REALTORS® with 16 or more years of experience earned $88,500.

So if you want a thriving real estate business, all you need to do is hire as many agents as we can and wait for 16 years.

I hope you got the joke…

On a serious note, over the last 4 years at Agently, we’ve been obsessed with one question and one question only:

How to close the $80,500 gap?

How to turn the agents you recruit into agents who produce?

(That’s without having to wait for 16 years, of course)

Creating more producers is the ultimate challenge our team here at Agently is solving for.

And here’s something I want to show you…

From non-producers to producers

If the objective is to create more producing agents, we first need to understand who actually makes up your roster.

At the highest level, every agent falls into one of two groups:

• Non-producing agents

• Producing agents

Pretty obvious.

But within those two groups, there are six very different types of agents—and each requires a completely different development strategy.

Non-producing agents

1. New - joined less than 90 days ago

Every agent who joins your organization begins in New—whether they just received their license or joined after years at another brokerage.

We consider agents New during their first 90 days or until they complete onboarding.

The objective is simple: get them through onboarding and ready to produce as quickly as possible.

That includes your administrative checklist, 30-60-90-day plan, buyer and seller training, systems training, lead certification, and everything else required to make them production-ready.

But completing onboarding isn’t the finish line.

Production is.

2. Activating - onboarding completed but no closings yet

Agents who complete onboarding but haven’t closed their first transaction move into Activating.

This is where most organizations lose visibility.

Closed transactions tell you who has already produced. They tell you almost nothing about who is likely to produce next.

Some activating agents are consistently prospecting, following up, attending training, and building a real pipeline.

Others have already disengaged.

Both currently have zero transactions.

But they are not remotely the same investment.

More on that in a minute.

3. Dormant - no activity and no transaction in 6 months.

No CRM activity and no transactions for at least six months.

Inevitably, some of the agents you recruit will end up here. That’s the never-ending cycle of the real estate industry.

Your job is to identify them quickly and decide whether they can be reactivated—or whether your time, leads, and support should be invested somewhere else.

Producing agents

4. Producing - at least one transaction

Once an agent closes their first transaction, they officially become a Producing agent.

But one transaction doesn’t create a sustainable real estate business.

The next objective is to help that agent build consistent activity, a stronger pipeline, and the productive habits required to close the next transaction—and the one after that.

5. At-Risk - producing but performance is dropping

At-Risk agents are producing agents whose activity, pipeline, engagement, or productive habits are declining month over month.

By the time their closed volume drops, the decline may have already been underway for months.

Catching performance dips early helps prevent production drops later.

6. Top - top 20% among producers

Pretty obvious. These are your rainmakers—the top 20% of producers in your organization.

Ultimately, this should be the destination for the agents you bring in.

The direction of the funnel is simple:

New → Activating → Producing → Top

At-Risk and Dormant are not destinations. They are warning signs that an agent has stalled or started moving in the wrong direction.

But how do you know who has the potential to produce?

This is the hardest question.

Imagine two activating agents.

Neither has closed a transaction.

One is prospecting every day, following up consistently, setting appointments, completing training, and slowly building a real pipeline.

The other hasn’t logged into the CRM in three weeks.

A traditional production report treats them exactly the same: zero transactions.

But we know they are not the same.

That’s why we created the Production Confidence Score.

It is a score from 0 to 100 designed to show how much confidence you should have in an agent’s ability to become—or remain—a consistent producer.

The score combines four components:

1. Production: Transactions and sales volume already generated.

2. Activity: Dollar-producing actions captured in the CRM, including conversations, dials, appointments, follow-up, and leads added.

3. Coachability: How consistently the agent engages with and applies the training and coaching being provided.

4. Habits and behaviors: Whether the agent performs productive actions consistently or works in occasional bursts, along with patterns of follow-through and execution.

Agently connects to your CRM and transaction management system to understand what agents are actually doing.

Because we also run their training and coaching, we can see how receptive they are to development.

We combine all those signals into one simple score that helps identify which agents have the greatest potential to produce more for your business.

From there, Agently delivers personalized weekly coaching and accountability based on each agent’s individual performance and current bottleneck.

Different agent. Different problem. Different plan.

At scale. On autopilot.

Your roster is a production funnel

You already have a funnel in your CRM for managing clients.

Now you need one for managing the agents responsible for serving those clients.

The new Agently gives you a complete map of your sales force: who is new, who is activating, who is producing, who is at risk, who has become dormant, and who is on the path to becoming a top producer.

Our job is to keep agents moving to the right.

From New to Activating.

From Activating to Producing.

From Producing to Top.

And when someone starts moving in the wrong direction, to catch it before the decline appears in closed transactions.

Recruitment puts agents into the funnel.

Development moves them through it.

If you want in my next article, I can go deeper into the Production Confidence Score and show how we identify production potential before it appears in actual production.

For now, take a look at your roster and ask yourself:

How many agents fall into each of these six categories?

How many moved to the right during the last 90 days?

And do you have a system responsible for moving them forward?

If you want to put Agently’s AI to work onboarding and developing your agents at scale, visit our brand-new website and schedule a demo.

I’ll be happy to show you exactly how it works.

On July 29th, 2026, at Inman Connect San Diego, we will unveil the world’s first AI Team Leader.

For over four years at Agently, we’ve been building the ultimate platform for team leaders and brokers — a tool to onboard new agents and develop existing ones into consistent producers.

Then came AI … and fundamentally changed everything…

No warning. No transition period. Nothing.

Almost overnight, we realized something uncomfortable: it no longer made sense to hand brokers and team leaders a tool.

AI makes tools obsolete.

Let me say that again, because it took us a while to fully accept it ourselves:

AI makes any tool in your tech stack that “requires you to use it” obsolete.

AI lets you skip “using the tool” entirely. It delivers the outcome — without you in the loop.

So at Agently we thought… what if…?

What if, instead of being a tool that team leaders and brokers use to onboard, train, and develop agents, we built an **AI Team Leader** — your AI clone that takes on the hardest parts of the job and delivers the outcome for you:

• Onboards your new agents - for you

• Trains and develops existing agents into consistent producers - for you

• Retains existing production - for you

Hands-free... On autopilot... While you’re doing everything else that demands your attention.

I really want you to fully recognize the SCALE of the transformation

Pre AI:

• Here’s a tool. If you use it consistently, it will help you accomplish task X.

Post AI:

• Here’s an AI that accomplishes task X for you. Without you.

Unless you have unlimited hours in the day, you should no longer pay for the tools;

You should only pay for NOT using the tools — and only receiving the outcome.

And thanks to AI, that outcome now costs a fraction of what you’d pay a human to deliver it.

What’s next?

We’re still working to fully comprehend the scale of these changes. But we know they’re inevitable.

Today, the team leader and broker try to be everything at once:

• Recruiter

• Trainer

• Operations manager

• Coach

• Lead provider

• Culture builder

• Accountability partner

• Marketer

Tomorrow, that role transforms into something different: hiring a set of AI agents that run these functions for you.

What doesn’t change

In all of this transformation, one fundamental remains untouched.

Your agents — the human ones — will remain the custodians of the real estate transaction. Because they own the relationship with the client.

Something AI can’t do. And in our view, never should.

AI doesn’t replace your agents. It replaces the grind of building them.

If you’re attending Inman Connect San Diego, join us on July 29th for our Lunch + Launch event, where we unveil the AI Team Leader live — with real data, from a real team, in front of a live audience.

📍 Lunch & Learn | Inman Connect San Diego | Wednesday, July 29, 11:30 AM–1:00 PM | San Diego Ballroom

Seats are limited. Sign up here 👇

[Reserve your seat now →]

Here’s a number that should change how you think about onboarding:

If a new agent doesn’t have their first client under contract within the first 90 days, there’s nearly an 68% chance they’ll never close a single transaction for you.

Not “they’ll struggle.” Never.

Once that window closes, re-engaging an agent who’s gone quiet, lost their momentum, and started second-guessing the whole decision is brutally hard. Most of them simply quit.

So the question every team leader and broker should be asking isn’t “how do we recruit more agents?” It’s “what actually happens in the first 90 days after they sign?”

Why this matters more right now than it has in years

The recent wave of consolidation — Compass and Anywhere, Rocket and Redfin, the Keller Williams deal, Real and RE/MAX — has done something interesting at the agent level: it’s put a lot of people in motion. Some agents are looking to join bigger brands for all their glory, while others gravitate towards a less corporate-like and more agent-centric environment.

And in a market with this much uncertainty already, what agents are looking for is the opposite of uncertainty. They want clarity. A real pathway to growth. A team or brokerage that offers genuine value — training, technology, and a predictable way to build their business.

That’s the migration happening right now. And it raises the stakes on one thing in particular: the moment an agent joins you, your onboarding is the first proof of whether you actually deliver on that promise — or whether you’re just another logo.

That’s true for the experienced agent shopping for a better home. It’s even more true for the brand-new agent entering the industry at this strange, fast-moving moment.

Most onboarding is admin theater

Here’s what we see at Agently across a huge number of teams and brokerages: onboarding gets treated as an administrative process. A pile of HR and compliance tasks — and almost completely disconnected from the thing that actually matters, which is turning a new agent into a producer.

In most cases, “onboarding” is a PDF checklist:

• Sign your ICA

• Transfer your license

• Set up your MLS account

• Here’s your CRM login

• Here’s how you write a contract

• Good luck, Chuck.

And that’s it. That’s the whole thing.

So the excitement a new agent walks in with — the exact energy that’s supposed to fuel their first 90 days — is dead by week two or three. They’ve checked the boxes, and now they’re sitting there with no idea how to get their first client under contract, let alone how to become a consistent producer.

The problem isn’t the checklist. The problem is that most teams treat finishing the checklist as the finish line. And that single decision is what quietly sets agents up to fail.

What great onboarding actually looks like: three phases

Building real momentum means using that early excitement to drive new agents through three distinct phases — not one.

