KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Thad Wong and Mike Golden

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Do I have a close relationship with those that I work with? And do I feel better about myself working at this entity than another? And so when you talk about culture and relationships, love, that piece of it, that to a lot of people is more important than anything else because not everybody can rely on getting that at home. So if you can get it at the office and you can build strong relationships and you can have that component filled while you're also being inspired and coached to be the best you can be on the field. It's really the best of all worlds. You're listening to the Real Estate Sessions

podcast and I'm your host, Bill Risser, Executive Vice President, Strategic Partnerships with Rate My Agent, a digital marketing platform designed to help great agents harness the power of verified reviews. For more information, head on over to ratemyagent.com. Listen in as I interview industry leaders and get their stories and journeys to the world of real estate. Everybody, welcome to episode 344 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. As always, thank you so much for tuning and thank you so much for telling a friend today. We have a couple of guests on the podcast. We're going to be talking to the co-founders and co-CEOs of At Properties. I'm talking about Thad Wong and Mike Golden. They've been together over 25 years. They've guided their company through all sorts of

different markets. And man, when it comes to technology, when it comes to solving that problem of how do you handle it from contract to close, these guys have it nailed. I can't wait to get started. Thad and Mike, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thank you, Bill. It's pleasure being here. Yeah, it's really exciting to have you both on the show. That I got a chance to say hi to you at it was the T-360 Summit this past spring. And you were kind enough to say yes. So thank you so much for doing this. First things first. I like to find out where my guests come from, right? I think that I know what, obviously you're both in Chicago. You've been there a long time, but I don't think either of you are natives of Chicago land. So Mike, I'll start with you.

Where'd you grow up and what got you to Chicago? So I grew up just outside of Boston. So I'm East Coast by birth and live there basically through high school and then college. I took a job and randomly ended up in the Chicagoland area. when I got out of college and just kind of stayed. Dad, how about you? Something similar in there? You know, I grew up in Minneapolis and with my mom, and my dad lived in Michigan. So when I went off to college, it was nice.

Chicago was close to both Minneapolis and Michigan, so I could be close to two different homes and be away from home at the same time. How did you get to Chicago, though? I mean, was it for school? Was it for work? What brought you down there? really a girl. So it was school, but school would never be that important. But it was this fantastic girlfriend I had at the time. And she was going. And so I of course went. And it was a good choice

for that period of life. Ah, all right. That makes sense. There are about 10 realtors of the 340 I've interviewed that knew they were going to be a realtor at the age of 15. They just knew that was their life's journey. I'm going to assume that wasn't the case for both of you and that you did something else before real estate. So that I'll go back to you on this one first. What was before real estate? Well, you know, I don't know if it was before real estate because I worked at the trading floor with the mercantile exchange during the day and I finished my college degree at night. So I was in night school to get educated. And real estate was really my first job out of college. But I did a lot of things before that for sure. Yeah. Mike, how about you? My path was definitely a little different.

When I got out of college, I took a job with a consulting firm, and that's kind of how I came to Chicago. Originally, I was working in an office in Connecticut and then transferred out to the Chicagoland area, and I ended up kind of staying. So, you know, I got in a real estate part-time to kind of make some extra money when I thought I was going to go back to business school and just, you know, got into it and never got out of it. But it definitely wasn't a career path choice originally, you know, back when we started being a, you know, real estate broker wasn't exactly a cool profession. Like the last thing, a 20-something year old wanted to go to a party is tell someone they were a realtor. Stop the conversation real fast if you were trying to get a date.

So I never imagined myself staying in it full time, but I got into it and loved it and met that and we started working together. And, you know, here we are, 20, what, 26 years later between the two of us? That's awesome. Let me ask you a question. You come to Chicago. in the 90s, which as a sports fan would just seem to me to be like the epicenter of the sports world with probably one of the greatest athletes of all time, kind of dominating the scene, except for that weird little two-year hiatus that decided to try to play baseball. But talk about MJ and the Bulls. But you both came from other markets.

