Selling Without Competing

How many managing brokers are there who sell? According to NAR’s 2016 Member Profile, 10 percent of Realtors are “broker-owners with selling,” a 4 percent decrease from 2015. Only 1 percent are “broker-owners without selling,” which has remained unchanged from 2015. Three percent say they are a manager.

Managing brokers who sell have to make sure that their agents are at ease with the idea of their manager selling homes alongside them.

Karen Cookingham has been the managing broker at LW Reedy in Elmhurst for 17 years, where she manages an office of 95 agents. Before that, she sold real estate for 10 years. She says she handles an average of six transactions per year for family and people she already knows. Her firm’s owners are comfortable with her selling because – so long as it doesn’t interfere with the business – they feel it makes her a better managing broker.

“If my agents ever came to me and said that it wasn’t fair to them or if I got that feeling from a group of them, then I would revisit what I’m doing,” Cookingham says. “They know that I am not competing with them and I strongly believe that would be the most concerning thing to the people who are in the office – if I were taking calls that could have been theirs.”

Myslicki acknowledges that the size of a real estate company plays into expectations of how leads are distributed.

“If you were at a company where you could get a lot of multimillion-dollar listings and they [managing brokers] were keeping those all to themselves instead of spreading them around, I could see how people would be resentful of that,” Myslicki says. “Most people in real estate understand that it’s up to them to get their own leads. It’s not really up to the managing broker to give people leads, other than to reward agents who are doing well with more leads.”