Two real estate heavyweights have joined forces to create a new company that will rank top-performing agents across the country and, if things go according to plan, boost the profile of the founders’ other businesses.
The new business is called America’s Best Real Estate Agents LLC and is the result of a collaboration between high-profile coach Tom Ferry and REAL Trends, the company that produces the annual America’s Best and The Thousand rankings of real estate professionals.
Steve Murray, president of REAL Trends, told Inman that the new company will now handle the annual rankings, which will be rebranded “REAL Trends & Tom Ferry The Thousand” and “REAL Trends & Tom Ferry America’s Best Real Estate Professionals.”
Steve Murray, left, and Tom Ferry Credit: Planomatic
According to Murray, REAL Trends is contributing its intellectual property to the new company and will continue to handle all the data analysis and verification for the annual rankings. Ferry, meanwhile, will handle marketing and is financially backing the new venture.
Last year, REAL Trends’ rankings included nearly 14,000 agents and teams. But Murray said that his company was still missing 15 to 18 percent of the agents” who might have qualified to appear on the list, and his team began discussing ways to let more Realtors know about the rankings.
“We thought, ‘is there somebody who can get us to a really complete coverage of who qualifies?'” Murray recalled. “And one of the answers that came back was Tom Ferry.”
Ferry was a natural fit because his social media reach, marketing budget, and Realtor database are all many times larger than what REAL Trends previously had access to, Murray said. As a result, the hope is that by partnering with Ferry, REAL Trends will significantly increase its exposure within the industry.
Murray also said that the partnership will benefit Ferry and his company Tom Ferry International Partners by increasing their exposure to top agents who are doing, in some cases, hundreds of transactions per year.
In other words, both REAL Trends and Ferry hope to significantly extend their reach through the new company that draws on their respective core strengths.
“We’re going to build this to be the best and biggest of its kind,” Murray said. “Beyond what we could have dreamed of.”