Episode 309 – Annette Anthony – Vice President, Technology Engagement – EXIT Realty

  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 Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend. Speaking of friends, I get to visit an old friend, Annette Anthony. She is the Vice President of Technology Engagement for EXIT Realty. I have known Annette for years and I have also had the opportunity to see her in action at EXIT onstage, emceeing rallies, doing training and hands-on stuff, which is my favorite. It's going to be fun to catch up with her, get some tips, tricks and technology which everyone can always use. Let's get this thing started. --- Annette, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I have known you for at least a decade, if not further back. I want to talk about our time in Phoenix together, but before we get there, are you a native of the Valley of the Sun? 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. You are close to Encanto Park and the golf course. 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. I know you love Arizona but there are parts of Arizona that after that long, get a little tiring. You are not a snowbird. I'm going to call you a summer bird because your home base feels like it's Phoenix and Scottsdale, but you take off in the summertime. Where do you head to? [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. A lot of these little things were happening in the Phoenix area, in the real estate world and at associations or in little different events. I swear that I know you from your SharperAgent days. I would see you in an office meeting where you were talking about the product. 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. Were you always techie even prior to that or has this ramped it up for you? [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? I remember going to an office building in Scottsdale into a fairly small conference room with you and about five EXIT agents. I think you had just gotten rolling with EXIT. Is that true at that point? 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...