Producing broker or not? The two owners I sat with run it opposite ways

The first guy's math worries me. If his 19 deals are paying rent and payroll, the six agents aren't carrying the business, they're a hobby attached to it. That's not a brokerage, that's a producing agent with a sign out front. Which might be fine! But it's a different thing than what kestrel is asking about.

I'd want to see the second owner's numbers before I called her the winner. 14 agents sounds better than 6 until you know how many of the 14 closed anything last year. Headcount is the easiest number to grow and the least informative.

Voted referrals only. Seems like the version where you keep a little revenue and most of your calendar.

The conflict story is the part I'd take seriously. On the rental side I've seen the same shape with a manager who kept a few of his own units in the same buildings he managed for other people. Nothing improper happened as far as I know, but every single disagreement got read through that lens after a while. Trust goes first and the explanation never catches up.

So my vote isn't about which pays more. If your agents think you're competing with them for the same seller, your training is worth less to them no matter how good it is.

pike put it well. I'd add that the producing owner has a succession problem baked in. The day he wants to slow down, the revenue that covers rent walks out with him and the six agents are suddenly the whole business. Anyone buying that shop is buying him, and he can't sell himself.

Five years into a service business and I went through exactly this, different trade. I was the top producer for three years and it felt safe. It wasn't safe. Every hour I spent on jobs was an hour I didn't spend making the other four people better, and the ceiling on the whole company was my personal capacity.

What actually broke the pattern was hiring one admin before I could comfortably afford one. That bought back about 12 hours a week and I put all of it into training. Revenue dipped one quarter and then didn't dip again.

So I voted stop entirely, with the caveat that you need a bridge to get across the gap. Going from 19 deals to zero in one January would put most people out of business.

Dumb question, is the broker legally required to review the files their agents write? Or is that just something good ones do?

rigging, there's a supervision duty on the broker of record in every state I've looked at, but what it actually requires, which documents, how fast, whether a designated broker can delegate it, varies state by state and you'd want to read your own commission's rules or ask a license attorney. Practically speaking, if an agent in your shop writes something wrong, it lands on you, so most owners build a review step whether or not the rulebook spells it out.

On the actual question, I keep thinking about it like running crews. The best framer I ever worked with was a terrible foreman. Different skill. Being good at 19 deals tells you almost nothing about whether you can make ten people average five.

Voted keep producing and I'll be the unpopular one. Everybody in this thread is describing a shop where the training is worth something. Most aren't. If your value to an agent is a desk and a hat, you should absolutely keep selling, because the splits will not feed you and the day one of your two producers leaves you'll have nothing.

harrow that's kind of bleak but I think it's the honest state of most small offices I've walked into. The recruiting pitch was always about culture and never about anything I could measure.

I want income without a second job, and the producing owner sounds like two jobs while the non-producing one sounds like one hard job. Neither is passive. I don't think either of them is what I'm looking for, but the thread was useful.

There's a middle version nobody's voted for. Keep the personal book but only in a lane your agents don't touch. I do fast, ugly, low-price stuff and I'd have no problem staying in that lane while agents I hired did retail resale. The conflict cairn described comes from fishing in the same pond, not from producing.

The real cost is still attention though. thatch is right that the hours only go one place.

flint, doesn't that break down the moment an agent brings you a deal that's actually in your lane? Do you take it or hand it over? Because whichever you do once becomes the policy.

compass, you write the policy first and put it in the independent contractor agreement, then you don't have to decide in the moment. That's most of what separates the shops that survive a disagreement from the ones that blow up over one file.

kestrel, on the crossover question, the owners I've asked put it somewhere between 8 and 12 agents, but it tracks productive agents rather than bodies. Six people doing 12 deals each generates enough company dollar to pay you for full time management. Twenty people doing two deals each doesn't, and you're stuck producing to eat while also carrying twenty people's compliance risk. That's the worst square on the board and it's where a lot of shops sit.

keystone's last line is the whole thread for me. The question isn't producing or not, it's whether the bench generates enough to pay a manager. Everything else follows from that number.