What does it take to sell 150 million in real estate and run a real estate company from scratch? That’s what our guest, Erica Deuschle, will share today. Erica is the founder of Erica Deuschle and Co. Real Estate Team and Managing Partner at Keller Williams Main Line. Having no natural background in real estate, Erica has the grit, passion, and work ethic to be the stand-out agent she is. She prides herself on the personal customer service that she offers her clients, and she never plans on giving that up. Always ahead of the game, answering questions before they are asked, efficiency is a huge key to her success! If you want to hear about how Erica succeeded in the real estate game, tune in!
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Erica Deuschle – Grit, Passion, Work Ethic & The Pineapple
I am here with Erica Deuschle. Erica, how are you?
Thank you for having me.
Thanks for joining us. Erica is one of the Founders of Keller Williams Main Line. She is also the Founder of Erica Deuschle & Company, one of the largest real estate teams in Pennsylvania. They did over $100 million in sales just in 2020. Erica, you’re keeping busy. Thank you for taking the time.
I need to update that bio, Chris, because we did $150 million in 2021. I need to get you an updated bio.
This is why I wanted to connect. I love to connect with people that are doing big things. I’ve seen you around. You’ve been on several phenomenal real estate panel events. You and I haven’t had the chance to connect one-on-one individually, but through the panel, I saw you. I think you were on a panel tour or something. You were back-to-back two weeks in a row or almost.
It’s a world tour.
I meant to get an autograph, but you were so busy. One of the things that jumped out at me and as I’m looking for guests on FUEL. We’re looking for highly successful individuals with that grounded foundation. That’s what FUEL stands for. FUEL is an acronym for Foundations Under Extraordinary Lives.
I like that. I didn’t know that.
It’s not just a cool buzzword. We want to meet with people that have that foundation in life that they’ve built a successful business. We have athletes on the show, community leaders and everybody has a story. What we’re here to do is unpack the story. I’m sure in your world, everybody knows you as Erica, the real estate agent, the team leader, the company owner that sold $150 million in real estate, but we like to unpack who Erica is and talk about the journey that got you to be where you are now. You’re one of the leaders in your field. That needs to be recognized.
Also, a lot of people don’t see the journey, the struggles and all of the things along the way that get you to $150 million in real estate sales or to be a top athlete or to be a community leader. That’s what we want to talk about and dive in. One of the things that caught my eye and we can talk about this later, but your email address was the pineapple. We can talk about where the pineapple comes from, but I want to open it up by talking about how you knew you wanted to get into real estate? What is your passion for being in the real estate business?
I grew up like my parents didn’t have much, but they always opened up their home. My dad worked three jobs when I was a kid, but my parents always entertained. They always found a way to bring people together in their home. They always had a beautiful home. They didn’t have much money, but their house was always beautiful.
I had a love of home decorating. I would be punished as a kid to my room all the time for mouthing off. I would rearrange my bedroom like every weekend. My mom would come in and the whole room would be different. I think that like my love of design, my love of being with people. I love entertaining. I love large groups of people. For me, that’s how it started my love of home, basically.
One of the things, too, did you know that that you wanted to be around people? Maybe it’s not real estate, but I did from an early age, like, “I need to be surrounded and helping people?”
I wanted to be Oprah as a child. I always tell people this, but I would race home from elementary school so I could catch Oprah at 4:00 on Channel 6. I think I loved how she brought all sorts of people together and treated everyone the same no matter who they were or where they were coming from. She gave her love to everybody that she encountered. I went to college. I have a broadcast degree. I thought that I would be a radio personality growing up.
Did you ever dabble in it?
I did. I had a classic rock radio show in college called the Stone Age. I went to East Stroudsburg up in the Poconos. That was WESS FM. It was a great radio show. I did an internship at the Howard Stern Show in 2003 when he was still at K Rock. I thought that’s what I would be doing. I thought that would be my way to connect with people. Long story short, I met my husband, fell in love, moved to Florida and gave up the broadcast piece, but I found my way back to PA and here I am.
If you jump into real estate, there's no salary, no blueprint, or training program. You are just on your own. Click To Tweet
You and I are from a similar area for those that are reading, Delaware County and you know what they say. You don’t leave Delaware County. Somehow, we all end here.
I tried.
You tried, but you ended up.
I was homesick.
When you were going through that and you were in Florida. Were you also in Florida doing the broadcasting?
No, I tried. When we first moved to Florida, I tried to get interviews in Jacksonville. We lived in St. Augustine. I just couldn’t get an interview. It was some odd jobs. I worked for Enterprise Rent-A-Car for the year and a half that we were there. I got promoted to assistant store manager in three months, and people working there for years were like, “Who’s this girl coming down here?”
