Exciting Innovations, Cooperation, and Evolutions Through a Pandemic
Jonathan, Keith, and Jim welcomed Vanessa Bergmark with Red Oak Realty for a discussion about real estate during sheltering in place, cooperating with competitors during and after a pandemic, and innovating and changing behaviors.
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Highlights of the Conversation
- Quick state of the Bay Area market after the shelter in place order
- How marketing and prepping properties has changed
- Looking outside real estate for insight; NYTimes story about Macy’s
- How showings have changed, maybe forever
- The value of high trust
- Will the real estate transaction get more or less expensive?
- The critical importance of routines for creative work and play.
- Cooperation amongst competitors – more important than ever
- Personal interactions are the foundation of great communication, and the art of communication.
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Transcript
Jim:
Jim Duncan with Nest Realty and Sweat the Details. We’re here with Vanessa Bergmark from Red Oak Realty in the Bay Area in California. Vanessa, thanks for making the time for us.
Vanessa:
Thanks for having me.
Jim:
So if you don’t mind, just tell us a little about who you are, where you’re based and a little bit about your market first.
Vanessa:
Sure, sure. I’m originally from Brooklyn, New York, which I think kind of matters. It’s a little bit of a different way to grow up and be raised, and then moving to the Bay area. It’s almost the exact opposite or at least it used to be, but, so I took over Red Oak Realty’s owner about just over 10 years ago in 2010, the company was started in 1976 by four gentlemen that had been former agents and just kind of to want to go out and do their own thing. So we’re still actually, our Berkeley office is still in the same office, their first, very first office in Northern Berkeley, that they moved from their hot tub to their garage, and then to the office space that we still have today.
Vanessa:
And so it’s like many Bay area companies that was founded in a garage. We’ve expanded, we’ve expanded since then. We now have five offices in two counties and we serve the Oakland, Berkeley, kind of East Bay market. We’ve got 170 agents, and again, at five locations. We did have an acquisition actually earlier this year where we bought another local independent. So we’ve grown quite a bit in the last six months, and I’ll tell you there’s nothing like an acquisition followed by a pandemic to keep you on your toes, so.
Jim:
I think we’re all going to have really good stories once we’re out of this thing.
Vanessa:
Oh yeah.
Jim:
I think we’re all familiar with shelter in place and shutdowns unfortunately. But, our market, 13 March I think it was, day to day, we’re down about 45% from new listings and new contracts. What is your market seeing since then, or since your shut down?
Vanessa:
Yeah, so our shutdown, which was interesting, we were the first… This is what we’ll always get with this. We were the first County to shut down on March 16th at midnight, but we were at that time, considered non-essential. So not only did we shut down, but we were considered a nonessential business. Two weeks later we then became essential. So during that two week period, which I’m bad with the days, but I guess it’s a 16th to maybe like the 27th or whatever, that two weeks later Monday was, we were down 70%. so ultimately what happened was, not only did we hold all of our listing inventory from going to the market, we had about 91, I think we’ve got 130 now, we put out three that week under SIP, under non-essential SIP.
Vanessa:
But we really just plummeted. And I think some of those, the reasons why we went so low, was a lot of existing contracts just freaked out. And it really happened that Thursday when we started to see the QM, the non QM loan product had pulled, and the FHA and VA. Once that happened, panic set in on what does this mean? Am I buying at the height of my buying at worse than the height? Do I need to get out? So we spent that whole first week, essentially I was saying we were unraveling all of our transactions, and my day to day was trying to figure out the new practices, but trying to get people out of non-contingent offers. Some of them, they were closing 72 hours later and they were canceling. So that first two weeks was kind of mayhem and it was a 70% drop.
Vanessa:
Now we’re tracking it, we track it week over week, and we’re actually sharing some of that information with Mike DulPrete, who I’m sure you’re all familiar with. We’ve been tracking our data for 17 years, so we know every week’s data for a 17 year period, and we were able to pull what normally happens and then track it against what happened post SIP. And what we saw is we’re now starting to make a little bit of a bump back in the, going on three weeks since we’d been considered essential. And we’re now in the nice… We’re actually on 50%, we’re back up to 50% of what we normally should be. That’s better than 70, so I guess it’s up. Things are looking up.
