by Michele Gillis
Staff Writer
Building a team is a great way to manage your business by delegating work to others and allowing yourself to focus on bringing in new customers and servicing your existing ones to the best of your ability.
So, as a busy Realtor, you enlist some help but is it all roses and sunshine? Not always. Yes, you get help, but those helpers can lose their identity while under your umbrella and if they learn a lot and get really good, you run the risk of them leaving you with a spot to fill. But, most say the pros outweigh the cons.
In every business model there are pros and cons, so we interviewed four different teams to see how they work it out to make their team successful in this market and in the long run.
Here are three who are making it work and one who is just starting:
Team Knapp
Company: Coldwell Banker Vanguard.
Team leader: Kim Knapp
When team started: 2004.
Agents: Two.
Support staff: Two.
Why started: “The first year, I sold $6 million,” said Knapp. “The second year I sold $12 million. I could not do it without help. Also, when you start adding team members your numbers go up. By 2005, we had six agents and our numbers were $43 million.”
How they work: Knapp works exclusively with repeat customers and the other agents work with our referrals and other generated leads. Says Knapp, “We have one agent that is our lead listing agent. Buyer leads are equally distributed-however, personality and needs of the parties is taken into consideration. I manage prospecting activities, overall business plans, staffing issues and management.”
How big a team?: “This is for each individual to choose. It depends on what kind of leader you are. It’s not a matter of simply how much business you have. It also includes running an office, controlling the finances, managing the moral and maintaining the customer service that is associated with your name. There are a lot of variables.”
Handling agents: “Agents are a wonderful and interesting crew. I say that in love. They come and go. But, when that day will be, you never know. So the con as a team leader is the go part. You pour into someone, teach them everything you know, you discover that just when they were turning into your rock star they bloomed into a rainmaker and now you have to find someone else and start at zero. It’s like falling in love. It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. I guess this is how the brokers feel.”
Dana Hancock Team
Team leader: Dana Hancock.
Company: Re/Max Specialists.
When team started: 2002.
Agents: One.
Support staff: One.
How they work: Hancock is responsible for the marketing plan and communication for the team and she works listings and buyers. She also reviews our systems on a regular basis “to make sure we are doing things professionally and in the most efficient way possible.” The agent works leads and buyers and the support staff members handles all the paperwork, helps with the marketing and coordinates the transactions.
Who do it: “I think being on a team is great in almost every respect,” said Hancock. “You have support, the team leader takes care of all the marketing and systems, you get leads so you don’t have to go out and find all your own business and you can take time off and not have to worry about your business being handled correctly. As the team leader, I have people to bounce ideas off, and take care of business for me if I need to leave town or take time off. I think it’s a win-win situation.”
Why started: “I had too many leads that I didn’t have time to follow up on and I didn’t want them to be wasted.”
Susan Kennedy Team
Team leader: Susan Kennedy.
Company: Coldwell Banker Vanguard.
When started: 1995.
Agents: Five.
Support staff: Four.
Why started: “When you become a busy Realtor, you can’t perform all of the aspects of your business with the amount of professionalism that your standards require without a strong support system,” says Kennedy.
How they work: “We have an office manager who is also a broker-salesperson. We have one full time office assistant who helps me with my buyers/sellers and organizing my contracts and closings, one full-time marketing person who does our buyers searches for homes with a personal touch, gets feedback for our sellers on showings, maintains our Web sites and closes out our files. We also have one closing co-coordinator who takes our files from contract to repair negotiations and on into closing and one part-time office person who helps me stay organized with files and billing. As the leader, I am the engine of the team.”
Teamwork: “I know that if I have a buyer who comes into town unexpectedly, I have a team of great Realtors who can step in and give them the professional home buying treatment that they would get from me. I know that if I am on the road showing homes and there is something that a customer or a lender needs from a file that there is someone in the office who can help. The process does not have to stop for me to come back to the office.”
Crawford Team
Team leader: Jennifer Crawford.
Company: Coldwell Banker Vanguard.
When started: This year.
Agents: None.
Support staff: One.
Why start a team: “A team of people provides leverage for a business, and that is what I decided a long time ago, is that I am running a multimillion dollar business and I have to treat it like one. (A team) helps you bring more systems into your business, which provides more efficiency and consistency and that allows you to also handle a larger volume of business without sacrificing great standards that you set.”
The next step: When she hires an agent, “I want to make sure the agent has the proper support to ensure their success. I believe having the great administrative support lets them focus on their ‘must-do’ activity which is work with their buyers and lead generate.”
What she’s learned: “The pros are that you leverage yourself, therefore implementing the Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 Rule. This rule is best described by Richard Koch, who wrote a book about this principle. He described it as ‘the principle of the greatest outcome for time and effort expended’. When you have a team, you can achieve this much more successfully. The cons that may be possible with building a team is finding/hiring great talent and retaining them, training them effectively, and putting in the effort required of this endeavor to get it started correctly.”