At 23, my parents had a horrible house fire in the summer of 2005. That’s what made me want to move back home. They pretty much lost everything in the fire. They were all fine, but my little brother was only ten at the time. It was a traumatic time for my family. I said to Dave, my husband. He was my boyfriend at the time. I said, “I got to move home.” It was pivotal because I’m like, “He’s either going to stay in Florida,” where he’s always wanted to live because that’s where he was born or he’s going to move to Delco with me and he moved with me. I knew we were good, but I missed home very much.
When you got back, at that time, were you faced with like, “Do I want to do this broadcast off?”
I was. It’s funny. We moved back within like a two-week period. That’s how quickly we moved back. Enterprise transferred me to a store in Ardmore, but I came back. I was like, “This is not me.” It was great when we lived in Florida because I got the lay of the land. I met so many people in that job but being back home, I was like, “This isn’t not going to work for me.” I cleaned houses for a year leading up to our wedding. Soon after we got married, I got my real estate license when our oldest was a couple of months old and I jumped in full time.
That had to be a little bit of a scary time because for those of you that don’t know, if you jumped into real estate, there’s no salary, no blueprint and no training program. You are on your own. How are you prepared for that? Did you have any support? Did you have any plan or were you like, “I’ll figure it out?”
I wasn’t that prepared, but I had a very supportive family. I knew that if we struggled, we would get a little bit of support. We had a mortgage, but I knew if, God forbid, we couldn’t make a mortgage payment, somebody in my family would help us. Dave was very supportive at the time. I also knew that I was going to go balls to the wall and go for it. I was all-in.
There were lots of naysayers. It was 2009. The market was bad, but I didn’t know any different. Everyone thought, “Are you crazy?” Maybe but I knew that if I jumped in and I knew if other people could do it, I could too. I was very adamant that I wouldn’t give up. It was tough, though. I remember we literally had to charge groceries on a credit card, my first summer in the business. Crazy.
The common thread here in FUEL, a lot of times, there’s no overnight success. There’s no shortcut. Not to say somebody somewhere didn’t find it, but overall, the people I meet with and talk with on the show, honestly and selfishly, I say it all the time. That’s what fuels me. I love meeting people, hearing their stories and making connections. It’s what I love to do.
Every time I do one of these shows, it’s like you get to learn somebody’s story and who they are outside of what they do. It’s humbling to see so many people that didn’t have it easy. It wasn’t like, “I’ll start a real estate business,” and everything falls into place. It’s like you take all these little twists and turns in life and take a lot of risks. You’re charging groceries on a credit card.
With a baby and a mortgage. It was a stressful time. I look back now with this new market shift that we’re seeing and approaching here, but I’m grateful that I got in when I did. There was such a lack of tools that we have now. There was no ZipForms or DocuSign. I was driving around with a baby in the car, going to people’s jobs to get signatures on contracts. I had the carbon copy agreement of sale. Crazy.
I look back on that. I’m so grateful that I’ve been in the business for many years now. That might not seem like that long, but the business was so different back then. I’m grateful for that because I feel like I learned when things were harder. I feel prepared for this shift. I feel excited to teach my team how to thrive during this new era that we’re about to see.
Many readers know that my primary job outside of this is I own a mortgage company and I’m the same way. I got into the business in 2005 and had my daughter in 2004. She was a baby. I was young. I had her at 25. I was fairly young and had an okay career. I worked myself through college and thought, “This mortgage thing’s going okay. Everybody was buying and selling real estate, flipping houses.” I started flipping houses and I thought I was the next real estate mogul. I’m quitting my job. I did the whole deal and the market crashed. I was like, “What happened?” Everyone was like, “I’m supposed to be set here. I quit my job and gave up my benefits.”
I was the same as you. I didn’t know any better. My friends were young, first-time home buyers. That market was still there when things crashed and I kept going. As we head into this shift now, I look back and have people who haven’t experienced the shift or don’t know what’s going on and are freaking out. I’m like, “Okay, cool. This is go time. This is where we dial in what we do.” What separates the big boys and the big girls.
It’s another pivot. It’s like when we were faced in March of 2020. We couldn’t leave our houses. How are we going to get stuff done? How are we going to get the 40, 50-some pending deals that we had to the table? You pivot. You make it work. It’s the same mentality of, “We have to dive in, head first and figure it all out.” It does excite me. It scares me too. If you get used to doing a certain amount of production or making a certain amount of money or investing a certain amount of money for your team, you want to keep all that going. It’s a lot to think about, but it also excites me.
That’s one of the things too. A lot of our audiences are entrepreneurs, people that are looking to take their business and level up in life. What would you say to somebody like that? We’re in the real estate world and we’re seeing a market shift. Every industry has its own challenges. What do you say when you’re in a position like this and you are the leader and responsible for, “Do I double down on my team? Do I cut back?” How do you navigate that as a leader?
