Today’s RealTrending features Corey Hasting, broker/owner of Engel & Völkers in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. His firm was a top mover in the 2022 RealTrends Nation’s Best rankings, doubling transaction sides to 1,488 between 2021 and 2022.

Hasting was a defensive starter for Ohio University and the Cinncinatti Bengals before becoming the youngest brokerage owner in Engel & Völkers history at age 27. Hasting talks about running a brokerage and how his focus on training has resulted in increased agent productivity.

Here is a small preview of today’s interview with Corey Hasting. The transcript below has been lightly edited for length and clarity:

Tracey Velt: Obviously, recruiting is always a focus, but increasing the agents that you have, increasing their productivity is really important. Talk to me about what you’re doing to boost that, because you’ve doubled your transaction sides in one year. So I wondered if you doubled your agent count to or you just doubled your productivity?

Corey Hasting: But one of my favorite stats is that 89% of our advisors increased their production from 2020 to 2021. And really one of the hardest markets that we’ve ever seen, now everybody’s enamored by prices and all this stuff, but there’s more competition than ever. There’s less inventory than ever. There’s so many things that a lot of our producers don’t have to deal with, or didn’t have to, but now have to.

And so we do a ton. We do obviously a lot of training. We have tremendous marketing. We talk about, “What are you doing for your farm areas? What are you doing for social media? What are you guys doing for [lead 00:11:07] generation?” Outside of them just buying Zillow leads or whatever else. And so we try to really empower our producers to build their brand essentially.

RealTrending features the brightest minds in real estate. Twice a month, brokerage leaders, top agents, team leaders, and industry experts share their success secrets, trends, and lessons learned navigating this ever-changing industry. Hosted by Tracey Velt and produced by Elissa Branch.