AI, Authenticity, and the Real-RE/MAX Deal

The real estate industry is being reshaped from every angle…mergers, AI tools, shifting consumer habits, and knowing how to navigate it separates the agents who thrive from those who stall. 

Johnder Perez is joined by David Brown, a marketing veteran who spent over two decades building the RE/MAX brand at the corporate level in Canada before joining the Hallmark leadership team. 

From the Real-RE/MAX combination and what it actually means for agents on the ground, to the promise and pitfalls of AI in real estate marketing, David and Johnder unpack what it takes to build a standout business in 2026. 

The conversation lands on a timeless truth: authenticity, personalization, and genuine human connection are the real competitive edge… and the best technology should amplify those qualities, not replace them.

Listen For:

3:37 What led to the fantastic growth of the RE/MAX brand in Canada?
7:36 What does the REAL-RE/MAX combination mean for agents and broker owners?
17:39 How can real estate agents use AI without falling into the slop trap?
28:18 Why is AI an amplifier and not an equalizer for real estate agents?
30:21 What is the prescription for finishing 2026 strong in real estate? 

Connect with David Brown, Manager & REALTOR®, RE/MAX Hallmark® Simcoe County Leadership

LinkedIn 

Connect with Johnder Perez, Director of Technology and Marketing for RE/MAX Hallmark®

Website | LinkedIn | Instagram | Email 

Transcript

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Johnder Perez (00:00):

AI is not an equalizer, even though some people say it's an equalizer, it's an amplifier. So you're good, you're better. You're better, you're great. All right, everybody. Welcome to Real Estate Strategies with RE/MAX Hallmark Simcoe County Podcast Room. I'm here with David Brown and we are in person. Welcome, David.

David Brown (00:22):

Pleasure to be here, Jonner. So we're

Johnder Perez (00:23):

Going to have an exciting, and you're in it for a treat because David's background with RE/MAX pans back to RE/MAX Canada corporate. Back

David Brown (00:31):

When dinosaurs rolled the earth.

Johnder Perez (00:33):

Well, we're going to go from dinosaurs to AI and the future, I'll know. And today's part of, and we're blessed and fortunate to have him as part of our RE/MAX Hallmark leadership team. So are you ready to get our conversation going? Absolutely. Awesome. Thrilled to be here. It's hot in this room, so we're doing

David Brown (00:49):

An awesome job.

Johnder Perez (00:49):

Try to do our best. So David, RE/MAX Canada Corporate. When I was just an agent at RE/MAX, you ran advertising, marketing, all the big stuff with the RE/MAX brand up here in Canada. Let's start with getting, so that we get our viewers and listeners a bit of context into your specialties and what we're going to be talking about when it comes to marketing, advertising, AI, and the future of the brand. So let's start with RE/MAX Canada and how you got into corporate, what you were responsible for.

David Brown (01:20):

Yeah, hopefully it's not a boring story, but I came in as a marketing person. I was a salesperson in the beginning of my career, and then I went on to do agency work and headed McDonald's and General Motors and was kind of what they called the big brand franchise guy. And RE/MAX at that time had done a really good job of building the base of the brand surrounding just really create productive agents. And they wanted another look at how to build the brand and take it further. And they sought after what they call the big brand franchise guy, which was me. And I just had such a great experience for over 20 years working for some great entrepreneurs. The system is built on entrepreneurs, both at the street and at 30,000 feet. The founder was just an agent that had an idea and a dream and didn't waver from it as we all go through some of the conversations we're going to have, just how you got to stick to your guns to be successful.

(02:21):

And so it was great for me to be at head office trying to figure out how to build agents business, how to help them network, how to create a community among all of RE/MAX. And when I left HEADOffice and Ken called me to come and work with Hallmark, it was such a privilege to come and work on the last mile where the rubber hits the road and all the things that we though we did so importantly and valuably how sometimes it's not as important as we though it was at head office. So to be here helping agents build their business has been just a wonderful ride and the leadership is just phenomenal.

