Full transcript of OnTheRecord Season one, episode seven, featuring OnThe Market Chief Executive, Jason Tebb and Daniel Daggers, Founder of DDRE Global.
Jason Tebb: Welcome to the seventh episode of OnTheRecord. I’m Jason Tebb, Chief Executive of OnTheMarket, and over the course of this first season of podcasts I’ll be talking to the innovators and leading figures in our sector to discuss their journey in the industry, their views on proptech and their opinions on how adopting new technology can benefit every agent.
I am delighted to welcome Daniel Daggers, who in a career spanning over two decades has established himself as a leading figure in prime and super-prime markets around the world. Founder of DDRE Global, a luxury estate agency business, focusing on digital marketing and personal relationships. Daniel previously spent over ten years at Knight Frank in London and is widely considered as Mr. Super Prime. With over 54,000 followers on Instagram, a reputation for selling some of London’s most exclusive homes and a winner of Spears’ UK Property Advisor of the Year, gives me huge pleasure to welcome Daniel Daggers to the show. Hi Daniel.
Daniel Daggers: And now I know how Tyson Fury feels when he gets into the ring. Brilliant. Thank you.
Jason Tebb: Did you like that?
Daniel Daggers: I thought that was absolutely brilliant. Well done.
Jason Tebb: It’s my best one yet.
Daniel Daggers: Well done. Absolutely well done.
Jason Tebb: How are you? How’s things?
Daniel Daggers: Everything’s great, thank you very much. Busy. Very busy.
Jason Tebb: Good, good. It’s an interesting time in the market, I’m sure we’ll come onto that in a while if we get time, but first of all let’s dive straight in. Tell us a bit about your background and maybe a quick summary of how you maybe came to be an a estate agent in the first place and then give listeners some insights into your career so far.
Daniel Daggers: Sure, okay. So born and raised in London in Maida vale, borders of Kilburn. I’ve got a Yemenite Israeli mum who’s a tough cookie and my father’s from Stoke Newington and I lived in Maida Vale, went to a local boys club, youth center and a local school there and then we moved a little bit, but not too far. We are a creature of comfort, as a family. And then I tried to make it as a professional footballer, but I wasn’t good enough and I knew that in my heart of hearts, and I fell into a estate agency after studying surveying for a month and realising how much I hated it.
I, as part of my GNVQ, because I wasn’t intelligent enough to do A Levels, I worked at a business, an estate agency for two weeks. And then after doing that, I went to study surveying, didn’t like it and lo and behold, the owner of that property business bumped into my father and said, ‘what’s Daniel doing now’? And that’s how I started my career.
And I started when I was 17, 17 and a half. Very keen to be independent, make my own money and I stayed there until I was 27. So I did a ten year stint, understanding how small independents really tackle the market and how important ad spend is and every dime and every dollar and every pound. And that was a real amazing way to truly understand how important everything is when you are a small business. So I did that and then I moved to Knight Frank in 2007, just before the financial crisis, November, 2007. (I) worked there for twelve years, spent six or seven of them in St. Johns Wood, then took a role to bounce around the US and be the US ambassador, then moved into the private office and then ended up running the private office at head office, which was Baker Street. And so bounced around the world, met some fascinating people, worked with some really interesting people and understand what big organisation looks inside and what a small organisation looks like inside. So that’s it really.
Jason Tebb: Fascinating. And, you know, having that experience of both small and large businesses gives you, I’m sure, a different perspective and two very different angles on how to run a business, scale a business and grow a business. My own experience slightly echoes that, I’ve been involved in both small and large agency businesses and both equally taught me very different things, I think. But tell us more about what you’re doing now about DDRE, how you set it up and how the business differs from conventional estate?
