Recruiting For Your CRE Brokerage

Recruiting For Your CRE Brokerage
June, 2025
Need to grow your CRE Brokerage?
As the saying goes, you’re only as strong as your weakest link.
As your brokerage expands, recruiting brokers becomes vital to your success.
The right brokers can build your brand, execute your vision, and boost your revenue.
Why Recruiting Brokers is Crucial
Most people struggle to recruit brokers, but it’s not their fault.
The recruitment process can be challenging, especially if you’re new to hiring.
You can miss a critical step or two, preventing you from attracting, hiring, and retaining the best of the best.
Recruiting brokers today is vital for several reasons:
- You can only do so much on your own or with a small team. Expanding revenue is directly related to the size of your team. It’s taking off the limiters of your growth.
- Recruitment is an opportunity to help brokers with their growth, potentially changing their lives.
- Success also hinges on the quality of your team. Top performers bring specialized knowledge, their networks, and a commitment to closing deals.
- Sustainable long-term growth is only possible with brokers who can grow and maintain a healthy pipeline, manage closings, and provide an excellent client experience.
- Breaking into new asset classes or areas requires top talent with specific expertise or local knowledge and connections.
- Real estate is a relationship-driven business. Your goal is to recruit brokers with strong interpersonal skills and integrity to build client confidence, trust in your brand, and future referrals.
- Brokers have a wealth of options. They can choose to join brokerages bigger than yours, with more resources, or they can venture out on their own. Now it’s harder than ever to attract quality talent. A strong recruitment process ensures you retain brokers for years, saving tens of thousands of dollars.
Your goal is not to add as many bodies as possible. Rather, it’s about building a team that aligns with your long-term vision. You want to recruit brokers that are proactive, motivated, and capable of fulfilling their goals through your business.
Creating an Effective Recruitment Process
Recruiting brokers for your brokerage requires a strong process and strategy.
You should aim to attract brokers in the same manner you attract potential clients or customers because, in many respects, the concept is the same. The top talent is already employed or motivated to work on their own.
Furthermore, there are other brokerages, some with more experience and resources recruiting the same talent.
Competition can be fierce.
Inexperienced brokers are looking for support and growth, so you must show how you can help them.
Experienced brokers have leverage, so you must provide value and build trust, even if you’re new.
Thanks to the competitive nature of recruiting, some teams take on a scattergun approach—adding as many brokers as possible without considering fit or long-term goals.
But if you’re serious about building a high-performing team, it’s important to think about how to structure a real estate team from the ground up. A clear structure helps ensure that every new hire has a defined role, making collaboration smoother and scaling easier.
Just get as many brokers on your team as possible and the rest will work itself out, right?
This is an unsustainable strategy that will ultimately hurt your reputation with clients and hiring future talent.
We want to be more targeted with recruitment. Taking the time to create a plan can help you map out your unique value proposition, find more of your ideal brokers, and form partnerships.
Define Your Recruitment Objectives
First, Identify and write down what you want to achieve by recruiting.
- Do you want to increase your revenue? By how much?
- How many more brokers can you manage?
- Do you want to expand into new asset classes or territories?
- Are you looking for new or high-performing agents?
- Do you want more team diversity?
Your goals will determine how many brokers you’d like to add to your team, experience requirements, and incentives. Objectives should also align with your vision or the long-term goals for your brokerage. Finding the individuals who fit your vision now can lower churn and turnover rates later.
What’s In It For Them?
One of the hardest things you can do is convince someone to buy something you value but she/he does not. Recruiting is pitching or selling on the idea of working with you long-term.
Through your conversations, recruitment ads, outreach, or cold pitches, you should share the benefits of working with you. Paint a picture so that brokers can see your value proposition, where they fit, and how they can grow.
Understand What Motivates Brokers
Brokers become your partners, so you should find out what motivates them to perform or work with teams. If you’re unsure where to start, meet with your existing team members or peers to find out more about them:
- Find out what motivates them.
- Uncover their goals and challenges.
- Learn what are turn-offs or deal-breakers.
- Ask them what kind of support or resources they expect.
This info can help you find and nurture potential recruits to possibly join your team.
Modeling your recruitment process based on feedback can help you develop the right incentives. It can also help you determine the ideal budget and offerings for your recruitment efforts.
Develop and Implement a Recruitment Plan
Now it’s time to create and execute a step-by-step plan for recruiting effectively.
This is the process you’ll follow, which you can scale depending on how many brokers you intend to recruit.
Think of your recruitment plan in the same way you would a lead generation funnel.
At the top lies all the ways you can find or attract potential hires.
These all go into a database you’ll contact. Organize prospects based on experience, specialization, location, and performance metrics.
There are software and CRM tools that are designed for the real estate management process. Use these to remain organized and to help you follow up on time.
You’ll then reach out to them. Either do this yourself or hire someone to help you to contact them and set up meetings. Individuals who you’ve pinpointed as high-quality you may need to nurture more closely.
Unless explicitly applying for the role, arrange to meet with hires just to learn more about them, share experiences, and determine where you can add value. Some of these interactions will be interviews.
Continue the process until you find the ideal candidates to discuss work opportunities and pitch an offer to work with you. Share your vision, culture, and incentives, while letting them know you’re open to negotiation.
To summarize:
- Determine the avenues to find candidates
- Use these avenues to find candidates
- Compile and organize them in a database or CRM
- Contact ideal candidates
- Meet and build rapport
- Shortlist
- Offer
- Repeat process accordingly
The recruitment process is often ongoing, especially if you’re looking for top talent or multiple brokers. If you stop the process, you can miss out on finding amazing talent when they’re free or end up scrambling to fill roles if someone leaves unexpectedly.
Best of luck as you continue to build and grow your brokerage and build upon the success you have already had.
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