US estate agency poaching cools: top 100 brands' net recruiting down 57% year on year (Courted data)

The battle among US real estate brokerages to poach agents has clearly cooled this year. According to recruiting software firm Courted, net recruiting production at the top 100 US brokerage brands was $24.3bn in January to September 2026, against $56.6bn a year earlier, a fall of 57% year on year.

This is data from a single private company, not an official statistic. Courted published its analysis on its own website on 1 November 2026 and also presented the results in a webinar; US property news outlet Inman reported on it on 5 November.

Hiring fell faster than departures

Courted defines net recruiting production as the sales volume brought in by agents a brand recruits, minus the sales volume taken away by agents who leave.

• Volume recruited: down from $257.1bn to $176.6bn, a fall of 31%
• Volume lost: down from $200.5bn to $152.3bn, a fall of 24%

Both sides shrank, but recruiting shrank faster, so the net figure narrowed sharply. As a share of brands' annual sales volume, the recruiting rate fell from 11.4% to 7.2%, the attrition rate from 8.9% to 6.2%, and the net growth rate from 2.5% to 1.0%. Courted says this 1.5 percentage point drop is more than half of the net production the top 100 gained a year earlier.

The third quarter shows it most clearly: net volume gained fell from $17bn in the third quarter of 2025 to $2.2bn in the same quarter of 2026.

The big brands are not getting bigger

The top 10 brands account for about 70% of the top 100's sales volume, and their net growth over the period was only 0.69%. For brands ranked 11 to 25, the net growth rate dropped sharply from 4.05% to 0.9%. The number of brands recording net growth also fell, from 81 to 68.

The most aggressive recruiters lose the most

Of the 95 brands in the top 100 in both years, 73 lost a smaller share of their production than the year before. The median brand attrition rate fell from 6.3% to 4.7%, and the number of brands losing 10% or more of their production fell from 21 to 14.

However, the quarter of brands with the highest recruiting rates lost 10.0% of their production in 2026, 2.8 times the 3.6% lost by the quarter with the lowest recruiting rates; in 2025 the gap was only 2.0 times. By Courted's calculation, the most aggressive recruiters kept only about 31 cents of each dollar recruited, against 41 cents last year.

Courted chief executive Sean Soderstrom described retention as this year's "bright spot", but cautioned that a market with less movement does not mean a retention programme is working well; with fewer agents in motion, every departure may be production that is hard to win back. He also said the data shows the market has cooled by more than the industry realised. In a LinkedIn poll Courted ran in October, about two-thirds of respondents expected net recruiting gains to hold steady or rise, and nobody chose "down more than 50%".

How the figures are calculated

According to Inman, Courted's data comes from MLS (multiple listing service) records, de-duplicated across markets and brands. It measures the sales volume of agents as they join or leave a brand, not headcount. Acquired companies count only once they are folded into a brand, while brands a parent company runs separately, such as Real and REMAX, are counted separately. Courted also says the July to September figures may be revised slightly because of late reporting.

For comparison, Courted's 2025 report said the top 100 brands recruited $276.0bn and lost $233.0bn over the full year 2025, a net gain of $42.0bn, or growth of 1.8%. HousingWire, reporting the same data in March 2026, said about 230,000 agents (16%) changed brokerages in 2025, and that the rate has stayed between 16% and 18% since 2020. Another dataset, Recruiting Insight, reported 3,742 brand switches in the first quarter of 2026, but its method differs from Courted's and the two cannot be compared directly.

Analysis: what it means for recruiting teams

The following is analysis by the Focus-50 editorial team, based only on the data above.

First, lower attrition does not necessarily mean a more cohesive team. Soderstrom cautions against mistaking a quiet market for a strong retention programme. If your team has lost fewer people this year, it is worth working out whether you did something right or whether the whole market simply had fewer people switching.

Second, the return on growing through heavy poaching is getting worse. The most aggressive recruiters also had the highest attrition, and the share kept from each dollar recruited fell from 41 cents to 31 cents. Recruiting a lot does not mean keeping a lot.

Third, with fewer people moving, each departure is harder to replace. For recruiting teams, shifting some resources from recruiting new people to retaining existing ones may pay off better in this market.

Finally, remember that this is data from one US recruiting software company, measured by sales volume, with no official or independent third-party verification, and it cannot be applied directly to Hong Kong or other markets. But the question it raises is a general one: when no one is leaving, how much of the loyalty you see is real?

Compiled by the F50 Editorial Team from public sources, for general reference only and not professional advice. Details are correct as of the publication date and may change.