January 29, 2025Kara Hinshaw, a real estate whiz and owner of Key Associates Signature Realty, chats with Nick about going from running a small-town brokerage in Santa Claus, Indiana, to heading a booming business with 65 agents closing 550 deals a year. She spills the beans on her unique “teamerage” model, her awesome systems, and how her corporate background in global procurement helped her scale her business. They also talk recruiting strategies, training new agents, and why adaptability and leadership are the keys to her success.
Chapters:
- 00:00:00 – Failing Forward: Lessons in Growth
- 00:00:28 – Why Teamerage Is the Future
- 00:01:00 – From Real Estate Kid to Visionary Leader
- 00:01:46 – Walking Away, Coming Back Stronger
- 00:03:14 – Solo Brokerage to Scalable Machine
- 00:05:41 – When Staying Small Wasn’t Enough
- 00:09:43 – Redefining Real Estate with Teamerage
- 00:13:10 – Systems That Do the Heavy Lifting
- 00:17:25 – Why Video Isn’t Optional Anymore
- 00:21:39 – Turning Rookies Into Rockstars
- 00:22:49 – The Messy Middle Nobody Talks About
- 00:23:45 – Scaling Smart with Virtual Assistants
- 00:25:19 – Project Management That Actually Works
- 00:29:21 – Recruiting Without the Hard Sell
- 00:32:37 – Keeping Your Best Agents Happy
- 00:35:27 – Cracking the Code to Leads and Clients
- 00:41:57 – Learning, Adapting, and Winning
- 00:42:41 – Closing Thoughts, Opening New Doors
Links and Resources:
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Episode breakdown: building a teamerage from a town of 2,000
Kara Hinshaw owns Key Associates Signature Realty, based in Santa Claus, Indiana, a town of about 2,000 people. She ran what she calls almost a solo brokerage for 15 years, then decided to grow. Today the company has 65 agents across four offices and closes around 550 transactions a year. She talks with Nick McLean about the “teamerage” model, the year she spent on systems before recruiting, and the virtual office that keeps 12 VAs productive.
Give every agent the same support, then let them grow out of it
Kara first tried a traditional team setup inside her six-agent brokerage, with one buyer’s agent dedicated to her. It didn’t feel fair to the other five. So she chose to grow as a brokerage with a team environment, where everyone gets an equal share of the support, whether that’s leads, transaction coordinators or marketing.
She built the support list by asking what she had needed in her own 15 years of selling. New agents lean on all of it. As they become productive, they can operate more like a team within the brokerage and pick what they still want. That range is what she means by teamerage.
Spend a year on systems before you recruit
Kara knew how to sell. What she didn’t have was systems, and some of her agents would be two hours apart. Before she tried to grow, she spent a full year on the basics: how agents get paid, HR, digital signatures, moving files off paper, onboarding, marketing support, and the workflow for transaction and listing coordinators.
Nick added that paying agents on time and accurately is the first system to own, even on a cloud brokerage. Agents look to the team leader when something goes wrong. Kara made the same point about training: the brokerage may offer its own, but your CRM, scripts and role play are how your company does business.
I’ve learned a lot about staffing and how important staffing is around you when you are starting to grow.
Kara Hinshaw
Run VAs from a daily virtual war room
Key Associates has more VAs than U.S.-based staff. Twelve VAs now handle marketing, transaction and listing coordination, ISA work, recruiting support and the database. It didn’t work at first. The company started the VA route about three years ago and had to start over three times before it clicked around year two. Suneet Agarwal’s framework for real estate team structure and hiring order covers the same roles she staffed.
Two things fixed it. First, every workflow lives in ClickUp, from auditing and paying to marketing, TC and listing tasks, after Trello failed as they grew. Second, instead of monitoring software, each department sits in a daily Google Meet “war room.” Marketing has one, and listing and transaction coordinators share another. U.S. staff sit in too, and any agent can click in and get an answer on the spot. Kara and her director of ops also hold a biweekly call with all the VAs.
You got to know what you want them to do. There has to be a system around them, accountability around them.
Kara Hinshaw
Make marketing automatic and let it do the recruiting
Marketing is the core of the company and its biggest staff investment. Kara has been on video for years and has a dedicated social media person. Agents get custom graphics and video support, and just-sold marketing is generated automatically from the transaction in ClickUp, so agents never have to request it. Truly custom work is available, but agents pay for it.
That visibility drives recruiting. Kara estimates 65 agents is about six and a half percent of a market of roughly 1,000 agents. To break into bigger towns, she renamed the company from Key Associates of Santa Claus to Signature Realty, changed the logos and website, and started selling in markets she had no desire to sell in, just to be seen. About half of her growth has been new licensees, recruited with dedicated systems, and half experienced agents who came over after watching the company.
I had to start selling in a market that I didn’t have any desire to go sell. And, just to be seen, I guess is what happened.
Kara Hinshaw
Use leads to train agents, not to feed them
Kara calls leads her biggest area to improve. Agents opt in, and the goal was never to feed them forever. Leads are there to get new agents trained and comfortable enough to fly on their own. Looking back, she says weak management and accountability around leads cost her money, but Nick pointed out the long-term return shows up when those agents start generating business themselves.
The rules are tightening. Existing agents are grandfathered, but leads now go to people who need them to grow. Except for Zillow, leads drop into a shared pond, where aggressive new agents call away, and one ISA has moved into a client care role watching the database. Retention has held up. Kara says the company has lost no more than 15 people in five years.
Key takeaways for team leaders
- Build your support menu from what you needed as an agent, and offer it equally so new agents can lean on it and producers can step back from it.
- Put pay, onboarding, files, marketing and TC workflows into systems before you recruit. Kara spent a full year on this.
- Before hiring VAs, define exactly what they’ll do and put the work in one project system like ClickUp.
- Replace monitoring software with a daily department Google Meet that staff and agents can drop into.
- Treat leads as a training tool with an exit plan, and route them to the agents who still need them.
- If you’re expanding beyond a small town, you may need to sell in the new market yourself so agents there know who you are.
