in your area. I mean, how has that changed your, you know, persona there in Savannah?
Karin Carr
It’s crazy, because I just moved to Savannah on June 1. It was my first day at the new office so I’ve literally been there what five months? I’m new to the area and people don’t know me. I have no market share. People have never really heard of me before… and I was on freakin news on Fox TV two nights ago talking about this service. Now people are just like, what? It makes so much sense when they see it that they’re like, how did we never think of this before? And you’re right once once they start doing it, they’ll never be able to go back to the old way again.
Karin Carr
Yeah, it’s easy for me to get them to sign the buyer brokerage agreement as well because after I sit down and I show them how this works, they say wonderful. Okay, to get started, all you need to do is sign this document officially hiring me for my services. Again, it’s free of charge to you. This will allow me to get started working on your behalf and nobody says no, I don’t want to do it. They’re like, great, where do I sign?
Lauren Taylor
That’s awesome. That’s a huge hurdle to overcome in our business. I know so many agents who aren’t even comfortable asking but the reality is that you need to be protected in these relationships and you are going above and beyond. So what is your goal?
Karin Carr
Oh, I was gonna say there’s so many people that they spend, you know, months with their buyer. Then the buyer goes and writes an offer with the agent that was hosting the open house. I’m like, how is it that you did not have a buyer brokerage agreement already in place? And they’re like, well, I didn’t want to ask, I didn’t want to be pushy. But when I present this is, look, this is a killer thing. And nobody else is doing this. You’re only going to get this from me. And it doesn’t cost you any money. They’re totally happy to sign.
Lauren Taylor
Yes, there’s definitely a benefit of being first, right? And we talked about this in the group, how you position yourself as not just a virtual house hunter, but as an innovator. I mean, right now, It will start snowballing very quickly over the next couple months, but you want to be the first person in your community because when we do have someone copy the idea, man, they’re like, oh, well, Karin has been doing that. You know, you’re like the original Savvy House Hunter!
Karin Carr
Well, thank you so much. Oh, sure. I just want to say I drafted up a press release. And I sent it to all the TV stations to say, you know, Savannah area realtor showing houses through virtual reality. And when Fox News contacted me that was their whole thing was this is I mean, virtual reality, people think that it’s only for playing video games. And this is a really cool way to show people that we can use this technology in our day to day life and have a practical application, not just watching roller coaster videos on YouTube. And that was their whole angle of the story was how cool this is. And they made sure to say that I was the first one doing it in Savannah, that was pretty awesome.
Lauren Taylor
Yeah, that was awesome. If you guys want to see the clip, it’s on our Facebook page as well. So thank you so much for taking the time. I’m so excited to watch your business just continue to explode this next year. If you have one tip of someone who’s maybe on the fence about joining and starting the program, and what tip would you give them?
Karin Carr
There’s no way that this is not going to help you. If you have a website and you have a place where you can add content to your website, to a blog page, for instance, write a blog post about this, put a Facebook video out, put it on your Facebook page, your personal page, just start letting people know what it is that you’re doing. There is no way that somebody would say, that’s stupid. I’m never gonna do it. Like once they see the benefit of it. It’s just gonna snowball from there. So, I mean, I’ve got several buyers that I’m working with.. two of them are already under contract. It’s has helped me enormously.
Lauren Taylor
Well, thank you so much for sharing your story, Karin. We really appreciate it!
Karin Carr
Thank you for having me.