REAL TIME Podcast

There are countless ways to succeed in real estate and no two individuals take the exact same route—so, how then does a real estate professional confidently make their next move? There’s so much to learn from other REALTORS® and those who have been in the industry for a long period of time, or have taken a unique path to success.

Mentorship doesn’t just benefit the mentees—mentors also have a lot to gain—like leadership skills, a helping create a more vibrant industry, improved communication skills, insight from different perspectives, a broader network, and boosted confidence. For mentees, the guidance and knowledge transfer is invaluable, networking opportunities can help grow your business, and learning the ins and outs of the industry from someone who’s been through it already can help boost your confidence, too.

Nicole Christy, CEO at the Ottawa Real Estate Board, and Rachel Gagnon, REALTOR® and Top 35 Under 35 with Royal Lepage, join the latest episode of the REAL TIME podcast to talk about their experience with mentorship and how it’s helped their careers.

Transcript

Erin Davis: What did you do the last time you were stuck overthinking a decision you had to make at work or were uncertain what your next move should be in a sticky situation? Who do you trust to help with those tough calls? Real estate mentorship can be a mutually beneficial experience for both the mentor and the mentee and it's something that REALTORS® and real estate professionals alike can explore throughout their entire career, not just in the beginning. Learning never stops. No matter your age, your career or your journey, there's always something to be learned and someone to learn from.

Hi, I'm Erin Davis, and welcome to REAL TIME, the podcast for REALTORS® brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association.

Erin: To get a better understanding of what exactly real estate mentorship entails and how to go about creating a successful mentor-mentee relationship, we have two incredible real estate professionals with us who are well-versed in this environment. Joining us today are Nicole Christy, CEO of Ottawa Real Estate Board, and Rachel Gagnon, a top 35 under 35 REALTOR® with Royal LePage. Hello to you both and thank you so much for joining us today to talk about mentorship within the REALTOR® association community.

Now just before we dive in, let's start by having you introduce yourselves, give us a bit of background on who you are and how real estate mentorship has been a part of your career and we're going to start with you, Nicole.

Nicole Christy: Perfect. Thank you, Erin. Yes, I have been in the real estate industry for almost 15 years. I got my start at the Canadian Real Estate Association. It was a co-op position coming out of the University of Ottawa and I've taken the experience, I've learned there, and I've worked for some of the top tier advocacy associations here in Ottawa. Returned to the real estate community back in 2021 when I joined with the London St. Thomas Association of REALTORS® to begin work at the local level. Now I'm here in Ottawa as the CEO of the Ottawa Real Estate Board.

Erin: You, Rachel, what's your story?

Rachel: Yes, so I actually started in the real estate industry in 2015. I was licensed in 2015 as a 19-year-old and I'm a real estate broker here in Ottawa with Royal LePage Performance Realty. I got my start in the industry with a very small brokerage on a very small team, and then a few years later, I transitioned to becoming a solo agent in a large brokerage, and now I'm just in the process of building my own small team.

Erin: Wow, okay. Let's get right to it. What exactly, to you, is mentorship within the real estate industry, and have your experiences followed a set pattern or structure or do you feel like you developed your own unique model? Rachel.

Rachel: To me, real estate mentorship is really, it's an always evolving, pretty much a daily task. It can be as short and sweet as answering somebody's quick and simple question or it can develop into a career spanning relationship that you build. We all know that our days don't look the same and sometimes you run into something that you never thought you would experience, and you need to turn to see who could potentially guide you into figuring out what the solution is. Sometimes that can just be having a trusted point of contact. You can have a few.

Then I would say that you end up having two or three long-term mentors along the way who you share values with and who you look to when it's maybe something a bit more fluid, a bit more gray, and that you need to see how they transition to the other side in their own career, and then figure out how you're going to implement that into your own.

Erin: As far as you know, is your path similar to those of other REALTORS® that you've spoken with, or did you just follow your own heart?

Rachel: I would say I've been pretty true to myself. I really prefer a one-on-one personal approach with my clients, and I think I've associated myself with mortgage brokers, lawyers, and other r REALTORS® who have the similar values along the way. I would say that I've pretty much followed my own path in that regard. Through the years, I've also looked at how other people have structured their own career and seen how I could implement little bits and pieces of their way of doing things into my own. I would say most REALTORS® end up having their unique path and we all end up in the same direction but take your own path to get there.

Erin: Okay, Nicole, let's hear for you what you say mentorship is within the real estate industry and your experiences.

Nicole: Absolutely. Mine is very similar to Rachel's. I find that mentorship really ebbs and flows throughout your career. Some mentorship opportunities or mentorship experiences that you seek out, they have a really short time horizon. They're issue-specific. You're maybe joining a new brokerage or you're joining a new association, and you need to learn the ropes of this new environment. It might be something short-lived like an onboarding. Then there's mentorships that I've been able to benefit from throughout my career. I've been able to turn to these folks at times where I'm struggling, whether it's professionally or personally, to get a sense of how they would manage, navigate these circumstances.

Sometimes you just need somebody who's going to be able to hold up a mirror and give you feedback that's sometimes hard to hear but it's necessary for growth. That's what I've appreciated in the people that have formed that inner circle for me. They're there when I need them. They're a text, a phone call, a Zoom call away, and they're happy to provide that feedback that I need that maybe I don't want to hear in the moment, but that will give me that growth opportunity.

Erin: Nicole, it seems too, if I'm hearing both you and Rachel correctly, that this isn't just a one-way flow of information.

Rachel: Oh, no.

Erin: It's not just you getting everything. It's you sharing what with your peers as well.

Nicole: Absolutely. This is a two-way street. As that relationship grows and it becomes often more of a friendship, it's a mentorship still, but it's a friendship. It could be a colleagueship. It could take a bunch of different forms. While you're sharing your experiences, they're learning a little bit of what's going on in the industry, what's going on at the association, what's going on with the board or the brokerage, and they're benefiting from this exchange. It's an exchange of information, ideas, opinions, and it's something that they then can use for their own benefit as well.

Often you find that your mentors or your mentees are ways to bridge into new opportunities for yourself. As you're having these conversations, they're connecting you with their networks and you're being able to benefit from the relationship that you formed.

Erin: How long does a mentorship usually last? Can you answer that for us first, Rachel?

Rachel: I like to keep it very organic. I think it's very normal that when you have a certain situation that you're trying to get through, that you realize when you've gained the information that you need in order to get to the other side. Then at that point, it just becomes a natural professional or personal relationship, and like Nicole said, typically they become friends. You look to them for professional guidance, and then at a certain point, you get to know them as people and their relationship gradually changes within your life. It's not to say you won't circle back, but I would say that sometimes it's a case-by-case basis, and then sometimes it's a longer growth process that you're looking to go through.

You'll check in with them here and there maybe on a more formal basis, and then sometimes it's in passing just when you touch base on other topics.

Erin: People understand that, right? In the mentor-mentee relationship, is that unspoken that it might turn into a hop-on, hop-off kind of experience, Rachel?

Rachel: I think so. I think everybody is willing to share their knowledge. Even just before jumping on this phone call, I had an agent call me just to pick my brain. At the same time, I'm not necessarily expecting her to call me every time that she has a situation she runs into, but she knows that door is open. Likewise, if I run into a situation, I know that door is open. I think everybody's respectful of each other's times. It's a relationship that you understand once it's established.

Erin: Is there an importance, and we've spoken about this in previous episodes, especially as it pertains to working at home, working in an office, and all of the work that REALTORS® do, is it important to set boundaries in the mentor-mentee relationship? Have you found that, Nicole?

Nicole: I think that there is a respect that you have to form for each other and each other's time. There is definitely boundar,ies and barriers to how much you want to push someone into their personal time. I do find that if you're looking to start a mentor-mentee relationship, having a conversation, a coffee, starting somewhere with just an information interview, if you will, seeing if this is a person that has the time to be a mentor. Or you're a mentor, is this someone who is the right values alignment for you as a mentee? Because you have to build rapport, and you have to make sure that you're able to support what the needs are in either situation.

It can be challenging, especially, and I'm sure Rachel can speak to it, the real estate industry is cyclical. There's ebbs and flows there too, and people might be busy. If they're busy, they do really need to focus on their career in certain instances or their clients or their families and they may not have space, the capacity to be everything you need them to be in that moment. It's probably something short-lived if you have built a relationship with this person over time, but respecting that and understanding that they can't be everything to you all the time.

Rachel: Yes, I think Nicole hit the nail on the head with what she said, and I think accountability is also a huge one. Whether it's as a mentee, you want to know what's working, and then on the flip side, I would say that as a mentor, you want to know that what you're saying, the person's taking to heart, they're implementing certain portions into their day-to-day, and that you can see that there is growth. It's one thing to talk somebody through a situation, but then when they circle back, whether it's three, six, eight months later, you want to know that progress was made because if at a certain point, it just needs to go somewhere.

Nicole: Sometimes you have to be honest with yourself too. You may not be the resource they need. As a real estate agent or as association staff, we have a limited amount of expertise and we shouldn't be bridging into some of the professional guidance or information that needs to be probably communicated. Is this legal advice you should be seeking? Is this a different professional that should be weighing in here? I may not be the person that you need in this moment.

Erin: How do when you could use a mentor? Let me ask you that, and we'll start with you, Nicole.

Nicole: I think it's if you're at a pivotal moment where you have a decision to make or that you're stepping into an area where you're not familiar. You're joining a new brokerage, you're joining a new association, you are in a different type of client relationship, or maybe it's a piece of the market that you haven't really had experience in. I think that's when you should be looking for somebody to help you navigate a little bit and act as a sounding board. I think you'll know you're ready because you're going to be hopefully self-aware and able to say, "I am maybe not completely confident here.

This is an area that I want to put my right foot forward, I want to serve my clients well, I want to serve the members well," depending on your audience, "and to do so, I'm going to need some input, I'm going to need some support." You may not be reaching out to one person, you might be reaching out to quite a few to get a sampling of what you need to do because as a mentor as well, we have to be comfortable with people taking just what they need from us. They're looking for our opinion, they can't be expected to take everything. Maybe it won't work for them, but parts will.

Erin: Rachel, because you began at such a young age, often when we start something, we don't know what we don't know. How did that you needed a mentor, and then how did you go about getting one?

Rachel: When I started, I didn't have any connections. Confidence was low and obviously, you don't have the knowledge under your belt that the more experienced agents will have. It started off with little tidbits. You grow and you grow through the motions, but then you just get to a certain point where you're ready to take on more. I think Nicole summarized it very well. You just know when you're ready to get to that next level. I think the important part as an agent that's going through those baby steps is knowing how much you're willing to put in to get to that next level. There are times where you'll seek a mentor and they'll give you fantastic information, but you're just not ready to make that jump.

I think being honest with yourself of what your capacities are, what your knowledge is, and getting the information from a few different mentors, like Nicole said, and choosing what bits and pieces you are ready to implement. Maybe you put a little asterisk to refer to some notes of the future, and maybe you circle back to that person when you're ready to dive into that idea more in-depth. You know when you're ready to grow.

Erin: Yes, and as you point out, you can definitely have more than one mentor, so that's good. When we talk about sharing values, which is something that you have both brought up so far, what does that look like? Can we give some examples of what that might mean starting with you, Rachel?

Rachel: Sharing values, honestly, in my opinion, is probably the most important part you can have in terms of looking for a mentor. It's not necessarily that you need to share all of the same values with the mentor you choose, but you need to know what your values are and what the values are for your mentor in order to know how much information you are going to retain from them. Let's say we look at an agent who's one-on-one with their clients and very personable, and they like to have a say in the entire part of the process.

You can go towards a system-based and automation and template-based agent, somebody who really likes to have a lot of structure in their system, but you might go towards them to get mentorship towards how to be more efficient. In terms of how you're going to structure your career as a whole, how you're going to grow through maybe being a solo agent to being a team agent, the people that you're going to collaborate with, how you manage your time, that's a broader subject that you may look towards having a long-term mentor who shares the same values as you.

I think if you go towards a mentor who is successful with the values that you share, in the long run, you're probably going to have a much higher return of the information that they're sharing with you and that you can carry into your own world.

Erin: Nicole, how does that look to you, the sharing the same values?

Nicole: Yes, I think there's an importance in understanding what your top values are in your career. For me, I was looking to grow. I'm a learner just by interest, by personality, and I wanted somebody who is collaborative, somebody who's very transparent. I want to know the good, the bad, the ugly when it comes to how they navigate certain situations. I need somebody who's going to be really transparent with how they manage, how they rose through the system, how they rose through their career, and be really introspective about how they communicate with me so I can learn. If I can learn from the mistakes, the lessons, those are usually where the most growth is.

That is what I'd be looking for somebody who's very transparent, who's very collaborative, who's very open, and who has the time to dedicate to it, and they're also aligned with seeing the success of the industry, seeing the success of the association. Those are key to me.

Erin: Now, there's often the perception that working in real estate can really be quite isolating. When, of course, in reality, it's a large community of professionals working toward common goals, right? We all know that choosing a REALTOR® is such a personal choice, but the same goes for choosing a friend or a mentor. Can you share your experience with this decision-making process for you? Or maybe recommend how somebody who's watching or listening may want to approach it, especially if they're a little bit apprehensive. Rachel.

Rachel: When I first started in 2015, I started with a very small company. We're talking three to five agents at most, and that feels very isolating when you're looking to try and get a different opinion or a different perspective. I went looking to see who I could find that I could resonate with and maybe just get a, again, just a different opinion on how to navigate through certain situations. I remember it was my first year and I was about to submit an offer on this big agent's property. I gave him a call. I was obviously a bit apprehensive to ask him a few questions. Being greener, you don't totally know what direction to take things.

I remember he picked up and he was just the most friendly, genuine person, and just ready to give his time and get to know me in the industry as well. I remember hanging up the phone and saying, "That's the kind of agent that I want to be a few years down the line." Then at that point, we built a relationship, and even circling back to a few years ago, he was my first call when I was looking to transition brokerages. I really valued his perspective on the challenges that I was facing, what I was trying to overcome, and even transitioning from being a team agent to a solo agent. The doubts that I had in giving me confidence and metaphorically holding my hand through the process.

Yes, I think looking outwards and trying to find somebody who shares the same values like we touched on earlier and you'll know. When you find the right person, what they're saying speaks to you and really just treat that relationship with respect.

Erin: Okay, two questions. Did that house sale go through?

Rachel: It did.

Erin: Yay, okay. Is he still somewhat of a mentor to you now or has the relationship changed?

Rachel: He is still, yes. He's still very much my mentor and actually now as I'm transitioning into the next phase of my career, which would be a bit more leadership and less sales, he is definitely my go-to and he knows it. I would say that now that I have years of experience under my belt, he also circles back to me now and it's become a more collaborative relationship like we touched on earlier where he feels like he can gain different perspectives from me and sometimes he has doubts of his own and whether we circle back in person over the phone or sit down for a quick lunch, it's definitely become a reciprocal relationship.

Erin: That sounds wonderful. Wonderful. Okay, Nicole, can you share your experience with your decision-making process or recommend how somebody who might be a little on the fence or apprehensive about getting a mentor, how that would pan out?

Nicole: It's definitely something that you can either seek out. That's looking at people within the industry or within your spheres of your network and seeing something in them, whether it's an experience or they've reached a certain pinnacle in their career and that's where you're looking to go and you can seek them out. Then some of it is just falling into it. Often if it's somebody who's perhaps in a position of authority, so my first mentors were supervisors. They were people that I reported to. They were invested in me.

They wanted to see me grow and the slow constructive criticism or slow constructive feedback that happens with the day-to-day work, I would be ingesting that and I'd be trying to seek out how to do things a little bit better, how to take the next steps. Then slowly that rapport grew where I felt comfortable going to them and saying, "I really do want to learn how to do this. I see myself going here." That's where they were able to provide more strategic advice and say, "Okay, if that's what you want to do, here's where you need to go. Here's the courses you should be taking. Here's the people you should be speaking with."

Often, they're happy to facilitate setting up those meetups, those information coffee meetings where you can leverage the network they have to build to where you want to go. If you're feeling apprehensive and you're either seeking out or you're falling into a mentorship and you just want to expand what that mentorship looks like and just maybe test the waters to see if this is something that person is also interested in entering into with you, I would say just start with just an information session. This is where you just, "Hey, I'd like to take you for coffee and just pick your brain about something. Hey, I just wanted to touch base about this project or this article I saw or this deal that I'm doing."

It's just a one-off, but you're testing the waters to see how they respond and they're getting to know you and you're revealing a little bit more about what you want and where you want to go and you'll take it from there. You'll see if the values align, if the time that they have to dedicate to you is enough for what you need, and then you can formalize it a little bit more. If you're apprehensive, just start with something really organic and something where there's no ask. It's just an information exchange.

Erin: I'm glad you brought up the ask because we all have in our phones those calls that come up or texts and it's always from someone who only gets in touch when they need something. Is there a way for a mentee to give back to the mentor, even in the early stages, so that the mentor feels that they are also getting something out of this relationship besides just the good feeling of helping someone else to succeed? Or is that not in the expectations? I don't know, qhat do you think? Rachel.

Rachel: I would say it's definitely a give and take. Like I have a few newer agents now who are doing what I did in my first year and they'll circle back to me for information, for help in certain circumstances, but if I circle back to them and say, "Hey, I need somebody to help host an open house," or, "Could you help me with this walkthrough," or, "Could you help me with X, Y, Z," whatever it could be, they're always willing. Honestly, it's been a huge part in terms of me transitioning into the mentor role where I know that it's a reciprocal relationship. I know that I'm not just giving and never seeing this person ever again. It definitely helps to keep the motivation up because you're both gaining from each other.

It's not to say that you always have to gain from somebody, but it definitely shows their willingness. It shows that they're willing to constantly give back. Oftentimes, I would say that is a preface to knowing that when they get to the next level, they'll also be willing to help the person that's below them. It's just the gift that keeps on giving. Yes, I definitely think that you don't always have to have it be reciprocal, but it definitely helps both sides when it is.

Erin: Nicole, what do you think of that?

Nicole: I absolutely think that there can be a little bit of give and take. Certainly, we have, in the industry, created these forums where there is a bit of that. We have young professional networks or YPN, sometimes they're called your professional networks. We have them, anyway, in Ottawa at the local, provincial, and national levels where there is these YPNs that connect people who are looking to grow, looking to build a career in the industry, possibly looking at leadership roles in the industry on the volunteer side and connecting them with people who are also eager to see the success of the association of the real estate community and they're coming to provide exchange information, provide information.

I think that in those formats and in those forms, you can see that give and take because those newer agents are coming from careers outside of the industry and now coming into real estate can imbue some of the information that they're providing with their expertise, whether it's demographic information or new understandings of how technology works or different techniques. There's that old adage, you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but you absolutely can. We see at the YPN events, a mix of agents of all experience levels, ages, backgrounds. I think it's a great way to give and take.

Erin: Now, somebody watching or listening today might be going, "Hmm, maybe I would be a good mentor." What are some of the signs that you might be a good mentor? We'll start with you, Rachel.

Rachel: I think if you feel confident in something, and it could be anything. It could be that you are very strong with Google systems or it could be that you feel very confident how to prepare a listing or how to meet with clients in certain circumstances. You could approach your brokerage, let them know that this is something that you feel comfortable talking on and let them know that anytime an agent has a question in that subject, that your door is open. They can give you a call anytime. I think they would appreciate it. It gives a collaborative energy throughout the office or just throughout the industry in general.

On the flip side, if you see agents in passing, particularly the agents that might be a bit more green or have a different expertise level in that subject, you can let them know that your door or your phone is always open if they need a helping hand. Maybe, you never know, somebody could be apprehensive and may not want to reach out, but the fact that you took that first step and opened the door for them, they may just feel that much more comfortable reaching out to you when they need to.

Erin: Nicole, what would you suggest people look at inside themselves for signs that they might make a good mentor?

Nicole: I think part of it is just looking inside and saying, "Do I have the time to dedicate to this? Am I looking to be a part of the future of the industry? Do I want to have a part in how the industry grows in its success?" If the answer is yes to these questions, I think you'd be great to be a mentor. There's ways to seek it out. Obviously, we talked a lot about falling into mentorship, but I think a lot of the things that Rachel said is just putting it out there because people are going to be apprehensive. You have something to offer, but they may not know how best to seek it from you. It could be just also establishing yourself as a subject matter expert.

Being part of social media groups, being part of committees, being part of different aspects of the industry where you can carve out that space as a subject matter expert so people know to come to you. Because you might have some great skills and if people aren't aware that you have a rich career in commercial real estate or that you've come from a background in the finance industry and if they're having questions around investment and things like that, maybe you'd be a good mentor in those fashions. Setting yourself up, putting it out there, establishing yourself as a subject matter expert, and somebody who has the time and capacity to do this, I think those are key.

Erin: Nicole, you already mentioned some of the resources that particularly young people starting out can get into or join in. For somebody who hasn't yet been able to build a professional network, what resources should they look at in a local, provincial, or national level? Do you have some suggestions for us? Then we'll ask Rachel.

Nicole: Absolutely. I think there's a lot of resources that we've built out over the years. There's obviously the YPN networks at the local and the provincial, and then with the National Association, they've been providing resources to these networks to see them grow, to see them be able to offer more to the folks seeking out, not only mentorship but opportunities to network. Certainly, YPNs provide educational events, there's panels, there's speed mentorship dating, things like that are one-off events, but there's also often a forum where you can connect and find somebody who has self-identified as wanting to be a mentor and you can self-identify as wanting to be a mentee.

You can find the right person from this pool of people who are ready and willing. I think also depending on where you feel comfortable, but at your local association, getting in touch with the board, the staff can also help facilitate finding someone that might align with where you are and where you want to go. Our boards, our committees, they're full of people who have had successful careers and are now looking at giving back and they've proven that because they've dedicated time to the board and we can help you build those connections or at least connect initially, and then you can see where it goes from there.

Rachel: I think if you're within a brokerage that's able to provide that resource, then you're already in a good spot to start. I know within my brokerage, we actually have almost daily training sessions with what Nicole described as industry specialists. Somebody who is self-identified as being very strong in a certain subject and that already starts one good connection. Again, like Nicole mentioned, your local board, they can put you in touch. They'll know that this person sat on this panel and would probably be a good resource for you for a certain question.

I definitely think tapping into, on a small scale, your brokerage, and on a larger outside scale, tapping into your local network. If you're willing to take it higher than that, definitely into the provincial and national levels, you definitely have some great resources.

Erin: This idea of working together and lifting people up, that really does come through when we talk about mentorship in real estate. Now, Nicole, you've gained a lot of experience in your career first with CREA, then the London and the St. Thomas Association of REALTORS®, and now with the Ottawa Real Estate Board. How have mentors helped you along your journey?

Nicole: I was able to find mentors early in my career that have thankfully stuck with me to today and I still lean on them. They are still references that I've used to get those new positions, seek out those new opportunities. I think that I was able to find people early who saw something in me maybe I didn't even see in myself. They were the ones that initially put the challenges and opportunities in front of me. They gave me the push where I didn't have the confidence.

They said, "Let's try it out, see where you go, just give it a chance." Those are the people that I think really lean into the mentorship role in a way that you can see expand and help serve throughout the rest of your trajectory wherever you choose to go. When you're coming back and you're not sure what the next step is for you, maybe you're looking at jumping from one broker to another to seek new opportunities or moving into a new career, they're the ones that you can circle back to and say, "Hey, do any opportunities?" They're the ones that you can start speaking to identify what the next best thing could be or what the next step could be.

I've been very lucky to have those folks in my corner and those people have been able to stay with me through each one of those new chapters in my career.

Erin: I'd say they'd be lucky to have you in their corner too. How about you, Rachel? You have an impressive list of accolades under your belt, don't blush, being in the top 2% of agents in Canada with Royal LePage three years in a row. How has having a mentor as you began your career helped you to get to where you are today? Maybe even higher than you would have already gone. Who knows?

Rachel: Yes, definitely. I have to give a lot of credit to having the mentors along the way. I would say for myself, I'm the type of person who if a situation lands on my lap that I'm uncertain of, it will escalate very quickly in terms of stress levels. Having somebody that's a phone call away or that's a conversation away and a trusted resources has just been so significant. I would say that probably the biggest thing in terms of building your confidence is having a mentor that you trust on the other end of the phone just because every day you run into a new situation. You run into things you never thought would exist, but here you are, here's a situation.

Sometimes it's time-sensitive and there's a lot of money on the line and you really want to take care of your people, but there's certain circumstances where you just don't know what you don't know. Having somebody that you trust on the other end of the phone, be it small or big, could be a day-to-day task, just like it could be a major milestone moment in your career. Having those people around you is, I would say, everybody should try and have at least one mentor in their life, if not a few.

Erin: To be a mentee at the same time too. It seems like you can be both. It just seems to make sense because we never ever stop learning. Is that right, Nicole?

Nicole: That's right. Really, no matter what career you're in, whether you're on the real estate side, the association side, learning is a part of how you grow and how you thrive. This industry is evolving just so quickly as we can all attest to, whether it's on the technology side, the market, the market conditions. To stay up to speed and competitive in these times requires you to be tapping into those networks, learning, being a self-learner, identifying what you don't know, and then seeking it out where you can. I think it's a great trait to have. I think a lot of our mentors, my mentors anyway, they have that same value system, they have that same expectation.

They're learning as I'm learning and they're able to bestow down what they're synthesizing from what they're learning. That's a benefit to me and I can also provide that service going back up.

Erin: I'm curious about both your perspectives on this one, but I'm going to start with you, Rachel. What would you say are some important tips or considerations when it comes to real estate mentorship?

Rachel: I think a good mentee definitely carries a certain sense of accountability for themselves, knowing, again, like we spoke earlier, the metric of their success levels, knowing themselves well, how much work are you willing to put in, respect for their mentor, being open to new ideas. I think a lot of us have a certain direction we want to take it, but realizing that there's not just one way to reach one end result. Just being flexible in the type of information we're willing to receive and being open to different perspectives.

Nicole: I think Rachel hit the nail on the head. It's really just being honest with yourself. What do you want to get out of this? Then putting in the time and effort, listening, being attentive. It's okay to disagree with what somebody is telling you. You get to choose, it's your career, what you want to take and what you want to cast away, but making sure that if you're asking somebody for their time and we're all busy, we all have families, that you are willing to move forward and at least take what they're saying and put it into motion in some sense so that there is that return in value.

Erin: Are there things that you've encountered during your day and thought, "Oh, I went over this with my mentor"? Does that ever come back to you like that? Is it the gift that keeps giving? What do you think, Rachel?

Rachel: I would say probably my most significant lesson that I've learned from a mentor along the way, and it was probably my first week in real estate, and it was try and keep a paper trail of almost everything. You don't know when you're going to need it and it makes for a lot of emails, but when you do need it, you are going to be very happy it's there.

Nicole: It's your insurance of happy.

Rachel: Yes.

Erin: It's a virtual paper trail, right?

Rachel: Yes, exactly. That is something I've carried in my back pocket through the years and it saved me more than once. I would definitely say that that's probably the smallest one-liner that has carried me through my career.

Erin: That's fascinating. Anything like that pop to your mind, Nicole?

Nicole: Yes, I also have a one-liner. It's funny how the one-liners stick with you, but it's sometimes you have to move out to move up. Sometimes you've outgrown the role. What you're seeking next, you're going to have to leave what's comfortable, what you know to gain the breadth or depth of experience that you need to take that next step. For me, I was working at the Canadian Real Estate Association here and I wanted to make that leap to more of a leadership role, but I needed more depth in the housing space within the leadership space.

That's where I moved up, I moved out, and I was happy to come back to the real estate community bringing what I learned from these experiences and other places that then I can take and use it to better the industry we have here, the REALTOR® community, and my board at the Ottawa Real Estate Board.

Erin: Okay, those are two great one-liners, if you will. It all comes back to one main point, it seems, after this great conversation with you both, which is having a tight-knit community. Why do you both feel this is so crucial to a striving industry? We'll go back to you, Nicole.

Nicole: I think it's having a tight-knit group that can serve as your sounding board. It can provide you with the feedback you need, whether it's constructive or whether it's supportive. You need a little bit of both probably. Then that also allows you to build out a network. It starts with a small group, and then hopefully, it organically grows to their networks, to folks that they know, to people that they trust.

Because if you trust somebody within that close circle and they have a trusted relationship with someone and you need a lawyer, a mortgage broker, you need somebody with experience in this, that, and the other, a recommendation from someone in that tight-knit group, that's going to be held with so much more esteem. You build the small group, and then you expand the network, and hopefully, between those two things, you have the building blocks, the infrastructure for a really strong and successful career.

Erin: You, Rachel, why do you think that having a tight-knit community is just so important to a thriving industry?

Rachel: I think that confident, pleasant agents just make for confident, educated clients. At the end of the day, it's a collaborative industry. We're going to cross paths at one point or another. If that can be a positive experience, we're all going to be better for it. I think that the stronger the industry is as a whole, and that can be through transfer of knowledge and mentorship, the better we're all going to be for it. I don't think there's really anything we can lose.

Erin: Okay, so what's next? You're both enjoying thriving careers so far, but obviously, there's so much more to come for you both. What are you hoping to achieve? We'll start with you, Rachel.

Rachel: I'm pretty happy with my sales career. I really can't say anything about that, but the next challenge that I've given myself is stepping into more of a leadership role. Leadership, communication. I've looked towards people within the real estate industry and outside of the real estate industry to try and help me navigate these new waters and become more confident in the information that I can pass down and different structures. Yes, definitely the leadership side.

Erin: For you, Nicole, what's the future hold for you?

Nicole: Oh, that's a great question. I'm relatively new here at the Ottawa Real Estate Board, so I am getting settled. It's been about three months, but what I'm looking to do and what I know the board is hoping is that we can establish ourselves and grow the vision we have as being all things real estate in Ottawa. Serving the members, being a voice in the community on housing, real estate, making sure that people in Ottawa, citizens have a resource when it comes to their housing needs. That's something that I look forward to building and growing here at the Ottawa Real Estate Board.

Erin: Congratulations on your new position, by the way, and good luck to you. Good luck to you as well, Rachel. Let me just end with this question. If somebody watching or listening leaves with one thing about this conversation, Rachel, what do you hope it is?

Rachel: I think once you're really ready to put in the hard work and find the people that align well with you and everything else should fall into place.

Erin: Nicole?

Nicole: I would say successful people have a lineup of people behind them that help them get there. If you're looking to be successful, start building out that network so you have the folks behind you to help propel you all the way through.

Erin: Sounds great. We thank you both for your time and your experience and wish you both all the best in the future. Can't wait to see what's next. Thank you.

Nicole: Thank you.

Rachel: Thank you.

Erin: Thank you, again, Nicole and Rachel for that insightful and inspiring conversation. The benefits of real estate mentorship are clearly long lasting, and you never know when the connections you make will circle back around to help you in the future. Now, if you're wondering where to start, reach out to your local board or association to see if they have any programs on the go or they could point you in a direction that you may not have considered. Of course, if you liked this episode and we hope you did, please tell us by giving us a rating or review us on your preferred podcast platform. We always appreciate it.

REAL TIME is brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association. Production is courtesy of Alphabet® Creative with tech support from Rob Whitehead. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Erin Davis and we'll see you next time on REAL TIME.

Exploration into turning REALTOR.ca into a for-profit subsidiary of CREA has included the most comprehensive due-diligence process undertaken in CREA history.. It’s about keeping REALTORS® at the forefront, looking at how this invaluable tool could be better leveraged to serve members, and addressing changing consumer needs. The proposed path forward is outlined in REALTOR.ca Forward: the draft business case for REALTOR.ca as a taxable entity.

Understandably, the discussion has sparked curiosity from members.

On this episode of REAL TIME, Janice Myers, CREA CEO, and James Mabey, CREA Chair, answer common questions regarding the draft business case and what the transformation could mean for REALTORS®.

Transcript

Erin Davis: Hi there. This isn't the first time that we have dedicated an episode to a discussion about REALTOR.ca and what's next for its future. Well, for today's conversation, we're doing something a little bit different. Before we look ahead, we're going to peel back the curtains a bit, and I guarantee you'll learn something about REALTOR.ca you didn't already know. I'm Erin Davis, and welcome to REAL TIME. For today's conversation, we're joined by CREA's CEO Janice Myers, and the chair of the 2024-25 CREA Board of Directors, James Mabey, who's also a broker owner from Edmonton, Alberta. Welcome both to REAL TIME.

James Mabey: Thanks so much for having us, Erin.

Janice Myers: Pleasure to be here.

Erin: Thank you. Now in Canada, if you're someone who has any interest in real estate, there's a very good chance that you have heard of REALTOR.ca. And we know that because of the market share. So how did REALTOR.ca come to be? And we'll start with you, James.

James: That's a great question, Erin, and something that we're very proud of at CREA. So historically, of course REALTOR.ca started as MLS.ca and that was way back in 1995 when a group of associations and boards came together to create a single source for listing information for consumers. And because it's a trusted source for Canadian consumers, it has become, of course, wildly popular and meets the needs of buyers and sellers, but also REALTOR® members across the country.

Janice: And I would add to that that, you know, the success has come from that initial collaboration of boards and associations, the community across Canada and and the strategic foresight that those people had to and REALTORS®, of course, had to create REALTOR.ca. And it is really, truly the envy of, of and a prime example of collaboration. It's the envy of the world. So we're very fortunate to have it.

Erin: You would ask a question that would kind of bring to light just what REALTOR.ca is. When you talk with new members. Janice, tell us about those sort of off the cuff but very insightful conversations.

Janice: Well, REALTOR.ca would come up in the context of talking about MLS, the MLS trademark, and what MLS systems are and when. I'd have a group of new REALTORS® just starting in the business, we'd talk about the three pillars of the MLS and what an MLS system is with respect to the data, etc. and then REALTOR.ca would come into the conversation and I'd say, well, so what is REALTOR.ca? It's not the MLS system. And then we talk through, oh yeah, it's the consumer portal. And everybody knew of REALTOR.ca. And when I would say to them that is your industry owned consumer portal. And every single board and association sends data to REALTOR.ca, which is managed by CREA. They would be very impressed.

Erin: I guess so, and it is obvious that this tool has resonated with Canadians. But did its success come as a surprise?

Janice: I guess in a way, I mean, I don't think that everybody thought that, you know, that collaboration, that initial collaboration was going to be so successful. But then the CREA team really worked hard to build it and maintain it and build it into the incredible market share that we have today. And that's really what we want to continue.

Erin: Yeah, anything but an overnight success. It is built and built and built. But what was the initial impact for REALTORS®? James.

