Episode 215: Bryce Holocombe
On this episode of The Brad and Taylor Show, we sat down with Bryce Holocombe from Brookstone Realtors!
To watch the full episode, check it out on YouTube below. In the meantime, here’s a transcript of the conversation…
Here’s what you missed from Bryce Holcombe…
00:00:00:16 –> 00:00:03:17
Taylor: Welcome to The Brad and Taylor Show. Today we have Bryce Holcombe.
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Brad: You’re listening to The Brad and Taylor Show, a podcast that inspires entrepreneurs to pursue their passions. We’re sitting down with some of the best to learn how they got started and some lessons they learned along the way.
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Taylor: Hey Bryce.
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Bryce: Hey, how are you guys?
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Taylor: Good. How are you doing?
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Bryce: Doing well. Thanks for having me.
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Brad: Awesome. Well, let’s get this started. Tell us a bit about you. What do you do?
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Bryce: My name is Bryce Holcomb. I’m a real estate agent at Brookstone realtors. I’ve been doing this for a little over two years now and I service the Metro Detroit area.
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Brad: That’s awesome. So how did you get into real estate? What’d you do before this?
00:00:41:09 –> 00:01:30:29
Bryce: Before this, I started doing property management but dating back to about, I would say, 0 8 0 9. When the crash was happening, my mom and stepdad started buying some rental properties. So I was in high school, making extra cash, just doing some grunt work. But I kinda just fell in love with the idea of real estate. From there I went to Central Michigan, got my degree in real estate development and financing. As I said, I did property management. My employer at the time paid for me to get my real estate license. So I’ve been licensed for about five years now, but didn’t sell anything, didn’t even pursue selling anything till about two years ago. So that’s where I am now.
00:01:31:12 –> 00:01:33:00
Taylor: Nice. How did you get your first client?
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Bryce: It was my brother-in-law. Okay. There we go. He had just moved back to Michigan. He was living with my mother-in-law at the time. He had started his first job and he wanted to start looking for houses and that’s where it started.
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Taylor: Nice. How long did it take after that first transaction to get your second one? Did you get the ball rolling pretty quick or did it take some time?
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Bryce: I would say after I closed the first one, I closed my second one about a month after that. So, and then after that, pretty much COVID happened, so…
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Taylor: And then the market got crazy. Yup.
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Brad: Did you start on a team or were just solo the whole time?
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Bryce: Solo the whole time.
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Taylor: Nice. Did you get any advice when you first started out in real estate? I know you said your first couple of years, you didn’t really do much with it, but when you first got into the groove of getting those clients and everything, did you get any advice that stuck with you?
00:02:39:07 –> 00:03:14:27
Bryce: Yeah, I would say really just when I first started, it was really just putting the work in. I started doing open houses or hosting open houses for other agents. I reached out to every single person that I knew that I thought, you know, would maybe use me as a realtor. I sent texts calls, just stayed top of mind, and made Facebook posted videos. Eventually, you know, it just started to happen. So all in all, just really just put the work in.
00:03:15:10 –> 00:03:21:21
Taylor: Yeah. It takes a lot, a lot of work. A lot of people maybe don’t realize that when they’re first getting into it, how much work it actually takes behind the scenes, but oh yeah.
00:03:21:22 –> 00:03:46:19
Bryce: Yeah. I mean, they tell you all the time you get your license, your phone’s not going to just start ringing. So there’s a lot of marketing myself and a good sphere of influence that I reached out to. I feel like I got in at a good age. I’m 28 now. So a lot of my friends were starting to buy houses, families buying houses, things like that. So I think it worked out pretty well.
00:03:46:25 –> 00:03:57:25
Taylor: Yeah. That’s perfect timing, especially with all your friends, starting to look for their first homes. Yeah. Good timing with that one. What is the worst property you’re showing that you’ve been to?
00:03:59:09 –> 00:05:00:25
Bryce: So in the property management world, when I was doing that for a few years, I mean, I’ve been in houses with fleas. I’ve been in houses that were flooded from broken pipes, trashed houses, houses that were broken into. But recently I just sold a house here in St. Clair Shores where the seller inherited the house from his cousin that had passed, but the cousin was a hoarder. So it was a two-bedroom house on a crawl and about a thousand square feet. So there wasn’t much room for storage, but it took three 40 yard dumpsters just to empty the place out. And then after it was emptied out, I mean, the carpet was shot. I mean, there was water damage. There was everything in between and then it was just hoarding is disgusting. So I would say specifically private, but I’ve seen plenty of nasty houses even before selling.
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Taylor: I know you mentioned the fleas. You don’t know how common that is. That is, that always gets me when everyone’s mentioned the fleas. I’m like, oh.
00:05:09:29 –> 00:05:21:23
Bryce: Yeah, you’ll take one step in, you open the door and it’ll smell like a dog or a cat. And if you step in and you look down, there’ll be all over your pants already and everything. It’s crazy.
