Douglas Elliman Poaches Three Teams From Franchises

Texas agents from three different franchises left for Douglas Elliman recently, with some citing the brokerage’s relatively small size as a draw.

Douglas Elliman brought on three teams from franchises in Austin and Houston in the past few weeks, according to a company announcement: the Dicker Morin Group, a two-agent team in Austin that joined from Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty; the Siebert Group, a three-agent Austin team joining from Keller Williams; and Lindsey Barnett, a Houston agent formerly with HomeServices of America.

As consolidation in the industry yields ever larger firms, culminating in the Compass conglomerate, some of these agents and Douglas Elliman leadership say that the benefits of a smaller brokerage outweigh the resources of a larger company — especially in Texas, where private inventory rarely remains exclusive.

The advantages of leaving a franchise for a corporate brokerage include access to a national private listing network, Douglas Elliman Texas president of brokerage Melissa Webb said.

However, according to Webb and some agents, pre-market inventory isn’t as strong a recruiting lure as it may seem.

“I think everybody wants to make a big deal about these off-market platforms. The truth of the matter is, if you’re a top luxury agent, you are always going to know about the inventory in your area,” Webb said. “There’s different networks throughout all the cities.”

Thanks to a sustained demand for off-market sales in Texas, one of the country’s few non-disclosure states, private luxury listing portals operate in the state’s major metros independently of any brokerage.

As other brokerages such as Real and Compass swiftly add agents to their rosters, Elliman is appealing to exclusivity.

“My goal isn’t to have a million agents. We’ll never want to have thousands of agents. That’s just not ever going to be our model,” Webb said. “If we have underperforming agents, we probably ask them to succeed somewhere else.”

Job support and “accessibility to our leadership” were primary selling points for the Dicker Morin Group, according to co-founder Lana Morin.

“There are many brands out there that we could go to where we could have higher splits, and we could have this and that, but the support and the brand that Douglas Elliman provides is a big piece for us,” Morin said.

To Morin, whose team also works in California, Douglas Elliman’s private inventory matters, but not as much as its personal referral network.

“Having that exposure to high-net-worth individuals in these different markets is also really something that we look at, because there’s so much back and forth and relocation and second home purchases,” Morin said.