The Realest Real Estate Team

"I like working with Saad." Mike Sokolowski, known to everyone as Soko, offers that as the entire explanation for why he partnered with him a second time. The decision came down to two people who had already done the work together once and wanted to do it again. That single line explains most of how Soko & Saad Real Estate Group actually runs.

They met at Torii Homes, introduced by James, a mutual friend and former colleague of Saad's. The friendship, though, took shape somewhere other than an office. It came out of a standing weekly pickup basketball game that has kept going through job changes and company changes.

Naming the team took almost no deliberation, because clients had effectively named it for them. Both men kept turning up by name in each other's reviews, so "Soko & Saad" arrived less as a branding decision than as an acknowledgment of and confidence in who they are. They considered an independent-brand version for roughly five minutes and abandoned it the moment it started to feel complicated.

We Are Agents First

Neither of them has much patience for the theater of the business, the top-one-percent claims and the brokerage-hop announcements and the general posturing, and Saad has a name for the alternative they are going for instead. He calls it the REALEST real estate team.

It's the line they come back to, and they let it decide things that most teams would settle with a spreadsheet. Their two most recent hires were clients before they were colleagues, people who already understood how the pair worked long before anyone talked about signing on.

ENRG made sense to them for a reason that is easy to state: they wanted to build something of their own without vanishing into somebody else's machine to do it. Saad's startup background made the read quick. He recognized the combination of direct access to leadership, genuine autonomy, and room to build without a layer of permission in the way. It is a boutique arrangement in the truest sense, suited to two people more interested in the work than in the announcement of it.

Even the Logo Carries the Same Lightness

It was designed by a friend of Soko's who runs branding at Athletic, the non-alcoholic beer company, and it came back as three options, of which Soko and Saad independently chose the same one without needing to compare notes. The mark is playful at the top and steadies into "Real Estate Group" underneath, enough polish to signal that the work is taken seriously even when the two of them are not taking themselves that way.

What is easy to miss is that neither of them needed a boutique brokerage to survive, and they chose one anyway. They are the same two people who have been doing this the same way since Day 1, and ENRG simply turned out to be the place that fits.