Ranking the Top Real Estate Teams with Mark Adams | Ep 061

Nearly 30 years ago, real Trends began ranking the top brokerages in the United States. Nearly 20 years ago, they began ranking agents and teams. Nearly 10 years ago, they began ranking teams based on small, medium, large and mega sizes. And right now, you're about to go inside how all of it works with Mark Adams, senior vice president of Housing Wire Real Estate Group. How they intend to triple the rankings this year, going from the top 1 1/2% to the top 5% of performers in America how they're expanding from national and state rankings to include city rankings and what that means for you, the two criteria that separate an agent from a team and how they define small, medium, large and mega teams what exactly it means for these to be verified rankings and some of the lengths they go to to do that verification, some benchmarks and trends they're seeing in team size, productivity and profitability. All that and much more right now with Mark Adams on Real Estate Team os. No matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team os, your guide to starting, growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte. Mark, I just tell you right off the top, I'm an HW Media fan. I consume a number of your podcasts. I've had Mike Simonson, your colleague at Altos, research on the show and I'm excited to have you here to talk Real Trends Verified, among other topics. Welcome to Real Estate Team os.

Thanks for the invite to be on Ethan. It's an absolute pleasure and I love talking Real Trends Verified. So excited for the conversation today.

Cool. And I know a of course a lot of folks that have been on the show are also on the lists and other folks are wondering like how do those things work? So we'll get into all that. But we're going to start with a question I ask everyone because everyone who's been on the show is a leader at some level and certainly you are too. And so what is a must have characteristic of a high performing team?

Yeah, you know, I listen to the show a lot and you've gotten some really great answers. I hope that mine stacks up in some way, but I think accountability is to me the number one characteristic of a high performing team. When I was younger I played hockey and had a coach for a travel team and he would always interview players before he put them on the team and he sat me down when it was my turn to be interviewed and asked me a question. And later I found out why he was asking me the question, learned that he was asking everybody this question, but he, he would sit you down and say, tell me about the last team that you were on. And really the answer was on one or two sides of the spectrum, it was either. I loved my team, we were a brotherhood, we got along great, we had great chemistry. I want to find a team like that. And his answer was always, I think you're going to find that on this team. The other side of the spectrum was people who said, I hated my last team, we didn't get along, it wasn't my fault. But we just, we didn't click, we didn't accomplish what we wanted to. And he would answer the same way, I think you're going to find exactly the same thing on this team. So to me it just underscored that accountability is incredibly important. You have to take ownership for things that go right and things that go wrong and ultimately you control your own destiny. We live in a great country and great society where success is rewarded and you're responsible for your own success. So if you don't have that characteristic, it's, it's kind of a non starter. Working with teams that I like to operate in.

Man, I love that story. In part because of the shared responsibility. I often, I think customer experience is owned and defined by the customer. All we can do is seek to influence it, improve it. I think the same thing about company culture or team culture. As leaders, all we can do is seek to influence it, but it is really owned and lived, brought to life, managed and pushed around, good, bad or other by the people on the team. And I think a sense of shared responsibility, shared opportunity and shared accountability across the team is just so critical to high performance. So I'm with you completely on that. For folks who aren't familiar, just let's, let's just kick this off really quick with a drive by on HW Media. What is it? And then tell me a little bit about your team inside HW Media and then we'll back into your how you arrived there.

Yeah, so HW Media at its core is an information services company. Our most well known brand at the moment is Housing Wire, which is a news publication. It covers all sectors of the housing economy and our goal is to really provide the full picture. So we don't really want to be operating in a news environment where we're only focused on real estate or mortgage or title or servicing or appraisal. We want to play in the space of the intersection of those elements and those industries. And really the theory is that by understanding what's going on with your peers next to you, you can better set up yourself for success and stay better informed. So, you know, outside of Housing Wire, we have a number of other information services and data businesses, Real Trends being one of them and Altos being another.

And what is your scope of responsibility? I think your title is SVP of Housing Wire Real Estate Group. Like what falls under that umbrella?

Yeah, so it is really anything that touches real estate within HW Media. So at its core, that is the general management of the Altos brand. So work directly with Mike Simonson to help make business decisions that set up the Altos brand and team for success as well as overseeing the Real Trends verified product. So really just ownership of those, those two brands within HW Media.

How did you find yourself there? I mean like when I think about your, or when I look at your background or think about it, it's, you know, there is some real estate there, there's mortgage there, there's marketing there. Like talk about your background and how you wound up in the seats you're in.

