Doorify Real Estate Podcast

Meet the Board: Jessica Bryan – Providing Choices in a Changing Market

• Doorify MLS

Share episode

We’re continuing our Meet the Board series with another dynamic board member, Jessica Bryan. 

In this episode, we get into the need for flexibility, the value of having choices, and how board decisions impact agents and consumers alike. Jessica Bryan brings serious experience to the table. She’s the Broker-in-Charge at Century 21 Southern Lifestyles, a former president of the Orange Chatham Association of REALTORS, and currently leads the Professional Women of Chatham and Orange Counties. On top of that, she’s authored 42 books—and has two more on the way! 

We talk about how new technology and vendor relationships shape the MLS landscape, why choice matters in the tools available to agents, and what it takes to make tough decisions on the board. Jessica shares her passion for balancing innovation with the needs of realtors, highlighting the importance of thoughtful, strategic planning. 

Tune in for a conversation that covers technology, leadership, and the future of real estate—straight from someone who’s seen it all.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

  • The challenges of managing multiple technology vendors
  • The importance of offering flexible tools to agents
  • The board’s efforts to ensure data accuracy and system reliability

Links from this episode:

1ae5b43598204883b524f061d4880e6d10fca88c (for podfollow.com)

Jessica Bryan [00:00:00]:
As far as the board and the decisions that were being made, there has been so much change in the real estate industry. It's been a little upending for a lot of people and even for the board members who understand the reason for everything, it's still difficult. And I see that there's such a strong need for all of us to be very flexible. That to me is a really important part, not only serving on a board and at work, but in life in general. We just have to be flexible because life keeps throwing things at us and there's constant change.

Matt Fowler [00:00:40]:
Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming out again for another DoorifyMLSs.com podcast together this morning with me is Jessica Bryan, our special guest from the board. Hello, Jessica.

Jessica Bryan [00:00:52]:
Hi, Matt. How are you today?

Matt Fowler [00:00:54]:
I'm great. Kicking off another, another week. Board week. Always look forward to that. When I first started the job, Dave Phillips, who hired me, he was CEO of the Raleigh regional back then, told me to imagine dividing my salary by eleven and walking into the board meeting. And if I wasn't that much prepared for that day, then I wasn't doing my job, which was, I think, really focused my thoughts on the board meeting. And it's, it is very critical that those eleven meeting, we skip July, you know, go off well and that we continue to execute our plan and move forward, inform everybody what's going on. I hate when I surprise people, especially when they're on the board.

Matt Fowler [00:01:41]:
Right. So what I want to do this morning or today, Jessica, is just kind of talk to you a little bit about Jessica and a little bit about your experience on the board. You've got experience on a couple of different boards that we work with.

Jessica Bryan [00:01:52]:
Oh, yeah.

Matt Fowler [00:01:53]:
So my first question is, tell us a little bit about Jessica that maybe most people don't know.

Jessica Bryan [00:01:59]:
I have a lot of interesting things in my life. I think that one of the things that people are really surprised about is I came from LA and La, Hollywood, you know, it's a different place. I was the glass plus lady for a couple of years. I was spraying windows and cleaning stoves on commercials. So that was kind of a fun thing. That was before I became a realtor.

Matt Fowler [00:02:22]:
Wow, okay, so la, that's not like Louisiana. I'm from Alabama. We used to say that was mobile. It's lower Alabama.

Jessica Bryan [00:02:30]:
Yeah.

Matt Fowler [00:02:30]:
So how long have you been in North Carolina, then?

Jessica Bryan [00:02:33]:
We moved here 30 years ago.

Matt Fowler [00:02:35]:
Yeah. So long time.

Jessica Bryan [00:02:37]:
Yeah. I'm a native now, you know?

Matt Fowler [00:02:39]:
For sure. For sure. So what is Jessica doing when she's not doing real estate and you're super busy. Do you have any time to not.

Jessica Bryan [00:02:47]:
Do real estate every once in a while? I can manage other things. So I'm an authorization, and I've published 42 books. I'm working on two books right now as well, and that's fun for me. I love to travel, so my husband, skip, and I travel a lot, and I like to incorporate my writing and research with our travels. And I'm always very inspired by places we go. So I like to work that into my books. And I enjoy writing mysteries mostly, so that's a lot of fun. Actually, everything I do, I do for fun, other than maybe cleaning toilets.

