Servant leadership is more than a lazy LinkedIn buzzword cooked up by corporate PR teams. It’s a crucial reason why new school brokerages like The Agency and Real outsold Keller Williams last year. If you want to scale your team or brokerage in 2025, lead by example, or get left behind.

Not convinced? Mauricio Umanasky, founder and CEO of The Agency, the second fastest growing brokerage in the country in 2024 according to RealTrends, is still taking listings. Real President Sharran Srivatsaa offers so much in-the-trenches advice for agents on social media that he comes up as an “internet personality” instead of a multi-billion-dollar brokerage president when you search his name on Google. The numbers don’t lie: servant leaders sell more real estate.

To find out how brokerages leverage servant leadership to scale fast and keep agents happy, we sat down with Jen Cameron, managing partner for The Agency’s new Seattle office. She walked us through how servant leadership helped create the flywheel that propelled her brokerage to success, and how agents can apply it to their business to thrive in 2025.

Jen Cameron: By the numbers

• Market: Seattle, Washington
• Niche: The San Juan and Puget Sound island regions
• 2024 office sales volume: $220 million
• Primary lead generation strategy: Sphere of influence, referrals
• Highest ROI real estate software: Sprout Social, The Agency Creative Center
• Real estate coach: Bill Pipes

Servant leaders scale faster

Cameron now runs a wildly successful brokerage for The Agency in Seattle, with over $220 million in office sales last year, their second year in business. How did she manage to scale so quickly? By staying in the trenches:

“I still sell. I still sit listing appointments. When my agents have questions, I don’t give them theoretical answers — I tell them what just worked for me last week. My agents don’t feel like I compete. They feel like I’m helping them win.  Because I get it. I’m not up there at the top so far detached from what they’re doing.”

Leading by example doesn’t just build loyalty with her agents, it creates a flywheel that helps her improve her performance: “They make me a better agent,” she says. “They push me to stay sharp.”

The lesson is clear. If you want to grow your team or brokerage in 2025, lead by example, or get left behind.

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Real estate is not a side hustle

Cameron was quick to point out that servant leadership isn’t easy. Juggling clients and running day-to-day brokerage operations takes dedication and sacrifice. She recalled waking up at 5 a.m. to catch a ferry to an island off Seattle for a listing appointment (and sometimes staying overnight) for listings she might not get. But it’s a non-negotiable in this market if you want to keep your agents motivated and scale your business quickly.

“I worked every single day in 2020, 2021, and 2022. I mean every moment I wasn’t asleep. Real estate isn’t just pretty listings and champagne closings. It’s schlepping A-boards, missing holidays, waking up at 5 am to catch a ferry, just for a listing appointment you might not get.”

If you’re not willing to put in the hours and effort to lead by example, you’re not going to make it.

Mediocre agents sell, great agents serve

Already grinding every day and not scaling as quickly as you’d like? Cameron’s advice for new agents might just help make 2025 your best year ever: focus on serving, not selling. It’s a subtle mindset shift, but incredibly powerful if you apply it to everything you do as an agent.

As a brand-new agent, Cameron made daily coffee meetings with people from her sphere a priority:

“Every day, I scheduled a coffee date with somebody I knew. Sometimes I had double coffees, eventually I had to stop drinking coffee because I was getting so many heart flutters.  But coffee was cheaper than lunch or dinner.”

She never pitched her services, but approached each meeting with a simple question, one she still asks agents in her referral network at The Agency and those she mentors at her brokerage:

“I never reach out to people like, ‘Hey, send me clients.’ I ask, ‘How can I support you?’ That’s what creates real trust. That’s how I built my network—agent to agent, client to client, cause to cause.”

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The ultimate guide to real estate networking

Even top 1% brokers benefit from coaching

Think real estate coaches are just for new agents? Think again. Most of the top brokers we’ve interviewed over the years work with coaches, and Jen Cameron is no exception. She’s worked with multiple coaches across her 26-year career in real estate.

