Episode 198: Matthew Bizzarro
On this episode of The Brad and Taylor Show, we have Matthew Bizzarro of The Bizzaro Agency!
To watch the full episode, check it out on YouTube below. In the meantime, here’s a transcript of the conversation…
Here’s what you missed from Matthew Bizzarro…
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Taylor: Welcome to The Brad and Taylor Show. Today we have Matthew Bizzarro.
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Brad: You’re listening to The Brad and Taylor Show, a podcast that inspires entrepreneurs to pursue their passions. We’re sitting down with some of the best to learn how they got started and some lessons they learned along the way.
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Taylor: Hey Matthew.
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Matthew: Hey, how’s it going?
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Taylor: Good. How are you doing?
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Matthew: We’re doing beautiful today. It’s a beautiful day here in New York.
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Brad: Oh yeah. That’s awesome. Well, tell us a little bit about you. What do you do?
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Matthew: All right. So I am the broker-owner of the Bizzarro Agency. We are a boutique real estate firm that focuses on upper Manhattan and my job is to impact lives.
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Brad: I like it. I like it. So how’d you got into this?
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Matthew: Oh, man. My story for real estate is really funny. I moved to New York in 2001 to actually become a teacher. And it was phenomenal. I worked at a really great school in Upper Manhattan and I realized within the first year that it was nearly impossible to live in Manhattan on what was a Catholic school salary. So I had to get another job and I waited tables for a bit. That ran its course quickly. I was downtown and it was very much a business crowd, a business lunch crowd that would throw a tantrum. If they asked for one ice cube in their diet Coke and you get them to, oh yeah, life is short. So then I fell into real estate. Part-time working summers and I just absolutely loved it. I taught and did a real estate tandem until you know, for many years. And then the school I worked at ended up closing, but what happened was my real estate business just kept growing and growing. That was my next natural step.
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Brad: That’s awesome. So how’d you build your team and how did you go from there? How’d you build your team?
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Matthew: Yeah. So when I worked for a smaller company for about 10 years, and then when I went on my own to really focus and specialize in the neighborhoods up here, I always thought it was just going to be me. And then I brought aboard one of my clients and I trained him and he was incredible. I taught him everything I knew and he just started crushing it. And then he brought on somebody. Then word started to get out that we actually train folks and we can actually teach them how to be a successful real estate agent that can have a career. And you know, we just took off.
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Taylor: How long was it before you ended up deciding yes, I’m going to bring on somebody else. How long were you doing it?
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Matthew: I was only doing it solo for about, under our organization for about six months. And I actually made the jump thinking, look, I have enough business and I’ll be able to feed my family and everything is good. And it just sort of became a natural thing that I was never looking for. And then as I realized, because I’m still a teacher, right. So I love teaching. So I was able to still do that by teaching, you know, and being able to have an impact on people’s lives by giving them a career. So they can feed their families and lives. And I just realized that I had that passion and then my passion sort of became, how can I help others in the real estate field?
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Taylor: That’s awesome. So how many people do you have on your team right now?
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Matthew: We’re at 27. We have 27 really rockstar buyer agents.
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Taylor: That’s awesome. Are you guys all kind of in the general Manhattan area or where do you guys service?
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Matthew: So we service our main core focus is upper Manhattan and the Bronx. So I call it so basically above a hundred 10th street, what I call unsexy Manhattan, where everyone goes to Manhattan, they want to do everything downtown and they want to see all the sites, which is awesome. And then there’s this really great residential area. That’s just north where a lot of people choose to live because they can afford it. It’s one of the most affordable places for first-time home buyers. So I always dug in, I’ve lived in the area for almost 20 years. So we always just dug in there. And then what happened was, as we expanded, our territory has expanded, right? So we do a lot of business in the upper west side. We do a lot of businesses in Brooklyn. But it was always staying with the core belief that we are going to service the area that we know and live the most, which is upper Manhattan.
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Brad: That’s awesome. So what’s your favorite way to market right now? Maybe not the best way. Maybe not the most profitable one. What’s your favorite way to market?
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Matthew: Honestly, my favorite way to market is just being with people. Just being out there and you’d be like, Hey, I got a sweatshirt, who can I go find it, give this sweatshirt too. Or just go in, go into the park with my kids, just hang out or farmer’s market, whatever it is. I always find that person’s connection. I mean great there’s Facebook and there’s Google and there’s all this stuff, but I really find what I enjoy. And my fairway is just being with people. The only thing I’m old school in.
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Taylor: It’s not a bad thing that face-to-face connection is huge. A lot of people are kind of steering away from that. So that’s awesome.