Jessica Bryan [00:03:27]:
But, you know, we talked about that.

Matt Fowler [00:03:29]:
Well, that's cool. Writing is just writing is that. That's fairly time consuming.

Jessica Bryan [00:03:33]:
I guess it is. I tend to write late at night and early morning, you know, when my phone isn't ringing. For real estate, that's about the most quiet time.

Matt Fowler [00:03:44]:
Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, that's super interesting. I'm trying to write a book myself, and it's. It's a process. I go back and forth between researching and writing, and I don't, I don't know, spend enough time, I think, putting words on paper. I have to get more disciplined about that.

Jessica Bryan [00:03:58]:
Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to do and to carve out the time when you can just really zero in and focus.

Matt Fowler [00:04:05]:
Yeah, I guess. I guess that's the thing. The zero in and focus thing is something that we do spend a lot of time thinking about at Doorify. Jessica, maybe moving over into that conversation, one of the things that I really focused on when I was hired three years ago, the board said, run this thing like a business. And I think a business has to have a strategic plan. You know, a plan. I hope it's strategic. And we went through and made a plan.

Matt Fowler [00:04:30]:
And the way I know how to implement plans is by bringing those plans down into the calendar really is what that looks like. And it has to be visible in your, you know, your Google calendar or outlook or whatever it is you use. And, you know, back in the day, people probably remember Ben Franklin and Franklin Covey and all that stuff where you. You try to match your calendar with your values. And, you know, for a company, your values are your plan. And you should be able to see if it's color coded, to see all five of our strategic objectives on my team's annual calendar, which is what we're putting together right now for 2025. And one of the things that we did when we tried to match those things is last year we decided to change our name, which fell in the middle of an already ambitious schedule, I think. And then we had things added to our calendar by the regulators and by our accountants that weren't in our plan.

Matt Fowler [00:05:35]:
We started off the year. So tell me a little bit about being inside that boardroom, making those decisions, deciding to change our name, because I think it sure surprised a lot of people, and just like you to comment on that while we're getting there.

Jessica Bryan [00:05:50]:
Well, I think it was a very good idea based on the fact that we are growing and incorporating other areas that aren't the Triangle. So changing the name was far more inclusive. And I think that just the whole idea of what Doorify represents, of opening doors for people, was a very clever use of that whole name change. Yes, it did surprise some people because they. Well, a lot of people just don't think about those things, you know, and they don't like change. Once it was explained, I think it was a very. Everybody pretty much nodded and agreed and understood it. And the whole idea is the idea of connecting people to property, and I see it as just a really good thing as far as the board and the decisions that were being made.

Jessica Bryan [00:06:46]:
There has been so much change in the real estate industry. It's been a little upending for a lot of people, and even for the board members who understand the reason for everything, it's still difficult. And I see that there's such a strong need for all of us to be very flexible. And, you know, that, to me, is a really important part, not only serving on a board and in work, but in life in general. We just have to be flexible because life keeps throwing things at us and there's constant change.

Matt Fowler [00:07:19]:
Yeah. You know, and I've. We get a lot of emails from our I. Almost 15,000 subscribers, Jessica. And there, you know, there are petitions, there are people who really have a complaint, a real one, and I think it's important that they know that you and I acknowledge those, and we don't dismiss those. I hope people understand that. We were in a position where we had used a single platform for so long, almost ten years, nine years and eight months, without making any changes to it. And I think that was like suspended reality.

Matt Fowler [00:07:59]:
Right over that period of time, we just pushed off changes until we pushed off the standardization. We pushed off changing from Paragon to maybe a more modern product, and including Paragons new Connect, which is a more mobile friendly product. But we were stuck with one vendor, and that's just the way it's been done across the industry. And I think an architecture that I learned about years ago felt more appropriate than being stuck with one vendor. And I think that's really proven to be correct, even though that one vendor that most of our subscribers still rely on is struggling to keep the data up to date, to map everything over. And we're working with them as closely as we can. But our alternative at each of the months that we meet, we meet monthly at the board is we go over these things and we really talk about, is it bad enough to fire them and make them leave? And then 10,000 people would have to change to a new system, or should we keep chipping away at it and working with them? So it's painful. It's been really disruptive for all of us, and we're really just still focused on, on the rest of this year in 2025, when the best parts of our choice project, the brand new stuff that gets plugged into our new system, are going to start to be visible.

