The Real Estate Sessions

 

Do you want a steady stream of repeat and referral business? Bill Risser introduces Barb Betts, the Owner and CEO of The RECollective. Barb shares how building a real estate business through relationships is her primary focus. Even until now, she still receives referrals from the internet leads she met 20 years ago. That is why real estate agents should want to build the majority of the business by referrals. She shares some of the best ways to do that—from personalized postcards to social media. If you want more tips on how to build a relationship-based real estate business, tune in!

Barb Betts - Owner/Broker - The RECollective

Thank you so much for having me, Bill. I'm excited to be here.

I am in the Long Beach area which is situated halfway between LAX and Disneyland.

I was born, raised and brokered in Long Beach, California.

He was drafted out of Long Beach Wilson High School by the Tampa Bay Rays. He spent many years in the organization. He had some significant injuries that have been challenging, and you throw in COVID in the middle of that. He played Double-A in 2020 for them and was a free agent at the end of the season. There's this little thing called the baseball lockout going on now. It's been a little challenging this off-season.

He signed the contracts with the Los Angeles Dodgers. We have moved into the Dodgers Organization now at the Minor League level. The fun fact is all my friends are thinking they are going to see him at the Chavez Ravine in April 2022 and that's not quite the case. I'm super excited for him to continue his journey and play baseball at such a high level.

[bctt tweet="You can balance being a mom and having a successful career in real estate. " via="no"]

He's a left-handed hitting catcher which is unique to the catching position. He is naturally born left-handed. He eats, drinks, sleeps and golfs left-handed. My husband is challenged in the height department. When my husband saw him picking up Cheerios with his left hand, mom wanted to get him a glove for his right hand. Dad said, "I'm not going to have a 5'10” left-handed player that can't do anything." It's a true story. My husband bought him a glove for his left hand and threw balls at him in our living room at a very young age. Chris can throw a baseball harder than I've ever seen anyone throw a baseball right-handed. He hits balls 400 feet left-handed.

Not so long ago, we were Angel fans, but we did own a Dodger hat, which is a good thing. I never thought I'd say I bleed blue being a SoCal girl and mostly raised in the Orange County side of town. We are Dodger fans overnight. We've made a lot of our friends very happy because we have a lot of Dodger fan friends.

I'm the typical realtor that had a bad experience buying a home. Many realtors can relate to this where I thought, “If they could do that poor of a job and make that kind of money, I could do better.” I was in accounting. I was a glorified bookkeeper/CFO, but I was not a CFO. I was a bookkeeper but I was good at it. I love spreadsheets but I hate debits and credits and that kind of stuff. I also was a young mom. We just had our son and our daughter was on the way.

I worked for a very challenging boss who was female. She told me one day when my child was very ill that I needed a nanny for situations like this because I'm a working woman. I thought, "No." I decided, "What can I do where I can have a balance of being a mom and having a successful career?" Since I had a child so young, we were eighteen when we had our son, I didn't go to college. I didn't have anything to fall back on. I wanted something I could own and say I'm an expert in. I wanted something that included a license or certificate that didn't require me to go back to four years of college. You combine the bad experience of buying a home with me wanting that, and every one lands in real estate. That was the easy answer.

People are going through high school in career class, doing the course and then researching why they should go into real estate.

What I found there was the manager. I will never forget when I went to the career night that we used to have back in the days of real estate. It was pouring rain that night. I still went and no one else showed up. We were in a training room and he said, "Let's go to the conference room and sit down." I figured he had canceled.

[caption id="attachment_4159" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The RECollective: Learning the short sale market was the best thing we did, and we didn't shy away from that.[/caption]

 

One person there is worth his time. I'll never forget him, Richard Dewitt. He has since passed but he sat down and educated me. He gave me hope and told me I could do it. I know more now if you could fog a mirror and you have a real estate license, you probably can land in a brokerage somewhere. He made me feel special and heard. To that point, they had great new agent training and a mentor program. They had all the things I needed going into the career that I knew nothing about more than just my personal transaction. Education and support are what attracted me to Prudential.

This is really going back. Realtors who are reading who think that internet leads started with The Portal. Let's call them that to keep names out of it, it didn't start like that. It started with Yahoo.com. It was the first site to generate buyer and seller leads online. They partnered with Prudential only. It was called The Portal. Each office in our Prudential system had an assigned agent that was the Portal agent. I was the only agent that was willing to take it on because all the other senior agents were like, "That's never going to turn into anything. The internet is never going to sell a house. No one is going to go online and look for an agent." We know where we are now.

I tell people that before I got my acting gear and figured out how to do business that sustained my family and me, and allowed me to balance, I did stay up until 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning answering internet leads. I was working 37 days straight with no break. There were a lot of agents who said it would never work. This is why this whole NFT world and everything else that we're in, I don't understand it yet, but I never say never.

It's the combination of learning to work the internet leads and what I became passionate about, which I continued through my career. It’s the power of doing business by relationship. Learning those internet leads have the potential to turn into relationships. Although they were frustrating and irritating, some of them were very challenging. Sometimes they are non-responsive and sometimes they ghost you on appointments. The good ones turned into relationships that I still have now.

When they give me referrals and have conversations, or they come to one of our parties, it cracks me up to think we met online years ago before internet leads were even a thing. We then fast forward to what my good friend Glenn calls the great inconvenience of real estate. We all know what happened in '06 and '07. I thought, “I've got to not ignore this REO world that is going on.” Relationships got me an REO account. A good friend in Arizona who was an REO machine handed us a binder of all the REO contact she had and said, "Go build some relationships." That's how we got our first REO account, which led to more REO accounts.

We were not getting 50 to 60 new homes a day like some brokerages were, but I'll equate it to this last refinance boom. In that period, I didn't stop working on my relationships because a lot of real estate brokers did. They focused on their banks and left all their other people behind. When the REO world stopped, they came up for air and their clients had moved on to other agents. The REOs, in my husband's words, were the icing on the cake at the time. It was nice to have a guaranteed 5 or 6 deals a month coming in, but we never forgot our relationships. We got through that and it has been crazy ever since.

Learning the short sale market was the best thing that we did. We didn't shy away from that. Those were the hardest days of my career. This market is hard now. Don't get me wrong. The speed and the exhaustion of the market now are so hard. However, when you have to go into someone who you just celebrated with a few years ago, pop champagne with, give them their keys to their first home, and now you're having to go in and have an adult conversation about how to break up with their home and divorce their mortgage. That was very hard because these are the people you love. With REOs, they are gone. You have no relationship with them. Short sales were a lot more challenging.

[bctt tweet="Educate others and give them hope that they can make it. " via="no"]c

By then, my husband had joined me. We have a small little team. In Prudential, there were some leadership changes at the time. It was an aging brokerage. It didn't have the technology and the forward-thinking. No one was sitting around talking about ideas and what was coming next. It felt like a change was appropriate. I was a founding member at the Keller Williams that I went to. That was exciting because we got to build something from the ground up and have some influence being on the ALC. We moved and grew our team there. It was a great experience and we're super glad we did it.

I got my broker's license in 2016. It’s not because I ever thought of opening my own brokerage. It’s because I felt like it was the next step. It was like getting a Master's in real estate. I already had the Bachelor's. I was very successful and I thought, "I want to have that higher level of knowledge." The other reason I did it was I remember leaving Prudential and feeling suffocated that I had to find somewhere else. I thought to myself that if that ever happens again, I don't want to be forced into finding something else.

That was my backup plan. I can always be on my own if I ever need to leave or if this company closes its doors. A culture shift happened. My team was unhappy and we were unhappy so we thought, "This is the time." Having the confidence to do it is a big deal. It's not easy opening your own brokerage, but we had the team and my husband's support. We did it and never looked back since. It’s been a few years now and it's the single best decision that we ever made.

Relately is the marketing company. The real estate company is The RECollective.

I'm a relationship junkie. I've been, seen and built our business by relationship. I understand intrinsically the power of building a business by relationship, and it's not just by referral. I don't like the word referral. If you know me well, I use the word referral internally with people like you. When I talk to my clients, I don't say the word referral. I use the words introduce and connect me. They are us.

Referrals are whatever agents should want to build their business by and have the majority of their business be that way. What I found is as I teach agents how I do what I do and how I've built my systems. One of my key factors in building our business is consistent communication. You have to consistently show up in front of your clients or they will forget you.

[caption id="attachment_4160" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The RECollective: You need to be on social media and learn how to do it relationally.[/caption]

 

You don't always have the time to talk to every single person in your database. I believe in the power of mailing to your database. It's not the large geographic neighborhoods. I'm talking about a list of relationships. We started creating big, large postcards that we mail to our database. We create the content every month and do a combination of personal and professional like, "I love you," versus, "This is what's going on in real estate." Agents started asking me for them and they were like, "I don't have the time to create them. Can you create them? Can I have your templates?" My staff and I sat down and I thought, "I want to help the industry but I'm not just going to give it away. We worked hard on all of that."

We decided to launch a marketing company that helps realtors market relationally to their database. We prepare a custom postcard. What I mean by custom is they all look the same. I'm not creating one for every different realtor, but on the back of the postcard, we work on a custom template for you with your photo and information.

We've got our mail house and they send it all out for you. You don't even have to think about it. It includes birthdays, anniversaries, and all the love cards or notes that I send everybody, and social media content. It's a marketing tool for realtors that want to work relationally and don't know how to get the message out there, and don't have a team or a staff to do it for them. That's how it was birthed and it's been super successful. We're happy with it.

I don't care. They can put whoever they want in their database. That's why I'm launching the academy, to teach them how to do it the right way. What we don't do is we don't let you nitpick the content. You got to trust us that this works and we're doing this the right way. You're getting the content that I used in the last years and I know it works.

