Why 3,700 top teams call Keller Williams home

While the nation’s top real estate teams are found at a variety of brokerages, one brand dominated the 2025 RealTrends Verified Rankings. With more than 3,700 teams in this year’s RealTrends rankings, Keller Williams leads all other firms by a wide margin. 

Leaders of top teams at Keller Williams believe there are good reasons for this.

“The culture is collaborative and it is full of entrepreneurs,” said David Gubb, the co-leader of Ridgewood, New Jersey-based The Gubb Team. “The systems they provide are designed to help teams grow strategically.” 

According to Gubb, whose team is brokered at Keller Williams Village Square Realty, this is a major reason why he and his team have chosen to remain at KW despite “tempting offers” from competitors.

“The other brokerages are all fine, but Keller Williams just has so many great properties and we don’t want to leave,” Gubb said. “The grass may always seem greener, but Keller Williams has always provided a fertile ground for us to build our real estate business.

“They give us the freedom to run our business our way, paired with unmatched access to coaching, technology and a national referral network. It is hard to beat.” 

In 2024, Gubb’s team closed 88 transactions totaling $103.7 million in volume. 

Gary Keller’s influence

Jason Abrams, the head of industry and learning at Keller Williams, may be a bit biased toward his firm but shares a similar view. 

“The reason I believe you have so many of those teams, and that so many of them grew up at Keller Williams, is because they grew up to be the biggest businesses in the industry,” Abrams said.

“I think we’ve always been in a highly aspirational industry, but when you are the home of the Millionaire Real Estate Agent Playbook, you are going to breed a heck of a lot of millionaire real estate agents.” 

For top team leaders, coaching, technology and the network created by the Keller Williams franchise system are common reasons why they feel the brand is the best place for their businesses. 

“For me, the biggest thing was taking a career visioning class, and all the masterminding with other agents and team leaders within the organization that had already done what I was looking to do,” said Stacey Sauls, the leader of the North Carolina-based Stacey Sauls Group.

“When I was looking to start my team, they offered me everything and I used nothing because I didn’t know what I even needed. But now we are in Command, their CRM, and we are using all of the trainings, and all of that has been huge for our agents, our database and our marketing.” 

Like Gubb, Sauls has not turned a blind eye toward the tools, training and technology offered by other brokerages. But she doesn’t feel that current offerings elsewhere are enough to entice her and her agents away.

“We have everything we need right here,” Sauls said. “And for us, leadership is really important, and we get that from Gary Keller himself. And then just the collaboration with everyone in the organization, it all just makes us want to stay.” 

The Stacey Sauls Group closed 191 transaction sides in 2024 for a total volume of $108.7 million. 

Masterminding strategies, solutions

For Matt Sarver, the leader of the Keller Williams-brokered The Sarver Group in North Carolina, the collaborative nature of the firm is one of the best parts of belonging to the network.

“They have provided me with some great opportunities to grow my business over the years, including the ability to have ownership in our market center, but there are also always new levels and goals to strive for,” Sarver said.

“Once we hit $1.5 million in gross commission income, we got to be part of Gary Keller’s top-200 teams. And then there are further levels of that, but we get to mastermind and brainstorm because we are all going through the same challenges, but we have different ways of thinking about them and solving them. There is just a really great community and so much support.”

Sarver and his team closed 188 transaction sides in 2024, totaling $109.6 million in sales volume.

While collaboration and education might be why teams stay with Keller Williams, Abrams believes it’s also why so many top teams are formed there.

“It is the systems and the models we have, but it is also the fact that there are so many of them here masterminding with each other and sharing best practices,” Abrams said. “Every year we host some of the largest mastermind sessions in the industry, and these teams come together and share openly and unabashedly about their businesses — where they are winning, where they are losing.” 

Abrams said that at smaller firms, you often hear about “unique practices,” which he described as practices that are working well for one person. But at Keller Williams, the brand’s top teams can use these masterminds to develop “best practices.”

“That is really what makes our education stand out in the crowd,” Abrams said. 

Abrams is aware that other brokerages are working on their own systems, training and tools to develop and recruit top teams, but he’s confident that Keller Williams has what it takes to maintain its competitive edge. 

“We believe that there is a cross-section between being physically based and digitally enhanced,” Abrams said. “Agents can come into a physical market center, get the best of face-to-face training and then also be able to run their business effectively from anywhere on the planet.

“Also, being educationally based, we provide a foundation of education for every phase of their business — that is really all they need from us, then they can go get as creative as they want from there, but that foundation we provide never changes.”