033 The Past, Present, and Future of Real Estate Teams

As we've heard on episodes of Real Estate Team Os with guests like Tom Ferry and Chris Heller, the roots of the team model in the real estate industry are more than 30 years deep, but we're still just getting going. The guests in this episode are among the pioneers of a new way to serve buyers and sellers and support agents. A way that is fundamentally different than the traditional brokerage model.

If you're an individual agent, you can only service at a proper level, maybe one or two clients like that at a time, and that's not scalable without a team.

The only reason you should ever start a team is because you have more business than you can handle and the consumer experience is suffering.

It was too much for me to handle. So at that time I'm like, okay, let me just go ahead and now's the time for me to actually build a team.

We started as a team bridge before the word team bridge was even a thing in the industry.

80% of the agents out there become more productive once they join a team.

Agents shouldn't be doing all the things agents are doing.

The future of our industry depends on an operation that has the flexibility to offer a great human experience to the agent.

In this special episode of Real Estate Team Os, we explore this idea through the experiences and insights of seven different team leaders and brokerage owners from New Jersey, Virginia and Florida over to Colorado, Arizona and Texas region. We all connected in person at the Pendry in San Diego and each guest answered these three questions. When did the team business model come onto your radar? Why did you commit to it? What benefits did you see? And what is the future of the team model in the real estate industry? All that and more right now on Real Estate Team os. No matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably.

With an operating system.

Welcome to Team os, your guide to starting, growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte. First up, we've got Micah Harper, CEO of Exquisite Properties, an independent Team Ridge in San Antonio, Texas. In addressing the past, present and future of the team model, he shares very specifically the advantages a real estate agent gets when he or she is supported by a team operating system. Notice too, something that you'll hear often on Real Estate Team os. A top performing agent should shouldn't necessarily start a team. Here's Micah. Past, present, future of the team model. Like, when did the idea of a real estate team occur to you? Was that like a decade ago? Was that two decades ago? Was it last, you know, several. A few years ago. When did it make sense for you in the, in the course of your business? And where do you think the team model is going? High level.

Interestingly, like it was at a Zillow summit that I became even aware of the team model and aware of like just the bigger ecosystem in general. So Zillow had a summit in San Antonio and so just talking to people there and meeting. I'd never met Levi. We're in the same market. We had never met, we'd never done a deal like, you know, so it just opened my eyes to how much bigger the whole thing was because up until that point I was pretty much just an individual, individual performer and had a couple of, couple of agents at a little bit, little office and had never thought about growing it into what it is today. So yeah, it was 2016.

What was interesting to you about it and different from the way you had seen the business before?

I think as an individual performer agent, right, you're, you're focused on doing your business. You're focused on doing as much as you can as well as you can. And when I saw the team model, when I realized, like, agents shouldn't be doing all the things agents are doing, right? Agents aren't the best person at necessarily at details, you know, at follow up. Like, agents are people people, right? Agents need to be in front of people. Half, half therapist, half negotiator, half reassuring people they could do this. And so having done it for a long time and having sort of hit a max limit for myself as an individual and looking at where does my future go? Like, do I do this forever until I just fall over one day or, you know, what is, what does that look like? The team model made a lot of sense because I thought, you know, I can offload the things that I shouldn't be doing, I can offload the things that I'm not good at doing. I can find people that are better than me at doing those things and I can free myself up to do the part that I really like and that I'm really good at. And I thought, you know, if, if I'm producing at the level that I am and that's what I'm looking for, then that has to be what other high producing agents are looking for. And so I started building out that, like, what does that look like? What kind of support? What can I afford now, right? And how do I grow? And then what can I afford then? And eventually I'll have a group of agents that have Services that they could not afford on their own. Right. Because all of the support and everything of a team is very expensive. And so as an individual agent, to have a transaction coordinator, listing coordinator, a past client coordinator, all the technology that you need. Right. And constantly be able to keep up on all those things, plus go out and sell a bunch of houses or buildings or whatever, it's. It's too much.

