Episode 381 - Matthew Rathbun, Broker - Coldwell Banker Elite

00:00:00 - Matthew Rathbun

More and more, if you aren't paying attention, you should. More and more, we know these consumers have their favorite of either realtor or zillow, and now homes is really coming to play. We could say all we want, but they exist because we neglected what the consumer wanted at a pivotal time, which is what I see agents doing with AI now and some other things. That door was open and somebody said, I will fill that need. And they did. And they did it better than real estate industry said.

00:00:28 - Bill Risser

You're listening to The Real Estate Sessions and I'm your host, Bill Risser. With nearly 25 years in the real estate business, I love to interview industry leaders, up-and-comers, and anyone with a story to tell. It's the stories that led my guests to a career in the real estate world that drive me into my 9th year and nearly 400 episodes of the podcast. And now I hope you enjoy the next journey. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 381 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend. Well, we set a record on this episode. My guest, Matthew Rathbun, is with Coldwell Banker Elite out of Fredericksburg, Virginia. They kind of cover the whole Virginia, DC, Maryland area. He's a broker. He's also Executive Vice President of other areas. He's a speaker, he's a trainer. He's a bright guy and I couldn't let him go, so you're going to be listening to, and I'm telling you, just disregard that number down on the player that says it's over an hour, it's worth every second. So I think you're going to get a lot of great information out of here. We're talking about a lot of different topics that are important today. So let's get this thing started. Matthew, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:43 - Matthew Rathbun

Hey there. Thanks for having me.

00:01:45 - Bill Risser

I am so excited to have you on the know, I've known about you for literally a decade. We've never really talked in person prior to meeting in person at the bar camp, re bar camp, one coast that we did up in Jacksonville a few weeks ago. And anyway, I had a chance to sit down, have a meal. I really enjoyed the conversation and I think you're going to have some great nuggets for the listeners today. You also have kind of a cool backstory. We're going to talk about that, but very excited to get this thing going.

00:02:16 - Matthew Rathbun

Yeah, me know. First of all, the re bar camp was such a great event. It was so much fun to you know, some of these things that we follow each other on Twitter, Facebook and all these things over the years, and I still, you get to sit down with people at table that I've met for years and maybe I haven't talked to them for years and get what's going on in their life now and where our world focus and views have changed and it's just, I don't know, I love that experience and it was great hanging out with you down there in Florida. Cool.

00:02:43 - Bill Risser

Well, let's start where I always start. I'm sure listeners that have been around for nine years know what I'm going to say next. But look, you live and work in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which had to do a little recon. I know I've driven through it on the way to see my son in DC from Florida, but you're about. Is it halfway between Richmond and the DC area? Does that sound about right?

00:03:04 - Matthew Rathbun

Yeah, by miles. It is about halfway right in the middle of the state capitol and in the nation's capital. But if you go south, you will get there in an hour. If you go north because of traffic, you may get there the following day. So, yeah, it's somewhere right in the middle when you look at a map.

00:03:22 - Bill Risser

But yeah, boy, I found out that the hard way, the first trip we took up there, we decided, hey, we'll just go to Jacksonville, spend the night there, give us a little head start leaving St. Pete, and then it won't be 14 hours. It was 14 hours from Jacksonville. It was unbelievable on I 95. But you're a native as well, of the Fredericksburg area, right. You were born and raised there?

00:03:46 - Matthew Rathbun

I was actually. I born and raised here. And actually just yesterday I was talking to someone I was about an hour south of have we just in January opened our newest office, which is in Richmond, the state capital. So I'm imaging that. And I was down there with a new agent doing a home inspection and met the home inspector, and he's like, I'm from somewhere you'd never heard of called Fredericksburg. I'm like, you mean an hour north where I've lived all my life? I don't know that I appreciate being told no one's ever heard of it, but it's also better known as a landmark of where the traffic ends if you're going north on 95 where, where the backup tends to start. But yeah, I've been here my whole life and my wife and I got married 30 years ago, almost 31 years ago now, and we just stayed here. We had no reason not to. We did live a little further south here. We did a church plant, and we're in a leadership team for about six years. And as soon as we realized God didn't hate us anymore. No, just kidding. We went back home, came back here to Fredericksburg. And it has really grown up over the years. I mean, it's just to see so much real estate development and to know a little bit about where that dirt used to be and where it came from over now. I turned 49 last week. 49 years. The owner of my firm and I were sitting having coffee, and if he didn't know the person walking by at the coffee shop, I did. We never get anything done if we sit in public together. But it has definitely its charm and its history here, which I love. I like traveling a great deal, and there are times where I fantasize about maybe moving to a big city or another area. My wife, on the other hand, thinks this is as big as she wants to get, so I'd rather live with her than in the city. So here's where we are. This is our.

00:05:23 - Bill Risser

Smart, very smart, Matthew. I'll tell you, for me, I can't even imagine. It was a big deal for me the first time I went to Washington, DC. It wasn't on a school trip. It was later on in my adult life. We took our son that whole know, because I grew up in California, then I lived in Phoenix. But you're right in the center of the history of this country, going back as far as the revolutionary war, the civil war. Oh, my gosh. And so I just wonder, do you get to a point, like, for someone who lives in Manhattan, you just kind of take it for granted, or do you really have this appreciation for the history that you're just surrounded by?

00:06:02 - Matthew Rathbun

So, interestingly enough, going up through was my add had set in very early. I was disinterested in anything that wasn't hands on right in front of me. Civics really brought some of this to life when my civics teacher, because it's always that one teacher you have, it was 7th grade civic. Sorry. And she just really started making like, hey, this is where things were signed, and this is where the first president lived, and this is how they grew up. And then as a kid, I feel especially for american history or american children, it's all just old people signing stuff. And you don't really get the different phases, you think, okay, you don't think about the colonial occupation beforehand, all that. So hit about mid 20s or so, my wife and I started. I really started hiking and going on trails and reading the historical plaques that is everywhere around us and going to the museums and reading the stuff there and putting it all together. And then came Hamilton, a musical. And I mean, who doesn't love history after that? No, I'm kidding. Well, before that, it just really put it together for me. But more than any of it, you learn things better by teaching. And we decided to homeschool our girls. And so we would do field trips all the time to get them excited about it. And so I would learn more about it and read so many books to walk through the paths that people have taken here, to go to DC routinely and think these monuments and things we've seen have been here for hundreds of years and they were there for a reason, really brings it to life. So I became a history nerd much later in my 20s before going into general brokerage. When I showed property or a buyer's end, they got an entire history. Matter of fact, more and more my clients, if you read my early years as a buyer's agent, would give me reviews about giving them history lessons and bringing things to life about the properties. We have homes that still have fragments of a cannon from the civil war on the side of their house, down by the. You know the phrase sideburns comes from General Sideburn. Well, that was his nickname, General Burns here in Fredericksburg. And to be able to share those little nuances made the area come alive to the buyers. And it wasn't just the house or a transaction. And it also overcome that kind of awkwardness when you're first meeting someone, they don't have anything in common. So I definitely used it for sellability. I still do my listing descriptions and selling the community heavily here, being outside of DC and going up there a lot, being. Walking on those stones and appreciating it and more so when you become leaders in anything, when you become a broker or a company leader or. I've always had leadership roles in every job, I've had to really think about what the leaders before us went through. And it's easy to get really bogged down with how poorly presented our elected officials are now versus the statesmen and the brilliant minds we had before and the weights they must have carried on their shoulder. I don't know. It's a big thing for me. I love it. I love it very much.

00:08:53 - Bill Risser

Yeah, that's fantastic. I'm so happy to hear that, that it's not just, you know, it's just know. And DC is just north of us. It's not that kind of an attitude. It really is a special place for this entire country, so it's very cool. Now, I got this sports angle. To me, I have to bring it up because my son lives in Washington, DC now. He works for a not for profit. He's kind of in the Adams Morgan area. I like to say this. He's right down the street from the Washington Hilton, which is a very famous place back in 1980.

00:09:22 - Matthew Rathbun

It is.

00:09:23 - Bill Risser

That's where Reagan was shot, right? I think right outside the side entrance there. So my question is this. Is it safe to assume you're a Nats fan? The caps, I mean, recent Stanley cup for them. The Nats had a recent World Series win. The commanders. Oh, well. And the mean. Do you follow the DC sports? Did you grow up that way as a.

