Good Neighbor Podcast South Charlotte
Bringing Together Local Businesses and Neighbors of South Charlotte.
Good Neighbor Podcast South Charlotte
Advice on the Charlotte Real Estate Market-Podcast-Starting Smart In Charlotte Real Estate
Ready for a real look at what makes a durable real estate firm in a hot market like Charlotte? Mike Sposato, owner of Carolina Realty Advisors, shares how he turned corporate sales awards and early investing into a 20-year brokerage built on one core promise: the right advice at the right time changes everything. We trace his leap from burnout to business owner, then unpack the systems, training, and hiring decisions that keep clients calm and deals clean.
We get specific about why great agents don’t “sell houses” so much as deliver real estate transaction services, guiding people through a complex path they only walk every six to seven years. Mike explains how Sandler selling reshaped his approach to needs analysis, negotiation, and client trust, and how he combined that with a teacher’s mindset and neurolinguistic programming to craft a repeatable training program. From short, focused videos to live role plays and audio refreshers, the goal is muscle memory: agents who can diagnose, advise, and execute under pressure.
If you’re thinking about starting a team or stepping out on your own, Mike lays out the two leverage hires that change everything: an operations-minded office manager who owns compliance and paperwork, and a licensed assistant who keeps showings and open houses moving. We also walk through the tech stack—Follow Up Boss for CRM, Brokerment for transaction management, MLS, and e-sign tools—that gives a small firm enterprise-level rigor. Recruiting against big brands like Keller Williams and eXp is no small task, so Mike looks for grit, teachers who can break down complex steps, and proven sellers who want mentorship over hype.
Whether you’re an aspiring broker, a seasoned agent, or a curious homeowner, you’ll come away with a practical blueprint for building a resilient, client-centered business in the Charlotte real estate market. If this conversation helps, tap follow, share it with a colleague, and leave a quick review—what’s the one system you’ll implement next?
Carolina Realty Advisors
Mike Sposato
(704) 619-7070
mike@carolinarealtyadvisors.com
carolinarealtyadvisors.com
Welcome everyone to Advice on the Charlotte Real Estate Market podcast featuring Mike Spizzato, owner of Carolina Realty Advisors. Welcome, Mike.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks for having me. Actually, I'm excited. This is my very first podcast that we're going to be doing to kick off the new uh series on advice on the Charlotte real estate market. And really the intention I want to do, it's going to be all-encompassing. So we're going to talk about things like if you know for realtors, if you ever want to start your own company or start your own team, to of course information about the market, submarkets, different types of things like uh residential, commercial, different facets of commercial real estate. So it's going to be a lot of um different topics covered, a lot of advice overall that would help people that are, you know, connoisseurs or you know, people really are interested in real estate, which honestly it seems like everybody to a degree has got some level of interest in real estate.
SPEAKER_00:So anyway, I even have my real estate license. So uh and Charlotte is a hop-in area. Well, I know you have been in real estate a minute. So tell us a little bit about your journey and your why. Why did you become a realtor and why did you start your own firm?
SPEAKER_01:Hmm. Well, um, when I first moved to Charlotte a long time ago, I my first job was out, it was a business-to-business sales job. And from that, I was pretty fortunate, did well well enough to start to buy my own portfolio of real estate. And as time went on at my corporate job, it became a real grind for me. And I started to think to myself, why am I making all this money for somebody when I could do it for myself? Because I had been recognized in my corporate job as what they called the rookie of the year nationwide. And then for the first couple of years that I was in sales, I was the number one salesperson in the country out of 350 um sales reps across the United States. And so, you know, I was doing really well and I was learning a lot about um not only sales and marketing, but when I got promotions, I learned about sales management, recruiting, sales training, accounting, all the stuff that you would need to know in order to have a fair chance at you know having a successful business. And so it just I got to a point where I literally got burned out, started to have minor health problems that could have escalated if I didn't make a change. And so once I had this portfolio of real estate, took an interest in it, I was like, you know what? I think maybe I'm gonna get into real estate. But the funny thing is, is this kind of dates me. Um, when I started going and get my license, I was only interested, I wasn't committed. And what I mean by that is this is back in the time where you know, we the internet was just coming out, there was no uh social like media, like there was no Facebook or Instagram or ways to meet people. So I was somewhat newer into Charlotte, even though I had my job here for a while. I worked 24-7, it felt like for this corporation. So I didn't really have a life outside of work. So I was taking a real estate course because I was interested, but I also just wanted to meet people and get out. And so they used to have used to have to go to a classroom. And when I started, there was 88 people in my class. And of the 88, I believe only like eight to ten of us actually passed the class. And you know, within a couple of years, like two years, I think I was the only one that took that class that actually got into real estate and was still doing it.