Yeah. And part of that cost is the opportunity cost. I mean, I think it's a unicorn agent who has the passion and interest to do all of those things well. And I think it's a rare brokerage anymore that's providing that level of service. It's probably even close.

I agree. I don't know that. I don't know that the brokerage model has much value to provide anymore. Right. I don't know that the consumer is that brand conscious when it comes to their agent. I think they want the person they trust, the person they like spending time with, the person whose advice they're going to take. And I think a team, because it can aggregate the resources of a bunch of top producing agents, can afford everything that they need. And I don't know that the brokerage adds a lot, which is why. Why I think you're seeing these team bridge models, which is what we are. Right. We're an independent brokerage, but we're organized completely as a team. And because we can provide the resources that we need and we don't need anything from a national brokerage and a lot they could provide to us.

Sure. Is this the way it's going? Like what, what are the limitations or like what do you think is the future of this model? Do you think more agents will be joining teams and the right types of folks will be starting teams and filling in the staff positions and things? Is this where it's going or is this like a. This is going to be in the mix?

No, it's 100% where it's going. Yeah. Because real estate agents are not generally good business people. Right. And. And just because someone's a top producing agent does not mean they should have a team or run a team or even that they want to. You know, like, I have a. I can think of an agent I have. Her name is Marie and she's a top producer. She'll sell 80 homes, more than 80 homes this year. And we've tried many times to move her into mentorship, to move her into leadership. And she doesn't say it outright, but her actions say, I don't want this, I don't want this. I'm not good at this. I'm not focused. I'm not passionate about this. Like, just leave me alone, let me do what I do. And I have my other things in my life that I'm interested in. And so I think you're going to find that those people that run teams are business people, right? They're not even necessarily great Realtors. They're people that put systems in place, are people that can support Realtors. But I think that the future of teams is how does a Realtor retire, right? We're all great at like, take somebody who's never been in real estate before, train them up, give them leads, show them a business plan, help them make money. But like, but then what, right? And that's the question that's going to get answered in the next couple of years is then what do you, can you build a company, a team and sell it? Can an agent get leverage and have what we call showing partners in our organization do the bulk of the business for them? And can they stay a Realtor until they're in their 70s? Do they buy investment property? And that's like, you know, what happens for a Realtor after they're successful. And I don't know that there's ever been a great answer to that question. And so I think teams are struggling with that now. How do you take a person who's at the peak of their career and keep them motivated, keep them fulfilled, keep them interested and answer that question for them of what comes next?

Again, leadership isn't for everyone and Micah's questions there at the end are yet to be answered. If you have any thoughts about the salability or enterprise value of a real estate team, as we move into the future, can we move this asset onto someone else once we choose to retire, email me. Ethan E T H A nollowupboss.com, i'd love to hear from you on that topic or any other related to this show. And off the top of that response, Micah referred to Levi. That's Levi Rogers, founder and owner of an independent team Bridge in his market, San Antonio, Texas. Levi was our guest back on episode 13 of this podcast, an episode titled More Planning for Better Execution. Be sure to check that one out in YouTube in your preferred podcast app, or@realestateteamos.com Next up, we have Dave Ness, the founder of Thrive Real Estate in Denver, Colorado. He began this organization as a Team Ridge from day one, so he'll share a little bit of that story and notice specifically how prescriptive they are in order to get agents productive Here. Here's Dave Nass.

So we're homegrown from day one as a team. So there was never like a what year? An epiphany. 2013, 14. Right around in there. Yeah. The observation at that point was I knew I wanted to start an organization that had a really, really, really thick, strong culture, which of course gets thrown around a lot in our industry, the word culture. But what that meant to me was everyone seeing the world the same way, everyone using the same vocabulary, everybody thinking the same way, driving towards the same goal. And so when we started, it was very much from a perspective of this has to be a very tight knit, tight relational capital group. And then of course, the challenge of that is taking something so special and so strong and scaling it to the degree that we want. But yeah, we started as a team bridge before the word team bridge was even a thing in the industry. So I didn't know we were doing that, but that's ultimately what we did.

