There are over 100,000 independent real estate brokerages in North America with over 300,000 agents within them. Indie brokerages make up the backbone of our real estate market!

There many unique challenges these brokerages face such as keeping up with ever evolving technology, training and retaining agents and the biggest one, just being profitable!

REAL Broker values the importance of independent brokerages and structured our model to support independent brokerages while allowing them to keep their own flexibility, brand and business models.

In this article, I’m going to outline the 10 biggest benefits of independent brokerages joining REAL Broker!

1. Keep Your Brand With Private Lable

At REAL, independent brokerages have the option to join our Private Lable program where they can 100% keep their branding and not advertise they are with REAL at all if they choose to.

This means you don’t have to include REAL in your signs or marketing and you can sign contracts in your company’s name!

This is perfect for brokerages who have spent years building up their own personal brand and want to keep it but still want to tap into the benefits of being with REAL and take some of the responsibility of being a broker off of their plate.

Check out my full article on the Private Lable program to learn more.

2. Additional Streams Of Income

One of the benefits of joining REAL Broker is getting access to additional streams of income into your real estate business. For independent brokerages, not only is the broker getting additional streams of income but their agents also will as well!

Here is a quick summary of all the streams of income agents at REAL Broker have available.

• Stock Awards: At REAL, there are 4 ways to earn free stock in the company. 1. Simply capping will earn you free stock. This is true for team members paying a half cap as well 2. When an agent you attract to the company closes their first transaction at REAL, you as their sponsor receive a free stock award. 3. With the stock purchase plan, all agents can buy REAL stock directly out of their commission, and by doing this they can earn up to 20% bonus free stock on each purchase. 4. With the Elite Agent Award, agents can earn up to $24,000 in free stock each year by hitting certain production milestones. It’s even easier for team leaders to hit this as part of their team members’ production counts towards the team leaders’ Elite Agent award.

• Revenue Share: Revenue share is how REAL Broker rewards agents for helping grow the company. For any agents who name you as a sponsor, you will receive 5% of each commission until they cap. If they are on a full cap, this is up to $4,000 a year per agent, if they are a team member and on a half cap, this is as much as $2,000 a year per agent.

  So by converting your brokerage into a team at REAL, each team member will have a $6,000 a year cap ($4,000 for mega teams) and you will receive up to $2,000 back in revenue share for each team member who caps. With a half cap, it typically takes 2 to 3 transactions to cap.

  Revenue share also goes down 5 tiers. So not only can your agents receive revenue share, if they bring on an agent, that agent will be in your tier 2 and you’ll receive 4% of each commission until they cap, 3% for tier 3, 2% for tier 2 and 1% for tier 1. So as your agent’s networks grow, so does yours.

• Mentor Program: At REAL, anyone can apply to our mentorship program. By being a mentor, you can earn 25% to 50% of the commissions of the agents you mentor. The mentor sets their price. This can be a great stream of income for agents who want to diversify their income or focus less on production.

• REAL Title: REAL Title offers Joint Venture, where agents and team leaders can invest in their state’s REAL Title company to become an owner and get paid out part of the profit quarterly. This incentivizes you to use their services and team leaders are allowed to invest more than solo agents.

• Loan Officer With REAL Mortgage: One unique stream of income agents have access to here is the ability to become a loan officer with REAL Mortgage as well. By doing this, they can earn both their buyer agent commission and a loan officer commission of up 1.25% of the loan amount

• REAL Mortgage Rev Share: REAL Mortgage also has a 5-tier rev share-like system where you earn points for each loan a loan officer originates going down 5 tiers.

Try my Revenue Share Calculator to get an estate of how much rev share you can expect to earn from your agents. At REAL, they would be team members and pay a $6,000 a cap.

3. Award Winning Technology

One of REAL Broker’s strengths is our award-winning, proprietary technology. Our technology gives REAL Broker, its agents, and its team leaders a huge advantage in the industry by streamlining our workflow and giving us new capabilities. Here is a breakdown of some of our most impactful pieces of tech that independent brokers and their agents will get access to.

• reZEN: This is our main hub for all of our technology. With reZEN you and your agents can track all of your production, how close you are to hitting Elite Agent or Capping, submit contracts for compliance, access support, and much, much more.

• ProTeams: This is our team management software for team leaders. With it, you can fully customize your splits, fees, and caps with your team members down to the agent level. So if you wanted to have one split with one group of agents and a different split with a different group, you can do that. If you work out a specific deal with a specific agent, you can set that up in ProTeams and it’s fully automated. Many of our former independent brokers tell us this software saves them hundreds of hours in admin costs each year.

