Let’s do a quick quiz for team leaders and brokerage owners to test how well you know your agents. This is essential for agent retention. While recruiting is critical, retaining your agents is just as important—if not more so. Retention is all about re-recruiting your agents consistently: every week, every month, every year.

Here’s the key: friends don’t leave, and friends refer friends. Your agents—your customers—need to see you as more than just their leader. They need to see you as a friend. And that kind of relationship only happens when you invest time in them and approach your interactions relationally, not transactionally.

Many brokerage owners and team leaders make the mistake of thinking transactionally. They view agents as numbers in a model—hiring 10 new agents a month and watching eight leave. It’s a churn-and-burn approach that feels like a meat grinder.

That’s not how you build a strong company.

A successful brokerage or team thrives on community, culture, and relatio...

When we talk about targeting for recruiting in your market, who would be your number one target?

I’m going to share an opportunity you may not have considered yet: Who’s the most likely to move?

NAR did a study on how often agents switch companies, and they found that the average agent stays at a company for about five years. So, agents move about every five years on average. But there’s a group of agents who move more often—agents on teams.

Agents on teams don’t move every five years; they move every three years, making them much more likely to make a move.

Why?

In my experience, the number one reason is their splits. Team members are often on lower splits, maybe 50%, 40%, or even 30% when all is said and done. They're typically earning around 30-50% from a transaction, and they’re often doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The issue is that they start to look at their team leader and think, "The team leader isn’t working as hard as I am." They don’t always see the full picture—how...

Have you ever had someone in your company say, "Geez, I can't believe how great it is here. I wish I had made the move years ago"? This has happened to me so many times as a brokerage owner. It often took years to recruit them, and once they join, they're like, "This is amazing. Why didn’t I do this sooner?"

It’s frustrating for us as brokerage owners and team leaders, but there’s something we can do about it.

The strategy is called “presuasion”—not persuasion, but “presuasion.”

What does that mean? It’s about taking a more casual approach to recruiting, in some ways, and showing people what they could experience if they joined you.

How do you do that? The easiest way is through testimonials from your agents. But not just from the agents who’ve been with you the longest—the best ones come from those who have joined most recently. When new agents say, "I wish I had joined six months or two years ago," grab that testimonial right away. Capture it in writing or, even better, on video....