Aug. 3, 2021

Howard Flaschen : People Before Property

Welcome back to the Real Estate Excellence podcast with your host Tracy Hayes!   In today’s episode, we are going to deliver another best of the best with our guest, Howard Flaschen. He is one of the most well-respected brokers in NE...

 

Welcome back to the Real Estate Excellence podcast with your host Tracy Hayes!

 

In today’s episode, we are going to deliver another best of the best with our guest, Howard Flaschen. He is one of the most well-respected brokers in NE Florida.  He runs an office of highly educated and supported agents at Round Table Realty.  "People Before Property" is his motto and all of his agents fit the mold.  Howard is dedicated to what he refers to as "family" when speaking of his agents at Round Table.                                                                                                                                                                                         

Let’s dive in and learn more about the people before property mindset.

 

[00:01 - 05:54] Opening Segment 

 

  • I welcome today’s guest, Howard Flaschen!
  • Howard shares his background, his study, and his early career journey.
  • How he found Round Table Realty, Inc.
  • The importance of technology for brokers and agents to support their career life.
  • Howard talks about how his work experience in Gordon Biersch plays a role in his mindset today.

 

[05:55 - 21:20] Internal Motivation and Self Driven Education

  • Howard talks about how he survives the economic recession in 2006 - 2008 with Richmond American Homes.
  • The downside of working in a corporate environment especially in a recession period.
    • The pyramid concept and employee-employer model of the corporate environment.
  • Howard talks about his leadership style and how he motivates his employees.
    • The investment in employee training.
  • Howard talks about where he gathers information and knowledge.
  • Internal motivation and discipline.
  • Self-driven education.
  • The key to longevity in a real estate career.
  • Recognizing the choice that you have and make the right decision.
  • The power of taking action and doing something.



[21:21 - 35:04]  People Before Property 

  • Howard talks about handling our own anxiety 
  • The power of being authentic and being ‘You’.
  • A shift in the paradigm.
  • Howard talks about the people before property mindset.
  • The core value and foundation in Round Table Realty.
  • Focus on taking care of people and clients.
  • Howard talks about his motivation to come to Round Table Realty every day.

 

[35:05 - 41:34] Transaction Broker Status in Florida

  • The tactics in winning offers regardless of the current market conditions.
  • The significance of influx and injection of education at the beginning of your real estate career.
    • Constant learning and trying.
  • Default transaction broker status in Florida.
    • Agency law changes.

 

[41:35 - 46:41] Closing Segment

  • Is it more important who you know or what you know?
    • What you know.
  • Working with an independent broker or teams?
    • Depends 
  • Advantages of being on a team
  • The Jumbo shrimp, or The Jaguars?
    • The Jaguars
  • Travel bucket list
    • Mediterranean cruise
  • If you had one hour to sit and talk with someone, past or present, who would that be?
    • John F. Kennedy and Ty Cobb
  • Connect with Howard
    • See links below.
  • Final words

 

Tweetable Quotes:

“I don't believe that you can get long-term externally motivated.” - Howard Flaschen.

”If you just focus on taking care of people and your clients now you're just going to have this really long successful career.” -  Howard Flaschen.

“You can get lucky or think that you are the best real estate agent in the world, but for the longevity in this career, it’s constant education and constant self-motivation.” - Howard Flaschen.

 

You can reach out to Howard on Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin. or check out the Round Table Realty website at https://www.roundtablerealty.com and Facebook or Instagram.

 

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Howard Flaschen  0:30  
Hello. My name is Howard flashin, broker, owner of roundtable Realty. If you are looking to level up your business in this crazy world of real estate, you need to be listening to the real estate excellence podcast with my good friend Tracy Hayes,

Podcast Intro  0:43  
welcome to Real Estate excellence making lasting connections to the best of the best in today's industry, elite. We'll help you expand your circle of influence by introducing you to the leaders in the real estate industry, whether it's top agents who execute at a high level every day, or the many support services working behind the scenes, we'll share their stories, ideologies and the inner workings of how they run a truly successful business, and show you how to add their tools to your belt now please welcome the host with the most Tracy Hayes,

Tracy Hayes  1:17  
Hey, welcome back to the show real Estate excellence podcast with your host, Tracy Hayes, my guest today is certainly one of the best, of the best in Northeast Florida. His brokerage is surrounded by the biggest franchise names in the business, yet his agents continue to put up big numbers. He continually recruits the best talent in the area, people before property is his motto and adopted by everyone on his team. He is highly respected amongst his broker peers in the region as a leader of the Round Table Realty. He focuses on his agents with relentless support. Welcome, Howard flashing broker, owner of Round Table Realty. Howard, welcome. Oh, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. I'm honored to have you come over today in your busy schedule, as I'm sure it is here being closing in in the last few days of the month of July. And we know the last week gets get hectic, so to be able to get some time with you is honored. So I just want to start off as I start off all my shows is just, Hey, who is Howard, you know, how where were you born? Where'd you grow up? Let's, you know, talk about, you know, Hey, where'd you go to high school?

