Typically, how a broker or firm or brokerage interview goes: it’s not just a one-way interview where they are interviewing you to be a real estate agent there, but you are also interviewing them to make sure that it’s the right place for you. It’s basically a two-way street when it comes to interviews. They’re going to ask you questions and you have the right to ask them questions. Just like any type of job interview. The mission is to find out if it’s a good fit for the broker and if it’s a good fit for you and these questions will help. They’re not in any particular order of importance, they’re just five questions that I feel like need to be asked.
I won’t be covering questions, such as, do you all offer leads or what’s the splits? None of that stuff. The questions presented are more high-level questions that when you ask these, a broker will look at you a little bit differently, in a good way, because you were really thinking about this intelligently to decide whether you want to work at this firm or not.
What is the company culture like?
This is super important. What this is going to do is going to let you know if the company culture even aligns with what you stand for or how you are as a person in general. Is it a very close-knit family environment or is it just kind of everybody doing their own thing? Do we participate in events together? Do we donate to charities together? Am I gonna feel happy walking in here or is it just so serious and stuffy? You want to know that because you want to know if you’re going to even be comfortable working there. You want to align yourself with a culture that really supports you, but also one that makes you feel comfortable.
How many agents do you have?
Don’t take what I’m going to say in a bad way. When I joined my first Keller Williams office, this was the first office that I joined when I got my real estate license, they had over 300 agents at that particular office. Not saying that it’s a bad thing, because I saw 300 agents as a good thing and it still is a good thing for that office.
If you have a firm with over 300 agents, then that lets you know that people like working here and it’s very attractive for an agent to work here. The fact that you are able to maintain 300 agents shows that you all have the systems in place to train, to market, and to really help out all of those agents by providing support to that quantity of people.
Now, if they tell you that there are only 20 agents here, there doesn’t necessarily have to be anything wrong with that, but you may want to inquire why. Are they a new firm or are they just more exclusive or is it that nobody wants to work there for some reason or another? You want to find out how many agents currently work there so that you can know how you’re going to fit in. Sometimes when it’s a super busy office and there’s not the staff to support it, you could get drowned out in the crowd and that’s something to think about.
How does the brokerage market to bring in business for the agents.
This is a big thing because real estate is super stimulated by the community. It can get down to who knows you, who signs do we see, what are they doing in the community. You want to know what the brokerage is doing to actually market this firm and to market me as an agent.
Is it just about the broker or is it about the actual agents? Is it just about marketing luxury homes or do we market how many sales we’ve done as a brokerage? That’s super important because a lot of brokerages I know still offer things like phone time and that’s basically where you know you could sit at the front desk and answer the phones. If anybody calls, it could be a potential lead. The downside of that is nobody will to call if the brokerage isn’t marketing. Now, if a broker doesn’t market out in the community in general, that just means that you just need to have a really good marketing plan to market yourself.
How many listings does the brokerage currently have?
This is another thing that can bring in business. The more signs that someone sees with a certain broker, the better it can be for business because then they see that the broker is active in the area and they maintain a lot of listings. This tells a potential client that they do a lot of business and so you want to know how many listings does the brokerage currently have.
This is also a great opportunity for you to find out if you as an agent are able to market other listings or possibly hold open houses for some of the listings that the brokerage has. Of course, you would have to contact the other agents or the broker and go through that whole process, but brokers that keep a healthy amount of listings really gives you better marketing opportunities.
What is the five year to 10-year goal or plan for the brokerage?
You want to know where this brokerage is heading. You want to know what things they plan on doing, how big they plan on gating. Just things like that. You want to know their direction. Are they planning on moving offices? Even wondering if they plan on opening other locations, maybe in your town or in another state.
You want to know the direction that the brokerage is actually headed in, so that way you can be prepared for what’s to come. It can give you something exciting to look forward to. Be careful with the brokerage that just says, “we’ve done all we want to do and it’s just up to us as agents to work.” Take it as a red flag, so know where the brokerage is going, know what their plans are, know they intend to be in the next five to 10 years.
If you want to get a copy of the full list of 60 questions that you can use in a brokerage interview, go ahead and visit this link and you can download that for free.
I hope this information has been helpful to you. If you have any questions or any recommendations, feel free to leave those down in the comments section.