So these are the various positions on a real estate team, and what I’m going to talk about is the admin systems portion of a real estate team — the roles, the responsibilities, and how it all works. Quite frankly, what I’m going to talk about is where I see most of the problems.

There’s a lot of utility here. If I’m recruiting, this is the presentation I’d give to someone struggling with a TC but still has no time — someone using a TC paid by file. I’ve seen it motivate people. Someone selling 30 transactions a year with no time and no desire to go anywhere, and I’ll say, “What if all of this was done for you?” You wouldn’t have to do your own marketing, your own admin, listing to contract, contract to close. You could give away a lot more, get a lot more free time, and generate more business.

This is how I present it. We have a huge administrative course that goes through all of the administrative systems, but it’s hard to get someone to sit through that. So this quick elevator speech really explains the role in a way I also use when I’m hiring someone. I would never offer someone an administrative assistant job without laying out these expectations for how it’s going to work. This same presentation motivates people, and almost every real estate team out there needs massive improvement in their administrative systems.

I always start with the job description. When there’s a new admin hire, this is a lot for one person to do — it’s over-inclusive. They can’t do all of this. First, they typically learn listing to contract. I call this the Listing Manager role — from when we’re about to take the listing until we get offers.

The second part of the job is contract to close. We get an offer, we get acceptance, then it goes from contract all the way to closing and a little post-closing. They also handle some of my marketing — not just social media posts, but managing CRMs, coordinating events, and all the things an individual agent can’t do alone, and certainly can’t do with just a TC who’s typically only handling listing to closing.

Then there’s the administrative manager role, especially once we bring on a buyer’s agent or a showing assistant. Once we start bringing people on, we need team management, and that admin jumps into that role too.

In the beginning, it’s just one person, and clearly they can’t do all the marketing, admin management, and everything from listing to contract and contract to close. But as the team grows — maybe to 75 to 125 units — we’re probably going to need to hire a second person. That’s okay, because you’ll have a lot more money by then since you’re selling more.

You bring on a second person, and maybe the first person gives away half their job and trains their replacement. I’ve seen this work two ways: you keep one person in the listing manager and transaction coordinator role since both are transaction-focused, and the other person takes marketing director and admin manager. I’ve also seen it work where the listing manager also serves as marketing director — since there’s so much marketing involved in listings — and the other person takes transaction coordinator and admin manager.

Eventually you bring on a third person and give away another part of the job, and this becomes four different positions. That typically happens around 200 to 300 units. I’ve seen teams we coach run multiple transaction coordinators and one or two listing managers, because there’s more volume in transaction coordination than in listing management, so that role tends to duplicate first.

The point is: we want as much work as possible on the admin side, taking time away from the agent — especially that first agent. We really only want them lead generating, showing properties (if they’re solo), and doing buyer and listing consultations. I want a lot of the communication on the admin too. I want my admin, not my agents, having most of the conversations with clients.

Just like I love my dentist and I love my dental hygienist, I want your clients to love your admin. That person needs to be good with people, or you’re going to end up doing double work — talking to clients and then talking to your admin. That’s why we recommend the S profile so strongly for this role — they’re good with people. The C profile is good at not making mistakes, but their bedside manner can be a little rough.

We want the admin pulling that conversation, because if clients are always calling you, we’ve got a problem — first, they shouldn’t be calling you, and second, they’re calling the wrong person. Good customer service comes from proactively answering questions before the client feels the need to call. This is where teams really grow, because the admin becomes a true value to the agents, who can focus on generating new business instead of customer service.

You see a lot of teams get big and struggle to demonstrate value — and run into trouble with commission splits — because their admin systems are too weak. The stronger the team, typically the stronger the admin systems, and that shows clearly in our listing-to-closing checklist.

This checklist has four tabs. The first is pre-listing. When we get a call about a listing appointment a few days out, the first thing I do is get the address, pull the seller lead sheet, gather the information, and hand it to my admin to prepare for that appointment — presentation packets, slides, a pre-listing video, and a CMA.

A CMA sounds like brain surgery to some people, but it’s not. Someone taught you how to do it, so you can teach someone else. You do it in front of them three times, they do it three times while you review and correct, and pretty soon you don’t need to make edits anymore. You’ve trained them to do CMAs the way you like — and once you’re doing 40, 50, 60 listings a year, especially during your busy season, that’s the kind of task that gives you back real time.

After the listing appointment, I tell the seller, “You’re going to get a call from my listing manager today or tomorrow — she’s your personal concierge, dedicated to all the marketing systems. Call her with anything you need.” You set the expectation up front that additional help is coming. This can’t be about you if you’re trying to grow an organization — you don’t scale, your organization has to scale.

From there, the checklist covers everything from listing to contract, before it even goes active on the MLS — starting marketing activities, coordinating open house schedules, preparing social media posts — because if that listing sells quickly, you’ve lost your window to market it and demonstrate value.

Once the listing goes live, your admin should be fielding offer calls until offers come in. Then you step back in to negotiate, and we move to the seller closing checklist — more marketing around the transaction if you have both a marketing person and a transaction coordinator, with the TC making sure sale-pending flyers and marketing activities actually happen. As we get closer to closing, the task volume increases. The buyer contract-to-close checklist works the same way.

These checklists are intentionally over-inclusive, because it’s easier to delete tasks than to create new ones you forgot. You can shade out anything you don’t have the bandwidth for yet as a placeholder for later. It’s built as a Google Drive document — you can do this in a CRM, but it’s harder to work the full checklist that way. Many teams keep a file in Google Drive for each property, and every file gets pulled every single morning. The admin pushes each file forward — emails out, phone calls out — then spends the rest of the day handling responses. Every file, every day. That’s the rule.

That job exists to free up the agent for listing appointments, showing property, negotiating contracts, lead generating, and recruiting. Everything else goes to the admin.

Once you’re running a team, you also need a dashboard. You’re tracking production across agents — contacts made to their sphere of influence, social media posts, open houses held, lead follow-up tasks in the CRM, new contacts added, progress through onboarding training, and lag measures like units closed year-to-date and units pending. This lets you make educated decisions while holding agents accountable — because if you’re relying only on a TC to support your whole team, it’s going to be really tough. You need administrative roles filled.

Most real estate agents don’t want to think about any of this — they’re social creatures who want to generate business, not build systems. But to actually lead a team or a brokerage, you need these systems in place, or you’ll burn out. You’ll lose agents, you’ll have no time, and you’ll end up working harder than you ever did as a solo agent.

Admin is everything. A lot of people don’t know what they don’t know, so walking through this — how robust it really is, and how much it takes off an agent’s plate — helps motivate them while also showing them exactly what they need to learn to let go of. It’s how I set expectations with a new administrative hire, how I motivate agents to get leverage, and how I explain what the role actually looks like from the job description through the listing-to-closing checklist and the administrative management behind it. Hope that helps.