Everyone says that. My husband and I still sell real estate. I still work a lot of days and we are active owners. He's a realtor and I'm an active broker. I couldn't do what I do without my husband. I got to give him major props in this. He has transitioned to take over a lot of our day-to-day sales activities. I still do a lot of rainmaking. I still do a ton of lead generation and go on certain appointments, but he's at the appraisals, inspections and...

Sara Sutachan - Senior Vice President Of Member Information, California Association Of REALTORS®

I'm going to be talking to Sara Sutachan, Senior Vice President of Member Information for the California Association of REALTORS. One of the largest associations in the country. We both grew up in Southern California. I have a few questions about that and then a lot of questions about what's happening at CAR? What are some of the changes she's seen? What are some of the things she sees moving forward? It's going to be a very fun conversation and let's get the thing started. Sara, welcome to the show.

Hi, everyone.

It was crazy.

I'm in Florida. We've been doing whatever we want for like a year. I did some research and I see that you've been with the California Association of REALTORS for many years. You went to school in California and I'm going to assume you're a California native. How did I?

You did research.

In Los Angeles and if any of your readers are old enough to know about the movie, Valley Girl, that was me. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, which is a suburb of Los Angeles.

I grew up at the Galleria.

All of my cousins in the Midwest, on my mom's side, were like, "Talk like a Valley girl." I was like, "I don't know how to do that. That's normal me."

[caption id="attachment_4169" align="aligncenter" width="600"] California Association Of Realtors: Real estate associations are unique because the board is so large, which allows for a lot of power in policy initiatives.[/caption]

 

It's funny you ask. I remember vividly I graduated high school in 1993, but that earthquake was in '94. I was still living at home and I had younger siblings. I remember trying to run in the house while it was moving and I swear to God, I felt like I was not moving anywhere. The floor was going under. It disappeared. I was running it and not moving. It was weird.

I went to take care of my younger siblings and I stuffed them under the bed. I did everything you shouldn't do in an earthquake. I got them secured. I wasn't smart about it, but we didn't stand under a doorway. Growing up, we used to have these earthquake drills where you would go under your desk and hold on, so I didn't do that. I stuffed them under a secure bed. They were little. We had a lot of earthquake damage and there were so many people.

There was that apartment that crushed people. It was scary. The whole neighborhood got together and helped each other turn their gas off. It was a community-building experience I have to say. It was funny. My parents are divorced and we ended up staying at my dad and stepmom's house. My mom being at her ex-husband and new wife's house. It was weird, but it was a community. We were all in it together.

It's so weird. You can't even explain it unless you've been through it. My grandmother was from Florida. She was from the New England area and she retired in Florida, and then when she couldn't live by herself, she moved in with us. She couldn't stand not knowing when an earthquake was coming. She didn't stay very long in California.

In her opinion, at least you knew it was coming. That's the unknown with earthquakes.

My claim to fame now is how to change my wiper blades. When in those rare occasions that it would rain in Southern California, I would change wiper blades at AutoZone. My kids love to tease me about AutoZone. They're like, "Get in the zone, AutoZone." It was a good experience. I agree with you. It taught me about standing up for myself being strong and a lot of times, a woman working at an auto parts place gets underestimated. It set me up and it strengthened the future of my career.

You're the only one that has asked me about AutoZone in my many years in the career at CAR.

[bctt tweet="It is so important to build up the women we see as future leaders, tap them on the shoulder, and talk about them behind their backs in a positive way." username="billrisser"]

What's not in my LinkedIn and I hid this for a long time because I thought it was shameful. I worked for a commercial real estate broker for a hot minute after college and I hated it. I hated the environment. I hated the people I worked with, no disrespect. It was not the right place for me. I didn't put that on my LinkedIn. I didn't put that on my resume. I didn't even tell the people at CAR that I worked for a real commercial real estate broker because I didn't last very long. It was an embarrassment on my resume, but I will say what it did for me was taught me what I didn't want to do in the real estate side.

I did not want to be in the commercial. I very quickly met Leslie Appleton-Young. I was like, "I know what I don't want, but she's who I want to work for. I want to be like her. I want to be her. I want to know her. I want to learn from her." That's why I got started at CAR. I was very green right out of college. I was taken by this fabulous woman who was boss in her own right and getting stuffed on. That's how I got started at CAR. That was several years ago. I started as an entry-level researcher. I was a data nerd. I call myself a recovering economist.

I did. For many years, I was a research economist for the trade association. I am rooted in the data. It is what every single one of my initiatives is based on. It's looking at the data and spotting an opportunity in that data. That sounds geeky, but you can't argue with statistics. WomanUP is one example of that. When we look at the percentage of women in this industry, it's the majority by far 67% to 70% of realtors are women across the country, but when you look at the brokerage firms, the CEOs, the broker-owners, or principals, it was mainly men. Based on the data, we were able to create this initiative to help women take that next step in their careers. That is how I base everything. It's all rooted in data and facts.

I went the safer route in the industry and I have to give a huge shoutout to realtors who are pushing pavement every day and doing the work. I was so scared to go into that side of it and didn't like the commercial side. I didn't know if I wanted to sell and live on commission, so I took the safer route with the data.

We're very unique. Real estate associations are unique because our board is so large, but that also gives us such power in our policy initiatives. We have 800 people on our board of directors in California and that is profound. We are the largest business group in Sacramento. They call us the realtors and that gives us a lot of political goodwill and power.

We stay super focused on real estate. We stay in our lane when it comes to our legislative priorities and what that means for realtors. That does give you a lot of political goodwill and clout, but in terms of our board of directors, it's not like a for-profit company where you have twelve people on the board, a CEO, and a chairman. It's a little bit different dynamic, but it is a team.

We have a leadership team that's elected and then we have our CEO and our executive staff. We have five department heads and I'm one of them. It's a very close-knit relationship. We have a new CEO that came onboard in 2021. Joel Singer, who was our CEO for 30 plus years retired, a mentor and friend. He gave me a call. It was so nice to talk to him.

[caption id="attachment_4170" align="aligncenter" width="600"] California Association Of Realtors: Having a lot of voices is a great thing when you're looking at big, broad issues that impact the real estate industry.[/caption]

 

It is a different dynamic. It taught me the importance of collaboration and teamwork being in that environment for so long. We have a lot of voices and that's a great thing when you're looking at big broad issues that impact realtors, the real estate industry, and homeownership in communities across, I would say, California, but across the country.

As a trade association for realtors, that is our mission. We stay focused on that mission. We do have a consumer ad campaign to bring to light what a realtor does for consumers, but we are not confused as to who we serve. We serve realtors. Our mission is to make sure that the realtors make money, that's their bottom line, that is our whole mission, but also preserving private property rights through collective action, and that is our action in Sacramento in California.

Also, we do federal lobbying as well. We're unique in that regard because we're so big, we do have a federal lobbying arm. This colleague of mine, anytime I want to know about what's going on in federal politics, I talked to him about it because he's so well-versed. There are certain policy implications for California that happened at the federal level that are different and wouldn't happen for other states or smaller states for that matter. It's a very important piece of what we do.

CAR has 211,000 members. I think 212 is our forecast for this year. I will say Florida surpassed us by a couple of thousand realtors. I would like to encourage more Californian realtors to join us. We have 136 staff. We have 800 board members, as I mentioned. We have four leadership teams, we have our President, Otto Catrina, President-Elect Jennifer Branchini, Treasurer, Heather Ozur, and CEO, John Sebree.

That doesn't even include licensees in California. We have doubled that. We have 450,000 licensees in California because everybody wants to say they have a California Real Estate License. Who wouldn't want to have a California Real Estate License?

We have so many challenges in the state. I was talking to Bob McKinnon. He says, hi, by the way, but he said, "We're taking all of your Californians in Texas." We have our set of challenges, but people come for the weather and they stay because it's beautiful.

I lead my award-winning team of 11. It includes our research division as I mentioned, I'm a research geek. Our long-term strategic planning for the association. We educate realtors on fair housing. We have the ultimate goal of equitable access to homeownership through research data. We have a financial literacy arm.

[bctt tweet="The beautiful thing that came out from the acceleration of technology is the ability of industries to be flexible, embrace it, and use it on a day-to-day basis." username="billrisser"]

I also oversee our charitable arm, Housing Affordability Fund, which I'm so proud to announce that we created our first-ever statewide closing cost assistance grant for underserved communities. That's big. We have WomanUp. We have Latino Professionals Network. I worked directly with the CEO, the CFO, and our strategic planning committee to make sure that our budget and our strategic plan are on point, outward-facing, looking out long-term, and how that affects and will affect our members.

It's grown so vast and quickly across the industry and nation. We have to give kudos to our national partners, RateMyAgent is one. Thank you so much. Tami Bonnell is a huge proponent. We have Realogy and Engel & Völkers. We have huge real estate national and international real estate companies that are supportive and have latched onto the movement and have started their own. It's a conversation that needed to be started, had, and continued.

We started the conversation. Coming to our WomanUp, listening in to these conversations of powerful leaders that we have on our stage, that's a start. I also think advocacy for women is so important. I am a big proponent of supporting, empowering, and building women up when they're not in the room. That is the number one thing.

We can all be doing sisters, brothers, however, you want to call it, but it is so important to build up the women that we see as future leaders, to tap them on the shoulder, to talk about them behind their backs in a positive way. That's the way to do it. It's through this community, conversations that we have, the words that we use, the role models that we highlight, and the support that we give one another is so important.

Contrary to popular belief will tell you, men are welcomed. They're not shunned or shamed away. That's the whole point. Men are at the table and men can be the best advocates for women.

