Realtor180 | Real Estate Podcast for Agents Who Want to Grow with Shawn Kunkler
The Cost of Caring Too Much: Starting Over and Building a Real Estate Business From Scratch | Shawn Kunkler & Rachel Hausman Masse, $50M Producer Turned Two-Market Agent
May 06, 2026
Season 3
Episode 162
Shawn Kunkler / Rachel Haussman Masse
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Most agents never stop long enough to ask the question. They just keep going, more transactions, more markets, more hustle, until something forces them to sit down and reckon with why they do it the way they do it and where that came from in the first place.
Rachel Hausman Masse sat down. And what she found stopped her cold.
She spent nearly two decades building one of Chicago's top-producing real estate teams alongside her mother. Over 100 transactions a year. More than $50 million annually. A brand, a business, and a partnership that had taken the better part of her adult life to construct. And then she left. Quietly. Secretly. Without telling her sphere, without a clean transition, without a roadmap, and moved to a state most of her clients genuinely believed was somewhere near Canada.
What followed was not a triumphant pivot. It was 18 transactions in year one. A from-scratch rebrand in a market with zero crossover from everything she had spent two decades building. A mother who needed space to rebuild what they had created together. And the slow, uncomfortable realization that the way she had always operated, the sleepless nights over deals, the vacations spent worrying about listings, the emotional investment that went so far beyond what the job required, was not just a personality trait.
It went back to being six years old. Her father's MS diagnosis. Her twenties were split between visiting him in a nursing home and caring for her clients with the same ferocity. She never separated the two. And it had been running her career, and costing her, ever since.
In this conversation, Shawn and Rachel cover what it actually takes to build a real estate business from zero in a market where nobody knows your name, why working with family is one of the most complicated business decisions an agent can make, the apprenticeship model Rachel believes should replace the way the industry currently trains new agents, why having only one revenue line in your business is the most dangerous position you can be in, and the mindset shift that separates the 30% of agents who close deals from the 70% who closed nothing last year.
This is not a conversation about tactics. The tactics are in there, and they are worth listening to on their own. But
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About the Podcast:
Realtor180 is a weekly show dedicated to connecting you to top-performing agents nationwide to learn their insider secrets for succeeding on a massive scale. Each week we discover fresh marketing ideas, business strategies, and doses of inspiration to grow your business to the next level. More importantly, we will hear firsthand from industry experts about the pitfalls to avoid making along the way.
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