James: Um, I think that's a really important thing because it gets at the heart of why we are re-examining REALTOR.ca. The initial impact of having a portal, a single portal for consumers to access MLS listing data was that it really helped members to make sure that their listings were front and center, and that they weren't competing for eyeballs. Even when I started in real estate 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. Almost part of me. I know I look fresh faced, but it's been almost 20 years. You know, you were competing for eyeballs. You were spending a lot of money on advertising to reach consumers in newspapers and print advertising. You know, that has largely gone by the wayside because of things like the internet. And consumers demand to be able to access all of the information in one place online. And that was really the secret sauce of MLS that became REALTOR.ca, and has really put downward pressure on the costs to our members to compete for those eyeballs and make sure that their listings are getting full exposure.

Erin: Yeah. For sure. I mean, $310 seems like a steal of a deal for exposure like that.

Janice: For sure. And not all of that $310 a year goes to supporting REALTOR.ca Approximately 43% of those dues go to support REALTOR.ca. But we are in an incredibly competitive environment when it comes to technology. Consumer expectations continue to shift and change, and we want to make sure that this primary asset continues to grow and innovate for members.

Erin: Yeah, yeah. There's no resting on your laurels at all because the internet has come such a long way since 2008. And has that changed? REALTOR.ca's mission or goals?

James: You know, Erin, it really hasn't changed the mission or goals because, you know, it was created again to create value for members. And that has never changed. But what has changed is how consumers' expectations have increased and the demands on the system have increased. And so, you know, REALTOR.ca has evolved over the years. You know, we have Android and Apple apps. We have the web based experience or desktop based experience. We've moved to a mapping search tool as opposed to drop down menus. So there's been incredible innovation to try and keep up with consumers' demands of the site. And of course, that is a very expensive process to go through. And every time we have to retool REALTOR.ca, we take that very seriously. And faced with what's coming now with artificial intelligence, I mean, that's going to reshape the way that consumers search the internet. And so, you know, with a finite resource like member dues fueling REALTOR.ca, that creates a bit of a problem for the Canadian Real Estate Association to make sure that the tool stays competitive and keeps that market share. That really allows our members to save money as they transact across the country.

Erin: Yeah. And of course, it bears mentioning that this is a not for profit environment, too, when you're talking about the costs of keeping up with everything and staying ahead of everything as you have.

Janice: And we and the team have done an incredible job, there's no doubt about it. But there's so much more, as James has said, that we can do. We need to build on what consumers are expecting in the portal world, some deeper insights into properties looking to provide more consumer insights. A better educated consumer will connect with a REALTOR®. And so these are the types of things that we're looking at that we need to continue to evolve the platform.

Erin: Yes. And it's not just popularity that has grown, but the market share from 25 to 48%. That is incredible. So how has that aligned with changing REALTOR® business needs as well?

James: You know, I think that the online lead world has evolved in quite a long way. So there's a fraction of transactions compared to the number of actual leads that are generated online. And more and more, our members are demanding transaction ready consumers. They're expecting warm leads, better leads. They don't want quantity. In fact, sometimes we struggle to make sure that consumers are getting the response that they desire from our sight and from our members, because the leads aren't seen as being as warm or as good. As for, say, a handshake and a referral from a past client or somebody that you know is in your sphere of influence. And so with that changing landscape, we really just want to make sure that the website is delivering for both consumers and for the members. And that takes constant innovation. And we know we're struggling a little bit with, for instance, younger demographics, people who are new to Canada, people who are just familiar with the REALTOR® brand and with REALTOR.ca specifically. And so it's really important that we continue to keep that up. Innovation will take us a good chunk of the way, but we also just have to make sure we're listening to people, consumers and members to make sure that the site is as good as it possibly can be.

Janice: REALTOR.ca really, really does exist to connect consumers with REALTORS®, and it's all about anticipating those needs and filling that gap so that those, as James pointed out, those sort of ready consumers are there to connect with REALTORS®.

Erin: The listening that you referred to just a moment ago is so important, especially when there's so much more noise in today's online landscape. So what does make REALTOR.ca unique?

Janice: Well, you know, the collaboration between boards and associations that fuels the power of REALTOR.ca to see it be successful. That is really, as James has said a few times, the secret sauce to REALTOR.ca's success. The fact that pretty much every single listing that is put onto an MLS system in Canada feeds up to REALTOR.ca. That does not exist anywhere else in the world. And we were. We are extremely fortunate. So you have that and your and the successful sort of initiatives that the CREA team has undertaken to support REALTOR.ca has led to this incredible market share and one that we want to maintain with some very well-funded competitors coming on the scene. We need to make sure that it remains the primary business asset for our REALTORS® in Canada.

James: And I think it's important to note as well, that REALTOR.ca is a REALTOR®-centric environment. So it's an environment that's designed to bring consumers together with REALTORS®. But again, it's meant to do so in a way that is really member-centric. And that's quite different from a lot of the competitors in the portal space that, you know, really make their money on the backs of agents. So we want to make sure that we remain true to that, that that's always central to the platform. And so I think that it's really important that the portal has really moved from a search-based tool to a research-based tool. And so what I mean by that is that the consumer journey starts a lot before they're actually ready to transact. And so REALTOR.ca is a lot of people's favourite pastime. It's where they explore real estate and shop for real estate. And so, you know, we want to make sure that that's a friendly environment. And so the depth of data is really important. Consumers expect more, you know, the breadth again we're covering the entire marketplace across the country, which Janice already mentioned is super unique. And we've also had an increased focus on making sure that we maintain transparency for consumers, because that also is part of what they are expecting these days. And I think that that's part of the REALTOR® brand as well, is making sure that there is transparency to consumers and that it's not just the deepest source of data, but it's the most trusted source of data.

Erin: And it would seem to reason that a better educated consumer will connect with a REALTOR®, but that can't come without a cost, right?

Janice: There's always more money to spend on all sorts of innovations that will help with that connection.

James: Yeah. You know, members are constantly looking for ways to, of course, prospect for business. And, you know, there's nothing that REALTOR® likes more than sitting at a kitchen table with a buyer or seller, helping them to, you know, make the largest investment of their lives and trying to chart a path forward. And REALTOR.ca has become a really important part of that conversation, whether it's your buyers or sellers, that you've got a place where they can really explore the market and also see that their listing is getting that full exposure. And you know that, again, it's about meeting consumer expectations. And that's a constantly moving target.

Erin: From year to year. I could appreciate that the source of funding could be both finite and fluctuating. Is that about right?

James: That's actually exactly right. It's entirely accurate. And we actually have just seen the first ever reduction in the number of members in the country. And so when we have all of our eggs in one basket, i.e. relying on member dues to fund REALTOR.ca and the Canadian Real Estate Association. That means that you start to have to prioritize things. You can't do all things you know that would allow the site to generate the leads that members are expecting to generate, the quality of leads members are expecting, and also to meet consumer expectations in an environment where, as you pointed out, there's a finite amount of resources. And so, you know, I've served on the technology committee, I've been on this board of directors for a number of years, and it's always a situation where you're trying to make sure that it has the appropriate resources, and it's a prioritization exercise, and we can only imagine. And I think it's important we do imagine what is possible in an environment where there isn't scarcity, you know, where we can really empower the team that's running REALTOR.ca in a new enterprise to move forward and to really not just deliver but exceed expectations.

Erin: And as you examine the impact of decision making for things like new features and priorities. Can you see any areas where we're falling short? Janice.

Janice: We've certainly done an excellent job of getting to the market share that we have, and it's really about maintaining and growing that market share for the benefit of our members. And you know, we, I mean, the research has shown that we're extremely trusted by a certain demographic my age. And the younger people aren't necessarily loyal to one portal over another. And so it is a challenge to continue to get the eyeballs on REALTOR.ca. And there's just so much more that we can do if we have more resources fueling REALTOR.ca.

Erin: Well, can't CREA allocate more funds to REALTOR.ca to help address these areas? Janice.

Janice: You know, there's only a certain amount that we can do with a finite amount of resources. And also, as James has pointed out, we've experienced our first decline in membership in quite some time. And so the balancing of priorities beyond REALTOR.ca, of course, CREA was created as an advocacy organization, and the successes that we've had in that area are really important, particularly in this time of a housing crisis in Canada. The reputation of REALTORS®, professionalism, those are all the things that CREA stands for as well as REALTOR.ca. So, you know, to answer your question directly, there would need to be much more. And this is what's in the business case, is a significant increase in dues to even maintain our status quo over the next few years. So the business case goes through that carefully. What would be the effect on membership dues to maintain the status quo and then what is possible, which is really exciting. If REALTOR.ca were put into a taxable entity and allowed to grow and thrive those revenues.

James: And I think it bears saying as well that the status quo option with a large member dues increase, but that wouldn't allow for the kind of innovation that we're talking about needing in order to be competitive in the marketplace. And so there is a big distinction there to be drawn as well between these two options, where one is essentially maintaining a platform, but probably seeing market share erode versus one where we are reinvesting in that platform and able to do so at scale.

Erin: So speaking of revenue generation, this is something that we've talked about in previous episodes. The case for REALTOR.ca as a taxable entity. And you just released REALTOR.ca Forward – the draft business case. So what is the purpose of the report? Janice, you go first.

Janice: Well, there's the main purpose of the report, which is a business case that lays out two scenarios. One is staying the same and what we call the status quo, and the other is moving forward. And that's what REALTOR.ca Forward is all about. So it signals a lot of careful due diligence by a member driven REALTOR.ca task force, along with the CREA board and experts like PricewaterhouseCoopers. And this is the most comprehensive due diligence process that CREA has ever undertaken in its history to make sure that this is a viable future for REALTOR.ca. So the idea is to look at whether this is a viable opportunity, which the business case clearly points out that it is. And the goal of the report is to prepare an alternative to help reduce the pressure on those member dues and continue to have REALTOR.ca thrive and provide that value back to members.

James: I'm really proud of the work that went into producing this business case. You know, we had so many volunteers involved, and as Janice pointed out, a lot of excellent outside consultations. But, you know, the thing I want to remind our members of, the members who haven't been involved in these discussions, is that we recognize that REALTOR.ca is probably the premier asset of Canadian REALTORS®, and we take it very seriously. You know what we're doing here. It's so important that we get this right. And so, you know, we've been engaging with our boards and associations as well as the members on the street to make sure that they have a say and an opportunity to chime in before we present a final business case to the boards and associations, to the voting delegates at a special general meeting.

Erin: So paint us all a picture, would you? Why the need for a taxable entity? James, I'll hand it back to you for this one first.

James: This is a really important point. So we've had a lot of advice, obviously, from outside counsel, from tax counsel, that there is significant risk to the Canadian Real Estate Association by pursuing different types of revenue. So it's the source and type of revenue that really generates risk to our not-for-profit tax status. And so it's not about whether this new entity is profitable or not. It's actually about the revenues that are generated that create this risk. And so that's why, you know, the vehicle that's being proposed here is a taxable entity. And that's really to mitigate that risk for the Canadian Real Estate Association going forward.

Janice: Yeah. And I would just add that when people hear taxable or for profit, which has sometimes been used, people think that there's going to be money made and what's going to happen with that money? And one of the most important key principles of this is that any excess revenue in any given year is reinvested back into the platform that's actually baked into all the proposed governance documents. So the revenue reinvestment is key. And the fact that it would be a wholly owned subsidiary of CREA and REALTORS® would continue to own REALTORS.ca through their membership in CREA. So it's a wholly owned taxable subsidiary, revenue reinvestment back into the platform. And then the third thing is governance excellence, in which it would have its own board of directors. And that would be the third component. And these were all agreed to by boards and associations before we even went down the road of developing a business case.

Erin: Will CREA membership dues decrease as a result? Janice?

Janice: Well, the business case lays out in the second scenario, it lays out a transition period of about ten years where revenues would ramp up. And the business case examines five key revenue streams And during the time over that ten years, the the percentage of dues that go to support REALTOR.ca would decline from about 43% down to 25%. And so it's not that that would be a dues reduction, but that that portion of that $310 per year would come back or stay with CREA proper to grow the advocacy and the professionalism and the reputation pillars of what CREA is. It's important that CREA continue on behalf of members.

Erin: I'll let either of you answer this as you see fit, but can you walk us through the five key revenue streams? Would you do that?

James: Yeah, absolutely. So I think that members are always keen to know exactly how we would generate these revenues. And so it's important to note that we actually examined about 30 different revenue opportunities. And they were prioritized based on a set of guiding principles. But the five that were shortlisted by a subcommittee of the REALTOR.ca Task Force were advertising revenue from non listing pages, expanding the pricing and the opportunities through the Data Distribution Facility, or the DDF, which members would be familiar with. We also have an opportunity to create a tools marketplace, so we've vetted apps and vendors that our members are already buying services from, and created an environment where that would be available through REALTOR.ca so that members can access those services, which would create some margin dollars for CREA. We already have a really valuable tool called the Insights Report, that members would also be familiar with and the insights that are gathered through REALTOR.ca. And this isn't from the actual data that we use to power REALTOR.ca, but rather the way that people are actually using the tool to search through properties and the trends and patterns that evolve through that. There is an opportunity to create a product for those kinds of data insights for non-REALTOR® members. And last but certainly not least, is the opportunity for us to generate leads for third-party service providers like mortgage and insurance. So those are the five that have been identified in the business case, and there's more depth on each one of those in the business case. So I definitely recommend REALTORS® review that report, which is of course available through our member portal.

Erin: All right. Great recommendation. Thank you. And we kept track. You did all five. Thank you James. So the broader question is what's in it for REALTORS®? Janice.

Janice: You've hit the nail on the head. What is it in it for REALTORS®? Well, some of the things that we've touched on are the ability to have a better educated consumer, we could improve the leads just in terms of the quality of the leads. And we know that this is of great importance to REALTORS®, having that significant marketplace that consumers will continue to trust and go to actually elevates the brand of REALTORS® as well. So I would say there's a lot of things overall that's in it for REALTORS® to maintain REALTORS® market position and to continue to innovate the platform.

James: As a member myself, you know, I'm really looking forward to three things. One, that I continue to get absolutely amazing value for my membership dues, because of course, we'll have a diversity of revenue streams that will help to maintain the funding of REALTORS® without compromising what I'm also getting for the rest of my career products and services. We also have that ability to make sure that I've still got exposure for my listings. So, maintaining that market share so that I don't have to invest in other platforms or tools to reach consumers with the listing content that I want to push through from my MLS system, and also a better user experience for both REALTORS® and consumers and so I know that REALTORS® across this country will understand when I say this. When you receive a lead through REALTOR.ca currently and it just says, “I'd like more information about this listing”, and you know that all the person had to do was click a button to get that to pop up and come into your inbox. You don't treat the lead as valuable as it needs to be treated. And so, you know, things like the ability to customize a lead form, things that will, again, be small tweaks that require investment and retooling those things will become possible. And so even more of the feedback we receive from consumers, but also from REALTORS®, will be able to be implemented into a tool that really delivers on my expectations as a member.

Erin: With REALTOR.ca becoming its own entity, does that change how CREA will operate or what its mission will be? James.

James: No, Erin, it doesn't. So the Canadian Real Estate Association has always existed to make sure that members are well served from coast to coast to coast. And our 160,000 REALTORS® across this country really depend on us for much more than REALTOR.ca. So that's only a part of our third strategic pillar, which is REALTOR® and consumer technology, which encompasses a few other things as well. But there's also two other really important functions that CREA performs. And Janice had alluded to them earlier. One is advocating with the federal government. So CREA is in a unique position, of course, to make sure that the housing file during a housing crisis is absolutely actioned by the government in a way that is beneficial to consumers and to REALTORS® and of course, upholding the REALTOR® reputation. When I put my REALTOR® pin on every morning, you know, it's important to remember that that means something because the Canadian Real Estate Association enforces the REALTOR® code, and that we have members that are subscribing to that high level of professionalism. So there's so much more that CREA does. And I would additionally point out that just because REALTOR.ca would be spun out into this taxable entity doesn't mean that CREA still wouldn't provide that oversight of REALTOR.ca on an ongoing basis, which is still a really important function.

Janice: Absolutely. Yeah. We want to make sure that REALTOR.ca continues to meet the needs of both members and consumers. It's a balancing act, and I would say that our work in advocacy is even more important in this environment. We believe everyone deserves a place to call home and that it offers dignity and belonging. And there's a lot of work along the entire housing continuum to make sure that that happens.

Erin: I know that we've only scratched the surface here today, but if we could, let's fast forward a year from now, what would you hope to be saying to REALTORS® if we were to do a follow up episode? Janice.

Janice: Wow, that's a really great question. I would hope to be saying, look at the growth that REALTOR.ca has undertaken for your benefit and look at the increased market share. I would love to see even more market share. And I would love for us to see action on the housing file at all levels of government. We know that we can't solve the housing crisis in silos. We need to collaborate with all levels of government. So those are the main things, and I would hope that we all continue to be extremely proud. As James pointed out, about the step that we have taken to ensure that REALTORS® primary business asset remains the top of mind for consumers and that we protect it on behalf of members.

Erin: Am I missing anything here? Because to me, it seems there's just no downside for REALTORS®. Only two upsides. James.

James: I agree with you, Erin. I think that there's only upside for REALTOR® members. And, you know, one of the things that the task force and the board have been really careful about is making sure that we're really conservative with our projections. So in a year's time, I would love to be able to tell members that it has actually outperformed our conservative numbers that we've used to sort of make the business case, and that there's even a higher degree of reinvestment back into REALTOR.ca. And I'd love to just talk to members here and say, aren't you thrilled with the way that this site is now delivering for you? And what else do you want us to do with it? Because at that point, we'll have the capacity to really be able to make sure that it is as good as our members deserve.

Janice: It's a pretty exciting time. It's an exciting time, Erin. It really is. Mhm.

Erin: And if REALTORS® are listening to and watching this, only take one thing away from this conversation today, what do you hope it is? We'll start with you, Janice.

Janice: That CREA is going to innovate on your behalf and make sure that you, your primary business asset, is protected and maintained and and grows.

James: I hope we've piqued people's interest. And what I'd really like for them to do is to actually go through the business case and engage with their elected leaders at their local board or associations, so that those folks feel empowered to come to Ottawa, potentially later this year and really dig into the conversation, have a great outcome and allow us to move forward.

Erin: Thank you. Thank you to you both for making the time to join us on REAL TIME and enlightening us even more about what REALTOR.ca is, and the value that it delivers to our REALTOR®, viewers and listeners. We so appreciate it and best of luck to you both.

Janice: Thank you.

James: Thank you Erin.

Erin: See, I told you you'd learn something. This conversation with Janice and James certainly shed light on the future of REALTOR.ca, especially regarding the REALTOR.ca Forward report. Value remains at the forefront of REALTOR.ca mission, making sure REALTORS® and consumers have the best experience possible. I'm so glad we got to learn more about how that value will continue for years to come. And of course, if you liked this episode, please tell us by giving us a rating or a review on your preferred podcast platform. We always appreciate it. REAL TIME is brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association, CREA. Production is courtesy of Alphabet® Creative with tech support from Rob Whitehead. Thank you so much for listening and watching. I'm Erin Davis. And we'll see you next time on REAL TIME.

It’s no secret that Canada is facing a housing crisis. The country is in need of programs and strategies to help build more homes that meet people where they are. It’s a national issue that requires collaboration from all leaders, politically and otherwise.

The Honourable Sean Fraser, Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities, is our guest on this episode of REAL TIME, where we discuss Canada’s housing supply goals, where we can draw inspiration from, and how REALTORS® can be part of solutions.

Transcript

Erin Davis: Canada is in a housing crisis. The country is in need of programs and actions to help build more homes that meet people where they are. It's a national issue that requires collaboration from all leaders, politically and otherwise, to help ensure everyone has a home.

Hi, I'm Erin Davis, and this is REAL TIME, the podcast for REALTORS®, brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association. Today, we are joined by the Honorable Sean Fraser, Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities, to talk about Canada's housing supply goals, the challenges we are facing to make them a reality, and how REALTORS® can be part of the solution. Minister Fraser, thank you for being here today.

Minister Sean Fraser: Thanks so much for the opportunity to connect. Looking forward to it.

Erin: The natural place to start is the state of the housing crisis in Canada. 5.8 million homes are needed to be built by 2030 to help restore affordability and address supply. What is currently in place to help with the development and affordability of housing in Canada, both now and in the shorter term?

Minister Fraser: Look, thanks very much for the question. Depending on who you ask, you're going to get a range of different estimates on exactly what it's going to take to cure the supply gap. The one thing I think everybody agrees on is we need to build more homes. The housing plan that we've put out just in April of this year seeks to do that in three keyways. The first is to reduce the cost of building homes. The second is to make it easier to build homes. The third is to adopt new strategies when it comes to the way that we actually build them. Let's dig in a little bit on what that means.

To reduce the cost, what we've tried to do is look in our own backyard to figure out what we can do as a federal government to directly reduce the cost of housing.

We have removed the GST from new apartment construction and changed capital cost allowances to reduce taxes on home builders, and we're starting to see that have an impact.

We also create low-cost financing programs, such as the Apartment Construction Loan Program, or something new that's coming up to build accessory dwelling units to get more supply into the market, which is particularly helpful during a high-interest rate environment.

We've got a big project on the go that we'll have more to say about, I think, in this conversation, including the use of public lands to build more homes.

In addition, we need to incentivize solutions at other levels of government, including zoning and permitting reforms, and, of course, embracing new technologies when it comes to building houses more quickly, such as factory-built homes. There's no silver bullet. If it were easy to solve, smarter people than me would have decades before. The reality is there's a number of levers at our disposal that can help build out that supply, which is essential if we're going to cure the supply gap and ultimately resolve a reasonable level of affordability in the housing market in Canada.

Erin: The existing programs are certainly a great step forward, but we also need to acknowledge that the reality is hitting those housing supply goals is a difficult task. We've heard some rhetoric around development cost charges. Minister, can you fill us in on how or if those are affecting our ability to not only build homes, but build affordable homes?

Minister Fraser: Certainly. I've got a particular perspective on development cost charges. For those who may not be familiar with the issue, it's a tool that municipalities use to raise revenue. In my view, it's one that does so fairly inefficiently because it raises all the revenue on new housing. When you increase the cost of something, you tend to get less of it or you get some of it with a higher price point.

From my perspective, it risks both impacting the housing output goals that we've set as a government and the housing affordability goals, because developers, despite the fact I believe most of them are in it for the right reasons, want to help provide solutions, they're also running businesses. We can't expect that businesses who incur larger costs simply to eat all of those costs. Now, to a degree, community versus community, it may happen in some and not in others. What we're trying to do is to understand, why are municipalities feeling the need to increase development cost charges? I don't believe it's because any community wants to increase the cost of housing. It's because municipalities are cash-strapped. We need to deal with the very real challenges that cities are facing in this country when it comes to now dealing with the costs of certain services that traditionally may have fallen within, particularly at the provincial level of government, including community housing, including dealing with homelessness in their communities.

When you have municipalities incur these increased costs and they have limited access to revenue tools, they go in the areas where they think they have some political space to play.

The solution is going to be to increasing, from other orders of government, the level of investment in infrastructure that currently development cost charges are being used to build out. We've put $6 billion on the table for housing-enabling infrastructure. In order to access it, we said, "You have to freeze your development cost charges."

For those who don't wish to abide by those terms, we have created a new product through the Canada Infrastructure Bank that will provide lower-cost financing to build out that infrastructure, but we want to ensure that if you're going to be using federal dollars to build out municipal infrastructure, you're not simultaneously increasing the cost to housing in your community.

Development cost charges are one of the hurdles we need to overcome. We're seeking to do that by tying access to federal infrastructure money to policies around freezing the cost of development cost charges when that policy was released in April of this year.

Erin: What are some of the frustrations that you're feeling in regards to hitting the housing supply target?

Minister Fraser: There's no shortage of things to become frustrated about, but I try to focus on the opportunities that we have to make a difference. That said, there are certain potential obstacles that we're going to need to overcome, that the impact of our policies remains to be seen. Now we're starting to see very good output when it comes to building permits, for example. We have seen some encouraging numbers when it comes to the latest data from CMHC on housing starts in the month of May of this year. If I look forward two, three years, and I ask myself what bottlenecks are we potentially going to hit if we can't resolve them today, the productive capacity of the Canadian economy is one of the very serious obstacles I think we're going to need to overcome.

We're producing homes close to the record level of production, but when I talk to builders in different markets in Canada, some are already experiencing a labor shortage that's preventing them from growing their home-building capacity. We also see an opportunity to overcome this not just by training the next generation of Canadian workers, but by incentivizing new construction methodologies that pull from a different labor pool, specifically modular housing, penalization, mass timber, potentially even 3D printing, that don't necessarily rely on the same pool of skilled tradespeople that traditional home builders may. By bringing in new solutions, we can overcome that obstacle.

The other piece that is a big question mark is the involvement of other levels of government. I think the federal government can say sincerely, "We've put our hand up and want to play a leadership role, but we need others to join the fight."

Province to province, the ambition and appetite for change varies significantly. We can't do this alone. We'll need provincial governments and municipalities pulling in the same direction.

The third and final, potentially the most important bottleneck, is capital. Making sure we're creating an opportunity for money to come into the housing sector by creating a set of circumstances that makes it more appealing to invest in Canadian home building than it does for investors who may be targeting industries in different parts of the world.

Crowding in that private capital, working with provinces, and growing the productive capacity of the Canadian home-building workforce are the three big things that I believe will pose a bottleneck if we don't sort out the policy solutions today that will reveal themselves over the next few years.

Erin: Minister, you used the term "legalize housing" last fall and it left some people curious. What did you mean by legalize housing?

Minister Fraser: This is not a concept that I've invented. This is something that becomes readily apparent to you when you start to engage in the obstacles to getting more homes built today. Thankfully, we've legalized a lot more housing than was the case even six, eight months ago.

What I meant when I used the phrase legalized housing was simply to point out that most kinds of houses are not legal to build as of right in most communities in Canada or in most neighborhoods in Canada. There's a lot of restrictions on what you can build and where you can build it. For example, a lot of suburban neighborhoods, frankly, a lot of neighborhoods altogether make it impossible to build a small apartment if you don't go and get a zoning change or a special exemption at your local council. That process can add months, sometimes years to the process of just getting an answer saying, "Yes, you are allowed to build the thing."

By the time you actually get permission to build it, when you have that lengthy process of getting an approval, the math that justified your investment in the first place may no longer take hold. We've seen this in a significant number of communities across Canada as we've dealt with a challenging interest rate environment over the past few years. A lot of projects that were approved after they got that special permission from council are now dealing with a higher rate of interest than they baked into their pro forma when they were deciding to go forward with the project or not.

When we can actually change the rules so a developer, a small builder, whoever it may be understands that they can build something without having to go through that lengthy process, that kind of housing will have been legalized in communities. When you make something illegal, guess what happens? You get a lot less of it. We should be making it easy for people to contribute solutions to the housing crisis. My own view is that if someone has land and is willing to make an investment, we should not forbid a person from advancing a solution on their own property when we're in a housing crisis. If we legalize housing by changing the rules to permit home building during a housing crisis, we're going to see more houses, and that makes sense to me.

Erin: I'm glad you mentioned land because land availability is often a key talking point when discussing housing supply, something that came up in episode 51 here when we were talking about Alberta. Can you speak to how government land could be used to address the supply crisis, Minister?

Minister Fraser: One of the things that you've got to realize, and we led off with this, it's become very expensive to build homes in this country. The cost of land, labor, material, supplies, interest, it's all gone up in the last few years and we have to look at what tools we have that can bring the cost of building down.

I'm never going to say that the home-building sector should reduce wages of workers in the home-building sector. In fact, I think if we paid people fairly, we'd see even more come into the industry in different parts of the country.

That said, land is something that we actually can potentially control the price of to some degree when we're dealing with land that the federal government owns, or the different levels of government own. If we can reduce from the input cost of construction the price of the land on which a building will sit, the cost of building is going to go down and the opportunity for developers to pass on those savings to residents when we get supply and demand balanced out will become much easier.

One of the things that we're doing that's a unique approach compared to the historical practice of previous federal governments is embracing a new strategy to make land available for housing. Rather than selling off land to the highest bidder, which will not provide a level of affordability necessarily to the homes that are built upon that land, we're going to enter into long-term leases for those who will commit to certain affordability goals when it comes to the housing that will actually be built on that land.

In exchange for those affordability outcomes, we'll be able to negotiate significantly reduced cost, potentially even for as low as a dollar, for a long-term lease on the land that will last at least the life cycle of the asset or the building that's constructed.

When we make that land available, we can remove one of the most expensive contributing factors to the overall cost of home building. If we bring that cost of building down as we grow the supply of housing in this country, we can potentially be dealing with rents or home prices that are much closer to what a middle-class worker in a given community can afford as compared to what would happen in the free market on private land or on government land that is sold at market prices.

This is an enormous opportunity. As the largest landowner in the country, the federal government has a role to play. The path that we're charting and that will be revealed over the next few months, I believe, will have an enormous impact on the housing supply crisis facing the communities in every part of Canada today.

Erin: Part of CREA's advocacy efforts, as recommended by REALTORS®, has to do with growing the skilled labor force. You talked about labor there just a moment ago to help build the supply that we're missing. What does this look like, Minister Fraser? I know you spoke about this at a CREA conference last fall, but would you refresh our memories please?

Minister Fraser: Certainly. I've identified the capacity of the Canadian home-building labor force to produce homes as one of the potential bottlenecks that we're going to hit. Even if we have a perfect municipal zoning policy in place, perfect financial policies in place, there is a limit to how many homes the Canadian economy can produce today, and we want to grow the outer boundary of that limit.

There's three key areas where I think we can do this. One is by increasing the investment in training for skilled workers. We need people who have the trade and the qualification to practice that will actually be able to increase the pace of construction for existing home builders, including traditional home builders who simply need more people to grow their business.

By investing in training, we can significantly increase the capacity of the workforce over time, including by tapping into traditionally underrepresented groups in the skilled trades. Thinking about investing in programs that will bring more women into the trades, thinking about programs that will bring more racial minorities and indigenous peoples into the Canadian home-building trades, and just generally increasing the overall pool of labor supply by investing in training more broadly.

We also need to embrace targeted immigration programs that will ensure that we both align the housing output with our overall immigration numbers, but simultaneously use those immigration programs in a targeted way to bring in more skilled trades people who have the capacity to help contribute a solution to the housing crisis.

The third thing is not necessarily about growing that same pool, it's about embracing new technologies. By creating incentives to scale up home-building factories, and by incentivizing the purchase of a piece of equipment that will allow one to build more efficiently, we can significantly increase output and build homes faster by comparison, in most instances, to traditional home-building strategies.

The other advantage, in addition to just becoming more productive through the embrace of technology and the use of equipment, is the fact that you're not necessarily competing in the same labor pool. The skill set to build homes that are built in a factory and assembled on site are not perfectly aligned with conventional home-building strategies. By tapping into a pool of labor that may not come from that same skilled background, at the same time we train more skilled tradespeople in this country, we're going to be able to build that overall capacity to produce homes, which will be key if we're going to hit those supply targets.

Erin: Where does the education begin then? Are we talking like getting students coming out of high schools and going into skilled labor? You talk about the immigration adding to that workforce. How far back do we have to go and start planning for this increase in skilled labor?

Minister Fraser: There's things that we can do in the short term, for example, by embracing some targeted immigration programs. We made a change over the course of the last few years to have a category-based selection model within the express entry system that targets five key areas, one of which is the skilled trades. We've seen a fairly significant increase in the number of skilled tradespeople who've come in as a result. That can have an impact within the first year of a policy change. Not necessarily enough to solve Canada's housing crisis in one fell swoop, but enough to make a difference.

There are other things that will take, admittedly, a little bit longer to reach maturity. When you enter into training, for example, you might have a cohort of people who starts their training tomorrow, but they may take a couple of years before they get that designation. That means we must do it, but we have to be patient for some solutions to reach maturity as compared to others.

When you ask how far back do we need to go, when I talk to a lot of my friends who work in the skilled trades, though they may have only started their formal training after they finished high school, very often they grew up on a construction site working informally alongside a family business. They've been turning wrenches in garages their whole life, growing up working on bikes. That's the kind of community that I came from. You see that implementing a culture change in addition to the formal training initiatives that incentivizes and demonstrates respect towards people who have those essential skills in the trades is something that can help shift the proportion of people in a country who work in a given sector over time.

Again, by investing in home-building factories and incentivizing changes with more productive equipment or processes, we can very quickly scale up new players in the sector. There's employers I talked to who are recruiting from a broad range of industries, but not targeting people with any particular skill set, but who are willing to put in an honest day of work. They actually find training old habits out of certain skilled trades can be more challenging than having somebody start fresh who doesn't come with a particular formal skill but has a willingness to work. There's many solutions that we have to embrace, and we do have to embrace them all simultaneously.

Erin: Housing supply issues won't be solved by one person or party alone. We're realistic. We know that. It's a national issue that requires leaders, and not just political leaders, to work towards a meaningful solution together. Minister, who needs to be involved in the housing conversation outside of political leaders? Are we talking like CREA, Cooperative Housing Federation of Canada, for example, developers? Who would you like to see at the table as we build a house around that table?

Minister Fraser: Look, it's an excellent question. One of the things I've learned that I believe more than just about anything else in nine years in politics now is that decisions are not going to be made effectively if they're made behind closed doors on Parliament Hill. They need to be made in full engagement with the people and organizations who are going to be contributing solutions and to be informed by the people who need those solutions.

When you ask who should be involved, private developers and home builders should be involved. Non-profit organizations who understand the needs of specific communities can be involved. People with lived experience should be involved. Advocacy associations who understand the perspective not just of the executive director but of an entire membership of an industry need to be involved.

Groups like CREA would provide an excellent example of the opportunity to engage an entire industry in a more effective and efficient way by sending representatives into these conversations. There are academic experts who've been studying their lives to understand the solutions to some of the challenges we're facing today. Let's borrow from all of the knowledge base that the different players in the sector have to contribute. I want to point out that it's not just for formal organizations to contribute solutions. I've had the opportunity to stream a number of different local council meetings when they were debating the measures baked into their Housing Accelerator Fund agreements with the federal government and I was blown away by the perspective, particularly of young people, who were showing up at council meetings, explaining to their local councillors what these policy changes could mean for them if it would create an opportunity for them to live in the community where they grew up.

Ordinary citizens have an opportunity to advocate to their local councils, to send letters to their MPs, to their MLAs, to raise awareness as part of the need to embrace new solutions to contribute to a better housing sector a few years from now than we have today. It's not just to be left to those who have an opportunity to build massive apartments. Individual citizens can contribute solutions in this process at a local and national level as well.

Erin: Yes. I love that you mention councils because we'd like you to talk about the importance of working with cities to help create affordable housing solutions, Minister.

Minister Fraser: This is where the rubber hits the road. In a lot of communities across Canada, the success or failure of housing initiatives will be determined by a willingness of the local level of government to embrace solutions or to sometimes bow to pressure to avoid the reforms that we know will have a positive impact. I've seen extraordinary leadership at cities across the country.