First of all, no, we didn't have it nailed. However, we were well-positioned given that we have such a close tie to the industry. It's such a close tie to brokers that we were able to respond right away. I started a Friday call with California brokers. We went down into lockdown on March 13th,...

 

As business owners, our number one goal is to close more deals at the end of the day. But how can you succeed in today’s saturated real estate industry? Today, Bill Risser chats with Annette Anthony about finding more efficient ways to do business. Annette is a real estate technology expert. She is also the Vice President of Technology Engagement for EXIT Realty, a firm that builds technology for brokers and agents to help them become more productive. Need some tips, tricks, and tools to help you bag the advantage in any market? Tune in.

Annette Anthony - Vice President, Technology Engagement - EXIT Realty

Thanks for having me.

I was born in Glendale, California. My father and mom raised three girls. I'm the youngest of three. My dad was an immigrant from Mexico, Alejandro Moreno Rubio is his name. Could you imagine coming to the US, he was sixteen years old with the aspirations to get his education and live the dream of an American. He was fostered with a family, got his education, went to college and graduated. It's not just going to college, but you have to also be part of extracurricular activities. You have to volunteer, a job, a certain GPA, the number of hours that you are working. It was not handed. It was a pretty awesome experience.

My dad applied for his US citizenship. As soon as he graduated college, he obtained it. He served in the military, in the Army, and married my mom. My mom then came over from Mexico. When she was nine months pregnant with me, I'm the youngest of three girls, she got her citizenship, so that is pretty special. Starting off in California and then as things got crowded, it was difficult, they were noticing to raise three girls. They wanted something a little bit quieter, so we moved to beautiful Arizona. We were in Phoenix at 16th St & McDowell, which is not a great neighborhood now, but back when, it was a safe and quiet place to raise three girls. I’m super proud of that.

My dad was a young entrepreneur. He started a business in upholstery because he was like, “What am I going to do?” He would go to a secondhand store and would buy a piece of furniture, but what he would do with it to convert it into a beautiful masterpiece. He had it in the front yard covered in plastic with a sign that said $25. Luckily, a woman, her name is Sue Jayden. I do not even think that she's around anymore, but she happened to see that chair and said, “Who did this?” My dad was like, “I did.” She was like, “I want to see more pieces, but I think you are going to be my full-time upholster.” It was a pretty cool dream.

We moved to Scottsdale and that is where I met my husband. We were high school sweethearts. I'm still married with two kids. I love Arizona.

[bctt tweet="You can't tell people to do something if you’re not already doing it yourself. And if you’re not having fun with it, they're definitely not going to do it." username="billrisser"]

Our son, Michael, has been playing ball. He has had a ball in his hand since I can remember, so he earned himself a baseball scholarship and was recruited by Briar Cliff University here in Sioux City, Iowa to come and play baseball. What do good parents do? You go follow your kid's dreams. My husband has retired from the Military and law enforcement for years.

We have the opportunity to live in Sioux City, Iowa. Who would have thought that we would be residents here? We love it. When we dropped him off, it was like, “This is pretty far for us to leave our son.” When I was on my way back to Toronto, my husband is on his way back to Arizona after we moved into the dorms. My husband sent me a picture from Zillow, a link to a property that came on the market.

He was like, “What do you think?” I'm like, “What do you mean what do I think?” He says, “What do you think about us possibly putting an offer on this house?” I said, “If you think we can do this, let's give it a shot.” The offer got accepted and here we are in Sioux City. Who knew that I would want to be a Midwest girl? I love it here.

The people are authentic and relaxed. It's very different. It's cold but we love the cold. We are still honeymooners here in this weather. We do enjoy being out here. We are here in the spring and fall months so that we can be with our son, and then we head back to Arizona in the winter and summer. Summer is pretty hot in Arizona, but when you have a pool and air conditioning, it's all good.

I was working for a small title company called Land Title. They are huge in Colorado, small in Arizona. A friend of mine said, “You would be great in title.” At the time, I was working for FireRock Country Club. I was selling golf memberships at $85,000 a pop. She said, “You would be great working for a title company.” I explored the opportunity and I loved it. I had an awesome branch manager and I learned so much from her.

My role was to build relationships with real estate agents. I did. I helped introduce those real estate agents to my branch manager. SharperAgent, the CRM tool, Land Title in Arizona, was the only reseller of SharperAgent. SharperAgent was my reason for connecting with agents because what I discovered is agents did not have CRMs. We are talking back to the early 2000s. They had no CRM.

They would carry around albums of their referrals, reviews or testimonials, “Look at my huge album. Let's browse through all these things that people say.” Times have changed. SharperAgent was what got me in the door and I would have one-on-one meetings with agents. That agent, after I helped them be successful by getting organized and start the behavior of, “This is my regular daily thing to do.”

That agent would introduce me to another agent. I would be in a small conference room, the four of us and then those groups started to expand to then I would be leading training for offices on how to stay better connected with their database. Broker owners at the time were like, “You are a value to me. I want to add you to our training schedule because you are helping our agents grow.” That is how it started with SharperAgent.

[caption id="attachment_4149" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Real Estate Technology: When you teach technology to agents, they freak out. It's important that you take your understanding and show them how to apply it in their business.[/caption]

 

I'm a problem solver. I love to have conversations. I love to listen to people. “What are you doing? How is it working?” Tami says if you could wave a magic wand, but I had different words that I would use. If you could do things a little differently, what would that look like for you? Listening to their concerns gave me an opportunity to find what other people are being successful and what is it that they are doing that I can help you adapt those behaviors? I can help you stay accountable and we can work together.

You can have that hype person follow up with you to see how things are going and we can monitor your success and we will make adjustments along the way so long as we are continuing to move forward. I always have had this curiosity of how to help agents or take a look at what they are doing because we have had great conversations and how do we make it work for their business?

It depends on when that was. How I got started with EXIT was I kept my head down with SharperAgent and was exposed to a lot of different brands. SharperAgent then signed a deal with EXIT Realty by providing a white label solution. They call it EXIT Promo Shop back then. I had the opportunity to get to know the leadership at EXIT, worked with their broker-owners, regional owners, all of their agents, while at the same time, still working with a lot of other brands. SharperAgent was acquired by Market Leader. Market Leader was acquired by Trulia. Trulia was acquired by Zillow. All these different transitions and all the while, keeping your head down, continuing to learn, build relationships, trust and have fun.

The CEO, Tami Bonnell, at the time was watching, learning and seeing how I was working with her people. One day, she tapped me on the shoulder and said, “How are you?” At the time, she was a CEO of a huge international real estate company, but she took a special interest in me because she saw what I was doing for her people and had said, “How are you doing in it?” I was honest. I said, “I'm doing great. I love what I do. Thank goodness I'm adaptable. I love learning. I'm helping agents. I'm expanding my knowledge. I can help agents grow.” She said, “What if you could do what you love to do, but do it with EXIT?”

It was at that moment that I knew this was possibly where my last business card will be made. This is the last company that I will ever work for it because I'm home. As big of a company as it is, you always feel like you are valuable. People notice even the smallest of things and they always make, at least for me, feel like I can do more because they do so much for me.

She knows my family intimately. She knows my husband and my kids by name. She knows what is going on in their lives because she takes a very special interest in me. I'm not the only one of the executives who feel this way. It's our regional owners, agents, admins in the offices and the staff, but it's also the industry. There are so many people who come up to me and say, “I love Tami. You are so fortunate that she is with your company.” They tell me their story of how she makes them feel. Even though we have thousands of agents, she makes you feel as though you are the only one and most important person that she has on the phone with.

She always picks up on things in our conversations or things that I'm doing that I did not even get to tell her yet, but other people are sharing with her. She will write me a handwritten note or send me books with inscription messages that she has written personally to me. I try to do my best to emulate that. I have a lot of learning to do.

When you did the show with Bob and Muleshoe, Texas came up and you had a good time about that. I'm thinking, “I wonder if Muleshoe high school has memorabilia.” They do. I found the coffee cup. Those are the things that Tami has instilled in me so that I can be the best version of myself. I can catch people doing something extraordinary when they least expect that somebody is watching.

[bctt tweet="Consumers want two things – pictures and pricing. If you don't give them that, they will find someone else who will." username="billrisser"]

Websites were the next hottest thing. You need to have a website. That was probably the biggest thing. The CRM, people had a very hard time trusting that technology that you could put your contacts up in the cloud. There was a lot of resistance, but those agents, which I suppose were the twenty percenters who believe that this is where the direction of the industry is going, were the trailblazers that I was able to link arm-in-arm with. We would take other people along with us on the journey.

I love Facebook. It's truly authentic. When I feel like I want to post something special when something touches me, “I want to share this,” rather than, “It's forced.” Facebook is my go-to. I have explored so many things though. I have had so many funny conversations with my husband. He was like, “You are going to do what on snap what?” Snapchat.

Even my kids would throw up their arms and say, “Are you serious, mom?” I have older adult children. Michael is 23 versus 27. They were like, “You are getting on Snapchat?” I'm like, “I'm doing some recon. I need to understand the technology so that I can explain it to the agents and those who are interested. I can teach them how to use it.”

TikTok came about and they were like, “You are going to do what?” I have this curiosity. I never want to be the one that says, “I do not know.” I'm going to explore. I'm going to dive into it. Even Alexa Flash Briefings was a cool technology that a lot of people were very intimidated about. The biggest thing here is when you are teaching technology to agents, they freak out. It's important that you take your understanding and show them how to apply it in their business. With respect to social media, Facebook is one of my favorite.

