When your real estate business grows from one realtor to include an assistant or buyer agent, your role will change too. Hello, manager!

You have just made your first hire and are super excited. Great! Your new real estate assistant starts in less than 2 weeks and you are ready to take your business to the next level.

Day 1 arrives and your employee comes through the door. It’s the honeymoon phase: you’re both ecstatic; you can’t get enough of one another. Week 3 comes around the corner in the bat of an eyelash and you realize your star assistant starts showing up to work on her own timing; in other words, a bit late. Her being late delays your day, but she’s so great, you’ll overlook that. Then the document you needed yesterday to close a sale wasn’t proofed properly. Okay, no biggie: just take a few minutes to adjust that as well. Oh wait, there’s a listing that has the wrong measurements for the property. Alright, now it’s getting a bit frustrating that you, the realtor, have to pay someone to be your assistant AND spend a lot of time fixing her mistakes.

Welcome to being a manager

Hiring is a big part of growth of your real estate team but with growth, comes great responsibility of managing employees. Gone are the days where you were only self-governing. Now, you not only have to do your job as a realtor, but you have to govern over others.

So it’s time to flex your management muscle. This means you have to exhibit leadership, not dictatorship or being a push-over. Choose wisely because your approach can make all the difference in terms of the culture of your real estate office and the satisfaction of your employees.

What makes a great manager?

Yes, yes, I get it! No one wants to be the bearer of bad news, nor do they want to be the truant officer correcting behaviour at every turn. Essentially however, employees do need some hand holding, at least at first, and direction in order to make you and your brand successful.

Balance is the key to great management. You don’t want to be a micro-manager, a dictator or a push-over. Leaders must be able to relate to the team and earn their respect and loyalty. Leaders show and pave the path by rolling their sleeves up and getting dirty, fostering a company culture that values talent in others. It’s a matter of mindset. Part of being a leader includes making choices so that tasks that are not in line with your mission as a realtor, such as making more sales and closing more deals, will be given to others to handle.

Recognizing talent, assessing it and then molding your real estate assistants according to your team need is the way to go.  Just because they might come with the badges of honour and have accolades from your competitor TREB teams, doesn’t mean that they are necessarily a good fit for your company culture. You have to shape their careers how you want and groom them how you want your company to be. Everything from social media image to how you want your assistant answering the phones is part of the package you need to create.

At the end of the day, you have to keep this in mind: An employee that is treated well, and not only in compensation but emotionally as well, translates into a strong support pillar to your real estate business.

Easy ways to make a leadership effort

  • Make it a point to have 15 minute pow-wows once a day to make sure everyone is on task and knows what’s expected of them. Take your cues from body language as much as things your assistant and the others say to see where everyone stands.
  • Host a team meeting once a week to update them on what’s going on: staff who feel included in the decisions will feel more committed to the everyday.
  • Engage in a quarterly review and definitely make sure to ask for feedback from your employees. They are the parts in your engine that can take your real estate business from being Honda to a Rolls Royce. Take care of them and they will take care of you!

So you really have to ask yourself: will hiring a great employee be the answer to your business growth stagnation or is it also that you have to work on yourself as a leader? Think about it and when you’re ready to make that first or next great hire, think about AGENTC.