myBurbank reporter Ashley Erikson, interviews Burbank realtor, entrepreneur, and community leader, Mary Anne Been. Mary Anne shares her incredible career journey and her love of the community through volunteerism. She has led a girl scout troop for 13 years, acted as President of the Burbank Coordinating Council, studied and worked as a chef, traveled the world for an online travel magazine, and worked as a personal fitness trainer. Mary Anne now serves the Burbank community as a real estate agent, and shares where she sees the city in the net few years and what the housing market is going to be looking like.
Big thank you to Compass Realtors Mike McDonald and Mary Anne Been for being a continued sponsor of the “Women of Burbank” show. For more info visit https://burbankarealiving.com/
myBurbank reporter Ashley Erikson, interviews Burbank realtor, entrepreneur, and community leader, Mary Anne Been. Mary Anne shares her incredible career journey and her love of the community through volunteerism. She has led a girl scout troop for 13 years, acted as President of the Burbank Coordinating Council, studied and worked as a chef, traveled the world for an online travel magazine, and worked as a personal fitness trainer. Mary Anne now serves the Burbank community as a real estate agent, and shares where she sees the city in the net few years and what the housing market is going to be looking like.
Big thank you to Compass Realtors Mike McDonald and Mary Anne Been for being a continued sponsor of the “Women of Burbank” show. For more info visit https://burbankarealiving.com/
From deep in the Burbank Media District. It's time for another edition of my Burbank Talks, presented by the staff of my Burbank. Now let's see what's on today's agenda as we join our program.
Speaker 2:Hi, my Burbank reporter, ashley Erickson, here with another episode of Women of Burbank, and today my guest is Mary Ann Bean, a dynamic entrepreneur and dedicated community leader that has made a significant impact on the real estate industry in the Burbank area. Thank you for being here and I want to first of all thank you. You've been a long time sponsor of the Women of Burbank podcast show, so now I get to have you here and be a part of it and see where the magic happens and thank you personally. So thank you, you're very welcome.
Speaker 3:I love to support all things Burbank. So when I saw this and saw that you were featuring women of Burbank specifically, I thought what a great cause and what a great thing to sponsor, because the women in Burbank are phenomenal.
Speaker 2:There's some pretty incredible women. I mean, we've had, you know, people that study cougars. To you know, liquor stores, to you know, mexican restaurants. It's so wide range and we're only just breaking the surface of the amazing women here. So I agree to have you as another amazing woman of Burbank. So first just tell me a little bit where you're from, how long you've been in Burbank, a little bit about your family, Sure.
Speaker 3:Born and raised in San Diego, and then I moved to LA.
Speaker 2:You left the beach I left the beach.
Speaker 3:Now, born and raised in San Diego, I lived there until I was in my early 20s and then I left and went to culinary school in San Francisco and then, when I graduated from there, I moved to Burbank with my husband, who had a television career, and we've never left. It's amazing. We've raised two kids here and it's been great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what was your first feeling about Burbank when you first came here? Was it different than San Diego?
Speaker 3:It's so different. Two things. One was I got lost everywhere I went because there's so many similar named streets, you know. So it just was between North Hollywood and here, I thought, but I'm still on Magnolia.
Speaker 2:And then you're like inshore my notes and you just keep going.
Speaker 3:So, and that was before cell phones, so it was just really I had to like use my wits Anyway. And the second thing was I lost my train of thought. What did you ask me?
Speaker 2:Just the difference between San Diego and here.
Speaker 3:What your first thoughts were, how interesting people were and not interesting, like intriguing, but interesting. Like in San Diego, everybody's so laid back and chill and just wanting to like they're just friendly and smiley, you know. And then I moved to LA, and I don't mean it so much about Burbank, but just LA in general. You can't just smile at people on the street. You're crazy, they think you're crazy, they think you're going to mug them. They're just like yeah, oh, hey, weirdo, why are you being nice?
Speaker 2:to me, and it's like the hustle and bustle right. Everything is just so quick paced, especially with immediate interest.
Speaker 3:Fast. Oh my, I really had to like speed up my life. Yeah, yeah, move here, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's funny. Well, you have been here for a long time and you've really invested into Burbank. You put your roots here, you put your family here, and one thing that I wanted to talk about was that you were a Girl Scout leader for 13 years. Yeah, so were you a Girl Scout as a child? Nope, no. So your kids were interested, your girls were interested and you wanted to be involved in it.
