Hey guys, as a real estate broker, we all know we should be recruiting every day. But sometimes we get caught in a mental trap—thinking that being overly assertive or aggressive with potential recruits is the way to get results.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to recruit.

The right way is by creating relationships, building value in your conversations, and genuinely developing friendships with agents in the marketplace. When you do this effectively, making calls, sending texts, or emails doesn’t feel “salesy”—it feels natural because you’ve built a connection.

The wrong way is sending cold texts, emails, or voicemails repeatedly without making any meaningful connection. Eventually, people shut down, and you hit a brick wall—you’ll never break through.

Start from a position I call “no recruiting.” Don’t start with a recruiting pitch. Build a relationship first. The worst thing you can do is try to sell too early.

We’ve all experienced it—walking into a car lot or furniture stor...

As a brokerage owner or leader, are you treating your current agents as your own personal SOI—your sphere of influence?

As an agent, you were trained to do this. You’ve heard it repeatedly from gurus, speakers, and podcasters: work your sphere. You need 20 to 50 contacts per year with your sphere to generate referrals.

But are you applying that same principle to your own agents?

Most brokerage owners and team leaders don’t. Then they wonder why recruiting is so hard. Recruiting feels difficult because they’re not getting referrals from their own agents.

The number one recruiting strategy for every brokerage owner in America should be this: your agents are so impressed, enthusiastic, and in love with what you do that they’re shouting from the rooftops, telling every agent in the market to work for you.

If that’s not happening, it’s because you’re not treating your agents with the same intensity and intentionality as your SOI.

So let’s change that. Treat them with the same respect ...

If you're a real estate broker, I want you to do something the next time you're in a grocery store. Look at the shelves and notice how many products say new and improved.

Now apply that to your own real estate company. Ask yourself: What about my company, what I'm offering to agents in this market, is new and improved?

If you can’t think of anything, neither can your current agents—and certainly no one outside your company can either. But this is the secret sauce.

We often think recruiting is all about commission splits. It’s not. If the lowest split was all that mattered, then the operator with the lowest split in your market would have every agent working for them—and we know that’s not true.

So what is attracting agents to join one company over another? It’s the tools, the technology, the services, the support, and most importantly—which company they believe can help them close more transactions at the end of the day.

Here’s the challenge: What can you roll out every quarter th...

As a brokerage owner and team leader, I have a question for you: when’s the last time you fired someone?

That’s a big one, isn’t it? Have you ever actually fired someone, or do they just leave on their own? A lot of brokerage owners and team leaders don’t have the strength to say, “This person isn’t working here anymore.” But avoiding that creates roadblocks for recruiting.

Sometimes one agent creates what I call the “bad apple syndrome.” They’re so difficult—dramatic, gossipy, toxic—that potential recruits won’t join your company because they don’t want to work with them.

Think about your roster right now. Maybe everyone is fantastic. But maybe not. Maybe you’ve got someone with barnacles—someone others don’t want to work with.

And here’s another question: how many people on your roster haven’t closed a deal in the last year? You might have five, six, eight, even ten agents producing nothing. Why are they still on your roster? They’re dragging down your company’s production number...

Question: how fast do you pivot on price when you list a property?

Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes even the best of us get it wrong. When we get it wrong and don’t pivot quickly, we risk missing the opportunity to sell the property for top dollar.

So, how fast do you pivot? Do you wait two weeks, three weeks, a month, two months? Are you setting that expectation upfront with the seller?

Here’s a study from ShowingTime. They’re integrated with many MLSs across the country and help schedule showings. Because of that, they have their finger on the pulse of showing activity.

Their study, based on tens of thousands of showings, shows that after the first five days, showings plummet on most listings.

Why? Because when a listing hits the market, all eyes are on it. Most buyers—probably 95% to 99%—are set up on portals like Realtor.com, Zillow, or your website. When that listing hits the MLS, the entire backlog of active buyers sees it almost immediately.

Hundreds of buyers look...

What is push-button recruiting?

