Introduction: Thanks for listening. I’m Shawn, and this podcast is from my conversation with Dan Bennett, which I held face-to-face in a hotel lobby when he was visiting me in Victoria. 

Dan has been a licensed REALTOR® for 42 years, 40 of those as an Associate Broker, with the occasional forays into office management and ownership. He is the past president of the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board and the BC Real Estate Association and served five years as a Director of the Canadian Real Estate Association. Following CREA, Dan was on the BCREA Standard Forms Committee for several years. He is also a founding partner of REALTYnuance, an agent-level, BC-focused real estate transaction management platform. He and his wife, Sue Bennett, work as a team, licensed at HomeLife Benchmark in Langley, in the lower mainland Fraser Valley region of BC, with Dan handling the commercial real estate business. He has extensive experience at the brokerage, regulatory and organized real estate levels and can be reached through his website: LowerMainlandLiving.com

Shawn O'Hara: It's great speaking with you today. 

Dan Bennett: So good to be here in sunny Victoria. Nice to catch up with you.

Shawn O'Hara: Having known you for 20 years, Dan, something I've really come to learn is how genuinely you care. In all the discussions we've had, you've always brought it back to how it benefits the buyer or the seller. I found that really neat about you. your perspective is genuinely, how do we help the consumer?

Dan Bennett: Well, I thank you for observing that. It is a service business, and so that's obviously the key element of it, and whether it's our own business or whether it's a brokerage office, they are in the business of servicing. That's just the mindset you grow up with after being in this type of a business, if you put the service first, if you just look after people and do the right thing, then the income comes after it. 

Shawn O'Hara: What made you get into real estate? 

Dan Bennett: At the time I did, I was traveling a lot on business, wanted to be closer to home. It was actually, our kids were involved in swim club, and there was a fellow at Realty World at the time, who said you know, when you get your license, come and see me, and so I did.

In the early 1980s, I left a salary, a company car, an expense account and what not to get involved in real estate when the interest rates were 21, 22 percent. so that was just wonderful, wonderful timing. When you can get into any business when it's tough. Then you learn all of the right skills along the way. 

In the first couple of years, I took my urban land economics course in appraisal at UBC, and then got what they called the Agent 915 license at the time, which is now Associate Broker, so I really had a broker's license right from two years into the business, and managed some offices in Burnaby, was a partner in an office. Then I got involved in organized real estate as if I didn't have enough to do.

I was approached initially by a fellow who eventually became one of the presidents of the Canadian Real Estate Association. And he said, well, you're managing an office in Burnaby. How about if you come and sit on the Professional Standards Committee at the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver?

That was my early introduction to professional standards in the industry. Shortly thereafter, I got approached to run as a director for the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board. And then eventually went through to becoming president. Followed that up with BCREA and eventually President of BCREA.

And then five years on the Canadian Real Estate Board, so I had a lot of involvement in organized real estate. After that was all done, I came back and started up an office in Langley. And did that for a little while. Then Sue and I put our business back together again doing mostly residential, but doing some commercial small buildings retail buildings and that's my background in real estate. 

Shawn O'Hara: What kind of changes have you seen over the years from the REALTOR® perspective 

Dan Bennett: Back when I was president of the Fraser Valley Board at one of the meetings for members, I recall my assistant executive officer, Rick Wood at the time, taking about 150 feet of telephone cord, plugging it into my laptop, which weighed 15 pounds, running it across the floor, finding an outlet, plugging it in, getting through the switchboard, so we could show everybody this thing called the Internet, the World Wide Web that had just started up.

As I was talking and telling them that this was the thing of the future, the screens slowly started to fill with the first page, and of course, looking around the room I could see these faces going, this is the future of real estate? I don't think so. And then sometime after that we got together with two other fellows and we said, you know, there's a lot of applications starting to come in for real estate. There's CRMs and there's a lot of other things, but what is missing?

The one thing we decided was missing was some type of electronic managing of your transactions. What we're doing is putting all of our transactions basically into a box and we have a file and it has the customer's name on it, and then we put property stuff in it.

