The Real Estate Sessions Rewind - Annette Anthony, Vice President Technology Egagement, EXIT Realty

00:00:00 - Bill Risser

Hi, everybody. Welcome to another Real Estate Eessions Rewind episode. This week, we're going back to February 2022 and bringing back Annette Anthony. She's the vice president of technology engagement for exit Realty, full of wonderful ideas, full of energy, and one of my favorite people in the business. So enjoy.

00:00:18 - Annette Anthony

If I have something to communicate today, whether it be by phone or by text or by email, it could definitely be done by video. So whether it's, hey, I'm going to see you next week for our appointment. I can't wait. Send that as a video or hey, we just met. It was so good to see you again. Great to hear about your family. Do a video.

00:00:40 - 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 really anyone with a story to tell. It's the stories that led my guests to a career in the real estate world that drives 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 309 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend today. Speaking of friends, I get to visit an old friend, Annette Anthony. Annette is the vice president of technology engagement for Exit Realty. I've known Annette for well over 15 years, and I've also had the opportunity to see her in action at exit, on stage, emceeing rallies, doing trainings, hands on kind of stuff, which is my favorite. So it's going to be really fun to catch up with her, get some tips and tricks on technology, which everyone can always use. So let's get this thing started. Annette, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:44 - Annette Anthony

Hey, Bill. Thanks for having me.

00:01:46 - Bill Risser

Oh, my gosh, this is so exciting. I have known you, I'm going to say, at least a decade, if not further back. And I want to talk about that, our time in Phoenix together. But before we get there, are you a native of the valley of the sun?

00:02:00 - Annette Anthony

You don't know? Well, practically, I should say. I was born in Glendale, California. My father and mom raised three girls. I'm the youngest of three. My dad was actually an immigrant from Mexico. So Cananea Alejandro Moreno Rubio is his name. So could you imagine coming to the US as he's 16 years old with the aspirations to get his education and live the dream of an american? So he was fostered with a family, got his education, went to college, graduated, and it's not just go to college, but you have to also be part of extracurricular activities. Like, you have to volunteer, you have to have a job. You have to have a certain GPA. You have to have a certain number of hours that you're working. It's quite a. You know, it wasn't just handed right, and it was pretty, pretty awesome experience. So my dad applied for his citizenship as soon as he graduated college, obtained it, and then he served in the military, in the army, and married my mom. So my mom then came over from Mexico, and when she was nine months pregnant with me, I'm the youngest of three girls, she got her citizenship. So that's pretty special. And, you know. So starting off in California, and then as things got really crowded and just. It was difficult, they were noticing, to raise three girls. They wanted something a little bit quieter. So we moved to beautiful Arizona. We were in Phoenix, like, 16 straight in McDowell, which is not. Not a great neighborhood now, but back when it was just a really safe, quiet place to raise three girls. And super proud of that, you know, my dad was a young entrepreneur. He actually started a business in upholstery because he's like, what am I going to do? He would go to, like, a secondhand store, and he would buy a piece of furniture, but what he would do with it to convert it into something, a beautiful masterpiece. He had it in the front yard, covered in plastic with a sign that said $25 and luckily built a woman. Her name is Sue Yaden, with Sue Yaden designs. I don't even think that she's around anymore, but she happened to see that chair and said, who did this? And my dad's like, I did. And she's like, I want to see more pieces, but I think you're going to be my upholsterer full time now, so, pretty cool dream.

00:04:17 - Bill Risser

Nice. I love that story. I think it's. Yeah, the american dream. Yep. Absolutely.

00:04:22 - Annette Anthony

Arizona is quite special for us.

00:04:24 - Bill Risser

Good, good. I'm thinking 16th at McDowell. You're really close to Encanto park and the golf course. Yes.

00:04:31 - Annette Anthony

And then we moved to Scottsdale, and that's where I met my husband. We were high school sweethearts, still married almost 30 years later with two kids. Yeah. Love Arizona.

00:04:41 - Bill Risser

I know you love Arizona, but there's parts of Arizona that, after that long, get a little tiring. So you're not a snowbird. I'm gonna call you a summer bird.

00:04:50 - Annette Anthony

Right.

