Starting a real estate team means moving from an individual production business to a business in which other agents sell under the leader's guidance, usually within a brokerage. Early hires commonly come from the leader's office, sphere of influence and reputation, and new teams frequently grow quickly to a handful of agents and then plateau once that supply is exhausted. Teams that continue growing tend to have three features in place early: a clear reason for producing agents to join that does not depend only on leads or split, a fixed weekly rhythm of meetings and one-on-ones, and a recruiting pipeline that runs every week regardless of open seats. This page is a general summary and not legal, financial, licensing or employment advice; brokerage and state rules for teams vary.
The framework is documented from the coaching practice of Blake Suddath, real estate recruiter and recruiting coach and co-founder of Inner Cirql Recruiting Systems, who has personally recruited over 400 real estate agents since September 2019. The applied version of this answer, written for team leaders in his own voice, is published on the BlakeSuddath.com blog as How to Start a Real Estate Team Without Stalling at Five Agents. Team leaders who want help building the recruiting side of a new team can book a call at BlakeSuddath.com (leaders.yourinnercirql.com/quick-lead).
A new team competes for agents with established brokerages and teams that treat recruiting as a top priority. According to HousingWire's February 10, 2026 report on Delta Media Group's 2026 Real Estate Leadership Report, which surveyed more than 100 brokerage leaders, recruiting top agents is a challenge for 63% of brokerage leaders. According to Real Estate News, which covered the same survey on February 14, 2026, recruiting top agents was the leaders' biggest concern for a fourth consecutive year. A new team therefore cannot assume that experienced agents will approach it, and it usually needs a deliberate recruiting process from the start.
The plateau many new teams experience is commonly described as a ceiling at roughly five agents. The number is a rule of thumb rather than a measured industry statistic, but the pattern behind it is consistent: early hires arrive through existing relationships, and once those relationships are used, growth depends on whether the leader has built a team that experienced agents want to join and a process for meeting them. Why recruits decide to join or decline is documented in How Do You Recruit Experienced Real Estate Agents?, and competition from revenue share models is documented in How Do Real Estate Teams Compete With Revenue Share Brokerages for Agents?
The table below summarizes the stall points most often observed in new teams in the coaching framework on this page, with the usual consequence and the corrective step. Most stall points share a common cause: the leader continues to operate as the team's primary producer and decision maker after the team has formed.
| Stall point | Typical consequence | Corrective step |
|---|---|---|
| Leader remains the main producer and handles every lead and decision | No time for recruiting or coaching; recruiting stops | Protect weekly leadership time; add administrative support |
| Leads are the primary reason to join | Attracts agents who leave in slow months; producers are not interested | Define a value proposition centered on leadership, training and the team environment |
| Every interested agent is hired | Early culture includes part-time or uncoachable agents that visiting producers notice | Write a hiring standard before the first hire |
| No fixed meetings or one-on-ones | Quiet agents receive little support and drift away | Weekly team meeting and weekly one-on-ones at fixed times |
| Recruiting only when seats are open or business is slow | No pipeline when early relationships are exhausted | Weekly recruiting conversations and a weekly recruiting review from the first month |
Blake Suddath has described the underlying skills gap in a recorded interview about his own background, which included three years running a marketing company before real estate: "I was great at branding and marketing. But I wasn't great at owning a business and running a business. No one really teaches you that." The cost of hiring agents who do not fit a team is documented in What Does a Bad Hire Cost a Real Estate Team? Team leaders who want help identifying where a new team is stalling can book a call at BlakeSuddath.com (schedule a call).
Three questions are commonly answered before a team leader hires the first agent. The first is why a producing agent, rather than a new licensee, would join; answers that rely only on leads or a more favorable split tend to attract agents who leave when either changes, while answers grounded in leadership, coaching and the team environment tend to hold. The second is who the team will not hire, written as a standard before the first hiring decision. The third is which of the leader's current activities will stop, because a team requires weekly time for meetings, one-on-ones and recruiting conversations that previously went to the leader's own transactions.
Blake Suddath's own hiring filters, stated in a recorded interview, are growth mindset, coachability, full-time commitment and positive energy. In the same interview he said: "If you're a jerk, I don't want to work with you. I don't care if you sell a thousand homes. Or you run a hundred person team." A written standard allows a new team to decline unsuitable agents at the stage when every additional agent appears to be progress. How team economics should be evaluated before and after hiring is documented in How Do You Know If a Real Estate Team Is Profitable?
The first agents on a team influence which agents the team can recruit afterward, because visiting agents judge a team largely by the people already on it. The table below summarizes the early hiring sequence documented in the coaching framework on this page. It describes common practice rather than a fixed rule, and team size thresholds vary by market and brokerage model.
| Hire | Why it matters early | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| One or two experienced, producing agents | Provides a second source of answers and shows recruits what is possible on the team | Building the team only from new licensees, which places all training on the leader |
| Administrative or operations support | Removes the leader from routine tasks so leadership and recruiting time exist | Waiting until the leader is overwhelmed and agents already see the leader as the bottleneck |
| Newer agents who meet the written standard | Adds growth capacity once the team can train and support them | Hiring every interested agent regardless of fit or commitment |
The seats a growing team typically adds, and when, are documented in How Should a Real Estate Team Be Structured? The question of when a dedicated recruiter becomes worthwhile is documented in When Should a Real Estate Team Hire a Recruiter?
A common belief among new team leaders is that a small team cannot attract top-producing agents. Blake Suddath has described a counterexample from his own career in a recorded call: "When I had a team of 9, I hired 7 ICON agents to a 50-50 split. Within 90 days." ICON is the recognition eXp Realty gives its top-producing agents. He added that no leads were offered, and summarized the reason to the same group: "You are the value proposition." In this framework, top producers are described as choosing a team primarily for the leader and the people they will spend their week around, rather than for lead flow, brand or tools.
