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During the early coronavirus-pandemic years, agents left their real estate brokerages for many reasons: Higher splits, recruiting incentives or even just to work more closely with a friend at another company.
But now, as home transactions are fewer and farther between, agents find themselves chasing value again in the form of reliable systems, marketing and lead-generation tools.
And it’s a critical part of how brokerages are growing, Corey Hasting, an Engel & Völkers broker-owner in Jacksonville, argued Wednesday at Inman Connect Las Vegas.
“If you have your stuff in order, if you have all the systems and you can sell it that way, it’s easy to recruit right now,” Hasting said.
Hasting’s operation opened in 2018 with zero agents. Today, 135 agents work out of six locations. They’re on track to record more than $1 billion in sales volume this year, he said.
That growth was largely fueled by creating the support infrastructure that would appeal to top-performing agents in his Florida markets, then focusing on recruiting from that top tier, he said. It’s also ensured the brokerage has been protected from some of the bigger drops in revenue seen across most of the country as mortgage rates spiked over the past year-and-a-half.
“Let’s say the average agent is down 25 percent” in sales volume, Hasting said. “Our level of agents may be down 10 percent or not down at all. Usually when times are tough, the cream rises to the top. So the biggest thing I tell people is go after the right agents, and they’re the ones who will soar through a down market.”
But recruiting is only one way to grow a brokerage in a down market.
“Looking at the landscape from our vantage point, our goal is to help our broker-owners grow through mergers and acquisitions — and grow in bulk — as opposed to recruiting one agent at a time,” said Peter Luft, vice president for franchise sales at RE/MAX.
Luft says his focus is on helping franchise owners acquire other companies through a combination of funding, incentives and other initiatives. For many broker-owners, he believes, this approach is more achievable than merely setting a goal of recruiting the top agents in a given market.
“I think every broker-owner would love to have a company built with just the top 50 percent of people in the industry,” Luft said. “I’d love to see NAR [membership] drop from 1.56 million down to a million or 800,000 people who are really solid performers. But the reality is, that’s not our industry.”
As brokerages consolidate, their agents begin to benefit from more ancillary services. And their brokers, in turn, begin to find recruiting easier, he said.
Regardless of the approach it takes to get there, both panelists agreed on the importance of having ample support in place so that top-producing agents can focus on what they do best.
“Agents are really good at a lot of things, but they’re not always good at everything,” Hasting said. “And so we want to streamline their business so that they’re only doing money-producing activities.
“Let us worry about the marketing, let us worry about the social media, let us worry about everything.”
