Real estate people love to extol the limitless potential of a career in the business. Michele Harrington’s story makes the hype a reality.
While Harrington’s path from U.S. Marine to CEO of Southern California’s iconic FirstTeam Real Estate was anything but predictable, there was one constant that fueled her momentum every step of the way: a fierce entrepreneurial drive. That drive has propelled her real estate journey from the day she jumped in feet first as an agent to the seat she now holds at the head of the 45-office, $6.1B company. And as she moves forward on an expansion plan that is taking the company beyond state borders, Harrington is just getting started.
Facing Fear, Finding Freedom
After her tour as an airplane mechanic with the U.S. Marines, Harrington went in a different direction than most of her fellow vets when returning to civilian life. Instead of joining on with the likes of Boeing or McDonnell Douglas, Harrington followed her innate entrepreneurial voice.
“I was the kid with the lemonade stand,” she explains. “Even when I was in the Marine Corps, I started a pet-food delivery service because I loved animals. I’ve always had that entrepreneurial bug.”
According to Harrington, that independent spirit caused some friction during her military career.
“The military was great for me, but really hard for me because I didn’t want to listen to people,” she says. “I mean, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a rebel. You’re a juvenile delinquent. The military does not fit into that path. But I didn’t know who I was back then.”
While serving four years of active duty then two years as a reserve, Harrington gained invaluable insight into what made her tick and what she wanted next in life.
“I figured out that I really don’t want to work for somebody that’s always telling me what to do— what to wear, how to act, how to stand, how long my nails can be. It was a very restrictive environment. And I wanted freedom.”
The problem was, like many wanna-be entrepreneurs, Harrington lacked direction and capital. But when she bought her first home with a VA loan, a path began to crystallize.
“I saw what the agent got paid and I was like, ‘that’s not bad,'” she recalls. “So I got my real estate license while I was still in the Marines. At the end of your military career, they have what they call terminal leave—all the leave or vacation days that you saved up. If you saved up enough, you could have three months of leave time. So I did. I had three months to close a deal or I would’ve had to get a regular job.”
While a three-month deadline for an agent to close their first deal is aggressive, to say the least, the pressure served Harrington well and she met the goal.
“I knew I had to,” she says. “I feel like sometimes the best agents are the ones that have to make a sale.”
This is where Harrington’s military training paid dividends, because success in real estate, she fervently believes, is all about discipline.
“What makes successful agents stand apart from unsuccessful agents really boils down to discipline,” she says. “Do you have the discipline, tenacity, perseverance to get up every day when nobody’s telling you to get up? To go out there and door knock or cold call or prospect? Do the uncomfortable things that you don’t want to do and do it over and over again, facing rejection? That’s what makes a great salesperson.”
The military also taught Harrington how to conquer fear, a daunting obstacle for many a fledgling agent.
“What you learn in the military is there is no such thing as fear,” she explains. “You just do what you have to do. So I think (my military training) transferred perfectly. I became a top producer at my office the first year I was in real estate.”
Getting the ‘Keys to the Mustang’
Before long, Harrington was running her own successful firm in Southern California, an affiliation agreement she brokered with local firm Star Real Estate. This move allowed her to migrate away from the franchise brand environment, yet not have to go it completely alone.
“I wanted to piggyback on somebody else’s reputation and resources,” she says. “So I did a trademark agreement with Star Real Estate. I’ve always been very creative with business, and doing the trademark agreement was totally something I came up with. We did that deal together and it worked out really well, and I kept growing.”
Harrington’s success with Star Real Estate eventually caught the eye of FirstTeam, who approached her with an acquisition opportunity along with an offer to become broker-of-record for an entire region. Both the price and the potential were right, and Harrington embraced the challenge of helping a company grow at an operational level.
After serving in the regional manager role, in 2019, Harrington was appointed COO by FirstTeam Founder Cameron Merage.
“The company had gotten a little fat,” she recalls. “So I helped really streamline things, get the processes back in place and get the company in a better position.”
Her success continued, and by the end of 2023, Harrington was named CEO as Merage returned to the role of founder and chairman.
“That was really exciting,” she says. “I feel like somebody handed me the keys to a vintage, beautiful Mustang, and all I had to do was a little bit of work to make it into this beautiful machine. I think when companies get old, they get dull and their shine just fades away. Somebody has to take it, restore it and paint it, and get it looking all cute and pretty again. And I feel like we got it looking cute and pretty again.”
