For years Kyle Whissel and Daniel Beer have run individual real estate teams, learning, and growing side-by-side in Southern California. However, it wasn’t until seven years ago that Whissel and Beer were first brought together via the Fast Forward Movement, an agent coaching, collaboration and mastermind group that they helped co-found at eXp Realty. 

“We became partners and friends,” Beer said. “We’ve had the opportunity to look under the hood and see how each other operates, professionally and personally, in both good times and bad.”

They soon realized that they were running duplicate businesses, with both putting energy and resources into the same marketing, systems and CRM issues. 

“Finally, it just made sense to combine forces and gain scale, and gain advantages with lead providers and vendors. And, just provide even more opportunities for exponential growth for team members and agents,” Beer said. 

Whissel and Beer announced the combined Whissel Beer Group last Wednesday. The consolidated team will continue to be brokered out of eXp Realty. 

HousingWire recently sat down with Whissel and Beer to discuss their combined team, as well as general industry trends. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Brooklee Han: This past year, we’ve already seen a lot of consolidation in the housing industry. How do you feel like some of the moves by big industry players like Rocket and Redfin are going to impact the real estate space and those running larger teams like yourselves?

Kyle Whissel: I think the expectations of people today are so different than what they were five or 10 years ago. We are in a push-button economy. If you want something, you push a button and get lunch or a ride somewhere. Agents and consumers are looking for that same push-button experience. Delivering that experience is almost impossible for a small team or a solo agent, because the resources you need in order to create that experience are hard [to develop] without a large team.

We pride ourselves on our ACE team, which stands for ‘Agent Concierge Experience.’ If an agent needs to schedule showings, instead of spending hours calling different listing agents and juggling a map and client availability, they can push a button, indicate which client they are scheduling and what properties they want to see, and it will get done for them.

The key is to have a larger organization like ours, because you can’t deliver that at a small scale. I think this will drive consolidation in the future for teams, agents and small firms. This also frees up the agents to do what they got into the business to do, which is to help buyers buy homes and sellers sell their homes.

BH: Boosting agent productivity is one way to grow your business. What else do you attribute the success of your businesses to? 

Daniel Beer: We are both very humble implementers. I see agents receive information and get coached on the best possible practices and then, before even running the play as prescribed, they change it. They don’t do what is taught, or they don’t even try to take action. Running the play is a core value for us at the Whissel Beer Group. So, speaking for myself, but also in observing Kyle, I’ve seen that we are both humble implementers that are aggressively seeking out best practices. 

Whissel: We also have the understanding that our client is not the buyer or the seller, but the agent. I think obsessing over the creation of the ultimate operating system for our agents is also what [drives] our success. If we can provide the agent everything they need, they will then go and serve the buyer and seller even better than they did before.

BH: Over the past 18 months, there’s been a strong focus on value proposition — the value an agent is providing a client, but also the value the brokerage is providing the agent. It clearly sounds like this is something you are focused on, can you tell me a bit more?

Beer: There has been this thought process that technology is going to replace brokerages, but the actual beginning of brokerages being replaced was the advent of the team. Starting somewhere around 2000, we saw teams provide value. Over time, it’s become disproportionate to the level and value the brokerages can provide.

Brokerages are still important. But, instead of being the place that provides agents with all this value, they are the equivalent of a clearing house that handles the legal compliance component and the backend support. In exchange, we’ve seen teams grow from being just five or six agents to organizations with over 100 agents.

BH: What is some advice that you have for agents looking to start a team?

Whissel: People often think the next step for them is becoming a team leader or a broker, but then they realize it is not what they thought it was going to be. I think a lot of agents are hitting this ceiling. They think the only way to the next level is to start a team. You have so many great producers that try to run a team, but it turns out they are not great team leaders. They end up making less money than they did before and they are working more hours managing people and doing tasks they don’t like or aren’t good at.

We are focused on providing an opportunity for people like that to get back to happy. We want to take those team leaders and show them that there are ways to get to that next level without having to hire and manage 15 people. 

If you feel like you need to start a team, you should consider if you just need a better operating system to help you get to the level instead of bringing more people and agents into the mix.

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