Mark Aguirre

Hello and welcome to the very first episode of the Daily Dose Everything. Today we interview Mark DeGerry from Platinum Real Estate Professionals, and we talk to him about everything from his life growing up in Iowa, his military career, and also his real estate career. Alright, so we're here with Mark DeGerry from Platinum Real Estate Professionals. How you doing Mark?

Good, good, good today. That's good. So if I heard right, you grew up in Iowa, what can you tell us about that? Oh, Iowa.

It's a shitload of snow. It's cold as hell, and I don't know why anybody would want to live there. So the club, sorry, go ahead. It's a, you know, the best thing about growing up in Iowa was, you know, a small town, grew up in a small town called Sargible of Iowa.

And, you know, I went with the high school there, you know, from grade school. I guess I moved there in fifth grade and spent all my life there. I went to a Sergeant Buffludin, public school, and then all my up to my freshman year. And then I went to a Catholic high school, my sophomore and junior year.

Um, food, in fact, my dad, he actually played for healing high crusaders where they were national champions and well, estate champions and nationally recognized in 1961. Yeah. Um, so, um, I always want to play football for them. So, you know, just out of respect for my dad, I left my friends at my, at Sergeant Buffludin, went to play two years in, uh, for Suse City healing, uh, for two years.

And then I went back and joined my graduating class for my senior year. Yeah. So that was, uh, you know, then once I graduated, um, I went into the Iowa International Guard right out of, uh, right after high school. And, uh, I was in the International Park for 10 years, uh, before I got out.

Um, but the entire time when I was, uh, in the International Park, I worked for a local box plan. Yeah, uh, making like cardboard boxes. And then, uh, that was what I did for my entire career for 30 years. Um, I managed box plans up until 2013.

And then, uh, and I would, the company that I worked for got bought out. And then I just decided to go to work for my, uh, wife who was a real estate broker and just decided to sell for her. And then, I mean, then it was, uh, it was kind of a nice deal because, um, I always want to get in real estate because when you work for a box plan, and yet I moved around nine times, I sold nine houses through a real estate agent. And each and every time I, I can remember looking back and in the amount of money I had to pay in real estate commissions, I mean, I really walked away with anything because when you moved nine times, I mean, you're only in a house like one or two years.

So by the time you go to sell it and you pay in the commissions, then you really don't have much left equity at all. So I decided that once I got into real estate and attained enough points to get my brokerage license, I started company up that allows people, you know, it gives me the ability to represent them, you know, get full representation. Yeah. And, um, and they walk away with most of their equity in the pocket.

So that's, uh, that's kind of where I got the idea that's having to pay the commissions out. Uh, myself personally is how I came up with my business model. And that's the one where you get a lot of commissions back especially with people by home with you. Yeah.

So, um, I wanted to be able to represent, I want to be able to get back, whether I'm representing somebody that's selling a property or somebody that's buying a property. So that's just that my business model is when you, I offer a full service, just like any other brokerage in the city and tell that where I live. So when people list with me, I do literally everything that any other brokerage and stick you to offers, open houses, um, you know, on three MOS's, uh, professional yards on, I use professional for you name it. Yeah.

You get everything you would with any particular brokerage. The only difference between me and them is you pay a third of what you paid to them, which means, you know, you're talking 40 to 50% in real estate commissions. That's how much you're playing. You can bank on Satan.

You know, that's, that's crap. What am I? Yeah. And then when I represent people there, looking to buy a new home, whether it be new construction, um, you know, existing home investment properties, whatever.

If they choose me to represent them as a buyer's agent, I get paid from the seller. So one thing that a lot of people don't understand is the seller pays the commissions both sides. Buyers agent commission and listening agent. So they're paying all the commissions.

They're responsible for all the commissions in real estate transactions. Buyer shouldn't be charged at nine. Yeah. We represent buyers free.

They don't, they don't pay me a fee. They don't pay me nothing. I get paid from the seller. Whatever they're offering on the MLS, there's a compensation that, you know, when you're looking at homes, it lists on their how much they're offering to pay the buyers agent.

Usually everybody's either two and a half to three percent of the purchase price. So what that means is when I represent my buyer, that seller's company, three percent of the purchase, the sale price of the home. So if, say, they're selling their house for 400,000 and they're offering a three percent commission to the buyers agent, meaning on a brand-wide buyer, we're going to buy that house. I get paid three percent of that, which is a 12 grand.

Yeah. So what I do is I give 1% of that back and cash to my client, which is for grand. For grand as a token of appreciation. And that's straight to the client's bucket, they can do everything they want.

Yeah, they can, I mean, a lot of my clients are being examples. Um, clients that I've represented that took advantage of that program. They want to took a trip to Disneyland, took a kids to Disneyland. I think it was like $35.

