Join a Real Estate Team or Go Solo?
Should You Join a Real Estate Team as a New REALTOR or Growing Agent?
There is so much to know in real estate. The list of skills required to be a successful real estate agent is endless. How does one learn everything they need to know to be a successful real estate agent? Well, it comes down to the people you pair with. That might be choosing to join a real estate team or working closely with a real estate mentor. If you are a new real estate agent (0-2 years experience) a team and mentor is recommended in most cases. If you are a growing agent (3-5 years experience) then a team may work or you could just want to pair with a great mentor.
In this real estate agent training podcast, you will learn if you should join a real estate team or go solo!
How to Find a Great Real Estate Mentor
Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Rev Real Estate School. The podcast with quick tips and actionable advice to help you sell more real estate in today's world. And now your host Michael Montgomery.
[00:00:11] Hello and welcome back to Rev Real Estate School. I'm your host Michael Montgomery and today we're talking about one of these age old debates and it's do you join a real estate team or do you go at it solo. We're going to jump into the pros and cons of both of these and when it makes sense to potentially join a team or to go more of the mentorship route. And we're also going to talk about maybe when it doesn't make as much sense to join a real estate team. We're also going to talk about the industry in general.
[00:00:41] First off let me just run something past you. Let's say you read a job description, and you know exactly where I'm going with this. As soon as you start to hear the job description. Within the job description you heard that you needed to have this sort of knowledge you needed financial literacy, you needed marketing knowledge, you need the content marketing knowledge, digital marketing knowledge, you need to market knowledge in general, you need the legal knowledge, negotiation skills, and the need to have soft skills like sales, motivation, intuition, relentlessness, communication. You know where I'm going with this. This is what it takes in order to be a real estate agent. Now if I read a job description that needed all of those skills I would think, "OK" this person needs to have an MBA needs to have experience. So it goes to show what is required in order to be successful in this career. And in most markets it's honestly just a few month course. Right? You jump right into it and it says OK now you're ready to go. Now you're ready to go sell a house. But we know that's not the truth. And we know that there's so much more that goes into learning how to be an agent and how to be a successful agent.
[00:01:50] Then you might think, "no problem while my brokerage is going to train me well even the brokerages with some of the best training out there." It very rarely gets used. And why is that? That's because most real estate agents when it comes down to it they need to really important things when they're in a newer phase of their career. They need a level of accountability and they also need apprenticeship. These are two things that are not heavily valued when you get into the real estate industry and they're teaching you a lot of the skills that you need to know and these things are important they go back to our job description there off the start but there's so many other things that are required to know and the direction of most real estate brokerages in our modern world right now is to go towards getting less and less fees from the agent which means they offer less and less services to the agent and that's not always the case but there is a strong push towards that direction. So what does all of this mean? What we've been talking about is the fact that the real estate agent needs to know a ton of information. They need to be accountable. They need to have a level of apprenticeship. They need to be paired with the right brokerage. A lot of skills that are required and they need to be paired with the right people.
[00:02:57] How do you go about doing this? If you're a new agent and when I say new agent I'm talking about zero to two years in the industry and then when I say growing agent we're talking about like three to five years in the industry and in my opinion if you are a new agent you should either join a team or you should have a very close mentor.
[00:03:19] Both of these models can work very very well however without either of them your chances at success will go down. Not impossible but it will definitely go down. So joining a team that needs to be a decision that's made based on who you want to join why you want to join the team. The mentorship way can work just as well as the team so if you have a mentor or if you have somebody who you're going to follow along and learn from that can be great. But usually the team model has a little bit more structure. So this is if you're a new agent so we're talking zero to two years then you want to either be part of a team or have a mentor that you can follow around and you can follow them around it's not just talking to them once in a while or having them on speed dial. It's going to listing presentations with them it's going on buyer showings with them. It's coming into the office and helping them with research and this is free work that you could be doing for them. But what you get in return are more checkboxes beside those things that are required on our job description. This is absolutely huge.
