Recruiting real estate agents is a simple 3 step process: Prospecting for appointments, booking appointments, and conducting appointments.
But why is it that recruiting real estate agents seem to be the most difficult task for all team leaders, managers, and brokers? In any industry, finding the right people to put on your team is the single most important factor in determining a business’s success. This is especially true in the real estate industry, where the success of the team leader is completely reliant on the success of the real estate agents that are working for them in their company.
So how can brokers and team leaders master the art of recruiting real estate agents to their business in such a high attrition industry like real estate? The one thing that separates the few high-level real estate recruiters that are recruiting real estate agents to their brokerage with great success versus the majority of brokers and team leaders who are struggling to recruit even one agent a month is their skill set.
Old ways of recruiting real estate agents like mass email, cold calling, and direct marketing require very little skillsets and yield very minimal results. Most real estate agent recruiters are finding their marketing dollars wasted by recruiting random agents to their company who are not producing any income for their business and actually end up becoming a liability. The same skillsets that have produced the lucrative results for successful real estate agents can not create the dream lifestyle of freedom and abundance that these agents are looking for when they decide to transition into a team leader or brokerage owner role.
In order for ambitious real estate entrepreneurs to create the high-level lifestyle that they want that only a few people in the real estate industry have achieved, they have to put an equal amount of value into the marketplace. It is no secret that real estate team leaders, growth leaders, and brokerage owners are the ones that are in pursuit of a more favorable, less time-intensive, higher income, and higher freedom lifestyle than the average real estate agent, and high-demand lifestyles require high-demand skillsets.
In this day and age where technology is becoming more prominent, having non-replaceable, valuable skillsets are what is going to separate the successful entrepreneurs and the ones that fail. We are paid accordingly to the skill sets we have, so it is important to not only identify but also master the ones that are most valuable to the marketplace.
In this article, we are going to cover the 6 different skill sets that you need to master for recruiting real estate agents to your team, brokerage, or company. These six skill sets are prospecting, inviting, presenting, closing, follow-up, and leadership.
As a final note, before you dive into this article, I want to impress upon you the idea that recruiting real estate agents only requires you to do 3 things: prospect for appointments, set appointments, and conduct the appointments. The skills that we are going to cover in this article will help you to accomplish those 3 goals more efficiently. \Instead of covering specific details as to what exact steps you need to take to build an agent recruiting pipeline, we are going to cover the overall principles of recruiting real estate agents in general that works no matter what system or strategy you are using or what brokerage or team model that you have to offer.
Table of Contents
The 6 Skillsets to Master for Recruiting Real Estate Agents
- Prospecting
- Inviting
- Presenting
- Closing
- Follow Up
- Leadership
1) Prospecting
The very first skill set that you need to master for recruiting real estate agents to your company is prospecting. Prospecting is the act of grabbing the attention of your potential leads through inbound reactive or outbound proactive strategies.
Real estate brokers and team leaders that come from a sales background understand the power of prospecting. You need the ability to first grab a prospect’s attention first to then convert them into a potential client, customer, or recruit in order to have a business at all. This is especially important in recruiting real estate agents. You have to first start conversations with potential agents in order to begin the recruiting process where you can then vet the agent, qualify them, then recruit them to your team.
There are 2 types of prospecting strategies. Inbound reactive and outbound proactive. Both are effective strategies when it comes to recruiting real estate agents. In a well-rounded recruiting plan there needs to be a mix of both strategies.
Inbound reactive prospecting strategies are methods of prospecting that require you to create and post content on platforms that will drive prospects to you. This is most commonly used on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Google, and YouTube, but has also been applied in the past in the form of billboards and signs, and commercials.
Inbound prospecting gives you the best return on time because once you create a piece of content it is then made available to your prospects whether you are doing work or not. In other words, you are doing one set of work in the present to yield multiple sets of results in the future.
You can leverage inbound prospecting for recruiting real estate agents in 2 different ways. Through paid ads or organic marketing. While paid advertisement yields faster results to generate more prospects, it is not as sustainable or scaleable as building an online presence or brand that potential agent recruits are drawn to. Also, be aware of the local real estate agent recruiting laws as well your brokerage’s policy if you run a team, as some may disallow paid advertisement for the purpose of recruiting agents.
Outbound proactive prospecting is when you are actively reaching out to potential prospects that you have identified either through social media or in your sphere of influence or through other mediums. This strategy requires you to have better communication skills but can yield the most results in the fastest time.
