The Boutique Broker’s Guide to Delighting Agents and Winning Star Talent

Keeping the lead machine fed

Not every brokerage prioritizes creating a lead pool for agents because there are some agents who prefer to work their spheres independently. But if providing leads to agents is part of the value that you offer to agents as a brokerage, then it’s smart to determine the best way for leads to support your overall business strategy—and how you want to go about providing and distributing them to your agents.

At West + Main, Staub has reallocated a portion of the brokerage’s marketing budget to drive more leads to the website for agents; buyers and sellers are forced to register in order to request to view listings online, to visit a home in person, or to obtain a home value as a seller.

Those leads then get distributed to agents through the company’s CRM—or, in the case of quick-showing requests, the agent who’s scheduled for floor duty at

the office is ready to go out and show the prospective buyers the house. “When they work a floor shift, they’re guaranteed a lead,” Staub says.

One of the markets Ansley has been able to capture in Atlanta is the coveted developer services segment; McCormack notes that due to the company’s relationship with new construction builders, the brokerage is able to offer agents some leads in those areas as well as others.

In the case of teamerage Wemert Group, Smith explains that “it wasn’t about building the biggest, baddest real estate team on the planet,” but instead the focus of founder Jenny Wemert was to serve “the next family in front of them at a high level. And when they ran out of bandwidth because they had too many families to serve, they’d hire more agents.”

This philosophy means that Wemert has established itself and thrived as a rainmaking interdependent model. Smith says that 40% of the brokerage’s business in 2020 was repeat or referral-based, “which is a little bit unheard of when you get up to our volume.” So Wemert agents know that leads are always available for them to tap.

“We can provide the leads as they’re stabilizing their database—or, if they have a great, amazing, stable database, but there’s a gap between what they expect and what they’re seeing, they can at any time reach out and put their hand back into the lead machine and start working with a new family.” That stability allows agents to focus first and foremost on getting those deals done, while generating leads and marketing is something that the brokerage provides.

To ensure that no leads slip through the cracks, especially the highly valued repeat and referral business, Smith explains that Wemert has a Director of Agent Services who essentially serves as a leads manager for agents.

“She watches over our database, and she has a small team that watches for opportunities for our agents—looking at databases and noting that we didn’t touch this family this year, which helps as leverage from the brokerage, to make sure that the opportunity is not missed by the agents.”

If you didn’t remember the other primary responsibility of the Director of Agent Services, you can probably guess by now what makes the most sense at an boutique brokerage—she’s also heavily involved in Wemert’s training and agent onboarding.