Phase 1: Admin (non-negotiable, but not the point)

License transfer, tax forms, ICA, tech setup. None of it is optional, and there’s nothing to debate here — it has to get done. Just don’t confuse getting it done with onboarding being complete.

Phase 2: Core skills training (also non-negotiable)

This is the part most checklists skip entirely. Every new agent needs a minimum, required skill set to take a client from first contact all the way to closing:

• How to generate leads

• How to convert those leads into appointments

• How to run buyer consultations and listing appointments

• How to turn those appointments into signed contracts

Think of it as the floor — the baseline competence no agent should be without. These modules should be as non-negotiable as transferring a license.

And if you’re a team that provides leads, there’s one more thing that belongs here: a lead certification program. Because nothing wastes your lead investment faster than handing real leads to an undertrained agent.

This is something we help teams build at Agently, and the mechanism matters. We design lead certification around AI-powered script role-play: agents record their responses to real objections and scenarios, and the AI evaluates each response against the ideal script you provide — your playbook, your language, whatever you’ve found converts best. Score high enough and they pass that objection and move to the next. Fall short and they get specific feedback on what to fix, then try again.

Lead Certification with Objection Practice - Watch Video

It’s the most reliable way to protect your lead pool — agents earn access to your leads by proving they can actually handle them.

Phase 3: The 30/60/90-day plan (the whole point)

This is the phase almost everyone overlooks — and it’s the one that actually drives production.

The 30/60/90-day plan is not training. It’s a week-by-week set of specific income-producing actions — the calls, conversations, and appointments that actually generate business — built around the one goal that matters most in onboarding: getting an agent to their first transaction, or at minimum their first client under contract.

In a team environment, this can happen fast. In a brokerage where agents prefer to be more self-paced, it may run slower. The pace flexes. The goal doesn’t.

It all comes down to where you draw the finish line

Here’s the core idea, and it’s worth sitting with:

The difference between onboarding that produces agents and onboarding that’s built to fail them is entirely about what you define as the finish line.

If your finish line is “complete the admin checklist,” you’ve all but guaranteed your agents will struggle to ever reach production.

If your finish line is “close your first one, two, or three deals,” you’ve built a system that unlocks enormous growth — especially if you’re recruiting brand-new agents.

Same agents. Same market. Completely different outcome — decided entirely by where you chose to put the line.

And once you have that kind of system in place, something powerful happens. You can recruit an essentially unlimited number of agents and run every one of them through the same process. You spot underperformers early, before they drain your time and your leads. And you give serious agents the skills, tools, and clear guidance they need to actually become producers for your business.

Join us June 30th: Building the Ultimate Onboarding Playbook

On June 30, I’m sitting down with Zach from FAM Realty — who built FAM (one of the top teams in Southern California) to over $650 million in production with a team of 50 agents — to design the ultimate onboarding playbook, live.

We’re going to build out the complete 30/60/90-day plan: not the admin version everyone already has, but the version that onboards agents into production. The system that lets you recruit with confidence, weed out underperformers fast, and turn brand-new agents into consistent producers.

By the end of the webinar, all attendees will recieve that Ultimate Onboarding Playbook to apply in your business.

If you’re planning to grow your team or brokerage in 2026, this is the one to be in the room for.

[Save your spot for June 30 →]

A few months ago, we did something most brokers never get around to: we took real agent activity data, mapped it against real production numbers, and ran the correlation.

The magic result was “r = 0.72” — don’t worry if you don’t know what r stands for, it’s a statistical term, and .72 is a very strong correlation between the income-producing actions your agents take today and the closed volume your team generates approximately 60 days later.

That single finding reframes everything about how you should be thinking about growth. Because it means production isn’t some unpredictable force that ebbs and flows with the market. It’s an output — one with measurable, controllable inputs sitting right inside your organization.

There are three of them. Most brokers only know about one.

Lever 1: Recruitment

More agents, more production. You know this one.

But recruitment is slow, expensive, and front-loaded. You invest time, money, and energy long before you see a single closed deal. Heading into high season, ramping up new agents while trying to capitalize on an active market is like trying to board a moving train.

Recruitment matters — but it can’t be your only move, and it shouldn’t be your first one right now. Because there are faster levers to pull, starting inside the organization you already have.

Lever 2: Agent Activation

Before you go hunting for new talent, take a hard look at the team you already have.

Ask yourself one simple — and slightly uncomfortable — question: What percentage of my agents are actually active right now?

Not licensed. Not names on the roster. Active — meaning consistent outreach, booked appointments, clients under contract.

Pull a CRM report. For most brokerages, that number lands somewhere between 60–65%. Let’s call it 60%.

Now ask: Can I move that to 70 or 75%?

That’s not a recruitment problem. That’s an activation problem — and the ROI on solving it is almost unfair. These agents are already in your organization, already know your culture, and cost you nothing to re-engage. The only investment is a structured plan and a friendly touchpoint.

Here’s the key mindset shift: skip the high-stakes conversations. No “are you in or out?” ultimatums. No drama. If an agent hasn’t resigned and their license is active, assume they’re in — and act like it.

The most effective re-engagement tool is a simple reactivation program — call it something like “90 Days to Your Next Closing.” Most dormant agents aren’t disengaged because they stopped caring. They’re stuck because no one ever showed them the fundamentals: how to generate leads, who to call, what to say, how to get the appointment, how to run it. Give them a clear path from zero to one, and you’ll be surprised how quickly they move.

Activation has a higher ROI than recruitment. Period. You’re not acquiring anyone — you’re unlocking value that’s already yours.

Lever 3: Per-Agent Productivity — The One That Changes Everything

Now let’s zoom in on your active agents and get precise about what “active” actually means.

If I asked you to rank your active agents from most productive to least, how would you do it? It sounds simple, but it’s genuinely hard. Some agents dial Zillow leads. Some work their sphere. Some thrive on social media, others run open houses, do cold calling, circle prospecting, or build entirely through referrals. The range of income-producing activities is enormous — and comparing a sphere-based agent to a digital prospector is like comparing apples to lug wrenches.

So how do you create a universal measure of productivity across all of them?

You assign a dollar value to every action.

The math is straightforward:

• It takes roughly 70 conversations to close one deal.

• If your average commission is $9,000, one conversation is worth $9,000 ÷ 70 = $128.

• It takes about 5 dials to produce one qualifying conversation (2+ minutes, on-topic).

• So one dial is worth $128 ÷ 5 = $25.

One dial. Twenty-five dollars. Every time.

You can apply the same logic to every activity in your playbook — open houses, social DMs, referral calls, text outreach — and suddenly you have a single, unified language for productivity across your entire team, regardless of how individual agents work.

Now here’s where it gets powerful.

When you total up all the income-producing actions your agents are performing each week, multiply each by its assigned value, and plot that number as a trend line — something remarkable emerges.

That activity chart will almost exactly mirror your closed production, with a 60-day lag.

In fact, we did it for some of our Agently clients and we were SHOCKED!!!

I know how stupidly obvious it sounds, but we just proved on raw data that the more action your agents do, the higher production volume will follow in ±60 days..

This is the r = 0.72 finding. We didn’t hypothesize it — we measured it. And it means a few things that should change how you operate:

• If your production is soft right now, look at what your agents were doing 60 days ago.

• If you want to know where your production will be in 60 days, look at what your agents are doing this week.

• And if you want to grow production, there is exactly one place to focus: driving more high-value actions today.

This gives you something most leaders never have: a forward-looking indicator. Not a lagging report of what already happened, but a real-time signal of what’s coming — and a direct dial to adjust it.

Here’s how to pull this lever:

1. Shortlist the income-producing activities you want your agents focused on. Keep it tight — five to eight actions at most.

2. Assign point values to each one using the commission-per-action framework above.

3. Make activity visible. Weekly leaderboards, team check-ins, whatever fits your culture — the goal is to make actions feel real and consequential.

4. Reframe prospecting for your agents. Every dial isn’t a task on a checklist. It’s $25 moving toward their next commission. Every conversation is $128. When agents feel that connection viscerally, their relationship with outreach changes entirely.

The 60-day lag isn’t a delay to be frustrated by — it’s a gift. It means the decisions you make right now, this week, will determine your summer. You’re not at the mercy of the market. You’re making a deposit.

The Formula

Three levers. One equation:

Recruitment × Activation Rate × Per-Agent Productivity = Production

Most brokers spend 100% of their energy on the first term. The ones quietly outgrowing their markets are pulling all three — and they have the data to prove which ones to press harder.

You now know where to look. The 60-day clock starts today.

At Agently, we built a platform to help you pull levers 2 and 3.

Learn more at agently.com

Disclaimer: Nobody forced me. Fully voluntary decision — I guess I just love a good challenge.

Every week, I personally take exactly 15 demo calls with brokers and team leaders. And at least once a week, somewhere between the product walkthrough and the pricing conversation, I hear this:

“This is an amazing platform — but my agents won’t use any tech.”

The first few times it happened, I stalled. Literally had nothing to say. So I started asking questions instead.

When I asked — “the agents who won’t use any tools, are they closing a lot of deals?” — I want you to sit down before you read the answer.

Because the answer was: “No, they’re not producing, but tech won’t change that.”

Let that sink in for a second.

There are brokers out there making strategic technology decisions — decisions that shape the competitiveness of their entire business — based on the opinions of agents who aren’t producing.

Instead of focusing on the 30% who are actively closing deals and equipping them with tools that make them more competitive, some brokerages are designing their entire tech stack around the 70% who don’t use technology in the first place.

I’ll be honest — I don’t know if it’s appropriate to say this — but I think it might be a good thing that some of those brokerages will eventually go out of business.

Because in my world, even when you work with independent contractors, you have a moral responsibility: to enable your people. To give them the tools and support to be competitive. To set them up to win.

When brokers underserve their agents, agents underserve their clients. And the market will eventually sort that out.

