5 Tips For Building a Real Estate Team

I’m going to give you five tips for building a real estate team. It’s very important if you want to build an on-market real estate team that you understand what goes into it. I think there are a lot of people building teams now who think it’s going to be easy. You kind of spread some leads around and that’s it. That’s not how we work on my team. And I want to explain five tips that I think might help you if you’re looking to build a real estate team.

My name is Jonathan Greene. I know these tips because I run a big real estate team called Streamlined Properties On-Market. We’re brokered by eXp Realty. We’ve had up to 50 agents in four states. That’s how I know what works and what doesn’t and I’m still learning every single day as it goes.

Let’s go, number one:

Be the example.

So when I say be the example I think you have to have been in production and you have to still be doing production at some point when you start the team. Because if you start a team and you’re not in production as an agent, it’s very hard to just have them look back on your prior transactions and feel like you understand what it’s like to be in their shoes in this market. This market’s different than the market a couple months ago. Things are always changing. So for me, I want to be the example just ethically, professionally, but also transactionally. I want to outproduce people, everybody on my team until they’re ready to outproduce me. And that’s still the case on my team, but I hope it’s not like that forever. I don’t want to stay in production forever. I do want to be a team leader who eventually scales out of production.
But right now, I think being the example for my team and showing them that I’m willing to show 20 houses in a week even at this level and that I can close, it shows them that they can actually just model your behavior and see that it will work for them as they customize it to their own personality. So that’s number one, be the example. And I think that goes for all facets of the business, but you have to be doing the business to be the example. And I think that’s really important.

Number two:

Hire agents who want to be the best, not make the most.

I don’t have any problem with people who are money motivated in real estate. You should be, it’s totally fair. You just can’t be money-motivated over being client-motivated because then eventually you’re going to make a decision that’s not in the best interest of the client because you want to get the commission.

So in order to stay client-focused, you want agents coming on your team who are obsessed with being the best and they know that if they become the best, all the money will come from that. And I really believe that in almost all aspects. If you work hard enough to be the best in your field, the money rewards will come eventually. If you’re always focused on the money, you’re not going to be focused on process or client. And we want all of our agents on my team focused on their clients. It’s the most important aspect of the business. Deals fail. You can’t worry about commission, even if you need it. You have to know that you’re doing the work every day and more will come. That one’s important. Focus on hiring agents that want to be the best, not make the most.

Number three, I have to tell this one to myself all the time and I keep learning the same lessons and I’ve read it in books and I still don’t listen, but I’m going to listen in 2023:

Fire fast, higher, slow.

In the hiring process, you wanna make more hoops so it’s harder to get onto your team. I’ve made the same mistakes as a lot of people in real estate teams. When you’re new and you’re building a team, you want to hire a lot of people because you want to get bodies in there. You have leads coming in, and you want to train as many people as you can at once. It eventually blows up in your face.

To be completely honest, I think you get a little bit excited about the numbers and that people want to be on your team or they want something. But there are usually things when people leave the team or they’re off-boarded by us that we saw at the beginning that probably was a red flag that we should have known. Sometimes we convince ourselves that we can mold them to be the way that we want or that they’ll change their focus. But most of the time people are going to pretty much continue to do business the way that they want to do business. And if they can’t comply with the way ethically that we want to do business I personally need to have a quicker pull on that. And that means fire fast.

It means when you see something that’s unacceptable and it happens again, it’s probably time to let them go. I think that progressively what I’ve learned is the things that happen once or twice will keep happening no matter how you coach it. And that makes somebody uncoachable. And once somebody’s uncoachable, there’s really no point in keeping them on a team because uncoachable people are not team players. You’re a team player when you’re coachable because you want to work together. Everybody’s working for the same thing: to help the team be better. So overall, we look better but you have to fire fast. Please listen to me on this one. Fire fast, hire slow. I know it’s attractive when you’re building. We got to 50 agents. Right now today, on November 29th, 2022, we have 44 active agents and one onboarding now. But over the course of the last two years, we’ve let go more than 60 agents or they’ve left the team. So that’s how it goes. And I think that you have to understand those numbers that it’s not easy.

It’s not easy to make hiring decisions, and it’s not easy to make firing decisions. But when you want to move quick on one, don’t do what I’ve done. Don’t hire quick. You need to fire quick and hire slower. So we’re building portals that’ll make it harder for people to get on the team that they’ll have to do work to get there. But then when they get there, they’ll be fully understanding of what the culture is and we won’t have as many problems later on.

Number four:

DISC test everybody.

