Real Estate is a Human Business

International agent coaching expert and speaker, Darryl Davis, who’s been coaching agents for over 30 years, joined me on an episode of my podcast. We discussed how important it is for brokers and agents to understand that real estate is a human business and is so much more than just buying, selling, listing, and transactions, production, and volume.

The Big Myth - Agents Leave for Money

It’s often said that agents make their decision to leave based on money, but that’s not entirely true. What’s been confided to Darryl in his agent coaching sessions is that agents feel like they weren’t being “cared for” or their broker “didn’t have enough time” for them. 

It’s imperative for brokers, managers, and leaders, to recognize that listening and engaging with your agents 1-on-1 and recognizing their achievements is going to go farther than a commission split. Brokers who aim to do this will want to consider implementing some systems and processes to stay connected and engaged with their agents. 

If you are concerned with competing solely on commission splits, “You are going to lose,” Darryl says. No matter what business you’re in, if your only advantage is a cheap price, there will always be someone else who is going to do it for less. It’s more important for people to feel as if they are part of something bigger, not just another line item in the income and expense sheet.  

Part of Something Larger 

People want to be a part of something larger than themselves and within the arena of Real Estate, it’s important for agents to feel like they picked the best brokerage in town. 

Developing a company culture requires a few things: 

• Actually writing a Mission Statement: This can just be one sentence, but brokers should define what they want their company mission statement to be. Those who don’t, find that the culture is defined for them and it’s often not what they would like it to be. 

• Define company values and what you stand for

• Developing a language within your culture to help members identify themselves within your culture

If the company culture is, “To positively impact lives and the community through real estate,” and the values of that company are, “Service, Knowledge, and Integrity”, then you can change the language of how agents interact with their clients. They aren’t “selling” they are “serving”. It’s not a “transaction” it’s a “navigation” through the challenges of that transaction. A culture that is purposeful, and enjoyable that makes your agents feel proud to be a part of the team, thus hitting on that human element.

Commitments First - Goals Later

Brokers and managers will usually discuss what an agent’s particular goals are in transactions and volume as a measure of success, but these conversations are often missing the human element, which can eventually lead to agents feeling as if it’s just the bottom line that’s cared about. 

Darryl stresses that brokers and managers should be discussing an agent's commitments to where they see themselves in their personal lives before setting goals based on volume and transactions. It’s important to do this to understand what is really driving your agents, and understanding their “why”. After pin-pointing the why, break down the money it will take to reach that goal and equate that to transactions and volume goals. 

The key part of this, and what is a broker’s or a manager’s key responsibility is to keep them accountable to these commitments, not because of the brokerage’s bottom line, but because it’s your promise to them to help them be successful. Keeping your agents accountable helps them to focus on what they have to do to keep that very important commitment they made to themselves to reach the next level of their lives. 

The Ripple Effect

No one sells a house just to sell a house; and no one moves brokerages just to move brokerages. There is something other than money driving that decision and that’s often their next level of life.  When brokers and leaders approach real estate with the focus on the human element of the business, they can inspire their agents to connect with their clients on that same human level. 

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If you are feeling that there is a challenge you are
facing in your business, or you just want to chat, let’s connect.

Real Estate Disruptors - Part 2 - Cloud Based Brokerages

Steve Murray, President of REAL Trends, and I discussed disruptors in today’s real estate industry. Previously, we considered iBuyers and if they really are different than the disruptors of the past. Today, we will examine the cloud-based brokerage and how this new model might be changing how we recruit and retain our agents today. 

Bundled and A la Carte Brokerages 

There are two basic types of brokerages: 

1. The Bundled Brokerage - the more traditional brokerage, where an agent pays a graduated percentage plan and they are provided with office space, coaching management, technology, software systems, support staff, marketing assistance, etc. 

2. The A la Carte (Unbundled) Brokerage - this is the cloud-based brokerage, where the agent pays a monthly fee and a transaction fee, but if they want office space, a CRM platform, access to a marketing platform, etc., they pay extra per the menu of offerings. 

