By: HomeSmart Professional Partners Realty Broker/Owners Marie and Mark Hischier

As a seasoned real estate agent who is licensed in three states, I’ve worked for brokerages that follow both the traditional and flat fee model. Some were dedicated to outstanding support and technology, while others struggled to keep up with the industry. After experiencing and evaluating varying structures at several brokerages, I knew we needed to end up with a company that shared our values.

We have successfully grown our brokerage by heeding to three core values: visibility, efficiency and referrals.

 

1. Visibility

First thing’s first… It’s important to be seen. Consumers are scouring the internet for homes, so we post our clients’ homes all over the internet. Our system makes marketing easy with personal websites and YouTube videos for each property, sharing our listings on over 1,000 websites worldwide. We can also download social media posts and build flyers that promote our agents and their listings.

Here’s an example of how powerful marketing can be:

While we were walking the neighborhood, handing out invitations to an open house, a young boy saw us coming his way. He ran up the driveway yelling, “Mommy, Mommy, the REALTORSⓇ are coming, the REALTORSⓇ are coming!” Now that’s good marketing!

 

2. Efficiency

The market is strong and appreciating reasonably, so consumers are investing in real estate. Sellers are receiving multiple offers and buyers are purchasing for long-term investment. Running a successful operation in such a busy industry requires efficiency.

It is important to have technology that is seamless and integrated to give us more time to focus on our clients and growing our business.

A savvy back office system is critical to our daily efficiency. We can review paperwork, schedule classes for our agents and print reports that track our performance. The agent portal allows our agents to focus on their clients by giving them the means to easily create their own marketing materials. Without smart systems, it would be impossible to supervise, educate and support 100 agents at this level of production.

 

3. Referrals

We’ve built a culture of family. With a strong foundation of support and stability, recruiting for a tough business is made so much easier. 35% of our agents are referrals. Our agents share the benefits of our structure, training and technology with others in the area and essentially do the recruiting for us.

By adhering to these our core values, and by following a brokerage model that does, we’ve seen great results. We reached a milestone 100 agents in just four years, and our office was awarded No. 1 in transaction growth for 2016.

At the end of the day real estate is a people business. We want to be a brokerage that agents get referred to, and we want those agents to be people our clients refer their friends and family to.

Find out if the HomeSmart franchise business model is the right fit for you. Contact Bryan Brooks at [email protected]