The 3 Anchors of Agent Training That Ensure New Hires are a Perfect Team Fit

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30-day and 60-day onboarding programs are common among today’s real estate teams. In Silicon Valley, Rainmaker Real Estate is taking a different approach: a training and onboarding system with no set time limits, where the focus is on quality over speed.

On this week’s Walkthrough, Nancy Reynolds shares a deep dive on the three anchors of the Rainmaker Residency Program and explains how this program helps them hire agents who are a perfect fit for their small team.

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Links and Show Notes

• Nancy Reynolds Homes – Nancy’s agent website
• Rainmaker Real Estate – Nancy’s team website
• Nancy on Instagram: @NancyReynoldsHomes
• Homebot – mentioned in this episode
• Join our Facebook mastermind for The Walkthrough listeners
• HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center
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Full Transcript

(SPEAKER: Matt McGee, Host)

I asked a question this morning in our Facebook Mastermind Group — well, last week by the time you’re hearing this. Anyway, the question was, what are some of the reasons why a real estate team doesn’t reach its full potential?

So far, people are saying things like systems and accountability — the lack thereof, I presume. Lack of effort from team members. One reply mentioned that some teams become too impersonal, they lose that magic of creating great client relationships. I think all of those are legitimate reasons that a team wouldn’t reach its full potential.

But I think the number one reason is that they don’t have a great training and onboarding system in place, a system that puts new team members in the best position to succeed from day one.

Nancy: The thing I remember is that there was good training about contracts and best practice, even though that was helpful when you’re brand new, you don’t have any clients. So I was a little frustrated because my response to it would be, okay, what good is this if I don’t know how to convert clients? There was no sales training.

Matt: That’s the voice of Nancy Reynolds talking about the training she received early in her real estate career. Nancy is the co-founder of a successful team in the Bay Area that’s taking a unique, structured, three-pronged approach to training and onboarding new agents. It combines classroom education, with in-the-field training, and there’s even a mini course in marketing and branding.

Nancy is gonna share it all with you today. Because how well you train your agents could be… maybe will be what makes or breaks your team’s success.

This is “The Walkthrough.”

(INTRO MUSIC)

Hi there. I’m Matt McGee, the managing editor of HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center. Welcome to “The Walkthrough.” This is a weekly podcast. We have new episodes come out every Monday morning. This is the show where you’ll learn what’s working right now from the best real estate agents and industry experts in the country. At HomeLight, we believe in real estate agents. We’re on a journey to find out how great agents grow their business, stand out from the crowd and become irreplaceable.

Can you think of any times in your life when you weren’t prepared or trained for something you had to do? I think back to many, many years ago, when I took a new job with a great marketing company. I was brought on to help their clients with SEO. Now I had all kinds of experience in SEO. Frankly, I was really good at it at the time. But I didn’t get any training at this new company on how they do SEO and how they service their clients. Needless to say, the lack of training made that job really, really difficult.

The same thing applies in real estate. When you add a new team member, whether they’re a new agent or someone with great skills and experience, they still need a great training and onboarding process.

You heard Nancy Reynolds a moment ago. She’s the founding sales partner at Rainmaker Real Estate, they’re a small team in the Silicon Valley. She and founder Alex Wang launched the team about 18 months ago. In the past 12 months, they’ve done more than 80 transactions, and $180 million in volume. Today, they have seven agents and a seven-person support team. One of those seven agents just graduated from Rainmaker’s training program and another is set to graduate soon.

Nancy leads the agent training, their system is called the Rainmaker Residency Program. And it’s part of a very deliberate and very structured approach to agent onboarding. I mean, we’re not talking a 30-day or a 60-day training. The fact that they call it a residency program tells you that this is different.