But I’m not here to shame anyone.

Most brokerages don’t resist technology out of stubbornness — they resist it out of trauma.

Every broker I’ve ever met has a story. A CRM that no one logged into. A training platform that collected dust. A tool that cost thousands and died on the vine within ninety days.

I call it Post-Traumatic Tech Buying Disorder.

And it’s completely understandable. If every tool you’ve ever bought has failed to stick, of course your first instinct is “my agents won’t use it.” That’s not weakness — that’s pattern recognition.

The problem is when that pattern recognition becomes the ceiling on your ambition.

So the purpose of this article is simple: I want to give you a framework for evaluating technology that cuts through the noise, protects you from making another expensive mistake, and helps you make decisions based on one thing and one thing only.

Return on Investment.

Step 1: Understand What the Technology Actually Does For Your Business

When evaluating any software, forget the demo. Forget the design. Forget AI hype. Forget whether it integrates with your favorite CRM.

There are only three ways a piece of technology can justify its cost:

Category 1: It saves you time.

Category 2: It saves you money.

Category 3: It helps you make more money.

Category 4: Makes you look cool because it has the word AI in it

That’s it. Every software product on earth falls into one of these three buckets — and the bucket it falls into determines how seriously you should take it.

Category 1 — Time savings is the most common claim and the weakest value proposition. Example: a new transaction management system saves you two hours a week. Eight hours a month. If your time is worth $300 an hour, that’s $2,400 in recovered time. If the software costs $600 a month, your ROI is 4x. Not bad — but time savings are soft. They’re hard to measure, easy to overestimate, and often eaten up by the time it takes to implement the software in the first place.

Category 2 — Cost savings is more concrete. If that same transaction management system uses AI to eliminate the need for a $4,200-a-month transaction coordinator, your ROI is 7x — and it’s measurable to the dollar. That’s $3,600 going back into your pocket every single month. This is real money, not recovered hours you may or may not have used productively.

Category 3 — Helps you make more money. The boldest claim of the three. But when it works, it’s a money-printing machine.

Let’s use a simple non-tech example. Say there’s an abstract leads provider — let’s call them Fillow Zlex. You spend $10,000 a month on 100 leads. Ten of those leads convert, netting you $20,000 in commission. That’s a 2x return on every dollar invested. The unit economics work — and your only job is to scale.

Category 3 is where the real leverage lives. Because you’re not cutting costs or recovering time — you’re multiplying revenue. And in real estate, where every incremental transaction has significant value, even modest improvements compound quickly.

At Agently, we sit squarely in Category 3 — and we know it’s the hardest claim to make, which is exactly why we have to prove it.

The chart below shows data from one of our pilot teams. What you’re looking at is the relationship between pipeline activity — the actions agents take — and closed transaction volume. Measured over eleven months, it shows a 77% correlation between your agents making more dials, conversations, and appointments and closed volume. Typically, there would be a 60 - 75 day lag between the actions and transactions.

The 77% correlation is VERY HIGH. When agent activity goes up, production volume follows within 60-75 days — predictably, measurably, and consistently.

Agently does just that - it gets agents to do more income-producing activities. Not through persuasion or chasing, but by showing them how every action they take today translates into the commission check they earn tomorrow.

Here’s what that means in practical terms.

Say you have a team of 100 agents. Thirty are active producers. The other seventy are, for whatever reason, not producing consistently. What if — just among those thirty active agents — you could increase their dials, conversations, and appointments by 30%?

Not doubling. Not a dramatic transformation. Just a 30% improvement in consistent daily activity for agents who are already engaged.

That marginal improvement unlocks approximately 40 additional transactions per year. At an average net commission of $9,000 per deal, that’s approximately $180,000 in additional net commission income — from a group of agents you already have, doing work they’re already close to doing.

Now, go back to the objection that the agents wouldn’t use it.

Do you really care if only 30% adopt the platform — if that 30% generates 40 more closings a year?

And here’s the part that takes care of itself: once those agents start producing more, once the leaderboard shows their names at the top, once their peers can see the streak they’ve built — you won’t need to push adoption. The other 70% will ask to be included.

The technology sells itself when it works. Your only job is to let it prove itself first.

Step 2: Talk to Existing Clients — Not the Company

Ask for references. It sounds obvious because it is obvious — and yet most brokers skip this step because it feels time-consuming.

Let me reframe that: switching software after a failed implementation will cost you ten times more time, money, and organizational trust than a 30-minute reference call with a non-biased business owner who has already done what you’re considering.

Ask them: Did agents actually use it? What changed? What didn’t? Would they buy it again? What do they wish they’d known before they started?

Five honest answers from real clients are worth more than the best sales presentation ever made.

Step 3: Run a Pilot Before You Commit

Don’t make a long-term decision based on whether you think your agents will use it.

Instead, start small. Take your top 10 to 15 most engaged agents — the ones already in the 30% — and run a fixed 90-day pilot. Set clear metrics before you start: what does success look like? What numbers need to move?

If the results show up, go all in. If they don’t, you’ve lost 90 days and a manageable amount of money — not a year-long contract and your team’s trust.

If your software vendor only offers annual plans or doesn’t offer paid pilots - walk away.

And critically: don’t push the technology top-down. Let the pilot group generate the proof. Then show that proof to the rest of your agents. When their peers are producing more, and they can see exactly why, adoption doesn’t need to be mandated.

It happens naturally. Because agents are rational people who want to earn more money.

They always were.

Make sure you are not letting the least productive part of your business set the ceiling for the rest of it.

And that’s not a technology problem.

That’s a leadership decision.

Max Grebenuk
Founder at Agently — the Agent Production Engine

Want to see the production data from our pilots? Or talk through whether Agently fits your team? Book a call here: https://www.agently.com/

But only 20% of your agents produce consistently.

The other 80%? Feels like they’re just sabotaging your business, right?

Why can’t they just make those dials?

Follow up with those leads.

Host that open house, meet some buyers, set some appointments. It’s not complicated.

You even paid for those Zillow leads. You got them a CRM with a power dialer. A fancy office with a cooler to stay hydrated. You hired a transaction coordinator and an expensive coach that whispers in their ear, “Yes, you can!”

Why can’t they just do the damn thing?

Why bother getting a license and joining your team only to do nothing?

Alright. Let’s cool down.

I’ve got something for you — but first, we need to agree on something.

You must accept the fact that you can’t talk someone into becoming successful.

You can’t train someone into taking action.

The idea that you can hold someone accountable hard enough to turn them into a top producer is absurd.

Even if you try, there are not enough hours in a day to babysit every agent on your team.

Just like every other normal human being, agents feel resistance when they’re told what to do — unless they asked for it.

Do you feel resistance when someone repeatedly tells you to do something? I certainly do. And the more times someone repeats it, the less inclined I am to actually do it.

Hard accountability worked for the 20%. For the other 80%, accountability doesn’t feel like support — it feels like surveillance.

But do you know who else avoids accountability? You do.

I don’t blame you.

Accountability is conflict. Accountability is micromanagement. Telling people they don’t meet your standard. Becoming the bad guy. Making hard decisions you didn’t sign up for.

A better way

So let’s go back to the real reason agents got licensed and joined your team.

It’s highly likely that, just like every salesperson who ever lived, they were hoping to earn some commission.

They didn’t for your weekly team meetings and 1-on-1s. They joined to make money.

So instead of telling agents what to do — what if we showed them how every action they take today earns them a piece of the commission they’ll collect tomorrow?

It’s annoying to realize how simple it sounds, knowing it took us many months to build.

Here is how it works.

Every week, agents get a personalized list of income-producing actions designed to get them to their next deal faster.

If your team provides leads, the actions can focus on dialing and follow-up. If you’re an SOI-focused team or if you focus on circle prospecting or open houses, the actions will reflect that. It’s 100% customizable to how your business actually runs.

Every action has a value assigned to it. We call it Pipeline Dollars.

Some actions are worth more than others — because they should be. For example, following up with a lead is worth more than making a social media post. If your team thrives on social media, you can reverse that and put higher activity value on posting TikTok videos with listing walkthroughs. There’s a formula behind this, built around what actually moves deals forward.

As agents complete their actions, their Pipeline Dollars fill up a house — a visual representation of their next transaction. The total capacity of that house equals their average commission per transaction.

The idea couldn’t be simpler: fill the house by taking action, earn your next deal.

And here’s what happens when an agent can see that in real time — when they can watch the house fill up with every dial they make and every conversation they start:

The resistance disappears.

Instead of being told what to do, they want to do it. Because now they can see, clearly and immediately, how every action moves them closer to a commission check.

Accountability stops feeling like surveillance. It starts feeling like income.

We also integrated with all major real estate CRMs — so every time an agent takes action in their CRM, whether that’s adding a lead, making a dial, or setting an appointment, it automatically reflects in Agently.

Your CRM is still the place to do the work.

Agently is the place that makes agents want to do the work.

And when a deal closes? The house resets to $0, and they start working toward the next one.

Inspiration

As we built this, we researched the most successful RPG games ever made — studying the psychology behind what brings people back to a game every single day, often without any external pressure at all.

Then we rebuilt those principles inside Agently.

Leaderboards are the most visible example. We’re currently piloting this with four teams, and the data is already telling a story: agents are checking the leaderboard multiple times a day. Not because anyone asked them to. Because they’re competitive. Because they want to see where they stand. Because recognition is a more powerful motivator than any accountability conversation you’ve ever had.

Streaks are the other tool we deployed — and honestly, the results have surprised even us. Most agents operate in bursts. A week of hustle followed by two weeks of drift. Consistency is what actually separates top producers, and streaks build the habit of showing up daily. Complete at least one action a day to keep your streak alive. Miss a day, and it resets to zero. What we’re seeing in our pilots: agents are far, far more likely to pick up the phone because their streak is about to expire than because their broker told them to call.

I’m getting too excited sharing this with you.

