Lighting A Fire: How to Keep Real Estate Agents Motivated

Real estate is both a rewarding and challenging profession. Associates are constantly learning and are highly knowledgeable about local community issues and the national economy. While every transaction is unique, helping people achieve their dream of home ownership is a gratifying experience that never gets old. The passion your agents have for the real estate industry is why many home buyers and sellers choose your company over your competitors. Just like a high-performance engine needs an occasional tune-up to continue performing at optimal level, your agents also need some regular coaching and encouragement from you to stay motivated and achieve the best results for your brokerage.

Get To Know Your Agents

As a successful broker, you probably have a team of agents with diverse personalities. While a pep talk during an office meeting may fuel the enthusiasm of some agents for weeks, others respond to a one-on-one conversation with you about their individual business plans and revenue-based goals. You or your manager should regularly schedule a time to meet with each of your agents personally to discuss their current clients and transactions that are in progress. This also provides the management team an opportunity to learn more about them and their lifestyle. Understanding your agents helps know how to best to motivate each one of them and lend your experience where needed on deals that are in progress.

Acknowledge Their Strengths and Accomplishments

Recognition is one of the most effective methods of motivating your team. Everyone wants to be appreciated and respected, especially younger, or new to the industry agents. These agents in particular will need encouragement as they experiences the normal initial disappointments and exceptional real estate agents, while gently coaching them toward best practices.  Make a big deal of their first sale, and let them know they have a safe, professional home within your brokerage.

setbacks of the selling process. Let them know you recognize that they have the potential to be

It is also important to let your experienced top producers know how much you appreciate them. Reliable agents who always do well can too easily be taken for granted. Allow them to mentor junior agents, as a sign of how much you respect their abilities.

Why Millennial Real Estate Agents Will Want to Work With Your Brokerage

 

Millennials are now the largest portion of our population which means more and more of them are becoming agents, as well as buying or selling real estate. This generation is also now recognized as the most profitable in history. What are Millennial agents looking for? It’s the three T’s: transparency, team, and technology. Read on to learn what it takes to become the go-to real estate brokerage for every aspiring millennial agent in your market.

Transparency

One thing that Millennials are experts at is identifying a company or business with a negative culture or questionable company values. In general, the vast majority of Gen Y wants to associate with companies that are completely open, honest, and transparent. The more you can demonstrate that you and your brokerage operate with transparency, the more appealing it will be to Gen Y. Start by clearly highlighting and visiting your mission statement, slogan, and company values on your website, inside your offices, and through your social media. It is also very important that you are open and honest about the state of your brokerage. Sharing the good, bad, and ugly, along with your plans for the future is a powerful way of instilling trust and attracting motivated Millennials that hope to both make a living and make a difference.

Team

Another very important priority for Millennials is the culture of your brokerage’s team. Unlike the Boomer generation, Millennials are far more likely to seek greener pastures quickly if the culture support model and management style of your brokerage is not to their liking. They seek to align themselves with people that have high integrity and a moral approach to business, who balance their strengths and weaknesses, and who support their individual goals. They also place a great deal of value in professional development. If you currently hold team meetings, consider inviting prospective agents to attend a few to see first-hand how you interact with your team, educate them, and support them. Show them how you foster collaboration, motivate through leadership and encourage an environment of teamwork.

Technology

Finally, it is important to remember that Generation Y grew up surrounded by technology. More than any other generation, they have a steep expectation for tech-savvy tools and resources from their brokerage. Be upfront and forward about sharing all of your high-tech tools available to agents including websites, CRMs, content management systems, social media marketing, lead generation software, etc. The more that you can prove your brokerage will streamline their business, set them apart from the competition, and allow them to work on-the-go, the more Millennial agents you will attract to your team.

Remember the Three T’s

While the three T’s are vital to Millennial agents, they are also important elements for your other agents as well. Weichert embodied the three T’s long before there was a Gen Y. It is part of the core value system that Jim Weichert embraced to build a successful national real estate brand and continues today through the Weichert Family of Companies. We equally coach our affiliate offices to adopt and value the same philosophy. From an unwavering set of core values, people-first philosophy and dedication to providing the best technology and tools available to agents, it’s a winning formula all around.

For more information about how Weichert can bring the three T’s to your real estate brokerage, visit www.weichertfranchise.com.

Undeniable Traits Of A Successful Leader

As a real estate broker, you are no longer directly responsible for leading buyers and sellers through the complexities of real estate transactions. Instead, you are now charged with the responsibility of successfully leading your team of real estate agents to reach their potential. While there are many traits and skills that make up what most would consider a successful leader, there are a few that serve as the cornerstones for every broker. As you strive to become the best leader you can be for your team and your business, focus on the development of these must-have traits.

Authenticity

 

The greatest leadership wisdom taught in lofty places like Harvard has to do with being authentic. Authentic leaders are said to value input and feedback, are positive, truthful, and open. They build trust and generate enthusiastic support that improves both individual and team performance.

Consider that a career in real estate can feel like a roller coaster, full of ups and downs. For some real estate agents, the downs can lead to doubts in their abilities and fears about their future. As their broker-leader, you can help shoulder those burdens by being an authentic leader who has both empathy for their situation, but whose enthusiasm and positivity helps them stay focused and motivated. Being an authentic leader, also helps creates the authentic culture in your brokerage that will minimize turnover and help improve production.

