How to Build a Real Estate Recruiting System That Works Year Round (Not Just When You Have Time)

Every brokerage needs a real estate recruiting system, yet most brokers treat recruiting as something they get to when the day allows. This session with Jay Teresi, developer of BoldTrail Recruit and a twenty-five-year veteran of residential real estate, lays out the operational framework for building one that runs consistently, targets the right agents, and converts relationships into signed agreements. It is built for broker-owners and team leaders who want to grow intentionally rather than opportunistically.

Key Topics Covered

  • Why recruiting cannot be cyclical and how to build a pipeline that moves agents toward you before they decide to leave
  • The annual growth formula that tells you exactly how much recruiting production you need to hit your company goals
  • How to identify which agents at competing brokerages are most likely to take your call and why top producers are usually the wrong target
  • Why co-broke recruiting produces warmer conversations than cold outreach and how to build an incentive structure that gets your agents to help
  • The brokerage self-evaluation process that sharpens your value proposition before you ever pick up the phone
  • How to use production data to spot agents who are stuck, overpaying, or misaligned with their current model
  • The four C’s framework: conviction, confidence, consistency, and closings

Agents Do Not Move on Your Schedule

The most common recruiting mistake is picking up the phone when you have a free hour and expecting results. Agents do not move because you decided to call. They move when their own circumstances align.

Pending deals need to clear. Commission clawback windows need to close. A market shift makes staying uncomfortable. A personal situation creates urgency. None of those timelines care about your availability.

Agent migration patterns also vary by region. In the northeast, movement tends to cluster in the fourth quarter and early first quarter. In the west, it skews toward the first quarter. But those are tendencies, not rules. They describe only a fraction of total agent movement. Agents move all year round when the right conversations are already in motion.

If you only recruit when you have time, you are building relationships after the decision window has opened. That is almost always too late.

The brokers consistently growing their agent count treat recruiting time as protected and non-negotiable. Teresi kept a note on his office door during his recruiting blocks. It read “building the office.” Agents knew not to interrupt. That protected time was what made everything else in the system work.

Trust also takes time to build. An agent who is not ready to move today may be ready in four months. If you have not been in their orbit, you will not be the call they make when they are.

Start With a Goal You Can Do Math Against

A recruiting goal of “I want to add ten agents” is not a plan. A recruiting goal built on your current agent productivity, your growth target, and the gap between them is.

The formula Teresi uses is straightforward. Your annual growth goal equals your current agents’ projected production plus whatever recruiting needs to produce to close the gap.

Here is a simple example. If your agents are collectively projecting ten million dollars in sales and your company goal is fifteen million dollars, you need five million dollars in recruited agent production.

But the math does not stop there. If you recruit a two-million-dollar producer in February and they have already closed some deals this year, you are not getting two million dollars of production from them this calendar year. You might net one point two million.

That means to reach your five-million-dollar recruiting target, you may need to recruit six or six and a half million dollars worth of agents on paper to account for timing. That level of precision tells you how active your pipeline needs to be at any given moment.

Anything you can measure, you can manage. Anything you cannot measure, you are guessing at.

This framework also depends on one input: your agent business reviews. If you have not sat down with every agent on your roster to review their prior year production and set goals for the coming year, you are building your recruiting target on assumptions. The annual review is not just a retention tool. It is the data input your growth plan depends on.

Know What You Are Recruiting To Before You Recruit From Anyone

Recruiting without a clear value proposition is how brokers end up in conversations they cannot close. Before you identify who to recruit, you need an honest self-assessment of what you are actually offering.

Teresi recommends surveying your current agents. Not to ask if they are happy. To ask why they are with you. Most brokers have a theory about what keeps their agents loyal: the tools, the culture, the commission structure, the coaching, the brand. In practice, the answers agents give rarely match what brokers expect.

Once you know why agents actually stay, you can identify the competing brokerages where your message will land.

Here is a clear example. If your strength is a higher-split or alternative model with full technology and operational support, you are looking for agents inside traditional franchise models in the two-to-five-million-dollar production range. These agents are paying their broker for infrastructure they are not fully using. That is a specific conversation. And it has a specific answer you already know before you dial.

The reverse is also true. If you run a full-service traditional model with physical locations, admins, and a high-touch coaching environment, you are not competing for the type-A agent who wants a desk and a split. You are looking for the agent at a hundred-percent shop who is doing three to five transactions, wants someone to call when a deal goes sideways, and is losing hours every week on transaction management they would rather hand off.

Neither target is better than the other. What matters is knowing which one fits your model. That way your outreach is targeted, your conversations are relevant, and you never reach the commission negotiation only to find you cannot win.

The Production Data That Tells You Who to Call

Most brokers use MLS data to pull a list of top producers and start dialing. This is one of the least efficient approaches available. Top producers are typically the hardest to move, the most expensive to bring over, and the least likely to fit a model they were not already considering.

