The Art and Discipline of Real Estate Sales Success with Michelle Mumoli

Transcript

[Mattias]
Welcome to the REI Agent, a holistic approach to life through real estate. I’m Mattias, an agent and investor.

[Erica]
And I’m Erica, a licensed therapist.

[Mattias]
Join us as we interview guests that also strive to live bold and fulfilled lives through business and real estate investing.

[Erica]
Tune in every week for interviews with real estate agents and investors.

[Mattias]
Ready to level up?

[Erica]
Let’s do it.

[Mattias]
Welcome back to the REI Agent. It is a warmer day for the first time in a while. We’ve had a long winter.

The time of recording this is February the 24th. And it’s making me feel ornery.

[Erica]
Oh my word. To both of those things. Yes, the sun is out.

And yes, Mattias is in a rare form right now. Very energetic, which I, you know, our sun was also this morning. So maybe it is the weather.

Maybe it’s just like, thank God.

[Mattias]
Finally.

[Erica]
God.

[Mattias]
Yeah, we’ve had a longer winter and ready for it to warm up. I always am hesitant at this stage in particular. Again, this is gonna come out a couple weeks after this recording or the time of recording.

But it’s always, you know, when you have a nice week and it’s warm and you’re like, kind of like, oh, I can go on the deck. Maybe I’ll have a beer out on the deck. That’d be fun.

And then there’s like a snowstorm. And then you’re like, come on. No more.

[Erica]
Yeah, see my, this March is, I have a lot of feelings about March. My birthday’s in March and it’s the week after spring starts. And so in my head, I’m thinking, well, it’s springtime.

So it should be a beautiful birthday. And it never is, almost never. It’s always usually very cold.

Sometimes there’s snow, but can almost never go outside on the deck.

[Mattias]
And so I’ve, I’ve tried to plan. Sorry, I just cut you off.

[Erica]
Well, all I was just gonna say is your birthday is in September, which is always absolutely gorgeous. Such gorgeous weather.

[Mattias]
I’m very jealous. Meener, meener, meener. I, what I was gonna say is I’ve tried to plan multiple trips to the Dolly Sods to go backpacking with you on your birthday.

And it’s never a good time. So I’ve stopped trying. Also, we have three kids and that makes it hard.

[Erica]
Yeah, you also took me to DC to go see the cherry blossoms. You hyped that one up.

[Mattias]
We were in the Metro, hadn’t seen anything yet. We were just getting to the, what, the National Monument area. And I was like, when we get up out of this Metro, out of the ground, we’re just gonna be pink everywhere.

It’s just gonna be this gorgeous scene. We go up. Nothing.

[Erica]
It was brown. It was completely brown.

[Mattias]
So.

[Erica]
So I guess all that to say, I don’t have high expectations for March when this actually airs. I think it will be exactly the same weather. And I am just soaking in the sunshine that we’re getting this week as it comes.

Because I know it’s not gonna stay for another month or two. Yeah.

[Mattias]
But let’s enjoy it. So today we have Michelle on the podcast. She is a team leader over in New York.

New Jersey. Close to New York City. She has a lot of experience, a lot of wisdom to give to us.

Including kind of the dynamics that happen when you are kind of creating a team. And how to think about when you have reached that level of success. That you need to kind of expand.

And how can you kind of focus on your own personal happiness.

[Erica]
Yep. An interesting piece to her story. She comes from an arts background.

Prior to joining the real estate field. And that still plays a large role in her life today.

[Mattias]
Yeah, so without further ado. Here’s Michelle Mumoli. Welcome back to the REI Agent.

I’m here with Michelle Mumoli. And my lovely wife Erica. I figured I should introduce her too.

How are you Michelle?

[Michelle Mumoli]
Hi guys. Good, how are you?

[Mattias]
We’re doing great. We’re doing great. We just got a CrossFit workout in.

So we are, I’m feeling a little extra ornery. But yeah, how are you?

[Michelle Mumoli]
I did not just get a CrossFit workout in. But I probably should. But I’m great.

I’m great.

[Mattias]
Michelle, you are a realtor out of New Jersey. What part of New Jersey? Is this like close to New York City or?

[Michelle Mumoli]
Yeah, I am literally right across the river from New York City. And I service around an hour commute to New York City. And that radius is a massive radius because we’re one of the most densely populated states in New Jersey.

And so we are a direct front door to the Manhattan market. So for people who cannot really afford the space or need more space in Manhattan and the boroughs, they come to New Jersey.

[Mattias]
Sure, yeah. So do you cross over into New York as well? Or do you have license over there?

You just stay in special isles?

[Michelle Mumoli]
I do not. I stay in my state. I stay in New Jersey.

[Mattias]
It’s interesting. I have kind of a line too that I don’t cross typically in my area. And I’ll go further some directions, but there’s one direction I just kind of stop.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Why is that?