What if we took that sort of filing cabinet concept and The term cloud didn't even exist. What if we just put it onto the worldwide web and we could access it wherever we were? And we thought, well, that was a pretty spiffy idea. So we went ahead and did that and started a product called REALTYnuance and helped create the first paperless office in Cloverdale. And then, of course, a lot of things came. We got busy on our business, didn't spend a lot of time on that project. And a lot of other folks thought, well, that'd be a great idea. And so there's a lot of transaction management systems out there now.

Shawn O'Hara: Was the intent of that efficiency? 

Dan Bennett: Well, it was efficiency. And the other thing that we did that nobody was doing was, one of the worst complaints clients have in real estate is communication. My agent is just not communicating me. So the agent's out there doing all the right things. The customer's sitting at home wondering, What the heck's happening?

Why isn't my house selling? And there was no communication. We opened it up so that the client, could actually access all of their documents online 24 7 showing logs and things that would happen. The whole goal there was to involve the client in the process so to take away that concern as far as communication was concerned.

And that was well received by a lot of clients, because obviously people are working on shifts, or they're on a different time zone, they're traveling and all that good stuff, so the ability to come back to your hotel room after a day's work, and you're in New York, and your house is in Vancouver, to be able to go in and see what's been happening, and look at documents, or look at offers, that sort of thing, that was a big deal. It helped the broker out as well too, because all of this stuff was coming in electronically and two people could do the work of three and that third person could then get involved in marketing and help out. So value added as far as the broker was concerned.

But as you go along, there's certain rules and regulations and things you have to do and disclosures and all of this good stuff. And so being able to have all of this documentation online, when at the time the Real Estate Council wanted to do an audit, we actually had one company that the Real Estate Council did the audit from their own office because they could go online and see all of the files that they wanted to.

So it made it easier for the regulator, made it easier for the broker. to show compliance. But what's happened in the past number of years is that we've gone from a real estate council that had a lot of practitioners, licensees on it, who could give some really practical advices, to legislation and regulation and that sort of thing, and we've now shifted from the real estate council to the BC Financial Services and they are not involving practitioners, so that there's an increasing amount of regulation and bureaucracy that's sort of not being vetted by the industry, but being dumped onto the industry.

What caused the shift? Well, politics kind of gets in the way of a lot of good things in life and way back there was a particular provincial government that was hoping to get re elected. They were working on a housing study to show what was blocking the increase in inventory of new housing.

With an election looming, they shelved that report, unfortunately, and just, essentially blamed foreign buyers and blamed the real estate industry for all of the ills in the housing market. And basically set the discussion back about 10 years. But what that did is well here's the folks that are responsible for all of the problems, so now we have to regulate them more.

So it shifted away from the industry being involved in self regulation to specifically a government agency now under the B. C. Financial Services Act and, and there's no question, it doesn't matter what your industry or your profession is, there's always going to be some bad actors. And there will continue to be bad actors.

The regulator's role is to protect the consumer. As a licensee, as a REALTOR® myself, I feel one of the ways I can look after my businesses, do the best job I possibly can for my clients, look after their interests and protect them, and then they and their friends will come back again.

So yeah, that was a change. At one point under the Real Estate Council a deal would be put together, it would be sent into the office, the managing broker would look at it, make any recommendations for changes or things that should happen before subjects came off.

In the number of years where there were offers coming in with no subjects on, a lot of stuff was going through that wasn't being looked at properly. So what the change in the legislation was is that the managing broker now has to be involved in the transaction even before it starts. To be able to show that I as an agent, licensee, have done all proper disclosures to clients ahead of time and all the way through the transaction.

So it's become much more onerous for the managing brokers now because they have to be on top of these transactions right from the beginning right through to the end. I can understand the logic, the reasoning behind it, if you do it right from the beginning, like there's not much point spending a month with a person, selling their house, selling them into something else, and then saying, oh, by the way, have we talked about agency yet and what I'm supposed to do for you?

I agree that that type of conversation should be held up front. But what is happening now is that, and this gets back to the nobody really looking at it from a practical point of view. There are so many disclosures and what not that has to happen that it has become extremely bureaucratic.

In a multiple offer situation, for example, we basically have to say to the seller, this is what your commission would be on each one of these offers. We have to calculate that all out again. if an offer came in at $1 million, this is what your commission would be.

