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Show Summary
In this engaging conversation, Ross Rylance shares his unique journey from a third-generation real estate background to a successful career in the music industry, and ultimately back to real estate. He discusses his early life in Florida, his experiences touring with famous bands, and how personal life changes led him to embrace a career in real estate with Keller Williams. Ross emphasizes the importance of seizing opportunities and the value of building relationships in both music and real estate.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Ross G. Rylance (00:00)
So, in 2002, my boss of three and a half years, Waylon Jennings, passed. Waylon changed my life, as you can see, for Waylon. I a couple license plates in different states. I also have a huge tattoo on the inside of my arm of Waylon’s logo. Waylon changed my life. And I went out to replace a driver for a weekend. It turned into three and a half years because they wouldn’t let me go.And the respect given to me by Waylon and the entire organization was amazing. Six days after Waylon died, Willie Nelson started a four-night run at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and I was living in San Francisco, ⁓ Alameda, actually. I had convinced Waylon to let me move there and fly me back and forth on Southwest Airlines. We were only going out two or three weekends a month. So I would fly home to drive the truck for the weekend and fly back to Oakland, California.
Dylan Silver (02:31)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is a realtor based in Santa Monica, California, working with the Keller Williams office in Beverly Hills. Please welcome Ross Rylance. Ross, welcome to the show.Ross G. Rylance (02:46)
Thank you, Dylan. Appreciate being here.Dylan Silver (02:49)
It’s great to have you on here, Ross. We actually connected ⁓ for a pretty good sized conversation yesterday and then chopping it up a little bit here today before hopping on here. You’ve got a really ⁓ interesting backstory. But before we get to that, I do want to ask you how you got into real estate.Ross G. Rylance (03:08)
Well, actually I am a third generation in real estate. My grandfather was a prominent architect in Brisbane, Australia. My dad immigrated with us and the family to America when I was a young boy and he was a general contractor. He actually helped develop the town of Coral Springs, Florida. When we moved to… When we moved to… Kind of, yeah, that’s what my, my parents divorced and I had separate…Dylan Silver (03:31)
my goodness. So you were a-Ross G. Rylance (03:38)
opportunities. But my dad moved to Coral Springs, Florida when there were less than 500 people living there.Dylan Silver (03:44)
No kidding. Do you recall, you have memories from that time period?Ross G. Rylance (03:46)
Yeah.absolutely. Are you kidding me? ⁓ And so now the population of Coral Springs is a little over 137,000.
Dylan Silver (03:51)
SoYeah.
So what was it like? Was it a swamp? Like what was it like?
Ross G. Rylance (04:01)
It was, well, we actually built a two story home, one of the first in Coral Springs in South Florida. We made the cover of the Miami Herald. ⁓ We were a half a mile from the dike that separated the Everglades from civilization. And the joke out there was if the alligators don’t get you, the mosquitoes will. Because the mosquitoes would come across your yard in the summer.Dylan Silver (04:25)
That is true.Ross G. Rylance (04:30)
thick as thieves and they’d hit you like 12,000 thick, they could almost knock you over. Because there wasn’t enough civilization out there to stop the wildness. Two times, my dad built a house, we had a white sand beach on the lagoon that we were backing to. Twice we went outside, there were 10-foot alligators sunning themselves on the white sand beach because they’re just part of the landscape.Dylan Silver (05:42)
It’s amazing. know, Florida today has a reputation for being full of entrepreneurship, but also kind of this ⁓ bastion of anything goes. And I say that and it’s got a negative connotation, but I also love Florida. So I’m half joking, but you still have a lot of the positives of entrepreneurship out there. As an aside, I’m out in Fort Lauderdale like five or six times a year. think it’s⁓ It’s not that area, but Fort Lauderdale is amazing and it’s one of the reasons actually ⁓ why I ended up moving to where I’m at right now was because I was in Fort Lauderdale and I said, well, this is gonna be my connecting flight if I’m living in the Dominican Republic. So I think I can do this. And then here I am.
