The Real Estate Sessions

By Bill RisserBusiness Entrepreneurship Marketing

The Real Estate Sessions episodes

July 19, 2022 The Real Estate Sessions Rewind - Natalia Karayaneva, CEO Propy
Episode Summary:
Guest: NATALIA KARAYANEVA

Episode Summary:

Meet our guest in this episode, Natalia Karayaneva, CEO of Propy and serial entrepreneur born and raised in Russia.

In this episode, I sit with Natalia as she explains key concepts about Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, NFTs, and smart contracts, paving future trends and developments in the real estate processes.

Top Takeaways:

"I strongly believe in the experience of a real estate transaction to be as easy as buying a book online."
- [Natalia Karayaneva]

"Do not be afraid of novelty; embrace innovation."
- [Natalia Karayaneva]

Episode Highlights:

[00:23] Intro
[00:54] Meet today's guest, Natalia Karayaneva.
[03:12] About Natalia's background.
[08:30] Natalia's first exposure to Blockchain
[14:30] Discussing Cryptocurrency and Blockchain in Real Estate.
[27:12] NFTs in Real Estate.
[36:13] About the "Learn and Earn" App.
[38:15] Natalie's advice to new agents.
[39:04] Connect with Natalia.
[40:18] Outro

Episode Notes:

Growing up in Russia, Natalia struggled through the devastating communist collapse, with a shortage of resources and other hardships that pushed her into entrepreneurship. Even with this, she never expected to leave Russia. However, as a child, she knew she wanted to do something impactful and was fascinated by other cultures and technology.

At 19, Natalia moved to Bulgaria, got married, and started her first company creating applications for small businesses. She also worked on a significant social media project to improve real interaction between people and reduce the anonymity in social media platforms in the past. With a Computer Software degree in Russia, and a Master's degree in Sustainable Urban Development at Oxford, Natalia's passion lies in Blockchain, Real Estate, and Sustainability.

Describing how she picked interest in Blockchain, Natalia recommends "The Sovereign Individual" by James Dale Davidson. Following the crash in the value of the Russian Ruble after the collapse of communism, her family finances were severely affected, and she learned the need to have prodigals that are fair to a large number of people, independent of government activities. This initiated her motivation to start Propy even though, at the time, she knew nothing about Blockchain.

The name "Propy" came about as Natalia stumbled on the domain "Propy.com" while trying to find a suitable one for her business-related property. Natalia agrees that all the different aspects of Real Estate can be integrated into a compact digitized form as a smart contract in the future. So far, the Blockchain mechanism has never been hacked, so they are considered highly secure.

About Blockchain/ Cryptocurrency: Cryptocurrency is virtual money, independent of any government or corporation. Many people are getting more involved with it, especially in developing countries where they don't trust their government. Bitcoin is the first significant cryptocurrency launched 13 years ago; Listeners are encouraged to review the Bitcoin white paper. Ethereum is also a cryptocurrency, but it also has the capability of smart contracts, which will be adopted in Real Estate. It is important to note that becoming a bitcoin miner as a single user on a computer is now virtually impossible. The tasks are more complicated by far due to the high level of competition among existing miners. However, other Blockchain networks give coin rewards to people who already own a stake of coin and verify transactions; called Proof of Stake Prodigal.

While Natalia would not advise anyone to put all their savings in any cryptocurrency, she encourages people to start with a small amount of money and transact on Blockchain for learning purposes. Additionally, even with the volatility in bitcoin, Natalia believes that overall, the value of Bitcoin will go as high as $100,000, and Ethereum will also have an exceptionally significant increase in value; this is owed to a general increase in utility of these cryptocurrencies. It is important to note that Bitcoin, like most cryptocurrencies, has a limited amount of supply.

NFTs in Real Estate: Natalia explains that realtors can now take a crypto-certified agent course that defines the critical aspects of smart contracts, NFTs, cryptocurrency, and blockchain applications in Real Estate. NFT avatars and Cryptopunks have become a thing of status on social media, and just the skyrocketing demand for these limited pictures has pushed up the cost to millions of dollars.

A smart contract would include payments and proof of it, signatures on the purchase agreement, and, lastly, an automatic transfer of ownership after the first two conditions have been successfully confirmed.

NFT is a Non-Fungible Token that exists in a digital wallet that can instantly be transferred to another person's wallet. This is the same concept with Real Estate NFTs, where the ownership of a property in a wallet can be transferred to another wallet in minutes. The aim is to simplify buying and owning Real Estate properties by making the process less traditional and more digital.

About the "Learn and Earn App": This program allows agents to do traditional deals, deals with crypto payment, and NFT deals, even if they have not used these methods before. Every step would be recorded on the Propy Blockchain, and while doing these everyday transactions, agents get rewarded with tokens. There are also reward tokens for taking surveys, which helps incentivize people to make more use of the platform. For more information, listeners are encouraged to check the Propy website.

Natalie's advice to new agents: Do not be afraid of novelty; embrace innovation. Older agents can get a younger mentor in technology while they teach them how to do Real Estate. Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain NFTs are here to stay, so learn and embrace them.
42 min
July 12, 2022 Episode 325 – Todd Schroth, Schroth Team Brokered By eXp Realty

What are you doing right now to help you succeed in the long run? Join your host Bill Risser as he talks with Todd Schroth about elevating real estate standards. Todd has spent the last 20 years vested in the Orlando Real Estate market by helping others buy, sell, and invest while standing alongside investing himself. He shares his journey in this industry and dives deep into why coaching is crucial for business success. He loves educating people and helping them reach their full potential, even if it means that person can search for other job opportunities outside of his company. He also discusses creating solid teams, recognizing strengths, and nurturing opportunities. Learn how to build a better business!
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Todd Schroth, Schroth Team Brokered By eXp Realty
This is episode 325. Thank you so much for tuning in. As always, thank you for telling a friend. We are going over to Orlando. That's where Todd Schroth and his team with eXp. He has been in the business his entire life. As soon as he got out of high school, he was right into real estate. His family has got a history of it. I love these stories. They are quite different. A big shout out to Anthony for telling me that this is the guy I needed to talk to. He was absolutely right. Thanks, Anthony. Let's get this thing started. Todd, welcome to the show.
Bill, thanks for having me here. I'm looking forward to sharing.
You have a huge fan in Tampa. Did you know that?
That's why I'm excited to be here because he's talking nothing but crazy stuff about this guy, Bill Risser and I was like, “Who is this guy?”
We had a nice conversation. I can't wait to get your story here. We will get this thing going. You are in Orlando doing great things in the real estate world. You have been there a long time. Are you a native Floridian or did you escape the cold somehow?
The family wanted to get down and escape the cold. My mom, back in high school, was like, “Want to move to Florida?” I was like, “Sure.” I was sixteen years old. We drove down. We have been down here ever since.
You moved in the middle of high school. How was that?
It’s my junior year of high school. I went to a private school here, which was funny because sitting in the hall, on the first day of class, somebody walks up to me and was like, “Todd?” He was somebody I went to sixth grade with that moved down here as well. It was perfect.
You had someone right away and that was cool. Looking at your history. It's pretty interesting that you are one of the unicorns on the podcast. That's a good thing. You've only worked in real estate. From day one out of school, this is what you've done. Talk about the very beginning.
I graduated high school and got signed up for college. I had one job besides real estate and was eighteen years old. Going back to the days of fax machines, I was in the bookstore doing something and saw a piece of paper on the school's fax and it said, “Computer sales.” Let me go check it out. It was an ad they sent over. I went and checked it out. I got the job and did that for a year. Basically, I was 17, 18 years old doing that. A buddy of mine from high school ran into me at the computer store and he's like, “We are buying real estate and doing this stuff.” I was like, “It sounds interesting. Let's talk further about it.”

[bctt tweet="If you want to be a great leader, bring your team where they can be successful as well. They could be successful agents on their own. " username="billrisser"]

At nineteen years old, I get involved in the real estate industry and I'm a second-generation real estate. My mom has been selling for 55 years. My dad, my stepdad, and my step-mom, all had real estate licenses. My sisters both had real estate licenses. My brother is a custom builder. My wife got her license. It is the family business. Our dinner conversations at Thanksgiving were about what was going on with the markets.
At nineteen years old, I bought my first investment property. I didn't have my real estate license but I was doing the investment stuff. I was like, “Let's give it a shot.” We had private capital tobacco. It obviously made it easier to buy without having to save up back then $16,000 to buy our first house. Back then, it was $16,000 at 18% was our loan. I was buying a lot of real estate with 18% money and cashflowing all of it. Now, you buy something with 6% and I'm like, “Can you cashflow it?” The price is all relative to the rate that's sitting out there. I did the investment stuff for about 5 to 25 years.
I got burnt out. I had a lot of rental properties, stuff we were managing, and flips we were doing. At the same time, I opened up a telemarketing company. I ran that for about 3 or 4 years and had a manager in place. I wasn't like physically involved every day. When I quit real estate investments and got into the management of the hands-on, I hated it. I hated working with people.
I did it for about six months and said, “I'm done. I'm going back into real estate.” I shut the company down. We sold it to our manager. We got into the real estate side. I got my license and right into sales. How do you find your first client? Go after the market you were working on before. I was listing investment properties. The staff was doing, “We will buy your house cash,” ads. If they didn't buy it, I would go in there as a listing and say, “They didn't want to give you enough money. That was my first listing appointment was someone who didn't buy their house.
You had a solid ten years after that first purchase at nineteen. Your experience starts building on investment stuff until the time you become a residential real estate agent.
For five years we did investments. For the last several years have been involved in real estate.
You are 25, 26 years old talking to probably people a bit older than you about investing in real estate. How did that go?
When you flip or fix, or work on 800 properties more or less, you have a lot of knowledge that you are spitting out at them. Growing up in the industry, I had knowledge of the whole process because we have been on the floats, in the offices, and all kinds of things with our parents. We were basically going through that with them. I do feel bad for the kids that are getting their licenses now at 19, 20, and 21. I love working with those people because I want to give them the knowledge that I had to help them get started.
When you started running your own operation, would you hire young guys or women that had something about them that you knew that they were going to be successful? How did that work?
We had an agent walk into my office about new agents and I was like, “The beauty of new agents is I can't teach an old dog new tricks.” If I had an agent coming to me who want to work on our team, who has been in the business 10, 15 years, I can't get all their bad habits out of them but I can take a brand-new agent and train them and give them the exact path to go forward with. When I go into coaching and I'm like, “I want to revamp my stuff.”

[caption id="attachment_4357" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Coaching: We can't get all their bad habits out of them, but we can take a brand new agent, train them, and give them the exact path to go forward.[/caption]

What do I do? I always go back to my old habits and do things the way they were, even though the other system is better. Even though I can show that agent who has been doing this for twenty years who doesn't have the success level they should, the path to go forward. That's the correct way to do it. They still go back to the old habits. If I can take you, Bill, as a brand-new agent and get it going, you are going to have the right path going forward. I love new and young agents because they are right out of school and aggressive. They want to make money.
Hungry is a good word. You started with RE/MAX and were with RE/MAX for a long time.
I went right for the best office. I knew I wanted to end up there. I was at another office for two weeks and the day I was supposed to be my floor time, I quit. If I'm going to give up a lot of my commission, I might as well go right to RE/MAX where I'm going to make 100% or 95% of the time. All I wanted to go to that office for was sales training. I already knew real estate but I needed sales skills. That's why I was going to the first office. When I was looking at the numbers, I've always played with the numbers. How can I make more money? I went right to RE/MAX and signed up with them. I was there for eighteen years. Obviously, we ended up at eXp Realty a few years ago.
When you start thinking about margins at age nineteen, that changes your whole life.
If you think about it, I looked at the sheet when I was signing up. I'm like, “First $30,000. I give them $15,000,” but it costs me $1,000 a month to work at RE/MAX so twelve times $1,000 is $12,000. I'm ahead. $3,000 there. Why don't I go right to the source?
Think about this, in 2000, things are starting to explode when it comes to social, everything online, the Web 2.0, we are talking back and forth. I'm going to get a wild guess here. You probably embraced that as a young guy and ran with online leads and all that great stuff.
Everybody was trying to figure it out. All the people were coming over to our office showing us stuff. We had our websites. We were able to play with it. We got it from the company. When one of the trainers was in, I was like, “I closed half my business with your site last year.” They are like, “I would love a testimonial.” Now there are 120 million online leads and 5 million houses sold. There were 1 million houses sold and probably 500 online leads sold but nobody picked up the phone.
The lead comes in and I call them up and ask them, “You inquired about 123 Elm Street. Would you like to take a look at that?” “We are coming down next week from Massachusetts, whatever.” That was the business. That's where we are getting it from. Wherever we had to spend money on commercials or marketing, we would do that. That was going to get attention but it wasn't as abused as it is now. It’s a lot harder.
It's changed dramatically. I remember when the first IDX feed came out and a buddy of mine in Phoenix’s blog website thing went from 500 pages to 50,000 pages because we had a listing that was huge back then. Now, it means nothing. Everybody has that.
IDX is IDX. You got to click it on the MLS and it's going to Realtor.com. When someone says, “I put your house on over 500 websites,” I'm like, “All you have to do is to click a button and it automatically does that.