Howard Flaschen  2:17  
So I was born in South Florida, but really, all I remember is Northeast Florida. Grew up here, attended Mandarin High School Mustangs, traveled around a bit, determined that I was going to follow in the family's footsteps into real estate with one of my best friends, and we started working for a home builder, a small mom and pop home builder here in town, and really, enjoyed it. My father worked there, and we really that was basically the start of a people before property mindset, working for a small builder, really taking care of people. They were bought by a national home builder, and then we kind of flipped around and saw what it was like to work for huge, monolithic, bureaucratic corporate entity with quarterly earnings, right? And fought our way through that, and then decided at some point in time that we were going to go into general real estate. And really, honestly, to be fair, interviewed at many different brokerages about where to start, and they were all really, really outdated. The tech stack was outdated, the philosophies were outdated. Even the branding was outdated. This is early 2000s not mistake from you LinkedIn, yeah. And so we just decided, look, we're gonna have to do this on our own. And literally, two guys at a dining room table going through all the different tech options, all the different things that were available and launched, and 11 years later, we're one of the top 10 brokerages in Northeast

Tracy Hayes  3:40  
Florida to not jump too far ahead, but you mentioned something there to trigger the question, I mean, how? And I don't think I've ever asked this in the with some of the other brokers and agents. How important is the technology today, when you are looking at brokers like you were

Howard Flaschen  3:54  
doing, I think it's one of the most important things. I mean, if you talk about it internally from support, agents are stressed constantly and frustrated, just like their buyers and sellers are in environments where the pendulum has swung so far to one side. But in their career, they have to have easy tech, easy to adopt, easy to put in place, easy to use. And so with a little bit effort, they have to be able to have that sort of tech stack, and that allows them to be efficient, allows them to gain time back for their friends and their family, and it allows them to be able to help people quickly get offers in or turn offers into sellers. And without the technology, and without the ease of use and the support, honestly, we have a great trainer for that. Without the support, I feel like they're really hamstrung

Tracy Hayes  4:43  
right now. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go back because you advanced very quickly in your timeline, but I'm gonna go back a little bit because you left this on your on your LinkedIn, which I see LinkedIn, to me is everyone's resume, if they pronounce the restaurant correctly. Gordon Bierce, Gordon birch, and you left on there, and obviously you're just the scene. Like you just got out of college, you were in working there as a server. How is that that experiences? It wasn't like something you did for four months. You did it for years, yeah. How is that experience played a little bit into your mindset in life and running your business

Howard Flaschen  5:14  
today, I don't think it plays a little bit. I think it plays a lot. I think that there's no faster way for someone to learn a customer service high intensity mindset than from waiting tables and service. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I had great people that I worked with. I'm friends with, many of them still to this day, seven bridges is part of that same family of restaurants at the time, and I think that it teaches responsibility. It teaches you how to juggle things quickly, problem solve quickly, and be customer service, heart first, right out of the gates. And so, you know, for me, I think it's a boot camp. I encourage everybody to go wait tables. And for those of you out there who are going to restaurants right now and being frustrated and upset at the servers and the restaurants, not really a great place to do that. They're working their tails off

Tracy Hayes  6:06  
right right in the brokers and the agents in my first show, if you I don't know if you listen to that one, but that broker, I didn't even know that, because she didn't leave it on her resume. She worked at Hooters for three or four years, and she thinks the same thing of that experience, how valuable it was to deal with people in that situation. So where you work for the the small builder, and then I get, well, I guess Richmond homes was the large builder that bought the smaller builder out. You were with them through the 2006 789, timeframe, period, how, what was surviving like there?

Howard Flaschen  6:41  
Well, when the bubble was inflating, it was crazy. In one end of the spectrum, in that we, you know, we would sell 10 to 12 homes on a Saturday. I mean, it was absolutely crazy. The construction model at the time was similar in one aspect of what it is today, which was that there was just demand endless. There was an endless amount of demand for these houses. The quality began to start dropping, sure, and which is inevitable, and we are seeing some of that today as well. Yep. And you know, went to work for them and saw that side of things, and the high stress environment and the burnout that comes from it. And then when things started to deflate, you start to see the other side of the spectrum as well, which is they have monthly quotas, and they've got demands that Wall Street is demanding for their stocks and their and their numbers and the revenue. And so the pressure starts to get put on from that side. And one of the things we really, really hate about that environment, which is something we don't do at our brokerage, is they start to benchmark you against your peers within the company, and on the month of May, you win an award, and they give you an iPad. And then in June, you fall short of their quota by a sale, and they're in your office writing you up, threatening your job, corporate America, threatening your livelihood. And so, you know, it's one of the things that I absolutely hate about that environment, and I think that a lot of people out there that have corporate America type jobs and publicly held companies on Wall Street, you know, they have some sort of sense of job security, you know, where you get a paycheck every two weeks and get these benefits and you and you have a place to go nine to five, but the minute the market goes into recession and you thought you had job security, they're cutting you left and right and putting you on the streets. And so I think it's really a problem that really doesn't have a solution. As long as we're in a quarterly, quarter to quarter stock price environment, I think there has to be some sort of change of mentality out there, and probably won't happen in my lifetime.

Tracy Hayes  8:35  
I always try and you know, because I've experienced that, I've experienced that in my 15 years of being in mortgages, my first 12 years was working with two, now, the two largest lenders in the country. One of them became the largest lender while I was there. But same exact thing, but they and they never reached out to say, Hey, you're slipping a little bit. Let's get you some additional training. Let's get you some additional coaching, because the ability is still there. You know, we were talking a little bit before the show about your son playing baseball, and you know, how does he go from the number one hitter to one of the lowest hitters on the team? It was something psychologically there, or maybe a little more practice, or whatever it was, and they don't want to the company doesn't want to look at themselves as the ones that, hey, I've got this guy here that we know can do it, because he's done it before. Why is he slipping? What's going on in his life? How can we bring him back up with some education, whatever it is, you know what I mean, to get the swings of the bat again,

