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Ron Shuffield is a respected figure in the business industry, recognized for his contributions as the founder of the Beacon Council and his leadership roles at the Chamber of Commerce and the Coral Gables Community Foundation. He views his career journey as a continuous learning experience, underlining the importance of mentorship, aligning with individuals of integrity, and the transformative power of personal growth within the industry. Shuffield's perspective has been shaped by his commitment to ethical business practices, such as trust, integrity, and longevity, and his belief in engaging in community roles. His guiding principle revolves around having respect and maintaining grounded values, ensuring that his team supports the company's core principles. Consequently, his approach highlights the importance of continuous learning, ethical conduct, and community involvement in building a long-lasting and successful career.
Transcript
00:00:00 - Bill Risser
Hi, everybody. Welcome to another real estate sessions rewind episode as I continue my spring break. This break is nearly finished, and we will soon be back.
00:00:08 - Ron Shuffield
I don't know if I ever asked for business. It just comes to us because our associates are very active in whatever they're doing in the community, too. When people come to work for us, I say, you know, get involved in something you like doing, something that benefits the community.
00:00:26 - Bill Risser
You're listening to the real estate sessions, and I'm your host, Bill Risser. With nearly 25 years in the real estate business, I love interview industry leaders, up and comers, and really anyone with a story to tell. It's the stories that led my guests to a career in the real estate world that drives me into my 9th year and nearly 400 episodes of the podcast. And now, I hope you enjoy the next journey. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 354 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend, as I always say. And today we're going to have a lot of fun. I am talking to Ron Sheffield. Ron is the CEO and president of the Berkshire Hathaway Home Services EWM Realty operation in Miami. We'll say South Florida. I met Ron with our CEO when Michael Davey was out here traveling through Florida, just kind of getting a sense of the Florida market for an australian. It was unique to be able to experience that. Ron was kind enough to have lunch with us, and, boy, I could tell just how during that conversation, he was somebody I had to talk to. It's somebody's story I had to get. So I'm really excited to get this thing started. Ron, welcome to the podcast.
00:01:36 - Ron Shuffield
Yeah, thank you, Bill. It's good to be here. Yeah.
00:01:38 - Bill Risser
You know, you and I met about a month ago or so, maybe a little longer down in your neck of the woods, Coral Gables area. We had a really nice lunch with Nina Fabri from the Berkshire Hathaway Home Services company. Right?
00:01:50 - Ron Shuffield
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Fun day with you guys.
00:01:52 - Bill Risser
It was really fun to talk to you and learn about, really, the unique space that the Miami real estate market is. And we're going to talk more about that. But first, I always start the podcast with where everything started for Ron. Now, I'm pretty sure, uh, and most people probably could tell that that accent's probably not a south Florida native, right? So far, so good. Yeah.
00:02:16 - Ron Shuffield
I grew up in New York City.
00:02:19 - Bill Risser
So let's go with where you grew up and and how long. How long before you made the move down here?
00:02:25 - Ron Shuffield
Sure. Well, I grew up in Tennessee and still the fifth largest city in the state, Jackson, Tennessee, which is near Memphis, but certainly not a huge place, 50,000 people. So you got to know a lot of your family, knew everybody in town, sort of thing.
00:02:40 - Bill Risser
Yeah.
00:02:40 - Ron Shuffield
So I had a great growing up experience and high school experience, and then, like a lot of guys and kids from that area, we went over to Knoxville, which is 300 miles away, to go to school at the University of Tennessee. So I spent four years at the University of Tennessee and had a wonderful experience there and met, of course, people that are still friends of mine today that I've known for decades now. So it's a lot of fond memories looking back on that. But after college, you kind of want to not maybe go right back home. And so I moved to Florida, and I thought I'd stay for a few years, probably end up back in the south someplace. And so here I am all these years later, and, you know, met my wife down here and, you know, three kids and five grandkids later.
00:03:28 - Bill Risser
I'm not going anywhere, you know, Ron, I moved to Florida in 2017, knowing I was coming to the south. I was coming to SEC country, kinda. It's just north of us, up in Gainesville. But, man, it's a whole different world from growing up in San Diego and then moving to Phoenix, where college sports are just whatever. Boy, if I hear another SEC person tell me it just means more or it just matters more, there's a word. There's something that the SEC people love to say, but, um. But so you're. You're a volunteer through and through. Rocky top, the whole thing. It's nailin Stadium, right? It's just unbelievable, right? What's going on up there? But I've got some buddies who went to Florida, and they really don't like Tennessee. What happened there?