Matt Fowler [00:09:25]:
And youve seen some of those coming up. So maybe thats a two part question. Jessica, tell us a little bit about your experience in 2024, seeing how the sausage is made and then a little bit about what you see going forward.

Jessica Bryan [00:09:41]:
So, excuse me, allergies. So one of the things that I find fascinating is I love technology. I am not that good with technology, but, you know, I'm a realtor, and I represent realtors on the board as well. And so seeing it with the realtor's eye and what is useful is very important to me personally. I get very excited by what's coming up, what is down the road, the way people see a need and come up with these fabulous ideas to satisfy those needs. But you said something before that I think is really important. The idea that we have choices, to me, is extremely important. I don't want to sacrifice that ever.

Jessica Bryan [00:10:33]:
And I don't think we should sacrifice it for our subscribers either, or for the public. And by doing what we are doing, we are bringing in choices for people who can either choose to do something different or stay with what they know. We don't want to overwhelm people. But by the same token, people are very different, and they have various levels of needs and of understandings. And therefore, or by giving them a lot of different choices, they can stay with what they want, or they can go to something that is new and different and exciting and, you know, run with it.

Matt Fowler [00:11:18]:
Yeah, I've shared many times, I'm a recovering real estate appraiser who ran a software company for 20 years, and I don't know where in that experience makes me qualified to pick the software that you use for your customer. Jessica. My expertise is going to be in making sure that the one that you picked works. And that's what we're really focused on with vice and Corelogic and FBS. And I would say that even eleven months out from, almost eleven months out from turning the system on, we're not quite there yet with either of those three vendors. And it's taken us all this time to get to a point where we're confident that all the listings are in all the systems, all the photos and the documents are present, and the days on market are being calculated in the correct ways and that it works correctly through our data. Share with Longleaf a lot of moving parts there.

Jessica Bryan [00:12:08]:
The thing that is interesting about that is that we are so dependent upon the vendors. And I think that that's something that sometimes people forget that we are not the ones that are designing these programs and, you know, working out all those moving parts. We are running the train, but, you know, there are people behind us that are making us promises and they have to deliver, and that's sort of out of our control.

Matt Fowler [00:12:39]:
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's sort of like a general and a sub, right? A general contractor, the subcontractor. So we, you know, I'm not a developer. I don't have software developers who writes programs on my staff. So what we have is a collection of integrations. And that's really what my staff manages is to make sure that the data is correct across the place. We did some things this year that we were the first in the industry to do, including having our own copy of our own data certified by the national standards Organization. And while that data, we feel, is close to perfect, it isn't represented completely in any of the three platforms that we're working on. So our objective, obviously, is to make sure that the data is accurate and complete in every place that you could look at it.

Matt Fowler [00:13:32]:
In the last couple of months, we've been doing this manual audit process, and at the board meeting in October, we're going to be able to show you an automated result coming out of that audit that actually looks every few minutes to measure how many listings are on every platform, how many photos, how many documents. What's the status of that listing across all these platforms? So the presence of the documents, the presence of the listings, is something that's now being automated and reported back to the vendor. If they're the lag we found a lag this last weekend that the system didn't catch. So we're fine tuning the system to make sure that, that we can't miss one. And we feel that that's part of our obligation to our subscribers. The data goes in one place and we make sure it's correct everywhere.

Jessica Bryan [00:14:17]:
That's such a good point because there is so much accountability. And I think that our objective to provide accurate information and reliable information and data is something that is really notable. My time serving on the board, I've really noticed how much emphasis there is on that. And while there can be glitches, and I understand that, and that's always frustrating for people, the fact that we put so much emphasis and importance on that, say reliability is something that you don't see in a lot of industries. And I think that bottom line for the consumer, that is probably the biggest plus that we have over some of the other services around.

Matt Fowler [00:15:09]:
Yeah, I think the public and may not know that we have these data integrity department. We have employees that look through the data that comes in and make sure it's correct, it's in the right location. It's described accurately, that there aren't statements that are inappropriate in the remarks, that the square footage has been measured by an actual person. According to North Carolina law. There's a lot of stuff that separates us from, like, the old newspaper classifieds, right? I guess. I guess in the modern context of something like Craigslist, not to reg on Craig Newmark, but we don't want to be that, right? We want to be this clean data source that we even actually take the data from the, from you guys. Jessica. Then we add things to it, like whether the property has fiber broadband or whether there are green building attributes that are built into the structure, or the property is eligible for down payment assistance.

