Accountability Systems You’ll Actually Want to Use [MINISODE]

Every real estate team leader faces the same fundamental challenge. How do you keep your agents productive without them burning out? Too often, accountability is misunderstood or overlooked, increasing stress, causing confusion, and decreasing production. In this minisode, we set out to answer, how do you set up a system of accountability that your agents actually appreciate and benefit from? And we'll explore solutions with other leaders who've been where you are.

This is a very simple thing to do. We've got to just get out of our own way.

That will never change for me, because I know I was down in the dirts.

That's a signal. But your strategy is flawed and you gotta fix your strategy.

Let's first identify the problem, which is.

They did a study of 2,000 agents in five metro markets. Over 50% of that body was closing zero to one transaction a year. And then 70% were closing less than five transactions a year. For most offices, we need to get that number to 7, 8, 9, 10 to be making profit. So the first thing every everybody that I'm coaching, when I'm sitting with them for the first time, I'll say, what's your purge and productivity? And they'll say, I have no idea. Let's figure it out. So what you're going to do is you're going to run your MLS stats. You're going to figure out how many transactions on average your agents are closing.

Your team is a business, after all, and if it's not profitable, you need to figure out how to make it profitable. And it starts with seeing one or both of these two things from every.

Agent, either participation or performance. Performance means you're out there taking listings, making sales, doing everything we're asking you to do. If you miss one of our office meetings or a training session, I'm going to get it. Because you're out there crushing it. I want you to all of them. But I'm going to understand, okay, on the flip side, if you are not out there producing, you're not making sales or taking listings or doing things. I'm asking, I'm going to expect that you are participating in every single thing we're doing. Every training event, every coaching session, every mentorship thing, everything we're doing, I want to see there. So it's either participation or production. I want to see both. But if I see neither, you're not producing and you're not participating, there's not going to be room for you at this team.

Clearly defining simple standards for participation and performance will tell you when and where accountability is needed for participation. That means Measurables like meetings joined, trainings completed, or communication and collaboration executed for performance. That means metrics like calls, appointments, contracts and closings. But defining metrics and identifying where there's a problem is just the start. How do we implement accountability? What's a good timeline for check ins and what do those check ins look.

Like if you screw up, we're going to talk about it, we're going to get better at it, but you're going to be accountable to what you're doing. And so we do one on one conversations and we have one on ones where we talk about accountability and we talk about, you know, your goals and some of those other things. And then we also have group accountability meetings. Every huddle now, one of the pivots we recently made, Ethan, we've increased the accountability. Our huddles just changed. So every morning we are recapping what we did from the previous day. How many calls did you make? How many conversations did you have? How many appointments did you set? How many appointments did you hold every single day? I think that accountability is the highest form of love. But the problem is we're doing it too late. If we're not meeting with one on ones, we're doing it maybe every, every two weeks, it's too late. And so when we start falling off or you know, not hitting what we need to hit, what we do in our organization is we increase the accountability around whatever the metric is that we're after. And right now it's activity.

If every agent was a self starter who didn't need any direction, this minisode would be over right now. But we all know that's not the case. So what's our responsibility to remove roadblocks and support agents?

The one thing I need to tell all team leaders out there, you need to provide opportunities. If you cannot provide opportunities, this is not the model for you. And there's no right way. It's just the one right way is the word opportunity. So what I do is I strip it all down and I say, all right, hey, I'm going to take all these things off your plate, like banging a sign in the yard, entering things into the MLS transaction, management, I mean all of the above. And what I want to do is I'm going provide you opportunities, you're going to provide me opportunities by also following up things and we're going to convert leads and we're going to make things happen. That's what we've done here to really increase not just profitability but per agent productivity because we have the ability to not only just provide them support, but they know what their clarity is. They know what their mission is, is to produce and actually convert leads.

I will help and support you and create you to be the best individual agent you have. But I want you to become a better person. Every change that I've ever made at the company was never top down. It was always agent up. God, I'm just. I'm running home. I'm showing properties left and right. I go home and I'm spending an hour and a half writing offers. And I was like, well, what if we just. We did that for you, right? What if we just add another staff member to increase the volume intake? We've got closing coordination.