SPEAKER_00:That's amazing.
SPEAKER_01:It's a big churn in our business, um, for sure. And you know, it's something like what I'd like to talk about today is you know, for those people out there that are thinking they're having some success in real estate and maybe they want to start their own company, either their own team or branch off and start their own company like I did. So we we started our company, it was January of 2006. So we're just a couple of weeks away from our um 20th anniversary as Carolina Realty Advisors.
SPEAKER_00:So that's amazing. Congratulations. What an achievement.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, this market is is insane. And and in your 20 some years, you have seen all the growth and the craziness. Well, what do you find, you know, what is your mission then? Now you've started your own company. What did you decide you wanted it to look like and how have you done that?
SPEAKER_01:That's a great question. So um my business partner and I, back when we started the company, we we we called ourselves Carolina Realty Advisors because we saw a gap, at least in the residential sector of you know, brokerage, that there was not a lot of what we call savvy business people out doing the real estate um sales. It was more or less, you know, just I'm kind of joking when I say this was a lot of part-time um people that maybe, you know, maybe a woman who's uh the kids are off to school, husband. So she was out doing it and selling a couple houses to, you know, here and there to the girls she played tennis with, and you know, uh brand new agents getting in and really not being trained very well, um, people who just didn't have a business background. And so therefore, what we were seeing is you know, people were out trying to make a sale so they could make a commission so they could pay their rent or pay for their car bill or whatever it was, but they weren't really taking a higher road and trying to really give advice because honestly, we we've carved out our slogan. It says, really, the right real estate advice makes all the difference to our clients. And if somebody were to look at my reviews, you'll see time and time again, it's always the advice, timely advice here or there that saves them thousands of dollars or tons of stress or helped them win a deal or something like that. So it's really that forward-thinking level of intelligence in the middle of a deal, or when you're you know meeting with a new client that helps them get the outcome they want. And so culturally, you know, we we we took that approach and then we backed it with um we actually with what we call it's it's Sandler selling systems. That's our sales training model. And if anybody out there listening has ever heard of Sandler, which you can Google, and it once you hear it for the first time and you start looking it up, it's everywhere. But um, you know, when when I first got in the business, I hadn't heard of it either. And I became a member of their president's club, and that's a long story within itself. But the Sandler sales approach is really it's like a higher-end psychological-based approach that's really about needs analysis. It's not featuring benefits at all, ever. It's always about talking to your clients, really, really, what's in it for them? How is this going to benefit them? What do they need? Because you know, the one other thing that going back to like why we started the business is because what you know, if I were to ask you, Regina, just just honestly, because I'd never asked you this question before, but what is it that you think real estate agents sell? What is it we do?
