Meet Christopher Noland | Christopher Noland

We had the good fortune of connecting with Christopher Noland and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Christopher, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
When I was a child I wanted to be a video game animation artist and I was also interested in sim City and urban planning.

Instead I took dance classes in college and musical theater and I moved to New York City to be on Broadway, model and act.

When I arrived in New York City, I found out the room that I had rented was under a vacation the following week and I was pretty much homeless upon arrival.

I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t have any money, and I will say agent told me that I would be really good at the real estate job because I had a great attention for detail and I could remember all the amenities and everything of the buildings.

What she didn’t know, is that I was really really needing a place to stay, and I cannot afford the broker fee to rent an apartment in Manhattan, I literally got the license because I needed a place to live myself.

So in turn, after getting the license I found that I could help other people avoid the situation that happened to me when I came to New York.

I worked as an agent in New York for 10 years. I worked during the last financial crisis and crashed and got to experience the entire market collapsing so I am familiar with market cycles.

I took time in 2010 to move to Japan to Tokyo, I wanted a break from short sales and what not. I was planning to expand my career to Japan until the Fukushima nuclear disaster happened. And that disaster happened I became one of the rescue volunteers. I took footage of all the damage and I put it onto YouTube where it was found by Yoko Ono.

Yoko Ono and her people featured me an imaginepeace.com and they encourage me to make a film about the disaster in Japan which is titled 3.11 Surviving Japan.
It was released in four cities in the United States in 2013 and it remains in the Yamagata documentary film festival museum in Japan.

I moved back to the United States shortly after the release, I gained a California real estate license, I worked in California, but I admit at this point I got tired of showing the homes myself, I had been doing it for almost 13 years at this point with a little bit of a break.

I decided to start a referral business where basically I would market for the agents and they would just pay me the referral fee, this works very well for me up until the inventory shortage started before the pandemic. When inventory shortage started people did not need the advertisement so much anymore, my business with that started drying up, and that’s when I decided to move to Florida for opportunity into the Florida realtors license in 2021.

I am now in Florida in Sunny Isles Beach a service area and south Broward, I work for Ancona real estate at the time of this article, and hopefully while you’re reading it, I specialize in luxury waterfront condos and homes, multi family investment properties but really I can sell anything.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
No. The road could not have been any more challenging.

Yeah we struggle along the way is when you start out there is really no pay. I remember working for the first six months going up and down stairs in Manhattan apartments not getting paid not getting paid worrying if this is going to work out.

Eventually after six months I was able to learn my first deal and I actually negotiated base payment which is pretty much unheard of now.

I would say the biggest struggles I face when I moved from state to state and I had to just a different state laws that might conflict with the previous one, I hold three state license is currently I’ve had 4 in my life, there have been times where it’s been a challenge and I’ve had to go back and look up to make sure that I am giving the client the right information because this isn’t just advice, it’s legal advice and can have consequences you need to make sure you know what you’re doing.

The largest struggles I say I find currently in this market aside from finding inventory, is the lack of professionalism of some of the other agents that are never on time, they post listings and never answer the phone, or they just don’t even show up when you make the appointment.

This is really frustrating it happens a lot in the Florida Miami market, it makes me look bad to my clients it makes me look unprepared because really you’re not supposed to disparage the other agent in front of the client so it’s like what can you really say? You had an appointment the other person isn’t there you don’t really know why at the moment, but all he can really tell them as they’re not here we can’t get in.

The reason I include that statement in this article is because I’m hoping more and more realtors in the area can come to terms with the fact that when they have a listing, they’re there to service that listing for the public, the owner and the other agents, whatever else they’re doing is not really important anymore they made a contract to sell that home, they need to do that job in south at home and be helpful to everyone else was trying to help them instead of being unavailable.

If you are going to take listings, answer your phone, answer your text messages, I don’t take the listing be a buyers agent.

I don’t know how many times I have gone or sent someone and the other agent doesn’t show up, they are late over an hour, these things are not just obstacles and challenges they are really unacceptable and unprofessional. It just makes the job harder for everybody especially the clients that we are supposed to be giving excellent services because they are paying us a lot of money, they are paying a lot of money for service that sometimes they don’t get and sometimes the obstacle is the completely out of my control and that I find very frustrating

I work in residential and multi family commercial real estate. What makes me different is I’m not going to tell you that this is the deal of the century, I’m not gonna tell you this is the best time to buy, I’m going to sit down and analyze with you if this is the best decision for you to make. Everyone’s situation is different during every different time period, just because the interest rate went up doesn’t mean that it’s a bad for a multi family investor, it may be bad for a residential homeowner who cannot afford the higher payment, but I never tell people you have to buy you have to buy now now is the time now is the time, that’s like used car salesman talk, I would rather be honest with the person about the situation in the current market and keep them with their trust then try to sell them something and lose that. Because the end, it is their decision and it is one of the most important financial decisions and we are there to guide them along that we are not there to just sell them something. So even if it means they have to wait two years, if that’s better for them it’s better for them , because I know after all this time they will come back to me if I was the honest agent with them and if they don’t, it’s on them

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
My favorite childhood memory was going to British Columbia with my grandmother because it was the only road trip that I really ever got that wasn’t to see my step fathers parents which was never that pleasant.

I’m honestly going to say I don’t have a lot of good childhood memories, I felt that I had to go make those memories after leaving home.

As we’ve become adults sometimes we understand why those things happened, we forgive the people that we were wrong about, and then we hold a count of the people that we realize caused the issues for us.

There’s a lot of people who do not have the childhood memories, and I’m writing this to encourage people to know that it’s OK to say that, it’s OK to say my childhood was not great, there was a lot of tragedy, it affected a lot of people around me, but, life is better now and actually relationship with my family is better now

Website: ChrisNolandSellsMiami.Com