That's cool. So it was. I mean, your vision is very, very clear. How do you balance individual goals? Because, you know, each producer has goals and you probably help goal setting, plan and all that.

Yeah.

Versus the unified goal. Like, do people. Do your team members, specifically the sales producers, how do they balance their interest in the collective as well as themselves? Obviously, they roll up into the collective, but, like, how. Like from a. We're doing it, everyone.

Yeah. Like, how does it actually work? And how do you balance that? Yeah, it's an interesting topic because of course, in real estate, everyone's a 1099 independent contractor, or most are. And so most people get into real estate because they want to chart their own course, have more control over their calendar, you know, have. Have more autonomy, which, of course you get into real estate. And whether you're on a team or not, you quickly realize you're not getting any of that.

Yeah.

All of your clients are your bosses, and they're gonna tell you exactly what to do. But we're actually pretty prescriptive, to answer your question, we're pretty prescriptive upfront. So for the first three years, the agents that, that we're bringing on to our team and in our company don't have to worry about goal setting because we're. We're going to hand it to them.

Yeah.

So in our. In our world, the Target for year one is 12 transactions, and then the target in year two is 18, and then the target in year three is 24. And then beyond that you do you. So if you want to maintain 24, great. If you want to scale up and go all the way to 80, and we've had some agents do that, that's fantastic. Or if you want to kind of pull back a little bit and maybe go on cruise control at around 10, 12 transactions a year, that's okay, too. When we get into the 6, 7, 8 transactions per year mode, we're just not interested in doing that.

Yeah.

No matter what year it is, if you're first year or if you're 10 years. Because as a team, once again, it becomes about identity and about culture. We're going out into the world and in our language, calling ourselves real estate advisors, which to us actually means something very big, which is to be the best in the industry. And I don't think that there's anything that any human being can do six or seven times a year and be the best at it. It's just not possible. And so for those reasons, we're pretty prescriptive with our goal setting up front. And then in tenure, agents will earn the right to kind of set their own chart, but we still have a little bit of a minimum there.

That's a theme we hear all the time in these episodes On Real Estate Team os. The team uniquely puts agents in their position to spend more time doing what they do best, connecting, communicating and closing by supporting them with people, processes and technology. Something a team is uniquely prepared to do. Next up, you'll hear from Mercy Lugo Struther, CEO and principal broker at Casal's Realtors in Northern Virginia. She shares her path into the team model, an awakening of possibilities and visions of scalability. She also cites original research from SISU and Workman Success Solutions titled the Unexpected Impact of Teams in Real Estate. I've got that original research linked up right down below in the description. Whether you're watching YouTube, it's down there. Just click. See more if you're listening in your podcast app, it's down below in the description of this episode. And if you're watching or listening@realestateteamos.com, it's also right down below. So be sure to check out that research. It's well worth your time. Here's a go at the past, present and future of the team model. With Mercy.

Like everybody else, it started as being something casual. Let's get together and let's make things happen. And people were calling that a team. But about five years ago, it was more of like an awakening of possibilities. When you start coaching, you start listening. We were still a flex team as well. You begin peeling that onion. There's so much more that can be done. I think that has basically transformed from just giving you an awakening of possibility to where we're heading, which is just a game changer because we as Realtors need to be able to operate, run businesses, run business in a very efficient way so that we can serve our clients. And by serving our clients, we make money. Right? So it is a game changer. It's the weight of the future. And if you, I mean, there's a research, you may have, may have read the research. It was called the Unexpected Expected Impact of Teams in Real Estate. And they found two very interesting things of the teams of the future. Number one, 80% of the agents out there become more productive once they join a team, and 81% are more likely to stay within the industry rather than leave the industry because they don't know where to go, where the next lead is going to come from. So definitely a game changer for everyone.

