Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Shelly Vincent, Employing Broker with HomeSmart

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

As the Employing Broker of the largest real estate company in CO, I have a unique, bird’s-eye view of the market. I also sit on the Board of Directors for REColorado, and it provides me a great perspective into the support side of agents as well. My passion, though, is prop-tech. I am a crypto real estate specialist and love learning about how AI will change our industry as well! I teach the subjects and have appeared on my podcasts and events as a presenter.Learn more:https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelly-vincent/Instagram: @shellyvincentColorado Real Estate Leaders https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/colorado-real-estate-leaders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-shelly-vincent-employing-broker-with-homesmart

Welcome to the Colorado Real Estate Leaders podcast, brought to you by Trailstone Insurance Group, bringing you interviews with Colorado's best real estate and mortgage professionals, empowering you to understand the current trends in the housing market so you can make the American dream your reality. Enjoy today's episode. Well, it's a great day in Colorado and welcome to the Colorado Real Estate Leaders podcast. Today we have with us, Shelley Vincent, who is employee broker with homeowner. Smart. Shelly, welcome to the program.

Thank you for having me. You are welcome. Let's get started with learning a little bit about you. What is your story and background and how did you get into the real estate industry? Well, it's actually a really interesting story. I was in advertising the first 17 years of my career. And I lived in Blockegee, Mississippi. In 2005, I was the director of advertising for Hard Rock Casino.

And I was really excited. had a great career going and the Katrina hit and pretty much destroyed everything. So I didn't have a house and have a job and didn't have anything. And from that, I started a four-color glossy magazine and began building a tremendous amount of former advertisers that were now in my magazine. And one of my primary advertisers was a very large investor developer group. And I began working with them. And my company also did a branding as a specialty, and we began branding their real estate projects. And I was creating materials for real estate agents and all of their projects.

I got very interested in it. I was like, man, these guys are doing great. They're living a great life. I'm enjoying working with them. And from there, I still stay in advertising for a while, but by 2010, I said, okay, I really want to do this. And so I lived in Orlando, Florida at that time. and I got my real estate license and began practicing real estate all along the Atlantic coastline.

That's awesome. And it's really interesting that you had that story to background because I'm sure you can bring some of that corporate and advertising and marketing and branding into the business now and when you're talking to your clients. It is actually amazing how the transition is very simple from advertising to real estate because you are a living. marketing person when you are in real estate, you are marketing yourself, your services. And my background in advertising and marketing absolutely was a huge strength in me starting this business. Awesome. You know, Shelley, we've been talking a little bit with you before. And you are really at the forefront of understanding what technology is going on for real estate law. Share some of the, share some of the thoughts that you have for where real estate technology is going.

Yep. Well, I did. get interested in crypto all the way back in, I guess, 2016, 2017. I'd buy a little, sell a little. And I began seeing news of the advances in blockchain technology and the applications it has to many different industries, including real estate. I actually came across another agent who is now a very good friend of mine who had begun doing cryptocurrency, real estate transactions in California. And she and I began talking and working together. Well, I got very lucky and I was the first agent in Colorado to complete not just a cryptocurrency

transaction, but one that was insured by title, which is a very difficult thing these days. And so I just really enjoyed the use of it. But also, I've become more aware of it because there's so many scams out there. There's a lot of bad actors. And so having a real education in what blockchain technology can do for us as far as recordkeeping and preventing fraud, preventing these scams is so amazing. And just really trying to promote that to really help bring our industry forward is something I'm just become really passionate about. That's awesome. I love when cutting edge technology meets kind of the traditional, you know, stodgy, old world things that we think is not.

really cutting edge. So I like how you're mixing that together. I just kind of have scratched my head going out in the world, blockchain crypto and real estate, and you mentioned secured and insured by title, unpack that a little bit because I know that some people don't think that those two go together. They technically don't. And there are real estate transactions that do occur through independent lawyers, things like that, where they do just exchange crypto for property, vice versa. But trying to get a transaction that has title insurance through it is very difficult. I was able to partner with a local title company here that was willing to go the extra mile for me and work with their underwriters to get the underwriters to understand what the

transaction entailed. And that really the funds exchange, whether it's, you know, you could change property for property. You can exchange cash mortgages or crypto for property. It just has to be in the, you know, the value has to be in U.S. dollar form. It doesn't really affect the title or the value of the home. And so this is, which is one of our biggest challenges in real estate is the lack of understanding of how blockchain and cryptocurrency works within those that are decision makers for these policies. We were very fortunate that the underwriter, did understand what we taught them about it and felt comfortable enough to insure the property.

