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Real Estate Team OS is your guide to starting, growing, and optimizing a real estate team. Weekly episodes give you stories, insights, decisions, and hard-learned lessons of team leaders, operations leaders, brokerage owners, and real estate agents at every stage of business growth from solo agent to mega team.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to our second minisode here on Real Estate Team os the main idea of the minisode. To give you a quick dive into one question or topic from multiple expert perspectives, all in under 10 minutes. In this case, setting up accountability systems that agents actually appreciate and benefit from with past guests, Barry Jenkins, Jonathan Campbell, Daniel Dixon, Jim Remley, and Ben Lumley. These are very visual episodes, so if you like this concept, be sure to check out the minisodes playlist on the real estate team OS YouTube channel. It's linked up right down below. We'll be releasing about eight or 10 mini episodes each year, so be sure to sign up for free of course, for release updates and subscriber only episodes@realestateteamos.com slash subscribe. Now, agent accountability systems with Ben, Jim, Daniel, Jonathan, and Barry here on Real Estate team. Os every real estate team leader faces the same fundamental challenge. How do you keep your agents productive without them burning out Too often accountability is misunderstood or overlooked. Increasing stress, causing confusion and decreasing production in this mini, so we set out to answer how do you set up a system of accountability that your agents actually appreciate and benefit from, and we'll explore solutions with other leaders who've been where you are.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
This is a very simple thing to do. We've got to just get out of our own way.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
That will never change for me. I know I was down in the dirts, that's a signal, but your strategy is flawed and got to fix your strategy.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Let's first identify the problem, which is
Speaker 4 (01:38):
They did a study of 2000 agents and five metro markets. Over 50% of that body was closing zero to one transaction a year, and then 70% were closing less than five transactions a year. For most offices. We need to get that number to 7, 8, 9, 10 to be making profit. So the first thing, everybody that I'm coaching, when I'm sitting with them for the first time, I'll say, what's your pur and productivity? And they'll say, I have no idea. And I'll say, let's figure it out. So what you're going to do is you're going to run your MLS stats, you're going to figure out how many transactions on average your agents were closing.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Your team is a business after all, and if it's not profitable, you need to figure out how to make it profitable. And it starts with seeing one or both of these two things from every agent,
Speaker 4 (02:24):
Either participation or performance. Performance means you're out there taking listings, making sales, doing everything we're asking you to do. If you miss one of our office meetings or a training session, I'm going to get it because you're out there crushing it. I want you to all of 'em, but I'm going to understand, okay, on the flip side, if you are not out there producing, you're not making sales or taking listings or doing things, I'm asking, I'm going to expect that you are participating in every single thing we're doing, every training event, every coaching session, every mentorship thing, everything we're doing, I want to see you there. So it's either participation or production. I want to see both, but if I see neither, you're not producing and you're not participating, there's not going to be room for you at this team.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Clearly defining simple standards for participation and performance will tell you when and where accountability is needed for participation. That means measurables like meetings joined, trainings completed or communication and collaboration executed for performance. That means metrics like calls, appointments, contracts and closings. But defining metrics and identifying where there's a problem is just the start. How do we implement accountability? What's a good timeline for check-ins and what do those check-ins look like?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
If you screw up, we're going to talk about it, we're going to get better at it, but you're going to be accountable to what you're doing. And so we do one-on-one conversations and we have one-on-ones where we talk about accountability and we talk about your goals and some of those other things. And then we also have group accountability meetings. Every huddle. Now, one of the pivots we recently made, Ethan, we've increased the accountability. Our huddles just changed. So every morning we are recapping what we did from the previous day. How many calls did you make? How many conversations did you have? How many appointments did you set? How many appointments did you hold every single day? I think that accountability is the highest form of love, but the problem is we're doing it too late. If we're not meeting with one-on-one, we're doing it maybe every two weeks. It's too late. And so when we start falling off or not hitting what we need to hit, what we do in our organization is we increase the accountability around whatever the metric is that we're after. And right now it's activity.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
If every agent was a self-starter who didn't need any direction, this mini so would be over right now. But we all know that's not the case. So what's our responsibility to remove roadblocks and support agents?
