The Real Estate Sessions

You think you can beat your competitors by simply offering more services than they do to their customers, right? But that’s until you hear this conversation with Rick on the Real Estate Sessions podcast today. In his words, “Don’t fool yourself for a minute to think you’re gonna do more than the average agent and everything in real estate.” Instead, offer little but offer it best. Do what you can with sincerity, responsibility, and discipline.

Rick is a US Navy veteran who also worked with law enforcement – a position he felt completely out-of-place with – before venturing into real estate. Though joining the Navy was never a conscious choice, it taught him a bunch of lessons on responsibility, discipline, and honesty, which he uses in his life and business even after becoming a real estate investor today.

In today’s episode, Rick explains what he’s learned about real estate investing, including marketing analysis, work habit creation, customer service, and the huge importance of confidence in the industry. He reaffirms that the whole real estate market could bring down your confidence at times, and that what you need to do then is anything that would gain you your real self back. You’ll learn about Rick’s foolproof 4 BASIC stats to know about the state of the market at any given time, among other things. Tune in to hear more about it!

Success Clues:

1. If the markets go down, the first message you need to do is to learn about the market status thoroughly. You can’t just kind of go with your gut.
2. Your company’s service department is more important than its sales wing.
3. Your presentation matters as much as your work in real estate. Make sure it’s a good one!
4. Do anything you can to maintain your confidence as a real estate agent. It’s the first thing you need to be successful here.

Meet The Guest!

Rick DeLuca is a Western Regional Owner at EXIT Realty. He has owned the Rick DeLuca Seminars for 34 years now!

Time Stamps

[00:24] Intro

[01:03] Meet Rick Deluca

[02:07] Rick’s experience growing up in LA

[06:49] Rick’s experience serving in the Navy

[08:04] Getting into the Navy – Rick recollects how mature/ informed he was about his job and its relevance when starting

[10:23] On deciding to do something different and how the decision turned out

[12:19] Getting into law enforcement (becoming a detective at 27) and then into real estate: the journey

[17:03] Why your service department is more important than the sales department

[17:54] Achieving success in real estate + the factors that enabled him to do that

[20:02] The toughest part about a hot market is if you’re not careful, you’ll end up creating bad work habits.

[21:24] Do more than the average agent after identifying what the average agent does

[23:32] Rick says the quality of your listing presentation, or the physical packaging of your presentation matters incredibly in your real estate deals. The higher the quality, the higher the perceived value of the content and the sender (you).

[24:41] Delivering your listening presentation to the client’s place of employment rather than their home

[25:42] Rick’s period working as a trainer/coach/educator

[26:50] Getting national recognition for high company productivity

[28:31] Do fewer things than most agents do but do whatever you do, well

[30:14] The number one thing that happens in the real estate market is it wreaks havoc on your confidence

Dani Vanderboegh is a distinguished journalist and advocate in the real estate sector, currently serving as the service editor at Inman. With a background in writing and journalism, and a master's degree from the Missouri School of Journalism, Vanderboegh has significantly influenced real estate journalism and advocacy. Her role at Inman involves transforming industry news into serviceable content for readers, aiding them in their business operations. Vanderboegh's Real Tea column, which cleverly intertwines real estate and reality TV, has gained considerable popularity, offering a unique and entertaining viewpoint on the industry. Despite personal challenges, including being wheelchair-bound since 19, Vanderboegh's determination and resilience have led to remarkable professional and personal achievements. Join Bill Risser as he hosts Dani Vanderboegh in the upcoming episode of The Real Estate Sessions podcast, where they delve deeper into her impactful journey in real estate journalism and advocacy.

(00:00:22) "My job is to figure out how we can take what's going on in the industry, what's going on in the news, and make it serviceable for the reader to use that information in their business." - Dani Vanderboegh

(00:02:56) "Our super loud politicians don't necessarily echo the sentiments of the entire state." - Dani Vanderboegh

(00:12:07) "I think that there's this misconception that you're in a wheelchair now. You can't do any of the things that you did before, and your life is virtually over. And that happened when I was 19. And since then, I've had a career, stopped that career, got my master's degree, started a new career. I'm scuba dive certified. I've done a half marathon. I've had a baby. There's very little that I feel like I haven't accomplished. It just doesn't look the same way as it did when I was 19." - Dani Vanderboegh

(00:20:50) "When I had my daughter, she was premature. She came at 26 weeks and four days, so it was just over six months, and I did not have a ton of vacation time saved up. And they allowed my coworkers to donate time so that I wouldn't be working a whole lot of time. And he donated something like 180 hours so that I would get paid while I was taking care of my daughter in the NICIA." - Dani Vanderboegh

(00:31:18) "There's so many people who just can't they feel they can't talk about it. There's contracts with Nar, there's contracts with other know, when you look at cases like this outside of real estate, there's often a hefty sum paid out and there's usually non disclosures involved and there's a bajillion reasons that women aren't able to speak about these abuses." - Dani Vanderboegh

(00:35:06) "Create content. And by content. I don't mean vanity content. I mean content that will help your clients through the process, that will help them know who you are and what you do to help them. And then the second part of that is push it out to the world. Make sure you're on the socials pushing out your content, showing the value you offer, and really just double down on doing those things. Make video, make articles. Push it out there. Get your face out there. Be the realtor they know." - Dani Vanderboegh

Dani Vanderboegh is a highly accomplished journalist and advocate in the field of real estate. As the service editor at Inman, she has made a significant impact on real estate journalism and advocacy. With eight years of experience at Inman, Dani is responsible for handling service journalism related to the real estate industry. Despite facing challenges, including being in a wheelchair since the age of 19, Dani has achieved remarkable success in her career. She holds a master's degree in journalism from the prestigious Missouri School of Journalism and has a background in writing and journalism. Dani's determination and resilience have not only led to professional accomplishments but also personal achievements, such as becoming a mother and completing a half marathon. Her dedication to her work and her ability to overcome obstacles make her a true inspiration in the field of real estate journalism and advocacy.

Links to Dani and Inman content -

The disability series I mentioned:

What is ableism? 2 'disabled' women sound off

26% of your office is touched by disability. Are you prepared?

Welcome home! How to help buyers navigate accessibility

Your clients have disabilities. Here’s how to market to them

Real Tea clips: https://www.inman.com/tag/real-tea/  

On-stage/event clips:

5 takeaways from 'The Great Door Knocking Debate' at ICLV

Top women real estate leaders spell out sexual harassment

‘Together we’ — How women in real estate are working to thrive

Raise your hand, please! Here's how to get involved at Inman

Dani’s clips in general: https://www.inman.com/author/dani-vanderboegh/ 

What we’ve published on NAR thus far:

• Agents: Kenny Parcell's resignation is the 'beginning' of fixing NAR by Marian McPherson
• NAR President Kenny Parcell resigns after NYT exposé by Marian McPherson
• 'Just being boys': Let's talk about NAR's problematic culture by Rachael Hite
• 5 massive NYT takeaways NAR can't escape by Christy Murdock
• NAR's sexual harassment spin isn't fooling anyone. Here's why by Christy Murdock
• NAR harassment, retaliation and evasion revealed in Times exposé by Andrea Brambila and Jotham Sederstrom
• Sexual harassment claims against NAR may not be settled just yet by Bernice Ross
• Top women real estate leaders spell out sexual harassment by Marian McPherson
• NAR hunkers down as agents push back: The Download by Christy Murdock
• Is this really who we 'R'? by Valerie Garcia
• Woman withdraws case accusing NAR, Kenny Parcell of harassment by Marian McPherson
• Women make up 66% of NAR's membership. Is it serving you? by Bernice Ross
• NAR pushes back on harassment claim amid growing agent backlash by Jim Dalrymple II, Andrea V. Brambila and Dani Vanderboegh 
• Real estate leadership is in hot water: The Download by Christy Murdock
• Suit accuses NAR and its president of sexual, racial discrimination by Jim Dalrymple II

DESCRIPTION

Rick Gonzalez is a seasoned real estate agent based in Florida's panhandle, with a unique focus on serving military members and their families. Born in New York and raised in Puerto Rico, Rick's father's service in the Air Force during the Vietnam War instilled in him a deep respect for the sacrifices made by military families. This, coupled with his own experience serving in the Navy, has given him a unique perspective on the challenges faced by military families, particularly when it comes to real estate. Rick leverages his military background and customer service experience to provide unparalleled support to military families, helping them navigate the complexities of real estate while their loved ones are deployed. His dedication to serving VA buyers and sellers and his commitment to building long-term relationships with his clients underscore his passion for his work. Join Bill Risser and Rick Gonzalez on this episode of The Real Estate Sessions podcast to learn more about Rick's unique approach to real estate.

DETAILED OUTLINE

00:00:00 - Supporting Deployed Military Members

Supporting Deployed Military Members is a topic that Rick Gonzalez, a real estate agent, is passionate about. With a background in the military himself, Rick understands the unique challenges faced by military families when they are deployed. He aims to be a buffer for military members, ensuring that their families have support and assistance with any housing-related matters. Rick's focus is on VA buyers and sellers, as well as families who are PCSing (Permanent Change of Station) in and out of the area. He strives to make sure that military members can focus on their duties without worrying about their families' well-being. By providing guidance and being a go-to resource for the families, Rick helps alleviate stress and allows military members to concentrate on their mission. Overall, Rick's dedication to supporting deployed military members and his commitment to helping people make him a trusted and valued agent in the real estate industry.

00:02:31 - Moving from England to Florida

Moving from England to Florida at the age of 15, Rick Gonzalez shares his unique experience of adapting to a new country and leaving behind his British accent. Born in Holland to an Air Force father and a British mother, Rick spent his childhood in England before his father's retirement brought them to Florida. Initially, Rick's British accent caused quite a stir among his classmates at Choctaw High School, with many mistaking him for being from Australia. Determined to fit in, Rick quickly shed his accent, surprising everyone with how swiftly he lost it. Despite the challenges, Rick fondly remembers his time in England, living with British families and attending British school. His journey from England to Florida ultimately led him to a career in real estate, a path he never anticipated while growing up.

00:08:44 - Disqualification from the Marine Corps

Disqualification from the Marine Corps can sometimes lead individuals to unexpected paths, as seen in the case of Rick Gonzalez. Despite his initial desire to join the Marines, Rick's dreams were shattered when he was disqualified due to his asthma. This setback prompted him to explore other options, ultimately leading him to join the Navy instead. Rick's journey took an interesting turn when, dejectedly leaving the Marine Corps recruiter's office, he was approached by a Navy recruiter who offered him an alternative. Rick seized the opportunity and embarked on his military career in the Navy, undergoing basic training in Orlando. This unexpected twist in Rick's story highlights the resilience and adaptability that can arise from unforeseen circumstances, ultimately shaping the course of one's life.

00:14:46 - Real Estate Career

Looking for a fresh start after the BP oil spill, Rick Gonzalez found himself considering a career in real estate. With the money he received from the spill, he decided to give it a shot as a last-ditch effort. Rick had previously worked in various industries, including door-to-door sales and the restaurant business, which equipped him with valuable soft skills for dealing with people and conflict. Despite starting from scratch, Rick's charismatic personality and determination helped him navigate the real estate industry successfully. Today, he is known for his expertise and ability to connect with clients, making him a trusted agent in the field.

00:19:54 - Handling Hurricanes

Handling Hurricanes: Real estate agent Rick Gonzalez shares his approach to handling conversations about hurricanes in Florida. With a focus on helping people rather than sales, Rick aims to be a reliable resource for his clients during hurricane season. He provides information on hurricane preparation and has even written a blog on the topic. Despite living in an area prone to hurricanes, Rick mentions that these conversations surprisingly don't come up frequently. He attributes this to the fact that many of his clients, who are military personnel, are already well-trained in emergency preparedness. Overall, Rick's goal is to ensure that his clients feel supported and can focus on their safety during hurricane events.

00:28:43 - Real Random Podcast

Real Random is an exciting new podcast venture by Rick Gonzalez, inspired by the format of the popular Smart List podcast. With three hosts and mystery guests, Real Random aims to delve into the personal stories and experiences of individuals in the real estate industry. The podcast will provide a unique perspective, going beyond the tactics of real estate and exploring the person behind the profession. Rick has carefully selected fellow agents from different parts of the country to ensure a diverse range of guests and demographics. Real Random is set to launch with at least ten episodes, offering listeners an hour-long deep dive into the fascinating lives of real estate professionals.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 - Rick Gonzalez

But so that's what I try to do. I try to make sure that they understand that, hey, I've PCs. I know what this is like. I had a family like this is this is not uncommon to me. And let them know that, look, I'm going to be your family's goto for whatever they need so you can focus on what you got to do to get home safe. And you don't have to have those phone calls about the frantic family member back here. They're saying, hey, how do we pay the mortgage or owe the insurance? And trying to know that role as well.

