The Ultimate Guide to Recruiting Agents for Your Team or Brokerage

It was 2003 when I left my sales position at RE/MAX to partner with another agent to start a boutique real estate brokerage in Denver, Colorado. We were both top-producing agents, so building a real estate brokerage should have been easy for us—or so we thought.

We believed that agents would join us because we were influential. We thought if we opened a brokerage they would all contact us for the chance to work with us. Well, they didn’t. And after four years, we were roughly the same agent count as we were the day we opened.

My partner said to me, “We need to recruit some more agents.” I responded with, “How do we do that?” He said, “Call them … I guess?” “What would I say?” I thought to myself.

We were obviously in over our heads. I knew at that moment, I had to learn how to recruit.

Since that day, I have received multiple awards for recruiting real estate agents as well as building one of the fastest-growing real estate brokerages in the state of Colorado. What I have learned is being a great agent or running an outstanding team or brokerage does not in itself attract agents. You must have a great recruiting plan. In this article, I’m going to give you my recruiting plan that allowed me to grow my independent brokerage by 40 agents each year.

Why a Recruiting Plan Is a MUST for Any Team & Brokerage

(Source: Isaac Rosenberg @Compass)

Many teams and small brokerages don’t see the value of having a recruiting plan. They believe if they provide good service for their agents, the agents they have won’t leave and other agents will be attracted to the company. This, unfortunately, is not true.

Teams and brokerages may also think that intentionally staying small allows them to avoid having to add agents. This strategy is also doomed to failure.

The real truth is that over time, all teams and brokerages will lose agents. Whether you lose them to the competition or attrition, the fact is no matter how good you are, you’re going to lose agents.

This loss will impact the success of your team or brokerage. Fewer agents means lower potential revenue, and reduced revenue means fewer services for your remaining agents. This leads to agents being vulnerable to other recruiters, or worse, actively searching for greener pastures by shopping other brokerages. Therefore, you must have a plan to recruit even if it is only to add two to three agents a year.

The Right Way to Recruit Real Estate Agents

There are only two ways to recruit. The right way and every other way.

The right way requires you to build relationships by creating trust and showing your recruiting prospects that you really do care. Doing this ensures that you are attracting the right agents into your organization and also increases the chance that they don’t leave after you have invested a lot of time and money into them.

The Tools You Use Are Important 

This article covers my strategy for poaching producing agents from other brokerages, but if you want to recruit brand new agents, ZipRecruiter is the way to go. It’s the #1 rated job search app on both Apple and Android, which means you’ll cast the widest net possible for new talent.

Visit ZipRecruiter

The right way is slow, methodical, and planned out.

The plan is to make sure that nothing was overlooked by your recruits or by you. The decision for a producing agent to change brokerages is likely the second-largest decision they will make next to getting married. We are talking about their career path and their future income here; they are definitely not taking this lightly, so neither should you.

How to Identify the Ideal Agent to Recruit to Your Team or Brokerage

(Source: Dawn McKenna Group)

Before you make a recruiting call or send an email, you must first identify what type of agents you are prepared to support in your organization. Agents in different phases of their career have different needs. If you are not prepared to support their unique needs, then you will have trouble recruiting them, and even more trouble convincing them to stay with you for more than a few months.

Let’s take a quick look at the different types of agents and strategies to recruit them.

How to Support New or Newer Agents

If you are planning on recruiting agents who have sold less than three homes in the past year, then you need to be prepared to spend a significant amount of time training them on the basics of real estate. Training more than two or three newer agents at a time can become a full-time job.

If you choose to hire more than a few new agents at a time, you will need a designated mentor or trainer and a detailed educational program that includes how they manage a database, do their marketing, give buyer and seller presentations, and how to write and negotiate contracts. Fortunately, we provide these resources on The Close Pro.

Otherwise, their needs will impact your personal real estate production. And trust me when I say, you won’t make as much money training new agents as you will just doing a few more sales each year. For this reason, I strongly suggest that if you don’t have the resources to train new agents, then don’t recruit them.

How to Support Mid-level Agents

These are the agents who fall between eight and 20 transactions each year. They have some basic needs: a good website, a great customer relationship management (CRM) tool, lead generation support, and a sense of community. Overall, they are the easiest agents to manage and also the easiest to overlook.

Since this group is so often forgotten by most brokerages, they are also the most common to recruit and be recruited from your team or brokerage.

