90 Days to More Listings with Jordana Tobel | Ep 030

Helping agents have better, more specific and more productive conversations with buyers, in part using AI training tools and resulting in more buyer agreements Generating more listings by developing skills and habits across your agents across a wider array of activity areas and channels and supporting your diversity of agents by adding more nuance to the splits and fees and services that you're offering them. If you're looking for specific things you can do today to make sure that you and your team have a fantastic second second half of 2024, you're in the right place. My conversation today is with the founder and the CEO of Premier Listings, Jordana Tobel. She's got about 100 agents in three offices in South Florida and she shared all of this with us in this conversation. Pay special attention to the detail in her breakdown of a beta version of a 90 day listing program that her agents are in right now that's already producing results. This conversation is the result of her replying to an email that I sent out with some of these details in this is what I'm doing to prepare for the second half of the year. I wanted to know more about it and we turned it into this episode. You can subscribe@realestateteamos.com subscribe when you go there, you put in your email address, you get subscriber only episodes immediately and you get weekly updates with insights, lessons learned and places to go to learn more about starting, growing and optimizing a team. That's@realestateteamos.com Subscribe I know you're going to love this conversation with Jordana, as I did. Here it is. 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. Hey, thank you so much for listening to and for joining me on Real Estate Team os. Jordana.

Happy to be here.

Yeah, really excited for this conversation. I love the way that you're preparing your organization for the second half of 2024. I'm looking forward to sharing that folks here in this conversation, but we're going to kick it off where we always do, which is a must have characteristic of a high performing team. What comes to mind for you for that?

So you know, I think right now with all of the negativity that's been surrounding the industry, surrounding the market, I think we have to all have a sort of like relentless positivity. For me, it's about Being positive and also doing it together. So having a strong community, a strong.

Culture.

A community that's really supportive. And part of that includes being positive. There are so many doors that are, I don't want to say slammed in our face, but sort of. So it's important to just continue to get back up every single time. And so for me right now, a team has got to be relentlessly positive.

In my experience and in my mindset, because so much of this is framed by how we see the day and see the moment and see a situation as a problem and. Or as an opportunity. I can see the good in a lot of different situations. There's certainly plenty of good happening right now. But for you, as you think about this and you think about the diversity of mindsets and personality types in the organization that you lead, how do you help people separate, you know, false positivity from just seeing the positive and seeing the opportunity, even amid the challenges and the noise and stuff, like. Because I can see like a. Maybe a false optimism or something, but.

Right.

But it's not that. Like, how do you parse those things for people as you're maybe doing one on one conversations or group conversations?

I think that's actually easy to do in the sense that it sort of comes down to results. So, people, you can't be falsely positive if you're not moving yourself forward in your business, whether it's about your skills or whether it's about the reactions that you're getting from your clients. But I do have to agree with you that I do see the silver lining and everything that's happening right now, I think it gives all of us an opportunity to raise our standard. It's something that I've always sort of wanted to do. And this sort of is for. Is sort of forcing my hand in so many ways. As an organization, we've required every single one of our agents to have something in writing when they work with buyers for years now, prior to the settlement and all the noise that's happening. And so now, again, I just feel like we're forced to sort of continue doing that and doing it in a way where it can't be a false positive if the person that's sitting across from you is saying, yes, Jordana, I'm happy to sign this agreement because I know I need you. And so to me, it's sort of like a bigger part of enabling us to do the things that we do best, which is really help people. Agents that want to be held accountable, they want to be not just handed Leads, but they also want to be held to a higher standard. So we're doing things like checking how many times they're calling, what are they saying to those leads. We're asking them and requiring them to show up during role plays and show up during power hours. So again, the goal is sort of like, you know, if you were to go to the gym, are you going to work out better and get a better, get better exercise if you're doing it on your own versus if you have someone standing over you saying, ethan, give me two more push ups. So it's that sort of idea, that sort of, that second component. And then the third sort of category of how an agent might be a part of our organization is we have something called Platform plus, which essentially means they get all the tech, they get all the, all the different tools, integrations. We use a lot of these, an AI texting assistant, we use a switchboard, all of those tools. But they don't necessarily want to be held accountable. They don't necessarily, they have their own leads that they're buying, that's that third option. And they all have different sort of fees and payment structures around it.