00:00:34 - Bill Risser

You're listening to the Real Estate Sessions podcast. And I'm your host, Bill Risser, executive Vice President, Strategic Partnerships with Rate My Agent, a digital marketing platform designed to help great agents harness the power of verified reviews. For more information, head on over to Ratemyagent.com. Listen in as I interview industry leaders and get their stories and journeys to the world of real estate. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 361 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend today. Rather than a remote recording over the Internet, I'm actually sitting down with my guest in the halls prior to day two of the Tom Ferry Summit in Dallas. On this episode, I'm thrilled to be talking to Rick Gonzalez of the Gonzalez Group, powered by Real Brokerage, LLC. Rick is up in the panhandle of Florida. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about his military service and as an agent, how he continues to serve those in the military with their real estate needs. We're going to have a great time. So sit back, relax, enjoy, and let's get this thing started. Rick, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:38 - Rick Gonzalez

Hey, thanks for having me, Bill.

00:01:39 - Bill Risser

So I owe you apology. We met via inman but also via the industry syndicate and podcasting and all that stuff. And to have you on as a guest this late is flat and embarrassing.

00:01:53 - Rick Gonzalez

Just having the best for last. What's what I keep telling myself, thanks.

00:01:57 - Bill Risser

For bailing me out. Thanks for bailing me out. Look, you've listened to the podcast before. I have a very routine setup, but I love to start at the beginning and with you. I know you've been in Florida a long time. I see that you go back to early 2000s. You were in Florida working, doing some things, and I know you served in the Navy. Thank you for that.

00:02:16 - Rick Gonzalez

Right.

00:02:17 - Bill Risser

But let's talk about the beginning. Were you born and raised in Florida? Are you a native?

00:02:22 - Rick Gonzalez

No, I graduated high school in Florida, but I didn't get to Florida until 89, so I was 15.

00:02:31 - Bill Risser

Okay.

00:02:31 - Rick Gonzalez

And I actually grew up well, we'll go back further. I was born in Holland.

00:02:36 - Bill Risser

Oh, okay.

00:02:37 - Rick Gonzalez

So my dad was Air Force, so stationed in Europe a lot. So he had met my mom in England. Then he had gotten transferred, and so I was born in Holland, and we immediately went back to England after I was born. So I was raised in England until I was 15, so I had a really cool British accent when I moved here.

00:02:56 - Bill Risser

Wow. So your dad serves there's an Air Force base that he worked at, was he no, no.

00:03:02 - Rick Gonzalez

There was multiple Air Force bases where we lived. It was Bentwaters Air Force Base in Woodbridge. Which Woodbridge for the UFO nuts out there. There's lots of UFO activity in the Woodbridge area.

00:03:12 - Bill Risser

Okay.

00:03:13 - Rick Gonzalez

But yeah, Rendelsham forest for the UFO people out there. Look up that one. Rendelsham Forest. So I grew up off base because my mom was British, and so I went to British school, did the whole Harry Potter, the blazer and the tie, the know, the houses in schools, did all that. I was a prefect at one point, and then my parents split, and my dad moved back here to retire, and I stayed in England for a while with my mom until yeah, 88, my dad came back and said, hey, come to Florida.

00:03:54 - Bill Risser

I can't believe I don't know that about you. One, there's not a lick of an accent.

00:03:58 - Rick Gonzalez

And that's why gone. That's why right. There's no accent, so people don't know.

00:04:02 - Bill Risser

To ask, is your mom over still in English? She here in the States now.

00:04:06 - Rick Gonzalez

Everyone's passed. Mom passed a number of years ago.

00:04:10 - Bill Risser

Okay.

00:04:12 - Rick Gonzalez

But yeah, you can imagine coming to northwest Florida, the south, with a British accent. My first days of school for the locals, if anyone locals listening, choctaw High School. Go big green. For the first days of school, there's that terrifying moment when the teacher's like, mr. Gonzalez, can you read the next paragraph? And you're sitting in the back, and as soon as you start talking, everybody in the entire classroom turns around and stares at you like, Where did that come from?

00:04:43 - Bill Risser

Right.

00:04:44 - Rick Gonzalez

And then I became the new kid from Australia.

00:04:46 - Bill Risser

Oh, okay. For some reason, it was going to be Aussie, not not English.

00:04:50 - Rick Gonzalez

Nobody knew the accent. They assumed I was from Australia.

00:04:53 - Bill Risser

That's awesome.

00:04:55 - Rick Gonzalez

So some of the girls loved it, the boyfriends, not so much. There was a few scuffles, and that definitely gave me some motivation to start to lose the accent as quickly as possible. So through some effort, my guess is.

00:05:09 - Bill Risser

You could whip it out whenever you want.

00:05:11 - Rick Gonzalez

No, you'd be surprised.

00:05:12 - Bill Risser

Really lost it.

00:05:13 - Rick Gonzalez

Yeah, you'd be surprised how quickly I lost it and it stayed gone.

00:05:17 - Bill Risser

Okay.

00:05:17 - Rick Gonzalez

Yeah.

00:05:17 - Bill Risser

What part of England did you live in?

00:05:19 - Rick Gonzalez

The Southeast. So it's Suffolk. Yeah.

00:05:22 - Bill Risser

There's, down towards the channel.

00:05:24 - Rick Gonzalez

Felixdale Port is near us. It was a place called oh, actually, it's right outside of Ipswich. Martlesham Heath. It's a big plan community.

00:05:32 - Bill Risser

Wow.

00:05:33 - Rick Gonzalez

Yeah, it was really neat. I enjoyed it, living with all the British families and going to school.

00:05:39 - Bill Risser

Yeah. They sort of adopted you, right? It was kind of like yeah, well.

00:05:43 - Rick Gonzalez

Because my likes and my mom was British. She was an Er nurse. Yeah. I didn't really have an American accent, so the only thing that kind of tipped them off that I was not one of theirs was the flamboyant American clothing of the big multicolored bubble jackets.

00:06:03 - Bill Risser

You were paying attention to what was happening over in the US.

00:06:06 - Rick Gonzalez

Yeah, well, because we would shop on base. We were one of only two kids in my school that had access to the commissary.

00:06:13 - Bill Risser

I love that. That's cool. So you get over to Florida, you do high school, and you end up going into the Navy. So talk about that process. I mean, what led you there?

00:06:24 - Rick Gonzalez

What was that like? Yes. The Dutch thing and the British thing come into play here. So on my 16th birthday, I got a letter from the Dutch consulate that I was going to be drafted into the Dutch Navy. Which caught everybody off guard.

00:06:41 - Bill Risser

Right.

00:06:42 - Rick Gonzalez

Didn't realize that just because I was born there, they could do that.

00:06:46 - Bill Risser

Like automatic dual citizenship for you. Is that okay?

00:06:49 - Rick Gonzalez

So at some point I really had three. I was Dutch, British and American. And so quickly we had to have a conversation like, well, what are we going to do? Well, we obviously we have to denounce the Dutch citizenship because I'm not going to be exported back to Holland.

00:07:05 - Bill Risser

Nothing wrong with the Dutch.

00:07:06 - Rick Gonzalez

No. For any of our Dutch listeners. We love you guys. But the plan, I think for me in my head with my dad being know, he was always this larger than life hero looking guy, right. He was always in uniform. He was my hero. So I always wanted to go into the military. Our neighbor in Florida was an Air Force pilot, so I was groomed for the Air Force. And then, I don't know if you remember, there was this little movie back in the mid 80s, top Gun.

00:07:36 - Bill Risser

Oh, you know, I lived in San Diego at the time.

00:07:39 - Rick Gonzalez

Yeah. Okay, so you're familiar. Very familiar. And so I had seen that in the movie theater as a kid, and I was like, wow, those Navy pilots are pretty badass.

00:07:48 - Bill Risser

Yeah, their motorcycles are awesome.

00:07:50 - Rick Gonzalez

Yeah, right. They get all the and so it was kind of perfect. Well, in high school we had so, you know, it was Air Force ROTC, so I was already getting used to wearing the Air Force uniform. And then in walks the Marine recruiter, Staff Sergeant Williams. Never forget this guy. And he asked everyone what they want to do. I said, I want to be a pilot and join the Air Force. He says, well, you know, Marines are pilots, too. And I said no. I didn't know. And he know, we go through Navy flight, says, you know, they're the best of the best of the best. So I was hooked so I started to the process to join the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps poole in high school, we would go and train with the staff sergeant on weekends and everything. And then when I went to the recruiter's office, he was a little too thorough with his background check and found out I had asthma, and they disqualified me from the Marine Corps.

00:08:44 - Bill Risser

Wow.

00:08:45 - Rick Gonzalez

So in Navy fashion, as I was leaving, very dejected from the recruiter's office, I hear, hey, because all these recruiters offices are all right side by side. So I'm walking out, hey, you still want to go in the military? I was like, yeah. He's like, Come here. And so two weeks later, I was off to the Navy.

00:09:04 - Bill Risser

Wow. Where did you do your training, your basic training?

00:09:08 - Rick Gonzalez

Orlando.

00:09:08 - Bill Risser

Okay.

00:09:09 - Rick Gonzalez

RTC.

00:09:09 - Bill Risser

Orlando right there.

00:09:11 - Rick Gonzalez

Yeah. We were one of the last classes through there in 94.

00:09:14 - Bill Risser

Is that gone now? Yeah. A lot of closures for a lot of bases.

00:09:17 - Rick Gonzalez

Yeah. The only one they have now is up in Great Lakes or Great Mistakes, as we call it.

00:09:21 - Bill Risser

And also San Diego still has one.

00:09:24 - Rick Gonzalez

Not a boot camp. Yeah, they used to have three, so it was always like a roll in the dice to see which one you'd go to. And they tried to send me to Great Lakes, and I was like, hey, look, I'm a Florida guy, and it's February. I'm not going to yeah. And so I went to Orlando.

00:09:40 - Bill Risser

I wanted to ask you a real quick sports question. You know, I ask a ton of sports. Nothing I hear nothing in your past about know Yankees yet. How the hell do you become a Yankee fan growing up in England and.

00:09:56 - Rick Gonzalez

Living in well, like everything else in my life is my dad. My dad's side of the family is from Puerto Rico via New York, so he moved from Puerto Rico to New York when he was very little.

00:10:09 - Bill Risser

Okay.

00:10:10 - Rick Gonzalez

And my whole family lived up there before until he joined the Air Force and went to Vietnam. He was huge Yankees fan. Big New York. Sometimes people say they hear it in my accent just a little bit, just from being around him. So it's I would say the same thing.

00:10:29 - Bill Risser

I would think he might be from the Northeast. When you get going, when we're having a conversation, you kind of get rolling. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Somehow I always have to get my guests. We have to leave this. I could stay here for another hour. There's lots of questions. Like Gonzalez in England. That's different. There's probably not a lot of Gonzalez's in Great Britain. Okay. Yeah.

00:10:48 - Rick Gonzalez

It was weird growing up over there because in my whole school, there was me and there was one black kid, and that was so but that's all I knew until I got over here. And then there's shorts and flip flops and girls, and it's a different life over here, Bill.

00:11:05 - Bill Risser

Yeah. You're okay with it?

00:11:07 - Rick Gonzalez

Yeah, I've adapted.

00:11:09 - Bill Risser

Especially the Emerald Coast.

00:11:10 - Rick Gonzalez

I've managed.

00:11:12 - Bill Risser

All right, so let's we got to get you in real estate.

00:11:15 - Rick Gonzalez

What pops up?

00:11:16 - Bill Risser

What happens there that, you know, this is going to be the way for me.

00:11:20 - Rick Gonzalez

So it's another long story. I never thought

We head back to Jan 19, 2021, for this Real Estate Sessions Rewind with Sean Carpenter of Coldwell Banker and Sean Speaks, LLC. One of the most popular guests on the podcast, This was the first episode where I brought a guest back on to catch up. This has now evolved into Short Cut Sessions as I catch up with previous guests. Thanks for always helping other innovate, Sean!

Enjoy!

Our guest has been recognized as one of Inman News 100 Most Influential People in Real Estate and lives by the philosophy to build relationships, solve problems, and have fun! Our guest is Sean Carpenter, CEO and Founder of Sean Speaks, and a Coldwell Banker agent in Columbus, Ohio. I am thrilled to have him back on the podcast after being one of The Real Estate Sessions’ first guests. 

In this episode, join Sean and me as we dive into the world of training and presentations as Sean shares advice for aspiring speakers. We also discuss some great Inman stories and the changes that Sean has implemented during the global pandemic.

Top Takeaways: 

• Sean Carpenter’s Advice for New Agents
• “The stock answer would be to build relationships, solve problems, and have fun. My new answer for this new episode is to make it a point to listen to every episode of The Real Estate Sessions because if you do that, you will get a mixture of some of the coolest people in our industry.”
• “Anyone that is not in the industry who Bill has brought on, you can learn from the podcast as well. What they talk about, how they grew, and where they’re from. Probably my favorite part of every episode, Bill, is when you get the backstory of people.” 

