Building a Top-Producing Real Estate Team

If you’ve been in the real estate industry for several years as an agent, you may feel like it’s time to take the next step in your career by building a real estate team. There are, however, many factors to take into account before you start creating your dream team.

Adding agents to your team is essential if you want to maximize your success. When working as a real estate agent, there are numerous responsibilities that you’re tasked with performing, which include finding new leads, meeting clients, managing marketing campaigns, performing property tours, and working with  

As you grow more successful, it will eventually become impossible to serve additional customers on your own. When you reach this stage of your career, building a team will allow you to continue your career’s upward trajectory without working 70 hours per week.

Once you’ve made the decision to build a real estate team, it’s essential that you add the right pieces around you. This guide takes you through the pieces you need to build a top-producing real estate team.

How do Real Estate Teams Work?

When a real estate agent works solo, they are usually responsible for every aspect of the transaction. Real estate teams work because instead of one person doing handling everything, there are professionals in place that focus on a specific aspect of the transaction.

The per-transaction profit you make will be considerably less with a real estate team; however, with the right amount of volume, you will make more money with much less work on your behalf. Additionally, as the team grows, the easier it will be to scale your operations.

What Value Proposition Will You Offer to Your Real Estate Team?

When you’re attempting to bring on new real estate agents to your team, it’s essential that you provide prospective team members with a great value proposition. You’ll need to convince other professionals that they would benefit from joining your team, which is why value proposition is so important.

In real estate, value proposition involves communicating the benefits of being in a team as well the unique benefits that only you and your support can provide. Keep in mind that your value proposition must be strong enough that you can convince reputable real estate agents and admin staff to come work with you.

If the value proposition isn’t worthwhile, the only agents you may convince to join your team are inexperienced ones who simply want to increase their credibility.

To start creating an effective real estate value proposition, let’s take a look at the many benefits associated with being in a real estate team. The primary advantages of joining a real estate team include:

  • When an agent joins a team, they receive extensive support from other agents and administrative staff, which can be invaluable when attempting to navigate the real estate industry.
  • Only in a team can real estate agents gain a sense of accountability when it comes to achieving goals. Along with this accountability, other team members can provide encouragement that helps an agent continue improving.
  • In a real estate team, agents can focus more on providing an awesome client experience, while the Admin staff takes care of the paperwork and transaction.
  • Being in a team allows for greater success than a single agent can have on their own.

These benefits should serve as the basis for your value proposition. However, it’s also essential that you have the team’s structure in place before you make any hires, which is the only way you can convince professional agents that joining your team would be better than working alone.

The Structure of a Winning Real Estate Team

If you want to create a real estate team that’s successful from the very start, it’s highly recommended that you adhere to a specific team structure. Successful real estate teams possess some common elements that you should include in your team.

You must first hire the right agents and admin staff before you can begin to imagine further success. Along with developing a strong value proposition that prospective agents/admin staff can reference, it’s also important that you offer enough tools to attract agents. Some software that you should have on hand when you start building your team include:

  • Lead generation systems
  • Real estate marketing materials and tools
  • MLS listing tools that can be integrated into your website
  • Open house management software
  • Property valuation software
  • Market report software
  • Collaboration and communication software
  • Efficiency tools that provide workflow automation

With these tools in hand, you can convince potential team members that you have everything they require for sustained success. If you’re going to be dealing with a high number of leads, all of the aforementioned tools may be necessary to stay on top of the many tasks that will need to be completed on a daily basis. To that end, it’s also highly recommended that you have all of the necessary systems in place before you create a real estate team.

Every business requires a strong enough foundation to support the increased tasks and responsibilities that naturally occur in the course of running a business. When building a real estate team, you’ll need to handle an increased lead volume as well as the greater responsibilities that you’ll invariably have. The main real estate systems that will bolster your chances for success include:

  • A comprehensive business plan with clearly stated goals
  • A vision and purpose
  • Extensive marketing and advertising systems
  • A referral system
  • A management system for transactions, escrow, and buyers
  • Listing inventory system
  • An online marketing system that extends to blogging and social media marketing
  • Forecasts and profitability reports

 Putting the Team Structure Together

When all of these systems are put in place, you’ll have a much higher chance of being successful and convincing other reputable agents to join your team. As mentioned above, a strong marketing presence is necessary if you want your real estate team to get ahead of the competition.