[Mattias]
It’s just a different market, Charlottesville. So I will travel an hour north, south often. But when I get over to Charlottesville, it’s just for some reason I haven’t sold anything in there yet.

It might be a similar kind of thing where they have a really strong market. They have lots of great agents. And it’s just for some reason I’ve never gone over there.

[Erica]
Also interesting. I don’t know if this has anything to do with that, but it’s geographically, we’re in a valley, so north and south. But to get to Charlottesville, you go over a mountain.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Oh, so that is almost like a natural dividing line.

[Erica]
Yeah, kind of like the river that you’re talking about.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Yeah, except I’m physically not licensed in the state of New York. So I mean, it’s interesting because every state has, you know this because you’re real estate agents, every state has different real estate requirements, real estate laws. And in New Jersey, the way that a real estate transaction is conducted is completely opposite of how it is conducted in New York.

So, you know, sometimes you will see a lot of agents that are duly licensed in New York and New Jersey. And again, it’s one of those things where I usually try to tell people like, pick what you wanna do and be really good at it, but you can’t do both because you’re talking about a lot of co-ops in New York City where they are, you know, 100 to 200 page co-op packets and applications and things like that. We don’t really have that here.

We have very few co-ops if, you know, really a handful. And so it’s just a totally different way of doing business. And we’re an attorney state.

So that’s a lot of things, you know, something that a lot of states are not attorney states. So a lot of people don’t know that.

[Mattias]
Yeah, we’re not. So that makes a ton of sense. I’m curious to know that in the DC area, I think a lot of people are like tri-licensed in the tri-state area that they’re often selling in all the different areas where they meet.

So I’m curious how that is for them. I’ll have to get somebody like that on the podcast sometime. But anyway, Michelle, where, tell us about how you got started.

How’d you get into real estate?

[Michelle Mumoli]
I kind of grew up in real estate, actually. My parents were immigrants. They were able to do that, the BRR method before anybody was talking about BRR, but basically they would buy multifamily homes and we would live in them and, you know, purchase one using the equity, purchased another, et cetera, et cetera.

So we would like manage these buildings ourselves as a family. I later got into the arts and just decided that, you know, I kind of like, I kind of got real estate. Like I understood real, just like the vision of real estate and what it did for my family and really got licensed in 2013 and have been full speed ahead ever since I, once I got my license, I was lucky enough to not really be able to have to have a full-time job other than real estate.

So that’s all I’ve been doing.

[Mattias]
Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, that’s not normal. A lot of people will juggle a couple of things there for a while, including me.

I had a, we were doing the debt payoff thing at that time. And so we were juggling a couple of jobs each for a few years, but yeah. So, yeah, you mentioned that you started off as a solo agent and then you got into a team.

Can you describe that a little bit for me?

[Michelle Mumoli]
So I was at a couple of different brokerages in my career. I’m now at Compass. But when I was at Keller Williams, I started a team and I also used to coach new agents.

And that’s sort of, the need arose from, I think when you walk into some of those brokerages of that nature, they’ll give you like a book that somebody wrote, you know? And at that time, when you walked into Keller Williams, they would give you the millionaire agent handbook, which is amazing for what it has had for that time, but also amazing because it does kind of give you like a mini MBA, right? Like if you’re doing this much, this is how you have to scale.

If you’re, you know, if you’re doing this many deals, this is your infographic on all of the people and the team org structure that you need to have, which is great. And I kind of took from that what I needed and, you know, created this team, not a great fit. I think sometimes like you put people in certain positions and they’re just not a great fit for that point in time.

And maybe your leadership skills at that point in time are not fully developed enough or you don’t have enough time. I think that’s one of the things that’s really important to consider time, because you are essentially the person at the top of that pyramid that is creating the lead structure for everybody else under you. And so, yes, it’s great and they can bring leads to the table, but at the end of the day, you know, they’re looking to you for that mentorship.

They’re looking to you for the one-on-one, the accountability has to be there. And so now in having this team at Compass, there’s so many different things that are already dealt with on the Compass end that, you know, you don’t really have to do in terms of platform-wise and CRMs. You don’t really have to like relearn the wheel, but you still have to have that accountability with the people that you are working with on your team, because when you don’t have it, they don’t show up. You know, like people, somebody said something very interesting to me one day where they said, there’s very few leaders in this world and there’s a lot more followers. So if you lead really well, people will follow you.

And those were really amazing words that just kind of have stuck in my brain through different periods of time in my career and my expansion of a team. And so when you lead, people will follow exactly what it is that you are modeling to them. And that’s something that’s really important for people to remember when they’re like building a team of anything.

You know, you could be building a construction team. You could be building any type of business because this is your own business.

