048 Real Estate Teams by the Numbers with Andrew Flachner

How does your cost per lead compare to other teams your size? How do your lead sources line up with those of your peers and your competitors? How do the referral fees that you're paying out compare to what the market is paying at large? Roles, compensation, org structure, database size. If you're wondering where you line up against other teams, you're in the right place because we're talking in this episode.

About the Teams Report which provides essential.

Benchmarks for real estate teams.

With us today is Andrew Flackner, the.

Co founder and president of Real Scout, the team that pioneered this report along with the Tom ferry organization and T360.

And of course supported by dozens of.

Other brands, brokerages, tech companies. You'll learn many of them here in this episode. And we walk through four categories of key takeaways from the team's report. Learn about the level of optimism among real estate teams about the 12 months ahead in terms of revenue growth, recruiting and customer acquisition.

Learn about team size and structure, including non agent roles.

Learn about the differences between large teams and small teams in terms of cost per lead, referral fees and compensation. You'll also learn about the biggest opportunity in the year ahead for teams of all sizes according to those teams themselves. It's all right now with me and Andrew Flackner talking about the team's report 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 a real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte.

Andrew, I love this Teams Report project that you've put together. I thank you so much for bringing it to the show. Always great to spend time with you in conversation. Welcome to Real Estate Team os.

Thank you. Good to be here.

You have undertaken what I think is. I'll get your take on it in a minute. A first of its kind dive into real estate teams. Benchmarks for team size, org structure, roles, compensation by role, gci, growth expectations, tech budget, lead gen and distribution, cost per lead, referral fees, database size, SOI and nurturing and a whole lot more. Would you call it first of its kind?

Yeah, I think so. There hasn't been a report that has been this robust and had a sample size this large as far as I know.

Cool. Well, we're gonna dive into some of the initial findings. We'll dive into what it is, why you like, why you, why Real Scout, why the folks that you brought together to put this Thing together, How did it together, what can agents and team leaders learn from it? Brokerage owners as well, why they should go fill it out, where to go fill it out. But I am going to start with my standard opener, Andrew, which is what is a must have characteristic of a high performing team.

I think a high performance team needs to be focused on data. And whereas teams used to be a little less sophisticated, usually they were kind of mom and pop operations. Today we're finding that the teams that are really growing quickly are the ones that have access to the data. And I have the infrastructure to act on that data.

Yeah.

I would also add the data literacy. I mean, I think it comes natural to some people. Some people have had formal or informal kind of training around it. But I also sometimes worry about data in the hands of someone who's not particularly data literate and perhaps like overreacting or misreading or whatever.

Yeah, I mean, you don't want to be data rich and insight poor. Right. So you need that translation layer if it's you or somebody in your team or someone you trust or, or some expert in the industry that you look up to. But it's really critical, especially as so much is changing in the industry, that you're able to navigate this not only on instinct, but using data to make decisions.

Yeah, I think when most people hear data in this context, I know I did initially, but I always catch myself. We think about quantitative data like things gathered, measured, flowed between systems, put into nice dashboards or reports and presented that way. But qualitative data has a role to play too. And I feel like maybe a really experienced agent or team leader or brokerage owner may have really good, a good handle on. Even if they don't think about it intentionally this way. Gathering and using qualitative data stories that they're hearing, things that they experience themselves, things they're hearing from their peers, things they're hearing from agents, et cetera. But the quantitative side is probably the big missing piece. Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, I think qualitative is pretty important as well. And so there's plenty of opportunities throughout a transaction life cycle to gather data about your process and how clients are responding. So it's one thing to send out a request for somebody to write you a glowing review. It's another thing for you to meet with a past client or a client who's about to close the transaction and ask the tough questions, like, what do I need to do to improve? Like what was the least enjoyable or the most rough part of this process and that's going to help you improve.

Or even taking all of your customer reviews and running them through a little AI tool and identifying themes.

I think that's one option. But remember that a lot of times when you're requesting reviews, you've already established a relationship with your client, they are trying to help you and help your business. And so oftentimes those are going to be sugar coated. And then back to your question about quantitative. I think that it is important to get data from a lot larger sample size. Right. So there's nothing wrong with asking a peer or a friend or even a competitor. But I think better than that might be a mastermind where you're sitting around the table where 15 or 20 of your peers can contribute ideas and weigh in on your process. And then there's another use case where, you know, hey, I want to learn from hundreds of agents and see, you know, how hundreds of team leaders are developing their business.