Speaker 3:I don't know that my kids were interested because they were young, you know, like first and second grade my oldest daughter, anyway, I think. I was interested in it for her and I attended a meeting and then I was coerced into being a leader because they just didn't have enough right, that's how it works, yeah. So I started a troop and it was amazing. I loved all the little kids and I got to know some of the girls and their parents and we all became friends. We're still friends to this day, yeah. And then as our troop grew and the girls grew, I merged with another leader, geraldine Walters, who's still one of my very best friends, and we had a phenomenal group of girls that graduated Girl Scouts and I couldn't be more proud of them All the way through, All the way through.
Speaker 3:Not all the girls, you know, they even. They come and they go, whatever. But the girls that graduated with us are phenomenal young women. One's a commercial airline pilot, one's an archaeologist. One works with the airlines as an airline stewardess I don't think we use that word anymore.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't know. Flight attendant, Flight attendant.
Speaker 3:Thank you, you know, and just a wide range of professions that are all very successful and I'm very, very proud of them.
Speaker 2:I was a Girl Scout growing up. I went through the whole thing daisies, brownies, juniors, cadets, seniors. I don't know if I finished my gold project. I know I did. My silver Silver was out there called like a silver, brown silver and gold, yeah yeah. So how has the Girl Scouts troop impacted you and the girls just through volunteerism and Burbank, and what things have you done around this city as a?
Speaker 3:troop. How does it impacted me and it's just a point of pride. You know, it's something really just to step back and go, wow, I've helped create these amazing, strong women. You know, because now they're women. I have girls that have moved to New York and they're working and marketing and they're living on their own and they're just they're 25 years old. That's amazing. So it's been a, it's been a really honor. It's an honor, I guess you know, to watch this stuff happen. And then the impact that our girls had on the city was pretty cool. We were the first troop to introduce reusable shopping bags.
Speaker 3:Before reusable shopping bags were thing in the grocery stores before the state said you have to use them or you're going to get charged, you know. So our girls did a huge recycle project in Burbank. They recycled enough recyclables to be able to purchase these bags. They designed the design and then they went to the arts day on San Fernando and passed them out for free to the entire community. I think they gave them out over 1,500 of them.
Speaker 2:Oh wow. Yeah, that's amazing. Do you still have that bag? I still have one. It's pretty amazing because I know they fall apart pretty quickly.
Speaker 3:No, it was very impressive. They were very conscious of their surroundings and what was going on in the world, and it was something that was important to them, so they were one of the first people to do that in this town. It was really, really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's such a great program and I just remember those badges and really learning in-depth details about your community and civil service and the camping trips oh my gosh, catalina, and all these things. Did you guys do a lot of camping trips? We did a lot of hosting?
Speaker 3:of trips. So our troop was a big money earning troop. We had a very strong ethic, which was if you want to play hard, you have to work hard, and our girls understood it 100%. So they did anything and everything they could to earn money to do the things they wanted to do. So we would host encampments for a whole weekend, like three days, and we'd invite troops from all over LA and they would come and we'd put them through obstacle courses and teach them the eight basic camping skills and feed them for three days and it was incredible, and we'd have two or 300 kids there, wow that's incredible.
Speaker 2:That is really incredible. That was really cool. Are you missing cookie season?
Speaker 3:Not at all, Not one. See, I have not eaten one Girl Scout cookie in years. They make you sick. What's your favorite?
Speaker 2:None, you don't like them at all. I can't. I've got to throw out to the Samoa. That one's so good. It is the season right now. Yes, it is. They're at every grocery store, bank corner of Porto's. You can't turn a corner without finding them.
Speaker 3:I have a specific set of girls that I donate to and I just give them my money because I don't want the cookies and I don't have anybody to give them to, so I'm just like I don't want them my money that's fine.
Speaker 2:Well, you were also were the president of the Bourbon Coordinating Council, which is a huge job. So tell me a little bit about that organization. And how did? Was this an overlapping? Was this after being a Girl Scout leader? And then you moved on to this job.
Speaker 3:So how we discovered BCC was through Girl Scouts. But then president Janet Deal came, spoke to the troops and asked us to support other holiday basket program which my girls were all about. So we would sponsor families and do holiday baskets and that was our first endeavor into BCC. As volunteers we would do the holiday basket program and we did that throughout Girl Scouts. So for years and years, right. And then when I got done with Girl Scouts I was kind of, what am I gonna do? I need something to do for nonprofit, I want to contribute. So I thought, well, I'll be a volunteer for BCC. I went and I spoke with Janet and I started volunteering and then before I knew it I was on the board and then before I knew it I was president. That's how it works, right.
Speaker 2:Yep, you can't put your foot in the door, something always happens like that Every time. As a PTA president right now, I know exactly that feeling.
