In 2025 the hundred largest residential real estate brands in the country added 229,316 agents and lost 122,016. Nearly two recruits for every departure. With that machine running, the group’s sales volume grew 1.8%.
The explanation fits in one line, and it comes from the same report: the agents who left had been producing $2.11 million a year and the ones who arrived were producing $1.44 million. A 46% gap. Recruiting at twice the rate bought them roughly standing still.
Where these figures come from
From Courted’s recruiting and retention report, which looked at the hundred largest US residential brokerage brands by transaction volume and covers around 90% of the country’s on-market agents. HousingWire wrote it up on 4 March 2026.
Two warnings before going further, because they change how the numbers read. First: this is national data, not Florida data. Second: it measures movement, not motives. None of these sources says why anybody leaves, and further down you will see why that matters.
16% switch brokerage every year, and have done since 2020
16% of agents changed brokerage in 2025, roughly 230,000 of them, exactly the same share as in 2024. Since 2020 the figure has moved between 16% and 18%. This is not an odd year or the aftershock of a downturn. It is how the industry runs.
And that 16% is only one of three currents. Around 15% of agents are new to the business each year and another 15% leave it. Add the three together and close to 46% of an average brokerage’s workforce is in motion in any given year.
That number is worth sitting with. If nearly half your people arrive, leave or move every year, the question of whether you will have churn is already answered. The one still open is which of the three currents is costing you money.
Who moves: not the rookies
This is where the report takes apart the common intuition. Agents with between one and five million dollars in sales were 31% of the movers, the largest single group. And 76% of everyone who moved sat between one and twenty-five million.
So the agent who switches is not the newly licensed one who got tired, and not the star who left to open her own firm. It is the agent who works, closes and keeps the office running. The one who, on leaving, takes a share of the volume with her and leaves a hole the next hire takes months to fill.
The arithmetic almost nobody runs
The hundred largest brands brought in $276 billion of volume with their recruits and lost $233 billion with their departures. A net gain of $42 billion, or 1.8%, after recruiting at 1.9 to one.
Put another way: it took nearly twice as many hires as exits to grow by under two points. That is the whole arithmetic of a strategy built on recruiting. It works, and it costs twice the effort per point of volume, because the production coming in is worth 46% less than the production going out.
And that calculation still leaves out what recruiting costs: the broker’s time, the signing incentives, onboarding and training someone who will take a while to produce. None of that shows up in the $42 billion.
Florida, in its own numbers
The 2026 Florida Realtors Member Profile asks members whether they expect to still be active in two years. In Florida, 71% are very certain they will be, against 75% across the country. Another 20% are somewhat certain and 9% are not certain.
Read it from the other side, which is the side that affects you: almost three in ten Florida members will not firmly say they expect to be in this business in two years. And that is among members of the association, who are the most committed slice of the licence roll.
The same report carries three more Florida figures that explain a good deal of what you see in your office:
- Median experience is 11 years, against 13 nationally. 13% have a year or less, against 11% nationally. Florida has the greener roll of the two.
- Only 47% say real estate is their primary source of income. More than half of your people have money coming from somewhere else, which changes what a slow month means.
- 86% are independent contractors, and 53% work at an independent company against 40% at a franchised one.
What that independent contractor status actually means, and why the duty to supervise them lands on you, is in the independent realtor guide.
The median Florida brokerage has two agents
This one comes from no survey: it comes from counting the DBPR licence roll, which is public. The state’s 309,358 active licensees work across 34,801 companies, and the median is two agents per brokerage. 45.4% have exactly one.
Hold those two facts together. A structural 16% annual churn is a statistic when you have three hundred agents and something else entirely when you have four: there, losing one is losing 25% of the firm in a fifteen minute conversation. The full breakdown, by size and by county, is in how to choose a brokerage.
What these numbers do not say, and nobody should invent
Neither source says why an agent leaves. Courted measures movement and the Member Profile measures certainty. Not one question about reasons.
Worth saying out loud, because that gap fills itself. If you find an article listing "the five reasons agents leave" with a percentage next to each one, check where the percentage came from before making a decision with it. It is nearly always a vendor survey of that vendor’s own customers, which is a sample picked by whoever is selling the fix.
Four things you can measure in your own brokerage
What follows is not data, it is judgement: four calculations that turn a national statistic into your specific problem. All four run on numbers you already have.
- Your own rate. Departures over the year divided by average headcount. Under 16% and you are doing better than the market; over it and the problem is yours, not the industry’s.
- Production in against production out. Average GCI of the agents who left against the ones who arrived. The national report puts the gap at 46%; yours is the only one you can change.
- How long replacing takes. Months between the departure and the replacement’s first closed deal. That hole, times the production that walked, is the real cost of the exit.
- How many of the arrivals are still there at twelve months. Recruiting five to keep two is not recruiting. It is restocking.
The four get read together. The first one alone misleads: a brokerage that recruits heavily shows a low departure rate by arithmetic, because the denominator grows, while it may be losing exactly the people who produce.
And the money conversation
The split is the first thing an agent looks at when another brokerage calls, and it is almost never what they think it is. A high percentage with a cap nobody reaches leaves less than a lower one with no fees, and comparing two offers on the percentage is the most reliable way to choose badly. The full arithmetic, with the figures for each model, is in commission models.
Worth knowing even from your side of the table: it is the calculation your agent will run when the call comes, and it is better that you run it first.
What this guide cannot tell you
How much churn there is in Florida. The Courted figures are national, and the Member Profile asks about intent to stay in the business, which is not the same as switching firms. Combining the two to produce a Florida number would be inventing one.
Nor what sits inside the Commission’s disciplinary record, which is the other place to look when an exit ends badly. The FREC disciplinary reports live on the DBPR site, which blocks automated reading, so that one has to be pulled by hand and we have not done it yet.
What is on the record, and what changes a decision: churn is structural, it takes the people who produce, and recruiting faster does not offset it, because what comes in is worth 46% less than what goes out.