LPT Realty’s Robert Palmer: ‘We run the brokerage like a business instead of as a loss leader’

LPT Realty founder and CEO Robert Palmer took the stage Tuesday at HousingWire’s The Gathering in Austin, Texas — outlining growth strategy built on team empowerment, agent retention and a deliberate separation from mortgage origination.

The “I think it’s become an excuse for large brokerages that are losing money to say, ‘Oh, we need the ancillaries,’” Palmer said. “I love to say it looks great in the spreadsheet. Every big lender and big real estate brokerage who do a JV — you know, spreadsheet together — they’re going to make all this money because they’re going to underpay the loan officers and expect the Realtors to fall in line and use them. And in reality, that doesn’t happen.”

He pointed to recent pivots from major players, including Compass and Anywhere, away from large-scale “The idea of buying a larger legacy franchise brokerage, I worry, do they become a cloud brokerage because we bought them, or do we end up becoming a legacy franchise brokerage?” Palmer said.

He said with more than 500 teams inside LPT, growth feeds itself.

“Even if we didn’t attract any new teams — which we do continue to do — we would still grow as a brokerage as we help those teams grow inside of our network,” said Palmer.

He added that both Humaniz and Reside remain brokerage-agnostic. “It’s not about making teams move to LPT,” Palmer said. “It’s about helping teams grow.”

On private listings and the one thing he’d change

Palmer said LPT’s guiding principle on private listings is agent choice, though he called the concept largely irrelevant for most of the firm’s markets where the average sales price is roughly $390,000 to $400,000.

“I understand the idea of private listing if you’re in Manhattan,” Palmer said. “I’ve got a home out in Montana in a neighborhood where everything was a private listing. Nothing has ever hit the MLS. I understand there are certain areas and neighborhoods and properties where that’s necessary.

“But where I live in Central Florida, it’s irrelevant. With a half-million dollar home that was built by a builder in the last couple years, we would be doing a disservice [to add it to] a private listing network.”

Asked what he would change about the industry with a magic wand, Palmer pointed to the lag between effort and reward in real estate.

“The efforts an agent is putting out today — the open houses they’re holding, the neighbors they’re talking to — is not going to turn into any type of revenue for them for [about] four, five, six months down the road,” he said. “We see too many great entrepreneurs who have the potential and the talent, and they just don’t have the ability to last through that lag.

“I think it’s the absolute hardest part of this industry.”