Keller Williams Realty Beverly

orientation to learn more.”At first, Parisella admits that he was skeptical. “As an agent, everything I heard was too good to be true; I thought I had to be missing something; there’s no way this is real.” In the end, though, he was convinced that the Keller Williams model was solid. “To me, the number one thing was the com- mission split, and having a cap, which means you get the true, 100 percent commission after a certain amount of volume,” he explains. “So, going in, I knew how much I would pay the company, and when I added up the numbers of what I was paying Carlson, it was significantly more and I couldn’t justify. So, it made a tremendous amount of sense to me. That was the first piece that really attracted me to the company.” Charlene Smith, the firm’s CEO, adds her per- spective of why becoming a Keller Williams franchise was a good decision. “The compensa- tion is extremely attractive,” she states, “but at the core, it’s the belief system and the culture. The company is so focused on the agent, and all of us had been working in a very traditional format, where the focus wasn’t on the agent, it was on corporate. At the end of the day, we were being told by Keller Williams that we were their most important asset. And to hear that, and to look at how the company is going to operate, it made complete sense that we were finally being ac- knowledged as individual business owners, or as team business owners, versus a real estate agent that worked for a corporate brand.” KELLERWILLIAMS REALTY BEVERLY When Parisella and Archer first opened their Beverly office, they had less than ten agents. “Back in 2004, we opened a second location in Salem, and I went on to open three other locations – all Keller Williams offices – in Newburyport, Reading, and Topsfield,” Parisella relates. “So, collectively, we have about 465 agents and we surpassed $1 billion in sales volume in 2017. The goal that I have for the five offices is to have 500 agents, so I’m less focused on expanding locations, although that’s something we have been looking at, but I believe we can get to 500 agents, and then, spe- cific to Beverly and Salem, to get to the 300 agent mark; we’re at 231, right now and we’re hoping by the end of the year to hit the 250 mark and then to 300. And getting up towards that $2 billion mark would be great.” When it comes to deciding what type of agent would make a good fit for the firm, Parisella says several different metrics come into play. “We have something called the KPA (Keller Personality Assessment). “It’s an assessment that Keller Williams developed,” he says. “We use that as a benchmark. It’s not the only thing we look at, but it gives us an idea of how the person is ‘built.’ But, it’s really about a commit-