[Erica]
I wanted to go back just for a second, because I’m thinking, you know, you have, it sounds like two sides to you that you’ve developed quite well. One being your love of the arts, which I’m really curious about because it requires a lot of creative mind. And I’m curious how that still is used by you or if you do, if you’re into that at all anymore, and then kind of this business side, which I know we’re focusing on more today, but can you speak more to the film, the arts, that piece of you and how that is still a part of you now?

[Michelle Mumoli]
I think on a visual level, right? It’s aesthetically, you know, walking into a listing presentation. I think the first thing that somebody comes, you know, asks me is, what do I do to this space to make it look better?

You know, so that’s like the first thing is like the missing scene of the whole thing of putting together this story of this condo or this house or whatever it is that I’m selling to make it look appealing to a buyer. But aside from that, it’s really coming from like a non-corporate world, my, you know, problem solving mind. So everything that I look at is probably not the way that somebody else who may be in a more corporate thinking structure might be looking at something to solve a problem.

And there are problems, as you know, there’s no deal that is like any other deal. I say that to every single buyer that I encounter because they’re like, is this normal? And I’m like, nothing is normal.

You know, there is no normalcy to the business that, you know, most buyers really don’t need to know about the ins and outs of what we do on the backend because we present this really amazing, you know, at least for me, a concierge type service that it’s like, don’t worry about it. It’s been taken care of. If you have been brought into the fold and someone mentioned something to you in the transaction and you don’t know what it is, it’s probably already been taken care of.

So don’t even worry about it. But it’s looking at things from different ways of creatively solving a problem that somebody who may not have been in the arts may not be thinking about it that way. And that has really, I really played such a crucial role in my success in this business.

Because again, looking at something like it’s a brand new puzzle every single time.

[Erica]
Yeah. That’s a good way to describe that. And, you know, you’re so close to so many different museums and art and theater.

Do you explore any of that aside from the business side?

[Michelle Mumoli]
All the time, all the time. I mean, it’s like right here at our fingertips. New York City is literally like two miles away.

You know, so anytime that, you know, you wanna go see something that is culturally impactful, you go. But also, you know, New Jersey has a lot of very prominent cultural establishments as well. So there’s always, that is actually my downtime is like getting out of the problem solving mode and just going to see, you know, a beautiful art show or a lot of my friends are artists.

So just hanging out with them and literally just decompressing is beneficial to my brain.

[Erica]
Yeah, I love that. Help us get to know just how you are, how you function. You know, we recently took the CliftonStrengths test.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of that. Mattias and I did, and it’s a personality assessment, but it helped us understand how we naturally, like what qualities we naturally lead with and what we don’t per se, and then how we work together. And I’m just curious for you, how you would describe how you naturally lead, what qualities come out naturally for you?

What’s been more of a learning curve for you?

[Michelle Mumoli]
One of the, you know, the amazing qualities that we have as business owners is that we carry our name with us. Our name is our reputation, right? And so delegating when it comes to how you are going to let someone else take a lead, you know, a lead or a listing or something that has to do with the business is really crucial.

And it’s something that I’ve had a really hard time doing in the past, and I’m starting to learn to let it go because I just have to believe. And the way that I like to train my agents is that they are, they shadow me, they listen to my phone conversations, they listen to the buyer consultations, they come to seller listing appointments, they’re seeing what I’m doing, they’re listening to me talk, they understand my mission, they understand my vision for the future of the Momole Collective and how I do business, and I imbue that upon them.

And so they take that with them and they follow through. And I can kind of tell when they’re not, and when they’re not, it’s like, well, bouncing back on the accountability. So although I have not taken this test that you’ve taken, I would love to learn more about it because it could probably help me grow as a business owner as well.

But how I usually like to work is, essentially, I do like to work collaboratively. I mean, even when you’re talking about bringing, the minute that you start talking to a buyer and you start to engage a buyer, you’re like, you’re constantly honing in on that initial consultation needs and wants list, right? Because there might be two parties that are looking at things.

Two parties might have different ideas of what it is that they’re talking about. So I bring it back to, okay, let’s go back to that list. Let’s discuss, again, it is a very collaborative environment when you’re working with somebody.

And leading, for me, I think it’s like, I have a natural leadership quality, and sometimes that could come across as being very demanding. But I think that that word demanding, demanding and women in the same sentence has gotten a really bad connotation. Like, oh, she’s a woman and she shouldn’t be demanding, but it’s our business.

And so we need to be demanding. And so we’re not seeing the results that we want. We need to demand better results.

And if those results are not being given to us specifically by the people that we are, quote unquote, employing, then we need to, either they see themselves out, because naturally that’s what happens, like fat just sort of floats up to the surface and then it sees itself out, or we request that they move on or that they take on a different role if you really like them as a person, or maybe have some more mentorship time to develop their skills.

