Takeaways from the “Opportunity Report”–Part 2

by | Oct 30, 2024

On Monday, I asked for your thoughts about the “Opportunity Report” recently published by T360.

Concerning agent hiring, the authors of the report drew the following conclusion:

A transition is necessary from a mostly part-time, salesperson/agent-focused industry to a more mature, mostly full-time, agent-populated industry that is viewed as a trusted adviser in the real estate transaction.

I received a lot of great feedback on this topic. Here is a quick summary…

Almost everyone agrees if the industry was mostly populated by full-time professionals, then clients would be better served and the industry would be healthier.

However, there was not a consensus on if or when this state of affairs could be achieved.

Some brokerages have already converted to a “full-time only” standard and hire selectively to achieve this objective.

So many of our industry’s problems have long traced directly back to the volume of part-time agents, from our reputation, or lack thereof, to the dim-bulb practices that lead to Sitzer.

Other brokerages have built hiring and financial models around the reality that part-time agents will continue to be a significant part of the equation:

It seems the report insinuates that those agents will cause problems and find it difficult to sustain themselves and find a limited level of success.  But I haven’t seen that.

With a large established base of part-time agents (and that model is working for many brokers), an organic transition to a full-time workforce seems unlikely.

One CEO thinks a wide scale transition would probably require an outside force to make this happen.

As long as barriers to entry remain low and brokerage “cost to hire” remains relatively low, marginal/part-time agents are here to stay.  I think the whole thing changes the day the DOJ is successful in making agents “employees”.  

No chance a broker would pay the employment expenses of somebody doing 2.5 transactions per year.

No matter where you stand on this issue, you’ll have plenty of time to contemplate your position.  This kind of change will happen slowly.

 

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