Speaker 3:It's always more than you sign up for, right, but I think you have to have that expectation. But the two years that I was president were a great two years. I had a great board. These people were very supportive and almost I don't want to say single-handedly, but Hildi Garcia, who's a teacher in Burbank and an amazing woman, and I worked very closely together and we redesigned the entire Holiday Basket Program, made it paperless, like everything online, and we just got such great feedback from the sponsors and from the families that were involved. It was great. So we revamped Holiday Baskets together and that's probably the most proud thing that I did.
Speaker 2:Other than these holiday. Just for people that don't know what those baskets are, those are for families in need. During the holidays you guys put together baskets of like toiletries and food and presents too.
Speaker 3:So we do. We serve all the low-income families in Burbank. There's many that apply right. So one year we might have 300, another year we might have 500, just depends on what the need is. Every single family gets gifts for every member of the family that's in the household, and then they get at least two weeks worth of non-perishable foods to get them through the holidays. And really what it's about isn't giving them a holiday, it's about giving them the opportunity to provide a holiday for their family and still be able to pay their rent and their bills. Because we all know holidays are expensive. It costs a lot of money. Let's get them through the holiday season so that we can make a burden a little less for them.
Speaker 2:Makes that stress off of them? Other than the baskets, what else does BCC do, Funny? Right, because everybody's like oh, holiday baskets. I know the baskets very well, but I'm sure there are more than that.
Speaker 3:So in 1933, BCC was developed or created, founded, and it was to help coordinate within the community between all the different services that can be provided for non or low-income families. It kind of fell off through the years. It's been 91 years so of course things change or they get forgotten and stuff kind of happens, but the original job was to coordinate for these families and help them find resources. The other program that we do that we still have intact is our campership program. What we do is we reach out to all the families that we serve and we provide these kids with a $300 voucher that will get them through at least one session of a summer camp. Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:So Boy Scout Camp, burbank, parks and Rec, ymca, boys and Girls Club, camp Edwards, up in the San Bernardino Mountains, and there's four. I always want to call it Forest Lawn, but it's wrong.
Speaker 2:I hope that's not a Forest Home, forest Home.
Speaker 3:It's a way different camp. They're dying to get in.
Speaker 2:Start them young. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:I think it's called Forest Home, anyway. So there's a wide range of camps that we work with, and they all work with us on our voucher program, and so the family will register and we'll send them information, and then they ask for the voucher to get paid, and that's how we pay it, that's awesome, yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's like you got a little bit of the summer, you've got the holidays. It really kind of covers a lot of the year for families that are in need, correct.
Speaker 3:And then throughout the year we just kind of we hold association meetings, so the people who belong to BCC as members come to association meetings and we have speakers that come from all different aspects of the city to talk and educate our members. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:So you've done all this volunteerism, but you also work. You do have jobs. You're not just giving all your time, but before we get into your careers or real estate agent, I want to talk about the incredible paths you've had before that, like a chef and a personal trainer and a corporate liaison for the Metropolitan Water District and overseeing an online travel magazine. All very different things, and I'm so excited to go into every single one of them. So let's start with your career as a personal chef, because you did mention you went to culinary school. I did so. Tell me about your background, what got you into it and then what led to becoming a chef.
Speaker 3:So I come from a big Italian family. All we do is eat and cook just what we do. So I've cooked my whole life. You know there was a summer where all I did was cook dinner for my family because I was the one home, right, so I always cooked. It just felt like a natural thing to go into.
Speaker 3:So I went to school in San Francisco, the California Culinary Academy, and I graduated and then I started my internship with John Fresnel, who was one of the executive chefs for the Petina Group at Gower Sunset Studios. It was their restaurant there and I started my internship and I just loved the company so much and I loved working there that I started to work through all the different restaurants that they had in their group and then I landed in their catering kitchen. Oh okay, and I worked there for a long while and I just loved every aspect of it because we did some really cool stuff. Like we worked everything from for Barbra Streisand to Wow, to movie premieres and Private Beverly Hill Home like small dinner things. It was just cool. It wasn't like your typical. We didn't cater weddings.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know we catered a lot of actors' guild stuff Really cool. We did the Emmys, really really fun, cool things, yeah. So we did that. And then I got pregnant with my first daughter and I worked all the way until I was eight or nine months pregnant and then that was enough. I had my kid and I stayed home with her for about a year.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Yeah, and what was your? Did you have a specialty? Were you better at baking or things like that? What was your favorite?
Speaker 3:So I went to culinary school to become a baker. Oh okay, I love baking a pastry. I got bamboozled and sold the entire program. So I took the whole program. Oops, I'm sorry I keep bumping into things. So I got bamboozled, I took the whole program and really kind of just fell in love with the job, right. But I love to bake, I love to make pastry, and so people who know me will ask, like my friend Teresa, I always ask like you make some cookies, like I really love some cookies, is that chocolate frosting? Did you just make that? Oh my gosh, so yeah.
