With over 30 years in the business and over $125 million in gross sales in 2023 alone, Joel Carson stands at the top of Utah’s real estate scene. After leaving an accounting career and teaming up (and eventually parting ways) with his father‑in‑law, he found his niche by relentlessly door‑knocking FSBOs—closing 106 transactions his first year and earning national recognition.

In this episode, Joel shares how he systematically adds a new lead source each year mastering everything from bus‑side ads and pay‑per‑click to social media engagement and in‑house handyman services to build a one‑man operation that enables him to meet with every buyer and seller himself.

He also dives into the power of consistency (yes, answer your phone!), local branding, and pivoting quickly when the market shifts. Whether you’re a new agent carving out your first niche or a veteran looking to scale without losing your personal touch, Joel’s playbook is packed with hard‑won lessons and practical tactics for long‑term success. Tune in to learn how he turned persistence into profit—one deal at a time.

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Off Market Podcast. This week we have Joel Carson. Joel is at Salt Lake City's number one realtor and has been consistently ranked the number one realtor in Utah by real trends, personal sales. He's also been recognized by organizations including best of SLC Property, spark and Zillow.

As a top industry leader, Joel has more than 30 years of experience buying and selling real estate in 2023 alone. Sold well over 125 million in gross sales. If you're looking to buy or sell real estate in and around Salt Lake City, Joel's your guy. Joel, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Austin. Nice. Nice being here.

Thanks for, thanks for coming on. So Joel, take us back to your beginnings. How'd you get into real estate? How'd you decide, Hey, I wanna be a realtor? Yeah, back in, I got out of the military, uh, was an accountant of all things super boring. Didn't like that field. My father-in-law at the time was in real estate.

He had been in real estate for decades and [00:01:00] he said, Hey, you should give this a shot. This was in 1990s, uh, before the internet. Um, mind you, so. Got started with him and we teamed up, which was, uh, ended up being not a great thing. He was very old school. Anyway, got out of that partnership and really went after for sale by owners.

Um, and I. Uh, took off from there. I love it. So maybe take me back to that first deal. Do you remember who it was? How did it unfold, what the dollar amount was? Obviously we're talking about much larger properties today. We were back then, but talk to us about that. Uh, that first deal you, you closed. Yeah. I remember it was in an area called Sandy, Utah, which is very close to where I live, and it was a listing I picked up.

Uh, and it ended up being my thickest file. I, you know, that that file was this thick with just, I had everything in there, didn't miss a detail. They were very [00:02:00] kind, basically felt sorry for me to give me the listing. And so, yeah, that was on 8,600 South. I remember it had a teal green door, and I'll never forget that that transaction ended up selling it and had a happy client, so it didn't.

Yeah, it, it, it ended up working out really well. Hey, you never know. Sometimes it can be your neighbor, it could be your best friend, it could be somebody you just pass to pass on the street. You get your first deal and, and then you're off to the races. So you sell your first deal. You obviously sell some more deals.

In the beginning, I've heard two approaches, people will to go really. Narrow and wide deep. So they'll try to go after a specific type of listing in a specific market, in a specific neighborhood, or they'll go really wide. Right. Anything that gets thrown at 'em. What was your strategy in the early days to start securing more of those listings and representing more of those buyers?

And then ultimately, how did that strategy evolve over time? Yeah, I mean, I just took a very. Logical [00:03:00] approach to real estate. I've always said that you need to be sitting at the table with a buyer or a seller. I mean, there's many ways to make money in real estate, but literally those are the two main ones.

Right? And back in when I started in analyzing that, I thought, what's the quickest way to a closing? And the, and I answered that. That was a for sale by owner. They want to sell and they don't have an agent. So. I attacked, uh, for sale by owners. I had multiple steps, uh, would stop by their house, always appeared to be in a rush.

Never asked for a listing, just was helping them. And over a period of 10, uh, times of being on their doorstep, annoyingly, I would end up getting the call and listing their home. And my first year I was with a com, a brand called Better Homes and Gardens, uh, which is still a franchise, but ended up number one in the nation.

I was rookie of the year. I closed 106 [00:04:00] transactions doing for sale by owners. So dove in very narrow. I, I would guess is the answer to that. Absolutely crushed it outta the park. It's interesting. How you can find a niche and if you can find that niche when you're just getting started of something that nobody else is even paying attention to, you can crush it.

Right? We had, uh, the youngest broker in California history on the podcast a few weeks ago, and he got his broker's license in two months. And the way he did it was he went after multifamily and single family owners who were renting their apartments and they were doing it on rent pads. And he'd go out and be like, Hey, I saw this listing.