Keith:
So Vanessa, are the drops primarily coming from a lack of listing volume or is it buyers or, where’s the unraveling starting now?
Vanessa:
So, as suspected with the Bay area, and we talked about this, was one of two things will happen, right? The normal thing would be that there’d be inventory is going to be available and buyers are going to be freaked out so they won’t buy and you’re going to see depression on prices, or we went into the year with a 30% lower inventory than we had year over year. So we started at a massive deficit. We were like, okay, this can also mean that there’s going to be less, they’re going to hold those listings. Because see we saw what our sellers were doing, and we’re going to see an increase in prices because there’s going to be more demand at barely any inventory. And that’s what’s happened.
Vanessa:
So now we have no inventory, we have multiple offers again, now it’s not on every property. It still matters where it is, it matters how it’s priced, a lot of things matter. But it is still a competitive sellers market in the Bay area, and it’s kind of all that war, because there’s competition on how do you respect the shelter in place health requirements and access the property and get your offer accepted with very strict terms and then close the escrow. So, it’s heated competition right now.
Keith:
Yeah, I will say within Charlottesville, as Jim said, we’re down 45% our citizens, since March 13 from year prior. But what’s interesting is, over the last 10 days, I think three or four of our markets have reported that number of new contracts exceeds number of new listings for the MLS. That’s true here, it’s true of a couple of our North Carolina offices. True in one of our Virginia offices and it’s just, you’re right, there is no inventory, but whatever’s coming on is still being snagged, even though there’s a pretty deflated buyer pool as well.
Vanessa:
So now we have this conversation at hand though with our sellers of, okay, do you want to go out in this because going out in this is still very difficult. It takes probably 10X the effort to prep the property with all the technology, because we can’t do regular prepping and we can’t do staging. But then we have to bring in this whole virtual experience. We have to do virtual open homes, super complex, not as much exposure and the legal requirements to access a house are horrific. So we’re left with, do you want to do that? Because soon there might be this flood of inventory to the market and so you’ve got these sellers being like, this weighted, do I do this very lengthy, intense process to go out now, or do I hold and take it to the market? But then you’re going to be competing with inventory and then you’re going to be competing with potentially higher jobless claims, maybe less loan product.
Vanessa:
So what is the risk factor then? So, every single transaction is like a little newborn baby that you have to look at it and be so specific to every consideration and I think that’s a skill set that you’re going to need to have in the next 12 to 16 to 18 months, is incredible negotiation skills, incredible communication skills and the ability to analyze every facet of that seller’s risk analysis and their ability to move quickly and negotiate and hit expectations and everything. I never put this much energy into every single transaction, and now it’s like a new… And I think that’s going to be a bit of the wave of potentially what’s to come even when it lifts, because it’s not going to just be like, curtains up, back on.
Jim:
To our point of conversation yesterday of these innovations we’re seeing now from the virtual showings, from the video and all of that, which of these things do you think are going to carry through for whenever we come out of this, whether it’s in three months or 18 months? I think that we’re clearly going to innovate some things immediately for cause, but I think that some of these things are going to stay with us, for the rest of our respective careers and that it’s going to change the practice of the industry.
Vanessa:
I was just having a conversation with this with some top agents on the West coast in Denver and Seattle and Tacoma. And I think two things are going to happen. One is we are going to need… It’s the flood are not going to open and we’re going to suddenly say, let’s go to a concert and a movie. And so what we’re doing right now is we’re tracking other industries that make their living on large group events and watching what the deciders of those industries are doing. And there was a great article that was out, I think it was yesterday for the New York Times, super grim, but probably accurate about what is happening to shopping malls and retail centers. And they did a whole profile on Macy’s and Nordstrom’s and Neiman Marcus, which was already in trouble and declaring bankruptcy.
Vanessa:
But they’re looking at their habits and what they have done is they’ve cut their entire workforce. They are cutting their C-suites and just firing them and a lot of them are not ordering all of their product for Q4. So I think that’s a bit of a canary in a coal mine of, these are people that are not expecting traditional behaviors in large groups. So how does that affect real estate, right? I mean, if concerts are being canceled and large groups are taking this and saying we’ve got to cut costs instantly because we don’t see this coming back anytime soon. Well, what does that mean for us? And I think where we’re going to see that behavior is in open houses and broker stores. No seller is going to say, bring in the general public to walk through my house where I’m going to need to bathe and use the bathroom and sleep and eat with my family.
