How Real Estate Recruiters Can Accelerate Your Growth

Why Your Brokerage Needs Real Estate Recruiters

Having real estate recruiters is a recent approach as the solicitation of real estate agents by brokers was practically non-existent prior to 1983 when the National Association of Realtors repealed its bylaw restricting this practice. Recruiting was initially a secondary role of the brokers or office manager, who focused on recruiting new agents with little effort towards recruiting experienced agents. Priorities have changed since then such that some larger brokerages now keep a dedicated recruiter on the real estate team to bring new and experienced agents on board. The earliest recruiters were company cheerleaders who could smile and charm prospects into joining the firm, but a new profile of recruiters has emerged during the last couple of decades. These individuals are more likely to have a solid understanding of the real estate business and use metric-driven practices to standardize the recruitment process and improve its efficiency.

A real estate firm often uses a team of recruiters who specialize in new or experienced agents and may hold advanced degrees or have professional expertise in their specialty. Timelines have also changed since the early days of real estate recruitment since managers can now respond online within a short period after receiving a message on a new prospect. Accountability measures help ensure that managers follow best practices with regard to response times.

The large number of mergers and acquisitions resulting from the Great Recession of 2008 illustrated the need for innovative recruitment methods that include a centralized system for recruiting agents from multiple sources. These systems are continually evolving to add more accountability and reporting measures that allow recruiters to track their recruitment pipelines and communicate with prospects through a variety of customer relationship management systems (CRMs) like Brokerkit in addition to traditional phone calls. Technological advancements in real estate recruiting also include virtual career webinars in which prospects passively attend events that allow them to assess their careers, thus increasing the brokerage or organization’s pipeline.

Why You Need Real Estate Recruiters

Brokerages primarily hire real estate recruiters to find and recruit qualified candidates in a range of positions, including real estate agents, a call director, regional vice president, mortgage brokers, and title handlers. They generally do this by matching an applicant’s experience with the roles that are currently available within the company. At the start of the application process, recruiters will walk a candidate through the basics including things like the real estate broker job description and salary as well as training and advancement opportunities.

Recruiters attract top talent by running ads in various media and conducting outreach initiatives within their vast network that serve to generate interest in the company’s open positions. Real estate recruiters are accustomed to hiring available real estate professionals quickly before they find other opportunities, while still assessing their skills and performing background checks. Recruiters may also negotiate salary and other benefits with applicants in cases where the brokerage doesn’t set these terms for each position.

Where to Find Real Estate Recruiters

Brokerages are often able to find experienced recruiters from their own contacts or sphere of influence within their community of real estate professionals. In cases where this approach is unsuccessful, it may be necessary to retain an executive search firm or boutique search firm, ideally one that specializes in real estate. These companies typically have access to a large number of well-qualified applicants who can meet the skill and cultural requirements of a particular position. Many executive search firms are using intelligent bots to engage real estate recruiters 24/7, which can greatly increase the recruiting process. Many early communications with a candidate can now be automated, including emails, text, and voice mails.

What is your real estate recruiting missing?

Brokers should be constantly looking for ways to grow their business, which requires identifying the missing pieces in their recruiting tactics. Great company culture is essential for providing the pathways for growth that top agents expect and is becoming an increasingly important requirement for real estate professionals in recent years. Your brokerage may already have a cohesive culture that any agent would be proud to be part of, but you also need to market that culture effectively to gain agents’ attention. There is more to recruiting than just covering your real estate broker job description and salary. The combination of in-person and online recruiting helps ensure that you always present your best side to agents who may be looking for a change.

Culture is the collection of aspects of your company’s expectations, goals, values, and sense of community. Marketing your culture successfully requires you to clearly illustrate how these factors are different from every other brokerage. This could include participation in recreational activities like a picnic or professional events like conventions that help agents picture themselves in supporting roles, which is what all professionals are seeking in today’s real estate market.

Promoting your culture is particularly important for small brokerages, businesses which are typically unable to compete with larger firms on the basis of financial incentives. Instead, a small brokerage must emphasize its ability to value agents as individuals with unique strengths and weaknesses. Once you can demonstrate that your brokerage can do this effectively, you’ll never have to worry about agent recruitment.

What are some questions to ask when talking to recruiters?

Prescreening real estate recruiters is a common means of ensuring you don’t waste your time and money on recruiters or organizations that can’t deliver on their promises. The following questions can help make this determination.

