Meet the Board: Chanel Hart D'Aprix – Doorify's Rebranding and Mission Expansion

We've got another insightful episode in our "Meet the Board" series.

I’m joined by Chanel Hart D’Aprix, a top real estate agent and board member, to talk about Doorify's rebranding journey and what it means for the community. From expanding MLS boundaries to reshaping how real estate services are delivered, there’s a lot to unpack. 

We dive into how Doorify is setting new standards for real estate tech, making it easier for agents to focus on what really matters: building client relationships. 

Don’t miss her insights into what’s next for Doorify and the big impact it’ll have on agents and clients.

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

• The vision and impact behind the Dorifi MLS rebrand
• How MLS is adapting to serve agents and clients better
• The challenges and rewards of modernizing MLS technology

Links from this episode:

• Know more about Chanel Hart D'Aprix: https://hartandolive.com/agents/chanel-hart-daprix
• Learn more about Doorify MLS: https://doorifymls.com

1ae5b43598204883b524f061d4880e6d10fca88c (for podfollow.com)

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 3:49 About Chanel Hart D'Aprix
• 7:37 Leadership changes delayed project for 10 years
• 9:27 Progress requires adaptation to serve clients effectively
• 14:12 Striving for statewide MLS to serve inclusively
• 16:22 Zillow: Unique brand name from "zillion pillows"
• 20:55 Chanel: realtor impacting business, diverse board strategy
• 22:19 Belief in leadership direction; gratitude expressed

Transcript

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:00:00]:
We want to be as inclusive as possible. I would love to have an MLS for the entire state. So by changing the name, it allowed us to not limit ourselves to solely the Triangle area because we want to be able to serve, again, using that word, serve as many people as possible, but also include as many subscribers as possible. Well, you don't feel very included when it's in an area that you don't even particularly live in number one or do business in. So this just allows us to expand and no longer put these barriers in any way, shape or form.

Matt Fowler [00:00:40]:
Hey everybody, it's Matt Fowler again. I'm the executive director of Doorify MLS.com recently changed our name from Triangle MLS that we've been forever and ever. And we're going to talk about the rebrand and some other stuff related to Doorify and the MLS business today with our special guest, Chanel Hart D'Aprix. Say hello, Chanel.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:00:58]:
Hey, how is everybody? Good to see you, Matt.

Matt Fowler [00:01:00]:
Great, great. Thanks for joining us again, Chanel. The day we're recording this, I have no idea where you are. You're always on the road.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:01:06]:
I am. Just got back from Florida, but going to Nashville tomorrow. So today we're in Chapel Hill.

Matt Fowler [00:01:10]:
Oh, well, cool. Well, I'm glad you got a day at home. I'm out at the RESO standards meeting in Frisco, Texas, just outside of Dallas today. The meeting? Yeah, Frisco is really cool. We're at a hotel that's connected to the Cowboys training center or something. It's all, all Cowboys out here, which is fine.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:01:27]:
All about the Cowboys. Hit the Cowboy Club when you're out there. You'll love it.

Matt Fowler [00:01:30]:
Yeah, I'll have to do that. The reason that we're here at RESO this week, I think we just astound our subscribers. And I want to talk to you about who Chanel is and what you do on the board before we get there. I'm going to post in the comments down below Chanel's call a screenshot that I took yesterday late in the day at a session I was attending about stellar concessions. Okay. So, you know, seller concessions on off market properties is a big topic right now because of the compensation change that was made this summer. And this is a group of about 500 database managers and MLS people from around the country who were looking at, I think it was 70 something. There may have been 170 different seller reception options that are currently present in the 532 MLS databases that we kind of look at.

Matt Fowler [00:02:19]:
Okay. So if you look at there were 500 and something different ways to say status, like active, closed, sold. And we found out that 30 of them, only 30 of them were used in more than one city. Right. So, okay, so there's like maybe 30, maybe real ones, and then the rest of that garbage. And our job is to go through that list of seller concessions and to real, you know, put the ones that are the same together. There's this join, split, or merge thing that we go through and decide, is it. Can it be joined with something else? Can it be deleted? Can it be merged with something? We do have to transform it into something else.

Matt Fowler [00:02:51]:
That sounds just as exciting as I know I'm describing it as. And we spent two hours talking about this stuff, and then we have kind of a result. And that's why these meetings have been going on for so long. This is my 18th year of coming to these, and we're only in version 2.0, which is just coming out. Just coming out this fall. The work that goes into that is so that we can do the things that the subscribers are going to get to see next year. So in 2024, they got to kind of work at a building site. Metaphorically.

