This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jordan Karp, 30, founder and CEO of Jordan Karp LLC, a real estate brokerage in South Florida. Karp started his own brokerage at 26 years old and has nearly reached $1 billion in transaction volume. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I started my business at the beginning of 2023.
Before, I was working on investing for my family and creating a portfolio of acquiring diverse assets from 2020 to 2022.
I was cold-calling for properties to acquire, invest, assemble, buy, lease, and manage across all asset classes. I was doing it for industrial, commercial, retail, residential, single-family, development sites, creative, and opportunistic multidimensional strategic assets across Florida.
I was brokering deals for myself on the side where I saw value in the market, and did that until the end of 2022. Then I started my business full-time.
My transaction volume is about $500 million from January until now, and about $1 billion lifetime.
I love my job because no day is the same. Here’s a glimpse at what my workdays look like.
I catch up with clients on restaurant rooftops, boats, and the padel court
I have all different types of clients. I have celebrity clients and I also have private equity clients. I have clients who’ve sold businesses, CEOs, people in private businesses, founders, chairmen of businesses, lawyers, managers.
One of my clients and close friends, Austin Rosen, manages Post Malone, and he has a private restaurant rooftop at the Electric Feel Studios in Miami, where I’ll usually have client meetings, dinners, and spend a lot of time.
I work with a lot of music artists, managers, and people in the music industry, and we’ll meet at Feel. I’m very dynamic, and I’m very adaptive to where I meet clients.
It’s definitely important to meet people in person, whether it be at the office, on the padel court, in the street, or at a certain property.
I usually work with a boat or yacht company, and they service me whenever I have a client in town to look at different properties on the water.
If the client is not familiar with Miami or Florida as a whole, I’ll take them by boat or a yacht.
We’ll start at the southernmost point of Miami and go all the way to Bal Harbour, the northernmost part. I’ll give them a full education and information about the market, what properties trade for, the price per foot, the trends of where things are going, and they can see the level of houses.
I’m available to my clients whenever they need me — even at 3 a.m.
There’s no difference to me between 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. — my phone is going off all day.
I’ve taken calls at all hours of the night; I’ve done 2 a.m., I’ve done 3 a.m.
When I was selling the SLS Brickell Hotel for $55 million in 2023, I was selling that for the Royal Family of Qatar, and they were based in London.
I represented the seller, and I also represented the buyer, which was a private Albanian group, Kastrati Group. They were in Albania and traveling through Eastern Europe, and the main office for the Royal Family of Qatar was in London. So I was up all hours of the night.
They would call me at 4 a.m., 3 a.m., and 2 a.m. They would send me documents. I’d have to get on calls with them; they were in the same time zone as each other, or slightly different ones, but a closer time zone than where I was.
My work-life balance is work, work, work. My work and my life, and the balance of working within my life, are vertically integrated.
I live to work. I don’t work to live.
For me, this is fun. It’s not work.
Sometimes, my days run into a workout right after, and I’ll take the adrenaline or the rush of work into it.
I’ll go on a run from where I live on North Bay Road up through to Allison Island, to La Gorce Island. Sometimes I’ll run from North Bay Road down through Sunset Island, to Venetian Islands, to downtown Miami, and I’ll run the properties I usually sell.
I get a running perspective when I’m running by them and see, “Oh, that’s an address I should keep in mind.” Then I’ll be taking calls for work while I’m doing that. So I’ll be fielding different properties, but also fielding calls and working on the progression of that all at the same time while running those routes of the neighborhoods.
Sometimes the important call comes in the middle of that time or when you’re outreaching to a client, and they’re busy, and the worst time for you is the best time for them. You have to take that call in that moment and bring three different people who have three different time schedules together.
You’re in the middle of your workout. But what you do doesn’t really matter compared to what the greater goal is.
Then, from the workout, I’ll shower, and it’ll be 10 o’clock at night, and then I’ll decompress from 11 p.m. to 12 a.m. and be on my phone and still be available for calls, and look at calls that I missed while I was in the shower.
I have no shame and still door-knock
Door-knocking goes exactly how you could imagine. It’s uncomfortable, but I think where there’s discomfort, there’s growth.
If you come with value and you come with service and you come with persistence, I think there’s a level of appreciation and acknowledgment that you went out of your way and are expensing the time to generate value and bring something to the table.
People have an appreciation and acknowledgment for that, especially people on the other side, who live or have built these types of homes and have this type of net worth. They were likely, at some point, at this stage in their life, so they can relate to you in a sense; there’s a connection that sometimes gets built in that way.
I want to door-knock on as many homes as possible, so I’m not looking at the percentage of acceptance, but rather at the volume of business that I get from playing the numbers game.
If you call 200 people and you get 10 people to respond, you’re busy. One hundred ninety people are rejecting you, but the 10 people will keep you busy. And if you call 500 people and you get 20 people, you’re a little bit more successful.
I actually take rejection well, meaning I can handle rejection and I can continue to persist and work on that opportunity. I know there’s the long term and there’s a long game, and the opportunity can always be around the corner, and you just have to keep chipping away.
I’m relentless, I’m fearless, and I have no shame — that’s my business model.
Life is very short, and at the end of the day, people want to see results.
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