Speaker 2:You have like one that's like your ultimate, that everyone loves, like your signature dish oh my, gosh, I don't know my signature dish.
Speaker 3:I don't know that I have a signature dish. You'd have to ask the people to eat my food. I think my thing that people crave all year round is my Thanksgiving dinner. Oh, I have a group of. I have always tried to travel during Thanksgiving. I have tried to convince my family. Like let's just take a vacation. No, my kids literally say no, you have to cook dinner.
Speaker 3:Oh so you do the whole work I do. I have 30 people in my house every year. I do the whole dinner from beginning to end. Nobody brings anything. Wow, I don't trust people. So you know, you always have that one random person that'll show up with like a tiny little dish enough for two people, yeah.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Get the memo. Yeah, I don't want to give them the look.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I'd rather just do it myself.
Speaker 2:I want to go to your Thanksgiving. You're welcome to. I do not cook at all. I do not step foot in the kitchen. That is my husband's domain. I don't like it. I don't want to look at it, I just want to eat it. I don't want to do it. You're welcome.
Speaker 3:I make everything from scratch. Nothing's pre-made. The whole dinner, from soup to nuts.
Speaker 2:You know how to make scones? I do. Do you know how to make a pumpkin scone? I do, because I was really, really depressed this fall when Starbucks discontinued my favorite thing in the entire world, the pumpkin scones. Oh, you might get a delivery, don't worry, you can recreate that.
Speaker 3:I'm very, very grateful. 100%, probably better. Oh, I can't wait.
Speaker 2:I used to buy, like, before they take it out of the package, I would just come and like ask for them, like shipped in, like give me all of the packages and I would just store them and eat them all the time. Oh, that's hilarious. So you were a chef, okay. So then you went on to a personal trainer. Is that how it went down the line?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I couldn't stay in the food business because I had kids. Now I can't work till two o'clock in the morning. My husband is in the TV industry and he's freelancing camera and audio. He's working until two in the morning sometimes. So one of us had to give. So I gave and I stopped cooking and I stayed home with my daughter.
Speaker 3:I get bored very easily. So here she is, a year and a half old. I'm like I got to do something with myself. I'm like I'm going to do something crazy. So I thought and thought and thought and I thought well, next thing I love the most is fitness. It's what I've always done in my life. I was in, I swam in high school and I was on the dive team and I liked to run and I lifted weights my whole life and so I was always pretty fit and I thought it would be a nice natural fit. Yeah, so I went and got my certification and became a personal trainer. I worked in a women's gym in Glendale for a while, wow Until I couldn't work there anymore and then I took it home and became an in-home trainer and traveled to my client's houses.
Speaker 2:That's incredible. Do you still do training now, either personal training or just training for yourself? So I don't look like it. But yeah, that's amazing. Don't second guess yourself.
Speaker 3:I recently have gone back to the gym and started lifting again and training again, because it's important.
Speaker 2:You have to take care of yourself.
Speaker 3:Lifting is the thing, now too, it is let's get some muscles you have to be cardio and because girls were afraid of muscles, right Now we have tattoos and we have muscles and people don't care.
Speaker 2:That's very, very true, and I don't like cardio and I feel really good when I lift weights. I probably wouldn't be able to outrun or breathe after anything strenuous, but I could lift something high.
Speaker 3:That's right. It's about strength. You're fine. It's fine. I just need to run faster than somebody else.
Speaker 2:That's very true and trip them in the end of the world.
Speaker 3:So I did that for probably two and a half years. It was pretty good at it and I really enjoyed it, so that was something you've always been into.
Speaker 2:You said food and fitness has been important to you.
Speaker 3:Weird that I never became like a nutritionist.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those would go hand in hand. They're counteractive.
Speaker 3:I like cake too much.
Speaker 2:Pastries and pilates. That's a good one. Oh, somebody used that for something. So now I'm really excited to talk about your travel magazine that you worked with with your husband, right? So tell me about the magazine how it got started and how you got to travel the world with it, yeah, super cool.
Speaker 3:So it was an online travel magazine. It was in paper. My husband called me one day. Well, so before that is when I was at Metropolitan Water District. Oh yeah, I missed that one, yeah, so that was a weird job but it was fun. I worked for the board. It was exciting as a magazine. I technically worked for the food service company but I liaised between the board of directors and the food. It was basically my job was to babysit the buffet, so nobody stole the food.
