Show Notes

Joselin Malkhasian

Welcome to the Agents Who Crush It In Real Estate podcast where you’ll hear the good, the bad and the ugly of how real estate agents overcame challenges and grew their business. Check out the Episode Notes at CrushItinRE.com/podcast. Here’s your host, Lindsay Favazza.

Lindsay Favazza: Welcome back to the Agents Who Crush It In Real Estate podcast. I am sitting across from the one and only Joselin Malkhasian. Joselin, welcome to the podcast today.

Joselin: Hi Lindsay. Thank you so much for having me. I am a huge fan of this podcast, so excited that you asked me to be on it.

Lindsay: Well, we can’t have a podcast where we talk about agents who crush it in real estate, and not have you on it, so it’s far overdue and I’m so glad that we’re finally sitting down to do this. First and foremost, I like to always take it back to the beginning. I know from your story, because I know you very well, but tell our audience how you first got into real estate and what that transition looked like for you, because I know that you’ve got a pretty incredible story.

Joselin: Yes, well, my story is probably similar to a lot of people, where real estate wasn’t my first career. I was a grad, a business management major and I graduated in 2009, and I was called the curse of the ’09 grad, and the reason why was because the financial market completely crashed the fall of ’08, so I’m actually studying this in real time, my senior year of college as a business management major. That was a lot of fun. Then when I graduated that spring in May, I literally had zero job prospects.

I had nowhere to go, nothing to do, so I stayed at the company that I was working at through college and I was there for a couple years and really wasn’t seeing any growth, wasn’t seeing any change. Switched jobs to a startup where like most startups, I was promised the sun, the stars, the moon, and they really couldn’t deliver back. I was working really hard. The one thing you’ll know about me is that I don’t do anything halfway.

Lindsay: Hardest working person I know. Absolutely.

Joselin: If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it 110%, so the fact that I was working so hard and not having anything to show for it, just made me really doubt and question what I was capable of. I come from a background where my family is very supportive of me, and I’m always doing great and, “Great job, and you’re going to be this and you’re going to be that.” For the first time in my life, I’m not having anything. I’m not having successes.

I’m not having anything to look forward to. I was really having a soul search moment where I knew I needed something else. I knew I wanted to be helping people, making an income that was directly related to how hard I worked, and my husband actually was like, “You’d be great at real estate. You love real estate, give it a shot.” I would go to open houses for fun. Look at real estate for fun, but I never wanted to be in real estate, because to me real estate was the butt of the joke. When you failed at everything else in life, you turn to real estate.

Lindsay: So crazy that that was your mindset back then, and now you’re like one of the most successful real estate agents in Massachusetts.

Joselin: Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but thank you.

Lindsay: I mean, you are.

Joselin: Thank you. Yes, my husband kept saying, you should do it and I was totally against it and he said, “Hey, do me a favor. I want you to have a conversation with Anthony Lamacchia. You’re not going in for a job interview. You’re not going in for anything. You’re going to talk to him.”

Lindsay: Just talk, yes.

Joselin: Just talk to him, so I agreed, and little old me walks in, meets with Anthony Lamacchia and I go, “This is not a job interview, this is a conversation.”

Lindsay: Do I just set the stage? Anthony’s like, he’s probably thinking to himself, “Sure.”

Joselin: Yes, he’s like, “She’s going to sign up in the next five minutes.” I met with Anthony and literally just sitting in his office, talking to him about the company that he had, the company that he envisioned, because at this point, I think I was one of 10 agents at the time when Lamacchia Realty really first started.

Lindsay: This was 2013.

Joselin: This was the fall of 2012 when I met with him and I heard what he was doing. He asked me, why do you feel that real estate is like the butt of the joke? He’s asking me all these questions and I was giving him my experiences. He goes, “I don’t know what real estate agents you know, but those aren’t the real estate agents I know and that’s not the real estate team that I have here at Lamacchia.” Once I heard that, I’m like, okay, this is what I want to do, and I got licensed at that very minute.

