We’re going to talk about a very important concept — having some form of a real estate productivity coach inside your brokerage, or even your team, especially with large teams.

Here’s the problem. We’re out there often saying, “If you come work with us at our brokerage, we’ll help you sell more real estate.” That’s great — I’m a big fan of using an increase in production as your value prop. It’s probably the most valuable and effective value prop out there, much better than saying, “Come to us because we’re cheaper.” That tends to run its course for a lot of reasons, but that’s neither here nor there.

Let’s talk about how you add value and help people sell more real estate. Someone can be a little cheaper and save a client five or ten thousand dollars, but if you can help them earn a hundred, two hundred, three hundred thousand dollars a year, now you’re making a real difference in their life. Those are the brokerages that tend to grow and stay big.

One of the things I see is that people come into the brokerage, or even onto a big team, and then they just get lost. They’re not coming in much. They’re not engaged. They’re not part of the culture. Their production really isn’t increasing because they haven’t changed how they do business compared to where they were before.

One of the most effective ways to fix that is to have some sort of productivity coach in the office — someone they start working with, where there’s accountability, coaching, and training to keep them engaged and actually experience the value of the brokerage. And not just with new agents. A lot of people only do this with new licensees. I’m suggesting you may have different programs and comp structures for different agent levels, but at the highest level, I’ve seen brokerages constantly adding value to as many agents as will receive it — new and experienced.

That’s how you get producing agents in your office. That’s how you gain influence. The higher the production level in your office, the higher the influence. You create social proof that successful agents exist, succeed, and thrive there. But you have to deliver on the promise — and that’s where a productivity coach comes in.

Before we talk about how to pay this person, I want to talk about what this person looks like. Who’s a good candidate for a productivity coach?

A productivity coach is someone who genuinely wants to build people up. If someone is purely money-focused — “I need more money” — that’s not a good coach. They’ll get frustrated, they won’t have the patience to work with agents in the office, and they’d honestly do better selling real estate on their own. On the DISC behavioral assessment, a high-D who’s mainly chasing income from other agents’ production probably isn’t the best fit. They’ll move out of the role too fast and get impatient.

The I and S profiles are good fits. The C can work too, believe it or not, because they like systems and structure. The I loves people and being around them. The S likes deep relationships and is extremely patient. From a goals standpoint, they genuinely like seeing people succeed — and the good news is there are a lot of I’s and S’s in real estate, because it’s a people-first business.

You see it all the time at any association of Realtors: people volunteering their time to sit on committees, run committees, serve on boards, run events — completely separate from their sales business, and it actually takes time away from selling. But they want that leadership role. They want to train, they want to help the industry. Agents generally want to be elevated, and a lot of them want to pour back into people — it’s part of why people start real estate teams in the first place. A productivity coach role is a great way to build a team inside your office without taking on team expenses, and it’s a way to generate income without working directly with clients — though the coach can still sell real estate too. Just not so much that they don’t have time to actually coach.

Productivity coaches often sell somewhere between five and fifteen houses a year themselves — enough to stay relevant and keep some income, without needing to rely entirely on compensation from the coaching role.

So that’s how you define this person: they love agents, they’re patient, they build people up. A good coach has to be more of a “rockstar maker” than someone who wants to be the rockstar themselves. These people are everywhere and not hard to find — this is also a great recruiting tool. Offering someone a leadership position like this is a wonderful carrot, so don’t just look inside your office. Look outside too, on the recruiting trail. If you’re the first person to see this potential in someone, that’s huge.

Be where agents are. Be at association events. If you’re recruiting the right way — adding value and using a needs analysis to understand where people want to go — this will show up all the time. The best way to find a productivity coach is the same as finding any position in your brokerage: keep recruiting, keep sifting through the haystack until you find the needles.

Now — how do we compensate them?

I lean toward performance-based compensation for two reasons. First, it helps the coach grow their own program: if they want more income, they’ll bring more agents into the program and help them close more transactions. Second, paying this person a straight salary isn’t something I’d recommend. A small base with heavy performance-based comp on top makes more sense — especially since a coach who’s still in production isn’t relying on this role to pay their bills.

Compensating a coach for new agents is the easiest version of this. Most new agents will agree to a 50/50 split. Say your standard office split is 75/25 — the agent gets 75%, the brokerage gets 25%. For new licensees, it’s common to move them to a temporary 50/50 split for a defined period. Out of that extra 25%, you might pay the productivity coach 20% and keep 10% at the brokerage level for new agents, since they take more coaching time.

