2024 Northeast Florida Brokerage Year in Review
Each year I sit down and review brokerage performance and take a look at what agents are doing and why.
I use MarketView Broker as my data source and Momentum Realty's internal tracking. The data is not perfect, but it gives us hints.
Here's our insights from reviewing the 2024 numbers based on agent movement and our personal experience as the 2nd top brokerage office by volume in Northeast Florida.
2024 agent movement numbers showed the following:
Lower Fees & Splits. Agents are primarily moving away from high brokerage split models and toward flat fee or 100% brokerage commission models.
No Monthly or Annual Fees. Agents are becoming allergic to monthly fees and annual fees.
Strong Local Leadership & Support. Agents are looking for consistent local leadership (not turnover in their leadership teams).
This makes sense to us as the market moves from a hot sellers market into a balanced market.
Agents are reviewing their financials, reflecting on the value they receive from their brokerage, and making changes.
The brokerages losing the most agents who carry production are KW Southside (though many of them went to KW St. Johns), eXp Realty, Slate Real Estate (which folded into KW St. Johns), Redfin, United Real Estate Gallery, OpenDoor, and Coldwell Banker Vanguard Realty.
The brokerages gaining the most agents who carry production are Momentum Realty, REAL, LPT, and Herron.
In terms of agent production, the numbers show a great divide among brokerages who target partnering with professionals looking to grow their business and others who sell here and there.
There’s no judgement — each agent gets into business for their own reasons, but each brokerage generally caters their services and their cost model attracts a certain level of production of agent in the marketplace.
*Units and Agent data from MarketView Broker Dec. 1 2023-2024 and Momentum’s Internal Tracking. Data uses # of Agents per Brokerage Office as PRODUCING agents only, not agents who produced 0 or who are in referral status.
Momentum Realty is the only 100% commission brokerage that has high producing agents who generally produce 3x more than other 100% commission brokerage offices. EV, KW, and Coldwell are all high fee franchises with their average producing agent doing 9-10 deals per year, as well.
Keep in mind, units per agent doesn’t tell the full story. Some of the major differences reflect in the net profit for these agents, include:
Sales Price. Their sales price (often based on the location of the agents’ offices and where agents live).
Brokerage Splits. Their brokerage splits (the top productivity brokerages, other than Momentum Realty which is 100% commission, are high split brokerages, some of which are uncapped).
Business Expenses. Their business expenses (often price point/marketing dependent)
Commission %. Their commission %'s received (although we cannot retrieve this data now due to the NAR Settlement MLS changes, we generally know that higher sale price luxury homes also tend to come with lower commission %'s).
Other interesting facts you may not know:
There’s 1,300+ brokerage offices and 12,000+ real estate agents in NEFAR.
No brokerage office has more than 4% market share of agent volume production. When you roll up all the brokerage offices (let’s say separately owned franchises), the top firm comes to 5% market share. Overall, the brokerage world is extremely fragmented.
Momentum Realty is the only brokerage (that we know of) offering its agents, via its founders, fix and flip private loans out of their own capital to help agents build wealth faster via investments. At Momentum, we always say, “the purpose of real estate is to get out of real estate.” The founders back this with action, first by achieving financial freedom themselves, and second, by building a company that supports others who want to do the same. The results speak for themselves. Momentum Private Lending generated 27 fix and flip loans for $6.8M of loan volume, helping Momentum Agents net an additional $1,100,000+ in profits in 2024.
Agents have A LOT of options, and a lot of great ones. We will continue to provide you data and perspective that may be of interest to you.
Cheers to all the great agents and brokerages out there! This chart above is the Top 10 Brokerage Offices by Volume from Dec 1, 2023-2024. FYI - the data is not perfect, it is flawed due to agents not putting in all their new construction and FSBO deals in MLS. Some agents even forget to close out their deals in MLS, so that wouldn’t count here. If you’re one of those agents, please go and close out your deals so you and the other agent gets credit for your sales!
Thank you to those who have supported our start-up company, Momentum Realty, in its 5th year of serving agents. We are excited to share we jumped two spots in 2024 to become the 2nd highest producing brokerage office by volume in NEFAR by sales volume.
jb (jon@movewithmomentum.com)