[bctt tweet="You cannot be afraid to have your highest producer leave the team because that means you’re holding them hostage. You have to help them grow. " username="billrisser"]

It wasn't that hard anymore. You have had a team for a long time. I'm trying to think about when teams became involved. I feel like it was around 2010-ish or maybe right before the dark days. How about you? When did you start building it? There's still got to be some lessons you learn that you can pass along to someone reading.
I didn't quite understand the team concept back when I first got into the business. Teams were in my office. There was a team in 2000 or 2001. My mom was like, “Go be a buyer's agent.” I'm like, “I'm thinking assistant. I don't want to be somebody’s assistant. I want to work for myself. I don't want to be underneath Bill Risser or whatever. I want to be my own agent. I don't want to be an assistant.” I'm not thinking of a buyer's agent as someone who's getting the opportunities, going out, and closing them.
I had the wrong mentality then but this is 2000, 2001. This is like Janice was putting the team stuff together but the teams did come around in late 2010. When 2008 came around, short sale days, obviously say the dark clouds came over us, we were carrying 25 to 30 listings. It's a lot maintaining those and keeping up on the short sales. We did our own negotiating. Some we leveraged out but it wasn't stuff that was all selling right away. You got to keep in touch with the sellers but buyers were also calling to buy properties.
I'm getting married. We've got our kids. I'm not wanting to go run around twelve hours a day showing houses as I did in 2007 and earlier because I was single. I didn't care. I will work 24/7. It was a way to find time and freedom. I still work seven days a week and as much as we needed to but it was a lot of missed opportunities if I didn't have a buyer's agent in play at that point. The sign calls that we were getting, keeping, and nurturing those opportunities.
Was it the same setup now? A certain split if it was referred from you or a different split, was all that in play already?
No. Back then, it was called a one split for everything that was going on. We shared business and were like business partners. I consider the buyer's agent. I had an assistant who's still with me now, who was running my company now. Longevity is what we have in our team. Treat them right and they stay with you forever. We continue to treat people right. We only give so much because we've got people that take and take. You got to go back and forth but it wasn't run like a business. It's like, “A lead came in, let's go close it.” We never thought about payrolls, splits, the hard cost, and what things look like.
I was like, “That split was not profitable. I don't know why I did that.” I didn't think about the breakdown of what was that 40% or 50% we were getting at the time. Through different coaching over the last few years, we've got it running more like a business. I've got four people on the payroll. It was even scary enough for me to go to Paychex and do a direct deposit. I did that a few years ago. They would get checks to me handwritten and the bank would have to call to ask what the amount was. I felt like I was at the next level having paychecks with direct deposit.
We have four assistants in the office. We've got fifteen agents working for us. I've got a huge brick and mortar space where we all work in the office. We do have virtual assistants as well. We've got three of those in the Philippines. My closing coordinator has a virtual assistant helping her with transactions. My marketing coordinator has a virtual assistant. My director of operations has one. They have help. I love people in the office because I can fire everybody and probably hire twenty people for what I pay them. I love having people in the office because I can see, hear, and know what they are doing. They have assistants because they are able to work on them.
Your office door is open. You can hear what's going on. I did that in the title space. I ran a branch for a number of years and I loved having my door open and listening to issues. Sometimes there are issues in the title side of things. Did you know that?
I thought it was you guys who got the papers because you make the least amount of money in a transaction and you get all the BS. I was like, “$400 to close the deal.”

[caption id="attachment_4358" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Coaching: Real estate is a way to find time and freedom. You have to nurture those opportunities.[/caption]

You are spot-on, sir. Thank you very much for bringing that up. I appreciate it.
I need $1,000 for this event we have going on. Can you give me some more marketing money?
I will let that sit out there a little bit and let everybody kick in. That's perfect. You talked about coaching. You receive coaching. You believe in coaching. You are a coach. You love educating other people. First, I'm going to say why, and second, let's talk about the genesis, the start of agents who win because that's cool.
I never thought about coaching. I was going to look at coaching back when I got started and the coaching was Mike Ferry’s system, pick up the phones and prospect. I’m like, “I don't like talking to people. I don't want to pick up the phones.” I never got involved in coaching at the beginning of my career. I always thought it was people smiling and dialing, and that was not my method of business.
Come around 2010 and ‘11, I got into the coaching side with Donna and Mike Stott with Your Coaching Matters. I was with them for seven years. Like the brokerage, I don't coach hop. How can we help each other? I outgrew what they had going on and then got into a couple of different other platforms. Now, I have been with three different coaching companies over the last few years. Each one has offered us a different level of experience, information or knowledge that we've gained from them.
The last three that we've had have helped us transition more to the business model versus like, “Go sell houses and we will see what happens at the end.” Now, it's all about profit. Every day we are looking at CTE and what the splits are on each deal. The agents that are on the team, if they are not producing, had a conversation, “If you are not selling houses but most brokers are pushing you out because this is a transition time. This is when money is being made in real estate. Pick up the phones.”
There are also different kinds of coaching that I've learned about. Back then, obviously, I always thought coaching was picking up the phone, smiling, and dialing. That's not it. The different types of coaching we have to look for is we want to get leadership coaching, accountability coaching, prospecting coaching, sales coaching, team leadership coaching, and business coaching. We've formulated what our business model is and what we want our splits to be. It's a matter of, we have a coach on recruiting, how can we bring more agents to the team of the company?
We have a coach on systems who are helping us work our backend. They are also helping us with our training for the agents, providing the systems for that. The next coach that I'm looking for is leadership. “How can I become a better leader?” Those are the things that you can either take a class in college and learn there or you have life experiences and go back and teach them. The coaching that I'm providing is to my agents and helping them become better agents and training.
Let's transition into agents who win.
Trying to figure out a platform to deliver from, and I don't use it for attraction. I don't use it for anything, except it's a value to give back. It's a small Facebook group. That's Agents Who Win on Facebook and
35 min
July 05, 2022 Episode 324 – Jeff Dinter, CEO – Gravy

If you want to find answers and succeed in the real estate industry, particularly regarding home ownership, you have to be willing to research and talk to people. How can you close deals and get consumers to feel confident about their home purchases? Join your host Bill Risser as he dives deep into a conversation with Jeff Dinter about driving that entrepreneurial spirit in the real estate space. Jeff is the CEO of Gravy and a serial entrepreneur with a thing for product design who spends most of his career solving problems in the real estate tech and fintech spaces. In this episode, he shares his knowledge on how to work with agents and lenders to build great connections. He also discusses mistakes he has seen throughout his career and explains the new bridge he has created that hasn’t existed before.
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Jeff Dinter - CEO, Gravy
We go into the heartland of the country, St. Louis, Missouri, and we are going to chat with Jeff Dinter. He is the CEO of Gravy. There are over 100 million renters in this country. What Gravy does is guide them down that path to home ownership. It’s very interesting. We are going to have a lot of fun with this conversation. Enough of this stuff. Let’s get it going.
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Jeff, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
I was very excited to have you on. I get a lot of requests from podcast bookers, and generally, they are from motivational speakers or real estate investors who, somewhere in their life, were poor. I love it when I find people starting up companies doing things a little bit different. We are going to talk a lot about Gravy, your company, but I always like to start in the same place. You grew up in the Midwest, but it doesn’t get more Midwest than St. Louis, right?
That’s right. It’s the spot in the middle of the Midwest.
Do you still live there? Is your company there? Tell me why it’s so special for you. Why St. Louis?
I was born and raised in St. Louis. I had a brief stint in Orlando, Florida, with my fiancée at that time but my wife now. For a few years, we ended up moving back, and it’s still here. Gravy is very remote-friendly, but our flag in the sand is here. We have got a handful. Our team is in St. Louis. It has always drawn me back for sure.
There are probably two reasons that I’m still here. One, it’s family. I have got mine and my wife’s immediate family. They both live within ten minutes of our house. That was a plus and a big part of why we moved back from Orlando before we had a toddler. Now that we have a child, it’s free babysitting plus family time, so that’s an easy one. Two is the tech scene in St. Louis. It’s been growing more and more over the past decade or so. There are lots of great people, great minds thinking differently, and engineers. I love the environment here.
I hear that a lot from a lot of different places around the country. I don’t know if it’s the time we are in, and with tech being so powerful. These little areas before were not considered Silicon Valley. You’ve got them all popping up all over the country.
It’s a great point to your comment. It started on the coasts, and slowly but surely, the density came in and may not have the density of East or West Coast in St. Louis or Kansas City. The good news is that even if it’s smaller, the overall concept of thinking differently, getting folks that either want to build software or reimagine different things, the density, appetite to take risks and start businesses are there. It’s a cool combination of founders, but also people that make good early team members at startups are all here. I love it.
My readers know I have this weird thing with sports. You can see it all around me. Can I assume Cardinals fan, or are you like some other people I know from St. Louis who got bushwhacked into being a Cubs fan somehow?
I have got two answers for this. The first is I’m stereotypical from St. Louis, diehard Cardinals fan for life, not against the grain. Growing up, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t part of growing up that by default, if you were a Cardinals fan, you were not a Cubs fan. There’s truth to that. My mom’s family, so my extended family, is in Springfield, Illinois. They are in the Illinois state closer to the center, and that’s a mixed bag. Some Cardinals and Cubs fans. We had got some cool bickering that happened from when I was growing up, but at the end of the day, Cardinals fan for life.
[bctt tweet="At the end of the day, businesses are about solving problems and finding big problems that a lot of people care about. There are new opportunities and problems to solve." username="billrisser"]
You got Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Giants, but Cardinals and Cubs are right up there with them. I’m sure it’s been a lot more championships for the Cardinals and the Cubs in the last hundred years. You always got that.
What’s cool is that even if it’s early in the season, mid-season, every series between the Cardinals and Cubs feels like post-season. That’s always fun. It’s great baseball.
I don’t know how old you are. Have you forgiven the Rams?
The short answer is yes. I grew up 100% going to some Rams games. I never got into football as much as being in a baseball town. Cardinals were a big Blues fan. I loved hockey. With the Rams, I have got no hardcore burn. If you ask the same question to my dad, I think he has a better answer because he’s got a little bit more thoughts around it.
I love competitive sports in general, not knowing the outcome of an event and the suspense that goes with it. I love any sports event that goes to the last quarter, last period, or last minute. That’s what I love about it, so yes. I have forgiven the Rams. I still watch football. I’m a Chiefs fan, but I’m not rooting for the Rams anymore. That’s all I have got.
You mentioned the Blues. I live in St. Petersburg. I’m right across the bay from Tampa. If you had to pick a team before this started, did you want to see the lining one another or were you rooting for the Avalanche to get one for many years?
The Avalanche eliminated us. There’s the conference debate versus rooting for Patty Maroon is on Tampa. He’s a St. Louis boy. I have lots of friends who went to high school with him, I believe. I’m Tampa Bay here, for sure. I do think that Colorado is tough to beat right now. They didn’t plan so well. It could go either way, but Tampa has my vote for the series. Some work to do.
It’s all about Vasilevskiy. If he can have a game like you had on Monday night, things will get better, and I will get out of this because a couple of people turned off their podcasts who don’t care about hockey. Let’s talk about you growing up. I’m going to assume you are pretty techie. I was going to know that’s the case that you were playing with computers and all about that. If you are fifteen years old, a sophomore in high school, what were you thinking about doing?
I was a techie nerd growing up. My dad loves computers. I had the old-school HTML books lying around the house. I’m learning generally how to code. I was taking apart computers. With that said, I was created at the end of the day. Less technical, more creative. I liked computers. I ended up going the designer route and not the engineer route. I understand engineering, but I’m a designer at heart.
When I was fifteen, I was dead set on being a rockstar at that time. I was listening to music. That was the other creative outlet. It’s playing music in high school bands. After high school, I played music for the next 5 or 6 years touring the country for the better half of the year of all United States and Canada. It was a huge part of me jumping into the world because being in an unsigned band is hard. It’s almost like starting a startup. Fifteen-year-old Jeff wanted to be a rock star. As you can tell, it didn’t pan out. Otherwise, we’d be talking about my greatest hits, but I have shifted to the tech world. Now I will take it.
Now you open the door. What’s the instrument you played?
[caption id="attachment_4339" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Home Ownership: We were ultimately a platform that helped property managers better engage with and retain their mobile-first renters, so the modern renter lives on their phone.[/caption]