But I want to say something I genuinely believe:

Technology for agents must be built around their needs and their goals.

Every tool you’ve tried to push onto your agents was built for you — for reporting, for visibility, for your peace of mind. Not for them. That’s why adoption has always been a battle. That’s why you’ve spent years trying to force people to use software they have no personal reason to care about.

This is different.

This is a game — a simple game where you earn virtual coins by taking action. Easy to understand for a 20-year veteran. Easy to understand for a brand new agent. The only difference from every other game they’ve ever played is that the reward for winning isn’t virtual coins.

It’s a real commission check.

When we closed a deal, the house resets. The game starts over. And they can’t wait to play again.

This is the most exciting product our team at Agently has ever brought to this market.

And the truly wild part? We’re just getting started.

This system has opened up a vision for what comes next — deeply personalized agent coaching and training that runs completely on autopilot, giving every agent the individual guidance they’ve been craving, while freeing you to do what you actually signed up for: lead.

That vision has been backed by our investors. We just closed a fresh round of venture capital.

And because what we’ve built doesn’t fit neatly into any existing category — not a CRM, not an LMS, not a coaching platform — we’re defining a new one.

We call it the Agent Production Engine.

There is a before and after in every industry.

Before and after the MLS. Before and after Zillow. Before and after the smartphone in every agent’s pocket.

Before today, we managed production by hoping, chasing, having hard conversations, and quietly accepting the 80/20 as the permanent cost of running a brokerage.

After today, you don’t have to.

Learn more at agently.com

And if you want to see this running for your team — book a call with me directly. I’ll walk you through everything personally.

You’ve probably heard about the ongoing acquisition spree.

• Compass acquired Anywhere.

• Rocket acquired Redfin.

• Stone Point Capital took a majority ownership stake in Keller Williams.

• Real Brokerage is combining with RE/MAX for $880 million.

On the surface, it may seem like simple market consolidation happening after four long years of tough market conditions — which, historically, is quite normal. Weak players get absorbed. Stronger ones grow. The cycle repeats.

But there’s a much bigger play behind all these headlines. And if you’re running an independent brokerage, you need to understand it clearly — not in two years, but right now.

The Real Reason They’re Buying Brokerages

Here’s the part most coverage misses entirely: these companies aren’t buying brokerages because they love brokerages.

A typical brokerage runs on 5 to 10% net margins. That’s not a business anyone gets excited about at the board level. So why are private equity firms, mortgage giants, and tech-forward platforms suddenly racing to acquire them?

Because the brokerage is the cheapest customer acquisition channel left in America for selling a homeowner a bundled financial product over the next 30 years.

Think about what sits on top of a single real estate transaction.

• Mortgage origination.

• Title insurance.

• Escrow.

• Homeowners insurance — renewed every year.

• Home warranty.

• Moving services.
  Mortgage servicing rights

• The next purchase.

• The next sale.

Stack all of that together and the math changes completely. The brokerage itself becomes a loss leader. The transaction is the bait. The client relationship — and everything that can be monetized from it over decades — is the actual prize.

The agent count in all of these deals? That’s the delivery vehicle.

The ancillary stack is the actual profit.

So What Does This Mean for Independent Brokerages?

Here’s where it gets real.

The big platforms have clear advantages that smaller brokerages simply can’t replicate. They can own the tech stack. They can subsidize commissions. They can run a full ancillary operation — mortgage, title, insurance — under one roof. Independent brokerages can’t do that, at least not at that scale.

But here’s what independent brokerages do own: agents. And agents own client relationships.

That client database — the past buyers, the past sellers, the people who trusted an agent enough to hand over the biggest financial decision of their lives — is exactly what every one of these acquiring giants is really after.

The large platforms can play this one of two ways. They can wait for struggling brokerages, squeezed by shrinking margins and rising costs, to quietly collapse — and then scoop them up as distressed acquisitions for pennies on the dollar.

Or they can go hunting, recruiting top agents away one by one with signing bonuses and production incentives.

Either way, the target is the same: the agent, and the relationships they carry.

The Agent Is Back at the Center — and That Changes Everything

Here’s something worth saying plainly: the agent is back.

For years, the narrative in PropTech was that agents were an inefficiency waiting to be automated away. Zillow figured out the hard way that wasn’t true. Redfin learned it too.

You cannot displace a trusted human relationship with an app. AI can process data. AI can generate leads. AI can draft contracts and summarize disclosures. But AI cannot sit across the kitchen table from a nervous first-time buyer and make them feel genuinely understood. Agents can.

That’s why every major player in this consolidation wave is racing to aggregate agents rather than replace them. The agent is the last mile of a very expensive distribution network, and right now, that network is being priced accordingly.

The Strategy for Independent Brokerages: Become Indispensable to Your Agents

If the big companies are coming for your agents — and they are — the only winning response is to make your brokerage the place where agents thrive.

Not just survive. Thrive.

You can’t out-tech Compass. You can’t out-capital Rocket. But you can out-care them. You can out-develop them. You can build the kind of environment where agents actually grow into consistent, high-producing professionals — which, ironically, is exactly what the big platforms need but rarely prioritize once the recruiting check clears.

Brokers who still run a “recruit & forget” strategy - GONE.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: none of the ancillary revenue strategies that make these mega-deals pencil out work if agents aren’t closing deals.

Mortgage attach rates, title capture, insurance cross-sells — all of it requires a transaction to start. An agent who isn’t producing consistently generates zero ancillary revenue. Zero.

So the brokerage that focuses relentlessly on agent development — on turning newer agents into consistent producers and keeping top performers operating at their peak — is building exactly the asset everyone else is trying to acquire. And if you do ever choose to be acquired, it is far better to negotiate from a position of strength, with a thriving roster of productive agents, than to be picked up quietly as a distressed seller running on fumes.

The consolidation happening right now isn’t the end of independent brokerages. But it is a forcing function. The brokerages that make it through the next five years will be the ones that decided — clearly and early — that their core product isn’t transactions.

It’s agent success.

At Agently, that’s exactly what we focus on: helping brokerages and teams develop more of their agents into consistent producers. Because in the new economics of real estate, that’s not just a coaching philosophy. It’s a survival strategy.

P.S. One Other Bold Prediction I Am Willing to Make

I’ll close with something a little unconventional.

I believe we are going to see a meaningful rise in top-producing agents being offered W-2 employment rather than 1099 independent contractor status. And I think it happens sooner than most people expect.

Here’s the logic: when a platform can generate $30,000 to $50,000 in ancillary revenue per transaction on top of the commission, the economics of retaining a top producer change dramatically. The margin exists to pay a salary, offer benefits, and create real financial security — the kind of stability that has historically been absent from a commission-only career. Large platforms will use that margin as a weapon to lock in their best agents and protect their most valuable distribution nodes.

Watch for it. There will be fewer agents, but an agent who closes 30+ transactions a year is about to become very, very valuable in ways that go well beyond their GCI.

If this gave you a clearer picture of where things are headed, share it with another broker who needs to see it.

Only 5% of real estate teams have managed to grow beyond 20-30 agents.

And I don’t mean recruiting “dead souls” who sit on the roster. I mean, actual, consistently producing agents.

Out of that 5%, even fewer leaders are openly sharing their exact playbooks and strategies.

Team Peterson-Jackson is that rare exception.

Tomorrow at 2pm ET, LaShawn and Towanna will join us on our webinar and share exactly how they went from 20 to 89 agents in 18 months — scaling across multiple states without burning out.

Register Here

One of the fastest-growing teams at eXp. Recognized as Icons of the Year in 2025.

No theory. Only the proven strategies that helped them scale to 89 agents and keep growing while most other teams were waiting for the market to recover.

When it comes to building systems and processes, few have more hands-on experience than these two.

If you’re building a team or brokerage, this is the event for you.

📅 April 29, 2026 · 2pm ET

👉 [Register here — it’s free]

Please note: we have a limit of 100 seats. First-come, first-served.

Prepare your questions. See you there.

There’s a conversation that almost never happens in real estate.

Not at conferences, not in masterminds, and definitely not on social media.

It goes something like this: “We had 15 agents, only 3 were producing, and I had no idea what to do next.”

Nobody wants to admit it. But it happens to the majority of growing teams — and if you’re building a team right now, there’s a good chance you’re either already in it, or heading straight for it.

It Always Starts So Well

Think back to when you hired your first 2–5 agents.

They were probably people you knew. Former colleagues, agents who’d been watching you produce results and wanted in. They already knew how to close deals. They just wanted a fresh environment, a new brand, and the energy of a team on a mission.

You were the leader and the producer. You inspire by example. You had 1-on-1s that actually mattered. Recruiting and training felt exciting — a challenge, not a burden.

That phase is intoxicating. And it creates a very dangerous illusion.

The Wall Nobody Talks About

Around agent 6, 7, 8 — things quietly start to change.

The new recruits aren’t the same caliber as your founding agents. They need more time, more hand-holding, more training before they see their first closing. Some never get there at all — they leave without a single deal to their name.

You suddenly find yourself training agents who think MLS is a soccer league (it actually is) and thinking what am I doing here?

Meanwhile, you’re still trying to stay in production yourself. Because that’s what pays the bills. Because that’s what you’re good at. Teaching others how to sell turns out to be very different from knowing how to sell.

Your operations manager starts taking on more — trying to systematize what used to run on instinct and trust. But there’s only so much one person can absorb.

The culture that made your team feel like a team? It’s quietly diluting.

What started as a tight-knit group with direct access to you is slowly becoming something harder to define. More agents. More noise. More fires to put out.

Here’s the number nobody in this industry likes to say out loud: up to 95% of teams stall somewhere between 10 and 15 agents.

And if you look carefully at those teams, you’ll usually find the same pattern — out of 12 or 15 agents on the roster, 3 or 4 are genuinely producing. Almost always the ones who joined in the first wave.

