What top agents actually want before they’ll switch agencies

Twenty years of talent acquisition experience suggests the strongest sales performers are now researching leadership, culture and progression before entertaining a bigger pay packet.

For years, real estate recruitment was heavily driven by salary, commission structures and incentives. While remuneration will always matter, the conversation with candidates has noticeably shifted over the past 12–18 months.

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson has also written extensively about this. Her work points to something I think most leaders would recognise. We all say we want to learn from failure, but organisations are often not particularly good at systematically capturing and learning from it.

I think that’s the opportunity.

Businesses today certainly don’t have a shortage of data. We have dashboards, KPIs, engagement surveys, conversion rates, customer feedback and reports on almost everything.

What we can have is a shortage of contradictory data.

The information that challenges the story we are already telling ourselves.

As a CEO, I don’t just want to understand why our best people perform. I want to understand what is stopping the next group from getting there. I don’t only want feedback from people who love what we do. I want to understand why someone chose a competitor, why a great candidate said no or why an initiative we believed in didn’t land.

Not to find fault. To find the gap.

That requires some discipline because success is comfortable. When something works, it validates the strategy, the investment and sometimes our own decisions. When something doesn’t, it asks us to be curious enough to consider whether the market has shifted, our people need something different or something we see as a strength isn’t actually experienced that way outside our own four walls.

For me, leadership isn’t about changing direction every time something goes wrong. It’s about making sure we’re looking at enough of the picture before deciding we’re heading in the right direction.

I still want to study success. I want to understand it, recognise it and create more of it.

But I also want us to get better at capturing the customer we didn’t win, the person we couldn’t retain, the opportunity we missed and the idea that simply didn’t work.

Because sometimes the most valuable information in a business isn’t sitting in the result you’re celebrating.

It’s sitting in the result you weren’t expecting.

And if we’re prepared to look at both, we stop simply reflecting on the organisation we already are and start seeing more clearly the organisation we could become.

Candidates are not just looking for their next role; they are looking for the right environment. They want to understand how they will be supported, how success is measured, what development looks like and whether the leadership team is genuinely invested in their growth.

Another noticeable shift is that candidates are conducting far more research before accepting opportunities. Employer reputation, online presence, leadership visibility and team stability are all being assessed closely.

The organisations that do this well create a reputation that attracts talent before the recruitment process even begins.

The real estate industry remains incredibly rewarding and full of opportunity, but the expectations of employees have evolved.