Lon Welsh says ‘sophisticated’ buyers will push brokers to evolve in 2025

Velt: You founded Your Castle in 2004. You achieved incredible growth to become one of the largest independent brokerages in Colorado. Talk to me a little bit about some of those key strategies that helped you scale and grow as quickly as you did. 

Welsh: There’s three big drivers: retention, recruiting and then scaling the back-office things.

From a retention standpoint, it requires building a tribe culture of knowledge sharing and  cooperation, as opposed to when I first received my license. I was at a large franchise that had a different culture.

We do a quarterly meeting where we share a lot of information on real estate trends and actionable sales growth ideas. We also do a lot of homegrown, differentiated classes.

From a recruiting standpoint, when we’re meeting somebody new, we’ll try to ask them, “What are some opportunity areas where you wish you  could grow a little more?” We’ll have something that can fill the gap that they’re needing. That’s how we attract people, and recruiting has always been a full-time job.

Velt: How are you able to make recruiting work and what are the secrets to that success? 

Welsh: Our director of recruiting at Your Castle has been with me for 14 years. It’s really an outlier and it’s tough. The core of the job is making a lot of calls, getting a lot of rejection, and  being OK with making $70 to set two or three appointments. It’s tough to do that every day. So you’ve just got to find the right personality type.

Velt: I want to talk about artificial intelligence. You’re working on a book, so it’s obviously transforming the real estate industry. How do you really see it impacting brokerages and  agents now and over the next five years?

Welsh: It might be like two or three years where we see a really significant change. Repeat and referral is the cornerstone of the business. There’s been an unbelievable amount of change in the last 20 years. Yet the way that agents match with clients hasn’t changed.

To end the conversation, Welsh offers advice to brokers who may be struggling in today’s marketplace.

Welsh: Just having a positive attitude about this and saying, “Where’s the opportunity in this? Is there something I can communicate to agents that differs from other brokers? Maybe there’s a positive spin I can bring while others remain negative.” And that’s a great way to stand out. People don’t want to be in a negative environment. 

Consumers are going to get more sophisticated. You’re going to see bifurcation, where the number of consumers who feel like they can do a larger set of the activities is going to increase somewhat. 

There’s going to be a segment of consumers that says, “I could probably figure this out. I’m too busy. Moving is stressful enough. I’d like to have more of a concierge level of service over a full-service brokerage.”