If you’ve sent the emails, made some calls, and none of the agents are interested in what you have to say, please keep reading. There’s nothing wrong with your wording, and your script doesn’t need a rewrite. You probably told them your office has great culture, support, competitive splits and management who cares about success. Here’s the problem, every competitor said the same thing. We’ve seen this many time. It comes down to three sentences, and the first has to be about the agent, not you.
Why real estate recruiting messages get ignored
NAR reports that 52% of offices are focused on recruiting experienced agents. So the producing agents in your market are getting some version of your message from several brokerages at once. Each is making the same unverifiable claim about itself. The only message that gets read is the one about the agent. Doing this requires knowing something true and specific about the agent before you reach out.
How to recruit a real estate agent who is not looking
Three parts: observation, relevance, and then the ask.
The observation is a fact about the agent’s business that you could only know by looking at it. Not a compliment. A fact.
Noticed you have had four listings in the same condo complex this year.
The relevance connects that fact to one concrete thing your brokerage does. One thing, named as a thing rather than as a quality.
We put a have an automated marketing plan for targeting similar owners in that condo’s like that.
The ask is small enough that saying yes commits them to nothing.
Email: Worth a fifteen minute call in the next two weeks?
Phone: Can we discuss what you need right now for a couple minutes?
That is the entire message. It works because it can be delivered in seconds and answered in four words, and because the agent can check the first sentence and find it accurate.
Three ways these messages go wrong
- The observation is flattery instead of a fact. You are crushing it out there is a greeting, not an observation. If the same sentence could have been sent to anyone in the MLS, it does not work.
- The relevance is still about you. “We have amazing support” is the self centered message, shortened. Name the person, the process, or the tool. A listing coordinator. A file that gets reviewed before it goes to escrow. A Tuesday one-to-one that happens every Tuesday.
- The ask is too big. “Come in and meet the team”, which is a genuine cost to them before they have decided anything. Keep the first ask to a phone call.
Write five of them this week
Pick five agents in your market whose production you can actually see. For each one, write down a single fact about their business and a single named thing your brokerage does that connects to it. If you cannot finish the observation sentence, you do not know enough about that agent to recruit them yet, and the fix is research rather than a better email.
Then send the five. Keep the ones that get a reply and look at what the observation sentence had in common. After fifteen or twenty of these you will know which facts about an agent’s business are the ones worth opening within your market, which is something no template can tell you.
Using LeadUp, you can do this in about one minute per contact to recruit and retain your best agents.