Start With A Win - Lessons in Leadership with NAREB President-Elect Lydia Pope

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

Our guest on this episode of the Start With A Win podcast is Lydia Pope, President-elect of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers. Lydia provides a brief history of NAREB by shedding light on unconscious bias and discrimination, including the obstacles Black families have encountered in the homebuying process. Lydia didn’t initially realize how prevalent this discrimination was until she and her husband went to buy their first home many years ago. It was very apparent that their real estate agent was steering them to certain neighborhoods and houses and away from others. This experience motivated Lydia to get involved in real estate, and the rest is history. She has been working with clients to ensure fair housing practices, educate them about the home buying process, and make sure that they feel empowered to look at whichever houses they want to without fear.NAREB launched in 1947, providing education and advocacy for Black homebuyers as they navigate the homebuying process. The organization is proud of its past, relentless in the struggle for equality, and committed to opening doors for others, and they expect the same of each member. Their efforts have gained a new level of purpose over the past seven years since the publication of their first State of Housing in Black America (SHIBA) report, which provides data for the unfair practices in the housing industry that negatively impact Black families. With these statistics in hand, Lydia feels the job set before her is very clear. She is committed to making positive gains in credit scoring, restrictive underwriting, down payment assistance programs, affordability, and the long-term effects of COVID-19 on the economy. On the NAREB website, you will find resources and training about their focus areas, including community, government, and membership. If you are a real estate professional of any ethnicity or any background, consider joining NAREB as they lead the way in positive cultural change.Connect with Lydia:https://www.nareb.com/ [e-mail] Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Every day is filled with choices. You're here because you're choosing to start with a win. Get ready to be inspired, learn something new, and connect with the win nation. Coming to you from Denver, Colorado, CEO of Remax, Adam Kantos here with Start With A Win. Hello, producer Mark. How are you doing today, buddy? I am doing fantastic. Fantastic. I like it. The white glasses, the nice goofy hairdo you got there. Everything's on point today. There you go. Awesome. I'm super excited about today's interview. We have with us the president

elect of NAREB, the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, Lydia Hope. Great friend of REMAX organization and the real estate industry overall. So NAREB is the National Association of Real Estate Brokers formed July 29th, 1947. This is amazing because this is the oldest minority trade association in America. It was established by African-American real estate professionals as an alternative for African-Americans who were excluded from the National Association of Realtors. So, I mean, incredibly important. This is a forward movement in mankind and society here. So Lydia herself, incredible woman leader.

We're honored to have her on here. She's been in the real estate industry since 95. Owner and president of E&D Realty and Investment and E&D Property Management, as well as E&D construction company. So tons of past accomplishments. I get some incredible leaders on here. Lydia is certainly one of those, a great friend, huge smile, awesome leadership. I mean, she served as the first vice president of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, President of Women's Council of NAREB. So, Lydia, welcome to Start With a Win. We're super honored to have you on here.

Thank you. Thank you. It is my pleasure. I'm definitely looking forward to today. Awesome. Well, Start With a Win, I mean, we're a huge part of leadership, community. You know, we really, really are into the, really are into making things better in society, in our communities. We talk a lot about fair housing, things like that. And also leading

into February here, when this is broadcast, it's Black History Month. So we're super excited to kick off this celebration this month with today's event. So Lydia, you're president-elect of NAREB, which is an amazing organization. I've been honored to be on a panel with your organization. I mean, I'll tell you, I'm just sidetracking here. Ladies and gentlemen, this is probably one of the most professional organizations I have ever spoke with. I mean, and they treat you the best. I mean, I'll tell you, organized, this organization, you can clearly tell has been around for decades, really has it going on. So if you haven't checked out NAREB yet, please do. Lydia, can you tell us a little bit more about NAREB? Man, where do I start? So Adam, the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, we go all the way back.

