December 14, 2023In this episode, co-founders of Reside Platform Nick McLean and Preston Guyton sit down with Tara Limbird, founder of Limbird Real Estate Group, Arkansas’s #1 team for 10 years. Tara shares her journey, discussing her unique prospecting and marketing strategies that have led to over 1,000 team applicant recruits annually. The trio explores Tara’s client retention methods, emphasizing the shift from transactions to cultivating “Forever Clients.” Tara also provides insights into her ventures in property management and a title company, offering valuable advice for those expanding in the real estate industry. The episode is a concise yet impactful guide filled with Tara’s insights, winning strategies, and mindset shifts for real estate success.
VIDEO CONTENTS:
00:00 – Introduction
01:14 – Tara’s Background, Her Team , and How She Recruits and Onboards
13:19 – Marketing v. Prospecting Based Business
19:43 – Tara’s Top 3 Marketing Sources and Client Events
30:36 – Creating A “Forever Client”
34:30 – How Tara Has Expanded into Other Businesses
Episode breakdown: how Tara Limbird keeps a team on top in Arkansas
Tara Limbird and her husband started their team in Northwest Arkansas in 2010, when there was only one other team in the area. Nick McLean introduced her as the leader of the number one team in Arkansas for the last 10 years. She sat down with Nick and Preston Guyton to explain how the team recruits, trains, markets and keeps its clients, and how it has added other businesses along the way.
Let your brand do the recruiting
Because the team markets and brands itself heavily, it receives a couple thousand applications every year. Most come through job sites like Indeed, and many applicants are new to the business or haven’t taken the licensing exam yet. Some of the team’s agents are former buyers and sellers. Even with that volume, the team usually nets about three to six new people a year.
Tara got into real estate through a newspaper ad for a new construction home specialist in 2004, not an ad asking people to become agents. One of the hosts suggested team leaders try the same approach and advertise specialty roles to bring people into the industry. Tara said she might start doing that.
Treat onboarding as work that’s never finished
When the team was small, Tara trained every new agent herself, one on one. As it grew, her time ran short, so the team gave one person the primary job of training, along with some recruiting. The onboarding class runs about three weeks, half a day at a time, and focuses on getting people on the phone, with small tests along the way.
She doesn’t expect the class to ever be done. Each group learns at a different speed and brings different experience, so the training keeps changing.
I think the problem is as team leaders we want to check the box and move on to something else.
Tara Limbird
Use marketing for the brand and prospecting for the pipeline
Marketing is Tara’s strength, and it brings a lot of business to the team. She also saw that it can’t be counted on day to day, since no one knows how many sellers will call on a given morning. So the team shifted toward a prospecting-based business, where agents know how many people they need to talk to and how many appointments they need to set. She can’t control who calls, but she can control how many calls the team makes.
Her marketing rule is consistency. The team has been on radio since about 2013, and its logo and look match everywhere it shows up. When the team went independent and needed new signs, she narrowed the designs to three, printed all three, and hammered each one into her own front yard to see which she could read from the car. She also makes her marketing team check every piece on a phone, because that’s where clients see it.
Everything on our team doesn’t happen by accident.
Tara Limbird
Give past clients a reason to hear from you
Tara’s top sources today include past clients and sphere, Google pay-per-click and reviews, and social media. The team has close to a thousand reviews and asks every client before closing how they heard about the team. For past clients, it runs a Facebook group with promotions and sends a small coffee gift card on birthdays.
Client events do double duty. Agents often don’t know what to say when they call past clients, and an event gives them four or five different touches: the invitation, the reminder, the event itself and the follow-up. The team has run holiday photo sessions with a photographer, which cost little and give clients a card to share. She promotes the event before, during and after, with photos, review requests and referral asks.
As Realtors we just think, oh, they’re going to remember me forever, but they don’t unless you stay in front of them forever.
Tara Limbird
Add other businesses one at a time
The team added a property management company around 2015 or 2016 with an agent who came from the rental side. It now manages almost 500 doors and runs independently of the sales team. A title company followed around 2018, starting with one hired closer before taking on the underwriting. The team also does 10 to 15 flips and wholesale deals a year, often partnering with the agent who brings in the property.
Her advice is to first get the real estate part down and keep a close eye on what pays the bills. Then pick one thing at a time, get the processes and people in place, and let it struggle before adding the next.
Key takeaways for team leaders
- Strong branding brings recruits as well as clients. Consider advertising specific roles, not just “become an agent.”
- Hand training to one dedicated person once you can’t do it yourself, and keep revising the class.
- Build a prospecting rhythm you control instead of relying on inbound calls.
- Test your signs, ads and posts the way a client sees them, including on a phone.
- Use client events to give agents several reasons to call past clients.
- Master the core business before adding property management, title or investing, and add one at a time.
