Building & Scaling a Real Estate Team

Scaling a sales team is an exercise in managed chaos.

There is a romantic notion that growth is linear—that you add one person, you get one unit of growth. In reality, growth is step-function and messy. Scaling a real estate team from 5 people to 50 is not just about doing more of what you did with 5. It breaks everything.

When you have 5 agents, you can manage them over lunch. You know their spouses’ names, their financial struggles, and their specific weaknesses. When you have 50 agents, you are running a small corporation. The informal “tribal knowledge” that held the small group together evaporates. Without structure, entropy takes over, and the organization descends into noise.

This chapter details the mechanics of that scaling phase—the “Scale-Up” phase where most leaders burnout or implode.

Phase 1: The Recruitment Engine

You cannot scale without a constant influx of talent. In real estate, the churn rate is notoriously high. People join, realize it’s hard work, and wash out within 90 days. To grow a team of 50 performing agents, you probably need to recruit 150 people.

I stopped treating recruitment as an “HR task” and started treating it as a “Sales Funnel.”

• Top of Funnel (Awareness): We marketed the lifestyle and the system, not the job. We held “Career Nights” that looked more like Apple product launches than job interviews. We showcased our top earners (social proof).
• Middle of Funnel (Selection): We didn’t take everyone. This was crucial. By creating a barrier to entry—an interview process where we actually rejected people—we increased the perceived value of the seat. We looked for “hunger” over “resume.” I would take a hungry fresh grad with a chip on their shoulder over a complacent veteran any day.
• Bottom of Funnel (Onboarding): This was the drop-off point. We built a “7-Day Bootcamp.” If you couldn’t survive the intensity of the first 7 days (mock calls, role-plays, grueling study of project details), you didn’t make the team. This filtered out the tourists from the soldiers.

Phase 2: Structure and Hierarchy

At 15 agents, I became the bottleneck again. I couldn’t be the direct manager for 15 ambitious, high-maintenance salespeople.

I introduced a tiered structure. I identified the 3 natural leaders within the group—the “Alpha” performers who others naturally looked up to. I promoted them to “Team Leaders” (TLs).

This was a critical structural shift.

• Dave (Group Leader): Accountable for Vision, Strategy, and Developer Relationships.
• Team Leaders: Accountable for the daily activity and morale of their 5-7 agents.
• Agents: Accountable for sales.

I split the override commission. I took less of the pie personally to fund the TLs. This is simple economics: Would you rather have 100% of a grape or 10% of a watermelon? By giving up margin to empower leaders, I uncapped my volume.

Phase 3: The “Culture of War”

When you have 50 young, hungry salespeople in a room, you have a lot of energy. If you don’t direct that energy, it turns inward—office politics, gossip, negativity. You have to direct that energy outward at a common enemy.

In our case, the enemy was “The Market” or sometimes a rival agency.

We gamified everything.

• The Bell: We installed a literal ship’s bell in the office. You only rang it when you collected a booking fee. The sound of that bell cut through the noise of the office. It was Pavlovian. When it rang, everyone applauded.
• The Leaderboards: Digital screens everywhere showing real-time rankings. Salespeople are competitive beasts. You don’t need to yell at them to work harder; you just need to show them that the guy sitting next to them is beating them.
• The rituals: Morning briefings at 9:00 AM sharp. High energy. Music pumping. We primed the state of the team before they made their first call.

The Problem of Standardization

As we scaled, quality control became the issue. Agent #45 didn’t have the same polish as Agent #3. He was misrepresenting unit sizes or promising returns that weren’t guaranteed.

This is where the SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) became non-negotiable.

We built a “Playbook.” It was a physical and digital bible of how we did business.

• How to dress.
• How to greet a client.
• The exact slide deck to use for Project A.
• The exact objection handling script for “It’s too expensive.”

We stripped away creativity from the process so they could be creative in the relationship. We didn’t want 50 different artists painting 50 different pictures. We wanted 50 soldiers marching in step.

The Inflection Point

Scaling hurts. There were months where I felt like I was running a daycare center for adults. There were betrayals—TLs who I trained leaving and trying to poach half the team. There were cashflow crunches where we had spent huge on marketing before the commissions came in.

But the machine started to hum. There came a point where the brand of the team was bigger than the brand of Dave Chong. Developers were calling us because they saw our army in the market. Buyers were referring friends to us because “that team knows what they’re doing.”

Key Takeaways for Builders

1. Recruit Always: Recruitment is not an event; it is a lifestyle. You are always looking for talent.
2. Build Layers: You cannot manage more than 7-10 people directly. Build a leadership layer early.
3. Kill Politics: High performance kills politics. Focus everyone on the external scoreboard.
4. Codify Knowledge: If it’s in your head, it doesn’t scale. Write it down. Record it. Distribute it.

Building a team is the ultimate leverage. It allows you to be in very many places at once. But it requires you to serve the machine, not just run it.