Steve Koleno, one of the nation’s top brokers, has joined Chicago’s Dream Town Real Estate to focus on selling luxury homes in Illinois — a significant pivot from how he has grown his business over the past five years.
Koleno notched the third-most deals in the country last year, with more than 1,700 sales and just under $684 million in volume, according to Real Trends.
His high number of transactions is due to his focus on working with “some of the largest single-family rental companies” owning anywhere from 20,000 to 82,000 homes, Koleno said. This included a stint as vice president of American Homes for Rent, the designated broker for a division of Blackstone that later became Invitation Homes.
“Last January, I sold 208 houses in four months for a big private equity fund,” he said. “So we specialize in more business, more corporate.”
As those companies gravitated away from Chicago and the midwest, due to “the markets, the price point, the politics,” and toward the Sun Belt, Koleno followed suit, he said.
As the sole broker on his team, Koleno grew his practice by getting licensed in a slew of other states to begin doing business across the Sun Belt and on the East Coast, in addition to the Midwest, he said. This was also his way of responding to pandemic-era market disruption, he said.
“Now, I’m honestly trying to come back to Chicago and leverage that success that we’ve had and our track record to make a longer-term footprint here,” Koleno said, adding that he wants to “get back to the traditional” of working with individual luxury home buyers and sellers.
“I am a strategist, a complete strategist, with all of this,” said Koleno, who formerly worked with RE/MAX.
Due to ongoing business in other states where he’s licensed, Koleno said he was looking for a local luxury brokerage that would provide him independence as a “non-traditional” broker.
Dream Town ranked No. 7 on The Real Deal’s list of Chicago’s top residential brokerages this year with $1.17 billion in total sales volume.
Koleno is “independent minded, and we’re the one of the largest independent [brokerages] left standing,” Dream Town founder Yuval Degani said. “It felt right for both parties, and we’re so proud to support him to do what he’s trying to do in Illinois.”
Though Koleno will be focusing on working with individual home buyers and sellers within roughly the $800,000 to $1.7 million range, he said that working with large corporate buyers like Blackstone is “in his bones.”
“The institutional side of single-family rentals really does not exist; it’s not a big thing in Chicago anymore,” he said. “So, I’d love to get into builders, or developments could work, because we do high-volume listings.”
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