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From Code to Closing: Hao Dang's Unstoppable Rise in Real Estate

• Courtney Twiss • Episode 33

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Ever wondered how someone can transition from software development to selling 42 homes in their first year? Join us as we chat with Hao Dang, a real estate maven who did just that, all driven by the noble goal of buying a home for his mom. Hao shares the secrets behind his phenomenal success, including his unique approach to networking through sports and social events. Discover how he categorizes his contacts based on their housing status and offers them personalized market analyses, laying the groundwork for a thriving career in real estate.

You'll also get an insider look at Hao's high-performing brokerage team in Seattle, where the average home price is a staggering $1.3 to $1.4 million. We delve into how they focus on tech professionals and business owners, generating leads through open houses and streamlined processes with lenders. Despite facing market challenges like high interest rates, Hao's team has set an ambitious goal of reaching $200 million in business this year. Listen in for effective strategies on handling objections and navigating a tough market, while striving to grow both their agent count and transaction volume.

Visit Hao's website:
https://www.haodangteam.com/

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Speaker 1:

That puppy is the size of a full grown dog, dude, she's going to be ginormous. I'm talking like she's going to be ginormous, so stout, she's like a toddler. When you try to hold her she's like carrying, like a baby. My gosh, my puppies are little, at least it's just they're two of them and they're still crazy Cool. Well, welcome back to the now podcast, making moves in real estate, episode 33, which, by the way, is my favorite number. Today we're excited to have Hao Dang, the leader of a powerhouse team of 18 real estate professionals serving the Pacific Northwest. With over 20 years of experience, a background in marketing and a reputation for strong negotiation and market expertise, hao has built a team that consistently delivers exceptional results for buyers and sellers alike. His hands-on approach, combined with proven systems, which we, like some systems over here ensures clients are always capable or are in capable hands every step of the way. Beyond real estate, howe is passionate about personal growth, family and exploring Seattle and beyond, so let's dive into his journey and team building secrets. Welcome out, welcome. Thank you, michelle.

Speaker 2:

Appreciate it.

Speaker 1:

Well, we're really glad we were able to get you on our podcast today, and so we'd love to just hear a little bit more about your journey, how you got into real estate and your team and business up there in Washington.

Speaker 2:

Perfect. So I got started back in 2002, prior to real estate, as a software developer, and the reason why I got into real estate is actually to buy a home for my mom actually. So that was back in 2002. Probably not the best time to start after 9-11. Obviously, we know what happened then the market collapsed and get into real estate. I was like are you sure you want to get into that career? I was like, absolutely To buy a home for my mom, no doubt. So I sold 42 homes my first year in real estate in 2002. So I thought I did okay. I just I was like you know what? This is actually a pretty fun career. So I started.

Speaker 1:

That's how I started 42 homes in a tough market. Your first year. What were you? Doing what was working?

Speaker 2:

for you. Funny enough, everyone's like, hey, you should do a bunch of different open houses. And honestly, um, the reason I was like, so what is the purpose of an open house? So the reason why people do open houses is to meet new people, right. And so, for myself, I was super active in tennis. I played like two, three, four tennis matches a week. I was down at Green Lake, running around the lake, I was going to a lot of weddings and barbecues. I played on a basketball team that had a bunch of doctors and pharmacists on there, and so for me, it was all about networking. And one of my mentors said, hey, the bigger your network, the bigger your network. And so I would ask three questions deep. And so I would say, hey, michelle, how's it going Good? Hey, by the way, who else do you play tennis with? I play tennis with Courtney and I play tennis with Sarah and I play tennis with Blah. I was like Courtney and I played tennis with Sarah and I played tennis with blah, like, hey, we should get together and all play tennis together, like this next week.

Speaker 2:

So I would top route, meet your friends and your friends and so forth, and as you know it here, I know I just know the two of you now, and now I know probably like 30 other people now just around your circle, and so I never really talked about real estate. I just talked about life. You know where they live, they live where they work, and real estate always just came up. So that's how I kind of got started. One of the other things that my mentor told me, too, is write a list of all the people you know in your phone, your email and so forth. And I did that. He says now I want you to do one other thing for me. I want you to write all the people that rent. So I put R by them and all the people that have that own homes. Put an O by them. All the people that own. You're going to go out and you're going to do a market analysis for them. You're going to practice on your friends and family rather than your clients. I was like, okay, I think I can do that. He's like tell them that you're working on a project. You need to do five this month. It could be 10, 15, but you just got to do five and all the people that are renting find out how much they're paying in rent and if they have any type of down payment that they could put toward a home and try to get them into a home. That's all I did.