Daniel Daggers: So I left KF under unusual circumstances and then I had a six months non-compete, so I couldn’t do anything. And at the end of the six months non-compete, after convincing Sara, who worked at Knight Frank previously, to come and join me, we got hit with Covid, which was March 2020. So coming from a place of working at a desk and having X amounts of people support me in my role, making money for a business, I was at my kitchen table and we were all in lockdown and I had to go and build a business, which was a significant challenge. One, because it was foreign to me and I’ve never done that before and two, because I was at my table, which is not necessarily my comfort zone. So doing that was interesting. I like challenges. It created some disruption in the market, also expedited change, which is what I’ve been championing for many years now. And we started the business, with just Sarah and I very quickly found one or two other people to support the backend of the business. And now we fast forward two and a half years, we are 19 people, split 50/50 between support and base camp operatives, legends, and then advisors. Not estate agents, but advisors. Not brokers, but advisors. And we’ve sold over £400 million worth of property. Our rental book portfolios at one point was humongous, but it’s called a little bit and we’re based out of Marlebone, and that’s the story morning glory. But our business is not an estate agency business, or a brokerage.
Jason Tebb: so I think that the Covid pandemic has definitely sped up that pace of change and, you know, one of the positive things to come out of such a terrible set of circumstances was that people are embracing this technology and you mentioned there the rise of ,you know, that personal brand and in fact, you know, as you quite rightly say, over in the US this is the norm. It’s a realtor environment, it’s a personal brand environment. Do you see that pace gathering over here over the next few years as well? Obviously, it’s something that’s important to you and you’re very much promoting that as your own network, your own internal and external network. Do you think it will continue to grow in the UK?.
Daniel Daggers: I think it will have to. And the purpose and foundation behind it is that we’re all consuming the same content globally, right? Because we’re all on the internet and that has a major impact as to how we do business. And it means that everybody has access to the customer to a certain extent.
And whilst everyone says all the brokerage and, you know, personal branding in the US and they do it this way and everyone in the UK looks down in their nose at them, the truth is that the US is the largest population that speaks the same language as us and is most similar to us. Okay? And therefore, the wonderful thing about having mass population is that you can find the best business model very quickly. They know what they’re doing. We may not like it. It may go against the grain, but they have such a big pool of people and industry there is driven by entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship pushes boundaries to find the best solution possible for whatever industry it is you’re working in. And so we, and I often say this over digital channels, when you travel from the UK and you go abroad, you get a glimpse as to what the future looks like because people adapt to entrepreneurialism and change much quicker. So yes, we need to speak the same language as all the other businesses around the world. The majority of business, estate agency businesses around the world, run a brokerage platform and trying to marriage a brokerage platform within estate agency doesn’t work in a world of global referrals. It works when you have peer to peer ,or person to person, and there is accountability and responsibility there and that is what I think customers want.
Customers wanna know that Daniel Daggers is working on my behalf. I know what to expect from him. I see him online. I know him in his work environment, in his personal environment. I know him in his hoodie. I know him in his suit. All these things create trust. And so, do I think it’s having a major impact here in the UK? Yes, absolutely.
I had a meeting with a central London, Super-Prime developer and they told me that 82% of the transactions in their development came from third party introducers. That’s not surprising for me, because when you’re in the industry, people don’t wanna release that information, but that is the truth. And so if that’s the case, the likelihood now of creating a bottleneck to make sure that everyone comes to speak to you is totally broken, because whoever is closest to the customer, i.e. the person who carries the most trust and can communicate with that customer the most regularly, is the person who is going to create wealth and do the business. And therefore the influence and power now lies with the person, as it should be.
Jason Tebb: Yeah, you’re right. You’ve built up your reputation, and indeed your business now, on the back of working in what is called within the industry, prime and super prime market, so I’ve gotta ask as part of this podcast, how is the current macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges affecting the prime and super prime markets, if at all? I think there’s probably a perception it doesn’t affect it at all, but it’d be interesting to get your view.
Daniel Daggers: Real estate is a luxury good and if you look at patterns across all luxury goods, best in class assets, watches, boats, jets, whatever it may be, the best of the best doesn’t tend to lose value. And that’s because the most successful and wealthiest people on the planet understand quality and they know that it’s very hard to replicate it. And so if you pay a premium for that piece of quality, someone else will pay it from you, or will buy it from you and will be paying a premium and therefore you have ultra high net worth buying it from ultra high net worth, who are extremely wealthy and they never have to sell. There are two different kinds of clients that we work with,
there are needs and wants. In the super-prime sector, there is very rarely a need to sell, but there may be a want, there may be a need to buy and that drives the market. So from a macro perspective, whether the money is coming from Asia, Russia, Middle East, Europe, US, London is still a very healthy place to be. And all those people, because we’ve done such a great job using media over the past a hundred years to create this wonderful place that we call London, our home, people want to spend time here. For educational reasons, safety, even though it’s become less safe like every super-prime neighborhood or city practically in Western civilization, and it’s still a very healthy place to be.