It's not even on my radar. Twitter, I felt like I needed to post more and it felt forced. It’s my least favorite. I deleted it, which to your audience, it's okay to know that if you are not comfortable in that space, you do not need to be there. You do not have to have all the links and it’s forced. Go where you feel the most comfortable. Do not worry about missing out on something on the other platforms. When you are ready, that will appear to you, jump and dive in.

My account is private. My singing is an opportunity. If you catch me, that was a good time. I love to sing. My dad used to sing all the time. He sings not quite professionally, but in college. He was involved in plays and sang quite a bit. We even sang together on a cruise ship when we went on a family vacation. It was so fun. I love to sing karaoke and it's a good time. That opportunity was special for EXIT Southeast. Bob McKinnon, our Director of Leadership, started to learn how to play the guitar. I let Stacy, our regional owner for EXIT Southeast, I let her know, “Your event is coming up. I'm saying Bob McKinnon is learning how to play the guitar and he is pretty good.”

[caption id="attachment_4150" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Real Estate Technology: You don't have to have all the links. Go where you feel the most comfortable, and don't worry about missing out on something on the other platforms.[/caption]

 

That little bug in her ear and then Bob and I strategized and said, “We should do something.” We kept it a secret. Nobody knew. The guitar that Bob McKinnon used, it was a loaner, Carrie Underwood's lead guitar. That was his guitar. Those are some strings that were pulled. We had a good time and nobody knew what we were doing other than Stacy, Valerie and Kenny, they were the only ones who knew. Even Tami, Craig and Lori Muller, our leaders and all the agents and owners had no idea. Catching them at a surprise was special for us.

We build technology for the agents. Our number one goal is to help them close more business. If it does not work, if it's hard to use, if the agents are not adapting, we are not going to do it. We have had other tech that we have brought on and it sounded like a great idea at the time, but now that it's in the hands of the agents, it was not as big of a success. We were big enough to say, “This is not working. We are going to do something else.” They respect that we have such an insatiable appetite to continue to move forward and try to find better ways for them to do their business more effectively.

That is what we do. The most important thing too, is we make sure that we teach them how to use it. We do that in a lot of different ways. They can go online. We have lots of different webinars. We have one-on-one training. They can reach out. I'm one of the executives of the company and they call, text and instant message me and say, “Could you show me?” My answer is always, “Absolutely.” Some will even say, “I hesitated to even call because I know you are busy.” I always tell them, “I'm never busy. I'm booked. I'm scheduled,...

 

Customer relationship management is very important in real estate. Organizing your database and customers can be very tiring, which is why CRM tools are a must! And Wise Agent is a CRM tool for all realtors out there. Join Bill Risser as he talks to its COO, Eleni Sommerschield. She gives agents the information they need to build and scale their businesses. Listen to this episode to understand how to properly create relationships. Remember, you don't have to overwhelm yourself when it comes to CRM. Discover the power of Wise Agent in today's episode!

Eleni Sommerschield, COO - Wise Agent

Bill, thanks for having me.

It's a cute little town. You can't find it unless you run into it on accident.

[bctt tweet="There are a lot of women in real estate. But the higher you get in the industry, the less there is a women's presence." username="billrisser"]

If you're an avid golfer then you do know Fountain Hills because we do have some good golf courses here.

We're in the Northeast Valley and it's about 1 hour from Payson, which is where you would find snow and 1.5 hours from Flagstaff where NAU is. We could be in the snow if we feel like it but I'm coming from Chicago. I don't feel like ever being in the snow. We live here in Fountain Hills. It's a little bit higher in elevation so you can get a little bit cooler temperatures in the winter and the summer. Unfortunately, in the summer, only 1 degree cooler. Everywhere else is 112 and here it's maybe 111.

It is used to be but then it's maybe third. I haven't looked that up in a few years but when it was built in the '70s, it was the largest fountain. It was engineered by a group out of Germany who came here and built it. The cool thing about the fountain is that it goes off every top of the hour for fifteen minutes. In 2021, they added lights to it. It is always lit but there are different color lights. A couple of times a year, they changed the color of the fountain. On St. Patrick's Day, they change it to green. Veteran's Day, they changed it to red. At Christmas time, it's red and green. It's pretty cool.

[caption id="attachment_4138" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Wise Agent: When looking for CRM tools, always look at what the support and training look like because that will tell you a lot about the company.[/caption]

 

I grew up right outside of the city in a small little suburb, smaller than Fountain Hills called Lincolnwood, which is a stone's throw from the city. Chicago's a great city. It has a high population of Greeks there. My parents chose that city for its Greekness if you will.

It was great. Chicago has changed over the years. When I was growing up there, it was completely different than what it is but it's still a great city with great restaurants. There are a ton of things to do. Times are different too, though. It was still a busy city but not as busy as it is. When I was growing up, you'd cross the street and there are 15, 20 people and years ago, you were crossing the street with 150 people almost like Manhattan, New York.

I grew up in a very strict Greek household. Think of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. That was my life. My parents met through my mom's sister and her husband who knew my dad. They were living in Chicago, all three of them. My mom lived in this tiny remote village in Greece. My dad said to my uncle, his future brother-in-law, "I'd like to find a woman like your wife. Does she have a sister?" He said, "Yes. She has a sister. She doesn't have anyone here. It'd be great for her to have her sister here. You would be perfect together."

They called my mom and my grandfather and said, "We have a husband for you. Come here." My mom came to Chicago on April 30th, 1974. She met my dad and a week later, they were engaged. A month later, they got married legally because my mom had a green card and my dad didn't. They got married legally in the courthouse two years before I was born, which was crazy. I didn't find that out until I was eighteen that they had to get married legally. They never celebrated that anniversary. They ended up getting married in July 1974.

[bctt tweet="The 'R' in CRM is the most important part of customer relations: relationships." username="billrisser"]

He went from Greece to Canada. He was in Quebec in that area. He and one of his buddies that he'd known pretty much his whole life got on a bus to come to Chicago to see their friends. They came with the clothes on their back and nothing else. They didn't get checked at the border. They came in illegally, by accident on the border patrol side. They were like, "We're not going back because we don't know if we could ever come back to Chicago and life is good here." They had a lot of friends in Chicago so they ended up staying.

I grew up in a strict Greek household. I have an older brother and a younger sister. I'm the middle child. My responsibilities were the older one of the three of us because I had to make sure that if my mom needed help, I needed to be there to cook, clean and iron. I was groomed to be the good Greek girl and good Greek wife. I did a lot of that stuff. I still like doing a lot of that stuff. I still cook and entertain a lot. My dad owned a business, a liquor store on the Southside of Chicago in Bridgeport. He opened that store when I was four years old in 1980.

[caption id="attachment_4139" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Wise Agent: Real estate is a really big industry. There are a lot of subsets of groups that know each other really well from across the country.[/caption]

 

It was a family business. He needed help and he would call on my mom to come to help him, my brother and myself. He would keep my brother at the store until 11:00 PM. My brother was five years old and he had to run the beer from the cooler and help my dad stock things. He was the original staff boy. I grew up and learned to work there.

My dad passed away a few years ago. My siblings know this so it's okay. I was my dad's favorite. I was daddy's girl. At fifteen, he was grooming me to take over the family business. I love the liquor store, learning from my dad and watching him negotiate the orders. It was on the Southside of Chicago and it was a liquor store so we did pretty good. I learned how to negotiate with him. He did not take anyone's crap or BS.

I have a good gauge of who's BS-ing me from him. At fifteen years old, I was his bookkeeper. Being Greek, they like keeping things in the family. As much as things can be kept in the family, I was going to be the Greek wife that was cooking, cleaning, taking care of the business, doing what I needed to do and taking a cue from my parents.

We were two minutes away from Comiskey Park. It's not called that anymore but I'll forever know it as Comiskey Park. We lived on the Northside. Everyone in my family is North-siders, a fan of the Cubs but I had to be loyal to Bridgeport and our family business. I was always a Sox fan. I loved Ozzie Guillen and I still do. He's awesome. I thought he was a great player and he was fun to watch even as a coach. He was a hothead.

I was one of the fair-weather fans so I would root for the Cubs too. I did both.

When I was four, my dad had a dream of having my brother be in electronics and do computers. It was the early '80s and that was the hot thing back then. My dad brought home an IBM PCjr, which was the first personal computer for home use. My brother took one look at it and had zero interest. You had to learn DOS to use it. It didn't have an operating system. I struggled throughout school in reading because my dad worked late hours and my mom was at home with us and did not know the language. She still is very limited in her language abilities in English.

[bctt tweet="You need to be able to lean on somebody when you're learning something new." username="billrisser"]

I struggled with reading. For me, reading DOS commands, they were a one-word thing, I had to know how to read very little with that. I learned DOS and how to use the computer that my dad brought home to us when I was 6, 7years old. My parents’ dream was for their daughter to get married. I didn't need to go to college. That was my dad's dream, at least for me not to finish school.

My mom wanted me to go to school. She didn't have more than a sixth-grade education. She was like, "I want you to finish school and get a degree." They were like, "Become a teacher because they have school hours and then they're off for the summer." I didn't like kids. I'm like, "That's a terrible idea for me." I was always good with electronics and things of that nature. Anything that would break around the house, I knew how to fix it. Inherently, I knew how to do things like that.

I wanted to drop out of college and my mom refused to let me do that. I wanted to go to culinary school because I learned how to cook and do whatever and that was a big passion of mine. They said, "No," and so I listened. I said, "Fine. I'll stay in school but I don't know what I want to do." My mom said, "Why don't you get a degree in Computer Science? You like computers. You're good at that." I said, "I don't know. Isn't that for boys? That's not for me." She gave me the courage to apply for the school of Computer Science at DePaul and they accepted me. I then went and got my degree.

