REM Mastermind: The retention playbook that’s working for top brokerages

From the REM Mastermind Series | Moderated by Andrew Fogliato | Presented by Real Estate Magazine | Sponsored by REMAX. Watch the full session: https://youtu.be/39b2nygieEM

Agents almost always say they left for money.

Ask a broker why they lost someone and the story is usually a better split down the street. It is the easy explanation, and it is usually wrong. The brokers who keep their best agents will tell you that money is the reason agents give, not the reason they go. The real reasons show up earlier, and they are almost all things a broker-owner controls.

REM built this playbook with three broker-owners who run some of the strongest, most respected brokerages in their markets. Jim Burton owns Remax Infinity in Newfoundland, with three offices and more than 70 agents, and has lost just two agents to competitors in the last two years while growing his roster by about 25 net. Christan Bosley is president and broker of record of Bosley Real Estate, the nearly century-old Toronto brokerage, where roughly half the agents who leave come back within five years. Corinne Lyall is co-owner and broker of Royal LePage Benchmark in Calgary, Royal LePage’s Brokerage of the Year for the Prairies in 2025, where she trains a sales team of more than 220.

Different provinces, different models, different scale. What they share is a set of operating decisions that produce retention as a result. Here is the playbook.

Play 1: Stop managing retention. Manage growth.

The first move is a mindset shift, and it is the one most brokers get backwards.

None of these three start their day thinking about keeping agents. They start it thinking about growing agents’ businesses. Burton said it directly: he does not get up worrying about retention, he gets up thinking about how to grow his agents’ business, because agents who are growing do not leave. That is the entire theory, and his numbers back it. Two agents lost to competitors in two years is not the product of a retention program. It is the product of a growth obsession that makes leaving irrational.

The lesson for owners: retention is a lagging indicator. Chase it directly and you reach for perks, technology and counteroffers. Chase agent production instead and retention follows. Every play that follows is a version of this one.

Play 2: Track the numbers that tell you who is slipping before they tell you.

You cannot grow what you cannot see, and these brokerages measure their business with a rigor most agents never apply to their own.

Bosley runs a monthly scorecard for every office, built on four KPIs: active listing inventory count at month end, firm deals written that month, current agent count and how many agents are at standard, and gross margin with average commission rate. Her team measures twice a month, and every number ties back to the annual budget, so she knows exactly how many deals and listings each office needs to hit plan. Managers report last month’s actual against next month’s forecast, and when the two diverge they bring an action plan. When one region’s listing volume ran nearly 50 per cent above goal but sales lagged, her reaction was not celebration. It was why aren’t we selling these, and the managers came back with a plan on price-reduction conversations.

Burton gets a closed-sales list every Friday and a year-over-year balance-sheet comparison every second Friday, including what fell through and the net to the office. Lyall sends monthly productivity reports to every agent, mapped to Royal LePage’s award levels so agents can see exactly where they stand against the next tier. Her agents scramble near the November cutoff when they are close to an award, and reach out for help getting there.

The retention payoff is early warning. A scorecard tells you who is slipping while there is still time to intervene. One Bosley manager noticed firm deals dropping while the production report looked healthy, realized deals were dying in the conditional period, and now personally calls every agent with a conditional deal each Monday to help get it firm. That is a metric turned into a save, both of the deal and the agent.

Play 3: Show agents the books.

Tracking the numbers is table stakes. Showing them to agents is the differentiator, and it was the strongest theme of the entire session.

Bosley is transparent with agents about what the brokerage measures, where it sits against goal, and how leadership uses those metrics to build training. She frames it as a partnership: in order for all of us to succeed, we need to work together, and here is how we measure it. Her agents understand the brokerage’s profit margins and why it invests where it does. The brokerage makes no significant decision without agents understanding that it is happening, why, and what is needed from them.

Burton runs the same transparency through his CFO, hired four years ago and, in his words, one of the smartest things he has done. Good fiscal management, he argued, is itself a signal of a company’s future. Bosley called her VP of finance her secret weapon.

Why this retains: transparency turns agents from tenants into partners. An agent who understands the economics of the brokerage stops seeing a competitor’s split as free money and starts seeing it as a number attached to a business. That is a far harder agent to recruit away.

Play 4: Make the one-on-one the engine.

All three stay in close, direct contact with their agents. The mechanism that keeps agents close is structured, repeated, one-on-one contact, not something the agent has to chase.

Bosley does annual business planning with every agent, runs weekly and biweekly coaching through a dedicated real estate coach, personally coaches a segment of experienced agents, and has her leadership team contact every agent at least quarterly. The reporting system decides which call to make: a congratulations when someone is climbing, a how-can-we-help when someone is slipping. Lyall coaches agents who want to break a ceiling, runs weekly group coaching through an associate broker, and tells new agents they will be limited only by their own level of engagement. Burton keeps a standing open door and returns any agent’s call within the hour.

The common thread is that support is available and proactive, not something the agent has to chase. Lyall’s line: busy is a terrible word, because it just means I’m too busy for you. When agents leave other brokerages, all three said, it is often because the support they were promised never materialized.