Matt Fowler [00:03:21]:
We were. We were building the thing and it was not great fun to have to also work there.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:03:27]:
Exactly right.

Matt Fowler [00:03:28]:
There's a lot. A lot going on. Noisy. Metaphorically, again, there's. All the subs are there. Who knows what those guys are doing? I want our subscribers to understand the enormous amount of work that our staff and certainly our directors put into the work that we do. And as we get into talk about that, I've been asking everybody the same question. Tell our subscribers something that they might not know about.

Matt Fowler [00:03:49]:
Chanel.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:03:49]:
A little unknown fact about me. So I was actually accepted, Matt, to join the. And serve in the Peace Corps right after college.

Matt Fowler [00:03:57]:
Wow. Awesome. Yeah.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:03:59]:
So it was right after I graduated from Carolina and my boyfriend and I at the time both were accepted. And so. But they. It ended up the program came back to us and said that they only needed one person. So I went ahead and passed the opportunity on to him, and it really worked out because we broke up. I moved on to be a lobbyist in the state of Oklahoma. So it was all good. But I wonder how different my life would be if I would have ended up really serving in the Peace Corps at that time.

Matt Fowler [00:04:24]:
Yeah, well. Wow. That you were called to do that. I mean, that's a. I know people that have done that, and it absolutely changed their lives. And I know a few people that have Done kind of the domestic version, Teach for America, where. Where you signed up to go teach in an, you know, under resourced school. And everybody I know who did that was really deeply affected.

Matt Fowler [00:04:41]:
So I'm sure lobbying in Oklahoma deeply affected you in some way.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:04:45]:
All serve in the ways that we can serve. Right?

Matt Fowler [00:04:47]:
Amen. Amen to that. Amen to that. Well, so lobbying in Oklahoma, that's a. That's maybe not a direct career path to real estate. What led you to real estate?

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:04:55]:
But I will tell you, they are joined very closely together. And so we lived in Miami for a long time from Oklahoma, and I was in real estate in Miami. It was a little bit market there. And so when I. When we moved to Chapel Hill, I actually moved into a neighborhood where there was a two broker in charges who lived there. And so we of course ran across each other at the pool. I started talking about what we did, and that's really, really came about. And so what I found is that practicing in the Triangle was very similar to the sense of community that I felt in Oklahoma.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:05:28]:
It's a very easy transition over to real estate in Chapel Hill. I really loved it.

Matt Fowler [00:05:33]:
That's great. That's great. So you, Miami, you said, was a really different market. You mean just the pace or the.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:05:39]:
Pace, you know, how you negotiate deals, how many attorneys were involved in deals? You know, it was just a very different way of doing business. And of course, you have multiple languages, you have multiple cultures. That was very wonderful for me to be able to experience, you know, different cultures every single day. And so, you know, it was just, it was absolutely a different pace, though, because when you are diving into a transaction, you're diving into the culture with the people that you're working and surrounding yourself with. So in Miami, that was from, you know, a majority of South American countries. And it was really fascinating.

Matt Fowler [00:06:12]:
Yeah, I've heard Miami described as the capital of Central America.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:06:15]:
Yep. Got it. Nailed it.

Matt Fowler [00:06:16]:
Yeah. Yeah. And it's such a fascinating place. I love Miami. I was going to ask you if the difference was related to the international nature. I guess you have a lot of.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:06:23]:
International buyers, a lot of international buyers, a lot of different ways of doing business, a lot of different ways, like I said, of negotiating and practiced, and not that one way is better or worse than another. They're just all very different. So I think we get natural cadence based on where we are. But in Miami, I was always on my toes.

Matt Fowler [00:06:41]:
Yeah. You know, natural cadence. As the guy who made us update our tech stack, you know, we break the Natural sometimes, because it needs breaking. Right. But because we view. I understand. It's useful, like the forms, to have something you don't have to read every time. Right.

Matt Fowler [00:06:56]:
It's. It's a standard thing. Everything else changes. Let's have one thing that doesn't. Just to build efficiency. I get that. But, you know, maybe to transition over to what we're doing inside the boardroom. The board hired me three years ago.

Matt Fowler [00:07:08]:
They said, matt, run this thing like a business. And I don't know that everybody understood what that meant. Me or them. Yeah, or them. You on the board. I think we kind of found those things out together. I ran a software company for a long time, and certainly I used those techniques. You know, I know how to do that one way.

Matt Fowler [00:07:24]:
And we found that the board was ready for change and that the. That the board had actually made a selection to replace Paragon with the FBS Flex MLS system before hiring me.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:07:36]:
Yes.