00:04:51 - Bill Risser

Because. Because your home base feels like it's Phoenix in Scottsdale, but you take off in the summertime. Where do you head to?

00:04:58 - Annette Anthony

I do. You know, our son Michael, he's been playing ball. He's had a ball in his hand since I can remember. You know, a baseball, a football. Well, he earned himself a baseball scholarship and was recruited by sue, you know, by Briarcliff University here in Sioux City, Iowa, to come and play, you know, baseball. So what do good parents do, right? You go follow your kids dreams. And my husband, you know, he's retired military and law enforcement, 25 years. So we have the opportunity to live in Sioux City, Iowa. Like, who would have thought, Sioux City, Iowa, that we would be residents here? And we love it. Bill, when we dropped him off, it was like, wow, this is pretty far for us to leave our son. And, you know, my husband, when I was on my way back to Toronto, my husband's on his way back to Arizona. After we just moved him into the dorms, my husband sends me a picture from Zillow, right, a link of a property that just came on the market. And he's like, what do you think? I'm like, what do you mean, what do I think? He says, what do you think about us possibly putting an offer on this house? And I said, you know, if you think we can do this, you know, let's give it a shot. Well, the offer got accepted, and here we are in Sioux City. And who knew that I would want to be a midwest girl? I mean, I love it here. The people, you know, you just can't. They're just authentic. They're very relaxed. It's just very different. It's cold, yes, but we love the cold. You know, we're still kind of honeymooners here in this weather, so we really do enjoy being out here. So, yes, we're here in the spring and fall months so that we could be with our son, and then we head back to Arizona in the winter. No? Yeah, I guess in the winter and the summer, which, you know, summer's pretty hot in Arizona, but when you've got a pool, it's all good. Air conditioning. Yeah, it's all good.

00:06:49 - Bill Risser

I love it. I want to think back to, you know, me running around, you know, a lot of these little things that were happening in the Phoenix area in the real estate world, at associations or, you know, different little events. And I swear that I know you from your sharper agent days, right?

00:07:05 - Annette Anthony

Yes.

00:07:06 - Bill Risser

When you. Yes. Like, I would see you in an office meeting or something where you were talking about the product.

00:07:11 - Annette Anthony

Absolutely. So I was working for a small title company called Land Title. They're huge in Colorado, small in Arizona. A friend of mine said you'd be great in title. At the time, I was working for Fire Rock country club. I was selling golf memberships, 85,000 a pop. But she said, you would be great at working for a title company. So I explored the opportunity, and I loved it. I had an awesome branch manager, and I learned so much from her. And my role was to build relationships with real estate agents, and I did. And I helped introduce those real estate agents to my branch manager. Well, sharper agent, the CRM tool land title in Arizona was the only reseller of sharper agent. So sharper agent was kind of my reason for connecting with agents, because what I discovered is agents didn't have CRMs. And we're talking back in the early two thousands, you know, they had no CRMs. They would carry around albums of their referrals, like their reviews, if you would say, right, their testimonials. Look at my huge album, and let's browse through all these things that people say. Times have changed, right, Bill?

00:08:18 - Bill Risser

Absolutely.

00:08:19 - Annette Anthony

So, you know, shepherd agent was what got me in the door. And I would have one on one meetings with agents. Then that agent, after I helped them be successful by getting organized and start the behavior of this is my regular daily thing to do. That agent would introduce me to another agent. I would be in a small conference room, the four of us, and then larger. You know, those groups started to expand to then I would be leading trainings for offices on how to stay better connected with their database. And, you know, broker owners at the time were like, you're a value to me. I want to add you to our training schedule because you're helping our agents grow. So that's kind of how it started with sharper agent.

00:09:02 - Bill Risser

Were you always techie even prior to that, or was this kind of ramped it up for you?

00:09:07 - Annette Anthony

You know, I'm a problem solver. Like, I love to have conversations. I love to listen to people. What are you doing? How's it working? If you could, you know, Tammy says this. If you could wave a magic wand, right? But I had different words that I would use. Like, if you could do things a little differently, what would that look like for you? And, you know, so just listening to what their concerns were really gave me an opportunity to find, well, other people are being successful, and what is it that they're doing that I can help you adapt those behaviors, and I can help you stay accountable, and we can work together. You can have that hype person follow up with you to see how things are going and we can monitor your success. And we'll make adjustments along the way, so long as we're continuing to move forward. So I always have had this curiosity of how to help agents, how to take a look at what they're doing, because we've had great conversations and how do we make it work for their business.