That’s when the “reset” decision gets made.

“This time, I’m only hiring top producers.”

Unfortunately, every team in the market is hunting them too.

The Reset Trap

The reset feels logical. Clean slate. Higher bar. Better agents.

But here’s the hard truth: agents aren’t the problem. The system is.

Or more precisely — the absence of one.

When you hire better agents into a broken system, you get the same result. Slower, maybe. But the same.

What very few team leaders recognize in time is that their job description fundamentally changes as the team grows.

With 5 agents, your job is to lead by example, stay in production, inspire people directly, and attract like-minded realtors. Everything is ad-hoc. Creativity is your friend. You make decisions on the fly, and it works — because the team is small enough to absorb it.

But at a certain inflection point, that playbook stops working. Almost overnight.

Suddenly, you need to be a system-builder, not just a team leader.

There aren’t enough hours in the day to give every agent the time and attention they came to you for. But distancing yourself isn’t an option either — because remember why they joined your team in the first place. They wanted to replicate your success. To follow your footsteps. To learn from you directly.

If you can’t deliver that at scale, you can’t expect them to stay.

The Real Transformation Required

I want to be clear about something: not every team should chase growth. I know great teams that are intentionally small — tight family operations that are happy exactly where they are. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But if you’ve chosen the growth path, you need to understand what it actually demands.

It demands a transformation — not just of your team, but of you as a leader.

You can’t build an outstanding 30, 50, or 80-agent organization by staying in production and doing the same things you did when you had no team. That version of you was perfect for a different stage. What the next stage needs is different.

What it needs is systems.

Onboarding is a system. Not a welcome email and a folder full of documents — a structured, repeatable process that gets every new agent to their first deal as fast as possible.

Ongoing development is a system. Not a weekly call you squeeze in between showings — a coaching and training cadence that runs consistently, regardless of how busy you are.

Accountability is a system. Not a conversation you have when things go wrong — a real-time visibility layer that shows you who’s on track and who needs attention before it becomes a problem.

These should not be to-do items on your daily list. They should be the infrastructure of your organization — running in the background while you do what only you can do: lead, build culture, attract talent, navigate the market, bring your vision to life, and build generational wealth.

That’s why we built Agently. Not to add more tools to your stack — but to give team leaders the systems that let them scale without losing what made them great in the first place.

What It Actually Looks Like When It Works

On April 29th, we’re hosting a live webinar with one of the most remarkable team leaders we’ve had the privilege of working with.

They joined Agently with 15 agents. Faced every challenge described above. Made the difficult decision to transform — not reset.

Today, they run a multi-state brand with 89 agents, and were recognized as an ICON of the Year by eXp for their results.

We’re going to walk through the exact transformation — the mindset shifts, the systems that were put in place, and the moments where it felt like it was all going to fall apart.

You’ll have the opportunity to ask questions directly during Q&A.

If you’re building a team — at 5 agents, 15, or 40 — this is the conversation you need to hear.

[Reserve your spot for the April 29th webinar →]

No recordings sold. No replay gatekeeping. Just one hour that could change the trajectory of your team.

See you there.

If you had a hard time figuring out what is going on… you’re in the right place.

As always, let’s oversimplify to understand who the real winners and losers are.

What actually happened

• February 26, 2026 - Rocket and Compass announced a three-year alliance under which Compass “Coming Soon” listings would appear on Redfin immediately, with Compass “Private Exclusive” properties to follow.

• March 17, 2026 - Zillow announced Zillow Preview (their own version of pre-market “Coming Soon” listings), launching with Keller Williams, RE/MAX, HomeServices of America, Side, and United Real Estate. Zillow Preview makes it publicly visible on Zillow and Trulia before MLS submission.

• March 18, 2026 - Compass voluntarily dismissed its federal antitrust lawsuit against Zillow after Zillow revised its "Coming Soon" listing policy. The lawsuit, filed in June 2025, challenged Zillow's rule banning private listings.

• March 18, 2026 - eXp Realty announces that it will syndicate Coming Soon listings to Realtor.com, Homes.com, and ComeHome.com

Why this matters (A LOT)

That changes everything.

Because the moment a listing hits the MLS, it becomes commodity inventory.
It’s everywhere. Everyone has it. No one owns it.

But before that?

• That’s where demand is shaped.

• That’s where pricing is tested.

• That’s where the first — and often most valuable — buyer is found.

And now, that moment is up for grabs.

Brokerages like Compass want to control it.
Portals like Zillow and Redfin want to capture it.

Because whoever controls the pre-MLS… controls the market.

That is huge. It changes EVERYTHING:

• who wins listings,

• how agents justify their value,

• where consumer demand gets captured,

• how portals compete

The true impact by player

Brokerages

Large brokerages gain the most.

Why? Because pre-market inventory is now a strategic asset, not just a status flag. If you are a large brokerage, you can tell agents and sellers:

• “We have more flexible go-to-market options.”

• “We can give your listing exposure before MLS.”

• “We can help you avoid immediate DOM and public price-history baggage in some markets.”

• “We have a differentiated channel strategy.”

That is a recruiting, retention, and listing-win tool. Zillow is explicitly selling Preview to brokerages as a stronger recruiting and listing-conversation story, while also saying agents cannot access it independently; it must come through a brokerage partner.

So the likely result is more power concentrating in major brands and networks that can negotiate directly with portals and build repeatable pre-market playbooks.

Smaller independent brokerages are in a tougher spot. If they do not have relationships with portals or meaningful in-house audience, they risk looking less sophisticated in listing presentations.

Agents

For listing agents, this is mostly a positive shift.

They now have a stronger pitch to sellers:

• test demand before going fully active,

• gather engagement signals,

• potentially manage DOM optics,

• generate early interest,

• and in some cases route leads directly to the listing agent.

But there is a catch: this may widen the gap between listing agents and buyer agents. If more inventory is “won” earlier through listing-side marketing, buyer agents may lose some of the information advantage they used to get from pure MLS parity. The lead may also be captured sooner by the listing side or by portal.

Consumers

Consumers gain from transparency relative to truly private networks, but not uniformly.

The upside:

• buyers may see more homes earlier,

• sellers may get more options in how they launch,

• and some pre-market listings that were previously hidden inside private brokerage channels become public.

The downside:

• inventory may become more fragmented across platforms and brokerage affiliations,

• rules will vary by market,

• and there may be more consumer confusion about what is “really available,” when tours/offers can happen, and whether the listing is actually active.

So for consumers, this is better than hidden office exclusives, but not the same as full open-market access.

MLSs

MLSs are the most strategically threatened long-term.

Not because they disappear tomorrow, but because their role as the first place a serious listing appears is weakening. NAR’s own policy gives MLSs discretion on delayed marketing windows, and local rules now shape whether pre-market activity can happen, how long it lasts, and how DOM or price history are handled.

That creates two problems for MLSs:

• They lose some agenda-setting power to portals and national brokerages.

• Their value shifts from “the place where listing exposure begins” to “the compliance and cooperation rail once a listing goes active.”

MLSs still matter a lot. They remain the core data-sharing and cooperation infrastructure. But if pre-market becomes the highest-value part of the listing lifecycle, MLSs risk being pushed one step later in the funnel.

Zillow

Zillow’s move is defensive and offensive at the same time.

Defensive, because Compass and Rocket/Redfin threatened to create a meaningful pre-market inventory advantage elsewhere. Reuters reported Compass dropped its lawsuit after Zillow opened its platform more broadly through Zillow Preview.

Offensive, because Zillow is using this moment to say:

• “Public pre-market should happen on our rails.”

• “We are the pro-consumer, pro-transparency standard.”

• “If pre-market is going to exist, it should still reinforce Zillow’s audience and lead ecosystem.”

This is why Zillow Preview matters so much strategically. It lets Zillow preserve its core narrative while avoiding being cut out of the fastest-growing inventory segment. Zillow says it averaged 235 million monthly unique users in 2025, and Preview gives participating brokerages access to that audience.

Compass

Compass probably forced the market to move.

Its thesis has been that sellers want flexibility, privacy, testing, and controlled exposure before going fully public. The Rocket/Redfin partnership gave Compass much broader distribution for that model and turned a company-specific strategy into an industry-level challenge.

Compass’s win is that everyone is now competing on its terrain.

But Compass also faces a risk: once Zillow and other portals support public pre-market products, Compass loses some of the uniqueness of its “three-phase” style approach. If every major brokerage can offer a version of early exposure through Zillow Preview, Compass’s differentiation shifts from “we alone do this” to “we may do this better.”

Who is helped and who is hurt

Winners

• large brokerages with scale,

• listing agents,

• portals that can turn pre-market into audience and lead capture,

• sellers who want flexibility and controlled launch strategy.

Mixed

• consumers: more visibility than private networks, but potentially more fragmentation and confusion during search.

Losers or pressured players

• smaller brokerages without portal partnerships,

• buyer agents if lead capture shifts earlier toward listing-side systems,

• MLSs if pre-market becomes the most strategically important phase.

And you know what triggered this?

Remember NAR’s 2025 changes to Clear Cooperation Policy?

That boring little clause about delayed marketing exempt listings.

It didn’t look like much.

But it broke the rule that listings start on the MLS.

And once that rule broke… the fight for the pre-MLS began.

Now connect the dots.

• 90% of production comes from 10% of agents

• Agents lack consistency and accountability

• No visibility into agent performance and what drives growth

• Expensive leads get wasted by undertrained agents

• Agents lose momentum and eventually churn

Yet, your sole mission is to overcome all of the above.

Because your entire business model depends on one thing: Agents closing deals.

What I am about to show you is a new, fundamentally different way to drive agent productivity in real estate.

A New Game in Real Estate

Imagine turning agent productivity struggle into a… GAME.

You start at Level 1, let’s call it “Foundation Builder”.

To progress to the next level, agents need to close a certain number of deals.

