Most of us spent 2025 focused on what got harder in real estate. But while everyone was focused on survival, a massive new opportunity was coming into focus.

Technology has evolved and stacked to remove the limits that agents, teams, and brokerages have faced for decades.

AI and new platforms now allow us to do things that used to be really hard, flat-out impossible, or took years to pull off.

In 2026, new capabilities will reshape market share for agents who are willing to adapt, test, and move early.

Scaling our businesses (even across states) is more affordable. We can use team leverage to double down on our strengths. We can grow visibility and market share faster and more efficiently than ever before.

So how do you take advantage of the age of acceleration? Are new lawsuits the latest threat to our business? What opportunities should agents and brokerages be going after?

In this episode, we're joined by Jack Miller, CEO of real estate consulting firm T3 Sixty.

We talk about the new era of real estate success, where the real opportunity is hiding, and how to capitalize on it before everyone else does.

About our Guest

Jack Miller is the president and CEO of T3 Sixty, a trusted advisor and management consultancy in the residential real estate brokerage industry. Clients include franchisors, brokerages, Realtor associations, MLS organizations, technology companies and brokerage industry investors, and market analysts. Jack brings more than two decades of hands-on real estate experience, blending strategic leadership with deep technology expertise. With a background in electrical and computer engineering, he has leveraged his tech-savvy approach to drive innovation across franchising, brokerage operations, and proptech. At Keller Williams Realty International, Jack led technology development during the company's expansion from 9,000 to nearly 60,000 agents, shaping its technology strategy. A key contributor to the Swanepoel Trends Report and Real Estate Almanac, Jack remains at the forefront of industry trends, making him a sought-after speaker known for delivering actionable insights on the future of real estate. Connect with Jack on LinkedIn.

Get a copy of the 2026 Swanepoel Trends Report at https://www.t3trends.com/.

About Your Hosts

Lance Billingsley is a seasoned real estate professional with over a decade of experience in agent development and business coaching. Since January 2021, he has served as the Vice President of Agent Development at Navi Title Agency, where he leverages his extensive industry knowledge to mentor and support real estate agents. Before his tenure at Navi Title, Lance co-owned a top-performing real estate team at Realty ONE Group, achieving recognition as one of the company's top five teams. He also served as a business coach for Tom Ferry.

Dave Richards is a well-respected business coach working with CEOs, entrepreneurs, mortgage and real estate professionals, and others. With over 25+ years of executive leadership experience, he coaches and consults with the top professionals and organizations in their respective industries. Capitalizing on his certifications in Human Behavior, he specializes in building and optimizing high-performance teams and tackling difficult decisions that hold his clients back. He easily connects with entrepreneurs to help identify and communicate their vision, define their culture, and increase their profits and growth in today's dynamic marketplace.

Check out this episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm, so our show reaches more people. Thank you!

Do you believe that winning in real estate is about working the hardest or being in the business the longest? Well, today's market is proving otherwise. An okay agent who's great at marketing will beat a great agent who's bad at marketing.

Their message travels farther, faster, and lands with more people, and that creates leads, appointments, and closings. Effort isn't the differentiator anymore; consistent visibility is.

We're in an era where speed-to-decision matters more than perfect strategy. Many of us obsess over "what if," waiting for 90% certainty before we make a move, while the top 13% operate on 20% information and pull the trigger.

They build their audience long before they try to monetize it. They post, email, send mailers, run campaigns, and it's not because each action guarantees a lead. But because they understand the accumulation of attention is the cheat code. Brand is no longer a vanity metric; it's the lever that makes every action cheaper, faster, and more effective.

And AI isn't leveling the playing field; it's exposing who's been hiding behind mediocre marketing.

And here's the real danger: agents who continue posting inconsistently, waiting for ideas, hoping something finally works, will be outpaced by those treating marketing like an engine instead of a chore.

How will the current shifts in marketing and AI impact the everyday solo agent? What are the three simple activities that lead to audience growth, engagement, and ultimately, conversion?

In this episode, we unpack this with entrepreneur, real estate marketing expert, and co-founder of ListingLeads, Jimmy Mackin. Jimmy's platform supports 4,000 in their marketing efforts, so he understands where agent marketing is working today, and where it's heading next.

Jimmy shares the misconceptions holding agents back, the skills the next generation must master, and the mindset shift that separates the 13% who scale from the 87% who stall.