Howard Flaschen  9:26  
right? But I think there's a cost involved with that. There's a human cost, and I think that upper management at a lot of corporations, as I have seen it, as you get further down the pyramid, it becomes more and more replaceable, and that's the easy fix,

Tracy Hayes  9:39  
right? So even though that costs money, too, yeah, but that's budgeted

Howard Flaschen  9:43  
for right? What's not typically budgeted for is, how do they coach someone within their team, right? Right? They would rather point the finger at you, right, versus themselves and just replace you over and over. Now, in our brokerage, we do a lot of coaching, do a lot of training, but it's still a commission based. Business, right? And it's still up to them to wake up every day and answer the phones and do the work. And they're in the lead generation business, like we talked about, they have to go out and fill their funnel with with their future clients. And in this sort of job, which I'm sure there are many other 100% commission jobs where it's like that, where you have to do the job yourself as well. So I get it, but in the employee, employer model, there's a cost involved to doing that. And I find that most corporations that I see the anomalies are the ones that do what you describe, where they actually reach down and coach. The most common thing that they do is they say, You know what, you just don't have anymore. I'm gonna replace you with someone younger, better, faster, whatever they they think it might be. And it's shame, because I'm really there's a lot of talent that that has

Tracy Hayes  10:46  
been because of that. Looking at your background and so forth, in I know you're constantly, we've mentioned it several times already, constantly training. Have you reached out? I mean, there has to be. Had to be. You have so many different agents from so many different backgrounds, male, female, whatever you see them not having that same spirit they had before. They're not going after it before. Reach out and say, Hey, what's going

Howard Flaschen  11:08  
on? Well, we provide a lot of different avenues for them to have the resources available. The first thing that has to happen is they have to wake up in the morning and want to change, right? Someone who's in that mode, who's who's just down on themselves, or down on the market, which can happen, the burnout, all of those things occur. They have to want to make change, right? And at our brokerage, we do three or four trainings a month, right? Where we have an open office, 24/7, for them to come in, yeah. So we do three or four trainings a month. We have a portal with over 500 different videos on different topics for people to get into. We have a Facebook break room where people can go into and talk and chat. People get together offline. We have events. We just did escape ology with our gang. But oftentimes the turnout, it's interesting, right? So, so here's what's

Tracy Hayes  11:57  
interesting. You are going into an interesting area. I think you know where you're going with it.

Howard Flaschen  12:01  
Interesting thing. So a lot of people, and this isn't just an arbitrary This is in life, right? A lot of people voice their frustrations and their their unhappiness, and they're missing out on their mojo and all those sorts of things. And then you put in front of them the different things that they can do to potentially work on that a books to read like we have a library of books at our office, right? The portals that they can go to to do this stuff, YouTube's loaded with stuff. Like, there's just tons of avenues for them to do stuff. And then they look at you sometimes, and they put their hands and go, What do I do? Really, like, in this day and age, like, it's, it's hard to go and motivate yourself, because then, going back to the employer employee mindset, right? When you're an employee, they have the carrot and stick of you want to get paid. You want to every two weeks, and here's what we need you to do. We need our TPS reports, right? Do on on Monday, right? And you're going to stay late, and you're going to come in early, and you're going to do that's the employer employee model, right? In real estate brokerage and maybe in lending as well. It's not nobody's going to tell you what time to come in and what time to leave. No one's going to tell you what to do. You're going to see the results of at the end of the year, right? And so the idea that there's some magic bullet out there that can come externally, I just feel like that's,

Tracy Hayes  13:17  
well, it's interesting. You bring this up, and this is something I totally enjoy talking about. And here I got Ryan serhant here in front of us as well. And one of my questions for all my clients is, where do you get your personal Do you listen to podcasts? You read books? Where do you generally like to grab?

Howard Flaschen  13:35  
I mean, the internet is loaded full of stuff, right? I mean, you, you can't avoid it. So it's just got now we obviously do. We have different training modules and different portals and all this sort of stuff. But I got that's really small in the Great Lake of stuff that's available for people to motivate themselves. And I hate to say, and I hate to say, it sounds so stuck on it, but at the end of the day, I don't believe that you can get long term externally motivated. I don't think that I could call someone every morning at seven o'clock and tell them it's time to get

Tracy Hayes  14:16  
up right, right. Eventually they'll

Howard Flaschen  14:18  
stop answering the phone. That's just not going to happen. That's just not the job we have and not the times we live in. So that's not going to come externally. That stuff comes internally. So if you're in a job that's a commission based job, and you find yourself sleeping until 11, and you're not time blocking, which is one of the most important things you can do in this industry, time block, if you're not time blocking, to call past clients, follow up with the leads that have called you recently, to visit model homes, to build relationships with your peers. If you can't do that stuff, that's not gonna come external, right? I mean, you have to find that inside

Tracy Hayes  14:57  
yourself. Well, I go back to you were. Obviously a conversation that was going on before the cameras came on, but you were telling me you're talking about, I think, to your son and one of the ball players about the straight line. You're down here and you want to be up here. Is it a straight line? And it's a straight line? If someone tells you, yes, if you go out the door, you turn left, then take two steps, and then turn to right, take three more steps. You're there, that can be a straight line because you're telling them exactly what to do, yes, but life ain't like

Howard Flaschen  15:25  
that. Well, that's right. And the dots you just described are here to here, if you want to go from here to here, right? So here to here can be a straight line, right? Somebody tells you how to get a couple steps right, here to here.