To earn their next deal, they need to complete income-producing activities: dials, conversations, appointments, open houses, etc.

Every activity has a value assigned to it - we call it Pipeline Dollars.

For example, it takes an average of 70 conversations to close one deal, so we can divide the average commission per transaction ($9000) by 70 conversations to estimate that one conversation is worth $143.10 Pipeline Dollars.

In a similar way, we can allocate activity values to all other activities, where, for example, a dial is worth $30 Pipeline Dollars, etc.

The goal is to complete enough income-producing activities so that the total value of Pipeline Dollars is equal to or greater than the average commission per transaction.

Agents EARN their next deal by taking income-producing actions - the app simply creates a visual representation to show if they’ve done enough or not.

If agents lack certain skills, for example, they don’t know who to dial or what to say or how to host an open house, they can unlock those skills by completing training modules right inside the same app.

All the content comes with the platform, but every brokerage has the ability to fully customize training modules, weekly activities, levels, benefits, and more.

Why a game?

Success in real estate life comes from taking action.

Your life is a scoreboard of your past behaviours and the actions you’ve taken.

Taking responsibility for your actions today creates opportunity for a better tomorrow.

Taking consistent action towards a defined goal is the only way to succeed.

Everything else is just noise.

Any real estate coaching boils down to one thing and one thing only:

Success comes from taking daily, routine, consistent action.

The obvious and valid question is, why doesn’t every agent do it?

The problem is that agents are humans.

And like for all humans, it is monumentally difficult to build and maintain productive habits.

Whether it’s exercising, reading a book, sticking to a diet, or learning a language.

That’s why people invented gamification systems — small psychological rewards and feedback loops that deliver micro dopamine hits — to motivate people to keep taking the routine and repetitive actions that drive results.

Take, for example, language learning.

You need to consistently study new words → learn grammar rules → practice daily.

Boring, hard, repetitive.

So people invented the Duolingo app: Complete lessons → earn points → maintain streaks → collect rewards & achievements → earn badges

Suddenly, routine, repetitive actions are no longer boring - they are… “rewarding”!?!?

Players return daily to complete more learning activities because they are “afraid” to lose their streak.

Duolingo for Sales Training

All existing technology in real estate is built for the 20% of agents who already have a habit of taking action, hence they have business

• CRM for managing clients (only good if you have clients to manage)

• Listing marketing tools (only good if you have listings)

What about the 80% of agents who struggle with consistency and accountability?

The best we could do is pay for a real estate coach to inject a dose of short-term motivation that evaporates by the time agents get back to their desks.

Why not use the same gamification mechanics to drive agents to take action?

• Leaderboards

• Weekly Rewards & Recognition

• Level Progression - brokers can set different benefits for different levels (for example, better splits at higher levels)

• We researched and applied the most effective gamification mechanics from various RPG and strategy games to drive maximum adoption and engagement.

This game will not turn every agent into a top producer.

But it will give 30-40% of agents who lack guidance and skills complete clarity as to where they are now.

What skills do they need to acquire to improve performance?

What income-producing activities do they need to focus on?

And how can they develop their career with your brokerage by unlocking new levels?

This clarity is what most of your agents are missing to truly succeed in real estate.

The Launch

On April 20th, we will launch the product to existing Agently clients.

If you would like to be among the early adopters, you can book a demo with me using this link, and I will add you to the early access list.

We are also currently raising a new $1.2M funding round that will be used to further advance our sales training technology. Half of the round is already filled by existing investors.

If you share our vision and are interested in becoming an investor in Agently, reach out to me at max@agently.com.

We are bringing a New Game to Real Estate!

I came to realize how the word “onboarding” has a totally different meaning for brokerages and teams.

When brokerages say “onboarding” they mean “administrative onboarding”

• Transferring a license

• Signing the ICA

• Setting up email, CRM, MLS & other accesses

• W2 forms

Onboarding ends when the paperwork is done and all compliance requirements are satisfied.

The main objective of “administrative onboarding” is to ensure compliance.

When teams say “onboarding” they mean “onboarding agents into production”

The main objective is get agents to start producing FASTER.

• Set clear productivity standards and expectations of what it means to be a part of the team

• Train agents on core skills and the team’s best practices

• Train agents on key systems and tools (dialers, CRMs, etc)

• Teams want full visibility into the onboarding process to filter out non-performers early

• Create a Lead Certification Program to protect team leads (especially for Zillow Flex and other teams providing leads)

Agent Onboarding Framework by Agently

Brokerages and teams may operate differently, but we all want the same thing:

A scalable, streamlined, low-friction onboarding machine.

A system that every new recruit plugs into —
that delivers clarity, accountability, and momentum —
and moves agents into production as quickly as possible.

Here is our latest framework.

Phase 1

There’s no escape from admin tasks.

For most organizations, onboarding ends there.

For Agently clients, that’s just Step 1.

Phase 2

Many brokerages skip Phase 2, but for newer agents joining high-producing teams, it’s non-negotiable, because undertrained agents are the #1 reason for wasted leads.

Many of our clients at Agently previously used generalist LMS platforms like Trainual, Kajabi, Thinkific, or Skool.

However, most of these learning management systems are built for creators and influencers to sell educational content to consumers — without being directly tied to real-world results or production outcomes.

At Agently, we purpose-built a system for real estate to ensure agents can actually practice scripts, conversations, and objection handlers before they are qualified to face clients or receive access to team-generated leads.

Check out the demo of Agently’s AI Script Roleplay feature.

Phase 3

Here are some examples of the training we built for our clients at Agently.

Phase 4

Many teams use 30-60-90 Day plans to filter out underperformers early on.

It’s a great way to accelerate agents into production and set key KPIs like first client under contract in 30 days, or two closed transactions in 90.

Phase 5

Lead Certification Program is what separates the best teams from the rest.

Have agents practice dialing Zillow Flex leads, objection handlers, and appointment scheduling scripts.

Only once they score 80% or more, they receive a certificate to access the team’s lead pool.

This was a game-changer for many of our teams at Agently, reporting an increased conversion rate after introducing Lead Certification Programs.

If you want to grow by bringing in new agents, onboarding and training them to a certain standard. Filter out unprofessional agents early to protect team leads.
Do all of this in a scalable and streamlined way, without adding workload.

Let’s chat.

“71% of Agents Closed Zero Deals in 2025.”

This stats quickly went viral.

There was just one problem.

NAR never officially published it.

Where the Viral Stat Came From (and Why It Matters)

The now-infamous “71%” number appears to have originated from a slide shown during a session at Inman Connect, not from any formal NAR report or publication.

As Vanessa Bowman, Senior Editor at BAM, explains in her breakdown, NAR has not released an official dataset supporting the claim that 71% of agents closed zero deals in 2025.

You can read her full piece here: https://nowbam.com/the-truth-behind-the-viral-71-of-agents-closed-zero-deals-stat/

So What Do the Real Numbers Look Like?

When you look at survey-based NAR data, the picture is still sobering—but more grounded.

According to recent Realtor self-reported transaction data:

• ~5% of residential agents report 0 transactions

• ~27% report 1–5 transactions

• The median agent closes ~10 transactions

Important caveat:
This data comes from survey respondents, which introduces bias. Agents doing zero deals are far less likely to spend time filling out NAR surveys. So even these numbers likely understate how bad things are at the bottom.

Different methodology. Different definitions. Same conclusion:

More than half of agents are dramatically underperforming their potential.

Have Things Actually Gotten Worse?

Yes. Especially for the marginal agent.

What’s different today isn’t that underperformance suddenly appeared. It’s that the market exposed it.

1. A Smaller Pie: Fewer Home Sales

Existing-home sales collapsed from ~6M annually at the peak to:

• ~4.09M in 2023 (slowest since 1995)

• ~4.06M in 2024

• ~3.95M annualized pace heading into late 2025 / early 2026

Affordability, higher rates, and tight inventory crushed transaction volume.

When the pie shrinks by ~35%, someone is going to starve.

2. Mortgage Rates + the Lock-In Effect

Millions of homeowners are sitting on 3% mortgages.

That creates a powerful psychological and financial lock-in:

• Fewer sellers

• Fewer move-up buyers

• Fewer transactions overall

3. Agent Count Didn’t Fall Fast Enough

Even if you completely throw out the “71%” stat, the math is unavoidable:

• Transactions fell fast

• Agent count fell slowly

When volume drops faster than headcount, deals per agent collapse.
The weakest producers are the first to hit zero.

4. Teams + Production Concentration

This is the part most people miss.

Production hasn’t disappeared—it’s concentrated.

• More deals are happening inside teams

• Activity is often recorded under lead agents

• Support agents, juniors, and specialists may show up as “0” in some datasets even if they contributed

Depending on how stats are collected, the bottom can look much worse than reality—while the top quietly gets stronger.

Future of Agent Productivity

So whichever stats you choose to believe, the truth remains the same: more than half of your agents are underperforming.

Many in the industry have quietly accepted this as “the norm”.

• High churn.

• Low productivity.

• A small top tier carrying everyone else.

At Agently, we see something very different.

We see one of the largest untapped growth opportunities in real estate—not through more recruiting, but through systematically developing the agents you already have.

At Agently, we believe the next wave of production growth won’t come from hiring more agents into broken systems. It will come from unlocking dormant potential using AI-driven development, accountability, and behavioral coaching.

That’s why at the end of Q1, we’re releasing the first fully gamified agent development system built specifically for modern real estate teams.

Imagine this: you’re playing a game where your character is a Realtor.

• You level up by gaining skills and closing deals.

• You progress by completing real activities that actually lead to closed transactions.

• You unlock new levels by doing the work that top producers already do consistently.

Except the rewards aren’t virtual badges or dopamine hits—they’re real commission checks earned through real-world execution.

I genuinely believe AI has the potential to redefine how agents are developed, coached, and supported—especially in a market that no longer forgives unprofessionalism and inconsistency.