Though I've been in the news a couple of times for having a disagreement with a municipal government here or there, I found over the course of the past 11 months that I've been in this position that there's an awful lot of cities who want to be incredible partners out there. I'm yet to meet a single one who doesn't want to build more homes for members in their community who are underserved when it comes to housing. Some are willing to go the extra mile.

I think about mayors like Cam Guthrie, who is advocating for ambitious reforms. I think about Berry Vrbanovic in Kitchener or Dorothy McCabe in Waterloo who are implementing these kinds of reforms that are transitioning vast employment lands into residential lands, who are embracing new zoning practices.

The City of Kelowna, who has been ahead of the curve, not only in zoning for four units as of right, which has seen an uptick in the construction of fourplexes, but also in using AI in order to identify faster processes for issuing building permits.

There are incredible leaders and if we understand the best practices from the cities who are experiencing success, we can share those lessons with other levels of government and in fact put financial incentives on the table through a program like the Housing Accelerator Fund, which has led to what is likely the largest upzoning in Canadian history over the course of the past year.

Some of these changes are not just going to have an impact in the short term, as the money we put on the table is used to support more housing growth, but in perpetuity as the systemic reforms that make it easier and faster to build homes and get permits take hold and create a new culture of home building in the cities that have made those important changes. We have to work with cities.

Thankfully there are many good partners across the country who share the desired outcome and are willing to make some of the changes to turn that desire into a reality.

Erin: Looking outside of Canada for a minute, Minister, we've seen countries and areas that have implemented programs or policies that have helped address similar supply and affordability issues. Is there anywhere that we can draw inspiration from to help within our own borders?

Minister Fraser: Certainly. Look, there's no shortage. Some of the work that's been done around building design which is able to withstand very serious safety threats, but nevertheless embrace a single-stair egress, creates opportunities for more efficient, effective building designs that will allow you to fit more home into each building, if that makes sense.

It's not limited to any one country. I think about the work that has gone on in Finland when it comes to more or less eliminating chronic homelessness by adopting a housing-first approach. I think about zoning reform in Auckland, New Zealand, Minneapolis or Austin, Texas, that has led to an explosion of multi-unit residential growth. Factory-built homes have become more or less the norm in countries like Sweden.

I had the opportunity to spend a year studying a master's degree in the Netherlands. Though I didn't live in the biggest city in the country, I nevertheless benefited from a serious public transit system where I was able to walk or take my bike to classes every day that was just as efficient as driving through the city.

There's incredible lessons we can pull internationally from zoning reform, from investments in non-market housing, to modernizing the home-building industry, to investing to solve homelessness. There are so many examples to pull from and I think about the successes and failures that others have experienced as we sit down to develop our own policy track.

Erin: Many people think that building homes is strictly about single-family homes, which are important, too, of course, but there are many other types of housing that could address Canada's supply crisis, right?

CREA's asks in its pre-budget submission are all related to supporting the entire housing continuum, including the stimulation of prefabricated housing.

Can you talk a bit, please, about how modular and prefabricated homes could be part of the solution, like automation as well as 3D printing, all helping Canada to reach its housing supply goals?

Minister Fraser: We need every kind of housing manufacturer to be building more housing, whether that's traditional contractors doing stick-built homes, whether it's modular housing, whether it's panelization, mass timber. We did mention 3D printing. It's got a lot of ways to go before the sectors mature and can be counted on for the kind of volume that we need, but we need to embrace all of it.

I think the advantage right now, though on a cost basis, depending on the building design, you can be competitive. You don't see enormous savings when it comes to manufactured homes. Some kinds of designs could even be a little more expensive, but for multi-unit residential, depending on the scale of the building, you can be cost competitive, but you can build sometimes twice as fast. When you have an opportunity to build more quickly, time can be money based on the terms of financing or the interest rate environment you may be dealing with. You have an opportunity to create a solution much more quickly, and though the cost of building may only be on par, it can help address some imbalances between supply and demand in the market more quickly.

There's a few things we're doing to incentivize more use of manufactured homes in this country. The first is directly incentivizing the uptick of new technology or processes with a hundred million dollars in contribution through both one of our supercluster initiatives and through the regional development agencies in Canada who understand the more localized opportunities to scale those factories.

When I actually talk to those in the sector, they tell me though incentives are appreciated, what they need even more is orders. If they're going to justify a factory expansion, they needed to know there's a pipeline of projects that will justify a bigger facility, the new piece of equipment, staffing up, whatever it may be. We're trying to do that in two key ways. One is to carve out a $500 million tranche of the apartment construction loan program just for homes that are built in factories.

The second is to use our public lands initiative, and this is still under development now, to create greater opportunities for manufactured homes by figuring out how we can commit to a certain scale of factory-built homes when it comes to the public lands initiative to incentivize growth in the sector at the same time we get that housing output.

There's a number of different opportunities that I see, but these tools that we put on the table as part of the National Housing Plan, I expect, are going to have a significant impact.

Erin: We can hope, and hope is what this is all about. Why should Canadians be hopeful moving forward in regards to housing supply and affordability, Minister, when this is clearly a daunting problem to solve? Are you hopeful?

Minister Fraser: I am, and it's not out of a sense of blind optimism. I'm hopeful because I'm actually seeing solutions implemented at a local level that I believe can be scaled up and replicated at a national level.

When I see the extraordinary uptake of the Housing Accelerator Fund, for example, in six months we've reached deals with 179 partners across the country. Following it, we've seen remarkable upzoning of cities across the country. In April, the most recent month for which I've seen the data, we set a record for the issuance of building permits in this country. We didn't do that by snapping our fingers and creating a new tool altogether. We borrowed from the best practices that were already being implemented in cities right across the country, and created an incentive for everyone else to implement those practices as well, and we're seeing change. When we removed the tax from new purpose-built rentals in this country, we saw a number of provinces join forces with us, and then most of those provinces have seen a positive impact when it comes to starts this year as compared to last year.

In my own home province of Nova Scotia, where we've removed the tax on both the federal and provincial tax on new apartment construction, we've actually seen growth this year compared to last of more than 100%. It's remarkable what we're seeing in certain provinces, but this is not to say the job is done. We have a long way to go, but we are starting to see the early signs of success of some of the measures we're putting in place.

The reason that I'm optimistic that we can continue to see these measures taken up is I've never seen such alignment across party lines, across levels of government, in the desire to solve a problem like we currently see with the housing crisis.

We've seen the federal government put out what has been billed as the most ambitious plan in half a century to build homes in this country. Provinces seem more than live to the issue and are implementing a lot of measures on their own. Cities are waking up not just to the need to build more homes, but the opportunities for their communities if they can accommodate the people who want to move in and call those city homes and contribute their talents to the local economy and local community.

The political will is there across levels of government, across party lines. We're starting to see signs of success, and we're even seeing the latest rate cut from the Bank of Canada demonstrate not that we are where we need to be, but that we're trending in a positive direction.

I'm filled with a sense of hope and optimism. The scale of the task before me is not lost on me, but I do understand what can be done when you have three levels of government working together, and I think we've got that in every region of the country.

Erin: Okay. How can we use those wins to continue the momentum?

Minister Fraser: Success begets success. What has been incredible to me is, again, pointing to the experience of the Housing Accelerator Fund, though there were some challenges with some of the measures we were inviting cities to adopt in the outset, nothing created more momentum than a neighbouring city adopting those changes first.

When we were able to stand up and announce that City X was going to receive several million dollars to make certain kinds of changes, City Y next door decided they wanted to do the same. Then City Z took similar measures, and we saw that the competition actually became not just a competition for the federal money that was on the table, but making sure that they weren't to be outdone by their neighbours, knowing that that would actually potentially pull people from one community to another based on housing availability.

When we demonstrate that certain measures work and can be done within the political context of a given community, it creates a level of courage and ambition at a local level, I find, right across Canada, to say we can solve this problem.

My sense is the political temperature has reached a stage where leaders will ignore the housing crisis at their peril. There are solutions that are being made evident in communities across the country, not by the most rigorous or recent study that's been performed on them, but by the policies that are being implemented that were informed by those studies 10 and 20 years ago that are having an impact today.

We can continue to increase the level of ambition by rewarding communities who are adopting policies that are making a difference. I have full faith that when those solutions prove their merit, the momentum will continue to snowball. We're seeing that with zoning, we're seeing that with multi-unit residential construction. My hope is we can see that in the home-building industry with more factory-built homes.

There's no shortage of solutions, but once communities see that they start to work somewhere, they're willing to try them in their own backyard more often.

Erin: Can you tell us why initiatives such as the Cooperative Housing Development Program are going to help Canadians?

Minister Fraser: Certainly. If you're going to understand how we can help, you have to understand that there is a problem first. Separate and apart from the housing affordability challenges we have in the market, there's an enormous challenge when it comes to the lack of social housing, affordable housing for low-income families in this country that is subsidized by governments.

The reason that we have a shortage of non-market housing in Canada, and by the way, we have about 4% of our total share of homes in this country exist outside of the market, the average for developed economies in the world is about double that, and the number of people in Canada who live below a low-income threshold is between 10% and 11%. There are going to be people who fall through the cracks. If you have more low-income people in your country, then you have houses that are designed to support people with low incomes. The cost, by the way, of a shortage of affordable housing is not revealed just in housing costs. You see increased health costs as people run into challenges with the mental health system and emergency room more often. You see more challenges in the legal system when people have challenges with the police or the courts. You see people less often fulfill their economic potential because it's awfully hard to look for a job when you don't have a place to go to bed at night.

When we have investments like the partnership we've made with the Cooperative Housing Federation, or like the increased contributions through the Affordable Housing Fund, or a new acquisition fund to pull low-cost housing from the market into a non-profit setting, we can correct that imbalance between low-cost housing that's subsidized by governments and the number of low-income Canadians that live in this country. It's been 30 years without any serious investment by the federal government in affordable housing. Conservative governments and liberal governments have both chosen to pull back. We changed that in 2017 with the introduction of the National Housing Strategy. We've increased the ambition with the latest plan to solve the housing crisis, but these investments will help specifically target the needs of low-income Canadians and therefore benefit not just the people who live in them, but the entirety of a community's population on the basis of those costs we won't incur and the opportunities that more people who have their housing needs met can create in the communities where they live.

Erin: Nobody knows their communities better than REALTORS®. There are more than 160,000 in Canada, a collective that continues to be a strong voice for housing supply and affordability issues in Canada. Do you have any tips for them, Minister?

Minister Fraser: Look, I won't tell anybody else how to do their job. I've got enough people telling me how to do mine, but there are a few points maybe I'll make in response to your question.

First, I'm grateful to REALTORS® who put the interests of their clients first. This goes without saying, but I trust the industry to ensure that they're well informed on what policy tools may be available to their clients who are trying to save up for that down payment, who are considering whether they want to avail themselves of a 30-year amortization period. Make sure you understand what policies are on offer. You will be better than me at guiding people through the process of buying their first home in particular, given your wealth of experience. Continue to put the interests of your clients first, and continue to be aware of the tools the government has on offer to make it easier to become a participant in the housing market or a homeowner.

Finally, don't assume that governments know what your experience is. It's been extraordinary for me, before and after my time in this position, the wealth of information and experience that REALTORS® have shared about my own market in my own community, my own province of Nova Scotia, or nationally.

I should give a shout out to Susan Green, my friend, neighbor, and REALTOR® who's been involved with advocacy campaigns with CREA for a number of years.

Don't be afraid to show up at that council meeting. Advocate strongly if you believe in zoning reform, because in the absence of voices explaining how it will make a positive difference, there will be people who are afraid of change in their community.

If you can demonstrate through your experience, your knowledge, your training, that we can invite new solutions to communities who are not accustomed to them, and the world doesn't end. You can live in a community that creates a vibrant and dynamic place to live for a next generation of people who may call a community home. Don't be afraid to participate in the debates as they play out at a local level. Inform folks like me and my counterparts provincially about your industry's point of view. Make sure at an individual service level you continue to support people by making them aware of what tools are available.

I'm grateful for the work that you do to help guide people through the home buying process, and very grateful for the opportunity to connect today.

Erin: We're very grateful as well, Minister. Thank you so much for your wisdom, your insight, and your time. Thanks a lot.

Minister Fraser: A pleasure, as always. We'll look forward to our next conversation.

Erin: You bet. Thanks again to Minister Fraser for taking the time to be with us today. We all know this conversation isn't going away, and the REALTOR® community continues to roll up their sleeves and take action.

Of course, if you liked this episode, please tell us by giving us a rating or review on your preferred podcast platform. We always appreciate it.

REAL TIME is brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association, CREA. Production courtesy of Alphabet® Creative, with tech support from Rob Whitehead. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Erin Davis, and we'll see you next time on REAL TIME.

On June 5, The Bank of Canada announced its first rate cut in four years. This could be the sign many were waiting for to come off the sidelines and step into Canada’s housing markets. But, what does that look like across the country and how do other economic factors play into the decision making process?

On the latest episode of REAL TIME, we hear from Shaun Cathcart, Director and Senior Economist, Housing Data and Market Analysis with the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), Ann-Marie Lurie, Chief Economist with the Calgary Real Estate Board (CREB), and Jason Mercer, Chief Market Analyst with the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB), as they share insights on the current state of Canada’s housing market from a national, provincial, and local level, exploring everything from the need for more supply to interprovincial migration to pricing.

Transcript

Erin Davis: It finally happened. On June 5th, the Bank of Canada lowered the interest rate for the first time in more than four years. Could this indicate the beginning of a shift in the Canadian housing market? If so, what can we expect at a national, provincial, and local level? I'm Erin Davis. Welcome to REAL TIME, the podcast for REALTORS®, brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association. Now, who better to speak to the state of Canada's housing market and economy in general than our three guests today?

Joining us are, Shaun Cathcart, Director and Senior Economist, Housing Data and Market Analysis with the Canadian Real Estate Association, Ann-Marie Lurie, Chief Economist with the Calgary Real Estate Board and formerly with the Alberta Real Estate Association, and Jason Mercer, Chief Market Analyst with the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board. Welcome to REAL TIME. What does the Bank of Canada's most recent announcement mean for current and potential Canadian home buyers? Why did this change happen now? We're going to start with you, Shaun.

Shaun Cathcart: Sure. Let me take the second part of that question first. The reason it happened now is because the Canadian economy is not doing that well. Inflations and the Bank of Canada's favorite BFFs, CPI-common, CPI-trim, CPI-median have been well-behaved, as they say, for four months and it just seemed like the right time. They were a little bit worried about the housing market doing it in the middle of the spring market, but they did it anyway.

What it means for current home buyers or current homeowners, if they've got variable rates, their payments will go down. If they've got fixed rates, that their renewal date is looking better, whatever that is out into the future now that this rate cut cycle has started. If you're a potential home buyer, if that's the signal you were waiting for to jump into the market, there you have it.

Erin: It really has a psychological element to it, doesn't it, Shaun?

Shaun: Very much so. If you think back to last year when buyers jumped into the market with both feet in March and April, basically anticipating rate cuts, and all they got was rate hikes, they weren't going to get fooled again this year. That camp has probably moved over into the, I'll believe it when I see it, and now they've seen it.

Erin: Ann-Marie, how about your perspective on this?

Ann-Marie Lurie: For our market, it's a little different. We're already in really tight conditions. Any change in rates is just going to bring even more demand into our market, especially for people who were priced out to a certain extent. What we'll be closely watching is what actually happens on the bond yield? Are we going to see this transfer into declining five-year lending rates on the qualification basis? Those are the things that we're looking at. Again, it's just going to further tighten and increase demand even more so than what we are already experiencing.

Erin: Because you've already seen pent-up demand and activity even before the rates moved, right?

Ann-Marie: That's right. Our market has been performing very differently than what you're seeing in some other major markets in the country. We've seen extremely strong demand, we have limited supply, we're in seller market conditions, and we've had strong price growth. This has been happening all the while, while we have very strong or very high interest rates.

Erin: Jason, your take on this. Do you think it's about time or what do you think?

Jason Mercer: Certainly, if you look at the GTA experience, it's been quite a bit different than what Ann-Marie was describing out West in Alberta or Calgary in the sense that, we did see a very real impact when the Bank of Canada hiked rates through 2022 and 2023. A lot of would-be homebuyers moved to the sidelines. It's not to say that most of these people don't want to purchase a home. In fact, most of them have every intention on making a purchase as we move forward.

Our public opinion polling done by Ipsos suggests that there's a lot of these homebuyers that maybe this first move on the part of the Bank of Canada may see some of them start to get back into the market. In reality, we probably need to see 100 basis points, 150 basis points before we start to see a real marked acceleration in sales activity. We'll see stronger activity in the second half of 2024, but even more so as we move into 2025.

Erin: Predicting is hard, we know that. What do you think July's interest rate announcement could bring?

Jason: Sure. I think the Bank of Canada stated that they're going to be watching all the various economic indicators. I think that's the case. I do believe that if we continue to see slower growth in the economy and moderate growth in the employment market, then I think there is, at least, a chance that they could bring on another cut as we move into July. It's probably 50-50 at best at this point.

Erin: Do you think a lot of people are holding on now? We're selling a house, so this may be a little bit personal interest here, but I've got you here, I might as well ask. I'm sure that there are people who are very interested in what's going to happen. Do you think that people are going to see the June rate drop and then go, "Okay, why don't we wait until July?" What do you think, Shaun?

Shaun: I think the first one is really the big psychological one. Rates aren't any lower. To Ann-Marie's point, this was already priced into five-year mortgage rates well before, back a month or two ago. It's really the psychological element at this point. To Jason's point, there's a lot of people that if it's the actual rate itself that you're getting that you're waiting for, a lot of them are going to be waiting for maybe 100 or 200 basis points lower than what it is now. For people that are just wanting to be sure, unlike last year where they got burned that the loosening cycle had officially started, that the Bank of Canada is going to wave the green flag on that. I do think that there's some segment of the market that will jump, and I expect to see it showing up in the first little bit of June.

Erin: What are your ideas on it, Ann-Marie? A July drop, what might happen?

Ann-Marie: Again, I think that it depends on how much this actually impacts the overall lending rates. I think it will encourage some people to reconsider getting back in that potentially couldn't. In our market, it's going to depend on if they have supply available to them. We've seen that there's been a shift towards more affordable product. It hasn't necessarily entirely curbed our demand, but we have seen that shift towards more affordable product. What we could start to see happen is a pickup in some of the higher-end product in our market as rates start to come down.

Erin: Interesting. All right. Let's put into context some of these pricing peaks and valleys. If you're looking at housing prices in a vacuum, whether it's locally, provincially, or even nationally without context, it can be hard to see a way out. Is there any context to be added to the discussion around housing affordability that could put things into perspective, Shaun?

Shaun: Sure. I think the biggest impact on housing affordability is the fact that the Bank of Canada is expected to move rates back towards much more normal levels or what would be considered neutral by them, which may be 3%-ish from the 5% that we were at for so long. That'll make a big difference for affordability. If you're expecting a lot more in the way of price declines, the biggest price declines were really in 2022 from quite frankly, a very short-lived peak.

People have bought basically, between October of 2021 and March of 2022. Other than that, a lot of markets are already stabilized near those levels that we had before and since. It depends where you are. Quite frankly, I would expect to see some moderate price growth creeping back in as all this demand comes off the sidelines.

Jason: Every market is different. If you look at the greater Toronto area, we have seen a pretty marked uptick in available listings. Initially, as people move off the sidelines and back into the market, start to take advantage of lower borrowing costs, there's still going to be quite a bit of choice out there. There will be negotiating power for buyers. Eventually, we're going to eat through, we're going to absorb some of that standing inventory.

When that starts to happen, there's going to be more competition. You're going to see more interest in a given home. That's when you start to see upward pressure stocking exerted on home prices. We will start to see that, later on, this year and I think even more so into 2025, especially if we don't see any meaningful additions of that to the housing stock. I'm sure we'll talk more about that.

Erin: We will. We'll also look across the country too, but, of course, when we've got Ann-Marie with us from Calgary, which is such a fascinating market to begin with. What's your perspective on that in terms of the prices? What's going on right now, or what you can expect, and what you've seen, Ann-Marie?

Ann-Marie: First of all, our market is obviously very different. We are relatively affordable when we look at other markets in BC or Ontario in comparison. We have gone through periods of price adjustments. We've been always known as this boom and bust market. However, I want to remind people that even though we've gone through some adjustments, our prices are rising again, and we still have a lot of catch up to do. We're still quite a significant spread compared to some other larger markets in the country, so it is a little different here.

Now, that's been one of those factors that has attracted people to our market, and it's why our demand has stayed relatively strong throughout this time frame, and it's why we've seen some really strong price growth. It wasn't so long ago that we saw prices actually, at least, say stable or somewhat slide. I think, again, a lot of that is to do with how we add supply and how much supply we can add. A little bit of a different scenario here. Like I said, prices have been rising pretty steadily for the past two years, but when you look at that spread, we're still far more affordable.

Now, people in Calgary don't necessarily feel like it's affordable after the price jumps that we've had, but, put some number of perspective to this. We still have product available like our typical apartment condos in the $350,000 range. People can still purchase detached homes in the 700,000 range. Very different market conditions here and for us, our affordable is a little bit outside of Calgary where we still have more options in all types of home options.

Erin: We'll get into the whys and wherefores of that as well, Ann-Marie, but let's talk about interprovincial migration. Alberta knows a few things about that. There's been an increase in interprovincial migration in the last few years, of course, Alberta being one of the country's hotspots and it's not just because of great hockey. What might be causing this? Let's get all your opinions on this. We'll start with you, Ann-Marie. What makes Alberta so different?

Ann-Marie: I think our relative affordability has been a draw because when we look at our interprovincial migration; the majority of people have been coming from Ontario, followed by BC. These are the two markets that we're seeing a lot of people come into the city. Again, our affordability is, we're far more affordable relative to those two markets. That's been one of the factors that have attracted people here. Further to that, especially we did have supply going into some of this. Now, obviously, supplies become a bit more of a challenge now. Other than that, we've also been creating a lot of employment. Employment has actually been improving here and really a lot of professional and technical jobs, which tend to be in a higher pay grade. This is another factor that's really contributed to it. It's not just the relative affordability, it's also the positive employment situation. Even our economy has really been outperforming some of the other provinces in the country.

Erin: Shaun, your take on the interprovincial migration?

Shaun: That's been an interesting one to track. As Ann-Marie said, a lot of Ontario to Alberta, and a lot of that is the younger set, 25 to 35, looking for employment, but also home ownership where that's become very difficult in Ontario. There is even some evidence in the demographic data that the 65-plus boomer parents are following their kids and grandkids out West because what's the point of having your big Toronto home if no one's going to visit you? Another trend is the older Gen Xers moving out East for their retirements.

I guess maybe the 60-years-old, they got called back to the office to make that Toronto commute and said, "You know what, I'm going to sell my big house and move out there where I can get a place for 300 and retire early." Lots of interesting trends. I think we have a tendency to blame COVID for a lot of these. Certainly, COVID was a turbocharger of a lot of things there were, but up and out to be able to afford a home has been going on for a very long time.

Erin: Ann-Marie, you mentioned the tech sector. Is that one of the parts of the growth of Alberta where people can move to be at home, be working from home? Has that added to the attraction in Alberta?

Ann-Marie: I think that does come into play. There's no question that sector has been growing here. Alberta has been able to attract a lot of investment into even venture capital. That's been one factor that has supported some of our growth. The majority of our industry is still in the energy sector and spin-offs from the energy sector. I think that ability to work remotely has increased the appeal, especially because of our relative affordability.

That if you're not having to go into the office and now you can, all of a sudden, purchase and get into homeownership, as Shaun was saying, we had product available in all price ranges for several years. I think that for a lot of people who really desire homeownership, Alberta is really a good option for them, especially if they're not having to go into the office. We've improved our connectivity in terms of airlines. We're seeing growth in different industries that we haven't seen. That's really speaking to some of our diversification that's happening in this province as well.

Erin: Jason, we all heard during the pandemic about people who were living the dream, going up to the cottage, staying at the cottage, working from the cottage. Is that still happening? Is that still a thing or Is that bump? Are we over that and it's back to normal thing? What are you seeing in terms of that remote working now?

Jason: It's interesting. If you think about the movement out of the GTA property to surrounding areas, it could be cottage country, it could be other smaller metropolitan areas in the greater Golden Horseshoe like the Kitcheners and Hamilton's of the world, that's a trend we were already seeing prior to COVID in the sense that people didn't want to leave Ontario to say move to Alberta, but they were looking for a place that was more affordable that they could purchase a home in Southern Ontario. We see that, we look at our members' activities. It used to be that the great, great majority of transactions reported through TRREB's MLS system were within the traditional GTA boundaries.

Now, you're looking at more than a third of those transactions are actually in other centers in Southern Ontario. People's clients have started to look further afield to purchase a home, and our membership has been helping them out. If you think about, though, whether those people are being replaced, they are. We're not seeing a hollowing out of the GTA, it's just from a different source. We're the single greatest beneficiary of immigration into the country. People want to move to the greater Toronto area to take advantage of a diverse labor market and what have you, but it impacts the housing market differently, rental versus ownership.

Erin: How does interprovincial migration, we will get to immigration, Jason, but how does interprovincial migration affect any housing market? Are there areas popping up as hot spots that might not have been considered before? You talk about the general spread, Jason, into the Golden Horseshoe or even East to Port Hope, Trenton, all of the places that used to seem so far from Toronto, but now people are finding they'd rather drive for two hours than sit in traffic for two hours. How does this migration affect the housing market? Shaun, do you want to address that first?

Shaun: Sure. I guess the biggest impact would be that it's spreading, whereas it used to be that it was Toronto and Vancouver were expensive and most other places weren't. When you've got all of those people moving out into those other places, once Toronto and Vancouver were in some sense limit to how far those prices could go up and how many people you could jam in there, it spreads across the country, including during COVID, where it was disproportionately to the East Coast, places where they were considered very affordable before. It's a double-edged sword because it's nice to have that home price growth and that activity level in places that were pretty sleepy for decades. If you're a local person in Fredericton, for example, and you're looking to buy that starter bungalow, and you're now having to compete with a retiree couple from Toronto who just sold a place for $1.7 million, that's where the double-edged sword comes in.

Erin: We've touched on this a little bit so far in terms of demographic. Shaun, you mentioned retirees from Toronto moving to Fredericton and people also wanting that particular house coming from different income brackets. When it comes to location popularity, can you see anything or tell us about anything that you've seen and the contributing factors that you've noticed?

Shaun: Sure. One of the things that's going on in demographics all around the world, quite frankly, with the hockey stick of population that popped up after World War II, is that most of those people are still around and just aging through time. In that middle-aged space, you've got now your boomers, your Gen Xers, your Millennials all in that space at the same time. We stopped building the traditional low-rise single-family home about 20 years ago.

A lot of those, not to make accusations, but a lot of the empty-nester boomers are stuck in those big homes. A lot of those bedrooms are collecting dust, whereas a lot of young people are looking to start families and can't do that in a 600-square-foot condo. As we mentioned, they're moving out further. I don't know whether that makes those other regions popular. It's mostly because they're more affordable to get a place that's suitable for, say, a family of four.

Erin: Ann-Marie, what are you seeing? Are you seeing more retirees, or you're seeing the younger end of the demographic coming in and trying to really start something?

Ann-Marie: I would say we're seeing younger demographics increase here. That's what's attracting people to our city. Again, part of that is because we do have that supply of detached homes that are larger that can house a family, as well as other product types and in affordable ranges relative to other larger markets. We traditionally find that our interprovincial migration tends to be younger people that are coming here. We continue to see that trend play out.

It's been the largest growth in terms of our demographics, and a lot of them are coming specifically into Calgary. Again, that has to do with that future opportunity as well. What does that job prospect look like? In addition to that cost of housing, we are relatively affordable, especially given our salaries here tend to be a little bit higher than some of the other locations in the country.

Erin: Also, Ann-Marie, as you well know, of course, Alberta has this spread out factor as well, where Okotoks, and Longview, and Turner Valley, and Black Diamond, and even Airdrie were places that were so far from Calgary at one time. These places are just a drive away now and not a huge one. What about the spread-ability of Calgary? Has that worked to your benefit? Is the market taking advantage of that geographically?

Ann-Marie: It does. Yes, for sure. I think one of the differences is in our market, is that we can add supply when we need to. Traditionally, throughout every cycle we've seen, whenever we run into these extreme shortage scenarios, we see the new home industry is able to really expand. Last year Calgary had a record level of housing starts in the Calgarian region area. We have to remember that we are not like Toronto where our surrounding communities, or surrounding cities, or towns are a very long commute. We have markets like Airdrie that it's actually a closer drive if you work in the North part of the city than it would be if you lived in South Calgary.

I think that that's an important distinction as well in how our market's a little different, is you're not driving that far out for affordability. It is a little different. We still have land available within the city limits that can add significant homes. We're seeing construction happen and respond to basically the supply shortage that we're currently facing. I think that's always been the difference in Alberta, is because we do have a lot of land.

In fact, I think that now we're starting to see some shifts as well, not just from Calgary, but in Edmonton, who last year recorded price declines. They're starting to see a bit of a shift as well that more people are considering Edmonton, which is relatively more affordable than Calgary. I think that there has to be a lot of perspective in the difference about how you can add supply. That's something that our province has been really good at doing, but part of that is because we have that land supply available.

Erin: In 2023, Canada's immigration numbers were much higher than we're accustomed to, putting more pressure on an already stressed Canadian housing market. This added pressure on the market, it also affects supply and affordability. How have you seen this play out in the Canadian housing markets? We'll start with you, Shaun.

Shaun: Sure. Just for anyone that doesn't know, it's a combination of immigration, which we have a target for, and non-permanent resident arrivals that add to that population growth, typically in the 300,000 to 400,000 person range, sorry, from about World War II until about 10 years ago. Last year it was 1.25 million. That's a huge jump in people. Everyone needs to live somewhere. I think what's amazing is that we're really not seeing much of an impact in the ownership market. It's all flooding into the rental market, which was already struggling beforehand. We do expect to see some flow out of the rental market, into the ownership market, even in the absence of big rate decreases just because for a lot of people, it's going to start to look a lot more just relatively favorable to buy, even at very high rates and prices, than to stay at a rental market that's increasingly expensive and maybe precarious too in terms of being able to stay in your unit.

Jason: It's interesting. We've done a lot of polling around immigration, and certainly, our last round of Ipsos polling found a couple things. There's a short-term and a long-term story to this. When we're seeing record levels of immigration into Canada and certainly, drilling down to the GTA, a lot of that initially is pointed at the rental market. We've seen very tight rental market conditions over the last number of years. At the same time, when you look at people's propensity to purchase a home, we actually find that newcomers to Canada, the period to move from renting to owning is actually shorter than for households that were born here.

If you think about that, the last couple of years, we've seen record immigration that's really impacted the rental market, but these people are actually going to be moving in fairly short order into the home ownership side of things. Putting interest rates aside, just the simple fact that we're seeing this strong population growth on the back of a population cohort that has a higher propensity to buy, that really provides a longer-term view that we're going to continue to see strong demand for ownership housing.

Erin: That's fascinating. All right. You'll remember that CREA's pre-budget submission includes recommendations on how the affordability and supply issues can be addressed, just what we've been talking about today. From your individual perspectives, what types of housing are needed to solve the housing crisis? We'll start with you, Shaun.

Shaun: Sure. When we were advocating for more supply, it was more of everything. You can choose the number you want to look at, whether we need an additional 1.4 million homes per the PBO just to catch up by 2030, or whether we need another 3 1/2 million per CMHC by 2030, which is a tall order, given the fact that we'll be lucky to make the 2.3 million baseline that that needs to be added on top of.

You really need more of everything. It's not one or the other, but it may have to be one or the other in terms of capacity constraints to build. I think our more recent submission does encourage the government to look at a modular housing of factory built penalization, mass timber, and some of those new technologies where there may be some really big opportunities going forward to do things better, more energy efficiently, faster. It does have some challenges, which is why it hasn't taken off yet.

Erin: Jason, the missing middle, tell us about that.

Jason: I think it's a really important concept. It jumps off something that Shaun said earlier about more aged households living in a home that's way too big for them. It's not that a lot of these people want to live in this large home, it's that they want to live in their current neighborhood. They don't want to move away from friends, they don't want to move away from the amenities that they're used to, and they simply don't have other housing options that would better meet their needs.

If we're able to see a greater diversity of home types, not just more housing in the aggregate, in a lot of built-up neighborhoods, but also in new subdivisions and developments that are being put up, I think you'd see an easier movement through that housing continuum over time, from renting, to owning, to buying your second home, et cetera. People would be more easily able to find a home that meets their needs. What you'd see then is more churn in the marketplace and less of these tight market conditions, some of which are due to the fact that people don't believe they'll be able to list their current home for sale and find something else that meets their needs.

Erin: That sounds brilliant. I love the idea of that, staying in your neighborhood but downsizing at the same time. What is the big obstacle there? Is it NIMBY, where there was a 4,000 square foot house if it turns into a multi-family like six or even just row houses for three families? Is it NIMBY? What is it? What do you think is the main obstacle there?

Jason: I think certainly, when we first started banging the drum on the need for more housing supply, it was thrown out by some policymakers as a bit of a red herring. I think over the better part of the last decade, there's really been that realization that housing supply has been a problem. We've got a housing supply deficit that's built-up over time. We're also not building enough homes to account for the record levels of population growth we're expecting to see over the next few years. With that in mind, I think there's been a real positive shift on the part of all levels of government that A, we need to see more housing supply in the aggregate, but we also need to see a greater diversity of home types brought online.

I think that started to permeate down to the neighborhood level. I think more and more people are seeing A, yes, we need more housing supply, and B, it doesn't make a lot of sense to oppose it. I'll tell you, we did a study looking at what the art of the possible is for missing middle types of housing, both in existing built-up neighborhoods, but also in new developments. Some of the options look pretty cool. I think there's an educational component as well. If people that are initially opposed to new types of housing in their neighborhood looked at what some of the possibilities are, I think there'd be a lot less resistance.

Erin: I love the thought of that. Ann-Marie, Alberta, what's going on there?

Ann-Marie: First of all, we've only really seen a struggle to keep up with supply over the past two years, and that's just because of the sudden influx we've had of migrants. I think that's just some of the differences that, again, our market has had. Now, with regards to adding supply, there's no question. I think we need all different forms of supply. Now, our newer communities are quite diverse. They do have a really good selection of your typical detached homes to your semis, and row, and apartment properties. I think that because we have still a lot of new community development, we're seeing that good mix in all of our newer communities.

Now, when it comes to the existing communities, sometimes that's where there is some challenges. Often the challenge in our market is not that the redevelopment can't happen, it's what type of pricing are you coming in at? The biggest challenge that we're seeing in our market is development of affordable type of ownership properties. Again, affordable is always relative to each market, but for us, it's how do we get that product available in some of those lower price ranges? We traditionally saw even apartment style product, we used to have product available in the 200,000s. Now that's disappearing. Where we're finding the biggest challenge to add supply is in those lower price ranges.

