10 All-Star Insights To Motivate and Inspire Real Estate Teams

Culture makes or breaks a team’s success. High-performing mega teams are successful because they have a culture that starts with the team leader. Every member of the team is 100% on board and dedicated to working together for mutual success. The philosophy begins and ends with the team leader and is carried out with staff and other agents on the team. Good culture breeds a sense of teamwork, dedication, commitment and forward-thinking vision for all to achieve their goals.

Team leaders don’t cringe at accountability or confrontation to help team members learn, grow and achieve greatness. They raise everyone up instead of playing to the lowest player’s level.

Anyone in your organization should know the ‘why’ that drives the business. Be passionate about it and be able to articulate it.

Having that compass prevents distractions or chasing ‘shiny objects.’ When making decisions, this makes it easy to say ‘yes’ if it moves the mission forward and ‘no’ if it does not.

Every person in the organization has to be willing to self-confront and ask themselves, ‘Why am I doing this?’ ‘What can I get out of the next 12 months? Based on the lifestyle I want to live, how much time am I willing to invest? 10 hours or 40 hours every week?

It’s a constant game of trading time for money. You need to figure out the best way to make the maximum amount for the least amount of time and energy.

Staying in their own lane means our agents only do three things: meet with clients, negotiate contracts and complete a great hand-off to the staff. The transaction coordinators handle the transaction; the marketing department handles the marketing; and the productivity assistant makes sure the clients are communicated with every day.

Write down your goals, preferably by hand, and read them twice a day.
The trick is you read it in the emotion and energy you will feel when you accomplish that goal. When you write it out by hand, you are actually doing something with your subconscious and making it more powerful. You’re building a burning desire to do everything you can to motivate yourself to make those calls and get past your fears.

Top agents who double or triple their business year over year put together a plan and break it down by monthly and weekly goals.

Something that many teams have failed at for a long time is they have a model in place and they don’t want their buyers agents to be anything other than buyers agents or listing specialists to be anything other than listing specialists. A good team today needs to have progression from joining and being a newbie to being one of the agents to maybe getting on a specialized team or becoming a team lead or a director of operations. So there’s a career path tied to the team.

My philosophy is, ‘Don’t try to be all things to all people.’ Find where your passion is. Make a connection with something you like, and have fun with the business.

Three is typically the magic number of niches agents should target in their goal setting. If you say you’re going to work expireds, FSBOs, social media and more, you’re stretching yourself too thin.

You might start a property management company, look at new construction or speculative houses. Find a niche that complements the other markets. There’s always going to be a market going up or down.

Today’s agents want to know what you’re doing with their money. How are you adding value back to them? When you’re making capital investments, are you surveying the people who matter — the agents and admins who are executing your systems and building the buy-in around your ideas?

Just as buyers and sellers want to know what kind of value an agent is adding back, agents demand the same of their team lead. Are you putting it back in your pocket or investing back in the team? And when you’re investing, are you asking for their buy-in?

Our transaction has been one of the smoothest pieces through all of the pandemic. I had three admins logging in and logging out [of individual dotloop agent accounts] on average 30 minutes per day. I was paying admins $15/hour … multiply that times three and we found that it was costing us $45 per day [not being on the teams-specific platform]. So when dotloop for Teams rolled around, we jumped on it. Now, I get a notification every time one of my agents writes a contract. Additionally, admins get notified every time something happens. So if an agent needs something, the admin gets a notification and can jump on it to help out. That part of the business is 100% on point.

We find that effective agent accountability, matched with proven systems and high-level strategies, ensures success.

It’s all about the story we tell ourselves about the virtual world. We’ve grown up in a world of face-to-face communication and tell ourselves that we have to be around these people [physically] to make it work. You have to have an open mind to what a virtual world can create.

If you’re training once a week or twice a week, you need to keep that consistency on a virtual platform so people know when they’re going to jump on and communicate with you.