The Real Estate Sessions

I visit with one of my first connections in real estate in Phoenix Arizona. Nick Bastian was one of the first bloggers in the real estate space in the Valley of the Sun. Raillife followed the development of the Light Rail system in Tempe. Nick became and still is an expert when it comes to what's going on and what is coming soon in Tempe. With over 30 years in the business, It was fun to chat with Nick again after first interviewing him 7 1/2 years ago in September 2015.

Cheers!

Many resources show aluminum as the ten-year anniversary gift. Some say it's tin, but I'll go with aluminum. I recorded this episode on April 12, 2023, 10 years from the day of my final therapy treatment in my colon cancer journey. Some of you know my disdain for the term "chemotherapy." I chose therapy instead.

Once you know which protocol your oncologist has determined is best for you (FOLFOX for me), the next logical step is to check out the calendar on your phone and determine the date of your final treatment.

Setting goals and waypoints made sense to Cindy and I. 12 treatments break down into four quarters, three treatments each quarter. Getting to halftime made sense as a reasonable waypoint. Reaching the final quarter was a great feeling.

But there is no more incredible feeling than wrapping up the final session. Knowing there would not be another 5-hour infusion appointment with multiple trips dragging the IV tree to the bathroom. Even though the staff at Ironwood Cancer Center was fantastic, knowing this would be the last time you saw them was important. They knew that as well.

So, this will be the last episode of my journey. Thank you to all the folks that publicly and privately commented about how sharing my story has helped. I love hearing that. While I am always available to answer questions or chat with a newly diagnosed colorectal cancer patient, I'm done using this forum for that purpose. I will continue to post a March episode to remind everyone about getting screened. March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, for gosh sake.

See you next week with another episode, and thanks again.

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THE REAL ESTATE SESSIONS PODCAST

Episode 349: 

Host: BILL RISSER

Guest: RUSS COFANO

Episode Summary:

Today's guest is Russ Cofano, the CEO and President of Collabra Technologies, and he is currently based in Redmond City, around the Seattle area.

In this episode, Russ discusses the importance of agents adopting digitalization to expand their sphere of influence and increase productivity. Russ also talks about his accidental but direct entry into real estate.

Top Takeaways: 

"Seeing the problems and helping people solve those problems is a great way to get a knowledge base that no one else does."

- [Bill Risser] 

"You live life through the windshield, but you view life and understand life through the rearview mirror."

- [Russ Cofano] 

"In marketing, word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective method of marketing because it comes with the seal of approval of the person making that referral."

- [Russ Cofano] 

"Marketing is not a 30-day diet; it's not a 90-day lead gen program. It is a consistent process over time to build your presence in whatever you're trying to market."

- [Russ Cofano] 

"There is a correlation between certain digital marketing activities and production."

- [Russ Cofano] 

"It's amazing how many agents don't see the power of ratings and reviews."

- [Russ Cofano] 

Episode Highlights:

[00:56] Intro

[01:19] Meet today's guest, Russ Cofano

[04:24] What's the biggest misconception about Seattle? 

[07:24] From Law school into real estate. 

[15:36] Starting work with Collabra Technologies. 

[21:11] About SphereBuilder. 

[31:17] Case studies on top producing agents. 

[38:00] Working with MLS companies.

[42:44] Advice from Russ to new agents

[44:03] Connect with Russ.

Episode Notes: 

With a lot of his life spent around the Seattle area, Russ sees that the biggest misconception about the place is its heavy rainfall. However, the annual rainfall is even less than New York City's. Although there are more rainy days, most are short, quick drizzles. Russ schooled at the University of Washington and loves Football. 

After getting his Law degree, Russ got into real estate, which piqued his interest while in law school. He wanted to start developing hotel buildings but decided to represent developers instead due to the high-interest rates. Incidentally, where he got a job had a significant presence in residential real estate, and working there gave him a lot of knowledge and passion for the industry. Because his role was the legal hotline for realtors calling in, he gained much experience enough to be a broker before starting. 

Russ had discovered he had prostate cancer, after which his wife got diagnosed with breast cancer, and although they fully recovered with treatment, they decided to stay in Seattle. He eventually got to work with a new company managing their assets to help the company grow by building technology that allows realtors to be better marketers. 

There are two spheres of influence; the first is close contacts like friends or family who know, like, and trust the agent. This sphere also generates referrals through word-of-mouth marketing. Another form of marketing is Search Marketing which has become owned mainly by portals. Now, there are social channels built with a different strategy than the close contacts

SphereBuilder contains a tool called Sphere Index which is a way for an agent to measure their performance in digital marketing through an analytics platform that observes their activity on different social media. SphereBuilder also recommends how agents can improve this score based on the benchmark set by successful agents in their area. It has a content generation platform with easy sharing mechanisms through organic and paid-ad formats. This is crucial because marketing is a consistent effort to build an online presence. Already there is a correlation between certain digital marketing activities and production. Over time, there would even be a tighter correlation between these two. From the case study on the top-producing agents, one can see that these agents did things differently using a platform of their choice, an authentic approach, and consistency. SphereBuilder helps agents do these things.

Agents are time-poor and sometimes not too tech-savvy; hence SphereBuilder has been made to be as simple as possible so that agents can quickly do what they need. This allows them to spend more time with prospective clients. This ease of functionality is similar to Bill's "Rate My Agent" process to help give agents ratings. SphereBuilder categorizes digital marketing into three subsegments; profiles, content/engagement, and reputation ratings. Interestingly, only some agents are maximizing their digital presence.  

