In July 2023, Chris Snow already ran one of the stronger teams in Northeast Florida. Florida Coastal Team, based in St. Augustine, had 16 agents, closed 197 transactions that year and did $83M in volume.
Then the Florida market softened, and many teams in the state saw production fall by as much as 30%. Most leaders with a team that size would have protected what they had. Chris kept building, and on the 2026 pace the team is at 56 agents, 500 transactions and $150M in volume.
How he got there comes down to a few deliberate choices, and the order of his hires mattered as much as the hires themselves.
Growth was running through two busy people
For two or three years, recruiting at Florida Coastal Team sat with Chris and his sales manager. Both of them still sold. Both of them also owned training and teaching for the agents.
On episode 110 of the Reside Platform Podcast, Chris said what was missing was consistency. Nobody was reaching out to the database of agents every week, and nobody was interviewing on a steady schedule. The team ran Indeed ads, but recruiting happened when the two leaders had time for it.
Plenty of producing team leaders are in the same spot. The people who are best at recruiting and training are also closing deals and running the business, so when the market gets hard, recruiting is the first thing to slip.
Chris did not want to hold steady. He wanted to scale, and his plan fit in three lines: recruit better, train better, lead better.
Step one: get a steady flow of candidates
When Florida Coastal Team joined Reside, the team started running the Indeed ad Reside provided. Chris described the early results as a trickle. They added more budget, then more again, until the team had a consistent flow of applicants instead of a hit-or-miss one.
Early on, Reside supplied much of the leverage the team didn’t have in-house. Over time, Chris pulled some of that work back inside the team, starting with training.
Step two: hire the trainer before the recruiter
Bringing that work in-house forced a decision. Chris had to choose between someone to bring agents in and someone to develop the agents already there.
Do I hire the trainer or do I hire the recruiter? And I went the route of, let me hire the trainer first.
Chris Snow, Florida Coastal Team
The trainer gave newer agents a dedicated point of contact three days a week, five to six hours a day. That freed Chris and his sales director to keep producing and running the rest of the team.
The order matters. A recruiter feeding agents into a team with no training capacity speeds up turnover, while a trainer hired first gives every new agent somewhere to land. Only once training was up and running did Chris hire a full-time recruiter.
Step three: a full-time recruiter on a monthly cohort
Florida Coastal Team brings on new agents once a month as a group, and Chris walked through the cohorts on the podcast. Before the recruiter started, two or three agents came on in January and four in February. She started at the end of February, and her first cohort in March was seven agents. April added five more, and another three started the week before the recording.
The pipeline behind those cohorts showed up in the weekly team meeting. Chris said the team was consistently seeing three to five new faces every Thursday, all people looking at joining.
He also chose not to max it out. If he asked the recruiter for 10 agents in a month, he said, she could get them. Instead the team kept each cohort at four to five so training could keep up.
Train in one 90-day cycle, repeated
Monthly cohorts only work if onboarding can absorb them. Chris built training as a 90-day cycle that runs in 30-day blocks.
- Days 1 to 30: new agents onboard and hear the content for the first time.
- Days 31 to 60: the previous cohort goes through the same content a second time, alongside the new group.
- Days 61 to 90: agents hear it a third time, and may now be teaching it to the newest group.
So it’s just that layer upon layer upon layer. 90 days worth of content. We’re just doing it 30 days at a time and recycle it.
Chris Snow, Florida Coastal Team
Every agent hears the core material three times, and agents in their third month teach it, which locks it in for them and takes load off the trainer. According to the case study, production per agent held even as the team tripled.
Give new agents leads to nurture, not pressure
New agents need conversations to have. Chris has run PPC lead generation for years, and in his view a PPC lead is usually still just thinking about a move. When someone is 12 to 18 months out, pushing for a showing scares them off.
So the team trains agents to nurture instead, calling, texting and emailing with something of value each time.
If I’m not doing one of those three things, I’m not nurturing that person. I’m annoying that person.
Chris Snow, Florida Coastal Team
He shared a few of the specifics.
- A living list of value messages. The team keeps a running document of things worth sending, split by stage. Closer-in leads get a market analysis on a property or the five best deals in a neighborhood. Leads further out get the best restaurants, ice cream shops or dog-friendly parks in the area.
- A three-to-one ratio. At least three personal or event-based touches for every one message about real estate.
- A weekly email. It goes to about 40,000 people, with an average open rate of 30 to 37%. Non-openers get it again on Saturday morning.
A new agent who joins in a monthly cohort doesn’t have to invent a follow-up plan. The list, the ratio and the brand exposure are already in place.
Keep standards that hold at three times the size
The third part of the plan, lead better, was about standards that didn’t depend on the market. The case study describes clear standards, consistent accountability and a culture built to produce in an up, down or sideways market. Those systems held as the team tripled.
Chris also sees the recruiter’s job continuing after the growth phase. If the team reaches the point where it has grown enough, he plans to point her at re-recruiting the agents already on the team, every month and every year.
The results, year by year
Florida Coastal Team grew every year from 2023 through the 2026 pace, through two years of soft conditions and into the recovery.
- Agents: 16 in 2023, 22 in 2024, 30 in 2025, 56 on the 2026 pace. That is 40 agents added in three years.
- Transactions: 197, then 236, then 350, then 500 on pace. An increase of more than 300 transactions a year.
- Volume: $83M, then $100M, then $120M, then $150M on pace.
The full numbers are in the Chris Snow case study. To hear Chris explain his lead conversion and recruiting setup in his own words, listen to episode 110 of the Reside Platform Podcast.
What other team leaders can take from it
- Fix the bottleneck that sits on you. If recruiting and training only happen when you have spare time, they won’t happen in a hard market.
- Build the landing zone first. Chris hired a trainer before a recruiter so new agents had someone to develop them.
- Recruit on a rhythm you can train. Monthly cohorts of four to five, not as many as the recruiter can find.
- Repeat the same content. A 90-day cycle in 30-day blocks gives every agent three passes and turns veterans into teachers.
Reside works with team leaders on recruiting, training and accountability systems like these.
