When you run a real estate agency, you quickly learn that your staff are by far your greatest asset. Your agents are essential to gaining clients and keeping them happy, and that makes them vital for your business.
Not only that, staff turnover is expensive. Recruiting and training new agents only to have them leave soon after is costly for any agency, not to mention disheartening. You quickly realise that retaining your agents, particularly your top performing ones, needs to be a high priority for your business.
It goes without question; you want the best real estate agents you can find. And you want to keep them.
In order to recruit and retain real estate agents who are in hot demand, you need to provide them with the best possible opportunities, tools, services and working environment.
Here are some things you can do to attract and retain outstanding agents:
Provide lots of training and support
Nobody likes starting a new job and being left to their own devices to work things out for themselves.
If you provide your agents with training and support such as administrative assistance, technology and leadership, they’ll feel encouraged and motivated and will be more likely to remain loyal to you.
Things like ongoing staff training, mentoring programs, marketing and admin support will give you a much better retention rate.
Help with lead generation
The more leads you can provide to your agents, the more opportunities they will have to convert those leads into clients. And the more leads you have, the more you can grow your business.
A thriving business is a sure fire way to have the best real estate agents banging on your door wanting to work for you.
Have appropriate technology in place
Most people these days start a property search by doing an online search, and use this far more than print marketing. With the right technology and tools, a good real estate website can generate thousands of leads a month.
If you also include a blog network, SEO tools, an email marketing system and a user-friendly client and content management system, your agents will have all the tools they need at their disposal.
Offer perks they won’t get elsewhere
One way to keep your valued staff working for you long term is to offer them something they won’t get from another agency.
This could be a sweetener such as paying them their sales commission straight away, rather than waiting until settlement, as is normally the case with commission payments. You can do this by using an advance commission company and receive your commission payments as soon as there is a signed sale contract. Your agents are bound to be delighted with that!
Choose quality over quantity
In real estate, skills can be taught and training can be provided, but having agents with the right personality is what makes all the difference. This can’t be learned.
It’s far better for you to recruit a few high quality agents than lots of mediocre ones. You’ll be able to invest more of your time training and mentoring 5 great agents who’ll be able to get the same results as 10 average agents.
The take home message
With new workforce trends such as flexible hours and working from home, real estate businesses need to look beyond the traditional ways of retaining agents and think differently.
Real estate agents are looking for more than just a high salary and commission, so if you can offer them a high level of job satisfaction, you should be well on your way to keeping a loyal team of agents working with you for years to come.