February 19, 2025Suneet sits down with his longtime friend and industry powerhouse Barry Jenkins for a raw, insightful, and entertaining conversation about real estate, leadership, and personal growth. With 26 years in the business, an 80-agent team, and a bestselling book, Barry shares what actually moves the needle in sales, why agents are throwing away perfectly good leads, and how being “too nice” is holding them back. They also dive into AI’s impact on real estate, the importance of mindset shifts, and why Barry’s fitness journey completely transformed his approach to business. Of course, there’s no shortage of laughs, storytelling, and the kind of brutally honest insights that make this episode a must-listen for anyone in real estate, sales, or leadership.
Chapters:
- 00:00:00 – Choosing Growth Over Destruction
- 00:01:00 – A Snack Addiction and an Awakening
- 00:01:19 – 26 Years, 80 Agents, and a Bestselling Book
- 00:02:10 – The Accidental Impact of Mentorship
- 00:03:45 – Why ‘Too Nice’ is Ruining Your Sales
- 00:06:35 – Writing a Book When You Barely Passed English
- 00:09:15 – Why Agents Think Leads Are ‘Bad’ (And They’re Wrong)
- 00:13:00 – Personal Growth, Mindset Shifts, and Hard Truths
- 00:18:41 – Faith, Journaling, and the 600-Page Habit
- 00:19:32 – Rock Bottom, Resilience, and Rebuilding Stronger
- 00:21:56 – How Fitness Forced Me to Level Up in Business
- 00:23:02 – Real Estate Battles, AI Takeovers, and What’s Next
- 00:24:44 – The Secret to Beating Plateaus (in the Gym and Business)
- 00:25:46 – Lifting Heavy, Failing Hard, and Winning Big
- 00:27:03 – Business is a Sport—And I Play to Win
- 00:31:35 – Hidden Revenue Streams Most Agents Ignore
- 00:35:10 – Kyrie Irving, Unexpected Moments, and The Art of Awareness
Links and Resources:
Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to the Reside Platform Podcast? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube to leave us a review!
Episode breakdown: leading the sales conversation
Barry Jenkins has spent 26 years in real estate and runs an 80-agent team in Virginia Beach. He wrote Too Nice for Sales and helps build the product at Ylopo. In this conversation with Suneet Agarwal, an old friend, he explains why agents lose online leads, how he prepares to teach, what a competing brokerage taught him about his own business, and how he sets up ancillary revenue.
Lead the call when the buyer doesn’t know what they want
The book came out of what Barry taught Ylopo customers. A lead from Google or Facebook lacks certainty. They can’t answer the questions most salespeople rely on: when do you want to move, have you been approved for a loan, what kind of home do you want. So agents decide the leads are trash.
Barry’s view is that the problem sits with the agent. Most agents are good with sphere and past clients, people who already know what they want. With them, the agent plays waiter: what do you want, when do you want it. That accommodating style fails with an uncertain lead. Wanting to be liked, the agent ends the call fast with something like “I’ll send you an email.”
You are too focused on making the person like you. When, in fact, you should be consumed with the fact that this person is making one of the largest financial transactions of their life, they don’t know enough about the subject to ask a question, you should take on the role of a leader in the conversation.
Barry Jenkins
He wrote the book the way he talks, as a set of stories. It came out in 2022 and has sold around 25,000 copies without advertising.
Saying yes to every price is not service
Barry learned the cost of being agreeable in 2008. He said yes to every seller’s number. If a seller wanted to list at $300,000 when the neighbor sold for $250,000, he took the listing and paid for the marketing. He went on 10 appointments, took all 10 listings, and sold none of them.
Other agents in the same market were trained to tell sellers the truth, including that an underwater seller would need to bring $30,000 from savings to sell. Seven out of 10 sellers said no thanks. The three who said yes sold. Those agents were closing deals while Barry wasn’t, and he points to it as proof that opportunity exists in any market for agents willing to lead the conversation.
Know who you’re teaching before you teach
Barry applies the same clarity to training. Before he speaks, he pictures one persona in the room. For a session on team management, it’s the struggling team owner in the back who is thinking about closing because the lead spend just went on a credit card. Knowing that person keeps the content focused.
He tells the story of the night before a large event, when someone in an elevator asked what his talk was about and he couldn’t explain it. He went back to his room and rebuilt the whole presentation.
If I couldn’t tell somebody in 30 seconds what I’m about to teach on, that’s a problem.
Barry Jenkins
He says this holds for a conference keynote and for training one agent on your team. The goal is to change something in that person’s business while you have their attention, not to impress them. His book follows a set order: decide what to say, outline the chapters, match a story from his life to each chapter, unpack it, and end with action items.
Let a competitor show you who your business serves
A cheaper local brokerage with a strong culture recruited about 11 of Barry’s agents over 18 months. All of them were agents who didn’t need his leads. People asked what he was going to do. He told them he was grateful.
Those agents had taken half his attention because he kept trying to stay attractive to them. Once they left, he only had agents who needed his leads, and his next step was to go find more of them. He stopped trying to be everything to everybody. Suneet’s version of the same idea: he won’t change the trajectory of his business based on someone else’s model.
Build ancillary revenue that runs without you
In Barry’s area, buyers often can’t get a mortgage without a termite and moisture letter. He found a termite company that doesn’t do crawl space repairs and a crawl space company that doesn’t do termites. When his agents refer an inspection to the termite company, they get free listing photography from his in-house photographer. The termite company gets the referrals, and the team earns revenue from both the treatment and the crawl space work.
He structures these deals so the partner is excited too. He prefers a third of the net profit, and he locks in the P&L and standardizes pricing up front so expenses can’t creep. He doesn’t run the day-to-day. He says he spends about five hours a week on his team, which is why the setup has to run without him.
He also cautions against thinking a tool alone fixes a team. Coaching, relationships and direction have to come with it.
You can’t just buy software and expect your organization to thrive. It’s like buying a box of tools and expecting to be able to fix your car.
Barry Jenkins
Key takeaways for team leaders
- Train agents to lead uncertain online leads instead of ending the call with “I’ll send you an email.”
- Coach honest pricing conversations. Ten listings that never sell cost more than three that do.
- Before any training, name the one person you’re teaching and make sure you can explain the point in 30 seconds.
- When agents leave for a competitor, ask whether they were the agents your model actually serves.
- Structure ancillary partnerships so every party wins, with pricing and expenses locked before you start.
