Real estate recruiting 2.0

Quick: What's more difficult than being a real estate agent during a housing downturn? The answer would have to be being the recruiter for a real estate brokerage company during a downturn.

Everyone wants to sell houses during a boom when buyers are a dime a dozen and commission checks overlap in frequency. But of course, nobody wants this job when inventory hits record highs and consumers are in "wait-and-see" mode.

One recruiter's answer is to go where the agents are today -- and that seems to be in the blogosphere.

I found this blog (Exit Realty: Exit Scout Looking for Top Talent) among the Real Estate Blog Directory at InmanWiki: It's from Shawn Berry, a scout for Exit Realty. So far, he's only got one entry so it's hard to say where he's going with it.

Recruiting was competitive even during boom days. I remember seeing ads from brokerages offering free vacations, cars and TVs to prospective agents as sign-on bonuses.

Most people expect the agent population to deflate over the next year or so. Since many brokerage models seem to revolve around the premise of agent volume (more agents = more commission splits for the broker = more revenue = more potential for growth), brokers could be in for a much worse ride than agents. With sales slowing and agent ranks fleeing, this model no longer works -- or at least on paper it looks ugly.

What happens to the broker model over the next few years? Will this downturn force a change in how brokerages operate? Will brokers be more gung-ho on instilling new efficiencies like going paperless or office-less? Will they pull more marketing spend out of print (traditionally expensive) and instead invest it online (generally cheaper)? Or, will small really be the new big when it comes to brokerage?

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