On today’s show, Nancy is going to walk us through the three anchors of their program. You’ll hear her explain the eight training modules that teach new agents how to work with today’s buyers, the 10 marketing and branding tactics that they teach new agents, and what their in-the-field training looks like too. Those eight training modules I mentioned, Nancy has a handout. It’s sort of a, I guess, an outline or a guide to what they do during that training. You can download that in our Facebook Mastermind Group. I’ll have more info on that before the end of the show.

For now, let’s get started. As the conversation begins, I’ve just asked Nancy to give me kind of her elevator pitch for the Rainmaker Residency Program.

(BEGIN CONVERSATION)

Nancy: I would say it’s a program where you are not only going to learn best practices, but you’re going to have opportunity from day one, to practice the craft of real estate in real-time with real clients. But with the nurturing guidance of somebody holding their hands so that you can’t make any fatal mistakes. But I think bringing agents in early on before they learn bad practices or wrong practices, and giving them an opportunity to touch the ball as much as possible, they can launch their careers much faster if they want to and be more professional. So raising the level of professionalism in our industry, I think, is valuable as well.

Matt: Let’s talk about the Rainmaker Residency Program itself. Tell me how you combine those two things? How do you combine the sort of classroom style of learning with the actual on the street out in the field type learning?

Nancy: When you’re a brand new agent at Rainmaker and you agree to go through our residency program, we have a series of eight modules, that would be the classroom training. And really, it’s sales training, okay, so contract stuff, it’s amazing, people can learn contract stuff very quickly, if they’re trying to be in contract. So to take six weeks to learn contracts, when you have no real opportunity to put them into use, it’s just not as meaningful. So we find that we do the eight modules, and it’s all on sales conversions, right? Because every prospect comes to you and there’s this series of all these small conversions between when you first pick up that phone, you know, that lead comes in to when you potentially get a paycheck, right? That’s the in-class sales training.

And then at the same time, we bring new agents in on our business. So they’re gonna instantly join us, with buyer clients, with seller clients, what have you and all of the different tasks that we do as Realtors to help our buyer clients get from, I just got my pre-approval, or I need to get one, to, okay, this is the house I wanna buy and what do I do to get it and everything in between.

So that’s the in-the-field training and in-the-classroom training. At the same time, we are also training them on how to market themselves, kind of, not just best practices, but what’s really relevant for how they wanna market because everybody kind of has a different style, right? Like not everybody wants to be on social but we’re gonna train you on if you’re gonna do social, here are some good ideas and best practices and resources to help you.

Matt: Why don’t we start with what you’re doing out in the field with these agents, you’re bringing them along on transactions, they’re working with buyers and sellers. Are they just watching and listening to you or like how active are they?

Nancy: During the residency program, they are required to complete six transactions. There’s not a limited amount of time, they don’t have to do it in two months or six months or whatever. But six transactions and again, I’m overseeing or actively holding their hand through these six, right? So the first three is where I’m doing a lot more of the heavy lifting, and they’re doing a lot more kind of shadowing, if you will. So being physically present, sometimes doing things independently like showing houses, etc. But I’m probably doing the majority of the interface with the client while they’re on the call with us and we present ourselves to the clients as we’re the team. So it’s normal, they’re not like in the background on the call, they’re there, live, and they listen, and they shadow, and they learn. And then after each call, we have kind of a debrief, so we can go over what they learned, what their perspective was, etc., okay.

So the first one, I’m pretty much doing 99% of everything. Okay. And the second one, I’m kind of scaling back a little bit, hopefully, they’re going to be excited to start doing more of it. The third one, we’re probably kind of 50/50 as far as our interaction and then by numbers four, five, six, the second three, they’re expected to be a lot more independent, but I do oversee everything. So if they’re gonna send a contract out, I’m gonna look at it first. If they’re gonna send an email that isn’t something they’ve covered before or that’s maybe a delicate situation, I’m definitely going to oversee that and help them edit and draft that type of communication.