Johnder Perez (03:00):

That's amazing. And as I said, we're fortunate to have you because a lot of the marketing, advertising, I don't call myself an expert by any means, but my secret weapon is I go to David and we have fantastic conversations about it because you've seen the growth of RE/MAX's brand in Canada. I mean, of course, as you said, the entrepreneurial approach that they took literally starting from, and a lot of the great brands that have started from a single person whose vision was to make real estate agents' lives easier and better. So what would you say in your experience with RE/MAX, RE/MAX Canada, what led to that fantastic growth that we still see to this day?

David Brown (03:37):

Quality of the people we attract. A brand is a set in expectations and you either deliver on them or you don't. And good advertising will set the expectations very well and you either deliver on them or you don't. We've always had this wonderful brand truth that we attracted the best agents to our business model. We're the most productive in the industry by most people's measure three to one. And so when you're building a brand off of that, a setting expectation and getting results, all of our communication was true when we took that into search engine optimization and trying to build the brand on the internet. And that was every few years there's a new challenge and we'll get into some of them, Jonder. But at that time it was really about getting indexed properly and developing domain authority. And when you look at that without getting technical into it, when Google's looking to find a great agent in Huntsville, we're the answer.

(04:38):

We just had to make sure that that was understood. And so that's really the brand truth is that we have a network, we've got leading market share, we've got more productive agents. And so as marketing shifts, we just need to be relevant in that conversation and whether it's indexing or we're going to get into some interesting topics with AI and such things, but you have to know your truth and you have to be able to communicate it. And a lot of it was about trying to connect the dots if you were. And as an independent organization with independent contractors, that can be a very big challenge. I spent 10 years fighting to create DDF with the industry, trying to get our listings on the website. We created RE/MAX.ca. It was three regional websites. That was an era ago and you go, now the challenges are much different, but on any given morning you can wake up and see the challenge or you can understand the opportunity and you just have to pursue it.

Johnder Perez (05:37):

And that's fantastic because I mean you've seen that evolution when it comes to technology and how many years that in terms of different avenues for advertising and reaching out to the consumers. Now, part of being with RE/MAX Hallmarks leadership is now you have an intimate understanding and a groundwood approach in terms of how real estate agents do their business. So going from literally high up there in terms of being in the balloon, now being on the ground in terms of real estate agents doing their work, getting busy, what do you find separates real estate agents who are successful at building up their business versus those who struggle?

David Brown (06:13):

Great question. Simply doing the work. I think that sometimes we buy into a lot of things, most often that the market's in the way. And we've all gone through a couple of tough years, let's be frank. But I've got new people, I've got veterans that are killing it or getting killed. And the difference is I think that their ability to pivot and to do the work and to know what's important in the business and not get caught in rabbit holes. So we're going to talk a little bit about that too.

Johnder Perez (06:49):

So I mean basically it's the mindset. I mean, a lot has changed, a lot of traditional to digital, all these different types of marketing and advertising, but there's always going to be truths that always is going to remain in terms of putting in the work and being effective. And so that's what we're going to explore now in terms of our conversation together because it's interesting when we do these podcasts, it's that the pre-conversation always raises the interesting topics and we try to do it justice when we actually speak about it when we're live on camera in front of everybody. Don't forget, right? So we're going to start with something a bit interesting, sensitive, and yet optimistic at the same time because for those of you who follow real estate, and I mean obviously for those of you who are part of RE/MAX and in the real estate industry working was the mega combination of REAL RE/MAX.

(07:36):

And so REAL bought RE/MAX, $880 million price tag, the early stuff that went out called it an acquisition. Technical details would put it as a merger. So however you want to translate that or whatever you decide that means. One of the challenges that was faced early on, which was again swiftly addressed by leadership, was the combination use of the REAL RE/MAX brand. Now having worked at RE/MAX corporate, RE/MAX Canada and seeing the valuation of the brand, and of course to preface it by saying that REAL as well is in itself a brand. I mean you don't grow to 36,000 agents starting in 2012 to 2026, 14 years without having some sort of brand. And as you said, what that brand performance expectations are in terms of what somebody would experience interacting with such a brand. How did you see that REAL RE/MAX combo, the ability for REAL agents to be able to use that REAL RE/MAX and also on likewise RE/MAX to use it, but then leadership quickly addressing RE/MAX broker owners and associates concern about the use of their brand?

