The Pattern That Repeats Across Agents

By Dr. Jeffrey Scott Stanton, DCH

Four agents, four stories, one explanation each

Dana kept a folder, mostly out of habit, with a short note on every agent who had left her brokerage over the past two years. She had never gone back and read them together until the afternoon a fourth resignation landed on her desk and something about it felt familiar in a way she couldn't immediately place. She pulled the folder and read all four notes in a row for the first time.

The first agent, she had written, "struggled to close, never quite got comfortable asking for the business directly." The second: "good with people, but hesitant at the moment of truth, left to try new construction sales instead." The third: "talented, but something held her back right at the end of the appointment." The fourth, the one sitting in front of her that afternoon, had used almost the exact phrase the first one had: "I'm good at everything up until I actually have to ask."

Four agents. Four different ages, four different backgrounds, two of them hired by Dana directly and two inherited from a previous manager. Read individually, over two years, each departure had seemed like its own small story about an individual who just hadn't quite had what it took to close. Read together, in the space of ten minutes, they were obviously the same story, told four times.

She almost didn't trust what she was seeing

Dana's first reaction was skepticism toward her own observation. Four agents struggling with the same specific moment, the ask at the end of the appointment, felt too neat to be a real pattern rather than a coincidence she was now reading meaning into. She almost closed the folder and went back to telling herself the individual stories she had already written down for each one.

What stopped her was a harder question she made herself sit with: what had she actually taught any of these four agents about that specific moment, the ask itself, as opposed to everything that came before it? She had trained all four on finding leads, on presentation skills, on objection handling earlier in the conversation. She had never once sat down with any of them and worked specifically on the fifteen seconds where a conversation turns into a commitment.

She started asking around the office, carefully, without naming what she suspected. A few of her stronger agents described the exact same moment in almost identical language, the difference being that they had each separately figured out their own way through it, through trial and error, with no help from her or from any training the brokerage had provided. The skill existed in the office. It had just never been taught, only inherited by whichever agents happened to stumble onto it themselves.

That reframed the four departures completely. These were not four agents who individually lacked some trait the stronger producers happened to have. They were four agents who had never been given the one piece of coaching that would have closed the exact gap between where their skill already was and where it needed to be, a piece of coaching Dana realized she had never built because she had never seen the gap clearly enough to build toward it.

What changed once she saw it as one problem

Dana did not wait for a fifth resignation to test what she now believed. She built a short, specific coaching block, just on the ask itself: when to make it, what to say in the exact moment, how to sit in the silence that follows instead of filling it with a concession. She ran it first with two agents who were showing the early signs of the same pattern, the same hesitation the four departed agents had each described in their own words.

She was honest with herself going in that she was partly testing a theory about her own leadership, not just helping two agents close more deals, and she found that harder to sit with than she expected. It meant admitting that a problem she had spent two years quietly attributing to four individuals had actually been sitting in a gap she herself had left open.

Neither agent became a different person overnight. But within a month, both were closing appointments they would previously have let drift into a maybe, and more importantly, both could now describe out loud what had changed, which neither one had ever been able to do about the ask before. That alone told Dana she had finally found the actual lesson, since a skill an agent can describe is a skill that has genuinely been taught, not just absorbed by luck.

The change that outlasted the two-agent experiment was smaller than the coaching block itself. Dana started running her weekly one-on-ones differently, not by adding more questions, but by asking one specific one with every agent, regardless of how their numbers looked that week: "Is there a moment in your process you quietly avoid?" Most agents needed a few weeks before they trusted the question enough to answer it honestly. The ones who eventually did gave her a running map of exactly where her coaching attention needed to go next, long before any of it would have shown up as a resignation.

She also stopped trusting a single exit interview to mean anything on its own. One departure is a data point about a person. A second departure that echoes the first is a question worth asking out loud, in front of the whole leadership team, not just filed away in a folder. Dana now reviews her last several exit notes together on a set schedule rather than waiting for a coincidence to make her look, because she learned the hard way that the pattern was visible the entire time, sitting in four separate folders instead of one.

She still keeps the folder of exit notes. She added a fifth line to it eventually, not about another departure, but about what she had learned from reading the first four together: that a pattern repeating across different people is rarely about the people, and that the fastest way to miss it is to keep writing each one a separate, individual explanation.

About the Author

Dr. Jeffrey Scott Stanton, DCH is the former EVP of Learning & Development at Douglas Elliman Real Estate and the founder and Chief Learning Officer of R2R Diagnostic Group, where he helps real estate organizations and agents diagnose and fix the behavioral patterns behind inconsistent performance.