Tracy Hayes  15:39  
That is a journey. Oh,

Howard Flaschen  15:40  
yeah. I mean, that's ups and downs and downs and ups and downs. And yes, you have to be able to get through the downs, and you have to not believe that your up is how it's going to be always and kind of, what I'd say is aim for the middle of in between those two. And you can have that nice feeling inside of having progress. But again, going back to the question at hand, you can provide all of the external stuff imaginable, right? We can go to the Ale House, and I can buy dinner for everyone, and that is fun for three hours. We can go to escape biology and have two hours of fun, right? I can provide 500 videos in a portal. I can provide hours upon hours of training. There's tons of things to do, right? But at the end of the day, if you don't wake up wanting to do this stuff and wanting to call your leads or follow the action plans, or

Tracy Hayes  16:29  
do you think they get overwhelmed? Because obviously, there is a lot of stuff they can go after, you think they get overwhelmed because there's just too much stuff to do. They're like, I don't even know where to start. Well,

Howard Flaschen  16:37  
well, that that's the thing. I mean, do they get overwhelmed? And I'm talking about the industry as a whole, and I guess you could percolate that out into to a lot more than just real estate. Perhaps they're overwhelmed, but the baseline to being overwhelmed may be so low that overwhelmed is is nothing, right? I mean, just waking up and watching a podcast. You know, I have a, I have amazing realtor that works, you know, it is, I think, Robert Adams. Robert Adams listens Tom Ferry podcasts, reads articles. It's non stop. His education, his self driven education, is off the charts. He's constantly and I, as you know, I have the most amazing realtors that work at round table Realty that have joined me and my family allowed me to support them, right? You know, they're amazing, and so they're a lot of them are doing that same stuff, and that is what it takes to have longevity in this business. You can get lucky, you can get your license right before a bubble starts to inflate, right? And you can think you're the best real estate agent, right? But for longevity, for a long term career, it's constant education, constant self motivation, constant getting up and surrounding yourself with people who believe that that is the case. You birds of a feather flock together. So, you know, if you find yourself hanging out with people that are kind of down in the dumps, and, you know, wanting to bring everybody down.

Tracy Hayes  18:01  
And, you know, I was sharing a something that I came across in the last 48 hours, just yesterday with somebody. It's like, wow, they actually was the mortgage market animals or whatever call. They started a loan officer Breakfast Club every 830 to nine o'clock in the morning. Just started on Monday, and I heard about it on Monday evening. I'm like, I'm gonna zoom in. And I shared it, and someone said to me, how do you have time? I said, How do you have time not to you have to make the time. You have to. When I'm out walking the dog, I'm listening to a podcast, you know, I'm driving the car. I'm listening to a podcast, somebody's giving me information might be good, information might be bad, information might be information that I might not be I personally could not implement myself. But there's somewhere in that podcast I'm going to pull a nugget out one thing that I can implement.

Howard Flaschen  18:46  
I tell all my agents, got to learn one thing, one thing. If you can learn one thing, that's it. But let me talk about what you just said. You are making a choice over and over and over, all day long, you're presented with the choice of what I'm going to do for the next hour. Okay, you make that choice that you're going to dive into this podcast, or you're going to read this book, or you're going to read this magazine, or you're going to go watch a YouTube video that has to do with the topic at hand. And it doesn't have to be loans specifically, no, it could be how to stay positive in a tough market. It could be about fixed mindset versus growth mindset. All of these things are available to us. For my son, again, talking about baseball. For my son, I typed in the YouTube fixed mindset versus growth mindset. It wasn't like I had to search for one video and find there was hundreds of videos to watch on that topic, right? And so we can do that at all times. So when you say, are they going back to are they overwhelmed, overwhelmed with that? I can't imagine, okay, that I look at it as if somebody said, Well, I'm overwhelmed with the choices. I'd be like, well, you just aren't making the choice. Then, you know, you'd rather binge watch TED lasso or something like that.

Tracy Hayes  19:58  
You said something earlier, you know, you said. I got all the books and stuff in, all the materials at the office that they can access and obviously online. And they ask you, well, what should I do? I'm listening. It's like Tom Ferry's name comes up all the time. Go listen to every one of his podcasts. That would be my answer right now, this listening way, I would say, go become a Tom Ferry freak and listen to everything he has to tell you is, there's other people in the in the industry as well that are good, but I think they get confused. Oh, should I be listening to Tom, or should I be listening to someone else? Should I be over here? Should be at Keller Williams? Or should I be at round table? They're worried about something that's

Howard Flaschen  20:32  
not Yeah, but let me just say yes, okay, Tom, Ferry is amazing, right? We have a portal filled with videos too. There's, there's all these videos, right? I boil it down to do something,

Tracy Hayes  20:41  
yes, right?

Howard Flaschen  20:42  
Even if you watch someone and you're like, This was terrible. Okay, so you learned what not to do. That's fine, too. Yes, you moved forward. You know, you picked the wrong podcast. You won't listen to that one again. But, yeah, learning doing something is some the mortgage

Tracy Hayes  20:58  
market animals, they have three podcasts, and I can't remember which one it was, but the one thing, the one guy comes on every time and says, Even doing something badly is still good. Fail forward. Fail forward, if you're gonna, you know, obviously, social media is a big thing. You know, a lot of agents, some agents, have taken it by the reins, and, you know, to do a little video. It could be where, what's a good restaurant in town? I mean, if you watch the success stories, and I've know, I've told it on the podcast before, I was listening to a podcast interviewing a guy from Montana who did a video on moving to Montana because Californians want to move to Montana. And he does a video what it's like to live in Montana. Went viral, couple million views when I saw it months ago. But everyone Oh, I don't What do I look like? Dude? This guy was just dressed as casually. Could be standing out on the side of a road with a mountain behind him, and he's talking to a cell phone, and it went viral. You just got to go do it. So let me not giving him Nike average.