About 10 years ago, according to Steve Murray, 70% to 80% of the agent population were more comfortable with the traditional bundled approach, but today that number is less than 50%. Steve also says, “In 2019, about two-thirds of realtors did 0-3 transactions in a year and the great majority of them don’t have the desire to invest the time, effort, and money it will take to go beyond that.”

Meaning, that the majority of the agent population out there aren’t interested in the traditional model anymore because the cloud-based model gives agents some flexibility in how little or how much business they want to do. A lot of people are getting licensed and there’s fewer deals at the bottom, but the people who are successful are going to continue to be more and more successful. 

According to Realtor Associations nationwide, there is a lot of churn in the industry. It’s almost for every new member to an association, there is one that drops off.  So it would make sense that most of these agents doing 0-3 transactions a year would consider an a la carte options vs. the more traditional brokerage. Brokers who want to be a large market share brokerage have to rethink some of their offerings to move closer to the unbundled model. 

How Should Traditional Brokerages Compete with Cloud-Based Brokerages? 

First and foremost, focus on retention. Working with the agents who have already chosen you is much easier and far less expensive than recruiting agents who do not already know you. Review first what you can do for agents who are on your team. Manage their expectations, make sure you are supporting them with what they say they need to be successful in their business. Offering training, one-on-one coaching, and leveraging the right software to build and strengthen your agent relationships is key. 

Also, it’s important to understand that there will be agents who may already be working with a cloud-based company (i.e. eXp, NextHome, etc.) and they want to do more than 0-3 transactions per year, however they are not getting the one-on-one coaching, training, and systems they might need to get there. They may be looking for a brokerage that can develop their skills. If you can appeal to them, they may be willing to transition to the traditional model. 

The best advice for the traditional brokerage is to recruit great talent and have an extraordinary training model. According to Steve, “The brokerages who are making a 14% margin are being very selective about who they recruit.” Ensuring they are recruiting a team that has the willingness to invest in their business and are not happy with just 0-3 transactions per year. This may mean a more rigorous interview process or making sure that your leadership (sales managers, relocation managers, marketing team, etc.) within the company is talented and compensated accordingly. Also, accountability is crucial for successful brokerages. Define how you are going to measure success and hold the agents to that measure. 

What Should Traditional Brokerages Do Moving Forward? 

Brokers need to learn more about their target recruits. Don’t just ask the question of how much an agent sells. Ask will they fit with who we are? What are their interests? How can we help them get to where they want to go? These are most likely not the touch points a cloud-based company is connecting with. 

eXp is a fast-growing cloud-based brokerage. They have a really, really good recruiting system and presentation. They offer shares of the company with their agents and they can earn more shares by meeting certain standards. According to what they are seeing at REAL Trends, eXp is adding 1,200 to 1,500 agents a month. “In 2019, they had somewhere between 15,000 to 18,000 agents doing 70,000 transactions a year, which is not quite 4 transactions per agent.” These agents may not be the agents to target for the traditional brokerage, but

As a broker, this may mean you spend more than 10% or 20% of your time on recruiting tactics and really identify who it is you want to join your team. There are a number of tools out there where brokers can leverage data and find who is likely to consider a move right now where they are able to cut down the potential from 10,000 people to 500 people that have expressed a desire to move to their company. Use your resources on those 500 rather than the 10,000. 

At some point, companies that are experiencing growth will plateau and level out. The demand for brokerages who can offer more of a holistic approach to support agents who want to do more than a few transactions a year will increase. Moving forward, the traditional brokerage can use the technology there is today to effectively recruit and retain the right agents who want more than what the cloud-based brokerages can offer.

Bottom Line: “The traditional brokerage model is not complicated and hasn’t changed in a long time. You have to be able to recruit talent, you have to develop that talent, and you have to spend less money than you have coming in.” Steve offers as advice. 

