Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lisa Angell. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Lisa , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?
I have to admit, I was late to the party on the importance of social media in the ability to find our customers/clients out there. I started my real estate career as a licensed assistant to a top producer in Las Vegas in 1997. As you can imagine it was a much different and more “traditional” market regarding getting and keeping leads. My boss spent large amounts of money on printing postcards & neighborhood reports and then mailing those, as well as advertising in magazines. She was a luxury agent so she even took out ads in the Wall Street Journal. When I started on my own in Seattle I was cash poor so I did the free stuff, sat open houses, knocked on doors of expired listings, nurtured my database as I built it etc. The only thing that seems to be of any relevance now is nurturing your database – and even then you can be sidelined for another agent who has done a good job of bringing some value to people via social media. I have to admit, when I am looking for a service I start where everyone else does, online. I watch YouTube videos and I am grateful for the valuable information I get from people. I don’t know why it didn’t seem clear to me at first, but it does now! I am spending a lot of time these days just trying to think of what people may like to know about and then doing videos/creating content on those topics. I have always thought that you always do well when you’re trying to help people, and now we really just have a new vehicle for that. One of my mentors used to say “see the people, solve their problems, cash your paycheck”. If you spend the majority of your time working on solving problems for people and trying to make their lives better, even if it’s simply alleviating some stress during a home sale, then everything comes around! We actually have an even more efficient way of doing that now!!
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I started as a licensed assistant to a top producer in Las Vegas. I actually met her at a nightclub the same day I had been looking in the phone book for real estate schools in 1997. Quite the coincidence ! She offered to meet me for lunch and talk about it really just to see if I would show up, and I did. She paid for me to get my license and I worked for her for 3 1/2 years. I decided to move and took some time off from real estate and did other things, but a few years later I found I kept going back to that and how I would do it if I were on my own. I learned a lot of wonderful things from her for sure and I have always been grateful! One thing I was a little leery of though were the hours she kept. Even with an assistant she was 24/7 and that always scared me a bit. Of course her business reflected it. It is not an easy thing to do, to keep balance in this business. I understand that people have diverse schedules & sometimes there’s no other way to meet their needs except for working many, many days in a row. But I do try; so whenever I see some downtime ahead I try and capitalize on it! That is one of the reasons that from Seattle, to Yakima WA and then to the Coachella Valley, I have always kept my business on the smaller side. Big enough to make a decent living and have the experiences I need to keep up with the market, but small enough to give personal attention. I’m now on my 25th year of helping buyers and sellers with everything from small homes to luxury estates, homes built in the early 1900s to new construction to land. I’ve seen a lot of markets in the last 25 years and one thing never changes – if you can help people maneuver the obstacle course that is real estate sales and make things a little less stressful & a little more smooth, then they can focus more on the fun part! The adventure of moving to a new home/area, the excitement of buying your first home, the fun of planning your dream home from the ground up! Let’s face it, moving is stressful under the best of circumstances and there are a lot of people and moving parts during the transaction, but there is more fun to be had & my main goal is being proactive & educating people on the process. The more your expectations are set and met, the more you can focus on the good stuff! That’s my job and I love that part!
Have you ever had to pivot?
One of my goals has been to be back in my home state of California and when our youngest graduated from high school my husband and I decided to make the move. That turned out to be May of 2020. If you can imagine, that was quite a pivot! It took a while to get my test date for California but the “hands off” turn that everything had taken kind of helped in that regard. I was able to partner with colleagues in Washington to help open doors and then I’d do a Zoom and go over paperwork. That kept going until February of 2021 when I finally was able to take my test and get started at my new office in La Quinta, CA. But simply being sidelines for those 6 months or so took me by surprise – I started to wonder if I was ever going to catch up – kind of going back to what I was referring to before in social media and tech. I was hearing terms I’d never heard before & it was daunting at first. But starting over also gave me a lot of downtime and now half way into my 4th year here I have learned more than I thought possible! I used the downtime to search out everything I could find and take every class I could take and it has opened up a whole new world to me of social media & content driven marketing among other things. I think things happen for a reason and just about 6 months ago I was offered the opportunity to be a host of a tv show called The American Dream. I don’t know that I would have grasped the power of that opportunity before, but I have now! Not only is it fun to do, but I am able to offer content in a way that is unique and I can showcase homes and small business in our area to a degree I’d never have been able to do on my own without a national Emmy-nominated, Telly Award winning tv show! I’m not done learning by a long shot (we never are) but this was a great cumulation of what I’ve been able to learn so far!
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
When I first started on my own I had nothing – I moved up to the Seattle area the year I turned 30 and was staying with friend. I scraped together money to pay for gas and my phone with some help from my Mom & Dad! Those friends and my parents certainly allowed me the opportunity to give it a go on my own with a commission only sales job. I was also lucky enough to be able to sit at a model home (while still being separate from the builder) and I was there all the time! That allowed me a very inexpensive way to meet people and start my own real estate career from the ground up. I sold more in that first year than I’ve ever been able to reproduce and it’s possible it was out of necessity. But when 2008 came around 5 years later, that was a blow. Everything I had built up since June of 2023 when I started selling real estate on my own crumbled down around me. It never was clear that I had any options as an independent contract to get any assistance or small business loans for a Realtor, so (and maybe it was available, I never really knew) so I went back to very low cost methods of getting sales. Referrals/repeat business from my database, knocking on doors of expired listings, holding open houses, basically trying to find anything that would get the largest ROI possible. Expired listings was a good example. I worked on that lead generation avenue before, but all of a sudden every penny counted! So I went from printing bound booklets & mailing postcards to creating a trifold brochure that narrowed down my booklet into the most important information I wanted them to know about me. I knocked on their doors because I felt it was more personal and more effective than cold calling. When I did that, I would group homes together like I was showing a buyer so there was no crisscrossing around town and that would help save gas. I tried to find ways like that in every aspect of my business and it paid off. I was able to hold on until late 2009 into 2010 and when my business finally started taking off again, and when it did it took off bigger than I’d expected! I wasn’t selling the highest priced homes like my first year, but I sold a lot more and was finally able to get some breathing room. I also learned a lot!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://lisa-angell.kw.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisaangellrealtor
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LisaAngellRealtor/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-angell-realtor/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@lisaangellrealtor
- Other: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/lisa.angell.realtor
Image Credits
Priscilla Zamudio headshot