A practitioner’s talk (YouTube, Sept 7, 2021) describing the speaker’s transition from hands-on real estate agent to manager/operations leader. The speaker recounts hiring an administrator (2008) and a buyer agent (2009), building repeatable systems for marketing, listings, closings, and buyer workflows, and shifting from doing tasks personally to designing and delegating systems.
2008 was my first full year. I sold 44 homes in 2008. Early that year, I hired my first administrator. And she was responsible for, generally speaking, well, four areas. Marketing coordination, listing coordination, closing coordination. And she did a lot of running type activities for me. So she was a courier and a runner and, you know, ran signs and picked up lockboxes and tenant closings and getting checks from here to there and all of that stuff. And so my role, because I was harnessing this inner manager in me, was for marketing coordination. I would build the system, our clients for life system, you know, where she could come in and she could send out the postcards, or she can send an email to the database, or she could take a video that I shot and get it out to our database, or she could, you know, whatever. All the stuff we do, right? So I built the system and then she coordinated the system. Listing coordination. I gave some examples there. But closing coordination, before I had administrator, I was holding, you know, bringing these files with me everywhere. And I was involved in repairs and inspections and all of that stuff. Right. That's not. It's critically important work, right? Mission critical to get from contract to closing. There's really nothing more. Well, I mean, there are things that are more important, but you don't need to be the one doing it, right? You need to design the system of how you want it done. And then there may be exceptions. Maybe 80% of the time a licensed administrator can run with that system. Maybe 20% of the time, the producing agent gets pulled in. Right? So it's this mindset. And then. So that was my first year when I was stepping out of me personally doing things. The next year, 2009, we did 58 transactions. I did like 95% of them. I hired my first buyer agent. And so in order to hire a buyer agent and get out of buyers, which took me a year or so after that, I exited buyers. I had to build the system to work with buyers. So this is how you set the appointment. This is what you say to set the appointment. This is how you follow up once the appointment sets, so you increase your show rate. When you meet with somebody, this is what you say to get them to be okay with you presenting your services to them. And this is the buyer loyalty agreement and the buyer packet you use to get them to sign up to work with you before you show them a house. Right. And this is how you show houses. And this is how we put the showing packet. We had a cover page and the MLS sheets. And this is the system and the page that they use when they leave the house and they critique what they liked about the house and what they did. And when you write an offer, this is our offer summary sheet, and you fill in the blanks. And all of that was a system. I did it first, then we did it together, and then they ultimately did it. And so you have to think about all of this.