It's been on the market for now, 30 days, 60 days. You can't seem to rent it. Are you interested in selling? Sure enough, almost every time. Yeah, of course I'll have you sell it. And closed 27 listings in his first month, wrote to the board and said, Hey, you know, I just got my license. I closed these 27 listings and I think I'm ready.

Gimme the test and I'll pass it. Took the test, passed it, and there he was. So, oh, that's crazy. What a story. Yeah. [00:05:00] And talk about a niche, you know, that's, yeah. Super important. Yeah. Or we had another one. She focuses only on divorces in Southern California. She represented these divorces and made relationships with all the divorce lawyers.

So the moment the divorce lawyer gets the case, they're like, Hey, you need to sell this real estate, make it as clean as possible, hands it over to her, and there she goes. So maybe talk to us about your strategy from scaling from then. So you go from doing these FSBOs, and I assume FSBOs were your niche for a little while, and now you have this team and you're still crushing it.

So talk to us about what you do today. Yeah, I think my strategy's a little different. You know, there are a lot of big teams out there. I've chosen more of a lone wolf pass. I have staff that works for me, but I don't have any buyer's agents. I'm the one that's out there, uh, meeting with the buyers and the sellers, and, and that's all I do is, is do the meetings.

And then after that, my listing coordinator takes over and, and once we're under contract, my [00:06:00] transaction coordinator. But one thing I did early in my career is I, I said I'm going to add a new source of business to my portfolio every year. And a lot of agents, I think they're like, how do I start? What do I do?

There's so many different things, social media, Google advertising, whatever. And they end up starting things, but they don't perfect it, you know? I mean, if you go down the, the rabbit hole of Google Pay per click, I mean, there's a lot to learn there, you know, and, and without hiring a company, which there's a lot of people out there that just really take your money and they don't deliver, I chose to learn that and actually figure it out.

I, I've now hired someone full-time that works for me, but. I think adding a new source of business so that you are not just stuck in, in a, a very narrow approach, like any investment, the wider the [00:07:00] portfolio, the lower the risk. And that's been very effective for me to scale my business. You know, people always ask, how do you do?

'cause I'm doing over 200 transactions a year myself, not a team. Nobody gets that and I stay hyperfocused on. Activity that creates a, a closing, you know, if I ask myself often, is what I'm doing making me money? Yes or no? And you know, agents tend to waste a lot of time doing busy work. I stay hyper-focused on what makes money, so I love it.

Yeah. We had a, a guest on as well, his name's Rick Fuller. He is the number one in Sacramento and the Sacramento area. And he had this. This, uh, funny take on the 80 20 rule. He calls it the 97 3 rule, which is most realtors spend 97% of their time on activities that don't produce anything and the 3% of activities that actually produce transactions and listings and the rest of it, it just somehow gets glossed over as if [00:08:00] it's magically gonna land in their lap.

And so he constantly focuses and tries to train his team on, Hey guys, these are the three activities we need to focus on today, because that's what's actually gonna drive forward the business. It's not. Going out and doing flyers or mailers. It's getting meetings with people, picking up the phone, calling, making sure you're staying top of mind with these people.

Um, and I think another thing interestingly that you touched on there was you expanded your business and, uh, and you decided to go with different approaches to try to drive that business. And one of the things you didn't touch on that I'm actually really interested to learn about is social media. You have almost 200,000 followers across all of your different platforms.

You absolutely crush it when it comes to engagement on those posts. So I'd love to hear why you decided to go down that path, how well that's worked for you, and, and maybe share a couple of tips if you have, for people that want to go down the same path as you. Yeah, I mean, social media is an interesting one.

I a lot of people, I, I [00:09:00] do it really more for being top of mind. You know, I think being out there every day in social media, people see your face, um, and they remember you. It's, it's not necessarily just driving business to the bottom line. I mean, I get leads from it, but the majority of what I focused on is, uh, building relationships with.

Agents nationally. I try to follow and comment and, and like other people's listings and make real comments, not just a bot. You know, I think a lot of people hire, again, these companies that take your money and, uh, don't do what they say they're going to do. So that is just kind of a coup. I mean, it's grown rapidly over the last couple of years.

I have adult children. They all are in awe of my social media because, you know, they think their social medias are, are, uh, everything. And they look at me and go, dad, we don't even understand, but. You [00:10:00] know, I've, I, uh, watched Million Dollar Listing New York and Million Dollar Listing, uh, LA I love those guys.

And Ryan Shan, I think that guy's a stud, uh, followed a lot of what he does, you know, he's got a very focused way of his business and it just, it just keeps going. As far as a tip, I think it's just doing what you want others to do to you on social media. So, you know, follow, like, comment, um, engage, and it'll happen, you know?

