Debbi DiMaggio: How Mindset Built a 35-Year Real Estate Career
She ran the LA Marathon on a month's notice without training her body. Mile 18 nearly broke her. The same principle has carried 35 years of real estate.
Debbi DiMaggio is a real estate agent at Corcoran Icon Properties in the San Francisco East Bay and Beverly Hills, LA. She has 35 years in the business and a clear, ownable line: luxury is a service, not a price point. But the story behind how she built her career — and why she just published a book about it — starts with a marathon she had no business finishing.
While on a family vacation during the holiday season, December 2023, her son told her he wanted to challenge himself. Five words. Debbi didn't fully understand what he meant, but the phrase stuck. So she walked out the door and started running. Not training for anything specific. Just moving.
In February, she made a decision. She would run the LA Marathon. With less than a month to race day. No coach. No formal plan. And — this was the part — she wouldn't train her body. She would train her mind.
"I wanted to prove that you can do anything on mindset," she says.
She read books. She watched videos about Navy SEAL discipline. She immersed herself in the mindset of a soldier — David Goggins, in particular. She told no one. A week before the race, she told her husband only because he'd need to come with her in case something happened. She did not know if she would finish.
Mile 18
She felt fine for the first half of the race. Hopping along, she calls it. Bouncing. Waiting for something to give and watching it not give. And then the eighteenth mile.
"My brain started questioning what I was doing," she says. "What have you done? Why are you here?" Mile 18, she has since learned, is a thing. The wall most marathon runners hit. She had not known that going in.
What she did next is the part she comes back to. She did not push through with grit alone. She reframed.
"I told myself, no is not an option. You will not quit." Then a second thing arrived, and she still doesn't know where it came from. "I said to myself: you are fortunate. You are fortunate to be running. You are running for all the people who cannot run."
She finished the race.
"You are fortunate. You are running for all the people who cannot run."
— What she told herself at mile 18The Wiring
Debbi will tell you she has been like this her entire life. She does not know where it came from, only that the wiring has always been there.
"My whole life, I don't know how or why, but I've never seen a roadblock I couldn't get around." She started in real estate 35 years ago at a firm that didn't hire unseasoned agents. Debbi was the exception — and the youngest person they had ever brought in. They paired her with a mentor. She did not argue. "I just listened and learned and took in everything I could to excel." By the end of her first year she was in the top ten at the firm, alongside agents with more than a decade of experience.
That instinct — to move forward without negotiating with the part of yourself that hesitates — is what she kept building on. It is also the thing she now writes about. Mindset in Motion: Activate Purpose, Power, and Peak Performance came out earlier this year, endorsed by the CEOs of Compass and The Corcoran Group. The book introduces a five-step framework she says she has been living for decades without naming: Goal, Believe, Internalize, Share, Activate.
The book took her a year to write. But it was a lifetime in the making.
What 35 Years Looks Like
Debbi works the East Bay — Piedmont, Oakland, Berkeley, Orinda, Lafayette, Danville — and Beverly Hills, LA. The dual market is rare. So is the way she frames the work. She and her husband have been business partners for 35 years; they specialize in clients going through transitions. Divorce. Death in the family. A relocation for a new job. Downsizing after the kids have moved out.
"There are many reasons people move," she says. "And everyone in the family is going through their own transition." Her job, as she describes it, is to get them across the finish line and into their next chapter as seamlessly as possible. The marathon language is not accidental.
Most agents focus on the deal. Debbi has built the practice around the person.
"There's a lot of listening," she says. "A lot of compassion. Because oftentimes, they don't have anyone to talk to. They use you as a sounding board. And you just need to be there."
She makes a point of it: "I don't consider real estate a job. It's a lifestyle. It's what I do. I'm helping people through whatever it is they're going through. When you're helping a client to buy or sell a home, you spend a lot of time together. You are very much into their life at that time."
She has, she says, never worked any other way.
A Client Who Activated
Most of the clients Debbi works with are in the middle of a difficult moment. One client comes to mind first when she's asked. A woman going through a brutal divorce. Blindsided. Strong, until the rug was pulled out from under her. The husband had left abruptly. There was a house, and a settlement, and a thousand smaller decisions to make in the worst time of her life.
Debbi and her husband listed the home. They spoke to the wife and the husband separately, on different calls, holding the neutral middle. They remodeled the entire house and got it sold. That part — the transaction — was the easy part.
What Debbi remembers is what came after.
"A lot of people going through divorce never get past it. It becomes their whole life." This client did not. She moved through what Debbi now calls the five steps without knowing she was doing it — and when she got to the last one, she didn't stop.
"She activated. Even after the divorce had leveled her, she went on to do incredible things. She built her team of supportive people. She's now the President of an international company." Debbi shakes her head, still amazed by it. "Had she not gone through the divorce, she wouldn't be doing all the incredible things she's doing today."
That last step — Activate — is where most people stall. They know what they want. They know what to do. They just don't move.
"I love to see when people activate, but that's where a lot of people get stopped up. They think it's too much work. It's really wonderful to see people in the activation phase, doing the work."
— Debbi DiMaggioIt is also, by her account, what mile 18 of the LA Marathon was for her. The decision to keep moving when the brain has stopped cooperating. The discovery that the body will follow if the mind does not blink.
How to Choose Someone at a Life Moment
Ask Debbi what to look for in an agent when you're hiring one in the middle of something difficult and emotional, and she does not lead with experience. Experience is the floor.
"There are a lot of real estate agents," she says. "What's really important is finding someone who not only has experience, but someone you genuinely connect with — someone who not only listens, but truly hears you. It's not about comparing one agent to another. It's about how they guide you, support you, and help you navigate the process in a way that feels right for you. We're all unique, and different people connect in different ways. At the end of the day, real estate is a relationship business."
"Read the testimonials," she says. "Then go a step further — ask the agent if you can speak directly with a past client. I've had clients say, 'Please have your future clients call me,' and I absolutely encourage it. A former client can share what their experience was really like — how they felt throughout the process, how challenges were handled, and whether they truly felt supported. Many people don't take the time to make that call, but if you do, you'll gain valuable insight that can help you make the right choice."
It is, in Debbi's voice, the same advice underneath the marathon and the activation and the 35-year practice: do the small thing the moment seems to ask for. Make the call. Decide. Move.
Because confidence is not waiting for you at the finish line. It is built in the doing.
Debbi's book, Mindset in Motion: Activate Purpose, Power, and Peak Performance, is available on Amazon. A portion of proceeds supports breast cancer causes.