How Watters International Realty Provides Unparalleled Support to Team Owners

Two years ago, Chad Brady signed on to become one of the first Watters International Realty team owners. The Austin real estate firm was founded just six years earlier, but in that time it had made a name for itself as one of the fastest-growing agencies in Texas. Brady, a seasoned agent in his own right, was attracted to the brand’s team-oriented operational model, but he had never before run his own business, and he was nervous about overextending himself.

“I knew real estate, but I didn’t have any experience running a business,” he said. So Brady started small, taking on one Watters International territory in San Antonio — the city’s first — in 2016 with a small office and just one agent. Since then, his business has exploded, taking on a growing team of agents and support staff and becoming one of the highest-performing agencies in the city.

“My goal is to end 2018 as one of the top five real estate teams in San Antonio,” Brady said. “By 2019, I hope to be number one.”

Brady attributes most of his success with Watters International Realty to the brand’s operational model, which invests heavily in support and resources for a small group of talented agents — traditional agencies take the reverse approach, taking on as many agents as possible and investing minimally in infrastructure — but he says his effectiveness as an owner is due in large part to the support he’s received from the real estate firm, including both the corporate office and other team owners.

“Chris [Watters, the brand's founder and CEO] and Bradley [Pounds, President and COO] set me up with everything I needed to run the business, and the support has not let up,” he said. “The team culture goes all the way to the top; we’re all working together.”

Brady’s story is familiar to every real estate professional who has signed on to be a Watters International team owner. The company has refined a strategy of taking skilled realtors and giving them the support they need to become high-performing business owners.

According to Bradley Pounds, Watters International’s owner-support programs are among the most essential components of the entire business.

“Our team understands that our primary responsibility is ensuring the success of our owners,” Pounds said. “If one of our teams is struggling, that means something isn’t working, so we stay focused on making sure that every team has everything they need to perform at the highest level.”

At the center of Watters International’s support system is a coaching program available to all owners, regardless of how long they’ve been with the brand.

“Whether you are a brand new owner or you’ve been with us for years, we offer hour-long group phone calls on a weekly basis and one-on-one coaching sessions every two weeks,” Pounds said.

Watters also offers specialized ongoing coaching for individual team members, including buyer agents, listing agents and team leads. Pounds says there are unique advantages to each coaching model, and many owners take advantage of all of them.

“The weekly group calls are a great opportunity for us to focus on one big-picture challenge or improvement while the one-on-one coaching lets us work closely with an owner to focus specifically on where they are at with their business,” Pounds said. “The specialized training makes sure every team member has everything they need to succeed and frees the owner up to focus on the business.”

Crucially, Pounds says he and Watters remain personally involved with coaching and support, leading those weekly group calls and meeting with owners on an ongoing basis.

“Chris is the expert on all things marketing-, listing- and revenue-related, and my expertise is in buying and recruiting,” he said. “Our model is built on specialization and combining talents, and that informs our coaching strategy as well. Chris and I both work closely with owners and team members to make sure that all the pieces are working together.”

Pounds says one of the most valuable support systems doesn’t come from the corporate team at all. It’s the owners, he says, who provide the most knowledge and support among themselves.

“When we started looking into building our team model, we were surprised to learn that a lot of team-centric firms actively limit contact between owners,” Pounds said. “That was just crazy to us — completely upside down. We knew from the start that we wanted our owners to work together as much as possible, so that’s how we bust our system, and the knowledge pool our owners have created is just phenomenal.”

Watters International Realty’s explicit focus on developing specialized talent means that most of the realtors who join the system as team owners are passionate and skilled realty professionals, but few of them are experienced business owners. Pounds says that is the primary knowledge gap that the brand’s support systems are designed to fill.

“We know most of our team owners are new to business ownership, and in the beginning, I think every one of them is going to experience at least a moment of apprehension or doubt, like, ‘where do I start?’” he said. “Chris and I are committed to relieving that feeling as quickly as possible and making sure that our owners have all the direction, support and resources they need to stay confident and effective throughout their entire careers with us.

The whole reason we started Watters International is that we have this amazing roadmap for success with our team model. We feel that our job now is simply to make sure that our team owners have everything they need to follow that roadmap.”