Okay. I feel like a lot of folks that are watching and listening are, well, I know are early stage team. And where a lot of them wind up is I've been a successful agent. I needed to bring a couple people around me, maybe a full time and a part time assistant, a buyer's agent. And now I've created some kind of lead flow, whether it's through a partnership or some other means. And now I'm going to start essentially offering that high accountability, all the tools, all the tech, I'm going to get brand new agents. And now whether they're 18 months in or 36 months in before they realize that a bunch of these agents have now outgrown their system because they don't have that mid level offering and they don't have that independent offering that, that you have. Like that's a necessary evolution. I think where you are is where everyone needs to get at some point in a way that makes sense for them and their financials and all of that. I would love for you to share, like how did you figure out the right combination of essentially splits and services at multiple levels in a way that was advantageous and attractive to the agent while also being respectful of your own needs as someone running this operation with a bunch of fixed overhead and I'm sure some variable costs as well. Like I just asked that like broadly because it's something Every team leader is going to struggle with if they haven't already. And it seems like it occurred to you early.

Yeah, I mean, it sort of did, but it's interesting that you asked that because we're making another change, which I'm going to explain in a second. And we just sort of finalized this yesterday on our management call. Myself and my sales manager, my marketing manager, we, we came up with a little bit of a shift that's sort of in line with what you're talking about. But essentially it happened pretty organically in the sense that I realized that there's a lot of different types of agents there and each agent is running their own business. And again, if I'm going to be their partner, I have to be able to be a partner to an agent who's here, who's here, who's in all different levels. And so again, it just sort of happened organically by listening to the needs of those individuals, how could I deliver to them the things that were most important while also maintaining something that gave my agents that are more experienced and that have been around for a while. Which is actually why that second sort of category that I mentioned earlier, the agents that are on my accountability program, they're receiving leads every single month. Just yesterday we finalized, within that program, we are dividing it into different levels so that, you know, an agent who's just licensed is going to come in a different place than someone who's been doing this for 20 something years and has an enormous amount of experience working with buyers, working with sellers. They understand the ins and the outs of working a CRM. And so there's. We actually came up with four different levels of our lead program where there's going to be a level one agent, someone who maybe has a recent license and maybe those leads are a little bit different versus a level four agent who might come in with a senior title. We do have agents in the office that we get this senior level title, whether it's a senior realtor associate or a senior broker associate. Now someone who's in that level four is going to get opportunities that have been warmed up by the ISO, say, versus a level one is still sort of has to prove to us that they have what it takes. Because I think that one thing that I realized really quickly is that I think there are a lot of people out there and a lot of agents in all of my years of hiring and interviewing with people, they think it's going to be easy and they don't realize how difficult it actually is to make it in this really difficult business. And so it's never the ones that you think either. Right. I might be sitting across from somebody in an interview, and they join the company, and I think that they're going to be the, you know, number one agent in the office. And at the end of the day, they might not have the skills that it requires. And so that's sort of why we put these levels in place, so that somebody that does have those skills can have those warmed up isa handoffs, they can have Zillow leads, they can have leads that are coming from sellers, which is another sort of shift. I think it's really important to pivot as the market pivots and as the industry pivots. And one thing that we've moved our focus on is to focus on making sure that we have a strong message to sellers. And then I can then deliver these opportunities for sellers to work directly with my team of agents who are all have been highly trained. But again, a level one agent might not have had the same training as what I'm calling a level four agent or a seller lead agent.

