Category: Blog Posts

Dr. Raj Bhatla is Psychiatrist-in-Chief at The Royal Mental Health Centre in Ottawa, one of Canada’s foremost mental health care, teaching, and research hospitals.

Ron Antalek is a REALTOR® in Maple Ridge, British Columbia with more than 30 years’ experience, a mental health advocate, and the recipient of the Canadian REALTORS Care® Award 2020.

On Episode 26, Dr. Bhatla and Ron join REAL TIME in support of Mental Health Week 2022.

Aligning with this year’s theme of empathy, they explore various topics surrounding mental health including destigmatization, mental health in the workplace, the vulnerability of REALTORS®, and how to support one another through compassion and understanding.

Erin Davis: Welcome to REAL TIME, the podcast for and about REALTORS® presented by the Canadian Real Estate Association. I’m Erin Davis and I’m delighted to be your host for these informative, enlightening and often groundbreaking discussions about everything going on in your world now, how far we’ve come, and equally importantly, what’s around the corner. Let’s dig in. REALTOR.ca is Canada’s most popular and trusted real estate platform developed and operated by CREA.

REALTOR.ca helps REALTORS® and their listings achieve greater exposure while providing an easier, more accessible experience for property buyers, sellers, and renters. It’s more than that. On this episode of REAL TIME, we’re going to explore the evolution of listing sites and how REALTOR.ca has staked its claim as a leading platform beyond listings. We’ll look at the future of Canada’s real estate landscape, new innovations on the horizon, and how REALTOR.ca will continue to add value to best serve REALTORS® and their clients. We are so pleased today to have with us two people who know REALTOR.ca inside out. Let’s welcome them here on REAL TIME.

Patrick Pichette: Hi, Erin. Patrick Pichette, Vice President, REALTOR.ca. I’m the Vice President at CREA who is responsible for our technology offering which obviously includes our flagship product REALTOR.ca. This month is my 10th year anniversary with this wonderful organization.

Erin: Wow. The changes you’ve seen, and we’ll be talking about those for sure. Andrew, sir, hi.

Andrew Jackson: Hey, nice to meet you. Thanks for having us, Erin. I’m Andrew Jackson, I’m the Head of Business Development at CREA. I myself joined about three years ago, and I primarily focus on developing partnerships and commercialization strategies.

Erin: Now, before we get too far into our conversation today, can we clarify the difference between an MLS system and REALTOR.ca? Patrick, you can lead us off into this.

Patrick: That’s a great place to start, Erin. It’s a question that comes up a lot even within our membership. Let’s take a second talk about what is an MLS system. Without getting too technical, an MLS system is a cooperative selling system that is operated by a local real estate board or association. The Ottawa Real Estate Board operates an MLS system. Victoria, where you live, Erin, they operate an MLS system. Some are local and some are province-wide like in Nova Scotia, for example.

As a member of a board, you get access to an MLS system and you can share your listings with other REALTORS®. The MLS systems also contain all sorts of detailed information and tools that are really geared towards the REALTORS®. REALTOR.ca on the other hand is not an MLS system. This is where people get confused. REALTOR.ca is a national listing portal where consumers can view the listing info that is stored in these various systems across the country. Essentially, every REALTOR® represented listing across Canada, residential, commercial, and even some rentals as long as they are shared within this local cooperative, will appear on REALTOR.ca. It’s REALTOR.ca’s role to engage consumers and be that one-stop research destination if that makes sense.

Erin: Yes, it does. Andrew, that’s really where you come in, this sort of the consumer-facing angle of the whole thing. Is that correct?

Andrew: Yes. Well, I focus primarily on sourcing partnerships that are really going to enhance the experience for consumers on REALTOR.ca but also deepen the value to our members. Any partnership that we entertain, the first and foremost question is really where does this contribute to member value? What is this doing for the member? You can imagine that our phone rings off the hook because of how popular REALTOR.ca is, and oftentimes, people are like, “Yes, man, we’d love to put our thing there up on REALTOR.ca. Yet, often actually, those calls don’t really have a clear value proposition to our members, so they don’t really go anywhere. A lot of them have, so we’ve been able to bring a number of exciting partnerships and consumer experiences to bear.

Erin: Can you give us an example?

Andrew: Yes. Patrick, I’m just thinking of all the things that we’ve been adding even over the course of the pandemic, to the viewing experience. I know you want to touch on a couple of those.

Patrick: Yes, I think just really quickly one that comes to mind is the partnership with TD Bank. We know that consumers will visit various sources of data before making any decision. Actually, there’s some research that indicates that the average consumer will look at 11 different sources before making a decision. We know that, yes, they’re coming to REALTOR.ca. They’re probably looking at other real estate sites. They’re going to their bank website to see how much they can afford. They’re going to social media. They’re going to look up editorial content on sites like The Globe and Mail and so on.

The beauty about a partnership like TD Bank, in this case, when a consumer visits the site to go find out how much they can afford, and they do that by using their mortgage affordability calculator. Once they get that ideal range of a mortgage, TD will then show them listings from REALTOR.ca that fall within that range. The idea is that whether a consumer is on TD or Scotiabank, which is another partner, or Kijiji or The Globe and Mail, or they’re on Microsoft Bing or on social media, that the information that they’re seeing is consistent and that it’s up-to-date. That’s why we value these partnerships very much. It helps give credibility to that REALTOR®, -generated information.

Erin: When we come back, how REALTOR.ca came to be? I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying that charity begins at home, and no one knows or exemplifies this better than the people we trust to sell and find our homes. You, the REALTOR®, by volunteering and raising funds across the country, REALTORS® play meaningful roles in the communities where you work and live. Let us know how you’re giving back by sharing your story at REALTORSCare.ca, won’t you?

Now, back to Patrick and Andrew on REAL TIME. Gentlemen, how did most consumers navigate listings prior to the advent of REALTOR.ca? Patrick, let’s go back in the Wayback Machine and when did this start? Was it like renderings of condos on cave walls?

Patrick: Almost.

Erin: What are we looking at?

Patrick: Almost. I love the fact that you’re going there because I love telling the story. Before REALTOR.ca was launched in 1995, there was no single source website in Canada for real estate information. You had to scroll through individual brokerage websites to see what was available and keep in mind that we’re talking about the early ’90s. There was very few brokerages that had websites. Really, the other option was to go directly to a brokerage office or even to the mall to see those one-pagers that are pinned up against the wall. I think we still see those one-pagers today, but back then, that was your best option. That and driving around, and looking for lawn signs.

Going back to 1995, the leadership back then made the really wise decision to launch a national website where consumers could see what was available in the market. Regardless of which broker represented the listing or which franchisor was doing their promotion, consumers now had a single source to access that information. However, the site was very primitive back in 1995. Most listings did not even include a single photo. Most listings did not even include an address. Address was not a mandatory piece of information for REALTOR.ca. You would literally have some listings that would have no photo, no address. It would be a message like, “I have a listing, a detached home, 1500 square feet, three bedrooms, call me for more information.” That was the model back then.

Erin: If I understand this correctly, it’s become the obverse if you will because, in 1995, REALTORS® were driving consumers to listings, but now, as we see some 27 years later, it’s listings driving to REALTORS®. Is that about right, Andrew?

Andrew: Absolutely. REALTOR.ca is honestly one of the greatest pieces of member value that CREA delivers to the REALTORS® of Canada. How that translates is in enormous amounts of leads generated as consumers continue to come to REALTOR.ca. The listing agent has always clearly displayed alongside a listing. Our mission there is to generate leads for our members. It really has created this great virtuous circle scenario.

Erin: What differentiates the platform from other real estate sites, Andrew?

Andrew: The way that I frame that question is actually to reflect what I’m hearing from the partners that approach us because of course, in my role, partners are contacting us and they’re considering their options. I often hear from them as to this is why we picked REALTOR.ca. It really comes down to three things that I hear pretty consistently. First of all, that it’s the most comprehensive. It has listings from every real estate board across Canada.

Secondly, it’s the most popular site. It is the most visited real estate website in Canada, and I’m sure that Patrick has some Comscore data that will support that but that trend has actually just been continuing to grow. Third, I think this is really important. Perhaps, most important is that it’s most trusted website by both consumers and REALTORS®. I think a big part of that is because of our ownership as a member-based organization in CREA. Even if you think about the name, it’s REALTOR.ca. A REALTOR® is at the core of this. It means that the data that is coming from our members, it’s trusted data. The business model of the website and the intentions are all trusted.

Erin: I’m a bit of a numbers geek. Patrick, do you have at your fingertips some of the numbers for the people who went to REALTOR.ca in 2021 by any chance?

Patrick: Yes, absolutely. Andrew mentioned the Comscore numbers. Comscore is an independent company that monitors web traffic in pretty much every industry including ours. REALTOR.ca, in 2021, had 45% market share, meaning 45% of all traffic to Canadian real estate websites and apps went to REALTOR.ca. Another great example is CIRA which is the Canadian agency that manages the .ca top-level domain. They recently came out with their quarterly report and indicated that REALTOR.ca is the sixth most visited “.ca”. Not just real estate, but all domains. It’s ahead of sites like cbc.ca and walmart.ca.

Just to build on what Andrew was saying, this is great news for our members because they own a powerhouse brand that is trusted by Canadians. The fact that the site is called REALTOR.ca and that Canadians are spending so much time on this site, that’s helped keep our members top of mind with the consumers. The second benefit of REALTOR.ca and why it’s driving so much value is definitely the leads. In 2021, we sent about 6 million email and phone leads to our members. The great thing is that these leads go to them at no additional cost. Everything is included in their member deal. This is something that is unique anywhere in the world, the fact that members own the leading portal and that they don’t have to pay to get those leads and business opportunities.

Erin: We’re going to talk in a moment. We’ll compare Canada and REALTOR.ca to other, let’s say, neighbours, but what are the alternatives that are out there? If people weren’t going to REALTOR.ca, what other options are there? Andrew?

Andrew: Consumers often will go to a number of different websites on their home buying journey. I think, Patrick, it’s on average 11 or something like that?

Patrick: Yes, 11.

Andrew: We know that consumers are going to get exposure to all sorts of different websites, and that’s actually part of our strategy as well. We actually have a, you can think of it as a syndication service where a member who’s choosing to share their listing on REALTOR.ca can also make the choice to have us distribute that to a number of partner websites that we do business with. In fact, if you were to look at the top 10, let’s say, real estate websites in Canada, I believe the number is something like 8 of those are in fact powered by REALTOR.ca. They also, by the way, display a badge probably to do that because what it does for the consumer is they can see that badge and they can know that they’re dealing with the real legit listing information right from REALTORS®.

Erin: CREA is taking advantage of the, as you have put it, the purity of its model and intent for its members as well. Yes?

Andrew: Yes. I think when a member organization can really tap into who it is and who it isn’t and that’s what we’ve really done with REALTOR.ca. They can really differentiate on a vector that others can’t touch, which is that it is that purity of the model. They’re strictly for the creation of member value. I’ve actually worked at other not-for-profits that have had businesses that had the same structure at play. What it really allows for those businesses to do is really punch way above its weight class, if you will, and compete with much larger and often more capitalized entities.

Erin: When we return with Patrick Pichette and Andrew Jackson, we’re going to talk about how REALTOR.ca stacks up against the global landscape. It’s really encouraging.

There’s something about sharing a cup of warmth and comfort with each other that’s really connecting. At CREA Café, you are connected with each other, as well as the latest news and stats, legal matters, and advocacy updates. It’s all right here at creacafe.ca. Grab a mug of what moves you and join in.

Now, back to REAL TIME with Andrew and Patrick comparing real estate portals, and how Canada shines. Looking to other parts of the world, how does Canada stack up in terms of these types of sites or services for consumers? How does REALTOR.ca, for example, compare to other real estate portals across the globe? Patrick?

Patrick: We actually stack up very, very well when you look at the landscape globally. I’ll use the US as an example where the picture is actually somewhat different. In Canada, the large majority of licensees are REALTORS®, meaning that they have a license but they’re also members of a local real estate board, a provincial association, and CREA. In Canada, REALTOR.ca, with the MLS systems and their rules for cooperation are supporting most transactions. In the US, the industry is much more fragmented so only about 50% of licensees are REALTORS®, meaning that they’re members of a local association and are using the local MLS system. On top of that, there’s about 600 different associations and MLS organizations in the States, and they also have a wide range of different portals.

There isn’t really an equivalent to REALTOR.ca. It’s nearly impossible to get a full national view of the marketplace in the US. One of these portals is REALTOR.com. Unlike here, REALTOR.com is not owned by the National Association. It’s actually owned by News Corp which is a big media company. It owns the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Obviously, it operates under a different model than REALTOR.ca. At the end of the day, what a CREA member gets for their $310 a year in member dues, a US REALTOR® will be paying thousands of dollars to REALTOR.com and other portals.

Erin: Those are US dollars of course. That is a huge difference. We are almost one-stop shopping, not to simplify it too much, and they’re having to jump through all kinds of hoops and barriers and come up against walls and confusion. It paints a much better picture for where we are or am I being biased?

Andrew: I don’t think you’re being biased. I think that’s exactly the case. I think that, in fact, again, when various partners approached us and they once are educated on the Canadian landscape, they’re like, “Man, wow, you guys have got a great here.”

Erin: What does competition in the Canadian market mean for you, Andrew?

Andrew: More pressure for one but listen, competition is an indicator of a vibrant and healthy market, and it is always welcomed. Honestly, it’s vital to everyone bringing their best game. That’s the way that we view it. For us, it means we’re paying real to close attention to important innovations, particularly those that I would say tap into recent consumer phenomenon or trends. I got to tell you, these past 2+ years has just been unprecedented in terms of changing consumer expectations, not only because of how much we’ve been doing remotely in the pandemic but also demographic shifts and the different expectations that come along with that.

Listen, buying and selling a home in today’s markets is different than it was several years ago. All of that we can see has led to continued innovation, and we think that competition is bringing out the best in everybody.

Erin: We have heard from some of our guests already in 2022 about just how the pandemic just catapulted us into a future that we weren’t expecting to be in for another, well, I don’t know, 5 or 10 years. It’s really been a strong and positive catalyst.

Andrew: Absolutely. It’s almost science fiction, how you could fast forward so quickly. Now, these new ways have just become the new norm. It is unreal.

Erin Davis: Yes, warp speed. Let’s look to the future then, both short and long term if we can. What’s next for real estate transactions in Canada? What tools, technologies, and innovations can we expect to engage with in the future to enhance the buying, selling, and listing experience? We’ll start with you, Patrick, please.

Patrick Pichette: Andrew just touched on this. A second ago, the COVID pandemic accelerated the adoption of several technologies that were still somewhat fringe before the pandemic. An example would be digital signatures, for example. Instead of meeting the client in person, doing that remotely. We’re seeing a strong uptake there about 15% every year. Another great example is using live-streaming platforms, so Facebook live, Instagram, and so on, to do showings, to do open houses. When the pandemic started, nobody was doing this. We had zero live-streaming open houses that were being promoted on REALTOR.ca.

In a matter of weeks, into the pandemic, there were literally thousands of virtual live streaming open houses that were being promoted. That’s an example of a technology that we saw maybe was going to be four, five years out, that really picked up some steam. We saw a bigger uptake in video and 3D tours. Before the pandemic, only about 15% of listings on REALTOR.ca included a video or 3D tour or an interactive floor plan that quickly doubled to 30%.

In terms of the short term, we’re paying attention big time to virtual reality. This is something that hopefully all members are paying attention to. Yes, it’s still early on in this technology. We’ve all seen the wearables. The headset is still clunky looking, but the hardware is going to become friendlier. 5G broadband is going to help as well. I really think virtual reality is primed to impact our industry.

In terms of the short term, the train has left the station when it comes to consumers expecting digital interactions. REALTORS® need to get comfortable with integrating these kinds of technologies into their day-to-day practices.

Now, when it comes to long-term, Erin, it depends how far into the future you want to go. I think, one day, somebody will own real estate in outer space. Maybe that’s probably too far out for this conversation. I would say pay attention to the early signals. You’re hearing a new set of buzzwords, cryptos, NFTs.

Andrew Jackson: Metaverse.

Patrick Pichette: Yes, metaverse. Good one. I know it all sounds goofy right now but it’s like being back in 1995. The internet was new. It was clunky. We were told that it was just a fad. We were told it was for scammers, so we need to stay off the internet. Then, we had the dot-com bubble that burst in 2000. Most of the dot-com projects disappeared but the underlining technology of the internet gave rise to the digital age that we’re living in today. Listen, we’re in 2022 now.

Just last month, a house in the US sold as an NFT for the first time. People are buying real estate in the metaverse. Millennials are buying crypto. I saw a survey by CNBC this week, and I know we’re just talking about millionaires, but 83% of millionaire millennials have invested in crypto. It’s early. These are just signals. I’m not saying that you need to run out and start engaging in all this. Take the time to understand the technology behind it. Just google your questions. Invest the time now to learn about this stuff. Become literate because it could pay off in five years from now.

Erin Davis: Yes, and Andrew, you found that crypto is even hitting close to home?

Andrew Jackson: I was going to say or have kids that can stay literate for you because my 15-year-old comes home and talks about the crypto club at his high school.

Erin Davis: Oh. He’s not talking about a chess club or [crosstalk] anymore. It’s a crypto club. That’s fascinating.

Patrick Pichette: Andrew, what’s happening is we’re becoming our parents. Remember, our parents, how scared they were to put their credit card number into a website or do online banking and they rolled their eyes. Our generations doing the same thing now with crypto and NFTs, and so on.

Erin Davis: I think we’re all looking for signs that it’s safe. When REALTOR.ca says it’s safe, then I’ll believe you.

Patrick Pichette: We’re not quite there yet.

Erin Davis: I’ll keep an eye on it. How do we see REALTOR.ca evolving to add even more value to consumers? There has been a reference of REALTOR.ca shifting its focus from search to research. Now, explain to me, and I know this is going to be easier than nonfungible tokens or crypto. Thank you. What does that mean?

Patrick Pichette: Yes, it is easier to explain. It’s something that we’ve been using internally as well with the team is the shift from search to research. Again, if we go back to 1995, REALTOR.ca listings for the most part had no pictures, had no address. Twenty-five years later, it’s evolved into this national portal. The evolution will continue, and the next big step for us is to transition REALTOR.ca from a search to a research tool. What does that mean exactly? I can give you an example.

Currently, everything that’s available for sale on REALTOR.ca, so everything that’s represented by a REALTOR®, obviously. It’s on REALTOR.ca when it’s for sale, but the moment that the listing comes off the market, there is no information left on the site.

Erin Davis: Right.

Patrick Pichette: One day, you’re looking at 123 Main Street in Victoria, and the next day, the listing is gone, and you don’t know why. That is a major pain point for consumers. It forces them to go elsewhere to get that information, because ultimately, the consumer will always find what they’re looking for, and they’re quite comfortable in doing their own research. Consumers want the history. They want to know how much a house sold for. They want the comparables.

They want to know things like, “This house I’ve been looking at, is it still available? Or is it actually conditionally sold?” They expect to get all this information on REALTOR.ca. Again, they’re quite comfortable in doing their own research.

This shift, believe it or not, is also going to help our members because their value is not in answering basic questions about a property. Their value is to be a trusted adviser, help their clients understand what all that information means, help them navigate the process of buying or selling, and help them make the right decision.

Erin Davis: We’ll be back with Patrick Pichette, VP of REALTOR.ca, and Andrew Jackson, CREA’s Head of Business Development in a moment, looking into the future and what might not be happening.

The REAL TIME podcast is brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We cover a wide array of fascinating topics. For a list of guests and what we’ve already talked about, go to CREA.ca/podcast or subscribe on your favourite platform.

Now, back to our guests and the future as we see where we’re going, but perhaps most crucially, what we’re holding on to. I need you guys to do a little bit of crystal ball gazing, if you will, what are the real estate predictions that everybody is betting on that you think won’t happen? Andrew, I’m going to ask you to go first on this one.

Andrew Jackson: I don’t know what everyone is betting on but you do quite often hear people question or even sometimes, REALTORS® themselves reflect on concerns about what is– They’re maintaining their value proposition in amongst this world of all this innovation. I think that people completely sometimes underestimate the importance and the value of their advice. People are going to and they do continue to seek advice from those experienced individuals on what is one of the most substantial and increasingly complex transactions in their lives. Our research continues to show that in spades, so I really think that the REALTOR® and the core value proposition of knowledge and advice, whether you’re on the buying side or whether you’re on the selling side, is very much there.

We’re all about innovation as you’ve been hearing and listening to some of the things that we’ve made progress on over the 10 years that Patrick has been here and beyond. In the next 10 years, we’re going to continue to innovate. It’s in our mission, but we’re never going to lose sight of that core value proposition that is working with an experienced REALTOR®.

Erin: Amen. Patrick?

Patrick: I totally agree. I think there’s a lot of people who are counting on the displacement of REALTORS®, a lot of companies too. Andrew gets these calls on a daily basis, but I’m betting that is not going to happen. REALTORS® will continue to be an essential part of the transaction. Now, technology will take over the admin side of the business, so how research is done, sharing information with clients, marketing, back and forth on paperwork, and so on.

REALTORS® have to be ready to integrate technology into the process-oriented part of their businesses. There’s always going to be a human side to the transaction, and buying and selling a home is a very emotional journey. There’s always going to be a role for REALTORS® to be that trusted advisor.

Erin: In this age where we’re so used to diagnosing ourselves on Dr. Google and all of those things, a lot of us are used to doing a lot of the legwork on our own, aren’t they, Andrew?

Andrew: Absolutely. I think that that is demographics support that even more so. Every generation younger than me, basically, they’re used to picking up their phone and solving their own problems, or at least running with the ball far enough along until they reach those junctures where they really want the value add of someone who’s been there done that. That’s where they look for that experience.

Erin: It is an emotional journey too and not one that you should take on your own.