Howard Flaschen  21:53  
On that note, I did. I did a training class yesterday. Man, what is your worth? Okay, this was an hour long training on what are you worth? Are you worth less, or are you worth more, right? And what one of the main points of this conversation was, there's always going to be pushback from agents and lenders and from humans when you are trying to challenge the paradigm that they've been in, okay? And we can talk a little bit about what I'm talking about in the future, but so there's challenges to the paradigm right now. We know what they are, okay. There's there's these challenges. And so some of the agents in the training were venturing these Well, do you think that this is going to go over like this, or do you think it's going to go over like that? And what we came to find out was these anxieties and these pre judgments of how it's gonna go when I say this, or what are they gonna these are our own. Okay, we're putting it on the world like they're gonna judge me and they're gonna say this, and they're gonna say that nine times out of 10, it's us. These anxieties are our own. If we put it out there, whatever the attempt is you might be pleasantly to surprise me. Oh, it didn't go like that. They didn't throw

Tracy Hayes  23:05  
darts at me in before starting the podcast and doing your research. I got a coach that coached me on how to do the podcast, and one of the things that they teach, and I've listened to others say the same thing, even if you say something controversial that actually gets more attention. And you know, they use the Donald Trump scenario as the reason why is Donald Trump is so divisive. They use the word divisive because he's got people that agree with him, who are Die Hard, and whatever he says they're going to do, then you got the people who disagree, but they're still going to listen. So he's influencing them as well. At the same time, even though they tell you they disagree with them, they're still listening to hear what he said, kind of like the Howard Stern type of thing. So just go out there and do it. People are going to like you, or they're not going to like you. Can't control that.

Howard Flaschen  23:50  
That being said, we are in regulated industry, so be careful. Don't say anything and do anything that can get you. I'm not sure that Donald Trump has to worry about fair housing violations,

Tracy Hayes  24:02  
right? Well, I'm not saying you have to go out there and no on this from from a but people want to be so PC, maybe what they want to say so they're so afraid that I can't do the video, because I might say you just got to go out and do it. People love that's the great thing about social media, is people are, you know, kind of showing that they're normal. So

Howard Flaschen  24:19  
let me, let me twist that into something that they can do without touching on, on any of the Fair Housing stuff. I think what you're saying is Be authentic. Yes, okay, if you, if you can be you and you're a good person, and you're not going to say something that's a fair housing violation, which, if that's in your heart anyway, that's a problem, right? Okay, but if you can be you and be authentic, and then take the chance, create the content, say the thing. Then people like that, I do. I want to know who you really are. When a new agent comes in and sits down with me, whether or not they're going to join us or not, I ask kind of atypical questions, because I want. To know who you are. And at first, when someone sits down with me, typically, you know they expect, you know what you would expect at a normal interview

Tracy Hayes  25:07  
job. Yeah, right. And really they're interviewing you.

Howard Flaschen  25:09  
That's the mindset they should have. When I call an agent say, hey, understand there's some changes going on at your brokerage. You know, I don't know if you've been looking around, but when you do, I love you to include us right in your interviews. That's what it is. And by the way, that is another shift in the paradigm, because it's for decades been the brokerage that's interviewing the agent, okay, or the team, right? And we're judging you, and there's a little bit of that, right? But it's really a marriage. You're interviewing me exactly, with Keith and Leslie and Aaron and my team right of support people, you're interviewing me to find out, am I going to give you myself, my authentic self, or am I going to put up a facade? So I agree with that statement that in social media, in doing the things to put yourself out there, not being a secret agent, you got to be authentic. Give people yourself almost not. Almost all of the agents at round table Realty are heart first agents. And we coined that phrase. I don't think it's trademarked, but heart first agent, okay? And when they are authentically giving of themselves in a people before property mindset. I'm not really worried about the things they're going to say and do, because it's coming from that

Tracy Hayes  26:25  
place, right, right? It makes my

Howard Flaschen  26:27  
job easy. Well, you

Tracy Hayes  26:28  
brought it up because that's one of my questions. Where did your people before property phrase come from?