“I started in my branch office doing ‘How to Do an Open House.’ I started to get invited by our Director of Training at the time to come up and teach that little segment of new agent training on open houses. I started getting good, and people started asking more questions. What was half an hour visit turned into an hour and a half visit.” – Sean Carpenter [13:25] 

“Attention is incredibly important. If you want to grow, having attention is huge. I always talk about the attention economy – on the other side of attention is trust. If I can get your attention, hopefully, I can earn your trust, or if I have your trust, I can get your attention.” – Sean Carpenter [37:25] 

Episode Highlights:

[00:30] Intro 

[00:56] Meet Sean Carpenter – Sean Speaks 

[01:55] The StareDown Podcast 

[03:49] The Buzz Around Genuine Relationships 

[05:48] Who Is Sean Carpenter?

[08:30] The King of Presentations 

[12:55] Sean’s Advice to Someone Who Wants to Be a Speaker 

[15:03] Inman Ambassador 

[19:01] The Story of O’Hara’s 

[23:11] Life’s Standstill During the Pandemic 

[26:40] Sean Speaks Goes Virtual 

[29:35] How Sean Has Been Thinking Outside the Box 

[35:40] Sean’s Thoughts and Insights on Clubhouse

[42:26] Sean’s Advice for New Agents 

[45:15] Connect with Sean 

[46:35] Closing Thoughts 

[47:13] Outro 

Episode Notes: 

Joining us today is Sean Carpenter, CEO, and Founder of Sean Speaks. In Episode five of The Real Estate Sessions, Sean appeared as one of the first guests over five and a half years ago. In this episode, Bill and Sean catch up and discuss how the nation’s current changes have impacted the real estate world. 

Sean Carpenter graduated from the University of Florida before becoming a golf pro working at a resort in Brooksville, Florida. Sean moved back to his home state to work for a private golf club in Cleveland, Ohio, before leaving the golf business and returning to his hometown. Back in Columbus, Ohio, Sean became a beer salesman for Coors Distributor. Eventually, Sean Carpenter found himself at the Ohio State University campus working as a beer salesman, where he enjoyed the relationships he built and the product he sold. 

This work led Sean Carpenter to the real estate industry, where he became an agent for four and a half years before becoming a branch manager. Sean found that he loved the coaching and training aspect the most in his position and decided to take a position as the Director of Training for the Central Ohio area for over ten years. Spending his time in front of a class of agents, Sean found his passion for speaking and decided to retire from the director of training role and jump back into sales. Sean founded his company, Sean Speaks, and travels national talking to real estate audiences big and small. Sean continues to actively work with the buyers and sellers in Central Ohio to understand the current markets and hold credibility for his audiences on the topics he is discussing. 

Having around fifty detailed presentations, Sean can personalize and modify the presentations according to the audience he is speaking to. Sean found himself inspired by a mentor’s storytelling style and used the advice to lead him to his speaking career. Sean Carpenter works under his philosophy to build relationships, solve problems, and have fun! Sean’s advice to someone who aspired to be a speaker is to get in front of the room more. The more that you present, the better you will get at doing so. Take opportunities as they come and know that a small audience is just as important as larger crowds. 

Before Coronavirus hit the nation, Sean Carpenter was spending around seventy-five to one hundred nights on the road with Sean Speaks traveling all over the country. Sean compares the global pandemic’s impact to driving down the interstate and realizing that the traffic you see ahead is at a standstill. Weeks and months went by with the world not returning to normal; people learned to improvise and pivot to continue to do the things they needed to be accomplished. Sean highlights the importance of the real estate industry as an essential trade as it contributes significantly to the economy. 

With the pandemic, Sean explains he still had to find ways to continue to build relationships, solve problems, and have fun doing it. To keep Sean Speaks going, Sean began to use Zoom for conferences, presentations, and training sessions. Sean even began to reach out to companies who he previously did speaking for to offer a virtual discussion he calls ‘How to Keep in Touch When You’re Not Supposed to Be Touching.” He has presented this discussion at least 35 times and is still a relevant discussion at this point in the pandemic. 

Sean Carpenter’s advice for new agents is to build relationships, solve problems, and have fun. To elaborate on that, Sean advises new agents to listen to every episode of The Real Estate Sessions as it gives a great mix of fantastic advice from some of the best in the industry! 

Resources Mentioned:

• Apple Podcasts — The StareDown Podcast 
• Trip Advisor – O’Hara’s Restaurant and Pub

Connect: 

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Find | Bill Risser

At [email protected]

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Find |Sean Carpenter

At [email protected]

On Website

On Carp’s Corner Blog

On Facebook

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On LinkedIn 

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Description:

In this podcast episode, Bill Risser and Russell Shaw delve into the fascinating world of real estate and career success. They explore the evolution of Phoenix real estate, from a small town to a bustling metropolis. Shaw's unconventional career path from selling life insurance to comedy and then real estate is also discussed. The concept of "carte blanche" is explored, emphasizing the importance of freedom and authority in one's career. Effective communication skills are highlighted as crucial for success in the industry. The evolution of real estate advertising is examined, with an emphasis on understanding consumer needs. The significance of systems and replicable success is also discussed, with insights from expert Gary Keller. Building trust and treating clients with respect are emphasized, and valuable resources for homeowners and real estate professionals are mentioned.

Episode Outline:

(00:00:00) The Evolution of Phoenix Real Estate

(00:06:30) From Life Insurance to Comedy

(00:13:02) The Power of Carte Blanche

(00:20:07) The Importance of Communication in Real Estate

(00:26:28) The Evolution of Effective Real Estate Advertising

(00:33:35) Real Estate Success and Systems

(00:40:48) Building Trust in Real Estate

(00:47:36) No Hassle Listing

00:00:00 - Russell Shaw

Well, it would be the ability to talk to people. It would be the ability to communicate to people. And it would be like if I said, what's the most important part of intelligence? Let's take it that way. It would be to have some idea of what's going on with the other person.

00:00:24 - Bill Risser

You're listening to the Real Estate Sessions podcast. And I'm your host, Bill Risser, executive Vice President, Strategic Partnerships with RateMyAgent, a digital marketing platform designed to help great agents harness the power of verified reviews. For more information, head on over to Ratemyagent.com. Listen in as I interview industry leaders and get their stories and journeys to the world of real estate. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 360 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend today I have a real treat for you. We are headed to Phoenix, Arizona, where we are going to be talking to one of the legends of Phoenix real estate, some might say The Godfather, just a huge figure in Phoenix real estate. I'm talking about Russell Shaw. Russell is with Realty, one group. When I first moved to Phoenix, he was bigger than life. You're going to see that as we get into the conversations. The phrase I'm applying for a job is something that if you were in Phoenix in the early two thousand s, you heard it over and over and over. Just an amazing guy. Let's get this thing started. Russ, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:34 - Russell Shaw

Thank you so much, Bill. I appreciate you having me on.

00:01:38 - Bill Risser

I've been remiss in waiting this long to have you on here. I just introduced you as the legend of Phoenix real estate and some of the great things you've done and the fact that I first moved to Phoenix in 2000 and my mornings were greeted just about every morning watching the news with I'm applying for a job. We're going to talk about that shortly, but first I'd like to start at the beginning.

00:02:06 - Russell Shaw

Sure.

00:02:06 - Bill Risser

Rush, you're a native phoenician. There are very few of you floating around.

00:02:10 - Russell Shaw

Well, yeah, I was born in Phoenix, lived in Phoenix all my life.

00:02:14 - Bill Risser

Let's talk about that. Let's talk about, first of all, some of the changes.

00:02:20 - Russell Shaw

Oh my God. Like when I was a little kid. Well, no, I'll give you a better example. There was a policeman killed, motorcycle patrolman killed. His name was Arthur Blum. The reason I remember this, it was over by the Bali High Motel off of Grand Avenue, and he had stopped somebody driving and he radios in and they shot him from the back of a campervan. At the time, it was the biggest manhunt in the state until they found those people.

00:02:56 - Bill Risser

Wow.

00:02:56 - Russell Shaw

There had never been anything in Arizona like it. What was interesting, fast forward now, if a cop gets killed, it doesn't even make the front page of the Arizona Republic. It's on the second section on B, one below the fold. I'm just giving you, for instance, we were a sleepy little town, and we didn't have the Black Canyon Freeway. I 17 had not. That was our first freeway. Phoenix was the only place in the country where truckers on I Ten drove down Van Buren because there was about 25 miles where they had to get off the freeway and drive on city streets. So I'm telling you. Van Buren think of, like, 16th street and van. The long haul truck drivers were coming across these city streets to get back on the freeway, and they were on city streets for about 25 miles. All that stuff. None of those things had happened yet. And Phoenix was this sleepy little town. The population of the city of Phoenix was around. It wasn't a million. It was more like about 700,000.

00:04:16 - Bill Risser

Wow.

00:04:17 - Russell Shaw

And now it's one of the biggest populated cities in the nation, period. I mean, without any modifier on it. The areas in the north, like the dreaming that was, like, out in the country, like, driving to what is now, say, 32nd street in Bell.

00:04:37 - Bill Risser

Sure.

00:04:37 - Russell Shaw

Those were all dirt roads. Those were dirt roads.

00:04:44 - Bill Risser

I can't even imagine, like, trying to get over towards East Mesa. I mean, I remember in 2000, you would drive on McDowell for 30 miles.

00:04:55 - Russell Shaw

Yes. Quite literally. So it's changed so dramatically. And the inflow of population. I remember one time I was at a realtor luncheon, and this really nice and very knowledgeable man from ADOT, Arizona, Department of Transportation, was there giving a talk, and he couldn't have been. I thought it was fascinating. He said they had surveyed people to find out what the citizens of Arizona, specifically Phoenix, hoped Phoenix would have. Like, what would we develop into? And the answer that everyone gave, we don't want to be like Los Angeles. What made that funny? Nobody. It never occurred to anyone to say, here's what we would like. They wanted to hear, here's what we don't want.

00:05:47 - Bill Risser

Right.

00:05:47 - Russell Shaw

And of course, that's exactly what occurred. Sprawl, right?

00:05:51 - Bill Risser

Yeah, exactly. 101, the 202, the 303, they're all out there, and everything happened, and now everything's all spread out. For those that know Phoenix, it was boy. I mean, if you got to North Scottsdale, to where the princess is now, there was nothing up there.

00:06:07 - Russell Shaw

Yeah, it was just desert, quite literally desert.

00:06:10 - Bill Risser

Yeah. That's cool. So, Russ, I want to find out kind of ultimately how my guests get to real estate, and we'll get there with you. But before we go there, tell me what 15 year old Russell is thinking about for a career. You're in high school. What's playing to your mind?

00:06:28 - Russell Shaw

I was routinely getting kicked out of high school by the time I was 15. Different numerous, numerous different high schools. I started at Central High. Got kicked out of Central. I'm trying to think I went to North High I went to a lot of different schools, phoenix Union, for a little while. But what was funny is I always thought, well, maybe someday I'll sell life insurance. I actually had this I don't know why I had that goal particularly. I knew this man my mom knew who seemed to be I think he did something with insurance. I didn't even know what kind, but he wore a suit, and he seemed successful looking to me. Whether he was or not, I don't know. But he was a nice guy, and I thought, well, I'll do what he does. When I was 15, I had become an amateur magician, and I had sort of intertwined, well, maybe I could use magic tricks to literally like, I was doing performances, I would charge $25 to do a show at some birthday party.

00:07:37 - Bill Risser

Wow, nice.

00:07:39 - Russell Shaw

Somehow I thought, well, maybe I could use magic tricks to get customers to want to talk to me.

00:07:46 - Bill Risser

Were you ever hanging out with Gene Urban at the time? I think you know Gene, right? He's a magician.

00:07:52 - Russell Shaw

No, I don't know. I know the name, but I don't know him. But it's funny, this was my plan, and I did get into the life insurance business. Yeah, you did. I was in it for five years. And what makes it funny is I became what's called a CLU chartered life underwriter, which is about the same level of education in terms of difficulty as a CPA. The test.

00:08:18 - Bill Risser

Sure.

00:08:18 - Russell Shaw

And what made it funny is I kept thinking, well, once I get that, I'll like the business better. I actually hated selling life insurance. I didn't dislike it. I hated it. And when I left, I had no idea that I would wind up in real estate. And when I did, it was just because I didn't know what else to do. I knew I didn't want to sell cars, and I couldn't bear the idea of going back to life insurance. And so I wound up as a realtor. And my first year actually, my first nine months, I wound up selling enough to make $87,000.

00:08:58 - Bill Risser

Wow.

