KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Building Your Real Estate Dream Team

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

SummaryReady to stop being a solo agent and start building a scalable business? This episode is your comprehensive guide to building a high-performing real estate team. We break down the essential steps, from defining your vision and identifying the right talent to implementing systems that create a cohesive and productive environment. Learn how to leverage the power of a team to achieve more, gain financial freedom, and create a business that works for you.Key TakeawaysDefine Your "Why": Before you hire, get clear on your vision for the team. What is the team's mission and purpose? This clarity will attract the right people and build a strong culture.Hire for the Gaps: Don't hire people who are just like you. Instead, identify your weaknesses and hire people whose strengths complement yours.Systems are Key: Your team's success depends on the systems you implement. Create repeatable processes for lead generation, client management, and transactions to ensure consistency and efficiency.Lead with a Purpose: A great team leader is a coach and a mentor. Focus on empowering your team members, providing continuous training, and celebrating their successes.Keywords/PhrasesReal Estate Team, Team Building, Real Estate Business, Real Estate Leadership, Agent Coaching, Real Estate CareerCall-to-ActionReady to take your business to the next level? Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform and learn how to build your real estate dream team!

And welcome to another edition of the nerdy agent podcast. I'm your host, Luke Pedersen, here with my brothers and fellow nerds, Josh and AJ. You. There are not much, there's not much to talk about us for sports this week. Royce Lewis hits a lot of home runs. No one wants to listen to that content anyways. We usually bring, what? We usually talk about something about Minnesota sports.

Royce Lewis is the best player in baseball. That's pretty fun. Yep. This week on the Nerd Agent podcast, we want to talk about growing teams and specifically retention of good agents and what that looks like. The reason we wanted to bring it up is we were chatting with someone last week kind of on this topic and I thought it might be helpful for a different demographic of viewers here.

We talk a lot about how new agents can work on stuff to grow their business, but I thought maybe some agents are in the position where they're thinking, I want to start growing a team or I've been trying to grow a team and hasn't been going well. So we wanted to hit on kind of the major topics on how the advisor realty group was built, which we've talked about, and how you can do that. at scale as well. So to start, can you just give like a brief rundown on our team how it was built over the last, what, five years would be the six years? Seven years. Seven years. Seven years. Time goes fast, doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, I started a team. I probably talked about it's before

on here, but I just randomly ran into a guy who was selling me door-to-door century link. And I told him he wasn't making enough money and he was too good at sales. So I asked him if he would have coffee. And it took him a little while. Him and his wife actually became clients of mine before he got his real estate license. And then, yeah, one way to get business. Just ask people questions when they're knocking on your door. But he eventually was, you know, more and more interested in it and really hit the ground running, sold the house in his first week. Another past client of mine later joined.

And then Luke was the third agent on the team before we switched to EXP. and you know I realized early on that the number one thing that I could offer folks was just mentorship right so I was like hey man I've already done this can I just teach you how to do it and taught those three basically just hey let's sit in a room together every day and work and you ask me questions and I mentor you and kind of help you but quickly realized like and as I've had more conversations with you know teams like Luke said talking to a team last week that's that's the main thing that's the main thing that's the main thing that's the main thing that's the main thing that's the main thing that's that most, you know, quote unquote teams are offering, right? It's just mentorship. And mentorship is great until the mentee realizes that they can already do this by themselves. So why am I paying you for mentorship that I don't need anymore? And so as I learned that, I started to shift into, hey, we need to have an employee, right? Because let's get, wait, so just stop there for a second. So, so I just want to get to the team. So we left EXP now for the last five years. We've been growing with these different pieces that we're going to talk about now. We're at about 48.

