The $80,500 Production Gap

According to the NAR, REALTORS® with two years or less of experience completed a median of just two transaction sides last year and earned a median gross income of $8,000.

REALTORS® with 16 or more years of experience earned $88,500.

So if you want a thriving real estate business, all you need to do is hire as many agents as we can and wait for 16 years.

I hope you got the joke…

On a serious note, over the last 4 years at Agently, we’ve been obsessed with one question and one question only:

How to close the $80,500 gap?

How to turn the agents you recruit into agents who produce?

(That’s without having to wait for 16 years, of course)

Creating more producers is the ultimate challenge our team here at Agently is solving for.

And here’s something I want to show you…

From non-producers to producers

If the objective is to create more producing agents, we first need to understand who actually makes up your roster.

At the highest level, every agent falls into one of two groups:

• Non-producing agents

• Producing agents

Pretty obvious.

But within those two groups, there are six very different types of agents—and each requires a completely different development strategy.

Non-producing agents

1. New - joined less than 90 days ago

Every agent who joins your organization begins in New—whether they just received their license or joined after years at another brokerage.

We consider agents New during their first 90 days or until they complete onboarding.

The objective is simple: get them through onboarding and ready to produce as quickly as possible.

That includes your administrative checklist, 30-60-90-day plan, buyer and seller training, systems training, lead certification, and everything else required to make them production-ready.

But completing onboarding isn’t the finish line.

Production is.

2. Activating - onboarding completed but no closings yet

Agents who complete onboarding but haven’t closed their first transaction move into Activating.

This is where most organizations lose visibility.

Closed transactions tell you who has already produced. They tell you almost nothing about who is likely to produce next.

Some activating agents are consistently prospecting, following up, attending training, and building a real pipeline.

Others have already disengaged.

Both currently have zero transactions.

But they are not remotely the same investment.

More on that in a minute.

3. Dormant - no activity and no transaction in 6 months.

No CRM activity and no transactions for at least six months.

Inevitably, some of the agents you recruit will end up here. That’s the never-ending cycle of the real estate industry.

Your job is to identify them quickly and decide whether they can be reactivated—or whether your time, leads, and support should be invested somewhere else.

Producing agents

4. Producing - at least one transaction

Once an agent closes their first transaction, they officially become a Producing agent.

But one transaction doesn’t create a sustainable real estate business.

The next objective is to help that agent build consistent activity, a stronger pipeline, and the productive habits required to close the next transaction—and the one after that.

5. At-Risk - producing but performance is dropping

At-Risk agents are producing agents whose activity, pipeline, engagement, or productive habits are declining month over month.

By the time their closed volume drops, the decline may have already been underway for months.

Catching performance dips early helps prevent production drops later.

6. Top - top 20% among producers

Pretty obvious. These are your rainmakers—the top 20% of producers in your organization.

Ultimately, this should be the destination for the agents you bring in.

The direction of the funnel is simple:

New → Activating → Producing → Top

At-Risk and Dormant are not destinations. They are warning signs that an agent has stalled or started moving in the wrong direction.

But how do you know who has the potential to produce?

This is the hardest question.

Imagine two activating agents.

Neither has closed a transaction.

One is prospecting every day, following up consistently, setting appointments, completing training, and slowly building a real pipeline.

The other hasn’t logged into the CRM in three weeks.

A traditional production report treats them exactly the same: zero transactions.

But we know they are not the same.

That’s why we created the Production Confidence Score.

It is a score from 0 to 100 designed to show how much confidence you should have in an agent’s ability to become—or remain—a consistent producer.

The score combines four components:

1. Production: Transactions and sales volume already generated.

2. Activity: Dollar-producing actions captured in the CRM, including conversations, dials, appointments, follow-up, and leads added.

3. Coachability: How consistently the agent engages with and applies the training and coaching being provided.

4. Habits and behaviors: Whether the agent performs productive actions consistently or works in occasional bursts, along with patterns of follow-through and execution.

Agently connects to your CRM and transaction management system to understand what agents are actually doing.

Because we also run their training and coaching, we can see how receptive they are to development.

We combine all those signals into one simple score that helps identify which agents have the greatest potential to produce more for your business.

From there, Agently delivers personalized weekly coaching and accountability based on each agent’s individual performance and current bottleneck.

Different agent. Different problem. Different plan.

At scale. On autopilot.

Your roster is a production funnel

You already have a funnel in your CRM for managing clients.

Now you need one for managing the agents responsible for serving those clients.

The new Agently gives you a complete map of your sales force: who is new, who is activating, who is producing, who is at risk, who has become dormant, and who is on the path to becoming a top producer.

Our job is to keep agents moving to the right.

From New to Activating.

From Activating to Producing.

From Producing to Top.

And when someone starts moving in the wrong direction, to catch it before the decline appears in closed transactions.

Recruitment puts agents into the funnel.

Development moves them through it.

If you want in my next article, I can go deeper into the Production Confidence Score and show how we identify production potential before it appears in actual production.

For now, take a look at your roster and ask yourself:

How many agents fall into each of these six categories?

How many moved to the right during the last 90 days?

And do you have a system responsible for moving them forward?

If you want to put Agently’s AI to work onboarding and developing your agents at scale, visit our brand-new website and schedule a demo.

I’ll be happy to show you exactly how it works.