Lisa Neff-Wheeler, Coldwell Banker Realty

A Career Change Closer to Home

Lisa Neff-Wheeler knows what a move feels like from the inside. Her father’s work relocated the family again and again, starting when she was in first grade. Through all of it, the family kept coming back to the same part of New Jersey. Lisa grew up in Griggstown and graduated from Montgomery High School.

Healthcare was her first calling. When her father was badly injured during her high school years, Cornell Medical Center pulled him through against long odds, and Lisa wanted to be part of the industry that saved him. She started at the University of Delaware as a chemistry major, then moved to the business side of healthcare, earning an MBA in health administration and finance from Temple University.

Lisa was working at Temple University Health System in Philadelphia when she and her future husband, John, were planning to marry, and one of them had to move. A job offer from Children’s Specialized Hospital brought her north. Out driving with Lisa one day, her mother pointed out a sign for new construction in Hillsborough. She and John fell in love with a neighborhood of 18 homes on a single street and built a house there.

Half of her career was spent consulting, helping organizations transform their operations, and much of the rest working inside health systems, where she rose through finance operations such as billing, registration, and the revenue cycle. Along the way she handled contracts worth millions of dollars, and at Deloitte she negotiated her own deals. The work also meant constant travel, and on Thursday nights she often did not get home until two or three in the morning. When COVID hit and healthcare organizations stopped hiring consultants, Deloitte offered her early retirement, and she jumped at it.

Going back to healthcare would have meant commuting to Philadelphia or New York, and Lisa wanted to work close to home. What she loved about consulting was the client service, the flexibility, and the fact that no two clients are the same. Real estate promised the same, and the moves of her childhood had already shown her how a transaction worked. She now works with buyers and sellers through the Somerville office of Coldwell Banker Realty. Every deal hits bumps, from a solar panel transfer to a septic problem under New Jersey regulations, and getting clients through them to their goals is the part of the job she cares about most.

Away from work, Lisa is a NASCAR fan with racing in the family. Her grandfather was a mechanic, and her mother drove in a couple of stock car races as a teenager. Lisa used to go to Daytona every year. Walking the track there showed her something television never could, that the turns are banked three stories high. She takes the same approach with a seller’s home, walking through it in person and telling the owners honestly what it will take to get the highest price.