This is what you've gotten to. And just a note here, because I do think that the number one thing is retaining good agents, right? Anybody can retain an agent that's going to sell three houses because where are they going to go? What are they going to do? It's when the person gets to 20, 30, that they start to look at you and go, what more do you have for me? So if you are starting a team right now, the number one piece there to start with would be find somebody that's probably newer, that you've done more business than, that you have more knowledge than them. And, and, you're, and, and help them learn to grow their business, give them mentorship, would be the number one piece. Well, honestly, though, at the same time, if you're thinking about starting a team, the first thing

you should do is ask yourself why you're feeling like you should. Because I think what we've seen is too frequently, people just feel like, well, I was a good agent, so now I need to be a team leader. It's the next iteration of my business. But people that go that route don't often have much success from a team standpoint because, like, what we hear a lot is like, well, I just pour energy into these newer agents that I bring on and then they just leave me and I'm frustrated and it's it you hear more of a like it's about me kind of mentality in some of those conversations where it's like I did this for them and then they went and did something else because to AJ's point one essentially all you did was bring somebody in and offer the mentorship um but also it seems like a lot of people are

doing it for themselves as their next thing in their career rather than thinking about does this fit in terms of what I want to create from a legacy standpoint or what I want to build for others within this industry. So I think what we've said to people from the start has been, you know, the goal of this team has always been just how can you be helpful to other people? It's the goal of my personal real estate business too. But like if you start from a why of I want to help other people have a career in real estate and do what I can to support them and then continue to build out, Tad is what he's going to talk about next, build out the right systems, processes, these tools to help them have even more success down the road and keep them wanting to stay and

working with us, then you'll have more success in doing this. But if you don't start with the why and you just say, well, I need to build a team now, you're probably going to find yourself in some of the spirals that we're going to talk about. And you maybe should be reevaluating whether or not this is even the right thing for you to do. I think that's a super good piece too, because you either say that, well, I guess it's the next thing for me to do, or they start to look at some of the bigger teams. And without realizing the amount of effort and work and why they did it, they go, wow, they're doing so well, making so much money. I want to make a lot of money.

Yep. It's another way people do that. And that just never, I mean, you know if you're a real estate agent, having clients and having them know that all you're trying to do is make a bunch of money is never going to grow a successful business. And so that's, that is a piece that just from AJ's standpoint, you've always said to me, you wanted to help people have a career in real estate and make, like, do really well and be successful and make money and support their families.

And that literally started from the first agent because you literally looked them and said, you are not making enough money. I want to help you make more money is what you did. And we're not going to get into the dollars, but there was a lot of money sunken into the team for the first three years that you didn't see anything back. It was negative for a while until it started getting built more. So that is a good piece on making sure you know why you want to do it. As you get growing, as you let's say you do want to do it, you have the right reasons. You get started. You add some agents. That's when people start getting into the situations where their agents get good and then they leave. So talk about kind of retention and growing from there that you were going to get to.

Yeah. And like I said, I was there, right? With three people, we had, you know, maybe part-time help. And realizing that, you know, as soon as they get to 20, 30 sales, they're going to go, and I'm just going to do this on my own. I'm going to start my own team or I'm going to be a solo agent and kind of figure this out. So I quickly realized we need to put some systems in place for one, which is so, you know, again, And coming from the right lens is very important because if you don't, then you look at it as, I'm going to spend money and time on something for these agents and I'm not going to get anything in return potentially. Rather than looking at it as I'm going to spend money and time to support these people so

they can become more efficient and sell more homes. And so currently we use a product called paperless pipeline to manage transaction coordination, listing coordination. That's the first thing that most teams need to do is create a task list for, a purchase agreement gets completed, now what happens, right? And it needs to be something either that agent can follow or if you do have an employee that that employee can follow. And we just kind of did them both together and hired our first staff member. And that's a really difficult thing to do. It's easier for us now to hire people because we're hiring for more specific roles. I still think they are,

all of our roles are still very broad, but they're far less broad than they were at the beginning. You know, we hired Zoe was our first ever employee. She was doing transaction coordination, listing coordination, social media, marketing, branding, content creation, event planning, managing our database. Like, she was doing everything. And so to find somebody that's good at everything is impossible. Like, there's not one person in the world that is good at all of those things. So you try to find, like, what's most important to us? You know, I would probably argue at the beginning, you want to find someone that, like, can lightly do marketing, but is,

super organized type A and really good at the coordination aspect because that's the part you have to nail to create that client experience from the start. And we've kind of gone through those phases. And then, you know, obviously we hired a marketing person next. So then that took that piece off of that number one employee's plate. So then she was just doing listing coordination, transaction coordination, that kind of thing, right? So just to touch on the first employee, which I think is a really important piece. There are a lot of people don't want to spend the you know, 50, 60, 70, 40, whatever it is, $1,000 a year that you have to spend to hire an employee, but the really important piece there is from a scaling perspective, and they even talk about this with,

