Real estate sales team aren’t exactly a new concept, but with the resurgent buyer confidence in the real estate market, sales teams have proven effective ways to help divide a city amongst a group of agents, and to effectively leverage the power of networking by putting ‘we’ before ‘I’. But productivity for real estate teams is a difficult battle to fight.
Whether you’re a new team or an established team, you’re going to run into a number of the same problems. The main difference is how many issues have these problems created going unaddressed.
Just like any organization, as you scale, you stretch current resources thinner – causing organizational issues manifested as growing pains.
These issues affecting productivity for real estate teams can be grouped into 6 broad categories:
1. Branding Inconsistency
2. Messaging/Marketing Inconsistency
3. Poor Internal Communications
4. Weak Task Allocation/Access to Common Resources
5. Weak Time Management
6. Time Spent on Non-Essential Tasks
1. Strive for Branding Consistency With Easy To Use Branding Assets For All Agents
With numerous chefs in the kitchen, ensuring that dishes taste exactly the same when they reach the table is a major issue affecting productivity for real estate teams. This is where it becomes absolutely essential to develop a brand guide which outlines:
- Approved logos and usage standards
- Color palates for content, print marketing and more
- Specific fonts for all marketing materials
You need to ensure that your branded materials look the same no matter who on the team creates the content. Very specifically outline design standards and have an approvals process for all outbound visual materials. Here’s a great compilation of effective branding guides to get you started.
2. Ensuring Messaging/Marketing Consistency With Automation
This is MASSIVELY important for any team. You want to ensure your outbound messaging is uniform unless individually specified as individuals. You don’t want conflicting information going out from the same accounts, as it undermines your message, campaign’s and organization’s credibility and authority.
This is THE biggest problem impacting productivity for real estate teams, and it’s also one of the most easily solved.
Once you hit team status, you NEED a marketing plan, and you NEED to enforce it. Strictly.
Your plan should outline:
- Marketing goals
- Applicable resources
- Budgets
- Situational analysis
- SWOT analysis
- Strategy
- Action/implementation program
- Key Performance Indicators/Evaluation metrics
Leveraging on marketing automation will not only save a lot of time for your marketing efforts but also ensure that your team is spending ample time nurturing all of your leads on the database. We wrote a beginner’s guide for getting started with marketing automation and you should definitely check that you if you haven’t implemented automation within your team.
3. Master Effective Team Communications Among Members Of Your Real Estate Team
Once you’ve got more than 2-3 people working together on the same task, the need for communications increases significantly, and email/group texts simply won’t cut it any longer. It’s time to get a dedicated task manager and/or communications platform to maximize productivity for real estate teams.
Google offers a great selection of productivity apps like Drive, Hangout, Sheets, Docs, etc. They’re an outstanding array of free functions that require only a Gmail login, but the communications functions aren’t the greatest. You’ve got Gmail chat, but that’s about it.
Enter Slack. Slack is a great app which allows all team members to participate in both group chats, as well as private conversations. This is a GREAT way to have ongoing team brainstorming sessions and to keep track of assigned tasks.
4. Ensure Clear Task Allocation/Access to Common Resources
A team needs to have a clear division of tasks and duties, where there is no question as to who has ownership of individual tasks. Asana is a phenomenal platform for this. Productivity for real estate teams often suffers when task ownership and common resource access isn’t clear and focused.
Not only can you assign tasks, schedule due dates, leave comments for team members and create templates with set sub-tasks to make a more efficient and standardized workflow.
5. Master Time Management/Scheduling
Meetings and appointments are an integral part of commerce, and there’s literally nothing worse than missing a scheduled meeting by forgetting. Calendly is THE BEST scheduling software out there right now, and they’ve designed a suite of functions which will take your time management to the next level – and the number of other apps and CRMs it can work with means that you can augment your current programs with Calendly, rather than scrapping them and starting over.
Calendly is THE tool to boost productivity for real estate teams. We have tested a lot of different calendar booking systems, nothing beats Calendly.
Some of the useful features in Calendly:
- Deploy team calendars that automatically figures out time slots based on your other appointments.
- Manage appointments with multiple appointment formats
- You have a dedicated appointment booking landing page that you can direct people too.
6. Outsource Administrative and Real Estate Marketing Tasks
A real estate agent makes the most of their time when they are on the road. Whether you are meeting a new prospect for a listing presentation or simly showing a few condos to a potential buyer, you need to be out there. In order to make sure that all of you administrative tasks are taken care of, you should think of outsourcing some of the tasks.
That’s when you decide whether you have enough of these tasks that it makes hiring someone to handle them worthwhile.
Typically, you would want someone in an administrative capacity to handle day-to-day office tasks, but who can also offer some creative input with digital outreach and marketing efforts (social media, newsletters,
Not ready to bring on someone full-time? Why not look at platforms like side.co and remote.com to find people to complete specific projects or tasks.
Summing it All Up
Productivity for real estate teams is absolutely essential. Any team has to have all of its players focused on their roles to help move the team towards its goals. Teamwork makes the dream work, and buy-in is so vital to this.
If you’re adopting any of these ideas, you have to commit to them fully, or they won’t bear fruit. Identify your goals, identify your challenges, create your plans and execute!