Texas real estate agent Ben Caballero might be 83-years-old, but he’s officially the top sales agent in the US, selling a staggering 16 homes every single day.
In 2020, Mr Caballero set a world record with 6400 home sales, presiding as the listing agent on sales totalling more than US$2.46 billion.
This year, he’s on track to sell 6000 homes in Texas at a rate of 16 sales every single day.
According to thehustle.co, Mr Caballero got his start in real estate when he founded The Apartment Finders in the 1960s – a service that helped prospective tenants find rentals in Dallas.
After a slow start, holidaymakers started to use the service and the business took off.
He used profits to launch a building company and some other real estate ventures over the years, but by the time he should have been retiring, he finally hit on the concept that would transform his life.
In the early 2000s, Mr Caballero started selling homes on behalf of builders, when he realised that many homebuilders didn’t really want to go through the process of selling them and, at the same time, sales agents didn’t understand the nuances of selling new homes.
In 2007, he launched a platform, HomesUSA.com, that streamlined the builder-agent relationship.
The program allowed builders to easily enter data about homes they wanted to list and the information was directly uploaded to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS).
As simple as the program was, it proved to be a significant innovation for builders who developed hundreds, even thousands, of homes annually in Texas.
From 2004 to 2021, Mr Caballero sold more than 48,000 homes worth a staggering US$17 billion.
The Guinness Book of World Records honoured him for the first time in 2016 (3600 sales), again in 2018 (5800 sales), and once more in 2020, for his sale of 6400 homes.
These days, Mr Caballero has more than 60 builders as clients, including giants like Toll Brothers.
Other large agents in the US might sell a few hundred homes in a year, and none have surpassed $2 billion in annual volume, like Mr Caballero, who outsells many of the nation’s top brokerages.
Recently, Mr Caballero has been working on taking his service national.
His plan is to create a version of his program that can be licensed to homebuilders anywhere, which could mean many more sales for Mr Caballero and a greater impact in the real estate industry.
No matter how big his business gets, he has no plans to upgrade his plain suburban office to a skyscraper in New York or London.
“I don’t need that,” Mr Caballero said.