So we're going to talk a little bit about the World War II, when they talked about the segregation, when the Supreme Court, when they passed the Restrict of Covenants. So moving forward, the realtors, well, Blacks understood that, you know, the discriminations and housing and the challenges that we were having just in our community that we're serving. So in 1947, there were 12 folks here. It was one lady and 11 men. They were in Tampa, Florida. And they said, you know something, it's time for us to start our own organization because the goal of that is to focus on the discrimination, the housing market, and how do we help Black folks get into homes. So in 1947 in Tampa, Florida, that's how the National Association of Real Estate Brokers was formed. And it was seven different cities around the country that made up these 12

folks here. So what I really enjoy about NARAB, and that's what we call ourselves NARAB, that's our acronym. The focus was about an equal housing opportunity, civil rights, advocacy, you know, for Blacks, making sure that we protect the consumers in our community. We call ourselves the realtors. That was one of our names. People say, what did you get the realtors from? That was one of the trade names that we say that we call ourselves as real estate professionals. And some of the things that we were involved in, the Realtors per se, or the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, is that we were involved in the Civil Rights Act of 1965. We were also involved in the Communities Investment Act, the CRA, back in 1977, the FIERA in 1988. We were part of the establishments of the Fannie and Freddie,

those goals that they had in 1992. So we were really involved in activism, advocacy, and assuring that Black folks would get an opportunity to be able to live in the communities, to work in the communities, and to buy a home as a Black person within our organization. So that's how the REALTIPS was formed. And that's what our mission is, democracy and housing, just making sure that we focus in the communities, but not just that, just making sure that we're proud of our past, we're relentless in our struggle, and we want to make sure that we continue to open the doors

to others when it comes to housing. So great organization. Wow. That is so inspiring to hear how much effort and how much change this organization has created in society over the years. I mean, huge gratitude to you, to this organization, to the history of the people that started this and worked their way through it and the challenges that they overcame. And we go out and we seek our challenges every day because fair housing is a real thing.

And it's something that we have to focus on. Unconscious bias, unfortunately, happens and we have to focus on that in order to overcome these things and make sure that the African American community, that all communities have the opportunity for that dream of home ownership. And we work on building great communities to raise our families in and teach our children in and share our values and things like that. So huge gratitude to you and this organization for that. So thank you. Give me a little bit of history on Lydia. I mean, Mr. President-elect, I mean, that's awesome. Good for you. I mean, you've been a leader in real estate for 25 years, but I'll tell you what, this is like a, this is a big deal. And we're super proud to be affiliated with this organization as REMAX and as professionals in the real estate space, because you are consummate professionals in the real estate space in NARAB. And I'll tell you what, I would love to hear a little bit about you as a person. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Okay. So I'll go forward to go backwards first. So I'm currently married to a wonderful, wonderful pastor. We have four beautiful, beautiful children. And so we're definitely faith-based. My background in real estate, I was in high school on my way to college. My degree, my other world, was actually public broadcasting. So I worked a couple of radio stations while I was in college. And then I met this attorney who was a real estate agent. And I said, you know, I want to do real estate.

Never did it. Didn't think about it until I went to buy a home. My husband and I were looking for a property and the real estate agent didn't give us a lot of opportunity, give us choices. And I felt that we were being steered and felt very uncomfortable. So I said, you know, I'm going to get my real estate license because as a black person in a community, I just felt that, you know, how would I feel if someone did that to me? And it happened to me. It happened to me. So I got my real estate license and learned. And my focus was educating our black folks in the community, showing them that, listen, you can buy a house in any neighborhood that you want to buy in, that's why I got my license. And I worked for a

black real estate company to later in life, buy them out. So during the time of the foreclosures is the markets was going pretty bad. I decided to go ahead and purchase the company, which was E&D Realty. I've owned the company for quite so many years. I grew my agents. And I actually, as of January of 2020, we opened up another company. We have about 19 agents called New Era Real Estate Group. So now we run two real estate companies, the property management. I also do housing counseling. So it's the education of our, not just the consumers, but our Black folks in our communities. So I got into real estate because of that. It was something that I had a passion for on educating. And then my home, my clients that I work with, I walk them through the step. Still to this day, I may be the president-elect,

but I tell you now, when I talk to my clients today and show them a house today, I still walk them through every single step of the homeowner process. And they truly enjoy that. I treat them like I want to be treated. I love that. And I hope Mr. Pope is a strong man because he's got a lot to keep up with here. So, by the way, by the way, now we can see why you're so good on this broadcast

with your background in the broadcasting industry. I mean, you, you, you've done a lot. So kudos to you. And again, Mr. Pope, keep your act together because she is on it. Yes, yes. This is great. So I have a question for you. So we, we, we talk about this, you know, this is the oldest minority based trade organization in the United States. And I'm not a black guy, clearly. And I was invited into this organization with open arms. This is not just for African Americans, correct? Correct. It's for any and all. We don't discriminate at all. This is, in fact, I got to tell you, I have seen so much business being done in this organization across ethnic choice, all the religious backgrounds that it's fantastic because an organization like this is about, and you said it, it's about the freedoms of America.

