When we refer a client, we want to know they’ll be in knowledgeable, responsive, and capable hands.

More Than a Referral List

In addition to receiving referral opportunities from Momentum Realty, you’ll become part of a growing network of proven agents across Florida and Georgia.

Network members can build relationships and exchange referrals when clients move outside their markets—creating opportunities for business to flow in both directions.

You may be a strong fit if you:

• Closed 12 or more transactions in the past 12 months

• Have a proven record of five-star reviews on Google, Zillow, Realtor.com, or similar platforms

• Respond quickly when a new referral comes in

• Communicate consistently from introduction through closing

• Deliver the kind of service clients enthusiastically recommend

• Want to grow through high-quality referrals and collaborate with other proven agents

Immediate Florida Openings

We are currently seeking agents in:

Bay, Bradford, Brevard, Calhoun, Charlotte, Citrus, Collier, Columbia, DeSoto, Dixie, Franklin, Gadsden, Gilchrist, Glades, Gulf, Hamilton, Hardee, Hendry, Hernando, Highlands, Hillsborough, Holmes, Indian River, Jackson, Jefferson, Lafayette, Lake, Lee, Levy, Liberty, Madison, Martin, Miami-Dade, Monroe, Okaloosa, Okeechobee, Osceola, Palm Beach, Pasco, Pinellas, Polk, Santa Rosa, Seminole, Sumter, Suwannee, Taylor, Union, Walton, and Washington counties.

Ready to Join the Network?

To be considered, please provide:

• Your primary market and coverage area

• The number of homes you sold in the past 12 months

• A link to your reviews, website, or professional profile

Apply to Become a Referral Partner

Not a fit yourself, but know an excellent agent in one of these markets? Please share this post with them.

Questions? Contact Jon at jon@movewithmomentum.com or visit movewithmomentum.com.

Most media gets posted - and then forgotten.

Meanwhile, the agents gaining ground in today’s market are turning attention into appointments through better content, stronger follow-up, and smarter AI-powered systems.

On Tuesday, August 25, Momentum Realty is bringing together six of Northeast Florida’s top real estate producers to share exactly how they’re doing it.

This isn’t a motivational seminar or a room full of abstract marketing advice. It’s a working mastermind built around real examples, honest conversations, and strategies you can use on your very next listing.

What you’ll learn

During the mastermind, our panelists will pull back the curtain on:

• Their RESULTS

• How they plan content

• Their social media posting cadence

• What converts

• The follow-up sequences they actually use

• The AI tools they rely on every week

• The mistakes they’ve made - and how you can avoid them

You’ll hear what is working in their businesses right now, why it works, and how to adapt it to your own market.

Meet the panel

The conversation will feature five producers with expertise across social media, luxury, new construction, relocation, investment properties, probate, and waterfront real estate, along with the co-founder of Momentum Realty:

• Tammy Baranowski — Top 5% Producer, Social Media

• Amanda Kinard — Top 5% Producer, Luxury and New Construction

• Kady Andreoli — SFR, Relocation Specialist

• Jon Brooks — Co-Founder, Momentum Realty

• Chris Moore — Top 5% Producer, Investment and Probate

• Greg Grant — Luxury and Waterfront

Momentum Realty Assistant Broker Michelle Weaver will moderate the panel.

Following the panel and live Q&A, I’ll give a featured presentation on the media and data systems behind one of Florida’s fastest-growing independent brokerages - and how agents can apply those systems to their own businesses in 2026.

The agenda

10:00 a.m. — The Panel: Media That Wins Business
Six top producers share their strategies and real-world examples.

11:00 a.m. — Live Panel Q&A
Bring your toughest media, marketing, or follow-up question.

11:15 a.m. — Featured Presentation with Jon Brooks
A closer look at the media, data, and AI systems helping Momentum grow.

11:45 a.m. — Final Q&A and Close

Event details

Date: Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Time: 10:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Eastern
Doors open: 9:40 a.m.
Location: Jacksonville Golf & Country Club
Address: 3985 Hunt Club Road N., Jacksonville, FL 32224
Cost: Free
Attendance: Active real estate agents only

Bring a notepad - and come ready to discuss what’s working, where you’re getting stuck, and what happens after your listing media goes live.

Why this conversation matters now

Buyers are taking longer to make decisions, and listings need more exposure than they did in the recent past. But winning in this environment doesn’t necessarily require spending more money.

It requires a better system.

The strongest agents are learning how to connect content, conversations, data, and follow-up into one repeatable process. That is what this mastermind is designed to explore.

Every market eventually changes. The agents who adapt first tend to win.

Attendance is intentionally capped (we only have 10 seats left, reserve yours now) so everyone has an opportunity to participate and ask questions. If you’re an active agent who wants practical ideas you can immediately put to work, we’d love to have you in the room.

- JB, keep crushing it! Onward!
movewithmomentum.com

Florida does not have a housing shortage. It has a mismatch, a pipeline almost nobody counts, and a repricing that will take years to finish.

I went on Market Insider last week and said something that gets me in trouble every time I say it: the housing shortage story you keep hearing does not describe the market I work in every day.

I want to be careful here, because this argument gets flattened into a headline within about ten seconds. So let me start with what I am not saying.

First, what I am not arguing

I am not arguing that housing shortages are a myth. They are real, and in some places they are severe.

If you live in Boston, coastal California, or large parts of the Northeast, you live in a market where it is genuinely, structurally hard to build. Zoning is restrictive. Land is constrained. Approvals take years. Construction costs are punishing. Those markets have been under-building for decades, and it shows up in prices, in rents, and in young people leaving.

That is a real shortage. I am not here to tell those people their experience is fake.

What I am arguing is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss:

housing is not a national market, and a national average can hide two opposite problems at the same time.

The United States can have a genuine deficit of homes in constrained metros while Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Colorado simultaneously carry too much of the wrong product at the wrong price. Both things are true right now.

Averaging them together produces a number that describes nowhere.

Ask anyone who tells you there is a national shortage two questions:

1. Which market?

2. Which product, at which price point?

The answers usually fall apart, because a shortage of $250,000 starter homes in Jacksonville and a glut of $700,000 new-construction homes in the same county are not offsetting problems. They are separate problems that happen to share a zip code.

Here is the part people miss. A shortage is measured against demand, and demand is not population, it is qualified buyers.

You can add residents and lose buyers at the same time, and that is roughly what has happened. Wages in Northeast Florida have not kept pace with either general inflation or housing costs. Jacksonville home prices roughly doubled over the last decade while wages rose something closer to half that.

Florida’s median household income sits near $68,000. Comfortably carrying a typical home here, once you load in the taxes and the insurance we actually pay, takes something closer to $100,000 to $115,000.

That gap is the whole story. More people, fewer buyers (especially locals, who are often priced out).

What actually happened: a demand shock, not a shortage

Before 2020, nobody in Jacksonville was talking about a shortage. We had inventory. We had normal days on market. The market functioned.

Then we got a demand shock.

Between 2020 and 2022, historically low interest rates collided with a migration wave, and Florida absorbed something like a decade of demand in about three years. Hedge funds and mom-and-pop investors piled into starter homes, accelerating a trend that had been running quietly since 2012. Prices went vertical.

Builders did what any rational business would do. They built where the margin was, which in Florida meant the mid-level luxury band roughly between $500,000 and $700,000. A builder can make several times more gross profit on a $700,000 house than a $200,000 house using the same crew, the same permitting process, and roughly the same overhead. I do not blame them for that decision. I would have made it too.

But that decision assumed the demand wave would keep rolling.

It did not.

Florida’s net domestic migration (that is domestic only, people moving here from other states, not international immigration and not natural population change) went like this, per Census Bureau estimates compiled by the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research:

That is a decline of roughly 93% in three years. Florida, which spent years at or near the top of the national migration rankings, finished 2025 ranked eighth. Miami-Dade County alone recorded a domestic net loss of nearly 73,000 residents.

International migration, which mattered enormously to Florida, has also fallen sharply from its peak.

I want to be precise about what this does and does not prove. It does not prove Florida is emptying out. Mid-sized counties like Polk, Pasco, and Marion are still growing, and Northeast Florida is still adding people.

What it proves is that the demand assumption underneath a very large amount of 2021-2023 construction is no longer valid. Builders committed capital to lots based on a migration curve that has since fallen by more than 90%.

You cannot un-pour a foundation when the demand forecast changes.

Why builders discount without cutting the price

Here is where brokerage experience matters more than any dataset, because this is the part you can only see from inside a transaction.

When a builder cuts the sticker price on a home, it creates a new, lower comparable sale for every remaining home in that community. That damages appraisals on homes still under contract, angers buyers who closed last quarter, and resets the value of the entire remaining phase. It is the most visible and most expensive way for a builder to move a house.

So builders reach for tools that lower the buyer’s monthly payment without lowering the recorded price.

This is not a fringe practice and it is not a conspiracy. It is disclosed, it is legal, and it is now the dominant form of discounting in American homebuilding. Per NAHB survey data, 63% of builders reported using sales incentives in July 2026, the sixteenth consecutive month at 60% or higher, and that share hit 67% in December 2025, the highest in more than five years.

The main instruments:

• Mortgage rate buydowns, frequently financed through the builder’s own affiliated lender using forward commitments purchased in bulk. This is the big one, because a builder can buy a rate reduction wholesale far more cheaply than it can absorb an equivalent price cut.

• Closing cost credits, which cover real cash the buyer would otherwise bring to the table.

• Design center and upgrade packages, where the builder sets the stated value of the incentive. A flooring or fixture package presented as a $15,000 upgrade may cost the builder a fraction of that at their trade pricing.

• Lender-paid incentives tied to using the affiliated mortgage company, which is why the financing conversation and the price conversation are never really separate.

How big is this? Industry-wide, incentives are running somewhere around 7% to 8% of sale price. And this is the number I would put in front of any skeptic: PulteGroup disclosed incentives at 10.9% of gross sales price in the first quarter of 2026. That is a public company, in its own filings, telling you that roughly eleven cents of every sales dollar is going back out the door as incentive.

When I said on the show that builders are using up to 10% of a home’s value to move product, that was not a guess from the field. It is in the financials.

Now, the honest nuance, because I want this argument to survive contact with someone who actually follows the builders: builders are also cutting prices outright. NAHB reported 37% of builders cutting prices in July 2026, at an average reduction of about 6%. So the accurate statement is not “builders never cut prices.” It is that incentives are roughly twice as common as price cuts, and incentives are the portion that never reaches the public price record.

That distinction matters enormously for you as a buyer, and here is why.

If you buy at a recorded price of $600,000 with $60,000 of incentives attached, the county records a $600,000 sale. But the economic price of that house was closer to $540,000. When you try to sell in three or four years, you are competing against a builder who is still selling the next phase with the same incentive structure.

That is how buyers end up underwater without the price index ever appearing to crash.

The inventory almost nobody counts

Months of supply is the number everyone quotes, and in new-construction-heavy markets it is close to useless on its own.

Here is why. Months of supply is typically built from active MLS listings. But in many new construction communities, and this is consistent with what our agents see and what builder representatives tell us directly, builders list only a model or two in the MLS. The rest of what they control does not appear.

What does not appear breaks into five distinct buckets, and they carry very different timelines:

1. Completed standing inventory. Finished, vacant homes with a certificate of occupancy. This is immediately competitive with your resale listing today. Drive the community and you will see them.

2. Homes under construction. Vertical, unsold, delivering in weeks or months. This is competition for the next two quarters, and the builder’s carrying costs are running the entire time.

3. Finished lots. Cleared, permitted, utilities in. A builder can go vertical here on short notice, and the capital is already sunk, which is precisely why they will build rather than sit.