Speaker 3:It was really it, You're a food security guard and to make sure that none of the board members were without anything right, because they're volunteers. It's the mission of the MWD to make sure their board members are happy and whatever. So my job was to basically babysit and make sure these people had what they wanted, and then I went home at two o'clock. So that was my day.
Speaker 2:It's not bad, it's not bad.
Speaker 3:It was okay job. But so I'm working that job and my husband calls me one day from Las Vegas. He's at a conference and he says I need you to quit your job and help me with this travel magazine. I met this woman. She's a travel blogger. She wants to do this magazine or this website, I don't know. Think about it Right. So time goes on, things change between their friendship and she leaves the scene and he doesn't know what the hell he's doing, because it's not his thing. Yeah, and he asks me to take it over. I never have done social media. At that time I had never like I'm not an online. I wasn't an online person. I really hadn't traveled extensively. At that point I had no concept of what the heck I was stepping into, but sure.
Speaker 2:No problem, I like you. I like how you can just wing it from chef to pastry to traveler.
Speaker 3:I tell you, learning on the fly is one of my things.
Speaker 3:It's an important skill to have. Yeah, I was very I'm very good at that part, but so I said, okay, so I come in, I start kind of learning and talking to our video editor like what's really the thing, and I said the first thing we need to do is hire a copy editor, because, while I can read, I'm not an editor, right. So we hire a copy editor and we start garnering submissions from different writers around the world. At one point I had over 50 writers around the world who wrote for us for free. Wow, they just wanted their name in the magazine. Yeah, so they would write for us. They'd submit their stories, some of them which were photographers as well, so they'd send these amazing photos. Some of them did video, so we'd post that because it was online, it was cool, we could do that. And then I started to get asked to travel. So I did some really cool things. Like we went to Africa for 20 days. Wow, do you?
Speaker 2:mean the whole family, nope, just you. Thank God. Yes, it changes the travel experience a little bit.
Speaker 3:It can be a lot and the kids were still in school so it was like whatever. But Jason and I went to Africa for 20 days and we had an incredible time. We started in Nairobi and we did all different kinds of like safari camps. I mean, that's probably my most favorite trip. Yeah, because I saw things that I probably are. When it's in a lifetime thing, right, if you have anybody out there listening ever has the opportunity to go to Africa. Do not say no, I'm going to be a travel agent now.
Speaker 2:Right Now, you know where I'm going to go, yeah exactly.
Speaker 3:So we did that, went to Thailand and I went to Turkey and I've been all over Europe and you know.
Speaker 2:And how long was this span when you were doing all these traveling for About?
Speaker 3:six years.
Speaker 2:Okay, wow yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the blogger showed up on the scene and it just killed what I was doing because they were doing stuff for free, right. And then now how am I going to generate income? So the last big project we did, I was very proud of, we did. You know, when you're sitting in an airplane and the back of your seat has a TV and you see all those ads or videos about the destination you're going to, we did that with Hawaiian Airlines. Oh, awesome. I don't know if they're still playing or not, but we had like six different videos that we did. That they played in flight on Hawaiian Airlines and it was us and we had a host and we walked through Hawaii and we had, excuse me, hawaiians Airlines flight attendants touring us around their part of Hawaii that they're from, oh wow, and showing us like their favorite thing, yeah, and it was really cool. So we went to the big island and we went to Lanai and we went to Oahu and we went all over Hawaii. It was really beautiful.
Speaker 2:Did you bring your kids to any of them?
Speaker 3:I took my oldest daughter to Italy with me once. Oh, okay, it was so run and gun that it was really hard to it had tow kids along. Yeah, yeah, you know when you're working. It's a very different type of travel than traveling for leisure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so that went away, while you said, the blogger scene hit and so that dissolves, right, right In 2015. Okay, yeah, and then now for your current career. Was this easy transition? Was there time in between before you became a realtor?
Speaker 3:There was time in between. I don't know how long. Yeah, probably two years. Okay, yeah, there's probably like a two-year gap where I just kind of sat at my husband's office and helped him with marketing and advertising for his company and tried to figure out what the heck I wanted to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then I got super bored again and I called my realtor who's now my business partner, mike McDonald, and I said, hey, I think I want to get my real estate license. And he just kind of chuckled, was like, okay, whatever board housewife, go get your license. Yeah, and I was like, okay, so I wouldn't got my license. And he's like, well, I'll mentor you for like your first five deals and teach you the ropes, and then you're going to go on your own and see a later kid, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So I get my license and I show up to work and I'm ready to work, you know, and I have a hard work ethic, Like I will do the job. Mm-hmm, I'm like I'm going to do the soup tonight. It's like no problem. And he didn't know this yet, you know, because he sold us houses but we weren't like, we didn't hang out, so he didn't really know me. So I started working and I started making deals and in my first year I sold 13 houses, wow. And he was like, oh, you're doing pretty good. Maybe I should stick around a little longer.