And then again, I think the big value in the field training is the debriefing afterwards. So even when they’re doing four, five, and six, those transactions and they’re much more independent, I always like to say, okay, make this your client, right? Even though it’s going in my name and I’m overseeing it all, I want you to make this your client and be the person, the point of contact. But I’m here to make sure you don’t do anything fatal.

Matt: Tell me more about what a debriefing meeting might look like. I would guess just off the top my head in the first couple of transactions when you’re still doing most of the work, you’re probably explaining things like why you said what you said, why you kind of steered the conversation this way. And then in the second three, you’re kind of reviewing what they did more, is that how it works?

Nancy: Exactly, yes, yeah. And I think the key is, it has to be right away. So as soon as we hang up a call, or as soon as we finish the showing, or whatever it is we’re doing, you know, finish a negotiation. And this isn’t just working with buyers, right? This is working with the agent on the other side of the table. So we’re negotiating for our clients trying to get them in in this ridiculous strong seller’s market. And so that negotiation training ultimately in the end is what makes our agents or what makes Rainmaker agents a little more valuable than people that don’t know how to negotiate for their clients to get something. But it needs to be right away. So we always have to make time instantly afterwards to go over it while it’s fresh in everybody’s mind. And then the repetition, right? Over, and over, and over again.

Matt: So, you mentioned the timeframe here that it’s not, you know, the six transactions could take any length of time, most of the training that I’m familiar with from having spoken to team leaders and agents across the country, it’s fairly, you know, there’s a 30-day onboarding or a 90-day onboarding. Tell me about why you guys have this approach where it sounds like it’s gonna take as long as it takes?

Nancy: Because we believe in quality over quantity. The same goes when we work with our clients, we believe in a good fit with our buyers versus just one that’s gonna close escrow on a house quickly. So yeah, we do have a 90-day check in. So there is a period of time where we do kind of say, “Okay, how is this working? Are you doing the things that we need you to do?” And typically, we’re providing a lot of opportunity. So if somebody is not stepping up and accepting our coaching, then it’s not a good fit, and maybe we need to help them find a new home. But that said, if it takes somebody six months or a year, or a year and a half to do all six transactions, that’s okay with us.

Matt: Okay, so that, I mean, that sounds fantastic — how you just explained going along with the six transactions, getting the agent to take on more of the load as they get into the second half of those six. Let’s transition, Nancy, into, you mentioned, there’s eight training modules that you go through with the new agent. This is more of the, I guess we’re calling it the classroom setting. Can you kind of walk us, tell us what those eight are? And then we’ll start to unpack some of that.

Nancy: Yes. So the first one is about converting an inbound lead. So the first thing you wanna do is book an appointment to have a longer conversation. So that’s number one. Number two is now the day comes, you have this conversation, this consultation, right? So what do you do in this consultation with this buyer prospect? Three, if they’ve committed to working with you in that consultation, success, you’ve converted, right. And now the next one is we have what we call the BOSS. It’s a workshop that we do with clients that commit to working with us, it stands for Buyer Offer Strategy Session. And we are educating and empowering them during this process. But we are also doing some conversions in here.

So, in this process, we’re getting their commitment to basically get their pre-approval done, do some other things before we go look at any houses, okay. So that’s the BOSS. Number four. How do you review disclosures with prospective buyers? Disclosure packages do nothing but scare people. So how are you gonna support your clients to understand the information accepted and have the confidence to still buy this house. Number five, writing offers to win. So our market in the U.S. has been so competitive the last however many years, and we don’t believe in writing offers in vain. Meaning if you…you have to want the house so bad that you are willing to jump through hoops and convincing your buyer clients that that’s what they have to do that’s hard to do. So training on that, how [not] to write offers in vain.

And by the way, we don’t wanna write offers in vain because that just helps push the prices up more, right? If you’re gonna write an offer that’s not gonna win, well, that’s another offer on the pile. And guess what, next week, when a house goes on sale around the corner, everybody’s gonna say, “Well, that other house got this many.” Now you’re just competing with yourself, you’re just gonna pay more. So that’s what I mean by that.