Speaker 5 (04:35):
The one thing I need to tell all team leaders out there, you need to provide opportunities. If you cannot provide opportunities, this is not the model for you and there's no right way. It's just the one right way is the word opportunity. So what I do is I strip it all down and I say, all right, Hey, I'm going to take all these things off your plate, like banging a sign in the yard, entering things into the MLS transaction management. I mean all of the above. And what I want to do is I'm going to provide you opportunities. You are going to provide me opportunities by also following up things and we're going to convert leads and we're going to make things happen. That's what we've done here, to really increase not just profitability, but per agent productivity because we have the ability to not only just provide them support, but they know what their clarity is, they know what their mission is, is to produce and actually convert leads.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
I will help and support you and create you to be the best individual agent you have, but I want you to become a better person. Every change that I've ever made at the company was never top down. It was always agent up. God, I'm running home, I'm showing properties left and right. I go home and I'm spending an hour and a half writing offers, and I was like, well, what if we did that for you, right? What if we just add another staff member to increase the volume intake? What about closing coordination method? Instead of having a third party, we brought someone in in-house every time I would ever make any change, including follow up. Austin Core, big on sisu is another platform that we use for contract management. Every system that we've ever implemented, we would do demos with all the other agents in our office to say, is this something that would help and grow your business?
Speaker 1 (06:06):
A common theme between Ben Blum Lee and Jonathan Campbell is empathy structuring your team operating system to free agents from simple mundane tasks. Accountability when done with empathy doesn't just drive near-term results. It enables agents to thrive personally making them happier and more productive over the long-term. Let's do a quick midway recap. You have your two categories for metrics, participation and performance. You have a schedule for accountability and clarity on standards, and you've removed mundane, monotonous tasks that slow agents down for more productive activity. These are all things that we as team leaders can track in our businesses, but where do we get the benchmarks and who sets the specific goals? This isn't exclusively your responsibility. You can involve your agents in it too.
Speaker 6 (06:55):
If you were to fast forward 12 months and look back on this day, we want you to tell us what success looked like. We allow them to define what it is that they would perceive as successful. We reverse engineer that goal, whether it's revenue or units sold, marry it to the lead source that they're on. So let's say it's Google and Facebook leads and we say, look, if you want to make X based on industry averages, one to two deals a month, you're going to have to try to reach a hundred people a week, talk to 20 of them and keep one or two. That's a lot of failure to find one or two people a week to realize your long-term goal. Is this still your long-term goal? And some say yes, and some say no. So for us, it's about them setting the expectation. Us reverse engineering the
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Work. Successful agents can and should be self-defined, and Daniel Dixon doubles down on this perfectly.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
A lot of our goals in our organization are tied to the amount of agents we have and what they want to go to. We want to go sell 275 million here in Colorado, but that's because I want 20 agents making six figures. I want another 20 agents making 80 to 90,000 a year, and then we're going to have this smaller group of newbies that are coming up and hitting it. All that together is 2 75. It's not just Daniel wants to sell 2 75. So we're number one. It's tying it back to other people.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Finally, let's talk about where to track things, where to keep the scoreboard that enhances shared accountability. Here's a solution that's simple and inexpensive. Our
Speaker 5 (08:22):
Scoreboards are simple Google Sheets that we bring up. They make commitments, then they log everything. It has to be a player scoreboard. If they're not involved in it, they're not going to buy into it. And I get it, follow Boss has an incredible system for that, but I also want my agents to enter it manually so that they are bought in. There's nothing worse than a system telling you exactly what you did, and you're like, okay, cool. No, it takes you five minutes. Look up your numbers and enter them. And again, it's says rudimentary as a simple Google sheet, but it's that entering that actually makes the difference.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
The key here is creating agent buy-in and ownership, having them input their own
Speaker 6 (09:05):
Numbers. The brokerage and the team is about keeping it on its guardrails. And the way that I do that, I have management and accountability software that manages every appointment, every mislead, every lead source that's not performing. And so I'm able to go into this twice a week. I have admin that goes in daily for some of the nudge tasks that come up, but they're literally just twice a week. I'm just looking at the delta, which agents are low performing? They need to get into training, which agents are, so I'm quarterbacking. What that's allowed me to do is to have a lot of margin in my personal life to spend time outside of everything I just said, to spend time doing things that matter.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Beyond this, we as team leaders can give ourselves and our leadership teams enhanced visibility using tools like Follow-Up Boss in combination with csu. Increasing per agent productivity requires mutual accountability. You have a role to play, as does each one of your agents. We hope you enjoyed this mini, so it was a fun one to put together. As always, we welcome your feedback and we welcome your recommendations on other topics that should be treated in a mini. So leave us a comment right here or use the contact form at the top of realestate team os.com or send me an email directly Ethan ETHA n@followupboss.com. Thanks so much for watching and we hope you continue to get value from Real Estate Team Os.