Luca: Happy Saturday everyone. Welcome back to the Magic Towns Italy podcast This week we have a special guest. Justin Curtis Mavity. He’s been a real estate agent, one of the very few qualified, licensed, real estate agents from America in Italy. After 10 years in the country, he has a lot to say about buying a property, which areas to pick, which areas to avoid. You can just hear straight in his words now. Nice to meet you Justin. Justin: You as well. Luca. Luca: I think it would be interesting to start from how you got to Italy. Justin: In 2017. I had been a teacher for about 15 years. I was a music teacher, in a public middle school in a suburb of Denver. And I’d always had this love of Italy. I’d been on several vacations before, and in fact, that’s how I discovered Bologna. We [00:01:00] stopped in Bologna and I said, wow, this place is magic. I studied Italian for a year, a whole year, and before I kind of started getting my feet under the ground and I could be, you know, functional. In Italy, Luca: Did you have a network or did you just pick Bologna because you liked it when you visited? Uh, Justin: In Denver we have an Italian friend, Lucia, who is from Bologna. And so that was, uh, that was the connection. At least there was somebody, uh, that I could reach out to in case of, emergency. Luca: So you’ve been there for the best part of 10 years? Justin: Yeah. For the best part of 10 years. It’s changed quite a lot, honestly. I mean, when I first came to Bologna, it was. It was a touristy city in the summer, of course, but not as much as Florence or Rome or Milan in the last few years, especially after COVID tourism here has exploded. It’s, it’s noticeable. And then of course, you know, May and July are just, just chaos if you’re in Piazza Maggiore at this point. Yeah, Luca: That still doesn’t explain how you got into real estate here, right? Justin: So, real estate in the United States was always going to be my backup plan, my, my second career, I started so [00:02:00] young, I could have retired at 52. Uh, I’m gonna be 45 this year. Luca: Go 81. Justin: Yeah, go 81. Exactly. After I got my feet on the ground here, I, of course had to do the, the teaching English thing like many of us do, you know, to get by and to feed yourself and to pay the rent. That was a several years long process just to even get into the real estate course here and get started. It was already something that was in my mind to do. And so when I came here, I thought, gosh, this is a supernatural fit. I mean, I’m an American. This is something I wanted to do. There is nobody basically doing this here that I know of. Luca: Huge gap. Justin: Yeah, absolutely. I got my real estate license in the spring in May of 2023. And I’m sure you guys are a bit familiar with this process, that you have to do the, the written multiple choice exam and if you pass that, then you need to go onto this oral exam in front of a panel of experts and a live audience. I passed that and I thought, gosh, I’m gonna get picked up by, by anybody. So I went to all the big agencies in town and they’re like, you can answer phones and do translations. Luca: Really? [00:03:00] Justin: Wow. That’s all. That’s all we can do with you. And then you can work. But I did find a small local agency. They didn’t quite know what to do with me either, but at least the...