For instance, do you currently have a website with Agent Bio pages? If not, this should be one of the first things you make for your new real estate team.

Prospective team members may not believe in the legitimacy of your business if you don’t even have a website to represent your brand. Along with a stylish and functional real estate website, you should also determine how you’re going to market your properties online.

Make sure that you also produce high-end content for your website that’s relevant to potential clients and team members. Increasing the popularity and visibility of your website will help you bring in new clients and grab the attention of possible team members.

Your marketing plan should be thorough and well understood before you build your team. You might also want to develop a plan for future expansion of your online presence.

A core element of any successful real estate team involves the people who are hired. When an agent joins your team, they are representing yourself and your brand. With professional and experienced real estate agents on your team, your brand image will be strengthened.

Once a few experienced and respected agents have joined, you’ll be even more likely to retain top-producing agents. After the team structure is in place, the next step is to ramp up your marketing to generate leads for new agents.

Key Elements of Marketing

If you have a successful lead generation strategy in place, chances are, you have been successful in marketing yourself as an expert real estate agent. As you put your team together, additional marketing assets will go a long way in increasing and sustaining a steady stream of transactions.

Website with Lead Capture

As touched upon previously, among the most important aspects of any real estate team is its website. Your website will be a place that people go to view properties, look up information about your real estate agents, and find out how to contact you.

The website you build should be developed with lead capture in mind. In general, this means that your website should be highly functional, aesthetically appealing, and easy-to-navigate.

When a visitor enters your website for any reason, they must be provided with a great user experience throughout their entire journey. In order for users to have a great user experience when they visit your site, it’s important that you provide them with relevant content, quick-loading pages, and easy navigation.

These individuals should be able to reach the page they’re looking for in just a few clicks of a button. When someone has a good user experience, they are much more likely to convert into a return customer.

Social Media Marketing

Another core marketing element is social media marketing, which is more important today than ever before. Facebook alone has nearly 2.9 billion active monthly users. You can’t reach these people with conventional marketing campaigns alone.

There are several key facets of social media marketing. For instance, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all offer paid ads that you can purchase when you want to send targeted ads to your main audience.

While paid social ads are a fantastic way to promote your brand and any listings you represent, effective social media marketing involves more than that. It’s highly recommended that you create a page that will represent your real estate team on all of the most popular social media platforms. These platforms include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Online Reviews

Many real estate teams overlook the importance of generating positive ratings and reviews strategy. This type of strategy can help you and your team sell more homes. Keep in mind that around 97% of customers search online for local business reviews before deciding if they want to do business with them. This form of marketing involves a couple of different steps. First, make sure that you ask your clients to leave a review of your business online after a successful transaction.

You should also respond to reviews whenever possible, which will increase customer satisfaction and make your brand seem more trustworthy. Google and Zillow are two places that you should focus on. Because most internet users search Google when they’re looking for information about a company, focusing on Google reviews can be invaluable.

As for Zillow, they have an extensive online directory of real estate agents. This directory provides people with the opportunity to leave in-depth reviews and ratings on the agents they’ve used in the past.

Real Estate Postcard Campaigns

While online marketing is more important than ever, there are still a number of traditional marketing techniques that should be used when you want to reach new clients and generate leads. One such technique involves real estate postcard campaigns, which are easy to design and can be a great starting point for any marketing campaign.

The postcards you create should incorporate eye-catching visuals, relevant information, and a small number of headings and subheadings. Postcard targeting is possible with the right software. If you send postcards to specific neighborhoods, consider personalizing them to include the name of the neighborhood, which should help you obtain higher conversion rates from your campaign.

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Lead Generation With An Established Pipeline

Having an established pool of leads as an individual real estate agent is necessary if you want your real estate team to be successful. Even if you have developed the best marketing campaign around, agents aren’t going to be willing to sacrifice a portion of the commission they bring in on their own without you providing them with leads that are ready to be nurtured and eventually converted.

Best Practices for Building a Pipeline of Leads

Because of the importance of building a pipeline of leads that the agents you hire can immediately gain access to, you should adhere to the following best practices.

Use a Great CRM

First of all, you’ll want to use a great CRM, which stands for customer relationship management. Great customer relationship management occurs when you know how to effectively handle relationships with current and prospective customers. When you’re searching for the ideal CRM software, there are some components that can help make a CRM awesome, which are detailed below.