Speaker 2:You want a partner. Amazing. And now, how many years has it been as a partnership?
Speaker 3:You're making me do math In 1922, 1923.
Speaker 2:So eight years? Yeah, wow, that's amazing. And so you've been, you know, here in Burbank selling houses for eight years. And what have you learned? Just learned about Burbank, or learned about yourself now in this transition as a realtor? Oh, that's a hard question.
Speaker 3:That's a good question. It's a hard question. What have I learned about myself? I've learned that I am not afraid of people or situations. You know, I've always kind of been very confident. But when you're dealing transactionally with people and there's a lot of money on the line and sometimes you have to say the thing, right, not all people can say the thing and they always kind of beat around the bush. Mike laughs. He's like I've never seen somebody like you walk in the house and be like so sign the contract, it's good this time I got places to be Tiktok friend, we got to go.
Speaker 3:I got peace trees to make and I got to work out, but you get the job done, you know, and I'm not harsh and brash with people, but I'm like I'm here to serve you. Let me do my job to the best of my ability. Yeah, you know. So I really am very dedicated and you can probably talk to any one of my clients and they'll tell you how dedicated I am to them. They think they're my only client. Yeah, that's how hard I work for people.
Speaker 2:Well, you seem to prove that in everything that you do, you go full force into it. So that's pretty incredible. I don't know how. I'm not too yeah.
Speaker 3:No that's a really great characteristic.
Speaker 2:Hopefully no one will listen to this and take you in to do something else. Sign you up for something.
Speaker 3:Don't listen, I think at this point it'd be kind of hard. I enjoy real estate a lot. I enjoy it. It's interesting enough that I'm not getting bored. Yeah. I'm dealing with enough different people all the time, different locations.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Different locations. Plus, mike and I have started a property management company. Oh, okay, so we also do that. So I'm in between the two.
Speaker 2:I'm busy all day, every day. Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. I've been loving your community through real estate, like sponsoring podcasts and what are some other things that you have been able to do and love your city through this job.
Speaker 3:So you know the holiday and Halloween map? Yeah, I sponsored that. Oh, amazing. I sponsored her for the holiday part. Yeah, because I was watching it through the Halloween stuff. And she works her tail off, jennifer, yeah, she really does, and this isn't like her job, this is just her passion. Yeah, right, so she has a whole full-time job that she's working and she's doing this thing and people are coming at her kind of hard a little bit and I was watching it and I was like, eh, she needs some support, right. So I reached out to her and we kind of became friends on social media and I said, hey, do you want to sponsor? I'm happy to help you because she's coming out of pocket 100% on this stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you don't realize that it costs money to put that on. That's a really complicated map that she's working with. It's a lot of money too.
Speaker 3:It's not just like pennies, right? So I sponsored her because I thought let's lighten your load. You're doing a cool thing that the community loves, let's do it. So I sponsored her. That's incredible. I did that for her. And then we do a community garage sale all of Burbank, not just one neighborhood or whatever. So it's the Burbank community garage sale and this is our second year doing it and the reception has been amazing. People that participated are like, oh my gosh, you guys do so much for us. I go to every single house and I meet every single proper user and I say thank you for participating, and what can I get for you? And we give them signs and we give them bags and we give them stickers and whatever they need.
Speaker 2:Do you take the stuff after they're done, like help organize a pickup of their leftover stuff? It's amazing Well.
Speaker 3:I did last year with Kiwanis. I don't know who's doing it this year. I'll have to figure that out. Yeah, it's really cool. Yeah, it's really fun. I enjoy it. I just like meeting people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this career has been your longest out of the different things that you've done.
Speaker 3:No, I would say it's pretty tied with food, like food food. I've always kind of come back and forth into you know what I mean. So in one aspect or another, when I left the food industry to have kids, I still worked privately for a couple in Burbank as their personal chef. Oh wow. So I did that for a long time and then I get requests here and there. Can you make us a wedding cake, can you make us? Yeah, whatever. So I still kind of kept my hand in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's a trade you can have forever, which is nice yeah.
Speaker 3:I'm telling you it's the best piece of advice I ever got in my entire life was from my grandmother. Well, she gave me two pieces of advice. The first piece was learn a trade because you can work anywhere in the world, wherever you end up right. So that's very true. I learned to cook and people always got to eat. That's 100%. Always have a job. The other piece of advice she gave me was play the field.
