Meet the Board: Frank DeRonja – Building Generational Wealth Through Real Estate

Another board member joins the spotlight in this Meet the Board series.

This time, we sit down with Frank DeRonja, Principal Broker at Corcoran DeRonja Real Estate, to explore how real estate professionals create real impact beyond just opening doors. 

Frank has spent over two decades in real estate, serving in leadership roles and building lasting relationships. We talk about the importance of making real estate accessible as a path to generational wealth, and what MLS boards are doing to stay ahead in a shifting market. 

Frank also opens up about the challenges of balancing volunteer work with a thriving career—and how relationships built through service make it all worthwhile. Finally, we cover the recent rebrand from Triangle MLS to Doorify and how the new name better reflects their broader mission.

There’s so much value in this conversation—whether you're an agent or just curious about the industry. Tune in for some practical takeaways and a deeper look at what makes real estate meaningful.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

• The importance of real estate in building generational wealth
• Doorify's rebranding and its impact on consumers and agents
• Leadership, volunteering, and relationship-building within the real estate community

Links from this episode:

• Know more about Frank DeRonja: https://drefirm.com/agents/frank-deronja
• Learn more about Corcoran DeRonja Real Estate: https://www.corcoran.com/corcoran-deronja-real-estate/36
• Learn more about Doorify MLS: https://doorifymls.com

1ae5b43598204883b524f061d4880e6d10fca88c (for podfollow.com)

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:20 About Frank DeRonja
• 4:46 Significant learning curve for MLS board role
• 8:25 Real estate agents' work more complex than perceived
• 10:53 Generational wealth through strategic real estate investments
• 12:59 Home values surged significantly due to COVID-19
• 16:27 Volunteering builds industry relationships and deep knowledge

Transcript

Frank DeRonja [00:00:00]:
People always think it's easy to be a real estate agent and it's definitely more complicated. I think from the consumer standpoint, it's a great name. And really, again, how do we help folks enter? What is the best way to build wealth and generational wealth as well, beyond just having the place to live. You understand that? I understand that. How important it is for the home is for families.

Matt Fowler [00:00:33]:
Hey, everybody, it's Matt Fowler, the executive director at Doorify MLS. Get to say that now since we changed our name recently, we are the former Triangle MLS. There's a lot of reasons that we did that, that we're going to chat with our special guest, Frank DeRonja today about. Hey, Frank.

Frank DeRonja [00:00:49]:
Hey there. How are you?

Matt Fowler [00:00:51]:
I'm great, man. Thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Like, we don't spend enough time together already. I know, born commitments a lot.

Frank DeRonja [00:00:59]:
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Matt Fowler [00:01:01]:
And you're also. We got some kind of questions to tell our subscribers, who is Frank Daraja today? And we're going to have some fun with that and then we'll talk a little bit about what in the world we're doing with Triangle over there at the board of directors. But you're also involved in leadership at RRAr, is that right?

Frank DeRonja [00:01:19]:
That is correct. I am the current 2024 secretary treasurer, and the election for president elect is happening this week, but I am running unopposed. So it looks like I will be your 2025 Raleigh regional association president elect.

Matt Fowler [00:01:38]:
So fantastic. Which, as I understand the train schedules, makes you president of Raleigh in 2026, 2022. How that works? Okay. Like things remaining equal. That's really cool. Cause somebody in my position, Frank, who, you know, who's down in the weeds and the technology all the time and the rules and regs within ardental. We love having experienced people in our leadership because you know what's going on, you know the conversations that are happening, and it's really valuable to have you guys engage. And I know it's.

Matt Fowler [00:02:09]:
I know it takes a big chunk out of your stuff. You actually get paid for.

Frank DeRonja [00:02:14]:
Oh, yeah.

Matt Fowler [00:02:15]:
I mean, it makes the industry work and that we could not. We just absolutely couldn't do it without you. I really thank you for service on both of those boards. So before we get into the business stuff, what does, what do people generally not know about Frank DeRonja? A little known fact, I have two.