And on average, how educated, (if) I can use that phrase, is your classic ultra high net worth purchaser> and by that I mean, do they come to you saying, I’d like to live in insert, you know, default prime Central London area here? Knightsbridge, Mayfair, all those kind of areas or. Or do you find that they are now, because of the rise of the level of information they can get quite easily, they’re more akin to other areas as well?.
Yeah, without shadow a doubt.
I’ve been working the super-prime sector now, over 10 million pounds, for 12, 13, 14 years, and in the first half of that everyone would come into the SW post codes and it’d be Knightsbridge and Belgravia and parts of Mayfair and then from there the agents that could commute cross borders would take those ultra high net worths to neighborhoods like St John’s Wood and Notting Hill and Hampstead and Highgate and they would create margins for themselves, where the big organisations couldn’t support the non boundary type of business, right? Where you can go to different neighborhoods with your customer, which is what they want. Now, however, because you can get so much information online, and you can follow people that you think are cool or have their finger on a pulse, you can see what cool places there are. And the interesting thing about that is that it has a major impact at the lower levels of the market and it has a major impact at the top end of the market. .So we are seeing now the ultra high net worth saying, no, I want to spend 30, 40 million pounds in Marylebone. Notting Hill has been the most buoyant market in London for the super-prime sector, if you exclude new builds, and so has St. Johns Wood and Highgate and Hampstead. There was a reason for that in recent history, which is that people have wanted low built detached homes, and I said that on social media right at the beginning, right
at the outset of Covid. It was like, everyone’s gonna want their own environment that they live in, and they don’t wanna be interrupted by neighbors and use common areas and have to pay for the service charges. As Covid’s effect on the world started to soften, people started to go back to the whole concept of, well actually, maybe I do want an apartment in London. Maybe I do want an apartment in Paris. But you can see these patterns coming and you can see, if you’ve been in the industry for a long time, you can see how people, the ultra high net worth, the demographic of that person has changed drastically. Their wants and needs, likes and dislikes, have changed drastically.
I no longer, for instance, this is a nice snippet, but I no longer meet Middle Eastern royal families at the Bulgari Hotel in Knightsbridge. It’s very rare for that to happen. Now I meet them at Children Firehouse when you would never have guessed that five, six years ago. So the demographic and the audience that we’re playing with and that we’re working with want different things.
Jason Tebb: And I think that shows that the more you are, as a business owner, in tune with the changing nature of your consumers, your customers behaviors, the more you understand it, the easier it is for you to adapt in any market as well in order to be able to satisfy their needs and wants in this very changing and different world post Covid. But interesting to know how you have been able to build those relationships and the way that that consumer behavior has changed over time. Very interesting to know.
Daniel Daggers: This is a nice thing for both of us, cuz we’re both believers in digital, right? You are obviously running a humongous business and I’m running one that will hopefully be a humongous business, or maybe not, let’s see. But the first viewing takes place on the mobile phone. It no longer takes place And and so if you are not adapting to the norm, now whether or not that’s a 50, 60, 70 year old, or a 20 year old, searching for a property, I’m afraid that they’re gonna miss you out. So your content needs to be insane and people need to see it, but the delivery of that information is extremely valuable. As information becomes more democratized, the value of that information is no longer there because everyone has it. So where does that value go to? It goes to the person who is delivering it to the customer, and that is the fascinating thing about brokerage and estate agency.
Jason Tebb: You are listening to OnTheRecord, the OnTheMarket podcast with me, your host, Jason Tebb, My guest this week, Daniel Daggers. We’ve been hearing about Daniel’s career to date, how his business differs from conventionalist estate agency and his views on the use of technology. Moving on from this, we discussed Danny’s views on the power of social media in the sector and the merits of operating a personally branded, realtor-style model in the UK.
So Daniel, you are known for your impressive social media presence, as you corrected me earlier, over a hundred thousand total followers on all your social media, not just the 54K on Instagram. And you recently stated that social media alone has, in your opinion, created £1m worth of revenue for your business.