00:10:00 - Bill Risser

I remember going to an office building in Scottsdale into a fairly small conference room with you and about five exit agents. I think you had just gotten rolling with exit. Is that, is that true at that point?

00:10:13 - Annette Anthony

Depends on when that was. How I got started with exit was I just kept my head down with sharper agent and was exposed to lots of different brands. Then Sharper agent then signed a deal with Exit Realty by providing a white label solution. They call it Exit promo shop back then. And I had the opportunity to really get to know the leadership at Exit, worked with their broker owners, their regional owners, all of their agents, while at the same time still working with a lot of other brands. Well, then Sharper agent was acquired by market leader and then market leader was acquired by Trulia, and then Trulia was acquired by Zillow. So all these different transitions, right? And all the while just keeping your head down, continuing to learn and build relationships and trust and have fun. The CEO, Tammy Bonnell, at the time was just really watching and learning and seeing how I was working with her people and one day tapped me on the shoulder and said, you know, how are you? And at the time, think about it, Bill. She's the CEO of a huge international real estate company, but she took special interest in me because she saw what I was doing for her people and had said, you know, how are you doing, Annette? And I'm thinking, wow. And I was honest. I said, tammy, I'm doing great. Like, I love what I do. Thank goodness I'm adaptable and I love learning and I'm helping agents and I'm expanding my knowledge so I can help agents grow. And she said, but what if you could do what you love to do, but just do it with exit? So it was at that moment that I knew, you know what, this is possibly where my last business card will be made, because this is, and it is, this is absolutely my last, you know, company that I will ever work for because it's, I'm home. You know, this company truly, you know, as big of a company as it is, you're, you're always felt like you're valuable. People notice even the smallest of things and they always make, at least for me, they make me feel like I can do more because they just do so much for me.

00:12:23 - Bill Risser

You know, I had the honor of interviewing Tammy on the podcast, and you're not the only person. I've heard it many times that when Tammy says to you, how you doing? It's not that kind of quick, hey, how's it going? It's like, no, she really wants to know how you're doing.

00:12:37 - Annette Anthony

Absolutely. You know, she knows my family intimately. She knows my husband, my kids by name. She knows what's going on in their lives because she takes a very special interest in me. I mean, think about it. And I'm not the only one, one of the executives who feels this way. It's our regional owners, it's our owners, it's our agents, it's the admins in the offices, it's our staff, but it's also the industry. There's so many people who come up to me and say, oh, I just love Tammy. You're so fortunate that she's with your company. And then they tell me their story of how she makes them feel. So even though we have thousands of thousands of agents, she makes you feel as though you're the only one. Like, you're the most important person that she's on the phone with. And she always picks up on things in our conversations or things that I'm doing that I didn't even get to tell her yet. But other people are sharing with her. And she'll write me a handwritten note or she'll send me books. I have lots of books with inscription messages that she's written personally to me, and I try to do my best to emulate that. Now, I've got a lot of learning to do, but, you know, like when you did the podcast with Bob, you know, and Muleshoe, Texas came up and you guys really had a good time about that. And I'm thinking, I wonder if Muleshoe High School has memorabilia, and they do, and I found the coffee cup. So it's things like, you know, those are the things that Tammy has instilled in me so that I can be the best version of myself. I can. I can catch people doing something extraordinary when they least expect that somebody's watching.

00:14:13 - Bill Risser

That is a wonderful talent, skill, whatever you want to call it. And something that we all could be better at, CRM, because of the sharp, raging connection, was the technology that you really started with. But I love looking back at people who have been in these roles, kind of like me back in the mid two thousands. What other technology were you talking about besides CRM? What was most popular back then?

00:14:39 - Annette Anthony

Back then, I mean, well, websites were the next hottest thing that you need to have a website. You know, that was probably the biggest thing. But really, the CRM people just had a very hard time trusting that technology that you could put your contacts up in the cloud. So, you know, there was a lot of. There was a lot of resistance. But those agents, which I suppose were the 20 percenters who really believe that this is where the direction of the industry is going, those were the trailblazers that I was able to link arm in arm with, and we would just take other people along with us on the journey.

