Maine Real Estate Leads to Professional Success and Personal Balance: Meet Chris Lynch

Have with me in the studio, the owner of Legacy Properties Sotheby International, here in Maine. Chris Lynch, nice to have you in today. Thank You for the invite. Well, I should introduce you actually as also our friend, our friend Chris Lynch, because you actually are a dear friend of, um, my husband and, yeah. Well, over a decade. Yeah, yeah. For a very long time. Yeah. And I think there's been a lot of intersections over time, not just because of the work that you do, but also the intersections amongst the business and kind of local connections and, and you went to Bates. I did. I went to Boden, of course. You know that, so there, there's always that ongoing. It's, it's fine. Least you didn't Go to Colby. Right, exactly. . Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and we, we like Colby, there's nothing wrong with Colby, but there is a traditional sort of three college rivalry amongst the, the liberal arts schools here in Maine. I'm just teasing about Colby Too. Yes, yes. No, we understand. Although back in the day when, when I went to Boin, I mean, it was, it was a rough rivalry. Yeah, it was. I mean, we, I don't know if I would've been able to talk to you Back then, , so, um, hopefully it's changed somewhat. Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. But there's lots of interesting things going on in Maine with regard to real estate. Sure. Are, yeah. And you've been doing this long enough, so you've kind of seen ups and downs and backs and forth. Tell me about the state of where we are. Thus. 17 years since I started the company, and, uh, we've grown quite a bit. So now we're over a hundred people, you know, statewide and, and really cover a broad swath. So we see it's, the interesting thing about Maine is every market's kind of a microcosm, you know, each town has a different vibe, has a different, uh, depth, has a different inspiration for people. And so it's super hard to talk about Maine as one market. You know, we tended to carve out coastal communities kind of from Kittery all the way up through the other side of Bar Harbor. Uh, and, and even as you go through the coastal communities, you know, Camden's very different than kind Canne Port. And Bristol is very different than Harpswell, and Northeast Harbor is very different than, you know, all the other places in Maine, to be honest. It's a really cool little spot. And we just opened an office there about 18 months ago. Yeah. So you kinda have to pick your spots. And even if you look at counties, all the counties are so different. Um, we're break, we're funny enough, we're breaking out an index right now where we're trying to create our own statistical index that, that, that helps report on both microcosms and kind of macro trends in different counties, also different types of, of cities and towns. And it's, it's hard to do, but it, we're getting through it and it's giving us a better picture as to what's going on with what we like to look at, you know? So now we're going back into the lakes and the Belgrade Lakes, Sebago Lake, long Lake, Panther Pond, uh, little Sebago. And, and those are each their own microcosms. Uh, so it's, it's been fun. Challenging, been fun. So what are some surprises from kind of doing this, this work, looking at the data? Well, the Biggest surprise is how hot Maine has become, you know, and, and not just coastal Maine. And not just Portland. I mean, Portland's been hot for a decade, really, maybe 20 years. Very different than when you were at Bower. I was at Bates. You know, it's really, it's come such a long way, and everybody wants to come to Portland and they get here and they learn more about Maine. So last year, I wanna say 22, 20 $3 of every high value property spent on the main property was coming from Massachusetts. And so I think the biggest change has been people from away, you know, finding the value that we who've lived here for a long time has been 22 years for me, you know, saw a long time ago. Uh, and, and really people didn't appreciate how much there is here and now have the opportunity, particularly with remote working, you know, to be able to, to come here and live here and enjoy life here. Big change, though, last two years in particular. And I know that there's definitely been a, a covid impact, and you might anticipate that as Covid starts to, I'm knocking on wood, sort of as I'm saying this, um, hopefully starts to recede. The public health emergency is, is being officially lifted. So I think I'm safe in saying that we are, that this pandemic is, uh, receding. People are still coming to Maine. They Are. So what happened was their friends came during Covid, and then they came to visit, or called them or sent an email or a text saying, Hey, you should check this out. And so there's the, you know, there's an effect in place that is just, it's