A Decade Doing Real Estate for the Carriers
Most of Rudy's career happened somewhere buyers don't usually think to look: inside the real estate departments of the country's biggest wireless carriers. As a telecom site acquisition project manager, his job — for AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Cricket, and Google, among others — was almost identical to what he does now, just with cell towers, rooftops, and utility easements instead of houses: find the right piece of real estate, work it through entitlements, permitting, and right-of-way with the local jurisdiction, negotiate the lease or purchase, and make sure the client didn't overpay at any point along the way.
Over more than ten years and 100+ jurisdictions and city councils — concentrated in Los Angeles and San Diego County, but stretching to Chicago, Seattle, Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area, Tennessee, Hawaii, and some of the toughest permitting cities in the country (New Orleans, Beverly Hills, Baltimore) — Rudy managed the real estate side of telecom build-outs for AT&T's FirstNet backup-power initiative, a joint U.S. Navy/Google spectrum-sharing project across the Hawaiian Islands, T-Mobile and Sprint's 5G rollouts, and hundreds of individual cell site, rooftop, and tower transactions for companies including American Tower, Crown Castle, and SBA.
The throughline in almost every one of those roles was the same: secure the location, then protect the client's money. As a Vice President of Acquisitions, he purchased over $20 million in communications real estate assets. In one lease-renegotiation engagement alone, he saved AT&T more than $200,000 in three months; in another, over $2 million in last-minute negotiations on difficult sites. That's the job description in real estate terms — site selection, entitlements, and getting the best possible deal — just applied to infrastructure instead of a family's next home.
Now, Applying That to Your Transaction
Rudy holds his California real estate license and works as a Personal Real Estate Liaison alongside the Patti & Jeff McKelvey Team at Coldwell Banker West. The habits carry over directly: reading a deal from every angle before you're in it, staying on top of permitting and paperwork so nothing stalls a closing, and treating every negotiation — whether it's a nine-figure carrier lease or a single-family home in EastLake Trails — as a chance to save the client money, not just get to the finish line.
The Patti & Jeff McKelvey Team
Patti McKelvey started in real estate in 1987, after running a children's furniture retail business — and joined McMillin Realty, the sales arm of The Corky McMillin Companies, one of San Diego's major homebuilders, right at the start of her career. She spent the next 29 consecutive years as McMillin Realty's top-producing agent in both sales and listings — mainly working new-home sales for McMillin's own master-planned communities across Chula Vista and Bonita (Rancho Del Rey, Bonita Long Canyon, Sunbow, and Otay Ranch among them) as they went up phase by phase, but also selling homes in the area's other developing communities, EastLake included, right alongside them.
She was San Diego County's #1 agent for total unit sales in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 — 204 sales and 133 listings in 2013 alone — and #1 in the South County in 2017. She's ranked in the top 1% of real estate professionals nationwide and has closed more than 6,000 transactions over her career. Her son Jeff joined the business years ago and has worked alongside her ever since, handling everything from home maintenance issues to the team's marketing and web presence — Patti has called him the most critical part of her team.
When McMillin Realty wound down in 2016, Patti and Jeff moved to Coldwell Banker West in 2017 and have been the brokerage's top-producing team every year since. Today the team's roots are especially deep in EastLake — 40 years of transactions and relationships in the community — with a strong concentration in Rancho Del Rey and Bonita South as well.
Rudy works alongside that team as their Personal Real Estate Liaison — the person a buyer or seller talks to day-to-day, backed by four decades of local market history and a McKelvey Team that's been through more EastLake and Bonita transactions than almost anyone in the county.
The Book: Real Estate Magic
Patti wrote a memoir about it all — Real Estate Magic: How a Real Estate Rock Star Helped 6,000 Families Attain the American Dream. The title comes from something her own clients used to tell her: whenever a deal hit a rough patch, they'd say, "Patti, do your magic." It's the story of how she helped more than 6,000 families find the place they call home — and now we'd love to hear your story too.
