5 Key Elements of a Successful Real Estate Team

dotloop

August 06, 2018 | comments

How to Build a More Productive and Collaborative Real Estate Team

New research reveals that the key to getting teams to work more productively and collaboratively may be more of an art than a science. Here are a few tips from those findings that you can implement immediately as a broker or team leader to help you quickly realize your real estate team goals.
 

1. Communicate in an engaging way

 
Several years ago, MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory researched team productivity and revealed some interesting results. They used electronic communications “badges” to help identify and quantify several communication styles that contributed to higher performance among teams on a bank’s call center. While all other variables remained the same, including the content of the communication, specific teams still outperformed others simply by the way in which they communicated to each other. Factors included tone of voice, body language (do they face one another when they speak?), how much they talk versus listen, and levels of extroversion and empathy.

Turns out, the style of communication quickly became the most important predictor of the teams’ productivity and success over other factors, including individual intelligence, personality, skill and substance.

Following that insight, the researchers recommended revising the employees’ coffee break schedule to encourage more informal socialization with their teammates. As they predicted, the average duration of the call center’s transactions (a success metric) dropped more than 20% among lower-performing teams, and employee satisfaction rose by more than 10%.

While dynamics can differ among a real estate team, the same communication factors can play a large role in your team’s productivity, morale and ultimate success.

“These patterns vary little, regardless of the type of team and its goal,” says Alex “Sandy” Pentland, director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory. “Productive teams have certain data signatures, and they’re so consistent that we can predict a team’s success simply by looking at the data—without ever meeting its members.”
 

Takeaways:

• Encourage your team members to talk and listen in equal measure.
• Encourage team members to face colleagues and clients while communicating.
• Engage in conversations with energy and gestures.
• Enlist all members—not just team leaders—to connect directly with one another.
• Provide opportunities for agents to socialize aside from business discussions.

 

2. Share the knowledge

 
Instead of feeling frustrated by a team’s differing work styles, transform these differences into strengths. A recent dotloop survey showed that multi-generational teams of agents place value on different aspects of their jobs, including commission structures, work/life balance and opportunities to collaborate. While one agent might prefer working online, others prefer face-to-face meetings. When you start regarding these differences as complements to one another, you’ll start using them to your advantage.

For instance, baby boomers can complement younger millennial agents by sharing their seasoned knowledge of the real estate industry, while millennials might add value by identifying, reviewing and teaching new technology available for real estate teams.
 

Takeaways:

• Find what makes individuals on your team click and tap into their unique skills. Ask your baby boomer agents to help millennials build relationships, and invoke millennials’ tech skills to help train those agents who are less computer savvy.
• Ask your team members to take turns in leading trainings. Before rolling out a company-wide adoption initiative, start by training a beta group of key influencers. Collect their feedback as they learn the system, and use those findings to fine-tune the rollout. Learn more tips to help your team adopt new technology.

3. Embrace shared goals

 
The concept of “psychological ownership” can play a meaningful role in employee satisfaction. In a study of more than 800 employees, Linn Van Dyne of Michigan State University and Jon L. Pierce of the University of Minnesota, Duluth, discovered that employees’ sense of psychological ownership for the organization positively correlates with not only job satisfaction and commitment to the organization but also work performance.

Real estate team members should also see themselves as a part of the larger machine in a way that complements how integral they are to the overall operation. Connect your team members with your brokerage’s overarching business goals but also help empower their psychological ownership by giving them ownership of their personal space, allowing them to create their own title or managing a team-building activity. According to the researchers, small touches like encouraging agents to personalize their desks with photos of their families or favorite posters can dramatically improve their sense of engagement and job satisfaction.

We recommend real estate teams set SMART goals that unite team members under a shared vision of success. Setting SMART goals allows you to better budget your time and money and to track what’s working well.
 

Takeaways:

• Share your business-focused and personal SMART goals with all team members.
• Ask team members to create their own SMART goals.
• Showcasing how every team members’ goals intersect to foster a feeling of ownership and inclusiveness.

4. Adopt collaborative technologies

 
Real estate teams often become overwhelmed by the paper shuffle of transaction management. The good news is technology can easily streamline real estate processes to make your team’s work paperless, collaborative and much more efficient. Transaction management tools like dotloop provide the robust reporting tools and deep visibility into a team’s performance that allow brokers and team leaders to instantly identify high and low performers, pending closings and more.

Meanwhile, admins and transaction coordinators will profit from custom workflow templates and autofill capabilities that keep deals moving and improve compliance.

CRMs can also help agents streamline their tasks and expertise, creating a well-oiled machine. Investing in a CRM that integrates with your other existing software and tech tools will intuitively help your real estate team with pipeline tracking and transaction management.

Dotloop’s transaction management platform, for example, was designed specifically with real estate teams in mind and integrates with CRMs, accounting software and marketing platforms to enable all your team members to work in sync.
 

Takeaways:

• Present tech tools as a means of recruiting top agent talent and in the early stages of onboarding. A digital transaction platform like dotloop can help provide the Gen Xer with the features they value most: eSignatures (86%), document editing (58%), storage (39%), collaboration (24%) and compliance (22%).
• Automate your team’s transaction management process with dotloop to eliminate time-consuming data re-entry while enabling your admins, agents, buyers and sellers to collaborate on one platform from CRM to close.

5. Incorporate fun into daily work

 
At the end of the day, every great real estate team should focus on having fun. Celebrate successes as a team, provide good benefits and create time for non-work activities, and you’ll soon be rewarded with a genuinely more enthusiastic, engaged and productive team.