Propy’s Weekly Webinar runs every Wednesday at 1 PM PST.
Weekly Webinar #126: Women Real Estate Leaders Give Tips for Success
Propy’s VP of Customer Success, Gwyneth Iredale is joined by a dynamic panel of women real estate leaders in a fast-paced conversation about what it takes to be a leader, their advice for a changing market, and more.
Background on Speakers
Gabrielle Channell is with Channell Real Estate Investments out of Sarasota, Florida. She is the Broker/Owner, and they specialize in working with VA buyers. They also handle corporate rentals in addition to real estate sales. Gabrielle and her husband bought the NFT in Tampa, and did a full renovation of the unit. The unit is rented to a very happy tenant.
Elizabeth Menees is with Keller Williams in Miami. She’s been licensed since 2018, and has been with KW since 2020. She has been pursuing the commercial realm, and says that women are finally starting to take a seat at the table in the commercial world.
Shelly Vincent is the designated managing broker for eXp Realty for the state of Colorado. She manages 1,500 Real estate agents. She has a passion for technology, cryptocurrency, and blockchain and how that is affecting the real estate market. Her mission is to educate her agents and give them the tools they need to complete transactions that include wallet-based transfers. She was the first agent in Colorado to complete a wallet-based transfer on a fully insured title.
Laura Pamatian is the founder of Height Zero Real Estate, which is a consulting firm based in South Florida that works with commercial property owners and developers on tokenizing their real estate assets. She has been in real estate and development for 20 years.
Kala Laos is the CEO and co-founder of Zoodealio. She has been a business architect in the real estate space for over two decades, and is the designated broker owner of a real estate company in Gilbert, Arizona.
Barkley Romero has two real estate-based companies. The first one is called REAL Gratitude, and she works with agents to help them learn how to give back to their communities to grow their business. She is also a licensed agent with Forbes Global Properties in Arizona, and HomeSmart in California.
Suzy Truax is with eXp Realty in California, Florida, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. She has been an OG in real estate since 1999, and OG in crypto since 2013. She was one of the first actively selling agents on the Board of Directors for eXp World Holdings, which is the parent company for eXp Realty, and is also one of the founding members of the Crypto Real Estate Alliance.
Danielle Garofalo is the co-founder of the Metaverse Institute, which is a Web 3.0 education-only platform. Metaverse Institute was created to accelerate mass adoption through enterprise agreements. Additionally, she is the marketer in residence at Core Real Estate, and has been in this industry for about a decade. She started out in digital marketing when people thought the internet was just a fad, and made her way to consulting with some of the top agents in the industry. Her clients have had a lifetime of total sales of 70 billion from the campaigns and branding she has done with them.
Examples of Leadership
1. Ask People What Their Goals Are
Danielle always asks new hires, whether it’s an assistant or a marketing director, what their goal is. She wants to know if their goal is to have her job, and believes that answer should always be “yes.” She states that she wants to teach people to replace her because she never wanted her role to be forever. As a leader, your role is not to compete with people, your goal is to make them you.” She believes this philosophy works because if dissolves any potential tension up front, and let’s people know that we’re working together as a team. She is there to help team members grow into other positions—including hers.
2. Have Conversations About Expectations
Suzy believes that, as a leader, it is critical to have a conversation about expectations with the people who report to you. Everyone needs to understand what their role is, and what things will they be doing, along with your role and what your actions will be. This is also important for real estate agents who are meeting with a potential listing or potential buyer. Understanding expectations will get everybody on the same page. “I feel like every single day that we show up as a real estate agent and reach out to our clients, asking them what can I do to help you, what can I do to make your life easier, is putting us in a leadership position,” Barkley shares. She believes that a real estate agent can rise to a leadership position when they acknowledge the power in providing service, but also by elevating others, and giving voices to those who might not have a voice.