I will dig that up and I will link that up down below. Whether you're watching in YouTube or you're listening in your podcast app, just one more follow up here. Like what was going on back then? Like when your world got opened up and you realized that there were layers to this thing and where are you today? What was going on for you then and how did that change what you were doing such that your business looks like and feels like and is operating as it is today. See what your contacts are doing on Zillow. Monday, December 8th join follow up Boss for a sneak peek webinar where you'll be among the first to see how to get Zillow searching, browsing and saving insights for the contacts in your database directly inside. Follow Up Boss so when a past client of yours gets that late night and extra bedroom would be really great right now. Kind of feeling you'll know before anyone else who's showing high intent to buy or sell insights about what's happening right now so you can deliver a personalized touch touch at scale. See what your contacts are doing on Zillow Monday, December 8th at 1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific. Learn more and sign up through the link in the description below. You're in your podcast app. Check out the description of this episode right down below. It's the first line and the first link. Now back to the conversation.

It's a little bit on the personal side because when I started real estate, I started as a area developer, so I never imagined That I was actually going to become a realtor because the true passion, like the purpose in life was just waking up every day and thinking how I can help an agent run a business, you know, effectively. So that's, you know, pretty much how, you know, everything got started and evolved. It was sort of like a purpose of like, okay, yeah, I want to do this. I want to be able to help other people. And it's started evolving to where we are now, where we basically have to. We are a small team, a small boutique team that operates like a small company because there's so many benefits to doing so. If we want to effectively serve our clients, there's no other way that I will do it from a benefit perspective. You know, not only you are operating a business the way that it should be operating, right? You have accountability, you have your numbers. You have very clear roles and responsibilities. There is collaboration among the team members. Everyone is an expert in an area. But when you put all of those great minds and ideas together, wow, right? You get something so much better to be able to serve the client support. There was something else that I think that was why I also made the switch. I think that one of the reasons why realtors want to enter the real estate industry is because of the freedom that it provides. But I believe that that freedom is what really gets them into trouble. By being able to entering or being part of a culture or a cadence that is going to help them better manage their time as well and really run the little businesses within a business, the right way is just, you know, a huge, huge opportunity for a lot of people out there. You know, mentorship opportunities. You know, we do have mentors inside and, you know, scalability of it. Scalability as well. Right. There's like, so many different things that, you know, can be done when you run a business, you know, a business team, instead of just, you know, doing whatever I need to do today to be structured.

Notice that theme of supporting agents that Mercy closed on there. That comes up throughout this episode and many others here on real estate team OS. Next up, we have Abel Gilbert, the founder and CEO of 1Path Realty, an independent team Ridge in Miami, Florida. And he's also featured in his own episode of this show, episode 29. If you want to spend some more time with him here in this clip, he speaks very specifically to the importance of human experience and the way that the team can provide a better human experience for clients, staff and agents alike. He also speaks to the potential for teams of thousands of agents to dominate in the future. Of this industry. Here's Abel Gilbert.

Yeah, it came into my radar pretty much when I became a conscious agent, you know, and I'll tell you a little bit more about that, please. I've been in real estate since 2001 and however many years that is, 23 years. And in my local market, I just didn't have a lot of exposure to greatness. They just, it didn't exist. Or at least the ones that had greatness weren't really willing to share that publicly, right? Until I went to a Zillow premier agent forum in 2017. And, and that's when I became conscious. And I say it like that because I, that's when I was exposed to systems. That's when I was exposed to agents who were accomplishing numbers that I didn't even think were possible. And, and that's when I, that's when the team model was exposed to me, right? And then over time, you know, I think what happens with learning something like the time frame between when you learn something to, to when you actually deploy varies, right? It varies on many factors, mostly the person. It took me a few years to, to get to a place of like, oh, have my team.

