A real estate team owner argues most teams are unprofitable once you remove the owner's personal deals. He built his team around a 30%+ profit target without doing any deals himself, and says team owners should focus on what agents actually take home, not commission splits.
Run at 30+% profit without a single deal done by the owner.
Around 2009–2012.
What I see with traditional real estate teams is that they, the team owner just got busy enough where they just kind of threw some agents into the mix, like here, work these extra leads. But there never was a concerted focus or effort or a vision around. Like, what if you started out your real estate team building journey with a very specific outcome. Like this thing has to run at 30 plus percent profit without a single deal done by me, what would it have to look like? And that's it. Like literally exactly the question I posed to myself when I started building my team. You know, I didn't want to be like the other teams of the day. And this is back in, you know, 2009, 10, 11, 12, when I was building my team, I saw team leaders where they were selling 300 homes, but the team owners themselves were selling 75, 80 homes a year. And you know, when you really started to scratch a little bit at the surface, you would see that it was not a profitable model if you stripped out the production from the, from the team, from the team owner. So the challenge becomes, is that team owners think they're competing with a brokerage option for their agents, right? So like, why would an agent come on my team, you know, and give me 60% of their commission check when they can, you know, keep 80% of their check by going with another brokerage? And, and so just being clear as a team owner, like what your true value proposition is and be able to articulate it and focus on, you know, the amount of hours your agents put in and the money they take home. Splits are kind of a stupid thing that we came up as an industry, which I don't think they serve anything really well. They've definitely been the source of much wailing and gnashing of teeth, let's put it that way.
