There are three ways, and only three ways, to grow your real estate business:
With 50% less homes selling in some markets, it's been a tough couple years for increasing # of transaction sides.
It's also been tough for net commission. Price points aren't going up and there is more pressure to lower commissions than ever.
But for bringing in new agents?
This market has been an absolute goldmine for some of our teams bringing in new agents. I've spent the last decade heavily entrenched in hundreds of real estate businesses—and I don't think I've ever seen a riper field for recruiting.
While it's the best market I've seen in a while for recruiting, it's absolutely an unfair market. It hasn't been kind to everyone.
Tough times test your culture.
Most of our Sisu clients already had this dialed in years ago, but in the crazy Covid years of 2020-2022 we saw teams recruiting heavily on two value propositions:
It's not that they intentionally went out and said "let's recruit on a better split". Definitely not. But when you got deeper into their recruiting process, you saw more and more that that's what they were leaning on to get the deal done. Because there wasn't enough depth there.
When you lead with these two value propositions, you tend to attract a certain type of person. Someone who wants an easy button.
So when the fire comes, and the market gets tough... your culture gets put to the test. The people who joined you for the promise of "easy" will leave you or wash out as soon as it's not easy.
Some of these teams were not built on a sound cultural foundation—and now that the storm is here, we see them washing away.
We ran an analysis (both quantitative and qualitative) on the teams in our Sisu ecosystem who have grown tremendously in 2023 and into 2024.
We looked at things like:
One thing is glaringly obvious across our research.
The teams recruiting the majority of the agents, who also have high agent retention numbers... they recruit on one thing. And one thing, almost exclusively.
Leadership.
In my mind, there's really only two buckets of agents in this industry.
There are agents who want easy.
And there are agents who want more.
The beauty of recruiting on leadership is that you're sending a signal to the market that only attracts the Agent Who Wants More, and scares away the Agent Who Wants Easy.
That's why these handful of teams are dominating this recruiting market. They're taking the lion share of those dedicated agents, Agents Who Want More, because those agents are looking for leadership in tough times.
The weird thing about leadership is that leaders have all kinds of different builds.
You have really outgoing leaders and you have really introverted leaders.
You have experienced leaders and you have young leaders.
You have big idea leaders and you have fine details leaders.
There's really not a through-line when it comes to personality type for leadership. I believe there is really only one reason why somebody would choose to follow a leader.
People follow leaders who have a proven track record of Getting People What They Want
So how do you send leadership signals to the market?
You PROVE that you are that leader. Prove that you are getting agents more, and you will attract the Agents Who Want More.
In our research, we found some really interesting things from across the Sisu community.
The leaders who are dominating with agent attraction are relentless with sending these leadership signals to the market via their social media pages.
Three excellent examples that come to mind are Dj & Lindsey Dellasala out of Florida, The Utah Life in Utah (Spring Bengtzen and Justin Nelson) and Team Borham (Jeff Borham), also out in Florida.
We ran numbers across our database to analyze the top teams when it comes to agent attraction in the past 12 months. DJ & Lindsey were at the top with an insane 153 agents added in the last 12 months. Utah Life brought in 87 and Team Borham brought in 63, putting all three of these teams in the very upper percentiles of recruiting teams in the world.
Some examples that we love, taken from each of their social media profiles:
Show people you can get them What They Want, and they'll follow you. But you've gotta be the real deal.
So at the top of your funnel, you're sending a message "we get agents more even in this tough market".
As people move down the funnel, you need to prove to them that you are the real deal—that it's not all some show for social media.
So how do you do that?
I'll tell you how our top Sisu teams are doing it.
Show Them The Money!
A great recruiting appointment has three objectives:
Sisu clients have the most advanced accountability dashboards in the industry. Once they've satisfied points #1 and #2, they'll flash a dashboard like this one to start proving #3:
This is an agent I have worked with personally. 265k GCI in his first full year. Pacing at 400k+ GCI this year.
I'd probably then zoom in on this:
Top numbers are actuals. Bottom numbers are goals.
I'm trying to communicate that "this is a science".
You come in, follow our processes, and you get a certain outcome. The only question is how bad you want it, because if you want it bad enough, I can take you there.
For the right agent, this is the sweetest recruiting message you can possibly deliver.
You're proving that you get people What They Want. Numbers speak louder than words.
And if you're not on Sisu, and want to see how our Sisu teams are dominating....
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