There’s a reason the “this could’ve been an email” meme continues its momentum. No matter how much you encourage your agents to take part, not all meetings are fondly remembered.
But in the game of real estate, team meetings are essential. They keep agents accountable, reinforce your team culture, and underline the goals and expectations required for individual and team-level success.
If you’re following the same ol’ agenda, it might be time for a refresh. So how can you jazz up your real estate team meetings and get your agents inspired?
These ideas will help you revive your team meetings and increase agent motivation.
Real estate team meeting agenda ideas
- Inspire your team with music
- Break the ice with informal team networking
- Hold a weekly prospecting contest
- Offer agent-led tech masterclasses
- Ask your team for their feedback
- Spotlight top-performers in an agent panel
- Bring in a guest speaker (live or via video!)
- Add a ‘news segment’
- Try a real estate roundtable
- Use a Level10 (L10) framework
- Take your team building outside
- Roleplay real scenarios
12 ideas for your next real estate team meeting
Whether you’re hosting morning kickoffs or weekly masterclasses, your goal is to foster focus and energy in your real estate team meetings.
Capitalize on the time you have in front of your agents with a team meeting agenda that includes plenty of space for goal-tracking, peer-to-peer connection, and good old-fashioned fun.
1. Inspire your team with music 🎵
Founder and CEO of St. Louis-based RedKey Realty Leaders, Jill Butler, keeps gratitude (and rhythm!) high on her team’s agenda.
“Gratitude is an important way to increase resiliency — not just a soft skill. They say you can't be stressed and in gratitude at the same time! Now more than ever, focusing on what is good, what's working is more important.”
No matter what market shifts may come, Jill makes sure she takes time to publicly acknowledge her team’s accomplishments and celebrate with a few of her favorite tunes.
“We start each meeting playing the song Tell Me Something Good by Chaka Khan and agents share good news professionally or personally so we can celebrate with them.” After setting the right tone with a little help from the Queen of Funk, Jill pivots the agenda to encourage peer-to-peer recognition. Here too, she gets a hand from another musical icon.
“At the end of each meeting we play Who Do You Love by George Thorogood and we ‘bucket fill’ — it's a time for you to give a shout out to someone who helped you or who goes the extra mile. Start and end with a dose of gratitude and it lifts the energy of the meeting.”
"Gratitude is an important way to increase resiliency — not just a soft skill.”
2. Break the ice with informal team networking
Two truths and a lie? How about five more minutes and goodbye?
No matter your team’s headcount, you want to nurture a culture where each and every individual is invested in your shared success. But cringe-inducing icebreakers aren’t the way to do it.
To help build camaraderie, experts like Ryan O’Neill, Broker and Founder of The Minnesota Real Estate Team, recommend low-pressure team intros that give way to organic conversations and relationship building.
“I always ask agents to find someone in the room they don’t know and introduce themselves and chat for a few minutes. It’s a nice way to build community and get to know the other agents on the team.”
3. Hold a weekly prospecting contest
Prospecting is a notoriously challenging part of the sales process but in real estate, you simply can’t function without it.
One way to sweeten the pill is to use your team meeting agenda to reframe your agents’ mindset through a little healthy competition.
Encourage agents to amplify their prospecting numbers with a weekly contest, logging their daily power tasks in your company’s lead management system. From there, you can use your team’s performance data to reward the agent with the most lead activity each week, and offer a secondary prize to the agent showing the most growth.
For example, when agents at the Orlando-based Funk Collection team take key actions like making a gratitude call, securing stellar online reviews or lending a hand to a fellow team member, they’re rewarded with points. The winner gets some serious prizes, including (among other awesome rewards), a one-week cruise for two.
Talk about a fun way to heat up the competition!
“That’s the biggest thing with this business,” explains Co-founder Jeffrey Funk. “If you’re not having fun, take a good look and figure out how you will because the customer will know.”
⚡Pro Tip: Rotate the prize options to heighten the excitement factor. Gift cards to local restaurants, entertainment spots, or other fun agent gifts are always a welcome surprise!
4. Offer agent-led tech masterclasses
Every real estate tech stack will vary.
Whether you’re providing your team with a real estate CRM and other resources, or encouraging agents to find their own real estate power tools — each member of your team will have a unique set of tech knowledge they can share with the rest of the group.
Consider adding a “Tools and tips power hour” to your monthly meeting lineup or even a brief 15-min. workflow demo to your existing team meeting agenda.
During this time, you can encourage agents to share their latest productivity hacks, workflows, and prospecting power moves to help the rest of the team save time and increase results.
Ask agents to communicate the benefits of the tool or tactic by sharing the numbers around the results they’ve gotten, plus specific examples of how they use it in their day-to-day workflows.
⚡Pro Tip: Need inspiration? Check out Real Estate Team OS to learn how top-performing teams put Follow Up Boss to work for increased sales and commissions.
5. Ask your team for their feedback
It’s one thing to share your feedback with your team, but leaders who return the favor by asking the team for their opinions are often those with the strongest cultures and commissions.
According to Kathleen Black, founder of Kathleen Black Coaching & Consulting Inc., “Team is about synergy. You can’t get feedback, you can’t grow.”
But be warned. The power of this tip lies in your ability to — you guessed it — follow up.
Start by establishing a feedback cadence you can stick to. For example, you could send your team survey every week, month, quarter or year depending on how it fits with the rest of your coaching strategy. With a free tool like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or Jotform, it’s easy to gather the feedback you need.
Here are some questions you can add to your agenda to help elicit the right feedback from your team:
- What do you think is going well with the business?
- What do you think I could do better?
- Where do you think I bring the most value to the business?
- Where do you think I'm costing the business?