One client replaced all new brand new appliances. One replaced all the parking in the house. One, I've had clients that have just stuck in the bank and stayed for a rainy day or other clients has taken a paid off debt. Yeah.

So whatever they would have my clients to do with that money, I just give a cash to a check they can do with it with everything. And I tell you what, they, uh, I get more and more thank yous and five star reviews because of what I offer. It's a big deal. Big deal to them, it's big deal to me to be able to give something back.

So what initially got you into process doing like what sparked that idea that hey, I'm going to give cash back to my buyers. It gets screwed over by real estate agents. So I was selling one ticket or house when I worked for the box plan. And I was only there for like a year and a half.

So I didn't have anything in equity. So by the time, so when I was relocating, uh, I spent a year and a half at that point, I had to go to a different location. So we're responsible for selling our own house through a real estate agent. So I hired my real estate agent and the offer that came in, uh, the market wasn't the best.

Um, I ended up under what I owed. If you once they factored commissions in, yeah, by the time I was sent and done, I was going to lose money. I'd have to bring money out of pocket to sell my house. So I asked my real estate agent, hey, can you do me a favor?

Can you, you know, reduce your commission? So I don't have a short sale on my record. I didn't have a free cash. Yeah.

And this answer was, no, I can't do that. Mm-hmm. And I was like, you gotta be shit. Me.

So, um, from that point on, I just made it up one to myself. I know what I'm doing when I retire. I'm going to do something to where people, because as a broker, I've do whatever I want. There's so many clients that I represented that I reduced my commission even below what I charge now.

You keep them out of the situation. That's what I like to do. And personally, that's the right thing to do because nobody else is going to do that. And I just feel that, I mean, the feeling that I get when I do something like that, I mean, to me, that just makes me feel like, um, you know, it's one of the best feelings ever to be able to help somebody situation that you know, personally, it is really intent to get into that type of situation.

So it's kind of nice to be able to do that. Yeah. And then also with you being form of military, you do also do discount for those who are form of military as well, right? Oh, for military veterans.

So I'm a veteran, obviously, from a military experience in background. Um, so a lot of veterans today don't get the benefit that they deserve. Yeah. And one of the things that they're real estate broker, I like to be able to provide them with an opportunity to save even more money.

So one of the things I do is, you know, my business follows, I listen for 1% for the entire general public, but for veterans, I list their homes for half a percent. And it's just one thing that gives them the ability to save as much of the equity in their home as possible. And feel good about giving back to veterans because of, you know, we as veterans, you know, there's not a lot of, you know, not a lot of, um, you know, opportunity out there recognition, if you will. Yeah.

Um, for, you know, just as veteran status and what they've gone through. So I think me personally, that it makes me feel even better to be able to provide something like that to them. Mm hmm. So when you're in the military, what were you primarily doing?

You're with the Air Force Greg? Um, I was in the Air Force and the munitions. Okay. So I, uh, armed and dearmed Air Force, just like our particular unit, we had a seven course theirs.

And then we converted, we did a conversion into a 16, five,000. So being able to, you know, go on TDY's, I went to TDY up in a cold day calendar. Yeah. And, you know, you're talking countries in Japan, China, everybody comes over up into Canada for this NATO exercise.

You talk about the funnest experience. I mean, literally we took a ban and strap the canoe, we strap the canoe to the top of this band. And you get a lot of TD, you know, you got a lot of free time when you're on these TDY's. So we were staying at the barracks and we had a rental man.

So we strap the canoe to the top and drove out to cold day. And we had a buddy mine. We pout this something to all the way right to the word. So in cold, like, there's one spot where literally walking, walking, way steep.

And then all of a sudden it drops off. You can tell because how all these reeds growing around were drops off. So we anchored though, but canoe there and we sat there and fished for Northern Pike and oh my god, we had the funnest time. I mean, just like every time you cast out, you got a fish on and you talk.

I don't know if you ever fished for Northern Pike before. No, I haven't. Those fish fight and they're so fun. We were laughing so hard.

It was just a, it was probably the funnest, what the funnest experiences I've ever had in my life. Just being a cold at Canada alone, being able to go to Mall of America when we had some free time. But that fishing expedition right there, that was, I would say that's probably one of the funnest times I've ever really. What else besides Canada for these stations?

Let's say we've been to Turkey, the St. True and Belgium was our checkered flag base, but I spent some time obviously in basic training at San Antonio, Texas. And I spent some time at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio as well. Both field up in Wisconsin.

There were a lot of TDWIS up there. But I would say, you know, being in the air guard was, that was probably one of the funnest experiences I'm like, I got into military because, you know, there are, there's a lot of stuff that I've seen going up in military at our Air Force Base at our, uh, guard base in Sioux City. We actually had, I don't know if you remember, you're probably, you're probably too young, you probably anymore. We had a plane crash right at our airport.

