DANIELLE RODRIGUEZ &

From River 2 Ocean

her everything she needed to know about being a REALTOR®. They showed up at the office daily, pouring through contracts together. When Heather had a sales appointment, Danielle would shadow her.

After six months, Danielle was ready to take flight in real estate, but she couldn’t imagine doing it alone. Neither could Heather.

“When Danielle was done mentoring, we worked together so well that we got to talking. It’s nice to have another agent who’s there with you to work together with — bouncing ideas, someone to cover, someone to work alongside. Since we were at the office together every day, I couldn’t imagine separating.”

Heather and Danielle continued working side by side. Although they weren’t officially a team, they coordinated everything they did, right down to their matching logos.

“At some point, we said, ‘This is ridiculous. Let’s just be a team,’ Danielle recalls with a laugh.

In January 2019, Team Heather & Danielle was officially born.

Four years later, Heather and Danielle are thriving. They have fine-tuned their systems and honed in on their individual strengths. The result is a well-oiled

Heather Strazinsky and Danielle Rodriguez first met in 2013 through a networking group. While attending the group together regularly, the pair realized they had a lot in common, and their relationship slowly began to grow. At the time, Heather was running a successful jewelry sales business while getting her real estate business off the ground. Danielle, who was running an organizing business at the time, eventually joined Heather’s jewelry team, allowing them to develop a deepening friendship.

“We got along really well from the start,” Heather recalls. “When she joined my jewelry team, we became very close friends. We mesh very easily -— ideals, personalities, and desires. Sometimes, it felt like I was talking to the same person.”

Danielle watched Heather succeed in real estate, piquing her interest in the career. So when a client suggested at a jewelry party she give real estate a shot, she listened.

“I had always thought about doing it, and I figured it was the right time. So five years ago, I got my license. With a twenty-year sales career, I thought I could apply what I learned to real estate,” Danielle says.

Heather mentored Danielle in the early days of her career, showing her the ropes and teaching real estate machine that closed 52 transactions for over $25 million in 2022.

“Heather is a wiz with a contract. She knows them in and out, frontward and backward. She could easily be a broker. She prides herself on knowing everything about that,” Danielle explains. “I handle the searches for people, and we share the showings. In everything else, we find a 50/50 split. There’s never a client that’s top-heavy with one of us. We have equal facetime with them.”

As REALTORS® and community members, Heather and Danielle are committed to giving back. They have a particular love for rescue animals; they donate a portion of each sale toward Murphy’s Kittens, a 501(c)(3) non-profit focused on rescuing and rehoming stray cats. In 2022, they helped find homes for 133 cats.

The most significant change in Heather and Danielle’s business has been the founding of their brokerage, River 2 Ocean Realty, in early 2023. It’s an exciting and scary time, one ripe with opportunities for growth and expansion.

“We are doing something we’ve never done before in order to grow,” Heather says.

“We are extremely adaptable,” Danielle adds. “No matter what happens in our private lives or business lives, we keep going.”

Heather and Danielle are excited about what the future holds. They don’t have a concrete vision of what River 2 Ocean Realty will look like in two, five, or ten years. Instead, they are focusing on the present moment, choosing to care for their clients and grow their team with the heart of service they have come to be known for.

“Slow and steady wins the race right now,” Heather says. “We just know we want to do the best we can, taking on agents that give the level of service we provide. If we remain a small boutique brokerage, we are happy with that. If we expand in Florida and beyond, that’s exciting too. But we are not in a rush or hurry. We’re excited to be right where we are.”

Thank you MOCA Jacksonville for the photo shoot location.

© moving to new places, and this gives her an edge when work ing with military families.

Nykki and her children moved back to Jacksonville, FL and eventually settled in Clay County. Her family is a tight-knit group, and they enjoy spending time by the pool together, cook ing, and planning their next adventure, despite having a busy career. Nykki works to make sure she provides everything her children need or want, and she has made it her mission in life to be remembered for her independence, character, integrity, work ethic, high moral standards, and compassion. And so far, she is heading exactly where she wants to be.

Career Changes

Nykki has been blessed with the opportunity to gain the experience of having a few careers under her belt. She was first involved in the alcohol industry in sales which opened the door for her to become a national program director for a mobile marketing firm.

Unfortunately in 2020, when most of the country was shut down, and like many individuals in the service industry, her company was unable to keep her on. She saw this as her next opportunity to take the leap she had been thinking about doing, she went into real estate.

As Nykki delved into the real estate world, she quickly found her niche as a real estate agent with a unique advan tage: she came to the table with a General Contractor (GC) connection. Her partner is a GC, which gives her additional resources to offer her customers, whether it be for remodels or custom builds.

her

Nykki finds it most fulfilling to help individuals and families find their home. “If we can’t find it, we can build it,” she says. As Nykki started working on the new construction side of real estate, she has learned and gained industry knowledge and understanding of all the steps that go into a new construction build. This includes finding the land, all the way through the complete building process and she notes it to be “a lot of steps, but (she) loves it.”

With her newfound experience and knowledge of new construction, it allows her to help find “anything from an investment property, all the way to walking you through every step of a custom new build” and not only that, but she can help with “selections, floor plans, you name it.” One of her favorite undertakings are the relationships she gets to build with new clients and developing new skills.

Nykki also puts special effort into helping those with low credit scores and finding them their perfect home, as she wants to help everyone succeed and rise to the top.

Nykki hopes to continue expanding her knowledge of new construction while spending lots of time with her family, traveling, and starting her own investment portfolio.

Congratulations to Nykki Van Hof on being this month’s Rising Star!