Vanessa:
Even if I vacated, there may be illegal… That is going to… It’s probably going to instantly change. It already has, but I think that per the CDC requirements, we’re not going to be able to bring those back anytime soon. So then what we’re going to have is okay, the quickest people to adopt to the new technology, to do those showings, show those houses in their best light, be able to deliberately and purposefully package a property, inspections reports, the little details that you would get to see walking around, all of that, but they’re going to use it through tech and then get the most amount of people to get the highest price for their listings, are going to, I think they’ll have the upper hand here. And I think also, what you’ll see is, at first there’s been this, we don’t know how to get all these Zoom people on, on a Sunday open house and it gets hacked and only three people sign up.
Vanessa:
But once consumers start figuring it out, we just started shooting ours to the portals last week, but they still haven’t really figured out through Zillow that you can go to an open house, they will, give them another week. You’ll probably start to see that the consumers adapt to this new reality, and by the time we get a vaccine or whatever happens, and we’re allowed to go back into public places, be it three months, six months, eight months, where we have changed consumer behavior in the meantime. And I think the answer’s probably going to be yes. I think it’s going to be, why would we go back to having strangers in our house again? That’s so stupid, right?
Vanessa:
So, I think that part’s going to change, and there’s going to be a new… The people that can adapt to that technology and the technology, all these tech guys out here right now that offer tech products, I hope they are coming up with some brilliant ideas on what to offer us to make those needs met. Not given that they’ll be met. So, I think that’s going to probably happen. And I think that watching these other industries are telltale signs. So I’m pulling away as much as possible from just reading real estate opinion and looking at other smarter people and other industries that are showing me their decisions and saying, they made that decision, where do I see that in my own practice? If this person in this industry is getting hurt, where do I need to pivot in my own practice? And, that’s the kind of thing, that’s my new norm.
Jonathan:
Right. Yeah. And one thing I’ll say, is that I’ve been doing the same thing and we’ve been reading a lot about what’s going on in other industries and just thinking, in this one aspect of the sharing economy, right? The sharing economy of cars, and houses, and scooters. I mean that has been one of the industries that’s been hit the hardest. I saw this article I read, I think it might’ve been New York Times in the last week, was that the hardest hit industry of any across the country was scooter sharing and scooters.
Jonathan:
And then that’s number one, and then Airbnb and Uber have been hit hard, and this concept that we started to think was going to become normal of open door and things like that, where you would just punch a code in and go into a house without a real estate agent, maybe all of a sudden like on a dime, that concept is flipped and people aren’t going to want that to happen. Now granted that’s not quite apples to apples, but I agree with you that changes are coming and, people just getting into houses at the… Picking up the phone or sending a text and saying, let me in your house, it’s something that’s probably not going to be as easy to do as it was five years ago.
Vanessa:
No, I think it’s going to become a high trust. I mean, we’re looking at who we’re allowing near us right now because of risk to my squad and my people, like in my family, and it’s going to be who you know, who you trust, because it’s not only just a like, well they’re staying in my house, but are they staying in my house with something that could kill me? The disease will pass, but the fear philosophy might stay for a little while. So I almost think that the top agents or top professionals or companies or what not have an opportunity to provide practices that are going to show transparency and create trust.
Vanessa:
And then they stay relevant because of that, right? Because they’re actually saying, I know that this has now become a new need and I’m providing a resource for you to know that you have a higher level of trust, whether it be legal, the background of who is accessing your property, what offers they’re coming in with. I think they’re going to want to see a more qualified interaction in business. And I think that might be a new norm. I don’t know. It’s all… We don’t know. But you could see the little psychological things and say, how do you as a business owner and customer service meet that need?
Jonathan:
And I think that, I’ll let me just say this one thing, that even though we don’t know to what scale it is, I think we’ll all agree that the real estate transaction becomes more expensive. So whether that’s more expensive with time or whether that’s more expensive with, now I need to buy a box of gloves, latex gloves for the house. And that’s probably on the low scale. But on a high scale it becomes more expensive because there’s so much more time and it could shift, who knows?
