If you own your own real estate business, there are three things that probably keep you up at night: recruiting top and lasting talent, retention of that talent, and increasing your business’s profitability while decreasing your costs. If you’re anything like the rest of us, you probably need some help with at least one of those three. Here are some ideas to help you with recruiting, retention, and profitability.
Recruiting
The best talent is created, not found. It’s great when you happen upon a rising star who will bring skills to the table that will benefit your business in some grand way, but this isn’t the norm. You probably didn’t start out as a rockstar with no training at all. Your experience is likely hard-won and built on years of work—or years of great mentorship. Give that opportunity to someone else. Instead of searching for rockstar hires, hire the people you can train to become rockstars. Then, build out systems and processes to teach them to work the way you do.
Hiring is sometimes a numbers game. You may need to hire three people to find the one who will work with you and learn from you the way you need. This is okay. Hire carefully and let go as it becomes apparent someone isn’t a fit for your team. As you build your team of incredible agents and admins, others will wonder at your ability to locate incredible talent. You’ll know the truth: far more important than finding top talent is the ability to train it.
Retention
People quit leaders and managers, not jobs. How you lead your people will determine whether or not they stick around and remain loyal to you. This is the other side of the coin to training excellent talent; you need to be able to inspire trust, loyalty, and buy-in from your team. How do you do that? Here are some actionable things to start doing right now:
Daily Huddles
This is such a simple thing that far too few agents and teams take advantage of. Meeting up at the same time each day increases communication, accountability, and community among your team. This is how you build culture, teach the team as a whole, and inspire and motivate your team members to higher numbers, better deals, and more growth. This is a place to measure success, reward hard work, and become aware of emerging problems before they fester and infect your team. Huddle up every day. Make it effective, brief, and powerful. Test a few formats until you find out what your team needs.
One-on-ones
Schedule frequent touches with each of your team members where you can drill down into how they’re doing, both professionally and personally. Get to know them. Make it genuine and make them an important part of your business. If your team members feel an investment and ownership of the business, they’ll have more reason to stick around. These personal touches will also deepen your relationship with your team, building something more than just a professional working relationship.
Create A Culture of Load-Sharing
One of real estate’s biggest bummers is the workload and the frequent need to work weekends. As you meet with your team and build a culture that retains team members, put a big focus on helping one another lead rich personal lives. If something important comes up for a team member, normalize sharing the workload so that team member can have a chance to live a life outside the office. With this culture, your team is likely to feel supported and able to have some kind of work-life balance—necessary feelings to commit to sticking around long term.
Profitability
Can you make enough money to justify hiring employees and starting a team? Will too little be spread too many ways? The numbers say no. We commissioned a study on teams that was carried out by The Center For Generational Kinetics that found three out of four real estate professionals said that belonging to a team led to higher profits than going it alone. The same study found that teams increase productivity, agent accountability, and sales numbers. If you’re currently struggling with profitability, it’s likely that the right team members will not only solve the problem, but catapult your business to greater heights.
Owning your own business can be exhausting and difficult. If you follow our advice on recruiting, retention, and profitability, you’re sure to find more time, greater control of your business, and more satisfaction as a business owner in real estate.
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