(08:48):

How did you see the navigation of that and how it was dealt with?

David Brown (08:52):

Yeah, I'll unpack that a little bit because that's a lot. I think that first of all, I would just talk about the consolidation in the industry. And any of us that have been around a long time have seen this most obviously at the board level, at brokerage levels. The economy of a scale is important to be able to develop tools that helps them build their business, to cut out costs, to find simplicity in the business. And of course in the recent times it's all been cloud versus traditional. And would cloud brokerages usurp traditional brokerages? And those of us who are in the bricks and mortar full service real estate industry as we are here at Hallmark have been watching this debate in the clouds, if you will. And so the first thing I think that we were all pleased to understand was that REAL is a great partner for RE/MAX on a number of fronts.

(09:54):

Tamir is brilliant and responsive, which we'll get to in a second. But I think the whole industry took a breath because we saw cloud needs, traditional and traditional can benefit from cloud. And so that's a very important acknowledgement because that's been a big debate for quite a while. And then how it unfolds, there's going to be some bumps. And so Tamir, and again, we just sat in his town hall and imagine taking over a network like RE/MAX and not knowing all the stakeholders and a lot of the issues that I've lived with for a very long time. And one of them is our ad fund is strictly under contract and half of your head office dollars go back to the ad funds. So when we start talking about good business purpose of merging the two together to build a little bit more profile, that hits a wall because RE/MAX agents have put money into the ad funds to build an expectation around our brand and that ought to stay distinct.

(11:07):

And those bridges will be built, but they're not built yet. So I think what we found and what I was really impressed by was the nimbleness of them to listen to our leadership especially. Steve was very all over them about maybe this isn't the best move. And within 24 hours they retracted it and shifted gears and moved forward. And I go, that's the kind of leadership that we all get behind because nobody can get everything right out of the gate. As far as the cloud-based side, bringing more tools and empowerment to us bring it on, there's a lot of things I think that are in their portfolio that'll be less valuable to a Hallmark because we already have scale. We already have 2000 agents. We have a great operating team. We're building, this guy's doing an amazing job at leading a lot of our AI executions, a lot of things that we're already big enough to do.

(12:00):

And when I was working for Integra, we had a $16 million budget at that time, so we could build a lot of technology. We could do a lot of things that other regions only envied. And so we've got the beauty of picking and choosing as we go down the road on what will fuel your business versus what's a distraction to your business, whoever it comes from, whether it comes from Bull Trail, whether it comes from Real, whether it's another third party arrangement, we are in that driver's seat. So I'm pleased and I'm very pleased that Jonder's at the helm of that because he's very smart, making great decisions and really has your back. So I'm proud of you.

Johnder Perez (12:43):

Well, I lean on my insights, but we get through conversations, so I value that a lot. We're just

David Brown (12:48):

Winging it.

Johnder Perez (12:49):

Well, I mean, David's pretty humble when I talk about him like that, but a lot of the key insights that I pick up during our conversations, believe it or not, become some of the things that we use. And it is a very interesting thing. And if you're part of the REAL family, and we're now REAL RE/MAX, we're all brothers and sisters at this point. You know what? I want you to feel that REAL is a brand and I admire, and I'm not just saying this for the sake of being out there, but again, what you've built in a short time span and what we will now build together is fantastic. And I'm going to say this, you don't need RE/MAX as a brand. I think as REAL being a brand and letting our buyers, our sellers, our investors, our renters, letting agents decide which one of these business models do they jive with.

(13:33):

And I think over time, it's fair to say that in any entrepreneurial environment, let the market decide and what will prevail will prevail. But what I do see here are the synergies, maybe not at the front end because REAL is operating its own fantastic front end marketing branding, and branding is not just a logo, as they say. I mean, it's the culture, it's the environment, it's the beliefs and expectations, and so is RE/MAX. And the hardest thing is, of course, mixing these two up and where do they combine? But where I see the fit is on the front end, each of these provides a different experience and different set of expectations and culture. But on the backend, when it comes to unified technology, the ability to collaborate with each other, sending referrals back and forth, that's really what I think we're excited about.