Yeah, it's a good question. And you know, you look at my resume and you say, wow, you've, you've kind of done a lot in housing. You've bounced around like crazy. But I am, I call it the gravitational pull of the housing industry. And I was started in orbit from my dad who is a mortgage executive or was a mortgage executive with Countrywide and Bank of America. And I knew growing up I wanted to do something in real estate. I wasn't exactly sure at the time. And during school I was in a program designed at land development. And it just so happened I was in College in 2005-2009. So when I got out it was slim pickings in terms of opportunities in real estate. And after jumping around to a couple jobs that I won't bore the audience with, my dad said, hey, you really should think about getting into mortgage. And I remember his logic, which still tracks. He said, there's never been a worse time to get into the industry. There's never been a better time to get into the industry. It can only go up from here. I bought it and I jumped in and started at bank of America and moved around to a number of other lenders doing correspondent lending, wholesale lending, non delegated lending, a brief stint in loan modifications and I really liked it. But I have to say I didn't love that side of the business and really picked my head up and said, okay, You've spent eight years in a very specialized field that you want to stay in, but is there something different you can do? And I think it was fate that I had a friend who our CEO actually tried to hire. He said, hey, I'm not interested, but I know a guy. And through that relationship got introduced to Clayton Collins, our CEO, and got brought on to the, at the time, housing Wire. So it was kind of an odd set of coincidences that brought me here, but it's really been the best decision that I could have ever made joining the organization.

Love it. I've got two more questions, then we're going to dive specifically into the real trends, verified ranking of agents and teams by sides and by, by volume and kind of get into how all that works and definitions of teams and a lot of interesting things. But while we're here, again, two questions. One, one of the reasons I really enjoyed what I was getting from HW Media in general, I probably started engaging with your podcast in particular, I don't know, five or six years ago, was what you already said, which was kind of like this confluence of things. Like I, in a, in a previous company I was in, we had a very strong balance of real estate and mortgage customers. A little bit, you know, a little bit less in title, but title was represented there too. I've been to a number of title events and things, so I really like this confluence and I think it could be really helpful for anyone and let's just generically say real estate mortgage title for simplicity. It's so helpful for people to pick their heads up and not just deal with the mortgage person for what you need from them in this moment and in this transaction or in the last five interactions with them, but down to kind of understand, understand what's going on. And so I'm going to turn this into a question for you, which is what do you think real estate agents and team leaders and brokerage owners would benefit from knowing or understanding better about loan officers in the mortgage industry?

You know, I think that they're in similar roles, you know, you know, real estate professionals and mortgage professionals both, at the end of the day, want to serve their client and customer the best that they possibly can. I think that there can potentially, potentially be animosity between the two. That you're not approving my loan or the client that you referred to me is crazy. But ultimately you're serving the same goal. So I don't know. I think I look at everything as we're all on a team together. So I don't want to be too rose colored glasses at this point, but I think there's some empathy for the fact that both sides of the transaction are at the end of the day trying to do the best that they can and get a deal across the finish line and help people with in many cases, the largest single investment that make in their entire life. So I think there's a baseline of understanding that that's always helpful. But you know, the housing market drives the mortgage market, mortgage interest rates drives the housing market. So, you know, like you, like you mentioned Ethan, there's just, they're so connected at this point that, that, you know, if you're only focused on inventory numbers, you're missing a core cause or a core driver of those inventory numbers, which in many cases is interest rates or Fed policy or broader economic trends. So yeah, you know, I think, I think at the end of the day you, you can stay way ahead of the market by understanding things that are coming, regulations that are being impacted. I mean, you look at what's happened with the real estate industry with the doj and that's been put the real estate world through the absolute wringer. The mortgage world went through something very similar in the housing crisis with regulations coming in. So I think that there's a lot of commonality between the two and maybe they don't realize it, but I think that if we can do our job and kind of spotlight how, you know, RESPA can come for both sides of the house, you know, the crises that impact you impact me. I think that we can, at the end of the day serve the clients better, which is what everyone's trying to do.

Yeah, really good. I hear in there two things. One, be a decent human being with curiosity and empathy and like treat people well. And then two, you know, we're on the same team, you know, whether we're formally on the same team or we're just, you know, partnering in this situation or in a set of situations, you know, the same respect and curiosity and empathy you would extend to a direct teammate. You would extend, extend to anyone who is functionally a partner or teammate in your client's success and therefore in your success. I'm going to put forth. And then this is the second question, but I'm going to, what I'm really going to do is just put forth an idea based on your LinkedIn headline, which is empowering real estate professionals with market intelligence, which I like because it's very succinct. It's like, who is it for? You know, what, what is what is the thing and what is the benefit to the person it's for, which is empowerment through market intelligence. And so, you know, I think about a hierarchy of kind of what's out to help an agent or a team leader or brokerage owner or a loan officer, you know, inform their decisions and, you know, figure out the next right step and these kinds of things, kind of see what's coming, etc. You know, there are ideas which are a little bit loose and everyone's got them. And there are a lot of like fun sayings around ideas and their value. Then there's information which I think is like grounded in some kind of a reality. You know, it's like a, you know, it's, it's anchored, it's grounded, it's maybe like fact checked or something. And that's got more value, I think, than an idea, although they both have their own unique value. Then you have what I would call insights. But I think intelligence fits here too, which is it's got additional perspective, it's broadened, it's, it's now like looking forward or it's put into a different context. It is information, but it's got this additional layer of value to it. So I would just love, before we transition into one form of the intelligence that you're empowering real estate agents with, like, what do you think about that? Or you think about your own mission or the mission of HW media. Like, what is intelligence in the scope of, you know, ideas, information, insights? Like what? Like, do you see it kind of the same way that I described it? You know, elevated from a grounded piece of information, there's some value added, some meaning derived or some context provided that makes it intelligent.

