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Tracy Tutor has been keeping busy.
In 2024 alone, the founder of The Tracy Tutor Team at Douglas Elliman appeared regularly in Season 15 of Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing LA, expanded into Texas, and clinched The Hollywood Reporter’s coveted list of top luxury agents.
She’ll also be among a roster of real estate thought leaders speaking next week at Inman’s inaugural Connect Austin conference on Oct. 9 at Brazos Hall.
Despite a hectic schedule of speaking engagements, media appearances and client calls, Tutor made time to speak with Inman about her most pressing business issues, including adjusting to splitting her time between two states and grappling with a multitude of market challenges in LA, among other things.
Here’s what she had to say, edited for brevity and clarity.
Inman: What has it been like transitioning into Texas?
Tracy Tutor: Obviously, California and Texas are just vastly different places. But one thing they have in common is both have beautiful real estate.
I think figuring out how to transition, what I bring to the table as a veteran agent of almost 24 years, and bringing that to a state that operates a bit differently is a big asset. But what I’m enjoying more than anything are the people and the difference.
Not to lean on politics, because that’s not an area I like to discuss, but I think the perception of Texas, particularly in California, is not reality. Dallas is an incredible city, Austin is an incredible city, and while probably more similar to Los Angeles than Dallas is, I think the people are incredibly warm, friendly, inviting and it’s been a surprise.
I came to Texas to do business, and I left Texas thinking I could live here. And being California-born, bred and raised, that’s a pretty big statement. I think that speaks to the culture there — and being invested there in the last two years, I’ve learned something: Perception isn’t always reality.
So I’m having a great time, I’m learning all these different markets, I’m meeting a bunch of great agents, getting to work with new people and challenge myself in a market that is vastly different from California. Like, I got on a horse yesterday at one of my new listings on a cattle and horse ranch.
That sounds amazing.
This is not something that you’re going to find in California, so it’s fun to be in a new environment. When you’ve been doing [real estate] as long as I have, you start to go, ‘Same thing, same place,’ so to be somewhere new and learn about a different market, get my feet wet in the world of farm and ranch, is pretty cool. And I’m passionate about that because I grew up having horses in my backyard and I have a great respect for it — I guess you could say I’m in my cowboy era.
I’m sure it is really refreshing and exciting to explore something new at this point in your career.
Absolutely.
I’ve been hearing more and more about people moving from California to Texas because of the tax benefits and cost of living, and it just seems like there’s more affinity between those two markets all the time.
Honestly, that’s why I went there. Because after COVID, so much of my network and people that I knew had said, ‘I want out,’ for tax reasons and more space and, obviously, cost of living. So I thought, if I’m going to get my license anywhere else, this is where I’m going to get it.
So when I initially went there to take advantage of that transition from California to Texas that I saw so many people making, that was my initial thought. But then I sort of fell in love with it and am really embracing what Texas has to offer. It’s very different from growing up and being born and raised in Los Angeles, and never having lived anywhere else. I’m really enjoying it.
That’s great. In addition to the challenge of learning a new market, what other things are challenging you in your business right now?
Obviously, there’s national issues that we’re faced with, and I think we’re sort of in the thick of that transition within our decision [to expand to Texas]. I don’t think it’s going to prove to make that much of a difference in my business, but I think it affects the industry as a whole, particularly younger agents trying to break into the industry that traditionally start to work with buyers.
We’re going to see an exodus for some of those people that aren’t sophisticated enough or haven’t been in the industry long enough. How many of those people are going to be able to survive? I think that’s really sad for the industry as a whole. It’s my opinion that we work for every single dollar that we earn, and I think the vast majority of agents out there aren’t making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. It is really going to affect those agents who are working 50 hours a week to make $54,000 per year. And I think that’s a really sad thing for the industry.