Andrew: Listen, who has bought or sold a house in the last couple of years? It’s complicated. You need a strategy. You need a winning strategy. I think that that’s where a lot of this value is in helping determine what’s going to be the right strategy for you, what’s worked in this circumstance, and what could be effective? Absolutely.

Erin: Let me ask you, Patrick. If you had one thing that you wished REALTORS® knew or would take away from REALTOR.ca or use on REALTOR.ca, what would it be?

Patrick: I would say, Erin, most REALTORS® don’t know this, but going that extra mile in adding something to your listing, like a 3D tour, for example, actually has a significant impact on lead conversion. Earlier, I mentioned that, great, we’re up to 30% of listings now that include a video or an interactive floor plan, a 3D tour. That’s great, but there’s still 70% of listings that don’t. That’s a takeaway I hope that REALTORS® will take with them. What I can share is that listings that have that extra level of interactive content are 50% more likely to convert into a lead. That’s something that we see across a board, whether it’s adding a video or it’s adding just more information about the neighbourhood, or more information about the listing. At the end of the day, a consumer that’s better informed is going to be more engaged and are more likely to convert into a lead.

Erin: That’s huge listings with virtual content, 50% more likely to convert to a lead than one without, that is huge. When you talk about historical info, what does that entail? What it sold four or five years ago, or what are you looking for there, Patrick?

Patrick: Gosh, there’s so many data points that you can provide about a home and if you look at REALTOR.ca, not all listings are created equal. It could be, yes, sure, sold price history. It could be information on the taxes. It could be information about the neighbourhood, the schools nearby, condo fees. If you did a scanner REALTOR.ca, you’ll see that as you’re going through one listing to the next, you’re going to come across a lot of gaps. There’s still some listings that will have one or no picture. That is still happening in 2022.

Erin: That tells me, you do not want to see the inside of that house. Am I wrong?

Patrick: Exactly. Again, the takeaway is that a consumer that’s better informed, that’s better engaged, you’re building the trust with them, they’re more likely to call you to be that trusted advisor. They’re not looking at REALTORS® as gatekeepers to information. I think that’s a myth that we need to break through.

Erin: Andrew, as we look at this from a consumer point of view, we are in the age of TL; DR, too long; didn’t read. Can a REALTOR® provide too many details? Can you give people too much information because I don’t think that’s possible? What do you think?

Andrew: I was going to say we’re also in the world of scrolling with our thumbs pretty quickly. I agree with you. I think that people have become natural editors, and so that they can flip through and digest a whole lot of information really quickly and pull out the pieces that they think are really important.

I think what’s interesting about this journey from search to research is that, and we’ve seen this also accelerated over the past couple of years where people are not just using the site when they’re in the midst of a transaction. They’re also now using this as part of their dreaming process about the future, or part of their curiosity process about what’s going on in their neighbourhood, or you name it.

That’s the shift that we saw is, and that’s what’s driving our consumer growth is that people are turning to this more. Even sometimes, if it’s just for entertainment value because it’s all very interesting and educational stuff.

Erin: That’s why you’re saying that you’re hoping that people keep coming back to REALTOR.ca for the innovations that are currently and going to be happening.

Andrew: I think that we’re taking this direction that Patrick talks about, the shift away from search to research very seriously. There’s just so much that that vector holds, and we can’t wait to bring it all out to you.

Erin: Oh, we can’t wait either. You guys hold a spot.

Erin: Before we say goodbye for now, what single piece of advice would you give our listeners today to help them stay successful as this market continues to evolve, and Patrick will begin with you?

Patrick: I’ll give you one very actionable and easy piece of advice. When it comes to keeping up with the market and with technology, there are no shortcuts. Take the time to do some research. I hope that this podcast today has stimulated some questions, and I’m sure everybody will be leaving with some questions about some things they heard, but take the time. Google your questions. Go to YouTube. Anything that we talked about today, there’s probably a thousand videos on that topic. Just getting a habit of taking that 10, 15 minutes a day, do some research. If you do that, you’ll be in the 1% club when it comes to knowledge around the latest tech trends and how it can help your business.

Erin: Andrew?

Andrew: Here’s what I would say, Erin. I think that when you are really confident in your own core value proposition, when you know that people turn to you in those critical transactions and they need the advice, they want the advice, they want to bounce off ideas, they want to develop a winning strategy, when you know that those things are all there and going to remain true, then you can really lean into change. You can lean into these innovations. You can lean in and you don’t even have to become an expert in it, but you can just be a little bit more relaxed about learning about these things and continue to build your own relevant experiences. That’s the balance that I would advise.

Erin: It should be fun.

Andrew: It should be fun. It is fun.

Erin: As we have had today and proven. Thank you so much for joining us today, and I can’t wait to hear what’s next.

Andrew: Thank you so much for this opportunity.

Patrick: Thank you very much, Erin. Awesome.

Erin: It was. Our thanks again to Patrick Pichette, Vice President, REALTOR.ca, and Andrew Jackson, CREA’s Head of Business Development for their insight and enlightenment.

REAL TIME is a presentation of the Canadian Real Estate Association. On our next episode, we’ll be discussing mental health awareness. You’re not going to want to miss it. REAL TIME is a production of Real Family and Rob Whitehead and Alphabet® Creative. I’m Erin Davis. Thanks so much for joining us. We’ll talk to you here again next time on REAL TIME.

Erin Davis: Welcome to REAL TIME, a podcast for and about REALTORS®, brought to you by The Canadian Real Estate Association. I’m your host, Erin Davis. Today we’re going to be joined by the model guest. I mean that literally and you’ll find out how as we dive into our conversation with Sinead Bovell, a human guide to a digital future.

Over the last two years, we’ve seen technology progress at a rapid pace. Sometimes you may ask yourself, are we pivoting or are we spinning? Our rates of embracing new technology have skyrocketed, and there’s not a chance they’re going to return to pre-pandemic levels. We’re in this for the long haul, but what does that future look like, anyway? What are the risks and benefits of a society that engages, transacts, and communicates primarily through technology?

More to the point, in our industry of real estate, where personal branding, human connections, trust, and networking are fundamental, what does the digitization of our economy mean for a REALTOR®’s business? These are all good questions, and fortunately for us, we have just the guest to answer them today. Sinead Bovell is, to quote her Insta bio, changing the narrative about who should be talking tech.

She’s known as the model who talks tech, founder of WAYE of tech education forum. She’s spoken three times to the UN on tech and the future. Sinead Bovell is our guest today on REAL TIME. Hey, Sinead, thanks so much for joining us today.

Sinead Bovell: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

Erin: Well, you’re a futurist and an entrepreneur, and you’ve spoken at the UN and educated 1000s of people on the future of technology. One of the amazing things about you is just the road that your career has taken because it didn’t start this way, you didn’t start this way. Tell us about your journey from a management consultant to a model futurist, and social entrepreneur. This is fascinating.

Sinead: Thank you. Yes, I would say my career has been unconventional, to say the least, but I’ll add as technology continues to change our world of work, my career might not seem so unconventional by the end of this decade. To answer your question, I did start out in the world of management consulting. This is largely to do with how I define success growing up.

I only really considered jobs that existed. I was leaning heavily into societal versions of success. That led me to focus on the things that I liked, which was analytics, problem-solving, strategic management. All of that took me to a place of management consulting. However, along the way, I never felt fully satisfied and inspired by the problems that I was solving. In doing my MBA and landing the goal that I thought I always wanted, it became ever more apparent, and I couldn’t ignore this calling that I was in the wrong lane.

In some ways, the wrong life, these weren’t the problems I wanted to be solving whatsoever, but I didn’t really see an exit. I was simultaneously most scouted by a modeling agency. This is nothing that I had ever considered before.

Erin: How did that even happen? How did that happen? You hear stories about somebody in a lineup at a concert or just – tell us how that happened, Sinead. I’m curious about it.

Sinead: Yes. Interestingly, I was at a business event and a scout came up and said, “Are you interested in modeling? Do you model?” I was in the middle of a conversation with somebody about something else to do with networking, so I was entirely thrown off. I didn’t really take it seriously, I just kind of, as a Canadian would politely say, “Oh, thanks so much.”

Then she returned about a half an hour later. I took the card. I went into the agency a few days later, and I signed with them. Long story short, I ended up quitting the path I had created for myself and stepping into this new world, that I really didn’t know what I was doing, but what I did know is that I would somehow connect my old world with this new one, that the Fundamentals of Business and Economics, all the things I had learned, still applied here.

What makes me a little bit different in this new world might be the very thing I can use to step towards the life I wanted to live, whatever that would mean going forward. One thing I did realize is that I would show up to these photo shoots, and start talking about things like artificial intelligence, the future of work, all the conversations I was having in my consulting and MBA world, and people were incredibly intrigued and wanted to learn.

That was the first light bulb moment that all of these conversations I almost took for granted and got educated in weren’t conversations that everybody was invited to but conversations that everybody needed to be a part of. That was the initial light bulb moment for me, maybe there’s a gap that I can fill here. Maybe this is where I can be of service.

Erin: How did you get inspired to start WAYE? Tell us about this acronym? What it means and how you got it off the ground, Sinead.

Sinead: Yes, WAYE stands for Weekly Advice for Young Entrepreneurs, and where the inspiration for the name came about was, the more I studied the future of work and was forecasting the changes technology would bring to our workforce, the more I realized, a lot of us are going to become entrepreneurs in some capacity in the future. As we start to lean a little bit more into more flexible working contracts, things like gig work, a lot of us are going to have to be our own boss in some way, marketing our skills more frequently. That’s where the inspiration for WAYE as an acronym came from.

Erin: Just the name of it though, the first word is Weekly, so you are committing yourself right from the jump. How did that work out? Was there ever a point where you went, “Okay, this is a lot?” Or did you just know that you had that much content, and enough people interested to contribute and be part of all of this, that you knew your vision right from the jump?

Sinead: I would say I knew my vision. I would encourage every entrepreneur to know what their aspirations are, but there was nothing I could say concretely. Again, with entrepreneurship, everything was up in the air, and not only did I not know if this vision would work, but also if people would care. Is this content that people actually want to consume?

In terms of weekly, our news cycle is, fortunately, or unfortunately, now down to minute to minute. I knew that I would continue to advance the conversation in the best way that I could, but in terms of there were no assurances that any of this would work. Of course, there was the unconventional background also fueling some of my concerns. Would people take me seriously? Is this somebody that they’d want to listen to? I prevailed and persevered through it, and here we are.

Erin: Yes, here we are, indeed. You once said that you noticed the gap in the speed at which technology advances and people’s ability to use it. How big is this gap and who do you think is most affected by it, Sinead?

Sinead: I would say there are multiple gaps happening simultaneously. That depends on the geography you’re looking at, the age group, the skills, economic access, all of these different factors are lenses through the various tech education gaps and tech access gaps that we see.

On the one hand, when you look more geographically, there are a significant portion of the world that can’t even access the Internet, whether that’s the infrastructure itself, whether that’s cultural norms or things like the internet not being gender-neutral in certain locations. There’s that gap that actually is global, even if you’re in a country that leans heavily into technology, you’re still going to find that divide, depending on location, economics, et cetera.

Then there’s the policy base gap. We see technology changing at a pace that our infrastructures aren’t designed to keep up with. Technology is leapfrogging ahead of all of our systems.

That’s quite a gap. Then even if you consider yourself somebody that is tech-savvy, you can pop around on social media, get your news online, there’s an additional gap of how the world of work and life is changing as a result of technology. How we live and exist today is going to look fundamentally different in 5 and 10 and 15 years. There’s all of these different layers and tears of gaps that I’m trying to tackle the close, but I think each of them, all of them are of critical importance.

Erin: Yes. The goalpost just keeps moving and moving and you stop to take a breath and you go, “Okay, it’s moved again.” You’ve suggested, if you want to see what the future holds, all you have to do is Google how tech is disrupting my career. I did that just before we sat down in real estate, and boom, right there, there’s a Forbes article, right online with 15 ways that technology is disrupting real estate. Really, the tools are at our fingertips if we just know where to look or even know to ask the question.

Sinead: Yes, I would say, leaning into technology is the best thing that we can do about our future. Leaning into how the world is changing, doing as much as we can to take initiative, like things like Googling how my career is changing, or how this role is being impacted by advanced technologies.

Erin: Coming up, Sinead looks at how we’ve been forced to fast forward into the future over the past two years, and just how that going.

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Now back to Sinead Bovell as we discuss the future and the reality we’ve been living in for the past two years – the pandemic. Let’s talk about that because there has been so much said and written about it, but really there is no limit to it because your opinion on how the pandemic impacted our with technology now that we’ve been trusted further and faster into a more digital-first economy.

Sinead: Yes, so the pandemic it’s a really interesting case study when it comes to technology and on the one hand, it has been absolutely devastating the amount of lives that have been lost that are still battling this horrific pandemic and virus but I’d say when we look at how it impacted our societal infrastructures and our world of work and life, we have accelerated into the future by at least a decade.

The changes we’re seeing today weren’t on the forecast charts until your 2027, 2030. Interestingly, we often fear that technology is outpacing us and our ability to keep up, which is true in some respects. But at the same time, a lot of us adapted quite quickly. We fumbled around on Zoom. I think you’re on mute is literally going to be the phrase of this time.

Erin: Or you should be on mute. That’s the other phrase, right?

Sinead: Either of those. You’re on mute, you should be on mute or where are you tuning in from, all of these different phrases that we’ve all used at some point, but we got the hold of these technologies a lot faster than I think we would have on ourselves had we not gone through these past couple of years. It has certainly fundamentally accelerated us into the future in many ways.

In some ways, it’s been good. I’d say things like healthcare and industry with so much red tape technology offers a lot of efficiencies, a lot of ways to leapfrog over these legacy systems that were blocking access and now we realize if you can just call in, FaceTime in, remotely meet your physician instead of hustling into a city or having to take a day off work that is a win for everyone.

Of course, it’s not always going to be the right answer, of course, technology you can’t solve all the problems. There are times when you need to go into a hospital or visit your doctor but there’s also a lot of times when you don’t need to do that and so the pandemic forced us in many ways to make these changes and to adapt and in some ways, there have been some silver linings here.

Erin: Yes, and what has felt like spinning is actually pivoting, if you look at it in a positive way too. Yes. Now how do you suspect that digitization is going to impact industries like real estate where personal connections and you mentioned going to a hospital, we can do our medical care so much online, but so a doctor looking at you can often tell you, “Okay, there’s something going on with you. What aren’t you telling me?” Real estate, let’s take it back to real estate where personal connections are so fundamental to business, Sinead.

Sinead: Technology is going to have quite a profound impact, on the real estate industry, and it already has, right. If you were to rewind the clock only a few decades ago, the idea of listings being online was fundamentally unheard of and now that’s the first place we go to check the real estate market if we’re interested in buying or selling or even just browsing. So that’s already been a massive change and social media as well but of course, as we look out into the future technologies like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, you may have heard terms like the metaverse.

These are going to change how we access information, where we access information, and where consumers and prospective buyers and sellers expect the industry to be, and here’s what I mean by that. If, for example, a technology augmented reality or virtual reality becomes more mainstream by the end of this decade, I don’t just want to search and see a house online. I’m going to put on my augmented reality glasses and do a tour as best I can up until the limits of that technology. It doesn’t mean that technology is going to replace the job of the real estate agent. That real estate agent will probably be a part of that walkthrough in the form of a hologram but in a lot of the different areas, our fundamental behavior is going to change.

However, I will let’s say when it comes to something like real estate, an asset and a decision that is usually one of the most important decisions, or at least most important financial decisions in most people’s lives, there are things that you cannot just replace or substitute with technology and this is one of those cases.

An artificial intelligence system may be good at understanding which properties to show you that you might be interested in, but you’re going to want that human real estate agent’s opinion on the areas that AI can’t give you, those subjective human-based experiences that real estate agents have that an AI system doesn’t. Real estate, it’s not a cookie-cutter process.

There is last-minute bidding that happens all of these things that an AI is not cut out to deal with, these ad hoc changes and pivots. That’s where a real estate agent is going to be critical, but you do need to be leaning into how this world is changing. When you hear terms like the metaverse, it means you should stop and think, “How could this change my relationship with technology, with how I sell?”

Erin: Sinead, when you mention the metaverse, I have to confess, I approach it with a degree of cynicism because to me, it’s Mark Zuckerberg changing the conversation from Facebook and saying, “Hey, look over here.” You are addressing it with respect and vision so tell us what we need to know what we can even take in and digest and this point about the metaverse would you?

Sinead: Yes, I have some of the cynicism with you. I totally get it. We hear it. We cringe the way it was introduced to a lot of people, but here’s what I’m turning into a little bit more. Not so much as the cartoons and running around in this virtual world that is a part of it, but that’s not what I think would be important for an industry like real estate. I’m turning into a world, in which the digital is equally, if not more important and so what could that mean in real estate?

It could mean that you have a digital twin of your real house as an asset so when somebody goes to buy a house, they buy their physical house, but they also buy a digital twin that is powered by artificial intelligence, that you can do everything from seeing how furniture rearranged would look before you actually buy the furniture. To get flags and notifications when something’s about to break down ahead, actually breaking down and the same way digital twins are used in engineering right now.

A manufacturing plant would say this dishwasher is going to break down in the real world. We’ve been modeling it on our simulations. We would have that of our houses as well. Those are the types of things that I’m paying attention to. Outside of the real estate, we’ll probably have one of our physical bodies for healthcare and things like that but those are the areas that I’m turning into. I would also as, a real estate agent and technology like augmented reality so if I can show up and give somebody a tour via a hologram that’s a real plausible scenario, for the future.

Again, if you were to align the clock 25 years and tell someone they’re going to really engage in this thing called the internet, and they’re going to put their house in this cyber community, and people are going to bid on it and make appointments on it, we would think that was crazy. Now here we are. So, the metaverse, I think that there are elements that we can ignore, but there are elements that are very legitimate. They’ll of course depend on how the technology changes over time but that’s how I would think about it as a real estate agent.

Erin: If I was to buy a digital twin of my house, what might I expect to pay?

Sinead: Yes, I would say there are many ways that you could look at this question. You could buy actual real estate just in the metaverse and not have a physical house with it but it really depends on how things evolve so maybe this is something that is included in the house deed so it’s not necessarily something that really increases the economic value of the house. It’s something that becomes expected over time and we might look back and think it was ludicrous that we didn’t have this security system where we’re monitoring our house in real-time and where we’re getting these updates, where we’re able to make changes digitally before we invest in them. Physically I think in time, that’s probably the level that well, we’ll get to but there are all different ways that it can evolve and, of course, nobody can predict the future. If anybody tells you, they can, I would be very skeptical.

Erin: When we return. How much do we spend betting on the future? Sinead looks at the risks and the questions we should ask.

Enjoying REAL TIME? Thank you, and be sure to visit crea.ca to access valuable resources and discover more fantastic and useful real estate content.

Now back to Sinead Bovell, founder of tech education forum WAYE Talks. From a business standpoint then, what are the risks and opportunities of investing in new technologies?

Sinead: It depends on what you mean by invest. If I’m putting a bunch of money into developing a technology that I hope my line of work will lean into, of course, that’s always going to be a risk. We forecasted the Internet to go one way and it’s gone an entirely different way and people have lost money in that. The dot-com bubble and even technology like virtual reality. If you think that that’s going to be the future and that isn’t the technology that underscores the future, then you’ve probably lost out.

I think that there will be economic risks as we step into this changing world of technology. I think where you can’t really go wrong is what are the general-purpose technologies that are becoming foundational?

The Internet was one and artificial intelligence is another. These are areas where it becomes a little bit less risky but we still have to do our research and lean into them. I think, of course, any investment is always going to be a risk. It’s do your due diligence and ask yourself where is my market? Where will my market expect to find me? Where will my customers seek out information? What will that behavior look like over time? I think that’s in many ways is worth the risk of meeting your customers where they are or where they expect to find you.

Erin: Something that we often hear and feel is a lot of the fear and questions around AI. You’ve talked a lot about AI and the future of technology as it relates to business. How do you think, Sinead, that this growing shift to word automation will impact the workforce? Who’s going to be most affected either positively or negatively?

Sinead: I will say I have yet to come across a job or an industry that won’t be impacted by technology. The same way it’s hard to find a job that hasn’t in some way been impacted by the Internet.

In terms of who will be quite drastically impacted and then what we can say with more certainty, artificial intelligence as it stands today can do one task really, really well and a task that is repetitive and predictable. That would lean more into roles that are more administrative in nature or food preparation, scheduling, and task management. All of those types of roles unfortunately do fall under some of the main advantages of artificial intelligence.

Those types of roles were seen more so in the line of automation versus augmentation. However, 90% of the workforce will have some of their tasks drastically impacted by artificial intelligence. That doesn’t mean that your whole job’s going away but it does mean that tasks in your job will eventually be passed to an AI, some of those tasks. The tasks that can’t are the tasks that are fundamentally human in nature that we need that human interaction, that human viewpoint or opinion or perspective and it’s not something that we can automate.

Erin: The human interpretation, the experience, the wisdom, that sixth sense too because you’ve been there before.

Next up going where we haven’t been before. The upside of tech in our everyday lives, REALTOR.ca is the most popular and trusted real estate website in Canada. Don’t miss our next episode of REAL TIME when two CREA members discuss how REALTOR.ca is evolving into so much more than a listing site. Just make sure you subscribe to REAL TIME when Episode 25 drops, you’ll be there to catch it right away.

From shopping to working to dating and real estate our love affair with technology, it grows stronger by the day. I don’t have to tell you that. You don’t even have to be a futurist just realistic.

Sinead, what are some of the benefits of a society that is increasingly engaging, transacting, and communicating through technology? What are you seeing as the benefits of this?

Sinead: Our personal view of the world has expanded in many ways and in ways that we couldn’t have imagined or predicted. It has really minimized the idea of borders in some respects. We’ve shifted into a lot more efficiency in our day-to-day transactions.

