Managing a Franchise Real Estate Network

Meir Nachshon

Managing a Franchise network

Franchise network is a complex operation to be managed and supervised.

The complexity is caused mainly because of that each office is privately owned and operated while the master franchise office, the franchisor must receive reliable reports as per the operation of each office.

The reports are required from various reasons:

1)    The franchisor is required to report to the international company which gave him the master franchise license to his territory.

2)    The franchisor should receive its share from the deals done by the offices.  The more detailed is the level of reporting, up to a specific agent, the more secure is the franchisor that deals will not “disappear” (…) from the report.

3)    The franchisor wishes to supervise each office based on countable parameters, such as the total amount of exclusive properties. Such level of supervising is preferred to be immediate and available “on line”.’

4)    One of the most important responsibilities of the franchisor is to provide quick and reliable management knowledge to the managers/owners of its offices, including latest deals in a specific area and market trends based on trusted source of information.

5)    An information system which supports statistical analysis of the pipeline is an excellent utility to train and manage the agents. The capability to analyze enables to manage and to improve the agents’ working techniques, to increase the rate of closings=deals  and to improve the business profitability, (which of course affects the franchisor).

6)    A statistical management system provides a reliable PR to the local market, which is an important aspect in the competitive real estate brokerage market of today.

7)    In order to increase the internal competition between the offices and the agents in each office, it would be helpful to be based on an identical measurement standard, as achieved based on a similar information system. It should be possible to compare the amount of properties in the office’s inventory, exclusivity of properties, listing, sales and rents in the area, commissions from clients etc’.

8)    The franchisees must use an identical designed form of documents, such as brokerage services, exclusivity etc’.

9)    It is important to be able to measure the co-operation between the offices. In addition, the offices and agents must be able to share leads between each other.

10) It is important to use an online DB of inventory, as big and “historical” as possible. B.M.B.Y software provides such an online DB* which may work both countrywide and worldwide

11) Today’s professional real estate market is based on MLS. B.M.B.Y software provides a sophisticated built-in capability* to be connected with all the brokerage offices which uses its BMBY.expert© software – worldwide.

Training of agents and target-based work method:

Training of sales agents and the use of sales targets are highly important and should receive our focus in this article.

It is important that each office will establish its work program that will cover several continuance periods. A real work program will include numerical target which are simple to understand and to manage by the office agents and staff  and be represented in the software. From a long term experience in managing sales agents, a known tip to the sales manager is to set the sales targets to be set to 105-110% of the actual possible production.

The work program will refer to several topics:

ü  Count of phone calls  that the entire office is committed to perform to property owners and prospects.

ü  Count of field visits with prospects to show them suitable properties, including the documentation of each visit.

ü  Count of the office/office total inventory, divided into exclusive and non-exclusive properties and the ratio of getting new listings after presentations.

ü  Count of new prospects (leads) and the entire follow up treatment (which establishes an accurate pipeline).

ü  Documentation and control of commission (buyers/sellers).

BMBY.expert© software offers to the franchisor the following:

ü  Solutions to the above demands, including the option for MLS

ü  Supporting the web page of each office and up-up the entire franchise network web portal.

ü  A personal design as per the franchise standards, including automatic forms.

ü  A strong growth engine, thanks to the up-to-date web technology and professionalism.