SPEAKER_00:You most of us would say a home, a house.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Yep. Or I hear people when I interview them, like, oh, we sell dreams and things like that. I disagree. I personally think what we sell are real estate transaction services. Because if you think about it, most people when they they usually buy a home on average, like once every six through maybe six to seven years on average, they'll move. So when you only do something that infrequently, learning the dance moves, how to do it consistently the right way is difficult. So showing a house is easy, you know, listing a house is a little bit more difficult, but the the hardest part is taking somebody from where they are today on step one and step 100, the outcome of selling a house, buying a house, or selling and buying a house. And there's so many little things along the way that could go wrong that if they do go wrong, could cost the consumer thousands of dollars, maybe even more. And not only that, but the amount of stress and sleepless nights and things that can happen that you know unfortunately do happen if you don't have a forward-thinking advisor as a realtor who's really in your corner.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I love that. And I I that makes so much sense. So, what do you what is important in your opinion as the owner of a firm when looking for your team?
SPEAKER_01:To hiring, um, well, I learned this lesson many times over, and the first couple of times I learned it the hard way. I think as a broker, once if you're if you're an agent who starts to gain some traction, you kind of have your approach down and you have a repeatable revenue model where you have inbound leads or something that's working for you, where you can consistently bring in a certain amount of business. In order to grow, you really have to have two key people, in my opinion. One of them is somebody on the back end who can handle a lot of the tedious um day-to-day paperwork. Um the paperwork component of doing a real estate transaction literally is like a six to 10 hour endeavor.
SPEAKER_00:Wow.
SPEAKER_01:Um, so if you're gonna do four or five deals in a month, that alone is a really good part-time job just on the paperwork side. But then you've got to worry about compliance, technology, things of that nature. So you have to have somebody who's like a almost like an office manager who really is you know good with paperwork and enjoys doing that. But secondarily, I think having a license assistant, someone who can help you with open houses, showing property, and doing things that requires to have a license. And so, you know, in your first couple of years, you might have to forego putting all the money in your pocket in order to get the right people behind you.
SPEAKER_00:Invest in your business.
SPEAKER_01:Invest in your business, really. I mean, it it's it's people initially, and so you know, um, I would say if I had to do it all over again, I would look for an office manager who was passionate and excited to be there and was okay with some of the mundane paperwork and was looking to grow and help you grow, and similar with a licensed assistant, in so much that you want somebody who is um maybe tied to your um pay plan. In other words, instead of just a based salary, give them something where they can make every time you make a sale when they're involved in it, you can give them a percentage of it so that they're excited to continue to go out and help you and grow and so forth. So I think position-wise, you need to have those two people, or it's going to be a long sled to get to where you want to go.
SPEAKER_00:I love that idea. That's that's amazing. So, what is your method for recruiting great agents?
SPEAKER_01:That's a that's a that's a challenge because being a smaller firm, um, we, you know, there's right now, I think we have 15 total people in our firm from admin staff, you know, full-time licensed assistants, and then agents in general. So it's not easy recruiting because we're recruiting and we're working against like the Keller Williams, the EXP, those bigger firms. And so, like, as an example, Keller Williams has people that are not actually agents that are paid as recruiters, but they, you know, they have a license, they work at Keller Williams, but their deal is to go out and host events. And, you know, the when people come through and they graduate from getting their real estate license, their name automatically gets put on a list with their phone number and contact info. And that person whose full-time job is recruiting has all the time set aside to go after those people. Same with EXP, and actually, I I have that list too. I just don't have the time to do it as a business owner. The one thing, though, to beware for those who are getting into the business, there are companies out there that monetize their training. So there's companies, if you go to work there, first thing, literally, when you fill out all your paperwork, you have to give them your credit card and they will charge you for different training programs. So they're monetizing the training, they charge monthly fees. They, if you're on a team, the company takes a split and then the team lead takes a split. So your your take-home dollar gets really diluted when you're working at a lot of the bigger firms out there. They just don't really tell you all that up front. Um, I've never been somebody who'd want to work in a bigger firm because I worked in a big company in corporate America and hated it. I'd rather work in a smaller firm where I have direct access, you know, in a to the owners or my agents, and everybody knows everybody, and it's kind of you know, almost like a tight-knit type of family type of organization. And that's more like who we are. You know, we're not a boutique firm by any stretch, but you know, the other agents I look for, they got to have sales experience, or believe it or not, I love school teachers.
