Hi. This is Paul Zoellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you. Today, I'm really thrilled to introduce you to Daniel Smith, and our topic today is homeownership sustainability and closing the racial wealth gap.

Daniel Smith is the founder of Keepingly, a platform that helps homeowners maintain, manage, and grow their property value. With over 20 years of experience in digital marketing and consulting, Daniel has transformed how organizations in the Caribbean and the US position their products online. At keepingly, Daniel uses his personal experience as a homeowner to create innovative solutions for the housing industry. His work earned him recognition as a RIS Media real estate newsmaker in 2023. As a futurist, Daniel is dedicated to leveraging technology to address key issues in the housing market, focusing on homeowner sustainability, equity and fairness. His recent Fast Company article, which I will put a link in the show notes. His recent Fast Company article outlines policy changes needed to make homeownership more equitable from addressing appraisal biases to enhancing credit programs. Daniel, welcome to the show.

Well, thank you for having me, and thank you for for the introduction. You I'm listening to it, and I'm thinking, wow. I I sound more better in in in Paul's introduction than I feel sometimes as an entrepreneur in real life.

Who who is this awesome human? I wanna meet him. Exactly. Exactly. Well, I'm really impressed at what you're doing. And before we hit record, I was telling you a story. This is a very this is really up in my mind. I am working on an initiative with the black chamber in New Mexico here, and the CEO, Carla Calsi, who was I think it was episode 334. We recently did an interview.

I'll put that link in the show note as well. But Carla has been raising this issue. And recently I was at a Black Chamber event and Carla said, okay, how many of you own your own home? Raise your hand. And it was pretty striking. You know, who, you know, what what people look like, who owned homes and didn't own homes. And this is something Carla has been raising if we could bake into initiative where we're working to get capital in the hands of black entrepreneurs. But can we also increase the number of people who are sitting in a room like that and raise their hands saying, I own my own home a few years down the road. This is literally something in our ecosystem we've been talking about.

So I am so thrilled to have you here, Daniel. Before we get into keeping Lee, just what would somebody wanna know about who Daniel is and a little bit about your background before we get into the specifics of hon ownership and closing the racial wealth gap.

Yeah. Thank you, Yvonne. So excited to be here in the world is a drop topic we're gonna address. And for me, I would say, you know, my background has been in technology, like the, introduction said, you know, and I've spent 20 years really helping 20 years plus, really helping organizations to be able to position their products and face the consumers who have done everything in digital marketing from web development, application development, and consulting side. Really cut my teeth in business to my bachelor's in business and then went on to do my MBA. And, you know, part of that really coming up in a family with, like, everybody was an accountant. We had, like, have, like, what, 10 cousins on on one side. And so in my family, there were, like, 7 accountants.