I just got off the phone with a Realtor friend of mine. He manages a large non-Help-U-Sell office in an upscale Southern California neighborhood where the average price remains absurdly high despite the drop in value over the past couple of years. He was telling me about one of the new production awards his franchise just rolled out. Like most of the production awards in his franchise and in most of the other franchises as well, it is based on Gross Commission Income (GCI) generated to the office by the agent.
I decided to put a pencil to it, took his average sale price and multiplied by the average commission rate per closed side in his traditional office, then divided that into the new award criteria. Turns out an agent in his office could probably win the award by closing — get this — eight sides in a year! Is that freaky or what? Close eight sides and they give you a trophy!
The funny thing is, this is a manager who is always moaning about the poor per person productivity of his staff. Last time we talked about it, I ribbed him about having an office full of people who were satisfied doing 6 deals a year. He said I was wrong: he was having trouble getting most of them to do 3!
So, tonight, when we did our little arithmetic exercise, I just had to ask him:
‘Do you think maybe rewarding incompetence in this manner isn’t helping solve your productivity problem?’
But he didn’t want to talk about that. He wanted to talk about how this new award will help him retain his ‘solid middle’. Sigh. If that’s your ‘solid middle’ I shudder to think what your ‘flabby bottom’ looks like.
See, that’s what happens when brokers get out of the real estate business and into the recruiting business. They devote their energy not to finding better ways to please the customer but rather to inventing silly trinkets — golden handcuffs, I think they call them — to help them hang on to the non-productive agents they worked so hard to recruit! It’s a world gone crazy.
Hold tight to your vision, Help-U-Sell brokers. Fine tune your expectations so that they drive you to not just achieve your goals but to smash through them on the way to the heights. When you add an agent or two, don’t let their comfort zone dictate your standard. As my traditional manager friend knows, you get what you expect, and if your expectation is that eight closed sides in a year makes you a star . . . eight closed sides in a year is probably all you’re ever going to get.
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I still laugh when I hear a traditional agent boast about being in the ‘million dollar club’. Around here that’s four, maybe five sales. I expect my buyer specialists to do three a month minimum and be in the ‘million dollar club’ in February. Incidently we don’t celebrate it. Instead we go after the next million.