In the beginning, most new team leaders or broker-owners should spend some time recruiting real estate agents by proactively reaching out to prospects while they build up their content so they can bring in more prospects through reactive means. Communication is key when it comes to outbound prospecting, especially conversation starters and piquing interest and curiosity.
Piquing Interest and Curiosity
As you begin to reach out to more agents in your proactive prospecting or conducting discovery calls with agents that are interested in working with you, you will learn that the number one skillset in prospecting that you need to master is piquing interest and creating curiosity.
When you first start talking to an agent prospect, you will not have enough time to explain the benefits of your brokerage or team model in one 15-30min sitting. The number one mistake that most recruiters make is jumping into their value presentation in their very first contact with the agent prospect. In your first call with an agent, your one and only job is to pique enough curiosity and interest in the agent’s mind so that you have the chance to invite them to sit down with you for at least 1 hour with their undivided attention to take a look at your value presentation.
It is unrealistic to think that you will be able to convince an agent to partner or join with your team in the first 5-10 minutes of the conversation when your prospect still has no idea as to what is it about your team that might add value to their business. So your first task as a recruiter is to create enough interest in your prospects so that they are open to seeing the presentation of how your team or brokerage operates.
2) Inviting
Once you’ve created enough interest in your agent prospect, your next job is to invite them to sit down and see a full presentation on your team or brokerage. This can be a live presentation done in person or on zoom or a pre-recorded webinar or video. So the second skill set that you need to master when recruiting real estate agents is inviting.
Like I mentioned earlier, recruiting real estate agents only requires 3 steps, prospecting for appointments, setting appointments, and conducting appointments. Inviting is the setting appointments portion of the 3 step process.
The most important thing to remember when setting appointments is the law of consistency. This states that once a person commits to something verbally or mentally, they are more likely to carry out that action later on. So with that being said, it is extremely important for you to skillfully ask for commitments from your prospects when recruiting real estate agents.
Find ways that you can have your prospects verbally commit to join you on a presentation or to watch a value video. The best way to do so is to get them to state that they have no other commitments during the time of a live presentation. If you are inviting the agent prospect to view a value video, ask them what specific time they would be willing to set aside and commit to watching the video and follow up with them immediately after that time. This way, it is much more likely that the prospect will actually show up to a live presentation or view your value video.
Another great way to increase your show-up rate is to confirm appointments with your prospects one or two hours out from the appointment time. Send the prospect a confirmation message or confirm with them one or two hours away from the presentation that they will be showing up to the call or meeting. This way, you are reinforcing their previous commitment that will stay consistent with what they have said, which is to attend your presentation or view your value video.
On top of creating consistency with your prospects, another inviting skill set that is vital to recruiting real estate agents is creating scarcity. Once your prospect is interested to learn more about working with you, you have to set the standard that it is an opportunity for the agent to work with you instead of feeling like you are chasing them down to do you a favor.
You do this by creating scarcity. Instead of asking prospects to attend a presentation, it is much more effective to frame the event by creating an opportunity for the agent. Make it clear that the presentation is for serious agents only, and that if they are committed then you should be expecting them to be present with their undivided attention at the presentation.
Recruiting real estate agents is not low ticket sales, you are not asking potential customers to buy a product from you once. Recruiting real estate agents is about creating partnerships with other real estate entrepreneurs that can be mutually beneficial for both you and the agent. So instead of feeling like you have to chase after your prospects, there should always be mutual interest between both you and the agent with varying levels of interest during the entire recruiting process.
The last thing to remember when inviting prospects to view your team or brokerage’s model is to use a third party. When you use a third party or present the information with a partner, it creates social proof that other successful leaders in the industry have benefited from partnering with you and your team. When using a third party or presenting with a partner, always edify the other party and highlight their accomplishments when you are inviting the prospect.
3) Presenting
The third essential skill set to recruiting real estate agents is presenting. This is the actual process of presenting the brokerage or team model to your prospective agents. When presenting to agents you need a rehearsed presentation that you can conduct anytime and anywhere that you need to be completely familiar with.
When conducting a value presentation on your team or brokerage, you must be able to highlight the key talking points of your model and introduce them in the very beginning of the presentation in order to frame the presentation. You do this by letting the prospects know exactly what you are going to cover, the sequence you are covering them in, and why each point is important. Although presenting your team or company’s actual real estate model is the longest part of the recruiting process, it should not include any fluff or irrelevant information so your agents are not getting confused and focusing on the wrong points.