And this is an organization that preaches fairness and equality for all. And I love that so much. And I'll tell you, the one thing, and I mentioned it before, that I keep seeing here is, I'll tell you what, the professionalism and the demand to be better. I mean, there is a constant demand to be better and raising the bar in professionalism in the industry by this organization. And I'll tell you, you know, Jim Rohn, great speaker, mentor, writer in society. He always said that your average of the five people you spend the most time with and the power of association

in this organization is very strong because the people are unbelievably amazing and they're doing great things. So let's talk about some of the things that we can all work on when it comes to increasing black homeownership, you know, like down payment assistance, you know, things like that. What are some of the things that NARAB is particularly interested in in order to continue to grow black homeownership in society? Okay. So in 2011, our organization, we formed what they call the Sheba Report. It was published then in 2013. That Sheba Report, which is the state of housing in Black America, what it does, there are real numbers. It talks about the numbers. It talks about the facts and all the detailed information that is needed when it comes to homeownership.

Some of the things that our Sheba report entails, and I'll just give you a snippet of that because we always bring our Sheba reports out at the Congressional Black Caucus, which we'll be doing in August of this year. So some of the challenges that we found that were important to homeownership was the credit scoring, the restrictive underwriting. You know, you're talking about the down payment assistance programs, you know, affordability, you know, loan level pricing. And indefinitely, we're looking at the long-term effects today with the COVID-19. What is really happening with our renters, with our homeowners? Let's look at those numbers. So those are some of the topics and discussions that we're having and the solutions that we're putting together so that, again, it's about creating Black homeownership and increasing the knowledge and expertise and just making sure that our community understands.

And then we're providing them not just conversation, but we're providing them solutions to a lot of these challenges. Great points. Great points. And our listeners, I mean, we have a huge amount of people globally in the real estate space that listen to the program. You have an unbelievable resource base for these people on your website, some of the information that is put out by the organization. Can you give us a little bit of insight as to the training and the knowledge available to everybody to research these things? So we actually broke this up into three areas. I'm going to talk a snippet about each one. We talk a little bit about community, how we focus in with the community, then what about our government, and then our membership. So within the community, our goal is to partner with all our faith space. We have a great faith-based and civic engagement initiative that really stands out and it brings the community

together. The best thing about African American is that many of us, we worship in certain churches and even within our other ethnicities that our worship is so important. So we really engage in our pastors and our bishops and our clergy when it comes to the community, reaching out to them and say, hey, listen, you have a great congregation. Let's talk about home ownership. Let's bring our community together. Then you're talking about the civic engagements.

You've got the fraternities, the sororities, you have the Urban League, the NAACP. So the community is majorly important as we begin to educate them on about home ownership. Then you've got the government. You're talking about your legislators, your Congress folks, meeting with them to put together program solutions to down payment assistance, to the loan level pricing. So our SHIBA report is one of our platforms that we go to our legislation and we say, listen, we need you to look at this information. We need you to help us provide

solution. Let us be the voice of this. Then we talk about our membership. See, our membership are the grassroots. Our members are educated when we have our workshops, when we have our conventions. And even when we have webinars and Zooms like this, our goal is to educate our members so that they can speak. See, it doesn't matter what happens at the top. What's important is how do you bring it down to the grassroots of your membership and how can they articulate and provide that service to where they live, where they work, where they do their business. This is so important that our membership is engaged and we educate them through all of those platforms. We can call this podcast Lessons in Leadership

by Lydia Pope. That's some good information. Thank you. Speaking of leadership, you're walking into a big position here as president-elect. I can clearly see you're a very, very strong leader. Okay. I mean, I've, I, I talked to a lot every day and I'm like, you got it going on. I wanted to ask you, uh, as a, as a leader walking into this position in a great organization, how do you, uh, how do you view, I mean, let's just call it taking over, uh, taking the seat, taking the gavel, whatever it is, uh, when you assume the position of president, I mean, let's just call it taking over, taking the seat, taking the gavel, whatever it is, when you assume the position of president? I mean, what's your platform look like? What are your goals taking over as the president of the organization, things like that?

