The Year Christina Welch Stopped Selling: How Giving Away Her Own Book Built Jacksonville's No. 1 Real Estate Team

In 2015, Christina Welch stopped selling real estate. Her team was four years old, her name was on the sign, and she was still the strongest listing agent in the building. She handed her entire book to her own agents anyway.

By December 2022, when she sat down with Tracy Hayes for a second conversation on the Real Estate Excellence Podcast, that decision had compounded. The Welch Team, launched in late 2011 inside Keller Williams Atlantic Partners, had grown to 25 people, and Hayes introduced her as the leader of the number one real estate team in Jacksonville, Florida, according to the Jacksonville Business Journal. She was sixteen years in, and eight years removed from her last closing as a producing agent.

Most agents build a team to sell more. Welch built one by subtracting herself, then spent a decade treating retention not as a loyalty problem but as a value problem she had to re-solve every year.

The Year She Handed Over Her Own Book

The exit happened in two stages, and she is precise about both.

"So we started the team in 2011, in which we started adding buyer agents to the team. So at that time, I was still out showing property," she said. "And then once I told the buyer team I was not going to sell anymore to buyers, I was going to give my entire buyer business to them so I could focus on listing property, that was the first transition."

The second stage was the expensive one, because listings were the profitable half.

"And then when I told the listing team, these are all your customers, this is the only way that I see as a fair opportunity for you to trust me and not taking the crème de la crème of customers that are actually going to sell quickly, I had to step completely out," she said. "And so for that, I think it built trust within the team."

A team lead who keeps the best leads is running a lead-generation company with junior labor attached. One who gives them up is running a business. She does not call it a sacrifice.

"Honestly, I didn't know I would be out of the selling piece of it for as long as I have been," she said. "But for me, I get so much more out of training the agents on the team and helping lead the team to bigger growth opportunities than I ever would being out in the field."

Five Active, Five Pending, Five Sold

The episode was recorded into the teeth of the 2022 rate shock, and Welch had a longer memory than the agents she was training.

"When I got into real estate, the average interest rate was 8%, so I was selling 8% on condos and single family homes," she said. "And, you know, even then, people bought and sold property."

What she gave her agents instead of a forecast was a pricing routine she can recite. "So we'd say five by five by five. So we look at five active listings. If there are five active listings, we look at the five that are under contract, and we look at the five that were sold, but we gauge those that were sold within a six month time frame," she said. "And we really want to only look two months back to see, did they have to have a price reduction? Where did it end up selling for based on square footage?"

The part that had reversed since the previous summer was direction. Where the team had priced above market and let escalation clauses work, they were now going under.

"I wouldn't price it too far below what I call market value, because if you've got five competing properties on the market, and they're all priced above what we feel like the current market value should be, you want to price a little bit below them," she said. "So that way, not only does your property stand out more, you're not going to have to reduce, reduce, reduce, to try to catch up."

The Cat Under the Sofa

The marketing spend did not change. "We still sent the stagers in, we still send the cleaners in, we still do professional pictures," she said. "We want the sellers to have their home in show ready condition."

Her name for the alternative is the three Ps: "we put a sign in the yard, we put it in the MLS, and then we pray that it sells."

The team runs what she estimates at twenty steps behind a listing, so when a property stalls the diagnosis narrows fast. "If it's not selling, and you've had 40 showings, it's either going to be the location, the condition, or the price," she said. Location has exactly one remedy, and that remedy is price.

None of which works if nobody will say it to the seller's face.

"We can't sugarcoat it, because if we sugarcoat it and we tell them that their house is nice and it smells lovely, when in actuality, it smells like a cat's been living under the sofa for years and years and years, like we need to be honest with them about it, because that's the only thing that is going to get it off the market," she said. "And remember, we don't get paid until it sells."

Four Months, No Paycheck, and the Metrics That Decide

Welch does not soften the entry cost, and her standards are specific rather than aspirational.

"We have set standards and goals for our newer agents on the team. And if you're not hitting those key metrics, then it's unfortunate, but this might not be the right job for you," she said. "And so key metrics being like prospecting time and actually following up and offers written and offers accepted."

The runway is what new agents underestimate. "When we say it's hard, I don't think people understand when we tell you like you're not going to get paid for four months and it's going to be thankless," she said. What follows, if they survive it, compounds: "once you get past those four to six months, you'll start seeing a little bit of income, and then it's like a snowball effect. It'll eventually start to just come because your pipeline is there and you're following up with all these customers, and those B buyers become A buyers, and those C buyers become B buyers."

The retention answer is arithmetic. Heading into 2023 the team had built tiers, so an agent could see the next rung and what the team would supply to get there, whether "an ISA or our closing coordinators or our marketing department, or specifically farming and helping you farm a community."

"It's not about the commitment, it's more about the value," she said. "We know that we have 25 people on the team now, we need them to have a sustainable life where they're actually making money, whether that be a salary that we're paying or commission that they're receiving."

One detail in how she describes that support says more than any slogan. "Notice, I didn't say you're part of this great team. You're the expert," she said. "Because we want the agents on our team to shine and be known as the expert."

The Zoom Call She Ends Early

Her hiring process is the most transferable thing in the interview, and it exists because the first version failed. Asked what it looked like in 2011, she did not dress it up. "Oh, I like you. Come join us. Fail," she said. "Don't ever hire people just because you like them."