“How do I know you won’t poach my hires?”

Recruiters should be willing to sign a non-compete agreement contract that prevents them from luring your new hire to another employer.

“What do you do to screen candidates before I see them?”

Recruiters should evaluate a candidate’s work history, skills, and compatibility with your brokerage before their application reaches your desk. Many brokerages these days also use personality assessments such as the DiSC to find a fit.

“Do you prepare candidates for interviews or correct their resumes”

You may not get an accurate picture of a candidate if the recruiter preps candidates for their interview. Likewise, recruiters should simply discard poorly written resumes instead of fixing them and passing them on to you.

What cool things do real estate recruiters do for prospects?

A career seminar is one of the best ways for a recruiter to attract new agents. When done properly, it creates a wide funnel for new recruits who can increase your revenue over the long term. In addition to providing information about getting a real estate license or covering the real estate broker job description and salary, a webinar also provides an opportunity to educate attendees on the services your brokerage offers. You can also post a recording of the webinar on your website, allowing prospective recruits to watch it at their convenience. GoToMeeting and Zoom are popular methods of creating webinars, especially if you’ve never made one before.

How do you stop aggressive real estate recruiters?

Real estate recruiters are often aggressive by nature, but this trait can also be a turn-off for agents who are receiving multiple contacts from the same recruiters. The term “recruiter” is somewhat of a misnomer because the best recruiters actually attract agents more than they recruit them. One way to reduce recruiters’ aggressive tendencies is to clearly outline your expectations before you hire them. You can also pay them a flat salary instead of a commission, removing their incentive to fill an open position by any means. Another tactic is to pay the commission after a new agent has been employed a certain period of time to ensure that person is a good hire.

How to Improve Your Real Estate Recruitment

Whether you are a chief executive officer, senior vice president, or a managing broker several strategies can help you overcome the current challenges in recruiting real estate professionals. The most important of these is to continually recruit, so you aren’t scrambling to find a replacement for an agent who has left suddenly. Another tip is to incentivize referrals, which is still a great hiring source due to the low cost and high chance of success. Emphasizing culture is also an effective strategy for improving recruitment, especially when you can’t differentiate your brokerage in other ways. Additional approaches for attracting agents include experimenting with ad headlines so you don’t sound like every other agency.

The Real Estate Recruiter Job Description

A real estate recruiter seeks out real estate professionals and convinces them to join a real estate company. Depending on the company, they may be responsible for filling a particular role within the company or a variety of roles. These recruiters often use methods such as mixers and open houses to attract multiple candidates at once, but they may also communicate with individual candidates. They may conduct interviews and verify backgrounds for brokerages that don’t already have a dedicated specialist to perform these tasks. Some real estate recruiters also perform research on competitors to determine competitive salaries.

What does a real estate recruiter do?

One of the primary duties for many real estate recruiters is generating leads for candidates. This task generally involves placing ads in a variety of media. Real estate companies often need to hire personnel quickly, so recruiters often rely on online platforms such as job sites and social media for leads. Once the recruiter has generated a sufficient number of leads, the next step is to identify the best candidates, with the necessary real estate experience and training needed to fill the position. Recruiters may also work with outside agencies to perform these tasks, depending on their employer’s resources. Lastly, a real estate recruiter will have some initial conversations with the candidate and cover the basics like real estate broker job salary and other information about your firm.

So you want to be a real estate recruiter?

The first step in becoming a real estate recruiter is to decide on the experience level of the real estate agents you wish to recruit, whether they’ve just obtained their licenses, are seasoned professionals, or somewhere in the middle. Next, you need to determine what you can offer them that they don’t have where they are now. You then need to contact them, which typically involves many communication methods. Real estate recruiters must also be social butterflies and professional minglers since they need to spend time in the same room as real estate agents. Finally, this job requires you to get an answer from agents as quickly as possible so you can move on to the right person for the next prospect.

Real Estate Recruiter Salary

A real estate recruiter’s salary is highly variable since it’s based on commissions to a greater extent than many other professions. ZipRecruiter reports that the average annual salary for recruiters in the United States is $57,651 as of May 5, 2020. These salaries range from $22,000 to $99,000, with the majority of positions paying between $36,000 and $75,000.

How do real estate recruiters get compensated?

The compensation of real estate recruiters largely depends on who they work for. Recruiters who work directly for a brokerage typically earn a flat salary. The compensation of independent recruiters is often based entirely on commission for the agents they recruit. Recruiters who work for a recruiting firm often receive a salary and commission.