00:09:01 - Russell Shaw

I found it in real estate, you could walk up to anyone randomly and say, I'm a realtor, they would immediately want to start talking to you about house prices and different houses they'd seen and this sort of thing. If you were sold life insurance and you said to someone, Hi, I sell life oh, God. They wanted to get away from you because part of well, part and this is not I'm not trying to be disrespectful to life insurance salespeople or it's not that I don't believe in that product. People shouldn't have it. But the whole sales pitch is basically getting someone to start visualize themselves dying and leaving their family broke. This is this isn't one of the things that life insurance salesmen do. It's the thing they have to do.

00:09:51 - Bill Risser

Right.

00:09:51 - Russell Shaw

And the sales trainers would literally say stuff like, no. When you're at the table, you've got to back up the hearse. You've got to get them seeing themselves in a coffin. Like, if you were trying to sell $100,000 policy back in the day, sure, you had to get that guy to start confronting. You died and she doesn't have any money. And that was what I hated doing. So I used to have this joke of, maybe I could come over and see you and talk about your death.

00:10:27 - Bill Risser

This works for me. Now when I think about how funny you are. Russ, you're doing stuff on social. We're going to talk about that, but let's start first with where you got to really have fun with comedy. I know you did a little bit of stand up, but you got into radio and you're doing this at the same time you're selling life insurance.

00:10:48 - Russell Shaw

Yes.

00:10:48 - Bill Risser

So my guess is you probably wrote some bits that you probably couldn't pull out in front of a customer.

00:10:53 - Russell Shaw

I'm just guessing that would be an understatement. I did commercials, and I was part of a couple of different comedy shows that were on the air, but I wrote commercials, and probably if I had to pick what became my claim to fame, there was a moving company in Mesa at Southern and Country Club named Lepla Moving and Storage. And KDKB's Am tower was in LePla's parking lot.

00:11:26 - Bill Risser

Nice.

00:11:27 - Russell Shaw

Henry Lepla, the owner and president of Lepla Moving Storage, had a right to have X number of 32nd spots run on the air in exchange for money that they weren't giving him to pay for. The parking lot was a trade out. So disc jockeys, when they got off the air, were having this sort of hot potato, like, okay, it's your turn. You make these spots, you write something to put it on, and nobody really wanted it. I mean, different people did it. I was already hanging around the station and doing different things and little jokes and stuff. Marty comes to me, and he sort of gave me my break, to tell you the truth. He goes, would you like to do the Lepla commercials? I go, sure. Well, since no one like, I wound up later functioning like a small ad agency as I got established because the Lepla commercials worked so well. Henry Lepla, first time ever, writes a letter to the station going, I don't know what you guys are doing. I've never listened to the station, but we're getting the phone to ring all the time. We've gotten more business in that actually when I started doing those commercials than they had in the previous years, and that continued. So the sales staff at KDKB realized this. What made it funny is then different advertisers wind up calling me and go, hey, could you do some commercials for us? So I wound up making a living doing commercials for other people. But with the Lepla commercial, they were supposed to be 32nd spots, I had complete carte blanche to say whatever I wanted. Some of them, I didn't even bother saying their name and the time where they were supposed to be 30 seconds. In radio today, if a spot is supposed to be a 30, it's between 29 and a half and 30.

00:13:39 - Bill Risser

Okay.

00:13:39 - Russell Shaw

Any difference in that? They're going to compress it that you are not going to have a spot that runs at 31 seconds. It's just not going to happen. That's true. Obviously on television as well. The timing is precise right, so I had the right to make them any length I wanted. Some of them were almost a minute long. Some of them were 7 seconds long. I did whatever the hell I wanted, and I made all the commercials about myself saying hi as though I were a celebrity. I wasn't endorsing them. It's like somebody like I was Bob Dylan or something like, here's the company I normally would use for moving if I were moving, I'm not know this kind of thing. So I got to write jokes and just put them on the air. And I became as well known as any of the disc jockeys who actually got paid by the station to be there. It was the most fantastic experience because I had complete carte blanche to do whatever I wanted, and there was no one saying, you can't say that here. If I wanted to make a joke about there's a store called Wilco Wilco or something, I can't remember their name, but it would be the equivalent of one of these big discount places, sam's Club or something. And I could say they're having a special this week on cocaine. I could say anything I wanted, and nobody was mad about it. And if somebody called the station complaining, the people there thought it was funny. So it wasn't like, oh, you can't say that on the air, right? I could say anything I wanted. And it was unbelievable, and it was an opportunity. It was years later, I did stand up, but it was initially and then I got on the comedy shows because of people that like a guy named Todd Carroll who later went to work for National Lampoon, and he later became a screenwriter. He wrote a couple of different shows, and I was on those shows with Todd. So that's how that all started.

00:15:55 - Bill Risser

Would you say you don't have that carte blanche anymore when you're coming to your social channels?

00:16:02 - Russell Shaw

No, I would. Oh, I do. I could care less at this point because I'm very political.

00:16:12 - Bill Risser

Your memes are hilarious. I think sometimes, Russ, you come right up to a line and sometimes you tip your toe over.

00:16:19 - Russell Shaw

Yeah, yeah.

00:16:20 - Bill Risser

You're okay with.

00:16:23 - Russell Shaw

Like it's it's my goal is not to offend. My goal is actually partially an educational like, I do a lot of posts of different philosophical type stuff, a tremendous amount which don't get the same kind of response as the funny memes or the funny jokes, but they're important to me.

00:16:55 - Bill Risser

Okay.

00:16:55 - Russell Shaw

Because it's like, do a lot to help other people, mostly agents, because I'm an opinion leader to most agents. But when someone's in trouble and they have their attention, it's sort of like what Tony Robbins does, only I'm not selling anything because usually what's holding someone back is a dumb idea. Like, literally, they have a goal of doing something, but their attention is fixated on this stupid thought that they're using to explain to themselves why they can't do the thing they really want to, kind of stuff where Tony Robbins has a gift, really, or an amazing skill of being able to spot that dumb idea. He can't teach it, by the way. Like, none of the Tony Robbins coaches can do it. Tony can't teach it because he doesn't have a technology. He just knows he can do it. He absolutely knows he can do it. And he's correct. He can do it. I've actually figured out exactly what he does, and I don't do the firewalk or any crap like that. I'm a Scientologist, and because of the stuff I've learned from Scientology, I'm able to, when I'm talking to someone, sort of see their dumb thought, and all I'm doing is getting them to see it doesn't belong to them. I'm just getting them to see, how does this align with your goals? Like, there's something you want. I want blah blah. Okay, let's put your attention on blah, blah. Not this reason, like whatever the crap is. And it's like an agent who loses a deal. I literally have dozens of agents who, when they get stuck, will sort of text me and sort of, can we talk? Sure. Basically what's happened is they've lost a deal or they've had a crummy customer or something that's given them a loss, and they've taken their attention completely off of, I want to be a successful, financially independent, prosperous agent. I'm just saying, making up those but that's essentially the kind of stuff most HR trying to a lot of agents.

00:19:25 - Bill Risser

That's what they want.

00:19:26 - Russell Shaw

Yeah, that's what they want. And instead, they have their attention on how can they stop bad customers from upsetting them? Well, there's a nice goal, because now your attention is fixated on stop right there. That's all you'd have to do to screw up your entire life is fixate on how can I stop blah blah. Because now you're pushing against it, which means you're going to have lots of it.

00:19:57 - Bill Risser

I can almost equate that Russ to, you know, the worst thing to think about on the golf course is don't hit it in the water.

00:20:04 - Russell Shaw

There you go.

00:20:05 - Bill Risser

What are you going to do? There you...

The podcast episode explores the growing interest in artificial intelligence (AI) in real estate and the need for agents to embrace its potential applications. It features David Marine, the chief marketing officer for Coldwell Banker, discussing the successful rebranding efforts of the company and the positive impact it had on changing people's perception. The conversation also touches on personnel changes, upcoming events featuring Shaquille O'Neal, and the partnership between Coldwell Banker and Amazon Prime for Thursday Night Football. The discussion emphasizes the importance of storytelling in creating a compelling brand and highlights the role of technology, particularly AI, in the real estate industry. It provides insights into the challenges and successes of rebranding and showcases the broader perspectives and interests of the individuals involved.

00:00:00 - David

There's a lot you can't open your web browser today without seeing something around artificial intelligence and AI and all that stuff. And there's a lot of infatuation around it within the real estate, as there should be. I don't know where that's specifically going to go and how it's going to be used on a regular basis, but I know that it's going to be used and it's something that any agent out there needs to start Theorying out.

00:00:29 - Bill

You're listening to the Real Estate Sessions podcast and I'm your host, Bill Risser, executive Vice President, Strategic Partnerships with RateMyAgent, a digital marketing platform designed to help great agents harness the power of verified reviews. For more information, head on over to Ratemyagent.com. Listen in as I interview industry leaders and get their stories and journeys to the world of real estate. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 359 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend this is going to be another shortcuts episode where I kind of venture back in time, find a guest that I haven't heard from or chatted with in a little while. And this was a little bit more than a little while. This was nearly five years ago, in September of 2018, that I interviewed David Marine, the Chief Marketing Officer for Coldwell Banker. And so we're bringing him back. We're going to find out what's happening in his world. We're also going to probably bring up the Mets because he's a huge Mets fan, sports fan in general. So let's get this thing started. David, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:31 - David

Thanks so much for having me back, Bill.

00:01:33 - Bill

You know, I didn't realize that it's been nearly five years since we last recorded that episode.

00:01:39 - David

I didn't realize that either until you had referenced in an email to me that we talked in 2018. And I'm like, man, that feels like the world has spun around a few times since then.

00:01:51 - Bill

I was going to say we were in a whole different place in 2018. I mean, the market was doing great. We had this ten year run going, or call it eight year run, and everything was good and man, a lot's changed. And so let's start there. What I like to do on these shortcut episodes is ask the guest what's happened in your life. It could be professionally, personally, but in that time span, what's that one thing that stands out and you go, wow, this is a big moment in that five year period.

00:02:22 - David

Yeah, pretty much. Probably like right after our podcast recording is when we started embarking on the rebrand effort for Coldwell Banker. And so rebranding the core brand, our global luxury, our commercial division basically took up four years of my life during that point in time and really great to be on the other side of that and also to see the impact that we hoped it would make. It did make in changing people's perception. It re energized our network and all that. And then since that time, also, I now have my oldest son in college. So finally those 529 plans I've been investing in for the last 17 years, finally starting to use them.

00:03:04 - Bill

Good.

00:03:04 - David

And it's also depressing to see that, you know what, I thought there would be more money in there, but there isn't.

00:03:10 - Bill

Yeah. It's a big milestone as a parent is that first child going away. I'll give you another one. When your son turns 30, it's going to feel way different. When you tell people, when they say, how old's your son? You say, 30. It's a different feeling. I hit that.

00:03:28 - David

I can't even imagine that. But yes, you're so right. He's turning 19 this month, so even like, on the brink of 20 and having kid in your 20s seems like odd because in my own mind, I'm not that far from there. Right.

00:03:43 - Bill

Yeah, it was just a little while ago. No big deal. Yeah. Let me ask you a quick follow up on the rebrand. There had to be some feedback, both very positive but also negative. When that happened, how do you handle that? Did it take you someplace where you wondered if the team had made the right decision or did you stick to your guns and go, no, this is really where we need to be and this is why we're there?

00:04:08 - David

Oh, yeah. There was plenty of feedback. I don't know if you realize this, but everyone in real estate is a marketing expert and just anyone in general is a marketing expert. But there was definitely feedback. There was negative feedback. And what was a big learning lesson for me, and I didn't anticipate at the time, was just how Coldwell Banker hadn't changed his logo for over 40 years. So this was a brand and identity that basically everybody had known and lived with for the majority of their lives. And then you're coming along and you're changing it, and change as a whole stirs up emotions. It's hard. So there was plenty of backlash. And I remember the weekend after it launched, just being at home and looking at all the comments on Facebook and that stuff and just reading everyone wondering, like, is this the right thing? Am I doing the right move in making this change? But at its core, I knew that this was something that had been talked about since I joined the company, which was 22 years ago, and always been debated, and no one took the plunge on it. But what it forced me to do, and the biggest lesson I learned is putting together a story as to why you're doing this that convinces both on the rational and the emotional side of things. And then what I saw is after we had talked about doing it and initially started showcasing it, I went on basically like a 20 city tour of telling that story to individuals and as soon as you got in front of them and you explained it, it was like instant, oh, makes perfect sense. And now you see that after the fact. It's like everybody loves it. I think we've sold and we don't make money on it, but we sold over a million dollars worth of apparel in the first year of it. So they're embracing it, they're embodying it. It is now just commonplace and everybody looking back will say like, yeah, this is the right move. But for the first couple of weeks afterwards, it was tense. So it was one of the biggest learning experiences of my career.

