KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Deciding if a Real Estate Team is Right for You

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

Summary:This episode explores the critical decision of whether to join a real estate team or remain a solo agent. Dustin Brohm breaks down the key benefits of team structures, such as increased transaction volume—noting that team members often do 2.4 times more volume and are 11 times more likely to stay in the business. The episode provides a tactical framework for agents to evaluate their own needs and offers a specific list of questions to ask potential team leaders to ensure a good fit.

Speaking of the accountability and how serious it is in the every day of a life of entrepreneurs, we all know that one thing that is shared as a secret between all the successful people out there, they have an accountability partner. They have somebody to keep them accountable for the wise and their goals they put for themselves. We are a high support, high accountability environment, not hang your license and pray and hope I get a deal kind of team. We know that we give you fish, leads, fish. But we also teach you how to fish, which are the skills. So we do provide leads, but we don't build lead dependent agents.

We build skilled agents. And we teach agents how to create business, not wait for it. Truth of the matter is, you guys don't need more leads. You need more skill. So leads can help you start, but skills help you scale. And that's exactly what we teach here at the Align Group. Part two of three on top trending questions, agents ask about joining the Align Group. Hello everyone.

This is John Sy from EXP Realty. And here's my partner, Axel Ziba. If you're interested in chatting with us about partnering with us here at EXP Realty, go ahead and book a call in the link below in our Cal and you can get a no obligation confidential call. us. So if you've ever wondered what agents ask before joining a top team like the Align Group, you'll find it in this video. And the answers may surprise you. There is more noise, more teams, and more confusion in the industry than ever before. Agents don't want the hype,

they want clarity. Axel and I will be walking through the top trending questions about the Align Group, what agents want, what we offer, and how to know if we are the right environment for you. So let's get right to it. Question number five. Is this a high accountability team or do your own thing team? When it comes to, and thank you for highlighting that question, John. I think this is a good question for every agent to understand and judge their team based on. Now, at the align group, so this is about the align group.

We're not talking about any other teams at this point. We're putting out there why the align group is number one. And why is the agents are coming in to choose the align group. group to scale to the next level. And we don't take accountability much lightly. Accountability is a form of love. As you mentioned it many times. And when it comes to accountability,

you actually count on John Syne, my partner right here, and he's the master of it. He keeps us all accountable into the goal and the promise that we made to yourself and to fulfill the why that we start this business from a get-go. Let me show you a few things in here. We have a chat group on their WhatsApp,

which is our main chat with the Alliance group. So we separated a chat to have an accountability chat group. At around 7, 8 p.m. every night, everybody comes in there from the team that participates in the tools and system that we offer. They're coming in there reporting their activity of the day. Now, John, but why don't you give us an example? What is it that they're coming there on a daily basis to report? So every single day, this is the expectation when you join the team. It's high, high accountability on a daily basis. We expect you to report your contacts every single day. How many appointments you set on that specific day?

Any listings taken, any buyer sales made, and any listing sold, and any price reductions, either conversations or actual price reduction sign. All these things wrapped up into one are what we call IPA, income producing activities, instead of income servicing activities, ISA. So, if you want structure, you will thrive here. If you want to coast, this is not the team for you. Love that. Thank you so much for highlighting that, John. And as a matter of fact, speaking of the accountability and how serious it is in the everyday of

entrepreneurs, we all know that one thing that is shared as a secret between all the successful people out there, they have an accountability partner. They have somebody to keep them accountable for the wise and the goals they put for themselves. You always thought us to track or numbers. That's a trait of an entrepreneur. That's a trait of success to track your numbers. If you agree, for the past two and a half years, I came up with apps, I came up with Excel sheets and many other things to give the tools and system to the agents to track their number.

Trust me, I even created an Excel sheet inside Google for the people to log in, report their number of contacts, appointments, and those appointments turn into contracts. And that Excel sheet, of course, in a form of course, in a form of course. It was calculating the ratio of their success, so from contacts to the appointment, from appointment to the contract. It was phenomenal. But every day we're learning from the new technology

and improving the aligned group based on it. So recently, at Chad GPD, in the OpenAI, the chat GPT became a group chat where we can report or activities as an accountability pod in there where chat GPT can calculate your ratio based on the chat that it was there without just going back and do the numbers. I can quickly even maybe share my screen and show it to you guys if you guys well. So if you guys can see my screen right here, I'm going to go to that accountability chat that we have.

So we have some people coming in, their report on a daily basis. And here, John just asked that chat, hey, give me the ratio of the past week. And immediately, based on that chat, it just calculated their ratio. of success. So at the Align group, just to show that to you guys, every day we are trying to fulfill and trying to make it better from a day before for the agents like yourself. Absolutely. And when I was selling 149 homes a year, I knew exactly what my ratios were. And it took a whole year for me to be able to look at those ratios and say, okay, it was 100 contacts to one listing taken. And we know, guys, one listing equals one paycheck.

