Making It Work from Day One: Tina's Playbook for New RE Agents

You're listening to Crazy Shit in Real Estate. You'll be amazed at all these wild but true situations that others have found themselves in. Because on this show, you'll hear uncensored, unbelievable stories from the world of real estate.

I'm Leigh Brown. Let's dive right in. I'm Leigh Brown. This is Crazy Shit in Real Estate. I'm so excited today because Tina Jan is on the show.

She has a whole new business venture that I didn't even know about.

So you get to experience it along with me. Plus, she's super smart and delightful, so enjoy this conversation. I'll see you on the other side. Oh, are those living or fake plants behind you?

They're living. I'm trying to turn my, um, office into a tiny little jungle. I've got way more plants by the door where there's sun.

I mean, that one behind you is the kind that's hard to kill, isn't it? What's it called?

The pothos.

Is that what it's called? That's the real name?

I think so. I think it's called a pothos plant.

I don't, I don't know because I'm good at outdoor gardening, but not indoor gardening.

And then one on this side, it's, um, ornamental pineapple. I actually had a pineapple show up on it once. Really?

Yes. Oh, did you, could you eat it or was it just a, like a fake?

I, I think it's ornamental. I don't think you want to eat it. It's so tiny. It probably wouldn't be juicy anyway.

A whole pineapple in your house.

Yes.

All right. So tell my audience who you are, where you're located, how long you've been in and around the real estate space. Give them a little bit of a snapshot.

My name is Tina Jan. I've been in real estate for about 20 years. I started in 2005 as a realtor. I'm now a broker. It's been an interesting journey. I'm also a property manager. So I have 4 agents working with me, and then I have an assistant that helps me with property management. And, um, beyond that, I really enjoy real estate photography. So that's the creative side of it. But more importantly, recently, uh, within the last 2 years, I started a, um, company called openhousepeople.com, and it puts out open house sign directionals. For agents.

Oh, smart move. Right?

So we place out like 20 signs at least an hour before your open house begins, and then we pick them up after you're done. So I remember when I started having to schlep these signs in my heels, dressed up, hazard lights on, you know, that kind of thing. And, uh, took me years to figure out how to do it, but, um, I've made a business for other agents so they don't have to do that.

Okay. So where's that located? Where's your open house people business?

We're located in the Inland Empire of Southern California. So that's Riverside County, San Bernardino County. We're based out of, uh, Redlands, Yucaipa, Beaumont, those cities there.

Okay. So you've got different municipalities, different counties, which means there's different rules all over the place. Is that one of the advantages of using this service? I mean, I know that where I am in North Carolina, each municipality has its own sign rules, which is something a lot of agents don't know about until their signs vanish. And that's— Yes. Vanishes when the signs go away.

Yes, there's that. And also we have a lot of senior communities here because it's really warm weather and, um, you can't even put directionals in there. So we put them like outside of the community, you know, and try to do the best we can to generate like from where intersections are, shopping is, to try to push it towards the community.

Okay, so this isn't meant to sound ugly, but if you're talking senior communities, do you have them in a big font so they can be legible to the driver?

So we have generic signs. They're a bright yellow, bold black. They're, they're big and they're very simple. It just says open house and an arrow. It's just very simple to read.

Yes.

I mean, I, I say this because I run around with my reading glasses all the time, and if I see a little sign, like, what? I don't know what they're— exactly. And it also matters to those of us that aren't quite eligible for the 55+ neighborhoods. Yes.

Yeah, we literally just last week, um, I was looking at the arrows. I'm like, should I make the arrow part bigger so people can see the direction and not like just a straight line? Yes. So I'm always looking at that and we're always just trying to, um, make things better. We have like a whole system.

It's the story of real estate and what you're talking about here is actually you, you see the pain points that you go through as a practitioner.

Yes.

And you realize there's not a solution for that pain point, so you just create one.

Yes.

2 years ago you created this little company?

Yeah, 2 years ago we started doing open houses for other people, but I've been thinking about this idea forever. I'm like, why doesn't this exist yet? Right. So And finally I was like, I can do this. I can put this together. And, um, another broker friend of mine, she's like, Tina, why don't you make something like this happen? And I'm like, okay, if I have your support, you know, I will. So, okay.

So what's the adoption rate been? Are other agents open to using your service even though you're technically a competitor?

Yes. I don't really try to mention that I'm, um, like a broker or something unless it comes up. Like I'll mention it like, hey, you know, I think these are where you should put your signs because as a realtor for 20 years, I think this is where the signs should go, and that's something we learned about as well. We make sign maps so that the agents can review where the signs are going to be placed. Holy cow. So they get a chance to like review it and approve it and make changes, right? So a lot of the objections that they would have have been addressed.