4. Planned or platted phases. Phase two, three, and four. Entitled, financed, and scheduled. Not competition this month, very much competition over a multi-year hold.

5. Land pipeline and option contracts. The longest-dated bucket, and the one builders can actually walk away from, which is exactly what they do when demand breaks.

Only bucket one, and only sometimes, reaches your headline inventory number.

This is why I get frustrated with a clean “4.5 months of supply, that’s a seller’s market” take. Months of supply is a snapshot of listed competition. It says almost nothing about committed competition. A resale seller in a new construction corridor is not competing against the six houses listed on their street. They are competing against a builder with finished lots, a sales trailer, an affiliated lender, and a strong institutional incentive to keep the recorded price high while discounting the payment.

You are not competing with a neighbor. You are competing with a balance sheet.

Where does the visible data support the oversupply case? Condominiums, most clearly. Florida condo and townhouse inventory ran about 8.1 months in the second quarter of 2026, and condo-specific readings in parts of the state have been running considerably higher, with South Florida condos around 10 months in June 2026 and some measures of Florida condo supply in the 12-month range, against single-family closer to 4.5 months. Whatever else you want to call that, it is not a shortage. Condos also carry Florida-specific pressure that single-family does not: milestone inspection requirements and reserve funding rules have pushed association costs up hard, and that shows up as both new listings and dead deals.

So when someone tells you Florida has a housing shortage, the fair response is: which product? Because the condo market and the entry-level single-family market are telling opposite stories in the same county.

Rents: what is actually happening, and where I need to be precise

On the show I said rents are down 10% to 20% from the peak in some areas. That is true in specific submarkets and on a net effective basis, and it is not true as a metro-wide asking-rent statistic. Those are different measurements.

Here is the honest picture for Jacksonville, which is the market I know best:

• Metro average asking rent is roughly flat to modestly down. Jacksonville apartment rents are running around $1,504, down about 0.4% year over year, with broader Florida metro readings down in the 1.4% to 1.9% range.

• Vacancy is the real story. Jacksonville multifamily vacancy has climbed to roughly 12.2%, the highest among Florida’s major metros, as new deliveries outpaced absorption. Vacancy moves before face rent does.

• Concessions are widespread. Free rent periods and waived fees are standard on new lease-ups. This is why net effective rent, what the landlord actually collects over the lease term, has fallen considerably more than the advertised rent.

The distinction is simple. A landlord will give you two months free before they will drop the advertised rent, for the same reason a builder will buy your rate down before they cut the price: the concession is invisible to the comp set, and the price cut is permanent and public. Same playbook, different asset.

Layer on the supply side. Jacksonville absorbed a large multifamily delivery wave at the same time that sellers who could not get their number started renting their homes out instead. Those accidental landlords are not underwriting a rental business. They are covering a mortgage. They compete directly with professionally managed apartments, and they are far more willing to take a below-pro-forma number because their alternative is a listing that will not sell.

Multifamily distress: some of it is public, most of it is deferred

There is real distress on the multifamily side, and the reason you have not seen a wave of headlines is not that it does not exist. It is that commercial real estate does not reprice the way stocks do.

A lot of 2021 and 2022 multifamily was acquired with floating-rate bridge debt on two to three year terms, underwritten to aggressive rent growth and an exit cap rate that assumed cheap money would still be there. Rent growth did not materialize. Cap rates moved against them. Insurance in Florida moved violently against them.

When those loans hit maturity, the borrower has a gap. And what happens next is usually not a foreclosure. It is:

• a maturity extension, sometimes with a fee and a rate cap purchase,

• a loan modification that defers or capitalizes interest,

• a rescue equity or preferred equity injection that dilutes the sponsor but avoids a default event,

• or a negotiated paydown where the sponsor brings cash to right-size the loan.

Lenders do this because taking the keys means marking the asset, staffing up a special servicing function, and realizing a loss today rather than hoping for a better rate environment tomorrow. Extend and pretend is not a slur. It is a rational response to an uncertain rate path, and it is the single biggest reason commercial repricing takes years instead of quarters.

It also means the published data understates the stress. A loan that has been modified is performing. A property that has not traded has no new comp. The distress is real, it is just sitting in a file drawer rather than in a price index.

The distress that is already showing up

On the residential side, the numbers have already turned, and this is where I push back hardest on anyone telling you the consumer is fine.

FHA delinquencies reached 11.88% in the first quarter of 2026 per the Mortgage Bankers Association’s National Delinquency Survey, up from 11.52% in the fourth quarter of 2025, which was itself the highest since early 2021. FHA foreclosure inventory hit its highest level since the fourth quarter of 2018.

Two things make that number more serious than it looks.

First, the timing is not an accident. Pandemic-era FHA loss mitigation options expired at the end of September 2025. For years, a borrower who missed payments could move the arrears to the back of the loan and repeat that process. That door closed. Several years of deferred distress is now working through the system at once, and the MBA notes that borrowers in required trial payment plans still count as delinquent until a permanent workout is in place.

Second, look at the spread. FHA delinquency at 11.88% against bank-booked single-family mortgages near 1.89% is a gap of roughly ten percentage points, wider than it was heading into 2008.

This matters for Florida specifically because FHA financing was heavily used to move new construction at peak pricing to buyers with thin down payments. Those are precisely the households with the least cushion when taxes and insurance reset. And Florida is a judicial foreclosure state, so every one of these files moves through a court. That adds quarters, sometimes years, to the timeline.

Slow is not the same as stopped.

Where my 31% to 42% number actually comes from

When I say I expect a correction of roughly 31% to 42% from the October 2022 peak in our market, people reasonably ask whether that is a feeling or a model. It is a model, and I want to explain the reasoning, because the conclusion is only as good as the framework underneath it.

Some background so you know where the framework comes from. Before I built a brokerage, I worked in real estate investment banker at a Wall Street bank, where I did lead underwriting work on institutional single-family rental portfolios. That meant underwriting the entities that built this asset class: American Homes 4 Rent, Invitation Homes, Progress Residential, and FirstKey Homes, among others. My job was to answer, at scale and with real capital at risk, a single question: How much can I lend against this asset, and what is my downside risk?

That question is the backbone of the model.

Here is the logic, without the proprietary parts.

Start from the floor, not the ceiling. Most housing forecasts start from today’s price and apply a growth or decline rate. I do the opposite. I ask: at what price does an all-cash institutional or private investor step in and buy these houses as rentals? That bid is the floor under the market, because when prices reach a level where the rental math works, capital shows up and stops the decline. Housing does not fall to zero. It falls to the investor bid.

Then underwrite the house the way an institution would. That means building a real cash flow, not a back-of-napkin cap rate:

• Gross rent, marked to what the unit actually leases for today, not the 2022 pro forma.

• Vacancy and credit loss, because no portfolio runs at 100% occupancy and some tenants do not pay.

• Property taxes, and in Florida this is where models break. A non-homesteaded investor does not get the Save Our Homes assessment cap. On acquisition the property is reassessed at market value, and the annual cap is 10% rather than 3%. Investors get taxed harder, every year.

• Insurance, which in Florida is not a rounding error. It is frequently the difference between a deal and a pass, and it has been rising while rents have flattened.

• Maintenance and capital expenditure reserves, because a rental consumes roofs, HVAC systems, and turns. Institutions reserve for this. Amateur investors do not, which is why so many of them are struggling right now.

• Property management, whether you pay a third party or absorb the cost yourself.

• HOA and CDD, which in Northeast Florida new construction can be substantial and are frequently omitted from casual analyses.

Then apply a hurdle. Institutional capital does not buy for zero. It has a required return, and that return has to clear the cost of financing plus a risk premium. When the ten-year Treasury moves, that hurdle moves with it. This is the part most consumer-facing housing commentary misses entirely: when financing costs rise, the price an investor can pay falls, even if rents are perfectly stable. Cap rate expansion is not sentiment. It is arithmetic.

Then solve for price. Given today’s rents, today’s Florida insurance and tax load, realistic maintenance, and a hurdle that clears current financing costs, what purchase price produces enough monthly cash flow, in my model roughly $300 a month per house, for an investor to actually transact?

Run that, and the answer in our market lands about 31% to 42% below the October 2022 peak.

For scale: Northeast Florida prices fell roughly 36% during the global financial crisis.

My range brackets that, which some people find alarming and others find implausible. I would point out that it lands there not because I picked a scary number, but because the inputs, especially Florida insurance and non-homestead taxes, have deteriorated in ways that push the investor bid down hard.

What would make me wrong:

• A meaningful drop in mortgage rates would lower the hurdle and lift the floor.

• A genuine reversal in migration would restore the demand assumption.

• Florida insurance costs stabilizing or falling would materially improve investor math. There are early signs of rate moderation, and if that holds it moves my numbers.

• Wage growth outrunning price declines would close the affordability gap from the other direction.

• Sustained construction of genuinely affordable product would change the mix rather than the price.

I am not certain. I am underwriting a range and telling you the assumptions. That is different from a prediction, and you should treat anyone who claims certainty about a five to ten year housing path with suspicion, including me.

“But this is not 2008”

The critics are right on the facts. Today’s homeowner balance sheet is dramatically healthier than 2007:

• Roughly 1.6% to 1.9% of mortgaged homes are underwater, versus something like 23% to 26% at the depths of the last crisis.

• Homeowner equity is at record levels, in the neighborhood of $17 trillion.

• More than 90% of outstanding mortgages are fixed rate, most locked at generational lows.

• Homeowners are withdrawing equity at a fraction of the pace they did in 2005 and 2006.

• Underwriting since Dodd-Frank has been genuinely conservative. The liar loans are gone.

All true. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and any housing bear who waves this away is not being straight with you.

Here is why I still think prices correct anyway.

Prices are set at the margin, not at the average.

This is the single most important concept, so let me be concrete. Suppose there are 1,000 homes in your community. In a given year, maybe 30 of them sell. Those 30 transactions set the appraised value of all 1,000. The 970 homeowners with 3% mortgages and enormous equity are not participating in price formation at all. They are not bidding. They are not offering. They are spectators.

Value is determined by the marginal buyer, meaning the most motivated qualified buyer available at a given moment, and the marginal seller, meaning the person who has to transact regardless of price.

So the question is not “are most homeowners fine?” They are. The question is: who is forced to sell, and who is able to buy?

On the forced-sell side, you do not need many. You need the ones with the classic triggers: death, divorce, disease, job loss, and relocation. Those happen at a fairly steady rate in any population. Add the 2022-2024 peak buyers with thin equity, the FHA cohort now running at 11.88% delinquency, the accidental landlords carrying negative monthly cash flow, and the builders who carry inventory on credit lines and cannot simply refuse to sell. A builder is a permanently motivated seller. That is the business model.

On the able-to-buy side, the pool has shrunk because payments, taxes, and insurance have all risen faster than wages.

A small number of motivated sellers meeting a shrunken buyer pool sets the comp.

The comp sets the appraisal. The appraisal sets what the next buyer can borrow. That is the transmission mechanism, and it does not require a single homeowner with a 3% mortgage to sell anything.

The 2008 comparison is also misleading in a second way. In 2008, the shock was a credit event: the financing disappeared, defaults spiked, and prices fell fast and violently. Today’s is an affordability event: financing exists, but the payment does not work for the marginal buyer. Credit events crash quickly. Affordability events grind.

The endpoint can be similar. The path looks nothing alike, which is precisely why people keep declaring the bear case dead.

So why has this not played out yet?

The answer is that real estate is one of the slowest, least liquid asset classes on earth, and price discovery takes years.

Look at the last cycle. The Case-Shiller national index peaked in 2006. It bottomed in 2012. Florida markets peaked around late 2006 and did not find a floor until 2011 or 2012. That was with a full-blown credit crisis, mass defaults, a banking system in genuine distress, and forced liquidations. Even under those conditions, the repricing took five to six years.