• REAL Signature: This is our digital signature software built into reZEN. With it, your teams can write contracts and send documents out for signatures with their clients. This is accessible within the app as well.

• reZEN App: This is my favorite peace of tech because it gives you all the capability of reZEN in a well designed mobile app! The ability to bring up any transaction and see all the details of it including the co-op agent or title compani’s contact information is a game changer for me personally.

• Ai Assitant: Because REAL Broker built all of our own technology, we have access to all of our own data and can feed that data into our AI assitant, Leo. With Leo, you can ask it questions like what is my average commission, how many deals did I close last year or when is my next closing by using similar technology to Chat GPT, it can look at your data and provide insights into it.

• Workplace: Workplace is how we tap into the REAL Broker community. With it you can post questions in groups, access live training and message anyone in the company.

• REAL Academy: This is where you and your agents can access all the training REAL Broker has to offer including over 200 online courses, over two dozen recurring masterminds, and 30+ live streams a week. Because it’s built into a website, you can access all of our training through your phone as well.

• Lofty: Lofty is one of the best CRM and websites in the industry for real estate agents! It includes AI technology that will text leads for you, smart plans that include mailing custom postcards, FB and Google PPC add integration, and much more. Lofty typically costs $500 a month but at REAL, our agents get it for only $40 a month if they choose to.

• Other Software: There are several other smaller pieces of tech integrated into reZEN such as our Whealth Plan, Marketing Center, REAL Partners, and Reports. REAL is also rolling out our consumer app currently and the REAL Wallet which is how you will manage your REAL Credit and Debit Card.

4. Industry Leading Agent Training

By joining REAL, the responsibility of training your agents will no longer fall entirely on your shoulders. Instead, they will have access to on-demand training from our top producers all across the county on every topic you can think of!

All of our training is housed in the REAL Academy which has over 200 online courses, over 2 dozen recurring masterminds, and 30+ live streams a week. All agents at REAL have access to all of our training and the best part is it can be accessed on our phones as well.

REAL Broker offers some of the best training for our agents in the entire industry! The reason for this is because of the stock awards and revenue share. For our Elite Agents to receive their full $24,000 in free stock, they are required to teach at least one class a month to our agents.

Even our non-elite agents are incentivized to provide the best training possible because we all own stock in the company. Personally, I host 5 masterminds a month and I do this because of the stock I own and the revenue share I receive.

5. Better Agent Retention

For many independent brokerages, keeping agents in your company is a big struggle. REAL Broker can help solve that in a couple of ways.

One is with the “Golden Handcuff” principle. By providing financial value to your agents, you will create a situation they won’t want to leave. For example, if your agents attract 1 or 2 other agents and are now making $4k to $8k a year in passive income from revenue share, this will incentivise them to not want to leave and give that up. Our free stock at REAL also has a 3-year vesting period. So if leaving means they have to give up $10k or $15k worth of free stock they are waiting to vest, it is going to make it a harder decision for them.

Another way REAL improves agent retention is just by providing so much value overall. Our technology really does streamline agents’ business which reduces stress and frees up their time. Our training and community really are the best in the industry and this will make it harder for agents to walk away from so much value.

6. Free Up More Of Your time

One of the biggest benefits for an independent broker to join REAL is freeing up your time which allows you to focus on activities with a high ROI. There are three areas REAL will can help with this, compliance, training, and support.

• At REAL, we have dedicated brokers and broker team members who review all of our agent’s contracts to make sure they are in compliance with state laws. We leverage technology within reZEN to streamline this compliance process.

• At REAL, you no longer will be expected to give up as much of your time to train your agents, you instead can leverage all the training, live streams, and community in REAL Academy. Of course, you can still train your agents but all of that responsibility won’t fall on your shoulders.

• Supporting your agents can also be a big consumer of time for independent brokeragers. At REAL, we have excellent agent support including a 24/7 call center, email support, community support through Workplace, contract support through your broker’s team, and direct access to your state’s broker through phone, email, or text. This gives you the ability to simply be the “source of the source” rather than constantly putting out fires yourself.

7. Access To a Nationwide Community

Many agents say that our community is one of our biggest assets!

We have a helpful and collaborative culture at REAL. Because we all own stock in this company and many receive revenue share, there is a financial incentive for us to give back to our community and support one another.