The things that I like to point out, one being in the pandemic, for example, we all had to switch to a laptop or screen-based workforce and you’re only really seeing your colleagues in these little squares. At the same time, it was probably the first time many of us saw into the homes of our colleagues. We saw cats running across computer screens and children interrupting meetings. Those were often met with nothing but compassion and empathy and understanding. It became a lot easier to say, “I can’t schedule a meeting at this time. I have to do a pickup or whatever it is the case.”

We became a much more empathetic workforce in a much more compassionate and understanding workforce. In the same ways that we feel technology takes something innately human from us, in other ways it does the exact opposite. It really does open our doors in our windows to one another in ways that previously weren’t possible without technology.

Erin: That is a great point because previously if somebody said, “I’m sorry. I’ve got to pick up my daughter at daycare or whatever.” There might have been, admittedly or not a bit of an eye-roll, from somebody on the team. Now you can picture that little girl or you can see that employee as a parent who has responsibilities and you go, “Yes, okay. We’ll schedule this for later.” Whether we knew those barriers or whatever those preconceived notions were, they seem to have as you say fallen by the wayside as we open up to compassion. That really is a positive thing to focus on.

Sinead: I think so. I think the conversations around remote work and flexible work, these are incredibly important conversations for a variety of reasons but not least of which being inclusivity. Who are we excluding from the workforce simply because we incorrectly assumed they had to be there. We were probably excluding new parents, people with different physical needs, and accessibility needs, all of these sorts of communities. Even when it comes to building a more diverse workforce, a workforce that’s more reflective of society more broadly, that might not be available in your specific town. Now in a world of remote work, there are no more excuses.

We can truly hire and source from everywhere and we should be leaning into that. I think that it’s brought a lot of important conversations and not just because in some ways or sometimes it’s more comfortable to work from home. From a more inclusivity standpoint in a more progressive society, we don’t really have the excuse to exclude people anymore. We have fundamentally proven that that is a myth and it doesn’t exist. Everybody can join the workforce if we’re willing to accommodate.

Erin: Of course with every gift, there seems to be a risk, especially where we’re talking about technology. What are some of the risks? There’s a great vulnerability that is out there from a technological standpoint, is there not?

Sinead: Absolutely. With every technology there are risks. Especially in technologies like artificial intelligence, the way our data is being captured, the more things we do online, the more exposed we are and the more vulnerable we are. We’ve seen right now we exist in a world where our data is used in ways we don’t understand, in ways we don’t truly consent to, our personal information and our personal lifestyles are mined, refined, and sold. That has quite drastic impacts on society from multiple lens points or vantage points. Whether it’s national security, whether it’s just privacy, and the right to exist in private, all of that is being challenged by technology and not in a good way.

I would say when it comes to the risk with technology, I think I flag data almost immediately. Of course, things like workforce augmentation and automation, that is a very big risk. Not even just a risk, that’s something that we know is happening that we actively have to deal with. Then there are the things that are unforeseen. The ways technology will change the world that we haven’t really accounted for.

That’s also why everybody in some capacity needs to exercise some elements of being a futurist. Companies especially, governments especially how can we forecast in some ways how the world is going to change so we can minimize the risks as much as possible and we can be prepared as possible for what’s to come.

Erin: Up next, Sinead shares what we could be even should be embrace racing more for our workforce and in our social media lives.

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Now the rest of our chat with Sinead Bovell, our human guide to a digital future on REAL TIME. What digital opportunities are businesses not taking advantage of right now, Sinead? Can you think of any off the top of your head?

Sinead: There are a lot of different digital opportunities. I think businesses are still not fully embracing how digital technologies can shape their workforce for the better. We’re still seeing a bit of reluctance around things like remote work, but also where are your customers on these digital platforms that you are not taking advantage of?

We’re only now in the last five years, seeing companies step into social media and that become a non-negotiable, but the conversation is changing. Whether that’s augmented reality, and keeping up with how that world’s changing or worlds like the metaverse, it’s not as much that you have to suddenly be there, but you have to be leaning into it and preparing your business to make the leap should these technologies scale in the way that they’re forecasted to.

I think what we’ve seen with the pandemic, is technology isn’t going to wait. It was challenging for many, many companies to pivot and to adapt, but they didn’t have a choice. The companies that struggled the most probably would struggle the most over this next decade. They probably wouldn’t have survived or won’t survive the next decade as we see fit, so I would encourage everybody to lean into the world of technology and to take it seriously even if it sounds something out of a world of fantasy because that’s how we would’ve described technology, the technologies we used today, in decades ago.

Erin: Yes, absolutely. To wrap up here today, and we do thank you again so much for your time. If you could Sinead, share one tip to help our REALTOR® listeners thrive in a world transformed by technology, what do you think it would be?

Sinead: My one tip up and it’s actually very, very simple is to every month, every six weeks do a simple Google of how my industry, my role is being impacted by technology. How technology is changing the work that I do. You can get more specific, you can say how artificial intelligence is changing my role, but I would every month, every six weeks stay in the know, do the best you can to lean in and be prepared. Something as simple as a Google search, I think that has some great return on investment.

Erin: Wonderful advice. Again, we do thank you so much for your forward thinking, for your time, and for leaning in with us today, Sinead. Thanks so much.

Sinead: Thanks for having me. It’s been so great being a conversation with you, Erin.

Erin: Follow Sinead Bovell on all social media platforms or Sinead Bovell, that’s S-I-N-E-A-D-B-O-V-E-L-L.com. Her insight on everything happening now and in the future is well worth your time.

REAL TIME is proudly presented to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association. Produced by Alphabet Creative and Real Family Productions. Rob Whitehead is our technical producer. I’m Erin Davis, inviting you to be sure and subscribe, so you don’t miss one of our inspiring, informative guests, wherever you download podcasts.

Next time, two members of CREA talk about the evolution of listing sites in Canada, how REALTOR.ca is evolving into so much more, plus the mechanics of Canadian real estate. Thank you so much for sharing this conversation with us, and we’ll talk to you again soon on REAL TIME.

Erin Davis: Welcome to REAL TIME, the podcast for and about Canadian REALTORS® brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association, one of this country’s largest single industry associations. I’m your host, Erin Davis.

Today it’s my pleasure to share with you an amazing chat with Hamza Khan, about what makes a leader. Hamza, as you’ll soon hear, knows where of he speaks. He’s a bestselling author, a teacher, an avid learner, and of course, a sought-after public speaker. Mr. Khan has two TEDx talks that I know you’re going to want to look for, especially after hearing our discussion. I can’t stop thinking about some of the things we talk about today. Active inertia, you stress, and how your social media are all about, give, give, give, and then ask.

Hamza Khan joins REAL TIME to talk about what it means to be a great leader as the workplace and workforce continue to evolve. What do employees look for in leadership? How can those in charge pivot to thrive in the future of work? What does that even look like? How can employees thrive to be seen as a leader in real estate? We’ve got a lot to cover. Buckle in and get set to take some mental notes from episode 23 of REAL TIME.

Thank you so much for joining us here, Hamza. We are so excited to be listening to you and chatting with you. You’re a celebrated thought leader who has spoken to hundreds of audiences globally about the future of work, and of course, you’ve written books on business resilience, even delivered a TEDx talk about the differences between management and leadership. Whew. All right. How did you get here? Tell us a bit about your journey.

Hamza Khan: Wow, wow, wow. First of all, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I’m really, really excited. A little bit about my journey, I began my career working in the education space, specifically within student affairs, both at the University of Toronto and at Ryerson University. Those experiences then set me down the path of entrepreneurship. I created a boutique digital marketing agency that worked primarily in the education space as well. I got to work with institutions outside of those two that I just named. Then that put the wind in my sales to start my current company, which is a soft skills training company known as SkillsCamp.

Throughout that journey I’ve been very fortunate to do a lot of public speaking, to write two books, and to do considerable research on the future of work where I’m now studying at Ryerson University. I’ve come full circle in a sense. I’m studying the future of work, specifically the relationship between organizational leadership and occupational burnout, really interesting stuff.

Erin: It is, it is, and you’ve never stopped learning, which it’s a great message right off the top too.

Hamza: Yes. Thank you, Erin. I would describe myself as a lifelong learner.

Erin: How about the time you were an intern at Sony? That is a fascinating little beginning as it were, and something that you saw that a lot of people didn’t.

Hamza: Yes, that was a really, really formative experience in my career. One of first jobs that I had while I was at university, studying at the University of Toronto, Scarborough in my fourth year, I got an internship at Sony Music that was supposed to only span three months. Now mind you, this was in 2007 at a very interesting time in our history. This was right before the 2008 financial crisis, and then at the same time, the music industry was going through considerable disruption.

I watched from the inside out as an intern, as a fly on the wall, as somebody who had access to all of the different conversations, as many as I could at the time, just hopping into meeting and talking to this person and that person, I got to watch from the inside as active inertia, the tendency to repeat tried and tested behaviors, even in response to dramatic environmental shifts. I watched how active inertia collapsed Sony Music entertainment.

This is a company that had to engage in layoff after layoff during the time that I was there, and what should have been a three-month internship ended up spanning for more than a year, Erin. Actually, my boss pulled me a set and said, “Hamza, I know you’re only here for three months, but you might want to stick around. This is going to be like a compressed MBA for you.”

It truly was because I got to see again how Sony music, but not just only Sony Music, the entire industry responded to these external forces of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and it was a compressed MBA, an unforgettable rehearsal of the four stages of an organization’s evolution. Every organization is introduced, it grows, it matures, but then it has to decide, is it going to renew or decline? Unfortunately, and I hate to say it, Sony didn’t renew itself in time. They eventually did, but it was quite a turbulent journey. I consider myself very fortunate to have seen that from the inside and then taken those lessons with me throughout my career.

I think often about this quote from Jack Welch, the ex-CEO and chairman of General Electric, which interesting fact about them, they’re the only company from the 1917 Fortune list, which remains on the Fortune list today, the Fortune 500 list specifically. I think it’s because they’ve embodied the ethos that Jack put forward, which is, change before you have to. That’s rooted in another one of his quotes that I think about often. He said that if the rate of change on the outside of the organization exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is nearer.

Erin: As Jack Welch himself would say, prepare for when your leadership is challenged, and that really brings home the message that we’re talking about today. You’ve been quoted as saying that you sink to the level of training, preparation, and character with belief that another crisis will happen and more things will test you throughout your career. Can you explain what that means, sinking to the level of training, Hamza?

Hamza: That’s really interesting. I had a very vivid experience at the start of the pandemic. Like many people, I was afraid, I was spending time with my family, not sure how all of this was going to play out. My father, God bless him, a very hard worker, a very resilient man, but he was terrified at the start of the pandemic. Anxiety got the best of him and one night he suffered a panic attack, and thank God I was at home. I was able to see it and get him the necessary help. In that split second where I saw him fall on the ground and have a panic attack, which then led to a seizure, my mind went to a really dark place. It was an out of body experience. In the flash of a second I rehearsed my entire life experience with my father, every memory, good, bad that I’ve had with him just in the blink of an eye.

When I reflected on that experience afterwards, because suddenly in that moment, I remembered how to deal with somebody who was going through this, I remembered how to administer CPR, all of this training that I picked up throughout my life within the Canadian Armed Forces and courses that I’ve taken with the Red Cross just came back. I booted up a dormant program, if you will.

When I reflected on that experience, Erin, it reminded me of something that I talk about quite often, especially when I’m talking about burnout and stress. There’s something known as the amygdala hijack that happens to people when they’re overwhelmed by sudden and unexpected stress. A part of their brain known as the amygdala, a primitive part, overrides their prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that you and I are using right now. It’s used for high cognitive functions. It’s used for complex planning, creativity, so on and so forth.

When we are stressed in a sudden and unexpected way, like I was, when my father suffered his panics attack, the amygdala took over, it overrode, and in effect hijacked the prefrontal cortex and sent blood away from my brain, away from my prefrontal cortex towards my extremities. It got me prepared for fight, flight, or freeze. I learned in that moment something that I had been theorizing up until that point, which is when faced with a crisis like COVID or anything for that matter, a new competitor entering into the space, a conflict at work, whatever the case may be, a leader doesn’t actually rise to the occasion. That’s an optical illusion caused by other leaders falling back, and you sink to the level of your training and preparation, and your preparedness for that leadership moment depends on what happens in the moment, it depends on the days, weeks and years of planning and preparation that go into that.

Erin: Hamza Khan polishes his crystal ball and focuses on soft skills and what we can expect the next decade to bring. One thing that’s hard to predict is style, but you can stay on top of what’s new and now in everything from housing trends to design tutorials at REALTOR.ca/Living Room. Check it out for inspiring and entertaining articles always at REALTOR.ca. Now, back to Hamza Khan.

Hamza, your keynotes are grounded in preparing organizations to thrive in the future of work. What does that future look like?

Hamza: Excellent question, Erin. I appreciate you giving me the space, the platform to share these insights.

Erin: Are you kidding?

Hamza: Published a book.

Erin: We’re so glad to have you here. Honestly, this is amazing. Sorry, go ahead.

Hamza: Thank you. I’m getting a little emotional thinking about that experience with my father, because that served as the impetus for me to then write my second book, Leadership Reinvented, a book that I immediately started writing after reflecting on that experience, because I thought to myself, Wow, every leader in the world right now, government, nonprofit, or business leader, especially in the real estate world as well. Every leader who is being forced to contend with the increased volatility, complexity, and ambiguity caused by Covid-19, this is a reflection of who they truly are. The actions that they’re taking, the thoughts that they’re having, this is their true leadership disposition because they’ve all sank to the level of their training and preparation.

Anyways, that experience inspired me to write Leadership Reinvented which is about being distinctly human in the future of work, of leaning into the things that can’t be easily distilled down to binary code. The things that can’t be reduced to ones and zeros. I believe that in the future of work, the things that are going to be done by human beings are going to be those that can’t be done by machines.

The future of work, like I said, looks distinctly human. By 2030, Deloitte estimates that 70% of the workforce as we know it, will be disrupted by technology. Advances in automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, you name it. Like I said, what’s left will be the jobs that can only be done by humans and those jobs will require the soft skills, creativity, collaboration, critical thinking. To anyone listening to this, get bullish on the soft skills because by 2030, there’s a good chance that you’re going to be forced to rethink your entire career game plan. I promise you that what’s going to be left are going to be the things that make you, you. The things that make us human.

Erin: The job of leaders is going to be, if I understand your message correctly, taking care of their people, enhancing the human resistance to creating leaders.

Hamza: Amen. Absolutely. Couldn’t have said it better.

Erin: You did say it. I’ve read your stuff. You’ve also said something that stuck with me from the jump, and it should be a meme, it should be a t-shirt. It should be on everybody’s desk, if we have desks. You can’t always make the right decision but.

Hamza: You can make a decision and then make it right. Story of my life.

Erin: That’s beautiful because it encompasses forgiveness, forgiveness of ourselves, for others to look at us and see the humanity but can we delve into that a little bit deeper please, Hamza.

Hamza: Yes, certainly. We can’t always make the right decision but we can make decisions and then make them right. Especially when we’re talking about the future of work and being prepared for those leadership moments, the key is to just keep on moving. Keep moving forward and keep striving to reach that forth point in the evolution of an organization and have the necessary training and preparation, so that when you are faced with the turbulence, the stress of that decision, the decision between renewal and declining that you default, you sink to the level of training and preparation that results in you automatically engaging in the behavior that will lead to the organization renewing itself.

It’s a messy process. We can’t get it right. You can plan as much as you want. You can forecast as much as you want. At the end of the day, it’s still you, it’s still your colleagues. It’s still the organization that has to go through the process and take the actions and you’re going to misstep along the way but that’s part of the process, that’s part of the journey.

Erin: I think the time in this case though, time is seen as a luxury when it comes to making things right that perhaps was not the right decision to begin with. You’ve got to be given that time. It’s a necessity and not a luxury.

Hamza: Well said, and I think it was Boston Consulting Group who said that changes that were planned over the next five years will need to be made in the next two. That’s how much time is being compressed according to them as a result of the pandemic. Every organization, entrepreneur included, sole proprietor, somebody listening to this who might just be an agent of one, running a one-person operation, that includes them too. They’re going to have to change faster than they think. We don’t have as much time as we thought.

Erin: Why is it compressed?

Hamza: I think a whole host of factors. Again, I keep on coming back to that acronym that I learned when I was in the Canadian Armed Forces as a way to describe our external environment. Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous, VUCA. If I had to break them down even further, the more volatile the environment, the faster and further conditions change. The more uncertain environment, the hard it is to forecast, the more complex the environment, the harder it is to analyze and the more ambiguous the environment, the harder things are to decipher.

Another way to think about VUCA, those four forces, is as entropy. It’s essentially a law of the universe that things that are unattended to get worse over time. If anybody listening to this is engaged in avoidance, if they’re ducking and cowering and thinking that the external environment will reset to a more comfortable time, I think they’re in for a rude awakening. Like I said, if left unchecked, disorder and randomness tends to increase over time. Let’s just put it this way, Erin. Chaos is hungry for failing organizations, failing professionals and it thrives when people are unprepared.

Erin: That’s chilling, and undoubtedly dead on. We’ll be back in a moment with leadership speaker, author, educator and so much more, Hamza Khan imagining the world a new and envisioning fresh ways to work.

Celebrate two years of REAL TIME with us by revisiting some of our most popular episodes from these two seasons. We’ve talked about design ideas, social issues that affect us all no matter where we live, living green and plenty of great ideas on how to get your message out. Hamza discusses that a bit later too. Catch them all and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss one episode of REAL TIME.

Other than the entropy that we’ve talked about, what work related trends are we seeing as a result of the pandemic? Let’s get positive here because there have been a lot of good things that have come out of this as we now have two years in the rearview mirror. Let’s look at that and what you think is or are likely to stick.

Hamza: Yes, and I appreciate you shifting us in this direction because I think, especially given the focus of my research, it tends to focus on the consequences of inaction. It tends to focus on the people and the organizations who aren’t moving fast enough, but you’re absolutely right. There’s so much to be gained by this. I often think about a quote from a poet by the name of Arundhati Roy who wrote at the start of the pandemic.

She wrote, historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. I love that quote because it gives everyone, yourself and myself included, the permission to innovate, the permission to see new ways of working. Your question is a really good one. What work related trends are we seeing as a result of the pandemic and what’s likely to stick?

I think the big ones, Erin, are permanent working from home arrangements as well as hybrid work arrangements. Those two things we have demonstrated over the last two and a half years almost, not only can people be productive while working from home and having flexible work arrangements but in most cases, I would say, they can be more productive. That I think is going to stick, it’s going to be left to the leaders to figure out how to do so in a way that also respects the need for collaboration, for the serendipity that comes from being in a physical workspace.

There’s benefits to all three of those styles in-office, hybrid, and working from home. I think in the prevailing paradigm of work, working from home and hybrid work arrangements were the exception to the rule. That’s perhaps the biggest one that I think we’re seeing as a result of the pandemic and what’s likely to stick.

We’re also seeing this final sweep of digitization. Any industry that hasn’t been touched by digital disruption, to be honest, every other industry I can think of has gone through it, beginning with the entertainment industry back in 2007.

I think the final bastion of change is traditional education, a space that I’m intimately familiar with, that I currently work in. To a certain extent I would also say the real estate industry has a couple of elements that require digitization but I think it’s already happened as a result of the pandemic. I’m not too worried about that. We’re also seeing an increase in uptake in gig work and side hustles. More people are getting into the industry. More people are adding on different components to their portfolio of work which is really great.

The one that gets me really happy or the two that get me really happy, Erin, are a reprioritization of well-being at all levels. I get really happy about that. People taking the time, taking the opportunity to step back and reflect on where the imbalance in their life occurs or maybe present and thinking about well-being in a more holistic way. Not just physical well-being but also mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. That’s been really cool to see.

Then, I also think that we’re seeing a great leadership reinvention. Every leader in the world right now, myself included, is taking a hard look at their assumptions about leadership, their leadership style and are thinking about ways to be more human-centric.

What’s likely to stick from everything that I just listed right now will be everything except the great leadership reinvention but not if we can help it and that’s why we got to get this podcast out to as many listeners as possible.

Erin: The great leadership reinvention. What do you mean by that? Can you elaborate a bit on that?

Hamza: Sure, sure, sure. There’s so much over here but I’ll try to keep it succinct because I could go on for like five hours about just this topic alone.

Erin: We could listen, trust me.

Hamza: You think about the old way of leading or like the old playbook. It was rooted in what was known as the Theory X style of management. This was advanced by Douglas McGregor, a professor from MIT. In the Theory X style of management, the leader assumes that the employees are lazy, that they want to avoid work, that they need to be micromanaged. This is how some leaders thought about their employee at the start of the pandemic.

What was true was that younger and younger generations, certainly my generation, Gen Y, and I know this to be true for all of the students that I teach as well in Gen Z, that they require a Theory Y style of management, which isn’t really management at all. It’s actually just being led. It’s assuming that these people are adults. They’re perfectly capable of managing themselves. They have the best of intentions. They’re creative, they’re self-reliant, they’re resourceful, et cetera, et cetera.

In the words of Admiral Grace Murray Hooper, you manage things and you lead people. The great leadership reinvention is going to see people shift away and just abandon the Theory X style altogether, unless you’re dealing with a problematic employee in which case you might have to step in and micromanage a little bit over here but I would contend that it’s also the leader’s responsibility to see to it that those employees are phased out of the organization. I’m a big believer that there’s no such thing as bad employees, there’s only bad leaders. I will be the first to say that as somebody who has been a bad leader in the past and is actively working to be a good one.

The great leadership reinvention is ultimately about four qualities, of leaders becoming more human-centric. That’s prioritizing people over everything. It’s about them being changed friendly, making innovation a priority. It’s about becoming values-driven and Gallup has shown this time and again that what employees want out of the workplace more than money, more than titles is they want purpose, they want meaning, they want engagement. I think that being a values-driven leader is really important and that can go into a whole other area of study which is the Theory Z style of management. I’m not sure we have enough time for that one.

