What Makes a Real Producer?
For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been talking about how we sell houses (if you need a recap, you can find them here, here, and here).
We started with what to tackle, in what order, and why. Then we talked about what your house is actually worth, and what you need to consider before deciding how it should compete. Then we put the house on the market and talked about how to tell what’s working: watching buyers move from Awareness to Interest to Consideration to Conversion, and figuring out where things are breaking down when they don’t.
So by now, we’ve covered a lot of the what.
What needs to happen before a house goes to market. What information matters. What can be changed. What should be left alone. What to watch once buyers start responding. What to do when the response isn’t the one we wanted.
It’s an awful lot of responsibility.
Which brings us to the last lesson.
What does all of that require of the person doing it?
What values and traits do you need? What systems and methods? What kind of judgment? And if you’re delegating your agency to someone else—giving them the responsibility to act on your behalf—what exactly are you delegating it to?
In real estate, we have a pretty familiar way of answering that question.
Production.
How much did you sell? How many transactions did you close? Where did you rank? Did you make the list? Get the award? Hit the next level?
For a long time, I thought production told me something important, too.
In fact, early in my career, being recognized as a Real Producer felt like evidence that maybe I was becoming the kind of professional I wanted to be.
And then a whole lot changed.
Including my definition of the word producer.
I have a story.
I promise this story is worth it.
Because if you stick with me, I’m going to tell you what I value now. What I think you should actually look for when you hand someone this kind of responsibility. And, increasingly, who I hope keeps finding their way beneath our porch light.
But to explain that, I have to tell you how I got it wrong first.
Apparently, People Were Talking About Me on Facebook.
In late 2021, I kept getting notifications from a Facebook post. Real Producers Magazine had asked some version of: Who do you know who’s outstanding in real estate?
And people kept tagging me.
Elisa. Elisa. Elisa. Elisa.
I was watching it happen in real time, and I was so tickled.
Not because I was crushing some lifelong dream of being in a real estate magazine. I’d barely been in real estate long enough to have developed one.
I got my license in the summer of 2019. I did okay that year. Not enough to pay all the bills. Luckily, I was also working full-time as a consultant, which was more than paying them.
But I knew that if I was ever going to figure out whether I could really do this, I had to actually do it. So I gave myself a deadline. January 2020, I was going all in. I didn’t renew my consulting contracts. I signed up for Friends of the Cabildo because I wanted to understand more about the history of the city I was selling. I had a chip on my shoulder about not being born and raised here, not being able to answer “Where’d you go to school?” the way New Orleanians mean it.
I was going to learn. I was going to work. I was going to figure it out.
Three months later, mid-class at the Cabildo, we all got sent home because of COVID.
Cool.
Real estate agents were deemed “essential workers,” which sounded important, except nobody really knew what being an essential real estate agent was supposed to look like during a pandemic. Open houses disappeared, then came back with masks. Two weeks became an open-ended question about how we were going to live, much less sell houses. The rules changed. The world changed.
Eventually interest rates dropped, the real estate market took off, and it started to look like maybe I could dig myself out of the debt I’d accumulated betting on myself.
Then Hurricane Ida hit.
There were a lot of false starts.
So by the time those Facebook notifications started popping up in late 2021, I wasn’t just carrying a healthy dose of imposter syndrome. I tended to it like a little pet. I coddled it.
I had entered an industry where everyone was constantly talking about uncertainty, and I wanted people to be certain about me.
And suddenly, without my asking them to, a bunch of people were.
That felt really, really good.
Then Real Producers Called
I qualified by their production criteria, and the nominations apparently got somebody’s attention. I was going to be featured in the September 2022 issue.
There were forms. Interviews. A writer. A photo shoot. I was asked to nominate other agents for various categories and recommend vendors I worked with. I proudly put the Real Producers logo in my email signature.
At one point I actually emailed them to ask exactly how many Realtors were in NOMAR because I wanted to make sure I was accurately telling people how selective this thing was.
About 6,000, they told me.
Great. Out of 6,000!
Reader, I was new.
And I was certain I was headed to the cover.
September arrived.
