In the competitive real estate market of Dallas-Fort Worth, where agent turnover is a persistent challenge, one team is making headlines for an unusual achievement: not losing a single agent since its launch. Justin Nimergood, who leads Top Gun Team out of Southlake, TX, says the team's retention record is no accident. It stems from a deliberate strategy that prioritizes loyalty over production alone, and from a contractual approach that reframes the agent-team relationship as a long-term partnership.
Traditional real estate commission structures typically reward production: the more an agent sells, the better their split. Nimergood designed Top Gun Team's split structure differently. Newer agents pay a fair share upfront, similar to industry norms, but agents who stay with the team for two, five, and ten years see their splits improve based on tenure, regardless of whether their production changes. Nimergood's reasoning is straightforward: a split structure based only on production incentivizes agents to leave as soon as a better production-based deal appears elsewhere. By rewarding time on the team, he gives agents a reason to stay even when a marginally better production split is available elsewhere.
Nimergood is careful not to overpromise. He does not expect zero turnover to last forever, and he distinguishes between acceptable turnover, such as an agent relocating out of state or country, and 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 become the team's leading differentiator in the Dallas-Fort Worth market, ahead of production numbers or growth speed. His goal is for Top Gun Team to become synonymous with keeping agents for the long term, not just recruiting them.
Another distinctive element is the language in Top Gun Team's agent agreements. Every agent who joins signs what Nimergood 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 an employee. 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 about his legacy, Nimergood does not point to sales volume. He says he wants to help create multiple millionaires among the agents on his team, believing 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. He has seen agents use the financial stability they build 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 concrete signals worth weighing against the more common, production-only split structures found elsewhere in the market. Nimergood's approach may also prompt other team leaders to reconsider how they structure compensation and agreements to foster loyalty in an industry known for frequent job changes. More information is available at topgunteam.org.