Yeah. So let's dive into some of the data that you've collected in the teams report. Theteamsreport.com, we'll probably say that a couple of times if you want to go a, get the preview and or B, more importantly, go ahead and fill out the survey and you'll get a much better sense of what it is here through the conversation because that is the only way that you get the full complete report. It's by and for the community. And so if you want full access to all of the information, we're just going to kind of COVID over some of the main ideas here in this conversation. But to get it going in that direction, one of the things you asked about was optimism about the year ahead. Here's we record this and release this at the end of 2024. Looking forward to the year ahead, nearly quarters of teams expect 10% or greater revenue growth next year. Talk about the optimism that you saw with regard to revenue growth.

Yeah. So let's talk about optimism. Let's talk about how team leads are responding to everything that's happening in the industry. It's true. 75% of the respondents to the survey said that they will see a 10% year over year growth or greater. And only 2 1/2% of team leads said they expect negative growth. And I think there's a few reasons for this. I mean, one kind of funny way to position this is that it can only go uphill from here. Right. Because between July and August, existing home sales fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of less than 4 million that's down from a peak of 6.1 million in 2021. So it can really only go up from here is, I think, a lot of the sentiments here. But I just heard a stat the other day from keeping current Matters saying that, you know, home sales will grow 20% in 2025. So I think that growth is on a lot of people's minds and obviously a welcome change to the current real estate environment. But even when it comes to things like the election, which is now behind us, NAR settlement, the cost of lead gen and inventory, 70% of the team leads who responded to the survey said that these things will either have a neutral or positive impact on their business. When it comes to interest rates, of course, there's a lot more optimism around that. Even despite the recent uptick after the election, 75% of team respondents said that they think interest rates will have a positive impact over the next 12 months.

Yeah, the only one that stood out to me there is slightly negative is inventory. There's probably just still some concern of will this unfreeze, will this unlock, will we start to get more normal inventory? It's interesting because when we see that 75% of folks expect moderate or high growth. By the way, for anyone who missed that previous slide, if you're listening and not watching as well, almost 15% of people expected to grow 50 to 100% and 2% expected to double their businesses in the year ahead. So I have a feeling that has a lot more to do with market conditions. Whereas the moderate growth population says, you know, we're going to keep doing what we're doing structurally, but we're going to benefit from some of these positive trends in the market, including ideally, interest rates coming to a zone where, I don't know, people hope and expect to land. With regard to the full report, you have optimism about recruiting, you have mixed results kind of on customer acquisition. Want to give a little bit of tease to some of the way that those questions were structured and what teams are expecting with regard to recruiting and customer acquisition?

Yeah, well, there's a lot that's moving around right now in the industry. Right. There's, there's some incumbents that are getting a second bite at the apple and they have new models, fresh ideas. You have some new up and coming brokerages that are starting to sweep the industry. And so combine that with how tumultuous it's been in the market with interest rates and the election and, you know, the costs of lead gen changing. I think what you're seeing is That a lot of the team leads that are best prepared going into 2025 are feeling quite optimistic about recruiting. Right. When there's someone who's shaking up the snow globe, you know, where those little flakes of snow will land has a lot to do with how prepared those teams are who are in a position to a position of strength and position of recruiting. So I think that's driving a lot of the optimism. And certainly a lot of the people who filled out the survey are in a position of strength and they're excited about the recent changes.

We just kind of teed up what I wanted to do, which is to back out a little bit and talk about the teams report overall. You mentioned, like the types of folks who filled this out, so we'll get to that. But, you know, for anyone who is not familiar with the teams report, what's your kind of elevator description of it?

The reason why we're so passionate about pulling together this research is actually based off a quote that a friend of mine had. His name's Suhail Doshi and he's a pretty iconic founder in Silicon Valley. And he has this quote that I haven't been able to get out of my head for the past few years. And it says this. Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their gut. They will either be lucky or wrong. And I think that you've been doing these interviews for a long time. You're interviewing some of the most sophisticated teams out there. But many of the teams that we meet out in the field, they are relying on instinct. Now, that instinct is backed by years of experience. So I don't want to belittle that, but certainly if you can widen the aperture, you can look into data from a lot of your peers or even your competitors. It's going to help you grow your business in a new way. So in many ways, we think this is the ideal time and the most critical time to take out your binoculars, to look over the hedges, see what your peers and competitors are doing, because it's going to inform your 2025 strategy. So what we decided to do was to create the teams report. We partnered with Tom Ferry and T360 in authoring the report. But the reality is that we have many, many distribution partners, including Follow Up Boss, of course. But the biggest brokerages in the country, exp side, LPT, real, even reMax, were involved in distributing it. A lot of really great technology companies like Curator, Blended Sense, Follow Up Boss, of course, Street Text, I'm not going to name Every logo in this. But certainly we have a lot of really great distribution partners that have helped get the report into the hands of so many team leaders. I did want to make sure that I make it clear the only way to get the full report is to complete the survey on theteamsreport.com and we enter introduced this mechanism. It's almost a pay to play but instead of paying money, you just have to pay with your time. But once you contribute to the data set, then you have the access to the full 50 page PDF. And if you're not a team lead or you don't want to go through the time of filling out the survey, there is a way to just download a 14 page preview doc and some of those insights we're going to cover on today's conversation.

