The Real Estate Team Myth

Why your team will NEVER deliver the results that you expect

Any of this sound familiar:

You have done a great job selling real estate and you found if you want to do more without working 14 hour days, 7 days a week...you need to start building a team.  

You start building the team by hiring an assistant and a couple buyer's agents.  

They aren't the best, but they are excited...you generate leads for them, but they don't call all of them.  One leaves, so you are back to recruiting again.

You start getting bigger, and now you are officially losing your mind.  It feels like running a daycare sometimes. You have no clue what your agents do each day - but as long as they close a few deals, you are ok with it.

You have a couple rockstars who emerge only for them to leave so they can make more doing less because of your team's split.  

You somehow were making more money personally when you were doing half the business 2 years ago by yourself.

You now are worried about things like payroll, payroll taxes, benefits, office space, enough leads for everyone, who is actually calling their leads, and everything else that comes with running a small business.

If this doesn't sound familiar, you either haven't had a team for very long or you happen to be apart of the .01% of real estate agents who are great at running every aspect of small businesses or you hired a great operations manager.

The craziest part is this is NOTHING LIKE WHAT EVERYONE SAID HAVING A TEAM WOULD BE LIKE!!!!

It would be great, they said....It's like being able to just sit back and have others do the work, they said....It's going to reduce stress and free up SO MUCH TIME, they said....

LIES!!!!   It's hard work.  If it was easy, then everyone would do it!

It's way more difficult if you are just winging it and trying to figure it out yourself without consulting with people who learned the hard lessons so you don't have to learn the same lessons.

So, now that you know the real estate team myth, let's focus on how to get to the actual goal.

Because....is your goal to have a real estate team OR IS IT...

• You want to leverage people to make your business grow

• You want to reduce the amount of hours you are putting in without losing profit

• You would love to be able to make money while you are on a beach

• You want to help others gain success like you have

• You want to build a business that is actually sellable and not reliant on you to make money

Hopefully it is one of those reasons or another besides the idea of just having a team to have a team.

Understand these 7 Steps before you do ANYTHING with your team:

1. Recruiting and Retaining Top Talent - This is done with a compelling vision and clearly articulating the following 6 steps to differentiate you from any other option for them to grow as a real estate professional.  No matter your relationship with the team member, they need to feel an ability to grow otherwise your team is just a stop in their journey.

2. Compensation - You will not retain people if the compensation is not a win win situation.  So, align compensation to the most important thing in your business which is making money.  Focus on how your team handles leads. Teams waste the most amount of time and money on leads month in and month out.  There will be top teams that argue to the death here on whether you have someone dedicated to handle all the inbound leads you pay for or have the agents handle the leads.  We found a dedicated person with proper compensation is the most efficient option to make sure you maximize every lead you have.

3. Lead Generation -  Again, this is where teams waste massive sums of money by not having the proper strategy to generate leads.  Most teams spend insanely large amounts of money on buyer lead gen while hording all seller leads for the team leader.  If you recruited some A-Player talent by offering the ability to take listings, it would allow you to spend more money on seller lead gen, and if you are taking 10 plus listings a month, do you know how many FREE BUYER LEADS your agents will get?  That's a lot of open houses, sign calls, and online inquiries on your listings that will turn into buyer deals. THIS IS A HUGE AH-HA! WRITE THAT ONE DOWN REALLY BIG...

4. Reporting and Technology -  Cash Conversion Cycle, Return on Investment, Average Time of Response, Contact Rate, Appointments to Close Deal Rate....the list goes on and on.  For you to run your business like a true CEO, then you are going to need to know not only what metrics to track but how to track them. There are a lot of tools out there that if set up correctly will track some of these key metrics, and I cannot speak to all of their capabilities.  As for Market Maker, we built out our entire reporting based on what we and some of the top teams in the country were requesting to see.

5. Managing and Accountability -  As long as you have the reporting dialed in, managing and holding your team accountable to their goals is much easier.  This is where you need to truly become a leader. Major Tip: There is a huge difference between agreements and expectations.  If you are working from expectations (and you can steal this for your personal relationships too), you will be let down more often than not.  If you come to an agreement from both sides, the results will pleasantly surprise you. Once you establish agreements from each of your team members on what they will produce, you will need to have regular one on ones and team meetings to run through numbers so they are held accountable for the agreements they made.

6. Proven Repeatable Systems - Chances are you are a highly successful agent and if you met with a client or spoke with them over the phone, you could say a lot of things that would get that client to work with you over anyone else.  People who you are hiring DO NOT HAVE YOUR SKILLSET. If you have a system that is proven to work regardless of who is doing it, then you have something that will grow without you. Again, plugging into systems that have already been established are much easier than building everything from scratch.  There are a lot of options, but I'm biased and would say we have proven systems for all areas of a team that you wouldn't need to develop including the last step here...

7. Training - What was your experience with real estate?  I have a financial background and getting into real estate was facinating for me.  While you get your license, you are taught basically nothing about being a succesful agent and only how not to get in trouble being in real estate.  Then most of you will have not gotten a whole lot of anything from your broker on how to be a better agent besides floor time and being lucky enough to be chosen to do an open house for someone else...compared to other professional industries, it's a joke.  I was going to tell you but let me show you how many hours some other professions require to be licensed:

WHAT?????  But to handle the biggest investment in people's lives.....you only need to go through as low as 40 hours in some states.  I'll never understand that, but you can develop a world class training program or plug in to one to deliver training that agents never get on how to be a expert and a trusted advisor to their clients.  While these people represent you and your brand, you want to make sure they maintain a high level of service to your clients. So, unless you've developed training programs for companies previously, it will be much easier to plug in to training programs.  We give Market Maker clients access to online and live training conducted by top agents and coaches.  The same training 100's of the top teams sent people through year in and year out. There are other good options out there to get everyone through training so you don't have to develop it yourself.

Knowing is half the battle.  Real Estate Teams are not what everyone said they were but that is okay...

Now you are equipped to make sure that you are going into building or rebuilding your team with the right understanding of what it is going to take to get the results that you are looking for!


This post was originally published by Market Maker Leads.