Right?

It took me two years exactly to, to be able to get to that point. But ultimately I do believe that the future of our industry depends on an operation that has the flexibility, right? An operation that has the flexibility to offer a great human experience to the agent, to offer a direct impact to our customers that comes from, from happy agents, from agents that are successful, right? Because when you only look at a brokerage or a team or a company based on agent count, then you're really, like you said, you're looking at it from a superficial perspective. It's all about, oh yeah, this is how big I am. But it doesn't really, it doesn't really tell the full story. To me, what tells the full story is how many families do you help? How many people are buying a home through you? How many agents are successful not just through making money, but that have a successful home, right? Because ultimately that is the reason why we do what we do. That is the reason why people buy homes, right? Because they want to be happy, they want to have a happy home. To me, the future of real estate is how can an independent brokerage operate as a team at a high level, at a level of, of having a great culture and at a level of having an optimized per agent productivity where it's not about having, you know, 20,000 agents, but it's about having maybe 2,000 agents that are highly productive, but that are also ambassadors to your brand, that represent, you know, your core values and the reason why you know, you've built what you've built.

To hear more and learn more from Abel Gilbert, be sure to check out episode 29, Culture as the Key to your sustainable success. You can check that out in your preferred podcast app like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can watch it in YouTube or you can watch or listen at realestateteamos.com we publish every episode there audio and video with a short write up and links. Next up we have Becky Garcia. She is the founder and CEO of a 99% female real estate organization in Phoenix. Like a lot of folks, she started her team because she had too many opportunities to manage effectively herself. So she brought people around her. Learn how she transitioned that team through a a major market shift and why. As Abel Gilbert also says, culture is the key to it all. Here's Becky. When did you become aware of the team model? What was interesting about it to you? When and why did you commit to it and where's it going?

Okay, so for me, I would say it came to my attention around 2008 is when it was really going to be a concept for me to like look into and take seriously. We were in an REO market and I was an REO agent at the time and the amount of calls that we were coming in, the sign calls, the interest in our listings, it was too much for me to handle. So at that time I'm like, okay, let me just go ahead and now's the time for me to actually build a team. And so it started with that. So for me it started with an admin, like just adding admin to take over a lot of the paperwork that I could free up my time. And then that only buys you so much time. And then it was like, okay, well now I need to add actually more agents to help me actually take over the buyer side of a lot of the transactions. So for me it grew from admin to sales team and then right now we're at about nine admin and about 30 agents. So that's where it's grown right now for me.

How is the transition out of the REO market into a more normalized market? Like did you, I would assume that you built, obviously in hindsight you built something that could transition, but how was that transition for you as the market shifted based on what you were building early on? Based on those conditions, you, you were able to migrate it into you Know the next reality in your, in your market in Phoenix.

Yeah. So the one thing that I feel I did right during that time was actually keeping track of that, my database and keeping track of everybody that we were actually helping buy, sell homes. So I always try to look at the market, like predict what that market's going to be, the next, what the next market's going to be. So like at the time we were selling a lot of, you know, before Aria, we're selling a lot of homes. From the sale of the homes, I started getting the calls of I can't make my, make my mortgage payments and now what do I do? So it was like, okay, let's figure out the short sale. You know, then it was like, well, these short sales aren't getting approved. So now it's going to go to. They're going to, what's going to happen? Okay, bank owned property. So now let's go to that. So it was always just keeping my eye on what the next, you know, market was going to be. And once it was done with reo, at that time, I remember it just being a lot of new home construction people were buying. So, so I was like, okay, now let's figure out, you know, how that all works. So just being able to see what, predict what the next market was going to be and just making sure I kept in really close contact with everybody who was, you know, buying and selling homes during the REO time. So cool.

And with that in mind, where is it going? Like, not just for you, but in general or both? Where do you think the team model is going? Is it. Because obviously there's a lot of confusion and excitement and hype and promise. It's all true at some level. Is this where the industry is going and if so, to what extent and why?