They even made a movie out of it, uh, flight 232. But you're with it in 1997. Yeah, I was born in the old zone. So we actually had a United Air Air flight 232.

You ever heard of the woman? So the movie longs? No, I had it. So, um, I can't, John Boy, uh, I can't think of an actor's name, but, uh, and Charlton Heston played, uh, played the pilot, Al Hanes.

And I was in extra in that movie. Um, but this plane crash, flight 232, United flight 232, um, had like 39, or 297 people on board, 100, 100, 100, some survived. But what happened was, uh, they lost the hydraulics on this plane. Yeah.

And the only way that the pilot could fly was in circles. That's how we made it into the Sioux City airport. And this plane was coming in and it looked like everything was fine. Like it was just, but our airport was super small.

Not it was at the time DC 10 DC, DC 10 or DC seven. Anyway, huge plane, yeah, bigger than our airport can handle, but we're the only airport close by that they could land him. So this plane's coming in and it's coming in. It looks like you're going to have a perfect landing.

The minute it touched down, the wind tipped hit the ground and this plane car wheeled into flames, throwing passengers into the cornfield. So once the plane settled and it was in flames, you know, we had a seven pilots, but that taxi down, get ready to take off that they held up. So all the pilots shut their planes down jumped out to go help any survivors that they could find. You're talking pilots carry kids, I have a few slodge.

And people walking out of the cornfield that had been ejected from the plane. That's crazy. I mean, for the long time, there was so many people in the garden unit that screwed up, started smoking again because they were of everything that they did. So our alert hanger and Bondo was full of caskets.

I tried to, you know, the Bondo was set up for as more, you know, with Dell, you know, viewing dental records of people that I didn't find. It's probably the most horrific experience ever. Yeah. But um, so there's a lot of memories from it.

A lot of good ones, a lot of bad ones. Yeah. So originally got you going to the military with a family member or actually really. Yeah.

So just um, it was out of a sheer luck. My, uh, I want to say the wife was a broker. And when the company got bought out, the boss might like bought out, a boss company that got bought out, um, they wanted me to move to California. I wasn't, I wasn't ready to, I wouldn't want to move to California.

Yeah. So I, uh, we got talking to society that I just retire. And if I real estate license, but it were for her, so I'm real estate estate for her company. And she really, she didn't sell, she got her broker's license, um, because she has a lot of rental properties and her folks have a lot of rental properties.

So in order for her to manage them, she had a broker's license. Yeah. So that's one of the reasons why she attacked hers. And it's just, I was just fortunate enough that okay, I go work for her.

I started selling residential for her, even though she never did it before. Um, she did a occasional deal for a friend or family member, whatever. But, um, and then for her own person, you know, being a representative of the buy additional rental properties. So then, um, I decided I'm going to start building her company up and eventually build something where we can both, you know, benefit from.

So that's when I came up with the idea of the 1% given the 1% back because I went to the division of real estate to figure out how I could give this money back because in real estate, you can't pay an unlicensed person a commission. Yeah. But the division simply pointed to me and said, well, what you can do is once the transaction closes, it becomes a broker, it's just money. So once that happens, it's like, you can do whatever, whatever you want with it.

So perfect. They just suggested that I call it a rebate. And that allows me, that's where I got the 1% cash back rebate idea from. So now I can sell houses for 1% in the 1% cash back, which is something that nobody else does in the city of Utah that I'm a world.

So it provides me to have a company that does something that nobody else does. Yeah. And then yeah, I got a, I got a self three times as many properties as your typical real estate agent. But I'm busy around.

And my clients are the one solely benefiting from. Let me represent them. And then I'd also imagine with you having like the best deals in pretty much all city Utah and given all this money back to them. That's what I said at home.

I bet you that you have lots of repeat customers you have never ever framed family friends. Oh, shit. I have, I have clients where I've represented mom and dad, all of their kids several times now. And everybody, you know, there's a lot of skepticism.

Yeah. Because when you talk about nobody else, when nobody else does what I do, you know, this world is full of scams. Yeah. And so there's a lot of skepticism that you got to get over and get around.

Because everybody, you know, one of the biggest thing is everybody thinks what's the catch? There's got to be something to it. Yeah, it's kind of a two-minute to be true situation. Exactly.

That's, you know, some of my clients actually use that phrase. And I'm like, you know what, I have over 153 five star reviews now. So that's helped quite a bit get over that skepticism because I've had several hundreds of clients that have used us and found out it's the real deal. Yeah.

No, they really, they're the ones that really understood that there isn't anything to be skeptical of. It's something that it's been a long time coming. I mean, real estate agents and, you know, there's a lot of good real estate agents out there. But they just think different than I do.

