One of the biggest struggles for real estate team leaders is how to exit production. Because you’re such an integral part of your business, it can be very challenging to remove yourself from the day to day operations of your team. But doing so is completely necessary if you want to move to the next stage of your career—one where you can focus on the bigger picture and earn a multiple six figure income without being in the trenches selling homes day after day.

We’ve covered this topic in several other articles, but because we hear a lot from real estate leaders that they want direction on this topic, I wanted to put this piece together. It will include some of the most critical tips for real estate team leaders to exit production.

Make Yourself Replaceable: How Real Estate Team Leaders Can Hire Great People

If you’re reading this, then you probably already have a team. But I still think it’s valuable to go over the proper way to hire new people, because many real estate leaders don’t handle it the best way. Hiring great agents and ISAs is one of the most crucial steps for pulling yourself out of the day to day of your real estate company.

Approach recruitment like prospecting – When seeking candidates, especially for real estate ISAs and agents, treat it as you would lead generation. Post job listings on platforms like Indeed and other employment websites, aiming for a high volume of applicants. Set a goal to receive 20-30 resumes from potential hires weekly. If your advertisements aren’t attracting sufficient candidates, adjust and refine them.

Create a candidate shortlist – After gathering a substantial pool of applicants, begin the screening process to develop your shortlist. Many real estate team leaders fall short in this area, often relying solely on candidates’ self-descriptions. To identify top-tier talent, adopt a more comprehensive approach.

Assess abilities prior to formal interviews – To evaluate candidates’ performance and skills, particularly for ISA roles, gauge their phone communication abilities. The crucial skill for ISAs is engaging in effective conversations with unfamiliar individuals. If a candidate struggles with phone communication, they’re unlikely to excel in this role. Evaluate their phone manner, voicemail etiquette, and performance in roleplay scenarios before proceeding to traditional interviews.

Conduct formal interviews – Once you’ve filtered resumes and identified candidates who demonstrate strong phone skills, move forward with formal interviews. This step allows you to delve deeper into their background, expertise, attitude, level of motivation, and overall character.

Put simply, whether you’re hiring agents, ISAs, or another position, the order of the process should be: narrowing down resumes, screening performance, interviewing them, then deciding whether or not to make the hire.

Inspect What You Expect: Setting and Sticking to Team Expectations

As a leader of real estate teams, your role involves setting clear objectives for your agents and ISAs, while ensuring they’re held accountable for their progress. Maintaining transparent and effective communication channels is crucial. This approach ensures your team members understand their targets, and you can accurately track their performance at various stages.

For newcomers or underperforming team members, consider implementing a structured goal system with 30, 60, and 90-day benchmarks to gradually increase their targets. This strategy allows you to identify potential mismatches earlier, rather than waiting the typical six-month period it often takes for real estate ISAs or agents to reach full productivity.

For your sales team, key performance indicators to monitor include:

• Number of calls made
• Number of successful contacts
• Ratio of contacts to appointments scheduled
• Comparison of appointments set versus appointments converted

Establish specific benchmarks for each of these metrics at different time intervals and regularly review whether or not your team is hitting them. This approach provides a clear framework for evaluating performance and progress. Once they are consistently achieving the goals you set for them, you are one step closer to exiting production.

Implement Effective Real Estate Training

If you are a real estate team leader trying to pull away, then few things are more important than effective training. Your real estate agents and ISAs need to be masters of:

• Asking the right questions for sales discovery
• Having real conversations instead of relying on scripts
• Handling the most common and uncommon objections
• Knowing when and how to close on your calls
• Understanding how to work different leads differently, including expireds, FSBOs, inbound, outbound, etc.
• Overcoming call reluctance and being able to stay positive in the face of hearing “no” A LOT

It’s important to remember that training is not one and done. It needs to be consistent and reoccurring, which is why many real estate leaders decide to use an outside training company, like Smart Sales Coaching (excuse the shameless plug). Because be honest with yourself, do you have the resources, bandwidth, and ability to deliver comprehensive training and support for your team—especially as you work to exit production?

Real Estate Team Leaders Must Commit to Pulling Away

Once you hire the right people, set clear expectations, hold your team accountable, and put the right training in place, the next step is to actually start to step back. This may be the most difficult part of the entire process. At this point, I recommend shifting your focus to being a resource for your team. Instead of directly producing business, be a mentor to your agents. Help them produce more and more business. Give them support and encouragement. Help them become rockstars.

Also remember that you are not alone. In addition to training resources for your team, at Smart Sales Coaching, we also have leadership coaching programs. We’ll 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.

We can help pull back while maintaining a highly successful company. Check out some of our real estate team leader resources here.