Ross G. Rylance (06:29)
I’ll throw a littlenugget on you. I used to go to Brownie’s Bar in Fort Lauderdale, famous for their conch chowder. Sadly, they’re long since closed. But yeah, my dad built a property right on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. We immigrated from Pearl Springs to Boca Raton, Florida, and he started building a bunch of homes in Boca Raton. He built the Firehouse Restaurant in Boca Raton that was very successful for about 25 years.
Dylan Silver (06:47)
Yeah.Ross G. Rylance (06:56)
had a 1938 fire truck as the bar inside the restaurant and people used to go. There was the steak seafood place in Boca for years and all the white patent loafers and the the ⁓ sequined or double breasted Jordan Marsh suits were pretty loud back then with the colors. And it was it was a fun time. And all the men back in my day were wearing those whiteAlligator loafers, man, that was kind of…
Dylan Silver (07:27)
Boca, I’ve heard amazing, I haven’t been to Boca. Shame on me, I need to go. Everybody in Fort Lauderdale tells me I need to go to check out Boca as well. That’s another thing. It’s just truly a beautiful, beautiful area. I wanna ask you about real estate and your journey. Did you know, based on you had multi-generations in the real estate space, did you know growing up that you were eventually gonna get into real estate yourself?Ross G. Rylance (07:52)
No, absolutely not. I actually, one day standing with my dad in front of some of his construction trucks, it said Peter R. Rylance construction on the door. And he turned and he looked at me he said, man, I really want that to say Peter R. Rylance and son. And I looked at him said, you’re not thinking that’s me, are you?Dylan Silver (08:16)
sorry.Ross G. Rylance (08:18)
No, sadly, I broke my dad’s heart that day because he was absolutely, he absolutely was thinking that. And I literally didn’t understand. I do now 40, 50 years later, understand what I turned down was an opportunity to get in on the ground floor in the 70s or early 80s into real estate and understand it. And now 30 years later, I’d have aDylan Silver (08:21)
Ugh.Yeah.
Ross G. Rylance (08:45)
database of referrals calling me probably doing a hundred transactions a year just on past clients. ⁓ I just didn’t I didn’t understand. No offense as you see on the wall behind me. I spent 38 years touring with over a hundred bands. That was what excited me. What I didn’t know is how inconsistent the income would be how volatile the work environment would be. I didn’t understand that. didn’t I didn’tappreciate the opportunity that was being given to me as a third generation child in real estate. And I didn’t also understand how fun it was to help people.
Dylan Silver (09:24)
Yeah, you know what, when I think of real estate right now, it’s almost, I mean, you were involved in the music industry. ⁓ The real estate space in a lot of ways is like rock and roll in some sense, because you’ve got the HGTV and you’ve got people doing flips and you’ve got selling Sunset and everyone seems to want to be involved. But I’d say this is a fairly new pivot, this idea that you canyou know, have a semblance of celebrity while also being involved in real estate. I do wanna pivot though, Ross, and ask you about the music industry and your involvement in it. How did you get involved in the music industry?
Ross G. Rylance (10:44)
It was the weirdest situation. Two of my friends responded to an ad in the Denver Post that says, like yes, referring to the English rock band, call this number. They called the number. They spoke with a guy named Andrew Weinrich, who owned a company called Brockham International at the time. And they said, do you want to go out and sell t-shirts for yes?Both my friends were like, absolutely. And about eight months later, they had toured with Yes, Billy Joel, Kansas, a bunch of other bands. They called me and said, this was ⁓ summer of 78. They said, hey, buddy, if you want to, if you can get to Tucson, Arizona in the spring, we’ll put you out with us on Eric Clapton Muddy Waters Tour of North America.
