Alex Vidal knows a thing or two about training.
The ERA brand president is in a seemingly never-ending state of physical training for his next Ironman race. (How many of you can drop into a town and run a half marathon for “fun?”)
But coaching and training are also his key differentiators in his role for ERA.
“I’m an expense to the company. The agents are the ones in the field doing the sales that ultimately generate the commission for the brokerage and for themselves, and ultimately float up to ERA,” Vidal told Inman. “Eighty percent of everything I do is …to empower my agents to do two things: Live a better life, and make more money.”
With that in mind, Vidal agreed to sit down with Inman — in advance of his appearance at Inman Connect San Diego — and open up his four-step playbook on how brokers can recruit and retain agents in a hypercompetitive real estate market.
Below is a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and brevity.
Inman: You have been on the road quite a bit since landing your current role about two years ago. What do you say when you meet with your franchisees?
Alex Vidal: I never have a scripted talk. I literally go in there and say, we’re either going to talk for five minutes or we’re going to talk for a couple hours. And it’s going to be completely dependent on you guys and who’s willing to pull the cork on the bottle.
Where do you feel you need the most help? That’s what I’m here for. I can talk about whatever. So let’s talk about what you actually want.
In addition to that, I have a coaching program that I lead in conjunction with our head educator at ERA, where last year we put close to 5,000 agents through the program.
What are you hearing? Is there any common theme from the franchises?
Yeah, you know what’s super interesting, man? Everything that you read in the headlines, and it doesn’t matter if it’s Inman or anywhere else, that’s not what they’re talking about.
What they’re talking about is, ‘How do I get a buyer who is interested in buying, but they’re stuck on what the mortgage rate is?’ Or there’s not a lot of inventory and how to get creative, even though inventory is starting to creep up? You don’t hear talk about commissions. You don’t hear talk about private listing networks. Like, you don’t hear any of that stuff in the field.
When you are recruiting and retaining, some agents are probably people you might not want on your team. How are you coaching the franchises on how to get the right person? Is that a concern? Do you have to filter out some of the crowd?
Absolutely. Now there’s data, right? There’s always data, and you have to be careful.
It’s super interesting about recruiting. Most brokers hate recruiting until they’re really good at it, and then they love it. How do you get them to really love it? And the long answer is just really showing them who they should be targeting. How do you know who to target? If you look at real estate sales, the best customers are the ones who are referred to you by somebody you’ve already helped, by your customers.
In real estate brokerage, it’s the same thing. Your best recruits are going to come to you by the agents who are in your office, who have come across David. I think David’s a great agent, and now as a result, I think he should be affiliated with ERA.
Give me the recruiting playbook. Four steps, what are they?
No. 1, who are the agents with other brokerages who are being referred to me by the agents existing in my company?
No. 2 is super easy. It’s like, who are we doing business with? Like, I’m doing X number of transactions a month. Ninety-nine percent of the time, there’s a co-op agent on the other side. That shows me that agent’s doing business. That’s an easy reach out.
No. 3, you could look at your agents who have left you over the last year, two years, three years, four years, that you may say, ‘I really want this person back.’
And then No. 4 is, rather than blanket cold calling, saying, ‘All right, I’m in this market. I really want more signs or more business in this particular neighborhood. And then going into that neighborhood, researching the agents that are there.’
Recruiting becomes a hell of a lot easier when you have that kind of, in my opinion, that flow.
Why is that hard? If you’re an agent, you’re presumably making cold calls. You’re already used to that. So what is the hard part about being like, ‘Hey, you’re the top producer in this neighborhood and I need you, and here’s what we offer?’
I think it’s just understanding that, again, you’re not the only person that’s calling them. They’ve gotten 20 calls that day, that week, of somebody calling them and saying, ‘Hey, I wanna talk to you about interviewing you, about coming to my brokerage.’ And it’s almost like walking into a car dealership.
Is that a big concern? We call them boomerang agents. They leave and then they come back. Does that put a stain on your brand if somebody does that?
If you have a big backdoor and agents are leaving you, you’re gonna have a really hard time bringing people in the door. If I have raving fans within my organization, it makes everything I wanna do — recruit agents, help you become more productive, make my franchisees happy, go sell franchises — all of that starts with making my existing agents raving fans. And then all of a sudden, recruiting becomes a hell of a lot easier.
You’ve been in the industry 27 years. So that’s pre-Great Recession by a bit. What would you tell a newbie who thinks now is a good time to get into real estate?
Mike Ferry said two things that I love. The first thing he said was the market’s always hot for great agents. And that’s really just focusing on the things that you could control — the systems, the people.
The second one that I love, and why we do the coaching, is Mike Ferry literally got in front of 5,000 people and said the reason he has a job is because your broker doesn’t want to do theirs. That’s when I really kicked the coaching program into high gear. And I love those guys. I’m really close with Tom.
I love Mike. But at the end of the day, I never want my agents to say, ‘I have to go outside my organization cause my company doesn’t provide it.’ And that’s why we do it.