00:09:45 - Matthew Rathbun

Did? Well, you know, we grew up watching professional wrestling as a kid, so it's kind of tainted what you see as sportsmanship after that. But, no, my grandfather and my father were, they were big, like, again, professional wrestlers with professional. And air quotes for those who are listening in. No, my father actually was a very talented ball player, and he had a lot of struggles and a lot of demons in his life, but he was a very talented baseball player, and he got me hooked on baseball very early on. I love sports. I love the drama. I love the story. If you really get to know the players and the leaders and all that kind of stuff and how hard it must be to command those things, and you start thinking about more than just a guy or a gal throwing a ball or hitting a ball, I got to say, I did try pickleball. I find that pickleball is stealing it here from a comedian, but it really stuck with me. It's for people who aren't talented enough for tennis or too old for tennis or who are too poor for golf, and it's right in the middle. I picked up golf last year, and that comedian's joke made a whole lot more sense after I started playing golf. Commanders. I love football. The team has had a lot of bad years, decades of bad years. So it leads me to watch other better teams play for a while with just keep hoping and making excuses for this team. The Caps love going to see it. I don't watch it much on tv. I do like watching see it. I got to say, I'm not a big basketball fan. I'm sorry for those listeners who are. I can only like so many things, but baseball still is where my heart and soul is. I love to play. I love to watch. Actually, we have a minor league team that is just about five minutes from my house that built one of the most beautiful stadiums. Matter of fact, other minor leagues come in and look at it. Our company has a box suite seat up there, and there's 77 games. We hit a lot of them, as many as we possibly can. And watching the young kids who are coming up through the ranks early on is so much more fun, from my opinion, than the professionals. So, yeah, big sports guy.

00:11:42 - Bill Risser

Is it a single a team in Fredericksburg?

00:11:45 - Matthew Rathbun

It is. Yeah, it sure is. Okay.

00:11:47 - Bill Risser

Yeah. That's going to be a lot of youngsters. These are people that, some that got drafted out of college, maybe some other free agents, but then there might be that one or two. They got the one or two or $3 million bonus, got the nice car, and they're trying to make it to the bigs. That's very cool.

00:12:05 - Matthew Rathbun

Yeah. And a lot of them actually aren't. Some of them don't even speak English well, but they just play, and they play with their whole heart, and they put everything out in the field because they're trying to get that job and they're not worried about what sponsorships they're getting. They're just trying to get on the team. They just love the just. It's just fun to watch them and get to know them a little bit.

00:12:23 - Bill Risser

Matthew, I'm going to use basic math, or the fact that you told me this at dinner in Jacksonville, but real estate, knowing the number of years you were in it, real estate was not your first gig, which is by far the path most people in real estate take. There's always something first. Right. I've found over time, the service industry, a bartender, that sort of thing, that's very popular, and then also teaching and nursing.

00:12:49 - Matthew Rathbun

Right.

00:12:49 - Bill Risser

These empathy kind of roles are there. And so let's share with the listeners, what was your first job? What were you going to do? What were you doing before real estate found you?

00:13:01 - Matthew Rathbun

Yeah. My first job was actually working in the nursing home kitchen at 14. So that was not my first real job, though. That was my first job. I loved working. I could not wait to get out of the house and start making money and get in the workforce and did not particularly enjoy sitting around in class listening to a teacher repeat the same thing 14 times for those people who weren't paying attention or didn't care about academics. And so I was eager to get into workforce. That led to, interestingly enough, I worked in the kitchen nursing home.

00:13:28 - Matthew Rathbun

That led to being an orderly. As soon as I hit 16, which led to a nurse there saying, I think you'd be good at this. And so I started taking EMT classes. And back then they let you do a lot more as a teenager than they do now. And for good reason that they don't allow that now. But I started at 16 and just basically every minute I could stay at the firehouse or the EMS agency and eventually just really had more of a focus on emergency medicine, pre hospital medicine, as an EMS medic. And that led to becoming a dispatcher for the sheriff's office. And they found out I was a medic. I was a young guy in my late teens. They asked me if I would be attached to their, they called it Ert, but basically a local SWAT team because they needed a medic on it to be certified.

00:14:14 - Matthew Rathbun

And then eventually went to the academy and then worked as an officer for a period of time. Those careers all had learning opportunities, both good and bad. I learned things I didn't like about myself. Like if I look back now at 49 versus when I was in my twenty s and teens, I didn't necessarily like, I would not like who I was at all back then.

00:14:33 - Matthew Rathbun

But there was other parts of me that had a deep dedication to people and community. I loved volunteering and then loved it even more when I started getting a check for doing what I loved. And I just really focused on that. My wife and I got married at 18, and we are still married now, 30, almost 31 years later. To surprise of many who knew us in our teen and career, I put it beyond for everything else, for me. And there's so many incredibly good officers. My brother is an officer in the District of Columbia.

00:15:04 - Matthew Rathbun

He's a sergeant there now. He's been through some stuff. It's a rough gig, especially in modern times, and more so in the district. I have great admiration for him and who he is and the man that he is. I wanted to go do that and chase adrenaline and got caught up in that world, which led to some not being a good father, not being a good husband, and so decided to do something else. And while I was searching for what else I wanted to do, we found, well, my wife has always been a very faithful person to religion in general. But I started saying, okay, I need something more in my life, something more than the accolades of doing this job, the adrenaline rush, whatever. And so left that industry, loved the people who were there. They do an amazing job. Many of them are still there all these years later.

00:15:53 - Matthew Rathbun

Focused on my marriage, focused on what I wanted to do next. My mother in law, misery loves company. My mother in law, being a real estate agent, said, go get your license, do it for a year while you go to school, figure out what else we want to do.

00:16:05 - Matthew Rathbun

And now here we are 21 years later. I get to wake up every morning and decide if I'm going to be a marketer, if I'm going to be a negotiator, if I'm going to go focus just and take the day off to go be a good husband or, my girls are older now, we have a grandkid and I can travel and go do those things. And I don't know any other career that would have allowed me to grow as this one has and be different. The different things about life I enjoy and pay quite well for you.

00:16:31 - Bill Risser

You know, the roles that you have with cobalt banker elite. Correct. In that Fredericksburg area, you cover a lot of different, you cover a lot of territory. Just kind of lay out a little bit of the stuff that you do there besides sell real estate.

00:16:49 - Matthew Rathbun

Yeah, we're exhausting. We have now ten offices going from northern part of Virginia into Richmond. And also I'm licensed in DC and Maryland, in addition to Virginia, I am the principal broker in DC and I am the executive vice president on the brokerage team here in Virginia and Maryland. The owner, I answered to him, he hired me. Strangely enough. We had lunch. He's an incredibly interesting man and quite frankly, one of the few people in this industry who is the real deal. He loves people. He's incredibly smart, patient enough to keep me on staff. But we met for lunch and I had been an agent for a while. I was a broker at a small office for a while. Then I worked for the realtor association in addition to keeping my license active during the short sale period of a time. And I worked a couple short sales while working on staff as the ed director. The association and I didn't really particularly like that job. The association is amazing. I'm still actually the vice president for my local association, president elect for Rebi national, that's the education affiliate for NAR. Still heavily involved in association. Loved it. I just didn't like working for members on staff. It was too limiting. I had too many opinions I wanted to share and couldn't. And I honestly wanted to go back to making money based on my efforts, not on just a fixed salary. So I didn't really let it be known that I was looking for a job. And he reached out to me and said, hey, if you're looking, I want to just talk to you. We went to lunch for 2 hours. Didn't once ask me for a resume or my production or philosophies of business. He asked about family, and it was very important to him. And I figured out later on that is the most important thing. And he also adopts everybody he brings in, whether they're an agent or staff. So he said, I don't know what I want you to do, but I want you to come work for me. And here's our salary. And so for the first six months, I wandered around doing whatever I wanted and having no direction and spending morning and night trying to fix things, better policies, better tools, meeting with the agents one on one, and coaching. And then he came to one day, I said, can you just run operations for me? And I said, sure. And I didn't know what I was getting into. But that was 14 years ago, and we have grown and we have seen some challenges and we have just some other ones. But he's a very gracious person who gives me a lot of leash to do a lot of things. And we've created some just amazing careers here and things to be proud of. But more than the production and awards, we have a huge impact in our community. We're very involved in nonprofits, supporting agents, talking to them about their staff and helping out. And somebody gets sick at our company to watch the agents flock to help them. It's just an amazing thing. We have about 220 agents and staff in the company. So we're not big but not small.