Lindsay: So you had more like car used car salesman, if you will. Nothing against any used car salesman out there, but there was that like stigma of that–

Joselin: The sleazeball.

Lindsay: That it was sleazy.

Joselin: Yes, and you can’t see me, but I’m nodding my head in agreement here, but that’s exactly how I felt. I felt like they’re only looking out for themselves, and if you look at real estate agents and movies and TV shows, they’re always a scatterbrain. They’re always in like a suit and they’re always annoying and nobody ever wants to talk to them. The person that helped me buy my house wasn’t the best experience. It’s a friend of ours, so I don’t want to say anything about it, good, bad or ugly, but I didn’t feel like I had the most guidance.

Lindsay: They didn’t improve your thought of what a real estate agent should be.

Joselin: Exactly, so I knew that I didn’t want to be that, and it was oftentimes second, third, fourth career choices. I felt like, okay, so I failed at everything else so ow I’m settling for real estate and I didn’t want to feel like I was settling, but boy was I wrong and that is not what real estate is.

Lindsay: A lot of people I’ve talked to, it’s actually the opposite. That real estate is their passion career. That they ended up leaving something else because they didn’t feel that great about it and they really ended up in real estate because they loved looking at homes and they loved helping people, and so it’s actually like the opposite of what you originally thought.

Joselin: Well, that’s exactly why I did it. When we would go on vacation or go to the Cape for the summer, whatever it may be, for a weekend for the summer. I wish I summered on the cape. [laughs] When we’d go for the weekend, the first thing that I would do is I’d see an open house sign and my husband be like, “Oh, here we go.” Because I’d be pulling over because I had to see the house, so I’ve always had the passion for it and I never actually realized when people say do what you’re passionate about.

I never thought of real estate as a passion. I just thought it was something fun, and I also never realized that you actually can make a career out of a passion. There were a lot of light bulbs that went off for me after that meeting.

Lindsay: That meeting was in the fall of 2012, so your official first year in real estate was 2013. Take me back. What were your numbers?

Joselin: In 2013 was my first year of selling and that was exclusively on online leads. At this point, I could not get a family member to want to work with me.

Lindsay: Only buyers agent.

Joselin: Only buyers agent, so I did not even touch a seller. The first year in real estate, I sold nine homes, which was just about $2.5 million in volume. That was year one.

Lindsay: That’s a solid first year.

Joselin: That’s what I thought.

Lindsay: Solid first year, and then 2014.

Joselin: Yes, so this is actually a funny story about the first year. At the time when I started at Lamacchia Realty, there was a partnership there. It was Anthony’s partner called me and he said, “Hey Joce, how did you first year go? I go, “Not bad. Nine houses, $2.5 million in volume,” and he goes, okay, well what’s your goal for next year? I was very proudly and so here I go, I’m going to blow him away. I was like, “12 houses,” and he uses the word I’m not going to use on the podcast. It was, “That’s bleeping pathetic, get a better goal.” I was like, what?

Lindsay: Nine to 12. Now you look back and you’re like, what was I thinking?

Joselin: At the same time, I didn’t have the self-confidence in me that I was capable of doing more. At Lamacchia, what they really helped me do is they helped me look at the bigger picture, and they helped me realize what can I do to grow and that don’t really settle for less. Aim for the stars and if you land on the moon, great. You’re still better than what you planned.

Lindsay: Aim for 20 and you can land at 15 and it’s still better than 12.

Joselin: Yes, so I always say that they were completely right, because then that next year I sold 25 houses.

Lindsay: 25 houses and your second year in real estate, and that’s buy-side only.

Joselin: Buy-side only still. Still was not working with sellers and I would probably say 98% of those were still online leads and not a lot of sphere business at all. Like I said, I had– When you’re younger, I was about 25 or 26 years old, and in an industry that you’re just shifting, this is a real significant milestone in people’s lives, either buying a home or selling a home. I didn’t have very many people that were going to trust me with that because I was so new in the business.

