Witness the Epic Ascent of Drew Coleman While Mastering Real Estate and Redefining Success

Transcript

[Mattias]
Welcome to the REI Agent, a holistic approach to life through real estate. I’m Mattias, an agent and investor.

[Erica]
And I’m Erica, a licensed therapist.

[Mattias]
Join us as we interview guests that also strive to live bold and fulfilled lives through business and real estate investing.

[Erica]
Tune in every week for interviews with real estate agents and investors.

[Mattias]
Ready to level up?

[Erica]
Let’s do it.

[Mattias]
Welcome back to the REI Agent. We have Erica here and we are a hot mess.

[Erica]
I am a hot mess.

[Mattias]
I’m kind of a mess too.

[Erica]
Yeah, I’ve been sick this week. And which is why I haven’t been on podcasts and I struggled to get through this one because I have had a really bad cough and I just get into these coughing fits I can’t get out of. And I lost my voice for, or about did.

It always seems weird to say this, but it hurt to talk. Like my voice felt really tired.

[Mattias]
Do you need to talk at all to your job?

[Erica]
And so I got through seven therapy sessions on Wednesday and I was croaking by the end of it. I could barely get through it. So today was my first day back on the podcast this week.

And yeah, I am a hot mess. And feeling it.

[Mattias]
Yeah, you’re hot. All right. All right, so well, I’m really tired.

So I had talked about this in the intros before you were, when you were on about this like upcoming music thing. I talked about being nervous about it. It went amazing.

I had a lot of fun. I was so amped afterwards. I had trouble sleeping.

So I got like less, I got like five and a half hours of sleep and then finally I was able to get some sleep. And for some reason, oh yeah, the game was really good last night. It was the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions.

And it was really good. And I normally, I can get to the first half and then I’m out, you know, we’re East Coast time here. So it’s like past nine.

It’s so late, I can’t stay up anymore. But yeah, last night it was really good. So I ended up watching, I think into the fourth quarter.

I did fall asleep, I didn’t finish it. But yeah, so I got another like five and a half hours of sleep and I’m pretty tired. So I’m a bit of a hot mess too.

[Erica]
Okay, so we’re both kind of a hot mess.

[Mattias]
You got a lot to look forward to in this episode. No, it’s good, it’s good, I promise. Erica, you did something fun, yes, last night.

Well, at least it was fun for one of our kids. Yeah. Can you explain that, what you did?

[Erica]
Well, I sort of accidentally created this tradition where we go to a hotel with our child when they turn five. And our middle child, our daughter is turning five on Monday. And so this night at the hotel has been hyped up for like a year and a half and it finally arrived.

And so I went to the hotel with her last night and we hung and I was kind of feeling like this. And she wanted to go swimming, that was like her big thing. She wanted to go swimming, it’s 19 degrees outside.

I hate being cold, but I was like, you know what? I’m gonna get in the water because this is what she’s been looking forward to and we’re gonna do it. And so we did and it was like the highlight of her evening.

She had a great time. And I think her other highlight she said was when we were coming up the elevator, the elevator doors opened and there was this guy standing there right in front of us beaming at her. And he had a bright red, glittery, sparkly red suit on and a Santa hat and a big wrapped present on his hip with a big bow on it.

And she looked up at him, she’s like, mom, I found Santa. And she doesn’t, we’ve never really talked about the idea of Santa as a real thing. And so when she described it to our other daughter, later the next day, she said, I saw a human dressed as Santa Claus.

[Mattias]
Yeah, well, and the thing about this hotel, do you know how when you go to the cereal aisle in a grocery store, they always have like the kids, like cereals are really sugary and like bright colors and they’re always at their level, eye level. So they’ll start begging to see it. Well, this hotel is got like neon lights that are like sparkling and moving and like changing and they was recently built.

And so that’s kind of where that initial visit happened is like that, oh, that sounds so cool. Let’s go to the new hotel that has all those crazy lights. And then I think every time we drive by cause we live close to it, yet our daughter was reminded that that happened and these happened to her too.

And so then we’re just like, we’re spending a lot of money at one of the more expensive hotels in town.

[Erica]
The rates have increased over the years. They no longer offer breakfast.

[Mattias]
To like, like, it’s like a five minute drive from us.

[Erica]
That was the other thing. She was like, we drove around to get our dinner and then went to the hotel and she’s like, mommy, are we still in Virginia? I was like, we’re literally two streets away from our house.

[Mattias]
So I don’t know if our youngest is old enough to remember this tradition, but I think we can create a new one for her.

[Erica]
Oh, I don’t know.

[Mattias]
Maybe something special. That’s not this.

[Erica]
Maybe this time though, you will be chosen to go to the hotel.

[Mattias]
My track record is terrible. There’s no way.

