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 Hiring Personnel
Recruiting Support Personnel

The quality of your company's support staff will have a big impact on your ability to recruit sales associates




  


Assessing Personnel Needs

Advanced-Beyond Job Descriptions: Job Matching for Real Estate Sales

Recruitment Planning

Advanced: What Top Performers Want from You

Recruiting Salespeople

Advanced: Tips for Recruiting the Seasoned Professional

Recruiting Support Personnel

Advanced: The Family and Medical Leave Act

The Interviewing Process

Advanced: Behavioral Interviewing

Tips for Selecting a Psychological Test

Structuring Compensation

Advanced: Compensation Tips for Management Personnel 		  5 Support Positions and Why You Need Them

Some combination of these positions—either full- or part-time—keep your company running smoothly.
  • Receptionist/company secretary. Produces your company's first impression on most prospects. Don't skimp here.
  • Office manager. Keeps associates' schedules, orders supplies, coordinates company-wide events such as staff meetings, and acts as a back-up receptionist.
  • Bookkeeper/closing coordinator. Enables salespeople to complete more sales by assuming responsibility for routine closing functions and paperwork. In many cases, this person's salary can be billed back to associates who use the services.
  • Marketing coordinator. Develops and produces company marketing materials and ads, as well as providing marketing support to salespeople on a fee basis.

TIP: Survey sales associates to determine what types of support they need. This is particularly important if associates will be billed directly for support services. —Carla Cross, Carla Cross Seminars, Issaquah, Wash.

Hiring Personal Assistants at Your Company

In many cases, individual sales associates hire personal assistants. But there are pluses in the company hiring assistants and then billing associates for their time. According to the 2001 NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® Member Profile, the average REALTOR® working with an assistant earns $90,000 compared to $40,000 for those working alone. The average assistant is paid $20,000.

Pros of Company Assistants
  • Helps ensure that taxes and withholding will be handled properly
  • Helps ensure proper supervision of assistants' work
  • Makes hiring easier, since salespeople can benefit from company-sponsored benefit programs.
  • Gives salespeople who might not have the volume to hire an assistant the option of trained help.

Cons of Company Assistants
  • Places most of liability for assistants' activities on the company
  • Creates expense that may not always be offset by associate use fees.
  • Places burden for hiring and management onto the company.

Licensed vs. unlicensed assistants

Another important consideration when hiring personal assistants is to decide whether or not they should hold real state licenses.

Unlicensed assistants are:
  • Less expensive to hire than a licensed person.
  • Usually limited in the duties they can perform.

Licensed assistants are:
  • Able to perform more real estate related duties—showings, closings, prospecting, and so forth.
  • Are more likely than an unlicensed assistant to make the transition to sales.

TIP: Whether or not your company hires assistants directly, you should develop a policy on whether or not assistants need to be licensed. For more advice on working with real estate assistants, visit REALTOR.org and buy a copy of Real Estate Assistants: A Guide to Risk Management.

10 Skills That Make a Great Assistant
  • Time management
  • Communication skills
  • Customer-service orientation
  • Organizational and follow-through skills
  • Flexibility to adapt to changing schedules and priorities
  • Attention to detail
  • Basic understanding or the real estate transaction process
  • Familiarly with and ability to use work processing, spreadsheet, and simple desktop publishing programs.
  • Ability to update MLS listings and simple, template-driven Web site components.
  • Ability to assist in routine transaction tasks, such an competitive market analyses, flyers and property marketing brochures, and inspections and closing documents.

Portions adapted from "What Technical Skills Should Your Assistant Have?" Allen Hainge, Realty Times, January 26, 2001

TIP: For more on hiring and working with personal assistants, visit the Personal Assistant Q&A.

Does Your Company Need a Transaction Coordinator?

Providing assistance to salespeople in completing the post-transaction coordination.
  • Do a significant number of transactions fall through or fail to close on time because of incomplete paperwork?
  • Do many of your salespeople exhibit a list/slump listing pattern—in which they don't acquire many new listings while transactions are underway, and then are left with no business when the transaction closes?
  • Are transaction details overlooked that later cause disputes with buyers or sellers?
  • Are essential documents and details missing from transaction files, increasing your legal exposure?

If you answer "yes" to more than one of these questions, consider hiring a coordinator.

TIP: If a transaction coordinator is a company employee, he or she can alert you or the designated brokers to potential problems with a transaction before trouble begins. —Heidi Bergman, consultant on real estate support systems, Grass Valley, Calif.

Tips for Recruiting Assistants >		    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 






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