Five Star Real Estate’s Paul Carlson offers key tips for leadership and succession planning

In this week’s episode of the RealTrending podcast, host Tracey Velt sits down for an informative conversation with Paul Carlson, the president of Five Star Real Estate. Carlson explores his early career journey, including insights into how he grew the brokerage.

He also explores key lessons he learned as he inherited the president’s seat from his father, Greg Carlson, Five Star Real Estate’s founder. And Carlson offers some key tips on centralizing management, building a brand and creating a successful succession plan.

Following a brief introduction, Carlson shares his background in the industry. The young executive started his career in 2006 before transitioning into key management roles at Five Star Real Estate in 2012. Before that, Carlson was forced into adversity by the 2008 recession and minimal support from his father. This adversity pushed him to learn and grow as a real estate professional and photographer before joining Five Star. Today, the company has about 740 agents and 22 offices, and it closed some 8,000 transactions in 2024. 

Velt follows up with a question on Carlson’s transition into the president’s role at Five Star. Carlson says that the company enforced an anti-nepotism clause, forcing him to work his way up the ranks. His father started inviting him to marketing meetings with other executives. From there, Carlson started to push for change within the company, which inspired his father to offer him the leadership role. Carlson emphasizes the importance of establishing a unique style of leadership rather than attempting to mimic a predecessor.

“The best thing I could do is realize I could never be him, and the company doesn’t need me to be him,” Carlson says. “I see a lot of people taking over their parent’s business trying to imitate the president or founder, and it just doesn’t work. I’m good enough as I am.”

Carlson still had to work to earn the respect from some of the senior members of the company, and he faced further criticism overall as he attempted to get the staff on board with Five Star’s future-facing strategies. 

Following that, Velt asks Carlson to share his initial strategy for growing Five Star. First, Carlson focused on rebranding the company. Internally, he focused on shielding his team from outside noise and tech companies reaching out to pitch products and AI tools. Instead, he chose to focus on building a strong culture without relying on widely available technology to augment Five Star’s productivity.

“I was trying to create something unique because, in my opinion, if everyone can get kvCORE, if everyone can get Cloud CMA, if everyone can get Adwerx, any one of us can go buy it,” Carlson says. “Realtors can go to get it themselves too, and that’s not truly differentiating yourself from the marketplace.”

Next, Carlson explores a few strategies he used to grow Five Star over time. The company focused on three primary areas to drive growth — lowering costs for agents; offering real-time, centralized brokerage support via phone; and internally designed personal branding managed by a dedicated team. By offering these three forms of assistance, Carlson says he established Five Star as more of a consulting firm than a traditional brokerage. 

Carlson and Velt close the conversation by exploring the criteria for a good succession plan. Carlson believes that it’s essential for a child to take a company and morph it into their own through hard work and visionary thinking. Companies that don’t implement these principles during a succession may experience shrinkage. He advises successors to find their internal motivation before taking the reins of a business.