3 Real Estate Brokerages #Winning at Building Business Culture
The idea of building a positive company culture sounds, well, obvious. But, if you’ve ever worked at a brokerage with a bad one, you definitely know it.
Good company culture starts from the top and trickles down. Great leaders understand this. They take stock of their personality, their “why” and what they find important when doing business with others, then apply that to form a mission statement and tagline. “For us, it’s Real Estate Done Differently,” says Noelle Nielsen, broker-owner of Bright Birch Real Estate, a 7-month-old brokerage in Burnsville, Minn. “I thrive on humor and taking a less traditional approach to how we interact in the office, how we do deals, and how we market ourselves and interact with our community,” she says.
Florida Realtor magazine spoke with three brokerages to find out how they define their culture and, more importantly, how they live it every day.
1. Dewey Mitchell and Allen Crumbley, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, Tampa
The Culture: Family-oriented with a big dose of fun. “We want our agents and employees to be comfortable and have a feeling of home,” says Christie Clark, creative design strategist and marketing team member. “We base a lot of our initiatives off our four key values: Teamwork, Integrity, Passion and Excellence. We call it TIPE. We like to say there is a certain ‘TIPE’ of person who works for us,” says Clark.
How They Live It: Like most companies with a strong culture, BHHS Tampa uses a multilayered approach to reinforce its culture. At the core are events that bring together agents, their families, leadership and prospective agents.
The company has two main events each year—a Fall Fun Fest and a BBQ. Both are large, include family members and are “all about having fun and appreciating our agents,” says Casey Bryan, CCO and regional market president. “We have over 600 agents, so they love events where they can meet other agents and celebrate their hard work,” says Olivia Crumbley, brand and special projects strategist on the marketing team.
The team also organizes one-off events, such as a Berkshire Hathaway Day at a Tampa Bay Rays baseball game. “We bought shirts for the event and everyone sat together,” says Crumbley.
On a monthly basis, the brokerage also holds mastermind groups. “We invite one agent from each office, so 20 agents are invited. That reinforces our culture of collaboration,” says Bryan.
Communication: Reinforcing culture goes beyond events, says Clark. “We live key values and culture through our communications as well,” she says. Each month, Clark and Crumbley produce a video e-newsletter, called News-ish, that gives agents information on upcoming events, offers kudos to top producers and delivers on the “fun” part of their culture. “We brainstorm and plan a story, then we have a videographer film us,” says Clark. The video features Clark and Crumbley acting out funny skits, announcing events and offering what they call “infotainment.” Brokerage owners Allen Crumbley and Dewey Mitchell both have segments in the video.
“Everyone loves Dewey’s hashtag segment,” says Clark. “No one wants to read a long newsletter. But they’ll watch a video of us acting crazy delivering important information that bonds us as a team,” she says.
Since the video e-newsletter, they’ve seen a marked increase in agent engagement and in event attendance.
Pep Rallies: Finally, says Clark, “We found a need to tie everyone together and we decided to do it with the clothes we wear. We introduced branded T-shirts with trendy graphics at an event we called the Cab Bash (one of their company colors is Cabernet). It was a giant pep rally. Offices competed with each other for a spirit stick for most pride and most spirited office,”
she says.
Now, throughout the year, the marketing team designs and sells different T-shirts. “People love them. We see agents wearing them under blazers for appointments and staff wearing them on a daily basis,” says Clark.
Overall, says Crumbley, “Our goal in everything we do ties back to the culture—fun and family.”
2. Noelle Nielsen, Bright Birch Real Estate, Burnsville, Minn.
The Culture: Real Estate Done Differently. “That means we have a less traditional approach than many of our competitors in how we interact in the office, how we do deals and how we market ourselves,” says Nielsen. “I’m a mom, and we have a lot of family-oriented people in our office. Our culture is that family comes first and life happens. While we’re working, we take it very seriously. Agent life is a huge part of culture.”
How They Live It: The culture starts with Nielsen’s strategy of smart hiring, a focus on collaboration and her unique personality. She then reinforces it by focusing on creative ways to build her small team and bring them closer together. “We do team-bonding activities such as an escape room and bowling. We also have family days. The goal is for all the agents to know and support each other,” says Nielsen.
