A Three Properties Five Years Seminar Post
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Today’s post is inspired by The Millionaire Real Estate Agent Podcast—Episode Four: From Social Work to Real Estate Royalty With Kymber Lovett-Menkiti. If you’d prefer to listen to the full episode, and skip the read, I’d encourage that. The story I’m about to share includes some emotional moments too, so be prepared.
Kymber is the president of Keller Williams Capital Properties, overseeing eight offices in the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia region. She also directs the Keller Williams Maryland/D.C. Region, managing over 4,500 agents. Kymber was the 2020 president of the D.C. Association of REALTORS® and serves on the District of Columbia Arts Commission. She chairs the Capital Properties Menkiti Group Foundation and is on the boards of Crittenton Services and Step Afrika.
Previously, Kymber led sales at The Menkiti Group, helping over 1,000 first-time home buyers and brokering over $1 billion in sales. She has been recognized by the Washington Business Journal as a 40 Under 40 Honoree and by RISMedia as a Real Estate Newsmaker from 2021 to 2023. She was also named the 2021 District of Columbia REALTOR® of the Year.
Kymber currently serves as the 2023 Broker Relations Liaison for the National Association of REALTORS®. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and four sons.
I have never personally met Kymber, but her story definitely resonates. I too, for example, serve on the Dover Arts Commission board (DAC), and our latest project was knitting sweaters for trees. Which seems silly but the number of people who gathered together to knit together, it was really an act of community building more than trying to keep the trees warm.
I’m not much of knitter though. The DAC initiative I was most recently the heaviest involved with was the Dover Reads: One Book One Community where we featured local author Linnea Hartsuyker and her book The Half Drowned King, crammed together in The Spinning Yarn shop to learn how to turn wool into thread, had a book discussion, an author talk, and a learn to row event in conjunction with Great Bay Rowing. They even put me out on the water.
I love getting people together and connecting them to each other and building community. And full disclosure, as a Realtor, I still rent. In early June though, I placed an offer on my house for zero down with a zero interest rate (if you can believe that!). Though my landlord didn’t say yes, he did say, “Not at this time. When it is time, we’ll let you know.” When our lease is up for renewal again, I’ll rewrite it so we’ll have the right of first refusal.
All of us presenting at the First Three Properties in Five Years seminar are in one way or another still in process. Our purpose is to lift as we ourselves climb, to pull people through that door with us.
Kymber did not start out at the top of her game. Kymber’s journey in real estate began in 2007 when her husband Bo took a sabbatical from his nonprofit position to earn his real estate license and sold a couple houses.
We know what began in 2007. New home sales plunged by the largest amount on record while home prices across the board tumbled in December of that year. Sales dropped by 26.4 percent, a new record in decline. The 2007 drop pushed the nation into a full-blown recession. We all remember, and this was Kymber’s start: the worse possible time to get into real estate.
Today, 2024, there are significant differences between now and 2007/2008. For one, the banks require more stringent requirements for a mortgage. We have supply chain issues making new construction way more expensive than it should be. A housing shortage across the nation, keeping prices high.
But, we are beginning to see some of the 2007/2008 tactics returning. Zero down mortgages for example and interest-only loans, ARMs. And subprime mortgages are being rebranded as non-prime or non-qualified mortgage all aimed at borrowers who do not meet traditional credit standards.
Kymber bought her first house with her best friend, Tiffany. Well, we’ll call her Tiffany. Though Kymber shared this story in the MREA podcast, she did not name her friend for privacy reasons.
It was just a little roadhouse just outside of Washington, D.C., nothing special, and cost $180,000. I imagine chipped paint, weather-beaten among oaks. The inside smelled of wood and lavender. Peeling wallpaper and drafty windows.
In the podcast, Kymber laughs and says, “What the hell were we doing?” Signing all the documents, putting all that money down, “It took our breath away,” she said.
