We recently connected with Sandra Rathe and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Sandra thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. So, we’d appreciate if you could open up about your growth story and the nitty, gritty details that went into scaling up.

Scaling up in Real Estate can be very tricky. My business grew large because people liked and trusted me, how do you get those same people to accept someone other than me? By putting in the work and training my agents to be as good, if not better than me! You can’t expect people to know everything, you have to take the time to teach them. We spend hours and hours role playing, going over different scenerios, teaching everyone all the aspects of real estate and of developing relationships. By creating a very detailed play book, and developing tried and true processes, everyone on our team learns to do everything the right way and learns how to wow our clients just like I do. It’s really scary at first to let go and send other people out in the world under your name and brand, but when they go out and do an amazing job there is no better feeling. We constantly train and educate ourselves and everyone who works with us, from photographers to inspectors and all the way to our closing professionals. Together we make each other better and continue to improve. We always keep an open mind and seek more knowledge.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I got into real estate to have a career where I could make a difference in people’s lives and also be available for my young children who were 5, 6, and 8 when I got started. Prior to real estate I had been an internal auditor for Price Waterhouse and then a corporate controller for large corporatioons. Both of these careers were very rewarding but they also entailed a lot of travel and time away from my kids. Getting into real estate gave me the flexibility to be there for the kids but also to create an amazing business that I could one day have my kids join me in if they would like. I love being real estate as it brings a different challenge every day. No two sales are the same and we are constantly learning more every day. I absolutely love when we get the difficult ones that no one thinks are possible. Watching our clients achieve the success of their real estate dreams drives me and my team. We often work with people who are in financial distress, getting divorced or suffered a loss. While these can be sad times for the client, we love being able to help them and bring a little bit of peace and closure for them. We help them move on and rebuild their lives if needed. We also do a lot of luxury sales which brings another whole level of satisfaction as we get the pleasure of working with highly successful people and enjoy the fruits of the labor as they purchase or sell a beautiful high end home.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

I believe that my reputation was built on my high level of customer service. I am always here to go above and beyond for my clients and my potential clients. If someone needs help with something I am the first one to jump in and say “how can I help?” We don’t just sell homes, we create an amazing customer experience so the client always wants to come back to us. Even if someone isn’t ready to buy or sell today, we will be happy to help with referrals, home valuations, or even just an opinion on renovations. When you work with Sandra and the Sandra Rathe Team you are a client for life!

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

We have a very strong system to stay in touch with our past clients as well as people that we have met but have not yet made a move. Because people have different preferrences we have to make sure to hit all the different ways that we can stay in touch. We have a system of follow up to stay in touch with our clients via phone calls to check in and see how they are doing or to invite them to an event, or to give them an update on something happening in their community. Periodically we drop off little gifts for people to let them know we are thinking of them. During non pandemic times, we host a few events per year to see our past clients in person. We also will create some smaller get together opportunities like playing sports together, meeting for dinner, or going boating. Another thing we do is send out holiday messages and cards. We love hearing from our clients and always offer our services to help them with any questions they have and this really goes a long way for most people.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.SandraRathe.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sandraratheteam/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sandra.rathe/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-rathe-26403115/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thesandraratheteam2973

Image Credits
Luxury Lens – Joya