How did you develop the question set? Give a sense of the range of what is covered in the full survey and what someone's going to get in the 50 page full report?

Yeah, absolutely. So we didn't have the answer to this question when we got started with the survey. And so what we did was we did a lot of interviews with top producing teams and we asked our friends, we asked follow up boss, hey, can you connect us to some of your top customers? We want to understand how they're thinking about their business, how they're thinking about 2025 and most importantly, which questions they have about the industry and the business. And we had Tom Ferry do the same. So a lot of it involved me sitting in front of top teams across the country for hours upon hours of interviews asking Ethan, what do you want to know about the business? What do you want to know about what your peers and competitors are doing? And that made the basis of the survey. Now there were a lot of questions we didn't have an opportunity to ask that I think we'll ask in subsequent reports. I mean we could have probably written a 50 page report just on lead gen or paid acquisition. And yet we had to really just scratch the surface across a variety of different topics. Topics.

Why didn't this exist before? Again I mentioned in the intro and off the top there, you know, some of the things that are covered here, it's in depth. It's what other team leaders and brokerage owners want to know. Why do you think this hasn't existed before? And like why did you take this on? Or why did Real Scout take this on?

Yeah, well, it's a good question. I think partly it's because it's a lot of work, right? I mean this was A six month effort. It was cross disciplinary. Multiple teams at Real Scout were focused on it, but we also had, you know, staff at Tom ferry and a T360 and all the companies on the screen that were pouring a lot into making this happen. It was really an interesting blend between, you know, anecdotal insights where we met with individual teams to create the formation of the questions, but then also getting data in aggregate and being able to analyze that data. I will say that there we're not the first to like run a survey or run a poll, but usually those are, they're almost like pulse updates on the industry. Like, hey, what does everyone think of the NAR settlement? But to go this in depth, I think it takes a lot of effort and also to the credit of everyone who filled out the survey, it takes a lot of time from them as well. I think the average respondent took about 20 minutes to complete a survey. And given how busy business is, I think it is a lot to ask of the people who filled out the survey. But the flip side of that coin is I spoke to one team lead who said, hey Andrew, I don't care if it would have taken me an hour to fill out this survey, I would fill it out because every single one of the questions I want to know the answer to. I want to see how other teams are answering these questions.

Yeah. So you've had what, a thousand ish teams fill this out so far?

Yeah. By the time this airs we will have over 1000 team leaders who have taken the time to fill out the survey. There's actually. Well, when we crunch the data for today's conversation, there's only about 350 in the sample. But we do want to rerun the data, see if there's any material shifts in the responses.

What kind of feedback have you been getting? You just shared a really good story of like I would have spent an hour because I want to know what everyone else thinks. But you know now that of course the preview is out, you've shared this out in the community at large. What's some of the feedback you've been getting about the report? Like specifically? I guess two, did it fulfill your own expectations while probably surprising or satisfying or delighting some other folks out there?

Yeah, it exceeded my expectations. I did not expect that every major brokerage, every major technology company would be distributing this to their email list repeatedly and sharing it on social media. So clearly there was an appetite for this data that exceeded my wildest expectations. The flip side of that is it definitely Left me and a lot of the respondents hungry for more. You get done reading this 50 page report and you still don't feel satiated because now you want to drill down deeper in one category another. And the reality is there's just an endless amount of research to be done here. So we are excited about that outcome. We want to do more of this research and we want to get it out through our channels. And anyone who fills out the report or even gets the preview will be added to a mailing list where when we do these updates, when we do refresh the data, when we do ask for sentiment questions based on, you know, current events, we will make sure to send those reports or those updates out to the distribution list.

