Real Estate Success and Tech-Centric Growth EP47 W/ Greg Sax

Full Blog: https://augurian.com/blog/how-i-work-greg-sax/

Welcome to the captivating world of real estate growth and innovation! In this exclusive interview, we sit down with the brilliant mind behind decades of experience and success in the industry—Greg Sax. As the Director of Growth Management at RESO (Real Estate Standards Organization), Greg has transformed the landscape of real estate transactions through data standards and efficient processes.

Join us as we delve deep into Greg's remarkable journey, from the pre-internet era to the tech-centric present. Discover how he navigated the early days of the internet, harnessed the power of information, and contributed to groundbreaking developments like Gopher and HTML. Greg's insights are a testament to the endless possibilities when you stay open to new adventures and emerging technologies.

Explore the dynamics of real estate growth, co-opetition, international expansion, and the fascinating interplay of various personalities within the industry. Greg's wisdom and experience are an invaluable guide for anyone seeking success in real estate or the tech world.

Get ready for an enlightening conversation that uncovers the strategies, challenges, and triumphs behind real estate growth and standards. This interview is a testament to the power of curiosity, cooperation, and innovation.

#realestategrowth #podcastinterview #saas #growthmanager #techleaders 

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Transcript

Josh Becerra:

Hey everybody, this is Josh Becerra. Welcome to the next episode of "How I Work." My guest today is Greg Sax. Greg is the Director of Growth Management at RESO, the Real Estate Standards Organization, an independent nonprofit that develops data standards and processes that create efficiencies for all participants in real estate transactions. Members include multiple listing services, brokerages, realtor associations, and technology partners, serving nearly two million real estate professionals. Greg has more than 30 years of work experience in tech-centric research, marketing, communications, product, and growth, with 17 of them in the real estate industry. So thanks for being here, Greg.

Greg Sax:

Well, thanks for having me.

Josh Becerra:

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. You have a plethora of life and work experiences. I believe once you told me that you got your start kind of in the pre-internet days, working at the U of M on the Gopher program, as they called it. Can you tell the audience a little bit about the early start and then your journey to where you are today?

Greg Sax:

Yeah, sure. So I got my degree in creative writing, of all things, from UW Madison. And I envisioned that I'd be more involved in book publishing or newspaper publishing. But a funny thing happened along the way: the internet. And I dove into that. My first job out of college—this is pre-internet, right? Even though I went to UW Madison—I got my first job back at the U of M in their Department of Family Medicine. I was something of a research specialist, and part of my work involved going into online databases like Westlaw and Medline, which was the big one because I was working in medical. And finding published articles that research-oriented doctors needed to do their work. And back in those days, you paid by the minute. So I had to get pretty quick at finding information.

And that led me to what was called the Microcomputer Support Lab at the University of Minnesota, where Gopher was invented.

Josh Becerra:

Okay.

Greg Sax:

And why Gopher was so cool was because you could get into things—this is pre-graphics, right? So you would get into FTP sites, directories, and for my work, libraries. So I quickly became friends with those guys and worked in that capacity. And I just fell in love with the wealth of information there. And right about that same time, I discovered desktop publishing. And I'd run a zine in college. So the combination of desktop publishing and information just made me realize I didn't really need traditional publishers to do what I wanted to do in life.

Josh Becerra:

Yeah, cool.

Greg Sax:

Then Netscape and HTML came around, and eventually Medline became free thanks to the work of Al Gore, who also invented the internet, as we all know.

And so by the time I left that first job, it was only 1996, but I was like an early internet veteran, and that helped me get work in other fields. The one that I chose was travel health—the things you need to know before you go, like medical recommendations and safety and all that. So I got jobs in content management there and learned how to do marketing and SAS development. We sold products to travel nurses who needed to know how to treat their patients, right? And so I did that for several years, eventually landing in San Francisco during the dot-com bust, which was quite an eye-opener and taught me some lessons. 

I eventually returned back to Minnesota, got a job in real estate in the communications department at the Minneapolis Association of Realtors. What I liked about that was the media relations in particular. And we controlled a lot of information in housing, including things like closed sales, median sales price—things people really wanted to know—inventory, and the media picked up on that, and I found that very compelling. Particularly, they wanted the stats. So a few of us within that organization created a for-profit entity called 10K Research and Marketing, and we sold stats packages—like on a weekly, monthly, annual basis, whatever people asked for—to other associations and MLSs around the country.

So people took notice of that, and eventually we were acquired by a little showing company, actually a large showing company called Showing Time, which has since been acquired by Zillow. So that's pretty exciting. I wish I saw some of the cash flow on that, but

Josh Becerra:

Yeah, right.