About the Guest

Jimmy Mackin is an entrepreneur, author, and real estate marketing expert dedicated to helping agents grow their business and stand out in a crowded market. He's the founder and CEO of ListingLeads, a marketing platform that supports over 4,000 agents with tools, automation, and strategies to attract more listings and clients. Through his work with ListingLeads and his co-founded AI-powered seller report tool Beacon, Jimmy focuses on turning passive audiences into active opportunities, helping agents demonstrate value and win business in competitive markets. Jimmy isn't just building software; he's building a movement. With a mission to become "the most useful person to follow in real estate," he speaks about data-driven strategies that work today. His insights have been highlighted alongside industry leaders, and he's studied thousands of top-performing real estate marketing campaigns to uncover what truly drives growth for agents. Follow @jimmymackin on Instagram.

About Your Hosts

Lance Billingsley is a seasoned real estate professional with over a decade of experience in agent development and business coaching. Since January 2021, he has served as the Vice President of Agent Development at Navi Title Agency, where he leverages his extensive industry knowledge to mentor and support real estate agents. Before his tenure at Navi Title, Lance co-owned a top-performing real estate team at Realty ONE Group, achieving recognition as one of the company's top five teams. He also served as a business coach for Tom Ferry.

Dave Richards is a well-respected business coach working with CEOs, entrepreneurs, mortgage and real estate professionals, and others. With over 25+ years of executive leadership experience, he coaches and consults with the top professionals and organizations in their respective industries. Capitalizing on his certifications in Human Behavior, he specializes in building and optimizing high-performance teams and tackling difficult decisions that hold his clients back. He easily connects with entrepreneurs to help identify and communicate their vision, define their culture, and increase their profits and growth in today's dynamic marketplace.

Social media is one of the most powerful tools in our business… and also one of the most confusing. We're constantly told to post more, stay consistent, and put ourselves out there,

But most of us are still trying to figure out what actually works, and what actually turns content into conversations, and conversations into clients.

The truth is, so many of us are doing social media the hard way. We obsess over how polished our posts look, whether we said the perfect thing, or whether we're "on trend," but almost none of that is what actually moves the needle for us.

We get caught up in follower counts, going viral, and looking perfect, when in real estate, those metrics don't matter. The things that really matter are trust, connection, approachability, and just showing up. Unfortunately, we overlook these things and focus on metrics that don't drive success in our industry.

The agents who win on social aren't the ones who look the most put-together. They're the ones who show up honestly, talk like real people, and create content that feels like who they actually are, not who they think they're supposed to be.

What popular social media practices actually erode our approachability and trust? How do we focus on the metrics that actually matter in real estate?

In this episode, we're joined by marketing strategist, real estate coach, and digital marketing educator Tessabella Jelten. She's seen behind the curtain of more than 450 agent accounts, from newer agents to top producers to the faces we're used to seeing on HGTV, Bravo and Netflix.

She shares how to build trust and approachability through content and the simple social strategies that actually generate conversations, not just views.

About the Guest

Tessabella Jelten is a widely acclaimed marketing strategist, real estate coach, and digital marketing educator, and the founder of The Neighborhood and House of Agents Academy. She has been working exclusively in the real estate space for over eight years, managing more than 450 agent accounts, including TV celebrities on HGTV, Bravo, and Netflix. Her journey began directly out of high school, when she began her career as a bootstrapped real estate investor with no money to her name, sitting at her laptop trying to figure out the best way to acquire properties, raise capital, brand and market them, and understand the ins and outs of real estate. Through this process, she successfully built a name for herself in the valley, remodeling and restoring historic properties. The entire time, she was documenting the process through social media and building a brand that later became a residential real estate team partnered with the NBA's Phoenix Suns. Through years of real estate and marketing experience in the field, Tessabella developed a unique approach to building, scaling, and branding real estate companies. Through strategic networking, years of hard work, and a relentless passion for her work, she's gone on to work with some of the largest names in the industry to build entire marketing suites, lead generation funnels, and commercially recognized brands. Through the years of trial and error, she eventually cracked the code and has since been on a massive growth trajectory, helping real estate professionals around the world through her signature success 4S Formula. Follow @tessaabellaa on Instagram.

About Your Hosts

Lance Billingsley is a seasoned real estate professional with over a decade of experience in agent development and business coaching. Since January 2021, he has served as the Vice President of Agent Development at Navi Title Agency, where he leverages his extensive industry knowledge to mentor and support real estate agents. Before his tenure at Navi Title, Lance co-owned a top-performing real estate team at Realty ONE Group, achieving recognition as one of the company's top five teams. He also served as a business coach for Tom Ferry.

