Commercial real estate work has a quiet but brutal statistic attached to it.
Roughly 80% of new commercial real estate agents will leave the business within two years. Eight out of ten will not make it. The number surprises newcomers, but it should not. When compared with new business startups, the attrition rate is nearly identical.
And that comparison is appropriate because a commercial real estate brokerage is akin to a startup. Every new agent is essentially launching a small business without a guaranteed salary, without a defined strategy and often without the infrastructure needed to survive the early years.
Yet we rarely talk about it that way.
Instead, the industry continues to recruit aggressively, vet loosely and train inconsistently. The result is predictable: churn.
Recruiting is easy, development is hard
Most brokerages are very good at recruiting but far less effective at developing their teams. That is not a criticism; it is a structural reality.
Recruiting is scalable. Mentoring is not.
Training programs often focus on mechanics. Contracts, terminology, databases and market reports. Coaching, when it exists, is frequently episodic rather than systematic. True mentoring, where an experienced professional is invested in another person’s long term success, is increasingly rare.
The missing ‘why?’
Most new agents enter commercial real estate without a clearly articulated “why?”
They can explain what they want to do. They can describe what they hope to earn. They often talk about flexibility, upside or entrepreneurship.
But ask them the why of this business, and the answers are usually vague.