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If you are feeling that there is a challenge you are
facing in your business, or you just want to chat, let’s connect.

Real Estate Disruptors - Part 1 - iBuyers

If you’ve been in the real estate brokerage world, you know that a hot topic in the industry is “the disruptors” and specifically the iBuyers of real estate. Steve Murray President of REAL Trends and I discussed some insights to how brokers today can deal with disruptors like the capitol-driven iBuyers. 

How Have Disruptors Changed? 

Disrupters aren’t new but they have changed in scale - they are much larger than they were before. They are also leveraging technology and innovative software to quickly and accurately conduct evaluations for their clients. 

They are purporting they can be more efficient at buying and selling property, but Steve says he’s, “Not sure that’s the case, yet.” There are still many factors that go into buying and selling that are unique to each transaction as well as the factor of great customer service and the personal relationship that most customers still expect no matter what business model there is.

Brokers should be aware that iBuyers as disruptors are not new. There has always been something that has shaken the industry and even caused innovation and positive change throughout history. Although they are not new, they are still a disruptor because we are still in the discovery phase and brokerages still do not yet know how to proceed. 

Fight? Ignore? Embrace? 

Do we fight them, ignore them, or embrace them? Because they are well funded, it’s not likely that their backers will pull funding anytime soon. It may not be wise to go up against them and compete with them - your marketing budget is probably smaller than theirs.  Ignoring them, thinking they will go away, is also not wise, as their backers probably won’t be pulling their money anytime soon. 

But might be worth it for brokerages to see how they can best partner with them and offer even more services to their clients. Think about what service you could offer by leveraging their services. Consider how things could be mutually beneficial to work with an iBuyer. 

How Can Brokers Deal with the Disrupters Today? 

Considering there is a cost to customer acquisition, whether that be making phone calls, advertising online, direct mail each avenue has its own capture rate. Next, consider partnering with a disrupter where they have done all the research identifying and targeting your ideal customer. They are using their advertising dollars to get in front of that lead and then will give you that prospect. Sure they might ask for a 40% referral fee as their capture rate. But as Steve says, “There are plenty of brokerages out there who are more than happy to take those prospects at that price because it’s typically a really good prospect.” 

Partner with a disrupter you are comfortable with, that you can monitor and track, and that delivers excellent service to your prospective customers. Use the information they can share with you to measure effectiveness. Steve says these are much better tools than brokers used previously such as classifieds in the newspaper, which didn’t allow them to track anything. With SEO, lead pipeline tracking, direct pipeline tracking, brokers are able to actually see how much it actually costs them per closing. The ability to maneuver is much better than it used to be in the past. 

Takeaways: 

• Disruptors like iBuyers are not new, but they might be a little different. 

• Working with iBuyer could be beneficial if it’s the right fit for the brokerage’s business model. 

• Partner with an iBuyer with technology that can be leveraged to monitor and track effectiveness.

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If you are feeling that there is a challenge you are
facing in your business, or you just want to chat, let’s connect.

Tips to Really Be There for Your Team

In an earlier article, I spoke with Anne-Marie Ellison, Managing Partner of ERA King Real Estate, who shared some insights on how she successfully coached 32 real estate agents to grow their business on average of 22% year-over-year. 

We discussed her well-executed plan that inspired consistency and encouraged her agents to develop positive behaviors to grow their business. She also explained how an important software system called 3 Data Pulse has served as the “the backbone” of their company and has been a “game-changer” on how they run their business. You can hear the full interview with Anne-Marie by clicking here.

“It’s created consistency in the information so that the data is easy to digest and we get a big picture idea of what’s really going on with our entire agent population.”  ~ Anne-Marie Ellison

Being 100% dedicated and focused on a goal you and your team have set out to achieve, like coaching agents to grow there business 22%, can be difficult as a leader or manager as you often have other obligations and responsibilities in day-to-day life. Anne-Marie shared some great tips for leaders to help them be there in every aspect of their lives. 