Another agent was on the cover. My pal Gary was the Rising Star. And there I was, tucked cute in the back with a four-page feature called Creative Spark.
Which, to be fair, I thought was cute.
The writer, Dave Danielson, had picked up on something that was absolutely true about me even then: I liked solving puzzles. I liked the fact that no two transactions were the same. I liked figuring out how to get somebody from I don’t know if this is possible to Oh. We did it.
He wrote about my “creative spark” and entrepreneurial spirit.
Turns out, they got that part exactly right.
I just had absolutely no idea what I was going to build with it.
A brief word about the photographs.
A couple of photographs were included in the feature, and fortunately you had to pay for every photo thereafter that you wanted to keep.
I wanted to keep a lot.
About $1,700 worth of a lot.
See earlier where I mentioned my pet syndrome.
So you’ll be seeing these photographs gratuitously throughout this article.
I paid for them.
You’re going to look at them.
I Think I Misunderstood the Word “Producer”
In real estate, we use producer primarily as a measure of transaction volume, and therefore it connotes a certain level of prestige.
After all, a top producer sells an awful lot of real estate. We rank production. We award production. We put production on plaques and in bios and, occasionally, magazines.
But that isn’t the definition of producer that interests me anymore.
I mean producer in the more traditional sense of the word.
An inventor. A connector of dots and people. A creative problem-solver. Someone who creates something from nothing, finds incremental value, recognizes opportunities and figures out how to seize them. Someone who makes other people feel valuable and, ideally, makes them money.
You cannot be terribly risk-averse and do that job well.
And I think salespeople sometimes section themselves off from that kind of creativity. In most companies, Sales is one department and Marketing is on another floor.
Real estate doesn’t work that way.
Whether you’re a one-man band, part of a team, a broker or, in my case now, the owner of an independent company, at some point your job becomes invention.
You’re being hired to anticipate things your client cannot anticipate because they don’t know which questions to ask yet. To recognize opportunities they cannot see yet. To bring expertise, judgment, people and resources to bear on their interests—and to do it without exposing them to massive unnecessary risk.
That’s not just production.
That’s agency.
So What Should You Actually Look For?
I don’t particularly care whether someone comes to me with the highest production numbers in the room.
Production tells me you’ve done business. That’s useful information.
It doesn’t tell me how you do business.
More importantly, it doesn’t tell me how you think.
I value people who reach dead ends and don’t immediately double back. Instead, they take a beat and think: What would need to happen for me to go through, over or around this challenge? What would have to happen to make that possible? Is it within my control? Or do I know somebody who would know how, or can take me there with them?
What I’m describing is curiosity, but not curiosity alone.
Curiosity without good judgment is recklessness. And the real estate world does not need more recklessness.
What we need are people who can connect dots. People willing to invent something when the obvious answers—or the only available answers—aren’t good enough. But who also know that sometimes the smartest thing you can tell a client is, No. Let’s not go there. Keep your money.
I want people who understand that expertise isn’t about mastery. It isn’t even about how many years you’ve been practicing something.
It’s about practice over perfection.
Sure, it’s knowing what you know. But it’s also recognizing what you don’t. Knowing who or what can fill that gap. And then pulling it all together to further somebody else’s interests.
If you can look back over your real estate career and think of a client you were proud of helping two years ago, but also think about how much more that same client would benefit from working with you today, you’re practicing.
We all are.
And you’re headed in the right direction.
I look for people who value autonomy and can handle all the responsibility that comes with it. Who don’t need to be handed scripts, but also don’t mistake independence for having nothing left to learn. People who recognize just how much can be learned from others.
And I want people who actually like agency. The real kind.
Not agency as in the company whose logo is on your sign. Agency as the relationship created when one person is entrusted to act on behalf of another—and the capacity to actually act.
These are the people the world wants to hire.
They make decisions with the client. They bring their client educated choices. They unearth risk and reward. They find value in bringing people opportunity. And they’re not afraid to get something done once and improve it rather than waiting around to get it perfect the first time.
Because when somebody hires you, they’re handing you an enormous amount of responsibility and hoping you deliver on whatever you’ve promised to achieve.
And if you’re my kind of person, you’re not asking:
What price do you want?
