Residential brokerage fires team leader for focus on ranking agents by sales and tactics

A California-based residential real estate brokerage fired the leader of a high-performance agent team after a dispute over training.

Irvine, California-based Realty One Group fired Jeff Sibbach, who leads the Sibbach Team in Arizona, and Phil Sexton, the team’s manager of operations and marketing. In response, Sibbach and Sexton swiftly moved their team to eXp Realty.

The Phoenix Business Journal last fall ranked Sibbach as the Phoenix area’s top agent. According to Sibbach, he closed $106 million of sales in 2018 while his team closed $223 million of sales.

Sibbach told Inman that he was fired in late January after he pushed for a training program “to raise the agent culture inside the company” amid rapid technological and operational changes sweeping the brokerage industry.

Sibbach owns a coaching business for real estate agents called Agent Truth, which runs a program designed to help consumers distinguish good agents from bad agents based on their sales and marketing practices. A website for Agent Truth claims the program can produce “atomic growth.”

The program may expose questionable practices by some agents, Sibbach told Inman, but the overall purpose of Agent Truth is to “raise up the great agents as our industry is threatened by mediocrity.”

“One of the many reasons we distanced ourselves from Jeff was because of his Agent Truth program,” Realty One Group CEO Kuba Jewgieniew said in an email exchange with Inman.

Jewgieniew also said the Agent Truth program “a self-serving way to boost the image of the Sibbach Team. I believe it will likely damage the reputation of agents in the communities we serve.”

Sexton told Inman that the Sibbach team maintains a focus on home sellers and buyers to counter brokerage business models that will “take business away from agents who are focused solely on themselves.” [Inman] – Mike Seemuth