Tom Ferry Summit fuels optimism for officers struggling with new NAR rules

April Noessel was in a difficult situation.

She raised five children on her husband’s salary and began renovating houses to make ends meet. Her family fell into debt when one of their mistakes backfired. The bad deal was particularly painful because of the indignities required to prepare the house for sale.

“I was carrying one of my kids in a backpack and scraping magnets off the floor with a knife,” Noessel said. “When that went wrong, we had no money and were up to our eyes in debt. We literally had to feed our children by going to food banks. Our real estate agent made more money than us.”

But soon after, Noessel became licensed as a mortgage broker in California and began following the advice Tom Ferry gave in his YouTube videos. Within a short time she started her own real estate agency – Gold Group Real Estate – that lifted her family out of poverty and into success.

Iowa real estate agent Lori Bogle has a similar story. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she became burned out in real estate and found herself drinking more often. But in July 2020, she quit drinking and also turned to Tom Ferry’s YouTube channel. Now she not only owns Bogle Real Estate, but she has become a pillar in her community, something motivated more by her faith than her business.

“Our farmers market in our city was struggling,” Bogle said. They only had four or five vendors, so we sponsored them. We go outside and have a scolding. We interview people and put them on camera and stuff like that to promote it. I think we have about 30 to 40 suppliers now, so that’s really great.”

‘Charge the storm’

Noessel and Bogle were the first two speakers at the 2024 Tom Ferry Success Summit held this week in Dallas. Their stories of perseverance are perfect for this moment of fear and uncertainty in the real estate industry following the $418 million settlement of the commission lawsuits by the National Association of Real Estate Agents (NAR).

But there was no fear at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, the cavernous venue where the summit is being held and which feels almost cramped because of the hundreds of real estate agents attending the event.

The slogan for the summit is ‘charge the storm’, and the event’s logo is a photorealistic representation of a bull bathed in a cosmic swirl of dark blue. It is a striking representation of the mood within the event.

The feelings of anger and foreboding that permeate several Facebook groups, Reddit threads and other message boards are not present here. Instead, agents see the rule changes as an opportunity to better serve their buyers and sellers.

It’s hard not to be optimistic when you see Ferry – one of the country’s leading real estate coaches – bringing his infectious energy to the stage. In between speakers, he asks officers to get up and dance to club music, and his true believers do so without hesitation or inhibition. When the crowd’s ‘woo-hoos’ aren’t loud enough, Ferry demands they turn up the volume. And they do.

But the summit is more than just a three-day pep talk. The speakers share tips on everything from social media to goal setting and budgeting, lessons useful for real estate newcomers and veterans alike.

“I really liked when Tom Ferry talked about complaining, criticizing and comparing, because those three things don’t get you anywhere,” says Deborah Harmer, a Cincinnati real estate agent who runs the company. eXp Real Estate-connected Harmer Home team with her husband Ken.

“You want to complain and criticize when things don’t go your way, but that never encourages anyone to do better. That’s just not the case. I thought, ‘Yes, I can do a better job with that.’ So I like that.”

Sharing best practices

Brooke Lewis, an agent at The Perry Group in Salt Lake City, obtained her real estate license in March after working as a medical device salesperson. Her friends lured her into the trade and she liked the idea of ​​coming face to face with customers.

She said the speakers at the summit shared best practices that are invaluable to her as she begins to build her business.

“I haven’t really had many opportunities when it comes to listings, and so there’s been a lot of talk about how to get listings and how to be a good real estate agent,” Lewis said. “So that’s been very helpful. The conversations about marketing assets and social media tools have been great because obviously my social media is very small at the moment, so I’m hoping to grow that and continue to take some of the principles away from that.”

Steve Osborne from First Team Real Estate in Southern California has been a regular at Tom Ferry events for 17 years. Even though he has an established and successful business, he still finds Ferry’s events useful as the industry evolves and customer needs change.

“I have a strong feeling that if I don’t keep at it, I’ll be a dinosaur in a nanosecond,” Osborne said. “You’re talking to a guy who started in real estate before the Internet, before we even had a fax machine. My work doesn’t even look like how it started.”

Tom Ferry’s attendees may not like the settlement-mandated rule changes that went into effect Aug. 17 — nor the insinuation that officers behaved unethically — but it’s not keeping them awake either. Many of them are in states that already require buyer representation agreements, and those that aren’t find the agreements like something they should have done in the first place.

Transparency with clients is a shared value among brokers here, and waiving commissions and fees is something they support.

“These are the new rules, adapt to them and then find a way to make them work to your clients’ advantage,” Harmer said. “I think this works for our sellers. Instead of having to promise in advance how much they are going to pay the buyer’s agent, we now get all the facts at once, all the pieces of the puzzle, and then they see what their net is.

“I have 17 agents in my brokerage and I feel like this is an opportunity for us to really shine and show our value,” Noessel said. “We don’t need all these novice officers who don’t really take the case seriously, who don’t want to put everything into it. They will never read the forms and they will not know the rules. It will essentially push out all those who are not truly committed.”