Doorify Real Estate Podcast

Meet the Board: Mark Parker – Strengthening Agent-Consumer Connections

• Doorify MLS

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It’s another episode in our Meet the Board series, where I get to sit down with members of Doorify MLS’s leadership team. 

In this episode, I chat with Mark Parker, who brings a wealth of real estate experience and insight. We explore his journey, perspectives on industry change, and what excites him about the future of Doorify

Mark Parker, an Associate Real Estate Broker with Coldwell Banker Howard Perry and Walston, has spent over 20 years in the business. His global upbringing—from Zimbabwe to Belgium to Brazil—gave him a unique outlook on life and work, shaping his approach to real estate. Mark shares his experiences transitioning between management roles and sales, offering an inside look at the challenges and rewards of both. 

Tune in to get another round of board member insights you won't want to miss!

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

  • The strategic improvements and future direction of Doorify MLS
  • Managing agent concerns around technology
  • The value of locally controlled MLS platforms

Links from this episode:

1ae5b43598204883b524f061d4880e6d10fca88c (for podfollow.com)

Mark Parker [00:00:00]:
And a lot of what we do is we're not salespeople. We find solutions to problems and try and fix things. And a lot of times if the client is not aware about those problems that are happening behind the scenes and the agents are working together, then I think we've done our job. And every transaction is different. It's no two transactions are the same, but just finding solutions and making things work and having happy clients at the end of the day is more important than anything. I wouldn't trade this for the world. I'm passionate about it. I believe we provide a great value to the consumer.

Mark Parker [00:00:26]:
And it's fun.

Matt Fowler [00:00:35]:
Hey, everybody, thanks for joining us again. I am Matt Fowler, the executive director of DoorifyMLS.com. i love saying that. The former Triangle MLS. We've grown so much and changed so much, it was time to change our name. And we have our special guest with us this morning, Mark Parker from the Doorify board of directors. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Parker [00:00:54]:
Good morning, Matt. Great to see you and thank you for having me on here. It's good to be here.

Matt Fowler [00:00:58]:
It's a lot of fun. We get to spend a lot of time together, Mark, because the Doorfy board commitment is, you know, better than most, a significant commitment. So thanks for doing this for us. Real quick. I just want our subscribers to kind of get to meet Mark and our other board members. It's what we're doing with these things. And we've got a few questions that we're asking everybody. And this is a little open ended, you know.

Matt Fowler [00:01:18]:
So I want to hear what you want to talk about, Mark. But before we start off a little bit about Mark Parker, what's a little known fact about you?

Mark Parker [00:01:27]:
Oh, I don't know. I just, I enjoy life. Like to have a good, good time in life. I've been doing this for about 26 years. So I think I started when I was about 16, but, yeah, that was my.

Matt Fowler [00:01:38]:
Apparently. But I saw you. You did a last minute trip to London the other day. That's, that looks super fun.

Mark Parker [00:01:44]:
Absolutely. I've, you know, I've gotten to a point in my life where I'm just saying, you know what? Buy the ticket, enjoy life. I don't want to wake up one day and be too old to enjoy those kind of experiences. So I'm glad to do. And I heard you're thinking about doing a trip soon, so that'd be great.

Matt Fowler [00:01:57]:
Yeah. Yeah, always. I've got another one on the calendar somewhere. And you went to high school over there, didn't you? Did I hear that.

Mark Parker [00:02:03]:
That's right. I kind of grew up, actually. That's probably more of something about my background. I grew up all over the world. I'm very blessed, very fortunate to have lived in a lot of great places, and I think that's really been a big part of cultivating who I am by experiencing and seeing different cultures. But a real quick snapshot on me. I was born in Zimbabwe, lived in Malawi, lived in South Africa, lived in Belgium, but most of my education was in England, just south of London. So I was there, and then my parents moved to Brazil when I was about 16.

Mark Parker [00:02:31]:
So I finished off high school there, but when I graduated, I moved to the US and stuck around ever since. I've been here for a while.

Matt Fowler [00:02:39]:
Well, I love doing these interviews because I want to talk to you about Brazil, and I learned that one of our board members has written 20 something books. More than that, I think it's just so interesting, the people that come into that room and kind of wind up in real estate. I mean, real estate is a really diverse industry. It really is. Yeah. So you just said you practiced real estate for a long time when it was 20 something years.

Mark Parker [00:03:04]:
Right. So the practitioner has a small team for about ten years and did relatively well. I worked for, at the time, Fonda Morrissey, and then I transitioned into management in 2009. So I kind of of saw the writing on the wall. The market was definitely changing quite significantly there, and so. But I still was very passionate about real estate, did not want to leave real estate, but I also had a family to support. So that management transition at the time seemed to be a great move for me, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I had a great office.

