August/September Business View Magazine

72 73 grown teams, and five expansion teams with their hub in another state but boots on the ground in the Tempe office. In all, the 35 teams make up 60 percent of the total agent base of 275. The office covers the entire Greater Phoenix Metro area – a population of six million people. Of the 70,000 real estate agents in Arizona, approximately 70 percent are in the Greater Phoenix Metro region. Keller Williams is the biggest real estate brokerage in the world with over 180,000 agents in more than 32 countries. Competition is heavy, but KW has a different mindset – rec- ognized by Training Magazine as number one in educating agents. Henderson explains, “Keller Williams has their own trainer certification platform and, in our case, one of those trainers is the owner of our office. Three agents in our office are in Gary Keller’s Top 100 Mega Agent Mastermind; they learn directly from Gary Keller himself, and are able to bring in other mastermind agents to teach on their own experi- ences. It gives our office a unique perspective on higher-lev- el training.” Online training is also done on www.kwconnect.com – the Keller Williams version of Google for real estate agents. The site features KW-approved courses where the content has been built to help agents succeed. Agents can also post their own content, and have it rated by Keller Williams. Many of the high-level course materials are also available online if KELLERWILLIAMS REALTY PHOENIX KELLY HENDERSON CEO agents want to self-teach at home. Henderson tells of another aspect unique to KW Realty Phoenix: “Because there is so much busi- ness out there, there is no point in being compet- itive with each other. Instead, our teams are very collaborative. For instance, we have a monthly Top Agent Mastermind that meets here, and half of the agents are from outside our office. They’re all top producers, but because our MLS is so vast, we rarely compete against each other.Who we’re competing against in today’s market is ‘my mom’s sister who is a hairdresser and part-time real estate agent.’ That category of competition is way more frequent than someone saying they’re inter- viewing the three best agents in this office.” Community involvement and giving back is at the core of the Keller Williams philosophy. The annual Red Day in May has every office pitching