Jonathan:
I mean in some markets, it’s happened, but the listing agent’s got to be there for every showing and that listing agent is going to be the one that opens the doors and opens the cabinets and opens the back door and turns the lights off and things like that. So I think we’re all looking at a situation that becomes more expensive, A, because we need to think more and prep more, but B, it’s going to take probably a little bit more time and maybe more money with videographers and virtual tours and floor plans and things like that. Like you’re saying, prepackaging up that listing to kind of prep it and ready to get out there.
Keith:
So Jonathan, let me go point at the other direction. While you’re saying it’s going to be more expensive, if I’ve got virtual tours, Matterport tours, if I’ve got floor plans, if I have all of these methods of viewing remotely, it also makes this far less expensive. It means that your buyer from Colorado doesn’t need to travel to Charlottesville or to the Bay Area to look at a house. They can make informed decisions walking the street… We already sent our buyers to Google to do, walk down the streets before they ever come to Charlottesville or to let them know what a neighborhood feels like. And I think there is going to be a part of this that says, we’ve got more information, we’re providing a better service to buyers and they’re going to go to make a more rapid decision without spending the time and money in location.
Jonathan:
Maybe expensive isn’t the right word. It’s going to take more resources from the listing agent.
Vanessa:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jonathan:
To get it ready and to get it to the, this is very transactional and I don’t mean it this way, but to get it to the finish line. All right? And so, that’s I think what we’re learning, and we don’t know to what scale that’s going to be.
Vanessa:
I think you both bring up great points. It will be very expensive in certain parts and it’ll be less time probably for the consumer. We’re looking at broker tours and there were close to 200 people on a virtual broker tours on this past Monday through our association. Now if I wish I could have done a before and after, because brokers tours would be crazy realtors parking in the streets, the neighbors yelling at them because they were all piled on top of each other to run into a house for five minutes polluting the air. All those things, all the chaos it took and time and trying to get from place to place to place and not seeing it all. And this brought out an incredible efficiency and it probably, the agents were saying they saw more houses on the virtual tour and they were able to refine a product for their client faster than they ever would have been if they had to go around in their car.
Vanessa:
So there will be less expense on time, but I do believe as I prepare, as we talk about this from a company perspective, I’m looking out there and going, okay, if this does become a new norm, who do I need to staff? Who do I need to train? What is going to be the skill set of my agents? Their ability to communicate, our brand’s ability to communicate, the whole back end of our marketing department, the skill set that they can use because we’re not even going to be making, we’re not going to be talking about flyers anymore that are going to be left to properties. They become irrelevant, but what will be relevant for digital, how to get all the digital listings out. I had hired by sheer luck in January, a really good old friend of mine that I worked with 20 years ago in the travel industry, who was an incredibly talented cinematographer and videographer. And I said, I got this epiphany on Christmas Eve looking at this book.
Vanessa:
I won’t go into the story, but it was… I called him up and I was like, I think I want you to work with me. And I think there’s some cool stuff we could do with video because his videos are not, they’re not videos. They’re works of art. And by sheer luck he said yes, and he started working with me in January and he has become overnight outside of my sales manager, my most important asset as an organization. Period. Now, will that change? Maybe, but he has been able to, with the knowledge he showed up with and $55000 worth of camera gear that I didn’t have to buy, because he showed up with it. He’s got a room set up, he is banging this stuff out and his skill sets here and he was able to just pivot and get us in there.
Vanessa:
And some of the video we’re putting out, I’ll send you guys one, is one of them was just incredible. And then we’ve integrated that with box brownie and virtual staging and voiceovers, and now we’re trying to figure out which platforms we put it out on. That part of it is going to become, who are your next key players? Just like all of a sudden doctors and nurses were level of importance, I mean we’ve always known they’re important, but you talk about that skill set, this skill set is what’s going to be needed in that next reality.
