2 Recruiting Mistakes Killing Your Real Estate Brokerage (Do THIS Instead!)

Here’s a question I get almost every day from people who think they need to start recruiting to grow their business.

As a real estate brokerage owner or team leader, the only way to grow profitability is by increasing the number of agents working for you.

You have to switch hats. Many of you are coming from being top-producing agents, where your focus is on personal production. But when you move to the brokerage side, it’s no longer just about your production—it’s about where production comes from.

Production doesn’t come from one, two, or even ten agents. It comes from a team of agents working under you. Your customers are no longer buyers and sellers. As a brokerage owner or team leader, your customers are agents.

If you want to grow, you need more customers—more agents. If you stay stagnant with the same number of agents, you won’t just fail to grow; you’ll become less profitable over time. Inflation is constantly eating away at your profit margins. It’s grow or die. Expanding your agent base is crucial.

Now, I often hear people looking for an easy way to recruit. Let me give you two examples of what doesn’t work.

First, hiring a third-party company—whether based in the Philippines, Mexico, Canada, or even the U.S.—to make cold recruiting calls for you. Who responds to these calls? Usually, only new agents or low-level producers. Experienced agents almost never take these calls seriously.

If you want to recruit at a high level, you have to treat it at a high level. You need to be the one making those calls.

Put yourself in their shoes. If you’re a $5M, $10M, or $20M producer, and you get a cold call from a third-party recruiter, you’re hanging up. But if the brokerage owner calls you and says:

"Jim, I just want to say I appreciate what you're doing in the market. I see you’re up 22% over last year. Your negotiation and offer-writing skills are impressive. I’d love to sit down and show you how we can help you grow even further. Would you be open to a conversation?"

That’s a completely different experience.

So, don’t outsource recruiting to third-party cold callers. Own the process. Take responsibility. If you want your company to grow, you personally have to recruit.

Now, there is one exception: an internal recruiter.

If you have someone inside your company working alongside you, this can be successful. Think of it like a headhunter role.

For example, if an internal recruiter calls and says:

"Hey, I work side by side with Jim. We were just talking about who the movers and shakers are in the market, and you came up. He’d love to meet with you."

That’s a completely different message. It’s warm, personalized, and credible because that recruiter is part of your team.

The second mistake? Push-button recruiting.

This is when you download the entire MLS and put agents on a generic drip campaign, thinking, I recruited today. No, you didn’t. That doesn’t work.

High-level agents can spot a mass email from a mile away. If you’re an $8M, $10M, or $15M producer and you get a generic, impersonal recruiting email, do you even read it? No. You delete it immediately.

Successful recruiting requires personalized outreach—emails, texts, phone calls, video messages. High-level agents respond to authentic communication, not spam.

If you want coaching like this every day, schedule a discovery call with me below, and we’ll talk about how to grow your company in your market.

Schedule your free discovery call here: https://www.erealestatecoach2.com/real-estate-brokerage-coaching-2024

And when you sign up, you’ll be talking directly with me. I’d love to connect and discuss your business.

Have a great day and good selling!