Lindsay: We were still coming out of the recession, right? We’re still somewhat not back to a good market like we are today.

Joselin: Yes. We still had short sales back on.

Lindsay: Yes. Doing 25 in a year like that is still very impressive, so impressive for your second year. All right, so now we’ve got 2015 to 2017. You’re in the 25 to 35 range, correct?

Joselin: Yes. That’s what I was doing. Wasn’t seeing too– I was having growth. I never did worse one year than I did previously. I had always grown, but I wasn’t really growing as much.

Lindsay: You weren’t doing the 9 to 25.

Joselin: I wasn’t doing the 9 to 25 jump, so I knew that I had to kick something into gear. I just didn’t know what it was.

Lindsay: Yes, so then 2019, now that’s a different story. What did you kick into gear and share with our listeners what your numbers were that year?

Joselin: In 2019, I sold 56 homes, which was just about $35 million in closed volume for that year.

Lindsay: Amazing.

Joselin: In 2018, I was really worried and focused on other things and we’ll talk about this a little bit later, but I wasn’t having the year that I wanted. When I sat down at the beginning of December 2018 and I set out my goals for ’19, what I decided to do is I was going to stop comparing myself to other people. Stop comparing myself to other agents, stop looking at what so-and-so down the street was selling.

Lindsay: Only you.

Joselin: It’s only me. That’s all that I can focus on. What I did is I wrote out, and I’m a big fan, we have an online hub, like a client management system. I’m a huge fan of it but I went back to old school paper and pen. What I did was I wrote everything out by hand, who I wanted, who was in my pipeline, what my prospects were, what listings I could potentially have but didn’t have yet, and I just sat and I wrote them all out. I put my head down and just focused on accomplishing these tasks, like sign them up, sign up the listing, put it on the market, get it sold, and I wasn’t paying attention to anything else around me.

I’ll never forget, Anthony texted me. He’s like, “Hey, do you realize you have 19 houses under agreement right now?” I was like, “No, actually.” I didn’t, because I wasn’t number focused. I wasn’t focused on what my numbers were. I wasn’t focused on what my volume was. I was just focused on keeping my head down and working and just getting it done.

Lindsay: Then all of a sudden, you get your head up and you’ve got 19 under agreement.

Joselin: I had 19 under agreement.

Lindsay: It worked for you. So tell me, in that year too, you also were working much more from your sphere, correct? Like you’ve now started to make that shift.

Joselin: Exactly. I started making the shift, probably around 2018, where I was coming off all online buyer leads, still had some seller leads, but I was really starting to shift because I knew I wanted to grow my sphere business. For me to maintain the relationships that I wanted to and to maintain the level of customer service I wanted to, I knew I had to let go of something. My focus really became to shift into working by my sphere and working by referral, and that really came to be in 2019, 2020, and now 2021.

Lindsay: Alright, so 2019, you have 56 and you have $35 million. Then going into 2020, you ended up finishing that year with 46 and $35 million, which is the same amount of volume as you had from the previous year and slightly less sites, but that means you had a higher price point, and you also did that in a pandemic year when the whole world shut down. Talk to me about that year and what you faced.

Joselin: 2020, I thought was going to be my year. I’m hiring an assistant this year, I’m going to grow my business, and then March 2020 came.

Lindsay: It shut down everyone’s lives. [laughs]

Joselin: I don’t know if you remember what happened.

Lindsay: Take it back. March 2020.

Joselin: The way the news was going, I truthfully did not think that we were working again in 2020. I thought that we were going to be shut down for the year. I did not think that we were going to make any more money. I was even thinking what do I do? Do I go into teaching? What can I do with my career? Because I’m not going to be in real estate after this year. This is where my mind was. What I did, especially the first few weeks of the lockdown, is every single– depending on if they were under agreement, about to go on market, or a buyer searching, I would have set calls with every single one of my clients.

I’d give them updates about what are we doing, where we’re at and what we’re seeing. This was especially true for the clients I had under agreement, because they were worried like, are we closing this?

