Who am I? My name is Josh “the Shark” Altman, aka “the Rain Man of Real Estate,” of the Los Angeles–based Altman Brothers Team. As you read this book you’ll notice that sometimes I lead a chapter with my stats to instill confidence in my clients. Please allow me to do so now.

Last year, out of 2.5 million agents, the Wall Street Journal ranked me #22 and the #1 team in Los Angeles all while filming a TV show for 10 months, writing my last best-selling book, filming a Youtube Channel, recording a podcast, flipping houses, doing 30 keynote speeches around the world, and mentoring thousands of real estate agents. Oh yeah, and having a baby. I have closed over $3 billion in sales. Currently, I have 58 listings with over $100 million in escrow at all times. As my bio reads:

Altman’s reputation precedes him with various record-breaking sales and listings, including a $145 million listing in Beverly Hills, the most expensive one-bedroom ever sold at $21,500,000, the priciest lease in the history of Beverly Hills, the costliest condo sale in Santa Monica, and the highest-price-per-square-foot home sold in the Hollywood Hills. He once approached a big shot studio head one morning at a local gym and sold his house – which wasn’t on the market – for $11.25 million by close of day.

There, now you know, but that’s enough about me. Let’s talk about the game.

Buying and selling real estate is about time, the shot clock. Our market is the world, but our home field is Los Angeles, the city that made us local globalists. This place is crazy. You’ve never seen anything like it. For my brother Matt and me – moving to LA and setting up in Beverly Hills – it was like we were bank robbers in the Wild West, with every money-train there for the taking.

For East Coast guys like us, hustlers with the service mentality, this town gets your adrenaline pumping for more than fame and fortune – it’s the thrill of the deal that keeps us going. Hell no. It’s the hunt, the catch, and no release. The biggest whales from all over the world, they all want a piece, and we want to sell it to them.

I’m talking luxury real estate. I’m talking $20 million-plus mega- mansions under construction, pulling our humble $12 million villas upward because houses are literally judged by the company they keep. Try being a property-flipper on the Westside dealing with a real estate agent who doesn’t understand Altman “Hollywood,” the shot clock, or “Game Time.” If a launch is stalled, if a property goes stale, which will happen here even prior to listing, your coach/client is getting smacked with $20,000 to $40,000 monthly carrying costs: pennies to few, but not to a businessperson who’s been around the block. This dirt piles up and it buries you quick.

The seller’s market here is fierce, bloodthirsty. Many of my clients won’t even look at a property if it was shown to the general public. They want privacy, exclusivity, something no one else can have or has even seen before.

These are the movie stars, hip-hop moguls, fashion models, television producers, professional athletes, kings of property development, the tech industry, hotel heiresses, socialites, and all of their high-end attorneys and doctors who make their homes in the Hollywood Hills, Bel Air, Santa Monica, Marina del Rey, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Beverly Hills.

This is the clientele who demand to see and sell via pocket listings – the “exclusives” that never make it to the MLS. Pocket listings take more time and energy because showing and selling them is a one-on-one process. But Matt and I have the reach within this top-dollar community to fulfill the need with buyers who want to play ball.

Also, some of our clients are developers who buy properties the way everybody else shops for new sneakers. For many of our clients, a real- estate deal won’t make or break their whole bank. This is West Los Angeles. Private jets are common transportation. We kill it here.

But beyond the Hollywood Hills are my sweet spots, the $2- to $4-million deals that power my business day in and day out. The clock runs differently there: a week on the market and a listing starts to go cold and cramp up; a month passes and you can forget about multiple offers. You have to beat that clock. Do it and you make money, if not, you have to drop the price. You’ll have to reinvent the listing.

If your re-launch isn’t on point, just take the property off the field in a stretcher, light a match, whatever. It’s done. I’ll tell you soon how we nurse it back to health. We’re great at that, reviving the deal. To dying properties, the Altman Brothers are the best doctors around.

Don’t take my word for it. Matt and I did $423 million in sales last year. I’m aware of what we’re up against. You see, any savvy real estate agent or home shopper can figure out on the MLS how many times and for how long a house has been listed. Hell, just Google it. It’ll tell you.