Greg Sax:

I had already moved on to RESO, where I work now. Why I was fascinated by RESO is that when I was at 10K, we worked in data, and getting access to MLS data is tricky and kind of dirty. There's a lot of bad data in there, and you have to do a lot of cleaning and mapping of fields. People who do database stuff, they know what I'm talking about.

Greg Sax:

And the job was to clean that stuff up. And I found that very compelling. So I found a need for 10K to join that. And then when I saw that they had an opportunity in growth management and I saw my skills aligned with it. I was glad to apply and get hired and I jumped at that opportunity. To wrap a bow on this long circuitous journey across multiple states and countries, I want to say a key factor in my career arc was always to stay open to new adventures and new technologies. So it's one thing to be aware of advancements in technology and communications, but you have to play with that stuff too.

Josh Becerra:

Yeah, I tell people all the time when they ask me like, what's the one thing that you would suggest, you know, as a digital marketer that I should do? And I always say, just stay curious, you know, look at what's new coming out, be curious about it, play with it, right? Like, I think you're, you're right on there. So as kind of the director of growth management, I remember you quoted an old BASF commercial. We make the things you buy better as the way in which you describe your work at RESO. So tell us a little bit about this concept of making things better. I think you described it as like you're the cleaner and the editor. What do you mean by that?

Greg Sax:

When I was at the stats company, I used to have a sign on the outside of my door that I found in the basement that just said Janitor. And I put that sucker right there on my door. Because that's what, to me, growth and project management is really like. It's a concept I think a lot of editor types, product and project managers, can relate to. Even teachers and coaches might also agree – that you are, it's not always necessarily your job to be the maker of the thing. You're the driver, you know, and you can't help but to strive for quality because it's your job to maximize the value of that thing that is being made. I feel lucky to have also been a maker and to be somebody who's created successful products in my life but I'm never too shy when a project manager is assigned to me for anything. 

Some people see that as a place to get angry that somebody's in your business and I love it because it feeds right into the need for a group to keep things moving forward in an organized manner. I mean, sometimes PMs piss me off, but only because they're right. They're trying to get me to do stuff on time and just pushing for the greater good, just as I'm often. forced to do for others.

Josh Becerra:

I love that. I'm thinking, oh, maybe I need to get like a janitor sign on my desk or something, because there's something about someone who isn't always responsible for creating all the things, but is kind of responsible for helping clean it up or make sure that it's like got the right kind of direction to it. So I love that. You know, you've got lots of years of experience. And one of the things we talked about a little bit was all the different types of people you've encountered along the way, right? One you described as kind of like a lone ranger, the other you described as like heavy engineers or developers and you've learned how to interface with these kind of extreme personality types making sure that you're still able to get things done. So like in your experience, what is it that's helped you kind of navigate people and their work styles?

Greg Sax:

Well, the Lone Ranger thing, if my current boss hears this, and I'll make sure that he does, he's going to love that I spoke of him as a Lone Ranger in public.

Josh Becerra:

Nice.

Greg Sax:

Thankfully, it's a term of endearment today. It hasn't always been with some past people. You get a lot of egos in anybody's work. I have a couple of grown kids right now, and they lament their workplaces and who gets in their way. Boss is doing what to them and I'm like, you know, you're never not going to run into that. You just got to learn to deal with it. So when somebody with more authority than you goes all ape in your product line you know you without knowing the nuances of the changes that they make and how they're going to affect the end, you know, like they may make a change over here because I think it's a great idea in the middle of the night it can be frustrating to clean up but like you just deal with it. I really have a marketing minded CEO. So the challenge there can be more like, hey, isn't that my job? Like you're doing my job right now.

Josh Becerra:

Right.

Greg Sax:

But ultimately it's not really a problem for me here. I'm very appreciative of that because there's mutual trust and respect there. And those are the two most important words that I've dealt with in team building. Even if you don't always agree on something, you have to trust and respect the person you're working with, otherwise the project isn't going to move forward. So for developers, man, engineers and designers have been fighting about stuff since before all this stuff was being developed on computers.

Josh Becerra:

Yeah, for sure.

Greg Sax:

Technical specs are absolutely important. And as someone who's done a lot of technical writing myself, I value it greatly, but it's just not sexy. And when you're working in growth, you gotta be able to sell that sizzle a little bit. And it can be particularly challenging in a standards organization because much of what I do is based on technical specs.

The people that implement our products and seek RESO certification are technologists and they want facts. The C-suite folks... who want their boards of directors and working realtors to understand why they're spending money on implementing standards. They want a shiny description and a pretty picture. And I don't think, even though it's real estate standards, which is very deep in the mud, I think that applies to a lot of products out there, especially technical products. You've got to speak to your tech folk and your board side. As a growth manager, I'm mixed in both of those equations. maybe like a virus, but I prefer to think of it more musically.