But any business owner is gonna be demanding because it’s your name. Your name is on everything. Your name is your reputation.

Your name is everything.

[Mattias]
I’m curious what kind of team structure you use. Do you have specialties like buyer agent, seller agent, that kind of stuff?

[Michelle Mumoli]
I don’t. I think naturally, if it’s a newer agent, a newer agent is just gonna automatically become a buyer’s agent, or we have a lot of tenants here as well. So a buyer agent or a tenant agent that’s gonna take leads out.

I think that’s just a natural progression of the business, and maybe even potentially incorporating like a showing agent status. Like all you’re gonna do for these three showings is you’re going to go open a door. You’re not going to discuss the property.

They will discuss the property with me, and you will learn from that how to open a door, because believe it or not, a lot of people don’t read showing instructions anymore. So that’s step one of the elimination process, you know? Did you read those showing remarks?

You know, I get like so many phone calls where people are like, I don’t know what the code is. I can’t, and I’m like, did you read the showing instructions? I see you scheduled it, but did you read it?

And then five seconds later, it’s like, oh, okay. I get it. I saw it.

[Mattias]
That’s true. That’s true. Yeah, that’s interesting.

[Erica]
How did you pull this team together? How did you decide who you wanted in your team and what you wanted that to look like?

[Michelle Mumoli]
I still am growing the team, and I am still fine-tooth. It’s still going through people with a fine-tooth comb, because I think that, you know, people are people, and people have personalities, and so you have to be flexible with the personality that you’re working with. But it also, the person that you choose for the team, at least for me, has to be a person that really has a lot of willingness to learn consistently.

Like, you know, I don’t usually typically love people that talk too much, because if you’re talking too much, you’re not really listening. And so I’m still very particular with the people that I’m bringing on, and I’m always, like, training people on how to listen really well on the team, because it’s really important that you’re listening. Your whole existence in this business is listening to your client.

They don’t care about you. They don’t care about your stories. They don’t care about you.

They don’t care if you’re driving a fancy car. They don’t care what kind of clothes you’re wearing. That whole reality TV show BS is nonexistent in the real world.

All they care about is that every single time they tell you something, that you’ve made an adjustment on what it is that you’re showing them, or that you’re listening to them, and now something else is coming to the table that is going to benefit them, because that’s it. That’s the whole job. It’s client-focused.

[Erica]
I was just thinking, we had, so going back to this CliftonStrengths test, we had Rosie Noel on the show. She’s a personality coach specifically for CliftonStrengths, and one of the pieces that she did for us and she does for teams is she can pull the personality assessment from each individual person all together so you can see the team’s strengths and how balanced the team is and their personalities mesh together, which I thought was so cool. That is really cool.

Yeah, yeah, and her whole point too was you don’t want to ask somebody to do something that they don’t naturally lead with, and so you want to focus what you’re asking of someone to be what their strength is already, and that way you use your team as efficiently as possible, which I thought was brilliant.

[Michelle Mumoli]
That is so brilliant. I feel like I’m going to research that after this because from the get-go, like sometimes I’m not the greatest judge of character, so it’s like if they’re a newer agent and they’re coming on the team, it kind of like, I have to feel them out for what it is that their strengths are, and sometimes I can just, again, having that leadership quality and really pushing people to a limit that they’re not really comfortable with, and it could be because they should be doing this strengths assessment.

[Mattias]
Yeah, it’s interesting, and one of the people I’m bringing on my team was really familiar with it and really excited about it, and so that’s one of the things that we’re trying is we’re going to have everybody take that test. We haven’t done anything yet as far as group coaching, putting them all together, but it is really curious as to how different people lead with different strengths, and I would guess from hearing you talk, you’ve talked probably like you have some influence at one of the core strengths and then also futuristic vision, like you have those attributes, I would guess, and those are great, and like Rosie herself, she is really high futuristic, and she said her husband was like, that was like his last one, and so she’s like trying to help him understand where her mind is. Now that she understands that that’s like that big of a discrepancy, she has to tailor how she communicates to him so that they’re kind of on the same page more or less, which, yeah, it’s super fast. I love personality stuff in general, but this one is a really good one.

[Michelle Mumoli]
That sounds really intriguing because that is essentially, it’s all about communication, and so understanding like where somebody is and how they are understanding you enables you to be able to communicate with them better, especially when everyone’s trying to go in one direction. If somebody is thinking outside of that, now they’re like, the third wheel on that bus is like pulling it in another direction, and it can really ruin things.

[Mattias]
You know better than I. I mean, I’m just saying, like I haven’t really had a ton of experience with actually implementing this. It’s all kind of theory at this point for me, but I know that like people often use disc assessments.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Disc was, yeah.