Want to know what real estate recruiters make?

A salary site like Indeed provides current job postings that give you an idea of what real estate recruiters can expect to make. These postings include location to ensure you only consider the compensation of openings in your area. Real estate recruiters often have other titles, so you need to examine the duties of the position. You can also check out the various real estate roles in your market in salary.com to get a good understanding of compensation benchmarks.

How to Recruit Real Estate Agents

Recruiting more real estate agents can reduce the workload of your current staff and allow you to redistribute their responsibilities. Finding a direct hire doesn’t need to be an overwhelming process, provided you approach it like a marathon instead of a sprint. You need to build your recruiting pipeline before you actually need to hire anyone by using a variety of channels. You also need to understand what you’re looking for in your candidates and establish a set of broker metrics to begin your assessment. Make sure you’re ready to cover everything about your brokerage with your candidates including real estate broker job salary as well as benefits and other opportunities.

The off-season is a great time to reach out to former colleagues to see where they stand with their career development because that’s when agents most often look for opportunities. Real estate recruiting websites can also help you identify new talent, and some of them even manage the recruitment process.

Real Estate Recruiting Ideas

Defining your brokerage’s culture, mission, goals, is the first step towards developing an effective recruitment campaign to find that next direct hire or ideal candidate. The best real estate recruiting ideas include soliciting feedback after every rejection so that you can revise your strategy for the next time. You should also clearly state what makes your brokerage different from all the others in your first contact with an agent. Many agents are now active on social media, making these platforms an effective means of recruiting. Paid ads also allow you to reach agents directly by pushing your pitch towards them.

Real Estate Recruiting Software

Real estate recruiting software is an essential tool for attracting the best agents in today’s business environment. Recruiting real estate agent tools perform functions such as gathering data, planning campaigns, and developing email templates. For example, Brokerkit can help you clean your lead lists from various sources like BrokerMetrics, forming the hub of your agent growth platform with its email and text outreach capabilities. BrokerMetrics is a suite of business intelligence tools for the real estate industry that performs queries on market statistics that aren’t available in most other MLS systems. You can leverage data from a tool link BrokerMetrics for your agent outreach campaigns in Brokerkit.

Real Estate Recruiting Ads

Real estate recruiting ads now include social media, which is becoming increasingly important in the lives of real estate professionals. Your message on these platforms must be clear and powerful to ensure it gets the attention of the agents you’re trying to attract. This is your opportunity to describe what makes your brokerage unique, such as a great mentorship program, favorable commissions for new agents, or the opportunity to attend seminars from the best agents in your area. Your messages to agents on social media should also include a discussion of your brokerage’s culture, which is often the deciding factor for agents.

Recruiting Real Estate Agents Emails

Recruiting real estate agents emails must precisely target your audience since you don’t want to send an email to every agent out there. This process typically involves the use of real estate recruiting email templates, which you’ll tweak depending on the specific audience you’re targeting. At the least, the real estate agent recruiting letter you send to new licensees should be different from the one you send to seasoned professionals. Bear in mind that it’s easy to filter and delete emails, so persistence is essential for successful real estate recruiting email campaigns.

Real Estate Recruiting Scripts

Real estate recruiting scripts must quickly explain the benefits of your brokerage to the agents you’re trying to recruit. These benefits certainly include financial compensation, which can be particularly complex in real estate. You’ll want to cover all the facets of your real estate broker job salary. Agents can receive compensation in many forms, including monthly fees, referral fees, and commission splits. They also have to pay additional fees that other professionals don’t have to worry about, such as association dues and MLS fees.

Qualities of a Good Real Estate Agent to Recruit

Recruiters need to know the qualities of a good real estate agent if they’re going to excel in their job of securing professionals who are a good fit for a brokerage.

These qualities include the ability to negotiate, which is essential for helping clients feel satisfied with the terms of a sale instead of cheated when they don’t get their original asking price. Real estate agents also need to act as a tour guide, with a detailed knowledge of the neighborhoods, school districts, and amenities of their city and their local real estate scene. Solid knowledge of relevant technology is becoming an increasingly important requirement for successful agents, now that lockbox apps, automated lead generators, and social media are becoming standard tools in this field. Honesty has always been a requirement for real estate agents, who must often tell clients that their asking price is unrealistic. Persistence is also an essential characteristic, especially for agents at the beginning of their careers.

