Real Estate Team
Building a successful real estate business isn’t an undertaking you can handle alone. You’ll need to work with top talents to achieve increased productivity. Fortunately, you can leverage success stories and professional tips from the founder of the Teresa Cowart Team and renowned real estate team leader, Teresa Cowart.
With over 17 years of experience handling real estate teams and sealing property deals in Savannah, GA, Teresa Cowart will be a guest speaker at the Georgia Residential Real Estate Masters Summit.
This event, organized by Ardor SEO and sponsored by Homes by Ardor (HBA), is an avenue for successful real estate team leaders to speak on powerful strategies for building a profitable real estate team.
If you’re looking to build a top-notch real estate team, here are some tips to help you get started while you plan to attend the summit.
Building Strong Relationships
A team leader’s primary responsibility is to guide and manage team members to achieve stated goals. Building strong relationships with your team members will help establish the connection needed to work together to achieve agency goals.
Although it takes ongoing effort and time, maintaining relationships is worthwhile if you want a collaborative and committed team.
Some measures to help maintain steadfast relationships with your team members are:
- Include All Team Members in Decision Making
The fastest way to strengthen your relationship with team members is to include them in decision-making. Request their opinion on crucial matters to improve motivation and engagement, build trust, and give them a sense of responsibility.
- Hold Regular Meetings
Reach out to your team members to build dependable partnerships and confidence. Adopting an “open door policy” is highly recommended.
Short meetings enable team members to share ideas, concerns, and thoughts beneficial to your real estate agency’s success. Also, offer constructive feedback regularly to improve their personal development.
- Request Leadership and Management Style Feedback
Most managers and leaders often give employees feedback. But requesting feedback from your team members will help you discover areas to improve your leadership or management style.
Initially, you might not receive honest answers from them but keep encouraging them to speak their mind, and with time, they might trust you enough to give honest feedback.
- Use the Feedback
Most team leaders hold monthly or weekly meetings to brainstorm and receive feedback. Often, creative ideas are put on hold or die after the meeting without any executed action.
An excellent way to build and strengthen relationships is to value their feedback and ideas enough to execute them. A new sense of connectedness happens between employers and employees when the team members feel heard.
Training Real Estate Agents – Keep Motivating
Besides steering your team members in the right direction, motivation also serves as a sort of training for a real estate agent.
The following are some ways to motivate your team members to help you achieve your goals while training them to be better:
- Offer Public Recognition
One great way to boost your team’s morale is through public recognition. Always acknowledge every team member’s contribution before the rest of the group. Besides motivating your top performers to keep being better, the rest of the team will put in extra work for recognition too.
You can create a visible whiteboard, leaderboard, or chart to record their achievements.
- Provide the Right Working Tools
Ensure any software you adopt is smart and easy to use. That way, your agents will reduce time spent on non-revenue-generating activities.
Employees become focused and highly motivated when they do what they love using the right tools.
- Utilize Performance Tracking Data
Nothing is as important as analyzing team performance to make data-driven decisions on the best way to grow your agency. Performance data is crucial for engaging and motivating your team members.
Ensure the performance report shows your team members’ work history and request strategies to achieve better results in the future. Don’t forget to support their feedback with proper training to retain their motivation.
- Keep Your Feedback Specific
Focus on giving meaningful feedback on the effort, not the team member handling the position. This strategy has proven more effective for intensifying motivation than monetary rewards.
For instance, identifying your speed-to-lead star or the agent great with Zillow leads and giving them well-deserved praise will boost their motivation. On the other hand, discovering agents that struggle with their tasks will help you create tailored training material to help them improve.
SEO for Real Estate Listings
As more people turn to the internet for their needs, you already know a considerable portion of your potential customers are looking for your business and listed properties online.
If you’re looking for ways to make your listings easily discoverable, you need to lean towards search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO for real estate listings helps you optimize your listed properties for increased visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs).
While implementing SEO strategies to achieve the best result might seem daunting, you can leave the hard work to leading digital marketing firms like Ardor SEO.
Ardor SEO specializes in local real estate SEO practices to ensure your property listings rank high on local search engines for industry-specific keywords.
Other vital tips to help your business rank high on search engine result pages include:
- Create a Responsive Website
An unresponsive website is the fastest way to lose potential clients. Research shows most internet users browse from their phones. Therefore, ensure a faster site load if you want to run a successful real estate agency.
Once your website is highly functional, you can focus on optimizing your property listings for SERPs.
- Include Local Keywords
Start with researching the right keywords to use and insert them strategically into your listings. If you’re a realtor in Newnan, GA, or its neighboring cities, considering key phrases property buyers in this area search for will help you pick the right keywords.
Think about broader descriptions like homes for sale in Moreland, GA, or luxury houses for sale in Lagrange, Georgia. Don’t forget to do more research on these keywords to discover the best way to use them.
- Optimize Your Real Estate Listings for Search Engines
After finding the right local keywords, it’s time to add them to relevant pages on your website. Using them in every listing (keyword stuffing) isn’t advised; it can negatively affect your ranking.
To learn more about SEO best practices, listen to the Icons of Real Estate Podcast to hear top real estate professionals talk about how SEO helped them become successful and how you can achieve the same result or better. Teresa is one of the elite guests! Check the episode here!
