The top real estate broker in the US says a single strategy helped him sell an average of 92 homes per week
- Ben Caballero is the top real-estate agent in the US.
- He sold 4,799 homes in 2017 - an average of 92 homes per week.
- Caballero says he pulled it off by specializing his business as much as possible.
- He sells only new-construction homes in Texas from companies that build hundreds of homes each year, and he created an online platform exclusively for these "volume builders" to keep track of their listings, thereby saving them a huge amount of time.
Texas-based real estate broker Ben Caballero sold 4,799 homes in 2017. That's an average of 92 homes per week.
In total, he sold $1.9 billion worth of real estate that year (the most recent year data is available), making him the top real-estate agent in the US, according to Real Trends, a residential brokerage industry publication. He was recognized by Guinness World Records for selling 3,556 homes in 2016.
And although his portfolio might suggest that he sells Los Angeles megamansions or New York City luxury penthouses, Caballero only sells houses in Texas.
Caballero says he owes his success to one main strategy: specialization.
"Specialization is critical to be successful," Caballero told Business Insider. "Attorneys [and] doctors have specialties within their professions. And I count 40-something different specialties in the real estate business: leasing, commercial, residential, industrial, hospitality, vacation homes..."
The first way Caballero has specialized his business is by selling only new-construction residential properties.
He also only works with "volume builders," or companies that build several hundred homes per year, or sometimes up to 3,000. These builders include Toll Brothers and CalAtlantic Homes. Caballero doesn't sell all of the homes they build because some of them sell before they even start construction, he said.
Caballero created an online platform, HomesUSA, exclusively for volume home builders to track these hundreds of homes. The platform streamlines the process of creating a listing, tracking the progress of a house's construction, and updating the listing when photography is added and when the home is complete.
Through this online service, Caballero's team is able to create a listing in an average of 13 minutes, saving the home builders a huge chunk of time.
"If they didn't have our system, they would have to have multitudes of spreadsheets ... and they'd be entering it manually," Caballero said. "Instead of being able to initiate a listing request in a minute or two, it'd probably take them anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. And if they are dealing in hundreds of listings, that's a lot of time that they would be spending doing that."