Ben Caballero Becomes the First "Billion Dollar Agent"

America's number one Realtor® for the last four straight years – Ben Caballero, president of Texas-based HomesUSA.com – has become the first billion-dollar producer in the world for total home sales last year. Caballero personally was responsible for 2,491 home sales, totaling $1,022,000,000 in 2015.

Uniquely, nearly all of his transactions were new home sales for more than 40 homebuilder brands that he represents throughout the Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin metro areas. Caballero's feat is the result of a highly inventive technology he developed: an online listing management platform that streamlines the MLS listing and marketing process for homebuilders, charging a flat-fee versus a sales commission.

"HomesUSA.com allows the hands-on ability to update the information as often as needed or to change the status of the home listing the moment a sale occurs. This allows Toll Brothers to maintain a consistent and accurate level of home listing information among all inventory, a key factor for the success of Toll Brothers' available homes for sale in the state of Texas," said D'Anne Lancaster, Toll Brothers National Online Sales Concierge Manager.

Caballero is expected to keep his top ranking when The Wall Street Journal and REAL Trends announce its new list of "The Thousand" top real estate producing agents in June. He has been the number one agent in the USA for the last four years, outranking all others on the list in two categories, (1) number of real estate sales transactions, and (2) cumulative transaction (dollar) volume, and he also is the only agent to surpass these same two categories for real estate teams. In 2014, Caballero registered 2,383 home sales representing $925 million in volume. The second-ranked agent had 463 sales, meaning Caballero sold five times as many homes as the second ranked U.S. agent.

From 2010 to 2015, Caballero's total home sale volume tally is $4,503 billion. To put his 2015 new home sales numbers in perspective, Caballero sold an average of more than 47 homes per week, or more than one sale every business hour.

How he does it

Caballero explains how his HomesUSA.com online platform empowers him to manage this massive sales production with a support staff of just ten. "Our Internet-based technology allows us to maintain an average 13-minute turnaround for posting requests to the local MLSs, which then syndicates the listing to sites such as realtor.com and Zillow -- with the utmost attention to data accuracy," Caballero said. "For homebuilders, we really are the best conduit for building relationships with local real estate agents that bring the buyers and generate faster home sales."

The platform features a robust media management system, which allows builders to place orders for a listing photo package (a minimum of 25 photos). The system tracks the status of each assignment, from the acceptance by the professional photographer to confirming that matching the images were uploaded to the listing in the HomesUSA.com system and are ready for distribution to the MLS and syndicated sites.

Caballero's platform also instantly allows homebuilders to generate market intelligence reports, including Days on Market comparison tracking against competitor data, detailed breakdown of the builder's current listing inventory, agent activity, leads generated and more. All buyer leads are automatically routed to the builder's sales rep responsible for the development where the listing resides. In total, builder clients receive more than 40 different benefits, from CMA reports and automated email alerts to a comprehensive weekly summary report that is emailed to management and each sales counselor.

"The Internet has allowed HomesUSA.com to re-invent the listing and marketing process for homebuilders to rapidly accelerate the sales cycle," Caballero said. "Studies show we have been able to speed up a sale for our homebuilder clients by as much as 30 days or more. Lower days on market means reduced carrying costs and that means higher profitability for homebuilders. Incredibly, the savings a builder gets by using the HomesUSA.com platform is several times greater than our flat fee."

Caballero, who became a real estate agent at the age of 21, was a homebuilder himself, and developed his online platform in 2008 based on a paper-system he created before that. Caballero says his system is available to builders nationwide and can easily give multi-market builders a way to monitor all their MLS listing activity in all markets in real time.