Vanessa:
And then the people to train the masses, what it’s like to get 170 agents trained on a completely different model, that’s huge. And then the ability of the skill set they’ve showed up with, the ones that can negotiate. I did this call last night with one of my top agents around this strategy, and I’ll tell you, what we ended up coming up with was nuts, it was like we were in a war room, it could have been on West Wing and this morning she found out that she had all this competition and the strategy we came up with worked and she got her offer accepted.
Vanessa:
And it’s those moments when you’re like, that stuff is just going to go right to the top in this next market. And if we’re not there, if we’re not there, well we’ve got to get there really fast.
Jim:
So tell me, the brainstorming. We were talking yesterday about sort of how you brainstorm the future of your company and how you slotted out your time to allow your brain to work, if you will. Tell me a little bit, go back to that and how you’ve restructured your days to be more productive and more creative.
Vanessa:
I think I’m a naturally… I’ve never been a crazy, naturally organized person. But in growing my career I’ve learned that discipline is key. And someone long time ago, this woman Bev Steiner, who I worked under, said, there was freedom in the discipline. So the more discipline you are, the more you actually get with your free time because you’ve done what you needed to do in a slotted amount of time. And one of the first things I saw myself, my own personal experience, but I saw tit in my kids, and I saw it in my friends. I would get a lot of texts all day and they were just like… And it was like, man, no one knew what time it was, what day it was, you had a cocktail at two. Someone compared it to Vegas in one of those memes, we don’t know what day it is, we don’t know what time it is, and I’m bleeding money.
Vanessa:
And what I saw was, how things just breakdown without structure, and then I saw myself falling into that. When I’d eat dinner, one night we were having dinner with my kids at 11 o’clock at night and I was like, oh, I don’t know if this is so good. And I just talked to my dad last night and he was like, I need a routine. And I think the thing is, you do need a routine. So about, I think it was week three, because we’re going into week six now, right? About week three I started being like, okay, enough, enough, no more of that Tiger King, no more of bad stuff going in your brain at night. This thing isn’t just three weeks of fun.
Vanessa:
This thing’s going on and there is wasted energy right now on what I’m not doing purposely. So I just started really restructuring my day, making sure that I was up at a certain time, showered by a certain time, walk the dog by a certain time. Everyone was back on eating on a schedule, stopping at a schedule and not going into I was working till 10 o’clock at night, it was not healthy. And then what I did was, during those times of work, I would time block them into today’s projects, right? The things that I need to do for the deals that are going on today and my agents needs right now, but I’ve got to start time blocking. I timed blocked even a little bit of time for fear and panic because if I didn’t actually address them in a nice little block of time where I gave into all of the fear, then I found it like saturating in my day.
Vanessa:
It started dripping in it at two o’clock and then again at 10 o’clock, so I was like, you know what? If I’m going to have fear thoughts, I’m going to do them for one time blocked hour and I’m just going to let it rip and then I’m going to park it and I’m going to switch my brain. And so what I’ve done now is had this one big time, it’s a long answer to this, but is to get down and think about the reorganization of the entire company. And I’m talking every office space, the way the rooms are laid out, the way we do each facet of our marketing, how all of our legal is done, the way we process a transaction, the way we teach our agents, the way we communicate with our agents, every last drop of that. And then what we’re going to be reading and who we should be following.
Vanessa:
And so I’ve spent now about three to four hours a day, just absolutely brainstorming. So we took a couple of articles just recently that we read that were kind of like, ooh, articles. And I send them out to the company and I said, if anyone wants to get on a brainstorm call where we just grab a cocktail and just come up with anything, let’s just start to do this. And my COO and I are doing it, we’re time blocking with each other because he’s really good. I’m always like, [inaudible 00:24:19] coming up with ideas and white boarding and the yellow, I should show you my room right now, there’s yellow pads of paper all over the floor. He’s the one that just takes all of that and makes it happen, right? He puts together spreadsheets and Gantt charts and takes everything and makes it into these little chunks, and then we address it piece by piece.
Vanessa:
And I could barely log onto Hive and he has the whole thing going. So we’re doing that, and I think that, first of all, what it’s done from week three to week five is it’s actually getting me inspired again. And I think that the mental response to it is, it’s just am like, oh my God, I’ve been in this business for 17 years and there’s times I’ve been so cranky with it, but I’m really right now, super excited about what we can build and I don’t have to get a new career or start a new company.