Speaker 2:That one's done, though, right? Yeah, sorry, honey, that's really cute. She sounds like a fun lady. She was, so the words to the Y is that is that's your takeaway from today. 100%, I'm gonna trade and play the field. Are you listening? All the youngings out there, exactly? Well, just tell me a little bit about your real estate endeavor and what are the trends going on right now. What's the housing market? I know nothing about this. So if you want to just give our listeners kind of where we're at in Burbank, what it's looking like and what it feels, I think every realtor kind of has a different perspective, so you might hear different stories.
Speaker 3:My perspective is this the city is not going anywhere. Our property values are not going anywhere. We think for a little bit they're gonna sit stagnant right. Things are taking longer to sell, especially at a higher price point like Burbank, burbank anything a million over. People are just kind of waiting. They're waiting to see what the game is gonna be right. So it's just taking longer right now. It's not that they're not selling.
Speaker 3:I think price points are gonna stay the same. I don't really see much change. I think interest rates are gonna drop. I've been talking to a couple of our lenders. I think that they're gonna drop a point or two. But I will say this this is my one piece of advice I've been giving all my buyers, because they're all coming at me like when's the rate gonna go back down to two and two and a half percent? Probably never. Probably not until we have another crisis. Everyone forgets that that interest rate was to stimulate the economy. That's what our government told us, right? We're gonna lower the interest rates, we're gonna stimulate the economy, we're gonna get home sales up, we're gonna be able to buy houses. And then it went back to normal. What you guys see now is called a normal interest rate man.
Speaker 2:And what is it now Like? Six and a quarter?
Speaker 3:So anything between five and seven. I would almost feel lucky to have.
Speaker 2:Okay, right, because there's no waiting. Like just do it now, there's no waiting.
Speaker 3:And here's the thing that's gonna bite people on the rear end is you can wait for interest rates to drop over buying the house now, at a time where you're not gonna have the competition like we had during COVID right, there's less competition, housing prices are not going astronomical, they're staying where they're at. You can probably offer asking price and get your offer accepted, and while you're still paying an interest rate, there's a saying marry the house, date the rate no-transcript. People have to understand that if you don't buy now and you wait, and you wait and you wait, you're gonna lose tens of thousands of dollars worth of equity in the home that you could have bought. Instead of making money, you're losing money. It's a really important lesson to learn. Yeah, and I know people who have waited five years to buy a house because they just think At some point they're gonna get this great deal. Yeah, and they're just non-committal or they're afraid. Yeah, yeah, really what it is the jump in the water, yeah, so buy the house now, don't wait.
Speaker 2:Yeah, who knows what things are gonna be like in a few years. I'm always the jump in and figure it out later, kind of girl it's better to do it that way sometimes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, just buy the bullet. Yeah, I have to, especially if you want to get in the housing market.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what do you see Burbank looking like in the next five to ten years? Not just in houses, but just like in. You know the way it's being built and you know growing. I mean, you're really in the city, you see it, you see all the areas, you see the development.
Speaker 3:So See a lot of things and I hear a lot of things. I know, you know, I have a lot of conversations with yeah, there's a lot of development I think people aren't aware of. That's been, it's in the works, you know, it's in conversation. What do I see? I see a lot of people getting scared Because high density is coming. I don't think there's a way around it, right, people don't understand that if the city doesn't grow and develop, the state's gonna do it for us. So we have to make decisions as a community instead of allowing outsiders to make those decisions for us. Yeah, control over it. I agree with every decision that's made. No, you know, look at the rancho. Right, pickwick went away. Now it's being developed into multi unit housing and people are losing their minds over it. Should it have happened? I don't know. Is it a good thing for the city? I think so. Is it a good thing for the rancho? Probably not.
Speaker 3:Yeah right, because it just means what more traffic and less opportunity to ride your horse without getting hit by a car, right? So there's pros and cons to everything. I think the city is gonna go through a major attitude adjustment. You have a lot of new people in this town that aren't from here. Back in the day, 20, 30 years ago, people that lived here were from here, and now there's all these people who've migrated here from other states or from other cities in California Because of the industry, because of Netflix, because of Amazon, because of whatever, and it's a different mindset being brought into a town that has a very old school mindset. Yeah Right, so it's just gonna need an attitude adjustment yeah.
Speaker 2:And that may take 5 to 10 years or longer.
Speaker 3:And there's gonna be so much multi unit housing development that it's freaking people out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can't drive anywhere without seeing a building being worked on and built, and they're popping up so quick, I think, the city is really trying to keep up the infrastructure, but I don't know how that's gonna work.
