If you’re looking for real estate team leader training, you’re in the right place. What should you do when you want to learn something? Look at someone who is doing it at a high level. Success follows clues. And that’s why we’re following Patrick Higgins, owner of high-performing team Nashville Home Guru.
In May of this year (2022), ICC hosted a real estate conference in the beautiful Florida Keys. As a part of that conference, I brought up a panel of top producers to speak to the attendees about their real estate success stories.
If you missed this conference, you can enroll in our FREE online course, the ICC Real Estate Conference 2022 Summary Replay and gain access to several of our powerful mastermind sessions and videos.
Patrick Higgins, ICC coaching client, landed in the real estate industry after years in the corporate marketing world. He started out as a solo agent, selling 15 houses a year.
Fast forward 8 years later to today, and Patrick has a team with 4 admin and 13 agents. Patrick’s team continues to grow. He also opened both a mortgage company and a title company — expanding to multiple pillars of business within the real estate industry.
Patrick is a very successful leader of leaders. He recently promoted two of his agents to co-team leaders. His ICC coach, Brad Baldwin, says that Patrick is excellent at recognizing and developing talent.
When he promoted two of his agents to team leaders, it was for several reasons.
It isn’t easy to hand the reins over to other people.
Patrick has had a hard time “letting go” and letting his new co-team leaders run his team. But, he knows that these individuals will do a better job than he could. It’s a win-win because he found a better fit for his team members, and he found capable leaders to run his team in an efficient and effective way.
“I can see it doing better without me. It’s hard, but I know it’s what’s best for the team.” This, right here, is real estate team leader training 101. Patrick acted with humility and developed the self-awareness that other people could lead the team better.
There will be times when things go wrong and you want to jump back in. And you need to be careful about if, how, and when you do that. That’s the hard part. It is all too easy to sabotage things by trying to take over and steer the ship again.
Leadership sometimes means staying out of your own way.
This is all a process. It is essential to get all team members to see how the puzzle pieces fit and work together. Patrick has worked hard to make sure each of his team members has buy-in, and that they can see the vision and embrace the team goals.
At first, it is uncomfortable for everybody. But then team members start to “get” it. Suddenly, the ISAs are setting appointments for the sales agents. When the team members can all work together, everyone benefits.
What can we see that every successful team has in common? Systems. Successful real estate team leaders also meet with their people on a regular basis. These teams have Team Dashboards, where the key metrics like Activity Based Indicators (ABIs) and Results Based Indicators (RBIs) can all be easily tracked.
Systems bring teams together.
You must make the systems formalized. You must implement the systems and stick by them. And this is one of the main reasons clients coach with us at ICC. Team leaders are usually in need of systems to use so that they don’t need to invent one on their own.
Letting go can be a really good thing. For example, during the ICC real estate conference (where this Top Producer Panel took place), Patrick was able to “check out”. His business was able to continue to run at a high level without him being there. He could be at a work conference — or on vacation — and have full confidence that issues were being handled. This is huge for work/life balance.
You can let go by leveraging your people. This is really the whole point of real estate team leader training.
If you are always putting out fires as the team leader, then you know there are issues that you need to fix on your team. How do you find out if there is a problem with your plumbing? You run the water and see if there is a leak.
The same goes for your real estate team. When issues arise (and they will arise), how are the issues being handled? If you feel like you are constantly playing defense, it’s time to get your systems in order.
You shouldn’t be saying “no” to taking a vacation because you’re too afraid of how things will go during your absence.
Success follows clues. I say this often, mainly because it’s true. Nobody needs to reinvent the wheel. The systems are available, and they’ve been proven time and time again. This is why I wrote The High-Performing Real Estate Team. You shouldn’t have to come up with this stuff on your own — as a team leader, you have better things to do. My book is the instruction manual for real estate teams. In it, you’ll learn many game-changing strategies and systems. You’ll also:
Written for real estate agents, teams, brokerages and franchise owners, The High-Performing Real Estate Team is an indispensable resource that will guide you toward growth while providing you with the resources and downloadable materials to reach your goals faster.
Today we are giving you a free download of our Small Team Organizational Structure Chart. This is perfect for leaders working on starting a real estate team. If you’re already a team and you’re looking to grow, this chart may not “fit” you. Reach out to our team (fill out the form here) if you’d like to learn more about how ICC can help you build out a custom organizational structure — and the systems that go with it!
