Real estate, home services, medical spa, and SaaS founders and operators — talking through what actually works.
Five years ago Mike Hubbell lost everything he had built and found himself 28 million dollars in debt. He did not go quiet. He went back to work.
In this episode, Mike shares the full story behind Luxe Living Homes — a vertically integrated net zero real estate development platform he describes in one sentence: to revolutionize real estate the way Tesla revolutionized cars. Luxe acquires distressed properties and transforms them into energy-producing net zero communities, delivering cash flow, appreciation, and tax advantages to accredited investors simultaneously.
Mike walks us through what he lost, what broke, the new investment philosophy he built from scratch after the collapse — including his Rule of 75 percent — and what the road from 28 million dollars in debt to a 1.2 billion dollar development pipeline actually looked like. We also cover his 506(c) investor model, the crypto and digital treasury integration, what the net zero real estate market looks like heading into 2026, and where AI fits into the future of real estate development.
This is one of the most honest comeback stories in real estate. And Mike tells it better than anyone.
Daniel D'Amico has spent his career in service. He started as a firefighter with the FDNY. Then he built D'Amico Group Real Estate in Yonkers, New York — a faith-based brokerage built on one idea: you have a friend in the business. D'Amico is Italian for friend, and everything about the way he runs his company flows from that identity, including donating 10 percent of all gross income to ministries in Guatemala and New York City.
Now he is running for Westchester County Legislator for District 16 — and the platform he is running on is built around the same things he has been fighting for inside real estate for years: housing affordability, homeownership for working families, and public safety for the communities he has served his entire career.
In this episode Dan talks about the thread connecting all three chapters — the FDNY, the brokerage, and the campaign. What it means to build a business around your values in one of the most competitive real estate markets in the country. What he has seen in Yonkers and Westchester that convinced him the problems needed to be addressed from inside the policy arena, not just inside a transaction. And what a real estate professional who has actually worked this market for years brings to a political conversation that a career politician simply cannot.
She arrived in Beverly Hills as a single mother with forty dollars. Today, Valerie Fitzgerald leads the number one team in the number one Coldwell Banker office in the country, with over three billion dollars in luxury real estate closed across Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and the Westside. In this episode, she shares the full story — egg farm in South Dakota, Ford model in New York, and building one of the most recognized luxury brands in LA from nothing. We cover resilience, what celebrity real estate reveals about human nature, and her bold new chapter with QUEENB: Grace. Grit. Reinvention.
What does it take to move to a city where you know nobody, sell 40 homes in your first year, and build the number one team in your market for seven consecutive years? Bernie Gallerani did exactly that. In this episode, Bernie breaks down how he went from starting over in Tennessee with a new license and a family to feed, to leading a 20-plus agent team closing over 600 transactions and two billion dollars in career sales. We cover the real story behind scaling from solo top producer to team leader, the hiring mistakes he made along the way, what his operational engine actually looks like, and where AI fits into a business built on relationship and prospecting discipline.
What happens when someone who has spent 35 years managing over three million square feet of real estate decides the software doesn't work well enough and builds it herself? Timmi Ryerson is the founder and CEO of Smart Property Systems, a cloud-based property management platform she has been building for over 20 years from Ketchum, Idaho with a team of three and zero outside funding. Today it serves over 20,000 subscribers across six countries and nearly doubled revenue in 2024 without a single outside investor. In this episode, Timmi shares how she went from managing real estate to building the software to solve the problems she lived firsthand, why she rebuilt the entire platform from scratch in 2013, what small landlords are still getting wrong in 2026, and her honest take on where AI actually adds value in property management versus where it creates noise.
What does nearly fifty years in real estate actually teach you about sales, people, and building something that lasts? S. Robert August has helped merchandise over $50 billion in real estate, worked with Disney, Whirlpool, Pella, and Exxon, created the first centralized Parade of Homes that became the national industry model, and received the Legend of Residential Marketing Award from the NAHB. He is the only person in history to win NAHB's top sales and marketing award twice. In this episode, Robert shares lessons from five decades at the top of new home sales and marketing — what buyers actually want from a salesperson in 2026, why the close is the hardest skill to master and the easiest to fake, where small brokerages are wasting their marketing budget, and where AI will never replace a great salesperson.
What does it take to close a deal that four other brokers couldn't crack over ten years? Rick Kelly, founder and CEO of Alta Real Estate, just did exactly that and walked away with REBNY's 2026 Residential Deal of the Year, beating out every major brokerage in New York City. In this episode, Rick shares what it really takes to build a boutique firm that competes with the biggest names in the industry, how he cracked the international buyer market, what Southern warmth and New York tenacity actually looks like in practice, and why small and focused consistently beats big and generic in real estate.