Coming off a week at ICSC Las Vegas, Britney Mroczkowski showed up to the second session of She Does Deals with a theme and a guest speaker who embodied it. Leigh Brower left 26 years in healthcare to start over in commercial real estate in her late 40s — and in under a year closed five deals, landed two national brands, and built a newsletter to nearly 1,000 organic followers. Here is what you missed if you didn’t make it to the latest She Does Deals mastermind.

Part of an ongoing series. Missed Session 1? Read the inaugural She Does Deals recap →

What Mroczkowski Brought Back from ICSC

ICSC added a full day dedicated to women in commercial real estate this year, and what it confirmed for Mroczkowski was that the women who have built careers in this industry took risks early, reinvented themselves more than once, and built confidence by doing the hard thing first, not by waiting until they felt ready. 

Several themes ran through every panel she attended. Preparedness is a competitive advantage in this business. Showing up in rooms where women are underrepresented is how the industry changes — and it changes one room at a time. Women tend to fear mistakes more than men. And, perfectionism has a cost: not hitting send on the email, not reaching out for the meeting, not publishing the post until it’s flawless. “With AI, that helps a lot,” Mroczkowski said. “Hit send. Get the deal done… Confidence comes after you do the hard thing. Not before. Not during. After.”

The practical corollaries she put to the room: 

• Answer the phone when other commercial brokers don’t
• Start working deals from day one
• Send the text and the email
• When you don’t know something on a call, “the most powerful thing you can say is, ‘I don’t know. That’s a great question. Let me get back to you.’ I still use that to this day, 17 years in.”

She also addressed a habit she’s seen consistently among new advisors: the instinct to learn everything before touching a deal. “The only real way to learn is to put yourself out there,” she said. “You have to start working on deals. That is it.”

“Take Your Shot” became the theme of the second She Does Deals mastermind.

Leigh Brower: The Healthcare Career That Became a CRE Edge

Brower got her real estate license in 2019 and her broker’s license in 2023, but stayed largely focused on residential while keeping her corporate healthcare job running alongside it. She couldn’t find where she belonged in real estate. The shift came when she stopped trying to separate the two careers and started asking what happens when they intersect. She joined as the featured guest on this month’s She Does Deals session. 

“Real estate was not just a location decision,” she told the group. “It was a business decision and a wealth decision.” Healthcare providers — navigating burnout, trying to grow their practices, managing reimbursement strategy and staffing — were making real estate choices without anyone in the room who understood both sides. Where a practice opens, how much rent it can absorb, whether a site supports patient access and referral patterns, what buildout costs do to first-year margins, all of it connects directly to whether a health and wellness business grows or stalls. Almost no one was connecting it for them.

“I saw a gap,” she said. “A lot of health and wellness operators and investors are making real estate decisions without a true strategic advisor helping them connect the dots between operations, growth, patient experience, and financial performance.”

That realization reframed her 26 years of experience entirely, but some of the traditional firms didn’t see it that way. When she first explored commercial real estate, the consistent response was that she’d be welcome, but she’d need to start as a junior or an assistant. eXp Commercial read it differently. “I finally found a platform where entrepreneurship was encouraged, where advisors could build a niche, where I could bring new ideas forward instead of trying to fit into the traditional box.

“I may be new to commercial real estate. But I’m not new to business. I know how companies think, how executives make decisions, how to build relationships, how to sell complex ideas.”

In Mroczkowski’s account of their first in-person meeting at a Tampa restaurant, she shared that Brower arrived with a full business plan, the first 30 days already mapped, and a request to have it critiqued. The guy at the next table eventually asked the manager to move them because they wouldn’t stop talking about commercial real estate. The manager had him pay for their lunch instead.

One Year, Five Deals, Two National Brands, and a Successful Newsletter

Less than a year in, Brower has closed five deals and is currently representing two national brands — Haraz Coffee House and Amo Sami’s Shawarma. She has built a professional network across Tampa that, by Mroczkowski’s account, now reaches every major player in the market — built through a combination of preparation, persistence, and a direct line to Mroczkowski when someone wasn’t responding. “She was persistent. Everyone in Tampa now knows who Leigh is.”