David Brown (14:18):

Yeah. And I see it much more as a B2B versus a B2C proposition. I think that we're all in the business of differentiating ourselves, and the RE/MAX brand presents us with a signature professionalism that compliments the brand that each of us as individuals built. And REAL has a different value proposition, and it's distinct from us. And the difference is that they're killing it on a lot of tools. So we're going to talk about AI as an example, and they have a very powerful stack that can fuel us if it fits our parameters. And I think that that's the way that you're best to look at it for the next while is I'm going to continue to do my business as RE/MAX. They're going to continue to do their business as REAL, but we're going to find efficiencies, economies of scale and ways to make agents more powerful, productive, and that's the way I think it's going to unfold.

(15:16):

But stay tuned. Maybe

Johnder Perez (15:17):

The

David Brown (15:17):

Next podcast will be saying something a little bit differently.

Johnder Perez (15:19):

Time will tell and then we're hoping to get there. But it

David Brown (15:22):

Is really good news and it could have been Big Bedzillo or it could have been lots of other. We're very sure that Roy LePage is soon to be going down the same path. And this consolidation isn't going to go away. It's who are you dancing with at the next

Johnder Perez (15:41):

Dance?

David Brown (15:41):

And we're very happy with the partnership with REAL.

Johnder Perez (15:44):

There's a lot of fantastic opportunities to come with that. And what's interesting thing too about what you just said, David, is in terms of the consolidation, because we saw this happening with Compass. I mean, Compass was basically taking independence, putting them under their umbrella, then they acquired Anywhere. And you're going to see a lot of that. I don't know if I'd call it an irony, but because real estate is such a local business and yet on a global scale, there is that mass economies of scale, but also that mass opportunities in terms of what can be done with it. But we're now going to talk about leveraging artificial intelligence, AI, which has become another hot topic. And this is something that doesn't -

David Brown (16:27):

My head hurts.

Johnder Perez (16:28):

It's something that doesn't seem to be going away because I mean, yeah, we didn't want to turn this into purely AI conversation, but it is what it is in terms of what's happening right now in the market. So you recently attended a Tom Ferry webinar. Was it a session on AI? Yeah,

David Brown (16:44):

He had a couple of his hot rods talking about AI, and obviously they're looking to build coaching around that. I just rolled the tape back. Many of us have been on the sidelines sort of watching. There's people out in the bleeding edge and there's other that are on the bench ready to jump on the ice. And I look at where Jonder's come from where he was way ahead of me obviously, but he's very, very wise about these decisions now. Very proud of him for that. And I look at it and go, "Gosh, you can be in such a short time. It is really AI." I go, "In such a short time, that learning curve is just like this." And so it's all going to change very quickly, and I think that you're smart to take a breath. I think that there's an awful lot coming, and I guess we're going to debate that a little bit about where it really helps us or where would you like to go?

Johnder Perez (17:39):

Well, we had an interesting conversation before this. I wish we were recording before this, but it's more so, I mean, let's start with this. We were talking about the ability for a real estate agent to create their own digital twin. We're talking about the fantastic use of AI versus AI slop, which is what I like to use in my training, gigo, G-I-G-O, garbage in, garbage out, which is your AI as a tool is only going to be as good as what you make it. But I guess what we can do, because our audience are real estate agents and real estate broker owners and anybody aspiring to get in real estate, in terms of marketing, we have real estate agents that they don't want to be on video. Now AI has solved that. They don't like writing, AI has solved that. They don't like doing, or they're not really great at doing the Facebook ads or the sophisticated stuff, but now AI has solved that as well.

(18:32):

So David, in an age where you could literally use any AI tool to bring you up certain number of levels, what is the flip side to that and what could you see happening in terms of the level of content out there? You talking about search engine optimization back when you were optimizing RE/MAX.ca for Google. What happens now in an age where anybody can literally do anything with these AI tools?

David Brown (19:01):

So you asked me about Tom's session, first of all, and as I was trying to acknowledge with you about how fast you've gone to being an expert on this, the way these tools are evolving, where you can use something like Agently that you talk to it for a few minutes, feed it a script and it'll give you an avatar and put you in a home tour and you never had to get on video. So all those people who are afraid of video, there's now a tool. And so these types of applications are just bursting and overwhelming, quite frankly, and a bit of refreshing. So I think when we go back to where are we at, the 5% of people who are content curators are really truly unique and special and shouldn't probably pay attention to most about what we're about to say. It's the rest of the 95% of us that can level up their game using tools without a lot of effort.