[Erica]
We were getting ready for bed and she had so many funny one-liners on this trip. She was like, oh man, I forgot that you stink. You’re really smelly at night.

That’s why I cuddle with daddy and I should have asked daddy to come. I was like, well, do you wanna switch? Because we can get dad over here.

And she’s like, no, no, I just won’t sleep by you. And then she literally made a separation, like a divider between us on the bed of pillows so she didn’t have to smell my breath.

[Mattias]
I don’t, I’ve never had a complaint. In case you’re wondering.

[Erica]
You must be a very tolerant partner.

[Mattias]
I should win an award. Yeah, anyway, so it is getting to be, it’s December now and I got an offer on one of our flips. It is with a private lender and that’s exciting.

[Erica]
But also- Well, I actually haven’t heard details about that one.

[Mattias]
Yeah.

[Erica]
You said you got an offer.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to say that there was another house that I’m closing on on the 10th that they came with a pre-approval letter. This is just, I wasn’t involved in the ownership side of it. It was just the agent.

But they came with a pre-approval letter for this private lender. It was like an organization. But I looked them up and it just like the rates and the terms were just way too good to be true.

And I was like, what is happening here? This doesn’t seem real. And so the person decided that they were gonna go with traditional financing because we just basically said, hey, look, we don’t trust this source.

We have multiple offers. We’re probably gonna go with a different offer. And then anyway, so then we, so they decided to go traditional financing and then like a little bit after the homestretch, they said, hey, we’re gonna do cash.

Like, okay, that’s fine. And then they apparently tried another shady private financing person and had like $30,000 wired to them. And it was like fraud.

And it was, they delayed closing and started getting financing, but they’re gonna close now here, like a couple weeks later. But yeah, it’s just weird. I guess this higher interest rates are getting people to seek different types of mortgages or different types of financing options.

Cause it’s just, yeah, it’s different.

[Erica]
Is this the same potential wire fraud that you learned about when we were coming down the mountain on your bum people?

[Mattias]
Yeah, yeah.

[Erica]
It was the same one?

[Mattias]
Yeah. It was a, yeah, we were hiking down the mountain. I like have a really bad, twisted my ankle pretty badly.

And I checked my phone. And so I have the new operating system that gives me the like AI summaries. It like summarized this whole thing as like, hey, my client’s a victim of a wire fraud.

We’re not gonna be able to close. We might, everything’s gonna be fine. We’re gonna close on Friday.

And like, it just like made it so like nonchalant that I was like just dying laughing. Cause I thought that’s what actually they said. But then when I opened it up, it was a lot more of a problem and not so nonchalant.

And that was fun cause you know, we hit a deer and had a sprained ankle and had to deal with, you know, closing getting delayed. But yeah, it was a great, great date night. 10 out of 10, we’ll do it again.

Seriously, that was fun. Anyway, today we have the pleasure of talking to Drew Coleman. Drew is coming out of Portland, Oregon.

Drew has been a seasoned agent for many, many years and he started a team and now has his own brokerage. But Drew was great to talk to. He’s a good example of, you know, how you can really do this business a lot of different ways.

And you don’t have to subscribe to just one idea. But yeah, he had a great perspective and a great nuance, which I’ll let him describe and not tell you now. But anyway, without further ado, we have Drew Coleman.

Welcome back to the REI Agent. I’m here with Drew Coleman. Drew, thanks so much for joining us out of Portland, Oregon.

[Drew Coleman]
Such a pleasure to be with you, Mattias. Thank you for having me.

[Mattias]
Drew, you’ve had a fast track, a big growing company that you said started as a team but now you are running a brokerage. Tell us a little bit how you got started in real estate sales and your background in it.

[Drew Coleman]
Yeah, absolutely. So I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. My wife, who I was dating through college, had a grandfather who was a real big time real estate agent in the Bay Area.

And as we were courting, I guess you would say, we spent some time down there and he’d show me around what he did. And I was amazed as he would go around the town and he’d say, I sold that one, sold that one over there. She’s doing a kitchen remodel, you gotta see it.

Hey, and everyone would know. It’s like the guy was the, he’s a mini local celebrity. And I thought, not the celebrity part, but I thought that it seemed like this was a role, this was a job, it’s a profession that you actually get to tangibly invest in people’s lives and move the needle on how they actually live, the time that they get with their families and their recreation, et cetera.

I thought this was a pretty cool thing. I knew I wanted to, like everyone who gets into the business, work with people, but it ended up being a great fit. So after college, I networked my way to working for one of the top teams for a couple of years straight out of college and started my own team and let it grow.

And we rolled that into a company a couple of years ago.

[Mattias]
Okay, I just had to quickly make a note there. So I’m hearing that when I go around town saying every house I sold, I have to wait until the son-in-law comes involved for somebody to be interested and not just annoyed. Is that what you’re saying?

