Realtor Recruiting: Build it, and they will come. Yeah right. In this article I explain my Realtor Recruiting program and how I recruited 120 agents in 12 months.
Here’s How I Recruited 120 Real Estate Agents in 12 Months
In 2009, I started a boutique real estate brokerage in Sacramento, California, with one of our clients. She had just upgraded her Salesperson license to a Broker license, and She was looking to leave Prudential, and open her own shop. I was looking for a testing ground for new real estate marketing tactics. So, we gave it a go. I would run the marketing, and she would run the real estate side of the business.
We believed that agents would join us because we were influential and well known. We thought if we opened a brokerage they would all contact us wanting to work with us. Well, they didn’t. And at the end of the first year, we were at roughly the same agent count as we were the day we opened.
My partner said to me, “We need to recruit some more agents, and me cold calling them, or ‘wining and dining‘ them just isn’t working. I need you to put a marketing campaign together to generate some interest.”
“Where do I start with this?” I thought to myself.
Get A Free Consultation
See How We Get You REAL Results.
SEM – Unlock massive amounts of traffic with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) using a combined SEO/PPC strategies with clear ROI. See REAL Results
SOCIAL / EMAIL – our team creates epic content that will get shared, get links, and attract traffic back to your website for lead generation.
CRM – Tie all of your marketing efforts together, track your contacts across all channels, automate follow-up, and measure REAL results.
I knew immediately that in order to start A Realtor Recruiting effort, I was going to have to start building our Recruiting Broker Brand
The key to success here was to give the offering a voice of it’s own. I started with consideration of what attracted our existing agents and engineered the brand from there.
- Flat Fee – 100% Commission with $49.99/month fee. $495 Transaction Fee + $120 Document Archival Fee.
- Traditional – 80/20 Commission Split – No Monthly Fees, No other fees.
- In-house Leads – Given to agents in exchange for a 30% (Off-the-Top, Only available to Traditional Agents).
- CRM – Built internally and provided for free to agents. All leads routed in CRM
- Transaction Management – For contracts files, had to be used in order for agent to get paid
- Transaction Coordination – Available in-house for a fee. Document Archival Fee waitved if agent used our TC.
- REO Listings – Available to agents to hold open (or sell)
- Investment Properties – Flip properties I owned that agents could hold open (or sell)
I took all of the above and build a recruiting website to demonstrate and explain the offering in depth. The idea was that everything an agent needed to know was on the website, and the offering itself was simple, diverse, and compelling.
Let's Grow Your Business
The Realtor Recruiting Marketing Strategy
I used the following channels for my Realtor Recruiting Campaign:
Realtor Recruiting by Email Marketing
My secret weapon, since I started my first Real Estate Website Design company back in 2004, has been my email database. In the beginning I would spend my evenings, and weekends copying and pasting the contact information of agents from the roster page of their brokerage websites.
In 2006, we were involved in building the first iteration of .mykwagent.com websites. Using Wolfnet IDX we build out agent websites for Keller Willilams agents. From here a number of data partnerships grew, and eventually, with access to data from over 400 MLS systems nationwide, we maintain a comprehensive database of almost every real estate agent in the United States.
Finally, I put together a HTML email flyer with the sole purpose of driving traffic to my real estate recruiting website. This email was then blasted out an email to the, then, 8,500 real estate agents in the Sacramento Metrolist MLS.
Then, WHAM! The new agent sign-ups just started flowing in!
Let's Grow Your Business
Realtor Recruiting on Social Media Platforms
Across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram I created a set of ads, similar to the email, to drive brand reinforcement and traffic to the website. If they didn’t see the email, or if they unsubscribed from the email, they would still see my ads on every social media channel.
Then, I created an audience for my ads that said show it to anyone within the Metro area with the job title Realtor, Real Estate Salesperson, and a bunch of other criteria.
Finally, to really hit ’em hard, I uploaded my list of 8,500+ Salespersons within Sacramento Metrolist MLS to Facebook and said show any of these people all my ads, as often as possible.
The result was a 10x increase in new signups from just the email marketing alone.
My business partner had hired 6 agents in the first year.
So, to toot my own horn, my Realtor Recruiting – Recruiting Broker Brand marketing campaign knocked it out of the park! Really, I mean, I added 120 more Realtors to our brokerage by the end of the second year.
Now, we can all agree, that’s scalable, right. This was one Metro region!
Finally, and best of all – it was all done online. It sold itself. Literally. We sold the company.
Let's Grow Your Business
What did I learn about Real Estate Agent Recruiting?
So, being a great agent, or running an outstanding team or brokerage does not, in itself, attract agents. You must have a great recruiting plan.
In conclusion, by using In this article, I’m going to share more details on my recruiting effort, and other tips I’ve picked up along the way, that allowed me to an independent brokerage from 6 to 120 agents in a year.