I played guitar and sang.
Lead or rhythm?
Rhythm guitar, lead singer.
If you were to compare yourself to a band that even an old guy like me would know, who would you compare yourself to? What was the genre you were in?
We were pop-punkish. Blink-182 is probably the closest one because I grew up a pop-punk kid. I played guitar and wrote a lot of songs. I was the manager at the end of the day to where it was all business for me. I wish I had had more fun. It was all business. I’m trying to get the product out the door and have my business hat on before I knew it, but it was a great chapter in my life. I made a lot of lifelong friends and had great experiences.
You were the guy herding the cats sometimes and in rock and roll. It’s got to be that way.
I was a dad. Yes.
Now we know where this entrepreneurial spirit comes from. You’ve done a lot of different things, and as I look back and see your history, it’s a lot of PropTech and FinTech stuff. Why did you go that route?
I honestly don’t know when I fell into both PropTech and financial tech verticals. If you look at it from an industry macro perspective, those two industries have experienced so much change and evolution in the past decades around embracing technology. A lot of very old-school best practices and status quo around how the finance industry worked with banking. The same with real estate. No matter what vertical you are looking at or sub-vertical within real estate, whether it’s commercial, residential, or home buying investor, everything has been touched.
Every part of the flow has had technology touch it, pull it apart, and try to reimagine it. That’s what attracted me to it at the core. At the end of the day, it’s solving problems and finding big problems that a lot of people care about as the underlying piece because, by design, those industries have gotten shaken up a lot. It means new opportunities and problems to solve, which is what pulled me in.
It’s one of your greatest hits. It would be TenantLoop. My question is, was this your first look at the rental space? What was that pain point? What were you solving there? I’m always curious about evolution.
[bctt tweet="If you like the idea of real estate and helping people solve problems, you want to build a product that helps renters have a better experience." username="billrisser"]
A quick backstory on TenantLoop. We were ultimately a platform that helped property managers better engage with and retain their mobile-first renters. The modern renter lives on their phone, and at that time, this TenantLoop started as me scratching my own itch. My wife and I had an apartment at that time, and we had a bad experience. A lot of the problems stemmed from communicating with our property manager and messages falling through the cracks to the maintenance team if we had an issue.
Paying rent was very old school. All the things that go into a great renter experience. If you think about living in an apartment or a single-family home, they were bad there. It made me look at the industry of, “Is there a better way to do this?” We had a bad experience. We didn’t renew the lease. We moved, even though we didn’t want to. The TenantLoop hypothesis was happy renters. They were new leases and I would have been one of them from that business hat. That was my first jump into real estate. I’ve always liked the concept of real estate. I didn’t know where I fit in. I wanted to build a product that helped renters have a better experience, and that’s what we did.
It was acquired. Congratulations. That’s the goal of most people that are in that entrepreneurial spirit, but I also imagine it takes you out of the game for a little while. You probably had to hang around a little bit. Did you always know there was going to be a part 2, 4, 5, or 7, wherever you are at?
Everyone knew there would be a next chapter. Myself, the acquiring company, my family, everyone knew. That was my first W-2 job. After the acquisition, we joined as part of that deal to keep building what we were building. What’s unique about that is that TenantLoop was at a pretty early stage. Honestly, our team knew there was a lot more work to do around the mission that we set out to do to reimagine this resident experience.
We were excited to stay on. We kept building it and what’s cool is that it went from us having a few thousand renters on the platform after the acquisition, $2 million. It was a huge jump, and for us, that type of alignment with Buildium which is part of RealPage. That was acquired. They knew property management software very well, which is accounting, leasing, and a lot of the fundamentals of running a business. They had some tools around the TenantLoop concept, but we ultimately became their mobile bet, and we got to keep building that product, which was a great experience.
That mobile-first is amazing, the ability to have the mindset. I think the mindset comes from a little bit of how you live your life. You are not lugging laptops around most times, only when you got to get the heavy lifting done. That’s obviously a big powerful part of what you did.
I appreciate it and those fundamentals. The writing was on the wall that mobile was coming to real estate, particularly for renters. A lot of renters were interacting with their property manager on an old-school web portal at that time, and that’s not how you think of the peace of mind. The whole goal of that company was to enable property managers to give their customers peace of mind while they are renting with it. If something does pop up, because it will, it’s going to get resolved with the least effort and stress possible. We didn’t believe they had the right tools to do that from a mobile-first perspective.
You’ve been a part of a lot of startups throughout your career. You joined up with others where yours. Are there some common mistakes that you see made? Especially now, I would consider you probably have mentor status for some people. There might be some people who find you and have questions. What do you tell them?
I can say I have learned the hard way on many lessons here. To your first point, I’m very fortunate to be involved in a number of startups, some that which I played the founder role. Others that I was the lead product designer for very early-stage companies. I wasn’t the founder. The founders had domain expertise. They were the ones putting everything on the line to go solve the problem that they loved. I was leading design to figure out what that application looked like, felt like, and how we applied their hypothesis to a product. That’s what I loved, but what’s cool is both of those buckets get you exposed to so many different challenges that companies that are trying to do new things encounter. That’s both an opportunity and a risk.
The two that come to mind for me are 1) I will call it Founder Tunnel Vision, and then 2) The art of delegation. Founder tunnel vision, this is why the magic happens. It’s when founders see something that no one else sees. They have a vision of how to solve a problem in a different and meaningful way, but that doesn’t mean you should be closed off to feedback along the way.
That could be as simple as early idea validation to make sure that your potential customer cares about that problem as much as you do or making sure that it’s not isolated or too specific of a problem you are solving. Also, once you launch that feedback loop of getting feedback from consumers, that may not always be the feedback you’d want to hear, but ultimately for great ideas to win, make sure you are open to getting that feedback and incorporating it. That doesn’t mean you can’t have the product company perspective of like, “You won’t know this or won’t understand it until you see it and we are going to build it so you understand it.
[caption id="attachment_4340" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Home Ownership: Magic happens when founders see something that no one else sees. They have a vision of how to solve a problem differently and meaningfully.[/caption]

You don’t have to lose that big bet, but getting the feedback and the feedback from consumers, customers, and partners is important. At the end of the day, you can’t do everything. Find people that are very good at what they do and build your team from there, and I have learned that the hard way because I’m a doer. I like getting through the to-do lists, but a startup launching or a growth stage company that maybe has new initiatives. It’s always relevant to make sure you’ve got the right people in the seats to do the job and prioritize ruthlessly because the to-do list will never get shorter. I think it’s just important. Something we have not perfected, but we practice at Gravy the best we can.
I love your use of the word ruthlessly. It’s the same with the company I’m with now. There’s no just cruising along. It’s got to be everyone’s in working in the same direction or focused on the same thing. We are all moving there as fast as we can. We know because of the band experience, that’s your doer part. My bad, we didn’t get the name of the band. You got to throw that out there.
You haven’t heard of it. One is called Lowercase. The other one was called The Vanity Affair, which was a spin on the magazine title. Hoping that people thought they had heard of us before. It’s a really bad idea. It worked, I guess. That’s where eighteen-year-old kids for you make business decisions.
I’m glad I went back to that question. That’s great. Let’s get into what Gravy does. There are a lot of companies that help people beat out cash offers. Debbie is out there. I think they are helping renters become owners, but all these companies like Ribbon, Orchard, Flyhomes and Knock. They are not what you do, but they are all doing the same thing. Did you find a lot of companies? There had to be some that were doing close to what you were doing. What was that vision? What led you down the path with Gravy?
From a macro lens, the awesome thing here and you touched on it is there have never been more new companies that are trying to reimagine parts of the home...
33 min
June 28, 2022 Episode 323 – Sarita Dua, Principal Broker At Keller Williams Realty Professionals

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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Sarita Dua, Principal Broker At Keller Williams Realty Professionals
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.
[caption id="attachment_4330" align="aligncenter" width="600"] 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.[/caption]

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?
[bctt tweet="We all have crazy unique stories. We take that unique path to success." username="billrisser"]
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.
[caption id="attachment_4331" align="aligncenter" width="600"] 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.[/caption]

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.”
[bctt tweet="The best things in life are happy accidents, but then if you believe there's no accidents, maybe it was all by design. " username="billrisser"]
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.
[caption id="attachment_4332" align="aligncenter" width="600"] 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.[/caption]

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, risk management. That's what this is. The way I look at it as every problem that we came across was an opportunity to bulletproof our system. We'd have a different problem but we wouldn't have that same problem over and over because we account for it. It was in line with what I did, even though it looks like a huge sharp left that I took or a sharp turn off course. It was off course.
Join a team. That's the best way to do it. Everyone told me to join a team and I'm learning-based. I would have joined the team but the reality was I was on a team, my company. I felt like I would have to call in sick. If there was anything that went wrong with our family, I couldn't do it. My whole thing was that freedom and flexibility that everybody wants when they're a realtor. I did need that. Therefore, I went out on my own.
If I was going to be on a team, I'm not going to let my team leader down. I...
49 min
June 21, 2022 Real Estate Sessions Rewind – Jason Pantana, Business Coach and National Speaker for Tom Ferry International
Real estate professionals who put themselves in coaching compared to those who don’t, do better. When it comes to real estate coaching, look no further than Tom Ferry. Jason Pantana, business coach and National Speaker for Tom Ferry, is here with your host Bill Risser. Join Jason as he talks about his journey into real estate and coaching. Find out how the Tom Ferry International has been so successful for all these years. Learn how to market through social media and how to find your niche in all this. Discover all this and more in today’s episode with Jason Pantana.
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Jason Pantana, Business Coach and National Speaker for Tom Ferry International
I’m excited. Sean Carpenter, who’s probably my number one guest-getter on the show, has connected me with somebody I’ve known for a long time because of what he does in the industry. We’re going to be talking to Jason Pantana. He is a business coach and the national trainer for Tom Ferry. It’s going to be a lot of fun. We’re going to share a little bit about where he grew up and how he ended up in Nashville. What I want to get to with Jason is talking about how important coaching is in the real estate space, and why not talk with the number one coaching operation in the country? It makes sense. Jason, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me. I’m pumped. I owe credit to Sean Carpenter. He’s been a long-time friend and an awesome guy.
I’m sure you guys have run into each other many times in different cities around the country.
We have spoken to different events. We’ve got a long history. I’ve known him for most of my real estate career.
We’ll talk about getting to Nashville and what took you there. First, let’s talk about Lynchburg, Virginia. As we are doing this episode, where you live in Lynchburg are buried in a bunch of snow. As a kid who grew up in San Diego, I have no idea what it’s like. Share a little bit about growing up in Lynchburg?
I grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia. I moved to Nashville when I was 21. That’s where I am now. Lynchburg is a small college town. There are several colleges. There is Liberty University, Lynchburg University in the area and Radford. Tech down the road and UVA up the road. It’s definitely a college town. Everybody calls it a cul de sac town and I love Lynchburg. My family is still there. It’s home. It’s a cul de sac town because it’s one of those places that people come and they don’t leave.
They don’t leave because it’s a nice, not too little, not too big, right size town. It was peaceful. I had a great suburban life, family, friends and school. It was a wonderful place to grow up. I don’t know what else there is to say about it, other than it was what a lot of people would hope for as far as a place to grow up.
There’s a huge benefit to small-town living. What family feels like, neighbors are neighbors. It’s not like growing up in a city where everybody pulls into a garage and it goes into their home.
I was there over the holidays visiting family and I was like, “There’s where I ride my bike.” I was showing them stuff because we were driving down the area. I was like, “It was such a different way of living too because I’d be on my bike and gone literally all day with all the neighborhood kids.” We had a blast. It was a good grip in the ‘90s. It was a good life. It was fun.
You ended up going to school in your hometown, which is awesome. I always liked to find out what was the field of study? What were you focusing on? What was this big plan as you’re eighteen years old, which turned out always a little bit different?
I went to Liberty University. My dad is a retired professor from Liberty. He taught Statistics and various other things in that department. I was always destined to go there. When I went to Liberty, my motivation and intention were to leave and become a rockstar. I have a twin brother. We are musicians. We grew up and our dream was to be successful musicians. College was the waypoint on the path to where we were. I had no focus or interest in doing college when I went to college. I had bigger and different plans. Those plans didn’t pan out the way I expected, but life’s beautiful in the way that it works out for your best interest over time.
I went there. I studied. I initially started studying Computer Management Information Systems. Mostly because I was afraid of Computer Science and I was like, “That’s going to put a damper on my ability to be a musician and a rock star. It’s going to be time-consuming, so I’ll take the lesser of the two.” I have an older brother. He’s a software engineer and an entrepreneur. I wanted to be like my big brother. I was going after technology. I got into classes and I was like, “This is not where I belong. This was not the right place at all.” I changed majors and went into Business Marketing. I did that for three years. My brother and I had a producer who caught ahold of one of our EPs, invited us to move to Nashville and record.
We were like, “We made it,” which couldn’t have been more untrue. We moved to Nashville. I dropped out of college and did what all aspiring musicians do. We waited tables at the Macaroni Grill at the Opry Mills Mall to make ends meet. We played gigs. We did whatever we could. Honestly, that went on for a few years of trying to make it and not knowing what we were doing. It was the 2000s. The economy was crummy, not to blame it on the economy. You always look back and say, “You could have done things differently,” but it worked out the way it was supposed to work out.
After 2 to 3 years, I was like, “This is going nowhere.” I decided to reinstate myself in my college program and finish. I finished the last remaining credits remotely, which I enjoyed doing that way. When I went into college, I was lucky enough to have had several full rides. My dad worked there and I had a full ride. I went to a high school that gave me a full ride because it was associated with the university. I played in a band there that gave me a full ride. I used one I hadn’t already started to finish up. I got my degree in Marketing a couple of years late.
Business Coaching: Social media platforms these days are becoming much more unique with greater optimization.