While the MLS work is demanding, some lawsuits can undermine how MLSs have operated. It has become imperative to broaden the value proposition they provide agents. However, there is sluggishness in MLSs to adopt this due to the typical delays in their decision-making processes. 

SphereBuilder hopes to become the marketing data source for the real estate industry. With real estate being a marketing-related business, harnessing data analytics to give real estate agents prescribed steps to get transactions. 

Advice from Russ to new agents: Find a mentor or someone you connect well with beyond the business, and learn everything you can from them. It may seem slow initially, but it will be your best decision ever.

Resources Mentioned:

Connect:

Find | THE REAL ESTATE SESSIONS

At Tresonline.com

Find | Bill Risser

At [email protected]

On Twitter

On Facebook

On Youtube

Find | Russ Cofano.

At [email protected] / [email protected]  

At www.spherebuilder.io - Click here for Industry Paper

On LinkedIn

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The ART of Real Estate was founded with one question: What if buying and selling real estate could be a great experience? Today, Bill Risser sits down with the firm’s Broker-in-Charge and owner, Brad Allen. Brad shares how his experience in the service industry has shaped his business and philosophies, where he learned how hard work and determination could keep you ahead of the game. Tune in for some great real estate advice.

—

Thank you so much for tuning in and telling a friend. That’s how we continue to grow this little program in our little corner of the internet. We are going to South Carolina. One of the South, deep South, we are going to talk to Brad Allen. He is the broker-owner of The ART of Real Estate Brokerage. We are going to talk about that name because it’s awesome.

We are going to talk a lot about South Carolina and how Brad got into the business, his views, look at culture, and what the customer experience should be is important. For any broker-owner reading, he’s got some great advice on how to roll out some of the things he was able to do in Columbia, South Carolina. Let’s get this thing started. Brad, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be on your show finally.

We connected through Inman and like a lot of the people that I talked to on the show, maybe it wasn’t a direct connection for some and was through other channels but this was direct. You and I both worked as ambassadors and it’s a fun job. It was sometimes harrowing. Is that a good word? First of all, I like to start at the beginning with my guests. I audibly gasped when I was looking through your stuff online and saw that you were raised in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. For golfers out there, it’s 1, 2 or 3 of the meccas in the United States. Tell me it was awesome growing up in Myrtle Beach.

It was okay at best. It’s the place where there’s everything to do if you are a tourist and you feel like there’s nothing to do as a local. A year and a half in high school, I didn’t even go to the beach and I lived 0.5-mile from the beach. It’s one of those things that doesn’t resonate. Looking back, it’s fun to take my kids but growing up. It’s one of those places that is okay.

My guess is that a lot of the locals there probably are employed by the resorts because there’s so much going on there. I can’t remember the number. It’s 30, 40, and 50 golf courses within a short drive in that area.

It used to be 90 golf courses in 30 square miles several years ago. A lot of them closed and became developed. It was a lot.

You had a couple of different gigs in there. I’m guessing. You probably worked in the service industry but did you work on the golf side too? Let’s talk about some of the things you did living in Myrtle Beach.

It’s a tourist town. There’s not an industry in Myrtle Beach. It is all catering to tourism. The service industry is how you come up. That is why most of the high schools there have bad sports teams because we didn’t have first waits, we went to work. My waits were growing up. In college, I can’t share those stories online. They are too graphic.

I did some landscaping as well but I grew up in restaurants and it was impactful for me. It’s one of the few experiences that has shaped my business and my mentality, knowing that the consumer is always right, which we want to tell people that’s the case but let’s be honest, they are not. It allows me to play chess because when somebody is upset, I know I can make them happy but I also don’t have to give up my move firstborn to do it.

It’s impactful growing up on the beach where you see people sometimes driving 8, 9, 10 to 11 hours. A lot of Canadians come down there in March and spend their entire year’s savings going on vacation. How awesome is it that you are able to serve these people, knowing that this is where they want to go? It has helped me to learn the value of a dollar, how people spend their dollars and how you need to make sure they come back.

There’s one restaurant I worked at. We would go on three and a half-hour waits. People had come there religiously for many years. The food was okay at best but it was the experience. It was the memories. It’s how they felt when they were there. They were clients for life. That is something I strive to do in our business. Even though I don’t fry oysters, we do have some little different.

We are going to talk about that as we get deeper into what you are doing, the fact that you have taken that and created a brokerage that’s built around those same philosophies, which is super cool. Did you do something on the golf side ever? I know the golfer in me. I’m always checking it out.

I wanted to go to school to be a golf course architect. I did a trade school for half a day and two years in high school to do golf course landscape management. I was the President of our FFA chapter, which was a joke because we were pretty boys. I drove golf carts and stuff. Everybody was tractor pulling and hog racing. Golfing is a big part of it. I’m a horrible golfer but I love to get out there and dig a trench from the tee box to the hole.

FFA can apply to golf courses. I did not know that. I got to rethink my FFA thoughts. Give me the biggest misconception about South Carolina.

We are one of the top moves through destinations now and your dollar does go a long way in South Carolina. One of the biggest misconceptions is people think that they can bring their way of life to South Carolina and that we are so grateful that you are here. Let’s be honest, we are a don’t-tread-on-me state. Everybody gets along. Everyone wants to be left alone. People can bring their money but if they can leave some of their idiosyncrasies behind that, they will have a lot better time in the South. We are polite. We would be nice to your face but don’t look twice at a Southerner. In spite of them, they will get you back. I promise.