I actually had to pull this up just to make sure I got it right. So the disc test is a personality test. We use the free one on Tony Robbins’ site. It’s great. We get it to all our people who are onboarding to make sure that we understand what their disc is. D is for dominance, I is for influence, S is for steadiness, and C is for conscientiousness. Generally, a D is a driver. You can’t have too many drivers on your team. Usually, the team leader is going to be a high D. As a team leader, I test as a high D. When I’m not on a team, I test more as a high C because I’m very into compliance, which is also a C thing. But as a high D, if you surround yourself with other high Ds, you’ll just find yourself having arguments all the time. So it’s very important that you use the DISC test to your advantage.

It also helps you relate to your employees and agents. It’s much better if you don’t understand than if you did not understand. So if I’m a high D and I have a bunch of high Is, which is influencers, but it really means like great communicators are talking all the time, great with people, they’re also more emotional. So high Is take things very to heart. So you can’t speak the same way to a high I that you would to a high C who’s just going to be numbers focused. So understanding the DISC test of the people on your team is very, very important.

S are going to be steady. You don’t have to worry about them too much. You need to guide them, care for them and make sure they have what they want. But they’re generally going to work on their own pretty steadily and without a problem. And your high Cs are analytical. Looking at numbers, can crunch the numbers, and maybe have a little bit of a hard time making those calls or doing what it takes to close deals. But I think that all of the DISCs work, you have to understand who is which one on the team so that when you’re growing your team in the admin section, you understand if you’re hiring people for administrative, transaction coordinators, anything in the back end, you better be hiring high Cs. Trust me when I tell you that. And if you’re hiring callers, ISAs, anybody who’s going to do that, you want high Is on that end, not high Ds on the phone. That doesn’t really work for real estate for the phone, it’s too pushy. You need high Is on the phone and you need high Cs in the backend and you can have SCs in the back end, that’s great.

But please use the DISC text. Tony Robbins has it for free. You give it to them, it gives you a breakdown and then you keep them all set up so you understand how to deal with everyone on your team.

Number five, this one’s really important. It’s definitely my favorite. I call it:

The science of systems.

You have to have your systems set up in advance and you have to understand what you’re working with so that when people come in, you put them into a funnel that’s already going to work. Systems are everything. And systems could be your CRM, how you manage your data and your clients, but also workflows. If X happens, then do Y. And are you relaying that stuff to your agents? I’m really good at building systems and what I haven’t been really good at is making the easy workflows for my agents. So they can just look at a one-sheet and say, okay, somebody says this, I go to this. Or when this happens in a transaction, I do this. We create lots of content and videos, but I think we need more. Just to-do lists. Like here it is X, Y, Z, you do these things, check off the boxes and you’ll be complete for your listening. That’s systems.

And you also need systems for onboarding. We’re pretty good at onboarding I think in general, but we want to get better because we want people to come into what we’re going to call Streamlined University, be able to spend a week getting to know how everything is and then you just don’t get an automatic run onto the team. You have to graduate the university to get on the team.

We want to make real estate better. I think overall, if you look at the business of real estate it doesn’t have a great connotation. I think people think it is easy to get into, the bar to entry is low, but teams are scaling well because they provide the coaching systems, back-end support that I think consumers want. And that’s why everything is flowing towards real estate teams. But if you want to create a real estate team, think about these five things and think about if you have them in place for when you get started or if you’re just starting one, can you get these in place right away? They’re all really important.

Over time, I’ve learned these lessons. I had a team before. I’ve had this team for the last more than two years, two and a half years at least. Now I understand what it takes. I’ve read hundreds of books on trying to figure out what it is. But if I just go back to the front and say, number one, be the example, what does someone have to look for if you’re not an example of how they should do business? I know at some point as team leaders, we all do wanna scale out of production, but I’m still heavily in production because I want the agents on my team to be able to see that I’m willing to do the exact job that they’re doing and I do it every day.

So those are five tips. I hope they were helpful. I’m going to go over them one last time. So you have the list of bullet points at the end.

1. Be the example.

2. Hire agents who want to be the best, not make the most.

3. Fire fast, hire slow.

4. DISC test everyone.

5. The science of systems.

Use them to your advantage. I hope this has been helpful. If you want to build a real estate team or you have a real estate team and you want advice, we are rolling out a program coming up in 2023, in which our back-end people, myself and three others, will be teaching other real estate teams how to do it. We’re figuring out the dynamics on that. But we’ve gone through every possible thing over this team and my former team, and we know what it takes to get this to the next level. Have a good day.