The second step to conducting a high converting presentation for real estate agent recruiting is to keep your prospects engaged for as long as possible during the duration of the presentation. The way to do this is to ask questions throughout your presentations to keep the audience engaged in a conversational manner rather than have them sit through the presentation and passively take in information.
When you are giving your recruiting presentations, think of yourself as educating your prospects on either new information or a new way of explaining old information. Your agent prospects are essentially learning a new model or a new way of doing business in real estate, and most importantly, learning about how you and your specific team can help them with that. Learning is not a spectator sport, people learn the best when they are active in the process versus only taking in information without having to reflect on or expand on it in their own thinking.
So the best way for you to ensure that your prospects are actually learning about your business model is to actively engage them by asking questions for them to reflect on so that your prospects are actively learning about your team or business model.
4) Closing
Now that you have created enough interest in your prospects to invite them to a presentation, and your agent prospects have seen the presentation of your real estate team or brokerage’s business model, it is now time to set your closing appointments or your objection handling appointments. Usually, the best time to set a closing appointment is BEFORE the presentation after you have successfully invited your agent prospects to join you on a presentation. This follows the law of consistency that we talked about previously where you will have a much higher success rate if you are able to get your prospect to commit to something beforehand.
After you have invited your agents to a recruiting presentation, ask them what would be a good time for a follow-up appointment. This way you are assuming the close and follow up before the actual presentation so that you will not have to chase your prospect after the presentation phase to close them to your company.
When you are conducting your real estate agent recruiting closing appointments, what you are essentially doing is handling the agent’s objections and negotiating with the agent on why they would benefit by joining your team or company. The best way to do that is to gather as much data as you possibly can from that agent and identify their pain points so you can move them away from their pain and towards pleasure.
When you are negotiating with your agent prospects make sure that you are not deviating from your own team or company goals and core values. This means that you should not be changing the way that your team is run just because one or a few prospects ask for these changes. If they are not aligned with what you currently have to offer and plan to expand on into the future, then they are not in alignment with your vision of the ideal agent at your team or company.
Negotiation is different from haggling. You are not disputing any issue with your prospects and changing your team and the way it is run and compromising your goals. Negotiating is collaborative and requires you to empathize with the other party in order to better help them solve their current problems. An agent will not agree to entertain seeing a new real estate team or brokerage model unless they are having major issues with their current brokerage or seeking new opportunities. And an agent does not seek new opportunities unless they are stagnant in their career with no clear expansion opportunities in their current business.
The best way to recruit real estate agents is to let them recruit themselves. Ask them questions about their business the way it is currently instead of making statements about how your team or brokerage can solve that issue. Instead of making a close-ended statement about a perk at your team or company, identify that advantage then identify the pain point your agent prospect has that is aligned with that advantage and ask them how they plan to solve that problem in their current business.
Anchoring
When you are at the end of your closing appointments and are getting ready for the close, make sure you anchor your point with your prospect by reversing the pressure back onto the prospect instead of feeling like you have to ask for the close in a standoffish way. The most difficult part of recruiting real estate agents or in any other sales loop is to go for the close, but it is also the skill that separates the most successful recruiters from the rest because it is the one task that yields results.
Instead of asking an agent to join your team or company, ask the prospect if they see any reason why they should not join your team or company right away. This accomplished 2 goals. First, if the prospect can not think of any reasons, then it is only logical for them to join your team or brokerage, again using the law of consistency. Second, if they do state a reason, it then becomes a chance for you to not only identify their major objections but also handle them and address them as well.
Of all the real estate recruiting skills, closing is the one that yields actual results, because it is the final commitment that the prospect makes before onboarding to your team. And it is much easier for someone to commit to saying no than it is for them to commit to saying yes. That’s why asking the prospect if they see any reason why they should not join your team or company is the easiest way to get a commitment from an agent prospect.
5) Follow Up
The fortune is in the follow-up and that is true for real estate agent recruiting as well. You are not going to get every prospect committed to joining your brokerage or team the first time you contact them about partnering with you. That is why follow-up is so important so that you can be front of mind for that prospect when they are ready to make a change in their business. The most important thing to remember about follow-up when recruiting real estate agents is timing.
