The best thing you can do to accelerate your real estate team, writes Erin McCormick Torres, is to attract, hire, and drive immediate production from like-minded recruits.
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The best thing you can do to accelerate your real estate team is to attract, hire, and drive immediate production of like-minded team members who will align seamlessly with your culture, standards, and overall organizational goals. Hiring the wrong person or someone for the wrong seat on the bus can massively disrupt your team and disrupt a strong culture.
So how do you find and recruit agents who will be champions of your culture? Here are some ideas.
Before you start attracting agents
Develop and live according to your MVVBP
It’s your rallying cry. Your MVVBP stands for Mission, Vision, Values, Beliefs and Perspective.
- Your mission statement – why you are in business – should be concise, memorable and something that speaks to the why of your organization.
- Your vision contains your goals for the future and the path to achieve them.
- Your values are your non-negotiable principles by which you realize your vision and bring your mission statement to life.
- Your beliefs are what you believe to be true when your perspective is how the company – and its agents and associates – perceives itself.
In order to attract like-minded team members, you must first establish who you are, as well as where you are going and why, and be able to articulate it convincingly.
Create your avatar or missing person report
Before you start attracting team members, think about who your best partners have been. Who do you serve best? At what level of production? What behavioral traits do they possess? What moral principles?
Some teams prefer new agents that they can mold to their standards of success. Other teams only want proven agents who know the fundamentals and need next-level leverage, lead generation levers, and proven systems to scale.
Look at your background to see who you’ve been most successful in growing and retaining. Consider your strengths with lead generation. If your team is largely focused on sphere-based lead generation, you need to find agents with a strong local network. If you’re a team that loves cold calling, find someone who’s fearless on the phone.
Then define who your ideal team member is, for example: We accelerate 1-3M producers who are humble, hungry, and smart, show up in person every day, have a large local network, and a big why to drive their motivation and self-responsibility.
Define your value proposition
Write down 25 reasons an agent would want to partner with you. (Do you doubt your ability to attract? Do 50!)
What makes your team unique? What is your superpower? As a leader, how do you support your agents at the highest level? The purpose of this exercise is to define what you offer, help you articulate it, and build confidence for the conversations you are about to have.
Be clear on your standards and non-negotiable for the agents on your team
Do you want each agent to sell at least two houses per month? Do you have a mandatory team take-off huddle every morning? Do you require your agents to submit their numbers five days a week? Set your standards and make them known in the recruitment process.
Ask incoming agent candidates to sign a document with your written standards. Make sure they’re aware of what it takes to stay in your world, the type of culture you’re fostering, and the results you expect.
Once you’ve determined your MVVBP, avatar, value proposition, and standards, it’s time to attract team members
Start with a “hit list” of agents you would like to work with in your market
Take a list of broker metrics and highlight 25-40 agents you respect and would like to do business with. Collect their contact details and add them (labeled appropriately) to your recruiting database and CRM.
Come from contributing to the delivery of valuable items
Once your hit list is established, invite these agents to trainings or events with your team.
- Host a happy hour with a co-broker or agent or monthly mastermind.
- Host local trainings on hot topics in your market.
- Invite agents to a phone party or lead generation session.
- Partner with another team or agent on a customer event.
- Send them a podcast or a book that they would find interesting.
Always strive to provide valuable content, such as an invitation to an impactful event, or conversations or object handlers that you have found useful or had success with, in a value-oriented newsletter. See who opens invitations or newsletters and follow up with a compelling call or text.
Show what your team is all about on social media
Are you home for dinner every night due to team influence? Do your agents take four weeks of vacation per year? Has your productivity per agent and net pay increased year over year? Tell the stories of your team: their victories, their growth, how they like the way they live. Present these successes authentically on social media or in a newsletter.
Pay attention to agents bidding on your listings
One of the best ways to find agents is to see who is writing offers on your listings. Do they send a cover letter with the nuts and bolts of the offer and have prompt communication during the offer process? Sold!
Or, did their contract contain errors, missed your bid deadline, or failed to communicate in the pitch process? In the latter case, this agent could be a good fit for your team if you are training-based. Either type of agent is an opportunity to see who excels and who could really benefit from joining your team.
Always lead by example
If you want to turn heads and attract agents to your team, head-on with production. Don’t let go of the accelerator. If your team consistently posts the most ads or writes the most offers in your market, agents will take notice.
They’ll ask you what you’re doing and how you’re doing it – especially in a changing or declining market – and invite a conversation about how they can achieve similar results within your team.
Erin McCormick Torres is COO for Livian to KW. She’s an author, business coach, realtor, and content creator who runs the popular blog Travel Like a Local: Vermont. Connect with her on instagram And LinkedIn.