That's where we're seeing supply actually decline. I think that for us, it really comes down to what are those options to increase that land supply available to develop on? That's something that is another thing that tends to influence our market, is that ability to unlock that land for development. We've seen land costs rise significantly, especially when there's been some boundaries placed on new development within the city limits and outside of our city. Those are things that we're looking at on a policy basis, but I think that the biggest challenge that we're facing today is having supply come in some of those lower price ranges where we traditionally had supply.

Erin: What impact does our REALTOR® advocacy have on the current state of the housing market? We'll start with you, Shaun.

Shaun: We've got 160,000 voice strong membership. We have a very strong presence up on Parliament Hill, a lot of connections and meetings that are happening all the time, PAC days here in Ottawa, where we basically meet with every MP in the country and with the REALTOR® representative from their area. We also have PAC at home where members meet their MP where they live. We've got a really, really, very, very strong advocacy voice here in Ottawa. I think that the things that we're advocating for are being echoed by other organizations as well. It's everything on the supply side. I think that all political parties are on side with that. It really is a front burner issue in Canada. A big part of that is been that we've been out there for the last few years saying this is what you need to be focused on.

Erin: Jason, you've been talking about supply as well, of course.

Jason: Thinking about government relations at all levels of organized real estate, whether you're thinking about the board level, the provincial associations, or CREA at the national level, there's been a great partnership there. I think that's in realization that it's all three levels of government that have a role to play in housing policy and certainly recently making things work from a supply perspective.

I think we've really seen the benefits of that cooperation over the last number of years as the feds, the provincial government, and local government, certainly in the GTA and across the country have come up with some unique new policy stances and platforms that hopefully, we'll see more housing supply come online. I think the next couple of years, we're going to tell this tale because we need to move from the policy paper to getting actual shovels in the ground.

Erin: Oh, thank you, Jason. I love that you talked about the future here because it's a perfect way to begin our wrap up to this Episode 51. What is one thing that ®S should pay attention to this year? We'll go local, and provincial, and nationally. Jason, let's start with you, again, on this one.

Jason: I think at the local level, if you look at a region like the GTA, every neighborhood can be different. Whereas in some parts of the GTA, even in this environment of higher borrowing costs, some neighborhoods have been very tight. If a listing comes on the market, you're seeing a lot of competition for it. In other areas, it's going to take some time to see market conditions pick back up. Of course, then that dictates what your strategy is going to be as a buyer or seller. A REALTOR® that really knows what's going on in a local area is, obviously, going to have a lot of value to bring to that transaction.

The other important thing I'll note is just the value that REALTORS® in general bring to the overall economy. We've estimated that every transaction that gets reported through TRREB's MLS system results in another $70,000 worth of expenditure in the local economy. There's billions of dollars of economic benefit and associated jobs and tax revenues that's associated with REALTORS®' work.

Ann-Marie: For us, I think the key thing is to understand that we are different than sometimes the national trends. Again, looking at it on what are those local factors that are driving our province and our overall economy? Are we going to continue to attract people from different parts of the country? Is our migration numbers going to stay strong? That has a significant impact on our housing market. I think that understanding some of those different trends really come down to some of the fundamentals that are driving our provincial economy versus what you might be seeing in other parts of the country. I think it's going to be very important for both buyers, and sellers, and REALTORS® to really understand some of the dynamics within our market. Again, what we're seeing is very differing trends in the lower price ranges, and different product types, and as well as by location. Our market is still a seller's market condition, and that's not really expected to change over the short-term until we see some shifts in supply.

Erin: Last word to Shaun Cathcart. Shaun, what do you say about what's coming up?

Shaun: I guess the big one would be, think about boring costs coming down. They could come down faster than people think. Think about how much pent-up demand there was beforehand, how much pent-up demand there's been the last two years when the market's been very quiet, and how much additional demand is coming through population growth. It's not a database that we can measure, but we know that there is a record number of people out there on the sidelines ready to go. You've got increasing turmoil in rental markets, pushing people towards the ownership market, and when boring costs drop, be prepared to get a lot busier maybe faster than you think.

Erin: I love that note on which to end. Thank you. Thank you all so very much for sharing your wisdom here with us all today. Best of luck to you in the second half of 2024.

Shaun: Thank you.

Jason: Thanks very much.

Ann-Marie: Thank you.

Erin: That conversation certainly gave us a lot to digest. If you want even more context or to keep up with how things play out, visit creastats.ca for the latest housing market analysis. Of course, if you liked this episode, please tell us by giving us a rating, or you can review us on your preferred podcast platform. We always appreciate it. REAL TIME is brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association, CREA. Production is courtesy of Alphabet® Creative, with tech support from Rob Whitehead. Thank you so much for joining us here. I'm Erin Davis. We'll talk to you soon on REAL TIME.

From websites and ads to social media, newsletters, and podcasts, content is everywhere and has the potential to be a powerful business driver.

But how do you consistently create good, creative content?

That’s where Melanie Deziel comes in, a creativity coach and leading voice in content marketing. With clients including Google, Netflix, The New York Times, and others, Melanie joins REAL TIME to share her framework for systemizing creativity, making it easier and faster to generate content that stands out and connects with your audience.

Learn more about Melanie and her book The Content Fuel Framework at MelanieDeziel.com.

Transcript

Erin Davis: Web pages, social posts, newsletters, podcasts; content is everywhere, but do you need to be too? I'm Erin Davis and welcome to REAL TIME, the podcast for REALTORS® brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association. Joining us today is Melanie Deziel, a creativity coach and one of the top voices in content marketing. Hitting a wall with your content? Not sure which channels are best for your business? Let's delve into what makes a strong content strategy with our guest today.

Well, thank you for joining us today on REAL TIME, Melanie. I'm so excited about this discussion. Let's start with the basics. What is content marketing and why might it be an important tool for entrepreneurs?

Melanie Deziel: Content marketing is a really broad term and it can be used to include a lot of things. I think for our purposes, we want to think about any time we're intentionally using content to communicate with our audience. That could be the copy that's on your website or the copy of an email, it's the content you're putting on social media, it's the videos you may record. All of that is really the content that we're talking about here, things we are constructing as REALTORS® to try to really convey a specific message to our audience.

Erin: One of the phrases you use, and I love your books and I'm so glad we're going to be focusing on one of them today, is random acts of content. Now let's look into that a little bit. What do you take that to mean?

Melanie: A lot of times what happens is you have this vague understanding that I'm supposed to be on social, I'm supposed to create content, and without putting a ton of strategic thought into it, because that's not what we were trained for after all, you just do your best. You throw something out there, but you haven't put enough thought into whether that serves your business, whether that serves your goals with who you're trying to reach, whether the audience is correct. That's where we end up with the random acts of content. You're using all of your resources, your time to create these things, but they may not be serving your overall goals.

Erin: Okay. Most REALTORS® would agree it's important to have a social media presence, obviously, but what other channels are cornerstones, Melanie, of a strong content strategy?

Melanie: The content strategy specifics are going to be different depending on what your priorities are and, as we'll talk about later, I'm sure, how you like to create content, what kind of content you create. What we do know is that social media is important, so is your website. If you have a web property where you are sending people, you want to make sure that there's stuff there worth seeing. Not just your listings, not just your background professionally, but maybe some helpful blog posts, maybe some articles about common challenges they may run into, maybe other helpful content that's going to allow them to be a better client for you and allow you to better serve them. Thinking about what you can offer on your website as well as what you're offering on social media is a really good way to do that. We also want to consider the role that email plays in helping us to build that relationship, but also to sustain it over the long term.

Erin: Okay, let's talk about the frequency and cadence of emails. There's a meme going around that says, "Hey, I know I bought a toaster from you once. It doesn't mean I want to hear from you every single day." How do you measure that? How do you find not only your comfort zone, which could be every day because we've always got something to say, but what you think that the person seeing it in their inbox is going to say, "Okay, I'm going to click on this." What do you think, Melanie?

Melanie: I love the meme example that you shared. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of the toaster company for a minute here and think about, for our audience, for the relationship we already have with them, what is a frequency of hearing from us that they would expect and then tolerate, right? Because what they expect may be lower than what we ideally need to do, but what we don't want to cross is that tolerance threshold, where they're like, "Oh my goodness, get out of here. Mark as spam, delete, unsubscribe." We're trying to avoid that at all costs, so you want to think about that. It's going to be different.

For your established clients, folks you've worked with who already know, like and trust you, you have a little more leeway. You can talk to them a little more frequently. I think every day is still pretty strong. I think we're probably looking at once a week or every other week is really a great place to start to establish yourself and then to test from there more or less frequent. Anything less than every two weeks and people kind of forget who you are when you do pop up. Anything more than that and you have the possibility that, as we mentioned, you may be showing up a little bit more often than they'd like to have you.

Erin: Okay. What might a REALTOR® consider when choosing content channels and formats? Because there are so many out there, Melanie. How do we choose that?

Melanie: There are so many and it can be really stressful. There's a lot of pressure, I think, on us to be everywhere, do everything, be super active on all these different platforms. I would really encourage you to think strategically about a couple different things. The first thing you want to think about is where your audience is. Because if you're showing up every day on TikTok, getting millions of views for your amazing dance moves but none of your audience is there, that doesn't do anything for you. That's a lot of time and effort that you're spending that could be better served actually reaching your audience.

You want to think about that. Where is my audience? The answers to that you can find by looking for the basic social demographics of each of the different platforms. That information is usually pretty easy to find because they want their advertisers to know who they're reaching. As a general rule, if you're going after, high-income professionals, for example, LinkedIn is going to be the best place for you to reach that audience. If you're looking for moms, families, Facebook and Pinterest are going to be two great options for you. Instagram also has a lot of really great demographics that you can dig into based on the data they share and try to identify where are these folks. You could always, of course, pay to reach them through ads, but ideally, we'd like to make sure we're showing up in the places where we could reach them organically. That's the first thing to think of. That's the first one. It's like, where is my audience?

Erin: Right, fish where the fish are.

Melanie: Exactly. We don't want to be fishing in an empty pond or fishing in a pond full of something we're not allowed to catch.

Erin: Right.

Melanie: The other thing you want to think about, though, is like in our analogy here, what kind of fishing do you like to do? Are you a fly fisher? Are you a deep-sea fisher? Are you just a casual shore fisher for bass and trout? That's about as far as my fishing analogy can go here. You want to think about, what is your favorite way to create content? Because here again, I'm coming back to TikTok, if you decide-- you discover that your audience is on TikTok, but you are absolutely averse to being on video, you don't want to be showing your face, you don't want to be dancing, you don't want to be doing lip syncing, then that's not a good match.

What we're looking for is kind of a Venn diagram overlap of, where is your audience and what kind of content do you like to create? How do you like to communicate? Hopefully, we find something that's really in the center there that allows you to create in the way that's comfortable for you and effective, but also allows you to reach the ideal audience. If that overlap isn't as big as you'd like it to be, that's a time to think about the tools or the talent you can add to your team to try to fill that gap.

Erin: That's a great point. Don't feel like you have to do it all yourself. You, for example, are an amazing communicator. I love your speaking and everything that you do, but you don't love, say, the nuts and bolts, the cutting, the editing and that sort of thing. That's where you say, hey, somebody has to be the star of this and somebody has this other set of tools, so you go about finding who has the other set of tools, right?

Melanie: Absolutely, yes. A lot of times the folks that we look to, especially on social media or in marketing, the folks that we're looking to as examples and saying, "I want to create content like that," that person very well may be using a professional photographer. They're not shooting photos on their iPhone. That person may have a whole video crew set up to make their videos look incredible and you may not have access to that. It is important to take a look at who are we setting as our standard, and are we working with the same resources, because tools and talent can make a big difference if you are trying to fill that gap. Hopefully, you're able to find the way you like to communicate. You've got the support of tools and talent that help you do it, and you're able to bring that content into an environment where your audience is ready to consume it.

Erin: Yes, that comfort zone is so important because if it's not comfortable for you, it's not organic and it feels like a drudge, and I think that the audience can pick up on that. What do you think about that?

Melanie: Absolutely. The reality is we got so much to do. Nobody has time to be doing things that make them absolutely miserable because there's something to be said for that. When you show up in a video or in a podcast or in some other environment, you need to bring your whole self. You've got to dial your energy up a little bit. You're a little more animated, a little more movement, a little louder than you might normally be. If you're not feeling it, that's going to come through really quickly. It's going to be obvious that you're not having fun, and that's not a whole heck of a lot of fun to watch or listen to somebody really uncomfortable or really clearly doesn't want to be there.

We want to make sure we're bringing good energy, and sometimes that means we have to change the way that we create content, we might have to change how frequently, and really tapping into, when does your energy work best? Just as a personal example, I know for me, I'm not a morning person. I love coffee; still doesn't help. I'm not a morning person. If I need to show up on video, I need to be animated and wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, morning is not going to be it for me. I'm going to be looking to schedule that filming, hopefully, sometime in the afternoon where I know I've had breakfast, I'm ready to go, I've warmed up and I'm feeling a lot more alive. Those are all things that you want to consider too. When do you do your best writing, or when are you your most alive and animated? Because that might impact when you decide to create the content.

Erin: Melanie, what's the best way to truly find out where your audience is, or do you just put in the work and watch what happens? How do you find that perfect pond, to go back to the fish analogy?

Melanie: All right, we'll do fishing for a little more. The greatest thing to do is to take a look around. If you've got other fishermen, other REALTORS®, other folks in your space who are targeting the same audience you are, they're trying to catch the same fish, take a look and see where they're fishing. Where are they dropping their bait? Where are they spending time? If they're having those conversions, they're having that engagement, that's a good indication that, hey, maybe that fishing hole over there might be perfect for the fish I'm trying to catch, for the audience I'm trying to reach.

The other thing you could do is-- I don't know how far our fishing analogy goes here. Maybe the Fish and Game website has some data about what fish are in which ponds. Our equivalent being you're going to look and see what you can find about that demographic data to see who are the users of these different networks, who's present there, who can you expect to reach. There are some tools that can help you do that too.

A great tool that I love to talk about is SparkToro, Spark T-O-R-O. It's a tool that allows you to plug in some keywords or an account or two on social media that you know is reaching the right audience. Then it will show you the related accounts, the related hashtags, the related podcasts they listen to, all of those different things, to give you a sense of where do these people hang out when they're talking about these key terms that are really important to me.

Erin: Okay, how hard is it to use SparkToro and is it free?

Melanie: There's a free-- there's free search access, so you could start and test it out for free. Then you can also go ahead and upgrade if it's a tool you decide you want to use more regularly or more intensely. What I will say is it's a lot more reasonable than many of the enterprise tools that are out there. You can, of course-- I mean, there are whole agencies you can hire to do social listening and sentiment testing and all kinds of stuff. That's really too much for most of our purposes. A smaller tool like SparkToro that's going to help you identify those audience overlaps is probably just the right size for what most of us are doing.

Erin: Excellent. Okay, I'm going to give it a go. I am. You're known for coming up with creative ways for businesses to engage their audiences. This is what you get hired to speak for, large groups. Now, what would you say to someone who says, "Look, I'm not creative"?

Melanie: First of all, I'd probably take a break and have a little cry because it breaks my heart to hear folks say that. Because the reality is when we're young, when we're kids, there's no fear of not having a good idea. You see your kids-- if you've got little ones, you know they come home with the wildest drawings, the craziest ideas, the best outfit combinations that they've picked all themselves, no fear of embarrassment, no worries about whether it's a good idea. Through schooling, through socialization, we start to become more self-conscious and we start to believe that there are negative consequences for bad ideas. The reality is the stakes on what we're talking about here are very low. We should feel safe to come up with ideas, to talk things out with our team, to discuss the different options without fear of humiliation or professional downfall. We're talking about something that should be fun, communicating with our audience, which we do know how to do.

Most of the time, if we can get through the therapy phase of helping make sure that everyone feels comfortable, it's also about having the right prompt. A lot of times we just focus on-- we have a hang-up like that, "I'm not creative," or I'm just the, blank, person. You focus on just this one thing and you reinforce that idea for yourself. Instead of focusing on why you can't do something or why you're not well-suited to it or why you're not creative, let's switch up the prompt and ask yourself something like, what could I teach my audience? What have I learned that my audience would want to hear? What could I do that would make their lives easier? What kind of information is my audience trying to find or what questions are they asking? Those questions are going to get you to the same result, which is something you can create that they will value, but hopefully it's not sort of digging into those same insecurities that may come from a place of being concerned about the quality of your ideas.

Erin: That would make it a whole lot less scary just to rephrase the prompt, what does my audience want to know? Then you use the tools and stuff that you've mentioned and maybe even like chambers of commerce and the things that are so local and important to the people in that area or where your client is. That's brilliant advice. Yes.

Melanie: Thank you.

Erin: You're welcome. Now, I know as a writer, you've probably had the writer's block, but what about people who get caught up in a creativity slump? Then how do you nudge us ahead?

Melanie: If we're stuck and a new prompt isn't working, like we just talked about, then sometimes it's helpful to just switch things up entirely. I know that sounds a little scary, but there are little things you can do that data and studies have shown us actually help your creativity. Small, simple things like try taking a different route to work in the morning, driving a different road. Try brushing your teeth with your wrong hand. What we're trying to do is get our brain out of a rut and get new inputs for our world. If we're consuming the same things, seeing the same things, it can be hard to come up with new ideas because there's a lot of sameness around us. Even just little ways to expose yourself to new information; listen to some new music, watch something on Netflix that's a totally different genre than you'd normally watch. Just find a way to spice up your inputs a little bit so that you, hopefully, make some new connections between different things that are going to inspire you to create some content.

Erin: All right, how about cutting back on the frequency of it? That can feel like a vacation. If you take away the having to do it, the obligation, then something can become more of the joy that it was meant to be.

Melanie: Absolutely, yes. There's a lot of burnout and fatigue that you can encounter, especially if-- I talked about earlier that once a week or every other week is a great starting point because that's less likely to lead to overwhelm. If you, right out of the gate, commit, "I'm going to do a new episode of my podcast every single day," there's a really good chance you're going to burn yourself out quickly and it's not fun anymore when it becomes an obligation. Yes, absolutely. If what you're feeling is sort of overwhelm and burnout and it's just not fun, that's a good sign that maybe take a step back, take a break or reevaluate the way that you're doing it to see if you can make it a little more approachable and a little more enjoyable again.

Erin: All right. What I'm really getting from this message is if you're a content creator and you pick a day like, say, St. Patrick- no, Cinco de Mayo. Let's pick Cinco de Mayo, and everybody and his dog is posting something about, how do you make a margarita? What's your favorite? How hot do you like your nachos? All that kind of thing. Is there some way that you can flip around something that everybody's posting about and make it unique, make it matter to the person who is digesting or receiving that content, Melanie? What would you do?

Melanie: Absolutely. Those types of posts that you talked about, they can feel like a lot of fun because we tend to get responses, but what they're not is really differentiated. If everyone's out there posting, what's your favorite topping for a taco, or what kind of nachos or margarita are you having today, we kind of blend in in this sea of content sameness and that's not what we're looking for.

The thing to think about is, what makes my perspective different? What is it about your perspective that can change the way this is? Because only you have lived your life, only you run your business, only you live in the place that you live, only you know the people you know. What you might consider is what if you were to poll all of your clients and ask what their favorite Mexican restaurants are in the area. That would be very unique. That's something that no one else can do. They don't have your clients, they don't live in your area. Even if they do live in your area, bring your own flavor into it. What are your favorite places to go around the neighborhood? What is the best meal you've had in a particular food genre that you can speak to and speak to folks who are in your neighborhood? Because the best place to take your kids for all-you-can-eat tacos in the neighborhood is so much more relevant to your neighbors than which of these toppings can you not live without on your nachos.

Erin: That's fantastic. When you think about it, if you were at the dog park and you just sat down on a bench next to someone, you wouldn't turn to them and say, "Hey, what's your favorite margarita today for Cinco de Mayo?" You might seem a little off, to say the least. You would ask something of the person you're connecting with on social media just as you would in-person and maybe reframe it like that?

Melanie: That's right. Yes, act like a human. The example you gave is actually perfect. If someone sat down next to you at the dog park and they turned and said very robotically, "What is your favorite topping on nachos?" He could be like, "Who is this robot, and which of my neighbors have they replaced here?" It doesn't feel natural. Yes, think of it that way. What's the conversation you would have? If you did run into a client and you were talking about that holiday or that topic, what would that conversation be like, and try to have your content align more closely to that.

Because the other thing you don't want to do is have all of your content giving out a certain feeling, a certain vibe, a certain emotion that doesn't align with how you actually show up in the real world. Just because everyone else is posting about margaritas doesn't mean that you have to be the party gal posting the same thing if that's not how you are, if that's not what you're interested in. Maybe you're someone who really likes history and you want to talk about the history of the holiday, or you want to talk about maybe someone in the community who has had a huge impact because of something having to do with that holiday. There's ways for you to look at it through your own lens and not feel like you've got to show up looking like everybody else because you're not.

Erin: You've given us so much food for thought so far and actually made us hungry at the same time. Thank you very much. I'm wanting nachos. Of course, you've written a couple of excellent books that are also filled with all kinds of great information, including Prove It, and the one that we're discussing today, The Content Fuel Framework or How to Generate Unlimited Story Ideas. Now in it, along with all kinds of great insight like we're hearing today on content and creativity, you share a system for creative brainstorming. Okay, how does the system work?

Melanie: It's a really good question. What I find when I'm working with clients, when I'm working especially with folks who are doing their day job and don't have to spend as much time marketing their day job, the idea of coming up with content can be really challenging. It feels like a foreign concept. It's not our day-to-day. Most often what I find is people get stuck because they're trying to think of too much at once. They want that one strike of genius, that one lightning strike, light bulb moment, the muse and just the right amount of coffee and to have something just magically happen in full.

What a content idea really is, is it's actually two things. When we break it down to its smallest parts, it becomes a lot easier for us to tackle that challenge of coming up with an idea. That first part that we want to think of is the focus. What is this content about? What is the story, the theme, the topic, the message? Those are all synonyms you might use. What are we actually trying to communicate here? Once we have that answered, then we can ask the question, what's the best format to bring that to life?

The example I like to give here is the reason we start with focus is because we've all gotten a package in the mail that the item inside was nowhere near the appropriate size for the box that was chosen. Somebody decided how to deliver that to you before they decided the content of what was inside, and the mismatch was really obvious to us. It creates a lot of waste, a lot of filler, and we don't feel good about it at the end of the day. We can do the same thing with our content if we're not careful. If we decide, "We got to do a video. It's going to be incredible. What are we going to say? I don't know. We'll figure that out later," then the video we end up with probably has a lot of filler, it's probably not very focused because we're deciding on the package before we decide the content.

When we start with our focus, what are we going to say, then we ask what's the best package to put this in so that we're going to deliver it effectively to our audience. Whether that is a video, a podcast, whether it's an infographic or something else entirely.

Erin: I will think of you every time I open a box and there's another tiny box or it's just filled with packing peanuts or airbags. Just filler--

Melanie: I don't know if that's good.

Erin: No. No, it's not, but it's a brilliant analogy, Melanie. Thank you. The book also walks readers through 10 different ways to bring your stories to life and the formats that they could take. Okay, so let's explore that a little bit too, like the base prompt.

Melanie: That's right, so the focus being what's our angle here. There's a lot of different angles that you could take, and as you said, in the book, I walk through 10 different ones just to give you some options to start. Some that are really common and that would work really well in this space would be people-focused content. Looking around to say, not just myself, I don't want only content that focuses on myself, but who are the people around me that I could create content about that would help me communicate my values, my job, my community to my audience. It might be people on your team. It might be the mayor of the neighborhood. It might be the person who's been running every morning for 20 years and knows the nature in the area better than anyone else. You know who those people are. That's the question to be asking. Who are the people that I could tell stories about that help convey this idea?

People-focused content is some of the most relatable stuff. It's not the only way to tell stories. You could tell stories about the history of a particular topic or an area, you can give people instructions on how to achieve something. There's lots of other options, but I think if you start with people-focused content, you're going to be on your way to creating some really engaging, really interesting and relatable content.

Erin: That's amazing. Okay, and to get a little bit more black-and-white about it, how about maps? What about using maps to do this?

Melanie: Absolutely. Maps are a really cool option. I think most of us default to writing written content or video if that's where you're comfortable, but there are some other formats that are so, so valuable. Maps is one that I think is really underrated, and given our expertise here, it's a perfect vehicle for us to deliver content.

We made the example before for Cinco de Mayo that we were going to highlight some of our favorite Mexican restaurants in the area, our favorite tapas places. We're going to really spice it up. Well, most people would probably think to just deliver that as a written list, but how much more valuable would it be if it were delivered as a map? Even just a basic map that shows where these places are, it's going to be a lot more valuable for our audience when we're talking about geographic content all of the time.

The same could be true for that people-focused content. I mentioned the person who runs laps every single morning in the neighborhood. I bet you they could create something really cool. Here's a two-mile trail. Here's a five-mile trail. Here's a 10-mile trail. Describing that step-by-step would make for some really boring content, but if it were on a map, it suddenly becomes something that's really useful.

Erin: Yes, digestible in a whole different kind of way. You mentioned briefly, history. What about our own histories? What about writing blogs kind of about yourself, not going into too much minutia or self-aggrandizing, but letting people know just who you are so they feel a connection with you, Melanie?

Melanie: Absolutely. At the end of the day, this is a relationship business. We're trying to build relationships with clients that hopefully last them through even more than one home. We want to be there for those important moments. In order to do that, they have to know and like us. We've got to be able to help them understand who we are and what's important to us. Being able to talk about the things that are important to you, your hobbies, your interests, your values, help them understand not just the services that you offer, but who you are as a person.

A great example of this is the REALTOR® that we worked with in buying our first home, Lois. We were looking at REALTORS® in the area and a lot of sameness, like we were talking about, a lot of similar content about how to look for your first home or whatever the case may be, but Lois' specialty was she talked about things to do for families. She specialized in helping families find their first home. My husband and I had a little one, and so seeing her content, knowing that she's focused on what's important to her, family bonding and family time, helped us see that she was a little bit different than the other options out there and she was the right fit for us. She's out there sharing content like- not happy spring or it's the first day of spring, but a great spring activity is picking berries with your kids. Here are my favorite berry-picking orchards in the area that are great for kids under 10, that they're very walkable, for example. That is so much more valuable than just a generic happy spring graphic. What can I do with that? Nothing.

Finding a way to tap into what makes you special. If you're a dog person, find a way to work dogs and dog parks and dog-walking trails and whatever else into it. If you're a music person, talk about the history of music in the area. There's ways that you can examine the areas around you, the people around you and the work that you do through the lens of what makes you truly special. That's what's going to allow people to connect with you on a deeper level.

Erin: Wow. Elevating your personal brand, if you will, and going deeper at the same time. Just brilliant. Okay. How can we ensure, Melanie, as entrepreneurs and REALTORS®, that we're creating content strategies that connect with people and support our business goals and not just content for business sake? I think you've touched on many of them; make it personal, use a map. I think the message has to be not me, me, me, but what do you need from me? What do I think is interesting to you?

Melanie: Absolutely. Yes, the example I gave of Lois is thinking, what do my families need? What do families in our area need? That's the driving force behind a lot of the content that she creates to connect with families who may be looking for homes in the area. You can do the same thing. Really focus on, what is it that your clientele are looking for? What are the challenges that they face? What are the problems that you can help them overcome? What are the questions that they have? If you're keeping your audience's needs at the center of the work that you're creating, it's a really good chance you're not going to get too far off-track and too self-serving.

If you do need some sort of formula, if you're a rules person, the 70-30 rule is something that comes up a lot. The idea of that at least 70% of your content should be for your audience, and then you can allow 30% to be for you, more self-serving, more of a call to action for your business. What we want to do is provide enough value that it's okay that we ask for things for ourselves on occasion. If we are only doing that me, me, me, there's not a lot of reason for folks to stick around. What are they getting out of the exchange? That 70-30 balance, if you need a goal, is a good place to be.

Erin: That is so brilliant, the 70-30. Give, give, give 70%, and then the 30% can be a gentle ask. It's so smart, and it works in real life relationships too. If you only call somebody when you want something, pretty soon they're going to see your number and go, "I'm busy." That is just a great lesson. Thank you so much for that, Melanie.

Okay. Now building long-term relationships with clients is critical in real estate, obviously. You're still in touch with Lois and you bring her up. How can REALTORS® be intentional with their strategies to not just attract new leads, but to help nurture and convert those leads and then ultimately retain them as clients? How do you do that?

Melanie: I think we've mentioned a few different approaches to creating content, talking about what your audience needs. It's also really important to feel comfortable talking about things that are not directly related to what you do. Coming back to that 70-30 rule. Most of your clients, once they're done working with you, hopefully, assuming everything goes well, they may not need to work with you for a while, and so those direct, ask-focused content might not be what they're looking for, it might not be the right time. You need to be providing enough value that it's worth sticking around.

I know we talked earlier about that threshold of, like your toaster company, how much is too much to be in the inbox. If your tools give you the option to segment your audience, to separate between you've got your hot leads, maybe your active clients, and then you've got your just warm ones, the ones that are kind of in the background simmering a little bit, that tiny burner in the back, the simmering ones, we just need to keep it warm. Reaching out to them less frequently with more audience-focused content is a great way for you to stay top-of-mind without overwearing your welcome, and making sure that they don't forget who you are, but they don't get bugged by you too much either. That's one option is to treat those audiences differently. Who are you maintaining in that simmering burner in the back, and who are you actively trying to fire up to make that conversion?

Erin: How do you think content marketing can help REALTORS® to build trust and credibility? I mean, rampant consumer skepticism. It's something that we discussed actually with Nature of Things, Anthony Morgan, in Episode 47, and it is real.

Melanie: Absolutely is. The environment that we are all operating in as REALTORS® or even just as business owners, it is some of the most skeptical consumer experiences that we have ever had. The data shows time and again that year after year, unfortunately, the world gives our customers a lot more reason to be skeptical, a lot more reason to doubt what they're hearing. Just look at your latest- your email inbox or your missed calls list, maybe your text inbox these days, and you'll see the spam, you'll see the reasons that they're not trusting.

That could be upsetting, but there's a way to see it as an opportunity. That in this world that our clients are operating in and our prospects are operating in, everyone around them is giving them so many reasons to doubt, and we can use our content to show that we are who we say we are, that we do what we say we do and that we can be trusted to help them with this problem that they're trying to solve.

Content gives you a chance to communicate the truth behind your business claims, the ability to really show that they don't have to take your word for it, you've got testimonials to back it up, or they don't have to take your word for it, they can see it themselves. They don't have to take your word for it, you've got accolades to prove it. Really finding ways to use that content to say, "I'm bringing you the evidence. I'm bringing you the receipts. I know there's a lot of reasons to be distrustful, there's a lot of reasons to be skeptical, but I'm going to help ease those concerns so you know you can trust me."

Erin: Terrific wisdom. Thank you so much, Melanie. All right. What three things do you want people-- what three toppings? No. What three things, Melanie, do you want people to take away from our discussion today?

Melanie: Three important things for you to remember is at the end of the day, your story matters. People work with you because they want to hear what you have to say, they want to connect with you and they want to work with you specifically, so bring yourself into your content. It's so incredibly important.

I also want you to remember that your content should serve your audience, not just your business needs. We want to make sure that the stuff is for our audience, that it's adding value to them so that they see us as someone who adds value to their life.

The last thing I want you to remember is that have some fun. This stuff is supposed to be fun. If it's feeling like a drag, if you're dreading doing it, it's a good indication to you that maybe something isn't quite right for you strategically. Change up your process, change up your content, try recording in a new way or a new day, and really just find a way to bring that spark back. Because when you're having fun, that's going to be obvious in your content.

Erin: Oh, that is so good. It reminds me of something a trainer told me once, that when you were a kid at the playground, did you stay on one machine for 30 minutes? No, you didn't. You ran around and tried all the machines and you just had a great time. I think your message is such a great reminder to bring the fun back into it and come from a place of joy where you can.

Melanie: Absolutely. It makes it a whole lot more fun because if it feels like a drag, man, it's just, why are we doing it, right?

Erin: Exactly. What a great conversation. Thank you so much, Melanie.

Melanie: Thanks for having me, thanks for chatting.

Erin: Oh, so much great content there from Melanie, so many messages on how to get your messages across in really unique ways, ways that resonate with you, ways that are about you.

REAL TIME is brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association, CREA. Production is courtesy of Alphabet® Creative, with technical support from Rob Whitehead. For more real estate resources, tools and insights, visit us anytime at CREA.ca. If you like this conversation, our 50th, if you can believe it, why not explore the rest of our episodes, from the art of negotiation, to AI, sustainable business practices and more. We cover all things Canadian real estate with a wide array of exciting guests. Don't forget to rate or review the show. This is where the 30%, where we're asking you to do something, we always appreciate it, so thank you.

I'm your host, Erin Davis. Thanks again for joining us and we'll see you next time on REAL TIME.

Everyone’s been put to the test in their career. On this episode of REAL TIME, we invite two members of the REALTOR® community, Anu Joshi-Mehendale and Dusko Sremac, to reflect on their top lessons learned in real estate as they approach a decade of experience in their respective practices.

Get advice to help you minimize mistakes, set yourself up for success, and stay motivated in your own practice – new or established.

Transcript

[music]

Erin Davis: Question: What do you wish someone would have told you when you were starting out your career? Would you have done anything differently based on their advice? I'm Erin Davis and welcome to REAL TIME, the podcast for REALTORS®, brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association.

Our guests today are Anu Joshi-Mehendale and Dusko Sremac, two very different REALTORS® from two very different backgrounds. What do they have in common? Like any entrepreneur, they've both experienced their share of trials and victories building a business in real estate. Are you ready for some lessons learned? Let's dive in.

[music]

Erin: First off, thanks to you both for joining REAL TIME. Let's do a quick round of introductions. Who are you, where you're from, and how you got your start in real estate?

Anu Joshi-Mehendale: Thank you, Erin. My name is Anu Joshi-Mehendale and I'm a real estate broker based out of Caledon, Ontario. Just finished 10 years in the industry, so very happy to be here. Got started out fairly early. I actually interned at a property management company the year after high school, and I was going to be starting university. It was a suggestion from a parent to go ahead and get my real estate license. Here we are 10 years later.

Erin: Okay. In this case, father knows best. It was your dad, right? He's the one who suggested it?

Anu: Yes, it was. That's right.

Erin: Okay. I'd love to get into a little later on why he suggested this for you, but we're going to meet our next guest now. Dusko, go ahead.

Dusko Sremac: Hey, my name is Dusko Sremac with the Real Estate Partners at Real Broker here in Calgary. I have been licensed for almost seven years. The way that I got into real estate was we started investing into real estate about eight to nine years ago. By trade, I'm a journeyman electrician. I was always around real estate and fell in love, and then I ended up quitting my job and going full-time into real estate.

