# How Chris Stafford Runs a San Francisco Listing Business From Panama

> Published: 2024-10-01 | Category: podcast-episode | Tags: podcast-episode, listing-agent, delegation, remote-work, mindset

**Guest:** Christopher Stafford

Chris Stafford left PwC for real estate, survived a devastating year, and rebuilt a listing business he runs remotely from Panama through delegation and gratitude.

## Content

Chris Stafford sells real estate in San Francisco. He does it from Panama. That single fact undermines almost every excuse an agent has ever made about why they have to be everywhere, do everything, and answer every call themselves. On this episode of The REI Agent podcast, Chris joined Mattias and Erica to explain how he got there — through eleven years he hated at PricewaterhouseCoopers, a year he barely remembers, and a decision to build a business around his life instead of the other way around.

## Why Did a Successful CPA Walk Away From an 11-Year Career?

Chris didn't set out to be a real estate agent. He graduated college without much of a plan, discovered he was good at accounting, and, as he puts it, "just sort of fell into being a CPA." He spent eleven years at PricewaterhouseCoopers and made a lot of money doing it.

He also hated it. "I literally felt like I was going home every single night crying on the inside."

The exit came from a friend — the same person who had sold Chris his first house in San Francisco — who told him he should go into real estate. Chris didn't study it for two years or wait for the perfect moment. He packed up, made the switch, and hired a real estate coach on day one.

That coach cost him $1,000 a month back in the early 1990s, which was real money then and would be real money now. It was also the best decision of his early career. The coach dramatically compressed his learning curve, and his instruction was blunt: get on the phone and start making cold calls. Chris didn't know enough to argue, so he made hundreds of them.

His only regret about the whole thing is that he didn't do it sooner.

Erica named the thing that keeps most people stuck: when work is miserable but the money is good, most people put their head down and keep going. Chris's answer was that he'd had too many experiences reminding him how short life is — and that the days and years accelerate as you get older.

## What Happened That Changed Everything?

About twelve years ago, Chris got a random phone call on a Tuesday afternoon. His partner had brain cancer.

His partner is thankfully in remission now, but the year that followed was brutal. "We spent a year in the hospital, and I drank way too much. I was just, I don't even remember most of it. It was sort of that whole year was sort of a blackout period."

What propelled him out the other side was, in part, a woman he met during that period who became his spiritual advisor — someone he still talks to twice a month, now in her late eighties, living in Las Vegas. Her observation hit him like a ton of bricks: we are making all of this up anyway, so let's make up fun stuff.

"We're designing our businesses. We're designing our lives. We're designing our families, and we have to be more conscious," Chris said. "All of us in this world are going 800 miles an hour, and that's one of the reasons why I think that we're not really appreciating what we have."

The framing matters because it flips a year that felt entirely out of his control back into a set of choices he could actually make. Coming out of that period, Chris cleaned up, wrote a book called *Massive Abundance: How to Create Passion, Purpose and Prosperity in Your Life*, and made a structural decision about his business that everything since has been built on.

## Why Did Chris Focus Exclusively on Listings?

He decided to work only with sellers.

The logic was economic and personal at once. As a listing agent he could earn more, leverage his time further, do more volume, and take significantly more time off. And he was honest about the part most agents won't say out loud: he never enjoyed buyer work. "I respect and love all people and all buyers, but I hated putting them in my car and I hated driving them around and showing them all the properties."

There's also a structural argument he makes that agents should sit with. As the listing agent, you are part of the deal no matter which buyer closes it. If a buyer's deal falls apart, you go find them another property and start over. One side of the transaction compounds your effort; the other side frequently resets it.

San Francisco added its own friction. The Bay Area is enormous but the city itself is only about seven square miles — dense, with terrible parking, and, unusually, no lockboxes. A buyer's agent there has to call the listing agent to arrange every private showing and wait for someone to come let them in. For an agent trying to protect his time, that was a logistical nightmare with no upside.

So he specialized. And specialization is what eventually made the whole business portable.

## How Does He Actually Run the Business Remotely?

"Probably 85% of everything I was doing in San Francisco, I can do remotely."

Chris is the rainmaker in his business — he owns the marketing function, and marketing is where the phone and Zoom do almost all the work. He calls his sphere of influence. He works expired listings. He works probates, which he genuinely loves. He does listing appointments over Zoom. All of that travels.

He also has a substantial referral business built over three decades, which produces inbound calls he doesn't have to manufacture.

On that point, he offered the single most quotable piece of tactical advice in the episode. Agents constantly conclude that outreach doesn't work because nobody responds. Chris sold a woman a condo about twenty years ago and has emailed, texted, and called her ever since. She never once returned a call. Then, out of nowhere on a Sunday afternoon, she called and asked him to list the condo. When he pointed out that she'd never responded in twenty years, she said she didn't know she was supposed to — she just knew he was there.

"Keep calling all your SOI, keep calling everybody, even if they don't respond, because there are lurkers out there. The lurkers are paying attention."

