5 Key Team Leader Strategies to EXIT Production in 12 Months – Create a Positive Real Estate Team Culture

If you want to build a successful real estate team and pull yourself out of production in 12 months, then you need to cultivate a company culture that works for your business. So far in this series, we’ve talked about who and how to hire, how to set clear and achievable expectations, and how to train your agents and ISAs in sales – all from the angle of preparing your team for your exit from the day-to-day.

But the only way to ensure that everything doesn’t start to fall apart when you are out of production is by creating a solid and durable idea of, “how we do things around here.” In other words, a culture.

What Is a Real Estate Team Culture?

The culture of a real estate team, or any business, is kind of like your online reputation. It’s there no matter what. The only difference is that, if you don’t actively cultivate and guide it, then you won’t have any control over what it becomes, and it’s likely to tend towards negative. Culture provides the driving force behind the way things are done at your company, helping things like training, customer service, and goals persist once you are not there managing them.

You can have a great strategy and great systems in place, but if you have a weak culture, then your real estate team will not be successful, and neither will you.

Real estate teams are made of individuals who earn commissions and basically have their own sub businesses within the group. But the most successful teams, the type you want to build if you are exiting production, form a cohesive unit of agents who can rely on each other and support each other.

Real estate team culture touches how people hold themselves accountable, how motivated they are to lead generate, and how they interact with your clients. It such an important thing, but many team leaders don’t put in the effort to actively plan and create it.

You can change that for your real estate team.

A Great Real Estate Team Culture Starts with You

The culture that will take root with your team depends largely on how you carry yourself, deal with stressful situations, and interact with your agents, ISAs, and staff. So, the culture that ultimately prevails will really start with your actions. Here are a few ways you can get the ball rolling in the right direction:

• Be a real estate mentor – at the heart of it, a team leader is a real estate mentor or coach. You need to have to help people succeed and pass on your knowledge, skills, and experience to them. You have to want to be their ultimate support and go to person. You should view their success as your own success.
• Be a great communicator – agents almost always have to be great communicators in order to do well. But it’s even more important for real estate team leaders. No matter which leadership styles you think are best, communicating clearly should always be at the top of the list. You’re leading meetings, setting goals for the team and for individual team members, and guiding training activities. Knowing how to communicate effectively without coming off as negative, passive, unsure, or angry will make all the difference in how your team relates to you and to each other.
• Be positive and empathetic in stressful situations – as a real estate team leader, your agents and staff are looking to you to set the tone in different situations. Staying positive even when things aren’t going great, and making sure you always remain empathetic to the feelings and mistakes of your team members are critical to maintaining a productive, cohesive, and effective real estate team.
• Be influential – you have to have an impact on your agents’ mindsets and outlooks. If your agents don’t tell themselves the right stories, then they won’t produce. What are the right stories? There job is helping people and their community. When they call leads, your agents have valuable information and skills that will help make that lead’s life better. Your agents aren’t sleezy salespeople or a burden on the people they are calling and working with. Leaders need to have the charisma necessary to positively influence their agents’ thoughts and feelings of self worth.
• Celebrate wins – celebrate the success of everyone on your team. Acknowledgement can go a long way towards ensuring continued motivation, confidence, and success for agents, ISAs, and other staff.

How to Build the Culture You Want

A positive, productive real estate team culture does not just happen. It takes careful planning and consistent cultivation. In addition to carrying yourself and taking actions that help build the culture you want to see, you also have to define what it is. Think about a vision for your real estate team, create a mission statement, and document your company values. Then share all this with your current team and ask for their feedback. What do they think? What do they want to see? What will help them be more successful?

Once you set your values and your cultural goals, it’s your job, in the beginning at least, to make sure all team members are onboard. Treat adhering to real estate team culture like any other part of the job, just like their sales goals. The last thing you should do is retain a high producing agent who flaunts the company culture or is responsible for a toxic atmosphere. It’s not worth it.

Recruit Candidates Who Fit with Your Values

We talked a lot about hiring for your real estate team in the first article in this series. Once you determine that they can do the job, you’ve looked at their past history of success, and you think they’d be a valuable addition to your team, next you have to see if they’d fit in. Ask them to define what a good day at work means to them. Ask them to describe their work style. See what excites them about your real estate company. You can even ask them to provide feedback on your company’s stated mission and values.

These questions can help you determine whether a candidate “gets it” for your culture and what you’re trying to build.

The more you can build a durable culture and hire people who buy into it, the more successful your real estate team will be, and the sooner you can exit production!

At Smart Sales Coaching, we offer real estate leadership coaching that will help you set up a sustainable business model that gets you out of the day-to-day trenches and avoid working an impossible number of hours. A successful real estate team leader needs to focus on the business as a whole, and you’ll be able to create a plan to achieve that. Click here to see how it works.