00:15:20 - Bill Risser

Social media is exploding while you're in this role. So you had to. That was definitely a part of your repertoire and trying to help people understand, to use that better. And I've seen you do that even to this day, talking about things like video and YouTube, which I consider social media. Right, but let's get your favorite social network and why.

00:15:42 - Annette Anthony

Yes, I love Facebook. It's truly authentic. It's when I feel like I want to post something special when something touches me, oh, I want to share this rather than. It's for. So Facebook is definitely my go to. I have explored so many things, though. I mean, I have had so many funny conversations with my husband. He's like, you're going to do what on Snapchat? What? Snapchat. So I'm like, listen, this is just. Even my kids would throw up their arms and say, are you serious? Mom and I have older adult children, right? Michael is. He's 23. Boris is 27. So they're like, wait, you're getting on Snapchat? And I'm like, listen, I'm just doing some recon. I need to understand the technology so that I can explain it to the agents. And for those who are interested, I can teach them how to use it. And then TikTok came about, and they're like, you're gonna do what? But you know what? I just have this curiosity, and I never want to be the one that says, I don't know, I'm going to explore. I'm going to dive into it. I mean, even Alexa flash briefings, right? That was a really cool technology that everybody. Well, a lot of people were just very intimidated about. And it's like, listen, if I could break it down, and then if I can teach it to you, because the biggest thing here is when you're teaching technology to agents, they freak out, right? And it's important that you just take them, you take your understanding, and you show them how to apply it in their business in respect to social media. Yeah, Facebook definitely is one of my favorite.

00:17:07 - Bill Risser

Let me put you on the spot.

00:17:09 - Annette Anthony

Yeah.

00:17:10 - Bill Risser

Do you have a least favorite? Because I'll tell you mine. Tell me yours. You know, it's one that's really important in us in a lot of ways, but I just don't think it is that important in real estate. You might differ, but for me, it's Pinterest.

00:17:23 - Annette Anthony

I'm just like, yeah, it's not even on my radar, Pinterest, but definitely, like, Twitter. Twitter was not. I just felt like I need to post more, and it felt forced. So definitely my least favorite. I deleted it, which, you know, to your listening audience, it's important to. It's okay to know that if you're not comfortable in that space, you don't need to be there. You don't have to be. You don't have to have all the links and, you know. Yes. And it's forced go where you feel the most comfortable. Right. And don't worry about being about missing out on something on the other platforms. When you're ready, it'll appear to you, and you can jump in and dive in.

00:18:03 - Bill Risser

Thinking about TikTok, I had the pleasure of hearing you sing at the southeast region rally. Is that correct? I said that, right? Yeah. And first of all, you are a fantastic singer. So tell me, if I go check out your TikTok account, I can find something somewhere.

00:18:22 - Annette Anthony

I don't know. My account is private. My singing is an opportunity. Right. So if you catch me. Yeah, that was a good time. I love to sing. You know, my dad used to sing all the time. He actually sang, not quite professionally, but in college, he was involved in plays, and he sang quite a bit. So I love. We even sang together on a cruise ship, my dad and I, when we went on a family vacation. So, fun. La bamba, of course. Right? But I love to sing karaoke, and it's just a really good time. That opportunity was really special for exit Southeast, and Bob McKinnon, he's our director of leadership, and he started to learn how to play the guitar. So I let Stacy, you know, our regional owner for exit Southeast, I let her know, hey, your event's coming up. And I'm just saying, bob McKinnon is learning how to play the guitar, and he's pretty good. So that little bug in her ear. And then Bob and I strategized and said, we should do something, and we kept it a secret. Nobody knew. In fact, the guitar that Bob McKinnon used, Bill, are you ready for this?

00:19:25 - Bill Risser

Go ahead.

00:19:26 - Annette Anthony

It was loaned by. It was a loner. Okay. Carrie Underwood's lead guitar. That was his guitar. So those are some strings that were pulled. And, you know, Bob and I, we really had a good time, and nobody knew what we were doing other than Stacy, you know, Valerie and Kenny, they were the only ones who knew. So when he came to the event, even Tammy and Craig and Laurie Muller, you know, our leaders and all the agents and owners, they had no idea. So catching him at a surprise was really special for us as well.

