Work Your Sphere of Influence to Your Advantage

RISMEDIA, October 3, 2009—Working your sphere of influence is one of the easiest ways to stay productive in any real estate market. Everyone has a sphere of influence and staying in touch with yours could you help you stay at the front of the pack. George Wallace, Broker/owner at Coldwell Banker Wallace and Wallace in Knoxville, Tennessee shares how you can use your sphere of influence to your advantage.

George Wallace
Broker/owner
Coldwell Banker Wallace and Wallace
Knoxville, Tennessee

Region served: Greater Knoxville area
Years in real estate: 25
Number of offices: 6
Number of agents: 250
Average sales price: $200,000
Average time on market: About 5 months
Best idea for time management: Make a schedule and stick to it.
Best tip for running a productive meeting: Have a predetermined agenda and PowerPoint prepared with preset goals of what you are trying to accomplish.
Best advice for real estate rookies: Get in touch with the people you know. It is crucial to work your sphere of influence since people do business with people they know.

What is your biggest challenge in today’s market and how is your company taking it on? From a company standpoint, our biggest challenge is office profitability. We are constantly recruiting and actively seeking acquisitions and roll-ins to keep our offices full of agents who are successful in the industry.

What are some of your best recruiting practices? Part of everyone’s job is to recruit agents to their office. It is important for us to get in front of new recruits on a weekly basis and present what we do and the tools that we have to help our agents succeed. It’s all about bringing a level of accountability to our managers in terms of recruiting.

What are the best marketing techniques you use within your company? We have embraced many new ideas over the past few months in order to market our properties and provide our clients with the best service. We now publish our own color magazine in order to promote listings as well as reduce bottom-line advertising costs. In addition, we have become heavily invested in the technology aspect of real estate and have overhauled our website to include the information and tools our clients need.

How do you effectively communicate with your agents? Each of our offices sends out a daily memo that includes information regarding production numbers for the day and week as well as any other information about things occurring in the office or the market that will be valuable to our agents. We have four company meetings a year at which the broker/owners speak and we also maintain personal relationships with our agents by visiting the offices and staying in touch.