Hidden Gems: Meet Jim Smith of Golden Real Estate

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jim Smith.

Hi Jim, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
As with most Realtors, real estate was not my first career. My first career was in journalism. Trained as a summer intern at the Washington Post in 1968, I dabbled in journalism for a few years, starting a newspaper in Brooklyn NY, and later a trade newspaper for the criminal justice community in NYC before giving up and using my typesetting equipment to start a trade typesetting business I named Journal Graphics.

In the mid-80s we diversified into transcribing, printing, and mailing transcripts for TV (and later NPR) news, public affairs, and talk shows, quickly becoming the nation’s leading producer of such transcripts. In 1991 I moved that business from lower Manhattan to Denver (where I had lived as a child), purchasing an office building near the state capitol building for $110,000. That got me interested in real estate.

When Journal Graphics lost its major accounts (ABC, CNN, and NPR) to a competitor in 1996, I dissolved the company and settled into becoming a commercial real estate landlord for that building before selling it for $1 million. I got licensed as a real estate agent in 2002 to learn more about real estate, finally deciding that residential brokerage was more interesting than commercial real estate investing.

Knowing how hard it was to break into that industry, I figured out that writing a real estate column would help me stand out among my colleagues to potential clients. There’s a saying that “you teach what you need to learn,” and writing a column on real estate for public consumption was the way to do it.

I would choose topics (such as foreclosure) that I needed to learn about and write columns that I’d ask my managing broker to review for accuracy before publishing as “advertorials” in local papers, later buying a full page for them in the YourHub section of the Denver Post. It has been two decades now, and the desired result was achieved. I have made a name for myself among hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers, generating at least 90% of my clients without ever doing other kinds of prospecting.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Given my nest egg from selling the office building, I could afford such a major investment in advertising and, yes, it was a pretty smooth road to the success I enjoy today. Even during the “great recession” of 2008-10, I kept writing the weekly newspaper column and, having bought a stand-alone building for Golden Real Estate in 2007, grew that new brokerage into a well-known and well-respected brokerage in Jefferson County.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I don’t know of any real estate brand that puts value statements on its “for sale” signs, but Golden Real Estate from the beginning has had two value statements on its signs, and we have stayed true to them throughout. The first is “Hometown Service Delivered With Integrity,” and the second is “Promoting and Modeling Environmental Responsibility.”

Over time, we transitioned our building on South Golden Road into a truly “net zero energy” building that was heated, cooled, and powered by solar-generated electricity, removing the natural gas meter in 2017. At one point we boasted five Tesla cars between myself, my wife, and our broker associates, charged for free at four EV charging stations in our parking lot that were also open to the public.

As you can see by scanning two decades of my newspaper columns at www.JimSmithColumns.com, I have written about solar power, home insulation, electric vehicles, net zero energy, and sustainability in general repeatedly, even though we moved Golden Real Estate out of that building and into a downtown Golden storefront in 2021 and sold that building in 2023.

What do you think about happiness?
I am happy with the continued success of Golden Real Estate, Inc. and with the impact I have made through my journalism in the field of sustainability, home electrification, and EV adoption. In February 2021, RISMedia named me a “Real Estate Newsmaker” in the category of “Influencers” in its magazine, Real Estate.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://goldenrealestate.com/; www.JimSmithColumns.com
• Facebook: facebook.com/goldenrealestate1
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/jimsmith145
• Youtube: youtube.com/jimsmith145
• Other: http://realestatetoday.substack.com; http://jimsmith145.substack.com