(20:01):

And I'm more excited, we'll get into more of the business to business assistance stuff,

(20:07):

But let's stay on the track that you broached where we were talking about Mark LaFleur, who we'd partnered with just a little while back and how much things have changed since, what is that, a year ago more, right? Yeah, that's right. You baked in some of the things that. But Mark taught me one thing that as somebody with a lot of media experience that tonnage. So the point is that the tools now, if you don't want to make a podcast, AI can make you one. We're going to talk about slop, which is it really going to do something for you and what's it going to do? But we're in a world right now where you can fire on all eight cylinders, you can be in all channels, there's a lot more tonnage coming. And so that poses its own opportunities and challenges. So the opportunity is your content's going to be a lot more pervasive.

(21:11):

Is it going to convert? So we have to have a quality versus quantity, right? So neither one of us, because we talked about it before, thinks that quantity has been downgraded. In fact, I think it's going to become more rare and more special.

(21:24):

Don't we agree on that?

Johnder Perez (21:25):

Exactly. Because as you said, if it becomes easy to make this, and again, from a real estate agent strategic point of view, any excuse or obstacle or objection has literally been eliminated. Now the flip side to that is if it is easy to create, now you've got a ton of competitors that could literally do the same thing as you can. And so that 5%, they're always going to be at that level.

David Brown (21:48):

Yeah. And those who can, I mean, it's a real gift, and I think there's still a serious debate among us about whether it converts. So the point I would make, not oversimplifying it, is the social audit. I still call it the social audit. And so if I'm not one of those people that are really, really creative and doing a lot of really great social media, getting a lot of engagement traction views and one of those unique individuals that are that 5%, there's a greens fee that we all have to pay. And that's what's shifting very quickly is that we really need to be able to rank in, used to be just among search. Now you got to be in YouTube, you probably want to have a great presence on Instagram, and all the channels really require quite a bit of work. That's all getting a lot easier to get content that's passable, and that's the debate we're

Johnder Perez (22:40):

Having.

David Brown (22:41):

And you ought to do that. You ought to do that not in a replace of door knocking or going out and working in your community, the stuff that really generates your business. But when people are doing what I call a social audit, which I was referred to John Durr, I heard he's a great guy, and before I do business with him, I'm going to look him up and what am I going to see? And so that part of it is really important. And what I'm excited about is that you can have a decent report card with very little effort with the way the tools are evolving. And if I want to become a practitioner Innisfil 20 minutes from here and I feel like I want to build my business in Innisfil, I can really use AI to develop great content around homesteading in Innosville, what the challenges are without a lot of work.

(23:32):

And our debate is, is that enough? And that's the AI slop conversation, right?

Johnder Perez (23:38):

Well, there's different levels of dealing with that. So is that enough is the big question. And we do a lot of training here at RE/MAX Hallmark when it comes to AI, and so we're not going to get into a detailed training session on how to actually do this. It's more so the overall high level concept, which is we talked about this concept versus doing it versus not doing it, should you do it? So for example, you're not on video. Should you do an AI twin, even though it's not the real you, just to be on there? Social media posting, you're not doing social media posting, you're not doing blog posts, you're not posting on Facebook, Instagram, or making any kind of videos on YouTube or any of that stuff. Doing it versus not becomes the first level. But now when you do it, and as you said, I mean it's a minimal or low effort, but I challenge that more so in the sense of you can get by, well, I mean it is reflecting exactly what you said.

(24:28):

You can get by with just, "Hey, create for me a script for Innisfil or create for me a blog post for..." So yeah, minimal to no effort. Now, if you're a sophisticated user of AI, you know your market, you have an intimate understanding of it, and now you're using the tool as, "Okay, this is what I'm saying about it. Now help me create a nice strip. What would get more traction in terms of social? Okay, can you now, here's my raw footage that I shot of my real self doing this. Can you edit this for me?" Which is now the part that I don't like to do. But it also becomes that scenario we were talking about earlier, which is artists, they don't like AI in terms of replacing their skill. I'm not a coder developer by any means, but I'm "coding, developing, vibe coding applications for us." I mean, we do have a development team here at Hallmark as well, so it's not like I'm doing it as a one-man show, but am I the fake coder developer because I have that superpower?

