How to Set Your Real Estate Team Goals

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Every broker or real estate team leader wants their performance to grow. While a team of top performers can easily improve performance month to month, without proper goals, most teams will struggle to make positive change on a consistent basis.

As for setting team goals itself, this activity is often a challenge for new team leaders and brokers because setting team goals is an art and science. It is essential too because without proper targets and tracking, you cannot measure and manage the performance of your team.

The best team goals are goals that are aligned with the overall company objectives and vision. Research shows that only 7% of employees understand how their own work contributes to the company’s wider objectives. So clear goal setting for teams is crucial to make sure the entire business is doing the right things, moving in the same direction together.

Generally, setting team goals can be guided by the four functions of management. A manager ought to plan, organize resources, instruct others and keep people accountable.

Following this, you can set real estate team goals by:

1. Planning

a. Set your company vision

b. Determine your revenue target

c. Setting overall team goals

d. Setting team member goals

2. Organizing resources, training and mentoring

3. Instructing others: Marshalling the team to their particular goals

4. Keeping people accountable: Tracking and analyzing performance

Here is how to do each of these in turn.

(Don't have a business plan? Get one here: The Simple Real Estate Business Plan)

Set your company vision

Your vision will be a guide for everything else you do. It’s the stable buoy that you can home into, even when weathering a storm.

It’s a part that’s often skipped, but shouldn’t be ignored. If you don’t have a crystal clear vision anchored in your mind, you might start doubting your strategy at the first sign of resistance -- and you’re likely to make bad decisions.

So sit down and start by writing down your values. How fast do you want your business to grow? Do you want to focus on customer service, lead generation, an impeccable reputation, etc…?

Think about the broader ideas that shape the way you develop your business.

Turn each value into a broader goal -- quantitative and qualitative. Revisit this document regularly and make small changes often.

Read more: Why building a culture is important within a real estate organization

Determine your revenue target

Now that you completed your strategic vision, you’ve taken the first step. Now you’ll need to translate this vision into concrete revenue targets. This should be the fun part!

Based on how important revenue growth is to you, consider how much you will need to grow in the next quarter or year. Be sure to make provision for taxes, business expenses, etc to ensure you have an accurate revenue number to aim for.

This figure will vary according to the maturity and environment of your business. If you are a younger brokerage, you may be able to squeeze faster, higher growth rates above 15% as you capture and develop a fresh market. For older firms in established areas with long-standing competition, the figure may be lower.

With the figure in mind, you will now need to reverse engineer it in order to develop your revenue goals for your quarterly, monthly and weekly basis.

For example, if you need secure $150m in new listings, how many listings would you need for the year? How many listings does the equal each and every month?

Setting overall team goals

Team goals shouldn’t just be based on overall revenue. This is a common mistake made by real estate professionals.

Ultimately, your revenue is important -- but you should also be interested in other goals. Remember, what you’re looking for with goal setting is uncovering what causes your business to grow and what doesn’t. So you should not only target the end result -- revenue -- but also all steps that lead up to it. You’ll see that, when tracking and analyzing results, you’ll want to know what actions specifically created more leads, more sales and more revenue.

Start off with goals that can be achieved within the next 2-3 months -- this will make sure your teams start off on a roll and are more likely to see clear progress. This will keep morale high and will prepare them for more long-term goals-setting, in case you want to explore that further down the road.

Here are some goals that real estate professionals typically start off with:

• Outcome goals

• Production
• Average sales price
• New listings

• Process goals

• Number of calls
• Number of appointments

• Training goals

• Complete training on lead generation
• Complete training on price negotiation

Set these goals for the next week, month and quarter.

Setting team member goals

With your weekly, monthly and quarterly goals in hand, you can now set the goals on a team member level.

Split the goal evenly between team members at first. So, if you determined you want to team to make 500 calls per week, and you have 10 team members, allocate 50 weekly calls to each.

Then, you can consider team member strengths, experience and their current workload. For instance, a less experienced agent may have fewer ongoing deals and might need to make more calls before raising interest with a customer. This agent should perhaps make 70 calls per week, whereas a more experienced agent only needs to make 30.

Keep in mind that goals should always be set realistically, but ambitiously -- keep stretching your agents’ comfort zones. You want to run an ambitious business after all.

Read more: How to set team member goals

Organize resources, training and mentoring

Now that you have determined the goals of each team member, consider what resources your team needs to succeed.

This can include training, mentoring, guidance and marketing help. For example, some team members may require training to become more confident with open houses, while others may need extra coaching to improve their production levels. Check to see that your marketing is performing at the right level to support the required level of lead generation for your team.

Thinking through what resources and guidance your team will need ahead of time can help position you to overcome any obstacles to performance before they arise.

Marshal the team to their particular goals

Armed with your goals and resource allocations, you can now brief the team and agents on their respective goals.

How you instruct the team may depend on your particular management style. For some brokers, team leaders are more comfortable running sessions on a one-to-one basis to allow for more honest communication regardless of other team members. For others, some team leaders prefer open groups style sessions which can increase accountability as goals and expectations are made public.

Regardless, you are likely going to want to implement both of these to varying degrees. For instance, you may first meet with team members one on one to discuss targets, training resources and create a personal action plan before meeting as a team to discuss goals publicly.

Track and analyze performance

Having established personal plans, individual and team member goals you should begin the tracking and analysis stage.Usually, this involves careful but not an intrusive measurement of team member performance. An easy way to implement this is through the use of tracked lead/client pipelines and dashboard tools like Zipi.

Another way to monitor and track your team performance is through the use of weekly meetings. These open planning sessions can help keep your agents accountable (read more about accountability here) and reinforce your expectations on required performance targets.

It’s crucial to adjust goals where necessary. A 2009 study found that companies who set arbitrary goals and don’t review them regularly might actually shoot themselves in the foot. They end up chasing a narrow goal that doesn’t contribute to the company’s success -- and might even lead to failure. For instance, this is what happened to GM when their target was to gain 29% of the market. They never got to 29%, and their blind obsession with this number meant they stopped improving their product and invested all their cash in sales and marketing.

Tracking the performance of your team allows you to support your team members as and when the need arises. For example, if an agent is underperforming for a particular month, you can arrange to provide coaching or additional training in order to improve any performance issues they might be experiencing.

Conclusion

Setting goals is often a challenge for new team leaders and brokers, however with proper planning, goal setting can be quite straightforward.

Make sure to always start with the end in mind -- have clarity on your vision and values. Then you can break up your larger goals into annual or quarterly revenue targets and monthly, weekly listings or sales targets. With these figures, delegate to your team members their targets according to their abilities while also making provision for supporting them to achieve these goals.

Lastly, make sure you put in place procedures like digital pipelines, dashboards and monthly or weekly team meetings to both track and manage team performance. There’s a lot to take care of, but keep this up and you’ll see your business grow every month!

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