Mark Parker [00:03:35]:
Then I moved over to Harry Potter and Walson a little over three and a half years ago, almost four years ago. So managed a very large office for a good while, and then just decided recently to go back into sales. So I've stepped down from the management role, had a great office with some really amazing agents, and then just decided to go back into sales, which I really enjoyed. I've been doing it. I'm back in sales for probably about five, six months now.

Matt Fowler [00:04:00]:
Yeah. You know, I know several people that have done that, that have spent their time, you know, running the office and doing that thing and tapped out and went back to what they originally enjoyed about the business. Yeah, several of those guys are making more money, but they all seem happier. Right. They're just. They don't have that kind of responsibility. I think you've got enough of that to transition to the MLS questions. You've got enough management responsibility inside the boardroom at Dorifont to probably fill your need to decision making.

Matt Fowler [00:04:31]:
Yeah, so I've been asking the same few questions to everybody. Mark, you know, we just had a pretty interesting three years that you and I just went through. You know, we had to renovate and some things to be able to move forward. I use all these metaphors at one point, if we're renovating the mls there were so many subs on site that you couldn't get your work done, you know, and I think it was disruptive. It was absolutely disruptive. And we had an aggressive schedule and then we had stuff added to it by the universe. So coming out of all that we have a clear path, I believe to be the best mls in the country and the way that we can prove it. And we have published this new brand and the tagline, our message is connecting people with property.

Matt Fowler [00:05:23]:
And I think a lot of our subscribers have misunderstood that. We're trying to cut them out. And what we mean exactly is the b to b to c concept that we've written about a lot and talked about. So that's business us to business view in the middle to the consumer. And if the consumer is going to get a sub second alert that says Mark Parker on it so you can be as fast as the fastest app on the app store, we want to work towards that and we just built an infrastructure to do that. But tell me in your words how connecting people with property fits in that.

Mark Parker [00:05:58]:
Right. Great question. And Matt, first let me say this. I mean yes, we've been through a lot of changes in the last twelve months and change is difficult. People always struggle with that. But what I'm telling everyone is that it was necessary. We had to make improvements not only just to our platforms but to forward facing websites. And that's gonna make our agents, or all the agents that our practitioners a lot more efficient, a lot more effective and there's a lot more opportunities there.

Mark Parker [00:06:29]:
I've heard from some folks that they said, oh, Doorify, they didn't quite understand the name. It means that we're opening doors. I said no, we're opening up doors to opportunity. And I think the changes that we've made of are very robust and it makes it easier, a lot more agile to move forward as we add new products and services to increase the efficiency of agents business. It's funny you asked me this question because just yesterday one of my former agents from the office that I used to manage, he called me and he expressed his concerns. But I spent time with him explaining that his concern was we're giving too much information to the consumer and it may bypass the agent. And I explained to him quite the opposite. I said, look, the consumer already has access to that information.

Mark Parker [00:07:14]:
What we're doing now is we're now putting the consumer in direct contact with the agents directly. And I asked them specifically, would you rather them search on another site that may be leading them, or would you rather them search on our platform, our site? And then if they do want to be connected to that agent, they can be put directly in contact with that agent. So it's not just giving us better products, but it's also putting us directly in communication with the consumer.

Matt Fowler [00:07:43]:
Yeah, that's exactly right, Mark. You said that really well. I've been doing this for a really long time, as you know, and consumer portals have been a big part of the strategy that many people have been recommending. For those of you watching, I'll put a link to it in the show notes below. But podcast just came out yesterday, October 9, from Sarah Fogg and I. Sarah's the MLS director of it, Prime MLS, and they've had an MLS consumer portal for a long time that I sold Sarah back in the day when I did that. And it was always our kind of flagship site. And they make a lot of ad money off of that, just from, you know, Liberty mutual ads and Home Depot ads, things that don't interrupt the process at all.

Matt Fowler [00:08:24]:
But other companies have been making money off of our members listings for a long time. They've been making all that ad money. And then when somebody connects with them, they sell that lead back to the consumer or, excuse me, back to my subscriber. What we're doing is trying to interrupt some of the lead flow or those connections that are happening on paid lead sites. We're not going to change it entirely, but we can interrupt some of that traffic. And in some of them, in all of the markets that we had, these sites, they become a very valuable source of email verified leads that are coming directly to you as a member, benefit from your trade association or from your MLS. We did it for a really important reason. That's trying to be a solution to the things that some of our subscribers think we're adding to.