Why would a former vice president at Coldwell Banker and Sotheby’s and current managing partner at The Agency need multiple real estate coaches? Here’s Cameron:

“If you only work with one coach, you will only know one way. I’ve had many coaches throughout my career. Last year, I hired Coach Bill Pipes as a gift to myself.  He doesn’t do the ‘what’s your why?’ that so many real estate coaches lean on.  His philosophy is that you’ll figure out your why. Instead, he focuses on the mechanics of your business — actually getting things done. I also work with a consultant, Stacy Jones, who acts more as a coach to help me build my business, brokerage and all aspects of my life.”

When it comes to running your business, Cameron suggested looking outside the real estate industry for a fresh perspective:

“A few years ago, I hired a business consultant outside the real estate industry. She was the one who convinced me that I needed to step down from my last job. I was working for Coldwell Banker as the vice president of luxury for Washington and Oregon. She said, ‘You must never work for anyone else again because you’re an entrepreneur and this is making you miserable.’”

Related article

The best real estate coaching programs for 2025

Jen Cameron’s favorite objection handler

Have trouble countering the inevitable “An agent on Zillow said they would list my house for a $20 Starbucks gift card” objection? Cameron uses a simple but clever objection handler that gets to the heart of the problem with discount agents:

Seller: Will you discount your fee?

Agent: No.

Seller: …

Agent: …

Seller: Why not? Another agent said they’d list my house for half of what you’re asking for.

Agent: Well, they would know their value better than I would.

The full picture

Know an agent who is thriving despite the odds and has actionable insights to share? We’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us here: vetted@housingwire.com.

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Sick children and Australia’s wildlife will benefit from the sale of a Gold Coast apartment, with all proceeds from the deceased estate to be split among nominated charities.

The property on Breaker Street, Main Beach goes under the hammer on May 24, with the sale price minus legal fees and commission to be donated to not-for-profit groups Children’s Hospital Foundation and Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife, as per the late owner’s wishes.

Tina Nenadic and Julianne Petersen of Gold Coast Property Sales & Rentals – Gold Coast listed the home, with proceedings on the day hosted by Apollo Auctions.

“The late owner always loved and enjoyed kids, that’s why she is leaving the funds to the Children’s Hospital Foundation,” Ms Nenadic said.

“She was very passionate about that.

“She was also passionate about wildlife parks and animals.”

Ms Nenadic said the two-bedroom apartment, in The Inlet tower, offered a huge 190sq m floorplan with stunning views.

“It’s actually quite a large apartment in a building that’s 90 per cent owner-occupied,” Ms Nenadic said.

“A lot of people buy into the building for retirement and are attracted to the location in Main Beach.”

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The residence has open-plan living and dining areas that open up to the outdoor balcony.

“The late owner renovated the kitchen and everything else is in very good condition,” she said.

“There’s not much to do but move in and enjoy.”

Ms Nenadic said she had received plenty of interest over the marketing campaign.

“We have had people who already live in the building, people who are about to retire and people who also want a second place on the Gold Coast,” she said.

“I’ve been mentioning the (charity) auction and all of the potential buyers have said ‘how sweet is that’.”

The median apartment price in Main Beach is $1,4m, down 1.6 per cent over 12 months.

Property records reveal the late owner paid $380,000 for the Breaker St apartment in 1992.

The post Apartment proceeds to go to charity as buyers bid for good cause appeared first on realestate.com.au.

To start things off, I have an announcement to make, today will be my last weekly article for Altos Research.

I founded Altos nearly 20 years ago to bring a new level of analytics and data to the housing market. Two and a half years ago, Altos was acquired by HousingWire, and it’s been tremendously beneficial for both companies.

I’m now stepping out of the day-to-day operations and handing off to the incredible team at HousingWire, led by my good friend Clayton Collins.

I’m confident the data and the company are in great hands.

I’ll still play an advisory role and will continue to contribute to HousingWire with a monthly column on the market. If you’re not a HousingWire subscriber, please join us.

I will also continue to share regular insights on the housing market via my own social channels, including Twitter and LinkedIn.

Make sure you’re following me there if you’d like to keep up with these. I’ll also be sharing details about a fun new project I’m working on very soon, so watch out for that.