Besides the liquor store, which is a huge jump from technology, after that, I worked at a company that did more networking. That's where I met my husband. I worked in the tech support department there and did a lot of networking, telephony and technology support.

Yes.

Like every major life decision, you need to flip a coin and decide where you're going to live and settle down in life. That's what my husband and I did. We decided on a freezing bitter cold day in Chicago. We both wanted to leave the city because the weather was cold there. I wanted to move to Florida because that's where a lot of Greek people lived and I felt like that would be part of my community. His parents had been snowbirds in Arizona in Fountain Hills.

He told me, "Let's go to Arizona." I was like, "Who's going to Arizona? How hot is it there? It's like you're living in the sun. I don't know about this." We flipped the coin. He duped me in saying, "Heads, I win, tails, you lose." We ended up here in Fountain Hills for a long weekend and we both fell in love with it. We came in July so it was blistering hot but we were out here for a long weekend and we ended up buying the place. We were like, "Let's buy something." We bought it in Fountain Hills.

Fountain Hills is a small town. The population here is 25,000 people. Even though I grew up in Lincolnwood, which has a population of 13,000 people, I was so close to the city. I was a city girl and slept in the suburbs. Living in Fountain Hills, we're so secluded and isolated from the rest of the valley that everybody here knows everybody.

If you try to go out to the store or go anywhere like, "I'm going to go out without makeup. Hopefully, I don't run into anyone," you're for sure going to run into somebody because it's that small. My kids are the same ages as Brandon and Mike's kids. Through mutual friends and kids, that's how I met Brandon and Mike.

I'm one of those people that I know what I want and that's not how I was early in my life. I very much did whatever my parents told me to do but I quickly grew out of that in my early twenties. My youngest was three years old and I told Brandon and Mike, "This is what I want. My family needs to come first. I'll work twelve hours a week. I need to be home with my family and raise my kids." Here we are years later and I work twelve hours a day. It went from me running and managing the development team, the appropriate projects are being done at the appropriate times. I got a lot of things more organized and streamlined.

[caption id="attachment_4140" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Wise Agent: When you're having a conversation with a realtor, you have to know how you met them, their interests, and their hobbies. It has nothing to do with real estate but everything to do with relationships.[/caption]

 

As far as work is concerned, yes but my dad also did commercial and residential real estate investment. I helped in that. I was the one that got my dad into residential real estate. He was always on the commercial side of things and had some storefronts besides his liquor store. He had other stores and buildings. My dad wanted to buy another building and I was seventeen years old at the time. I said, "How many more offices are being built and started? How many more businesses are opening up? Everyone needs a home to live in. Why don't we buy a house or a townhouse and rent that out?" That's how he started doing residential real estate investment.

What I was shocked is there wasn't much technology that real estate agents were using. When I started years ago, it was a different environment and scene in the real estate industry. I was very much shocked because a lot of the realtors I knew were all females. I thought, "This is a very women-driven industry." I was shocked to find out that the higher you got in the real estate industry, the less of there was a women's presence.

It's a big industry. There are a lot of realtors around the country but there is a subset of that group that knows each other well from across the country. That was one of the things that I found was unique and different and what I loved about that. Even though you're an agent in California, your best friend is also an agent and they live maybe in Florida or somewhere else in the country.

That's a big one. That is probably the number one thing. Even bigger would be, "I have all these people on my phone." They'll go to their phone and see,...

 

What if there’s a singular solution that automates the day-to-day activities for agents, brokers, and teams? That’s what Elm Street Technology can do for you. Bill Risser welcomes Bondilyn Jolly, the VP of Marketing at Elm Street Technology. Bondilyn talks with Bill about how Elm Street is hyper-focused on being the leader that demonstrates how to run a tech company the right way. Elm Street helps real estate organizations define who they are. When they know what they want to do, how they want to do it, and for whom, they’re better able to position themselves in the market. Listen to this episode to learn more!

Bondilyn Jolly, CMO - Elm Street Technology

Thank you for having me, Bill.

I'm hoping that that's not changing in Q1. We're off to a rocky start for sure.

I'm from Binghamton, New York. I grew up close to the Pennsylvania border. My family used to spend a lot of time up on the St. Lawrence River, which is where the US and the Canadian borders meet. I used to spend all of my summers up there.

It isn't. It's most well-known for the University of Binghamton, IBM in Endicott was there, which is where my dad worked and that's why we were there. I grew up in a rural community where the road I lived on turned into a dirt road as you got a little past my house. I grew up playing out in the woods and making mud pies, climbing trees and skinning knees. That was my childhood. I did my undergrad in Ithaca, but I was very much inclined to head South and get away from that cold weather as soon as I could. I always say, "I may not have been born in the South, but I moved there."

[bctt tweet="Streamline and automate your daily activities as much as possible. " username="billrisser"]

About an hour and a half outside of Binghamton. It's a stunning area. Cornell University is there as well. Ithaca houses fantastic universities that sit on opposite hills from each other.

They could come up for all of my performances. I was a Music Major, studying Music Education and Performance. It was nice because if I had a concert or something like that, my parents would drive up to attend it. I could always go home on a weekend if I wanted to, but I had that sense of independence living in Ithaca as well. I did my undergrad in Music. A lot of people will ask me, "How did you go from music into running a software company?" It's interesting because whatever it is that side of the brain, that whole creative processes side lends itself to that business development side for me, they run in parallel.

I spent years as a classically trained pianist, but I majored in Percussion when I went to college. I was an orchestral percussionist. I specialized in the marimba, a large keyboard percussion instrument, and I studied at Ithaca with a gentleman named Gordon Stout, one of the premier marimbas in the world. I had the pleasure to spend four years studying with him. I was invited after that to do some Master's work in Austria and study Conducting. I had gotten heavily in the Conducting. Instead of studying Conducting, I chose to marry this cute guy named Ethan Jolly and to this day, I don't regret that choice.

I have a beautiful music room in my house. I passed down the love of music to my daughter, who is a musical theater freak and a beautiful vocalist. She plays some piano and we have guitars and percussive instruments. You can come in and take over our music room any time, any of our guests.

[caption id="attachment_4126" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Elm Street Technology: The creative side of the brain lends itself to the business development side.[/caption]

 

My first job was as a music teacher. Ethan and I got married right out of college. We settled in the Cleveland, Ohio, area. I was an elementary school music teacher. It was a lot of fun, but after about a year and a half of doing that, my husband was transferred with his work to the New Orleans area. I ended up leaving in the middle of the school year and moving to New Orleans. At that time, I was like, "I can't necessarily go to a teaching job." I was doing substitute teaching.

I started doing some sales and marketing consulting for a large athletic club down in the New Orleans area. This is back in the late-1990s. I developed their very first website for them. They were having some retention issues, trouble communicating with their membership because they had to rely on the membership to come into the club back then to find out what was going on. The internet was popping into existence. I taught myself HTML and built their very first website as a means to disseminate information to the public. Within six months of doing that, I had so much business in the New Orleans area that I started my company out of a spare bedroom in my house. The rest is history.

It's funny because I did not know HTML myself. I was strong in sales and marketing. It was a natural avenue for me. At the point that I started to need a developer, I hired this young guy. He was in college at Tulane in New Orleans. I hired him as a part-timer and he ended up becoming my CTO and to this day, he is my lead engineer at Elm Street, years later. He's one of my work husbands, as you say.

My company was called New Millennium Designs and then it became NMD Inc, and eMerge was a software product that we developed, an email marketing automation platform. We developed that, but then we very quickly became known as eMerge, so we would do business as eMerge. By the time I sold out the company, it was that eMerge platform was what was being acquired was that piece of technology.

[bctt tweet="Stay open to ideas and allow things to evolve organically. " username="billrisser"]

It wasn't. We worked in law enforcement. We had an account that was a large government contractor. They will call watch systems to this day. We developed a software platform for them called the Offender Watch, which is the largest and most comprehensive sex offender management system in the United States. I had that software contract with them, but what happened was a lot of these law enforcement agencies across the United States were either federally or locally mandated to disseminate sex offender information to their constituency.

We built the system. It was an email and a direct mail system that would automatically pull sex offender records. If there was a relocation or a new record, it would automatically run appropriate geo searches on that regional area and send out email and direct mail notifications to the constituency. That was the base system that we built. What happened is a lot of these law enforcement agencies were coming to us and saying, "We want to send communication that isn't connected into this giant software solution. We want to send general communication."

We were referring people out to these SMBs, like the constant contacts. MailChimp was coming on the scene, yet these law enforcement agencies had some very specific criteria into which they had to communicate. These off-the-shelf solutions like the constant contact and MailChimp were not able to service those needs.

We ended up pulling that communication automation component of what we developed in this giant software and we pulled it out and packaged it separately as eMerge. We were able to customize and the experiences and the communication workflows based on the needs of our government clients. That's how it started and then we got stuck into real estate.

In New Orleans, there was a large Keller Williams office. We had quite a few of their agents who came to us and started using the platform. That's when we started developing some content specific to the real estate space. It was an opportunity to do some testing inside of RE/MAX. We initially worked with RE/MAX's North American franchise team. We came in and did a case study with them. It blew up for us and it was strong. I credit the RE/MAX organization as the group that introduced and pulled me into the real estate space. That's where we started defining who we were inside of the space.

I entered the space doing franchise initiatives and business growth strategies, working with companies, and to this day, I still do a lot of consulting on that level, business growth, M&A, franchise development, recruitment and retention. We build and develop a lot of campaign strategies on our platform around that.