Dave Richards is a well-respected business coach working with CEOs, entrepreneurs, mortgage and real estate professionals, and others. With over 25+ years of executive leadership experience, he coaches and consults with the top professionals and organizations in their respective industries. Capitalizing on his certifications in Human Behavior, he specializes in building and optimizing high-performance teams and tackling difficult decisions that hold his clients back. He easily connects with entrepreneurs to help identify and communicate their vision, define their culture, and increase their profits and growth in today's dynamic marketplace.

Conversations are the heartbeat of our business… and also the biggest blind spot we have. We live and die by the quality of what our people say on the phone, in a consult, or across a kitchen table, yet it's the one part of the job we almost never see.

We can track dials, leads, pipeline, and appointments all day long, but the real work, the tone, the timing, the questions, the confidence happens in a space we've never had true visibility into.

And we feel the pain of that every time an agent swears their listing appointment went "great," only to walk out without the listing and no clear understanding of what actually happened.

Conversations have always been the black box of real estate: crucial, unpredictable, and completely invisible.

Until now.

AI is finally giving us the ability to watch the "game film" of our business for the first time. To coach on what actually happened in the conversation, rather than what we were told happened. How can AI give us more insight into our conversations? How should agents be thinking about AI today?

In this episode, we're joined by Justin Benson, founder of Shilo, the AI helper built specifically for real estate conversations. Justin breaks down how top performers are using conversation intelligence to coach at scale, and what happens when AI handles the busywork so we can focus on the client.

About the Guest

Justin Benson is a real estate operator turned tech innovator who's transforming how top-performing teams sell homes. After scaling the Gluch Group across three states and personally closing hundreds of transactions, Justin saw firsthand the hurdles that slow agents down - and set out to solve them. He launched Bara Agency, a fractional CTO consultancy dedicated to simplifying complex tech stacks for large real estate teams. Building on that momentum, Justin introduced Shilo AI, an AI-driven assistant that delivers real-time call coaching and seamlessly automates CRM management, enabling elite agents to close more deals, faster. Passionate about empowering agents nationwide, Justin is on a mission to help real estate professionals break through productivity ceilings and dominate their markets. Visit https://www.shilo.ai/ to learn more or follow @shilo.ai on Instagram.

About Your Hosts

Lance Billingsley is a seasoned real estate professional with over a decade of experience in agent development and business coaching. Since January 2021, he has served as the Vice President of Agent Development at Navi Title Agency, where he leverages his extensive industry knowledge to mentor and support real estate agents. Before his tenure at Navi Title, Lance co-owned a top-performing real estate team at Realty ONE Group, achieving recognition as one of the company's top five teams. He also served as a business coach for Tom Ferry.

Dave Richards is a well-respected business coach working with CEOs, entrepreneurs, mortgage and real estate professionals, and others. With over 25+ years of executive leadership experience, he coaches and consults with the top professionals and organizations in their respective industries. Capitalizing on his certifications in Human Behavior, he specializes in building and optimizing high-performance teams and tackling difficult decisions that hold his clients back. He easily connects with entrepreneurs to help identify and communicate their vision, define their culture, and increase their profits and growth in today's dynamic marketplace.

In this current market, every real estate agent's deepest fear isn't losing their next commission; it's extinction, being replaced, or getting forced out of the industry. Whether it's because of lawsuits, AI, or market shifts, can our businesses survive when the playbook that worked for years suddenly feels outdated?

What no one tells you is that this isn't just a new-agent problem. Even seasoned agents with decades in the business go through the same gut-punch moment when they wake up and realize: "I don't know how to win in this market anymore." One day you're the expert, the next, the landscape changes, and you feel stupid all over again.

The difference between agents who last and agents who leave has nothing to do with talent, training, or even tenure. It comes down to one thing: the willingness to move with the market instead of trying to force it back into what it used to be.

Too many agents are clinging to an outdated version of success instead of adjusting their message, methods, and mindset to what buyers and sellers actually want today. The market doesn't care how it used to work or how you wish it still worked; it only responds to what's relevant right now.

How do we avoid our extinction and evolve as the market shifts? Where is the real estate market headed?

In this episode, we sit down with Wendy Shaw, a 40+ year industry veteran who has lived through every version of the "this is the end of real estate" story, and came out stronger every time.