SPEAKER_00:How about that?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, because school teachers, if they've never been in sales, what you're taught to become a teacher is to take and build lesson plans. And that's how we sell is like a little mini lesson plans. It's taking a big topic like buying a house and be able to break it down into tiny little digestible steps where you can help educate your clients along the way. And teachers make really great real estate agents. Um, obviously, somebody who's got previous sales experience. And I also like looking for people who have what I call grit. And so grit could mean different things for different people. For me, grit means um you're not gonna quit because things will get tough in this business. They do all the time. You know, sometimes it's really, really lean, and sometimes it's you're making money hand over fist and everything in between. So if you're the kind of person that's gonna just crumble when things get you know rough, then this is not for you. Because at the end of the day, you know, people don't realize that real estate agents what we really are is we're independent contractors, there's no base salary, there's no benefits, there's no health insurance. So we're independent contractors that are really outside sales position people. So we get to eat what we kill, so to speak. I know that sounds kind of graphic, but it's the truth. It's like if you can't consistently bring business to the table, then sooner or later you're gonna be out of the business. And so finding those kinds of people with grit, sales experience, and you know, that kind of that that go-getter like driven mentality is critical.
SPEAKER_00:What is your philosophy then, once you find that amazing person, in training them, developing them, mentoring them?
SPEAKER_01:All right, well, that's another great question. So early on, um, because I actually have my degree in education. So when I graduated and was going through early development in my career, I took a lot of sales training courses, um, like I mentioned, Sandler sales training. And I also have a master's certification in neurolinguistic programming. So if anybody knows what NLP is, then you know. And if you don't know, I not I don't have any time here to even get into that topic. But what we do is when we onboard somebody, we we have a whole video series internally in our company G Drive that's got over a hundred different little videos that are anywhere from three or four minutes to you know 10 minutes long, so they don't make you gloss over and fall asleep. But they're the foundation to get you into the training room, so to speak. And so you you kind of first couple days you'll be watching those videos, learning about some of the software programs and things that we do. But then once you've kind of been in a company for a couple of days, we start to do in you know, in class, like in training where we do role-playing, rehearsing, you know, scenarios that come up every day in our you know, real estate experience. You know, I've written a book, I've got um, like I said, the videos, we have audio um reinforcement and a little flash drive that we give to everybody and require that they listen to them. But overall, it's an all-encompassing training program. And you know, when you tell people that you have a great sales training program, everybody's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone, and and even I was when I first got in, because I was like, Well, I was winning all these awards in corporate America. I don't need sales training, and boy, was I wrong because selling in corporate America is 180 degrees different than selling real estate in Charlotte, North Carolina. It's just different. And so it took me a couple of months to realize that. And once I realized it and jumped into the Sandler program, then I was able to extrapolate pieces from that and build a proprietary sales training program. The good news is um the people who have gone through it in the past and they've embraced it, if even if they've left the company for whatever the reason might be, they're still successful in this business. That's it's it's kind of I'm proud of it. And and it's like they're like little ninjas and they're speckled all over the area. And that you know, some people left because you know they started having children and they live too far away for daycare and you know that kind of thing. And other people maybe just whatever the reason was, they just went a different direction. But the ones that were like my shining stars, all of them are still in the business and all of them are thriving.
SPEAKER_00:That's amazing.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:What kind of software programs do you use to support your operations?