[Mattias]
Quickly analyze, maybe their clients as well, and I don’t know, maybe if you got really familiar with the strengths, personalities, you’d be able to like kind of figure out what their core colors are. There’s basically four different areas within all the different strengths, and that might help you also be able to kind of communicate with them more effectively.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Yeah, I do remember taking that, and when I was at Keller Williams giving agents that test, the way that the Keller Williams model of hiring somebody was like, ridiculous, it was like 10 interviews before you hired them, and it was like really extracting like the disc personality, and like extracting like, but where do you see yourself in three months? Where do you see yourself in six months? To like very specific, concentrated whys, and I just felt like, I felt like that may not be for everybody.

I think that like if you can just ping the personality and understand like the way that they think, that it would help you understand that person, and so that’s probably better than going through like this whole disc analysis, because sometimes there’s like crossover, right? Of like, sometimes it’s the D and the C. Sometimes it’s the I and the, you know, and you’re just like, what if you’re a little bit of all?

[Mattias]
Right.

[Michelle Mumoli]
You could be.

[Mattias]
Yeah, yeah. She mentioned, back to the strength part, Rosie mentioned that, you know, sometimes somebody might not be high in a certain color, but they’re strategic, and so they have a strategy for doing a thing, that if you looked at just their strengths, you’d be like, they’re probably terrible at this, but then they have a strategy for it that makes up for it, so it’s really curious, and you know, there’s probably, you could probably spend tons of time trying to really, really understand it, and I enjoy it, but you know, there’s also business to be done.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Yeah, yes, that’s a whole, like you need to hire like a full-time personality person for the team to, you know, and maybe that’s an operations management role, right? For somebody to be like, suss this person out for how they’re going to be able to work.

[Mattias]
Yeah, yeah, totally. I think.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Again, future, future vision.

[Mattias]
Yeah, exactly. Well, I just had somebody talk to me about it, about their team, and they had a meeting where it seemed like everybody was just super analytical in the group, and there was none of the relationship piece, and so like, I think it just sounded like it was everybody was just kind of, not fighting, but they were just, they were not communicating in a way that was building a relationship together, and I just thought that was something that she had mentioned it’s important often to have that relationship person in a team as well, and this is back to Rosie.

She said that it was important to have that, and I was thinking that’s probably one of the things they were missing at that meeting was there was just everybody was analyzing numbers and fighting over it, and not caring about feelings.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Yeah, it’s like you’re just talking in like, you know, ones and zeros to each other, you know, and it’s like, it’s just robots, like, blah, blah, blah, you know? I just imagine just robots sitting at a table, just going like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and yeah, because also this business is very personality based, you know, like your clientele is personality based, you know, like everything is about this relationship, and so you have to kind of be able to be a flexible personality because you’re encountering all of these different types of people.

[Mattias]
Well, Michelle, we talked about a little bit of like kind of the left versus right brain earlier when we were talking about your, you know, business versus like artistic stuff. I think another parallel to that might be, I think agents are often either personality agents or they are systems agents. Would you describe yourself as one or the other or a hybrid?

[Michelle Mumoli]
You know, I have to be a hybrid because I am the team leader, so I establish the systems, you know? I’m at Compass because I was constantly looking for how can my business be better? How can I have systems that are provided to me that are going to make it easier for me to implement those systems instead of having like a thing here and a thing over there and, you know, this other app and this, you know, and trying to merge all of these things, which is super complicated.

So I’m a little bit of both, you know? Even though I don’t love doing it, you know, I didn’t love sitting down and writing an operations manual. I did not love that.

It was like, my brain was like, no, not now, you know? And I was like, no, I have to like sit here and I have to do this and I just have to get in the zone and write like a 35-page operations manual. That’s just what I have to do.

And in that operations manual, it’s like, now I did it and now it’s done, but I’m still like in my head, like I’ll go back to it and tweak it whenever I do something. I’m like, is that in the operations manual? Because that, when created, makes everything else just so much smoother for your life.

You know, where you’re like, now I can go out and like be free. I love doing events. I’m like such a people person.

Like people just re-energize me. Like just having this conversation with you is re-energizing me, you know? So I’m not really a systems person, but I think that when you run your own business, you have to be, you have to learn to be.

[Erica]
Yeah. That’s a really good example of how you set up something so that you can do the thing that you love the most, more often, rather than being locked down.

[Mattias]
It also reminds me of the, I think it’s Jocko Willick says, discipline equals freedom. And it’s often something you run away from. You run away from like the discipline of whatever.

This is like, the operations manual, that’s discipline to write that down. But what you find after doing it is it actually frees you up more. And so if you, or like intense scheduling.

That’s been a focus of ours here recently, is like we have to like, we have a meeting every week basically to go over our weekly schedule. And then I am trying to, you know, carve out a certain amount of time, at least once a week to write a book and you know, all these other things. And if you don’t, yeah, if you don’t have that initial extra discipline, you will just get lost in the shuffle.

