“I love the money, and I love helping my clients, but I’m spread WAY too thin, and I don’t know what to do. I’m not giving anything in my life — my clients, my family, my mental and physical health — the attention they deserve. I got into this business to have freedom, but now I feel like I’m in a prison of my own making. And there’s no way to work my way out of it because working harder only makes me more successful and busy, and that makes it worse!”
This is a quote from a highly intelligent, incredibly professional $13 million real estate agent at a large brand-name brokerage. It’s the story of most agents who reach similar or higher levels of success. The way it’s supposed to work in business is that the more successful the business gets, the more freedom the owner enjoys. But in residential real estate, until recently, there hasn’t been a way of doing business that made that possible. It is now, and we are the only brokerage who can guarantee it. In fact, we are offering a $5000 prize to the first agent who achieves our guarantee outside the Relevate system.
Hi I’m Mike Regan, founder and CEO of Relevate Real Estate. I started Relevate because before getting into real estate, I was a process improvement consultant for over 15 years. From what I could see from the outside looking in, I thought residential real estate had great potential for process improvement. I felt there was a way to build a better business system so that agents could not only (1) earn unlimited take-home income but also (2) enjoy the reward of plenty of time off to be with their families and take care of their health. In fact, now, after 15 years of process improving residential real estate and creating that better business system, we are guaranteeing those specific results. In this blog post, I will explain exactly what we guarantee at Relevate regarding take-home income and life balance for real estate agents. I’ll also explain how agents qualify for that guarantee and how we back up that guarantee… with our bank account. By the end of this article, you will have a clear understanding of how Relevate Real Estate’s guarantee works, and that should help you understand more clearly if Relevate, as a brokerage and business system, could be a good fit for you.
THE RELEVATE REAL ESTATE GUARANTEE
The Relevate guarantee is that if you work our proven process correctly, three things will happen:
First, if you are not yet a top-producing agent (that means selling over $10 million in volume annually), then you will become one within 12-24 months. We have a good system here, and if you work the system, and you have the basic talents needed, you’ll get there. This goes for experienced agents and new-to-real-estate agents.
Second, as a top-producing, $10 million-plus-volume agent, you will have a BALANCED LIFE, and the more homes you sell, the more balanced your life will become. Having a balanced life means having plenty of time to hit the gym and to spend with family, not working more than an hour or two each weekend, and having at least 8-12 weeks of vacation during which you will not have to check your phone (AND during which your clients will be well taken care of).
Third, as a $10M+ volume agent, you will keep at least 65% of your annual gross commission revenue as take-home income (after all expenses including splits, fees, marketing, client service support, etc). That’s easy to do as a lower-producer, but that’s impossible to do for a top-producing agent unless you have a very high average sales price, or more likely do all or most of the work yourself, in which case you will not have anything resembling a balanced life. We’ll show you what percentage of their total commission revenue top-producing agents keep at other brokerages, and it’s not pretty.
WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL ABOUT A TOP-PRODUCING REAL ESTATE AGENT HAVING A BALANCED LIFE?
If you are a $10M+ volume agent, you already know why a balanced life would be a big deal — because it’s very likely your life right now is way out of balance… unless either your average sales price is very high (over $550k), or you are giving up way too much of your commission income to pay other people for taking some of the load off you. Some agents enjoy working all the time and being on the phone during every date, family activity, and vacation. These agents may even get a sense of importance by being the only ones who can handle most situations in their business. But for the rest of us, that’s not how business, and life, are supposed to work.
Real estate can be just like most other businesses where, as you get more successful, you get more control of your time, and more of it. Just because you haven’t seen or experienced this in real estate doesn’t mean it can’t exist. Residential real estate brokerage just needed some big process improvement. And that’s what it got.
WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL ABOUT KEEPING 65% OF YOUR COMMISSION REVENUE?
If you don’t care about having a balanced life, then up to about $12M in volume, you can keep more than 65% of your commission as take-home income by doing all or most of the work yourself. Beyond that level of volume it just isn’t possible because no one has enough hours in the day to handle that amount of work by themselves, and they will need to pay others to help them with marketing and client service, and these agents rarely keep more than 50% of their commission income. In fact, the average is less than 40%. I want you to see all the details of what high-volume agents at other brokerages must pay to make that kind of volume happen, so I wrote a blog post for you.
THE PROVEN PLAN
So what is this proven plan that Relevate agents follow to become a top producer if they aren’t already, AND once they get there, to have an unreasonably balanced life and take home 65%+ of their total commission revenue?