And I knew that if I wanted to do 100 deals, I needed to take 100 listings. So I calculated based on that. I would have to talk to 50 people per day for 200 days out of that year, which I did. But this right here, when you put into chat GPT, you can see it ongoingly what your ratios are. So it will go up and down based on your ratios every single quarter. So it's as easy as inputting your numbers into chat GPT. and then you can ask it on a weekly basis, where am I at? How am I doing with my ratios?

And when we work on our skills and work on our mindset, our ratio is going to get better, right? So this is how we hold each other accountable, and when you hold each other accountable, you're going to move forward. We are a high support, high accountability environment, not hang your license and pray and hope I get a deal kind of team. I love that.

Okay. Axel, question six, what marketing support will I? actually get here at the Align Group. That's a great question. Now, of course, when it comes to marketing, there are two different versions. There's, of course, the organic way and there's paid version. When it comes to the branding of the Align Group, we are striving every day to put our names out there. As a matter of fact, we put in more effort to brand yourself as the best team they can benefit the consumers out there and serving their needs. Now, when it comes to digital services, when it comes to advertisement, when it comes to serving their needs and being in front of them, that's how

we market and have the reputation for it. Now, when it comes to listings, when it comes to providing that value proposition as part of being the aligned groups marketing tools and why the sellers are choosing to list with us, we have tremendous system, support and marketing tools that you can plug and play and show it off. And we don't take that like. To show you a few, let me share my screen with you again so you can see for first hand of what we have. And here we go. Number one, of course, immediately you're going to become part of the future of luxury. That's ex-B luxury.

At the Align Group, thanks to John being part of the EXB luxury, we're all part of that and many listings that we have can benefit the sellers of being a spread. among many portals in luxury portfolio. Another beautiful tools and value proposition at the Align Group is that every listing comes with its own website if you want it to market it that way. Now you can grab that link and put a QR code behind it, put on your fourth seller sign, or spread it along many platforms out there to benefit your sellers. We're using an app called High Noting here where you can plug in entire information of that property for the consumer.

to view and highlight it with even a video of yourself explaining about that property or having a video tour in there. Now, one of the benefit of having a full-time admin's ad the Align group is that on a weekly basis, we also report back to our homeowners that listed the property and trusted us with it. And we're giving them a full report on a weekly basis of the performance of it. As you can see in my screen, that's one of the sample report that we sent to them on a weekly basis about their activity. And this is another report that they're going to get from us on a weekly basis about the luxury portfolio that we just talked about and how many clicks it had and what links and what platform it was featured on. In addition, of course, at the Align Group, we take every

listing extremely serious. Whether it's $300,000 or a $3 million property, we are caring for that property based on the brochure and a service that we're providing. When it comes to the brochure, we don't take it lightly. We have a high, glossy paper, folded papers for showcasing this, the beauty and highlights of the property itself. As I can see, this is one of our templates that's going to go to our print shop

and is getting printed. And this is another version of that for Ada or one of our listing agents. So these are the examples that we take seriously for marketing material. When it comes to marketing a property, it is extremely important to stand out and use the tools and value provider for you at the Align Group and do the plug and play.

One of the biggest advantage of being part of the Align Group is to have professionals outside of the real estate realm that they are there to benefit us and beauty of it is that they're putting you first and with better rates, such as photographers, videographers, lawyers, inspectors. Now, all of these, they can be done in a way pose it to your clientele as a marketing tools to better. benefit yourself and benefit them. Perfect. So really, Axel, all we wrapped up in one is you're going to get virtual staging, full staging, photography, video, drones, social media content, and ads all wrapped up into your brand elevated here at the Align Group. So you don't look like a new agent if you're in

fact brand new, you're going to look like a professional from day one. Exactly. And question seven, Axel, what admin support? do I get? It is important for every high-performer agent to have somebody to back him up. And I'm going to say that in that way is that because if you're doing your own paperwork, you're falling behind your prospecting and you're losing a deal. Having an admin support is going to give you a leverage of getting out there and doing more deals, talking to more people, and closing better, closing more. Now one thing that we have to consider is what are the tasks that the admin can do for

When it comes to, of course, the compliance with BCFSA as part of a regulatory, most agents, we all hate doing paperwork because it's taking too much time out of us and let's be real. Nobody likes doing it. Maybe I do. That's a side of fact. The paperwork that is done, let's go over it. So certainly the conveyancing part of the paperwork has been done by the admin. They are in direct relation with our conveyancing side of the,

ex-B relationship and they're going to be monitoring every paperwork making sure you are fully compliant with or regulator. That is something that, you know, it's going to save you down the road by not having any mistake in your paperwork down the road. Above all, if you're taking in these things, of course, they guide you through with the step-step program that we have and plug and play of what it's needed in terms of getting that listing live on the market. The biggest of all and the most time consummable is to input the listing on MLS. They got this for you. They're going to take care of that for you.