00:06:12 - Bill

Yeah, I just can't imagine that's such a big change, especially for there are a lot of longtime employees at Coldwell Banker. So that was part of your audience that you had to deal with. So congratulations on that. There's a lot of things that happened in the I don't want to call it the mothership, but Realogy becomes anywhere. Some recent changes. I mean, who thought Sherry Chris would ever retire? I didn't think that would ever happen. And then I know Ginger Wilcox from back in the day and she comes on board. Right. So there's a lot of stuff happening. But let's focus in on Coldwell Banker. Is there something that you can share? Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. That's either new or what's next?

00:06:56 - David

Yeah, right now we're in the midst of it's weird because typically summer, a lot of people on vacation, things kind of slow down, the market, kind of cools a little bit. And this year we anticipated that the first half of the year was probably going to be a bit of a slow start. And then we're anticipating the back half of the year. Things are going to start picking up and momentum is going to build as you head into 2024. So we actually moved a lot of our focus to, hey, let's focus on the back half of the year to kind of prime the pump heading into what we expect to be a good 2024. So we've got our Gen Blue experience coming up in October, which we're always pumped about. It's our national event. I'm super excited because Shaquille O'Neill is our keynote speaker and in my mind, he is a American treasure. We should do everything we can to protect that man. He's just going to be fantastic. Not only hall of Fame basketball player, but fantastic business savvy branding guy, all that. So excited for them. And then we're doing something different this year from a marketing standpoint is we are doing a partnership on Thursday Night Football with Amazon Prime. And so we'll be running ads across those games as well as doing some social activation around it using our Move meter, which is a brand new feature on our website, compares the cost of living and a whole bunch of other factors between any two cities. So we'd be doing some move meter matchups, not only of the games that are on Thursday Night Football, but allowing our network to customize videos, social to do move meter matchups for any game that's happening across the country. So you live in a college town, and you want to do Clemson versus Florida State. Put the Tallahassee Greenville South Carolina or Columbia South Carolina in there. You create that graphic meter matchup. You got your local high schools, and by me, it's Mountain Lakes versus here's. We'll see who wins on the field. But here's the matchup as real estate. So we think that's going to be a really great social driver and talk track to get people thinking about, oh, what are the possibilities of moving not just in a town next door, but even across the country?

00:09:03 - Bill

I love that idea. That's great. Yeah. I'm thinking good. Yeah. So Tampa Bay plays La, and you get to yeah, that's exactly I think.

00:09:11 - David

Tampa Bay is going to win that real estate matchup.

00:09:13 - Bill

I know we are. Yeah. That's an easy one. No, I think that's great. That's awesome. I know of another speaker other than Shaq that's going to be at Gen Blue. Is Sean Carpenter coming back? Is that what I hear? That right.

00:09:25 - David

Sean Carpenter is the Gen Blue mainstay. I love having him there every year. We met at a Gen Blue when it was called the International Business Conference, like, 15 years ago, or maybe even longer than that. So I've known Sean for a long while. Whenever I can get him to be a part of the Gen Blue experience, I know it's good. He always brings, one, the energy and two great insights into his sessions. So excited to have him there. And then it's always just good to hang out with him for a little bit when we get to see each other in person. But we text back and forth and on Facebook and stuff throughout the year. And he also likes to prod on the Mets and college football, but Pete Alonzo on the Mets is a Florida Gator, so he's got some small affection for them there.

00:10:11 - Bill

Yeah, small. Geez. Yeah, true. I always want to find out from the people that I've talked to in the past, and I dug into your personal life a little bit. We know a little bit about your family on these shortcut episodes. I just want to know, first of all, I think you already had your vacation this summer, right? If I remember right, I might have saw a poster, too, and you mentioned your son had enough college. Is there anything else kind of big on the horizon for the Marine family?

00:10:40 - David

Well, one goes away to college, the thing was like, well, how is the family going to just how are the kids because I have four boys. How are the brothers going to react? What was crazy was the instant change in dynamics in our household. As soon as we got back. It was like, oh, there's a new pecking order, and here's how it's going to work. And then all of a sudden, then when my older son comes back, it then mixes things back up again. And now who's trying to get his attention? Who's trying to impress him? So next big thing on the horizon is we're heading down the shore. My parents have a place down at the Jersey Shore, so we'll be there for a four day weekend before we go and then take him down to school, and then it resets back into school mode. And my wife teaches at the high school. And so then that's when soccer kicks in for my younger two. And so that it's back into that routine. I actually coach my youngest son's soccer team, so I got to get back into scheduling the practices and the game schedules and the balance, and who can go here, there, and everywhere. But to me, that's a fun part of it. And I enjoy getting to be part of their lives and with the team, even though some seasons there's not very many victories.

00:11:54 - Bill

Speaking of not many victories, that's a great segue. I'm glad you threw that talk about the Mets.

00:11:58 - David

Yeah, okay, sure.

00:12:01 - Bill

Look, we chat back and forth on messenger about usually the Mets and what's going on with that team. David, we're recording this on August 2, 2023, and all that money that was spent, well, at least now you're still paying a big chunk of it, but Verlander and Scherzer are gone. What's going on with the Mets?

00:12:26 - David

It's a fire sale. So there was great anticipation for this year, right, that it was going to be another World Series run. But here's the thing. So I was at your beloved Padres Mets first round playoff game last fall, and Max Scherzer was the starter of game one. And I was pumped, and I brought my boys to the game, and my dad, because I was like, this is the game to go to. Scherzer's on the mound. Game one playoff. City field. He laid the biggest egg, arguably, in Mets playoff history in that game. I think he gave up, like, five or six runs in the first two innings or whatever and lost. And so that has been, in Mets fans minds, is that that's what we got Scherzer for and he let us down. Plus, he's 40 years old. Verlander at 39, they had multiple years left. I think they both had at least one more year left on their contract. So actually trading them and getting some young guns in return, I'm all for it. Especially one of the guys is Acuna, whose older brother Ronald on the Braves is, like, MVP candidate. If he is even 75% as good as his brother, that is the steal of the century. So I get it. This year is not going anywhere, but I'm hopeful that it's giving us some more building blocks in our farm system and we got some good pieces in place through Lindor, Alonzo. So I think we'll be set up. But yeah, this year's a wash. Look.

00:13:49 - Bill

I've been through many of those know, time with the Padres. The relocation to St. Pete has been really fun to watch because this is a team right in Tampa Bay that absolutely has solved the we don't have a lot of money problem. And it is that farm system that Kevin Cash is an incredible manager. It's just been a lot of fun to watch. A little weird year this know, with the first two and a half months, just crazy good and then just tanking in July and now battling out with the Orioles of all teams in the.

00:14:22 - David

East, we'll see that's the crazy part. The AL East is the best division in baseball right now. Tampa Bay is incredible that every single year they contend and they do it their way. And I think there is a real estate lesson there as well, especially from a marketing standpoint of like, hey, I don't have the dollars to invest in doing this huge thing that I see everybody else do. But here's what I know that I'm really good at. And Tampa Bay is really good at identifying talent, building up that talent and then maximizing them for the time in which they have them before they have to go and they sign a max contract somewhere in real estate. And even as a marketer, it's like find those areas where, you know, this works for you and this is successful. And so therefore, let me put my time and energy into that and not worry about what anyone else is doing. I remember early on, my father gave me some advice about never count anyone else's money. Don't worry about what somebody else is making or worry about what you're doing with yours. And I think that Tampa Bay does that. And from whether you have a small budget, big budget or whatever, figure out what you can control and make sure you're getting the most from that without worrying about what anyone else is doing.

00:15:40 - Bill

I've never heard it defined that way. That's perfect. Here the last question, David, I'll get you going. What has your attention in real estate right now? There's always something, right? You're keeping your eye on it.

00:15:52 - David

You can't open your web browser today without seeing something around artificial intelligence and AI and all that stuff. And there's a lot of infatuation around it within the real estate, as there should be. I don't know where that's specifically going to go and how it's going to be used on a regular basis, but I know that it's going to be used and it's something that any agent out there needs to start figuring it out. And I'm not a big fan of Gary Vee, but I did see a post that he put on a video and he compared it to the advent of social media. He said, remember when there were executives who would be like, I don't use email, but my assistant prints out my emails and hands them to me and then I read them. He's like, that is you if you are not starting today to investigate what stuff like chatGBT or other AI tools are doing. So spend a little time every day just testing it out. I thought that was pretty good advice to figure out how does it work specifically for me in what I do every day, how does it work within the real estate spectrum? So that would be something I'm keeping an eye on and trying to figure out what is the best way that that can work for me personally, but also as part of the Cold Banker brand.

00:17:11 - Bill

Yeah. I've adopted a website called Podflow AI that now does my show notes and it pulls out quotes for it, writes a blog post. It does all now.

00:17:23 - David

All right.

00:17:23 - Bill

I have to go in and tweak it a little bit, but I didn't have to do the heavy lifting up front. So there's some opportunities. I think you're right. But it's got to fit. Once again, it's not a silver bullet. It's not going to fix everything. And it just has to be used the right way. I think we talk about all the time, technology makes good agents better and that's what it is. Right. It's not something that's going to save somebody if they're not a good agent.

00:17:50 - David

Yeah. I've also been exposed because with my wife as a teacher, she's trying to vet, like, hey, this feels like this paper was written in AI. So there are now tools that can identify whether writing is developed by AI or wow. So it's everywhere. So it's coming.

00:18:08 -...

August 1, 2023 is the 8th anniversary of The Real Estate Sessions podcast. I thought I would do 10 episodes, just to understand the process of recording, editing and publishing a podcast. I quickly discovered that my curiosity itch was getting scratched with every episode. Learning things I never knew about connections in the industry was cool! Interviewing over 100 Inman Connect contacts made the connections even closer. So, here I am with over 400 total episodes, celebrating the 8th anniversary of the show.

I invited three guests to help me with this episode. First, Sean Carpenter. Sean has listened to every single episode of the podcast. That is truly amazing. He's been a guest multiple times and always delivers amazing content to the audience. Figures. He does that for a living! You must check out Carpscorner.net. Sean has over 1000 episodes on the blog that is 18 years old!

Shelley Zavitz was recommended to me by Wendy Thatcher, a colleague with Chicago Title in 2019. Her first book, Your First 365 Days in Real Estate is fantastic. She followed that up with Marketing that Moves You, another grand slam. Her sharp wit and knowledge of people makes her a treat to share a mic with.

Finally, Joe Rand rounds out the quartet for this special episode. One of the nicest guys in the biz, Joe always makes me laugh. As a speaker, author, industry leader, or just a guy that loves fantasy football, Joe is always fun to hang with. Joe's books, Disruptors, Discounters, and Doubters and How To Be A Great Real Estate Agent, are a must read for anyone in the business.

Rather than list all the episodes for each of these rock stars here, head on to therealestatesessions.com and type their name in the search bar. You'll quickly find all of their shows, ready for your listening attention.

Starting a career in the real estate industry can be overwhelming. In this podcast, Bill Risser and Jim Remley discuss the importance of recruiting experienced agents and utilizing motivation as a key component to success in the real estate industry. They explain that a good relationship between the broker leader and the agents is essential and that nurses and teachers make great realtors due to their nurturing and educational approach. Technology can help brokers scale their businesses and stay competitive in the ever-changing market, and those who don't embrace it will be left behind. This episode offers valuable insight into the world of real estate and provides a great starting point for anyone looking to dive into a new career.

Episode Outline:

(00:00:00) Oregon Lifestyle Overview

(00:04:59) Recruiting at 24

(00:10:15) Recruiting Experienced Agents

(00:15:04) Recruiting Agents

(00:19:54) Attracting Experienced Agents

(00:24:43) Recruiting Productive Agents(00:29:29) Embracing AI

Episode Links:

https://www.erealestatecoach2.com/

https://www.jimremley.johnlscott.com/

https://www.luxuryhomecouncil.com/

Episode 357 – Jim Remley, Principal Broker, John L. Scott Real Estate

00:00:00 - Jim Remley

And you're looking at your four quartiles, your bottom, your middle bottom, your mid-level, and then your top. And you're saying, how can I move the bottom level up to the next tier and then and that third tier up to the fourth tier. And I'm always coaching them and helping them and saying, what can we do to help get you there? And that takes deep conversations with people and really analyzing their business and saying, hey, listen, let's take a look at where you're at, where you're going. What do you need specific help with? Is it a listing presentation? It's a buyer's presentation? Do you need accountability? What does it happen to be?

00:00:32 - Bill Risser

You're listening to the Real Estate Sessions podcast and I'm your host, Bill Risser, Executive Vice President, Strategic Partnerships with RateMyAgent, a digital marketing platform designed to help great agents harness the power of verified reviews. For more information, head on over to Ratemyagent.com. Listen in as I interview industry leaders and get their stories and journeys to the world of real estate. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 357 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend. And today we're going to go back out to the Pacific Northwest, one of my favorite areas of the country, and we're going to talk to Jim Remley. Jim is with John L. Scott in Oregon. He's a coach, a speaker, a Real Trends top 500 broker. Just an amazing story author. It goes on and on. He's just great stuff and he's going to drop a lot of important information. I think for anybody out there that's in the recruiting side of things, if you're a broker owner or if you're a team leader, you want to listen in. So, let's get this thing started. Jim, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:36 - Jim Remley

Hey. Super excited to be here. Thank you.