Yeah. I think that one percent is more than fair in regards to compensation. You know, I get those estate agents come up to me all the time saying, and you're, you're pimping yourself out or, you know, you're disrupting the entire real estate industry by doing what you do. And I'm like, I don't get a shit because I feel good about what I do.

Every transaction I do, and I go to the closing table to settlement table where the people are, they see their settlement statement and see the difference between what they pay the buyer's agent and what they paid me. Yeah, that is what gives me the satisfaction of doing what I do. And that's what keeps bringing the referral business to me because they just experience saving over 10 grand, 12 grand. There's, I think the highest I've ever saved somebody is 20 grand in real estate commissions.

That's insane. That's insane. It's right. But I don't deserve that equity.

Yeah. That belongs to the seller, my client, because they they should be allowed to, I mean, they were hard for the gain that equity in their house. The service I provide, 1% is it pays my fees as a real estate broker to the local boards that I want to to allow me to continue passing on savings to all my clients and provide them a service that nobody or that everybody else provides, but at a third of the cost. Yeah.

So from my perspective, I have a best, the best experience and best deal in the city you talk. Yeah. No, nobody else does that. And I think it really shows a type of person you are that you're willing to give up.

You're your commission just to help people. That's right. And I think that really does say a lot of up. There's no, there's no companies on that.

You know, I think from, you know, after, you know, grown up in selling houses, I think they forget who their really clients, you know, truly, what their clients really need to them without our clients or nothing. But you know, clients are not business. And I think we forgot over time the importance of that. You know, I'm not saying that that it's, I don't know what I'm trying to say.

All I know is that's to me the right way to do business is I probably get it from my dad. My dad probably get it. He'll go, I know for a fact, my dad give you shirt right off his back. And that's just how I was raised.

I got Midwest values, ethics, you know, growing up through the military and, you know, yeah, I don't know, that's how I was raised to care for people and to do whatever I can to help them out. That's just how I raised. I can't change that never will because I feel damn good about what I do. And yeah, am I ever going to get rich off real estate?

No, I'll never ever be rich off real estate. But that's not what I intended when I got into real estate. I intended to give me something to do to keep it busy, provide something to clients to allow them to keep as much equity as possible. I get paid a small fee, which allows me to continue with my business.

Yeah. And pay my real estate fees to my local real estate boards to allow it represented more and more clients on the road. So they can walk away with as much money as possible instead of paying them commissions and not ever have to experience anything less than they get with any of the real estate. That's what makes me happy about what my business is all about.

And so do you think if you're flat in the list, what's it doing this? Anyone else ever end up doing it? Or I think, you know, in today's world, even now that people know, I'm in their market, they will do it on a case by case basis. So if they're competing with me, they'll do it just to try grab the business from me.

Yeah. But like I said, I don't think that's very business minded because if you're not doing it all the time, it's part of your business model. You can. I mean, either do it or you don't.

Yeah. And I just think it's all for the wrong reasons when they have to do it. That's the big difference. They have to do it versus want to do it.

They only have to do it because they're competing with me. And to be honest with you, I give 110% to every client. I'm not saying real estate agents don't either. I just think there's different, um, motive behind it.

Yeah. It's all about money for them to me. It's all about care with the client. Then walk away with more money that I'm getting paid.

Because I'm a client to do they walk away with more money than I am. Yeah. And that makes me feel fantastic inside because I know that referral is going to lead to more more continued business. And that's how I say business.

Yeah. And I feel good about that. No, I think that's really good because you're able to recognize, okay, maybe I give a regular money right now. But down the road is only a regular.

You're just going to create vegan customers, vegan clients and referrals and all that. Yeah. And you know, in the more more clients that I represent, the more money I say people, every client I represent, I'm saying them with more money. I mean, I think, uh, you know, I do a year and the results like Facebook live, I'll do a video on how much I say to my clients.

You get all these other properties there. I'm revenue and sales I generated this year. And I don't give a shit about that. Yeah, that number on how much I didn't sales don't mean anything to me.

You don't want the amount of money that only figures that matter to me is how much I saved my clients year over year for the 12 months for that year and how much I gave away in rebates to the clients I represented all year. Those are the two figures I share. Nothing more because it goes the only two things that matter to me. So again, so we're kind of getting free far into it.

And so close it out. I want to start a little tradition on this podcast. So I'm asking you question, you have one week to live during that week, what do you want to do? If money's not an issue, you just go do whatever you want with whoever you want.

Spend time with my family. Yeah, I mean without without being raised, the way I was raised from Midwest and from my dad, you know, I learned a lot from him. I was raised right is people matter, family matters. And without friends and family, what's going on in life?

So that's kind of how I live my life. And if I had a week left, I did enjoy the time of the people that I grew up with in this race. Just experienced as much as I could in my endless days, if you will. Absolutely.

Right, Mark, what was really great talking. I appreciate you taking the time to do this. Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate that.

You bet.