Hey, I'm Tory.

In 2024, I had just given birth to my second child, a son, and I was on maternity leave. But anyone in real estate knows the work never fully stops. It's always going on in the background. I stayed well connected and kept doing referral deals while I was on leave.

Around that time, the big-name brokerage I was part of started cutting out the online training. Team meetings were no longer streamed or recorded, and the training reduced drastically.

The reason I was given: with the TRESA changes, agent and brokerage fines were almost doubling. The brokerage was getting too many charges from agents in the industry part-time who weren't staying up to date with TRESA, the new rules, and how to do deals and paperwork. So they moved the meetings in person, to focus only on agents who are in the industry full-time.

Here's the thing: even though I was technically on maternity leave, I was still in real estate full-time. When I couldn't get those benefits of my brokerage just because I had to be there in person, something clicked in my mind. This doesn't work for me anymore, and there has to be a better way.

I'll be honest with you: leaving my setup at the time scared me. I had established a great connection with the brokerage, and I had finally bought my own office room in the building. I invested a good amount of money into furniture and equipment to set it all up, make it look nice, and create a space for collaborations. I connected well with the brokerage owner. So my biggest fear was wasting time, wasting money, disappointing people and connections I was committed to, relationships I had poured into, and people thinking of me differently for leaving. I was scared of leaving and having to start from the ground up yet again. And I was scared about what my clients would think, seeing another brokerage change on my social media and branding. But underneath all of that fear, I knew I couldn't stay somewhere that no longer worked for me. I had to trust that there was a better way, and I had to be brave enough to go find it.

I had been part of a cloud-based brokerage before, eXp, and I had an amazing experience there. But there were still some things I would have liked to be different.

What surprised me the most after joining REAL was how simple they make everything. Coming from brokerages in the past where there were 100 different systems and different logins: if you wanted to know what deals you'd done, you had to go to one system. If you wanted to upload paperwork, you had to go to another system. If you wanted help with marketing, you had to go to another system. Or if you needed assistance with something else, you had to go to a specific person.

With REAL, I was surprised that they just had one app that was the central hub for everything you needed. And I love the Leo feature. Pretty much any question I have, I can go and ask Leo first, and he'll either give me the answer, put me in the right direction, or at the very least connect me with one of my managing brokers to talk with. And I can always reach out to support directly from him as well. The capacity that the technology has, and the simplicity of it at the same time, was a pleasant surprise.

Plus the versatility. REAL is online, flexible, and ready at my fingertips, whether I'm on maternity leave, actively full-time in the industry, on vacation, or just wanting to take a break. I can tune in when I'm ready, when it works for me.