Category: Attract Talent

If you run a brokerage, lead a mortgage or title team, or recruit top producers, you have likely felt the squeeze over the past year. Finding sharp real estate agents, transaction coordinators, experienced loan officers, and reliable escrow professionals feels harder than ever. This is not just a temporary hiring lull. According to a recent […]

I’m in the Philippines thinking about something I see in some real estate offices, and not in others. There’s a framework for global economics: wealthy nations built wealth partly by extracting resources from developing nations. Take resources, send back minimum, keep profits. One-directional. Built into the system. Some real estate offices operate the same way. […]

I’m in the Philippines right now with my wife visiting family. Watching Filipino culture up close (the way families stay connected across continents, how strangers become family in five minutes, the way people solve problems with what they have), I noticed something. It’s just intention made visible in daily life. That’s culture. Not the poster […]

Four sentences that separate the brokerages people fight to join from the ones they quietly leave Mike Deegan won his 400th game coaching baseball at Denison University. Someone asked him what drives that kind of sustained success. His answer had nothing to do with talent or technology or market conditions: “Show up every day. Work […]

There’s a spot on Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest free-standing mountain, where a vehicle can reach you for the first time on the descent. Before that point, if something goes wrong, your options are a helicopter or a stretcher carried by porters. There is no other way out. So you move, and you deal with whatever you’re […]

The top-line number looks fine. Roughly 103,000 agents active per quarter, less than 6% variance over 18 months. Stable. Consistent. Under control. It isn’t. We tracked 192,788 individual agents across six consecutive quarters, Q4 2024 through Q1 2026. Not rosters. Not license counts. Actual closings, quarter by quarter, agent by agent. When you follow the […]

I follow Joe De Sena, the guy who built Spartan Race out of a stubborn refusal to let people quit. He sent something to me this morning that had nothing to do with obstacle courses. It was about loneliness. And I couldn’t stop thinking about how perfectly it described what I’m watching happen in our […]

I was thinking today, we can overcomplicate this business. We debate splits, technology stacks, lead generation, office footprint. And somewhere in all of that noise we forget the thing that actually holds a brokerage together. How people feel when they walk through your door. Horst Schulze said it best. “Guests do not primarily want luxury. […]

The “Unreasonable” Talent Play: What Real Estate Leaders Can Learn from Google’s DeepMind Deal Every brokerage owner knows the feeling of a competitor eyeing their market. They have a bigger budget, deeper pockets, and an aggressive recruiting team. How do you actually beat them? A recent Wall Street Journal article titled “The Inside Story of […]