Let’s talk about how a real estate leader, manager, or brokerage owner should handle it when agents transfer from team to team within their brokerage. If you’ve ever run a brokerage, you know this can be a nightmare. Handled poorly, it causes so much drama — because you’ve got two big teams involved, plus the agent caught in the middle, and you can end up losing an entire team, not just one agent, if this isn’t handled properly.

I’ve seen it happen so many times, and how you handle that situation is what preserves a brokerage. A brokerage with a lot of successful teams that peacefully coexist is incredibly valuable. You get real collaboration between team leaders, and you prove that this is where top teams go.

And if you have a lot of top teams in your brokerage, agents are going to join because of it — even if they never admit that’s the reason — because they want to go where the success is. Success leaves clues. It shows agents, “top teams exist here.”

That builds market share and name recognition for the brokerage, because you’re proving that’s where top teams go. It’s the same social proof that exists within an agent population or local association — even with new agents coming in. They think, “I’m going to go where the top agents are, because that’s safe.”

It’s like an Amazon review. You buy the product with the most reviews because it feels safe — you figure, why would I question it if this many other people already vetted it? We’re all guilty of that kind of thinking. That social proof within an agent population is powerful, which is why managing how agents transfer between teams matters so much.

Unfortunately, most people want to know: “What do I say when the agent or the team leader comes to me and tells me there’s a transfer happening?” As if there’s a magic script to solve the problem in the moment. There really isn’t. It has to be preventative and communicated upfront — which isn’t the popular answer people want to hear.

By the time it reaches you, the damage has usually already been done everywhere. So you need a policy in place upfront, one that’s clearly communicated to team leaders on how transfers should be handled. They may follow it, they may not — but at least you had it, and it’s no longer your fault, which means it’s no longer the brokerage’s fault either.

That policy has to be clear and communicated upfront. Very few brokerages actually do this, but it’s so easy once it’s in place. I’ve had this policy in my own brokerages, and we have clients who use this same policy — it’s incredibly helpful.

It’s a fairly robust policy — probably a full page in your policies and procedures manual. If someone tells you, “I want to join a team,” or, “I want to join your office and bring my team,” or, “I want to start a team,” this policy comes up. And I bring it up regularly in sales meetings, too.

The problem is you can’t introduce it after the fact. If you do, you put whoever just went through a transfer on blast. Everyone will know that agent moved from one team to another, and that the team leader who received them “messed it up.” So it has to be preventative and upfront.

Here’s the policy: when an agent first tells a new team that they want to leave their current team — we’ll call it the “old team” — all of the burden and difficulty shifts to the new team leader. That new team lead has to say: “Wait — I can’t even talk to you about what it would look like for you to join our team. I can’t tell you about compensation, how many leads you’d get, or any of the benefits of being on our team.

I can’t say anything about that until you’ve had a conversation with your existing team leader and told them you’re exploring other options. Then you need to come back and tell me that conversation happened — and before we talk about anything further, I have to call your team leader myself to confirm it happened. That’s what I’m required to do.”

I have this entire script written out in the policy so there’s no confusion, because what team leaders need is a script — so you give them one. This cannot look anything like transferring between brokerages. You can’t go interview everywhere, nail down exactly what compensation and expectations would look like at the new team, and then go tell your old team leader you’re leaving. That’s not how it works inside the same brokerage. There’s a code of conduct here, and there’s a structure we all have to follow.

When you handle it that way, you show a strong ethical standard, and you earn respect from that agent for playing by the rules. Here’s why that matters: if the new team leader doesn’t do this, the old team leader is going to instantly assume the worst. That’s just what humans do — we don’t want to ask, “What am I not providing this agent?” We want to blame the new team leader for being underhanded or unethical. That’s where we naturally go in this industry, and now you’ve got one team leader hating another.

So it’s important to give people an out, and the out is: we’re following the rules. When you call to confirm and the old team leader says, “Yes, they talked to me,” you can say, “Good — because I didn’t say a thing. I read the script.” And if you actually read the script word for word, that’s even better. That gives the new team leader a real chance to work it out with their agent.

I know this is a lot to ask. If you’re the agent transferring, think about how hard that is — you have to have an upfront conversation with your current team leader about the fact that you’re looking elsewhere, then go to the new team leader and say you had that conversation, and then the new team leader has to call and confirm it. We make it intentionally hard, because as a leader, you don’t want interoffice transfers to be easy or fun — there’s too much potential for harm across three people: the old team leader, the new team leader, and the agent in the middle. You can even have agents on different teams trying to recruit each other, so this needs to be well known across the board. There’s too much room for human error if people aren’t thinking it through.

I’ll take it a step further — I’ve seen this earn respect even between brokerages. When a new team leader handles it this way, other team leaders respect them for it. They say, “Before we can even talk, you need to have that conversation.” And the reason the confirmation phone call is in there is that agents will often say, “I already talked to them,” when their definition of “already talked to them” is really loose — maybe they just expressed some displeasure about a new policy, not that they’re actually thinking about leaving. I’ve been burned by that so many times that the confirmation call has to happen.