Working full time, Kymber began studying for the real estate exam. She attended classes in the evening from 7pm to 11pm, and spent all day long in the classroom on Saturdays getting her required courses in. After she earned her license, she maintained her full-time job, and began searching for a brokerage.
Many of us Realtors come to the career as a side-hustle—making the most of our time. Returning client phone calls on our lunch break, slipping out for a cigarette break only really to do the paperwork to list a house. In the business, we call this “dual-career” and often deride folks who are dual-career. Oh, how can you be serious if you’re not full-time? Kymber and her husband Bonwalked into the local DC Long & Foster office and asked for jobs. Long & Foster at the time had dominant market share in the DC metro area, and they flatly told Kymber “We don’t take dual-career.”
At twenty-six and twenty-eight, Bo had only two years of real estate experience. Kymber only just newly licensed. Instead of being defeated by Long & Foster’s response, they opened the first Keller Williams franchise in the DC metro.
KW took a crazy risk with Kymber and her husband, but real estate doesn’t really work like a normal job.
First, it’s pay to play. You pay your brokerage, you pay your board, you pay NAR, you pay the state. My wife and her job at UNH, the only thing she pays for is parking. Additionally, you don’t get interviewed by a brokerage for a position. You do the interviewing. Brokerages are always looking for warm bodies. The more real estate agents a brokerage has, the more money the brokerage makes. Agents run around like little Dunkin’ Donut’s franchises, independently owned and operated. When you look at my business card, it says independently owned and operated right at the bottom of the card, right below the Keller Williams Coastal and Lakes & Mountains logo. And a lot of people think, oh KWCLM is independently owned and operated. Indeed KWCLM is independently owned and operated. But me, the Steve Bargdill office, is also independently owned and operated. When you hire me as your real estate agent, you’re don’t actually hire me. Instead, you hire KWCLM. Then, KWCLM contracts me to represent them. Except for those who own their own brokerages, all real estate agents work with their brokerage, not for their brokerage.
I knew this going into real estate from the beginning. I don’t remember how many brokerages I interviewed, but there was a lot. It was an entire process. And I had a similar experience to Kymber and her husband’s Long & Foster experience. One of the brokerages I called, and I won’t name names here but, they literally said, “We are not the brokerage you start at, we are the brokerage you end up at.” Since then, they’ve reached out a couple of times seeing if I’d be interested in jumping ship. Today, because Kymber now holds the dominant market share in the DC metro area, Long & Foster often makes fun of themselves for not having “hired” Kymber.
Two years later, Kymber and Tiffany sold their little roadhouse, making more money on that single sale than they both had earned together in an entire year. The sale allowed Tiffany to return to grad school, and both reinvested a heavy portion of the sale’s proceeds into Kymber and Bo’s new Keller Williams brokerage.
Then. Fall leaves crunching underfoot, Tiffany walking briskly to school, her bookbag slung over her shoulder, the sunlight filtering through the trees, casting dappled shadows across her path. She felt a sudden wave of dizziness. Her vision blurred. She stumbled. Fell. And passed out. Later that night, she died. A blood clot from the deep veins of her leg had traveled up through the bloodstream to block a lung artery. She was only thirty years old.
Today, even in death, Tiffany has managed to take care of her mother who still receives dividends from that initial investment into Kymber’s business, all from the sale of that tiny real estate deal.
I’ve pushed past fifty already and death is often on my mind these days. Not in a bad scary way but in the sense of who I am, and what I want to accomplish in the time I have left. And I think about my kids’ future, and what kind of legacy I can leave them and their kids and their kids after that.
Kymber’s story is a testament to resilience and determination. The mother of four children herself, transforming careers and lives and entire communities—even in as far-flung places from DC as Massachusetts. Being named a 40 Under 40 Honoree, achieving over $1 billion in sales, receiving numerous industry accolades. At over fifty, I often feel I’m just getting started, finally deciding to be an active participant in my wealth journey. And it’s okay. Because everyone starts somewhere.
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