This Week's Headlines
- 01 The squeeze warning was said out loud. At RISMedia's CEO & Leadership Exchange in Washington, D.C., John De Souza, president of Cressy & Everett Real Estate in Indiana and Michigan, said smaller operators "are going to get squeezed out" as larger brokers acquire smaller competitors amid shrinking margins and tough competition. Read the RISMedia report.
- 02 NAR's own budget assumes the ranks keep falling. The association's 2026 budget was built on a baseline of 1.2 million members, nearly 300,000 below its then-current count of about 1.49 million, and trade coverage projects membership falling to roughly 1.2 million by the end of 2026, the biggest decline since 2012, from a peak of about 1.56 million in late 2022. Read the Real Estate News story.
- 03 The member profile shows who survives. NAR's 2026 Member Profile, based on 2025 activity, shows the typical agent closed 9 transaction sides, down from 10, for a median gross income of $59,200. Agents with 16 or more years of experience earned a median $88,500. Agents with two years or less earned a median $8,100. Read the NAR report.
Now the part I actually want to talk about, because this is the story under the headlines: the squeeze is not coming for small brokerages, it is coming for operators who rent everything. The agents who get squeezed out are not the ones with the smallest market share, they are the ones whose business depends on things they do not own.
The squeeze is a model problem, not a size problem
When John De Souza told the room in Washington that smaller operators are going to get squeezed out, the natural reaction is to check your market share. Stop. The consolidation wave is real, the Real + RE/MAX deal and the Compass + Anywhere merger proved that, but the squeeze is not about how many listings you hold. It is about what your business is built on.
An operator who rents their brand, rents their leads, rents their systems, and rents their income gets squeezed from four directions at once. When the broker consolidates, the brand changes. When lead costs rise, the margin disappears. When the market slows and there is no system running follow-up, the pipeline goes quiet. When every dollar requires you at a closing table, a slow month is a crisis. That is the squeeze, and it does not care how big your farm is.
What the numbers actually say
NAR's 2026 Member Profile is the clearest picture of the squeeze we have. The typical agent closed 9 transaction sides in 2025, down from 10, for a median gross income of $59,200. Meanwhile, agents with 16 or more years in the business earned a median $88,500, and agents with two years or less earned a median $8,100.
Read that gap again: $8,100 versus $88,500. That is not a hustle gap. That is an asset gap. The veteran agents are not working ten times harder, they are working on top of assets they accumulated: a database that knows them, a brand the market recognizes, referral systems that run without them in the room, and income streams that do not require a closing table. The squeeze takes the agents who never accumulated anything, and the membership projection tells you exactly how many of them there are.
"The squeeze is not coming for small brokerages, it is coming for operators who rent everything. Agents who own their brand, their demand, their systems, and their income streams do not get squeezed, they get bigger."
Coach Randy Byrd
The three things you rent that get squeezed
If you want to know whether you are on the squeeze list, run this audit. Every line you are renting is a line someone else controls, and someone else controls means someone else can squeeze.
- Rented brand. If consumers in your market think of the company sign before they think of you, you are renting your brand. When the office changes signs or the merger closes, you start over from zero. The AgentPreneur Model exists because the brand has to be you, not the broker.
- Rented leads. Bought leads are a monthly tax with a price someone else sets. When the price goes up, your margin gets squeezed. When the volume drops, your pipeline goes quiet. Owned demand, your database, your sphere, your farm, your content, compounds instead of expiring.
- Rented systems, or none at all. If your business only runs when you show up, you cannot scale your real estate team and you cannot survive a slow month. Real estate systems are the difference between a job with a license and a business that produces while you lead.
How to grow your real estate business so you are not the one squeezed
Here is the playbook. It is the same one I coach agents through every week, and it works in any market because it does not depend on the market. It depends on you building assets.
- Own your demand. Your database, your past clients, your sphere, your farm. Ten touches a day to people who already know you beats a hundred dollars a day renting strangers. Owned demand cannot be renegotiated, repriced, or merged away.
- Install real estate systems. SOPs for every step of your business: lead response under five minutes, follow-up cadences that run on their own, contract-to-close checklists, past-client nurture. A business that runs on systems can be coached, scaled, and sold. A business that runs on you cannot.
- Build the brand. Content, video, market authority in your farm. When agents and consumers in your market can name you, you are never a commodity, and commodities are the first thing the squeeze takes.
- Scale your real estate team. When you are the bottleneck, hire and lead. Team leader coaching is how you multiply production instead of trading your hours for dollars. The veterans in the member profile did not get to $88,500 by doing more showings, they got there by building around themselves.
- Create income that does not need you at the table. Investments, revenue share, assets that pay while you sleep. That is how you increase real estate production and get off the transactional treadmill at the same time.
The model you build on decides how much squeeze reaches you
One more layer, and it matters more than most agents admit: the brokerage model you build on sets your cost structure. The legacy brick-and-mortar model carries big offices, big leases, and big debt, and that overhead does not disappear, it gets passed down to the agents who carry the production. Some revenue-share plans cap what you earn at five levels deep, so the builders who create the most value never get paid past the shallow end.
The eXp model is cloud-based and office-free, so the office is the platform instead of a lease, and there is no five-level cap on what builders earn. That is why I call it a superior growth environment: your economics are not built to hit a ceiling. When consolidation squeezes overhead onto the agents underneath it, the model that carries no overhead is the model that does not squeeze. Choose the model the way you would choose any business partner, because that is what it is.
The 30-day no-squeeze reset
You do not need to wait for the market to be kind. Here is the month that moves you off the squeeze list.
- Week one, audit what you rent. Write down every line of your business that depends on something you do not own: the brand, the leads, the systems, the income. Name them. That list is your squeeze risk.
- Week two, build the owned-demand list. Pull every past client, every sphere contact, every farm lead into one CRM and build the 90-day follow-up cadence. Ten touches a day, every day.
- Week three, document one SOP a day. Lead response, listing appointment, contract-to-close, past-client nurture. By Friday you have real estate systems that run without you.
- Week four, pick your three metrics. Lead volume, conversion rate, average commission per closed side. Review them every Friday. What gets measured gets managed, and what gets managed stops getting squeezed.
Every week I talk to agents who are exactly where you are: watching the headlines, feeling the squeeze, and wondering if there is a way to build that does not depend on the market being nice. There is. It starts with a 10-minute conversation about your business, your model, and your number. No pitch, no pressure, just a coach who has been in the trenches for 23 years and has spent the last 13 coaching agents off the treadmill and into assets.
Talk soon, Byrd.