How to Recruit Agents to a New Brokerage

How to recruit agents to a new brokerage starts with a decision most recruiting advice skips entirely: whether you are recruiting headcount or production. They pull in opposite directions, and only one of them builds a business.

Here is why that matters, from the only kind of evidence that is not self-reported. Relitix's analysis of MLS records found that an agent's production level barely predicts whether they will switch brokerages, with one exception: agents doing under $1 million a year switch at much higher rates than everyone else. The agents most available to a new brokerage are, on average, the ones producing least and the ones most likely to leave you next.

We build websites for brokerages, so be appropriately skeptical of us on this topic. That is also why the section below about whether a website helps recruiting says what it says.

The production statistic everyone repeats, and where it came from

You have seen the claim that 71% of agents closed zero deals last year. It is unsourced.

NAR confirmed to industry outlet BAM that the figure did not come from its research. It traces to an unscripted remark by a Redfin executive during a 2025 Inman Connect session, which Redfin confirmed was never formally published as a statistic, and which the speaker himself called "a little misleading" because it counted inactive license-holders, part-timers, and team members whose transactions close under a team leader's name. It keeps circulating anyway, usually attributed to NAR.

What is actually measured points two different directions, and both are worth knowing:

• NAR's 2025 Member Profile found only 5% of REALTORS specializing in residential sales reported zero transaction sides in 2024, with a median of 10 sides. Agents with two years or less reported a median of 3. This is a self-reported survey of dues-paying members, which skews toward the engaged, and NAR members are not the same population as all licensees.
• MLS-record analysis by independent analyst Mike DelPrete, using CoreLogic data, found the top 20% of agents average 26 transactions a year and account for about 65% of all transactions, while the bottom 80% average 3.5.

So "most agents do nothing" is folklore, but "production is heavily concentrated" is real and measured. For a new brokerage those are very different problems. You are not fishing in a pond where everyone is drowning. You are fishing in one where a fifth of the fish are most of the weight.

How to recruit agents to a new brokerage: who is actually available

Three measured findings about who moves, each labeled by who produced it.

Movement is at historic lows. Relitix's Agent Movement Index, built from MLS office changes and excluding merger reflags and new entrants, read 114.1 in April 2025, down 12% year over year and continuing a multi-year decline. Relitix sells recruiting software, so it has an interest in brokerages caring about movement, but the index is built on public MLS records rather than opinion.

Roughly 10% of agents changed brokerage in a year. DelPrete's analysis with Courted, spanning 82 MLSs, found over 144,000 of about 1.4 million agents moved between June 2023 and June 2024, or 14% once non-producers are excluded. Courted sells recruiting and retention software and supplied the statistical analysis, though DelPrete states he drew the conclusions independently. Read the exact percentages with that in mind.

New entrants mostly do not survive. Relitix's MLS-record data found roughly 70% of nearly 58,000 new entrants across three years did not stay, and the trend is worsening: 49% of agents who had their first closing in 2022 closed nothing at all in 2023, against 37% for the 2021 cohort and about 28% for 2017 to 2020.

Put those beside the under-$1M switching finding and the picture is uncomfortable but useful. The agents who will take your call are disproportionately new, low-producing, and statistically likely to be gone within a couple of years, either to another brokerage or out of the industry. Recruiting them is not free. It costs your supervision time, your training, your insurance exposure, and your attention, and nobody has ever published what that actually adds up to, which is its own finding: there is no measured figure for what supporting one agent costs a brokerage. Every cost number in circulation describes the agent's own expenses, not yours.

Why agents leave, and who paid to find out

Three sources, three very different levels of trust.

Notice what the top row is doing. A franchisor ran a survey and discovered that the single most important thing to agents is brand trust, at 93%, which is precisely the product a franchisor sells. That does not make it false. It does mean it should never be quoted without the label, and its sample size was not disclosed in any coverage we could find.

The most useful source in the table is the bottom one, because it measures what agents did rather than what they said. And there is no fourth row: no large-sample, disinterested survey ranking why agents switch exists. NAR has not published one.

The one advantage you actually have

Two findings line up in your favor, and they are the reason a new brokerage is not simply a worse version of a big one.

First, the largest offices have 33% higher agent turnover than small offices, per the DelPrete and Courted analysis. Scale does not retain people. In some measured sense it does the opposite.