That's really cool. Okay, so I won't ask you what it costs to use your service, cuz I know that as a practitioner, you would've picked something that would fit a realtor's pain point. But now I'm thinking too, most open houses are conducted by early career agents because they're trying to build their business or doing all the traditional model things. So you are bringing their knowledge level up because you do have the Sign Map and you do know the rules with signage and with the different communities.

Yes.

If they were really wise, they would be thinking about how this is taking their learning curve on a higher plane than you and I had, where we had to learn one by one by one by one.

Right. Like, where would be good placement? How many do I need to put? You know, what should I do here? I've noticed that actually a lot of luxury agents use us as well. They understand the importance of open houses, or they'll order it for their newbie agents who are hosting the open houses because they want to help them along as well. So we get like the newbies, the luxury, we get both. All right.

So talk to me about your real estate market in your part of California, because you're in, obviously not in the Bay Area and you're not in LA County right now. So tell us about your, what your part of California looks like. I find this to be always an interesting conversation because California gets pigeonholed into San Francisco and LA, and there's so much more to your giant, beautiful state.

Yeah, we are in an area that has like a lot of working class families. Our homes are a little suburban slash even rural, so we have a lot of like horse property kind of places and it's more country. The people here like just identify with that a little bit more. People move here from LA, from Orange County because they want more space. They want land, they want their, you know, kids and families to have dogs and space in the backyard. So we, we give that them, give that to them. Sorry.

Hey, we're in real estate because we're, sometimes you have to watch your characters in MLS. So we give that them, but it actually makes sense. Thank you. So when you got into the business, have you always worked in this area? Is this your home place where you grew up or did you land here from somewhere else?

So I am actually an Orange County transplant. Um, you're one of those people. I moved here.

Yeah.

After a couple college. I started, um, real estate while I was still in college. I took my test while I was still like in school, and I took my test up in Oakland, so in the Bay Area. And then I really got into it because my parents were buying a new home, and I really, you know, being an immigrant, the, the oldest one, uh, you tend to be very, uh, like protective, and you do translating, and you take on a lot of roles. Yeah. So I really wanted to, you know, learn more about it. I started taking classes, uh, so many that I had enough to get my broker's, and then, but I didn't get it right away. You know, it took me a while. It took me 10 years before I got my broker's license.

But you had the education for it at the beginning?

Yes.

Yes.

Right?

Yeah. So that's how I kind of got into it. And, you know, since I was a transplant from Orange County, I didn't know anyone in the Inland Empire, you know? So a lot of my, you know, real estate friends, they grew up here. They went to high school here. I didn't know anybody. I have really had to start from scratch. So that was interesting. And I think that's something that differentiates me as a broker. Now I can tell my realtors like, hey, you can start with nothing. I started with nothing, knowing no one. And these are the steps you can do to grow your business.

Okay. So why did you pursue your license while you were in college? Did you always have this eye on real estate or was it just you're an education junkie and you wanted to add another license to your lineup of things you've learned, or how did that happen?

So when I was growing up in Oregon before that, my parents had gotten into, you know, auctions and going to look at some purchasing maybe rentals. So as a kid, I saw them going to those auctions. I got really excited. I like the way that the energy when they're doing those things. So I got really interested in real estate back then, just like going in homes and seeing what they're like. But then As I, you know, got actually out of college, my parents are like, you need to get a job. So I was like, okay, well, you know, I got my license 'cause, you know, I was trying to help them along with their real estate purchase, just knowing it, not like hands-on helping, you know, but just figuring out what was going on. So I was like, okay, well, I'll just get into real estate. And that's, I just went in after college and that was my first college, after college job. I thought I was only going to do it for maybe, a year just for the summer. And here I am 20 years later. Okay.

So you are a big-time unicorn because we seldom find anybody in real estate that this is their first real job.

Yes.

Because usually we come to real estate from something else after finding out that other pathways aren't right. So you've always been in real estate. So how did you, how did you get up and running in an area where you didn't have the long-term, went to high school here relationships, and you were young. So that's always a tricky part in real estate with the average age being 56. And then you were obviously 22, 23. How did you make it go?

It was really difficult in the beginning because not a lot of customers are going to trust a 22-year-old baby, right? Who has never—

I was like, I was trying to tighten up my bags.

Like, no. I know I often say real estate has taken my best years.

I'm stealing that because that's, that's so true.

