Mangas named Toledo ‘Realtor of the Year’
Written by Caitlin McGlade | | news@toledofreepress.comJohn Mangas dove into the real estate business as a college student and more than 30 years, a wife, two children and a dog later, he opened a regional Re/Max Preferred and won the Realtor of the Year Award.
The Toledo Board of Realtors chose Mangas on Dec. 6 as the annual winner because of his involvement on the board of directors at the city and state level, said Paula Hiett, chief executive of the board.
Mangas has also chaired many committees and volunteered a lot his time to the board, she said.
Mangas said his success relies on adapting to evolving buyer attitudes and coping with economic crisis.
“The average realtor in America is in their mid 50s and the average first-time buyer is in their early 30s,” Mangas said. “My industry still wants to do things they way they always did.”
John Mangas
Homebuyers now look online for properties and wait merely a half hour to hear back from an agent before moving to the next one, he said.
“My industry hasn’t gotten its arms around that immediacy,” he said.
As a broker, Mangas trains hundreds of agents to sell homes.
Mangas originally studied business at UT, but after conducting maintenance and property management for an apartment owner during college, he switched his focus and earned a marketing and sales degree from Owens Community College.
He got his broker’s license in the mid 1980s, and a few years later landed a job with Cavalear Realty Company, which was Toledo’s top development agency at the time, he said.
After promotions that eventually made him president of the company, ownership of the company changed and he and his business partner Kathy Kuyoth opened Re/Max Preferred Dec. 20, 2001.
He has experienced the market at both difficult times, when interest was high and many people couldn’t afford to buy homes, and at times when the market was positive for buyers.
He described the present situation for his business as a “trifecta.”
“Interest rates are low and fixed rates are in the floors and housing affordability index has never been better, so it’s a tremendous time to buy a house for the first time,” he said.
His focus is not only on real estate.
Mangas was raised on a farm in Henry County with a mother and father who taught him to “do what he could with what he had,” he said. His father was a quadriplegic so Mangas helped his mother take care of his father for many years.
That lesson, he said, instilled in him a need to work with the community and help those who need it.
“I love Toledo,” he said. “It’s a wonderful place to live, with great housing stock and I love being involved in the community and giving back what I can.”
Tags: John Mangas, real estate, Realtors