going to be here for a long time. It's going to be here for a long time. Why Northeast Harbor? Northeast Harbor is one of the most, um, highly valued markets in the state of Maine. It's a perfect fit for us. And, and from Northeast Harbor, we do all of mdi. I, and we do north, um, uh, north and east and a little bit west out towards Bangor and, and a little bit south, you know, down towards Casteen and, and, and some just really beautiful towns, uh, that are out that way. It's a, it's, well, it's three hours from here. Um, it's a great footprint for that whole Hancock County, even into Washington County for us. How much work are you doing in Washington County at this point? Very Little. Yeah. Just a little too far. We do a little bit. You know, funny enough, we've taken three or four listings in Eastport, which is, um, about as far on the coast as it gets in Maine, as you know. Uh, so it's the first sun, first city to see the sun in, in North America. Uh, so it's been, it's been fun. Yeah. But that's is, even the fact that you've have those listings, I think is very interesting to me because eSport is far, it is far. I mean, it is not easy to get to at all. . No. So, no, it's far, but it's beautiful. And it's really, it's also a place that's been discovered, um, in, in a smaller way. It's still a fishing village. Um, but it's pretty special. Really beautiful. Very authentic, you know, real Maine. So one of the things that, as you're talking about this, I'm thinking about, because I come from healthcare obviously, is, um, do we have currently the infrastructure to support people who are coming from outside of the state? And, um, I don't know if you have opinions on this or not. I mean, I think people look for, depending upon how old they are and where they are in their lives, they look for healthcare, education, you know, access to venues, entertainment, hospitality, food. So are you seeing things start to shift as a result of people coming in from other places? So, Not yet, but you're, I think you're onto something. You know, I think Maine had a lot of infrastructure for how few people were here, right? So you could argue for many, many years we had more schools than we really needed. Now they're filling up, you know, we had more hospital beds than we really needed. Now they're more closer to capacity. Um, we kind of had, I called it the Noah's arc of, of life. There was two of everything, right. And we really only needed one and a half. Uh, and, and now we're at the point where I think we, we have two, two of everything. And they're largely filling up. Yeah. So, but we're, we're close. I mean, if you think about there's really only one major highway in the whole state, and then there's, you know, 2 95, which runs nearby, but, you know, not really a major highway. It's probably 35 miles long, something like that. Uh, it, it, you know, we could probably, there's infrastructure's light here, So it'll be interesting to see how we handle that, because I know, you know, again, going back to the healthcare example, so we're trying to bring in doctors, nurse practitioners, physician assistants to the part of Maine that I work with, which is sort of Augusta, Waterville area. Mm-hmm. . And they will come visit us and they'll say, oh, it's a lovely spot. We love your hospital. We can't find any place to live. So there's no place for them to live. But then we have other people who are able to kind of have reemerged are looking for healthcare. So we're now at a place where we, we need more doctors, we need more nurse practitioners, nurses, medical assistants, all of the people. We don't have any place to put them if we bring them from somewhere else. And there really just aren't enough of the people who are homegrown quite yet to take care of the population that's coming in. There's not nearly enough new building going on here. Yeah. And no one's leaving. Right? Right. So we have no one leaving, a lot of people coming wanting to come. And so it's really put some pressure on, on, well, that's why housing prices have gone up so much, and they're gonna have a really hard time going down. That's probably the question I get the most is are, is going down. And it's just hard for them to go down. There's still 5, 6, 7 buyers for every, you know, good property. We talk about the three-legged stool, good home, good location, good price, and there's lots and lots of buyers at every price point, pretty much all over the state for a property that has those three legs of the stool. Yeah. So you came in as somebody from finance Yes. When you started, that was, that was your field originally? Yes, it was. Yeah. And it was a bit of a risk for you when you moved to Maine, started this business? I hadn't, I I, I didn't realize how big a risk it was at the time. Tell me about that. It's A big risk. You know, I gave up everything, you know, I gave up my job, I gave up my house and packed