I gave you human-centric, change-friendly, values-driven and the last one is self-disrupting. This goes back to the quote that I shared earlier from Jack Welch which is, change before you have to. All of the organizations and the people listening to this podcast who were shocked by Covid-19, this is a wakeup call for us, that this event can happen. It can stress us out, it can disrupt our business. Let’s use this as the impetus to start disrupting ourselves well in advance of whatever that next disruption may be.

Erin: You’ve also talked about embracing the flexibility. It was birthed through necessity totally like so many great things. Now can you put that genie back in the bottle once people have said what I really hate that commute in the morning or I’m enjoying having this melded life, this balance of home and work? Now, of course, with real estate and REALTORS®, you can’t do everything virtually, but can that flex be flexed even more in the future as we head through that great gateway as you quoted the poet earlier?

Hamza: This is going to be tricky. I think about this all the time as somebody who does a lot of solo work. I’m studying right now attachment theory and it’s talking about how at the end of the day we are social creatures, we need each other’s company, we need to be with people that we like including our coworkers. The research is showing that this is a great way to reduce our stress, to reduce cortisol, and to produce oxytocin, the bonding chemical that has tremendous benefits for us just on a biochemical level alone. Being around other people, engaging with customers, with clients, with colleagues, with managers, it’s really important.

I think that Zoom and Microsoft Teams and other virtual communication technology that we’ve used, Slack, Discord, whatever you may be using over here, was a good holdover. It has shown us that we can maintain relationships. We can continue to do work, if needed, virtually but where possible we should find ways to incentivize employees and teams to come together in-person. I think the onus is on leaders and I would also encourage leaders to include their subordinates in the decision-making process with the question of how can we make our shared workspaces more conducive to productivity and collaboration?

I think you’ll be surprised by the answers that you get. Like where I’m recording this podcast right now, I can look out and I can see an office building right beside my home here and it’s empty. It’s empty at the time of recording and I think that’s largely because if I look inside all of these windows, I see a very boring space. It’s cubicles. In a strange way, Erin, cubicles reinforce isolated work.

Can we reimagine what a shared workspace looks like? Maybe it’s hot desks, maybe it’s an eclectic combination of seating and standing arrangements. Maybe it’s something that’s conducive to bumping into people. It allows for the kinetic energy that comes from when the right people, the right engaged people are in a shared space together. Maybe leaders need to think about intentional ways to bring people back to the office. For theme days.

Maybe they can say, if you’re coming back to the office two to three times a week, and let’s say that that’s your prerogative, on Wednesdays from this time to this time, we put our computers away and we all meet up in the boardroom or we all meet up in this creative space and we do some innovation exercises. We try to imagine what sort of organization would disrupt this one and we try to emulate attributes of that organization. There’s so many possibilities.

We sometimes focus on all of the things that we’ve gained from working from home but I would encourage everyone listening to this podcast to also think of the things that you’ve lost. Trust me, one of the things that we have lost is people and being in an environment where the magic that comes from people seeing each other and not being mediated by the screen is possible.

Erin: When Hamza Khan returns, sharing the lessons he teaches about social media, this is so good.

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We return now to our enlightening and fascinating talk with educator, speaker, author, and leadership expert, Hamza Khan.

Part of what we are embracing now is of course, the myriad ways that we can get our messages out, whether it’s TikTok, Insta, Facebook, all of these different platforms. How important is it for people to be using these keys in order to reach the audience? What do you put out there? You have a pretty good formula as to the give and ask that’s really important for people to hear.

Hamza: One thing I should mention is that I’m also an educator teaching at Ryerson University and prior to that, I was one of the founding members of Seneca College’s social media certificate program, which was the first in the country and I’m really proud of that. I teach social media classes. It’s a really interesting class because it transcends the technology itself and it has less to do with the individual platforms like Instagram and TikTok and more to do with branding, marketing, and communications as disciplines.

I assure all of the students, and I want to give the same assurance to all the listeners today, that being effective online in terms of branding yourself, in terms of using social media to get your business out there comes down to these four words. Do things, tell people. It’s really that simple. Do things, tell people and you’re already doing incredible things. The business that you’re running, the sales that you’re making, the testimonials that you’re acquiring, the connections that you’re fostering, the events that you’re volunteering at, your presence in the community, you’re doing these things but now you have to let people know because this is where our market has gone.

At least for the last 10 years, certainly I would argue even longer than that, there’s been a gradual shift to people living their life offline to living it online to the extent that now we’re having conversations about we’re going to go fully online with the metaverse. I don’t know how we’re going to eat in the metaverse. I think we’re going to have to come back out of our virtual reality from time to time to perform some very basic bodily functions, if you will. The point remains that the audience’s expectations and behaviors have shifted to spend increasingly more time online.

The last time I checked, Gen Z is spending something 15 to 17 hours a day connected to the internet. This is where our audience is. If this is where our future customers are going to be, then the onus is on us to present ourselves in a way that is memorable. That we’re top of mind when it comes to this generation. I would include myself as well in that to make decisions about buying a home, about renting, whatever the case may be, about getting mortgage, all of that.

There’s a couple of things that you can do to create an effective personal brand online, again, and they all fall within the do things, tell people model. The first thing that you can do is share testimonials that you’re getting from the different clients that you’re working with. Ask for them. If you’ve done a really good job with a particular client, ask them to write you a Google review. That’ll go long way towards increasing your searchability. You can also take that Google review and turn it into an Instagram quote and share that. You could also perhaps even record them if they’d like talking about what it is that you did for them and how hands-on you were and what the experience of working with you is like and that can serve as some social proof that you can broadcast across your social media.

You can then also ask for warm introductions via social media. I’ve seen a couple of REALTORS® do an exceptional job of giving resources and information generously. I’m in the process right now of buying a home. I’m working right now with a REALTOR® who I followed for a number of years and didn’t do any business with but they were so great in terms of providing education.

What’s the word I want to say? I don’t want to say it was easy because as a social media user and a content creator myself, I know how much work goes into this but they seem to have found their groove with producing their Monday tips and providing eBooks that I can download. A whole manner of things. Do that. I would say, what should govern all of this, the sharing of testimonials, asking for warm introductions, giving resources and information generously, just be a mensch. Try to be helpful, try to be useful to your community. You give, give, give and then you can make that ask. I think a lot of people make the mistake of jumping onto social media, creating a website and making the ask right away, but you actually have to earn the trust of your audience first. I think that this real estate agent did a phenomenal job of earning my trust over years of nurturing me in their funnel.

Erin: That’s amazing. Build the bond without necessarily being on topic but on brand. Playing the long game, it is a long haul.

Hamza: Playing the long game. Actually, earlier today, Erin, I was looking at another one of my friends who is running a fantastic real estate account on Instagram. They were talking about their experiences of going through a pregnancy. You might think listening to this, what does being pregnant and sharing that have to do with my business? Well, it creates a bond. It humanizes you. It makes your story very compelling.

In 1927, a doctor by the name of Dr. Bluma Zeigarnik advances a theory known as the Zeigarnik effect that states that humans are irritated by unfinished tasks. I think that this can also apply to social media. If I’m invested in your story, I’m more likely to continue to follow your story until it reaches its resolution. By simply engaging with one piece of your content, that’s all I need, if I just for the first time see your post about you going through your motherhood journey, I want to know what’s going to happen next because I’m invested at a subconscious level. I want to see this through until the child is born, but then I’m not going to stop at the child anymore. I actually want to follow through the child’s evolution and development.

Throughout that entire process of you sharing, you can definitely weave in elements about your work. Even if you don’t want to talk about your work at all, if I’m curious enough, I will actually click on your bio and then I’ll see, oh, wow, you’re an agent. If I go on your website, you’re offering this webinar series that I can attend. Fantastic. It’s free of charge. Next thing you know, something will click. I’m looking for an open house and then I remember what’s top of mind for me is that you shared on your Instagram story or on TikTok that there’s an open house coming up this Saturday. That’s how the new sales funnel looks like in this digital world.

Erin: As my mentor, Valerie Geller, who is an amazing broadcast journalist and teacher of broadcasters, just this tidbit is, be personal but not private. There is a line in there and it’s brilliant.

Hamza: Be personal, not private. I love that.

Erin: She’s great. Is there a telltale sign in the online world, Hamza, that tells you, that’s a good leader?

Hamza: That’s tough because it really depends. I’m thinking about this especially in the context of like some of the listeners of this podcast are sole proprietors, others are organizational leaders and especially online, trust, leadership, and authority are tightly grouped together. Be ridiculously helpful. I can’t stress that enough. I think that everyone, regardless of what you do for a living, if you strive to be genuinely helpful, that is going to take care of all of your other success metrics, because the natural byproduct of being ridiculously helpful is all of the success that comes with it. I would advocate that the best leaders that I see out there are ones who are genuinely helpful and actively helpful for that matter.

Erin: You’ve said that there are two kinds of marketers, pull marketing and push marketing. Can you tell us what that’s about?

Hamza: Yes, sure. The push marketers, you know them, and you’ve probably unsubscribed from their newsletters and you’ve probably muted them on social media. They’re annoying. They’re in your face. They’re human popups, if you will. God bless them. They’re trying their best, I understand. But maybe if you are a push marketer listening to this, let me tell you very respectfully that you might be annoying your audience.

What you want to do instead is become a pull marketer. Again, provide value. Solve a problem for your audience. Help them do something better, faster or cheaper. At the very least, help them do something better, faster, cheaper. If you do this enough, if you do it consistently, if you do it actively, and if you do it with good intentions, eventually what’s going to happen is you are going to pull people towards you. You are going to be top of mind for them. You are going to be unforgettable.

I’m a very good example of this. The agent that I defaulted to when it came time for me to make the decision about who I want to work with to go through this process of buying a home was the one who earned my attention over this long funnel. I was pulled to them. They didn’t have to push their services to me, they pulled me into their orbit.

Erin: Excellent. Now how can sole proprietors, Hamza, like many of our REALTOR® listeners strive to be seen as leaders in their field? I know you’ve been reading a really good book that has this acting as if sort of an underlying theory here. Have you got anything out of that that you can share with us?

Hamza: Winning by Tim Grover. What a book. It’s quite an intense read, I must say. Again, I feel like a broken record over here, but think it’s worth repeating over and over again, but you just have to be useful. You have to give, and that’s how you’re seen as a leader. It’s very clear to your audience that you are helping other people. Unabashedly share those testimonials that I alluded to earlier. Capture them and share them.

Like I said, if you’ve done a great sale, if somebody is happy with your level of service and you’re working with them, make that known to your followers. It’s a feel-good story. It’ll impress people and it’ll create the narrative in their minds that you are somebody who is helpful, who can get the job done, who is effective, who is again, human-centric, has all the values that we’ve been talking about throughout this entire discussion that we’ve been having so far.

Act like the sort of person that you would want to work with. Act like the sort of person that you would do business with. Act as if you are already this successful business owner, this business person, this REALTOR®, whatever you may be right now. Act as the best version of yourself and conduct yourself accordingly online and the rest will take care of itself, I promise you.

Erin: Our final segment with Hamza Khan is next. We’re going to talk about stress. Guess what? There is a good kind, and he’s going to share that insight and wisdom with us in just a moment.

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Now, as we’ve discussed, real estate runs on an entrepreneurial spirit and certainly, so do you, so tell us, how do you stay grounded and healthy and avoid burnout, Hamza?

Hamza: That’s a great question. There’s something that’s very helpful in the conceptualization of burnout known as the conservation of resources theory. We experience stress typically in three instances. The first one, when there’s a threat of a loss of resources, the second one, there is an actual net loss of resources and the third one, there’s a lack of gained resources following the spending of resources. I’m not just talking about money, I’m also talking about time, energy, and attention.

It’s really important for entrepreneurs and people with an entrepreneurial spirit to do two things. There’s so many I can give you, but I think the chief among them are to assemble boundaries and to guard your precious resources, to guard your time, to guard your energy, to guard your attention. One way to guard your time, for instance, is by putting non-negotiables in your calendar.

Let’s say that it’s really important for you to replenish your energy by working out in the day. Well, don’t leave that to chance. Don’t let it be something that is occasional. Make it likely. Make it consistent. Put it in your calendar every morning from 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM, I’m going to work out. Fantastic. If you find yourself consistently pushing off lunches, well, put them in your calendar the same way that you would reflect a meeting in your calendar or a showing in your calendar. Put in from 12:00 to 1:00 every single day I’m going to eat lunch and I’m not going to do any work while I’m eating lunch, because that’s just working while eating.

Assemble those boundaries against your precious resources, number one. That also includes your attention. Being very intentional, for instance, about turning off notifications, maybe using some app, like I use the Pomodoro technique to guide how I work. I work in 25-minute bursts with five-minute breaks.

The second part of the solution that I would advocate for entrepreneurs, and those who are entrepreneurially spirited is a guilt-free replenishment of your energy. Imagine that every day you start your day with four full buckets of energy and you have the mental bucket, the emotional bucket, the physical bucket, and the spiritual bucket, and you empty these buckets as the days’ tasks require.

Now, most people wait until the end of the day to maybe sit down with a warm meal and watch something on TV and replenish their energy, but they never quite get all of their energy back. They go to sleep waking up the next day feeling groggy. The year that I burned out in 2014, I didn’t take a single break for 11 months and I hoped that I could take this miraculous trip around the world in December of 2014 and recover. Unfortunately, I burned out in the process. I learned the hard way that if you don’t pick the time to relax, your body will pick it for you and it usually picks the most inopportune time.

Replenish your energy on a daily basis, ideally throughout the day, if you can. If you have the opportunity in the middle of the day, if you’re big on naps and you can take a nap, take a nap. If you have the opportunity to drop your kids to school and that replenishes your energy, build that into your calendar, make that non-negotiable. Guilt-free replenishment of your energy, I would argue, is part your job. It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s not an augment. It is essential to the work that you do.

Erin: I love that. It’s permission. Thank you. Then there’s your idea of reconceptualizing bad stress as good stress?

Hamza: Yes, yes, yes. I thought, like many of the listeners, that there’s only one kind of stress, distress, and that is stress that causes trouble, danger, feelings of alarm. I learned, after I had burned out in 2014, that there was such a thing as good stress, eustress, E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S. This is stress that is helpful, plentiful, is a precursor to something more desirable.

Research out of Stanford by Dr. Kelly McGonigal who wrote The Upside of Stress, a fantastic book, by the way. She revealed through her research that simply reframing a stressful experience as one that produces eustress instead of distress is enough to change your reaction, your body’s reaction to that stressor. You actually register that stressor as less stressful.

I actually did this quite recently too. I’m in a master’s class right now and I thought to myself, “Oh, man. I don’t want to do this. It’s a huge drag on my time. I don’t feel quite ready for this.” I found myself going into a mental spiral. Then I took a step back and said, “Well, this is actually a precursor to something more desirable, I want to continue to develop my understanding of this subject matter. I want to become more adept at the work that I do. So, this is necessary for me, this is the thing I got to do to get to do the thing that I want to do.”

I know that many of the listeners right now feel that way about a lot of their portfolio, there’s things that you don’t like to do right now that are causing you psychological stress. Coming back to the conservation of resources theory, you might be perceiving it as a threat, a net loss, or an insufficient reward. I promise you, if you drop a T-chart, and in one column you write down distress and the other you write down eustress as the labels, and then you just move things from one column to another, there’s a very, very good chance that the things that you are perceiving to be stressful right now, for example, let’s say updating listings, you think, “Wow, I don’t have the time for that right now. It’s really stressful.” If you see this as important to building your book, to meeting your targets, and then you take it a step further, what is the transcendent end result of doing this work? Well, I get to have all the things that I want and enjoy them with my family. I promise you that you will actually process that stressor quite differently.

Erin: That’s amazing. As we end, could you – there’s just been so much. You have filled our buckets again and again here, Hamza. If you could share one last tip to help our listeners become stronger leaders, what would it be?

Hamza: Okay. Ready for this one?

Erin: I am.

Hamza: As counterintuitive as it sounds, be more human.

Erin: Be more human. Is there any way you can elaborate on that at all?

Hamza: Absolutely. Coming back to an earlier question that you asked about what the future of work looks like, I think that, again, everything that can be automated will be automated. By the year 2030, we are going to find ourselves in a very, very different epoch of work than the one we are in right now. The most effective leaders, the ones who are able to attract and retain and engage top talent, the most effective entrepreneurs, those who are able to compel others to work with them, the most happy people are going to be those who have made considerable investments in their humanity.

These are people who have gotten bullish on soft skills, they’re creative, they’re empathetic, they’re emotionally intelligent, they’re collaborative. Again, the jobs that we’re going to do in the future of work are going to be those that can’t be done by the machines or can’t be easily done by them. You just have to extrapolate a little into the future, not that far, just 2030, those jobs are going to be distinctly human. That is what is going to remain at the end of the day.

In the words of futurist Alvin Toffler, I think about this quite often, he said that the illiterate of the 21st century won’t be those who can’t read and write, it’ll be those who can’t learn, unlearn, and relearn. Mental dexterity, flexibility is another fantastic skill to invest in that’ll allow everybody listening to this to be prepared for when the next change comes and to continue to change themselves and arrive at that fourth stage of the organization’s evolution, and renew every single time. In this way, you cross the chasm of time, time and again.

Erin: Thank you so much for the time you’ve spent with us today, you went past your Pomodoro rule of 25 minutes. We are so, so grateful to you, Hamza, it’s been a pleasure and all the best to you in the future. Thank you for helping us with ours.

Hamza: Thank you so much, Erin. I really, really appreciated this.

Erin: We appreciate you listening and joining us for this 23rd episode of REAL TIME from the Canadian Real Estate Association. We know your time is precious, and thank you for spending some of it with us.

On our next episode, we’ll keep our eyes on the road ahead with an expert on AI and the future of work, Sinead Bovell. You’re not going to want to miss it, so be sure and hit that subscribe button.

REAL TIME is produced by Rob Whitehead with Real Family Productions and Alphabet® Creative. I’m Erin Davis, and we’ll talk to you here next time on REAL TIME.

Erin Davis: Welcome to REAL TIME. I’m Erin Davis. Whether it’s our salaries or our family dinners, negotiating is part of our daily lives. For REALTORS®, it’s fundamental to your business. On episode 22 of REAL TIME brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association, we’re joined by one of Canada’s most influential business leaders, the dynamic and very entertaining Wes Hall who brings us some practical knowledge.

With Mr. Hall, the newest member of CBC’s Dragons’ Den team, we’ll explore principles, best practices, and trends in negotiation, as well as key takeaways to help you as a REALTOR® to strengthen that skill. Look at you with the still new dragon glow to you. [chuckles] You said on a promo for CBC that everybody was going to love you and all the dragons were going to love you. How has that worked out so far, Wes?

Wes Hall: They still love me.

Erin: Oh, good.

Wes: That’s what happens when you’re a lovable person. Everybody is going to love you, right?

Erin: Oh, okay. All right. I’ll keep that in mind for our conversation here. It’s great to have you with us. Your story is unbelievable. You did, as you know, grow up living in a tin shack in Jamaica, and now here you are one of North America’s most influential power brokers, a hugely successful entrepreneur, an anti-racism activist, and of course, as we mentioned, the newest dragon in the den. Tell us if you can, Wes, here, and it will make a best-seller one day if it hasn’t already, your journey from such humble beginnings to where you are today. Would you, please?

Wes: It is indeed a journey. When people hear about this tin shack, they probably roll their eyes and go, “Of course, everybody is from a tin shack.” I literally was from that tin shack. It’s got the zinc roof. If you look it up on the internet Wes Hall’s tin shack, you probably will see it. Me and my grandmother in a picture standing looking at the shack and me saying to my grandmother at the time, “I’m going to get you out of this place one day.”

I have 14 brothers and sisters, by the way, a traditional Jamaican family where I have zero full brothers and sisters in that number. My mom and dad was never married. They had a one-off and I was that one-off. That’s why I’m so special because you just can’t replicate Wes Hall.

[laughter]

Erin: I wish you’d work on your self-confidence a bit.

Wes: I’ve tried. It’s just so hard.

[laughter]

Wes: It’s hard to be humble but I try.

Erin: You came to Canada in your teens.

Wes: September 27th, 1985, Friday. I came to live with my dad and I moved to Malvern. That’s where my dad was living at the time and he had five kids in Canada on his own. I came in to live as number six in that household. He had another daughter that was in Jamaica that came later on, but I was out of the house by that time. I was added to that household and it was the most amazing thing for me because it was my first time on an airplane, my first-time seeing traffic lights because I lived in literally the bush in Jamaica.

When I came here, I got off the airplane at Toronto International Airport, Pearson. I walked outside and I saw these people, my siblings, and my stepmom, and my dad waiting for me. Oh, man, it was just a euphoric moment. Then I got into their vehicle and I’m driving on a six-lane highway, the 401. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Then we landed at his house in Scarborough that the whole neighborhood was still under construction. It was mud and dirt but to me, that was paradise. I found paradise coming to Canada.

I kept that picture of me and my grandmother in that tin shack on my desk on Bay Street for two reasons. One is to remind me of where I came from and never to forget, and two, to celebrate this great country of ours. It’s only in a place like Canada – I hear about the American dream and so on. You never hear about the Canadian dream, but the Canadian dream is alive and well. For me having that picture, it’s really celebrating the Canadian dream, that you can come from a tin shack and you can end up at the top of corporate Canada on Bay Street.

Erin: It is an amazing story. The Canadian dream, as you say, we don’t tout it enough. It’s our nature to downplay stuff like that. Your grandmother who raised you and your brothers and sisters, what kind of an impact or influence did she have on the man that you are today?

Wes: Everything, every aspect of who I am today was architected by her. When you think about it, she didn’t sit me down and gave me lessons and say, “Here is how you become a man, Wes.” She used her example of industriousness to show me what I should be when I grow up. See, I was abandoned. My oldest sister, she was two years older than me, my younger brother who was a year younger than me, and I was 18 months at a time and we were left in a house by ourselves by our mother. A neighbor heard us crying and went to the plantation. My grandmother worked at a plantation. She worked in a plantation, banana plantation, a coconut plantation depending on the season.