And I was like, are you kidding me? So I had a friend living, I was living in Lake Forest, Illinois at the time, a suburb of Chicago. One of my closest friends was an English child whose dad was vice president of Wrigley Gum, and they’d come over for England. When I told him, he said, oh my God, if you can get me on it, I’ll pay for us to get there. And at that point, I was a college student, didn’t have as much money as the other kids in town.
So I called my friends back and they said, absolutely. Yeah, four of us will be needed for this arena tour. So he paid for us to travel. went we ended up going to Eric Clapton’s wedding to Patty Boyd Harrison at the Tucson Country Club. And then we started a U.S. tour. And the coolest thing about the tour was Eric wouldn’t come into the arena till Muddy Waters had finished playing because he said, I should be opening for Muddy Waters, not the other way around. But
Dylan Silver (12:38)
Wow.Ross G. Rylance (12:39)
Eric had a big hit, a song written by J.J. Cale called Cocaine that made him a household name. You know, it was a big hit. People came to hear that song played. Eric had an incredible band from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Really great guys. it was just amazing to, you know, to be part of that. That morphed into 38 years of touring.Dylan Silver (12:46)
Yeah.What was your tasks on that first tour? What were you tasked with?
Ross G. Rylance (13:11)
⁓ Counting in and out merchandise every night, receiving shipments of merchandise and making cash deposits at various local banks under $9,000 a wire so that none of it could be traced. One day though, as a joke, in a bank, there’s three of us at Teller’s handing $9,000. You see the Teller girl goes, where did you get this money? I said, dude, we just robbed a bank.Dylan Silver (13:26)
Did you ever feel like, wow, we’ve got a lot of responsibility here?Ross G. Rylance (13:42)
And oh my God, we were faced with 15 Oklahoma State squad cars and it was ugly. It was saying you have a bomb in an airport. It’s really not too wise. No, no, it was not at all. in defense, was only 19. Come on, man.Dylan Silver (13:50)
They could have gone the other way.Yeah, not the thing to do. Not the thing to do.
Yeah,
I mean, when you’re young, right? After that first tour, what was the other work like? And was each ⁓ job and each role different? Or was there lot of similarities, whether it was managing marketing and merchandise, or was each opportunity different?
Ross G. Rylance (14:26)
Well, I will say that I was in college at the time when I took the job. I dropped out of college. My parents are like, you get your ass back into school and graduate. I did go back to college. I was studying at Columbia College in Chicago for a fine arts degree in arts and entertainment media management. The director of that program was the biggest promoter in Chicago for 30 years. His name was Fred Fine. I graduated.Fred placed me in an internship in New York City with one of the biggest PR firms in live music, a guy named Howard Bloom. And while working at Howard’s office, Howard had clients like Prince, Hall & Oates, Luther Vandross, Cool and the Gang, David Bowie, Billy Joel. The production manager for Prince kept coming in our office going over the Purple Rain tour.
Dylan Silver (16:04)
my goodness.Ross G. Rylance (16:06)
One day, this guy, Tommy Marzullo, looked at me and said, hey kid, you want to come on the road with me? Because knowing that question may come up one day, I stood up and said, yep, my bag is packed. When do we leave? And he hired me as operations manager for his production company in Madeira Beach, Florida. We were overseeing ⁓ Purple Rain, Luther Vandross, Motley Crue, Amy Grant, Philip Bailey, Striper.a bunch of bands where I was operations manager. And then that just morphed back into more touring. One day, the manager of Ted Nugent, Bob Seeger called said, I need a production assistant out on Ted Nugent. Well, Tommy was on Purple Rain. Everyone in the office was out except the secretary and me. And I said, hey, Doug, I can take that job for you. I’ll cover it for you through Marzullo Tour Services. And I went out.
and then literally never stopped until 2020. But I ⁓ was an operations manager, production manager, stage manager, tour manager, bus driver, security, truck driver, and catering. So I’ve done it all. I’ve done every hat you can wear and show business and still be standing upright.