Erin: Okay. Nice to meet you both. I love that you're both at just about the decade mark or thereabouts. We're going to explore not only how you got here, but where you're going. I'm really excited about this conversation today. Caledon, Calgary, it's fantastic. It's just very organic today. Let's dive into it. Anu, as you mentioned, it was your dad who suggested to you that you get into this. Why? Why did he suggest it for you? Was it something in the family or what led you there?

Anu: Yes. My dad actually got his real estate license several years ago, and that's still on his docket for an eventual retirement career. Now I'm happy to bring him into my team. He's actually working with me now. I don't think we saw all of that when he first suggested that I get my real estate license. I think there's a lot of things in the real estate industry that are attractive to a lot of people. Obviously, the promise of flexible schedules and the ability to earn, great potential for earning amongst many other things. I think there was a lot of things that led him to invite me to get my license and it's been a really, really steep learning curve since then for sure.

Erin: Dusko, you didn't come to real estate just like it was in the family, like Anu. As a matter of fact, I love the story of you being at the airport and just as you put it, blowing up the bridges. Tell us that story because that's one of what Oprah used to call an aha moment. Tell us how you got there.

Dusko: At the time I was involved in real estate for a few years, picking up rentals, looking at building infills. I had a business partner, and I remember after Christmas break 2017, it was January 7th, 4.30 AM, I'm in our terminal. My bags are checked in and I just sat there for about 15 minutes thinking, "This does not make me happy. If I'm going to do this, I have to go all in."

I remember asking security to get my bag back, got my bags, called my girlfriend, now wife, and I said, "Hey, where are you?" She said, "I'm just pulling into the driveway." I said, "Turn around, come back. I need to come home because I quit." That was the TSN turning point for me.

Erin: No kidding. Okay. That was a real moment for you. I love that it came out of the blue as you got your bag back and all of that. It's a fascinating story. We're going to be talking now about what do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out? Is there anything that you would have done differently? We're going to start with you, Dusko.

Dusko: I think just having realistic expectations of what it takes to build a steady, consistent, strong business. I think it's so easy to get caught up in social media and the way that our industry has shifted where there are models that are less sales and more recruiting. Now you get sold on this vision of success and what success means to you or what it should mean to you. It doesn't really matter what fields you're coming from and the level of experience. It does take a long time to build a strong, consistent business. I wish someone would have told me from day one because my expectation was to go from zero to 100 sales in year one. That's just not realistically how it works.

Erin: How did you get that impression? Where did you get most of the ideas of real estate that you had when you asked for your bag back?

Dusko: I think like many agents now, social media. You see all the sales, you see the upside, you see the income, the freedom, but you're not seeing the 10 years of experience and sleepless nights and working 24-hour days for years and years of building it in the background.

Erin: Okay. You were also around someone who had bought a bunch of properties too and that led you to believe, well, I can do this, right?

Dusko: Yes. I remember my first boss when I was 21, I think at the time he owned 50, 60, 70-plus units, duplexes, commercial spaces. I just saw the amount of wealth and opportunity that was built. It took him 20, 30 years to get there. I just knew that this is something that I want to do long-term and no regrets, that's for sure.

Erin: Good. Okay. Anu, what did you go in thinking when you started this? You went to school for this too, right?

Anu: I actually went to university for communications. That's what I joined in. I ended up switching my major to political science. That's led me to participate in organized real estate right now. I participate at the local, provincial, and national levels, the public policy angle of things. For real estate, at the time, we had a real estate college and every REALTOR® getting licensed in Ontario at the time went through the same program. It was six courses to get your license. I did do that while I was in my, I think, first year or second year of university.

I started pretty early. In terms of expectations and stuff, I don't remember even following agents on Instagram. It wasn't a big thing back then when I was first getting started. Instagram was, but not the REALTOR® profiles and the flashy agents and stuff. When I got into it and started doing it seriously, I realized that there's a lot more to it. Just like any other business, if you want to be successful in the real estate industry, you have to put the work in. My colleague here mentioned, the 20-hour workdays and all of that, that was not something that is readily available information.

We learn a lot on the job and a lot of that comes from experience, actually doing the deals. When I was 19 and had my real estate license, nobody was giving me their house to sell. I spent a lot of time working with mentors, with senior agents, just following around my broker of record to see what he was doing at the time. Just to learn more and more about transactions, more about the industry, and get all of that experience even before I touched my first deal. Nobody told me that it would be that much learning before I started, even in the realm of earning anything.

Erin: Yes. I think that it's almost like anything, right? Dusko, you come from an electrical background. You can read all the books that there are, all the manuals, but until you actually get in there, any career, and I come from radio, you could study radio all you want, but it's not until you swear on the air that first time that you learn that you're not supposed to do it. You know what I mean. You have to make your mistakes and learn those things.

Dusko: The one difficult part is when we're looking at even the trades, electrical, when I left, we had a 50-person crew, and it is life and death when you're working on large gear, big voltages, but you always have the support and supervision of those that have a lot more experience than you.

In real estate, you get licensed, whether you have 10 years or no experience, you can do the same amount of transactions. You have the same power to do the same deals. I think this is a very difficult industry because there is nobody looking over your shoulder to help you through a transaction. Brokers are there, of course, but no one can guide and lower the liability except for you, the agent.

Erin: If I'm hearing this correctly from both of you, it's your responsibility to find someone who is going to show you the ropes. Were you able to do that? We'll start with you, Anu.

Anu: Yes, for sure. I've actually been very lucky to have mentors in my life at various points in my career. I'm a firm believer in the saying that once a student is ready, the teacher will appear. I've been lucky. Obviously, I had to seek out those opportunities, but they did show up in accordance with my hard work and my dedication. I think that holds a lot of weight.

What you're putting into it, you will eventually get out. Maybe not right away, but eventually, yes. For me, that did come in the way of mentors, people that showed me right from wrong. Even now in my career, I have people in my life that will tell me, "Anu, that's a stupid thing to do." I'm thankful for that. It's not so great to hear it in the moment, but that professional experience that somebody else has, someone senior to me in experience and in the industry, can guide me.

I am extremely lucky to have that. Even to new REALTORS®, if you don't know what you're doing, it's all right. None of us did. We learned on the job. The capacity to learn and the capacity to adapt and the willingness to learn, I think, will make your trajectory better. It definitely did that for me.

Erin: I'm excited to tell you, we have a Working REALTOR® episode in the works right now about mentorship coming up. You're preaching to the choir here, Anu. I see that Dusko is also nodding his head there. I think you want to add to the conversation about mentorship.

Dusko: I think as a whole, as an industry, we need to come together and help one another. If I'm receiving an offer, even, and I know that there's things that are being left out, I'm still going to advise and help out that other agent and say, "Hey, maybe look at these two sections. They were left blank. Maybe consider adding A, B, C," or guiding them in the right direction as to who they should be speaking with.

Again, it's super tough. Like Anu said, you have to strive and go out of your way to find that mentorship. Thankfully, I was able to join a team where I think that I probably saved three to five years of struggling. My education was very much fast-tracked.

Erin: Anu, interestingly, and I mentioned this right off the top, how differently you've chosen to go your routes. You're not into the large team idea. You know that you're better off alone. That's a really powerful thing to realize, isn't it?

Anu: Yes, for sure. I think that came through a lot of exploration on my end. It didn't just hit me one day. I had to go through all of-- well, I started off as a solo agent. I did end up joining a team. I learned a lot from that and the team lead became one of my mentors for several years after that as well. I learned a lot there. I realized about myself, the way that I work, the level of professionalism that I expect from myself and from others, the best way sort of forward was for me to be a solo agent.

That comes from reflection. I think that the business model for a team is fantastic and it works for a lot of people. I think solo agents, that model also works for a lot of different people, but it really comes down to who you are as a person and what kind of business it is that you want to build. A lot of our personal traits show up in our businesses, whether it's positive or negative. Having that sort of self-awareness of who you are, what you bring to the table, what your weaknesses are too, what you can't do and bringing in people that can eventually serve your clients because at the end of the day, that's what it is.

We're not in a house-selling business. We're in the people service business. How can I serve my clients to the best of my ability? How can I facilitate transactions? How can I help them make comfortable decisions with often the biggest purchases of their life? A lot of it just comes down to a lot of self-reflection. Who do I want to be? How do I want to show up in my business? It's not just a business question. It's more of an existential question. Asking it early on will make the rest of your business building smooth sailing.

Erin: Dusko, what do you have to say about that?

Dusko: Very different businesses. The day I got licensed, I already knew I did not want to be a solo agent. I wanted to grow a team and that was since day one. Looking at it from a business standpoint, it's more what is scalable and I can't scale myself. I recognize that it is a people business and I do have a fiduciary duty. At the end of the day, nobody cares if I'm busy or sick or having a bad day. People need to see homes and deals need to get done.

For us, we started our team when I had less than 12 months of experience and we've gone from having two agents to over 30 agents. Obviously, six years later, we do about 500 transactions a year in our local market. A big part of that growth was just finding the right people and building a very strong culture.

Erin: Now we've talked about the first 10 years, starting out, building, as you say, Dusko, and learning and making mistakes, Anu, you referred to. A little bit of truth or dare and we're all out of dares. How about some truths? Tell us, if you don't mind, about a big mistake. This is not to embarrass you but to make sure that other people learn from it. Go ahead, Anu, I'm going to ask you to go first.

Anu: I had a near miss, it felt like it could have gone really, really negative, but luckily it didn't, so there's a happy ending to the story. I was selling a condo to a friend of mine and they were looking for two parking spots, which is sometimes very difficult to find. We ended up finding a place with two parking spots and forgive me for getting a little technical, but one of the parking spots was titled and the other was exclusive use in a condo.

What happened when it was, I believe it was the day of closing, they called me and said, "Anu, I thought we had two parking spots and our lawyer is saying we don't have the two." I was like, "What are you talking about?" "We looked at this, we looked at the status certificate together. We went through this together, you have two parking spots." They at this point were panicking because they spoke to the property manager, they spoke to the lawyer and they were like, "No, we don't have two parking spots." I said, "Okay, you know what? Give me an hour, we're going to figure this out."

I hung up the phone with my client and immediately started crying. This is not something-- I mean, I can laugh about it now, seven or eight years later, but at the time, it felt devastating because there was an ever so slight possibility that I may have missed something or we may have done something incorrectly or what have you. I spent that hour going through the status certificate, tears in my eyes and trying to find where is this exclusive use. The property manager at the time for the building that they bought was new, so they didn't necessarily know what was going on.

I did end up finding it, found the deeded spot, found the exclusive use spot. It ended up that they did have the two parking spots, everything was resolved, the client was happy, everything was taken care of. That was a very, very close call. That taught me that always, always, always be very diligent. To this day, due diligence is first and foremost the most primary thing that we have to do for our clients.

Erin: Good. I'm glad it turned out okay for you. Jeez. All right, Dusko, what about you?

Dusko: The appropriate ones, okay? Two really quick ones. One is ask for help early. I remember writing one of my first offers, someone walked me through it. Amazing. That weekend I'm writing another offer, but not on a detached home, now it's on a condo. I spent hours writing it up, trying to save it, buying titles, getting everything submitted. I end up submitting the offer and I get this phone call from the listing agent. She has about 20 years of experience, I have about 20 days of experience.

She goes, "Hey, is this your first deal?" I'm like, "Yes, it is." She's like, "Yes. You wrote this on the wrong contract." Now I've wasted four hours. Next time, definitely after that, I asked for help very early on the process.

Tthe other one is double-check with your clients if they're joking or not. I had a home inspection, the client's looking out in the backyard and goes, "Wow, a trampoline. I wish the trampoline was staying in the deal." I'm like, "Oh, mental note." I call the agent after the home inspection. We waive conditions, but I go, "I'm going to buy that trampoline for my client from the sellers." I buy it. Possession day is here. We're doing a final walkthrough.

The client goes, "The trampoline's here." I'm like, "Yes." He's like, "Why did they leave that here?" I go, "Why do you sound so disappointed? You were so excited that during the home inspection, I bought it for you. That's your trampoline." He goes, "What am I going to do with a trampoline?" It was the most uncomfortable one minute of explaining to him that he now owns a trampoline ever. Now I always double-check and I go, "You're sure you want the trampoline? This is not a joke." It's like, "No, we want it." Moving forward, I double-check with everybody. I asked for help very early in the process.

Erin: Okay. Oh, the good old saying, if you lose, don't lose the lesson, but your heart was in the right place, even if the trampoline, it turns out wasn't. Oh, my goodness. Okay. Let's flip it over to the positive. What was a big milestone for you? They ask movie stars, when did you know you'd made it, but what was a milestone and it doesn't have to be material. It could be something spiritual. It could just be like, "I'm on top of the world." How about you Anu, what was your milestone?

Anu: I'm not great at celebrating my achievements. I'll just say that right off the bat, but something that was life-changing for me in my career, as I know it is in my first year and a half or so, I was actually doing a full-time job in marketing. During that time, I was trying to do real estate part-time, but I had this epiphany and I truly believed that if I was going to give this my all, that's the only way I'd ever succeed.

That summer, I still remember when I said, "Okay, you know what? I'm going to let go of this job and I'm going to go headfirst full-time into real estate. It's just going to be swim or sink at that point. Sink or swim." I'm still swimming. It wasn't easy, but making that move really early on my career really helped. Of course, I was living at home at the time, full disclosure, I was still at home at the time. I didn't have to worry about a mortgage payment or a rent payment or anything like that, which was huge.

With that support from my parents, I was able to take that leap. If I hadn't taken it, then I probably would have been stuck debating between this part-time full-time situation, but I'm so thankful that I was able to do that and everything that came after that. I'm a very big proponent of doing real estate full-time, also any business full-time, a lot of respect for people that do side hustles. That's just my personal mentality that go all in.

Erin: Yes. Dusko, your milestone moment.

Dusko: I think it was just over two years ago, my son was born. I think that really changed perspective and priorities for me and my business. I'm extremely competitive in everything and anything. I cannot play games with anybody because I'm the worst loser as well.

I remember the first four, five years of my career, the only thing that mattered was making the top producer list and where our team would rank. That's the most important thing every single month. As soon as my son was born, it shifted towards, "Okay, how do we grow the business, but how do we also prioritize family time and our families?" At a similar time, my business partner also had his first kid.

We were going through the same transition at the same time, which is good. I can honestly say in the last two years, I don't remember the last time I looked at a top producer board. I don't care about what other people are doing. I've gone all in on just focusing in on our families and our business. You'd think that business would fall, but each year we've still had growth.

Erin: I just love the stories that you tell of taking the leap and there's the bridge for you in both very different ways, but Dusko, having a family and changing priorities does not necessarily mean changing the goals, does it?

Dusko: No, and I think you can change the schedule up. There's ways to become more efficient and prioritize the important events at work and at home. For me, for instance, we don't do lunches anymore, meaning we're not going to take random coffees or lunches with other agents because again, at the end of the day, what is top priority? Top priority is running our day-to-day business, taking out clients and family time. There's very little that we sacrifice on the family side. We just have to be extra efficient. We're still working long days, there's still 20-hour days, but we're always making time for family every single day.

Erin: It would seem to me, Anu, that that would be one of the real benefits of being part of a team of a brokerage. How do you manage that? How do you handle when something happens in your own personal life or you decide you want to do something or go away or just have some Anu time? What do you do? How do you handle that?

Anu: Absolutely, a great question. Here's where teams do come in. Full disclosure, I do work with buyer's agents. I work with my partners that will take over certain parts of my deal. I have a virtual assistant. I have a grassroots assistant that helps me with certain things. It's a very different team setup, but I agree with Dusko that the business that we built, scaling is an issue.

I ran into that much later in my business, about halfway through when I was realizing I reached my potential. I couldn't replicate myself. I couldn't show more than six clients a day or what have you. There is a cap for an individual. The natural next step is to build a system. Build out a system, have team members that participate in executing that. I know Dusko does that very well on a very mega level with his very large team. I do that on a much smaller level. It looks a little bit different for me, but yes, there is delegation involved.

There is other teammates that have that expertise that step in. At the end of the day, my job is to service my clients. How I do that, how I facilitate that is going to be up to the system that I build. I think Dusko brought up a great point as well in terms of family time.

Early on in my career, and even until very recently, I found myself working very, very long hours. That is something that I think in real estate or in any business to be successful, you have to be agreeable to that because that's what you're signing up for. I think you can be an average agent, you can be an average business owner, you can be an average anybody, but if you want to reach the top, you want to reach the heights of success, whatever that might mean for you, it might mean crazy transactions. It might mean higher gross commissions, what have you, whatever your measurement is to reach that, you need to be putting in work.

You need to be putting in the effort, the time that it takes to learn that art, I can call it an art now after 10 years, that all takes a lot of effort right off the get-go. If you're willing to put that in, I do think it's extremely rewarding. One of the things that we talked about earlier is the promise of this industry is, for example, flexible schedules. Some agents, maybe not as experienced, would say, "Oh, you get to make your own schedules and have your own time."

If you want to be doing a certain number of deals, you're earning a certain amount of money, you actually have to work a lot more than is expected, a lot more than the average agent will tell you. If you want to be productive, whatever that means to you, you have to put in the work. Eventually, there is an output. Eventually, you will have flexibility, you will have stability in your business, you will have all of these things, but it does take time to build that. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of learning, and a lot of inputs to be able to achieve that.

Erin: You both talk about starting basically in the past decade or so, and you've got all this experience now and wisdom under your belts with so much more ahead of you. Looking back, what opportunities do new REALTORS® have, new ones that might be become harder as you get more established? What do you think, Anu?

Anu: I think that new REALTORS®, the biggest thing that they have is that they're not yet committed to any one thing. I used a lot of my time up front when I was new in the industry when I was learning. All I was doing was learning. I barely transacted in my first two years. I was just learning and learning, learning different things to do. I used to shadow senior agents. I used to hold open houses for them. I used to do paperwork for them. I was literally learning everything grassroots.

My colleague and I, we talked about doing the door knocking, doing the online legion. There's so many ways to get business in our industry. Learn as much as you can and then figure something out that makes sense to you, that works for you, and that you can commit to, and then take that forward. I think a lot of agents and we meet agents all the time on the other side of the deal or at professional events and whatnot.

It happens to everyone. It's human nature. There's this stagnation, not just of themselves and their business, but also sometimes their mindset. "I've been doing this long, I know what I'm doing," that kind of thing. I am a lifelong student. If there is something new in the industry, there's constantly changes happening. It is my job as a real estate broker to learn about it, to figure out how to implement that in the best possible way to serve my clients because, at the end of the day, that's the game that we're playing.

I think that that takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of reflection and it also takes awareness that even though you know everything up until this point, technology is changing. The industry is changing. People are changing. The way we do business is changing. Marketing is changing. Online lead gen is changing. The only thing that is guaranteed is that change. If you're able to keep up, like Dusko mentioned it before, this is where the agents that are in it, full-time, full effort, get to shine because we're doing this every day. We're reading the news. We know what's happening in other countries, other regions. We are using all of that knowledge together to help us achieve our end goal of servicing our clients.

Erin: Dusko, what experience can a newer REALTOR® have that helps you as you move on that you might not have now at this point in your career?

Dusko: First off, Anu looked at my notes and she stole my answer. I have very little to add now, but I'll expand on what Anu said because I agree with her 100%. I think the luxury that a newer agent would have, there's two. One, you should not have very high overhead. You're not going to have an admin, you're not going to have the desk fees, the advertisement budget that a senior agent would have.

Second thing is time. When I'm looking at what my open schedule looks like day to day, I have very little time now. When I first started, I was three to four hours a day on Tom Ferry or on YouTube trying to learn scripting and how to be better. I was asking senior agents. I was door-knocking. I was trying to do online legion shooting videos. If I could go back or if I could advise a new agent is figure out what you like to do because everything works.

Door-knocking works, online legion works, social media works, but it's like what do you want to do and what will you stay consistent with? Because I find a lot of agents, they'll say, "Oh, well, I saw Anu door-knocking and she did 10 deals off of that. I'm going to door-knock." I would rather do no deals than door-knock. I'm going to tell you right now. I'm door-knocked out and same thing with social media. You're starting to see this huge push. We saw it for a few years on TikTok and Instagram. Now it's shifted towards long form and YouTube. What's next? Again, it's what you're going to be happy with and what you're going to be consistent with.

Anu: Those were so great. Honestly, I will tag onto that. In terms of finding out what it is that you can commit to, I think that's a great point. I think people that are new in this industry put too much weight on what's out there. Also, going after the new shiny thing. TikTok was really shiny a little while ago. Every agent was on TikTok, and before that, it was something else, and before that, it was something else, and tomorrow it'll be something new. We have to find a balance between keeping up obviously with the trends, but building your business based on you knowing where you can show up and how you can show up.

Dusko: I remember when I started, I looked at-- we had one of the top teams in the world, in our marketplace, and we still do. I saw, well, he's doing billboards and he has this type of website and this is what he's doing, so I'm just going to replicate that. Well, if you have 50 to 100 agents in that budget, you can replicate that and you'll have somewhat similar results, but not really. I get phone calls weekly of agents asking me about what websites we run, what we do for PPC, what we do for SEO.

In the back of my head, I'm like, this is a 7 to 30-year play. When we're making a business decision, we're not making it for ROI three months from now, three years from now. I'm thinking, what's the return in 5 to 10 years on all these big decisions? I feel like so many people just think three to six months, but they need to be thinking three to six years because that's what really compounds a strong business.

Anu: I agree. There are two different hats. There is the hat as the registered REALTOR®, there's the agent, and then as the business owner. As you start to scale and you start to grow, I think you have to also balance what-- I mean, you mentioned that your schedule's all booked up. A lot of it is going to be your business growth tasks, maybe not your client servicing, maybe that's where the team comes in. I think that there are those two hats. Again, lot of potential in this industry, but you do get out what you put in.

Erin: What keeps you motivated as you move into your second decades, both of you in the phase of say, a setback or challenge, and how do you make sure that you'll learn from it and set intentions to apply what you'll learn in the future? We'll start with you. Well, let's start with Dusko.

Dusko: Looking forward, the next, let's say, even five years, the way that we lay things out is financial growth of the business. We have a fiduciary duty to our clients, but we also have a duty to our agents and our staff and employees. If you include the backend staff, the admins, and our partners, we're really responsible for 50-plus people because there's other sub-industries that rely on our business as well and we take that very serious. When we're looking at growth and investing, we're at a point in our business where now we're starting to diversify into other asset classes as well because we don't want to have all of our eggs in one basket.

Erin: Okay, and Anu.

Anu: In terms of setbacks, I think as time goes on, I think we become more resilient. we're more knowledgeable, we know how to bounce back from something better. I think things do get easier. More so, we get more capable of processing them and coming back from them.

The other thing also, is your purpose for why you're in this business has to be abundantly clear, both to yourself and to all the partners that you're actually working with. There has to be this vision for what you see for your future. It may not be just a monetary goal. I actually think that money is the least motivating factor. For a lot of people, I know it's a push. When we get into really thinking about how we want to show up in our business, that purpose actually stems from something deeper inside of us, who I am, what I want the contribution to the world to be. I think asking those kind of questions.

Some criticism is, "You're just a REALTOR®. What's the big thing?" No, I'm actually interacting with people's families, with people's biggest financial decisions. Advice that I give could set them on a completely different wealth trajectory for generations to come. We do hold a lot of that responsibility, and showing up with that sort of purpose in mind, whatever it may be, and it varies from person to person, but having a purpose, I think, fuels your movement forward and it makes it easier to get past the little bumps.

For example, in my first couple of years, probably my three or four first years, I actually wanted to quit real estate. Over and over, I just wanted to quit. Every deal was too hard. Every client objection was too difficult to deal with. I couldn't do it, and I hated it, and I wanted to quit. Eventually, we got through that, I got through that, and a lot of that came from reflecting. "What kind of business do I want to build? What kind of person do I want to be?"

A lot of that has helped how I approach clients, how I approach problems because the problems keep coming. More money, more problems. As you grow, you will get to encounter different types of problems. You'll have different types of responsibilities. All that comes with growth. Having that clear purpose moving you forward I think makes it easier to deal with these setbacks.

Dusko: Just to add to that too, I mean how many agents do we know or do you encounter day-to-day that say that they're burnt out?

Anu: Oh, yes. For sure.

Dusko: I feel like a lot of that burnout comes over time. I remember my first few years, I'd lose sleep over the tiniest little thing. Over time, you get a bigger gas tank, and you learn how to manage that stress and responsibility a lot better. You're right, 100%, the money is not a factor after you become consistent. You start saving money and you're covering costs. That's not going to keep your business going. You're going to get burnt out. You need to have a greater purpose and good to keep that going. Can I just say? I very much appreciate that you snuck in "More money, more problems," into that response too. Very much. That has to get clipped.

Erin: That will be in our Best Of if not on our social media. For sure. There was something that I've heard you ask in interviews, Dusko, too, which really just underlines what Anu said there. You ask a question about money when you're interviewing somebody,

Dusko: Real estate attracts people from all different industries and walks of life and levels of experience. One of the first questions I ask is, what prompted you to interview us? Why do you want to get into this industry? What's the big factor? I would say 99% of them, if they're not willing to say it, I'll say it for them and I'll say, it's the money. It's the promise of potential income and quick income. It's good and bad because a lot of people come into this industry. Ideally, you want to have 6 to 12 months of savings saved up. Very few are going to have that.

We call it commission breath. It happens in every commission-based industry where people, maybe they start making decisions or maybe they start getting extra stressed and not making the best decisions themselves because they need a paycheck. Unfortunately, that's going to happen in every industry that's commission-based.

Erin: What is the best advice? You're giving such great advice in this episode and we can't thank you enough. The best advice that you ever got and that you actually took to heart? I'm going to start with you, Dusko.

Dusko: The best advice that I got was to partner with someone. I was fortunate enough to find a business partner that had a different level of skill sets than I did. At the time, he was not a registered REALTOR®, he just got licensed recently. His strengths are tech. SEO, PPC, or marketing, and mine were sales. That has helped us greatly. I love having now partners that I can bounce ideas off of because sometimes I come up with terrible ideas.

I feel like the reason we're able to scale and build a very strong business is because we have a very open and honest relationship with one another in our inner circle. We can bounce terrible ideas off of each other and we can call each other out because that's a relationship that we have. I feel like when you're a solo agent, or maybe when you're a solo team lead, there's nobody there at that same level to say, "Hey, you need to stop because this is a terrible idea."

Erin: Okay. Anu?

Anu: Fair enough, Dusko.

Erin: Best advice.

Anu: I do have mentors that call me out all the time. You know what? I definitely see the value of having a strong partner that's in there with you. That's definitely important. Honesty between partners is important, but also honesty with yourself; who you are, how you want to show up. We've talked about that theme a lot. One of the best pieces of advice that I have received as a REALTOR® is if you have a choice that you can make in one of those situations, you're going to lose the transaction, and the other one, you're going to lose the client, lose the transaction every single time.

To this day, it has informed the way that I deal with my clients, the way that I service them, the way that I make decisions in my business. They're always, always client-oriented, never transaction-oriented. I found myself saying this to my clients, "If you don't close on this house at this price today, it doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is that you're happy, your family is secure in this decision because there's a lot more there that's at stake than this particular deal or this particular transaction."

That consultative approach of always, no matter what, keeping clients in front of me and just that is who I'm servicing, right? If you have a choice between losing the transaction, losing the client, give up the transaction every single time.

Dusko: To put a dollar figure there and put things into perspective as well, each deal should be actually good for eight other transactions. That includes future deals plus referrals. A lot of the agents that are like, "I just need to get this deal done," I'm 100% with you, Anu," I'd rather burn 30 deals a year than burn one client a year because the ROI in the future of having that strong relationship, rapport, and referrals is priceless.

Anu: I agree.

Erin: That was that advice. All right. You got one thing you want people to take away from this podcast and what would it be today? All right, Anu, to you.

Anu: Yes. For any new REALTORS® or anyone that's in the industry, thinking about maybe scaling up wherever you are in your business, just make sure that you're being honest with yourself, why you're in this, what your greater purpose is, and allow that to help you build a business that works for you and for whatever it is that your priorities are. It may be your family, it may be your other goals and ambitions in life.

Be all in and allow yourself to be purpose-driven because that is important and that's what's going to keep you from burnout. That's what's going to keep you from fizzling out like many agents do. It's not an easy industry, but it is an extremely rewarding one.

Erin: Dusko.

Dusko: Anu keeps looking at my notes, and I just have to call her out. Mine would probably be whether you're licensed for one month, one year, or 10 years, if you're lacking consistency in your business, it's lacking the consistency of you putting in that work. What I mean by that is even after being licensed for almost seven years, getting a lot of referrals, I still every single day am very consistent in reaching out to past clients, future clients, and trying to build my name and better rapport with people.

It's not easy, but I can promise you it does not matter how long you've been in this business. If you're lacking consistency in the amount of deals you're doing, it's just a lack of consistency of you working on your business.

Erin: Excellent. Thank you both so much for everything that you've brought to the table and the conversation today. We wish you both just great success from Caledon to Calgary and into your second decades. Best of luck to you both. Thank you so much.

Anu: Thank you so much, Erin, for having us.

Dusko: Thank you, Erin.

Erin: I just love how those two lanes are pointed in the same direction, fulfillment, balance, and a sense of purpose as REALTORS® in Canada. REAL TIME is brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association, CREA, production from Alphabet® Creative, and technical support from Rob Whitehead. If you want more real estate resources, tools, and insights, you can visit us anytime at CREA.ca.

If you liked this episode, please do explore our other episodes, including more from our Working REALTOR® series. Whether it is growing your business or balancing work and life, you'll find thoughtful advice from REALTORS® across the country. Oh, and don't forget to rate or review the show because we always appreciate it. All right. I'm your host, Erin Davis. Thanks for joining us. We'll talk again soon on REAL TIME. Bye for now.

A survivor of two civil wars, Zahra Al-Harazi immigrated to Canada in 1996 with her three children and no higher education. Today, she’s one of Canada’s most successful entrepreneurs.

On this episode of REAL TIME, Zahra unpacks the turning point in her story, when she defined her sense of purpose, and how it continues to guide her and her businesses. She also shares strategies for defining your own purpose, and how to harmonize your personal and professional values, so you can stay focused, motivated, and fulfilled.

Discover Ikigai, the Japanese concept Zahra swears by for inspiring your sense of purpose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai

Learn more about the Enneagram personality types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram_of_Personality

Transcript

Erin Davis: What stories do you owe your 80-year-old self, and how can you start writing them today? One word, purpose. That's our topic today on REAL TIME, the podcast for REALTORS® brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association. I'm your host, Erin Davis, and our guest is Zahra Al-Harazi, one of Canada's most successful businesswomen, a woman whose life defies expectations, consultant, author, and community builder. Zahra joins REAL TIME to talk about the power of purpose and its business potential for REALTORS®. Let's get started.

Erin: Zahra, people have different definitions of purpose. How do you define it, and why is it important for businesses to have a purpose beyond profit?

Zahra Al-Harazi: Thank you for that question. A purpose is the explanation of the company's motivations and their reason for being. It's a way to set boundaries for what an organization will and will not do as part of its growth strategy. It is really important to have purpose as an organization because it defines the reason that you are there. Especially in today's world, between the millennials and Gen Z, there is a massive trust deficit, desire for sustainability, desire to fix social inequality.

Brand control isn't as much as it used to be because there's this rise of social media and people trust more in what other people tell them about a product than the product itself. There's all these reasons why you should have a strong purpose statement. Really, the purpose statement is your reason for being.

Erin: You have said that there are two types or two ways in which your values have to align with the corporation. Can you explain that?

Zahra: Rather than two ways, I think there is a personal purpose and then there is an organizational purpose. Really, those things should align. Organizations should really understand what their target audience, meaning their stakeholders, meaning their employees, their customers, what they want, what they desire, what is important to them, and then aligning that purpose to both those things. If I, as an employee, don't feel the same sense of values and purpose with my organization, I'm going to be less interested in what that organization has to stand for.

I will go looking for somewhere else that does align with my values, my sense of purpose, the things that I want to do, what my legacy is meant to be. I think those are the two things that are really important. A lot of people write these nice things like mission statement and values and purpose and whatever, and put them up on a wall. If you ask the employees without looking at the wall what those are, most of the time they won't be able to tell you.

They're also very similar to what every other organization is doing. You can change the logo in the name and put in another name and you've got pretty much the same sense of purpose. Truly understanding your audience, what they want, your employees, what they are passionate about, what motivates them, what gets them going, what drives them, is then going to make a really powerful purpose statement. Every stakeholder should remember what your purpose is without you having to articulate it over and over again.

Erin: Zahra, I find your own story of realizing that you had a purpose, of course, but it wasn't really in line with who you are or what you really wanted. Can you tell us that story? Because it's really enlightening.

Zahra: Yes. I don't know that I had a purpose before I actually sat down and I worked on articulating it. I think for a big chunk of my life, I was pretty lost. I was doing what I thought I was supposed to do and what other people told me. I never really got to true success until I defined what that purpose is. I'm both a refugee and an immigrant. I was a refugee when we left the war in Uganda and went to Yemen. I was an immigrant when I left the war in Yemen and came to Canada.

In that time, I just wasn't sure what I was meant to do, what I was supposed to do, how to go about life, and my sense of purpose. I didn't even know what having a sense of purpose honestly quite meant. Then I took the tools that we use at a really low time in my life when I was going through a lot of bad things. If you're from Calgary, you'll know that when the recession happens and it's this very cyclical sort of environment, it affects you. Between that, getting a divorce, a whole bunch of different things, I was just not at a good place. I took the tools that we use to build a brand.

For my first company, it was an ad agency. When we're helping a company design their purpose and their values and their brand and how they operate, we usually start with a creative brief. That creative brief can be pretty powerful because it fully understands what this brand is supposed to be, what it does, what are its drawbacks, who's its competition, what's its purpose, how does it work, what does it look like on a shelf, and all of that. Once we understand this brand is then when we are able to move forward and design it. I took that tool, and I built a purpose for myself.

Honestly, in the last 15 years, that purpose hasn't changed much, but it also helped propel me to what I am doing today.

Erin: You have said that the things that you adhere to in terms of your purpose, like integrity, honesty, experience, and expertise, those are non-negotiables. They're totally who you are and what you wanted yourself to present, what you wanted you to present to the world. How do you translate that into what a company should also have for brands? How does that translate? Your own, because you're a company, so how do you translate that into what others can also see and believe and be?

Zahra: Yes. Actually, those were for my company when I was building purpose for my company and we were trying-- because clients would ask us what ours was as we were building theirs. We grew by flying by the seat of our pants. We didn't actually have time to stop and do that. We realized that we had to do that as a company. As we were looking at that and trying to figure it out and we had these big post-it notes on the wall and we were writing things down like integrity and honesty and excellence and all of that and nothing, it didn't feel right. It was weird because we kept crossing it off and it was like, why does that-- That sounds like a good purpose to have.