My mentality now is double down as far as what’s working and what’s not. Investing more into what I know is tried and true. A prime example is I canceled. I don’t want to say the name of the company, but I canceled a mass mailing that I’ve been doing since the fall. I didn’t see a return on it. I thought that it would be great. A lot of people use it. It wasn’t great for me.
Now, I’m allocating that money to other things that I know are tried and true. That all get a better return. I’m all about investing even more for my team. We worked on stuff to fine-tune what we’re investing in, lead gen-wise, so important, but we have no intentions of scaling back on things that make sense.
You have to look. If you’re in a business and things are shifting, the market’s down, or whatever it is. There are things that do work that you’re probably doing. You could look and say, “These three things are working. These other three things are not working so well, or I’m not sure or maybe it’s not a fit. What you’re saying is we can peel those back, the three that aren’t working. We’re not sure and pour more into what we know is working.
I think when business owners in this climate can have a good instinct. That’s something that I’m grateful for in business. Knock on wood. I’ve always had very good instincts as to what to do and what to invest in just because I feel like I know myself well. That’s important and getting through a time like this it’s knowing who you are, what you stand for, what’s important to you and helping my team thrive is very important to my husband and myself.
You work with your husband, right? You brought him onto the team.
Dave’s been with me for a few years, full-time. Dave runs the buyer side of our business.
You have that family feel, that everybody’s all-in on the business?
Very much so.
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How about your family otherwise outside as you were coming in the business or in your younger years? Are there any family members that were important and instrumental and building that foundation as to who you are now?
My parents and my one grandmother, who I told that I was thinking about it and she said, “Do it. You can do it.” I think some other family members were probably a little weary thinking, “What is she doing?” She was very encouraging, but I’ve always tried to channel how hard my grandparents had to work and my parents. I’ve always channeled that and I love to work, so that’s a plus. I still love to work.
That’s the key is to find something that you love doing. As many people say, if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. Mike says that all the time, Mike McCann, who we’ve had on the show. It is true and sometimes it’s tough because there are people that don’t get it. They’re like, “Stop working. Why are you always working?” I look at work and it’s like, I could be doing some manual labor or working out something a lot harder than this.
If I’m having conversations with people and helping people and doing what I do. It’s not that bad. Now since the pandemic, it’s super flexible. We have a place at the beach and sometimes I’ll set up shop and start taking calls, Zoom calls or whatever. People are like, “Why are you working?” I’m like, “I’m not complaining. The pools here, the beaches.” This could be worse.
That’s an important thing in this business. It never turns off, but I don’t ever want it to turn off. It’s like this thing in my brain where if I’m not crazy busy, then I’m like, “Oh no.” I always say I try not to complain because that’s why we are where we are. If we are on vacation at our place at the beach, I have to work. I always remind myself, “That’s why you’re here.” It’s not a struggle. It’s like a mental juggle.
It provides all the blessings you have in your life.
I’m still very much in the trenches of selling too. A lot of people come to me and they’re like, “You’ve scaled, but you’re still.” I love to sell. I love to sell real estate.
As a real estate agent, many people strive to like, “I’m going to build my business, then I am out with selling.”
I know. I still love it. I still love the connection. I still pick every picture for every listing, which is crazy. I still do every listing writeup. I have good systems in place, very organized. We’ve run a big operation, but it’s simply the way we do things. It all works.
I’m the same way. I’ve been in the mortgage business for several years, opened the company in 2018 and I’m still on the front lines having the conversations. When somebody refers a client to me, I have the initial consult then I structure up the loan options because I love it. People are like, “Why don’t you hire a loan officer?” I have an amazing backend staff. It’s how we’re built. The more volume scales. Once I do what I love doing is my little niche, then I can pass it to more people behind the scenes. We’re like a unique company in that. We don’t have a ton of loan officers. We have a lot of amazing ops staff.
I’m not going to turn over what I love. I’m not going to do what I don’t love and that’s hiring a bunch of loan officers. It’s not what I love to do. It’s great when you can identify. I think that’s key for anybody reading. What you’re good at and what you enjoy, even if that’s not the norm. Erica is still doing the listings. You could easily put someone from the team and say, “Here’s what we’re going to do.” You could easily do that and remove yourself, but that would away what you love. Speaking of what you love, we’re going to talk about it as we wrap it up here, the pineapple. This is like your email address. We’ve got it on the website. Tell us a little bit about what this pineapple is.
