Delegation is one of those skills everyone in real estate says they want to master, yet few genuinely do. In agencies and property businesses, it can make the difference between sustainable growth and burnout.
When you delegate effectively, you give your salespeople, property managers and support staff the confidence to make good decisions quickly, freeing leaders to focus on strategy, relationships, and growth.
But as many principals and team leaders know, it’s rarely straightforward.
Dr Kirstin Ferguson, author of Blindspotting and Head & Heart: The Art of Modern Leadership, argues that progress happens when leaders are honest about what they don’t know, or hand a task to someone who can do it better. It’s this blend of curiosity and humility, or what she calls leading with both “head and heart”, that enables teams to innovate, grow and take ownership.
For real estate leaders, that mindset sits at the core of effective delegation.
Delegation in real estate isn’t simply about handing off jobs, it’s about creating space for others to contribute ideas and make decisions that move the business forward.
It requires leaders to accept they don’t have all the answers about every client, property or process, and that’s exactly why empowering others matters.
Why leaders struggle to let go
Many agency heads find delegation hard because their careers have been built on doing everything themselves: every open home, every marketing tweak, every negotiation.
Others hold on to tasks because they fear a wrong move could cost a listing or client. In smaller agencies, leaders often maintain control simply to protect their team from added pressure.
But research shows there’s a difference between thoughtful delegation and avoidance. Victor Maas and Bei Shi from the University of Amsterdam found that managers tend to delegate more when performance targets are difficult, but not necessarily more wisely.
“Managers will tend to delegate tasks with difficult targets to avoid potential blame and hold on to tasks with easy targets to claim potential credit,” they wrote in their paper: The effects of target difficulty and relative ability on managers’ delegation decisions.
Their experiments showed that target difficulty significantly increases delegation, even when subordinates have lower ability.
As the authors observed, “when the subordinate has lower ability, 58 per cent of participants delegated when target difficulty was high,” a finding that “confirms that difficult targets lead to over-delegation and easy targets to under-delegation.”
The researchers describe this pattern as image-driven: managers are motivated to protect their self-image and social image – “to assume personal credit for successes and avoid personal blame for failures.”
The result can be organisational inefficiency: “Difficult targets can lead to over-delegation and easy targets to under-delegation, potentially destroying firm value,” they warn.
They argue that organisations should “consider not only the motivational effects of targets but also how targets affect managers’ delegation decisions,” and that firms “might benefit from clear rules and policies for allocating decision authority and from more closely monitoring managers’ delegation decisions.”
Applied to real estate, the parallels are obvious. A principal might assign a junior agent to manage a difficult vendor relationship, shifting responsibility for an uncertain outcome, while keeping simpler listings for themselves. The result is not always intentional, but it reflects the same dynamic of self-protection and performance pressure.
Leadership expert Dr Kirstin Ferguson calls these unseen drivers “blind spots.” In Blindspotting (2024), she writes: “Everyone has blind spots, and we can’t help that because we’re human. Understanding them and hunting for them lets you deal with some of these challenges that are probably being caused by your blind spots.”
She adds that “blind spots are hidden gaps in our thinking … the biases or the baggage of past experiences … that can have profound consequences for us and our businesses.”
For Dr Feguson, acknowledging limits is a sign of strength: “None of us know everything … We build more trust and credibility by being able to say these four words, ‘I don’t know – yet.’”
Creating genuine autonomy
Most leaders sit somewhere in-between keen to empower others but reluctant to let go fully. That hesitation often results in “faux-tonomy,” where agents appear to have independence but still second-guess what their boss wants. A clearer framework can help.
Models like RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) or DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed), can be applied to real estate settings to clarify decision-making and accountability within teams.
Both frameworks are designed to make responsibilities clear but serve slightly different purposes. The RACI matrix defines roles in ongoing tasks or projects, ensuring everyone knows their part and who has final accountability.
The DACI model focuses on the decision-making process itself, identifying who leads, who approves, and who contributes, so teams can move from discussion to action with greater speed and clarity.
In real estate, RACI can help define ownership across listings, marketing or compliance, while DACI ensures major business decisions, such as platform changes or office expansions, are made decisively and transparently.
What to delegate and what to keep
As Jeff Bezos once explained, some decisions are “one-way doors”—big, irreversible calls that deserve senior oversight. Others are “two-way doors,” easily reversible and ideal for delegation.
In real estate, opening a new office or restructuring your commission model is a one-way door.
Testing a new ad platform or adjusting social media strategy is a two-way door. Allowing your team to own the two-way doors accelerates progress without risking the big moves.
Delegation isn’t abdication; it’s a mindset. The best leaders combine head and heart: the clarity to define what success looks like, and the humility to let others figure out how to get there.
As Dr Ferguson writes, acknowledging what you don’t know isn’t a weakness but a strength. It’s what creates cultures of trust, adaptability and innovation.
When leaders in real estate embrace that idea, when they make space for others to think, decide and occasionally get it wrong, they not only scale their business but also grow the next generation of confident, capable professionals ready to lead in their own right.
