The Evolution of a Real Estate Agent | From Agent to Business Owner

The Evolution of a Real Estate Agent 

As a real estate agent, what are your career goals? If you’d like to eventually own your own real estate brokerage, you’ll need to set a goal, timeline, and target for yourself in order to grow and scale your business. This target is key, as you’ll need something to aim for in order to reach your goal.  At 1st Class Real Estate, we can help make the process easier by showing you the ins and outs of being on your way to owning your own brokerage. These stages are what we call the “Evolution of a Real Estate Agent.”

Maximizing Transactions as an Agent 
If you’re a real estate agent and you’re trying to determine how to develop and be more profitable so that you can grow your business, you’ll need to figure out how much it is that you want to grow. First, decide how many transactions you’ll need to do in a year, and then set another target for how many that equates to doing in a month, a week, etc. You should also calculate the number of buyer vs. seller contracts, but don’t forget how often that number can fluctuate, and you can end up with more seller transactions than buyer transactions.

It’s also necessary to factor in how much profit you expect to make, given that it’ll be necessary for you to spend money to generate leads and business.  Calculate how low you can get the cost of a lead, so you can scale up those transactions. Work on recognizing which lead sources are generating actual business and contracts. You could end up having a lead source that is $3.00 per lead but not generating closings, but your $100.00 per lead source… is. Identifying how many transactions you need to make and how much each will cost, is essential to your evolution as an agent. 

Leverage - Buyer Agent, Seller Agent, Team Leader 
The next step in your development and another key factor is leverage. There will come a point in time when you realize that it makes sense to bring someone in under you to take on some of the roles you are filling in the business. For example, if you are an agent working on listings, then you can employ an agent to start bringing in buyers. Eventually, you will delegate someone else to handle the buyer contracts, so you can become a team leader working on marketing and generating more business.

If you can bring in agents and help them be successful, you’ll be supporting their value and in turn, increasing yours. The right agents will concentrate their time on the business and ensure that the company will be profitable. Consequently, as a team leader, you will be building a business, constantly growing, and gaining leverage. 

Your Real Estate Brokerage 
At some point, it won’t make sense to be in a team at a brokerage anymore, and it'll be time to take the plunge and begin making the transition to becoming a real estate broker. The next part of your evolution begins when you decide to open your own brokerage.

Instead of helping buyers, helping sellers, or being a team leader who is helping the agents on your team, you'll actually now be helping others become team leaders. At 1st Class Real Estate, we have a model that is set up to give 100% commission to team leaders. This allows team leaders to compensate their buyer and seller agents well enough (at a high split) to be successful. If the agents are making enough money to pay their bills and spend money on their own marketing, they can go out and obtain more contracts. The leaders will in turn become all the value that you need. Doing this in your new brokerage will allow you to scale. 

We’ve created a model that works for broker-owners to easily bring on agents and increase their value. We find that it will cost you less money in most cases to run and own your own firm than the costs associated with being a team leader at another firm. Depending on where you are in the evolution, and even if you're just starting in real estate, you now know how to evolve and be positioned to grow your business.

Begin your evolution by factoring all of these points into your plan, and creating your goal and target timeline. It doesn’t matter if the date you set is three months from now, one year from now, or in three years. Start gathering the information you need to hit your target. Having your own real estate brokerage is a target you can aim for and a goal you can achieve. If you have the right guidance, becoming a broker is not as difficult as you may imagine it to be.

You may be opening the door to something you never even considered before. During this progression, you’ll have gone from working with buyers to working with sellers, to being a team leader, and to being a broker-owner. This is the evolution of a real estate agent, and we can help you grow your business and make the process less daunting. You can obtain a good deal of the information you’ll need by checking out the tools and resources on our website and by attending one of our discovery days. At 1st Class Real Estate, we’re here to help!