Training day: Resi brokerages are betting big on coaches

Chirag Shah has made a career out of paying attention to detail. 

The real estate coach, whose meals come pre-packaged and calorie-counted, stood in a conference room at Compass’ Fifth Avenue headquarters, ready to impart lessons he’d picked up observing luxury hotel staff.

“It’s really turning the what into how,” he said during a training session with Megan Varga, a top producer for Compass in Orange County, California, who paid $10,000 for the one-day program. “It’s meeting where she is and understanding that she’s in Newport Beach, it’s high-end luxury, she’s not running a 100- to 200-transaction business; it needs to be more curated.”

Shah provided Varga with detailed instructions on how to train her team to provide the all-inclusive luxury experience found at a Four Seasons, much of which involved creating efficiencies using Compass’ tech platform. They also addressed the team’s organizational alignment, budget analysis and hiring road map. 

“A lot of coaches will just talk pie-in-the-sky ideas, but you leave and you don’t really know what to do,” Varga said. “Chirag gives you action steps where it’s like immediately I’m diving in and doing those things to get to that destination.”

Real estate coaching has come into its own in the past five years. While well-known brands like Tony Robbins and Tom Ferry have been around for decades, brokerages are ramping up their in-house training, too. 

In a fireside chat last fall amid a housing market downturn, Compass CEO Robert Reffkin urged brokers at all levels to hire a coach. Reffkin’s firm has been aggressive in its adoption of in-house coaching. It has a six-person team that coordinates with Chirag’s company, as well as dozens of free programs for the firm’s brokers with both in-house and outside coaches.

Corcoran relies on sales managers to coach its agents through transactions, but also has a training hub called Agent Studio that it’s folding into its headquarters at 590 Madison Avenue. The move is intended both to make in-person sessions more accessible and to use them as a recruiting tool. It’s led by Ida Fields, who offers marketing and mindfulness coaching.

While many brokers swear by coaching, there’s no doubt it’s also become another business line. Just ask Ryan Serhant, who launched an education business, Serhant Ventures, alongside his eponymous brokerage in 2020. It includes a coaching platform that last year had over 13,000 enrollees and an 85 percent gross profit margin, according to Serhant’s year-end letter.

“I think everybody should have a coach,” Serhant said in a video on an Instagram page dedicated to his training business. “What are you going to do? Just be shooting in the blind, or trusting some other agent in your office, or a team leader that has maybe kind of figured it out?”

Brown Harris Stevens relies on sales managers to train its agents, but the topic of coaching recently set off sparks between Serhant and BHS CEO Bess Freedman when Serhant offered to train BHS agents — for a fee.

“There is a fine line between being unorthodox and being a schmendrick,” Freedman wrote Serhant in an email, using a Yiddish term for a fool. “Thank you, but we are going to pass.” 

If splurging for a coach in a downturn seems counterintuitive, Compass’ Varga said she grew her business 35 percent last year after a session with Shah. Doreen Courtright, a broker with Douglas Elliman, says her experiences with Tom Ferry coaches and access to the network of other brokers who use them have been critical to growing her team and earning referrals.

“Maybe [they] don’t want to share with the broker sitting next to them, but brokers in Chicago and California, everybody shares their best practices,” Courtright said.

Carol Staab, a luxury broker at Elliman, said the industry can be difficult to navigate, even for seasoned brokers.

“When you’re by yourself like this, it’s a very lonely business. It’s not like you’re working for a corporation and you’re on a team,”  she said.

An industry of its own

Programs differ based on the client — and the coach. Some brokers opt for regular group sessions, while others prefer one-on-one meetings. Some coaches, like Shah, focus on the business, while others take a broader approach centered on mindfulness. The latter say their trade is rooted in the same science as sports psychology. 

At the high end of the market, brokerages need help tailored to their clientele and often advice on how to gain market share.

Other coaches focus more on mindset than on business specifics. It’s a big part of the model run by massive coaching companies and is also a focus of Jennifer Knight, Serhant’s in-house coach. 

Knight has a Ph.D. in performance psychology and trained Army soldiers before joining Serhant. While contracting for the military, Knight would look at Army Combat Fitness Test scores to measure the impact of her coaching. She’s developed a similar system at Serhant. 

“We can measure with metrics if a leader is creating a climate that undermines high-quality motivation,” she said. 

Knight said working with someone trained in performance psychology ensures that new habits are learned in a way that can make them permanent. 

That style doesn’t work for everyone. Elliman’s Staab said she considers Tom Ferry’s model to be “BS.”

“It’s just a chat,” she said. “It’s very mass-market. I’m a luxury broker and we’re in New York, it’s a totally different culture, a totally different way of doing business … It just doesn’t work.”

Staab said she paid $1,400 a month for the weekly half-hour calls. She also worked directly with Ferry, which entailed 20-minute phone calls while he drove his car, she said, adding that he grew frustrated when she challenged his advice, which often didn’t translate to her niche. Representatives for Ferry did not respond to a request for comment.

The experience didn’t turn Staab off of coaching altogether: She now works with Aaron Keith of Buildify Systems, who she says “goes into the weeds” of her business.

Enough brokers are buying in that Shah has grown his business to seven coaches and seven full-time employees, who work out of a Westport, Connecticut, office that doubles as an event space. That’s despite launching during the pandemic when the housing market was essentially frozen.

But even Shah acknowledges that in order for his coaching to be successful, his clients need to come to him with a clear direction, and not just a notion, of what success looks like.

“There’s so much ambiguity and lack of clarity around things that people don’t know what actions to take,” he said. “If you don’t know where you’re going, you could end up anywhere.”