Yeah, you know, I think it's kind of like proving a theory in a lot of ways. You know, I think that I'm going to make more money if I do X, Y or Z. And you can prove that out by actually seeking out market intelligence and taking that step behind that intuition or step beyond that. You know, just broad guttural reaction that this is going to work. You know, we, we are very much in the business of conducting research. You know, one thing that, that we did over the is look at the profitability of brokerages versus real estate teams and the introduction of mortgage and title services within those environments and how the vast majority of profitability was actually driven by ancillary services versus a core brokerage or real estate business. So if we're going to look at an actual example, you could say, I want to make More money. We all do. Okay, well, how do I do that? I'll just sell more houses. Well, sometimes the market doesn't really allow you to do that. So some of the insights and research projects that we're always working on really allow you to kind of have the roadmap to say one way to do it is to increase staff and do acquisitions. Another way is to offer more services. And if we're going to get a slice of the pie, let's make our slice of the pie a little bit larger by offering these partnered services that at the end of the day, you, as the team leader or brokerage owner can reap the benefits on. So, yeah, I kind of view it as like the theory is in your mind saying, I think this will happen. And a lot of what our job is is to provide you with the information that proves that theory or disproves that theory and ultimately sets you up to make a business decision that's going to improve your life and the life of your family and the life of your employees and team members.

Yeah, really well done. For anyone who wants more on ancillaries and kind of the how and why behind it, Episode nine with Daniel Dixon, who's right up the road from me in Denver, Colorado. We spent a lot of time on that topic. It comes up in these conversations from time to time, but that was one where we dedicate a lot of time to it. Okay, Real Trends verified rankings of agents and teams. We're like, are we going into the 28th season? Like, what is this and where are we in the historical arc of this ongoing project?

Yeah, it's been going on for a long time. So the brokerage rankings were actually the first attempt and successful attempt at producing any kind of rankings within the Real Trends universe. And that was in 97. So 28 years ago that launched. 2006 is when the agent and team ranking started. So 19 years of agent and team data is what we're sitting on. It's interesting. We acquired Real Trends from Steve Murray, who, if your audience doesn't know, Steve is an amazing human being, but a wealth of knowledge, especially for team leaders. When we acquired the business, he has been an absolute godsend to us in helping understand the history of the program, what's worked, what hasn't worked, and kind of being that guiding light that's saying, hey, stay on this course. This is where you're going to find success. So he's an absolute wealth of knowledge. So absolutely have to give Steve some love on the podcast. But the ranking Started as the top 200. And simply that number was chosen because just about 200 people submitted. So it's like, okay, now we're looking at a list last year that had 21,000 agents and teams on it. So it's grown considerably. This is, you know, this, this season, which will look back at production from January 1 to December 31, 2024. The 2025 rankings, as we call them, is on pace to be our largest year yet. We've made some. Some small tweaks within the program that we. We think is going to allow us to expand the rankings from showcasing the top, you know, 1.5% of producers to the top 5%, which, at the end of the day, is something that's going to empower agents and teams to showcase their excellence. And I think that we're very much in the business of providing context. You know, how are you ranked nationally? How are you ranked at a state level? And as of last year, introducing how you're ranked on a city level. The research that we've done really shows that agents are impressed with national and state rankings, but they care more about your production in the community that they want to enter. So last year, we expanded the rankings to include city rankings. We piloted 50 cities. This year, there will probably be close to 200 cities that we're doing rankings in. And ultimately, by expanding the size of the rankings, we're able to produce lists that are more robust in specific markets. And it really puts us on the trajectory to start identifying agents for consumers to connect with. And that's obviously down the road. Right now, we are a award recognition program, but that's really what the future holds for us, is the continued expansion of the rankings. So we're hoping to have somewhere in the 60, 70,000 agents this year, which would roughly triple the size of the list and requires all kinds of technical considerations and things like that. But we have an amazing team that's working on the project and making sure that we find success this year.

