When Should You Hire A Buyer Agent?

The second thing that sucks the most, time and life and energy and will to live out of your being, in my humble opinion. And some of you may like working with buyers, but it's not going to help you really move the needle on the time, money, freedom. So buyers is the next thing. I mean, you're still working on systems. So this isn't a call about what systems to work on at what point, but it's about, you know, when do you flip the switch to giving up buyers. And for me, the year that I did 120 sides. So that was that. My third full year I did 118 sides. So I went from 44 to 58 to 118. That year I did 118 sides. Was the. I did, I think I did 66 of them and it was 33 buyers, 33 listings. But most of my buyers, I had my buyer agents act as showing agents. So I got out of a lot of those evening and weekend showings and not having to give most of the commission away. So I think here too, I think there's a. This, this is if you don't have enough income of your own to bring in. You know, if you're only doing 20 deals a year and 12 of them were buyers and you hire a buyer agent, you give them all your buy buyers, you're not going to have enough income to survive because you're trying to coach that buyer agent and you're giving them more than half of your GCI and you just don't have the bandwidth to do it. So you've really got to focus on getting your personal production up to a point. So it was the end of 2009 that I hired Kris and that was the year that I did 50 something sides personally. So you and one really good assistant can do anywhere from 50 to 100 sides. And I think there's, it doesn't mean that's the equation all the time to bring a buyer agent on, but you've got to get the right assistant in place to build, help you build out a platform before you hire a buyer agent. So you've got systems that are sort of helping you more so than throwing people at it. Because if half your business on, let's say it's 50 sides and let's say it's average $10,000 commission check to keep it simple. Or let's say it's 6,000, it's over 200,000 price point market. So 6,000 times 50 deals is 300 GCI. And if half of them were buyers, it's 150. If you give half of that away, it's 75. Your 300 goes to 225. So 25% of your total GCI goes out the window. Then you have an assistant and then advertising. And so your total income goes down considerably. And it may be the right call. I'm not saying it's not the right call. And we'll talk about buyer agent compensation, but you have to focus on individual production before you give up everything. If you're personally heavy on buyers and you get out of working with buyers, you better make sure that you're going to replace that income with whatever activities you're doing. If you're recruiting, you have to make sure you're bringing in another buyer agent to replace and get them ramped up and scaled. And so it's really not until you have a few buyer agents that you're able to exit buyers, truly. So I just want to make that point here. You want to hire a buyer agent as soon as your individual production reaches a point where you can't do anymore and you're working, you know, 45, 50, 60 hours a week, but you're not doing any of the admin tasks and systems have been built and then you're hiring a buyer agent or three or four and getting them up and running. And then you're sort of falling forward fast on the hiring process and identifying talent process. And quick note on that. It's a separate topic completely, but you're going to have to probably get 100 resumes in to find 10 to 20 people that are worth talking to. Find, you know, four to five that are worth interviewing to hire a couple buyer agents. So it's not a, you know, I talked to four people and I hired one of them. This is a Internet lead gen type pipeline. You know, you generate 100 Internet leads and you're likely to close one to three if you're really good.