But anyway, but yeah, so yeah, it was really hard for customers to kind of trust a newbie agent, especially being so young and not even ever buying my own house before, you know, I was still living with my parents, so I didn't really have that life experience that they were looking for. And because I was young, I don't think I had the authority to kind of be like, this is what you do. So, um, a lot of times I would have some clients request like, hey, can I get an older agent? Can I get a this type of— so I have to like, okay, you know, I want to make them happy. So I'm like, okay, sure, here you go. You know, but I think some people really took a chance on me. I was driving a, like an '89, my grandmother's '89 Corolla. And I had a few, right? I was like, you know, my, my college car. And I had a few people really appreciate that. They're like, you know, I, I think they saw a lot of themselves in me and like I was hustling and trying to make it happen and they took a chance on me. And, and I think that's, that's why they saw my eagerness.

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What I was writing down there is you mentioned that your age meant they didn't, it didn't come with authority. And we often look at our beginnings of real estate, whatever age we are when we get started, the confidence that it takes to build to the confidence to tell somebody this, but the confidence conveys authority. And I've never heard it phrased that way before. And it's so brilliant. Because you're, you're working with people, biggest amount of money they're probably spending unless they're big high rollers.

Yes.

You didn't have your own purchase in the background and you were helping your parents make their way through and you hadn't worked in the real world, right? You would question your own authority by undermining what you'd learned in going to classes and learned in the general hustle and drive of being the oldest child, which, let's be honest, that's a position of authority right there. True. But we, we do undermine ourselves until somebody says, I'm good.

Yeah.

Always these strangers that give us a chance when the people who are closest to us, they might know us too well and say, well, I don't know about you. Yes, exactly.

Exactly.

The guy from the grocery store is like, you seem like a nice young lady. Let, let me let you buy my house. Like, okay.

I think that's exactly it. I think that's exactly what happened. If like maybe a dozen of those people gave me a chance and they're like, you seem like you're working really hard and you seem like you, you're studying, you're putting forth the effort, you know, in the beginning I was just voracious for information. I took, you know, any class that they were having at the board, you know, I would go out and learn myself, you know, I think that's why I was able to absorb as much information as I can. And I wasn't afraid to like go out there and try, you know, some people are afraid to, go out and do something new. And I wasn't afraid to do that. I was like, okay, if I, I know it's scary when it's new, but if I do it 10 times, it'll be 10 times better. If I do 100 times, you know, I'll, I'll know just that much more.

And it brings up the point of here we are in the business today. So we're recording this in April of 2025. Real estate as a system is undergoing a lot of change right now, and a lot of us from lawsuits and settlements and regulatory changes, and the system is moving. So you and I, with our— you're 20 years, I'm 25 years— we have to unlearn the way we've always done it.

Yeah.

Somebody's 22 years old out of college and they come in right now, they're going to learn it this way. Yes. So they don't have to be disrupted. They're going to be the disruptors, whether they know it or not. Right.

They're going to embrace it.

Yeah. We have to go back to our, our younger selves, take them right back out again and say, when I was young and didn't know anything, how would I react to what's happening right now? As opposed to the reactive nature that we have to change. Yeah.

With the new changes, I was, you know, a lot of people were like, I don't want to make these changes. I'm like, bring it. Like, let the changes happen. Yeah. I'm like, I'm going to wing it. The people who can adapt, who can, you know, be ready for whatever happens, they're going to do well.

That's right. Because if you can grow an ornamental pineapple, then you can do anything. I'm so jealous of that. And I'm never going to try it because first of all, I'm in North Carolina. And second of all, it will die. It will die a sad, lonely death over there on the—

He's never come back after that. So we'll, we'll see. There was like a one-time only deal.

I hope he comes back. Come back, pineapple! Speak it into existence. Please come back.

I know.

Okay, Tina. So of course the story of the show is all the unexpected things that we see in real estate. And I've already poked at a couple of things that I love your business idea. I think it's brilliant. You're probably going to wind up franchising that out around the country and then you'll be a really big deal. And I'll say, I knew her back when. We're old pals. And then of course you talk a little bit about the challenges of getting started as a young person in a really interesting business, but in those 20 years of professional real estate, dying to know the craziest thing you've encountered that still you look back on and say, did that really happen?

One of the craziest things that happened was during the eviction moratorium that we had, um, right in the middle towards the end of COVID And, um, there was an empty house that I was selling. I had hired a house sitter to come in and take care of it because before she was had moved in, we kept getting break-ins. It was on a busy commercial street, like intersection. So we were just getting homeless people in there all the time. I had to board up windows. I had to, you know, every weekend I was boarding up windows. I didn't know how many windows there are, but every weekend I was boarding up windows.

Wait a minute, wait a minute. And she's willing to go be a house sitter in a house where you have to board up the windows?

