Title: 
Associate broker
Company: 
RE/MAX Elite
Location: 

Man with a plan

“Have a business plan. Many salespeople, even top producers, don’t know what they’re getting for the money they spend on their business.”

Christopher Viets (rhymes with “beets”) says his first two years in real estate were “absolutely brutal.” He earned essentially nothing his first year and little his second.

Then he and a friend decided to try out Mike Ferry’s system. In 2000, his fifth year in the business, Viets closed nearly $13.5 million in sales.

“Don’t take any system verbatim,” he says, “but use what works for you. I committed to working the phones really hard, and it produced fantastic results.”

Viets has been making cold calls just about every weekday from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m., with a goal of making 75 contacts per day.

“Once you learn to be good on the phone, your results change,” he says. “Until you can get past the rejection, you take it personally.”

In the past year, Viets has moved into a new niche—investment real estate. Viets buys distressed multiunit properties, rehabs them, and sells them for a profit. Next, he’d like to earn property management and commercial real estate designations (cpm and ccim), with the goal of eventually having his own investment brokerage.