Speaker 2:

So I went out and did a market analysis for one of my pharmacists and one of my attorney. They're like hey, uh, what do you think my home is worth? I go about 350. He's like I bought the place for like 90. Uh, how much money would I make about? You know, 200 something thousand. He's like I'm actually looking at buying a place a little bit bigger, like 3 000 square feet in such and such area. I got how much is something like that? It's just about 700. Do them out together, it's about a million dollars combined. Right? So I kept on doing more and more of those. Next thing, you know, uh, 42 homes later in that first year. So it was really it was just a lot of fun just doing it without really any effort yeah, that's like my kind of uh model there, with all the networking we go to.

Speaker 1:

like you know, we're small towns, there's lots of fundraisersers and with my kids and different things of getting involved, so I love that. So is this like step one and two, with your new agents that you bring on your team of like what to do?

Speaker 2:

That and also like doing 12 open houses within the first month. So I would suggest doing, whether you do flash opens. Do you guys know what flash opens are?

Speaker 1:

No, we don't have a lot of you don't know.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so we, we love open houses on our end. Uh, so we. That's how I've also built my own business as well as doing a lot of flash opens. So let's say, for example, you take any city, you take the north part of it in the south part, so north part, I would do like 11 to 1 and then the south part do do 11 to 1 and then 2 to 4. And then I would flip-flop and do 11 to 1, 2 to 4. I put my A board or my sandwich board on the actual listing so it looks like it's my listing. So in one weekend I'm doing four open houses and so in one month it looks like I kind of control the area because I've done 16 open houses now.

Speaker 1:

Make sense. So you're asking other agents to go do open houses for them and you're putting your sandwich board. So people are seeing your signs all over.

Speaker 2:

That's right, yep, and I would put out about 12 different signs. So you know, as neighbors are walking around or driving around, all they see is just my sign. The other thing I started doing, too, is actually working from the home during the weekday and doing open houses, because that's basically your storefront. Instead of coming into the office, I would actually do it at the house. The other thing I would do is the 10, 10, 10, 10. So knock on 10 doors in front of you, 10 doors in the back and on the sides and try to find out if there's any other people that are looking to sell. Once that home goes under contract, the other neighbors are going to say, wow, hal just sold another home in my neighborhood and he's doing another home that he's doing an open house for. So you start trickling around. It's like, wow, this guy's pretty active, even though a lot of those listings are not mine. It might have made it look like it was mine, yeah.

Speaker 1:

That's so great. Well, especially so. I have, you know, grew an independent brokerage myself and had a few locations, and we ended up merging with eXp. So a lot of eXp agents don't have offices, they work from home. So I like your tip about hey, go set up shop in the listing and work from there and have an open house. I feel like that could be very beneficial to a lot of people.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so, courtney.

Speaker 2:

so open houses are pretty hard to come by on the weekends would you say sometimes yeah, what about offering to say, hey, what if I could do an open house for you either Tuesday, wednesday, thursday? And you think anyone's going to object to that? Probably most likely, not, right? So if a brand new listing comes out on a Thursday, friday, the listing agent wants to do the open house, go ahead and do it. It's yours, I get it, but the thing is, are you going to do it during the weekdays as well? The answer is probably not, so I'll do it for you, and so you're going to get those people that drive around during lunchtime, or some of the neighbors and so forth. It's a great opportunity to meet new people.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I love it. I think it's great. The only reason we don't do a lot of them in our area is for rules. So a lot of the houses are very, very spread out, haven't necessarily a lot of subdivisions or neighborhoods, but in the Fresno market, which is that's definitely a big thing with open houses. So you went from 42 deals the first year and then decided to scale your business and build the team.

Speaker 2:

Correct. Yeah, so fast forward to 2013,. After all the short sales from 2009 to 2012,. Someone approached me from Zillow and said, hey, we have this great opportunity to buy or invest in Kirkland and I was like, okay, so how much is it? At the time it was what the word they were asking for lead gen was about 25% of what my mortgage was. So it's so. You know, it's a big number as like, and I've never really heard of the company Zillow, and so I asked around. It's like hey, should we? What do you guys think about this company? They're like don't do it, I've already done it. I was like you know what? I took no faith and I just, I just did. I converted my first lead for $900,000. I reinvested that money and I bought a couple of these zip codes. So I've been doing Zillow for about 11 years now. Fast forward to 2015.