I love it. I love it. I think that's, you hit it on a point there, which often gets overlooked, which is some people like to put out content, putting out content's only one of the battles. The other battle is now you have to actually go engage with other people's content. So they naturally wanna follow you, engage with your content, which I think some people forget about.

So talk to us a little bit about the process of becoming a top agent in your area. There's been a few different ways to do it. I've seen people that have. Hired these massive teams and they've scaled [00:11:00] through listing agents and buying agents that sit underneath 'em. There's people that have started brokerages and then there's people like yourself and David Curry who decided, Hey, I'm just gonna be a one man operator.

I'm gonna be the one that's doing the listing and buying, representing those individuals. And so there's like this dichotomy. And that's kind of the, the ways people have scaled. But talk to us about some of the things that maybe people don't get to see as much. Like some of the struggles you've faced or some of the things you've had to give up or some of those sacrifices you've had to make.

Because I think those are the things where people think they want it, but they don't actually know what all it takes to get there. Right. You know, I've always been a techie. I got into the industry back when we had, uh, all the listings in a book, you know, which I thought was amazing because we controlled the data.

Um, I. When the internet came out, uh, everyone was terrified that we would be replaced, and I quickly just jumped on board, started buying domain names. I'm a junkie of domain names. I own [00:12:00] 500, and they're all very good. But I think staying up with technology is very important. Just like with social media, Yelp and Snapchat and house and all these different things, you just really need to jump in and explore and see what's going to drive.

Business. You know, a lot of people don't realize you can advertise on Yelp, for instance. And I do advertise on Yelp, but one thing I've done is I answer my phone. I think it's probably the most underrated, uh, success tool there is. I pick up the phone and I say, hello. And you wouldn't believe how many times people say, Joel, you're the only agent that answered their phone this morning.

I've been trying to find somebody. So I, I would say just as a very low level, uh, ideas, answer your phone, but a lot of times that phone rings and it's a, a spam call. You know, it's someone that's wanting to sell something. And something I again learned early on is I listened, uh, one of those calls was Zillow [00:13:00] back a decade and a half ago, and it was this gal and, and I love to hear a good sales pitch.

I mean, who doesn't? And she sold me on Zillow. I said, it's, it's terrible data. You, you know, back then it was awful. And she just said, give it a try. And I did. And I'll tell you, Zillow's been one of the, you know, things that's, uh, driven a lot of my success. Along with realtor.com, homes.com. So I listen to those prospecting calls and I'll do a demo.

Uh, even doing this podcast, Austin, I don't do these things very often. In fact, this is probably one of the only ones I've ever done. I. But I listen and I look for those opportunities and I explore, and then I'll put things into motion that I believe is, is a good fit and is going to be successful.

Sometimes you give people money, it doesn't work. Sometimes you do and, and it works out for the long haul. But one of the things that I would say a, [00:14:00] again, is a lot of times people try things and then they. They back off. The market slows down. I can't tell you how many times my wife has said we need to cut back on Zillow.

And I tell her, look, we've gotta stay right now. The fact that the market slow is the reason we're gonna keep it. And so consistency in advertising will give you consistency in transactions. Everything that I've done that has return on investment, I've continued and I've expanded that. I don't want to be too long-winded here, but you know, that's, I think some advice to really take to heart is, is stay consistent and you'll have success.

That is one of the most underrated piece of advice I think I've gotten on this show. I. A lot of people will talk about, Hey, you, you gotta pick up the phone and make a hundred phone calls a day. Or, Hey, you gotta, you know, knock a hundred doors a day. Or, Hey, you gotta call up your friends and their friends and [00:15:00] everybody else's friends and ask for referrals.

But to your point, the people that win are the people that survive, and those are the people that continue to be consistent throughout. When downturns happen, you're right. There are people that will cut back and then there'll people that'll double down on the things that work and the people that double down on things that work come out of the other side more successful because they've survived the downturn and, and now they're so, for agents that are just starting to get into real estate, it's arguably one of the most difficult times.

To become a new agent, right? You're now having the bifurcation of buyer and seller commissions. You've got fewer listings, you've got more competition than ever, 4 million realtors in the US competing for 5 million listings. You've got realtors taking on, again, 200, 400, 600 listings with a team or even by themself.

What are some of the tips you have for agents that are just starting out that have decided, Hey, I, I think I want to give this a go. What are some of those tips you'd share with with newer agents? You [00:16:00] know, I, I think just keep it to the basics. You know, don't overthink it. You've got to, you've gotta be in the path of a buyer and a path of a seller.

