07-07-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
The matchmaking secrets for high-performing teams
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Boosting productivity by building high-performing teams is a key survival strategy for companies in tough economic times, and few sectors have faced tougher conditions over recent years than the real estate industry. But how exactly do you mix and match staff with different characteristics and performance levels to create more effective teams, especially when managers have to assign jobs on the spot or have no effective way of assessing the qualities employees possess that are critical to teamwork, such as soft skills?
A new study has introduced a quantitative approach for making the best matches between real estate agents with widely differing latent characteristics and performance levels to build teams with the greatest likelihood of completing property deals.
Entitled Heterogeneous complementarity and team design: The case of real estate agents, the study was conducted by Mandy Hu Mantian, Associate Professor of the Department of Marketing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School, in collaboration with Yan Xu of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Chu Junhong of the University of Hong Kong, and Andrew Ching of Johns Hopkins University.
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It found that real estate firms could boost the number of deals they successfully conclude on sales and rentals if they restructure the agent teams following the quantitative approach. As real estate agencies typically earn a commission based on a percentage of the property's sale price, even a small increase in successful deals can translate into significant revenue.