up the family. We moved to Maine and, and just started prospecting for a new life and a new job, and a new, you know, a a just a, a whole new idea of what the next 20 years, which we've just completed now, 22 years here, were going to be like. Um, but I didn't, I didn't factor. I was 39 years old. It just didn't seem like a big risk at the time. So we, we, we did it and never looked back. Not once. And you, if I'm calculating back correctly, it seems like you had to weather the 2007, 2008 storm. Yes. That was a big storm. So I started the company in 2006. Um, grew very quickly, opened four offices, got to 45, 50 agents by the end of 2007. And then business just stopped. You know, not only was there an a, a home housing crisis, but there was sort of a liquidity meltdown globally, which was impossible to do real estate in any meaningful way. And it was a disaster. It was really awful. You know, I never doubted what I was doing was gonna work, but everybody else did. Especially my wife and kids. Yeah. Friends. I still run into people around Portland saying, I can't believe you made it . I never thought that was gonna to succeed. Yeah. Someone very recently. Funny enough. Yeah. So how do you respond to that? I mean, how do you, so if your wife, I'm, I'm, I mean, God bless Laura for kind of being there and sticking it out, and that's it. But when you're the person and you've assumed the risk and you're in your early forties and people are saying, oh, this isn't gonna work. It's not working for any of the rest of us. How do you respond to that? And how do You, and for young kids, and For young kids, . Yeah. I didn't wanna keep going and piling it on, except I guess in retrospect you've been successful. Yeah. But at the time, as you're going through it, what are the sort of internal resources or what do you have to tell yourself? The reason I started the company was I thought there was a need. I mean, I thought, I thought that the, the Maine, coastal Maine, uh, real estate in Maine, the main lifestyle was underappreciated. I thought it was under marketed. I thought it was undervalued. Um, I thought there was a, a, a room for a, a better presentation for more investment, more infrastructure. Um, it, it just seemed to me it was a, a a and again, at the time, it seems like I was the only one seeing that , I was crazy enough to do it. But that, that there was a real opportunity to do more with what we had here. It just looked like, you know, it had to be. And it, and, and for a while I couldn't prove that I was right. It took a long time, you know, but I really believed in it. I just thought we kept doing the right thing, even though in 2008 and nine and 10 were really tough. I just kept investing, kept growing. And when you say you kept investing, you're, you're reinvesting and the resources, not only from your organization, but also from, I'm guessing personally. Well, there were no resources from the organization. Oh. So I guess you just kept putting, personally, putting your own money into It. It was my kids' college fund. Yeah. Which has since been replenished. And three of them are out. Yeah. But, but it, for a while, yeah. It was basically, that was our savings, right. We were saving for our kids' college. And, uh, I said, you know, this is, you know, but time to do something, time to do something different, do something new. It was an idea that made sense to me. Uh, it was the sticktuitiveness that really made the difference. So where does that come from in you ? I don't, I don't know, but it can be a problem sometimes. Yeah. I hate to give up. I hate to lose. Hate to lose. Yeah. I hate, Yeah. Yeah. So you, so there's something about the challenge of it, and maybe even people saying, oh, we don't think this is gonna work. We don't think this is a good idea. And I would say, and again, I heard that a lot. And I, I would say, you might be right. Call you back in a year. We'll know, we'll know better by then. That's right. Yeah. But I was really convinced and, and maybe delusively, so I was convinced. Yeah. Well that's, it's interesting too, because again, you come from finance, you're a numbers guy, so you, you need numbers to be able to say, typically to say, this is going to succeed. And yet here you are saying you didn't really have any information that suggested that you actually would succeed. No, I had a plan. And the plan was, you know, first year grow, which I did. And, and I knew it wouldn't make money. Growth was expensive. And then the second year to grow, and I knew I'd lose money cuz growth is even more expensive than the second year. It wasn't a first year. And then the third year I would be breaking even. And what I didn't predict was a three year global financial meltdown. And that changed it quite a bit. And I've been through, again, I worked in the bond business, so I've been through cycles, I've been through interest rates going up, interest