I mean, so how did you handle that? Are you, were you still a Celtics fan, Mike will say? Or was it T-Woles for you, Thad? Then you got here and you switched. What happened as you got to Chicago? I'll let you guys just kind of hammer this one out. So anyway, so I'm still a Red Sox fan, maybe not as diehard as I was when I was a kid and a Patriots fan. You know, when I was growing up, they were both pretty bad. Or when they

were good, they still were bad. But I'm a converted Blackhawks fan. I think the Wirt's family has done a lot of great things for Chicago. And I love the team and love hockey. So, and, you know, as far as the Celtics, I was a Celtics fan, you know, but I was not a huge basketball fan when I was a kid. So I was much more baseball football or my sports and that I watched. Didn't play, but watched anyway. In coming to Chicago, that was really the beginning of my love of basketball. I'd never been a big basketball fan except going to Spartans games with my dad growing up. And so it was really MJ that introduced basketball to me.

Now it's my favorite sport to track. And so, you know, watching Michael Jordan Live at the United Center for me was, just probably some of my greatest sports memories because there was nothing else. You couldn't go to any stadium, any arena, any field, and have the same feeling you had if you were in a stadium with Michael Jordan on the court. Yeah. So I have to ask you this question is that diehard Michael Jordan guy. We're recording this the day after LeBron passed Kareem for the total points record for

career. And I swear today on Twitter and some other places I saw the word goat. assigned close to LeBron. How do you handle that? Didn't, did anybody ever claim that Kareem was the goat? Hmm. No. No.

I don't think anyone is comparable to Michael Jordan. No, it's so like beating Kareem's all-time scoring title has a lot more to do with duration, et cetera, than it does being the greatest of all time. There are a number of players better than Kareem. And unless you sat in a stadium and, watched Michael Jordan play and knew at any given moment you would see magic. And I've seen a number of games live with Michael Jordan, with LeBron James, many more than I saw Michael Jordan. And there is no comparison.

LeBron James does not have the ability to fly. He doesn't. He has the ability to muscle his way through the court. And also, I would argue if you look at the number of games that were lost because of not late in the game, hit in the game, or early in the game, missed free throws. you know i mean nobody ever talks about that but lebron is reliably unreliable when it counts on the free throw line if you're if you're the number one best in the world ever you're the most reliable when it counts so there's so many things you can go on between the two but it's not

even close and if you look at enjoyable players to watch you'd rather watch kobe than lebron coby is a much more even even though i'm not a fan of him personally but kairi i'd way rather rather watch Kyrie. That style of dance basketball is so much more enjoyable than crash, then slam up, get a layup, and get fouled. Well, I'm glad I asked that question. That was a great answer. And Mike, look, as a kid who grew up in San Diego and never won a championship in anything,

I know the Boston area went through some really dark days, 19-0-8, whatever it was for the last World Series. but, you know, to have the run you had from 2000 to call it 2020 is, was unbelievable. And no one's going to feel bad for all those years that you guys didn't win. Would you agree with that? I would agree that no one's feeling bad for us any time right now. You know, we, I mean, again, our teams are not what they were, but yes, we had an incredible run. I didn't live there to experience it, but experienced it from afar. But it was fun.

It was fun. and yes, no one should feel bad for us. San Diego, they can feel bad for San Diego. Yeah, except then they just. And the Celtics now, if you're a basketball fan, you've got to love watching the Celtics now. They're a great team. They're my favorite teams to watch.

Marcus Smart might be one of my, he's one of my top five players. Yeah. And with Kyrie leaving and going to Dallas, that's one less team to worry about, to be honest. I mean, we'll see how that goes. All right, well, like I could say, I could make this whole podcast about sports. We could just sit here all day.

And it sounds like you guys Let's do it. But I got to get to the other stuff. I already get yelled at. Other stuff. You know, the important stuff. Some of the important stuff. But first I want to ask you this, you guys are going together a long time.

