Arizona Best is an independent, family-owned firm with award-winning training, education, and quality agents.

Arizona Best Real Estate was established in 1987 by David and Charmayne MacIntyre. They are still running the business today, but a lot has changed since they first started the company 35 years ago. 

Over the last 35 years, Arizona Best has successfully navigated and adjusted through tumultuous market changes. With their affiliation with Leading Real Estate Companies of the World® (LeadingRE), they can compete with any national brand.

"I acquired this firm from a savings and loan," says David. "I established four locations, 115 agents, with about 400 listings. We started with nothing. We worked out of two motel rooms and two homes as we scraped together all of our furniture to get things up and running."

David holds a degree in real estate from Arizona State University and ran numerous firms before starting Arizona Best. He was the Director of Education at the Arizona Department of Real Estate where he had the opportunity to set up and approve all the real estate courses in the state. He took almost every course there was to expand his knowledge.

"The advantage I have in this market is my degree in real estate, and being with Leading Real Estate Companies of the World®," says David. "I decided to go into residential real estate because a small independent company like ours can compete with large franchise offices due to LeadingRE. We don't have a franchise fee, giving a 6% profit competitive advantage. I've run several smaller firms and larger firms over the years."

Relocation and Luxury Properties

At Arizona Best, they supply many services, including serving our military through Military on the Move®, relocation, new construction, residential, and luxury. Their relocation services are award-winning. Allison Rybarczyk runs the Relocation Department at Arizona Best.

"I met Allison, my stepdaughter, when she was 4 years old," says David. "She is the face of Arizona Best. She goes to every seminar, course, class, and conference to expand our knowledge, including LeadingRE conferences in Shanghai, Portugal, and Dubai. We send a small team of agents to go with her because the more experience, the better. Allison, our staff, and agents are at every kind of event that exists in real estate. What happens is our relationships work. We assign those clients to our top 40 agents. As a result, about 25% of our income comes from relocation alone because we network and talk to people."

Arizona Best has been through every up and down in the market imaginable, including fluctuations of luxury residential properties.

"In our market, luxury real estate is considered homes that are over one million dollars," says David. "We always had nice homes at lower prices, so here are the million-dollar numbers. Currently, in 2022, we are at 4,756 homes which sold over a million dollars. In 2021 it was 5,542, and 3,159 in 2020."

They have established and maintained several luxury global partnerships, including Who's Who in Luxury Real Estate and Luxury Portfolio International® (LPI).

"We have been in Who's Who in Luxury Real Estate for over 20 years and in Luxury Portfolio International® for over 15 years. We have been a member of the Arizona Residential Architects group that designs many of the multi-million dollar homes here in the valley for over 10 years. We are involved where the luxury homes are."

Quality Over Quantity

Arizona Best believes in quality over quantity. David says that's what makes them so competitive.

"People come first." David says, "What we are looking for is high-quality, professional, and energetic people. Volume is vanity and productivity is profitability. Our agents sold 901 homes with an average price of $720,000. This gives our agents a substantial amount of income for each agent who sells about 10 homes."

"The book Good to Great suggests getting the right people on the bus," says David. "We look for independent, positive, and self-directed learners. We're very selective in choosing who comes into the company. It's more of a lengthy interview process. We build our business on relationships, not advertising. As a result, we have a fine group of people who like each other that focus on helping people who know, like, and trust them with real estate."

Considering their goal isn't to fill seats in the office, they only bring in a few new agents that they can help become caring, quality Realtors®.

"It's a process where instead of trying to hire 50 people a year or 50 people a month, we might hire one or two a month because we hand-pick them," says David. "We could be as big as we want to be, but as I said, I'd rather have quality people selling 10 to 15 homes each and take our time getting to help them."

David believes that the success of the agents is largely impacted by the resources they are given. That's why at Arizona Best, everything they need is given at no cost to the agent.

"We provide all the support for the agents," says David. "We pay for everything for a successful business, so that they have everything they need to make more money here than they do anywhere else, and they love the culture. I have a wonderful leadership team who is available to the agents whenever they need our help."

Given his background in real estate education, it's no surprise that David values providing proper education for agents. He finds that it's important to invest the money, put in the time, and bring in the right people. He also knows that education can be fun.

"We brought in valuable speakers from Leading Real Estate Companies of the World® and Luxury Portfolio International®," says David. "We had a cocktail party and luxury brand collaboration event for 60 people at Hangar One at the Scottsdale Airport, a premier corporate jet facility. The following day we had a Luxury Masterclass at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Scottsdale, hosted by Luxury Portfolio International®.  We learned all the tools and resources available to our agents to be equipped in selling luxury homes. We invest a lot of money and time in education, but it's education with cocktails. That's what works!"