Matt Fowler [00:07:37]:
And that it didn't work out because of leadership changes at the MLS and all sorts of stuff. It just wasn't time. So that got kicked down the road even farther so that when we. When we released our Choice project in November 2023, it was 10 years and one month from when we had released Paragon. So that's. I mean, what hasn't changed in 10 years? You know, I mean, I had an employee celebrate an anniversary the other day, and they'd been at Triangle Door for so long that it was before Bruce turned into Caitlin Dinner. I was like. Like, you know, the whole Kardashians.

Matt Fowler [00:08:10]:
Not that that's a milestone for anything, but I was just Googling it, you know, like, what happened in that year? And. Oh, God, was that that long ago? So it's just been so long, and we needed to change it. And after waiting for so long changing it, even more traumatic. You know, we also hadn't changed the Deuce the do's in forever, and that certainly needed doing. So, you know, inside that room, maybe. Let's talk about it this way, Chanel. Inside that room, maybe tell us the story about. About, you know, deciding to bring in more than one.

Matt Fowler [00:08:37]:
You know, we really did that to try and honor the Paragon people so they didn't have to change. But just, you know, walk us through that. Last January, we hadn't decided whether to fire Paragon or not because it wasn't working out well, and we didn't. We decided to put our head down and push through so that the Paragon people could stay with Paragon. And here we are. Here we are a year later, almost, and 76% of our subscribers are using the same system they used before.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:09:02]:
So I always like to say that not everybody loves vanilla ice cream. Right. That's why we have a multitude of different ice cream choices. But ultimately, we're all here to serve our clients. And in order to do that, we need, in my opinion, the best technology possible in order to do so. So change is difficult for human beings just in general. Change is tough. However, if we do not naturally evolve and keep up with what's going on, we will be left behind.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:09:27]:
And so as everything is progressing around us in a forward fashion and we're staying exactly where we are. Yes, I mean, there's something to be said about, you're very familiar with everything that's happening with you. However, if you do not progress with what's happening, how can you truly serve your clients and your community to your highest and best capacity? So ripping the band aid off is never comfortable. However, in order to get in and get things done, these are things that have to happen. So I think what a lot of people don't realize is that, Matt, you brought something and the board agreed wholeheartedly to a change that had never been seen in the industry. I don't know that people fully understand and can grasp how unbelievably amazing it is. So we chose to honor exactly the system that was in place, but we also chose to propel forward technologically to ensure that we could serve our clients in the best capacity possible. So we took the both of best worlds, in my opinion, the best ice cream flavors available, and made it a choice.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:10:25]:
So every single subscriber had the option to choose what they wanted. And so to me, I think that was the best that we can honor every subscriber who was a part of our system. Not everyone's going to be happy in any system all the time. That's a fact. But I feel like we really, really dug deep for multiple hours. This is not something that just came upon in a whim. This was literally something that had been. We had been seeing this happen for years, not even months, for years, Matt.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:10:53]:
And so it finally came to the point where we had to make a choice. And I feel like the choice that was made really served everybody.

Matt Fowler [00:11:00]:
You know, I agree, obviously. And I think the, the really nice thing for the subscribers to hear is that we aren't going to be doing this again.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:11:08]:
That's right.

Matt Fowler [00:11:09]:
This is a one off thing where we translated our data to this national standards. We're not going to do that again. We brought in a new version of Paragon and the Black Knight people will continue to evolve Paragon. They'll update it. They'll probably sunset some old version of Paragon and bring in a new version of Paragon. That's going to continue to happen. But we. What we did is going to let people just kind of go into the marketplace and say, while I find Paragon comfortable, there's this brand new AI magic thing where you just talk to it or you just upload the video and it fills out the form for you in two minutes.

Matt Fowler [00:11:43]:
I saw a demo of that just recently. That's not science fiction. And previously I would have gone to my Black Knight person and said, hey, I saw this amazing AI thing and you just talked to your iPhone. It filled out the phone with you. And they would have patted me on the head and said, that's adorable, Matt. We'll get. We'll get to that in.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:11:59]:
Bless your heart, Matt. Bless your heart.

Matt Fowler [00:12:01]:
Yeah, that's adorable. What a cool idea. And they would go right back to, you know, earning my business every three to five years with incremental changes that they know are going to be accepted because no one likes change. So that's why we have a. And I don't. I'm not talking about Paragon, but why, as an industry, we have software that kind of looks like it was made at the library.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:12:19]:
Yes.

Matt Fowler [00:12:20]:
And you. You've. You've been sending those alerts to your clients. Yeah. So I think that. That you don't look great when you send those. When you send those alerts in that way. That you want a more competitive, more modern way of doing that.