If an offer came in at 800, this is what your commission would be. If we countered that offer of a million dollars to 1.2, this is what the commission. would be on 1. 2. When you're doing all of the offers to start with, you would calculate this out. Then again, when you're into a counter offer situation, you have to calculate it out again.

Shawn O'Hara: Do you have to calculate that out for every offer?

Dan Bennett: Every offer that comes in, every offer you present, you have to say this is what your commission would be on this. If there's 10 offers? If there's 40 offers. If there's 40 offers.

Shawn O'Hara: You're filling that out? 40 times? 

Dan Bennett: Yeah. Technically, but you know, practically speaking, a listing agent's going to look and say, look it, here's a whole bunch of offers with subjects in.

Here's a whole, here's four or five with no subjects. I think we should start with those and see which, you know, if we can get any of those to, to work first from a practical perspective. 

Shawn O'Hara: How has it impacted the, the brokerage? I'm thinking, say, you had to hire more staff, or... But, I'm an agency owner, and I've got more regulations to deal with

Well, you've got more regulations, and you've also got to be on top of the transactions from the beginning now, so there's a whole, another layer of supervision that has to be there. I think, it depends on the size of offices and the number of people. Some brokerages, a small brokerage, you'd find the managing broker would be reading all of the contracts.

himself or herself, or there would be someone designated in the office to read them and make sure they're right and he would look, he or she would look after the exceptions. In much larger offices, they've actually gone to a compliance officer who is responsible for regulatory compliance provincially and FinTrac federally.

That's added another layer because that person has to have a certain level of expertise. So it's not like you're going to just simply have a clerk who can sit down and go through things. You're going to need someone with expertise and you have to pay for the expertise. And right now, well, a brokerage office has challenges making money because the costs have gone up so much.

So you've got these brick and mortar costs to start with. If you downsize the office to get away from the large brick and mortars to save some money. Then you've got to have all of the systems remotely and that type of thing to deal with people. And if you want to open satellite offices or expand your business as a way of generating more revenue, you can't say I'm going to go and generate another 100,000 over here, but it's going to cost me 93,000 to get that 100,000.

So you have to find very cost effective, efficient ways. To open these other offices, to generate this other income, to bring more sales people in. Even bringing more sales people into an office puts another demand on who's ever looking after compliance. Because that person has to read all of those contracts.

So, yeah, compliance has put more burden on the office. From a responsibility, a liability, and from a cost perspective.

Shawn O'Hara: And that would mean they would require more, staff, since it's a highly specialized skill, they need to keep their staff happy, be concerned about burnout, other issues like that.

Dan Bennett: Well, that's the truth. If you've got one person who's responsible for compliance, and that person gets to the limit and gets burnt out, and just says, I can't do this anymore then replacing that person is difficult. Hiring an assistant for that person is probably less difficult, but it's still a cost factor.

So, it gets back to an earlier question about REALTYnuance, were you guys doing that for efficiencies? And I think this is an area in the industry where people are looking for efficiencies, not only to do the job so that one person can be more productive with the job, but so that the cost factor is less and, and the risk.

 If I have somebody who's burnt out and missing stuff, that, that puts me in risk of financial penalties or that sort of thing and puts my salespeople in a risk situation as well. So it's not just the financial cost of doing the compliance. It's what if I don't do it properly.

It's the repercussions that come from not doing my compliance properly. And what are the repercussions? I could lose my brokerage license. There could be fines. There could be penalties. Could be court situations. Just anything, you know, it's one thing about having to go to court and be successful and what not, but it's all the cost and the prep and the time and the focus away from your business.

Basically, sales people, licensees, REALTORS®, they want to get out there, list and sell properties, make money, look after their families, have a good life, and that type of thing. And, from a brokerage perspective they just simply want to see the whole thing running smoothly, if your compliance officer, for example, has to focus on a court case, then that takes her away, him away from looking after the day to day stuff.

