Today we’d like to introduce you to Brayden Knutson.
Hi Brayden, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today.
My journey into real estate started out like many others that you hear about throughout the industry. Grand ambitions of being the next big realtor on HGTV quickly turned into crushing blows that created resiliency and invaluable experience. It’s not about how you start but about how you finish. I was in my mid-twenties and had just finished up at UNT when it was time to figure out what I was going to do for a career. I was at a stage in my life where I could either go for the “safe” play, such as being a salaried employee at a reputable company, or I could do something riskier, such as pursuing a career as a realtor. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always gravitated towards real estate as it seemed like it would be the perfect job to marry all of the things that I was inherently good at. As a baseline, I’ve always been a creative at heart, but also love to be around people, excel at math, and have a passion for economics. I also like to have variety in my day-to-day activities and knew that this career would afford me the autonomy that I desired if I could make it work.
At the time, I had just moved to a studio apartment in Dallas, and I had less than $500 in my bank account. I used what little I had to start taking online real estate classes. The normal amount of time that it takes to finish these up is usually 6 months to a year. I ended up taking all six courses, along with passing the six proctored exams, in six weeks. I applied to take the final exam in person and after many sleepless nights studying (it is a very hard test) I passed on my first try and officially got my license in July of 2018.
Just like almost every other person who gets their real estate license, I was filled with enthusiasm and excitement. Many people envision quick success with multiple deals closed in their first year as surely their friends and family will flock to them the second they announce they’ve started a career in real estate on social media. I figured that I might be a little bit behind in this respect as most of my friends from college weren’t even married yet, much less thinking about buying a home. I also had only moved to DFW in 2013 for college and didn’t have the huge network right off the bat compared to someone who was born and raised here, but I had a modest goal of selling $2mil for my first year.
A lot of those early days in real estate can seem aimless as you don’t have any clients that you’re working on and you’re trying to implement all kinds of strategies to pick up that first client and get the ball rolling. I was filling up my weekends with open houses, going door to door in Park Cities and leaving handwritten letters on the doorsteps of multi-million-dollar homes, taking every optional class to enhance my knowledge at my brokerage, and posting photos on social media from broker tours to look busy. When the storms hit in October of that year and everyone’s power was out, I drove to my local Walmart and picked up 50 bags of ice to deliver in my neighborhood with a business card attached. My day job was the one that I’d had in college, which was working as a project manager for an office moving company. At night, I’d drive for Uber and pick up drunk college kids or young professionals from the bars in Uptown, but make no mistake about it. Real estate was my full-time job and where I devoted most of my time to.
I quickly started off on an established team and was learning from a veteran in the real estate market. All of those things I was doing sound good in practice, but real estate is an incredibly competitive industry. Ask almost anyone you know if they have a close friend or family member who’s an agent and they’ll most likely know at least one. There’s a reason that nine out of ten real estate agents don’t end up renewing their license after two years. Fast forward to July of 2019 and I’d sold a grand total of zero homes. After factoring in real estate courses, office fees, MLS dues, cards, signs, and marketing, I was down about $15k for my first year. I was working hard, but I wasn’t getting in front of tons of new people face-to-face. The ones that I did get in front of just weren’t convinced, and no matter how hard I studied the neighborhoods I was talking about or the real estate laws, I found myself lacking on the actual “sales” part of why they should pick me. I think a big part of that is that I didn’t have the experience yet to fully be able to guide people through the process and people can pick up on that.
I knew that my second year was make or break for me as I had just proposed to my now wife and needed to start seriously thinking about our future together. I knew that if I could just get one or two clients closed out, I could market that and try to carry the momentum forward. Halfway into my second year, my wonderful wife, Stephani, and I got married, and we found out that we were having a baby girl in December of 2019. Externally, I was ecstatic, but internally, I was incredibly anxious about how I was going to support our family. I had closed one deal in October for some of my family, but I didn’t have much on the immediate horizon. My open houses were fruitless, and barely any people walked in the door. I was holding open listings for my team that had been on the market for months and therefore, they weren’t getting much traffic. My door-to-door knocking wasn’t getting any return calls, and my friends, although now married with fresh careers and potentially looking for their first home soon, barely remembered that I was a realtor. I needed to make a change.
I had read articles about the real estate brokerage, Compass, periodically, and the few people that did come into my open houses talked endlessly about their in-house app and tech-savvy buyer’s agents. But there was a problem. Where a lot of brokerages don’t have many requirements to allow new agents to join, Compass was the creme de la creme when it came to real estate brokerages, and I couldn’t get in with my current resume. Although they’d only been around for a couple of years at that point, they’d managed to pull in almost every other top agent in DFW with their top-of-the-line in-house search engine, custom CRM, endless marketing materials, digital workspace, and some of the best managerial minds in the industry, including Keith Newman who’s become a very close friend and confidant. The more I read about them, the more I knew that’s where I needed to be if I was going to have the best chance to provide for my new family. Luckily, I had an aunt who just joined Compass after transitioning from her previous brokerage, and after talking with her, she was interested in creating a team and invited me to be on it. I gladly took the position as I didn’t come close to the production qualifications to get into Compass on my own. We finalized the agreement, and I hit the ground running. One thing that I really appreciated about working on that team is that they gave me full autonomy to do what I felt was best for my business.
