Intero Real Estate Blog

Everyone is faced with challenges in life. How you deal with them determines your success. Blogging is a new way of communicating for me, but I’m happily jumping in with both feet. I see the potential it offers for building community and sharing thoughts and ideas with others, something that is central to my way of thinking about real estate.

I’m the Los Angeles Territory Chief Executive for Intero Real Estate Services and have been in real estate in this region for more than 25 years. I’ve worked with many different brokerages in many capacities prior to joining Intero, including having helped to build Keller Williams, into a market leader by expanding the company’s footprint in four years from 20 agents in one office to well over 1,400 agents in 14 offices.
 
Though it’s still relatively unknown in LA, Intero is one of the fastest growing real estate companies in the country, having gone from zero to more than $4.5 billion in sales in just four years. Our brand is very well known in Northern California, where Intero was founded in 2003 by Gino Blefari in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its meteoric rise from startup to more than 63 offices and 2,200 agents today has made it a favorite in the media there.  Here in LA, it’s a different story. Many realtors don’t yet know who we are, and few realize just how different our culture is.

We are hoping to change that. In this blog, I’ll communicate the story of Intero and what we stand for. I will also be sharing my experience, knowledge and views on what it takes to succeed as a realtor in LA—with a slight twist. Success is more than just professional accomplishment. It’s professional accomplishment paired with something much more personal and sustaining, a realization of your true potential as an individual. I’d like to delve into this idea and what it means. I’ll also invite guest authors (other veterans in the industry) to contribute their thoughts.

I’m calling this blog Success Track after a program of the same name we’ve developed in our office. One of my main focuses here will be discussing the important role that agent education, training and ongoing professional development play in the success of a real estate office. This is an area, unfortunately, that has become neglected in our industry and one that contributes to the failure of many agents and offices. We developed Success Track here in LA to give our people a structured framework around which they can build and grow their business. What we discuss here will be a direct reflection of the kinds of things that were implementing in our offices, and we’re happy to share with your our results.

I also want to take the time now and talk about my perspective on the business of real estate and how it differs from most in the industry. This is important because it directly relates to my deciding to join Intero and bring the company LA.

I come from a family where most everyone is hearing impaired. I inherited the condition from birth, but spent much of my youth hiding it. Though I should have had a hearing aid at the age of 5, I didn’t actually receive one until 19. My mother lived in a time when wearing a hearing aid meant carrying an enormous box with wires on your chest, and she wanted to protect me from the embarrassment and stigma she experienced. So, we kept my hearing impairment hidden, and I spent years trying to be as normal as possible, often overcompensating in other areas such as sports.

Of course, living with a hearing impairment, meant facing some real challenges as I went through my youth and teen years. Often, people would mistake me as standoffish or cold, not knowing that I simply wasn’t hearing everything they said. I was also forced to rely on all my other senses to communicate or even understand what was going on around me. All of this meant that I lived in a very introspective world, where I developed a sense and perspective of the outside that was very different from most. My hearing was a challenge for sure, but it was also a gift, because it helped me to develop at my core a deep-seeded drive to overcome, and its that drive that has pushed me forward and helped me to reach many of my goals.

My passion for what I do in real estate comes from identifying with others who are facing (or trying to face) their weaknesses so that they may grow as individuals. I fought to overcome my own limitations, and so I have a passion to help others breakthrough theirs.

In fact, many of the things that hold us back are self-imposed. Years ago, I had a stint on television. I remember what I thought the first time I saw the cameras on the side of the set, “they’re going to see my hearing aid and kick me off.” I had to break through that in order to move forward, or else it would have paralyzed me. We all have the fears we latch onto about what we can or can not do in life. And yet, those limitations often come from an internal source, not an external one. Everybody has something they must face. Mine was hearing. For someone else, it may be a difficult childhood and yet for another, it may simply be lack of direction.

My whole motivation in bringing Intero to LA is to have this region stand for something. I realize that on some level this is Pollyanna. I’m not going to have an impact on everybody’s life, but what I can do is have an impact on my people—those who come to Intero with a vision for success that is bigger than simply making money. 

We created Success Track to give our agents a program that teaches the daily habits, smart business practices and overall real estate acumen that’s needed to survive in a competitive market like LA. More importantly, we developed it to motivate and help people to understand their own potential (personally and professionally) and work toward fulfilling it. Dreams are very important. They drive us forward. And to be able to dream, we must first understand what it is that we are wishing for.

Success comes in many forms. When we are on track and doing the small things everyday that push us forward, that’s success because we are working towards those larger goals we set for ourselves. Our everyday small victories give us all the motivation we need to get up and go at it again the next day. It’s just as Confucius says, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Success Track isn’t just about the steps we take, though. In this industry, there’s often a gap between the exercise of practicing real estate, and the belief that you will succeed as a realtor. As good leaders, we need to teach more than just the steps. We must also work on your belief system . . . your vision and purpose. This truly gets to the heart of how we are doing things differently, because this is where we start—on your vision and purpose.

Most of us don’t think of real estate as being holistic. But really, it is about people, and whenever you’re dealing with people, you have to look at the whole individual. When we understand the person—and only then—we can empower them to move even closer to their dreams and success, which is ultimately our success as an office.

—Ron

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