The commercial real estate brokerage business has a well-documented training problem. Most firms assign a new broker to a senior agent and hope for the best. The new broker shadows calls, picks up context clues, and tries to reverse-engineer a career from watching somebody else close deals. Mentorship, in that form, is the whole plan, and it rarely produces the results firms expect.
Mike Gallegos, Executive Managing Director at Sands Investment Group (SIG), has a blunt read on that model. “That’s not really skills development,” he said. “You’re basically hoping it clicks over time, and it’s way too slow for today’s market.”
Gallegos spent more than 20 years in the industry before joining SIG. He has watched talented people wash out of brokerage at firms that confused proximity to senior producers with actual coaching. Mentorship exists, but there’s no system around it. No business plan. No defined specialization. No milestones mapped to measurable growth. At SIG, a better mentality exists.
Rethinking Broker Onboarding & Growth
SIG runs a 90-day onboarding program calibrated to where each broker sits in their career. Someone five years into the business at a direct competitor doesn’t need a cold-calling primer. Someone fresh out of college does.
SIG’s training tracks are split accordingly. Experienced brokers focus on scaling, business planning, and refining their specialization, while newer brokers spend time learning the fundamentals of prospecting, deal mechanics, and market analysis. Workshops and ongoing education run on a monthly basis beyond the initial three months.
Specialization is central to the model. Rather than sending a new broker out to prospect everything in every market, SIG narrows the focus early. Pick a product type, a geography, and an investor to serve and build a knowledge base that makes you a credible voice in that lane. The result is a broker who earns faster and compounds expertise, rather than chasing a moving target.
“Structured coaching is proactive,” Gallegos said. “You anticipate things, and you can lay out mile markers. When someone can see that there’s a path and there’s progress, you shape them so they can build skills before gaps become expensive.”
He frames the difference through a lens borrowed from author Daniel Pink’s research on motivation: when new brokers get the chance to master their craft on their own terms, anchored to a long-term purpose, they produce the best outcomes for the business.
A Coaching Framework
This philosophy of proactivity shows up in how SIG designs career trajectories. Joe Wichmann, Head of Recruiting at SIG, describes the firm as “an opportunity engine.” It identifies niches within the market, builds business plans around them, and gives brokers the tools and runway to own them.
“We don’t treat everyone the same because everyone’s not the same,” Wichmann said. What stays steady is SIG’s emphasis on the five core principles that govern the company:
- Culture
- Coachability
- Consistency
- Collaboration
- Communication
These values function as a behavioral coaching framework. Consistency and communication set the standard for client delivery. Collaboration rewires the default CRE instinct to hoard information and compete internally. Coachability determines who actually absorbs the training investment SIG puts behind them. All of them together add up to a top-notch culture.
Wichmann adds a sixth quality he looks for in advisory candidates: curiosity. “Why does that CVS always seem to pop up across the street from Walgreens?” he posited. “You have to want to know why things work the way they do.”
From Intern to VP
The live version of this training model is visible in Vice President Matt Montagne, who has spent his entire eight-year career at SIG. Montagne interned at the firm after college and never left. He joined Tyler Ellinger’s team as a junior broker, and the two now run deals together. Max Freedman, who leads the Austin office, served as a second mentor.
But Montagne’s trajectory wasn’t built on mentorship alone. The combination of working alongside experienced brokers and operating within SIG’s structured training and specialization model is what compressed his timeline. Mentorship gave him a sounding board. The system gave him a business plan, a defined lane, and a framework for growing into it.
“Those first five years, having someone I could talk to about what the situation is, what the client needs, what the problem is, and have them walk me through solutions — that was everything,” Montagne said.
The mentorship chain didn’t stop with him. When Yossi Freeman joined the Austin team as a junior broker three years ago, Montagne stepped into the mentor role. Freeman has since risen to Vice President. “His success led to more of my success,” Montagne said.
That compounding dynamic is what Gallegos describes when he talks about culture fueling retention, fueling institutional knowledge. “The longer your talent stays with your firm – and the more collaboration between teams – the better your institutional knowledge tends to be,” he explained. “ You draw from that knowledge to approach clients, put together narratives, and showcase case studies in a way that levels everybody up.”
When asked to describe SIG’s culture, Wichmann offered a challenge rather than a tagline. “Pick up the phone and call anybody you want at Sands Investment Group,” he said. “Ask them their favorite thing about working here. I guarantee every single person will say ‘culture.’”
Montagne echoed that. “It’s a bunch of ambitious people who aren’t just looking out for themselves but understand that working together is going to lead to more group success,” he said. “You can go fast by yourself, but you can go further together.”
SIG has closed more than 5,950 transactions totaling over $11.5 billion in sales volume across 48 states since its founding in 2010. Those numbers are a reality because the brokers producing them chose to stay and build, and educate the next generation.
The culture and training models are the reason. The results are the proof.