[00:04:21] Now if you're a growing agent so if you've been in the industry for three to five years you're starting to really get your feet wet you're starting to understand the industry a little bit more then maybe the team model is less of interest to you but you should definitely still have some level of a mentor maybe your mentor changes maybe when you're new you have a certain mentor and as you start to grow you get a different type of mentor but you still need somebody within your life that you can look up to and you can learn from. And the reason is is because there is very little education in this industry. It's just the way it is. You're not going to have a lot of education even when it comes to relicensing courses and things like that. Those are bare bare bones. There's not going to be a lot of education and a lot of work you're going to learn and real estate is going to come down to experience and actually being part of deals and dealing with people and understanding people and having your hands on deals. This will not happen unless you have a very close mentor or you're part of a real estate team. Now we did a podcast on how to find the right mentor for you. This was a month back or so I will link that up into the show notes so that you're able to go back and have a listen to this episode. If the mentorship route sounds like it's something that's a little bit more interesting to you there's no right or wrong here but what you do really need is you do need to have an ally at your office that you can work directly with. Now even if you're past the growing agent stage your five plus years then there should still be somebody that you can talk to and that you can work with and it could be more your broker and it could be somebody else with in your industry and in your office.
[00:05:59] This industry allows you to go out there and do your own thing. If you do not want to have the mentorship or have the team model however it rewards the people that truly have the knowledge and the experience so be one of these people and understand that if you are in the newer stage if you're 0 to two years in the industry or in the growing stage three to five years even then your focus should less be on let's just make as much income as possible and be so much more focused on how I can learn all of these skills that go into becoming a real estate agent. Because once you really start to understand these skills and we're talking again about the hard skills like financial knowledge, market, all of that and the soft skills like motivation, intuition, buying purposes, these sort of things you put these two things together and you can be making an amazing income for yourself.
[00:06:50] Unfortunately, human nature wants instant gratification and this is one of the major flaws of human nature is we want things now and we want to be able to start doing deals now and that is totally fine. It's part of human nature. But if you can delay gratification in this industry then there is no ceiling to how far you can go. So when you're in these newer stages new agent and growing agent which is really where we focus our attention on on this podcast and in general in a lot of our training does focus on the zero to five year mark then having a mentor or having a team can be extremely beneficial.
[00:07:27] Let's quickly jump into if you are considering a team. Some things that you should look for and things that you shouldn't look for. So first what I recommend that you look for. Look for a team with a proven track record. This is very important. You want to make sure that you're jumping in with the right team that does have some success in your market. Look for structure and systems. These are things that you will really want to learn as you scale your business up. They don't sound sexy. They don't sound fun but they are super important. Look for an exchange of value. So as far as exchange of value goes is what are they providing to you and what are you providing to them. It's not a one way street. It's not they're just going to provide you with leads and it's not just you're going to do work for them for nothing there needs to be some level of an exchange of value that makes sense and you also want to look for learning opportunities. So who can you learn from, who can you go an who's listing presentations can you be part of. Now some things that I would not focus on is don't focus on the number of leads that they're going to provide to you. This is less important if you're a new or growing agent. Don't be so focused on the number of leads. Be so much more focused on the learning. The apprenticeship and the accountability piece. These three things will take you so much further than a handful more leads so be less focused on the leads and the leads does play on our instant gratification desires. So try to let that go and focus more long term where you're learning the accountability apprenticeship and you're also just learning the industry. Next is don't look necessarily for the best split again what you're after is education knowledge and experience. You're looking to add skills to your resumé so that you can go back and look at that job description that we discussed off the start and say Yes I have all of those skills and if you're new or growing you probably don't even if you're beyond growing you probably don't. There's still always so much to learn within this industry and being paired with the right people goes a really long way and it doesn't just come down to the split it comes down to who you're learning from. So a quick recap. Yes it can really pay to be part of a team or to have a mentor at your office or in your market that you look up to and that you work with and that you shadow because this will go a very long way in your career. Thank you so much for hosting this episode. I really appreciate it.
[00:09:56] Remember you can ask a top producer anything I'll get to do with show the state go to our website let us know where you did that the free coaching section and a deep Give me a call. That's it. Thanks so much. And we'll see you in the next lesson.