SPEAKER_01:So that's a um there's a lot of different. Let's start with the CRM. So the CRM is basically where you're going to keep all your leads, prospects, etc. Um, we use follow-up boss. There's others out there. Um, some of them are really good, some of them aren't. Um, but that's like the main hub for keeping track with everybody. And so follow-up boss is really important. And luckily, we were early on, I guess, into getting into follow-up boss. And very luckily, um my previous business partner, who's he's still here, he works here. He just I bought him out and he's he's one of our agents now. But he and um our assistant back then, both of those guys were so smart when it came to technology that I mean the the things they've done in this company with technology, there's no way I could have done it personally. But it's like we have the software programs and systems in place that you would see at like a major, like, you know, a company that's got you know, thousand or fifteen thousand agents across the country, kind of thing. So we've we've leveled up and we've made those investments. So we have a variety of different things. The main one being follow-up boss is one of the ones that we use. Um obviously every agent's gonna have access to the MLS. And then um from there, there's gonna be some back office things that we use as some people like everybody's got like DocuSign or zip forms. We use um a company or a um software program called Brokerment for tracking all of our deals. And so what that means is like when if you were gonna buy a house for Gina and you were my client, as soon as we agree that you're gonna work with me, vice versa, and we sign an agreement that starts a new file in our brokerment. And then as we go along each step of the way, there's a checklist of things that need to be put into there so that we make sure we're you know on top of everything, our transaction managers keeping up with everything, we're compliant, you know, and in that kind of thing, just in case real estate commission wherever knock on our door. So we've thought through all of it. And we you know, we've been around, and like I said, we're just weeks away from being in business for 20 years. So having the right software programs that are going to help you grow are important.
SPEAKER_00:My very last question. You're almost at your 20-year anniversary, Mike. What are you most proud of when you look back?
SPEAKER_01:That's a good question. I hadn't thought about that. I kind of, I mean, I try to stay humble and all this stuff, and and just, you know, I think probably the sales training and helping people who have come in the door that thought real estate was going to be, you know, get rich quick, easy. You know, they didn't need everything, they didn't need the training. They just, you know, they thought they were hot shots and taking them and kind of building the foundation underneath of them and helping mentor them, yeah, support them, coach them all along the way while still, you know, producing broker and you know, kind of burning the candle at both ends. But um, yeah, I think that's probably it. The what the the people that are still in the business that have ever worked here, if anybody were to talk to them, my gut says you're gonna hear a lot of amazing stories about the things we did to develop their careers. And I think that's probably the thing I'm most proud of.
SPEAKER_00:That's amazing. Well, congrats. That's a huge accomplishment. And in such a competitive market like Charlotte.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, it's it's not easy, and uh, you know, nothing worth it ever is easy. Um recruiting's, you know, hard when you're especially when you're going against big firms that are. I mean, there's a firm called EXP, which I'm sure you're aware of. And you know, that you go to work there, and they have it's it's it's like multi-level marketing, it's like a pyramid. It's essentially if you went to work there, you pay them a certain amount of money. If you find two people, those people underneath you pay money, you get a little bit of that. And then the people they hire, you get a little bit of that, and so on and so forth. And so there, I've as an example, I've run up against EXP agents that don't even sell real estate. They just do that recruiting thing, and that's how they make a little, you know, month-to-month passive income. So you've got all kinds of different business models all over, but you know, here it's it's basically you get your license, you come in, you get the sales training, and it's not just once. We do sales training probably three to four times a year. It's the same information, it's just sometimes a little bit slightly different viewpoint because most people I find there most people are two or three time learners. And I don't know if you know what that means or not, but it means the first time they don't get it, it just goes right over their head. Second time they're like, Oh, that made a lot more sense. And then the third time they really, really get it. And so, you know, if somebody's out there and they're like, I need mentorship, I need a coach, I need training, I need support, I need leads, I need all of that in order to get going. That's the smart person, that's the humble smart person. The person out there that thinks they're, you know, they don't need any of this stuff, they're just fooling themselves because this industry is not easy at all.
SPEAKER_00:Well, Mike, congrats on your very first podcast uh with many more to come. Um, Mike Spadato, owner of Carolina Realty Advisors in Charlotte, North Carolina. Thank you so much for today.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, thanks, Regina. I appreciate your help.