And yeah, I think that’s another really good theme of, you know, discipline can equal freedom. If you have some intentionality and you plan out a little bit, you can find yourself to be more free.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Absolutely. You know, I think like a couple of weeks ago, the statistic came out that 74% of agents didn’t close a single deal in 2024. And that is a very ridiculously high statistic.

And the reason for that I think is because there are these external influences of like reality TV or these brokerages that are like, you get, you could get your real estate, you know, be a real estate agent here and make 90% of your commission. And it’s like, that’s all fine and great. But are you learning the skills to be a business owner?

And those skills do require a massive amount of discipline.

[Mattias]
It doesn’t come easy. It’s something that, you know, you have to take massive action. You have to show up over and over again to see the results.

[Michelle Mumoli]
That’s an understatement. That’s an understatement. Saying showing up again and again makes it seem so easy, you know?

Because somebody will be like, well, you know, I go to all the trainings. Right, you go to all the trainings, but are you like implementing these things? Right, you go to all the trainings, but are you like really listening?

Right, you go to all the trainings, but you know, like what are the conversations that you’re having with your people on a regular day-to-day basis? Like, I don’t walk into any room anymore and someone talks to me about, I mean, they could talk to me about a lot of things, but the first thing they say is like, how’s the real estate market? You know, and that’s what I tell to people.

That’s what I tell agents when they come into the team. It’s like, who you know is who you know. I don’t know who you know, but you should become the person that is their realtor, the person that they trust with information.

[Erica]
That discipline piece, it seems like you learned that value and that practice from an early age in your childhood when your family was moving into these multifamily homes and managing that property together. It seems like that’s a lot of work and took a lot of sacrifice too, I would imagine, just time.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Yeah, I think that the work ethic really does come from then because there was never a time when they weren’t working. It was like, there were no real summer vacations. It was like, here’s a paint bucket.

You’re bored, go pick up a paintbrush, go pick up a bucket, go clean something. Go do something that is going to garner some sort of work back into this thing that we’re trying to develop here. Don’t just waste your life.

But there was a long time before I became a realtor when I was in the arts that I was a little freer of that discipline. And I didn’t see much of an income from that. And I think that it was lacking the income and wanting to live a better life that led me to the decision to do this for a living.

It was like, I know real estate. I should just go get my real estate license, obviously. And I will work up to it.

But I will say that I didn’t really start making enough money to pay a mortgage until I was probably in year four of this business. It was a lot of just understanding people and understanding motivation and a lot of learning and a lot of mistakes in terms of who I decided to pursue as a client. And maybe sometimes those weren’t the best relationships to have.

But yeah, I mean, yes. To make the super long answer I just gave you shorter, yes, yes, it was. It was my family’s work ethic that has led me here.

[Erica]
I tend to try and give him space to ask all the real estate stuff because I could talk to you forever about growing up and your family and the arts. Because I am curious, too, and now this is me making a little bit of a jump. So you tell me if this is true or not.

But growing up in a family that worked so hard all the time and maybe didn’t take as many vacations, it made me wonder what it’s like for you or if you’ve ever felt like you’ve had to earn the time spent relaxing or doing nothing or if that feels as productive to you as work.

[Michelle Mumoli]
That’s a great question. That’s a really great question. I oftentimes have to put my phone on silent.

So there’s times that I will… I have never gone on a vacation where I haven’t at least answered emails at least three or four days. If it’s a seven-day vacation, it’s three or four evenings that I’m going back to emails and answering them because I’ll have an away message.

But it’ll be like, I’ll get back to you in a couple days. But I oftentimes have to set the time to not answer the phone. Dinners, times with friends, I will literally put my phone on silent.

I will put it in a pocket. I will make sure that I give them my undivided attention. And these are things that I have to structure that time.

If I don’t structure that time, I’ll work. You know, I’ll just, I’ll answer, you know, I’m like, I think like Christmases, I’ve answered emails or I’m like trying to, you know, fix a problem or try to tackle a challenge. And if somebody answers me on the other line that I need an answer for, I’m like, great, it’s Christmas.

Otherwise I’m thinking to myself like, well, I’m sitting. I’m not actively doing anything. So I can answer an email or I can make a phone call.

[Mattias]
Yeah, it’s hard to shut that off.

[Michelle Mumoli]
It really is.

[Mattias]
It’s a clear line with being an agent. It’s just all the time. And so when there is something that seems obvious like Christmas to stop, it’s just, yeah, hard to really shut it off.

I think that also the, you know, smartphones haven’t really helped that at all. Like we have everything bombarding us, right? So like I think the focus modes are something that I wanna like tackle and really get better at.