For this reason, you must create a strong sense of community in your team or brokerage. You can do this by having regular team meetings, group lead generation activities, and mobilizing around a common vision or cause. This could be increasing the market share of your organization or even donating to a charity you all care about.

The Secret to Recruiting Top-producing Real Estate Agents

(Source: Douglas Elliman)

I categorize Top Producers as agents who sell more than 30 homes a year. They are often considered to be unreasonable or demanding. Since most companies want Top Producers, they are usually able to get their demands met by someone. Does this make them demanding or just knowing what they can ask for?

The demands of Top Producers may vary greatly, but they mainly have three things that they are seeking: more opportunities, recognition for their efforts, and a better compensation plan.

The Recruiting Needs of a Top-producing Real Estate Agent

Opportunities

For Top Producers, opportunities come in many different forms. It can be the opportunity for a leadership role in an organization or even just an impressive title they can put on their business card. For others, it is the ability to learn something new or have access to better training or mentors.

Recognition

Some Top Producers thrive on the approval of others (I, too, am guilty of this). Believe it or not, there are many companies that are not good at giving credit where credit is due.

Top Producers typically invest more time and more of their own money into their businesses than other agents. All this helps your brokerage grow your brand. Therefore, they deserve special treatment, don’t they? I think so.

It’s not that they need you to kiss their butt; they just need to know that you appreciate having them in your organization. You can do this by creating unique experiences that only they are invited to. This can include taking them to sporting events and introducing them to influential people. I once took my top agents to see Tony Robbins in Palm Springs. They still talk about this trip, 14 years later.

Compensation

The third recruiting need a Top Producer seeks is a better compensation plan. Many Top Producers selected their brokerage and negotiated their compensation plan long before they became a Top Producer. Now they find themselves paying an unfair share of their commissions to their brokerage and they are seeking a better deal.

DO NOT … I repeat, do not … change your compensation model to accommodate a Top Producer. This will lead to animosity among your other agents if they feel you gave them a better deal then what they are receiving, which, in turn, leads them to resent the Top Producer. Resentment can divide your team or brokerage.

Instead, build your team or brokerage model’s compensation plan to attract financially conscious Top Producers. If you already have an established compensation model, consider paying an upfront joining bonus in lieu of modifying your compensation model.

What Types of Agents You Should Recruit to Your Brokerage

(Source: Vickey Barron @Compass)

When you are creating a plan to recruit agents to your team or brokerage, you want to start with the type of agents you are already equipped to support. You can always add in other agent types later as you expand your offerings to serve more agent types.

Since I am a teacher at heart, when I opened my independent brokerage in Boulder, Colorado, I began with training new agents. I believed that if I could get brand-new agents to become successful quickly, it would show the mid-level agents who I can help them also.

After accomplishing this, I was then able to attract Top Producers and Teams. This successful plan allowed us to become the fourth-largest brokerage in Boulder in less than three years.

How to Select Agents to Recruit & Find Their Contact Information

Just like real estate sales, your success in recruiting real estate agents to your team or brokerage is dependent upon your ability to select the right leads and find their contact information.

Knowing how to find agents’ production and contact information is gold when it comes to recruiting agents for your team or brokerage. However, to be successful at this, you don’t need to have their exact production. Also, stay focused on the production of the agents in the areas you want to recruit, not the entire MLS.

Finding new agent leads is a completely different process than finding producing agents. This is because new agents can get mixed up with the non-producing agents on MLS production reports. Therefore, you will need to source new and newer agents differently than producing agents.

How to Find & Recruit New or Newer Agents

(Source: magazine.realtor.com)

There are two types of new agents: prelicensed and in-school. Prelicensed are people who are interested in getting their real estate license in the future. In-school are people who are currently in real estate school or who have recently graduated and are interviewing brokerages.

Collect prelicensed and in-school leads by placing ads in employment websites like Indeed, Career Builder, and Craigslist. Your ad will read something like:

When they contact you, they will have general questions about starting a real estate career.

Answer their questions, and then direct them to a real estate licensing school like Real Estate Express or Kaplan. Keep in touch with them throughout the process so they are sure to interview you once they receive their license.

You can find the in-school leads by contacting your local real estate schools and asking to present the benefits of your team or brokerage. They will usually ask you to bring lunches or snacks for the students in exchange for a 15-minute presentation. Some universities that offer a degree in real estate can also be a great resource.