I am deeply grateful for the team at HousingWire and especially for all of you in the audience. I’ve done these weekly videos and articles every single week for over five years with almost no break, and it’s really been a labor of love for me. And while I do all the talking in these, what’s really happening is that I am learning. So thank you for this incredible opportunity for me to learn and to serve you all these years.

OK — let’s get to this week’s data. It’s a pivotal time in the housing market. There are three big trends for this summer’s housing market:

1. Unsold inventory of homes on the market continues to grow. There are 33% more homes on the market now than at this time last year. Even the Northeast is growing a bit. Connecticut finally has inventory growth over 2024. Not a ton, but it tells us that basically everywhere in the country, inventory is climbing.
2. Home prices are flat or a tiny bit below 2024. Supply is great enough now that home prices in most places are very sensitive and ready to drop if buyer conditions get worse.
3. For the rest of May and June, despite the fact that homebuyer demand is still very light, we’re likely to see notable home sales gains over 2024. For years, the headline has been “Home sales are down, but prices are up.” The message for the rest of the summer is likely to be “Home sales are up, but prices are down.”

Let’s get to the details in this week’s data.

Inventory

There are now 768,000 single-family homes unsold on the market. In fact, there are now more homes on the market than we counted at the beginning of 2019. Inventory is back to pre-pandemic levels. Now, to be clear, that’s still a lot fewer homes on the market across the country than almost all of the last decade, but it’s climbing. And the Northeast markets like Connecticut still have relatively tight inventory. So the buildup of unsold homes is mostly across the Sun Belt.

This suggests that there are likely several more months of inventory growth, as the Northern markets have a lot of room to expand. So we’ll end 2025 back in much more normal levels of unsold inventory on average across the country.

In this chart, we have the last decade of inventory trend with unsold single-family homes, and it’s really easy to see how the number of unsold homes on the market has climbed right along with interest rates over the last three years. 768,000 single-family homes are on the market now. That’s up 1.5% for the week and is almost 33% more homes on the market than last year.

At the right end of the chart, you can see that the weekly climb is still heading up. In the old times, inventory would peak in August. In the post-pandemic years, the season has stretched and unsold inventory kept climbing until October or even November.

So this year by Q4, we’ll probably have 900,000 single-family homes on the market. And if mortgage rates rise, like they’re doing today, it could be even more than that.

New listings

The other part of the supply equation is how quickly sellers are entering the market. This week, we counted 76,000 new single-family listings unsold, with another 14,000 new listings as immediate sales, so that’s 90,000 total. That’s 8% more sellers than a year ago across the country. That’s a hefty jump from 2024, though it’s 5% fewer than last week — a little dip for the week.

This mid-May period is when we typically see the most sellers hit the market. This is it — we’re roughly at peak housing market for 2025 right now. So if you’re expecting some kind of oncoming flood of sellers that will tank home prices, it looks like you’ll have to wait another year.

In this chart, the purple line is this year. We have one more week for home sellers before the Memorial Day weekend. And I expect this coming week will have the most new listings of the year. We’ll have a few good weeks in June after Memorial Day, and then the late-season decline starts with the July 4 holiday.

What we can see here is that there will continue to be more sellers than a year ago, but since right now is roughly the peak for the year, there is no sign of any flood of sellers. Nobody’s panicking. In 2022, the market was totally tanking at this point in the year, so new listings volume kept growing all the way until July.

But that’s not happening now. So next week’s data — or maybe mid-June — will show the most new listings of 2025.

Interestingly, the condo market had already slowed by this time last year, so the condo new listings volume is about the same as it was then. While there are 8% more single-family home sellers now than the same week in 2024, condo sellers are about the same. 16,000 newly listed condos were unsold this week.

Weekly pending home sales

On the Weekly Pending Home Sales numbers, I’ve been talking about this coming trend for a while. The year-over-year weekly pending home sales rate is starting to show growth. This is mostly because last year was so weak and getting slower by midsummer. Last year, there were only 68,000 single-family home sales contracts started.

