In the following interview, Michael Knight, President & CEO of CENTURY 21 Desert Rock in Hesperia, Calif. talks tech, recruiting, and providing the best possible service.
Region served: The High Desert and Inland Empire of Southern California
Years in real estate: 13
Number of offices: 1
Number of agents: 40
Best time management tip: Get control of your schedule.
Most effective way to motivate agents: Remember that every sales associate doesn’t learn in the same way. Understanding their goals is the key to motivating and helping them achieve success.
Key to staying profitable: Review all bills in detail. Billing mistakes happen, and they can add up to significant amounts of money being lost to human error.
Can’t live without tech tool: Dotloop. The platform allows me to audit and review files anytime, anywhere.
What strategies are you using to enhance your recruiting?
Our company motto is “Excellence in Everything.” It serves as the foundation to support our growth and the ongoing success of our affiliated sales associates. In preparation for enhancing our value proposition, we completed an in-depth SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. After a major investment in increasing our servicing levels, we now have a system in place with the ability to provide industry-best service to all our affiliated agents and their clients.
Please describe your technology best practices.
Our SWOT analysis identified that we needed to upgrade our office technology. We replaced our computers, upgraded printers/copiers, our network, our Internet pipeline and our WiFi. We also swapped landline phones to VoIP, installed security cameras, incorporated smart TVs into our conference rooms, improved our website and partnered with a marketing company to help us be consistent—both online and offline—with CENTURY 21® brand marks throughout our communications, websites and social media platforms.
What strategies are most effective when it comes to training?
Listening to what our sales associates tell us and delivering learning programs based on their needs has been most effective. Some of our greatest successes have come from our own affiliated agents who host learning in the areas in which they excel. We supplement these sessions with appraisers, attorneys, accountants, escrow officers, lenders, etc. We also provide sales associates with systems and tools that our competitors don’t or can’t, and we offer courses on how to fully utilize everything.
What are two fundamentals that you feel are essential to your company’s continued success?
We plan to increase our sales associate count from 40 to 60 by the end of 2016. We are actively looking to open additional offices and expand into new markets through M&A activity. Our success depends on understanding our culture and providing all sales associates with industry-best systems, tools, learning and support.
For more information, visit www.desertrock.c21.com.