We are in a slower version of that process, and nearly every institutional force in the system is designed to slow it further:

• Judicial foreclosure. Florida requires a court to process every foreclosure. That is quarters, often years, per file.

• Loss mitigation and modifications. Distress gets restructured rather than realized. The FHA program change in October 2025 removed one of these buffers, which is exactly why delinquency is now surfacing in the data.

• Extend and pretend on the commercial side. Maturity extensions and modifications keep multifamily assets from trading, which prevents new comps from printing.

• Builder incentives instead of price cuts. The entire mechanism described above exists to keep the recorded price from falling. It works, on paper.

• Sellers who refuse to capitulate. We see record rates of what I call rage quitting: a seller lists, gets showings but no offers, refuses the price reduction, and withdraws. A withdrawn listing never prints a low comp.

• Lock-in. Ninety percent of mortgage holders have no rational reason to move. Low turnover means few transactions, and few transactions means slow price discovery.

• Policy intervention. There is persistent political appetite to support housing demand, and every intervention on the demand side delays the adjustment.

Here is the thing to understand about all of these: they delay price discovery. They do not repeal it.

A withdrawn listing does not create a buyer. A modified loan does not create income. An incentive does not create equity for the buyer who accepted it. Each of these mechanisms buys time, and time is genuinely valuable if the underlying problem is temporary. If the underlying problem is that local wages cannot support local prices, time just moves the adjustment into the future and adds carrying costs along the way.

Which is why my timeline is years, not months. I said on the show that this is a five to seven year process and could stretch toward a decade. That is not hedging. It is the base case. The variable that would accelerate it is job losses, because unemployment converts patient sellers into forced sellers, and forced sellers set comps.

What I think should happen

My honest policy view: let it correct.

The Federal Reserve held rates too low for too long and created the conditions for a speculative run in housing. Then we responded to the resulting affordability crisis with a decade of programs designed to stimulate demand, which in a supply-constrained, price-inflated market largely converts into higher prices rather than more ownership. Down payment assistance, buydowns, and looser qualification are all demand-side tools applied to what is fundamentally a supply and price problem.

A correction is not a costless event. Falling prices mean real families lose real equity. Construction employment suffers. Local government revenue tied to property values tightens, which hits schools and services. People who bought in 2022 through nothing but bad luck of timing get hurt the worst, and they did nothing wrong.

I do not dismiss that. I weigh it against the alternative.

The alternative is what we have been doing: preventing adjustment, which preserves nominal prices while affordability keeps eroding underneath. That path transfers wealth from younger and poorer households to older and wealthier ones, locks a generation out of ownership, and builds a larger imbalance that eventually corrects anyway, from a higher altitude and with more accumulated debt attached.

The productive intervention is on the supply side, at the price points that are actually missing. In our market that means single-family homes around $200,000 to $300,000. That runs into land costs, impact fees, regulatory cost, and the plain fact that a builder makes several times more profit building expensive homes. Fix those constraints and you change the mix. Keep subsidizing demand and you just move the price.

Markets that are allowed to clear reprice once and then function. Markets that are prevented from clearing stay broken for a very long time. Japan spent decades demonstrating this.

What to actually do with all of this

If you are buying new construction: this is where the leverage is. In many new construction communities,, total concessions in the range of 10% of price are realistic, and we have seen individual deals with $100,000 to $150,000 in combined incentives. That is a new construction statement. It does not transfer to resale, where a typical seller has neither the margin nor the balance sheet to do it.

Ask the builder to quote the deal both ways: as a price reduction and as an incentive package. Then compare. A rate buydown lowers your payment but leaves your basis at full price, and your basis is what you have to overcome at resale. If the builder will not cut price at all, understand that you are accepting resale risk in exchange for monthly relief, and size that trade deliberately.

If you are selling a resale home near an active builder community: you are not competing with the neighbors. Price against the builder’s effective price, not their sticker price. Find out what incentives they are actually giving this month, because that is your real competition.

If you are renting: you have leverage you did not have two years ago, particularly in buildings that delivered recently and need occupancy to refinance. A tenant with good credit and a clean payment history is exactly who those properties need. Negotiate the renewal, not just the new lease.

If you are deciding between renting and buying: run it honestly. In our market, renting versus owning a comparable home can currently save meaningful money each month once you include taxes, insurance, and maintenance. If your horizon is two or three years, that gap is very hard to overcome. If you are planting for a decade, the current math matters much less, and you should not let a market call keep you out of a home you intend to keep.

Jon Brooks is the Co-Founder of Momentum Realty in Jacksonville, Florida. He previously worked in real estate investment banking, where he did underwriting work on institutional single-family rental portfolios including American Homes 4 Rent, Invitation Homes, Progress Residential, and FirstKey Homes.

This essay contains my analysis, forecasts, and opinions. It is provided for general informational purposes only and is not financial, investment, legal, or tax advice, and it is not a representation about any specific property, community, or builder. Market projections are inherently uncertain. Figures cited are current as of publication and will change. Verify independently and consult a licensed professional about your situation. Momentum Realty is an Equal Housing Opportunity brokerage.

Sources and further reading

• University of Florida BEBR, Florida migration slowed sharply in 2025

• Mortgage Bankers Association, National Delinquency Survey Q1 2026

• Mortgage Bankers Association, Q4 2025 delinquency release

• NAHB 2026 Housing Outlook

• Florida Realtors market data

• South Florida condo market intelligence, June 2026

• RentCafe Jacksonville rent trends

• Momentum Realty Florida county scorecards, all 67 counties

I needed control. I believed nobody could do the work as well as I could, and my ego grew right alongside that belief. For a while it worked. Then it stopped working.

In my first year I ran straight into my own ceiling. I was out of time and out of energy. If I kept refusing help, the most I would ever produce was whatever I could squeeze out of one exhausted person. Me.

I had watched that story play out for other people. The slow grind backward into fatigue. I had also watched agents pour everything into the business and quietly lose their families in the process. I wanted no part of either ending.

There had to be another way.

Reinventing how I worked

To break through, I needed two things. Talented people around me, and the discipline to be far more selective about what I said yes to.

So I built a plan to reinvent myself. To shed my skin and evolve one more time.

What follows is what actually worked for me. I am not promising it will work for you. I am telling you it changed my life and my family’s life, and you might pull an idea or two out of it.

One warning. The plan only worked because I was willing to do the work and stay coachable. Your thinking can change overnight. Your results cannot. Actions are what move the numbers.

The whole thing also hinges on what you do with the time you win back.

It is easy to buy back ten hours and then waste all ten. Seneca said it plainly a long time ago. It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.

I am obsessed, and I refuse to waste it. Maybe you are too.

What I cut in my business

Here is what I stopped doing to buy back time.

• No more showings. I hired showing agents and buyer agents. Instantly I got 10 to 15 hours back every week from a very low dollar per hour activity. It was basically Uber driving.

• No more setting appointments. I hired an inside sales agent to book them for me. That saved about 10 hours a week.

• No more marketing. I hired marketing help and used Fiverr for one off projects.

• No more social and networking events built around drinking. I put that time into my family and my close friends instead.

• No more answering email. I hired a transaction coordinator and a virtual assistant.

• I reinvested every hour I bought back. I spent it having more business conversations, and my production doubled from $12M in my first year to $20M in my second to $36M in my third.

I was willing to put money into the business because I knew exactly what I would do with the hours I got back. I would grow it. If I had bought back the time and then coasted, the whole thing would have collapsed.

The time was never the reward. It was the raw material.

What I cut at home

Over time I did the same thing in my personal life.

• No more grocery shopping. Brittany and I set up Instacart through Costco and pickup from Target. That erased hours of wandering the aisles.

• No more picking up dog poop. We have two rescue dogs, so we hired a company called Doody Daddy. I wasn’t scooping in 105 degree heat. Easy call.

• No more mowing the lawn. I hired someone to mow and trim.

• No more cleaning and organizing. I hired a house cleaner who also handles the laundry and the dishes.

• No more scrambling for last minute child care. We keep three babysitters on speed dial, which gives our schedules real flexibility.

• No more getting sick. I became intentional to stay on top of diet, exercise, and supplements. Being sick every other week carried an insane cost for me and my family. I added a sauna with red light therapy at home and use it almost every day. Avoid getting sick at all cost.

Doing less, on purpose

At some point Brittany thought I was crazy, or lazy, or both. I had stopped doing a dozen things most people do without thinking. But she watched me pour that reclaimed time into higher value work, and she watched the results show up. Instead of doing everything and calling it busy, I was doing a few things extremely well with a web of support underneath me.

The results compounded. The business climbed faster and faster while I did less, not more. And the work I kept, creating opportunities and converting new clients, became the thing I got truly great at.

Saying no is how you say yes

By saying no, I finally had room to say yes to what mattered most. The mindset took time to settle in. The proof showed up in the numbers.

That path turned us into one of the most profitable real estate teams in the country, with what I believe is the best lifestyle attached to it. It led to invitations to speak at national and local brokerage events. Today we teach the same tactics and strategies at our company, Momentum Realty, which grew from zero in 2020 to nearly $600,000,000 in sales last year.

Momentum is now the number two brokerage office by sales production out of roughly 1,400 brokerages in Northeast Florida.

This worked for me, and it has worked for plenty of our agents who adopted it and asked to be held accountable to it.

So here is my challenge to you. What are the low cost things you can stop doing that would hand you back a pile of time, so you can pour it into the things that actually matter?

Start there.

-JB / jon@movewithmomentum.com movewithmomentum.com

At 25 years old, I was $80,000 in debt.

It wasn’t because I didn’t make money, but because I had absolutely no idea where it went. Student loans, a car payment, nights out, random purchases I couldn’t even remember. I was a finance major, and if you had asked me where my paycheck disappeared to every month, I couldn’t have told you.

One habit changed everything, and I’ve done it every month for the last twelve years.

When I moved to Jacksonville in 2014, I sat down and did something I had never once done as a finance major. I wrote down every dollar I earned and every dollar I spent. Then I did it again the next month, and the next. Net worth statement, income statement, every dollar accounted for.

That habit is what got me out of debt and, a few years later, to my first million.

The $80,000 Problem

My first year in business for myself as a real estate agent, I had exactly one goal. Get out of the hole.

Suddenly every dollar had a job. I stopped buying things and nights out became nights in. Every commission check had one purpose, which was to destroy debt.

Twelve months later it was gone. For the first time in my adult life, my paycheck belonged to me instead of to my past decisions.

Making Money Work

Once the debt was dead, the extra money changed jobs. Every dollar that used to pay interest started buying assets instead.

I bought another property and rented out the one I’d been living in. I wasn’t trying to hit home runs. I just wanted assets that would quietly become more valuable while someone else paid the mortgage.

The Million-Dollar Shift

In year three I roughly doubled my business again. Looking back, every major jump in my income followed a major investment in myself. Coaching, training, conferences, better mentors, better books, better people. Every dollar I spent becoming better came back many times over.

That’s the year my net worth crossed a million. I was 28.

Net Worth by Year

2014    -$80,000
2015         ~$0
2016     $250,000
2017     $650,000
2018   $1,050,000

Here’s the crazy part. Becoming a millionaire didn’t feel much different than becoming debt free. The freedom felt almost identical, and the only real difference was the size of the numbers.

The first million isn’t hard because of the math. It’s hard because you’re fighting gravity the whole way up. Every unexpected expense matters, every mistake hurts, and every dollar has to come from your own labor. Then eventually something changes, and your money starts working while you sleep. That’s when the game becomes a completely different one.

The Millionaire Trap Nobody Talks About

The problem is that new problems show up as you climb.