I mean, I've heard it too many times, right? So we are kind of reiterating this. Even a successful agent by themselves should probably have an employee. Because you yourself, when you hired the transaction coordinator, went from 29 sales to 55 in one year. Exactly, which happens pretty quickly. I, myself and Josh have been fortunate to never have to coordinate our own transactions, so we're able to scale without that, but it removes a huge back end piece to a transaction that doesn't really produce anything for the agent. They're able to them take those hours and go out and get more business and sell more houses, which then actually does produce. And so the scaling effect of that first employee is absolutely massive. Well, and there's also the component of you think about financials,

right? Because I do a lot of the financial management for our company. As a leader, when you get to the point where you're going to start a team, just make sure you also think about the employee that you're hiring how essentially they're also subsidizing your personal business, right? So you're starting a team, but probably be thoughtful about you personally being at a point in which financially, if your team doesn't produce anything, this employee is still adding value for your own personal business. You have to be able to have enough time to be able to go in and actually focus on the team side, but there still has to be revenue coming in to account for this expense at a meaningful enough with scale. But it should be able to create a cost benefit for you just personally

to say if I pay somebody $60,000, I can go do more transactions to get that $60,000 back personally. And this person can then be subsidized across the rest of the team employees that I'm bringing in and offer some sort of benefit that then I can use to help go recruit agents to this group. Right. So I'm trying to like, I guess I'm speaking more logistically in terms of how you do some of these things and the financials associated with them. But that's, I think, also a key component is if you just go hire a TC, but you're not producing on your own end, you're going to find your numbers upside down pretty quickly because you shouldn't expect your team to come in and produce at a high level immediately.

So I want to, and we could get into all of the employees, but I think that would be in the weeds, just because these agents aren't looking to, we're not talking about 40, 60 agent teams here, right? More like five to 10 agents. And so that's an important first piece. So you can mentor agents. Once they get good enough, you can retain with the systems and processes of transaction coordination. Sorry, keep doing that.

You just keep knocking on. You can retain with the systems and processes and an employee from a transaction coordination perspective. As you grow, you maybe would add one more employee to split out buy side and sell side deals, listing coordination versus buying or marketing. Or some marketing stuff. After that, outside of the employees, because they don't need to hire as many as we have, we have quite a few. What would be the next step to continue to retain these agents that say you've given them the transaction coordination? Now they're selling 25 houses a year.

And they're going, looking at you going, well, I could figure out how to just do that myself. Yeah, you've got to create opportunity. That's what we talk about a lot. And an opportunity sometimes does come into play right around the time when you do get staff and systems. I would say we went through all three of these things pretty quickly, right? Like we had an agent, the first agent I had, I already had some. online lead opportunities for him. It just wasn't as many and then it's about balancing how many you have. So we now have an immense amount of opportunity to the point where many of our

agents work primarily just with leads that we provide to them. In a lot of cases we have more than we can even they'll even be able to take. Yeah, exactly. So it's a it's a great setup and you know I got us on this new program four years ago and and what that's done is you know, The partnership with Zillow has been kind of like a proprietary almost like thing where it's not available really very many other places. And that makes retaining, especially those agents that really rely on taking those leads, it helps to retain them just knowing that until they have enough personal production, the whole making a switch doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense. So you're able to scale pretty effectively and efficiently. But we've even gone into iterations way beyond those three things, you know, where it's additional layers of support. And we're always thinking about what more can we do.