(25:26):

Is an artist, is somebody who's good at writing, that now uses AI as an illustrator, did they break the code of creativity? Now for the real estate agent, somebody who creates the script purely from AI, and so the text that they're saying is purely from AI, the video generator is from AI, where do we draw the line in terms of the marketing that goes out there and in terms of a personal agent's brand value in terms of what they show?

David Brown (25:56):

It's a really, really complicated question, and one I don't have an answer for, but I think that there's a few milestones we've passed. When you took ChatGPT 4.0 and fed MarketWatch into it and then created, "Oh, give me an Instagram script, make it humorous, summarize this." So one of the big first challenges that we had with AI was garbage in, garbage out. And as soon as you could really reflect on what information you were putting into it, I think that was a game changer. And so now you get into with, "We should all learn to use these tools." I think that they're going to start to help us show up in places that we otherwise wouldn't be, and that's a good thing. Are they going to convert for us? I think not, but I think that we're going to pass that social audit. If I reflect back to my dinosaur days, the path that people either come and knock on the door at the office and said, "I need a real estate agent," which isn't happen too often, depending where you were, or as the internet developed and then realtor.ca, RE/MAX.ca, as we developed those channels, it became very predictable in terms of how people were going to reach out and connect with us.

(27:05):

That's all gone to hell. Now it's a thousand different ways. It can be off of YouTube, it can be off of. And now you need a landing page because it's very fractionalized. And so I think that the AI is really going to help us perform in each of these channels because we're not really sure where it's important for us to understand where our customers come from and spend more time on those channels that are productive for us, but it helps us be there. And so I think that's a really important part of it. It's never going to be. And I like the avatar, honestly. My net on it is I've met so many agents who don't want to be in video. And I think that what's really important as we navigate this AI slop is I've got this ugly, memorable face, and if my ugly, memorable face is on all of my stuff, that's one thing I've done to personalize the AI slop.

(27:57):

And I think that there's a number of other things that need to humanize me, that need to connect me in really relevant ways, the work I do in the community, the way I give back, the relationships I build, the whole brand of me. But I really like the fact that I can be front and center in a communication using the tool if I otherwise wouldn't be.

(28:16):

And so I think that's pretty cool,

Johnder Perez (28:18):

Honestly. And it empowers, and I posted on this and I was taking some video of you, that's why. Sorry if I took you off. No, you were fine. But my point was that AI is not an equalizer, even though some people say it's an equalizer, it's an amplifier. So you're good, you're better, you're better, you're great. But in the sense that it's not an equalizer, if you didn't have that skill level of insight to begin with,

(28:44):

You're only going to get what's been regurgitated out there because at least today, the way things work with any of these AI tools, particularly LLMs and the way they're modeled, is based on existing information, doesn't extrapolate or create insight for you. What's unique about you listening to this and you watching this, what's unique about you that AI is not going to replace is you have a unique insight into your market. At least that's what you should have, is you have a unique insight and intimate understanding of your marketplace that cannot be replaced, and you sharing that makes a huge difference. Now it depends on, okay, I don't want to be on camera, but I'm taking my unique insight and I'm going to create an AI digital twin for it. Great, because that AI digital twin is not regurgitating what somebody else said about your market, it's saying what you're saying about it.

(29:28):

So with all this, and we can geek out on this all day, because we talked about an hour before this talking about these things, I think what we got to turn it to now, David, is knowing all of these tools that are available, AI being just one part of it, but just in general, the way the market conditions are currently, it's not as easy as the days where it was like a drive-through or order taking, "Hey, I want to sell this house. Great, 24 hours done." What is a real estate agent's strategy? What is their Plan to finish off 2026 strong, a combination of the marketing, advertising, communication, but also hard work. If you were to prescribe that to our agents, you're leading up here in Simco, a lot of our agents all throughout Hallmark lean on you for support, whether it's on Ontario or Florida, wherever we are.

