Coverage and Time Off
Who Holds Your Clients While You Are Away, and What It Costs
Updated
Bottom line: Usually another agent you pay to hold your clients while you are gone. HousingWire describes an hourly rate between agents, with offers of $25 to $50 per hour.
Who steps in for your clients while you are away?
Another agent can hold your clients while you are gone, paid for the time they spend on your business.
Ashley Harwood, a real estate coach, writes in HousingWire that this is her favorite way to take a vacation as a solo agent.
How should you pay the agent who covers for you?
In HousingWire, Harwood calls an hourly rate paid between agents the cleanest way to set it up.
HousingWire reports she has seen agents offer anywhere from $25 to $50 per hour.
What changes when your backup is on the same team?
On a team, the agent who covers you can be someone you already work beside every week.
Keller Williams Southwest works from an office at 1650 Highway 6 in Sugar Land. Fourteen people there handle marketing, technology, productivity coaching and compliance.
Filed in The team.
Questions & answers
What do Sugar Land agents ask about this?
Do I pay the agent who covered me before the trip or after I'm back?
HousingWire carries one coach's own example. Ashley Harwood paid another agent $600 once she was back from a trip to Europe, and she judged it money well spent. The payment came on her return, after the cover was done, not up front before she left.
Her example is one trip and one figure, not a rate card. Whatever you and your backup agree, write down the amount and when it gets paid before you leave, so nobody is guessing once the trip is over.
Does the agent who covers me expect me to cover for them in return?
HousingWire describes agents paying each other an hourly rate, which points to an arrangement that can run in both directions. You hold their clients on their trip and bill for your hours. They do the same on yours. Talk through whether the trade is mutual before the first trip, so both of you expect the same thing.
Paying by the hour on both sides keeps the trade even when one agent's trip runs longer than the other's. Once the hours are paid, neither of you owes the other a favor.
Who do I talk to at Keller Williams Southwest about planning time away?
Start with Jana Hayes at Keller Williams Southwest in Sugar Land. The office offers weekly one-on-one coaching, classroom training, and a yearly business plan reviewed every month. That monthly review is a standing place to set your weeks away and decide who covers them.
Office strategy at Keller Williams Southwest is set by a 12-agent Associate Leadership Council. If you want to know how coverage between agents works here before you decide, ask Jana Hayes directly.