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When Gary Gold was getting started in real estate in Beverly Hills in 1989, he started working with a mysterious recording artist who was looking for a studio apartment to rent for no more than $2,000 per month.
Despite the low price tag, Gold said he put in the work to find the client a place.
“I treated that person like they were buying an estate,” said Gold, a broker now known for his nine-figure deals.
The client was Paula Abdul, the singer who had recently put out a hit studio album near the start of her career. She went on to become a repeat client of Gold’s as both their careers took off.
“Every agent has these moments, these opportunities that can change everything,” Gold said. “They’re not necessarily obvious when they come. They don’t come with instruction manuals, and there’s no guarantee.”
Those opportunities can come as a surprise, and they can often follow failure, Gold and others said Tuesday during Inman Luxury Connect at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.
“My story starts with failure,” said Ivan Sher, owner of IS Luxury in Las Vegas.
As a new agent, Sher said he made thousands of cold calls in search of listings and got few appointments. Business early on remained painfully slow.
“I remember having to sell my CD collection to get a babysitter,” Sher said. “And then I had to sell my guitar.”
He moved to Las Vegas, he said, “out of desperation.” But that’s when one of his career’s pivotal moments took place.
“I got partnered up with the iconic Realtor in the city,” Sher told the audience of hundreds. He partnered with Florence Shapiro, a well-known and successful broker around Vegas, and their brokerage thrived.
Christophe Choo, a luxury broker in Beverly Hills, found one of his pivotal opportunities by chance at a real estate conference around 2006.
Google had recently bought YouTube for $1.65 billion, and early indications were that video was about to become more relevant for all industries. Choo leaned in.
He started creating videos of high-end listings around Los Angeles and acted as a “DJ of content” on real estate in his market, building a reputation as an early adopter of the power of video creation in real estate marketing.
Gary Gold | Photos by AJ Canaria Creative Services
He was putting in that work while business was slow, eventually muscling through the down cycle to earn high-ticket listings and grow his business, becoming a top producer in Beverly Hills.
When things are going well, Realtors need to find a way to harness the momentum, said Roh Habibi, a Bay Area Realtor who starred in the TV show Million Dollar Listing San Francisco a decade ago.
Habibi said he put in a significant amount of work and took risks to land his spot on the show. What he didn’t expect was for the bump in notoriety to vanish quickly after it aired. What’s more, it didn’t seem to lead to a bump in business, Habibi said.
“Afterwards I thought, ‘OK great, show’s over. it’s aired. The phone’s going to start ringing; emails are going to start coming in, text messages,’” he said. “No. Nothing.”
“All it did was when I walked into a room, perhaps someone who may have seen the show or knew about the show said, ‘Hey, that’s that Realtor from that television show,’” he said.
Success can quickly turn to failure, the group said, and Realtors need to be ready to recognize their moment and take steps to harness the good moments.
“Success is a very strange beast, and it often comes before total annihilation,” Gold said.
Gold told the crowd to be loud and proud about their accomplishments when things are going well to capitalize on and leverage that momentum.
The words evidently struck a chord with a Realtor in the audience who promptly walked to the stage and loudly told the crowd about her high-end listing, garnering some applause and expressions of bewilderment.