Matt Fowler [00:09:13]:
We're actually trying to change it because the thing that's really different about Doorify is who owns it. It's not some California company or a canadian data reseller. It's Mark Parker's company and the other bits in this market you own something that's a seven letter domain name that never existed in the dictionary. Before that we were able to acquire the.com for. It's extremely unusual to be able to do that. I mean it's a very valuable brand and it's now the property of Doorify MLS, which is owned by the local brokers in this area. And that's adding enormous value. I believe one day it'll be worth as much as.

Matt Fowler [00:09:52]:
I think it's a big accomplishment.

Mark Parker [00:09:54]:
I couldn't agree with you more and go back to the conversation I had yesterday. His comment was that, you know, we're never going to be able to compete with the big engine search engines out there. And I said, actually I believe we will be able to. And look, that's the american way, right? Competition is good. But I think also if, you know, on a local area, if people start getting used to going to Doorfi as opposed to anywhere else, we now then control the narrative. We can send the message that we want to do and show the value proposition that we as agents provide to the consumer. So I think it's a win win win situation for everyone.

Matt Fowler [00:10:28]:
I just, I think we could prove that. Actually, Mark, it's going to be, as I told the board when we talked about this project, they need to think, we all need to think about this as a 60 month project. So this is not, if you're doing marketing and branding in a market the size of ours and you want your name to be given back to you in a man on the street interview, you know, what is the authoritative source of real real estate information in this area? And you would like them to say Mark Parker. And of course, but like a fallback would be Doorify. Because, you know, when consumers go to Doorify, they're going to get Mark Parker fairly represented with rules that are written in this market, not written by some foreign company. They're written by the, by the people who practice real estate in North Carolina. And there's not another side that does that. Right? You know, so think of it as I love my realtor.com friends, but this is, this could be a local realtor.com that we actually own this time, right? Because we don't the other one in a real way anymore.

Matt Fowler [00:11:33]:
And people, you know, they paint us with that behavior and we're actually part of the solution up to that. So we want people to be proud of that brand, send people to it. We've got some classes coming up online that will I linked to that do some fairly sophisticated a b testing using ad tech. And we can demonstrate that campaigns that point to Doorify domain are more successful overall than campaigns that point to a less trafficked domain. So you may even want to use that domain to boost your own properties because you'll get more leads from them. We'll have more coming up on that soon. Mark, tell me about homeowners. Tell me what makes you passionate about putting somebody into a new house?

Mark Parker [00:12:13]:
Well, like I said, I've been doing it for a long time and I just love helping people. And it doesn't really matter if it's their first transaction or if it's their 10th transaction. It's going to be a big, impactful decision that they make at that moment. So just helping people through, navigate the murky waters of buying or even selling a home, there's a lot of challenges. It's not something that people do on a day to day basis. So just helping someone with their biggest investment, it's fun, it's exciting. And a lot of what we do is we're nothing salespeople. We find solutions to problems and try and fix things.

Mark Parker [00:12:43]:
And a lot of times if the client is not aware about those problems that are happening behind the scenes and the agents are working together, then I think we've done our job. So. And every transaction is different. It's no two transactions are the same, but just finding solutions and making things work and having happy clients at the end of the day is more important than anything. I wouldn't trade this for the world. I'm passionate about it. I believe we provide a great value to the consumer. And it's fun.

Matt Fowler [00:13:05]:
Yeah, that's what I always loved about real estate, too. I was in a long time ago in an industry that was different. And then I got an appraisal license and, you know, was hanging out with the real estate guys instead of the lawyer guys. And boy, what a difference. Those break rooms are very different places. I really enjoyed real estate a lot this whole time. And the thing that we do has to have a things that you've spent 20 something years on. It's not making commission, right? That's not.

Matt Fowler [00:13:37]:
If you ask what, what do you love about what you do? You wouldn't say a percentage number. You would say it's about those smiles and, and you know, sometimes you get paid a lot on a transaction that it was super easy and the numbers all were great. And you know, there's this bidding process that happens and the price goes up and then sometimes you work forever you know, once and months and nothing. You don't get paid at all. The deal never goes through. And I think people in real estate just kind of expect that and know it's going to just average out, you know, to something that's, that's a good income. If you work hard in this industry, people usually say the hardest working people seem to be the luckiest. I think there's something that goes with that.

Matt Fowler [00:14:21]:
Right.

Mark Parker [00:14:22]:
I think people create their own luck in a way, so. And it's just like anything, there's an old saying in this business that don't worry about the money, take care of the client, the money will come. And I think, don't get me wrong, we all have bills and have to put a meal on our plate, but then we do this for a living. But I think most realtors do this because they passionate about helping people and that's really what it comes down to.

