Recruiting Insight

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It’s a great day to recruit, and thanks for joining us as we kick-off our fall season of the Recruiting Insight podcast.

When the storm clouds start gathering on the horizon, it’s helpful to connect with some seasoned executives who have led real estate organizations through difficult times.

This week, we’ll be strategizing with Rich Davidson, the founder and CEO of Cairn Real Estate Holdings.

Cairn is a nationwide real estate investment firm focused on building a network of industry leading companies and professionals.

They currently operate in more than 70 locations, have more than 4000 agents, and completed over 30,000 transactions last year. And honestly, they’re just getting started.

Prior to starting Cairn, Rick was the Global CEO of Century 21 for seven years. In this role, he was responsible for the health and wellbeing of a network that spanned 80 countries, had 8000 offices, and 125,000 sales professionals.

At the same time, he served at the chairman of Easterseals—the largest health service charity in America which cares for 1.6M individuals each year.

As you might have guessed, none of these achievements happen without inspiring all types of individuals to get behind a vision and work towards something much bigger than one person could possibly achieve.

Is this not the essence of recruiting? I think it is, so let’s jump in and see what we can today learn from Rick’s achievements.

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It’s a great day to recruit, and today we’re making a stop in Kansas City and checking in with Chad Dumas.

Chad is the Senior Vice President of Brokerage for Reece Nichols and manages one of their largest offices.

For you those of you who don’t know, Reece Nichols is the 800-pound real estate gorilla in the Kanas City metro area.

They have 27 company-owned stores and more than 25 franchises spread across Missouri and Kansas. And there are about 3000 professional agents who keep all of this running.

To build something this large and successful, you know it takes a lot of recruiting. But it doesn’t stop there. You have to build a culture that retains the high performers who have grown up and become successful in the organization.

There is no better person to help us understand how this all works at Reece Nichols than Chad. He started as a new agent, quickly became high producer, became the most successful recruiting manager in the company, and is now part of the executive team.

And he did all this from inside the Reece Nichols framework.

So let’s jump in, and see what we can learn from one of the rising stars in the real estate industry.

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Many of the Recruiting Insight listeners are owners of single-office brokerages, leaders of real estate teams, or managers of offices that need to grow.

If you’re in one of these positions, I think you’ll find Sarah Zdeb’s story both inspiring and insightful.

Sarah is the founder and CEO of JPAR Carolina Living.

She started her franchise from scratch and grew it into a multi-office company with more than 100 agents.

And this year, she is on track to grow by a net 50 agents again.

This kind of growth is what most real estate entrepreneurs have in mind when they start a brokerage, and today Sarah is going to share some of her secrets on how she made this happen.

Also, near the end of our discussion, she describes an innovative process she’s developed to consistently generate experienced agent recruiting referrals.

It’s something you can quickly add to your recruiting process and start generating referrals.

Let’s jump in—we have a lot cover today!

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There has been much debate over the years on the best way to structure the real estate recruiting function in a brokerage.

Some leaders believe it’s best to have first-level managers heavily involved in the recruiting process. After all, wouldn’t a recruiting prospect want to connect with the manager with whom they’ll be working?

Others believe a centralized approach is more effective. Doesn’t it make sense that results would be better if a recruiting team was exclusively focused on the difficult task of recruiting?

We won’t settle the debate today, but we will give you a peek into one of best run centralized recruiting organizations in the country.

Jeremy Lambert and his recruiting team at Your Castle Real Estate recruit over 300 agents per year, and he’ll share what he’s learned from leading a centralized recruiting group over the last decade.

If you ever thought of centralizing your recruiting function, you won’t want to miss today’s episode.

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In today's podcast, we'll be joined by Rob Keefe. Rob is the founder and President of Relitix
Relitix helps real estate brokerages use data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to make better management decisions, recruit and coach more effectively, and find new ways to stick it to their competitors.
Full disclosure: Rob and I have something in common besides real estate. We were classmates together at the Naval Academy some 30-odd years ago, and we both spent time as naval officers before jumping into the real estate industry.
Before starting Relitix, Rob led organizations in every corner of residential real estate, including real estate brokerage, real estate development, mortgage banking, title, and relocation management.
He also served as Chairman of the Wisconsin Realtors Association representing the state's 14,000 Realtors and has served as a board member of the National Association of Realtors.