[Drew Coleman]
I suppose it’s how you do it, right? We’ve all seen those people who sold in one minute and it gets to be a little bit irking that they’re talking about the homes they’re sold. And he did it more in a way of the community that he built and the families that he touched.

And I really appreciated that.

[Mattias]
Sure, that sounds awesome. Okay, so you hopped right into a team from the beginning. So team life has been kind of the way you’ve experienced real estate so far.

[Drew Coleman]
Yeah, in 2001, teams were not that common, right? It was really the beginning of, it was really pre, what I would call peak Keller Williams, which I think brought the prevalence of teams to the forefront. But this was someone where I acted as an assistant for a husband and wife team and they were very, very organized.

I think so many real estate agents don’t have a process and we’re big ninja selling fans here at our company. And I’ve been fortunate enough to create a great friendship with Larry Kendall. And the one thing that people want is knowing a track record of how things are gonna go, right?

Expectations lower the stress level and transaction. And my mentors, Bob and Debbie, were great at having a process that they explain to people. Bob was a ex-Marine veteran.

That’s not your prototypical real estate salesperson. He was very much more of a detail person, a rules follower, down the line, here’s what we’re gonna do. Coming from corporate America, Kodak Eastman background.

So I learned a lot there and then have augmented through the years with my own variety and flavor to the business.

[Mattias]
Yeah, no, you’re mentioning ninja selling gives me an idea of the type of model you’re operating out of. Cause the next question is gonna be like, are you doing cold leads? Are you doing inside sales agents kind of stuff?

But it sounds like you’re probably more focusing on the relationships with the databases of the agents in your team, in your company and kind of expanding that way. Is that correct?

[Drew Coleman]
No, but you would think that based on what we said I think one of the things that makes us unique is that we’ve really embraced all of the spectrum. Usually you find these niche companies that it’s either all of the agents who have done a lot of business top producers, which was the brokerage that I came from and grew my team at, which no longer exists. It was sold to a franchise after the owner passed.

And so all of my business was repeat and referral and as well as my teams for a number of years. But then we had one of our current agents, Robin Malcolmson, come to join us. And she said, hey, I really wanna work with you guys.

And I already had some staff and support and buyers agents at that time. And I said, well, I don’t know what business we have to give you, give it a few years. Usually we can support another position.

But she wanted to do it at the moment and she’s a rock star. So we started diving into the world of leads. And it’s been an interesting journey since we’ve done that because now I think we’re a company that doesn’t turn our nose up at repeat and referral, nor do we do it at leads of any source.

So there’s a lead calling in right now. So, yeah.

[Mattias]
Yeah, that’s interesting. Now, I get it. And I’m assuming then you are treating those new leads as you would your repeat.

And like, so you kind of build them into your sphere and they become more than obviously transactional. I think that’s the reputation that you can get as if you are in that lead role, is that you just, it’s a numbers game. You’re gonna get 5,000 calls a week and you’re gonna get 1% of them in meetings or whatever the numbers are and et cetera.

So there’s obviously a way you can build that rapport, you can build that relationship for a long-term repeat and referral kind of thing, no matter where you get the lead source.

[Drew Coleman]
Absolutely. And I think one of the secrets is there’s so much to learn in this business. Rip off and duplicate is one of the greatest words.

And everyone does business a little bit different. And what we’ve learned is that people who do leads can learn a lot from those who work their sphere and how to cultivate a sphere, make those people. But also people who have sphere business can learn some things about the language, the urgency, the communication preferences of modern people, through those who are working with leads.

And also, not all leads are created equal. There’s a stigma sometimes across the breadth of real estate that leads are this and it’s a bunch of junk and people ripping you off. We’ve kicked a lot of tires and there have been those sources, but we’ve also found a lot of really great ones that have created amazing relationship.

We work, our specific office within the Portland metro area is in Lake Oswego, which is the, I guess there’s no better way to say it, the wealthiest suburb in the state of Oregon. And we’ve got a listing on Lake Oswego, which is the most expensive real estate in the state for $4 million that was an opportunity that just came to us that’s just gone to the market. So, and our agents created a phenomenal relationship with those folks.

They just bought their dream kind of retirement place with tractors and let their grandkids drive around and they’ve lived Lake life, but that’s been a great transaction. And so we embrace all of it and we’re able to bring things to our sphere agents, as we call them. And we want everyone to be a sphere agent, of course, that we’ve learned on this side that have been really beneficial, so.

It’s interesting.

[Erica]
Yeah, before we started, you had mentioned that you’re the owner of the brokerage and you’re trying to be, I think you said a little bit less involved as you go. So I’m just curious where you’d like it to be when it is as you’d like it.