The house that we were raised in was provided by the plantation owners for the workers to raise their family, so my grandmother had this two-room tin shack that she was given. She came and got us from the plantation and brought us to live with her. I was 18 months old and she wasn’t argumentative about it or was bitter about it. She was 60. Could you imagine at 60 years old, you have all these grandkids that you’re raising already and then you inherited three more and the three was all under five years old? You would have some resentment towards your children or your kid that did to you or towards your grandkids.

My grandmother, I never ever remembered her holding it against me as a child. She was working extremely hard to make sure that there’s food on the table for us, to make sure that we went to school. We didn’t have much. I didn’t wear shoes to go to school because we couldn’t afford it. There are times when I didn’t even have food to bring to school to have lunch. The fact of the matter is that she knew that education was important, and she made sure that we went to school. I grew up watching her, and as a result of watching her, it was instilled in me what I should be when I grow up and I wanted to be like her.

Erin: She taught you the art of negotiation, I understand too. As anyone who has been to a Jamaican market, as a tourist, I always go in there and I go. “Oh, I hate to haggle. I hate that bartering back and forth.” If you don’t know how to do that, you don’t belong there.

Wes: Listen, when you are poor, you have no choice. Just put it that way. If you think about my grandmother raising all these grandkids, and she has a finite amount of money to spend. If you think about what it’s like to work on a sugar cane plantation, you’re in the hot Jamaican sun, you’re bent over with a machete in your right hand and grabbing the stalks or sugarcane with your left hand and you’re chopping at the root. Then you chop the stalk at the top and then you put them in piles, and you do that for 10 hours a day. The only time you stop is to drink some water, wipe the sweat off your brow and have a little bit of a snack or something to eat quickly and you go back at it again.

When you get that paycheck, once a month they pay you, you have to stretch that money as far as you possibly can. When you go to the market to shop, you have to make sure that if they’re saying that tomatoes are $2 a pound, you try to make sure that you get that tomato for $0.50 a pound. That’s what I saw in my grandmother when she would take me to the market with her that not a single price that she was quoted she end up paying for that product. She always negotiated and she always got the price she wanted.

Erin: She was also someone who was selling her wares as well, so you sold from the other side.

Wes: Exactly. I saw the buying part and the selling part. When you’re buying, you want to get it as cheap as possible. When you’re selling, you want to get the most money as possible. One of the things that my grandmother would do is because she would sell puddings, for example, she would bake these amazing puddings and she would sell them. Her puddings were so good that she would be selling it for more than everybody else in the market. She’ll be sold out before everybody else. That would create this amazing word around the neighborhood that if you want to get the best pudding at the market, you have to go early because Mama Julia’s pudding is always sold out early.

When you’re creating that kind of demand for your product, it doesn’t matter what the competition is doing because you’re always going to get your price. Especially when you’re going to be sold out before everybody else, you can keep on marketing that up. That’s what my grandmother would do, that her pudding was the most expensive pudding in the market and it’s always the one to go first.

Erin: Before we leave Jamaica and head to Bay Street, which is where we’re speaking to you today, what became of your grandmother? Were you able to share some of your bounty with her before she left us?

Wes: You know what, thank you for that question because I never really got asked that question in the past and I really appreciate it. In that tin shack picture that you would see if you search on the internet, I was 22 years old and my grandmother was a very old woman at the time. I went back and I said to her, “Mama, I’m going to get you out of this tin shack one day. I’m going to work hard enough in Canada. I will continue to work hard to get you out to that tin shack.” I got my first big break on Bay Street, the first one I became a vice president on Bay Street, I’m like, “Finally, I’m ready to get my grandmother out to that tin shack,” and she died two weeks later.

She never saw the ultimate success. See, I had three children. I was working hard. I was trying to provide for my family, and I was waiting for the perfect opportunity, the perfect timing to bring her over to show her my success. As a result of waiting for the perfect opportunity, she never saw any of it. I shouldn’t have waited. I should have brought her in here a lot sooner so that she can see what I saw when I came here at 16-years old, September 27th, 1985, because that impressed me, just being in this country impressed me. I know she would be impressed by this country and by what I was doing to work hard and to try to provide for myself and my family here.

She never saw it. She died in that tin shack. That’s one of the reasons why, Erin, I push myself as hard as I do because she deserved to be where I’m at, she deserved to appreciate the fruits of my labor because she was a big part of that and she never got it. I don’t really work for money anymore. Yes, I initially started by saying I want to make as much money as I possibly can, but now I try to change people’s lives by the wealth I’ve created for myself by working hard. If I can change people’s lives like my grandmother changed my life, this world will be so much a better place.

Erin: That is so beautiful. Thank you and I am so sorry. I’m so sorry for that regret for you, Wes.

Erin: Coming up, how Wes Hall just about let his biggest break slip away because he had to. It’s a great story. Love REAL TIME? Thanks for finding and supporting us. Subscribe to our channels on Spotify, Apple, and Stitcher to stay up to date on future guests and stories, or visit CREA.ca/podcast for more details and to catch up on past episodes. They are all worth your time.

You referred to that job, that vice presidency that you got on Bay Street. Your first really big break, but you almost talked your way out to that one. I just love the lesson in here. Be prepared to lose, Don’t pick a fight with someone who’s got nothing to lose. Tell us that story, Wes, if you would, please.

Wes: I was living in a 1100 square foot house with my wife. We couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage. We had three kids under three years old and I had this job offer to be director of business development for a US company and I was going to be business development director in Canada. I had this mindset that my next big break has to be a vice president position. I won’t accept anything less than that. This gentleman, the CEO of the company, offered me this opportunity to be director of business development and he told me what the salary was and so on.

I remember when he gave me the call, I was in the master bedroom with my wife. We didn’t really have enough money to afford a bed, so the box spring and the mattress was on the floor and that’s where we’re sleeping. I took this call and the gentleman says, “I have exciting news for you, Wes. After the job interview and everything, I’m offering it a position of direct to business development.” I said to the gentleman, “I really appreciate the offer, however, I would like to be a vice president.” He said to me, “I don’t have the authority to offer you a vice president position but director of business development is yours”. I said to him, “When you have the authority to offer me that job, give me a call”.

Erin: Oh.

Wes: He said, “Okay.” [chuckling] He hang up the phone, and that was it. My poor wife was laying on the mattress on the floor. She could not believe what just happened because we didn’t even have enough money to buy diapers for all the kids and I’m turning down this job not because of the money, but because of the title. She couldn’t believe it, but guess what happened. Two weeks later, I got a call from that gentleman and said, “I have the authority to give you what you want,” and I became a vice president on Bay Street.

Erin: Oh. Those were some tense two weeks with your wife, though, I’m going to guess.

Wes: [chuckles] We’ve been married for 30 years now and I can tell you if I didn’t get a job, it probably wouldn’t have made it to 30.

[laughter]

Erin: Wes, why is it so hard for us to negotiate fair compensation?

Wes: I think we’re afraid of losing out. When you think about it, that’s your value. That’s what’s going to create wealth for yourself and your family. That compensation is going to allow you to take nice vacations, live in a nice home, be able to do things for others philanthropically, and so on, but yet we find it very difficult to tell people this is how much I’m worth, this is what my value is to you. We go into companies and we create massive values for companies.

When I was working at this vice president level at this company, I was creating a ton of value. I was underpaid and I went into my boss’s office and I said, “Listen, I’m underpaid because here’s the value that I’m creating for you, and here’s where my compensation is. They don’t align with each other.” They fundamentally disagreed with me on it and I left to start Kingsdale. If they didn’t disagree with me, I would be still working for somebody else and I wouldn’t have started my own company, Kingsdale.

As a result of starting this company, I became one of the most successful person in the industry and become the person that I am on Bay Street today because I wasn’t getting fair compensation to begin with. I tried to do something about it, and when they refused to do something about it, I decided to go on my own and bet on myself. That’s the problem, a lot of people aren’t prepared to bet on themselves. When you think about it, would you prefer to invest in somebody else or would you prefer to invest in yourself because you know what you can do, you know what your limitations are, you know what your capabilities are as well?

Why not bet on yourself especially when you want to be an entrepreneur, but you go, “Man, I just don’t know if I can do it.” You need to get those doubts out of your mind, at least give it a shot. That’s why I decided to do, when I started this firm, I said, “I don’t want to be sitting here 20 years later regretting the opportunity that I’ve missed. I want to know that I’ve tried it, it didn’t work and I can pivot and figure something else out.”

Erin: Boy, have you ever made it work out for you? Let’s talk a little bit about high-stakes negotiation. How do you go about reading the room?

Wes: Every single negotiation we go into, we have to figure out who’s on the other side of that negotiation. Some people are prepared to pay more than others, some people are just not. When you are in a business where there’s no particular price list, for example, if you look in the real estate business and there’s typically if you go down a particular street in a particular neighborhood, every single house is not exactly priced the same.

There’s room there, wiggle room for your creativity, and for you to now determine to the market why your house should be more valued than the other houses in the neighborhood, and in sometimes, 20%, 30% higher. There may be features that you put into your house that others didn’t put into there. How do you value that? In terms of negotiating, you have to figure out how important are these things to the person buying my house?

Erin: How does a REALTOR® go about finding out what’s important? Just listen or what hints would you give, Wes?

Wes: I would say the questions that you ask. When you’re going through a showing, for example, you have to appreciate what are the things that are getting the person’s attention that you’re touring through the house. Sometimes, for example, we’re going through and we are just excited about, “Oh, I can’t wait to show them this part of the house,” but yet that person is still in the kitchen looking around the kitchen, but we want them to hurry up so they can show them the important part of the house. Guess what?

The reason why they’re in the kitchen, maybe he’s a chef and he loves to cook. He’s picturing himself in the kitchen cooking a beautiful meal and you’re trying to interrupt that by showing him the gym when he doesn’t care about the gym because the gym is so beautiful or the theater is so beautiful, but he doesn’t watch TV or he doesn’t watch movies, or he doesn’t really care about those things. We need to read the audience and to see what’s appealing to them and then focus on those moments.

One of the things that somebody said that I heard great about selling the house is that sometimes after you finish the showing, just sit in the living room or some great part of the house with the person and have a conversation with them because then they can visualize themselves living in that house, sitting in that room, maybe reading a book, maybe the fireplace is on and it’s snowing outside. All of a sudden, it changes their view on the place because they see themselves in it. Sometimes we miss those little part of getting things done. If we focus on those things and pay attention, we can close deals really quickly and we can actually get the prices that we are looking for.

Erin: So much of this is listening, isn’t it?

Wes: It is. One of the things that I tell my team when we’re negotiating, for example, and sometimes in real estate, you’re on the phone negotiating with the other side and you give them all the this is why this house is so great and everything, the feature sheets is all there and everything. Then you tell them, “Okay, but this is my price, $10 million.” Let’s say, for argument’s sake, we’re in the big leagues here, $10 million. This person on the other end, you convince them that this is the best house for them and you know you convinced them is the best house. Then when you put the $10 million on the table, again, you try to justify it still.

Why? You’ve already convinced them that this is a house for them. Now you have to convince them that $10 million is a price that they need to pay in order for them to own it. Let them determine why it’s not worth $10 million. Sometimes we try to sell against ourselves. We tend to just oversell when we already have this person closed. Then we try to justify the price tag that we put on there.

We shouldn’t justify. If we list the house for $10 million, once you start to you put your feature sheet out and you start to bring people through it, $10 million is $10 million. You bring me an offer for $10 million, nothing less. You bring me something less, I’m going to have a conversation with my seller about it, but at the end of the day, this price is the price that you’re going to pay ultimately. You’re not going to get me to say it’s eight or seven because other come say this is unique, and these are the reasons why it’s unique. When you find that buyer that know that this place is unique, you got to close them.

Erin: Sometimes it’s listening to the seller too, the seller who maybe doesn’t want this house torn down for a replacement. That they want to be able to come by and see it again with their grandchildren one day and say, “This is your parents were born,” or something like that. There can be things to listen to in the seller’s story too. Can’t there?

Wes: Absolutely. I sold my first house for $200,000. Bought it for $112,000 and I sold it for $200,000. It’s over 30 years and every year, I go back to look at that house because I remembered when I was standing in the bedroom, when I got that job offer and I turned it down, I remember that I fixed that porch at the front. The porch was done by me, my hands.

I take pictures of that house it’s important to me that I do that. Then I bring my kids by to say, “This is the way you were born.” If I now, let’s say, when I was selling that house and I had that emotional attachment to that place, and somebody said, “I’m going to rip it down and I’m going to this amazing building there and the house is going to be fantastic,” fine, that’s your dream, but you just took away something that’s really important to me because you’re going to demolish it.

As a result of that, I prefer to sell it to someone for less money who’s going to preserve it than somebody who’s going to destroy that memory. Sometimes if we don’t appreciate the seller’s motivation for selling, we could be leaving a lot of value on the table and we completely could be losing opportunities because we just didn’t listen to the reasons behind why this person is selling this house.

Erin: When we return to REAL TIME, our guest, Wes Hall, one of Canada’s top rank business negotiators looks at the things that hold us back, the barriers when it comes to negotiation. If you’re like me, you find the best coffee or tea is the one you’re enjoying at home, maybe right now, but the best content is at the CREA Cafe. Tap into the knowledge of REALTORS® across this country of ours. Share your own lessons and insights by visiting REALTORS® Corner on CREA Cafe, a hub of great content created by REALTORS® for REALTORS®.

When we’re talking about negotiation, as you’ve pointed out so perfectly, it can come with a great range of emotions, especially in an industry like real estate where clients aren’t just buying and selling houses, they’re buying and selling homes. They’re buying and selling the place where your children came into the world and where you took that phone call and said, “No, I’m going to wait for VP.” Wes, what are common emotional barriers to negotiation? You’ve said there’s a thin line between arrogance and confidence. What are some of the most common emotional barriers?

Wes: I think sometimes it’s really not really understanding people’s motivation. When you think about the real estate transaction is one of the most important transaction that you’ll ever do in the business world. I buy and sell companies and so on, but that’s only a very small number of individuals that are in that category. Most people that own a home, at some point, they’re going to transact. At some point in their life, they’re going to sell that home, and then they have to make that decision very, very quickly. The longer you stay in that home, and the more improvements that you make to it, the more difficult it is to part with it.

You’re parting with your neighbors that you’ve built great relationship with over the years, you’re going to the unknown in the future. If you don’t understand the emotional attachment that people may have to that piece of asset that they’ve cherished for so long, that have built their value – My company, for example, that $112,000 home that I bought, for example, allowed me to a bigger home that allowed me to put a leverage on it to start my company, Kingsdale. That home created a value that I have and the wealth that I have today. It was an emotional attachment because it’s my future.

If you don’t appreciate it, that it’s my future, and don’t really treat it like that, then all of a sudden I don’t want to do business with you because doing any type of business, especially in that space, it’s about trust. I have to have trust and confidence in you that we’re going to have a good working relationship, you’re going to respect what I bring to the table, and I’m going to respect what you bring to the table.

When you give me the advice to say, “Wes, you should take this undervalued number or this price,” that I trust that you’re coming from the right place and that you just don’t want to turn me over because you have so many deals on the table and you have so many other clients, I have to be so special to you that I believe that I’m the only client that you have even though you may have hundreds. You have to give me the impression that I’m so important to you, that there’s nobody else that you’re paying attention to. My business, Kingsdale, when you think about what we do, we advise companies that are doing hostile takeovers and shareholder activism.

When I’m advising a CEO that’s under threat, somebody is saying that we’re going to replace you because you’re not competent. Then I’m talking to that CEO and I’m saying, “Wait a minute here, I’ll call you back because I have somebody else on the phone to talk to,” how do you think that person feels? In their mind, they’re the most important person on your list and you’re telling them that no, let me call you back because I have other things to do. We should make sure that we spend as much time.

If we look at it to say, “You’re not paying me as much as somebody else,” guess what? That person in the future could be paying you so much more because you’ve cultivated that relationship. Again, I spent $112,000 for my first home. Could you imagine had the real estate agent, who actually didn’t, treated me just like a sale? Then I bought my second house for double the price and then my third house and my fourth and my fifth to now I’m here in Dragons’ Den and I’m creating this wealth.

Could you imagine if that $112,000 relationship had been kept to this point how much more successful that relationship would be for that initial agent? We have to look at relationships as very, very long-term and thus forget about the price because people go through cycles in their career, and you want to follow them through that cycle. It’s all dependent on how you treat them from when they’re at the beginning of the cycle to all the way through the cycle.

Erin: In their career and in their families. You’re going to need more bedrooms, you’re going to need fewer bedrooms. You might want to buy a second home, if you’re able to, for your children to live in.

Wes: Exactly right.

Erin: All of these and the importance of building relationships. Just before we get off this particular part of the conversation, Wes, and we’re just loving having you here today, how do we cope with our own humanity? How do we cope with our emotions and not let that overrule the sense of a business decision?

Wes: When you’re successful, there’s a lot of pride and ego that comes with success, the reason being is because everybody’s telling you how great you are. Your staff’s telling you, “Wow, you’re number one in the city,” or you’re number one in the province or you’re number one in Canada. Then all of a sudden, there’s other things that start to come with that. Hubris comes with it and you need to have people around you, they’re just not buying it.

I always use the expression with my wife that we’ve been married for 30 years next year. We go for walks every morning and literally I say she carries a pin around with her so that when my head is getting too big and bloated, she just takes the pin out and just pop it. That keeps me grounded because I know that that person, she’s going to call me out. I want people around me to call me out because that’s the only way that you are levelheaded because sometimes we get ahead of ourselves, and even the people that like us hate us as a result of it.

[laughter]

Erin: I can’t imagine.

Wes: I know. The kids are like, “This is too much, he’s too much.” If that start to happen, that means that you just aren’t surrounding yourself with the right people or maybe you have them but you’re not taking their advice. I know some of the most successful leaders that I know today are people who have amazing people around them and they listen to them, and they get good counsel from them and it allows them to be grounded and still be very, very successful.

One of the things that I look at as well is, philanthropically, if you’re a successful person, do you give back? Because it takes a certain personality to go, “I’ve earned all this money, I’m going to give it to help certain causes,” or if you don’t have it financially yet, to donate your time to mentor maybe kids in underserved communities or people who want to be a part of your sector to be able to bring them in and give them that free advice and mentorship. If you do those things and you do a lot of them, they automatically keep you humble.

[music]

Erin: When we come back with negotiator extraordinaire and newest star of CDC’s Dragons’ Den, Wes Hall, does he ever get intimidated? And a tough message that Wes had to deliver that ended up being called the best advice the anxious recipient had ever gotten.

Every day, more and more Canadians are discovering the joy of house hunting, apartment searching, and all kinds of real estate finds from the comfort of their own home. In fact, there were 1.6 million searches for REALTORS® on REALTOR.ca last year alone. You can make the most of those visits with the REALTOR.ca tools we provide as part of your membership, REALTOR.ca.

Now back to Wes Hall on REAL TIME. As somebody who leads shareholder activist campaigns, what strategies have you used for approaching sensitive or difficult negotiations because you are involved, you are giving back, you are being the person that little Wes in bare feet going to school needed at that time other than your dear grandmother? What strategies have you used? What do you keep in your heart while you’re doing this?

Wes: First of all, I’m never intimidated by people. I remember I was advising the CEO of a very large company; it was a hostile takeover and a proxy contest. I was brought in on the file pretty late. I was in my late 30s and this was a very big transaction. The CEO made a lot of fundamental mistakes in communicating to the market and strategic decisions that he made. These shareholders came out and said, “We want him fired.” The board and the CEO hired me to defend them. After analyzing the situation, I decided to set a meeting with the CEO, and I went into his office. His office was massive, massive, massive office. It took me like five minutes to walk to his desk from the door.

I sat there in front of him and I said to him, “I am really good at what I do, but there’s so many mistakes that were made I can’t help you and you’re going to lose this fight. My recommendation is for you to get into the boardroom and negotiate an exit package with the current board because we’re going to lose this fight and you’re going to have a hostile board coming in. It’s either negotiate with friends now or enemies later. Which do you prefer?” That’s a tough message because at the time, this gentleman was making a few million dollars a year in compensation and he had a great life. I told him there to go resign tomorrow.

The next day he actually resigned. Still today he’s like, “The best decision, best advice I’ve ever been given.” If I was intimidated by the size of his office, how much his compensation was, that I’m just this 30 something-year-old Black guy walking into this accomplished person’s office to give him this piece of advice, he wouldn’t have gotten the right advice because of me being intimidated and me being afraid to do the right thing and say the right thing because of how he was going to respond to it. We have to always appreciate that integrity first, that matters.

Sometimes we’re giving people advice that they don’t want to hear because we’re intimidated by them. If we allow that to stop us from giving the right advice, I don’t think we’re being good advocates, I don’t think we’re being good advisors. In the real estate business, that’s what you are, you’re an advisor. You’re going to walk into somebody’s home and you’re going to tell them, “I know you think this house is worth $10 million, but it actually doesn’t. It’s worth 5 and there’s a reason why f5 is a good price for it.” You’re going to sit there and go, “Well, you know.”

If you were intimidated to have that conversation with that person, you’re going to take it at 10, you’re going to try to sell at 10 and you realize that you can’t execute at 10. You’re going to bring them an offer for 5, which you know is the right offer, but then all of a sudden, your credibility is out the window because you weren’t upfront and you weren’t transparent in the beginning.

Always be transparent because at the end of the day, after giving that CEO the advice, if he didn’t resign and we lose and he loses everything because all of a sudden, the new guy’s coming in going, “I’m not going to negotiate your compensation package with you, I’m firing you right now and you have to sue me to get what you’re entitled to.” He would have been worse off in that situation. I would feel bad that I didn’t give him the right advice, to begin with, because I was intimidated or was afraid of what he was going to say. We always have to think about our integrity when we give advice, is this the right advice, and why? If the client doesn’t want to take it, you’re not going to have any regrets.