You know, we've talked about do we hire a showing agent. We have, you know, not to get to all the employees, but we have so many people that are doing so many things to support the agents that recreating it now would be difficult. We see most of our competition coming in the form of probably other teams that are at similar. sizes now more than anything. Yeah. And I think, I think a couple key points. One, to my first comment, focus on the North Star, right? And so for us, the North Star has always been, help people have success and do whatever you can to support others that are going to be joining your team. And then the next comment would be from there, when you think about action, you don't have to just follow the action plan we're kind of laying out. But AJ's given like high level steps as you iterate

and grow. But I think more than that, like the point that I would make in what he's kind of done as those steps have come into play is just like always been thinking about what is the next right thing for supporting that North Star. So it's like, where are my agents at right now? What do they need? How do I provide that? So just keep doing what you think is the next right thing. And if you get to a point where you don't know what the next right thing is, find other team leaders or people that have done this that can provide you with that insight. So part of what's been helpful here. is, and this is not a recruiting pitch on EXP, but our structure within our group at EXP is a lot of really good mentorship of people that have done it before you. So we join under a team

that's one step ahead of us, kind of, I mean, like if you think about where they're at, they've just kind of been one year ahead of us or two years ahead of us in terms of where their production is. So anytime you get to the point of a roadblock and you say, what is the next right thing, you call people that have already gotten through that roadblock and you start getting ideas and then you do the next right thing and you keep growing that way. Lastly, what I'll say is to the point of that North Star, we try to think about every one of our agents. Often, we have touchpoints for them within the team. We have a lot of collaboration with all of the members, but also one-on-one mentorship leadership structures, focused on trying to understand where people are at any given time.

A, we want them to feel important and heard and seen because we want them to know that they matter to us, but B, when we think about how do we continue to retain, and I think that's one of the strongest points of this team is people just really haven't, like in the last few years, no one's left because we're checking in a lot, we know where they're at. And if there's ever things that we find where we go, because we've hit the point of like, oh, shoot, we have now some top producing agents that are getting to the point where maybe they don't need the leads anymore. We find new ways to try to create value for them so they still feel connected and like they belong and like it's the right thing to stay.

So every person understanding where they're at on their journey within your team and not just building a one-size-fits-all approach, that allows you to be able to build a team where you're going to retain people. You're going to feel like they're invested. You're going to build the right culture that gets you to the point you want to be at. I want to touch on the opportunities piece again, too, just quickly. Because I do think the one unique situation we have, AJ is going to knock my microphone over again. I'm going on my armrest. The unique, who set this microphone off? Chase. The unique piece we have that I think is, it's not replicable, right? The Flex. Zilliflex stuff isn't super replicable. There are other ways for leaders to provide opportunities to their agents. We've ran Facebook ads. We've have the advisory MN.com that we've ran Google PPC to. We've done Real Geeks. We've done YLOP, we've done Sierra. Just having listings to hold open as a opportunity. The next one I was going to get on was we're on lists with big teams because at EXP like Josh talked about not to not to beat how.

good EXP is too much, but we have other teams at EXP that we work with because it's mutually advantageous to work together that there must be 30 listings a week that we could host an open house on. If somebody in our team wanted to host five open houses a week, they could do that starting tomorrow, right? So having connections with people to provide those opportunities as well would be huge. Do you have any other touches on growing the team? If you are an agent out there listening to this and you don't want to grow a team, but you're going, man, that team sounds pretty cool. We do always like to just plug the advisor realty group. We're growing right now. We're trying to add agents basically all the time. So if you are interested and you think you might be a good fit,

DM us, reach out to us somewhere. We're on social media. I'm sure you can find us. And that's all we have this week. I think also though, if you want to grow a team, but you don't feel like this gives you all the answers or you have more questions coming out of this, like I said, our approach has always been just do what we can to help people. So if you run into any roadblocks and you have questions and you want to reach out and you want to talk to us. Like, we are totally accessible. We're totally open to chatting. And so we'd love to just hear from people. If there's questions, concerns, thoughts, whatever, like reach out directly, send a note to the nerdy agent podcast on Instagram, email us, whatever. We're here for you. And that's all we have this week on the nerdy agent podcast. And as

always, remember, be better. Bye-bye now.