Broker of the Month

Dan Bitza
President, CEO
Prudential Select Properties
St. Louis, Missouri

Interview

1. How many agents do you currently have working on your team? What are your short and long term recruiting goals?

Currently Prudential Select has just over 500 agents on our team. Our goal is to have a minimum of 750 agents by the end of 2004. In our business you must always be recruiting because if you’re not recruiting, you’re not growing and growth is vital.

2. What is the key differentiator about your company that you present to candidates you are interested in recruiting?

Prudential Select is genuinely interested in the success of our agents and we believe that the ingredients for success are to recruit, train and retain. It’s not enough to just recruit someone. If you leave out any of the other ingredients, you won’t succeed. We offer extensive training and have a full time trainer on staff.

Being the largest locally owned and operated St. Louis real estate company also has many advantages to our agents including the fact they aren’t hit with the various surcharges that the bigger nationally-owned companies impose on their agents and on the buyer or seller. And, while we aren’t the biggest real estate company in town, we are the largest, independently-owned, full service company in town with nine – soon to be ten – offices in the St. Louis area.

3. What is your primary selection criteria when looking to recruit an agent?

There are several things we look at including the impression we get in the initial interview. Do they demonstrate that they are self-starters and have the staying power that’s required while they are developing their business? We look for someone who has a professional appearance, good cognitive ability and the financial resources needed to start up this business.

We have been using the Real Estate Simulator to help us assess some of these characteristics. For example, if they score reasonably on the Simulator, we know that they are capable of learning and have a likelihood of success.

4. You have been very successful at attracting new recruit leads to take the Real Estate Simulator. In fact, you had 40 people take the test in one week. Can you describe what you have been doing to create such interest?

We have been promoting the opportunity to take the Simulator in all of our newspaper ads as well as on all pages of our website. Our website features a prominent link to the Simulator featuring a racy red sports car and a tag line that reads, “Test drive a career in real estate, FREE.” We promote our website in all of the ads, on all of our literature and we also have a link on the front page of stltoday.com which is the number one website in our area. We’ve only been promoting the website this way for about two months, but so far we are receiving about 40 to 50 hits per week.

5. What would you recommend to a broker or manager who is interested in recruiting, selecting and training stronger agents?

The Real Estate Simulator is a great way to generate leads and to learn about a candidate’s potential. One great advantage to using the Simulator is that an agent needs to be technically literate enough to access the website and find their way around a computer. We are looking for younger agents who are technologically savvy and the Simulator helps to bring in this type of recruit lead.

Once we bring them in we need to make them aware that we have a sincere interest in their success and that we have a game plan to help them. As long as they are willing to pay a price in terms of money, time and intellect, we want to spend time training them and pointing them in the right direction. We want an agent to realize that by joining us, their investment is in good hands.