That’s good advice for all the readers up in the Northeast. Take it easy when you get there. Let’s move on. You are out of high school. You are thinking about college. There had to be a career path you were thinking about.

Going through high school, I knew I wanted to go to college. I’m not sure what I wanted to do exactly. I attended the University of South Carolina and started a degree in Criminology. I wanted to go to law school or Federal Law Enforcement. That’s the path I went down and took a lot of ologies. I was a Criminology major with enough credits. It is still in the paper to be a Southern Studies minor in an African American Women’s Studies minor because I took all of those classes, so I didn’t have to take a lot of math. I’m very well versed in the ologies.

I know exactly what you are talking about. I was the same kind of guy, the minimum math required to get through. Not an engineer, not a developer. You are not in that line of work and you did something different. What did you do right out of school?

Back in college, I worked at a law firm being a runner and there was a huge foreclosure law firm. One of the older attorneys pulled me aside one day when he gave me a $20 million check to take to a courthouse to buy some lands and said, “Son, don’t be a dirt attorney.” I was like, “If I’m not going to be a dirt attorney, what can I do to make as much money but also the same realm?” I went straight into real estate. I took my final exams, took the 1st week of real estate school, graduated the 2nd week of real estate school, and was licensed on June 6th of ’06, straight in.

Did you stay in Columbia?

I did. That taught me a lot of lessons. The only thing I knew about Columbia was bars and restaurants in college. I decided to start a career offering networking but I didn’t have one. That helped propel me on how I train and bring on younger agents in my company because real estate is not set up for somebody that’s 22 to 27. It’s not set up for people like that. It helped me instill in agents now. I went straight into real estate and hadn’t looked back.

What was your first brokerage?

That’s Prudential. It is back when they were top four. They had a recruiter and I remember going in and coming out, going, “They want to give me a job.” My mom was like, “How much are they paying you?” I’m like, “Nothing.” I got to spend all this money, it was the dumbest. I was excited but quickly found out what it meant. It was hard.

Culture is a big pot of chili or stew, and each person you put in there can change the taste of that pot.

CLICK TO TWEET

We talked about how quickly you connected with your partner now, Mary Lane Sloan. Let’s talk about that meeting. It was important in your life. It changed the direction of where you were headed.

Mary Lane is 2 or 3 years older than I am. She was already a state-certified teacher. She was teaching fourth grade and decided to shadow our previous partner myself on spring break. She was like, “I’m going to sell houses while I’m not teaching.” Quickly it became relevant that she was good at it. We have meshed together and we have been partners for several years.

Usually, people say, “Partnerships don’t work.” I agree with them but this one has been cool. It has changed the trajectory. We are not necessarily best friends. We don’t talk a lot. We talk in the office. We see each other a lot and we run the company together but we’re not hanging out on Friday nights, drinking beer in the garage. It’s truly a cool dynamic. I have been very fortunate to have her in my life and help us grow this thing in the right way.

Were you at Prudential when you first built The ART of Real Estate team? Let’s talk about that. First of all, I dig the name. I know there’s a story in there. I’m hoping that you are going to share it with us. I know how you are, Brad, you had to be thinking, “We are going to be different than everybody else. This is why we are going to be different.” Let’s talk about that.

We started a team before teams were cool. The way we did that is we had a previous partner. She was busy. She was in her late twenties at that point. She had kids in school and was a perfectionist in a good way. She would not take more than about six clients at a time because she wanted to give them an exceptional experience.

I get in there and I’m like, “Let me help you. You go find the business, I will handle it.” It helped me take people from sticky notes to a database. It helped me put processes in place. That’s when Mary Lane came on. She started as a buyer’s agent with us. We brought in another team member and put all these processes in place because we realized at that time it was about to be a recession.

We are in the early twenties. A lot of the people that were in their early 30s had gotten out because they had families to feed and it was tough for them. In reality, I feel like they weren’t trained probably well in their early careers. When it got tough, they had to get on. We created a system and a team. That allowed us to give them exceptional experience and take on more clients. What dawned on me is that a lot of people can find the business but without the structure, they can’t handle it. We started adding people and we added a lot of wrong people. We added some right people and a lot more wrong people. We finally started to find a rhythm and still working on that several years later.

How fast do you know you hired the wrong person?

Sometimes you know it when you are in the interview and you are like, “This could go 1 of 2 ways.” I never want to be the guy that doesn’t hire a rock star because they had a bad interview or that is open to certain things. It can go the other way too very quickly. I fired an agent that was finding business left and right but could not explain the contract, even though he had been trained on it seventeen times. It’s a liability and bad for our brand. I’m not a body shop. We do, we will let people go.

Let’s come back to the name. How do you come up with that name?

Full transparency and it’s funny that our previous partner, her name was Andrea Reynolds. She’s still a b***** realtor. She sells a lot of houses. We worked underneath her as a team. We were the Andrea Reynolds team, The ART of Real Estate. As we had some legal changes, she had gone on to a different company and we retained the brands and everything else.

It was a tagline on to our previous team name, which helps me when I talk to other team leaders or owners going, “Don’t name it after yourself. Here’s why. Name that for something different.” We’ve always said that we have a philosophy, we have a way of doing things and there is an art to it. If we can continue to give that delivery, it works well.

If I’m an agent who’s sitting there talking to you and trying to understand what it’s like to work there and we will talk more about what culture means to you. I guarantee I know that there’s a certain rhythm and way of you, laying out to somebody in 30 seconds what matters for people that work in that team?

