Episode 319 – Joe Rand, Chief Creative Officer, Howard Hanna Rand Realty

  Admit it or not, we have different treatments to the buy-side of things compared to the selling side in real estate. In this episode, Joe Rand provides examples of these differences. Joe is the Chief Creative Officer of Howard Hanna Rand Realty, one of the country's largest family-owned real estate brokerages. He also discusses the vulnerabilities and not having proper assurances buyer agents face when dealing, which includes commissions. Stay tuned to learn more from Joe Rand because real estate is not just buying and selling, and it involves a lot more enclosed on those terms. --- Joe Rand, Chief Creative Officer-Howard Hanna Rand Realty Welcome to episode 319. Thank you so much for reading and for telling a friend. If you haven't guessed, he's back. Joe Rand is going to do a regular episode of the show. We did twenty episodes of Randing and Raving and had a lot of fun with that. With some of the things happening in the world with real estate, I thought I'd bring Joe back at his take as only Joe can do it. I'm not going to do an interview with Joe upfront about his background. I've done that before. To let you know quickly, he’s got a Law degree from Georgetown and JD from Stanford. He taught at Fordham and works with Howard Hanna Rand Realty in Westchester County. It's a family-owned business they've had for decades. He's one of the smartest guys I know in real estate. He might be the smartest guy I know in real estate. Who else but Joe to come on here and chat about some of these topics? Let's get this thing started. Joe, welcome to the show. Bill, how are you? It’s good to see you. I'm doing great. I'm so excited to get you back and fired up to chat with you. Some things are happening in the world of real estate that I thought, “Who can I get some knowledge about this? Who's the guy that knows what's going on and that'll be honest?” You called a bunch of people. You called Rob Hahn but he wasn't available. You called what's on the list, all the various doers but at some point, I returned your call because I like you, Bill. I took an interest in doing this. I appreciate it. I wasn't at the top of the list but I'm on the list, which is something. For those of you who've missed Joe's first episode, we have a traditional episode with Joe Rand where I do my thing and find out about how Joe got started in the business, what he did as a kid and all that great stuff. That’s not going to happen here. That was years ago before we knew each other. How we got to know each other was on the show. The only reason you knew who I was was that somebody had come on the show and said nice things about my book and then you said, “I got to interview this guy.” We interviewed and hit it off. I was lucky enough to be on what I think is the Bill Sessions Podcast, although I know it's not your name. Your name is Bill Risser. I was on that once but in 2021, we did something fun, which was me being my alter ego for weeks. I have a playlist on the website. You can go get all twenty Randing and Raving with Joe Rand. The theme was you would get questions from the public and they would give me an audio question. I would not know what it is in advance and not be prepared for it. I would have to be spontaneous to respond. The idea, as you initially pitched that to me, was that whenever I do a podcast, I'm pretty good for about 30 minutes to 40 minutes and then get tired. I start getting little nuts because my medication wears off. You're like, “I want you in the post medication phase to the part where you start to lose control of yourself.”   [caption id="attachment_4263" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Real Estate: The next three to five years something disruptive will happen to the buy-side commission at about 20 to 25%, which is a lot higher than a year ago.[/caption]   This happens on stage. You speak a lot around the country. It's my favorite part sitting in the audience going, “I can see it coming and happening. He's going to go off on that thing.” I do. I get bored with myself. I'm like, “I got to level this thing up.” We had fun with that. That was a great thing. For anybody who never heard it, go back and look for them because they hold up. All the issues we talked about are still relevant. Most people have a burning question as to whether they would rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck, which is one of the questions we answered and what you should do if you steal stuff from a supermarket. That was another good one. Plus, some real estate stuff that we covered but we want to have a serious one because this is a serious show. It's a real substance show, not my normal BS. I might try to play the straight answer question and see what you have to say and if I can help out people and give them some insight into what's going on. Not so fast. I got some emails still hanging around. I thought, even though we're part of this show, I'm going to throw you an audio question. It was one of the topics I wanted to cover anyway. It works out perfectly. What do you think? Are you up for it? Do you want to keep the format? We're doing a crossover episode. I'm going back to the 1970s when someone from Friends would show up on Seinfeld or something. Let's get those audio questions. Here we go. “Willie here from Melbourne. I'm a big fan and reckon you've got an opinion over this passion between NAR and the DOJ. Overall, the policy has been around for years so I'm hoping you would mind giving us your take. I liked your show and that Risser guy, he's amazing. Cheers.” That is shameful, Risser. What are you talking about?   [bctt tweet="It's all contingent that if you don't buy something, you pay nothing." username="billrisser"]   Risser, you can pick up on this. When we stopped doing the Randy and Raving, people stopped leaving messages. Risser didn't have any voicemails. He made himself a voicemail faking his voice with an Australian accent that he got because he hangs out all this time with all these Aussies from RateMyAgent but he still hasn't picked up a decent accent. That is horrible. That is not as clearly you teeing me up to talk about all the stuff that's going on with the NAR lawsuits and the Department of Justice. It's a fine question, Bill. I'm amazed that you had to resort to that shamefulness to incorporate an audio message that you made for yourself. Councilor, I plead the fifth. You don't want to incriminate yourself. I respect that. Despite the fraudulent nature of that voicemail, Bill, you trying to fake your audience and mislead them into thinking that people are still calling the Randing and Raving line, even though we both know the only people that called in were your buddy from Arizona and a bunch of Russian bots, besides the fact that it's a good question. What it does is it tees up. We’ll separate it into two issues because two things are going on with all the lawsuits and antitrust. One is clear cooperation and the other one is the seller paid buyer agent commission. Let's talk about the latter one first, the seller paid buyer agent commission. There is a lot of concern and suspicion that both the DOJ and these lawsuits against NAR wind their way through the courts that there is some threat to the system by which sellers pay a commission to the buyer agents and the buyer agents don't have to pay their buyer agents. It gets rolled into the purchase of the home On a fundamental level, I want to explain why I think that the whole thing is nonsense. The people think, “This is a bad thing,” and it raises prices and all that stuff. To me, it’s self-motivated reasoning from people that want to blow up the real estate industry or have the business model that they're trying to play up. That is this, the system works very well. The reason the system works is that there's an offer of cooperation out from the seller, which is usually a unilateral offer of compensation so when you're working with a buyer agent, that buyer agent can show you anything that’s in the market. It's not like buying anything else or a car. If you want to buy a car, you have to go to fifteen different lots. If we didn't have cooperation, you'd have to go to fifteen different brokers because every broker would have only their properties to show you. Instead, you go to one agent and that agent represents you as your fiduciary and they can show you anything in the market. You don't have to come out of pocket for those services at all. It's all contingent that if you don't buy something, you pay nothing. It's not a bad deal for the buyers. This idea if everyone's getting screwed by the system, the buyers get a good service out of it. The sellers get a good service because they pay one commission, which covers the entire transaction and essentially,...