The following information is provided by the Center for REALTOR® Development (CRD).
The concept of a real estate team is nothing new. They have existed for decades, but over the past several years, the team concept has evolved and become far more ubiquitous.
As the real estate industry progresses and consumer demands on agents increase, many real estate professionals have begun moving their existing single-agent practices to a more sophisticated and advanced team model. As a result, there is a thirst in the industry for education and guidance about what makes a good, effective and healthy real estate team.
The Certified Real Estate Team Specialist (C-RETS) certification is a credential (developed by the Real Estate Business Institute, an affiliate of the National Association of REALTORS®) designed to bring together best practices to help real estate teams reach higher levels of performance and success.
The C-RETS curriculum provides a comprehensive foundation of skill development, training and resources to build, lead and manage a high-performance real estate team. It consists of four courses offered in a combination of classroom, virtual and online delivery formats—of which completing any three earns you the credential. The courses include:
- Designing & Sustaining Successful Teams
- Team Leadership for Maximum Performance
- Position Your Team for Profit
- HR Solutions for Teams
Designing and deploying your team should be done in four major stages to include:
- Planning
- Reviewing
- Recruiting
- Building
The foundational Designing & Sustaining Successful Teams course covers these steps in detail and walks you through how to approach them all in turn.
Once you’ve sat down and answered some basic questions about the structure and foundation of your team, it’s time to begin considering who should be on your team. Careful consideration should be placed on launching your team and choosing your team partners, members and staff. Making poor decisions could have a long-term negative financial impact and could affect your relationship with consumers.
Team Leadership for Maximum Performance goes into greater detail about recruiting, coaching, supporting and developing team members. One of the key distinctions the course makes is the difference between character and competency. Character consists of the attributes that define someone’s personality. It is how they communicate, process information, make decisions, and act upon information. Character incorporates beliefs people have about themselves and the world, and is expressed in their behaviors. Competency, on the other hand, is the learned skills, knowledge of processes and how to execute them, and understanding of strategy and tactics that the individual possesses. Competency addresses “what” the person can do, and character is “how” they do it.
Both competency and character are important considerations when looking for team members that are a good fit. We’ve all been in the situation of working with individuals with great personalities but lacking in skill breadth; and conversely, with individuals who have a great skillset but with character flaws which impede performance. The point here is that it is up to the team leader—the individual building the team—to have the mindfulness and forethought to proactively look for individuals with the right balance of character and competency traits to round out the team. Each team and its needs will be different, so there is no set formula that can be offered when looking for these traits in team members.
With the planning and insight tools offered by these courses, the educated team leader can have in mind a profile of the ideal team member (or members) to help intentionally build the most effective team for their purposes.
To learn much more about developing and managing healthy and effective real estate teams, consider obtaining REBI’s Certified Real Estate Team Specialist (C-RETS) certification. This entire month of February, all the C-RETS online certification courses are offered at 25% off their regular prices.
For more information, please visit RISMedia’s online learning portal from NAR’s Center for REALTOR® Development (CRD) and the Learning Library. Here, real estate professionals can sign up for online professional development courses, industry designations, certifications, CE credits, Code of Ethics programs and more. NAR’s CRD also offers monthly specials and important education updates. New users will need to register for an account.
