If you’re feeling uneasy about the market and wondering if it makes sense to continue recruiting, you should read Joe Rand’s article published in Inman earlier this week. No, I’m serious. If you haven’t read this article yet, stop what you’re doing now and invest a few minutes to gain some much-needed perspective to what’s really happening in most real estate companies. Joe’s point is simple: The negative news you’re reading is really based on a very small subset of companies. More specifically, layoffs have been announced in 18 companies that have one or more of these three characteristics:
- They’re publicly traded real estate companies with cratering stock valuations.
- They’re mortgage and title companies heavily dependent on refinance business.
- They’re real estate start-ups with unproven business models.
If you’re not in this group, the hustle to find, engage and hire the talented agents continues. Joe puts it this way: Yes, the housing market is cooling, but “cooling” is not the same as “cold….” There’s a lot of meat on this bone. No, we won’t match the record-setting years in 2020 and 2021. But the volume of real estate sold in 2022 will probably be higher than in 2019, or 2018, or 2017, or probably any other year going back to the Big Bang. That’s a pretty good year! And to capture these opportunities, you’ll need agents who can pivot, learn quickly, and find new ways to meet the needs of their clients. You can either train, coach, and mentor your existing agents to make these adjustments or you can hire new ones who are better able to adapt. Most organizations continue to do both. This we do know—those paralyzed by fear will be left behind.