Real Estate Agent Bio Videos: Strategies, Tips, and Scripts

If you are watching this video, it’s because you’re on this page, which is who is Robert Newman? I have always been a lover of a big believer in the magic of storytelling. In terms of my entire career, I believed that what we do for our livings is very much impacted by our personal story.

And, I have shared in many different places, on podcasts, in writing, on my own website, about real estate, like what realtors should do about bios. I have strongly encouraged the concept of being a little personal, sharing your story, letting people know who you are. Because at the end of the day, we’re always doing business with other people, and when you’re doing business with a company, oftentimes even if that company is fairly large, you’re doing business with whatever that founder’s vision is, and you either buy into that vision or you bought into the results of that vision, like Amazon having things delivered next day.

So what’s my story? What’s Robert Newman’s story? Well, Robert Newman was born in California, specifically in Newport Beach, to a young lady who got pregnant with me in 1969. She was very young and had me out of wedlock in 1970. This wasn’t a great time to have an accidental pregnancy, and it was particularly unkind to my mother. Her family pushed her out of the family circle of trust, and she had to support herself. As a result, I ended up growing up for the first few years of my life being raised by people other than my mother. My father was never in the picture, and I don’t know much about him. My mother passed away when I was very young, at the age of 17.

However, I was lucky because when she did come back to raise me when I was about three years old, she brought another man into my life who has been my father my entire life. He promptly adopted me a few years later, and so I talk about my family. My brothers work for my agency, but this family is my adopted family. They took me in and have kept me close for many years. So my life, in a weird way, because my mother passed young and my father kept raising me, is a product of the kindness of people that did not necessarily know me prior, and it definitely forms a lot of my philosophies when it comes to how I do business and what I’m looking to accomplish in the world, which is basically to give back some of the things, some of the great experiences that I’ve been given throughout my life.

My family moved around Southern California when I was young, and like most teenagers, I wasn’t getting along with my dad very much. So at the age of 17, I had the brilliant idea to get a GED, leave school, and go directly into the workforce. I had about 50 different jobs, and none of them stuck. I didn’t find anything that I loved. However, my family raised me without television or media, but they had a library in the house with thousands of books. I was always reading books from a very early age, which gave me an idea that even my own family didn’t give me.

Both my parents were coders, and my mother was managing developers. My dad was coding in Cobol and helped create the original code for the day and night tellers. They were the original people where you could put a card in and money would spit out at you. My exposure to technology and the idea of technology happened very early in life, even though I personally didn’t have the gift of mathematics.

When I left home and went through all these jobs, I became kind of like a punk rock homeless person, running around the streets of Hollywood.

It was 1988 and 1989 when I started to get ready for an idea, and I was living the life of a punk on the streets of LA. That’s when I first learned my first really hard lessons on life because it was fun and exciting for all of a week, and then it just got hard and depressing. I learned real quick that the only way for me to change my circumstances was to change my behaviors, change my habits. And that’s where those books that I mentioned really came in handy. I had read enough books to understand the very broad concept of mindset affecting results, and that there were two ways in the US to make a lot of money: owning your own business or going into sales without a technical skill set.

I chose sales and entrepreneurship, and my first business when I was 19 was a cleaning business. I started to change my life, and the way that I changed my life was by dedicating myself to learning the art of sales. My first sales job was selling perfume hand-to-hand on the street. We would chase people down and say, “Hey mister, got a minute? Hey ma’am, got a minute? I’ve got something really incredible to show you.” We would have this bottle of perfume in our hands, and we would ask them to smell it and tell us what they thought.

I did that for a couple of years, and then I got a job as a telemarketer when I was about 21. That job would change my life. While I was very bad at it for the first few months, I spent a lot of time listening to every single person on the phone. I became really good at every single script and every single thing that everybody was saying. I started to learn the concept that for everything somebody said to me on the phone, there was a response or a rebuttal. I also had my first mentor, Billy Halverstadt, who showed me how to run call centers and analyze results.

By the time I was 23, I was running the call center I had started working in when I was 21. I became very good at push marketing, convincing people to do something they weren’t intending to do in the first place. I had the chance to learn from the best sales trainers of the day, including Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins, Brian Tracy, Dennis Waitley, and Earl Nightingale. I spent thousands of hours learning about the psychology of selling and the mathematics of making sales calls in volume.

Along the way, I started a couple of businesses, including a consulting business. I even taught at a few colleges as a guest speaker, despite being a high school dropout.

But anyway, here’s a strange thing. I, a high school dropout, have taught at quite a few colleges, just little courses as a guest speaker or as somebody who’s walked in. I got very, very good at communicating the idea of learning to be excited about things that most people are not excited about, like door knocking and phone calling. I learned that in my early 20s.

Unfortunately, in the middle of my life, I had a relationship with a woman, and it fell apart. It mentally and emotionally destroyed me. Believe it or not, even though I was hanging out with punks and doing a lot of stuff in the streets of L.A., I was always pretty much a clean-cut kid. But when my relationship fell apart, I started drinking heavily and ended up developing a drinking problem. That’s where my professional story staggers a bit.

I did still do many things. I consulted with ADT, ran canvassing crews, and sold security systems. I went through a whole bunch of jobs, just kind of blindly wandering from gig to gig. I was always able to get the gigs because I’ve always been very, very good at selling or training others to sell. I’ve always been an asset wherever I went.

Well, seven years of that and a couple of minor things worth mentioning. But here’s where my story really gets interesting. I got sober, and as part of getting sober, I managed to lose all my friends and family. Nobody’s talking to me anymore. It was pretty much a deep bottom. I was living on the streets, staying between the Long Beach mission and the LA mission.

