Expanding Your Real Estate Team: Best Practices for Bringing on New Agents

[Bubba McCants]

Hello BiggerPockets Community,

I hope you're all thriving in your real estate endeavors! I’m excited to share that I’m in the process of growing my real estate team, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and best practices on bringing new agents onboard effectively.

A Little About My Current Setup:

I run a high-performing real estate business in [Your City/Area], focusing on [Your Niche/Market]. With increasing client demands and a vision to expand, it’s the perfect time to bring new agents onto the team. However, I want to ensure that the process is smooth and that new team members are set up for success from day one.

Here’s What I’ve Been Thinking:

1. Hiring the Right People:

• What qualities should I look for in potential agents beyond the usual qualifications and experience?

• How can I assess whether a candidate will be a good cultural fit for my team?

1. Training and Onboarding:

• What essential training programs or resources do you recommend for new agents?

• How do you structure the first 90 days of onboarding to ensure they are productive and confident?

1. Providing Ongoing Support:

• How can I create a supportive environment that fosters continuous learning and growth?

• What are effective ways to offer mentorship and coaching to new agents?

1. Setting Expectations and Goals:

• How do you set realistic yet challenging goals for new team members?

• What key performance indicators (KPIs) do you track to measure their progress?

1. Building a Strong Team Culture:

• What activities or strategies do you use to build and maintain a strong team culture?

• How do you encourage collaboration and camaraderie among team members?

• How do you balance the workload between seasoned agents and newcomers?

• What are the common pitfalls to avoid when expanding your team?

I appreciate any insights or personal experiences you can share. Growing a team is an exciting yet challenging journey, and I’m eager to hear your advice on navigating this process successfully.

Thank you in advance for your wisdom and support!

[Abel Curiel]

Quote from @Bubba McCants:

Hello BiggerPockets Community,

I hope you're all thriving in your real estate endeavors! I’m excited to share that I’m in the process of growing my real estate team, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and best practices on bringing new agents onboard effectively.

A Little About My Current Setup:

I run a high-performing real estate business in [Your City/Area], focusing on [Your Niche/Market]. With increasing client demands and a vision to expand, it’s the perfect time to bring new agents onto the team. However, I want to ensure that the process is smooth and that new team members are set up for success from day one.

Here’s What I’ve Been Thinking:

1. Hiring the Right People:

• What qualities should I look for in potential agents beyond the usual qualifications and experience?

• How can I assess whether a candidate will be a good cultural fit for my team?

1. Training and Onboarding:

• What essential training programs or resources do you recommend for new agents?

• How do you structure the first 90 days of onboarding to ensure they are productive and confident?

1. Providing Ongoing Support:

• How can I create a supportive environment that fosters continuous learning and growth?

• What are effective ways to offer mentorship and coaching to new agents?

1. Setting Expectations and Goals:

• How do you set realistic yet challenging goals for new team members?

• What key performance indicators (KPIs) do you track to measure their progress?

1. Building a Strong Team Culture:

• What activities or strategies do you use to build and maintain a strong team culture?

• How do you encourage collaboration and camaraderie among team members?

• How do you balance the workload between seasoned agents and newcomers?

• What are the common pitfalls to avoid when expanding your team?

I appreciate any insights or personal experiences you can share. Growing a team is an exciting yet challenging journey, and I’m eager to hear your advice on navigating this process successfully.

Thank you in advance for your wisdom and support!

 Hello Bubba! Great questions. Looking forward to the other responses from BP members..

Hiring the right people:

Some qualities to look out for are punctuality, integrity, and goal oriented. You should be able to assess whether someone is a good fit or not within the first 30 days. If they don't show up when they're supposed to and they don't begin generating leads (or trying to) in the first week, RED FLAG! They might be in analysis paralysis but if it persists, you may have someone who just isn't ready to take their business (or your team) seriously.

** Former athletes and former military personnel make for great Agents. In my experience, people with an athletic or military background understand the value of hard work and also realize that consistency will bring results eventually.. every set back is an opportunity to learn, grow and get better for the next at-bat.

Training and onboarding:

As far as programs or tools, I've tried monitoring CRMs and more in-depth platforms (like Sisu) to track agent activities/KPIs. While these platforms were helpful and essential while we grew a large multi-state team, they aren't totally necessary. 