A lot of times agents feel like they are the LeBron James of the deal. I’m like, “We are all a big circle. We all have points.” We have fifteen staff people. I was like, “You are a part of that circle. Your job is to deliver and handle the client. Give them an exceptional experience and be the quarterback. It’s the listing coordinator’s job to make sure this happens. It’s my job to make sure that this happens. If everybody does their job, it’s a smooth, fluid circle. It’s like a wheel going down the road but there’s a flat spot. Everybody is going to know it. It’s going to be clunky and it’s not going to be a great ride.”

I usually start with that and I tell them, “We are looking for people that are hungry, humble, and smart. That’s it. You don’t need to know real estate. I don’t need you to have experience. We can help you but we need to know that you are those three things.” If they can agree to that and are open to learning, we have had some good success helping agents reach their potential.

It’s 2013 or 2012. Maybe you start thinking, “We got to have our own brokerage.” I’ve talked to a lot of different broker-owners and there’s always a story. It can be tough. It could have been, “They had a mentor that walked us through it.” What’s your story about how you launched that brokerage?

We were fortunate in a couple of different aspects. In 2009, we changed Prudential Franchise to a new one. The recession got hot and heavy. The gentleman that owned our company, owned several different businesses building and was a wealthy guy. He said, “You are the least profitable. We are shutting it down.”

My previous partner and I, two other people said, “Give it to us. Make it look good. We will take it on.” I got my feet wet pretty quickly in 2009 by owning a company and quickly, I sold it back to our other partners because we were not going to get along through it. Those are all for a reason. We signed a non-compete and I stayed there for about three years. We did about 85% of the business, the entire company, just our team.

What happened at that point was, at the time, he was going to shut us down. We looked at all the companies. All the big names were interviewed with them. We thought about shutting it down and going to work with them. Fast forward, Brookfield bought Prudential and flipped us to HomeServices of America, which is brilliant. It was the coolest thing ever.

At that point, we are like, “We are spending a lot of money on brand recognition. We are going to have to spend a lot of money to turn all our stuff over to Berkshire Hathaway. Let’s go down this rabbit trail one more time and see what’s out there.” I think our franchise agreement was coming up. We hired a business coach and a real estate coach and said, “If we opened our own company, what do we need to do?”

It was three intensive days of mission and vision. We were like, “What do we want to do? Who are going to be owners?” There are 7 of us but only 3 of us came out as owners. We had some hard conversations. We were about a year before we jumped out of our current brokerage. We kept going through it and saying, “Should we open a market center for Keller Williams?” It was an option.

Enhanced Consumer Experience: A lot of people can find the business, but without the structure, they can’t handle it.

We do this and this. We did our due diligence. It was not a quick decision. It was in-depth and we decided at the last moment, “Why fly somebody else’s flag on our building if it’s all our money and we can do it differently?” We took that money that we were given by Warren Buffett and put it into staff. It was a little different but it helped us know who we were. Opening a brokerage is not for everybody. It’s not profitable half the time. If it’s somebody’s goal, they got to be into it because it’s not easy and not the best route for a lot of people.

The word margins overtake your life.

It’s a constant battle. Agents want as much money as possible. You’ve got to make much money to pay everybody. The staff wants more money. It’s tough.

As you’ve grown the brokerage, affiliate operations have been a big part of what you are doing. The first one of all wasn’t titled. I always expect to see. You went with insurance first. Why insurance? I don’t know if I know another team that brought on insurance into the fold.

This was our pandemic response. Several years before the pandemic, we went down the rabbit trail and it wasn’t going to work out for us. Insurance is hard. It’s like a mafia. The way the carriers work, they control everything. I was fortunate when the pandemic happened. We did fund like every other real estate company.

My partner and I were like, “We’ve got people in place to help run the company, why don’t you try and find other aspects for making money? If this happens again or the recession happens again, we have some other avenues.” We started the insurance company. We are fortunate that team up with a company that helped us get a lot of carriers. I was able to acquire a great producer that had the experience that wanted to come to help us.

The reason is we are doing 500 or 600 transactions and 60% of those are buyers. I started looking...

Episode Summary:

Meet today’s guest, Nate Joens, Co-Founder of “Structurely,” a technology company that builds AI based out of Ames, Iowa. Nate also grew up in Des Moines, Iowa.

In this episode, I sit with Nate, discussing how to use AI in Real Estate, benefits and particular areas of functionality, and future expectations for AI in Real Estate.

Top Takeaways:

“As much as I might say email is dying, I think that the combination of text and email work really well together.”

– [Nate Joens]

“Messaging is really eating the world, and you just need to be present where your customers are; you don’t know where that might be, though.”

– [Nate Joens]

“All salespeople kind of give up on leads too early, and they are on to the next new lead.”

– [Nate Joens]

“That’s the real precipice of what Structurely is here to do; it’s not to replace agents, It’s not to replace ISAs, it’s to augment the role.”

– [Nate Joens]

“For every 100 leads a typical agent gets, one or two will turn into a transaction…you only need to close one or two more to have a massive increase in revenue.”

– [Bill Risser]

Episode Highlights:

[00:36] Intro

[01:15] Introducing today’s guest, Nate Joens.

[04:15] How did “Structurely” come about?

[16:03] Do customers often give you feedback?

[18:00] Text vs. Email

[20:10] The considerable opportunity in old leads.

[21:44] Success stories from users.

[24:05] What do you anticipate in the future with AI in Real Estate?

[28:28] About “impactfulai.org”.

[33:40] What one piece of advice would you give a new agent?

