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Build Your Business, Let Your Agents Sell Listings

— Michele Watson


Running a real estate brokerage is a rewarding business. You can do things your way from choosing a name and a location, training and mentoring a team, and driving your marketing.  You know you’ll never forget the excitement you felt when your sign was hung outside your brokerage for the first time. You made the transition from motivated sales associate to independent business owner and with that, comes a necessary shift in your thinking, and your actions.

The Salesperson Within

Most of the independent brokers we talk to were excellent sales associates. It’s why they made the move to being a broker. But a few years in, too many of them are still actively selling their own listings on a day to day basis. If this describes you, you have to know that you’re limiting your brokerage growth by continuing to actively sell. Before you hung your sign, the inner manager in you should have begun to change your focus from selling, to the process of managing. This means recruiting both experienced and promising new agents, and figuring out how to make them successful. Sure, it’s hard to break away from selling homes. After all, your sales prowess paid your bills all these years, but now it’s time to use your expertise to help other agents succeed and increase your bottom line. Salaried or contracted specialized administrative employees can help ease your work load and move you away from directly working with buyers and sellers to focusing on increasing agent transactions.

The Case for Letting Go

Many brokers mistakenly believe that they can’t stop selling or they won’t have the revenue to continue their operations or sustain their own income level. Inevitably this feeling is really due to another issue: you don’t believe your staff is able to do it as successfully as you. While this may even be true, if you want your brokerage to continue to succeed and grow, you need to invest in addressing that issue, not out meeting sellers to get listings. Train your agents to sell like you do, recruit new agents, and resist the temptation to slide back to old ways. Do that and everyone will reap the benefits and financial reward.

In fact, non-selling brokers typically earn more than those that continue to sell after opening their own brokerage. National Association of Realtors member profile for 2015 showed that managing brokers who solely took charge of their brokerage earned a median annual salary of $102,200 as opposed to $86,400 for brokers who also were in the field listing homes and/or working with buyers.

Handle Business Details

Think back to when you were working for another brokerage as a salesperson. How do you think everything ran so smoothly? Through the broker’s hard work on the various day-to-day activities of running the brokerage as a business. Or maybe it didn’t run smoothly, because the broker was too focused on their own selling or not invested in developing their agents.

Similarly, your mindset should only be on overseeing business details, such as continuing to foster your business and your brand to help agents get a leg up on the competition and your brokerage keep its integrity and sorecuieputation, among a slew of other operational tasks. If you are overwhelmed with the sheer number of tasks involved in managing your own brokerage and need a roadmap, you can consider an affiliation with a national real estate brand like Weichert. Our affiliates have the advantage of a blueprint for running a successful real estate brokerage, complemented with many broker tools to help handle business operations, marketing, recruiting and training that points you to the activities you should be working on for success.

Build A Better Life

When your entire brokerage is run seamlessly as a business, you are making a better life, not just for you and your family, but for all your agents. A successful brokerage means you can confidently take the family on vacation, knowing that the systems and people you’ve put in place will handle affairs while you are away.

Weichert has helped hundreds of brokers build the business of their dreams, contact us today at 877-567-3350 or online at http://weichertfranchise.com.

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