[Drew Coleman]
Yeah, Erica, great question. Yeah, I don’t think I wanna be less involved, definitely not less involved. I think we’ve brought more and more amazing people.

And one of the things, the company that I worked at through many years that we’ve learned that we’ve tried to adopt from Hassan Company Realtors was that I learned the value of gatekeeping the quality of the brokerage and they did a phenomenal job of that. While I was at Hassan Company, it was named top sales volume per agent company in the country a number of years, actually competing sometimes with the group in Fort Collins, Colorado, which Larry founded. So that’s the ilk of it.

The way that we have tried to build it is we’ve added a principal broker. So when I say I wanna be less PB, I think that we can have great people answering those, hey, what do I do in this situation calls? I love being hands-on.

I wanna be as hands-on as I can with the growth, the strategic vision of the organization and creating a real estate company that does things a lot better than others. One of the ways we do that is we looked at the prevalence of teams and when we were running our team at top capacity and winning some awards there, I realized the most replaceable part of this ecosystem, this pyramid is me at the top. And what if we create a company that just interchanges that top person and whatever agent is doing the work can have the name and lights and the marquee of their own business, but we can provide that level of support at a company structure, which I hadn’t really seen done before.

And that’s been a super successful model and it makes our agents able to achieve levels of success and work-life balance that have been previously hard to attain in the real estate game.

[Erica]
Yeah, no kidding. I was gonna ask you about that next, by the way, just your own work-life balance. I know you have a family.

I’m curious how you’ve managed that, if there’s ever a time where it felt like it was really hard to have that balance and where it is now.

[Drew Coleman]
Well, the two of you probably know this better than anyone else and you work together, so you understand this. Well, first, I mean, I’m lucky to be married to the most patient and understanding woman in the world and I think it has more to do with her than it does with me that we’ve been able to make it 23, four years, 24 years in this business. But I made the kids a priority.

The nice thing about real estate is that you can sometimes, you build your own schedule. Now, you often have to work when your clients want you to work. I don’t know that my work-life balance has been the best.

A lot of our agents, I think, is better. I tend to be wired that way a little bit, but I’ve never missed one of my kids’ sporting events. I’ve been there at every play, graduation and everything else and I think it’s not necessarily the quantity of time but the quality of time you spend with the family and we’ve had a lot of that, so.

[Erica]
Yeah, for sure. I don’t know about for you, I think for, I guess I’ll just speak for us. Sometimes I don’t realize that our balance is off until it’s staring us straight in the face and then all of a sudden it becomes very apparent that we have to recalibrate a little bit and then adjust.

I don’t know about you, or have you been able to stay ahead of it?

[Drew Coleman]
I don’t know, I don’t, you know, sometimes I think that the work-life balance conversation gets a little bit too, you know, that we should all be working an hour a day and then eating bonbons on a beach. I think that there’s that argument out there. I see on Instagram, too, which I don’t necessarily subscribe to.

You’re looking very sick.

[Mattias]
4-hour work week.

[Drew Coleman]
Yeah, the 4-hour work week, which good for him if that’s what you want to do. But I feel like we’re doing something more important than just selling real estate. I think we’re helping people, you know, go from the lives they have to the lives that they’re dreaming about and that’s really our goal for both our agents and our clients.

Have there been times it felt off? Yeah, usually for me that manifests in like a feeling of, you know, my body’s going so fast, it’s like, holy cow, you get a little bit sick or, okay, I need to take a step back and realize, you know, this is not, we’re not curing cancer, sending people to the moon here, even though what we do is very important, so.

[Erica]
Yeah, I have heard a lot of people we’ve talked to describe their partners as patient. And it does seem like it takes a certain level of flexibility just in general for somebody in this business.

[Drew Coleman]
Yeah. Can’t wait to watch this part of the video back, Ellie. My business partner, she’s just crawling across the back there.

She just had a kid a few months ago and she’s been able to do a good job of that balance and it’s just, a lot of times people waste a lot of time in organization and understanding. Really, you talked about books earlier and one of the books when we were doing our pre-work on this call that we followed pretty religiously is the traction book. Just talking about having an operating system for our business that makes sure that we take that rocks principle and probably everyone remembers the, I think it’s like a high school science project where you take a, the professor takes a, teacher takes a jar of rocks and puts four big rocks on it and says, is this full?

And everyone says, yeah, it’s full. And then add smaller rocks, is it full? Yeah, now it’s really full.

Add sand and then add water, right? That premise makes sure that we focus on the big rocks, the big things that we want to accomplish on a quarterly, weekly basis and breaks it down from there. And that’s been, that’s helped us, I think, keep our priorities in check and understand if what we’re working on is really that urgent or important.

[Mattias]
Yeah, it makes sense. I do have a, I want to go backtrack a little bit if it’s all right. I want to hear more about this individual agent brand kind of spotlight.

