Keller Williams is set on making this year’s Mega Camp the best ever, with the Texas franchisor remixing the conference’s agenda to include deep-dive sessions with co-founder Gary Keller, giving star agents the stage to lead intimate masterminds on one topic of their choice, and for the first time, inviting experts outside of the industry to share insights.
Jason Abrams
“It’s a much different Mega Camp than ever before,” Chief Industry & Strategy Officer Jason Abrams told Inman excitedly in a call a few days before the conference.
Abrams said KW leadership is focused on helping agents navigate a growing list of unknowns — including the Iran conflict, inflationary pressures and mortgage rate trends — and still grow their businesses.
“We think we could be in a higher interest rate environment, which is going to widen the gap between the number of buyers and the number of listings,” he said. “So we’re going to take an old page out of the Shift book that Gary wrote, which is: When the market changes, it becomes the quest for the motivated buyers and sellers.”
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: Although I cover Mega Camp every year, it feels like it snuck up on me. This year is speeding by.
Abrams: You know what? I have a clock in my office that counts down: 3 days, 22 hours, 4 minutes and 31 seconds. And the minute that it ends, it starts counting down to the next year. So it never creeps up on me, but it always feels too soon.
Every time we talk about Mega Camp, there’s usually an overarching theme for the conference. One year, I remember Gary [Keller] leaned into the imagery of the bison charging into the storm, which was appropriate for that time — we had just been thrust into the middle of a pandemic. What’s the story KW is telling this year?
It’s always leads, listings and leverage. The question then becomes, what are they a vehicle for? And this year, you’re going to hear Gary speak a lot about living your best life. He said this the other day: “In order to live your best life, you have to give your focus and attention to the parts of it that matter most.”
And that’s a big theme for us this year — everybody figuring out their unique mission, their vision for their life, and how helping buyers and sellers make the best choices powers that mission. We’re going to go deep on self-image, self-identity, ego and all these important pieces that make up who we are, so we can get clear on where we should be spending our time.
When we think about our life, that’s probably our spirituality. It’s our key relationships. It’s our physical health. It’s our job. It’s our business. And when we think about our business, it’s lead generation and then helping people make the best decisions they can make.
That very much connects to Mega Camp’s keynote speaker, Simon Sinek. When it comes to focusing on what matters most, there’s a lot happening in the industry. What’s noise? What’s a signal? (Shameless plug for our new CEO’s podcast of the same name.) But really, what should we be paying attention to that we’re not?
I think there are three things:
- No. 1: I generate leads in order to have the opportunity to help as many buyers and sellers as possible make the best decisions.
- No. 2: Specific to this market, [what is] the number of active listings [compared to] the number of current buyers looking? How do we help our sellers maximize the opportunity of selling their [home]? And help these buyers through the confusion of high interest rates and uncertainty?
- No. 3: It’s wildly important right now to be able to differentiate yourself and your services as a real estate agent from all the others. All the data shows that consumers don’t even know the right questions to ask to determine who the best real estate agent to represent them is. So we need to be very, very clear in how we differentiate our value and explain our services.
Sticking a pin in the part about what consumers do and don’t know, I often ask my friends and family about topics in the industry, like buyer-broker commissions or private listing networks. Oftentimes, they have no idea what I’m talking about, or they’ve heard a sliver of the full conversation. How can agents educate consumers better and add context to what they’re hearing about the market or other industry topics?
That’s a great question. Gary and I spent a lot of time on this, and we wrote a course called Value Squared. In it, we lay out a very simple concept that we’re going to be talking about at Mega Camp, called the Circle of Trust. And the Circle of Trust has four components.
- First is authenticity: I am who I say I am, and people need to see that and believe it. And that goes from your personal brand to the way you show up.
- Second is competency: I’m actually competent to do this job, and I can prove that to people through my track record and strategy.
- Third is transparency: I’m totally transparent about what I do, how I do it and — very important — what I charge for it.
- Last is dependability: I keep the promises that I make, and I meet the expectations that I set.
And as long as you can wake up and honor those four things in every relationship — not just in business, but in your life — you’ll find that you’ll have much deeper and richer relationships … Stop behaving like a salesperson and start behaving like a consultant who uses the words and power of sales to move people in the right direction.