Yeah, really good. Okay, let's dive back into insights. Let's cover like three zones here over the next 20 something minutes, team size and structure, a few of the takeaways there. Then we'll talk a little bit about lead gen, and then we'll talk a little bit about soi, by far and away the biggest source of leads for people, but also a massive area for opportunity, it seems like. So talk a little bit about what you asked about and what you observed about team size and team structure.

Yeah. So I think that for each one of these insights, there is a part of the data that is not surprising at all, backed by something that kind of is a bit of a head scratcher or is a little surprising or may encourage even like a 5 millimeter shift in how team leads are thinking about their business for the upcoming year. The part that is maybe a little less surprising to me is that teams are organized in a lot of complex and diverse ways. In fact, there's no singular definition for how a team is structured. There's also no one size fits all way that a team should be organized. There's a lot of paths to success. Now, if you look at the distribution of team sizes, the average team size is 25. However, I wouldn't really look at the average here because there are some mega teams with 700 or more agents that are skewing the data and the median team size is 6. So that tells me that, you know, years ago I think a lot of the team size, maybe median team size was closer to two. Right. Because oftentimes there was like a husband and wife team, for instance. But as teams have scaled and grown, I think that we're seeing that median increase. And then when it comes to structure, this is another one where there's no, no agreed upon definition for how teams are structured. But we were able to codify it into a couple of formats. The first is like a singular team or a unified team structure. And a lot of the smaller teams describe themselves that way. And what that means is essentially they're working a single database. They're almost like an assembly line. Right. A lot of agents that are collectively serving the same customer, and they're spending heavily on developing business for the team. Now, another popular team structure was a collective of independent agents or business owners. And this is what I would call a cooperative. And they utilize the team more for shared services like marketing or transaction management or technology, but they oftentimes work their own databases. So in other words, these are independent agents working under a team umbrella. Now, many teams, especially the large teams, describe themselves as a hybrid of these two structures. So you can kind of think about what bucket you would categorize yourself in. I don't know if I would necessarily say one is better than the other, but certainly as teams scale and become mega teams, it's more likely they will be a hybrid. Because even if they start as a unified team structure, they're probably partnering with or even acquiring other teams that have a more independent nature about them. Maybe they use their own technology or they have their own processes. So it becomes a bit of an amalgam.

The larger the team gets, the more diversity there is in your agent population, not only in terms of what they're capable of, but what they want, what they expect, et cetera. So several episodes came to mind as you were describing all those different options. And one of them comes to mind is episode 30 with Jordana Tobel at Premier Listings down in Florida has three specific ways agents can engage, and those three kind of match these three options, and ultimately then it becomes a hybrid, you know, and people can move between these things as well. So there are. This makes a lot of sense to me.

Yeah. I mean, one other insight that we had is almost like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but a team's hierarchy of needs when it comes to recruiting. It turns out that 9 out of 10 of the respondents have non agents on the team. And the three top non agent roles are marketing, transaction management, and accounting. So the larger teams are actually much more likely than the smaller teams to have administrative staff, ISAs, ops, and sales managers. But what's surprising is you can almost tell the sequence in which these teams are hiring. Right. Marketing seems to be the first reason that you'd scale a team, then transaction management, then admin and finance. And then at that point you would scale using ISAs and really scaling customer acquisition muscle.

Yeah, it was interesting that about half of large or less than half of large teams and less than a quarter of the small teams have ISAs that the small team number surprise me. But 50% of large teams, I think a lot of folks think, okay, we're doing this thing, let's figure out the ISA function. But it's. But you know, as I encountered that data and I was thinking about stories that I've heard and people I've met, I can't think of a handful of very large teams that said, you know, we tried ISAs a couple of different ways and it never worked out. But did ISA, you know, less than 50% of larger teams using ISAs? Did that surprise you at all? Or do you have any personal thoughts on that?

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Yeah, it did surprise me. I mean, I thought that that would happen a lot earlier in the process and after speaking with Tom Ferry and others in the industry who have a lot of exposure to teams, you know, one of the insights there is that oftentimes when teams are formed, there's a rainmaker, right? There's a epicenter of the brand that controls a lot of the communication and a lot of the client experience. And I think it's hard to give that up until scale is absolutely necessary.

Yeah, good call. Again, to get the full report, the teamsreport.com you have to go fill it out. One of the things that is in the full report in this kind of zone is a lot of detail on compensation. Compensation on some of these roles, compensation for agents, et cetera. So there's a lot more stuff to get if you go get the full report, Lead gen. Talk a little bit about lead gen and sources.

