Make Your Smile Shine

and teaching and started working for a few telemarketing companies to teach effective sales techniques. A landlord of hers suggested she apply those skills to realty. Though it was a field that she hadn’t really considered, she dove in and found real estate used the same parts of her brain as law. She was hooked.

“The profession triggers those same things in me that originally made me want to go into law: to fight, to fix what’s wrong, to fix what people need,” she said. “Being a real estate broker allows me to do that … without having to leave the area.”

Though Spampinato loves both her career and Duluth, she specifically loves the real estate market in Duluth. She said the economic diversity forces residents to become one greater community.

“When you have a city like Duluth, where you can have a half-million-dollar home right next to a duplex for college students or a duplex for starting families, you are forced outside of that comfort range. … You're going to go outside, and you’re going to have somebody from a completely different background, from a completely different age group, who probably only agrees with maybe a third of what you do, and in this city you’re actually forced to be nice, say hello, and get to know who that person is. It’s awesome.”

Despite this, real estate is known to be competitive. Spampinato described it as a “shark versus shark” business, which she witnessed the drawbacks of firsthand during the 2008 recession when many agents she looked up to were forced to quit.

Trying to stay afloat in a sinking market, Spampinato started trying everything. Most importantly, she began to consider ways in which she could make the profession more stable and sustainable.

“Real estate is based upon the idea that you eat what you kill. You don't get a closing that month, you don't get a paycheck,” she said.

Spampinato saw that this was wrong and wanted to come up with a new model so talented agents would be able to support their families when the market was down or when they were simply unlucky. After plenty of mistakes and trial and error, what is now Remax-Prodigy began to take form.

Now, Spampinato has a team of agents who are just that, a team, which is rare in the realty world.

Remax-Prodigy operates under “a collaborative team structure in which a portion of every closing is shared so that everybody has a consistent, long-term paycheck, where customers are guaranteed, and the agents are able to entirely focus on the clients without having to worry intensely on the back office stuff.”

While she became an independent agent in 2008, this model really started to take off about four years ago, and has been largely successful. Spampinato’s newest focus is recruiting more Realtors to the team so she can get back to her various hobbies and her family.

“That’s the reason I work the way I do,” she said of her family. Spampinato and her husband are the parents of a 7-year-old son and twin 3-year-old girls. The family travels every year, with the stipulations being their destination has to be outside of the United States, and she has to be able to deep sea dive. She'll be receiving her shipwreck diving certificate this year.

She incorporates her other passions into her family life as well, using her special-effects makeup skills on the kids for Halloween and crafting convincing costumes for the Renaissance Festival. In addition, they breed Bengal cats, which she described as “basically dogs with spots that meow and roar at you.”

Spampinato takes pride in being a woman who can be and do so many things, acknowledging that women often have to work harder for success.

“As women in business, we need to stand on each others’ shoulders,” she said. “We need to support each other.” D