Building your real estate business from the ground up is no small feat, but with any growing and thriving business, there are certainly some growing pains.  Success is great of course, but when you have enough volume and are doing enough business, you may be wondering how you can handle it all.

With today’s inventory-shortened real estate market, you may find yourself struggling to keep the candle burning at both ends.  For that reason, you may need to build a real estate team around you.  Today, we’ll look at forming the ideal realty team and how you can make your already successful business thrive even more!

Evaluating Volume

Hiring employees always comes down to a key question in any industry: does your business have enough volume to sustain adding personnel?  This may seem like a silly question, but it’s easy to take a shortsighted look into your business and say you need help without looking at the greater picture and the long-term consequences of building a bigger realty team.

You’ll need to take a long look into both your historic sales data as well as future outlooks of the real estate market to decide whether or not adding more agents will be productive or counterproductive to your firm.  In general, an agent can handle 40 transactions per year with upper-end agents able to handle up to 60.

Is your existing team overextended or are they underproducing?  Evaluating these metrics can help you make a decision on whether to add to your team.

Look at Your Business Model

If you decide that you are ready to expand and start forming an ideal realty team, then take a long look at your current business model and extrapolate that out over the longer term to see how the pieces may fit together.  Evaluating your business plan can tell you not only where you are but where you can use some help and what kind of people you need to bring in.

Naturally, you’ll want to take a good look at your business goals, current volume, future production, and of course all of the financials that factor into making a decision to build a team.  Your overall business plan will likely dictate what you can take on and who can join your team in the future.  If you don’t already have a business plan, then now is the time to create one.

Hire the Right People at the Right Times

Building an ideal realty team isn’t something that happens overnight, and it can take some self-control to not make some big splash hires all at once.  As a matter of fact, it’s better to draw out the hiring process and make sure you’re doing things right to begin with and can sustain the growth.

In almost all cases, your hiring process will start with administrative help.  Most agents starting out are able to handle the majority of their own administrative tasks, but as their business grows and transactions approach that 50-60 per year range, things can start to slip.  Your first hire should be on the administrative side as this person can be the hub from which all of the rest of your realty team can thrive.

From that critical administrative hire, you can look into hiring a buyer agent to handle new leads, an inside sales agent to help your agents in the field to make calls and handle desk work, and a listing agent.  Through each step, make sure that you’re providing enough work for each worker or they’re producing enough to sustain the momentum