Insight, Innovation, & Inspiration: Who is the Miami Beach Brokers® Managing Broker?
by Christopher J. Lazaro,
Florida Licensed Real Estate Broker & Realtor®
Miami Beach Brokers® & Metro International Investments
The intention of this article is to introduce myself as a Real Estate Broker to:
1) any prospective customer or client,
2) any would-be entrepreneur interested in how I got started in the real estate business,
3) or any prospective agent who might wish to join either of my two real estate brokerages, Metro International Investments or Miami Beach Brokers®.
A Little About Me:
I am a former senior information technology professional, originally from New York, who ended his time in Corporate America as a full-time employee after a 15-year career in the industry with the latter years serving as a Sr. IT Architect at IBM, mainly for their largest financial account, American Express. In that position, I worked directly with senior executives to reshape their information technology portfolio spanning thousands of servers and hundreds of reference architectures, which we later refined into just over 30 reference architectures for the entire company! This resulted in a 100-fold increase in productivity by harnessing the power of new technologies, such as Cloud, while drastically reducing their overall data center footprint and expenses. The projects I headed included technology migrations, typically from Microsoft to Linux, Sun Microsystems, or IBM's AIX on P-series & zOS & ZBX platforms. I often had to leverage dozens of subject matter experts and other delivery-level personnel to design & cost highly available, globally distributed, information systems infrastructure for IBM's clients. I led each of my project teams to great success for the customer & the company, but as I have always said, "I am only as good as my team", and I thank them all for their tremendous dedication to every project and for helping me make my career at IBM a success! My projects ranged from as little as several hundred thousand dollars to over fifty million dollars!
Metro International Realty PLLC
I resigned from IBM at the end of 2011, to start a career in an off-market commercial real estate business with an experienced broker who had over 40+ years of commercial brokerage & development experience discreetly marketing off-market (unlisted) opportunities and targeting them to senior executives at major investment companies including real estate investment trusts, family offices, and high-net-worth investors & investor groups seeking investment opportunities not publicly advertised. We formed a company together, Metro International Realty (Metro International Investments is the company's DBA), and closed a number of seven and eight-figure deals before he retired at the end of 2019 and I took over as the sole owner of the company and it continues to be in operation to this day with plans to expand the company's scope into Mortgage Loan Origination, and possibly other areas as well.
Miami Beach Brokers® - How I came to start Miami Beach Brokers®
The 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic
January & February of 2020 were very good months for Metro International Investments! Over 120K in commissions in just the first two months of the year, and for a small company, like mine, that is awesome! I do not believe I was ever more optimistic about the future than I was around Valentine's Day of that year. Even as we headed into what was supposed to be a "2-week lockdown", I was so confident in the future I bought a brand new car the day before the lockdown was to begin in March of 2020! Little did I know that the COVID-19 pandemic would become such a disaster, the stock markets would crash and radically whipsaw, and my sales pipeline would vaporize!
News headlines drove the markets and some feared the end of the world. I remained calm, at home, and while I was certainly concerned about the future, I did not panic. I had already lost almost everything and rebuilt my life TWICE in my life; the DotCom bust which coincided with the September 11th tragedy, and the 2008-2010 Mortgage & Real Estate Meltdown. I had already seen this movie before, so to speak, and this time panic was not an option, I now had a baby girl, Aryel, who was not even a year old yet, to take care of and that was above all else the highest priority so I would do & try just about anything to make sure we could simply maintain our life while the dust settled from what turned out to be a global economic disaster.
During the pandemic, Metro International Investments, my company, took a massive loss and more than 75% of the sales pipeline was wrecked. Transactions were suddenly canceled, and the entire world panicked as markets roiled with every news headline leading to a staggering loss in pending commissions. Many good agents left the business to move on to greener pastures doing something else and a number of brokers either closed up shop or merged into larger brokerage houses in some way.
Insight
However, I was not going to sit idly by and go bankrupt! Metro International Investments has performed for years and I reluctantly followed the advice of my CPA and engaged the Small Business Administration for an EIDL Loan to assist the company with some additional working capital as there seemed to be no end in sight to the pandemic and how it would impact life as we know it. The problem I had was that the name, "Metro International Investments", according to many customers in the past, came off as pretentious to many people, or was "not obviously a real estate company", and I realized that it would be an uphill battle to rebrand the company as a retail residential real estate brokerage when it served, almost exclusively, a clientele of sophisticated real estate investors for the prior 7 years!
Innovation
I had an idea! I decided to dust off some LLC documents I purchased in 2017 and began to build a new residential brokerage: Miami Beach Brokers LLC (dba, Miami Beach Brokers®) granting brand & marketing rights to Metro International Investments. The company would make an investment in operating as (and therefore doing some branding & marketing work as) Miami Beach Brokers®, a real estate company specializing in the greater Miami Beach Real Estate markets. All monies collected as a result of this activity would go directly to Metro International Investments, without any fee(s) to Miami Beach Brokers LLC, for the first 18 months, and then a monthly fee & transaction charges would apply in the future until the arrangement would expire or be renewed. This arrangement would provide an instant, ready-to-market solution for the company to quickly target the local market and bring in commissions from residential sales & rentals while at the same time establishing a brand I had been desirous of building for several years; a natural win-win scenario.