How to Find the Producing Agent’s Production & Contact Information

(Source: Coldwell Banker)

If you would like to recruit producing agents to your team or brokerage, you must get an idea of the agents’ production in your area and their contact information. This can be done manually through your MLS or in just a few clicks with recruiting software like BrokerMetrics. BrokerMetrics starts at $200 a month for the basic tools. In addition to agent production and contact information, BrokerMetrics can also provide market share and trend reports.

In this example, I am using the Matrix MLS system, but most MLS systems offer the same ability to search closed transactions for market analysis reasons. If exporting and manipulating Excel files is not your cup of tea, then you can farm this out to an admin or virtual assistant.

Begin with a search of recently sold homes in the past six months. Limit the search to a one- to two-mile radius around your office or the territory in which you would like to expand your team or brokerage. This will ensure you have agents who are doing business in your area.

Next, export the full search information into a CSV file. Be sure that the export includes both the Listing Agent and Buyer’s Agent’s contact information.

Once the file is downloaded, sort the CSV file by the listing agent’s name. This will consolidate all the transactions that each agent did in the last six months within the geographic area.

In this example, we can see that Alissa Edwards has closed five sales in the area in just the past six months. To me, this suggests that Alissa likely specializes in the area and may be a good fit for your brokerage. Notice her contact information is also listed (in yellow).

In this simple search of 1,500 closed transactions, I was able to identify over 100 producing agents who sold over two transactions in the past six months within two miles of my office. These agents would be excellent leads for recruitment.

Next, repeat the sort using the buyer agent’s name. This will give you a hefty list of agents who are working with buyers in your territory. Personally, to further narrow the list, I would eliminate agents who have only closed one transaction from the list.

After this process, you now have a list of producing agents in your area. Now all you have to do is have a good reason to contact them.

The Best Scripts for Recruiting Real Estate Agents

If you only learn one thing about recruiting scripts from this article, it should be this: The best script is the true script.

What I mean by this is don’t say you are something that you are not. For instance, don’t say that you are a training organization if you don’t have training. Don’t say that you will provide excellent service if you don’t have the staff to support them. Get very clear about who you are and are not.

If you are a Top Producer Team that wants to build your brand, then make that clear in your script. This script won’t appeal to another Top Producer who is interested in growing their own personal brand, but will resonate with a mid-level agent who wants to be part of something and isn’t concerned about being the “Top Dog.”

Your goal should not be to get appointments with all the agents—your goal is to meet with the right agents.

Think of your script as a way to weed out the agents who don’t fit, not to simply get appointments. I would much rather have three appointments a week with people who are looking for what I am offering than have 10 appointments with people who have no interest, need, or willingness to pay for what my organization offers.

With this in mind, here are the four most effective scripts I have used to recruit producing agents to my brokerages.

The Best “New to the Area” Recruiting Script

This script is best used to recruit producing agents to your team or brokerage if you or your organization is new to the area or is looking to expand into a new territory.

Once you’ve gathered a list of recruiting leads using my process above, use the following script to contact them.

Many recruiters would scoff and say that this script is too direct. This is because many companies reward recruiters for the number of appointments they set and not the quality of the lead or appointment. The key to recruiting success is to find the right candidates to join your organization, and not to get appointments with everyone with a real estate license.

Another concern I hear with this script is with the word invest. Recruiters say things like “I don’t have money to give them” or “We don’t BUY agents.”

My response to this is that the word invest can also mean investing your time in mentoring them, investing by providing them your extra leads, or investing in them financially. However you choose to invest is up to you. If you don’t plan on investing in agents in some way, you are going to have a hard time attracting talented agents and retaining the agents you have.

The Most Effective Mid-level Agent Recruiting Script

Use this script for agents who market specifically to a community, neighborhood, or town. Begin by paying attention to their advertising on Facebook, newspapers, and listing signs. When you see they are marketing a unique message or a new listing, contact them with the following script.

This is one of my favorite recruiting scripts because it works on Facebook IM, texting, and even on Slydial, as long as you are honest and transparent about their ad or marketing. If you are just spraying this message to all the agents, they will quickly figure out it is insincere. If agents think you truly don’t care about them, they will dismiss you in the future.

The Best Events & Seminar Agent Recruiting Script

Holding events and seminars is an outstanding way to attract agents who are learning-based. These agents will likely be newer in the business and mid-level seasoned agents looking for new ideas on how to generate more business.

Choose a trendy lead generation topic that you or a panel can speak about for 60 to 90 minutes. It is BEST PRACTICE if you present the information or host the panel. This will position you as the expert … and everyone wants to know the expert.

Here is a short list of the most trendy real estate topics right now.

