Randy Reis started his real estate agent career after 30 years working on Wall Street.
His New York City real estate team now includes 16 agents. Randy was the first agent in NY to join eXp Realty.
He also has a revenue share team of nearly 1000 agents in 46 states and six countries.
Transcript:
Chris Bounds 00:02
I had the pleasure of being with you on a panel and really enjoyed the conversation we had. You’re a successful team leader. How did you go from an individual agent to team leader? What was the reason for that and how did that how did that look for you?
Randy Reis 00:20
Sure. So you know, it’s a very interesting story. It actually started back, I worked for another company, one of the largest ones in the industry. On my orientation day there, I sat down and I was a late add to the orientation class to test out a clipboard with everyone’s name on it and it said, David Reese and I said you got my name wrong. I’m Randy Reis not David Reese.
The guy sitting next to me, elbowed me. And he said, “I’m David Reese.” So I sat next to this guy with the same last name, same spelling, which is a relatively uncommon way of spelling it. And we talked a little bit after and my background was on Wall Street, but he was a cardiologist who had performed open heart surgeries. And then, he went to the corporate side of healthcare and then he wanted to help doctors navigate out of what was no longer a winning business model. Right.
The guy that hung a shingle up on Central Park West of Fifth Avenue, was no longer making the dollars that he used to see because of Medicaid, payout rates and insurance costs that had gone through the roof. So about a year later, we decided to partner up. We focused on both residential and commercial him forming more of the commercial side. We did a couple of assisted living complexes and a lot with doing some business here in New York City, residentially.
But that was the beginning of octane, it was more a matter of this guy was probably the smartest human being that I’ve ever met and he’s here in eXp. Now, we’re no longer partners. But we are great friends. And if you ever get a chance to speak with him, he can speak at a level that most real estate agents cannot. He is an Magna Cum Laude from an Ivy League school. And he can present from a thousand people. But once we came over to eXp Realty, I realized that I wanted my team to grow. Right.
eXp facilitates that and basically lays a groundwork that is very fertile. So the opportunity to grow a team and the benefits of growing a team that are so significant. We were very early on here in New York City. I’m actually agent number one in New York City. About a year and a half to get opened. So I really believed in the eXp story to such a degree that I gave up my business in 2018 to be here and try and help us this gift is open. In 2017, was the best year that we had ever had in real estate.
So it really was a leap of faith. We didn’t know when we would be open, but I knew that I was going to do everything I could to try and get us open as quickly as possible. Took about 14 months, we opened in July of 2019. And then we were hit with New York City how to slow down immediately, slowest fall and winter in many years. In 2020 start up, we started to get busy and then COVID hit. So we had the New York City’s had a really rough go of it. We were hit harder by the COVID.
Decline than just about anywhere else, all the people were leaving the cities and migrating. And that’s what caused all the great business that’s happening around the country. But no, we started to hold our own back in December, business started to grow. We started to really grow our team this year.
We have four agents coming into 2021. And now we’re at 16. So we’ve added significantly to that number. A big part of the impetus of my growth was bringing in someone to manage my team. I hired someone who had been the head of production at a very large company here in the city to come in and manage my team because I am not a hands on mentoring kind of guy.
I’m more of a top down overseeing the process. The visionary versus operator exit today ago. You hit the nail on the head. I can see you’ve read rocket fuel. Right.
Chris Bounds 04:22
Yeah. I’m the same way. I’m more of a visionary that the operations and I’m also an introvert which makes operations and management a little bit more challenging for me. It sounds like you might have some of those traits too.
Randy Reis 04:39
Yes. Yeah. I’m great at getting projects started but I get frustrated and I don’t want to finish them. So I need someone who’s going to implement all the things that need to be done.
Chris Bounds 04:49
Awesome. So it sounds like that alone. But that was a huge part of the success of the development and really the main success and driver in the growth of your team. Right. Is bringing on that operations role.
Randy Reis 05:02
Yes. Well, he’s allowed me to be able to focus more on the attraction efforts of growing my team. Right. I believe that recruiting cures all the worries. The failings that may occur and running in a team because when you bring in X number of agents, some of them are going to be able to simulate the work ethic that’s necessary to make the calls, get on the phone 10 to 20 times a day with new people.
And some are just not. I mean, you can try and affect people’s behavior by through self discovery process. But that doesn’t always work with anyone. The more that they realize that there are people waiting to join, waiting to come on board and replace them if they’re not willing to do that. The more that seems to change their own behavior to the point where they become more effective at what they’re doing.
Chris Bounds 05:51
Yeah, I remember reading Barbara Corkins blog and that was her strategy. There was never an empty seat and there was always someone ready to replace a seat. And she made that well known. And of course, we kind of know how her story has developed. So for agents who are looking to go from individual agent to a team leader, any advice on how to make that transition and how they should go about finding the first couple of team members that are really going to start that foundation?
Randy Reis 06:24
Sure. I believe I’m going to take a little step back. I believe that every new agent should join a team. Right. Because I think that the learning curve gets shortened so much by being on a team and I didn’t join a team when I first came to real estate. I had a sizable database of people from Wall Street.
A team leader approached me and asked me to join this team. But he wanted me to split 50/50 on not just the deals that he provided, but on the ones that I brought to the table as well. I said I’ve known these people for 30 years. It didn’t sit right with me to be able to give up half of the dollars that I saw potentially coming in from those potential leads. But the fact of the matter is the amount of business I did in the first two years was inconsequential to some degree because we were in the middle of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.
But truthfully, I went on my own and I had to recreate the wheel for everything that I had to learn. And if I had gone on his team for a year and just learned the process of not just real estate, but building a team, then now everything would have been so much smoother and it would have the timeline would have shrank significantly. Yeah. The first thing, get on a team and understand what’s going on. Think about the back end. If you want to grow a team also, think about what and why the team leader is doing the things that he’s doing as opposed to just creating more sales. Right.
Chris Bounds 07:50
Yeah. It’s like building a house. It’s not a final 20 seconds. It’s like building a house. You can go out and do it yourself or maybe you should work on a construction crew to figure out how to build the house. I totally agree. Especially, for me personally on the investing side. I had It going out and actually either joined a mastermind early on or partnered with or worked with a local real estate investor that was just crushing it.
The timeline would have been much shorter. So ultimately, you pay for it and your experience or learning from other people’s experience and your suggestion. I agree with it. Go with other people’s experience. Shorten that timeline and after a year or two years or whatever, go off on your own and you’ll be able to take that experience and just run with it.