00:01:38 - Bill Risser

Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. I had the opportunity to kind of do a little research and wow, you've done some really cool stuff over the last, I'm going to say 25, 30 years. 30 years, yeah.

00:01:49 - Jim Remley

Thank you.

00:01:50 - Bill Risser

The way I start my podcast, every single time, those that listen know it is. I like to find out about you. Let's start out where you grew up and what's that experience you had growing up. And it looks like Oregon is where you were born and raised, am I right?

00:02:07 - Jim Remley

I was born in Long Beach, California, but my family were hippies, and they came up to Oregon and the hippie kind of train and they landed in a little town called Roseburg, Oregon, which is kind of in the middle of the state. And I grew up there. It's a typical, very small town, 25,000 population and very much a typical town in America, kind of circa America.

00:02:32 - Bill Risser

And so, I would guess that train you talk about, I grew up in San Diego myself. There were a lot of people in the 80s making this mass exodus for the Pacific Northwest. Right. This is what you're talking about with the train, right?

00:02:48 - Jim Remley

Yeah. Not a literal train, but people coming.

00:02:51 - Bill Risser

It was a lot of people. In fact, I think the locals up there were getting not upset, but like, hey, wait, what's going on here? This is changing pricing of housing and all kinds of stuff.

00:03:00 - Jim Remley

Right, right. Yeah. There was definitely a backlash. And now I think most people that live here are transplants, but back then there was more of a so let's.

00:03:09 - Bill Risser

I think when people think of Oregon, the first thought is Portland, because that's the big city. That's where everything kind of revolves around. It feels like, however, you're in southern Oregon now, you're in the Pass Medford area. Yeah.

00:03:23 - Jim Remley

Medford, Ashland. Yeah. Right over the border of California, just.

00:03:26 - Bill Risser

North of the border. So how would you explain that to somebody who's never been there, has never been to that part of Oregon? What would we find?

00:03:33 - Jim Remley

Well, first I would say that for the rest of us that don't live in Portland, we don't love the association with Portland. I'll say the rest of the state is actually pretty conservative. Folks that live a know, I wouldn't say conservative, but I should say more of a normal lifestyle. Not what you're seeing on the news in Portland. Right, right. So, when you look at that, what's on the news, it's totally the antithesis of what you see in 99% of Oregon. It's just an interesting dichotomy there. But that's the truth of it. It's a very rural lifestyle and people love it, and it's very much the lifestyle what you'd expect the Pacific Northwest to look like.

00:04:15 - Bill Risser

How big is Medford?

00:04:16 - Jim Remley

Medford is a population base of about 80,000.

00:04:19 - Bill Risser

Okay.

00:04:20 - Jim Remley

So, it's a little bit bigger, but not huge. For sure.

00:04:22 - Bill Risser

Yeah. I have to share a story. My wife and I, she wasn't my wife at the time. She was my girlfriend. We drove up to Canada, to Vancouver for the World's Fair, and on the way back, we decided to come down the entire coast. And so, you would ignore what that route looks like. Right. And one of the little communities we traveled through was called Gold Beach, Oregon. Right?

00:04:43 - Jim Remley

Yeah.

00:04:43 - Bill Risser

Not too far from you.

00:04:44 - Jim Remley

Yeah, that's right.

00:04:46 - Bill Risser

And so, as we're headed down with Highway One or whatever we were going to call it at that time, there was a big giant sign for a pancake breakfast and fire truck and a couple of firefighters that wouldn't let you pass. They said, you're going the wrong way. Go this way to the breakfast.

00:05:05 - Jim Remley

You're having breakfast.

00:05:06 - Bill Risser

So, we did. We turned left and we went down this road into a little parking area and had the best pancake breakfast we've ever had with the Gold Beach Fire Department and a whole bunch of locals. And it was just a great me. That's Oregon, right?

00:05:20 - Jim Remley

It is Oregon.

00:05:21 - Bill Risser

That and the Tillamook County Fair that we went to. One same on that same trip. I take it back to the same trip we stopped. And it was just so cool because I grew up in San Diego, which is a little bigger, obviously.

00:05:33 - Jim Remley

Yeah.

00:05:34 - Bill Risser

So, it was really nice to see that small-town life in the south of Oregon. Good, good. So, let's get to the crux of the conversation here. And you got into real estate really young, right? Because generally, we're going to talk about recruiting and some other things. You know that it's the second and third career for the majority of people you talk to.

00:05:58 - Jim Remley

Absolutely.

00:05:58 - Bill Risser

But I think I read somewhere you were 19 when you got into real estate. Let's talk about that.

00:06:03 - Jim Remley

Well, my buddy, his dad owned a real estate company, and he said, let's go get our real estate license. And at the time, I barely graduated high school, and I ended up working in a lumber mill. And like most kids in Oregon, we worked in lumber mills. So, I was working the graveyard shift in a lumber mill, and I was also going to college at the same time. Actually, ended up flunking out of college because I couldn't work graveyard and go to school at the same time. Wasn't my constitution. But he said, let's get a real estate license. So, I went and studied. I finished. He didn't I did not go to work for his dad, but I did go to work for the first company I drove by after I got my letter in the mail, which was Cinch 21. And so, I was 19 at the time. And just went in and not knowing anything about anything, just thought I was going to come in and crush it.

00:06:52 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I would guess it was kind of lucky. It was Century 21, at least, right? Because for a new agent, they were already in the mode of education training. I mean, they were kind of a great place to start. How long did you stay there?

00:07:07 - Jim Remley

I was with C 21 for five years. I was fortunate. I struggled my first six months getting my feet under me, but I was smart in the fact that I did go to all the classes that they offered, and I did read a lot of books. I attended a lot of seminars, and I just started to take a lot of notes and kind of figure out my own way. And after that first initial six months of struggle, my next year in the business, I took 150 listings and got listed in the top 1% of the nation. Wow.

00:07:36 - Bill Risser

I got to know, is there a special book in there that helped with that?

00:07:39 - Jim Remley

Which book? There are a lot of them. One of my favorite authors at the time back then was Hopkins, Tom Hopkins Art of the Sale, which was a fantastic book, but a lot of those things don't apply today. So, the world of sales has changed dramatically since the late 80s, early 90s. Now we're selling it a completely different way, but at the time it was very effective, and I used a lot of the strategies, but I did learn about for-sale banners and expired listings and working in a sphere of influence and farming from other mentors that I worked with. And I dove deep into those areas and create a lot of success there.

00:08:17 - Bill Risser

So, at the age of 2021, you know what you're doing now, you're enjoying the career. You've chosen that path. And I think it's such a massive advantage to know that early that that's going to be what you're going to do, as opposed to the people that come in later. And then at the age of 24, you make the biggest step. You say, I'm going to have my own brokerage.

00:08:40 - Jim Remley

Yes.

00:08:41 - Bill Risser

So, was there a mentor? Was there some help? How did that come about, especially at that age?

00:08:47 - Jim Remley

Well, what happened was that I and a buddy started working together. There's a backstory behind that, but we became one of the first teams in Oregon, really was me and him and our assistant. And when we started to look at our production level, we recognized pretty quickly that if we had moved out of our own office, we were like number two in the county at our production level, right? So, we're like, well, maybe we should just do that. Maybe we should move out of our office and be our own office. And so, we found a gal that was thinking about selling her little company, and we bought her company, and all the agents left, and it was just me and him and our assistant. And then we started to start to grow from there. I will say that over the next 15 years, we grew from basically nothing to 17 offices and became the largest independent company in Oregon.

00:09:46 - Bill Risser

I want to know what it's like for a 24-year-old gym to talk to someone in their 40s or fifty s and try to explain to them why you were the brokerage I needed to come work for.

00:09:57 - Jim Remley

Well, I'll tell you, I made a lot of mistakes. But I think what it comes down to whether it's me at a listing appointment at 19, my first year, trying to talk a retired couple in a listing with me, which I look like I might be there, old enough to be their grandkid, maybe, or whether it's trying to talk to somebody, trying to recruit it's the same thing. And that is what we're really selling, is a vision of what we can do for you as a human being. And so, it's building a relationship with you on the other side of the fence and saying, hey, listen, here's what I think I can do to help you with your goals. It's not about me. It's about what I can do for you. And I truly believe that I can help you, and I'm going to work harder than anybody else to make that dream a reality. My advantage as an agent, talking to potential agents was I had done it and I was successful. And I would always use that as a competitive wedge and say, I'm not a broker that hasn't done it. I'm somebody that's in the field of doing it every day. That's a huge difference between me and maybe where you're at now. So, I would use that as an advantage, too, as a competing broker at the time. But I will say my number one mistake, which I think is as important as our successes as our mistakes, right? My mistake was, for the first five years we had that company, I thought to myself that I was a little intimidated by recruiting experienced agents. Although I did. My number one goal was to recruit new agents. Because I thought to myself egotistically that I could bring a new agent in and help them create the same level of success that I did. So, I started doing recruiting seminars every month, which I did for five years straight. Where I'd bring it? I'd do advertising, rent a hotel room, do a whole showing, a dance for 90 minutes. Get people excited about getting a real estate license, help them find the school, and then help them get to the school, get them to the other side. And it was a weaning process. You'd have 50 people in the room. You might get two at the end that would actually come to work for you. But what I found and what I teach now was the mistake that I made is I would end up with this basically group of people that I didn't know it at the time, but they had an 86% attrition rate. So, 86% of the people that end up in the business end up out of the business two years later. So as a broker, I'm investing all this time and energy into these people that are eight to nine times out of ten are not going to make it in the business. And it wasn't about me being a good or bad trainer. It was just about them as human beings not being up to the task.

00:12:19 - Bill Risser

Right.

00:12:19 - Jim Remley

So, then I eventually pivoted and said, wait a second, we've got to start recruiting experienced agents. And we took a whole different tactic.

00:12:25 - Bill Risser

Yeah, we're going to talk about that. I think that's very cool. That's going to be a great takeaway for a lot of people listening to the podcast, you're with John L. Scott now, which is a big they're not independent. They're a regional, big regional right up in the Pacific Northwest. How did you come to partner with them?

00:12:43 - Jim Remley

So, what happened is I grew this office to 17 offices, and then I got recruited to start teaching for the National Association of Realtors, which I did for many years. I tried all the designation programs, and then I was passionate about teaching and I'm coaching and that kind of thing. So, I did that, and I sold my interest in my company to my partner when I started to do that. And then I got recruited to come down and help another guy who had just opened a company. But he had bought this company, this John L. Scott company in Medford. And he came down and said, Jim, I want you to come down and just consult with me about how I can grow this company because I've known you've grown. Come down and consult with you, but I'm not going to go work for you. Well, he was a good recruiter. He brought me down, offered me a ton of money, and said, Jim, we want you to stay here. So, we pulled the trigger and moved down. A little bit of a short, long story on that is he had bought the company in the Great Recession of 2008, and it was suffering. He had gotten all the way down to 38 agents when I joined, and two agents left the weekend I joined, we were down to like, 36 or 37 agents. We took that company and we, over the next ten years, went from $100 million in business to $1.4 billion in business. Top 500 companies in America. And we're competing with companies that are in Chicago and Atlanta and New Jersey and New York, La. We're in a population base of 80,000, right? So, we're crushing it at that level. That's how I've got into this whole coaching gig, is people have asked me, how did you do it?

00:14:11 - Bill Risser

Yeah, that's fantastic. Let's go down that path really quick with coaching a long time ago. This is almost like in 2000 when you started kind of dabbling on the Internet with coaching.

00:14:28 - Jim Remley

So that was, erealestatecoach erealestatecoach.com.

00:14:32 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I'm sure that sites changed over the years quite a bit. I actually looked at it yesterday and I'm like, oh, this looks very cool. It's a very professional, modern-looking site. I can't even imagine what it looked like when it first launched.

00:14:48 - Jim Remley

Whole story about that, too.

00:14:49 - Bill Risser

Go ahead, let's hear.