Recognition

 

There is nothing more demoralizing than having those you look up to ignore your strengths and accomplishments. As a leader, it is your job to give recognition to those agents that perform well and showcase exceptional talents. If you hold team meetings, you may want to consider regularly giving out awards or tokens of recognition to worthy individuals. Certainly top performers should be recognized, but there are many things you can recognize people for. In the spirit of being authentic, just make sure they are recognized for real achievements.  If you look hard enough, everyone has something meaningful they have achieved that you can hold up for your team.

Humility

 

Everyone makes mistakes. The difference between an average joe and a successful leader is that a leader is humble and willing to admit their mistakes. This is another attribute of the authentic leader, the willingness to admit mistakes. In fact, as a real estate broker, you have a special opportunity to use your hard earned knowledge to save your agents from wasting their own time, money, and resources in the same ways you may have as an agent. By exercising humility and openly leveraging your mistakes into lessons, your entire team can work smarter and will have deeper respect for you as a leader.

Empowerment

 

One of the first things you had to learn to do as a broker was to stop selling homes yourself. Now the next part is actually empowering your agents to do the selling and make them as good at it as you were. Don’t be a broker who swoops in and personally fixes everything, whenever a deal hits a rough spot. Instead give your team the training they want, the advice and support they need, and the encouragement to be successful. Agents who feel empowered and supported, and who are not micromanaged, will take more initiative and over time will develop into more productive and motivated sales associates.

Accountability

 

If you strive to lead an all-star team, you must lead by example by being accountable for what you say and do. This really means getting back to some basics like saying what you will do, and doing what you say you will. Since the buck stops with you, some things will naturally float up to your level, and when agents see that you will jump in and handle the big challenges, their confidence in your leadership will grow.

Accountability is actually one of the important skills Weichert teaches its brokers through the Weichert Management Academy. The academy, open to Weichert owners, brokers and managers across the country, teaches attendees all the important elements of building a successful team and managing a successful business. In this training the behaviors that constitute accountable leadership at every level are discussed. Being accountable means employees will feel your organization is solid, and that they are both well supported, and empowered to move their business forward.

There’s Always Room To Be A Better Leader

 

As a real estate agent, you successfully developed your abilities as a salesperson. As a broker, your focus shifted to being an effective leader. If you think you could benefit from leadership coaching and training programs, as well as a collection of production boosting tools and systems for your agents go to weichertfranchise.com or call 877-746-2067.

Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/blog/undeniable-traits-of-a-successful-leader-2/

Marketing Automation: High Tech Doesn’t Mean Giving Up On High Touch

There is no question that technology has become a driving force in the real estate industry. Not only are you required to build a strong online presence, but the increasing demands on you as a broker have likely caused you to turn to automation tools in order to manage your client data, and your to-do list. Marketing automation in real estate brokerages, has become extremely common as it allows for you to maintain touchpoints with large numbers of clients both hot and cold, without having to always be hands-on in that capacity. Despite this, many brokers are slow to adopt these tools, fearing the complexity or that the human touch will be lost.

Here are a few things to consider if you are wondering how to strike this balance.

You Still Control The Message

Sometimes it can feel unnerving to automate portions of your business because it feels as though you are giving up some level of control. However, just because you are using a marketing automation tool like a chatbot or social media content scheduler like HootSuite, you still have control over what is said, who it is said to, and when it is said. You can control the imagery used, and select different messages based on the unique concerns of your prospect. The best part is that you only have to set up these emails or posts once, then they can be reused for each new client fitting the bill. That saves agents a lot of time while increasing their touchpoints with current and future clients.

Segment and Personalize

Investing the time to create carefully tailored emails for contact lists that are segmented by the type of client, allows you to create a more personalized outreach to subscribers. For instance, if you are working to attract FSBO leads, you should create a lead capture that specifically appeals to people considering selling their house themselves and automatically add them to a segmented email list that receives content relevant to FSBOs. Fill your emails with solutions to their deepest pain points, testimonials from similar people you’ve already served, and personality to seem more human. The result will be an increase in open and click-through rates which will ultimately bring more leads and referrals.

Automation Is Just Another Tool In Your Toolbox

There is no denying that the real estate marketing automation tools out there today are brilliant and getting better every day. They are very effective at drawing people into your funnel, nurturing them through their buying journey and creating leads. Still, even though these tools are meant to save time and energy and increase responsiveness, there is a risk of becoming complacent after using them for a period of time. Rather than treating these tools like a “set it and forget it” button, actively monitor them, measure results, and make adjustments as necessary. It should be one of the many things you utilize to run your business.

Staying True To You

While automation tools can alleviate much of the strain caused by the demand for constant touch marketing, they are not a replacement for the human touch that you bring to your business and brand. Make sure you mix in a healthy dose of person-to-person contact, including phone calls, door knocking, open houses, educational seminars and community events. Don’t just rely on tech to bring business and recruits to you.

Weichert brokers and agents have discovered that when done correctly, these powerful resources can allow you to be in multiple places at once, expand your reach, and impress your audience. We coach our offices not to substitute tech for personal contact, but rather use it to complement your arsenal of tools to run your business. Weichert, for example, provides a CRM, complete with a mobile app, sophisticated tools for open house management and follow up, as well as the contact management and branded outreach automation, which is great for organizing contacts and staying on top of follow up. But Weichert also coaches on hosting call sessions, door knocking and regular open houses to integrate personal touch points as part of an overall marketing plan.

For more information about how Weichert agents use marketing automation to realize that next level of success, go to www.weichertfranchise.com.

Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/blog/marketing-automation-high-tech-doesnt-mean-giving-up-on-high-touch/