Courted: 16% Of Agents Changed Brokerages In 2025, But ‘trading Up’ Doesn’t Equal More Sales Volume

Just 16% or roughly 230,000 agents moved to a new brokerage in 2025, according to the 2025 State of Brokerage Recruiting and Retention Report published Friday by real estate industry recruitment, retention, and market intelligence platform Courted. This share of agents remained unchanged from 2024. Overall, the share of agents who have changed brokerages in a given year has hovered between 16% and 18% since 2020, according to Courted’s data. 

In total, these agents who moved brands represented 15% or $590 billion of the year’s total sales volume.

The report is based on an analysis of the top-100 U.S. residential brokerage brands by transaction volume based on roughly 90% of all on market residential real estate agents and transaction volume.  

According to the report, of the agents who moved between brokerages in 2025, the largest share were those who recorded between $1 million and $5 million in sales volume, as this cohort represented 31% of all movers. In total, 76% of all moving agents reported between $1 million and $25 million in sales volume in 2025. 

While agents who swapped brokerages are important to consider, they are just part of the puzzle when it comes to agent recruitment or retention, according to Courted. The report found that in any given year, roughly 15% of agents are new to the industry, 15% leave the industry and 16% swap brokerages. This means that at the average brokerage, during an average year, nearly half (46%) of the agent workforce is either new to the industry, in transition or leaving the industry altogether. 

“Brokerage revenue is built on a sales force that is almost half fluid every year. That level of instability makes retention strategy as important as recruiting strategy – if not more,” Sean Soderstrom, the co-founder and CEO of Courted, told HousingWire in an exclusive interview. 

Modern brokerage competition

In 2025, the top-100 residential real estate brands in the country, which collect for $2.33 trillion in sales volume or roughly 59% of the nationwide transaction volume in 2025, recorded a 1.9:1 recruit-to-loss ratio in 2025, with 229,316 agents joining and 122,016 agents leaving.

While this might seem like a win from an agent count perspective, Soderstrom said things look a bit different when you consider how this movement impacts sales volume. According to the study, the top 100 brands recruited $276 billion in 2025, but they lost $233 billion in sales volume.

This means that while they may have recruited nearly two agents for every agent lost, they only recorded a $42 billion net positive sales volume increase, or just 1.8% net volume growth. 

“This is the defining dynamic of modern brokerage competition: enormous gross churn producing minimal net expansion,” Soderstrom said.

The brands on top

Of these top 100 brands, Courted found:

• SERHANT. was the biggest winner when it came to the share of net volume gain, as its net volume rose 279% in 2025.
• The Real Brokerage recorded the largest jump of dollar amount of net sale volume gained at $12.5 billion in 2025.
• Keller Williams, despite recruiting the most agents in 2025 at over 46,000 who represented $42.9 billion in sales volume, recorded the largest net sales volume loss in 2025 losing $7.4 billion.

These challenges come in part due to 81 of the top-100 brands recruiting agents with lower sales volume production than the agents they are losing, with only 16 brands “trading up” in agent quality. Of these top-100 brands, the study found that on average they lose agents 46% more productive than those they recruited. 

“On average, outgoing agents produced $2.11 million per year, while incoming agents averaged $1.44 million – a 46% productivity gap. Many brands are winning the headcount battle but quietly losing the economics. Growth in agent count does not equal growth in enterprise value,” Soderstrom said.

Quality of agents

Despite these challenges, Courted said some brands had a strong year when it comes to the quality of agents they recruited in 2025. According to the study, SERHANT. recruited $6.22 billion in sales volume in 2025, gaining most of these agents from brands like Keller Williams, Douglas Elliman and Long & Foster.

The Real Brokerage also had a strong year, recruiting 38%, or $22.4 billion, of its total annual sales volume production in 2025. Additionally, the study found that the average production of agents joining Real was 45% higher than the average of the agents recruited by the top-10 brands. 

Like Real, LPT Realty also recorded nearly two-fifths (39% or $8.6 billion) of its total sales volume in 2025, after recruiting over 6,600 agents in 2025. 

In comparison to these brands, Compass, which closed its acquisition of @properties Christie’s International Real Estate in 2025, saw just 26% or $57 billion of its 2025 sales volume production come from agent recruitment in 2025. 

Best retention

While they didn’t top the list for recruitment, the three brands that recorded the best retention in 2025 were Howard Hanna, Samson Properties and Cummings & Co., which lost only 5%, 4% and 2% of their sales volume in 2025, respectively. The report noted that in general, while some cloud-based national brokerages saw significant recruitment growth in 2025, when it comes to retention, the top-performing brands were regional companies with robust office footprints. 

“Virtual and tech-enabled brokerages averaged +11.6% net volume growth, more than four times the +1.8% net growth across the top 100. These models are winning on velocity,” Soderstrom said. “But they’re also experiencing the highest turnover, which means the real question isn’t just growth – it’s durability.”

Additionally, while it is not ideal for a brand to lose agents who are more productive than the ones it is recruiting, Soderstrom says there is a silver lining. 

“Given the expectation of higher splits for top agents, these agents tend to have individual profit margins below the average of the brokerage, thereby contributing downward pressure on overall margin percentage,” Soderstrom wrote in the report. 

Due to this, mid-level producers tend to be the most profitable for a brokerage, meaning that if a brand trades one top-producer for two mid-level producers, it may be better off from a profit standpoint. 

“The good news for brokerages is these agents represent the bulk of the volume movement each year,” he wrote. 

Looking ahead, the report states that given the current brokerage consolidation environment, acquisitions will be a key driver to agent count and sales volume production growth in 2026. 

“The brokerages that win over the next cycle will measure net recruited profit per agent, not just recruited volume,” Soderstrom said. “The scoreboard is shifting from who recruits the most to who converts recruiting into compounding EBITDA. A focus on commission design innovation and measurement of agent-level EBITDA is critical.”