Buyers are sure to think there’s something wrong with the house and they’ll want out, as if touching the place would hurt their image, their brand, their team. In a town where you’re only as good as your last project no one picks up a dying horse, they just cover it in a tarp on the track, put it down right in front of the crowd.

Study after study has backed this. The longer a house is for sale, the less likely it will get asking price. In and around LA, this clock ticks faster than anywhere in the world. A listing’s life expectancy is short. Taxes, loans and mortgage rates are high. Act fast, you’ll make money. Ignore this, you’ll lose money.

When money’s lost, the locals get restless, the word gets out and you have to know how to hold on to your successful image and keep the jackals at bay. The only way to do that is to make bank and keep your eye on the shot clock. Balancing urgency, strategy, and patience is a delicate game. It requires finesse. It requires the Altman Close.

Matt and I were working on a sale in the Hollywood Hills, a glorious Italianate celebrity compound on a cul de sac hovering above hawks in the clouds over LA. A builder bought it, intending to renovate and resell; he installed Carrera-marbled hallways, vine-covered pergolas, hand-forged iron railings, and a series of outdoor decks with fireplaces for entertaining. What he did was beautiful.

We proposed a listing figure. He thought it was worth more than what we suggested. He hired some other agent. The guy then bumped around, struggling to sell it at a higher price with that other agent. The nerve, but hey, we know the drill. It happens. Everyone wants to be a baller until they get stuck with the ball.

After some time with his face in the dirt and his pockets getting plucked, he finally came back to us ready to accept our suggestion, the one we’d given him in the first place six months earlier. After being on the market for six months, this house should have been a pig.. But it’s LA, man. You never know. The old agent couldn’t sell the house because of all the construction around it. That was a major issue for him in showing the property to his clients. The trick is to be aware, to be ahead, to think the way hockey legend Wayne Gretzky’s father taught him: “Don’t go to where the puck is, go to where it’s going to be.” You have to be quick, ready to adjust, adapt, and overcome.

The surrounding homes that were being constructed brought this listing back to life. The new-construction houses surrounding it came in at an average of 15,000 to 20,000 square feet per property. Those are big houses. Our listing was about 11,000 square feet, a rare home that is actually scaled to human beings, designed for indoor-outdoor Southern California living and now the smallest mansion on an exclusive mega-mansion hill, home to the 1% of the 1%. We eventually sold the house. Instead of letting the construction work against us, we used it as a positive and embraced it, using it in our pitch as the most affordable deal on an A + block. We sold it for future value, not what it’s worth now. We went where the puck was going to be.

Some may say we got lucky with that one, but there are always the signs. You either see them or you don’t. In our business, if you don’t, yep, you lose money. We make money. We close. That’s why our phone rings.

What did we do differently than others? We sold it, not just listed it: two very different things, which we’ll talk about later. We didn’t quit. Almost 99% of the time, a deal is within reach if all parties stay engaged. Quit, and you’ve taken yourself out of the game. Why are we successful, why do we close? We know this. We’re aware. We’re on point. We move and we move fast.

Beyond LA, the current average time for a house sale is 70 days according to Redfin.com, or 65 days according to realtor.com, but it doesn’t matter. You’re already behind the clock if you care about those numbers. We don’t use those stats as our benchmark. We beat them and as a result . . . say it with me . . . we make money.

Either way, LA or not, the turnaround to close varies wildly from market to market, economic cycle to cycle, season to season. Houses sell more quickly and closer to list in school-time months.. Six months on the market – the length of a standard listing agreement – is time enough to sell most houses if you know the Altman Close.

It sounds more simple than it is, most challenges do, but I can assure you, selling real estate on a high-end level will either get you right up in the morning or keep you down for good. Many who take a few uppercuts to the chin never get off the stool and go back in the ring. So, we’ve perfected a system, a well-oiled machine. Game time.

1. Have an effective strategy. Show up and show up on time, prepared.
2. Execute it without time-costing errors. It’s A-B-C. You move down the alphabet too fast, or skip a letter, you’ll have to backtrack. Then you owe instead of earn.
3. Don’t quit. Throw in the towel and you may not get that second chance. Ever.