00:19:30 - Bill Risser

It would seem like with leadership, ownership like that, and the owner of the company, as well as you, that taking away that whole transaction part of real estate and just making it another deal just probably doesn't exist in Coldwell Banker elite. I'm going to think that you use language more like, we're here to serve families and we're here to help people with this most important thing in their life, as opposed to, hey, we need to get x number of deals because we got to get this done. Am I going down the right path? Does that sort of thing follow from the efforts that you put into really taking care of people?

00:20:08 - Matthew Rathbun

Yeah, I love how you phrase that. And I have to say that I feel like the speech I give more often than anything else to the agents is you are their guide, not always their hero. That comes for certain moments. But we don't start from marketing as the hero. We start from marketing as a guide. And if you put the people first and we do a tremendous amount of training, that is a huge thing. Every day, almost every single day during the week, we have some level of education, and we record it, and there's a library, and it's just all there for them. And education is probably the biggest reason why people come and stay. And I don't care whether we're talking about your business plan.

00:20:44 - Matthew Rathbun

I don't care whether we're talking about how to represent buyers. We start with the position of, we want to respect the trust they gave us. It isn't earned just because we passed the test and got a license. And if you put their interests first, that builds the business. Zig Ziglar would talk about, if you want to reach your own goals, help as many people as you can. I'm paraphrasing, not nearly as brilliant as he was with that word.

00:21:08 - Matthew Rathbun

He also said, marriage is grand, divorce is 100 grand. Both of those things have guided me through a lot of career and life plans and questions that come up. But the reality is that from my own practice, when I sit down with that seller and I'm talking about selling their home, I am incredibly conscientious of the fact that they have an eight or nine year old kid who has grown up in his home, and this is the only world they've known, and they have realized what the world is and isn't around them.

00:21:39 - Matthew Rathbun

They have laughed, they've had birthday parties, all the rest. And that I will ask the know, do you mind if, can they come and sit with us? I want to talk to them for just a I and I stole it from Sean Carpenter, a mutual friend of ours, and I've never let it go, and I always give him credit when I talk about it. But we have a little kids listing agreement, and it's literally a direct rip off of what Sean taught in a class one time. How dare he share that and not expect me to rip it off. No, he knows. But we use that, and we sit with the kids and go, hey, can you keep your room clean, all this stuff? And do you have questions for about what's going to happen? And it's amazing the questions these kids come up with.

00:22:12 - Matthew Rathbun

But mom and dad, that's the moment where they see we're different. When I get there and I open up a notebook and I'm like, I am here to ask questions today, and I'll give you advice tomorrow. My second meeting with you, and I take copious notes of everything they're saying, and I don't hide behind a laptop.

00:22:26 - Matthew Rathbun

I'm not ushering them through. It is sit there to listen. It makes it very easy to address their needs and to remember those things. And we build a lot of tactics in our agents about that, but really more so, not just with how we treat our clients. My agents have heard this sermon. As a matter of fact, they call it the Matthew Ted talk because I give about once a year as an agent, when you sit there in their dinner and you pick up that phone during dinner, you have told your children and your partner that that phone call or that text was more important than they are for that moment because you didn't even carve out the 1 hour time with them.

00:22:59 - Matthew Rathbun

That's not a way to have a successful business because if we are not in our personal lives put together, there's no way to be our best in our professional lives. But also, I did this to support my family, to build a better future for them and put the girls through college. I'm not sacrificing them for another trophy or award or whatever. And so when we're talking to our agents, it is twofold. It can't be totally self sacrificed. You're running a business. You need to have a budget and a plan. You need to walk away from clients who are toxic and they're going to abuse you. But at the same time, those people you do choose to work with should be worthy of your time.

00:23:32 - Matthew Rathbun

And then they deserve the best of you that they can get, except when it is at the cost of your family. So to me, it's a very straight path, those three elements. But for a lot of agents, I find them get confused. And I believe that when they get confused about who's really important, agents will brag about the fact that they were supposed to be at the amusement park with their kids today, but they put that on hold because they had an out of town client coming in. What has that said to you? I've got to live with that kid for the rest of your life. But I am actually training my kid to be a parent. And I find a lot of people in the upcoming generation who are being labeled as lazy and all the rest aren't lazy.

00:24:12 - Matthew Rathbun

They don't want to treat their family the way that our parents may have treated us and neglected us for an award, a trophy or a better office in the building. I think that we have to work on our own mental health and give license to those around us to say, your family isn't worth sacrificing for this, you aren't worth sacrificing for this. And to get better life balance, choose better clients and be more effective when you work with them.

00:24:36 - Bill Risser

You're making me flashback to an old song. You might be too young for this, but cats in the cradle, Harry Chapin. Rough tune about making time for your family. Very important.

00:24:48 - Matthew Rathbun

Yeah, no, I totally know that song. Look, if anything written. Let me just be clear. Anything written after 1995, and even that's sketchy, isn't music. So it's got to be sixty s. Seventy s. Eighty s are great. 90s. We start getting muddy. If anybody disagrees with me. Boy bands, that's what you need to know about what happened in the 90s. If that's the best we could do, that tells you how bad the music got.

00:25:13 - Bill Risser

All right, all you swifties, just leave them alone. It's okay. Don't worry about it. Let's see. I love the way you care about your agents. I heard you on another podcast. I'm being real honest here. Once again, I'll credit Nar and Monica's, what she's doing over there. It's very cool. But something came up about change. There's so much change is inevitable in the world of real estate. There's all kinds of stuff happening. But you have a really interesting kind of take, right on the topic of change and that challenge it presents with agents. Would you mind sharing that here?

00:25:50 - Matthew Rathbun

You have to remind me. What, my nod? No. Look, I think change is something that can happen for your blessing and your benefit, or you can take it and perceive it as something happening to you. It isn't happening to you. Whether it is the lawsuits, and I know most of us both, as speakers, as brokers, we're kind of in this. We get it. There's a lawsuit. We know what the consumers issues are, and we're all focused on that. But AI is a significant change. And for the first time ever, I've always thought there was room for you run your business the way you want to, and you can be profitable.

00:26:29 - Matthew Rathbun

Whether you're shaking hands and kissing babies in person, or whether you're sitting on a keyboard generating leads with a team, and there's people in the middle. I truly feel that AI agents without AI are going to get drastically outpaced by agents who are using it for a variety of reasons. That how we choose our clients in our future, how many touches we give them throughout a transaction, our marketing efforts, and how we gain traction with our clients. These are significant changes coming up. And to take the position that it's happening to me to be antagonistic or to wait for it to manifest, test itself in a way, I have no choice.

00:27:06 - Matthew Rathbun

To change it's first of all, going to be incredibly stressful for you, but it also is going to cost you a lot of money in business coming down the road, but rather to see it and go, hey, this opportunity, whether I like it or not, is happening.

00:27:17 - Matthew Rathbun

This change is happening. What can I do to get out in front of it? What can I do to increase my business by learning about the ideology, where it came from and why, and not be mad at a consumer who sues us because they didn't understand the commission and some of that stuff is nonsense, right? One of the people in the lawsuit was saying, or some of them were saying I had no options. I didn't know there was choices. That's probably not true. They probably knew it was negotiable.

00:27:45 - Matthew Rathbun

But the real question is, are we continuing to see what the consumer wants and to be overt about it? Let me talk to you about all the things I do. Don't take for granted just because I have a license. I am an agent and you should trust me, but rather say, I got to earn your trust from beginning to the end of the transaction and then for your future referrals and all the rest.

00:28:06 - Matthew Rathbun

That's what these consumers are telling us, is they don't see the value. And it's not that it's not there, it's that they don't see it. I do a lot of, again, I'm on a lot of leadership roles within state, national, local association. The National association of Realtors has tremendous value. I will stand on that hill and fight for it all the day long. But we suck at communicating it. We are horrible communicators of all the materials that we've created, all the resources, all the tools, all the applications, all the work that we do to defend both homeowners and buyers from a legislative standpoint. To be real, to be honest, there's no national association of homebuyers or National association of home Sellers.

