Why the Traditional New Agent Model Is Failing — And the Team-Centric Fix That Could Save the Industry

I was in a meeting today and we had a conversation about agents, brand new agents to the business and how companies bring them in, they do the training, they do all the book work and all the legal work, the documents, how to handle all the different aspects of that, the technology pieces, the tools that whatever company provides. And then they typically, a company sends them out and tells them to go do open houses and talk to their sphere of influence and add people to their database and things like that. But then once things don't go as planned, because it's really hard to do that in today's world especially when you're competing with such high-tech teams and high-tech agents and experienced agents and Zillow Flex and all the other platforms that are out there now vying for the same buyer or seller. It's really inverted and it seems like some company, and this is not a slant on any company because all companies are designed this way and their models are working quite nicely and they're making money doing it. But some company one day is going to take and move into a mode where they require new agents to go through company sponsored teams. And what that might look like is where the company helps market, especially if they have ancillary services such as mortgage, title, insurance, things like that, they could all participate legally. you know, by the rules, by RESPA and everything else, where they could participate in the marketing to get new leads, where they would subsidize the team leader and they would go in and add that cut, that agent, that new agent, and they would be calling not just the new leads generated, ideally 20 to 30 new leads per month for a new agent, but they would be given the training, they would give them the culture, they would give them the sales background, which is something that you just don't see typically companies train. They do get training platforms, you know, that's out there like Ninja, Floyd Wigman, Buffini, there's an awful lot of platforms out there and they're all good systems, but the real world is hearing the conversations, doing the conversations and making the phone calls and certainly doing the open houses, but when you do an open house, you really ought to have a mindset of, hey, I'm gonna do open house and maybe you do some throughout the week and even, and you go out there with the mindset of, I'm going to utilize this time, even if nobody shows up, I'm gonna be making my phone calls, my prospecting calls. So to go back to it, maybe the company subsidized for a period of time or a number of transactions and then the new agent pays a mentor fee or a training fee on their first, say six transactions back to the company from whatever split that is with their team that they go with, and then that is what they move forward with. And it would be really cool because. larger companies are gonna have multiple teams and each team has their own methodology of how they generate, how they work leads, their culture, what they believe in, what systems they use. So the new agent could almost like a job fair, call it a team fair, they could pick any of those particular ones and then the company would work through it with the team and that would work really well. They could actually even work with solo agents, really good solo agents that could use some showing help, could use some assistance helping them because they're growing their business and you could even do it with some of that. So I think there's a model there because the failure rate for new agents is just so high now and it's getting higher and higher because they're not just competing anymore with other agents, they're competing with teams, they're competing with brokerages that are basically teams or called teamerages and plus they're competing with the Zillows of the world, the realtor.coms of the world, all the different referral portals that are out there now. So I think that there is a really good opportunity for some real estate company, whether it's done at the corporate level or the local level or even at certain office levels but I think this could be leveraged into a really good opportunity. Helps the team leader by subsidizing, creating new leads and providing agents. It helps the new agent because they can go be where they can have the most likelihood of getting the most at bat sooner and faster and not every agent's gonna make in the business and create a realistic expectation. But it helps the company, it helps the team leader, it helps the agent. It's kind of hard to visualize, and it's kind of hard to implement because sometimes that could conflict with some of the roles in an existing company because they have obviously built in training, they have built in all these programs that are built in. So there's just a conflict around that. It's a healthy conflict, and they do a really good job because they have done well for a very long time. But I think going forward, there's no question in my mind, unless somebody has a tremendous sphere of influence and is walking into a whole lot of listings or a whole lot of buyers through some type of unusual sphere of influence set up, I think it's really hard for a new agent to have expectations to make it in this business without investing a tremendous amount of money. And most new agents, what they do have to invest is their time and energy and discomfort of learning and doing things that are uncomfortable to get it going. But most of them don't have the financial resources to invest the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars it takes to do what teams are doing or what long-term successful agents are doing. So it was a really good conversation. We had this conversation with a couple of brand new agents or fairly new agents to the business and then some existing agents who have gone through teams. And so we've had some that went on their own, went to a team, and then some that came through a team. And it's pretty obvious the best pathway is to go through a team, but there's no two teams created equal. Every team does things differently. and you know in our case we have a very different team culture and it's not just the functions there's a high degree of accountability and that's not the way a lot of teams operate. We believe in coming to the office a lot of teams don't operate that way but the beautiful thing is the larger the company the more different team alternatives you could have. Obviously the company would have to work out the financial deal with the team leader and pre-screen it and have them kind of as the approved teams for somebody to go through but I think mandating that would be a good idea because when I got into business there was kind of a rudimentary mentorship program where I got paired with an agent and I had to pay that agent a percentage of my income to for the first I think it was six transactions and that really worked well. In the long run I learned a lot of the idiosyncrasies of the business you just can't teach from a book. Real estate schools and formal training will teach you how to do documents, how to fill out forms, how to say the right words about agency and things like that but if you never get a chance or never get in front of a customer to do any of those things you don't need that knowledge yet. So to some degree the training is a little bit backwards from what it seems like it should be in today's world.