You have to evolve from being a business operator into being an investor. Both can make you wealthy, but they reward almost opposite instincts, and I had to become a completely different person to make the switch. You basically need a brain transplant, or you pay tuition to the market until you get one.

In business, speed creates opportunity. In investing, patience creates wealth.

The biggest investing losses of my life didn’t come from bad markets. They came from trusting the wrong people. There’s a built-in problem with handing your money to someone else to run, because you’re exposed to crooks, thieves, and misaligned incentives you can’t see. I’ve had powerhouse attorneys review the documents and still watched things go sideways with almost no way to fix it short of a long legal fight.

Eventually I figured out something about myself. I sleep better when I control my own investments, and that has quietly become one of my biggest advantages. Today most of my capital goes into businesses and real estate where I understand the risks and control the outcomes.

Awareness Comes First

Tracking my money didn’t make me wealthy. It made me honest.

Once I could no longer lie to myself about where my money was going, better decisions became almost inevitable.

Because looking back, becoming wealthy was never one decision. It wasn’t one investment, one business, or one lucky break. It was thousands of tiny decisions that all started the day I stopped guessing where my money went.

Awareness came first, and wealth came later.

Jon Brooks Co-Founder, Momentum Realty 📧 jon@movewithmomentum.com

In 10th grade, I was a B-C student. I was floating along, playing soccer, basketball, swim team, hanging out with friends. No real goals or purpose. I didn’t read books, never took homework seriously, and didn’t care about most things. I was average at most things, especially school.

Then one day a student named Nick joined our school from abroad. Nick was a dedicated student and went about life with focus and purpose.

Nick and I became best friends, and because of this ONE relationship and the amount of time we spent together, I became a student with a 4.0+ GPA by the end of the school year. I didn’t even know you could get above 4.0.

This one person made my stats go up.

It’s not surprising that Nick went on to be an MD/PhD from Johns Hopkins.

College.

Freshman year at Virginia Tech, I met a girl named Brittany. We started dating and she was different. There wasn’t drama. We were better together. We pushed each other to go bigger, take harder classes, sign up for the things we really didn’t want to do but really should do to make our lives better. We called each other out on our BS. If you know me, you know I need this often and am grateful for it.

We supported each other in getting out of our comfort zones, and that helped both of us grow. Brittany even helped me take on clients for a calculus tutoring business that paid 3x what we could earn at the Virginia Tech dining hall.

This one person made all my stats go up.

It’s not surprising that Brittany is now a very successful entrepreneur, leader, and mom of three kiddos at age 32.

Corporate.

When I switched jobs from a Big Four accounting firm to Wall Street investment banking, I met a guy named Jean. Jean was my boss and I was his underling analyst, lending money to institutional investors so they could buy up single family rental and small balance commercial properties.

Jean is a kind, thoughtful, 25-year Wall Street veteran with a massive amount of wisdom from experience. He was well respected on the floor. Not in an intimidating way, but because of who he is and how he treats people.

Jean saw something in me. Looking back, I see that I was finally showing up, ready to learn, eager to help, and he sensed it. He went out of his way to take me under his wing and spent hours with me each day training me up on everything he knew about real estate and the business.

That daily training and attention over a year changed everything for me. I was learning from someone much further ahead of me, which created a warp speed effect in my personal and mental growth.

This one person made my stats go up. Not surprising to hear that Jean has since been promoted several times and is an exceptional developer of people.

Entrepreneurship.

From there, I launched a few companies and started collecting relationships with people much further ahead of me. People with wisdom from experience, successful outcomes from good decision making, and the numbers to back it up.

I was diligent and selective, which made my search for mentors effective. I met Jason, Elizabeth, Vlad, Paul, Frank, and even started running ideas by my parents, who have great wisdom. Many other mentors helped me along the way.

The knowledge from others started flowing, and these mentors were willing to pour into me because I was executing on everything they were teaching me. By the way, if you want a mentor to invest in you, execute at a high level and tell them the results. They’ll want to help you more.

Suddenly, our businesses took off and I went much further than I would have on my own. Once my stats got high enough, I wanted to keep growing, so I joined mastermind groups like GoBundance and Young Presidents Organization. The relationships in these groups add fuel to my growth every day.

By no means has it been a perfect journey. I’ve been broken down and put back together many times. My ego gets too big, I stick my foot in my mouth, and I’ve made relationships with the wrong people who pull my stats down. You name it, I’ve been there. And now I am so hyper aware of elevating my stats that I keep this concept front of mind.

Get around people who level up your stats.

I want to spend time with people who pull my stats up. People who, when I’m around them, help me generate a bigger and brighter vision for myself than if I was on my own.

The book Tribe of Millionaires by GoBundance calls this The Influence Effect.

Jim Rohn said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

Warren Buffett put it this way: “I learned that it pays to hang around with people better than you are because you will float upward a little bit. And if you hang around people that behave worse than you, pretty soon you’ll start sliding down the pole. It works that way.”

So the point of this article is to get you thinking.

Think about your own life.

Write all of your relationships on a piece of paper and figure out:

1. Do you have the right relationships?

2. Who is adding to your stats and who is bringing your stats down?

3. Who are you missing currently in your life?

4. What will you do to keep your stats front of mind when entering new relationships or deciding who gets your time?

This exercise is not just for business or financials. It applies in all gardens of life.

Go get it! It’s time to level up. - JB

You can email Jon at jon@movewithmomentum.com / movewithmomentum.com

I wasn’t angry about anything. I was cleaning out a closet, holding this pile of hardware, and I realized I couldn’t think of a single thing any of it had actually done for me.

I told Brittany these don’t mean anything to me. She just sat there like, yeah, they really don’t matter to me either.

I think about that box every time someone asks me the question I get asked more than any other: Jon, why do you post so much about profit?

That box is the answer, but let me back up.

Almost every week I get a call from an agent who is frustrated with their financials.

Usually it’s someone doing real volume. Good branding, plenty of closings, maybe an award or two on the shelf. And very little in the bank. I get it, because I lived it, and because to me the purpose of a for-profit business is right there in the name.

Profit is a good thing. It gives you options. It provides stability to your family, it reduces stress, it gets you better healthcare, and it lets you do a lot of good for the people around you. Nobody hands you any of that on a stage.

This isn’t theory for me. In my 20s I started below zero. In debt, in an industry I did not know, in a city I did not know, with no network. I had to crawl out of a financial hole first, then build a foundation strong enough that I would never go back into it.

That climb is still the thing I enjoy helping other agents do most.

And I’ll tell you something most people at the front of the room won’t: I still have money fears. Daily. They never really go away.

But I know now that anyone who asks the right questions, gets the right information, and networks with the right people can get over the financial hump and live with less fear.

On my way from debt to millionaire I got some good advice and a lot more bad advice.

The bad advice often came from the most celebrated people. Team leaders who never had financial success themselves. Conference speakers with massive sales businesses who were idolized in the industry and had almost nothing to show for it in profit or lifestyle.

I had seen this movie before, back when I was an investment banker. I looked at my bosses, twenty years ahead of me on the same path, and asked myself if that was the life I was working toward. The whole thing spent at the office, grumpy, no family time. There had to be a better way, and there was, and it started with asking hard questions.

Here’s an honest one. I was jealous of the vanity metrics. The units, the volume, the stage time. It’s sexy to be the star. But when I actually ran the numbers, I kept finding that I was netting more money and working far less than the people being idolized.

So why would I copy a high volume, high time, low margin model? To satisfy my ego? What is the goal here, being number one in units, or saving, investing, starting a family, and having the option to retire young?

You already know the answer. The industry just hopes you never ask the question.

What’s funny is that now I get messages from agents at our company saying wow, I’m working less and making more money, what do I do now?

I just smile and respond: exactly.

The trophies went in the garbage the day I stopped asking what the industry thinks matters and started asking what matters to me.

I wrote one sentence down that day: serve more people at the highest level, then net more profit, so I can have more options and freedom.

That’s still the whole business plan.

So why do I post so much about profit?

Because profit was never the goal. Freedom is the goal, and profit is just the variable that gets you there.

Onward, Jon Brooks Co-Founder, Momentum Realty

📧 jon@movewithmomentum.com

🌐 https://movewithmomentum.com

📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@therealjonbrooks

🐦 X: https://x.com/JonBrooks

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonbrooks/

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamjonbrooks

My friends kept texting to ask how I did at a Pokémon regional in Salt Lake City. So here’s the post, business lessons and all. Stick around for the result.

If you know me, you know I peaked at 10. I was the Pokémon World Champion two years running, 2000 to 2002. Roll your eyes, but it’s been on every resume I’ve ever written, and it turns out the way you win a strategy card game is the way you win in business. (The cards my family pulled back then are also worth a small fortune now, literally more than a lottery ticket. Fellow nerds: @blastoisekid.)

Super Trainer Showdown Winner, 2000. Swim shorts and Harry-Potter glasses, fueled by maple bacon donuts and pizza.

So after 20 years away, I figured I’d jump back in and go for gold. Thanks to Brittany and the family for indulging me. I went 4-4-1. I’ll get to that. First, what nine rounds reminded me about competing.

1. Reps beat talent.

I walked in with 34 games under my belt: twelve weeks of evenings at shops around Jacksonville after a two-decade layoff. My average opponent was playing 30 to 40 games a week. I asked them. So I had the skill and almost none of the reps, and it showed. I was reading cards for the first time mid-match, learning what they did while the clock ran.

Talent is real and hard to teach. It also loses to volume. An average player with huge reps beats a gifted one who doesn’t practice, every time, over a long enough season. Reps are what turn skill into results and shrink the role of luck. It’s the same reason the agent who runs the listing presentation fifty times closes the deal the “naturally gifted” one fumbles.

2. Pick your deck before you sit down.

I ran Arc/Pika/Tina, the #12 deck going in. Not a meta deck, which is a polite way of saying the math says it won’t beat the field consistently. I knew that and played it anyway. Nine rounds later, the math was right.

Strategy is chosen before the effort starts, not during it. Study the whole field, find the lane where you actually have an edge, and commit to it. Pick the wrong lane and it won’t matter how hard you play. Your market position is your deck. Choose it on purpose.

3. Study the best, then take what works.

The most useful conversations I had all weekend were with strong players from other regions, people who’ll never sit across from me at my home shop. No competition, all upside. The fastest way to the top is to play the people already there, copy what they do, and adjust it to fit you.

Mastermind with people a level ahead who aren’t your direct rivals. It’s the cheapest tuition there is.

4. Curiosity beats judgment.

I asked a lot of opponents why they were there. The answers were all over the map, and none of them were what I’d assumed. Everyone’s playing a different game for a different reason. Judging them tells you nothing and costs you focus. Stay curious. Just remember the reason someone shows up isn’t what wins them the round. Reps and focus do.

5. Luck is real, so earn the right to use it.

Anyone who says luck isn’t a factor has never opened a dead hand at the wrong time. A lucky amateur can beat a skilled player in a single round. Over a season, the skilled, prepared player wins. The job is to have the reps to cash in when good luck shows up, and a plan for when it doesn’t.

6. Commit, or keep it a hobby.

Here’s my honest limit: I’m not willing to trade evenings with my kids and my wife to grind 40 games a week right now. So I won’t be the best again this season, and I’ve made peace with that.

Greatness lives at the extremes, and the extreme has a price. Half-effort buys you the middle, and the middle is a miserable place to live. So either pay the price to climb or call it a hobby on purpose. Both are fine. Pretending is the only bad option.

7. Play the long resource game.

In Pokémon, the player who spends everything for a quick burst usually wins early and loses late. The one who paces resources across the whole game wins the matches that matter. Business is identical. Your time, cash, energy, and attention are the deck. Spend them like the game is long, because it is.

