The Pros And Cons Of A Having A Listing Agent

By having a Listing Agent, you can leverage yourself through them. You can increase the number of appointments and even schedule simultaneous appointments. You could be off listing the Jones’ while your Listing Agent is working with the Smiths.

This expansion has the effect of increased listings sold but will also influence your buyer controlled sales. Because of the increase in listings, you will increase your ad calls and sign calls, which will increase leads, buyer prospects, buyer clients, and buyer sales. With increased listings sold and buyer sales, you will also increase your past client ranks in a shorter time frame, which will increase referrals. You will also usually see a decrease in cost per transaction, which will make each transaction more profitable.

You will raise your image or increase your brand recognition in the marketplace. With more listings in the ground, you become a more well-known Real Estate Agent in the marketplace. This will increase the unsolicited call-in appointments that say, “I see your sign everywhere.” Your quality of life will be enhanced because you aren’t the only plow horse hooked to the yoke to pull the business. There is some safety in numbers as long as the other horse is hooked to the yoke with you and isn’t shoving you down or pulling your plow rows from straight to crooked.

Your time away from the business will be more relaxing, and the business will operate while you are gone. For an Agent without a Listing Assistant, before they go on vacation, at best, is a fire drill and, at worst, is total chaos. Inevitably, everyone wants to list just before you want to take time off. Whether that’s the influence of Murphy’s Law or just that your focus and intensity rise before you are heading on vacation, the days leading up to time off are usually some of the busiest of the year. The lead up to your time off will be more controlled with a Listing Agent.

The time while you are gone will also be more effective for the business. I always had people who wanted to list their home call when I was away. Our first objective was to try to make them wait. If that jeopardized our opportunity to list the property, we sent in the team. That was usually a Buyer’s Agent or another Agent in my office that I would split the listing with if it was more than my Buyer’s Agent could handle. If you don’t have a Listing Agent, it’s rare to list new property while you are away. You might generate buyer sales or listings sold, but you won’t take any new listings. The net result is a drop in listing inventory when you are away enjoying your family time.

If the team managed to delay a few listing appointments, you will have a work backlog to attend to when you return. You will come back relaxed and recharged only to jump into the frying pan that has been on the stove heating up while you were gone. There will not be a slow, smooth transition back into the business. You will need to be back on your “A” game the minute you hit the front door of your office. A solid Listing Agent makes the before, during, and after period of time off much easier for the Lead Agent. Without a Listing Agent you may have come back from a vacation feeling like the time off wasn’t worth the extra effort invested before and after your return. That won’t happen with a Listing Agent.

The cons of a Listing Agent are as significant as the pros. The most glaring ones will happen to many Agents before they even make a dime of profit from them. This causes the risk of adding a Listing Agent to your team far exceed that of the Buyer’s Agent.

First you will need to invest significant resources to find quality potential candidates. You will have to pan a lot of river beds to find a gold nugget. You want them to have the right attitude first. You can’t train a good attitude. The behavioral style must be similar to yours. Again, that’s something training will not solve. They either have it, or they don’t.

Finding them through delivering flyers to all real estate offices, sending e-mails through the MLS system or Board of REALTOR®s, or doing direct mailings through the Board of REALTOR®s’, mailing lists takes discipline, practice, money, and time. Even using a strictly word-of-mouth campaign through your company, your Broker, your mortgage company, the title company, and even other Agents you know or do business with, will be an investment of your resources. If you stick with it long enough and consistently enough, you will find the right person over time. You can’t be impatient. You are really looking for a rare individual, rather than Johnny Anybody. The wrong hire is worse than no hire.

The training investment is far more significant for a Listing Agent. The investment of your time and energy to make this person a top performer for your team in the listing area will be hours each week. You will need to role-play, coach, book appointments for them and yourself, and go on your appointments and theirs for a period of time. They will need a lot of work with you, or they will have to blow a lot of leads and opportunities that you would have landed to even reach the basic competence level.

A non-negotiable for me would be a non-compete contract. I would never hire anyone in this position without one. The resources you will invest to find this persona and train them are enormous. The training, skills, and intellectual property you are giving them as your Listing Agent are priceless.

Champion Team Rule - You are not in the business of training and equipping your own competition.

If you don’t use a non-compete, I guarantee they will leave you and compete with you in the future in the open market. Many will leave you and not only compete with you in the open market, but also compete with you for your own stable of past clients. This is especially true with the ones they directly did business with and have a relationship with.

A drawback to a non-compete is some quality candidates won’t sign one. You could lose some good people. My view is you have now ferreted out the ones who would have left and left quickly. The ones who object to the non-compete will leave as soon as they feel they have learned enough to make it on their own. Once they reach that moment, they hit the road. Many already have that figure in their head when talking with you. They think, “I will spend twelve months learning the business from the best, and then I will go out on my own.” When they get in the position that they start to have some success, their ego grows, and their timeline gets cut in half, and they are gone one morning without any notice.

Another major con is that you will be saddled, at times, with listings that you would have turned down or ones with terms and conditions that aren’t in your favor. You will be forced to deal with over-priced listings that you will have to invest your time in to get the price reduction. In the interim, you will have to market them knowing the money is being wasted because it won’t sell at its current price. You will have listings you wish you didn’t have in your inventory because of condition, motivation level of the seller, price, or area or type of property (i.e. a manufactured home in a trailer park). Your options are either, bite the bullet and hope it comes out OK, or deal with it head on with the seller in correcting the issue or referring it to someone else. Referring it to someone else has the risk of alienating the seller and the Listing Agent on your team.

All of these situations affect your bottom line negatively in terms of time invested by you and your staff to solve the issues, more marketing dollars spent on each property, lower odds of you achieving a sale and earning a commission. The Listing Agent can have the attitude of getting any and all listings they can because it’s not their resources they are using in marketing dollars, staff time, and your time to fix the problem. They have all the potential upside of earning a few dollars with none of the downside of increased costs and lower odds to cover out of their pocket.

Dirk Zeller is a sought out speaker, celebrated author and CEO of Real Estate Champions. His company trains more than 350,000 Agents worldwide each year through live events, online training, self-study programs, and newsletters. The Real Estate community has embraced and praised his six best-selling books; Your First Year in Real Estate, Success as a Real Estate Agent for Dummies®, The Champion Real Estate Agent, The Champion Real Estate Team, Telephone Sales for Dummies®, Successful Time Management for Dummies®, and over 300 articles in print.

Real Estate Champions is a premier coaching company. Training covers a wide spectrum from new agents, to seasoned, as well as those interested in real estate marketing or real estate investing.

You can get more information at Realtor’s Ultimate Business Planning Kit, Real Estate Team Building