This is releasing in, like, mid to late March of 2025. The 2025 rankings, I believe, will still be open when this releases, if someone is interested in participation. What does that look like?

Yeah. So the individual submission portal will remain open until April 9, I believe, is going to be the deadline. So anyone that's listening, if you are part of a national brand, there's a really good chance that the brand will submit your data to us directly through for you. So before you go on the website and take any action, call your broker, say, hey, am I on the list, they can run down and tell you you're good to go or you need to take action. If you are not submitted by your corporate organization, your brokerage, you're an independent agent or team. Go to realtrends.com on the homepage you'll find a submit now button. All you need to do is just submit your basic information. And what makes us verified is that you are required to submit documentation that proves what you are saying is true. So that can be a third party letter from your broker or a cpa. You can give us an export in the MLS as long as it has property types. Because we are a residential only program. So we don't count commercial vacant land, empty lots, leases, rentals or any business that you refer to a friend. It has to be transactions that you've closed that are documented and that we can see and verify. Which really in our mind separates this program from anyone else out there that we're going the extra mile to track down and actually research properties that you've been involved with to make sure that they are applicable and that we maintain rankings that is authoritative and accurate, which is our number one concern.

Okay, you answered two questions I was going to ask all in that one pass, which was great, including what does verified mean. You addressed that really well and what is included and what isn't. And this is like very, very purely residential. So let's get into, like you said, agents and teams were added in the early 2000s, I think 2005, 2006. What is the difference between an agent and a small team and. Or if it makes more sense to address, you know, the different definitions of a. Well, I guess, and let's start there very specifically difference between an agent and a team. Because I know that there are different definitions from other people in the mix, MLS among them. Like how do you define a team, I guess against an agent?

Yeah, it's a bit of a challenge because you know, an MLS could have a rule, your state could have a rule. Virginia has some really interesting rules about what constitutes a team. So we try and operate with a common denominator of a set of rules across the country. So if you are an individual agent, you can have one licensed assistant that is handling administrative functions, maybe is doing, you know, like sitting open houses, things like that, but is not doing core functions of an agent. So not drafting contracts, not doing negotiations, not taking listing presentations. They could be there for the listing presentation. But if your assistant is closing business, they are an agent. If they're a licensed assistant in Our mind. So you can maintain your status as an individual agent as long as it's just one licensed assistant and that assistant is not performing the functions of an agent. If you are a team, anyone that is producing transactions or is in a role where they're attempting to be a producing member of the team, we count them as a member of the team. So if you have a hundred person team, which would be a blessing but also come with some challenges, obviously, and you have 90 people that are producing and 10 people who are new that have not closed the deal, you still count those people that have not closed the deal because their intention is to close deals. The other element that trips you into a team category is if you publicly present yourself as a team, which is tricky sometimes. Agents are of the mind that if I say I'm a team and I make my website very grandiose, it helps attract customers because they look at this amazing. I have the architect and the interior designer and I have the, you know, the closing coordinator. And it's a team of eight people. If you call yourself a team, you are a team. It is just a hard, fast rule. Every year after rankings, you know, there is inevitably people that slip through the cracks and you know, they. We go back to their website and it says the Mark Adams team. And we have to tell Mark Adams that even though he's a single person, he's presenting himself as a team. So we are moving him to the team category and a small team, the size of teams, which is something that I know you asked about, which I'll jump into just really briefly. Again, it's just based on the number of people that are attempting to close transactions. We introduced the team categories in 2016 and that was really an effort to better contextualize. Again, we're in the business of contextualizing performance. It's hard to say a mega team of 100 people is number one. And you know, a small team which maybe has 5 to 10x the per age of productivity is not even on the list. So by having different categories, we're able to better, you know, rank you amongst your peers at the end of the day.

Cool. And what are the cuts? Small, medium, large?

Yeah, it's a really good question. So small team is going to be two to five agents. Medium team is going to be six to 10 agents. Large team is going to be 11 to 20 agents. And a mega team is over 21 agents on the team.

And to your knowledge, you know, how locked in have those been? I mean, I know that you mentioned that this, that these cuts came, you know, within the past, you know, six, eight years. Have you observed across these groups the need to get even more refined? Like I feel like when I look at mega team and I think there's, you know, there's 22 producing people on this team but then there are also some with like, you know, 220. And I don't know, I haven't looked into the like the biggest ones that are on there. But I assume that we're going to a place where there are 2,200 producing people on a team. So like, what have you seen in terms of trends? And you mentioned one trend you saw earlier about profitability in teams and brokerages. Have you noticed any trends in team sizes that leads you to start thinking about these categories any differently?