You’re asking:
What goals matter to you?
And then you’re describing what it would take to get there and leading them along the way.
What Would Have to Happen?
There’s a question I ask all the time:
What would have to happen for this to work better?
A seller tells us they need a number that, at first glance, looks unrealistic.
It would be very easy to think: Jesus. Do you know what it would take to get there? Are these people real?
But wait.
What would it take?
Is any of it within our control?
If it is, can we attach a value to it?
Can we create something? Augment something? Delete something? Change the way the house competes? And does the evidence suggest the potential result is worth the money, time, risk and effort?
Sometimes the answer is paint.
Sometimes it’s landscaping.
Sometimes it’s furniture, a doorway, an inspection, a repair, a floor plan, a better story or a completely different launch.
Sometimes the answer is: Nope. Don’t spend that money. The problem is the price.
The producer’s job isn’t to make everything bigger. It’s to figure out what the production requires.
That’s what we’ve really been talking about throughout this Back to School series.
Preparation before the house reaches the market. Positioning it against what buyers are actually choosing. Pricing, presentation and promotion working together. Then, once the audience arrives, paying attention to what they do and changing course when the evidence tells us to.
When our clients let us do that work with them, they not only get more real about the decision in front of them.
They allow us to produce real results.
I did not intend that pun.
But there it is.
Somewhere Along the Way, I Had to Become a Broker
This is not a game of Chutes and Ladders.
I did not get my broker’s license, open a brokerage and collect a few agents’ licenses and suddenly land on the final square of Real Estate Career.
Being a broker is an instrument.
It gives me the ability to create, construct and invent without having boutique or corporate restrictions placed on the work. We follow the law. We follow licensing law. We learn from best practices.
We do not have to swallow every convention simply because somebody decided it was a best practice once.
And, truthfully, I had hoped I wouldn’t have to do this.
I had spent years in corporate positions before real estate. I’d built and scaled multimillion-dollar businesses with small, talented teams of my choosing. I’d been burned by parts of corporate life. I liked consulting. I liked being an independent contractor. I liked bringing other independent people in when I needed them.
It felt freeing.
So when I got into real estate, I made myself a promise to play small.
I would be independent. I would control my own work. I would do good work for my clients. I would not build another machine.
There she goes again.
And Then There Was Sara
Sara Skjerli was the first person I hired before Cool Murphy became a brokerage.
We worked at the same brokerage during that awkward we’re all back at work but COVID is still definitely around period.
And I found her incredibly annoying.
She popped up like a whack-a-mole. Constantly. Cheerfully. Bubbly all the time.
This is coming from someone who has been accused of having a Pollyanna complex and who was, quite literally, a cheerleader.
Still.
It was like a puppy that kept humping your leg.
Eventually I realized something. Sara didn’t know where to begin. She was doing her best to bond with people she thought might be worthwhile as friends, colleagues or mentors.
And you know what?
Good for her.
Meanwhile, I had more work than I knew what to do with, so I wondered: Does Sara want to do any of this? I gave her a couple of open houses. A few scraps of opportunity that had been thrown my way. She started asking questions the way sponges ask questions.
Then she listened. She implemented. And she grew.
And I remembered something about myself that I had apparently been trying very hard to forget: I really like leading people.
I like watching someone learn something and then use it. I like building with a small group of talented people. I like creating things that can feed more than just me.
It was clear that the combination of Sara and me had benefited Sara.
I wanted more of that.
Autonomous, But Not Alone
When I decided to build a team, I had one guiding principle for it: it was for people who wanted to be autonomous, but not alone.
Because those seemed to be the choices available to me. Be independent and lonely, or join the thing, follow the system, drink the Kool-Aid.
I didn’t want either.
For a while, I hoped I could find the thing I wanted somewhere else. Plenty of people told me I would eventually become a broker. I kind of hoped they were wrong.
Turns out, I couldn’t find it because it didn’t exist. And apparently I couldn’t will it into existence either.
I was going to have to get out there and put in the work.
So here I am, building things again.
Methodologies. Systems. Scale. Staff. Admin. Compliance.
Ugh.
But now, when I start feeling that old resistance, I know the question to ask.