Lindsay: All the worries that you were having, they were having too.

Joselin: Times 10, so it was really important for me to just keep my clients calm, and even if I didn’t have an answer just to be there, and a lot of letting them talk. That was my 2020. I did end up with less units closed but my volume stayed the same. The other thing that happened that year is my income increased tremendously. Even though I had the same sales volume, because at this point now, that shift had really come from leads to sphere business and to referral business, that increased my split levels. I was making a lot more money and I was like, “Oh gee, great. I’m going to sell 10 less units and make a whole lot more money.” That was my 2020.

Lindsay: Then 2021, so we have to make sure the listeners know at this point that you are very superstitious so I’m going to switch my wording to make sure that we don’t mess anything up. At the moment, we are in the end of October and you are looking like, with everything under agreement that you have at the moment, you will be around 57 transactions, potentially, and $42 million in volume. Definitely another big growth year for you.

Joselin: This was definitely a big growth year for me over last year, and like Lindsay mentioned, I am super superstitious.

Lindsay: We got fingers crossed. We’re hoping.

Joselin: To me, it is not done until I get the on record message. I do not count my chickens before they hatch. Under agreements are just under agreements.

Lindsay: I heard someone say the other day, don’t smell the roses until it closes, and I really liked that phrase.

Joselin: I really like that one. That’s exactly what I believe. I don’t like to talk about things before they happen. This is assuming I don’t do anything else for the rest of the year and assuming everything closes, I’m at about $42 million in volume, which will be really my flagship year. I’ve always wanted to close up to $50 million as a gold. I’m not hitting that goal, but again, it’s that–

Lindsay: You’re landing closer and closer.

Joselin: Landing closer and closer, so better than $35 million.

Lindsay: Absolutely, awesome.

Joselin: Speaking of the superstitious, when Anthony texted me that 19 under agreement, I was like, “Okay, fine.” Then he put it on Facebook and it was a closed group, it wasn’t like it was a public group. I texted him back and I said, “Mr. Lamacchia, if any of these do not close, I am coming to you personally for my commission.” [laughs]

Lindsay: How did that work out? Did they all close?

Joselin: I think there was one that didn’t close but then we put it back under. I don’t remember exactly what happened. There was like one.

Lindsay: He didn’t have to pay you any commission.

Joselin: He didn’t have to pay me and I would never have followed up with that. He’s been my biggest cheerleader since I started here and he was just trying to pat me on the back.

Lindsay: Of course, and he doesn’t believe in that kind of stuff at all.

Joselin: He doesn’t believe in that and he thinks I’m absolutely insane for believing it but I do. I don’t count it until it’s done.

Moderator: Let’s take a quick break and hear from Dave Karoly the master of objection handling, as he teaches you how to overcome buyer and seller concerns.

Dave: The question we received is how to respond if a seller says they don’t want a sign because they don’t want their neighbors to know or whoever else. Truth be told, we all know the value in the sign typically is to us, the agent. It allows all the neighbors to know that we have the home for sale. How often does a buyer nowadays purchase the home from a sign in the yard? It’s very rare, we all know that they’re searching online, they’re searching through MLS. While that’s to our own benefit, a lot of times if you want to push for the sign for your exposure, great, but it’s oftentimes a red flag to me, because their neighbors are going to find out whether there’s a sign in the yard or not.

People are going to start driving by the house. People are going to start showing up randomly. A lot of times they’ll be dressed in professional clothes. The neighbors are eventually going to find out that it’s happening. We can talk about some strategies to reduce the amount of exposure, but the more you reduce the exposure, the less you’re going to attract buyers, and ultimately they may cost themselves some money in the sale. It’s kind of a red flag if they don’t want a sign, they don’t want people knowing they’re selling. They’re limiting their own exposure to the home.

Again, this is a discussion for after they’re signed up. You obviously want to have the listing in hand, but talk about why, talk about ways to reduce it. If they don’t really want a sign at the end of the day, I’d rather have a listing without a sign than not have a listing at all.

