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Show Summary
In this episode of the Investor Fuel podcast, host Michelle Kesil interviews Steven Koleno, a successful real estate agent with a unique background in engineering and investment. Steven shares his journey from being an engineer to becoming a top agent, discussing the challenges and successes he faced along the way. He emphasizes the importance of innovation in the real estate industry, particularly through his Blue Ocean Strategy, which focuses on creating a unique market space. Steven also highlights his work with investors and his efforts to expand his business model across multiple states, aiming to cater to consumer needs in a rapidly changing market.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Steven Koleno (00:00)
reach your friends and family, go do door knocking, go do cool. And you’re like, how in the hell am I going to, I quit my job to be a top agent, not to make it as an agent. I thought I had the ability to do it. And you’re like, I don’t know enough people. Like none of this is gonna work to make this really a thriving business because you don’t, it’s too old school. So I think the ability to,⁓ adapts to strategies like we are a i don’t know if you know what blue ocean is but blue ocean strategy is a huge part of what we did it’s probably a twenty six twenty eight year old book and it’s basically teaches you how to stay basically stay away from the competition create your own market your own marketplace where there’s just plenty of consumers plenty of business and everyone else is fighting over the the status quo and the red ocean is for like a bloody red ocean
And that’s, that book’s a big part of what we did. We created a Blue Ocean Strategy. I’m very strategic, very visionary. Kind of tried to predict where the market was going five years ahead and built a business model back in 2000. Started forming in 2018, but 2019 with the actual frameworks that I still work on today. And that’s probably one of the biggest ways we separated was we created what we call a Blue Ocean Strategy.
into a lot more strategy through the years like are you do you know Alex Hormozi and Alex Hormozi fan something like that to me is a modern-day blue ocean there’s a lot of people Seth Godin I mean there’s different people that do it but it’s just trying to separate yourself
You’re trying to separate yourself from the competition. So when Alex Hormozi that says, you know, $100 million offers, make an offer so good that your consumer would feel, I can’t remember all the words, but it would basically be hard to say no.
Michelle Kesil (03:17)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Investor Fuel podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil. And today I’m joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting with, Steven Koleno, who’s been making serious moves in the real estate space, working with lot of investors. So excited to have you on the show today, Steven. I the listeners are really going to take something away from how you’re approachingcreating a different type of agency and yeah, really helping investors in the market. So let’s dive in.
Steven Koleno (03:53)
Sounds great. Glad to be here. Thanks.Michelle Kesil (03:54)
Awesome. So first off, for people who are not familiar with you and your world, can you give the short version of what your main focus is?Steven Koleno (04:04)
Sure, absolutely. Yeah. And it’s hard for me to talk short anytime, but I’ll try to squeeze it in here. So yeah, I originally started out as an engineer. So that’s important to kind of know because I didn’t gravitate towards the normal traditional real estate focus, right? Of a traditional agent. So started ⁓ as an investor actually back in 2006.Michelle Kesil (04:08)
Medium version.Steven Koleno (04:26)
and I was an engineer for 12 years, but then me and a high school buddy started buying investment properties. By the fourth property, I became a licensed agent in 2007. We bought 23 new construction homes. Well, 18 of them were new construction, but bought 23 homes. By house 27, quit my full-time job to manage this rental portfolio. And then from everything from 27 to about 70, we bought flipped. At one time I had a building in our hometown.We had…
company trucks, we had three crews and we were like rehabbing more for long-term rentals. Obviously at that time 2007, 2008 wasn’t the best time to own one home. We owned 65 homes. It took a while. Banks started failing on us. We kind of had perfect credit at that time. We had a system where we were buying and holding property but the banks were starting to call our notes due in the different commercial type loans we had. But during that time we got into
raising capital, what, you we did a private placement, we did self-directed IRAs, we did hard money, soft money, pretty much everything back then to keep acquiring properties. But then when that all kind of spun out of the downturn in 2008, nine to 12, we lasted to about 2012 and I could have gone back and been an engineer back to the healthcare industry or something like that because I had that experience, but.
real estate kind of changed my life, right? It changed it good and bad. It definitely changed it towards the good and then we went through some tough times. But I ended up going back into the, at that time, this is about 2012, those big institutional companies were starting to buy the foreclosures, buy the distressed properties. And that was kind of the forming of this single family REIT. So through there, make it quick, I worked for three different companies. I worked for a company called Haven Homes, which was part of
Apollo Global Management moved over to American Homes for Rent, which at that time owned 27,000 single-family homes. We helped them get to 37,000. I became vice president there, managed a team of 49 people in three states, about 4,900 homes. And that was awesome experience. And then went over to a division of Blackstone. And that was my last corporate job. I quit there in 2017.
to be a full-time agent because people were telling me, what are you doing in the corporate world? You should be out and kind of running a team and all that stuff. But that’s a quick nutshell and you can ask me questions kind of from there.
