Your brokerage business is growing and you need new agents. Or, an established agent leaves and must be replaced. Both scenarios necessitate recruiting and training agents you hope will become top producers.

Moreover, neither scenario is typically a one-and-done deal. For large, successful brokerages, recruiting and training are continual efforts. The average real estate agent has been tenured at his or her firm for four years, according to research from the National Association of Realtors. Agents come and go. Successful agents may switch brokerages, and promising new agents enter the profession. Both must be recruited, and both must be developed to turn them into producers for your brokerage.

How do you find the best candidates, and what can you do to keep them well beyond that four-year average? Here are some tips on recruiting and training outstanding real estate agents:

Smart Recruiting

Perhaps the most basic way to attract great talent to your brokerage is to market yourself the right way, via the right channels. Real estate is an interpersonal business, so blasting an email that says, “Hang your license with us and become rich!” to every agent in your address book will not impress. Effective recruiting requires a little bit of legwork and a lot of one-on-one conversations. Strategies such as training seminars and happy hours are also good ways to meet potential agents, but ultimately, the direct conversations you have at such events will make or break the initial relationship.

Social Strategy

Of course, no discussion about recruiting real estate agents would be complete without exploring how social media can help.LinkedIn is a great source for finding, networking, recruiting, and interacting with real estate talent; keeping an active company page with helpful articles and news gives prospects a place to go to learn more about your business—especially in the early stages of their interest. However, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram pages are great tools for recruiting real estate agents as well. Just regularly posting to your accounts is a good step, but you should also leverage all of these platforms to directly engage potential candidates.  

Train for More Transactions

Once you get real estate agents hired, giving them opportunities for enhancing their skills becomes a priority. Specifically, how do you enable and empower agents to achieve more transactions? Here are some strategies to consider:

• Provide training resources, such as classes, seminars, videos, and documents, to encourage your agents to keep their learning current.
• Leverage technology to streamline onboarding processes so new agents don’t require months to learn the ropes, but instead can hit the ground running.
• Leverage the same technology to simplify transactions, compliance, communication, and collaboration. The subsequent efficiency fosters better results and frees up time for agents to participate in more training.

Ultimately, highly trained agents are highly productive agents. This not only increases profitability and retention, but also enhances your reputation as a successful brokerage that agents will want to work for. That leads us to the next point …

Differentiate Yourself

Competition for the top real estate talent and promising new agents alike can be fierce. When you are interviewing a candidate, the candidate likely will be (and should be) interviewing you in return. Making a good impression at every stage of the recruiting process is important, but doing so here, near the conclusion of the candidate’s journey, is critical. Therefore, differentiate yourself by highlighting everything that makes your brokerage great and unique. This can encompass some of the things we’ve already talked about and include:

• Training/development opportunities
• Agent-friendly commission structure
• Advanced technology
• Available marketing tools and resources

The culture of your business should also be a key selling point. Many real estate agents, especially the younger generation of agents, want to be part of something more than just deals and commissions. If your brokerage can offer a unique culture, be sure to highlight that in every facet of recruiting and training.

Franchise for Success

Independent brokerages can try assembling all these resources to recruit and train real estate agents on their own, but it’s a tall order. On the technology side, for example, trying to cull together brokerage management software from multiple third-party sources can leave you with a system that doesn’t communicate with itself and is difficult to use. A better strategy is to franchise with a partner dedicated to helping brokerages realize increased success. The best franchisors provide training resources, technology, and support to help brokerages not only attract great talent, but also keep those agents for the long term. Great brokerages have great agents; the right franchise can make both even better.