Agent turnover is one of the quiet costs most real estate teams avoid discussing publicly. Justin Nimergood, who leads Top Gun Team out of Southlake, TX, addresses it directly. Since founding the team, he says he has not lost a single agent, and he wants retention, not just recruiting, to become the team's defining metric. In an industry where agent mobility is high and loyalty is often transactional, that claim carries weight.
Most commission structures in real estate hinge on production. The more you close, the better your split. Nimergood built Top Gun Team's split structure differently. Newer agents pay a fair share upfront, similar to industry norms, but agents who stay for two, five, and ten years see their splits improve specifically for tenure, regardless of production changes. His reasoning is straightforward: a production-only split rewards someone for leaving as soon as a better deal appears elsewhere. A structure that also rewards time on the team gives agents a reason to stay even when a marginally better production split is available. This approach could pressure other teams to rethink their compensation models if retention becomes a competitive advantage.
Nimergood is careful about framing the zero-turnover record. He does not expect a zero percent turnover rate to last forever, and he separates acceptable turnover, such as an agent relocating out of state or country, from turnover tied to team culture or benefits, which he considers a problem he is responsible for fixing. So far, he says none of his departures have fallen into that second category, because he has not had any departures at all. He wants agent retention to be the team's leading differentiator in the Dallas-Fort Worth market, ahead of production numbers or growth speed. His stated goal is for Top Gun Team to become synonymous with keeping agents for the long term, not just recruiting them.
One detail Nimergood points to often is the language in his agent agreements. Every agent who joins signs what he calls a lifetime partnership agreement, a term he says is unusual in an industry where most agreements run six months to a year, or carry no specific term at all. He is precise about the distinction: it is not a lifetime employment contract. It is framed as a partnership, because he considers every agent on the team a business partner rather than someone working for him. The word lifetime is used intentionally, he says, to get agents thinking past a short-term stint and toward what their career could look like if this became the last team they ever needed to join.
When asked what legacy he wants to leave, Nimergood does not point to sales volume. He says he wants to help create multiple millionaires among the agents on his team, on the belief that agents who reach that level of success end up taking on bigger roles and more responsibility across the industry, not just within Top Gun Team. For Nimergood, the bigger picture is what that success makes possible. He has seen agents use the financial stability they build on Top Gun Team to help others, and he hopes that ripple effect becomes part of the team's lasting legacy.
For agents evaluating teams in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the retention record and the lifetime partnership language are two concrete signals worth weighing against the more common, production-only split structures found elsewhere in the market. For more information, visit TopGunTeam.org.