Erin: When we wrap up our talk today with Wes Hall, how to navigate the waters when you’re working with family, don’t miss it.

In our previous REAL TIME episode, you heard about homelesshub.ca and so many more valuable links as part of our REALTORSCare® Week. REALTORSCare® is all about bringing you information to help you help others, a national guiding principle celebrating the great work done by the Canadian Realtor Community. You can help raise awareness for the charities and causes closest to your heart by sharing your story. Just use #realtorscare on your favorite social media platforms.

Now back to our guest. He’s a master negotiator even when it comes to family, Wes Hall. I can’t imagine what it was like growing up one of your five children with a master negotiator. Did anybody ever get a raise in their allowance or how did you move your negotiating prowess into parenthood, or was this something that you left mom to do? How did that all work out, Wes?

Wes: First of all, two of my boys are working with me. One is working with me very, very closely. Last week, he said to me, “I know we’re on compensation season, so I just wanted to know what’s going to happen with my comp?” I said, “How much are you making?” He told me and I said, “Why do you need more than that? I’m paying your rent, you’re living with me at home, I’m buying your food. The only thing that you have to worry about is the clothes that you wear. Why do you need more money than that?”

[laughter]

Erin: Not fair.

Wes: That’s a reasonable response to it. He started to stutter a little bit because he didn’t really know how to respond to that. I said, “Plus, the work that you’re putting in, you’re going to inherit in the future anyways. Why do you need money now? You’re fine.”

[chuckling]

Wes: I said that in a sense that I want to see how he responded to it. He certainly held his own and justify why his compensation should be higher and he will get a higher compensation. What my wife said to me at times is that just remember that you were dad first and you’re their business person and the boss second. How you interact – When you’re working closely with your son or your daughter, especially in the real estate game where there’s a lot of families working together, sometimes we forget the fact that we’re just a parent first and the business will be fine.

I keep that in mind every time we’re having conversations, whether it’d be about tough conversations like compensation, conversation about discipline in terms of a work discipline, meaning that you messed up on this thing, and how do I respond to you? Do I respond to you as your boss or do I respond to you as your father? When I get home, do I have the boss hat on at home or do I have the dad hat on at home? I make sure that I’m very careful in terms of what hat I’m wearing when I’m having those conversations because it could ultimately affect our relationship in a very negative way if that’s not managed properly.

Erin: Is there a limit on how much shop-talk at home or over the dinner table?

Wes: [laughs] My wife manages that, Erin, very, very well. She’s very good about – We try to have dinner as a family at 6:00 PM every evening. Around the table, we talk about different things but we’re very balanced in terms of what we talk about. If I’m sitting on the couch reading a book or I’m watching a show, he doesn’t walk in and say, “Hey, by the way, that deal, here’s what’s going on,” and all that. He respects those boundaries.

If we’re having a five-minute conversation about something business at the dinner table, we do that but it’s not an hour conversation. It’s a very short conversation, but the rest of the conversation is about family, about us, and the business will come. We don’t overly focus ourselves on business, business, business, because that could be draining and there’s no time to unwind and there’s a lot of stress that comes with that.

To the extent that when I’m walking with my wife, for example, if I have something on my mind business-wise, that’s where it gets resolved because it’s amazing. When you’re talking to somebody who’s not in the sector that you’re in, they can see problems from a completely different perspective. I value that perspective because I would never have thought of the solution the way that she would think about it. I find that we solve a lot of problems in my business world by having those walks and having those conversations with her about challenges that I’m facing and coming up with a completely different way of thinking about it that I wouldn’t have.

Erin: You know, Wes, that once COVID’s over, you’re not going to be able to hide behind the mask and everybody’s going to be recognizing you from TV. Your wife’s going to need a bigger pin.

Wes: [laughs] It’s funny I was walking through the neighborhood, and this was when I was just announced on Dragons’ Den. This young lady walked by me and she turned around and said, “Are you Wes Hall?” My wife was with me, and I said, “Yes.” She’s like, “Oh, I love you. I can’t wait to watch you.” My wife after, she turned around, she looked at me and said, “Oh, man. I’m not going to live this down.”

[laughter]

Wes: I’m like, “See, I’m a big deal, honey. You got to treat me like a big deal.” She shaked her head and go, “Yes, never.” [laughs]

Erin: That’s great. Great, great, great. Thank you for helping us to talk about negotiating deals and everything that’s been a part of this, Wes. It’s been just such a pleasure, and you are a big deal.

Wes: Erin, you know what? You’re so kind, you should be my PR person.

Erin: [laughs] Oh.

Wes: [chuckles] I probably can’t afford you for that.

Erin: Now that you’ve taught me how to negotiate.

[laughter]

Wes: That’s right.

Erin: Thank you.

Wes: Thank you, Erin.

Erin: Best of luck to you in everything. I can’t wait to read an autobiography about you, or I’ll write it with you.

Wes: It’s coming out next year so stay tuned.

Erin: Awesome. Thank you, Wes, so much.

Wes: Perfect. Thank you.

Erin: Thanks again to Wes Hall for joining us for this episode of REAL TIME brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association.

Remember to be sure to visit CREA.ca to access valuable resources and discover more fantastic real estate-related content. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button. Will you, please? REAL TIME is produced by Rob Whitehead with Real Family Productions and Alphabet® Creative. I’m Erin Davis. Thank you for making the time to join us.

Erin Davis: Welcome to REAL TIME, a podcast for and about REALTORS®. I’m your host, Erin Davis, and it’s great to have you sharing this time with us. We explore everything in this podcast from living green to marketing tips, design, and so much more.

On episode 21 of REAL TIME today, we’re joined by Dr. Naheed Dosani to compliment REALTORS Care® Week 2021. Dr. Dosani, a Toronto-based physician and humanitarian, has been making headlines, and more importantly, a real difference while providing palliative care to the homeless and vulnerably housed since 2014.

In this episode, we’re going to explore Dr. Dosani’s perspective on the state of homelessness in Canada, the impacts of health and social system inequities. We’re going to talk about PEACH, and it stands for Palliative Education and Care for the Homeless and how Canadians, we, can seek humility and empathy in supporting marginalized people. Dr. Dosani, thank you so much for taking some of your precious time to be with us here today. It means a lot to our members and to me. Thank you for this.

Dr. Dosani: Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Erin: You are amazing. As a physician, you must’ve always wanted to help people, but tell us about your journey in medicine, Doctor, and what drew you to caring for the homeless and vulnerably housed in particular.

Dr. Dosani: I’m the son of two refugees who came to Canada in the 1970s from a country called Uganda in Africa. My parents came to Canada as refugees with nothing, fleeing war and persecution. My upbringing was really focused on justice, community wellbeing, and what social change could really inspire. I originally wanted to pursue maybe journalism, maybe law, but then found myself in healthcare and in medicine.

It was a turning point for me working as a resident doctor at the University of Toronto in my training. In my first year of residency, actually, where I met a man named Terry who presented to the shelter I was working at, and he presented in pain crisis because he had a widespread head and neck cancer. He had been on the streets for over 15 years. He had a longstanding mental illness, schizophrenia, and he was actually diagnosed with his cancer a year before at a local cancer center.

Unfortunately, due to his mental health, he wasn’t able to follow up for appointments. The tumor grew, and so he started to experience pain, and he did what any one of us would do. He went hospital to hospital, ER to ER, walk-in clinic to walk-in clinic, seeking the kind of pain control that anybody in this country should have access to.

Terry was denied access to pain medicines. I could read this in the medical notes and the charts. Maybe it was because of stigma. Maybe it was because of bias, but he’s found himself in our care on this day. I remember building a somewhat of a trust with him in the sense that he promised he’d start some pain medicines the next day.

I got to the shelter early the next day to work with him, and I couldn’t find him anywhere, and I had found out that he had died. He had overdosed on a combination of alcohol and street drugs. He had turned to the best pain relief that he knew. It was too little too late. This was a life-changing event that showed me that people experiencing homelessness lack access to care, and particularly people who experience homelessness lack access to palliative care. It’s a human rights issue.

Erin: I think that what you said that jumped out to me there was that he went hospital to hospital, and right away, people thought that he was just a guy there trying to get a fix. Would that be a summary of his situation before something like PEACH could have intervened?

Dr. Dosani: Yes. This is a great question because many people listening might think, well, he had access to healthcare because we all have access to healthcare. It’s “universal” in Canada, but that’s actually a common misnomer in the sense that there are still biases, stigma, and discrimination that exists in our healthcare facilities and in our healthcare programs for people who are unhoused, people who use drugs, people with mental illness, racialized folks.

I’m sure we’re going to talk about this throughout the conversation, but while you may all technically have equal access to healthcare, it doesn’t mean we have equitable access to healthcare, and Terry needed equitable, justice-based access to healthcare, and particularly palliative care.

Erin: Can you define the difference between equal and equitable perhaps in Terry’s case or in some example that can illustrate that for us, Doctor?

Dr. Dosani: For sure. I love this contrast and comparison because I think it’s such a crucial pillar of understanding when it comes to why this kind of work is so important. Our healthcare system is pretty good at being equal.

Most people in this country get the same things to be happy and healthy, but that doesn’t work for everybody, especially for people who might need more like someone who lives on the streets or in shelters or someone who lives in poverty. People like this need equitable care. They need a health system that gives people what they need to be happy and healthy.

In justice-based health systems, that takes us one step further where our systems are rearranged in a way that people are empowered and supported with the resources to make their own healthy lifestyle choices when they want, how they want, where they want. It’s an empowering way.

We need to go from equality to equity to justice. Unfortunately, Terry didn’t have access to equity-based palliative care or justice-based palliative care. That’s why he died. His death has become – I carry it with me everywhere I go. It’s in my heart right now, Erin, and it’s a big reason we do the work we do.

Erin: His death and that brief ships in the night that you had with this man has turned into a catalyst for your life.

Dr. Dosani: Yes. A turning point, a life-changing event that led to me becoming really focused on the issue of homelessness and healthcare. I spent my entire residency learning more about the intersections of healthcare for people experiencing homelessness, and then later applied for a palliative medicine residency at the University of Toronto, where I spent my entire training program figuring out how we could make and inspire a change.

In July of 2014, with colleagues at the Inner City Health Associates in downtown Toronto, we developed the PEACH program, Palliative Education and Care for the Homeless, a mobile street and shelter-based palliative care program that provides healthcare for people, whether they’re under a bridge, on the street, in a shelter, so no person falls through the cracks. It started a very basic with myself and a street nurse named Namarig Ahmed driving around in a Honda Civic. I just actually got rid of that Honda Civic very recently. I had that for a long time.

The program has grown, and in 2021, we have a pretty robust program. We care for between 120 to 130 clients at any time. We have a health navigator on the team. We have a nurse coordinator, five palliative care physicians, a PEACH psychiatrist. We also have had iterations of peer workers, people with lived experiences on the program, and integration with our home and community care colleagues, including physiotherapy and PSW supports to really meet people where they’re at.

Erin: Incredible, and without being too precious, you literally grew PEACH from the pit, the whole, the deficit that was on the Toronto streets in terms of the state of palliative care for the homeless and vulnerability. How many other people were paying attention to this when the whole issue of Terry and your residency coincided, Doctor?

Dr. Dosani: The issue of homelessness and healthcare – and particularly access to palliative care – has actually been written about around the world for quite some time. It’s not a new concept per se. A lot of people around the world have written editorials and commentaries and the literature and even popular media articles about the fact that we need to do better, but what was lacking was a real robust view of how we can clinically create models to make this happen.

In most jurisdictions across North America, Europe, and Australia, there is access to community-based palliative care; but what doesn’t actually happen is that those community-based programs orient themselves towards people who live in respite shelters, drop-ins, rooming houses, and really where unhoused populations reside; but also bringing it together with a trauma-informed approach to care, recognizing that many people who live on the streets and in shelters have experienced significant loss and trauma.

Also recognizing that people who live on the streets and in shelters also are people who use drugs, and a lot of the time, they don’t get access to palliative care because the requirement for access to palliative care is stopping the use of drugs. We know that doesn’t work. Abstinence doesn’t work, so we provide harm reduction palliative care. I think it’s the combination of those concepts that make PEACH unique.

Erin: Well, PEACH is unique, as a matter of fact, in all of humility. I really want you to blow your own horn here, Doctor, it has been brought to the attention of cities worldwide, has it not?

Dr. Dosani: Yes, we’re really lucky and feel honored to be part of a network of family of programs that exists in cities all around the world, right here in Canada. Colleagues in Victoria, Edmonton, and Calgary, to name a few, have developed programs that feature mobile supports and mobile programs for people who are in need of palliative care and provide palliative care for structurally vulnerable people. The model has actually been replicated in cities like Seattle and Brisbane, Australia, and even as far as ways as England as well. This really is a global health issue. It’s this intersection of the need for palliative care and the need for homeless healthcare intersecting together. It really makes a lot of sense.

I think it’s important for us to reflect on the fact that people who experience homelessness are 28 times more likely to have hepatitis C virus, five times more likely to have heart disease, four times more likely to have cancer. The average life expectancy for people who live on the streets and in shelters is actually 34 to 47 years old. When you look at the life expectancy of Canadians, that can range from between 77 and 82 years old. Homelessness cuts a person’s lifespan by half. It is a terminal diagnosis of the social determinants of health, how we live, learn, work, and play. This is really how we conceptualize the issue.

Erin: 34 to 47. That’s an incredible number just to stop and look at. It’s almost as though being unhoused or vulnerably housed in itself is a deadly disease.

Dr. Dosani: Totally. Then when you throw in the addition of a life-limiting illness, like cancer or end-stage kidney disease, or COPD, or liver failure, for example, you really see mortality go up. We recognize that to be on the streets, to live in a shelter is already taking years off of your life. Then when you have another medical illness, it’s clear why access to healthcare is key, of course, but access to palliative care is an important component of any approach that supports healthcare of people experiencing homelessness and focuses on human rights, and of course, people’s dignity and their quality of life.

Erin: Back with Dr. Naheed Dosani in a moment. He’s a man who, with his team, makes a difference on the streets of his city, throughout the country, and the world. We’re going to talk about that and so much more on this special edition of REAL TIME that comes while we’re marking REALTORS Care® Week.

REALTORS Care® is a national guiding principle celebrating the great charitable work done by you as a member of the Canadian REALTOR® community. Help raise awareness for the causes closest to your heart and home by sharing your story. Using #REALTORSCare on your favorite social media platform.

As we return now to our chat with Dr. Naheed Dosani, I asked him what impact this PEACH program has had and just what he has seen with his own eyes.

Dr. Dosani: It’s a fair question. What does the PEACH program really do? At the outside, it’s important to recognize that we provide medical care, and those pieces are key. We also, because we’re a palliative care program, prioritize people’s pain and symptom management, and particularly their quality of life, which is bread and butter for what palliative care and healthcare programs really do. It’s so much more than the medical model. It’s about meeting people where they’re at.

When I talked about trauma-informed care, that’s really supporting people and connecting with people. It’s allowing people to heal, even if they’re really sick, giving people a hand to hold or someone to talk to when no one else is around. It can also be very practical, particularly when working with this population. Palliative care is not just providing the medical care, it’s actually ensuring people have the basic necessities of life, like a roof over their heads, so finding housing is a huge part of what we do. Securing food for people. Ensuring people have money in their bank account. People have social supports and human connections when they need them.

There’s an aspect of this that’s psychological or even emotional or spiritual care in nature to recognize that there’s a higher power or something out there that’s driving our soul and our will so that people can heal. Each team member, depending on their discipline, leverages these different components of that holistic biopsychosocial-spiritual model to make this work.

Erin: You mentioned the spiritual aspect of it. How do you get up every morning knowing that this is what you’re going to be doing? Is it the hope or the difference that fuels you, or how do you do it, Dr. Dosani?

Dr. Dosani: I think that’s a very fair question too. At the outset of that question, I will say that a lot of the time I have difficulty, and I’m going to be just vulnerable with you for a second, Erin, to say that this is not easy. Our team sees a lot of suffering in different ways. Remember, we’re dealing with people who have fallen through the gaps again and again and again, and then towards the end of life, are fallen through the gaps again at a time when no one should ever fall through the gap.

If we can’t get the dying part right to help people, how are you going to work on the living part? It’s frustrating. It’s sad. It’s heavy at times, but on the flip side, what drives me is that in just a short amount of time, just a few years, a few people who care in healthcare and social services have come together to develop a model of care that inspires change, a new way of thinking, a new way of being, and we’re doing it. Then we’re doing it in a lot of cities across Canada now, and now people around the world are doing it. Like, what’s not to be inspired by?

The other thing that really drives me is that this work is not being done in isolation. It’s not like I’m doing my clinical work and then going home and hanging out, it’s tied to advocacy. I could never imagine doing this work in an isolated way. It’s connected to advocacy around anti-homelessness policies, around ending poverty, because a lot of Canadians don’t realize that homelessness is a human-made problem. It was created by humans, and it can be ended through policy choices, like housing first or housing for all, which actually saves the system a lot of money.

I advocate in a systemic and structural way at a population level. That makes the clinical work make a lot more sense because you know you’re working on something better.

Erin: We’re going to get to that in terms of integrating it with our message here today for REALTORS Care® Week. Let me go back to the personal for a moment, and just as you open the door to vulnerability, which of course, shows such great courage, what kind of life does this leave you with? Do you have time for your own personal life?

Dr. Dosani: Balance is really important. Sometimes when you’re in the thick of these cases and you’re in it deep with people who are dealing with such strife, it’s hard to see that, but wellness and resilience is really important. We’re hot off the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re still in the COVID-19 pandemic. Let’s be real right. More than ever before, health workers have been pushed in a way that we haven’t been pushed before. I don’t like calling it burnout because I think that places the blame on colleagues.

I think a lot of people, including folks who work on the PEACH team, including myself, are at times facing moral injury and even compassion fatigue, because this work is heavy, because it’s hard, we’re not getting breaks. Specifically for people who work on the front lines of homelessness because the policy solutions are not being put into place to prevent homelessness.

Our work and our services are being accessed more than ever before. That’s a scary thought, but I got to say that there’s hope. One of the things that we do as a team to support each other is to support our grief. We recognize very early on in this journey that people working in healthcare and in social services, providing a palliative care for people in the community needed help and support around their grief and their loss experiences, particularly when we were supporting clients who ended up dying.

We developed these things called grief circles. There are actually ceremonies that happen when a client dies. We will descend on a respite shelter or drop-in. We will hold a minute of silence. We will light a candle, and then we will cry together. We’ll laugh together. We’ll tell stories of what it was like to care for the person that we cared for. Then we’ll think about how to not just remember or reflect on that care, but how to renew and reinvest in each other. We call it the 4Rs, and then we’ll hold that moment of silence and put that candle out and go out and do it again.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we had these grief circles virtually, and actually, the PEACH program got utilized in the city of Toronto to actually hold these grief circles for health workers working in the COVID recovery models, maybe not working in palliative care, but people who are working just in the healthcare models for people experiencing homelessness because of all the overdose deaths that we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. Do I think grief circles are the answer to your question? No, it’s scratching at the surface, but we need to develop safe, structured ways for people to address their grief, and me having that space through the grief circles with the PEACH program helps a lot.

Erin: Good. It’s good to hear that there are ways to take care of you because we’ve all been so loud and rah, rah and banging the pots and pans, and it’s quieted down, and then you start wondering who is taking care of the caregivers.

We’re so grateful to Dr. Dosani for sharing his passion and commitment today towards helping the most vulnerable among us. His chat with us is complimenting REALTORS Care® Week. There are incredible stories that you can access by following REALTORS Care® on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and using your own #REALTORSCare. Now, back to Dr. Naheed Dosani.

Tell us, Doctor, how has the pandemic impacted Canada’s unhoused and vulnerably housed populations specifically? You mentioned the drug overdoses. In what other ways because so many of us have just been tied up with our own dramas and mourning and challenges during this time?

Dr. Dosani: People experiencing homelessness were hanging by a thread before the pandemic, and that thread essentially snapped. People were disconnected from their social and healthcare supports via their respite shelters or drop-ins, and many of these facilities and institutions that support people who are unhoused had to close or reduce services due to physical distancing. Remember, this was before we had a vaccine. This was very hard for people. We ended up seeing more people than ever before on the streets and in parks.

What we did see to be positive about things was an incredible response that was collaborated from our health facilities and health workers to social care agencies, to activists, to government agencies, to faith groups, who in different cities and towns across Canada said, “We need to respond to support people experiencing homelessness and to make this work to save lives.” We saw the development of hotels, and motels, recovery programs.

I had the distinct pleasure and continue to be the medical director for the Region of Peel’s COVID-19 Isolation Housing Program. The development of these programs that we saw spread up all across Canada. This was an amazing feat. It actually showed me that there’s a lot more ability for us to collaborate and make magic happen than we thought. Before COVID, it was always, “There aren’t resources, and we can’t make that happen.” Look, COVID showed we could do it. I always say, “COVID has proven we can cure homelessness if we really want to.” That’s really exciting.

On the flip side, and it’s more of a negative tone, I also saw the increase in criminalization of poverty through and through. In cities like Toronto, the people I care for used to maybe get ticketed if they were panhandling. Now, we saw actually violent encampment clearings by the City of Toronto and Toronto Police. This happened in many cities across Canada, where they were actually sending drones, horses, police, and militarized operations to remove people.

One report done by the media here in Toronto, they removed 60 people from parks in Toronto and spent $2 million. That equates to about $33,000 per person. Imagine if that money was just spent on housing. Well, in one way, we saw the rise of empathy, compassion, and collaboration is magic to respond to the needs of people experiencing homelessness. Our cities and police forces across Canada actually criminalize poverty in a way that I’ve never seen before. This should be concerning to people who are listening to this discussion.