So what are we talking here? Is that like, there’s no company branding on their signs, on their websites? What’s that look like?

[Drew Coleman]
Yeah, good question. Well, it’s really their option. You know, I think they say a fool learns from his own mistakes, a wise man learns from others.

And I’ve seen companies come and go where they’re very emphatic about their branding is going to be on everything. And to me, our vision for the company is to support the agents and let them thrive. And really, I think the modern real estate ecosystem is about personal brands for agents.

And we want to be the brand that allows them to reach their fullest potential as far as that goes. So if they want to have a sign that’s all their branding and it’s state compliant, either in Oregon or Washington, with our logo as small as needed, great. If they want to use our beautiful branding that we have as a brokerage, outstanding.

But really, that’s the approach that we take is we want to do that. Because I’m sure in your market as well, you’ve seen these people who they join a team because they want opportunities or they want to get going. And then one of two things happen, they fall out or they have success, but they want their name on the sign and they want to move on.

So then they have to move to a different company. And then maybe they feel like they’re farther in their career, they move to a company with more of a prestige brand. And then they’re edging out and they go to a place to hang their license and have some referral business and have a usually younger person at that point take over.

We wanted to build a company that supported that entire career arc where people could grow their career but still have their name be recognized and not feel like they had to move three or four times. And we’ve tried to build an ecosystem for that. And it’s been great, still in progress, of course.

[Mattias]
Yeah, that makes sense. And one of the key things you said there was that the state compliance, because that was the first thing I thought of. I was like, wait, I don’t think we are able to not have our company in Virginia on a sign, for example.

So that makes a lot of sense. And I think, honestly, that sounds a lot like kind of the approach I’ve often taken with my real estate sales from agent to client basis where it’s really about them, it’s not about me. So trying not to put myself over them, that could look a lot of different ways.

It could be posting pictures of them on my social media, for example, at the closing table, unless they want to share it themselves. So that’s been one of my kind of ways of doing it. So it sounds like you’re kind of taking that same approach, but from the broker level.

[Drew Coleman]
100%, yeah, that’s the same intentionality and heart we have behind how we do that with agents. And I think that’s such a successful recipe that no one wants to, I don’t know, the glamor, here I am on the hood of my Jaguar culture that we see sometimes in real estate, is I just don’t know that that’s attractive to clients when you step back and look. And neither is the just sold in 12 hours with 15 offers.

It makes what we do look very simple and simplistic, which I don’t know that we want to do. I’m a big believer in the show the work type of methodology, which is, you know, Amityus, that he had his property, we met with him two months ago, we had a lot of painting that needed to be done, we had our interior decorator come through week three, then we had bark dust put in, we had paint, we rearranged the furniture, we made sure that we captured a 3D tour, we did this. Telling that story on an Instagram story or in a postcard or something like that, to me, would be so much more compelling if I’m someone, oh, okay, he’s gonna take me through the steps, then sold in 12 hours, okay, great, real estate looks easy, I think I wanna do that instead of, you know, selling pages and cell phones.

[Mattias]
Yeah, yeah, or just do it myself, put it up, sell by owner. I mean, and yeah, to your point, like, I mean, if somebody really thinks about it, yeah, if you were to price a house $100,000 under market value, like, it probably will sell in 12 hours, but 15 hours, right?

[Drew Coleman]
Of course, yeah, anyone can do that. Doesn’t show in group, was it above market? Was it below market?

What were the circumstances?

[Mattias]
Right, yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. I like that a lot, and definitely it’s something that I’ve been working to build in my business more and more is that, you know, pre-market presentation or preparation, because yeah, again, anybody can take pictures. I got a lot of flack for my very first listing when I had, there was a, I believe there was a keg on the front porch, and there was, I think, a shotgun or something in one of the shots.

Yeah, like, yeah, Mattias, maybe you should think about like trying to stage the pictures a little bit before you.

[Drew Coleman]
Just take a picture. That wasn’t like your bonus to the photographer for a photo shoot well done or anything? Take a keg, yeah.

[Mattias]
Yeah, so come a long way from that point, but that’s awesome.

[Drew Coleman]
Yeah, yeah, it’s such a wonderful business, and I feel like one of the things we try to put in the heart of our agents is giving back, too, and Mattias, I saw that you had served as your board president. I think that’s just so important, and so many agents are detached with the ecosystem that’s been created that allows them to do business. I served as Portland president and Oregon Realtors president, and I’ve got a role traveling for NAR next year to talk about RPAC, and people, if it is easy, if there’s anything easy about real estate, it’s because of the system we’ve created that’s the best in the world that allows properties to be transparently and fully shared amongst people, and anyone can have access to all of the properties.