Wow. I mean, I think that you think about the tip of the iceberg. You think of like the 80-20 Pareto principle. The tip of the iceberg is probably, you know, 1090. And I think that blockchain and crypto is probably 0.001 of people's awareness of what it does and what it can do. So that's really cool that you've got that kind of started that ball rolling. What about AI, how's that going to factor into things that you're doing currently and what people can access in real estate? Well, AI is a part of our lives already. And I think a lot of people don't give credit to how much AI we already use.

When we're doing searches for MLS, when we are seeing, like in our real estate tax reports, the likelihood of selling, the confidence scores, the average prices, that's all AI. when we start to put a search term into Google and it auto completes for us, that's AI. You know, the Tesla auto driving cars, anything that's predictive technology that, you know, movies you might like based on our search histories, all of that is AI. And we're just seeing it move further in. And, you know, when we talk about chat, GPT, things like that, chat bots are AI. It's all moving forward.

It just be getting better. and better. Now, I've been experimenting with chat GPT a lot, especially with writing listing descriptions, writing blogs. It's fantastic as a guide, but I still find factual errors. Or one of the biggest things I'm having to work with my agents right now is, you know, we have fair housing terminology that we're very sensitive to these days as to what words we can and can't use. And chat GPT has not learned that yet. And so we can use a tool as a guide, but we do not want to depend on it yet to do our jobs for us. That's huge. I think that that's one thing that we see people, you know, running for the hills like

AI is going to take over the world and chat GPT is going to, you know, eliminate all jobs. It's not. It's just a tool. It helps you kind of do some of the, you know, scut work so that then the person with the real intellect behind the tool can now go, okay, good, let me just polish this, add this, and add their, their flare. So, yeah, you articulated that very well. Made me think about something. Blockchain and crypto, how is that going to affect the mortgage industry, do you think?

Because, you know, it could potentially have people in the mortgage lending industry running for the hills going, hold up. You know, is this going to replace the need for our services? Right. Well, I'm going to just have to say, especially with this week, what's going on in the news with Coinbase, with finance. everything in the crypto world right now is in high turmoil. And it's an effort by the government to regulate it and control it, which they're still their lack of understanding. They're not quite understanding that that's very difficult to do based on just the type

of programming that blockchain is. I was laughing at one politician the other day said, it's time to shut it all down. And I just kind of laughed and it's like, well, you obviously don't have a clue how this works. if that's how you feel about it. But we've seen different mortgage companies that you can leverage your crypto is collateral. We've seen some have survived, some have not. But one of the things I've noticed, cryptocurrency, especially Dogecoin, Bitcoin, have all outperformed the stock market, Ethereum.

All of your large primary coins have all outperformed the stock market in the last two years. and so I think that they're very good securities to invest in. I'm a little concerned about what exchange you put your money into right now because of the way the SEC has targeted them currently. And so, yeah, I believe we're going to be seeing a lot of monies going to the cold wallet outside the hot wallet features where the cryptocurrency is not kept on an exchange. It's kept on a separate like USB-type storage device. which will affect the crypto market when you're not able to make fees off of these exchanges.

So there's a lot up in the air. Right now, fighting to get mortgage companies to exceed cryptocurrency as assets has to be on an exchange. There's just so much a gray area. And let's make it real clear. The U.S. is way behind on crypto adoption compared to other countries. It is the primary source of currency in many countries. So we are behind on this. It makes me think of all of the things that real estate agents and mortgage professionals need to do to stay up on the industry like continuing education.

Is this a topic that is being maybe looked at being taught or should real estate agents and mortgage lenders start getting up to speed on this so that they then are in the know when they're working with their clients? Absolutely because we do have clients that ask about them, especially because I'm an employing broker. I feel it's my responsibility to have this education so that when any of my agents come and say, hey, someone asked me about this, I'm able to educate them on it. I do have a two C hour class that I do on crypto and blockchain. But I'm also adding that AI chat, GBT element to the class as well because it's so, you know, so, dominating in the real estate market right now in the news and all the applications of it. And I believe our agents need a much better understanding also of that technology as well.

