Real Trend’s The Thousand
Lives of Real Estate Magazine (LORE), Winter 2014
No.1 Individual Salesperson in Both Transaction Sides and Volume Ben Caballero: Specialization Is Key
As a multiyear The Thousand No. 1, Ben Caballero, MIRM, broker/CEO of HomesUSA.com Inc. in Dallas, is often asked how he achieves such a high sales volume “My answer is specialization. Real estate has many areas in which agents can specialize. I choose to be a corporate specialist. Corporate specialists serve informed corporate clients, whose needs are vastly different from those of retail home buyers and sellers. They provide a specialized set of services and often handle a high volume of properties,” says Caballero.
An agent who specializes in real estate owned (REO) properties is one example of a corporate specialist. “My specialty clients are volume homebuilders. My clients’ marketing departments, sales departments and product knowledge exceed those of any agent and most real estate firms. To attract homebuilders as clients, I had to determine what I could do more effectively than they could. I had to go beyond providing traditional agent services,” he says. “I realized that as skilled as home-building companies are, their core competency is building homes. They are not skilled in the nuances of the MLS or the details of how agents work, but they do want agents to bring them buyers, and they do recognize the value of having their home information in the MLS. I reduce their inventory marketing time by managing their MLS listings with a high degree of accuracy and timeliness.”