 The industry right now is looking for some efficiencies and I don't know that the industry necessarily knows what that looks like at this point. if You look at any of the literature that's coming out now on artificial intelligence and, this is supposed to be the big savior and certain jobs are going to be non existent, but some of the best advice I've seen from an artificial intelligence point of view or, or using technology more is make sure the person is involved and the, Technology is the tool that the person uses.

Technology doesn't take over, but the technology supports the person in doing their job. And that gets me back to when we talked about REALTYnuance and having something that was proprietary, specific to the real estate industry. And I think right now, we need something that is specific to real estate regulatory compliance provincially.

across the country and federally with FinTrack to have some type of tools that we can use because there's shortages of people, skilled people, to do this kind of work. So you do need technology to support the people that are there. 

Shawn O'Hara: REALTYnuance, that was up and running, and what gaps did you see that prompted you to consider RealtyCAP?

Dan Bennett: Well, REALTYnuance in any transaction management is basically for the agent, for the REALTOR®, for the licensee who's out there listing and selling, leasing properties. It's meant to pull all of the information together into a deal sheet, a transaction sheet that feeds that into the back office efficiently.

It’s agent centric. The RealtyCAP is managing broker compliance officer focused. So what it's doing is helping them manage all of the compliance of all of their sales people, managing the compliance of their office and, responding to audit and preparing themselves basically for a potential audit situation.

Shawn O'Hara: Do brokers like audits?

Dan Bennett: They like audits that go very well and they're successful and they get a pat on the back. They don't like them if there are some concerns. At one point, and I think it's perhaps softened a little bit it.

There was a little more leniency. I don't, there's not quite that same amount of leniency now. If you, if you find that there was a problem and you fix it, you still need to report it. Which probably still concerns. So I, I think the concern is, and most, most brokerages will spend time in their sales meetings and all of their meetings and discussions with people, their sales people, to.

Make sure that they're doing everything right from the beginning. so the brokerage is doing everything reasonable to make sure that their salespeople are compliant. And, that's about all that can be asked from a legal and a regulatory perspective is that the broker do everything that was reasonable to ensure compliance of the salespeople. 

Shawn O'Hara: Do you see brokerages going to more technology? Because it sounds like they've got a system that's very highly dependent on key people.

Dan Bennett: I think it's been traditional and, and some of the brokers, like myself, who've been around for a long period of time, may have a tendency to do more things, more hands on, more manually, and that type of thing, because that's how we, we grew up. I think a lot of the people coming into the business now, technology is second nature to them.

It's like the kids I had to learn the internet way back when we were doing that presentation for people, for our, our members. Now kids just use it. They don't have to learn it. They just use it. It's like flipping on a light switch. So I think there's a bit of a transition in there where some of us still look at doing things the old way and still like to have a piece of paper in our hands because it, you know, it's something solid and it's not going to evaporate in the cloud and I'm going to lose it forever.

When I get a new, piece of technology. My wife will say, Oh, you bought a new toy. Did you? And I said, No, no, I bought a technological tool. And I always used when I was doing training, I always used to say to people, don't think of this as technology. Think of it as a tool just happens to be an electronic tool or a cloud based tool or something like that.

Dan Bennett: I think that brokerages are going to need a lot more of these tools that involve technology. To remain efficient, to be compliant, and to, you know, really, we're not in this, this is not a not for profit endeavor that these brokers are working on. They're there to make money get a return on their investment, and that's fair.

So they should. So if they can get these tools that can work 24 7, 365, on their behalf Then, yes, they're going to turn to them as long as they're cost effective, I guess the best measure that I would use to say if I could find another person at X number of dollars a year to support my compliance officer, I'd probably think if I could get a piece of technology for half the price, that's got to make a lot more sense because I, first of all, I can't find the person and when I do find that person that person could get a better offer two months from now, and I couldn't afford to keep them, but, so there is an attraction of getting some technology to help the very well qualified person that I have working for me now and have that technology support that person in what they're doing, and, and to be mobile as well too, so when that person says to me, I am out of the office, I can't do this anymore, well great, take your laptop down to the beach with you so you can, you know, it's not only the software tools but it's the hardware tools like the mobile devices and whatnot.

