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Nearly 5,000 Keller Williams agents gathered in Austin, Texas, this week for Franchisees’ annual Big Broker Camp, a three-day conference designed to educate and train agents to navigate market. While the usual conference fees are on the agenda—classes on social media tips, lead generation strategies for buyers and sellers, and work-life balance—the upcoming deadline for buyer-to-agent commission changes is per session meeting as brokers prepare for an uncertain future.
Jason Abrams
Ten minutes before taking the stage to deliver Gary Keller’s State of the Housing Market speech, Jason Abrams, director of industry and learning at Keller Williams, tells Inman “Perfect timing” for this year’s conference, and strategies for franchisees to help agents not only survive but thrive.
Inman: WWhat are you most excited about about this year’s Super Agent Camp? What is the main focus of this year’s conference?
Abrams: I have two messages. The first one was something we discussed yesterday at the CEO event. We spent a lot of time discussing this idea [being] Antifragile. It’s an idea put forward by a famous economist, and the idea is that some things are not only resilient, but also antifragile, meaning that when they’re put under stress, they actually get stronger.
We believe it’s not enough to just get through the tough times, and it’s not enough to just get through the tough times. If you really want to thrive and be antifragile, you will grow and become stronger [with] The more stress you deal with. Then we laid out the whole concept of how to actually train.
The second thought we discussed was “win the morning, win the day.” This is what you think when you look at your life [and] The things that matter to you—your job, your business, your spirituality, your physical health, and important relationships—all of these things end up being the one thing you can do every day to move them forward .
As long as you complete that one thing before 12 o’clock every day, you win. It doesn’t matter what happens in the afternoon. Have a great day at noon, and if you add up the days, you’ll have an amazing career.
We will discuss this throughout the week.
“Antifragile” is a very interesting idea, and seems like a timely message as the industry approaches the August 17 deadline for procedural changes outlined in the National Association of Realtors Buyer and Broker Commission Settlement Agreement . How do you connect the idea of antifragility to helping agents cope with these major upcoming changes?
Change is inevitable, but participation is optional. We ask our agents to make changes so that ultimately they can have stronger businesses and better careers. We also make sure they get all accurate information and not take opinions they may have seen on social media as fact as this is very dangerous.
We also ensure they understand exactly what the rule changes are, that they are 100% compliant, and understand how the changes are being received by their local boards and multiple listing services. This is most important to us because we believe real estate is a local business driven by local relationships.
We are teaching agents to follow all the rules and then wait for best practices to emerge. The idea of making wholesale changes before understanding best practices doesn’t make any sense to us.
This is a good point. Industry leaders have been discussing various ways to achieve this for months, but we won’t really know what the outcome will be until after August 17th. At the same time, I see that your agenda is really focused on helping agents get back to basics and hone those core skills. With all of this happening, what are the core skills or business strategies you want KW agents to master?
We wrote the Value² class [in March]I think we were the first real estate company to launch a full-fledged course that said, ‘Okay, great. Consumers are always willing to pay for something, and understanding what your value is and how that value actually helps the buyer or seller achieve their goals is the primary goal.
We can’t do it in a loose fashion; we have to be able to connect directly, so we have various groups of buyer’s agents and listing agents who design unique value propositions. They’ve gotten the results they were looking for, and they’ve documented them. We’ve always been a database-driven business, and I believe we still are, which means these real estate agents have 500 to 300,000 people in their databases.
those people [in those databases] Need real estate news from your real estate agent. So how do we authorize our agents to do this? We’ll explain how to do your best on social media. We’ll explain how to best do this by leveraging their reach and powerful touch programs. We’ll explain how to do your best at educational events as well as fun party events.
We’ll do it methodically, step by step, so they can explain their value at scale.
This is needed. There’s still a lot of confusion when I talk to my friends and family about what’s going on, and they look to agents for guidance. We’ve already discussed how you coach agents through change, but how does KW leadership prepare for this change? How is KW preparing to grow as a company?
At the end of the day, we are a talent development company and your question is a very smart one because we ask the same question. How will talent development companies help people cope with change? One of the first things we did was hold a company-wide open house. We’ve done two of these where we explained the actual changes and completed the reconciliation.
The next thing we did was start writing a course specifically focused on agency value, since it’s at the forefront of change, and the course was called Value². And then we said, “Okay, what are the best practices for agents to demonstrate value?” In fact, we published a new playbook this week, The Millionaire Realtor Playbook Volume 2, which has more than A 71-page playbook for real estate agents to start from scratch: How to get more buyers and sellers to talk to you? To, “How do I provide them more value? And how do I expand my business?”
Finally, sometimes we just get lucky. It’s perfect to have all of our top brass gathered in Austin this week for Super Agent Camp, where we’ll spend the next three days discussing the changes that are coming. I’m incredibly excited about the timing and I really think our employees are ready.
Email Marianne McPherson
