Seven Pillars Behind the Million Dollar Real Estate Team

In the book “The Million Dollar Real Estate Team,” which Pounds co-authored with Watters International Realty CEO Christopher Watters, the dynamic real estate duo took a deep dive into what makes a real estate team great.

It essentially boils down to seven main pillars: leadership and scaling, marketing and lead generation, technology, the sales team, coaching and training, the back office and the brand ambassador program.

Team model basics

Watters International Realty operates on a team-based real estate model. Forget about internal competition; teamwork is the main force behind the company’s success.

“Our model is very specific, meaning it has been refined over the course of many years, and we have essentially built our team model without the benefit of a roadmap or manual,” Pounds said. “The great thing is we have an intimate understanding of how all of these pieces fit together and how critical each one is. If you neglect one of the seven pillars, the other ones can’t move forward.

They can’t grow as fast as they should. It’s also important that you work on the pillars in a specific order to avoid a really steep growth curve and skip the pain involved in creating a high-production brokerage.”

Leadership and scaling

Leadership and scaling

The first pillar to be tended to is the leadership and scaling pillar, Pounds said. According to Pounds, leadership and scaling is an umbrella term, and it refers to handing over certain responsibilities to hires who are a better fit for the job.

“You’re building an organization where effectively you go around and fire yourself every few months from different responsibilities,” Pounds said. “The way you fire yourself is by replacing yourself with someone who is a better fit for a certain set of tasks than you ever will be.”

Pounds noted that it’s been said in the real estate industry that one is in the lead generation business, and the position real estate teams are led to believe is their number one priority is generating leads.

“We say that is no longer true,” Pounds said. “In the team model, leads are easy. You can go out and buy 100 warm leads today if you want. What’s hard is finding the people so that you can fire yourself from these different areas of the business. To install a team of leaders who can operate the business better and more efficiently than you could, you’re going to need to meet a lot of people. It’s a rare bird that can come in as a sales agent and grow into a director of operations or a director of sales.”

Leadership and scaling, Pounds said, has to do with what one looks for in agents, how to grow agents from entry-level positions into critical leadership roles and how leaders get them all to stay.

“It’s the blending of the art of leadership and the science of leadership,” Pounds said.

Marketing and technology

Marketing and lead generation

One of the biggest challenges for any real estate agent starting their career is where to get the business from, and this challenge keeps amazing team owners from taking the reins and building their own organizations because they’re under-equipped when it comes to creating leads, Pounds said.

“The real estate industry can be something of a one-trick pony when it comes to training its agents to do the same five tricks for creating a buyer and seller business,” Pounds said. “If you go into any big box broker and pay your startup fee, what’s going to happen is you will get the same advice to take the same five tactics for building your book of business. Now more than ever, when you’re competing against major lead generation platforms like Zillow or Realtor.com, it’s important that you are much more creative about creating affordable leads to provide to your agents.”

Over time, he said, one’s lead generation tactics will grow from cheap and cheerful guerilla marketing.

“Your marketing will look a lot different because you’re able to make bigger long-term bets on more expensive marketing initiatives,” he said.

Technology

Having the right technology in place is crucial for building one’s business and helping it elevate to the next stage of growth, but business owners need to be smart and not get sucked into expensive cash outlays that do not really move the needle in terms of results, Pounds said.

“The technology pillar can be a weight around the neck of many early team builders, because they’re balancing the need to conserve cash against the flashy appeal of a lot of tech toys, for lack of a better word, that purport to be the cure for everything that ails the new team owner,” Pounds said.

The sales team

Sales team and coaching

Pounds described the sales team as the “engine” of a team-based brokerage. One of the most challenging aspects of managing the sales team is finding the person or people who can lead efforts as effectively as you do, he said.

“Not only is it the driver of almost all of your revenue, but it’s also the well from which you will draw to grow leaders within your organization,” Pounds said of the sales team.

Coaching and training

Coaching and training within the team model are critical, Pounds said, because the team model is built on recruiting and growing talent on an ongoing basis.

“Because you’re always recruiting talent, you’re always training and onboarding new and existing talent while helping existing talent to grow their skill set, so it’s important that you have a sustainable, repeatable plan for coaching and training that doesn’t suck up all of the time and energy of the team owner,” Pounds said.

The back office

The beauty of the team model is that leaders can capitalize on the strengths of all personality types, Pounds said. An example he gives is that of a high-driving listing agent who can do “exponentially more deals” if they have an organized, empathetic coordinator helping him or her with service delivery.

This is an area where Watters International Realty shines.

“Our model is built on the specialization that the strength of the back office allows,” Pounds said. “The traditional real estate model is very prejudiced against certain personality types who are less ‘sales-y’ and who may be more talented when it comes to systems, processes and the like.”

Brand ambassador program

The brand ambassador program is the “secret sauce” of the Watters International Realty model, Pounds said.

“The brand ambassador program helps to leverage the power of a wide array of vendor partners to boost the lead generation capacity of the entire organization,” Pounds said. “Think of it as the turbocharger that gets bolted on top of your lead generation efforts. This is the secret component that allows small teams to pick up massive market share on a radically expedited timeline. Through a lot of testing, we have created a repeatable, scalable brand ambassador program that team owners can install into their organizations to maximize growth.”

Personal and professional characteristics

In addition to the seven pillars, there are personal and professional characteristics crucial to building a successful real estate team.

“We certainly use a variety of assessments to help weed out any obvious misalignment between a candidate for our sales team and our organization’s core values, commitments, etc., but there are also some key indicators of success that no assessment is ever going to tell you,” Pounds said. “I have yet to meet an assessment that effectively measures internal drive.”

Instead of hiring someone who has experienced success in areas of the real estate industry but has been inconsistent about that success, Watters International Realty would rather hire someone who is newer to the business but has an even and early track record of always reaching for more, Pounds said. He added that what’s important to see is a pattern of work progressions, and that periods of “extreme success” followed by periods of “chaos and prolonged failure” do not bode well for that person’s tenure within one’s organization.

“If someone was a cashier at a fast food restaurant and six months later they became an assistant manager and 18 months after that they gave her her own store, even if she has no real estate experience, I can infer she wants more and is reaching for the next rung,” Pounds said. “That person has a high likelihood of achieving success in a business where they have the ability to step on the gas and create more income for themselves. They also have a natural aptitude for leadership that we would then be able to grow and nurture during that person’s tenure with our organization.”

In terms of personality, the most important thing to look for when someone sits with you for an in-person interview is how they make you feel, Pounds said.

“That’s what a client is going to think when they are put in front of this person when they become an agent with your team,” Pounds said. “They can have a stellar resume but if they feel inauthentic or seem to lack humility or empathy you should realize you’re not going to be able to fix that person. It is highly likely that potential clients will feel the same about him or her when they meet in a sales consultation.”

And of course, if a real estate team needs a specific skill set, it’s important to validate that the candidate does, in fact, have that skill set, Pounds said. An example he gave was of computer skills.

“If you have a person who works in an administrative capacity it’s important to verify they have these skills,” Pounds said. “You can’t take their word for it. Put that person through a basic, practical assessment of the basic skills required to perform their roles effectively. They don’t have to know your proprietary software, but they have to be able to navigate basic platforms and problem-solve if they run into difficulties.”