I recently had a special focus mode for a particular person and I turned it on if it was the evening or the weekends and I didn’t wanna get riled up. It went so far that it took out text messages of all my message, you know, iMessages or whatever. It took the message completely out and I couldn’t even see it if I wanted to.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Oh, wow.

[Mattias]
So that was, you know, cause I had just gone down a little bit of a rabbit hole of like, how can you, you know, better maximize these focus modes. But I think that getting good at that is another technology skill that we don’t really maybe think about as important. When we get into real estate, you know, we can maximize our CRMs. We can do all these different tech things. But then like, how do we actually build in? Like, do not disturb me for like this evening, you crazy person.

[Michelle Mumoli]
That’s so tough because I feel like even though, you know, they may be a crazy person, like I would ping you back on that question and say like, what expectation did you set? Did you have one phone call with that person at 9.30 PM and all of a sudden now you, you know, because your boundary was open, right? You opened that boundary.

[Mattias]
It was like, oh, I can call up at 9.30. Yeah, I mean, it was another agent. So it wasn’t a client first of all, but it was, yeah, I mean, there was definitely, I mean, there was periods of time where they were definitely texting mostly just in the evenings. And, you know, I think that’s, we often fall into that trap a little bit, but yeah, it’s just when things got not pleasant that I was like, I gotta take drastic action.

[Erica]
But I hear you both saying it really takes something, an intentional choice to set up a system so that you can draw a boundary because your job, just the nature of it is not gonna set it for you. Yeah.

[Michelle Mumoli]
No, because I mean, we are on their schedule if you really think about it that way, right? Because if somebody works from nine to five, when do they have time? Like they can make the time, you know, if their job isn’t really that demanding or whatever, but like, then if you look at our schedule, I usually, I use the word everybody is, I’m on everybody else’s schedule because if they can only see things on a Sunday, if they work six days a week, if they work till five, you know, like now you’re like, you have to figure out how to balance that focus time that you need so desperately with the time that they have available that you need them to be available because they are essentially your income source.

[Mattias]
It is a tough balance.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Sorry, I cut you off.

[Erica]
No, no, no, no. That was great. That was great.

It’s funny, you know, it’s like a double-edged sword maybe because, you know, you’re on your client’s schedules and you need to be available to them and then there’s also the people in your personal life that are so important to you and the relationships you want to prioritize and how do you appear to be as accessible as possible while also being present to the people close to you in a way that they feel it? And I think that is just like the giant dance of the real estate agent life.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Yeah, that’s the million-dollar question because I think everybody knows… I think, you know, what’s funny is like one of my best friends is also a very like high-functioning, like high-level real estate agent and I think everyone in our lives sort of feels the same way about us where it’s like if we’re stepping away from a situation, don’t bother us because we’re making a phone call, it’s not like we’re taking a loan time, we’re taking a phone call, we’re answering an email, but if we’re there, then we’ll try to be there as present as we possibly can. It’s a weird… But that is, again, I feel like that is the plight of like a small business owner, you know?

Yeah, absolutely.

[Mattias]
And, you know, hopefully getting systems and people in place as a team, et cetera, can help alleviate that a little bit. I’m sure there’s other things that come up because of that, but yeah, the goal being that you can prioritize more and more. I feel like that should be the goal of everybody when they’re in business is that they should be able to prioritize what they want and need for themselves more and more as they go without sacrificing service, without sacrificing business.

And that would be a goal of mine, for sure.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Yeah, I think that’s a great… I think another thing that a lot of real estate agents aren’t talking about when they’re talking about building a team is what is your legacy? What is the legacy of your business, right?

Because you can go full throttle for how… I’m not gonna age myself. I won’t date myself.

I refuse to do that. But like, you could do this until you’re dead. You could literally do this until you’re dead because you’re a 1099 employee.

You know, you’re like, you’re your own business, right? So you could do this until you’re dead, but how do you not do that? And I’m not talking about some like seventh level, whatever, but I’m talking about a way to like build your business, get it to where you want it to be and be able to be surrounded by a group of people that are supporting you that you trust to say, okay, I’m going to maybe go somewhere warm for the winter for three months.

Can, you know, how are you going to leverage that? It’s not just giving it to whomever. It’s really building the team, trusting them, and saying, I may move for a year.

I may want to travel for a year. I’m still going to, the brand is still there. The name is still there.

I still may be working on some capacity on like those touches or those conversations, but somebody else is taking the ball and really is on the ground running it. So like, that’s something that I don’t even think, I don’t, I can’t have that conversation with a lot of real estate agents because they’re not really thinking about it.

[Mattias]
Yeah.

[Michelle Mumoli]
And this is also like that precludes, you know, people that have their kids on their team, because if you have like a family member on a team and not even husband and wife either, because let’s just, you’re not going to like, your legacy is not going to be left to the other party. It’s like, you want to leave the legacy to somebody else so the two of you can enjoy your lives.