The role allows me to play several instruments in the business and tech space, and the important thing to realize is that Lone Rangers and Code Cavers each represent a passion for the work. So you just find those points of cohesion in the midst of different voices that want to be heard. And a good growth manager, I believe, knows... how to be a conductor and coax the best performance out of the audiences at hand.

So that's really where I come from.

Josh Becerra:

I love that metaphor, you know, honestly, like when you're thinking about, yeah, playing multiple instruments and being a conductor, like I really get what you're getting at when you're saying like, there's kind of different types of people, you gotta learn to work with them in the ways that they need to work so that they feel heard, so that they're getting what they want. That's really great.

Greg Sax:

I mean, specifically before you get to the next question, at RESO we have, you know, we've got the typical social media and newsletters and all that. But like for our tech folks, we've got a GitHub. And they go there to see the technical specs and they get their own little sequestered area. And it's really helped us keep the audiences both happy.

Josh Becerra:

And it's kind of like in their language and in a platform that they understand and they're used to, right?

Greg Sax:

Absolutely.

Josh Becerra:

Yeah. So what I think is really cool about your job is that you are kind of in this standard space, which is unique, you know? Like, it's not every day that somebody's out there trying to get companies to kind of adopt standards. You know, most of the time, companies are out there trying to pitch their wares or get someone to buy their product or whatever. So it's a little bit different of an animal and you're trying to get MLSs and real estate brokerages to buy into these standards, which in a way requires them to cooperate, but they might also view one another as competitors, right? Like two brokerages, maybe in the same geographies, MLSs that overlap somehow. So can you help the audience understand a little bit how you kind of market this idea of cooperation to these stakeholders that have some of the same kind of universal benefits. So how does cooperation kind of, how are you marketing that in this standards environment?

Greg Sax:

Well, there's three that I like to point to that help. If I, I'll probably say a few paragraphs here, cause that's what I do. But if you think about Bluetooth or a little more deeper, maybe IEEE for engineering or underwriters laboratory, a little stamp you see on a lot of products you buy. These things were standards that had to be created by groups of people that wanted products out on the market. If you get to something more universal than a specific product, any form of gathering of like-minded professionals working towards a common standard, it's going to involve some form of co-opetition. Because you're creating a baseline of operations for the greater good of whatever your occupation is. Some really big ones you might think of are legal or medical or food standards. The differentiation comes in the form of how... maybe private practices operate, or how businesses are created, or how they serve their customers. But the underlying standard is something for them all to build on. In our case, we're not a government entity. So we oversee it, but our members create the standards. And they get ratified by our board, and we facilitate and enforce them. Due to that, we adhere to a pretty, here's where things get kind of good.

We adhere to a pretty strict antitrust policy, and we read a statement before any work group meeting that involves discussion of standards. That brief statement somehow helps set the tone. Organization veterans will also help newcomers understand what's going on, because it's usually pretty obvious when a topic involves something for the greater good versus something that's a little self-serving. You know, a new company might come in. and try to make it just about their product. And people, they really vetted out before, generally before we even have to get involved. So we're just stewards of the standard mission. Our members are already stewards of the real estate industry as a whole. And realtors abide by a strict code of ethics. We're all reminded that all the time because they're the constituents we're helping at the end of the day. And a lot of money moves around in the real estate industry, so we gotta be careful. Having that stewardship mindset fits right into defining standards and moving the entire industry forward with common language for our base.

Josh Becerra:

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And I know that you're thinking about expanding internationally, so that's something new for the organization. Just curious about international expansion in general. I think that those are things that other marketers and companies are dealing with and thinking about. So tell us a little bit about where you are looking to expand, what you've learned with some of the early international expansion efforts. challenges that you think people who are interested in expansion should be considering? Do you have any advice there?

Greg Sax:

A little bit, yeah. You know, we expand where demand takes us. And that comes from where our members, we have a lot of brokerage members and they expand into new countries. The MLS concept itself, believe it or not, is really only in the US and Canada. And so as brokerages move into other countries, that idea gets exposed to them. And a lot of these countries lack a sort of centralized listing service. And then more real estate purchases are happening over oceans now, not just over state lines, especially in places like New York, Miami, Hawaii. There's already been a lot of international exposure there. So that has increased our exposure to international audiences. Now our first big efforts have come in Canada. It's our nearest neighbor, they have a big entity there called the Canadian Real Estate Association, CREA, which is the equivalent of our National Association of Realtors, which is the umbrella association for all of what we do in association land. And the National Association is a big supporter of us. So from there, we have members moving the MLS concept into Central and South America. And that's been pretty exciting and very recent. Some challenges, that's where the fun stuff comes in. We've learned that privacy is a huge consideration in developing international standards in different countries.

