Ben Kinney (IMSD founder) and his team closed over 500 transactions in 2011. To handle that kind of sales capacity he has had to reinvent the traditional real estate team structure.
Many real estate agents make us much money as a doctor, so why don’t we run our business the same way? The doctor has a receptionist, nurses, records specialists, and other professionals who handle 90% of the interactions with her patients. If your doctor answered the call for appointments, helped you fill out forms, submitted insurance paperwork, and managed billing, they wouldn’t make any money. Here is how to model your business the same way.
Building Your Team From Scratch
The first person you hire is going to be an administrative assistant. If you can’t hire one, hire a virtual assistant part-time. Your time is spent getting appointments instead of doing $10 an hour kinds of work.
Next, you want a Buyer Specialist. Ben Kinney knows that for every 30 leads he generates in a month, he can hire another Buyer Specialist.
After that comes the Listing Specialist. This is often a salaried person on his team who earns a bonus per transaction. Ben feeds them all of their leads. If that Listing Specialist does their own prospecting, they get paid more.
Finally, hire your replacement! One of the most important points in Ben’s team structure video is, “If you don’t have a team, you have a job. If you have a team, you have a business.”
The Real Estate Team of the Future
Once you’ve got your administrative assistant, Buyer Specialists, and Listing Specialists in place, you’re ready to start building the Ben Kinney team model.
In this model, the Buyer Specialist and Listing Specialist each get their own assistant. This new tier dramatically increases the production potential within the team. Instead of 20-30 transactions per year, your Buyer Specialist can close 80-120. The Listing Specialist can increase from 40-50 transactions per year to 100-300.
Let’s use the Buyers Specialist as an example. Under this model, the team owner in responsible for lead generation. The goal of the Buyer Specialist is to set appointments and conduct the initial consultation along with the showing assistant. The showing assistant is then responsible for driving them around to look at properties, letting the inspectors and appraisers into the house, and working to find the buyer their dream home. If you are an individual agent not interested in building a big team the showing assistant concept could work wonders in your business.
The listing assistant is responsible for hosting open houses (we know you’ll miss those!), dropping off flyers, and doing regular check-ins with the seller.
Real Estate Team Compensation
Under Ben Kinney’s real estate team model, the owner gets 50% of the commission and the Buyer or Sellers Agent gets 50% of the commission.
The assistants are then paid by the Buyers Agent or the Sellers Agent. The listing assistant receives 5-10% of the total commission. The Buyers Assistant gets 10-25% of the commission depending on the type of property they are showing and other factors mentioned in the video.
Do you see the beauty in this model yet? The team of the future builds up a staff without fixed salaries. When the team owner understands internet lead generation and feeds a steady of stream of leads to his team, everybody wins.
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