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Leadership isn’t about tools or status – it’s about connection, consistency, and becoming the one your clients and team trust most. 

There’s a reason some leaders build empires while others stay stuck. It’s not about who has the biggest ad budget, the most followers, or the fanciest CRM. According to Alex Vidal, President of ERA Real Estate and the first Hispanic president of any major national real estate brand, it comes down to something simpler – and harder – than any of that. 

We sat down with Alex for a candid, unscripted conversation on Real Estate Unscripted, and what he shared was a masterclass in servant leadership, resilience, and the kind of gritty entrepreneurial thinking that builds a 26-year career from secretary to brand president. If you lead a team — or aspire to — this one’s for you. 

Watch the complete interview on our Real Estate Unscripted podcast here! 

The Entrepreneurial Mindset That Changes Everything 

Alex didn’t walk into real estate with a vision board and a five-year plan. He was 19, a new father, and needed a paycheck. He faxed his resume everywhere and landed a job as a secretary at Kai’s Company. Within ten months, he’d spotted a problem — the brokerage was hiring and losing the same 70 to 80 agents every month — and created his own solution. “I learned very quickly to build a career on filling the hole in the donut,” he told us. 

He asked to start calling the list of new licensees arriving in the mail each week, setting appointments for branch managers. He was making $21,000 a year. Within ten months, he was promoted to recruiting director. 

The lesson for you: stop waiting for someone to hand you an opportunity. Look around your business right now. Where’s the hole in the donut? What problem is going unsolved? That’s your next move. 

Related reading:  Medium – Moving From Command & Control to Coaching & Collaboration: Alex Vidal Of ERA Real Estate On How Leaders and Managers Can Become Better Coaches

You Don’t Need a Lot to Stand Out 

Here’s a truth that might sting a little: you don’t have to do much to separate yourself from your competition. Not because the bar is low, but because most agents simply aren’t doing the basics with any real intention.  

The average consumer knows 12 to 13 realtors. So for every contact in your phone, they have a dozen options. The real question — and Alex asks this of every agent he coaches — is this: Are you their clear favorite? 

If your honest answer is “I don’t know,” that’s not a knock. It’s an opportunity. The agents who win aren’t the ones chasing the next tech tool or trend. They’re the ones who pick up the phone and genuinely ask how someone is doing. Not to fish for referrals, but just because they care. 

When you call your sphere without an agenda, something shifts. The wall comes down. They invite you into the conversation about real estate — rather than you inviting yourself. That’s a completely different dynamic, and it’s what makes you the clear favorite. 

Related reading: Leadership That Builds Market-Ready Agents

Three Leadership Principles That Actually Hold Up 

When we asked Alex for his top three leadership lessons, he didn’t miss a beat. These aren’t platitudes. They’re hard-earned truths. 

1. Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. 

Alex travels over 170 days a year to be with his agents and broker owners in the field. He makes more recruiting and retention calls than anyone on his team. He gives his personal cell number to every agent, broker, and employee he’s ever spoken with — and he means it. Servant leadership isn’t a buzzword. It’s showing up and doing the things you ask your people to do. If you’re asking your agents to prospect, you better be prospecting too. 

2. The higher you go, the lower you go. 

The more responsibility you carry, the more your job is to make life easier for the people below you — not the other way around. Alex ends every one-on-one meeting with the same question: “What can I do to make your life easier?” 

He holds skip-level meetings with his team every other month to get a true pulse on what’s happening on the street. He doesn’t just manage from the top — he stays embedded in the work. 

3. Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan. 

This one’s about ownership. When there’s good news to deliver, Alex lets his team make the call — they earn the win. When there’s bad news, he picks up the phone himself. Every time. That’s not just noble. It’s strategic. It earns you a level of trust and loyalty from your team that no compensation package can buy. 

Related reading: Empowering Real Estate Leadership: Practical Steps to Motivating Your Team

How to Bounce Back When Life Gets Hard 

Alex has been through two divorces and has rebuilt his life — and his finances — each time. When we asked how he got through it, his answer was a blueprint for anyone navigating adversity in business or in life. 

After his second divorce in January 2023, he sat down and built a vision board. Not as a feel-good exercise, but as a functional operating system. He divided it into categories: finances, social circle, goals, and physical fitness. When he didn’t know what to do on a hard day, he looked at the board and asked a single question: does this get me closer to what’s on here? 

Within three months, he had sold his house, bought a new one, earned a promotion, and completed the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon. .”Going through stuff is inevitable. That’s where having goals and having the discipline, whether you want to or not, to go after those goals is what gets you out of it.” 

For the leaders in the room: your team is watching how you handle adversity. Not just whether you survive it — but how quickly you bounce back and what you model for the people around you.

The Gratitude Practice That Actually Works 

Inspired by psychologist Shawn Achor‘s research on gratitude and happiness, Alex developed what he calls the 5-10-25 rule. On great days, write down five things you’re grateful for. On okay days, ten. On hard days, twenty-five. 

