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Decades ago, Ben Caballero was passing through Dallas on his way back home to Oklahoma City when the water pump on his car went out. Very quickly, locals stopped to help. They directed him to a garage. And the experience changed Caballero’s life forever.
Ben Caballero
“I was about 20 years old,” Caballero recently told Inman. “I said, ‘When I get out of the service, I’m just going to move to Dallas because this is just a nice place.’ People were very helpful.”
Caballero ultimately followed through and moved to Dallas, then soon thereafter began working in real estate. Fast forward to the present, and Caballero has consistently ranked as the top real estate agent in the country. And this week, he set new world records for having sold 7,722 homes in 2024 and for doing $3.92 billion in volume.
Those numbers are staggering for an individual agent overseeing a small administrative team — Caballero’s company is called HomesUSA.com — so Inman caught up with Caballero last week to find out how he did it — and to get advice for those hoping to follow in his footsteps. The takeaway from this conversation was that Caballero has scaled his business up by focusing exclusively on representing new home construction, finding the right markets for his model and leaning into technology.
Working with builders
Caballero’s entire business model focuses on representing large-scale builders, and he told Inman, “We don’t have any agents helping buyers or listing consumer homes.” That means Caballero has a large supply of inventory to work with and that his tactics also diverge considerably from those of most agents.
- Caballero markets to agents: “What we do is we market their homes to Realtors, and we don’t market them to consumers. For the Realtors, what we do for them is to ensure that the information that they get on our builders is accurate, it’s timely, it’s complete and they can rely on it.”
- Caballero charges a flat fee, not a percent-based commission: “It varies depending on the volume. A number of things affect the fee. What type of service they want. We have builders that don’t require as much service. We take that into consideration.”
Timing matters
Caballero currently works with about 70 different builders in his home state of Texas. But creating a relationship with builders requires getting the timing just right.
- Builders face yearly cyclicality that limits their flexibility: “Production builders, they’re like most large corporations. They work off of budgets and you have to hit them at the right time of the year or they can’t really do much to incorporate any significant expense in their expenditures.”
- Builders also may become more open to new relationships in harder times:
- “I have found that we do better in the difficult times. That’s when builders are not in the ideal market and they’re looking around to see if they can do something better.”
- “If builders have plenty of demand for their supply, they’re not looking to make much of a change. But if things slow down, their inventory grows, then they’re looking around to see what they can do differently. A lot of times we’re that difference.”
Finding the right market
Caballero ended up in the Dallas market essentially by coincidence. But it just so happened that the region was the perfect location for working with homebuilders, and Caballero said that today, Dallas-Fort Worth consistently goes back and forth with Houston for the metro area currently adding the most new homes. Alternatively, Caballero was frank about some smaller markets with less building simply not working with his model.
- Set up a home base in a fast-growing market: “If a builder is building 10 or 20 homes a year, they don’t really need us because what they need is somebody that can handle that kind of volume with speed and accuracy.”
- Focus expansion on fast-growing markets where builders are active: “We would love to be in Florida. That’s the second strongest state, and maybe even is giving Texas a good run for its money. There’s also Tennessee and Georgia and a number of the East Coast states.”
Caballero is actually putting this advice into practice: Despite holding a record for doing the most sales, he told Inman his team has the capacity to do far more, and he is looking to bring his model to additional states in the future.
Technology is key
Caballero operates with a team of about 25 people, none of whom are licensed real estate sales people. Some of the team members handle builder relationships, work with multiple listing services or do other administrative tasks. But about half of the team works on tech, including Caballero’s proprietary platform.
He began building the platform in 2007, and described it as a key way to track information and keep all parties involved in a transaction on the same page. Even so, doing more than 7,000 deals in a year with a staff of just 25 is unique in the industry, and Caballero ultimately said, “We’re as much a tech company as we are a real estate company.”
Caballero said it would basically be impossible to do what he has done without his platform.
“I wouldn’t even try it,” Caballero said.” They couldn’t pay us enough. There’s just no way to keep up.”
Update: This post was updated after publication to clarify that Caballero’s team is made of administrative staffers, not licensed sales agents.