rates going down, making money, losing money. Uh, and I know cycles, you know, are cycles that they usually don't last forever. That was a prolonged and very deep cycle. It was really unpleasant. Really was . I'd be kidding if I didn't tell you otherwise. Yeah, it was, it was hard. That was hard. Uh, and then 2011, all of a sudden, you know, everything, I felt like everything we had done just came in. It just came to life. And it was July 4th weekend, 2011, and it just, all of a sudden our signs popped up everywhere we'd been prospecting and our agent base was growing and our customer base was growing and we're getting repeat business from four years ago. And it's just, all those little things just, it takes a while. And that was the other thing, I think I was maybe a little naive as to how long it takes to start a new brand, grow a new company, and get that acceptance in the marketplace. It seems so obvious to me. I thought it would take six months, you know, but it didn't, it that that was gonna take three years without the meltdown. It took six instead. So that's, I think that's something that a lot of people struggle with is when to give up versus when to say, okay, I'm gonna hang in there. And, and you obviously chose to hang in there. Other people don't. But you never know what that point is. No, no. I mean, there is a break point and, uh, I, fortunately, I never, never got close. You know, really my resolve was there the whole time. It just, and again, it was hard. It was hard. But my resolve was there. I knew, I just knew that if we kept doing it, if you do the right thing long enough, I mean cliche, but it does, it comes back. And we just kept doing the right thing. I knew in my family and raising my kids. I have my older ones who kind of saw me go through rough times. And my youngest one has seen relatively nice times. Yeah. You know, as a result. And you have a span of four kids. Four kids, eight years. Yeah. I mean, have you ever kind of explored with like, their experience of going through like, rough times versus now and kind of, or do you feel like everybody's kind of like, no, I'm good, we're Fine. So fortunate, uh, all four of my kids to a pretty high degree take after my wife. And so they're just super nice kids. They communicate with each other, they communicate with us all the time. Um, I would say my two daughters talk to my, at least every day, sometimes more than that. Uh, my oldest son moved back to Maine four years ago and just started his fifth year with my company and was just promoted to chief financial officer. And he's got a great life here in Maine. He loves his, his life here. He loves his job, he loves the company, he loves his dad, loves his mom, his brothers sisters. Um, and, and you know, as, as the, as they've grown, they've gotten even more close to each other and, and to us, which is interesting. So they, so you don't, you, you, you're not hearing from them that they felt this kind of struggle that you were going through professionally? I don't think so. You know, I mean, probably at some level they could all accept our little one, you know, all all tell a story that, you know, I can remember when you came home it didn't look good, . But they've never, you know, they've never verbalized that to me. And I didn't, you know, I, I tried not to bring work home with me. You know, I really didn't, you know, when we got home, we all sat down to dinner every night. We all had lots of things to talk about. We had school, we had kids sports, we had, you know, what we're gonna do next as a family. And so we never really had to get into, boy, this is tough . Yeah. So not only did you kind of have to stick to it despite everybody else's, um, concerns on your behalf, but also you were showing up and putting the best face forward for your family. So that showed some pretty significant, I would think, uh, inner fortitude and a, an ability to frame things in a very, Don't they call that com compartmentalism? Maybe That's what it is. Com compartmentalizing. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. I mean, I suppose you could take it also as a negative, right? But, but I was just thinking, you know, the ability to, I mean, you clearly had to frame it in such a way that you could actually yourself continue to exist and move forward and also make it possible for your children not to be impacted. And maybe it's compartmentalizing, but I just think of it as just a really strong framing. Like your worldview is very specific and this is the one you're gonna go with and we're gonna go in this direction together. Well, my, where I'd come from, obviously working on Wall Street was super hard. It was really rough and tumble every day. You could go in and lose your job, you know, and it was, there wasn't any margin for error. Um, and, and so that was really stressful and that was really hard. And, and part of the reason we moved to Maine