We talked earlier about how businesses have changed and adapted and how they will need to continue to change and adapt, but when did you recognise, that potential of social media and why do you think the rest of the industry is slow to catch on?
Daniel Daggers: Oh, leading me down a dark alley here you are. When did I first notice it? When Iwas bouncing around the world for my previous business I went to the US and I saw these agents take their phone out, using Instagram and they would take a picture of themselves in this beautiful property, but they would focus on their clothes and how they look. And I thought to myself, wow, this person has 4,000 followers, so 4,000 people now can see this person in their beautiful outfit, but in this 5 or 10 or 20 or 100 million dollar home, that’s really interesting. That’s free marketing for people. Right? So it’s personal branding cause it’s me, but I’m in this amazing property that’s for sale. So I thought that’s quite interesting.
And then I got invited to go to 432 Park Avenue, which was the highest residential tower built in New York at the time. And it hadn’t been finished yet. And I’m up on the lift and it was an outside lift, so you can imagine how petrifying this was, you had to get into two lifts ,actually, they had to break the journey. And I get onto the 70th floor and I get my phone out and I thought to myself, I’m gonna go onto Facebook. I’m gonna do a Facebook Live, right? So I do Facebook Live and I’m petrified as I’m doing this Facebook Live, and I ask the consent obviously, and I do this Facebook Live and I’m thinking to myself, oh my God, my data roaming charge is gonna be ginormous. My firm’s gonna hate me, but I’ll pay for it if I have to, because this is a really good investment. It’s a really good opportunity to see how this works. So I walk around this shell of apartment, which is gonna be 20 million dollars and I’m like, look at the amazing views, and here’s where the bar’s gonna be. I’m a novice at it, I’ve never done it before. Never done the presentation before on camera. And then I post it on my Facebook and I get something like 20,000 views and some of my clients messaging me and I thought to myself, oh my God. This is it. This is the new phase of our industry.
So I ran back, not literally, because there’s the Atlantic in way, but I got back to the UK. I met the Head of Marketing, who was fond of me and I’m very fond of her, Fiona O’Keefe, at the time at Knight Frank and I said so listen, I need to build my personal brand and I need all of my social media handles to look the same and I need to produce content and then build an audience and that audience will love me, hate me, but I will do whatever I can to help market my clients’ homes because that’s essentially what I was doing.
Jason Tebb: And they’ll still watch the content, whether they love you or hate you, it’s still out there. Yeah.
Daniel Daggers: Yeah. Well, I’m at the forefront of people’s minds and for other companies to have that, they have to send emails every day. But with GDPR you can’t do that because then if they say unsubscribe, we’ll never be able to speak to them again.
So this is an opt-in opportunity to stay in touch with people, and I jumped on it and I quickly built an audience. I’m sure it rattled a few cages, but I have met some of the most successful people on the planet, and I won’t name names. And if it’s not them, it’s their children, and some of the best agents around the world, irrelevant of brand. And we all follow one another and we all want to do business with one another because now all of a sudden we come to a space where morality gets involved and personality gets involved and where brand doesn’t make a difference. Because it shouldn’t. Because our customers don’t care whether or not we find a buyer through DDRE Global or Savills. Customers don’t care. They care about two things. They care about how quickly you can find me the buyer or the tenant and how much you can get for me.
Jason Tebb: Yeah, asking price tomorrow is the thing, isn’t it? And the rest is, I’m sure it’s very relevant at some stage, but it becomes less relevant if you get asking price tomorrow.
Daniel Daggers: Yeah. And so this essentially helps the client and that is the whole purpose. And I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts and read a couple of books, I’m not a great reader, about the phenomenal success of Bezos and a couple of other business owners and they talk about being infatuated by their customer. I am absolutely not the brightest person in the market. I struggle to spell, there’s loads of weaknesses in my armor, loads. But I love my clients. I absolutely love my clients and they know it. And I feel very passionately about it and I want to deliver a great service and that is how, I suppose, I became more successful.
