The pattern plays out in real estate businesses across Australia every single week. You recruit someone promising, hand them over to a senior agent, and three months later they’ve either quit or they’re underperforming. Meanwhile, you’re back to square one, spending half your time trying to fill the gaps.

Sound familiar?

Here’s what most agents don’t realise: this isn’t a recruitment problem. It’s an onboarding problem.

Most real estate businesses operate on what I call “gut feel recruitment.” They meet a candidate, get a good vibe, and bring them on board. Then comes the real mistake: they immediately hand that new recruit to a senior team member and hope for the best.

What actually happens? The new agent becomes a glorified assistant. They’re doing the administrative tasks, the prospecting calls no one else wants to make, the weekend open homes that clash with football matches. They’re not learning the business—they’re learning to resent it.

Within months, they can’t see a future in your business. They either leave the industry entirely or jump to a competitor who promises them something better. And you’re left wondering why you can’t seem to develop your own talent.

The cycle continues because you keep trying to recruit experienced performers from other agencies rather than building capability from within.

The businesses that break this cycle do something completely different. They implement a structured three-month induction programme that keeps new agents away from team members until they’ve built the right foundations.

This isn’t about keeping them isolated. It’s about giving them the core skills and habits they actually need before throwing them into the deep end.

During these first ninety days, new agents focus on three critical areas:

Building Client Relationships: Not as someone’s assistant, but as a professional learning to create genuine connections with property owners and buyers.

Prospecting Fundamentals: Developing the daily habits that separate consistent performers from those who chase quick wins.

Systems Mastery: Understanding how a high-performing real estate business actually operates, rather than just copying what they see senior agents doing.

Here’s what makes this approach powerful: by the time these agents are ready to work alongside senior team members, they’re already contributing. They’re not starting from zero—they’re bringing value from day one.

When you implement this properly, the results speak for themselves. In one business I work with, two agents in their first ninety days generated an additional $100,000 in revenue. And they still hadn’t been released to work with senior team members yet.

That’s not luck. That’s what happens when you give people a proper foundation instead of hoping they’ll figure it out through osmosis.

But here’s the interesting part: the impact doesn’t stop with the new agents.

When you bring junior agents through a proper development programme, something fascinating happens with your senior team members. They start to lift their own standards.

I was recently in a client’s office catching up with their experienced agents. One of them pulled me aside and said something that stuck with me: “These new people coming through with better systems—it’s completely changed my perspective on what I should be doing.”

That’s the power of systematic development. When junior agents are performing well because they’ve been properly trained, it creates a healthy competition that elevates everyone. Your experienced agents can’t coast on what worked five years ago. They have to stay sharp.

Younger talent with solid foundations doesn’t just add to your team—they transform your entire culture.

The traditional approach fails for one simple reason: businesses rely too heavily on individual team members to train new recruits. They assume that great salespeople automatically know how to develop talent.

They don’t.

Your top performer might be brilliant at listing presentations and negotiations, but that doesn’t mean they know how to transfer those skills to someone starting out. More often than not, they’ll just recreate their own habits—good and bad—without any strategic thinking about what this particular person needs to succeed.

When you leave training to individual team members, you get inconsistent results. One agent learns excellent habits. Another picks up shortcuts and bad practices. There’s no standardisation, no quality control, no systematic approach to building capability.

The result? High turnover, frustrated agents, and a business that never develops its own bench strength.

The alternative is treating recruitment and onboarding as a business system, not a personality exercise.

This means creating a structured programme that every new agent goes through, regardless of who they’ll eventually work with. It means having clear benchmarks for what they need to achieve in their first thirty, sixty, and ninety days. It means investing time upfront to build proper foundations instead of hoping they’ll learn on the job.

Most importantly, it means accepting that developing talent is a leadership responsibility, not something you can outsource to whoever has desk space available.

When you take this approach, you stop being dependent on recruiting experienced performers from competitors. You start building your own pipeline of capable agents who’ve been trained in your systems from day one. Agents who understand how your business operates because they’ve been immersed in it properly from the start.

That’s how you break the revolving door cycle.

If you’re reading this and recognising your own business in these patterns—high turnover, inconsistent results, constantly recruiting—the good news is this is solvable.

The starting point is understanding exactly where your current systems are failing. That requires an honest assessment of your recruitment process, your onboarding approach, and how you’re developing talent once they’re in your business.

From there, you can build a systematic approach that actually works for your specific situation. Not a generic template, but a structured programme tailored to your business challenges and growth goals.

Because here’s the reality: you can keep recruiting new people and hoping they work out, or you can build systems that consistently develop the talent you need.

One approach keeps you stuck in the same cycle. The other transforms your entire business.

Ready to stop the revolving door in your business? Book a Real Estate Business Assessment & Brainstorm Call to identify your specific recruitment and onboarding challenges and map out a systematic solution.