Somewhere in that journey, I hit my bottom and decided to stop drinking. It wasn’t simple. There were many tries and failures, and I ended up losing a big business I had established. I lost everything because of drugs, ending up in jail. My partners sold everything out from underneath me. Many things in the middle were drug and alcohol-related, and I learned a ton of lessons.

At about 36, I made the decision to change. I realized that the days of door knocking and telemarketing were limited in terms of their efficiency. The industry had been changing for a long time. Most effective telesales now happen on the inbound side, where people call you because they’re your customer or have received something from you. I recognized that and wanted to get out of telemarketing.

I got a job as a telemarketer at Girls Gone Wild, a company that everybody knows and loves, or usually loves to hate. I got the job because they were close to the Long Beach shelter, where I was living at the time. I was just getting sober, living in the mission, and working all day and all night selling DVDs and continuity programs over the phone.

Within the first year of being sober, I was running the largest series of call centers I had ever run. I was in charge of a budget of seven million dollars in direct advertising. But that gig ended with the FBI raiding the building. I wasn’t really unhappy when it ended. I had saved money and paid off old warrants and restitution.

I wanted to get into online marketing and real estate. I sent out 300 resumes after leaving Girls Gone Wild. It took me 300 resumes to even get a single call. And I started, I think I took a week off and then I started sending out resumes. In my brain, because of all my sales history, I thought that would be a golden ticket into tech. But boy was I wrong. It took me 300 resumes to even get a single call, one phone call. That’s it.

Actually, that’s not true. I’m sorry, I forgot. There was another call from Radiant Seven. And then I got a call from Agent Image. Agent Image didn’t take me, they said I was too old. The other place that called me was Agent Image, John Crabb, one of the founders.

The funny thing is that the first 200 resumes I sent out, I was using the corporate global name for Girls Gone Wild, which is Mantra Entertainment. Nobody knew who that was. And then the last hundred or so resumes, I was just getting so desperate for anybody. I was like, “Well, maybe somebody, I’ll take any kind of call.” So I started putting down Girls Gone Wild, and that perked John Crabb’s ears up.

He thought that maybe I had forged the experience on my resume. I mean, it is pretty weird because the job I applied for at Agent Image was a starting sales person’s job, and my last title was Director of Call Center Services, which was essentially Director of Marketing for Girls Gone Wild.

That was my introduction into both real estate and search engine optimization, which happened about 14 years ago. The moment that I started to learn the complexities of Google, the ideas behind Google, it played into my roots with technology and my parents being hippies. Google’s original logo and adage really appealed to me.

I started to realize that there’s this incredible avenue for attraction marketing. If you put up a really good answer to something on a web page, it is very likely that somebody would call you as opposed to you calling them. I was tired and exhausted of convincing people to do stuff. I wanted to try something else, and I tried attraction marketing. I’ve been sold on it ever since.

For a while, though, because of newness into sobriety and a few other things, unlike my past where I had often started my own companies, I slowed down on that a lot. I worked for Agent Image for a few years. Then a friend of mine who was the former head of a cable channel called G4 called me and asked me to come run what at the time was LA’s biggest independently owned web development sales team.

I did such a great job that they agreed to sell my division to the CEO of the company. I took my friend’s offer and ran the sales team at a place called Cyplex. We did some really big projects, high-ticket stuff.

Eventually, Vinnie called me and we got in touch. And then when we got in touch, the reason that I was getting exhausted. Right around the time that I was doing some business with Jeff Probst, who is the producer for Survivor, he called me from some island on a sat phone on a Sunday night. He told me he wanted changes made to his project and that we needed to have a deliverable by Monday morning. However, I had nobody to call as my entire team was off. It was great work, but also brutal work. High-end web development is unforgiving, with big budgets and people calling at all hours.

As a person compensated partially through commission, these projects could run for a year or longer. Sometimes the agency wouldn’t be working on the project, so payments could be delayed. Despite the challenges, I learned a lot and realized that I could be successful in the real estate industry. I had become a true technologist and gained the skills to develop any project I wanted.

I reconnected with Vinnie, who asked me to run the sales team at Him Forza, the division we had started at Agent Image. I accepted the opportunity and returned to the real estate industry for another five or six years. During this time, I did business with many prominent names in the industry, either through previous connections or by seeking them out.

Vinnie eventually decided to stop working in real estate, and given my extensive experience, it was only a matter of time before I pursued my own entrepreneurial ventures. I started by working as a consultant for various clients, including dentists and real estate professionals. Through consulting, I gained in-depth knowledge of different systems and tools, such as KV Core and Zurple.

While working with clients, I realized that there was a significant gap in the real estate industry. There was a lack of teaching and guidance for real estate agents regarding attraction marketing. Companies focused on SEO-driven real estate websites were limited, often requiring agents to rely entirely on those companies for their online presence.

Seeing this gap, I founded Inbound REM to address these issues. I aimed to provide real estate websites focused on content and equipped with a robust content management system. As a consultant, I offered tailored advice on producing effective videos and crafting compelling messages to attract potential clients. My approach diverged from the traditional methods taught in the industry, focusing on a holistic strategy.

Over the years, I honed my understanding of Google and its various platforms, including YouTube, image search, local search, and more. I applied my knowledge and skills to my own website and developed products and services that emphasized content and effective marketing strategies. Inbound REM has grown from a small operation to a company with 18 full-time staff members, including developers, writers, SEO technicians, and more.

Despite the challenges, including the pandemic and false starts, our company has steadily grown. We have also built a network of part-time developers, designers, and writers to provide additional support. Currently, Inbound REM continues to thrive, focusing on delivering quality services to clients in the real estate industry.