[36:09] Outro

Episode Notes:

About “Structurely“: Des Moines, Iowa, is where Nate grew up, and it is gradually becoming a mini tech hotspot. While finishing school, Nate started the company, Structurely with his friend since both of them had an interest in Real Estate and technology. After talking with many agents, they realized that most agents disliked the aspect of following up with leads, which is typically the most challenging aspect with any form of sales. Nate and his friend decided to solve the problem with technology.

This was around when chatbots were getting a lot of hype, and they decided to take advantage of this method. Although the amount of lousy publicity chatbots got due to people’s bad experiences while conversing with them, the first goal was to ensure their chatbot conversations were human-like. Competitors often try to depict human conversations as better than their AI conversations. Still, the in-depth analysis showed that 99% of users do not think they are conversing with a chatbot.

Three main concepts to be defined for the chatbot to work included Slots, Context, and Intent. Building Structurely based on the framework using these concepts has been pivotal in creating human-like conversations. Additionally, the feedback from users or agents through a robust script customization product also helps the conversations grow in a more human-like fashion. It allows agents to customize conversations based on their individual preferred responses to different questions asked.

Although Nate believes email is a dying medium of communication, it still works well in combination with texts, and it will be in use for a long time. This, however, won’t alter the flaws of email like low open rates, low response rates, and high rates of abuse. Hence, they do not intend to replace such methods of communication; whether it’s email or text, messaging is a crucial means to communicate, and it is essential to meet customers where they are. 

There is a massive opportunity in old leads. Unfortunately, most agents give up too early on old leads believing that a new lead has a higher chance of closing when it actually doesn’t. Structurely has been able to look into this and take advantage of old leads forming the source of most deals being closed recently. Not following up on old leads in any industry is simply a disservice to that business.

There have been several success stories from users of Structurely who benefited from the experience. It has also helped agents customize their chatbot as an assistant rather than as an agent. This creates a good relationship because leads lower their guard and relate freely. Some leads even go as far as requesting to meet the assistant they were chatting with, which depicts the success of creating very human-like conversations.

A significant expectation with AI in Real Estate is AI writing content on its own. This is made possible by the software GPT3, the world’s largest natural language processing model. It is trained on the entire corpus of text from the internet. This machine can execute tasks with a simple command; examples include writing sales copies, property description copies, follow-up texts, follow-up emails, and other forms of writing that consume a lot of time and energy from agents.

About “impactfulai.org”: There is a large amount of incorrect information about AI out there. One of these is that AI is “Self-learning”; this is not true because all the data AI learns has been labeled somehow at a point. This website aims to educate people on the myths about AI and the negative publicity of chatbots. Another benefit of having human-like follow up on leads is that while agents often complain about the poor quality of leads, machines do consistent follow-up, and these same leads are now seen to be of high quality.

Nate’s advice to new agents: Make yourself known on social media. It’s like being the digital mayor of your sphere of influence, and someone who Nate recommends people follow to see this practically done well is Emma Jordison.

Resources Mentioned:

Connect: 

Find | THE REAL ESTATE SESSIONS

At www.TheRealEstaterSessions.com

Find | Bill Risser

At [email protected]

On Twitter

On Facebook

On YouTube

Find | Nate Joens

At www.structurely.com 

On LinkedIn – Nate Joens

RATE & SUBSCRIBE

At  Ratethispodcast.com/REsessions

On Apple Podcasts

On Google Podcasts

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Bill sits down with Kurt Uhlir, a leading expert in disruptive technology and deliberate innovation. He is a globally-recognized marketer, entrepreneur, speaker, and the lead inventor of disruptive technologies in five industries.

Kurt is the VP of Marketing and Operations at eXp World Holdings. He advises leaders, from startup founders to private-equity-backed CEOs to the President of the United States.

Listen in as Kurt looks back on his eclectic life and what led him down the path he is currently on, from his earliest days as a school athlete to a brief career as a stuntman, to signing up as a high-angle rescuer, to his stint as an alligator handler—and, finally, to his foray into marketing and entrepreneurship.

Kurt gives the three best pieces of advice to real estate agents looking to take their marketing strategy to the next level. The most foundational of these is to treat your business like a business, regardless of whether or not you work with a brokerage.

He also believes that an agent needs their website to be the focal point for anything they do, marketing-wise. Finally, Kurt encourages agents to have a clean contacts database to keep their operations organized and purposeful.

Kurt shares how agents can use today’s opportunities to add one-to-two zeroes to their network within the next few years.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

● [03:43] How Kurt was primed for entrepreneurship from a young age

● [06:12] Why athletes make great leaders in the business world

● [13:09] Defining “spatial data” and its uses

● [20:14] Why Kurt entered real estate

● [22:46] Three things real estate agents should be doing in their marketing strategy

● [27:53] Personal websites versus Zillow

● [30:53] Being an “influencer” as a real estate agent

● [32:24] High-achieving servant leadership

● [35:54] Real estate in a post-pandemic world

Key Quotes by Kurt:

● At the end of the day, it’s perseverance that wins.

● I believe in “netweaving” as opposed to “networking.”

● What helps an agent is not just having a website but making sure that their clients and prospective clients realize that they’re in a different game as a trusted agent over big portals.

As I do every March, it's another episode dedicated to promoting regular screening for you and your loved ones for colorectal cancer. As a survivor from 2012, I speak from experience.

If it wasn't for a persistent General Practitioner, I might have kept skipping my first colonoscopy and ended up with a different result.

It's a short episode, so please check it out and share it with friends. We can make a difference in so many people's lives!

Cheers!