Obviously, how tight you are and the relationship and the camaraderie is really fun for me to see for the first time. I'm meeting you both at the same time. But there had to be like 25 or 26 years ago. There had to be, you know, when you first started working together, did you kind of go like that? Did you kind of go, well, I'm not too sure about Mike, you know, this one thing. Or Mike, vice versa, like you kind of went, huh, about something about that? I'd love to hear, you know, you both share that right here.

Because I'm assuming you've never heard this on a podcast interview before. I got a good answer for this one. All right, go ahead. Do you have a clear one, Golden? There was only one time I questioned Michael Golden's judgment. one time and one time only, and that had to do with a choice of girlfriend. And that was the only time I ever questioned his judgment, and I voiced it to him and made it super clear. And he was 100% accurate.

And we won't go any deeper than that. Mike, this is your chance to reply? You know what? The only issue I ever had with that is when he wore the pinkie ring. You remember? Yeah, yeah, it's a very English tradition. It's very classic. You know, you being from the East Coast,

I thought you would really, you would enjoy that sense of style. Yeah, I don't know. At the moment in time. It wasn't a, it was like that. I remember. I remember, but at the moment in time, it was a weird, it was not the right time.

Right now you could get away with it. If you were in Nantucket, along the seaside at a golf club, it would have been the perfect apparel. 100%, but we were in Chicago. All right. This is great. Let's get to add properties because this is really, it's an amazing thing you've created

and kind of cultivated and grown over the last two and a half decades. So let's start with, how did that come about? What made you decide to, we're going to do this. We're going to create a brokerage. And then for like the probably the one millionth time, can you explain the ad property's name? Yeah, why don't you do the name? Okay. So the name, you know, we've said this a thousand times because people ask it.

It was really unique. But in all truth, when we started all of the other brokerages were the names of brokers called Will Banker, Baird and Warner. They all incorporated someone's name. And the one thing we knew is we wanted to build something bigger than ourselves. And the other thing we knew is that the name Golden Wong would be a terrible logo. So we decided to go with something different. Cool.

And how about launching that brokerage, Mike? You mean why? Yeah. Yeah, why? It was a lot of happenstance, really. You know, Thad and I were working together. We were the equivalent of a team before teams was even a word in our business. And when we didn't call ourselves a team, we just were, you know, we were just business partners.

And we did what we tell all of our agents not to do. We just kind of jumped in. We're 50-50, pretty much from the get-go and never kind of looked back. We had a client who, well, was a developer. We did a lot of development represent work. So we marketed larger loft, adaptive reuse projects, high-rises eventually. And we had a client who didn't like the guy that we worked for and basically came to us and offered his business to us if we left, but said that,

if we didn't leave, he was going to go somewhere else. So, and I think it was much more about the fact that he didn't like the guy we worked for than versus how much he liked us. But it was an opportunity and, you know, we didn't really know any better. So we just said, we'll try doing it on our own. And, you know, it worked out pretty well. But, you know, there have been bumps in the road over the years, but we've always been able to figure it out.

Let's talk about a couple of things as I was doing some research to kind of figure out what what I wanted to find out about you and the company. But the, man, the words, relationships, culture, that sort of thing popped up over and over and over. And that, I think this question may be directed your way from the research I did. Why is that so important? Well, our industry is, you know, we're not selling a product. And, you know, we don't have employees. We have independent contractors.

And the independent contractors have a fundamental piece where they say, am I paying the right price for the value that you're providing? So you have that equation. The other side of the equation is, do I have a close relationship with those that I work with? And do I feel better about myself working at this entity than another? And so when you talk about culture and relationships, love, that piece of it, that to a lot of people is more important than anything else. because not everybody can rely on getting that at home. So if you can get it at the office and you can build strong relationships

and you can have that component filled while you're also being inspired and coached to be the best you can be on the field, it's really the best of all worlds if you can get that done. I think I attribute a lot of our culture to, you know, explain on how we stood the pressure Compass had for a few years, the amount of money they were throwing a people to get them to join, even our leadership team. We have the most sought after leadership team, I'd say, in the country. And nobody of substance left for Compass, no one. And part of that was, I think a big piece of that was the relationship. Because Compass was more than willing to buy a date, right? They were more than willing to buy your spouse, your girlfriend, your boyfriend.

