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How to Lead and Train Your Real Estate Team to Retain Top Talent

Most businesses tend to look at the reasons employees typically leave: more money elsewhere, a newer office or concept that’s exciting, successful poaching by the competition, etc. This can distract you from what really works for retention. Just because a team member left to seek a higher salary doesn’t mean the highest value is money for your team and that’s where all your effort should shift. It’s better, however, to focus on what keeps people in their job instead.

 

“Team culture” is a term that gets thrown around haphazardly in recruiting and retention discussions, but the concept is often skewed and the dynamic is more complex.

Three professors at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, Terence R. Mitchell, Thomas W. Lee, and Brooks C. Holtom dedicated more than a decade of research to what boosts retention in companies, and they developed the concept of “job embeddedness.”

Similar to the idea of a strong culture in a company, but more tangible, their research showed there are three primary components to this concept, or what commits people to their job, and they involve both an employee’s relationship with the company, as well as the community in which they operate.

The 3 Primary Components of Job Embeddedness are:

  • Organizational fit
  • Inter-personal links
  • Unwillingness to sacrifice their current situation

Basically, if an employee feels comfortable in their office and community, tied to the values of each, connected to coworkers and people outside the office, and they believe leaving would risk sacrificing too many things they value, it’s very unlikely that they would leave their job.

So how can you take this and create a plan to encourage job embeddedness and retention in your real estate business?

Lead Generation Real Estate Plan

Create an Onboarding Plan

It’s crucial to look at onboarding as a company-wide exercise and one that shouldn’t be limited to the first week for a new hire. New hires bring fresh perspectives that can help spur innovative ideas for your team, so the onboarding process is beneficial to both parties.

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  • Provide a comprehensive strategy and system for lead generation. This is where new agents reportedly struggle the most. According to an Inman News survey, 47% of respondents said including lead gen is critical to initial training and 40% said lead gen was the most important area to work on in an ongoing training.
  • Incorporate formal training on all the systems and establish office protocol. New Agents who excel are the ones who follow a system and are being held accountable. It’s critical to provide your team with the right technology and properly train them from the onset.
  • Set up in-person workshops with team members to learn about the market, best practices and each person’s role
  • Plan offsite outings like a team lunch to foster camaraderie outside of the office, and stoke stronger inter-personal connections.

Real Estate Lead Generation

Prioritize Training and Career Development

This is how you enhance the “fit” aspect of job embeddedness. When you dedicate time and resources to your team member’s career planning, and focus on communicating opportunities and promoting within your organization, you show your team that they have a future with you.

The top areas to cover for successful ongoing training are:

  1. Lead Generation
  2. Transaction Management
  3. Time Management
  4. Customer Service

Focus your training on processes and systems.

  • Have agents create a business plan with goals, objectives and strategies to reach them. Take the time to review the plan, address personal and professional goals and demonstrate how to track them.
  • Promote continuing education through conferences, webinars, additional reading and research.

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Use your training to promote inter-personal connections too.

  • Set up a mentoring program partner up junior team members with a more experienced “mentor” on the team to act as a sounding board and an example of how they can progress in your company.
  • Share best-practice strategies in dedicated meetings
  • Bring in outside experts from the industry to host workshops and mastermind sessions

Lead Generation Plan

Encourage Community Outreach

Many real estate companies encourage agents to participate in some form of community service and often teams participate in efforts together as a team building exercise. This is a great idea for helping with job embeddedness too. It promotes shared core values and creates stronger ties between agents and the community around them.

This can also benefit your brand. Showcasing your company doing good work in the community creates a very positive brand awareness play and the opportunity to meet prospects who could benefit from your team’s services.

 

Real Estate Lead Generation

Lead Your Team the Right Way

In order to see success from any of these tactics, their must be strong leadership at the core of your business. As the leader, your job is to create an environment that fosters strong connections. Simon Sinek artfully discusses this concept in his talk “Why Good Leaders Make us Feel Safe.”

He explains that it’s about trust and cooperation. These are feelings that can only be developed in the right environment. It’s the leader’s job to create that environment.

tech phobic real estate

There are constant forces trying to disrupt success: economic shifts, strong competition, whatever is contributing to frustration and stealing business. You can’t control these elements, but what can be controlled are the conditions inside your company. A strong leader sets the precedent of service, sacrifice, and helping others. When the leader puts the team’s needs first, it creates an environment where people feel safe and enjoy a sense of belonging. That’s where the magic happens.

“If the conditions are wrong, we are forced to expend our own time and energy to protect ourselves from each other, and that inherently weakens the organization. When we feel safe inside the organization, we will naturally combine our talents and our strengths and work tirelessly to face the dangers outside and seize the opportunities.”

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Choose A Strategic Partner


Agent resources

 

In Inman’s Study, they also asked respondents to answer what resources they thought brokers and team leaders should provide to help them thrive. The top six responses were providing a mentor, offering coaching, equipping agents with training in technology, customer-service, and social media, and placing new agents on teams.
 
Agents need solid resources, and good leaders need good resources too.  It’s impossible to handle this all on your own while running a business too. Choosing a strategic partner ensures you can provide all the resources your team needs, the proper training, the cutting edge technology, and the coaching and strategies.

When you’re researching what companies can best serve as a partner for your team, make sure they can offer you all the resources a growing team needs:

  • Lead generation to feed your agents
  • Technology to scale your customer service offering
  • A system to keep your team accountable and on the same page
  • Access to expert opinions and education on the latest strategies in their field
  • Industry connections with organizations like Upstream, RESO, and digital marketing powerhouses like Facebook and Google
  • Coaching and success management for proven best strategies

When you use these methods to enhance your team’s sense of how well they fit with your company and the community, it strengthens their connection to both. Providing the right coaching, technology and tools creates a work experience that keeps your best performers on board–and out of the competition’s hands.

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