2401 - Combining Relationship Building and Technology for Success with DPI Showcase Websites’ Mark Weithorn

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0:46Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, Mark Whitehorn. Mark, you are the founder of DPI Showcase Websites. That also happens to be your website, your website name, dpishowcasewebsites.com. Mark, you're just down the road from me. You're in South Florida. I'm up here in Orlando. Mark, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you for having me. This is fun. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I always love talking with leaders and kind of what they do for fun when they're not at work. I understand you do some traveling and you went to the Galapagos.

1:28Tell us about that experience. It was absolutely amazing. It was like two different worlds. First of all, you fly in to the Galapagos from from Quito, Ecuador, where I stood on the equator, which is really cool. and then they hand you you go to a pier and they hand you life jackets and you go what's going on and then you jump on a tender and they take you to this like mini cruise ship where there's only 100 passengers and you're treated like the life of luxury but the other hand every morning and after afternoon you're going on excursions onto the islands and you're jumping onto these tenders where you're sitting on the side of this inflatable and you're seeing all these animals and we were climbing on lava fields and you walk up to these animals and they don't move.

2:20You're like three feet from a bird, a blue-footed booby, okay? And they don't move. And then you're walking on the beach with all these sea lions, just like hanging out and sleeping and crabs and iguanas. I mean, we're in Florida. We have a lot of iguanas, but these are huge so it was a really fun luxurious uh excursion into nature wow did you see the giant tortoises oh yeah we did and i want you they're huge and and they just they just migrate they go from place to place and uh you just go to where they are they take you to where they are in their paths and i wanted to touch one i wanted to like in and the guide said no can't touch it you know you can touch it as long as you're eight feet away

3:16they had these naturalists um these these are local people who were trained about the nature of the galapagos so every time you go on an excursion or a hike they're there to explain to you what's going on. And we learned so much. And the thing is, we probably only saw about 3 % of the Galapagos because it's really protected. But it was fun. We loved it. I recommend it to anyone. Yeah. You know, if someone wants to just do a quick search real quick on Galapagos animals, just so you can see some examples of the encounters that you could potentially have. but it really does. You said you only sell by about 15%.

4:00If someone were to plan a trip, how many days would you recommend? How do they plan their itinerary? It's done through Celebrity Cruise Lines. They have this mini cruise ship, and it's a week. What happens is you fly into Quito, Ecuador, and you spend a couple of days there touring around. they have some tours and stuff and um that's really interesting because that's 9 000 feet up so you know we live at sea level so you're kind of like you know sucking air um and then um after that they fly you to the galapagos so it's about a 10 day trip 12 day trip on the back end so yeah about that. Well, it sounds divine.

4:44Thank you, Mark, for inspiring a little wanderlust. So, Mark, let's talk about business. Tell me what DPI Showcase Websites is. We are a website company that creates specialized websites for realtors and brokers across the United States and Canada, and now Puerto Rico. So, these are specialized websites that link to the MLS so you can see all the listings that are available in the area. And plus, it has a whole bunch of other tools like a client management system, a CRM, and a whole bunch of other things to give realtors the edge for their marketing. Now, is this something that they would generally do?

5:28Like, would the brokerage be providing this? And just help me understand this world a little bit. Or is this usually, do you work directly with the real estate professionals themselves. I don't really know how that world works. So we do both. We specialize in small to medium sized brokers. These are brokers that have less than about 200 agents, or some of our clients are brokers that have no agents and they're as happy as can be. They just do their own thing and no one bothers them and they're happy. And then we also work with individual realtors because realtors tend to change brokers every so often for whatever reason.

6:08So they want to be transportable. They need to take their website with them, their CRM with all their client information with them. So if they switch brokers, it just takes two minutes to change it out. Yeah. And so why, I guess, Mark, before working with DPI, like a DPI showcase website, what's the problem? What are real estate professionals generally doing, and how do you help them sell more homes? Sure. The challenge is that technology has gotten really tough. Every minute, the programmers in Silicon Valley, they're moving your cheese. They're changing things. Where the button used to be on the right, now it's on the left.

6:58Now, Now with AI, it just adds another complexity. So what we do is we provide the realtors with a lot of automated tools. So this way they don't have to worry about technology. For example, we automatically blog for them. And then we automatically post that blog on their Facebook and LinkedIn with a link back to their website. And then we automatically send out a weekly e-newsletter to all of their clients with the previous week's blog articles and holiday emails and birthday emails. and market reports and all done so they don't have to lift a finger. And this way they're staying in touch with their clients because the challenge is if you don't do that, it's out of sight, out of mind.

7:41And you sell them a house and seven years later, they need you again and they forgot who you are and then you lose them. And realtors need to stay in touch with these people. So we automate that whole thing for them. Hmm. What is, you know, here we are, you know, kind of, you know, well into 2026. What are the trends that you see as it relates to real estate professionals and particularly how they grow, operate their business and how they do their sales and marketing? So it's a challenge balancing technology and personal relationships. Real estate, you have to have a personal relationship with your client.

8:30This is the largest purchase or sale that they're going to do in their lives. And they don't want to talk to some bot. They want to talk to a person. They want to be able to call you on your cell phone and you pick up and you answer questions for them. That's what they want. But at the same time, you need to know technology. You need to do certain things. So what we do is, first of all, I teach marketing classes to realtors at the Miami Association of Realtors. I've been doing that for like 28 years. And these are basically how-to classes on how to get leads and how to service your clients and things like that.

