Although his name is synonymous with top-tier luxury real estate in the western part of the U.S. today, Paul Benson was not always an elite real estate advisor.
Before he threw himself into the world of lavish estates and picturesque mountain towns, Benson spent many years in the auto retail industry.
Paul Benson | Engel & Völkers Gestalt Group
“I was running some of the nation’s top, biggest dealerships,” Benson told Inman. “And my dealership got sold to AutoNation. I had a friend who was a real estate broker at the time in Newport Beach, and he said, ‘Why don’t you go with me one weekend and just feel this out? See how it goes.'”
That Saturday, Benson watched his friend win three listings by door-knocking, two of which he had also already secured buyers for.
“Basically, he made $100,000 in a few hours that afternoon, and I thought to myself, ‘Huh. I’m going to go get my real estate license,'” Benson said.
Taking the skills Benson first learned while selling cars and expanding on them while applying them to real estate has served him well. He is regularly the No. 1 agent in the Engel & Völkers network globally, and one of the top-earning agents in the state of Utah, where he is based. He is also co-founder and CEO of the Engel & Völkers Gestalt Group, a network of about 50 offices and just under 1,500 advisors across Utah, California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Washington and Idaho.
How does Benson stay on top of the market so consistently, all while leading a powerhouse group of agents across multiple states? Relentless marketing, extreme responsiveness and maintaining a deep knowledge of his local market, he told Inman.
Relentless marketing
Benson got his first sales gig in Park City by being in the right place at the right time. While on vacation, he stumbled across a new development project in Deer Valley that needed help with representation. The next thing Benson knew, he was volunteering himself to sit at the project and had relocated from Vermont to make the city his permanent home.
For the first six months, he did nothing but work.
“I did open houses literally morning, day, night, every single day, seven days a week,” Benson said. “I still have clients from those six months that I’m working with today, and I made over $1 million that first winter in Park City doing open houses.”
He also made sure that he was the first person in real estate that people coming into town on holiday encountered. How? By investing heavily in prime placements in magazines at the local airport. This was around 2004 and 2005, when print media was still healthy.
“Back then, it was the same magazines on every newsstand in every airport,” Bensons said. “Unique Homes, Robb Report and duPont Registry, and they were always next to each other. And I said, What if I was on the cover of all three? And it was a massive, massive investment. But I did it, thinking that everyone would get off the plane and see those ads, and that was my first really, really big, over $100 million year in Park City, and that was 2007.”
But as more of the world shifted to digital marketing, Benson adapted his marketing strategy, too.
“Then came the website world, and I wanted my website to be found everywhere, so I invested there,” he said. “And then came the social media world, and I put a lot of time and energy into building that up. And I just looked at it this week — you look at some of these posts, and you’re getting 30,000, 50,000 eyes on a post in a week, and that’s before everyone shares it. That’s frankly bigger than a lot of the magazines I used to spend all this money on.”
At least every quarter, Benson said he and his team reassess their digital marketing strategy and think about how it could be improved. With such swift changes taking place with AI today, Benson said optimizing website marketing to be included in AI results is very important in order to stay visible.
Rapid responses and generosity
High-end homebuyers and sellers expect to receive answers on demand today, Benson said, which is why one of his top priorities is to have his phone and Apple Watch close at hand so that he can respond to requests as quickly as possible.
“I believe the most powerful thing you can do is be responsive and be fast, so I try really hard to separate what’s important and not important and anything that is a task, anything that is minutiae-related, anything that’s repetitive, it’s going to somebody on my team to handle,” the luxury advisor said. “And what that leaves me is the ability to be present, to take phone calls, to communicate with clients and to respond quickly.”
Being attentive and quick to respond has also allowed Benson and his team to win business from other agents, simply because they’re able to pick up the phone more quickly, he added.
“People expect instant responses right now,” Benson said. “And they expect it whether it’s from an Instagram direct message or text, an email, doesn’t matter — they expect it.”
In addition to remaining responsive, Benson said that maintaining a certain generosity of spirit, or what he called “not being transactional,” can also go a long way with clients.
“Let’s say a client fires me because their listing doesn’t sell,” Benson said by way of example.
“And instead of getting angry or frustrated, I continue to help them, and ultimately, I still don’t get to sell, but I continue to help them until I give them advice that helps them with their new broker and their new broker gets it sold. That client will still remember that and come back later.
“Or where you’re just helping somebody, knowing that there’s no commission involved, in just random ways, or helping other agents in random ways. What I’ve found over the years is that’s a powerful thing for people to realize — that you just really love what you do, you love the industry and you want to help.”
In-depth local market knowledge
Agents who want to succeed in their market need to be local experts, Benson said, and this is especially true in Park City. The city has an interesting mix of high-end vacationers, second-homeowners and locals and has one of the highest concentrations of pricey listings in one ZIP code in the country. Properties in one neighborhood could sell for $500,000, and a few minutes away, there are $20 million mansions.
“And every single one of these little micro-markets is completely different as to how it’s doing, how the interest rates are affecting it, how the snow this year is affecting it — or lack of snow, I guess, is a better way to put it,” Benson said.
“You have to absolutely know your stats and facts and figures in every single one of these neighborhoods, like what sold, why it sold, who built it, who’s the architect, what made it unique, how much we think it cost to build that home versus the home next door. You have to know every detail you can because it’s the most valuable thing you can do for a client.
“A client is coming to town not knowing Park City, and the best part of Park City is that they don’t have a relationship, generally speaking, with another agent yet. They’re tourists; they’re here to ski, and they are falling in love with Park City for the first time, and it gives you, as a brand new agent, an equal playing field to everyone else.”
The ubiquity of portals like Zillow and new tools like ChatGPT allows consumers to have access to more information about real estate than ever before, Benson said. That’s why it’s so important for agents to have insider information and insights that Zillow and ChatGPT do not, ready at their fingertips to share with clients, to show why they’re valuable.
“And the only way to have that information armed and dangerous, no matter who walks in and no matter what they ask, is you have to spend every single minute learning that market,” Benson said.
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The post How this broker consistently dominates his market while running a 1,500-agent affiliate appeared first on Inman.
