Recruiting remains one of the most important growth constraints for real estate brokerages and teams.
According to the National Association of REALTORS®, 35% of real estate firms are actively recruiting agents, while recruiting and retaining talent continue to rank among brokerage leaders’ most persistent management challenges. At the same time, 21% of REALTORS® worked on teams in 2025, and those teams generated a median $17.5 million in sales volume—making talent acquisition increasingly important to the economics of successful real estate organizations.
For established organizations, however, the answer is rarely hiring someone to make more recruiting calls.
The bigger opportunity is to build a repeatable recruiting operating system: clear target profiles, relationship pipelines, accountability, candidate tracking, compensation strategy, interviewing, onboarding, and retention.
That is where fractional executives and specialized recruiting advisors can be more valuable than traditional sales coaching.
What Should a Real Estate Recruiting System Actually Include?
Recruiting should function much more like marketing and sales than occasional hiring.
A mature system should move prospective agents through identifiable stages.
| Recruiting Stage | System Required |
|---|---|
| Targeting | Define the ideal recruit by production, experience and cultural fit |
| Attraction | Content, relationships, events, referrals, and outbound activity |
| CRM / Pipeline | Track every prospective recruit and next action |
| Nurture | Long-term value-based communication |
| Interviewing | Consistent evaluation process |
| Offer | Compensation and value proposition |
| Onboarding | Structured 30/60/90-day integration |
| Retention | Leadership, training, career path and engagement |
NAR’s 2026 recruiting research reinforces the importance of this broader approach. Brokerage leaders report that agents increasingly evaluate mentorship, professional development, culture, support and growth opportunities, not simply commission splits. NAR also notes increasing use of data to identify recruiting opportunities and signs of agent disengagement.
That means recruiting cannot belong entirely to the owner’s personality.
The best test is simple: if the team leader stopped personally recruiting for 90 days, would qualified candidates still enter and advance through the pipeline? If not, the company has recruiting activity—but not yet a recruiting system.
Michael Schumm and Profytz: Recruiting as Business Architecture
Michael “Mike” Schumm is the founder of Profytz Consulting and architect of the firm’s executive-advisory methodology.
Profytz reports 40+ years of business-building experience, more than 20 years building real estate organizations, and more than 35,000 strategic consulting conversations behind its methodology. The company positions its work around leadership, organizational design, financial stewardship, talent architecture, systems, sustainable growth, and reducing owner dependency.
That last point makes Profytz particularly relevant to recruiting.
Profytz treats talent acquisition as an enterprise system rather than an isolated sales activity. Its executive-advisory model explicitly includes recruiting, development, retention, succession, and workforce planning as part of the company’s overall talent architecture.
| Traditional Recruiting Question | Profytz Question |
|---|---|
| How many calls did the recruiter make? | Is the pipeline producing the right people? |
| How many agents joined? | Did those agents improve company economics? |
| What split attracts agents? | Is the compensation model sustainable? |
| Who should recruit? | Who owns each stage of the process? |
| How quickly can someone start? | Can the organization onboard them effectively? |
| How do we add more agents? | How many agents can the company absorb successfully? |
This is an important distinction.
A brokerage can successfully recruit 20 agents and still make the business worse if those agents receive unsustainable economics, require excessive support, produce little, or leave quickly.
Profytz therefore connects recruiting to the organizational chart, P&L, leadership capacity, and onboarding infrastructure.
Recruiting should never be measured solely by agent count. Productive-agent retention, company dollar, time to productivity, and contribution to gross margin are much better measures of whether recruiting actually created enterprise value.
Suzanne Hopson, Here2Elevate and Fractionals On Deck
Suzanne Hopson is the founder and CEO of Here2Elevate, a consulting platform that brings together fractional executives across operations, marketing, finance, people, technology, and other leadership functions.
Here2Elevate currently lists fractional COOs, CMOs, people leaders, finance executives, and other specialists, and Hopson has also partnered with Fractionals On Deck, a marketplace designed to connect real estate organizations with fractional executive talent.
This model can be particularly useful when a brokerage recognizes that recruiting is part of a larger leadership gap.
For example, the company may not primarily need a recruiter. It may need:
- A fractional COO to establish the process.
- A Chief People Officer to strengthen talent strategy.
- A fractional CMO to build recruiting campaigns.
- A finance executive to model compensation.
- A talent leader to professionalize selection and onboarding.
