Profit Margins Are Falling for Individual Agents - and Teamwork is the Cure

Our industry is in a crisis right now, but there’s a cure for that, and it’s called teamwork.

There are many pain points in our industry today, which can easily be alleviated by switching to a team-based model. Here at Watters International Realty, we thrive on that model, and we encourage other industry professionals to join forces to reap the benefits.

The number one issue in our industry right now is that so many real estate agents still work alone. Traditionally, single agents have to wear many different hats - marketer, negotiator, courier and more. When they get a new listing, they have to do all the marketing of that house on their own. If a house needs flyers, they need to drive out and deliver flyers. What’s probably the most frustrating is when an agent is sitting with a client, and someone calls with a question about, say, a for-sale sign they saw, and the agent can’t answer that call right away.

That creates a point of friction for agents.

There’s only so much time in a day, and single real estate agents run the risk of becoming a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. The benefit of working within the team model, like we do here at Watters International Realty, is you get the scale that comes from greater efficiency.

Real estate agents also don’t make as much money as some might think. Some make less than teachers do, and single real estate agents are being negatively impacted because there are no efficiencies. They don’t have teammates to rely on and help them manage the small stuff. Not even agents at real estate brokerages have the support they need - all they have is the ability to use the agency name. Since no real support is offered, those inefficiencies end up crushing you from a profitability perspective.

And let’s talk about the Internet. Bottom line: There’s too much information out there, and much of it is outdated.

I think people think that because of technology it’s getting easier for real estate agents, and the truth is that technology has made real estate more complex. A lot of these popular websites are inaccurate. You can call on 10 houses listed on a popular real estate website and you’ll find that half of them were already sold a few months ago. Consumers are more confused than ever before. There’s just an immense amount of ambiguity from a consumer perspective, and this is where a real estate agent can truly shine by educating clients and helping them understand the process. This becomes even easier when a real estate agent has the support of an entire team.

Real estate agents also face the issue of data entry. The biggest issue in our industry right now from a technology perspective is integration. There is a lot of redundancy and it is just a massively fragmented space right now. Agents need to log into different platforms and it takes them three times longer to do things than before because they have to log into multiple systems. If you have a new client who wants to sell their house you have to re-enter their info in the transaction management system and re-enter it into your company’s platform for internal purposes. The amount of redundancy that happens due to lack of integration makes the amount of work for an agent exponential. Everything takes twice as long because you have to enter data into multiple systems.

We at Watters International Realty are at the forefront of fixing this. Right now, we are beta testing a new solution to this integration in the real estate space, and we’re excited to see what new developments will happen in 2019. We want to help alleviate this burden.

While our industry is facing many issues right now, there is no reason to lose hope. Real estate agents will never become obsolete, and that’s because no machine can deal with the complex emotions that come with selling a home.

Keep in mind: We’re selling something that has a significant number of emotional ties to a person’s life, and the primary reason people need to sell their home is not always for the best of reasons. The one positive reason for selling a house is a lifestyle upgrade, which is when the owner is moving on to bigger and better things. Otherwise, people mainly sell houses due to death, divorce, financial distress and downsizing. These are all emotionally jarring events that can often make the sales process a stressful one, and it is impossible to build an algorithm to sell a home online because there are so many moving parts and so many emotions involved.

We’ll never be obsolete, but by changing up the way we work and improving efficiencies, perhaps we can make our lives just a little bit easier.

Hence the Watters International Realty team model.

Here at Watters International Realty we can leverage the support staff we have in place to be more successful. We have an inside sales team who takes inbound queries and set up appointments for the agents. We never have that issue in which an agent can’t take a call because they’re with a client. Once our agents get the client under a representation agreement, there is a team in place to help them execute and accomplish their goals. We have listing managers who take care of things such as coordinating staging, photography, brochure design and listing syndication. Not to mention a transaction coordinator, who will follow up with the buyers mortgage company, title company, inspectors, appraisers and the co-op agent involved in the transaction. 

At Watters International Realty, our real estate agents just need to focus on doing a great job when they meet a client face-to-face. They can hand off the workload to the next person on the team, and only when something comes up from a communication perspective, such as weekly follow-up calls and reports on how the home sale is going, will they get involved again. Everything else is done by specific departments, and the consumer doesn’t have to worry about staying in touch with any of these team members.

At Watters International Realty, the real estate agent is - and will always remain - the captain of the ship.

For more information on Watters International Realty, visit http://wirsystems.com.