Stay Consistent 

For Anne-Marie’s coaching agents, they met once a month to go over their key performance indicators, prospecting, and goals. However, the rules were that they keep the meeting no matter what and always talk about the same things each meeting. 

Anne-Marie chose one full day a week (Thursdays) to meet with her coaching agents. This would make sure she was in that mindset and “fully there” for them in the meeting. Each meeting would start at the top of the hour and end 45 mins later, leaving 15 mins to record the previous meeting notes and prepare for the next meeting, using the 3 Data Pulse system. 

As leaders, we set the tone for each and every interaction we have with our team and by not cancelling the meetings or moving them around, it shows each person that you are just as invested in their business and success as they are. By talking about the same items each meeting, this generated anticipatory behavior that helped Anne-Marie’s agents know what to expect every single time they met. 

Pro-Tips to Keeping Things Consistent: 

• Choose one day out of the week you can focus on this one mindset

• Keep the meeting no matter what - use virtual meeting tools if you aren’t able to meet in person

• Have a consistent structure for every single meeting that will not change

• Leave time between meetings to record the insights from that meeting and refresh your memory of the upcoming meeting with the next agent

• Use software that can record the meeting information and send automatic reminders between meetings. 

As a leader, keeping things consistent and recording meeting insights in a central system benefits us by freeing up the mental energy that it takes to create a new agenda every meeting; having to find a new date and time to reschedule meetings if they aren’t kept; and trying to remember from a month before what was discussed. 

Use Time Activation

Some may call this Time Blocking but Anne-Marie whose read, listened to, and attended a number of classes about time management, has termed Time Activation and follows this to help her manage her time and energy. 

Time Activation as she explains it, “is where you assign a date and time to accomplish something. When you assign a time to accomplish a project, a task, or a meeting, you move that item off of your to-do list and do away with the mental angst you have of getting that thing done.” As leaders, we have so much on our schedule and can easily be running around in circles or get in the habit of rescheduling meeting after meeting, which can stress us out. It’s important to be intentional with your time so you can be there for your team.  

Here’s how Anne-Marie manages time activation: 

• At the beginning of the month, schedule your “big items” - big meetings, absolutely have to’s, often those are things you don’t have control over their time (i.e. Board meetings, doctor appointments, etc.) 

• Each Sunday or the start of the week, schedule out your meetings, and work backward from those to schedule a time to work on anything you need to prep for those meetings. (i.e. if you have a sales meeting on Wednesday, schedule a block of time the afternoon before to finalize the presentation.)

• Schedule your “busy work” so that there’s nothing left on your to-do list. (Anne-Marie color codes busy work as yellow which is labeled “Banana” in the Google Calendar.) 

By scheduling out the workload on our to-do list we alleviate the stress or worry we have to get that project done. We don’t have the mental angst, as Anne-Marie says, that can develop when we just keep running that to-do list in our head. We therefore can be present for others and be confident that we can get the work done. 

Keep Your Personal Commitments 

A key factor to leaders being there for our team members is being there for ourselves too. If you have a doctor's appointment or you know working out helps you decompress or process ideas, this helps our team members too. Anne-Marie shared that it’s really important to her that she makes sure she shows up for her son and he has her full attention while she’s with him in the afternoons. Make sure the schedule these and keep your commitment to you. 

By staying consistent with your commitments, even your personal ones, and using time activation, we are better able to be there for our team and ourselves too. 

Final Thoughts

Often as managers, brokers, or leaders of any kind, it’s sometimes difficult to manage our time, energy, and resources to avoid being spread too thin when we are working with our teams. This means we have to implement systems, processes, and techniques that allow us to free up energy-sucking activities to be there on a human-level for our people.

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If you are feeling that there is a challenge you are
facing in your business, or you just want to chat, let’s connect.

Coaching Your Team to Results

I recently interviewed Anna-Marie Ellison, Managing Partner of ERA King Real Estate who has grown her agents’ business on average 22% year-over-year using a few strategic processes and a software system that kept her fully integrated with her team. 