The key is pen to paper — not your phone. The physical act of writing creates psychological ownership of what you’re grateful for, which makes it more real and more lasting. And the rule is to never repeat yourself, which forces your brain to scan for new positives you’ve been overlooking. 

He now coaches this practice inside ERA, and his own sons use it. When you’re in a funk, the board doesn’t lie — you have more going for you than the one thing that’s going wrong.

Why Your Agents Aren’t Coming Back to the Office 

One of our audience members asked how she could get more of her agents back into the office – and Alex didn’t sugarcoat it. 

Agents aren’t coming to your office because they don’t see value in the trip. That’s it. If your sales meetings aren’t worth getting dressed for, they won’t come. The solution isn’t to mandate attendance. It’s to build enough value that they want to be there. 

Alex’s approach during COVID became a model for the entire ERA system: agents could only attend coaching sessions by coming into the office as a watch party. The in-person requirement wasn’t punitive — it was designed around a high-value experience that justified the commute. When you create something worth showing up for, people show up.

What the Industry Must Get Right in the Next Five Years 

We asked Alex what real estate absolutely cannot get wrong going forward. His answer cut right to the bone. 

He shared five reasons why consumers become online leads instead of using an agent they already know: 

• They don’t know anyone in the market. 

• They didn’t want to upset anyone in their sphere — so they went with a stranger. 

• They wanted privacy. 

• Speed — portals respond in thirty seconds. 

• They didn’t want to bother their agent. 

Read that last one again. Consumers are using Zillow because they don’t want to inconvenience you. 

The fix isn’t better tech. It’s becoming so genuinely connected to your clients that none of this other stuff matters. Make yourself the clear favorite, and the lead portals become irrelevant. 

For Agents Who Are Brand New — and Burned-Out Ones Too 

Whether you’re brand new to the industry or considering getting out of it, there is one underlying truth: your results live and die by what you’re intentionally putting on your calendar. 

For new agents without a sphere, Alex’s advice to his own son — who moved to a new city in January with zero contacts — was this: put something proactive on your calendar every single day to put yourself in front of new people. Open houses every weekend. Door knocking in a target farm area. Meeting developers. Asking for referrals. The method matters less than the consistency. 

For burned-out agents, the answer isn’t motivation — it’s meaning. Money is a fleeting motivator. What does making more money allow you to do? Alex shared a story about a grandmother in Colorado Springs who wanted to take her granddaughter for coffee in Athens and her grandson to walk the Colosseum. That’s a why. When you know yours, getting out of bed stops being a negotiation.

The Bottom Line

Alex Vidal built a career on spotting what was missing and filling it. He leads not from a corner office but from the field — traveling 170-plus days a year, making calls alongside his team, owning the hard conversations, and asking every person who works with him what he can do to make their lives easier. 

None of it is complicated. All of it requires discipline. 

If you take one thing from this conversation, let it be the question he poses to every agent he coaches: “Am I their clear favorite?” 

If you don’t know the answer, now you know what to do.

For Your Agents… 

“Are you their clear favorite?” Here’s a question worth sitting with today: of all the real estate agents the people in your sphere of influence know — and the average consumer knows 12 to 13 of them – are you the one they’d call first? 

Not because you have the best ads. Not because your Instagram looks great. But because you’ve shown up for them as a human being. Because you called just to check in. Because when things got hard, you were steady. 

That’s the whole game, right there. 

The agents who win long-term aren’t necessarily the loudest or the most tech-savvy. They’re the ones who make people feel like they matter. And that’s not a skill you have to buy or learn from a course – it’s a choice you make every single day. 

So today, pick up the phone. Not to pitch. Not to prospect. Just to connect. Ask someone how they’re doing and actually listen to the answer. Small move. Big difference. 

You’ve got this. 

Darryl Davis is an award-winning international speaker, real estate and business coach, and best-selling author of three books, all published by McGraw Hill Publishers.       

For more than 35 years, Darryl has spoken to and trained more than 100,000 sales professionals around the globe to more than double their production year after year. His book,  How to Become a Power Agent in Real Estate, tops Amazon’s charts for one of the most sold books to real estate agents.       

He was awarded the Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) designation by the National Speaker’s Association, which is given to less than 2% of all speakers worldwide.       

Whether from a stage or Zooming into a virtual room, Darryl’s extraordinary humor, relatability, and natural gift for teaching real-world, results-producing skills and mindsets to audiences have made him a client favorite throughout his career.       

Audiences will laugh, learn, and ultimately walk away better prepared for a changing world, with the tools, skills, and training they need to build their businesses with more ease and less stress and to design lives and careers worth smiling about.       

Bring One of Darryl’s W.O.R.K. Topics to Your Organization!      

By providing your agents with the knowledge and insights they need to stay ahead of the game, you can ensure that they are equipped to handle any situation that comes their way! 

Contact us here to learn more!