The First 50 and the Next 50
Last month, FirstTeam celebrated its 50th birthday in conjunction with the firm’s annual awards ceremony. Reflecting on the company’s staying power over five decades, Harrington points to the people.
“The staff is amazing, and have been with the company a really long time,” she says. “We have 20, 30-year veterans, so I don’t have to micromanage or worry about certain departments. I can just focus on growth.”
At the heart of the company’s past and future success, however, are its agents, and that’s why Harrington and her team launched the Behind the Agent campaign last year in tandem with a total company rebrand. Behind the Agent speaks to FirstTeam’s longstanding priority to power agent growth, a philosophy that often stands apart in today’s brokerage landscape.
“We could collect licenses and collect fees, and that’s what a lot of brokers do, especially these cap models. They’re just getting a massive amount of people that pay them fees every month and they have no brick and mortar. It’s a great model for them—profitable. But an agent doesn’t go there to get help growing,” she says.
“Our Behind the Agent campaign means that when you come here, if you want to grow your career, if you want to start a team, if you want to start an office, if you want to start a brokerage, we’re going to help you do that. We’re going to help you get the most out of your real estate career as opposed to just collecting fees.”
According to Harrington, while the Behind the Agent branding may be new, the laser focus on agent support has always been part of the company’s DNA.
“Everything is about the agents—it’s not about shareholders, it’s not about the most amount of money we could make or going public or trying to get venture capital,” she says. “So many other real estate companies have to worry about so many other different things—their board of directors, their franchisees—but we don’t have to worry about any of that. We only have to worry about our agents. Our constant thinking every day is not to raise the stock price, it’s how to support an agent’s business. I think the agents see that, too.”
This success formula and philosophy has kept FirstTeam operating as an independent throughout the course of its history. As Harrington explains, the franchise model just never made sense to her or Merage.
“Being a franchise is a good model for the franchisor who’s collecting the 6% – 8% on every transaction, but it’s not good for the owner of the local company,” she says. “We realize that they can’t bring anything to the table that we haven’t already created, so there’s no reason to affiliate that way.”
As far as other avenues to growth, such as venture capital or an IPO, Harrington says she and Merage won’t rule anything out. But they will most definitely be selective.
“Cam and I are real estate veterans. We sold real estate,” she says. “So if we ever partnered with somebody, it would have to be somebody that really understood what we’re all about because we’re not a guy who grew up in the VC space that started a real estate company because they thought it would be a profitable entity. We’re people that grew up in real estate. We wouldn’t want to partner with somebody who changed that culture. Any kind of partnership in the future would have to be with the right person or people.”
Ready to Venture Out
Last year’s rebrand set out to reflect FirstTeam’s longstanding culture, but to also improve upon it, says Harrington, updating the logo and colors to give the 50-year-old firm an important refresh.
“I wanted the brand to reflect the more modern style of brokerage that we are,” she says. “I think we’ve accomplished that.”
FirstTeam’s modernization, however, wasn’t just skin deep; it also involved an important rebuild of the company’s tech stack. Harrington teamed up with Luxury Presence, Follow Up Boss and RealScout to create a revamped platform more in tune with the modern agent’s daily needs. Once this updated tech platform was in place, Harrington turned her gaze toward new frontiers.
“We realized that we had a lot of bandwidth to help people grow their own companies,” she explains. “We have accounting, we have HR, we have people that have been with us for a really long time who are very professional and know what they’re doing. We felt like we could take on more than just our agents in Southern California.”
To power the company’s geographical expansion, Harrington reached back to the strategy that had worked so well with Star Real Estate—affiliating with an existing firm to fuel growth. By taking this same approach to affiliation, she has successfully brought the FirstTeam name and way of doing business to successful and growing teams in Washington, Arizona, Colorado and Idaho (as of press time)—and that’s just the beginning.
“I love the idea of helping entrepreneurs grow a business, so we started looking at teams that really wanted to grow that were outside of Southern California,” Harrington explains. “We’re letting the teams have their own brick and mortar and we’re supporting them with tech, legal, accounting, branding, brokerage…all that stuff.”
Expanding FirstTeam’s presence by affiliating with teams means the sky’s the limit, geographically speaking. The only prerequisite, says Harrington, is that the team is hyper focused on growth.
