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Getting to a position in your career where you need to employ some help is an exciting milestone for an agent, but it also comes with its own set of risks.
Recently, the winners of REB’s Innovator of the Year shared how they are looking to create a smoother transition from the point where an agent generally begins to need help, to being in a place where they can comfortably afford it.
Speaking on a recent episode of REB’s Business Empowerment Showcase, Upside Realty chief executive Adam Rigby and director of sales James Kirkland discussed why there’s still room for that role, albeit in a different way.
Revealing Upside Performance, the pair discussed the positives of the new platform, which aims to step in and fill the gap by taking on some of the tasks an agent seeking out growth in their business might have originally brought a sales assistant on to handle.
“I think what we are doing is sort of changing the role of the sales assistant a little bit. And also, I guess changing the risk profile of an agent, getting to a point where they can only grow by hiring that sales assistant,” Mr Rigby shared.
“What we see is that you’ve got a lot of agents who get to about $200,000 GCI and then they have to do this big leap of faith, which is, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to have to put my hand into my pocket for $70, $80, $90 grand to get someone to come and help me.’”
It’s not only a risk because an agent has to then make a pretty serious commitment to sustaining that level of income for the foreseeable future, but it also oftentimes means that their personal bottom line drops back for a while, right when they’re attempting to step into a new level of achievement.
“That is a big problem that keeps a lot of agents stuck,” Mr Rigby said.
Their platform aims to alleviate that cliff by filling in the campaign management tasks that would often be the first tasks assigned to an assistant.
“We’ll let you grow through that normal leap of faith point. And then you can bring on the sales associate much later, and they’re helping you much more with actual dollar productive jobs,” Mr Rigby explained.
“So they’re helping you with the opens, or they might be doing a bit of the prospecting for you, rather than doing all this campaign management stuff, which is just a cost base.”
Mr Kirkland, who was an agent for many years and started his career performing many of the tasks Upside aims to cover, opined that it’s also a win for those starting out in their careers.
“I was a young agent and I spent sort of eight years doing, from end to end, every task. And that was taxing, it was time-consuming. And what I found is, it was just taking time away from speaking to more vendors and ultimately selling more properties,” Mr Kirkland explained.
After 10 years out of the real estate industry, he said he returned expecting to see that tech had filled some of those gaps, but many were still relying on the sales assistant model and struggling through the same cliff in bringing that new staff member on as they were a decade earlier.
Upside saw this as its window of opportunity, Mr Kirkland explained.
“For us in this journey, it has been amazing to have a blank canvas to be able to say, ‘How can we genuinely use technology to create a world where an agent isn’t going into an office, is really being able to press a button and know that there’s a centralised team that can really take it from there?’”
You can listen to the full conversation with Adam Rigby and James Kirkland here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Juliet Helmke
Based in Sydney, Juliet Helmke has a broad range of reporting and editorial experience across the areas of business, technology, entertainment and the arts. She was formerly Senior Editor at The New York Observer.
