Saying Goodbye (And See You Soon) to WPP Agent Marguerite Martin

I’ve been trying to write this post for a while now, and I keep getting stuck. So let me start at the beginning. It was April 1st, 2011. April Fools’ Day. Pierce County was still deep in the wounds of the housing crisis the median home price in our market had fallen to around $194,000, down from a pre-crash high of $285,000. Agents were leaving the business in droves. It was, to put it plainly, a terrible time to double down on real estate.

Marguerite Martin showed up anyway.

While Marguerite is primarily known in Pierce County as a Tacoma real estate agent who created the Tacoma Neighborhood Guide MovetoTacoma.com- her role here at WPP and in the real estate industry has been unique.

I’d worked alongside Marguerite during my first time as President of the Tacoma Pierce County Association of REALTORS®. Marguerite was on the board and chaired the Communications Committee at TPCAR in 2009 and I knew what she was made of. When I recruited her to Windermere Professional Partners that spring, she came in with a proposal that, honestly, most people in our industry weren’t ready for yet. I wasn’t sure I was ready yet!

Marguerite came to WPP proposing a whole new approach to online marketing for our agents. Niche websites. Blog content. Social media as a lead generation tool. She wasn’t just thinking about surviving the market downturn. She was thinking about building something that would last.

What We Built Together

In those early years, Marguerite collaborated with our marketing and lead generation teams to create a network of niche websites and blog content for our agents. This was hyper-local, community-focused writing that put WPP on the first page of Google searches for neighborhoods across Pierce County. She wasn’t just marketing our agents listings. She was making the case that our agents were the true experts in the communities they served by showing off their knowledge and expertise when most internet SEO was still focused on clickbait and bait-and-switch.

That work eventually grew into WindermerePC.com- our top-ranking site and neighborhood guide that showcases the expertise of our agents across our entire footprint and drove real traffic and real clients to them. It was one of the most effective things we ever did for agent visibility, and it started with Marguerite’s belief that content could be community.

Then came Meet the Neighbors.

In 2018, Marguerite proposed a video series unlike anything we’d seen in real estate. Instead of focusing on houses these mini documentaries focused on the people in our communities. Twelve deep, beautifully produced, on-location mini-documentaries about the people who live in Pierce County. These neighbors were nominated by our own agents. Shot with a professional crew. Asking real questions about community, family, life, and belonging.

The Meet the Neighbors series won multiple awards, including recognition from BombBomb as a top creator of community video in the real estate industry. But more than the awards- it changed how people thought about what a real estate company could be. We weren’t just selling homes. We were honoring the people inside them and the communities we all are a part of.

The Prospecting Superpowers Program

If I had to point to the single most lasting thing Marguerite has given WPP, it’s the Prospecting Superpowers program- and I say that with full appreciation for everything else on this list.

The origin story matters here. Marguerite didn’t sit down and invent this program out of thin air. We had a problem at WPP. Too many tools for our real estate agents. In addition to the impressive suite of tools and resources from Windermere Corporate, Windermere Professional Partners offers a slew of additional prospecting tools for agents. Our agents were confused and overwhelmed at times trying to figure out how to implement them efficiently. Bafflingly, some tools seemed to work differently from one agent to the next.

Marguerite went and listened. She took a summer and surveyed real estate agents (in Tacoma and across the country) in depth about how they actually built their businesses. What worked, what didn’t, what they loved, what drained them. From those conversations, she identified four distinct prospecting styles and worked to help our agents stop wasting time and start playing to their own strengths.

The insight that made this program brilliant- and different from every personality test we’d seen- was this: your Superpower isn’t who you are. It’s what you do to attract clients most easily and joyfully. That distinction matters enormously. It means agents aren’t locked into a type. It means they’re empowered to build a business around activities they can actually sustain. Seeing agents stop wasting time and money on strategies that never felt natural to them was very gratifying. 

Since its launch in 2017, hundreds of WPP agents have been assessed through the Superpowers program. We’ve run it multiple times, refined it, rebuilt the materials, and watched it transform how our managers support their agents and how our agents build their business plans. The program was updated and relaunched in late 2024, when Marguerite once again rebuilt it from the ground up for a new generation of agents.

The Recognition She Earned

The industry noticed. Over the years, Marguerite was named a National Association of REALTORS® Fair Housing Champion, recognized at a national event hosted by Soledad O’Brien and featuring HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge. She received the Women’s Council of REALTORS® Entrepreneur of the Year Award for her Referral Business Model and collaboration with other Pierce County Real Estate Agents. She won the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber’s Popham Award (given to the individual who has done the most to build community spirit in the City of Tacoma). Marguerite was even a finalist for the Inman Innovator Award as Most Innovative Sales Agent in 2016. Recently, Marguerite’s unique business model received national recognition in Forbes.

But if you know Marguerite, you know those awards aren’t what drives her. What drives her is the agent who finally stops cold calling because they figured out how to attract clients they love in a way that is joyful for them. She’s driven by creating that video that makes a viewer tear up because they recognized their neighbor’s story. The agent who got their first client from a blog post she helped them write.

What’s Next for Marguerite Martin

Marguerite is stepping into an exciting next chapter as a Tacoma real estate agent with our neighbors and collaborators over at Windermere Abode in Old Town, closer to her home in Downtown Tacoma. 

While the Windermere Professional Partners Narrows office will feel her absence, the truth is- she’s not really gone. Her fingerprints are on too much of what we do here. The Superpowers program she built will keep running and we hope to have her back very soon to refine this program and create new innovations for us. Our agents she trained will keep using the frameworks she created. The videos, the websites, the systems, the culture of thinking creatively about what real estate marketing can be- all of that lives on.

Marguerite, I recruited you on April Fools’ Day in the middle of a housing crisis, and you showed up and helped guide us as we grew over the past 15 years. I’m grateful for every year, every proposal, every program, every story you told about this community. WPP is better because of you.

This isn’t goodbye. It’s see you soon.

— Kevin Mullin

Owner, Windermere Professional Partners