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Publications

What your agency is worth, and how to raise it.

Practical articles for real estate media agency owners on pricing, hiring, recurring revenue and selling. Each one opens on a real agency and a real number, and ends with what to do about it. Two new pieces a month.

Rows of blue houses funnelling toward a single gold one
Article11 min read

The Squeeze on the Middle

The floor came up, the ceiling came down, and you are standing in between

One owner in the group now pays 43 cents an image for daytime editing, down from 85 cents with human editors. A shop with a laptop can buy the same subscription. Meanwhile a platform held us to $10,000 a month for seven months on a contract that auto-renewed, at a point when we were already hurting. Nothing in your business broke. The position it sits in did.

  • The floor came up
  • The ceiling came down
  • And the middle pays rent
  • Working harder in the middle is not a strategy
  • + 2 more sections
  • trends
  • ai
  • growth
Read
A grid of white marble houses with a single gold one at the head
Article10 min read

The Consolidation Wave Is Already Here

The call you got in January was not random

There is a buyer working through our industry right now paying about 2.83x earnings, and he runs twelve cold callers at four dollars an hour to find owners having a bad quarter. The agencies selling to him are not run by worse operators than you. They just took the call in the wrong month.

  • The consolidators are not waiting for the market to settle
  • What the buyers have that you don't
  • Why 2.83× is a perfectly rational price
  • The offer is priced on your situation, not your business
  • + 2 more sections
  • trends
  • consolidation
  • selling
Read
A house shape made of many smaller cut-paper houses
White paper33 min read

The $27M Question

What Happens When the Best Agencies Stop Building Alone

A buyer offered one founder a million dollars for an agency doing $4.3 million a year. There was no number on the other side of the table to argue with. This paper is about where that offer comes from, and why private equity will not take the meeting under $3 million in combined earnings.

  • Part I: We Know What You're Dealing With
  • Part II: What's Already Happening Around You
  • Part III: What Vendors and Partners Keep Telling Us
  • Part IV: The Real Goal Is a World-Class Company
  • + 4 more sections
  • white-paper
  • thesis
  • valuation
Read
Newsletter

New writing lands twice a month.

What agency owners in the group are seeing on pricing, offers, platforms and AI, with the numbers attached. Unsubscribe whenever. No pitching.

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