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Steve Harney, a leading voice in real estate coaching for decades, died unexpectedly on Sunday, March 4. He was 68.
Harney was the founder of the real estate consulting firm Keeping Current Matters, which he founded in 2007 to help keep agents and consumers educated in the run-up to the financial crisis.
“It was right before the housing crisis and Steve’s vision was to help agents understand what was happening out in the world,” Dave Childers, CEO of Keeping Current Matters, told Inman in an interview. “The birth of KCM was out of the crisis of 2008 and with a sincere drive to help homeowners navigate that.”
Harney was born in the Bronx in 1955 and began his career as a real estate agent in Suffolk County, New York, in 1983. While working as an agent, he was consistently nationally ranked and was one of the top-selling agents for Suffolk County.
Harney eventually assumed leadership of the largest office for Prudential Long Island Realty in 1991, which led to him training Prudential agents up and down the East Coast, his first foray into training and educating his fellow agents.
Four years after taking the helm at Prudential, Harney founded his own brokerage, National HomeFinders, which grew to a 500-agent brokerage before Harney sold it in 2005.
He founded Keeping Current Matters shortly after out of a desire to help agents prepare for the choppy waters to come, specifically by providing them with the information, analysis and data they needed to help homeowners.
“Steve was just driven by the need to do right by an industry that had done right for him,” said Marc Davison, co-founder of the creative agency 1000watt, and a friend of Harney’s. “The guy was a broker. He managed agents for a long time, and I think when you do that long enough, that’s where your heart is.”
While Harney educated agents on straightforward matters like data, some of the most valuable insights they gleaned from him were about morals and the importance of doing right by others, friends said.
“I’ve never seen anybody so heavily researched in terms of data, brokerage operation, agent psyche, and agent mentality and the history of real estate,” Davison said. “There are other people who likely possess a lot of that, but Steve also had this inherent passion or moral ethic, and I know it came from his father.”
Harney sold Keeping Current Matters to his son and daughter-in-law, Bill and Charlotte Harney, in 2016 but remained involved as its founder and garnered a large following on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, where he regularly posted about housing issues.
Childers said Keeping Current Matters plans to continue spreading Harney’s mission of helping consumers make educated decisions in the housing market.
“When you come into the office here in Richmond, Virginia, you walk in and there’s a wall that says, ‘Every family should feel confident when buying and selling a home,'” he said. “That’s what drives what we do every day — that mission of helping every family feel confident.”
Harney is survived by his wife, Kathy; his sons Bill, Steven and Kevin; his grandchildren, Graham and McRae; and his siblings, JoAnn Uzzi, Michael Harney and Ricky Harney.