Dylan Silver (17:08)
Wow.Did you ever?
Did you ever feel like ⁓ there was an element of being in show business that an unpredictability which you almost liked, was it a love hate or was it not that at all?
Ross G. Rylance (17:43)
I know. I hate to use the expression, but it’s like a drug. It addicted me in ways that, come on, man, people would look at me and go, you work for Jackson Brown or you work for Crosby, Stills and Nash or you work for Kiss or whatever. And some days I was only local crew. But I knew the touring crews as well because of proximity. I can go to a cocktail party.And the biggest, baddest lawyer in town can be there, but my stories are just a little better than his. And so I can migrate people from the party if I want to, if I wanted to do that. That’s not who I am. But yes, because of proximity and because of 38 years of doing it, I got a couple of stories.
Dylan Silver (18:19)
Yeah. ⁓Stories.
wanna ask you about ⁓ going full time with real estate and then also getting into real estate. At what point in time, you mentioned you were active in the music industry until about 2020. At what point in time did you get active in real estate?
Ross G. Rylance (18:55)
So, in 2002, my boss of three and a half years, Waylon Jennings, passed. Waylon changed my life, as you can see, for Waylon. I a couple license plates in different states. I also have a huge tattoo on the inside of my arm of Waylon’s logo. Waylon changed my life. And I went out to replace a driver for a weekend. It turned into three and a half years because they wouldn’t let me go.And the respect given to me by Waylon and the entire organization was amazing. Six days after Waylon died, Willie Nelson started a four-night run at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and I was living in San Francisco, ⁓ Alameda, actually. I had convinced Waylon to let me move there and fly me back and forth on Southwest Airlines. We were only going out two or three weekends a month. So I would fly home to drive the truck for the weekend and fly back to Oakland, California.
because Waylon was also protected by the Hells Angels and he introduced me to the Oakland Charter. I was an amateur biker at the time and was pretty wide-eyed to be able to hang out at the clubhouse and ride bikes with the Angels on a Honda 750, mind you. ⁓ And I still have all my teeth. ⁓ They loved me, I loved them. But that night at the Willie Nelson show, there was a girl standing outside who didn’t have a ticket. It was totally sold out. I went in.
Dylan Silver (20:01)
youRoss G. Rylance (20:23)
I was watching Nora Jones, the opening act perform. ⁓ During intermission, a voice literally went off inside my head as I’m speaking to you now and said, hey Ross, you forgot someone, you need to go back outside. I looked at all my friends and said, hey, which one of you just told me to go outside? They’re like, what’s wrong with you, dude? I walk outside and there’s that girl standing there still. She walks up to me immediately, I’m wearing a Crosby-Stills Nash and Young.tour jacket from a tour I’d done and she put her finger on the end and said, do you know Graham Nash’s guitar tech, Alan Rogan, who had spent 30 years with Pete Townsend? I said, yeah, he had done Eric Clapton’s guitars on my first tour. ⁓ We started talking. I took her the next two nights. On the third morning, I got to invite her to Wayland’s memorial at the Ryman. We went to Wayland’s memorial. As we flying back to San Francisco, I looked at her and said, man, we should just
moved to Nashville. We moved, and because at the Ryman, I had run into an old friend, Bob O’Neill, who was production manager at the Ryman, we had done Tina Turner together. ⁓ I asked Bob for a job, and Bob said, absolutely, come back and I’ll give you a job. And so I was like, my God, I can have what every guy on the road wants, which is called a local job, where everyone comes to you.
and you’re working your room and you don’t have to go anywhere and you go home every night and sleep in your own bed. So I spent six years at Ryman Auditorium doing over 800 shows. And by day, I was a Keller Williams realtor, joined the company in 2005 in Franklin, Tennessee. Back when the company was so small, Gary Keller came to our market center. We were only 50,000 agents then nationwide. ⁓ I joined the company.
