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Since starting Wizehire four years ago, we have helped thousands of agents start their businesses and grow their teams. From these entrepreneurs, we’ve heard a question over and over again: “Where should I build my real estate team?”
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This question is critical in today’s changing market. The phenomenon of Real Estate Teams has become more popular within the real estate industry—26% of Realtors in a 2018 NAR study reported being on a team. Top teams–ever hungry for growth–have started expansion teams, taking their expertise in sales, marketing, and team building to areas outside of their local market. With more teams and larger players entering the industry, many agents are wondering where they should go to build their own business.
We’ve undertaken a study that identifies the hottest markets where agents can quickly build a real estate team. We’ve determined the best markets to build a real estate team by analyzing our internal data on the supply and demand of talent in 300 markets, along with data from Zillow, Realtor.com and REAL Trends on the underlying real estate market.
Below, we’ve highlighted the top insights of this first report with
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- a breakdown of the top 10 markets in which to build a real estate team;
- an explanation of the methods behind our analysis; and
- what to do if you’re not in one of these top markets.
What’s a hot real estate market?
To understand which areas of the country have the best opportunity for new real estate teams, we started by analyzing the 300 largest markets in the United States. We identified top markets by evaluating each area’s 2019 real estate health projections, assessing whether there’s room for additional real estate teams in the market, and if there is available talent (sales agents) to hire onto a team. [Skip to the Report] Using this criteria, we constrained our analysis to areas where the overall real estate market is currently booming, and the number of transactions and average home sale prices are expected to increase in 2019. This narrowed the field to 119 markets from the 300 largest markets in the United States. To identify the best markets for recruiting we created an index to rank each market based on the number of licensed real estate agents actively seeking new opportunities relative to the number of open real estate job opportunities within a market. We call this index the Opportunity Index and helps us compare the relative ease of hiring within in a market. Using the Opportunity Index, we narrowed our rankings to the top 10 markets to grow a real estate team in 2019. In this post we use a reader-friendly version of the opportunity index, which uses a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being the most difficult for hiring and 10 being the best for hiring. Our top 10 list is ordered from markets with the highest opportunity index to the lowest. Along with the opportunity index, we included additional metrics for each market—average days on market and median home price—to help you assess how effective a real estate team could be in these markets.The 10 Hottest Markets to Build Your Real Estate Team
1. Yuba City, CA
- Average Days on Market: 54
- Median Home Price (YoY change): $319,900 (6%)
- Agents Seeking New Positions: 56
- Opportunity Index: 10.0
2. Visalia-Porterville, CA
- Average Days on Market: 53
- Median Home Price (YoY change): $265,000 (8%)
- Agents Seeking New Positions: 44
- Opportunity Index: 10.0
- The laboratory supplier Avantor Sciences recently built a 500,000 square foot distribution center in 2012.
- California Dairies, the largest powdered milk producer in North America, is based in Visalia and has a 260,000-square-foot distribution center.
- Devon Jones, the economic director for Visalia, expects that another 100,000 square feet of industrial space will be built in the next year at Visalia’s Industrial Park.
3. Youngstown-Warren-Boardman, OH-PA
- Average Days on Market: 67
- Median Home Price (YoY change): $120,000 (12%)
- Agents Seeking New Opportunities: 50
- Opportunity Index: 10.0
4. Lakeland-Winter Haven, FL
- Average Days on Market: 60
- Median Home Price (YoY change): $226,990 (3%)
- Agents Seeking New Opportunities: 261
- Opportunity Index: 9.1
5. Johnson City, TN
- Average Days on Market: 69
- Median Home Price (YoY change): $209,900 (6%)
- Agents Open to New Opportunities: 39
- Opportunity Index: 8.8
6. Lansing-East Lansing, MI
- Average Days on Market: 48
- Median Home Price (YoY change): $169,900 (10%)
- Agents Open to New Opportunities: 55
- Opportunity Index: 7.8
7. Salinas, CA
- Average Days on Market: 61
- Median Home Price (YoY change): $850,000 (-6%)
- Agents Seeking New Jobs: 63
- Opportunity Index: 7.5
8. Monroe, MI
- Average Days on Market: 48
- Median Home Price (YoY change): $195,000 (6%)
- Agents Open to New Opportunities: 69
- Opportunity Index: 7.2
9. Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL
- Average Days on Market: 61
- Median Home Price (YoY change): $269,247 (4%)
- Agents Seeking New Jobs: 127
- Opportunity Index: 7.1
10. Olympia-Tumwater, WA
- Average Days on Market: 42.5
- Median Home Price (YoY change): $374,995 (16%)
- Agents Open to New Opportunities: 107
- Opportunity Index: 7.1
What if I’m not in a top market?
In early 2019, Wizehire will publish an update to this list and share our rankings of the top 100 markets in which to build a real estate team. Your market may very well be somewhere on this list. Email us, and we can share some early numbers ???? Regardless of whether your city is on the list, you should always take a pro-active approach to hiring. Your hiring timeline for building a real estate team may be longer than what you expected. If you desperately need to grow your real estate team, you can speed up hiring by looking for talent outside the real estate industry.- Hiring a transaction coordinator? Consider candidates who have administrative experience in other industries, such as an executive assistant or a paralegal. With an administrative background, candidates will have the organizational skills and attention to detail that you need to be a great TC.
- Hiring a buyer’s agent? Consider candidates who have sales experience but aren’t licensed agents yet. For example, you might consider an inside sales agent to prospect leads and qualify new leads. If they turn out to be a good fit for your team, they can start getting their license while working for you.