In this Q&A with United Country Ozarks and Auction Group, learn how brokerages can leverage their agents to boost recruiting efforts.
Liz Citron
Broker Associate
John Citron
Salesperson
Riley Cain
Broker Associate
Cody Weeks
Broker Associate
United Country Ozarks Realty and Auction Group
Mountain Grove, Missouri
www.OzarksRealtyandAuction.com
Region served: Southern Missouri Ozarks
Years in real estate: 45 (combined)
Number of offices: 4
Number of agents: 32
Your firm has seen rapid growth, especially throughout the last year. What would you attribute this growth to?
We love marketing where we live. Southern Missouri/Missouri Ozarks has been a well-kept secret for a long time, but we’ve developed marketing platforms to push our area and listings to the public. This has encouraged both company and sales growth. United Country’s marketing platform, unlike other franchises, allows consumers to search for what they are looking for without forcing them to select a location. Most buyers know what they want, but don’t care where it’s located. We focus on the “what,” not the “where,” because we know they will love our where.
Please describe some of your tried-and-true recruiting techniques.
We believe our agents are our best recruiting tool. Not only are our agents good at what they do, but they are also wonderful people. We are fortunate to have great chemistry with our team, and we make sure anyone we bring in fits into our culture. When you have the confidence of your agents and peers, you grow organically.
How does your company make its agents’ jobs easier?
We’re constantly brainstorming innovative ways to not only market our area and company, but to also make it easy and effective for our agents to personalize marketing materials and sites for the growth of their own businesses. The more our agents can stand out as experts in their own niche markets, the more they are viewed as experts in the field. In conjunction with United Country, we work hard to give our agents tools to differentiate themselves while being part of a great team. We also spend a lot of time and effort on training.
What ultimately led to your decision to join United Country Real Estate?
Having previously been an independent office, we were struggling to find the time to do everything we wanted to do—and adding a franchise was what we needed to take our business to the next level. United Country markets what we sell (farms and ranches, country homes, lake and river property, recreation and hunting land, homes in town and commercial real estate), and they do it very well. We’ve been with United Country since 2010 and have been a Top 10 office nationally out of over 500 offices for the last three years.
What is one of the challenges your market faces, and what are you doing to overcome it?
We’re a real estate company based in a rural area, as most United Country franchisees are, which means that there’s only so much real estate to be sold. While we cover a wide area, the fact that it isn’t densely populated is yet another reason why people want to move here. United Country’s marketing coupled with our regional footprint has helped us combat this challenge by making the most of the real estate available in our market. One thing that would broaden our market and area growth is an increase in coverage of high-speed internet.
What’s on the horizon for United Country Ozarks Realty and Auction Group?
In addition to growing by adding agents in strategic locations and increasing our marketshare, we plan to continue doing what got us here: being good to our agents and other real estate companies and refining our marketing.
For more information, please visit www.unitedcountry.com.
Paige Tepping is RISMedia’s managing editor. Email her your real estate news ideas to paige@rismedia.com.
