It’s no secret that Janki Patel, Realtor® & CEO of The Janki Patel Team in California, has found the perfect recipe for success with StreetText.
Only being with StreetText for just under 2 years, Janki’s team has already closed on a whopping 50+ additional deals from StreetText, with many more deals in the pipeline (as of Dec. 2021). A truly remarkable achievement!
But how did she get here? What led Janki Patel to be the successful CEO of a growing power house real estate team of 11 employees? Where does her winning mindset come from and how does she stay motivated?
We caught up with Janki to learn more.
“I had no idea what I was getting into”
Janki’s real estate career started nearly 18 years ago in New Jersey. “I took my real estate exam 9 times… it was really, really tough for me to be a mom, having my husband working in California while I was in New Jersey with two young children.” On top of that, Janki was juggling taking night classes and supporting her family by working during the day as a Loan Officer.
Janki’s career had a modest start in New Jersey, closing a few deals here and there but nothing consistent. She was much more focused on taking care of her children, giving them most of her attention after school hours.
Then came the 2008 financial crisis, and Janki’s life was turned upside down.
Janki found herself in foreclosure, and tried many times to save her family home. Ultimately, she couldn’t and was forced to leave New Jersey and drive back across the country to California with her two kids, staying at motels all along the way.
“I remember calling my dad and saying, Dad, I lost everything I have, everything I built, and I have to come back home.”
“We came here with $1500… and that’s where my journey started”
Soon after arriving in California, Janki got her real estate license. While waiting for the documents to arrive, she took a job helping a top producing Realtor with stuffing 700 to a 1000 envelopes on a daily basis.
“I remember the cuts I got on my hands, I’ll never forget. When I came here, I realized business here in California was done very differently and I had to learn to adapt.”
“I had to adapt very quickly”
Janki did not know anybody in California. After just learning to navigate the market in New Jersey, she was forced to rebuild her business yet again all by herself. Even though all bets seemed against her, Janki held a firm mindset of finding success and never giving up, knowing she needed to help pay her Dad’s mortgage.
She started cold calling Realtors asking for any advice as a new agent in the area. She found no help and received no good feedback. That’s when she started joining various networking groups in her region and soon after found a mentor who guided her through her first source of lead generation – door knocking.
“I’ll never forget her. She says ‘Okay, this is how it’s done, this is what you do, this is a list of people you can door knock.’ and I started just knocking on doors saying ‘Hey, do you know anyone that’s looking to buy or sell?’ – I was so timid and so shy, I had no confidence in myself at that time. But yet I did it because I knew I had to help put food on the table.”
“One of the other Realtors said, have you thought about this particular website that you can get leads from?- I hadn’t thought about it. So I signed up and started paying $300 to get online leads.”
That’s when Janki realized she had no idea what to do with a lead once she got them.
“It was trial and error, trial and error, and from there on, I tried to perfect it. I tried to perfect that one script.” After narrowing down her process with the help of her supportive husband, she started converting her leads.
“Nobody showed me the road here. Sometimes you just have to build your own path.”
Fast forward from 2010, every year she started closing a minimum of 10, 12, to 13 listings.
“I was okay with it – my husband was working, and so I had no issues in really just generating income that was just playing money.”
But just as things started picking up, she had to shift gears again. Janki and her family had just moved into a fixer-upper home when they found out that her husband was laid off of his new job. “That was just one of those like, okay, take a deep breath, it’s going to be okay, and I had no idea how it’s going to be okay, but I knew that I needed to make it.”
It was a true mindset check. Janki knew that she benefited from her go-getter personality. No matter what, she knows to get out there, and get her piece of the pie.
“I started door knocking over 200 homes, I started using different online sources. And I just didn’t see the significant return of investment that I expected at first – maybe I got a lead or two in conversions.”
With time, it started to pay off.
2016, 2017 and 2018 were some of Janki’s best years. Her business had grown to a point where she had hired her husband on her team as Director of Operations. As her business grew, she started focusing on one of her many passions – coaching – both by hiring her own coach, and coaching others.
“We started really looking into where my different leads were coming from.”
It was March 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, that Janki’s business started to slow down. Her past clients and other referrals from open houses and events were no longer coming in, and she had to invest in another source of lead generation to keep her business running. That’s where StreetText comes in.
Janki had first heard of StreetText in February 2020.
“I looked at it and I clicked back and I said, oh, this is just all a gimmicky thing, and I didn’t pay much attention… but when March hit, it came back again on my feed, and I said, hmm, I really need to dig into this and see what this is all about.”
At first, Janki’s mindset was off. She came in thinking StreetText wouldn’t work for her, and ignored the dedicated coaching, training and tremendous lead generation opportunities that were right in front of her.
“I started complaining about the leads I was getting, and I said, ‘you know Markus (Janki’s Coach), I’m not happy, I don’t like this’ – I had such a negative mindset.”
Like Janki had done over and over again in the past, her and her husband started building a system that worked for her StreetText leads. Instead of shutting them out, she shifted her mindset and thought ‘Okay, what’s the best way to do this?’
Janki started attending weekly StreetText Masterminds to learn from fellow Realtors. She began to see what they were doing with their leads and hearing about everyone’s challenges and wins. At first, she was reluctant to take their advice to heart, but soon after she began working the methods and strategies that were being discussed into her own workflow.
“I said, okay, if the lead comes in, what is the next step I do? What is the next course of action I take? Do I send them an email? Do I send them a video? Do I send them a text message? And if they don’t have any phone numbers and any emails, what do I do with that? Do I just toss it? Are there any good? What is my system?”
Janki and her husband got out a white board, and started writing down everything. If it was a partial lead, what do they do differently than a full lead? Where do mailers fit in? Videos? Strategy after strategy, they all started to come together to a foolproof system to converting leads.
“I think I hit a jackpot with StreetText, because I started seeing the value in these leads.”
1.5 years later, Janki would soon find herself to be one of StreetText’s top performing realtors, closing on 50+ listings from StreetText, with several more deals in the pipeline.
In our next post, Janki dives deep into her strategy, how she utilizes her full team to follow-up with every lead, and what systems she’s put in place to maximize results.
Read more about How Janki Patel Closed 50+ Deals with StreetText Facebook Ads.