Matt Fowler [00:16:06]:
A lot of stuff that we ping other databases to learn about that property, and then that gets syndicated across to thousands of websites so consumers can search based on that data. That's what you put in in addition to other stuff that we were able to find for you. We share that with the listing broker and say, is this cool to add this to the listing? And they do, which gives us the ability to answer what we know consumers are looking for. If you look online, people want to know what the Internet coverage is. You've experienced that. That's one of the questions people ask you about now.

Jessica Bryan [00:16:39]:
Sure. It's very important to people, and we as agents, when we are entering information, don't always have all of that information. So having the backup of really good, reliable information that we can count on is extremely important. It's helpful for us to do our job better, and it's really helpful for the public.

Matt Fowler [00:17:02]:
Yeah, I think just maybe. Last couple of questions. Jessica, we saw some new things coming to the platform. One of them is a new AI ad listing tool. So that when you're loading a listing, you upload the video, the photos you've taken, you identify what properties we're talking about from a new national database that we're subscribing to that, like, sucks in data from dozens of sources and gives us this really deep information about the property. They were calling it Carfax for houses. But we take all that data and kind of mash it all up, present it to the listing broker, and you guys review it for accuracy and push go, and it actually loads the listing into the system for you with substantially fewer errors. And I think you were just talking about the consumers more importantly, or just as importantly to the errors.

Matt Fowler [00:17:57]:
It fills out more fields than an average human would when they're checking all those boxes and describing it. So you get a more verbose description of the property that you can search by more things. You get a better idea of what that property is like. And the choice project made that possible, because I don't think that people that were providing the Paragon product, the ice company has that in their near term roadmap. And that's not a dig at them. I'm not suggesting that they should. They have other stuff going on. They're trying to make Paragon connect the best product it can be.

Matt Fowler [00:18:30]:
And I want them to focus on that. We can go over to just a different shelf in the store, metaphorically, and say, here's this brand new AI thing that will cost a little bit for people who want to use it, but that gives them the ability to say, you know what, that's amazing. I want to show that to my buyer. I want to go do this. They're going to, that expertise is going to reflect on my credibility. And I've been very uncomfortable being the person saying, no, no, we're just going to be with Black Knight for the ice forever. And we're. That we're with those people and not reaching out and offering another product to our people.

Jessica Bryan [00:19:05]:
Well, that's it. Because again, I. We do have so many people with different needs and different desires. When you are a top producer and you've got a lot of listings going on, it's such a time saving thing to be able to do that and do it accurately. And, you know, when you are busy, mistakes can be made. So having this backup system that can check for valid answers and accuracy, that's a really important factor for somebody who maybe has a lot more time on their hands and they can check everything and, you know, do the research themselves. So be it. And that's why choices are so important.

Matt Fowler [00:19:48]:
Sure. And I don't know if anybody's going to really want the thing, but we'll just see. I mean, I'm fairly confident based on the reception that those guys have had at the meetings that we've had a, we met with them in Seattle when we went out for the CMLS conference, and there were a bunch of brokers that just wanted to take them over in the corner and say, wait a minute, what can this do for my company? That's amazing. Which is exactly what we want to do. We're trying to introduce people to new technologies and to bring them into our dashboard so subscribers can opt into them, and they're going to be kind of the inexpensive version on the dashboard. Most of these products have a broker version that you can add to that, that your broker can talk to you about. Well, Jessica, thanks for joining us so much today. It was a lot of fun.

Matt Fowler [00:20:34]:
I enjoy catching up with you always. You're such an interesting person. I guess you can't write 40 books and not be an interesting person.

Jessica Bryan [00:20:40]:
42 books.

Matt Fowler [00:20:41]:
Oh, sorry. And two on the way.

Jessica Bryan [00:20:45]:
Two on the way. Thank you so much.

Matt Fowler [00:20:48]:
Thanks to the subscribers for tuning in again, and stay tuned for another meet the board coming soon. Thanks a lot, Jessica.

Jessica Bryan [00:20:56]:
You're welcome. Bye bye now.

People on this episode

Contributor

Matt Fagioli

Host