Easy to Navigate

The CRM software you use should be easy to navigate if you want to get the most out of the software. If the software is obtuse and requires extensive understanding to effectively navigate, it could be too difficult for you to use. The purpose of CRM software is to make your interactions with customers more efficient, which is why the software should be easy for you to navigate.

Email Drip Campaigns

The best CRM platforms offer functionality that supports email drip campaigns, which is necessary if you want to bring in more leads. Drip email marketing allows you to move leads through the pipeline at a faster pace and bolster lead conversion. Some of the email drip marketing features that the CRM should provide you with include a drag-and-drop email creator, email lists, campaign automation, lead generation, and lead scoring.

Easy to Assign Leads

The top CRM platforms also offer the ability to easily assign leads with a few clicks of a button. When you’re managing a real estate team, each member on your team will invariably have different leads. The only way to manage these leads with a CRM is by assigning them to the agent who brought them in, which is why this functionality is essential in the CRM you decide to use.

Note-Keeping Capabilities

Notes are a fantastic way to summarize any observations you might have about customer interactions and current outcomes. By using a CRM that offers note-keeping capabilities, you can take detailed notes that can later be referenced to determine how a lead is progressing. Not every CRM offers these capabilities, which is why it’s important to do some research before selecting a CRM.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are sections of your website that can be accessed by a hyperlink. The top CRM software providers allow clients to create custom landing pages with feature-rich page builders. Visually appealing and relevant landing pages can facilitate instantaneous lead engagement, which should result in better lead generation and conversion.

Leverage Google Ads for Real Estate

Among the more popular and effective marketing tools that you can leverage is Google Ads. This tool makes it easy to set up extensive advertising campaigns that bring in more leads and help you strengthen your brand image. While there are many benefits that come with using Google Ads, there are also a few drawbacks that you should be aware of.

Pros of Google Ads

  • Google Ads relies on an auction instead of requiring you to rank organically on Google
  • You can target specific locations and keywords with Google Ads, which should help you create more relevant ads
  • Specifically tailored to produce leads faster

Cons of Google Ads

  • You’ll need to make a large upfront investment, which can be risky since you aren’t guaranteed success
  • The leads you generate through Google Ads convert at a lower rate when compared to organic marketing
  • The Google Ads campaigns you build will require constant monitoring as well as a thorough understanding of the Google Ads platform

Since extensive knowledge of the Google Ads platform is necessary to get the most out of this tool, a member of your marketing team should have this knowledge. If you have yet to hire marketing professionals for your real estate team, make sure that your hires have the experience and knowledge needed to build a robust marketing campaign with the best tools available.

Invest in Organic/SEO Traffic

When you invest in organic/SEO traffic, your brand will benefit in a number of ways. Organic traffic involves any traffic that you get to your site from a search engine like Google or Bing. However, it can’t involve paid search ads.

The upside of organic traffic is that it’s considerably cheaper than paid traffic in most cases. SEO stands for search engine optimization. There are many things that you can do to optimize your website for search engines.

For instance, improving the load speeds for your website will help you receive a higher ranking in search results. Google considers numerous factors when deciding how to rank your website, which include everything the content on your website to your site’s performance.

A high-ranking on Google means that your website appears on the first page of search results for relevant keywords. If your website appears towards the top of search results, you will invariably gain more visibility, which should increase the amount of organic traffic you receive.

When you’re creating a robust marketing plan for your real estate team, you will likely need to determine what types of marketing your team will focus on. If you decide to focus on organic traffic to generate new leads, there are several benefits of doing so. However, there are a couple of drawbacks as well.

Pros

  • Organic traffic is known to convert leads at a higher rate compared to ad-generated traffic
  • Organic traffic provides an opportunity to establish authority via long-tail keywords
  • Organic traffic can only be performed properly with a long-term strategy, which yields strong potential

Cons

  • It’s almost impossible to obtain short-term results from organic marketing
  • This form of marketing requires a significant investment of time and money

Once you have enough leads in your pipeline as an individual agent, you’ll know that you’re ready to add agents and build a team. You can be certain that you have enough leads in your pipeline once you can no longer stay in contact with all of them by yourself.

Strong Support Staff

A successful real estate team depends on a strong support staff. Nearly all real estate agents love the practice of selling homes, which means that they don’t want to spend too much of their time in the office with the more administrative tasks.

