How to get ‘A’ players in your Estate Agency

On the day you opened your Estate Agency, there is a good chance it was just you working there and maybe, if you were lucky, one other person. Over the years, if things have gone well, you have got busier and busier. Once upon a time it was not a problem for you to handle all of the applicant registrations, portal enquiries, market appraisal requests and actually attend all of the appointments too.

But then, one day it became overwhelming, so you looked for help. But as a still relatively new business you really just needed someone cheap who could handle some of those registrations and portal enquiries. Gradually it became too much for just the two of you and another person to do more of the same was hired and so on.

But stop the wheel for one moment and take a look. You have a team of people that effectively are still working the same way you were when it was just you working from a bedroom on your own, you have just scaled it up. The wages you are paying out are now nothing to be sniffed at as a total monthly amount, but the amount is spread over an entire team of effectively low value administrators.

Working this way can lead to the owner of the business feeling very lonely, with all of the major decisions and responsibility still falling on his or her shoulders and with no one reliable to turn to for delegation and help.

The key to turning this ‘beginner’ team into premier league champions is to start offering higher basic salaries but how can you do that when there is no extra revenue, yet? The key is in automation.

If you are smart with the way in which you are working in should not be necessary to hire people on 15-20k just to register applicants or qualify portal leads as firstly, no big hitter is going to want to do that job for that salary and secondly it can just be done by your software.

“But that will take the human element out of things” I hear you say. Actually, it is quite the opposite as instead of just trawling through 100’s of buyer and tenant enquiries your software can do all of the heavy lifting for you, allowing your team to actually have good conversations with the right people as opposed to just getting through them all.

By looking at how to take the business to the next stage in this way you can revaluate your total wage bill and hire less people on higher wages. This will start to bring a better quality of employee into the business and allow you to not only delegate meaningful tasks but begin to see the road towards creating the company you dreamed of in the beginning, you know, the one whereby you had an easier life, not a harder one?!

You can learn more about how some of these functions work in Lifesycle here.