See, the great thing about our organization is we focus on succession planning. You know, when we put the Sheba report out back in 2011, again, it was published in 13, those issues that are there today, they haven't went away. So we don't want to reinvent the wheel. What we want to do is now create solutions. That's what's happening within our own industry, what's happening within our governmental industry, what's happening within our community. So the things that I talked about earlier in regards to the loan level pricing and down payment assistance, the credit challenges, the loan to value, even the appraisal issues that are happening in the areas that we live and work

in the Black community, those issues will continue. So my platform rides directly off of our Sheba because that's where the need is. The goal is to not stop these initiatives. The goal is to continue some of these challenges that that our Sheba report had discussed that was involved in those topics that I discussed and adding on to that. Again, with the COVID-19, we have something new. You know, what happened with the rise of real estate within that short window? Everyone knows last year in 2020, all of a sudden the market went berserk. Well, in that gap, what happened in that gap? Why did it rise so quickly? And what percentage of black homeowners bought properties within that window? And what was the cause of that, the unemployment? So now we're adding another issue. So that's going to be my platform rolling into my presidency for this year. Nice. So this is a great interview. I'm learning a lot

here. I'll tell you what, it's inspiring how driven you are, how driven this organization is. And we're super excited to really support and drive these things alongside this great organization in the real estate industry. So thank you, Lydia, for all you do. Hey, Lydia, where can our listeners find your organization on social media, online, things like that? Okay. So all listeners, hear me, hear me, hear me. I want you to go under N-A-R-E-B.com. That's NARAB.com. That's our website. You will find a slew of information. You'll find our Sheba report. You'll find information on some of our events that we're having forthcoming. You'll find out you can just email me at lydia.pope at nareb.com. So you'll find us. I love it. I love it. You can't miss it. And join, join, join this.

We definitely want you to join. Now, listen, you're going to get on the website, but you have to join our organization and be a part of not this mission, but be a part of the solution. We need you. We need you, especially at a time like this with what has happened within our economy, with the shifting of housing. The discrimination hasn't stopped. We need your help. No matter what color you are, no matter what race you come from or ethnicity, we need you. I love it. I'll be part of the solution. You couldn't have said it. I need a T-shirt that need you. I love it. I'll be part of the solution. You couldn't have said it. I need a t-shirt that says that. I love it. So, all right, Lydia, I have a question that I ask all the amazing people on our show every episode and our listeners love to hear the answer

to this. And that is Lydia Pope, president elect of NARAB. How do you start your day with a win? So knowing that I'm just, I'm not just the president-elect, but I'm a mother, you know, I'm a wife, you know, I have brothers and sisters, so I have siblings. So how do I start my day? You know, when I wake up in the morning,

my first thing is I always give my thanks to my Lord Jesus Christ, to my God. So prayer is my biggest start of my day. You know, once I've done my prayer, you know, it's a meditating time for me. I get up about four o'clock in the morning. I do my prayer and I just sit back and I think about, well, what are you going to do today? And I begin to strategize. My thing is if I don't, I need to walk out the door. When I walk out that door, I'm walking out the door with a strategy and I'm just fiercely attacking it because what I don't want to do is try in the middle of the day to walk

through my day. So my strategy is done early. I have peace in the morning and I'm ready to rock and roll when I leave that door. When I shut that door, it's working. I'm ready. That was incredible. So thank you for sharing that, Lydia. When I shut that door, it's working. I'm ready. Oh, that was incredible. So thank you for sharing that, Lydia. We appreciate all that you do, all that you do for the industry, for the community, for

your organization, and for America, for crying out loud. I mean, you are making a difference. So thank you for that. And thank you for being on Start With A Win. Thank you very much. Thank you. And thank you for listening to Start With A Win. Thank you very much. Thank you. And thank you for listening to Start With A Win. Thanks for joining us here on the podcast. Hey, if you'd like to ask Adam a question or

potentially be on our next episode with your Start With A Win story, give us a call and leave us a message at 888-581-4430. Don't forget to go onto iTunes and subscribe, write a review, rate the show helps us get the word out and reach more people. And for more great content, head over to start with a win.com. You can follow Adam on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook,

and Twitter. And remember start with a win. Bye.