00:14:50 - Jim Remley

So, when I started my coaching platform, I thought I had this whole vision of how I wanted to lay out, and I hired somebody to actually design the website, which huge mistake, by the way. Anybody listening? Don't ever do that. That's a big mistake. I spent $150,000 on building this website, and it completely failed. I mean, it was a massive, massive failure. Didn't make a dollar on the site. And then I found a platform that does all the same stuff for $2,000 a year, by the way. So anyway, yeah, it's gone through many iterations. When I started, I was completely focused on agent coaching, and that was kind of my passion. And what I've done for years. I've helped agents go from where they are to where they want to go. And I have one of the highest per-agent productivity rates in the country, where our average agent is doing about $6 million a year, which is when you have 250 agents, that's pretty hard to do. So, people have come to me and said, how do you get to that high level? And it's through our coaching. So, I built that coaching platform to kind of replicate that for agents that wanted to tap in and say, hey, I want to be coached like Jim's coaching, but I can't go to work for Jim because I'm in New Jersey, right, or I'm in Atlanta or know Florida or whatever, but I want the coaching. So that's what I built it for, what it became. Now, as you said, evolution is now our...

In this episode of Real Estate Sessions, Bill Risser and Katie Day catch up since the last episode 18 months ago and discuss the importance of video content for their business and the impact of technology on the real estate industry. They conclude that technology will not replace agents, but will help them become more efficient. Additionally, they discuss the importance of creating experiences for their children and Katie's plans to attend the Tom Ferry Summit in Dallas.

https://www.movemetotx.com

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 - Bill Risser

Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 356 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend today we're going to do another do another shortcuts episode. This time it's Katie Day who is with the move Me to Texas team or the Move Me to TX team. Powered by Real Broker, LLC. We had Katie on the show about eight months ago, and she's doing some fantastic work with video and really focusing hard on her community in the Houston area. And I really can't wait to get back chatting with her. She had a nice change in her life that we're going to chat about as well. So let's get this thing started. Katie, welcome back to the podcast.

00:00:45 - Katie Day

Thank you so much for having me again.

00:00:48 - Bill Risser

I can't wait to chat with our shortcuts episodes. It gives me a chance to go back in time. And for you, it was about 18 months ago. It was January of 2022, I believe you just started with Real about that time. So it was kind of a turning point in your career and some things. The first question that I ask every guest on these shortcuts is what's the most exciting thing that's happened for you in the last 18 months? Could be personal, could be professional.

00:01:15 - Katie Day

Oh, well, that's easy. So I had a kid. I had a baby in February, so I have a five month old daughter. So that's been the most exciting thing for me.

00:01:28 - Bill Risser

That was a no brainer. So let me just dig a little deeper there because I can't let that go. So the most surprising thing about being a mom, something that really surprised you, because I know I can imagine the prep work you did, the reading you did, you talked to a lot of family and relatives and friends, but is there something you just went, wow, I wasn't expecting that.

00:01:50 - Katie Day

It's funny you say that, because in almost all aspects of my life, I'm definitely a planner and I've got my lists and I've got my checklists and I do my research and things like that. And so is my husband. And we didn't do a ton of research or things prior to having Riley. And so it was a little, I guess, surprising. Right. So as far as things that we weren't sure about or things like that, that was pretty much all of parenthood so far, right. Which I think was a good thing to some extent, right. Just to kind of not have expectations, because I think that a lot of times people will try to plan things out and try to have like, this is our plan for having the kid. This is our plan for when we bring them home and this is the schedule that they'll stick to and all of these things. And we've just kind of figured it out as if we've gone. So that's been interesting, for sure.

00:02:44 - Bill Risser

Billions of people in this world on earth have done the same thing. Right? Just let's see what happens and let's go from there. Yeah, that's cool. That's great. Well, congratulations. That's fantastic. Okay. That's the best shortcuts answer so far.

00:02:59 - Katie Day

It was kind of a softball for me, right? I was trying to think of something that had happened in business and we said personal. I was like, oh, sweet. Like, I've got something.

00:03:06 - Bill Risser

Yeah, cool. Awesome. Let's talk about you and video. I can't talk to you without talking about video. Even though we're doing an audio only podcast, nearly 6000 posts on Instagram, 33,000 followers on your company Instagram. Instagram game seems to be really on point, I'm guessing. But let's just get for the audience that missed the first episode, let's get a quick recap on kind of your overall video strategy with your team.

00:03:33 - Katie Day

Yeah, so we decided to go all in on video back in 2019 and really make that be a pillar of our business. And when we did that, we kind of need to think about the different buckets and different things that we would do. And so it's evolved over time. But today what that looks like is we have kind of a neighborhood and community bucket. We highlight and focus in on local businesses and entrepreneurs in the greater Houston area. We have a kind of educational bucket and so we focus there on the things that people would want to know if they're buying or selling real estate or investing in real estate here in Houston. And then some more kind of personal and fun stuff, as well as just kind of highlighting our listings, highlighting what it's like to live in Houston and things like that.

00:04:22 - Bill Risser

It's a massive undertaking because you personally do a lot of the video. I know you use videographer as well for some other things. Your team is working in that same space. Is there a schedule or is it simply just kind of the business kind of dictates as you go?

00:04:41 - Katie Day

Yeah, great question. So as far as scheduled, we don't have it down to the day of every single day. This is exactly what's going to happen. There are some themes. So every single Friday we post our Neighborhood Spotlights and we do Community Spotlights and things like that. Now we're starting to do some more type of informational, kind of talking Headstyle stuff on YouTube every Tuesday. So it's another specific day of the week, something that happens. And then outside of that, depending on listing launches, we normally try to have the property videos posted before the listing launches. We can have that be part of the package. But the Neighborhood Spotlight type stuff or the educational tips, I shoot a lot of those at a time, so I just have a Google Drive folder of them to post kind of as needed. But it's not like I have to post four every single week on these days. At this time because that just gets to be a little terrible.

00:05:34 - Bill Risser

I would say tedious.

00:05:36 - Katie Day

Yeah, tedious is a more intelligent word.

00:05:38 - Bill Risser

But yes, I like terrible. Okay. The last thing I'll ask about video, just because it's been so fun to watch all this happen, I'm one of those lurkers that just sees a lot of the stuff that you and your team do and the educational videos. Man, I'm just going to guess that the traffic is growing on those types of posts for you. You must really be that resource in the eyes of Google, in the eyes of YouTube, a lot of other places when people are asking those kinds of questions, because you've been doing it for so long.

00:06:12 - Katie Day

Yeah, I mean, I think that that's one thing that is kind of my advantage, because it's not like any of the information I give is like groundbreaking stuff that's like, man, I wouldn't have been able to get this anywhere else. Right. It's just the quantity, and hopefully to some extent, the quality is higher than a lot of other people are doing. But one thing that we found in the comment you made of, like, hey, I'm just watching it all, kind of just taking it all in, we find that a lot of consumers are as well. Right. And so when we go in for a listing appointment or we have a buyer consultation, consumers are referencing those videos. And I'm like, man, I'm pretty sure I posted that like, six months ago. That was a really long time ago. And they're referencing, like, paint colors or how to stage their kitchen or do different things. And so that's something that the consistency of it in my mind, is what positions us very well with consumers, among other things. Right. But having that regular content for them to consume, whether or not they're working with us, but then hopefully most of the time, they're choosing to work with us. Right.

00:07:17 - Bill Risser

For agents new to video, you don't get that instant feedback on that stuff. It's built up over time. And like you said, it must be just fun when they say, oh, I love that video. And you're like, wow, you haven't even talked about video channel yet and you brought it up. That's cool. I like that. Question three. I'll leave the sub questions out as far as I can go here. So personally, we know your daughter Riley. That's going to be the center of your life for a long time. But personally, on a different on some other level, let's call it what's next for you? What are you thinking about or for you, for your family?

00:07:55 - Katie Day

That's a hard one, taking it day by day now, just trying to get sleep. But I think one of the things that I was very fortunate to have growing up was that my parents always tried to give us experiences generally every summer, right. Because my dad worked a normal W two job right. So we would take the summer vacation, but we would go on really cool vacations and have experiences, right? And so whether that was to the beach or to my grandparents house or to Disney or to different things, they always work to have very cool core memories for us. And so that's something that I'm looking forward to as our child grows to the point where she can actually remember things right. To create those. And so I think that that's kind of what I'm most excited about, about having a child that's cool.

00:08:52 - Bill Risser

As the parent of a 30 year old, I hate saying that. I'll tell you that it's the best. That's a great thing to be searching for and shooting for. So that's fantastic. Final question, really simple here. What are you paying attention to right now? Something that's happening in the world of real estate that's got you kind of going, I got to make sure I know what's happening here.

00:09:17 - Katie Day

There's a ton of things, right? And it's always trying to figure out what we should prioritize and what is actually newsworthy and will have impact on the industry or what's just noise and a distraction. So I think for me, that the two things that have been on my mind have been obviously, interest rates and kind of the impact that we're seeing that then have on pricing and on demand and buyer purchasing power and affordability and all of the subtopics that come with that. Right? And so kind of the economic outlook is something that we've been studying pretty hard for the past almost a year now. Right? And then I think the other thing that's been interesting is kind of just AI and its impact on the industry, which I think is probably a pretty low hanging fruit answer. But I think that it's definitely interesting and there's ways to leverage it, to be able to be more efficient, to be able to provide prompts or scripts or outlines for video ideas, or to be able to help you with property descriptions or different things. I don't think it's something that's going to replace real estate by any means or real estate agents, but it's definitely something that you can help use to help you be more efficient.

00:10:34 - Bill Risser

Another piece of technology that its job is to make your job a little either more efficient, a little easier, or whatever that is. Right. It's not going to replace anybody. Right.

00:10:45 - Katie Day

Cool. Not this week. Maybe next year. I don't know.

00:10:49 - Bill Risser

There's scary things skynet. That's always scary, but we'll face that when we get there. Katie, this has been great. It was just quick ten minutes, and I will see you in August in Dallas, right, at the Tom Ferry Summit. That's going to be exciting. So make sure you swing by the rate my Agent Booth, and say hello, of course. And maybe if we can work it out, we'll find time for a dinner or some sort of drink. Sound good?

00:11:14 - Katie Day

Sounds great.

00:11:15 - Bill Risser

All right, Katie, thank you so much for being on here again. And best of luck to the MoveMe to TX team.

00:11:22 - Katie Day

Awesome. Thank you.

00:11:23 - Speaker C

Thank you for listening to the real estate sessions. Please head over to ratethispodcast.com re sessions to leave a review or a rating and subscribe to the Real Estate Sessions podcast at your favorite podcast listening app.

Bill Risser and Stuart Sim discussed the importance of technology in the real estate industry, including user adoption, onboarding, and team performance tracking. Despite growing up in Montreal and being a fan of the Bruins, Stuart is now a fan of the Seattle Kraken. They discussed the need for agents to be well-educated on real estate sites, the importance of local knowledge, and the need to provide good content to the consumer. Companies like Chime and EXP are providing educational resources to help agents stay competitive, and goal setting and planning for the upcoming year was also discussed. With technology becoming increasingly important in the real estate industry, Bill and Stuart discussed the need for agents to embrace technology in order to stay competitive and provide good content to their customers.

(00:33:29) Goal Setting for 2021

(00:22:37) Team Adoption Strategies

(00:28:11) Embrace Technology

(00:05:30) Real Estate Technology

(00:11:08) Tech Startups Struggles

(00:16:43) Real Estate Technology

https://chimeinc.com

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfwsOqwKEvDFd9FQ27P3JIA

https://www.linkedin.com/company/chime-crm/

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 - Stuart Sim

It's our job as technology companies to provide them with the training and information about the product that gives them the confidence to actually adopt it and not just a user count, but also the percentage of the product they use. So, you know, if you're if you're only using 25% of a CRM, 75% of the value of that CRM is going out the door.

00:00:24 - Bill Risser

You're listening to the Real Estate Sessions Podcast. And I'm your host, Bill Risser, Executive Vice President, Strategic Partnerships with Rate, my Agent, a digital marketing platform designed to help great agents harness the power of verified reviews. For more information, head on over to Ratemyagent.com. Listen in as I interview industry leaders and get their stories and journeys to the world of real estate. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 355 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend or two this week I'm going to talk to I guess it would be somebody that I connect with regularly in the circuit. And when I say made by circuit, it's the different conferences and events and things that happen throughout the year. I first met Stuart SIM, who is the head of industry development for Chime. I first met him at an imminent event. I'm sure I'll bring that up with him. We also run into each other at a lot of different places and events. It's been really fun to watch his company grow and he's got a really cool story. So we're going to get this going today. Let's not waste any more of Stewart's time. Stewart, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:40 - Stuart Sim

Hey, Bill, thanks so much for having me.

00:01:42 - Bill Risser

Our first meeting was at an inman event in New York. I'm fairly sure of that. And I would say over half of the guests on this podcast had their my first meeting was probably at an imminent event.

00:01:54 - Stuart Sim

Yeah, well, you and I both do the tour. We see each other often on the road at some of the really good shows that are out there and events where you meet all these people and you develop these kind of relationships, it's fantastic.

00:02:06 - Bill Risser

Yeah, the word connected right in their title. And Brad's done a great job of doing that for all of us. I think some people may have already heard it a little bit. You have a bit of an accent, Stewart. I know you're aware of that. You are not from the US of A. You are Canadian, correct?

