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Ninja Selling is one of the real estate industry’s most notable sales training programs.
Formally founded as a coaching program in 1994, its core teachings stretch back to the 1970s. It promotes a relationship-heavy approach to customer care and urges agents to thrive in life and business. Agents proudly put their certifications on business cards, LinkedIn profiles and website bios.
“Today, Ninja Selling has over 100,000 graduates and is taught all over the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Spain,” its website states.
Southern California’s Joseph Chiavatti is an alumnus. At 33, he’s the head of brokerage for Ethos Lending, charged with leading its launch of a real estate company this summer. He left his own Side affiliate, Palm and Ridge. He’s also a musician, recent father and technology entrepreneur who wanted a better way to locate colleagues in the Ninja program.
What started as a side hustle in between closings, diaper changes and open houses is now called Referral Flow, and it’s now Ninja Selling’s official peer networking solution.
Joseph Chiavatti
Chiavatti worked closely with the Ninja C-suite to build out his software, beta test it and launch the initial offering. However, he maintains full ownership and will begin scaling Referral Flow into the greater real estate marketplace.
This is the second time the young broker has contributed to a proptech startup, having been part of InstaShowing’s initial leadership team.
“My dad was a serial entrepreneur, and growing up around that energy taught me to recognize real-world problems, think creatively about solutions to those problems, and then take action on those solutions,” Chiavatti told Inman. “That said, I’ve learned that having ideas is only the beginning. What really matters is refinement.”
Ninja Selling is promoting Referral Flow as a sort of internal LinkedIn, where members can build out regional profiles highlighting their Ninja certifications, industry specializations, languages and other career highlights. Sales history is graphically displayed according to buy- and sell-side, and a map designates where they’ve been closing deals in their respective markets.
Naturally, the more built out your profile, the higher your Referral Flow confidence score will be when someone comes looking for a colleague.
“We designed the workflows to reflect real-world practices, then layered in the right technology to streamline the process. That way, the transition from a manual, old-school approach to a digital platform feels intuitive. You’re not learning a new system — you’re just doing what you’ve always done, only more efficiently and in a fraction of the time,” Chiavatti said.
The primary interface helps the referring agent know their client is in good hands with a timeline of transaction milestones. It’s high-level but not meant to be a transaction management system. It does facilitate document upload for each referral deal as additional peace of mind for the parties involved.
A notable byproduct of Referral Flow is that it encourages brokers and participating agents to clean up their marketing act, so to speak. The confidence score will be affected if the system determines that a person is merely promoting a ZIP Code for the traffic benefits instead of actually having a demonstrable track record in that submarket. It’s not unusual for a Los Angeles agent to claim they’re busy in 90210, for example.
Down the line, Chiavatti expects his software to help brokers better market their agents and, more importantly, help ensure they’re not impacted by legacy phantom affiliations, in which an agent’s previous team or brokerage relationships are still floating around the internet. It happens all the time.
Still, he said he doesn’t want software to make users dependent on automation; there’s always an important human element.
“For me, the best tech tools don’t reinvent the wheel — they support and enhance natural, human workflows,” he said. “When we were building Referral Flow, it was important that the platform mirror the way I — and many others — already handled agent-to-agent referrals. The goal wasn’t to force a new system on people, but to take what was already working and make it smoother, faster and more consistent.”
Chiavatti did build something that can help connect the industry. It’s hardly the first such product in the referral system category, but it is one that can help multi-office independents emulate the big-brand trend of internal listing networks.
Referral Flow can be white-labeled and made private, so there’s little standing in the way of such a use case outside of its founder’s goals for it. Marketing technology company Luxury Presence has already built a solution to do this, so the model is out there and gaining traction as the battle for listing marketing control sizzles under the thumbs of the industry’s hottest players.
For now, though, graduates of the Ninja Selling system have a smartly refreshed, consistent method for finding one another — an idea actual ninjas wouldn’t be so quick to embrace.
“At this point in my life, I’m focused on just three things: managing the brokerage, serving my own real estate clients, and building technology for real estate professionals. If something doesn’t fall into one of those buckets, I don’t pursue it,” Chiavatti said.