00:28:45 - Matthew Rathbun

I think Kevin Sears has said something similar to that before. There's no one looking out for their interest because again, our elected officials are pretty inept right now. They're not getting a lot of laws passed. And so these lobbyists and these local rules and these state rules that are highly influenced by the association of realtors are benefiting consumers and us.

00:29:02 - Matthew Rathbun

We're just not good at telling the story. And so we need to get better at that. These changes that are coming up, not only should the agents have an open mind about it and try to find out what it is that just reduces your stress and try to say, okay, it is happening. What do I do next? You should be seeking out brokers and companies. I don't care what name is on the door, I just don't. I'm very proud of my company at Coldbanker Elite. I think cold Banker is a great franchise, but if there's not a good broker delivering that message from the franchise to their agents, there's a disconnect.

00:29:35 - Matthew Rathbun

Brokers need to be setting the example for this. If I'm telling my agents that video has a 403 times higher conversion rate for your marketing than any other tool, I, the broker, better be doing those things. If I'm telling the agents that having a CRM is something that's essential to them, I need to be doing those things because I can't lead change that I myself have not embraced and shown and exemplified for my agents to also do. They will follow the worst of you just like kids do. They will take up your worst traits. And so there's just a higher standard for leaders who have a plan for change and execute on it, and I think there has to be a plan for it.

00:30:10 - Matthew Rathbun

The second I hear that a major change is coming by, I'm putting pen to paper and go, okay, what steps do I need to incorporate into my business? Not all of these changes are things that we have to incorporate. When QR codes first came out, I was fairly dismissive. I mean, they were fun, but I didn't think we needed them. And then Covid happened and all of a sudden that's the only way to find out what food you're going to order in a restaurant that you're not supposed to be in without wearing a mask or being vaccinated. And now they've got their anyway. So I think that change is something that you have to find leaders who can take you through the change. And then you have to be open to see it as what's the best. When you do your swot analysis, when you list your threats, you're not listing your threats to be afraid of them.

00:30:50 - Matthew Rathbun

You're listing the threats to go, how do I overcome them and how do I create business opportunities from a threat that we may be facing? So I could talk about that forever and ever. I'll stop there just to say I think we have a much more healthy balance about it. It's not happening to us. It's happening and we need to figure out how to adjust to it.

00:31:08 - Bill Risser

I can see why you were a natural for leadership roles at the local, state and national level. That's really important to you. Isn't it?

00:31:18 - Matthew Rathbun

I think a lot of people paved the path for me before I got here. Just today, we were at a leadership development session, and I'm at a point now where I'm trying to remember to shut up more often and let other people talk. And this is one of my worst leadership traits, is I want to be the first one to solve a problem. This comes from being a teenager who was a medic and then eventually a cop, where people called you because they wanted you to fix their problem. Them. And being the father of daughters was a great way to learn how to shut up and listen because they didn't want to be fixed.

00:31:47 - Matthew Rathbun

I'm still learning that lesson, but part of our leadership role. They ask, how long before you started volunteering? Three months after I got my license, because, quite frankly, education was a big deal to me and we didn't have any. And I was like, what do I need to do to get this done? I'm like, join the education committee. And that's where it started. I think it's important to give back to people. And I also feel like you only get to talking about change and accepting it.

00:32:17 - Matthew Rathbun

If you don't like the change, you should be in the position to make those changes. And so stepping up and doing that, it's been 21 years. I've reached a lot of goals, personal goals, throughout that time. And to be clear, my national work has been some committee grunt work where I never chaired anything there. Rebi is an affiliate of NAR, and I did the committee work, and now I'm in the president elect position of an amazing organization. It is a model for every organization. It's just so well ran, and there's some dedicated people there.

00:32:48 - Matthew Rathbun

But I got to know, Bill, as I'm saying this out loud, and this is not a question that we were talking about, but I was fairly burned out when I landed in Florida. I feel like I just should be honest. When I was coming to Florida and I shared this with you through Sean, I think. Sean Carpenter. When I landed in Florida, I was like, man, I don't know that I have anything else in me to give right now. I feel like I'm being careful about my worldview and what I'm sharing, because not everybody agrees with how to accept change, or maybe there is some validity to challenges we have about communicating our value, these type of things.

00:33:24 - Matthew Rathbun

And then I got a chance to sit with you and a handful of other people who are smart and honest. And I was like, this is why I volunteer, not just to lead and make decisions, but to meet people who are giving me better ideas than I would have had, to meet people who also believe that we have a better future, to believe that our consumers have to come first, these are important things to me, and I found that through a lot of my peers in leadership, because when you go to things, if you get agents together, and I look at some of these Facebook groups here, these national Facebook groups, and I don't believe that's the best of us sometimes.

00:33:59 - Matthew Rathbun

I believe there's a lot of people who are saying things that are probably unlawful to say. I think there's a lot of people who are pushing bad practices and not putting a consumer first.

00:34:09 - Matthew Rathbun

And those are some of the people I look at and go, that's why consumers are mad at us, because that person took advantage of them or that person didn't give them the full fiduciary statutory duties that they have to them. And so it's very easy to get bogged down with the negativity in here if you're not surrounding yourself with people who are visionaries, who are thinkers, who are going to uplift you, who are going to be peers with you, and it's got to be, first your company.

00:34:32 - Matthew Rathbun

But then you can find that when you start volunteering. If I could just throw out one more caution, and I know I went completely different direction from the question you asked, but volunteering in a healthy manner when it starts affecting, because I've seen people who are getting totally into their careers and getting leadership and on board of directors, and I'm also on the board of director for some nonprofits in my area. And I've watched, even for those people where they're absolutely not paid, there's no financial advantage at all. They're giving 110%, and they got littles at home, or they got a partner at home who's trying to raise their family while they're out volunteering, because it gives them that thing. It's got to be a healthy dose. You have to budget your time for what's appropriate. I can afford to put more of it in than others because I'm a broker, and my job is to be with agents, and that's how I recruit and that's how I teach, that's how I develop.

00:35:20 - Matthew Rathbun

If you're a boots on the ground agent, volunteer for things that you're passionate about, just enough to contribute, but not enough to sacrifice your career or your family over. So there's got to be a healthy balance, and you should know where you are, and not one plan fits everybody. It's really up to you to make.

00:35:35 - Bill Risser

That decision, Matthew, with just looking at, first of all, your website. Unbelievable. Matthewrathbun.com, by the way, look in the show notes. You can get that there. You are incredibly well organized. I don't know if that was something that you really mastered at a young age or if it's something you picked up later in life. But one of the examples is the resources tab. I'm just telling people this, the resources tab@matthewrathbun.com. Where you've actually laid out and you break down based on the category and how these different tools help. There might be a couple hundred links in there where I can go if I've got a question about something.

00:36:18 - Matthew Rathbun

Right.

00:36:18 - Bill Risser

And you're even staying very current. First of all, where did all that come from? What's inside you? What's that thing you mentioned add earlier and maybe that's a part of it, right? Making sure that everything is in the right place, possibly. I don't know. But also, I always like to ask people that are very good at collecting this data, give me your top five right now, the links that you always have to give out because they're very popular, right? It's not something. I guess that's, maybe you throw a couple in there because they're your favorite. How's that?

00:36:52 - Matthew Rathbun

Well, okay. You got a lot of links. Yeah. Let me tackle some of that in different ways. My bedroom was always clean, always squared away. My siblings weren't. I'm the oldest of five. My mom was a collector of clutter, always clutter. And my dad was a let mom do whatever she wants to do kind of guy. I left home very early again. I was 16 when I got out. My parents weren't bad people, but they were hippies who never left that life, so ever that left that life. And so they were very free spirits. Very free spirits. A lot of just things that just, it wasn't me. So my room was always very clean and squared away. My schoolwork was always very organized. But I had to do that because my mind and I do have add and touch ADHD and I listened to everybody now is trying to take medication, and some people are way worse than mine.

00:37:49 - Matthew Rathbun

They need to take medication. But everybody now is going in on social and going, well, I had this condition, or some people are calling a disease and all these things, it's my superpower. But I had to work hard to organize my mind to focus on these things at night. Still again, at 49, I will have a candle here, my room has to be vacuumed and clean and organized.

