New Standard for Agent Onboarding in 2025 (+Playbook)
Every brokerage used to be a recruitment business.
Considering 71% of real estate agents didn’t close any deals last year, every brokerage should now become a training & coaching business.
It really doesn’t matter how many more you recruit if they end up joining the 71%.
Before you waste any more of your recruitment budget, you should first re-evaluate your agent development & retention strategy which always starts with … you guessed it: agent onboarding.
Over the course of the next four weeks, I will publish 4 articles sharing our research findings and ready-to-use playbooks for 4 different agent segments:
100 Days to Real Estate Success: New Agent Academy
Elevating the "Movable Middle": The Next Step of Your Real Estate Career
90-Day Revive Your Real Estate Career Accelerator (for the 71%)
Team in A Box: From Top Producer to Team Leader
Implementing these simple agent development strategies will immediately put your business in the top 10-15 percentile for sales productivity.
Not only will this help you increase per-agent production and improve the overall agent success rate, but it will also boost your agent recruitment efforts helping you attract agents from other brokerages who are failing to provide adequate guidance.
Phase 1 (10 days)
You won’t believe how many times I’ve seen onboarding processes where step one is Policies, SOPs, Transfer your license, or Change your email signature!
Really?
Sure they will read the policies, but say hi first, tell them what it’s like to be a part of your brokerage, and provide an open-armed welcome to make sure they feel appreciated.
Administrative tasks follow right after: setting up MLS, license transfer tax forms etc.
Setting goals, expectations, and productivity standards
Something non-existing in most onboarding processes that we looked at.
Yet, probably this is the most impactful exercise any agent should do on day 1.
Ask them what they want out of their career and show them what it takes to get there.
So simple, yet virtually no brokerage is doing this as part of their process.
Here are some of the templates Agently provides for brokerages to customize.
Technology setup, essential tools & systems
Some more ready-made templates from Agently.
Branding & Online Presence
Here is how this is structured on Agently.
This is where most onboarding checklists end. With Agently this is where true onboarding begins.
Phase 2 (30 days)
Phase 2 is where knowledge transfer begins.
Yes sure, you can make all new agents hit all the road bumps and learn from their own mistakes.
But why?
If your brokerages offer a mentornship program you are ahead of the game. If don’t have a mentorship just call it “shadowing”. The idea is still the same, instead of sterile classroom training new agents should shadow season ones.
Every single activity belongs to one of the three training pillars:
Lead generation
Lead follow up
Lead conversion
Shadowing other agents during:
buyer consultations
listing presentations
property showings
open houses
home inspections
preview homes
meet with lenders
After 30 days you can evaluate progress.
If you hear: “I didn’t know who shadow” make agents revisit “What it takes to succeed in real estate”.
Phase 3 (60 days)
Execution. By now all the formal training is completed.
Phase 4
Probably the most overlooked step ignored by 95% of brokerages.
Collecting agent feedback about their onboarding experience will provide you with invaluable insights for continuously optimizing such metrics as: days to first closing, onboarding completion rate, and overall agent retention rate.
At Agently we help brokerages implement and bring these agent development strategies from paper to life. With less staff, and less technology cost.
Agently runs all of your agent development strategies completely hands-free, reducing workload and giving your leadership team full visibility into agent performance.
If agent development is one of your priorities for 2025, schedule your 15-minute demo.