Once you’ve decided how often to send your survey, be sure to designate a set time to review the feedback and create space in the meeting agenda to directly address your team’s ideas and suggestions and make it clear that you’re paying attention.
“Team is about synergy. You can’t get feedback, you can’t grow.”
6. Spotlight top-performers in an agent panel
A tried-and-true team meeting tip, shining a spotlight on your top-performing team members is a great way to inspire the group.
“In this current market, we need to provide mindset, skillset and activities to help our agents reach their goals,” explains Jill of RedKey Realty Leaders.
By assembling a panel of expert agents with aspirational track records, team leaders like Jill are elevating the run-of-the-mill meeting agenda and bringing the dream to life for every agent on the team.
“We often feature agent panels where agents share what they are doing to succeed in the current market. It matters who says it, so it is motivational to hear from fellow agents about the activities and habits they are doing to increase their business.”
7. Bring in a guest speaker (live or via video!)
A great way to sidestep the task of constantly having to update your team meeting agenda is to bring in a little help from your friends.
Reach out to your favorite real estate coaches, lenders, landscapers, contractors, and other partners, and ask if they can pop in for a quick presentation or expert Q&A with your team.
And if they’re too busy? No problem. Let them participate at their own convenience by asking them to shoot a quick two- to five-minute video sharing their best tips at a time that works for them.
If you’re not sure where to start, take a look at Arizona-based Desert Dream Realty's preferred list of vendors for speaker category ideas and list organization.
Or if you really want to up the ante, try booking a celebrity cameo and surprise your team with inspirational insights or digital high-fives from their favorite actors, athletes, or superstars.
8. Add a ‘news segment’
Market trends change fast. To help your agents stay in the know, add a ‘real estate news segment’ to your next team meeting agenda.
Carve out a five- to 15-minute portion of your meeting to break down the top three trending headlines in your local area or the industry at large — bonus points if each topic comes with a practical insight or real estate script agents can use in their daily conversations.
To find buzzworthy topics, go straight to trusted sources like The National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), Inman.com, etc. Or if you want to dig deeper, check out your real estate podcast feed or local Facebook groups to see which topics are getting the most interest and engagement.
9. Try a real estate roundtable
You may have any number of new agents and seasoned veterans on your real estate team roster. If that’s the case, setting aside time for a little peer problem-solving via a real estate roundtable can be a great way to engage the whole team.
As a part of his agent onboarding system, Steven Rovithis, Broker and CEO of ROVI Homes, offers his 140 plus agents a variety of meeting options, including a 6:30 A.M. call designed to address common stumbling blocks agents encounter.
“Agents need about a hundred transactions to really understand this business,” Steven explains. “If you’re an agent doing 10-12 transactions a year, you can only learn so much. So our goal is to get a hundred transactions’ worth of knowledge into your head and expose you to all the hurdles as fast as possible. Real estate roundtable calls will absolutely do it.”
"Our goal is to get a hundred transactions’ worth of knowledge into your head and expose you to all the hurdles as fast as possible.”
10. Use a Level10 (L10) framework
If you follow the EOS framework, you already know the Level 10 Meeting™ offers a fun and efficient alternative to the classic time-waster.
The 90-minute meeting agenda covers the team’s latest progress on both long- and short-term goals, including time for sharing updates and issues that might be holding agents back.
Here's how the issue-solving IDS process works in an L10 meeting:
- Identify the three most important issues, determine what’s causing the problem, and prioritize each.
- Discuss possible solutions and develop an action plan.
- Solve by creating a to-do list from the action plan and assign responsibilities to execute the plan.
Team members are encouraged to grade each meeting to make sure they stay as productive as possible. 🏆
11. Take your team building outside
Combine work and play by setting your team meetings in new locations each time.
Team building at a restaurant, bowling alley, winery, or any other fun local hangout instantly gives your team members something to look forward to while keeping in tune with their local community. And by breaking them out of the traditional office setting, you encourage deeper connection and team building with every meeting.
For inspiration, checkout Oahu-based Kawaguchi Group’s bi-weekly team lunch meeting. Team leader Tony Kawaguchi uses the relaxed setting to unwind, connect, and get agents inspired to hit the next level. Here’s how he describes them:
“This is our bi-weekly lunch meeting, where we talk about the market, our new listings and closings, and everything real estate! The best part of our team meetings is just being with such great people!”
12. Roleplay real scenarios
Practicing your scripts and client conversations is key to elevating your conversions, but acting out a client/agent interaction in front of peers can feel, well… silly.
Overcome the awkwardness by roleplaying authentic scenarios in smaller groups.
Jenny Wemert, Team Leader at Orlando-based Wemert Group Realty, thoughtfully creates scenarios with buyer and seller needs in mind — including specific property information and concerns. She then splits her agents into two teams of 10 and gives them 25 minutes to work through their scenarios.
Wemert’s agents recently tackled two distinct situations — an FHA buyer purchasing an older home with known roof issues and a well-qualified conventional buyer with a home to sell contingency.
“It was a great exercise because they learned from each other in the groups and they were able to see how the other group approached the scenario as well. It was a fun way to review contract strategies without teaching it from the front of the room,” Jenny explains.
Elevate your team meetings and increase your sales
Whatever way you choose to go about it, don’t be afraid to switch up your real estate meeting format or structure. If you implement a new idea and it doesn't deliver results, scrap it and move to the next one.
Better meetings inspire better teams and better results. You owe it to yourself and your agents to make the experience better for everyone.
And if you need help tracking your team’s performance, Follow Up Boss’s customizable reporting features have you covered. You can track leading indicators like response rate, speed to lead across text, phone and email, and appointments by agent or source. Make your next meeting more productive with a 14-day free trial of Follow Up Boss.