It’s Nashville, so does that mean it’s country music? Was that your thing or is it going to be anything going to that?
It could be anything. Nashville is super eclectic. We were directed into the pop-country scene a little bit. As to how far we got into that scene, I will leave that undisclosed, but it wasn’t far enough to wait tables at the Macaroni Grill.
If someone does a deep enough dive online, we can find something, but it’s pre-YouTube, which is good for you.
We were MySpace users back in the day. It’s the 2000s.
Let’s talk about real estate. How does that come to the picture?
Real estate was completely random, unplanned and never part of anything I was ever thinking about doing ever. A lot of people say, “I’ve always loved houses. I used to go to our open houses for fun.” That was not me at all. That is not why I got it. The way I got into real estate was while I was waiting tables, I got married. My wife and I purchased a condo. Our realtor was pretty lousy. It was a pretty lousy experience, but we got the condo. I was intrigued by the process and was aware of a lot of gaps like, “You could have done this.” I was thinking about it, but then I never thought more about it.
I went back to trying to be a rock star, waiting tables, all that kind of stuff and finishing up school. Anyways, when I would wait tables, it was a super busy turn and burn restaurant. For one reason or another, I was pretty good at selling people stuff. I could sell them all. I could upgrade things. I knew not to sell dessert because I wanted the table to leave, so I could get the next table seated and then make more money that way. I was pretty strategic about it.
I had several tables that, for some reason or another, they would take an interest in me. They’d ask me questions about my life and what I was doing. I don’t know why exactly they did, but it would happen routinely. They would say, “What are you doing here in Nashville?” I’d say, “I’m a musician.” It’s like dad’s advice. They’re like, “What are you going to do if that doesn’t work out for you?” I was like, “You didn’t want marinara on the side or you did?” I got to segue because I’m like, “Where are we going with this?”
They’d be like, “What are you going to do if the music thing doesn’t work out?” I was like, “I’m going to be an actor because I was a smart alec. I’m going to be an astronaut,” just to say, “Screw off. Don’t invade my life.” I remember there was this one guy. I don’t remember what he looked like, but he was a table I waited at. He was instrumental in getting me to go back and finish my degree. I basically said, “I don’t need that degree.” I have my reasons.
He was like, “I don’t think you know when you may or may not need that degree. The way I would look at it as you’re endeavoring in life. You’ve got this quiver on your back and it’s one more arrow in the quiver. You may or may not need it.” I thought about that for a long time. It was a long time ago. I decided, “Let’s see if I can get one of my scholarships reactivated,” and I did. I was like, “I guess I’m doing this.” He was instrumental and there were several tables that would say to me like, “If it doesn’t work out, you could do great in real estate.”
For whatever reason, that would keep coming up. Honestly, my cynical thought was that must be what people say to college dropouts working at the Macaroni Grill, “You should go into real estate.” I don’t mean to be overly cynical about it, but that was my perception as a young twenty-something at that point in my life. I was like 21, 22 or 23 when all that was going on.
I would hear it again and again. One day, I guess it would’ve been 2010. Nashville had these historic floods that showed about nowhere. The restaurant I worked at was located on the Cumberland River, which completely came out of its banks and this mall that I worked at went entirely underwater. I was there the night that the water was creeping up. They basically told us all to leave and go home.
We have security footage. The restaurant got destroyed and then the restaurant decided that they were not going to fire us because I don’t know the specifics of it, but if we quit, it would not obligate them to as much financial commitment to us. We all had to quit our jobs to get money. People were like, “I’m going to get unemployment.” I was like, “I’m going to get a job. I think I’m done.” It was a pivotal moment for me. Within that flood, I graduated a week later. It all came to a head and I was like, “I’m going to get a job in marketing. I now have a degree in Marketing.” I put my resume out, literally everywhere, to every company I could possibly think of.
When you're endeavoring in life, you've got a quiver on your back. Use all your arrows because you never know if you may need it.
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It was 2010. There was no money anywhere. Nobody can hire me. I have no experience. I have this weird gap in my college resume. I could not get hired anywhere. I had my resume in so many places. I was on a walk with my wife one night unemployed and I got this voicemail from a robot saying, “You’ve been selected for an interview at X time on this day. Please come prepared.” It didn’t say who the company was. I put my resume in so many places. I thought to myself, “I’ll look up the address and I’ll figure out what the company is.” I couldn’t figure it out. I was like, “I’ll just generic-fy my resume and hope for the best for the interview, and then I’ll figure out what the company is when I get there.”
It’s a reasonable location, but it’s like several businesses and there are no signs anywhere. I can’t figure out what this business is. I walk in and there are 30 other applicants sitting in the waiting room, filling out clipboards. I’m like, “The clipboard will definitely tell me what I’m interviewing for.” I got this thing to fill out and there is no information at all about what I’m applying for. This is a testimony to how many resumes I put out there. They called me back to go interview and there are two interviewers and me. The first thing they asked me out of the gate is, “What specifically caused you to apply for this position?”
I looked at them and I was thinking quickly on my feet. I was like, “There are about 30 other people out there interviewing right now. I’m guessing you’ve been at this all day and you’ve been asking that same question to every single person. I’d be curious for you to tell me, ‘What attracted you to this position?’” They were like, “We love that question.” They proceeded to tell me what I was applying for. Somehow my resume had gotten into the pot where they wanted me to sell benefits and insurance to people who were dying. I was like, “No. Thank you. I do know why you did not promote this now as to what it was.” They probably bought my resume off Monster.com or something like that.
I was getting nowhere with getting a job after like a month or so. People go for two years looking for jobs, but I was young and didn’t know. I said to my wife, “What does it look like if I try to go into real estate? I used to hear it all the time. I should go into real estate. What does it look like if I try to get a job as a real estate agent? I didn’t even know it was 1099. I had no idea.” She was like, “I think it’d be good.” She was working, so we had some money, which was great, but I didn’t have enough money to cover getting licensed or whatever was involved. I called the guy who was my loan officer because my realtor was already out of business by that point in time because he did not make it.
My loan officer told me not to do it. He’s like, “I don’t think you’re the right fit for this. I don’t think it’s a good idea. I wouldn’t do it.” I was like, “I’m going to,” but in that conversation, I understood that there are things called brokerages and brokers. I would need to call the broker and get instructions on what their requirements are to be licensed at their office. That was what he told me. I went to Google and searched for real estate brokerages, real estate firms in the area. I made a list of twenty firms in order. The last one on the list was the one I wanted. I figured I was going to be doing some swing and a miss.
I proceeded to cold call these brokers and get on the phone with their principal brokers that I thought were the boss. I didn’t understand how the office worked. I tried to convince them to pay for me to get licensed and bring me on. I got hung up on. They are like, “We don’t do that. Are you kidding me? No,” again and again, but I was able to polish my script a little bit. I made the last call to this company called Village, an independent firm in the area that I had known some of their agents and thought they were cool. I was interested to work with them.
I get this guy named Todd, who answers. He’s the receptionist. He answers the phone, who is also a musician. He’s a cool guy. I started chatting with Todd and he started asking me questions. He wants to connect me to the right person. He’s like, “Here’s the deal. I can connect you with Bobbie. She’s the principal broker. She’s in charge of all the agents or I can connect you with Jen. She is Bobbie’s daughter. She runs our marketing department.” I’m like, “Get me Jen,” because it was unexpected. I go to Jen and it goes to her voicemail. I hit zero to come back and I was like, “She didn’t answer. Let’s go to Bobbie.” I go to Bobbie. I talked to her and lo and behold, she says, “Come see me tomorrow morning at 9:30.” I was like, “Okay.” I put on my awful suit. I had long hair and earrings.
I went into the office to interview for what I thought was a job. I had no idea. I thought I was going to get a paycheck, but I went in there and I told her what I needed and what I was wanting to do. She told me, “No. We don’t do that. I’ve invested in agents in the past and it’s always turned out to burn me. It’s never worked out.” I kept countering her politely until eventually, she said, “I don’t think I can say no. I have to say yes. I’ll make a deal. I’m going to recoup it out of your first three closings and then we’ll be even.” I said, “Sold.”
They funded me to get licensed, the money I needed to get my exam. I took it. I was their Rookie of the Year. I did very well in sales. It was at that office that I met another mentor in my life. His name is Brian Copeland. He was an agent at that office. He got me started in the speaking world. There was a random day where an agent was supposed to be teaching a class on how to use a Mac. This is 2010. This is old school. He got sick and couldn’t do it. They knew I had a Mac, so they’re like, “Could you fill in for him?” I’m like, “Okay.”
Brian was in the class who also had a Mac, but for whatever reason, he thought I was pretty good at teaching and training. He started throwing my name in the hat as I was building my real estate business to speak at boards of realtors and things like that. Before I knew it, I was traveling and speaking. There was this big opportunity that came up from the National Association of Realtors. They were starting this initiative called REThink Real Estate’s Future.
It was going to be basically a traveling roadshow of a handful of pretty established speaker types in the real estate community. Brian recommended they use me. I filled out an application. I was completely under-qualified, but they agreed to meet me. I went to DC for mid-year to meet with the team, get grilled and interrogated. Long story short, they selected me. I got on airplanes and went all over the place. I traveled and spoke. I’m still selling during all of this, but I ended up getting a booking agent.
I’m now on the road speaking and training more. Talking about technology, marketing and how to build your business as an agent, all the while building my own business. I did that for several years. Eventually, I got a phone call from Coldwell Banker Corporate, their headquarters. They were like, “We’d like you to stop selling real estate. Move to Jersey. Work out of our Realogy headquarters as our Director of Learning and Engagement.” I...
50 min
June 14, 2022 Episode 322 – Brittany Ranew, Premier Sotheby’s International Realty

Before moving to St. Petersburg and working in Premier Sotheby's International Realty, Brittany Ranew lived in Mobile, Alabama. And, life there was slower so Brittany really had to re-adjust to everything. She later found that the best way to do that is to be a part of the community. To build strong relationships first and business transactions will come. When you give freely in life, you will get in return. Join Bill Risser as he talks to Brittany about her real estate journey. Discover her love for jazz and soul and how that translated into her own podcast, St. Pete Soul. Learn how she learned real estate by finding mentorship in others. Find out why you need to start building those relationships right now!
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Brittany Ranew, Premier Sotheby’s International Realty
I get to talk to somebody I've known for a long time here in St. Pete since I moved here in 2017. I met Brittany Ranew. She's with Premier Sotheby's International Realty. She was a realtor who came to some of the sessions I was doing for Fidelity National Title. She was doing some cool stuff. She launched her own podcast, and we're going to talk about that. She's a classically trained singer, which makes me insanely jealous, and all cool stuff. Let's get this thing going. Brittany, welcome to the show.
Bill, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
It's great seeing you and talking to you. We've known each other for as long as I've been in St. Petersburg when I moved here with Fidelity National Title. You might have been one of the first realtors I met pretty early on in the game because you were in St. Pete, and I was working out of the St. Pete office. We always talked. You had some great ideas. I know you're a dog lover. I know that we're going to talk about your podcast. I know you love music.
We're going to have some fun with this conversation. Like me, you're not a native Floridian. Many of the people we talk to here in St. Pete are not. Although a lot of people are, it's shocking how many people are natives that live in this town, which makes sense. What was home for you? Where did you grow up?
I'm from Mobile, Alabama. Whenever I tell people that, they're like, "You don't have an accent." I'm like, "It's there. There are certain words. From talking to my family, it will come out."
I know Mobile's on the Gulf Coast. I know Interstate 10 runs right through it because when we were relocating to St. Pete, we stayed the night in Mobile. A tornado had hit a few miles South of the hotel. Everything was flooded. It was raining, and all kinds of stuff were happening. Tell me. That's not much to know about Mobile that I stayed there, and it's on the Gulf Coast. Tell me a little bit about where you grew up.
You're talking about the weather, which is a thing. Mobile is one of the rainiest cities in the country. That was the cool thing about moving to St. Pete being the Sunshine City because it's sunny all the time. In Mobile, it rains all the time.
It's funny. It's on the Gulf Coast, and you're still living on the Gulf Coast, but it's quite a difference.
Something about the Gulf into Mobile Bay and weather patterns sweeps across the panhandle from New Orleans all the way across to the panhandle. There are lots of stormy weather. It's hot and humid. I was used to the heat from growing up there. I like to describe it as a small version of New Orleans. It's got the same history with the French and Spanish colonization and all that.
You've got some of those influences with food like the Cajun, Creole, all of that. New Orleans is a bigger city, and they took it all to a different level, but we have some of those same vibes on a smaller scale. A fun fact that most people don't know is that Mobile is the birthplace of Mardi Gras. It is not New Orleans. It is Mobile, Alabama. I'm setting the record straight with that.
[bctt tweet="When you give freely in life, you will get in return." username="billrisser"]
That sounds like that's a sore spot for people who grow up as natives. Carnival, Mardi Gras, and all that stuff are all French start. That makes sense. It could have been either place. Once again, New Orleans took it to another level.
We went to New Orleans a lot. I went back there in February. The first time I had been since we moved here, I loved New Orleans. Mobile is a cool spot because you easily get to New Orleans and Pensacola.
I know you attended the University of Mobile. As you're attending school, first of all, what are you going to study? Second, what's the plan? Everybody has an idea as an eighteen-year-old, "I know exactly what to do. I'm going to go to school. I'm going to come out and do this." Let's talk about that.
I wanted to be a professional singer. That was my plan. I majored in Music in the Vocal Performance, and a lot of people were like, "Why aren't you doing the educational side?" I'm like, "I don't want to teach music. I want to do music." That's why I went that route. I am not a famous singer, so that did not go that way.
My guess is you could probably wow people at karaoke night. Have you done that before in the past?
There are only a few people in the city who know I have sung at Ruby's on two occasions for their jazz improv. I have done that.
That's the one right on the corner of 3rd and Central. You never let anybody know. You went in there and quietly did it and hoped you didn't know anybody in the audience.
Yes. It was so much fun, and I should do it again. It was one of those things where life gets busy, and you don't do some of that stuff that you love.
I got to ask you some questions about the music side of things. There's a wide range of music that you can study, sing and do whatever. You said jazz like an improv thing. What was your specialty? If you were going to cut an album, what genre would it fit?
[caption id="attachment_4308" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Premier Sotheby's International Realty: Event planning can be an outlet for wanting to do your own thing. If you're creative, the event planning business is a good way to dip your toe into the water with that.[/caption]