Number six. So presenting, negotiating offers to listing agents. We are very specific about how you do this and you do not ever just email an offer in and text the agent and say, “Hey, please confirm receipt.” There’s a whole…this is like serious negotiation, okay. So there’s that, then empowering your buyers to get what they want. So basically, are you getting a counteroffer? Did you present and is your offer not good enough? You still have a chance to try to go after this. How are you gonna do that? And it’s hard to basically push buyers to go up in price or remove contingencies. So I like to call it empowering them to get what they want. Oh, I’m sorry, so that was number seven.

And then number eight is when you get your offer accepted, now you’re in escrow, there are more negotiations that come through the escrow period, anything can happen. So how do we negotiate those to get what’s best for our clients?

Matt: Is there a lot of scripts and roleplay, I guess, that you’re doing for each of these sessions? What does a session look like?

Nancy: Well, it does kind of look like a class. It’s me, I prefer to stand up when I’m sharing and teaching. You know, I have handouts. So yeah, so it looks like a class that way. But there are definitely scripts and dialogues. I try to always sort of ask them where they’re at, kind of, know what their challenge is, what their perspective is today, and then ask them some questions, kind of see if they’re really stumped or not, or if they really have the wrong perspective. And typically, when you’re new you do, and then kind of expose them to what it is we’re gonna learn today and why, and how this is going to help you have what we call client control. And I don’t mean that in a way, like, we’re controlling our clients, I mean it more we know how to do this, our clients don’t, they’re so smart, they’re so savvy, right. But they don’t know how to do this. And they don’t know how to do it here in my local market, right, or whoever’s local market. We have to get them to trust that we do that. So that’s what I call client control. It’s all to help them get what they want.

But then we do roleplay. And depending on the topic, sometimes we schedule another day in between one of these eight modules to do nothing but roleplay. So we have these scripts. So there’s so many different objections, and agents, when they’re new, are very afraid of those. And they wanna know, “How do I answer every single objection?” But truth be told, it comes down to just a few answers, right? It’s really a matter of refocusing your client on what it is that they want, and how we’re gonna get it?

Matt: Tell me more about, I think it was number four on the training session, you kind of pointed out the disclosures review, and how you talk to the home owner at that point, can you kind of expand on that?

Nancy: So the tone of delivering this information has to basically focus on the facts, right, and it has to be supportive. So when they are…when the buyers are voicing their concerns, and their questions, and every question is a concern. We validate their concern, we support them, and then we have to eventually guide them to, “Okay, I totally understand that this is a concern for you, it would be for me as well, or it was when I was buying my house. But this is pretty common in our area that houses come with these sort of defects, right, or these unknowns. So it’s really gonna come down to if you really want a house here, this is pretty common.” Unless of course, there’s something that’s super uncommon.

So a lot of times, you can help give them confidence if you have stories of experience. So the number one rule for me is always do not share your opinions. Everybody has an opinion, it’s meaningless. But do share your experience. And also, we have to make sure we kind of shift the responsibility onto the buyer, right? Because it’s their house, it’s their money. And we’re responsible for advising them on real estate, but I can’t be responsible for the condition of a chimney. You know, so I can point to the chimney and inspection or non-inspection. And I can share my experience, “Well, okay, yeah, this chimney, they said, it’s having a little bit of movement from the house. That’s definitely not ideal. I have had a client have this situation and they took the chimney down to the shoulder, it cost them about $6500, plus a few $100 for permits. And they had to go through the permitting process and all that. So it took a little time, but that’s what they did with their house, and they’re pretty happy.” So you just kind of share experience that you have. So obviously when it’s new agents, they have to rely on our stories and our experience.

