If you're a broker, owner, or manager, here’s a key question for you:

Are you benchmarking your agents?

What do we mean by benchmarking? It means drawing a line in the sand—looking at what an agent has done over the past 12 months and what they want to accomplish in the next 12 months.

We call this Per Agent Productivity.

Start by measuring your entire office: What is your average per agent productivity?

Let’s say the average agent in your office is closing 6 transactions per year and doing $3 million in production. Once you know that number, and you must know that number, you can set a growth goal.

Now, based on that, figure out how you can push the envelope and go from 6 to 7, 8, 9, even 10 transactions per agent? What’s it going to take to make that happen?

It comes down to two things: recruiting and retention.

From a recruiting standpoint, your goal should be to help new agents outperform where they came from. This is another layer of benchmarking.

When an experienced agen...

Hey, guys. When you're sitting with a seller and you've taken the listing, it's important to have what I call the "red flag conversation."

Here's how it goes: I say, "Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Seller, now that we've listed your home, I want to explain the next steps. We're going to get your property into the MLS, turn on my marketing engine—yes, I call it a marketing engine—and your home will be exposed to every buyer in the market. In the first couple of weeks, all those buyers will take a look, and one of three things will happen."

Scenario A: We get a ton of showings, which is great. That means buyers in large numbers accept the price and want to see the home.

Scenario B: The buyers look, but there are very few showings—a small trickle. That's a red flag, signaling that buyers don't think we got the price right. If that happens, I'll reach out to you in the first five days because I'll be monitoring the showing reports in real time. If I don't see significant activity, we'll discuss this...