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Matthew: Yeah, it’s a big mistake because people are great.
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Taylor: I know. Do you guys do any community events?
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Matthew: We do. We just didn’t do a ton. Obviously COVID sort of slowed that down, but we’re looking to sort of roll some of that back, starting in 2022, which we’re super excited about. We’ve been doing some very little personal things, but you know, our hands got tied on that for the last 18 months. So that’s one of the things I’m most looking forward to is to be able to start doing that again for our awesome clients and friends.
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Taylor: Yeah. Do you have any goals for your team in 2022 besides the events that are coming up? That is super exciting about those events now face to face getting back to.
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Matthew: Well, we’re going to keep growing. We’re going to keep serving our clients. I mean, that’s our goal, just to serve and help as many people as possible and really just coming from that service and not coming from transactional. I think that’s where a lot of real estate goes wrong because they’re worried about transactions. They’re worried about making money. Agents see people as dollar signs, which is a huge mistake. We’re just trying to do things differently and actually look at people as people and be able to help them. So I don’t care if your price range is 150,000 or 1.5 million, you’re a person or a family that needs to be served. And that’s our job, to help you.
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Taylor: Over the years, what is the worst property or showing that you’ve been to? This is my favorite question.
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Matthew: Yeah. And I’m sure you’ve heard alliances. Look, this is a really tough one for me because being in New York, you know, I’ve seen everything between you. So many bed bugs, there are jumping raccoons, people in showers when they’re not supposed to be home. We have like, literally we were in a property once when someone went to the bathroom upstairs and it leaked through to that, to the people downstairs, like dripping on them. So we’ve seen a lot, but I’ll tell you the most challenging one was we had to do an open house once and I don’t want this to be morbid, but you know, I want to be able to bring one that you find hard to beat, right? New York, many years ago, was in New York city summer and it gets hot in the summer.
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You know, you’re talking to August, you can be a hundred, 110 for like a week or two straight. And so we had an open house on this property and the property was empty. So go to the open house and there’s this smell like, oh no, I can’t describe the smell. So I’m like, all right, well the property is empty, so, okay. It’s not something that, you know, we’re doing or the owner did and I couldn’t pin it. But as soon as I walked into the building, I could smell it as like, oh, this is interesting, and then as it continued to go up, you know, to the third floor, it gets…
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Taylor: Worse and worse? But what is that?
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Matthew: Worse and worse every step. So here we are at 110 and turns out, the neighbor next door had unfortunately God bless him, had passed away, but he had passed away about three weeks ago. It was really sad. Because it was just an older person. And I guess they didn’t have anybody checking on him, which breaks my heart. But nobody knew. And except there was no air conditioning there. There was no nothing. And it was, you know, it was a hundred plus degrees for two weeks and it was unlike, so people were coming to the open house and being like, what’s that smell? And I said because I didn’t know. I don’t know. But halfway through the open house guests who came to EMS, fire department medical, and literally go in and bring the person out, like there are people who come to the open house and they’re like bringing the person out.
00:09:34:09 –> 00:09:37:02
Brad: They’re like, can I take both of them? Just kidding.
00:09:40:16 –> 00:09:59:28
Matthew: Yeah. There’s now a combo apartment. That was a day and a smell and a moment in real estate when I was like, I think this is an amazing profession, but we really do get to see almost everything.
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Taylor: Yeah. You never know what you’re going to walk into.
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Matthew: And then that’s the thing I tell my agents too. Even if you’ve been in the business for 20 years, you still see things like this as perfection that every day is completely different.
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Taylor: I have to ask what happened to that apartment, that building, did you sell it?
Matthew: Yeah.
Taylor: Okay. Was it someone from the open house?
00:10:25:28 –> 00:10:42:14
Matthew: Honestly? Yes. I never, I never brag about myself, but there was a person that came, thankfully it will be after all the medics, everything came, but, um, yeah. And then they came back another time to look, and really loved the apartment. It was lovely.
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Brad: It was just the smell that day.
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Matthew: And you know, that went away. So then I said, wow, this is something else. I was like, all right, if I can sell this man, I can sell anything.
00:11:00:14 –> 00:11:09:03
Taylor: I can do anything. Now you sold it. You got this. How long ago was that, did that happen when you were like newer to real estate when that was going on?
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Matthew: Yeah, I was, it was probably 15 years ago. Yeah. So I was pretty, pretty green and I mean, you know, looking back on it and that took a lot of fear out of me, it gave me a lot of confidence.
