Real estate companies grow in many ways: sales volume, transactions sides, agent count, agent productivity and mergers and acquisitions, to name a few. Many firms excel in one or two forms of growth, yet struggle with — or don’t put a high focus — on those other growth activities.

Only a few companies excel in all growth strategies. In fact, in this entire report, only two firms did so.

RealTrends examined data from 2011 through year-end 2020 — a 10-year period. Our sources were the RealTrends 500 and Nation’s Best rankings, which cover the largest residential brokerage firms in the United States that closed more than 500 transaction sides, along with 10-year data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) housing sales and membership studies and other proprietary RealTrends data collected over the past 30 years regarding commission revenue and other factors.

We then inquired of the 100 best-performing brokerage firms as to the methods, strategies and tactics they used to achieve their results. Twenty firms responded to our questionnaire.

What was measured:

  • Growth in Agent count
  • Growth in Closed Transaction Sides
  • Growth in Closed Sales Volume
  • Growth in Agent Productivity

There were 731 of the largest brokerage firms in the country who we had complete data on for calendar years 2011 and 2022. The firms represented on the study included brokerages from every business model and state, virtually every nationally branded real estate enterprise and independent brokerage firms.