The arrangement of the photography, videography, behind the scene, and many other things that admins do, what admins do. And that is something our admin is going to take care of it for you. Absolutely. So what I'm hearing, Axel, is that MLS input, amendments, conveyancing, compliance, paperwork, all the running around, all the bookings. It really is taking the income servicing activities out of your hands so you can do what's important in real estate, which are talking to people, building deeper relationships. Being in communication is what really matters in the business.

This is a relationship business that happens to sell real estate. An admin leverage frees you to do what actually pays you talking to people. And what we have here at the Align Group as a real life example is, So Hale Farrow, joining our team as a really motivated, highly productive agent doing 17 transactions. And once we took the admin out of his hands, immediately he went to 28 transactions. And here, right now in 2025, he will be doing 40 transactions and it's only December 11th. So that's exactly what the admin can do for you here at the Align Group. Exactly.

John, I would love to say the next one. The next question I'm looking at in here, it's asking, does the Align group provide leaves or is everything self-generated? Let's both of us, let's tap into it. I always say this to anybody that wants to join any team or any brokerages out there. Now, one thing that you need to do is self-generating prospecting on a daily basis, regardless. You have to be self-generating prospecting. That is something that we do as an agent. you cannot truly rely on any brokerages or any team to hand you a lead.

Now, what they can do is to build the cake and have you eat it too. That means that the leads is not the cake. It's the powder. It's a sugar on top. It's a bonus. One thing that you guys have to understand is that when you know how to prospect it and the way that John coaches does, how to prospect and how to reach out to people, how to have them reach out to us back, then that is the wheel of prospecting turning.

The lead that the systems gives you, then that's a bonus on top. And just to answer your question in a very short form, yes, we do provide leads in our team and we're spending quite a bit of a money in our system and lead generating system. So just to summarize again one more time about the lead generating, yes, the aligned group, As a matter of fact, we do provide quite a bit of leads for our agents and we train them, not only giving them leads, we train them on what to say to them and how to talk to them at the same time. By who? By the master of all, John Sy, on a daily basis role play and practice that we have and many prospecting calls that we have on a weekly basis at the airline group.

So you need to plug it. Absolutely. And guys, we know that we give you fish, leads. fish, but we also teach you how to fish, which are the skills. So we do provide leads, but we don't build lead dependent agents. We build skilled agents, and we teach agents how to create business, not wait for it. Truth of the matter is, you guys don't need more leads. You need more skill. So leads can help you start, but skills help you scale. And that's exactly what we teach here at the Align group. And I want to complete that what John said. That was beautiful, that we're not only

giving you the fish and we're not only teaching you how to fish, we're also teaching you how to eat the fish too. Yeah, they know they have to. You've got some bones in it. All right. Question number nine, John, and that's a good question too. And that goes back toward the culture of the aligned group. So what is the culture really like? Will I feel supported or will I feel lost in a big group? I have had this question many times in my interviews when they hear that we have an average of 60, 65 agents that I know and will growing on a daily basis.

So I actually interviewed all the agents at the luncheon and I gave them one opportunity to say one word. And the theme that kept on coming up was actually family. Family. We're actually community. And I really warm my heart because we've created a beautiful community where they feel like they belong to something special. And at the same time, they're getting trained to become great salespeople. So we're, we've built a family and a community of great salespeople knowing how to make money in real estate at a high level.

So, you know, it truly warms my heart that we, Axel, you and I, we support the agents. we make them feel included. We help them on a daily basis. We help them build confidence on daily basis. And at the end of the day, it's what community is all about and collaboration is all about. Because at the end of the day, real estate is a very lonely business. And that's exactly what we give you here at the Align Group is a tight-knit community with all the resources, tools, and energy and collaboration, all wrapped up into one. So people don't stay for money.

They stay for culture. And our culture is built on growth, collaboration, and winning together. I totally agree with you. I just want to highlight that quickly right there. The chat group that we have and the support that every single agents are giving each other, it's uncanny. I remember my first days of joining the align group. And I remember the amount of commitment, the emotion that it was in the chat, the amount of care that it was going back and forth. when one person asked a simple question.

It doesn't matter what question was. Many they jumped in and to make sure that person is looked after answering that question in the best way they could. In many cases, when it comes to the culture and care, we had instances where a pregnant lady in our team drove all the way from North Vancouver down to New Westminster to carry a for-self sign for the other agents not to fall behind. That's care. That's collaboration.