Howard Flaschen  26:34  
That's a great story. So, you know, Betsy Sorrells is one of my my family members, our care agent. Anyway, I was trying to think of the shortest phrase I could get to to boil down my philosophy on real estate. And I want to, I want to name drop for a second. There's a guy out there who is a new home construction sales trainer. His name is Jeff shore, and he was critically important to my development as a site agent for a builder. There were a lot of trainers that would come in and would say, when someone walks through the door, you're going to say hello, and you're going to say it like this, and you're going to say this next phrase, it's a great day at XYZ builder, right? And they're gonna say this, and then you're gonna walk them to the stand, and you're gonna talk about the community, and from that moment, you're gonna walk them to the sign, and you're and it became this, am I a robot? What is happening? So Jeff shore walks in, and he says, I don't want you to do any of that stuff. Okay, when somebody walks through, you say hello, because that's the right thing to do, but your goal is to find out why they're there's a problem. If there wasn't a problem, they wouldn't be there. So what is the real estate problem going on in their life? Find that out, and then maybe you'll be able to provide a solution that is people before property. I didn't know it at the time, but that's what that is, right? So we launched this brokerage, and I'm thinking, I don't want to be the other guy. I don't want to have quotas. We're not going to do top Lister awards. We're not going to do top sales awards. We're not going to compare people within the brokerage to each other, because everybody's compared to themselves and what their goals are, okay? So I'm not putting that on them, that you have some sort of brass ring to attain. Everybody's is different, right? And I want to celebrate the individual, right? So how do I do that, right? So we launched Round Table Realty, and I'm just trying to get to the brass tacks of what it really means to be that, right? And I walked into the Ale House. We were having a group meeting. I think we had like favorite places. So this was the Mandarin Ale House. And we had 10, I think we probably had 10 or 20 agents at the time, and eight were there. And I walked in and I said, I think I came up with our model. I'm not sure, but I'm gonna throw it at and I remember Betsy sitting right there, and I said, people before proper I expected to, like, catch daggers. So cheesy, cliche. And Betsy was like, I love it. And they were all like, that's it. That's what we do. That is the heart of it. And so if I can do that, so like we bought people before property.com which goes to our website, and that literally has become the DNA of our brokerage. Every single agent that comes to our brokerage uses that phrase. It's trademarked. They can use it. And it truly is the heart of everything we do, every decision we make, has to be people before property. And if it's not, we're not doing and that, that's simple. So that's how we got to it. That's what it means. And people for a property, by the way, means different things at different times. So here's what I mean right now. Real estate agents across this industry are so stressed, I know that the general public is like, this is the greatest market ever. Like, try driving around all day submitting eight offers for a client, not winning any of the offers, and they're waiting for the phone call back from the listing agent, going, how did you fail us? This is not an easy market at all, and so people for property can sometimes mean taking a week off for your. Self, taking care of your mental health, leaning on your fellow RTR agents to help with a showing or an open house and that sort of thing. So people who are property, property can be internal as well, taking care of yourself, with your family and all those sorts of things, your personal development, absolutely. All of this stuff is people first, and that it becomes people before property, for sure. And so it really is the best phrase to describe the DNA of what roundtable

Tracy Hayes  30:25  
realty is. I imagine all your trainings focus on that. The trainings that you do Tailor of how, because we just derive that from whether it's personal development. Bettering you is putting people before property. Yeah, so it's part of is your trainings working in that

Howard Flaschen  30:39  
direction. Don't get me wrong, there's some pretty specific trainings we have, you know, like buyer engagement agreements. I mean, that's a really nuanced, specific training. I'm not certain that people before property is talked on that training, but everything we do from the ground up foundationally, is people before property. And I mean, look, there have been agents that have interviewed us, and we've interviewed them, and we got a sense that they weren't necessarily heart first or people before, property in the same vein that we think of it. They might say they are, but in our in our way, we didn't think they're written. Just doesn't work, and they don't, they don't come around. I

Tracy Hayes  31:13  
think it's again, I was listening some recent podcasts here recently. They were talking about the motivation of the dollar. They're just worried about what their dollar is going to be at the other end, and they forget about the long term play of one particular customer, for example, and that customer, hopefully, in a four to five year period, may be worth four or five deals for you, whether it's them, you know, as a loan officer, maybe they refinance, but hopefully you're going to get two or three referrals with them over the course. So what is the life history and value of that customer? So yeah, at the end, it's it's money, but you've got to put the people before the property. You've got to do the relationship building, as we mentioned earlier in the show, the relationship building through that process. So they're going to continue to feed you those leads. You just so desperately want the freebie referrals in future. So there's only

Howard Flaschen  32:05  
one time where I think the money might need to be higher up in your conscience, and that's when you're starting off in a commission based industry, because if you don't have a runway to get the plane off the ground, okay, so that's a problem. So you got to have savings account to invest in yourself and get to where your business starts to take off after that. I say, Forget about the money. Put the money out of your mind. How in the world are you going to know that when you're 65 years old, you made $30,000 less than you could have? You're never going to know that, right, right? So if you just focus on taking care of people now and taking care of your clients now. You're just going to have this really long, successful career, and you're going to end up with your net worth being x, and you won't know that it's x minus 30 grand, or it could be x plus 30 grand, because you took care of someone on day 421 of your career, right? So just forget all that stuff. Take care of the people that are in front of you. Do your lead generation, be that, in person, digital, whatever it may be, do your follow up, and lo and behold, fast forward 30 years, and you're really happy with the way your life planned out, your family's planned out, your financial net worth, your financial security. And you're like, how did I get here? Yeah, well, focus on the day to day. Take care of people. What

Tracy Hayes  33:23  
motivates you every day to come in the round table? Reality? This is because I imagine everyone looks to you for the for the for the attitude of the day. This is gonna be a strength and a week.

Howard Flaschen  33:35  
So I come in every day because I absolutely live for and adore my family of agents. I ride the waves of successes with them and pains with them. I love taking care of them. You could say, in a weird way, I'm in love with my agents. I love what they are doing the people before property mindset single agency. A lot of times they're really, really working so hard to take care of people that I want to take care of them at a max my wife would say she totally agrees that I sacrifice a lot throughout them first, right? But it's also a weakness in that I feel so much of the emotion that they feel to drain you, and it's very possible that other corporate brokerages that they figured out a way to segregate that from themselves. You know, maybe they're just recruiters, and they're not necessarily doing they've passed the management off to like somebody else, and they don't really ride those emotional waves with them. I have not figured that out, and I don't think I'm going to. I think I am who I am. That's what

Tracy Hayes  34:44  
makes your brokerage you. I mean, that's why you went on your own.

