The story of how real estate agents began working in teams isn’t an especially long one. It started with a 29-year-old Toronto-area agent who, after being licensed for only three years, had become RE/MAX’s top-selling agent worldwide and realized that if he trained other agents to do exactly what he did, his business would practically run itself. In other words, he cracked the code for how real estate agents could earn more and work less.
“It all began in Newmarket, Ontario, where I pioneered a system that worked, and I kept finishing as RE/MAX’s No. 1 agent in the world year after year, and naturally other agents started asking how a young guy in a small town made more money than any other RE/MAX agent in the world,” recalled Craig Proctor, who spent two decades atop RE/MAX’s heap of 100,000 global agents before devoting himself full-time to coaching agents.
Before Proctor started his own team, agents from all over the continent would pay $2,000 a day just to shadow him and learn what made him so successful. By 1995, Proctor realized a more efficient approach would be to host three-day seminars.
Today, those seminars—the next of which is March 19-21—attract thousands of agents and real estate professionals a year, who keenly listen to Proctor interview his most prodigious and successful students from over the past two decades.
Among the guest speakers at next month’s event, whom Proctor has mentored, are Sarah Reynolds Oji, head of the Reynolds Team in Washington D.C. and Keller Williams’ No. 1 agent worldwide; Rudy Kusuma, who was RE/MAX’s top agent in California before he decided to become independent; John Reeves, the top agent in all of San Diego County; Nathan Clark, the top agent on the northeastern seaboard; Tony Johal, a millionaire agent in the Kitchener-Waterloo area; and many more.
“If agents implement exactly what I tell them to do, they will dominate their marketplaces within six months to a year, it’s that simple,” said Proctor. “Obscurity is the enemy for many agents, even experienced agents. Nobody knows who they are, and if you don’t have anyone to sell to, you’ll starve to death.”
Proctor teaches agents how to market themselves in ways that totally eliminate the necessity to intrusively knock on doors and prospect as a means to drum up business. On the contrary, Proctor’s systematic approach compels buyers and sellers to contact the agent, who can then scale up their business without sacrificing their personal lives.
Proctor would know. In 2010, he sold his real estate business and bought a home on its own island in Florida.
“It gets to the point where you can’t go out on every appointment—imagine doing six or seven appointments every day. I was doing it seven days a week and that’s when I started hiring other agents. I taught my team how to generate and convert leads, and build massively successful businesses using the latest technology. That’s why many of my students, like Sarah Reynolds Oji, make more money than their franchise owners. Everything you want to do in real estate is already being done successfully by Craig Proctor members. There’s no reason to try and reinvent the wheel. Just copy and you will have success.”