Top Trendy Real Estate Topics:

1. Instagram and TikTok strategies
2. Paid Facebook Ad strategies
3. Real estate business planning
4. Virtual real estate showings and transactions
5. Using cryptocurrency to close transactions

Keep it a small event or seminar for only five to 25 agents. For a location, you can use either a conference room in your building or a vendor’s (mortgage or title company’s) neutral location.

Just don’t hold it in your office. Agents will be intimidated to come into the lion’s den.

Next, invite agents to your event.

Here is the exact script I use to get real estate agents to my events.

The secret to successfully recruiting with events and seminars is converting the conversation from the event to why they should take the time to meet with you one on one. Think of your event like a lead magnet on your website. You need to offer something they want, but your end goal should be to convert them into recruitment leads.

Think about it this way: The event is mainly for you to build trust with them. Trust is built through familiarity. They see you at an event, then later meet you at an association meeting, and then you call them to set a meeting. Then they are more likely to listen to your message without dismissing you. This is because you are already familiar to them. The event by itself will not get you a meeting.

The Columbo Script

If you want a producing agent to meet with you, you must give them a good reason to. I call this the “Columbo Script.” If you are a little older, you may remember the TV series “Columbo,” where the detective Columbo would say, “Just one more thing” before revealing the secret to solve the mystery.

At some point during the event, ideally the middle, you will tell the agents transparently why you are hosting the event.

Without going any further, say:

This, in fact, is my most effective way of recruiting. Although one would think that during the COVID-19 time this script would not work, this is not true.

Recruiting with Events & Seminars During COVID

If you’re in an area that restricts in-person events due to COVID, the event and seminar script works very well for Zoom events. The best practice is to keep the attendance limited to 10 to 15 agents and ask the attendees to turn their cameras on to ensure their participation.

Remember: Your #1 goal is to build trust, not to close them on the Zoom event.

The Best Top-producer Recruiting Script Ever!

Ask any real estate recruiter and they will tell you their greatest challenge is recruiting Top Producers. This is because the other recruiting techniques often don’t resonate with someone who has their own processes and systems, has a great personal brand, and already has tons of business.

As we discussed earlier in this article, Top Producers are attracted to three things: opportunities, recognition, and compensation. Therefore, the secret to recruiting Top Producing agents is to treat them differently than the other agents … because they’ve earned it.

Be direct, clear, and concise. Don’t be shy: Either pick up the phone or walk into their office. An email, text, or IM doesn’t work for this script.

I am sure, just like them, you are wondering what the opportunity is, right?

Well, that is completely up to you to decide. The opportunity could be the chance to meet someone influential in the industry, or the chance to have an amazing experience to show you recognize them, or the opportunity to join your organization at the ground floor before it goes to the next level. Whatever the opportunity is, this script will help you get them there.

The Best Recruiting Objection Handlers

No ultimate guide to recruiting agents can be complete without addressing the common objections real estate agents have when being recruited. Remember when recruiting, you are playing the long game. You are likely going to be in business for more than just a few years, so it is important not to burn relationships by trying to close them when they’re not ready, or by being too pushy.

Therefore, these objection handlers are to be used when speaking to an agent who you believe is a fit for your team or brokerage. If you overuse objection handlers, you can come across as insensitive to them and they may not want to meet with you in the future.

That being said, here is a list of the most common real estate recruiting objections and how to handle them.

Most Common Real Estate Recruiting Objections

I don’t want to move at this time. (Too busy.)

I am loyal to my Broker/Office. (I’m happy where I am at.)

I don’t want to leave my friends.

I don’t want to deal with the hassle of changing companies.

I don’t know how I can support myself without leads. (My broker gives me leads.)

Your company costs more than I pay now. (I don’t want to pay ______.)

I think I could sell more homes if I were with a better-known company.

Key Takeaways: The Ultimate Guide to Recruiting Real Estate Agents to Your Team or Brokerage

All teams and brokerages will lose agents over time. You must have a plan to recruit agents in order to grow or even just maintain your market share. Ultimately, your success in recruiting agents lies in your ability to clearly communicate to the right type of agents the services your team or brokerage provides.

Your script is the first step in narrowing down the field of agents in your territory. A good script is direct and to the point. It attracts or repels, allowing you to quickly sort the agents who are a good fit from the agents who are not.

I hope this guide serves as a starting point in your success in recruiting agents to your team or brokerage.

Over to You

What did you think of our Ultimate Guide to Recruiting? What would you like more coverage of? Let us know in the comments.