was that was my kids never saw me and left the house at five and five 30 in the morning on a good day, got home at 9 30, 10 o'clock at night, uh, on the weekends. Saturday, usually napped half the day to catch up. And Sunday morning I went back into work for a couple hours. So it was a, and that was a lifestyle that was fantastic when I was 25 to 35, 36, started to get a little tiresome, 37. And then a month after my 38th birthday said, let's do something different. And this is what different was and what different brought to us. So even in the toughest days in real estate, it was still not, it was a little bit easier than my easiest day on Wall Street, in fairness. Yeah. It was really tough. And so I had that, you know, background. I had that in mean, I was so happy to be where, where I was in doing what I was doing, even if it wasn't working at the time. Yeah. That, that, that, that's what got me through. I'm, I'm interested in your experiences in leadership because if what you're describing is going from kind of a much smaller or manageable organization to now a hundred people, I mean that's like, and is this a hundred agents that are working a Hundred agents? So that's a hundred, about 12, about 12 employees. Okay. So that's, that's a lot. I mean, you're talking, managing a very large group of individuals and I'm sure that you're not day to day managing every single one of these people yourself. But it still requires leadership skills that, um, I think are more highly developed than perhaps people understand. Leadership's an interesting thing. Yeah. And I went from 400 people under me, but I had department heads on Wall Street to zero and now up to a hundred and, and most of the hundred, it's a, I have a, I have a chief operating officer, I have a chief financial officer, and I have a broker services or brokerage manager. Um, and that's our infrastructure. I don't have, in five of my six offices, I don't have in-office management. Uh, I manage those offices along with my team. Real estate agents, by and large, are independent contractors. They like to do their own thing. They work for themselves. They're focused on themselves. And we try to let them do what they need to do and not burden them with, you know, responsibilities, management responsibilities and, and trying to, you know, get people around them to, to focus on their priorities. Uh, and so we do that at, at the corporate level. And that's been a huge difference between us and other real estate companies. Uh, most of them have in-office managers, in-office management, oftentimes they are or were top producing agents and they just ran out of things to give them. And so they said, we'll put you in charge. Uh, and, and management is different. I mean, management is, you have to put your people's needs and, and their desires and their goals ahead of yours. Right. So I have a list of things every day that I need to do. Very few of them ever get done. If someone has a problem, I, you know, my agenda comes second. And, and I think that's the most important part of management. I'm also interested in the fact that, I mean, you're describing people who work independently, which is excellent and wonderful. And I love working with high performing people. And I do, cuz I, I work with doctors and nurse practitioners and other people who are very high performing, very intelligent, very motivated. And also, there's still a need to maintain a culture. There's, in your case, the need to maintain a brand. So you're, you're kind of doing a parallel processes there. Yeah, Yeah. It's something we talk about a lot and, and, and we review every year funny of this time of year, you know, kind of mid-December really to mid-January is our, let's look back, let's look forward. Right. And what we realized is we're very, very particular about who we bring on. Even though they're independent contractors, there's a lot of business models out there that's just, if you get a license and you know, certain real estate companies will hire you whether you have any potential or talent or not. And, and you either sink or swim. Um, we only hire swimmers. Uh, most of 'em have to have swam before. Uh, and, and, and we have high functioning people who, you know, what makes us different is all of our agents without exception, are pulling the rope in the same direction. We don't have big teams, uh, that, that will kind of get disrupt the, the culture and the organization. We really work super hard, uh, to make sure the individual gets, seeing the individuals recognize the individual is, is, uh, is assisted every way that they need to be, to be as successful as they want to be. But we're people first and real estate agents second. And, and while that may seem subtle, it's not, is we have really, really good people. And you put good people with a good brand, with pretty good management and, and a good company. It just works. It really works