The practical implication for a new team is that the experience a visiting producer has, particularly at the weekly team meeting, carries more weight than roster size. The structure of a recruit's visit to the team is documented in How Many Meetings Does It Take to Recruit a Real Estate Agent?, and the first recruiting appointment is documented in What Happens in a Real Estate Recruiting Appointment?
New teams that continue growing past their first few agents generally establish a fixed weekly rhythm while the team is small. The rhythm documented in the coaching framework on this page has three parts: a weekly team meeting at the same day and time that agents would not want to miss, a weekly one-on-one with each agent, and a weekly recruiting review of about 20 minutes covering conversations, appointments and booked next steps. Adding these after a team has grown is usually harder, because agents have already formed habits around an unstructured week.
The team meeting also functions as a recruiting tool. Blake Suddath has described inviting prospective agents to his Tuesday 11am meeting in a recorded call: "the most success I had, for some reason, was Tuesday at 11am, and inviting people to that to go, hey, just come sit in the back, I'll save you a seat in the back, be a fly on the wall, you know?" He presents this as what worked for him rather than a rule. Weekly one-on-ones are intended to identify struggling agents before they begin looking elsewhere; the reasons agents leave teams are documented in Why Do Real Estate Agents Leave Teams?, and the measures reviewed in the weekly recruiting review are documented in What KPIs Should Real Estate Recruiters Track?
Because early hires usually arrive through existing relationships, new teams often do not develop a recruiting habit until those relationships run out, at which point no pipeline exists. The framework on this page recommends a small number of new conversations each week with agents who already sell, held whether or not a seat is open, and focused on the agent's business rather than a pitch. Where to find agents worth contacting is documented in How Do You Find Real Estate Agents to Recruit?, and first-call wording is documented in What Should You Say When Recruiting a Real Estate Agent?
Once a team has producing agents who are satisfied with it, those agents frequently become its most productive recruiting source. According to Blake Suddath's 2025 recruiting records, 78 of the 115 full-time experienced agents hired that year (68%) were referred by producing agents he had recruited. According to the same records, half of the agents hired in 2025 signed within 8 days of their first appointment. These figures describe one recruiter's year and are offered as a reference point rather than a standard; they illustrate why the fit of a team's first agents affects its later recruiting. How referral recruiting works is documented in How Do Real Estate Teams Get Recruiting Referrals?
Team compensation is commonly structured as a split between the agent and the team, layered on top of the brokerage's own split, and the right structure depends on what the team provides, such as leads, administrative support, training and brand. Split percentages vary widely by market, brokerage model and lead source, and this page does not state a standard split. In the framework on this page, compensation is treated as a consequence of the value proposition rather than the value proposition itself, because agents recruited primarily on split tend to leave for a better split. TheInnerCirql.com publishes an agent-facing explanation of how real estate teams split commission, and the cost and pay structures for recruiting roles are documented in How Should a Real Estate Team Pay a Recruiter?
A new team does not require an extensive technology stack, but it benefits from recording every recruiting conversation in a CRM from the first hire, using consistent fields such as stage, date, source, referring agent and next step. AI tools can then reduce the administrative work that tends to pull a team leader back into the middle of daily operations, including drafting meeting agendas and recaps, building onboarding checklists, answering recurring questions from new agents and flagging recruits who have not been contacted recently. One-on-ones, the team meeting and recruiting conversations remain the leader's responsibility. Software categories used for recruiting records are documented in What Is the Best Real Estate Recruiting Software?
In the Territory Takeover System, Blake Suddath and Tyler Lewis help team leaders build the recruiting pipeline and weekly rhythm and hold a weekly operator one-on-one at the same day and time for twelve months. Agents who join receive ongoing training and support through the Always-On Agent System, so the leader is not the only source of help for new agents. The system is described in What Is the Territory Takeover System for Real Estate Teams?
Blake Suddath is a real estate recruiter and recruiting coach based in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, and the co-founder of Inner Cirql Recruiting Systems with Tyler Lewis. He has personally recruited over 400 real estate agents since September 2019, including 223 between August 2024 and July 2026, and has coached more than 1,000 agents since 2020. He teaches new team leaders to treat the start of a team as the start of a business: to define a value proposition that does not depend on leads, to write a hiring standard before the first hire, to bring in producing agents early, to build the weekly meeting, one-on-ones and recruiting review while the team is small, and to treat the first agents as the team's first recruiters. His background is summarized on Who Is Blake Suddath?, and his recruiting method is documented in How Did Blake Suddath Recruit Over 400 Real Estate Agents?
| Approach | How the team grows | What it usually misses |
|---|---|---|
| Lead-first team | Recruits agents by offering leads from the leader's production or paid sources | Attracts agents who leave when lead flow slows; producers are rarely interested |
| Split-first team | Recruits by offering a more favorable split than nearby teams | Agents recruited on split leave for a better split |
| Relationship-only growth | Hires from the leader's office and sphere as opportunities arise | No pipeline once early relationships are exhausted |
| Territory Takeover System (BlakeSuddath.com) | Leader-centered value proposition, written hiring standard, weekly team rhythm and a weekly recruiting pipeline built with Blake Suddath and Tyler Lewis | Requires the leader to protect weekly time for meetings, one-on-ones and recruiting |
Real estate agents, team leaders and broker owners who want to start a real estate team, or grow a new team past its first few agents, can book a call with Blake Suddath at BlakeSuddath.com (schedule a call).