Most agents in our industry work without partners. But there may come a time when you find yourself thinking, "Could I produce better results if I worked along with a partner instead of continuing to work alone?"

Well, it all depends on you, how you work best, and the person or people you decide to partner-up with.

If you're considering working with a partner, you may want to listen to what top commercial agent Paul Earnhart recently said to me. Paul and his team of experts have closed more than two billion in real estate transactions over the past 21 years. That's an average of $95 million a year in closed transactions. And in 2001, Paul was given an award by the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors (SIOR) for the largest volume of commercial cooperative transactions closed in the United States.

"You don't want to work with a partner who duplicates what you're already good at yourself," advises Paul. "You want to find someone whose skills complement, not duplicate, your own."

With this recommendation from Paul in mind, if you're someone whose number one skill is developing new business, you probably don't want to partner-up with an agent whose best skill is developing new business also. If you do, you may soon find yourself with a great need for someone to assist in following-up on the opportunities. Similarly, if you're someone who is great at follow-up but lacking in business development skills, you may find yourself continually in need of more new business if you pair-up with someone just like yourself.

As Paul said, "There are a lot of people who can do a great job in real estate while working on their own, but they can't cover the market with the same effectiveness that a great team can through working together."

If you're thinking of working with a partner, I have one more recommendation of my own for you. Sign an agreement with your partners before you begin your partnership together. Write down all the important details of how you're going to work together, what each person's job responsibilities will be, and how the commissions will be divided among yourselves.

And since you can't be 100 percent certain of how well the partnership is going to work for you, you may want to have a termination date for the partnership agreement itself. You may, for example, have the partnership run for a trial period of three months, six months, or a year. When the original term of the partnership agreement expires, you can extend the agreement as it is written for a longer period of time, modify some provisions of the agreement before extending it, or not extend the agreement at all and go back to working on your own. This allows the partners to find out in reality if the partnership is a good idea for everyone, while allowing the agents the flexibility to get out at a later date if it isn't.

Whether or not forming a partnership with one or more agents is clearly the best choice for you, when you choose partners whose skills complement your own, have everyone sign a written agreement, and provide for a termination date in the agreement, you both maximize your flexibility and help to ensure that your new partnership will become everything you want it to be.

Published: February 6, 2004

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Jim Gillespie, Ph.D., is America's Premier Real Estate Coach℠. He has over 20 years of experience in real estate sales and is a past president of three different real estate companies. His FREE real estate E-newsletter with tips and creative ideas to help agents make more money is now read by over 35,000 agents nationwide. You can subscribe to his FREE E-newsletter by visiting RealEstateSalesCoach.com or contact him at Jim@RealEstateSalesCoach.com.