by Ben Hess, Managing Director, ThirdPool Recruiting
A few weeks ago, Stefan Swanepoel and T3 Sixty hosted their annual T3 Summit for real estate leaders in San Diego.
In an interview format, Stefan spoke with 13 of the top CEOs in the industry and published an executive summary of their insights. If you haven’t done so already, it’s worth downloading and reading.
Here’s a subset of some of these CEOs’ thoughts related to recruiting:
Rich Barton (Zillow): Zillow Group is going to move from search and find, to buy, sell and rent…
Ron Peltier (BHHS): The industry has over 80,000 brokers. There are too many brokers. We may only need 20,000 brokers, or 10,000 brokers, [or less].
Robert Reffkin (Compass): Agents are loyal to their manager and to the simplicity, ease, support and marketing brokerages provide them. But more than that, they are loyal to their family and entrepreneurial passion. I do not believe in loyalty to brand above all.
John Peyton (Realogy): Human nature is about loyalty…. For real estate agents and brokers–belonging to a tribe, with a common language and vision is important.
Glenn Sanford (eXp): The percentage of agent-mediated real estate transactions may drop from the 90 percent range today to perhaps a 60 percent range in the tech-mediated future.
Glenn Kelman (Redfin): Outside the U.S., buyer’s agents have always been less common and now U.S. buyer’s agents are coming under pressure.
Panel of 6 Large Brokerage CEOs: Many brokerages will have to hire a whole new breed of agent to work online leads as most existing agents are horrible at [this task]. The current agent population is too slow to adopt new tools and relies too heavily on assistants. In the end, most will be left behind.