Yeah, I mean, you know, your example, we're already there with some of the teams and this year we're really trying to do a better job when we get to that, you know, like super Mega team we'll call them, really looking into their financials and saying, are you a brokerage? You know, I think that the teamerage concept is, is incredibly popular. They're growing at a rapid rate. I think when we look five to 10 years back maybe there was one brokerage operating as a team. Now the mega category is, you know, the top 10 are all very large teams that are operating close to a brokerage structure. So this year we are doing, being more active in policing that and making sure that we are requesting financials, audited P and ls, making sure that their profit margins are in line with data that we have of real estate brokerages versus real estate teams and trying to align them appropriately. But teams have grown. When we look at the past five years, the average team size has hovered around the seven. Last year we almost topped. The average team size is 9, which that's not a huge jump in numbers on the aggregate. But when you look at the upper end of the scale, there is a big flight of people into teams. And one thing that's driven is the decreased productivity of teams over the past two years. Largely productivity is following the housing market. You know, we saw the highest per agent productivity in a team occurring in 2021 when the market was, was hot. Interest rates were 3%. We are all the way up to 17 transaction sides per agent on a team. This last year we were down to 11. We're projecting that it's going to continue to decrease. So yeah, we're always keeping an eye on the data. It's always telling Interesting stories. But as we're tinkering with the qualification thresholds in the program, there is very likely that we'll introduce new categories to again, better contextualize the performance amongst your peers. And to your point, 1, 000 person team and a 21 person team are completely different animals.

I appreciate all this kind of clarity around definitions and the challenge of defining things and being willing and open to redefine them. I think Team Ridge is an interesting part of that. Is this this or is this that? It's got characteristics of this, it's got characteristics of that. And I don't know too many organizations that are out there trying to be specific about it. So, you know, when I'm having these conversations out in a, you know, like in an informal setting, you know, someone might say a term or a concept and they think it means one thing, I think it means someone else and the two other people at the table think it means something else as well. So I definitely recognize the challenge, but then also the opportunity and I think it's really interesting and it is hard to do the nature of the research that you're doing if you don't lock some of this stuff down correct. Any other interesting trends that you think would be worth sharing with an audience of people that are wondering where they sit in this, you know, in this universe and in this time of teams and teamerages.

Yeah, I mean, if you want some benchmarking information, the average team on our, on our rankings does somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 transaction sides across the entire team, about 56 million in volume. That is well ahead of our qualification threshold for real estate teams, which this year is modified to move with the market and again to ensure that we capture about the top 10% or, sorry, the top 5%. So this year we're looking at a qualification threshold for teams of 40 transaction sides or $16 million. So, you know, I would encourage anyone listening that's above that limit to have that conversation with their brokerage to go on the website and submit your data. But if you are just outside that threshold. One thing I do want to talk about today is specifically the city rankings.

I was wondering when they become statistically viable or relevant enough to put up.

Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. I think that the data will tell us that answer a little bit more definitively, but it's probably not doing anyone a favor if you're the only agent on your team page or on your city page. So we're probably looking at a threshold of about 15 to 20 honorees in each city before we actually build a page. But there really is no limit on the number of people that we want to showcase in the city rankings. Whereas the national and state rankings, which are open right now, have a performance threshold that you have to qualify. If you are under that threshold and you want to submit your data, you can absolutely still do that. I would very much encourage you to do that because there are some markets where it is near impossible to hit 40 transaction sites or 16 million. You shouldn't be excluded from contextualizing your performance in your market. So the city rankings allows the opportunity for teams and agents that are under these thresholds to submit data and appear on a localized page. And again, we feel like that's going to drive significant value being around for 20, 28 years, 19 years. On the agent team side, we have very powerful SEO. So when you search terms like top agents in Texas or top agents in Dallas, we're organically the number one in two search. That's likely a term that your potential home buyer or seller will do. So I think it's all about putting yourself out there to be discoverable, to have a verified source saying that Ethan told me he was the top agent in Dallas, But I know 50 people told me they were the best.

All six agents I interviewed said that.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. What does it mean? We want to provide consumers with the resource to say, okay, agent A is not being truthful, agent B is being truthful. So anyway, if we can fill that void, it's a massive service that we're doing to both the industry and policing claims that people are making about performance, but also helping consumers find the best possible agent for them and their situation and circumstances.

Volume versus units. You can search one, you can search the other, and you can sort them. At this point, even if you search one versus the other, how do you all think about volume and units? You know, and typically when I hear an agent or a team leader talking about them, they're like, this one doesn't matter. This one matters. And it's like, well, I can see why you would say that.

Yeah, it probably depends on which bank is better.

Yeah, like, but how do you. How do you think about those two things?

