KGCI: Real Estate on Air - The 20-Year Journey to Becoming an Overnight Success

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Summary:This episode features an inspiring conversation with guest Anna Kilinski about her journey to becoming a top real estate professional. The discussion emphasizes that success is a marathon, not a sprint, and is built on years of consistent hard work, resilience, and personal development. Anna shares insights on overcoming challenges, the importance of a positive mindset, and how to stay motivated over the long haul. The content is motivational and focused on the mindset required for long-term success in real estate.

You're not going to lose 300 pounds just because you worked out eight hours in one day. It is consistency over time versus volume condensed. So, like, some people feel like, oh, well, I'll just make that up tomorrow and I'll make 400 calls tomorrow. Well, you're not going to have the same output, same outcome than if you just got up in a habit and just made it a habit to connect with five people a day. Welcome to Uncommon Real Estate, where it's all about finding creative solutions for real estate agents and investors. In exclusive mastermind conversations with some of the brightest minds in real estate, you'll learn how to earn an extra six figures a year. Don't follow the herd.

Be uncommon. Here are your hosts, multi-millionaire real estate agent and investor, Chris Craddock and Jeff Saferight. Welcome to another episode of the Uncommon Real Estate podcast. I am your host, Chris Craddock, and I am here with my longtime friend. Anna K of Atlanta, right? So that is who she is, Anna on the town or around the town. Anyway, well, she'll share a river. Be careful. Oh, yeah, exactly. You got to be careful. I can go. Anna is in town. Anna is in town. Sorry. Oh, man, that could go south fast. All right. But with that said, we always talk about the two wheels that you can be on. You make your money. You've got your cash cycle. your cash wheel where you're trading your time for dollars and then you convert that into building wealth. If you were on Wall Street, you would go to jail for insider trading. As long as you

disclose, you are allowed to insider trade in real estate. And so this is something super exciting because my friend Anna has built a great real estate business where she makes a lot of money in trading time for dollars in building a team and doing deals. And she has leveraged that also to build financial freedom and legacy for her and her family and generations that come by being smart with her money. And that is what we get to talk about today. So with that said, Anna, can you give us a couple of minute, just debrief on who you are, where you are, and the right way to announce what you are on town in town?

Let's see if I don't mess this up. So, Anna Kalinsky, born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Big Saints fan. I now live in Atlanta. I come from a little bit of a real estate family that may be understated, but I am the daughter of someone who started the Southeast region for Keller Williams. So that's a big piece of the story, but it's not necessarily just my story. I grew up washing real estate signs at his metery office after school. That was how I decided that I was like never going to be a realtor because I just was not going to do that. So graduate college from the University of Alabama, came to Atlanta, had a healthcare consulting background, got into information management, and started working in the corporate world. And that was a big deal for me because, you know, airline points and hotel points were like such a big deal when you're in your 20s because you felt rich and sophisticated. Well, my brothers, who were mortgage lenders at the time, said, you should probably buy a house. And I was like, I make $51,000. There's no way that I can

afford to buy a property right now. And they're like, you would actually be surprised. So little pin to paper. This was back in 2005. Obviously, there were some little bit more leniency in lending at the time. And I, yeah, I ended up finding this house, worked with a family member who was a realtor at the time. And I bought this house because I thought it was really, really cute. And little did I know that I had just started investing. I ended up buying a duplex. And I didn't really know what that meant for me, but I was super pumped because I had, I was in homeownership now and I had this cute little house that I could rent out the front for, you know, $1,200 and live in the back and have a roommate. And then I ended up actually cash flowing on my

own property. So that was my introduction to real estate. And then I decided that in my 20, hold on, before we go to the next thing. So first thing, I just want to throw this out there. So you had people in your family that were pushing you to think bigger right and you know your brothers were like hey you should buy so one i always say proximity is power who we hang out with is is important you know are are the people in your life pulling you to think smaller or pulling you to think bigger and so that's been a blessing that you've had is people that have helped you think bigger and then this is the other thing you know anybody that has listened to anything i've ever said knows that my like life mantra is massive imperfect action and what I love about this is it was imperfect right