Erin: Now that our eyes are open, what would you suggest we do so that we don’t see a clearing like we saw before, but that the city gets to reclaim the open spaces and safe spaces for families? Where’s the compromise? Where’s the common ground, Doctor? What would you have done?

Dr. Dosani: Well, I think we need to really ask ourselves about these incredible programs that have been developed across the country. These COVID recovery models are potentially new best practices that will allow us to help people off the street and give them a pathway and then provide social and healthcare supports for them. Then, of course, hopefully, support and empower them to be on a pathway towards housing from those sites.

Many of the leases on these COVID recovery models across Canada are actually ending very soon. I would be really disappointed if cities across Canada and our country said, “Yes, that was COVID. COVID’s over now. Go back to the streets and in shelters. Go back to how things were.” No, our legacy, the silver lining of a post-recovery world is that we can actually end homelessness.

I think we also need to really think about some of the assumptions we make when we’re having these conversations. Some of the politicians made statements that these people were making parks dangerous. Well, in actuality, there’s very few reports of that. When you look at the data, there was accusations that they were starting fires. There was, again, very little data to prove that. There’s a lot of bias and stigma and discrimination that comes into that.

The other thing is just to recognize that these are people with complex issues, complex feelings of hurt, and loss, and trauma, or sometimes mental illness, other physical illnesses. We need to build relationships with them. Of course, there is a desire to get people housed and connected, but if people don’t feel safe with their options, we need to listen to them.

Instead of putting the onus on people who are in encampments to find the solution, let’s put them back on our politicians who have to respond to these feelings and just say it’s their duty to make these spaces safe. That means increasing the amount of affordable housing supply in this country and making sure that this housing supply is high quality and safe for people because housing is a human right.

Erin: You’ve also said that housing is healthcare. Can you explain this and why you believe this, Doctor?

Dr. Dosani: I think in 2021, we’re pretty much in agreement that the social factors that impact healthcare impact health outcomes. This includes people who don’t have a home, people who don’t have money, people who don’t have access to food, security, and so homelessness or houselessness, the state of being itself is a risk factor on health.

I shared some of these statistics earlier with you just to say that just not having a home itself is a serious and often life-limiting disease. It can take 50% of a person’s lifespan away, so when you actually provide housing, and then you also provide access to social and healthcare supports, people can dramatically heal from their mental health to their physical health, just feeling dignity in society and feeling a sense of purpose. You can really work to heal people, even if they’re really sick.

When we say housing is healthcare, we’re trying to really frame housing as a healthcare issue because it actually has impact on healthcare outcomes, not to mention the outcomes that it has on society. It saves money. We know through the Housing First study done called the At Home/Chez Soi demonstration project, which was a three-year study done in Canada between 2014 and 2017. We know that for every $1 that went into housing for people with severe mental illness, Canada got $1.87 back. Not only does it make people feel better, it saves us money in the long run. It has the potential to save us millions and even billions of dollars over the years. That’s what we mean when we answer that question.

Erin: Coming up, using social media to spread the word, and how the doctor uses various platforms to lift himself up and get his message out. You can do it too. When you volunteer your time, make a donation, or raise funds for a cause you truly believe in, you’re making a difference in your community. Post that inspiration and have an impact by sharing your story online using #REALTORSCare.

Now, you’ve got a big following on social media, Doctor, which you use to help destigmatize homelessness and poverty. Do you think the message is getting through? How do we go about becoming better informed about these issues?

Dr. Dosani: I’m always honored to be supported by a community that just really cares. I’m actually blown away at the emails and messages and tweets I get and posts on Instagram and people commenting about how they believe in this issue too. They believe that health equity is crucial to a brighter future, but the reality is if you go and survey most Canadians, many people still believe that people who experience homelessness are lazy. Many people believe they did it to themselves. Many people believe people are choosing to be on the streets and in shelters.

Having cared for so many people over the years, I’ve never met one person who wanted to be in the situation that they’re in. Don’t get me wrong, some of the people I care for may have made a bad decision, a decision you and I might not make perhaps, but really, there are structural factors at play that cause homelessness.

We need to destigmatize homelessness from “a person who did it to themselves” kind of view or blaming people for their situation and start looking at things structurally because we know that there is not enough affordable housing in this country to support people. We know that there has been a weakening social safety net at the federal, provincial, regional, and city levels over the last three decades around healthcare, social assistance, PharmaCare, social supports. This has led to this trajectory of people experiencing homelessness.

We’re seeing a growing trend of people who are older and frail, who are experiencing homelessness for the first time after the age of 50. This is a growing trend. This is one of the elements of capitalism on steroids. We really need to think about that. I hope that through my posts on social media, we’re able to send those messages across and sometimes telling a compassionate story that derives empathy from people. Sometimes it’s just using capital letters and yelling because you just think there’s no other response. There is no other way to respond. It depends on the day, maybe the hour.

Erin: Yes, right. Are you seeing progress in terms of people’s perspectives or willingness to help? I’m thinking, you don’t have to be a Dr. Dosani or a Nurse Ahmed or somebody with a degree in order to help you. Are you seeing more people saying, “What can I do? I want to dive in.”

Dr. Dosani: I think the COVID-19 pandemic shined the light on inequities in a way that we have not seen for quite some time. People are more aware of these issues. That might be a silver lining of what happened during COVID. The fact that despite the inequities we saw, we did see more focus on these discussions, and that is power in and of itself.

I was blown away to see the response when cities, like Halifax and Toronto and other cities, actually criminalized poverty and supported violent encampment clearings. We saw the public come out, actually step out to support their unhoused neighbors. We saw people tweeting, posting on social media. We saw outrage, so yes, I do believe there’s progress, and people’s perspectives are changing.

In terms of how Canadians can become better-informed, I think there’s often a desire to go out and act, and I’d say the first step is to become informed, so to listen first. I’d encourage people to visit homelesshub.ca, the York University Observatory on Homelessness, which is a great repository of information on homelessness, both social health and other spheres.

I’d also encourage people to check out the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, who is doing excellent work to advocate for strategies and pathways to ending homelessness through policy, through real change on the streets, in shelters, in our communities. Their website is a really great resource as well.

I think those two resources have been helpful for me. Also just seeking out locally, who are your local respite shelters, drop-ins? Who are the activists who are doing this work? Follow them, support them, support their causes in your local communities because they need your support to derive health equity in your community.

Erin: That may go hand-in-hand with this next question for you because, of course, as you know, this episode is complementing REALTORS Care® Week 2021. During this, real estate boards, associations, and their REALTOR® members are making a collective impact volunteering in supportive housing and shelter-related charities right across Canada. Your advice to any organization, institution, or individual, Doctor, looking to volunteer their time or resources, go to homelesshub.ca, Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness. Anything else that you can recommend?

Dr. Dosani: Look, first, the REALTOR® community is a very special community. I’d first appeal to them by saying REALTORS® are as much or more than anyone else, a person who understands how much a home can mean to a person. There are thousands of Canadians who are dealing with life-threatening illnesses, the illnesses of not having a home, or what that means for them. You can play a real role. You can actually support the creation of new affordable housing. You can help on a policy level. Can you help local charities?

REALTORS® in Canada are often community leaders and influencers. Can you help to create and support community leaders who are working to end homelessness? Can you help to rally their communities, their communications, and their actions? REALTORS® are also respected voices on housing issues. When the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness or other institutions or organizations worked on policy, can you be powerful? Can you be influential? Can you join us in our campaigns?

Then finally, a lot of the time, the solution is really supporting people with resources. Many of the campaigns that we’re working on need money, need support, donations. There’s a bazillion REALTORS® in Canada, you guys are awesome. Your money and supports can really actually make a huge change. I think any opportunity to speak out around policies that will create a more affordable housing supply or directly support through in-kind support, these campaigns will make a huge difference, we need you.

Erin: What a great message. How do we go about ensuring, Doctor, that our support is meaningful for both parties? That we gain empathy and perspective as volunteers, not just showing up and getting that reward of making a difference? What’s your recommendation there to find that support meaningful for both sides?

Dr. Dosani: For sure. I reflect on two concepts here. The first is that sometimes when we go out to do good for communities that experience structural vulnerabilities, sometimes we project what we feel is the best thing for a community on that community. I’d ask you to not project what you think is best for people experiencing homelessness, but seek out the answer to that question, “What is it that the community I live in needs?” You’ll learn.

If you support your local shelters, respites, drop-ins, housing agencies, case management programs, they’ll tell you like, “We need money today because we are out of our compassionate funding,” or, “We’re doing a sock drive, people need socks, we need socks. We don’t need shirts, we need socks.” Very specifically. Listen to the communities that do this work and what they need, and they will guide you.

The second concept is reflect on your vulnerability. I will say that COVID-19 put us all in very unique situations where we all had this experience, where no matter – whether you lived in a home and felt very supportive, or you live on the street, or in a shelter, everyone felt vulnerable during this time. It was hard not to because of this virus and this pandemic.

I know people were thinking about what their mortality or their death might look like, people were thinking about like, “What if I go to hospital?” Tap into that vulnerability. I know that many people have moved on, and life is moving on, but don’t lose sight of what it was like to feel vulnerable, because if you tap into that, you have the potential to derive empathy and compassion for a community in Canada that does not have a home and do not have homes because of structural issues. Tap into that, tap into your empathy and compassion. I know you’ll find the way.

Erin: That’s amazing, it really is the strength and vulnerability. Many people just moved on from it, said, “Okay, what’s next? We’re going to be okay.”

Remembering how we felt the most vulnerable, we felt most of us in our lives. Thank you for reminding us of that. As we wrap up our chat for today, Doctor, and thank you again so much for your time. It’s amazing to look at the calendar. It’s felt like the longest year, and yet it’s amazing that 2021 is almost done. What has been your biggest takeaway from this year of so many images? How are you hoping to finish it off?

Dr. Dosani: I learned that despite our best efforts in society, even in the midst of a serious pandemic like COVID-19, we may have tried to all be in it together, but we were not. Some of us were in yachts thriving through this pandemic, and others were in life rafts barely surviving. What I do appreciate is that we can have a conversation about this. I can say this to you, Erin, and this resonates, it’s hard to deny that that’s true. We saw the outcomes on people’s experience during COVID-19.

The silver lining for me is at least we’re having the conversation. At least inequity is on the radar for people. Look, we’re doing this recording. It shows me that we are moving towards a society where we are thinking about the impact of a lack of housing for social assistance rates, PharmaCare, and the need for PharmaCare for people.

We’re thinking about food insecurity in unique ways and other kind of social inequities that really are impacting people in our communities. It’s everybody’s business. Everybody’s responsible to derive equity and justice for the people around you.

Erin: Do you think it’s possible?

Dr. Dosani: I do, I really do. There’s something called the spirit level, and there’s a famous book that was written about it that societies that are more equitable, people actually tend to be more happy, there’s less crime, the spirit level rises.

Actually, I’m hopeful of the fact that people recognize that when we are more connected, when we are more socially supported, and when people are not marginalized, people do better in all aspects of the world and in society. If this little dive into the world of palliative care, and what it’s like to support people who experience homelessness gets us there or one step towards that place, then I think this was a good time. I think this was totally worth it.

Erin: Oh, what a great conversation. Thank you so much for honoring us with this. Thank you, Dr. Dosani, so much.

Dr. Dosani: Thank you, Erin, really appreciate it. To all the REALTORS® out there, thank you so much for everything you do, I appreciate your time.

Erin: As we do appreciate yours, Doctor, not that there’s a lot of it.

Learn more about Dr. Naheed Dosani and how you can help him make a difference right across Canada, and as he stresses, locally, where you are. Again, that website he mentioned is homelesshub.ca, and check out the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness.

REAL TIME is a production of Alphabet® Creative, Real Family Productions, and Rob Whitehead. I’m Erin Davis. We invite you to join us for our next episode of REAL TIME, brought to you by The Canadian Real Estate Association when we’ll sit down with the incredible Stefan Swanepoel, a leading visionary of real estate trends. It promises to be exciting, and you don’t want to miss it, and so you don’t because we know you’re busy. Subscribe to our channels on Spotify, Apple, and Stitcher, and we’ll talk to you again soon on REAL TIME. Thanks for coming by.

Erin Davis: Hello and welcome to REAL TIME, Canada’s podcast for and about REALTORS® brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association. I’m Erin Davis. So glad you could join us for this enlightening conversation for our 27th episode. Now I just want you to take a moment and give this some thought. While no country can be defined by a single architectural style, there’s always a prevailing image: the Moorish riads of Morocco, Dubai sky-high contemporary landscape, the renaissance aesthetic of Italy. When we think of Canada, what comes to mind?

On episode 27 of REAL TIME, we are joined by Newfoundland-born, Norway-based architect, Todd Saunders best known for his iconic design of the Fogo Island Inn and Studios in Newfoundland and Labrador. A Canadian architect with a global presence, Todd joins REAL TIME to share his unique perspective on Canadian architecture and his approach to evolving it. We’ll look at the influences that have shaped Canada’s built environment and how a base understanding of these influences can help REALTORS® add value. Todd, thank you so much for joining us.

I wonder if we can go back a little bit if you would tell us about your professional journey from Newfoundland and Labrador to Norway which is where we’re joining you today. How has your career unfolded?

Todd Saunders: The journey from Newfoundland and Norway was from – It started when I was about 15. I left Newfoundland. My dad worked with Air Canada, and we moved to Halifax in my last two years of high school there. Then I studied environmental planning at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Then I wanted to be a landscape architect and I went to Rhode Island School of Design and as an exchange student. I touched in architecture when I was there. Then I was working in Vienna, in Berlin for a while when I was 21, 22. Then I did my master’s degree at McGill University and I studied ecological architecture and town planning, Master’s green architecture.

The weird thing was it was for my Master’s thesis, I hitch-hiked from Paris to China unexpectedly. I got a bunch of scholarships to look at Northern ecological communities. One of the communities is actually in Norway and on my way there, I hitch-hiked through Bergen and I fell in love with the place and a year after I was finished my Master’s degree, I came back. I didn’t go to my graduation at McGill. I put my thesis in the mailbox at the airport and I was gone before school was finished. I was quite eager. Then in Norway, I started off, I was 25, 26 years old. No contacts, just learning the language.

Basically, I started working really hard and it was on the sidelines of architecture while I was building playgrounds for children and their parents at different schools. I did a wastewater treatment system with a bunch of architecture students. Then I actually got a teaching position at the Bergen architecture school and me and another guy teaching together started a company. We started building our own projects. There was a little cabin we built and bought the land and built it ourselves. That’s actually how we first started our first experience for real estate agents where we project got published in the local newspaper.

Then we got 15 or 16 calls, people wanted to buy it and we intended on keeping it, but we sold it after a couple of weeks. We owned it and did really well economically on it and then started winning competitions. It was a hard start because it took about three or four years before we got any really interesting projects. It was like my early 30s before we started getting stuff built.

Erin: It seems like Norway, did have some familiarity within you to Newfoundland. It’s almost like the title of the award-winning documentary Strange and Familiar. Did Norway feel at all like home because of course it is now? You’ve been there for almost 20 years meeting your wife around 1995 or ’96. Now there you are in Norway planted like John Lennon’s Norwegian would. How is it that Norway resonated with you in terms of maybe comparison or familiarity to Canada?

Todd: Visually it was the same but economically, Norway is one of the richest countries in the world. But at the same time, their country from farmers and fishermen, and I experienced that upwards richness, wealth when I came here. First, when I got here, it was still a lot like Newfoundland down to earth. The architecture was very low-key, very practical. The landscape was the same, the food was the same, it was basically salt, pepper, dill and fish and then root vegetables. The food was very similar. Culture, it’s a bit different though. Newfoundlanders are extremely sociable whereas Norwegian in the countryside are quite private.

The city I live in Bergen, they’re more like Newfoundlanders, very hospitable and talkative. I actually really like the city I live in Bergen. I feel very at home. That’s actually why I came here. I was actually supposed to live and work in Oslo, but it wasn’t that interesting or different compared to Newfoundland and Bergen was, but there’s a lot of similarities, but there are two different worlds if you start looking at it in detail. Architecturally, they’re very complimentary and that really helped my career.

Erin: You have said that you can’t plan your life, but that you’ve carried your Newfoundland roots everywhere and a few things that you learned there that stick with you. What have you brought from Newfoundland to your life in Norway? I don’t know if you’ve held any kitchen parties there in Bergen but what have you carried with you from Newfoundland as you’ve expanded your influences throughout the world? We’ll talk more about that coming up.

Todd: Newfoundland has a very good rap now. People are looking at it in a positive way. We have actually negative traits as well, but there’s an openness in Newfoundland and a hospitality and Newfoundlander would give you their shirt off their back. There’s an honesty and directness in Newfoundland. It was funny. You couldn’t lie in Newfoundland because it was your integrity is your currency. If you lied, it’s such a small place within half an hour, everyone knows you lying, and then you lost your integrity and you’re worthless.

That’s been brought with me, like hard work as well. Then growing up on these little small islands, you become very independent because nobody’s there to save you.

Somebody wrote a letter recommendation for me for a professorship one time and he described it as a, I was like a person they could drop in the middle of Siberia and then come back nine months later and then I’ve started my own business and doing really well. It was like, that’s a Newfoundlander. There’s a survival instinct. It’s a tough life down there.

It’s not leaning back and enjoying the flowers and orchids blowing in the air. It’s a tough climate and then there’s humour. That’s another thing is hard to come across in a podcast here but Newfoundlanders, that was the source of survival there, humour. I think that’s got me a long way over here. I hope that God, I haven’t lost that. I was like –

Erin: I’m sure you haven’t. When we return with Norway-based Gander Newfoundland-born Todd, we’ll talk about what he already knew long before the musical Come from Away.

Whether you’re listening in Goose Bay, North Bay, Hilliard’s Bay, or near the Bay of Fundy, you can tap into the knowledge of REALTORS® across the country and share your own lessons and insights by visiting REALTORS® Corner on CREA Cafe. It’s a hub of content created by REALTORS® for REALTORS®. Now back to Todd Saunders.

You left Newfoundland before 911 and of course, that was such a seminal time in Gander when the world’s attention turned to the hospitality of Newfoundlanders, which can’t have been a surprise to you. Now that is the touchstone that I’m sure people around the world if you say, I’m from Gander, Newfoundland, they go, “Oh right, Come from Away.” This has been something else that’s been added to your calling card inadvertently, hasn’t it?

Todd: Yes. That was quite unexpected, but it was not a surprise at all. I think the numbers were, it was 9,000 people landed and 7,000 people living in the place and everyone got a place to sleep, but that’s again hospitality and organizing things on the fly. That’s what Newfoundland is really good at because the weather changes 15 times a day and you got to adapt. I wouldn’t say malleable, but adaptable and optimistic and not really afraid of change. I think that’s what Newfoundland is there. It’s always there with them. I think that’s an asset to roll with the punches.

Erin: How much has that been integrated into your design philosophy, Todd? What is most important to you when approaching a project? You’ve already mentioned integrity is your currency? That is a great foundation onto which you can build. Let’s get into that a little bit, your design philosophy.

Todd: It’s becoming more and more about wants and needs trying make architecture that’s not overly – I wouldn’t say it’s very well-built, very well-crafted. What I like about Newfoundland architecture, it’s all handmade. You can feel it, wants and needs. I’m very, very focused on needs first. When those are covered in architecture and you can explore the wants, if there’s the economy there or then the need for it but we question it as well.

It’s like, “Do you really need that?” It ends up with really, really good discussions. Then another part of me is, I’m extremely curious person and that’s integrated into our process. We work with clients that are really eccentric and they got their economy in place. They’re stable, but they’re always teaching us something. We’re learning from them. They’re learning from us. It’s not all about attaining happiness in our architecture. It’s more about learning, I think, and growth.

Erin: It goes back to what you talked about, being the people from Newfoundland, they are flexible, malleable, the changing weather, the changing needs all the time. You come in with your skillset and then you get somebody who says, “Oh, I want a soft ice cream machine in the bedroom.” Something like that. You have to park your ego a little bit too, don’t you? In terms of saying, okay, I wouldn’t have done that, but it’s what you want. Right?

Todd: Yes. It goes both ways. Clients that come to us, they’re a bit like us. It is the beauty of actually now getting 52 years old and then podcast like this, and then we’ve done our third book now. People can read about our values and we’re attracting more and more people that want to help.

Erin: You’ve also been doing some philanthropy I understand, an information center in Maine for the woman who founded Burt’s Bees.

Todd: Yes. Roxanne Quimby contacted us a few years ago. That’s under construction and I was in the meeting yesterday about that. They built the foundation last year and I’ll be going over again this summer and then Roxanne’s son Lucas. I think they used $20 million on the building and about $100 million donated the money for the land. Now they found out about the work that we were doing on Fogo Island. We’re moving more and more in that direction because the clients have great motivations and so the developers. We work with some of them where we try to focus on quality, but at the end of the day, it’s about making money and it’s a business, that part. Whereas my personal interest is actually working with a philanthropist because they have the money, and their intention is just to make the best possible architecture. Then it’s usually for a good cause. Then it’s a great alignment of our values and their values. It’s a very interesting field and we just publishing an article now called Architecture and Philanthropy a Catalyst for Change. Fogo Island, for example, there is the Inn has created 70 small businesses on that little island. Wouldn’t that be fantastic if you made a building that could generate its own economy?

That’s what we’re trying to interest in now, not just being a drain on economy and a maintenance nightmare, it’s a building that actually gives back. We’re trying to move in that direction. There’s not many clients out there like the client at Fogo Island Inn, like Zita Cobb, and then Roxanne Quimby at the Katahdin National Park. They’re hard to find, but when you find them, it’s fantastic.

Erin: Let’s talk about coming home and how do you feel architecture impacts the way that we live, interact with or appreciate a place?

Todd: I think architecture when done with care and with love can create care and love. What saddens me now is there’s a lot of architecture that’s half-designed. It’s good enough. It’s a bit sad because these things last for hundreds of years and then the homes we create, there’s only actually even one of them ever been sold. People fall in love with these places. Then things the Fogo Island Inn, for example, I love that place. I was there, there was a woman I met on the roof. One time my two daughters were in one hot tub and her husband was in another hot tub. We started talking. She was a psychology professor, so we could be open really quickly.

