World Investment: A story behind every agent

A story behind every agent

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To all the agents in the house,

The first round of the 2022 RealTrends rankings were published on Friday with the release of RealTrends + Tom Ferry The Thousand (RT1000), which ranks the country's most productive agents by transaction sides and sales volume.

As part of the rankings coverage this year, I interviewed several top performing agents and team leaders from across the country and what stood out to me was the incredibly wide variety of backgrounds, business structures and marketing strategies these agents and team leaders were using.

There are the "MLS only" agents like Jonathan Minerick, Ralph Harvey and Jason Saphire, who accrued several hundred, if not thousands, of transactions sides in 2021 by operating as limited services agents listing properties for sale on local MLSs and aggregating them to consumer facing sites such as Zillow.

Then there are the team leaders like Jordan Jankowski of the Pittsburgh-based team Selling Steel City and Ryan O'Neill of the Bloomington-based Minnesota Real Estate Team. For Jankowski, a former MLB pitcher, starting his own real estate team felt like a natural thing to do.

"Real estate is very similar to sports," Jankowski said. "It is very competitive. It is very performance based. If you take care of the people around you, your clients and your team, you will be successful. From sports, I knew that if I put in the hard work and essentially outworked everybody else, the results would come."

Meanwhile O'Neill, one half of the piano and instrumental music duo The O'Neill Brothers, entered the real estate industry expecting it to be just a side-gig. He now runs a team of over 100 agents throughout the Twin Cities area.

And of course there are the more traditional individuals agents like Quintavius Burdette, a former Ole Miss defensive back and wide receiver with a master's degree in accounting, and Meghan Clarkson, a waitress with a passion for marketing who was pushed into the world of real estate by one of her longtime regular customers.

Regardless of where these agents came from or how they run their business, all of them are clearly incredibly passionate about real estate and helping homebuyers and sellers negotiate some of the largest financial transactions of their lives.

To find out more about these agents and others, keep an eye on the RealTrends website and stay tuned for the RealTrends Nation's Best rankings coming out later this week!

Sincerely,

Brooklee Han

Real Estate and Title Industry Reporter