Jason Tebb: Do you think, because people may say, and I’m not one of them, but people may say that it’s all very well when you are doing some social posts or live stuff around a property that is, you know, in excess of 25, 30, 40 million quid and very different when you are looking at the other parts of the market. The other sectors of the market. Do you agree with that or do you think that actually all agents should be ramping up their social presence regardless of the value of the property they market? Does it make any difference?
Daniel Daggers: The latter, and I’ll explain why. I might be known now to sell homes over 10, 20 million pounds around the world, predominantly London, but I remember working for Vickers & Company and for a decade I sold homes up to about £1.5m at maximum. I started off selling £80,000 studio flats, and I can tell you being sat in a small office in the window, that what happens is the following thing: the customer walks in and they sit down and they go, hey Daniel, how’s it going? And I go, fine, thank you. How are you doing? And then they say, is there any deals? Is there anything to buy? What’s the market doing? Who’s buying? Who’s selling? That’s what they would do. I was selling a £100,000 studio flat, yeah, a £250,000, two bedroom apartment. Because your market is interested in your market, except now they don’t have to walk into your office when it’s freezing cold and raining outside. They can sit at home and listen to what Daniel Daggers thinks, (about) the super prime market across London. And so if you have an office in Berkhamstead, or if you are in Birmingham and your clients walk through your door and ask questions about the market, you should be producing content around those questions in the market and getting your customers to follow you online because they’re interested in what you have to say.
There’s loads of property porn anyone can be scrolling through on the market all day long. Just look at pretty properties. People are gonna get bored with that after a little while. They want to know information and they want you to be informative and entertaining. So absolutely every market, every genre.
Jason Tebb: Thank you. Moving on to the things you like to do when you’re not selling or letting prime and super prime properties when you’re not working. What are you passionate about? What are your hobbies and interests?
Daniel Daggers: I’m super passionate about people. I love people. So if I can, I’ll spend time with people, except most of my friends are married with kids and it’s difficult to spend time with them because they’re running around from kids party to kids party.
Really, honestly, I’m an introverted extrovert, so I do find a lot of comfort in being alone for a bit and at home, watching TV or scrolling through and Instagram or listening to a podcast. But when I truly switch off and feel most comfortable is when I’m watching movies or playing and watching football. That’s what I do in my spare time, yeah. Along with trying to find a wife.
Jason Tebb: Which also sometimes involves scrolling, I’m sure.
Daniel Daggers: Not on OnTheMarket! Not until you start posting pictures of the agents that are marketing those properties (laughs). I’m waiting for that to happen.
Jason Tebb: Well, strangely enough, it’s funny you mention that, but in our last release, early September, we released version 2.2 where, for the first time, you can upload personal branded photos of your individual estate agents, you can attach them to individual listings. And so for the first time, I think in the UK, you can actually now see personally branded content on our site. So it’s only a small step and I know there’s a long way to go. I know you’ll probably want much more than that, but it’s a good step in the right direction.
Daniel Daggers: I think, Jason, it’s a brave and absolutely right thing to do. Hundred percent, I’m all over you. I think you are a million percent right and well done you for making that decision because it’s very easy just to be part of the crowd.
Jason Tebb: Thank you. We’ll put little notes at the end for people who are listening to this who’d like to be able to put their own personal brand on their listings on, OnTheMarket as well.
But moving on. It feels like a bit like a therapy session here because when you were describing your own personality, without getting too deep, I can feel a lot of empathy with that.
Daniel Daggers: I’ve been on a real rollercoaster of a journey. It’s been glass ceiling after glass ceiling, after glass ceiling, after glass ceiling. And when you come home, when you are alone, sometimes if you’re not mentally strong, it can hurt. It could be difficult, but as an only child, you sort of get used to dealing with things. And my parents live abroad and also they’re old and I don’t want to share my problems with them. I want ‘them to feel comforted that their son is doing amazingly well and they’ve got nothing to worry about and life’s great because that’s what I want for them – even though my mom keeps telling me that I need to share more.
The thing is that you may find yourself as an ambivert. Do you know what an ambivert is?
Jason Tebb: Nope. But you’re gonna tell me.