Everything outside marketing is handled by other people. Chris has a business partner, a buyer's agent, a marketing team, and an assistant. Buyers are handled entirely by the team — he'll occasionally join an initial interview call and nothing more. As for administration, he's cheerfully unqualified: ask him which forms to use and he has no idea. He can write an offer and an agency disclosure. Beyond that, the paperwork belongs to someone else.

That isn't laziness. It's the same reason he left accounting in the first place. He didn't want the detailed minutia — he wanted to be the face-forward person meeting people and making deals. He built the business around that, and let people who are energized by the details own the details.

## What Does "Delegate and Defer" Actually Require?

Chris compresses his whole operating philosophy into two words: *delegate* and *defer*.

He admits he has an unfair advantage here. "I know I didn't get that gene. I would delegate everything in my life if I could." Most of the agents he coaches struggle with it badly.

The principle he teaches instead is play to your strengths. He described a client in Southern California who is exceptional at door knocking and cannot be persuaded to call his sphere of influence — but who was also spending his time on files and inspections. Chris's message to him: stop. Do the marketing you're genuinely good at, and hand the rest to a transaction coordinator. After a year of coaching, that agent is finally starting to delegate.

The consequence of refusing is a ceiling. "You're not going to be able to scale the business. If you really want to increase your business, how are you going to do that if you're sitting in some office doing file work?"

He extends the same logic to people who don't want to scale at all, which is a point worth pausing on. If your goal is $100,000 a year, do it in twenty hours a week rather than forty. Delegation isn't only a growth tool — it's a time-recovery tool. "Spend time with your family and your loved ones. That's way more important than working on files in my book."

Mattias framed it as the entrepreneur's classic trap: wearing every hat because it feels responsible. Someone else will find energy in exactly the tasks that drain you — and your clients will usually get better service from that person than from a stretched-thin owner doing it at 11 p.m.

## What Is the Reverse Gap, and Why Does Gratitude Come First?

Underneath the systems, Chris credits a serious gratitude practice for how he operates.

He referenced Dan Sullivan's idea of the reverse gap. Most people attach happiness to the future: when I hit this number, when I reach this title, then I'll be happy. Sullivan argues for inverting it — look back across the last five, ten, twenty years at everything you've accomplished, large and small, and take your happiness from that. Then move forward from a full tank instead of an empty one.

"So much of what people tie their happiness to is the future. But you should really make your happiness about all the things you've accomplished in the past."

He's also currently working through *10X Is Easier Than 2X* by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy — impressed enough that he signed up for Hardy's course. The thesis appeals to him precisely because it aligns with how he rebuilt his business: doubling requires doing more of what you're already doing, while 10X requires eliminating most of it and finding two or three strategies that actually get you there. The line that stuck with him: your future should pull you forward, rather than your past dictating your present.

Mattias added *Who Not How* to the reading list, which is the same principle applied to people rather than tactics.

There's one more piece of Chris's coaching that agents routinely skip. The very first module of his Agent Unleashed Collective isn't about scripts or lead generation — it's about physical health and mindset. His reasoning is simple: without both, you won't have the mental or physical stamina to sustain real estate or any entrepreneurial pursuit. The business tactics only work on top of a person who can actually run them.

He's equally direct about who he'll work with. His coaching clients need to be coachable, decisive, resourceful, and willing to do the work. He described paying-but-absent clients as the puzzle he can't solve — a woman who paid his full fee upfront three months earlier and has never once gotten on a call. Motivation isn't something a coach can install.

## What's the Real Takeaway for Agents?

Chris's two warnings bookend the episode, and they're the same warning twice.

"If you're not living your dream, you're going to be living somebody else's dream."

"If you're not designing your life, it will design you."

The Panama lifestyle isn't the lesson — it's the evidence. What made it possible was a series of unglamorous structural choices: specialize in the side of the transaction that compounds your time, keep only the work you're actually good at, hand everything else to people who want it, and anchor the whole thing in gratitude for what you've already built rather than anxiety about what you haven't.

Chris and his partner, who manages his social media, are free to live in Panama, Argentina, or wherever they decide to go next. The San Francisco business keeps running. That's what a well-designed business looks like from the outside.

## About Christopher Stafford

Christopher Stafford is a real estate coach, author, national speaker, and San Francisco broker with more than 30 years in the business. A former CPA at PricewaterhouseCoopers, he built a career as a top listing agent before creating The Agent Unleashed Collective, a coaching program that teaches motivated listing agents how to dramatically grow their listing business while reclaiming their time. He is the author of *Massive Abundance: How to Create Passion, Purpose and Prosperity in Your Life*, and currently runs his business remotely from Panama.

**Connect with Christopher Stafford:**

- [Agent Unleashed](https://theagentunleashed.com/)
- [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/Christopher.S.Stafford)
- [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/realcstafford/)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/theagentunleashed/)
- [TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/@realcstafford)

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