8. Get out of Loserville fast.

Drop your first couple of rounds and the system pairs you down. Suddenly you’re across from people running strange decks who aren’t really trying to win, playing a game you never practiced for. There’s a special kind of chaos at the bottom, and it’s sticky. The longer you sit there, the more your standards drift to match it. Whatever the arena, claw out of the bottom bracket fast. It’s far harder to climb out than to avoid it.

One more thing, because life is short: I love this stuff. The oddballs, the over-thinkers, the people who found their inner nerd and stopped apologizing for it. There’s no one to impress out there. It’s you versus you. We’re all dead in a hundred years, so you may as well enjoy the game you’re playing.

How I did: nine rounds, four wins, four losses, one tie. Thirteen points. I needed eighteen to make day two. High skill, low reps, exactly the result lesson one predicts. I’m running it back at four or five regionals next year, with the reps this time.

If you want to learn, or want your kids to (it’s great for kids: reading, strategy, and real competition in a safe room), check out Cool Stuff Games in Jacksonville or The Woke Poke in St. Augustine. Or email me and I’ll connect you.

jon@movewithmomentum.com

“The best players minimize bad luck by playing proven decks and modifying them slightly for their preferences.” This is no different in real estate.

Onward, Jon Brooks Co-Founder, Momentum Realty 📧 jon@movewithmomentum.com

📧 jon@movewithmomentum.com

🌐 https://movewithmomentum.com
📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@therealjonbrooks
🐦 X: https://x.com/JonBrooks
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonbrooks/
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamjonbrooks

We call it The Golden Mindset.

Yes, it’s easy to get sucked into the stories you tell yourself, or the ones other agents and the news keep repeating. Despite all the headlines, today's market still presents enormous opportunity. Transaction volume may be lower than during the pandemic, but competition has thinned, average home prices remain historically high in many markets, and skilled agents have more room than ever to capture market share.

It starts with mindset.

The Golden Mindset stays unshakable no matter what is happening around you. To build it, focus hard on the few variables that actually move your business. Frankly, there are probably fewer than three. Write them down and keep them in front of you every day. Everything else is a distraction.

The Results Formula

Your results equal your potential minus your interference.

Results = Potential − Interference

The formula is simple. If you want more results, you minimize interference, increase potential, or both.

Minimizing Interference

Cut the interference and your concentration sharpens. Concentration produces results. Results feel like growth, growth feels good, and the whole thing starts compounding on itself. An agent who is growing and happy has a huge year, and it has nothing to do with what’s going on outside of them. They quieted the external noise, and that’s what created the room to grow.

This is why protecting yourself from the noise matters so much. Stop absorbing everyone else’s story and build your own. You are the author of your own story.

I’ve seen this play out over and over again. One of our agents had every reason to blame the market. Headlines were negative, transactions were slowing, and other agents kept talking about how difficult everything had become. Instead of buying into that story, they doubled down on the handful of activities they could control. They ignored the noise, stayed consistent, and ended up having the best year of their career. Many of our agents are having their best year yet — earning more, working more efficiently, and spending more time with their families.

The market didn’t suddenly improve. Their mindset did.

You can become anything you want, in any market, as long as you do the work and minimize your interference.

Increasing Potential

The other side of the equation is potential. What is your self-identity, and how do you raise it?

As kids, we naturally used our imagination to build big fantasies of the future. Those visions stretched our potential. As adults, we rarely think that big anymore, even though we should, especially as the noise gets louder.

So here’s my challenge: fantasize about your perfect life. Your perfect business. What does it look like? Write it down. Then write it down again tomorrow, and the day after. As you focus on that future, you’ll notice you start thinking and acting differently, and the outside world matters less and less. You’ve seen a higher version of yourself, a future self that, over time, becomes your actual identity.

By visualizing your potential, you raise your own lid.

The Influence Effect

There’s a second way to raise your potential: deliberately put yourself around people who think bigger and achieve more than you do. Spend time around big thinkers and big action-takers and you’ll start thinking and acting like them, whether you mean to or not. We call this The Influence Effect.

I see it every day at Momentum. Our top producers are putting up career-best numbers in a market everyone else calls “hard,” and that energy is contagious. It’s the same reason the team closed $594M last year, sells 1.25% above market and 8 days faster, and lands in the top 1% in Florida. Standards rise when you’re in the right room.

Your Next Steps

So get to work. Block out the noise and cast your own vision. Find the people already ahead of you and get in the room with them. Time is short, and you’ve earned the results this mindset produces.

Keep The Results Formula close and come back to it often. Raise your ceiling through The Influence Effect. Then go do the work.

Let’s get it.

If this hit home, reply and tell me - that feedback is the only reason I keep writing. And if you’re serious about building real wealth through real estate, that’s exactly what I’m here for.

Onward, Jon Brooks Co-Founder, Momentum Realty 📧 jon@movewithmomentum.com

📧 jon@movewithmomentum.com
🌐 https://movewithmomentum.com
📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@therealjonbrooks
✍️ Substack: https://jonbrooks.substack.com
🐦 X: https://x.com/JonBrooks
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonbrooks/
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamjonbrooks

I had the great privilege of attending a GoBundance Champions event in Steamboat, Colorado. For those who don’t know, GoBundance is a men’s networking group for net-worth millionaires (check out The Tribe of Millionaires) — and there’s a GoBundance Women’s Tribe too.

I’m also humbled by the readers of this newsletter. At this event, so many of you came up to me at the event to tell me I should be sharing more often, and that this content is valuable to you. I didn’t realize how closely you were reading. I’d quietly slowed down on posting because I wasn’t hearing much back - and I only want to spend my time on things that make a real impact. So, point taken. More to come. And if you haven’t already, check out our newly improved website with Florida data for you and your customers: movewithmomentum.com

My goal is to help create 10 millionaires through real estate over the next five years. My passion is helping others achieve their own version of financial freedom.

The group pictured each donated $3K to 1 Life Fully Lived, a wonderful nonprofit run by Tim Rhode.

Here are some of my favorite notes and takeaways from the event. They’re in no particular order. Enjoy.

• Get financially free so you can figure out exactly who you are. Your purpose often reveals itself after you’re financially free, not before.

• If you’re not embarrassed by who you were five years ago, you’re not growing fast enough.

• Religion is in decline, and Americans are missing shared values and community more than ever - and social media is only making people lonelier.

• A low-rate environment forces your hand. It pushes you to invest in something rather than sit in cash.

• You have more control over your health and your lifespan than ever before.

• The clock that’s ticking is only 20% genetic. Your epigenome responds to your environment, not your genes — and your environment is roughly 80% responsible for your lifespan.

• How to hire talent:

  1. Respect them. Give them the space to operate and perform.

  2. Hold them accountable by the numbers. Plenty of frauds masquerade as talent. It doesn’t matter what they say - the numbers tell you the truth. When someone is consistently talented, treat them as an equal, or even your superior, in that role.

  3. Give them opportunities they can’t get anywhere else.

• Your life is a reflection of your decisions.

• My big aha: The people building wealth fast almost always have mentors who’ve spent 20–30 years doing it. They don’t simply figure it out on their own - they close the gap through mentorship. You pay for that gap one way or another: through mentors, or through mistakes. I’d rather pay for access to mentors.

• You’re always too much of something to someone. Be too good for it to matter.

• I’ve never seen a positive leader with a negative team.

• People rarely hit their goals if they keep even one negative person around.

• Change small, change often. Never sell a product - sell the result. Don’t get ready, stay ready.

• Getting rich and staying rich are two very different skill sets.

• The only real goal of money is independence. Use it to buy more time, not more stuff.

• The best way to teach your kids about money is to lead by example.

• Your political beliefs are usually a reflection of what you observed in your father.

• On their deathbed, not one person wishes they’d worked harder or made more money. Most wish they’d been kinder and made more time for family. Money never even comes up.

Which ones stand out to you? Drop a comment - I read and respond to every one, and your engagement is what tells me to keep sharing these notes instead of keeping them to myself. Onward.

You can learn more or follow me here:

• Website: movewithmomentum.com

• X: @jonbrooks

• Instagram: @iamjonbrooks

• Twitter/X: @movemomentum

#movewithmomentum | movewithmomentum.com | jon@movewithmomentum.com

I had the great privilege of attending a GoBundance event in Detroit, Michigan.

For those who don’t know, GoBundance is a men’s networking group for net-worth millionaires (their book, The Tribe of Millionaires, is a great intro) — and there’s a GoBundance Women’s Tribe too.

I left humbled. A number of people came to me at the event to say I should be sharing more often, and that this content actually means something to you. I didn’t realize how closely you were reading. I’d slowed down on posting because I wasn’t getting much feedback -- and I only want to spend time on things that make an impact. So consider this me getting back to it. Thank you for the nudge.

A quick reminder of why I do this: my goal is to help create 10 millionaires through real estate over the next five years. My passion is helping other people reach their own version of financial freedom.

Below are my favorite notes and takeaways from the event, grouped loosely by theme. They’re raw — straight from my notebook — and in no particular order. Enjoy.

One disclaimer before we start: none of this constitutes financial or health advice. These are simply notes from things speakers said at a conference. Do your own research and talk to your own professionals.

Business Notes

Legacy and leadership

It’s our job, as the patriarchs and matriarchs of our families, to teach our family and our community how to work and how to live. That’s the real legacy. Everyone is watching everything you do -- you lead by example. The goal is to give the people around us the tools they need to live the best life they can.

A clear picture of leadership came up that stuck with me. The traits that matter most:

1. A clear vision and purpose — and the discipline to actually communicate it.

2. Cash and financial management. Everyone in the executive suite must know their numbers.

3. The right people in the right seats.

4. Key relationships.

5. A commitment to constantly learning.

And maybe my favorite reframe of the whole event: the most dangerous people are the kindest people -- because they’re the ones with the courage to go solve big problems when no one else steps up. Be dangerous. Dangerous people do the hard things and make the biggest difference.

Showing up and doing the work

If you show up to anything and put zero in, you’ll get zero out. It all depends on you.

This one was personal. I went into the a GoBundance event with a bad attitude, and I got out of it exactly what I put in. So I’ve made a decision: going forward, I’m going all-in on every event I attend. The value of an event is whatever I decide to make it.

A few related notes on getting things done:

• We invent long-term timeframes to avoid doing what needs to get done now. Shorten your deadlines.

• The more high-performing you are, the more likely you are to hit a wall. Prepare for it in advance so you know how to get around it.

• You know it’s time to move on from a role when you start feeling sleepy about things that used to excite you. When it stops being fun -- and your finances are in order -- move on.

• Having your finances in order is what lets you stop trading time for money.

• A hard question many entrepreneurs wrestle with: How do I stop feeling like I need to be productive in order to have worth?

• Tony Robbins is famous for asking, “What would you do if you couldn’t fail?” Someone flipped it: What would you do if you knew you would fail? Different, better question.

• On writing: just keep writing daily and something will show up in it. Reflect.

Game selection and the long game

This was the richest theme of the event for me. Discipline and playing long-term are the qualities of winners. Too many people are inconsistent and undisciplined - which is exactly why they never see the hockey-stick effect.

A deca-millionaire poker player framed it better than I ever could:

• Go where there’s less competition.

• Don’t go play the hard game. Find the right table to sit down at.

• Game selection matters more than trying to become the best player at the hardest table. Table selection is everything. Chase deals, and protect your downside.

• “Give me time and I’ll win any game.”

More on the long game:

• Constantly reinvest in yourself. Invest for the infinite game. Outlast everyone else by being patient and disciplined.

• Plant seeds everywhere. Over time, it hits. Just keep planting.

• Short-term results don’t mean much. It’s all about the long term.

