The Next 5,000: Why a 4,000-Transaction Career Is Now About Building Agents
I was sitting across from a producer the other day when he asked a question I hear more and more lately. "So what does the next ten years look like for you? Because I cannot picture my own, and you seem to have already drawn yours."
Why It Is Coming Up Now
The industry keeps moving in the direction that pushed me out of the storefront model, and the recent numbers make it concrete. AGNT, the company that owns eXp Realty, ended the second quarter of 2026 with 87,338 agents and brokers worldwide, up 6 percent year over year, on 132,497 transactions and $60.5 billion in sales volume. The consolidation keeps rolling: Real closed its roughly $880 million acquisition of RE/MAX in August 2026, Compass absorbed Anywhere, and AGNT added the NextHome franchise network of 5,500 agents in May. When parents are reshuffled at that scale, an experienced agent's question is no longer "which office do I sit in." It is "what am I actually building here?"
The Direct Answer
For most of my career I measured myself the way everyone does: transactions. More than 4,000 of them, across rentals, first-time buyers, move-up families, luxury, multi-unit, commercial, and estate work. It is a good scoreboard, and it has a ceiling. There are only so many hours in a day and so many files one person can carry. Somewhere around year thirty I stopped thinking of my career as a number of transactions I could still close and started thinking of it as a number of agents I could help build. That is the next chapter: the next 5,000.
The Case for Building Agents
Building agents is leverage. One file pays you once. An agent you have genuinely helped pays you across every transaction they close and changes a life the way real estate changed the families you already served. I run my life on three funnels: changing lives, making money, having fun. Helping a producer get better runs through all three at once, which is why the model at eXp made sense to me at 55. Here is the plain version of the mechanics: the plan runs 80/20 toward a $16,000 annual cap, and after you cap you keep 100 percent of your commission. The 20 percent that flows to the company is the "company dollar," and eXp redistributes 50 percent of it back to the agents who helped grow the brokerage. Revenue Share 2.0 pays across seven tiers, and the first three, worth 3.5, 4.0, and 2.5 percent of company dollar, unlock with no production requirement. In 2024 eXp paid out more than $220 million in combined revenue share and equity benefits to agents, and cumulative revenue share since 2015 is more than $889 million. Those are reported numbers, not promises. When I say I want to help 5,000 agents grow over the next ten years, the income model, the mentorship work, and the mission are one thing.
The Honest Counterweight
Now the part recruiting content usually skips, and you should hear it from someone who already made it. Revenue share is performance-based, not guaranteed. eXp's own disclosure states the median Tier 1 revenue share is $0, because most agents never sponsor anyone. The residual only pays from agents you sponsor who actually transact, and it stops entirely if you leave eXp. If the pitch you hear is "join for the residual," walk away from it; that is not how disciplined producers build anything. The residual is a reward for real work: mentoring, recruiting, helping other agents grow. If you do not love that work, no payout structure changes it. And your own production has to stay the foundation. The agents I respect most at eXp cap first and build second. Building on top of a broken production base is building on sand.
The Local Read, for Montgomery and Bucks
This is a county-sized market where reputation travels in person, which makes building agents a natural fit. Montgomery and Bucks are full of producers with fifteen, twenty, or thirty years in the business, deep client lists, and nobody to hand the playbook to. The agents who thrive here will be the ones who stop hoarding what they know and start investing it in the next generation of local producers. That is where the revenue share and the equity matter: they turn an act of generosity into something that compounds, so helping another agent is no longer charity, it is strategy.
How to Think About It
Ask yourself one question: if your income did not depend on your next listing, what would you do with your time? If the answer is "I would teach this business to the next ten agents," the building model is worth a serious look. If the answer is "I would take a vacation and never look back," that is fine too, and no revenue share plan is built for you. The mistake is joining a building model without wanting to build. Know which one you are before you sign anything.
The Close
I stopped counting transactions and started counting agents. The next 5,000 is not a recruiting quota, it is the number of people I want to help the way clients have helped me for 35-plus years. If this sounds like your next chapter, send me the question you have been afraid to ask an agent who already made the move. One question, answered straight, no pitch, and no follow-up if you do not want one.