Howard Flaschen  34:47  
Yeah, one of the reasons. And so with Keith and myself and Leslie and Aaron and Liz, I love answering their phone calls. When they call me and they say a lot of times, my age a call, and they call me at eight. O'clock at night, nine o'clock at night, whatever. And or they'll text me. It'll be the lead with, I'm so sorry to call you. And I'm like, I always say, Do not apologize, right? I love it. You know, when they say I got a question, my answer is, great. I love it. I want them to call, right? You know, as a matter of fact, I will say them, I'll say to them, you know, imagine my life if you didn't call, that would be awful. First of all, you you're still going to call. It's just going to be when the fire is an inferno. I would rather you call up front and I get to talk to you and I get to help. That's what I want. To make

Tracy Hayes  35:31  
it a smooth and pleasant experience. So now you're probably getting calls with the current market conditions, and making that offer, and structuring that offer is extremely important with these 1520, offers that some of these homes are getting, what are some of the tactics that you're using your experience and making sure that you get the best foot forward when they submit that offer?

Howard Flaschen  35:53  
Well, without giving away some of our secret sauce, we put together a package that touches on all of the available features of an offer, because there are a lot, there's a lot of variables that that can be controlled and presented and how they get presented. Yes, and we have a lot of shared knowledge at our brokerage, and some training and some marketing materials that help get that offer to the fore, we have had incredible success winning that game for our clients. And it's it's really important right now to be able to win for them. They need it so bad. And and we do some things that are different than other brokerages, and we win a greater percentage of time, times than than others, because

Tracy Hayes  36:43  
you have some I've had one of them on here. Jennifer, only been in the business a couple of years. They weren't here in 2008 so they don't know what it's like to go from lean to great. Even the market's great, it's now a little tougher. The an experienced agent, you would think knows what to do, but they don't necessarily know what to do. Do they in this market? Well?

Howard Flaschen  37:00  
And a lot of times an experienced agent might not have educated themselves, because, right? So there's an influx or an injection of education in the beginning, right? You're learning so much, right, right? But eventually you get successful, and maybe you've been doing this kind of plateau out, right? You've been doing this 10 years, 11 years, I'll give you a great example of our agents doing this a long time, Erica jawless. And I think, you know, Erica jobs, she's an incredible agent. I mean, first of all, she's a great mom, great wife, great friend, and she's an incredible realtor. And she has exemplified the opposite of what I'm talking about. She's constantly learning, constantly trying. She'll venture, you know, I have some anxiety about that new stuff, but I want to hear more about I want to try more, right? That's the opposite. There are some agents out there that have been doing so long that it's hard to learn a new trick, and I think that they're doing doing a disservice, not just to themselves, but potentially to their customers. And I think that that's something that we try to strive to do. I mean, in my training yesterday, I had very educated agents in there who are looking at some real changes to the paradigm, but they're there, and they're learning, and they're seeing it. And we record all our trainings. We put them up so people can watch them later. They can't make it right. Yeah. And so even when the market is changing as rapidly as it has been, we're still trying to stay on the fore. And that goes with veteran agents as well. Try, try to

Tracy Hayes  38:21  
learn. I was listening to a podcast. Yes, you were talking about and this could go on for whether it's a loan officer or real estate agent, our value, you can make good money in this business, and they're in a real estate industry, there's no doubt you can make a very good living. But we have that because of the changes. If there wasn't changes, they'd eventually technology us out, but because their people are different on your end from the real estate agent, and there's different compliance stuff and everything from our side and guidelines from the loan, those are constantly changing. If we didn't have change, our value would be lowered. But because there's change, they need an expert. You need that person that's in the business that is staying in front of it well, specifically

Howard Flaschen  39:01  
for Florida, one of the changes that happened 15 to 20 years ago that makes my real estate agents more valuable to the general public is the state went to a default transaction broker status. And I don't know if you're familiar with this, but this is agency law, so this applies to real estate agent so transaction brokers in the state of Florida don't actually work for you. You think I'm your realtor, but as a transaction broker, I'm just a glorified mediator. I'm taking your offer, whatever you want to offer, I'm sending it over, and the transaction broker on the side is presenting it, and they're not supposed to influence anything. We're just a mediator, right? But that diminished the value right, of a real estate agent. When my grandfather owned a brokerage, single agency was the default, okay? And that was a single agent, like an attorney or a CPA or hiring them on your team. I'm a fiduciary, yeah, okay. I'm a fiduciary to you. I have to put your needs in front of my own. I have, this is in Florida Statute, and I have to do these things. So in my. Brokerage we practice, or are able to practice single agency for the right scenario, right so that I can call you my client, and I have to be obedient to your needs. I have to have

Tracy Hayes  40:11  
loyalty, share your expertise, coach them on how to make the offer.

Howard Flaschen  40:14  
I have to disclose everything to you. It blows me away that, and a lot of people don't know this, but as a transaction broker, if you, let's say you had a you want to make an offer on a home of 200,000 right? It's listed for 250 which you're never going to win that house. But let's just say you want to make an offer 200 on a house that's listed for 250 Okay, and the agent on the on those other side, before I present the offer, tells me, hey, hey, how can you get Tracy to make an offer on this house? Because my seller said they'll take 180 okay, I'm not allowed to share that with you. I can't tell you that they'll take 180 right? Because now I'm liable to the seller for the 20 grand they lost. So is the other agent. We're both on the hook. We both committed the violation of expressing that he would take less. But if I'm your single agent, and I'm holding your offer of 200,000 and he calls me and tells me he'll take 180 Well, I go, Oh, thank you very much. As a single agent, I have to tell you, or else I'm liable to you,

Tracy Hayes  41:09  
yeah, for the over which I think the average person walks up would think that's the way it's