The current version has five gates: an application, a thirty-minute discovery interview over Zoom, an in-office interview with the leadership team, personality testing using both DISC and a Keller Williams assessment plotted against the specific job seat, and reference checks.

The Zoom stage does more work than it looks like. "That's why it's so important on a Zoom call, because we're looking at key things. Can you make eye contact? Can you carry on a conversation? What is happening in the background? Because that's how you're going to present yourself in the world," she said. "And so the Zoom call actually can eliminate a lot of people from the very beginning."

"I can cut the call off if I know the interview is not going anywhere," she said. "Like I had an interview last week, and I asked a simple question, why are you in real estate? They didn't have an answer. And I'm like, you have to at least give me something."

The assessments are not used as a filter. "It just gives me insight as to how I need to speak to you, or how I need to listen to you," she said. She applies it to her own leadership team out loud: George is reserved, so she moderates her aggression with him; Kelly is a high I who likes to talk, "so sometimes I have to just listen."

The Crack Was the Phone System

Twelve years in, with a team ranked first in the city, the problem Welch was working on in December 2022 was leads falling out of the database.

"Right now, we're super hyper focused on making sure that we don't have any cracks in our system, any leads that have come in that have fallen through, or like have been lost," she said.

Her admission of the scale is rare for a top producer. "Even 16 years into the business now, it's like, did I put in every single person I ever spoke to into our database? And I can honestly say no," she said. "So that's what we're trying to fix."

The failure was narrow and unglamorous. Email leads auto-fed into the CRM. Phone calls did not. So the team moved its phones to voice over IP and set about wiring them into Salesforce, so an inbound call would create a lead record, flag a duplicate, and auto-assign.

She frames this as an annual discipline, not a project. "Every year you have to look at your business as an overall whole, and where is your crack this year, what fell through that you need to fix?" she said. "And for us, it was solely customers that didn't get put in the system."

"Houses Don't Cry"

Asked for her biggest mistake in twelve years, Welch named a pattern in herself rather than a market call.

"Everybody that we bring on board, they go, obviously, through a very strict interview process, and so we really find that they're going to be a good fit for our team," she said. "So when they're not, we try to make it still work. And then when they're still not, we still try to make it work. And so it's cutting those ties a little bit quicker."

She has been in the red on the team, too. "There were several years I'd look at George and Kelly and our leadership team and be like, you know, we're still in the red," she said.

The discipline built out of all that is now a team rule. Agents who feel themselves getting heated are told to invent an incoming call and step away. "Because we don't want you to be emotional," she said. "And sometimes, if you get emotional, then the transaction can really go downhill quick, and so we take a breather."

Her reasoning is the sharpest thing she said all episode. "The only thing that we can control is the conversations that are had between the buyer and the seller, because we're the person in the middle, and they're not talking directly with each other," she said. "If we're conveying emotion between those two parties, the conversation is going to go downhill quick."

Then the line Hayes stopped to mark: "This is real estate. Real estate doesn't have a feeling. It shows no emotion. Last time I checked, houses don't cry."

She had one more thing for agents who say they want a team. "I wouldn't suggest hiring anybody until you can afford their income," she said. What most need is not a team but transaction support, which is why the Welch organization launched Coaching to Close, a coaching and transaction-management company that also handles files for outside teams.

What Happened Next

The episode aired December 20, 2022, Welch's second appearance on the show after episode 2.

The clearest change is her role. Christina Welch is now listed as Operating Principal and Managing Broker of Keller Williams St. Johns, on that market center's own leadership page. Her Keller Williams agent profile lists her at KW St. Johns on Durbin Pavilion Drive as well as Keller Williams Realty Atlantic Partners St. Augustine. At the time of the interview she was leading the Welch Team inside Keller Williams Atlantic Partners; she has since moved into market center ownership and brokerage leadership, a different job from the one she describes here.

The Welch Team still operates, and she is still listed as its owner. Given how much of the conversation was about retention, the telling detail is who remains. George Pottenkulam, her first hire alongside Kelly, is listed as the team's Sales Director; Kelly DeLucia is Sales and Marketing Director. Both also appear on the Keller Williams St. Johns leadership page. Fifteen years on from the team's founding, the two people she named on the microphone are still in the building.

Cole Slate, now broker at Keller Williams St. Johns, credits Welch as a mentor in his own Real Estate Excellence feature. Coaching to Close is still operating, offering transaction management and coaching out of a St. Augustine address.

What has not aged is the pricing discipline. Five-by-five-by-five, the two-month lookback on reductions, and the refusal to price above the buyer pool are habits a normalized market rewards.

The transferable move is not the org chart. It is the sequence. Welch gave up her buyer business, then her listing business, and bought trust with the revenue she gave away. She replaced likability as a hiring filter with a five-gate process. She picks one crack each year and fixes that one.

For agents working Jacksonville, St. Johns County, and the corridor running from Nocatee and Durbin down through St. Augustine, the neighborhood-level version matters most. Pricing in Northeast Florida is community-specific: one subdivision can still see competing offers while the next sits sixty to ninety days, and the answer is in the five active, five pending, and five sold on that street rather than in a national headline.

"We wouldn't be a team without them. I can't put me in front of them," she said. "And honestly, everything that we've gained and grown is all because of them. And so even the cracks that we find, we fix them because we want them to be more successful in their business. So there's no I in team."

Featuring Christina Welch · Welch Team, Keller Williams Atlantic Partners · Real Estate Excellence × ReadTomato