Divas On The Air: Kim and Chavi on Inman’s Daily Dispatch

Team Diva was born with the recession of 2009, and founders Kim and Chavi met working at the Northwest AIDS Alliance. Weathering disruption paired with serving our community is part of our DNA as a business.

Kim and Chavi joined Brad Inman’s Daily Dispatch podcast this past week. The subject was what’s on everyone’s mind: The COVID-Crisis. Listen to it all here.

Longtime Divaland members may know that Inman is a leading independent news publisher for the residential real estate industry. But for those less familiar with the industry, the company also hosts the highly respected Real Estate Connect conference series. These conferences provide a gathering point for leaders in real estate, and they were critical to helping Team Diva find its voice and its path, being unconventional in a rather staid industry. (Kim has also been a guest speaker at Inman Connect.)

Inman also presents the Inman Innovator Awards, a national honor that Team Diva has now won twice. To say the least, we are always excited and grateful to work with Inman.

Inman’s Daily Dispatch: The COVID-Crisis And History Repeating

We have been seeing a feeling a lot of parallels with the COVID pandemic and other times in our personal and professional history at Team Diva. On the podcast, Brad Inman and Kim recall how the AIDS epidemic stigmatized properties, especially if someone died of AIDS in a house. Despite the disease not being transmitted by touch, people’s gut reactions still created fear around it.

Kim and Chavi know this all too well, having met while working in the Northwest AIDS Alliance. Kim transitioned to real estate in part to take a mental and emotional break from battling for funding for those suffering from HIV/AIDS. COVID is a very different disease, and the effects it’s having are also entirely different, but the anxiety around it is very familiar.

The economic impact of the COVID quarantine is just beginning to be understood and will extend farther than we can predict. This, too, is familiar, as Team Diva formed right as the country fell into the deep 2009 recession. At that time, Inman’s blog was a foundling, independent source for industry news. Inman, too, grew and found new audiences and purpose in those tumultuous years.

Next Steps in Real Estate: Virtual Tours, Variety Hours and Happy Hours

Everybody is eager to gather with friends again. And in real estate, we can’t wait to show houses to lots of folks worry-free. But that is just not happening any time soon.

On Inman’s Daily Dispatch, Kim and Chavi also get to chat about Team Diva’s recent virtual variety hour. In case you missed that, it was a way to raise funds for local performers, who did short performances via Zoom. It was curated by Raja Feather Kelly, a favorite choreographer of Team Diva, whose powerful new performance at WET was shuttered early by the stay-at-home order. The variety hour raised over $1000…not bad for a program put together in about 8 hours. (Thanks again to all of you who supported it.)

At the time, we were just starting to transition from our usual video content to exclusively virtual tours. As many people can attest, new users have been overloading the servers of these virtual platforms. But last week we had two virtual happy hours with Roy and Rocky that were sooooo fun. We’re really getting into this.

Listen to the full podcast of Inman’s Daily Dispatch to hear more from Kim, Chavi, and Brad Inman himself about the past, present, and future of real estate.