What would have to happen for this to work better?
What would have to happen so an agent could be autonomous, but not alone?
What would allow her to spend more of her time doing the part of this job that actually requires her judgment?
How do we give her the expertise, infrastructure, people and resources to do more for a client without requiring her to become an expert in absolutely everything herself?
How do we build a business where agency means exercising judgment and bringing those resources to bear in somebody else’s interest—not simply processing their transaction?
That’s the thing I kept hoping I could find.
So eventually, I built it.
Which Brings Me Back to 2022 Elisa.
I think when somebody asks what your younger self would think if she could see you now, you’re supposed to say she’d be shocked.
Or she’d be so proud.
My answer is more complicated.
I think part of her would look around and say:
Well. There you go again.
Because I knew how to build and scale businesses long before I got into real estate.
I just thought I was done doing it.
What I didn’t understand was that the independence I loved also left me untethered. I didn’t want a hierarchy. I didn’t want somebody else’s corporate culture. I didn’t want to build for the sake of scale.
But I did want people.
I wanted to create opportunities that could feed more than me.
And once I remembered that, everything changed.
Who Do I Hope Finds Us?
Sara embodied something I would eventually come to value enormously: attitude over aptitude.
Aptitude can be taught. Attitude cannot.
I came to love her enthusiasm and her unbridled optimism. Her intelligence. Her tenacity.
She’s no longer annoying.
She’s beloved.
And it turns out I look for essentially the same things in the people I build with that I think you should look for in the people you hire.
I love that Desiree has her own aesthetic and point of view.
I love that Courtney saw us doing something differently and thought, I want to do that kind of thing. I want that for my clients.
I love that Craig is open-minded about places and challenges other people might turn away from because the bricks that made them are 200 years old.
I love that Darcie finds a way to cap while chauffeuring her kids all over tarnation—and somehow is also the agent whose clients consistently praise how present she is with them.
These are useful things to know about the people I choose to have join us.
An MLS production report doesn’t tell me any of them.
And when I look at the evidence, every agent who was with us in January and dedicated themselves full-time to this market has capped.
That matters to me, but not because capping itself is the point.
People ask me all the time how many agents I want Cool Murphy to have, as though that’s the metric by which I’ll eventually know whether this worked.
I don’t think about it that way.
I want every agent who’s here to be invested and successful. I want five-star reviews from clients who become fanatics. I want leads eager to jump on a wait list because an agent’s time is worth waiting for.
That’s how I’ll know we’re exceptional.
Not because of body count.
We’re not actively recruiting.
We just leave the porch light on for people who are drawn to it.
So, What Makes a Real Producer?
In 2022, I wanted two things.
I wanted to be taken more seriously in an industry I thought was overdue for disruption.
And I wanted to be an author of some of that disruption.
Not the author.
And, as it turns out, not the cover.
An author.
I couldn’t have envisioned then that I’d become a broker. I certainly couldn’t have envisioned that I’d literally write a book about a methodology we’d developed. Or that we’d build an independent brokerage around the idea that representation can be more creative, more rigorous and more useful than simply getting something listed and sticking with it until it sells.
I just knew I wanted to do things differently on purpose.
Four years later, 4,303 real estate agents subscribe to our emails.
Which is pretty funny considering how excited I was in 2022 to have somebody else write four pages about me.
Now I’m the author.
And people are actually reading it.
Where I rank doesn’t matter much to me anymore.
What feels good is being remembered for delivering on the promise: bringing insight and resources to someone to further their interests and doing it well.
It’s a hell of a lot of responsibility.
I like it.
And maybe that’s the part of the word producer I’ve come to care about most.
Not being recognized as one.
Producing something real.
Turns out, that’s considerably more valuable than a cover slot.
Celebrated for her next-level creative approach to real estate, Elisa Cool Murphy is the author of Prepped to Sell: What Works Even When the Market Doesn't. She is an award-winning, top-performing real estate broker in New Orleans and the founder and owner of Cool Murphy Real Estate.
Contact Her -
email: cool@coolmurphy.com
Facebook: @homeinneworleans
IG: @coolmurphynola
YouTube: @coolmurphynola
phone: 504-321-3194
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