And I knew for sure, I did not wanna be a real estate agent because I didn’t wanna be working nights and weekends. I didn’t wanna be on my phone all the time. I wanted to be with my wife and my kids. My name is Eric Sztanyo from Keller Williams Realty and team Sztanyo.com, where we are helping you find your home and strengthen your family. And we’re gonna do something a little bit different this time. I wanted to give a little bit of my back story. If you don’t care about this at all, feel free to click off. You have complete permission. If you are interested about who your real estate agent might be, that you’re working with, then stay tuned. I want to tell you a little bit about how I got into being a real estate agent and this industryyand the story leading up to the many years, decade plus of how I got into work that I really, really love.
A lot of you guys are actually reaching out and I’m helping you now you’re relocating to the Northern Kentucky or Cincinnati area. I’m helping you find homes. We’re getting on a contract and it’s just really fun working with you guys. It’s fun that this thing that I started doing several months ago is reaching people who are moving to the area. And they’re like, “I don’t know anything about the area.” And you find my videos and you guys who I’m working with, I really enjoy working with. That’s, what’s really fun about this is yes, you want an agent who’s gonna be competent and knows what the heck they’re doing in their job, but you also moving to a new city and buying a house is a big deal.
So you wanna work with someone that you at least kind of like, or at least don’t dislike, right? I wanted to do this just so you guys can know a little bit more about me, know a little bit more about my background, and hopefully it’s helpful for you in terms of deciding if you wanna reach out and work with me or not.
How It All Began
So I’m gonna give you a little bit of backstory on how I got into real estate. It’s coming four years now for me, that I’ve been doing real estate full time. And a lot of people, I think traditionally in real estate, come from other areas in their work world before they land in real estate. I was just talking to someone in my office and she said, “you know, this last year with COVID in particularly, you’ve seen a lot of people who have come from the service industry, who’ve come in cuz the market is hot and it attracts a lot. Well, I came in a little bit before that, but let me give you the backstory of how that happened.
So many of you know, I grew up in this area. My family moved down from Michigan when I was seven years old in 1988. I grew up in Northern Kentucky in Florence. I ended up going to college in Nashville. I went to a small Christian university called Lipscomb university. I was a double major in accounting and management and a Bible minor. And when college ended, I really had no idea what to do with my life. What I did know that I liked was youth ministry. That was kind of what I grew up in as a high school student. I got involved with this ministry called young life. When I was in college, I was still involved with young life. I would come home kind of during summer breaks and be involved with different trips with that organization. I would also serve as a kind of youth minister intern in various churches in Nashville.
That’s the one thing I really knew that I liked. I didn’t really want to go on and get my CPA and become an accountant. I grew up in Northern Kentucky Young life. And when I moved back, I asked my area director Rick shear, shout out to Rick. Who’s been doing this for 25 years now. We just celebrated that a few weeks ago. Amazing. But he said, “Hey, we’re trying to start this area in Southeast Cincinnati. Would you like to go help start that area?” I was like,” yeah, absolutely. I would love to do that.” And so that’s when I moved to the Ohio side for the first time in my life and lived in Anderson township area for the next eight years. And so during that time I was a college graduate summa cum laude and I was taking any job I could take that would allow me to give a lot of time to this youth ministry, this Young life organization, cuz we would volunteer 20 – 30 plus hours a week.
So the first thing I did was I tried to sell health insurance and did it very poorly and then after that I needed some money. So I went and interviewed and got a job at La Rose’s pizza as a pizza delivery man.I did that for about a year. I was living in a house with eight other guys. We called it “The Ocho” because the movie Dodge ball had come out and we were all Young life leaders. So we were all living, insanely cheap in this house and I could get by on a pizza delivery salary. From there, I went and worked at mass mutual for a little bit. I got my series seven in 63 and tried out financial planning. I was actually working with my dad and my brother for a little bit and I was 24 trying to manage money for 50 year old’s and sell whole life insurance policies.And they told us to just cold call people. And that was not a good fit. So I stopped doing that as well and failed pretty miserably.
From there I kind of networked to some people that I knew and I got into the internet marketing business. This was around 2006. I started learning about search engine optimization. I started as a link builder and I worked for this internet marketing company for the next really decade. I worked in that industry. Along the way I launched a few of my own e-commerce businesses, which was getting my taste of what it was like to run your own business. I eventually kind of grew up in that business and those owners went and at other businesses. So I kind of took over that business and I did that for about 10 years. So on the personal front, my wife and I got married in 2005, we met through the ministry of young life.
So we had this common values and love of that ministry still. But we got married in 05. We ran hard still doing that ministry till 2008. And then we had our first child in 2010. So while I was working in the internet marketing business, I was also getting married and started having kids around 2010.
And during that time there was a pretty big transition for me of this, I would call it more of the single Paul’s narrative of the new testament go and do mission and Evangelize. And it was a very intense type of ministry. And that kind of shifted with a few new ideas from some other friends that I knew within my kind of Christian network that was more about the Abrahamic narrative. What happened to me is fatherhood started becoming really strong. In my worldview, like I was having kids for the first time, you know, all these revelations were happening as as many of you who are parents know, it’s like, “oh my gosh, the world is different now.” So that narrative and that lifestyle started rising really high.
