Repackaged from Inman News
Marlene Baugh has been a real estate agent in Virginia for nearly 40 years. In that time, she has served families across multiple generations, built deep and lasting relationships with her clients, and established a successful, trusted business with a team that includes her spouse, her sister, and her niece.
“It’s not just a job for me. It’s very personal,” she said. “This is my family. My clients are my family, and I could never just walk away from all that.”
Like Marlene, many veteran agents don’t want to see all their hard work vanish into the ether the day they hang up their license. But 31% of agents have no plan for retirement. They haven’t thought through what’s next for their business.
“We’re terrible about that as an industry,” said Richard “Coach” Fino, Director of Agent Success at Long & Foster. “So many senior agents have absolutely no exit strategy.”
Meanwhile, emerging agents face the daunting task of breaking into a highly competitive landscape. And even more established agents, with five or ten years’ experience, want effective ways to expand their team and their reach.
So one group is looking to move on. Another is looking to move up. What if they could help each other?
They can. The term for this is succession planning. It’s a purposeful method of either selling or acquiring an existing real estate business. As Fino noted, “the insurance industry has a program, and so does law. But nobody had put together an actual program or a platform to do that for real estate — until now.”
Want to learn more about the program that’s designed just for agents to buy or sell a book of business? Read the full article on Inman News.