Yeah. So again, I'll start with the unsurprising fact and then I'll get into what's maybe a little bit more peculiar. Big teams are spending more to make more, and that's not surprising. And just how much more? Well, when you're looking at the data here, medium small team, and I described in the report, we define a small team as two to five agents and the larger teams as six or more agents. And so when you're looking at the data, when you download the report, you'll see that we kind of bifurcate the.

Results in that way based again, on that median number. So that we're not biasing toward the average.

That's right, yeah. Median is really the name of the game here. So median data for smaller teams, that two to five agent team, the median team, is spending about $1,000 a month on purchasing leads, and median larger team is spending about 2,500 to 5,000. So a pretty big spread there. Again, not surprising, bigger teams spend more. But one of the things that is a little surprising to me is that the bigger teams are actually spending more to make more per transaction. And because the big teams and the small teams have about the same median transaction size, meaning median home sale is about the same whether you're a big team or a small team, what this might actually imply is that unit economics may be worse for larger teams. And that's just a fancy way of saying that smaller margins for larger teams. Now I think this is okay, right? So this isn't saying that they're doing something wrong and they need to fix it, but it's something to be aware of, right? These larger teams probably have more operational expertise, they have more resources, they're more efficient. And so they can afford to give up some of the margin in order to scale their team. And some of that may have to do with where their leads are coming from. But it's something where if you're a smaller team, you have to decide, do you want to play that game? Because a lot of times the larger teams are driving up the cost of leads for the entire market. So if you're a smaller team and you don't have those operational efficiencies, do you want to throw thousands of dollars into that engine when you might be better off with a different lead category? And I just want to put some data to back what I just said. So when you look at large teams versus smaller teams, the bigger teams are willing to spend More for more volume. So cost per lead. Small teams said they spend less than $20 cost per lead twice as often as the larger teams. And I've shared this with some of my friends and they say, well, hey, I don't even know where you can get $20 cost per lead. And because they're usually getting the more expensive leads and presumably the higher quality leads. On the flip side of the chart, if you look at the far right side, large teams cited cost per lead of $500 or more three times as often as the smaller teams. So again, this is just to summarize, it's the smaller teams that are paying less on a cost per lead basis. And the same thing goes for referral fees. So small teams said they spend less than 25% on a referral fee twice as often as the larger teams. And the larger teams said that they pay more than 35% three times as often as the smaller team. So the larger teams are spending more on a percentage basis for referrals. And I won't go into all the compensation pieces of it now, but the same thing goes for compensation. This is the average compensation for agents on these teams. Large teams compensate agents and staff more than smaller teams and the same thing goes for ISAs. So it's a big differentiator for large teams because they have the marketing and operational rigor, they can plow capital into their business and they can grow quickly. The team leads that are spending less than $100,000 on an agent is actually trending towards the smaller teams. And those who say that average agent compensation is 125,000 to 175,000, those were more often the larger teams.

You validated for me something I had heard anecdotally, which is that the smaller team is ideally a really well run SEAL team or something, is likely the most profitable for that agent who owns the team, is still in production, etc. And you have to get to 50 agents before you'll make about the same amount of money. I've heard that from three different people in approximately the same way. So that gap in between, it's me and seven others, or me and nine others or whatever, and I'm now out of production. I'm leading a team of, you know, 45 or 50 agents and some staff. The path between those two spots is fraught with danger because of we need to build the operational rigor and that's expensive. We need to figure out the systems we're going to try and fail. We haven't put in place things to make our agents effective enough, we haven't given them enough leverage for them to maybe earn some of these numbers that we see on the screen. So if you can navigate through, you're on the other side and you're in a much better position to take the margin that you wind up with and start really focusing on economies of scale in the spots that matter and really start turning that into not just more production, but more importantly, more profit. So anyway, I found this whole section very interesting.

I think that's a really excellent insight. It's not that the smaller teams are the mom and pop operations that don't have as much sophistication and the larger teams or these mega teams that are spending $100,000 a month on customer acquisition. There is this really unique scenario where you are a smaller, leaner team. The SEAL operation, you called it. And you are able to generate high GCI at higher margin. And that might be a sweet spot. I am noticing a lot of these teams are actually shedding some dead weight. They're trying to make their operations leaner so that they can get to a healthier business, a healthier P and L.

Let's talk SOI and nurture. I think it's a huge opportunity for lots of teams. I've actually heard that story explicitly out of team leaders mouths on this show before, which is we ran the numbers and we realized that, you know, essentially referral, repeat referral was our biggest source of leads. But we're literally spending no time or money or attention on it. And I think that's like a broad sentiment that we could maybe see in some of your results here.

