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, and 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, and 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.