Yeah, what? We're fine. I think so. Only because we're getting so many inquiries. Like people are saying, how are you growing your team? How are you? Where are you advertising? I'm like, we actually stopped all of our ads for agents because we just found them naturally coming to us. I think right now there's a lot of struggle. A lot of agents are uncertain about where the market is going. So they just see, okay, I need training, I need leadership, I need accountability. All things that we, you know, teams are able to provide to them. You know, they want the backend system built out for them. They don't want to have to do their own transactions and paperwork work. So, you know, for us it's been a natural attraction for agents solo Agents or new agents that are coming in and saying, I don't know what to do. I'm not getting the, you know, one on one guidance that I need from a brokerage. So now the team is, you know, things that people are automatically taking into consideration when either they're first starting or agents that have been in the business and are just struggling a little bit right now with the uncertainty and are coming to a team that has kind of things put together.

So yeah, I hear that story a lot. Like, you know, our primary avatar is this, but we're also taking a lot of agents who've been in the business for two, three, four years, let's say, but they've only been doing two or three or four transactions a year and were able to help them triple or quadruple or quintuple their, their sales because of the systems and the support and the culture.

And I, some people say, well, you only take new agents or experienced agents. I mean, ideally there's pros and cons for both.

Hey, thank you so much for listening to these episodes of Real Estate Team os. If you're like me, you're listening to a podcast conversation and sometimes you have questions or you want to go deeper or it reminds you of something that someone said on the same podcast two or three weeks earlier or two or three months earlier. Good news for you. If you go to realestateteamos.com bot that's B O T, you can tap into the collective wisdom of every single one of our guests. Use text mode to type back and forth and get your questions answered. Get 5 tips to improve your recruiting, for example, or go to voice mode and you can talk to it back and forth, interrupt it, redirect it, ask follow up questions. It's totally free. It's available to you@realestateteamos.com Bot that's realestateteamos.com bot. I know you'll find it just as useful as the rest of this conversation.

I mean, new agents, of course, they don't have the habits, you know, the bad habits set up and you can kind of mold them the way that you want with, you know, agents that maybe have a couple of years experience. That's also a good thing too because they know the struggle, they know how hard it is as a solo agent. So they find they appreciate a little bit more about what the team can provide them. So for me, you know, I like both, you know, any, any of the above, you know, as long as it's a good culture fit, that's most important.

That's exactly what I was going to add.

That's great.

Yes. Culture fit is first and foremost the most important thing. So what I always tell is agents when they're asking, talking to me about, you know, hiring, I said, for me, I would rather take maybe a lower producing agent that is like a perfect culture fit versus a higher, like a very high producing agent, but just is not, you know, a good culture fit for the team. I'll take this all day long over this one. So, yeah, so for me, culture is first and foremost the most important thing.

And how do you vet that out? Is it a feel, is it a how they respond to things? Do you just kind of know it intuitively? What does it mean to find a good fit?

Yeah, so I'm. So for me, there's like core values I think is what's important for a team to establish. What are their core values? And when you're interviewing, asking them, okay, does this person, is this person going to be a team player? Is this person going to be driven? Is this person going to be willing to be held accountable, whatever those core values are for that team? So I look at that. We ask questions that are based around, you know, things like that. And then also we do have them come in and meet the team and like come to one of our team meetings and get an idea of what the vibe is with everybody else. It's there and seeing how they react to other people as well. So I used to have it to where before I had a sales manager, I used to have our team, actually a few of our team members interview, you know, somebody that was going to come on board. Now our sales manager does that. But before I used to have the team actually interview too. So it would help kind of get an idea from both sides what, you know, who they felt would be a good fit or not. A couple of the questions I ask myself too is, is this somebody that I would want to hang out with, like after hours? Is this somebody I want to hang out with? Or, you know, I think some people say like the airport, is this somebody I want to be? You have a two hour layover at an airport with? But for me it was always like, is this somebody I want to hang out with after hours? And with the proper training, is this somebody I'm going to trust with my top tier level clients? So I ask myself a couple of questions like that too.