If you can provide your real estate team with a support staff to handle the bulk of the paperwork and administrative duties that are necessary in real estate transactions, the end result is a win-win-win. Your support staff should also implement your marketing campaigns, which is a task that would be too time-consuming for agents.

Administrative Assistant

A real estate administrative assistant is someone who can provide support to all team members in order to ensure smooth and successful real estate transactions. The responsibilities of an administrative assistant include managing paperwork, complying with legal procedures, scheduling appointments, and providing customer service when necessary.

Transaction Coordinator

A transaction coordinator is someone who is required to manage contracts during the buying and selling process. This individual must schedule inspections and repairs, complete any escrow paperwork, and make sure that offers and counteroffers are officially approved.

Additional responsibilities include filing all documents on time, making sure that the closing procedures are in order, and completing other administrative tasks.

Inside Sales Agent

A real estate inside sales agent is a professional who oversees lead generation and adds all qualified leads directly to the sales funnel. They are responsible for researching new leads and turning any existing clients into repeat customers.

Marketing Manager

A real estate marketing manager oversees the entire marketing team and is responsible for building and executing numerous marketing campaigns to bring in additional leads. They can manage both digital and direct mail campaigns and will market new listings until the properties have been closed on. A marketing manager must have extensive knowledge about digital marketing techniques.

Showing Assistant

A showing assistant is a valuable asset to any successful real estate team. This individual is responsible for transforming hot leads into active clients under contract. A showing assistant does everything from learning about a buyer client’s expectations and needs for a new home to managing showings, negotiating contracts and more.

This individual may also be responsible for providing property access to the buyer after the property is under contract, such as for inspections. He or she will also facilitate property access for appraisers, property inspectors and other third-party professionals who are involved in the transaction.

The ideal showing assistant has a balance of essential hard and soft skills. However, many of these skills can be taught through hands-on training with the right candidate. One of the traits to look for in a good showing assistant is motivation.

The individual should be a self-starter who requires no oversight once trained. He or she should also be motivated to produce results that benefit the entire team.

Great Team Culture

An oft-overlooked aspect of successful real estate teams is that nearly all of them have a great team culture. While real estate agents essentially act as independent contractors, the best teams support one another and are willing to help each other. You don’t want to be in a situation where two agents focus more on competing against each other than they do on cultivating new and separate leads.

What Type of Agent Should you Recruit to your Real Estate Team?

Not every agent is a good fit for a real estate team. If you want your team to obtain long-term success, recruiting real estate agents that do well in a team environment is essential. Here are some of the key traits to look for in order to maximize retention and limit turnover.

Moderately Experienced

A highly important factor in your hiring decision should involve the experience that the agent has. While inexperienced agents could provide you with the qualities and characteristics you’re looking for, hiring an agent who doesn’t have much experience is a risky move.

Even though you can train brand-new agents, adding agents who have at least some experience ensures a considerably shorter learning curve and properly demonstrates that these individuals understand every nuance associated with your real estate team. You should only consider adding agents who close around 5-10 transaction every year.

Enjoy Being Part of a Team

It’s also very important that you hire agents who enjoy being part of a team. Even though real estate agents don’t regularly need help, the extra support provided by other team members can be very comforting to the right real estate agents.

However, not every agent wants to be a part of a team. The industry is highly competitive, which is why some agents invariably prefer to work alone without ever receiving assistance from other agents.

Feel Invested in the Success of the Team

Along with making sure that your hires enjoy being in a team, it’s also important that they feel invested in the team’s success as opposed to individual success. While every member of your team will bring in their own leads, the desired goal of each team member should be to bolster the success of the real estate team.

When team members are optimistic, have a sense of belonging, and want to see each other succeed, the team’s success will almost assuredly improve. A great working environment can pay dividends for the whole team.

Summary

Building a real estate team that’s successful and regularly brings in new leads takes time, money, and a desire to further your career. The most difficult aspect of creating a successful team is having all of the right systems in place.

If your team doesn’t have a good foundation and structure, it won’t be enough to hire a few experienced real estate agents. As explained in this article, you should develop a good value proposition and start creating a marketing plan.

It’s also essential that you build a pipeline of leads, which is critical towards ensuring that you have enough leads for the new team members you hire. On that front, your hires should all have a moderate amount of experience and a desire to work in a team.

Now that you know what it takes to put together a strong real estate team that’s built for success, you should be ready to take the next step in your career.

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