Samantha Enos Leads DEI Efforts at Windermere

Samantha Enos Leads DEI Efforts at Windermere

A Conversation with Samantha Enos

Samantha Enos is Windermere’s Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Samantha helps direct DEI training and education focusing on DEI advancement within the real estate industry through outreach and collaboration. She also serves on the Seattle-King County REALTORS Board of Directors and is a member of the National Association of REALTORS Mentorship program. She chairs the Seattle-King County REALTORS DEI committee and volunteers on the Juanita High School DEI committee.

SeaChange Editor Sarah Rudinoff sat down with Samantha Enos to chat about helping create her role at Windermere and her goals for the future.
SARAH
Hello Samantha, thanks so much for doing this. We wanted to introduce Windermere agents to you to let them know what you do, what your goals are within the company, and why agents might want to reach out to you.
What has your journey in real estate been like? I know you’ve done a lot in your life, including executive suite jobs, marketing, and being on all kinds of boards. What got you started in residential sales?
SAMANTHA
Thanks for giving me this platform. For 23 years I worked in financial, legal, and IT staffing. While I’ve had a lot of success there, it is a sales-driven industry where no matter how good you are, the finish line tends to move. And sometimes it moves when you’re in the middle of the race, that’s just part of the industry. After 23 years I wanted to be more in control of my success.
I’ve always loved sales and I love houses. My favorite thing to do is binge-watch every show on HGTV. That’s my jam! I got licensed in 2019. Prior to that, I was also an investor. My husband and I got our first property in 2008, turned it into investment property and then picked up more investment properties down the line.
SARAH
With staffing and recruiting, it seems like you are matching people with work, in some of the same ways that agents match people with housing.

SAMANTHA

It is absolutely that. Moving into the real estate industry was seamless because people were always trusting me for their living. Trusting me to get the best salary for them or the best culture for them. They are absolutely relying on you, and that is also what our buyers and sellers do.
SARAH
Were there things that you saw in either your real estate work or the staffing work that prompted your interest in DEI, besides your lived experience? What did you see in the industries you were working in over the years?

SAMANTHA

What’s interesting is when you come from an industry that’s heavily regulated by the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), it is something that you’re consistently training in and teaching. I managed many teams as a regional director and the DEI work was always a part of that. But after 2020 it really changed — I’m now in a different industry. And in real estate, we work in an industry that really doesn’t have a true HR department. You are dealing with people who aren’t answering to anything outside of their own education about certain things. So, while you’ll speak to people who say, “I would never discriminate,” you’ve got an industry that’s riddled with it.
SARAH
Yes, of course. We frequently talk about discrimination at our office meetings and newer agents will say, “I have a client asking me about something that verges on being discriminatory, what do I say?” The very common question we often get from clients, “Is this a good neighborhood?” The illegal practice of steering happens every day while touring homes.
Can you share how you think corporate DEI has changed over the years, especially at the beginning of a new racial reckoning, a new chapter in this country?

SAMANTHA

I don’t think there was a true awareness as to how important it was. A lot of companies did not have a DEI role. They had HR, but there was not a role that was specifically dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion. We are realizing how DEI touches on everything. Being a company that has a substantial size, you have to have something that addresses these issues. And it goes way beyond race. I think a lot of times people hear DEI and they immediately go to race, but it’s much bigger than that: it is how we interact with one another.
Fair housing really focuses on how we interact with our buyers and our sellers, while DEI focuses on how we interact with everyone. DEI efforts make it clear that we should be paying more attention to our Black and brown communities, our LGBTQ community, our special needs community.
SARAH
After 17 years in the business, I am dealing with more ability and access issues as my client base ages and realizing how little ADA compliance housing we have in Seattle. How has it been to create a new position where there wasn’t one before?

SAMANTHA

It has actually been a lot of fun. Windermere partnered with a consulting firm for a year. We needed to understand the values that we wanted to define us as a company, and then find somebody who could execute that vision. This role felt like a great fit because of my previous leadership skills and all of the DEI work I do on REALTOR® boards locally and nationally.

