Why We Built a Team Sport in an Individual Sport Industry

Our team operates like a basketball team. We’re passing things, sharing the load, assisting one another. The ball moves. Someone sets a screen so someone else can score. That’s how we work every single day.

This is in contrast to most real estate teams, which function more like a golf team. It’s an individual sport, but somehow they’re calling it a team. 

We built CHORD around a different model entirely, one where everybody has a role in every transaction and we’re all pulling in the same direction. And we chose that model because of what it makes possible for our colleagues, our clients, and the culture we want to protect.

What it means for our colleagues

On any given day, someone on our team might ask “who’s in Brentwood today?” and whoever’s closest will step in to show a property. That happens because we all see every transaction as our shared responsibility. Every listing, every buyer, every challenge belongs to the whole group. Nobody carries the weight alone.

That changes the day-to-day experience of being an agent here. When you’ve got multiple people all moving toward the same goal, having conversations around strategy and creativity together, you get a better outcome and you grow faster. 

Our team meets about every listing and every buyer. We share creative ideas, troubleshoot challenges, and help one another in real time.

We also invest heavily in how we develop our people. When we launched our firm, we designed training around timing and relevance. Our newer agents get a mentor alongside them for as long as they need, whether that’s 30 days or six months. 

And we go deeper than scripts and tactics. We spend real time on soft skills, confidence, and people skills, because a great process in the hands of someone who believes in themselves is a powerful thing. 

Once you help someone work through the underlying human stuff, everything else clicks.

We want to understand what our agents’ goals are, and that means beyond real estate. What are their life goals? What are their retirement plans? We want to help them get to where they want to be. 

If you take care of people, the rest will come. All of it will. We’ve been doing this long enough to know that’s true. Our agents stay because we have their best interests at heart, the same way our clients come back again and again, because we have theirs.

What it means for our clients

When a team truly operates as a team, the client gets consistency. They get the collective creativity of a group that’s been strategizing together about their specific situation. And they get more hours in the day working on their behalf than any single agent could ever offer.

Between all of us, we simply have more capacity than one person has alone. And because we’re working together on everyone’s listings, sharing the load, backing each other up, we can offer a level of service, creative strategy, and responsiveness that only works when multiple people are genuinely pulling together. 

Our clients benefit from the whole team’s experience and energy, even if they’re primarily working with one agent.

That’s the basketball team advantage for the people we serve. The outcome is better because more minds and more hands are involved. 

And because we all share the same training, the same values, and the same standard of care, the experience is consistent regardless of who on our team a client interacts with on any given day.

What it means for our culture

We stayed boutique on purpose. We launched CHORD to finally have a brand that would highlight what we were already doing for years at other firms, and we wanted to protect the culture that made it work.

We want to know the agents, their kids’ names, their plans for Easter, and what vacations they’re taking. One of my agents just lost her grandmother and I knew about it that day. That kind of closeness matters. 

People who feel seen and cared for at their own firm are better at extending that same care to clients. It flows outward.

The basketball model only works if the players actually know each other, trust each other, and want to win together. That gets harder to maintain as you grow, so we stay disciplined about size and let the culture breathe.

Start passing the ball

Building a team like this takes intention. It takes hiring people who genuinely care about something bigger than their own production numbers, and training that goes deeper than tactics. But when it works, you can do so much more. You just can. And the agents who are part of it will tell you the same thing: once you’ve played on a real team, you never want to go back to playing alone.