And so from 2010 – 2015, I would say that fatherhood narrative just kept growing. And what happened was, and I didn’t realize it at the time, but fatherhood became more and more important and work became less and less important. And in the midst of that, I was kind of running that internet marketing business. I also worked for a startup for a few years which I loved that time. It was with cladwell.com. You can check that business out. Its started as a men’s fashion company and turned into like a women’s fashion startup. Great people who I worked with there. But what kind of came out of that time period I realized is work became not as important to me because a fatherhood narrative had become so big. And as I was running my own business- marketplace earth, a few of my clients actually pointing that out to me.
They’re like, “Hey, when the rubber meets the road, we think that your family matters more to you than the job you’re going to do for us.” And I got fired a couple times, a couple clients fired me and it was a pretty big wake up call for me because the reality they were right. I was not giving the work my best because it just didn’t matter to me as much as this other narrative on family and being a father.
Around that time, another friend of mine had kind of was going through a work transition and he recommended a book to me by Tim Keller. Who’s out of Redeemer Presbyterian in New York city. And the book was called “Every good endeavor” fantastic book. And what that book really did for me, it elevated work for me. Again, because I think I had – without realizing it – and having that experience in Young life for so many years, I had kind of made two different buckets of work.
There was kind of like Christian Hollier work. And then there was like secular non-Christian work. And I, again, like had elevated one over the other, what that book had done for me was it kind of gave it a lowest common denominator to me of what work is and how you can worship through work. You know, kind of the bottom line was like, no, God’s a worker you’re created in God’s image. Therefore, if you work, you are worshiping your creator. And that was just really mind blowing and helpful for me. I really like to worship it kind of put a reset button on all kinds of work and it made all work be dignified in my eyes. So then I asked the question the first time I’d asked it really since college, which was like, “God, who did you make me to be? What work am I designed to do I want to work now. I see that I can worship you through any kind of work. What job do you want? What did you design me to be?”
And that kicked off really like a two year journey of prayer and strength finders tests and, you know, asking around and like just kind of doing a lot of soul searching is really hard during that time. Income was not strong. I was kind of floundering with the internet marketing business. It was a tough period, for sure. So after about two years of that, I didn’t have an answer yet. And I feel like the way I say this sometimes is that God accidentally brought me into real estate because I was kind of just fed up with the journey and the process and I wasn’t making a lot of money and I knew I was good at getting internet leads.
And so I had been looking into this thing called wholesaling a little bit in real estate other than being a real estate agent. The kind of like the “We Buy Houses” signs you see all over the place. I was like, “I’m gonna give that a try. I can at least sell those leads if I don’t do anything with it.” And I had a little bit of background with real estate already.” Our first house in Anderson township, we turned into a rental, a short term rental, and then a long term rental.
We bought a duplex in Fort Thomas that we house hacked, which I didn’t know that term then, but that’s what we did for a little over a year. And then we bought a house in Newport, Kentucky, down in the east row, historic district. And rehab that and made it a short term rental. Didn’t work out with zoning, but it was a good experience.
So I had a little bit of a real estate background. I decided to launch this, investor cash buying house website. And I started getting leads from it. And then I got a lead under contract. And then I went to sell that house on bigger pockets, which is like a real estate investor forum. And another real estate investor, another wholesaler commented on my property and said, “Hey, you can’t do that.” I was like, “what? Like, that’s all this website is, it’s like thousands of properties for sale from investors.” He’s like, “no, no, no, no. You can’t say this property is for sale because you’re not a licensed real estate agent in the state of Ohio. You can say this contract is for sale, cuz that’s what you’re doing. As a wholesaler, you’re selling the contract, not the property.” I was like, oh, and I don’t like getting in trouble. I didn’t want to get in trouble.
The very next day I signed up to be a licensed real estate agent. I was like, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” So I signed up for my real estate agent licensing classes. And I opened up the first introduction to like, “this is what it means to be a real estate agent.” And as I’m reading down the list of like, these are the skills you need, negotiating in math and working with clients. And I’m like, all the light bulbs are starting to come on of like, “oh, this is me. Like, this is actually I know how to do these things.” Cuz I knew from my strengths finders test. But what was hard was like, I knew I didn’t wanna be a real estate agent, cuz like I said before, the fatherhood narrative was so high.
I was like, I don’t wanna be a real estate agent. Like you’re always working weekends and you’re always on the phone and you’re working nights and you’re away from your family. Whatever picture I had in my mind of being a real estate agent. I did not want to do that. But it seemed enough of a good fit that it was worth going after. And so around that time we were pregnant with our fourth child and our only daughter, Miriam, who is turning three in a couple of weeks or maybe by the time this thing gets out there, she’s already three. My wife we had this kind of running joke in our house. So this was our fourth kid. But every time we got pregnant or were having a baby, we either like lost a job or our income was cut.
