Starting a Boutique Brokerage at 40 with Kelly Schuit

I can't believe I just turned 40 years old and I'm starting over. Like this feels terrible. I was finally in a place where it was like all the cylinders were firing. This seems like the worst time to do this.

My guest today is Kelly Schuit, and the part of her story I find the most interesting is that she didn't start in real estate at all. Kelly spent more than 12 years in television advertising in Baltimore — media buying, audience research, figuring out where people actually are and how to get a message in front of them. In 2017 she took a meeting with a broker named James Weiskerger who wanted help with social media advertising for his boutique, Nextep Realty. She agreed to consult. Within a few months she had quit her advertising career entirely and gone all in on real estate.

What happened next made every agent I know sit up. She and James built the W Home Group into one of the top-producing teams in Maryland — over 600 homes closed in 2020. She became co-owner of Nextep Realty, which grew to three offices in Timonium, Fells Point, and Annapolis, roughly a hundred agents, and by 2023 had crossed a billion dollars in volume. Kelly personally has sold over 500 Maryland homes. And then she did the thing I want to spend most of this hour on — she started a brand-new brokerage with her own name on the door. Kelly and Co. Realty, boutique independent, Timonium, Maryland and Pennsylvania licensed.

>> Kelly, welcome. >> Thanks for having me. >> You spent 12 years in TV advertising and quit within months of one meeting. What did you see in that room that made a decision that big feel obvious? >> I went into that meeting thinking, if this guy sells so much real estate and I've never heard of him, I'm going to sell him some ad space. I joked for years after that he must be a better salesperson than me, because I left with a real estate license and he didn't buy any advertising.

I had just exited the cable industry. I was selling ESPN and HGTV when Chip and Joanna were huge, and my husband and I had renovated two of our own properties. I thought I was going to flip some houses — husband is Chip, I'm Jojo. There was a little house on our street going to foreclosure, I was going to start there. My husband said, I'm not working with you, you don't have a license, get your license and we'll talk. He was trying to put me at bay. The timing with James's meeting lined up and I never looked back.

>> What did people around you say? >> I was freaking out. I had a huge job, probably a quarter million dollars a year selling advertising, 12 years of vacation and benefits, and I was going hundred-percent commission from scratch. I did the math and told people I had to be in the top 8% of agents to replace my income. Looking back it's comical — I was coming from an industry where if you weren't the best of six people in the city you were cut out of the buy. Enter real estate, anybody can get a license. Top 8% is a pulse and two closings.

Everyone else said, Kelly, you're overworrying this, it's not rocket science. I said we could pay the bills if I sold eight houses between March 2018 and year end. I sold four my first month. Everyone said they told me so. My therapist says you need the right amount of anxiety — if you don't have enough, nothing gets done. Not her exact words but close enough.

>> You've said the home is the product. What did TV advertising teach you about attention that most agents don't learn on their own? >> A big part of my industry was local auto dealerships. People don't really care which dealership they buy the Jeep from — they want the Jeep. Dealerships spend their effort trying to get people into Adam's Jeep instead of any other Jeep. Clients don't care about that; they care about the Jeep and about convenience. So we talked about the emotional experience of being an Adam's Jeep owner.

When I got to real estate I realized nobody cares about me. They're clicking a Zillow ad and they don't care who opens the door for them. They want to buy that house. So the whole frame became making the client the hero of their story and us the coach helping them get there. The biggest gap between what agents think clients respond to and what they actually respond to? Agents put up a Just Sold and think that's proof they know how to sell a house. Of course you know how to sell a house — that's your job. If knowing how to sell a house is your value proposition, you're the same as every other agent. You just put the bar on the floor.

>> What did you get wrong the first few years? >> Not getting aligned on how we wanted to grow. We didn't intend to build the number-one team or a hundred-agent brokerage — we were selling a lot of real estate, having fun, and the marketing was attracting talent. We never paused to ask, are we building this smart, is this going to be profitable, do we both want this? Brokerages are hard to run at a margin. Once you've built something that big with that many people depending on you, it's really hard to unwind. The lesson that answers all of that: when you own a business you have to learn what you're saying no to. I was saying yes to everything because everything has a value, but it doesn't work for anyone when you say yes to all of them.

>> When a team scales that fast, what breaks first? >> Your personal life. There was a moment I looked in the mirror and thought, I'm going to lose everything that's important to me if I don't figure this out. Every bedtime missed, every bath time missed, date night interrupted every single time. Real estate can eat you alive if you let it — it's unlimited, there's no end. Every entrepreneur has that moment. You either fix it quickly or your life becomes your work.

My filter for new agents now: how would I feel if my phone lights up at 9 PM tonight and this person's number is on my screen? If I don't want to deal with it, that's the answer. It's not fair to them either — they're paying me to mentor them. The business I take personally is my niche. I still sell real estate. For everything outside that lane, I have a team that can handle it or other agent partners. And then I trust them — my marketing director doesn't tell my transaction coordinator how to run transactions. Everyone does what they're supposed to do and it works together.

>> You had ownership in a billion-dollar brokerage, three offices, number one team in the state, and you started over. Walk me through the thinking. >> The moment I knew was well before I was able to execute. Legally, professionally, personally — it's a lot to untangle. Once we clicked that first domino it was rough. A lot of people were impacted and it didn't go the way I was hoping it would. The simplest PG version: alignment was gone, and I'm going to be in this business a really long time. I couldn't keep forcing something that wasn't working.