New agents care most about learning — it’s really the one time in their career they’re primarily motivated by that instead of commission. It’s your one shot to add a lot of value. If you bring a new agent in without a coach, without accountability, without real onboarding, within six months they’ll think they know everything they need to know. Agents get spoiled fast — they make decisions and form opinions without ever having tried or learned the right way, and unfortunately that happens to the vast majority of the agent population.

There are two types of real estate training: how to service a client — fill out forms, manage a transaction — which most brokerages are decent at, and how to actually get clients, which is the more important and far less common training. That’s why 33% of agents don’t make it past their first year, and 78% don’t make it past five years. They all quit for the same reason: they didn’t make enough money. That gap is exactly what a productivity coach fixes.

For new agents, put them on that 50/50 split with a clear end point — maybe six months, maybe a year, maybe until they hit your commission cap, maybe their first five or ten transactions. The bigger your office, the shorter that period and the fewer transactions it should cover, because you need to make sure the coach has enough volume to make it worthwhile and you have to watch their time. In a smaller office, you can let a coach stay with agents longer — fewer agents, more attention, generally a higher success rate.

I’ve also seen productivity coaches build out their own division, hiring other coaches underneath them once they hit capacity. In an office of 400–500 agents, a lead productivity coach might take a percentage of what other coaches beneath her produce.

To be clear, this isn’t high-level, complex coaching. It’s usually about getting an agent’s social profiles set up, building out their sphere of influence, pulling contact information from their phone and social connections, setting people up on listing alerts, teaching scripts, and getting everything into the CRM. For more motivated agents, it can expand into prospecting — FSBOs, expireds, circle prospecting, door knocking. A lot of our clients use the systems already built into the agent management portal (AMP), so the coach — or the agent, watching alongside them — works through structured training while the brokerage holds them accountable through a dashboard tracking weekly activity.

This is also how you finally get agents actually using the CRM, and using it from day one — instead of blaming the CRM itself six months later, when the real issue was never the tool.

That accountability might start one-on-one and shift to a group setting once you have enough people in the program, with everyone tracking contacts made and additions to their CRM database. There can even be a dedicated bootcamp for brand-new agents — our New Agent Blueprint course is a good example — that gets them up to speed quickly before shifting into ongoing activity accountability.

None of this is complicated content. It’s just time-consuming. Building out a full contact database from someone’s phone and social connections can take the better part of a year if you’re only adding a handful of contacts a day. And most agents don’t do it: it’s estimated that only about 3% of agents in any given association of Realtors have an actually updated sphere of influence in their CRM. Most are just posting on social media occasionally, wondering why production goes up and down with the market, with no idea they’re not staying top of mind with anyone. Part of the problem is that agents mostly just copy what other agents post on social media, without seeing the other, less visible work successful agents are doing behind the scenes.

Compensating a coach for experienced agents works differently. I’d lean toward a voluntary, opt-in program with lighter compensation — maybe a 5–10% split, since it’s harder to sell a 50/50 structure to an established producer, or a flat fee, such as $500 per closing. Often the productivity coach will draft their own agreement directly with the agent, renewed annually, for a defined term. Just be careful here — if a coach gets too aggressive about enforcing that agreement when an agent wants to leave for a team or another office, it can create real drama, including threats of small claims court. Set expectations up front to avoid that.

I’d still promote this heavily at a high level, because plenty of experienced agents eventually leave a brokerage for exactly this reason: “I’ve been doing this fifteen years and I still don’t have a real database — I need to automate this.” Instead of losing that agent, offer them a coach right there in the office, paid only when they get paid, on a six-month or one-year term they can opt out of anytime.

This also rounds out your productivity coach’s own skill set — they get to work with bigger producers on higher-level strategy, like properly farming a neighborhood instead of sending out the occasional mailer, or building out an already-solid sphere of influence even further.

As the broker-owner, push this hard. Give the coach the platform — success stories at sales meetings, real visibility — and make it clear they also need to go out and generate their own clients for the program. Between the two of you promoting it, this creates a genuinely production-centered culture in your office, built around real success stories, which is exactly what people want to see and hear.

I strongly recommend this position if you want to increase agent production and actually follow through on what you’re promising at the recruiting table. If you’re worried agents won’t want to give up a piece of a split, that usually means the value isn’t being communicated well enough — because agents move brokerages for increased production all the time, even if they don’t always say so directly. Build this role, communicate the value clearly, and your retention will improve more than you’d expect.

Audience question: Would there be a place to have more than one productivity coach in a brokerage?

Yes — once a coach starts getting overloaded and can’t take on more clients, it’s very easy to bring in a second coach with their own split, and let the first coach run her own small team. I’ve seen this happen a lot. Once a coach gets to that point, they’ll almost always start voluntarily giving their own clients to newer agents and effectively run their own team from within that role. It happens almost every time.