Managing Your Real Estate Team During an Economic Shift

As a real estate team leader, you know, during a shift or a crisis, how can you be certain you're doing the right things at the right time? So that instead of just sort of surviving a shift or a crisis, you're absolutely going to crush it. You know, when I got into real estate, it was just before the Great Recession and the most devastating housing crisis that our country has ever seen. So I feel like, not in a boastful kind of way, I feel like I'm really well qualified to kind of go through the things I did right and the things I did wrong. During that time. I went from, you know, solo agent doing 27 sides in 10 months to 44 sides, my first full year in real estate to 2012, sort of when the end of that sort of Great recession and the housing market finally sort of picked itself back up. That year we did 248 transactions. I did a single transaction that year. And so I had to build the business. It was my desire to build the business in a way where I wasn't going to be the one doing the job of a real estate agent. And all of those years were really tough. We went on to sell over 400 homes in a single year where I only worked one day a week in 2014. So how can you go from where you are right now? Maybe you're running a small team or a larger team and things are really hard. You don't have the right cadence in place. You're not really sure what to do. Stick around to the end of the video. I've got a 15 minute training. It's free. It'll show you how to predictably build a real estate business that gives you time and money, freedom. If you like the video, please give me a thumbs up. Hit the like button. Subscribe. Subscribe to the channel. Turn on your notifications. You're the first to know about new videos and make sure you leave comments as well. All right, so let's talk about, you know, what, what do I mean when I talk about a crisis or a shift and I don't only think of, like the major events, you know, so 2008 was the onset of the housing crisis and the Great Recession. It was awful. It was really hard. I started in real estate at that time, so I feel like, you know, that's probably the best training I ever could have gotten as a business builder in the real estate industry. Now we're in a global pandemic and you might be watching this video 10 years from now. We're going into another crisis. Or another shift. I also view like even going from a buyer's market to a seller's market, you know, how do you need to think about your business differently? How do you need to look at your business differently so that you can thrive while other folks are barely surviving? You know, there are way too many real estate agents. It is the easiest profession to get into. There's no standards to maintain your license. And so in my market right now, there's 17,000 agents. That is up from 5,000 agents just a handful of years ago. Do we need 17,000 agents in my market? We do not. We need probably three to four thousand. If my dreams were to come true, there would be a minimum requirement for production and we would literally eliminate probably 14,000 of our 17,000. If we just said one home a month, you need to sell to be in our profession. Different video. I won't go on that soapbox right now. So I want to dig into and get serious about, you know, if you're leading even one person or five people or 10 people, you know, what do you need to do to make sure you're leading someone else through this shift? And it could be even some of these things are going to be relevant to, to leading your family and your friends through this shift. The first thing is you must eliminate the noise, the influences that aren't going to help you. And these are things that are mesh with your mindset. This is social media. This is the 24 hour news cycle. You need to first eliminate those things. It's going to be really hard to stay positive if you're being bombarded with news stories. The saying in the news industry, if it bleeds, it leads. And so it's always going to be anything that's a negative spin on anything that's going on. So that's the first thing that you need to guard yourself from those things so you can stand in, you know, stand up as a leader and a manager and a coach in your team and coach others as well. The second thing is a cadence. You need to lean into your cadence, your personal cadence as the team leader, and also make sure your team members have a cadence that they're following. This is straight up basic time management, daily planning, starting the day right, taking care of yourself, making sure that your routines stay consistent and there's no rocket science around it. The commitment has to be that you're going to lead by example and they're going to do it as well. And also back up one step. You need to explain to them that if they're in social media and they're in the news cycle, they need to be out of that news cycle as well. They need to guard their heart, guard their mind against those influences. And then they need to commit to doing the same thing with their calendars that you're doing with your calendar. It's not okay for you to show up late to the office and leave early if you're impressing upon them that you need to double down on lead generation. Right. You need to lead by example through times of crisis. The last thing I would really have you consider is that most folks sort of contract and they do let uncertainty and fear and anxiety get the best of them. I would lean in even more to your planning process. You know, when I was in those early days and it was bleak, I'd never hired anybody before, I never sold anything before. It wasn't like I had like this track record of business building behind me where I could just magically step into real estate. And all of a sudden I would have a, you know, a business that sold 300 plus homes per year and I could, you know, take eight to 10 weeks of vacation. It wasn't like that. I had a planning process where I looked at where I was and I'm like, I don't like this. I knew where I wanted to get to and I was willing to sort of break down that plan. At the time it was a 3, 5, 10. So I had a 3 year vision, a 5 year, even farther out vision than a 10 year, sort of like the top of the mountain. And that was in 2009. I look at that plan today and everything in that plan I've achieved. And that plan was written in the midst of the worst housing market we've ever seen. So I just decided that I wasn't willing to accept what the industry handed me. There were agents in my market that were running scared and I had really clear plans around what I wanted to achieve and the way I was willing to show up in my business as a leader that people will be attracted to so that they could be part of something special. And I could take on the risk of, you know, just running the business and some of the overhead and the responsibility of coaching and leading others. So when you look at your business where it is today, and you know, maybe you feel like you're not in a crisis or there's not an economic shift, it is coming. I promise you it's coming. And so you need to take inventory of where you're at today. Specifically where are you spending, you know, time and are you guarding your heart and mind against the things that aren't going to, you know, lead to anything good in your life? Or is your family member doing the same thing? That's the other aspect of this too, you know, are they really sort of guarding their mind? I drive my wife crazy. She likes to watch the news. I'm like, we're not doing it, like as a family. I'm not going to have it. We're just not going to watch the news because there's nothing good in it. She's like, well, we have to be informed. I'm like, why do we have to be informed? I don't know, we just have to be. I'm like, we don't have to be. I promise you I'll take on the risk of generating opportunity for this family so that we don't have to be in that just whirlwind of stuff. And so as you look at where you are today and where you know, you know what's possible, where are you lacking, you know, where are you maybe sort of backing off into what your potential might be, where you just know with a little bit of confidence, maybe a little bit of margin in your day to get your confidence back. And I'll leave you with this one thought. You know, my journey wasn't a straight line. It wasn't the easiest thing I've ever done. I failed more than most people I know. The thing I was willing to do was after every failure, and there were many, I was willing to get back up and learn from it. And so when you look at when you failed in business, does a failure, does it represent like a roadblock or does it represent a speed bump? For me, it was a speed bump. Maybe I had to slow down a little bit for the speed bump so I didn't wreck the whole car. And there were times, honestly, where I feel like I wrecked the whole car. How do you view it? Like, are you just going to stop your progress and sort of shrink into what's comfortable? Are you going to break through, through, into the uncomfortable? I mentioned earlier on that I put together a training. It's a 15 minute training where I go through exactly what I did in my business to go from agent struggling to being able to look back on my journey and create a really concise training on the steps I had to take to go from where I was to where I am today. It's predictablerealestatesuccess.com you can click on the link below. And if you like the video, please give me a thumbs up, hit the like button. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications so you'll be the first to know about a future future video. And make sure you leave comments so we can go back and forth and challenge each other. I enjoy the dialogue and I enjoy being challenged. Right. I haven't figured anything out. This is just my take on business and I'm here to serve you and challenge you to become a better version of yourself in business, in life. We will see you on the next video.