Heidi Witt: A not-quite-overnight success

Heidi Witt

By Danny Kucharsky

Saying Montreal-area real estate broker Heidi Witt thinks real estate 24 hours a day is not an understatement.

For example, the woman behind Heidi Witt Realties often gets up at 3 am to send her clients emails. “They want to kill me,” she says. “They go ‘Why don’t you sleep?’ I sleep when I need to sleep; my mind is always working.”

Adds her office manager Amy Benloulou: “If I don’t have my notepad ready when she comes in, I’m dead in the water. All her ideas come spilling out from overnight.”

The grinding of the brain gears seems to have stood Witt in good stead. After opening her brokerage last February, she now has seven agents and an average of 25 listings. She opened a new office in October, after previously operating out of her house.

Not bad for someone who has only been in real estate for about five years. After graduating with degrees in psychology and social work – both of which Witt says are extremely beneficial in real estate – she worked as a marketing coordinator for generic drug maker Pharmascience, organizing activities for 40 sales reps.

After 14 years there, she decided to become a stay-at-home mom for her two (now three) children. It didn’t work. “I tried to stay home from October to December and ended up on a psychologist’s chair within one month, freaking out. I’m not a stay-at-home mom. I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

Her husband suggested she go back to school and Witt thought about taking a real estate course, thinking it would help her run the revenue properties she owned with her husband. “I enrolled in the class and loved it.”

So she started as a real estate agent at Royal LePage Group Newton in Montreal’s Notre Dame de Grâce neighbourhood and won a top 10 award in her first year. Witt then moved on to more familiar turf in Hampstead, where she grew up, and Côte St. Luc, where she now lives. She did so by working for broker (and family friend) Nina Miller of Nina Miller Realties.

“I wanted to get more experience from her,” says Witt. “I still think she’s brilliant.” After about two years working for Miller, Witt says she learned everything she needed to know from her. At that point, she was getting 25 to 30 listings per year.

One day a client said, “I see you work for Nina, I don’t see you have any listings.” In fact, at that point, Witt had more than 10 listings. “The fact that they didn’t notice my listings bothered me.” That’s when she decided to go back to school to get her broker’s license. She operates her brokerage under the slogan, “a smaller company, a more personalized service,” and runs ads offering a “full-service package” that includes a home stager and a decluttering/estate sale specialist. 

The business is kept hands-on by keeping the agent count small. “Other people think I’m growing, that in a year I’ll be 20, 30 agents. It’s not going to happen,” says Witt. “If I go to my max, it will be 10. The problem is, I love what I do. I want to be outside selling and negotiating and buying and being hands-on. I don’t think I could handle more because I’m so hands-on. I don’t want to sit behind a desk – I did that for 15 years.”

Witt says she’d rather have fewer agents and run a family-oriented business, in which she co-lists with other agents, and provides benefits such as absorbing some of their costs. Indeed, her agents include her brother, an old friend of her husband’s and “the sister I never had.”

Besides, having too many agents leaves her open to making mistakes, she says. At age 42, Witt says she has 30 years of work ahead of her, so she can’t afford to mess up. “I’m scared of disciplinary committees. If I get a call from the ACAIQ (Quebec’s brokers and agents association, the Association des Courtiers et Agents Immobiliers du Québec), I will cry.”

So far, the opposite has happened. Witt says she can’t walk through a local mall without being stopped and congratulated, mostly by other women, on launching her business.

While Witt apparently thinks real estate 24 hours a day, she fits in other priorities, like working out every day between noon and 2 pm, skiing, travel and involvement in the city’s Jewish community. “I build my business, but I have a life and I want to enjoy my life,” she says.