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Business & Tech

Homes Are Where the Heart Is for Collingswood Native

After training at Main Street Realty, Collingswood graduate Ed Barski is setting up shop on Haddon Avenue with his partner, Michele Katinsky. This is the first independent business for both partners.

After college, Collingswood graduate Ed Barski returned to the area to put his business degree to work, and founded the Oaklyn pizza shop Philly’s Phatties.

Although he built the pizzeria into a successful restaurant, Barski found that flipping a duplex investment property on the side had given him a taste for the real estate game.

“For an average person, it’s probably the most stressful, exciting thing they’re going to do in their lives,” Barski said. “It’s one of the most rewarding things to experience.”

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The food industry started to seem less and less like it was for him, and, in 2007, he sold the business to begin working full-time at Main Street Realty in Haddon Heights.

“A lot of agents are in real estate so they can moonlight,” Barski says. “I got into it because I love the real estate business. The two passions went together.”

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Barski admits that learning the ropes took a while. In the first six months, he tried “everything you can possibly think of to get people to buy and sell their houses” and discovered first-hand that there’s no magic formula to the real estate game.

“There’s nobody who’s going to come in and teach you how to be a pro,” he said. “As you work at it, you get better at the things you need to do. You have to love real estate to do it.”

Barski said the most important thing for any good real estate agent to do is understand the perspective of his customers.

“The main things are telling people the truth even though you fear you may never get paid,” he said. “The bad agents will always tell you that they never made enough. A good agent will tell you, ‘I would have done that for free.’ That’s why I teamed up with Michele.”

Barski’s partner, Pennsauken native Michele Katinsky, says she knew she was a natural fit for the real estate business when, as a young girl, she would play The Price is Right with houses for sale in her neighborhood.

“It was like a little game as we would drive through the neighborhood,” she said, “because I was really close on the price.”

Katinsky applied that nose for value in condo-shopping after college. When she didn’t find an agent she liked, she decided to get a license and do it herself. At Prudential, she met Barski, and the pair soon decided to put up their shingle as Barski-Katinsky Real Estate.

“We decided we would be a better fit working together because we had more to offer that way,” Katinsky says. “We both had a vision of owning our own company.

“To us, again, it’s not a paycheck,” she said. “It’s the passion to help.”

Barski is excited to bring that attitude back to the town that raised him. He and Katinsky look forward to plunging into the community and lending a hand with local groups that need it.

“I think Collingswood’s a great town that’s evolved tremendously over the last few years,” said Barski. “The town has a lot of great groups that don’t get the support they need, and we’ve been very successful with real estate. It would be fantastic to be able to support them.”

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