Improv in Business: Real Estate
Special Guest Instructor, Greg Tindale is a Realtor by day and a Washington Improv Theater performer by night. Here he is getting some recognition in his local newspaper for how he puts improv skills to use in his day job.
Reprinted from The Dupont Current, written by Beth Cope.
Local Realtor puts his Varied Improv Tricks to Work with his People Skills.
There are many ways to find a Realtor: asking a friend, flipping through ads, choosing a name off a yard sign. Or going to an improv class.
“I knew he was a Realtor, other improvisers had used him … and he’s a really nice guy,” said buyer Jamie Lantinen of his Washington Improv Theater colleague Greg Tindale, who doubles as a real estate agent. Tindale helped his comedy buddy buy a semi-detached house in Brightwood in 2012. “It was kind of a no-brainer, and we never really talked to any other Realtors,” Lantinen said.
For years now, 33-year-old Tindale, who lives with his wife and 14-month-old daugh- ter in McLean Gardens, has been balancing his day job at the Tindale Team with his night gig at Washington Improv Theater, or WIT. Like the hundreds of Washingtonians taking classes or performing with the organization, Tindale is inspired by a simple fact: He loves it.
“I remember watching and just being completely enamored with how funny and magical it was,” he said of the first WIT show he saw, back in 2005. “And after taking my first class … it was like, ‘Oh. This is what I want to be doing all the time.’”
Since then, his involvement has grown; he’s now on the executive board at the theater, and last year he even donated some of the proceeds from his real estate business to help support the organization’s education pro- grams. And he’s benefited from his hobby as well: He’s sold over $8.5 million of real estate to people he met through improv.
Tindale says there are thematic connec- tions between his two worlds, too: When he got started in real estate, for instance, he read book after book about business. “Then once I started taking improv classes, all the lessons … were the exact same things they were teaching me in my business books,” he said.
Those concepts included “working towards agreement, and listening first before responding, understanding what people want — basically just treating people well and being a good scene partner.”
He said he would practice these ideas on stage, and then put them into play with clients — which Lantinen independently confirmed.
“I suspect he takes … lessons from improv and applies it to his work, such as the need to listen carefully to others,” he said. “When we were deciding between houses toward the end of a long search process, coming down to the wire, Greg reminded us what we had talked about at the start in terms of our priorities, and it really helped us confirm what deep down we already knew.”
At the same time, Tindale appreciates the stark difference between his work and his passion. The former, for instance, requires constant research and groundwork. But prep- aration is anathema to improv — making it a welcome break for anyone who works hard during the day.
“What I like best about improv is the lack of expectation. Whenever I go into a meeting, with real estate there’s some homework to do beforehand,” Tindale said. “Improv is the one part of my life where I get to just show up with actively having no preparation. Preparation is a problem in that world.”
There’s other appeal as well. Tindale said it’s refreshing to have a “safe space” where anything goes — especially in D.C., where “everyone has to be so serious in their jobs every day, and if you send out the wrong tweet you’re gonna get fired.” In fact, he thinks silliness is a lost art.
“If you go watch Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol,’ in the scene where they’re at the party, they’re all playing improv games. It’s some- thing as a society that we used to do,” he said. “And we’ve just stopped doing that. … We’ve forgotten that we’re allowed to be silly.”
Spending time being silly has other benefits: Tindale says that along with clients, many of his best friends have come from improv. One of his fellow performers officiat- ed his wedding, and her husband played a song at the reception.
His focus on relationships plays a role in his work world as well, since Greenline Real Estate LLC’s Tindale Team operates almost entirely on referrals. “Last year I sold about $10 million in real estate to about 20 clients,” he said. “All of those clients were friends, friends of friends, repeat clients or clients who read a five-star review online about my service.”
Learning how to connect with others? Not a bad skill to have in this field.