3. Leadership Starts With Yourself
Kala believes that leadership starts with yourself. “You have to be a very good leader of yourself, of your vision, of your time, of your resources,” she explains, “and leadership is how I conduct myself.” Being a leader is about being a good role model so that people can get on board with you. Ultimately being a good leader starts with how you take care of your mind, your body, your spirit, and your business.
4. Start Your Day with “Me” Time
Laura shares that she always starts her day with “me time” such as yoga or a workout, because you have to take care of yourself first before you can be “number one” for everyone else. A big part of leadership for her is learning from everyone every day. She explains that in the process of tokenizing real estate, there may be 20 different supporting vendors involved. She needs to coordinate that process and maintain those relationships, so being open to learning from everyone is a large part of that for her. Working in the blockchain space, she believes that it’s important to be collaborative because there is a bigger cause that they are working towards. “At the end of the day, all boats are going to rise with the tide,” she states.
Gwyneth adds that the tools we use, and how we communicate is constantly changing, so she agrees with Laura that being open to learning is very important. At the Propy Summit in March 2022, she heard Tom Ferry say “Lean in. Lean into learning,” and she wholeheartedly agrees with that.
5. Praise Others Often and Allow Your Team to Shine
Stacey Soleil, with Follow Up Boss, believes that leadership means knowing when to make it about everyone else on your team, instead of you. It’s important to let individuals on the team to be in the spotlight, and feel elevated. She looks for those opportunities to allow the team to shine. Additionally, she believes this practice builds the trust between leader and team members, and lets the team feel they are supported.
6. Get Your Agents Through the Changing Times
Shelly shares that in the State of Colorado, 30% of all agents have been licensed less than three years. As a managing broker with 1,500 agents, that means that a vast majority of her agents have never operated in a market other than a strong seller’s market. This puts a lot of responsibility on her and her staff to educate her agents on how to handle a rapidly changing market, how to create their niches, where to get business, and how to market properties correctly. “It’s been a big challenge for us to ensure that we lead our agents correctly through all these changing times,” she adds.
Tips for Becoming a Leader
Laura shares that to become a leader in the blockchain space you really need to learn the language. This technology is going to impact every industry, and while it may seem challenging and complicated, commit to learning the language, and understand how you can pivot and use it to your benefit.
Danielle recalls at the early stages of digital marketing and Web 2.0, that there were a lot of people telling her that nothing would ever come of digital marketing. She has a sense of déjà vu with Web 3.0, blockchain, and crypto, and her advice for early adopters is to have a thick skin, and stay determined. “Have that self-awareness and determination to know that you are in the very early stages of the next wave of what is going to be the success in the industry,” she explains, “and push the doubters aside.”
Suzy agrees with Danielle, and shares a story about the number one agent in her office in 2000 who didn’t want to learn the new internet-based MLS, because she thought it was going to go away. A year later, that agent was no longer the number one agent. “Everything is changing at the speed of light, and you have to be adaptable to change in the real estate industry,” explains Suzy, “and you need to think of blockchain and crypto like it’s the year 1992 and the internet is brand new. We didn’t know what to do with it at first, but now we do.” For agents who are early adopters and become fluent in blockchain and crypto, they will be leading the way.
Being adaptable to change also applies to the shifting markets, and Suzy explains that sellers are going to be reluctant to listen to you about this. Her advice: “Let the data to the talking, be firm, and help your sellers understand that these changes are coming.”
“If you’re really wanting to be a leader, you have to be visible,” Kala explains. She had a brokerage that she started in 2007, and in 2013 she decided she wanted to grow the brokerage. She started to produce a large amount of content to gain more visibility. Building her business required a high degree of vulnerability in putting herself out there and stepping into a position of leadership in her marketplace. “The rewards are massive, but you have to be visible to be a leader. It’s that simple.”
Barkley agrees that to be a leader, you have to be visible, but explains that doesn’t mean that you have to be a self-promoter. Instead, she urges that you focus on promoting your message, your cause, and how you can be of service. “Being a true leader is always offering value,” she explains, “so when you have the opportunity to promote, promote your knowledge, promote how you can help, promote your value.”
