April Noessel was in dire straits.

Raising five children on her husband’s salary, she began flipping houses to make ends meet. Her family fell into debt when one of their flips went sour. The bad deal was particularly galling because of the indignities it took to get the home ready to sell.

“I was wearing one of my kids in a backpack, scraping magnets off the floor with a knife,” Noessel said. “When that flip went bad, we had no money and we were up to our eyeballs in debt. We literally had to feed our kids by going to food banks. Our real estate broker made more money than we did.”

But soon after, Noessel got a mortgage broker license in California and started following the advice that Tom Ferry provided in his YouTube videos. In short order, she started her own brokerage — Gold Group Realty — that pulled her family out of poverty and into success.

Iowa Realtor Lori Bogle has a similar story. When the COVID-19 pandemic started, she got burned out on real estate and found herself drinking more often. But in July 2020, she stopped drinking and also turned to Tom Ferry’s YouTube channel. Now she not only owns Bogle Realty, but she’s become a pillar in her community, something motivated more by her faith than business.

“Our farmers market in our town was struggling,” Bogle said. They only had four or five vendors, and so we stepped up to sponsor them. We go out and have a booth. We interview people and put them on camera and stuff like that to promote it. I think we’re up to 30 to 40 vendors now, so that’s really awesome.”

‘Charge the storm’

Noessel and Bogle were the first two speakers at the 2024 Tom Ferry Success Summit being held this week in Dallas. Their stories of perseverance are pitch perfect for this moment of anxiety and uncertainty in the real estate industry as a result of the $418 million settlement of the commission lawsuits by the National Association of Realtors (NAR).

But there was no anxiety inside the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, the cavernous venue hosting the summit that feels almost cramped due to the hundreds of real estate agents at the event. 

The slogan for the summit is “charge the storm,” and the event’s logo is a photorealistic rendering of a bull bathed in a cosmic swirl of dark blue. It’s an apt representation of the mood within the event.

The feelings of anger and doom that permeate various Facebook groups, Reddit threads and other message boards have no presence here. Instead, agents view the rule changes as an opportunity to better serve their buyers and sellers.

It’s hard to not feel optimistic watching Ferry — one of the nation’s leading real estate coaches — bring his infectious energy to the stage. Between speakers, he asks agents to stand up and dance to club music, and his true believers do it without hesitation or inhibition. If the crowd’s “woo-hoos” aren’t loud enough, Ferry demands they turn up the volume. And they do.

But the summit is more than just a three-day pep talk. The speakers share tips on everything from social media to goal setting and budgeting, lessons that are beneficial to both real estate newbies and veterans alike.

“I really liked it when Tom Ferry was talking about complaining, criticism and comparing, because those three things will not get you anywhere,” said Deborah Harmer, a Realtor in Cincinnati who runs the eXp Realty-affiliated Harmer Home Team with her husband Ken.

“You want to complain and criticize when things aren’t going your way, but that never encourages anybody to do better. It just doesn’t. I thought ‘Yeah, I could do a better job on that.’ So I love that.”

Sharing best practices

Brooke Lewis, an agent with The Perry Group in Salt Lake City, got her real estate license in March after working as a medical device salesperson. Her friends lured her into the profession and she liked the idea of being face to face with clients.

She said the speakers at the summit have shared best practices that are invaluable to her as she starts to build her business.

“I haven’t really had a lot of opportunity when it comes to listings, and so there’s been a lot of speaking on how to get listings, how to be a great listing agent,” Lewis said. “So, that’s been really beneficial. The talks on marketing assets and tools of social media have been great because obviously my social media is really small right now, so I’m hoping to grow that and just keep taking some principles away from that.”

Steve Osborne of First Team Real Estate in Southern California has been a regular at Tom Ferry events for 17 years. Even though he has an established and successful business, he still finds Ferry’s events helpful as the industry evolves and client needs change.

“I just feel very strongly that if I don’t stay with it, I will be a dinosaur in a nanosecond,” Osborne said. “You’re talking to a guy who started in real estate before the internet, before we even had a fax machine. My job doesn’t even resemble what it started out to be.”

Tom Ferry attendees may not be thrilled with the settlement-mandated rule changes that took effect on Aug. 17 — nor the insinuation that agents were behaving unethically — but it’s not keeping them up at night either. Many of them are in states that already required buyer representation agreements, and those who aren’t are finding the agreements as something they should have been doing in the first place.

Transparency to clients is a shared value among the agents here, and pulling back the curtain on commissions and costs is something they support.

“These are the new rules, adjust to them, and then find a way to make them work to your clients’ benefit,” Harmer said. “This, I think, does work for our sellers. Now instead of needing to promise upfront how much they’re going to pay the buyer’s agent, we get all the facts at once, all the puzzle pieces, and then they get to see what their net is.”

“I have 17 agents in my brokerage, and I feel like this is an opportunity for us to really shine and show our value,” Noessel said. “ We don’t have to have all these rookie agents that just aren’t really serious about the business, that aren’t going to put their all into it. They’re not going to read the forms ever and they’re not going to know the rules. It’s going to essentially push all of the ones out that are not really committed.”