00:19:56 - Bill Risser

Yeah, it was awesome, because I would be terrified.

00:20:02 - Annette Anthony

I was definitely terrified. Yeah.

00:20:04 - Bill Risser

Couldn't tell. I've been to a few exit events. The focus on education is. It's everywhere. It's not just lip service. It's really important. Chat about that a little bit.

00:20:15 - Annette Anthony

You know what? We build technology for the agents, right? Our number one goal is to help them close more business. Period. That's it. And if it doesn't work, if the technology, if it's hard to use, if the agents aren't adapting, we're just not going to do it. But we've had other tech that we brought on, and it just. You know what? It sounded like a great idea at the time, but now that it's in the hands of the agents, it really wasn't as big of a success.

00:20:41 - Annette Anthony

And we were big enough to say, you know what? This isn't working. We're going to do something else. And they respect that. You know, they respect that. We have just such an insatiable appetite to continue to move forward and try to find better ways for them to do their business more effectively. And that's what we do. The most important thing, too, is we make sure that we teach them to use it. And we do that in a lot of different ways. They can go online. We have lots of different webinars. We have one on one trainings. If they wanted to, you know, they can reach out. I'm one of the executives of the company, and Bill, they call me and they text me. They instant message me and say, hey, could you show me? And my answer is always, absolutely. And some will even say, listen, I hesitated to even call because I know you're busy.

00:21:27 - Annette Anthony

And I always tell them, you know what? But I'm never busy. I'm booked. I'm scheduled, but I'm never too busy. We'll always find time, right? We have a phenomenal franchise support team that they can reach out to real people that they can connect with. And the technology is easy and it's proven, so it's got to work. But three years ago, Bill, Tammy actually challenged me and said, annette, you're just one person. You need to multiply yourself. And I'm like, you're right. There's only so many places that I can go.

00:21:57 - Annette Anthony

And I have led huge hands on workshops. That's my favorite. Like, I love to have the agents bring their laptops, bring their mobile devices, and they watch me, you know, follow every single step so that they can apply what I'm teaching them, so that by the time they leave, you don't have to write anything down. You did everything. You set up your systems. You don't have to worry about going back and going through your notes.

00:22:21 - Annette Anthony

And I've had as many as 200 people in a room at the same time. Can you imagine? 200 people. There was cords everywhere. Not one computer was compromised with spilled coffee. You know, nobody tripped on a cord. Everybody left safe, but they left with confidence, which is something that the industry just isn't really emphasizing. And here's where it comes from, where you sit down as a human and you walk them through on how to do something. You give them the respect, you give them the confidence for them to do it themselves. So with Tammy's challenge and saying, annette, you gotta duplicate yourself. So what I did was I reached out to our exit nation and said, okay, guys, here's what I'm thinking to do.

00:23:03 - Annette Anthony

I don't know how this is all going to go, but I envision people like myself, who have an interest in technology, who love sharing with others, who, you know, know the importance of human right connection. I want to be able to share with you a very simple tip. I want you to learn it, and then I want you to share it, like demonstrate it in the office to your agents. And we started with 28 people who said, all right, I don't know what you're up to, but I'm in 28 people. And then we've grown to more than 430. We call them exit engagement leaders. So we have these duplicatable people, 430 of them right now throughout our network, but we're not done.

00:23:43 - Annette Anthony

Like, we need to have one in every single office. So I continue to have some work ahead of me. But this is an enthusiastic crowd who, most of which are not technologists, right? They don't know everything about technology, but what I'm sharing with them each month is a simple tip, one tool, one resource, something that they can learn in less than five minutes and be able to confidently be able to share it with the peers in their office.

00:24:08 - Annette Anthony

Now, what's caused is this ripple effect of increased confidence and people engaging with our tools hands down. But what I didn't realize that happened was that it would also elevate their confidence in being able to present in front of their peers. Like, I had no idea that that would be a byproduct of this group of exit engagement leaders. So I'm so proud of them. And I continue to onboard more, you know, every week of people saying, you know what? We don't have one. An engagement leader in our office. But I want to get involved. And with their owner's blessing, then they're designated as the exit engagement leader.

