“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass… It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”- Unknown

Our industry spent the first couple years of the downturn waiting for the storm to pass. Now, we must learn to dance in the rain. The steps of a successful dance are attracting and retaining talented real estate sales professionals to our industry and to our companies.

Here’s “what I know” about attracting talent today: 

• Experienced agents are looking for options.
• There are experienced agents in your market place that would be great additions to your companies. Please stop telling yourself and everyone else that there are no agents that you would want to have at your company. That’s a bad excuse.
• A real estate career is a great choice for career searchers of all ages. We need to be loud and proud about our profession.
• “You’re great…. I’m great. Let’s have lunch and talk about you working here.” This script is like a bad pick up line at a bar; it isn’t appealing and doesn’t work.
• People don’t join companies. They join or leave the company of the leader.
• Leaders must take a daily role in attracting and retaining talent for their company. This is not a task you can afford to completely delegate.
• It takes 14 positive contacts on average before an experienced agent makes a move.
• Agents decide to make a move 6 months before they actually do. There is a trigger event that occurs. They start planning the move as an outcome of that event.
• You must be the destination brokerage in your marketplace.

Earlier this year I asked owners across the BHGRE network what they knew about talent attraction today. We had some great answers but the most common one was that “it’s a hard job”. I agree. But if it were easy we’d have a whole other set of challenges.

What would you add to the “what I know” list?