In the following interview, Greg McClure, CEO/broker of Realty ONE Group Complete in Rocklin, Calif., discusses the advantages of the brand, profitability, recruitment strategies and more.
Region Served: Greater Sacramento, Calif.
Years in Real Estate: 21
Number of Offices: 2, with 1 opening in July
Number of Agents: 400 +/-
Best Time Management Tip: Time-block all your activities, put them on a calendar and share it with your significant other so that you stay out of trouble.
Most Effective Way to Motivate Agents: Creating self-awareness. Make them look at how much time they’re truly spending every day on their real estate business.
Can’t-Live-Without Tech Tool: My smartphone and Google calendar.
What is your key to staying profitable?
Don’t be afraid to spend money to create profit. The more value and resources you can provide to increase productivity, the more return you’ll see on the back-end. So many brokers are afraid to spend money, but when I spend money on a new tool or program and it increases each agent’s productivity by one deal per year, times 400 agents, that’s a big number.
Talk about your technique for recruiting the best agents.
We don’t refer to it as recruiting agents, but rather, we refer to it as a growth strategy. I went from about 20 agents to just under 400 in less than four years, and right out of the gate, I tried to identify agents who would be early adopters of our business model. Once you get them to start talking about it, you can get mass adoption. That being said, it’s important to find the early adopters in your market and figure out how to get your message to them. Most of our early adopters were recruited because of strong social media skills, and once they came on, they became huge brand advocates for us.
Can you explain the Realty ONE Group commission structure?
This industry has two preeminent commission structures, one being the 40- or 50-year-old model still being used by most of the legacy brands. The other is a newer virtual model where there’s no brick and mortar, no broker, a few cheesy tech tools and no real support. But Realty ONE Group gives you the best of both, with a legacy commission structure and brick and mortar offices, robust training, tools and technology. We give people the power to invest in themselves and the economic freedom to run their business the way they want to run it.
How do you make money with this model?
We’re like the Southwest Airlines of real estate. We run a very efficient operation. Like Southwest and its new fleet of planes, we do it with great technology, better service and no extra baggage fees. We’re a highly efficient organization built to run today—not built to run 50 or 60 years ago. We make money through volume, and we pass that efficiency on to our agents while supporting them in running their business.