00:04:12 - Ron Shuffield
Well, you know, there's been a competition there for a long, long time, you know, and when I was in school, it was obviously, you know, very competitive at that point, too. I think we probably were a little friendlier toward each other when I was in college, you know, 40 years ago. But I tell you one memory I have, because we have a. We actually have a gator in my house, which is. That was a hard to. Hard thing to accept in the beginning. But our oldest daughter is a Florida graduate, and she had a great experience in Florida. But I remember going, this is probably her senior year, junior, senior year. We're up there for a ball game when Tennessee was playing in the swamp. And of course, you know, I was the only people, we were the only people there that any orange on where we were sitting because our daughter had gotten us the tickets. And so we're like, over in the middle of, I don't know, the alumni for Florida, I guess. And so our son at the time was probably, I don't know, he was maybe 15 or so, or even younger. He's by 13, and he's. He was all about Tennessee. So he had all this Tennessee wear on, and it was a cool day. So, fortunately, we had to have some jackets on. So I said, well, you know what? Until we see where we're sitting, let's just kind of, like, keep this jacket zipped up because these people can get kind of rough. And so we're, we're winning the game. We ended up winning that game that day. And so as, as it became clear that even though we had our arms all covered up with a jacket, we weren't shouting with any enthusiasm when Florida did anything right. And so this older lady behind us screamed out, she didn't understand why these people talking about us were ashamed of their colors. And so I told my son then, I said, okay, now after this next play, we're just going to quietly walk on down the aisle. We only had about two minutes left, and, of course, it was clear we were going to win. So, anyway, yes, there's a real competitive spirit between these two schools.
00:06:12 - Bill Risser
I love that. Well, look, eleven and two last year, I think, right? The balls are back. I know they went through a little rough patch, so you got to be excited. It's looking forward. I mean, your quarterback decided to go into the draft, right?
00:06:26 - Ron Shuffield
We've got going to have some new players there. But you know what? The coach. Coach seems great. You know, I don't know him. I knew some of those previous coaches, but he's great and everybody loves him up there.
00:06:37 - Bill Risser
I always wonder, was there someone in the real estate world as you were growing up that maybe kind of tilted you that way? Or was it something that came from another source?
00:06:49 - Ron Shuffield
Well, you know, my dad was in a retail business, and we transfer. He transferred. You know, every time he'd get transferred, every time he'd get promoted, we'd move to a new city. So. But most of them were in the south. So, you know, when I was really young, I mean, we were living in Texas, and then we lived in Kentucky, Louisiana. And anyway, I ended up in Tennessee. I say I'm from Tennessee, but I lived in some other places before that, but I moved there in middle school, and so, you know, that was certainly, you know, my early years. And so that's what I remember is really, you know, where I'm from and, you know, people I keep up with from high school are all obviously from that area. But when I graduated, my older brother had just started his law practice in Florida. He went to University of Miami law school. And so when I would come down for spring break or just vacations during college, those four years, I mean, I'd stay with my brother and his wife. And I thought, well, this really is a nice place down here. And so he said, man, you ought to come down here and just live here. So I thought, well, what would I do? And so one of his clients was a real estate developer. So I started out in the development side of things, and it wasn't brand new to me because as we were moving around quite a bit when I was growing up, we were always living in new subdivisions where they were building new homes. And so as I got into high school, I actually started working some construction summer jobs and working with a contractor who built our house. And so I just kind of started gaining an appreciation for how homes are built. And so even as a 15, 1617 year old kids, I mean, you start learning a lot about that. And I just was kind of attracted to that by the fact that we had moved a few times. And so I understood how all that worked. And then when I went to work with my brother's client and we were developing homes, that was a lot of fun. And then one thing kind of led to the next, and we bought the company we have now. At that time, it was Esslinger Wooten. Maxwell was founded by three women in the sixties, 64 to be exact. They opened our company in 1964. And then 20 years later, I had a partner by this time, and he and I were partners for 30 years. And we bought the company from the three ladies in 1984, and then we sold the company in 2003 to Berkshire Hathaway. And that's when Warren Buffett was getting into our business. He'd gotten into our business in 1999. So four years later, we were the 13th company that they purchased. And now Berkshire Hathaway has purchased about 65 companies across the country, all about our size or larger or smaller. And we're kind of right in the middle of the size of all of our companies, but a wonderful collection of companies that, you know, I had known many of these people for a lot of years, you know, just in the various industries that are various networks that we were a part of within the industry. That's how I got here, and so I've been. I've been at EWM now for 40 years, but now our name has changed, obviously, to Berkshire Hathaway, Ewm Realty. So, gotcha.
00:09:57 - Bill Risser
You know, Ron, at lunch, you shared, you know, the EWm story. Those are the last names, initials of the last names of the three women who own that real estate company. Can you share that with us?
00:10:09 - Ron Shuffield
Sure. Well, the three ladies that started our company in 1964 were already in their late fifties and sixties when they started the company. So by the time we actually bought the company from them, you know, they were in their seventies and eighties, and so they. They were dynamos of their day. And, you know, for that time, you know, for three women to start a company that became, you know, a large company in Miami, it was a real accomplishment that a lot of people shared their pride here in Miami. And we kind of met them kind of by a fluke. I mean, we were in a development business. You know, I had a partner for 30 years, and we were developing condominiums, mostly some single family homes, but mostly condos on both coastal Florida. But we were based here in Miami, and my partner had a relationship with the e anime Esslinger. They had gone to church together, and so he knew her through that. And so she had kind of confided in him one day that it just seemed like it was going to be time to sell. And they didn't really want to sell to anybody that had tried to approach them about buying that she wanted us to buy their company. And so I said, well, gosh, you know, we. We're over here in this development business. I mean, I don't know if we've got time to do all this. He says, well, I think we can do this. And so that's. That's exactly how it happened. It was pretty much that simple.
