Real Estate Team Playbook (eBook)

Introduction

Carey was a top-producing agent in one of the nation’s hottest real estate markets, doing $50 million to $60 million a year in volume. By any measure, she was a success.

She had a “team,” sort of—an assistant and a buyer’s agent who had one foot out the door. Effectively, though, she was operating alone . . . and she was reaching the limit of what a solo agent could do.

Like many top agents, Carey had sacrificed a great deal to get where she was. She often put in more than twelve hours a day, seven days a week. The only way to grow her business, she believed, was to work even harder. But how hard and how long can one person work?

And honestly, she didn’t want to work harder—she wanted more balance in her life. She wanted to remember what a weekend was, to have predictable hours, and to not spend her evenings talking nervous clients off the ledge. She loved working out, taking long hikes, and doing fun things with her three grown daughters. She had no desire to make her life all about work. She was definitely in the camp of wanting to work to live and not live to work. This was getting harder and harder.

Yet, like most agents, Carey was competitive. It was hard not to compare her production to other top performers and think, If they can do it, so can I. She was deeply motivated and driven to keep reaching for more and better.

To reconcile those two conflicting urges—to grow her business and reclaim her life—she needed help.

Times Have Changed

Carey hit the wall that all successful agents hit eventually: it’s impossible to do everything yourself. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to do what it takes to get the best outcomes for your clients. Ironically, it’s a problem that grows worse with success.

Sure, if you do only a handful of transactions per year (the industry average is less than four), the workload is sustainable. The money is not though. That’s why the attrition rate of real estate agents is so high—most new agents leave the business within five years. To make this career work, you’ve got to sell more homes than the industry average . . . a lot more.

But even if you’re a rock star, you’ll find that about fifty transactions per year is the absolute most you can handle. And if you’re selling one or more homes a week, what kind of life do you have? For most agents, the answer is zero personal life plus endless professional stress. The financial side of this equation doesn’t look a whole lot better. Yes, the gross income is high, but what you take home after taxes and expenses will probably not create the financial security you are hoping for.

It wasn’t always this hard. Even just a decade ago, timelines were longer and expectations were lower. A solo agent working with a cadre of trusted professionals—stagers, photographers, lenders, and so on—might have sufficient time and bandwidth to do it all and wow their clients.

But the technology explosion has changed that. Agents are at the mercy of the supercomputer in their pocket, and clients demand the same instantaneous attention and service in real estate that they get in everything else.

Now, it takes a team to get all the work done.

And in fact, teams are beginning to take over the real estate industry. Team production has exploded, and more and more agents are moving toward the team concept. In the very near future, if not right now . . .

You will either be leading a real estate team or . . .

You will be on a real estate team or . . .

You will be competing against a real estate team.

Teams are going to get bigger—some are already crossing state lines. They’ll get better as more agents embrace this process. And they’ll become more challenging to compete against as their market share rapidly increases. It is just a matter of how fast this is going to happen.

Right now, the real estate industry as a whole—including brokerages and associations—still isn’t set up to accommodate teams in the same way it serves individual agents. The companies don’t know how to make space for teams. They don’t know how to pay teams. They don’t know how to charge teams. They don’t know how to help teams prosper.

But this is going to change fast, or teams will outgrow the companies themselves. Teams are not going away. If you start working today to build a high-performing team in your market, you stand to gain what the tech industry calls the first-mover advantage.

In other words, opportunity knocks.

Today’s Teams Are Not Really Teams

Right now, real estate teams are going through a lot of growing pains in trying to figure out how to structure themselves and do business as a cohesive unit. In truth, most teams are teams in name only—often vanity projects for star agents. Everyone is running around doing their own thing, usually in a highly unorganized and dysfunctional way. Team members compete with each other, come and go as they please, and have little or no synergy.

With that kind of team, you’ll work harder, make less money, and have more stress than you do now. Not exactly what you were envisioning, is it?

But here’s the thing: that is not a real team.

On a true team, synergy is the goal. Everyone is better off within the group than outside of it, and together, you can achieve things no individual can. Instead of a free-for-all, everyone is in the same boat, rowing in the same direction, the same way, toward the same destination.

That is a team. And that’s what will elevate the home-buying and home-selling process in terms of both client experience and results. The truth is, a top-performing team can achieve vastly more than any individual (or loose group of individuals) can. Most teams are barely scratching the surface of this potential, letting untold value go to waste because they don’t know how to work together.

The purpose of this book is to help you avoid that fate and build a team—or join one—that can dominate the market, grow your bank account, and give you your life back.

So what are all these real estate teams doing wrong? In most cases, successful agents launch teams thinking they’ll quickly garner more business. But team building doesn’t work that way, and high hopes soon turn to disappointment, topped with even more stress.

Building a high-performing team demands specialized knowledge and skills that don’t come naturally to many in real estate. This is an independent contractor industry—most agents have no training or experience in building and leading teams. The history books are full of star athletes who failed as coaches because the traits that helped them succeed on the field or court didn’t prepare them to lead others. The same goes for real estate.

As a result, most so-called teams don’t function as teams at all. They evolve organically with no framework, and that’s a big problem. Where there should be synergies, well-defined roles, and accountability, there is instead constant friction. Production may go up, but no one has a life, and it could all fall apart at any moment. The leader keeps trying to do everything, so they can never take a break, let alone sell the business and retire comfortably. Nope—their last deal is their last paycheck.

On the flip side, successful teams are powerhouses that elevate everyone who touches them—especially their leaders. There has just never been a road map to show solo agents how to build teams right.

Until now.

Three Heads Are Better

When Carey hit her limits, she sought help from Steve Shull, who has been coaching top agents nationwide for over three decades. Steve is known for his game-changing approach to performance, discipline, and teamwork, and it’s no wonder—as a linebacker in the NFL, he played for the Miami Dolphins under legendary coach Don Shula, earning a Super Bowl appearance along the way.

During coaching, Carey introduced Steve to Jonathan Lack, a business consultant who specializes in turning around struggling companies. In fact, he had written a book on the subject, driven by the painful experience of watching his family’s multigenerational business disintegrate in his youth. When Jonathan gave Steve a copy of his book, Steve devoured it and immediately saw that nearly everything in the book was applicable to real estate. It underscored his belief that almost every agent with a team was running a failing business that needed to be turned around.

That belief was confirmed when Steve and Jonathan began working together to consult with real estate teams. As businesses, the teams were always a mess. Even on top-producing teams that looked successful at a glance, deeper investigation showed otherwise. In most cases, the most basic fundamentals of teamwork and sound business were being neglected.

That’s where Dana Green came in. Like Carey, she was a coaching client of Steve’s, and as Steve is quick to admit, Dana is one of the few real estate team leaders with a healthy business. She runs the top team in her market and has been in the team game for decades; when Dana created her first team, few people in real estate had even heard of the concept. No one knows the nuts and bolts of real estate teams better.

With Steve’s insider view on agents’ lives, Jonathan’s business acumen, and Dana’s team expertise, they had all the pieces of the puzzle in place to write this book: the team blueprint that real estate agents...