Frank DeRonja [00:02:33]:
Dogs, which you may, that come to work with me every day, and they're actually laying here nicely right now and call one my emotional support dogs. He truly is. Actually, that's one thing and then I have two old cars that I work on and piddle around with. So I have a 1969 Volkswagen bug convertible and a 1961 triumph three.

Matt Fowler [00:03:02]:
Oh, man. I used to have a six. It was my favorite car.

Frank DeRonja [00:03:05]:
Oh, yes. I would love to add that to a collection, but need to deal with the cars I've got right now.

Matt Fowler [00:03:11]:
I mean, two is a lot. And you want to stay married, right? I mean, you have a.

Frank DeRonja [00:03:15]:
My wife is very tolerant.

Matt Fowler [00:03:19]:
Thank God for that. Thank God for that. Frank. So how long have you served on the board?

Frank DeRonja [00:03:25]:
You know, I went back and looked, I'm in about my 9th year, although I was the Raleigh Regional association rep for most of that time. So I served as the, you know, the association representative on the board for most of that time.

Matt Fowler [00:03:43]:
So, yeah, maybe we should touch on that. We haven't in our previous conversations with the board members. The Triangle board is made up of directors from all five association stakeholders, shareholders that are involved with us. Raleigh owns Doorify, but the others are involved financially with us. And then in our operations as a regional MLS, they all operate as independent businesses that are all nonprofit and they all send people into the Triangle board. And for everyone that's sent to the. I'm going to start saying Doorify eventually. When, when people are sent into the door of our board by their associations, we also elect and at large member for each appointed member from the association.

Matt Fowler [00:04:28]:
So there's, that's five. That makes ten. Then we have a stakeholder reps and the stakeholder council elects a representative that sits on the board. Add them all up and there's 14 voting members on the primary board right now and a couple of non voting representatives like you were as the Raleigh representatives. Yes.

Frank DeRonja [00:04:46]:
Yep. Correct. So you know, then this is an interesting board in the sense that the learning curve for the, for MLS, and I've actually gotten good about saying Doorify, by the way, Matt. And I'll tell you, it has been, I'm pretty impressed with just talking with folks how that switch has happened with the end users. As far as just using that terminology versus Triangle. It seems to be out there and being adopted. But the learning curve for the multiple lifting board is pretty significant, meaning that I felt like that first year, year and a half I served on that board was really learning and learning about the technology and learning about the contracts and all the pieces. It's a complicated, it's a more complicated and intent role the association is serving on.

Frank DeRonja [00:05:41]:
Association board, which I've done as well. It's I would say less complicated, but more relationship driven. So it's two very different roles.

Matt Fowler [00:05:50]:
So, yeah, I think. I think that's a, that's an interesting observation. You know, when I was hired a few years ago, six years into your tenure, you guys said, run this thing like a business. And it was. That means differently than it had been in the past. And now I think we're operating sort of like a data company or software company, and there are, you know, we're making financial projections a little bit different than a budget. That transition has been really interesting, and I think it's adding a lot of value to the association. I think we're probably creating a little disruption along the way, which we'll get to in a moment.

Matt Fowler [00:06:28]:
But you said you'd practice real estate for a while, or did you been on the board for nine years. When did you start practicing real estate?

Frank DeRonja [00:06:35]:
I got my license in 2002 and then left my old business in 2003 to be a real estate broker full time. And then in November 2010, hung out my shingle for my company.

Matt Fowler [00:06:48]:
And so that was an interesting time to do that.

Frank DeRonja [00:06:51]:
Frank, listen, if you can. It was, I said at the time, if I can survive a year, I can survive anything. And so we've seen a lot of craziness since then, but that was definitely shapes how you run business and how you look at things.

Matt Fowler [00:07:06]:
And I'm a huge thing born during the depression. Right.

Frank DeRonja [00:07:11]:
Exactly right. It's. I'm like a cash reserves guy. I love cash in the bank. It's key. And it all comes back to that.

Matt Fowler [00:07:19]:
And so it does seem to get you out of trouble repeatedly when we have that to go back to. So, you know, you and I decided after the alamance merger, along with the other directors, that, that we need to change the name that we had stretched Triangle all the way to Burlington and down to Smithfield, and we need to do something about that. And we hired an agency. You know, we tried to do that the right way. I think we did an amazing job. I think the team did an amazing job by coming up with a seven letter domain name with a word that had never existed before. We were able to acquire the.com. i think the optics of opening doors to new types of software, new types of memberships, new types of ways of doing business, opening the doors to new financing models that might get first time home buyers into homes, just not being stuck with closed doors and closed minds.