If you're an office leader or team leader, you might be tempted to say, “I want to recruit, but I don't want to spend the time doing it. I just want to plug into a system—a CRM, AI platform, or some kind of tech—that will do the work for me. It’ll send emails, send texts, and every day it’ll do the job automatically.”

Then, like magic, people will just start calling, wanting to work for you.

Well, I wish that were true. That would be nice.

Another version of this is hiring virtual assistants overseas to make a thousand calls a day.

I'm going to tell you something you might not want to hear:

These systems, by and large, do not work.

On the rare occasion they do set an appointment, it’s usually with the lowest-hanging fruit—the kind of agent you don’t want anyway. These are people who’ve changed companies five times in a year.

Why doesn’t it work?

Because it’s not personalized recruiting.

Imagine you’re on the other end. If you're getting a gener...

If you're a brokerage owner or team leader, I want to talk to you about something that's kind of outside the box—and that is what we call “adoption rates.”

What's adoption? Adoption means you bring in technology, a system, a tool, or maybe a training program into the company, and you watch as only 20% of the people utilize it—and 80% do not.

That's the rule of thumb: The 80/20 rule.

So you start to wonder why the heck you would bring anything into this company? You feel tempted to cut everything: the technology they’re not using, the training, the mentorship program—this, that, and the other.

Well, remember there's also an 80/20 rule in production too:

20% of the people are doing 80% of the production.

So when you cut these things, you might actually be hurting the people who are supporting the company the most.

But I want you to rethink the 80/20 rule for a second.

When we measure whether we should cut, keep, or add something to the company, don’t just look at whether people a...

Hey guys, have you ever heard the phrase “a high tide floats all boats?” You probably have.

This concept applies to pricing. In a strong market—like we saw during the COVID years—if you priced a home slightly wrong, it didn’t really matter. The market was so hot that it would cover your mistakes. Even if you were off by 4% or 5%, prices were rising 10%, 15%, even 20% annually.

But that’s not the case today.

Today, we’re in a completely different market. There’s an imbalance: about 500,000 more home sellers than buyers. Prices are flat or even declining in many areas. Zillow and Redfin are both predicting price drops this year—the first in several years.

What’s driving this shift? Interest rates. Once rates come back down and buyers re-enter the market, things will likely shift again. But for now, we're stagnant—or even declining—on price.

So, when you're sitting down with sellers, the pricing conversation becomes crucial. We're no longer in a "high tide" market. In fact, the tide ...

If you're a broker, owner, or manager, here’s a key question for you:

Are you benchmarking your agents?

What do we mean by benchmarking? It means drawing a line in the sand—looking at what an agent has done over the past 12 months and what they want to accomplish in the next 12 months.

We call this Per Agent Productivity.

Start by measuring your entire office: What is your average per agent productivity?

Let’s say the average agent in your office is closing 6 transactions per year and doing $3 million in production. Once you know that number, and you must know that number, you can set a growth goal.

Now, based on that, figure out how you can push the envelope and go from 6 to 7, 8, 9, even 10 transactions per agent? What’s it going to take to make that happen?

It comes down to two things: recruiting and retention.

From a recruiting standpoint, your goal should be to help new agents outperform where they came from. This is another layer of benchmarking.

When an experienced agen...

As a brokerage owner or leader of a real estate company, you probably remind your agents every week that the best way to grow their business is by engaging their Sphere of Influence (SOI) and consistently asking for referrals.

But are we holding ourselves to the same standard?

We should be asking our own agents for referrals and recommendations about who we should be talking to in the marketplace.

Questions to ask regularly:

1. “Who are the top agents you’ve worked with in the last six months that would be a good fit here?”
2. “In that last transaction, how did Bob do? Would he be a good fit for our company?”
3. “Is there anyone I shouldn’t talk to—any red flags in the marketplace?”

By engaging agents consistently and requesting their generosity, they start to understand the importance of referrals—just like our clients do when we ask.

Agents aren’t conditioned to send referrals unless we ask. The best time to ask is right after you’ve helped them like after:

• Solving a problem
• H
...