The real estate industry spends billions of dollars every year trying to help agents find their next customer.
Meanwhile, most agents are sitting on years of relationships they’ve never learned how to fully appreciate.
I’ve spent much of my career thinking about that contradiction.
We keep introducing new technologies, new marketing strategies, and new ways to generate leads. Yet the most valuable opportunities in our businesses often come from people we already know.
I believe we can do better.
The companies I’ve founded and helped build approach that challenge from different directions. Some help people understand their businesses. Others help them organize their relationships, communicate more effectively, or turn good intentions into consistent action.
They share a common purpose: helping people build better businesses by making more of the relationships they already have.
Happy Grasshopper™
Better conversations. Stronger relationships. More business.
Most real estate agents have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people in their databases. What they don’t have is the time, confidence, or words to stay in touch with them consistently.
Happy Grasshopper helps solve that problem with professionally written messages designed to start real conversations.
Because the best message isn’t the one that gets opened. It’s the one that gets answered.
Technology is only valuable when people actually use it.
Real estate professionals have more technology available to them than ever before. Unfortunately, more tools haven’t necessarily made their businesses easier to run.
StackWrap brings the systems, resources, and applications people need into one organized workspace.
It helps organizations get more value from the technology they already own while making it easier for their people to get things done.
There’s a difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it.
The real estate industry has no shortage of training. What it lacks is consistent implementation.
BUILT is a live, hands-on program where agents organize their relationships, put proven communication strategies to work, and begin generating real conversations and opportunities.
Participants don’t leave with another notebook full of ideas. They leave having done the work.
Real estate leaders make important decisions every day about recruiting, retention, technology, training, and the future of their organizations.
Too often, they’re making those decisions without a clear understanding of what their agents actually think.
The Real Estate Industry Survey gives leaders a direct view into their agents’ experiences, priorities, and challenges, helping them make better-informed decisions about the businesses they’re building.
of new agents quit within 12 months of Being licensed
87%
of the industry churns every five years
71%
of brokerages operate at or within 3 points of Break even
Sources: National Association of Realtors (agents); T360 (brokerages).
To the people running real estate at scale,
The real estate industry has normalized failure so thoroughly that nobody finds it remarkable anymore.
Eighty-seven percent of our entire industry churns every five years. Eighty percent of new licensees quit before their first anniversary. Seventy-one percent of brokerages operate just above or just below break-even, every quarter, year after year. All of this in the single greatest wealth-creating industry on earth.
Only in real estate can we stand so close to an ocean of prosperity and fail to get wet.
The consumer has not abandoned the industry. Per NAR, 63% of sellers and 41% of buyers still choose their agent by relationship, numbers that have barely moved in a decade despite every technological disruption aimed at replacing them. The opportunity has always been there. What has never existed is the infrastructure to capture it reliably.
Fifteen years ago I started measuring what actually creates opportunity for real estate agents. What we found is that conversation leads to closings. Actual human beings writing back to their agent after months or years of silence. A phone call, a text, an exchange on social media. Forty-two million genuine relationships later, the data is clear: for every twelve people who truly know and trust an agent, two transactions per year are already waiting. An agent with 200 real relationships has roughly 33 transactions available every year, without buying a single new lead.
Meanwhile, the industry generated an estimated 300 million digital leads for 4.3 million transactions last year. In 2014, that ratio was roughly one to one. Agents are now spending 30 to 40 percent of their commissions buying noise from the same platforms making it harder to be heard, while the relationships that would have paid them for free go untended.
Generative AI is making this the defining business problem of the next five years. Every channel is flooding with cheap content. Audiences are learning to ignore anything from someone they do not already trust. In that environment, a genuine relationship is not just valuable. It is the only thing that still cuts through.
What we have built closes the gap between knowing real estate is a relationship business and actually running it like one, from the newly licensed agent to the international brand.
No matter where you are in your real estate journey, the data is clear. Those who seize the moment will have a durable competitive advantage long into the future. I'd like to explore that with you.
Use the link below to book a confidential conversation with me and we'll talk soon.
First-year attrition and five-year churn National Association of Realtors
Brokerages at or near break-even T360
Sellers and buyers who choose by relationship NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 2023; Real Estate Industry Survey, 2024 Industry Sentiment Report
Transactions waiting in every twelve relationships Happy Grasshopper reply data, fifteen years across 42 million relationships
Digital leads against transactions Digital leads: BUILT estimate aggregated from published industry sources. Closings: NAR existing-home sales.