Daniel Daggers: Okay, so I posted about this on Instagram. I’m an ambivert. An ambivert is someone who’s an extrovert and an introvert. And what’s really fascinating in today’s world is that as we are the mouthpiece of our own businesses now, you are sort of semi forced to be that gregarious character or personality online. And I can see how that is really difficult for people, I get that. I totally get that. I mean, putting my face on camera seven years ago talking about the real estate market was petrifying. Now, I know there’s something like seven million real estate agents around the world, I wouldn’t be surprised if if half of them are producing content. Or maybe not half, but a significant amount. And so you are not the one out of one anymore, if you know what I mean, or one out of seven million.
Jason Tebb: Talking about something else and I did read that you’ve recently participated in the Maccabia Games. I hope I’ve pronounced that correctly.
Daniel Daggers: Very good. Well done.
Jason Tebb: Thank you. Google’s a great thing, particularly on the pronunciation button. So tell us a bit more about the Maccabia Games and how did you get on?
Daniel Daggers: So the Maccabia Games is a tournament that takes place every four years in Israel. It’s for Jews that are all around the world to come back and reconnect with Israel.
And so I’ve represented Great Britain this time in football. I was captain of the team and it was an amazing experience. It’s the third largest sporting event of the world when it comes to competitors. You’ve got people from all over the world, Panama, Mexico, Germany, UK, US, you know, they’re bringing over 2000 people, 2000 athletes.
It is really amazing and you know, it’s a great way to network. It’s a great way to stay fit because you have to train for six months before it or nine months before it. But I know people now in Panama. Know people in Mexico. I know people in Australia from two competitions ago, from eight years ago, who are friends of mine. When I went there on business to do a public speaking gig, I had nothing to do for two nights and they took me out and I just thought that it was just amazing.
Yeah, that’s what we did. We didn’t win it and I like winning. I don’t like just taking part. It was a lovely experience with a great group of guys and great camaraderie and team spirit. It was fabulous.
Jason Tebb: And even there, as you quite rightly say, those network effects are never far away. And you know, building those relationships, meeting people, sometimes randomly, sometimes forced, sometimes as part of a sporting event, can build future relationships that ultimately change people’s lives and can have lots of positives, not just in business and monetary terms, but in, you know, emotional terms as well. So those kind of events and others like them, you know, certainly have value much more than just the results of the game, I think.
Daniel Daggers: Yeah. Without shadow of a doubt, yeah.
Jason Tebb: Just in the last few minutes before we have to close, what do you think’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in your career?
Daniel Daggers: The glass ceiling.
Jason Tebb: Okay, and what do you mean by that?
Daniel Daggers: When you have a structured business and you don’t have freedom to go and do things that you think are the right thing to do, you get met by the glass ceiling a lot and gatekeepers. And when you have the talent and you have a certain level of expertise and you have the work ethic, that glass ceiling shouldn’t be there.
It’s a false glass ceiling that stops your growth and therefore stops you from delivering a great service to the people who clearly like the service that you’re offering. So I think the continued glass ceiling is something that we have to handle, particularly in the UK because we have such a hierarchical environment when it comes to business and so I would say that. And then leaving my previous business, setting up my business during Covid. That was interesting, to say the least. But when you are met with difficult circumstances, sometimes you can’t do much about them, but you can do something about your attitude towards them. And when it gets really tough, it means that you are going to the next phase of your career and it means that there’s more opportunity behind the tough place that you are in now.
So I say to the guys in the office, if you are finding friction from your growth, it’s because you are about to burst into a new phase of your career and you have to embrace the friction and really enjoy it. Because now I know how to set up a business in really difficult times and if I want to set up a business next week, I can do that, no problem.
Jason Tebb: I totally get where you’re coming from. When I set up my own little business in 2013, (many people) who I thought were friends at the time said, ‘why are you doing it? It’ll be a failure. It won’t be a success. You’ve never done it before’. The business is still going, and whilst I obviously moved on to other things, I’m still a tiny shareholder in it. So that’s a testament to the fact that it was something that was successful despite what people said. I took a tough circumstance and I said, well, the only thing that can change is my reaction towards that circumstance, and in the end that helped me be, hopefully, a better business leader. So totally get what you’re saying. Totally get it.