Michelle Kesil (07:38)
amazing. I love that story. So yeah, how did that transition go into becoming an agent and how did you scale and get to where you are now?Steven Koleno (07:47)
Yeah, that’s all a great question. So when I was in the corporate world, I’m kind of, even though I didn’t know it, right, I was more of an entrepreneur mindset. So I had that experience from owning my own company for seven years and having some great success and then some challenges that everyone had.But when I got, when we were in the corporate, I just, I worked like it’s my own business and it’s not my own business and other people will take it. They just want to.
Sign in, sign out, it’s their job, they go home and I’m very passionate about real estate so that comes off when I was in the corporate world too. But finally had an opportunity in 2017 because I really like the healthcare benefits to be honest with you. I’m remarried, have a new one, a new baby on the way who’s now 12.
It was, you just couldn’t quit my corporate job. You’re kind of stuck there. But I had an opportunity to open a new brokerage for a company called Worth Clark Realty in Illinois. And we went ahead and took that, helped bring the first 18 agents over to a company that never existed kind of in the state. And then that gave me an opportunity to kind of still have benefits.
and allow me to kind of make that transition slow enough where I was able to do whatever kind of sales I wanted to do but still have somewhat of a corporate feel to it. Within about six months, he let me go as a managing broker because I was getting too good at sales and he wanted somebody to focus on that. that was kind of the turning moment because I had to decide like, am I going back to the corporate world or am I going to make this work? And so it kind of forced me to make it work. Our first six months
When I was there, I sold 16 houses my first year. was like a half of a year.
So we were pretty good at that.
Was in the flow of that. We landed a big institutional client the next year, which was my first full year. And then this is where the numbers get goofy if you’re a real estate agent, but we closed like 119 deals my first full year. 87 of them came from one client, a big Wall Street company that I happened to land and then service them. The next year, that same client happened to ⁓ start selling homes and I became like their top producing agent. Cause I was really good at systems from being an engineer and just everything.
So we sold like 290 some homes back in 2019 and that put me on the radar. was at Remax in real trends, which is kind of the way they rank agents, real trends in the Wall Street Journal and stuff. I became the number 10 agent in the country and the number one Remax agent in real trends and nobody knew who I was and it popped out of, know, but back in the corporate world, you know, I managed a team of ⁓ eight, we had six assistants, eight agents in two states and we
We rented over 1200 homes in 2016. So it was that process of me being kind of an engineer mindset and then seeing these big companies with like Salesforce and all this stuff working where I was able to see the inner workings of how you handle the volume. And I carried that over until to what I do today is a salesperson now.
Michelle Kesil (11:21)
Amazing. So what has been the key to like keeping your business running smoothly?Steven Koleno (11:27)
I don’t know if it’s always smooth because I’m, I’m constantly fixing it, but yeah, I think the ability to not fall into the status quo, right? Like when I started, everybody just, you know,Michelle Kesil (11:30)
sure.Steven Koleno (11:38)
reach your friends and family, go do door knocking, go do cool. And you’re like, how in the hell am I going to, I quit my job to be a top agent, not to make it as an agent. I thought I had the ability to do it. And you’re like, I don’t know enough people. Like none of this is gonna work to make this really a thriving business because you don’t, it’s too old school. So I think the ability to,⁓ adapts to strategies like we are a i don’t know if you know what blue ocean is but blue ocean strategy is a huge part of what we did it’s probably a twenty six twenty eight year old book and it’s basically teaches you how to stay basically stay away from the competition create your own market your own marketplace where there’s just plenty of consumers plenty of business and everyone else is fighting over the the status quo and the red ocean is for like a bloody red ocean
And that’s, that book’s a big part of what we did. We created a Blue Ocean Strategy. I’m very strategic, very visionary. Kind of tried to predict where the market was going five years ahead and built a business model back in 2000. Started forming in 2018, but 2019 with the actual frameworks that I still work on today. And that’s probably one of the biggest ways we separated was we created what we call a Blue Ocean Strategy.
into a lot more strategy through the years like are you do you know Alex Hormozi and Alex Hormozi fan something like that to me is a modern-day blue ocean there’s a lot of people Seth Godin I mean there’s different people that do it but it’s just trying to separate yourself
You’re trying to separate yourself from the competition. So when Alex Formosi that says, you know, $100 million offers, make an offer so good that your consumer would feel, I can’t remember all the words, but it would basically be hard to say no.
