Building on Friendship and Honoring a Legacy

With more than $1B in sales in 17 years, the co-founders of Weinberg Choi Residential in Chicago built their real estate business on relationships.

An Early Lesson in Homeownership

Native Chicagoan Tommy Choi has never taken homeownership for granted. As a young boy, Tommy’s grandfather often reminded him of one of the top reasons he immigrated to the United States from South Korea: for the opportunity to own his own home. “He wanted to put his stake in the ground,” Tommy said. “He wanted to say that this piece of Chicago, this piece of America, was his.” His grandfather impressed upon Tommy the belief that homeownership wasn’t a guarantee, but a privilege. Tommy couldn’t have guessed how this perspective would later factor into his life’s work.

A few years after graduating from college, Tommy was at a career crossroads. He was making good money, but he was miserable in his day job. His inside sales position with a tech company paid well enough for him to buy his first property – a condo where he lived with his best friend, Missouri native Josh Weinberg. Josh was working in sales for a national homebuilder, and while he liked the real estate industry, the two often commiserated about their daily grind. That’s when they started thinking about building something together.

Tommy and Josh already knew they made good business partners. Back in college, they’d created a profitable autograph sales enterprise that funded trips and parties. They harnessed the same entrepreneurial spirit to write up a new business plan, and by 2007, the friends had become licensed real estate agents. Preferring to build an independent brand, they opened Weinberg Choi Residential as a boutique brokerage and never considered joining a larger organization.

Despite their enthusiasm and dedication, Tommy and Josh got pushback from friends and family, who thought they were making a huge mistake entering the real estate industry in the middle of a downturn. However, the prevailing market conditions offered an unexpected benefit. While other companies were contracting and agents were leaving real estate, Tommy and Josh took up the slack, growing and building their network and database. “We were out there hustling, meeting people, really building relationships – which has been the foundation from day one,” Josh said.

At the outset, the partners focused on what they knew best: They concentrated their efforts on helping recent college grads find apartment rentals, realizing those renters would eventually turn into homeowners. With patience, their strategy worked, and those same clients called back when they were ready to buy. The approach resulted in year-over-year growth for the partners’ burgeoning business.

Discovering A Game-Changing Hiring Strategy

As the business grew, Tommy and Josh found themselves wearing multiple hats – and approaching burnout. They knew they needed support, but as Tommy said, “When you start to make money as an agent, that’s when you start to get protective over it.”

After four years, they made their first hire, and later grew to a seven-person team. While they were doing well, they found themselves making hiring decisions based on favorable personal impressions, rather than on a candidate’s career potential. They eventually acknowledged they were doing a disservice to prospective talent and to their business.

Later, after joining Keller Williams® ONEChicago, they realized how important a comprehensive hiring strategy could be to their performance and growth. They adopted Career Visioning, KW’s four-step talent screening process, and never looked back. Josh said the deep-dive approach to hiring has allowed them to set talent up for success by positioning each person in a role that not only uses their strengths, but fuels their fire to come to work each day. “Hands down, CV is the number one game-changing thing for our business, which is also a game-changer for our life,” Josh said. It’s what’s allowed them to scale their team to 16 members strong.

Providing for their team’s success has become Josh and Tommy’s top priority. “Our team is super important to us. Impacting their lives and [helping] them achieve everything they ever dreamed of and more is why we’re doing what we’re doing,” Josh said.

Finding A Clear Cultural Fit

Their focus on personal impact eventually led Tommy and Josh to Keller Williams. In 2016, a colleague they admired, who had just joined a KW® market center, invited them to sit down to learn more about the company. They were surprised by the cultural alignment. Tommy recalled, “When we learned more about it … we realized Weinberg Choi was basically Keller Williams. We were living the culture of what KW was.” That’s when they made the decision to join Keller Williams® ONEChicago.

They plugged into KW systems and models straight away. Josh said, “Before we joined Keller Williams, we had tried out every different model with our team, and we were very, very profitable. But we realized we really didn’t have a model – other than trying every different thing.”

By being strategic about their new hires and following a specialist model, Tommy says they added years of knowledge to their team without having to do so in real-time. “And we realized that not only could we have a bigger life, we could create a bigger opportunity for everyone that’s part of our family at Weinberg Choi,” Josh said.

The difference was immediate. Before joining Keller Williams® ONEChicago, Weinberg Choi was averaging $30-35M in sales volume a year. In their first year with KW, they hit $50M, and from 2021-2024, they averaged more than $100M in sales volume and 150-175 units sold annually. Since their founding, the team has sold more than $1B in real estate and served more than 2,000 clients. It’s an accomplishment they never imagined would be possible for a referral-based business.

Defining the Modern Real Estate Professional

When they made the decision to join Keller Williams® ONEChicago, Josh recalled they did so knowing they would be able to run their business according to their beliefs and values, and build on the brand they had worked so hard to establish.

As a business, Tommy says their differentiator is serving their clients as “modern real estate professionals.” To the Weinberg Choi team, that means leaning into offline phone calls, lunches, and face-to-face touchpoints, while also providing digital content that engages their audiences and increases their online visibility. From explainer videos on interest rate shifts to mortgage fundamentals and local restaurant recommendations, Tommy says building an online reputation is about creating useful, timely posts that build trust with followers. For Tommy, it’s also about letting his personality shine through and creating genuine connection. The dual-pronged approach to marketing helps them stay top of mind with past and future clients, while serving as a throughline to their culture and mission.

Tommy says he gets to honor his grandfather’s legacy with every client they serve. “I think my grandfather would be very proud of not just what I’ve accomplished, but what we’ve accomplished as a team, together,” he said. “Especially knowing the reason why I’m in the position I am today was because of his journey here.”

Watch the full KW Real Estate Role Models Weinberg Choi profile @kellerwiliams on YouTube. 

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