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Taylor: What do you do with those situations, for when you were doing the rental properties and stuff like that, you bombed the place or how do you get rid of it?
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Bryce: Yeah. So what would happen was you would hire a company to pretty much bomb the place. It’s like some sort of fumigation system or whatever they throw in there. They go in there with their suits or whatever they put on and hazmat suits and pretty much disinfect the whole place. And it takes a couple of weeks just to kill them all. They’ll live in the carpets and everything yeah, nothing I want to be doing.
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Taylor: No, me neither. What kind of goals do you have in place for 2022?
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Bryce: For 2022, personally, my wife and I have talked about purchasing our first investment property. And then professionally, I would just say I have a generic sales goal that I have in mind that I’d like to hit. So pretty much double what I did this year.
00:06:25:12 –> 00:06:31:26
Taylor: That’s awesome. Do you have an idea of where you want your investment property to be? Do you kind of want to keep it local to where you are?
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Bryce: Yeah. I live here in Sinclair’s Shore, so you know, it’d be nice to get one in St. Clair Shores, but St. Clair Shores, Warren Roseville, pointing just kind of the surrounding areas to where I live.
00:06:45:20 –> 00:06:51:08
Taylor: Yeah. And you have that background too. So I think it would probably be pretty, fairly simple for you since you already know what to do with that situation.
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Bryce: Yeah. It helps. It’s just coming along with something, you know, worth it at this point.
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Taylor: Right. For sure. If you could start over today, what is one thing that you would do differently?
00:07:03:09 –> 00:07:47:27
Bryce: In terms of selling real estate? I would say just organizing myself a little better. I was always kind of a keep everything in my head kind of person. And then as I started getting busier, the simple things now that I do is just using the calendar on my phone, time blocking everything, even if it’s small just so that I’m not double-booking myself or I can at least, you know, picture what I gotta do for the day. And it just helps timewise and for my sanity, it helps, I would just say just being more organized from the start.
00:07:48:09 –> 00:07:56:17
Taylor: Yeah. Because you probably now have appointments back to back don’t you? So it’s like, if you don’t have them written down somewhere, my brain would be all over the place.
00:07:56:18 –> 00:08:09:01
Bryce: Yeah. It’s yeah. I mean, when you have multiple buyers or whatever, it’s just, you have to balance not only your time but their time too. So just having everything in front of me just makes everything a little easier.
00:08:09:18 –> 00:08:14:03
Taylor: Oh, nice. Do you have any business books that you’ve read that you could recommend to anybody starting out in real estate?
00:08:15:05 –> 00:09:02:29
Bryce: Yeah, I listen to audio books. But when I first started, someone told me to read The Seven Levels of Communication and it kind of stuck with me. I was never like that, I never wanted to do cold calling or anything like that. So the book is basically about, you know, creating meaningful relationships that lead to a referral-based business, which everyone in this industry wants. So I’ve always been more of a this is much more than a sale, a lot of the people who are my friends to begin with, but treat more as, you know, treat them more than a friend in the transaction. So that hopefully one day you get referrals.
00:09:03:11 –> 00:09:09:15
Taylor: Yeah, for sure. And that way, the next time they’re ready to sell their home that you first got them in, get another one and you’ll be right there.
00:09:10:13 –> 00:09:11:04
Bryce: That’s the goal.
00:09:11:10 –> 00:09:22:27
Taylor: Yep. I know you mentioned your brother-in-law was your first client, right. How was that? Was that more stressful for you being that it was family, oh, there’s no room for error.
00:09:24:08 –> 00:09:59:00
Bryce: No. Yeah. I don’t think it was too stressful. It was his first time buying a house. It was my first time, you know, going through the transaction. So I never wanted a minute, but up here we’re learning together. I’ve never been afraid to ask questions and whatever I was doing, but, I just, I would say yes and no, you don’t want to, I’ve sold some houses now for my parents. You got to treat it as, you know, they’re not my parents or that’s not my brother-in-law and you just gotta do the best you can do so.
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Brad: Yeah, for sure. That’s awesome. Well, before we go, how can people get ahold of you?
00:10:03:18 –> 00:10:22:03
Bryce: My phone number is (586) 819-3008. And then on Facebook, it’s just Bryce Holcombe. I have Instagram, but I don’t use it very much for business, but I would just say phone and Facebook is the best way to get a hold of me.
00:10:22:15 –> 00:10:25:07
Brad: Well, sweet. Awesome. Well, Hey, thanks for coming on and sharing your story with us today.
00:10:26:10 –> 00:10:27:10
Bryce: Thank you. I appreciate it.
00:10:30:25 –> 00:10:32:08
Hello. Hello. Are you there? Are there, are there, Hey guys, we just wanted to thank you for listening on either a podcast or on the YouTube video here. If you guys wanted to subscribe, that would be awesome. That would mean a lot to us. If you guys could give us a five-star review as well, that would be amazing. And we’ll see you on the next one.
Check out Bryce Holocombe:
www.brookstonerealtors.com/agent.php?&agentid=171083
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