00:24:49 - Annette Anthony

Leader. And they're not franchise support. This is a peer. It takes about five minutes a month, but the impact is immeasurable. So to your point, it's the education, the training, the tools. It has to be easy. The tools have to be effective, but we have to be able to deliver the how to, you know, personally, one on one, to every agent. And that's what we're working on. And it's been very successful so far.

00:25:17 - Bill Risser

That is way more effective than a blurb in the monthly newsletter. Yeah, I mean, totally get it.

00:25:22 - Annette Anthony

Yeah, that's for sure. And, Bill, no one wants to watch another webinar. They don't?

00:25:27 - Bill Risser

Not right now. They do.

00:25:28 - Annette Anthony

I would rather like my people learn by being shown. Yeah, you can watch a video on YouTube. Of course you can. But there's nothing more personal than having someone who cares about you to say, hey, let me walk you through it, and in less time, be able to show you. And then that person can. Then it's the ripple effect. Okay, I got it. Now I can show my other colleague, and that person can show the next person.

00:25:54 - Bill Risser

You mentioned YouTube would love your take on getting agents to use video. It's so tough. What are your tips there?

00:26:05 - Annette Anthony

Well, kudos to Covid, because Covid got people to do video. I mean, true. Way to go, Covid. Right. It put the fear in everybody that in order for them to stay connected, they had to turn on the camera, they had to remove the sticky note off their computer, you know, camera hole. That's where it started. But here's. Here's what I love. I, first of all, if I can't tell people to do something, if I'm not already doing it myself, and then I'm not.

00:26:31 - Annette Anthony

If I'm not having fun with it, they're definitely not going to do it right. I love video. I had a bombbomb account. I had like 987 videos in bombbomb. Now I'm starting to use dub because there's a ton more features. But love, love the ability to be able to send videos all the time. But I do videos constantly and it's just, you know, anybody can do this.

00:26:54 - Annette Anthony

If you just think about, well, what if I have something to communicate today? Whether it be by phone or by text or by email, it could definitely be done by video. So whether it's, hey, I'm going to see you next week for our appointment. I can't wait. Send that as a video or, hey, we just met. It was so good to see you again. Great to hear about your family. Do a video, right? Instead of just that, send that text message, you know, there's just no replacement for the human touch and how people feel when they see you on video. I mean, it's just unbelievable. So here I've got a strategy that I did with one of our owners. Now, I love female entrepreneurs.

00:27:34 - Annette Anthony

You know, those are my soul sisters, the ones who say, you know what, I'm going to put my flag in the ground and I'm going to own an exit office and I'm going to attract and build leaders. Like, I love that. One of our owners, she, she is in the Chicago area. Her name is Esmerelda. Love her. She said, gosh, you're just so good at videoing it. I just am terrible. I'm so scared of it. I wish I could do it.

00:27:58 - Annette Anthony

It was almost like rubbing the genie bottle, right? Her saying, I wish I could do it. And I told her, all right, well, then I'm going to hold you accountable. You and I are going to help you do video. So she says, well, what do you mean? I said, we're going to meet every week. I'm going to teach you something and you're going to have absolute confidence to be able to talk about it. And you're going to do a video once a week for the next 30 days. She was like, you've got to be kidding me.

00:28:24 - Annette Anthony

No, I said, it's Tuesday, so we got a video to do this week because you're going to do it on Friday. So, Bill, it was holding her accountable. That's it. You know, holding her accountable that you can do this. And I'm going to give you, I'm going to share with you. You know, if I'm really excited about something, I know she's probably going to be excited about that, too. So it was just finding what are you excited about? And then let's help put the words together, but make them your own.

00:28:52 - Annette Anthony

But then you got it. You got it. Here's the due date. You got to do it. So I got to tell you about, like, she's been doing video, and I watch her. She's just absolutely natural. Now, it's not forced, but it's absolutely consistent. She's grown her office exponentially. And I told her, listen, what you're doing in less than your first year of being an owner, you're a unicorn. Like, she's growing. She's got, she's got about a dozen agents already. That's insane. And it's because of her confidence and talking to her audience on social, letting them know, hey, here's what I'm excited about today.

