Private listings, “coming-soon” strategies, the portal wars, syndication rules, the never-ending lawsuits — the trench warfare in today’s real estate industry is loud and endless. The industry keeps fighting over platforms, policies and control while agents struggle to do more transactions.
Yet traditional real estate is overlooking hundreds of thousands of potential buyers and sellers hiding in plain sight. The reason? We’ve lost our North Star upon which true, lasting success is built. The agents and firms that commit to finding it will crush their competitors.
The North Star our industry seems to have lost
I joined Jon Douglas Company back in 1980, first as an agent and later as executive director of training. By 1997, when the company was acquired by Apollo, we had 60 offices, 4,000 agents, and we were doing $1 billion per month in sales. Our market share in the luxury Westside real estate market consistently ranged between 50 to 70 percent.
Our company treated real estate brokerage as a serious, full-time career. Real estate services were our only focus. Our culture was built around superior service, total integrity, ongoing drive for excellence and technical expertise that made innovation a state of mind.
Training emphasized professionalism, deep market knowledge and contribution to our local communities that resulted in superior service that exceeded that of our competitors.
Jon Douglas summed it up best in a marketing piece agents used on every listing appointment.
The Jon Douglas Company philosophy has real meaning for the client, because it places you at the center of our business activity. Everything we learn is dedicated to guiding you safely through increasingly complex real estate transactions. Everything we do is geared toward helping you achieve your individual goals. If we do that right, both of us win.
Now compare that to where we are today. The industry’s conversation is dominated by discussions about platforms, policies, commissions, portal wars and who has the right to market our listing information. While these issues certainly impact our business, they are not the business.
Our North Star has never moved. We just stopped looking at it.
How to return to the North Star in your business
The most important question brokerage leaders and agents must address is, “Who are we really preparing agents to serve?”
That answer looks very different today than it did even five years ago. To return to our North Star, we must address the clients and market opportunities that traditional real estate continues to overlook
The 720K potential investor transactions traditional real estate continues to overlook
According to the National Association of Realtors’ March 2026 Existing-Home Sales report, individual investors and second-homebuyers accounted for 18 percent of the transactions, up from 15 percent from a year ago. Investors are no longer a side category.
The public numbers may still understate the opportunity. Kurt Carlton, president of New Western, which serves the one- to four-unit investor market and has 200,000 users in its ecosystem, estimates that up to 97 percent of these transactions are being done by mom and pop investors outside the MLS. That means traditional real estate may be missing hundreds of thousands of potential transactions hiding in plain sight.
Boomers own the listing market — we need to meet their needs
NAR’s 2026 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report shows boomers make up 55 percent of all sellers and 42 percent of all buyers. Many are sitting on decades of equity and facing complicated life decisions around medical issues, downsizing, relocation, estate planning, adult children and retirement.
As someone who is recently widowed, I see a major gap in the services we provide. Surviving spouses and adult children must navigate complex housing decisions both before and after a death. Moreover, probate, memory care, incapacity, serious illness, mobility loss and shrinking finances all affect real estate decisions. Sadly, few agents receive meaningful training on how to handle these situations.
The harder question is what happens when someone no longer chooses their next home, but must leave because illness, reduced mobility or money leaves no other option.
Unmarried women are possibly the largest overlooked market segment
According to NAR, 21 percent are single or unmarried women. Today, there are a record 20 million single female homeowners in the U.S. Many are widowed, divorced or never married. When they decide to list or sell, they need clear guidance, straight talk and genuine competence coupled with caution about risks they often face alone.
Quite frankly, I can’t recall seeing any training that addresses the needs of this group or helps them navigate today’s marketplace as homeowners, buyers, sellers or potential real estate investors.
Hispanic households now dominate new household formation
Hispanic households now drive the U.S. homeownership story. The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals’ 2025 State of Hispanic Homeownership Report shows they formed more than 1 million new households in 2025, representing 92.6 percent of all U.S. household formation growth. The median age of these homebuyers is 31. The result? Long-term demand should increase even more as these buyers move through their 30s and beyond.
Hispanic clients were an important part of my business from the beginning. Almost all of them wanted to buy duplexes or triplexes. That pattern still holds true today as many Hispanic and foreign buyers start their homeownership journey with a small investment property. More importantly, when you earn their trust, their referrals and repeat business can become an important lead source for ongoing business.
We need a new type of ‘market literacy’
As the industry fights about English-only listings on the portals, traditional real estate is failing to meet the needs of both the one- to four-unit mom-and-pop investor and multilingual clients.
According to Immobel.com, up to 74.1 percent of all digital searches are in languages other than English, and the most recent number for Los Angeles is 72 percent.
Agents today need training that helps them understand and serve this burgeoning market, which includes mom and pop investors, boomers with massive equity and complicated family dynamics, single women and multilingual clients.
How to realign with the North Star for your business
Real estate has always been about helping people make safe, sound decisions in transactions that affect their wealth, family, security and future.
At Jon Douglas, a client-first, excellence-obsessed culture served as our North Star. It should still guide us today. The firms and agents who rebuild their marketing, training and customer focus around that standard will not only win more business; they will own it.