This year, we counted almost 74,000. So the year-over-year home sales growth is 8.3% now. This is not because demand is strong, but because it was so lousy last year at this time. I expect that you’ll hear the headlines report annual home sales growth for May — even as April finished really poorly. The headlines will finally shift.

Cumulatively year-to-date, we’ve still sold almost 3% fewer homes than we had in 2024 through mid-May — the first 20 weeks of the year.

In the chart here, you can see the purple line has been below the blue line from 2024 for most of the year.

But this week saw 8% more transactions than the same week a year ago. Next week, the comparison is easy again. You can see that in this chart. The purple line for this year is now well above last year’s obvious slowdown levels. We’ll see one more week with newly pending single-family home sales, probably in the mid-70s, before the Memorial Day holiday dip.

The takeaway here is that I’m pretty convinced home sales are about to consistently report higher than 2024 for the next couple of months.

Home prices

I keep asking myself, what’s the right way to talk about home prices in 2025? Is the headline that home prices are below last year? Or is it more accurate to say that home prices are basically unchanged? There are now nine states where home prices are at or below 2024 levels. But that includes Texas, Florida, and Georgia — and just those three states account for 35% of the U.S. housing inventory. States like New Jersey and Connecticut have rising home prices, but those are tiny parts of the market.

The median price of the weekly pending single-family home sales is $400,000 now. That’s just a tiny increase from a week ago and is just a quarter of a percent more than last year. Home prices nationally are basically unchanged from last year. The last two weeks came in below 2024; this week is just above.

Seasonally, home prices (of the weekly pending home sales) are roughly at their peak. Some time in the next few weeks, prices will begin the long seasonal decline. In 2022, prices peaked earlier in the year because mortgage rates were rising rapidly. In 2023, the opposite was happening, so prices didn’t peak until early July.

Last year, mortgage rates spiked again in May, so prices peaked in early May. This year, rates have been inching higher — they’re definitely not improving buyer demand — so there is no action to push home prices up from here. Therefore, look for the 2025 peak in home prices to be sometime in May or early June, right about $400,000, where we are today.

I do a Twitter poll once a month on people’s expectations for home price changes for the year. There are a lot of folks out there who read these slightly negative home price trends as an indication of a coming crash. As always, there are people who expect home prices to crash. I’ve got news for you: that ain’t happening in 2025.

Even though the news right now is that by some measures, home prices are a little below last year at this time. That’s it. It’s a little below. The signal here is that home prices are very sticky. Demand is light, supply is growing, so there’s no upward pressure on prices. But there is no catalyst for a price crash unless we have some major economic catastrophe.

While this economy has a lot more risk of some crazy shock, that shock is not in the data yet. Employment is still good. Inflation is still pretty good. Home prices might end 2025 below 2024, but it’s on the order of a couple percent.

Price Reductions

And we can reinforce this forecast by looking at the price reductions. Price cuts are on the rise again. This is an indication that while home sales are likely going to keep increasing, home prices are not.

There is more supply in most of the country and not that much demand. 37.4% of the single-family homes on the market have taken a price cut. That’s up 60 basis points for the week.

At this point in the home buying season, price cuts are almost always climbing. These are the folks who listed their house in March and haven’t had offers yet. But because there are so many more homes on the market in much of the country, seller competition is greater — so more sellers decide each week to cut their asking prices to stimulate demand.

At this pace, over 40% of the market in June will have had a price cut. Home prices are not going higher from here this year. Now, this trajectory can change quickly with, for example, a notable dip in mortgage rates. That’s what happened last September. And you can see that in the blue line for 2024 in this chart.

2025 has been a huge disappointment for homebuyers, with stubbornly high mortgage rates all year long. If economic conditions conspire to get a nice dip closer to 6% for the 30-year fixed mortgage, then you’ll see a lot of pent-up buyer demand jump into action. That will keep a lid on price reductions and maybe the year will end with slightly positive home price appreciation. The lesson, though, from the last three years is that you can’t bank on mortgage rates falling, unfortunately.

Closing

Well folks, that’s the last of my weekly articles for Altos Research. I’ve done over 250 of these. The big lesson is that no matter what our expectations are, we have to let the data tell the story. Don’t let your story dictate the data.