You don’t have to know so-and-so. There’s a lot of things that are so beautiful about the way that it’s been designed now. We as an industry have work to do, and there’s a lot of improvement, but it’s a concerning time where people want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I agree. I think it’s, yeah, I mean, you said it perfectly. I mean, it’s just, it’s hard to sit back and be like, no, no, this is wrong.

What you’re saying is, like, what, what? Price fixing? Like, what?

We’re not allowed to talk about commissions. Like, things like that just were completely wrong, and it was just hard to sit back. Obviously, NAR had to get some clarity in our market with the settlement, not admitting fault, not admitting that those things were happening, but needed to move on, and so it’s gonna be still an interesting time to see how things roll out, but yeah, I agree.

I think it’s, if anything, it’s a good time to invest more in RPAC, to try to continue to, yeah, keep our legislation, all that stuff in a good place for the consumers. I mean, that’s really where it comes down to, is, like, we’ve tried to set up a fair system, like you said, for everybody to have a good chance at home ownership, a fair shot at it. 100%.

[Erica]
Drew, can you tell us a little bit about the Portland area? Just what draws people into it? What, any trends you’ve seen with people coming in there or leaving?

[Drew Coleman]
Well, natural beauty always is at the top of that list. It’s a rare place. We sit here in the Willamette Valley that sits in a beautiful, green, lush part of the world, but also we’re an hour from the ocean, we’re an hour from world-class mountain skiing, hiking, et cetera.

It’s a very outdoorsy type of area. It’s a very local business-focused type of area. You see that across the board in restaurants and law firms and real estate companies.

You don’t see TGI Fridays littering the land. You see a lot of private, local type of places. Nothing wrong with TGI Fridays.

Their French onion soup’s delicious, but that’s really the vibe of Portland. The TV show Portlandia stigmatized us a couple ways, but it also got some things right in the quirk and the independent spirit that we have here. But it’s a beautiful place to call home and every day you can walk outside and be inspired.

[Erica]
That’s cool. Do you, I don’t know how often you travel east, but you come all the way over here to the east coast. Can you, do you have any culture shock?

Can you tell you’re not on the west coast anymore?

[Drew Coleman]
Well, I do travel, and again, I’ll be traveling a preponderance of this next year for that RPAC travel team. There’s just differences. I appreciate everywhere.

I love expanding horizons and going different places, including Virginia, DMV, all of those areas. There’s pluses and minuses about everything. I don’t know that I would say it’s culture shock, probably, but there’s not really any place like Portland.

I’d say Seattle and Austin, Texas are probably the two most close facsimiles as far as like quirky culture.

[Mattias]
Okay, I didn’t know that about Austin. We might be going there next year, so we’ll look out for the quirkiness.

[Erica]
Yeah, yeah, we felt it a little bit. I have a sister in Seattle and brother-in-law, and so we visited them some. We went out for their wedding and we’ve gone out a couple times since.

And it is a different feel. It is kind of hard to explain, because it’s not, I don’t know if I would describe it as culture shock either, but it is definitely, like I can tell I’m not in Virginia anymore. And we, what was it, a year or two ago, we rented an Airbnb off the coast of Oregon, and probably one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever been.

Mattias had the flu the whole time, so he didn’t really get to experience it the way I did, but it was a beautiful place to be. I have not been to Portland, though. That’s been a place I’d really like to visit.

[Mattias]
Yeah, we drove through it on the way, but we didn’t actually spend any time.

[Drew Coleman]
Well, you got a place to stay. Anytime you want to come out, please let me know. We’d love to host you and act as tour guides to the town.

That would be a lot of fun.

[Erica]
Ah, thanks, that’s awesome. You were talking about hiking and skiing and the ocean. Do you subscribe to these hobbies, too?

[Drew Coleman]
You know, I skied. I actually lived in Vienna, Austria as a middle schooler, so they have a week that Austrians take their skiing very seriously. There’s a week called Ski Week that everyone goes to the mountains.

So yeah, we skied a fair amount there. Work and the kids’ sports have kept me off the mountain for the last few years, but we do love just going up there, sitting at Timberline Lodge in the winter and letting the fire roar, where they filmed The Shining, is a fun thing to do. Going out to Cannon Beach, seeing Haystack Rock, getting taffy fresh pulled, eating at the lovely restaurants, getting a fresh bowl of clam chowder.

We try to partake in that as often as we can.

[Erica]
Wow, that sounds like so much fun. I didn’t realize The Shining was filmed there. That’s interesting.

[Drew Coleman]
Well, the outside of it serves the inspiration. I think the inside was a lot of sets, as you might expect.

[Erica]
Yeah, sure, that’s very cool. Where we live, our town, like the main street, sounds a little similar to what you’re describing in the sense that there are not chains allowed there. It needs to be a local restaurant to be able to be set up downtown.