Yeah, I think it was. This was the most validating part of the survey for me because I've been waving this SOI flag for a long time, but it's noisy out there, it's distracting. There are so many people that are pitching, you know, SEO and paid acquisition. And I mean, there are so many different ways to generate business. And I'm not here to, you know, make those other sources feel less important, but I think it's important we look at the data. I think it's important that you, as a team leader, listening to this podcast, you look at your own data and you see not where the leads are coming from, but where the closings are coming from. And that is something I run into time and time again is I'll meet somebody out in the field, I'll say, like, hey, you know, where's your business coming from? They say, oh, I generated a thousand leads on my website last month. Okay, but how many of them closed? And really, if you want to have the rigor in your business, you know, if you want to have the operational rigor and you really want to double down on what's working, it's really important that you look at the data, not only the data from this report, but the data in your business. So what is the number one source of closed business for teams? Obviously, it's fear of influence. And that's by far the most important acquisition channel for most teams, regardless of size. And I want to emphasize that it doesn't matter if you're a large team or a small team. It doesn't matter if you're spending $100,000 a month in customer acquisition or not. Sphere of influence is probably still the biggest engine for growth. And that's because it works great. Even if it's just your past client or your neighbor or someone in your sphere or on your child's soccer team, like a parent that you've met. But also, even on the paid acquisition side, those folks are going to go back into your CRM, they're going to go back into your ecosystem, and they're going to guess what. Be part of your sphere of influence. Be part of your referral engine going forward. Three times more often than the next category of paid leads and paid referrals is sphere of influence. In other words, sphere of influence just towers over the rest of customer acquisition channels. And I think that, I mean, look, it's not shocking that sphere of influence reigns supreme in terms of customer acquisition and closings. But what is kind of surprising to me and kind of sad to me also is that most people are really unhappy with their long term lead nurture strategies. And this was a little shocking to me is, you know, when we asked these team leaders, and again, many of the folks who filled out this survey are sophisticated. They have been in the business a long time. But we asked them, you know, how sophisticated are your long term lead Nurture Systems? 60% of respondents said they either have a basic lead nurture system or they have no lead nurture system at all. And when you peel back the layers of the onion and you ask them, how do you nurture your contacts? Where do you send listing alerts from? Where do you send home value or market data up to your clients? The vast majority of them are using the MLS to do that. And I think that's unacceptable. I don't think you'll meet a consumer out there that would favor the MLS over the sites that they usually use. To get their real estate data. So, so this represents something that, again, a little bit disappointing, but more in a more productive way. It's the biggest opportunities. Go out there and invest in that part of your business. What we saw in the lead nurture customer satisfaction rates is that a third of the people who filled this out said that they are a 5 out of 10 or worse on the happiness scale when it comes to their lead nurture system. So again, when you're looking at transactions, where the transactions are coming from, it's really important that you double down on your strengths. And I think it's human nature to focus on the parts of your business that are broken or underperforming. But if you can resist that temptation, you can double down on what's working. That is how you're going to grow your business. In other words, do you want to double your SEO closings from zero to zero or do you want to increase your sphere of influence closings from 15% to 20%? I think that latter category is going to generate more for your bottom line in 2025.

Yeah. Something we've been hearing for the past couple of years is, you know, if you want to get things back on track for yourself and your business and the agents on your team, just plain talk to more people. That's it. And what's an easier conversation? I mean, when we look at all the scripting and the role playing and all the, the challenge of talking to somebody cold. That's why I kind of like the examples you pulled up. Do you want 00 or do you want, you know, to get more from the easiest, warmest conversations? And so developing a systematic approach to sparking conversations, generating conversations, giving people something to talk to you about, repositioning your expertise and just being available is just a massive opportunity for everybody.

Hey, thank you so much for listening to these episodes of Real Estate Team os.

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Yeah. And when I did an interview with Tom Ferry and he said you don't have a lead generation problem, you have a lead nurture problem, and I really couldn't agree with the statement more. I think that all the research shows that if you can double down on your strengths, that's better than focus focusing on your weaknesses. So go out there and double down on what makes your business engine hum, which is referrals and sphere of influence.

As you look forward to the future of this report, how are you thinking about it? I mean, I'm not asking you to commit to anything right now, but you know, there's a lot more in here. Again, theteamsreport.com costs absolutely nothing to get the report except your time. You just need to fill it out. Is this like, let's collect stuff, let's run the data again, let's see what's new and then let's teach these insights, see what feedback we get. And then is this like an annual thing? Like what, what is your imagination at this point? Still earlyish days, but it's real, it's happening, it's, it's helping people and informing people. What do you think the future of this report is for you?

