Building a Successful Real Estate Team

Need more help? Has becoming a broker ever crossed your mind?  If so, where do you start?  Who do you hire first? There are a lot of questions and details involved when building a real estate team. Knowing where to start and how to maintain long-term success will make building a successful team easy.

Know what’s important

Every agent has their own strengths and weaknesses, and your team should be built around members who are able to fill in those gaps. You want quality team members who are a good fit for what you’re trying to accomplish and share your values and overarching business goals. Creating a trial period of several months can make it easier for you should you decide to part ways. The wrong choice can create more work for you, and a bad experience for your clients.

Who you hire first

Some agents feel that they should start with hiring a buyer’s agent and most of the time those agents are new to real estate or have a lot of time on their hands. The first person you hire should be an assistant or transaction coordinator. The transaction coordinator can be licensed or unlicensed, however an unlicensed assistant can’t answer questions related to property, show homes, or do any property related tasks. When you hire an assistant, you free up time to focus on appointments and more client-facing issues that impact your bottom line.

Hire a Buyer’s Specialist

Your next new team member should be a buyer’s agent who will help with the additional leads and business that you have. Typically, buyers take much more time and effort than sellers. Buyer’s agents can support lead generation, consult on needs, show properties, submit offers on homes and work with lenders to help buyers get approved for financing. In addition, they can help manage the closing process by negotiating the inspection and executing the final walk through. Eventually this agent can train, mentor and assist additional buyer agents that you add to your team.

Find a Listing Agent

After you have hired a buyer’s agent, it’s time to find a solid listing agent. The listing agent prospects to generate leads, prepares Comparative Market Analyses to determine fair market value, makes listing presentations to prospective clients and converts them into listing agreements. It's important for this agent to keep a close eye on how the listings are progressing and whether or not a price needs to be adjusted. The listing agent will also need to negotiate all contracts and manage the closings.

Bring in the right Marketing Guru

There are a few things to consider when you look for a Marketing Director for your real estate team. You want to make sure you have someone with a broad range of experience and knowledge. Find someone who is an expert in everything from traditional marketing to social media. The marketing director will manage your CRM to make sure the proper follow up is executed with Drip Campaigns and Direct Mail initiatives.

Having a marketing expert on your team is important because this person is responsible for promoting both active and previously sold listings for your clients and potential clients. Your marketing director will also implement open house marketing strategies to ensure as many potential buyers are brought in as possible. It’s important that your marketing efforts are attracting the correct demographic to your open houses. A lot of real estate teams also have their marketing director send thank you gifts, and holiday and gift cards to help their referral business.

Ultimately, you will be able to scale and improve your overall business with a solid real estate team. After you start your team, it’s going to be very important that you or a team leader nurtures and develops your team members. These practices will keep your team members happy and will lead to long-term success.

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