The nuance in there is so good and so important. My foolish assumption was, like, you kind of graduate into this independent offering that you have, but in fact, there are experienced people who still want leads, they still want accountability. They still want to be close into this culture and community in a way that you're more independent. Folks that have a different structure with you do just a quick. I tend not to do cross promotions in the body of an episode, but I would be remiss if I didn't point viewers and listeners to the Inside the Lawton Team series that we recently did. I think four of the eight interviews we did in that series, different folks talk from different perspectives about their multiple levels of splits and services across agents as well. It's a standalone YouTube playlist, and you can see them marked Inside the team in brackets and in your podcast app. Thank you for enduring that, George, and I appreciate it.

No, I have to say I want to interrupt and sort of add on to what you're saying, because I watched those and I learned so much from how they scaled and how they've grown and all the different perspectives. So I really enjoyed that whole video series that you did. I was. I like, I was, you know, furiously writing notes. As you were. As you were, you know, in those interviews. So I'm glad that you shared it, and I do recommend watching it.

Oh, what a joy. So thank you for that. Thanks for spending your time with it, and thanks Again, for spending time with me in this conversation, I would love, like, in that spirit, you know, you mentioned, you know, our leadership team just came out with, you mentioned a couple of the roles, but I would love for you to kind of characterize Premier Listings as it is today. How is it structured? What are some of the key positions, you know, from a staff perspective, kind of how many agents, how many staff and maybe even approximately how many agents are in those different offerings that you have, not by count, but maybe as a share of the population. Just to give people a sketch of, like, what is Premier listings today in mid 2024?

Yeah, I think it's a great question. And I can't give exact numbers because I know them. Yeah, I mean, we have about. We cover around 100 licensees, and about 40, 45% of them are on what we call our lead team. And the lead team, essentially, like I mentioned earlier, is that sort of accountability program where people want that additional revenue stream. And just to sort of touch on what you said earlier, there are agents in that program that are extremely experienced that are. Have an enormous bulk of business, and they just want another sort of funnel of business to add to. And we do give me. Give that. Give people in that program the opportunity to be in control. And I think to answer your question earlier, you asked a little bit about, you know, how this company came to be. And in many ways it came to be because of my own experience. When I first got licensed, you know, I was told to call everybody in my. In my cell ph, and I was new in Florida. I didn't have a very big contact list in my phone. And I thought, okay, I know I'm smart. This doesn't feel smart. And how do I put myself in a position where I'm the one in control? And so that sort of theme sort of still exists. As far as, you know, what is Premier Listings all about? It's all about helping the individual agent reach whatever, put them in control to reach the goals that they want to. So if a person has a certain goal that they're trying to reach, our goal is to help them reach that by giving them whatever it is that they need, whether it's, you know, seller leads, whether it's buyer leads, whether it's, you know, additional marketing tools. We have a marketing sector. We have all different types of tools that essentially help the individual, you know, get to that level. So again, about 40, 45% of our team are on our sort of lead program, and the rest are sort of split up into those two Other sections, we have an office in Broward county, which is a little bit newer than our main headquarters, which is located in Palm beach county in downtown Del Rey. Each of the locations has a sales manager, and then we have our marketing manager as well. We have some virtual staff, two virtual ISAs, a virtual office assistant. And I'm really all about keeping it relatively lean in the sense that I don't want an enormous amount of staff. I don't. I never really was of that mindset. We do have a transaction coordinator as well, but I'm not interested in having this like enormous payroll that I think in the end ends up hurting the organization and creating too much of that overhead.

Yeah, it's such a difficult tension. I think it was the Elise Hannibal episode of that Inside the Lawton team series where she talked about like toggling so that like you don't want to burn out your best people, but you also don't want to over hire and have people sitting around and wondering what to do next. Like, lean is such. There's such a tension in it. How have you managed that over the years as. As like you've. You've pushed up against like, okay, because you're not a small organization there. And there was. But there was a point where you were half the size you are today. And so like, yes, you've probably gone through some growth spurts and fits if you're like pretty much every other team I've talked about.

You know, it's interesting. I think a lot of what's happened is it sort of happened organically. And I think that's something that really sets apart, you know, good leadership and good team leaders is you sort of have to be able to roll with the punches.