Play 5: Raise the bar, and be willing to lose people.

This is the play that separates a professional brokerage from a body shop, and it runs directly against the instinct to keep every desk filled.

Bosley is, by her own description, one of the only brokers who releases agents frequently. Her standard is four deals a year. Below that, absent a clear health or family reason, an agent goes on a list, gets six to eight months and one-on-one coaching to climb, and is released if they do not. As she recruits new agents in, agents on that list are asked to leave. Her reasoning is brand: underperforming and part-time agents are a detriment to a name that is, literally, her family’s.

The counterintuitive part is what it does for retention. Bosley released a large, well-known producer she believed had a good reputation, and immediately recruited five people who had wanted to join but would not while that person was there. You never know the impact one person is having on the people who will not come.

Both Lyall and Burton backed the principle hard. A producer who crosses ethical lines goes regardless of volume; Bosley said she would let go someone doing 50 deals a year if they lacked integrity. Too often, Lyall said, owners get held hostage by high producers. Sometimes it is not worth it. The standard is the culture. Protecting it retains the agents who meet it.

Play 6: When an agent gives notice, protect the ones watching.

How a brokerage handles an exit is a retention tactic aimed at everyone who stays and watches.

The panel split usefully on method. Lyall leads with relationship. She asks agents to come to her before the decision is made, and has earned that from many because of the coaching time she has invested. Once a decision is final she does not try to unwind it, leaving them with a line worth stealing: the change outside doesn’t change what’s inside. Bosley takes the opposite tack on the conversation. If an agent did not come to her before deciding, she will not spend time on it after. But she runs a clean, streamlined off-boarding with no held-back listings, commissions or web forms, and stays supportive, which is why roughly half her departures return within five years.

Where all three agree completely: never burn the bridge, always keep the door open. The agents who leave well are the ones who come back, and the agents who stay are watching how you treat the ones who go.

Play 7: Kill the technology myth.

Agents are recruited with technology promises. The best brokers have learned that technology neither keeps nor recruits people, and they say so plainly.

Bosley tells the story best. A local competitor had chased one of her top-10 agents for years, and the agent took Bosley to lunch to say she was leaving for the competitor’s platform, one that would handle her whole database. Bosley pulled the platform up and showed the agent what it actually produced: an automated home valuation the system had generated and emailed out, roughly $827,000 off the real market value, and it had landed in Bosley’s own inbox from the competitor’s own brokerage. The agent stayed. Every brokerage has the same tools, Bosley’s point went, and agents leave for the promise of things done for them, a promise that rarely survives contact with reality.

Lyall’s framing was technology driven, human led. The question that matters is not what platform an agent has but whether a human is helping them use it. Burton’s version was the question he asks any agent waving an offer sheet: are they going to grow your business the way I am. People gravitate to the predictability of a favorable outcome, and a platform is not that.

Play 8: Get ahead of the scandals.

The industry hands brokers periodic trust crises. How an owner handles them is quietly one of the strongest retention signals, because agents stay where they feel safe.

All three handle it the same way: in the open, in the sales meeting, never pretending it is not happening. Bosley read every document on the industry’s trust-account failures and ran a segment in every sales meeting walking agents through what happened, with a single message: the only way to differentiate is to operate with transparency and inform clients what it means for them. She would set a minimum production bar to hold a licence if she could; the regulator will not, she said, so she does it herself. Lyall keeps the conversation objective, steers agents off social-media pile-ons, and leans into compliance as something that protects agents and clients both. Burton, who lived through a trust scandal in his province, put it simplest: trust accounts are sacred.

Telling agents plainly that this will never happen here is a form of protection, and agents value it.

The framework worth stealing: Jim Burton’s four-way test

One tool from the session is worth carrying on its own. Burton is a longtime Rotarian, and decades ago he brought Rotary’s four-way test into his business. When an agent comes to him with a dilemma, he runs it through four questions:

1. Is it the truth?
2. Is it fair to all concerned?
3. Will it build goodwill and better relationships?
4. Is it beneficial to all concerned?

He offered it, half in jest and entirely correctly, as a test for anything an agent runs through AI before it goes out the door.

What this playbook is really about

Read the eight plays together and the pattern is unmistakable. These brokers do not sell retention. They grow agents, run the business in the open, track the numbers obsessively, hold a standard high enough to lose people over, and keep every door open on the way out. Retention is what that produces.

The brokers who struggle to keep agents are usually the ones treating retention as the goal, reaching for a counteroffer when someone is already halfway out the door. By then it is too late, and it was too late a long time before the notice. The work happens months earlier, in the one-on-one, the scorecard, the standard and the open book.

This is the first in a series of REM resources built specifically for the people who run brokerages. If retention sits on your desk, start here, and come back for the rest.

A note of thanks to REMAX

The REM Mastermind series is free for everyone who attends, and that does not happen by accident. REMAX has sponsored this series for the full year and their support is what makes it possible to keep bringing in strong panelists and offering this to the industry at no cost. It is a partnership we do not take for granted.