From Dentist to Real Estate Executive
Five Brothers’ Nickie Kalas is Dedicated to Growth & Service
by Carole VanSickle Ellis
Nickie Badalamenti-Kalas grew up in the business of real estate. As the youngest child of Joseph “Joe Bada” Badalamenti, founder and present-day chairman emeritus of field service solutions provider Five Brothers Asset Management Solutions, the industry was always operating in the background of her childhood home.
“My dad started [Five Brothers] with my mom, who worked hand-in-hand with him. We always had contractors coming to the house to get paid, and my dad did all of his delegating from home in the early days of the business,” Kalas recalled. However, this did not mean she planned to join the family business. Instead, long before becoming president and CEO of Five Brothers, she started a career in another family business: dentistry.
“My brother is an orthodontist. My older sister is a dental hygienist, and my other sister is also a dentist, so I landed in dentistry,” Kalas explained. After Kalas finished dental school, the two sisters started a dental practice. Then, the housing crash happened. Five Brothers weathered the storm. Due to the ensuing tidal wave of new compliance requirements, their clients and investors needed field solutions more than ever. Joe Bada began to realize it was time to bring in the next generation of the family.
“When my dad turned 85 in 2014, we were still on the recovery track from the recession in a lot of ways,” Kalas said. “He realized that things were going to continue to be different in the industry. He was going to need some help.” The siblings decided Kalas would be the one to train in the business, spending part of her time at Five Brothers and part of her time at the dental practice. Stretched thin, the family decided Kalas would leave the practice she ran with her sister to work full-time at Five Brothers.
“You cannot be as effective as you want to be when you are trying to do two full-time jobs part-time,” Kalas said bluntly. “We had to decide where it was more important I spend my time. What we did know was that Five Brothers had to be a priority. We had—and still have—a lot of employees relying on our business to support their families. That is how I ultimately came on with Five Brothers full-time. Those employees are our family.”
Treating Life and Business as a Journey
Many people might have struggled with stepping into a learning role at a family company, but Kalas thrived at Five Brothers, which she knew from the start was going to be her new and permanent location. “This is a business that requires all hands on deck. After my first year in the business, I knew it was going to be my home,” she said. “When you are running a business with this many people involved, you quickly understand the responsibility that goes along with running that business. You can’t take anything lightly.”
That mindset has served the company well for more than 50 years, enabling it to weather multiple economic cycles and, at present, continue operations during an ongoing global pandemic. “When the pandemic hit, we moved very quickly to protect our employees and our clients. Everyone moved to remote work. We got ready to help our clients deal with moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures and help them weather the storm,” Kalas said. “We’re all in the same boat, and we are making our best decisions based on the best information available.”
Because she entered the business with relatively “fresh” eyes after planning and training for a career in dentistry, Kalas has a uniquely effective manner of communicating about tough decisions and changing regulatory environments. She is clear, concise, and honest about her relatively short tenure in the business. In fact, she says, that new, somewhat unusual perspective can be an advantage.
“I always say that if I understand what we are doing or trying to accomplish on a large or small scale, anyone can. I don’t think it is ever easy to have someone come into a business fresh like I did and learn on the job, but everyone was so supportive of that process,” she recalled. These days, Kalas brings a combination of that learner’s attitude and a trained-on-site mentality to tough challenges like meeting client expectations in one of the toughest servicing environments in history. As public health intersects with real estate and housing policy in unprecedented ways, investors must have confidence in their servicing and field services providers, because so much of the industry spent 2020 in a holding pattern while politicians and health providers tried to work out the best way to “stop the spread” without devastating the economy in the process.
“We had to make quick decisions in order to provide the best benefit to our clients,” Kalas explained. “We pride ourselves on our level of integrity, and that integrity has provided us with a level of flexibility when it comes to conforming to what specific clients need.”
This flexibility has served Five Brothers clients and vendors well, providing the former with a relative degree of peace of mind and keeping the latter actively working in the field wherever health policy permits. “Dealing with COVID is a real, daily thing for these vendors,” Kalas said. “They have to keep their crews healthy, handle quarantines, and keep projects on schedule. On top of all that, when the moratoriums expire, they are going to have a substantial uptick in volume to deal with.” Kalas insists Five Brothers keep in close, consistent contact with vendors to make sure they are ready for anything in 2021, and the company does the same thing with employees and clients.
A Firm Foundation for Future Opportunity
That close contact has been and will continue to be essential in 2021 and beyond when the predicted uptick manifests. “We believe we are about to see some big numbers in terms of foreclosures, initiations of foreclosures, evictions, and defaults,” Kalas said. “There are a lot of people out there right now who are unemployed. That means investors are going to see a lot of changes in the value of homes and the availability of homes going forward.”
Because Five Brothers handles a vast array of real estate-related services, the company, led by Kalas, has spent much of 2020 preparing to act when clients call in 2021. “We have been in business for 55 years and handle default servicing, REO services, BPOs, valuation services, inspection services, and all aspects of property preservation,” Kalas said. Five Brothers also has a national vendor footprint, which means the company can cover all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Kalas credits the company’s proprietary digital platform for keeping employees and investors in that close, consistent contact that she values so highly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We have a longstanding history of doing business in this industry, and we are ready to help investors make the best decisions for the new economic cycle in housing when it comes,” Kalas said. “We will be here throughout the process as investors and the economy come back to the table and fully engage.”
Sidebar:
Weathering the Lows & Growing Through the Highs
One thing Nickie Kalas knows for certain is that life is a journey. That positive and determined outlook helped her make a huge transition from a family dental practice to the family real estate business six years ago and was cemented in her psyche when she faced a more personal challenge: her husband’s diagnosis of acute leukemia.
“We have three kids, and my youngest was 10 at that time,” she recalled. Her husband responded well to treatment and survived, but, Kalas explained, “That type of thing changes your perspective. You realize you really do not have much control over the master plan.” She credits the experience with creating a greater level of flexibility and confidence in her own ability and her family’s ability to work through challenges. “Life is a journey. We learned to roll with things more than we ever had. Now we know that as long as everybody has their health, we can manage.”
It is a particularly apt outlook for a CEO who came on board with the company with the stated goal of supporting not just the company but its employees as well and who is currently facing an unprecedented economic environment brought on by a modern, global pandemic. Kalas refuses to be another forecaster predicting “doom and gloom” for the industry or the national economy, instead treating 2020 as an opportunity to focus inward and prepare for the unexpected in 2021. “We have not just been focused on property preservation in 2020. We took advantage of the opportunity to make technological enhancements, improve our communications processes, refine our website, and really fine-tune the entire business,” she said.
“Sometimes, it can be easy to get entrenched in the operations of today when things get really busy,” Kalas concluded. “We take every available minute to be forward-thinking about our direction, our ability to be efficient, and our potential to ramp up and adapt in 2021.”
