A Conversation With ... Jesse Wiser

According to the Greater Springfield Board of Realtors, the average home sales price in our market was up 5.5% in May, year over year. What are you seeing with prices and inventory from your perspective?
I have a lot of broker friends in different cities, California and Florida, and whenever prices kind of went skyrocketing, they inflated a lot faster than we did. Around here, prices aren’t really going too high, but they’re not suppressing fast like the other inflating markets. So, Springfield is actually a really confident market to be in because house prices don’t go up fast and they don’t go down fast.

What about days on market – what is the experience like to buy and sell?
Houses $250,000 or less, if in the right location, go pretty fast. Houses $350,000 or more are a little bit slower. Days on market back in 2021, it was like seven days on average. In 2024, we’re about close to 40 days, which is a drastic change. It creates more of a neutral market, which is probably what we need.

You opened your brokerage in 2022, but you’d been a Realtor before that. What did you want to create as far as a culture? How did you want to do business differently?
I didn’t want to be a broker. I basically woke up one day and God gave me a vision to raise the bar in the real estate industry. Through that, I had to create values: teachable, teamwork, authenticity and excellence. Through those four core values, there’s a culture that’s being created. In the real estate industry, it’s almost impossible to think that independent contractors, people that are supposed to be competitive against each other, can have teamwork. We luckily have it. I’m the broker and my wife is an owner of the company. She works a lot of the behind-the-scenes compliance. We have a personal assistant, a videographer and then we have 15 Realtors. We really want to support our Realtors through one-on-one coaching, training and then marketing.

What does raising the bar mean to you?
Character is something you can’t measure, but it’s doing the right thing when no one else is looking. It is a lot of accountability, a lot of support, a lot of community and just a lot of one-on-one coaching. Putting the customer needs ahead of yours is raising the bar. It’s pretty rare to see that in this industry.

What were some of the biggest hurdles that you overcame in the process of opening the brokerage?
Whenever you become a Realtor, there are so many people trying to help you. There are playbooks, there are trainings because all brokerages want more Realtors. When you open up a brokerage, there is no help. You are lonely. That’s been one of the biggest struggles is figuring out on your own, because no other broker or brokerage is going to go out of their way to help a competitor. There are other broker/owners that are Christians as well that I have met, and we sharpen each other, and we confide in each other.

Tell me about the customers that you’re working with. What are their demographics, and where are they moving from and to?
We specialize in relocations. A lot of people find us on YouTube, they reach out to me because they’ve been watching my YouTube videos for a year or more and they feel like they know me. I work with a lot of people moving from the West Coast, California, Arizona, Utah, where real estate has become very expensive and they’re trying to make ends meet. Missouri is actually one of the cheapest for real estate and living in the United States. If I were to put a demographic to it, it would be people in their 40s with kids. They’re wanting to move here to be closer to the family. They’re selling these houses in California for $1.2 million. They bought them for $400,000. I would say probably 30% of my clients are cash buyers coming to the area.

What’s your approach to marketing on YouTube, and how did you get into that?
I love marketing. I love the demographics, the psychographics, the online behavior, offline behavior. Whenever you’re thinking of people that are moving, if you were to research, you go to Google. And who owns YouTube? Google. If you give the algorithm everything at once, it’ll favor you. After doing it consistently for three years, Google loves me. It’s not about the views; it’s about who is viewing it. I may get five views, but all five of those are customers that will use me. When someone (searches) “moving to Springfield, MO,” we own that space. YouTube is a powerful tool. I think every business owner should utilize it. It takes a lot of resources to get it going, but I think if you’re looking at a long-term plan, it’ll pay ten-fold down the line.

What’s the content in the videos?
Informational video about community, about the Springfield area. We do talk about Missouri, because when people type in “moving to Missouri,” I want them to find Jesse Wiser there and then funnel it down into Springfield, Nixa, Ozark, Republic. What I’ve realized is the majority of people move to Nixa and Ozark mainly because of the schools. They’re leaving their really good-paying jobs in California, and 50% are going remote. They still get paid what they did in California.

Halfway into the year, how many units have you sold, and do you have a goal for the year?
We’ve done close to 100 units for the brokerage as a whole. I would love to see 200 by the end of the year. I think we might end up around 175. Springfield, Missouri, and just the Ozarks, is 10 years behind in technology, marketing and everything, always. I have friends on the coasts, even Texas - they all think bigger. They think big, they believe big and they act big. I saw what are the East Coast, what are the West Coast people doing? And I just started doing what they did. It’s a matter of time before things just kind of grow. I’m in it for the long haul.