There are many reasons why you might be interested in building a real estate team. Whether it’s because you’re ready to increase your profits or simply lighten your own workload, taking the time to build a real estate team could be the answer for your
business. However, it is important you build the RIGHT team.
Here are our top 5 suggestions for growing a strong real estate team:
Ensure you have a solid foundation and start with the basics. Before you start building a real estate team, you must ensure your current business has a solid foundation to grow from. It can be very difficult to build a team if the current business isn’t running at top performance. Ensure you have defined your business and personal values so that you can ensure your new hire is a good fit. You should also determine your goals and create a plan for how you’re going to reach them. This will make it much easier to see where a new hire might fit into the equation and how they will benefit your end goal.
Before you begin building a team, it's important to have systems in place that you’re comfortable with and are working for your business currently. You don’t want to introduce new systems when you begin the hiring process as this will only add to the stress of adjusting to the new situation.
Determine who to hire and when. It is generally recommended that team members are hired in the following order:
Administration or Assistant
Outside Sales or Field Agent
Inside Sales Agent or Lead Conversion Partner Begin by hiring an assistant or someone who can help you do what you’re currently doing more efficiently before deciding to broaden your horizons. Once you and your new assistant are working comfortably together and business is running smoothly, it’s time to consider hiring a field agent that can duplicate your success and handle buyers and sellers as you receive more and more leads. Next, hiring an inside sales agent will help your team grow by ensuring that your leads are handled in a timely manner and followed up with on a regular basis so nothing falls through the cracks. Be ready to hire with plenty of leads and the language to convert them. Make sure you have a steady stream of leads coming in the door before hiring to ensure that your business is ready to grow and you’re not just splitting income. Leads are liabilities unless you know how to convert them, so be sure you are clear on the best language to use to turn leads into appointments and appointments into signed contracts. Once you know the language, it will be much easier to train new recruits to use that same language.
Hire the right people. Hiring the right people for your business is easier said than done. A complete hiring system includes knowing the right ads to run, where to run them, the right questions to ask over the phone and during face-to-face interviews and determining the candidate’s personality and qualifications are in line with the job you are hiring them to do. We recommend using a personality test such as our DISC Tools system in order to determine candidates’ personality types before hiring them. This ensures that their personality will be compatible with not only the role they’re going to fill, but also with yours and other team members’.
Set up a profitable compensation structure and focus on retention. Making sure that you know how your team members will be paid in order to ensure profitable and consistent growth for the team long-term requires some planning and goal setting beforehand. Using a 50/50 split simply will not work if you want long-term success. You also don’t want to get caught in a loop of hiring agents that you train and that then leave your team and become your competition. Setting systems and processes in place for retention ensure that your team members are building their business within yours and it doesn’t make sense to go elsewhere.
As you can see, hiring and training new employees can be an expensive and time-consuming process and hiring the wrong candidate can end up being even more costly.
At Dan Plowman Coaching, we coach our clients to ensure they hire and recruit the right people for their teams at the right time and create the foundation necessary to set their businesses up for success.
“I should not be more excited about your business than you are.” - Dan Plowman