Reputation and relationships

Always keep a good reputation and be a person of high character. That’s how deals and people keep coming to you first. Lose your reputation and you have nothing -- it’s very hard to get back, and word travels fast.

You also have to be present to win. You can’t extract value from a room you’re not actually participating in.

And the single best investment anyone talked about: RoR — return on relationship. Actively invest in your family, in yourself, and in your relationships. The people who don’t either go backward or stand still.

Financial discipline

• If your financial house isn’t in order, it only gets worse. That’s true in every market.

• The two questions to keep asking: Do we have enough cash and liquidity? And how do we scale with the resources we already have?

• Keep a “stay rich” stack and a “play rich” stack for investing — separate the money that keeps you safe from the money you take swings with.

Health Notes

The biohacking conversations were a big part of this event — Dave Asprey, often called the father of biohacking, was a major presence. These notes are the most opinionated of the bunch, so I’ll say it again: this is me writing down what speakers said, not medical advice. Talk to your own doctor before changing anything.

Energy is the real asset

If you aren’t investing your money, at least invest in yourself. The most valuable asset we have isn’t time -- it’s energy. Money is really just a way to buy other people’s energy. So the frame shifts from return on investment to return on energy. Stop wasting energy, and get better at producing it. The simple loop a few speakers used: Assess, Monitor, Upgrade, Repeat.

Sleep

• Aim for a floor of 6.5 hours and a ceiling of 8. Interestingly, the claim was that healthier people need less sleep.

• Sleep quality is one of the first things to go when you’re doing something wrong.

• Blue light is a big lever. “True Dark” glasses block 40–70% of blue light and reportedly help with eye strain and your sleep cycle. Wear blue blockers at night.

• For sleep protocols, a few people pointed to SleepWithDave.com (Dave Asprey’s recommendations).

Food and blood sugar

A surprising amount of how you feel traces back to blood sugar:

• Waking up between 1–4 PM-style energy crashes (or middle-of-the-night wake-ups) are often a blood sugar issue — caused by over-fasting or simply not eating enough. Suggested fixes: a tablespoon of raw honey before bed, collagen, and MCT oil (which doesn’t break a fast).

• Low blood sugar can trigger migraines. Caffeine is one of the better treatments — Excedrin is basically just caffeine.

• MSG came up as a hidden culprit. The claim: some restaurants use it knowingly, it makes you crave sugar and drinks, and it can push the average bill up ~30%. Essentially unregulated.

• A rough hierarchy that was shared: sleep is about a third of the equation, timing of eating is about a quarter, and avoiding foods you’re personally sensitive to is another big chunk. A blood sugar / glucose monitor helps you find your own triggers.

• Dairy proteins and wheat proteins were named as the most common problem foods.

• Intermittent fasting (when actually done) was described as doing something similar to Metformin.

• On diets: the claim was that going vegan feels great for about six weeks, and after that some people get tired or start losing hair.

Supplements, coffee, and therapies

• A lot of coffee reportedly contains mold (little US regulation here), which can make people sick. Bulletproof or “Danger Coffee” were offered as the workaround.

• The cynical-but-memorable line on supplements: big pharma will always say vitamins don’t work — until they can make money on them, at which point they’ll say they do.

• Stem cell therapy was described as working very well.

• Red light therapy got strong endorsements. “TrueLight” was mentioned as a roughly $350 portable unit.

• An NAD drip once per quarter came up as a regular protocol.

Training

• “75 Hard” got a thumbs-down — described as just overtraining, with no time built in for recovery.

• The counter-advice: train to the rep that builds muscle, then stop and return to baseline, and repeat. Don’t grind past the point of return.

• Resistance bands were called more effective than weights.

• Eat protein within 30 minutes of working out.

• And the through-line of the whole health section: constantly measure. Continuous glucose monitoring, sleep tracking — figure out what your body responds to.

Book and Podcast Recommendations

A running list of what people recommended throughout the event:

Books

• The Platinum Rule

• Your Next Five Moves

• Exactly What to Say

• The Algebra of Happiness

• Die With Zero

• Entrusted

• The Power of One More

• Headstrong and Superhuman (Dave Asprey)

Podcasts

• The All-In Podcast

• The Prof G Podcast

Keep planting seeds. Stay disciplined, play the long game, and pick the right table.

If one of these notes hit home, reply and tell me - that feedback is the only reason I keep writing. And if you’re serious about building real wealth through real estate, that’s exactly what I’m here for.

Onward, Jon Brooks Co-Founder, Momentum Realty 📧 jon@movewithmomentum.com

Recently I had the privilege of attending a private retreat with several other highly productive entrepreneurs.

We talk about the usual things, family and business, but we also work through life models that our moderator shares with the group. Below are two mental models I took away this time.

You may find them useful, or at least interesting, and you might consider applying them in your own life and circumstances.

Model 1: Victim, Villain, or Hero

The first model is a simple framing and a single question.

Every story has a Victim, a Villain, and a Hero. Which one are you being?

That question creates clarity almost instantly, for you or for someone you are working with, the moment they start telling themselves a story. It myth-busts within seconds and creates awareness. And awareness is the first step to change.

Model 2: Achievement vs. Fulfillment

The second model is about figuring out whether you are operating out of a need for validation or a need for fulfillment.

Most people operate from a quiet sense of not being good enough. That drives them to prove how good they are, to earn external validation, to feed the ego. Over time, that frequency of performance becomes an unfulfilling cycle: you constantly need to do more just to feel a sense of self-worth.

If you are a high achiever, you can probably relate.

But a segment of those achievers transcend it. They start operating at a higher frequency, backed by purpose-driven work that actually leads to fulfillment. That kind of work is usually connected to serving others or making a meaningful change in the world. The energy behind the two looks similar, but it is fundamentally different.

The high achievers who need external validation make it all about themselves.

The high achievers on the fulfillment path make it all about others.

For me, this is the model I come back to when making big decisions and asking why I am really doing the things I do.

Try it

Next time you catch yourself deep in a story, ask which role you are playing. And next time you are weighing a big move, ask whether it is coming from validation or fulfillment.

JB - jon@movewithmomentum.com / movewithmomentum.com

Most people assume the largest real estate brokerages in America are all giant national franchises. Massive offices. Private equity backing. National TV ads. Thousands of agents.

But something else is happening quietly in real estate. Independent brokerages are starting to take market share.

And this week, a Jacksonville-based independent brokerage officially entered the national conversation. RealTrends Verified ranked Momentum Realty:

• #440 in the United States by transaction sides

• #572 by sales volume

• 1,562 closed transactions

• $583.99M in annual sales volume

All from a locally owned independent brokerage based in Northeast Florida. No franchise. No Wall Street ownership. No national brand behind it. Just a local company built agent by agent, client by client, over the last several years.

You can read the full announcement here.

Why this matters

The real estate industry is changing rapidly. Consumers today expect faster communication, better technology, more local expertise, actual market intelligence, and transparency.

At the same time, many large legacy brokerages are struggling with bloated overhead, declining margins, outdated systems, weak agent support, and shrinking transaction counts.

That shift is creating space for a new category: the modern independent brokerage. Smaller. Faster. More data-driven. More locally connected. Less corporate.

That is the category Momentum was built for.

The real story behind the numbers

The ranking itself is cool. But rankings are not the business. The real story is what those numbers actually represent:

More than 1,500 families helped in a single year. Hundreds of agents building real businesses. A locally built company competing against firms many times its size.

When we started Momentum in 2020, the goal was not to create another traditional brokerage. The goal was to build something that actually matched where the housing market, and the agent business, were both heading.

That meant investment in technology, market data and research, media and content, consumer education, modern marketing systems, better economics for agents, and local expertise over corporate branding.

The market has responded.

The bigger housing shift happening right now

This ranking also comes during one of the strangest housing markets in modern history. Across Florida and much of the Sun Belt, inventory has surged, affordability has deteriorated, insurance costs exploded, investor activity slowed, migration normalized, and many sellers are still anchored to 2022 pricing.

Consumers need better guidance than ever before.

They need people who actually understand financing, affordability, inventory trends, local supply pipelines, insurance impacts, negotiation leverage, and neighborhood-level data.

The old real estate model was relationship-first. The next model will be relationship plus intelligence. That is where the industry is going.

Jacksonville is quietly becoming one of the most interesting real estate markets in America

One reason this growth happened in Jacksonville specifically is because the city itself is changing rapidly.

Jacksonville is no longer just a low-cost alternative to South Florida, a military town, or a secondary Florida market. It is becoming a major logistics hub, a finance and healthcare growth market, a migration destination, a large-scale new construction market, and one of the most important affordability battlegrounds in the country.

The housing trends happening here are increasingly becoming a preview of broader national housing trends. That is why we spend so much time building original housing research and neighborhood-level data systems, from our Northeast Florida Luxury Market Report.

Real estate is becoming increasingly hyperlocal. The agents and companies with the best local intelligence will win.

Final thought

The most interesting companies in real estate over the next decade probably will not be the biggest legacy brands (we are already seeing this). They will be leaner, more local, technology-enabled, media-driven, data-centric, and consumer-obsessed. A place where the broker is local and actually answers the phone and understands the local market.

That shift is already happening. And a Jacksonville independent brokerage quietly entering the national Top 500 is one small signal of where the industry may be heading next.

Momentum Realty is an independent, locally owned brokerage serving Jacksonville and Northeast Florida. If you are thinking about buying, selling, or building a real estate business, start here.

I told myself for a long time that I just kept getting unlucky on the hire. I picked up Carol Dweck’s Mindset on a flight back from a business trip and stopped being able to tell myself that.

Dweck is a Stanford psychologist who spent decades studying why some people compound and others stall. Her answer is simpler than it has any right to be. People operate from one of two belief systems about ability. Fixed mindset says talent is innate. Either you have it or you don’t, and effort just exposes your ceiling. Growth mindset says ability gets built through effort.

Effort is the point.

When a fixed-mindset agent reads a coaching note, they hear an attack on their identity. When a growth-mindset agent reads the same note, they hear a tip and try it.

When a fixed-mindset agent watches a peer pull off a $14M year, they decide that peer is special and unreachable. The growth-mindset agent emails that peer and asks what their setup looks like.

I’d been hiring for the wrong signal. Production history tells you what someone already did at one company in one market with one set of conditions. It tells you very little about what they’ll do when the conditions change. Mindset does.

When I was hiring after reading the book, the interview changed, especially for newer agents. Two questions I lean on now.

“Tell me about a time you got hard feedback. What did you do with it?” A fixed-mindset answer explains why the feedback was wrong. A growth-mindset answer explains what they changed.

“Who are the top three producers in your market right now?” Fixed mindset is dismissive. They got lucky. They had connections. They spend too much on marketing. Growth mindset is specific and admiring. Here’s exactly what they do. Here’s what I’m trying to learn from them.

You can’t fake the second answer if you’ve never lived it. Fixed-mindset agents don’t study competitors because studying competitors feels like admitting they’re better.

The piece most people skip in Dweck’s book is that everyone has both wirings. The question is which one is on top when the pressure comes. I had a fixed mindset about negotiation for years. I’d avoid hard conversations because losing them would mean I was bad at negotiating. The moment I named it I could work on it. You don’t fix the wiring by trying harder. You fix it by noticing which one is running.

A quick test. When someone at your level outperforms you, what’s the first thought that arrives? If it sounds like “they got lucky,” there’s work to do. If it sounds like “what are they doing that I’m not,” you’re already moving.

Eventually I realized I wasn't building a sales organization. I was building a learning organization. The agents who win long term aren't the ones with the most talent. They're the ones willing to stay students the longest. That's the culture we're trying to build at Momentum.

JB (e: jon@movewithmomentum.com / w: movewithmomentum.com)

Peek under the hood at Momentum.