That's not competition. And that's a culture that we have along the airline. I love that. Well, the next question is, and I hear this a lot, Axel, is when they join a team, is there really any growth opportunities, right? So question 10, what are the long-term growth opportunities here available at the Align group? This is a good one because we've been thinking about this, you and I, from the get-go, how one person from the team,

they can grow further and further into this business and become a leader. I wanna talk about one factor in here that in terms of psychology, I know you're coming back from a psychology background. When you are doing 20, 30 deals by yourself, and you're kind of plateauing on that case, you're on top of the world, that's how you feel at that point.

You know, I'm the top of the world, I'm the best nation, I'm doing 20 days, 30s, I don't need anybody. I'm doing the way. it is. And when you're entering a room of people along the same way that they're doing a amount of the same deals with you and they're part of that type of transactions that you have, you're looking at that group and say, oh my, I'm among the same-minded people. They all have a goal of scaling for the future. The goal is to grow and do better. The one thing is I want to step back in a little. I'll give you one example, John, and you may like

because as I said, you're coming from a psychology background. Before you enter that room and you're feeling that you're the best man in the room and the smartest person, and when you meet other people like John Syne at a totally different level, when you meet other folks that they're doing 40 deals, 60 deals, hundreds of deals, then the imposter syndrome kicks it. Then you start questioning, oh my God, I was better by my own. I shouldn't have walked into that room. I was on top of the world and an imposter syndrome comes in.

When the imposter syndrome comes in, the study shows that the ones that they're feeling the imposter syndrome at that time, they start asking better questions. They start looking into focus of helping others. They start looking into improving themselves and consequently becoming the best leaders they are. And that leadership right there, you and I, we talked about this quite a bit. we want to provide a leadership support within the Align group itself. As a matter of fact, we have a mentorship support for agents that they know exactly what they're doing on a day-to-day basis, guiding the new licensees for the first three transactions.

That is a support, and of course they're sharing some revenues with us, and nothing is free. So there is an opportunity for scaling to a leadership. There is a support for the Align Group to back you up, to become, a better leader, and we got you in terms of the best support for attraction. John, you know, when it comes to attraction, I want to leave that to you because you are the experts on that. When it comes to EXB and attraction, as an individual agent, of course, you can attract as many agents as possible.

When it comes to the team, can give us the difference between a solo agent and a team environment? Axel, really what they get here at the Align Group as a growth opportunity is that they can actually build their agent attraction, grow their revenue share organization through building a team under our team. Utilizing the Align Group brand and logo to build that into what we have already. So you can build a team, move into leadership with the Align group, become a mentor, which will attract more agents to your revenue share organization. So you can start to create revenue share income for yourself. So at the end of the day, coming in here,

We're not just having you sell real estate, but we're actually having you scale past just selling real estate. So in fact, we're not building just agents, Axel, we're building businesses together with you. And as an example of how that really works is when we had an agent who had a team of three people and they didn't have the admin support set up, they didn't have the lead structure set up. They didn't have the culture really set up. So when they saw what we have to offer, it's a plug in place. system where small teams can amalgamate with us, plug and play and start to attract even more agents under what they have already built when we gave them the support, resources, and tools to do so. And in actuality, Axel, can you just talk about how that happened?

Exactly. And that's just you just mentioned in a frame that you used to explain. It is so simple that smaller teams, they maybe don't have that structure. They don't have that type of training. They don't have that type of support, the admin, the training for the new agents that come in and they want to keep calling them asking left and right questions. We have that. We are in a bigger scale. We have everything that is needed for training support, for mental support, for community support, for cultural support, and transactional support. So everything is practically rounded. It's there.

Fundamentals there for you to bring your smaller team. join us and we can make you grow as a leader and bring in more attraction under you. So it's some sort of a, I don't want to say that, but it is team on their team, right? I mean, that's exactly what it is, Axel. And we're here to provide a structure and a culture and a community to make your life easier. And people join not because they want to make their life harder. They want to make more money. They want to net more money.

Keep more in their pocket. And at the end of the day, we give them a life back. I mean, that's at the end of the day. What I think agents really look for is to have their life back, is to have some time and to still make a lot of money without killing themselves. Hey, thanks guys for watching this video until the end here. If you found this video valuable, helpful, and useful, go ahead and share with a friend, like and subscribe to the channel because we're going to be pumping out even more content and even more videos like this to help you with your real estate career. and if you're interested in chatting with myself and Axel about partnering with us here at EXP Realty or the Align Group, go ahead and book a call in the Cali Lee link and we'll be happy to chat with you.

We'll look forward to seeing you at the next video. Let's go. Let's grow. Let's build.