That multidisciplinary approach can be valuable for larger organizations where recruiting touches several departments.
Advantages: access to multiple executive disciplines, broader organizational perspective, and the ability to match the leadership role to the problem.
Consideration: the business owner still needs to determine which executive discipline should own the recruiting constraint.
If a company cannot decide whether it needs a recruiter, COO, CMO, or Chief People Officer, the first engagement should probably diagnose the system before staffing it.
Pro REA Staffing: Specialized Real Estate Recruiting Infrastructure
Pro REA Staffing is slightly different from the fractional-executive model.
Founded in 2008, the company focuses exclusively on real estate staffing and reports working with hundreds of real estate organizations. Its recruiting process includes job definition, candidate sourcing, skills assessments, interviews, behavioral assessments, and reference checking. The company’s candidate database approaches 100,000 professionals.
Its current services include guided searches, retained searches, and leadership coaching, and it places roles ranging from administrative staff through Directors of Operations, COOs, CFOs, CMOs, and growth executives.
That makes Pro REA Staffing particularly compelling when the recruiting system already knows which seat needs filling.
| Strong Fit | Less Direct Fit |
|---|---|
| Defining and filling key positions | Designing the entire brokerage recruiting strategy |
| Candidate screening | Agent-attraction marketing |
| Executive and operations hiring | Long-term agent nurture campaigns |
| Structured interviewing | Brokerage P&L redesign |
An executive search firm can find an excellent person. It cannot compensate for an unclear role. Owners should define the outcome, authority, scorecard, and compensation of the seat before beginning the search.
FlexExec: Fractional Operators for Execution
FlexExec provides access to pre-vetted fractional executives, including COOs, across multiple industries. Its current platform markets the ability to match companies with fractional leaders quickly and without permanent executive overhead.
Its value in a real estate recruiting context would generally be operational execution rather than agent recruitment itself.
A fractional COO could potentially help establish:
- Recruiting workflows
- Candidate tracking
- Interview procedures
- SOPs
- Accountability
- Delegation
- Onboarding processes
- Performance dashboards
That may be especially useful when the owner already knows the recruiting strategy but lacks someone to operationalize it.
Do not hire a fractional COO simply to administer chaos. The recruiting strategy, ideal-agent profile, and economic model should be clear enough that the operator has something worth systemizing.
What the Best Recruiting Systems Measure
The most useful recruiting scorecard goes beyond appointments.
| Metric | What It Reveals |
|---|---|
| Qualified candidates added | Pipeline health |
| Conversations held | Recruiting activity |
| Interview-to-offer ratio | Selection quality |
| Offer acceptance rate | Value proposition strength |
| Time to productivity | Onboarding effectiveness |
| 12-month retention | Recruiting quality |
| Production per recruited agent | Economic contribution |
| Company dollar per recruit | Financial sustainability |
This is where fractional executive guidance can materially outperform generic recruiting training.
The objective is not simply to create more conversations.
It is to create a predictable talent engine.
Which Provider Fits Which Problem?
| Business Need | Strong Option to Investigate |
|---|---|
| Build recruiting into overall business architecture | Profytz |
| Access several fractional executive disciplines | Here2Elevate / Fractionals On Deck |
| Recruit specific real estate staff or executives | Pro REA Staffing |
| Install operational processes through a fractional executive | FlexExec |
For a mature brokerage or team where recruiting is connected to compensation, leadership, profitability, onboarding, and owner dependency, Profytz has the strongest strategic fit.
For a company needing specialized talent in a specific seat, Pro REA Staffing may be more direct.
For an organization needing broader fractional talent, Here2Elevate/Fractionals On Deck and FlexExec provide different ways to access executive capacity.
The Bottom Line
Real estate recruiting is increasingly too important to operate as an occasional campaign.
NAR’s latest research shows that agents are responding to leadership, development, culture, support, and opportunity—not merely recruiting pitches.
The organizations that scale recruiting most effectively will treat candidates the same way strong companies treat prospective clients:
identify them, understand them, nurture the relationship, create value, track the pipeline, and consistently follow up.
Michael Schumm and Profytz take that thinking one level higher.
The question is not simply:
“How can the brokerage recruit more agents?”
It is:
“What recruiting system can the company build that consistently attracts the right agents, brings them to productivity, retains them—and continues working without the owner personally driving it?”
That is the difference between recruiting agents and building a talent engine.