Are you goal-oriented? Are you sure you’re in the right place right now professionally? Develop the entrepreneurial mindset you need that can drive you to reach more success. Tune into this episode as Principal Broker Sarita Dua discusses her unique journey at Keller Williams Realty Professionals. She loves engineering and getting specific answers, but she realizes she wants something more as time goes by. She shares what triggered her to start a career in the real estate industry and the factors that contributed to her decision.

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Welcome to episode 323. Thank you so much for reading. We get to talk to an agent who has done something I’ve never heard of for a realtor yet in over 300 interviews. I won’t tell you what it is. You have to read to find that out but we’re going to be talking to Sarita Dua. She’s in the Portland area with Keller Williams. She has Ask Sarita, which is her website AskSarita.com. That’s been her branding for years. She created that prior to even getting her license. That gives you a hint about some of the things that Sarita does. Let’s get this thing started. Sarita, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Bill. It’s great to be here.

I can’t wait to chat with you. You have a very interesting story. You know that. It’s unique for a realtor to have the background you have. Would you agree with that?

Yes and no. We all have crazy unique stories but I’ve never stopped and thought about them. I do probably have a little bit of a unique path.

There are only a 320 plus interviews. There might be 6 people who knew they were going to be a realtor when they were 12. It’s always that second path. It seems like it’s such a heavy influence there. You’re in Portland doing some great stuff. We’ll chat about that but you’re not a native Oregonian. Let’s start at the beginning. What was home for you? Where did you grow up?

I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. My parents are immigrants. They got married in India and settled in Michigan in 1964. I was born and raised there.

I’ve had some people from Michigan but maybe not Detroit. I love the way these answers can go and never know. First of all, I want to hear a little bit about growing up there. Give me the biggest misconception about that area.

Detroit is not as crazy, rough or violent as some people assume that Downtown Detroit is scary. I had a great Midwestern upbringing. We did grow up in the suburbs and Detroit, the city, Downtown has changed a lot. There was a time when we didn’t hang out there and the biggest surprise in Detroit is Downtown Detroit itself. It is the place. We call it the D. It’s where all the sports teams play. It’s got a burgeoning food scene, great rooftop bars and craft breweries. It’s a fun place. Most people would not know or even assume that. They would avoid downtown because of some preconceptions from way back when.

Keller Williams: The cool thing with sports management is you can work with the team. You can do the ticket size and sales and sponsorships. There’s so many elements of it. And the idea is to kind of try different things out, to figure out what you like and what you don’t.

What part of the suburbs did you go to?

I grew up in this place, Shelby Township, Michigan. I was born and raised in Warren. My dad was 30 years in Chrysler. Back then, especially if you were from a different country like India, it was the Silicon Valley before Silicon Valley. A lot of young engineers from countries like India were able to get to Detroit, Michigan because companies like GM, Ford and Chrysler needed engineers. That was a way for my dad to get there, get citizenship, add value and provide a contribution to the companies. That’s how that started. We were always tied to automotive to the point where I couldn’t wait to get out.

We’re going to talk about real estate cycles. There were automotive recessionary cycles where my dad, uncles, other family members and cousins were always nervous if they were going to get laid off or not. I didn’t want my livelihood to be tied to an industry that was up and down. I went to a small college that was tied to automotive. It was called at the time General Motors Institute, GMI. It’s rebranded as Kettering University.

Although I didn’t work for automotive, I worked for a hospital and Intel. All of the students did a 5-year program for a bachelor’s instead of 4 but you did 3 months of school and work all 5 years and graduated with 2.5 years of work experience. Ninety-five percent of us graduated with good job offers.

I have to bring this up. I grew up in San Diego. I’m a huge fan of the San Diego Padres. I worked for them for twelve years later on but in 1984 and I don’t know if you remember this or not, the Padres played the Tigers in the World Series. There was this guy named Kirk Gibson who was a real pain for the Padres. We ended up winning one game. That was a year the Tiger started 35 and 5. They were an amazing team. Do you remember that at all?

I don’t mind outing my age. I graduated high school in ’87. We used to listen to a garage sale stereo component set. It was an AM/FM radio with two speakers. We still listen to baseball and games either on TV. We didn’t have cable back then. If someone else was watching anything else, we couldn’t watch the game. It was Kirk Gibson, Chet Lemon, Lance Parrish and Alan Trammell. I remember all of them.

Detroiters love their sports. Sometimes it’s tough to be a Detroit fan like the Lions. It is a curse to be a Detroit Lions fan. We had the Pistons, the Bad Boys regime of the Pistons as well. We’ll talk about my journey to Portland but I do miss having 4 to 5 major teams in your market. We only have one in Portland. We have MLS Soccer but we have mainly NBA basketball. Not to be a football fan and not having an NFL team is rough.

I discovered you posted on social about your son getting an internship with the Lions, which is fantastic. I had one year with the Chargers there. It was nice. My question is, first of all, did you and your husband, I don’t want to say, curse him with the Detroit Lions fandom but is that the case?

We all have crazy unique stories. We take that unique path to success.

CLICK TO TWEET

We became less Lions fans when we moved from Boston and we were Patriots fans. I was less of a Lions fan in my adult years. I was a Lions fan growing up. I love the Vikings too. I was weird but my brother was a diehard Lions fan. All of my cousins are Lions fans. My son is at the Lions. I’m proud of him for getting an internship in the NFL. He’ll be a senior in the fall of 2022 at Syracuse Sports Management.