Yeah, it's a good question. And let me just share a quick story because when I founded Real Scout 12 years ago, we didn't have an idea and then just go build. What we did first was something called customer development, where we sat down with our prospective customers and we didn't know who our customer would be at the time. So we talked to real estate agents, we talked to home buyers and home sellers, and we developed a product around their pain points and we asked them questions like, if you can wave a magic wand, what would you change about the home buying process or the home selling process? What would you change in your business? And the reason I share this story with you is because, you know, we don't have, I like to think we don't have the hubris to go out there and think we have all the answers. And when it comes to the teams report, as I shared earlier, we started with the foundation of talking to the people who would be reading the report and ask them, you know, what are your pain points? What would you change about the industry? How if you had a magic wand that you can wave what, what answers would you have about your business and the businesses of your competitors? And so the, the future of this report is remaining true to those values. It's sitting down with the people who are reading the report and asking them what information they want about the industry and their business. So we do want to get into some type of rhythm and some cadence here where we have updates to this report, where we are sharing insights. And ideally they'd be topical. Right. So like we, you know, the election is behind us now, but how are teams responding? How are they thinking about that? So I think that there's a lot more to come, but right now we have a little bit more analysis that we want to do on our current data set. And then one of the, I think the last question of the survey is, what questions did we not ask here that you'd want to know the answers to? So we have a lot of, of clues about where to take the report.

What do you think about the future of teams in general? I mean, you, you serve at Real Scout and, you know, as you just travel about the industry, you know, you're in connection with a lot of teams. You've been in this long enough that you've seen essentially the rise of teams today. I mean, we can say, you know, I would trace the history back about 30 years per the conversations I've had on the show, but, like, in earnest.

Team, as we think about it today.

Even though it's ill defined, as you saw in the research, and as everybody knows, has really been like the past dozen years that you've been building. Real Scout have been a really important dozen years for real estate teams. So you've seen a lot of that growth. I'm sure some of you, the way that you understood your customers started to change as some of them committed to the model. We certainly talked about it a lot with Dan CORKILL on episode 40 as well, because, you know, follow boss being 13 years old, same window. So I'd love to like any thoughts you have on, you know, the present and the future of teams based on the past dozen years of your commitment.

Yeah, so let me start with the past. I mean, teams were structured, I think, in a very informal way, and they were formed to manage this client demand and the need for some specialization within the team. I think currently teams are becoming a lot more evolved, more structured, more data driven, and that is helping create an experience for consumers and also, frankly, scale and revenue for teams. But I think the future is going to be focused on a world where these Teams are able to harness technology in new ways. They're able to take what they think is scale now and really add a zero to it, offering a solution to consumers that really is a bit more standardized. Right. I used to say that when you buy an Apple product or when you fly on Southwest Airlines, you know what you're going to get. It's a consistent experience. But in the world of real estate, consumers are faced with this problem that there are 1.3, 1.4 million realtors, and there's 1.3 or 1.4 million different experiences you can have in buying or selling a home. And so if you, as a team, can standardize it and deliver a really great experience, you're going to deliver. You're going to meet the market demand in a way that's going to help you grow your business. So I think the teams are going to be more incentivized to create that formatted experience.

Any other closing thoughts on the report before my three closing questions for you?

I mean, I would encourage everyone to download the report, and certainly podcasts like this are a great way to get some of the key insights, but there is just a lot of charts, a lot of data, a lot of insights. So theteamsreport.com is the best place to go. And, you know, instead of relying on instinct or luck, this is the time to to get that informed opinion on how to position your 2025.

Cool. Well, with that, I would love to know, Andrew, what is your very favorite team to root for? Or what's the best team you've ever been a member of?

Well, that's easy. I founded Real Scout 12 years ago, and I love the team that I'm on. And, you know, we have a really special culture at our company. It's a culture that is centered around feeling empowered, being purposeful, but also being empathetic. And that's the culture of Real Scout. Those are our values. And, you know, we've been doing this now for 12 years. I mean, some of our employees have been here since the very beginning, and that's the team I'm rooting for. And our hard work is starting to pay off because of how fast we're growing. But, you know, it's high performance. It's a small team. You talked about SEAL teams earlier. That's really how I think about the Real Scout team. I mean, we have, you know, over 100,000 customers, but we have a very lean operation, and that makes it so every employee at the company feels indispensable. I think that's the most important thing is that when you're working at a company, you feel like your work truly matters and that you individually have the ability to influence the outcome for everyone at the company. And that's a really, really exciting and motivating feeling. So, yeah, that's the team that I'm on. That's the team that I'm rooting for. And again, we have some, some nice momentum now.