A likable personality is another mark of the right people, as opposed to the false charm of a stereotypical used car salesman. They also need a strong business sense to understand the importance of the administrative paperwork required in real estate, including transactions, negotiation, and marketing. A detailed-oriented mind helps agents pay attention to the many small items that can make or break a sale, such as ensuring a home’s curb appeal is as good as it can be and customizing MLS listings to grab attention. Agents also need to be well-connected within their industry to ensure they have the support from other real estate professionals that’s necessary for success. Problem-solving is an essential characteristic because buying and selling a home routinely requires overcoming obstacles.

Each brokerage is going to have their own set of broker metrics for measuring success. Be sure to have these outlined before setting out to assess your candidates.

Various Real Estate Recruiting Jobs

Real estate recruiters often specialize in filling specific roles within a company. In some firms, they may only recruit new agents, while other recruiters focus on agents with a certain number of years experience. In others, recruitment may be divided into commercial and residential real estate agents. Real estate agents may work directly for the real estate brokerage, but they may also work for a staffing firm that the brokerage has retained. Other types of recruiting jobs include corporate recruiting as compared to recruiting for an individual brokerage.

Real Estate Jobs

A real estate agent is the most common job that a real estate agent recruiter tries to fill. These professionals buy and sell properties, so they may represent the buyer or seller. A broker is similar to an agent, with the main difference being who they work for. Agents generally must work for a brokerage, whereas brokers can also work independently. Mortgage brokers connect borrowers seeking real estate mortgages with mortgage lenders, although they don’t actually lend money themselves.

Entry-Level Real Estate Jobs

An entry-level real estate job may not require any experience in real estate. In some cases, the individuals filling these positions might not have licenses to sell real estate yet. In the meantime, they may work as administrative assistants, and perform clerical duties such as organizing files and scheduling appointments. Other entry-level real estate jobs may include property managers and secretaries. A property manager or someone who worked for a third party property management company in particular, has a wide range of skills that transfer well to the residential side. These roles allow real estate agents to focus on activities that directly generate revenue.

Residential Real Estate Recruiters

Residential real estate recruiters specialize in finding agents who buy and sell residential property and general real estate staffing. These properties are developed or zoned for non-commercial purposes, which typically consist of single-family homes. They also include condominiums, which are privately owned, but structurally similar to apartment buildings. Apartment buildings may also be considered residential properties if they consist of no more than

Commercial Real Estate Recruiters

Commercial real estate recruiters look for real estate professionals who deal with commercial properties or similar asset classes. These properties are used for business purposes, which typically include offices and retail spaces. Multi-family buildings are also commercial properties in most cases, including apartments, high-rises, and duplexes. Business owners typically lease properties rather than buying them, so commercial real estate agents must deal with leases. Business leases typically have longer terms than apartment or multifamily, leases, with 10-year terms not being uncommon.

Real Estate Recruiting Firms

Some real estate firms choose to work with a company dedicated to real estate staffing, rather than an individual recruiter. This practice is most common when a client wants to fill an executive position requiring extensive experience in managing a large number of other real estate professionals. Real estate executive recruiters typically specialize in this type of recruiting. These recruiters may also be known as headhunters because they’re looking for candidates with very specific qualifications. In some cases, real estate headhunters target individual candidates.

Corporate Real Estate Jobs

Real estate professionals with corporate real estate jobs help companies find properties for their specific needs, including space for factories, offices, stores, and warehouses. These positions have a wide range of titles such as corporate real estate manager, real estate acquisition and construction manager,, facility manager, and property manager. These job titles are well standardized, so it’s more important to understand the duties involved rather than the title.

Don’t Forget About Agent Retention

Retaining real estate agents is particularly challenging due to the high turnover of this profession. Brokers need to listen carefully to agents in order to help them achieve their goals through your company. It’s essential to lead agents through the process of becoming a business to maintain the excitement and commitment they had on their first day, which often fades after a few months.

ABR (Always Be Recruiting) your current agents

Brokers need to continually re-recruit their own agents, even after they’re on the payroll. One way to do this is by offering opportunities for career growth such as a mentoring program. The experience of seasoned agents who started their careers at your firm provides a concrete example of the benefits in remaining with your firm. Real estate retention software like Brokerkit is also essential for retaining real estate agents. Brokerkit automates your onboarding process for new agents and positions them for growth within your brokerage. It also sends reminders for retention touches via email and text messages.