Speaker 2:

You guys know what Sciatica is, uh-huh, so it's like a community down your leg. What I was doing is I delivered about 150 pumpkin pies during Thanksgiving and I got sciatica shortly right after that. Just getting in and out of the car just did not do well for my back. I was bed rest for about three months and I hired a transaction coordinator in bed and two showing agents to go out and show for me. So the one thing is you can stop me physically, but you couldn't stop me mentally, so I just went on and just did what I did and never looked back. So I realized that you can actually build a team being in bed.

Speaker 1:

Wow, I can relate to that from being on bed rest and being pregnant, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Things happen. You got to learn how to leverage and delegate.

Speaker 1:

Right, wow, okay, so you started with getting some help with the buyers. Now you have 18 people. What's the structure look like for you?

Speaker 2:

So I started poking holes in the business. It's like filling up a sandwich bag and poking holes to it. And so I was like realizing where we were spending our time and what was not the highest use of our time. So I hired a transaction coordinator to manage all the emails, uh, started writing up all the offers, starting the listing paperwork uh, having someone else to go over the listing paperwork, the owner uh, scheduling the inspection you know, the signs, the flyers, all that good stuff, right, the inspection, the signs, the flyers, all that good stuff, right. The inspectors, the stages of work. So just to try to get more of your time back and then just really just be more client-facing. So we have a transaction coordinator.

Speaker 2:

I have two ISAs that actually circle prospects. So if an agent on a team is looking for, let's give it a four-bed, three-bath, 2,000 square feet in a particular area. They can't find what's on there on the MLS. They will actually circle prospect other homeowners in the area and we'll try to do something off market. We also have two social media persons. So one does like the Instagram and Facebook and I just hired someone else that's going to do a lot of our video and so forth. So then we have a production manager, actually two production managers. So agents go to them first for any questions. One has 18 years of experience, the other one has about 10 to 11 years of experience before. Like, I can't obviously take all the calls myself, so they go out to them and then yep, so, and then all the other agents are either showing agents and or they do partial listings.

Speaker 1:

That's got it dialed in. It's incredible that you've been able to build that, because that's not easy. Is it mostly like people coming to you? Because, like even just the production managers like we were, I mean, to find people to do that is difficult. So what's the secret sauce?

Speaker 2:

So the other thing too we're all about, uh, accelerated learning, so we use slack. So if someone posts a question and they answer, obviously we put we give the answer instead of giving it to one agent. We put it in slack so everyone learns from that particular day. So that's the one thing that we've been more or less focused on, or and or we bring it up in the team meetings so everyone learns.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, guys meet like a weekly team meeting.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, correct, it's every Tuesday at 10. So we believe in three C's, three C's so collaboration, continue learning, and so yeah, so yeah, nice and culture. That's the other one Culture.

Speaker 1:

Oh, yeah, yeah, that's important, probably the number one. Yeah, what were you going to ask? Well, I was just curious with your, is it mostly luxury? What's kind of tell us a little bit about your area and the market that you serve?

Speaker 2:

So our average price is probably about 1.3 to 1.4. We cover mostly the east side, but we do cover the Seattle side as well. Our buyer profile is probably mostly just tech or business owners, and so I would say probably if I could say 60 to probably 70% are people that have families. So they're all wanting better schools, really close to commute, families. So they're all wanting better schools, really close to commute. They want to be pretty close to work and so forth. Yeah, buying a home is not just buying a home, it's buying a lifestyle. So they're always into like tennis and swimming and all these other things you just got to find out what they're working on.

Speaker 1:

Right, so you're the broker owner of this entire team. Correct, correct. And so what is most of your time doing? You know, as the broker owner, you have two managers, it sounds like. So what does most of your time and your day look like?

Speaker 2:

Honestly, it's just trying to create more opportunities for the agents on the team, whether it be through open houses, different lead sources, providing a really good programs through different lenders, so that we can get the buyers like streamlined, so they can get pre-approved and we can close fairly quickly. Try to give them more listing opportunities so they're always constantly learning. So they're learning the buy side is great, but learning on the list side is even more important because we all know if you get more listings you last in the business. So if they can list, then they can do the open house and generate leads on their own through open houses.

Speaker 1:

So how much business are you doing now in this current market?

Speaker 2:

So we'll do 200 million this year.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so wow, oh, my goodness At 18.

