'Wait and See' Is Over: Agent Moves Are Up 25%

Inman ran a piece this week with a number that should put every broker-owner on notice: agent moves are up 25% year-over-year. After eighteen months of agents staying put — waiting out the NAR settlement, waiting out rates, waiting out their own production slumps — the dam has broken.

The conventional read is that this is a splits story. It isn't. The brokerages winning these moves aren't the ones offering the richest caps. They're the ones who answered the phone first, had a real answer to 'what changes for me on Monday,' and didn't make the recruit do the math themselves.

What this number really tells us is that the inventory of 'open to a conversation' agents has roughly doubled in twelve months. That changes the recruiting job. The bottleneck stops being who's available and becomes who you can reach in the 72-hour window before three other brokers reach them too.

If you've been running recruiting as a quarterly initiative — pull a list, host a coffee, follow up in six weeks — the math doesn't work anymore. The brokers gaining share right now are operating on a daily cadence with a tight feedback loop: signal in, outreach out, meeting booked or moved on. Wait-and-see was a strategy. It just isn't one for 2026.