How 1 agent consistently ranks #1 while leading a company with 1,500 agents

Although his name is today synonymous with top-tier luxury real estate in the western US, Paul Benson was not always an elite real estate advisor.

Before diving into the world of lavish estates and picturesque mountain towns, Benson spent many years in the automotive retail business.

“I ran some of the best and largest dealerships in the country,” Benson told Inman. “And my dealership was sold to AutoNation. I had a friend who was a real estate agent in Newport Beach at the time, and he said, ‘Why don’t you come with me for a weekend and just feel this? See how it goes.'”

That Saturday, Benson watched his friend win three offers by knocking on the door, two of which he had already secured buyers for.

“Basically, he made $100,000 in a few hours that afternoon, and I thought to myself, ‘Huh. I’m going to get my real estate license,'” Benson said.

It has served him well to take the skills Benson first learned selling cars and expand them and apply them to real estate. He is regularly ranked the #1 real estate agent in the Engel & Völkers network worldwide, and one of the highest earning real estate agents in the state of Utah, where he is based. He is also co-founder and CEO of the Engel & Völkers Gestalt Group, a network of approximately 50 offices and just under 1,500 advisors in Utah, California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Washington and Idaho.

How does Benson stay so consistently at the top of the market while leading a powerful group of agents in multiple states? Relentless marketing, extreme responsiveness and maintaining an in-depth knowledge of his local market, he told Inman.

Ruthless marketing

Benson got his first sales gig in Park City by being in the right place at the right time. While on vacation, he came across a new development project in Deer Valley that needed help with representation. The next thing Benson knew, he had volunteered to participate in the project and had moved from Vermont to make the town his permanent home.

For the first six months he did nothing but work.

“I was literally doing open houses morning, day and night, every day, seven days a week,” Benson said. “I still have clients from the six months I work with today, and I made over $1 million at open houses that first winter in Park City.”

He also made sure he was the first person in real estate that people came across when they came to town on vacation. How? By investing heavily in top positions in magazines at the local airport. This was around 2004 and 2005, when print media was still healthy.

“At the time, every kiosk at every airport had the same magazines,” says Bensons. “Unique houses, Robb Report And duPont Registryand they always stood next to each other. And I said: What if I was on the cover of all three? And it was a huge, huge investment. But I did it, thinking that everyone would get off the plane and see those ads, and that was my first really, really big year in Park City, over $100 million, and that was 2007.

But as more of the world turned to digital marketing, Benson also adjusted its marketing strategy.

“Then came the website world and I wanted my website to be found everywhere, so I invested there,” he said. “And then came the world of social media, and I spent a lot of time and energy building that up. And I looked at it this week. If you look at some of these posts, in a week you get 30,000, 50,000 eyes on a post, and that’s before everyone shares it. That’s honestly bigger than a lot of the magazines I was spending all this money on.”

Benson said he and his team reassess their digital marketing strategy at least quarterly and think about how it can be improved. With such rapid changes happening in AI today, Benson says optimizing website marketing so it can be included in AI results is very important to stay visible.

Quick responses and generosity

Luxury home buyers and sellers today expect to get answers on-demand, Benson says. That’s why one of his top priorities is to have his phone and Apple Watch at hand so he can respond to requests as quickly as possible.

“I believe the most powerful thing you can do is be responsive and fast, so I do my best to differentiate between what is important and what is not important and what is a task, anything that has to do with details, anything that is repetitive, it will be handled by someone on my team,” said the luxury consultant. “And what that leaves me with is the ability to be present, take calls, communicate with customers and respond quickly.”

By being attentive and responding quickly, Benson and his team have also been able to win business from other agents simply because they can answer the phone more quickly, he added.

“People now expect immediate responses,” Benson says. “And they expect it, whether it’s a direct message on Instagram or a text, an email, it doesn’t matter – they expect it.”

In addition to staying responsive, Benson says that maintaining a certain generosity of spirit, or what he called “not being transactional,” can also go a long way with customers.

“Suppose a client fires me because his ad isn’t selling,” Benson said as an example.

“And instead of getting angry or frustrated, I keep helping them, and in the end I still can’t make the sale, but I keep helping them until I give them advice that helps them with their new agent and their new agent gets it sold. That customer will still remember that and come back later.

“Or when you’re just helping someone, knowing there’s no commission involved, in random ways, or helping other agents in random ways. What I’ve found over the years is that it’s a powerful thing for people to realize: that you just really love what you do, that you love the industry and you want to help.”

In-depth knowledge of the local market

Agents who want to succeed in their market must be local experts, Benson said, and this is especially true in Park City. The city has an interesting mix of luxury vacationers, second home owners and locals and has one of the highest concentrations of expensive listings in a single zip code in the country. Homes in one neighborhood might sell for $500,000, and a few minutes away there are mansions worth $20 million.

“And each of these little micro markets is completely different in terms of how they’re doing, how interest rates are impacting them, how the snow this year is impacting that — or lack of snow, I guess is a better way to put it,” Benson said.

“You absolutely need to know your statistics and facts and figures in each of these neighborhoods, like what sold, why it sold, who built it, who the architect is, what made it unique, how much we think it cost to build that house versus the house next door. You need to know every detail because that’s the most valuable thing you can do for a client.

“A client comes to town who doesn’t know Park City, and the best thing about Park City is that they generally don’t have a relationship with another agent yet. They’re tourists; they’re here to ski and they’re falling in love with Park City for the first time, and it puts you, as a brand new agent, on a level playing field with everyone else.”

The ubiquity of portals like Zillow and new tools like ChatGPT give consumers access to more real estate information than ever before, Benson said. That’s why it’s so important that agents have insider knowledge and insights that Zillow and ChatGPT don’t have at their fingertips to share with customers, to show why they’re valuable.

“And the only way to get that information armed and dangerous, no matter who comes in and no matter what they ask, is to learn that market every minute,” Benson said.

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Email Lillian Dickerson