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Brad: Right. That’s so true.
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Brad: Yeah. That’s awesome. So what are some of your guys’ goals for the next year? You and your team, or do you plan on growing?
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Matthew: Yeah, we want to grow, we definitely want to keep increasing in size. But it’s an interesting challenge because I’m looking for the right people. I’m not somebody that hires anybody. Like a lot of other brokers, their business model is just to be a factory and charge desk fees and they don’t care. And that’s just not my style. It’s not how I was built. I want to be able to actually impact people. So it’s a little challenging to bring on people because you have to have the right people that have to be the right fit. I mean, not only like culture, because culture is such a buzzword overused these days, but they really just have to be great people with good hearts. And those, unfortunately, they’re there, those folks are harder to find but I’m relentlessly looking. So we want to grow from that point because I always say like, we could be triple the size right now, but I don’t want to be a babysitter. You know, just not interested in that. I’ve got four kids. I don’t need 150 other ones, just running around recklessly. Not good.
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Taylor: Yeah. And coming from your teaching background, are you still the one doing all the main training when you do bring on new clients or new agents?
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Matthew: I do a lot of the training because it’s something that I like to do. You know, I have a lot of help now. We have a lot of systems and processes and a lot of wonderful people on the support side, my COO, my managers that are amazing. So they definitely help, but I think, you know, truly being able to, you know, cause I’ve just been blessed with a lot of knowledge. So I want to share that, I want to give that spirit of abundance. So I think it’s important that I’m a part of that personally for me.
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Taylor: Yeah. That’s awesome. I like that you are keeping true to what your core values were from the start, from what you’ve mentioned so far. So that’s awesome, you’re continuing to grow, but keeping that true.
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Matthew: Yeah. Because you know what, it’s you who grow at the right time with the right people, and if you train the right people, we’re going to grow their business. And they continue to grow and just good things happen. But yeah, not babysitting. I don’t have time for that.
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Taylor: Not in this market. What’s the best business book that you’ve read?
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Matthew: One of the business books I really like is called The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor. I don’t know if you’ve ever read or heard of that one. The Happiness Advantage. It’s a great book. It talks about all of his research on just people’s thoughts. I find that fascinating because I think so many people aren’t happy in general. I think a lot of our systems and our society tell us this and how we think. And I think a lot of that, you know, it’s challenging. They’ll get like I’m not sunshine and roses all the time. But I think it’s a really interesting kind of an eye-opener to what’s possible.
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Taylor: Yeah. Do you think that books help you understand when you’re working with clients from their perspective and where they’re coming from with certain things?
00:15:01:19 –> 00:16:15:25
Matthew: Yeah, for sure. Because it all comes around like being positive. And do you think about, I hate to say that the glass is half full analogy, but I mean, when you look at a situation and especially in real estate, because look, you’re going to get knocked down hundreds of times, you know, like in Manhattan alone, there’s a statistic that 92% of real estate agents quit in the first year. I mean, there are thousands of people that try this, right? Because they see it on TV, they’re like, oh, I can do this. I can make millions of dollars. Well, no you can’t. But that’s another thing, right? You can, if you build your business, but you’re not going to walk a game and sell millions of dollars of pet houses. But you know, because you get knocked down so much, you have to get back up. Can you get back up, but do you look at that as positive, you get knocked down and say, oh man, I’m done with the stinks. I hate it. Or do you say, wow, this happened to me. So I’m going to learn from it. And now I know before I entered this situation, how to handle it. So it’s never going to happen again. And so how do you sort of spin not even spinning, but how do you look at, to see positivity in situations?
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Taylor: Right. Yeah, absolutely. Before we go today, how can people get a hold of you?
00:16:21:03 –> 00:16:34:10
Matthew: They can go to our website, bizarroagency.com. I’m happy with all channels, YouTube, Facebook, you can find my Matthew Bizarro and Instagram is @meetbizarro.
00:16:35:04 –> 00:16:37:20
Brad: Awesome. I look at it. Hey, thanks for coming and sharing your story with us today.
00:16:38:06 –> 00:16:40:02
Matthew: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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Hello. Hello. Are you there? Are there, are there, Hey guys, we just wanted to thank you for listening on either a podcast or on the YouTube video here. If you guys wanted to subscribe, that would be awesome. That would mean a lot to us. If you guys could give us a five-star review as well, that would be amazing. And we’ll see you on the next one.
Check out Matthew Bizzarro:
The Bizzarro Agency
bizzarroagency.com
Facebook: @matthewbizz
Instagram: @meetbizzarro
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