00:02:23 - Stuart Sim

I am a Canadian. Long term Canadian. I grew up on the East Coast, moved to Vancouver 30 years ago. Great country to live in.

00:02:33 - Bill Risser

Yeah, you mentioned East Coast. So I'm just doing a little bit of digging. It seemed like you grew up in Quebec, right? Am I correct there? Montreal area.

00:02:42 - Stuart Sim

Yeah, I grew up in the West Island of Montreal in the late 70s, early 80s, which was a really different time. There language barriers. I went to a French school, my brothers and sisters went to an English school, all these different components. But for me it worked out well because I ended up learning that second language and ultimately my goal is to learn a third one. And I keep pushing it off as I get older, I really want to do it more. So yeah, interesting times, for sure.

00:03:14 - Bill Risser

Was it relatively simple. You keep hearing that as a child. That's the time to be doing this kind of stuff, like learning an instrument, picking up that second language. I would imagine speaking English at home and having to speak French at school. It happened pretty quickly.

00:03:28 - Stuart Sim

Yeah, you had to develop really quickly. The difference being like, when I think about when I go back to Montreal now, I can still speak the language, and my brother who's lived there for 60 years, still struggles with the basics. Right. It's insane. But those six or seven years where I was full time French made a ton of sense and I was happy at the results.

00:03:53 - Bill Risser

It is so unique to have a province or a state where that entity just be like, our language is French, we'll speak English, I guess. Tell me exactly how that works. I'm sorry, I'm such a neophyte when it comes to how Canada works.

00:04:10 - Stuart Sim

Again, I use the example of going back there. Right. So my mom still lives there and I have family back there, but when I go into a store that first time, my instinct is to speak English. But automatically they speak French. And you have the choice to speak English or French. They'll respond in English. But I actually like it because it gives me a chance to practice right now. Growing up was a little different because you were in that separation phase where Quebec wanted to separate from Canada. So languages were, call it an issue between the French and English, and that's kind of gone away now, so it's a little bit easier. Montreal still heavy English contingent there, lives there. And Montreal is so close to Ontario that it doesn't really make that much of a difference in the northern states. Right. Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire. Five hour drive to Boston. So super easy.

00:05:11 - Bill Risser

Yeah. How far from the border, say, to get into Vermont? I think it's very close. Right?

00:05:16 - Stuart Sim

It's like 45 minutes.

00:05:18 - Bill Risser

Wow. Okay.

00:05:19 - Stuart Sim

Once you get off the island of Montreal, it's like 45 minutes.

00:05:21 - Bill Risser

Okay.

00:05:22 - Stuart Sim

It's not far.

00:05:23 - Bill Risser

Well, I like talking sports a little bit. You know that. I'm just going to guess you're a hockey guy, am I right?

00:05:32 - Stuart Sim

Wow. Absolutely.

00:05:33 - Bill Risser

And is it Canada, is it the Habs or is it not?

00:05:37 - Stuart Sim

It wasn't the habs. Wow. Wasn't the habs. And it never really has been. So because I lived so close to Montreal, to Boston, we spent our summers in Boston, so I typically lean towards the New England team so the Patriots, the Bruins, Red Sox, not the Celtics, because I'm not a basketball guy. And of course now that I've lived in Vancouver for so long, vancouver, you're seeing them on the news, so a little bit of that for sure. And now the Kraken have a team, which is fantastic. Right? Seattle.

00:06:10 - Bill Risser

Yeah.

00:06:11 - Stuart Sim

So they made the playoffs. Pretty exciting to watch. The stadium that they built down there is really impressive. But yeah, growing up, absolutely. Bruins.

00:06:20 - Bill Risser

So that had to be weird. Living in Montreal, supporting the Bruins with everybody else. Hardcore Canadiens. How did that go?

00:06:32 - Stuart Sim

You know what? I think I liked it just because I was the difference. And as I got older, when you go to college and you start getting together and gambling a little bit, throwing a fiver down just for the games, it was super fun. But at that time, Montreal was pretty dominant, so it was a tough one because they used to pretty much slap the Bruins around.

00:06:53 - Bill Risser

Seventy s and eighty s. They want.

00:06:54 - Stuart Sim

To different today, right?

00:06:57 - Bill Risser

Yeah, that's true. My heart goes out to all the Maple Leaf fans. I mean, I thought this year might be the year, maybe they could get close. Oh, it's just too bad, right? You don't feel bad for them?

00:07:08 - Stuart Sim

No, not a Leaf fan at all.

00:07:10 - Bill Risser

That's awesome. That's what I wanted to hear. All right, we'll move off that. Let's move forward. Look, you head off to university. I'm sure in your mind you're going, I'm going to be working in real estate in the SaaS world, all kinds of tech. Is that what you were thinking?

00:07:24 - Stuart Sim

Well, there was no such tech at the time. We wrote papers by hand and had someone type them up for us, which was back in the day of university. My first computer on my desk was in like 95, and I think it was shared. I did take business at school, but I really didn't know what I wanted to be when I was going to university. I actually was a football player when it got to the university level, I wasn't fast enough or strong enough, so I didn't see a lot of playing time and kind of hit me in the face a little bit that said, this isn't going to happen. I finished school and I decided I needed some time away. So I'm a pretty good golfer. Just kind of hit it around pretty good. So I actually went away and taught golf for a couple of years in Mexico and the Caribbean just to instead of doing the backpacking thing around Europe, I took a different path to kind of give me a break. And then when I came back, technology still wasn't where it's at today. There was no such thing as email or anything like that, but I did understand kind of the sales side of things. So my first job was actually selling photocopiers door to door in Vancouver. Once I had moved out here, and once you get some form of technology on your resume, and that's just when things were kicking off with email and the interweb.

00:08:51 - Bill Risser

Kind of like early to mid 90s, right? That we're talking about that's right, yeah.

00:08:55 - Stuart Sim

Late ninety S. I actually got recruited by this company called WebSmart, which was an online secure card payment solution, and that led to databases. And once I got into database technology, that led me to I actually did a deal with Realtor.com to provide their human capital software, their software as a service. So I was already about ten years into database technology, and about a month after we finished the deal, they called me and said that you want to come on board. We're trying to reshape top Producer and the Top Producer sales team. And I took that on, and we went from a sales team of ten down to four, because I just trimmed everything off and then started building it back up based on what I believed was really going to be necessary. And we took the revenue from it had come all the way down after the debacle of 2008. This was 2011. We took the revenue from 30 million up to 65 million really quickly and grew the sales team from ten to 35 reps, plus, you know, ten support people. So it was a true organization. I was there for almost eight years, and it was really how I got super passionate about real estate. I took the role, started learning about real estate, started going to the events, but also just listening to Realtors on the day to day basis and how they struggle with technology and how a two hour call to get set up was hard to do based on what they had available in their day. So I really did get passionate about real estate when I worked for Top Producer Realtor.com, because I ended up leading teams in both companies. And then I broke away from there and started my own company, which was Facebook advertising for real estate agents called Martin Agent because agents struggled in the late 2018. Then I jumped to Chime about 18 months ago because I saw a massive technical opportunity, because the technology that Chime builds is super fantastic. Little bit of a struggle with the branding side, but we're getting there.

00:11:09 - Bill Risser

You said a lot there, so I'm going to go back real quick. First of all, the position you played in college where'd you come out of linebacker? Oh, Nelly.

00:11:18 - Stuart Sim

Linebacker, okay. Yeah, I was six, 2220 linebacker.

00:11:21 - Bill Risser

I was going to say back in that day, it was probably okay. You were average size for linebacker. Maybe even bigger, I would think. Yeah. Okay, cool. Good. And still playing golf?

00:11:31 - Stuart Sim

Still play golf.

00:11:32 - Bill Risser

Awesome.

00:11:33 - Stuart Sim

Absolutely.

00:11:34 - Bill Risser

That's all important.

00:11:35 - Stuart Sim

Still play hockey twice a week.

00:11:36 - Bill Risser

Do you really? Now we got to talk about that for a second. So Stuart, you're close to my age. I'm a little older than you are, but what is it like at a I'll call it a senior level. There can't be as much checking. It has to be a little more low key. Or is there always that one guy, that one guy who just thinks he's living this dream and he's going to take it out on somebody?

00:12:00 - Stuart Sim

Yeah. So for me it's interesting because as I get older, the game becomes harder to play. But yes. So I play in an over 30 league. I'm playing with guys who are 31, 32 years old and still thinking of themselves as I'm the man. And guys who played high level hockey, whether it was junior or semi pro, are guys that play in this league. So, yes, I'm now officially the oldest guy in the league. And I feel over the last two years I've kind of lost a step. My brain isn't telling my legs how to move as fast as they used to. So that part of it is where I struggle. And when we kick off in the fall, I might try and see if there's an over 50 league, but I'm still pretty competitive. The hard part is the competitive nature of what I am. I still ski. I still want to do all these fun things, jumping off cliffs into a lake, and my body is like, what are you doing, man? Come on.

00:13:11 - Bill Risser

Do you play defense? I'm just guessing. I would imagine.

00:13:14 - Stuart Sim

Yeah, because I've always played defense.

00:13:16 - Bill Risser

Okay. That's where the guys can really play a long time in their career. As I watch the NHL, you can be effective and be a little bit older back there as opposed to the.

00:13:27 - Stuart Sim

Yeah, I've still got a pretty good shot.

00:13:29 - Bill Risser

Nice.

00:13:29 - Stuart Sim

Yeah.

00:13:30 - Bill Risser

You like moving up in the power play and it's all good, right? That's awesome. I had no idea about this. Stuart, this is great. We've been chatting together for almost two years now and I'm getting a lot out of this. Good. Well, let's get back to the other the important stuff with your experience. I've sat and talked with you. I've watched you talk to others and you talked about you have a consulting company. There have to be when you're talking to a startup that's got some issues, are there common things that tech startups and especially maybe it's the real estate space routinely struggle with? Like do you almost know going into a conversation with somebody, oh, they're going to have trouble here and here? What would that be?

00:14:13 - Stuart Sim

Yeah, that's absolutely. Now the first one is money. They raise a bunch of money and they spend it like they're going out of style. And I have a couple of examples where during COVID you get the call saying things are great or you run into them at a show and you start the conversation again and they're like three months later when the bubble bursts, they're running out of money and they're basically selling for nothing. So you have to get my recommendation is always get a good CFO, an older CFO that controls that younger mind of wanting to push forward so fast. And technology is moving so fast right now that you get caught up in the race and you get caught up in the competitive nature of the industry that we're in. And whether it's a large franchise or a tech company like a Costar or even Zillow, they're moving forward fast and furious with new products and things. But when you're a small startup, you need to form certain relationships that are going to benefit you long term. And whether that's a partnership with a larger organization that can help you move forward with your user count to get your monthly revenue up there so you can actually pay the bills without dipping in to your seed money is my first advice, while Second advice is part of that as well, which is those partnerships. I think those are really key and we talk about that often. And we are in an incestuous industry where people work together because they like each other, or you get an opportunity with some larger organization because you're out on the road and you develop that relationship.

00:15:57 - Bill Risser

Right.

00:15:59 - Stuart Sim

A lot of these tech guys, the problem is that they're not salesy, right. They are tech driven, so their mind thinks a little bit different. So you need to give them that guidance. And if you can introduce them to people at trade shows and help them along, pushing through those to make sure that the brand gets established and then they're going to have a bigger opportunity than say, someone who's just sitting behind their desk building technology.

00:16:26 - Bill Risser

Right.

00:16:27 - Stuart Sim

No one loves that.

00:16:28 - Bill Risser

Yeah. Not getting out there and being a part of the it's almost like you got to be a part of the community. I mean, it's just mandatory, right? Yeah.

00:16:35 - Stuart Sim

I look at one company right now that's doing really well, rentspree, incredible. Michael and his team are out there like they're at every event. They're looking at partnerships that make sense. They're not just jumping into everybody, into bed with everybody. So I really respect him for the fact that what he's built and the direction he's taking that organization. So that's a great example of success in real estate technology.

00:17:03 - Bill Risser

Yeah. Well, let's talk about chime. You're with Chime, head of industry development. I think that's appropriate. There are so many companies in the tech space in real estate that do multiple things. Let's just go down that path. Stewart. What does Chime do? How is Chime different and what's your take on all the different stuff that's out there?

00:17:31 - Stuart Sim

Yeah. So I'll start with Chime because I joined Chime because I love the technology. I think it does deliver. I'm going to call it 85% to 90% of what a real estate agent needs. They're always going to need more help and they're always going to believe that they need more technology because something new comes out like AI. And everyone gets excited on this. Chime is different because we kind of look at what's out there in the real estate technology world and we look at what people need and how long it's going to take to develop and when will it be ready. So we've gone down the AI path. We...