“These teams are very entrepreneurial and they really want to grow something bigger,” she explains. “A lot of brokers don’t know how to support that or don’t want to support that. Brokers are always worried about their margins because it is a tight margin business. But I think it’s a shortsighted way to look at things because if I help that team build their team, then they’re going to stick with me. They’re going to be loyal to me, most of the time, and we’re going to grow as they grow.
“Don’t worry about the money,” she adds. “Worry about helping somebody build a sustainable career, a great business, become an entrepreneur—worry about teaching them how to do the things that we’ve done in Southern California and the money will come.”
Harrington believes that the company’s commitment to helping agents and teams succeed will help FirstTeam maintain the trajectory it’s been on under her watch, growing by about a billion dollars annually since she became CEO.
“I think in 2026, we’ll be closer to two billion in growth; my plan is to double the size of FirstTeam in the next four to five years…which is scary to say out loud,” she laughs.
A Message to Women: ‘Be Bold’
Part of Harrington’s claim to fame is the fact that she became the first female executive in FirstTeam’s historically male culture, a move that turned heads and inspired women agents at the company and around the industry at large. She hopes more women will follow her lead and rise up the ranks to leadership positions. And to help that effort, she recently launched The Powerful Women of First Team initiative.
“I think that there’s a huge benefit to women being leaders,” says Harrington. “There are so many things that we bring to the table that just are not in a man’s DNA. The fact that we want to develop consensus, the fact that we’re more democratic, the fact that our egos are usually not huge. We can have empathy, we get along, we can see things, we listen.
“I think women have this really unique way of leading that I think is wonderful, especially for an industry made up of mostly women. So I love to inspire and hopefully motivate women to get into leadership.”
Harrington also hopes to see more female team leaders, noting that while there are many women who are top-producing agents, they often choose to remain solo.
“I think this industry is so wonderful in the fact that there’s no glass ceiling—there are no politics,” she says. “There’s nobody saying, ‘I like you or don’t like you, so you can’t progress to the next level of leadership.’ You can do whatever it is that you want to do. You can start a team, you can start a brokerage, you can start your own office. I just want to be somebody that inspires women to take that step—to be bold and to really not just make it a job, but make it a business.”
‘The Last One Standing’ in the Futurescape
While Harrington has complete confidence in her plan for growing FirstTeam, the challenges affecting the industry as a whole will have an impact—for better and worse.
From her vantage point in Southern California, for example, Harrington has a front row seat to one of the industry’s most pernicious challenges: affordability. With a lack of inventory driving prices up and local regulations inhibiting the production of new homes, housing is reaching a breaking point, she explains.
“A lot of our lack of affordability is government-intervention driven,” she explains. “I’d love to see the California Association of Realtors®, especially the National Association of Realtors®, really focus on deregulating the building industry. There are all these rules that we have in place that disincentivize builders to build, and therefore, we don’t have as much to sell. You’re hurting younger people that are trying to build something for their families and build wealth.”
Harrington is also concerned about the ongoing threat of litigation.
“I worry about these class actions that seem to keep finding us,” she says. “In my opinion, class actions were set up for when somebody was poisoning the water, not when somebody made $500,000 on their house and had to pay an agent. So I hope and pray that gets reigned in.”
Another industry concern for many is consolidation. But Harrington sees this as an opportunity.
“When the Compass/Anywhere deal went through, it made me think, ‘wow, there’s really going to be a space for us now that everybody’s going to be the same.’ Because when a company buys another company, they roll it in. Everybody ends up having the same tech stack because you want economies of scale. That’s the reason that you bought them,” she says.
“Things will start to look very similar; things will start to be identical. There’s going to be more of a call for the boutique brokers. So I think there’s a huge opportunity for the more unique brands out there.”
Looking ahead, Harrington sees more change on the horizon, changes that will permanently alter the industry as we know it today. Much of this sea change will be caused by AI, which she foresees replacing human tasks in a variety of areas, from file review to escrow processing.
“Using AI in your business can really help you be efficient and more productive,” says Harrington. “And I think it will definitely replace people. If you are sitting behind your desk looking at files on a computer, you’re going to be replaced. So I think that’s coming, and I think the industry is going to be a ton different in five years.”
Harrington agrees with what many say, however: The human aspect of residential real estate cannot be replicated by AI. At least not yet.
“There are things that you want to know when you’re moving into an area that you want a human to talk to you about,” says Harrington.
“I’m not saying we’ll never be replaced,” she adds. “But I think we’ll probably be the last ones standing.”
