Is it possible to change your life with just five minutes a day? Yes, it is! It is time you start developing habits that will really benefit you. Because the secret to finding success over time is consistency. It’s not just about getting information, it’s about using that information to get you where you want to be. Join Chris Miles as he talks to mega real estate agent Karen Briscoe about her book Real Estate Success in 5 Minutes a Day: Secrets of a Top Agent Revealed (5 Minute Success). Karen is also the host of the 5 Minute Success podcast which she founded because of the book. Learn her story and how she was able to survive and thrive through so many unfavorable markets. Listen to her insight about today’s market. And find out how you can find success by spending just 5 minutes every day with a habit. Start your success journey today!
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5 Minute Success With Karen Briscoe
You want that freedom and cashflow today, not 30 or 40 years from now, but right now to live that life you love with those you love. Most importantly, it’s not just about living rich. It’s about living a rich life because as you are blessed financially, you can enrich the lives of others. That is the ripple effect I’m here to create for you. I thank you for tuning in. I appreciate you guys binging. You have been sharing it with others. Again, I can’t thank you enough for making our show on the top shows in the country, if not the world.
Thank you for being some of the best readers out there today. As always remember to check out our website, MoneyRipples.com. On there. If you are looking for specific topics, whether it’s about passive income, infinite banking, or whatever it might be, we have got different pages on that now. Be sure to check that out and see what updates we have made. Go there today.
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I have a special guest today that I thought was intriguing and interesting that I thought we should have her on. Karen Briscoe here. She is not only a mega real estate agent, but she’s also the creator of the transformative 5 Minute Success concept. She’s the author of four books, host of the 5 Minute Success podcast, and productivity coach, which you will also hear me on as well coming up here soon. Real Estate Success in 5 Minutes a Day: Secrets of a Top Agent Revealed was featured in Inman as well as a must-read of your best year in real estate. It’s one of the top-rank books out there today. She’s primarily in Northern Virginia, as well as Maryland and DC. She has done tons of real estate all over those areas. I’m excited to have her on. Karen, welcome to our show today.
I love the whole idea of both cashflow and money ripples. There are lots of ways to live a good life now. I’m thrilled to be on the show today and share with your community.
Give us some backstory, before you became this mega. You are a real estate agent, this mega success, and author. Tell us more about where your path came from.
I started out in the dirt, going back to dirt. I was a real estate developer in Dallas in the early-‘80s. The idea of buying land and putting streets utilities and selling lots to home builders. That is what launched my career and how I learned about the understanding value and creating value and market knowledge strategy and negotiations. Fast forward, my husband’s career took us to the DC metro region. I live inside the Beltway near the CIA. Whenever you see those movies that flash into Langley, I’m right down the street from that. I was the primary caregiver for our children as they were growing up because my husband’s career in public policy meant a lot of travel. I appreciate that I had that opportunity, but when I entered the workforce, I wanted to get back into the commercial real estate space.
I went to work for Nextel and had the sales engineering of warehouse offices. What I found pretty quickly was there’s something more boring than a bunch of sales engineering warehouse offices. It was during the tech bust. This is important to think about when companies are in disposition mode, there usually isn’t any money. I said, “Why don’t I do the other side of real estate?” Somebody said, “Why don’t you do residential? You seem to like people like houses,” which is what seems to be why people choose residential real estate. What I found was I do have both sides of the skill set. I have these hard skills, market knowledge, negotiations, the strategy. I do have soft skills. I enjoy the people, helping them with many cases their largest purchases.
In investing, I work with a lot of investors. I’m a women investor myself. I met with success rapidly. Fast forward, the market was rising. We are in a similar market cycle right now. This isn’t my first rodeo. The market was rising at a rate of double digits every year for five years in a row. Two of them were over 20%, not surprising. At first, it flattened for a couple of years, 2006, 2007, and 2008, the crash. In the meantime, I met with a woman who was number ten in the nation at the time. She asked me to join her team and become her partners, which I did. Sadly, she passed away in 2008. That was the same month the financial markets crashed. It was a challenging time in my business life and professional life.
