Real Estate Agent VS Real Estate Team

What truly is the difference between a real estate agent and a real estate team?

This is a question that we are asked often and we see even more false information being thrown around in the community pertaining to this subject. The differences between a single agent and a real estate team are many.

A single real estate agent can and should provide you with more inclusive service and handholding. The problem is this agent is very limited when this is the case.
Admittedly, every agent is in business to make money. That is the goal of every business, noticed that I said the word business. Most people that enter this industry treat this profession like it is a hobby. It is neither a hobby nor a job, it is a business.
The problem with a single agent is that you are very limited to what you can do. Selfishly, you are limited as a single agent as to how much money you can make and that ultimately goes against what every agent is trying to do.
Now, there could be some people were just doing it for fun and that is understandable but at the same time, it does sometimes hurt the reputation of other agents who treat the business as a true business.
But, if a single agent can only have so many clients at one time because they themselves can only service so many people at once if they want to go get more clients then what is it they must do?
Ultimately, they have to cut down on the service time they are providing to each of their existing clients.
This is the number one problem with a single agent. Again, some people are in it just for a hobby and something to do on the side, but I again go back to the fact that people that are doing this as a hobby can give the industry as a whole a bad reputation. (Don’t get me wrong, a team can give the industry a bad reputation if it is led poorly as well, and there are some teams that this is the case.)
This is the conundrum that we in the real estate community face each and every day.
There been many reports over the years about the future of the real estate industry, future of the agent, and the future of the brokerage. I think much of it hinges on the real estate agent versus the real estate team.
A single agent can only provide so much value to so many clients. They are capped. And then those agents find themselves usually in one of two camps; either they want to make more money and grow and do more deals which will inevitably draw their attention away from servicing their existing clients or they are part time and they only want to do a few deals but the lack of experience could possibly put themselves in precarious situations from time to time.
A good broker who has great relationships with their agents or has an office manager who is very knowledgeable can and should help those agents who are there to just do stuff from time to time on a part-time basis.
This brings us to the real estate team. Our real estate team is a business inside of the business.
The real estate team is a business inside of a brokerage which itself is a business.
The problem many real estate agents have faced over the years was that many of their brokerages we’re not providing the training that they were seeking and it was stunting growth.
Then a lot of agents figured out that they could go off and create a team to leverage themselves out because they had so many leads coming in and they wanted to train people to do things their way and to leverage out their own activity and increase and grow their time, money, and brand.
As a result, you have the real estate team which has itself seen much criticism in the previous years.
If a team has a great leader they should be able to grow and scale the business and service as many or as few people at the highest level that they want.
With the real estate team, you have people in specific positions and rules to fulfill the necessary jobs that need to get done each day for real estate selling and transactions to take place. A team can provide the service the client is looking for with personal concierge service every day whether that agent is available with another client or not.
If you have people on your team that are doing the transaction coordination or assistants on the team they can – depending on the questions or the jobs – get those questions answered or get tasks completed so the agent is running around trying to do everything.
All these people in different positions and roles must be trained properly and depending on their role should or could be licensed agents themselves.
If the client is needing their house marketed, a marketing expert is going to do a lot better job at that than a real estate agent who has never had any training doing marketing in their life.
If someone is better at following up with all of the scheduling and coordinating of plans and times and dates because they have more of that personality, it’s going to make sense for that person to execute on those tasks rather than the agent (who may struggle in that area which most sales people do.)
With the team, you can scale and depending on the number of transactions you do or you want to do you hire the appropriate amount of people to scale with that footprint. If you just want to have a small team you can have a small team or if you want to do thousands of deals you can scale your team and create a team of ninjas who can scale to do thousands of deals and have the operation run smoothly and make sure everything is serviced the same way every single time.
Now, the team concept isn’t for every person, but I do truly believe that it is the way of the future. Forever, people have thought of the real estate agent as this one-off the specialist but they have looked at a doctor and lawyer and many of those professions in the same way yet when you walk into a lawyer’s office, dentist’s office, or doctor’s office you don’t have that professional greeting you at the door, then signing you in, seating you, telling you to wait, coming to get you, doing the exam on you, checking you out, and making you pay, do you?
It’s the same way for real estate.
Why would one single agent be great at doing every single job in the process? The answer is, they are not.
People are scared to say that but it is the truth. Until we address that fact and address the fact that real estate is a business and it’s not a hobby or it’s not some little niche job it will be hard for the industry to grow otherwise.
This must be embraced and if it is embraced, real estate could change on a dime and things could get done faster and faster and with more efficiency.
Many agents have so many amazing ideas and so many great things they could be doing and inventing and getting out there and creating yet most of them are entrapped in the day-to-day, opening doors and trying to work with clients.
If they hired and built a team of people around them to handle paperwork and the scheduling just like a doctor’s office or lawyer’s office then they could spend time on the things that they are passionate about dealing with; people and building a business and being creative.
It’s a win-win for everybody. The agent gets to do what they want and they can scale the business big or small and the client most importantly gets the greatest service of all, they get their hand held with multiple people helping them throughout the transaction and a team of people working for them.