Speaker 2:

Well, I would say, you know, of the 18, just like every, any brokerage or any team, like you know you, you do have some. That team, like you know you, you do have some that you know perform a little bit higher than others. Um, but I think that's what you see with all, all teams and all verbiages, right? So 200, I think 200 is a good number. Uh, we're going to strive to try to hit about 350 next year and just keep moving on onwards and upwards. So wow.

Speaker 1:

Are you looking to try to increase your agent count to do that, or just your volume?

Speaker 2:

So try to get to around like 25 agents or so, with each agent doing about one to two transactions, so we could probably get up to about 35 or 40. On the buy side, we're averaging about three to five listings a week right now. So if we get to about 15 listings a month about 180, say roughly 200. And so we could probably get up to upwards of around like 500 or 600 transactions. That should take us around, like you know, with the average price of about 1.3, around like half a billion in production.

Speaker 1:

Wow, how's your team been doing with changes? I understand that Washington was using buyer broker agreements already. I don't know if that's accurate or not.

Speaker 2:

Correct. Yeah, so we've been doing buyer brokers for the last year and a half now and so I would say no difference has really changed. There is a lot of data that shows that some homes where the seller is not offering any commission, we treat those like for sell by owners. They just don't really get shown. The average days on market I believe it's about 82 days. Those owners that do offer a commission, they're selling at or above and they're selling about 2% to 3%. They have priced it appropriately. I would say business as usual. There's really no change on our end. We don't expect the buyers to pay our fee. We'll just show you properties where the seller is encompassing us. If, for whatever reason, the seller does not pay us, then we'll just negotiate in the contract.

Speaker 1:

Got it. So what's your biggest hurdle right now up in that market as a broker?

Speaker 2:

I would say competing with yourself. I think that when you compete with yourself, it's like how good can you be in this market? Are you dealing with consumers that want to commission back? Are you dealing with consumers where they want to pause until rates get a little bit lower? You've got to be really good with objections. So someone says, hey, I'm looking for rates to drop. I go, so is everyone else. You know those that are in two and three percent interest rates. If the rates do drop, you're going to get an influx of probably two or three times the number of buyers. Wouldn't it make more sense to buy in this market? Refinance later, you know? So that's that's an objection of someone who is concerned about high rates or prices dropping. So I was like well, I'm concerned that prices might drop. Well, let's go look for homes where they've been on the market for 30 or 40 days and instead of waiting for the price to drop, why don't you just offer a lesser price? So in this case, we just put one that was listed for $1 million. We offered $900. We ended up getting in contract for $925. So instead of waiting for price to drop, this offer less right now.

Speaker 2:

You know some of the other objections are you know, I just signed a lease agreement and I'm not ready to buy until like next July. Well, you realize this is programs out there where we can break the lease for you. By the way, courtney and Michelle, are you in a rental agreement with an apartment complex or a rental agreement with a private owner? I'm in an apartment complex. Well, you realize those lease agreements, you can break them within two days or two months. So what we could do is we can not only negotiate the price, we can negotiate closing costs. We could also negotiate that the seller pay your rent. What are you paying in rent? I'm paying $3,000 a month. Well, let's keep the seller to break that lease for you and credit you $6,000 at closing and or pay the property management company at closing. It'll be stated on your settlement statement.

Speaker 1:

That's great. You must do some role playing with your people A little bit, a little bit, yeah, a little bit. I would love to role play with you all day long on objective handling.

Speaker 2:

I love this stuff. Yeah, we just had someone else like you know what? I'm a little concerned that rates are high. I go what do you want rates to be? He's like I want rates to be like the forest, I go well, have you heard of a 2-1 buy down? Obviously, we talk about that and you guys know what that is, without going too much more detail is you know, go find a home that's been on the mark for 45, 50 days. Instead of reducing the price by so much, just do a 2-1 buy down. Rates at the time were like 675. We got them down to 475, you know, just to please them.

Speaker 1:

Yeah Well, and I'm sure you know, with the rates coming down, prices are also coming up.

Speaker 2:

Exactly On.

Speaker 1:

Tupac. We had our lender on because I own a lending company as well, and he was on our podcast last week and he was anticipating us getting back down into the fours on some of the loan products, hopefully this next year, which will be interesting to get back to that point again, but it might get a little bit crazy for everybody.

Speaker 2:

I agree. Yeah, got running around again like normal, right? I remember when the market picked up so much and the prices were going up so high, is you know, driving around with some of the agents? We'd literally be going from like home number A or home number one to home number two and it was like, hey, pp is purchase price, em is earnest money, like we would write it down or call it out, and she would write it down or call it out and she would write it up, have it sent out to the client. By the time we got to the second or third home, that offer was already being sent to the first home that we just saw. It was that fast.