Hey, if you're one of those folks who's listening to Becky Garcia talk about core values and culture and thinking some Version of that sounds soft or not important or not for me, I promise you are making a very big mistake. I've talked with dozens and dozens of top team leaders from across North America and all of the best have documented their core values, made them meaningful, and brought them to life inside their organization and built their culture in part on these core values. It is a critical step if you were to build an organization that's going to last through the ebbs and flows of this industry. Next up, we have Jo Oz, whose team journey started with the question, when do I need an assistant? Currently, it's at a partnership with a great company that allows him to run his New Jersey based real estate team from his home in Orange County, California. Here's Joe.

Yeah, great question. So the team model, I was at Keller Williams and there's a guy named Gary Keller. He wrote a book called the Millionaire Real Estate agent Book. And sure, everyone already knows about it, but in that book it kind of starts to talk about building a business in real estate. And I was at my broker before that, which was ReMax. And at that brokerage, this moment happened in my life when my life was a little unmanageable. No, my business was a man. Yeah, well, it all my business was making my life unmanageable. And what that really looked like was, is I like googled when do you need an assistant? And it was like the top three things. The list was like, is your home life a little unstable? I was carrying around two phones. My wife's like, can you please put the phone down while we're eating dinner?

Right?

So that answer was yes. The next one was, is business falling? Business will be falling through the cracks. And I remember specifically like that moment, there's a piece of paper on my desk and I was, oh, crap, let me call that number. Mary, I met you last week. You're looking to buy a house and blah, blah, blah. And she said, actually that was a month ago. And I found a house. Thanks for nothing. You know, so like I went through this list and I remember saying, I was like, wow, I gotta do something. And so in that book, it kind of talks about hiring an admin first. And that kind of was the start of it. And then I wanted some, I want some of my time back. Then we hire a buyer agent, right? And that's kind of like, I believe that's the way, but that's just the way it went for me. And so that worked out really, really great running that like meg, agent, model. And then I think as business I Mean, my situation's a little different. I think people start teams for. I think people start teams for the wrong reason. I think they start teams because they think they have to. I think they start teams out of ego. I think they start teams for a lot of those reasons. And really, the only reason you should never start a team is because you have more business than you can handle and the consumer experience is suffering, Right. Or if you just get to that point. I mean, I was like a young single agent just turning and burning, very motivated by money, and that's not who I am today, Right? So if you get to the point where, like, you've built a really cool business and you want to scale back a little bit and you want to just some more time, you can buy.

Your time back by having a team.

And having some of your agents handle it.

So I think that's.

That's really the best reason to start a team for me. Now, my real estate team is in New Jersey. I am not in New Jersey. So I live in Orange County, California, where my wife grew up. And it was kind of like the thing we kind of always wanted to do. And I had the golden handcuffs because I was running a really great business in New Jersey, which was a sphere of. Of influence, self like, no, no. Paying for leads business that I built, that I was very proud of. Obviously, very profitable, right? Sitting open houses, client events, shaking hands, kissing babies, going through my school yearbook and calling everybody and getting it back in a relationship with everyone from church and school and work and all these places, and. But there came a time when we wanted to move. Like, we wanted to move back to California, where my wife's from. And we aligned with Zillow, and we're part of the Zillow Flex program. And that became a catalyst for us to recruit when we have. I call it, like, limitless, limitless leads, really. So we have this partnership with Zillow, which is the largest technology platform in the world, where the consumer hangs out on to purchase real estate and search real estate and things like that. And so that actually enabled me to work remote. So now I work remote, and I have a team because that's where my brand is, and I'm just not there. So I have a team to do it. So I bought a lot of my time back by doing that.