00:38:12 - Matthew Rathbun

I'm not OCD, like everybody says, these exaggerated things that they are. It's so that I can have clarity to the project I'm working on. I have to have the right music. It's typically very aggressive rock that I have on, or sometimes it's just I have a fake fireplace that plays on the tv and a little candle, and the lights are exactly right in here, because when those things are organized and those things are right, it's easier for me.

00:38:34 - Matthew Rathbun

But I also took the position from a professional standpoint. My mission statement is that I will learn knowledge, gain knowledge, and give knowledge to those who trust me to do so, which works for my agents and my company. It works for my students in a classroom, works for my clients. And so I am forever looking for information. And if I find it valuable, I feel it's an obligation of all of us to contribute to the rest of culture. And so I'm going to create the resources and links. I want to say this, though, if you go to my website and you're like, oh, my gosh. And I hear this a lot from students. I taught srs recently and even some of the students in the room of agents who have known me for years and years and years.

00:39:10 - Matthew Rathbun

And I'm always a very systematic approach to everything because I have to be or I will forget things and I won't sleep at night. And there's some great books, atomic habits, which I think everybody has read or should read. Second brain by Tiago Forte, James Clear, by the way, for atomic habits. Tiago Forte's second brain is another huge one. But we are knowledge workers. Whether it's the mortgage industry, whether it's settlement and attorneys, whether it's real estate agents and brokers, what we know is our total value. It is in the lockbox system. It is an MLS, because that could go away tomorrow and there would still be an industry here. And it might go away at some point. There's still an industry here because people need us for information. And so one of the things that when people look at my website and thank you for the compliments, what I see is what you see when you live in a house, all the corners that need to be painted and touched up, the fact that the paint's been there too long, that that photo wasn't my favorite, but it worked for the time, and I never got a new one.

00:40:04 - Matthew Rathbun

When agents talk about where do you have time to build your buyer presentation or set up Trello for all the steps that you need to do. I've had 21 years to figure it out and I'm willing to deploy imperfect but functional and you can kill yourself as an agent trying to do perfect and never get out the functionality of it, saying, this is the foundation, I'll do better tomorrow, I'll revisit it tomorrow.

00:40:28 - Matthew Rathbun

Whether it's a website or a buyer guide or a consultation guide for a seller or buyer, it will never be perfect. You'll never be happy with it and you shouldn't be because things change and you grow and you learn, but you got to get it out the door.

00:40:39 - Matthew Rathbun

So it is a resource. It's meant to be a resource. If you visit there, you can sign up for a newsletter. I send it out when I have stuff to say. I don't send it out regularly, but there's no barriers. The information is just there. I don't make you sign up or just, or anything. You don't have to pay anything to get it. And it's because again, I feel like there's people who's contributed throughout my career that I want to give back to others the way that it was given to me. And also because I just feel like there's a big void there of meaningful information. If I could just say one more thing on that before I get to the recommended links that I would give. There's just a lot of stuff out there. Not everything's for everybody. And everybody's trying to tell you their program, their plaque, their script or whatever it is.

00:41:21 - Matthew Rathbun

You got to figure out who you are and what tool fits you, what resonates with you to use. And then there are times there's tools that are going to challenge you, you have to use. People are all the time like, I don't want to do video. Well, the rest of us have to see your face and hear your voice all day long. Might as well make some money about off of it saying it is your face, it is your voice. And there's other tool tools for it, but it's got to be the authentic you. That's what those tools or websites and resources need to be. But it clears up so much of your mind to go do your best work when you are organized. Now to your question about the website. So these are the ones. The websites that I would recommend are websites for productivity specifically, not necessarily for marketing. All the rest, one password is my first recommendation. It's the number one in password.com. And so it's on my iPad, it's on my iPhone, it's on my laptop, we spend so much time having to recreate new stupid passwords or remembering a password, or it becomes a barrier.

00:42:15 - Matthew Rathbun

Agents go to log into something and they haven't logged in six months. They're like, what's my password? But also lets me keep all my identity in there. My medication is in there. My wife and I share all of our household passwords in the same app, travel experience, journal logins and stuff. So if I die, my wife has everything in that system that she can get to, and it saves a lot of time, but it also takes the stress out of creating yet another password because it'll do that for you. And you only have to remember one password. That's all you do. That's the whole title. The next big one is this concept of second brain system. And I'd done this for years not knowing that it was actually a thing. But I didn't do it nearly as well as after reading Tiago Forte's book. And part of if you've ever read the book, getting things done by David Allen, getting things done by David Allen, which was kind of the og of productivity books in my life, he talks about the fact that our brains were not made for remembering things, but rather made for creating and recalling.

00:43:14 - Matthew Rathbun

We have a tremendous amount of stuff we have to remember in this industry. The one gift that I have is that I have an incredibly good memory for numbers and statistics and data, but I won't remember somebody's name until the third time I've talked to them. Even with that memory. Now that I again hitting 49, it's not as good as it used to be. And I need a place where I can quickly get information.

00:43:35 - Matthew Rathbun

And there's stuff I don't need to remember. I don't need to remember the pin number for the lockbox to do that. I don't need to know the MLS id for my client, but I need a quick place to find them. And so whether it's Evernote, which has gone through some ownership changes and maybe not be the best out there anymore, Evernote or Apple notes, if you're an Apple user, someplace that synchronizes your notes across multiple platforms, and again, Apple notes for Apple users is fantastic.

00:44:00 - Matthew Rathbun

They've released some amazing stuff in the past year. Apple's really pressing hard into the productivity world, or Evernote, which does the same thing and syncs to all your devices. I have hundreds of every AI prompt, every email. I have a whole email library of emails that I can copy paste for the clients through every stage of their transaction. Everything I've ever needed to know is in there so I can recall it quickly. And more importantly, other people can recall it if I need it, if they need it so I can share know.

00:44:31 - Matthew Rathbun

I have no interest in dying early, but if I do, I'd never want my family to stress out about where things are or what they needed to know. So everything is available for there. Canva would be the next one. And truly using canva, it's worth paying for. It's the cheapest investment into marketing and stuff you can use. But building out things like your brand guide on canva, where you can put your logo and your signature and your colors and your favorite font.

00:44:59 - Matthew Rathbun

So when I do go to create something, I hit one button and it just matches everything. If I were to switch companies, I'm not going to, but if I were to switch companies anytime soon, I can hit a button and it'll take my new logo and put it on everything I've ever created and use the prior logo for the AI. Elements to that are unbelievable. Even for me, who's a geek, it's still incredibly impressive. Again, in the vein of productivity, I would say Hootsuite. Hootsuite manages all my social media accounts.

00:45:27 - Bill Risser

Now you're talking. I was a Hootsuite guy back in 2009, I think, when it first rolled out. Some of that sound about right?

00:45:35 - Matthew Rathbun

Yeah, exactly. It was early 2000s, like when we were all kind of figuring out what we were doing. Remember those early days of the original bar camp where we were literally day drinking in a bar we rented out and like, what are you using for WordPress plugin? And how do you embed iframe and all this stuff that we don't have to do at all now? And the 6000 social media accounts that we were all beta testing and following each other on to only still come back to Facebook, which quite frankly was the worst of all of them.

00:46:01 - Matthew Rathbun

But as a survivor anyways, but oh, my goodness, Hootsuite is really kind of held strong for me and I tend to jump to the newest thing and test it for a while and see if I come back to something. Hootsuite, I've come back to to be able to sit here, we're recording this on a Tuesday and I can plan out the next month's worth of marketing and engagement stuff in an hour or two and just hit send.

00:46:28 - Matthew Rathbun

But then to go look at the analytics there. Now I have someone on my team who doesn't. We can share and see what's going on and what each other's posted and hold accountable and just have one dashboard I think is very valuable. I know there's other products, some of them are more expensive, but if you're super serious, like HubSpot's good and later and some of the other things.

