In March 2006 Phillip Cantrell launched Benchmark Realty LLC with his wife Amanda as his business partner in the front room of a house in downtown Franklin TN. Primarily established to service high-end new construction in the Williamson County area, the company followed a traditional broker model offering for the agents and quickly grew to become a 13 agent firm. Then came the economic downturn in early 2007, accompanied by the decline and eventual closure of almost all of the firm’s builder clients. That was immediately followed in the fall of 2007 with the news that the firm’s largest client had decided to start an in-house real estate division, enticing several of the firm’s agents to make that move. Almost immediately, the firm shrank to just 5 agents with a resultant loss in sales volume and causing the firm to face bleak prospects.

Not one to accept defeat, Phillip embarked on a thorough research effort to determine what was THE most successful business model employed in the major markets of the Eastern United States, which was not being done in the Greater Nashville area. Based on that extensive research, a new business plan was formulated in December 2007 and January of 2008. Benchmark reorganized and relaunched in February 2008 under a revolutionary brokerage model. Combined with an aggressive recruiting campaign, the company has seen rapid growth since then, consistently adding 9-12 new agents to the roster each month. In fact, the firm has seen a doubling in all major indicators for each year of the past 3 years. Those indicators are gross sales volume, gross commission income, profitability, transaction count and agent count. This cumulative success has pushed Benchmark into the ranks of the top five real estate firms in the Greater Nashville area and perhaps into the top 10 in the entire state of Tennessee.