Speaker 3:I don't know how that's gonna play out Because we are a grid system that's set in stone, you know, and unless you make some major radical route changes, I don't see how that's gonna happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we're definitely in a growth stage right now, Absolutely.
Speaker 3:But I think at the end of the day it's what needs to happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, growth is scary, change is scary, but everyone will adapt.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I agree, I think so. It's just an attitude adjustment, yeah speaking of attitude or mental health. I was talking to you about this earlier.
Speaker 2:I wanted to bring it up Because I've been seeing you on Facebook posting these videos talking about yourself and feelings and mental load and things like that, and you said your friends are checking in on you a little bit, so can you tell me what those videos are about? That's hilarious.
Speaker 3:So I am not a big share of all things me, so when I do share, people get concerned. Yeah, so I've been. I work with a coach. His name's Sean Whalen and he owns the Lions Den is what it's called and he is just no BS and he does things that make you uncomfortable, to get you comfortable Right. So one of the challenges was a 30 day video challenge. You have to do 30 videos and you have to talk about who you are and what you do. Well, I can only talk so much about real estate For 30 days yeah, yeah because that's a lot, it's ridiculous.
Speaker 3:So you have to start getting deep, yeah, so I'm starting to get deep and it's so uncomfortable and awful but it's been very good for me, kind of cathartic right. It makes you think about things a little bit, but things in a perspective. I have talked about everything from when my mom died tragically to today. I talked about being an investor in real estate. I mean just a broad range of things.
Speaker 2:What day are you on out of the 30? Every day, but for 30 days, what did you start?
Speaker 3:17 days ago. Oh, so you're like midway. Yeah, you're over the peak.
Speaker 2:I'm over the hump, yeah.
Speaker 3:That's frustrating. I've actually made people make lists for me because I don't know what's left to talk about, right. So it's been interesting, though it's a good experiment. It's a good social experiment. I've enjoyed it. The feedback I've gotten has been really interesting. I posted something the other day about a personal thing that happened to me and the feedback on that one was really interesting. You know you get the gossipy gossips. They want to call and I'm like what happened? I'm not going to tell them because it's not their business, but it's just very interesting the feedback that comes back you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to ask you how the response has been and how has it helped you through the process.
Speaker 3:Hearing the responses, it's good because well, it's motivating right, because people call me like oh my god, I totally get what you're talking about today. You feel a little less alone, A little less alone, and I think people are. I'll get text messages. Wow, I've watched your video today. It's been really great. I've watched all your videos. It's been so interesting to learn more about you, so it's good.
Speaker 2:They're on Facebook. Facebook and Instagram. Okay, it's at a public profile, mm-hmm. Okay, so everyone can come learn more about you. Yep. How many days left? You have 13 more days.
Speaker 3:Yep, so let us know what you want to hear about.
Speaker 2:Well, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for coming here talking about all these amazing things that you've been a part of. You're such an inspiration to the city and your community and inspiration to me, because I you know as a person who loves to go full force in and take charge and change my career path. You know, 70 times I am that same way. I get bored and I want to find new opportunities, and I always tell my kids you don't have to just be one thing when you grow up. When they say, what do you want to be when you grow up, it's never really just one thing. You're going to be a lot of things and that's okay. And it's really cool to hear your story and how you've transitioned to all these amazing things. So thank you for being here.
Speaker 3:You're very welcome, I also. I want to say one thing yeah, I started real estate and changed my career at 43 years old. You guys can do anything you want. Don't let anybody make you feel like you're too old to do something, or too young to do something, or you're not good enough to do something. Do what you want to do, when you want to do it, how you want to do it. Make your own rules, because I've lived by my own rules my whole life. I'm one of five kids, I'm the last of five kids and you know I watched all my siblings grow up and they went to college and my brother became an officer and you know all these things. I didn't live by any of those standards. I just didn't. I made my own rules. I did what I wanted when I wanted, and I've always been like that.
Speaker 2:Very freeing.
Speaker 3:It is.
Speaker 2:And it's also like what's next. It's the excitement of life, like you never know what is going to come your way, what opportunities, and sometimes doors have to close to let new ones open, 100%, 100%.
Speaker 3:So it's really cool, you're never too old to do anything. Yeah, I love that. Get on it.
Speaker 2:Whatever you're thinking in your head right now that you wanted to start that. This is your sign to start it 100%.
Speaker 3:Be an entrepreneur. There's nothing better. Oh, there's pros and cons.
Speaker 2:Maybe the fact that you work 24-7.
Speaker 3:You work a lot, you know, but it's worth it. It's worth it to be able to make your own decisions and not get told what to do all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, thank you. Well, thank you guys for listening to another episode of Women of Burbank. I'll see you guys next time. Thank you.