That’s pretty much it. We wake up every day and we try to improve our offer to the consumer. We try to listen to what the consumer, people say it, but we actually do it, study it, go on Reddit, go like we’re constantly trying to adapt to what the consumer wants. And that’s the biggest difference. The regular agent does not. The regular agent does exactly what they’re told to do. They cannot think out of the box. They do exactly what their kind of old school system is telling them. And obviously the way I talk, can tell sometimes agents don’t like the way I talk.
but consumers do.
Michelle Kesil (13:57)
Yeah, soI know that you work particularly with investors. Can you share a little bit more about what that looks like?
Steven Koleno (14:06)
Sure. Yeah, yeah. And we do some big numbers with investors. I, back in 2019, we created that Blue Ocean. I was only in two states, Illinois and Minnesota, and we became a top agent here in Illinois.⁓ Right before the pandemic, like two months before the pandemic really hit in, I signed a 12-state agreement. I was trying to figure out how to, and I was working with investors in both states. And so I was trying to figure out, because I’m virtual, so I was closing deals and doing transactions in Minnesota.
And I’m like, well, if I can do it there, I can do it in any state. So we started, and I was trying to grow outside of Illinois because Illinois at that time, well, even now, it’s a very tough market for institutional clients. There’s a lot of politics, extra fees, all kinds of stuff that goes on in Illinois. It makes it really tough. But you get into states like Atlanta or Georgia, Texas, Florida, there’s an immense amount of investors. So we ended up signing a 12 state agreement with
like a discount disruptive platform. It’s called Bakeham Brokerage and we did that on purpose. I went to them and said, hey, I think I’m the guy to help expand. Do you want to expand outside of Florida?
And we kind of helped them expand. But what it did at the same time is it allowed me to expand to all those states without any fees. I actually get paid by them a little bit to obviously expand. And it was a way I kind of got very strategic flywheel.
going where I just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and because of that business and what I have a background in the institutional so we work with when they are when they sell and they decide to sell we do really well but it’s it’s
You know, it’s all seasonal, right? If the investors are selling because inflation’s gonna go high, then we tend to do well. If things are great, then they don’t sell and we’ve gotta fight for business too. But I would say that’s the biggest, because of the, like here’s an example. I work for six different brokers in 13 states.
I’m a managing broker for four different firms in Georgia, some real estate agents will say that’s not even allowed. It’s completely allowed. They just don’t know it, right? I work for multiple builders as their managing broker to help them scale. And then we work for a variety of companies. But one of them that we work with a lot of regular investors, especially wholesalers, is the flat B platform I work for. And I don’t own it, I’m just an agent. But we do thousands of listings per year for wholesalers and investors.
Some states it’s not allowed, like South Carolina, you cannot wholesale a property and put it on the MLS. Most markets you can. Traditional agents don’t know it, they don’t like it, some will claim it’s illegal. It’s not, there’s steps, there’s processes we have to do, but as long as we do those, we work with a lot of investors. So last year we sold…
2600 different properties, right? And you’re in real estate where the average agent might sell four, six, vary. Sorry, numbers vary. Numbers vary. Sorry about that. ⁓ Numbers vary, but we sell about 2600 homes last year and majority of those, I don’t know the exact number, majority of those are investors. Because we will…
Michelle Kesil (17:49)
Okay.Steven Koleno (18:01)
we will look like an Amazon to them. Like they’ll use us once the product gets delivered to the front door, it works and they’re like, this works. Then we get a lot of regular homeowners who might try to sell for sale by owner, which that platform caters to. And they’ll give it a shot. works for, it doesn’t work for four days. They don’t get a call. They think it’s.and they go hire an agent. And we know the difference, right? Like we’re not trying to say, we’re just trying to give people options. So my model has changed through the years because now I’m 100 % focused on the consumer.
more than just about any agent on planet earth and when i mean that you can go to my linkedin you’ll see i’m calling out the industry i’m very vocal because my mind is i i mean i have been programmed that way now my mind is there i’ve built models around it and i’ve been coached by some really good coaches and one of the coaches from many years ago taught me that you you can’t build the business model around you about your plan it needs to be about the consumer that’s
where you can really get scale.