Dylan Silver (22:10)
Wow.Ross G. Rylance (22:17)
I do want to say my moniker for that is, I came to Keller Williams because of Gary Keller. I stay because of Moe Anderson. Moe is our director of culture, was the CEO of the company. I stay there because I love the culture.Dylan Silver (22:35)
So you’ve been with KellerWilliams for 20 years.
Ross G. Rylance (22:38)
No, I did have to leave the company in 2010. Sadly, my wife had a massive stroke and I had to be her caregiver until 2017 she left us. ⁓ While she was leaving us, she told me some things. She was in Monroe, North Carolina and said, hey, your girlfriend’s waiting for you in Santa Monica. I was on tour with another band later that next year. I was out in LA, I got fired. I asked this person out.Dylan Silver (22:46)
Yeah.Ross G. Rylance (23:08)
We had met at college in Chicago at 23. We started dating at 60, ⁓ which is, you know, great thing. And she’s lived in Santa Monica for 35 years. So we had been together for a year, year and a half, and we both weren’t happy with what we were doing. I mean, I was kind of happy touring, but she wasn’t like my late wife. She said, I need you at home. I don’t want you gone 11 months of the year and called that a relationship.Dylan Silver (23:17)
Yeah. Timing.Ross G. Rylance (23:37)
So I looked at her and said, hey, why don’t we get a job at Keller Williams? So in 2001, September 1st, 2021, I rejoined Keller Williams and she joined the company. We’ve been here four years now. We moved from Santa Monica to Beverly Hills about two years ago with a team. I’m on a team with Andrew Bloom, one of the foremost agents at our company out of 150,000 now. He’s in the top hundred.He came to us a couple years ago and said, hey, I want to start a team and watch on it. I’m like, dude, I haven’t sold much real estate because I don’t care. I want you on the team. I like you. I think we can make work together. And so five of us started a team. We’re now 12 in the Beverly Hills office. We have locations in Beverly Hills and Scottsdale, Arizona. Andrew has sold over 3000 properties and is a
Well, on a couple occasions, I’ve been with him and looked at his phone and guess who was calling? Gary Keller. So I was duly impressed. I was duly impressed like any rock star. Like, no offense, that’s rock star status when a guy who’s got 150,000 employees worth $2 billion is calling my team leader to ask him a real estate question. It’s pretty.
Dylan Silver (24:41)
That’ll do it.That’ll
instill some faith and confidence. ⁓ Ross.
Ross G. Rylance (25:03)
Yes, well,and it’s rock star status. Come on, man. I drop Andrew’s name with anybody in my company. If they’re aware, they know who he is. And they’re like, yeah, they know.
Dylan Silver (25:12)
They know.Ross, are coming up on time here. Where can folks go if they are in the Beverly Hills area and they’d like to reach out to you?
Ross G. Rylance (25:25)
So I am with BVO Luxury Group out of the Keller Williams Beverly Hills Market Center. ⁓ My cell phone number is 424-459-8535. ⁓ We service most of Southern California. We have teammates in San Diego. We’ve got a couple teammates who live a little bit east of Beverly Hills. Most of us arearound the proximity of the office. But yes, we are a team of 12 working diligently to be available and help people. I specialize in first-time homebuyers, members of the entertainment community, and affordable housing.
Dylan Silver (26:13)
Ross, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.Ross G. Rylance (26:17)
Dylan, I really appreciate you inviting me. It’s been a really great opportunity to share and I enjoy your podcasts. They’re really cool. I’ve watched a lot of them along the way. I waited a good seven or eight months to finally hit the maybe I should talk to you. I would counsel anybody watching this today. Don’t wait. Don’t think you’re gonna be better another day. Be who you are today and make opportunity and thank you again for the conversation yesterday.really engaging to speak to a stranger and hear the empathy in your voice about some of my steps and journey in life. And it’s just all we’re looking for, just being pleasant to each other and sharing.
Dylan Silver (26:58)
That’s it.
