Monica Hayes has been licensed in real estate since 2012, but the work she does today looks very little like what most people picture when they hear the word agent. She does not simply list homes, show properties, and hand over keys at closing. She sits with families who are trying to figure out what comes next. She talks through timelines with adult children managing their parents’ move from another state. She walks through homes full of forty years of collected life and helps people think clearly about what to do with all of it. Real estate is the framework, but the work itself is about transitions. And Monica has spent more than two decades building the skills, the team, and the infrastructure to handle them well.
A Career Shaped by People, Not Just Properties
Before real estate, there was social work. Monica graduated from the University of Northern Iowa with a degree in social work and spent years in direct care, including grief counseling. That background is not something that typically shows up in real estate bios, but for Monica it is the single most important thing to understand about how she operates. She learned how to be present with people in difficult moments. She learned to listen without rushing to a solution, to hold space for emotion while still moving a process forward. Those are not skills you pick up at a licensing course. They come from years of sitting with people at their hardest times, and they inform everything about the way she now guides clients through one of the biggest decisions of their lives.
She also carries more than twenty years of sales and marketing experience alongside that foundation. So while the emotional intelligence comes from one part of her background, the strategic thinking, the operational systems, and the ability to run a high-performing business come from another. Clients get someone who genuinely cares about their experience and someone who knows exactly how to execute. That combination is not easy to find, and it is what makes Monica’s practice hard to replicate.
Building Something Bigger Than a Real Estate Team
In 2024, Monica became a partner at Lepic-Kroeger Realtors, one of the most established firms in the Iowa City area. It was a recognition of what she had already built and a platform for where she is headed. But her ambitions have never been contained within a single firm or service offering. She is also the founder of Impact Companies, a broader enterprise that extends well beyond the real estate transaction into move management, organization, decluttering, and ongoing client support.
The thinking behind Impact Companies is straightforward. Most agents hand clients a referral list and move on. Monica wanted to stay involved, to close the gaps that exist between selling a home and actually moving out of it. Impact Companies is the structure that allows her to do that. And it is expanding. Impact Builders and Impact Investments now bring builder and investment resources into the model, giving clients on both the selling and buying sides options they would not easily find elsewhere.
What a Senior Real Estate Specialist Actually Does
Monica holds the Senior Real Estate Specialist designation, a credential that reflects her focus on older adults and their families. The clients she serves most are facing what she describes as one of the most emotional and overwhelming transitions of their lives. The challenges go far beyond the sale of a home. They are working through downsizing, often leaving a property full of memories, coordinating around health changes or care decisions, and in many cases doing all of this while their closest family members are hours away.
Monica’s role in those situations is part guide, part coordinator, and part steady presence. She brings structure to what can feel like an impossible number of moving parts. Her background in grief counseling means she understands that the decision to leave a longtime home is often wrapped in loss, even when the move is ultimately a positive one. She does not gloss over that. She works with it, and her clients consistently feel the difference.
A Reputation Built on Consistency, Not Luck
Monica’s team has earned peer-nominated awards and a strong production record in their market. But she is quick to redirect that conversation toward something she considers more meaningful. What she is most proud of is the people she has developed along the way. The model she has created prioritizes education, transparency, and protecting the client at every stage of the process. Watching agents grow within that framework, build sustainable businesses, and genuinely change their own lives while serving others well is, by her account, the achievement that matters most. It is also a signal of what kind of operation she is running. Strong results tend to follow strong culture, and Monica has been deliberate about building both.
Rooted in Iowa City, Committed to What Comes Next
Monica serves as Board President of The Bird House Hospice Home of Johnson County and is actively involved in several other local organizations. That community work is not separate from her professional life. It runs parallel to it, driven by the same values. She has helped shape local conversations around housing, aging, and what it means for a community to support its older residents in a practical and dignified way. For Monica, none of this is separate. The community involvement, the client care, the team development, and the business expansion all trace back to the same instinct that brought her to social work in the first place. She has simply found more ways to act on it.
Monica Hayes is not the kind of agent who disappears after closing. She has built an entire structure to make sure she does not have to. Whether a client needs help selling a home they have lived in for forty years, understanding what a renovation could add to a property, or simply moving with less stress than they expected, she has thought about it and built something to address it.
For those going through a significant transition, that kind of consistency is worth more than most people realize until they need it. Monica understood that long before she was a partner at a firm or the head of a growing company. It was always the point.