From Step 1 to Step 3, this all culminates with the close in mind. We like our clients, our coaches, to have the same mindset. We like athletes.

Matt and I were athletes. (You may not know it, but I kicked field goals for Syracuse during the Donovan McNabb quarterback years. Matt kicked for the football team of University of Colorado.) We respect discipline, hardship, pressure, and anyone who fights through adversity. It’s the same in real estate. As soon as we sign the listing we know the shot clock is counting down and we’re off. We don’t stop. No time for error. No time for tears. We close.

As I said earlier, I can’t teach you Step 3. That’s in you. I can lift your spirits. I can give you constructive criticism. I can shame the hell out of you. But that’s not my job in this book. My job is to teach you how to close from the door, the way I close, on point, successful, fast, like a shark.

As for Steps 1 and 2, I am going to show you how I leverage time to close deals by biting right through them – breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’m wild hungry and you should be too if you want to take a listing from me or from my world. Here are a couple of meaty buzzwords for you to chew on, or call them utensils to facilitate your deals:

• – Exclusivity
• – Inventory
• – Pricing

If you create a sense of urgency, you close. If someone wants the property at a certain price you like, you close. If more than one person wants the spot, you get the best offer and you close. If someone wants it for another price, you work it out, and you close. If you don’t like any of the offers, and you have the confidence to bounce, blow them off in a respectful manner and keep working. I consider myself a hustler and I’m damn proud of it.

In fact, this book is a hustle, but a straight-up honest one, as are all my deals, and it’s just the hustle you need. I’m here to make a deal, to cash a check. If I don’t, I’ve just burned a lot of time. So, I don’t burn time. I make money. You want to be a great agent, go where the money is while keeping the others buzzing along. Swallow them next.

It’s not an opinion for me to state that after many years of buying and selling in this market, the Altman Brothers team has turned our real estate business into a monster. Our listings, aka “product launches,” are constant and creative. We use time to elicit offers and create counteroffer competition.

Still, there’s always the unexpected. In a flash, you have to adjust, adapt, and overcome. Do so and you make money. The bank seizes the property, figure it out. An earthquake hits, figure it out. The seller stabs his wife in the pool house, facilitate a sale, and figure it out. We can’t predict every act of God or even scarier, acts of man, all we can do is figure it out as we keep one eye on the shot clock, the other on the goal – close the best deal for all and close it quick.

Now, at Altman Brothers we have developed systems for every part of a real estate close; listing appointments, feeding technology, broker’s opens, price reduction, you name it. I break every deal into three basic phases:

1. Open
2. Work
3. Close

Even before they begin, phases 1 and 2 are aimed at negotiating a close. We have scripts to help with difficult calls; schedules for selling and price reduction; and tips for building agreement among parties, melting dissent, financing, finessing and finding new business to open, to work, to win, to close. We run cold opens constantly and flip them hot, ensuring a steady flow of business all year long. We strengthen all relationships – and I do mean all – into repeat business, the Holy Grail of commerce. With the Altman Close, everyone wins.

We never leave a deal on the table. We rarely say no. It is our job to ensure every offer is better for our client; always working toward the best possible outcome. Day in and day out we move toward a close and a commission check.

We pump up our opens. We offer tools that will ramp up the level at which we work every property. We set up our open with no room to fail. We’re like a pack of wolves, and each member plays a role to keep me, the Alpha, alive and well, ready to feed first and make sure the rest are secure, the way I’ve planned all along. With the following pages, this will become you.

Take technology, for instance. I now breathe it. Almost 100% of all properties that change hands are seen on the internet first, and with that I come out swinging, positioning the house in its proper market before the first bell rings.

After years of success, “game time” and the “shot clock” are second nature to me. The Altman Close is in the air. I use these elements, and others you will read about in upcoming chapters – to my benefit. That’s why I close almost every deal. I make money.

We are “Hollywood” ready, prepared to do what needs to be done – think, sell, facilitate, communicate, and broker a transaction equal (quite possibly) to an individual’s entire wealth. Lives depend on me. My work matters. Do you want this as a real estate agent? Do you want to make money? If in your soul you need what we at Altman Brothers possess, the vicious hunger, then let’s get moving. The clock is ticking.