In 2019, Anna-Marie had 32 of her agents sign up for one-on-one monthly business coaching sessions, to help them develop their business goals. On average these agents have seen 22% growth in their take-home earnings! How did this get accomplished? 

There were two key components to their success: consistency and accountability. Both are hard to achieve without having a well-executed plan coupled with the proper tools to track and measure success. 

The Well-Executed Plan 

For Anna-Marie, her time and energy is used very intentionally and it does not change when it comes to her coaching sessions with the agents. Anna-Marie had a structured plan to keep her commitment to her agents and their coaching. They consistently meet once a month for 45 mins and keep that meeting no matter what. If they can’t be in-person they meet virtually. 

Sticking with the plan helps Anna-Marie’s agents know she’s just as committed as they are to their business plan and just as invested in seeing them succeed. During their sessions, they discuss the key indicators of success and answer these three questions:

1. How many listings did you get this month? 

2. How many buyers did you get this month? 

3. How many offers did you write or receive related to those leads? 

After those are answered, there was one more item - the “Brain Dump”. This is where Anna-Marie will work with the agent to record and pull out the names of other potential business leads, thinking through the process of prospecting. 3 questions and the brain dump is all that’s expected in the meeting, and that normally only takes 20 minutes, but the meeting doesn’t end there. Anna-Marie has specifically added time for the agent to freely talk about anything real estate or non-real estate related.

Anna-Marie, although a superstar in her role, isn’t superhuman and can remember facts from month-to-month. So how does she keep track of all this information? Well, that’s where the right system comes into play.

The Right System

In Anna-Marie’s case, her brokerage’s main goal is to holistically support their agents. They see them as human beings and not just numbers. So they’ve adopted the system, 3 Data Pulse, to help them stay connected and informed, not just for agent productivity but also for recruiting and retention. 

“3 Data Pulse has been a backbone for several of our offices for almost 2 years now. Leadership loves that you can see the notes and what was discussed in other meetings. It’s allowed me to make sure we are giving consistent information to our agents when they come in and ask questions, as well as automatically follow up with agents in the time between our meetings.” - Anna-Marie Ellison 

After each interaction with an agent, the manager, staff member, or key leadership will enter the details of the discussion into the system. Every time there is a company meeting, training, or a fun gathering, participation is entered into the 3 Data Pulse system. “It creates consistency in the information so that the data is easy to digest and we can get a big picture idea of what’s really going on with our entire agent population,”says Anna-Marie.

“Tracking is the most important aspect that 3 Data Pulse gives us,” Anna-Marie says. “You can’t measure what you don’t track and we can now be aware of how many times we are interacting with everyone.” How often have you thought that you just spoke to someone a week ago and really it’s been months? 3 Data Pulse enables leadership to follow up with those who may be liable to fall through the cracks. 

The key information that’s collected in the 3 Data Pulse system has helped Anna-Marie and ERA King Real Estate know who their ideal agent persona looks like to recruit agents who will be a great fit for the team. “We don’t need a bunch of agents to work with us, just the right ones, and this system helps us do that.” 

When asked what her favorite “Ah-Ha moment” was in using the software to help their agents’ growth, Anna-Marie mentioned, “Sometimes people just need to hear that we are happy to have you with us and we care about you. These conversations are so important and this system helps us to not only look at their production and KPIs but to also know when someone reached out and said hi.” 

Sometimes as leaders there can be a tendency for us to look at our team members as just top producers or another item on the spreadsheet because there just simply isn’t enough of us to go around. However, we are in the relationship business when it comes to leading a quality team, therefore, making it even more important that we see our team members as human beings. Using a well-executed plan along with a system specifically made to keep you connected and informed, like 3 Data Pulse, will help you and your team grow. 

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If you are feeling that there is a challenge you are
facing in your business, or you just want to chat, let’s connect.