Vanessa:
I’ve got all of this energy to put right back into this one that I’ve been with for a very long time and reinvigorate it. And the only way to get there was by putting this structure in place, because you can’t just innovate and be like, everyone, you take care of all the stuff going on here. I have to deal with the stuff that is bringing in revenue, keeping my agents engaged, that is very important. Equally as important, but this innovation timeframe is equally as important. And so we’ve really got to be doing both at whatever level you can, but both have to be a very weighted consideration.
Jonathan:
Yeah, it’s a tough balancing act. It’s like you got to… I agree with you, the first couple of weeks that, you used the word earlier, were mayhem and we just kind of felt like we were, every time we peaked around a corner, there was this new situation. It’s like, how we haven’t thought of that and we just had to kind of be predicting what was going to happen the next day. And then over the past few weeks, I’d say you’re right. The last three or four weeks, it’s been more of all right, we’ve kind of navigated those waters and now we’re focused on the longterm plan and we feel the same way. We feel like this is an exciting time where there’s going to be changes and it’s nerve wracking too, because we don’t know what those changes are. And so, but it is inspiring to be able to sit back and just think, what’s the real estate world going to look like in six months or two years from now?
Jonathan:
And how can we position ourselves to be in the right spot so that our agents are providing their clients with the best service and the best experience? We actually had a call this morning with, a training this morning, and this time you hear a lot of analogies and great analogies, but one of the analogies that the trainer had was she was using surfing as an analogy and she said, you’ve got to start paddling on the surfboard before you see the wave coming, and you just kind of have to know and kind of get out ahead of it. And I thought that was a great analogy and it’s sounds like you’ve kind of taken that concept to heart over the last couple of weeks, so kudos to you.
Vanessa:
Yeah. And I wouldn’t say… What happened was, we were paying attention to the news, just quickly, and I couldn’t tell, like many people, if I was overreacting or if this was really going to get that bad. And then one day I was finally like, I’d watched this Bill Ackman piece, and it was really treacherous and I was like, you know what, I don’t think I’m overreacting. I think I’m going to go run with the fact that I’m going to prepare for the worst here. So about two weeks, we got everything together and we got ready to pull the trigger and then we pulled the trigger on Friday the 13th, funny. And then on Monday, we were going into a shelter in place. That first night, I was still working from home. My staff was already over working from home, and I realized, we’re about to go into something brand new, and as soon as I heard we were sheltering in place, I’m like, we’re going to have conflict and mayhem from all of these transactions that we’re currently in.
Vanessa:
So we pulled all of our lists, we got all of our transactions out there and we’re like, all right, reach out to these agents. Figure out what’s going to be triaged instantly. But then I thought more so than that, we’ve got all these other brokerages that are in the exact same place. So I sent out an email and said, hey, we got this new dawn upon us, and I don’t know about you, but I think that we’re going to have a lot of conflict and I think that there’s going to be a lot of unknowns, and if we could just get together as a group and figure out a way to collaborate through this, we are going to bring down the fear and the angst not only of our agents, but more importantly of our clientele. So if anyone’s interested, let’s just set up a meeting. And we’ll do a Zoom meeting, and here’s the login.
Vanessa:
You don’t even need to RSVP. It’s going to be Thursday. I’ll see you there, if you want to come. And, they all showed up. They all showed up. I mean in these… We were saying, these were people that… One of my agents, one of my dear agents who I loved had just left three days before to go join one of these people’s companies. But it wasn’t about competition or let’s build relationships in case this thing falls apart so that we could create new, no. It had nothing to do with that. It had to do with, we are going to face this new thing and we are in such better shape, if we are not at war with each other and we are collaborating, there is not a single thing that does worse collaborating, right?
Vanessa:
There’s no example of that in the world where if you get together and you use your brains and your skill sets, I mean you could look at Survivor and that they knew very quickly to form alliances to get to the end, right? So I thought that and when you’d ask me the other day, when did you start planning that, and the interesting part was, the day I became an agent. 17 years ago going on 18, I was always amazed at how competitive and kind of nasty an industry it was for one that needed to actually work with the other person closer than any other industry that I know of. Where is it that you side by side with your biggest competitor, maybe your arch nemesis, have to go through a very intense transaction for a very high dollar amount?