Then there’s the newsletter. The Next Gen Dev, on LinkedIn, covers the intersection of healthcare operations, development, investment, and the future of CRE. It sits at nearly 1,000 organic followers — no paid promotion, built through consistent targeted content and launched in her first year, before she had a deal portfolio to point to as credentials. “I didn’t launch a newsletter because I felt ready. I launched it because I had something to say,” she shared. 

Why She Launched Before She Was Ready

Brower explained that she wasn’t seeing anyone in the real estate space discuss the intersection she was watching form —  the shift from hospital-based to outpatient care, the rise of wellness real estate, AI’s effect on healthcare delivery, the capital market dynamics reshaping where health businesses could grow and what real estate they could afford. “I didn’t see many people talking about that intersection in a way that connected strategy to real estate decisions,” she said. “So I said, I’m not going to wait and have somebody give me permission to have a voice out here.”

Writing consistently, she said, forced clarity. It made her study the market more rigorously, sharpened her positioning, and created proof of expertise before the deal history existed to provide it. “Every time I wrote, every time I posted, I was trying to prove to myself that I could show up before I was fully ready.”

Mroczkowski added the distribution framing she’d taken from ICSC: “You don’t have to have the largest audience. You just have to have the right audience.” A thousand dedicated CRE investors, developers, and operators outperforms 30,000 passive followers. And the follow-up she’d recently given Brower was now that you have the following, add the call to action. Ask them directly what you can help them buy or sell.

What Attendees Took from Session 2

• Start working deals immediately — waiting to feel ready consistently produces slower results than learning by doing from day one
• Prior expertise is a current asset — healthcare, operations, nursing, M&A: every prior career has a CRE vertical waiting for someone who understands it from the inside
• Launch before you feel ready — the newsletter, the cold call, the pitch: writing and publishing is what builds the expertise, not the other way around
• Target over volume — 1,000 followers in your sector who can do deals with you outperforms 30,000 who can’t
• Stop talking first — in a pitch or negotiation, the client’s favorite subject is themselves; ask about the property and write down what CoStar can’t tell you
• Build your circle deliberately — a network of women who share leads, specialize in complementary asset classes, and refer each other is a business strategy, not just a support system

The Room Responds

Another Florida advisor who joined the session and specializes exclusively in addiction treatment and rehabilitation center acquisitions — described building a niche so specific he now ranks near the top of national search results for “drug rehabs for sale” and “drug rehab valuations” through his site. His strategy is consistent content, inbound links, and time. “It takes a long time to do this. Don’t get discouraged.” He mentioned, in the same breath, a deal in the pipeline potentially reaching $26–27 million at a 7% commission — carved out of a sector most brokers never consider.

An attendee, who came to CRE after a career in nursing and paramedicine — she was the person called in when no one else could get the IV done — described the experience of going from being the most experienced person in any room to the newest one. Her approach to imposter syndrome: “I took that sense of it, balled it up, wrote it down, balled it up, set it on fire, and said: I’m going into these rooms because I’m supposed to be in these rooms.” She applied the same confidence that had carried her through medical emergencies to walking into commercial real estate conversations.

The incoming CCIM West Coast Florida district president was in the session, and she made the case for occupying leadership roles before you feel fully qualified for them. “Stand up, show up, and do not sit down. If you’re asked to be a speaker — just do it. If you’re asked to be on a board, pick the smallest thing just to be there. It will come back to you tenfold.” She noted that filling her CCIM board slate for next year has meant call after call to men, because not enough women are putting themselves forward for those seats.

How to Get Involved

Masterminds like this are rare in commercial real estate, and that’s exactly the gap Mroczkowski is deliberately closing.

She Does Deals is built for the conversations that don’t happen at most brokerages – the ones where you share the mistake, detail what it cost, and find out who has been through the same one and come out the other side. The deal flow that follows from those connections is a byproduct. The advisors who become colleagues, mentors, and peers in an industry that can be isolating even at the top are the product.

The room is open. Every advisor at eXp Commercial, every agent at eXp Realty, and anyone outside the network who wants a closer look at what is being built here. Men and women, at any stage of their career, with a story to share or a question worth asking are encouraged to join.

The next session is June 30. Add it to your calendar. 

Want to attend She Does Deals in person? Join us at eXpcon Salt Lake City on October 7-9, 2026.