As more and more brokerages have joined United Real Estate over the past few years, making it the seventh-largest residential real estate company in the country, agents have universally lauded the state-of-the-art technology and other benefits provided by the progressive national network.
If that wasn’t enough, the United Residential Investment program (URESI), which incorporates training courses and a mentorship community where agents are guided on a pathway to become successful property investors, has proven to be a dynamic game-changer.
Designed to build on agents’ existing real estate knowledge and skills, the program provides the specific education and resources they need to become investor entrepreneurs. Thus, instead of simply being the middleman between buyers and sellers, they themselves can invest in properties to build wealth for themselves and their families.
“URESI may be the most exciting thing we’ve ever done,” proclaims United CEO Dan Duffy. “We’ve launched millions of lines of code, incredible products and service offerings in addition to opening up in new markets—and while that’s all been great, this is fundamentally different.
“Our objective is to change the lives of our agents,” says Duffy. “We’ve gone at that challenge by offering programs to make them more productive, providing a phenomenal culture where they can thrive and advance what they’re trying to do for their families and themselves.”
Positioned as a significant differentiator for United, URESI enhances agent retention and recruitment by offering a comprehensive, supportive environment for agents to grow their investment portfolios.
The URESI Intro Course allows agents to enroll in free, self-paced courses to explore:
- Assessing the agent’s current knowledge and skills around investing as well as their comfort levels
- How to identify key markets and get started
Subsequent courses cover:
- How to find and evaluate a property
- Financing and renovation basics
- Long-term strategies for renting or reselling
Once complete, the URESI Community awaits—featuring more in-depth training, strategy sessions and a private investor network for collaboration, referrals and support. The program began slowly five years ago, progressing until United felt it was time to make it a reality.
“We were having conversations with a number of third parties that have built subscription-based knowledge ecosystems that are branded, where you buy their books and attend their events,” says Duffy. “We had a lot of other priorities, and we kept learning and watching. Then, about a year and a half ago, we finally determined that it made sense to go ahead and bring it out of the ground. And a lot of that was because we needed to get some foundation technology in place to be able to do it correctly.”
United built the program in-house because existing third-party real estate investment programs didn’t have the agents’ best interests in mind, whereas United is fully aligned with supporting its agents’ success. Unique in the national real estate landscape, URESI is built by agents for agents, with the full support of a national brokerage. The program also addresses financial aspects, ensuring agents are making sound investment decisions.
“As we looked around, no other brokerage in the U.S. had ever put what I would consider a complete and fulsome offering on the table that allowed agents to take the knowledge they’ve accumulated and become an investor,” Duffy says. “Agents can fundamentally change their financial wellness, which has an incredible impact on the rest of their lives, health and mental wellness.
“It’s one thing for us to recommend that someone take a class or even partner with somebody else, and we actually went down that road early on. But we realized some things very quickly. One is that these third-party companies really didn’t care about our agents’ outcomes. They cared about selling a subscription or a book, getting more followers on Instagram, creating a culture personality around one or two people. They didn’t have a fully integrated system, pathways and all the resources to increase the likelihood of someone’s success.”
Duffy realized that the answer to what he wanted was right in front of him. United had the goods to make the vision a reality.
“We’re great at training, and we have an LMS (learning management system) platform,” he recalls thinking. “We have the resources, and we can afford to do it correctly and offer it to our agents as part of being in the United community.”
Additionally, United has mentors, people with varying degrees of experience—some who have gone from a single investment property to hundreds of them. Duffy relates how he felt there was some inequity in that agents help investor clients buy properties for a single commission, then do it all over again, while the investor will reap continual financial benefits from that property. Now with URESI, United agents have the opportunity to become investors if they so desire.
Leading the way
While the URESI word is spread to United agents nationwide, after having extensively researched and audited similar industry offerings, Gabe Salas—member of the training staff at United corporate—has been tasked with building a comprehensive training strategy while working to create a supportive community for agents on their investment journey.
“At its core, URESI is an opportunity to build standard skills for investing, like running comps, financing, scoping and completing renovations and renting. All of that is in the education and training we give agents—a lot of which centers around shifting your mindset from being transactional to wealth-building for yourself, changing your perspective for you and your family,” he says. “There’s also a big focus on things like embracing discomfort or uncertainty by seeking out information, resources and guidance from peers. While these may seem inherent, they’re things people have to learn and get comfortable with.”
Duffy amplifies the point, noting that while agents have guided hundreds if not thousands of transactions, Salas uses those experiences while adding crucial elements to help them make confident buying decisions of their own.
“Gabe helps to demystify the process by interviewing super-experienced people within real estate who have done a great many transactions,” says the CEO. “There were thousands of hours of conversations, auditing what they did and how they started their journey. Gabe’s expertise is in taking what goes on behind the scenes, how it works, understanding it, inventorying it and making sense of it, then building various modalities of training.
“He brought it all together in a very cohesive 14-course program to create a pathway for success. He is as conversant and knowledgeable as anyone I’ve ever spoken with. He’s built this for the novice, but also with an eye on how you help the people who are somewhat experienced or have had some success amplify their success.”
Salas explains that the core courses equip agents with the tools to make smart, confident investment decisions, a full-court press to start on an investment journey and travel through the steps and milestones.
“We’ve generated incredible momentum in the past few months since URESI’s release, working with individual brokerages to help bring the program to them. We’re meeting with their lending or insurance partners who are eager to educate our agents because they work side by side with us. They’re literally in our offices coast to coast, getting involved and sharing insights,” he says.