(30:19):

What's your plan for them?

David Brown (30:21):

It's interesting because it's a lot that AI is not. So let's go back to the distinction that we do believe that this whole argument about tonnage, however good you are, there's going to be an awful lot more tonnage of information out there. And so you kind of need to play in that game.

(30:37):

But I don't think that's what converts. And so this comes back to this is a time of personalization and authenticity. And we went through this with post - COVID, I think was really important for people to be genuine. I just think that that's ratcheted up a few knots. Won't get into all the politics and all the rest of it, but acknowledge that there's an awful lot of disinformation out there. There's a lot more fabricated communication coming out. And fabricated is a negative word by its context, but let's just use slot. That's pretty negative too, right? It is true. But we have to pick through to figure out what's actually real in the communication. And that is a trend that's worth talking about because that trend is going to grow. And the only way to counter that trend in my view is being very personal, being very authentic, being very local, being very focused.

(31:40):

That's where I start to go. How are you standing out and what are you doing to trigger good feelings about your reputation? And one of my favorite things is to get caught doing something good. And so that's where we're very proud of Hallmark Giving and CMN and charity and so many of our agents give back in so many ways, but just get caught doing it as opposed to broadcasting that you do it. And similarly, when you're helping out people, this is a service business and we love to brag about great service when we experience it. And I was just out on Saturday for dinner and I couldn't believe the state of the workers were uninformed, uneducated and dumb. And again, I don't want to. And you go, so that was a missed opportunity for that establishment to have me bragging about them. And there's so many other things that were cool about where I was, but I went, eh, and I've experienced that two different times in as many weeks.

(32:42):

And I go, so it's not that complicated to differentiate yourself if you're understanding that what really resonates with people and what resonates today is what is your special gift anyways. It's genuinely connecting with people. We just have to figure out how to use the new tools to help us communicate them.

Johnder Perez (32:58):

So this is brilliant and a fantastic way to conclude our podcast today because basically what I'm hearing from David here is that there's always been tools. From when you started in real estate, the billboards, the print media, magazines, newspapers, then it went to digital search engines. Now it's AI agents that are going to tell real estate agents or are going to tell buyers and sellers which real estate agent to use. But what you said there resonates right now. And again, I don't know if this is a common thing as well, but the service level, I don't know if it's the sign of the times or what happened post-pandemic and all that, but that resonates because it seems like people don't care as much. So where is the opportunity? The opportunity is you care a lot more, even a little bit more than what the average is, but a lot more.

David Brown (33:46):

And one personal interaction with a good personal interaction with somebody who's going to pay so many more dividends than however many views or impressions you can get on social media. And it's a belly to belly business and we all know that, but there are some really great ways to help us propagate more attention and make the attention be on the authentic you. And I think that's where you'll really have a multiplier for it.

Johnder Perez (34:11):

And if I borrow from our real siblings, it's the work hard, be kind motto. And that's a fantastic philosophy to bring because RE/MAX Hallmarkers and RE/MAX associates are among the very hardworking and the kindest realtors out there. Our real brothers and sisters are among the hardest working and kind. But just that philosophy of that touch of experience, caring, authenticity, as you said.

David Brown (34:42):

It's funny because a lot of us, you said what's the prescription? And a lot of us are sort of back to basics and you go, well, that works on the other front. Back to basics is back to the core, the core of building relationships and reaching out and making them genuine outreaches. And yes, it's great to have a CRM. It's really great to use tools to make sure that you're on top of all those things. One of my friend's dog just died at seven years old and you go, you know what? How you reach out is everything to people and that's what is our special gift. And so just unleash that and use the tools to help you spread more of that kind of information and you'll kill it.

Johnder Perez (35:22):

There you go. David, thank you so much for such a fantastic conversation today. That was amazing. And for those of you who are watching and listening on this, depending on the platform you're on, make sure you like, follow, comment, subscribe, all that good stuff. And we will see you in our next episode of Real Estate Strategies with RE/MAX Hallmark. Thanks. Cheers. Take care. Bye for now.