Agent Life: To reinforce the culture, Nielsen encourages agents “to put family first. Take vacation time. We also offer flexible schedules. I came from an office that wasn’t flexible and it played into the culture there,” she says. That said, Nielsen wants agents who are eager to come into the office and collaborate. When she built the office, instead of focusing on individual offices, she designed it with a lot of wide open work spaces. “I went to a home furniture store and we bought really beautiful dining room tables.”
Fun Videos: As a former professional photographer, Nielsen wanted an outlet for her creative side. “I started taking videos of myself and posting them to Facebook. To my shock, people liked them,” laughs Nielsen. (Check out their YouTube channel!) Now, they get the whole team involved.
Nielsen hired a full-time videographer and brainstormed with the team on video ideas. “We do a lot of parodies. We have one called “The Buyer,” which is a parody of “The Bachelor.” We laughed our butts off doing that,” she says.
The beauty of the videos, she says, is that the team has a common goal. “The agents come in relaxed. We hang out, have fun and create these together. That has been a huge part of our success,” says Nielsen. “It helps a lot with the culture and agent retention because the agents become friends through the process.”
The brokerage puts out at least one, longer-produced video (five to 10 minutes) and a couple shorter videos each week.
Social Media: “We have an active Facebook page and I encourage all of our agents to do social media together. That means, engaging with each other’s posts and getting to know each other on a personal level,” says Nielsen.
Overall, she says, “even though we’re not a team brokerage, it has that feel because we are all rooting for each other.”
3. Jeanne Dailey, founder and CEO, Newman-Dailey Resort Properties, Destin
“Our culture has developed over time,” says Jeanne Dailey, founder and CEO of Newman-Dailey Resort Properties in Destin. “When I started the business in 1985, we were just coming off the oil spill in Louisiana and Texas, there were high interest rates, and Destin had one traffic light and one grocery store. We were selling units with negative amortized mortgages in an area no one had ever heard of,” she says. Succeeding in that environment, “created a confidence and awareness that the brokerage can weather any storm,” Dailey says.
The Culture: Because of the tough market, Dailey wanted to make sure her agents felt strong and could still find something to laugh about. “The culture that came through is that we surround ourselves with people who can have fun. You have to laugh because in this business, you never know when a crisis can happen. You’ve got to be with people that like you and have your back.”
Dailey sums up the brokerage’s core values with the words FUN, EPIC and TEAM, which she defines this way:
FUN: Having fun and celebrating small successes in our journey to achieve big.
EPIC, an acronym for:
Excel: Good is never good enough
Professionalism: Highly trained, skilled and competent associates
Integrity: Never compromising our morals or ethics
Caring: Go the extra mile to serve
TEAM: We work together to achieve and exceed our common goals.
“Our brand promise is to consistently provide friendly, professional service with high integrity,” she says.
Goal Setting & Competition: “About a year ago, I started setting goals for the sales department. Every meeting, we kept getting closer and closer, so I would push up the goal,” says Dailey. “The agents would all moan and groan, but we had fun with it.”
Collaborative Sales Meetings: Dailey says their monthly sales meetings are a time for laughing and joking. And, “I believe in having the agents involved in the brokerage, so we spend that time bouncing ideas off each other,” she says. “Also, it’s a time to motivate and pick each other up because there is so much rejection in this business.”
Dailey finds that food she offers at events serves as a way to reinforce the culture as well. “We celebrate a lot with food. The agents love it.”
Community Service: The brokerage is heavily involved in the community. “We collect backpacks for an organization called Food for Thought,” says Dailey. To encourage teamwork, she created five teams within the brokerage. “They are competing against each other to see which team brings in the most. That makes it fun. Last year, we collected 56,000 backpacks,” says Dailey.
The brokerage also has booths at local events such as charity golf tournaments, Chamber of Commerce events and 5K runs. “The agents love it because they can choose which charity they want to support,” she says. In addition, twice a month, the office has a casual Friday. “If you want to wear jeans, you can donate $2. The money goes to our Relay for Life team and the United Way.”
Culture can be difficult to define, but once you do, you must live it through the actions of the leadership team and brokerage. “If you’re struggling with what your identity or culture is, ask your clients, friends, family and agents,” suggests Nielsen. “When they think of you and your brokerage, what are some of the first words or themes that come to mind?”
She adds, “It’s all about being authentic. If you pick core values that are authentic to you as a leader, the actions should all fall into place.” #
Tracey C. Velt is a contributing editor for Florida Realtor magazine.