agents, none of whom receive much training or supervision.
Within these brokerages, agents are encouraged to band together into small real estate “teams”. These teams, in effect, function as pseudo real estate companies. Many of these teams are not even located in the same city or county as their employing brokerage. This has led to a “blind leading the blind” situation where inexperienced and unsupervised salespeople are effectively running their own real estate business, which is exactly what the law was intended to prevent. Even when a team is run properly, the team concept is inefficient and ineffective. Just because a group of agents have banned together does not necessarily mean they function cohesively. Most teams have a team leader who acts as the “rain maker”. It is the team lead’s job to promote the team and obtain listings. Unfortunately, after meeting with the team lead, a seller may never hear from him or her again. Instead, the listing is turned over to a team member (usually an inexperienced new agent) or even worse to an unlicensed “transaction coordinator”. Too often, what results is a situation where “the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing” which, of course, does not bode well for a successful transaction. Obviously, this situation is ripe for failure. No wonder team failure rates are usually quite high. Next time an agent brags to you about how many houses they or their team have sold, ask how many they failed to sell. Afterall, what does it matter if an agent or team sold a hundred houses if they took two hundred listings and failed to sell half of them? That is a 50% failure rate which means the chances of them selling your particular home would be the same as a coin flip.
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