The theme behind every team is too many opportunities for one agent to handle efficiently and effectively, whether those are being generated in person or online by you and your team members, or whether they're coming through something like a portal, partnership Our final go here is with Marcus Larrea, who built his team on a portal partnership and immediately realized that to create lead efficiency, they needed to create systems to support that. So be sure to listen for some tips around that and listen to him paint a future of the real estate industry that delivers on the instant gratification that we've all come to expect, that all buyers and sellers have come to expect based on companies like Uber. Here is our final go with Marcus Larrea.

The team model became very evident to me literally probably within two months in the business when I mentioned about swiping my credit card, taking people out, getting them to, you know, to the property, and getting them under contract. That to me lasted like two months and I realized I had a problem and I had to do a drawback and build the systems out. It probably took me about six months to cut back on my spend and then build the systems and then move forward again. But it became very evident to me that I needed to put systems in place again, synonymous with my other business, the medical device manufacturer. And for any business to succeed, no matter what industry, you have to have systems in place. And that was something I saw back in 2016, that very few teams had systems in place. So that's a huge advantage. With my background, I thought that we could get this done. And I discovered an awesome network of people. My coach, John Cheplak, amazing person. And the network of people within real estate that I met and become good friends with a lot of these people that had those systems in place. So we call it R and D, rip off and deploy. And that's what we did at the end of the day. And I had that awesome luxury through coaching with regards to the future of teams. I say this all the time to agents. You know, we're in a society, I call it the Uberization of society. And, you know, it started with Netflix and Blockbuster. You know, most people, I think everyone knows the case study of that at this point where Netflix came along and Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy them out and they thought they weren't a threat. So Netflix ended up continuing on with their business model of dvd. To your door in two days, you open your mailbox and your DVD would be there. That now has evolved to, you want to watch a movie, you pick up your cell phone and press a button, and your kids are entertained. You're entertained. It's instant gratification. With Uber, you order an Uber. If the Uber's 30 minutes away, you're going to cancel the Uber ride and try to find one that's closer with your groceries. You know there's apps out there where your groceries will show up to your door. You shipped all the time at home and you know they're at our door in an hour or two. So it's all about instant gratification. And in the real estate space, you know, Zillow's done a great job of that. Realtor.com has done a great job of that. There's a lot of big portals out there that that's their main goal. How fast can you get to the customer within a local level? If you're an individual agent, you can only service at a proper level, maybe one or two clients like that at a time. And that's not scalable without a team. So that's the future of this business. And it's been very evident. If you look at the team production at a national level versus individual agent production international level, they're completely opposite ends of the spectrum. Individual agent production is declining massively and team production is increasing at a massive rate. So that's only going to continue to get further and further apart with team production versus individual production.

Hey, if you want to hear Marcus share three specific times when growth didn't look or feel like growth where he had to take a step back with his team before taking any steps forward, be sure to check out our full conversation with Marcus from which that clip was pulled. Episode 31 of Real Estate Team OS. Thanks to Marcus and to all of our guests in this episode and thank you for watching or listening. If you want to hear more from all seven of these folks, be sure to check out episode 35 where we break down the real estate team OS, the team operating system, the people, processes and technology that we could not build these scaled organizations without. Again, that's episode 35 with all seven of these excellent team leaders and brokerage owners. Thanks again for watching and listening. If you want to see or hear more, be sure to check out YouTube.com ealestateteamos be sure to check out Real Estate Team OS in Apple Podcasts or Spotify and check out any episode anytime you can watch or listen there and read all the notes and get links to all of these people. Reach out and connect with them@realestateteamos.com and if you want email, exclusive insights and subscriber only episodes go to realestateteamos.com subscribe thanks again for watching or listening. I'm your host Ethan Butte. Hope you have a great rest of your day. Thanks for checking out this episode of teamos get quick insights all the time by checking out real estate team os.

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