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By Susan Elise Campbell
Shannon McCarthy may be ahead of the curve when it comes to rapidly changing trends in the local real estate industry.
The Shannon McCarthy Team of 14 real estate professionals, formerly part of Keller Williams, has moved en masse to eXp Realty, a cloud-based firm that trades on NASDAQ and claims to be the number-one independent real estate broker in the U.S. in terms of transactions and closed sales, according to the company’s website.
McCarthy is a Saratoga native who sold her first home in 2003. She has her flagship realty office in Saratoga and a second office in Lake George.
In the next month she plans to expand south into the Tri-Cities, where she said there is need for experienced real estate professionals.
“Once you have team members in an area and working it, you slowly grow market share,” said McCarthy. “It grows organically because you are attracting more agents.”
Whatever brick-and-mortar presence the team may build next, headquarters is now a cloud-based, non-traditional business model that McCarthy says benefits both agents and consumers.
“The industry is getting disrupted by eXp because a cloud-based company cuts expenses,” said McCarthy. “Real estate professionals can build our teams without a ceiling or restrictions on what we can do with processing and systems.”
The eXp paradigm also links brokers with buyers from all over the world. This is especially important for clients served by the Lake George office, as many sales are second homes. Buyers come from everywhere, McCarthy said, and are willing to wait for the right opportunity to open.
McCarthy has imposed a limit on the number of team members she hopes to attract, saying that 25 to 30 is a manageable number that she can mentor and support.
“I have been a solo agent, on a small team and on a mega-team,” she said. “I know how to help team members build a business and grow it and they won’t have to recreate the wheel. I want to have a close relationship with each team member. It is super important to me to mentor my team and support each individual.”
On the Shannon McCarthy Team, McCarthy said each professional can “work at a very high level. There’s no trial and error.”
By providing a cloud-based framework, agents have even more freedom to work with clients, a strategy that McCarthy said consistently outperforms.
“We had 344 transactions last year and year-to-date we have 125, so we are talking 400 transactions this year,” she said.
She said the traditional brokerage models are limited to whatever programs, servicing and contact systems they currently use. But because eXp’s membership base is so wide, she can “see what the best agents and team leaders around the country are doing and bring that back” to her teams serving the North Country down to the Capital Region.
“There is no doubt that COVID forced society online, and the industry realized we can do business this way,” she said. “We can all learn virtually and leverage technology to serve clients better.”
The transition enables the Shannon McCarthy Team to utilize eXp’s “superior contact relationship software for keeping in touch and staying informed,” she said. “There are so many nuances to each transaction, we cannot rely on our memories to stay on top of every detail.”
McCarthy said that “constantly following up and communicating” within the team and with consumers “is what our clients need to feel supported. Moving is already stressful.”
The premise of eXp Realty is that it “provides a network of other highly professional agents and the widest audience” of homebuyers, she said. “Usually there are franchises in different regions, but eXp is one large brokerage.”
Instead of competing with one another, agents learn from and help other members because eXp’s revenue sharing program motivates all to succeed, said McCarthy.
“So we have a true collaboration, working together to solve consumer problems,” she said.
Lack of inventory has been the number-one problem in real estate, which combined with rising mortgage rates adds up to a unique market, according to McCarthy.
“When there is no inventory, we have to mastermind how to work with clients to craft offers that will get chosen,” she said. “Also, sellers are concerned about where they’re going to move to when inventory is low.”
McCarthy is “looking to attract like-minded agents and support staff who want to work hard, be creative and innovative, and evolve to better help the consumer.”
McCarthy beat the odds by flourishing in her industry for 20 years. According to her, 90 percent of new real estate agents fail in the first two years.
Recent years experienced “the highest turnover I’ve ever seen,” she said.“I am excited and happy to be here and hope other business people out there with aspirations will join my team to be mentored. Teams are the future of this business.”
Learn more at www.mccarthysells.com or on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.