Michelle Kesil (18:59)
Yeah, amazing. I love that. So what are you most focused on solving or scaling next?Steven Koleno (19:06)
Well, that’s a great question. We are focused on kind of completing the last portion of the business model I did in 2019.It’s hard to do it on a podcast, but I have frameworks for this. But if you think of a Venn diagram, like just a circle with three different segments of it, we operate with the consumer in the middle and we offer all the options. We want to offer flat fee cash offers, things that are disruptive to realtors, even though I’m a realtor. Consumers, they want what they want.
Then we have what we call like a full service but like virtual full service. So example, we’ve closed over 10,000 houses in the last five years. I’ve only been to one of them.
I used to say none, but I just sold my neighbor’s house. So she came across the street and asked me if I would. My neighbor didn’t even know I was an agent and we’ve been one of the top agents. We don’t market to individual consumers. We’re more B2B. We work with brokerages. We work with builders. And then we get some of that volume, obviously under our name and stuff like that. But that’s kind of what we’re doing now is because I become basically a virtual agent, I don’t leave the house.
The third part of that diagram is what I call signature service, but it’s really what a traditional agent’s supposed to do. But you need to do it really well. The compasses of the world, right? The Sotheby’s, the top end. People who have more money and they value their time more don’t mind paying real estate commissions. It’s the ones that…
have more time or not the money and they see the big commissions being too much and real estate is ripping you off and it’s just a different, I see them different, I know they’re different people and trying to convince somebody of the other it’s like politics, there’s just a clash. So we see, we know everyone has different needs based on where they are at life. The one thing we don’t do now is because I’m in too many states, right, 13 states, 55 MLSs, over 80 metro markets and we have listings in them is we don’t cater to that person.
So
we’re trying to now partner with agents, more traditional agents, but ones that are open to
modern approach. We can’t partner with agents who are kind of stuck in that old school. They got to at least know we exist. They don’t have to like what we’re doing, but they have to know it’s an option. So we’re starting to do that. We’re starting to close that gap and feel like once we do that, we have something called open access, is we’re trying to on agent open access, we’re trying to create the term. And that’s just a generic term to try to get the industry to change to be more of as a trusted advisor instead of this
use car salesmen because many in our industry still see real estate agents as making too much money too much and most agents are starving most agents where it’s a tough business right now so it’s not quite that but I see why because they’re constantly being pushed the same thing and you can say commissions are negotiable but then if nobody negotiates the commission it leads to lawsuits and different things that we’ve gone through as an industry in the last year
We’re just trying to put the cut consumer in the middle and let them choose options. And it’s been working, but.
Michelle Kesil (22:04)
Yeah, amazing. It sounds like you guys really created a niche in the type of business model that you’ve created.Steven Koleno (22:11)
Yep, yeah, for now it’s a niche, we’re trying to make it more mainstream, but it’s an uphill battle, we know that, but we’re trying to do our part,Michelle Kesil (22:20)
Yeah, amazing.All right, so before we wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect, collaborate, learn more from you, what’s the best place they can find you?
Steven Koleno (22:31)
Yeah, let’s do this. LinkedIn as I’m huge on LinkedIn, a lot of followers on LinkedIn, but I’m not a social media guy. So I’m on Facebook, but I don’t post anything. Instagram, I’ve never posted one thing. I should, but I don’t. I have followers, but I don’t have never posted anything. So LinkedIn would be the best if you’re on LinkedIn. If not, you can definitely ⁓ find us at The Koleno Group would probably be the best. The, like my last name, K-O-L-E-N-O group.com would be the best way to reach us. And you can Googleless and will appear everywhere. We’re in a lot of states, a lot of markets helping a variety of clients, but pretty much focused on listings right now. We’re catering to large scale and you could be a regular homeowner, but we’re more scaled to the volume. So like we’ve taken 71 listings in a day is our record.
kind of nuts, so it took over 8,000 listings last year, because it’s a different model. It’s Netflix compared to type blockbuster.
Michelle Kesil (23:26)
Perfect. Well, listen, I appreciate your time, your story, and your perspective. We need more people in this space doing things in this right way. So thank you for being here. Yes. And for those of you tuning in, if you got value from this, make sure you’ve subscribed. We have more conversations coming with operators just like Steven, who are building real businesses. And we’ll see you all on our next episode.Steven Koleno (23:35)
Thank you, appreciate it.
