September 18, 2023Team leader Tim Moldenhauer discusses his team’s strategic partnership with the Reside Platform. He shares insights on the platform’s features, advantages, and how it will turbocharge growth. Learn how Reside’s tools and network will enhance operations, customer service, and drive increased home sales for the Moldenhauer Group in Northwest Arkansas.
VIDEO CONTENTS:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:52 – Tim’s Background & His Team
- 05:52 – The Learning & Coaching Mindset
- 10:15 – Prioritizing Agent Group
- 15:06 – Moldenhauer Group & RESIDE
- 17:55 – Agent Advice & Generating Leads
Episode breakdown: how a 40-year family team keeps its agents learning
Tim Moldenhauer co-owns The Moldenhauer Group in Northwest Arkansas with his mother, Margie, who has been in real estate for 40 years. Tim is in his 20th year. In this short conversation with Reside co-founder Nick McLean, recorded a few weeks after the team joined Reside, Tim explains how coaching shaped his career, how the team trains its 15 agents, and why he thinks agents grow faster on a team.
Get a coach early instead of waiting for experience
Tim grew up in the business. He delivered printed MLS books to offices as a teenager, and he remembers his mother doing 100 deals a year with one assistant around 1997. After a finance degree, he gave real estate one year and sold 23 homes. Margie had told him from the start that he would have a coach, and she sent him to a Mike Ferry action workshop when he was licensed.
He still waited 18 months to sign up. Tim met a group of new agents at that workshop, and in year one they all sold about 25 homes. The others joined coaching. The next year they were at about 45 while he was still around 25, so he signed up. His view now is that coaching speeds up the learning curve, and Nick’s word for it is compressing time. Too many agents are told to just keep going and it will come, then plateau after a few years.
Run a six-week onboarding and keep practicing after it
New agents at The Moldenhauer Group go through a six-week onboarding class, which Tim says the team modeled on Nick’s lead onboarding class. Once they finish, the training doesn’t stop. The team holds three meetings a week, and agents keep role-playing, practicing scripts and studying the market. Tim’s belief is that agents have to keep getting better for the job to get easier.
Tim came into the business short on confidence and nervous at every appointment. He used written affirmations and repetition to get past it. Nick, an introvert and former airline pilot, says scripts did the same for him. Both treat a script as a map that lets the agent be themselves in the conversation.
You just keep putting yourself out there, you keep practicing, practicing it. One day you look back and you’re like, whoa, I’m really good now.
Tim Moldenhauer
Give new agents the team’s experience at the listing table
When Tim started, his mother already had two full-time assistants and a buyer’s agent. Once he listed or sold a home, he handed it off, so his only job was to sell. He calls that leverage from day one. A new agent on the team can walk into a listing appointment and sell the team’s combined 60 years of experience instead of their own first year.
One of Tim’s agents did exactly that. She sold 35 homes in her first year and 52 in her second, all listings, by leaning on the team’s experience until she had her own.
Show agents what lead flow looks like on a team
Tim says no one should join a team just for leads, but leads are a real benefit. An agent who had been with the team about a year and a half told him she used to do anything she could to get more leads and now has more opportunities than she can handle. Part of that comes from visibility. The team keeps 40 or 50 signs out across its market area, and the business builds on itself.
If I moved like Miami, a city I didn’t know, I’d go join a big team. That’s the first thing I would do honestly.
Tim Moldenhauer
Nick adds that experienced agents are starting to see a team as another pillar of their business. Their referral and sphere business doesn’t go away when they join, and the team’s opportunities sit on top of it. One of his own agents has more years in the industry than he does, and he says experienced agents joining teams didn’t happen ten years ago. For more on that decision, Suneet lays out the case in real estate team vs. solo agent.
Tell newer agents to win the conversation game
Nick asks what Tim would say to an agent one or two years in, selling a handful of homes and wondering why business isn’t growing. Tim keeps it simple. Talk to people every day, bring them value and information about your market, and know what to say so you can be the person who finds the ones who are moving.
Understand you’re in the relationship building game, you’re in the conversation game, and every conversation matters.
Tim Moldenhauer
Tim joined Reside for the same reason he hired his first coach. He wants to be close to people who have done it before, and he wants his agents to get training from a wider group of leaders than his own team.
Key takeaways for team leaders
- Coaching compresses the learning curve. Tim’s peers who signed up in year two nearly doubled while he stayed flat.
- Build a structured onboarding, then keep role-play and script practice going in regular weekly meetings.
- Let new agents borrow the team’s track record at listing appointments until they build their own.
- Leverage means agents only sell. Hand transactions off to staff as soon as a listing or sale is secured.
- When you recruit experienced agents, frame the team as another pillar on top of their existing referral business.