9:08Like one of my most funnest classes is surviving the first six months as a realtor. And this is meant for the newbies, the ones who just got their license and the deer in the headlights. They don't know what to do. And it's a three hour class. And at the end of that three hour class, they have basic marching orders of how to organize their business, how to go find clients and how to service those clients. So that's what we do. And plus, after the website's created, we always set up a Zoom call to train them on how to use a site. and just make sure the social media is set up properly. The challenge these days with most media companies or most internet companies, I'm sorry, is they provide very little customer service.

9:57So you talk to a salesperson, they sell you the world and then they sign you up and then there's no help, there's no one to get to. For example, there's one company in particular, You know, they're larger than I am. And one of my clients said, oh, we're switching over to them. And I said, no problem. I'll see you in six months. They said, what are you talking about? I said, just put it in your calendar. I'll see you in six months. Sure enough, yesterday they called me and they said, Mark, I don't know how you knew it, but we're back. OK, so you really need to service people. You need to it's very intimidating technology.

10:37And you really need to give people someone to talk to, some assistance, because it's tough. Yeah. Mark, let's talk a little bit more about best practices for real estate professionals who might be listening. And I think this has application to anyone who is a small business owner. An observation that I have around local realtors is they love to promote themselves. They certainly love to promote, you know, hey, if you know anyone, da-da-da-da-da. I think there's some that get it, however, from a – the number one job is just to kind of stay top of mind and do so leading in value and generosity without all of the asks, right?

11:27And I don't know if you're a fan of this, but, you know, I'm just a huge fan of just you give generously. Folks know who you are. I mean, obviously, you know, they'll kind of figure it out through context. How do you like I don't know if you provide any guidance around that, like when you're doing training or if you're speaking to a room of professionals without kind of without getting into your like your services and, you know, you know, your features and that sort of thing. You know, let's talk to maybe just about general practices, general, general best practices. Sure. In some of my classes, I have a whole section on networking.

12:02And what I talk to them about is going out in the community and volunteering. If you're a parent and you have children in school, get on the PTA, make those brownies. All right. And, you know, volunteer, meet people. if you belong to a church or a charity or a synagogue or something like that if they have activities you know you want to be standing there on a sunday morning handing out the scrambled eggs because then people know you and they meet you and you can't just show up once because if you show up once you're a stranger you show up three or four times now you're family so get out in the community and just like meet people, hand out business cards.

12:48I mean, I always have this conversation, you know, the newbies, the Gen Zs, they like business cards. Oh my God, that's like so antiquated. What's with business cards? And I'm like, yeah, you need business cards. Because, you know, some people like to share their information with other people. But it's kind of like dating. You know, you give someone your phone number and you want their phone number in return and they don't want to give it to you because they don't know who you are. But if you hand them a business card, it's kind of like there's no obligation. They can put it in their pocket. They can hold on to it.

13:28They can throw it in the trash. And it's really simple. And I suggest that they should hand out at least a thousand of these business cards a year and it works. Three a day, you can do that. So, yeah, and it's, you know, one contention that I have made is that if you can get to a point, you know, really, it's, if you can get to a point where you've got a few hundred people who, when asked, you know, hey, who do you recommend? Or who do you know that, you know, we're thinking about selling our home, you know, we just need to talk with someone, kind of figure that out. Like, who would you know? And, you know, if you're a real estate professional where you've got a couple of hundred people that you are always going to be that number one name that comes up, you know, I believe, Mark, it's you're kind of in a situation where it's game, set, match.

14:21Now, it takes a while to get there. And, you know, and I think that the building blocks to getting there is exactly how you describe. It's building that human connection, you know, human to human and in person. So yeah, you actually, when you go to the gym and chit chat with people, you're working, you're getting paid for going to the gym and getting healthy and meeting people. So in that sense, it's kind of a cool job, you know, but I would argue too, Mark, and I'm sure you have some insight, you know, having been in this world for quite some time. In the beginning, it's harder. When you've spent years building your network, my point of view is that it gets easier the longer that you keep building and nurturing that network of friends.

15:13So in a few of my classes, I do this exercise with the realtors. I say to them, all right, take out your cell phone. And they'll look at me like, what? Open the contacts on your cell phone and scroll all the way to the bottom and look at how many people you have there. I said, start contacting these people. Make sure they know you're a realtor. Make sure they know you're a serious realtor. Make sure they have your website address there. You friend them on social media, on Facebook and LinkedIn. Invariably, people will have 900, 1 ,000. One woman had 4 ,000 contacts in her phone. In Miami, we call this mango bajito, which is the low-hanging fruit.

15:59And these are the people that you should start with. Start with people you know. They'll trust you more than strangers will. Well, Mark, you've kind of shared a bit about what you do, but your website is DPI Showcase Websites. If someone, maybe they're not ready for a sales conversation, but they'd love to learn more, or I don't know if you've got any resources. Well, I know you do because I can click on training videos and you've got many of them linked right there. But what other resources to our friend that's been listening would be kind of next steps if they're curious about the value that you provide?

16:39Sure. So the website's pretty straightforward. There's lots of live samples there so they can see the websites and how they work and things like that. And then we have different products for either realtors or for brokers. So, you know, like we do with brokers, they have sub-agent websites, which are basically websites they provide to their agents. They're a smaller site. Also on my website is a link to my YouTube channel, which has dozens of training videos. So there's simple things like, I need to share from my Facebook business page to my regular personal Facebook page. How do I do that? Or I need to link my Facebook business page to my Instagram page.

17:23How do I do that? And I have these one or two minute videos on all these things and people go there as a resource all the time. Yeah. Yeah. You've got your YouTube channel all linked up here. And again, your website is dpishowcasewebsites.com. Mark Whitehorn, you are the founder. Mark, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. This is really great. Thank you for having me.

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