Congratulations on continued success and operating in a way. I just love the language that you use there. Toward the end of the response, it really put some practical meaning on empathy, which means, you know, that word has a meaning unto itself, of course, but some people can't connect or relate to it. But the way that you described it at the end, which is, you know, employees feel, feeling seen, feeling like their work matters and these types of things. To design and run an organization that allows people to feel that way is a display of empathy. Lighter one here for you. What is one of your most frivolous.

Purchases or what's a cheapskate habit that.

You hold on to even though you probably don't need to?

Well, let's see. I think I really care a lot about workspace design. I mean, we're spending so much time just sitting in front of our computers in front of our displays all day. So, you know, I invested pretty heavily in creating a work environment that I don't know, accommodates good workflow, which doesn't sound frivolous, but I recently invested in a very expensive external display that my wife thinks this is a complete frivolous purchase and a waste of money. But if you're staring, you know, 18 inches away from your display all day, I don't want to see the pixels. I'm a bit of a pixel snob. I just want a crisp, clear picture and I feel like it improves my workflow. Or maybe it's just placebo, but I'm. I seem to, when I get back from traveling, it's just nice to be in front of my, my studio display.

Yeah. So that is a. I. I'm just guessing here. Probably larger than average, maybe curved, very high resolution monitor.

You know, it's. It's just the Apple Studio display, but it is.

Oh, got it.

It is crazy expensive. Um, but yeah, in terms of pixel density and refresh rate, it's just one of the best displays on the market and it just has a beautiful design.

How do you invest your time? Like, when you're looking to learn, grow and develop? What are you doing? What does that look like? Or when you're investing time in resting, relaxing and recharging. What are you doing? What does that look like?

I mean, in some ways my answer to that question would be one and the same, which is, you know, first of all, I have a 2 year old, so it means that rest time is a little rare these days. But when I do rest, I like to go to the beach. I live 15 minutes from the beach and most of the friends I have here in LA don't make it to the beach that often. But I just think that, you know, walking along the beach with the waves crashing, it doesn't matter if it's cold out, doesn't matter if it's raining or sunny. It is just such a great place to unwind and in some ways relax. But frankly, I do some problem solving when I'm out there. Right. It's just a, it's a context change. I'm not sitting in front of slack. I'm not on zoom calls. It's just a great way to think about problems in a new environment.

Yeah, really good. It's one of the reasons I spend at a minimum of half of my time when I'm running, walking or hiking with earbuds out. You know, it's really, you know, you really sometimes want to put in that podcast or put in some music or something. But taking those out and allowing problems to kind of solve themselves in a new, in a new environment, new context is super helpful.

Well, I love the way you record the teasers to these episodes when you're out in the mountains or hiking. And it really, when in my newsfeed, just flowing through my newsfeed, it's just nice to get to be transported into wherever you're hiking or running or walking.

Love it. I appreciate that. It's a small touch, but it's in just transparency for you just because you mentioned it and for anyone else who has seen them, he's talking about essentially the short. I don't think of them as promo clips. I actually try to have a good, solid, self contained idea in about 45 seconds from the guest and then I just kind of do a wraparound on it, on it. And I do those typically like in the first, you know, 20 to 30 minutes of a two or three hour hike. So I'm outside a lot anyway. I figure it's more interesting to look at, especially for folks who watch the show on YouTube and they just, you know, you're already standing in my office with me. There's no reason to see more of that. So Anyway, I appreciate that. Call out Real estate Team os on Instagram, YouTube shorts, etc. That's where you can see these things. But where Andrew, we've mentioned theteamsreport.com several times, but if someone wants to learn more about you or about Real Scout, where are some spots you would send them for that?

Yeah, absolutely. So we're trying to be more active with social now. So you can follow me personally on Instagram @aflackner or follow me on LinkedIn if you want more of my business insights. But yeah, trying to be more active on social. We're growing an audience and it's fun to collaborate with the industry. So if there's something you heard today that you have questions about or you want to add your own experiences to, please reach out to me. I'd love to keep the conversation going.

Those links are right down below. Whether you're watching in YouTube, listening to Apple podcasts or Spotify, or watching or listening@realestateteamos.com all that's down below. Andrew Flackner is a great follow. Andrew Flackner, you were a great guest. I appreciate your time.

Thank you.

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