Moderator: Thanks, Dave. Now, let’s get back to the show.

Lindsay: Tell me about one of the years from 2013 to now, one of the years that you feel like you had some struggles, and share with our audience what that struggle was, and maybe it’s a couple of different times that you have this, but what those struggles were and how you overcame them.

Joselin: This is a really great question because one thing that people don’t actually get or understand is that all agents, doesn’t matter what level you’re at, you’re going to have bad times and you’re going to have bad years.

Lindsay: They’re totally different.

Joselin: They’re totally different and I have so many agents that come to me and think that everything is rosy all the time. I’m like, “You guys may see a few closings that I have, but you have no idea how many listings I lost out on.” How many deals fell through. I’m not going to share that stuff all the time but this happens to everybody. Two stories that I want to share is one was in 2018. I’m Italian. We’re from Sicily. My dad was born in Sicily so growing up we spent a lot of our summers in Sicily. I used to go to Sicily every summer of my life or every other year, and there was a period at the beginning of the 2000s, like 2010, ’11, ’12, ’13, I went to Italy every single summer, and that is my happy place.

Lindsay: You’re not summering on the cape. You’re summering in Italy so that sounds even better.

Joselin: I’m summering in a small village with like goats and chickens and family, in the house my dad was born in, but yes. Sicily is one of the most incredible places on the planet. At that point in 2018, I had been so focused on building my career and building work, that I had not been to Italy since 2015. Five years had gone by that I hadn’t seen my family, that I hadn’t seen friends, and quite frankly, I hadn’t had a vacation. For me, 2018 was like, “I’m going to Italy. This is what I’m doing. I’m going in the summer.”

So I took two weeks and I went to Italy. What I did, I made one of the biggest mistakes you can do as an agent, is I purposely tried to slow myself down so that way I could enjoy my vacation. What ended up happening was, yes, I enjoyed my vacation, but I came back home at the end of August 2018, with zero under agreement. I had nothing in my pipeline. At that point, I’d only had $12 million closed, and to make president’s club at Lamacchia Realty, you need $16 million closed. I was like, how am I going to get $4 million?

Lindsay: You probably because you’ve taken this quick break. Two weeks is like a normal vacation that someone would take in normal life, but in real estate, that’s a long time. Now you probably, not only do you not have something under agreement, but you also haven’t had conversations necessarily with some of your buyers that you have.

Joselin: Yes, I wasn’t prospecting.

Lindsay: You have to pick back up everything.

Joselin: Exactly. You have to pick back up. There was no prospecting, there were no calls being made. I was working on my transactions that I had, and communicating with clients that needed to be, but I wasn’t doing anything more than that. I came back and I was like, okay, what am I going to do? How am I going to get this going? I’m not sure if any of you were in the business in the fall of 2018 or remember the fall of 2018, but we had a little bit of a slowdown. I think it was like a mid-election year so it was a little bit of a slowdown. What I do is, one thing that I do is I really try to focus on education. I’m still learning myself. I don’t have all the answers and the only way that I can continue to improve is to continue to learn.

One of my favorite things to follow is the Crush It page because Anthony’s always doing phenomenal updates and I use a lot of that, but I’m also reading a lot of articles. I have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal. Reading is what I do. What I realized was this is going to be a great fall for buying. Inventory was up. It’s a little bit slower. I think interest rates were up a little bit more at that time if I’m not mistaken, or something was going on because there was a little bit of a shift in the market. I used that collateral, that material that I had, and news articles, company updates that we had or Anthony Lamacchia’s updates that we had. I was sending them to every buyer that I had been working with.