I’m a resilient person, resourceful as you can tell. I had already been through a number of market corrections. I joined with my current partner, Lizzy Conroy, in 2009. She joined me. We set about rebuilding the business. As I did that, many people were like, “I first figured out how to survive and then I figured out how to thrive.” There were quite a few people that made it through the market. A lot of people didn’t, but those that did. I was the only one that did it. I had lost my partner. People asked me to coach, speak, and train. That led to the writing of the book because I had many people say that they found my stories to be sticky and memorable.
They felt like I should write a book. That led to the book and the book led to the podcast. I like to save my book for a podcast on its birthday. That 5 Minute Success podcast now has over 400 episodes. I’m looking forward to doing a pod swap with you, Chris, on that. The other books have come since then, but it’s been quite a journey, an opportunity to learn and grow and can contribute back to all sorts of folks, including your community.
It’s amazing that you went from Dallas while they have the TV show, Dallas, then you went from there to DC, which is a completely different world. That must have been a huge disruptor for you.
Culture shock. What often happens when people come to an area like the DC metro region, is major culture shock, too. We are not quite California and we are not quite Boston or New York, but we are out there, international city. We have a sophisticated clientele, our average sales price, mega agent, you introduce me as someone who runs a major team, but is not a brokerage. Our team in 2021 sold $116 million. Our average sales price is $1.1 million. Sophisticated clientele. The clientele, we have a lot of high-ranking government officials and lobbyists. The Amazon HQ2 is in our region. We have Amazon executives and a lot of techs. That is an opportunity to constantly sharpen this all. That’s for sure.
There are so many sophisticated clientele in the DC area that it really is an opportunity to constantly sharpen your saw. Click To TweetBefore we had this massive inflation further on the prices, I remember I was offered a short-term rental that we were staying in for the week right near the courthouse. That little row home, that almost 100-year-old row home, they were trying to sell for $1 million. I was shocked. I was floored. That place would go for $1 million. I could barely walk up the stairs without hitting the walls because there was such a narrow stairway. It’s pretty spendy to live there.
It took about fifteen years to get back up to the last peak. We have about fifteen years of recovery. Now the market is experiencing real appreciation. I’m not quite sure if it’s inflation because if you were talking to the sellers during all those years ago, I still haven’t got back what I had before. I get that back. I remind people that there were a lot of years when there was no increase in value. It is all happening pretty rapidly. Although this is typical of rising markets, real estate is a unique commodity in that the value mostly due to the lending environment is based on appraisals, and appraisals are based on most recent sales.
Real estate is a unique commodity in that the value is mostly based on appraisals and appraisals are based on most recent sales. Click To TweetWith that basic understanding of that, prices could never go up because it always has to be based on the last sale. What has to happen is a rapidly rising market where buyers are willing to pay more than the last sale and willing to make up the difference if the lender’s appraisal doesn’t value it. Even though it seems like a challenging time, the market needs these types of cycles. The question is, how long will it last?
That’s one thing I want to ask you. You have had 40 years of real estate experience on both sides of the equation. You have been on the dirt side and the development. You have been on the real estate side on the retail side. Based on what you are seeing here because you have seen all kinds of markets, it’s never quite the same. Things always tend to change what I have noticed over the years. What do you see right now? What lessons are you learning or even how you are responding based on your experience?
It is a different market cycle than the last run-up. The last run-up was based on at least the Northern Virginia metro region, DC region was based on the buildup of Homeland Security in response to 9/11. The nationwide run-up was based on easy lending, the derivative market, and things that worked structurally sound financially to begin with. It was a house of cards. I saw it and predicted it and advised people as best I could. The Dodd-Frank pretty much put lending back to you have to qualify framework.
You don’t have to have a heartbeat anymore. You have to have more than that.
You have to be able to call debt money and you have to have a job. That is not going to be what is key to this market. This market has several things that are unique to it. One is demographics. The Baby Boomer generation, we are the largest generation in the United States at 79 million. Every generation after that was smaller, generally about 15 million smaller. Until the Millennials. The Baby Boomers birth the Millennials and the Millennials are 91 million. That’s already a delta of housing because most housings was built for the Baby Boomers. We were already going to run out of houses. People weren’t projecting enough what we were going to need housing-wise because the Millennials are reaching their peak adulting years right now. Thirty-four, this is the peak year.
