5 Ways Real Estate Brokers Attract the Best Talent

Are you having trouble recruiting from the fluctuating pool of real estate agents? It is believed that as many as 80 percent of real estate sales agents leave the business in their first two years.

This makes snagging good real estate agents tough for brokers. There’s been a shift in the real estate industry recently. It’s no longer just about attracting the most agents but about attracting and retaining quality agents.

Quality sales agents are in high demand. If you want to succeed at finding and keeping talent, here are five tips to help you.

1. Choose quality over quantity

Skills can be taught, but a winning personality makes the difference. Instead of recruiting the most sales agents, focus your energy on looking for quality real estate agents. That’s easier said than done, of course. What are traits that indicate someone will prove to be a good fit for your business? It’d be nice if there were a magic bullet answer. But since there isn’t, we recommend assessing potential hires the way startup founders do. Nothing is more crucial to a startup’s success than its employees, who often have to wear many hats and have extreme flexibility with hours and creative direction. Sound at all familiar?

In an article for Forbes, Neil Patel, a start-up and marketing genius who is well admired across the Internet, recommended the following tips for hiring in startups that you can also apply when hiring real estate agents:

• Action takers. They don’t sit around waiting to be told what to do.
• When building any type of business, you will face obstacles. Good employees—and real estate agents—find inventive ways to solve these.
• Focused on customer service. Your clients will determine whether you are in business from year to year. Good real estate agents will focus on making each client happy.

2. Find real estate agents who embrace new technology

You don’t necessarily have to hire younger agents, but when you’re assessing a fit for your brokerage moving forward make sure you’re hiring agents who feel comfortable taking advantage of new technologies. It’s particularly important that they are comfortable with tech that can benefit your business, such as cloud computing or social media.

“With its emphasis on agents’ personal touch, the real estate industry has been slow to embrace technology,” says Bloomberg in an article encouraging real estate agents to switch to the cloud. “The cloud is appealing because it can handle the back-end functions consumers don’t see: accommodating big swings in traffic caused by the business’s seasonal nature, processing millions of photos, and estimating sale prices in real-time using thousands of data points, including comparable sales.”

Find agents who feel comfortable with new technologies that will save you time and money and who have also mastered the art of the personal touch.

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3. Utilize culture

A strong company culture is vital to attracting and retaining quality real estate agents.

A report by Employee Benefit News states that 23 percent of young workers said company culture plays the biggest role in job satisfaction, and 35 percent of all employees said it has the greatest impact on morale.

A healthy culture isn’t just Christmas bonuses and happy hours. Show your employees that you care about their ideas, passions, and careers.  Define your core values and stick to them.

4. Incorporate goal-setting into your daily communications

Of course, you know that culture is important for your real estate agents. But how do you go about creating a culture that rewards your employees? There are obviously many elements that work together to produce a healthy and motivating culture. One of the important pieces of the puzzle is goal-setting.

It can be particularly difficult to set goals for new employees, especially before you have a benchmark for what they are capable of.

Inc.com suggests setting both short-term and long-term goals for new employees: six months out and 12 months out. Keep checking in on those goals along the way.

“As a manager, it is vital that you adapt and adjust goals as necessary when business warrants it or when new information becomes available,” says Lou Dubois for Inc.

5. Continue their education

As a real estate broker, you should invest time in your real estate agents’ education. This can be webinars or online or onsite classes. Encourage them to take professional development classes to strengthen their skillsets and keep up-to-date on real estate industry trends. We believe in continuing education so much that we’ve made a variety of courses for real estate professionals available at McKissock.com. Head over there and get your real estate agents to find the most valuable topics for them so they can advance your mission and their own!