So, if I can have a staff person living in Kamloops and doing all my compliance, well the housing, well maybe the housing's not cheaper, but the housing could be cheaper. She might be living in Comox, or he might be living in Comox, doing my compliance for downtown Vancouver. Well that person now, what would I pay that person now? It goes a heck of a lot farther than it does in downtown Vancouver. So being able to be remote, and being able to be mobile, a number of the people that we know in the business who are compliance officers have four or five offices, and they like to go to those offices, sit down across the table from people and work with them.

But while they're in transit pulling off to have a coffee and whatnot, they can sit down and handle some of their function from Starbucks or wherever they go. So it's the software. It's the hardware, it's the mobility, and it's supporting that person, and it's got to be easy because a compliance officer may be a lot more technologically literate than a managing broker my age, and so it's got to be really, really easy to use.

I've got to be able to open that up and have a look at it and say, okay, this is where we're at. REALTOR® Sam Brown over here Continually having the same problem with stuff and I can go and get Sam and sit down. I can deal with the exceptions. That's probably a good thing to use is the technological tool supports me in doing what I'm doing every day.

But if it can highlight the exceptions for me, I can deal with those priorities right away. That's an important, that's important. Instead of, instead of going through a hundred files. And then finding that the last five were critical and could be going to court, if I can identify those ones right away, then I can deal with that situation.

And the crisis is over and now I can go back to my daily routine. As a broker or as a compliance person? Well, yeah, both. You know, because as we talked about earlier, you'll find that some, some smaller offices, the compliance person is the managing broker. And in the larger offices, it could be a shared situation.

The managing broker could be doing some of it. I've seen situations where the managing brokers have done job sharing, where one person covers for three months, goes away on three months holidays, and the next person, you know, that type of thing. So, having a technology that will support, that's easy to understand, easy to use, and whatnot, where one person can jump into it right away. Now let's say this compliance officer you got one compliance officer, the world revolves around that person, that person has to be sick. Well, there may be some other admin people in the office, or the manager broker for that matter, who can jump in and deal with it.

Now, in a situation where you don't have that technology, user friendly technology supporting that person then people are going through manual files or they're just, they're lost for a period of time and that's when you can find that something happens that you're now sitting in front of a hearing at the BCFSA.

Shawn O'Hara: Something gets missed even if it's inadvertent.

Dan Bennett:. Yeah, well and that's a really good point. It doesn't matter if I, oh whoops I'm sorry I made a mistake. That doesn't seem to fly nowadays. Oh, I forgot that. Well, I've fixed that. Oh, well, no, you went for a week working with this person without doing an agency disclosure.

Sorry, you can't wind back and start over again. That's an infraction, you know. Being able to identify potential crisis situations, and again, you mentioned this before about, do brokers like audits? Well, no, but if I can, identify a potential crisis and cut it off at the pass, that's a good thing.

Shawn O'Hara: A brokerage has compliance people to to protect the brokerage, protect the REALTOR®. Is it better to forget all that and just deal with the audits when they come up and end up in, front of a hearing, or what?

Dan Bennett: Well, I think it's preventative, you know, that's one of the arguments, whether it could be health care, for example, you know, do you fund preventative health care to prevent having people going to the hospital in the first place? Or do you wait till they get to the hospital and then treat them there?

Well, a lot of people would say it's better off to do the preventative health up front to avoid going to the hospital in the first place or avoid getting the... illnesses and whatnot that a lot of people are carting around. So I think it's the same in this, in this business. What your goal is, is to avoid the audit.

And it's kind of one of those things, like if you do preventative health care, how many people did you prevent from going to the hospital? Well, you don't know. I mean, all you can do is say, before we had this tool in place, What was happening over here was we were getting 5, 6, 7 complaints a year.

We were going to hearings with a certain number of them. And now, now we're not. Or now we're only going to 2 or 3. And what's happening is that because of our systems that we have in place, we're able to say to the regulator if a complaint comes in, well here's all the information, and hopefully avoid going to that hearing in the first place. 

Shawn O'Hara: The industry has gone from self regulating to what do you call it? Oversight?

Dan Bennett: Being severely regulated?

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah, or from self regulating to, yeah, to being regulated. What do you think the future holds?

