Real Estate Is Simple, Not Easy: How Hard Work & Consistency Create Success

Kyle Malnati (00:00)
But you know what I mean. Like I didn’t want to work a sphere of influence business. I wanted to make a call and if they didn’t like me, I could just rinse and repeat, erase it, and move on to the next one. So you can do that. You can make a fortune in this industry by just working hard and constantly being diligent. And that’s what I love about real estate. You don’t have to be from a from an affluent family. You don’t have to be from a certain area. You don’t have to have a certain degree. It just takes hard work and consistency.

Q Edmonds (02:01)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds, and I am super excited to be here today. I have a fantastic guests.

And I cannot wait for us to just peek through his lens. Listen, this gentleman is a broker, multifamily. listen, he is exited a business, exited two businesses, matter of fact. we have a gentleman that’s full packed, chunk full, a lot of knowledge, and this is his slogan. It’s more than just a slogan, this is what he stands by. When you work with Kyle, he’s gonna go an extra mile. And so I’m so excited to introduce you all to Mr. Kyle Malnati.

Kyle Malnati (02:48)
Yeah. Kyle Malnati, owner and operator of a company called Calibrate Real Estate from 2016 to 2023. That company was Denver Business Journal top 20 commercial real estate brokerages for three years in a row. You know, we did 60 to 100 million dollars of transactions every year. My wife and I owned the company before we were acquired by a Berkshire Hill Berkshire Hathaway affiliate called Kentwood here locally in Colorado and been a real estate broker for twenty-two years and counting. I love working with entrepreneurs. I also have a podcast by the same name, Calibrate Real Estate, on Apple Podcasts. And we’re up to 200 episodes and having a lot of fun there too. Thanks for having me, Q.

Q Edmonds (03:32)
No, absolutely. So you can tell this guy’s professional what he does. Cause I didn’t even get to ask him the question about what it is that you do now. Walk me through it. My man was already on it. And so I absolutely love it. You gave us a little bit of an origin story. I’m not sure if you want kind of expand on it, but I would love to know kind of where the passion for real estate came from.

Kyle Malnati (03:51)
Yeah, I’d be happy to tell you that. Well, it’s a 22-year career, and hopefully I can do this in less than 60 seconds. I was blessed my junior and senior year of college to have an internship at a community bank. And my degree was finance, my minor was banking and financial services, and I did a summer internship to basically follow the dollar through the bank from the deposit line, opening accounts. But also sitting in on loan committee meetings, meeting with the bank president. And if you’ve ever worked with a community bank, it’s all about relationships. And this is in a rural area. I went to the University of Wyoming and I got to meet a lot of really cool entrepreneurs, business owners, salt of the earth folks. And I transitioned that, parlayed that into a career in real estate brokerage. I got hired and started two weeks after graduating, and I worked on the bottom rung of the real estate brokerage, totem pole, if you will, or the ladder. I worked for a real estate team. There was a top-producing team. They did $70 million worth of transactions over a two-year period when I worked with them in 2004 and 2005. Did so well that I became their junior broker and started making prospecting phone calls, did a bunch of deals with my mentors. And at that point they had started their own company and I became one of their top producers. I actually was the top producer at that company in 2009. Fast forward two years later, I was recruited by a client that owned and operated apartment buildings and condo converted them and sold them as condos. He decided he wanted to bring me on to his residential real estate brokerage company to help grow the brand, but also help grow a commercial real estate platform within a residential real estate company. And I was at that company for five years, was a was a was a minor minority shareholder in the company and had two exits, one in 2016, where some of my shares were bought. That became seed money for my wife and I to start our own brokerage company, which was called Calibrate Real Estate. And then I had the remaining exit in 2018 when they were acquired by a title company out of Canada. So I’ve had two exits in my career. The company that I was the private equity shareholder, that’s called Madison. And then my own 100% owned company was purchased by Kentwood Real Estate, which is a luxury brand here in Colorado. And they’ve got a smaller commercial real estate team. So after seven years of kind of that mountaintop experience of owning and operating my own startup, I’m back in the day-to-day brokerage situation. And I love it because I’ve got three kids in high school. I’m so proud of their academic and athletic achievements and driving them around and chasing them around. I just didn’t have the bandwidth to continue operating my own company anymore. And we’ll talk more about that in the show on just some of the successes and some of the learning experiences I’ve had as a brokerage owner.