What surprised me is I wasn't starting over, I was starting from experience. People I didn't expect came with me. People I expected didn't. When you're clear on what you're building and what you're accepting, the right people get excited behind the vision. What I deliberately did not bring: no ego, no drama. There are top-tier agents I love who cannot work here. Personality and fit matters so much, and we have not wavered on that from day one. It's tempting — you see somebody putting up huge numbers, you like them, but you know they'll disrupt everything else. We pass.

>> Who's the right agent for a boutique vs a national brand? >> Agents attracted to the national brand are often agents who can run their own business and don't need back-end support. They have their own lead and referral sources. They don't want to build what I'm building, so a cloud-based 100% model makes sense for them — eXP, Real, local 100% shops. Agents who thrive in a boutique want local exposure, local brokers, real-time answers from someone who lives in the market. My broker still sells. You want to be able to walk into the office and get a real answer from somebody who lives in Baltimore, not someone responsible for the whole East Coast.

Baltimore is a perfect example of a market where boutique wins. The top 10 metros and the specific luxury niches aside, the thirty-plus-size markets reward hyperlocal — Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Baltimore, that type of big-city-with-a-small-town-feel. People in Baltimore do not care about Sotheby's; they care about Mike Smith, the agent in their neighborhood.

>> What are your lead sources now? >> I started with Zillow — part of my deal with my then business partner was some Zillow ZIP codes. I sold 14 million my first year, 90% of it Zillow. If you get on a Zillow Flex team you're going to close houses. But it comes at a cost — your phone rings in the middle of family time and you're going out at 7 PM to show an unqualified disloyal person a house because if you don't, someone else will. I didn't like it. I knew early I needed to stop paying for leads disrupting my life. Now I use realtor.com (higher caliber, I like not funding a competing brokerage), HomeLight and FastExpert, and self-generated digital advertising off our listing leads and website.

>> Walk me through the repeat and referral system. >> Every client goes on an eight-year follow-up because people move every three to five or seven years. Most agents talk to a client year one when they're definitely not moving, then disappear. If a client's going to move inside a year, that's not a normal client — something went wrong. The normal client forgets about you three or four years in because they don't care about the agent, they loved the house you got them. If you don't stay in touch, you could call and say did you like your real estate agent, they'd say yeah she was great, short, blonde — what's her name, Katie? They wouldn't remember.

So first year: pizza on moving day (we get their order), a six-week check-in task on my calendar for me personally, a $25 home-goods or Home Depot gift card around six months, seasonal practical touches — did you file for your Homestead credit, turn off your hose bib for winter, do you have friends looking in your neighborhood. Each anniversary gets a small gift — plant, cookies from a local bakery, handwritten note. Each birthday gets a Starbucks card with a handwritten note. (Starbucks will do free custom gift cards with your logo — most people don't know that.) Annual CMA so they see what the market thinks the house is worth, and a monthly curated newsletter that's actually readable — market, neighborhood, events, local businesses. It goes out looking like each agent's personal newsletter.

>> Who writes the newsletter? >> In-house marketing person, with input from the agents. We lean on local — businesses owned by past clients or that support us. After eight years I'll go to send a CMA and see someone moved without me. I get over it and put the new address in, because I'm a psycho. But most of them, I hear from them.

>> Tell me about the concierge program. >> I pay to prep every listing — paint, deep clean, landscape, small cosmetic updates — nothing out of the seller's pocket until closing. Not a flip — I separate renovated from move-in ready. Move-in ready is floors in great shape, deep-cleaned, painted, caulking done, small cosmetics addressed. I make every seller do four things on their own first: declutter, depersonalize, deodorize, deep clean. Deodorize is a conversation — I'll say, I have a dog too, I totally get it, you might not notice but a buyer walking in will. It's my job to say that.

Then I come in with recommendations and manage the contractors. These are my people — plumber, flooring, painter — not a national company. They prioritize us because they're always at one of my houses. I take a quote off pictures when I can, go to the homeowner with a transparent sheet — we'll invest $7,000, here's what you get, here's your seller net sheet with it factored in, we take it out at closing. If my painter says $500 it's $500 on the sheet, no markup, no float fee. I charge at least 6% commission when I do this and the prep is reimbursed at closing. It gets the house sold faster at a better number. The two I've gotten burned on, I remember the addresses — that's the cost of doing it. One time a seller loved the prep so much they decided not to sell. They paid me back and apologized profusely. I told them that's the best review you could give me.

>> You said after Inman that the future belongs to hyperlocal independents. Make the case. >> Serhant was on stage saying there will be two or three brokerages in five years. Compass and Zillow were in a pissing match. We were there selling Baltimore. Independents are hovering around 47% of brokerages. In any market, there's always going to be a place for boutique. I'm not worried about a Nordstrom up the street if I'm a cute boutique selling high-end women's fashion in a specific area — someone can buy a dress at both, but we're solving different problems. Especially since the pandemic, people are craving humanity. AI, hybrid work, big-box customer service — a boutique brokerage can deliver the white-glove local experience that a national cannot.

>> How do you turn new buyers into long-term clients? >> Set the expectation during the transaction. We're going to help you with your contractors, your home maintenance, your questions after closing — this is what working with us looks like. Then follow the eight-year system. Birthdays, anniversaries, CMAs, the newsletter. The retention isn't a trick; it's just doing what you said you'd do, for longer than most agents are willing to.