Dan Bennett: Well, I think you'll find that the industry probably, and it probably won't happen in the length of time that I'm there, the industry would like to get back to that self regulation for some of the reasons that we talked about previously, is you need the practical person in the field with experience, who's been there for a number of times, and there's a lot of people around who've got...

You think I've had a lot of experience. There's a lot of people around there who have had a lot more experience. You need that kind of advice sitting around the table. Now, BC Real Estate Association has a fellow named Marty Douglas, who's being, going to be involved with their Managing Brokering Advisory Committee, and that's a great thing because the managing brokers have been kind of, not looked after or, or not had as much emphasis over the past number of years. I think it's a good thing where you're finding the industry is now providing more support for them and hopefully with a product like RealtyCAP, we can provide as a, you know, as a private supplier, support what the industry's doing to help out managing brokers.

Shawn O'Hara: The old process was more consultative and now it's, It's almost punitive. 

Dan Bennett: I think so. And you know, it's funny, back in the quote good old days, the industry was asking for tougher penalties, but couldn't catch the attention of government to do it. And again, this is not the right word perhaps, but politics unfortunately enter into things like this, and I think it was just a political opportunity that took self regulation away from the industry, and a little laxness on the industry's perspective, but generally speaking, I think it was a political expedient, expediency that took self regulation away. Will it ever come back, or will it be a sort of kind of a hybrid situation where there are more practitioners working with the regulator to come up with more reasonable legislation and procedures and, and whatnot, and less bureaucratic, but I think, you know, when you get to the end of it, all of this compliance is to, is for consumer protection, and I think that's a great thing. I mean, you can't argue, it's a matter of our, the way we're going about it, is that the best way to do it? And, and I think that's a question that has to be asked going forward.

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah. That would be a good question. Yeah. What's the end goal, which you just said, so I'll feed that in.

Dan Bennett: What's the end goal as far as the...

Shawn O'Hara: I think you answered it. Yeah. For the end goal was actually to protect the consumers. 

Dan Bennett: Yeah. And, and I think one, one of the things nowadays, I think the real estate office, you asked me about what's changed over the years, and I think the real estate office has changed over the years. It started out where the broker was, basically in control of everything had much, much more favorable commission splits, really paid and controlled a lot of things to where it switched to more of the 100% commission model, where the salespeople took most of it and paid fees back to the brokerage. And so basically it became almost like a business office where you were kind of renting space, but you had this broker who was responsible for you. And I see that changing a little bit now. In some brokerages, I think you're going to always find the, the business model where here, here's you put your license up for a fee, you take on all the responsibility, you make a mistake, and the broker gets fined, you pay for it, so I think there's always going to be that sort of thing, but there's also going to be the types of offices that say, no, we want to be full service office to these, to salespeople.

We want to provide them with all of the training, the services, the support, all of this good stuff. But we also want to become almost like an insurance vehicle for them, where we help protect their license, their livelihood, their reputation, protect them from a legal perspective. So, we're almost an insurer, and it's hard to quantify, but I know if I was a salesperson out there and said, look, my license and my livelihood is really, really important to me, and this office provides me almost like an insurance policy with all of its support and the technology and the compliance regulation and all of that oversight that they provide. Boy, that's worth. I don't know how much you would put a number on it, but that's worth a lot to me as a salesperson, a month.

Is that a 500 premium on a policy? Yeah, probably. If I could spend 500 a month and be pretty much assured that I was going to be looked after from a compliant perspective and that sort of thing as a salesperson, you bet. I'm paying lots of errors and omission insurance right now, but if I had a broker who was really looking after me in that respect, that's worth something to me. I'm willing to pay more in my monthly fees to get that kind of protection. 

Shawn O'Hara: You have the errors and omissions insurance, but that doesn't mean that you want to be using it.

Dan Bennett: No, you don't want to be using it, and there's deductibles involved. And errors and omissions insurance doesn't protect your reputation. And your reputation in this business is I wouldn't say everything, but it's a whole bunch of things. So, yeah, I think not. I've gone through, you know, what, 40 years in the business and never had a business practice complaint and that's, that's important to me. I can say that sort of thing. I can use it in my business that you work with me and we're going to look after your interests.