Q Edmonds (07:33)
Sir, you right on my transition, right? Because I love to ask this question. You know, you’ve been two exits, two pivots. So, Kyle, I often say destiny has no wasted moments, right? We are going through this journey and we are learning from each leg of the journey, from the failures, from the success. So, sir, I would love to know throughout your moments, throughout your transitions, throughout this journey, what has the moments revealed to you about yourself? Have they revealed discipline, humility? Has it increased your tenacity? Like, what is the moments revealed to Kyle about Kyle?

Kyle Malnati (08:10)
You know, that go that extra mile mentality has been ingrained in me since I was in eighth grade. I was running for my class president. I didn’t end up winning. I got second place in a two-person race. But my slogan was vote for Kyle, he goes the extra mile. And that came from this this family trip we took down to Texas. There’s a town in Texas called Kyle, Texas. And there was a picture, my parents pulled over to the side of the road and took a picture of me with this, with this road sign that said Kyle one mile and that became the poster and campaign and became a mantra for me throughout my life. I can think of the times I’ve succeeded. I went the extra mile and I did more than what was promised. The times that I failed throughout high school and college, I got kicked out of college my freshman year, but still graduated in four. And if I think about all of the lessons that I’ve had from just such situations like that, it’s been am I putting in more than was promised? Or am I sort of shirking my responsibility? And as I matured through high school and college and then became a business person, I just said I’m never going to do that in business. I’m always going to put maximum effort in. And I will say that the hardest thing for me is that that mentality of of getting in and working with people both one-on-one, but then also leading teams, I really struggled kind of getting out of the way. I really struggle letting my teammates lead and giving them the opportunity to learn by trial and error. Oftentimes I would I would just get to a situation where they would get in trouble and I’d come in and save the day. And I would say that’s probably the biggest failure of mine in operating a brokerage company is that I not I didn’t do that well with every teammate, was kind of let them feel that heat and know that I was there to—to back them up and support them but not to come in and save the day. Yeah.

Q Edmonds (10:06)
Yeah. So listen, you’ve done this long enough to know what works and what doesn’t work. So I would love to know, let’s say last two years, let’s say, what’s one operational thing you’ve put into place that has really helped you be successful?

Kyle Malnati (10:24)
Well, I will say that in the past two years I’ve been on my own. I haven’t had a real estate brokerage. I haven’t had teammates, I didn’t have a personal assistant for a long period of time. And in a world where especially in brokerage, everybody talks about leveraging people talent, having a big staff, having people kind of support the top of the organization. That was a real weird wilderness period for me. It was it was a lot of searching and learning and deciding to kind of take everything that I had built up and dismantle it, unwind it. I learned a lot about myself. I will say that I’ve got I’ve got several people in my corner that have that have helped me. And it’s not just the normal people you’d think. Of course, my wife and my spouse. We’ve been together since high school. She’s had such an impact on my life, but my spiritual journey, my pastor at my church, but also my licensed mental health therapist, and just involving myself in this kind of journey of figuring out, okay, I built this was like the pinnacle of what I wanted to do is be a company owner and brokerage owner. And I got to a point, I got to this mountaintop experience and then said, this isn’t what I thought it was. It also didn’t it didn’t highlight the best parts of myself all the time. Don’t get me wrong, we won a lot of awards. I sold a lot of deals. I mentioned to you in our prep that one of my mountaintop client experiences, and they’re all fun experiences, but I helped one client between 2021 and 2022, and he timed it perfectly, sell his entire family portfolio, which was 36 properties individually. It wasn’t one fell swoop portfolio sale. We decided to put each one on the market. And these were single-family homes, pieces of land, duplexes, all the way up to an 11-unit. We sold 36 deals over the course of 18 months. And what I was really proud of is this was toward the tail end of my real estate brokerage. I handpicked brokers from throughout my company to partner with me on every single one of those deals. It was a completely collaborative effort. And it was really a beautiful essence of being able to usher his family legacy, which started in the 60s, as loan sharks, doing kind of hard money loans for people and buying properties at HUD sales. So I said this at the intro. I love working with entrepreneurs. I am an entrepreneur and working with people, whether they’re real estate investors or owning a business and they own the real estate with it is my favorite thing in real estate.

