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Nearly 5,000 Keller Williams agents descended on Austin, Texas, this week for the franchisor’s annual Mega Agent Camp, a three-day conference aimed at educating and training agents to navigate the market. While the usual conference fare is on the agenda — social media tips, buyer and seller lead generation strategies, and lessons on work-life balance — the upcoming deadline for buyer-broker commission changes underlies every session as agents brace for an uncertain future.
Jason Abrams
Ten minutes before hitting the stage for Gary Keller’s State of Housing Market address, Keller Williams Head of Industry and Learning Jason Abrams spoke to Inman about the “perfect timing” of this year’s conference and the franchisor’s gameplan for helping agents not only survive but thrive through commission changes.
Inman: What are you most excited about for this year’s Mega Agent Camp? What is the main focus of this year’s conference, and what’s the main message you hope agents will walk away with after these next few days?
Abrams: I have two messages. The first one we covered yesterday at our CEO event. We spent a lot of time covering this idea of [being] antifragile. This was an idea that was laid out by a famous economist, and the idea is that there are some things that they’re not just tough, but they’re antifragile, meaning that when they are put under stress, they actually get stronger.
We made the argument that it’s not enough to just weather the storm, and it’s not enough to just get through it. If you really wanted to thrive and be antifragile, you would be growing and you’d be stronger [with] the more stress that you deal with. Then we laid out this whole concept of how to actually train for it.
The second idea we discussed is, “Win the morning, win the day.” This is the idea that when you look at your life [and] the things that are important to you — your job, your business, your spirituality, your physical health and key relationships — all these things end up having one thing that you can do each day to move them forward.
As long as that one thing is done before 12 o’clock every day, then you’re going to win. It doesn’t matter what happens in the afternoon. Have a great day by noon, and if you add up a ton of days like that, you’re going to have an amazing career.
We’re going to touch on that throughout the whole week.
Being ‘antifragile’ is such an interesting idea, and it certainly seems like a timely message as the industry nears the Aug. 17 deadline for procedural changes listed in the National Association of Realtors’ buyer-broker commission settlement. How are you tying the idea of being antifragile into helping agents navigate these big, upcoming changes?
Change is inevitable, but participation is optional. We’re asking our agents to lean in to change so that in the end, they end up with stronger businesses and better careers. We’re also making sure they get all the accurate information, as opposed to passing off opinions that they might be seeing on social media as facts because that’s very dangerous.
We’re also making sure that they understand exactly what the rule changes are, they’re 100 percent in compliance, and understand how their local boards and multiple listing services are embracing these changes. That’s the most important thing for us because we believe that real estate is a local business driven by local relationships.
We’re teaching agents to follow all the rules and then wait for best practices to emerge. This idea of running and making wholesale changes prior to understanding what the best practices are doesn’t make any sense to us.
That’s a great point. For months, industry leaders have been discussing the myriad of ways this could play out, but we truly won’t know how this will turn out until after Aug. 17. That’s when the journey really begins. In the meantime, I see that your agenda is really focusing on helping agents go back to basics and hone those core skills. With all that’s happening, what’s the core skill or business strategy you want KW agents to latch onto?
We wrote the class Value² [in March], and I think we were the first real estate company to kind of come out with a full-blown course that says, ‘OK, great. It’s value that a consumer is always willing to pay for’ and understanding what your value is and how that value actually leads to helping the buyer or seller accomplish is the primary goal.
We can’t do this in a loose way; we have to be able to directly tie to it, so we have all kinds of panels featuring buyer’s agents and listing agents who have designed unique value propositions. They’ve gotten the results they’re looking for, and they’ve documented it. We’ve always been in a database-driven business, and I believe we still are, which means that these real estate agents have anywhere from 500 to 300,000 people in their databases.
Those people [in those databases] need to get their real estate news from their real estate agent. So how do we empower our agents to go and do that? We’re going to be explaining how to do it best on social media. We’re going to explain how to do it best with their sphere of influence and powerful touch programs. We’re going to explain how to do it best at educational events as well as just a fun party event.
We’re going to go methodically, step by step, so that they can explain their value at scale.
That’s needed. When I talk to my friends and family about what’s happening, there’s still a lot of confusion, and they’re going to be looking to agents for guidance. We’ve talked about how you’re guiding agents to handle change, but how has KW leadership prepared itself for this change? How is KW, as a company, prepared to evolve?
At the end of the day, we’re a people development company, and your question is so sage because we asked the same one. How would a people development company go about helping people work through change? The first thing we did was set up all-company open houses. We’ve done two of them where we explain what’s actually changing and went through the settlement.
The next thing that we did was we started writing courses specific to agent value because that’s at the forefront of the change, and that course is called Value². We then said, ‘OK, well, what are the best practices for agents to show value?’ We actually published this week a new playbook, the Millionaire Real Estate Agent Playbook Volume 2, which has over 71 pages of plays that a real estate agent can run all the way from: How do I generate more buyers and sellers to talk to? to “How do I provide them more value? and How do I scale my business?
And then, finally, sometimes we just get lucky with timing. Getting all of our top people together in Austin for Mega Agent Camp this week is perfect, and we’re going to spend the next three days talking about the changes that are ahead. I couldn’t be more excited about the timing, and I really think our people are prepared.