It would be in the jazz, like Norah Jones. Ella Fitzgerald was one of my favorites. I feel like I should have been born in the '40s or something with all that awesome jazz music. I love it. Harry Connick Jr. was one of my favorite artists. It would be in that world. With my degree, I was classically trained, so we were studying all kinds of different music. I'm proficient in lots of those things, but jazz would be what I love.
I love that. When you graduate from college, what's your first gig?
I started working at a local music company. That was internationally known. It happened to be based in Mobile. It's called Integrity Media. A lot of people would probably recognize the name. They're not open still. They were bought by another company. It was cool because I was like, "If I'm not going to be a professional singer, why don't I, at least, get to be in the music industry?" It's a Christian media label, so I got to work directly on the artist side of things. Not accounting but on the inventory side, helping them order their albums and arrange for some of the events they're doing with Integrity. I got to be on that side. I got to meet some cool artists. It was fun. It was a cool way to transition and stay in the music industry.
I saw a documentary. It was based in a recording studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. You must be aware of that.
I've never been. That would be a cool trip to see that.
That's nice. You're a realtor now. You've been a realtor for a few years. We got to get you to real estate. How do we do that?
I mentioned Integrity Media. They ended up getting bought out by another company and closed their doors. I was laid off. That was 2009 or something like that. That was a big shock of getting laid off. That was my first big girl job. It was like, "What am I doing with myself now?" I had already started in the event planning business on the side during my time there. That might be partly were wanting to be a singer was. I'd always wanted to do my own thing, have my own business, and be creative. The event planning business was dipping my toe into the water with that.
When I got laid off from Integrity, I was like, "I'm going to keep pursuing this and get another part-time job and see what happens." I interviewed for a real estate company for an administrative position. I ended up not getting it, then decided, "Maybe I should get my real estate license. I've always loved it. This sounds like a good idea." I did that. I joined Better Homes and Gardens and quickly realized that there was a lot more opportunity for what I wanted to do in real estate than in my event company. I shut the event company down and focused on real estate.
That's a big jump and move. I know they both were your companies. You had to get clients in both, and there was no money coming in. For me, that jump into real estate is a big leap of faith.
[bctt tweet="There's a lot more opportunity in real estate than in event planning." username="billrisser"]
It is. I got scared after I did it, like, "What did I do?" I joined a team. I was a Transaction Coordinator on a small team at the office. That helped me feel like, "Get some income coming in. Learn the ropes. Get some mentorship." That helped a lot.
You and your husband decide that you're going to leave Mobile. First of all, how did your family take that statement?
I would say good and well. All of our families are in Mobile. My husband's family too. Both of our parents were like, "We would be sad for you to go, but we know this is a great opportunity. You're young. Go do it." That was the sentiment.
Why St. Pete? You didn't know anybody here when you moved here.
Long story short, my husband was in a not-so-great work environment in Mobile. He's been in the insurance industry for his whole career. We were at the point where we needed Tim to have a new opportunity. It was like, "Where can we go to get you that? We will move wherever that needs to be." He had an acquaintance that was at this company in Mobile that had moved over to a company in St. Pete. He had this connection of like, "There's a job opening for a staff adjuster," because he was always independent. He knew a guy that had moved there. He messaged him probably on Facebook or something, made the connection, and got the interview. It was a long interview process.
It was about six months before we knew that we were moving and thought we weren't moving in the middle of that. Honestly, it was looking up the city's website and visiting StPeteClearWater.com or whatever and googling as much as possible and going, "This looks like a cool city. Let's try it." That's what it was.
I was waiting for a story like, "We had vacationed there, and we've seen it."
No, we are up to move. Maybe it was crazy, but it works.
I've heard you talk about the anxiety of the move. It's got to be stressful. First of all, the ability to overcome that is a big deal. I'm guessing that's become something you use all the time now when you've got people coming to Florida, maybe for the first time.
[caption id="attachment_4309" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Premier Sotheby's International Realty: When you're getting started in real estate, it's good to join a small team. That can help you get some income while you learn the ropes and get some mentorship.[/caption]

I like to say that my niche is relocation because I know what that feels like and be a resource for someone when they don't even know, like where a good grocery store is or, "What doctor I should go to?" I enjoy being that resource. I've dealt with anxiety most of my adult life. It had reared its ugly head when we moved here. Life triggers. That's usually those things that happen.
Thankfully, I was self-aware enough to figure out that, "This is going to start spiraling if I don't get help." I found a therapist that was recommended. I started seeing her, and that was a huge help being able to sit down and talk to a non-biased third party and get some of those coping mechanisms back in place that I had learned years ago when I had done therapy before. It was a long process but worth it.
In the industry you're in, it's almost like a coach but a life coach. You ended up here now. I think BHG is here, but you ended up going with the Premier Sotheby's International Realty. Let's find out why you did that.
When we moved here, there was not a well-established BHG brokerage here. There's more of a presence now than there was. My broker in Mobile at BHG of all things, his aunt and uncle, lived in St. Pete. He was like, "I talked to my aunt, and they're willing to help you out when you get there." Through his connection with them, my husband had a place to live for three weeks. They had a rental property. They let him stay in.
Also, my broker, he's like, "Sotheby's International Realty is in St. Pete. I've met Judy Green before, which is the Founder. She's an amazing lady. If you have any way of getting involved with Sotheby's, you need to do it." I was like, "Okay." I trusted him completely. I'm like, "If you say I need to reach out to them, then I'm going to do it." I reached out to the St. Pete office, and they were hiring an administrative assistant at the time. I needed a job, so I came on as the Office Administrator. That's how I got connected. I then got back into sales full-time in 2017 because that was in 2015 when we moved here.
2017 is when I got here, so that makes sense. You were getting into it. I don't know if you came to any sessions we were doing, or I don't know how we exactly met.
I remember meeting you at some of the training and stuff you all were doing. It was a cool way to transition. I'm glad that I worked at the office and got to learn the market and the business and all that in Florida, where I got back into sales.
If you're ever in St. Pete, you can check out their office. It's right there on 2nd right off of the beach. It's an amazing place. It's a great location.
It's close to Baucus and Cassie's.
[bctt tweet="If you've been moving a lot, relocation might be your niche in real estate. Because you know exactly what that feels like." username="billrisser"]
It's probably way too close. I moved here from Arizona. I was in the title business and came here to Florida. Were there big changes from Alabama to Florida when it came to real estate? Are they close enough proximity that it wasn't a big deal?
It was a big jump. That further led to my decision not to get back into sales right away. Mobile is in the South. It's a much slower pace of life. I know that we're in South of Mobile, but we are not in the South in St. Pete anymore. It's a much faster pace in general. The average house price is probably about double. It's probably more than that now. At the time, that was the case. The housing stock itself. The types of houses, all that stuff was different. In Mobile, it was sprawling with subdivisions and these huge lots. It's not the same here. It was probably a sticker shock and a culture shock with that, but then we fell in love with the area and figured, like, "It is what it is."
I try to tell people that there is no place to start a subdivision in Pinellas County. It's all taken up by stuff. You have to tear something down if you want to put something up. It's pretty much the way it goes. We got to talk about this. You are a podcaster. I love talking to people who took the energy, effort, and time to create a podcast. In fact, we talked about it a little bit when you were getting ready to do it. It's called St Pete Soul, and now it's making sense. There's that side of you, that Harry Connick Jr, and that soulful thing going on because when I hear you talk about stuff, you talk about the soul of the city or the soul of the person and what you do on St. Pete.
You interview local business owners, which is fantastic. That's the way to build relationships for one. Connect with people you probably hadn't connected with on a deeper level and also share that information that is something you could share with someone moving into town, "You can check this out. I talked to a lot of the business owners." Talk about that and how it's going. For me, this is not a simple thing but an important thing to do. A lot of agents don't get there. Congratulations on that.
Thank you because, honestly, I don't know if I would have started the podcast if you had not been willing to sit down with me and chat because I was so overwhelmed by the idea. You made it so simple, so thank you for that. It's been cool to connect with people I would have never had the opportunity to talk to if I hadn't had the podcast.
You talked about the word soul. When I was trying to think of the name, I did think about music because it was that tie-in. I was like, "Jazz and soul are the genre of music that I love." If you think about small business as the heart and soul of any thriving community, that's where that tie-in came for me. I had this whole piece of paper. I was writing out all these names, and all of a sudden, it clicked. I was like, "That's the one."
Of all the guests you've talked to, and not to put you on the spot, but people ask me this a lot, was there one that you're like, "That was a good episode. This was cool. I got some information I wasn't expecting?"
The one that comes to mind when people ask me that is when I interviewed the Founder of Keep St. Pete Lit, Maureen McDole. She's a native of St. Pete, which is wow, to meet someone like that. Her organization is amazing. She's helping at-risk youth and all kinds of people learn with literacy, creative writing, and all those resources. We have to do a strong art community here, so helping keep the arts alive is a part of her mission.
When I interviewed her, there were so many gyms of business, life, and things that you should do with your mindset and all that, which is important to me that I wasn't expecting. If you think about her journey, she started that nonprofit with nothing. It was all of her building on her own. You can see her passion, mindset, and tenacity are a reason why it became as big as it is.
I like the fact that you have one right there that you like that made a difference for
31 min
June 07, 2022 Episode 321 – Brad Allen, Broker/Owner of The Art of Real Estate

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.
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Brad Allen, Broker/Owner of The Art of Real Estate
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.

[bctt tweet="Culture is a big pot of chili or stew, and each person you put in there can change the taste of that pot." username="billrisser"]

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.

[caption id="attachment_4294" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Enhanced Consumer Experience: A lot of people can find the business, but without the structure, they can't handle it.[/caption]

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 at it and when do most people get their insurance? It's when the lender goes, “You need it. I got a friend. Let me get you a quote.” You don't know if it's the best quote. Insurance is notorious for poor customer service.
If I can have a great insurance experience, which nobody wants to talk about insurance, it's not a fun thing to talk about but everybody has to have it. If I can give them a great experience that keeps them under the real estate umbrella as well but it only helps my agents, it helps me give our clients a good experience and helps me stay a part of the clients in a different manner. It, to us, went hand in hand. It's not as hard as most people think but it's a little bit to get going.
Are...
32 min
May 31, 2022 Episode 320 – Marnie Blanco, VP of Industry Relations – Pacaso

How does real estate technology help you grow your business? This episode is just right for you to answer that question. Marnie Blanco has 24 years of experience in industry relations, business development, product management, product marketing, training, and support, with 19 years focused on the real estate vertical. In this episode, she shares insights on the technological aspects of real estate. Learn what Pacaso is and how Marnie manages her team effectively with the latest innovations!
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Marnie Blanco, VP of Industry Relations, Pacaso
We're going to talk about fractional homeownership. Some of you know what I'm going to say, that's Pacaso. This was the Austin Allison, Spencer Rascoff company that was started a few years ago. It makes it possible for more people to enjoy the pleasures, joys, and experiences of owning a second home without having to own the entire home, fractional ownership, either an eighth, a quarter or a half.
We have Marnie Blanco. She is the Vice President of Industry Relations. We're going to chat with her about first of all how she got into the business. Second, we're going to talk a lot about Pacaso, how it works, how it can be used by agents, and get an in-depth look at this new model. Let's get this thing started. Marnie, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
I am excited to chat with you. Pacaso exploded on the scene. I don't know any other way to say that. When Austin and Spencer got together, it makes perfect sense that those two guys would figure something out. First, we're going to talk about you. I want to find out about you. Specifically, you live in the Denver area, is that true?
Yes. I'm a little bit South of Denver in Castle Pines, Colorado.
You were born and raised in Colorado, correct?
Born and raised and I tell everyone I will live and die here as well.
Why Colorado? I don't want to say sell me on Colorado because you don't want more people moving there, but what do you love about Colorado?
It's funny you said that. I do always tell them. I'm like, "People, it's horrible here. No more people come." Born and raised and my family is here. It's all I've ever known and all I've ever lived. I am a creature of habit, but I can be that way because every job that I've had in my career for several years now has had some travel involved in it. It's pretty extensive travel. I still see all parts of the country. I still get to get out and spread my wings, but Colorado is special to me.
[caption id="attachment_4278" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Real Estate Technology: Take that leap and don't be afraid to make changes in your professional life.[/caption]