You know, it was like that movie with Paul Newman where he bought, you know, Woody Harrelson's girlfriend. It was like that, indecent proposal. That's what Compass's book when it comes out or Harvard Business Review study class could be indecent proposal. That's really what it was. And so it took a lot. I mean, you had to have Robert Redford.

You have to have a lot of close relationships based on authenticity, history, care, consistency to withstand that amount of that, that engagement. decent proposal. You know, I think the word culture is used a lot, you know, today. Do you think that it's, it's just kind of a buzzword for a lot of people as opposed to what you just described? I think everyone uses it because it's so important, but I don't know that a lot of people live it, you know, that they really, that they walk the walk.

You know, culture truly has been the, you know, the foundation of who we have been since we started. And part of it is because we worked in an environment that didn't have a great culture. And we recognize that if we're going to work at that time, 60, 70 hours a week, seven days a week, we wanted at least a place to go that was positive for us and positive for the people around us. But, you know, I think everyone uses the word culture because it's very in vogue. It's very important. But I think a lot of people don't really actually execute on it. Sorry, that makes sense. Yeah. When you have a real culture, you don't have to talk about it. But you know the companies that have robust cultures because they have great retention, they have fabulous growth.

You see agents posting and talking about the joys that they experience while being involved in the organization. You don't really have to explain to somebody your culture if you have a culture. It's kind of like a personality. Yeah. Okay. That's a good analogy. Fifteen years ago, we hit the dark days. That's all just called the dark days. Was culture a big piece of getting you through that? Or, you know, how did that, how did that properties survive or even thrive through those times?

During that period, you know, when you talk about the dark days, they were the darkest days for the agents. I mean, that's, that's, at the end of the day, that's who was really experiencing the greatest shock. And so our innate responsibility from a cultural perspective, from a leadership perspective, to offer guidance and support during that period was paramount to our success. We created a program to educate agents on finances to make sure they're solvent, to make sure they're saving for the future, or if we had to usher them through bankruptcy. And then we also created programs around opportunity and marketing to go deeper into capturing the share that there was existence so that they could experience abundance when the market is shipped. So I thought it was, for us, it was a true test on our leadership ability to be able to come up with programming that would be applicable during a downturn. but have the same amount of energy and attractiveness from the agency and participation to grow the culture during a dark age. And we also, you know, we also focused heavily on the relationships, making sure people didn't feel like they were alone.

Because that's the hardest part in our business is as independent contractors, everyone can feel like they're on an island. And when it's really bad, like it was in 08, 9, that period of time, you feel even more isolated because you don't have as much going on. You're stressed about your personal world. And, you know, I think Fad and I, we did probably each did two lunches a week at least with 15, 18 agents. And we invited, every one of our agents got invited to lunch over the course of, you know, six months. And it was more bringing everyone together and just talking about what was going on and making sure people knew that they weren't alone. And then talking about what they could do to help their business. And it was just focused on them and the relationship, because that's all we have.

In our business, we have no assets except for people. And so we focused totally on our people. And I guess you could say it was cultural, but it was much more of just, you know, our core, you know, our number one core value is how our relationships are everything for us. And that's what we focused on. And it paid off for us huge because we had the best growth in the downturn and coming out than we've ever had. Wow. It speaks volumes.

What type of leaders you are. App properties, I think, is synonymous with like technology. You guys embrace technology in a big way. But you call yourself, are you early a don't? of things that you see or are you more wait and see? Are you, do you kind of build your own or do you add to a stack? What's, what does it look like? Well, I think that it's different. I don't think you can, I don't think you want to be an early adopter on everything that has to do with technology. Um, but at the same time, we're a little bit different because we have our own technology team. We have a large engineering team. Uh, and we've built all our own technology for the last 15 years. So part of it is a process and building upon the stack to achieve a single sign-on fully integrated platform that saves the age in a tremendous amount of time and offers convenience and hopefully in the future opportunity for the consumer.