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Matt: So far, Nancy has covered two of the three anchors of the Rainmaker Residency Program. She’s talked about the field training aspect, those six transactions that new agents have to complete. She explained that the new agent needs to take on more responsibility with each transaction. Nancy also talked about the classroom training aspect, those eight modules that walk a new agent through working with buyers. She said there’s a lot of scripts and roleplay involved. It starts with setting the appointment and goes all the way through to negotiating during escrow. The third element of this training program is all about a subject that is near and dear to my heart: teaching the new agents how to market themselves. So let’s get back to the conversation with Nancy walking us through the 10 elements of that training.

Nancy: So the first thing is set up your database. Every agent comes through and is like, “I don’t have a database.” Well, yes, you do. You have people that you know, and I always say, I don’t care if it’s just your friends and family. If they love you and support you, they’re not gonna be upset if you market to them, right? They should be okay with that.

Matt: They wanna see what you’re doing.

Nancy: And even if they don’t, they’re not going to like, divorce you as a friend or a family member, but it’s good practice. So I always say use your friends and family to practice your dialogue and practice your marketing and this and that and just do it and start building.

Matt: If you bring people in, that’s such a great point you just made because if you bring these friends and family members in, in the idea that they are helping me as a new agent, they’re going to be much more willing to receive that message and sort of take ownership in the start of your new career.

Nancy: Yes, exactly. They still probably won’t refer you because they know you’re too green. But that’s okay. But that’s okay. So setting up your database is really important. And it’s interesting to me how difficult this is for a lot of people. And it’s all because being a salesperson is considered like, right down there with being a used car salesperson. I think bartenders rank higher than us as far as people not thinking we’re slimy. So people are, you know, agents are afraid to market themselves, they don’t wanna come across as a cheesy salesperson. That’s what I hear all the time. But if you set up your database and you provide valuable content, you’re not gonna be a cheesy salesperson, you’re gonna be somebody that’s hustling to try to put bread on the table. And you’re doing it in a way that’s also trying to help other people.

Matt: Gotcha. So number one, you’re training them on setting up the database, what else does the marketing training involve?

Nancy: Well, so various different ways that you can market and I truly believe in…well, okay, so when you’re new, I think you should try to be everywhere, because you…I think they call it like canvassing, when you just try to be everywhere, because you don’t know what’s gonna stick. But if you can’t do that because money is short or whatever, or maybe you’re working another job for a while still, to put bread on the table. And time and money are both short, then lean into the things that you are comfortable with, and do them a lot and do the well. So easy-peasy, monthly marketing newsletter, there are so many systems that you can use to just sort of automate that. Just make sure that the content is valuable. There’s a program called Homebot, which actually I learned about on your podcast from another agent.

Matt: Right? And my wife just started using it about a month or so ago. So yeah, we’re learning about it, too.

Nancy: Yeah, so Homebot is inexpensive, you just put people’s…you have to have their email, right. But it will give them some valuable content once a month, just specifically about their house, I get pretty decent engagement from it. So that’s good. And it’s inexpensive, it’s $25 a month for up to some number of email addresses, I think. And typically, if you’re new, that’s all you have anyways. Pop buys. So dropping off little gifts, I don’t care if you’re gonna drop it off, if you wanna mail it, whatever. But once, twice, four times a year, as much as you can do it, try to give something fun that sort of reflects your personality, if you have the time and are comfortable actually popping by as Brian Buffini would say, “Knocking on the door and saying hello.” I don’t think that’s bad idea. But you have to be comfortable with it or don’t do it, right?

Annual coffee date. So this is one where basically once a year, shoot an email out to all the people that I would like to have coffee with and invite them. And it’s amazing how much traction that gets. And then I get to see people that I like and catch up. And maybe they’re not ready to buy a house or sell a house right now. But lo and behold, they’re typically going to send me somebody or something, right. Of course, note cards, if you can do handwritten note cards, again, they need to have some value. And those need to be very customized. I don’t believe that those can be automated, but you can hire somebody to write it for you. So, like, I hired a marketing assistant pretty early on, and I would just dictate to her and send her files that, “Okay, please send a note card to this person, please send a note card to this person.” So it was still personal, I just didn’t actually do the work.

