In this industry, growth is easy to measure — office count, agent count, transaction volume. The metrics are visible, the momentum feels good, and the temptation to say “yes” to everyone who wants to join is hard not to give in to.
I understand that temptation. I have also learned, more than once, what it costs you.
Who we say “no” to at The Agency is just as instrumental in our growth as who we say “yes” to. That is a harder position to defend than it sounds.
When a high-producing agent wants to join your brokerage, the instinct is to find a way to make it work. Production is production. Numbers are numbers.
But production is not culture, and numbers are not values. And at the scale we are operating — over 180 offices across 17 countries — culture is not a byproduct of growth. It is what makes growth sustainable.
What the wrong agent actually costs you
The cost of a bad cultural fit is almost never visible in the quarter it happens. It shows up later, in the agents who quietly disengage, in the managing partner who spends their energy feeding into conflict instead of building community, in the reputation that takes years to build and one wrong hire to complicate.
I have seen it play out enough times to know that the short-term gain of a high producer who doesn’t share your values is almost always outweighed by the long-term cost of what their presence does to the environment around them. Culture is not what you put in your handbook; it is what you tolerate, and what you recruit.
The agents who fit The Agency are not defined primarily by their production. They are defined by how they produce — whether they collaborate or compete, whether they elevate the people around them or diminish them, whether they show up as a resource to their colleagues or treat every other agent as a threat.
When you build a meaningful relationship with your fellow agents and leadership, and personally align with company values, you become part of something worth building and worth staying for.
What selective recruiting actually looks like
Being selective is not about being exclusive for the sake of it. It is about being honest — with candidates, with your managing partners and with yourself — about what your culture actually requires to thrive.
It means asking different questions in the recruiting process. Not just what someone has done, but how they did it. Not just what markets they work in, but how they talk about the clients they serve. Not just their volume, but whether the agents they have worked alongside would describe them as someone who made the office better.
It also means being willing to lose the agent. That is the part that requires real discipline. When a high producer chooses a competitor because your process was too rigorous or your culture too specific, the instinct is to wonder if you made a mistake. In my experience, you almost never did.
The agents who are drawn to The Agency because of the culture — not despite the standards it sets, but because of them — are the ones who stay, who refer, who become the kind of leaders that make the next round of recruiting easier. That compounding effect is the real growth strategy. It just takes longer to show up on a spreadsheet.
What it does for retention
The other side of selective recruiting is what it does for the agents you already have. Nothing signals the value of a culture more clearly than watching leadership protect it. When agents see that not everyone gets in — that the bar is real and consistently upheld — it reinforces their own decision to be there. It tells them that what they are part of means something.
Retention is a relationship, not a contract. But it is also an environment. The agents who stay longest at The Agency are almost universally the ones who talk about their colleagues as much as their commission. They are here because of the people around them. Selective recruiting is how you protect that.
The counterintuitive truth about growth
The Agency has grown to 180-plus offices across 17 countries in 15 years. We launched 27 new offices in 2025 alone. We are proud of that growth, but the growth that matters most to me is not the number on the rankings. It is the quality of the network we have built — the agents who show up for each other, the offices where managing partners know their agents by name, the culture that has somehow stayed intact across 17 countries and 15 years of rapid expansion.
That does not happen by accident. It happens because we have been willing, consistently and sometimes at real cost, to say no to the wrong fit and yes to the right one.
In an industry that rewards growth above almost everything else, that is still the most counterintuitive thing we do. It is also one of the things I am most proud of.
Rainy Hake Austin is president of The Agency in Los Angeles. Get connected on Instagram.
