2026 The Thousand: Yeatman Group scales after 747 sides in 2025

While some real estate team leaders begin their careers as solo agents, expanding into a team only when they feel established enough, being a team leader is all Kyle Yeatman knows.

“I come from the homebuilder space, where I worked for Ryan Homes, PulteGroup, and later, a local Richmond, Virginia, builder where I took them from 75 homes a year to 300 homes a year before I left,” said Yeatman, who leads The Yeatman Group, a Long & Foster-brokered mega team.

“But I saw a huge opportunity in the market in our area where Realtors seemed to shy away from new construction, and I felt like I could bridge that gap between the real estate community and builders.” 

In order to bridge this gap, in 2014, Yeatman teamed up with his sister-in-law, who had also worked in the homebuilding space, to form a small real estate team.

“We started off representing small custom homebuilders that were doing maybe eight to 10 homes a year and were doing everything, soup to nuts, themselves,” Yeatman said. “Every builder we took on would double their business in the first 12 months, so after about the first year and half, it really took off.” 

Diversified lead generation

In 2025, Yeatman’s team closed 747 transaction sides for a total of $371.68 million in sales volume, earning the team the No. 10 and No. 26 rankings in the country among mega teams for sides and volume, respectively, in the 2026 RealTrends Verified The Thousand. 

Yeatman said it was never his intention to balloon to a mega team with roughly 40 agents, but the desire to take on different opportunities that were presented resulted in company growth. But things really picked up, he said, when the brokerage brought on one of the first sales trainers he worked with in his early homebuilding days.

“He built us an online wing, and we brought on four online sales consultants that handled all of the leads coming in and matched the consumers with the agent on the team they felt was the best fit for that buyer or seller,” Yeatman said. 

Today, Yeatman said his business has three different streams of leads: online leads from a variety of portals as well as organic internet traffic; the new construction segment he originally built the team around; and repeat and referral business. 

“We feel like we have built a business that can withstand even a bit of a recession. We haven’t had any major economic challenges yet, but the couple of blips we’ve seen, we have been able to get through pretty easily,” he said. 

As Yeatman has grown his team, he said he has primarily focused on hiring new or less experienced agents.

“This allows us to teach them the right way to do things versus having to fix bad habits,” Yeatman said. 

Eye for growth and cultural continuity

Due to this, Yeatman said he has crafted a robust agent education and training program known at TYG University. Every month, a new crop of agents begins the program together, taking part in three weeks of what Yeatman called a “pretty rigorous kind of boot camp” before embarking on individual training plans.

“We also provide them with a mentor who is not a team manager but someone who has been on the team for a while, to guide them and answer any questions they may have,” Yeatman said.

While he is pleased with the growth and performance of the team, Yeatman is aiming for more, noting that he is looking at expanding the team to other markets. But as the team expands, Yeatman said it’s important to preserve the culture of the team.

“This means that we don’t hire every single agent we interview,” he said. “We’ve turned down many really great agents because we felt they weren’t a match for our culture or that, long term, we would not be what they were looking for. By making these tough decisions and not eating everything at the buffet, I think we have really helped ourselves succeed.” 

Despite relatively slow housing market conditions in the first half of 2026, Yeatman said that as of early June, the team’s production was already up 20% compared to last year.

“This year will be the best year we have had,” he said. “We are already trending to well over 1,000 units and we should be at least to $500 million in sales volume. We are really excited for what is to come this year.”