What motivates today’s agent to leave or join a new real estate brokerage? If you instantly answered commission splits, you’re overlooking a new mindset that looks well beyond the paycheck. Today’s agent considers everything from cultural fit and marketing resources to productivity tools and software when selecting a new brokerage to call home.
Every real estate agent has their own motivation. Many are recruited based on attractive commission splits, but others favor brokers who offer the right tech tools or educational training. Actively listen to your job candidates to find out what motivates them. Many agents today — particularly millennials — are looking for remote and mobile-first technology that enables them to complete real estate transactions faster and more efficiently wherever they may be.
All too often real estate brokers find themselves forced to recruit when an agent leaves on short notice. In these cases, the pool of candidates is limited to whoever happens to be looking for a new brokerage at the time. Rather than compromise your standards, take the smarter approach and actively cultivate candidates before they’re even thinking of leaving their current team. Cast a wide net and look at both, up-and-coming agent as well as the seasoned agent looking to make a move.
Download this free guide to learn how brokers and team leaders can attract millennial real estate agents by better understanding the needs and wants of this generation.
On that note, consider closing your doors to clients for a night and focus on recruiting agents with a personable monthly or quarterly social event. These can take the form of happy hours or in-house speaking engagements. Such forums allow you and your staff to get to know a number of candidates in a more informal setting and build a rapport with promising agents for the future, even if they’re not actively looking to make a change now.
Maybe your brokerage offers great camaraderie among colleagues with helpful, supportive agent collaboration. Or perhaps you’re a large franchise that can provide awesome training courses, marketing and lead gen resources. Whatever it is, promote that one thing that sets your brokerage apart and really makes you special in the eyes of the type of agents you want to attract.
NYC-based Real Broker, one of the fastest growing virtual brokerages, appeals to the remote, mobile agent, while Parks Realty of Nashville, TN, has been honored as the No. 1 Top Workplace by local press for its family-friendly company culture.
Customers aren’t the only prospects canvassing the Internet for brokerages with a strong marketing presence. Promising agents looking to make their next move are also focusing attention on your online profile. Make sure you’re using strong SEO keywords in your online content (read more about content strategy) so when agents and customers search for homes for sale in your community, your brokerage name will pop up on the first page.
One easy way to spread the word quickly is by using dotloop’s branded communication feature. Brokerages who use the dotloop for Teams and Business+ platforms enjoy the added benefit of branding their account page with their logo displayed front and center. The result? Effective word-of-mouth advertising that targets your local agent community.
According to a survey by Capterra Talent Management, 94% recruiters are active on LinkedIn, though only 36% of candidates are active. The competition is fierce on this popular social channel. So why not look at less conventional forums to recruit?
Try creating a short recruiting video featuring testimonials from some of your more loyal agents, admins and customers, and post it on Facebook or YouTube. You might also look to recruit from similar sales-based and real estate-oriented industries, including the title, mortgage, escrow, insurance and financial fields.
Robust reporting and comprehensive dashboards on a streamlined transaction management platform like dotloop can help you get in front of your team’s productivity with highly refined sorts such as real-time views of active transactions versus closed accounts. Such data will enable you to track your strong performers as well as those who need more coaching. As you gain deeper visibility into those agents who are really driving your business, you’ll be in a better place to act proactively rather than reactively to changes.
Tech-minded agents are attracted to brokerages that offer technology, which integrates with their favorite CRM, marketing and accounting applications. Brokerages with fewer disconnects across departments also hum with greater efficiency.
Agents are finding having a well-integrated real estate transaction management platform like dotloop, which partners with 75+ CRM, marketing and accounting applications, helps streamline their workflow and eliminate redundant data entry. Data also suggests that agents who use integrated applications are more likely to engage with the transaction management process.
Once you’ve narrowed the candidate pool and initiated the interviewing process, make sure you track each candidate and assess them using the same, standardized criteria. Ask the same interview questions of each to ensure your polling of prospects is fair and balanced.
Of course, for all the resources you invest in recruiting great talent, all those efforts will lay to waste if your agents leave prematurely. Avoid the revolving door and retain great talent by constantly nurturing their skillsets with the right mix of ongoing training, productivity tools and robust marketing programs that close the deal and keep your agents happy for the long term.
Sometimes we think that once an agents has said “yes” to our brokerage then the recruiting process is over. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The onboarding period for real estate agents is crucial. This is the time that will reassure a candidate if they have made the right decision to join your brokerage or team. That is why making sure that your onboarding processes is seamless. This is another area where leveraging technology will go along way. There are great platforms out there – like our Onboarding Dashboard – that will help you showcase the capabilities of your internal operations and make a great first impression as you recruit more and more talent.
With dotloop Business+ and dotloop for Teams you can easily tag transactions with the lead source to create reports that tell you which channels are generating quality leads.