January 3, 2025Suneet sits down with Jon Foster, co-founder of the J&L Real Estate Group, to discuss what it takes to lead a high-performing team in one of the most competitive real estate markets in the country—the Bay Area. They break down the importance of showing up, building authentic relationships, and leading with clarity and consistency. Jon shares his insights on agent productivity, the evolving role of technology, and why personal development isn’t optional for leaders. The conversation also explores balancing business growth with family life and why true success comes from staying focused on serving clients at the highest level. If you’re a team leader, agent, or entrepreneur, this episode delivers insights you can implement today.
Chapters:
- 00:00:00 – The Hidden Power Behind Every Top Performer
- 00:00:17 – Meet the Billion-Dollar Game Changer
- 00:01:24 – From Crash to Cash: A Two-Decade Real Estate Journey
- 00:03:05 – Inside the Trenches of the Bay Area Battlefield
- 00:05:10 – The Unseen Struggles of Leading a 63-Agent Team
- 00:08:09 – The Books That Built a Billion-Dollar Mindset
- 00:11:01 – Tech Tools That Separate Winners from Strugglers
- 00:13:44 – How Do You Stay Connected with 63 Agents
- 00:17:47 – Is Work-Life Balance Just a Myth
- 00:20:00 – NASDAQ Bell: More Than Just a Ring
- 00:22:11 – Clients Aren’t Transactions: Here’s Why
- 00:25:35 – The Real Estate Market Is Evolving—Are You
- 00:36:30 – Why the Future of Real Estate Lives in the Cloud
- 00:40:29 – Final Words: Adapt or Fall Behind
Links and Resources:
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Episode breakdown: leading a 63-agent team in a hard market
Jon Foster co-founded the J&L Real Estate Group with his wife, Leslie, and has been in real estate for 20 years. The team works out of an office in Castro Valley, in the San Francisco East Bay, and has about 63 agents. Suneet Agarwal coached Jon for about three years. In this conversation Jon explains how he sets expectations, keeps a large team connected, and gets agents to have better conversations with clients.
Set the expectation to match the market
Jon describes the Bay Area as one of the most competitive markets in the country, full of analytical clients who ask hard questions and expect clear answers. The team runs a training every Monday and a meeting every Tuesday. Jon tells agents to plug into those systems like their income depends on it, because it does.
If they’re showing up where the expectation is up here, but they’re prepared down here, they’re not going to win the business.
Jon Foster
Jon treats culture as something the leader sets and keeps repeating. Suneet has written more on how team culture comes down to the standards a leader tolerates.
Attack per-agent productivity with teaching and personal development
Jon’s biggest frustration was too many agents selling too few homes. One answer was a YouTube channel, Winning Agent Movement, where he posts a new video every week on how agents can win. The other is personal development. He recently took about 20 agents from the team to a one-day coaching event in San Jose, and he pushes everyone to read Earl Nightingale’s Lead the Field, his favorite book.
He’s honest that he can’t want it more for agents than they want it for themselves. His job is to offer the A game every week. Agents still have to show up to receive it.
Stay connected with a big team on purpose
Keeping a real connection with 63 agents is a daily struggle, Jon says. He uses a mix of formats. Top producers get a quarterly dinner at the house, often with something unusual, like a brisket flown in from Texas or a hibachi chef. Everyone gets events like Topgolf, which the team did after eXp Realty named it the number one team for GCI among midsize teams. Jon makes the point that an award like that belongs to the whole team.
Jon is in the office at least four days a week and checks in with whoever shows up. Jill, the team’s director of operations, now runs one-on-one check-ins as she steps into a sales manager role. Jon admits it’s time consuming, and he also puts some of the responsibility on the agent. If you feel like you’re on an island, ask yourself if you’ve been showing up.
If I never see anybody, it’s hard to maintain a connection.
Jon Foster
Coach deeper conversations, not faster ones
Jon’s view is that a real business is one where the phone rings with referrals while you’re on vacation in Hawaii, and that only happens if agents built relationships first. When the team started using AI to review recorded calls, the biggest problem it surfaced was agents having surface-level conversations: when are you buying, are you pre-approved, let’s meet Saturday. Conversion suffers when agents never get to know who they’re talking to.
His coaching is to ask better questions and then listen. He thinks the split should probably be 70 percent listening and 30 percent talking. Instead of asking a seller about their timing, he suggests something like this.
Mr. and Mrs. Seller, it seems to me from listening to you, you’ve been thinking about this massive decision to sell your home for a very long time. I’d love to hear more about it.
Jon Foster
Then stop talking and listen. Most top agents in his market carry the same technology, he notes, so the ones winning listings are the ones connecting better with the client.
Grow your staff from within, and only lead if your heart is in it
Jill started as an assistant when the team thought it couldn’t afford her. She grew into director of operations and is now taking on sales management, while a new office manager, Lindsay, picks up operations work. The team also has a full-time marketing and social media manager, three ISAs and listing coordinators. Jon’s advice to anyone thinking about starting a team is blunt. If you aren’t willing to give it your full energy, don’t start. He pours his own effort into a message at every Tuesday sales meeting.
Key takeaways for team leaders
- Run a fixed weekly rhythm, like Jon’s Monday training and Tuesday meeting, and make clear that preparation has to match the market.
- Treat per-agent productivity as a teaching problem. Weekly content and shared books give agents something to plug into.
- Use different formats to stay connected: small dinners for top producers, whole-team events, and regular one-on-one check-ins.
- Listen to calls, or use a tool that does, to find out whether agents are having real conversations.
- Give agents better opening questions, and coach them to listen more than they talk.
- Look inside your team before hiring leaders. Jon’s director of operations started as his assistant.
