In a special crossover episode of the RealTrending and Power House podcasts, HousingWire CEO Clayton Collins sits down with Anthony Lamacchia, the founder, CEO and broker of Lamacchia Companies.
Collins and Lamacchia discuss the latter’s upbringing and career path, from working for a family business to carving his own path into real estate. Lamacchia also discusses the importance of marketing and branding for lead generation, boots-on-the-ground recruiting tactics using billboards, the commission lawsuits and the future of real estate in the coming years.
Lamacchia kicks off the conversation with some background on his upbringing and road toward entrepreneurship. For him, the entrepreneurial spirit sparked in his childhood. Lamacchia grew up working for his father’s landscaping business and sourced most of his business acumen from that experience.
College was never in the cards for Lamacchia, so the CEO launched his real estate career after finishing high school. Lamacchia bought his first house in 2002, started fixing and selling properties soon after, and got his real estate license in 2004.
Lamacchia’s first company, founded alongside a partner, operated as a small-scale homebuilding operation — but the CEO had a different vision. He wanted to expand and switch the company to a brokerage model. In 2016 and 2017, Lamacchia bought out his partner, expanded his business, and focused more attention on branding and marketing.
The CEO recalled principles he learned from his family’s old-school marketing tactics.
“Though [my dad] had a small business, he is just a branding and marketing machine,” Lamacchia said. “He would send postcards and by next Tuesday or Wednesday, he had $50,000 in deposits for jobs that were coming up.”
Lamacchia took this example to heart, drawing on the knowledge to scale Lamacchia Companies over the years. Collins segues into another question about Lamacchia’s staff, and how he balances taking on marketing responsibilities and delegating work to his team. Lamacchia welcomes the notion of delegating as it gives him more time for other tasks.
“I always view growing a business as you have to constantly get yourself out of jobs,” he said.
Lamaccchia spends most of his time recruiting talent from outside the company, creating marketing content and working with the media. Collins follows up with a question on Lamacchia’s relationship with Massachusetts-based Fox News affiliates and what drives him to focus on local markets rather than addressing broader markets like other commentators.
Lamacchia highlights his ability to educate viewers through his relationships with Fox affiliates as a means to attract valuable attention from clients.
“We are very fortunate to be in a business that everyone wants to hear about,” he said. “When you educate, you attract.”
Lamacchia took that mindset to Instagram, where he provided commentary on the commission lawsuits. He leveraged that commentary to scale his company and establish relationships with brokerages across the country. He refers to the scaling efforts as “invading” through a campaign of billboards, postcards, TV ads and other methods to recruit new agents and gather leads.
The conversation ends on an optimistic note with Lamacchia cementing his belief that Realtors and brokers will continue to thrive despite the National Association of Realtors‘ settlement. Lamacchia finishes by comparing the current real estate market to that of the early 1980s, and he expects a big boom in the near future, foreseeing a large expansion that will push annual home sales well above 6 million in the coming years.
