How Can Enterprise Brokerages Recruit Productive Agents?

Recruiting experienced and productive agents is crucial for the growth and success of large real estate brokerages. Here are eight tips to help attract top talent:

1. Establish a Strong Productivity Focused Brand Identity: Create a compelling brand identity that resonates with agents. Highlight your brokerage's values, culture, and commitment to excellence. A strong brand can attract agents who align with your brokerage's vision and mission. Most importantly, if agents in your market know your brokerage has a high volume of A-players, as they become more productive, they will want to join you.  One of our Nautilent customers, Re/Max Results, has done this effectively for years.  They have a specific policy to only keep agents that do at least 12 transactions a year.  Yet with 1400+ sales associates, their average agent does nearly 20 transactions per year!  While they still perform recruiting functions, many agents ask to join them!  A similar example is Scenic Sotheby's International Realty.  You can't ask to join their firm.  When someone shows promise to be a productive agent, they start keeping an eye on them.  As they expand, they may setup a coffee, but still track the agent.  After their agents have done deals with that agent, brokerage owners / staff will ask their agent of their opinion.  Then they might ask if the agent would ever want to join.  The process has been effective.  So effective in fact that they had the number one agent in the entire area join the company.  After years, Compass decided to enter the market and asked that agent, now running a mega team, to become their broker in charge of the market, meaning he would receive a piece of every transaction at Compass in the market.  He left to join that brokerage, and there was fear about all of the lost business.  After a few months, the brokerage retained dollar lost was minimal.  And many of the agents that left, quickly returned.  Many other agents told the owners of Scenic they wouldn't ever leave them.

2. Offer The Best Training and Support: Simply put, the number one reason that high-performing agents and teams join or leave their current brokerage is the support and staff you have in place.  Productive agents want to lean into these individuals to help them solve problems and multiply their efforts.   While the general thought in the industry is that agents want less service in exchange for higher commissions, what actually proves out is that agents want that until they have an issue and their low service brokerage isn't there to stand behind them.  By being known in your market as the company that consistently provides the best training and support for your agents, when they do have that moment, they'll know where to move their license to.  One thing that we've found that enterprise brokerages regularly do, is to provide sales and marketing training from outside their organization.  While agents love to have the staff from their brokerage there to help when they need it, they generally listen better to outside training resources from coaches and speakers.  By bringing in these third parties, not only can you keep your agents happy, but you can use it as a recruiting tool for other agents that want similar training.
   
   
3. Offer Mentor / Team Programs: Having these programs serves two important functions for recruiting productive agents.  First of all, you can get newer agents to join your firm and have the mentors / team leaders teach them how to be productive.  As the agents grow, they might be interested in becoming their own team leaders or individual agents.  But also, your team leaders and top performing agents are often looking for great team members.  If your brokerage can regularly provide them a steady stream of individuals, you'll have an easier time keeping your teams and top agents happy.
   
   

4. Provide Advanced Technology and Tools: It's contrary to popular belief, but productive agents would love if you provided them tools they actually want to use.  They don't want to have to pay thousands of dollars a month for other tools for them and their team members to use.  Experienced agents value access to advanced technology and tools that can streamline their workflow and enhance productivity. Invest in state-of-the-art CRM systems, marketing automation tools, and virtual tour platforms to empower your agents to succeed. But more importantly, make sure that there is excellent support that goes along with the tools to ensure the highest adoption of the platform from these agents.

5. Promote a Collaborative Culture: No one wants to work for a brokerage where everyone is negative and views each other as a threat.  Agents know that other agents are their competition, so it's inherent to working in a brokerage that your "coworkers" are there to get the same business as you.  That being said, by ensuring that your agents are congenial with each other, and even share information back and forth, you can keep an environment where people want to be.  Some great ways to foster this is to have events and mixers where agents can get to know each other outside of the traditional negotiation environment.  Break down the walls and you'll often be suprised what happens.  Most importantly, if you ever get a negative agent that brings everyone down, get rid of them, no matter the loss.  These agents will cause you larger losses overall in terms of other agents that will leave or forgo joining your brokerage.

6. Highlight Success Stories and Testimonials: Showcase success stories and testimonials from your top-performing agents to demonstrate the opportunities for growth and success within your brokerage. Hearing from their peers can inspire potential recruits and give them confidence in joining your team.  More importantly, you'll find that productive agents enjoy competition.  So the more you can highlight the successes of other agents in the office, the more they'll want to compete.  Now this may seem to violate the suggestion above to promote a collaborative culture, but it's all in the way you handle it. 

7. Provide Marketing and Lead Generation Support: Glengary Glen Ross wasn't wrong, every agent wants the good leads.  By offering robust marketing and lead generation support to help agents attract clients and close deals, you'll have one of the easiest ways to recruit top agents to your firm. Your technology vendor should be able to assist with this. Before selecting one, make sure that they not only have lead generation systems, but also support and success staff to go along with it to make sure that your dollars are being spent productively.

8. Emphasize Professional Development Opportunities: Agents that obtain designations are less likely to leave their current brokerage - particularly if you offer to pay for some of the costs.  For example, you can offer to reimburse agents for obtaining their GRI if they meet and keep certain criteria.  Obtaining a GRI can take over a year, so the retention opportunity is excellent.  The same goes for recruiting new agents to the brokerage.  It's doubtful their current brokerage will make a similar offer, and for agents that value education and designations, there might not be any better way to convince them to join your brokerage. But beyond traditional designations, professional development opportunities available at your brokerage, such as training programs and regular classes on negotiation, marketing, etc can help you land big name agents.

By implementing these tips, large, enterprise real estate brokerages can attract experienced and productive agents who are eager to contribute to the success of the brokerage and achieve their own professional goals.