Paths to sellers are difficult to get in, you know, to, as a new agent, winning listings can be tough. Uh, but I, again, I think it's a numbers game. I would fi focus on getting found online because that's where buyers are going and, and. For, uh, sellers, the ones that are out there trying to do it on their own.

I think finding that niche like I did, uh, and go after for sale by owners, I mean, I know that that might sound old school. Maybe it doesn't. I don't know if people are still doing it. I haven't knocked on a door for decades, but I would love to, honestly, that doorstep approach I think is. It's invigorating.

Again, don't, don't focus on things that aren't gonna make you money. Don't get lost in the minutia of, of the contracts and contract law. Uh, I [00:17:00] mean, it's important to know, but, you know, go make, make a mess of things and figure it out later. I. One thing when, when Zillow came out and, and there were other competitors in that timeframe, the thing that I was noticing when Zillow decided they were gonna get into the listing game, that was scary.

I mean, here you have this billion dollar company that is now going to compete for listings. Luckily it failed, but before it failed, I was positioning myself to how do I beat the 800 pound gorilla? And that is. Becoming a local expert. And becoming local focused. Zillow is a national company, but they're not here on the ground like I am.

I've lived here my whole life. I've been in real estate 30 years. It doesn't matter if it's 30 years or one year, you need to become like a local celebrity. You need to advertise, you need to be able to get found. And so I started, uh, advertising on the side of [00:18:00] buses That has been hugely successful just for brand awareness.

People recognize me. Uh, in town. And so I, I think don't underestimate your competition. And, and a lot of our competition is these big companies online that are getting into our wallets. Take a piece of that, you know, um, I still pay Zillow every month and, and happy to do it, but, you know, explore other opportunities.

Direct mail is very effective. So for listings, one thing that I added to my business a couple years ago. Was, I was noticing every time I would take a listing, we needed handyman work. Every seller has a a laundry list of things they need done, touchup paint, drywall, leaky this, whatever. So I hired a full-time handyman.

He's an employee. I bought him a sprinter van. We loaded it with tools. And every time I take a listing, it's part of what I offer as part of my, uh, full service commission, 6%. Uh, and they get [00:19:00] Ryan, Ryan shows up, makes all the repairs. I'll tell you, that's been a, a game changer. There's been a few people trying to emulate what I'm doing, which is fine.

It's flattering, uh, more power to 'em. But, you know, be innovative, think, watch your competition, and then don't, you know, you need to be able to pivot quickly and stay in front of your competition. It's so funny, you hit on two things there that I've always wondered and yesterday we actually had Gusty Dolos on the podcast who's the number one in Birmingham, Alabama, and he was saying that as a realtor, it's your job to become the mayor of your town, or your city or your area.

Essentially, you want everybody to know that you are the go-to for real estate. And if you can accomplish that, it doesn't make a difference whether you have the most number of listings. 'cause eventually you will. 'cause everybody will know who's the number one to call. Gusty or Joel or whoever in there area.

Right? Yeah. It's also super interesting that you're talking about a handyman. I've never heard of that, but that is such [00:20:00] a unique way to go about it, right? Those people always have something that they need fixed or touched up. I'm going through a listing myself right now, and that's what I spent the past two weeks doing, touching up paint, putting vital touches, cleaning, and all the rest of that.

And yeah, somebody would've said, Hey, if you listen with me, I'll do it all for you. I said. Sold. So yeah, I love it. I love it. So the last question and the question I always ask is, you have five minutes with your younger self. You can tell Joel whatever you want. You can tell him about things that, your mistakes you've made and things to avoid.

You could tell him things to do sooner. You could tell him maybe some stock picks, I'm not quite sure, but you have five minutes with your younger self. What are some of the things you, you tell your younger self just getting started in real estate? Wow, that's a really deep question, man. And I didn't prepare to answer.

Um, you know, I, I. I feel fairly good about [00:21:00] where I've ended up, um, just on my own. I think, you know, maybe, maybe this, I would say trust the industry, trust that it's going to be okay. I can't tell you how many people I talk to in this industry that are scared to death. They're, they have anxiety. Uh, they don't sleep working for commission.

I've done both. I've worked for salary. It has its benefits, but working for commission is definitely a mindset, and I would tell myself, trust that it's gonna be okay. That next deal's gonna come. You don't know when or how, but it will. And after 30 years of doing this on commission. It, it, that next deal always finds a way to you.

So that would be the advice I [00:22:00] would give. I love it. Thank you so much for coming to the podcast, Joel. Thanks a lot. Thanks Austin.