Half the agents complaining about this market right now were never going to make it in any market. They got in for the easy money, they kept one foot out the door, and now that the conditions ask for actual skill, they're calling it broken.
It isn't broken. Look at who's having career years.
At Momentum, our top producers are putting up some of the best numbers of their lives. Same listings, same buyers, same interest rates, same competing brokerages. Different agents, different result.
So when somebody tells me they can't get a deal done right now, I already know most of what I need to know about their business before they finish the sentence.
Here's what's actually going on.
The Pie Is Bigger Than It's Ever Been
Units are moving near the highest prices ever, and more total commission dollars are still in the market than at any point in the history of this industry. Access to that pie is more competitive, sure, but the pie itself grew. The agents who adapted are eating bigger slices. The ones running 2021 scripts in a 2026 market are watching their slice shrink and blaming the kitchen.
What I find genuinely strange is how many brokerages are still teaching those 2021 scripts. The shutdowns changed this business permanently. Buyer behavior changed. Listing dynamics changed. The way customers find agents changed. Technology changed. And entire training programs at major brokerages are still running the playbook they had in 2021, sending agents out with the wrong tools and then wondering why retention is bad (often 30 to 40% at franchises and Wall Street companies where you're just another number in the machine with a 1-800 number).
The winners I see in this market all have something in common. They adapted aggressively. They tested. They studied what was working and copied it. They got more confident, not less, when things got harder. That's the actual job.
The Three Patterns of Agents Who Are Winning
The agents winning right now are usually doing one of three things.
They're working higher price points, where the commission per transaction makes the math work even if you only close ten deals a year.
Or they're listing-based, using every listing to generate the next two or three pieces of business through neighborhood marketing, open houses, sphere outreach, and the conversations that come from being the agent with signs in the yard.
Or they're running real buyer consultations before they show a single house, qualifying financially, setting expectations, and walking away from anyone who isn't realistic or won't cooperate.
The Agents Losing Are Doing the Opposite
They're chasing buyers at low price points and difficult situations, in the most crowded segment of the market, against the most agents, on the thinnest commissions, with the most emotional clients.
They're buyer-dependent because they never built a sphere business that feeds them listings, so they're buying online leads (often bought leads, not even fresh), which means they're getting the buyers nobody else wants in the price ranges they can't control.
And they're not qualifying anybody, so they're spending their weekends getting dragged around by clients who can't actually buy what they're being shown. We have a solid buyer plan process at Momentum where we show 4 to 6 houses per customer before they buy. That's it.
If you read that last section and felt a little defensive, that's the diagnostic.
Working Hard on the Wrong Things
I want to be careful here because I'm not saying these agents are bad people. A lot of them are working hard. They're working hard on the wrong things, with the wrong training, inside the wrong systems, with leadership who often haven't done what you want to do, themselves. And the longer they stay in those systems, the more convinced they become that the market is the issue.
It isn't. The agents next to you are closing deals this week.
The harder version of this conversation is that the more intense a market gets, the more aggressive your business has to be just to hold your share. Coasting works in soft markets where there's enough for everyone. In this market, if you're not pushing and getting better each day, you're being pushed out.
Aggression isn't about being pushy with clients. It's about being relentless with your own business. Studying it. Adjusting it. Putting in the reps. Showing your work publicly so people can see what you actually do for a living.
The market rewards that. Always has. It rewards it harder now.
The Three-Year Test
If you want to know whether you're going to be in this business in three years, the test is pretty simple.
Are you running anything resembling the same playbook you ran in 2021?
If yes, the clock is already ticking. The agents who've rebuilt their business twice since then are the ones still going to be here in 2029.
The good news is the fix isn't complicated. Get around agents who are winning right now, the ones at the price points they want, the listing-based operators, the ones running real consultations. Watch what they do. Copy it. Stop taking advice from agents whose careers peaked in 2021.
The Five People Closest to You
The five people closest to you in this business set your ceiling. That includes the brokerage you've chosen to be part of. If you're surrounded by part-timers, hobbyists, and leadership that's still teaching 2021 scripts, you're set up to lose.
Momentum was built for the other kind of agent. 100% commission, $12,000 annual cap, no monthly desk dues or royalties. 270+ agents across North Florida and Georgia, ranked #2 independent brokerage in the region, 97.98% sold-to-list ratio against a 96.73% market average. That's 1.25% more in our clients' pockets and 8 days faster to close. We train current scripts for the current market.
The application is online, the strategy call is 15 minutes, and onboarding is digital. movewithmomentum.com/meet.