The Boutique Broker’s Guide to Delighting Agents and Winning Star Talent

Buttoned up tight: Compliance and supervision

At the end of the day, real estate transactions are legally binding agreements involving the transfer of tens of thousands of dollars (and more likely hundreds of thousands of dollars), and for a lot of brokers who want to compete for the top agent talent in their market, providing something more than access to basic errors and omissions insurance is one way to stand above the crowd.

Greg Fischer, CTO at West + Main Homes, notes that the compliance team at the brokerage has created separate checklists for buyers, plus pre-listing and post-listing items to tackle. “Agents have a template or a roadmap or milestone for what they should be shooting for and what the components of an end-to-end transaction are.”

The brokerage is also able to navigate changes in the market with the help of the compliance team. When the pandemic emerged in 2020, the team put together a coronavirus addendum that would help agents pause transactions where buyers or sellers had contracted the virus.

“Our compliance team does an awesome job creating, templating, and auditing all those checklists, but also doing evergreen and on-the-fly training for how to navigate things that come up.”