Matt Fowler [00:12:33]:
And I want you to be able. Yeah, I want you to be able to pick it.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:12:36]:
Well, you know, everybody has one of these. Right. There's the reminder, by the way. And how often does iPhone ask us to update based on the software that's available? So then you update the software that's available. And why do we do that? We do that to ensure that we have the most efficient and best systems possible for us to communicate with other human beings. It's the same thing. Have you ever met somebody who's never done an update before and they have all these issues with their phone and all these complications in their life? They start out small, but then they incrementally become larger and larger and bigger and bigger problems. So we are literally making these choices for subscribers to ensure that you are most up to date and can serve in the best capacity possible.

Matt Fowler [00:13:16]:
Yeah, we have to. So we're stepping out of product selection at the MLS level. That's something subscribers don't understand either, that we're not picking Flex for you. Right. We're specifically not doing that. What we're going to be doing to new members that join is we're going to be showing them which one is up to date, which one's fastest, which one's one second old and which one 30 minutes old.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:13:35]:
Yes.

Matt Fowler [00:13:36]:
And there is that kind of difference. And we're just going to expose that and let you pick which one is, you know, is best for you. Maybe. Let's transition, Chanel, and talk a little bit in our last 10 minutes here or so about why somebody would come into a room like we did this summer and say, let's change our name. So Triangle. Everybody knows Triangle. There's Triangle everything. You listen to the radio Triangle, Spinal Care, Triangle, Landscaping, Triangle, Vet Center.

Matt Fowler [00:14:02]:
But Triangle is part of two counties, and we're in 6, 16 and hopefully growing.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:14:06]:
That's right.

Matt Fowler [00:14:07]:
There's more to location, though, and changing our name. Why did you think that was a good thing to do?

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:14:12]:
Because we want to be as inclusive as possible. I would love to have an MLS for the entire state. I would love to have, you know, literally, I was a part of the Leadership Academy in North Carolina, and our project was called 1MLS. And the purpose was for that is that our. Our clients don't understand why we don't have access readily to be able to pull up that house they want on the beaches or the one in the mountains. They just think that they're already connected into one MLS. So by changing the name, it allowed us to not limit ourselves to solely the Triangle area because we want to be able to serve, again using that word, serve as many people as possible, but also include as many subscribers as possible. Well, you don't feel very included when it's in an area that you don't even particularly live in number one, or do business in.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:15:03]:
So this just allows us to expand and no longer put these barriers in any way, shape, or form. I always say real estate doesn't have a ceiling unless you choose to put one up. And we decide to move the ceiling.

Matt Fowler [00:15:14]:
Yeah, I've used the same metaphor, sort of. It's like the map has edges when you scoot out, you know.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:15:20]:
Yes.

Matt Fowler [00:15:21]:
The houses go away and you. They just have edges on it. And I want to. Changing the name is part, you know, part of it is removing that geographic connotation to it. Charlotte changed their name to Canopy. MRIs changed their name to Bright New England Regional, changed their name to Prime. There's a ton of examples where people have done this one one key hometown. I could keep going.

Matt Fowler [00:15:42]:
And it's, it's affirmative to us to see that other organizations saw the same thing that we did and felt that rebranding was a smart thing to do.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:15:52]:
Absolutely.

Matt Fowler [00:15:53]:
I think for our subscribers also they need to understand that we didn't just throw darts at the wall. And unlike some of our competitors, we did not do this in house. We have a very talented agency who made us do the research that's legal and we have a seven letter domain name where we own the dot com. And that is very, very unusual.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:16:12]:
Matt, let's just dive into that a little bit because I think it's really important for our subscribers and listeners to understand why that's so powerful and why that's so important. Do you mind diving into that a little bit?

Matt Fowler [00:16:22]:
Well, so is there another name that you know in the prop tech space? A word that's short, maybe seven letters that didn't exist before in the dictionary that if you had Googled, say Zillow, a zillion pillows. That's where Zillow came from, a zillion pillows. But that's a concatenation of those two words into a new word that they own more legitimately than they could own any other word because it didn't exist before they made it up. And the brand people, there are people that do this, smart people that go to school for this. They came back and said, you know, this one is a hundred out of a hundred, it's short, it's never existed before, it's a verb, you own it, you're able to buy the dot com. And that's so unusual. We believe that the consumer portal that's going to be telling our story to the buyers and sellers in the marketplace about, you know, how compensation is negotiable and always has been and how MLS is the most fair and open housing network in the world. And we can prove that we need to talk about that and tell that story because I don't think most subscribers understand that fully and I know most consumers don't understand it.

