I want to thank all of our agents who participated in our agent survey in August. This was extremely helpful as we look at various programs and avenues for expansion that will best serve you! We have worked hard to instill a culture of honesty and integrity with all of our agents. I believe that includes being transparent as a company. Therefore, this month we want to share with all of you the results of the survey.
However, I also recognize that a full report of the survey results may be a little boring and tedious. Therefore, I’ve uploaded into MojoDocs a full report that you can read here: Full Survey Report
I definitely encourage everyone to read it as it will give you some insight into where we are and where we can go. But for this blog, I want to hit the highlights.
What we are most proud of
We have a lot to be proud of as a brokerage and that is evident in the survey results. We are very proud of our agent/investors overall impression with StepStone where 95.8% of our investor/agents answered that their overall impression was Excellent or Good. Similarly, they felt their transition into StepStone was also Excellent or Good 95.8% of the time.
As a testament to the leadership team we have put together, myself and Angie, but to a larger extent, Cameron, our agents rated our responsiveness extremely high with Very Responsive receiving 88.7%!
The Masterminds and Sheepinars are also a source of pride and the survey results reflect that. Among those who have attended the Mastermind, 55.1% find it extremely helpful and 42.9% find it somewhat helpful. However, almost a third of our agent/investors have never attended a mastermind.
Similar results emerged for the Sheepinars with 57.8% of those have attended saying they are extremely helpful and 40% saying they are somewhat helpful. But again, about a third of our agents have never attended or watched a Sheepinar.
Where we can improve
While we got high ratings on overall impression and the transition into StepStone, There was a 2-1 split between Excellent and Good in each of those. We strive to be Excellent, so we definitely want to improve both of these numbers.
The same is true for both the MasterMinds and the Sheepinars. Both were about evenly split between extremely helpful and somewhat helpful. There were some great suggestions we have already started to implement with the Masterminds. Now you will see monthly market updates as well as a monthly deal anatomy to give a bit more structure and more ability to foster good discussions.
The strongest suggestion about the Sheepinars is the organization of the existing recordings in a manner that’s easier to find the topics you want to watch. We will look to improve the organization of the Sheepinars.
Agent/Investors of StepStone would also like to see more training. Born out of this is our new mentoring program for new agents and those looking for more partnership opportunities. But we are also looking for more and better ways to provide training without interfering with our highest-rated core value, Freedom (more on this later).
What Surprised Us
We have always believed, and still believe, that our community of investor/agents is our strongest feature. And we believed that that would be the #1 favorite aspect of StepStone among our investor/agents. We were surprised to find that the #1 favorite aspect was actually Freedom. When we asked you to rank five different aspects, Freedom emerged on top followed by Support, Community, Fee Structure and Education.
We are proud of our three core values… Freedom, Support and Community, and it seems our investor/agents concur with those three aspects coming up as the top three aspects of StepStone. But allowing you to practice real estate YOUR way without quotas or interference from us is important to you, therefore it will be important to us.
That is not to say Support and Community were not also important to you. In fact, The Community was the #1 mentioned aspect when the question was left open-ended. When we asked “What is your favorite aspect of being a StepStone Agent, Community was mentioned more times than any other answer.
Where Do We Go From Here?
If we could help our agent/investors out the most, it would be in helping them get leads. We don’t shy away from or hide the fact that we have, so far, been unsuccessful in our efforts to do just that. The co-ops we attempted wouldn’t hold together and everyone still struggles at getting leads… by far the most common answers to questions about your activity. When asked to rank the reasons you don’t do more investing, lack of leads was ranked #1 or #2 by 78.6% of our agent/investors. The next highest ranked answer, lack of funds, trailed it significantly at only 49.3%.
In 2017, we need to explore new and more options to helping our agents beat the competition and get more leads. Never hesitate to speak up, come to us with ideas and/or suggestions as to how we can take advantage of our size, our strong community and our smart talented agent/investors to corner the market and get more leads.
When asked to give suggestions in open-ended questions, more training was the most requested feature of StepStone. We want to do more to provide good quality training to everyone. We also want to do that in a way that doesn’t necessitate changes in our fee structure or interfere with the Freedom our agent/investors love. The mentorship/ambassador program is one step in that direction.
The idea of an annual conference, where we can have live training sessions and have more interaction with our agent/investors received significant support with 85.9% stating they would be extremely or somewhat likely to attend. We are in early discussions about putting on this event and would like more feedback from you on it.
Conclusion
Thank you again for your participation and your feedback. I hope you see that we are taking it all to heart and want to make StepStone even better for you. What we define as better is our agent/investors being more successful in their own businesses. We have a lot to be proud of and we are honored that you rated us highly, but let us know we still have plenty of room for improvement. It is our task to take this feedback and improve, expand and add to what we are doing so that you can be a more successful investor and a more successful agent!
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