Matt Fowler [00:08:12]:
The optics across the board here, I think, work really well. But tell me a little bit about how you saw that and how you see the Doorify consumer approach benefiting the agents out there in the field.

Frank DeRonja [00:08:25]:
I think it is definitely a consumer focused name, and particularly with how difficult it has become over the past, really, five to ten years to get into a home financially, that the idea that we're facilitating agents and firms, helping clients enter into the real estate world, I think that on the flip side, there's been a perception that from the agent standpoint is all we do are open doors to let people in homes. And it's interesting, I went to this. This is a side note. I went to an event last night which was like a Nashville singer songwriter event, which was very interesting. They had three songwriters, very successful songwriters, who were up there telling stories about their songs. And all these songs are country songs, the number one hit, you know, these guys between them had, you know, 50 number one hits since the nineties. And we were talking about, oh, what does it take to do. It seems like it would be easy to be a songwriter, and PM was like, people always think it's easy to be a real estate agent, and it's definitely more complicated.

Frank DeRonja [00:09:40]:
I think from the consumer standpoint, it's a great name. And really, again, how do we help folks entertained? What is the, frankly, the best way to build wealth and generational wealth as well, beyond just having the place to live? And we. You understand that? I understand that. How important it is for the home is for. For families.

Matt Fowler [00:10:03]:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it starts with. It starts with security. Right? On one of our interviews last year, we met a lady who was able to buy a house. She's a math teacher, and we were just talking to her about her experience, and she hadn't really thought about the equity. It wasn't really something that was in her head space. She was thinking about the more old school mortgage books she had with 30 years of payments. And she knew with her salary that it was going to go up with inflation, and she was going to be able to make those payments for 30 years.

Matt Fowler [00:10:38]:
And the security of doing that, you know, on top of the wealth creation, is why you and I want to do what we do. So along that line, tell me, what makes you passionate about bringing people into homes? Just a story about that, you know, I'll tell it.

Frank DeRonja [00:10:53]:
Well, just kind of building on that last conversation, I've met some over the years. I've met a lot of people, and I met a guy five or six years ago whose family owns a lot of real estate in downtown Raleigh. And I. Hes a guy. Hes a. Came from a family where, you know, were talking about, they started buying real estate in twenties and thirties. And he came from a background of people who it was very difficult to buy real estate, meaning like his great grandfather worked for the post office and really through all sorts of means, started buying property before it was, you know, even accepted that folks of their background should be owning homes. And I'll tell you, you know, that goes back again to generational wealth.

Frank DeRonja [00:11:42]:
I mean, the decisions this, this guy's grandfather made or great grandfather, you know, have impacted, has created so many opportunities for this gentleman and his kids and how successful they've been. That's been the base of this. And so, you know, I think it's a pretty cool story. They hear that history of success. You know, I think there's something too about being able to paint your walls the color you want and to not have a rent increase.

Matt Fowler [00:12:10]:
And that's what Kamala, that lady I interviewed last year, was saying, frank, and that she was able to tell her sons that that room, that was their room when they were going to graduate.

Frank DeRonja [00:12:21]:
Yeah.

Matt Fowler [00:12:22]:
And they weren't going to bounce from place to place and school to school every year. And then I got to tell her what a HELOC washing while we were on the phone, like you and I are talking right now. And I looked up her house. I used to be an appraiser, did a quick back of the napkin. And she can afford college tuition for those boys. That's something that was a revelation to her. In addition to that, years of security, that's where the rising tide of this equity lifts all boats. We had a conversation with the UNC Kenan Blagler guys a couple of weeks ago, and Selma Hepp talked about it as well.