Matt Fowler [00:17:28]:
And that's why Glorify is a consumer facing brand. The subscribers maybe don't understand it entirely. Some of that is because it wasn't intended just for them. It's intended to interrupt the conversation that buyers and sellers are happening having about organized real estate. And they say things if you stick a microphone in their face that we prefer more left in the past and for them to know about the value that we add and our, our commitment to affordable and accessible housing and to a better tribe. You know, we. I'm in Dallas today. I spend time in Charlotte and Atlanta.

Matt Fowler [00:18:02]:
I don't want to live in those places because of the decisions that they made as the city grew out.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:18:07]:
That's right.

Matt Fowler [00:18:08]:
And if Chapel Hill one day maybe let's, let's close on this. If Chapel Hill one day is subway stop and there is no, you know, there are parks and stuff in between, but everything's built up. It's, it's Brooklyn and all of these little places that we love. Pittsburgh harbor the places that make the area unique and special. How do we preserve? How do we. How can somebody. As a real estate salesperson, I manage a database. You know, we are absolutely focused on things like that with our partnership with unc, with our, you know, our membership and Urban Land Institute people invested in smart land use policy.

Matt Fowler [00:18:40]:
Like these are the things that I want to be working on less on, you know, these territorial issues or, you know, I think we can put those things to bed with our new technology. We do have a partnership that we're about to announce that has a statewide scope that I believe is it. I know is only possible because of the data standardization work that we do. Maybe let's close on what you think is next for Doorify. What does, what can subscribers expect from us next year that will make being a subscriber better for them?

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:19:10]:
Well, I think that firstly changing the name ensured that we are preserving our identity. But in the same sense we're also growing our community. And so I always say, you know, people thought Amazon.com was nothing but a bookstore online, but there was a much greater vision in place in the beginning. And so you have to think far in advance of where you want to go before you even begin. And that's what we have done with your leadership and I'm very proud of that. So we ultimately, we support realtors and we do that by offering those cutting edge tools that streamline our work. I'm a realtor as well. That's my full time job.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:19:45]:
So our mission at Doorify is just to equip agents with the technology they need to focus on really matters. Right. Which is building relationships with our clients and then closing deals efficiently. So that is what dwarf I MLS is going to continue to do to deliver that top notch service to clients and continue to build upon that.

Matt Fowler [00:20:07]:
Yeah, that the bottom line is making member tasks easier is actually one of the written strategic objectives that we have, we have five. And that's the one that got the second most votes at our last strategic planning exercise. The thing that got the most votes was improve subscriber satisfaction, which I think is almost the same thing as making member tasks easier. We are very, very focused on that. And three quarters of our focus for next year is really on just removing those kind of frict that make it just hard to do stuff. Some of that involves customer service. We've got a big new investment in customer service and the help desk, but also with just things that we know could work better. And our new, our new tool sets let us do that.

Matt Fowler [00:20:46]:
And we're not reliant on any one vendor to go do that now, which gives us a comprehensive, better, I think opportunity to get these things off.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:20:54]:
It truly does.

Matt Fowler [00:20:55]:
Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Chanel. And I hope everybody enjoyed meeting Chanel today and got to meet an actual practicing realtor person doing showings and you're not some ivory tower person like these decisions impact your daily business as well as you just said. So just want everybody to be aware of that. And we also have some really smart, diverse people on the board that have had a lot of life experiences that really, you know, all of that combines with maybe the strategy that I've just, you know, learned over all these years. The strategy that we have employed was really written in a NAR center for Real Estate Technology article in 2015. So next year it's 10 years old. If you Google Bob Bemis front end of choice, you'll see the article which was written in 2016. I'll put it in the show notes too.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:21:43]:
Please do.

Matt Fowler [00:21:44]:
It's a PDF. When you see it on the Google results, it's like a document you can link to, but it's out at nar something, something, something and you'll see it. And I didn't invent this plan. I just got tired of waiting for it to happen and had the opportunity to actually deploy the thing and there's only just a few. And here at the end of our call, I'll get to announce that I heard downstairs at the, at the meeting last night. I think that Canopy have announced a relationship with Paragon. So they're going There been a CoreLogic market forever and ever and they're going to be offering, they're going to be offering choice which gosh, I wonder where they heard about that.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:22:19]:
I don't know. Interesting. Well, it's always a pleasure. We very much believe in your leadership and the direction that you and the board are taking. Dolls and. Thank you.

Matt Fowler [00:22:30]:
Thanks, Chanel. It's been a lot of fun. Couldn't do it without you.

Chanel Hart D'Aprix [00:22:32]:
Absolutely. Talk to you soon.

Matt Fowler [00:22:33]:
Bye.