Gail Anderson - Executive Agent Magazine

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The Greatest Leverage In Real Estate
By Dirk Zeller
Being a Champion Listing Agent spawns opportunity
that carries new risk and high rewards. As a Champion
Listing Agent, you will enjoy these benefits:
1. Gaining leverage by employing numerous people
to work for you at no cost
How many licensed agents are in your board of
Realtors® That will be the number of people you
will employ to sell your inventory each day. The best
part is that all of these people working for you cost
you nothing! There are no wages, withholdings, taxes,
insurance, workman’s compensation, or equipment
changes (telephone, desks, and office supplies). There
are no expenses of any kind. Now, I know that many
of you are saying, my company covers all that with my
buyer’s agents who work for me. That may be true,
but you still have to manage these people and deal with
personal problems, mistakes, low motivation at times,
and interpersonal office politics. All of those still need
to be controlled and managed with leadership exerted
to produce a result.
There is a growing belief that creating a large team
of producing agents under you creates the best
leverage in the business. There are more agents
today trying to create leverage through people than ever
before. While I agree this approach is valid, you must
ask yourself, if now is the right time for you make that
play. Are you personally ready to build and use that
time Most importantly, have you used the easiest and
greatest form of leverage in real estate before you start
exploring people leverage
The greatest, easiest, and most profitable leverage
in real estate sales is becoming a listing agent. Too
many of us are not using this leverage to establish
the foundation of our success. We are getting drawn
into the more-people-bigger-team mentality before we
dominate as listing agents. Once you have the skills
and production of a Champion Listing Agent, you can
then build a team more easily with producing agents.
If you focus on being a great listing agent first, you
don’t’ have to manage and lead any of these agent
co-ops out selling your property until they actually
write a contract to present. You employ all of these
co-op agents for little time investment, no cost, and no
risk. With producing agents on your team, you take a
risk in terms of your leads and how they convert them.
You invest large amounts of your time to train, coach,
and direct them to success. Champion Listing Agents
eliminate the risk and receive the reward.
I want to stress, again, I am not anti-team or antibuyer’s
agent. I do, however, believe we, in our
excitement to achieve a Champion Team real estate
practice, take higher risk and lower net reward avenues
because we heard an “expert” claim success, or because
we really didn’t evaluate the return on investment or
evaluate the risk/reward equation.
2. Generating multiple streams of income
The residual value of a listing, in terms of additional
business creation, brand recognition growth, market
share, and market presence, develops leverage. By
taking a listing, you are, in effect, creating a storefront
from which to sell your services. A listing creates sign
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