Then I asked her why she was there and she goes, “Well, my husband’s going to die in six weeks, has a terminally ill disease and going to take euthanasia and he said, this is one of the places he wanted to visit before he died.

Erin: To talk, not only about the end of life but the beginning of life too, because in your experience you’ve had a handful of clients whose children have become architects. Just hanging around the Todd Saunders effect or what was that? How did that come to be?

Todd: I don’t know how that was. It just started happening. It was like you were with these families and these little 9, 10-year-old kids were often there at the office hanging out and then you meet them afterwards. Then they say, yes, my son’s an architect. Then my daughter became an architect, works in the city now and maybe living in these houses probably does affect them on some type of level. Then they probably see the love and care we put into these things.

Erin: Exactly. It was such a positive effect.

Todd: Yes. They probably see their family’s experience, enjoy, like making, creating something. It’s a big deal, starting from nothing and then creating something which you live and creating needs and layers of memories,

Erin: Todd Saunders, creator, and architect of the Fogo Island Inn and Studios in Newfoundland and Labrador talks about that gorgeous labour of love, shaping history and the future. When we come back, when we discuss labours of love, volunteering often comes to mind.

As a realtor, when you volunteer your time, make a donation or raise funds for your favourite cause, you are making a difference in your own community. Help amplify this great impact and maybe even inspire others to do the same by sharing your story online, using #realtorscare.

Designing the Fogo Island Inn, and we’ve referred to this throughout our chat today. I couldn’t wait to get to this, and I really do urge people to find the documentary Strange and Familiar, an award-winning film about your heart’s work. I won’t say your life’s work because you are a young man but designing the Fogo Island Inn was a milestone in your career, Todd. What was it to honour the island’s history while in some ways shaping a vision for new architecture in the area?

Todd: This is a place, it’s one of the poorest provinces in the country, always been, and there’s not many architects there. I have already practiced for about 10 years and I never thought I’d make a piece of architecture in Newfoundland, but because I travelled, I worked in six or seven different countries and traveling over 100 and its places India, Portugal, Costa Rica, South Africa, Japan, they have their own architecture, their own identity. I always kept checking back to Newfoundland. It was the more I was away, the more I appreciated the uniqueness and the individuality of Newfoundland. Then when I did get the call, it was yes, I think Zita chose me.

She interviewed 50 architects, but I think she said one time, it was because I had as much to lose as she did if it went wrong. She knew I would give it everything. I gave my heart and soul to that project. It’s a big part of me, but for better or worse, like I mentioned in the film, whatever we did or whatever we designed would be the future of that place forever. Luckily, and I knew in the bottom of my heart that this would go well. Luckily it’s created some amazing change and just people who’ve been there, David Letterman’s been there, Gwyneth Paltrow, the Prime Minister of Canada. That’s one part of it then, but there’s one very interesting people from all around the world. Like the producers of Come from Away, I walked them around through the four studios, we spent the whole day with them.

Erin: I love the one that you designed that is for writers. You just walk right in and there’s the desk overlooking the window. It’s like, “How could you not create in this space?”

Todd: Yes, there was the ex-CEO The National Gallery Canada. It’s actually called the Bridge Studio, but it was actually designed for a writing studio, but no one knew that. He walked into the door when he was there and he said, “I want to sit down and write a book here.” It’s made for that.

That’s getting back to the needs again. That one was the only studio made for a specific art type, which is writing. Then we just said, what do you need? It was a desk, a chair, a place to put your pencils, place a to lay your paper, a little seat by the fire, and that was it.

Erin: It’s just so wonderful. I hope that you’ve got one tricked out with acoustics. Somebody like me or you can sit down and do some broadcasting from there.

Todd: Yes, that’s right. I think all of them can be used for that actually; that was the one interesting thing is when I’m designing houses, they’re bespoke and tailor-made to the person. This is one of the first projects I did where everyone had to be a possible user. That was why the inn worked so well. We had a collaborative process where everybody’s opinion was equal because everybody could be a possible guest.

Erin: How do you get there?

Todd: Yes, you can fly Toronto to Gander, I think directly now. Then from New York, it’s New York–St. John’s Gander, and then drive out from there.

Erin: Oh, you drive. Okay.

Todd: There’s a private airplanes can land on the runway in Fogo, which is just a five-minute drive from the Inn. A lot of people do that.

Erin: We’re back in a moment with architect, son of Newfoundland and Labrador, and now resident of Norway, Todd Saunders, who will tell us why he’s glad there’s not a Canadian flavour if you will when it comes to our architecture.

Enjoying REAL TIME? Well, we hope so. Thank you. A reminder to subscribe wherever you love your podcasts for monthly episodes with guests who share ideas that we promise will resonate with you long after the closing theme has played. Don’t miss our next episode with TSN zone James Duthie, about the art of conversation.

Now back to Todd Saunders. Now, Todd, you’ve talked about all of the different countries in which you’ve worked. With this global perspective, what can you tell us about Canadian architecture? Is there a Canadian flavour?

Todd: I think there’s a Canadian attitude and thank God there isn’t a Canadian flavour and I’ll explain why I was the judge for the National Architecture Prize in Canada, which is called the Governor General’s Award. I’d been away for years, and they just asked me to join. I was in Ottawa and then presenting, I think they presented 100 projects that were being made in Canada. It reminded me a bit of Norway because Norway’s a very long country, very monotone culturally, like the people one language and 95% of the people are Lutheran; but in Canada, it’s also a large country, but very multicultural.

Norway there’s a lot of different architecture here and a lot of different personalities in the architecture, which I didn’t really prefer. I saw the same thing in Canada. I saw these young companies do spectacular work. It made me so happy to see the high quality. I wouldn’t say individuality, that’s not the right word, but uniqueness. It was very specific to place, like hyper-specific. That’s what I hope the style, we call it a style or a flavor of Canada, I think that would be the best thing Canada can do is just be very, very, very specific to where you’re working on. That’s what I tell these architecture students I work with.

I gave the lecture at Yale last fall when I was teaching there. I ended off by saying, everyone’s looking at these so-called ‘star’ architects. Then they’re working all around the world, but I said it’s one part of it, but the real joy I got out of the project was actually focusing on one place, like Fogo Island, and then really going deep. I encouraged them to find – you can do your projects all around the world, but maybe find one place you really, really love like community, and put a lot of effort in there. Use a lot of time, build up relationships and really go deep.

I think Voltaire talked about it. He said ‘cultivate your garden’. That’s what he meant. Use the time to get to know the garden where you…and then it’s your whole life you can put into there. You can take what you learn from these other projects, bring them back to that one place and then focus on being hyper-specific. Then trying to create an architecture that adds to a place and that people are proud of, and people love, and architecture gives instead of takes.

Erin: In that way, I think there’s a great tie-in and a familiarity with REALTORS® in that it is about connection and connection with community.

Todd: Yes, and I think that’s what and I see it swinging back like the younger generations architects just behind me are, they’ve varied values. I see it in my oldest daughter, it’s 15, they’re different. They’re buying all their clothes. Second hand on these apps online. There’s a new economy coming out of this. There’s a new value set of systems. I see hope actually that the city I lived in was actually, there was shops everywhere on the corners when I first moved here 20 years ago and now 7-Eleven, Starbucks owns every one of them. Then the city’s not allowing people advertise companies in the public spaces and there’s a resistance to it.

Now there’s a uniqueness in this city, and I think it’ll survive. I’ve seen St. John’s, Newfoundland as well. There’s a lot of peculiar, interesting little shops there. Copenhagen’s got that. I think the world craves this multifaceted diverse things. I think we went through a phase where a Starbucks and 7-Eleven were taken. I think that’s on its way out, hopefully. That’s where architects and REALTORS® can play a role.

Erin: I love that. We seem to be seeing the changes of you talk about your daughters buying clothes secondhand and that there’s this new economy. It’s like turning old industrial areas, seeing old factories, becoming homes, and seeing porches, making a comeback and outside spaces.

Todd: Yes. That’s like makes much more interesting. See, I think there’s one thing that the REALTORS® probably know and people are interested in interesting neighbourhoods. For example, Kitsilano in Vancouver and certain areas in Toronto and Montreal. I think people are buying into neighbourhoods now as much as they’re buying a specific piece of real estate because the neighbourhood is becoming their living room. You can actually build smaller, and your gym is the parks and stuff like that. I think the architects and planners can make better neighbourhoods than the, and with a good variation of architecture.

I think, yes, I definitely know that the statistics with the real estate agents here, there’s certain neighbourhoods that the houses sell quicker and stuff like that. There’s two or three areas in Bergen here. That’s young people in their 30s and 40s and they’re staying there. They’re buying places and not moving. They’re really enjoying the neighbourhoods.

Erin: Now you’re designing homes for people who are in their 70s and up and you get joy out of that?

Todd: I loved what, my best clients are over 70. I just love it because they’re like, it’s their last house and they’re like, they know how to make decisions. They’ve been living in other places. It’s actually hard to design for younger, like the 30-year-old couples, if they’re not well synced and know each other. It’s difficult to design for them but the ones over 50, 60 gets easier, 70 gets even easier. Then I’ve done one couple, they’re both in their 80s. They just turned 80 right now. That was fantastic. Such a joy to work with them. Yes.

Erin: You enjoy one-story houses. Tell us why this is such an insight into architecture that I hadn’t even considered.

Todd: Yes. It’s like a number of reasons that they’re easier to solve and they’re much more playful. Like a stair, for example, no one really knows that if you move a stair in a house, you might as well start all over again. You can move a few rooms around and stuff like that but as soon as you move a stair in a house design, then you really got to stick and move it, adjust it a little bit but once you move it more than so much, you might as well start off with a whole new house. Stairs actually take up a lot of square footage without even you knowing it. It creates hallway spaces but at the same time we do verticality in some of the houses, but I really started to enjoy the one-story houses.

Then with annexes where you have the core rooms in one part and then there’s an annex or a guest bedroom or a garage or a yoga studio or some other pod, which is connected by a roof and you create this like covered outside space between these two or three different elements. That’s where it gets fun. We’re starting to do more of that and stuff like this. You can work on Zoom and you don’t have to travel that much anymore.

Erin: As we speak to you, you’re sitting in your library in your home, and of course, it’s all about multifunction now, which is probably something that you always did embrace. You’ve spoken about it the parts of the house that are the gym or the home office or the guest room. Having houses where wellness is also integrated, like for meditation and getting well and allowing the light in.

Todd: It’s like a house, it’s a refuge in a way but I’m getting away from the single-family houses. We do them, but we’re working more on town planning stuff now. That’s where my love is because my undergrad is environmental town planning, and you can’t really get a commission doing a town plan when you move to Norway at 26 years old. Now at my age, we’re starting together. We’re doing a creative community outside of Atlanta, Georgia right now. We’re working on a second home community with live workspaces outside of Bergen right now. It’s like 47 different units that we could use, but we’re designing it in a way that looks like three different pieces.

It’s based on this old traditional grouping of farmhouses, that’s quite eccentric and unique to Norway. But I’m more interested in designing neighbourhoods. I would love to design a car-free neighbourhood somewhere in Canada, like the first off-the-grid car-free neighbourhood. That would be a dream and I think it’s possible. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of institutional barriers to these things, but fortunately some of the really eccentric architects are getting in. There are actually town planners in cities now, and there’s a lot more openness. I think we’re in for some really interesting types of projects coming up soon.

Erin: Well, what changes or trends, Todd, have you been seeing in Canadian architecture that inspire you today?

Todd: Because of COVID, I haven’t been home that much. Just generally in the world, there’s a strive towards uniqueness and interesting and different is I think that’s the key now. I think people are tired of waking up in a hotel in some city and there’s a five-second moment where you don’t know where you are.

Erin: Right.

Todd: I think that architecture has a role to play on that. Like why travel anymore if everything looks the same? I spent a week now in this town Barjac in France; it was fantastic. I was just down there working and observing people, little town squares, and history there and getting to know the waiter and the yoga teacher and stuff like that.

Erin: When we wrap up with Todd Saunders, how the givers are the greatest and why word of mouth is the best advertising here or anywhere else in the world.

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There’s a high degree of trust established between REALTORS® and their clients and I’m sure that’s the case for you too. I found it fascinating to learn that you have never paid for advertising.

Todd: Once, that was a couple of months ago, actually I was tricked into it.

Erin: Ah.

Todd: It was an airline magazine –

Erin: Oh,

Todd: – did a profile on Scandinavian I didn’t even know. I’ve never – I think 25 years that we ever paid for … I do a lot of interviews, and this is actually giving away information. My last book is called Share. Interview with 30 Nordic architects, that’s coming out this fall and it’s like 99 questions that I always wanted to ask other architects, because they were like starting my own company and what it was like. I did those 99 questions, and I asked these 30 architects, most of my friends, and asked them to answer three questions and it turned into these great interviews and I think giving information away and I think that’s more of –

People don’t understand it. It’s like you’re getting called by advertisers all the time and salespeople. They just want to take, it’s like, it’s the wrong way. If you want to get something, it’s the givers of the world that come furthest. Even though it’s in this hyper-economic society of selfies and stuff like that, everyone thinks it’s the takers that get the most but as the takers and then if you give without expectations, then you get a lot more in return. I think that’s why we never really, we’ve always been open to talk about our architecture. We create high-quality things. That’s another thing. If you do good stuff, people will want it. They want to pay for it and then they want to learn about it.

If you’re a person that has those qualities and you’re willing to give away and share, you gain a lot. It seems to work for us.

Erin: Oh, it sure does. Going back to what you said too, that integrity is your currency, which of course translates to REALTORS® so well, so let’s, as we begin to wrap this up here, Todd, what would you consider your key to successful client relationship management?

Todd: There’s a lot of layers to that. You mentioned the word trust. Trust is not a given. Like I have a lot of discussions about this. Trust is like layers of shared experiences. We use time with clients and the trust gets built up and we deliver. We’re reliable, it’s a big part of trust. We’re predictable. What we say, we do. I think that’s another tip for REALTORS® and then we never over-promise. Then we align our expectations very early along. Like I’m always asking questions. We very rarely draw to like the third or fourth meeting.

It’s a lot of asking questions and finding out things and when you understand another person, when you feel, you understand what they need and you focus on that, then it’s easier to make decisions. There’s too many architects coming to the board. I don’t know if real estate agents, but they come with a preconceived idea and they’re shoving it down in other people’s throats. It’s like they’re pushing their ideas and they’re not listening. Listening is a huge part of this and it’s ironic because I’m in a podcast and just talking but the listening and then asking good questions and then there’s curiosity. I think that’s why we do quite well.

Then I tell the people on the team that when you’re in conversations with people, it’s not about making the best design. It’s not about making the most money. It’s about building up relationships. If you build up a good relationship, that’s a fantastic thing. I was on an airplane a while ago. It was like 12 years after my dad had died and the pilot actually gave me a favour because my dad used to fix his plane and it’s like, it’s a relationship. That’s like my dad did something good for someone 20 years ago and then someone else still remembers. I think that’s a lot to do with anyone in business. Real estate, architects, selling books at a store. It’s like the personal connection you make with people it’s extremely valuable.

Erin: It is. It is. Todd, one final, final note here. What is one thing that you suggest to someone who is listening right now that they can do to become more attuned to the architecture around them?

Todd: Let’s say walk slower. Like the value of just taking a walk around your neighbourhood and that’s what probably saddens me the most about the way Canadian and North American cities are designed. They’re not experienced up close. When I take a walk, like walking around your neighbourhood. I was just in Mexico City. I missed my plane to Fogo and then I said, “Ah, hell with it. I was just going to stay in this neighbourhood called Condesa.” I walked like an hour in each direction. I could feel like, I know that was a beautiful walk, so walking and observing, being curious.

Erin: Taking a break. Todd, we can’t thank you enough for your time, your consideration, your immense talent and for everything that you’ve done to bring Canada to the fore, you’re an incredible ambassador for this country. Even as you work abroad and make your mark in all of the different communities in which you plan and you build. Thank you for that.

Todd: Thanks for those very kind words and thank you.

Erin: Once again, I can’t recommend highly enough that you search out and watch the documentary Strange and Familiar: Architecture on Fogo Island and see and hear our guest Todd Saunders in and about that Inn. You really have to see it to appreciate Todd’s magic and his vision. It’s glorious.

Join us for episode 28 of REAL TIME, when a career television broadcaster talks about the art of conversation, the most important element in that vital part of your business and so much more TSN’s James Duthie will be our guest on REAL TIME, so don’t miss it.

REAL TIME is an Alphabet® Creative production brought to you by CREA, the Canadian Real Estate Association, Technical Producer, Rob Whitehead, and Real Family Productions and I’m Erin Davis. Thank you so much for joining us and we’ll talk to you again soon on REAL TIME.

Using naturally occurring microalgae, Prometheus Materials and a team of scientists and engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a carbon zero alternative to carbon intensive portland cement based concrete… suitable for ready mix. In a recent press release, Prometheus Materials, a zero-carbon…

Christan Bosley, president of Bosley Real Estate, shares her expert advice on the 2022 updates that will help increase your property value and get you the most money when it’s time to sell.

Your home is one of your best investments, so it’s important to make smart decisions for its future. While it’s common knowledge that a kitchen and bathroom remodel can add value, there are other types of updates that can make your home stand out — especially when it comes time for resale. Here are some insider tips to help maximize your investment.

1. Enhance Your Front Hall or Mudroom

A front hall is the first thing people see when they enter the home, so it should have instant appeal. Whether it’s a front hall or a mudroom, accentuate organization and style. Potential buyers will appreciate a designated area for putting on coats and shoes, storing accessories and pet stuff, and a drop-off spot for mail and keys. And it needs to feel organized! It could be as simple as incorporating a small bench or table, or creating wall-to-wall built-in storage.

Photographer: Valerie Wilcox (Left), Robin Stubbert (Right)
Source: House & Home October 2020 (Left), House & June 2020 (Right)
Designer: Allison Wilson (Left), Susan Burns (Right)

2. Create a Home Office

With a hybrid work model here to stay for many companies, a designated home office will remain a necessity. But not all work areas are created equal. Christan warns that adding a desk to a nook or niche under the stairs is not a dedicated space and will not add long-term value. “If the property has more than three bedrooms, I would suggest staging a bedroom as an office space,” she says. “But the space should be advertised as a bedroom when selling the property. More bedrooms on paper will improve resale, but demonstrating the flexible use of a bedroom to buyers will generate additional interest.”

Photographer: Kim Jeffery (Left), Chad Lemmon (Right)
Source: House & Home November 2019 (Left)
Designer: Todd & Kristen McMillan, Ben Homes (Left), Sacha & Melissa LeClair, LeClair Decor (Right)

3. Carve Out Pantry Space

With people spending more time at home, it’s important that the kitchen is an attractive and efficient space. “A hardworking pantry has loads of appeal to a future buyer,” says Christan. “Having a dedicated storage solution, either hidden, a walk-in or a dedicated cabinet, has become a must-have in the kitchen.” And while a pantry won’t increase a home’s square footage, it can make the home feel more spacious and organized. Include elements that help with organization, such as alternating shelf heights and open and closed shelving.

Adding high-end touches like an appliance garage or a beverage centre in a pantry is a luxurious addition, and it also impresses buyers. “Appliance garages — which house items like the toaster and microwave — help create a minimalistic, clutter-free look that is highly desirable,” says Christan. Today, these are becoming a staple in the kitchen, thanks to the variety of sophisticated coffee and tea brewing systems at a range of price points. “It’s all about enhancing the morning routine,” she says.

Photographer: Courtesy of Bloomsbury Fine Cabinetry
Designer: Kassandra Arbour

4. Customize a Smart Home

The conveniences of technology are here to make our lives easier and, come resell time, buyers could be willing to pay more for it. “A well-connected home, such as one that offers an electric car charging station, smart appliances and a security surveillance system, is gaining broader appeal,” says Christan. “This can attract more interest and, potentially, more offers.”

While installing a security surveillance system is affordable, adding an electric car charging station ranges from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand. Of course, these types of upgrades appeal to a specific set of buyers, so it’s best to consult with your real-estate agent before choosing which ones would benefit your home’s selling price.

5. Construct a Dedicated Home Gym or Family Room

“Carving out a home gym area in a finished basement with an oversized mirror signals to the buyer that there is a dedicated space for this important use,” says Christan. The room should look the part — it’s not just about placing a mat on the floor. Consider playing it up and incorporating a gym-like aesthetic, so it’s clear that it’s a home gym. “At-home gym equipment purchases continue to be on the rise, meaning that self-care for time-strapped homeowners is still in demand,” she says. An obvious benefit for buyers is convenience: there’s no lineup for equipment, less travel time, and you can work out any time of day.

Before you convert your basement or extra room into a home gym, check in with your Bosley REALTOR® about potential buyers in the area. For example, if the main buyers are young professionals who value their health, they may be willing to pay more for this convenience. If buyers are primarily young families, then keeping the basement as a family room or playroom may be more valuable than a personal gym.

Visit bosleyrealestate.com to find a REALTOR®, and for more information and insight on the best renovations for your home.

About Bosley Real Estate Ltd., Brokerage

Bosley Real Estate Ltd. is a full-service, 4th generation brokerage operating since 1928 with offices serving the Greater Toronto Area, Niagara, Waterloo Region, Southern Georgian Bay and Northumberland. With over 250 agents in residential and commercial real estate, the firm has built a reputation on trust, respect and integrity selling and leasing property throughout Ontario. Bosley Real Estate is also recognized internationally through an exclusive affiliation with Leading Real Estate Companies of the World®. This prestigious partnership connects the brokerage to a global network of 130,000 real estate professionals in 70 countries. Headquartered in Midtown Toronto, President and Broker of Record, Christan Bosley continues to innovate and maintains the high standard of excellence forged over a century.

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