Today, more and more commercial real estate agents work in a team. Forming a CRE team helps you focus your efforts in areas you excel. Teaming up with other brokers also lets you pool your individual market shares, increasing your combined market share. Additionally, having a team can make you more credible when you sit down with a certain type of client.
Without the credibility, the market share, or the ability to show your clients you can service the wide array of their needs, you will put yourself at an incredible competitive disadvantage.
Where to Start
Unless you are looking to build a large and multi-disciplinary team and need a little bit of everything, the first step in building a team is to figure out what you need. Here are some of the things that your team can do for you:
- Generate leads by contacting prospective clients
- Handle the creation of marketing materials
- Perform market research to support your marketing activity and increase your expertise
- Manage your transactions
- Provide a different personality style to complement yours when you meet or otherwise communicate with clients
- Offer complementary services – ie. adding an agent that covers an adjacent area
- Field your calls and organize your business’ operations
After you have determined your needs, prioritize them. That ranked list will give you a vision for how you can build your team and who you need to build it.
Many commercial real estate professionals think that all that they need to do to build a team is to hire a bunch of young, hungry, college graduates that will be natural prospecting dogs. If you need more leads, and IF these young guns actually can prospect effectively, that’s a great strategy. If you need something else, you’ll need to look for someone different.
Your team can include other agents with similar experience to yours or agents that are more experienced than you. You also might choose to grow your business by adding non-licensed personnel. After all, the skills that make someone a great broker are usually different from the skills that make them a great researcher, designer or administrative assistant.
Building a successful team requires a clear strategy to increase your earnings. Hiring team members based on the bottlenecks and specific needs in your business, rather than based on what you hear from other agents, is the key to growing your income.
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