I haven't been called a task for not doing that in 40 years. That's a good thing to be able to say. That's a good thing for a brokerage to be able to say. We have gone for. Well, it's like a construction site where you see we've gone for 90 days accident free. We've gone for 90 days with no professional complaints, no professional behavior. What's the word I'm looking for? Anyway, with no...

Shawn O'Hara: I won't say violations, because that would imply wrongdoing. 

Dan Bennett: Yeah, we've gone 90 days complaint free. Okay. Or, we've never had a a fine or anything off it. So again, it becomes something like this, when you're doing this sort of thing, it becomes, whether as a salesperson, an agent, a licensee, or whether as a broker, you're trying to differentiate yourself from someone else that are in a situation that's pretty hard to differentiate.

We all this sell houses. It's we do a different way. We all as a broker, we provide certain services . But how do I differentiate myself out there? And this is probably one of the areas where we really look after our people. That's what we do. Is that important to you? No, you're not going to 10 people you interviewed to join your office. You might find four or five say, No, I look after myself. But all you need is 234 people to join your office under that premise of Yeah, it's important for me to look after you, that you look after me, and I don't mind paying a few extra bucks in fees to have you do that. 

Shawn O'Hara: The Realty Cap would appeal then to brokers who want to be protecting their agents, and as a recruiting tool, that's almost the same thing, no?

Dan Bennett: You're right, you're going the right way. 

Shawn O'Hara: Appeal to people who want to protect their agents, and also to have a... 

Dan Bennett: Yeah, you're looking for efficiency and protecting your agents, and I'm, what am I looking for as a salesperson? I'm looking for the same sort of thing. I'm looking for my business to run smoothly when I put a deal together, and, you know, it completes, and two days later, the check is in my bank account, as opposed to having to go and hound the office for it.

That's important. That's important to me. In this business, you have a lot of upfront costs that you get paid for down, down the road. And yeah, it's, it's important for it to run smoothly. And it's important that I don't get my license suspended for even two days because I have to take down my signs, my websites, my listings are all transferred over to my broker. It's just a huge, huge... Tsunami that nails your business. If you ever, if you lose your license, even for if you were suspended for two or three days or a week or that sort of thing, it's just incredible. I don't think a lot of people in our industry know how painful that could be. And it's, you know, it's brutal.

You're, you're in the website business, you know what it's like when somebody has to take down a website and... We get the phone call. You get the phone call.

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah, and it's not just click and click, there's a process and work on our end.

Dan Bennett: Yeah. And then you're, then of course then your customer's all client can get back to you and say, well what happened here? And there's your reputation. 

Shawn O'Hara: It also affects the Google ranking too, because Google sees the site is gone. Yeah. And they go... Yeah, it... Negatively, having a site down negatively affects the Google ranking, which is an additional cost.

Dan Bennett: Well, you know, one question you might want to ask a salesperson is, what do you think your greatest asset is? Well, it might be the business, it might be my charming personality, but it's definitely having a real estate license is probably one of the most important assets you can have if you want to make a living in the real estate business. And the other thing is your reputation. I mean, your reputation is no good to you if you don't have a license, but having your license and a good reputation it's a pretty good basis for being successful in the business.

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah. Neat.

Dan Bennett: And what this business has given me is obviously a decent income, but it's also given us the freedom, the ability to go to our kids swim meets and to be involved that way and to have a little more flexibility of time. Over the years, having built up satisfied clients, they come back to you. So you get to the point in the business, you want to get to the point in life where your money's working for you and you're not working for money. So in this business, in the early stages, you're always out there chasing clients and trying to get people to call and come.

Now, after you've done a good job, you've kept that reputation up. You've done good business with the people and been good with people. Then what happens is they call you. And so you get to that point in the business where it's really enjoyable because you're spending more of your time doing business.

We bring our experience, our expertise, our knowledge, and we say, Okay, Shawn, I know your personal situation, I know what you're trying to accomplish, here's how I see it, here's a couple of options. You know, it's fun. You're helping people. And that's a really enjoyable thing because now you can spend more time doing business rather than chasing after it. 

Shawn O'Hara: Thank you, Dan. It's been great talking with you today and thank you so much.