If you’re stuck in the messy middle of growing your real estate team, here’s a question that could change everything:
Have you built a real recruiting funnel?
During a recent BAM webinar on how to build a $100M real estate team, Byron Lazine, joined by Lisa Chinatti and Luke Acree, admits he was stuck bouncing 50 and 55 agents for years.
What got him unstuck is investing in and building a recruiting funnel.
Here’s what that looks like and what teams risk by not building one.
Recruiting on Emotion Keeps Teams Stuck
Luke has conducted 100+ hours of interviews with team leaders, and among those, the most common mistake in recruiting new agents was believing too much in a candidate’s potential and not filtering them by real qualifications.
As Luke put it, some have even delegated that responsibility to someone else because they couldn’t trust themselves to enforce a minimum standard for performance:
“Essentially, every team leader that I interviewed said one of the biggest things they did mistake-wise is they allowed people onto their team. They did not select people when they were recruiting properly. They just believed too much in the potential of everybody they met, and they needed to be harder and qualifying.
“Most of the team leaders that I talked to said, ‘I actually have now almost handed off recruiting or gotten people to help me because I just see too much potential in people.’”
Another mistake is hiring agents without an onboarding and training system in place to support them.
Lisa used a sports analogy to explain the value of the “bench” in real estate teams.
Every well-ordered team has three proficiency levels:
- Top 10% performing at a high level
- Middle 60% producing in the middle
- Bottom 30% rounding things out
Those middle and bottom tiers are the “bench.” That’s Lisa’s term for having backup depth on the team. It means you’ve got players waiting on the sidelines ready to step in.
Those two tiers are also continually working to improve their skills and deepen their knowledge and experience.
Her point is that most teams in the messy middle don’t have a bench. And without it, losing your best producer (or even a wave of mid-level agents) sets the whole team back months.
The lesson? Teams who rely too much on one or two top producers are setting themselves up for a crash. Because when one of those leaves, there’s no one ready to fill the gap.
Lisa added this reminder:
“Everybody’s going to leave. I’ve left. I’ve left every brokerage that I’ve been at except for the one that I own, and some days I leave that one too.”
No Recruiting Line Item on the P&L
Real estate teams stuck at 30 to 45 agents, which is the high end of what Byron, Lisa, and Luke define as the messy middle, fall into the “large team” danger zone. These teams are pouring every dollar into day-to-day operations, with nothing left over to build a real recruiting funnel.
Byron lived this firsthand.
“I (used to have) a small line item on the P&L for recruiting, and I basically lived for two to three years right at 50-55 agents. I would bounce continuously between those two numbers.”
At that size, Byron’s team technically cleared RealTrends’ 50+ agent threshold for a mega/enterprise team. But without a functional recruiting funnel behind it, he was still stuck.
Even at “mega team” size, no recruiting funnel means no real growth.
The Funnel That Changed Everything
In Byron’s words, here’s how everything changed:
“The minute I instituted a recruiting funnel, over the last hundred days, we’ve broken out of that and went plus-30 net agents. (Now we have) 78 (agents) because there’s a true recruiting funnel that we invested in and that we architectured.”
Luke turned this into a practical question most team leaders don’t consider:
“So if you’re in the messy middle right now, you should ask yourself, do you spend as much time building your marketing funnel for recruits as you do building your marketing funnel for buyers and sellers? You must build your marketing funnel for recruits.”
Lisa took it a step further:
“You said time, but it should also be money. If I open up every single one of those P&Ls, I promise you they’ve got line items dedicated to building out their recruiting funnels.”
Bottom line? Hitting an agent-count milestone doesn’t mean you’ve escaped the messy middle if the recruiting budget isn’t there to sustain it.
The way to get unstuck is by putting time and a piece of your budget behind a real funnel.
If you want to know more about the exact recruiting funnel that netted 30 agents in 100 days, that’s just one of many reasons to sign up for BAM Camp Team Leaders in Scottsdale. Check out the speaker line-up, the curriculum, and all the perks for our September in-person event.
