"A" in A-Team stands for Agent?
In 2007, Ralph Roberts, then the “official spokesman” of Guthy-Renker Home, published a brief essay on RISMedia called “How to Soar High with Power Agent Teams“. In it, he recommended an approach to teaming that is much more based on division of labor and functions:
I was recently flying home from the National Association of Realtors convention in Las Vegas, and I began thinking what would happen if airlines followed the same approach that most Realtors practice. I would call the airline to book a flight, and the pilot would answer the phone. When I arrived at the airport, the pilot would check me in, check my bags, follow me to the inspection point to make sure I wasn’t trying to carry any prohibited items on the plane, and then escort me to the gate to make sure I boarded the right flight and secured a seat.
He also wrote a book on the topic, which I havent’ read so it may be that many of my questions and thoughts are answered there.
Nonetheless, with more and more brokerage companies enabling agent teams of various kinds, and more and more successful agents creating de facto agent teams by hiring administrative assistants, listing coordinators, transactions managers, and the like, it appears that the ideas of “Power Agent Teams” have taken firm root in the industry.
Those ideas, however, have not been fully developed to their logical conclusions — at least not yet by anyone I’ve read or heard from in the past three years. I’d like to revisit the topic, therefore, to sketch out some consequences of the Power Agent Team idea and pose some questions.
I'll cover condos -- you take multifamily! GO GO GO!
“One man cannot practice many arts with success.” – Plato
Welcome to Part 4 of this series of too-many-words. Here are the links to previous parts: 1, 2, 3.
Let us review the situation. Upon deciding that the law firm (although not lawyers themselves perhaps) is a fine model for real estate, you have banded with other rainmakers and formed an institutional real estate practice. You have gone forth and installed a set of uniform, customer-centric relationship management processes, together with the computerized tools (CRM) to help them along. You have recruited people to be salaried employee associates, and have provided the best technical and marketing support. Through your institutional strengths, you have successfully changed the very ground of competition.
The last strategic step to consider is specialization.
In any reasonably complex industry, specialists are bound to arise. The competitive advantage of specialization is fairly large, as customers often want to make sure that they are getting the best qualified, most expert service provider. You are more likely to win business, and to be able to charge a premium for your services because the supply of specialists is lower than that of the run-of-the-mill generalist. On the other hand, the disadvantage of specialization is that your market is smaller than that of the generalist, and the demand for your services is lower as a result.
[I must point out before continuing that I mean true specialization, where someone actually has knowledge and skills that the average practitioner does not have. Simply saying one is a specialist in XYZ is mere marketing, and consumers usually can see past that pablum.] Read the rest of this entry »