00:46:46 - Matthew Rathbun

But Hootsuite's been a strong one for me. And it's free for what most agents are going to use because you're only managing a few accounts. And the last thing, and I think again for productivity minded stuff, things if you're an Apple user and todoist if you're not, or if you want to put both platforms. These are advanced to do lists. We have to learn to put reoccurring things on schedules and let the robots help us out. The world is way more complex now than it's ever been. And I need somebody to hold, people will say all the time, I need somebody to hold me accountable. I do too. And properly set up to doist dedicated app for that is things are todoist. It really ties into everything that we do. Like you can put it into this is a 6th item, but this one is really if you're totally geeky and you're a mega productivity person notion, so is the bomb.

00:47:42 - Matthew Rathbun

I just did a video on my YouTube channel about how I use it as an instructor, especially for conferences and traveling. Everything is organized there. I share it with my wife, I share my calendar on my website for my classes coming up. It's a massive project, but because it starts with a blank page and you have to take time to learn it, a lot of people kind of dismiss it. I think it's fantastic to do us ties into that and ties into my mobile app and ties into my website and I can share with the team if I want to do that, but it keeps us on track.

00:48:12 - Matthew Rathbun

And so I can trigger a button that says I have a transaction and it reminds me to send the emails and it reminds me to check on things. It reminds me to take out the rash. It reminds me to schedule the vet appointment. And I wake up every morning and look at that. And there's a lot of science if you're waking up at three in the morning going, holy crap, did I order that? Well, and septic, it's because your brain is cooking overnight and you're not resting because your brain is still processing problems.

00:48:37 - Matthew Rathbun

It will stop and rest better when you actually put it in an organization or in a platform that will manage those things. So I'll get off my TED talk about that. But the agents as knowledge workers, there is more things that we are obligated to know, whether it's a lender or a settlement company or an agent, than the human brain is designed to remember and carry.

00:48:56 - Matthew Rathbun

And so we let things go and we don't have those resources because we don't use the computers, we call them smartphones, which they aren't. The thing I use most on this device is the phone. This is my personal assistant and I need to use it wisely to give me more mental health than I have before. And those are my favorites of those tools.

00:49:15 - Bill Risser

And every single one of those tools available on the phone. That's amazing.

00:49:20 - Matthew Rathbun

Every one of them. If it doesn't work mobile, then there's no sense in doing it.

00:49:26 - Bill Risser

Yeah. So Matthew, watching the Super bowl, we all know the homes.com story, right? Andy Florence, acquired homes costar valued at $38 billion, wants to take over the world in the US and really change the way listings work and maybe lead generation works. I guess that's a fair way to put it. So I was looking through some of your things and I noticed that you had a presentation called wrestling aggregators. And now it makes sense because you were into wrestling as a kid and now you're doing real estate. So aggregators, meaning the portals, right? Zillow realtor.com, to be honest, homes.com has joined that fray. Tell me what wrestling aggregators means.

00:50:13 - Matthew Rathbun

So I want to talk about wrestling with aggregators. There's going to be some good and bad in this segment. I'm just going to tell you. I'm going to put it out there. Agents hated or continue to say hateful things about some of these companies. Companies. First of all, when you say with another competitor it's an antitrust issue. So you get on Facebook and you make a comment about any of these aggregators and the second person goes, I agree, and we shouldn't use them. That's the antitrust issue and you've just put it out there. Right? You keep yours opinion yourself, but you're also harming your client. So we know that the consumer spends about 18 to 24 months online doing their research before closing. And we know 95% of them use the Internet as part of their process. More and more, if you aren't paying attention, you should. More and more, we know these consumers have their favorite of either realtor or zillow. And now homes is really coming to play and I'll talk a little bit about them in a second.

00:51:02 - Matthew Rathbun

We could say all we want, but they exist because we neglected what the consumer wanted at a pivotal time, which is what I see agents doing with AI now and some other things. That door was open and somebody said, I will fill that need. And they did, and they did it better than the real estate industry did. And because we didn't do it now, we are paying for the generation of opportunities that they're creating. And there's nothing wrong with that. You see a lot of people pontificating online and people scorning others for using lead generation systems through these partners and others.

00:51:36 - Matthew Rathbun

Look, those are people who don't think about the business aspect of this. So when you get a client or I get a client, there was a cost of acquisition. I may have spent five years of sending them pictures about how much I love their puppy, sending them handwritten notes. Popeyes. We take the clients enjoyment for these entertainment sites and they've been very clear that they're an entertainment site, right? It's even been said by one of those partners that we are, we take for granted that they're cutting the four or five years on average. It took me to invest my time to gain that client by charging us a fee to get the client from them that they intercepted and got the client. If I'm particularly good at conversion and I spend the invest the four or five years and I'm worth, say, the average agent is worth, well, average producing agent, let's say the top 20% of agents who do most, 80% of the work, they're worth about $103 an hour. So if I spend 10 hours on that person over five years, I've already give them $1,000. Or I can go to this lead generation company that's doing that nurturing work, getting them one over and then giving to me the opportunity.

00:52:38 - Matthew Rathbun

And yes, I have to pay a referral fee. Whether it's a relocation company or an aggregator or whatever, there's a cost either way. And if you're shortchanging your time, your cost of acquisition is cheaper, generally by going through an aggregator. So just put the money part aside. Secondly, the price estimates of some of these properties, we say, people say estimates, but the avMs, the automatic valuation models, which are way more than zillow, that's just the one we think about, are inaccurate.

00:53:04 - Matthew Rathbun

They're often inaccurate because MLS data is inaccurate. Agents put in the minimum that they can, giving nothing for the algorithms to work with. In a world that's full of algorithms, it matters and we should have done better. But they are interjecting themselves in the transaction.

00:53:17 - Matthew Rathbun

They have not substantially changed the world other than how the consumer looks. MLSs are reinventing themselves, or should be right now, because what most agents have found when they're being honest with themselves is MLS is an entry point to where the consumer is. So we're entering our listing into MLS. It's distributed to aggregators and that's who's getting the listing. And so MLs are saying we're going to create these consumer facing portals so we can compete against these aggregators. Well, if you're in Virginia, moving to California, you don't think to look for the local MLS's website.

00:53:48 - Matthew Rathbun

You go to the three pages that are in front of you on ads on YouTube or on the Super bowl or wherever. And they're very clever and they're very good at it because they're doing one thing, they're getting in front of consumers. We as agents are trying to do 50,000 things. You're your chief financial officer, executive officer, marketing officer, your agent. You have to make your own coffee. So they had one purpose. Zillow has struggled, quite frankly, in my opinion, with redefining who they are from where they started.

00:54:15 - Matthew Rathbun

They seem to be the same thing. They're a listing portal for buyers. And that's okay. They're good at that. That's what they should do. They have tried from time to time to offer education to agents and some resource to agents that didn't land too well. And so they went back to what they were doing. Okay. Realtor.com has always been kind of stepbrother or stepsister. It's the same concept. Even if they were here first, they didn't have as much attraction. They weren't as attractive, I guess, but they did okay.

00:54:39 - Matthew Rathbun

And they had a lot of traffic and they had to do a lot of stuff. And now homes.com, which we never really recognize, even though it's been around for a long time, gets infused with money from Costar. So let's talk about what Costar did. So Costar convinced commercial agents to pay a premium amount for lead generation and promoting listings on a really not very good platform. And kudos to Costar because this was a marketing and messaging technique. But the website's not particularly attractive. But what they did is they convinced commercial agents that if you list the residential MLS A, you're going to have to deal with residential agents who don't know what they're doing, which is a true statement. And two, you're not setting yourself apart from them. And so pay us this incredibly expensive fee to get your commercial listings found and leased or sold. And then they bought their one and only competitor, which was a brilliant move and for reasons that I don't understand it, too complex for me, they were allowed to do that and now they're really the only show in town.

00:55:38 - Matthew Rathbun

It is not hard to see the brilliance of that company and that move, whether we like it as agents or not, to see the brilliance and leadership that they showed to now go. We are going to create a portal that is agent friendly and it's consumer friendly and we'll figure out how to make money off it later. So let's take the money we have and invest this. I think 1 billion is what they're investing in marketing this year.