[caption id="attachment_4127" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Elm Street Technology: The OffenderWatch is the largest and most comprehensive sex offender management system in the United States.[/caption]

 

We made one of those early mistakes that a lot of startup companies do, where for a bit, we were trying to be a little bit of everything to everyone. We were thinking we were going to compete aggressively in the SMB space. We were doing a lot of work in travel and tourism. We came into the real estate sector and so for a while, we kept thinking, "We're going to have a division. That's going to focus inside of each one of these business verticals." It became a little overwhelming.

We analyzed and said, "Where are our key opportunities? Where are the bulk of our clients live?" Real estate was that obvious choice for us. We ended up focusing aggressively there. We do a lot of work in ancillary type models, mortgage, lending, insurance, etc. We've used real estate as that foundation from where we started and then we've branched out from there.

It's been several years since we've been focused on the real estate space.

When we came out, we said, "We're going to be this the best of the best of email marketing automation." That's where our core focus was and then social media hit the conversation. It was very quickly that people were saying to us, "I've created this amazing email, but I want to share that content on Facebook. I wanted to go to LinkedIn."

Facebook was the first integration that we did as soon as they opened up their APIs. We came in and integrated with them. Very quickly, we integrated with Twitter and LinkedIn. We tried to expand all of that. It's important to allow people to consolidate and streamline their communication. For us, it was like if I'm creating a thoughtful and meaningful email piece, I want to be able to say, "I want it to look like this when it goes to LinkedIn. I want this to go to LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram. They might even want it to go out to Pinterest,” whatever that case is.

Being able to shape that story inside of one interface, syndicate and distribute that, and then analyze the outcome. That was big for us because a lot of our clients that we're working with would create an email with us, and then they'd have to go into Facebook and reiterate, and then LinkedIn, etc. We were looking at this problem or this challenge presented and how we could bring in technology that would help streamline and automate those daily activities for people. That's what eMerge became.

[bctt tweet="Define who you are and how best you can position yourself where you are. " username="billrisser"]

Elm Street was pretty new on the scene. They came out around 2015, 2016, they were founded. They were trying to solve a fundamental problem in the space. We have this problem with tech fatigue. Brokers are using anywhere from 15 to 20 technology products to manage their day-to-day. Agents are using 10 to 12 technology products. It can be very overwhelming and none of these technology products necessarily speak to each other.

That example I shared with eMerge where we were creating an email here, you were going to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter over here. Elm Street was a company that said, "We want to build a singular solution that runs on a singular data stack that will automate every step of the day-to-day for agents, brokers and teams.”

They were somebody who was on my radar. I'd been introduced to the CEO, Prem Luthra, by a mutual friend. At the time we started talking to them, we weren't interested in an acquisition. We weren't looking to be acquired, but we were searching out CRM solutions for integration opportunities with eMerge. I started having conversations with Prem in early-2018 and he ended up hiring me in a consulting role to come in and do some marketing work with the organization at the time. The more we got to know each other, the more we talked, the more I understood what the Elm Street vision was. It made more sense for us to come together and align.

To this day, the eMerge platform serves as the marketing automation arm of the Elevate platform, which is the primary tech stack for the CRM solution of Elm Street. It was synergistic for us and as a business leader, you always have to stay open to ideas and opportunities and allow things to evolve organically. That was a few years ago that we made that choice to merge with Elm Street and I haven't looked back for one second.

Mergers and acquisitions, M&A activity, can be very nerve-wracking for people. From me and Prem's standpoint, we were exploring how we can create a win-win scenario. "What is this look like for us mutually?" We were able to come pretty easily to terms that were equitable on both sides of the table. We were the fifth acquisition of Elm Street. We completed our twelfth acquisition on New Year's Eve 2021. We're a company that's growing rapidly. We're focused on bringing that best-in-class technology to fill out this very comprehensive product suite.

I've had a lot of conversations with companies coming into us, looking at us and sharing my story. If you come into it with that win-win strategy from both sides of the table, it's going to be okay, but you need to do it for all the right reasons. There are a lot of people that do it for the paycheck. They exit and they leave their staff high and dry. I was able to bring in my entire team and to this day, everybody that came into that acquisition with me is still there and has meaningful roles within the organization, and that's important.

[caption id="attachment_4128" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Elm Street Technology: You can't manage what you can't measure.[/caption]

 

I did. We had companies that had approached us. At the time I had these conversations,...

 

Journalism has evolved through time. Covering a myriad of topics from news, to entertainment, to real estate technology, journalists have surely become versatile throughout the years. Craig Rowe, a real estate technology reporter for Inman News, joins Bill Risser to talk about his role and the knowledge he is able to impart on the team. Craig recalls how his love for writing and his interest in real estate served a great purpose in his position at Inman. Listen in as Craig walks us through his summers as a kid, to how he got involved in real estate and settling in as one of Inman’s greatest assets.

Craig Rowe, Real Estate Technology Reporter, Inman News

It’s great to be here, Bill. Thanks for having me.

You’re not too far off. It is South of Rochester.

I loved growing up in a small town, and I am now full circle right back in a similar location here in Northern California. Caledonia was neat. It was a small town. I had a lot of close friends. I have three older brothers. In all our lawns, we had all these families in the neighborhood. All the backyards met, and every family down the street had six kids, and the back of us also had 5 or 6. There was this amalgamation of families and all these kids of different age groups all the time interacting. It was very Americana for the most part in this little town. We spent all-time outdoors.

We are very much free range. You could open the door at 8:00 AM, and I’ll come back at 8:00 PM. That was pretty much it. In those hours, I could be anywhere in the local trout stream fishing, and at some point during the day, you throw the pole back in the garage without your parents even knowing, and you take off again. I could be riding my BMX bike for two hours, and in the afternoon, we’re playing football, Wiffle ball, baseball, or something. That was it every day throughout the Summer until Winter stopped us from being able to do that stuff.

[bctt tweet="The journalistic integrity of the company you work for matters." username="billrisser"]

In high school, I played primarily forward and halfback because I was fast. I was not your foot skill guy and beating a lot of people with the ball. I was fast and aggressive, getting open and running down the opposite player’s best guy. Thankfully, my college coach recognized that. The position I grew into in college was someone would call a marking back where my sole job was to follow around the other team’s best player the entire game. I made an art of it. I would follow him to his bench, and when he stepped off the field, I would go back to my field. I would try and get into their heads. I had an aggression issue. That would often come out on the field. I led the team in yellow cards in my senior year and got a couple of notable ones in college. Ultimately, I always relied on being fast and my speed for the most part.

That is what helped me excel. I was not the best athlete on the field, but I was aggressive and played hard all the time, and that led to that. Caledonia was a football town. It had one of the better football programs for many years in the state of New York overall. They were always good. All the good athletes played football. I played soccer with a few of the other misfits and ended up at Nazareth, which was a big lacrosse school and remained a very prominent lacrosse school in the country in Division 3. From what I understand in lacrosse, there is not a big difference between D3 and D1. There’s a fine line.

I ended up playing soccer at a lacrosse school. We didn’t have the best record, but it was still a lot of fun. I enjoyed it very much. I was an English Major, but I started as an Art Major. I was always creative. I grew up drawing. It was the same thing. I was very inspired by comic books when I was a kid. I was drawing and writing all the time.

I got no plan. I talk about this often. I remember being at my girlfriend’s apartment. That night, I graduated from college, and I said, “Now what?” This goes right to my personality. I’m not necessarily a planner. I’m not career-driven. I’m much more lifestyle-driven, and that surfaced right when I got to school. All my friends were headed off to grad school.

I have some regrets about that. I probably should have gone after an MFA in Screenwriting or something, which is a big love of mine, or magazine writing, or straight into journalism. While I’m the only Inman writer, that does not have a Journalism degree. I am the only one that has a real estate license for a while. I was licensed in the industry several times. I had no real plan, so I ended up moving down to Florida with one of my brothers.

It did.

One thing that might be of interest to touch on what I did in Florida is when I got into publishing in journalism. I had a short stint at the Orlando Sentinel doing graphic design when newspapers were still thick with classifieds. I was doing all the design work on these very expensive auto dealership ads, where you’re placing the car image and getting down into the five-point type, and all that thing. I went from there and worked for a magazine company.

This magazine company was attached to an over-the-counter penny stock company. You’ve seen Wolf of Wall Street. I was knee-deep in that environment. If you remember those scenes in the movie when they’re in this giant bullpen and all these guys are out on the phone. Picture me in an office to the side with one editor, and he and I were putting together these magazines that were advertising these stocks.

Even though it was much smaller and not New York City, that atmosphere was spot on. At one point, we went down, and my editor told me not to go. He was a great guy. He said, “Don’t do this.” I said, “It sounds fun.” The owner of our company rented a bunch of limousines, stocked them full of beer, and what I learned later were drugs. We drove down to Miami or close to it to look at Marina, this boat company building these boats. On the way back is when everybody started to party. I was pretty intimidated by what was going on. By the end of that car ride, one of the managers, a mid-level guy, had fired everybody in the limos.

[caption id="attachment_4116" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Real Estate Technology: Consumers are already incredibly educated, but they don't know how to steer the ship yet. They’re on the ocean and they got their boat but they need someone to navigate it for them.[/caption]

 

He pulled over three times on the Florida turnpike and made people get out and find their own way back. I was the only one he was not in charge of, so he could not fire me. By the end of the night, we’re back in the parking lot, and it was me and this ravaging, coke-addled, drunk stockbroker and his girlfriend sitting there staring at me. I witnessed this whole debacle fights inside. It was nuts. There I was, the little magazine editor standing there. That’s how I got started in publishing. At my stint there, one of the guys died. He took too much coke and got in a hot tub. He was left alone and croaked. It was terrible.

Other than that, I have a couple of good friends in Florida.