you're like well like this I can buy this and it just happened that it was cash flowing it turned into a great investment because even though you didn't have all the answers you didn't know everything you decided to do that and it cash flowed and became a good investment I'm just curious do you still own that duplex or have you sold it all that have a dirty little secret as a for almost 20 years, I've never actually sold a piece of property that I've bought. And I don't know if that's a terrible investor because I haven't traded anything up, but I do keep accumulating. So that has been a plan for us. I do think we're at the point where we're starting to look at some 1031s to figure out what the best use of our return is,

plus what kind of noise level do we want in our investments and all that stuff. But kind of going back to what you said, it was unintentional. And I think, there's a big theme in my business, just when we're talking about growing a business or growing a real estate portfolio is, I think a lot of us try to kind of do it our way. We just try to feel like we kind of want to fumble forward. And I'm a big fan of failing and failing faster. But at some point, you've got to look up and look around you and say, who's done this at a higher level and what systems and models do they have to scale. And I would say it was halfway through my real estate career with building my team. And certainly many,

years into starting to accumulate property that I actually understood that there was a message and a model, but instead of just winging it, you know, I think we just, we are entrepreneurs and we just kind of feel like we know best and we should do it our way. So I think once I leaned into that, things look different. That's incredible. All right. So I know I interrupted you. So you bought that. Tell us about your entree into when you got licensed. And what was that for the first couple of years like, how did you learn to create time for dollars, you know, where you were learning to do deals? Where were you finding deals? Like, tell us, for somebody that's newer, like, tell us your journey from like, start to like, you know, being good at what you do.

Yeah. And unfortunately, I have not yet listened to all your podcast episodes, but I'm certain at some point you've kind of covered the cash flow quadrant, like where we're going from employee, which is what I was before I became self-employed, and then I started to decide that I wanted to exchange people and money for money and not time for money, and then becoming an investor, right? So I think when I was new in my career, I actually really didn't have any awareness of that concept. I had gone from being an employee in valuing security, having a consistent monthly income and all of the little bit of health insurance and all the things. And when I bought my house, Like, becoming a real estate agent was not on my radar.

Like, it just wasn't going to happen. I was going to be this business-minded, like, person that was going to, like, move their way up in the world from, like, a corporate perspective. Even though my entire family were entrepreneurs and they were sort of out there flapping in the wind, that felt too risky for me. However, being from New Orleans, we have a lot of really cool architecture. And the house that I bought was actually an old grocery store. So that piqued my interest. I was like, okay, this guy took this POS that was built in 1905 and turned it into this really cool renovation. And he was a great builder, but he was a terrible businessman.

And I remember at closing, I had a punch list of like three pages long, like single space, all the things that needed to get done. And it was like a full-time job going over there every day to like to ensure that he was going to get those things done. But every day that I went over there, I just started to ask a lot of questions. I'm like, how did you find this property? Why did you choose this one? I love what you did here. Walk me through like this decision. What else have you built in the neighborhood?

And I became sort of obsessed with the actual renovation process. And so before I even got into real estate, I was more interested in architecture and houses and design. And so I remember going to sit down and have a lunch meeting with my dad. and he does all of his business planning on the back of napkins. We don't have spreadsheets. It's just like, does this work or not work? And I said, Dad, I love this process.

I'm over here in this corporate job. I don't know how to go from making a decent salary. I mean, this was 25 years ago, right? To just having commission only or a very low income. And so we kind of came up with this plan that would allow me with, you know, the way that my house situation was set up with the duplex and some income. that I was going to go work for the builder. He needed, like, a project manager.

So I quit my corporate job. I took a significant pay cut, went to go work for this guy, and learned everything about permitting and construction. And here's what's so cool about this story is, like, I didn't consider that I was just building my award chest for everything that I would need to become successful in the future, for my own investments, my own renovation properties,

working with builders and partnering with builders, I was too young to realize that the first half of your life, you know, I like to say that I'm closer to 50 than I am 40. I think that entire phase is research and discovery. Like, you're just in the research phase. And then once you sort of accumulate all your chips,

you can go back and say, okay, now how do I implement this? So all of this time I'm spending, learning about real estate, and, you know, eventually he asked me like, hey, look, I've got to sell these houses. Could you sell them? And I was like, yeah, I'll get my real estate license. Got talked into selling them for 1%, you know, because that felt like a lot of money at the time until I realized what my value as a professional was. I started talking to more buyers and

sellers and understanding that it costs a lot of time and money of my own in order to run this business. So we obviously changed that financial model over time. But where I found my opportunities was, you know, I wish I could tell you I was the agent that did like FISBOS and Expirons and door knocking. I think I was just the realtor. And Chris, you've been in this business for a long time. And it is still like this to some degree. But can we make the agreement that there are a lot of professionals in this business that just simply don't call people back? They don't answer their phone.