Social media sales activity. I do believe that early on, if you don’t have any street cred, that can be challenging. So the activity that you do have, so like our agents who do these six transactions, I think they should be using that for social media. Now they don’t necessarily have to just post just sold, they can post things like, “Hey, I’m representing a buyer on this house that has like the coolest stove.” Or whatever kind of fits their personality. But again, if you’re not comfortable with social media, then this is not an area you’d wanna lean into, right? Because social media kind of has to be done right. If it’s not, you can actually hurt your presence.

Of course, if you can do any client events, and when I was new, in my first couple years, my client events were tiny, I’d have like 10 clients. But it’s okay. But I broke them up. And I did them. And they were fun. You know, and I like social media. So it gave me some social media fodder. And now this year, I’m gonna have a big event, it will be my biggest event yet, it still won’t be humongous, because we kind of like things to be a little intimate. But I’ll have maybe 80 people. So that’ll be a big event for me.

And then of course, there’s this one campaign about asking for referrals. And again, you have to be comfortable with this or don’t do it. And it has to be super professional looking. So you’re sending them a mailer, with a cover letter, and inside, you’re giving them two complete packages, that they can basically just hand to somebody else. So you’re asking them to hand these two packages out.

Matt: Oh, interesting. Okay.

Nancy: Yeah, so we call it Refer a Friend, I have to give Lorna Hines credit. It’s actually her thing. I didn’t make it up. And then in between, there’s just — you can do Christmas cards, you can do monthly scratchers or quarterly, there’s so much stuff you can do, but it’s all about staying top of mind.

Matt: I love that you are training the agents on all this marketing stuff, I come from a marketing background. So I love it, this warms my heart, Nancy. You are training them, I think there’s sort of an underlying message here is that agents, you are responsible for generating some of your own business, not just relying on the business that the team gives you. Is there a certain…like, a certain percentage, or a certain balance that you want in terms of how much business an agent generates on their own versus how much they get from you?

Nancy: We don’t have a written expectation yet, so we’re kind of developing that part of it. I mean, I think if an agent is not developing, say, 30% of their business from their own sphere, that kind of tells me they’re not hungry enough, or they’re not motivated enough. Because we would love it if an agent stayed on the team forever, right? If a good solid agent would just do all the stuff and convert, and sell, that would be amazing. But truth be told, you want people who are gonna work really hard to sort of get off the team after a few years, or at least do a hybrid. They’re gonna make a higher cut, obviously, if it comes from their own sphere. So they should be motivated to do that. If you’re not motivated to do that, I just find that you’re you probably were a really good customer service person. But I don’t know about being an independent salesperson.

Matt: So let me ask you this, Nancy, I mean, we’ve covered, we talked about the six transaction training that the agent has to go through, we talked about the modules for working with buyers, we just went through the different marketing training that you provide. You might have an agent come to you, and we’ve kind of been talking about an agent that has no experience at all, but what if you have an agent joining the team that’s already been doing this for four, or five, six years … do you sort of customize? Do you adjust the training in any way for more experienced agents?

Nancy: We don’t adjust it. No, it’s the same. And I’m really glad you brought that up, because I don’t know about the rest of the country, but here specifically in Silicon Valley, we’ve realized that the buyer pool has changed dramatically in the last 10 years.

So we have an agent on our team who has been doing this, I think, for 15 years. And he had measurable success until about a few years ago. And really what it came down to is the evolution of the buyer pool, he didn’t know how to work with that. And so he came to us and joined our team, he’s a veteran with contracts, and best practices, and all of that, so really valuable to the organization. But we had to train him on how to convert. He also is one of the nicest, most giving people you’ll ever meet. And so he struggled with that, doing too much, giving away too much, not holding anything back so that clients needed him, right. And so training him to basically breaking down the mindset and training him on how to work with these buyers that we’re seeing here in our market. Sellers, he was still really good with sellers, because they’re mostly the boomers. And those are kind of the people…at least where we are. Those are kind of the people he’s been working with most of his career, and he committed to doing it, and he had very quick success, and he’s contributing, and it’s working.