“Leading from example, and always presenting new information to the agents is a very important aspect of leadership,” according to Shelly. Because there is so much new information, especially with blockchain and crypto, and change is happening continuously, she needs to stay up-to-date on the technologies so she’s able to answer questions from her agents. As a leader she needs to be able to support her agents as they learn, and they know they can lean on her when they have questions.
Leaders also need to set up a really strong support system so they have the resources they need in areas they may fall short in. Laura explains that when you align yourself with the right people, who have the same ethics and vision as you do, it just makes you that much stronger. She adds, “Know your strengths, but also know your weaknesses, and how you can make those up.”
One of the things that Stacey has found is knowing when to draw the line and say “I’m going to stand my ground on this,” and knowing that this isn’t the battle you choose to fight. She believes it takes a lot of maturity and time to learn how to make those decisions, and to only fight the battles that really make a difference.
Tips for Shifting Into a Buyer’s Market
Suzy believes this is a fantastic time to become a real estate investor and urges all agents to get into the investor game. She doesn’t believe that the housing market is going to crash like it did in 2008, but rather that prices will cool down in some areas. She urges agents to remember that real estate is hyper-local, so what may be happening in one part of the country, may not affect you at all. The hardest thing to overcome right now is educating younger buyers about the rising interest rates, and making sure that they can afford to purchase with the higher rates we’re seeing today.
She adds that anything less than a three-month absorption rate is still a seller’s market, even if it’s cooling off a little. The bigger issue in her mind, is that she’s still not seeing a lot of inventory coming on the market, and there is still a shortage of inventory in her area.
Danielle states that the bubble we’ve been in won’t burst, but it’s going to deplete, which will allow the market to normalize. She urges agents to educate their sellers, as all the great marketing will not sell a property if the price is wrong.
“We are working with our agents now to ensure that they set appropriate expectations with their sellers,” explains Shelly, “because expectations are the root of all of our issues right now.” She adds that homes in the Denver market have appreciated 50% over the last five years. If prices relaxed about 8%, that seller still has a home worth 42% more than it was a few years ago. It’s not a bad thing to have more options for buyers, and it’s not a bad thing for agents to learn to negotiate better.
Shelly explains that a common way to transact many years ago was with an assumable loan, and she expects to see this come back now that rates are higher. In most cases, the loans that people got at the low interest rates are assumable loans, so agents need to talk to their clients about this opportunity. Brokers need to educate their agents about this once common scenario.
Kala doesn’t expect to see sellers wanting to leave their 2-3% interest rates to take out a loan at a higher rate. However, as real estate agents, she thinks it’s important for agents to become familiar with the different options that are available today when selling a home. There are many different ways to structure an offer, and at Zoodealio, she explains that they are able to provide the real estate agent the mechanism to lead generate using cash offer tools, and provide the home seller with an offer dashboard where they can compare an instant cash offer, or a cash offer with a 12-month lease back, for example. She believes it’s shifting the conversation with the home sellers to show them all the different options available, and what those options cost.
For people with high equity, Suzy explains that there can be a tax benefit to the seller if they do an installment sale, and this will help avoid big capital gains taxes. This is another point of differentiation for an agent to bring more knowledge to the table than other agents by understanding how to tap the equity without taking a big impact.
Laura shares that what her company is doing with tokenization will allow them to securitize the equity, and sell the equity off to investors. This approach is changing a lot of what can be done and the opportunities available for the homeowner and investors.
Connecting with the Panelists
Gabrielle Channell
LinkedIn
Shelly Vincent
LinkedIn
Barkley Romero
LinkedIn
Laura Pamatian
HeightZeroRealEstate.com
Kala Laos
LinkedIn
Danielle Garofalo
LinkedIn
Suzy Truax
LinkedIn
Stacey Soleil
LinkedIn
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