I went up to Raleigh to get back together with a girl I had dated in college. I got a job. At the time, it was called CB Richard Ellis, doing marketing for all the tenant reps, listing brokers, and asset services. I tended to click pretty well with all the brokers. Even though I was young and in this pod with all the other assistants and stuff, I had some good marketing ideas. Back then, a good marketing idea was an animated PowerPoint. They loved it. They couldn’t get enough. I started doing some work on a software product called Flash by Macromedia. It animated stuff you could publish on the web. I was making listing presentations and marketing materials, and people loved that.

I got recruited to this team for CB’s website. Their website rollout was they had this master site, and each office would have their templates to populate with content. I got this little side gig where I was going around to the different offices and helping them get up to speed with their website. I would come into an office in Charlotte or Nashville, Richmond, and help them get their website up to speed. That’s how I got into technology and real estate. I would interview the agents and talk to them about what was good, what they should put on the site, what content they should use, and all that stuff. I worked with CoStar as well when they were physically walking around office buildings recording space.

My wife and I were traveling from the East Coast out West to hike and backpack in all the national parks and having grown up camping all the time because where else do parents take four boys? You can’t take them on a civilized vacation. You have to take them into the wilderness and hope they come back. It was always ingrained in me. We ended up first in Las Vegas, prior to Truckee. That’s when I started doing my guide work, working as a backpacking guide, taking people on trips in the Grand Canyon and other parts of Southern Utah in the Southwest. I don’t love Vegas as a place to live. The town has a number of great assets and things going for it, but it was not for us.

We went to a small town again. I was very fortunate. My wife is pretty well-regarded in the world of college counseling and consulting in private schools. She was recruited to a number of different mountain towns in the West like Jackson, Aspen, Vail, and all these other places. We ended up in Truckee for a number of reasons. It had great access to water. At the time, it was more affordable than some of these other places and Lake Tahoe in general. This is a pretty fantastic place to live. The summers are unbeatable, and the winters are a lot of fun because the entire town and vibe of everybody are always to get on the mountain. Everything is about the snow and when it’s going to happen.

[bctt tweet="One of the roles of journalism is to shake things up because that's where the last bastion of truth lives, societally speaking." username="billrisser"]

Some of the most fun times for me is this buildup of a big storm coming like we had over Christmas. It was fantastic. I loved that excitement. I have become a kid again, back in New York, can’t wait to get out and go sledding in the Winter. I get distracted. I have a hard time working when I know there’s good snow out there that needs to be ridden. I’m very much like a child before the end of the school year waiting for Summer. I get distracted by it, and it becomes all-encompassing.

Truckee being a small town, you get to know a lot of people quickly. You see them on the hill. I do some stuff split boarding in the backcountry as well. It was fun. There are a ton of Olympians and current pro-athletes that are always around. You never know who you’re going to be sitting with. I have a local bartender that can do double backflips off cliffs and a good friend who’s dating a four-time Olympian. I love all this connection to outdoor sports, adventure, recreation, and everything. It’s fun.

It’s a little of both. The common client is someone who wants to experience some outdoors but doesn’t know where to begin, or they don’t want to get into it full on. They don’t want to buy a bunch of equipment because they know they’re only going to do it once or twice every few years. They hire people like us to take them out. The company I work for provides all the gear. We prepare all the food for them, and they get the permits. They have a whole team dedicated to getting permits in these parks and remote places. It is a lot of fun. The most rewarding work that I do is if you take someone who has never camped or hiked significantly.

For example, you hiked them for five days across the Grand Canyon. It’s on Corridor Trails, so it’s very well-marked like backcountry campsites, but they’re developed. They have pit toilets. It’s technically a backcountry and wilderness, but it’s a little more developed. Even so, for some people, that is any men’s experience, taking someone who has never done that, and something they don’t even believe they can do. They’re so scared and nervous about the hike, sleeping outside, and all this thing.

The reward that they feel and the role that you had in helping them get through all these emotional hurdles, fear, experience, and enjoyment is extremely fun and rewarding. I had a lot of incredible experiences and got to know a lot of cool people by guiding them around different places in the woods.

I connected with Amber Taufen, who at the time was the editor. I was a freelance writer at the time. In 2009, I went out on my own. I was working for real estate agents and different companies, but I always read Inman because I was in real estate. I was always on it. I emailed them about being a contributor, someone who writes for free, as a way for me to get more real estate business potentially.

However, when Amber saw my background, she said, “We’re looking for somebody that understands technology and can be a regular paid contributor.” As a freelance writer, a standard regular gig is awesome. You’re not scraping to get pitches accepted and all that thing. I did a couple of demo columns. She showed it to Bradley, and he liked it. I was very grateful. That’s how it started. It started as one a week quickly went to one a day. It’s very hard to sustain.

In 2015 and 2016, there were not that many new companies coming up as there have been in the last few years. Every day was hard to do a demo. Think about my views on it. Compare and contrast it to other products out there. We found a good balance. I liked the atmosphere and everyone I worked with at Inman. One of the big reasons I very much enjoy it and stick around is because I’ve always had good people to work with. I’m a very vocal advocate for journalism, and it’s why I love working with all these other journalists. I learned a ton. I bring a lot of real estate knowledge to Inman, but learning about principles of journalism, why things are published, why they’re not, and why certain things need to be edited. I love that. It gets me very excited and fired up.

[caption id="attachment_4115" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Real Estate Technology: The industry is learning to take all of this data, put it in this little machine, and then pump it out into any shape or form they want to use, and they're doing some incredible things with it.[/caption]

 

I love our Connect events because it’s one of the few times where the Inman team gives some people how it works if they want it. During these Connect events, we sit in a room around a table. All of us are writing, and these discussions will erupt about anything from a word we should use or not use, and we’ll debate for five minutes about whether we should use that word or not, how to quote something correctly, or should we use that person’s comments.

I love those conversations and hashing that stuff out. That’s how I came into Inman. I continue to do other freelance projects on the side. I have other clients, but Inman is my primary workload each day. I still love it. It’s a lot of fun. I have gotten to know a lot of great people, see some cool products and some duds.

 

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.

Jason Pantana, Business Coach and National Speaker for Tom Ferry International

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.

We have spoken to different events. We've got a long history. I've known him for most of my real estate career.

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.

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.

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.

[caption id="attachment_4101" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Business Coaching: Social media platforms these days are becoming much more unique with greater optimization.[/caption]

 

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.

We were MySpace users back in the day. It’s the 2000s.

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.

[bctt tweet="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." username="billrisser"]

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 thought about that. I took the time. I talked to my wife about that. It wasn't an easy choice, but it was a good choice. We did it. We sold our place in Nashville and we moved to Hoboken, New Jersey. I worked as their Learning Director, which is where I met Tom, in that process.

Real estate is not just grinding content for your online marketing strategies and waiting for people to come knocking on your door. In reality, you have to put in a lot of work and effort to produce engaging materials that resonate with your target market. Joining Bill Risser is Katie Day, Team Lead of MoveMeToTexas, powered by Real Broker, LLC. She looks back on her ups and downs as a college management major who jumped from one business to another until she achieved residential real estate success. Katie talks about how she builds a large following through her YouTube videos, the challenges of marketing in Instagram, and the needed mindset to win now that the real estate competition transcends to digital platforms.

Katie Day, Team Lead, MoveMeToTexas Team, Powered by Real Broker, LLC

Thank you so much for having me.

I am not a Florida native. I grew up in Maryland, so I lived there for the first portion of my life through high school. My parents were retiring to Florida when I graduated from high school, so they wanted me down there. When I went to the University of Tampa, toured it, I saw the campus and everything there, I was like, "How could I not go here?" That's where I ended up for college.

The University of Tampa was right on the Hillsborough River. It's an absolutely gorgeous campus and the hotel is now administration buildings, classrooms and stuff like that, but they have these big minarets. It's like the Russian-style architecture minarets. It's a stunning campus. They have Wi-Fi at the pool. It's 30 to 40 minutes from the beach. As an eighteen-year-old that's being told that they are no longer living at home and can do whatever they want, why wouldn't you go live near the beach and have Wi-Fi at the pool?

I said it was to study. I never took a computer to the pool, but it was an amazing time. I loved living there. I lived in St. Pete for a little while as well, Orlando, Naples, but as my time in Tampa, especially as a young adult getting out of my parent's home, was an absolute blast. I loved my time in that area of Florida.

Yeah. They live in Naples. That's where they moved to. I was looking at Florida Gulf Coast, which was like 30 minutes away. I'm like, "That's an unexpected pop-in." Two and a half hours, you've got to put some time and thought into coming to visit. I also looked at the University of Florida and things like that, but that was further away. It was a good happy medium between the two. Being close enough to drive home for the weekend or a meal or two, but far enough away that they weren't popping and I was popping on them on a regular basis.

I got a degree in Management. I didn't know what direction I wanted my life to go in. I knew that business seemed the smart route as far as college went. I was like, "I'll get a Business degree." Getting a degree in Management, I'd like to manage people or things. That was my route and I got the General Business degree, figuring it would bode well in any circumstance.

Bloomin' Brands, that's not what it was when I worked there. I worked for Carrabba's. It was my favorite restaurant. Fun fact, I worked there in high school. In my town in Maryland, the city that I lived in, they opened up a restaurant and I saw it driving. I was 16, maybe even 15, but I saw it and was like, "I'm going to get a job there." I got a job as a hostess. I worked there throughout the rest of my high school timeframe. Once I was eighteen, I became a server.

