Religiously attending rival open homes and actively diverting buyers from competing listings. Million Dollar Listing star Josh Altman sits down with REB ahead of AREC to unpack the brutal habits that separate the top 1 per cent of agents from the rest.
“We would literally go to 15 or 16 open houses in a three hour period,” Josh Altman told me this morning. Confused, I asked what the benefit was for someone already so deeply embedded in the LA market. “I have to know how to sell not only for a house, but I have to sell against other houses.”
The advice is a clear departure from the vanilla business and sales coaches who spruik “knowing data” and “forming human connections”. It’s a realisation that real estate is a zero sum game: if someone else is winning, you’re losing.
Million Dollar Listings star Josh Altman is one of the most recognisable figures in luxury real estate, having built a career selling trophy homes across Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Newport Beach and the Hollywood Hills. Alongside his brother Matt and wife Heather, he co-founded The Altman Brothers, generating more than US$9 billion in career sales.
Today, the business spans Los Angeles, Newport Beach, Scottsdale, San Diego and Las Vegas, with the group currently moving roughly US$110 million in property every month, equivalent to approximately US$4 million every day.
Josh Altman will be speaking at the upcoming AREC26.
Your blueprint to the 1%
By the time he started on television, Altman was on the way up. However, despite the designer suits and celebrity clientele, the secret to becoming a top performer is less glamorous.
“The thing that I prided myself with is understanding everything that's on the market, being built, coming to the market and what it's sold,” Altman said. “I felt like I got into a zone where I was almost a human computer.”
In Altman’s opinion, you can teach negotiation and paperwork. But the drive to know the most about your market is what makes a winner.
“I pride myself on knowing everything about every house in my market,” he said. “And it doesn't happen overnight, but I would do contests with my teams where I would say, ‘Hey, whoever goes to more open houses today gets a thousand bucks or whatever it may be.’”
Altman said his team would race between 15 or 16 open homes in a three-hour window, photographing themselves at each inspection while gathering intelligence on competing stock, buyer traffic and market sentiment.
The reason was simple. Elite agents are not merely selling homes. They are selling against competing homes.
“I have to know how to sell not only for a house, but I have to sell against other houses,” Altman said. “I need to make sure when people walk through my house and I find out what other house they're interested in, I have to talk them out of that house.”
That obsession with inventory knowledge became the foundation of Altman’s business long before reality television cameras arrived.
“I studied the MLS, which is our real estate bible,” he said. “I would study it five times a day, what's sold, what's coming to market, all that type of stuff.”
According to Altman, too many agents mistakenly believe elite performance is driven by charisma, flashy branding or natural sales ability, when the real differentiator is immersion in the product itself.
“Anybody can really learn the tricks to negotiating,” he said. “Anybody can really learn how to do whatever it is paperwork wise or anything like that. But understanding the market, it takes time. And you have really got to walk through every house and you be immersed in it.”
It’s more than the human connection. It’s about understanding what makes buyers tick.
That immersion extends beyond listings and auction results. Altman said mastering buyer psychologically was one of the most important skills an agent could develop, particularly when clients were undecided.
In his view, too many agents become focused on a transactional outcome, and overlook the emotional motivations that drive property decisions.
“When it comes to buying a place, I think it's always really important to understand that this is their home ,” he said. “unless they're a home flipper, an investor, this is going to be where they're going to make memories for the next five to 10 years, maybe the rest of their lives. ”
That emotional framing, he argued, becomes the decisive factor when negotiations tighten and price objections emerge.
As Altman told me, the deal shifts when buyers move from price to emotion.
“You don't even think about the value,” Altman said. “Think about the times you're going to have in that house. Think about your kids running around in the backyard and the smiles on their face, and that is how you close a billion and a half a year. ”
But emotion can also get in the way of potential vendors and buyers connecting with an agent. And for agents attempting to break into prestige markets, Altman said the biggest mistake was confusing luxury with superficial flashiness.
“You’ve got to mirror your seller. You’ve got to mirror your client.” he said.
“If I'm in Newport Beach, Newport Beach is known for being very under the radar, some of the wealthiest people in the world, and they walk around in shorts and flip flops in a t-shirt, and they have more money than anyone. And if you show up in a suit, they're going to laugh at you.”
The same principle extends to time management, presentation and professionalism, particularly when dealing with ultra-high-net-worth buyers.
“All people care about is that you're an expert at what you do and you treat people's time very valuable ,” Altman said.
“Time is money. You do one wrong turn on a drive between two properties. You just wasted that buyer's time. If they know that, you're done.”
So is wearing the world’s best suit or driving a flashy car appropriate in every scenario? Absolutely not. Know your market.
“. If you want to sell to the high end market, you got to understand what you're dealing with, what those people like, what they do, where they hang out,” he said. “You’ve got to really immerse yourself into that ”
Before becoming one of America’s highest-profile agents, Altman and his brother would sit at expensive Los Angeles restaurants ordering water with lime, pretending to drink vodka while listening carefully to wealthy diners.
“I would talk to the person on the left. My brother would talk to the person on the right.”
This is how agents can build real connections with high net worth individuals, and not flaunt performative wealth.
Preparing for a downturn. Afterall, it’s going to have to happen once in a while.
For Altman, one of the clearest indicators an agent has truly reached elite status is when prospecting becomes largely unnecessary because reputation converts into referrals.
“You've done so many good deals for so many good people that they keep giving you business,” he said.
“So your business becomes an incoming call centre.”
However, Altman said even the industry’s biggest operators were not immune to downturns, warning Australian agents how to prepare for shifting conditions after years of unprecedented growth.
Having seen the industry move backwards during the 2008 financial crisis, Altman said diversification across markets and client profiles was critical for long-term survival.
“It's really interesting to see, which is actually part of the reason why I spread out so much to these markets, to, I guess I would say to insulate myself from times when markets are down,” he said.
Even in softer markets, he argued, opportunities always remain available for agents capable of adapting their focus.
“There are people who need to buy because they're investors and they like buying when everybody else is selling,” Altman said.
“So there's always going to be buyers and sellers.”
Ultimately, Altman believes the agents who survive difficult markets are rarely the ones chasing quick commissions or social media fame.
“So if you're getting into real estate, make sure you're getting into it because you love it,” he said.
“If you love it, you'll become successful eventually. But if you're getting into it for the money, you pick the wrong business. I promise you.”
Josh Altman will be speaking at the upcoming AREC26.
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