This is why finding the right role model matters more than most people realize. Whoever you model determines the level of results you can create.

Model the wrong person and you won’t get results. Adopt the wrong mindset and you won’t get results. Take advice from the wrong book and you won’t get results.

The risk runs in one direction. Before you decide whose behavior to emulate, do the diligence to figure out whether that person and their message are the real deal. That requires an inquisitive mind and a commitment to focus.

It requires asking “why” enough times to get to the bottom of it.

Why this is harder than it sounds in real estate

Most real estate social media is positioning. Eyeballs and ego. People trying to look successful to their followers. Take what you see with a very large grain of salt.

Vanity metrics like sales volume and units closed are one clue about where real value gets created, but only one. Over the past few years we’ve learned for ourselves that those metrics can be smoke and mirrors. The hardest-working, highest-volume producers and teams often barely make any profit.

Profit is what matters. Profit is the medium of exchange for labor. The honest question is how much profit a person is making and for how much time invested. Output divided by input. Anything else is incomplete.

When you compare yourself to others in the industry, ask whether that big-name agent, team, or brokerage is actually achieving the kind of success you’d want for your own life. Or whether the appearance of success is the entire product.

A high-volume producer who works 70-hour weeks and clears 8 percent margins is not the model you want. Not if you’re trying to build a business that gives you a life.

What real leaders actually look like

So how do you find the diligent operators who succeed in the ways that matter? Real profit. Reasonable time. Here are three signals worth using.

Real leaders are transparent and honest. They share their results openly because the results are actually there. They’ll walk you through their profit and loss numbers privately. They’ll tell you directly when you are wrong. They don’t dance around it.

Real leaders help and share without keeping score. They invest time and sometimes money in people they see putting in the work. They want their impact to multiply through others. The opposite of hoarding.

Real leaders build relationships and create value. They get involved in things that matter to them with people who have influence. They invest in relationships at a depth most people don’t reach. This is years of compounding work, not networking events.

These three signals are a starting point. Even when you find someone who looks transparent, honest, and generous, keep digging.

How to actually verify it

Triangulate. Check what one source says against other perspectives and against your own observation. Then check the validity of every source you’re using.

Only after you’ve established that someone is legitimate do you have the foundation to examine, and sometimes reject, the status quo and reach your own goals.

This is serious work. The cost of skipping it is high. Skip the homework and you’ll end up at a well-known but low-producing brokerage, working under non-valid leaders, watching your own growth get capped at theirs. In my experience, 80% of people are faking it.

The role model decision is one of the most consequential career decisions you’ll make. Treat it like one.

Where the real data lives

Speaking of real numbers instead of vanity metrics, here’s what’s actually happening in the Northeast Florida market right now.

The U.S. housing market posted +5.6% pending sales year-over-year in April 2026 per Redfin’s national report. Northeast Florida posted −12.9% per NEFAR. The gap has widened for three consecutive months. Census ACS just released data showing in-migration to the Jacksonville MSA fell 15.5% from 2023 to 2024, the steepest single-year drop since 2017. The Jacksonville MSA recorded its first year-over-year payroll decline since 2010. Florida’s insurance market, despite the headlines most agents still repeat, has actually stabilized.

If you’re going to talk to a client about the market, talk to them with data. We publish a monthly Northeast Florida Housing Pulse covering all of it. Six primary sources verified. Sixteen pages. No paywall, no email opt-in.

Read the April 2026 Northeast Florida Housing Pulse → movewithmomentum.com/reports/2026-04-ne-florida-housing-pulse

Walk into your next listing appointment with data. You win the room.

If you’re hiring or partnering with anyone in your business, these might save you some sleepless nights.

You’re also hiring their spouse

When you partner with someone, you’re partnering with the person closest to them (especially for a high demanding job like real estate). If you can understand the thought process and mindset of the spouse upfront, you have a strong indicator of whether the person you’re hiring is going to get support at home.

A negative spouse will carry over to the person you’re hiring and impact their performance. If one spouse is fixed-mindset and the other is growth-minded, there’s going to be serious conflict at some point. Where possible, look to hire folks whose spouses are also growth-minded.

Ask about their past relationships

If they don’t have any long-term friendships, they’re less likely to have a long-term relationship with you. You’re not just hiring someone to do a job. You want that person in your organization for a long time. I personally only want to spend time and partner with long-term thinking folks who have long-term relationships. All the real benefits in life come from compounding returns over time.

A useful question: do you still have any friends from high school or growing up? Do you stay in touch with them? Dig a little because there may be a legitimate reason they don’t. But look for other examples of relationships in their past and present that have lasted five years or longer.

Watch the resume jumps

A track record of frequent jumps from company to company to company can be a red flag. This person likely hasn’t figured out that they have to develop themselves first, and that it’s not the company that’s the problem. As we say in real estate sales, a successful agent is going to be successful anywhere. Why? Because the type of person they’ve become attracts success regardless of the environment.

A pattern of frequent jumps means they’re likely to jump from you too. Short-term relationships don’t generate great returns for anyone.

Don’t let B players hire

Only allow A players to hire for your organization. B players will not hire A players. They’ll be intimidated by them and won’t be able to attract them. A players attract other A players, and they also attract B players who want to become A players. Let talent do the hiring and no one else.

If they’re not hungry, there’s nothing you can do

If the person you hired is not proactive and hungry, there is nothing you can do to help them. Just don’t hire the person from the start.

Ninety percent of hiring is finding the right person before they enter your doors.

One mistake I’ve made several times: hiring and paying for a coach for someone who isn’t willing to help themselves. If a person really wants to change, they’ll change themselves or learn the skill they need. It will be natural, not forced by you or by a coach. No one external can change the person. It comes from within and from the awareness that they’re the problem. The environment helps facilitate the space to make a change, but if there’s resistance from the person, it won’t work.

If you have to keep following up, it’s the wrong person

For some reason that person is not in alignment with their job or hasn’t acquired the skill you need from them. If you’re following up on basic tasks and activities and they’re not reporting in, it’s the wrong person. This is especially true if the lack of follow-up persists after you’ve set the expectation.

Watch for resistance to feedback

When you provide quality feedback, if there’s any resistance to receiving it, it’s the wrong person. If you’re fearful of providing raw and direct feedback because they’ll leave, you definitely have the wrong person. It’s just a matter of time. At that point you’re not in a business relationship anymore. You’re working around their ego.

You want folks in your organization who love getting feedback so they can get better, evolve, and become more valuable. Self-aware and self-critiquing folks.

Some people get the business, some don’t

In your business there are variables that matter and others that don’t matter as much. Find people who know the difference. If you have to keep telling them what’s important and what’s not, you have the wrong person. These people make bad decisions because they focus on the wrong variables.

Be wary of people who can’t figure out why things aren’t working. The reason is probably obvious to everyone else. If they don’t have awareness and aren’t willing to look in the mirror, you have the wrong person.

Protect yourself with legal agreements

You’re going to hire the wrong person eventually. It happens to everyone. Have a healthy agreement (consider the terms you want with your attorney) signed by every person joining your organization BEFORE they join you.

The person may seem professional and high-integrity on the way in. They may be a great fit during their time with you. But there’s still the possibility of theft, extortion, or long-term anger at the end of a business relationship. I know because all three of those have happened to me. Having legal agreements in place ahead of time gives you options when something does go sideways. You hand the agreements to your attorneys and move forward.

Without those agreements you’re at risk of losing sleep, facing a lawsuit without legal protection, and worst of all, getting distracted from your big life goals.

Want to see what A players look like in person?

If you’re a real estate agent in Northeast Florida, come spend a morning with seven of our top producers.

Open House Mastermind Thursday, June 4, 2026 · Doors open at 10:00 AM Stillwater Golf and Country Club, 1100 Stillwater Blvd, St Johns, FL 32259

Moderated by Michelle Weaver. Speakers: Heather Strazinsky, Shauna Clark, Danny Fontaine, Corey Miller, Amanda Kinard, Nate Watson, and Tiffany Riley.

Combined, they closed nearly $100M in volume across 200+ transactions.

No pitch, no sales script. Just real numbers and real strategies for what’s actually working in open houses right now.

Register Now

RSVP at movewithmomentum.com/open-house-mastermind →

All of it comes down to one thing: how do you turn what you’re doing today into something that still works five years from now, without you holding it together with both hands?

When you start a business, you wear every hat. You’re the CEO. You’re the janitor. You’re answering the phone at 9pm and rebuilding the website at 2am. That’s how it has to be at the beginning.

But if you don’t evolve out of that phase, you die in it.

The Hero Phase

In the beginning, you’re the Hero. You do whatever it takes to keep the thing alive. You take every call, sign every contract, fix every problem.

The trap is staying there too long.

This is what kills most real estate agents. They white-knuckle every task in every transaction. They convince themselves nobody else can do it as well as they can. They wear the workload like a badge.

And that’s where ego sneaks in.

Watch any superhero movie. The hero has a massive ego. Same thing happens to agents. They can’t see that the Hero complex is the exact thing capping their business. 87% of real estate agents wash out in their first two years. The Hero complex is a big reason why.

Some Heroes do crank out enough deals to stay in the game. They’re hyper-competitive, they have a strong pitch, they grind harder than the next guy. But there are 24 hours in a day. Every Hero hits a ceiling. Something gives, or the business stops growing.

The Leverage Phase

The agents who actually build something figure out the Hero phase has an expiration date. After it, you move into a second phase: leading through leverage.

This phase is less exciting. The skills that made you a great Hero are not the skills you need now. Most people resist it for that reason. It feels like a demotion to stop doing the work you’re good at.

But this is where companies are built.

Leverage means your business gets legs of its own. It runs without you being the legs. That means hiring people. Training them. Managing them. Handing off the responsibilities you used to guard.

Your job changes. You stop being the doer. You become the person who holds the doers accountable to the standard you set.

Build the Manual

The thing that makes leverage actually work is a written operations manual.

One document. Plain language. Tells your team how to handle the tasks (and record your process too) you used to handle in your head.

Treat it like you’re franchising the business. If an alien landed in your office tomorrow and you handed them the manual, they should be able to run the place by Friday.

Writing this manual is hard. You have to slow down and notice every decision you make on autopilot. You’ll find gaps. You’ll rewrite sections. It’s never finished.

But the day you have a real manual is the day your business stops being you. Your profits go up too.

Where Momentum Comes In

A lot of the agents joining Momentum show up as successful Heroes. They’ve grinded their way to a real income. Now they’re hitting the wall.

That’s the moment we love. We show them who to hire, what to pay, what agreements to use, what scripts work, how to build accountability without being a tyrant. Many of them pick it up fast. The growth that follows is the kind that doesn’t disappear when they take a week off. Intentional leverage really matters.

That’s the whole game. Build something that runs without you, so you actually own a business instead of a job.

One more thing worth saying. The five people closest to you in business set your ceiling, and that includes the brokerage you've chosen to be part of.

If you're surrounded by agents who don't sell, leadership that doesn't lead, and a cap structure designed to keep you small, your ceiling is already set whether you've noticed it or not.

Momentum Realty was built for the other kind of agent. 100% commission, $12,000 cap, 270+ producers, #2 independent in Northeast Florida (in just 6 years).

If you want to see what it looks like on the inside, apply at movewithmomentum.com/meet. Fifteen minutes, online, no office visit.

Half the agents complaining about this market right now were never going to make it in any market. They got in for the easy money, they kept one foot out the door, and now that the conditions ask for actual skill, they’re calling it broken.

It isn’t broken. Look at who’s having career years.

At Momentum, our top producers are putting up some of the best numbers of their lives. Not in spite of the market. Because of it. Same listings, same buyers, same interest rates, same competing brokerages. Different agents, different result.

So when somebody tells me they can’t get a deal done right now, I already know most of what I need to know about their business before they finish the sentence.