And as fast as things change, you probably need to do like quarterly classes as opposed to yearly. I mean, it's just so many times you take a class and it's like, okay, that's good for, you know, whatever time frame. But I think that the landscape here with crypto and blockchain is really changing so fast. So you've got to have people that you can look to that know how things are changing and then communicate that over to the real estate professionals. Yeah, absolutely. And with everything that's happening right now, we may see some buyers and sellers actually wanting to use the crypto either to maybe liquidate, move it into other property, or take it from the exchanges, get it onto these cold wallets and use them for purchases. So we're about to see a big change again in the crypto market and how it works. But we really need to not just focus on crypto. The technology behind it, which is the blockchain software, is where every county record needs to be kept, every title.

You know, everything in a transaction should be on blockchain software to be able to prevent fraud and to help secure our information better. You know, that's an interesting point. You mentioned title and fraud. And I know that I've seen the infomercials out there of, you know, these companies that will, watch your title and if someone tries to fraudulently access it and can gain access to your house and they will monitor that. Wouldn't what you just described kind of lock that down and prevent even if those kind of things are viable that would prevent that because now nobody can go in and access your title and falsify that. It would almost completely eliminate that. The location of

where the title is written on the blockchain would only be accessible by someone who knew the exact location, have the key to it. And so it would almost completely eliminate title fraud. Perfect. Blockchain can apply so many, it would eliminate so many fraud items. You know, it's for a, you mentioned a politician that said shut the whole thing down. They're probably implying towards more like Bitcoin, but also they're probably not a fan of blockchain because of the accountability.

Yeah, well, let's go a step further in that. I tried to be political, but let's talk about things from a banking perspective, if you recall the trucker strike in Canada, almost two years ago now. And the truckers were protesting, you know, making traffic, you know, jams, making life very difficult for the elected officials in Canada. So in an effort to, you know, try to stop this process, the Canadian authorities chose to freeze the bank accounts of the protest. So the protesters began using cryptocurrency transactions to fund it.

So the Canadian government goes to the crypto companies and says, shut down their wallets. They can't. Exactly. And so it was like, yeah, you don't, and this is, and you, to those who are educated in it, we're like, you really don't know how this works because that's, you can't do it. It's not, it doesn't work that way. and so, you know, but they're learning. And so now they're going directly after the exchanges.

And so this, you know, it's really interesting watching the whole, you know, regulation, standardization of crypto evolve as fast as it is going this year. And, I mean, the SEC just stepped it up 10 notches this week. So it's been really interesting following along. In fact, before I got on the phone, you know, with you guys right now, Coinbase's official Twitter account was live on a Twitter space is discussing the new bills that are being introduced into Congress, what it means the good and the bad of it.

And so you really have to pay attention to these things, just like other things in our industry, you know, that evolves so quickly, especially, you know, NAR policies, everything is changing right now. You've got to keep up with it or, you know, you're going to be left behind fast. I think that's the key point. is things are changing so fast. People don't know where to look for good solid information.

We certainly cannot look to Google other than just like for like a little cursory glance because we know we can't really know which source there is credible. So being able to turn to someone like yourself and get that taken care of with CE in classes and education, huge. So I think that is just spectacular. What you're doing, Shelley. If someone is interested in reaching out, connecting with you and learning more, what's the best way they can do that?

Well, I have a great Instagram profile that's just, you know, Instagram.com slash Shelly Vincent. No spaces. And that is the fastest way to get me. You'll see a lot of videos and posts that I do that are in regards to real estate. Also do a lot of leadership and discipline, motivation, teaching. One of the things that we're going to be working also, you know, as much as I don't like to say it, we're in the midst of a commercial real estate crash on coming. very quickly if you're reading the news. But we've always learned that whenever things go downward like that, there's always opportunity. One of the biggest applications in crypto and blockchain right now is the tokenization of commercial properties, especially when we're looking at things like conversion to residential. If I had any advice to agents right now, I'd say educate yourself on that because it's coming. I love it.

Well, I tell you, it's been a real pleasure talking with you. You've been super educational. And thank you so much for coming on, Shelly. It's been a real joy having you on the show. Well, thank you so much for having me. Thank you for listening to the Colorado Real Estate Leaders podcast, brought to you by Trailstone Insurance Group. To learn more about the topics mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.com.