What was fun about this kid is he had sports in his blood. I pick him up from daycare at age 6 or 7. He would be like, “Mama, LaMarcus Aldridge got traded.” I’m like, “How do you know this? You barely can go to the bathroom by yourself. You are a questionable reader.” He didn’t have a phone but he knew who had a phone and who would know. Even when he was 10 or 11, he would work his way onto his cousin’s fantasy football team. My brother would text me. He’s like, “I don’t know if we should let him in. He’s persistent. It’s $100 entry and we do this thing.” I’m like, “Let him learn. Just do it.” The kid won in the first 2 or 3 years every year because not only is he a big fan but he will not let up. He would say to my brother, “Uncle, you got to do this.”

He would beat him down by battering him with trades until my brother would probably be like, “Go ahead and take them.” It’s fun to see this. It happened to be the Lions but he would’ve worked honestly anywhere in the sports team. The cool thing with sports management is you can work with the team. You can be in game-day operations. You can do the ticket size, sales and sponsorships. There are many elements of it. The idea is to try different things out and figure out what you like and what you don’t. He does love working for a team. He’s worked running the summer football camps and liaison between the team and the different high school organizations. He’s loving it.

Let’s talk about how do you get to Portland? You wanted to get out of the area because it was all automotive all the time for you. What led you to move?

A couple of the best things of my life are happy accidents but if you believe, there are no accidents. Maybe it was all by design. I went to college as a Management Major for the first three semesters. GMI was known for having Engineering and Management. Three semesters in, I switched to Electrical Engineering. You’re talking about a rare path in real estate. I bucked the trend.

A lot of people, not to say that there was anything easy or negative about management but some people switched from Engineering to Management and I went upstream the other way. I have always been strong in math and science. I love the exactness of engineering. If there’s a problem, you get an answer and put a box around it. It’s right or wrong.

I felt like even if I didn’t do Engineering, an Electrical Engineering degree would let me do probably anything related to computers or information systems versus MIS or Management Information Systems degree might limit me. I went and did Electrical Engineering. I ended up working for Intel. That was the company that I was working with at college.

It’s funny that I always called it the Top Gun program, even before this movie was back out as the redo. I joined what I would call the Top Gun program at Intel, which was about twenty of us that had to be double E or Computer Science majors. We did a two-year rotation program in different marketing and engineering functions to go into sales. I realized in my career that maybe I’m a BSer and that’s why but you can have that exactness of engineering of getting things right with the math, the answer and the problem that I described.

Keller Williams: If you could have an engineering mindset, but be able to articulate how a client would solve a problem either by saving time or saving money with your solutions, it’s a very consultative approach.

You could also be good at communication but there was a rare Venn Diagram’s liver if you could do both. Be engineering-minded but be able to articulate how a client would solve a problem either by saving time or saving money with your solutions. It’s a very consultative approach. When I call it the Top Gun program, we got into this program, did these rotations and got into at age 23, a company car and a bag-carrying salesperson for Intel.

My rotations were in Princeton, New Jersey, Chandler, Arizona, the Phoenix Area and the Bay Area. My final placement was in Boston. I was single, loving my life, working hard and selling for Intel, calling on accounts in Boston. I never thought I’d leave tech. The lightning struck and I met my husband there in Boston. I got engaged, got married and had my 1st baby and 1st house. That was our life then.

An interesting twist, my husband, is the reason we’re in Portland. Although, I’ll take some credit for it. Portland was a big campus for Intel, as was the Bay Area, Arizona and a few other places. I was traveling to Portland a lot with my client. My husband is a textile engineer. He does R&D for fabrics or materials R&D. He had an opportunity to interview with Nike. I told him, “We have this new baby. She’s eight weeks old. We haven’t slept for eight weeks since we had her. Go for the interview but don’t like the job.”

I wanted to be near Michigan. We had picked Chicago or I wanted to be near his parents who are in Raleigh. We had picked DC. The big city is near our hometowns but not in our hometowns because his family was based in Raleigh. I’m like, “Go for the interview. It’s a great city. I want grandma and grandpa to come to the soccer games, the plays or spelling bees.” You know how the story is going to end.

He goes to the interview and calls me from the interview. I’m dating myself. We had bad phones with StarTAC flip phones and a minute of batteries. He calls me and I’m like, “Why are you spending your minutes calling me?” He says, “I love it.” I made a joke, “I hope your new family loves it too. Send me Christmas cards because I’m not moving to Portland.” These are those accidents. Two weeks later, we were on our house hunting trip to Portland. It’s where we settled in 1999. We’ve been here for many years.

Our daughter was born in Boston and never took a step in Boston. We moved when she was two months old and my son was born in Portland. Interestingly, my husband is still at Nike. Years later, he’s in Art Materials Research for footwear. He has patents for some of the coolest technology that they have like Flyknit if you’ve heard of it as a type of fabric in the shoes. It’s all a team sport at Nike but he’s on the team that has come up with many of those technologies. I’m proud of him.

Somehow you decide it’s time for you to enter the world of real estate. This is a fun part of this interview every time. What was that trigger and thing that you said, “This is it. This is the time?”

I’ll tell you what it wasn’t. It wasn’t that I loved houses. It wasn’t like I was an architecture fiend, watched HGTV or any of that. It was having a 2 and a 4-year-old loving tech but being client-facing. My large accounts were in Dallas, Atlanta and Chicago. We have these large named accounts after Intel. I was at several startups but gravitated that 100-person type companies where it’s like, “We have a great idea. Do it. It was your idea. Go do that in addition to all the other jobs you have.”

The best things in life are happy accidents, but then if you believe there's no accidents, maybe it was all by design.

