Tom Thornton

Since 2019, Tom Thornton has served as the Agent Success Manager (Sales Manager) for Realty Austin’s Southwest Region. He manages a team of over 180 top-performing agents responsible for over $1.75B in annual sales volume. Tom’s responsibilities include coaching, training, managing, and scaling this high-performance team. To do so, he uses his extensive background in real estate sales and marketing communications to collaborate with his agents and develop solutions for their growth and long-term success. He loves to see his agents and office thrive, and works to guide agents to continual business growth and an improved work-life balance. Tom also collaborates with the company’s leadership team to develop long-term strategies and improvements to the brokerage’s agent resources, training, and tools. As a member of Realty Austin's sales management team, Tom works to solve issues, collaborate on innovative training and coaching systems, and build resources that allow agents to grow on their schedule. In his coaching, he works to meet the agent where they are, working through process, skill, and mindset incremental improvements to help them achieve continued success. Inherently driven, Tom has earned an MBA, the title of Broker Associate, and several of the nation's top real estate designations, including GRI, CRS, ABR, GREEN, and SRES. Working toward fluency in Spanish by way of annual immersion studies in Mexico, and an avid reader, Tom is also committed to lifelong learning. Before real estate, Tom's extensive career in marketing, advertising, and publishing included work with some of the world's most renowned firms while at Young & Rubicam, Burson-Marsteller, and J. Walter Thompson. Providing brand management and marketing strategy services for companies like Dannon, Pfizer, Sony, and Merrill Lynch helped Tom build valuable skills that he uses to develop both individual agents and the brokerage's tools and offerings. Tom has been interviewed as a featured real estate professional in The New York Times, Austin Business Journal, CultureMap, and KLBJ's "Real Estate Radio." In Tom's downtime, he enjoys being an accomplished culture writer (as seen in Texas Monthly, Eater, and The Austin Chronicle, to name a few.) He has earned a Certified Sommelier designation from the Court of Master Sommeliers. Tom has also served as a board member for two nonprofit organizations and is an investor in Austin's acclaimed Jester King Brewery.