America’s number one real estate agent isn’t from Manhattan or Beverly Hills. You won’t find him when you’re filing through the programming guide for HGTV, and he’s never graced the cover of Real Estate magazine. He doesn’t cater to the rich and famous. Ben Caballero is the broker-owner of HomesUSA.com®, based in Addison, Texas, and sells new homes to Texans for more than 60 top builders in Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio.
Ben is not only arguably, real estate’s most successful agent, he may well be its most unconventional one.
The World’s Most Successful Agent
On the success side, he’s the first individual Realtor® in the history of the World to generate more than $1 billion in total annual home sales: he did that in 2015.
Ben Caballero has done it again. He’s shattered his own billion-dollar record. His business soared over 40% last year alone, and that means he booked $1.444 billion in total home sales, once again landing the number one spot on the REAL Trends “The Thousand” list of America’s top producing agents, which was just published in the Mansion section of the Wall Street Journal.
He is also atop the coveted REAL Trends “The Thousand” list for most transaction sides. The total is simply stunning: 3,556 of his new home listings sold last year. That means Ben sold seven times more homes than his closet competitor. You read that right: the number two agent had 467 of his homes listed sold last year and Ben outsold his competition 7-to-1. That’s crazy.
To give you an idea of what that number really means, Ben sold an average of more than 68 homes per week: that’s nearly 10 homes a day, every day of the week, or more than one-and-a-half sales every business hour.
Want to know something that’s even crazier? During a decade when the real estate trade media has been fixated on teams, Ben has crushed their numbers. That’s correct: Ben out-produced every single real estate team in America last year in BOTH categories of total transactions and total sales volume.
The top team in the USA closed 1,980 total transaction sides. Ben closed more than 1,500 more transactions sides than the number one team in America – 79% more business than they did! How does Ben compare to the number one team in the USA for total sales volume? The top team in the USA did $765.5 million in total transaction volume. Ben did $1.444 billion, or 89% more total sales volume – nearly double – what the number one team in America did.
Ben has been racking up these record-breaking numbers for the last six years. That’s how long he has held the top spot as America’s Number One Real Estate Agent on the REAL Trends “The Thousand” lists, again, for both total transactions and total sales volume by an individual agent. Between 2010 and 2016, he has listed over 20,000 new homes for builders that have sold, totaling $7.2 billion.
He’s received the 2014 Pinnacle Award for Real Estate Entrepreneurship from Gary Keller at Keller Williams Realty and was named the Most Innovative Real Estate Agent by Inman News in 2013 and a finalist in 2016. Most recently, Ben was named a 2017 Inman Influencer and a SP2017 Trendsetter by Swanepoel T3 Group.
The World’s Most Unconventional Agent
But Ben won’t win any popularity contests among many of his Realtor peers, because his business model does not include a conventional real estate sales model, nor does it include a conventional real estate sales commission.
This, despite the fact that Ben has been a Realtor since he was 21 years old and pioneered the creation of a company whose main mission is to help real estate agents tap into a largely untapped market: new home sales.
You see, Caballero does it differently than nearly every other agent on “The Thousand” list: essentially all of his transactions are for new home sales. Ben invented an online technology for builders, which allows him to achieve these ridiculously huge numbers.
Offered by his company HomesUSA.com, it’s a cloud-based listing management and marketing platform for homebuilders that streamlines their MLS listing and real estate marketing process. This platform allows builders to provide more accurate data to consumers while also dramatically increasing their ability to market their new home listings to real estate agents.
What Ben found is that most volume builders can’t keep up with all the changes that need to be made to their listings: there is too much information to manage. His company does all that for them, for a flat fee, and by automating much of this process, he’s able to keep all of the builder’s listing data accurate through the entire life of the listing.
Because his technology is so scalable, he grew 50% more builders – from 40 builders in 2015, to 60 builders today – and his business grew over 40% in tandem with that expansion. But where the builders really get the extra benefit from Ben’s platform is the marketing outreach it does to connect builders to real estate agents. Builders don’t typically market to agents and agents typically don’t show new homes. That’s a gap Ben is trying to fill and the result has been his builder clients, faster sales than their competitors.
Ben can show his clients how their home can sell between 10-30 days faster, on average, than their competitors that don’t use Ben’s platform.
Ben’s story is really unconventional. He’s not a tech guy, but invented incredible technology. He’s the furthest thing from a Millennial, yet probably will sell more homes to them than anyone alive. Even how he came to live in Texas. He’s not even Mexican-American. He’s a Cuban transplanted from Florida. But one thing about Ben that’s very conventional: Ben is competitive and likes to win. He likes being number one and is working hard to be number one this year as well. He says business so far says he’s going to set yet another new record. Yes, Ben is poised to do it once again.
REALTOR® is a federally registered collective membership mark which identifies a real estate professional who is member of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® and subscribes to its strict Code of Ethics.
