Statistics say that teams generally do better by a large margin than brokerages in terms of gross profit margin. Big brokerages like Keller Williams and eXp are profitable, but the money is on the teams, and in the next few years, there are companies that function like a team that will come in and make bigger footprints in the industry.

It raises the question: “What makes an excellent team?” These are the six core components I came up with. If you don’t have a team or are not part of a brokerage, that’s okay, because these are also as important to your business. And as you scale, you will be more prepared to build a team with just agents or a team with staff.

Over the past ten years, brokerages have seen a decline in agent productivity by 17.7%. What are teams doing better than brokerages that allow them to support individual agents at a higher level to boost their productivity in this business?

 1. Leadership

It all begins with leadership. There are some things that we look for in a leader, and the number one is: people look for leaders that can help them get to where they want to go.

In real estate, agents are looking for leaders who produce real results—they want to close transactions and want to join a team that will help them do just that. They want leaders who know the market and can tell them where the market is heading so they won’t miss out on opportunities.

At the end of the day, we join a team or a brokerage, not for the culture or the water cooler talk, but because we want to earn money. That’s how we can get the right people into our teams: Show actual results.

But what makes people stay in the team is how you treat them and the relationship that they’ve built with you and other members of the team. The culture and community aren’t what gets them in, but it is what makes them stay.

That’s why it is important to work on your skills and how you communicate. Or bring in people who can help you build that environment.

People stay because of the results you can bring in and the kind of leader that you are. They become inspired by you and want to be more like the person you are, in real estate, as an individual, and as a leader.

Knowing how to empower and push them to grow is also important. You do that by setting an example in continually learning in your field. That way you get more insight and know the market, know how to evolve with the market, and come up with ways in driving the change you want to see in your industry.

Strong leadership helps agents focus on what they do best, improve their weaknesses, and provide opportunities to put that growth and learning into practice. 

That is one advantage teams have over big brokerages—they are able to focus more on the individual needs of agents and act accordingly to help them achieve that.

 2. Technology

This is where I see a lot of teams fall apart.

Technology should make our lives easier, not harder. But one thing I noticed with some brokerages and teams is the tech that they dump or impose on their members is making the process more complicated, setting individual agents up to fail.

We should be able to leverage the technology available to us, and it should augment the process we use that delivers good results. Take the time to understand the tech at our disposal so that we can teach our teams how it can make their lives—and earning money—easier.

Some of the techs we use are Follow Up Boss, Open to Close, Chime, Artificial Intelligence, REDX, and Revaluate. A lot of those are built into each other, like Artificial Intelligence and Revaluate with Chime. They help us optimize or build processes that will allow us to get better leads and close more transactions using data analysis.

 3. Marketing

We need good marketing to get business coming in. One thing that brokerages and big companies like Zillow, Realtor.com, and Redfin do better than teams is the lead generation with their marketing strategy, specifically Google PPC. 

According to NAR, 41% of recent buyers’ first step in the home-buying process was to search online, while 51% of homebuyers found the homes they purchased online. Most of that originates from Google, which is why it is the number one most visited website in the world. 

Consumers depend on the internet for everyday tasks such as research, transactions, and communications, and homebuying has increasingly been integrated into those tasks.

There’s nothing stopping us from pulling a leaf out of brokerages’ marketing playbook and utilizing that strategy to our advantage. We can also explore new alternatives.

Social media play a big part. Recent studies show that younger consumers (Gen Zs) are increasingly using TikTok like a search engine—so much so, that it was enough to freak Google out and figure out ways to stop TikTok from becoming a bigger search engine. And Facebook is increasingly becoming a preferred source of news online.

Of course, it isn’t just digital marketing. Statistics also show that fine print advertising, postcards, etc. are still trustworthy sources for 42% of consumers. So, whether you do newsletters, online and social media marketing, or send out handwritten notes and postcards to your consumers, it is crucial to level up with your marketing.

 4. Coaching

Training, education, and accountability are the keys to consistent growth. You have to teach the agents important things so they can grow with the team and adapt to the real estate world, which is always changing. 

Are you providing the coaching and education your agents, or even the consumers, need to understand your industry better?

Better yet, are you getting coaching for yourself, so you can lead your team better?

Coaching is crucial in keeping up with trends, honing your skills, improving your strategies and plans, and finding new (and old) ways to leverage your strengths and work on your weaknesses. 

If you are looking for a coach to help you with your business, we do one-on-one and group coaching for real estate agents and teams, and brokerage leaders who want to take their business to a higher level. We also do a weekly free coaching program called Brilliant Talks, and you are welcome to sign up and join us if you want to learn and have a taste of our coaching programs.

Continuous learning and growth is crucial to support your business success in the long term, and it helps you expand your perspective from the experiences and challenges of others on the field.

 5. Staff

An agent’s number one job is creating relationships. We need to simplify the process and put the pieces together through the technology we are utilizing, the marketing we are executing, and the staff we hire as we scale our business. 

We need support with processes such as administrative work so that we can focus more on the higher-leverage tasks that require our attention.

 6. Opportunities

Are you giving your agents opportunities to succeed? What are you putting in front of them? We go back to the number one reason that agents join a team or brokerage—it is not to sit around and drink coffee or share small talk in the office. It is to get more opportunities and earn money.

We are in this career to make money. Are we going to make amazing relationships in this business? Yes. Are we going to change people’s lives? Yes. But if a leader doesn’t give you opportunities to make money and close transactions out of this career one way or another, then they won’t be able to make an agent stay. We all need to earn and make a living, at the end of the day.

Whether that is through coaching, giving leads, past clients, marketing, or technology, we need to keep making opportunities that will help us and other agents in our team make more money. That way we can continue doing what we love in this career and help more consumers—in this case, homebuyers and sellers—get the best deal that could change their lives.

Join us again next week for another session of Brilliant Talks. If you missed out on the previous sessions, you can find all of the replays on our website and my YouTube channel. And if you have any questions regarding coaching or leadership, feel free to reach out to me.