Second, the only study in this space with fully disclosed methodology found that money and technology are table stakes. Mike DelPrete interviewed ten agents with five or more years of experience and $3.5M to $35M in annual production who had left a brokerage in the previous six months. What they described as decisive was leadership accessibility, mentorship, personal connection, and belonging. One phrase from that study is the entire pitch for a small brokerage: "big enough to back you, small enough to know you."

That is ten interviews, not a survey, and it cannot carry statistical weight on its own. But it is the only source here whose author disclosed his method, his sample, and his funding, which in this topic makes it worth more than a larger survey run by someone selling the answer.

The practical translation: you cannot outbid a franchise and you should stop trying. You can answer your phone, sit in on a listing appointment, and know every agent's name and pipeline. Neither of those is available at an office of 500.

What you are competing against on money

Know the published numbers before you set yours.

• eXp Realty: roughly 80/20 with a $16,000 annual cap, plus a tiered revenue-share program starting at about 3.5% of adjusted gross commission income at tier one.
• Real Brokerage: 85/15 with a $12,000 cap and no monthly desk charge, revenue share funded from the company's 15% rather than the agent's side, plus stock awards at capping and for sponsored recruits.
• Traditional and franchise brokerages: commonly 50/50 or 60/40 for new agents, improving to 70/30 or 80/20 with production, or cap and flat-monthly models that trade a percentage for a fixed charge.

One number deserves to be read carefully by anyone deciding whether headcount equals a business. eXp's own compliance-driven income disclosure, which is unusually transparent for this industry, reports a median income of $4,985 across all 85,377 registered agents, rising to $13,463 across the 63,410 who were actually paid, and $22,175 for active agents with at least a year of tenure. Nearly four in ten registered agents sit in an entering tier with a median income of $0.

That is a company publishing, under compliance requirements, that a large share of the agents in its headcount are not earning. If the biggest recruiting machine in the industry has that distribution, a new brokerage counting signatures is measuring the wrong thing.

What the law lets you do

Two pieces of primary law matter, and one of them changed recently.

Non-competes are now a state question. The FTC's 2024 rule banning most post-employment non-competes was vacated by a federal court in Texas in August 2024, the agency withdrew its appeals in September 2025, and the FTC's own site now states the rule "is not in effect and it is not enforceable." Enforceability turns entirely on your state and on whatever you personally signed when you were somebody else's agent. Have a local attorney read your own agreement before you build a target list, because the constraint most likely to bite you is your own.

Independent-contractor status has a federal safe harbor. Under 26 U.S.C. 3508, a licensed real estate agent is treated as a non-employee for federal tax purposes when three conditions hold: they hold a valid license, substantially all pay is tied to output rather than hours, and there is a written agreement stating they will not be treated as an employee. Keep all three intact. States apply their own tests for non-tax purposes, so this is a floor, not a ceiling.

We could not verify a current state-by-state picture of real estate commission rules on soliciting agents already under contract, and we are not going to summarize fifty jurisdictions we did not check. That is a question for your commission and your attorney.

Does your website help you recruit?

No disinterested source has ever shown that it does.

We tested this claim in two separate research passes, on two different posts, and both came back the same way. Every source asserting a link between a brokerage's website or marketing infrastructure and its ability to recruit sells branding, marketing, coaching, or franchise affiliation. The closest thing to evidence is a franchisor's own survey reporting that agents rate brand trust and marketing support highly, which measures stated priorities about brand rather than any measured recruiting outcome, and which comes from a company selling brand.

What we will say, labeled honestly as reasoning rather than measurement: an agent deciding whether to join you will look you up, and what they find is either evidence of a real operation or evidence of one person with a license. That is the same job the site does for a seller, which we covered in what a brokerage website costs and in the recruiting question inside our IDX piece. We would rather tell you the evidence does not exist than sell you a website on a claim nobody has substantiated.

The first five decide the next fifty

Recruit for production and fit, not for volume. A roster of twenty agents averaging three transactions is more supervision, more insurance exposure, and more of your attention than eight agents averaging twelve, and it earns less.

Be honest that your first hires are taking a risk on you, and price that honestly in what you offer them: access, mentorship, a real say in how the brokerage runs, and terms you can actually sustain when you have thirty agents rather than five. Every recruit after that will ask your existing agents what it is like to work for you, and that answer, not your split, is what compounds.

If you want the brokerage itself to look established while you make that pitch, that is what we build, live before you open, priced in the open.