We realized that those things are set in stone. If you don't have integrity, then get out of business. If you don't value excellence, then it's not going to work. That was the big driver is understanding like, "Okay, so those things are table stakes. They're set in stone. They're non-negotiables. If we don't have these things, we shouldn't be in business because those are the cornerstones of doing things the right way." When we started looking at our purpose and our values as an organization, we started looking at how we wanted to live our lives, what we wanted to leave behind, what we wanted to touch, how we wanted to operate, how we wanted to act, how we wanted people to view us.

That's how we ended up with the set of values that we wrote down. Interestingly enough, those values have followed me now into my third startup, and they're the same things that I wanted then I want now. I realized that your personal values, your personal purpose has to align, especially as an entrepreneur, has to align like this, completely and totally with your company and your corporate values. Otherwise, you won't be true to them.

Erin: Right. Not just a slogan or something on a coffee mug, but something that becomes part of your DNA. Obviously, if you're in your third incarnation, then it certainly is. Now, question for you here, Zahra, is should a purpose differ from a mission or a vision and how do they work together if they do differ?

Zahra: Yes, so like I said, a purpose is the explanation of your motivation. Your reason for being. A mission statement is a definition of your business. What are you in business? What do you do? Who do you serve? What are your objectives? What is your approach to achieving those objectives? Purpose is different. With a lot of companies, you find that whether it's your values, your mission, your purpose, they sort of belong in the HR department, and again, become words on a wall. They don't live and breathe throughout every silo that-- and we all know that every organization is quite siloed.

Your purpose should live and breathe through your entire organization. How you do billing, how you do legal, what you volunteer for, what organizations you give for, what you attend, what you do, and especially as an entrepreneur. You have to live and breathe it at every touch point. If this part of your company does not align, it breaks that chain.

Erin: Okay, you came up with this list of words, a long list of words. I love your circle the 20 thing. Could you explain that exercise to us? Because I get a feeling we're going to be doing this when we're done, those of us watching and listening today, Zahra. You're really putting yourself on the line with this one and that's brave and it makes you vulnerable. I think that's why it works. Go ahead and explain that for us, will you?

Zahra: Happily, however, I didn't totally put myself on the line because I made it anonymous, because I didn't really want to know what people thought of me. What I did when I was working on my creative brief and my personal values and purpose is I put together 200 words on a piece of paper, and I just circled just instinctively and they were good and bad words. things that maybe were flattering, some things that weren't as flattering.

I just circled the 20 words that I thought that applied to me. Then I gave that piece of paper to a lot of people in my world, everybody from clients to staff to friends and asked them what they thought. I made it anonymous because I wanted them to be comfortable telling me what they thought. Then I also wanted to not really know what people thought.

Erin: It's like a focus group. Nobody likes those.

Zahra: For sure. I compared everything, and it was really interesting to see how I viewed myself versus how other people viewed me. There was a lot of similarities but there were a few differences. Where I thought I was assertive, a lot of people thought I was stubborn and bossy, That's interesting. Because maybe I'm not projecting myself the right way. I had to really think about that. It's like, this is what they're seeing. Why are they seeing that? How can I change that to them seeing me as being assertive?

It was a very helpful and difficult exercise in understanding yourself and what you put out there. Because that's a huge part of, for all of us, especially entrepreneurs, again, your brand is you. What you put out there in the world for people to see how they interact with you, who they believe you are, is such a huge part of whether they believe in your work and your product or not.

That was a really big-- Before I did this exercise, before I started exploring this creative brief and this brand, that self-help, self-motivation stuff belonged in this kumbaya world that didn't really apply to me. Because as soon as I thought something was wrong with me, that meant something was wrong with me. I just wasn't going to think that anything was wrong with me.

Erin: That perception is their reality, as much as you go, no, that's not me at all. Okay, where did you get the 200 words from?

Zahra: I Googled. I sat down. I wrote descriptive words. I just tried to put together words that I knew. Good words, bad words, like it's just very easy to do that part. Maybe there was some bias too in that exercise for myself because I know what words I wanted to see on there and stuff like that. That's why I made it such a big list of words so that I covered so many different things.

Erin: Yes, well, you said anonymous, but still, I do think it was vulnerable of you to open the doors to what people thought of you because most of us, a lot of us don't want to know. It worked for you. It was an eye-opener. You have a few other tests that you really like. There's, for example, the Enneagram.

Zahra: Yes, I love the Enneagram personality test. Again, it was a moment of conflict with a business partner. We decided to do the Enneagram personality test because we did not see eye to eye, and we did not understand how the other person works. We were so polar opposites in personality. We did this Enneagram personality test as part of our, just, trying to fix the relationship. We brought in a coach, and they did the Enneagram personality test. It was fascinating because not only do we all have certain personality definitions and traits.

For me, my personality is I want to try everything and see what sticks to the wall. On the bad side, yes, I'm the one with all the big ideas, but then I'm never around to pick up the pieces because I'm not the detail-oriented person. Whereas my partner was down in the weeds in this detail stuff. She would never do anything unless it was tried, tested, true. She knew exactly how it would work. We frustrated each other to a enormous degree. It was really powerful to understand. The Enneagram not only tells you how you work with people, how people should work with you, personality things, it tells you what your wings are.

If you're in a bad place, you might lean more into this direction of being an overprotective bully, for example, or in this direction of being too accommodating because you really wanted to work. You really just understand. It's all part of this growth journey that I think a lot of us just don't take on because like you said, it's difficult. It's scary. A lot of times you don't know what you're going to find on the other side of that research. It really helps. It helps understand what you want, how you're going to do it.

It helped me understand what I wanted to do with my life. I'll tell you what my purpose statement was that I wrote 15 years ago. This just rang true to me at the time. It wasn't a goal that was money-oriented or career-oriented, but what I wrote down is I will spend the rest of my life living stories and experiences that will change perspectives, outcomes, and hearts. That was really important to me because then I was a marketer. That was my first company phase. I was a marketer. What we did was we sold things to people.

We convinced them to buy what we wanted them to buy, to go where we wanted them to go. That was part of my DNA. I wanted to have experiences. I had come off a part of my life where I didn't have the freedom to do what I wanted to do. Now all of a sudden, I did, and I wanted to do everything. I wanted to change hearts because giving back is such a huge part of who I am. I wanted people to care more.

I wanted them to see other people and take in how they can change their lives. I wanted to change people's outcomes. I wanted to help people in poverty and get them out of that situation into a different place. These were all things that were important to me that meant a lot to me. I started working on that and I started speaking, for example, I've spoken to audiences around the world, two to 5,000 people at a time. I've spoken at the UN, at Canada's Most Powerful Women Conference, at a conference in Istanbul, for example, that had 2,500 entrepreneurs from around the world.

That became a big part of what I did. I set myself up to a place where I became an influencer, and I got to sit at tables where big decisions were made. I was the Canadian ambassador for UNICEF for four years. I was on the National Canadian Board of Directors for Make-A-Wish Foundation. Those were all things that I cared about. The first trip I took with my kids after my divorce was, we went with Homes of Hope and we build homes in Tijuana for families.

All of that led into this purpose statement that I had put out. It all continues to fit because everything I do, I measure it against that. Does this feel right to me? Which has led to my third company. I started doing stuff because I wanted to have experiences. I did everything from learning how to ride a motorcycle to jumping out of a plane, I am terrified of heights, to doing big and small things that were new.

Erin: Just incredible. That clarity really did just open up everything for you. You talk about being at the table where big decisions are made, but these are things, too, that can translate so beautifully to the kitchen table, too, because you have imbued your children, not only with your brilliance and everything that you are and have proven, not only in business, but in life and the obstacles that you have surmounted. The fact that you are giving examples of giving back and charity and living that.

I think this is a message, your message, your story is one that applies not only in business, but around the kitchen table. I think you're just resonating so much with so many people today as well. Thanks for this, but we're not done. Because, Zahra, I want to ask you, how could a well-executed sense of purpose help boost your reputation or maybe even shift misconceptions about you or your business? It's fine to have these ideas of what your purpose, what your mission, what they are going to be, but you got to go get it out there, right?

Zahra: Yes, absolutely. Before you get it out there though, it has to be true. It has to be true to who you are. It has to be true to what you do. For example, if we are talking real estate, and everybody wants to sell houses to people and a lot of those mission, purpose, value statements are going to be the same, but what is your niche? What sets you apart from other people? What is it that you truly believe in and you want to do?

An example could be somebody who wants to help seniors transition into smaller homes, which is exactly where I am right now. I want a one-story forever home that I never have to move out of, hopefully. I don't want to be moving when I'm in my 70s, and trying to figure it out. If there is somebody that has decided that's going to be where they want to live, and that's the client that they want, so now they've found a niche market.

If you do a good job, if you live by your sense of purpose, if you actually do that properly, every person that you work with is going to recommend you to other people. That means what organizations do you volunteer for, like I said earlier, what organizations do you give to? What events do you go to? Who do you socialize with? All of that needs to fit, and it needs to be real, because if it's not real, if you are acting and if you've decided that this is going to be what you want to do, but it's not a part of you, then it's not going to be believable.

I really think that understanding yourself and what you want to do in life is a huge part of your success story. It really is because if you are truly hungry for that thing, if you are truly inspired by that thing, if you are truly motivated to do that thing, then it all becomes real. You work harder. You work faster. You innovate better, and it all fits.

Erin: Yes, and you stop being a boat against the current. It just flows. That authenticity allows you to flow. What do businesses or entrepreneurs need to consider when they're defining and articulating a purpose?

Zahra: There's this really, really interesting Japanese concept that I really do love. It's called ikigai. It means your reason for being, and your ikigai is at the center of what you love, what the world needs from you, what you can be paid for, and what you are good at. Meaning your passion, your mission, your vocation, and your profession. Right at the center of those four things is your ikigai. I absolutely love that. I discovered that when I was working on my own purpose because it's easy to say, "Well, I'm really passionate about this thing. I love it, but it's not what I'm good at. It's not my actual vocation." I'm really passionate about saving lives, but I'm not a doctor. How am I going to do that?

What you're passionate about is only one piece of the puzzle. What your mission is in life, is the other piece of the puzzle. What the world needs. Your vocation is what you can be paid for. Your profession is what you are good at, and you take all of those and you put them together, and at the center of that is your purpose, and so great-- Look it up. It's ikigai. It's a great way to look at yourself and your life, and what you want, and how all of those pieces fit.

Because like I said, if it's not real, if it's not believable, if you're not actually good at that thing, you're not going-- Maybe you can get better at that thing. Maybe you can educate yourself and do that, but maybe you can't because your circumstances in life are not going to allow you to go deep enough into understanding how to get good at that thing in order to do it well. At the center of all of that, I think is your sense of purpose. Not just me, ikigai is the one that coined that.

Erin: I love that. I just love it. It just sums it up so perfectly. I know you've said you don't like to give advice, but I'm going to go ahead and ask you anyway and see if we can get something out of you here. What are some authentic tactical ways to weave a sense of purpose through every facet of your business? Do you have any that you can share or some feedback, or how do you operate there?

Zahra: I'm a member of Entrepreneurs' Organization. One of the things we are told is not to give advice to our foreign members. You can share an experience or a story as opposed to giving advice. If I were to say three things that really make a difference is clarity. What I've talked about is just understanding yourself, understanding what you do, why you do it, who you are, how you operate, and all of those things. That's one.

Pride is another one. Having pride in yourself, having that confidence and that courage and that understanding and that resilience and resilience doesn't come from nothing. We are not born with or without resilience. We earn it. We gain it, and we gain it by doing difficult things, by stepping out of our comfort zone. The more we do that, the more we step out of our comfort zone, the more we do difficult things like me jumping out of a plane is the things that help you build that resilience, and that resilience is so closely tied with courage and belief in yourself and ability.

Having that sense of pride in yourself and finding that is really important, I think. As women, we are taught not-- It seems boastful to talk about yourself in a certain way or to take ownership of say, "Yes, I did that." As opposed to, "It was a team effort." Be proud of who you are, what you've done, how you've got here, and then be motivated. Motivation is not easy to come by. Find that thing that you are really passionate about and you really want is really important because if you find that, then you're more motivated to do it. Motivation only works if your environment works, like if your psychological state, the environment, the people around you, the support system that you have, and your past experiences.

Those things come together in a perfect place, and you can tap into that motivation. Find that, find that motivation, find that thing that makes you want to do something.

Erin: The challenges that you faced, Zahra, when you came to Canada were far from a perfect place from which to start. Yes, confidence and perseverance had to be in your tool belt, but how did they lead you to such a successful career in business when you were first starting out and having to navigate life in a new country?

Zahra: Great question. I'm not entirely sure I know how to answer that. Only because a lot of it happened. A lot of it happened. I knocked on a million doors, and I was a nobody immigrant from nowhere. I was knocking on doors, because like when I came, I had three children. I had a high school degree. I didn't even know what the word entrepreneur meant at the time. I was so far behind everybody else. I was 26 years old, like I said, three kids, and didn't know anything about anything.

Just growing up where I am because of poverty of the country and the war and everything else. There's these big gaps in my knowledge of even popular culture and things like that. I knocked on doors. I asked people out for coffee. I asked them to teach me things that I didn't know and nobody ever said no. People are kind. People are helpful. That is, I think, our first approach for the majority of people. The doors that I knocked on, the people that taught me things ended up becoming my friends, my clients, my motivators, my fan club, and they helped cheer me on and take me to places that I might not have got to on my own.

I know that I put myself in places where I was lucky enough to have those resources. A lot of it, I think, happens with life. You have to capitalize on it. You have to move forward. My very first award was Top 40 Under 40. A client of mine, who was also a friend, Andrea, put my name in the hat. I didn't even know about the Top 40 Under 40 award. I was busy trying to build a company. I wasn't even thinking about it. I was early, first year in business sort of thing.

I won that, and with that came a lot of accolades and a lot of new clients and it grew from there. Again, this is advice that I don't like to give, but put yourself in rooms where things are happening. Volunteer, get involved in community, join a sports team. One of my very first things that I did when I came to Calgary because girls where I come from are not allowed gym class, and I don't think I even ran as a kid. Jim Button in Calgary started this thing where you just went and played a sport every week and it was 40 girls, 40 guys and then everybody got together at the end of the night for a drink.

The first time I went every game, like every weekend, every week we would do basketball or hockey or floor hockey, portaging and every week I'd be the one who put my hand up and said, "I've never done that before." I met the best people and some of them are still-- they play such a huge part in my life, especially Jim Button. A lot of that is the things that have made a difference. I can pinpoint decisions that I made to do things that weren't success-related that led to my biggest successes.

Erin: Talking about the purpose, does that change? Our perspective at 20 is so different from our perspective at 40 and at 60 and on and on, just who we think is old for one thing. Does your perspective need to be recalibrated as you go along or what is your opinion on that?

Zahra: 1,000%, 1,000%. What I wanted 10 years ago is not what I wanted 20 years ago is not what I wanted when I was a kid is in some cases not what I want today. We change, our circumstances change. There was a point where I just really wanted to go to Hong Kong. I don't know why I was fascinated by my visit there and the culture there and the people that I met there and the best of the best of the expat community. I just wanted to live in Hong Kong, but I'm an only child. My father was not well. It didn't make sense for me to do that. That dream had to be put aside, thankfully, because what ended up happening was much better.

Things change. Like I said, your environment, things that happened to you, your circumstances, guide different things, different moments in your life. You might go down a path that you never expected and find a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Yes, I revisit my purpose, my creative brief every year. Some things have not changed. I really haven't changed my purpose statement because I like it. It fits me, but other things have changed. Yes, absolutely. You have to revisit.

Erin: Like a tune-up every year. That's fascinating. Okay. What is or what are some stories you want to tell as an 80-year-old?

Zahra: At the risk of sounding very corny, what's important to me is doing good in this world, people who do good in this world. I'm very choosy about what I let into my life at this stage, about who I let into my life at this stage. I have kids that live all over the world, and I spend a lot of time going to see them. I have a limited amount of time outside of my business and volunteering for things that are important to me, of who I want to hang out with, what I want to do. I'm very choosy. I'm choosy about what influence I want to have, who I want to let into my life, what boards and charities I want to be involved in, what I want my business life to look like.

My new company is called Skillit, and it's an experiential company. It's where we take a family on an experience, but they learn something every single time. It's very experiential, but there are soft and hard skills that you come away with at every interaction. For example, we'll take a family out into the desert with no food, and they have to dig for water, forage for food, learn about medicinal herbs with a guide, of course, learn about medicinal herbs and how to build a lean-to.

Erin: Is there room service? No, I'm kidding. You almost had me there, Zahra.

Zahra: They're going to build a solar oven and cook their own food. Can you see how that brings together everything in my world? Because number one, it's experience-based. Number two, it's very associated with people and changing lives and influencing, making their lives better by teaching them things. For every skill we sell, we donate one to a young person in need. That's my give back, and so it just, all the pieces fit, and that's what I want to give my time to. That's the story I want to tell.

Erin: Beautiful. Thank you so, so much for sharing some of your story here today. We will definitely tell people more about that as we say goodbye to you. Zahra, we are just so grateful. As we wrap up today, are there any like three things you want people to take away from our discussion today? You've given us so much.

Zahra: I think I'm going to go back to the three things I said earlier, pride in yourself, clarity in what you have to do, and motivation to do it.

Erin: Wow. We've got all of that, especially the motivation after talking with you today, Zahra, thank you so much. We cannot wait to find out what's next for you, including Skillit. No more jumping out of perfectly operating planes, okay? Thank you.

Zahra: No, that was a one-and-done.

Erin: One-and-done. Good for you. Thank you so much.

Zahra: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Really appreciate it.

Erin: Wasn't she amazing? You know what? We only began to skim the surface of her own personal story. If you want more inspiration from Zahra, her book is called What It Takes to Live and Lead with Purpose, Laughter, and Strength. It details her journey and how it all began. You can find details on that in our show notes. We will also link you to Ikigai so you know what it is and where to find it, and also the enneagramtest.com. It's all fascinating. If you liked this episode of REAL TIME, we invite you to explore our other episodes. Don't forget to rate or review the show. We always, always appreciate it. I'm your host Erin Davis. REAL TIME is brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association, CREA.

Production is courtesy of Alphabet® Creative with technical support from Rob Whitehead. Thanks so much for joining us, and we'll see you again next time on REAL TIME.

Anthony Morgan is an award-winning science communicator. He’s also a PhD researcher and startup founder who’s hosted dozens of TV shows, including the Discovery Channel’s Daily Planet and CBC’s The Nature of Things with Sarika Cullis-Suzuki.

He’s the mastermind behind Freestyle Socials, a live, hilarious game designed to “undivide” people by blurring the lines we draw between one another.

On this episode of REAL TIME, Anthony shares science-based insight to help REALTORS® become better problem solvers in the face of a disagreement.

Watch the experiment Anthony describes as a “magic trick”– Daniel Simons’ selective attention test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

Transcript

Erin Davis: Working together to undivide us, what does it mean, and how can it help you in business and beyond? Anthony Morgan, a science communicator, and co-host of CBC's The Nature of Things, has made it his mission. I personally want to thank Anthony for inspiring my approach to a recent lost luggage situation. We'll get to that a little later on. I'm Erin Davis, and welcome to REAL TIME, the podcast for REALTORS®, brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association. Welcome, Anthony.

Anthony Morgan: Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Erin: We're excited too. For that matter, though, I could say welcome back because, at CREA PAC Days 2023, you led REALTORS® through a fascinating game called Freestyle Socials. For those of us not lucky enough to have seen it in person, can you explain the concept and just why this kind of exercise is so important?

Anthony: Sure. A Freestyle Social is a game. It's sort of a live social experiment. Its goal is to find ways to rethink disagreements so that we can have them more productively. It's supposed to be a game where disagreements make us laugh instead of losing faith in humanity.

Erin: Okay, I get that. This is something that sort of developed while you were getting your master's, right? Tell us how this all came to be.

Anthony: Yes, that's right. I was doing my master's in science communication up in Sudbury, and they had these events that they called science cafes. There were these amazing events. We would show up at a pub and they would ask these questions at the intersection of science and society. Things like, I don't know, should we bring back the woolly mammoth, which is technically possible, by the way. Side note, really cool.

They would convene this panel of experts at the front of the room to talk about it, to dissect it, and figure out the pros and cons for the benefit of an audience who was watching. They were really fascinating. I noticed as I was sitting and watching these things that I really wanted to be able to chime in and throw a thought in or two myself and the people around me. At that point in my career, I'd been working at the Ontario Science Centre here in Toronto for probably 8, 10 years, something like that. If you work at a place like that, the bread and butter of organizations like that is interactive. How do you make these experiences as interactive and fun as you possibly can?

That's what I spent my time thinking about. How can I make this a more interactive experience? We thought, "Well, we'll give it a shot." We showed up at a pub in Toronto. We put tape down the middle of the floor to divide the room. Then we would ask these questions. I call them spark questions, questions at the intersection of society. Should we erase bad memories? Should we design our kids' DNA? Should we pee in the shower?

There was a real range as far as the seriousness of them goes. We wanted some of it to be playful and fun. Then we would tell our audience, "Listen, you've got 10 seconds. What does your gut tell you? You've got to pick a side." Everyone's always like, "Oh, what do I do?" They're always surprised at what side their friends pick. "Oh, you pee in the shower, what's wrong with you?" That kind of thing. Then we would put a microphone in the middle of the floor. Each half of the room gets to explain to the other half why-- what are you doing on that side of the room? You should come over here with us.

The only rule of the game is that if you hear an idea from the other side that surprises you or makes you laugh, you should switch sides. That's because we're really trying to help society rethink how we do these disagreements. At the moment, we're having these debates that are really unproductive. We're just talking past each other. It turns into shedding matches. We've all been at that holiday event with our family where that uncle says that thing that makes everybody really tense in the room.

We're trying to help that. The problem with those kinds of disagreements is that your goal, you treat them like a debate, where your goal is to have your side sort of win. In this game, the goal is to hear as many surprising, hilarious, new perspectives as we possibly can.

Erin: To undivide us, then, ultimately.

Anthony: Exactly, yes. We know from part of my research that we are increasingly divided, what researchers call sorted. It means that if I know how you feel about, let's say, climate change or gun control, then it's increasingly the case that I know how you feel about many other issues. They're being sorted into left and right. I'm trying to help us remember that the lines that we've drawn between ourselves, those lines are a lot blurrier than we realize.

On any given issue, you might have a difference of opinion with somebody, but what we try to do with these games is we don't just ask one question. It's not just Kansas City Chiefs or 49ers. We ask many. You start to recognize that across many games, I might disagree with you on the Chiefs-49ers, but I agree with you about Taylor Swift should have won the Grammy. Maybe I like cake, and you like pie. You start to see that we're really more alike than we are different.

Erin: Okay, all right. We have to go back to a question that you raised there. I will give you a hint. It's not the woolly mammoth. It's not the DNA for your children. You know what the question is because you say you've asked this question more in your life than, how are you?

Anthony: That's right. Yes, I've asked it an absurd number of times. Should we pee in the shower? It's maybe my favorite question of all time because it's really great for this game. It's the kind of question that you cannot answer while taking yourself seriously. I just love that because in a lot of these discussions, they don't go well precisely because we do take ourselves far too seriously.

We believe that we are the same thing as the answer that we give. That answer is our identity. People, when they're answering a question like, should we pee in the shower, they don't feel that way. They don't feel like this is who I am, what I do in the shower. For the record, if you have roommates or friends or to any of your listeners, if you have somebody else who lives in your home and they say that they do not pee in the shower, I've asked this question well over 6,000, 8,000 times at this point. I'd say 80% of people say, yes, we should pee in the shower. If you think you have a roommate who doesn't pee in the shower, you probably have a roommate who thinks we should pee in the shower.

Erin: First off, thank you for that thought-provoking question and ensuring that we all think of Anthony Morgan in the shower tomorrow. Okay, that didn't sound right, but you know what I mean. Anthony, how does it work on a scientific level?

Anthony: Yes, well, as I say, we are increasingly sorted. We know that we're more and more divided into left and right, black or white. Those kinds of thinking can be really dangerous because when you align more and more of your identities into this one-- we call them mega identities, then it becomes easier and easier to see people on the other side as completely different from me, maybe even bad, maybe even evil, maybe even worthy of my disgust and my disdain and my, in some cases, aggression.

That's a really dark pathway that we really want to avoid heading down. I think a lot of people sense that it's the pathway we're heading on, but we're not really sure how we can claw ourselves back from that. This game is designed to help because it helps us to recognize that, well, even though people might be aligned on a few of these beliefs, then on a whole bunch of other ones, they're not aligned. They see things the way that I see them.

One principle that you really have to understand, this is maybe the most important thing I've learned in my 20 years as a science communicator, is that before people care what you believe, they have to believe that you care. I'll say it again because it's really important. Before people care what you believe, they have to believe that you care. We know that from the research, that if people dismiss something that I perceive as a real threat to myself, my community, anybody that I care about, if I feel like you're dismissing that threat, then I'm very likely to what's called morally condemn you, to see you as just a bad person, and then I'm likely to dehumanize you.

We know that from really surprising studies where, I don't know if you're familiar with the Ascent of Man, that very famous depiction of evolution that goes from chimpanzee to slightly more evolved and then all the way it's upright. You can present people with a picture like that and then ask them how they think about people who reject threats that you perceive as real. They consistently put them as slightly less than human. The more important the threat is, the more we perceive them as less than human. That's a really surprising and scary outcome. The goal really is to start to rehumanize each other and remember that we really are all in the same boat together. We really are all in this together.

Erin: Yes.

Anthony: It's very easy to try to cast people who are on the other side of the issue, whatever side of the issue you're on, as, again, completely different from you. Because they're not perceiving the threat that you are, it's easy to morally condemn them. We really are all on the same team in this.

We humans, I am an optimist about humanity because we are the most cooperative species in the history of evolution, as far as we know. We are able to cooperate in ways that have never-- we got to the moon. We've done some amazing things. I want to make sure that we strengthen that superpower as much as we possibly can. To me, the key is to just recognize that we're more alike than we're dis-alike.

Erin: Yes, you mentioned the moon. Then there are some people who think it didn't really happen. Yet you maintain your optimism. I think that that's really admirable, Anthony.

Anthony: I really am optimistic because what we've seen across time, across history, is that we have found more and more ways to cooperate across time at bigger and bigger scales to the collective good of everybody. It's easy right now to remember that there are some wars on. Those are very dispiriting. There are some conflicts. I don't want to take away from the weight of those realities. I don't want it to overshadow, at the same time, the greater reality, that is, the UN set a bunch of these millennium goals.

They said, "By 2025, we want to cut poverty in half." They blew those goals out of the water. We achieved that in way faster a time frame than we ever anticipated we would. Those kinds of trends are true across a whole host of dimensions that we measure to capture what human well-being-- how we're doing as far as promoting human well-being goes. I'm not an optimist. I'm a scientist. The science says we should be optimistic.

Erin: I love that. Thank you. I feel better already. I hope everyone watching and listening does, too, Anthony. Now, a lot of your work aims to help people to have better conversation around polarizing issues. What are some effective strategies for fostering meaningful conversations when people are divided?

Anthony: Yes, well, I would say the number one thing to do is to lean into curiosity. That's going to be a tough thing for us to do, but it's really an important thing for us to do. There's an experiment that taught me this. It's my favorite experiment of all time. It was something that I experienced when I was in first-year university, and I was taking a psychology class. It was this video that my prof put on, and he said, "Hey, I know something about how you see the world better than you do." Everybody in the classroom, our eyebrows go up.

He's just meeting us. How can he know anything about how we see the world? He said, "Well, I'm going to prove it with this video." It was a video by a researcher called Daniel Simons. I really want to encourage your viewers, you can find it on YouTube. It's amazing. It fundamentally changed the way that I see the world. It's almost like watching a magic trick.

You watch this video, and there are two teams of people, one wearing a bunch of white T-shirts, and then the other team is wearing black T-shirts, and they're passing this basketball between themselves. Your only job in that video is to count the number of times the players in white pass the ball between themselves. Now, I don't want to spoil the end of that video because, again, it's really cool. It's like one of those M. Night Shyamalan movies. If I tell you the ending, you're not going to be surprised. I want you to experience it.

What I learned from that video was that we all have blind spots in our thinking that are, by definition, invisible to us. We don't know that they're there. The best way to find your blind spots is by talking to people who see things differently than you. Those blind spots, they exist because-- your brain is a really wonderful thing. When you set a goal, you say, "I want to achieve this thing," your brain says, "Great, I'm going to help you out. I'm going to ignore all the other stuff that's not important for your goal."

That means that you miss really big chunks of reality. Because we all have these different goals, your goal produces blind spots for you. My goals produce blind spots for me. By talking to each other, we can help each other spot them. If you want to have better disagreements, if you come across somebody who believes we didn't land on the moon or that the Earth is flat, it's counterintuitive, but the way in is curiosity, to ask them questions about how they see the world because it's a really good way to help other people find the blind spots in their thinking as well.

Erin: Okay. How might these strategies, and you've given some excellent examples here, how might they translate into a business setting? When you're in the thick of a disagreement with someone, how to acknowledge their perspective, even if you don't agree or have you just given us, the big hint is to get curious about it?

Anthony: I would say that the thing that it really does is related to this big fancy model that psychologists have. It's called the biopsychosocial model. Scientists are really amazing, but they are terrible at naming things. They make really complicated names for everything. I'm going to give you a simple version of it. We'll start by imagining that you're you. You with me so far?

Erin: I am.

Anthony: Great. Imagine that you're pursuing a goal, all right? Maybe you want to lock down a deal with a client. Maybe you want to buy a new car. Maybe you want to improve your relationship. Whatever your goal is, you're moving towards it, and then you encounter an obstacle to that goal. Maybe you found out that your partner doesn't love the same kind of movies you do. Maybe you found out that your client has an asking price that's much higher than you were comfortable with.

Now the question is, how do you respond? The answer is, it turns out, it depends on two variables. The first is your perception of the size of that obstacle. Let's say I want to join the NBA, but I'm only 5'2". My perception of the size of that obstacle is, well, I'm only 5'2". You probably need to be a fair bit taller than that to join the NBA. It's unlikely for me to be a reality. That's the first variable. What's the perception of the size of the obstacle?

The second variable is your perception of the resources you have available to you to solve the problem. In other words, I want to join the NBA, I'm too short, but I've got Elon Musk levels of wealth, so I can invest in a surgery to grow the length of my legs. I've got enough resources to help make sure that I can make it into the NBA. The way we react depends on the gap between your perception of the size of the obstacle and your perception of the resources. If there's a gap, then you fall into what's called-- I call it the danger zone, the threat zone, where you're less creative, you're less empathetic, you're less open-minded. We're the worst version of ourselves.

What do you do if you're in that place? You can either change your perception of the size of the obstacle. You can do that by changing what your goal is. Maybe I'm not going to go for the NBA, maybe I'll go for-- I'll play basketball in like a call-up league. I can play with some buddies. Or you can change your perception of your resources available to you. Maybe you're going to have LeBron James train you to join the NBA. Those two things can shrink the gap between the obstacle and the resources and put you in what I call the challenge zone.

We love that feeling. We live for that feeling. It's the feeling that you have when you're in the zone or you're in the pockets, or you can start to think more creatively, you're more empathetic, you're more open-minded. It's when you're in that flow state. You're the best version of yourself. When you lean into curiosity with somebody who's stuck in their way of thinking, it puts them into that challenge mindset. They don't feel that their identity is threatened. They don't feel like you're trying to attack them. They feel like they get to be a teacher to you.

That puts them in this really calm mindset where they're able to be more open to new ideas and more ironically receptive to ideas from you. Most of our intuition is if you hear somebody say the earth is flat, our intuition says I got to tell them all the reasons that the earth is not flat, but what we know from the research is if you lean into curiosity and say, "How did you come to that idea?" that really is the key to unlocking new ways of thinking about the world.

Erin: I love that. As for me, if I wanted to be in the NBA, your advice might be, "Okay, that's not going to happen, but look over here, there's the WNBA. Let's look at that." You can shift the focus too, rather than just pointing at one particular goal.

Anthony: Exactly. It comes back to what we were talking about before, that our goals shape the blind spots in our thinking, they create them. When you identify those blind spots, you can actually change what's possible. If I'm trying to secure a deal with a client to make sure that we get a certain number for an asking price and they're just not meeting it, then what I can do is start to think about, "Well, how can I rethink my goal? Maybe the goal isn't to get this asking price. Maybe I'll shift the goal to one that's more collaborative." I'm trying to figure out how I can get the best deal I can for me and my client.

They'll feel that you care and they know that you need to-- before they care what you believe, they have to believe what you care, and it puts them in that challenge mindset. Suddenly, a world of possibilities opens up and you're likely to find a solution that you didn't even know was there.

Erin: Okay. How much of a role does fear play when it comes to a collaboration, a conversation, or a negotiation, Anthony?

Anthony: I would say that really depends on how big a challenge you imagine, whatever your goal, the obstacle to your goal is. I guess for people in your community, like the kinds of problems you guys are generally engaged with is how do I make sure that you're networking properly and building good relationships with our clients? Maybe you've heard that this particular client is very difficult to work with.

Those kinds of rumors can trigger fear in you, right? "Oh, well, this is going to be a real nightmare for me. Not only is this relationship going to be a difficult one, but they're going to spread rumors about me as a real estate agent and that's going to hurt my business and my bottom line." Those kinds of fears, well, that's when fears can be really stoked. Again, I would say that the solution in those cases is to just notice what's happening in your body. Notice that you're in fear and figure out how you can change your goal to shrink the size of the obstacle and increase your perception of the resources so that you're like, "You know what? The goal I had in mind was kind of scary, but this new one is something I can do." Then again, possibilities, they start opening up.

Erin: Pause, breathe, refocus.

Anthony: It's a very novice day. It's a little bit hippie-ish, but the science says that it actually works. The neuroscience is there to back it up.

Erin: How does body language play a role in all of this?

Anthony: Yes. I would say that your body language is important insofar as it lets you-- Yes, I see you're crossing your arms.

Erin: No good.

Anthony: Those kinds of things can be indicators that you need to notice what your goals are. For each of us, we all have different kinds of fear triggers and different kinds of things that make us feel a little bit afraid. It's really good, ideally, not necessarily in the moment when you're negotiating with a client, but in your general life to think about how do I know when I am in fear or when I am worried about something. What are the indicators in my body that tell me that? Maybe your breathing increases or maybe your palms get a little bit sweaty, or maybe your armpits sweat a little bit. Maybe you've got a habit of playing with your hair or biting your lip when you're nervous.