Here’s what’s actually going on.

The pie is bigger than it’s ever been. Units are moving near the highest prices ever, and due to this, frankly more total commission dollars are still in the market than at any point in the history of this industry. Access to that pie is more competitive, sure, but the pie itself grew. The agents who adapted are eating bigger slices. The ones running 2021 scripts in a 2026 market are watching their slice shrink and blaming the kitchen.

What I find genuinely strange is how many brokerages are still teaching those 2021 scripts. The shutdowns changed this business permanently. Buyer behavior changed. Listing dynamics changed. The way customers find agents changed. Technology changed. And entire training programs at major brokerages are still running the playbook they had in 2021, sending agents out with the wrong tools and then wondering why retention is bad (often 30-40% at franchises and Wall Street companies where you’re just another number in the machine with a 1-800 number).

The winners I see in this market all have something in common. They adapted aggressively. They tested. They studied what was working and copied it. They got more confident, not less, when things got harder. That’s the actual job.

The patterns are pretty consistent if you watch closely.

The agents winning right now are usually doing one of three things. They’re working higher price points, where the commission per transaction makes the math work even if you only close ten deals a year. Or they’re listing-based, using every listing to generate the next two or three pieces of business through neighborhood marketing, open houses, sphere outreach, and the conversations that come from being the agent with signs in the yard. Or they’re running real buyer consultations before they show a single house, qualifying financially, setting expectations, and walking away from anyone who isn’t realistic or won’t cooperate.

The agents losing are usually doing the opposite. They’re chasing buyers at low price points and difficult situations, in the most crowded segment of the market, against the most agents, on the thinnest commissions, with the most emotional clients. They’re buyer-dependent because they never built a sphere business that feeds them listings, so they’re buying online leads (often bought), which means they’re getting the buyers nobody else wants in the price ranges they can’t control. And they’re not qualifying anybody, so they’re spending their weekends getting dragged around by clients who can’t actually buy what they’re being shown. (We have a solid buyer plan process where we show 4-6 houses per customer before they buy).

If you read that last paragraph and felt a little defensive, that’s the diagnostic.

I want to be careful here because I’m not saying these agents are bad people. A lot of them are working hard. They’re just working hard on the wrong things, with the wrong training, inside the wrong systems, with leadership who have often, not done what you want to do, themselves. And the longer they stay in those systems, the more convinced they become that the market is the issue.

It isn’t. The agents next to you are closing deals this week.

The harder version of this conversation is that the more intense a market gets, the more aggressive your business has to be just to hold your share. Coasting works in soft markets where there’s enough for everyone. In this market, if you’re not pushing and getting better each day, you’re being pushed out. Aggression isn’t about being pushy with clients. It’s about being relentless with your own business. Studying it. Adjusting it. Putting in the reps. Showing your work publicly so people can see what you actually do for a living.

The market rewards that. Always has. It rewards it harder now.

If you want to know whether you’re going to be in this business in three years, the test is pretty simple. Are you running anything resembling the same playbook you ran in 2021? If yes, the clock is already ticking. The agents who’ve rebuilt their business twice since then are the ones still going to be here in 2029.

The good news is the fix isn’t complicated. Get around agents who are winning right now, the ones at the price points they want, the listing-based operators, the ones running real consultations. Watch what they do. Copy it. Stop taking advice from agents whose careers peaked in 2021.

The five people closest to you in this business set your ceiling. That includes the brokerage you’ve chosen to be part of. If you’re surrounded by part-timers, hobbyists, and leadership that’s still teaching 2021 scripts, you’re set up to lose.

Momentum was built for the other kind of agent. 100% commission, $12,000 annual cap, no monthly desk dues or royalties. 270+ agents across North Florida (and Georgia), ranked #2 independent brokerage in the region, 97.98% sold-to-list ratio against a 96.73% market average (1.25% more and 8 days faster). We train current scripts for the current market. The application is online, the strategy call is 15 minutes, and onboarding is digital. movewithmomentum.com/meet.

As a small business owner, your level of success will be the average of the 5 people you hire.

Open your roster. For each name, ask one question: if I were starting over today, would I hire this person again?

For most agents running a team, the honest answer clears maybe one or two people. The rest got hired because you needed bodies, or because the interview was pleasant, or because you were tired of interviewing. They’re still around because firing somebody feels worse than missing your number.

So you keep them. And then you blame the market conditions.

The five people closest to you in business set your ceiling. Average them out and you get a pretty fair read on where your team will be in eighteen months. If that math is ugly, you’ve found your problem. It isn’t that Zillow leads slowed down and it isn’t the market.

Here’s what I’ve learned hiring hundreds of agents at Momentum, advising teams, and building my own that grossed $1M+ in a single year: there are really only two kinds of people worth having on a team.

The first is Talent. Talent shows up with a motor. They take notes the first time you teach them something, so you only have to teach it once. They check in with their numbers daily because they actually want to know where they stand, not because you’re making them. You tell them the standard and they either hit it or they quietly take themselves out of the role. You don’t manage their effort. You manage their direction, occasionally.

The second is the Empire Builder. Empire Builders don’t just produce. They recruit, train, and lead other producers. They’ve already built something before you met them, which is the part most team leaders miss when they think they’ve found one. Potential is everywhere. Empire Builders have receipts. They operate with urgency, too.

Three Empire Builders is enough to have a massive life. Not thirty. Three. Even one. Everyone else on your team should either be Talent reporting to one of them, or working somewhere else.

The hiring mistakes I see agents make over and over are pretty consistent. The biggest one is hiring for the team you have instead of the team you’re building. You’re at $5M in volume and you bring in somebody who’s a great fit for a $5M operation. Eighteen months later you’re at $15M and that same person is now the bottleneck, and you can’t figure out why everything feels stuck. Hire for where you’re going. If the candidate feels like a slight stretch today, that’s usually the right call.

The other mistake is believing people change or that you can change them. They don’t. Skills change, experience accumulates, but behavior is who somebody is. You don’t want to be in the reprogramming behavior game like Tony Robbins. If you have to follow up to make sure tasks got done, that’s not coachable. That’s the person. You can spend two years trying to fix somebody and at the end of those two years they’ll be the same person, except now you’ve also lost the production you could’ve gotten from the right hire in that seat. Find someone who works the way your business demands from the beginning, not slotting in someone out of desperation. This requires having self awareness and having hard conversations upfront.

You can spot most of this in a real conversation, not a scripted interview. Ask them about a time they didn’t hit a goal they’d set. Listen for where the agency lives in their sentences. People who blame the market, the lead source, their last manager, or the algorithm are telling you something true about themselves. People who walked you through what they did, what they learned, and what they changed are telling you something different. At Momentum, we have an entire process for interviewing and setting expectations to minimize the burden of the recruiting process and to simply down to what really matters.

Ask them what they did when they were stuck and nobody was around to tell them what to do next. The answer “I figured it out” is the right one. “I waited for direction” is also a real answer, just for a different kind of role. There’s a name for that second person: cul-de-sac talent. They execute lists beautifully and generate zero momentum on their own. They have a place inside a big organization. They almost never have a place on a small real estate team where every seat has to produce. When you’re small, every hire is life or death. You cannot afford to have B players in a small business, they will stall out.

Ask them how they want to be paid. Empire Builders bet on themselves. They want commission, sometimes aggressively, because they know what they can do. Candidates who push hard for salary are telling you how confident they are in their own production. Believe them.

Once you’ve got the right people, leading them is straightforward. You set the standard, you say it out loud, you let them figure out how to hit it. They either do or they don’t, and the consequence ends up being whatever you said it would be when you hired them. Expectations are everything, set them from the start.

This is where a lot of team leaders fall apart. The standard gets missed and instead of holding the line, they start renegotiating with themselves. Second chance, third chance, fifth chance (I know, I’ve done it myself). Now everybody on the team has learned that the standard is actually a suggestion. The producers notice first. They start looking around. Because Talent doesn’t stay on a losing team, and a team where the bar isn’t enforced is a losing team, regardless of what the GCI says at the end of the year.

When Talent leaves, it’s almost never about money. It’s about realizing their leader doesn’t have the spine to protect the bar they’re trying to clear.

So back to your roster. Go through it tonight. For every name, even your assistants and independent contractors: would I hire this person today?

If the answer is no, you already know.

One more thing worth saying. The five people closest to you in business set your ceiling, and that includes the brokerage you've chosen to be part of.

If you're surrounded by agents who don't sell, leadership that doesn't lead, and a cap structure designed to keep you small, your ceiling is already set whether you've noticed it or not.

Momentum Realty was built for the other kind of agent. 100% commission, $12,000 cap, 270+ producers, #2 independent in Northeast Florida (in just 6 years).

If you want to see what it looks like on the inside, apply at movewithmomentum.com/meet. Fifteen minutes, online, no office visit.

To help address that struggle, I’m bringing to the forefront some of the most “taboo” conversations in the real estate industry: financial literacy and building a sustainable lifestyle. These topics are taboo because they’re not taught in school and most brokerages don’t address them, either.

Thus, profit and time freedom are what agents want, but they’re rarely discussed by brokerages? Why?

Number of Agents by Production Bucket

Here’s the type agents I see the most and spend time with, but I will also deep dive into each level of production and their corresponding obstacles at that level of production.

The Grind Agents. These agents sacrifice their personal life, relationships, health, and time in pursuit of growth. I know this cohort of agents well, as I was one, and it cost me big time. These agents glorify the “grind” until it catches up with them. They make posts like “no one will work harder than me” — which is probably true.

Yes, these agents are usually the most profitable agents in the room, too, but they’re often paying the price at home with their family and their “grind” phase is not sustainable. They’re being the hero and carrying their entire company on their back, until it breaks or they evolve. Not many evolve, by the way.

The Stagnant Agents. These agents figure out how to get their lead generation down (and provide good service) and build a small team, but then stall out because they don’t learn how to leverage via systems, technology, and people.

These agents usually hit a ceiling of achievement and remain stagnant, sometimes going backward. Or, they go one step forward, two steps back, over and over again, failing to break through to the next level. They peak out, and don’t engage in personal development, yet are restless because they know there’s more out there and they can do more, they just don’t know how because they’re outgrown their brokerage and peer environment.

Sometimes these agents hop around from brokerage to brokerage looking for magic pills, yet all along they’re looking for someone to change them externally, when really, it’s about who they are becoming internally and getting clarity of what they really want to get out of life (and their business).

The Mega Team Leaders. These agents are often the ones who have blind pursuit of more volume for ego purposes without seeking first to build a sustainable financial foundation for themselves AND their team members. They generally implode under stress and turnover and low to negative profit margins. I’ve seen this too many times.

It gets ugly when you see some mega teams turn in their profit and loss statements and run their numbers (often when buying online leads too). Most will actually refuse to create a profit and loss statement, because they know the truth - it doesn’t look pretty. If they address it directly, they have to change. And, they’re afraid or unwilling to change.

Yet, it all looks great on Facebook and they’re winning awards, so that’s good, right? Not really. Don’t mistake movement for achievement.

If this sounds familiar or if you’ve observed these type of agents before, that’s why I’m here to share some information and perspective on the common problems that real estate agents have in the industry at each level of production (including financial literacy and time freedom), while suggesting some solutions and ideas along the way.

I’m hoping that this post will help several agents who read it, and perhaps they’ll consider the perspective, become aware, and then choose a different path.

My goal is simply to start a conversation about the topics in real estate that most brokerages just simply won’t address or acknowledge.

Acknowledging these common obstacles is the first step in fixing them.

To learn about thinking big, and acting differently, to get different results, contact me for a strategy session: jon@movewithmomentum.com / movewithmomentum.com

Think Big, Question Everything