She shares the truths most agents don't want to hear about longevity, lead generation, and the courage it takes to stay in the game when the rules keep changing.

About Our Guest

Wendy Shaw is one of the top 1% of real estate agents in the United States and a respected voice in the Arizona market for more than four decades. With over 40 years in the business, Wendy has not only built a legendary career in residential real estate but she has also shaped how thousands of agents think, act, and adapt in a constantly shifting industry. Holding elite credentials like CRS (Certified Residential Specialist) and GRI (Graduate, Realtor Institute), Wendy combines unmatched technical expertise with the kind of lived wisdom that only comes from thriving through multiple market cycles, disruptive technologies, and cultural shifts in how real estate gets done. Connect with Wendy on Facebook.

About Your Hosts

Lance Billingsley is a seasoned real estate professional with over a decade of experience in agent development and business coaching. Since January 2021, he has served as the Vice President of Agent Development at Navi Title Agency, where he leverages his extensive industry knowledge to mentor and support real estate agents. Before his tenure at Navi Title, Lance co-owned a top-performing real estate team at Realty ONE Group, achieving recognition as one of the company's top five teams. He also served as a business coach for Tom Ferry.

Dave Richards is a well-respected business coach working with CEOs, entrepreneurs, mortgage and real estate professionals, and others. With over 25+ years of executive leadership experience, he coaches and consults with the top professionals and organizations in their respective industries. Capitalizing on his certifications in Human Behavior, he specializes in building and optimizing high-performance teams and tackling difficult decisions that hold his clients back. He easily connects with entrepreneurs to help identify and communicate their vision, define their culture, and increase their profits and growth in today's dynamic marketplace.

Check out this episode on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm so our show reaches more people. Thank you!

In real estate, everyone talks about scale like it's just a matter of adding agents or buying more leads. But the truth is, most leaders never really scale. They just build a bigger version of their own job.

They're still carrying all the weight, doing all the production, and wondering why their team is failing to thrive.

The deeper problem is that most leaders confuse activity with growth. They chase five strategies at once, dabble in new lead sources, and hire quickly without clarity.

What they end up with is a revolving door of agents, wasted money, and no leverage.

True scale doesn't come from more, it comes from clarity, courage, and consistency.

Most people in real estate never get past that breaking point. They burn out, retreat, or settle for mediocrity.

How do we shift our mind about scaling? How do we survive and thrive in the jungle that is the real estate business?

In this episode, we're joined by real estate leader and coach, Alan Kushmakov. We dig into the real levers of growth in real estate. We also talk about why most agents are wasting their time chasing "one deal to cover the cost," how courage and resilience separate the 13% who thrive from the 87% who disappear.

Guest Bio

Alan Kushmakov is a real estate leader, coach, and the CEO and Broker-Owner of Best Homes Real Estate. With over a decade in the industry, Alan has grown from solo agent to team leader to brokerage owner, building one of the fastest-growing independent brokerages in Arizona. His path wasn't a straight line, after losing everything in the 2008 crash, he rebuilt in real estate, made every mistake possible in team building, and ultimately cracked the code on recruiting, retention, and scale. Today, Alan is known for helping agents and team leaders push past the breaking point that stops most people in real estate. He teaches leaders how to scale with clarity, courage, and systems that don't collapse under pressure, drawing on his own lessons in resilience and growth. Connect with Alan on LinkedIn.

About Your Hosts

Lance Billingsley is a seasoned real estate professional with over a decade of experience in agent development and business coaching. Since January 2021, he has served as the Vice President of Agent Development at Navi Title Agency, where he leverages his extensive industry knowledge to mentor and support real estate agents. Before his tenure at Navi Title, Lance co-owned a top-performing real estate team at Realty ONE Group, achieving recognition as one of the company's top five teams. He also served as a business coach for Tom Ferry.

Dave Richards is a well-respected business coach working with CEOs, entrepreneurs, mortgage and real estate professionals, and others. With over 25+ years of executive leadership experience, he coaches and consults with the top professionals and organizations in their respective industries. Capitalizing on his certifications in Human Behavior, he specializes in building and optimizing high-performance teams and tackling difficult decisions that hold his clients back. He easily connects with entrepreneurs to help identify and communicate their vision, define their culture, and increase their profits and growth in today's dynamic marketplace.

Check out this episode on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm so our show reaches more people. Thank you!