The power and potential of real estate teams: expert insights for 2025

The future of real estate is all about teams. 🤝

To position your business for peak performance this year, we’ve rounded up key insights and predictions from seven groundbreaking team owners and leaders on where the team model is headed and how to get the most out of it in 2025 and beyond.

1. Team up to keep up

Marcus Larrea, Founder and Team Lead at Palm Paradise Realty Group in Southwest Florida, believes teams are the only way to meet changing consumer expectations in what he calls “the Uberization of society.”

“You order an Uber, and if the Uber is 30 minutes away, you’re going to cancel the ride and try to find one that’s closer. It’s all about instant gratification, and in the real estate space, there are a lot of portals out there where that’s the main goal, how fast can you get to the customer? If you’re an individual agent, you can only service 1 or 2 clients like that. That’s not scalable without a team.”

To keep up with the pace of change, agents must have the support of a team.

“At a national level, individual agent production is declining massively and team production is increasing at a massive rate. That’s only going to continue to get further and further apart.”

For Marcus, it’s adapt or die. He believes that the agents, brokerages, and teams that don’t adapt, will meet the same fate as companies like Blockbuster.

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2. Amplify every agent’s unique value

If you ask Micah Harper, he’ll tell you that today’s real estate customers care about one thing: finding the right person to guide them through the real estate journey.

The CEO of Exquisite Properties, an independent teamerage in San Antonio, Texas, believes that consumers aren’t all that brand conscious when it comes to selecting an agent. For him, the secret to success is simple — it’s about helping customers find the agent they vibe with.

Micah believes every real estate agent has a unique personality and skill set. It’s up to the team leader to assign roles that amplify the strengths of each member of the team. 

“I think they want the person they trust, the person they like spending time with, the person whose advice they’re going to take,” explains Micah in a recent interview for the Real Estate Team OS podcast.

True leaders in real estate don’t start a team just because it’s the next logical thing to do. Instead, they think critically about what each individual agent can contribute and where they best fit into the team model. 

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3. Build a strong and scalable culture

Dave Ness, Founder of Thrive Real Estate Group, an independent teamerage in Denver, Colorado, also places culture high on the list. From day one, he knew he wanted to build a team with a unique identity, supported by scalable structures that can adapt as the team expands.

“I knew I wanted to start an organization that had a really, really thick, strong culture,” says Dave. “That, to me, meant everybody seeing the world the same way, everyone using the same vocabulary, everybody thinking the same way, driving towards the same goal. When we started, it was very much from the perspective of this has to be a very tight knit group. Of course the challenge of that is taking something so special and so strong and scaling it to the degree that we want.”

Dave has found that one of the best ways to scale that culture is to set the right expectations with every new agent: 

“For the first three years the agents that we're bringing on to our team and in our company don't have to worry about goal setting because we're going to hand it to them. The target for year one is 12 transactions, the target in year two is 18, and the target in year three is 24. In tenure, agents will earn the right to set their own chart, but we still have a minimum,” Dave explains.

Agents who don’t continue meeting the minimum aren’t a strong fit for the team’s fast-paced culture, making it easier to spot and solve any misalignments as the team expands.

4. Give the client your best

As the CEO and Principal Broker at Casals, Realtors®, in Northern Virginia, Mercy Lugo-Struthers loves watching her team grow its capacity to serve clients.

“About five years ago, it was more like an awakening of possibilities. You start coaching, you start listening. You begin peeling that onion thinking ‘wow’, there is so much more that can be done,” says Mercy

She’s a firm believer that most agents that work with a team become more productive and are more likely to stay with the industry.

“As real estate professionals, we need to be able to run businesses in a very efficient way so that we can serve our clients, and by serving our clients, we make money. It’s the way of the future,” she explains.

Collaborating with others makes it that much easier to focus on what you do best: consistently showing up as a valuable resource to your clients.

5. Nurture happy agents, win happy customers

For Abel Gilbert, running a successful real estate team is about so much more than agent count.

The Broker/Owner of Miami-based ONEPATH Realty, believes that building a great team is about prioritizing the human experience first and foremost. The way he sees it, happy agents deliver happy customers that choose to work with you over everyone else.

“Ultimately, I do believe that the future of our industry depends on an operation that has the flexibility to offer a great human experience through the agent. To offer a direct impact to our customers, that comes from happy agents — from agents that are successful. When you only look at a brokerage, or a team, or a company based on agent count, you’re looking at it from a superficial perspective. To me, what tells the full story is how many families do you help? How many people are buying a home through you?”

Abel is a big believer that agent productivity is about values and culture, not size. 

“To me the future of real estate is understanding how an independent brokerage can operate as a team at a high level. At a level of having a great culture. At a level of having an optimized per-agent productivity. It’s not about having 20,000 agents, but about having 2,000 agents that are highly productive but that are also ambassadors to your brand, that represent your core values,” he explains.

6. Attract the right people, naturally

Becky Garcia is the Founder and CEO of The Garcia Group, a 99% female real estate team in Phoenix, Arizona. Years ago, she started her team because she needed admin help. From there, it grew to sales and beyond. 

“We’re getting so many inquiries. We actually stopped all of our ads for agents because we just found them naturally coming to us. I think right now a lot of agents are uncertain about where the market is going. They just see okay, ‘I need training, I need leadership, I need accountability’. For us, it’s been a natural attraction,” she explains.

New and experienced agents are flocking to The Garcia Group for the wide range of support it provides. So how does Becky decide who to bring on? For her, the key deciding factor isn’t experience level — it’s culture fit.

“It’s important for a team to establish their core values. When you’re interviewing, asking them is this person gonna be a team player? Driven? Willing to be held accountable? We ask questions that are based around things like that. We also have them come to one of our team meetings and see how they react to other people as well,” she explains.

For leaders like Becky, the right agents will naturally find you. The real challenge is filtering out the ones who don’t align with your values and culture.

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7. Buy back your time

When Joe Oz’s wife had to tell him to put the phone down at dinner, he knew it was time to move to a team model. Today, the Team Leader of Oz Group in Montclair, New Jersey, leads a thriving team of values-aligned agents, from hundreds of miles away.

“I think people start teams for the wrong reasons. I think they start teams because they think they have to. I think they start teams out of ego. The only reason you should ever start a team is because you have more business than you can handle and the consumer experience is suffering.”

Actually, he adds, there is one other reason to build a team: You’ve built up a great business, but you want to scale back your hours or change your lifestyle:

“There came a time when we wanted to move back to California where my wife is from. So now I work remote and I have a team because that is where my brand is and I’m just not there. I bought a lot of my time back by doing that.”

Most of us go into real estate precisely for this reason. We want control over our time and our lives. By building out a teamerage, you can take back some of that freedom that you set out to get in the first place.

Watch the full Team OS episode on the evolution of real estate teams

Real estate teams get it done

Today's real estate clients want quick solutions from an empathetic expert they can trust. And high-performing real estate teams are in a prime position to deliver that kind of support.

Because the truth is, individual agents can only do so much. As customers seek the right guidance, real estate teams offer personalized service at scale. Embracing this trend is key to meeting clients where they are and thriving long-term

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