Episode 313 – Madeline Hammer, Executive Director Strategic Alliances – RE/MAX LLC

RE/MAX LLC is one of the top real estate firms in the United States, with thousands of franchises. With many partners across the country, RE/MAX has a diverse, talented group of people at the helm. Bill Risser interviews its Executive Director of Strategic Alliances, Madeline Hammer, about all things real estate. Madeline talks about her journey from writing to sales and real estate to venturing into data. Tune in for more real estate insights in this conversation. --- Madeline Hammer, Executive Director Strategic Alliances - RE/MAX LLC I am interviewing someone from Inman Connect Las Vegas, November 2021. I’m going to be talking to Madeline Hammer. She is Executive Director of Strategic Alliances with RE/MAX. She has a varied background including sales and then pivoting into real estate by way of Trulia and then into Zillow Group. I’m excited to get her story so let’s get this started. -- Madeline, welcome to the show. Thank you, Bill. I’m excited to be here. I always start the show the same way. Some people like it but others go, “Change it up a little bit,” and I’m like, “No because I want to find out about you. I want to find out where you come from.” You live in Denver with RE/MAX and it makes perfect sense to be in Denver. Are you a native Coloradan? Is that where you grew up? No, I am a Midwestern girl. I grew up in Northern Illinois in Rockford, Illinois. I went to college in Iowa. You are in Denver, Colorado for a reason. How long have you been there? I moved in 2004. Tell me what I need to know about Denver that I don’t know already. Denver has 300 days of sunshine a year. It’s an amazing four-season city with sunshine all the time. As a Midwestern person, I always have multiple snow shovels and in Colorado, I use them literally once a year. There is always like one big snowstorm that comes through and dumps but for the most part, all sunshine, cold but sunny. We can get cold weather for sure. Have you adopted the Broncos and the Rockies? No. I am still a Minnesota Vikings fan. [caption id="attachment_4201" align="aligncenter" width="600"] RE/MAX LLC: It is important to buy and have enough insurance without overbuying it and understand how the policies work.[/caption]   The Vikings are moving along. They are doing okay. They have had some runs, though. They have had some awesome runs. Let’s talk about growing up in the Midwest a little bit because you said you went to Iowa. I have driven across from Chicago to Dyersville, Iowa because that is where the Field of Dreams is. I have been there and that drive there is a lot of corn. When you grew up, you were in Rockford, probably a couple of hundred thousand people in Rockford. It is a nice big town. About 250,000 people. Tell me about growing up there a little bit. I grew up in an area that was called Churchill’s Grove. It was where there was a civil war camp. The names of the streets around me were civil war generals. I grew up on Camp Avenue. It was a historical area. Rockford City is divided by a very wide river and we lived on the West side of town. There was always a thing about the East versus West side of town. Even the high school have different names East and West. It was a good place to grow up. A lot of family in Chicago and so I went back and forth into Chicago quite a bit to see cousins. You went to Iowa. You are a Hawkeye. Hayden Fry, am I right? He was the football coach. He was there for a long time so you still follow them. That is your Big Ten team. That would be my Big Ten team. I will get all sports for a second but this year, Iowa and Iowa State played each other and both were ranked in the top ten. It’s cool to have both schools because they are in different conferences but I’m sure there is a massive rivalry in the state, Cyclones and the Hawkeyes. [bctt tweet="Denver has 300 days of sunshine a year. It’s an amazing four-season city with sunshine all the time. " username="billrisser"] You know your Iowa teams. I'm going to namedrop Sean Carpenter, who is a good friend of mine and a college football freak and I have to keep up with him. I do my best. Let’s tell me the path you were following as you went to Iowa. What were you going to be? What was your focus? What was your field to study? I wanted to go into Public Relations. Initially, when I went to college, I thought I was going to be a writer and a journalist and maybe a teacher. My dad was a college teacher. I then realized that I wanted to go more towards business. I thought I was going to go into Public Relations. I did Communication Studies and I did Journalism. I was in the Public Relations Student Society of America. When I graduated, I quickly found out there were three jobs in Public Relations in the town of Rockford so I wound up in sales. Your first job is in sales. Where you are now in your career, when you look back, all that stuff you have picked up at Iowa was important and then you start doing sales on top of that. Where were you working? John Deere Healthcare. The tractor people had a healthcare division? They did. They started one of the first HMOs and this was in the early ’90s. My first job was selling group health insurance to businesses. I was only in the business for about three years but I have always appreciated spending a good amount of time on insurance because it is so important to buy it and to have enough insurance, not to overbuy it, to understand how the policies work. You have insider information is what you are saying. Enough to make my own personal decisions. I am looking at your career path because I’m able to follow things online and figure stuff out. For me, the way I put it is heavy sales background with a cool pivot into strategic partnerships. Is that the arc for you? I spent a lot of time in sales and sales leadership in telecommunications. When I got a package from Qwest, I took the money and the pension that I had saved and I put it all towards an MBA. I knew I needed to leave telecommunications. I wanted to go more towards a growth industry. You did pick one. Let’s talk about that. You spent over seven years and I call it the Trulia-Zillow universe because of that. You were there when Trulia was acquired or partnered. I was there a couple of years beforehand so I was there for the IPO and I was there for the merger with Zillow. I was there for the first three years as Trulia and Zillow were together and came to the industry as a group. [caption id="attachment_4202" align="aligncenter" width="600"] RE/MAX LLC: We vet our vendors and partners carefully. In particular, with the Canada expansion too, we look for vendors who can serve both the US and Canada.[/caption]   I’m thinking about some of the things that happened because there was this Trulia was getting reviews and Zillow was getting reviews on their own before they partnered up. I’m in the review space now myself. Was that an issue at that time? How were they going to handle that? Ultimately, they went to both places. Is it with the reviews that were collected and how we merged the data? I don’t remember there being an issue with it. Being in strategic partnerships and broker relations, gathering reviews and sharing the importance of them was something that I was always speaking about in broker events, industry events and agent events encouraging them to gather them. We had been collecting them at Trulia for two years before we started publishing them to agent profiles so we had quite a library. When the merger happened with Zillow and then we combined the reviews, it became a real powerhouse for agents. When you think about it now, Zillow Group is still the leader in the number of reviews in that thing. Realtor.com is doing very well as well. We are doing our best to try to catch them both. We will see how that plays....