Matt Fowler [00:12:59]:
The Corelogic chief economist at Prop Tech. If you look at the increase in value of every home across the whole area, that's an enormous, I mean, enormous amount of money. It's not just the ones that have sold that have gone up in value, because the value of homes in general have gone up. Everybody's equity, their access to that money through a HELOC, their ability to refinance, their ability to improve that property through renovations causes us to add housing stock, to improve the housing stock and update it. And it's the extraordinary growth in value since, really Covid, there was a hard upturn in 2016 that we see in our data, but Covid really had a spike in it. And those, those values in this area have not really moderated. We haven't lost that. We booked just to wrap it up today.

Matt Fowler [00:13:55]:
Frank, how do you feel about going into next summer? We have this choice model on the MLS environment now we have a bunch of new things that people might want to use to attack the market that we kind of forecast for next summer. After a half a cut rate cut, how do you see next year?

Frank DeRonja [00:14:12]:
You've got to be perpetually optimistic to do this business. I am perpetually optimistic. I mean, I mentioned before how conservative I am about a lot of decisions we make as a company and everything else. I think people still are moving here and we saw this during the recession. I can remember 2000, 910. Eleven people move here even without jobs like, oh, this is the promised land and so great to the area. I think that the inventory, we saw some of it, we've seen some of this year where folks who finally hit that point where they're okay giving up their three and a half percent mortgages just because they've gotten raises, they've had job changes, they're empty nesters, they've had more kids. It's like, okay, we finally are going to make that move.

Frank DeRonja [00:15:06]:
So to see some more inventory come up, I think if we can, you know, these rates coming in, the magic number would be in the fives, I think is from an interest rate standpoint, people say that, but we've seen that in the past 45 days. Right now, frankly, our October closings are good and that little rate cut trend downward has really made a difference.

Matt Fowler [00:15:34]:
And I think you can always refi. I think people understand that and if they have a life change, that's why most people move. Slow that down. I'm glad that the barriers have come down some. Our affordability index has started to look slightly better. And it's not just because the prices haven't moderated. Its income has come up. Last update to median household income helped affordability a good bit because North Carolina has a bump, which is great.

Frank DeRonja [00:16:05]:
Brian.

Matt Fowler [00:16:07]:
Well, Frank, I want to ask you one last question on the way out. It's a question I've been asking everybody. Standard interview question here, really. What should I have asked you about your board service that you would want to talk to the subscribers about? You know, a little mysterious, what happens in there when the door closes and we make these, make these decisions. What would you tell them about that?

Frank DeRonja [00:16:27]:
I get asked a lot. And this is on why? Why do you know as an individual I volunteer and I have been and I think that's something, this is something just in general, whether it's MLS or the association. And it goes back to something I'd said, particularly focused on association. But the relationships you have through this volunteer, you get, from a knowledge standpoint, pretty deep knowledge on how things are working in our industry. But probably more importantly is those relationships you have with, frankly, staff with you all over there and Alan in particular. I love the fact that I can text Alan sometimes, and I try not to bother him, but you have those relationships. But frankly, the relationships with other board members, that reaps a lot of benefits. And it's.

Frank DeRonja [00:17:17]:
I volunteered. This industry has been really good to me and my family, and I drank the Kool aid a long time ago. Meaning, like, haven't missed many swim meets or lacrosse matches or anything. It's a great industry, and, you know, and it's. And it's very extraordinarily rewarding to help folks get into a home and stay in a home.

Matt Fowler [00:17:37]:
It does feel socially valuable. You know, I don't think I want on my tombstone to say something like made realtors marginally more efficient.

Frank DeRonja [00:17:47]:
Right, right.

Matt Fowler [00:17:49]:
I wanted to say something like help people find home. And I think that is legitimately what we do. We make it easier to do that, more transparent. We make sure through our work that every house is in the list, so you don't have to worry why the one that you're looking for isn't there. Because we try to ensure that they're all there. Yeah. So thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate.

Matt Fowler [00:18:09]:
Thanks, Matt.

Frank DeRonja [00:18:10]:
Thanks for the time.

Matt Fowler [00:18:11]:
All the subscribers watch for more of these meet the board interviews coming up soon. I hope you enjoyed them. And if you see Frank out there in the road somewhere, tell him thanks for spending all that time down at the board office.

Frank DeRonja [00:18:23]:
Thank you.