Matt: Last question. I always like to ask my guests to sort of sum up — give my listeners a takeaway or two. What do you want team leaders, specifically, that are listening right now, what do you want them to understand about how you guys do training or just about the value of training and onboarding in general?

Nancy: I think what I would want team leaders to hear and this is based on me interacting with a lot of team leaders in the past however many years is that it takes a lot of time and dedication from you as the trainer. And if you’re not committed to doing that for these people that you onboard, then you’re really doing them a disservice. You’re also gonna hurt your brand, because they’re not going to perform at that super high level. And I think when you’re growing a team, I think that one of the most important features for the consumer is that it’s consistent. So the business practice is consistent. I always say, look, Matt, if you join my team, this is what I tell clients. “Oh, yeah. So Matt and I are gonna work together, we’re gonna help you get this house. I want you to know that you can expect, regardless of which one of us you talk to, the process is going to be the same and your experience is going to be very consistent. Matt has a slightly different personality than me. You know, he might tell you a different joke than I might. But you should be able to expect the same service and the same consistency from both of us.”

(Speaker: Matt McGee, Host)

That last bit right there that Nancy talked about, really interesting to me. After we wrapped up, I mentioned to Nancy that in my mind, training is all about getting the agents in position to succeed. I hadn’t thought about the branding and consistency aspect, but it makes total sense. Without a great training program, your agents may not be representing your team in the way that you’d always like them to. Great, great point.

One more thing to add. Once an agent graduates from the Rainmaker Residency Program, they have the option to also go through another training program that’s all about working with sellers.

All right, if you wanna connect with Nancy, a couple different ways you can do that, you can follow her on Instagram, her profile is @nancyreynoldshomes, or you can find her in our Facebook Mastermind Group. That’s also where you can grab her handout with more details on the eight training modules we talked about today. Just go to Facebook, do a search for HomeLight Walkthrough, and the group should come right up.

All right, let’s do our takeaways segment. Here’s what stood out to me from today’s conversation.

Takeaway number one, the Rainmaker Residency Program has three anchors: in-the-field training for six transactions, classroom training on eight steps for working with buyers, and they also teach new members about marketing and branding.

Takeaway number two, for the six transactions out in the field, Nancy does most of the work on the first deal, then she starts to scale back more and more each time. She says the agent should be doing most of the work during the final three transactions. And also, this is really important. They debrief right after every client interaction when things are fresh.

Takeaway number three, the eight classroom training sessions are focused on what Nancy called that “series of small conversions” from the time a lead comes in to the time a deal closes. She walked us through all eight. As I said, you can also get more info about that on the download that’s in our Facebook group.

Takeaway number four, there are 10 training pieces about marketing. It starts with setting up a database and includes things like social media, client events, and that Refer a Friend mailer that Nancy mentioned.

And then takeaway number five, every agent no matter how experienced they are, goes through the same training. And there’s no timeframe on all this. Nancy says they are more concerned with quality over quantity, quality over speed. That’s why it’s called a residency program.

Okay, I hope this was helpful for those of you leading a team or thinking about starting a team. If you have questions or feedback for me on today’s episode, a couple different ways you can reach me, leave a voicemail or send a text, the number is 415-322-3328 or you can send an email to walkthrough[at]homelight.com.

That’s all for this week. Thanks so much to Nancy Reynolds for joining me and thank you for listening. My name is Matt McGee, and you’ve been listening to “The Walkthrough.” At HomeLight, we believe in real estate agents. We’re on a journey to find out how great agents grow their business, stand out from the crowd, and become irreplaceable.

Go out and safely sell some homes. I’ll talk to you again next week. Bye-bye.

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