As our team at Inman began planning Inman Connect New York this January, we asked real estate agents a fairly straightforward question: “In this market, who do you want to hear from most right now?”
The overwhelming response was Barbara Corcoran.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that answer, because I think it tells us something interesting about the current state of real estate, the people who work in it and what they’re looking for from our industry’s leaders.
For context, before becoming Inman’s CMO, I spent years building a $100 million-plus producing real estate team in South Florida. I’ve personally sold more than 1,000 homes, ranging from properties under $20,000 to deals north of $20 million.
I’ve represented distressed sellers, helped families through extraordinarily difficult circumstances and negotiated transactions where getting to the closing table meant everything to the people involved. I’ve also mentored, trained and managed hundreds of agents through slow markets, busy markets and everything the last decade has thrown at us.
My point: I’ve carried the bag, and I understand my real estate agent brethren.
So, all summer when agents told me how much they are struggling (in what should be peak homebuying season), I took that seriously. For the past several months, I’ve heard from some of the most successful agents in the country who were going months without closing a transaction. These are experienced professionals who have built substantial businesses and survived multiple market cycles, suddenly finding themselves in unfamiliar territory.
Meanwhile, the industry around them is in a rather extraordinary state of upheaval. Major brokerages are consolidating, brokerages and MLSs are suing one another, the debate over private listings continues to divide the industry, and NAR is working to rebuild trust following several tumultuous years.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, agents are trying to sell houses while being told to post more on social media, stay hydrated and use more AI.
Our industry has some consequential decisions ahead of it, and the people making those decisions deserve to be questioned. Inman’s newsroom has an important responsibility to cover these issues, and our events should provide a place for the people involved to explain their positions.
But there’s another conversation agents want to have, and I think their overwhelming request for Barbara tells us exactly what it is.
They want to hear from someone who has been in their shoes, knows how to get scrappy in a down market to sell real estate, and can offer an experienced perspective without having to defend a corporate agenda.
There’s a reason real estate agents love Barbara Corcoran
One of my favorite anecdotes about Barbara is one that she shares often and seems to take enormous pride in — how gritty she was in her early life. Her LinkedIn bio opens with: “Barbara Corcoran’s credits include straight D’s in high school and college and 20 jobs by the time she turned 23.”
Tell me that doesn’t win the heart of a real estate agent. Our industry has a remarkable way of attracting people who struggled to find their place elsewhere.
Some weren’t great students. Others bounced around between jobs before finding real estate. I’ve met extraordinarily successful agents who can negotiate their way through an impossible transaction, recognize an opportunity before anyone else and build a relationship with practically anyone, and yet were kicked out of school when they were younger. (Looking at you, James Harris!)
Barbara herself has spoken openly about her struggles in school and dyslexia and how the challenges she experienced influenced the way she approached business. (I’ve got a completely unscientific theory about how I think many of America’s top-producing real estate agents who claim they struggled in school but are elite at selling are all actually just dyslexic, but I’ll save that for another time.)
Real estate agents find Barbara’s story particularly inspiring because real estate has always been an industry where people can build extraordinary careers around abilities that aren’t necessarily rewarded in a classroom, and Barbara took those abilities and turned a $1,000 loan into one of the most recognizable real estate brokerages in the country. She is one of us, and she made it out on the other side a literal Shark. And agents love her for it.
To boot, she built The Corcoran Group in New York City, where competition was fierce and standing out required creativity — something agents covet and understand deeply. Long before agents were being told to become content creators, Barbara understood how to make herself and her business interesting to the public. She launched market reports, generated publicity and became a recognizable authority on New York real estate.
She understood personal brand marketing before most of our industry knew what to call it.
She sold her brokerage in 2001 and went on to build another career as an entrepreneur, investor and television personality. And now, after all of that, there she is sitting in a chair on Shark Tank, evaluating other entrepreneurs and deciding which businesses deserve her money.
She’s one of us and uniquely doesn’t have skin in the game
Barbara understands something that most successful real estate agents figure out, and the new ones need to hear: A willingness to take risks, build relationships and solve problems can take you a very long way in this business.
And she’s spent enough time carrying the bag to know how to find business when everyone else is convinced there isn’t any. Her perspective on this is particularly valuable for agents to hear, if we consider the voices dominating our industry’s conversations right now.
The real estate conversations are dominated by brokerage executives defending their business models, MLS leaders explaining their policies and industry organizations navigating enormous changes; senators are filing FTC complaints against industry leaders, too. It’s overwhelming, and yet, none of it helps Susie Realtor or Mike Agent close a home this quarter.
There are important questions being debated about how homes should be marketed, who controls listing information, and how real estate professionals will operate in the years ahead, and while I do believe all of those discussions deserve a place on highly influential stages such as Inman Connect New York, agents also desperately need to hear from voices right now who don’t have a dog in the fight, who can hunker down on a mic and say, “OK, listen up, this is exactly what I would do right now if I were in your shoes.”
Barbara Corcoran is the real estate fairy godmother who is uniquely positioned to say that, without an obvious bias, something to sell the audience or any other ulterior motive. That dynamic really appeals to agents right now, who are growing tired of the industry’s constant infighting.
A real estate agent trying to figure out how to get their listing sold after sitting for 90-plus days, so they can get their client the win and feed their own family, is less concerned with which brokerage executive launches their AI tool most effectively and who is winning the latest argument about private listings.
Agents need a change of scenery right now, and Barbara knows how to generate business, find the buyer and create buzz around listings that have been sitting for weeks.
She’s also famously candid, and I suspect she will have plenty to say about what is happening in our industry.
My takeaway from the overwhelming request for Barbara is that agents are craving an independent voice of reason. Someone who understands the realities of selling real estate and can speak from experience.
And when our community made that request, we listened.
I want to give credit to Inman CEO Tom Bohn for taking the feedback seriously and making Barbara a priority for New York. One of the things I’ve appreciated about working with Tom is his willingness to listen to the real estate professionals who make up our community with fresh perspectives, while also prioritizing the industry leadership who are critical to our ecosystem as an industry.
We have an opportunity to put some of the smartest people in the business on our stages. I think we should pay particular attention when the people in our audience tell us whose perspective they value.
So, we got Barbara, and she’s going to tell our audience exactly what she would do right now. And we can’t wait to hear it.
Join us at Inman Connect New York, Jan. 26–28, 2027, at the New York Hilton Midtown.