As a real estate agent, you understand how important timing is when it comes to following up with your buyer or seller prospects. If you call them the moment they decide that they want to sell their home, then you are most likely going to get that listing agreement. The only problem is, you have no idea of knowing when that is, that is why the agent that follows up with the prospect the most consistently is the one that is going to eventually match up their follow-up timing with the prospect’s decision to sell and get that listing.
The same is true for recruiting real estate agents. You will hardly ever know when an agent is committed to making a change in their business and change brokerages. But if you follow up with them consistently over a long period of time, you will eventually be able to match their timing with yours and be at their front of mind when they are ready to move.
It is said that a major life shift happens in a person’s life every 90 days, if that’s the case then it is more likely than not that a real estate agent will either have a major life or business shift every quarter and be open to making a change in their business. If you have not been consistently following up with this agent week after week or month after month, then you will not be able to capitalize on any shifts happening in their business when the time comes.
Follow Up Schedule
When an agent prospect rejects an offer for them to join your team, you need to set up either an automatic or manual follow-up schedule that consistently contacts them for a period of time. Whether if that is month to month or once every 2 months or once every week depends on the temperature of the lead and the time that has passed since your first pitch to that prospect.
In the beginning, it is better to follow up with the lead more consistently as they are still trying to make up their mind and come to a definitive conclusion. A follow-up contact once a week is a good schedule to go off of until the agent has definitively told you that they are not open to making a move at the moment. Then the next step is to move into a month-to-month follow-up schedule, or if you are more aggressive, a follow-up every two weeks.
Lastly, after a substantial amount of time has passed, you will want to move that agents follow up to once every 2 months so that way, you are able to touch base with them at least once every quarter of the year.
Using Attrition Rates in Real Estate to Your Advantage
The very last resort that you want to use when it comes to following up with your real estate agent recruiting prospects is to once again apply the law of consistency and ask the prospect for a verbal commitment.
If your prospect has shown no interest in your team or company, the best way to end your conversations with them is to ask them to contact you first if they ever do decide to make a change in their business. If they are willing to commit to that then they will most likely be consistent with their word and when the time does come that they are ready to make a change, then they will contact you first to explore the option to join your team or company.
Real estate is an attrition-based business, but this can work both against you and for you. Because agents are likely to switch brokerages, then it works to your advantage if you are able to have an agent prospect commit to contacting you first if they ever do consider a change, because more likely than not, they will consider a change sometime in their career, whether they know it now or not.
6) Leadership
The final skill set that team leaders, brokers, and managers must master in their real estate agent recruiting business is leadership. To build a real estate team or brokerage that can sustain itself long term, not only do you have to recruit agents but you also have to factor in how you can one day stop recruiting real estate agents and actually live the life that you set out to create. In order for a team leader or broker to run a real estate agent recruiting business without having to actually personally recruit agents, they must develop leadership skills to create duplication and retention in their business.
To be a great leader you must be able to inspire your team to not only follow you in your business but also inspire them to create their own lasting impact and outgrow you as the broker or team leader. If you want to stop recruiting real estate agents one day then you must be able to retain the current agents you have while also creating and duplicating new leaders within your team or company so they can replicate the success that you have had and take on delegation from you.
That is why it is important to not only recruit agents to your team that you think will do great but also to recruit leaders or recruit agents that have the potential to become great leaders. Take the time to work with the agents on your team closely and figure out who your leaders will be, this way you can begin to set the expectation that once you decide to take a step back from the real estate agent recruiting side of the business, there will be one or a few other agents on your team that can step into a leadership role.
Like I mentioned earlier, recruiting real estate agents only requires 3 steps: prospecting for appointments, booking appointments, and conducting appointments. When you begin to develop your leadership skills, you can then spend the time to duplicate or delegate these 3 tasks to other members of your team so that you are extending yourself and duplicating yourself and your efforts outside yourself to expand your business and grow at a multiplied pace while your own personal workload actually decreases.
This is what’s called a forced multiplier, which means that it is a task that yields exponentially more results than other tasks that require the same amount of work.
Bottom Line
Recruiting real estate agents to your team or brokerage is an extremely simple process if you follow the system that the only things that matter are prospecting for appointments, booking appointments, and conducting appointments. Although simple, recruiting in real estate is not easy. But like anything else in business or life, your own skillsets and value determine the difficulty of accomplishing any task. So the most important things to master as a team leader or broker are skillsets because once you have mastered your skills, any system or strategy you put in place will work like magic.
To learn more about how you can improve your recruiting and business skillsets and work with some of the top team leaders in the real estate industry, click here.