Yeah, you know, I think that agents and teams find success in different ways. You know, you look at a market where average home price is 300,000, you can have a hard time cracking a national or sometimes a state list for volume just because we're going to do 2,000 transactions to make up for the ultra luxury agent and team and not to discount the fact that there are people that do very few transaction sides, but their values, I mean, the home amounts are astronomical. We have agents in Miami that do four transactions a year and they do $120 million. So we always have a sides or volume qualification threshold. And it really is to not punish you because your market might not support the high transaction sides or a high transaction volumes total. I don't think it necessarily diminishes the accomplishment on either side of the house. If I was an agent or team talking about the rankings, I would absolutely spotlight the one that I am the highest ranked in. But I think it tells a story. There is more than one way to be incredibly successful, and it's all about finding your path forward. If your market supports a high number of transactions and you want to serve a high number of customers, you should do that. If your market supports doing four deals a year and it's ultra luxury, by all means do that. There's more than one way to be successful in real estate, which is honestly one of the best things about it.

I like those levers for the same reason. One, it characterizes the way people are finding success. It also allows us to kind of translate a little bit across markets because Lafayette, Indiana is not Miami. Yes, in a variety of different ways. And so there's things that are realistic there and there are things that aren't. You've already shared a number of, you know, I think people that. That might turn their nose up at this kind of a project. A. I don't know that they'd be listening at this point in the conversation anyway. But, you know, it's the like, like, oh, you know, do I need an award? Do I need to. You know, and typically that's from someone who would carry like a number seven, which I would be proud to call a top ten. You know, that's how I positioned a number seven or number eight. But, you know, besides the kind of the award dynamic, in the we're number one. You already introduced SEO as a specific benefit. Any other benefits that you think specific to the agent or the team leader or the brokerage owner themselves versus, you know, because from my seat, as someone who observes and participates in and serves the industry, it's very helpful for me. I get it. For me, I get the way you talked about it for consumers, but specifically for. Are there any additional benefits that an agent or a team leader might consider in light of the easy sniping that someone might make it like, oh, great, another award?

Yeah, I mean, I think that As a society, consumer behavior, people are habitually online and it gives you an amazing accomplishment to point to by submitting. And I know that still we're talking awards, but, but by not participating, you lose that opportunity to maybe engage with an audience or a consumer who wants to work with an agent that is out talking about their accomplishments and qualifying themselves. I think to answer your question more directly, real estate teams. If I was an agent and I was looking for a team to join, I would likely want to be working for a team that is out being loud on social media, that's leaning into first time home buyers who are maybe more of the, the younger generation who are going to be on TikTok and Facebook. And how do you engage with them in content that's going to draw eyeballs? I think part of it is just discoverability. You want to put yourself out there, you want to advertise yourself. At the end of the day, if you want to grow like the rankings show, over the past few years, the team size has doubled roughly since we opened the rankings. There is a lot of agents that want to join teams and especially when the market turns. Our theory, and again, we're proving it out with our data, is that they're picking their head up and saying, I'm looking for safe Harper. I'm looking for someone that teaches process. I'm looking for someone that has technology that empowers my success. Well, a good way to prove that you have that is to showcase the success that you have. You're not going to be able to attract agents to your team if you're not out there actively showing the fruits of your labor. So yeah, I think that there always will be an audience that says it's just an award, that's, that's very fair. But I think given where we're at and consumer behavior in society and wanting to attract growth, it's, it's more important than ever to consider participating in programs like these.

Any limitations? Like as you look forward to the future of the program? Like is, are there any limitations to what you're doing or the way that you're doing it, or are there like ideas on the table to the degree that you can point us to the future?

Yeah, yeah. No.

I mean, I already feel like I got a few of them.

Yeah.

City. City is, is a big new direction and it's going to be significantly bolstered this year in terms of number of people per city and, or number of organizations per city, a number of cities included. But anything else in that zone, like as you think about the future of this and what it can be?

Yeah, I think that we're always walking a fine line. You know, at its core, real Trends Verified is a high performer, recognition, accomplishment. So if you open it up too much, then you lose the ability to say, these are the top performers. And maybe we start drifting into the world that some of our, you know, air quote competitors are playing in, where it's a pay to play. You know, pay me 500 bucks and I'll put you on my homepage as the top agent in your city. We don't want to go that model. I think that if we wanted unbridled growth, we absolutely would do that. And it would be a strictly. You pay us money and we'll. We'll say that you're the best. So I think we're always going to be restricted in our ability to grow as a result of, you know, the integrity of the rankings. But we are trying to walk that line and expand the database to your point to produce that city ranking. You know, I think one thing that we're really working on, and I mentioned it earlier, is, you know, the social presence, being able to have assets that are tasteful and can contextualize your performance. We are doing a full overhaul on what we call promotional packages. So traditionally, you get the logo or you get the badge that you put on your website. But agents, they're great at design. You look at most of what's produced, and it's really catchy. They have an aesthetic. They care about what they put online and how they present themselves. And we're working on modernizing these promotional packages so involving video, involving better graphics that agents and teams are proud to share. But at the same time, it's not an ostentatious. I'm the number one. It contextualizes their performance. And I think that that's really where we're trying to lean into.