Inevitably, January, February, March, are the time you’re going to sign up the most buyer clients. You’re not going to sell all those clients a home, especially the first few months, because it’s the spring market, it’s competitive, but that’s when you’re going to sign up the most amount of buyers. Naturally, by the spring and fall, you’re going to have some buyers that fall off. Either they’re getting discouraged and they’re not finding anything. I called every single buyer that I did not sell a house to and I go, “Now’s the time to buy. You need to find a house between now and say February, because that’s when the spring market starts back up again. If you don’t want to be stuck in that same multiple offer grind, now’s your opportunity to buy.”

I would just send them the articles. I would send them the market updates. I would show them the inventory levels, about how we had more inventory and inventory was sitting. I just reached out to every buyer that I didn’t sell and just was like, “Here’s the info, here’s the info,” and they responded. I needed from September to December, so three months to get them under agreement and close. I needed $4 million, but I ended up selling $6 million and that time period.

Lindsay: It almost like you overcompensated and now you’ve got all these additional deals that maybe if you hadn’t gone to Italy, you may have just gone through the rest of the year. You don’t know.

Joselin: You don’t know. Exactly. This fall is actually reminding me a little bit of that fall 2018 as well, where we’re actually starting to see properties sit a little bit. We’re actually starting to see price adjustments a little bit, and these are things we did not see four or five, six months ago in the spring, 2021.

Lindsay: You know that worked for you back then, so you can now grab that out of your playbook.

Joselin: Exactly. I’m grabbing it out of my playbook and it is such a great tool. If you’re not studying the market and studying market trends, you are doing such a disservice for your clients because you are their educator and you are their advisor. You’re not a salesperson. You’re not there to sell them a house. If they don’t like the house, you’re not selling it to them. It’s more educating them on when to buy and how to buy. I’ve been using that a lot right now. The other thing is I don’t always share my personal life and stories because some things are just meant to remain private.

Lindsay: Absolutely.

Joselin: I went through probably one of the most trying times of my life in 2020 and it was probably the most difficult year for me personally. I have a lot of people that always ask, “Well, you don’t have this or you don’t have that.” I always look at them and I go, “You don’t know what I have and you don’t know what I’m dealing with behind closed doors.”

Lindsay: You never know what anyone is dealing with.

Joselin: What anyone is dealing with. For me, I used negative energy that came from that and I converted it to positive energy. What I have going for me is that I truly love what I do. I love real estate and I love my clients. Even though I was going through the most difficult time of my life, I showed up with a smile on my face for my clients, because some clients knew what I was going through. Not everyone did, because it’s about them, it’s not about me. I need to show up and be happy. You’re getting a house, you’re selling a house. I would show up with a fake smile on my face because I had to put myself in there mentally, but I’m telling you, within five minutes of being with my clients, it was a real, genuine smile.

It was genuine happiness of being there and I really propelled myself to work. I was like, if I can’t control what’s happening in my life personally, I can control what I do in my work life. I’m going to use this as motivation to not cry, not self-pity and wallow, but I’m going to use this to really excel in an area that I know that I can. I put that energy into my clients and I put that energy into growing my business because I felt so out of control in one aspect, that I had to be completely in control in the other. Because of that, I made the president’s club at Lamacchia Realty in four and a half months.

Lindsay: You were the fastest person I think that’s ever made it. I want to just say that I know what you’re talking about. I know the struggles that you’ve had, and I can honestly say that some people would look at some of those things and they would go into a hole and they would have the right to. People would look at them and say, it makes sense that they’d be in a hole because of XYZ reasons. But you can put yourself into a hole or you can put yourself and your energy into something that you love, and it’s not necessarily a distraction. It’s a good healthy distraction, I guess, in a way.

I commend you on realizing that you needed to move forward and do the things that you could control, because there’s a lot of people that wouldn’t necessarily do that. Like you said, you could have folded. You could have gone into a depression. Any of those things could have happened to you, but you didn’t let it, and that is a testament to your character. Like I said at the very beginning, you’re one of the hardest-working people I know and it shows.