I appreciate all of you. I hope that you’ll connect with me on social media so we can stay on top of the data together. If you need to communicate about the housing market with buyers and sellers, you should go to AltosResearch.com and sign up so you can do this kind of work yourself. Thank you, everyone.

The lifestyle opportunity presented by an updated house near one of Geelong’s busiest local shopping hubs attracted a wealth of interest, but the potential returns provided the icing on the cake for the local homebuyer.

Four bidders vied for an updated, three-bedroom residence at 27 Ferndale Parade, Highton, which is close to the Highton Village shopping centre.

While first-home buyers provided the bulk of the interest in the renovated brick veneer house, it was a local investor who ended Saturday’s auction with contracts in hand for the 538sq m property.

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Barry Plant South Barwon agent Matthew Constantine said about 70 groups had inspected the home during the campaign, which finished with a $802,000 sale price.

Mr Constantine said the reserve price was $765,000.

“That was very well renovated with some major updates and then the proximity to the village and the convenience that provided was compelling for a lot of people,” he said.

“To walk around the corner to Highton Village and then down to the Barwon River as well, it was very much a lifestyle choice to me.”

Mr Constantine said it was encouraging to see an investor in the mix for the property.

“It’s very much a long-term game,” Mr Constantine said of the purchase.

“But they’re always going to be guaranteed a treasure trove of potential tenants in that position and the quality of the accommodation it contains so the returns will be pretty good.

“They’re expecting good growth in that area and I certain agree.”

A designer kitchen featuring matt black cabinetry, timber shelving and Corian benchtops.

Custom bench seating also created a cosy breakfast nook for casual dining in the room which separates to living spaces – a formal lounge at the front and a family room at the rear.

A stylishly renovated bathroom is another highlight in the three-bedroom house.

Investors are starting to make more of an impact on the property market as buyers see the potential for better returns ahead.

Investors have been getting out of the market in droves after the state government increased its land tax take and introduced minimum standard measures that have seen owners costs rising.

“The people jumping out of the market because of land tax and the like has very much slowed down,” he said.

“There’s a lot of property that we’ve sold in the last 18 months that is considered ex-rental stock and that’s only been pushing the rents up.

“So that’s where I think the returns are coming back now, because the supply in the rental pool is so tight.”

The post Why upgrading a home can offer more than a better lifestyle appeared first on realestate.com.au.

Pacific Sotheby’s International Realty has appointed Martha Mosier as its new president, the brokerage announced Monday.

Mosier — a longtime figure in southern California’s real estate industry — previously served as president and general counsel at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties, where she held executive roles since 2008.

She brings a background in law and a history of leadership in real estate operations, growth strategy, and regulatory affairs.

“It is a privilege to join Pacific Sotheby’s International Realty and the iconic Sotheby’s International Realty brand,” Mosier said. “Our industry is rapidly changing and generating new opportunities for luxury advisors. I am excited to play a part in leading this remarkable enterprise to further success.”

In her new role, Mosier is expected to guide the firm’s continued expansion as a full-service real estate company while navigating industry shifts and regulatory developments.

“Martha Mosier is representative of the talent and experience that will continue to lead us forward,” said Tara Brown, CEO of Peerage Realty Partners, which includes Pacific Sotheby’s International Realty among its affiliated companies. “At Peerage Realty Partners, our Sotheby’s International Realty partner companies are at the forefront of creating value and delivering an elevated experience for our advisors and customers.”

Russ Anderson — CEO of Pacific Sotheby’s International Realty — echoed that sentiment.

“We are delighted to welcome a professional of Martha Mosier’s caliber to the Pacific Sotheby’s International Realty team,” he said. “Her exceptionally deep experience along with our aligned values make her the ideal choice.”

Mosier has also been been recognized for her community service — including a Top Five Women of Influence, San Diego honor by the American Heart Association.

Pacific Sotheby’s International Realty operates more than 18 offices across San Diego and Orange counties and supports over 600 real estate professionals. It is one of the largest Sotheby’s International Realty franchises globally.