05/04/2026
Saturday morning, Spirit Airlines shut down their entire operation.
Thousands of travelers stranded at Fort Lauderdale with no flights, no plan, no warning.
Within twenty-four hours, JetBlue stepped in.
Ninety-nine-dollar rescue fares. Capped pricing on the busiest routes so they could not gouge anyone. Jumpseats opened to Spirit’s pilots and flight attendants trying to get home. Interview slots offered to every Spirit employee suddenly out of a job.
Here is the part that has me thinking about all of us.
Two years ago, JetBlue tried to acquire Spirit. The DOJ blocked the deal. The failed merger cost JetBlue roughly half a billion dollars.
They had every reason in the world to celebrate Spirit going dark.
They did the opposite.
Now look at our industry.
We are in the middle of a shift. Brokerages are closing. Teams are folding. Agents are leaving the business in numbers we have not seen in years. Rates have not cooperated. The settlement reshaped buyer-side commissions. A lot of good people in our business are quietly scared right now.
Here is the question every realtor in my feed should be asking this Monday morning.
When the agent across town hits the moment that flattens them — their team collapses, their broker shuts the doors, their pipeline goes dry, their personal life takes a hit nobody saw coming — what do you do?
Pounce on their listings? Quietly take their buyers? Stay quiet and tell yourself it is not your problem?
Or do you show up?
A coffee. A referral. A seat at your team table. A name dropped to a recruiter who is hiring. A check-in text on a Wednesday afternoon when nobody else is checking on them.
Here is the part almost nobody in real estate says out loud.
The agents who show up when other agents are flattened are the ones who will still be running this business ten years from now.
Not the loudest closers. Not the slickest marketers. Not the heaviest spenders on portal leads.
The ones with character that holds up when the pressure arrives.
JetBlue is showing the world what that looks like in airlines this weekend.
Keller Williams has been showing it in real estate for forty years — through KW Cares, profit share, and a culture Gary Keller wrote SHIFT to protect during the last real estate collapse.
You can wait for a half-billion-dollar lesson to learn this one.
Or you can decide today, on this ordinary Monday, that you are going to be the realtor who shows up.
Because the next agent who gets flattened is going to remember exactly who did.
Be one of them.
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If this hits home and you want to talk about how to build a real estate business that holds up through whatever comes next, that is what I do at Bridge Coaching. Thirty-minute intro call here →
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