1.You’ve got to have the desire, motivation, and basic ability to be successful at the Relevate level. We’ll be straight with you and tell you within your first 120 days with us if we feel you may be challenged in one of these areas.
2. LEARN the Relevate Business System. We have 1-1 and group coaching, 1-1 and group mentoring with our current top producers, and accountability groups with your peers, led by our top producers. These are invaluable and necessary learning opportunities. After joining us, many agents say they feel like they’ve received the equivalent of a master’s degree in how to be successful in real estate.
3. Add at least 200 qualified people to your database in our proprietary referral-generating software system.
4. Participate in, and include your full database in each of our monthly marketing campaigns (planned, printed, and ready to go thanks to our marketing team), touch base with each of your database members each month in person or by phone, and follow up with a personal, hand-written note.
5. Follow up professionally with each referred lead and use our proven processes to convert them into clients.
6. Utilize our fully-trained Client Service Managers whenever you run short of time to do the above.
7. Utilize our listing success systems and support team for your listings.
IMPORTANT NOTES:
Our system allows agents to handle unlimited numbers of local buyers and sellers without referring them out or sharing the commission with buyers agents. Therefore, in the Relevate system, GCI is calculated after any referral fees are subtracted. New-to-real-estate agents contribute a “training investment” to partially cover our costs of training them in real estate and sales. The 65%+ guarantee for annual take-home income as a percentage of GCI starts when that training investment is finished.
HOW DO WE BACK UP OUR GUARANTEE?
Our guarantee wouldn’t be worth much if we didn’t back it up. Assuming you do the “Relevate Proven Plan”, then if you don’t achieve what we promised we will finance your next efforts from our bank account.
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- If you do not become a $10M+ Top Producer within 12-24 months, we will cover the cost of all your marketing until you do (this assumes we’ve previously agreed you have the basic talent and ability needed to become a top producer).
- If you do not have a balanced life as a top producer, we will pay $500 per month toward client support and listing success labor until you arrive at your balanced life.
- If you do not keep 65%+ of your GCI as take-home income, we will credit the difference each month for you to use for your marketing or labor until and unless you reach 65%+.
The truth is that most of our agents do not do every part of the Proven Plan exactly as outlined above, yet almost ALL of them achieve the guaranteed results anyway. But we want to make certain that YOU succeed in a big way, and by following the proven plan 100%, you are certain of success.
OUR $5000 PRIZE
In addition to the above, we actually guarantee the uniqueness of our system with an $5000 prize to the first top producing agent from any brokerage outside of Relevate, who achieves our guaranteed levels of balanced life and take home income with an average sales price below $550,000. That $5000 will be paid in the form of $500 per hour for 10 hours of consulting, because we are ALWAYS ready to learn new ideas and implement them to benefit our clients and our team.
IS RELEVATE REAL ESTATE’S GUARANTEE A GOOD FIT FOR ME?
When you’ve worked as hard as any real estate agent needs to in order to sell $10M+ in annual volume, you deserve to know you will keep at least 65% of your gross commission income and have the “time freedom” to enjoy it. If you are just learning about our model, you may be curious to read these blog posts comparing the pros and cons of the Relevate business system versus other ways of organizing your business. Here at Relevate Real Estate, we are enthusiastic about educating the right agents about our system. If you are enthusiastic about what you’ve read here and would like to ask more questions or find out if you are a fit for Relevate, we invite you to click the link in the description below to schedule a time to come visit with us to learn more. If you felt this post was helpful, go ahead and subscribe to our email list and be notified whenever we publish more content like this. You can also schedule a time to chat with me HERE. I’m also interested in knowing what was going on inside your brain as you read this blog post!? Write your thoughts or questions in the comment section below, and I’ll reply as soon as possible!
NOTES:
*In both of the previous sections I say “unless your average sales price is very high”. That is because if your average sales price is for example, over $1M, then you’ll only need to sell 10 homes per year to achieve 10M+ in volume. And since that’s not a lot of transactions, you can do it all yourself and have a FAIRLY balanced life (keeping in mind you have to market to and serve more than 10 clients to get 10 closings) and keep over 65% of your commission revenue. Most agents do not have high enough average sales prices to reach $10M in volume with only 10 or 15 sales. However, even if you have a very high average sales price, if you push your volume much higher, say to $15 or $20 million, you will run into exactly the same issues (with regard to your life balance and percentage of you commission revenue that you keep) and you will have better results in the Relevate Business System.