We do a lot of outreach on what other brokerages are doing that is successful, or what other states are doing. How can we really envision these pillars that WRE created? We went from there to plan what my job description would look like; it’s still in progress.
SARAH

Of course. You’ve done such a wonderful job with the website, it is an incredible resource for agents creating our own business plans. What would you say your biggest goals are in the role?

SAMANTHA

I would like our owners to know that we are here for them, we want to be the resource they reach for when they need help or more training. I want to make sure that they are educated enough to know better, and not be put in a situation where they don’t have the tools. Another goal would be walking into one of our offices in Kirkland or your office in Mount Baker, and any agent can repeat the same thing: they know what defines community for us, what defines homeownership for us. What is really driving me in 2022 is making sure that message is really clear.

SARAH

You mentioned homeownership too?

SAMANTHA

Yes. As part of Windermere’s commitment to the communities we serve, we want to make homeownership attainable for everybody.

SARAH

Yes, and we know how hard that has become. We know we can’t fix all the problems – I am not in charge of capitalism!

SAMANTHA

Yes, it is scary that middle-income folks cannot afford to live in Seattle. How do we address the lack of housing for most working people?

SARAH

Yes, as REALTORS® we don’t want to be left out of that conversation, because we have knowledge and resources to be part of the solution. How can we focus on these issues as an industry and lend our support to ideas that work?

SAMANTHA

I love that question, and I love what we’re doing at WRE. One example is the partnership between Windermere and the Aspire Program at UW.

SARAH

Yes, we just interviewed Renée Cheng in our last issue, who is the Dean of the College of Built Environments at UW.

SAMANTHA

We still talk about that first round of interns. At the end of the internship, they did a presentation on how Windermere could bring more agents of color into the fold, because entering the profession is expensive. Windermere has created a scholarship program that any office can tap into. If an office identifies a person of color that would not be able to work in real estate without some sort of financial support, the office can bring them on, give a stipend, or fund them as they get up and running.

Do you know what percentage of agents own their homes?

SARAH

No, I don’t actually.

SAMANTHA

About 85% of real estate agents own their homes. What better way to decrease the home ownership gap for African Americans or some of our other BIPOC communities, than to bring them into our industry?

SARAH

I also think that the more diverse our agent base, the more diverse our buyers. We bring our communities into homeownership. You can speak directly to your community with trust and integrity. 

How can agents support the work you’re doing? What might that look like?

SAMANTHA

I am planning on having a DEI ambassador group where each office would have one DEI representative. I would also love to see our offices hosting first-time homebuyer classes or some type of community outreach to start bringing people in and just seeing some of the work that we’re doing. 

We need to be prepared to reach diverse communities. For example, members of the Latinx community will become the number-one consumers of homes in the future. They will be buying more homes than any other demographic and we will need to be prepared to reach them.

We’re known for community — that is what makes Windermere such a beloved brand. If we can do the work, it will attract more people to us.

SARAH

Yes, we can all make a difference too. There is a bilingual agent in our office, Mark Chavez, who has done a big push to get all our contracts and disclosures translated into Spanish. Then language is not an extra barrier for people to be empowered in the buying and selling process.

SAMANTHA

That’s awesome.

SARAH

I thought we’d wrap up with asking, what are some of your favorite teaching tools, besides our amazing DEI website? Lectures on YouTube, books, podcasts?

SAMANTHA

I’m big into books. I always have an audio book going in the car. One of my favorites is Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum. I love this book. It goes into the history of why we are where we are. I also do podcast a bit, and I go the DEI spaces on the social media platform Clubhouse. There is a lot of great content and conversation there.

SARAH

Cool, two things I have not heard of. Thank you! Samantha, it’s been so nice to talk to you.

SAMANTHA

That was easy, Sarah. I hope agents and owners feel like we are here for them as a central resource. Thanks for featuring our work!

2200 1323 Sarah Rudinoff
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