Speaker 2:

And then one of the other things we started doing too is, if the house was a million dollars, we escalated to 125. Obviously price is rejected to whatever the person thinks it's worth. And so we would have them get pre-approved with two different lenders to make sure they were fully underwritten, just so we wouldn't lose earnest money. And then we would actually order two different appraisals. One would come in at 125. The other one would come in at 11. So if the one came in low, we would go with the second one why? So the person wouldn't have to come in with 20 on the one one, come in with other 150 000 out of pocket.

Speaker 2:

So that's why we ordered the second appraisal. Make sense. So I was coming up with all this wild stuff and I was like what are you doing over there? Why are you closing so many deals and how is the buyer not being subjected to bring extra money in, pull money on the stock market and playing tax on that? That's how we did it. We ordered two appraisals. We take the higher of the two. I think we might get back in that market again. So that was a great tool for all of the years.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, and that kind of goes hand in hand when, in the beginning, we're talking about having systems, what other systems do you have in place that you think would?

Speaker 2:

help your agents as it gets into that kind of crazy wild market again. So we use fub we, so we use follow boss, and so the agents, when the leads come in, we track by like how many leads they have, and from there we put everyone in showing home. So those are the ones that they're super active, that they could put in the contract with the next 30 to 60 days. So their goal is to work on those, set up proper searches and understand all the different objections. And then, as far as the other leads, like if they're in nurture status, maybe they're not looking to purchase like three to six months out. They understand where the flow process is. They could create tasks and so forth, and obviously we have a pool of buyers that were buyers from 2013 to 2019.

Speaker 2:

Well, if I were to ask you, courtney and Michelle, what are those buyers today? Those buyers are sellers, right, and so why not reach out to some of those people and ask them like, hey, just wanted to reach out and see how you're enjoying your home, just wanted to see if you need any contractors, if you're looking to do any renovations, now that we're going into the fall, when's the last time you got your furnace service. So we do partner up with different people, so we have a big vendor list. So anything that they need we kind of help them with. And then the last thing is when's the last time you got a home evaluation on your house? We haven't, right.

Speaker 2:

And so getting them the home evaluation on their home tells them where they're at how much equity they can pull out and then potentially try to get them to another home and keep their home either as an investment and or sell it, take advantage of the five hundred thousand dollars, the taxes up there. So the thing is like if they bought the house for 600 000 and now their home is worth what 1.5? They have 900 000 locked in equity. They can literally go out and buy a home for two million dollars and get a much bigger home, transfer the equity into the new home. Same difference, right, even with the higher rate, it's not much of a difference because you're unlocking the equity that's in their home.

Speaker 1:

Makes sense. Wow, we have been. You are just chock full of gold nuggets, as we call them. I've taken a big old list. I have a really random question. I have to say your presence on LinkedIn. I'm not sure who does that for you, but it's strong. Do you get much lead gen from that source?

Speaker 2:

Probably should be usually a little bit more. We have not, I don't know. I think most people just find me online, I'm not sure how.

Speaker 1:

I was just curious, because every time I'm on LinkedIn, there you are, or like one of your agents. You know listings or open houses or just sold. It's like every day. I steer on my my, I see it. So whoever's doing that, it's good job.

Speaker 2:

I will let Annie know for sure. Yeah, so she's a social media person.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, all of your social media is great. I just am pretty impressed with the LinkedIn Cause I know that's something that we've heard can be a great lead source. I haven't actually spoke to somebody that has actually done it.

Speaker 2:

I think anything that you put effort into it's going to work. It doesn't matter what it is. It can be great. Open houses, linkedin. I just met this lady yesterday. She gets 70% of her business from YouTube.

Speaker 1:

I can see that, yep, yep.

Speaker 2:

Whatever works works as long as you work.

Speaker 1:

Exactly. Well work. I mean, some people think that they're working and they're not. It is busy. It is busy Anyways. Well, we've really enjoyed all of the nuggets. I mean, I think the biggest thing, bigger your network, the bigger your net worth Love it. Yeah Well, hal, we really appreciate you coming on here and joining us. I think definitely our listeners are going to get a ton of value from this episode. Where would be the best place for people to find you?

Speaker 2:

Just find us online and you can always reach out to our team.

Speaker 1:

And happy to help in any way we can. Awesome, well, thank you. Thank you so much, hal.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, courtney, thank you, michelle, thanks.

Speaker 1:

Have a good rest of your day. Thanks you.