Pineapple is a sign of welcome. If you go down South Charleston, Savannah, you’ll see pineapples everywhere. It’s like a Southern sign of hospitality and welcome. As a kid, my mom had pineapples everywhere. Didn’t know what it was at the time. Every year, at Christmas, my dad built this board that went up on top of their front door and a real pineapple, a real fruit, pomegranates, it’s all sorts of things. Basically, years ago, probably a decade ago, I thought, “What could my logo be?” I picked pineapple and it evolved over time. Trust the process with the Sixers turned into trust the pineapple. We had a lot of clients start saying, “Trust the pineapple,” and it grew.
As a huge Sixers fan season ticket holder, trust the pineapple. I love it.
That’s where it came from. It’s hard to go anywhere and not see a pineapple these days.
I know. Now, I’m going to be seeing pineapples everywhere. That’s awesome. Erica, it’s been such a great time here, getting to know you a little bit more and sharing your story with our audience. As we wrap up, I wanted to let you know that we didn’t prepare you for anything. We’re going to hit you with our FUEL rapid-fire, which are three simple questions. Here’s how it goes. Basically, we’re going to throw the disclaimer. We always do that. We know you would take Dave and your kids and all the loved ones. We’re not going to leave them out, but they’re excluded. You’re stuck on an island. You’re going to be on the island for a while, forever.
Forever?
Hypothetically. You have to pick one person that you would take outside of your friends, family and loved ones. It could be living, dead, celebrity, anyone that you would take that you would want to be stranded on an island with.
That is so interesting.
How about Oprah?
It can’t be Oprah. She’s very pampered these days. I don’t know if she’ll have the survival skills. Can we come back to that?
We’re going to come back to it. Next one is a book that’s had an influence on your life that you’d like to share with our audience.
You’re not going to believe it. I don’t read books.
Listen or whatever?
I don’t read books. I am the queen of the Cliff Notes in high school. I drive myself to Lauren’s Park Shopping Center Mall and pick up the Cliffs.
We’ll switch it up. We’ll throw the book away. Erica doesn’t read.
Jim Onesti has given me a handful of books. It’s a sin.
They look great on the shelf, Erica. All right, if you could travel to anywhere in the world, what’s on your bucket list?
That’s easy. Greece and Italy, for sure. I have family from both and that’s my dream. I don’t know for number one. I’m still trying to think.
We’ll go to number three. Favorite food that you have to have on the island.
Grilled salmon.
I thought you were going to say a pineapple. Come on. I teed it up for you.
Some red wine.
We’ll let you off the hook for number one. Erica, it was a pleasure having you on the show and getting to learn a little bit more about your business. For anybody out there reading, if you got something out of this and you were inspired or motivated by anything that Erica shared, please do us a favor. Share this on social media, give us a five-star rating on iTunes and on that note, we’re out.
Thank you so much.
Important Links
- Keller Williams Main Line
- Erica Deuschle & Company
- https://www.Facebook.com/Buy-or-Sell-with-Erica-Deuschle-Co-Real-Estate-139189632817302/
- https://www.Instagram.com/buyorsellwith_ericadeuschle/?hl=en
- https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/erica-deuschle-524b29102/
About Erica Deuschle
Licensed since 2009 and a top 5 agent on the Main Line among all brokerages since 2017, Erica Deuschle has the grit, passion, and work ethic to be the stand-out agent that she is. With over 100 million sold in just 2020 alone, Erica has proven her skills in helping her clients succeed in this fast-paced real estate market. Erica is able to execute specialized listing preparation plans that she designs specifically for each home she sells. Whether you are downsizing, upgrading to a larger home for your family, selling an estate, or moving out of the area, there isn’t a listing agent who is more in tune with the market, who knows what needs to happen for the most successful sale possible and who helps you make it all happen. Erica is detail-oriented, helps her sellers execute staging plans personally when needed, and has a book of local contractors to help get things taken care of. Her resources are endless.
Erica prides herself on the personal customer service that she offers her clients and she never plans on giving that up. Always ahead of the game, answering questions before they are asked, efficiency is a huge key to her success!
Not only is Erica the #2 individual listing agent in all of Delaware County, but she has the #2 team in the state of Pennsylvania (Real Trends, 2019). Erica is the # 1 listing agent in Haverford Township where she lives, selling the most homes in the entire Township. Her husband Dave and their team of skilled agents represent the most buyers in Haverford Township as well. Their domination of the market will benefit you in your home sale and home search!
If you are looking for a top agent on the Main Line, Delaware County, Chester County or Philadelphia, who also provides a true commitment to success and clear communication, Erica is the agent for you. Everything Erica does comes from a place of gratitude and you’ll see why she’s a true top agent in the marketplace. Erica’s love of home, design, family, and community is what drives her each and every day.
Tags: Keller Williams, pineapple, Real Estate Investing, real estate market, real estate success, top agent