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Although mega teams often rule the headlines, a new report found that more than 50 percent of respondents had six or fewer members on their team. Of these, the majority worked as duos, with one person focusing on sales and the other handling administrative and transaction management tasks.
California-based proptech leader RealScout partnered with T3Sixty and Tom Ferry to release its inaugural Teams Report, which dives into the intricacies of developing a successful team and the unique challenges surrounding technology, marketing, lead generation, recruiting and retention, brokerage relationships, and long-term goal-setting.
The 50-page report is based on a survey of 350 team leaders and was distributed with the help of 20 distribution partners, including Inman, Real Estate News, Realtor.com, Movoto by OJO, RE/MAX, eXp Realty, LPT Realty, Side, NextHome, Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, 1000WATT and FollowUp Boss.
Jack Miller | Credit: T3 Sixty
“As the real estate landscape continues to shift, driven by market forces, technological advances, and regulatory changes, teams will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in shaping the future of our industry,” T3 Sixty President and CEO Jack Miller said in the report’s introduction. “The insights in this report provide a foundation for understanding where teams stand today and the opportunities that lie ahead.”
Ninety-one percent of all teams had at least one non-agent in their team, and larger teams with six or more people were more likely to have a robust support staff to handle accounting, operations, marketing and other administrative roles. The median staff number was four people, signaling that team leaders are learning to leverage support staff to increase agent productivity.
“Many brokerages, as they have instituted compensation plans that give more of overall compensation to agents, have pulled back admin resources, thus causing teams to hire their own staff to handle transactions and other duties,” the report read. “The most common roles are roles that involve either administrative duties or specialized tasks, such as marketing.”
“It is notable that the median number of staff is four, implying that the teams responding to the survey are more staffed up than might have been expected,” the report added. “This tells you that more teams are taking seriously using staff leverage to increase their sales production.”
When it comes to team organization, smaller teams (<6) and larger teams (>6) leaned toward a unified team system where lead generation, sales and marketing funnels are managed and shared collectively.
The second most popular team model for small teams was the cooperative team system, where teams share marketing and tech resources but manage their databases and lead generation funnels individually. Meanwhile, the second most popular model for larger teams is the hybrid model, where sub-teams lean on the larger team for resources but have a separate sales and marketing funnel.
Team sizes also impact how team leaders approach spending, with the largest teams “trading off economics” to accelerate growth. The typical small team spends $1,000 or less per month on lead generation, while the typical large team spends between $2,500 to $4,999 per month on lead generation. Larger teams also spend more on a cost-per-lead basis, often having a CPL of more than $20.
“These possible explanations paint a picture where larger teams are better equipped to manage a higher-cost customer acquisition funnel through careful planning and bigger team resources,” the report read. “There may be factors inherently challenging for smaller teams, such as access to capital, ability to deal with volume, and general risk tolerance, that make it difficult to reach for higher cost leads.”
Team leaders on both sides of the spectrum said consumer acquisition may become harder in the coming year, as agents and consumers adjust to buyer-broker compensation and written agreement changes as outlined in the National Association of Realtors proposed settlement.
Forty-two percent of respondents said the consumer acquisition difficulties will stay the same over the next 12 months, while 33 percent of respondents said they expect things will get harder. Only 24 percent said they expect consumer acquisition to get easier.
“The minds of team leaders are mixed about the difficulty of acquiring customers,” the report read. “Changes to buy-side business, due to the NAR settlement agreement, have caused some new friction in the buyer business that did not exist before, and some uncertainty about lead flow for buyer business.”
In addition to NAR’s proposed settlement, team leaders were also thinking about the upcoming election and candidates’ housing policies, mortgage rate fluctuations and affordability, the cost and availability of leads, and housing inventory.
Respondents were overwhelmingly positive about mortgage rate and affordability trends; however, when it came to the NAR settlement, the election, lead generation and housing inventory, respondents were more likely to be neutral than negative about the potential impact on their businesses.
This bullishness has given way to an optimistic outlook for 2025, as 74 percent of respondents said they expect to experience growth of 10 percent or more over the next 12 months. Meanwhile, only 2.5 percent of respondents said they expect their annual growth to decline next year.
“The NAR settlement offers an interesting opportunity for teams, which may have the capacity of solving key pain points for individual agents,” the report read. “Compliance and administration is one area where access to support staff may be a significant workflow upgrade for agents dealing with newly mandatory buyer agreements.”
Andrew Flachner | Credit: RealScout
“Another would be the ability for agents, during compensation negotiations, to tout the value propositions of their team, in addition to their brokerage’s and their own as an agent,” it added. “These benefits may ultimately outweigh the downsides of the settlement.”
Although the report “inspires more questions than it answers,” RealScout co-founder and President Andrew Flachner said it still stands as one of the most comprehensive studies on real estate teams to date.
Since the 2024 survey ended, Flachner said the RealScout and T3Sixty team has received responses from another 250 team leaders and is inviting more participants through the survey homepage.