Josh Becerra:

Okay.

Greg Sax:

In Europe, they've got the European general data privacy regulation. Even displaying things like addresses can be a no-no, something we take for granted in listings. you might have to speak to a general area rather than a specific address.

Josh Becerra:

Wow.

Greg Sax:

Language is the most obvious difference. We've done a couple of translations into French Canadian for our neighbors to the north and Castilian Spanish. We have some standards based on that. But potential languages for growth, you know, you got a lot of what's going on in Asia. So different dialects of Chinese. Indonesian, Korean, Japanese, and then you get into Germany and French, not just French-Canadian, but Russian is actually one of the largest languages spoken in the world. You've got to get into all of that too. Then even variations of English, believe it or not. So as we go into the UK, we have to consider British English. Even our neighbors north would like some Canadian considerations for Canadian English. And then when you get south of the US, Spanish is not the same from Argentina to Puerto Rico to Panama, it's just not accounting for all that's different as well as address styles, measurements, currencies. The United States Postal Service and the US dollar only goes so far when you're trying to get something going on like the Czech Republic.

Josh Becerra:

Yeah, I can only imagine man. Well, I wish you the best of luck with that. That sounds really cool and having those standards internationally, I'm sure will help all of us acquire more property overseas at some point, right?

Greg Sax:

That's right

Josh Becerra:

That's the dream. Okay, so one last question and I love to ask all my guests this is kind of who's inspiring you today authors, podcasters, thought leaders, you know you had told me when we were prepping for this that you like to listen to kind of things that entertain you versus like getting immersed in like more stuff about real estate. So tell us a little, tell us who's inspiring you and what you're listening to.

Greg Sax:

So a little over a decade ago, I ran into a high school friend of mine that I hadn't seen in years and he happened to be a cabinet maker. We were at a dog park and I'm like, I just bought a house. We needed cabinets. I wanted to talk to him about cabinets. And he stopped me cold, politely but firmly, and he said the last thing he wanted to talk to me about was cabinets on his day off. And it struck me in a sweet spot, man. And since then, I've really thought about that. If all you do is talk about and read about stuff that's related to your work, I think you're gonna burn out a little bit and you're gonna get bored. And even worse, you're gonna become a bore. And so I tend to look for inspiration from, as you said, entertaining sources because I think it helps, it just gets my mind going towards more entertaining things. And what I do is a lot of industry relations stuff, it's a lot of people's business, and people wanna talk like folks, you know, and they wanna get to the bottom of something and then debate and have fun and talk about what's going on in pop culture. So I listen to a lot of pop culture stuff and as a man of a certain age, I like guys my age who are talking about things. 

So I listened to a fly on the wall with David Spade and Dana Carvey. They talk about their days at Saturday Night Live and their guests are frequently SNL alum. And I actually get something out of it because only like 55, 56 people have ever been players on SNL. And I find that fascinating. Like what was their journey to get to that shot, to get to that one thing that they got to do that they dreamed of doing. And they make it really entertaining. It's fun. Along those same lines, Conan O'Brien needs a friend. Conan was great on TV. He's great in podcasting. He makes me laugh and he brings a lot of fun guests on, as does the trio of Will Arnett, Sean Hayes, and Jason Bateman on a podcast called Smartless. All dudes my age, including the OG of podcasting, Mark Maron and his WTF podcast. Just super compelling conversationalist. 

I will give one shout out to a real estate marketing company that I love called 1000 watt so they're 1000 watt they're based out of Portland Oregon. They have a weekly e-newsletter called the dose and it almost never touches entirely on real estate. It's just inspirational stuff and marketing old ad campaigns from the 70s things that they just find on the internet that hits them. And I love that. And then, lastly, as somebody who comes from a creative writing background, I do try to read a few novels, and I'm right now stuck on a Jonathan Franzen novel. He's written a few books, some of the best books I've ever read in my life, The Corrections and Freedom, and now I'm reading Purity, which is a little bit of a slog, but the man knows how to write. And I can't let go of my creative side, even though I... eventually evolved into www.

Josh Becerra:

Yeah, well, I love the answer because I think you're right. Like, you know, being entertained and not just being so myopic and focused on your own thing, I think is truly better. It helps kind of expand your mind. Like part of the reason why we're doing this podcast and my guests are a little bit all over the place. Like who would imagine I'm interviewing, you know, you for this podcast. But it's because there's just interesting things and it's fun to understand how real estate standards work and what are some of the complexities that you're dealing with and how you're kind of managing through relationships and some of the challenges that you're faced with. So anyway, I really do appreciate you accepting the time to be a guest here on the podcast. And I'm just going to say goodbye for now because we're running out of time. But thanks, Greg.

Greg Sax:

Yeah, thank you. It was great.