There's all kinds of things. If you can start to notice those little indicators, then when you're in those spaces, when you're in those places where you're a bit afraid, you can say, "Oh, I notice I'm a little bit afraid. Let me check in and figure out what my goals are right now. Can I shift those goals to bring me into that challenge mindset, to bring me to that place where I know there are some possibilities and opportunities here that I didn't realize existed because of the way that I was looking at things?"

Erin: I see the guitar in your background. For those of you who are listening, it's a beautiful six-string and it's blue. I know you're a guitarist and I also know you're a Beatles fan because we do our research. Let's talk about come together and the whole idea of you and me against the world and not being adversaries, but actually coming together against a common goal. I think this is one of the absolute gems of all of your wisdom, Anthony, if you want to expand and expound for us.

Anthony: Yes. No. As I said before, I really am an optimist. I believe that human beings are the most cooperative species that we've ever seen on the face of this planet and we evolve to be that. It's really easy to believe that nice guys finish last and that it's a really Machiavellian world out there where it's shark eat shark, but humans are by nature, we're really much, much more designed to cooperate with each other, to be interested in each other's well-being. It's when we feel our happiest, the most meaning in our lives at our best. I just got married, and-- well, thank you. I'm very excited.

Erin: Congratulations.

Anthony: Thank you very much. We're looking at starting a family and having kids. At one level, the idea of having kids is kind of a nightmare. Objectively, kids are really expensive. They break all your stuff. They never say thank you. They only think of themselves. If you had a roommate like that, you're getting out of here. You cannot live here anymore. Yet, if you ask any parent, would you die for your kids? They say, "Oh, in a heartbeat," because we think the things that would make us happy are having lots of money or fast cars, or whatever.

The things that make us really, truly, genuinely happy, the things that genuinely fill us with meaning are finding ways to serve others. That's built into our DNA. I guess I'm an optimist because I know that that is true. Eventually, we all, not all of us, if we're wise, we recognize that, and we move towards that. I know that seeing people do that is contagious. We start to replicate what we see others do, that brings a sense of meaning.

I'm just really optimistic about humans, and there's a story maybe I could tell about why I know that compassion and leaning into that kind of stuff is really valuable. I was moving about a year and a half ago. I live in Toronto, so your listeners will know what the Toronto real estate market looks like. It's not necessarily an easy one to navigate. It's one where I had a short time to move. I had about a day and a half notice because I was moving from one apartment to another, and I had to rent a U-Haul.

I rented the U-Haul. I got there on the day to pick it up. I spoke to the lady at the counter, and I asked her, "Hey, is it possible, by any chance, that I could have the vehicle for longer than I reserved on the website? I have a limited time, and it'd just be helping me out." She said, "No, and because you asked that, now I can't rent you the vehicle."

Erin: What? Why?

Anthony: Yes. I was floored. I thought I must have misheard. This can't be true. I said, "I don't understand. Is this some kind of U-Haul policy?" She said, "No, I don't think you'll bring it back." I was shaking. I was so angry that this woman just saw my face, decided to judge me on nothing more superficial than what I was wearing, what I was-- I don't know what it was. I thought, "Before people care what you believe, they have to believe that you care."

I tried to draw deep on what I know from neuroscience and social science, so I walked around outside-- I was shaking. I knew I was angry. I walked around her side, I took a breath, and I thought about it and I tried to think about it from her perspective.

It was the end of the month, so it was probably a time for her where she was getting a lot of people coming in asking for vehicles. They were probably all very stressed. Probably not a lot of them treated her very well, or maybe there were people who didn't return with the vehicle and then it's on her. That's the next day somebody doesn't get theirs. She finished up with her next client.

She came out and talked to me and I said, "Listen, I know that you probably deal with a lot of people at this time of the month and that probably a lot of them are not very kind to you, and I want you to know that I don't intend to be one of those people." Immediately, her demeanor changed and she started thinking about what she could do to help me get the vehicle. I got the U-Haul that day.

I could've been self-righteous and angry, and looked at it and said, "She doesn't deserve my forgiveness or my understanding, or my thoughtfulness or my compassion." Then I have to think about, "Well, what outcome do I actually want? Do I want her to suffer or do I want my U-Haul?" It's to me just the most vivid reminder of the idea that leaning into compassion, it really is, I think, the most powerful tool we have in our toolkit for navigating even the most frustrating disagreements.

Erin: Yes. How does that translate to what you say about, "You and I are going to be on the same side facing this problem together."? Because you approached her not only on a human level and saw her humanity and put yourself into a place of empathy and compassion, but also how can we solve this problem together? Anthony, how did that work there?

Anthony: I really love that. I think a good approach when you're trying to problem solve around really tough disagreements is to look at it not as you versus me as zero-sum. It's not I'm going to win, or you are. It's you and I against the problem.

Erin: Yes.

Anthony: That framing is just so much more effective for problem-solving because it takes you both out of that threat mindset, it puts you both in that challenge mindset where possibilities open up. Reminding the person you're engaging with that that is your goal, explicitly. Say it out loud. I want to make it clear that I don't want this to be something where I win, or you do. It's you and me. This is the problem. We're teaming up together to face that. How can we put our resources together to tackle it?

Erin: I love that. I love that lesson. Just as a quick diversion, I put it into use just last week after having spoken to you first. This is my way of doing things anyway, was landing at the airport here at home and my luggage wasn't there. Now, it was at home, so I didn't really need everything in it, but I walked up to the desk for the airline and I said, "Bradley, okay, my suitcase didn't make it. How do we go about doing this?" I did it with a smile. My husband said he noticed as we approached, the guy had a face on him like he'd had a day because we know that they have to face all the angry travelers.

He said, "But when you were done with him--" and then I introduced the next people in line behind me, I turned to them and I said, "This is Bradley. He's going to make your night a lot better." The guy could hug me. That's amazing. I got my bag the next day. Again, it's compassion. It's realizing that the person you're speaking to is another human being and they're having a day as well. I know.

Anthony: Exactly.

Erin: It sounds so Mister Rogers' Neighborhood when you think about it, Anthony, but it really is true. There's something else you've talked about, the power of critical thinking. Now we're getting back into the less Rogers' Neighborhood end of things here. Our guest on Episode 43, Peter Mansbridge, you may have heard that name. I like to drop it. Sure. He talked about that very thing. What's your take? What's the power in critical thinking and how can we train ourselves to think more critically, especially in business? We've talked about real life and this conversation is, I hope, as useful and helpful to people in real life, but let's go back to business here for a moment.

Anthony: Sure. Yes. I love to talk and to think about critical thinking. It's actually part of what I study for my research at my lab. Researchers have all kinds of really complicated theories and ideas about it, but I've distilled it down to what I think is a really digestible way of thinking about it in something I call the five C's. They're just really good habits of mind to engage in if you want to practice critical thinking.

The first of those is what I call curiosity. It's the recognition, as I said earlier, that we all have blind spots in our thinking that are by definition invisible to us. We don't know that they're there. Those blind spots, they genuinely shape the reality that is possible. Maybe there's something called a nine-dot problem. Maybe you can try this. Do you have a piece of pen and paper with you?

Erin: I do. Wouldn't you know it, it's a REALTOR®'s pad. I get these.

Anthony: What are the odds? This is a problem that your listeners can do on their-- if they've got a pen and paper handy, it's really easy. You're going to draw nine dots in a grid on your paper.

Erin: All right. Done.

Anthony: Your goal is to connect all nine of those dots using only four lines, yes, it looks just like that. That's right. A grid pattern. Now connect all nine of those dots using only four lines and the trick is, the kicker is you cannot lift your pen off the page. All four lines have to be connected.

Erin: Okay.

Anthony: As you're drawing this, I'll let your listeners know that the success rate-- that's five lines, that's very close. You only had four. It's tricky.

Erin: How many lines?

Anthony: Four lines. The success rate for this is something like 0%, it's called an insight problem, and that is exactly the way that I reacted when I first encountered this problem as well, but I'm going to try to show you how to solve it. I'm going to see, actually, if I've got a piece of paper handy. We've got these nine dots here. Most people will unconsciously imagine a box that they have to stay within, but the solution lies outside, literally outside the box. You start with one line; you draw up and outside of that imaginary box. Two, three, and four.

Erin: Okay. Well, I didn't know we were allowed to draw outside the box. Anthony, I want to do over. No, I'm kidding.

Anthony: That's fair enough. I mean, the first time I experienced this, I saw it at the science center. One of my colleagues showed it to another visitor who was there, and I would say I cried for around two hours, somewhere around two hours. It was really frustrating, but it was really fun and cool to dive into because the thing about this puzzle is at no point did I ever mention the word box or say that there was a box that you had to stay within, that was an idea that you brought to it yourself.

There was this box, that was an assumption that you made about the world, and that unconscious assumption, that blind spot limited what was possible about reality for you. Only once you could identify that blind spot, once you could identify that assumption is the solution to this puzzle possible.

We all have these blind spots, and playing with those blind spots is the key to being innovative and creative, but the problem is, they're by definition, blind spots. You don't know they're there. How do you find them? The answer is, collaboration, is to talk to people who see things differently than you. The first 3Cs of critical thinking are curiosity, so asking for help, finding your blind spots, and playing around with them.

Curiosity, creativity, and collaboration. Now, the trouble is these things can often make us a little bit nervous to do, so you have to lean into calm and courage. You've got to be willing to notice what your goals are, what your unconscious assumptions are, and be willing to accept comfort over courage to be willing to be taught by people who maybe you don't agree with or maybe don't even like that much and let them teach you something about how you might see the world. I think as long as you practice curiosity, creativity, collaboration, calm, and courage, you are practicing good critical thinking.

Erin: Wonderful. Can we end on the Wikipedia note please, as just-

Anthony: Sure.

Erin: -the perfect example of collaboration, Anthony? I love this.

Anthony: Where to start with this? I love Wikipedia because there are lots of places on the internet where we disagree. It feels like most of the internet is people just yelling matches. It's just a big dumpster fire. There is one place on the internet where disagreements not only don't make people polarized, they actually un-polarize people. That is the most successful encyclopedia of all time, Wikipedia.

If you get all of the smartest people, the most well-respected, the most highly accredited people together and get them to try to write an encyclopedia, which by the way happened, you got the Encyclopedia Britannica, it is nowhere near as popular. It costs a lot more, and it is less accurate overall than Wikipedia; this place where people just get together to share their knowledge and try to tell the world what they know.

Erin: And timely too because you're constantly updating it, right?

Anthony: It's constantly updated. It's the place where people genuinely become less polarized because they have a shared goal. It's not you versus me, it's you and I versus the problem. We're trying to accurately describe the world. That means that I have to describe it in a way that even somebody who disagrees with me would agree and vice versa. We've done studies on it; it actually makes people less polarized. It's just the most amazing example of how this kind of radical collaboration can genuinely be a huge net benefit for the world and can transform the world.

Erin: Well, thank you. Thank you for collaborating with us here today, and we so appreciate your insight and wisdom. Anthony, it's been a pleasure.

Anthony: It's been a genuine pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Erin: Fantastic. What a great conversation with Anthony. Now, as a REALTOR®, you know your relationships fuel your business. Doesn't it always come back to compassion and collaboration, even if you disagree with someone? I mean, the science doesn't lie. If you wanna learn more about Anthony's fascinating work, including his hilarious game, Freestyle Socials, it's all on his website, anthonymorganscience.com. Or if you want to try that attention test that Anthony mentioned, just Google Daniel Simon's selective attention test, or you can find the link in our show notes. It's all right there.

REAL TIME is brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association, CREA, and is a production of Alphabet® Creative with tech support from Rob Whitehead. For more real estate resources, tools, and insights, visit us anytime at crea.ca. If you liked this episode of REAL TIME, check out our other episodes and please do rate and review our show. We always appreciate it. I'm Erin Davis, thanks for being here, and we'll talk to you again soon on REAL TIME.

Colour affects us physically and mentally. In business, it’s a silent salesperson, a powerful way to send a message.

To start the year, we invited one of the world’s leading colour consultants to help us explore colour trends and the malleable nature of colour itself – how we perceive it, what we can do with it, and how REALTORS® can wield it to instill confidence in their clients.

Leatrice (Lee) Eiseman is Executive Director of the Pantone Color Institute™ and Director of the Eiseman Center for Color Information and Technology. For more than 20 years, she’s been responsible for choosing the Pantone® Color of the Year, which has vastly influenced the worlds of fashion, interior design, product development, and beyond.

Visit LeatriceEiseman.com to explore Lee’s books on colour and online training courses.

Transcript

Erin Davis: Feeling blue, tickled pink, seeing red. Ever wonder why you feel the way you do about certain colours? Well, get ready for an episode full of colour psychology, and plenty of advice for REALTORS®. I'm Erin Davis, and welcome to REAL TIME, the podcast for REALTORS® brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association.

Erin: Now, on this episode, I'm joined by Leatrice Lee Eiseman, the executive director of the Pantone® Color Institute. What colour trends can we expect to see this year? How does colour influence our behavior, and how can REALTORS® use colour to your advantage? Let's ask the expert, shall we? Oh, welcome to REAL TIME, Lee. It's so good to have you here today to kick off the new year with us. We so appreciate it.

Leatrice Eiseman: It's my pleasure.

Erin: Ah, great. Now, we've got a fun question as we leap into this today. In broad strokes, not to use a painting pun right off the bat, but what is a day in the life of one of the world's top colour specialists look like, especially around this time of the new year?

Leatrice: Well, I can tell you no day is like any other day because I never know what challenges I'm going to have. You know I am a colour consultant and so people consult with me. They want answers to questions and particularly with my clients, something can come up out of the blue and I have another question to answer. I have to do some research in order to answer it or it's something I know because it's specific to the work that I do.

I would say to you a typical day would start out with my reviewing. Obviously, my emails, has anybody written in anybody need any answers? I would then go to some of my colour consulting work, which I do with my daughter, who is also my associate, Beatrice. We are also teaching classes online. Even though these are online classes, I'm still available to the students to answer questions. We have to allocate time for the training. I work a lot with Pantone®, my major client, and do a lot of consulting for them as the director of the Pantone® Color Institute.

I wear so many hats that I never know exactly unless I have a prescribed deadline. If I have a deadline, then I know I've got to allocate some time in order to pick out the appropriate colours for whatever that client needs. Be it in packaging or in graphics, whether it's a fashion client or cosmetics or a widget that needs to go on a shopping market shelf. My work is full of challenges and that is part of what I really, really enjoy about doing colour consulting because you really have to put your thinking cap on and so many people think it's so simplistic. Tell us what colour to use to improve productivity?

I get those kinds of questions all the time, and then I have to come back with, wait a minute, I need to ask you some questions in order to give you the answers. There's a lot of homework involved. That's a long-winded answer to your question, but it reflects what my days are like.

Erin: Well, it sounds like you probably do a lot of traveling too. You're in your seat, you've had your first beverage, you're just about to start reading your favorite new book, and somebody finds out what you do. Is there a question that a fellow traveler asks you more often than any other?

Leatrice: Yes, absolutely. I can be sitting next to the CEO of a big company who millions of dollars will come in or out as a result of the colour they've used, and they will have specific questions. Invariably what it boils down to is what colour should I paint my living room walls.

Leatrice: It's become like a family joke. When I'm going off to wherever it is and I come home, my daughter will say, "Okay, who did you sit next to, and what did they ask?" Almost invariably it's that same question. It really shows me that in the end, even though you make these amazing colour decisions about the widget or whatever, people are so involved with the colours that are around them. They don't necessarily think that way. They don't think that they are until they're in a panic and then have to make a decision about what colour to paint those walls.

It becomes very personal. That also is a part of my work that I dearly love that finding out more about people when they share what they like or dislike about a colour.

Erin: Oh, and we're going to dive into that. The psychology of it is just, oh, it's so fascinating. Okay, Lee, have colour trends changed over the years? Their impact, their longevity, and so on? I don't know. Have we always been this obsessed with colour?

Leatrice: I don't think people have been this obsessed with colour. I think that what has happened is even though for many people who are creatives, designers, and artists, and people's whose work involves colour or their hobbies or interests, but I do think what has happened with the proliferation of this global network that we started to hear about in the late '80s and '90s, and also television shows, the home improvement shows. I think what has happened now is that people will look at those shows or go online and they see much more information that's out there about colour, more discussion about colour, and as a result, it's opened up everybody's consciousness and awareness about colour.

I have to tell you, even though we will probably talk about colour in the year further in this conversation, one of the reasons that I started to do the Colour of the Year for Pantone® was because we were getting calls from people, particularly at the end of the '90s. People were emailing or calling Pantone® and asking, "What's the colour of the new millennium?" We understood that we needed to come up with the colour to represent that. They were interested in that.

For me, the fascinating part of it was the psychological impact of that. Why are they asking that question? What does colour represent to them? What does the future hold as far as colour is concerned? I think that doing the Colour of the Year really started an in-depth conversation with people who never even thought about colour before.

I remember my husband coming home from the barber and he's saying to me, "The barber said to me, it's about that time that the Colour of the Year is going to be announced. What do you think the Colour of the Year is going to be?" That's his barber. That's not a designer, interior designer, or artist. This is an ordinary person. We started that conversation about colour. I think that since 1999 in particular, it has become a big hot topic.

Erin: I guess so. What a coup for Pantone® to have you and to be associated so closely now with the colour, the authoritative voice. That's absolutely astounding. You were right there for the birth of it. That's amazing, Lee. Could you have imagined at that time that this would become such a thing?

Leatrice: I didn't realize that it would become such a thing right away, but as the years went by, I could see the momentum building and then again, dispensing itself through population, people that you would never think would have any access to information about the Colour of the Year, the ordinary person on the street that you could have a conversation with, and they would discuss the Colour of the Year.

It was just absolutely astounding that it would have the impact that it had. Of course, I'm delighted by it because if you can get a conversation going about colour, you can find out an awful lot about the person who's sharing that information with you, and you can help them. The bottom line to me is to educate people about colour. That's my passion.

Erin: Absolutely. You're good at it, obviously, to be doing this now for 25 years. That's incredible, in any line of business. To be doing it with something you feel passionate about, what a gift. What a gift.

Leatrice: Yes, this is.

Erin: Is it a bit of responsibility Lee, though? When you go out, I see your fuzzy peach and I will raise you a manicure because I went-

Leatrice: Ooh. I like it.

Erin: -to the manicurist. I said, "I'm going to be talking to this woman who knows from colour," and she says, "It's fuzzy peach for 2024, so I'd better get on it." You can't wear this crown lightly?

Leatrice: Well, no, I don't take it lightly because I realize that a lot of people do listen to it and embrace it. For me, the challenge is for those people who might say, and the colour is Peach Fuzz, they might say, "Oh, I'm not so sure that I'm so crazy about that colour." If you get into a conversation with them about it, you might find out, here I put on my therapist hat, and I say to them, "Well, was there anything in your childhood that you can remember about the colour? Anything negative perhaps that happened to you?"

Sometimes they can answer it right away. Sometimes they have to think about it a while and get back to you, but the answer could be, "Well, you know I remember when I was about four years old, I went to a carnival. It was my first carnival. I ate cotton candy. Oh, and I think it was that colour, and I ate too much of it and got sick on my way home and I've never liked peach fuzzy colours since then."

My challenge becomes, particularly if you're talking to someone who's designing a new product, their personal interest, their personal likes and dislikes, can't come into it. It's a question of, is it going to appeal to your target audience. If peach fuzz is exactly the colour that I feel is going to work for that product, then you've got to wipe out these negatives that are in the back of your mind and think of it from a positive perspective.

My challenge is that happened when you were four years old. Does it have any effect on your life now? Does it impact your life at all? It's an old memory that's stored in your memory bank. It has nothing to do with you as an adult and certainly as a business decision.

Again, in my consultant/therapist hat, I try to lead people down the path of making a positive out of the negative because it is important to look at it objectively. Look at your decisions objectively. I tell my students all the time, it cannot be a personal decision. It has to be a professional decision.

Erin: It's interesting that you talk about therapist/consultant hats that you wear, because I'm sure that every REALTOR® is going, "Yes, me too." All of this just resonates so clearly and people's preferences when it comes to colour and psychology. Let's do a little bit of word association or colour association if we can. Lee, you've already brought up, and I called it fuzzy peach. Peach fuzz. Peach fuzz. I got to get to know this for the year ahead.

Some of the colours and associations that you find most commonly among your students, among your clients, the people that you meet when you're walking down the street, or whatever during your daily?

Leatrice: Well, it's interesting because from a historical perspective, and of course, I do study the history of colour, I have to in order to know where people's thoughts and feelings came from. What were the influences in the world around us when they first formulated their opinions, where the public, in general, formulated their opinions? I do use colour word association studies. I've used them for a number of years, and we can track those studies and see if people's opinions have changed.

Of course, the colour I love to point out all the time, particularly for REALTORS® because you find so much of this colour, whether it's on the outside of the house or the inside of the house, and that is brown as a colour family. I can remember a time when we'd showed people a little swatch of Pantone® brown. Invariably the response would be earth, dirt, or dirty. Now that can be positive, or it can be negative. If they're gardeners and they love that wonderful, rich humus soil, then brown's a good thing.

Or they may come up with chocolate. Obviously, that's a positive response. More often than not, it was about earth and more about kind of dirty. Over the years, what I saw primarily coming from the fashion world, cosmetic world, where a lot of the trends do start, there was this changing attitude about brown. That was, I can remember seeing a Michael Kors dress coming down the runway, sequins and paillettes and sparkle. You never saw this for after 5:00. Brown was strictly a country colour, not a city colour, so to speak. Worn for daytime, never for the evening.

Other designers hopped on the bandwagon, and they used brown in a very dressy way. Of course, when you ask people about brown from the standpoint of beautiful leather does brown leather remind you, even a faux leather that we might be using today that looks like leather has a rich patina on it. If you were to go into a home and you saw grandma's armoire that's been in the family for years and you're never ever going to part with that armoire because it's very special to you or any other piece of furniture. Or your new home has those wonderful wood floors with a nice shiny patina on them.

Somehow people don't think of brown as a presence when it's in a wood tone. They think of it if you mention it as a pigment or as a paint colour. What I think REALTORS® have to to bear in mind, in particular, is how and where a colour is used. What is the context of the colour? Let's not just say, "Do you like brown? Do you dislike brown?" Let's think about it in various ways it might be used in a home, and look in how rich, or how elegant or how earthy, in the case of doing something rustic, earthy would be a good term to use.

It's no longer dirty. We don't think of that wood patina on the floor as dirty unless it has a lot of dog hair on it. We want to get rid of that. We know about that.

Erin: Yes, we do.

Leatrice: Yes, we do, but on the other hand let's think of the positive aspects of it. Even if you were to describe a home to a prospective client, what positive things can we say about that colour? Going back to brown for a moment in the fashion field, again, to supplement Michael Kors came the brown diamonds. That became a big deal. Nobody had ever seen or worn a brown diamond before.

Of course, the movie Chocolat came out about the same time that brown was gaining more momentum. That was a very artsy kind of film and had a lovely connotation. Even Godiva chocolates was no longer meant just for the elite. You could find Godiva in the corner store, in your supermarket. It was a little more pricey than some of the other chocolates were, but certainly worth it.

Your cosmetic companies started to come up with the usage of brown. Now of course, we see it even further supplemented as as a symbol of inclusion, of thinking in terms of all kinds of skin tones, and how some of the beautiful browns and mocha colours, the whole family of brown. We've developed a much different connotation of that colour. As a colour consultant and as a client talking to clients, I have to point out these things because they might be mired in a certain period, arrested in a certain period of their development where they don't think in terms of these newer aspects of brown.

For anyone in the real estate field, I can tell you, when you're talking about a person's home, a home they want to purchase or they want to sell, it gets very emotional. You have to become, in a way, a colour consultant yourself in that they look to you for your advice and your knowledge. For me, knowledge is all important. Training yourself, teaching yourself as much as you can, reading as much as you can about colour, because it's that guidance that helps your client develop confidence in you and your awareness level, and you're making them more aware as well.

Erin: I want to talk about peach fuzz, and this is the way that you described it. You said that this year's colour choice echoes our innate yearning for closeness and connection at colour radiant with warmth and modern elegance. A shade that resonates with compassion offers a tactile embrace, and effortlessly bridges the youthful with the timeless.

I agree with that. Of course, I do because you know exactly what you're talking about, but it seems to be such a lane change from what the colour was in 2023, which was so. It was warm and passionate and just so sexy. Let's talk about what was, what is, and how you get from '23 to '24, Lee.

Leatrice: Well, the most important thing in deciding on the Colour of the Year is what is the global zeitgeist about the colour. Listening to people they're telling us what it is that they want. What are their aspirations? What are their hopes? That's a very, very important points arriving at a colour decision.

That ability to listen, to absorb what is happening in the world around you.

Now, we certainly know there's a lot of concern about our world today, a lot of reasons to be concerned. The Viva magenta, which is an appropriate name for the colour, we felt coming out of COVID, we could feel a little more confident. At the time we were thinking about naming the colour, which is always about six months before we actually do it, we start to gather our, like squirrels, we gather our little nuts and kernels that lead us to the Colour of the Year.

We knew that we were on a pathway to come out of COVID, so people didn't want to be sequestered. They wanted to be with others. They wanted a reason to celebrate. What is more celebratory as a colour than Viva Magenta? Even the sound of it, Viva, it's full of life. It's full of energy. That we felt needed to be infused and now people are telling us, "Okay, we need some quiet time." We need time to ourselves, we need time to communicate with others, but not necessarily let's party, party, party, but let's do it on a more thoughtful level. I think thoughtfulness, kindness, these kinds of words, kept coming back to us again and again and again.

As I said, that's the first area that we look at. Now, of course, from a more practical standpoint, we have to look at what the designers are doing, what they're bringing down the runways, what the cosmetic world is doing, because that's always very indicative of direction. At one point in time, we did not look at industrial design at all, because industrial designers were always at the bottom of the list of designers as to who they would embrace or what they would embrace.

In the world of electronics, in particular, or the computers themselves, it was putty-coloured. Nobody ever did colour until Apple came along, as we know what happened in the late '90s, and they still didn't sell as many as PCs, but I will tell you, nobody who lived through that era will ever forget the impact of those amazing, colourful computers.

People did start to look at industrial design and think, "Oh my goodness, there's an area where colour is being used too, in mundane products we wouldn't have thought of in colour." As a colourist, one of the other areas that I look at, and people always think this is a head-scratcher, I look at what the concept cars are for the future because we know that the vehicle manufacturers have all of this marvelous technology that's available to them to test out new finishes, and new finishes help to bring new colours. We're always looking ahead to see what's on the drawing board.

It's not what's in the showroom today, but what the future holds. That's an area that we look at as well. We look at what's happening in the world of sports. Is the Olympics going to be held next year? What country? What are the flags of the country? What are the uniform colours that might be worn? Anything that might indicate to us where colour is going from a technological standpoint, from a fashion standpoint, graphic design, packaging, anybody doing anything new in packaging that really is different and unusual, what colours are they using?

What about the art world and the entertainment world? Certainly, we don't look at the movies that are coming out today, but we're looking at the movies that are going to be released next year. People all over the world are going to be watching those films. What colours are being used in the film? Are they animated films? I always tell adults, by the way, even if you don't have a kid, borrow one to go to movies and look at the animated films because that tells you a lot. Film animators are so marvelous in looking to the future, and they have the technology available to them now that enables them to put colours up on the screen that are so wonderfully intense.

It doesn't have to be a bright colour. It can be something like a neutral tone that they show us, a nuance of a colour that perhaps we hadn't seen before. Is it a gray? Is it a blue? Is it somewhere in between? We're constantly educating ourselves about direction, but we have all of these areas to look at and to do a lot of homework in.

Erin: Wow. I'm trying, in my mind's eye to picture choosing the colour. You went with Viva Magenta and everybody knew Barbie was coming out in 2023. Was there a tie in there, Lee, or was that strictly luck?

Leatrice: During the time that the movie came out, it certainly was a big deal and it's certainly not totally gone away. We wanted something that would have a bit more adult energy that would be involved in it. We wanted that same excitement. We were on the same track and thinking in terms of a colour family, but we felt that Barbie pink would be perhaps a little bit too obvious and maybe be perceived of as a little too juvenile. We always want our colour to be rather ageless so that it could appeal to all ages again, depending on the context in which it's used.

Erin: When you talk about peach fuzz, and when I brought this up at the nail salon where all the good conversations happen or your husband's barbershop, of course, there's a thought of, "Wow, it's back." Of course, it was a thing, and I remember my mom having throw pillows and a couch and stuff that had some peach in it. Is there a lifespan for colour, Lee? Do you look at it because we see things come back, like shoulder pads in fashion, for example, and different elements in the home as well that come back, like retro appliances or things like that?

Do colours have a lifespan that will come back? Will we see Millennium Blue again? Which of course we can tell now is 24 years old. What do you think of that?

Leatrice: At one point, we could talk about the longevity of a colour. We could rate colour from the standpoint of if you looked at just general likes and dislikes you would find that perhaps orange and some of our colours like bright lime greens and some of the purples were never considered the most popular colours. Invariably blue is at the top of the list. We know that, but there are many variations of blue. What blue are we talking about?

To answer your question, even though you read occasionally or see online or you hear somebody say, "Oh, trends happen so quickly." Actually, I think it's the opposite. I think that trends are lasting longer now in colour than they ever have before. One of the reasons for that is that we're dealing multi-generationally when you're looking at the younger audience, the kids, who were not even living when avocado green, harvest gold were the good colours. Remember that? Nobody wanted to touch those colours in the '80s because we were so inundated with those same colours.

Erin: Traumatized.

Leatrice: Colour traumatized. I like that. I might use that again. Absolutely. Now, what you're seeing is that colours have a longer shell place. I'll point out the yellow-green as a perfect example. Now, when we started to look at green as a Colour of the Year many years ago, obviously we were looking at the social implications of the colour.

If you say nature to people, if you say ecology, if you say environment and you say colour, almost invariably green is one of the first colours that comes to mind. The preservation of the environment, preserving the world around us. Now, we could think in terms of other earth colours, too. Green somehow implies a freshness and implies growth, new growth. Spring comes every year, and we see those new shoots coming out of the ground. We know that's always going to happen.

It gives us a feeling of something that's hopeful with that yellow-green. Now, at one time, it was not as popular a colour. It was considered garish. It's too bright. Now, we look at that colour as being more closely associated with nature and with preserving nature. Again, it's what's happening in the world around us. What social implications, what environmental implications are there, geographic implications? That has to be brought into play as far as choosing a Colour of the Year or--

I work a lot on forecasts, both for the home, for interiors and exteriors. A lot of my clients are clients who are building homes or communities and choosing colours. I have to look at it from the standpoint of not just the geography of the area that we're in, but what are the implications of that colour now? Is it thought of more positively? I would have to say to you that the yellow-greens, I would say in the last 10 to 15 years, have been more wildly popular than any other time in history. A lot of that is because of the connection to the preservation of the universe, if not our planet.

Erin: All right, let's talk about homes. Often when we look at homes, I know in my case, if I'm looking at a whole bunch of them, and that's usually the way it goes, I'll go, "Okay, the blue house or red kitchen house or." I don't think I've ever seen a red kitchen, but who knows? You know what I mean. I will associate the colour with a house. What about people like you talk, you said with builders and that sort of thing and we all associate new homes a lot with builder beige or very light gray or something like that. What is your advice to people who are looking to make an impact but not scream a colour?

Leatrice: That's a very good question. It's a question I get a lot. Obviously, I mentioned the geographic location. You don't want to be the purple lady who paints the house purple if the neighborhood is filled with other earth tones. Obviously, the neighbors aren't going to be very happy with that. Let's say that purple is a favorite colour, obviously, for us it's obvious, not obvious to everyone depending on how fanatic you are about a colour, if you love a colour, like a purple think in terms of the purple family. There are many different shades of purple. Everything from an elegant eggplant or the the French call it aubergine way down to the mauves and the lilacs and the grade of lavender-ish purples. There's a whole range and if that's a colour that makes you happy, there's opportunities to use that colour within the home.

Now, we obviously think of the accent colours, the pillows, the accent carpet, and perhaps something in a painting or a poster on the wall. Many opportunities, a lampshade wherever. I think that it's a really important if you're selling the home to do something that's a little memorable so that when people are looking at a lot of houses as perspective buys you are right. They will leave that home and think, "Oh, that's the house that had the red toaster and those appliances in the kitchen." It makes it more memorable.

I think that there is a case to be made for making the home more memorable so that when the prospective buyer leaves there is something they can tag onto that house that makes them remember the house. Now, it doesn't mean that you've got to repaint all the walls in that particular colour. I like to point out there are other areas as well, like for example the front door for curb appeal. If everybody else has a brown wooden door and maybe you want to make it a little more elegant, maybe your home is a little more traditional and you want to set the stage before you even open that door. Perhaps aubergine is the colour to use on that front door. Perhaps and certainly we know that we want to doll up the front of the house for curb appeal. Perhaps it's in the plants that sit on the front porch or on the front steps. Something that you can do in your landscaping around the outside of the house that will make it more memorable.

Oh, do remember those purple hydrangeas, how gorgeous they were against the house? Those memorable things.

I'm not suggesting that it has to be a bright knock-your-socks-off colour but I will say this about paint and I think it's really important to bear in mind, everybody's mindful about how much is it going to cost me. I don't want to have to pull up the carpeting and replace it. That's going to cost too much.

What about the entryway? What if I did one wall in the entry in that wonderful new Peach Fuzz colour, which is very warm and inviting? I want people to leave my house saying, "Oh, that's a very warm house. That's an inviting house. A feeling of nurturing of possibly using that colour in a bathroom because it throws a good light on the skin.

There are those opportunities to use colour, and it doesn't have to be brilliant colour, that's not what I'm suggesting, but finding a spot, the right place to use it, to make the house more memorable and to leave people with the right impression. As I always like to say, and I've already mentioned, if people leave your home and they say, "Oh, warm, inviting, I felt welcome in that atmosphere," then let's think about that in terms of what we might use in the colours for that house.

Erin: Such great advice, Lee. When we're talking about, say, a development that's got a school nearby and parks, and you're going to aim at the young family, for example, is there such a thing as staging that might appeal to certain buyers?

Leatrice: As far as young families are concerned, I think you need to think in terms of your area. The obvious thing is that there have been a lot of the gray walls, and of course, the black and white and a lot of it's being shown on television shows and inspiration online. The problem with that is that they all wind up looking very much alike. There's that memorability that disappears again.

Now, I say to people that live in a particular home, if you love the country atmosphere and you have decorated in country, now country also conjures up certain ideas. It can be over countryfied with too many home sweet homes all over the walls. At the same time, I think younger people today are a bit more sophisticated in their tastes but at the same time, they may find something memorable in something that they own. Maybe grandma's house was a favorite place to go when they were children and grandma had blue willow china that was in her china cabinet and you want a few pieces of that because it reminds you of your lovely grandma who you dearly love, and you want to introduce that colour scheme, but you don't want to do it so that it's overdone. That's the suggestion I give.

