Simple Solutions for Growing Your Real Estate Team

A successful real estate team with a solid foundation can prove to be an efficient and profitable structure for your organization.

Agent teams are the fastest growing model in real estate – for good reason. With more labor available, teams are able to grow the business, be more productive, and put more money into your bank account. As your team becomes more productive, growth will naturally lead to more listings, while more listings leads to more money.

If you are looking to build or grow you real estate team to become more productive and profitable in your real estate business, read on for our top tips.

Define the Team Structure

During the initial stages of building your team, there will be a lot of upfront work including figuring out how to structure your team. There are a number of different ways to structure your real estate team, so depending on how you look at it, that flexibility can be a blessing or a curse.

Take some time to think about how you want your team to shape up and how roles and responsibilities can be divided amongst team members. Here are some questions to ask yourself when structuring your team:

• Will each team have a designated administrative assistant, or will the support be shared among other teams?
• Do you need a lead coordinator or a listing coordinator?
• Will you have dedicated buyer and seller agents?
• Will agents be responsible for marketing and promotions, or will there be a designated marketing rep who produces marketing materials?

If you are really looking to take your marketing team to the next level, we suggest hiring a designated marketing rep who can handle the team’s promotion and social media. Social media and content marketing are hot new marketing vehicles in the real estate industry, so having someone to dedicate their time to both traditional and social media marketing will be beneficial to the growth of your team.

Hiring for Success

Finding the right team members who have similar personalities as your own and who share your goals can be a lengthy process. We suggest finding agents or licensed staff members who have similar personalities, a strong work ethic, with strengths that complement your weaknesses.

When focusing your efforts on recruiting, remember quality is more important than quantity. The entire recruiting, hiring, managing and firing process can be expensive, so it’s important to focus on hiring the first time around. Spend time vetting people that seem like they will stick around for a while so you don’t have to go through the recruiting process again for a number of years.

If you are vetting for newer agents that you see potential in, you can have novice agents shadow you or have them help you with open houses and showings. If you find someone that you work well with, you can eventually give them more and more responsibilities.

If you are hiring an experienced professional with a robust resume and plenty of business experience, consider consolidating their listings with your own to make them feel like a partner.

Delegation and Accountability

Unfortunately, you can’t just assume that you are going to hire rock stars to take over your responsibilities, then walk away and let your team run on its own. You’ll need to stay involved with your business and oversee the work being done in order to ensure it is headed in the right direction. Part of staying involved with your real estate team is delegating responsibilities and holding individuals accountable for their responsibilities.

You may want to implement a system to hold agents responsible for their goals. Incentives are a great way to ensure that team members hit their goals and that your team continues to stay on track with continued growth.

Pay Yourself First

The end game of creating and growing your real estate team is to become more profitable. As the owner of the real estate team, you take on a lot of the risks and liabilities, but that should also mean that you reap the most rewards, too.

Ideally, you’ll want to take 20% or 30% of your top line revenue and put it into your savings account. This money is the net commission that you receive from every transaction. The point of this is to not only increase your net worth, but make sure that you can continue you real estate team’s growth. We recommend reinvesting the money that you are saving to let your money work for you. This will help further build your net worth.

Continued Education

No matter what industry you are in, continued education and coaching are important to the advancement of any team. Therefore, it’s not only important to provide constant learning opportunities to individuals, but teams as a whole. You want your team members to continue to dominate the real estate industry by staying on top of new trends and learnings. This will take some work, but making continued education a priority will help retain your best team members and help your team grow.

Aside from offering a variety of real estate scripts and tools, considering using a real estate coach to help your team advance their career. An effective real estate coach can be beneficial at any point in one’s career, whether you are brand new to the industry or an established veteran.

Providing the right real estate tools and continued education will not only help with retention, but new techniques will help promote client and revenue growth for years to come.

Create and Fine Tune your Structure

Most importantly, before you start hiring more people and growing your team, you’ll want to ensure that you have a firm foundation in place for your business practices. Hiring people before acquiring a system is a surefire path to failure. This will include systematizing your business so that you can generate leads, close business, and boost productivity overall. Furthermore, you’ll want to have a set hiring and training system in place before you bring more people onboard. Trying to systematize everything as you build your team is a recipe for trouble and you’ll likely run into many different roadblocks. Here are some systems and procedures you’ll want to finalize before growing your team:

• Lead generation system
• Prequalification system or questionnaire
• Client care system
• Policies and procedures
• Finalize staff agreements and contracts
• Internal project management system
• Recruiting system for hiring and training

If you haven’t implemented a way to organize your entire network in-house, you should employ a system immediately. Creating an organized management system will increase your team’s productivity and efficiency, which in turn will generate more profit for your organization.

To view the original article, visit the Realty Commander blog.