The agents walking out of your brokerage outproduce the ones you bring in to replace them. Courted’s 2025 recruiting and retention report put numbers on it. Agents who left a brokerage last year were producing $2.11 million a year. The ones recruited in behind them, $1.44 million. The top 100 brands by volume brought in 1.9 agents for every one they lost and grew volume 1.8%.
Each swap costs the building $670,000 a year, headcount unchanged. Ten is $6.7 million.
Agents leave for one of two reasons. Somebody offered them a better split, or they got upset about something the brokerage did or didn’t do for them. The first is the one we talk about, because it arrives with a number attached and a competitor to blame. The second quietly empties a building. It’s never one dramatic thing. It accumulates. They asked for help and what came back was a training.
I’m not pointing at brokerage leaders. Most inherited this model and get a recruiting number every January, never a development one. I spent four years leading agent development at Compass as it grew from 6,000 agents to more than 25,000. What I heard most, room after room, was some version of I’m good at this, and I’m drowning.
What they’re actually upset about
Look at what a brokerage hands an agent. Lead generation. Scripts. Objection handling. Conversion. All of it is sales training, and agents are not in sales. They are consultants, advocates, advisors and educators, and almost nothing we teach aims at any of them.
Here’s the one everybody still teaches. Reach as many people as you can, as often as you can. Hit your 32 “touches.” Take the technology away. That’s walking up to somebody’s front door 32 times a year, ringing the bell and saying don’t forget I’m in real estate. Nobody would do that to a person they liked. We just do it from a laptop so it doesn’t feel like what it is.
The better the agent, the worse this feels. They built a business on real relationships, and now they’re asked to run a program they’d be embarrassed to explain to a client. So they don’t, and that becomes one more failure.
Eventually they decide it’s the brokerage. They leave, take the better split, and 18 months later they’re having the exact same week. NAR’s 2026 Member Profile puts the typical agent at 13 years in the business and 6 years with their current firm. Thirteen years in, and they’ve already rebuilt their whole working world on the theory that the building was the problem.
The five things this job burns through
Prioritization. Organization. Time management. Impulse control. Emotional regulation.
That’s the whole list.
Here’s a Tuesday I watched a few hundred versions of.
Wake up and before the coffee is made, there are 25 emails and seven texts waiting, all of them from live clients or deals already in motion. Four showings on the calendar. An inspector to meet at 11 a.m.. At 1 p.m., the school calls because their child has a fever, so the agent in the car to get them and rescheduling the back half of her day from the pickup line.
Somewhere inside that, we’ve asked the agent to reorganize their database and run outreach to 40 strangers who wrote their names on a sheet at an open house.
They don’t do it. Of course they don’t do it!
Agents live in two periods of time. Now, and not now. Everything in that day was now, and the agent is extraordinary at now. The database is not now, and not now has nobody standing in front of it.
None of that is discipline. Every one of those emails paid her back the second it was answered it. The database asks the agent to work for free and trust it matters in 90 days, which is a hell of a thing to ask of somebody who spent the day being needed right now by people who could see her.
Those same agents want the structure and resent being handed it. They’ll tell you they need a system, then refuse the one you built, because it arrived as an instruction instead of an option. Most of an agent’s week is two opposite things being true at once, and most of our training is built for one of them.
What actually changes it
Start with the educator hat. Most agents only ever get handed the advocate hat, which is why the business runs feast to famine. Educator is the low pressure one and it’s where trust starts. Teach it first, and be patient. It pays back on a longer clock than anybody likes.
Build the bumpers. An agent who keeps dropping follow-up will drop it again on a better calendar. Take the part that was never the point away from them. Pre-drafted, pre-staged, one next thing instead of a list of 80 and offered, not assigned. Bumpers on the gutters, not another lecture about how to bowl.
Change the question in the one on one. “How many calls did you make?” tells you nothing you can act on. “What did you drop this week, and where did it fall?” tells you which of the five is underwater, and you can build for it. Fifteen minutes, once a week.
Every brokerage has an operations budget and none of it points at those five. You’re paying for this either way. Recruiting spend, or the gap between who left and who replaced them.
The agents you’re losing didn’t fail. They outgrew a system built for somebody else. That’s a design flaw, not a people problem, and most couldn’t name it. They just know the same week finds them wherever they go.
If you only take one of these, take the one on one. You can start Tuesday, and you don’t need approval to run it for a month before deciding if it was worth the fifteen minutes.
Lance Pendleton is the founder of PreTSD Consulting and the creator of Reframe Lab. He was previously National Head of Agent Development at Compass and Chief Innovation Officer for the largest Sotheby’s International Realty affiliate in the US. He is affiliated with the Real brokerage.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.
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