00:11:27 - Bill Risser
Yeah.
00:11:27 - Ron Shuffield
And so we bought the company, and, you know, the market was in 1984, we bought it, and, you know, we just had. We had 50 people, 55 people, to be exact. And that first year, we did about $50 million of sales, which is pretty good. I guess in that time, they were averaging like a million dollars a person. Not quite, but we just started recruiting a lot of people, and then we started buying other companies that saw what we were doing, and then it just kind of kept growing. But the three ladies we still talk about, we have a painting of them in our offices just to kind of remind us of the help that they gave us and the inspiration they gave us when the company was started.
00:12:09 - Bill Risser
Yeah, one of them, one of them was business minded. One of them was a socialite. Am I being polite there?
00:12:15 - Ron Shuffield
Yeah.
00:12:15 - Bill Risser
And I can't remember what the third one was.
00:12:17 - Ron Shuffield
Well, she was, she called herself the business manager and she, they were cute. They, they were great friends. And you're, you got a good memory there. Yeah. The one that was really the, you know, the, the person that was out in the community was Anna Mae Esslinger. And she was the life member of the chamber of Commerce and, you know, the president of the board of realtors. And, you know, she played bridge every Wednesday at the country club and, you know, she just sponsored a lot of events in town and so she was very out involved in the community. The second one was Dodie Wooten, whose father was the second physician in Miami, actually built our still existing today county hospital. He and doctor Jackson or Jackson Hospital. Those two guys, you know, were early, early people to Miami. And so they needed a hospital and those two doctors built it. So they had a lot of affluent friends. And so Doty Wootton sold probably the first million dollar home ever sold here because they were friends with everybody else that had businesses here and there weren't a lot of people here in those years. Dodi Wooten was born in 1911 and her family moved here in 1917. And even by 1920, I think there were only about 5000 people living in Miami. And then Arlene Maxwell, she was a petite little lady who really managed the back end of the business. And she always used to laugh and say that she was the balance wheel between two big wheels. They had a great relationship for a lot of years. So that's how that happened.
00:13:53 - Bill Risser
Yeah, you mentioned, you know, you're, you're much bigger than 55 agents.
00:13:58 - Ron Shuffield
Now.
00:13:58 - Bill Risser
Let's talk about what Berkshire Hathaway home Services Ewm looks like today.
00:14:03 - Ron Shuffield
Well, we have a little over 700 agents and ten offices at Dade, Broward and Palm beach counties. And we've always focused on the high end markets and so we still do that. And we're fortunate that we've been able to assist a lot of developers over the last several decades because of our development background. Originally, that was easy for us to transition into that. So we have sold several thousand units in pre construction all the way back to the late nineties and early two thousands. And then Berkshire, of course, now owns other companies in our Florida market. So we have four sister companies, I mean, well, three sister companies plus us, four of us in the state that are owned by Berkshire Hathaway. And it's just kind of really wasn't planned this way, but they're kind of like, you know, West Coast, North Florida Panhandle, Jacksonville, and, of course, along the western or the eastern border down here. So that has given us a lot of strength, not only within our state, but across the whole nation now. I mean, we have major companies in Southern California and Dallas and Denver and, you know, Washington, DC, New York. I mean, in the midwest where Warren Buffett is, we own a lot of those companies up through there. So it's just been a great collection of people. We all like each other and learn from each other and, of course, has been easy to share business with each other because when people are moving, you know, it's really one stop shop. You know, we, we had the same name and, you know, it's all Berkshire under the Berkshire umbrella. We also own a mortgage company, a national mortgage company called Prosperity Mortgage, and title companies for each one of us to close deals, insurance company to help insure all these properties. So it's been fun to see how all this has developed over the years and we've all benefited from it, including our customers.
00:16:01 - Bill Risser
Yeah, you say development. So you, you had a lot of those sales offices for those new towers going up is what you're telling me.
00:16:09 - Ron Shuffield
Yes. Right. Yeah, really fancy. I mean, we were fortunate to be, you know, of course, when technology was not what it is today. You know, we had a lot of, you know, fancy, you know, screens and, and help in the offices to showcase what we were, what we were dreaming about would be there one day. And of course, you know, then we would sit off to the sideline in a construction and a sales trailer on the property in most of those cases, and we'd watch the building, you know, be built and then people move in. And anyway, it's that those, those were fun periods and still. Fun periods. I mean, we still. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now the developers are from all over the world. I mean, you know, we met last week with developer from, from Dubai and, you know, from South America. I mean, these, these development companies all see that, you know, these are, well, you know, established companies from other places that are now coming to the US, to Florida in particular, to build. So, yeah, we're helping them as well.
00:17:06 - Bill Risser
What, I'm going to ask you this question. I don't ask this very often, but I know you'll have an answer for this. What does a day in the life of the president and CEO of EWm look like? And tell me what it looks like. Tell me what you wish it looked...