Q Edmonds (13:37)
I love it, man. Thank you for that reflective answer. Let me ask you this: what’s next for you, sir? What are you looking to solve at scale next? What’s next, real goal?

Kyle Malnati (13:46)
Well, I believe in masterminds. I’m actually in two. I’m in a commercial real estate mastermind and a residential real estate mastermind. I’m a resimercial broker. That’s a rare breed where I bridge the gap between residential and commercial. And I like to say it’s a little bit of a joke, but I like to say I’m bilingual. I can speak both residential and commercial. And multifamily really does that. You have to kind of know both. It’s income property, but people live there and you’ve gotta deal with a lot of federal laws related to housing. And so it’s, it’s kind of this funny mixture of commercial and residential. My group, this mastermind group is working on a collaborative book together that’ll come out in this next year. And it’s been such a fun opportunity. I’m one of the investors in the book, but I’m also one of the contributors. And there’s gonna be twenty-five interviews. All these people are real successful real estate broker owners and thought leaders within the Colorado real estate community. And it’s just fun for me. I’ve had a podcast for a long time and interviewed many people, but it’s it’s interesting to be on the other side of it where you’re being interviewed and sharing your story. It’s a different way of looking at the real estate experience. I think it’s easier to interview people. I like your position, Q.

Q Edmonds (14:57)
I couldn’t agree more. When I’m on the inverse or reverse, I’m like, yeah. I do like this more. I agree with you. So man. Pastor relationship, therapist relationship, mastermind group. I’m going to love asking you this question. Talk to me about building healthy relationships within business. How important has it been to you? You’ve already named some people, is it more other people that’s helped you be successful within business? Of course, you got your lovely wife. So just talk to me a little bit about the philosophy of building healthy relationships within business.

Kyle Malnati (15:29)
Yeah, one of my favorite questions that I would ask at the end of my podcast when interviewing people is it’s this concept and it comes from a song that I really like called *Dear Younger Me*. And the idea is if you’re 22, now that you’ve lived some life and you go back and have a moment with your twenty-two-year-old self, what’s the advice you wish you knew when you were twenty-two? And if you had that opportunity to meet yourself at that point. I got married the following year. I’m a little bit more of a throwback. I’m in my early 40s, but I’ve been married for over 20 years, and real estate brokerage is the only career that I’ve known. I’ve never done anything else. And so for me, mentors have been really important. And the reason I’ve had two different shows, I had before I owned my own company, I just interviewed my clients on YouTube, and this is over a decade ago, and I don’t think that was really happening all that often. And so I interviewed my clients over 30 episodes and then now I’ve really done all these thought leadership interviews. And the reason I did that was to candidly, selfishly make myself better. It was an opportunity to take that coffee conversation that a lot of us hear about. You need to network, you need to learn about how entrepreneurs are successful. Or if you want to reach success in a certain area, you need to model people that are already doing it. Well, I would do the lunches and I would do the the coffee appointments and I would always come away like just fired up. And I’d be like, that’s a shame that that was a conversation between just two people. And no one else got to hear the conversation. No one else got to learn from it. And so just having an abundant mindset, but also having this innate curiosity, I wanted to interview the top thought leaders in my local area, but then it became it became national where I was communicating with people all over the world that owned and operated real estate or operated real estate brokerages. And every single time I was interviewing something, someone, I knew I was helping someone else out there, but I also knew that I was making myself better. My presentation skills were better, my awareness of what I could access was better. I became a better real estate broker and presenter from all of these podcasts that I did. So for me, if you’re young or if you’re just getting into this industry, finding people that are that have an abundance mindset and are willing to give you the keys to the kingdom. And make sure that you do the work, of course, but that are people that will invest in you from a mental standpoint and share with you best practices. That has been the game changer for me over twenty years is I’ve always asked questions, I’ve always tried to get better, I’ve been humble enough to come to people and say, How do I do this better? And that’s really served me throughout my career.

