How I started teaching real estate classes is a story I don’t mind telling.
In real estate, understanding contracts, pricing, and client psychology is what actually separates good outcomes from mediocre ones. I came up as a practitioner first — working transactions, learning the market, building a track record. It was the desire to go deeper and pass along what I’d learned that eventually pulled me into teaching.
Early on, other agents and brokers told me I read a real estate contract differently than most people in the business. I could put together an offer for a client while simultaneously working out how to position them for negotiation — where the outs were, what performance deadlines mattered for a buyer versus a seller, and where the leverage points sat. A lot happens after an offer is accepted, and knowing every out, loophole, and nuance in real time is what keeps a client protected.
My comparative market analyses were different too, and there’s a reason for that: I wasn’t taught to do CMAs by another agent or broker — I was taught by appraisers. That meant learning to break a property down piece by piece rather than relying on a flat price-per-square-foot number, which is still how too many agents price homes. When the National Association of REALTORS® rolled out the REALTORS Property Resource (RPR) platform in 2010, it was a natural fit — I could use it to build CMAs that looked more like an appraiser’s adjustments than a typical agent’s guess.
Being asked to teach by instructors, schools, and the Texas REALTORS association wasn’t something I expected. I appreciated the recognition, but I wasn’t sure I’d be the kind of instructor agents would want to sit through. Once I took the leap, I realized I had something worth sharing — and a different way of teaching it.
My approach has always been about bridging the gap between theory and practice. Years of hands-on transaction work, combined with the appraiser-style approach I use for CMAs and pricing, gave me a way to teach pricing and negotiation that lines up with how appraisers actually think, not the shortcuts a lot of agents get taught. I also learned that clarity matters more than credentials in a classroom. If I couldn’t explain something simply, it didn’t matter how much I knew.
When I started teaching, I had to write my own course content, and I wanted it to hold up for a room of senior, experienced agents while still being useful to someone brand new. I treated my classes like a room of professionals, not a mandatory box to check, and I never wanted continuing education to feel like a sentence people had to serve. I wanted people to talk, ask questions, and push back. That’s what happened — people started coming back, recommending my classes to colleagues, and treating the room like an open discussion instead of a lecture.
To date, I’ve written more than 100 classes and taught them across the country, in brokerages, at REALTOR® associations, and at conventions. The approach has stayed the same every time: respect the subject, respect the room, and have an honest conversation instead of a canned presentation.
Teaching turned out to be less of a career pivot and more of an extension of the same thing I do for clients: take something complicated and make it usable. It’s why I still teach today, alongside representing buyers and sellers.
Ready to take the next step? contact Robbie to get started.