More on this very soon.
Stay tuned.

agently.com

Do you know the number one thing most agents are bad at?

That’s right… Following up with leads.

This is why most AI tools in real estate focus on automating lead follow-up.

Amazing, so let’s assume no lead is left behind anymore.

We’re getting clients engaged & qualified, but here’s the next problem: follow-up doesn’t close deals. Agents do.

No matter how much we try to compensate agents’ lack of skills with AI, ultimately, they will need to pick up the phone, dial, schedule an appointment, and convert.

The agent’s ability or inability to handle client conversations will ultimately be the difference between a closed transaction and a lost deal.

At Agently, we decided to use AI to increase agent productivity by developing the ultimate script and objection roleplay tool.

Roleplay Script & Objections with AI

Step 1.

You chose what scripts and objections agents should role-play.

You can also provide your own optimal scripts and objection handlers.

This is a major difference from other platforms, where agents simply roleplay generic scenarios and team leaders have no ability to customize their ideal scripts.

Agently is built for teams. Teams are led by team leaders who have their own unique way of operating and doing business.

Team leaders need the ability to translate and share their own best practices to agents without any compromise.

Other AI roleplay tools only offer generic roleplay scenarios and don’t allow team leaders to customize optimal objection handlers the way they want.

Step 2.

Once everything is setup agents would use their white-labeled team’s app to record the audio with their objection handler.

Step 3.

AI will evaluate their response based on how closely it matches the optimal script or objection handler provided by the team leader.

If they score 80% of above, they pass. If they score below the threshold, agents receive feedback and an opportunity to practice again until they get it right.

Here’s a short demo video I recorded for you.

Use Case 1: Onboarding & Training Agents

Instead of being yet another standalone app, this tool is part of Agently’s agent development system.

This means the script roleplay can now become the core part of your agent onboarding and training process.

You don’t need to separately remind agents to roleplay the scripts using some third-party app.

The roleplay now happens inside your own white-label team or brokerage app.

Agently’s Agent Development System is purpose-built for real estate. That is why we can implement features tailored specifically to real estate needs vs. other LMS platforms like Trainual, Thinkific, or Skool, which try to cater to all industries at once.

Use Case 2: Lead Certification Program

One of the most popular use cases for AI Roleplay is to become a part of a Lead Certification Program designed to protect your team leads from undertrained agents.

Many teams make it a requirement for agents to complete a set of script practices and objection-handling exercises before granting access to the team’s lead pool.

Previously, this was a very manual process.

AI now allows to streamline the agent development process, further reducing team leaders’ workload.

What other use cases do you see for AI Roleplay?

This feature inspired us to redefine the entire approach to agent development.

We are already building it and will unveil it in March. Stay tuned

It looks like after three long years real estate market will finally see a recovery in 2026.

To capture market growth momentum, most teams and brokerages are planning aggressive recruitment campaigns.

To recruit effectively, it is important to understand agents’ state of mind, because what agents will be looking for in 2026 is completely different from what they cared about in the 2021 market.

Over the past couple of years, agents learned some brutally useful lessons:

• It doesn’t matter how low the split is — even the best split still pays $0 on $0 production.

• Likewise, even the best technology won’t save you if you don’t know how to generate business.

If your value proposition hasn’t evolved — if your recruiting page hasn’t changed in the last three years — it’s time to elevate your positioning. Because the agents you want in 2026 won’t be sold by the same messaging that worked in 2021.

Redefining Value Proposition

Splits matter — but they’re not decisive.
Technology matters — but it’s not decisive.
Culture matters — but it’s not enough.

What agents actually want is clarity - how EXACTLY will you help them get from where they are to where they want to be.

You need to be able to paint that vision clearly and confidently.

You need to show them the exact roadmap of how you’ll support them:

• from the day they start onboarding

• to the day they complete training and qualify to access leads

• to their first client under contract

• to the moment they cap

• and ultimately, to the moment they hit their income goal

Show them the journey.

Because at the end of the day, what matters to agents is reaching their income goals.

Technology and culture are great, but they’re “features,” not the reason someone joins your team.
A competitive split is nice — but it’s just an instrument designed to help agents hit their income goals faster.

And if you don’t have a proven system for helping agents produce?
Then the split doesn’t matter. Not to you, and not to them.

Standing Out From The Competition

If you truly want to capture attention, avoid these generic points used in 99.5% of typical value propositions:

• Competitive commission splits

• Industry-leading technology and CRM

• High-quality leads (for teams)

• Full marketing support

• Transaction coordination

• Best-in-class training and coaching

• A collaborative team culture

• Brand recognition and strong local market presence

I don’t want to take the shine off your value proposition, but let’s be honest, these are not differentiators.

The entire industry has access to pretty much the same technology.

Everybody claims to have the best-in-class training, whichever class that is.

Have you ever seen any team that openly said they have a poor culture?

All these claims are just noise.

4 Things Agents Actually Want To See

1. A Predictable Path to Production

Most agents (not all) want to plug into a proven system that consistently produces results for other agents.

Do you have that? Show it! Don’t hide it.

Share the exact case studies of agents who joined recently — and what they were able to achieve.

If you don’t have such a system in place, then maybe your focus should be on building one instead of recruiting agents and hoping for the best. Check out Agently’s ready-made systems for top-performing teams.

2. Business-Generating Support

How exactly will you help them generate business?

Does your value proposition talk about that? It should.

Describe your lead generation model. Are you a Zillow Flex team or do you focus on Sphere?

Be crystal clear that they won’t be left alone, having to figure out lead-generation themselves.

3. Transparent Numbers — No Fluff, No Hype

While others show promises - show your data instead:

• Average agent production vs. competing teams

• How quickly agents can hit their goals

• Retention rate and tenure

• Average GCI per agent

These metrics speak louder than words.

4. Real Leadership

“Leadership” gets thrown around a lot in real estate — usually as a buzzword.

But it actually has a very specific meaning:

Leadership in real estate is the ability to take an agent from uncertainty to consistent production through vision, systems, accountability, and guidance.

Can leadership turn every agent into a producer? Absolutely not!

But the right leadership constantly pulls the right agents in the right direction.

• Real mentorship from people in production

• Clear productivity standards

• Accountability structure to keep them consistent

Who To Recruit

Very often, I hear: “We don’t need new agents — we only recruit top producers.”

Such a smart strategy... except… it never worked.

Have you ever seen a team where all agents are equal top producers? Neither have I.

This is simply against the laws of Real Estate.

The stats show that agents peak within 2.5 years, and then move on somewhere else.

By narrowing down your search to only top producers, you risk losing a large share of your volume, and you risk missing out on the growth momentum when the market recovers.

Your best recruitment strategy is to recruit and develop a healthy mix of agents.

And as we discussed, in 2026, the answer won’t be your split, your CRM, or your “amazing team culture.”

It will be your system.
Your leadership.
Your proven ability to help agents increase their income — predictably.

Recruitment is no longer about shiny objects.
It’s about helping agents win.

And the teams that can prove they do that?
They will own 2026.

It’s also probably the perfect time of the year to think about your business goals for 2026.

I anticipate the start of market recovery at the end of Q1, but if you start your planning in January, you will already be late to the party — and spend the rest of the year chasing momentum instead of building it.

• NAR’s chief economist is now explicitly calling 2026 a “comeback” year, with ~14% jump in existing-home sales versus 2025 and new-home sales up as well.

• Fannie Mae’s September 2025 outlook pegs total home sales at ~4.72M in 2025 and ~5.16M in 2026 – that’s a noticeable pickup from today’s depressed transaction levels.

The baseline

The best place to start setting realistic goals is to look at your production levels for 2025.

• What volume are you projecting to hit by December 31st?

• How many agents do you currently have?

• And also, what’s the average price point in your market?

Just from having these 3 figures, you can already estimate the average per-agent transactions and volume.

We can get even more granular by segmenting agents into non-producers, low-producers, mid-tier agents, and top-producers.

Your 2025 production data can tell you A LOT about where to focus in 2026 to hit your production goal.

Route 1: Grow in size

The simple truth is - there always were and always will be only 2 ways to increase production:

• You either bring in more agents

• Or you increase per-agent productivity

Using your previous inputs, the formula gives you an answer to a question:

Simple right?

So, for example, if your team’s production volume in 2025 was $50M, how many more agents would you need to bring in to hit the $100M milestone in 2026?

Knowing this number helps you plan your recruitment efforts as well as figure out an onboarding and training system that would allow you to scale seamlessly.

It will most definitely be a very busy recruitment market.

As the market improves, everyone will be recruiting like crazy.

When the market is hot, the last thing you want to do is spend your time training new agents on how to tie their shoes.

Your job is to ensure you have a scalable and repeatable process for turning agents into producers that runs hands-free.

Route 2: Grow in productivity

The second route to our desired goal is through an increase in per-agent production.

In other words, training and coaching agents to generate and convert more business.

For example, if on average your agents are currently closing 4.27 transactions per year, you’d need to increase that average to 8.16 in order to reach your goal.

• Training core skills - gives agents the confidence to win business

• Coaching - is about setting specific KPIs and productivity standards

• Accountability - is all about making agents show up consistently

Please note: unlike with recruitment, where you are technically able to recruit any number of agents - you can’t infinitely increase per-agent productivity.

There is a certain limit where agents simply can’t handle more volume.

AI can certainly help streamline certain aspects, but AI can’t fix the human factor.

A typical top producer stays at its peak for 2.5 years before declining or quitting.

So no matter how much coaching you buy, you can’t only bet on working your agents harder.

Route 3: Do both

The simple truth is that inevitably you’d have to recruit and develop agents at the same time.

Simply bringing in agents without a system to get them onboarded, trained, and producing is a waste of recruitment budget.

More agents will not get you closer to your goal. More producers will.

Only focusing on productivity is a dead end too, because of the inevitable agent turnover and human factor.

The fastest route to your goal is to grow in all directions at the same time: headcount and productivity.