The more productive approach is to look for agents whose production patterns suggest misalignment with their current brokerage. Teresi calls this looking for what seems out of place.

Consider this example. An agent who closed fourteen transactions in a year with one on the list side and thirteen on the buy side is likely paying significant third-party referral fees. The conversation is not “you are bad at getting listings.” It is “we are doing a workshop on listing strategies in the current market that has been working across all of our agents. I would love to invite you.” You already know it will resonate. The data told you first.

An agent who has trended down in production for three consecutive years is not staying because they are thriving. Their broker is probably avoiding the performance conversation. If you call with examples of agents in similar situations who turned things around inside your model, specific agents with specific outcomes, you become the option they did not know they had.

Agents paying thirty to forty percent off the top of every deal through third-party lead programs carry a cost structure that makes growth nearly impossible. If you have built a referral and repeat business model, that is a conversation worth having with any agent carrying that overhead.

In each case, the data does the targeting for you. You are not guessing who is open to a call. You are calling the agents whose current situation already suggests they should be.

Co-Broke Recruiting: Your Warmest Pipeline Is Already in Your MLS

The agents doing business with your company in your market are among the highest-converting recruiting targets available. They are already on the other side of your transactions. They already have a working relationship with one of your agents. They know your brand from the inside of a deal, not from a cold call.

That is a fundamentally different starting point than any outbound list.

Co-broke recruiting starts with a search. By geography, by production, by company. Which agents are regularly appearing on the other side of your transactions? Which ones keep showing up in your market area? Those are the calls where your agent makes an introduction and your first conversation begins with “I know your work.”

The critical piece is building an incentive structure that makes your agents want to help. Agents will not generate introductions for free. A line on the deal sheet asking “is this agent a good fit?” is not a program. It produces nothing.

A real incentive is clear, documented, and communicated consistently. It can be a flat spiff. It can be a concession on monthly fees. It can be a share of early transactions once the recruited agent comes over. The specific structure matters less than the fact that it is real.

Teresi also raises one prerequisite. Your agents have to believe that brokerage growth serves them. If they think a new agent is competition for their business, they will not generate introductions no matter what the incentive is. That is a leadership conversation that has to happen before you launch the program.

The Four C’s: Conviction, Confidence, Consistency, Closings

Every tactic in recruiting comes back to one underlying variable. Does the broker believe enough in what they are offering to say it with confidence, every day, to the right people?

Conviction means knowing your value proposition well enough that you are not selling. You are showing someone they are in the wrong place for what they need. That shift in framing matters. You are not trying to take an agent from their current broker. You are identifying agents whose goals, production style, and current model are misaligned, and offering them a better fit.

Confidence follows from conviction. When you have run the commission calculator on an agent’s production before you call, and you already know they put more money in their pocket at your company doing the exact same production, the money conversation is not a negotiation. It is a proof point.

Consistency is what turns a good message into a reliable pipeline. Protect your recruiting time. Treat that block as non-negotiable regardless of what else is happening in the office.

Closings are the outcome when the first three are in place. Agents move when they trust that the change solves their actual problem, that the economics are better, and that the broker they are moving to has the follow-through to deliver what they promised. Building that trust through multiple conversations over time is what produces closings. A single pitch rarely does.

Key Takeaways

Recruiting is not a task you fit in when the day allows. Agents who are ready to move will not wait for you to have a free afternoon. The brokers building consistent pipelines treat recruiting time as protected and non-negotiable.

Your recruiting target is not a headcount goal. It is a production gap number derived from your agents’ projected output versus your company growth goal, adjusted for when recruited agents will actually close deals this year.

Top producers are rarely the right recruiting target. Agents whose production shows misalignment with their current model, lopsided buy-to-list ratios, declining year-over-year numbers, or high third-party referral costs, are far more likely to take the call and make the move.

Co-broke recruiting converts at a higher rate than cold outreach because the relationship is already established through a transaction. A warm introduction from one of your agents is the lowest-friction path to a recruiting conversation.

The commission conversation only wins when you run the math before you make the call. If you already know an agent puts more money in their pocket at your company doing the exact same production, the conversation is a demonstration, not a pitch.

Retention and recruiting are the same conversation facing in different directions. The examples and talk tracks you develop helping your own agents grow are the most compelling material you have when you call the agent at the competing brokerage who is not growing.

About the Speaker

Jay Teresi has over twenty-five years of experience in residential real estate, specializing in brokerage recruiting, retention, and scalable growth strategy. He has led large regional brokerage operations with more than a thousand agents and developed BoldTrail Recruit, Inside Real Estate’s platform for consistent year-round recruiting and pipeline management. He offers individual consulting for broker-owners on building and executing customized recruiting plans.

This session was hosted by BoldTrail, Inside Real Estate’s AI-powered productivity platform for brokerages, teams, and agents. To learn more about BoldTrail Recruit or to connect with Jay directly, visit insiderealestate.com.

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