Nearly every brokerage leader, coach, franchise executive, and association executive acknowledges the growing problem in the real estate industry, but few openly discuss it.
Today, agencies say they want mentorship, culture, accountability, training, support, and community, but participation across the industry continues to decline.
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They want coaching but ignore phone calls. They want culture, but they don’t attend office events. They ask for training, but rarely show up to workshops. They resist structure and yet demand responsibility. And while they increasingly operate independently, they want community.
This challenge is happening everywhere.
The association is having trouble increasing attendance. Securities firms are grappling with declining attendance at conferences and educational events. Coaches struggle with consistency and follow-through. Even some of the industry’s biggest brands with large technology and training ecosystems are finding that many agents aren’t as engaged as they once were.
What makes this even more interesting is that the problem is not limited to one business model. This is happening with traditional brick-and-mortar companies, virtual brokerages, independent businesses, franchise systems, coaching organizations, and more alike.
This raises a difficult but important question. Has the industry fundamentally changed the way agents access support?
The industry’s biggest challenge may no longer be attracting agents to support the system, but convincing agents that their participation is still important.
As information becomes more accessible and professionals become more independent, brokerages, associations, coaches, and brands are being forced to rethink fundamental questions about how to build engagement, accountability, and community in a business where participation is increasingly optional.
Transition from physical presence to digital access
For many years, success in the real estate industry has been closely tied to physical participation.
Agents attended office meetings, caravan tours, live training, networking events, and coaching sessions. Because there is information, opportunity, collaboration, and relationships. Participation was often seen as part of the path to growth.
Today, information is everywhere.
Agents can learn from YouTube, Instagram, podcasts, Facebook groups, AI tools, private masterminds, online communities, and text threads without ever setting foot in an office or attending a scheduled event.
Knowledge has become instantly accessible, and that accessibility has quietly changed behavior across industries.
Modern agents increasingly value flexibility over obligation, convenience over structure, and on-demand access over scheduled attendance. The industry has evolved into a world where many agents believe they can consume information when and how they want and build their entire business independently.
Can you build culture without participation?
That may be one of the defining questions for leadership over the next decade.
For years, many companies have operated on the assumption that if you provide the right tools, systems, training, and opportunities, engagement will come naturally. Get involved, plug in, participate and growth will happen.
Today’s reality looks very different.
Accessing information has never been easier, but getting engagement has never been more difficult. Providing resources is no longer enough. Participation is now a choice, and many agents are choosing flexibility over structure, convenience over commitment, and independence over involvement.
result? Companies can build great ecosystems, but the presence of resources does not create culture. Culture is created when people actively interact with each other.
And that’s where many companies struggle.
Engagement is declining due to information overload
In fact, the industry may currently be facing an oversaturation problem.
Agents are constantly bombarded with webinars, coaching offers, masterminds, scripts, AI tutorials, social media strategies, CRM systems, productivity tools, and educational content from every conceivable direction.
At some point, the abundance itself becomes overwhelming, and overwhelmed agents often disengage completely.
The rise of independent brand thinking
The participation crisis also reflects a deeper psychological shift occurring within the industry.
Many agents no longer consider themselves brokerage-dependent professionals. Instead, they increasingly see themselves as independent brands operating within a larger ecosystem.
That mindset changes everything.
Broker loyalty weakens. There will be fewer trips to the office. Increased independent learning. It becomes difficult to maintain traditional responsibility structures.
The paradox of participation
Still, the irony cannot be ignored. Agents that consistently participate are often still the fastest growing agents.
Because attendance alone creates success, engagement creates intimacy: leadership, collaboration, accountability, and proximity to opportunity.
Real estate has always been an industry fueled by relationships and repetition. Technology can support them, but it cannot completely replace them.
Winning companies solve engagement
The companies that ultimately win in the next era of real estate won’t necessarily be the ones with the largest technology stacks.
They may be companies that figure out how to solve engagement.
That doesn’t mean forcing attendance or going back to outdated forced meeting models. It means rethinking how participation itself is designed.
The future may belong to organizations that create flexible learning environments, personalized engagement, small communities within large brands, high-value in-person experiences, and accountability systems that agents actually want to use.
The challenge now is to create an environment where agents choose to attend because they see real value in it, rather than because they are obligated to do so.
Redefining what participation means
As a result, leaders may need to stop measuring engagement solely by attendance.
The future of participation may look less like weekly office meetings and more like intentional micro-communities, niche collaboration groups, digital ecosystems, mentorship circles, and individualized growth paths.
But one reality remains constant. The point is that no agent succeeds completely on their own.
The real crisis is not attendance.
Brokers, associations, coaching firms, and leaders who figure out how to rebuild meaningful engagement without relying on outdated structures could end up being the most influential organizations in their industry.
Because the real participation crisis is not about attendance.
It’s about connection.
It’s about community.
And in an industry that relies solely on relationships, that’s more important than ever.
In June, Inman takes a deep dive into the real estate team. What it takes to join a team, how to build a team worth joining, and yes, when to leave. During Teams Month, we’re bringing in some of the best team leaders in the country to bring you insights, frameworks, and hard-won lessons that don’t typically make their way onto highlight reels.
Lori Mueller is president of Fathom Realty in Cary, North Carolina. Connect with her on Facebook or LinkedIn.
