Working as a bartender out of college set James Krueger up to become a successful Realtor and eventually a broker in Houston.
In 2025, his Krueger Real Estate October 2023, an independently owned and operated member of the Corcoran network closed 718 transactions – 532 sales and 186 leases – for $236 million, marking the best year in the company’s history since its formation in 2014. It has more than 50 agents.
Growing up in Blessing, Texas, a small farming town southwest of Houston, the 49-year-old son of a nuclear engineer dad and school teacher mom, Krueger obtained a bachelor’s in economics at Texas A&M after initially studying physics, chemical engineering and finance. He was a member of a national champion archery program.
Krueger spent a year as a litigation consultant, building the economic damages case in patent infringement suits. He had been accepted to law school but turned it down and instead pursued bartending at night and training for the U.S. Olympic archery team during the day.
While he didn’t make the team, he said bartending was one of his best career moves that taught a shy kid how to talk to anyone – a skill that would make him a successful Realtor.
“Becoming a bartender was the best thing that could have ever happened to me because I was so shy that it got me to open up and talk to all kinds of different people,” Krueger said. “My parents weren’t happy with me.”
Krueger obtained his Realtor’s license in 2008 while working in executive compensation consulting with the idea of flipping houses. When he was laid off following the economic crisis, he changed careers.
“It pushed me out of the bird’s nest that I needed,” Krueger said. “From then on, I said what am I going to do. I said I have this real estate license so let’s see what we can do with it.”
Krueger hung his license with a small broker for a hundred dollars a month and advertised rentals and apartment findings on Craigslist. He admitted he didn’t know what he was doing at first.
It took a year before he closed his first sale and said the habits he built working internet rental leads carried over when a Zillow salesman sold him a ZIP code in 2010.
“The first one is always your hardest,” Krueger said. “After that, things took off.”
By 2012 and 2013 he was closing about a hundred transactions a year with no staff. He became a broker in 2011.
In 2014, Krueger hired six agents and handed them leads and by 2016 the company had grown to some 80 agents. But with that growth came a decline in company culture, and he let everyone but 12 agents go and rebuilt the company.
“We rebuilt with core values in mind of who we are and what we stand for,” Krueger said. “That was a pivotal moment. There was so much negativity. It was toxic.”
Krueger said he stepped out of production in 2020 to run the company whose agents today focus on homes in the $400,000 to $800,000 range with increasing presence in luxury.
Since 2024, he has recorded his own coaching, training and strategy sessions and is building them into an AI system that trains new agents and answers their questions in his voice.
“All I do now is coordinate with my management team on what to do and how to do things and where to make improvements,” Krueger said. “I am just a big problem solver right now.”
As for how he’s helping agents overcome dealing with elevated mortgage rates that have slowed transactions, Krueger said it’s important to keep them focused on the positive.
“It’s a little rough right now, but it’s been a lot worse,” Krueger said. “It might get a lot worse. You got to get people focused that you are getting traction and to keep up the pace. It’s a number’s game right now. You have to do it with a lot more people to do a deal than you have in the past.”
Since people need a place to live, Krueger said there’s always opportunities in any market. He said the best advice he can give Realtors is to join a team that they vibe with and learn from and not worry about the splits.
“The learning you are going to get and the accelerated growth you are going to get is way more valuable than something paying 50% versus 70%,” Krueger said.
In this market, Krueger said his advice for brokers is the hard lesson he learned – “don’t let a rotten apple spoil the whole group. We learned the hard way a few times. You let someone in there for whatever reason look at things in a negative aspect and spread negativity around about you, the processes and the way you do things. If you catch any of that, you cut that off right then. Don’t be afraid to let anybody go.”
Krueger said that’s a regular occurrence for a broker in that a group of agents are built up, but that it gets a “little stale” in terms of growth. He learned that it was okay for people to leave.
“That was one of the hardest lessons I had to learn as a broker,” Krueger said. “I used to take it personally and take it to heart, but now I learned to let it go and wish them the best. That is the best attitude to have. As a broker, all of your agents are going to leave you one day. They are going to move on from real estate, go to another brokerage or they are going to die.”