Matt Fowler [00:14:45]:
Absolutely. I agree most, the vast majority of people that I meet definitely feel that way. Maybe it's those people that I meet are the people in leadership that have the heart to get back like, like you're doing, Mark, which is really fantastic. I've got one more question for you before we end up. Yeah, tell me a question that I didn't ask about board service that you'd like the subscribers to know about.

Mark Parker [00:15:10]:
Well, what would you say is your vision and plan on marketing Doorify to get the word out, to have people kind of see and appreciate exactly what we've, what your vision has been to accomplish this? Because like you said earlier on in the interview, that they, you know, we've all been working very hard to push this needle forward, but what can we do to get that word out to let the, let our clients, for example, our agents out there know that this is a really forward thinking platform and we're going to make a big changes in the future to come.

Matt Fowler [00:15:43]:
Yeah, that's a great point, Mark. The importance of communications this next year. And I want our subscribers to know, and you see in our door five messages that are going out that we believe that we're on a path to prove that we are the best MLS in the country. And, but to our Paragon users who on November 29 last year had their platform significantly disrupted, unless they've taken part in any of our other tools that are now just now starting to come out, their entire experience has been that Paragon has been disrupted and you know, they haven't seen the benefits of it. Our vending machine, our AI listing manager, that's inbound the new partnership with our cmas, or new alternative ways to search the MLS that are designed to speak to the consumers. Those things are just now coming out and we're confident that licensed real estate brokers around the state are going to see the things that they can use if they're a member of Doorify. And our data is now reso certified in a way that's more thorough than literally any other mls in the country. We're currently number one on that list and we want to continue to be number one on those lists and that's going to pay huge dividends to our subscribers.

Matt Fowler [00:16:59]:
Right now, though, we've got a two out of five star rating on Yelp if people were to rate us and our task is to change that narrative and to let people see what we've actually done. Talking about is not going to do it. We're going to deliver things to their dashboard that are going to astonish them in the first quarter and we're going to be ready for a really hot summer next year. A half a point rate cut does not hurt. And our inventory is now back. We're up to a much more manageable number of houses for sale. So I think that next year looks great for Doorify and I'm really proud to be part of it all. And thank you, Mark, for giving us the support to go out and do these things.

Matt Fowler [00:17:42]:
I know there's a personal cost when people like your friend yesterday call and say, what are you thinking, Mark? There is in fact an architecture behind all this. Unlike the what some people have told me that they think I just make this up as I go along. I completely understand that it looks like that sometimes, but if you. I'll make put this in the show notes too. If you Google mls of choice and Bob Bemis name, B e m I s, you'll see a report from NAR from 2015. 2015. This is almost ten years ago that has an outline of our architecture with multiple front ends of choice and the sovereign database in the back. I came in with that architecture knowing that it was optimal.

Matt Fowler [00:18:29]:
You guys allowed us to put that in place and now we're starting to benefit from the result of that construction project. So really excited to be taking the kind of the veil off of that as we get into the early 2025.

Mark Parker [00:18:42]:
Absolutely, man. And let me say this, you know, first of all, thank you for your visionary thought and being so forward thinking. As far as, you know, bringing us, I won't say out of the dinosaur age, but bringing us so much more forward. And, you know, that's been a great honor to work with the great people on the board as well as you, to kind of hold on to your vision and see that. Because I said earlier on, change is difficult. People are uncomfortable with change and people get very comfortable with what they have on a day to day basis. So when you have that disruption, it does feel awkward. But I promise our members that twelve months from now, six months from now, they're going to see the great work and they're going to benefit from all the tools that have been implemented, and that's making their business so much better.

Mark Parker [00:19:30]:
I know we were talking the other day about the Ocusell thing coming in here, and that's really exciting. AI is going to enhance their business. And I think it was at prop tech south, the guy that was talking about AI. And AI is not going to replace our business, but agents that are not using AI will get replaced by agents that are using AI. So being that visionary that you are, I think you are seeing and projecting our business so far in the future that its members really are going to benefit significantly from it. I personally just want to say thank you for all that you've done. It's been amazing.

Matt Fowler [00:20:05]:
Well, thank you, Mark. Those. That makes me feel a little bit better about being known as the guy who broke Paragon, because I did do that and I really feel bad for the disruption that occurred there. And we'll just leave that in the past because new Paragon is out and it's got some, you know, work left to do on it. But we're really close, so I feel good about it. And thanks for saying that and thanks for joining us today. Watch for more board profiles coming out in the next few weeks. They'll show up at Doorify

Mark Parker [00:20:33]:
And thank you, Matt, always a pleasure. Thank you.

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