I sat down and evaluated everything I’d done up to that point and just didn’t know where to concentrate next. I’d never questioned whether or not I’d be successful. I’d always had a steely resiliency to succeed, but at this point in time, I had some of my friends and family start to question whether I should start looking at another career. Luckily, I didn’t have to. I didn’t realize it at the time, but all of the seeds that I’d been planting in the early part of my career were finally coming to fruition. I closed a couple of deals in the spring of 2020, and while they weren’t huge deals, they taught me a lot about the process and things to look out for while walking through potential homes with my buyers. Even with the pandemic and the birth of my daughter in the summer of 2020, I wasn’t slowing down and ended up closing eight deals in the month of August alone. It was like a crash course in how to operate in an extremely busy market, and I made tons of organizational tools that I still use to this day. These tools are custom tailored to each individual client and help me on how to proceed from the initial meet-up phase all the way through closing and beyond. I’ve fine-tuned it as I’ve gone along, but it all started that year. I started to realize that I really liked doing open houses but to ensure that I wasn’t holding empty ones, I made connections with prominent realtors all over Dallas who would allow me to hold their new listings open the week they came on the market. It worked to great success, and I’ve met so many great people who ended up being buyers, sellers, and investors of mine. I’ve also made partnerships with many realtors who have become great friends. I ended up finishing with over $4mil in volume for 2020.
In 2021, I ended up branching off from the team on my own while still staying with Compass, and I almost doubled my sales volume from 2020. Again, I really focused on the open houses with a fine-tuned “elevator speech” depending on the home’s location and price point. I also invested in signs with QR codes, food to bring people, and completely overhauled my CRM to make sure I reached out to every person who came into that open house while sending them custom content from notes I’d write down during our initial conversation. I also made sure that I was a valuable resource for all of my previous clients while helping out with home professional recommendations from my database, property tax season and maintenance tips, follow-up phone calls, and anniversary CMAs to show them how their homes had increased in value over the last year. A lot of my past clients end up becoming close friends, and that’s something I’ll always make a part of my business as I genuinely want to see these people succeed. Having them entrust me with one of the most important life decisions that anyone will ever make is a great feeling but also a great responsibility that I take seriously.
2022 was even better than the year prior, and this year, I’m already on track to potentially double 2022’s number. I’m finding that I’m not having to outsource nearly as much for my business, and a lot of what I’ve done this year has come from previous clients who have referred me to their friends and even partnering up with other realtors who I’ve made friendships with on some deals. As I’m still trying to increase my business, I try to be the hardest-working guy in the room. If that means taking a small land deal in Gun Barrel City and driving over an hour and a half outside of Dallas countless times while simultaneously selling a multi-million-dollar property in Preston Hollow, I work just as hard for each and every client. People constantly ask me what the part of my job is that I think is the most important. As a newer agent, I would’ve probably said something generic like hard work, which can be true, but residential real estate is a deeply emotional experience for the people involved. When large amounts of money are in the equation, and so many different things can go wrong with a home, I would say having experience in helping people navigate those complex emotions is by far the most important aspect. Some days, I can feel like a therapist, and there are even some very interesting personalities when it comes to agents you deal with on the opposite side, but ensuring that the clients are always comfortable in high-stakes situations is what separates the good agents from the great ones. That means taking care of problems before they arise, and the great agents can make a really difficult transaction look easy from the client’s perspective when in actuality, they’re putting out multiple fires before it’s even brought to the client’s attention.
As I sit here today, I look back just a few years ago and am so thankful to be in the position that I am now. It took an incredible amount of hard work, hard lessons learned, and a bit of luck, but I am seriously so happy with my career, and this is definitely what I was born to do. I’m also ecstatic to announce that an incredible opportunity presented itself to me, and I’m about to join the Mark Cain Group with Compass! Mark has been the premier agent in Preston Hollow and Park Cities for over twenty years now, and we’re just now finalizing things this week. Him and I are already partnering up on a few things right now around Dallas, and I can’t wait to help maintain what he has going on while also learning from him and adding some new things to the table from my side. My wife, mom, kids, family, friends, and Keith Newman with Compass have been incredibly supportive, and I wouldn’t have made it those first couple of years without them by my side. I’ve learned a lot and feel extremely confident in my abilities, but I feel like I still have so much more to learn and so many more people to help over the course of my career. One thing for certain is that I have just as much passion today as the day I decided that this is what I was going to do, and I hope to carry that on with me to each person that I get to help over the next few decades.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
There are a lot of different hats that I wear, but I’d say the main ones are being up to date on all contractual and real estate legislation, writing contracts, guiding clients through the process, marketing, managing emotions in high-stakes situations, showing homes, collaborating with other agents, making sure that I’m a valuable resource after closing and making sure that I have detailed organizational databases for all clients, realtors, prospects, and professionals. I’ve had older clients that have gone through multiple realtors tell me, and this is their words, not mine, that I’m a unicorn agent. I am always available 24/7, answer calls after midnight, stayed up until 1 am to write an offer the day before a major surgery, had a closing the day my son was born on 12/28/2022 (although I joined virtually, of course), and always make sure I study my butt off on my areas of expertise and construction flaws/red flags with those homes.
Alright, so before we go, can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
Ideally, I think the best types of clients put their trust in me and heed my advice when it comes to the overall market and how to handle the process once under contract and beyond closing. Some people take more convincing than others, and that’s okay, but at the end of the day, I’m here to help in whatever way I can, and my goal is to make that person as happy as possible while also being completely straightforward with them.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.compass.com/agents/brayden-knutson
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knutcompass/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brayden.knutson
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brayden-knutson-49a4aa162/