Your agents will be able to tap into, collaborate, and learn from our 20,000-agent community across North America (and growing fast). Because our community is all across the country, it reduces friction from only learning from agents in your market and gives you access to tackets working in other markets which no one else may be doing in your own.

Your agents can tap into REAL’s community through Workplace, the 30+ live streams a week, the over two dozen recurring masterminds, and the multiple in-person events throughout the county.

8. Flexable Team Structure

REAL Broker gives our team leaders alot of flexability and control in how they structure their teams. We ofer two main team structure.

First is a “Standard Team” where your your agents have either a half cap of $6,000 a year or a third cap of $4,000 a year. To be eligible for a third cap, the team needs to close at least $100M in volume a year with at least 12 team members. Source.

There is a minimum requirement that the team members give their team leader at least 10% of their commissions and the team agreement needs to be on file with REAL.

Standard Teams also get access to our ProTeam Software which gives you complete flexibility in what fees and splits you charge to your agents.

The second option is to create a “Marketing Group”. With this team, all your agents have a full cap and there is no requirement for them to give a commission off of each transaction.

The benefits to this type of team are it can go across state lines so you can start a nationwide brand and you can have any kind of arrangement to be on your team.

For example, you could charge your agents $500 a month to be on your marketing group, or 5 % of all transactions, etc. The Team Agreement does not need to be on file with REAL so you have complete control over how you want to structure it.

9. Flexible Marketing Requirement

REAL Broker is here to support our businesses, not the other way around!

With this in mind, they are very flexible with how we market our business and incorporate their brand as long as it’s in compliance with your local regulations. So much so, that with the Private Lable program, you don’t have to include their branding at all.

REAL also has several different logo styles and brand colors so that you can find the style that most compliments your own personal branding and marketing efforts.

10. National and Regional Events

REAL Broker may be cloud-based but we understand the importance of connecting belly to belly at times.

Currently, we have two official REAL Broker events each year. The RISE event and The REAL Summit event. Both events are multiple days and rotate their locations.

REAL also supports and encourages our agents to host larger events throughout the country. Many teams and agents like to put these on in order to use them for agent attraction efforts and will often find top-notch REAL agents to speak at them.

If the event is large enough, Sharran, the President of REAL, and Tamir, the CEO of REAL, will also fly in to be the keynote speaker.

I have personally spoken at several of these events with 100+ attendees. They are never exclusively for REAL agents but REAL agents often do like to attend.

Many areas also have in-person monthly masterminds and meet-ups put on by agents or teams at REAL Broker. As the company continues to grow, we will see even more agent-led meet-ups.

And there are the one-off REAL Broker events as well, such as REAL celebrating their 10 year anniversary in NYC at the NASDAQ.

FAQ About Joining REAL

What fees does REAL Broker charge?

For team leaders, REAL charges a $249 sign-up fee, a standard $12,000 a-year cap on an 85/15 split, $6,000 or $4,000 a year for team members, a $750 annual fee, a $30 per transaction E&O fee and a $285 transaction fee after you cap. See a complete breakdown of REAL Broker Fees here and my REAL Broker Fee Calculator.

Will REAL waive the $249 sign-up fee for a large team?

Yes, REAL will often wave the sign up fee if everyone signs up about the same time. I can help you arrange and negotiate this.

Can I sign a Letter Of Intent to join?

Yes, you can sign an LOI to join and start having your team members actually transition over to REAL before you officially do but they will still be in your downline when you do transfer your license.

Do I need to join REAL as a team?

Yes, by joining REAL Broker, your brokerage will now officially be a team at REAL with you as the team leader. REAL does allow teams within teams, so the team leaders at your brokerage can still come over. I can put you in contact with the right person at REAL to help structure that.

Is the Private Lable program available in all 50 states?

Ultimately it will be, however, right now it is not fully in all states. You can see an updated list of what states it’s available in here.

Transitioning Your Brokerage To REAL

As you can see, there are many unique benefits to joining REAL Broker as an independent brokerage.

Benefits for both you and the broker, like freeing up your time, giving you additional streams of income, and saving money on admin costs and technology.

But also really valuable benefits for your agents as well such as access to nationwide training, community, next-gen technology, and additional streams of income into their businesses as well.

If you would like to talk more about what joining REAL looks like as an independent brokerage, I’d be happy to hop on a 1-on-1 video call with you. I can answer all of your questions, share my screen to show you what our technology looks like, and go over the details with you. I have helped many large teams and independent brokerages join REAL and would be happy to help you as well.

Just click below to schedule a call or click here.