And so they’ve done, like this Saturday, we have our Winter Wonderland holiday festival where you can do a sip and stroll, where you can get your beer from wherever and walk around and go and shop, and they have kids’ activities. They do a nice job bringing the community together downtown, and that’s one thing that has felt a little bit similar to some of these descriptions, like you’re talking about with Portland.

[Drew Coleman]
Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that really adds a richness to a culture that doesn’t happen in some of these places where I’ll pick on some of these areas with long kind of semi-highways that are just littered with chain type of places. It can feel a bit soulless in those situations, and we do a lot to try to combat that.

[Mattias]
Yeah, is that intentional city planning, or do you think, or is that more also the culture, like maybe we’re quirky here, and that’s why we like the chain, you know what I mean?

[Drew Coleman]
Yeah, no, I mean, well, we do have very unique urban planning here. We have what’s called the urban growth boundary that there’s a layer of government that sits above the cities, but below the state level. It’s called Metro, which all of the cities a while back agreed to allow a lot of their land use and zoning to be controlled at that level, and it’s created this tight circle around the Metro area, which does prevent sprawl.

It also makes it very difficult for builders, especially production builders, to find enough land. Sometimes they’ll let in a swath of land from the urban reserves to be built on, but on the whole, it does prevent that urban sprawl that you might see in an LA or a Houston, so I think that functionality, along with the culture and the type of people we have here, all play into the restaurant scene. Yeah, I love it.

[Erica]
That’s interesting. I’m just curious, when the cities were agreeing to have this level of government there, did that take a while for all the cities to get on board?

[Drew Coleman]
You know, it was before my time, so I can’t speak to it firsthand, but it’s been going on quite some time, and I don’t know about the political fights that happened, and it’s probably a good thing for me to drive and ask chat GPT and learn a little bit about as I go.

[Erica]
That’s interesting. Are there a lot of places that have that level? Have you heard of that?

[Drew Coleman]
I’m not sure. Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s fairly unique from what I’ve learned, so.

[Erica]
That’s cool. Yeah.

[Mattias]
And how is the housing affordability issue? Do you see any solutions?

[Drew Coleman]
Well, I mean, again, Mattias, you and I, having kind of been in the governance involved, I think it starts with, you know, in a lot of parts of our metro area, before you even put a shovel in the ground, you’ve got almost $100,000 worth of SDC fees that speaks straight to affordability. I think we’ve got to get more people in the trades. We’ve got to do something, whether on a governmental level or a campaign marketing level, to get more people that want to be plumbers, electricians, framers, roofers, et cetera, because that’s an aging populace.

And if that continues to be the case, you know, your plumber’s gonna charge 10 times what you’re a neurosurgeon is pretty soon. So I don’t think that’s super sustainable. And I would just like to see more common sense.

I would like to see them. I’d like to see the taxation be moved to the back end rather than the front end. I’d like to see the affordability increase.

And hopefully we’ll see that. There’s a lot of changes coming, but it’s a slow moving ball and it’s gonna take a lot of bureaucratic tape unraveling.

[Mattias]
Yeah, to encourage development ultimately, to increase the supply. And do you all have a rent control? Has that been proposed or is that active in your area?

[Drew Coleman]
Thanks for bringing up that sore spot. Yes, we were the first state. I don’t know if others now have followed suit, but we were the first state with statewide rent control.

Oh, okay. And really not to get too political here, but what it led to is actually people taking almost all of their rental units and increasing to the max allowable because they didn’t want to get behind. So what we did see is actually higher than usual rent increases immediately after that was put into place.

[Mattias]
And is that something that you can’t increase it, but a certain amount if it’s like a lease renewal, but if that tenant is removed, you could then get it up to market, is that?

[Drew Coleman]
Yeah, if they leave and you’ve got a vacant unit, you can do that. But for the tenancy of the person who’s there, there’s only so much you can increase that. Yeah, okay.

And again, if there was more supply, the free market would regulate itself, but we’ve got condensed supply, we’ve got high SDC fees, which drives costs up, and then landlords are trying to create more revenue for themselves as they should because the costs are higher. It’s kind of a vicious cycle.

[Mattias]
Yeah, I interviewed somebody from Canada that basically that was her opportunity was knowing how to navigate the rent control because there would be people that wouldn’t have increased rents. Everything would be severely under-rented. She could buy a property cheaper because if things were severely under-rented and then she was able to return it and just knew how to basically get units back up to market value.

And that’s really just kicking tenants out. I mean, which it sounds like a great thing, but that’s kind of what ends up happening. And yeah, anyway.

[Drew Coleman]
Yeah, it’s a rough game and then we have that and we have mandatory relocation fees for people. Even if you are able to sell the property, which often there’s many rules around it, but it often has to be to an owner-occupant or to the landlord themselves repossessing, meaning moving back into the property for self-possession. It can be difficult and those tenants can do a pretty hefty sum of financial outlay called relocation assistance.

