Southlake, TX
Most real estate teams talk about culture. Few can point to specifics. At Top Gun Team in Southlake, TX, culture shows up in something as simple as a shipping label. When team leader Justin Nimergood put together custom swag packs for his agents, he made sure two international team members got one too, even though the shipping cost was steep. He says that decision was never about the cost. It was about making sure every person on the team, no matter where they live, feels like they belong to something bigger than a paycheck.
Culture Built on More Than Talk
Nimergood spent years studying leadership before he ever built a real estate team, including earning a master’s degree in leadership from Pepperdine University. That background shaped how he approached team building from day one. He intentionally applied the classic team formation stages, forming, storming, norming, and performing, when assembling Top Gun Team rather than letting culture happen by accident.
One principle he keeps coming back to: a team’s identity is not something you announce once and move on from. It gets reinforced in small, repeated actions. The swag boxes are one example. Another is how the team’s commission structure is built. Most teams and brokerages base splits purely on production. Top Gun Team layers in loyalty, meaning agents who stay with the team for two, five, or ten years see their splits improve simply for staying, not just for closing more deals. He even built in a 5% Commission Sponsorship Fee paid to Top Gun Team Agents on every deal of Agents they Attract to the Team. This ensures Agents have other ways to make money, and more importantly, help foster a culture in which Agents are incentivized to help one another. This, according to Nimergood, is vastly different from the majority of Teams, whereby each Agent is only striving to be the #1 Producer on the Team.
Even International Team Members Get the Swag Box
The detail Nimergood keeps returning to is that inclusion was not limited by geography. Sending physical swag internationally is expensive and logistically annoying. He did it anyway, because leaving someone out over a shipping fee would have sent the opposite message from the one he wanted the team to hear.
That kind of consistency is part of why agents describe the team the way they do. It is not a slogan on a welcome packet. It is a pattern of decisions that all point the same direction.
Family Culture That Started With the Agents, Not the Leader
Here is the part Nimergood is most specific about: he did not create the “family” language himself. He says it developed organically, and it is his agents, not him, who use that word when talking to prospective recruits. He is careful to draw that distinction because a leader claiming “we’re a family” carries a lot less weight than agents saying it to each other, unprompted.
Top Gun Team started the year with only a couple of agents. By June, that number began climbing quickly, growing from two agents to nine in roughly six weeks. Nimergood attributes part of that growth to timing and a new partnership, but he is direct that culture had to be in place first. He says he was not ready to grow earlier in the year because the processes, benefits, and team foundation were not yet where they needed to be.
Why Culture Ends Up Mattering to Recruiting
For agents evaluating teams in the Dallas-Fort Worth market, culture is often the hardest thing to verify from the outside. Anyone can put “family culture” in a job posting. What is harder to fake is a pattern of specific, sometimes costly decisions that back it up.
That is the piece Nimergood wants prospective agents to understand about Top Gun Team. The team’s leadership approach was built deliberately, using leadership frameworks studied over years, then applied consistently enough that agents started repeating the message themselves.
This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.
Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.
Media Contact Information
Heather Hook | KeyCrew Media | [email protected]
