By Walter Sanford
Special to Realty/Builder Connection
It’s Tuesday morning and everyone knows they need to be there for the office meeting. Most office meetings are a combination of the announcement of new listings, new rules imposed by the office, board, or state, legal updates, and maybe a quick snippet from a local affiliate.
If you’re at all like me, you don’t look forward to these mornings.
I didn’t want to repeatedly hear about the merits of a home warranty program, a re-hash of announcements already emailed to me, and listen to Sally talk about her overpriced listings.
Early in my career, I suggested to my broker that unless the office meetings were profitable, I was going to spend my time in proactive business activities, guaranteed to increase my bottom line. With an interest in new and exciting ways to capture business, my broker questioned me as to what a successful office meeting should include.
Here are the items that I suggested to make the office more profitable, engage the top producers, and be another reason the competition would want to come over.
1. Everyone should announce their new listing. As part of this “presentation,” each agent should include the seller’s motivation for selling, why they thought the pricing was good, whether they were looking for another property to move into, and how the listing was obtained. Sometimes, trade secrets are hard to come by, but it would be nice to see what works in seller lead generation. The moderator should keep this time frame short and snappy!
2. Next up in the meeting should be a mutual sharing of new buyers. Each agent should talk about their buyer’s motivation and specifically items like whether they were pre-approved, under contract (no buyers should be brought into discussion if they aren’t under contract), and their down payment capabilities. Then talk about their “hot button.” Once again, keep it short and snappy! Also at this time, everyone should try and match available listings with the buyers that were announced.
3. The agents should then have 10 seconds - no more - to share their best buyer and best seller with the other agents and share why that person was going to quickly buy or sell.
4. The broker should share a particular topic/item that she had been researching all week.
5. We should then hear a quick presentation from an affiliate. Instructions should have been given to the affiliate that he or she could not make any presentations that didn’t include a way to help a real estate agent increase his or her business. By enforcing this “rule,” the selling of their product was minimized, but using their product as a method to increase the agent’s business was maximized.
After an office meeting in this format, each agent should feel as though they had spent their office meeting time wisely.
Also, attendance should be strictly enforced; in fact, those who didn’t attend should receive sanctions ranging from mandatory opportunity time at open houses to a restriction of referrals that came directly into the office.
It’s time that you start creating synergy in your offices by having agents think about teaming up for transactions. In fact, it’s really the only reason for an office to exist! Brokers and managers, you need to step up your game and see how you can increase the transactions per week.
Follow these ideas and I think everyone will be more excited to be there at 9 a.m.!
Walter Sanford is a real estate consultant and can be reached at 800.792.5837 or [email protected].