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Posted: 7 Apr 2009
Whether you own a small office or a franchise with multiple offices real estate agents have much in common with other small business owners during difficult economic conditions.
For real estate agents, the focus revolves around how to recruit quality agents, how to retain quality and productive agents, grow your rent roll and how to increase overall profitability.
1. Define your hiring objectives
Principals must know what position they want to fill. What is the profile of the candidate that they are looking to recruit before communicating that need to the market place? It’s no longer a numbers game but a quality contest. Creating unnecessary turnover wastes too much time and it’s too expensive, let alone the disruptiveness that results from a team member on board who’s not a good fit.
2. Why should they join you?
Identify the top 10 reasons an agent should join your organisation before you start the recruiting process. Don’t get caught up in the compensation game as it isn’t and shouldn’t be the number one reason an agent joins your company. The focus should be rather, what you can offer to the agents by way of career prospects and company support.
3. Quality control
Before you offer an agent employment rigorously check their references and get them to complete a profile assessment test, and above all is the person you are about to employ going to add to your business or detract from the business and thus change the culture of the business.
4. Leadership
The number one reason why agents often leave their company is the lack of support they receive from management and ultimately a disagreement with management. This is almost attributed to leadership and communication in the office. The environment you create as Principals will determine whether you can retain your staff.
5. Support
Most employees are looking for guidance, mentoring, training, systems and support. Be honest with yourselves – is your company progressive in this area. If not, why would someone stay with you? Create an environment of openness, sharing and learning – it will result in higher productivity.
6. Business Plans
Study after study has shown that most businesses that fail did so because they did not have a comprehensive business plan for the company to follow. With a business plan to follow agents are equipped with the necessary tools to develop a realistic plan and accountability system.
7. Expense Analysis
It’s amazing that during the peak real estate market agents didn’t control their expenses and failed to set aside a portion of their profits for the leaner years. Re-margining your business and bringing costs in line with income is fundamental to the success of any business. But remember, it’s not a onetime event. It has to be continuously monitored and managed.
8. Systems
One efficient strategy to do more with less is to streamline activates, automate repetition and put systems and policies into place that can handle many non- income producing tasks. Technology for real estate companies has come a long way in helping manage clients, information and transactions, thus increasing the level of productivity.
For more information and help- speak to a BDH Solutions consultant.
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