The number one reason is my family is here. Particularly, my sister, who lives about five minutes down the street from me. She has two girls. I have two girls. They're all a year apart from each other. They go to school together. I always say, "I would live and die here," with the disclaimer that if she decides for some reason to get up and move, then I would follow her.
You both are probably saying the same thing about Colorado. All is good. You're going to stay there. I asked this question a lot to people when we talk about where they grew up. Give me the biggest misconception about your home state.
Every time people hear Colorado, they say skiing. All you do is ski. People ask me all the time if I ski, and I did as a younger kid. I had to come to grips with the fact that if I'm being honest with myself, I don't like skiing. I'm not going to do it anymore. The biggest misconception is people think Colorado is all about skiing, where in fact, it's more of an outdoorsy type of state.
We have our Colorado mountains that are famous for skiing, but people go there just as much in the summer and other seasons than they do in the winter. It's a year-round type of state. We have 300 days of sunshine. You can't beat that. The climate is wonderful because you get a little piece of all four seasons. You get the snow, spring, and the falls are beautiful, and then summer and warm temperatures as well but not horrible. Colorado is a little bit of something for everyone.
It's a beautiful place. I've been there a few times. I'm always blown away by the vistas. I remember traveling to Grand Junction one time to help a buddy pick up a vehicle. It's a whole different part of the state. It's not the same thing. There are lots of different places. I'm sure you're a Buffalo then. You had to go to school in Colorado.
I did go to CU. What's funny too is in high school, I was a Buffalo. I went to my local high school here. We were Smoky Hill Buffaloes. I said, "Once a buffalo, always a buffalo." I then went to CU and I was Buffalo. If I'm being honest though, back to my sister, I went to CU because that's where she went. I didn't even apply to any other school.
As my kids are getting older, I have a high schooler and I have a niece that's graduating and going to college, I was like, "How dumb was I?" What if I didn't get accepted into CU? I didn't even apply anywhere else. Again, because I'm a creature of habit so if my sister did it, that's what I did. Luckily, I got in and it was a great experience. It was good to be able to stay instate, be close to home, and then also get a great education at the same time.
What was the plan after you graduated? Was real estate even a little blip on the radar at that time?
My college experience was a little bit different. I graduated from CU in three years with a double major because both my parents passed away while I was in college. You work hard in college. I was like, "If I'm going to work this hard, I better start getting paid some money." I needed to move on with the next chapter of my life.
[bctt tweet="Everything is about the consumer. That's the North Star to every company, every business." username="billrisser"]
When I graduated, I graduated with a Marketing and Information Systems major, so straight out of school, I was a developer. I was a programmer. I was horrible at it. It was so bad. It was a bad choice on my part. For two years I wrote code. I even did it for a little bit like a side gig after I left the consulting business.
I went into telecom consulting and I wrote code. I did a lot of systems integration work and technical work within the telecom industry for about five years. That started my travel gig when I was working. I literally traveled to Kansas City for two years, Monday through Friday, every single week. I spent weekends at home here in Colorado.
My husband and I got married. We wanted to have kids and that is difficult when you're not in the same state. I decided at that point in time that I needed to make a career change. It so happened to be that my sister's next-door neighbor was the HR director of RE/MAX, the franchisor, which is headquartered here in Colorado. That's how I got connected to RE/MAX. There was a position open ironically enough called an IT Marketing Manager. It took my two majors together and stuck them together.
I made the leap into real estate. I didn't know anything about real estate other than the fact that my mother was an agent. She was a RE/MAX agent. She was an agent for a few different companies in her younger years, but I didn't know anything about it. I knew about marketing and technology and whatnot from my degree and my experience, so I made the leap.
It was a little bit of a scary leap though because, in the mix of it, I took a good 50% to 60% pay cut. I knew that that lifestyle of being on the road, every single week, Monday through Friday was not going to work. I took the leap and I couldn't be more happy that I did. When I look back, what a great change that was for me.
How convenient that RE/MAX happened to be located in Denver?
It's like fifteen minutes from my house.
I would think that having that coding background, even if it was not the highest level had to be a huge help moving forward in your career. You've worked with a lot of companies now. There are dev teams, the marketing side of things, and operations. There are all these things working together. You have a great opportunity to be the person that can drive some conversations. Is that the way it worked?
You hit the nail on the head. While I was at RE/MAX, at that point in time in real estate, nobody had all the listings on their website except Realtor.com. As a franchisor or broker, you couldn't have them. A part of my journey at RE/MAX was we built the first national website that brought on all listings in the United States. Remax.com was the very first to do that and part of my career there is building that.
[caption id="attachment_4279" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Real Estate Technology: The entire mission of Pacaso is to make second home ownership more accessible and more enjoyable for more people.[/caption]

From that, I started with a team of two people at RE/MAX and I ended with a team of about 40, 45 people because we built the entire eBusiness team at RE/MAX. We handled all the technology that was outward-facing to agents and brokers, whether it was Remax.com or internal tools for the agents, marketing, lead generation, etc.
To your question, it did help me understand the background of building brand-new platforms and what it took in terms of not only the dev time, but QA, implementation, launching, and then integration with other systems. That was my background for quite some time. I was able to marry it to the business portion of what RE/MAX does for agents and brokers.
It was a very unique position. It all came into place in a nice little way. I have always been grateful to have at least a little bit of background on it because I can understand concepts and the high level. As I said, I was horrible at doing it. You would never want me to touch anything, but I could understand the rhythm of technology development.
What was difficult and what wasn't difficult? There are a lot of non-techie people in leadership positions that go, "That will be pretty easy." Famous last words to a dev team or an engineer.
A lot of times we partnered with a lot of technology companies and that helped as well to make good partnerships because we could speak each other's language and understand what are we capable of, what's a reasonable timeframe, and what's to be expected. To all the customers, clients, agents, and brokers, you can set reasonable expectations as well when you have the full gamut of what's coming down.
You are brand new to the world of real estate. Was there anything that surprised you about agents, realtors and brokers? It's a different world. They're fully commissioned. What was your takeaway from experiencing that for the first time?
One particular moment that sticks in my head is my second or third week on the job. The very first trip I took was to the Inman Conference in San Francisco because they used to always have it in San Francisco before they even started the New York one. It was just once a year in San Francisco. I was sitting there with my boss and I didn't understand real estate. I had bought and sold a house of my own. From a consumer's perspective, maybe I understood, but I didn't understand the true role in-depth of an agent and a broker, how those are different, and what topics are important to them or challenging.
During the conversation, a lot of the travel agent sites were getting taken down and replaced by the internet. That's when Expedia, Hotwire, etc. were coming. All the conversation of, "This is going to happen to real estate agents. They're going to be replaced by the internet." They kept talking about all the agents and what they were going to do.
I remember leaning over to my boss and saying, "Does anybody ask about the consumer, the home buyer or the seller?" She's like, "No, we don't talk about that." That was eye-opening to me because that was the only hat that I understood. I didn't understand anything else. It's interesting now in my career to see how that's come full circle. Everything is about the consumer. That's the North Star to every company or every business. It took a while to get there.
[bctt tweet="Have a clear vision on where you’re going." username="billrisser"]
I was in the title business when Dotloop launched. It was groundbreaking at the time. I remember connecting, meeting, and saying hi to Austin in Inman. I know he was in Cincinnati and doing his thing and he was getting this company rolling. Somehow, Marnie who will not leave Colorado ends up convincing Austin that you can work for Dotloop and stay at home. How did you do this?
That came about in a pretty interesting way. I had been at RE/MAX for about ten years and that's where I met Austin. He was always trying to sell RE/MAX on a bigger enterprise deal or a bigger vision of how to use transaction management. At the time, people didn't even pay attention to transaction management. They didn't understand it. They didn't know it. Everything was website, CRM, and lead generation.
I was familiar with it because I had worked with them. They had a decent amount of RE/MAX companies using transaction management using Dotloop, but it was a foreign concept. At that point in time though, I decided to leave RE/MAX and go back to telecom for about six months. I had an old colleague of mine talking to my ears saying, "This is a good opportunity. Come back."
After ten years of doing the same thing, I was like, "Maybe I'm ready for something new." If I look back on my career, it was the worst decision I made. I left RE/MAX. I went back to telecom and within 48 hours of that job, I knew that that was not where I belonged at all. That was a hard time in my career because I had always been on a very good path. I had always been very successful at what I was doing. I had a very clear vision of where I was going. I had to make a hard decision.
I had to go to a colleague and a friend and say, "This isn't going to work." I waited for about a month or two. I tried and I knew this isn't going to work. I went in and gave my notice even after about a month and said, "I'm going to give you about a month and a half to two months' notice. I will finish that project out so you have something to work with." During that time, I had gone back to all my contacts in the real estate industry and said, "I need to be in the real estate industry."
Austin was one of them. What had happened is some news releases came out about Dotloop and RE/MAX. I was like, "I can't believe it. Austin won RE/MAX." He got RE/MAX. It wasn't quite that. It was something a little bit smaller, but that kick-started the conversation. The company Dotloop was growing pretty quickly at that time. It needed more experience from industry players. I joined Dotloop in the very early stages. That was crazy because I had never been in a startup world. I had worked for a few companies in telecom and RE/MAX, very established companies, but I had never been in a startup world. That was my first entrée into that world. That's an interesting ride.
Decisions can be made quickly. It's not like turning a freighter. All those analogies are correct.
You have to learn to fail. That was hard for me. I don't fail. Why would I want to do something if I'm going to fail? That was something because you have to try things and you have to keep trying until you figure out the right path. I eventually did and Dotloop became a very successful company and sold to Zillow. I was there for about four years. I went through that entire acquisition process with Austin and Zillow. I stayed about another four years before I'm over at Pacaso. It was about an eight-year run there.
Let's talk about Pacaso and network platforms. I heard that phrase several years ago. Uber and Match.com are network platforms. People that have something that other people need and someone in the middle makes it simple. At its core, that's what we're looking at with Pacaso, another network platform that solves a problem for consumers. It's fantastic. For the people that maybe don't know exactly how this thing all plays out or haven't been paying as close attention as I have, can you lay out the process that Pacaso has perfected?
[caption id="attachment_4280" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Real Estate Technology: What's really important in being an agent is being able to have a conversation with your clients, because probably with the pace of our marketing and brand awareness.[/caption]

The entire mission of Pacaso is to make second homeownership more accessible and more enjoyable for more people. The concept is pretty simple. We took a decade-old do-it-yourself type of model of friends and family getting together, finding a second home, and owning the home together as co-owners. What we've done is just modernized that platform and we have built out a model so that people can have access to it. They don't have to go find friends and family because as we all probably know, if you've ever done it, it gets real messy real fast. "So-and-so wants to sell. You don't want them to sell. How do I get into the house? You have Christmas. I want to have Christmas. You had it last year." That gets tricky with friends and family.
The model itself, we come in and we buy high-end luxury homes. Typically, about 2 to 3 times the median home value. We put that home into an LLC and then we find up to eight owners per home. You can own an eighth, a quarter, or up to a half of a home. We're in about 35 to 40 markets throughout the US. We launched Spain and London as well, back in the fall. Now, we have a global presence as well. Pretty soon, we will be launching Mexico in Cabo.
As an old title guy, twenty years with Fidelity National Financial, we had deeds all the time that had fractional ownership. It's super common in the title space. It's not even new. Not even close. It's everything else that was built around that which is what we're going to chat about. I have to ask you about the name Pacaso. It sounds eerily close to Pablo Picasso, spelled much differently but said the...
35 min
May 24, 2022 Episode 319 – Joe Rand, Chief Creative Officer, Howard Hanna Rand Realty

Admit it or not, we have different treatments to the buy-side of things compared to the selling side in real estate. In this episode, Joe Rand provides examples of these differences. Joe is the Chief Creative Officer of Howard Hanna Rand Realty, one of the country's largest family-owned real estate brokerages. He also discusses the vulnerabilities and not having proper assurances buyer agents face when dealing, which includes commissions. Stay tuned to learn more from Joe Rand because real estate is not just buying and selling, and it involves a lot more enclosed on those terms.
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Joe Rand, Chief Creative Officer-Howard Hanna Rand Realty
Welcome to episode 319. Thank you so much for reading and for telling a friend. If you haven't guessed, he's back. Joe Rand is going to do a regular episode of the show. We did twenty episodes of Randing and Raving and had a lot of fun with that. With some of the things happening in the world with real estate, I thought I'd bring Joe back at his take as only Joe can do it. I'm not going to do an interview with Joe upfront about his background. I've done that before.
To let you know quickly, he’s got a Law degree from Georgetown and JD from Stanford. He taught at Fordham and works with Howard Hanna Rand Realty in Westchester County. It's a family-owned business they've had for decades. He's one of the smartest guys I know in real estate. He might be the smartest guy I know in real estate. Who else but Joe to come on here and chat about some of these topics? Let's get this thing started. Joe, welcome to the show.
Bill, how are you? It’s good to see you.
I'm doing great. I'm so excited to get you back and fired up to chat with you. Some things are happening in the world of real estate that I thought, “Who can I get some knowledge about this? Who's the guy that knows what's going on and that'll be honest?”
You called a bunch of people. You called Rob Hahn but he wasn't available. You called what's on the list, all the various doers but at some point, I returned your call because I like you, Bill. I took an interest in doing this. I appreciate it. I wasn't at the top of the list but I'm on the list, which is something.
For those of you who've missed Joe's first episode, we have a traditional episode with Joe Rand where I do my thing and find out about how Joe got started in the business, what he did as a kid and all that great stuff. That’s not going to happen here.
That was years ago before we knew each other. How we got to know each other was on the show. The only reason you knew who I was was that somebody had come on the show and said nice things about my book and then you said, “I got to interview this guy.” We interviewed and hit it off. I was lucky enough to be on what I think is the Bill Sessions Podcast, although I know it's not your name. Your name is Bill Risser. I was on that once but in 2021, we did something fun, which was me being my alter ego for weeks.
I have a playlist on the website. You can go get all twenty Randing and Raving with Joe Rand.
The theme was you would get questions from the public and they would give me an audio question. I would not know what it is in advance and not be prepared for it. I would have to be spontaneous to respond. The idea, as you initially pitched that to me, was that whenever I do a podcast, I'm pretty good for about 30 minutes to 40 minutes and then get tired. I start getting little nuts because my medication wears off. You're like, “I want you in the post medication phase to the part where you start to lose control of yourself.”