00:29:29 - Annette Anthony

Here's what I'm learning. Here's who I'm helping. Here's who I'm, you know, here's who I'm looking for. Here's a tool that I, that I saw an agent leverage of ours, and here's how their business has grown. Let's have a conversation. Her audience is building, but her confidence to do this regularly. So, yeah, I love, I love helping people do video.

00:29:50 - Annette Anthony

So if you ever see me and you're just like, you know what, Annette? I need help. Just know that you're going to get the help, and I'm going to help you stay accountable, and you're going to be successful. Just ask for help.

00:30:01 - Bill Risser

Is there something new out there, some kind of a new piece of technology that has you kind of excited where you're checking it out?

00:30:08 - Annette Anthony

So one of our biggest technologies, I feel, is our geolocation technology specifically. And your viewers can definitely check this out when you text engage. That's by vanity code, to the number 85377. So take your mobile device, compose a brand new text message. The number you're going to text to is 85377. And in the body of the message, it's going to be the word engage. E n G a G e, hit send. Then you'll receive, receive a text message from me. Just click on the link. And what it does, Bill, is it fetches your gps location and it shows you the available listings where you are. So whether you're traveling on business, whether you're traveling, you know, for pleasure anywhere in North America, and it's exitized. So it doesn't matter if it's an independent or national brand or international brand. It's branded to me. So that is a really cool technology. It's our geolocation technology, but specifically for our agents to create their own vanity code and share that with their consumers, because consumers don't care who's behind the sign. They want to know what's the information behind the home that they're interested in. And oftentimes, the biggest challenge is when they call the agent, the voicemail is too full. You can't even leave a message. Or if you send a text message to the agent to learn for information, the agent won't respond back until the other part of the day. So what happens is consumers confidence starts to decline. Consumers want two things. They want pictures, they want pricing, period. And if you don't give them that, they're going to find someone else who will. So our technology, it's geolocation. It's throughout all of North America. So helping our agents connect buyers with their home of their dreams, whether it's, of course, anywhere in the US or Canada. And sellers love that because they know that time is of the essence and everyone is fused to their technology. So I love our geolocation technology, Annette.

00:32:10 - Bill Risser

It's that time. I know you know the question. You've listened to the podcast, so I'm going to ask that same question I've asked everybody. Give me one piece of advice for new agents just getting going in the business.

00:32:21 - Annette Anthony

All right, I got a zinger.

00:32:22 - Bill Risser

Okay. I hear it.

00:32:23 - Annette Anthony

So my biggest suggestion is to find someone who sees something in you that you don't see in yourself. Find that person. It only takes one who believes in you, who says, no, you can do this. I'm going to hold you accountable. We're going to work together. That person sees something in you that you aren't even that person yet, but you definitely want. Those people are out there. They might be successful people as well. And they were there once where they were just beginning, and they're giving back. So find someone who believes in you. I think that's the biggest thing you can do in your business. Your future self will definitely thank you.

00:33:06 - Bill Risser

You have to be open to what people are putting out there so you can find that person. I think that's awesome. That'll be great. If someone wants to reach out to you, Annette, what's the best way for them to do that?

00:33:17 - Annette Anthony

Sure. You know, you can definitely find me on Facebook. My handle is Annette Anthony. Very easy. But you, you can also text, engage to 85377. It provides you all my contact information. Don't hesitate to reach out. You know, we're here to empower one another. And I love what you're doing. I definitely love what you're doing with rate my agent and you're such a big influencer in the industry. I don't real I don't think you know how much of an impact you've made in people's lives, because you have.

00:33:46 - Bill Risser

That's very kind of you. And it is that you're right. I'm not comfortable with that. I have to learn how to be more comfortable with that. How's that?

00:33:53 - Annette Anthony

Yes.

00:33:54 - Bill Risser

This has been awesome. The only thing I did wrong here is wait so long to chat with you on the show. So thank you so much for doing this and best of luck. Continued success with exit. It's been just a blast to watch you grow and the company grow.

00:34:09 - Annette Anthony

Thanks, Bill. Appreciate all that you do for us and the industry.

00:34:11 - 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.