Inspiration
Where better than the Miami Beach real estate market to quickly & readily target a diverse, above-average income demographic? By doing this I was able to quickly bring in business with a name that has a built-in, internationally recognized cache, Miami Beach Brokers®. I went so far as to purchase the domain, MiamiBeachBrokers.com, trademark the logo, and trademark the name, Miami Beach Brokers®, itself!
The Miami Beach Brokers® Official Logo
With the help of a talented branding specialist, whom I have mentioned in the Miami Beach Brokers® Official WordPress Blog, I rolled out a brand that I am having a great deal of fun & success with! You can find my business social media & web presences just about anywhere @MiamiBeachBrokers and our website is https://MiamiBeachBrokers.com. I even went out and bought an entirely new wardrobe so I could fully embrace & represent my new brand! (see below)
Christopher J. Lazaro, Florida Licensed Real Estate Broker & Realtor®
One Business Starts Feeding Back to the Other
I am sure that everyone would agree that necessity breeds innovation and the circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic forced me to get creative. As a result, the business (nearly 18 months later) has done a fair number of transactions, built a large sales pipeline of individuals actively seeking to buy real estate, and it is nurturing people who are considering the sale of real estate. It has also resulted in new opportunities now coming to light and in the pipeline for Metro International Investments' core business in commercial real estate. Many people who buy very expensive homes either have or wish to have residential and commercial real estate investments!
It has been a very expensive endeavor that has required sacrifice and an unyielding entrepreneurial spirit, but I believe I made the right decisions to pursue things this way, and at the same time, I regrettably made some (not all) poor choices with respect to marketing that burned up a lot of capital without any return on investment. This is a subject for another post though, and I look forward to expounding upon it.
The Miami Real Estate Market of 2021
The tsunami of people fleeing the Communism of the North and the West and the Governors-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named has created other challenges that must continue to be pushed through and navigated. MLS Inventory is down by 65-80% virtually everywhere in Florida, meanwhile, there are ten times as many buyers as I have ever seen and virtually every MLS Listing sees 5-20 offers, many "All Cash" with "No Contingencies" and 10-20% over the asking price. Everyone thinks, "Oh you are in Florida so you must be killing it in real estate!"; the answer to that is a hard "NO". I am making a living because I am aggressive and resourceful. In an environment where every property gets 20 offers, this means that 19 agents do not eat. Whereas in a normal market there might be 2-4 offers on any given property, a Buyer's agent can assure themselves that with a reasonable list of active buyers, every 1-4 offers is going to yield a commission. With respect to the "Sell Side" of the market, listings are increasingly difficult to come by. Some sellers are waiting for the market to go even higher, while others see the markets of where they might go to also increasing so a rise in their own property value does not make a bargain for them elsewhere, so they decide to stay put or wait and see. Make no mistake about it, it is MUCH harder now to get a deal both accepted and closed!
Looking Forward into 2022
I remain optimistic going into 2022 because I can go into my kvCORE CRM and into my MLS account and see vetted buyers actively searching and inquiring with me about properties. I know I have sales forthcoming, at some point. I also can see prospective sellers signing up for market reports, and so I know I have a shot at being their listing broker so long as they continue to get timely and accurate information from my website AND I do my best to remain front and center as the real estate authority they see online or in their mailbox. I also see myself making changes both personally and in business that will lead to a positive transformation for myself and my businesses; I need a makeover, I need to update my brand further, and I need to get back into the shape I was in only 5-6 years ago! Given all that needs to happen, I am considering creating a YouTube/Rumble Channel that will document my experience "taking it to the next level" and in some cases simply getting back to where I already was.
Lastly, I would like to finish with some quotes I believe that best frame my persona, business acumen, & practices:
"Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.
-- Steve Jobs
"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."
-- Bill Gates
"Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction, and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.”
-- William A. Foster
I wish everyone a happy, healthy, and safe holiday season! On to 2022!
Cheers!
Christopher J. Lazaro
Licensed Real Estate Broker, REALTOR®
Miami Beach Brokers® & Metro International Investments
North Miami Beach, FL 33181
Office: 1-305-985-6285 ext. 888
Fax: 305-521-8995
License Numbers: BK3388297 (Office Code: MBBR01) & BK3252123 (Office Code: MEIT01)
W: https://MiamiBeachBrokers.com
W: https://mii.miami
Follow me on LinkedIn: https://LinkedIn.com/in/christopherlazaro
Follow me on Instagram: @MiamiBeachBroker
Follow me on Facebook: https://Facebook.com/MiamiRealEstateBroker
Follow me on Twitter: @MIABeachBroker
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