They don't follow through or follow up. They don't do that. That sounds really basic, right? What if you do that? what have you just did that and you took an opportunity when you're at the coffee shop to make an introduction to the person sitting next to you or when you went to a neighborhood event you were engaged i think we just think that this idea of lead generation has to be this really uncomfortable thing that we're doing at all times it really it should be an expansion of your natural talent like your natural ability to connect right and if for you that's online great if for you that's a podcast great for me it was in person and it was doing what I said I was going to do in the timeframe of which I was going to do it consistently over time. That is how I built my trust. That's, you know, the funny thing is, you know, I've got a signed copy of James Clear's book, Atomic Habits on my, on my desk,

you know, my, my office, I'm actually going to do it. Yes, absolutely. I'm going to do a walk around for social media of my office because I have the things that remind me what's important. But one of the things that I love about that book where he talks about Olympians, he said that they're good at doing the boring stuff and continuing to do the boring stuff. He calls it mastering the mundane. And you're talking about FISBOS and expires. You know, last year we did well over 300 million in volume and we've never really done FisBos or expired. That's just never been part of what we do. And everybody thinks like that's what you need to do or everything else. And like the bottom line is you find your lane. and then you run in your lane. And, you know, I love that. I absolutely love that. So we, you know, and obviously we've been in similar networks for a long time, but it always cracks me up.

So, you know, Gary Keller has this mastermind, right, where he brings in his top 100 agents. And he started it off one time. He goes, you know what's really fascinating to me? He's like, I bring my smartest top 100 people into a room. And then we spend the next 48 hours mastermining on how we're going to get out of lead generation. There's no way around it.

And lead generation can be what that is to you. Like I started a running club. I love to run. I met a lot of people through that. Word of mouth. I'm in the neighborhood, the community. So like, what is the thing that drives it for you? Going back to the James Clear thing,

and this is something that I teach a lot, the idea that consistency feels a lot like failure. I think we do the same thing over and over and over it over and over again, and we're going to get a lot of non-results before we get that first result. And I think the high achievers are the ones that are okay with feeling like they're failing for a period of time before they hit that breakthrough. So that is the big difference. Well, it's so funny. So I joined this fitness mastermind at the end of last summer, because I just was tired of, like, I was just like, you know what? I want to be elite in this world as

well. Like, like, I go to the gym. I work out. I do all that, but I eat too much. I eat my feeling. Well, thank you. I've been so, so happy to finally, like, feel like I'm in the right place there. But it's so funny because, like, all of my, all of my friends, like, I've gotten, like, I did a post about my, my journey on social. And I've had, like, a bunch of friends. And now I've got, it's for CEOs, people that, like, are thinking the same way that we're thinking. And also, you know, the problem with being a good salesperson is you can sell yourself on your own BS. And so, like, you know, people that are good at doing that too. And so it's interesting because there's six other guys that have joined this program now that I'm good friends with. And we just have a group text. And one of the guys just started. And one of the other guys this morning in the text thread just said, okay, here's what I've learned. Just trust the process, right? Because you'll feel like you're doing everything. And then you get on the scale the next day and the scale will go up. And you're like, wait, this isn't working. Why am I still doing it? And he said, you know, just having people remind me the process works, the process works. And then over time, you see the scale go down. You see, you know, your shirts stop fitting in the wrong ways and start fitting in the right ways. And he's like, but it doesn't happen overnight. And it always seems like it's going to, it's like it seems like it's going to take way longer than you, you think, or maybe it's not working, but you just got to trust that. And everything you said there was like what I was thinking. about after I saw Kyle's post to our friend this morning, you know, just because we so often

want to forget that the things work, like lead generation works, right? Talking to people works, right? Like, that is, man, it's just, it's simple. Yeah, and I would love, you know, I'm certain you've got a lot of different people from different brokers on here. And I like the idea that we're getting in relationship with people. I think that that's, the 20 year people, it's always been called lead generation. It's very hard to change that mentality. But you, you know, you can't expect to like pick up the phone and talk to somebody for the first time and then ask for their hand in marriage. Like, you're not going to do that, right? You're going to make an appropriate conversation that moves the relationship forward by just a little bit. So the next time that you talk to them,

you're just a little bit further along in the relationship. And I think that goes along with the lines in terms of getting in shape. Like, you're not going to lose 300 pounds, just because you worked out eight hours in one day. But if you're putting out for 30 minutes every day or 30 minutes three times a week for eight weeks, you're going to have a very different outcome. It is consistency over time versus volume condensed. So like some people feel like, oh, well, I'll just make that up tomorrow and I'll make 400 calls tomorrow.

