Less coaching than people expect, and a great deal more removing of obstacles.
I came into this role assuming the job was mostly about lifting performance. A reasonable assumption, and mostly wrong.
What does running a real estate team actually involve?
Making it possible for good people to do the work they already know how to do.
Agents who perform at a high level rarely need to be taught their job. What they need is for the things around the job to stop costing them time, attention and goodwill. Systems that work, support that answers, a brand that opens the door rather than requiring an explanation.
The work is unglamorous and most of it is invisible from the outside. It also compounds, which is the part that makes it worth doing properly.
What takes up the most time?
Decisions that only look small from a distance.
Which systems the team uses and who maintains them. How a campaign gets resourced when three launch in the same week. What happens when two agents have a legitimate claim to the same relationship. Whether a standard that slipped gets addressed now or allowed to settle.
None of these are strategy, and all of them determine whether the strategy works. A fortnight of these decisions made carelessly costs more than a quarter of good intentions.
What can a leader not do for an agent?
Most of what actually determines their result.
This is the part I underestimated. A business can provide the platform, the systems, the brand and the support. It cannot provide the discipline to make the calls, the judgement to hold a price under pressure, or the relationships that produce a listing three years from now.
Those are the agent's, and they are built in the work rather than handed over. A leader who believes they can supply them ends up managing people who were never going to need managing, and neglecting the things only the business can provide.
Accepting that limit makes the job clearer, not smaller.
What does support mean in practice?
Specific people doing specific things on a known timeframe.
Support is the vaguest word in this industry and it is often used to describe an intention rather than a capability. The honest version is concrete. Who does the campaign collateral, how long it takes, what happens at peak, who an agent calls at seven in the evening when something has gone wrong on a settlement.
A business either has answers to those or it does not. The answer is visible to agents within about a month of joining, whatever was said beforehand.
What is the hardest part?
Holding a standard while growing, because the two pull against each other constantly.
Growth is additive and standards are not. Every person who joins either lifts the average or lowers it, and the pressure to say yes is strongest exactly when the numbers are being watched. We have told capable agents that the timing was not right, and that is a harder conversation than any pitch.
There is a cost to it that does not show up anywhere useful. It can be taxing, and not only on me.
The alternative is worse. A standard that drifts does not announce itself. It erodes over a couple of quarters, nobody raises it, and then it is simply how things are done.
What has changed about the job
The technical side of it has moved faster in two years than in the decade before.
How a campaign reaches buyers, what a database can do, how much of the repetitive work still needs a person. Running a team now includes decisions about tools and process that were not part of the role when I started in real estate in 2007.
That part I find genuinely interesting. The rest of it, the standard-setting and the obstacle-removing and the occasional difficult conversation, is the same job it has always been, and it is still the part that decides whether any of it works.