We had this experience with taking some risks. We had a little bit of a risk tolerance and we also had a lot of trust in God (Honestly) that he was gonna provide no matter what happened. It was kind of risky to say like let me change careers in an entire new industry and learn something from scratch when I’ve got three kids and one on the way. But my wife who is amazing and she was just fully behind it and she was like, “no, go for it.” And so we kind of did back and forth a little bit until like a few months in. I was like, “I can do this full time.” And like we haven’t looked back since. And so that’s been about four years now. I remember when my wife was giving birth to Miriam, I was in the hospital studying for my real estate license in Ohio and working through the modules on my computer because when you have three little boys at home, it’s one of the only times you can actually get any work done is when your wife is having a baby.
So , that’s kind of a funny part of the story, I think. So Yeah, it’s been four years now and we really haven’t looked back. We’ve been kind of building out both sides of the business. Both the kind of traditional agent, Keller Williams side of things and being a residential agent, helping people buy and sell.
We’ve also been building out the wholesaling, which has turned into more house flipping on the investor side where people where I’ve built out the marketing kind of on that side and helping people sell homes where it doesn’t make sense for them to put that house on the market.
And I think the beauty of the story, and this is why I’ve just so enjoyed my work over the last few years is it was something I wasn’t looking for. It was something I didn’t want to do, but what was in heart, the desires of my heart, which were, “yeah, I wanna make more money from my family.” I would love to have flexibility. I like being a business owner of my own. But really, it also fit more into the vision of the future I have. Which for me, what I want to have a good life (And I think this is what scripture says is a good life) . is that I wanna be sitting around my dining room table with my children and their children enjoying meals and fellowshipping. So in fact that’s actually my screensaver. I look at this verse every day. I, I look at this picture of a dining room table with a meal set on it. And the verse is “How happy is everyone who fears out an eye who lives by his ways, you will eat what your hands have produced. You will be happy and prosperous. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine in the inner parts of your house. Your children around the table will be like shoots from an olive tree.”
And I think this verse is actually describing what the good life is and we can get trapped in a consumeristic country of ours and a lot of other things. I can myself too, can fall into that trap. But I think what I love about this story, what God has done for me and being able to do this work as a real realtor and a real estate investor is it’s fulfilling this vision of what I think a good life is because I get to be flexible. Yeah, there are times where I have to work on contracts. Yeah, I have to show houses sometimes on the weekends. I can’t avoid all that though, I am growing my team and hopefully that will become easier and easier, as I continue to learn skills from other successful Realtors. But you’re still running a business and bottom line for all of you who are running a business, you know, falls on you no matter what.
So those things are still there, but you also get the flexibility of being a business owner and kind of working your own schedule. I get to bring my children to work with me. Every Friday, I usually bring one of my sons with me. On Sundays, I often bring my two youngest cuz everyone else isn’t in the office and I can take them away from my wife and I get to teach their math class and we get to homeschool and do different things. And for the future, when my vision is I want them around the table. One thing I love about real estate is it’s very broad. You can do a lot of different things in real estate. You can be a realtor. And on the sales side, you can be an attorney. You can go swing a hammer and rehab houses.
It’s such a broad industry. You can do so many different things. I am going to be extending the invitation. I wanna work with my kids. And so they’re gonna have a choice. They could move away from the city. They could go do different things, but, we’re kind of casting a vision of we wanna do a lot of good things for this city and the families that we’re partnered with, kind of living life and community and our church life. We’re all like we’re here in Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky. Like we care about the city deeply. We care are about our children. We care about their children. And the decisions we’re making now are how do we get to spend a lot of time with them both now and in the future? When they’re adults, we want to be able to be grandparents who can help them when their kids are toddlers and running all over the place.
We wanna give our kids date nights that are necessary for their marriage. So it’s just really satisfying. It gives me a lot of joy to know that these things that were in my heart and this narrative around family and then God bringing both that family narrative and the work narrative kind of in alignment. It’s been pretty remarkable. So I’m really grateful and thankful for that.
I Would Love To Be Your Real Estate Agent
So there you go. That’s a bit of a longer story. Now you know lot more about me. I think we are all story formed. I think our stories matter. One of my favorite things that I didn’t realize going into real estate, but one of my favorite things about it is it’s a very pastoral job and you get to hear stories, then help find the right home that matches that story for the unique giftings of that family. I really enjoy that about the job because one of the things we say and that we believe here at team Sztanyo is home is where your family grows stronger together. And so we wanna help you find that spot that’s right for you. What area of town?, what kind of house?, how much land?. All those different things.
So now you know more about my story. You may be like, “oh, I really want him to be my agent now.” Or you may be like, “I definitely do not want that guy to be my agent.” Either way, you know, it’s kind of a risk (I guess) throwing this out there, But now you know more about me. If you like my video, I would really appreciate if you did click the like button, subscribe to the channel. Obviously we’re gonna keep bringing real estate content more and more to this channel as we build it out.
I would love to be your realtor of choice, whether you’re looking to buy or sell a house in Cincinnati or Northern Kentucky. if you want to get in touch with me, email me, Eric.Sztanyo@kw.com. We’ll be in touch soon. Thank you guys so much for being a part of the team Sztanyo clan.