14 Dec 2022
Real estate leaderboard or how to increase real estate sales use gamification
It’s fair to say that most real estate agents have an understanding of human psychology. Why, their job is to sell people’s most valuable asset of all, their house. To sell effectively, real estate agents must be persuasive and ensure they highlight features most of interest to potential buyers.
For leaders of teams of agents, their use of human psychology tactics usually extends further than the client side of their job. To develop and manage a consistently high-performing team, team leaders need to keep their team motivated to succeed. But this is certainly no easy feat without the right strategies.
This article is about how leaders of real estate teams can use leaderboards to boost their team’s success and incentivize them to perform to their highest potential.
We break down why leaderboards are so effective in the real estate industry, the concept of gamification and how leaderboards are an example of this, and how you can easily set up your own leaderboard today.
Let's get into it!
Why use a leaderboard to increase real estate sales
First off, we’d like you to think about how you currently keep track of your agent’s listings and sales. Is it on a big spreadsheet, or sales software?
If yes, you’re already halfway there to unlocking your team’s best performance.
But before we get ahead of ourselves - let’s talk about where spreadsheets fall short when it comes to seeing the best performance from your team. The thing about spreadsheets and lists is that they show you the data, they show you who’s performing well, but they don’t incentivize your agents to take action. They don’t inspire your team to challenge themselves or to consistently perform at their best. They’re just numbers, and they may be more fear inducing, than motivating.
Sure, you can sit your agents down each month to go through their listing and sales data. Sure, you encourage them with the promise of bonuses and other financial compensation, but without a way to keep their eyes on the prize every day they’re working, then you are unlikely to see their best performance.
Enter, leaderboards.
Leaderboards are a way to rank your real estate agents across key performance metrics and to measure them against their targets. Players can use them to see how they’re performing at any time, and in the process, see how they stack up against their team members.
But what we really want to convince you is leaderboards are powerful motivation tools. You can use them to visualize the metrics that matter to your team to consistently drive strong performance, with little extra effort on your part. We will talk more about that, shortly.
Leaderboards are easy to set one up using your existing performance data. Score your leaderboard’s players across the metrics that matter to your team, like a number of sales, or successful referrals. Then you can take your leaderboards one step further by building a challenge to motivate all your players to aim for the top spot.
It’s hard to sum up all the benefits of leaderboards in a paragraph, so we’ve come up with a list of why they are your next best tool:
● They motivate your team every day, without any extra effort on your part. Easily set a leaderboard up and create a challenge for your agents to aim for the top spot. ● You can see how your agents are performing at any time. Forget trawling through monthly performance reports, leaderboards are all about real-time metrics! The more visible your leaderboards are, the better. Display one in your office, and encourage your team to check it everyday. ● They create social accountability. Healthy competition is great for motivation. By making performance visible across your team, everyone is motivated to perform at the top player’s level. ● They recognize achievement. Leaderboards are an easy way to recognize top performers in your team, which - you guessed it - will motivate them even more. ● They are fun. Who doesn’t like games, especially at work? Leaderboards incorporate elements of gamification to engage players. Let’s see your performance spreadsheets do that (we bet they can’t).
Real estate gamification through leaderboards
We briefly mentioned that leaderboards are a great example of applied gamification - that is, integrating the achievement of desired outcomes with elements of games, such as challenges, rules, point scoring and fun.
Gamification is seen widely in industries such as education and recruitment, and is now starting to become more widespread across ambitious workplaces who want to get the best out of their team.
Gamification has been proven to improve workplace performance and increase employee satisfaction, just to add a few extra reasons to get your leaderboard set up today.
There are many ways you can gamify your leaderboard further, here are a few of our suggestions:
● Use your organization's branding and style to make your leaderboard distinct and get better buy-in from your agents. ● Add a time constraint element to your leaderboard, where players can only score points within a certain timeframe or times of the weeks, to increase urgency. ● Offer ways for players to score double or triple points for certain activities. ● Offer prizes for players to compete for, or for those who reach certain score milestones.● Display your leaderboard somewhere visible and announce the players who are in the top places on a periodic basis, whether that be monthly, or weekly.
Now let’s take a look at what type of metrics you can score your team on.
Key metrics to track on a leaderboard for your real estate team
Leaderboards are flexible to your team’s performance data of interest and can be set up to rank players across a number of different areas. Here are a few metrics we often see used by real estate teams:
● Number of sales.● Average percentage of sale price above the reserve.● Number of leads generated.● Number of referrals. ● Conversion rate (of leads to sales).● So many more - you choose!
Top tip: Make sure you’re ranking your agents across metrics where they have an equal chance to succeed. Try to avoid measuring them on factors they have little control over, such as how many listings they are given each month, or using whole sales figures over standardized percentages to compare them. The last thing you want is an unfair game!
How to create a real estate leaderboard
We promised it’s going to be easy, now let’s explain how.
To prepare for setting up your own real estate leaderboard, follow these four quick steps:
● Create a new spreadsheet (we recommend Google Sheets).● Choose the performance metric(s) you want to measure and list them in the columns of your spreadsheet. ● List the players (those would be your agents) that you want to be included on the leaderboard in the rows of the spreadsheet.● Input the scores of each player for each of your listed performance metrics.
Now you need a way to translate your performance data into a leaderboard. We recommend using leaderboard maker software. With Leaderboarded’s Google Sheet add-on, you can easily transform your spreadsheet into a stunningly visualized scoreboard with no extra manual work.
To get you started, we’ve created a leaderboard template on Google Sheets. With this template, you can complete the four steps we’ve listed above, no sweat.
Once you’ve made a copy of our template, all you have to do is delete the columns with metrics you don’t want to include, add the ones you do, then input the names of your players and their corresponding scores.
Then, download the free Leaderboarded add-on on the Google App Marketplace. Once installed, you can find the instructions on how to get your leaderboard set up in under 5 minutes.
Leaderboards are your key to seeing your real estate agents perform at their best
Leaderboards offer an easy, flexible way to motivate performance and increase real estate sales. To recap, here are the key reasons why you should consider using one for your team:
● They don’t take long to set up and are a tool which will have daily relevance to your agents.● They visualize performance data that might otherwise be fear-inducing for your team in a gamified way that motivates players to aim for the top spot.● They can be customized to your business, including branding and style, to feel authentic to your team and get better buy-in.● They allow both you and your agents to see how they’re performing at any time - forget performance data reports that only come out once a month, at best!● They foster healthy team competition, which is proven to be beneficial to performance.● They are fun!