You have evolved all the stuff behind the scenes. You've given us a sense of how this stuff comes together. We're verifying, we're looking at websites, we're seeing how they define themselves. We're checking PNLs, all this stuff. You shared with me a story that I have heard on this show in my seat a number of times. Most recently, I'm thinking of, like, episode 58 with George Lawton and Billy Hobbs of the Lawton team in Phoenix. Billy was describing, you know, when I. When he joined that organization seven years ago, everything was happening on a spreadsheet on one person's computer. And then they. They Put it online so that the two people could, you know, keep an eye on it together and anyone else could drop in and take a look at it. And then of course, it expands to a more detailed platform. And then they talk about the way they, they laid a business intelligence layer over all of it so that George, as the team leader, could get macro details on any dashboard, but have the opportunity to drill into micro stuff. And based on what you shared with me, it sounds like the experience of kind of running the back end of this whole operation went through a similar evolution from a spreadsheet.

It did, it did, you know, many sleepless nights because of spreadsheets. So when we acquired Real Trends at the end of 2020, we acquired the process that they used. And I think that it's an important distinction to make that the outcome that we were desiring was achieved. We were able to produce the rankings, but the process which we took to produce the rankings needed to be optimized and refreshed. And yes, it was spreadsheets, it was brands sending us spreadsheets. We modify the spreadsheet, we save the spreadsheet under a different name, we send it back to the brand, they save it under a new name, they send it back to us. At the end of the day, there were thousands of spreadsheets and folders, and I'm pretty sure that Dropbox has made tens of thousands of dollars off of us for the data that they are storing that we absolutely do not need to be having. So we recognize that that process needed to change, or rather the technology that we used within the process needed to change. To change so that we could be better optimized. And you know, basically once we compiled all the data on spreadsheets, we worked with a third party contractor who built a custom system that only he could operate that would then display the rankings on the website and kind of knew that there was a big risk. So in the background we made some contingency plans and said, okay, this will probably never, never happen that he goes missing. Well, a week before the 2022 rankings launched, his grandmother went missing and he called us and said, hey, I can't work on this project, I have to join the search party. And of course we said, absolutely, go do it. But at the same time, the over reliance on a third party contractor meant that we had no way to produce the rankings. So thankfully we had built the framework or the skeleton of a system and it was kind of a break glass in case of emergency situation, had to completely rebuild everything within a week. So that we could get the rankings online. So, you know, so a little bit of planning definitely allowed us to prepare for that situation. I think we now ask the question, you know, a little bit in a better light and say, hey, if someone wins the lottery, what happens? And they don't come in? And we really try and plan processes around that. So now we're operating on a system that has its own challenges and have just completely revamped it again. So we basically built everything by connecting solutions that were readily available. That was great. We had a lot more control. It was owned in house, but we were very beholden to the vendors and the owners of that technology for pricing and capabilities, to the point that with the Citi rankings launching, we actually maxed out the capabilities of a system where the. The CEO and COO and CTO of the platform reached out and said, what are y' all doing? Because this is not what the system is designed for. And when you have someone that owns the platform reaching out, saying, what are you doing? You should probably look in the mirror and say, there's gotta be a better way to do this. So now we are on our third iteration of the database and the platform and how it feeds into the website, which we own entirely internally, and that's really going to power our growth. And it really unlocks a capability that we've been after for a very long time, which is being able to track year over year performance of specific individuals, previously and still this year included. But with the framework to solve this problem, every year has been a snapshot. And there was no way to know that Mark Adams from KW in 2024 was Mark Adams with Coldwell Banker in 2023, with Compass in 2021. So there was no ability to track individual performance migration trends within brokerages, within the top percentage of performers. So what we're able to do now that we fully invested in this database is to lay the groundwork and start connecting people with unique identifiers so that we can produce, let's call it a profile that lives online, that shows how Mark performs against the market, how Mark performs against the peers, where Mark performed the best in terms of brokerage. So I think the moral of the story is plan for the worst, because you might need it. And if you have a technology owner reaching out, saying, y' all are using the system wrong, you probably should get off that system.

Yeah, you are the outlier. What are you doing? Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure the ops managers, directors of ops and COOs who listen to these episodes can identify with that and it's like a friendly reminder you may actually need to break glass because there may actually be an emergency.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

Yeah. And the other, I don't want to miss the fine detail in there of do the right thing by your people no matter what and figure out. Because there are other solutions. There are other solutions.

