Dawn McKenna worked for 16 years as a solo agent at Coldwell Banker before client growth and a geographic expansion prompted her to form The Dawn McKenna Group. Today, her team is one of the largest in the country.

Brandi Hampton of Dream Town Real Estate positioned herself as a leader and resource for her peers, and that led to her forming her own team in 2021.

And Peggy Glickman of @properties Christie’s International Real Estate found that pairing up with her son Michael Glickman gave each of them a chance to reach new clients and cover more ground as a two-person team.

While the impetus for each real estate team is different, the benefits are similar. In each case, these real estate professionals found collaboration helped them grow, learn and better serve their clients.

“I think the best part of a team is the people that fill it,” McKenna said. “You can really make people’s lives and become a real value add, not only in the seller-to-buyer experience, but in each other’s lives. To see them change their lives in front of me or giving them a boost or giving them their first deal — and then they go and capitalize — it’s really, really rewarding to see what we built here. My team will tell you: I get more excited when they win a deal than when I do.”

Forming a team

Shortly before McKenna launched her team, her oldest children were either in college or graduating, and many of her clients were going through the same lifestyle changes. Her children’s friends were calling her about helping them find apartments in the city, or her own friends were looking to downsize.

“My client list grew very large, very quickly and geographically,” she said. “Horizons were getting more spread out.”

One of McKenna’s clients had a large $5 million development in Naples, Florida. She had referred agents to that client in the past, but they were never quite the right fit. Her clients encouraged her to put together a team to sell the homes based on their experience working with her. With Coldwell Banker’s help, she formally created The Dawn McKenna Group in 2017.

“They asked, and we delivered,” she said. “ It was the clients that made me think maybe I could take this show on the road.”

Glickman was a real estate agent for nearly 32 years when she and her son, Michael Glickman, formed Glickman Residential at the end of 2022.

The duo was able to split up business between the North Shore, where Peggy Glickman is based, and the city, where Michael Glickman operates, covering more territory by working together.

“Five years ago, Mike got his real estate license and was helping me with my city referrals,” Peggy Glickman said. “We could share our businesses, my kid’s friends and my friends’ kids at this point, if they were leaving the city and had a condo or something that needed to get sold, or they were looking to buy in the North Shore. Before, I would refer that business out. With Mike living in the city, it was just a really convenient thing for me to have him in the city picking up and handling that business.”

With Michael Glickman developing his own book of business, he transitioned away from his teaching career to selling real estate full time.

“We’ve been working in tandem since the end of last year,” Peggy Glickman said. “We’re a little mother-son team of two, and it’s been great for me. It’s just great to have somebody to collaborate with, and we can improve our availability and level of customer service because we basically have two sets of eyes on everything.”

Hampton said she started her real estate team, The Hampton Collective, because of peer pressure. She felt siloed early in her real estate career. A natural sharer, she didn’t always feel that she was receiving the best support, because some agents were reluctant to share information for fear of losing business. She would speak up in team meetings and offer tips to other agents and answer their questions. Newer agents gravitated toward her.

“I even started shadowing them on their showing appointments and making it seem like I was the new agent,” Hampton said. “I would tell them to point out this, look at that, tell [the client] this so it made them seem like they were fully aware of what they needed to be telling their client. Because of that, everybody would ask me, every single time they saw me, ‘Brandi, when are you starting a team?’’’

Responsibility and rewards

Hampton finally took that step after spending about six years as a solo agent, first with Keller Williams, followed by three years with Coldwell Banker. She formed her team with Dream Town Real Estate in 2021. She now has five agents who sell, a leasing agent, two virtual assistants and a transaction coordinator.

“It’s scary having a team, because you have to be accountable for everything,” Hampton said. “They’re going to come to you before they go to the managing broker, so it’s like being a mini-managing broker for four people, and you don’t want to lead them astray. Every situation is going to be different, but it’s also rewarding because that means that they are sticking by you, that they trust you, that they really want to be like you or even better than you, and better than me is what I would aspire for everybody to be.”
The Glickmans made a smooth transition from working separately to forming a team because they had been working together more informally for five years.

