The Best Approach to Training a Real Estate Team

February 11, 2016

Natalie Carn

Anyone who’s run a real estate business knows there is one, primary goal they’re trying to achieve; and that is to increase profits.

Every year, real estate teams lay out annual goals — most of the time it’s upping the ante on last year’s results. Getting there … well, there’s many roads to choose from, but the easiest is improving your agent’s productivity.

You may look at increasing lead generation to support your agents. You may also analyze what technology can help simplify the work for you. But there’s often one element that gets forgotten in the mix: Training.

Too often training is seen as a one-time event at the start of a new job or when learning a new skill. We rarely take the time to think through someone’s entire learning journey.

A lot of business owners think if they establish a process and set up technology for their teams, naturally, their staff will follow the process and use the technology. Oftentimes, they don’t. Training doesn’t mean a one-time session of “look how to use this technology; start doing it.” Real estate tactics change. New features get built. And not everyone can keep up with everything moving around them all the time.

That’s why the best approach to training a real estate team is: Visualize your desired end-result and list strong, actionable objectives for your training. Perseverance has the longest effect on productivity, and more importantly, profits.

Five Tips to Develop Better Training

With a little extra effort and thought, you can greatly improve the content and effectiveness of your training. To help you develop better training – or better yet – learning journeys, use these five tips:

Real Estate Training Teams

With any training, you should provide SMART learning objectives. These objectives let your agents know exactly what they’ll learn and be able to do once they complete the training. For truly great learning objectives, make sure to follow the rules for SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely. Be sure to use action verbs that when performed can been measured. The Bob Pike Group shares a couple, if you need a little help.

If people can’t see the benefit to what you’re teaching them in some way (more leads, larger client base, increased commissions), your chances of retaining their attention goes out the window. It’s an idea training experts call the WII-FM, or “What’s in it for me?” By answering this question, you’ll create an incentive for your agents to remember and learn the material you’re presenting.

Our brains are programmed to retain information it thinks we need and to purge the rest. If you’re giving your agents too much to learn at one time, it becomes much harder to reinforce later. So, think about what the absolute need-to-knows are? Once you have those, divide everything else into a “nice to have” or “where to go” category.

Nice-to-have content should be used sparingly. Put that content in a workbook appendix or handout, and let them read it later. If you’re providing them a list of where to go, they can dig into more content on their own.

When planning out your training session be honest with yourself and answer the question “would this capture my attention and get me excited?” Don’t put others through boring trainings. Studies show we retain more information when we’re having fun. If you need some ideas for fun activities, check out these resources.

When we’re training new agents many aspects of what they learn won’t be applied immediately. It’s easy for them to forget, and often, they’ll have questions when they arrive at the task (they learned about). That’s why you should set aside helpful resources and materials, so they have something to fall back to.

Training for Real Estate Agents

After your training sessions, measure the results. If your goals were to increase agent production, and reduce employee turnover, compare how things changed from before and after. Look to see if your agents are using the systems you put in place, like logging calls. Look to see if they’re closing more deals, and your annual revenue is climbing. Measurements help validate if something is working or isn’t.

The Best Real Estate Training

As you get started, begin with the end in mind. Visualize what success looks like and use these tips along the way to design, develop, and facilitate training that will positively impact your bottom-line results.