Yes. Yeah, there's always a solution. Family first. We're always saying, you know, you can't be successful at work if you're not successful at home. So when that situation happened, it was very much a no brainer to say, what can we do to help? What resources can we provide? Do not worry about this for a second. It did then create the challenge that we needed to solve the problem. But we have a really strong team here, so we were definitely up for the challenge.

Yeah, really good. Any other thoughts before I give you my three pairs of closing questions? Any other thoughts on the future of teams based on what you've seen over the past several years?

I think one thing that stands out, at least at this point, and I mentioned earlier that that per agent productivity has declined, team size has grown. I don't necessarily view that as a negative right now. The data that we show again tracks that team performance and productivity moves with the market. So what I'm seeing is effectively a slingshot being pulled backwards right now that these successful teams that have showed in the lead up to a market downturn that we know how to maximize success when the conditions are right, we are reinforcing ourselves within the community. Those people are attracting agents like crazy. I think all it's going to take is the market conditions to cooperate, which will hopefully happen this year and those teams will. All the hard work that they put in is going to allow them to just absolutely move faster. I think that there's a people element to this. Steve Murray, who I mentioned earlier, had a key talking point during COVID when he met with brokerage owners and that was if you think you're close to your agents, get closer because you're not close enough. And I think that sometimes the numbers say it was market conditions, but I also think that the industry as a whole invested more in the success of their agents and their team members in a time of crisis. I won't say something hyperbolic that we're at a time of crisis, but you know, reinvest in your team, get closer to them, make sure they're successful. Then when the conditions align, you're really going to find that success that you're preparing for.

Today, two recent episodes. I want to point folks to. Antwan Thomas on episode 59 talked very specifically about margins and equity in splits in order to be able to reinvest in the team and in the staff and in the processes and in the coaching industry. We had a lot of conversation on that. And episode 55 featured Jonathan Campbell, who per realtrends verified is the number one team in Pennsylvania. And their agents are doing 45 to 50 transactions per year. There are two dozen of them. So if you want specific ideas about how to increase per agent productivity. Episode 55 with Jonathan Mark, this has been a pleasure. I really appreciate you doing it. As I mentioned, I have a few pairs of closing questions. You can answer one or the other or both. Some people like to do both, but really kind of set up as a one or the other. So what is your very favorite team to root for besides the HW media team? Or what is the best team you've ever been a member of besides the HW media team or your travel hockey team?

Yeah, gosh, I want to take them.

Off the table too.

I, you know, listen, I live in Dallas, Texas, so I'm sure there's a collective eye roll when I say I'm a Cowboys fan. So they are the worst team to root for. So I'm not going to pick them. I'm a hockey guy, so I'll go with the Dallas Stars. They have been through a rebuild. They have stayed true to themselves. They found success. I think that there's a lot of things that the Cowboys could learn from the Dallas Stars, but they probably will never learn those lessons.

How is hockey culture in Dallas and how long have you been in Dallas and how long? Like where's hockey culture in a growth curve?

Yeah.

And I grew up in Michigan and it basically is like, you know, it's a thing.

It's the Mecca. Yeah. You know, it's definitely less popular than up north, but so when I grew up in Dallas, so I've lived here for 20, 30 years at this point and I think that I came to Dallas at the right time. The Dallas Stars moved from Minnesota. They won a Stanley Cup. It got very popular. There was a massive amount of investment in hockey rinks which, which our summers, it's 110 degrees here. So the idea of not playing football and playing hockey in a.

You're not going to go to the pool, we're going to go to the ice rink.

It was a no brainer. It was a no brainer for me. So it's not a main sport, but there are a lot of very successful teams here. So you guys definitely have the crown over us though.

Yeah. Cool. And I'm in Colorado too where we imported a team from Quebec and also won a cup early in the became beloved and also was the one man Red Wings Avalanche. We won't go there but like what a crazy like window of time that was. Anyway, what is one of your most frivolous purchases or what's a cheapskate habit you hold on to even though you probably don't need to.

I feel like I'm the ultimate cheapskate. I don't have a lot of material things. I think, you know, I don't own expensive watches. You know, this Apple watch that I have on right now is probably the nicest watch that I have. I am more into experiences so I'd say the frivolous spending is mostly in travel. So this past year we went to Portugal and Spain on one trip, in France and England on another. So I have to give kudos to the team here at HW Media for allowing me to take week long vacations at times. But big into experiences, big into travel, learning from other cultures. That's really where I get excited when it comes to spending money. Everything else it's just, you know, bills and survival I guess.

Do you have your eye on any next place?

We really want to go to Tokyo. My wife is. We're expecting our first child in April so that means we are going to be on a travel freeze. So we'll probably just watch some like Rick Steves travel videos and try and pretend that we're there. But.