Arizona Best agents follow the Ninja Selling System. When training new agents they refer to the system to help them grow their businesses." Most of our agents started using the Ninja Selling System after we had our own four-day company Ninja Installation," says David. "We also have over 400 online Institute courses from LeadingRE that are award-winning. The reason we are so profitable is because of these two award-winning programs, it all adds up. Any brokerage can do these kinds of things to be successful."

Top Notch Marketing and Technology Services

For their marketing and technology, Arizona Best agents rely on several platforms, including DeltaNET®. They searched continuously for providers that worked for them, and ultimately found an array of services that they incorporated into a system that's effective to maximize productivity for their agents.

"We've looked at a lot of providers and we chose Delta Media six years ago because of the easy access they have with their Cloud Delta feature," explains David. "We use Delta Media Group® for our firm for so many reasons. Delta provides our agents with quality, customizable websites that include Search Engine Optimization (SEO)."

Aside from getting a custom-built website and SEO services, they also value having a blogging platform to post content and access to various other digital marketing and print marketing tools through Delta. 

"Delta gave us a blogging platform for our agents to provide content, and digital marketing tools that include social media posting, eCards, and Market Watch Reports," says David. "Their Facebook Ad Wizard allows our agents to easily make ads. They have print marketing tools that are quick and easy to create flyers, mailers, etc. for open houses. They have an easy-to-use tool to create a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA), called Delta Pitch, for our agents to provide a report for their clients and potential clients on what their home is worth."

Arizona Best believes one of the best ways to keep momentum going is by staying in touch with clients and maintaining relationships, which can easily be done through Delta's My Customer for Life (MCFL), SMS text messaging, or sending Smart Drip Email Campaigns. These are genuine and authentic ways to make maintaining contact more personal to people.

"We're a little unique." David says, "We don't advertise in the newspapers or do much magazine advertising. The bulk of our business is relationships that we've built over the years, and it's maintaining those relationships with the clients."

They have found that not only does DeltaNET and its automated and customizable features make life easier for agents, but it also helps them stay organized and drives results.

"Best of all, our agents stay organized with their clients on their Customer Relationship Management (CRM)," says David. "It is customizable and can be automated with campaigns to stay top of mind. As a result, the outcomes have been phenomenal. Delta Media Group is the best ever. We've been training our agents on where to find a lot of the marketing materials in DeltaNET, and this consists of instructional cards for all platforms."

Getting Better, Not Bigger

When thinking about their goals for the coming year, Arizona Best is looking to evolve and expand in a variety of ways to show their agents how to close two more transactions a year.

"We always aim to be better, not bigger," says David. "There is always room for improvement. In 2019, I sat down and improved the training program hoping that we could double the number of transactions and quadruple our profit for the company. Because home prices shot up, we doubled our income and quadrupled our profit; however, our transactions aren't up. Right now we're working on how we can add 35 more agents that also close 12 transactions at $720,000, which makes us a billion-dollar company."

They feel that the fact that they are in Arizona, where so many people are moving to from other states, presents them with a unique opportunity. Unlike in other parts of the country, the market seems to consistently be heating up.

"As we go into this next market, many areas may be down, but Arizona is just like Florida, Tennessee, and Texas," says David. "People are moving in, so we have plenty of people moving in and plenty of activity. The population is expanding so much, I don't know if we're going to have enough houses!"

Although growth is not their main focus, Arizona Best will add a large number of new teams in surrounding cities over the next few years. They are always evolving and expanding. There are 28 smaller cities and towns that already have agents they like and trust, so they are likely to add 28 teams of between five and ten agents. Arizona Best knows the way to ensure the growth and success they are hoping for is by providing agents with all the resources they need to ensure each agent succeeds in helping others.

"We will provide them with all of the services, relationships, products, memberships, education, legal and financial help they need to prosper at a dramatically lower cost to the team," says David. "Real estate is all about local relationships, and doing more in smaller numbers, so our mission is to continue devising a plan on how we can help more families where we started."

With David and Charmayne's leadership and their unmatched relocation services combined with high-quality, professional agents, Arizona Best Real Estate is certainly the best in the business in the Phoenix Metropolitan area. With the right technology to keep them going, nothing can stop them from attaining even greater success in the future. They are a family-owned business built on quality relationships where agents succeed by valuing people over profits.