Laura Mauelshagen says that the team at Ebby Halliday Realtors made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. After a few years away, the Denton-based realtor recently brought her team back to the firm where she began her real estate career.
“Their education is outstanding, which was what we were looking for, and they have a great office here in Denton,” she says.
Mauelshagen got her start in real estate back in 2011. She’d been waiting tables for years before deciding she simply couldn’t do that for the rest of her life.
During her first years in the business, while working two jobs, she signed 13 leases and one closing. It made her question if she had made the right career move. However, after closing 13 homes the following year, she knew she would make it.
Individual Top Producer to Team Leader
Working as an individual agent, she became one of her office’s top producers for several years before deciding to leave Ebby. During that time away, she formed her team, The Mauelshagen Group. Today the team includes three full-time agents as well as a transaction coordinator and an assistant. Their business spans an area roughly an hour from Denton in all directions.
Like practically every other corner of North Texas, Mauelshagen says that one of the biggest challenges she faces in the Denton areas is finding inventory. While her team has developed strategies to find homes for their clients, they still come up against many multiple off situations.
“People looking in Frisco or McKinney are coming to Denton because they can’t find anything, so we are feeling the pressure from all sides,” she says. “There’s also a lot more building up here than I think there is in central Dallas and Fort Worth, so I think we’re hopefully going to see a loosening on inventory.”
It’s not just neighborhood homes that people are looking for here. Mauelshagen says that many of her clients are now looking for rural properties, which is driving land prices in the area sky-high. Based on that, she thinks there is a good chance that Wise County to the west of Denton and north of Fort Worth could end up being the region’s next hot area.
Looking ahead, Mauelshagen says that her goals are to have a good group of five to seven agents and to be one of the top ten teams at Ebby.
