Trendsetters

  • David Winans
    Broker/Owner Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate David Winans & Associates
Founder of an independent, family-owned, multi-office brokerage with more than 35 years of successful real estate service, Dave Winans has been a leader and innovator in the way real estate is sold in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. He was one of the first brokers in Texas to offer consumers access to the Realtor database of homes through the Internet – a taste of the marketing creativity he is known for today.

Congratulations on your recent affiliation with Better Homes and Gardens RealEstate. How did you come to that decision? What benefits are brokerages seeking when they consider franchise affiliations?

There are a lot of great choices for franchises and we looked at all of them. But we felt that Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate was the franchise that had the best leadership, service, tools, and technology and was a franchise that could help us grow and prosper. BH&GRE is the next-generation real estate company, they are real estate 3.0.

But being so forward, they are also this trusted brand that has 97 percent brand
recognition. Trusted across 3 generations. The BHG franchise under Sherry Chris has grown to approximately 7,500 Realtors® in only 30 months – and the last 30 months have been the most challenging times of our industry in the last 50 years. The brokers that have joined BHG are, with no exceptions, all about collaboration, being on the edge, with the desire to grow and dominate and not fearing change, bur embracing the quick pace of change coming at us.


The Web and social media play a huge role in your brand identity and in the success of your company. Tell me about your “Texaplex” marketing campaign and about your new online comedy http://theagent.tv/

It was two years ago that the national economy was in dire straits with two-inch headlines every morning of bank failures, auto-company failures and 500-point drops in the stock market. I felt a need to be the one to shout out, hey, we are in America, we are in Texas – let’s look at what we have. I made up the word “Texaplex” to define the triangular area of Texas that takes in Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) in the north, down to Houston and over to San Antonio up through Austin and back to DFW. It’s where 80 percent of Texans live.

So I put a PowerPoint together with slides that pointed out amazing facts about DFW and Texas, such as: if Texas were a country it would be the 10th largest economy in the world, and the King Ranch with over 1 million acres is larger than the state of Rhode Island. I could see my Realtors smiling and reacting in a positive way. So I made it into video and put it on YouTube. It was my first video. It took off and now I believe that single video will cross the 200,000-view mark this year. I received a visit from Governor Rick Perry who is a fan of the Texaplex video. It was in The Economist and Newsweek, and on NBC.

I then did individual videos on Houston (that now has over 25,000 YouTube views) and my latest, Dallas/Fort Worth. The new DFW video was shown last week to 500 commercial brokers in Fort Worth. What would one pay for this type of coverage and publicity? Social media is real. We have been strong in the video side of social media and our @Texaplex Twitter account that has over 8,000 followers. I see now the opportunity of diving deeper on video – doing short videos on suburb cities, subdivisions, etc.

Comedy … so this brings us to our comedy, http://theagent.tv/. I told my marketing people that I wanted to do real estate comedy. TheAgent.tv came about because I realized we needed to entertain ourselves about our industry. (Editor: read the Jan. 27 RISMedia article, “Dallas Broker Turns Heads with New Web Comedy Series ‘The Agent.’”) The next thing I knew it was lights, camera, action. Over 70 actors showed up for auditions. We now have our own rap real estate song, “Makin’ Money.” Our real estate comedy Web series will be 10 short 2-4 minute episodes. Agents always say, “I could write a book about all the crazy things that happen to me,” so we are taking that into video form. I want to entertain fellow Realtors, the industry, and the consumer. Baby boomers like humor, but especially the Echo boomers. So this is a way to attract them.


Dallas has always had a strong relocation market. How are these tools helping you respond to the downturn?

Demographers are predicting that between now and 2030, Texas may grow another 12-15 million people. This will be like adding another Houston, another DFW and another Austin – all in this area I termed the Texaplex. So the videos are showing it is a pretty good bet that buying a home in Texas is a good move. The use of videos is a way to let the world know how much opportunity exists in Texas.

How are your buyers and sellers different today than they were 5 years ago?

I feel the Echo Boomers are getting in the driver’s seat of this economy. The Baby Boomers are still important to the economy, but it is the Echo Boomers who will now drive the housing market. Social media will play a large role in the coming years.

We need to get younger Realtors in our industry. They are the ones that understand technology and social media, and it is their peers that are going to drive the real estate market.