Private listings, “coming soon” strategies, portal wars, syndication rules, endless litigation: the trench warfare in today’s real estate industry is noisy and never-ending. The industry continues to fight over platforms, policies, and control, while agents struggle to close more deals.
But traditional real estate misses out on hundreds of thousands of potential buyers and sellers hiding in plain sight. reason? We have lost the North Star on which true and lasting success is built. Agents and companies that are committed to finding it will beat out their competitors.
Our industry seems to have lost its North Star
I joined The John Douglas Company in 1980, first as an agent and then as Executive Director of Training. By 1997, when the company was acquired by Apollo, the company had 60 offices, 4,000 agents, and $1 billion in monthly sales. Our market share in the Westside luxury real estate market has always been in the 50-70% range.
We treated real estate brokerage as a serious full-time career. We focused solely on real estate services. Our culture was built around superior service, complete integrity, a continuous drive for excellence, and technical expertise with innovation in mind.
Our training emphasizes professionalism, deep market knowledge, and community involvement, resulting in superior service that outperforms our competitors.
John Douglas summed it up best in the marketing materials agents use with every listing reservation.
Jon Douglas Company’s philosophy has real meaning for our customers because we put them at the center of everything we do. Everything we’ve learned is dedicated to safely guiding you through increasingly complex real estate transactions. Everything we do is aimed at helping our customers achieve their individual goals. If we do it right, we both win.
Compare that to our situation today. Industry conversations are dominated by debates about platforms, policies, fees, portal wars, and who has the right to sell our listings. These issues certainly affect our business, but they are not the business itself.
Our North Star has never moved. We stopped watching it.
How to get back to your North Star in business
The most important question that brokerage leaders and agents must address is: Who are we really preparing our agents to serve?
The answer looks very different today than it did five years ago. Returning to the North Star requires addressing the customer and market opportunities that traditional real estate continues to miss.
720,000 potential investor deals continue to be overlooked in traditional real estate
Individual investors and second-home buyers accounted for 18% of transactions, up from 15% a year ago, according to the National Association of Realtors’ March 2026 Existing Home Sales Report. Investors are no longer a sideline category.
Published figures may still underestimate this opportunity. Kurt Carleton, president of New Western, which serves the one- to four-unit investor market and has 200,000 users in its ecosystem, estimates that up to 97 percent of these trades are made by individual investors outside of the MLS. That means traditional real estate could be missing out on hundreds of thousands of potential deals hiding in plain sight.
Baby boomers own the public markets – we need to meet their needs
According to NAR’s 2026 Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends Report, boomers make up 55 percent of all sellers and 42 percent of all buyers. Many people have held assets for decades and are faced with complex life decisions surrounding medical issues, business downsizing, relocation, estate planning, adult children, retirement, and more.
As someone who recently lost my husband, I realized that there is a huge gap in the services we provide. Surviving spouses and adult children must make complex housing decisions before and after death. In addition, probate, forgetfulness, incapacity, serious illness, loss of mobility, and reduced finances all impact real estate decisions. Sadly, few agents receive meaningful training on how to handle situations like this.
An even more difficult question is what happens when someone is unable to choose their next home and must leave due to illness, reduced mobility, or because money leaves them with no other options.
Single women are perhaps the largest overlooked market segment
According to NAR, 21% are single or unmarried women. There are now a record 20 million single female homeowners in the United States. Many are widowed, divorced, or unmarried. The decision to go public or sell requires clear guidance, honest conversation, and genuine competency, as well as caution against the risks you often face alone.
Frankly, I don’t recall seeing any training that addresses the needs of this group or helps them navigate today’s market as homeowners, buyers, sellers, and potential real estate investors.
Hispanic households now account for the majority of new household formations.
Hispanic households are currently driving the U.S. homeownership story. According to the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals’ 2025 Hispanic Homeownership Report, Hispanics will form more than 1 million new households in 2025, representing 92.6 percent of all U.S. household formation growth. The median age of these homebuyers is 31 years. The result? As these buyers move into their 30s and beyond, long-term demand should continue to grow.
Hispanic customers have been an important part of my business from the beginning. Almost everyone wanted to purchase a duplex or triplex. This pattern still holds true today, as many Hispanic and foreign buyers begin their homeownership journey with small investment properties. More importantly, if you can earn their trust, their referrals and repeat business can become an important lead source for continued business.
We need a new type of “market literacy”
As the industry fights for English-only property listings on portals, traditional real estate is failing to meet the needs of both 1-4 unit family investors and multilingual customers.
According to Immobel.com, up to 74.1 percent of all digital searches are done in languages other than English, with the latest figure for Los Angeles being 72 percent.
Today’s agents need training to understand and serve this fast-growing market, including mother-and-son investors, boomers with large stakes and complex family relationships, single women, and multilingual clients.
How to realign with your North Star for business
Real estate has always been about helping people make safe and sound decisions in transactions that affect their wealth, family, security, and future.
At John Douglas, a customer-centric, excellence-driven culture served as our company’s North Star. It should still guide us today. Companies and agencies that reshape their marketing, training, and customer focus around that standard will not only win more business, they’ll get more business. They will own it.