00:55:59 - Matthew Rathbun

And I thought, man, this is great. And then I watched the Super bowl ads and I felt like the Super bowl ads were a tremendous amount of money and talent. I love those actors. I mean, who doesn't love Schitt's Creek? And it gave us the ability to say shit all the time. So it's great. But who doesn't love Schitt's Creek? They had to Saturday night. They have these incredible actors. They had some great CGI and they executed horribly on it. They were focused on the right thing, in my opinion, as a marketer. They were focused on, we're going to give you, the consumer, better local knowledge. If you go to homes.com, they will tell you what colleges high school students are applying for and rank them. Nobody else is doing that. My website's not doing it. I don't know many else is doing it. They have a lot of great information. They're doing local stuff. They're putting a lot of money into that. And I think that's what's going to set them aside from everybody else coupled with the fact that they have a brilliant backend for agents to go in and track their leads and engage consumers and generate business, and now they're not charging for it.

00:57:01 - Matthew Rathbun

It looks grid. It looks more attractive than Zillow and Realtor did. It's got some good traction. I was expecting big things for this huge budget on the Super bowl game and I felt it was chaotic and I felt the messaging was lost and confusing and it wasn't noteworthy after the event.

00:57:20 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I'll agree with you there, but it's funny you bring this up because just this morning, look, they're running a ton of homes.com stuff, still continual. It's there. It's still the same. It's still Dan Libby and Heidi Gardner. They're amazing, like you said. Yeah, but I don't know if it was and I felt the exact same way you did, lost opportunity at the Super bowl. But I think it opened up a whole bunch of people's eyes to just go, wow, who's this homes.com. I better pay attention a little bit. And for me it's these follow up ads that are different than the ones at the Super bowl. It's really starting to make sense. And this is from a guy like you in the business where I'm like, wow, what were they even trying to do during the game? So I think they're really smart. You said it. They know what they're doing. And so it's going to be very interesting to see how this continued marketing effort, right. Because obviously all good marketing takes a lot of time to take hold. So I think they're on the right track. We'll have to see.

00:58:21 - Matthew Rathbun

If I had to summarize it, if I was giving any feedback to the, and I was sitting in a room full of my in law's friends who, that's a whole different thing. But they were totally lost on what it was. They didn't know who the actor because they weren't the target. They didn't know who the actors were. This particular group would never have watched Schitt's Creek. They don't watch Saturday Night Live. They tend to be, they skew older and a different political spectrum. They were totally lost. They were also lost during the usher concert. So that just gives you kind of an idea of what we're dealing with.

00:58:49 - Matthew Rathbun

I thought that was a brilliant, I thought he did a great job with that. One of the better ones and he gave a lot away to other people which is something, a lesson we can all learn from going back to homes.com. They tried to cram too much in that 30 seconds. I think that was their biggest selling point. It was too chaotic to me and I was looking forward to it because I thought they were going to do a great job.

00:59:10 - Matthew Rathbun

You're right. The follow up ads are doing well. But you have to work to construct that story. They didn't give you frey tags five storytelling elements into 32nd marketing campaign here's the bigger issue. MLs need to take note of this. This direct to consumer path works very well. These entities know who their consumer is. They know data is more valuable than money right now because that money will follow the data that's being given and generated and leads centers will work. But MLSs really need to pay attention because they cannot continue to be simply a place where I put my data in.

00:59:48 - Matthew Rathbun

So it gets to the distribution point to the consumer to then make a decision to purchase. I have the least popular opinion in the world on this and that is a national MLS is the only true way to combat these other things and everything else in between is people just fighting over territory they've already lost. An RPR could do this. If anybody's listening here, I love my RPR. It's one of my favorite tools at Nar. It's already a national database. Why aren't we putting stuff straight into that so that there's one central location for everything else.

01:00:21 - Matthew Rathbun

I know the financial impact for local associations who need the MLSs as non dues revenue. I know everybody wants their local rules and every broker wants to have control over their local board. But that control comes at the cost of not reaching a consumer. And so if we're not willing to do that and save the model we are, we then also need to embrace where the business is actually coming from through these aggregators.

01:00:43 - Matthew Rathbun

And if I remember correctly, homes.com is now number two as far as traffic on the aggregator war. And so this is a whole big thing that I think agents really need to understand, that these are not your enemies, these are an asset when they're properly used. And that paying them for leads means you don't have to spend the same amount of money and time over a four or five year period for conversion. You're playing the long game here. It shouldn't be your entire business, but it can be part of your business and it can be quite profitable if you're good at converting online leads. Nar says 43% of online inquiries wind up buying and selling. And generally, if I remember correctly, is within six months. The average agents converting less than 4%. But they still hold the position that they're the authority and consumers have to come through them, which isn't true.

01:01:28 - Matthew Rathbun

And so they send off an email 24 hours after the inquiry comes in. That person who sent the email is a 23 year old with a baby on her lap at 11:00 at night, scared to death because she's never moved. This is her first adult decision that she's made and her husband has been deployed somewhere. Or this is the husband who was battling in love with his high school girlfriend that she dies in a car accident after he marries her and now he can't live in that home anymore.

01:01:53 - Matthew Rathbun

And they're emailing you and the email comes across as tell me more about this house. But what they're really saying is I need help in the process and they want to know what's not an MLS? And so an your replies and go, well, it's 620,000 and it's 50 bedrooms. Whatever. They already had that information. Are you building a rapport? Are you opening up the door to what they don't know? And thank God that AI is coming out.

01:02:15 - Matthew Rathbun

Yes, it's going to help us as agents, but it's also going to cause thousand times more content out there and the consumer is going to go, there's so many opinions and so much content and some of it's AI. I need a human to bring the humanity back to this process, to bring the creativity back to this process and help me sort through all the garbage that's out there to really focus on me. That's what that email is. And if you as an agent treat that inquiry as a human and not the quote unquote lead, you're going to get a lot more traction with them, especially if you answer quickly and then have some type of reasonable, personable campaign over the next two years.

01:02:53 - Matthew Rathbun

So when they are ready to tool the trigger, you're the one that's been solving problems they didn't know they had, and they're going to convert with you. It isn't that hard, but it does require work and it requires a very different worldview than we've enjoyed for the past 100 plus years. It's being challenged in courts and everything else right now.

01:03:10 - Bill Risser

The natural question for me is you want this to be you. You want this to be very personal. You want to once again become that servant, that servant mentality with your potential customers. We won't call them leads. And can AI be an answer there? Can it be good enough to be something personal? Because look, I mean, that's just the natural. I think that's what most people would think. They'd go, well, I don't have time for that. But boy, if I could just set this up and we won't call them chat bots. We're going to call it Alice. She's going to be perfect. My assistant. Is that here yet? I think it's coming for sure. Is it here yet?

01:03:52 - Matthew Rathbun

We're very, very close. Yeah, we're very close. The second you pontificate or you make a statement about AI, it's already changed, right? I just finished writing an eight hour program for NAR, for Rebi, rather. That is an affiliate for ABR, and so it'll be a certification. It took me a couple months to write it. I did not use AI to write all of it. I will say I used AI to double check what I was writing because I may be an english major, but I like reading more than I do writing.

01:04:18 - Matthew Rathbun

But it is there to definitely enhance our careers and it's there to help us build better connect with consumers. And I'll give you a couple of examples of how I just came from Oklahoma. Two days ago, I was teaching for their leadership conference, the NAR region nine leadership. I kept calling it district nine, but it felt like I should be volunteering as tribute or something. So it's not district nine, but isn't that a movie? Yeah, it is. It's a movie. So region nine leadership, and they were very gracious and great people to work with. I love the Oklahoma leadership team and their staff are absolutely outstanding. And I did a two hour session on AI and storytelling, and I make this point in every class that I teach.

01:04:55 - Matthew Rathbun

AI is not a replacement for you. You still have to bring creativity to humanity. It is the opportunity to do better at what we were doing before. And I want to know if you're looking on Facebook, there's people who I have a great deal of respect for. I love actually, some of them are good friends and they hate AI and they hate what it's bringing. And you'll see them take their little shots at it on social media and make fun of it when it fails or not.

01:05:17 - Matthew Rathbun

And some of them are, unfortunately, they're taking something that isn't AI and calling it AI because it automates a process that's different. But I get why they're upset, because the people I see that are most upset about it are particularly gifted speakers and writers and creatives. And now some of those things that they have been very good at, that set them apart, are now being automated in such a way as to be even better than what they were creating. But let me also say the flip side of that is there are a tremendous number of people in this world who have brilliant thoughts and ideas, but they've never been particularly talented at creating a way to bring them about, whether it's a visual or video or most importantly, the written word.