Research Real Estate Market – Mindset Matters
Conducting real estate market research is crucial to your business’s growth. Besides the market intelligence, you’ll gain, you can employ the knowledge when dealing with your team, fellow agents, and property buyers.
If you’re ready to research the real estate market, consider doing the following:
- Narrow Down a Neighborhood
Seeing as real estate is location-based, it’s best to choose a neighborhood or region. If you’re undecided about the areas to serve, check for a few places you’d like to know more about.
Also, identify your preferred neighborhood’s target market demography through sources like Census Demographics and NeighborhoodScout.
- Observe Your Chosen Neighborhoods
Besides identifying direct competitors in your chosen area, check the neighborhood’s real estate supply (number of properties for sale). Thorough research will show you if that particular community is in-demand.
Surveying your target market helps you discover people’s opinions on moving there. The more responders prefer a particular neighborhood, the higher the property prices. Simply put, demand dictates a region’s competition.
While observing the neighborhood, you might want to check several apartments, office spaces, and rental property listings. Pay attention to their prices and compare them with your listing price. That way, you get an idea of your target market’s pricing expectations.
- Study Your Competition
Now is the time to focus on your competition by checking for websites providing real estate supplier or vendor information in specific localities.
Check the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) for data on recently sold real estate properties in your preferred neighborhood. It’d be best to also look through The FNC Residential Price Index to access up-to-date data from valuations and public records concerning your target real estate market.
That way, you’ll discover the latest market trends and position your mind to adopt knowledge-driven marketing strategies for your business’ success.
Effective Team Communication
Team leaders managing a real estate team often experience communication challenges, partly because team members are usually on the road for house showings and might be unavailable to answer requests immediately.
However, a real estate team’s overall failure or success usually hinges on effective team communication. Some ways you can achieve this feat include:
- Regular Meetings
Given the dynamics of the real estate business, it’s not easy to hold meetings regularly. However, regular meetings are the simplest way to facilitate open communication in your team.
As the team leader, you’re responsible for scheduling mandatory, regular meetings without the work schedule affecting meeting times. Effective communication in meetings often leads to better teamwork and quality ideas, resulting in an improved experience for clients and team members.
- Written Procedures and Checklists
Documented procedures and checklists to aid communication are must-haves. Real estate professionals like Teresa Cowart, the founder of Teresa Cowart Team, believe that one common mistake most real estate team leaders make is not having written procedures and checklists for their employees.
Team leaders spend lots of time following up and training new hires to understand the business. It’d be best for all administrative staff to document their procedures and create a written checklist containing their operations. That way, new members have a valuable guide to help them discharge assigned tasks.
- Performance Reviews
Create time to meet with team members for performance reviews. Your employees need to know their performance and brainstorm how to improve their efforts. It’s a crucial part of effective communication,
However, ensure to approach the review as open communication. Avoid an accusatory demeanor.
Morning Meetings – For Setting Team Goals
Popularly called daily check-in, morning meetings present the perfect opportunity for team members to gather and plan for the day. Besides setting team goals, it’s also a way to keep tabs on each team member’s responsibility so they can meet deadlines.
Some vital tips for holding successful morning meetings are:
- Open the Floor
Start every morning by asking your team members to share any obstacles or challenges they encountered the previous day. Besides being a way to improve their communication skills, it helps them know where to pay attention so you can transform their struggles into powerful learning experiences that promote business growth.
Poor communication leads to low productivity and reduces positive employee relations. While you might not have enough time to cover all the topics, it’s always good to keep it simple.
Open the floor, celebrate success, recognize vital milestones, involve your team, and provide feedback in ten minutes.
- Involve Your Team
It’s great to delegate your morning meetings depending on how busy your morning is and if handling such a huge task will add value to your employees. Besides improving their self-esteem, involved teams are typically motivated to hit new milestones.
Boost employee engagement and employee relations by encouraging team members to participate in meetings and use their initiative when performing tasks.
Team leaders must allow their employees enough autonomy to enable them to achieve set goals and take pride in a well-executed project.
- Stimulate Interaction
During your next morning meeting, suggest that team members share their lunch and break to promote better interaction. Research shows that 29% of employees experience continual work conflict, leading to low productivity.
Encouraging team members to spend time together helps prevent internal conflict in the workplace.
Conclusion
Building and managing a real estate team isn’t challenging as you have been led to believe. You only need to equip yourself with the right information from experts who walk the talk.
If you’re planning to build a successful real estate team in Georgia, make time on 29th November 2022 to attend the Georgia Residential Real Estate Summit organized by the Ardor SEO sponsored by HBA and Tim Stout and Associates.
Attending the summit will expose you to success stories and expert tips from successful real estate team leaders like Teresa Cowart. The event also offers an opportunity to network with other real estate agents in Georgia to build a connection you might leverage someday soon.
Book your spot right away!
You’re a product of the events you attend. If you desire to build successful teams like the Tim Stout Team or Teresa Cowart Team, simply sign up for the Georgia Residential Real Estate at https://realestatemasterssummit.com/georgia/
It promises to be impactful!
See you there!!