“I think it’s been helpful for Mike to have me on board as the more experienced agent on the North Shore,” Peggy Glickman said. “Because if they’re moving from the city to the North Shore, then we both really know that market. And for me, it’s been really beneficial to have somebody who lives in the city, knows the city and can relate on a more generational level with our millennial clients.”

Michael Glickman cited their ability to always be present for clients as a major benefit of the team model. “The greatest thing is being able to always accommodate a showing,” he said. “It’s just having someone on the ground available when we need to be. That’s what clients are looking for, is that type of service.”
The team Dawn McKenna built enabled her to move into more markets and expand her business, a process aided by connections forged through her 21-year relationship with Coldwell Banker. In building her team, McKenna prioritized neighborhood experts.

“If you live in Lakeview, you’re not selling in Winnetka,” she said. “You’re going to refer that to someone on the team who lives in Winnetka, who knows everything there is to know about Winnetka. That’s the way it should be. Realtors shouldn’t be bouncing all over kingdom come, and they don’t even know where the schools are.”

Scaling the team

McKenna hired her first assistant in 2003, within her first two weeks with Coldwell Banker. The Dawn McKenna Group consists of 31 team members, including 19 full-time sales agents and 12 people in administrative roles.

“I have a listing concierge and a director of transactions,” McKenna said. “So, I have someone that’s my right-hand person, that goes on these listing appointments with me, knows these houses inside out to help the show. The three of us show all the time.”

The Glickmans each have backup agents they can rely on in case they can’t make a showing. Peggy Glickman’s daughter Stephanie helps with marketing, and her daughter Ali sometimes lends a hand with administrative and social media tasks.

“I think the hardest part going forward will be learning how to scale the business and grow it effectively,” Peggy Glickman said. “But we’re up for it. We don’t want to grow to the point to where we have a huge team. I think that’s never going to be our objective. We just want to grow to the point where we can offer expertise in different areas and really provide the highest level of service and return on investment for our clients and make it as easy for them as possible.”

The small size of their team makes it easy for the Glickmans to work out compensation, they said. They simply do a split based on who did the most work on a listing and who brought in the client.

“There’s nothing set,” Peggy Glickman said. “It’s basically on a client-by-client basis, because everything is different. If it originates in the city, Mike might work on the listing more than me so I might manage it.”
Hampton takes a slightly higher split from her newer agents to cover the extra time she spends with them. Otherwise, she views her splits as comparable to those of a regular brokerage.

“With newer agents, it’s pretty much like a partnership, because they’re going to be asking me more questions,” Hampton said. “I’m going to need to be readily available to them so they can kind of just run and hit the ground running. Their splits are pretty standard for if they were going to a regular brokerage.”

McKenna’s agents receive the same percentage across the board. It’s the same percentage she receives for her sales.

“I think on my team, we eat what we kill,” she said. “That’s just the bottom line. And so far, everyone on my team has eaten pretty well. Nobody is complaining that they’re not making money. Nobody is complaining that they don’t get leads or they’re not thriving.”

McKenna was never part of a real estate team before, but she learned something about running teams while her children participated in sports. She also received advice on scaling her team from her husband, who is an attorney. She learned from her director of operations, Michael Anthony, who formerly worked as the director of operations for Coldwell Banker’s Chicago office and who helped her organize.

“I went to my CEO and said, ‘I really needed someone to help me with my assistants … because we were all wearing all kinds of different hats,” she said. “Everyone did everything and it was kind of, sort of crazy. So Mike [Anthony] would come every week for the day and bring cookies and spend time with our team. So they were feeling so grateful, because they felt like they could do their job better and more efficiently, and it wasn’t always a fire drill.”

Hampton had also never been on a team before. She learned by observing agents who lead teams, including McKenna.

“I was aspiring to be a version of the Dawn McKenna Group,” she said. “I Instagram-stalk her. I just like her energy that she brings to her team, the fact that she also works in Florida. I’m licensed in Florida, as well, so now that I have a team, I kind of aspire to be a different version of her.”

EXPERT SOURCES

Michael Glickman, Glickman Residential at @properties Christie’s International Real Estate

Peggy Glickman, Glickman Residential at @properties Christie’s International Real Estate

Brandi Hampton, The Hampton Collective at Dream Town Real Estate

Dawn McKenna, The Dawn McKenna Group at Coldwell Banker