WASHINGTON – Many real-estate agents these days have personal assistants. But the better, more prolific listers and sellers have moved on to whole groups of assistants known as real-estate teams.
The team approach isn't new. Surgeons have teams. Lawyers have them, and so do accountants. But it is relatively new to the real estate brokerage business, where the majority of agents still try to do everything themselves, from advertising and marketing to chasing down lost documents to following up on loan applications.
That is changing, though, as more and more agents see the value of delegating these and the numerous other behind-the-scenes, time-consuming tasks that buyers and sellers take for granted so they can concentrate on listing and showing houses.
This isn't a knock on the typical agent. Most bend over backward for their clients, trying to be in a dozen places and do a dozen things at one time. Many couldn't work any harder. But in trying to do everything themselves, their clients sometimes suffer.
Enter the team concept, which frees the agent from the daily grunt work so he or she can provide even more and better service.
“You just can't operate as a single practitioner anymore without a team,” says Ralph Roberts, a top-selling Detroit, Mich., area agent and co-author of “Power Teams,” a new guide outlining how to build and manage groups of assistants. “The demands of the job exceed the ability of anyone one of us to handle on our own.”
Roberts and his co-author, John Featherston of RISMedia, a real-estate publishing company, believe the team approach is the wave of the future. So does Ashley Leigh of the Ashley Leigh Team, which works out of Linton Hall Realtors in Gainesville, Va.
Leigh, the top principal selling broker in the entire 12,000-member Northern Virginia Association of Realtors in 2004 and 2006 and the second most productive in 2005, maintains that the team concept is already changing the brokerage business. “All you have to do is look at who is No. 1 in your marketplace,” he says. “I would bet for the majority of markets, the No. 1 agent is backed by a significantly accomplished team.”
Chip Neumann, who operates the Chip Neumann Team in Ridgefield, Conn., has been the top agent in his town of 21,000 for 20-plus years. But until he put together his three-person team a dozen or so years ago, he “had zero life.”
“I was pretty stubborn,” Neumann says. “I thought I could do it all. But I learned there are people who can do some things far better than I can. And now I can concentrate on providing exceptional service to my clients.”
Neumann's team consists of himself and two full-time, licensed support staff – a client-care manager who is “hands on” with buyers and sellers and a marketing director who places advertising, follows up on all showings and handles much of what the top producer calls “background stuff.”
Leigh's team is much larger than that of Neumann, who didn't want to manage a lot of people. It has 20 members, all full time, with the majority being licensed agents. But Leigh says his “big team” approach is measured in production, not staff. With a volume of $185 million at the height of the real-estate market, he was “doing eight times (the business) I was doing by myself” before the slowdown hit.
Roberts stumbled upon the team concept nearly 30 years ago when he was a rookie. “It happened to me by accident,” says the man Time magazine once hailed as “the best-selling Realtor in America.” “I cannot spell. So I had to hire a co-op student to take messages. It wasn't a business plan; it was out of necessity.”
Now, he is the owner-broker of his own company, which he operates as a team with a handful of full-and part-time assistants who help him with all the back-office chores while he acts as a “rainmaker,” talking to consumers, getting his brand known and bringing in new business.
The team approach liberates agents from the shackles of the occupation, Roberts says. “You can do what you do best and are most passionate about, and assign the rest of the work to others who are better trained and equipped to perform those tasks.”
But teams are not just about freeing up agents to spend more time with their clients, according to co-author Featherston. It's also about being able to offer more. “Ralph and I both believe that to remain competitive, agents have to do much more – place more phone calls, ramp up their marketing and offer additional services,” the publisher says.
Agents backed by teams don't normally have higher fees, so they don't cost buyers and sellers more than agents who fly solo. And team leaders pay their helpers out of their earnings from increased production, so they actually are able to make more money.
For their book, the authors interviewed more than 200 teams, ranging in size from two people to “up into the 20s and 30s” that are companies run like a team. While they found no optimal number of team members, consumers thinking about signing up with an agent who is backed by a team should consider these points:
After the agent makes his presentation at your house, visit him at his office. “Stop by and see how you are greeted,” Roberts advises. “That's how your transaction is going to be handled.”
Look for experience. Leigh, the high-volume Virginia agent, says the team should be headed by a “proven leader” with a lot of transactions under his belt as well as a highly trained, seasoned staff that also has had “lots of at-bats.”
Make sure at least some of the staff is licensed, either as agents themselves or assistants. Your agent won't be available for every single person who calls, but the other licensees should be available in his stead.
They may go by different titles, but the team should include a closing person, a customer-service person and a marketing person.
The closing assistant will handle the day-to-day minutiae, from the day the contract is signed to the day the deal is settled. The person should be “dedicated to making sure all the paperwork is in order so there are no bumps in the road,” says Roberts.
The customer-service assistant will follow up with every agent who shows the house and provide you and your agent with important feedback. “If the door to a room is locked, if there is a bad smell, if a dog is in the way, you will know about it so things can be adjusted,” Roberts explains.
The marketing assistant will “get the house out there” in all possible places so it can be seen by millions of different eyeballs.
The staff might also include a buyer's agent, someone who works solely with potential buyers and is “out there showing houses 24/7,” Roberts suggests. Not only can he bring buyers to your door, the buyer's agent can help you find your next house.
The team and its leader should be embedded in the community. That way, the author explains, it “leaves the biggest footprint.” The team should be involved in a church or synagogue, the chamber of commerce, the Rotary, have a Web site, perhaps even a blog, so it shows up on as many people's radar screens as possible.
Lew Sichelman is a nationally syndicated writer based in Washington. E-mail him at lsichelman@aol.com.
© United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