In terms of how it affects me, I guess that remains to be seen. We’ve been working harder than we’ve ever worked, and in the last couple of years, I’ve been making less money, but that’s why you have to figure out how to pivot, and that’s why I’m expanding into Texas. That’s why I challenge myself every day to see what I can do to push the envelope to be better, and we’re beginning to reap the benefits of that, which is pretty incredible.
California is a whole ‘nother animal. We’ve got the ULA Tax that we’re dealing with, which is affecting the high end, and we’re still seeing some record-breaking transactions — something just closed for $112 million with my friend Aaron [Kirman in Bel Air] — but those aren’t as common anymore.
We also have wildlife ordinances that are coming into play, so developing is becoming less and less common in the ultra-high-end luxury market. So anything north of $5 million right now in Los Angeles is a much more difficult trade. People aren’t putting pen to paper as easily, even with the reduction of rates, so I’m holding onto listings much longer than I have in the past, and that’s a direct result of where we are in the economy. It’s an election year. And specifically, in Los Angeles, the ULA Tax is really killing people’s ability to sell their properties without taking massive losses.
Yes, the LA market has seen so many challenges in the last couple of years.
But if we don’t continue to pivot and learn and challenge each other, we’re not going to get better. So I’m not focused on the negative. I’m just focusing on what I have to do to make it happen, and how I have to do what I’ve done for the last 24 years differently in order to be successful in this new world order. That’s something that right now is making the industry very interesting.
Speaking of industry changes, there’s been a lot of discussion in the industry lately about potentially ending the Clear Cooperation policy. What are your thoughts on that?
If we’re talking about moving into a new era of selling real estate, there are some different things that come into play. Obviously, the MLS is very old. It’s very outdated. And if we don’t have the ability to market our properties off-market without having them formally in the MLS and we’re in violation … it’s just eliminating people’s ability [to sell off-market] and, by the way, affecting clients more than anything. Forget us. It affects someone’s ability to sell their property privately at the highest possible dollar.
That is really a consumer challenge more than it is a broker challenge, because if it was up to us, we would put it in the MLS every day, all day, because it’s maximum exposure and the widest net possible. But when you have a client that would like to function differently, and you have no ability to sell that property because of the Clear Cooperation Policy, then our hands are tied behind our backs.
There are people that are going to break those policies and try to get around them and get creative, but in this case, we’re just moving backward instead of forward if we continue to draw the line in the sand on what these policies are.
They have to wake up and say ‘Gone is the day of putting properties on the MLS and being in the newspaper for your open house.’ The market is different. Advertising is different. Media is different. Selling houses is different. And if they don’t give the agents control to be able to support their clients who should be making this decision — because it’s their asset, not ours — then they’re really limiting us.
Especially in the high-end luxury market, it seems like that’s something clients often want.
It’s a conversation I just had yesterday, and I said, ‘Well, we’re going to have some issues in the arena of trying to sell your property quietly, where, I can’t market it. I can’t do anything. My hands are tied.’
So it’s conversations that we’re having with our clients and saying, ‘Look, this is the way we have to do it for now. If we try to break the mold, this could affect our ability to maintain our license,’ and that’s a problem. And they need to do away with it.
And of course, the agents that aren’t doing any business would like to keep those policies in place, but it doesn’t affect them. It affects the consumer, and it affects the sellers who would like to maintain some aspect of discreteness. Not everywhere is a non-disclosure state. California is full disclosure; Texas is completely non-disclosure. So it’s really a problem.
That must be hard to navigate.
And between brokerages you’ve got people doing it left and right. So it’s not definitively working for anybody, and that’s the problem. If it was clear across the board — you lose your license if you don’t follow the rules — then that would be a very easy conversation to have with clients, but not everybody is following them. And the people who get caught are people like me, high-profile agents. There’s more attention on us, more people tattling on us, so I’ve got to follow the rules.
But Joe Smith brokerage who’s not necessarily a high-profile broker with high-profile agents is going to maybe get away with that. And what that does is it eliminates my ability to compete. Because if they can do it and get away with it and not get caught, and I do, then we’ve got a system that doesn’t work for everybody.
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