So when it finally gets to me and everyone’s upset, I ask: “Did you say anything?” “No.” “Did they talk to their team leader?” “Yes.” “Did you call and confirm it?” “Yes.” I’m putting a lot of the responsibility on the person receiving the benefit — the new team leader gaining an agent. And often when they call to confirm, the old team leader says, “I had no idea they were thinking of leaving,” because that’s a hard conversation for an agent to start. Then the old team leader can react poorly, their leadership can drop fast in a stressful moment, and none of that is the new team leader’s fault if they followed the process.

What’s interesting is that if you introduce this policy preventatively and repeat it to all your team leaders, they’ll love it — because they’re just as worried about losing agents as they are about gaining them. The problem only comes up if you don’t make it a regular topic and then suddenly announce it right after a transfer — whoever just lost or gained an agent will assume you’re talking about them specifically, and they’ll feel put on blast.

This has to be part of your office culture, brought up regularly — every six months, once a year — in a sales meeting or training setting. And when you say it, you say, “I’m not putting anyone on blast here. I just know I need to say this regularly, because we’re human, we get excited, and we forget. I have some grace for that, but I also have to keep doing my part and repeating this.”

The reason we require the agent to tell the old team leader first is that too often what actually happens is: the agent goes to the new team leader, and the new team leader says, “Here’s the policy — I know it’s an uncomfortable conversation to have upfront, so let’s just act like we already had it. Then you go back and tell your team leader you’re thinking of leaving, and I’ll call and confirm.” That is incredibly underhanded, and I can tell you it’s happened to me more than once — because it’s so easy to sympathize with the agent in front of you and not stop to consider there might be another side to the story. There often is. Different people in different positions see things differently.

That’s why we build in all these steps — otherwise you’ll see this underhanded behavior just as often as you’ll see it done right. It’s that common. It’s not that one person is evil — it’s usually just inexperience. Often when an agent moves teams because they’re unhappy, they end up losing that new team too, because agents sometimes bring the real problem with them: their own behavior. So understand — when agents move, it’s just as often about their own leadership skills or fit as it is a problem with the team they’re leaving. And to be fair, sometimes it really is a leadership issue on the old team’s side, and agents genuinely find a better home and end up much happier.

That’s why this needs to be a documented policy in your brokerage’s policies and procedures — with the script written out, because that’s the part people actually need to see and use.

ICT Coach: Having worked in a multi-brand W-2 environment — we had three brands, same ownership — this was a requirement. You had to go to your boss and tell them you were moving to another brand internally. If they found out some other way, you were done — you wouldn’t get hired. Your boss had to call the other boss and say, “How do you feel about this?”

Brian: Right — in the W-2 world, that structure exists for a reason. Brokerages start running loose, and now you’re just relying on your own charisma to tap-dance through the problem and keep people from blaming each other too much. But that gets harder over time, and you’re asking the old team leader to have a level of grace most people just don’t have. This was always my biggest retention concern — when these situations started happening without a policy. Once I got a real policy in place, things got a lot easier.

ICT Coach: The sister conversation we’ve built into that is something like: “I have nothing negative to say about you, and I hope you have nothing negative to say about the team you’re leaving.” We don’t want anything negative posted about the old team, and in return, you’ll never hear us say anything negative about you. If you don’t set that expectation, the new team becomes “the best day of my life” and the old team becomes “the worst company on earth” — and that’s cancerous for the organization. The old leader recruited that agent once, and now they’re talking negatively on social media, and it just becomes a mess. Setting that expectation upfront goes a long way.

ICT Coach: That reminds me — we have a client, Iron Valley, in Virginia and California. I was talking to them about culture last week and asked if there was anything they required agents not to do. They told new agents: “We don’t talk negatively about the real estate industry — not about clients, interest rates, buying, or selling. If we see it, we’ll require you to take it down. That’s against our culture.” I thought that was excellent, because we sometimes hurt our own business through pure negativity.

Brian: You see it all the time, and it makes you cringe. You never know when someone’s going to call you back and say, “I’m ready to return — things weren’t as bad as I remembered.” You want to preserve that relationship, and it takes real professional maturity to keep it intact instead of both sides just writing each other off. Those exit conversations are the upper level of real estate leadership communication.

It’s rare to find a team leader who’s respected for their production and well-liked at the same time — having both is unusual, and the only way you get there is through this kind of discipline. Otherwise, you get the team leader who’s great at the numbers but poaches everyone else’s agents and talks badly about people — underhanded. But if you actually build a team and hold the line on not recruiting from other teams inside your own brokerage, it works. I’ve seen it work really well — even office to office, brokerage to brokerage. If you maintain that standard, it actually makes agents want to join you more, because you’re not chasing them — you’re holding back a little. And other team leaders start reaching out and saying, “Hey, I wouldn’t talk to this person — I told them to talk to you first.” That’s how we try to run things here. It’s almost an anti-recruiting approach, but I’ve seen it earn real respect between teams, even though they’re fierce competitors for production and agents.

ICT Coach: That street cred is really hard to quantify.

Brian: It goes ahead of you in the marketplace. When you’re well-respected, that reputation is real, even though you can’t put a number on it — and that’s what makes it tough, because you could just go recruit from another team and immediately quantify that agent’s production landing on your numbers. That’s why most people take the easy path. But it’s hard to see all the goodwill you build over the next ten years, and the people who speak well of you and emulate your team because of it. It’s real, it’s just hard to quantify.