CLICK TO TWEET

I loved the energy, how hard we worked and sales in that. You could see your impact if you’re working on sales, marketing, biz dev and product marketing. Those were the things that I was doing and I loved it but we have a 2 and a 4-year-old and no family in Portland. My husband and I would play rock paper scissors because he was traveling to Vietnam and Germany. He’s on a seventeen-day trip to Europe.

Between the trade shows, the vendor visits and everything else, he was in Europe and Asia a lot. It wasn’t every day but every month and a half, you’d have a ten-day trip. Meanwhile, I would have quarterly business reviews. We’d look at each other like, “The kids were at daycare. If there was an ear infection, who’s going to change their schedule?” There were times when I was landing at 5:43 and daycare pickup was at 6:00. I had no room for error.

We looked at each other and said, “Something has to get.” We were both on these hamster wheels. We both loved our careers. This is going to sound like the most humble brag. I’m not trying to say this humbly but the reality is in my early 30s, I had no problem helping people but I had a problem asking for help. When you care about people and you think of your friends as family, asking them for help is a way of showing that you love and need them.

At the time, I was that person who would do anything for anyone. “6:00 AM, we’re going to the airport, let’s go. I got your Starbucks order.” At 4:40, I’m in the car. If you’re in my row on the plane and you live in my neighborhood, I wouldn’t ask you for a ride. It was weird. I don’t know if it was cultural. I don’t know what it was but I had a hard time.

My husband looked at me and he’s like, “We got to do something. This is not working.” I pushed hard. I’m like, “If you want me to put my job and make dinner and stuff, I’m nothing against anyone who does that but that isn’t me. You’re going to starve because I don’t know how to cook.” He’s the chef of our family. I need to do a lot of things. That’s how I’m wired. Daycare was great for my kids because they would have butter week. We’re going to make butter. I would never think of doing that.

I love that there were people that knew how to do this thing better than me but I knew that something had to give. I looked at different careers. I had done my MBA in Entrepreneurial Management. I love the startup scene. How could I have my business and not have to go as Mark Cuban or Barbara Corcoran on Shark Tank for money? I didn’t invent the newest draw and needed money but it had to be service-based. I looked at mortgages, financial planning, insurance and real estate.

I was pretty methodical about it. I interviewed brokers and wrote a business plan. I asked them all, “What would it take to succeed?” I was making good money in tech even back then. They would say to me, “You’d be lucky if you make $40,000 in your 1st year. As a family, you had a ramen noodle only in number and it was higher than $40,000.” I’m like, “How is this going to work?”

I did my homework and chose real estate. The irony of the whole thing is real estate. I do love houses and architecture. I lived in a beautiful 1910 foursquare that we remodeled and fixed up but real estate is people in the project management. That is the common theme that I had throughout my whole career. Even large-scale account management, product management and product marketing, it is people and project management.

Keller Williams: Real estate is for people in project management. It’s figuring out what’s going to happen next and solving problems before they become problems.

Telling people what’s going to happen. What happened? What’s happening now? What’s going to happen next? Solving problems before they become problems,

I am thrilled to re-visit with Sue Pinky Benson on this Short Cuts episode. Back in March 2017, Sue was my guest on Episode 85. For the Short Cuts interview, we find out what was the biggest event for Sue since the last time we talked, which iteration of Sue's pink persona does her husband and partner Josh like best, what's next for the Benson's and what is happening in real estate that has Sue's attention. All that and more for this episode.

Instagram for Sue

Real Estate Sessions - Episode 345 - Amy Chorew

Bill sits down with Amy Chorew, President of Curated Learning, a consulting company that helps proptech and real estate companies keep their training content and platforms updated and on the cutting edge.

With industry experience spanning over four decades, Amy is an expert in helping real estate firms scale their business through consulting, training, and events.

Listen in as Amy reflects on her storied career and why she decided in 1981 to make the drastic switch from art therapy to real estate and officially get her license in 1987.

She talks about the moment she was inspired to become a teacher, the gap she sought to fill in the sphere of real estate education, and the most common misconceptions and mistakes brokers and agents make when using technology to manage and grow their businesses.

Amy also discusses her most important lessons learned at the Fortune 500 company Anywhere and how those lessons carried over into her current work as a consultant.

Finally, Amy deep-dives into Curated Learning’s mission and her data-driven view on the future of real estate o both the macro and micro levels.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

● [02:08] A day in the life of a “Nutmegger.”

● [05:37] Amy’s foray into real estate in 1981

● [07:53] Amy’s passion for education and why her content is so effective

● [10:15] Working with Matthew Ferrara

● [12:47] Common technology-related mistakes by brokers and agents

● [15:53] Working with Realogy

● [18:40] All about Curated Learning

● [22:10] Amy’s take on the future of the market

● [26:50] Amy’s advice to brand-new agents

Key Quotes by Amy:

● Agents need to understand what’s going on in their local market. There are data points that you see people posting on social media. That’s not where they belong. They belong to your articulation to buyers and sellers so they can understand what’s happening in the market.

● A lot of people have unique ideas and great successes and can talk about them. But to create a course where students can implement is a whole different level.

● How do you manage client expectations? You give them realistic expectations—but then you have to exceed them.

● What I would tell a brand-new agent is to find the right company that resonates with them. Visit them twice. Don’t just go into that first interview. Go back and make sure that they’re the same company. When you’re there, understand your value prop—who you are and how you’ll articulate it—and get connected with your sphere. If you’re in it for the long haul, that will pay dividends over and over.