(This is the 9th post in a 9 part guide, please read them in order)
How to scale your real estate business for the future
By now, you’re hopefully running a well-oiled machine and your business is providing you predictable results. You finally have things figured out.
How do you know when it’s the right time to scale your business to the next level? For most real estate agents selling residential real estate, it should look like this:
- You’re marketing only to homeowners
- At any given time, you’re carrying at least 2-3+ listings on the market
- You’re juggling open houses every weekend
- There are constant buyer calls on your listings and you’re out most evenings showing homes
- You have no time and feel burned out even though you’re making good money
If this describes your business, congratulations because you’re in a great place. You’re making money and you have more business than you can handle at the moment.
The next natural step in your progression is to bring on another agent who can help you with your open houses and buyer appointments. As you know, juggling even several buyers at once can become very intensive and time consuming. This is why you’re going to assign buyers to an agent on your team. You will continue to focus on generating seller appointments to acquire more listings because it’s easier to carry 10 listings than it is to carry 10 buyers.
Undoubtedly there will be a lot of administrative work that goes on with the marketing of each listing and the documentation required for each closing. As we’ve discussed in a previous post, you want to always spend your time on activities that generate new business, not maintain existing business.
To address this, you can hire an assistant to handle the administration aspect. Many agents opt to use a VA (virtual assistant). This is someone who isn’t physically in your office, but who has the experience and can remotely help you keep your business organized and running efficiently. Generally, VA’s are cheaper than hiring an assistant to work beside you in your business. There are VA’s out there who specialize in helping real estate agents and require very little training to immediately make an impact on keeping your business running organized and efficient.
The key task for you at this stage in your career is to examine your business and determine how you can delegate different activities to other people so that you can strictly focus on finding more listings. In other words, you’re going to the bring in the business and your team is going to take care of it. But the business still lives and dies by your prospecting and marketing efforts.
To do this, you need to have an intimate understanding of the client’s journey from start to finish, and have checklists and standard operating procedures documented so that your hired work can have a clear set of objectives. One important part of creating and running a team is how you train your team members and hold them accountable. You’ll also need to have a mechanism to find agents who are the right fit for your team, and once again, understanding personality types is a good way to profile a candidate. If you’re following the DISC personality system, you will want to hire a buyer agent who is a predominant “I” personality with strong “D” characteristics.
As you continue to grow your business, you can expand your team by hiring more buyer agents and listing specialists. Running a real estate team can be the most rewarding chapter in your real estate story. Make sure you hire a coach or mentor who has experience in building teams to help you navigate the unique challenges of this aspect of the real estate business.
Congratulations, you are a top agent!