If you bring someone into the real estate business, train them, give them leads, teach them how to convert, help them build confidence, and turn them into a great agent, what are you actually hoping happens next?
Because if you do your job well, eventually they should outgrow you.
That is the part of the traditional team model that has never made much sense to me. We talk endlessly about developing people, creating leaders, and building leverage. But in most brokerage models, the better you are at developing talent, the greater the chance that your best people eventually leave and compete against you.
Think about how backwards that is.
You hire an ambitious agent. You spend years teaching them everything you know. You introduce them to your systems, your scripts, your vendors, your database strategies, your lead sources, and probably half the lessons you learned the expensive way. Eventually they become productive enough that they start doing the math.
They realize they can build their own brand. They can generate their own business. They can form their own team.
And then comes the uncomfortable conversation.
They are leaving.
Now the person you invested the most into becomes your competition. You wish them well, shake hands, divide up whatever needs to be divided up, and watch them build something five miles down the road using many of the skills you helped them develop.
That is not leverage. That is training your future competition.
Great Teams Need Somewhere for People to Graduate
I think we need to rethink what successful talent development actually looks like.
If someone joins your team at 25 years old, are they supposed to stay a buyer’s agent forever?
Of course not.
The best people are ambitious. They want more responsibility, more income, more ownership, and eventually more independence. If you recruit talented people and actually develop them, some of them should eventually want to build something of their own.
So the question becomes: Where do they go?
Most traditional teams don’t have a good answer.
There is the team, and then there is outside the team.
I believe there needs to be another option.
Your team should be able to function like a university. People can come in, learn, develop, produce, and eventually graduate without disappearing from your life or your business.
That is one of the biggest differences I’ve experienced at eXp.
Imagine your best agent coming into your office and saying, “I’m ready to start my own team.”
Instead of hearing that as a breakup, you get to hear it as a graduation.
Go build.
Go lead.
Go become bigger than you ever could have become inside my team.
And I’m still here.
More importantly, we’re still aligned economically. If I’ve invested years helping you become successful and you go on to build an incredible organization, we can both continue to benefit from that growth.
Developing talent should make you wealthier. It shouldn’t cost you your best people.
Your Map Might Be Too Small
There is another problem with the way we’ve traditionally thought about teams.
The map is too small.
Real estate teams are usually built around a local market. Maybe you dominate a city. Maybe you expand into a neighboring market. Maybe you eventually cross a state line.
But relationships don’t work that way anymore.
My organization has expanded internationally, and some of the strongest agents and leaders inside it operate thousands of miles away from me. That changes the way you think about scale.
At a traditional brokerage, growth is often constrained by geography, territories, franchise boundaries, additional caps, and all sorts of lines someone drew on a map years ago.
At eXp, the opportunity is much larger. My organization has expanded across countries, markets, MLSs, and time zones. I don’t need every talented person I meet to fit underneath one local team structure. I need somewhere for talented people to grow. Once you stop thinking exclusively about building a team and start thinking about building an organization, the ceiling gets much higher.
Eventually, Most Team Leaders Become Lead-Generation Companies
There is another uncomfortable truth about building a traditional real estate team.
Eventually, somebody has to feed everybody.
At first, building a team sounds like leverage. You are going to recruit agents, teach them what you know, hand off transactions, and buy back your time.
Then the machine gets hungry.
You have five agents who need leads. Then ten. Then twenty.
Suddenly, you aren’t primarily in the real estate business anymore. You’re running a lead-generation company.
And if you stop generating enough opportunities, the agents start wondering whether they still need you.
That’s usually not why somebody became a real estate agent in the first place.
Most successful team leaders I know got into this business because they were good with people, good at solving problems, good at selling homes, and good at creating relationships. They didn’t wake up one morning dreaming about spending the rest of their career generating internet leads for 40 other Realtors.
But that’s where the leverage model can eventually lead.
You solve your problem as a solo agent by creating a bigger machine, and then you spend your life feeding the machine.
I’ve described that before as creating a bigger version of the problem you were originally trying to escape.
What If Your Best People Could Become Your Biggest Asset?
There is a fundamentally different way to think about this.
What if your job wasn’t to keep talented agents on your team forever?
What if your job was to develop them until they didn’t need your team anymore?
Now your incentives change.
You don’t have to suppress someone’s ambition because you’re afraid of losing their production. You can encourage it.
You don’t have to worry that teaching someone too much will eventually hurt you. Teach them everything.
You don’t have to convince your best agent that staying on your team forever is somehow in their best interest.
Graduate them.
If they want to become a team leader, help them become a great one. If they want to build in another state, help them expand. If they have relationships in another country, show them the bigger map.
That’s what an organization gives you that a traditional team doesn’t.
The irony is that when people know they don’t have to leave you in order to grow, you can build deeper relationships with them.
Their independence isn’t a threat to your business.
It can become part of your business.
Build People Who Can Outgrow You
I think one of the greatest compliments you can receive as a leader is watching someone you developed become more successful than they ever imagined.
But the business model should reward you for creating that outcome, not punish you for it.
That’s the question I’d ask any serious team leader today:
If your best agent becomes twice as ambitious, twice as productive, and twice as capable over the next five years, does your current business model give them somewhere to go?
Or are you developing someone you’re eventually going to compete against?
I spent years thinking the answer to growth was a bigger team. More agents. More leads. More transactions.
Today, I think the bigger opportunity is building an organization where talented people can graduate, become leaders themselves, and continue growing alongside you.
You don’t need to keep your best people underneath you.
You need a model big enough to keep them beside you.
If you want to see what that could look like for your team, email hello@richtomasini.com and we’ll do the math.