Q Edmonds (18:12)
Kyle, man, thank you again for your answers, man. What’s one more thing you feel like people need to know about you? Maybe need to know about your business, about Kentwood, Calibrate, like what’s one more thing you feel like people may need to know about you and what you do?

Kyle Malnati (18:26)
Well, I will say this business, whether you’re in brokerage or investing, it’s a really simple business, but it’s not an easy business. And I think if people come with that mentality that you don’t need a college degree, I happen to get my degree in finance, but you don’t need that. All you need is the ability to make contacts and relationships. They don’t have to be people that you know either. I specifically started cold calling multifamily owners because as a twenty-two-year-old, I didn’t know anybody that was buying real estate and I didn’t want to get rejected by my friend’s aunt or what my dad wouldn’t reject me. But you know what I mean. Like I didn’t want to work a sphere of influence business. I wanted to make a call and if they didn’t like me, I could just rinse and repeat, erase it, and move on to the next one. So you can do that. You can make up you can make a fortune in this industry by just working hard and constantly being diligent. And that’s what I love about real estate. You don’t have to be from a from an affluent family. You don’t have to be from a certain area. You don’t have to have a certain degree. It just takes hard work and consistency. And having mentors around you, I again, that’s something we talked about at length is quite important.

Q Edmonds (19:38)
Kyle man, again, sir. Really appreciate you, sir. If someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you, sir?

Kyle Malnati (19:50)
Q, it’s a pleasure. Thank you for interviewing me. There’s a couple ways people can connect with me. I love Instagram. Kyle Malnati is my handle. And that last name, M-A-L-N-A-T-I. If you want to check out our podcast, we are on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. It’s very simply *Calibrate Real Estate*. And you can go to our website, which is calibratere.com. And I just would love to have a conversation. There’s a form if you want to fill it out and we can set up a call on the Calibrate website. So those are a couple of ways people can reach out to me, Instagram and my website.

Q Edmonds (20:29)
Absolutely. Well, sir, let me say three things to you sincerely. One, thank you for your time. I feel that time is our most precious commodity. And so I appreciate it. I appreciate you coming on, taking some time and out carving out some time for us. Secondly, sir, thank you for your gift of authenticity, your gift of what I would even say vulnerability. Like I believe that. Our stories, when we talk about ourselves, talk about our businesses, our backgrounds, plant seeds. And I believe those seeds can take root at any given time. They can grow at any given time. So thank you for coming and sprinkling some seeds, man. And lastly, sir, thank you for your mindset. Thank you for the way you think and bringing that mindset to this platform. I greatly appreciate you coming on today.

Kyle Malnati (21:11)
Q man, this was a pleasure. I really feel like the medium that we’re in as interviewers and interviewees and real estate’s the space that we’re in, but this podcast medium has done so many things for me. And I just I look at it like it’s a pleasure to be here. I realize it’s a time investment, but I’ve gotten here. I’m I’m on I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. I’ve been here through so many other people and it would be a shame to not share wisdom and knowledge and see what someone gets out of it.

Q Edmonds (21:40)
Yes, sir. Well, you’re gonna love this because I often say this: Jesus taught in parables, man. And so Jesus, the way that we can just storytelling is an ancient just law within storytelling. And so I believe, like you said, this tool is something that we can use to just further impregnate people with encouragement, tenacity, strength, right? And so again, man, thank you for coming on. I greatly appreciate you. Everyone, y’all heard Mr. Kyle. His information is in the show notes. So please get in contact with him. But definitely make sure you’re subscribed here because I promise you we’re going to continue to bring up amazing people, just like Mr. Kyle. So, sir, thank you again. And everyone else, y’all have a fantastic day.