Courted built the Bloomberg Terminal for agent recruitment and retention: Tech Review Update

Are you receiving Inman’s Agent Edge? Make sure you’re subscribed here for the latest on real estate technology from Inman’s expert Craig Rowe.

Courted is a brokerage and team recruiting intelligence and management solution.

Platforms: Mobile-first browser app
Ideal for: Brokerages; team leaders
Initial Review: November 2021
Updated: October 2023
New rating: 5 stars

Top selling points:

• Deep data on market-wide agent activity
• Predictive analytics applied to recruiting
• Retention analysis
• Integration of recruiting with business growth
• AI-powered outreach/recruiting tools

Top concern:

It’s possible some brokers would worry about Courted’s perceived contribution to the culture of bidding wars for top producers and teams. Or, they can get run over, because rest assured, the competition doesn’t care.

What you should know

Courted has evolved its emphasis from in-market networking among agents into a powerful technology asset for brokerage and team leaders that applies performance intelligence to long-term business decisions. It launched Brokerage Talent Solutions in late 2022, and this is it at close to full maturity.

The application uses machine learning and predictive analytics to determine a number of things about the agents in your market, and elsewhere, namely when they’re looking to make a move from their current brokerage  — or out of yours. That’s right, it can let office leaders know when it’s best to get proactive in keeping your people in place, and it uses a sharp, AI-based communications module to help, called ComposeAI.

However, this tool isn’t reading and parsing web-accessible data to use in its pitches, it’s processing information from a structured model proprietary to Courted. Brokerage Talent Solution is about identifying the right agent and hitting them with the right message at the best possible time. It uses a great deal of personalization, derived from a massive pull of market data about agents in every competing brokerage.

Targeted agents, whether in a recruiting or retention effort, can be searched for and organized in the same way an agent would use a CRM to identify critical leads. Each “prospect” is illustrated clearly alongside their current brokerage, recent deals, colleagues who have worked with them, historic activity and performance forecast. The company describes it as a Bloomberg Terminal for brokerage leaders.

Put bluntly, this is unfair. Courted customers have a massive advantage over competitors when it comes to identifying who will best benefit a brokerage, and in turn, help it grow. The software incorporates, or is based upon, the idea that agent production is intrinsically volatile. Production goes up and down, even for top producers. So Courted’s team set out to apply its algorithms to better predicting spikes and declines in performance, which is what it means by sending the right message to the right agent at the right time, which is materialized in its ComposeAI functionality.

In an email to Inman, Courted said that its research demonstrates “that only 1 in 20 agents above $50 million in sales volume switches brokerages each year. In contrast, close to 20 percent of agents between $1 million to 5 million in sales volume end up moving between brokerages.”

Courted shoots straight through the haystack to find those needles. That knowledge also applies to those you already have working for you, so it can be used to arrange meetings and set up new deals before they download their database. The best recruit is likely someone you don’t know, but don’t discount the impact of retention on your growth aspirations. Tend to the blooms, too.

The user experience is advanced in its ability to present actionable data on recruiting targets. It’s a consumer-influenced series of panels and spreads that allow for the pleasant digestion of information that could easily demand a run to the medicine cabinet if handled differently. Courted turns people and their business activity into a fantasy football draft experience, not to put too fine a point on it.

Courted can access performance and business behavioral data on 1 million agents, from which its attrition model can successfully identify 4/5 of those that move, and help your brokerage be the first there with the box truck.

More advanced applications of Courted’s Brokerage Talent Solutions include M&A due diligence and franchising. Revealing waves of declining agent counts, brokers who may be approaching retirement age or years of stagnant growth and low volume are all part of Courted’s skill set and can be combined with extensive reports on competitive brokerages, allowing ambitious business leaders to know when to start sniffing around.

From its potential to move metrics to its automated alerts to a target’s sliding market ranking, Courted is so much more than a human resources tool. This is a tool to aid in revenue generation.

Know this, though: This application can’t make you a better leader or create a more positive work environment — no software can make someone a better person. If you’re bleeding agents and can’t land your targets, maybe a mirror is your best tool.

Courted is still doing the other stuff it’s really good at, like helping top agents meet other top agents. You can loosely describe it as an industry-focused LinkedIn. Or HomeLight for agents only.

Users create profiles that become populated with local MLS performance data. The more deals you’ve done, the more robust your Courted account will look. It pulls in everything, too: DOM record, average sale price, annual volume, neighborhoods in which you excel, years in the business, property types sold and buy- and sell-side history. It’s impressive.

In-app messaging facilitates connections, and a slick map search can visually sharpen search results all the way down to which agents perform the best on specific streets — a critical stat when you want to build a team to dominate a wealthy suburb or high-end urban neighborhood.

In places where high-rise dwellings are popular, as in Courted’s first city of Miami, the app can help users find out which agents sell the most units in a particular building or even that building’s most popular floor.

The software also does a bit of marketing on behalf of its users through a series of “awards” graphics that highlight market milestones and accomplishments. Agents can repurpose these badges in social environments and listing presentations, for example. They’re called Courted Achievements, and help other agents quickly determine if you’re worth a reach out.

It remains an ideal tool for higher-producing agents wanting to broadcast their expertise and empower their in-market professional network, as well as for brokers and team leaders seeking potential hiring matches. It allows agents to search for colleagues according to performance in a specific category, such as luxury homes or a specific community, or by transaction characteristics, like who sells at the highest price most consistently.

Courted’s presence should grow quickly from here, especially as the industry seeks to re-balance itself in the midst of a hard-to-define market. No broker wants to lose a valuable team or miss out on landing the next one that moves. I told company co-founder and CEO Sean Soderstrom that this version of his product seems like where it was meant to go. It couldn’t survive only on helping agents connect, and he knows that. But that was certainly a terrific traction device, and helped it collect, process and find the value in the industry’s sales data. The roadmap includes a focus on more communication and helping users design processes around how they leverage the application’s content.

I wonder if the roadmap includes an acquisition, because if I was in charge of Anywhere or Compass or a fast-growing brokerage with a remote office model recognized for flashy tech-forward business decisions, I’d want to put an end to the recruiting battles as soon as I could.

Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe

Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.