Daniel Daggers: Without shadow of a doubt, because you can empathize with people. You see, I’ve spent 14 years, in the super prime market and no one looks like me, sounds like me, or does business like me. And I still have people say, ‘I don’t know why he’s doing this. He doesn’t belong here’. And I’m like, ‘no, no, you misunderstand. Like if I had the opportunities to talk to you, I would say, I’ve earned the right to be here’. I don’t know about wealth. Now I’m wealthy, of course I am, if you look at everybody else, the majority. But I didn’t know about watches and cars and planes and luxury real estate. I had to learn it. And I have an insane, insatiable approach to doing that. And so my business, if you look at the demographic of my business, we are unbelievably diverse. We’re not unbelievably diverse because we want to be unbelievably diverse. We’re unbelievably diverse because we attract talent. And that talent is whoever that talent is, whether they’re gay or straight or black or white or Asian or whatever it may be. If they’re talented and they’re morally strong and they are committed and they want to work hard and recognise the opportunities they’ve got, then this is an amazing place for them to succeed. Because we can open doors that other people can’t and we can expedite their success.
But what’s really fascinating is that wealth, also looks different now. I look a lot more like the ultra high net worth now in today’s market. I look more like them. I sound more like them. I act more like them. I dress more like them. And that’s not because I’ve dressed differently,. It’s because when we are all consuming the same content, watching the same movies, watching the same TV, we’re looking at the same social media, listening to the same music. We are all more similar than we have ever been before because we were separated. Now the internet just gives us that communication tool that we’re all receiving the same information to a certain extent. And that means I can speak to a Middle Eastern prince, no problem. They’re gonna rock up in their Nike dunks and they’re gonna be called as a cucumber. And then I’m gonna meet my tech billionaire over Twitter, because they’re all building businesses over Twitter, and I’m gonna meet all these people and we’re all remarkably similar when I put them in rooms and no one knows about the events that we hold and stuff like that where there’s a real add value. We are all much more similar people and that is what I love.
Jason Tebb: Fascinating.
Daniel Daggers: Let’s break down these social boundaries.
Jason Tebb: Exactly right. And what it does teach us is that, back to what we talked about at the start, the whole digital transformation, the change in the ability to consume information, to suck up content every day, is something that is probably more unanimously leveling as a media than anything else that’s happened previously. Because we can all consume that same information, look at the same things, aspire to be the different people, look and try and act and work responsibly like those people who are, you would consider your mentors or people that you look up to. That’s happened through social media. That’s happened because anyone can hop on their phone and get exposure to those kind of role models, figures that they would look up to or anything else besides.
Daniel Daggers: there is someone out there who’s building a new Amazon, right? And they’re doing it in front of our eyes on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and TikTok, right? All we have to do is find them and be interested in what they’re doing. Can you imagine having the opportunity two decades ago to watch Jeff Bezos build his business on Instagram? Can you imagine how fascinating that would be? We now have that opportunity. Why is everyone scoffing at the concept of doing that?
Jason Tebb: And someone’s doing it. Someone somewhere is recording themselves on a near daily basis, building their business and someone will crack it. And that will be probably some of the most compelling things that people can watch. And those who do embrace social media and use it regularly, I’m sure are already thinking about that as they’re building their own businesses.
Final question from me. What advice would you give to someone thinking of becoming a trainee estate agent? I fell into this business you by the sound of it, fell into this business. What advice, would you give?
Daniel Daggers: I was very lucky because I fell into a business that had really good people in it. So my piece of advice would be don’t get drawn in just by big brands even though there is a lot of talent there. Go and find a company where someone is excellent at what they do and sit right next to them. Listen to everything that they say, where they go, how they go about doing their business. Because that is going to expedite your success. It’s not just about sitting in a room. It is about getting us close to the best person in that room. That’s where opportunity lies. That’s my advice.
Jason Tebb: Great advice. Great advice. Thank you. Sadly, we’re out of time, but great to chat to you Daniel and thanks for your time. We’re going to add the links to your agency website and your social media in our show notes and on our channels. If any of our listeners would like to find out more, don’t forget, you can keep up to date with our next episodes by following us at OnTheMarketcom on Twitter. You can follow us on all other social channels too, linkedIn and Instagram, or search for OnTheRecord in your podcast app and hit the follow button. It just remains for me to say thank you very much Daniel Daggers. Very nice to speak to you. Thanks for your time.
Daniel Daggers: Thank you, Jason.