So it's not in some ways we're the first to do a lot of things, but they're not to do the things that are fancy that are involved in, let's say, social media or content creation. We do a lot of that manually. But it's really we're the first at creating the overall process to go from contract to close and what's now pre-contract to post-close and having a fully integrated system with everything from a digital listing presentation, open-house tool, integrated CMA, because we've built the deal management system that is like a stock you sign, like a sky slope that so many of our competitors still use and integrate their software into. We actually have everything soup to nuts because we built the spine of the organization. first and then add and everything on afterwards. I mean, I would say you kind of, it's sort of like the tortoise and the hair, kind of. You know, when technology sort of became in vogue in early 2000s, you know, we didn't, A,

have the money to pour into it at the time. We also recognized that it was just the return on investment wasn't there. It was too expensive. So we let other people go out there, spend a lot of money, burn a lot of money, trying to figure it out. But then as we see the opportunity, as that said, we developed this, this platform that's It's a complete end-to-end solution. It's what everyone else talks about, but we did it. And we've done it over the last, you know, 13, 14 years. And for us, we'll continue to win the race because we're very careful about where we invest. But we also, we also totally see the value of technology. Again, remember, Thad and I were practitioners. I mean, we were salespeople. Now, obviously, we've been out of that game for a while. But we really did fundamentally understand what the real estate agent was dealing with, what they needed, what they didn't need, what they struggled with, because we were them for many, many years. And, you know, now we focus heavily on continuing to understand what their new needs are.

And they're just adapting our program around that. If I had a nickel for every time I heard somebody say, hey, we've got contract to close. We've got a wired. But they don't. You talked about that spine. Is that platform or can you explain to me, you know, what you're doing there? Because I think this is, you know, how that thing got started and how it's being deployed. You know, a lot of people are talking about that.

Yeah, platform, we've used it internally at app properties for 15 years. And when we partnered with Ansley and Georgia, that was the first time we integrated the full system into another state. And the same was Serino in San Francisco. And then with at properties, franchisees in Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis, and the cross. And the thesis behind Christie's was, okay, now we have this fabulous internationally recognized luxury brand that everybody would love to be a part of when it comes to selling real estate. because you walk into a house and you say I'm within the Christie's International Real Estate Network, it brings you an astronomical amount of credibility because of the brand recognition. But unlike other brands that are known worldwide, we're coming at it where we have this

enormous infrastructure of value proposition we can give an affiliate. So we can give you platform, which will eliminate all of your other needs for technology that's owned by a brokerage, built by brokers, serving brokers, so that it's going to going to grow as time goes. And so it's kind of like getting the cars these days, the automatic updates of your software go on when you turn off your car and it's parked in the garage at night. Same with platform. So all the users of platforms get the gradual upgrades that come every single week as we're evolving the technology. That makes our brand of Christie's far more valuable because it has the technology. It's also owned and operated by a brokerage company. So when we're

meeting with the affiliates, we're still running and operating a brokerage and we can relate to them and then we can plug in our marketing division, which is best in class and our training and coaching and culture. So it's really an enormous, you know, injection of solid, valuable, intrinsic value surrounding and wrapped by the Christie's brand. So it's, it's really very different from a Sotheby's franchise, Ingalls and Volker, you know, because we provide so much to the broker and we're actually communicating with them while we're also simultaneously using these tools to operate and grow brokerage. Are there other opportunities out there for you to continue to expand?

Yeah, we think there's tremendous opportunities. I mean, particularly in the Christie's International Real Estate Network, you know, that's a heavy focus for us right now. You know, that brand just resonates everywhere you go. And, you know, that couple with our technology and our platform, we feel is, you know, best in the business without a doubt. So we see this tremendous opportunity to grow that network both throughout the United States and throughout the world. And we're heavily focused on growing that. In terms of growing our company-owned base, that's a little bit more difficult because

that's all about the people that you're partnered with. If you look at our partners in Atlanta, partners in California, I mean, we partnered with the people we thought were the best of the best. and we only invested in those companies and brought them in under our umbrella because we knew that they would be great partners for us to work with long term. We wouldn't be interested in just buying a company where the leadership just wanted to kind of exit stage left because then you know, then you don't know what you got. And we all know that the relationships and the culture and stuff is all driven by the local leadership.

