Being a Real Estate Team Leader: Who to Hire First
Building their own real estate business is the goal of many real estate agents. Running their own team, greatly increasing revenue, and, as the eventual goal, stepping out of production entirely. Every real estate agent has the potential to get to that point if they take the right steps and make the right choices along the way. It’s no easy journey and, in some ways, the real challenges only start when you make the jump over to growing your own real estate team and being a real estate team leader.
In this article we’re going to cover when the right time is to make the switch to building a real estate team, as well as who your first hire on that team should be.
What It Means to Be a Real Estate Team Leader
Before we start discussing when and how to start building a real estate team, I think it’s a good idea to touch on what it means to be a real estate team leader. As we covered in a previous article of ours, team leaders have to double as a real estate mentor. They have to be dedicated to assisting their team members and helping them grow and develop.
Like we said in that article, it’s not necessarily the same skillset involved in being a real estate agent and being a real estate team leader and real estate mentor. For that reason, the latter role is not always for everyone. But if you want to be a coach, a mentor, a trainer, on top of being in the day to day real estate trenches (at least in the beginning) and running a business, then building a real estate team may be for you.
The next question is, when should you start?
When to Start Building a Real Estate Team
The first thing you need to consider when deciding whether or not to starting growing a real estate team is if you have sufficient business to justify it. In fact, transitioning from a solo agent to building a team should be the logical next step for your current situation.
Look at it this way, being an agent requires various tasks and an immense amount of work. You have to spend time prospecting for new leads, creating and executing marketing campaigns, meeting with clients, dealing with mortgage brokers, taking clients on property tours, etc.
As your solo business grows, it will become more and more difficult to handle all of these tasks effectively. It will get to the point where it’s literally impossible for you to take on any more clients, and you will have to start turning people away.
Although this might be a good problem to have, you don’t want to be missing out on potential revenue. It’s at this point when you should consider starting a team to help handle the volume you are generating. Typically, 50 to 60 transactions per year is the most that an individual agent can handle. A good rule of thumb is to have at least 40 to 50 transactions before you consider starting a real estate team.
The next question is, who should you hire first?
The First Person to Hire for Your Real Estate Team
Too often, agents transitioning to real estate team leaders want their first hire to be another agent or a real estate ISA. However, more often than not, these positions are not the first ones you should think about filling. For one thing, you need a solid foundation of scalable and transferable lead generation systems, you have to be very organized, and you need a training program for new agent and ISA hires. Generally, most agents do not have the time on their hands to build these systems when they are still handling all of their own administrative work.
So, who should you hire first to your real estate team? An administrator!
Why Hire an Admin for Your Real Estate Team
All of your success as a solo real estate agent has brought with it mountains of paperwork, a large database to maintain, and a busy schedule to manage. If you’re handling 50 transactions a year, then you need someone to take some of that burden off your shoulders. That’s why an administrator is the best first hire you can make for your team.
An administrator will free up your time, so you can start focusing on building the systems you need to make agent and ISA hires that will help generate your business more revenue. Your next hire would typically be a buyer’s agent and then an inside sales agent. From there, it’s all about adding to the roster when the volume becomes too much for the team to handle. More agents, more ISAs, more admins.
Before you know it, you’ll be running a large, successful operation and can accomplish the goal of most real estate team leaders: to pull yourself out of production completely!
If you want to focus on ramping up the accountability, organization, and communication of all aspects of your business, as well as crafting and executing an effective plan for dominating your market, then check out our leadership coaching.