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December 1, 2022

8 Best Practices for Real Estate Team and Client Retention

Ashley Walsh
by:
Ashley Walsh

As a real estate leader, you have important responsibilities on your shoulders. You must build a good real estate team and provide the guidance necessary to build a thriving business. Part of this leadership entails teaching best practices, such that your team members can adopt efficient habits and develop critical skills. Fortunately, many brokerage firms have found success with the same highly effective tools and techniques. Follow along to learn the top eight real estate team best practices.

1. Set Goals

Goal setting can be a game changer for many brokerages. It allows individuals and teams to strive for concrete numbers and orient their day-to-day practices to achieve those objectives. These goals should be precise and concrete based on the last quarter, current market conditions, industry standards, and the number of clients. Depending on your specific values, your targets may vary from the number of leads to the number of transactions, to the distribution of clientele.

Real estate leaders can organize annual meetings and schedule weekly and quarterly follow-ups. In this way, you can review how current practices function for the team and the firm, remove or improve specific processes, or adjust goal expectations if necessary.

2. Maintain an Accountability System

While goal setting sets up teams for success, accountability keeps them on track. A well-working system is one of the most crucial aspects of any real estate business. Accordingly, you must work with your team to ensure goals by breaking down larger goals into manageable actions. Then, you must ensure that your agents stay on top of their workload and meet their numbers.

Building a good real estate team starts with letting team members know they can rely on you for support and resources to succeed. You’ll also need to provide actionable coaching when sales drop.

3. Hire, On-board, and Retain Top Talent

All real estate team leaders dream of hiring the best in the industry. It is certainly possible, especially if you develop and maintain a consistent company culture and a smooth, seamless on-boarding process. Along with your team, you should strive to develop a workplace that reflects your core values, provides transparency, and promotes trust amongst colleagues and clients.

Suppose your ways of conducting business, working, and communicating with people are all consistent and continuous. In that case, you have a better chance of hiring and retaining like-minded professionals. Furthermore, if the whole team has access to resources, tools, and support from the moment they come aboard, they will feel empowered to do their jobs. They will be more motivated to be productive and stay with the firm as they succeed.

This foundation will make it easy to build a good real estate team.

4. Ensure Team Feels Seen and Valued

Out of all real estate team best practices, ensuring that your agents feel seen, heard, and valued may be among the most important. Imagine you show your team members that they are integral to business success. In that case, they will see themselves in their work and the team will become more successful. In fact, 93% of employees who feel valued are more motivated to work hard and 88% are more engaged in their work.

Accordingly, you will have an easier time keeping top-tier talent, driving high performance, and developing a flourishing business. Focuses may include:

  • Listening and responding to agent suggestions.
  • Improving the work environment.
  • Providing competitive compensation and benefits packages.
  • Facilitating work-life balance.
  • Encouraging communication and collaboration.

5. Provide Competitive Compensation and Benefits

As you may know, real estate is a competitive industry. To build a good real estate team and retain top talent, you must consider compensation and benefits. Higher salaries and excellent benefits can be significant incentives for new hires. Likewise, transparent pay structures, yearly salary analyses and adjustments, regular salary increases, and consistent performance-based bonuses can be a great way to keep team members happy. It can also incentivize working hard, staying motivated, and hitting goals.

In short, working as a team should include dividing profits in an equitable way. This isn’t consistent with a traditional brokerage model but addresses basic needs and wants more effectively. It also cements the team and helps you work better as a cohesive unit.

6. Develop Brand and Client Experience Consistency

Real estate team best practices tend to focus on team members and how you can help them stay motivated and success-oriented. However, it is equally as important to pay attention to clients. After all, clients are how you will sustain and grow your company. A clear and consistent brand is one of the most effective ways to draw in new clients, encourage referrals from past customers, and satisfy current clients. It is about creating a relationship with your customers and establishing trust.

Your values show through your marketing, communication, and handling of client interactions. An excellent customer experience will both reflect and bolster your brand. Your clients will be happier if you get to know them, cater to their needs, keep them up to date, ensure proper prioritization of tasks, and meet deadlines. If buyers and sellers feel your firm and agents meet their needs and align with their values, they are likely to stick with you. Continue to deliver this way, and you will develop a brand and reputation that accomplishes far more than traditional marketing.

7. Prioritize Client Communication

Right from day one, client communication should be a priority for your real estate team. Proper communication will not only establish your brand and improve your customer experience, but it will also make day-to-day processes easier for your agents.

Communication can break into several categories and ensuring each is on point with your target audience and individual clients is critical. These elements include communication methods, times of day, frequency of updates, and communication styles. While you may have a standard way of speaking with clients, you may have to tweak your habits depending on your specific customers. As such, it is important to remain flexible with different communication means; you may join the 93% of realtors who use text messaging, but you may also be a part of the 90% or 89% who use telephone and e-mail respectively.

8. Train Team Members on Advanced Technology

By removing outdated tools and investing in new technology, you will give your real estate team the competitive edge necessary to thrive and grow. Staying up to date with the latest, or most efficient real estate transaction software can keep all processes efficient, automate repetitive tasks, keep files organized and stored, alert team members to missed tasks or approaching deadlines, and provide critical business insights. As a result, your agents can focus on more demanding aspects of their jobs, your clients and prospective clients stay updated and informed, and your team generates new, promising leads regularly.

Training team members on state-of-the-art technology is essential. Some team members may already have an excellent foundation but need training for new software. Likewise, some technology companies consistently update their products to keep up with industry advances and standards. As a leader, it is wise to stay updated on these changes, and train the team to use the new tools.

Stay On Track with Real Estate Team Best Practices

Real estate team leaders are in charge of business success, team member productivity, and client satisfaction. It can be challenging to tend to every task required to achieve these overarching goals. Fortunately, if you adopt these eight real estate team best practices, you can make your job and your team’s jobs more straightforward.

If you want to simplify and streamline your tasks even further, try real estate transaction software, Shaker. This advanced system will help your whole team stay on target from first interaction with a client all the way to close and beyond. Request a demo of Shaker today!

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