Joselin: Think you, and I’m very fortunate. Lindsay does know the personal issues that I went through because she is a dear friend of mine, even outside of work. I’m very fortunate to be at a brokerage where I have the full support of my company. If I needed to take the time, they had me covered if I needed it, and don’t get me wrong, I had my moments of depression. I had my moments of crying. I also don’t cry. To push me to cry, like I have to be–

Lindsay: Things have to be bad.

Joselin: I never cry in public but I had my moments where I let it out behind closed doors and, okay, I can either keep crying or I can push through this. I chose to push through because I do believe that it is, at some point, you have to allow yourself the time to mourn and grieve, but you also have to give yourself the opportunity to overcome it. I’m also the type of person that tries to find the positive in life and look at the blessings that I have outside of the pitfalls that we have, because everybody has them. Everybody has something they’re dealing with.

Lindsay: Everyone has a threshold of stress. Something that you went through might not have been as stressful for someone else, maybe. I doubt that, but just saying like, everyone has something that to you doesn’t stress you out at all, it might stress someone else out a lot, and they’ve dealt with other situations that don’t bother them. You never know where that line is for someone but you got to, no matter what, you got to push through.

You got to be able to move on and do the things that you can control, like you said. I was speaking to an agent yesterday who was having a very similar situation that they’ve gone through some difficult times and they were able to pull through, and they just had to put their energy into their work and that’s okay.

Joselin: That’s okay.

Lindsay: Sometimes people make you feel like you have to grieve or you have to have that time, or like, “No, take the time.” Well, no, if doing real estate is what makes you happy, then do that and put your– and that’s a healthy thing to do.

Joselin: I’m telling you Harry Styles and real estate got me through the worst times my life. [laughs] But what else connects there is, we had an agent at our company, Meg Martin, and she was just the most positive person –

Lindsay: We have all been inspired by her.

Joselin: – that I’ve ever met in my life. She had terminal cancer, joined Lamacchia, and said, “I’m going to make president’s club” and she did it. I was sitting with her. We were in Aruba on our president’s club. I didn’t know this at the time, but now that I know, Megan only had a couple more months left to live. We were on that trip in April and Megan passed, I believe it was in August. It was just a few months and we were sitting on a boat together. We’re on a jolly pirate adventure and people are swinging from pirate ropes into the ocean.

She and I are sitting at the bow of the boat having this moment and she asked me a very personal question. She said, “Joselin, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t ask this and if you don’t feel comfortable, don’t feel obligated to answer.” It was about the same struggles that I went through in 2020 and I told her about it. I just said “Megan, I have no business, no business saying any of this to you and complaining to or sharing my grief with you because of what you’re going through.” The thing that about Megan that was so amazing is that she said “Joselin, I understand what you’re going through and I would be a mess if I were going through what you went through.”

Lindsay: Absolutely.

Joselin: That just shows that everybody —

Lindsay: Everyone is different.

Joselin: Everybody’s different. Everyone has their different levels of grief and you don’t know what people are going through so in the words of Harry Styles, treat people with kindness.

Lindsay: I love it. Thank you, Joselin, so much. This was an absolute pleasure.

Joselin: Thank you.

Lindsay: I think that our listeners are going to learn so much from you and I’m not surprised, but it is what it is.

Joselin: I am so happy that you invited me on, and you are one of my heroes, so thank you.

Lindsay: I can’t wait to be on your podcast soon. We are going to link that in the show notes so everyone can go and check out. Joselin has a podcast as well with another Lamacchia agent, Darlene Umina. Definitely check that out. We’ll put the link in the show notes. Again, thank you so much, Joselin. I really appreciate your time.

Joselin: Thank you.

Thanks for joining us on the Agents Who Crush It In Real Estate podcast. We hope you’ve learned some valuable takeaways. Be sure to take action and grow your business. You can check out the Episode Notes and more content from the show at CrushitinRE.com/podcast. And if you’d like this episode, and you’d like to hear more stories, please share with others, post on social media or leave a rating or review. To catch all the latest from Anthony you can follow him on Instagram at Crush It In Real Estate on Facebook and YouTube. Thanks again and we’ll see you next time.