The only way to do it is through building systems.

All top teams run on systems.

Use the remaining 6 weeks before January 1st to position your team for growth in 2026.

Here is the Agently calculator to map your 2026 plan https://agently.com/roi.html

The top 100 MLSs have seen a 40%+ increase in team market share over the past 5 years.

Why? It all comes back to the reason teams were created in the first place.

A top-producing agent reaches a point where they can no longer handle the growing number of leads and business alone — so they bring on other agents to distribute what’s already working and scale it.

The core foundation and motivation of every team is built around one thing: growth.

“What can I, as the team leader, do to grow production?”
That’s the question driving every real estate team.

Brokerages vs. Teams: Different DNAs

Brokerages, on the other hand, are focused on preservation. They’re still trying to hold onto the glory they had in the past when the market was different — maintaining agent count to look big.

Their mindset has nothing to do with growth. It’s about protecting what they have, avoiding risk, and resisting change at all costs.

At Agently, we’ve worked with hundreds of brokerages to help build more effective onboarding and agent development systems. With a few exceptions, there’s always a familiar pattern:

• The broker-owner truly cares about the business and feels the need to innovate.

• But when it comes time to implement change, the internal staff resists.

• Why? Because brokerage employees aren’t incentivized by production growth. They’re paid the same whether agents produce or not.

As a result, they resist innovation — sometimes going to extreme lengths just to maintain the status quo.

Teams Don’t Have That Problem

Teams are wired differently. They thrive on innovation.

The only way for a team to exist is through growth. It’s built into the team’s DNA. The moment a team stops growing, it loses its original purpose.

And brokerages who bet on teams are now reaping the rewards. Just look at the numbers.

These brokerages realized they can’t train and support every agent the way a team can — so they delegated the most critical task of agent development from the brokerage to the team.

It was the smartest move they could make. All they had to do was create the right environment and give teams the tools to thrive.

Top Teams Run On Systems

Teams offer agents a clear, structured process for getting from 0 to 1 and 1 to 10+. Lean, fast, scalable, repeatable processes for turning agents into producers.

From ambiguity, lack of guidance and support, to clarity and clear non-negotiable productivity standards.

Most brokers are afraid to set any standards, because they think their agents would leave.

Teams, on the other hand, are constantly letting non-producing agents go because they care about their standards. Standards define the culture. They don’t care about the headcount, per-agent production is they’re core metric.

High-producing agents are attracted to teams specifically because they provide training, accountability, and proven systems for succeeding in real estate. Brokers only provide the logo — which, let’s be honest, is far overrated.

At Agently, we work to build systems for teams to run on.

Plug in your team’s goal for 2026 and see how we can help you grow https://agently.com/roi.html

You’ve all seen the numbers:

• IF APPROVED: Compass will pay $1.5 billion in an all-stock transaction

• Creating a mega brokerage with a combined value of $10 billion (including debt)

• 340,000 real estate agents

• yada yada yada

Numbers are a smokescreen for what’s behind these numbers.

Remember when Zillow banned Compass’s off-market listings?

With this deal, Compass is saying to Zillow,

“So you banned my Private Exclusives (Compass’s pocket listings) thinking you can sideline me?

I will now expand my market share to such an extent that off-market is no longer off-market - it’s THE market. “

Think about it… 340,000 real estate agents with a projected volume of 1.2 million transactions!

Zillow’s core consumer promise, ‘We show you all homes.’ turns into ‘We show you some homes.’

Essentially, Compass is now in the position to create its own Zillow… and I think it’s already happened.

Remember how Homes.com publicly said it would “boost” those listings that Zillow had banned?

Do you think what I think?

Homes.com is so desperately trying to overthrow Zillow as the “king of search”.

But consumers stubbornly go to Zillow.com for all their home searches.

Zillow became a synonym for homesearch, like Google is was a synonym for web search (that’s before ChatGPT arrived, of course)

How do you change a consumer’s habit?

CoStar said it would invest over $1 billion in marketing and awareness for Homes.com

But they needed something more to beat Zillow…

And maybe… just maybe… Robert Reffkin (Compass CEO) dialed Andrew Florance (CoStar Group CEO) and said:

• “Hi Andrew, I plan to acquire Anywhere. How would you like a lot of exclusive listings from the two largest US brokerages, featuring on Homes.com?”

And maybe… just maybe… Andrew replied:

• “That sounds great, Robert.”

What we know is that Compass was willing to pay an 84% premium over Anywhere’s closing price just before the deal announcement.

The 84% premium is very generous, which indicates strong urgency on Compass’s side to close the deal.

So it’s not an opportunistic acquisition; it’s a strategic move that was required by Compass after Zillow tried to cut them off.

Time to take sides… Join alliances…

Much like what happens in our society today, it’s a time of division.

If you thought the NAR lawsuit was the biggest change in the US real estate market, just wait for what’s to come.

We now have a market essentially dividing into two major forces controlling the consumer.

• I believe Homes.com will join forces and become the search portal behind Compass + Anywhere.

• On the other side, you will have Zillow, MLSs & NAR.

Inevitable brokerages will have to take sides, as you can’t sit on two chairs.

For example, eXp, a major emerging force, is about to reach 100k agents.

A lot of the top-producing teams are powered by Follow Up Boss CRM, which was recently acquired by Zillow.

Other major brokerages would also have to make their move.

Despite all the AI hype, companies are paying big $ to buy agents

No matter how much Compass positions itself as a tech startup.

This “tech startup” has just paid $1.5B to buy “good old” agents.

• They didn’t buy an AI engineers.

• They didn’t invest in AI agent-like robots to knock doors and host open houses.

• They bought a lot of real estate agents.

That tells you everything you need to know about where transactions come from.

• Whilst most brokerages keep buying leads and AI tools.

• Compass decided to invest in agents.

Expect a lot of agent turnover (recruiters are rubbing their hands right now)

Expect agent recruitment to become even more competitive.

Invest in developing your agents, because that’s where transactions come from.

Explore Agently today to learn how we set new agent productivity standards for the real estate industry.

What I see across hundreds of teams and brokerages is that everyone goes for the volume of training versus training completion/engagement/production impact.

If you know that Taylor Swift will be performing in your backyard every Saturday at 5, you will probably show up for the first 4 concerts (most likely you’d bring friends too).

By the fifth one, you might leave early because you’ve got laundry to pick up.

And by the tenth? You are likely to skip all the following gigs, only making occasional appearances a couple of times per year.

Isn’t that exactly how agents attend trainings?

For context, that’s Taylor Swift… now imagine your typical “How to Build Your Online Brand” or “Time Management for Realtors”

Agents develop complete blindness when it comes to training sessions.

They simply stop believing that it will move the needle for them.

Because none of these programs were designed around their specific needs.

What nobody tells you is that the training show-up rate in our industry is well below 20%.

Let that sink in.

At a brokerage with 100 agents, around 15 agents will show up.

A team with 100 agents will probably have 20-25 attending regularly (mostly top performers).

What was supposed to be the most powerful tool for developing agents and increasing production turns into a routine that ultimately pushes agents away as they feel more disconnected and disengaged.

Training becomes the annoying noise (just like the 20th Taylor Swift concert in a row).

I keep asking myself, so why are so many brokerages keep doing this regardless?

Well, there are a few reasons, none of which have anything to do with improving agent skills:

Reason 1: Training isn’t actually training - it is a recruitment tool.

Every team and brokerage has an agent recruitment section on their website that reads: “Join us and get access to the best-in-class culture, innovative technology and …” you guessed it, “ongoing training and support”. So they just keep doing it.

Reason 2: Agent Development Team needs to justify its cost.

There are staff members whose KPI is based on the number of training programs created. Attendance rate, completion rate, and the actual impact on production are NOT taken into consideration.

Just training - no context, no accountability, no follow-through.

Is there another way?

Imagine you only have limited training slots for every agent.

What would be the 5 mission-critical skills you would teach them that would give them the best chance of getting a client under contract and getting the closing over the line?

No cheating, only the 5 most essential skills. What would those be?

My list looks like this:

1. Lead Conversion: Turning Conversations into Appointments

2. Buyer & Seller Consultation Mastery (probably cheating here by putting two into one)

3. Market Knowledge & Pricing

4. Writing and Negotiating Offers

5. Contract-to-Close: Transaction Management

Am I missing some important topics, like SOI building or Showing & Presenting Property, Online Marketing, etc? Of course, I am.

Now imagine that every single one of your agents would complete those 5 trainings in full, and would pass a knowledge check at the end of each course to ensure they fully understand the content.

100% completion rate. No exceptions.

What do you think this would do to your business?

I am starting to see more of that in real estate.

I am starting to see teams introducing Lead Certification Programs that MUST be completed before agents can get their hands on the leads.

I am starting to see brokerages making the completion of their entire Onboarding checklist a requirement for all new agents. If you don’t - you’re out.

Does this mean you can’t run other training programs? Of course you can.

But only after agents are 100% equipped with core knowledge and skills - the essential training programs that become a NON-NEGOTIABLE part of your productivity standards.

Only after your agents obtain the essential skills that would help them make a living would they truly appreciate the value of other training programs you provide to them.

Only those agents who complete the core training deserve your attention.

Those that fail are not worth your time, and you'd better tell them to find another brokerage or team.

Endless hours of training content - is not your advantage.

Agents equipped with core skills and competences - are.

If you would like to build productivity standards in your organization, I would love to connect with you. Learn more at agently.com

Normally, I do these talks myself.

But this time, we thought it would be great to have one of our clients share how they are using Agently to grow production.

Meet Elias Astuto - Director of Sales & Coaching at #TEAMFAST, one of the top-ranked real estate teams in the country.

He shared how they were able to achieve $562M in sales with 50% fewer agents and how they use Agently to build systems & processes.

If you want to learn more about Elias’s coaching programs, check out #KEEPITMOVIN