I think that REALTORS® have to become, anyone who is involved in the sale of houses or putting a house on the market, you have to become a colour consultant, too. I mentioned that earlier, and I think it's important to question the would-be buyer or the would-be seller. What is there about your home that speaks to you? What is the message that you would want to give across, particularly in buying a home? What are you looking for? That's the advice that you could give to the person who's putting the house on the market.

Just a few pieces, not a whole wall of grandma's china, but a few touches of that that bring back some of that nostalgia but is not overdone. I never say to people, "Oh, that's so yesterday." Maybe the mauve carpeting was done several years back, but it's still in good condition. Maybe now with the mauve, we're going to use some other tones next to it. Maybe we're going to use some blue-greens instead of the usual kinds of colours that you would use with the mauve.

Here's your educational aspect that I was talking about earlier, of REALTORS® being aware that there's a great deal to learn about colour, and you should get the books, get the magazines, look online, take some colour training. All of this is helpful because the more you know about colour and the more you can pass on to your clients, the more confident they become in your abilities. Now, I'm being redundant, I said it before, but I'm a teacher at heart, and I believe that learning more about a subject makes you more valuable as a salesperson.

Erin: As you talk about therapist, consultant, there's also a little bit of decorator in there, too, because one of your messages that I love too, is that if you want to inject a little bit of colour, like I see you've got the Peach Fuzz on and I picked up a scarf. I haven't put it on yet, but I almost did for you today, Lee. Just eclectic, as you've said.

Again, it's not a magic bullet. It can be an eye dropper of the colour that brings in the feeling of 2024 and Peach Fuzz and what you're trying to, but not trying too hard, to send us a message if I'm getting your message correctly here today.

Leatrice: Yes, absolutely. I like your usage of the word eye dropper and also the word eclectic, because eclectic is a keyword today, meaning that you don't have to be so super conscious of everything being absolutely matchy, matchy. That it's okay to have a more traditional setting and to use a lucite coffee table in front of that wonderful cushy sofa. That you don't have to be as concerned about periods now, but what's more important is getting the essential feeling that you want get across. That you have a room that perhaps is rather dark, doesn't have a lot of light coming into it, small windows, the first thing to think about is how to enlarge that space to make that a more welcoming space.

I will share with you a tip that was given to me by a famous decorator in New York, many years ago. I've never forgotten it. I thought it was so brilliant. That was, if you have a room that's small and it doesn't have a lot of light, the obvious thing is to paint it with a light colour. I will tell you; it doesn't necessarily have to work that way.

Let's say it's a small powder room or a bathroom that you're not going to-- you don't live in that room, you're going to walk in and out, use it, and then come out and do whatever else. Sometimes a bit of drama is something to add too. I have never had a powder room in any home that I've ever had that I don't paint some deep dramatic colour because I know that people are going to walk into that and say, "Wow, I wouldn't have thought of doing a room in this dark colour."

Again, think context, a room that doesn't have any light coming in, but it has electric light so that you can see, let's stretch your imagination a bit and not do just the obvious. At the same time, getting back to the designer who said to me in a small room let's do the ceiling in blue. I thought, "Wow, why?" He said, "Because blue is the sky--

Erin: Wow.

Leatrice: -and because it opens us up to the universe and it makes us feel more connected with the outdoors, the outside." Same reason for using green plants in a room. Not only does it help as far as oxidation is concerned, or oxygenation, I should say, but it also brings in a sense of balance.

Now, there is something called homeostasis in interior design that I think is a really important point. Again, I teach it in my classes. Homeostasis is a fancy word for balance. That is that a room should never be decorated in totally warm colours or totally cool colours because you need a balance. Your temperature needs to be regulated in a given space. If you walk into a room that has mostly warm colours in it, and a lot of people would prefer that in a home, be sure that you bring some green plants in. Be sure there's some touch of blue-green or bluish-lavender, something from the opposite side of the colour wheel because that helps to give you balance. It keeps your homeostasis on a human level at a good point.

Conversely, we don't ever want to do a room that's all done in cool colours because then we're going to start to feel cold. Nobody wants to leave a home and say, "Oh, I felt chilled in that home. It's so cold." That's never a compliment. I'm not saying don't use cool colours because they are. Blue is highly preferred, but what shade of blue are we going to use? Is it going to be a Periwinkle Blue as we did two years ago as the Colour of the Year, very peri that has a little red in it, a little purplish tone, and it warms that blue up.

We don't have to say, "Don't ever use blue because it's cold." We might say, "Let's warm that blue up a little bit. "Again, it's educating yourself to the usage of colour and not overgeneralizing about don't use this, don't use that. Always think of it in context in terms of where the home is, where the space is, how are you using the colour?

Erin: Oh, there's so much wisdom here. Lee, honestly, we could go on. As we wrap up, I think part of the message that we've gotten from you and from Pantone® through the years is that, you know what? There's more than one colour on that paint chip, and it doesn't have to be that Peach Fuzz. It can be any of the ones in the family. I think that's really important to remember too.

You've mentioned this in branding for companies and for REALTORS® who have a company or their own partnership or whatever. If you want to freshen up the colours, not to throw the baby out with the bath water, but maybe to look at another colour in the family and keep your basic colour, but just expand on it, grow, let it blossom.

Leatrice: Exactly. It's a very, very well-made point. You don't want to throw the baby out with bath water. You have equity if you're doing branding in a particular colour, you've established it over the years. You've developed a reputation around it. Nevertheless, we want to freshen it up a little bit to a new pair of eyes. Again, you mentioned that younger generation that might be purchasing that product or that home, whatever it would be.

Let's give it a fresher approach. That's taking a look at the colours you already have and using a nuance of that colour.

There's also something else that I would like to mention, that is that there are a group of colours called crossovers that we see in nature around us frequently. As a result, they are very versatile colours. It's important to think in terms of versatility, and that is something that I teach in my classes as well. As a matter of fact, right now I'm working on a program that we are going to offer online to people who want more knowledge about colour in interiors. They don't want to be overwhelmed. It's not all about colour theory which can make you crazy after a while, but it's the most basic ideas, the most basic concepts about colour. I go back to the idea of educating yourself, keeping yourself aware of what's going on in the world of colour.

Erin: Thank you. Thank you for educating us, enlightening us, colouring our world. We so appreciate your time and your wisdom today, Lee. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, one more thing. I can't let you go. Just while it's us, what's going to be the colour for 2025?

Leatrice: Oh, you know I can't tell you that.

Erin: Oh, I can't ask.

Leatrice: I can't reveal it. Honestly--

Erin: Colour me blushing.

Leatrice: --we're still doing our homework. We're not anywhere near there yet.

Erin: Oh, I'd love to be in on the think tank. Thank you so much for opening everything to us here today. Take care. Well, I tried. Okay. Thanks, Lee. Happy New Year.

Leatrice: Thank you, Erin.

Erin: Okay.

Leatrice: Bye-bye.

Erin: Wasn't she great? Colour consultant extraordinaire, Lee Eiseman. Wow. I was tickled Peach Fuzz to learn that our perceptions of colour can actually change. I absolutely loved what Lee said about eclecticism in the home, so fascinating. If you want to learn more about colour trends and psychology, whether it's for yourself or for your business, Lee's got you covered. She has authored 10 books on the subject and has a handful of courses available through her website, leatriceeiseman.com, and you can find it in our show notes.

REAL TIME is brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association, CREA. Production is courtesy of Alphabet® Creative with tech support from Rob Whitehead. If you want more real estate resources, tools, and insights, just visit us anytime at CREA.ca. If you liked this episode, we hope you did, there's more where it came from. We're inviting you to explore all of our REAL TIME episodes, all bringing you trusted, inspiring perspectives on all things Canadian real estate.

Would you do us a favor? Don't forget to like, subscribe, rate, or review. We really appreciate it. I'm your host, Erin Davis. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll talk to you again soon on REAL TIME.

For all its opportunities, a career in real estate can be demanding.

Continuing our Working REALTOR® series, this episode highlights the importance of finding balance, not just for your health but to reconcile your hard work with a sense of purpose and fulfillment.

Hear from three members of the REALTOR® community who’ve made it their mission to find balance: Crystal Hung, a 2023 Canadian REALTORS Care® Award nominee and the owner of Icon&co.; Peggy Hill, broker and CEO at the Peggy Hill Team; and Darin Germyn, a REALTOR® and leader of the Germyn Group and Director-at-Large with the Canadian Real Estate Association.

Transcript

Erin Davis: This is REAL TIME, the podcast for and about REALTORS®, brought to you by CREA, the Canadian Real Estate Association. I'm Erin Davis, proud to be your host, and I'm so glad you're here because we've got a great conversation for you today in Episode 45. For all its opportunities, working in real estate comes with its share of demands, from long hours to quick turnarounds. Continuing our Working REALTOR® series, this episode highlights the importance of finding balance, not just for the sake of your health, but to reconcile your hard work with a sense of purpose and fulfillment.

You're going to hear advice and insight from three members of the REALTOR® community who have made it their mission to find balance: Crystal Hung, a 2023 Canadian REALTORS Care® Award nominee and the owner of Icon & Co, Peggy Hill, broker and CEO at the Peggy Hill team, and Darin Germyn, a REALTOR® with The Germyn Group and Director-at-Large with the Canadian Real Estate Association.

Welcome to REAL TIME, everyone. We're so thrilled to have you with us this month. We're going to start with a quick round of introductions, who you are, where you're from, and what drew you to working in real estate. We're going to start out, let's start in the east and with Peggy. Hi, Peggy.

Peggy Hill: I'm Peggy Hill. I am located in Barrie, Ontario, in Simcoe County. I have a small team of 60 REALTORS® that I run here. What drew me to real estate initially was that someone lied to me and told me that it's flexible hours and I can make a lot of money doing very little.

Erin: All right. We'll find out what version of the truth that turned into as time went on. Crystal, tell us about yourself.

Crystal Hung: Hello, everyone. I am Crystal Hung. I am from the beautiful British Columbia. I work in the Greater Vancouver market. What drew me to real estate was really a love for architecture and design and business. I grew up with an architect father and my mom was a chef. Between those two professions, I found real estate.

Erin: Here you are owning three brokerages. Wow. What a story. Darin, what's your story?

Darin Germyn: I'm down in beautiful Surrey, British Columbia. Like many, I had a father who was in real estate. Coming from the restaurant industry, came home one day, and he was in the kitchen making lunch and dressed really nice. I had recognized he was on the phone, he had freedom of time, a professional industry, social industry, and just was really intrigued by that. I decided I would, like so many, give it a try and see what happened.

Erin: I think we can all agree there's a unique brand of work ethic that is required in this profession. The question for you all and each of you, what strategies have helped you work smarter, not harder, when you're starting to feel the burn? We will begin with you, please, Crystal.

Crystal: Strategies. I think it's about knowing your constraints. Like any other business, any stores, there is a limited time of which the business is open. As a REALTOR®, as much as we like to be on the go 24/7, we really can't do that. Having a constraint and knowing what makes you happy was really one of the first things I did in my first year. I looked at who I was working with. I drew smiley faces when they made me happy. From that, I really found what was really making me happy and eliminated what was not making me happy.

There's lots of things that don't make us happy. Don't get me wrong. It's just really having the ability to track where things are at and having a conversation with yourself. I think over time, you just find balance and merge your lifestyle with your work.

Erin: Through something as simple as your homemade emojis, you were able to determine that running the business aspect was really what fulfilled Crystal. Am I right?

Crystal: Yes. Very early on, I realized there was this consistency in my business, which was I was really good at doing commercial deals. I was really good with developers. I love talking to my managing brokers and would go up to them and say certain things are not working. I was really drawn to the operational side of things. I think it enabled me to look at real estate as a career holistically. and find my niche in what I do now. It started with the smiley faces.

Erin: Very good. Peggy, what strategies helped you work smarter, not harder, when you're starting to feel the burn?

Peggy: I think in the beginning of my career, I think, like most people, we just work. There's no harder, smarter. There's nothing. We just work. I think the longer you're in this business, the more you learn, and you realize that there are certain aspects of the business that you're not great at and that other people can help you with. However, I think that comes with time, and it comes with patience, and it comes with money to be able to hire the right people to help you.

In the beginning, I honestly don't think I had a lot of balance. I think I was just doing it all and terrified to say no because it was the beginning of my career. Then, I met the right people, I got the right admin staff, I had buyers’ agents that helped me control my time and open windows for me. I think that's where the balance came in after, but it wasn't in the early days, I'll tell you that.

Erin: I found it interesting in learning about you too, Peggy, is that like Darin, you came from a restaurant industry. We know Crystal is steeped in architecture, which of course is a beautiful segue into real estate. You started out in the restaurant business, which can be extremely difficult, and then you segued into real estate. That must have been a really big change for you. All of a sudden, it feels like you're making money, and it's hard to pull back from that.

Peggy: It's very difficult when you're making money because restaurant businesses are not always lucrative. They teach you how to work hard, for sure. However, I got into real estate, and all of a sudden, I'm getting paid for my time. That's the one thing I had to come to terms with that it's okay to accept payment for my time and for my expertise and my knowledge because I was no longer handing people food.

I'm grateful for all the years that I spent in the restaurant business because it taught me people. At the end of the day, we're in the people business. No matter what business you're in, I think the importance is the people.

Darin: Peggy said it really well. Whether it's in the restaurant industry or helping people buy and sell one of their most valuable assets, we have a responsibility to really deliver on the expectations. One of the great ways to deliver on those expectations is to be very clear with our clients about what we can do and what we can't do, and also how we're going to perform our roles as their stewards of their transaction.

Personally, having a team of three helping me behind the scenes, I don't have to do everything. Knowing where my limitations are, and also where my time is better spent to be productive, rather than just busy. As an example, I could check email first thing in the morning, or I could have somebody help me check email first thing in the morning, so I can move on to bigger and better things to really assist my clients.

That all sounds great. Sometimes it takes a lot of willpower to really be able to do that. In our business, we really try to augment technology to help keep us all honest, whether that's software that helps with scheduling, as an example, where people can see directly into your calendar and book things in that only you allow for ahead of time and can't book things in that you don't allow for ahead of time, or whether it's in your voicemail saying that your phone is off at a certain time in the evening, or you're not available on a certain day or text auto responders.

There's so many ways that you can really help keep that balance so you don't come to that point of where you start to feel burnt out and not being able to deliver again on those expectations that are so important to deliver to our clients.

Erin: Name drop what you use for your calendar tech. I think we can all use tips. I'm sure that a lot of people use the one that you use.

Darin: Yes, there's various programs out there. The one that's my favorite is certainly Calendly. I find it the most user-friendly for both sides, not only for the professional side, but also for the consumer as well. Definitely, a great option to check out.

Peggy: I also live and die by my calendar. Everyone knows that I'll do whatever my calendar says. If they want me to show up somewhere, they'll just put it in there. I also want to give people permission as newer REALTORS® to not feel badly about saying yes all the time because we've all done it. We've all said yes. Even now, I struggle with no, but I'm in a very different position than I was when I first got my real estate license. I definitely live, and die, by my calendar.

Sometimes blocking those times out, people don't have the opportunity to put something in there. You don't even know that you've said no. I found that helped.

Erin: Yes. You have voiced a regret that you had back when your three kids were at home. I think that it's poignant to bring that up because so many people are dealing with it on the regular.

Peggy: For sure. I think a lot of times we want to do the best job possible. This job is so time-consuming. When it's your passion, and you want to do right by people, and you want to be the best you can be, it's very difficult to say no. Then you look at your watch, and it's seven o'clock, and you haven't gone home yet. I think if I had to do it over again with three small kids, I think I could have better time-blocked my time.

I could have not taken calls at dinnertime. Just time-blocked time that was specifically for them. Then people would understand. They don't want to understand, but they will understand. They will wait for you. It's really tough as a new REALTOR® to say no and to know that there's going to be more coming your way.

Erin: Crystal, you're also a fan of Calendly. Tell us about that.

Crystal: I'm a fan of technology. We try to automate parts of our business. Not all of it. It's not possible. Calendly, for example, for us, we've used it to help REALTORS® with too many leads and too many calls where they're overwhelmed. It's not only a great tool to allow people to see what your availabilities are, but it's also a great way to automate some parts of the business so you're not on the phone all the time coordinating appointments that really can be done by a tool.

Just to piggyback on Peggy's comments on saying yes, I think a lot of us got here today by saying yes to things that were difficult and challenging. I think there comes a point in time where you have to realize what are some of the things that you're really good at and drop some of the things you're not good at and refer it out and learn from other people.

Erin: You even do something as important as blocking off time for your lunch, and yet you use those two hours to also do something that's enriching for yourself and ultimately for your business, Crystal.

Crystal: Yes, I'm a fan of doing two things at once, like most REALTORS® are. Yes, I started with no appointments. When you start, you have nothing. I book appointments with myself to set my goals in the morning and make phone calls in the late mornings. Then I have two-hour lunch where I invite people to have lunch with me. Really realizing that you can both enjoy your lunch and have meaningful business conversations was one of my first discoveries in having a really balanced life, is just really blocking off two hours for lunch. If I feel like having lunch with myself, I'll do that. If I feel like I have space to meet a client, I will do so. It's worked out.

Erin: Darin, tell us about your philosophy of taking control of your calendar. If you don't have scheduling software, you can call the client and lay it out. Tell us about that.

Darin: Yes, it's really hard sometimes to impose all the great ideas that we want to-- the standards, I guess, that we want to live up to in our business. When the rubber meets the road, sometimes that's easier said than done. There's little things that you can do to still take control of your time. An example of that would be that you can be very proactive in planning your week or your time that you're actually going to spend with clients.

As an example, if a buyer that's actively looking for a property, rather than waiting for them to call you about the newest and greatest home to go take a look, well, why not book a set appointment a day or two out so everyone knows what and when you're going to be meeting. You can go ahead and look at the property then instead of being reactive and maybe being requested to go look at it at dinnertime. Another example of that would be maybe offering different times. You could say, "How is tomorrow at two o'clock," or, "Is Friday at four o'clock better?"

It's amazing when you give people those options, how they will then bend to help you succeed in maintaining your calendar rather than you succumbing to the most available times that they might offer, even if it's just on a whim.

Erin: When we return with Crystal Hung, Peggy Hill, and Darin Germyn talking leadership, whether you're solo or part of a team. Have you pulled up a virtual chair in the CREA Café today? It's the place to catch up on the latest news from the Canadian Real Estate Association. Bring yourself up to speed on legal matters, tech, and all of the elements that keep you on top of what matters to you. Visit creacafe.ca.

Now back to our three guests from the REALTOR® community: Peggy Hill, Crystal Hung, and Darin Germyn on REAL TIME. Let's move it into the talk of leadership now on REAL TIME. Of course, we are keeping in mind that we have individual REALTORS® who are working for themselves and, of course, their clients. About the leadership aspect of the conversation, Peggy, for example, you have more than 50 people who have your name on their business card. How do you balance the responsibility of leading a team with your own professional growth and achievements as a broker and CEO?

Peggy: I guess part of the beauty of having 50 people under my banner is that I'm not actively selling anymore. I think I found my lane, and it was very difficult to step away from the selling, especially to take that leap of faith and to believe that other people can hold what you hold dear, and they can be as great as you are in front of a client. That sometimes is an issue with REALTORS® is we get our ego fed by our clients telling us how great we are. It's not exactly the easiest thing to give up.

However, I just found different passions. Now I'm the rainmaker. That's my responsibility. My responsibility is to be financially responsible. My responsibility is to be the name out in our community and to make sure that I am the person that I say I am. It isn't easy, either, especially being the face of this company. It was never intentional. It's just back in the day, you were only allowed to call your team by your name. It's a lot. It really is a lot, but I love it.

My REALTORS® are my family. It's not hard for me to put their needs in the front and realize this is what they need. Because I'm able to stay back at the office, I can look at trends. I know what's happening with this market. When you're on the road as a working REALTOR®, sometimes you don't even have time to check your phone for your emails. I have the luxury of staying back and being their backup. When we meet, that's what I do.

This is what I tell them. This is what you need to know. This is what's happened. It works well for us. Again, it's having other people's needs ahead of your own and knowing what they need.

Erin: That's a maturity, Darin, that you talk about in terms of what Peggy has to say. What makes a strong leader in your books?

Darin: A strong leader is, to me, really anticipating the needs of the people that you're leading. If you think of the word leading, it stems from the word lead. When it comes to our clients, they're hiring us to lead them towards the result that they're striving for. Our job is to help them get there, as almost like a child-parent relationship where they're just watching you and wanting to know what the next step is and what the next move is because it's unfamiliar territory to them.

Whether it's with your clients or maybe it's with other REALTORS® or members of your team, they're revolving around you because they know that you're going to help get them to the destination that they most want to get to. Leadership comes with a lot of good, and it comes with a lot of challenge as well. It comes with things like sacrifice and added responsibility and added risk. The benefits of that are the rewards, like both personal and in business.

It comes with lots of opportunity, a sense of accomplishment. Being a true leader is just really being that shining North Star for others and giving the example of what's possible, helping them grow and succeed to get to where they want to go.

Erin: Crystal, how about you?

Crystal: I think the term team building is almost too trendy right now. I think it's perfectly fine if one REALTOR® has a team of professionals helping them. That could be notary, it could be inspectors, it could be lawyers, it could be mortgage brokers. Having that team around you as one REALTOR® is so essential. A lot of us are leading teams, but as a leader of my team and my companies, I don't see my job as to do their job. I see my job as really to craft a vision to help them see where we're all going collectively.

That's really what I focus on, is really communicating what that vision looks like. Whether it's a vision for one client selling a home or a developer selling a project, crafting that vision is the first thing I do. When that's done and clear in my head, I spend most of my day conveying that vision to my team.

Erin: You're more of a conductor, arranger, as opposed to saying to the first violinist, "Move, you're not playing those notes exactly as I would like them to be played or as how I would play them." You are instead overseeing the whole symphony to make the company work, whether it's just you, the soloist out there on the stage, or whether it's an entire orchestra.

Crystal: 100%. I think that's the perfect analogy. We do actually talk about theater production a lot in my team. We have to practice, we have to get the lighting right. We have to get, in our case, the furniture right. We have to get our photography right. It's really that organization of chaos that comes together that delivers results for clients. I really don't think that our job is to do everything. If you look at what our clients' needs are, it's over 200 tasks.

There's no way one person can do it all. If you have the space in your heart to lead a team of REALTORS®, and that might be your path, but if you're just one REALTOR® you want flexibility, you don't want to attach to anyone, you could have a partner that you call on demand to work on things together, if it makes sense. It doesn't always have to be a full-time team that works together forever. It's perfectly fine if you just have a part-time team.

Erin: Peggy, when you began, teams weren't really a thing, were they?

Peggy: 20 years ago, when I started selling real estate, there were no teams. There wasn't a roadmap for me to get there or even to think that I wanted a team. I had no aspirations to run a team. I was on the path to just want to feed my kids. What happened was I just started getting too busy. When I would roll my eyes, when the phone would ring, I thought to myself, this is not the experience I want for my clients. This is me dodging phone calls. This is wrong.

After getting some admin support, and that's when I hired my first buyer's agent, then my second, maybe my third. Then I had someone come with me to listing appointments because those are obviously the last things you give up. That person came with me for almost two years and learned everything I said and delivered to the client the way I wanted it delivered. Then that person showed that person. I'm sure there's different ways to do this, but again, I did not have a roadmap on how to get here. I was just trying to do a good job.

Erin: How did it feel, Peggy, when you would sit in front of one of your team members and say, "You made that happen"? How did that feel as someone who used to be the one that could tell themselves, give themselves that pat on the back?

Peggy: In the beginning, when one of your team members sells a home, and you weren't part of it-- because we all know there's a lot of great highs and a lot of low lows in this business. One of the greatest accomplishments is helping somebody buy and sell a home. When you're no longer involved in that, it's a hit to the ego at first, being completely transparent. It was a little tough to get used to, but then when you look at the bigger picture and how you're able--

I truly believe our team, we care a lot. I'm not saying others don't, but we just have a special way of doing things. I feel like the community would suffer without us. Now I can affect so many more people and help so many more people. Again, it did not start off as me wanting a team. Didn't even know what that was.

Erin: When we come back, we talk about this being the season of giving, but for REALTORS®, as you well know, that's a year round thing. We'll explore that. We hope you're enjoying this conversation. Part of our Working REALTORS® series. If you missed an episode, no problem. Make sure you subscribe. There are 44 other great, insightful, and entertaining real-time chats just waiting for you to enjoy, with a whole bunch more in store. Listen on your favorite app. Thank you for making REAL TIME the go-to podcast for REALTORS® in Canada who are on the move and at and on their way to the top.

Just like our guests today, Peggy Hill, broker and CEO of Barrie Ontario's Peggy Hill team, Darin Germyn, a REALTOR® with the Germyn Group in Surrey and director-at-large with CREA, and Crystal Hung, owner of Icon & Co, named to Business in Vancouver's 40 Under 40 list in 2021. While we're talking about helping others, it's a perfect segue into the additional time that you have all three committed in some way or another to broadening your impact, not just on your community, but, Darin, in your case, the country as well, putting more on yourself to give more of yourself.

Darin, you've held various positions on local, provincial, and national boards and committees, currently a director-at-large with CREA. What draws you to the governance side of real estate? How do you balance your own business interests with serving the real estate community-at-large?

Darin: It's a great story. Like so many volunteers have, I stumbled my way into it through the great mentorship, and coming off our conversation on leadership, of some of the great leaders in my life. It is incredibly addictive for all the right reasons. You get to meet incredible people. That's not just from organized real estate, but even people that you might not ever even have access to. Maybe it's politicians or thought leaders or influencers.

Not only that, real estate can be very lonely, and it can also be mentally challenging. By participating in some of these volunteer activities, it forces you to get outside of your own business to come up for some air, go for a break. Then you get to come back with a refreshed mind. I think the most rewarding part of it, though, Erin, is having your thumbprint on the industry. So often we can find ourselves maybe complaining or feeling a certain way about whatever might be going on in the world or a situation.

Sometimes it's maybe things that we feel like we don't have any control over. This is one thing that I can help influence. We're such an interesting industry full of incredible people. There's always things going on in our industry, whether it's government or policy or public perception. I want to be part of making that better. I want to make it better for everybody from coast to coast. It just gives me an opportunity to be a part of creating something great, rather than having something handed to me that I may or may not agree with.

That's the, I guess, the selfish benefit that comes along with being a volunteer. In terms of balancing your own business, you've got to get really clear on what is going to best serve your clients and cut out a lot of the noise. I think oftentimes there can be a lot of noise and a lot of fluff and a lot of things we do that we think we have to do. It's almost the difference between busy work and productive work.

When you can really figure out what makes you effective, for your clients, for the people you're serving, for the results that you want to produce, and you can cut out a lot of that fluff, it's incredible the amount of time you can get back in your day, the amount of leverage that you can create, and also surrounding yourself with people that can help you create further leverage to make sure that you can accomplish your business goals, your clients' goals, your personal goals, your volunteer goals, all of that. It comes with a great team behind you, and it also just comes with the clarity of what really moves the bar and keeps you getting better and being productive.

Erin: Crystal, you won the 2022 REALTORS Care® Award from the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, and you were one of this year's national nominees. Congratulations. Can you talk a bit about the philanthropic side of your life, please?

Crystal: I started volunteering, I think, when I was 12, 13 years old. I really haven't stopped. I've become more public about that work through the work we did during the pandemic. For me, it is one of the ways for myself to stay grounded. I think when we're successful in our career, in our industry, we get busy, and we forget to look at what's outside of our industry a lot. One of the reasons why I continue to volunteer and give back is it fills my soul, but it also keeps me humble.

The humility I see when I'm volunteering in myself and others, I just feel energized. There are days when I'm so tired, but I will go and make sandwiches with the crew and I feel energized after. After a while, your body just wants to do more of that. I think a lot of us just get busy, and we're so afraid to miss a call or miss an offer for 40 minutes. It sometimes just fills the rest of my week. It's so worth it.

Erin: When you tell your clients you're not available because you're volunteering, it is not virtue signaling. It is the truth, and it tells them who you are. That's just about as powerful as any slogan on a bus bench. That's great.

Crystal: I agree. Yes.

Erin: Peggy, have you got anything to add from your experience on this?

Peggy: I can tell you, for me, personally, I grew up very poor as a child and even as early as a young adult, and then I got into this business, and I've been very successful. I'm still so grateful that I can't stop giving. When somebody needs something, they-- I love the fact that in my community, I'm known as a person you come to when you need something. During the pandemic, we would put out dumpsters in people's neighborhoods, and I was known as a dumpster girl during the pandemic because the local dumps were closed.

There was really not much garbage pickups, so people were home trying to clean out their houses. We just put dumpsters out in neighborhoods and just did that. Again, it's a feel-good. It makes me feel good, and it makes me feel like I'm contributing back to the community that's given myself and my family so much that I'm grateful for.

Erin: What a neat idea.

Peggy: Yes. I'm the dumpster girl.

Erin: Back in a moment with our guests, and we'll be discussing the concept that no is a complete sentence. Something that can be hard to come to terms with. We all agree knowledge is power, from links to CREA Café to newsletters for and about you, plus insightful market analysis. Get the information you need to be knowledgeable and powerful. Find it all at CREA.ca.

Now back to our guests from Surrey, Darin Germyn of The Germyn Group, from Barrie, Peggy Hill, broker and CEO of Peggy Hill team, and from Greater Vancouver, Crystal Hung on REAL TIME. You've said yes to so much, and we're grateful to you, Peggy, Crystal, Darin, for making the time and saying yes to us today on REAL TIME, but when did you start being selective with the work that you took on? I'll start with you, Peggy.

Peggy: I think when I realized that I wasn't able to deliver the service that I got into this business to deliver, so when I wasn't able to call the clients back in time. When I didn't feel like I had the time to really devote to each and every single client, I believe that's when something changed for me.

Erin: Crystal, I love how you bring up the issue of vulnerability when you're saying no. I don't think enough of us are vulnerable in our lives and in our business, and that can be hard. How does it work for you?

Crystal: I think vulnerability is a tool, and it's a beautiful tool that once we understand how to express it, it allows people around you and your community to really know your value and respect your time and your boundaries. For me, I see our work as emotional and energy management. When you start to look at a client, and you say to yourself, "How much energy and how much emotion am I going to manage here?"

You ask yourself, do you have it? If the truth is you don't, you have to look at that and see who's actually a better fit for them. For me, it's not about saying a hard no or having a vacation alert to let everyone know I'm away. It's about just having those conversations with your partner, with your team, with your colleague, and your client to let them know you just need a little break and let them know you're away for a facial, or you are walking your dog and having those real conversations. I find it is so powerful.

Erin: You collect the people who respect your no.

Crystal: I do. Over time, they accumulate.

Erin: Yes, they do. Darin, do you have anything to add? How do you ensure you don't bite off more than you can chew, and why is this so important?

Darin: It's so important, Erin. I've always been getting a little confused with taking on obligations in situations where you can't deliver on the expectation that's been set. As an example, in our industry, if you've got a client that has an expectation, let's say, of the price of their home, and you know as the professional in the situation that you're not able to help them achieve their goals.

Rather than live through a transaction that's draining on you and them due to not being able to meet the expectations, and there's a strong likelihood of maybe that home not even selling, why not just avoid this situation at all? You're actually doing them a service because you're spreading the word for the next person that comes in so they can maybe help them meet the expectation, but you're also saving your sanity and your time, and that time can go to your family or volunteering, or helping another client and being there for them. I think it's so important to really help those that you enjoy, those that appreciate your professional opinion and really value it.

Help those who are going to accept you for who you are. We all bring different strengths and opportunities to the business. Embrace your strengths and work on your shortcomings to become the best version of yourself, to help better serve those that you are serving. One of the best ways you can do that is by being very particular with who you spend your time with, not only in business but also personally as well.

Erin: Respect yourself enough to say no. My husband, through my career of radio and some television, there were a lot of extracurricular things that I felt I had to do. It came down to the question, when I was deciding whether to do it, he said, "When we're on our way to the event, are you going to be saying, why did I say yes?" It just puts such a different kind of a filter on it. Put yourself ahead to that point. Whether it's in a business transaction or whether you're getting set to show up and shine to something, how are you going to feel when you're on the way there? That's my two cents worth rounded up to a nickel.

Darin: That's such a great point. If you're not excited to show up, if you're not excited to deliver a result, if you're not excited to make that phone call, you've got to look a little deeper and see what's causing you to feel that way. Maybe you're not the best fit for that situation because you're not as committed to it because your heart is not in it because you don't feel that you can help them achieve what they're looking for. That's okay. You need to be comfortable with that to know that you can't help everybody, but really put your focus, time, and energy into those that you can help.

Erin: Like you said, there could be somebody else who's a better fit for it, so send it their way. Let them have at it, and you'll find something that's better for you. I am so thrilled to have just listened to a keynote speech from each of you. I think it was fantastic, and thank you for inviting me to MC it. Now you have just done your keynotes, Peggy Crystal, Darin, on balancing your personal and professional life. Starting with you, Crystal, what would the last line of your presentation be?

Crystal: I started this career, this business with this concept in mind, which was, you're here to sell trust, you're not here to sell real estate. Trust is everything in real estate.

Erin: Nothing else matters. Peggy, what are your words of wisdom that you're leaving us with in this keynote speech?

Peggy: No pressure.

Erin: None at all.

Peggy: I think it goes back to our core values. Our slogan as a team is real people, real service, real results. I believe when you're being real, that's the best part of you. You check in with yourself, and that's what we live and die by over here. Just be real. Be real with your clients, be real with yourself, and nothing but good things will happen.

Erin: Last word to Darin, before we turn off the lights in this virtual auditorium, last lines of your keynote speech.

Darin: Well, how do you follow up with something that sounds intelligent when Peggy and Crystal had such good answers? I'm going to try my best. I'm going to steal a line from my coach and a mentor of mine, Richard Robbins. When it comes to finding balance, I think it's important for the listener to remember that it's your business. That means it's your game to play. You get to decide the rules.

It's your choice and your prerogative to create a business that supports the life that you want to live and help you become the person that you want to be. If you keep that in mind, you will be successful, and you'll find the balance in your life that you're looking for.

Erin: Thank you. Thank you, Darin. Thank you, Peggy. Thank you, Crystal. We are all giving you a standing ovation great keynote, but more importantly, just a super conversation today. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and your insight, and thank you for saying yes.

Peggy: Thank you.

Crystal: Thank you, Erin.

Darin: Thank you so much.

Erin: You take care. Thank you so much for joining us for Episode 45 of REAL TIME, a production of Alphabet® Creative. Rob Whitehead at Real Family Productions is our sound engineer. I'm your host, Erin Davis. We're so glad you joined us here. A reminder to subscribe so you don't miss one episode. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you here next time on REAL TIME.