As we’ve discussed, Real Estate Utopia is a unique agency where everything is desirable or near perfect for all its members. The agency provides the ideal qualities for its agents, property managers, business owners, and operations team. Real Estate Utopia is achievable and should be the goal of all agencies.
The first steps in creating a Real Estate Utopia are to make your team members euphoric. Producers become euphoric when their days are spent producing — listing homes, talking to owners about how they’ve increased the value of their rental properties, and closing deals. If you can find a way to take everything else off their plates except the productive tasks they enjoy, you will have made progress toward Real Estate Utopia.
But what about your other team members — those who do their work behind the scenes? Often, agency owners forget about these behind-the-scenes members because they lack the visibility of the producers. They aren’t in the spotlight to get a taste of glory every time they produce. Their job, instead, is to support those in the spotlight. Keeping the operations and accounts staff members happy is more important than making the producers happy, in our opinion. And creating a Real Estate Utopia requires that the operations and accounts staff be euphoric, too.
Administrative Operations Team
Your general administrative operations staff have a very different view of a good day in the office than your producers do. A Gallup study found that only about 13 percent of employees worldwide are actively engaged at work, and about 63 percent don’t care if the organization meets its goals. A North American study found that administrative professionals were sixth out of eight professions in terms of job satisfaction. In other words, only workers in two occupations disliked their jobs more. The study concluded that administrative staff could become happier if their positions were stimulating rather than tedious. Balancing work and personal life better and receiving recognition are also essential to job satisfaction.
Administrative operations staff, then, become euphoric based upon the ease of the work and the ability to complete all their tasks within the required timeframe. To ensure this, your agency needs to have enough administrative operations staff to avoid overflow and ensure that each worker receives work in an organized fashion to complete it efficiently. To achieve their vision of a better work-personal life balance, the administrative staff wants to leave their work at work. When they’re at home, they want to focus on their family. They don’t want to have to worry about too much work piling up for them tomorrow and not being able to put a dent in the pile.
Now, to your bean counters and protectors of the business.
Bookkeepers
Every real estate business must have bookkeepers. Bookkeepers have a history of disliking their jobs. In general, bookkeepers rate their job happiness at 2.7 out of 5 stars. That rating puts them in the bottom 14 percent of workers. So, making your bookkeeping staff happy will be challenging.
Real Estate Utopia requires that your bookkeeping staff be euphoric, however. So, you must understand what will make them happy and deliver. First, they’ll never be euphoric if the surrounding steps don’t work well. Bookkeepers love an orderly world.
Bookkeepers also are fixated on numbers and making them work. They don’t approach their jobs with the same emotion as other workers such as a real estate agent. Instead, they want to see the money come in and go out and to be able to put each bean in its proper place. To create a utopia for them, you’ll need enough operators to take care of all the little details that drive them nuts. For example, you don’t want them to have to chase you for an invoice for a credit card transaction that has no receipt. Your misplacement of the invoice causes their world to be less than tidy, and they don’t like that. A streamlined process with enough support to ensure all the beans are counted is what they seek.
Accountants
Your accountant is more attached to the outcomes than the bookkeeper is. They also want a streamlined environment, especially as it relates to numbers. They want you to pass the information they need on a weekly, quarterly, and annual basis, and they want the information to be clear and make sense. They don’t want it to look like the dog’s breakfast that they must clean up! They want to work the numbers and make forecasts for you quickly.
One Step Closer on the Utopian Road
Real Estate Utopia requires making all these behind-the-scenes employees — administrative operations, bookkeeping, and accountants — as euphoric as your producers. Once you’ve made all these employees happy, you’ve moved one step closer to achieving Utopia.