[Mattias]
Yeah. No, that’s very true. I do have to ask if you have a fundamental book or maybe a favorite book you’re currently reading that you’d recommend people to read.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Right now I’ve been reading snippets from Atomic Habits, which I think is really great because it’s talking about, it is talking about so much about discipline. And like, and I think that anything that’s like mindset related of like, there are no losses, right? Like there’s no such thing as a loss in this business because as soon as you, if you don’t have enough in the pipeline that you are lamenting a deal that fell through or you are, you know, lamenting one little component of something, deals fall through.

People say, no, we’re in sales, right? Like that’s just our business. Next, what’s next?

What are you doing? Learn from it, pick it up, you know, keep moving. But I think something that has always been very top of mind for me is how to win friends and influence people, right?

Because everyone very specifically in the business that we’re in, I only do referral business. I don’t cold call. So everyone that I know knows that I’m a real estate agent.

Everyone that I have ever encountered knows that I’m a real estate agent. And it’s not from being this super salesy person. It’s from providing them with a surface and information and education.

And that is the helpful component of how like it all comes back to your life as a whole pie as this person doing this type of business.

[Mattias]
We should have a special noise when they mention, when a guest mentions how to win friends and influence people. Like I should have that on, cause like that’s the one I have, Erica probably was laughing when you said it. Cause like I’ve wanted to give that secretly to people multiple times.

Maybe it just shows up in their mailbox one day. But it was a big one for me. I lived in Germany for a year and they have a very abrasive, not abrasive, but like it’s more confrontational for the culture.

You don’t avoid conflict. You don’t avoid the acute angle. And so I coming back from there and just kind of just me in general, who I was, I just really tried.

I read that a bunch of times before I had any idea I was going to be a real estate agent. I just felt like it was really a good book, really fundamental. I feel like it’s a, maybe even like a culture, American culture, like business book, one-on-one kind of, I think anybody could benefit it.

It probably wouldn’t work perfectly in other cultures, but I think here it’s, if you want to understand the way business works here and kind of the culture around it, it’s a really, really good book.

[Michelle Mumoli]
And I also feel like a lot of younger people that are inheriting businesses from their parents haven’t really read it. I experienced two generations of somebody that I’m doing business with and having the old world person who owns the business, it’s almost like a very natural thing that comes to them. And then having to interact with the junior that’s coming in and taking over that business, it seems very forced.

And yes, I agree. I think they should read that book because there’s something that’s very natural about somebody who understands just like business demeanor and how you do business. And business is in nature, a servicing type of platform, right?

It’s like, what do you need? I might have that for you. That’s it.

I mean, this is what it is. What do you need? I might have that for you.

And then you kind of like, you’re putting someone into like a role of taking over for that person. And sometimes it feels like they don’t really get it. Like they’re like really uncomfortable with a natural communication of, I might have that for you.

What is it that you need? I might have that for you. And it’s like, that is part of the influence.

[Erica]
Yeah. I think the seasoned real estate agents have built all of these micro skills that I don’t even know if you’ve realized you’ve developed until you maybe see a newer, younger version that maybe hasn’t learned this finesse. We joke about this in the therapy world too.

The seasoned therapists that show up in like their sweatpants and are just like, give it to me. What are we going to talk about today as opposed to the new ones that are dressed to the nines and using all of their clinical jargon. You build your flow and it just, you don’t quite realize how much a skill you’re building until you maybe see somebody new who hasn’t quite done that yet.

[Michelle Mumoli]
That’s very true. There’s just nuances of vernacular. There’s nuances of so many, I mean, really, there are so many things that I probably, I couldn’t, I wouldn’t be able to pick it up.

I wouldn’t be able to say like, do this or mirror, just like general common sense things where it’s like, if you like someone, you’re kind of, you start to mirror them a little bit. I don’t think that people really understand that if they’re not coming from a place of knowing that. So it’s, yeah, it’s just so many things.

Yeah, absolutely.

[Mattias]
Michelle, if anybody is wanting to sell a house in New Jersey or just wants to follow your journey, what’s the best place? Is there social media that they can follow you on?

[Michelle Mumoli]
Yes. You can find me on Instagram @MichelleMumoliRealtor or at The Mumoli Collective. And you can find me online on my website, TheMumoliCollective.com.

And you can Google me. Very easy to find.

[Mattias]
One of the other curses of being a realtor.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Yes, yes, indeed.

[Mattias]
Michelle, thank you so much for being on. It’s been a pleasure.

[Michelle Mumoli]
Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.

[Erica]
Thanks for listening to the REI Agent.

[Mattias]
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to catch new shows every week.

[Erica]
Visit REIAgent.com for more content.

[Mattias]
Until next time, keep building the life you want.

[Erica]
All content in the show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.