The 100 largest brokerage brands in the U.S. netted $24.3 billion in production through recruiting from January through September, down 57 percent from the same stretch of 2025, according to new data from recruiting software company Courted.
Courted builds the data from MLS records, de-duplicating agents across markets and brokerages. It measures the sales volume of agents who joined or left each brand, tracking production rather than just raw headcount.
The company sells recruiting and retention software to brokerages. It released the findings in a Nov. 1 blog post and walked through them during a webinar on Thursday.
Courted says recruiting has cooled far more in 2026 than most of the real estate industry expected.
In an informal LinkedIn poll in October, about two-thirds of respondents told Courted co-founder and CEO Sean Soderstrom that they expected the top 100’s net recruiting gains to hold steady or grow. None picked “down more than 50 percent.”
“I think it’s mostly because folks opining there may not have been super close to the details, maybe not actual operators,” Soderstrom said during the webinar.
Agents are moving less in both directions
Real estate agents are moving less, in both directions, according to Courted’s data.
Sean Soderstrom
The top 100 brands recruited $176.6 billion in production through September of this year, down 31 percent from a year earlier. Production lost to departing agents fell less, at 24 percent.
As a share of the brands’ combined annual volume, the recruiting rate dropped from 11.4 percent to 7.2 percent. The attrition rate fell from 8.9 percent to 6.2 percent. That shrank net growth from 2.5 percent to 1 percent.
“A 1.5-point drop may sound small, but it’s over half of the net production the top 100 gained a year earlier,” Courted wrote in its blog post.
The third quarter was weaker still, as net volume gains fell from $17 billion in Q3 2025 to $2.2 billion. “We were a few agents away from the top 100 brands losing production on a recruiting-minus-attrition basis,” Soderstrom said.
‘The bigs are not getting bigger’
The slowdown has hit the biggest brands hardest.
The 10 largest brands account for roughly 70 percent of the top 100’s volume, and they grew just 0.69 percent through September. The steepest drop came among brands ranked 11 to 25. Their net growth fell from 4.05 percent to 0.9 percent.
“The bigs are not getting bigger when you look at individual brands,” Soderstrom said. “Obviously, some parent companies sit across multiple brands, which is a slightly different dynamic we can talk about separately. But at the individual brand level, some of the biggest are slowing the most.”
There’s a methodological caveat. Courted counts acquired companies toward a brand only when they’re folded into it. Brands that a parent company keeps separate are tracked individually, so Real and REMAX count as two brands.
As a result, the data captures brand-level momentum, not the scale parent companies are assembling through M&A.
Soderstrom said consolidation may be cooling recruiting anyway. Agents at acquired brokerages are waiting to see what the new owners offer before they move.
He described brokerages telling him the recruiting cycle, from first outreach to a signed independent contractor agreement, has gotten longer. He acknowledged that’s anecdotal and that Courted has no data on it.
Soderstrom also said consolidation tends to spawn new brokerages, pointing to recent startups in the Atlanta area founded by people from acquired firms.
This makes sense to Soderstrom if you look historically at moments of consolidation, particularly in geographic markets where consolidation is extreme.
“I think of Northern California in roughly the 10 years leading up to 2018,” he said. “You saw a lot of consolidation, and you actually saw a number of new brands created, sometimes by people from the acquired companies.”
Net growth rate is production recruited minus production lost, divided by annual brand volume. Each cell shows how many brands in the tier grew. Source: Courted data, top 100 brokerage brands by rank, January–September 2025 vs. January–September 2026. Image: Courted
2 sides of the same coin
The flip side of a frozen market is better retention.
Seventy-three of the 95 brands in the top 100 in both years lost a smaller share of their production to departures than the year before. The median brand’s attrition fell from 6.3 percent of annual volume to 4.7 percent. The number of brands losing 10 percent or more of their volume dropped from 21 to 14.
Soderstrom cautioned against reading too much into that. “It’s important not to mistake a quiet market, with less movement, for a strong retention program,” he said.
He added another point: the companies that recruit the most volume are also the companies that lose the most volume, typified by companies without offices.
“So if you’re going to have a lot of losses, you need a really effective growth strategy to overcome them,” Soderstrom said. “Or flip it the other way: If you do a really good job maintaining and developing your agent population, that’s a strong sign of your model’s long-term durability.”
Soderstrom said that when he’s advising brokerages, he’ll often say, if anyone remembers last year’s numbers, the average was gaining 12 percent and losing 10 percent for the full year. “If you’re going to focus in one place, let’s curb some of the attrition first. Let’s fix the leaky bucket, then start adding recruits,” he said.
The lesson, he said, isn’t to recruit less. It’s to pair every recruiting push with an onboarding and retention plan.
“I show it this way because we should think of recruitment and retention as two sides of the same coin, and focus on net volume growth rather than just a headcount goal or minimizing attrition,” Soderstrom said.
‘Fight tooth and nail’
Courted expects fewer than 4 million existing-home sales this year. Against that backdrop, Soderstrom’s message to brokerage leaders was blunt: Inbound recruiting won’t carry them.
“If you want growth, you have to go get it,” he said. “That’s one of the most important takeaways from this analysis. Waiting for agents, or brand-new agents, to walk in the door and hoping they produce is unlikely to be the only thing that gets you where you need to go to grow out of a down market.”
His other point was that the math on retention has changed. “With fewer agents in motion, every departure is production you may not be able to win back,” he said. “So keeping an agent is worth more than it was a year ago.”
His prescriptions included setting 2027 goals around net production rather than headcount, with the top 100’s 1 percent net growth rate as the benchmark to beat.
He also urged leaders to target agents showing signs they may move, and to build daily habits around outreach and retention check-ins. He also suggested pushing existing agents to close one more deal. Going from 8 transactions to 9 is a 12.5 percent gain.
“The market isn’t going to get them from 8 to 9 because the market is growing,” Soderstrom said. “We need to go capture that market share.”
Soderstrom also made clear he isn’t expecting lower mortgage rates to bail anyone out.
“We simply cannot expect the market to get better between now and Nov. 5, 2027,” he said. “So we have to fight tooth and nail to gain share. That’s about retaining your agents and attracting new ones. And not to be overlooked, it’s about developing your own agents’ businesses, not to ride a growing market, but to fight tooth and nail to win more deals against other agents.”