01:05:55 - Matthew Rathbun

And because they were not gifted in those areas, the brilliant thoughts and ideas and things that could change the world have been quieted, whereas now they can go to Chat GPT and say please. By the way, when you are using AI, you have to say please and thank you, because when Skynet comes, you want to be the last one to be killed, but you need to say please and thank you just because it gets you in a good pattern. You don't want to start treating people like AI when you ask for things. So still say please and thank you. But anyways, please create a meaningful blog post about the regional library. And here's the five things I love about the regional library.

01:06:30 - Matthew Rathbun

And it starts as a draft. It's only a draft. AI has to be that unlicensed intern who's working with you, but they're smarter and more capable than that. You have to go and say, is this what I want to put out there in the world? Does this sound like me? Is this my tone? But it's a starting point and it's going to build confidence in people who didn't have it before.

01:06:47 - Matthew Rathbun

Canva is the same way I can go to canva and say, create a listing presentation for a seller that is facing divorce and it's going to create for you a 30 slide deck that's beautifully designed and all you have to do is go add what you want to make uniquely you in there. And so now we have lowered the barrier. And I know everybody says raise the bar. I think that's true for our moral character and for how we treat consumers.

01:07:12 - Matthew Rathbun

But for this part of it, we're going to need this as we move forward, as it gets more competitive. But even to its proper place, sellers are benefiting from it. Because an agent who uses AI to write a listing description is going to get far more SEO traffic. Because as much as we study marketing in the levels that we are, I'm not always going to land the best SEO phraseology. But AI has brought in the totality of all the world's knowledge and history up to this point. And if it is told to act like an SEO expert or marketing expert, it's going to create much better content from a technical standpoint than I can.

01:07:51 - Matthew Rathbun

And then I go back and dress it up and make sure it looks like me and it's appropriate and isn't going to violate any rules or anything. And I started playing with the system about a year ago and I said, write listing descriptions and I would tell it. Part of the writing listing description is don't violate fair housing. And guess what? Not since I added that have I had one thing that even made me concern, and I'm a hyper vigilant risk management person, especially for diversity and fair housing.

01:08:14 - Matthew Rathbun

And I think there's a place for it there because I could hire, and you'll see agents all the time going, does anybody have a good college student that I can hire for the summer to help me through work? That 17 or 18 year old may know how to use TikTok, but they don't know anything about people. They don't know how to cater to people, how to write for people's emotional connection to the property. And so you're wasting money trying to train them and getting both of you are frustrated because there's a different language block, whereas AI would do all that, and that frees up that person to go do something else. So I think I uploaded an AR profile, home buyers and sellers into Chat GPT recently and I have an ongoing conversation.

01:08:50 - Matthew Rathbun

Give me a summation of what for sale by owners are most in need of help with. And instead of going and reading a report and seeing 14 charts and graphs, which is incredibly valuable data, I can click a button and it gives me meaningful stuff. And the next thing is create a three week marketing campaign on social media for this. And it's going to create it. And I can copy and paste it into a video machine for AI or canva or something else and get better assets than I would have ever created in a fraction of the time, which frees me to do the human stuff, to call my client, to check in on them, to listen to them cry because their kid just went off to college.

01:09:24 - Matthew Rathbun

And I don't get bogged down with it's 11:00 on a Thursday night, I got to get the MLS entry in. And so I'm putting crappy content together that didn't serve my seller's needs. And so I think when it's properly executed and utilized, it's of real value, but it is not a replacement for us. And now we're in the foreseeable future, is it going to be? And they're actually putting safeguards up to make sure that that autonomous thought is staying in labs somewhere in some military facility and not being immediately deployed out to the community because we do bad things with technology, especially since technology outpaces regulations. So again, I'm a big fan of it. It's up to us to learn how to use it properly like any tool, and to use it morally and to bring the humanity back to it. But we were losing well before AI came about, beginning, I think, with a fax machine. This industry started losing to humanity, and now we're literally paying the price for it. People don't sue people they like.

01:10:16 - Bill Risser

Matthew, this has been fantastic. This is also going to be quite possibly the longest episode of The Real Estate Sessions in 381 episodes, which I think is talk about an accolade.

01:10:30 - Matthew Rathbun

Now you know why Monica split mine in twice older.

01:10:33 - Bill Risser

I'm not going to do that. I refuse to do that. Let me ask you the same final question every guest has answered. And you know probably 80% of the guests on this podcast. What one piece of advice would you give a new agent? Just getting started. We've talked about a lot of stuff here today.

01:10:49 - Matthew Rathbun

Yeah, I do listen and I do know that you have a lot of stars there. I was very happy to get the request, but I don't know that I've risen to the level of most of the speakers you have on here or most of the people you interview. When it comes to the best piece of advice, be you and don't let anybody change that. And I know that as brokers we want to reimage everybody who walks through the door into our top producer and everybody wants to be our top, everybody wants to be the top producer. There is something incredibly powerful about you communicating to people like you. Now, I want to be clear with this. I don't mean about your political views, because let's be real, if you post your political view on social media, 50% of the world agrees with you. 50% of people immediately hate you. But even the people who agree with you, most of them are just sick of it. They don't want to hear it anymore. But be the authentic you of be goofy. Tell the dumb story of something you did. I shared this story on social a while back and still people are teasing me about it. I was at an airport, I'm walking down the aisle and I realize I'm kind of frankly dancing a little bit, walking through the airport as an old man with his backpack on because I was totally in to, I'll just tell you it was a little bit of gangster rap and I was totally into it and forgot the world around me because I had incredibly immersive apple Max Airpods on. I couldn't see the rest of the world and I was feeling good and I'm like those people around me thought I needed to be on medication because know not particularly a good dancer in a mosh pit. Nonetheless, airport and I shared that. I shared stupid things I'm afraid of. I share things that happen in life and family, but I will never see people post stupid things about their spouse or their partner or kids. I'm not going to embarrass them for the world. Even if it's funny, even if I want to. I'm not going to embarrass the world. I don't do it to my dog, I'm not going to do it to my family, I'm not going to embarrass my dog in line. I think, though, when you meet with people, be friendly, be happy, be who you are, and then go find how the industry wraps around that. If you're not particularly excited to work with me, I'm not particularly excited to work with divorcing couples. I find them very stressful and they want to bring me into their drama. And we've married for 31 years. There have been moments, especially in our early 20s, where I didn't think we were going to make it to the next year. So I understand being rough, but that's just not my happy place. And so I want to be authentically me as much as I can, wherever I can. And then the other part of that is choose to work with people who are authentic as well. That person who you're meeting with, who treats you poorly during the interview, who says you don't have value, who wants to argue everything about us with you, doesn't want to get on board. They are still in the opportunity to, a, have joy in your career and b, to work with three or four other people because you're so consumed with their negativity. It costs you money in the long run because you're not at your best to go find better clients. So I know you asked for one and I always try to give two, but they're very similar to me. Be authentic and then work with people who are authentically like you.

01:13:38 - Bill Risser

What's the best way for someone to reach out to you, Matthew?

01:13:42 - Matthew Rathbun

Anything but the mean. If you have a question or follow up or you find something on the website or somewhere you just wanted to vent, email is the best for me. I try to answer every mail before I go to bed at night. I try very hard to be an inbox zero guy. And so matthewrathman.com is my web address. And then of course, I'm social. I'm all over social. But honestly, I do only schedule 20 minutes a night to answer social media direct messages. So email I do throughout the day. So if you want that, email is a much better way.

01:14:11 - Bill Risser

Matthew, this has been fantastic. I want to thank you so much for the time. I mean, we really took a lot of your time today. And look, I can't wait to see you again in person at the next event. It'll be somewhere probably in 2024. So thank you once again for your time. It's been fun.

01:14:26 - Matthew Rathbun

Yeah, thank you. It was great. And I appreciate being asked. Like I said, you've had some superstars on this show and I was like, oh, my gosh, I get to be on the show. It's going to be awesome. So I appreciate it and I enjoy talking to you.

01:14:37 - Bill Risser

Thank you for listening to The Real Estate Sessions. Please head over to ratethispodcast.com resessions to leave a review or a rating and subscribe to the Real Estate Sessions podcast at your favorite podcast listening app.