Howard Flaschen  41:13  
supposed to be. So the average member of the general public thinks we're default single agent. They have no idea that, if you hired me, that I'm actually just a transaction broker, limited liability, limited representation, hands off. Yeah, they don't know that. In my opinion, it's one of the biggest fake outs in the entire industry, and it's diminished our value. So you know what ends up happening? I'll tell you what ends up happening for real in the real world. What ends up happening is most of these transaction brokers are dabbling and playing around and doing single agency type stuff, yes, right? But they're just doing it without the correct paperwork, without creating that relationship and writing, and they're not doing that correctly. And then when they get called to the carpet and they get in trouble for it, they're gonna be like, Oh, I didn't know, yeah. And so we do it

Tracy Hayes  41:56  
way. I'm with you. I'm gonna, I'm gonna call you back how, because I know your knowledge, your experience, and you're willing to express it is huge. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna bring you back. I'm gonna wrap up the show here because we're running a little long, but I'm gonna go into my two minute warning questions. I officiate a little football, but we're gonna have you back on and some give us, because you have a lot of knowledge, and we don't have to go back to the background of that. You went to Mandarin high. We could just start right into the good stuff. I think is, I'm long winded, I agree. Is it more important of who you know or what you know? I would disagree with that. Okay, with that. I think you who you know can lead to you to what you know, okay? But I think, but the relationships, I think, are more important, okay, that's a we could talk about that on another another time. I always think that's a good question. I stole that from another podcast now you have independence, and you have some teams on your in Round Table. Reality, without them, let's say they're not listening right now, which do you prefer to work

Howard Flaschen  42:50  
with? I have no preference. I It depends on the individual. It depends on the team. So, so

Tracy Hayes  42:56  
it's very important. I would say what is very important for that team leader, whoever's the, you know, the Cotton Team, I think, is one of your team, one of your team on the teams there, and they have to be bought into your idea, because they're being you duplicated over here. Hopefully that their agents can't come to you, absolutely, but they need to be totally bought into That's right, people before property,

Howard Flaschen  43:13  
we have told some agents in the past that we're, they're not ready to run teams. There are some people that just get it. And the Cotton Team, who's a recent convert over to Round Table Realty this year, they get people before property, but so do the individuals. I mean, Robert Adams gets people before property. So does Erica, so does Wendy, who just came over. You meet these people, you go, you're people before property, for sure, heart first. And so it's not really a preference. There's advantages to being on a team, because you have instant access to somebody who's you know, kind of you get two layers of mentorship, right? Where an individual maybe isn't getting that in addition on teams, typically, the team leads are investing in you, getting you leads and holding you accountable. That's not really our setup. I'm not calling people, like I said, at eight o'clock in the morning, telling you to wake up, right?

Tracy Hayes  43:59  
You're out looking for a sporting event, jumbo shrimp or the Jaguars. Jaguars, because it's, it's training camp starts today, actually. But I love baseball. I mean, the shrimps a good experience, lot cheaper, right?

Howard Flaschen  44:14  
But there's only what? There's seven home games, right? Seven regular

Tracy Hayes  44:19  
season. Oh, the Jaguars. Oh yeah, yeah. So preseason, right? So if you

Howard Flaschen  44:23  
get an opportunity to go to one or the other, if dream finders wants to take me to a Jaguar game, I'm always gonna say yes.

Tracy Hayes  44:28  
And for those because a lot of know, all your agents are registered with nefar, yeah, they're having their our pack auction Friday night, jet home loans. And our builder here, Dream finders has donated two club seat tickets to be auctioned off Friday night. So you can go online the nefar and going to get into that our pack auction and make a big because we sold, yeah, make it. Make it. Make a bid there. What's on your travel bucket list?

Howard Flaschen  44:51  
Travel bucket list is to do a Mediterranean cruise with my wife and any friends who want to go. I'm really excited about doing that in the next couple. Years

Tracy Hayes  45:00  
Excellent. If you could sit down with anyone past or present. Genghis Khan forward, who would that be? Sit down and actually talk to him

Howard Flaschen  45:07  
for an hour. I would probably sit down with John F Kennedy.

Tracy Hayes  45:11  
That's interesting. Give me a little insight on that. What's What's your thoughts there?

Howard Flaschen  45:15  
I really think he was a heart first guy. I think he really tried and had ideals that maybe he didn't achieve and reach and all that sort of stuff. But I really felt like he

Tracy Hayes  45:25  
definitely could express it. I mean, he was definitely a good speaker, yeah, from that standpoint, kind of like Ronald Reagan, and you listen, he could really get you motivated. And I think America was

Howard Flaschen  45:35  
first, and then I could list out a bunch of other people, like, like Jackie Robinson, you know, you know, who's an interesting sit down? Who would be a really interesting sit down would be Ty Cobb? Okay? Ty Cobb was a baseball player for the Detroit Tigers. And if you read about this guy, he was not a good guy. I mean, this guy, he fought his roommate because on the baseball team, because his roommate got in the bath first at the hotel, and Ty Cobb came in and said, I get in first. I'm always first. So sitting down with him and kind of picking his brain on how he got to where he was, he was not a good

Tracy Hayes  46:15  
Well, I appreciate you coming by. And one of my gifts here is my Ryan Sirhan books. This is his second book. Big Money energy selling like Sir Hayes, really good. This is my last one. I've ordered more. I'm waiting for them to come in, but it's a obviously you know Ryan from Million Dollar Listing New York. And hopefully you can you'll read this and enjoy it now. You put it on your shelf for your other agents. So I appreciate you coming by today. Thank you so much.