Rewind
I’ve always enjoyed writing so I figure why not put my thoughts, experiences, ideas, etc., into a blog to share my journey of transforming the real estate industry for the better through educating agents earlier on in their careers. My hope is that this will help inspire others to follow their passions while also learning from my experience.
I also want to mention that I am starting this blog on May 30th 2025, three years after my journey began. But, to have the greatest impact on anyone who reads it, I want to start back at the beginning in 2022 and work my way to the present. I will do my best to recall everything that happened over the last few years. Although I’ll probably miss some things, I’m confident there will be more than enough shared to make a difference. That being said…welcome to my blog, Transforming an Industry.
NOTE: If I spell something wrong or don’t use the correct punctuation, I really don’t care, so please don’t waste your time pointing it out to me.
Before I dive into my journey, I thought it would be best to provide some context for where my passion for helping real estate agents entering the industry originated. It’s kinda important for you to know since that’s literally the whole reason why I am doing what I am doing.
I got my start in real estate in 2009 (you can read more about the start of my career on my About page). At this time, the market was awful since the recession from the banking crisis was in full swing. No one was buying or selling, and they certainly did not want the help from a newbie like me. For two years, I was in full survival mode. One of my favorite things I did to get by at this time was to go to brokers’ opens (open houses held on Tuesdays from 10am - 2pm for high-end listing agents to showcase their properties to buyer’s agents who might have a buyer for them). I did not have any clients yet, let alone a high-end one, but I knew these opens would often give away Starbucks gift cards for the first agents who came through and would provide lunches as well. So every Monday, I would plan out my tour to hit up as many opens as possible to gather all of the gift cards I could, get lunch for that day, and grab food for the rest of my lunches that week. While this helped keep me fed, it also allowed me an opportunity to meet agents, learn about buildings, neighborhoods, and finishes. The other thing I did during this time was use every moment I could to educate myself. I studied everything I could about everything I could. The market, neighborhoods, how pricing worked, how transactions worked, etc. I read everything I could get my hands on and attended every educational class my brokerage offered (especially since they were free). I would also spend time on my personal growth and development as well. My goal was to know more than any other agent in the industry while also becoming a stronger, more rounded person.
While these lean years were challenging, they also helped me tremendously in so many ways. One of which was understanding that to learn faster, I needed to get more transactions under my belt and surround myself with people who were already successful so I could learn from them. This led me to get myself elected to the Chicago Association of Realtors Young Professional Network (YPN) board. This board was made up of successful agents similar in age to me (many of whom went on to own brokerages and become some of the most successful agents in Chicago) who wanted to make a difference in our market and community. While on the board, I joined one of the board members’ team that he was starting. I saw it as a great opportunity for me to learn from someone who was where I wanted to be, while also accelerating my learning curve by having a lot more clients to work with.
After a few years, the team was doing really well, and we were ready to start growing, so the team leader brought on two brand-new agents who had just received their licenses. Recognizing that the team did not have a formal education process, I started mentoring the new agents and helping them as much as I could. This would continue until the day I left in 2016 to start my brokerage, but what started as simply helping a few agents turned into so much more.
I realized that I absolutely loved helping those agents. Being able to share my knowledge to help another human being was so fulfilling for me. So much so that I built my brokerage on the foundation of educating agents (specifically, newer ones), which included building out a six-week mentorship program that was incredibly successful. Before selling my brokerage in 2024, we had 50 agents go through the program, averaging $1M-$2M of production in the first 12 months with the brokerage, which, according to the National Association of Realtors, is 2-4 times more than the national average of $500,000 for first-year agents! I’m enormously proud of what my partner and I did for the almost decade the breakage existed. To see many of the agents we helped thrive in an industry that is very difficult to survive in (87% of agents fail within their first 5 years) shows we made a positive impact on these people’s lives.
While owning my brokerage, my love of helping agents turned into a passion. I knew it was what I wanted to do. It’s what I had built myself for over the last two decades of not only as a real estate agent and brokerage owner, but also studying the most successful people to ever walk this Earth.
I believed then (and still do now) that I can help people not only build a successful real estate business but also a life they want. At that time, I just had no idea how I was going to!