So it was a, it was a two, two homes on a lot. The front house was, she was willing to be a house sitter for, and then the back unit didn't have running water, didn't have, you know, anything, but could be lived in. So somehow during her stay, someone had squatted in the back unit. And, you know, we tried to give him cash for keys kind of thing to move out, something so we didn't have to go through the eviction process. We couldn't go through it even if we wanted to. And remember how I said there was no running water and no toilets?

Mm-hmm.

So we were able to call, um, code enforcement, um, as a safety hazard because there was fecal matter near it. And they were able to kick him out and board up that unit, uh, because of that. So even during the eviction moratorium, we were able to find a way to get him out. Thank goodness.

It only involved no running water and no toilet before you could call code enforcement to come out. Yes. Holy smokes. People will actually park anywhere.

Yes.

So crazy.

I just, I, I mean, kudos to the house sitter who's willing to be on the property when you have, even if it's the second unit that's having all the, the visitors.

Yes. She had, she had a dog, um, a couple dogs, but one of them had a really loud bark. So it, yeah, you know, helped out.

Well, and I think you're actually exposing a probably underutilized job out there. If you are a young person who's working an internship in a city and you need a 3-month rental, maybe you should find a vacant house and ask the homeowner if they'd like to have a house sitter while their house is vacant and you could— Yeah. —sit and have somewhere to stay. So I think you're actually building the economy in a lot of different ways.

Yeah, she was satisfied. Um, she just needed Wi-Fi. The biggest thing for someone to stay inside, just Wi-Fi.

You can literally have internet anywhere. Yeah. I'm a little fascinated by Starlink. I can sit here and be, oh, say move over here. Okay. Now I got a signal. Ah, okay. Squatters and eviction moratorium. Is the eviction moratorium over in California now? Yeah. It finally ended. Okay. Yeah. Thank goodness. I mean, I've had a lot of your California investors who moved their money to North Carolina and I'm very grateful for that, but it's part of it has to do with those policies. Yeah. They were still responsible for the property taxes and the maintenance and the safety and the upkeep and their own expenses, but the tenants stopped paying because you couldn't run them off. Yeah.

We had, um, I have a friend who actually did move to North Carolina. I think she's in the Durham area.

2 hours away, but you can come visit both of us. Yeah.

And so she had rented to kind of a friend of a friend during the, um, during COVID and, uh, the person had worked as a bartender and during that time no one could go out and attend those establishments. So of course she wasn't making any money and, um, she couldn't pay them. So it was really tough. Um, they weren't able to make any rent during that time.

I mean, it's looking back at it, the policies hurt so many people in so many ways. And ideally the public will ask more questions next time before we just let the government tell us what we can and can't do. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

I'm definitely for more civic involvement. I think people should know more about how their government works, especially in your counties and in your cities.

And so I will tell you that I mean, I started off by asking you about the different municipal rules on signs. So if you're in real estate and you don't have a Tina in your market to help you with your open house stuff, you can call planning and zoning and find out what the zoning rules are with temporary signs. Yes. You should know. And by the way, you can also call failed politicians because we know where signs can and can't go because we have to put signs out all the time. Yeah. But it's part of your job. Is to understand your community. But if more real estate people would go to county commission, city council planning— Yes. Forget DC. That's its own set of issues. But right there, what's around you, you'd be amazed at how much impact you can have by showing up. Then you gain a little knowledge and then you might—

Absolutely.

Now you'll spot a market gap and start a whole new company.

Yeah, I think if anything, just going to see what new shops are being built, what new communities are being built, that's so important. So you can just get a little bit more information than the next agent that's not going to those things.

So 100%. And what's it cost to get that information? Oh, that's right. Oh, it's free. Oh, just a little time. Yes. And frankly, it's the time you would have spent scrolling anyway. So put the phone down and go to a meeting. I agree 100%. Tina, if somebody wants to reach out to you to find out about anything going on with real estate in the Inland Empire, or if they need to ask you about franchise opportunities for your open house business, I guess you'll be open to that too. So what's the best way for them to find you?

I'm on Instagram @tinajan, Facebook, same handle. So just @tinajan anywhere online.

And of course, all of her handles are in the show notes for this episode. So you can follow, follow, follow and reach out to her with any of your questions. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm just beyond excited to hear about your business venture. And I can't, I can't imagine that it won't be anything but a great, great success.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Know it.

Friends, say something nice about Tina down in the comments. In fact, commit to going to a planning and zoning meeting on her behalf because she'll appreciate your civic involvement. Most importantly, hit the bell over here and come back and see us next time.

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