[caption id="attachment_4263" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Real Estate: The next three to five years something disruptive will happen to the buy-side commission at about 20 to 25%, which is a lot higher than a year ago.[/caption]

This happens on stage. You speak a lot around the country. It's my favorite part sitting in the audience going, “I can see it coming and happening. He's going to go off on that thing.”
I do. I get bored with myself. I'm like, “I got to level this thing up.” We had fun with that. That was a great thing. For anybody who never heard it, go back and look for them because they hold up. All the issues we talked about are still relevant. Most people have a burning question as to whether they would rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck, which is one of the questions we answered and what you should do if you steal stuff from a supermarket.
That was another good one. Plus, some real estate stuff that we covered but we want to have a serious one because this is a serious show. It's a real substance show, not my normal BS. I might try to play the straight answer question and see what you have to say and if I can help out people and give them some insight into what's going on.
Not so fast. I got some emails still hanging around. I thought, even though we're part of this show, I'm going to throw you an audio question. It was one of the topics I wanted to cover anyway. It works out perfectly. What do you think? Are you up for it?
Do you want to keep the format? We're doing a crossover episode. I'm going back to the 1970s when someone from Friends would show up on Seinfeld or something. Let's get those audio questions.
Here we go.
“Willie here from Melbourne. I'm a big fan and reckon you've got an opinion over this passion between NAR and the DOJ. Overall, the policy has been around for years so I'm hoping you would mind giving us your take. I liked your show and that Risser guy, he's amazing. Cheers.”
That is shameful, Risser.
What are you talking about?

[bctt tweet="It's all contingent that if you don't buy something, you pay nothing." username="billrisser"]

Risser, you can pick up on this. When we stopped doing the Randy and Raving, people stopped leaving messages. Risser didn't have any voicemails. He made himself a voicemail faking his voice with an Australian accent that he got because he hangs out all this time with all these Aussies from RateMyAgent but he still hasn't picked up a decent accent. That is horrible. That is not as clearly you teeing me up to talk about all the stuff that's going on with the NAR lawsuits and the Department of Justice. It's a fine question, Bill. I'm amazed that you had to resort to that shamefulness to incorporate an audio message that you made for yourself.
Councilor, I plead the fifth.
You don't want to incriminate yourself. I respect that. Despite the fraudulent nature of that voicemail, Bill, you trying to fake your audience and mislead them into thinking that people are still calling the Randing and Raving line, even though we both know the only people that called in were your buddy from Arizona and a bunch of Russian bots, besides the fact that it's a good question. What it does is it tees up.
We’ll separate it into two issues because two things are going on with all the lawsuits and antitrust. One is clear cooperation and the other one is the seller paid buyer agent commission. Let's talk about the latter one first, the seller paid buyer agent commission. There is a lot of concern and suspicion that both the DOJ and these lawsuits against NAR wind their way through the courts that there is some threat to the system by which sellers pay a commission to the buyer agents and the buyer agents don't have to pay their buyer agents. It gets rolled into the purchase of the home
On a fundamental level, I want to explain why I think that the whole thing is nonsense. The people think, “This is a bad thing,” and it raises prices and all that stuff. To me, it’s self-motivated reasoning from people that want to blow up the real estate industry or have the business model that they're trying to play up. That is this, the system works very well. The reason the system works is that there's an offer of cooperation out from the seller, which is usually a unilateral offer of compensation so when you're working with a buyer agent, that buyer agent can show you anything that’s in the market.
It's not like buying anything else or a car. If you want to buy a car, you have to go to fifteen different lots. If we didn't have cooperation, you'd have to go to fifteen different brokers because every broker would have only their properties to show you. Instead, you go to one agent and that agent represents you as your fiduciary and they can show you anything in the market. You don't have to come out of pocket for those services at all.
It's all contingent that if you don't buy something, you pay nothing. It's not a bad deal for the buyers. This idea if everyone's getting screwed by the system, the buyers get a good service out of it. The sellers get a good service because they pay one commission, which covers the entire transaction and essentially, gets rolled into the price anyway. The idea if the seller pays the commission is paid out of the proceeds of the sale.
The money is coming from the buyer. The buyer gives the money to the seller. The seller takes a piece of it and gives it to the agents, including the buyer agent. The best part about it is that the buyer pays it off for 30 years. They don't have to pay for it upfront, have to come out of pocket for it, worry about degrading from their down payments or anything like that. It's a good system that works well. Prices and real estate have done very well in the United States under this system.
Some people are concerned about it and I understand the concerns. The concern is that the buyer ends up hiring a buyer agent but doesn't have any ability to be able to negotiate their fee with that buyer agent because the fee is set by the seller and the listing agent by the offer of compensation. That is partly true but also partly nonsense because there are brokers, including Redfin that says to you as a buyer agent, “We will rebate to you what we get as a buyer commission.” This means that the buy-side is negotiable. You can negotiate the buy-side.

[caption id="attachment_4264" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Real Estate: If they got rid of the seller paid buy-side commission, that is absolutely something that every real estate broker in the country should be preparing for.[/caption]

If you want to go to a buyer agent, say, “If you get an offer of compensation that's more than 2%, I don't want to get whatever is above 2%, 1.5% or 3%, whatever the prevailing commission rate is. I don't want to get on to antitrust problems because of this dumb show. Whatever the number is, that's the number. Anything above that number, you rebate back to me or you rebate back to me a hard number like $2,500, regardless of whatever it is.” That's all negotiable. This idea that buyer agents can't negotiate is nonsense.
Flip it around. This cartel of the real estate industry keeps commissions high because sellers have to pay two sides, the listing side and the buy-side and they don't have the ability to negotiate the commission is a crazy idea. Bill, there was nothing more negotiable than a real estate commission. They're all over the place. I can't turn on CNN without seeing an ad for Ideal Agent, Homelite or any of these companies that promote the idea that you're going to be able to get a discount from your listing agent.
What they're doing is interjecting themselves and pretending that they're going to connect you to an agent, take your referral fee and then force the agent to take a discounted commission, which that business model itself is objectionable from my perspective. The larger point is that everything is negotiable. There are tons of discount companies out there.
The guy from REX, Jack Ryan, is always talking about how the cartels restricting his business. Do you know what's restricting his business? It’s his business model. He says, “I'm going to charge you less,” but all he’s charging is the listing side. He doesn't pay a buy-side so he's not getting the biggest exposure. Buyer agents don’t want to work for nothing and they are not very good at negotiating with their buyers to get a buyer-side commission. He's saying, “They're holding me back,” but he's out there with millions of dollars of advertising to advertise this 2% commission like a bunch of other people. Everyone knows they can negotiate the commission.
The other piece of that is this argument that it's compulsory that if you want to be an MLS, you have to offer a buy-side. You can offer $0.50. They don't say what the number is. NAR is so dumb about so many things. One of the things they're dumb about is why don't the MLS get rid of the idea that you have to offer a buy-side commission? Eliminate that you have to make an offer of compensation as a requirement. You get rid of a lot of these concerns.
You effectively have that and the worst of all worlds. People do take listings, put them on MLS and put them out for $0.50 but, at the same time, you're getting all the regulatory and legal scrutiny because you are saying that they have to make an offer of compensation. They have to offer a penny. They can offer anything. It's all stupid and dumb. The system works well. How is this sold for what they're worth? It's a perfectly transparent and fluid market. What makes it work is that someone is working for the listing side and buy-side. It's an adversarial system. Every lawyer understands that the adversarial system is the best way to elicit the truth in legal proceedings but they immediately say, “They don't need it in real estate sales,” which is ridiculous.
Joe, I love you. I'm going to say that honestly. That is that's amazing. I guarantee you that no other show that doesn't have you on it got that excitement, energy and honesty. What is going to be a massive change in the business if the decision goes a certain way? Let's say cooperation goes away. Do lenders then get involved heavily and start trying to roll the buyer's fee to the agent into the loan? In escrow, we're paying out a commission from the proceeds of the loan. How will this work? Most people can't pay the buyer's agent.
Everything I've said so far was me saying what I can't understand why people think that getting rid of the seller-paid buy-sell would be a good thing and these arguments that the Antitrust Institute is putting out. I understand why the plaintiffs are putting it out. They're trying to make money. It's a class-action lawsuit. The lawyers are trying to get money. I get that but I don't understand the DOJ’s perspective or the antitrust division’s position on this much.
I spoke at American Antitrust Institute with the Jack Ryan guy from REX, who got to speak for an hour and rail against the real estate industry. They gave twenty minutes to me and James Dwiggins from NextHome to give the pro. It was very much not an equal time type of thing because the American Antitrust Institute see antitrust everywhere they look. They thought there was an antitrust issue. I don't buy any of that.

[bctt tweet="There are tons of discount companies out there." username="billrisser"]

I can't get three brokers to agree to do anything. The idea that we're acting as a cartel is amazing to me if you knew anything about how brokers work with each other. That's why I think it's nonsense but there is a real possibility that the seller-paid buy-side to go with. What do we do if that happens? Do I think that's likely? No. Do I think it's possible? Yes. I would put it within the next years of something disruptive happening to the buy-side commission at about 20 to 25%, which is a lot higher than I had it in 2021.
It's not as high as Rob Hahn has it. Rob has at about 105%. Likely that's going to happen. I love Robin but he has a very pessimistic view of this whole process and how it's going to play out. It's possible. Even if you peg it at 5%, it would be such a disruptive event if they got rid of the seller-paid buy-side commission. That is something that every real estate broker in the country should be preparing for. I don't see enough of that happening.
I've been speaking about it at Inman at a virtual session I did. I've been talking about it on shows like this and when I talk to people. We need to be prepared for the possibility. If I were to say to a broker, “Let's say tomorrow, you could no longer get paid your buy-side commission by the seller. You have to get the buyer to pay it. Are you prepared to be able to do that?” Nobody is prepared to do that. If we want buyers to pay it, a couple of things have to happen.
Number one, we should start institutionalizing buyer-side representation agreements. Why don't we have buy-side representation agreements? Why won't we work with a seller without an exclusive right to represent but we'll work with a buyer who’s like, “Call me up and I'll meet you at the house?” What are we doing here? Why do you still meet people in the house? If a buyer calls you that wants to see the house, you're not doing your job if go meet them.
If I'm a doctor and someone calls me up and says, “I have a heart attack.” “Come on in. Let's go meet at the emergency room.” “I want you to come to my house to treat me.” “I'm not going to treat you in your house. I’m not doing you a service if I'm going to visit you. I have to be where the equipment is.” You're a buyer agent. You need to know whether they can afford that house because you're wasting their time and yours if you go see a house and you haven't pre-qualified that buyer for that house. You got to know a little bit about what they like.
Maybe they want to see that house. They don't even know the house is under a bunch of high wires and you know they're not going to like it when they see it. They're asking you questions and you're like, “There are three other houses like it. We should go see 4 houses if we're going to go see 1.” That's your job and what you do. You're not doing your job if you say, “Let me drive over and I'll meet you at the front step.”
The reason they do it is that they're so insecure about these agents. They’re...
40 min
May 17, 2022 Episode 318 – Cole Slate, Broker/Owner Slate Real Estate

In this episode of The Real Estate Sessions, Bill Risser sits down with an experienced broker and real estate owner, Cole Slate. Cole is the owner of Slate Real Estate in St. John’s Country, Jacksonville, Florida. He is a strong business development professional with a Bachelor's degree focused on family, youth, and community sciences from the University of Florida. To hear more, tune in, and find inspiration in Cole’s wisdom and experience in becoming a well-established broker.
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Cole Slate, Broker/Owner, Slate Real Estate
Thank you so much for tuning in and for telling a friend. I can’t wait to talk with Cole Slate. Cole is the Broker Owner of Slate Real Estate up in the St John’s County area, right outside Jacksonville, Florida. I met Cole at the Jacksonville bar camp, now renamed the One Coast REBarCamp. He has an amazing operation. Cole is a native Northeast Floridian. He loves where he lives and shows how he works with his community with charity and giving back in the world of real estate. He is an amazing guy. I am excited to get his story so let’s get this thing started.
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Cole, welcome to the show.
Bill, thanks for having me.

