Simone O’Leary
Broker-Owner • Keller Williams Centurion Realty • Realty North • Plainfield, N.J. • Age: 39
Simone O’Leary opened her real estate franchise in 2002 with the primary goal of helping others achieve the dream of home ownership. Her firm, Keller Williams Centurion Realty, provides the full range of real estate services: marketing, selling, finding and buying homes. “Home ownership is important to minority communities on a variety of levels. Being able to facilitate the process gives me an opportunity to be a part of something meaningful,” says O’Leary.
O’Leary has grown her firm’s revenue by more than 650 percent and increased the number of agents she employs by 300 percent since 2002. She and her team have led the Keller Williams New York-New Jersey region in home sales since 2005, and she plans to launch a mortgage division within the agency later this year.
O’Leary’s accomplishments have earned her countless awards, including the 2006 AFSCME/United Negro College Fund Award for Business Leadership 2006 and the 2005 98.7 KISS-FM Phenomenal Woman Award for Business Leadership. “Truly my success is a team effort. No one achieves these types of feats on their own,” says O’Leary. The team to which she refers includes her husband, Sean; and her children, Jenae, Oliva and Brandon; her parents, Daniel and Beverly Lunan; and her Keller Williams Centurion Realty associates.
Before opening Keller Williams, O’Leary was an agent with Realty Executives and Century 21 Realtors and a sales executive with Xerox Corp. Away from work, O’Leary serves as founder and chairman of several civic efforts: The Simone O’Leary Education Foundation, The Helping Hands Project and the “Got Food, We’ll Take It” Campaign. She is also is a member of The Fountain Project, a New Orleans hurricane relief effort.
O’Leary holds a bachelor’s degree in communications from Cornell University. She obtained her real estate sales license from the Mel Lissner School of Real Estate and her real estate brokerage license from the Professional School of Business in New Jersey.