Well, you're not going to have the same output, same outcome than if you just got up in the habit and just made it a habit to connect with five people a day. Just chop the wood. So we're here near the end of the top of the hour. A couple things I'd love to ask. And this has been just spectacular because obviously it's so funny because what you see is success leaves clues. And a lot of the things you're saying is just be consistent, do the work, find your niche, you know, don't give up, all the same stuff that like all the top producers say the same things.

love it. It's not new. However, I think that this feels like a real short, fun, compact conversation, and not to interrupt you, but I want to make sure I'm clear in saying that there

are enough shiny objects out there to distract you till kingdom come. And I want to reiterate that you can build a massive business. We built a $140 million real estate team with six salespeople, people in four operations on doing the basics. And if you cannot do that first, you do not earn the right to be creative.

That's really kind of what I'm trying to say in all of this. You know, there's different layers of your business, different things you can fold in as you grow your team and you grow your business. But also, you know, we talked about going on a hamster wheel and if you need to wrap up on me, do it. I think it's one of the things that I really try to do I speak to our agents and I'm out in the field teaching is try to shift their mindset from being a real estate agent who's looking to obtain a buyer contract or a listing contract to simply

saying, how can I use this opportunity to build more wealth in my world? I think we forget that we have the benefit of compensation to our advantage. We have the benefit of that insider knowledge, like you said. We have the benefit of meeting sellers in the marketplace before people know that that opportunity is available for them. And if you're just working for money, if you're just working for transactions, you will never have the adopted mindset that you're going to shift into being a business owner or being an investor where the money actually works for the money and not the time for the money. So they're all integrated, right? I love it. Yeah. So in the last, all right, so we got three minutes left. So first question I want to ask you

is what book are you reading right now or how are you leveling up? Well, I'm kind of an ear, I like, I'm a pretty philosophical person. So the one I'm reading right now is Chopwood, Carrie Water. I'm actually reading that to our kids. It's about grittiness and character

and basic principles of just being a really good human. And what's the last business book that I read? You know, I'm actually back with John Maxwell. I am revisiting some of his laws of leadership. I think that's something that's really important. We forget. how the basics of leadership actually help us be better real estate professionals,

better parents, right? I'm at 21 irrefutable laws of leadership. It's an oldie but goody. So good. I just mark down the chapel carry water because we've been, I've gone through John Wooden's 21, you know, so many times with my kid. There's a, it's almost like a devotional, like a daily thing that I've gone through with my kids a bunch. but that sounds like a great one that I need to email me. I will send you one like someone did me. Well, that sounds awesome. That sounds awesome. They're loving it. Right. So last question I have is, how can people get in touch with you? If they want to send you referrals, if what you're saying is awesome, who should they reach out to to hear from Anna K?

Yeah, I'll give you a really easy email address. It's Anna K, that's the letter K at KW, like Keller Williams.com. So Anna K at kW.com. If you want to reach me directly, I'd love a follow on social. It's at Anna k.com.com. That's it. Anna, you are spectacular. You are awesome. This is great. Everybody, one of my favorite quotes is, you know, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle says mediocrity knows nothing greater than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius. you hear that what she has done, she's built a great organization, and she's done a very good job doing it. And what she has shared is just be systematic, do the right things, and continue to do the right things. And there's genius in being consistent. And just don't forget that. So, Anna,

you're awesome. Thank you so much. Wishing everybody, big success. And thank you, Chris. Boom. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Uncommon Real Estate. Subscribe to the podcast to stay up to date with the latest mastermind conversations from Chris, Jeff, and other uncommon real estate industry leaders. If you love this podcast, please write us a review. And to fast track your real estate career, go to chriscratic.com.