Vanessa:
There’s not many industries that are hanging out together day by day in order to get revenue for both competitors. So I always thought it was a little bit weird and I’ve always had this thing, and Jonathan, I think you’ll know it being in the industry for a while, is I’ve always been sort of an open book, very transparent and very much into building a network and sharing whatever resources I have. So I kind of was always waiting for this day. I was always waiting for a day that we wouldn’t be at war with each other and we would just get on the same page. So the moment I saw that little glimmer of opportunity, I put out the ask, and it was amazing because you know what? So many people want that too, they just maybe, I don’t know, maybe don’t want the rejection of, I don’t want to talk to you.
Vanessa:
I don’t know. There was no risk at that moment. I’m like, I don’t even need an RSVP. If no one shows up, I guess I’ll be on that Zoom call alone, but I’m still going to ask. And the great part is, it’s now happening every Monday at four o’clock and we’re still in it now. It’s going into six, I think this is our seventh or eighth call now, and I just actually got on a call with somebody else today. There was a little bit of conflict and I was like, hey, you want to come to our Zoom call next week? I forgot to call. He’s like, yes, I’m in. Another big broker.
Vanessa:
So, and I think the thing is, on the other side of this, whenever we get out of our lock downs and we go through this, wouldn’t it be so wonderful if we can collaborate more as an industry? Because the client experience would be so much better and we would probably have such a better reputation if we were able to not bring that drama that we think makes us look like a good agent, but only creates conflict and fear for our clients.
Vanessa:
But we actually brought this harmonious, working together, even complex situations and made it a positive consumer experience. And I’d love to see that happen with the industry on the other side of this. So, maybe. That’s what I’m hoping for, and anyone that asks, I will always give, because I had been given a huge amount from so many people within this industry that have shared with me so generously that I’m a huge believer of pay it forward, even if it’s your competitor, pay it forward, so.
Jonathan:
Love your passion. We’ve had the same conversation about, how does this industry work better together? And most of our markets, admittedly that we’re in are kind of smaller towns. And I think sometimes, and this is probably a little bit of a stereotype, the smaller towns tend to be a little more amicable maybe, than some of the bigger cities, because we run into the same agents over and over again. But we are in our larger spots, not quite as large as the Bay Area, where things seem to be maybe a little more tense and not as amicable. So, but I wanted to kind of wrap with one question. So you talked earlier about your days and how you’re spending your time each day and clearly the days in recent weeks are a lot different than the days in 2019 and early 2020. But, as you kind of work through your days right now, what’s the one detail that you’re sweating? What’s the one detail that you’re really kind of ultra focused on, on a daily basis?
Vanessa:
I think it’s communication. I think if it’s anything is, my own skillset, my teachers would disagree with me, but my own skillset growing up was my ability to communicate between different languages almost. Whether it was different social groups or different age groups or, there was always this ability to really kind of communicate authentically and from my heart, but a lot of that was really done in person, kind of belly to belly. And, I think, my one thing that I’ve got to figure out and that I’ve got to teach is, how can we communicate now through words and video? In ways that we may not ever get to communicate as easily face to face again. I don’t know, Jonathan, the next time I’m going to see you in real life, but I got to meet you and know you.
Vanessa:
I remember one night hanging out in Palm Springs and [crosstalk 00:34:52], yeah Palm Springs night. It’s those personal interactions that are these foundations for really, really great communication. So I think now it’s, I’m re learning the art of how to communicate on platforms like this and through audio and just communicate my own story and my own brand story. And I think I’ve got got to admittedly, go back to the table and learn and get comfortable in new platforms, so that my message and my agent’s message and my business message gets out to our community. And I think it’s going to take a new way to do that. Same authenticity as it did in real life, but there’s a new way to do it. And I think the interesting part is there may be a better way to do it and a bigger reach than anything I ever really experienced before. And I’m kind of embracing that challenge. Thank you. Thank you guys for the invite. I really appreciate it. It’s nice to meet you all virtually.
Keith:
Thanks, thanks for all the time. [crosstalk 00:35:57].
Vanessa:
Good luck. Stay safe.
(transcription thanks to Rev.com)