Instead, you can keep things simple by using a spreadsheet. Agents can track their daily acitivities i.e. # of: calls made, conversations, contacts added to their database/crm, appointments set, appointments met, offers sent, and anything else you can think of. If they don't log their #s, aren't generating leads AND not coming to you with help/questions, another RED FLAG!

As far as structuring onboarding, I do not recommend a 90-day period as it is too long. I've used longer orientation/probation periods but I find that a 30-day onboarding should suffice. During this 30-day period, agents should be able to: set goals for themselves; set up their MLS; add their sphere/ALL of their friends, family, acquaintences to a database; begin calling/contacting everyone in their database; begin generating leads from other sources like cold calling, expireds, fsbos, social media, open houses, etc; begin tracking KPIs; create or refine online profiles; create and post social media content; attend role play sessions to work on lead generation/conversion skills & more.

I've created agent onboarding guides in the past so I'd be happy to share more info if needed!

Providing ongoing support: 

Create an easy-to-use communication system for your entire team to be integrated. You can use something as simple as a groupchat, whatsapp group, facebook group, or email chain. Other communication platforms that I've used which are very effective are Discord and Slack.

For training videos, "loom" is a great platform to look into! You can also just record Zoom calls and save all recordings to a shared folder. 

For mentorship, set up weekly 1 on 1 sessions with agents until they get into the swing of things. You can eventually scale it back to bi-weekly as needed. On these calls, review their goals and progress towards those goals. You should also field their questions/concerns. The kinds of questions agents ask should help you determine if/how they're progressing. Lastly, you want to be sure to add value on these sessions. Be prepared to teach them something or help them improve their knowledge base and skillset as they grow.

Set expectations and goals:

Let them create their own goals. Brandon Mulrenin may have a worksheet out there that helps agents calculate their annual sales goals. If not, I'm sure there are others online. The goals should lead to actions/activities that are measurable. A coach of mine often mentions SMART goals. 

S - Specific M- Measurable A- Achievable R- Relevant T- Time-Bound

KPI's to track were mentioned above under 'training and onboarding'

Building a strong team culture:

I've only been doing this for 5-6 years so I'm still working on it myself. 

To maintain a strong culture, I work my 4$$ off and lead by example. I care deeply about everyone on the team, their goals, their families, etc... Most importantly, I do not let anyone on the team who is not a good fit. I use a 30-day probation period to determine if someone is a good fit.

Monthly or Quarterly team outings are nice for camaraderie. Celebrate holidays, bdays, and milestones together.

To encourage collaboration, support, etc, start every team call/meeting with having each team member mention a 'win' that they had recently as well as a challenge they're facing... with the right mix of people, you should see your agents jumping at the chance to share advice/info and cheer one another on. Again, slack and discord are great communication tools as you can keep a long running conversations within the group + you can like, comment and share the same way you do on social media.

If by workload, you're referring to leads... you can balance workload b/w different agent experience levels by handing the higher-quality leads to your performing agents. Lower-quality/higher-quantity of leads can go to newer agents as these will require more legwork to convert to clients and sales.

Pitfalls: 

- When expanding your team, do not bring on too many agents at a time unless you have people, tools, or systems in place to help you onboard and train them.
- Institute a 30-day trial period (before introducing them to the team) where you and agent get to know one another. If they don't meet your standards, get rid of them. If they had extreme circumstances that led them to not perform, consider giving them some more time... then get rid of them if no progress is made. If they DO meet your standards, introduce them to the team and get them integrated.
- Not having a coach/mentor for yourself. Having someone who has 'been there, done that' will help you navigate challenges effectively AND weather some of those storms you'll face along the way.

Feel free to send me a PM if there is anything I can help with!

All the best to you on your journey!

Abel

[Melanie P.]

@Abel Curiel Post of the week! Very nicely done, sir.

[Peter Tverdov]

Not a team lead but own a brokerage. You will sift through a lot of bad agents. You can train and rah rah people to death but at the end of the day they need to put in the work to be successful. Find people that are really hungry to learn and hungry to make money. That's what I look for a lot of people don't want it bad enough and rather complain. "I didn't have time to cold call, its hard being a buyers agent etc" I parted ways with half of my brokerage in the last 12 months and have a little more coming this summer but we are better for it because I figured out what I was looking for and my guess is it will take you time to figure that out also.