“We’re just starting to open the door to connect our audience to those licensed professionals and experts,” adds Salas. “All of that combined together is what we’re offering, and what we’re continuously iterating and improving to ensure we cover the full experience for everyone.”
The URESI program is available to all United agents through the company’s online Bullseye Learning Academy. They engage with the content and community, with ongoing support throughout their acquisition of properties.
“We have an intro orientation type of training where we teach people about the basics of understanding markets and give them a way to evaluate their knowledge of investing to determine where they should go next. If somebody feels like they’re ready to jump right into the process, they get access to all of our resources, training, community, networking and workshops,” says Salas.
“Our marketing team has worked hard to ensure agents know this is available to them,” he adds. “There are ways they can get information on our internal platform, and ways they can slow roll the process as they get started.”
Raising the bar and boosting productivity
From the outside, it might appear that an agent’s time spent accumulating and managing investment properties would detract from their professional responsibilities to United. But it’s just the opposite, insists Duffy.
“We expect the agents who commit to the journey are going to spend some time on it, but what we find is that they become more productive. Their personal transaction production working for clients actually increases as a result of the competencies they accumulate as a result of becoming an investor themselves,” he says.
“They become better, stronger and faster, so both sides of their business actually grow. By becoming an investor themselves, they sharpen their saw and are able to cut more wood. So their core business of being an agent and serving clients actually improves in volume, and their lead generation strategies are enhanced.”
Fostering meaningful relationships and accountability
Along with husband Blake, Bethany McKay is a licensed agent with Benchmark Realty in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, a United Real Estate company. Closely involved with the program’s launch, McKay believes that URESI is different and better than other offerings for real estate professionals interested in growing a portfolio of properties.
“My husband Blake and I spent many years going to different conferences, taking classes and looking at the sources available to agents,” she says. “The biggest thing we noticed was that there’s too much noise and too many podcasts, trainings, eBooks and downloads—so people get the information but often don’t do anything with it. What we wanted with URESI was to build a community where people had actual, tangible hands-on help with their investment process.
“A lot of agents don’t really dabble. The investor-friendly agent is actually a pretty small niche. A lot of agents don’t understand the language of investors. They want to work with them because they’re repeat clients, but they don’t know how to speak their language and do those transactions. We really wanted this to be built by an agent to train them and teach them how to become investors themselves, and then organically help others as well.”
McKay points out that while buyer’s and seller’s agents know the processes, they must also understand the emotional aspect of the transaction for those involved.
“An agent who has never bought a house cannot understand the emotional process of what a client is going through when purchasing or selling a home,” she says. “I’m a better agent to help with this type of program because I’ve been in the trenches, failed and grown. There’s that perspective in this course and the content in general, learning from hundreds and hundreds of transactions.”
McKay targets mentorship and community as key pillars of URESI, with the program fostering meaningful relationships and accountability among participants, helping agents sustain success throughout their investment journey.
“The thing we’re seeing most in our industry is shiny-object syndrome,” she says. “We wanted a concierge white-glove service from start to finish because agents are so busy; we’re wearing too many hats. So we knew URESI was only going to work if we created this community and fostered a collaboration-over-competition-type mindset.”
Becoming property owners themselves instead of just helping others achieve this goal is a major mental hurdle McKay hopes URESI helps agents overcome.
“We have become so transactional as real estate agents that we forget that what we’re doing every day—helping other people buy and sell property—we can do it, too,” she says. “It’s a mindset shift of, ‘Hey, I can invest in my career and my family legacy while also helping others, and it actually makes me a better real estate agent.’”
“It’s going to change agents’ lives when they realize that they can do this and change their family legacy. So even though it may be new and look scary, URESI was built to be their go-to resource. We can walk with them, help them through their ups and downs and use our failures to benefit their families and their wealth.”
Avoiding financial landmines
A common concern for agents buying multiple investment properties is that they may become overleveraged. But Duffy is ultra-confident that URESI’s intensive courses, once understood, ease any angst.
“There actually isn’t a worry that they’re going to get over their heads because of the ecosystem; the community we’ve built has so many resources and experts available,” he says. “If they’re an active participant in the community, there are systems that allow the agent to get the right advice to navigate those challenges.
“That’s the beauty of the way we built it, which is different from what third-party companies have accumulated in some cases, which is millions of followers or subscribers to those programs. They don’t have the same degree of connection to the agent. We care about the agent holistically. We’re their partner from the very basic training as a result of our brokerage operation. And we go further than that because we’re vetting and curating the right lending partners.”
Duffy goes on to relate that URESI is transformative for agents who decide that their longtime financial goals must include property ownership.
“If an agent goes through a 20-year career and does a healthy book of business every year, when they get to the end their cash-flow stream stops, and there’s no residual income,” he says. “If the same agent makes 10% of those transactions for their own portfolio, then they own many properties that are appreciating.”
“They have a portfolio that has saleable value and the funds to retire. We think there’s around 7.5% of all agents who are intensely curious about doing what some of their clients do—buying residential investment properties, underwriting and financing them correctly. Many of those agents are inside brokerages that do not support such a journey. We’re aligned with our agents through URESI. We’re already working to make sure our agents have success while changing their financial trajectory for themselves and their families.”
For more information, visit https://www.GrowWithUnited.com.