But first, you must understand, despite a bit of drama and an occasional bite of my knuckles, Million Dollar Listing: Los Angeles often makes what I do look easy as I end each episode with my wide-eyed grin, a high-five with my brother, and a hug with my wife. The “easy” part is where the show gets it wrong. Closing is not always happy hour.

Closing, in truth, is often a bitch. Deals are difficult. Deals take work, lots of it. Deals take me from my family during dinner. They wake me at night. They interrupt me in the bottom of the 9th, the 4th quarter, my daughter’s bath time. Deals require pleasing the most demanding creatures on earth – people. If it were easy, the clients wouldn’t need us. They’d do it themselves. But not everyone’s cut from that cloth.

Negotiating can be extremely uncomfortable for most people. Fortunately, as you know, I’m an animal who will barter in the trenches for my client, my coach, my business. Their money is my money and I will negotiate to the death to get us both the best deal possible before the buzzer sounds. I make moves or I lose. But I don’t lose. I make money. I close.

To get what I want, to get what my client wants, and to even work with the opponent, there are triggers I use, a give-to-get, a give-and-take of what matters to me and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s personal. Sometimes it’s for the client. Sometimes it’s just to get the deal done and keep moving. But it’s always for the money and occasionally a bit of fun. I usually call those moments “Bad-ass, gangster shit. Ninja moves.”

Last year, for instance, I was doing this deal on a teardown behind the Beverly Hills Hotel when I opened the garage to discover a 1974 Ferrari Dino. Immediately, I wanted that car. So, I worked it into my commission. In plain, it was awesome.

In another deal, I was flipping a house for a client who asked me if I could make a deal on some wristwatches for him. I didn’t head to Canal Street in Manhattan for knockoffs, but I negotiated to acquire $9 million dollars worth of watches for $3 million. As long as it’s legal, the Altman Brothers don’t say no. Our mind is on pleasing, thus on closing, whatever the product may be.

If a property needs to shine, I have my team adjust the lights to look like Times Square. If we need to stage the home with furniture, here comes the Restoration Hardware truck packed and ready. Whatever may come our way, we don’t say no.

If we were to leave offers on the table, we would lose money, so we leave nothing. We accept. We buy. We sell. We close. Everyone shakes hands. This is business and though often a hardship, it doesn’t have to be a headache all the time.

We see agents drop out of the game all the time and we study their rise and fall. Why’d it happen? Where’d they go wrong? Constant variables take agents down, but a common theme stays the same: They mismanaged their set-up, their clock, or their team. They blew the play. Their open was garbage, their follow-through even worse, and as a result, the rest of the deal followed suit.

In order to have a successful play it takes follow-through from everyone on the team involved. Every aspect of every project needs to be timed accordingly. You can’t miss a beat. After you open, you have to launch the property. Sales, marketing, social, digital, PR, tech, it all needs to hit exactly at the right time in the right order. Do it right, you make money. Otherwise, you’re dead in the water.

You have to draw up the perfect play, rehearse it, execute it, and if need be, adjust, adapt, overcome. That’s a launch, that’s a close, and you only get good at it through trial and error, all pistons firing, everyone on the same page pulling their trigger when needed before the rest of the market gets a chance to catch their breath. If they see your blitz coming, the blockers come out. You hit the wall. Know how to adjust, adapt, and overcome.

We’ve built the Altman Brothers Company on our closes, and there’s only one method that works toward the close: Put one foot in front of the other, busting your ass from A to B to C. No dancing around. We go straight at our goals, play by play, always with victory in mind. Our reputation is gold.

We feed our business with our success, investing in talent, education, technology, and innovation. We expand, explore, and conquer. We even launch new listings with drone videos now. Because of the internet, our reach is worldwide. We’re localized globalists working with clients from Dubai, China, Russia, and the rest of the world.

This company is built on the deal – the open, the work, the close. We innovate. We reposition. We make deals. We make money. Our eye is on the clock, the playbook, and the field. We kick ass and we take names. We execute. It’s the only way I know how to be, a master of time and information, data and desire, dreams, risk, fear and need. What can I say? I’m a closer and you can be too. You can make money. Let’s play.