If you look at other cycles that the Millennials have been in, all of the things that they were the first at, the schools and then the college, all of them, when the Millennials hit, they needed to create more space for them. New construction, not infill, not tearing down an old house and putting in a new, but new construction starts statistically we are about 25 million every decade since the ‘70s. In 2008 with the financial markets crashed, most of the builders lost their options and their lending to buy and build houses.
They only built 5.8 million. We were already short 20 million houses before we enter the pandemic. A demographic that was trying to need houses. It’s a perfect storm. The thing is it’s likely to last a while because with construction costs going up and materials costs going up and land costs going up, they are not going to be able to catch up with the rate that they need to build houses. What happened is that Millennials have more children and more dogs, and they need more space. They have higher incomes. They will buy bigger houses. This could be a pretty long trend.
That’s the one thing I keep telling people. I was a mortgage broker in the mid-2000s. I saw how easy lending was. As long you had a good enough credit score, you could throw out there and say, “I make this much a month.” They will say, “You get a loan.” That does not happen anymore. That kind of lending doesn’t happen. We have had a housing shortage for several years. We are still trying to catch our breath, trying to catch up to that. It’s nowhere in sight nearly compared to where it has been. I definitely agree with that at that assessment though. Tell us about the 5 Minute Success. Tell us more about that.
When I was doing this coaching and speaking training, when people asked me how I did it, I would encourage people to work on their personal business development. That’s how you achieve. It sustained success over time. It’s like working out at the gym or whatever. You got to do it pretty frequently to have the impact, but people invariably said they didn’t have enough time. I said, “Do you have five minutes a day?” That’s a great way to break people’s limiting beliefs that they don’t have time, is to say limit the time. It’s Parkinson’s law. Parkinson’s law states that limiting and restricting will make you more effective and efficient. I know you have had this happen, Chris. Right before you are ready to go on vacation, you are going to be more efficient the day before or the week before.
The idea of limiting the time, people could commit to that. By working on it every day, and creating that consistent habit, then they are more likely to sustain consistent success. It led to me becoming this time guru because what I found is this whole idea of people being busy and not having enough time. If you think about it, everybody has the same amount. The one asset we all are given equally. Some people achieve amazing things and some people don’t get anything done. That’s where the opportunity to have these conversations about how people can achieve high-level success by investing five minutes a day or small amounts of time to take it to the next level.
Before we even ask about some of the habits that you can do in those five minutes, let me ask you, what are the best way for people to follow you? What’s the best way they can do that?
It’s easy because it’s 5 Minute Success. That’s the podcast, the website, and almost all the social media. On the real estate space, I’m googleable, Karen Briscoe. I promise you I have most of the first page. If you put anything in there about real estate or 5 Minutes Success, you are going to find me.
5MinuteSuccess.com is easy to remember. @5MinuteSuccess, that’s pretty simple to remember. Tell us, what are some of those habits? What can people do in those five minutes that can literally change the course of their lives?
The book is to read the book, Real Estate Success in 5 Minutes a Day. There are key principles. Even though every day is different, I felt like the profile of the real estate agent or the salesperson or the entrepreneur is they are always wanting the next new thing. I was like, “I’m going to give you the next new thing every day, but it’s going to fit into some basic fundamental principles.” The idea of the habit formation, there’s been a lot of research on that. I’m sure you have heard the whole Jerry Seinfeld, how did he become a good comedian? That was he made a commitment to write a joke every day. Low tech, he had a calendar, and he used the red X.