It is well long overdue. You are doing some cool things up in the Jacksonville area. I want to talk about all those things, but first, I want to talk about Jacksonville in particular. You are a native of Northeast Florida. I have been to your office. How far away did you grow up from your office? How far away was the home where you grew up?
From when I was born until eleven years old, I was literally in the ZIP code across the street from my office. From eleven years old until now, minus my years in Gainesville, University of Florida, I have lived in the same ZIP code. You are probably looking at a max fifteen-minute radius from everything.
You are the epitome of “real estate is local.”
It is a lot of our marketing stuff. If you hear a lot of people say hyper-local, our whole outlook is a more hyper community. You will hear me use that term a lot in regards to what we do and how we give back and things like that.
Now I live in St. Petersburg. We will call that West Central Florida. Northeast Florida is different than what we have down here. South Florida is completely different from everybody. Tell me a little bit about Northeast Florida. Why is it cool? What is neat about it? Are you tired of being called South Georgia?
Again, being a native, obviously, I am biased. I will be honest. It ruffles my feathers whenever I hear someone say something negative about the Jacksonville area, Northeast Florida. When speaking to people who do not live here or even those that are considering moving here or things like that, Northeast Florida, the Jacksonville area, is the best of all worlds.
We have ocean, inner coastal, river, the suburbs, the historic area, downtown, and an NFL team. It is cheating a little bit because landmass-wise, we are the largest city in the country. We have a lot of areas to have all this great stuff, but in the 30-minute drive, you can get to all of those things. We have the airport. Where else do you have all of those different types of environments, atmospheres, and resources? Nowhere that I can think of, but again, biased native opinion.
You also have the ability to get to the mountains if you want. That is a big stretch for the rest of Florida. Unless you are in the Panhandle, the Northeast, and the Northside, you are not getting to the mountains for hours from where I live.
It is not too far for a drive. I do not leave town much but I see people going to the mountains for weekend trips. I see it all the time on my social media feed.
You mentioned you are a Gator. We got to talk about it or Sean Carpenter will have my head. I do not know if there is a bigger fan than him. It might be you, but let’s talk about that. First of all, the University of Florida. I will continue my poll of Gators. I have to ask you this question because if you answer the same way that most people answer, it is going to continue this mind-blowing experience for me. What is your least favorite SCC school? You got to pick one.
If I have to pick one, I would say Georgia because of the rivalry and things like that, but Sean Carpenter might have my head is that I do not get too deep into the rivalries. For Rivalry weekend, I will be totally die-hard against this other school because they are playing Florida and I hope Florida kicks their ass and all of the Southern stuff, but I am one of those fans. Everyone has a reason to root for their school. They are raised a particular way and attend school.
[bctt tweet="Be the interviewer. Make sure that you are most comfortable with the environment, the culture, and the leadership of the companies you are interviewing." username="billrisser"]
They grew up around that city, the state, or whatever it is. I will be as big of a trash talker as anyone else for that particular weekend because that is the fun of it. I do not get too deep into it. SCC and my house are fun. I am a University of Florida alum. My beautiful wife, Laura, is an Auburn alum. She is in the other division. She is SCC West. She is orange and blue still, just the wrong orange and blue.
One more thought about the SCC. Unlike any other place I have been in the country, it is SCC first for a lot of people in the SCC. It is such a dominant football conference that even if Auburn or Tennessee is playing for the national championship, you as an SCC guy are going to root for them because it represents your conference. I am telling you, if you see USC or UCLA, if one of those two is playing for the national championship, the other school is rooting for them to lose. The last thing they want is that school to win. It is interesting. It is different here.
It is because we want to keep up that superior reputation as a football conference. SCC is an NFL factory. How did the SCC stack up in the first round of the NFL draft?
Five Georgia defensive players went in the first round. That tells you everything you need to know.
Even talking about Adam Hutchinson and everything, being a Jaguar fan as well, who knows where that top pick will have been better invested in the SCC player and Trayvon Walker or Adam Hutchinson, but my devil’s advocacy against Adam Hutchinson was he was missing an action against Georgia. Time will tell.
We will get to real estate now. Was real estate even a blip on the radar for you?
No. I have no idea. I always grew up with the idea that I was going to work for my family business. My dad owns a company. He is an economic development consultant. I went through college, figuring that I was going to do that. I did not walk. I graduated, but I did not physically go to graduation. Two weeks after my last final exam, I was in my dad’s office working. I gave it a shot for a few months, but it was not me. This plan, I had to work in the family business for the rest of my life and take over, was cut to about 3 or 4 months when I learned that it was not going to be something that I enjoy doing for the rest of my life.
From there, I got into mortgages. The reason I did that is it was a similar atmosphere. I was in a call center. In my dad’s office, I was making cold calls and doing research. Some of my best friends worked in this mortgage call center. I was like, “Even if the job sucks, I will be with some of my buddies so it will be cool.” That only lasted 6 or 7 months because of the same type of thing. I am sitting in a cubicle 40 to 50 hours a week on a headset taking mortgage applications. That is not my personality. I did not enjoy doing it. After that, I got into teaching and coaching basketball. I did that for a school year and then decided to get into real estate.
I was in the title business for twenty years and as a lender, you have realtor partners that are superior and superb. You probably worked with some realtors who struggled. How is that?
My short stint in mortgages was great because I learned and I got trained by EverBank at that time. Now it is US Bank. They had some of the best training programs that I know of. Only being in it for 6 or 7 months, I learned enough to now when I decided to get into real estate a year later after mortgages to be dangerous, to know enough about the mortgage situation and process that even when I got my real estate license when I turned 25 years old, it still added to this knowledge as for me being a resource for home buyers and sellers
It is the number one thing a realtor is. You are a resource. When you are good at what you do, you are helping, educating, and taking care of people. The more you know, the better off you are. I love that. You worked for a few different models like KW and Yellowfin, which is a Florida regional. We have them down here. EXIT Realty is another national brand. Talk about that. You worked your way through some good learning opportunities.
Whenever I get decided to get into real estate, I was super young, but I had just turned 25 years old. I would never buy a house before, but I was renting from my parents. When I decided to get in, we had a close family friend that was working at the Jacksonville KW office that, fortunately and luckily for me, made an awesome introduction to, in my opinion, the top team lead in Jacksonville and Christina Welch. I started off in a good situation. There is still stuff that I am implementing now that I learned from Christina. She and I talk or text every week or two still. Encountering that, I was young and inexperienced, and I did not know that it was best for me to interview the brokers and the brokerage.
Let’s be honest. Unfortunately, a vast majority of these models are going to hire anyone that has a pulse. I went in with the mindset of, “I hope they want me.” I am not talking in regards to Christina anymore. I had to interview separately for her because she had a lot of people trying to join her team. Luckily, I was the one that she chose, but in regards to a brokerage level, thank God that I was blessed and as lucky as I did.
Even now, I encourage every new agent that I talk to, “You be the interviewer. You make sure that you are most comfortable with the environment, the culture, and the leadership of these companies that you are interviewing.” There are some that are out there being picky like we are with my new firm. You be the interviewer and make sure that you are going to love where you are with the culture and the leadership and be most comfortable and confident in your new business.
[caption id="attachment_4254" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Real Estate Journey: It is the number one thing a realtor is - a resource. When you are good at what you do, you are helping, educating, and taking care of people. The more you know, the better off you are.[/caption]

You are at EXIT and the bug bites you. It happens to a lot of good agents where they go, “I can do this. I want to build something. I want it to be good.” As you do strike out on your own, what was your vision? What did Slate Real Estate look like before it was Slate Real Estate?
I loved my time, all of it at EXIT Real Estate Gallery. The leadership there with Sonny Downey, Ray Rivera, and Nancy Soriano. I could not have been in a better situation, but I was there. My team and I were there for five years and we were the top producers all five years. I am the furthest from a content person. If I am at a firm for five years, our team is the top producer for five years. Am I cool with that? Am I content? Am I going to keep doing that for the rest of my career?
What is next? What is progress? Is it making a bigger team? We had a small team of 5 or 6 people, which is fun, but as I was around longer, as I got involved more in our association, more at the state, got to know more people like you and Carp, and got out more, I got that itch to want to start something from scratch. There were a lot of small motivators behind that. Zero of them was anything negative towards EXIT. It was my tongue for what is next.
Many of the small motivators were you look at these big companies. We could go to whatever big company, EXIT, Keller, whatever it is. Maybe I love being associated with 10% to 20% of the other agents that are there, and I do not necessarily love the way that the other 80% of agents are portraying their business or how they are handling themselves and things like that. Something that was attractive to me was starting a brand, a reputation from scratch and doing it, and choosing agents to join us that I felt mirrored our qualities, goals, and the impact that we want to have, not only on the industry.
Forget the industry and the community. It is like something we talked about a little bit ago. Being that resource, we already have such a great reputation in the community with all the appreciation events that we do and everything we do to give back. I want to create that same reputation within our industry. That is what my goals are with this new company and new brand.
Let’s help some agents who are in that same place you were when you decided to strike out on your own. What have been, for you, the biggest challenges?
What should have been the biggest challenges are the initial investments. That looks different for everybody. The level of uncertainty when you decide, “I am going to leave this company of 500 agents and I want to get a start on my own. I am going to take on all these extra costs, overhead, and liability. I am going to take on more employees that I am going to have to pay. I have to pay for errors, admission, and rent now.” You mentioned our office. We built out this amazing office that was out of my pocket.
It is a lot of risks but what you have to be comfortable with, and I have said this a million times before, is the best investment that you make is the investment you make in yourself because you create the outcome. Even though it was scarier than hell doing all this, I also know that no one is going to put in the time and effort that I am going to to make sure that those goals and vision comes to fruition.
If you are going to gamble, gamble on yourself. We were talking about that before. That is fantastic. Let’s chat about the market for a little bit. Obviously, I do not have to ask what the market looks like in the last few years. Everybody was blown away by June of 2020. Everyone was like, “This is the last thing I expected.” You have gone through this incredible run like everyone else has. Even though short-term, like next fall or Q4, Q1 in 2021, because that is traditionally the slow time, beginning of the year, which it was not here this 2022. What do you think about that? I know you have to think that way.
I have a few different opinions in regard to that. First, we are always taught to read the forecast, the statistics, the history, what is going on, what the experts are saying, and things like that. In our market, in particular, I am not putting a lot of weight on it. Here is the reason. Number one, all of these forecasts and what experts are saying and things like that, they have not been through a pandemic before.
They do not know what is going on. They can go back as many years as they want. People keep throwing around the words bubble and recession. That is not happening. Even if it does, we do not have a history on this. We are the first of this occurrence to happen. Number two, lucky for us, you and I are in Florida and DeSantis has kept us open.
Everyone has been flocking here from all over the country. On some level, this demand is not going anywhere anytime soon. With the interest rates up, perhaps the purchasing power of these people who were joining us in our amazing State of Florida may be their purchase price be down. Thanks to interest rates going up.
Everyone’s circumstances have changed. We have everyone coming to Florida. So much of my business, which myself and everyone at our firm, is all organic word of mouth type business. Historically, I have always usually been a local-to-local move. Even a lot of those personal circumstances have changed because these families are already here, but mom and dad, who were working in Downtown Jacksonville both work from home now.
Their son, little Timmy, does not go to school anymore. They are virtual. Their little three-bedroom, two-bath house now needs five bedrooms and an office. Not only everyone who is migrating here, but also the local-to-local circumstances are changing as well. Going back to the statistics, some of my colleagues and I were talking about what we have seen going on in the past few weeks.
[bctt tweet="The best investment you make is your investment in yourself because you create the outcome." username="billrisser"]
Stats through our association, MLS, and even some stats at Florida Realtors has not been released yet for April 2022. What we are seeing is a slowdown in borrower and mortgage applications. We are seeing what is now longer than usual properties staying on the market, even stuff that is priced appropriately with the closed calculations because that is how we are pricing properties. At the end of the day, a worst-case scenario in this market is a buyer who needs a sufficient appraisal.
Even properly listing these properties, we could see one that only gets one offer and then a comparable property that hits the market the following week that we think is priced way too high all of a sudden gets multiple offers interest. What is going on right now is that, with regards to the active residential listings on our MLS, we are up 40%.
We had approximately 1,900 active listings in the Jacksonville area MLS. Before you and I got off, we were at approximately 2,600, which is approximately 40%. To paint a picture for you, a balanced market in our MLS is approximately 10,000 active residential listings. We are still ungodly low during this crazy inventory shortage, but historically what we have seen in the past with how low the inventory has been, we are starting to see listings creep up.
Is it a good thing?
That might be a whole other episode. Let’s get back to 3 or 4 months of inventory. I hate to sound bad, but when I got my license, there were approximately 5,000 realtors in NFAR, Northeast Florida Association of Realtors. Now, we are around approximately 11,000. Needless to say, a lot of these agents, on the other side, are not necessarily a joy to work with. Maybe this inventory growth will get us back to some colleagues that are more serious about our profession and more of a joy to work with. A lot of different takes and impacts that this growth of inventory I feel on hope is going to have.
You mentioned the interest rates. They are going to go up and Inflation is an issue. The Feds are going to do what they can to try to do what they can. I heard a couple of lenders talk...
39 min

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Interviews with real estate industry leaders, hosted by 25-year industry veteran, Bill Risser. The Real Estate Sessions was selected as the 2019 Inman Innovator Award Winner for Video/Podcast Show.

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