[Mattias]
Okay, wow, okay.

[Drew Coleman]
We own short-term rental properties in Idaho ourselves because we’re big on investment, but after some of these rules were passed there were a lot of Oregon tenants that were not paying rent, yet there was no recourse for the landlords because they were basically forgiven for doing that, but the landlords didn’t get recourse, so going negative. So we luckily had a vacancy in kind of 1031 to everything to some short-term rentals my wife manages in Twin Falls, Idaho.

[Mattias]
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the moral of the story is like if, the way I see it is you take all politics and whatever aside, it’s just that there’s gonna, if there’s a lot of houses available and there’s a lot of supply, there’s gonna be competition, downward competition, right? Like the prices have to go down in order for that to fill the units.

If there’s, you know, right now it’s the opposite. There’s not enough places and there’s too many people wanting to live there, so the prices go up. So yeah, hopefully we can get more development.

I mean, housing’s a basic need. If there’s not enough of it, we should have more.

[Drew Coleman]
100%, yeah, and if, I mean, the Great Recession was a terrible time in six, seven, eight, and nine, but what it did prove is what you just said, Mattias, which is that when we had that oversupply of homes where people owned a fourth, fifth home and it was this speculative building, we did see prices correct. So it shows that the supply and demand effect does work in real estate, and if we fix that, we will solve this problem.

[Mattias]
Yeah, yeah. Well, I am curious, you mentioned traction earlier. Do you have any other books that you find to be either a fundamental book that you think everybody should read getting into the business?

I could guess maybe Ninja Selling would be one.

[Drew Coleman]
Yeah, I’d better give my guy Larry some props to Ninja Selling, and you know, I think Ninja Selling is really the most thoughtful, full, whole cloth approach to real estate, and you know, it’s so thoughtful, and it really has an inquisitiveness, curiosity about people, and it’s show, not sell. I really love that. I think we’ve incorporated a lot of that.

You know, I think The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, although I hate the title of the book, still is pretty seminal in our business. If you’re wanting to talk real estate, exactly what to say for real estate agents is a wonderful book as well. Going real estate specific here, I should look at my bookshelf, because I’ve got a lot of these.

We’ve taken a lot from Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, really that tactical empathy piece, and that’s really phenomenal in negotiations. I think I’ve been a better negotiator the last two years than I had the first 23 because of some of the tactics that we’ve put in there, and then some more overall thoughtful books, Thinking Fast and Slow is a phenomenal book just to really understand where people are coming from, whether it be loss aversion, or slowing down, questioning instincts. It’s really made me an invaluable leader, I think, for managing our team.

So those come to mind at the moment. I just got a book yesterday, very kindly, from Portland Metro Realtors. We had our installation, and the major investors got a book, and I got a book I’m excited to read called Range by David Epstein, talking about how generalists succeed in a world of specialization because people have skills across different paradigms.

So I’m excited to pick that up. It’s the next read. Interesting, cool.

[Mattias]
Cool, well, if anybody, do you have a way for people that maybe are interested in joining your team or your brokerage, or interested in knowing more about you, do you have a social media website? What’s a good place for people to look?

[Drew Coleman]
Yeah, people can absolutely reach out. Email’s great, [email protected], T-H-E-O-P-T.com. They’re welcome to give me a call, 503-743-7331, and you can Google my name.

I’ve been around long enough. Like Mattias and Erica, I’m sure you can find me if you want to, and would love to talk to anybody. I just like, I love relationships, and there’s so many awesome people in real estate like you two that I’ve met, that I feel like, you know, now I got a friend in Virginia, and I think you attract more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, and appreciate podcasts like this, that you guys prove the same thing and try to better our world.

So thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks, Drew.

[Erica]
Yeah, thanks for coming on.

[Mattias]
I think that’s the first time we’ve had someone give out their number on air. But you’re, I mean, like, yeah, if you Google anybody’s name, we’re there. Yeah, you’ll find it anyway, right?

[Erica]
It’s gonna be there.

[Drew Coleman]
My blood tape’s probably online. I mean, the amount of information, I’m sure if you dig for it, that we’ve found is, there’s not a lot of privacy in the world, despite what we think.

[Erica]
So, yeah. Right, so true.

[Drew Coleman]
But yeah, thanks so much, Drew.

[Erica]
Yeah, thank you for coming on.

[Drew Coleman]
Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s been an honor, appreciate it.

[Erica]
Thanks for listening to the REI Agent.

[Mattias]
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to catch new shows every week.

[Erica]
Visit REIAgent.com for more content.

[Mattias]
Until next time, keep building the life you want.

[Erica]
All content in this show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.