The idea is to develop consistency. Some of the key researches, they say 66 days to develop a habit. If it’s truly a habit you want for your life, you are going to go beyond the 66 days. This is the idea to launch a habit. What they have found is that during the first 21 days, many people are excited and almost evangelistic about their habits. Think about the people who get a Peloton. They are all over social media with it. Often what happens is the next 21 days, people go through an evaluation period, a dip, like Seth Godin talks about. The idea is things that you want in your life, the benefit, you want to power through that dip. You don’t want to stay down there. You want to go into the other side because you start to experience the benefits of it. A good habit. You start to experience the benefits of it. You want to do more. The idea is you want to stay with it consistently long enough to put it into practice in your life and business.
People start to break their habits after the first 21 days. But if something is really benefiting, stick with it and power through it. Click To TweetOne thing that’s important is whether you are an entrepreneur, especially if you are a busy entrepreneur because there are many people out there with that hustle mentality. I got out of the phase where I said hustle’s a lie, trying to hustle every day. There’s hard work, but then there’s hustling as a habit, which can be dangerous, where you go too far and you curate your own rat race. Taking those five minutes, even focus on that one thing. I read a book by Napoleon Hill, a lesser-known one, talking about 52 weeks to grow rich. They would have one thing you would focus on every single day for a week and then you would move on. You would try to master those things versus listening to it saying, “That’s a good idea,” and then you move on with your day. This is something where you can focus and make that the focus of your day.
What I have found is there are several reasons why this is a benefit, this daily reader or whatever format. It’s because too much information is like a tsunami. I can’t absorb it. What happens when you take it in and implement it? You are more likely to remember it when you need it. You could have the ripple effect. What are the effects? I love it because it’s like throwing the pebble in the pond and it ripples out. Sometimes it’s a domino. It knocks over a bunch of things. Sometimes it’s a snowball, so it builds. Sometimes it’s an exponential thing. You have this major paradigm shift and everything changes. The idea is these actions are going to increase the likelihood because you are going to be consistent in putting them into practice.
I found that once you put it into practice, you go from understanding to knowing. People say like, “I know that already.” If you knew it, you would do it, but you haven’t been doing it. You got to know how to put it into practical use and practical application so that creates a real lasting change in your life.
Information without implementation is just entertainment, and I’m happy to entertain you and your community. If people are reading this and they want to make real change, they want to get out of the rat race, they truly want to build passive wealth. This is a key fundamental way that other people have done it to achieve high-level success.
Information without implementation is just entertainment. Click To TweetI like that definition too, the information without implementation. That’s the news. When you think about what’s entertainment, the media. There’s nothing you can do about it. That gives you lots and lots of information, but nothing to implement on. That’s entertainment. It’s mental garbage.
If you think about it, they look at it that way, too, because they are always looking for sensationalism because they are trying to recreate a higher dopamine hit, so then you will tune it. They do recognize it as entertainment. It is not news. It is entertainment.
Our whole goal objective for you guys, no dopamine hit. We want you to be as bored as possible so that your life will change for the better. There you go. We want boring for you.
We want something that will be interesting enough that you will implement it, too.
I appreciate your time today, Karen. This has been great. Fantastic. Again, one more time for our readers, where will they go to find you?
@5MinutesSuccess and Karen Briscoe at HBC group of Keller Williams.
Karen, again, thank you for your time today. Everybody, it’s not just about getting in the information. It’s about how you take the information going from a hearer to a doer so that your life can change. It’s not just about doing anything. It’s about doing the right things. Go make sure you check out Karen’s book, check out her website, and go check out the 5 Minute Success podcast. Make it a wonderful and prosperous week. We will see you later.
Important Links
- Real Estate Success in 5 Minutes a Day: Secrets of a Top Agent Revealed
- 5 Minute Success – Podcast
- 5MinuteSuccess.com
- @5MinuteSuccess – Twitter
About Karen Briscoe
Karen Briscoe is a mega real estate agent, the creator of the transformative “5 Minute Success” concept, the author of 4 books and host of the 5 Minute Success podcast and productivity coach. “Real Estate Success in 5 Minutes a Day: Secrets of a Top Agent Revealed” was featured in INMAN as “must read for your best year in real estate” in 2017. The book ranks on Amazon in the top 1% in its category. The 5 Minute Success podcast has ranked #1 on Overcast most recommended in the business category.