So for us, we'll always be, I think, seeking opportunities, but it's got to be the perfect right fit. It's not like you'll ever say I say, you know, we want to. We want to own a brokerage in Kansas City and then go to Kansas City and find one. It's much more about finding the right fit and the right team to be able to work with to make it successful. One more question for we wrap it up with the final question. But I have to ask the two of you because you're so involved in what's going on in the tech

side of things. What's the future of real estate tech look like? Well, I could answer that question accurately. You know, for us, in fact, can probably answer this better than I can. us, we view the kind of end-to-end one-stop shop solution for everyone, not just the agent. I mean, we originally built our technology around the agent running their business, and now we're integrating the consumer-facing piece in so that a consumer can basically run their transaction for beginning to end.

So for us, we think that that integrated one place to go to be able to do everything, to make it as easy as possible and as seamless as possible for the consumer and for the agent is ultimately the direction of technology, for us anyway. Yeah, at the end of the day, you know, the partners that we have, Christy's network and the App Properties Network, they are the local independent leader, which we always feel, you know, gets the best agents and that has that entrepreneurial spirit as opposed to having a corporation own all of the brokerages around the country. We feel like having independent owners and entrepreneurs owning the brokers is far superior.

So if you think about platform, and as we grow up, as we grow each affiliate and as we adopt an integrate platform into their brokerage, in a very short period of time, we're going to be affiliated with tens of thousands of closings annually. We'll probably get to 100,000 closings in a pretty short period of time. Once you have platform, our system, integrated with those closings, the amount of value that you can bring, true value you can bring to the homeowner,

whether it's through lowering the cost of homeownership, whether it's through the opportunities of travel, whatever it is, what the agent wants most of all post-closing is to give their customer additional benefits. And if we can make the agent more valuable post-closing than they were pre-closing, the likelihood of referral and repeat usage skyrockets. So having that communication and those tentacles in with the customers all filtered in through the agent. As long as we get buy-in from the agent's in approval, the agent's going to give these benefits to their customer, which only makes our software more sticky.

It only allows us to give greater benefit to the agent, which allows us to grow. So we feel that we have the best system by far, the best technology in America, and we don't need 1,500 engineers. We only need about 25, and we'll be able to gradually scale that. And if we selectively partner with the best independence in each major market, we'll have the best agents with the best technology, which is going to yield market dominance. Wow. This has been great. We kind of went past the time I asked of you. So let me ask you the final question we've asked every guest since day one.

What one piece of advice would you give a new agent just getting started in the business today? Mine's the same as I always would say, which everything is a relationship. And if you want to have as many relationships as possible, you need to be available 24 hours a day. If you're not available when someone calls you, trust me, you're replaceable. And it's less convenient to call you if you're not going to call you if you're not going to be available. to be there, call, text, email. So 24-7 availability is probably your greatest value that's free that you can provide when you first get started. Yeah, and I 100% agree with that. I'd also say that, you know, if I give someone advice is, A, nothing beats hard work because I think, you know,

if that and I look back at some of the successes that we had versus other people, it was more that we just worked harder. As that said, we were always available. We were always working. And And beyond that, it's like a new agent with us, we just tell them that please engage, engage with our systems, engage with our training and coaching team, create a plan for yourself and then keep yourself accountable and execute. I mean, nothing, there's nothing that there's nothing more valuable than hard work. And in our business, you can be successful if you put the time and the energy. And if you do everything the right way every time and you are on top of it and you are consistent, you will be successful. If someone wants to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to do that? Fad Wong at AT Properties.com.

Yeah. Yeah, same for me. Thad Wong at AT Properties.com. Love it. No, Mike Golden. Yeah, exactly. Email, Mike Golden at ATProperties.com. We're always available.

Gentlemen, this has been wonderful. It was a little bit different for me having both of you here, but it was fantastic. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Continued success with your companies. Bill, thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate it. It's great meeting you.

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