When I moved to Florida, they obviously had them all over in Tampa and Naples, where my parents live. I worked in both locations there, whether I was home for the summer or at school. I loved it. It's also great being a poor college student is getting money paid in tips. You come home with a couple of $100 cash at the end of the night. I was rich compared to my friends at that time. If there's food that's leftover or things that were cooked that were mistakes or that the chef or cook throw away for a couple of extra bucks, you're getting good food to eat. I was eating very well through college.

[caption id="attachment_4080" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Online Marketing: Many realtors originally came from hospitality jobs, with teachers and nurses following closely behind them.[/caption]

 

I definitely see a lot of the bartenders and servers. I think that hospitality is a hard industry as well. Not that real estate is easy, but I think that a lot of people see similar parallels of the harder I work, the more money I can make. I think it's the customer service and taking care of people aspect of things. People always need food and housing. I think both are high-stress environments. There are a lot of parallels. I do think that people in hospitality do well in real estate. I see a lot of that bartenders, servers, hospitality hotels, and stuff like that coming into real estate.

I was a trainer with them throughout college, but when I was graduating from college, it was like, "Am I going to stay in hospitality and go into management? Am I going to go find a job? What am I going to do?" For me, in doing what my parents wanted me to do, I looked for jobs with law firms or business-type jobs. I did end up leaving the service industry. I guess that would have been 2008 throughout probably '06, '07 and '08. I did train and do stuff like that for Carrabba's.

I got into multifamily directly out of college. I interviewed for jobs for insurance agencies, law firms and legal assistance. I got a Management degree. It's not like I had this super-specific degree that I had a specific career path. I was like, "What business jobs can I get that I make decent enough money to be able to pay some bills now that I'm out of college?"

I found a property management company that was hiring what they deemed a manager in training or a manager in a training program. Basically, their thing was they brought people on at leasing agents. Looking back on it, they bring people on as leasing agents and people that showed promise, they would show them different aspects of the business like the maintenance, management, budgeting, finance and paying bills.

If we went through that program, they would potentially move us to another apartment community where we would become the property manager. It's a great program for them. Looking back on it now, I was twenty years old when I got my first property. I'm like, "What were they thinking?" It gave me so much business knowledge on how to manage.

I don't think that I would be where I am now if I didn't have that. I totally now think that was too soon. I had too much responsibility and made so many mistakes. I don't think there's any other job or industry that I would've gotten that much knowledge, high-level management and business knowledge anywhere other than the path that I took and what happened there.

Yeah. Initially, I worked in South St. Petersburg, Orlando, Naples, Birmingham, Alabama and Houston, Texas. Looking back on it, hiring young kids right out of college, you normally don't have kids, spouses, pets and stuff like that. You're young and have nothing going for you. You have no ties. It's great for them to call and be like, "Do you want to move to Orlando next week for $5,000 more a year?” “Yes.” “Do you want to move to Birmingham, Alabama for $10,000 more a year?” “Sure.” “Do you want to move to Houston, Texas?" You always say, "Yes."

Looking back on it, a lot of them were lateral moves, but it's a new city and it’s a challenge. They find people with that drive or personality that want to fix and do everything. It was definitely a great move on their part. Looking back on it now, my negotiation skills clearly were terrible. I'm like, "I'll move across the country." I was all over Florida and Alabama, very briefly for about four months and then to Houston in 2011.

I was in multifamily here in Houston. I ended up working that and going into single-family property management for a while. All of the experiences I had, I learned a ton about business, management and how to be and not to be a leader and all of that. It got to the point that I was working hard until 8:00, 9:00, 10:00 PM, and getting paid the same amount of money every two weeks. I was working hard. For some of the companies I worked at, there are a lot of red tapes of like, “I'm in charge of everything,” but one of my departments is headed up by someone else.

They may mess things up, but I'm responsible for what they're doing. I have no authority over the type of things. It was frustrating to me to get beat up on calls with our executive team or earnings calls or things like that because other companies I worked for were publicly traded. It's like, "I'm getting beat up for things that I have no control over." I have to take these licks. It was frustrating to me to be putting in all of this time and energy to something that I didn't have full ownership over.

[bctt tweet="One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is posting content that they think other people want to see, not what actual consumers want to see." username="billrisser"]

When I left property management to go into residential, I basically had saved up money. I had a year-end bonus and stuff like that. I was like, "I'm putting six months of money away in the bank." I gave it to my fiancé at the time and was like, “Here are six months' worth of my bills and I'm going to try this real estate thing out and see what happens. If I'm going to work this hard, it is for myself and roll the dice on myself rather than work this hard to make the same amount every two weeks.” That was my moment.

This is a funny story, and something wasn't that funny until 2021. I got my license and affiliated with Real back in 2015. I was with Real from 2015 to the end of 2016. Now, I'm back. This is why it's a funny story. I saw an ad online that was high splits, low fees and no monthly fees and this and that. I don't even remember now at the time if they had monthly fees then, but super-agent friendly brokerage and tech-focused, this that and the other. I was like, "This seems cool.” I like money, so I affiliated with Real to start my real estate career.

The company was founded in 2014. It was in its infancy stages. They did have a lot of training, even for a very small brokerage that was tech-based with no local offices and all of that. It’s nothing like it is now, but I still got my training. There are people that were then that are still here now. It's funny seeing names again that I saw years ago. For me, everything was fine and I think it was good. In Texas, that's big as apartment and home locating for rentals. I was doing a lot of that. You don't need a ton of training for that, especially since I came from multifamily and single-family management.

I understood the process. I knew how to work with apartment communities. I knew all of that, but one of my friends, who's still a good friend to this day, was an agent with Coldwell Banker. That's how I knew him from different circles. He ended up getting promoted to be the branch manager of an office. He called me and was like, "I want you to come in and meet with me. I just got promoted." I was like, "I have no interest in leaving my brokerage. I'm good. I appreciate it. Congratulations to you, but I'm good."

He kept wearing me down and was like, "Why don't you come in and see the office?" I'm like, "It's four walls and a roof. You've got maybe some cubicles and desks. I'm good." He wore me down again and was like, "Come in. We'll grab lunch, whatever." I go in and I'm dressed in a t-shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. That's my casual wear. He greets me and walks me around a little bit. I think nothing of this. He's like, "Let me introduce you to someone." He opened up a door and was like, "This is my buddy, Chet. I’ve got to take this call. I'll be right back."

He closes the door. I realized at that moment, when he closed the door, I was like, "I'm in a job interview right now. I'm in here in jeans and a t-shirt, and this man is in a full suit.” Clearly, I can have a conversation, but I was not planning to have a conversation about my career or goals or what I'm doing in real estate. I was there for almost two hours. I totally hit it off with another manager, Chet. I ended up signing with Coldwell Banker on Monday because I had such a great conversation with them. My buddy was going to be managing the branch. I was with that branch for almost five years and it was great. They got me.

A few years ago, Real started to change their compensation and agent model and things like that. They added in the stock program and the ability to cap. With that, depending on how much production you have, you can get shares of stock and things like that. I'd always kept an eye on them. I had my news alerts on as you do for a lot of different companies, businesses and names. I was seeing what they were doing. I stayed in touch with our CEO and founder. We would message back and forth over the past five years. He'd be like, "This is happening. You should come back." I'm like, "I appreciate you. That's nice. Thanks so much."

I was all in with Coldwell Banker, but something happened in 2021 that we suddenly were shopping around for a new brokerage. We met with a lot of brokerages. We weren't planning on leaving and thinking about it. We're meeting with five different brokerages and seeing what it would look like if we made that move. At that time, Real wasn't even in the conversation, but I was like, "If we're considering making a move, we need to call my buddy, Tim Macy, out of San Antonio. He's been at Real for a year, and I want to see what he thinks about the decisions we're making and if Real would be a good fit for us, our business and team."

We started the conversation. I linked back to Tamir, who I'd been talking to for the past five years. I was like, "I think I want to come back. We want to do this." It escalated quickly from there. We moved our teams. It definitely wasn't something that we were necessarily planning or looking to make a change. Somehow, we found ourselves interviewing with brokerages. I was like, "If we make a change, it would be one of those moments where I knew that was a mistake, not at least to have the conversation." We decided to have the conversation and then ended up moving the business.

We are a team of nine agents. We have three admin and a videographer. We've got a combination of listing and buyers agents. Generally speaking, when we bring new agents onto the team, they come on as buyer's agents to understand and ensure that they are good at our processes and how we do things. Especially if they're experienced and know how to sell a home, but there are different things and processes that we do that differentiate us from other agents or teams in the marketplace.

[caption id="attachment_4081" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Online Marketing: Real estate is a relationship business. It is about conversations with your clients and providing value to them.[/caption]

 

It’s so that they understand how we do things and can potentially move into doing both listings and buyers if that's something they want to do. Our admin, we’ve got a marketing coordinator and she helps with social media and getting things scheduled, client events, client mailers and stuff like that. We've got two transaction coordinators. We have a videographer who works with us probably about 15 to 20-ish hours a week or so on top of his other stuff.

It's something that I have difficulty with sometimes. I was at a video mastermind and this was something that we talked about a lot is like, “What can we do to continue to...

This week, Joe is presented with an ethical dilemma. You notice something in your groceries that you didn’t pay for. What do you do? There are a couple more twists you will hear on the episode. Enjoy!

Another Real Estate Sessions Rewind as I continue my Holiday break.

Will wonders never cease? Will Joe ever fail to rant about any question? This week, a national speaker, Sean Carpenter, gets the Rand Treatment and his question answered on Episode 11 of Randing and Raving.

Remember, you can all in at 480 270-4590 and leave a question on any topic for Joe. Real Estate or non-Real Estate questions are welcome.

The much talked about Joe Rand books are available on Amazon:

Disruptors, Discounters and Doubters

How to Be A Great Real Estate Agent