Real Estate School of Nevada
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Most new real estate agents in Nevada pick their first brokerage the same way they pick their first apartment in college: whichever one had a sign in front of it and a friendly face inside.
That’s how 75 percent of new agents end up not closing a deal in year one, according to widely-cited National Association of Realtors data — and how almost 90 percent are out of the business by year five. The brokerage you sign with in month one of your career sets the floor for your training, your support, and your earnings. Choose well and the first year is hard but survivable. Choose poorly and you’ll spend it paying for the privilege of being lonely.
Here’s the part nobody warns you about: 10 percent of all real estate agents — and 14 percent of producing agents — change brokerages every single year (Mike DelPrete). New agents change brokerages more than anyone. That number isn’t a bug in the industry. It’s the industry’s signature. Agents leave because the brokerage they signed with wasn’t the brokerage they thought they were signing with.
The good news: you can avoid most of that by asking five questions before you sign. Every brokerage owner reading this knows these questions. The honest ones answer them in plain English. The ones who can’t — or won’t — are telling you everything you need to know.
At the Real Estate School of Nevada, we’ve trained thousands of Nevada agents through their pre-license course and into their first year on the job. The five questions below are the ones we wish every one of our graduates had asked before they signed their first independent contractor agreement.
Question #1: What’s Your Split — and at What Cap?
This is the question every new agent thinks they’re asking, and almost none of them actually are.
A real estate “split” is the percentage of your commission the brokerage keeps. Most new-agent splits start at 70/30 or 80/20 in the agent’s favor. Some traditional brokerages start lower. A few cap-and-keep models start at 100 percent from day one but charge a flat monthly fee instead. None of those structures are inherently better — they’re just different shapes of the same trade-off between upfront cost and back-end take-home.
The number that actually matters is the cap: the dollar amount you pay the brokerage in a calendar year before you start keeping 100 percent of every commission. Industry-typical caps run anywhere from $12,000 to $23,000 a year depending on market and brand. If a brokerage doesn’t have a cap, that’s not necessarily a red flag — it’s a structural choice. If the brokerage has a cap but the person interviewing you can’t tell you what it is in plain dollars, that’s the answer to the question.
Ask it this way: “What’s the exact dollar amount I’ll pay this brokerage in my first calendar year if I close one transaction a month?” Then watch the math happen in real time. A confident answer with a calculator open in front of them is a good sign. A vague “well, it depends on a few things” is the brokerage telling you they hope you don’t read your contract too closely.
The math matters for one reason: at the end of your first year, you’ll want to know whether the brokerage made money on you or you made money on the brokerage. Both are valid outcomes. Only one of them should be a surprise.
Question #2: Desk Fee — What Does It Actually Include?
“No desk fee” is the second-most-misleading phrase in real estate recruiting, right after “we’re like a family here.”
Most brokerages that advertise “no desk fees” still charge transaction fees of $250 to $500 per closing, technology fees of $50 to $150 a month, errors-and-omissions insurance of $25 to $100 a month, franchise fees of 3 to 8 percent of every gross commission, and a “broker review fee” of a few hundred dollars per file that gets billed at closing.
None of those fees are unreasonable on their own. They become unreasonable when nobody mentioned them on the way in.
Before you sign anything, ask the broker for a complete written list of every fee you will be charged in your first 12 months, with dollar figures and frequencies. Get it on paper or in an email. “Trust me, it’s not much” is not a fee schedule. “We’ll go over that in onboarding” is not a fee schedule. A two-page PDF with line items is a fee schedule.
Then — and this is the part most new agents skip — add up the fees, divide by your expected number of closings, and figure out the all-in effective split. A “90/10 with no desk fee” can quietly become a 75/25 once you include every line item the brokerage forgot to mention. A 70/30 with one transaction fee and nothing else can quietly become more profitable than the 90/10. The split number on the brochure is only useful if you know everything that’s hiding underneath it.
The Federal Trade Commission has been increasingly focused on undisclosed fees across multiple industries in recent years (FTC). The real estate industry isn’t subject to most of those rules — which is exactly why doing the math yourself, in advance, is the only protection you have.
Question #3: Who’s My Broker of Record — and How Often Do They Answer the Phone?
Your designated broker is the person legally responsible for every transaction you handle. In Nevada, the Real Estate Division (NRED) regulates broker supervision standards, and every active license is held under a broker who, by law, is supposed to be reachable when something goes sideways.
In practice, “reachable” means very different things at different brokerages.
At a small independent shop, the broker of record might be the person who interviewed you, signs your paperwork, and answers their cell phone at 8pm on a Sunday when a buyer’s inspection blows up. At a megabrokerage with hundreds of agents under one license, the broker of record might be a name on a wall in a building you’ve never visited, with a chain of three managers between you and them when a contract dispute lands in your lap.
Neither is inherently wrong. But you need to know which one you’re signing up for before something goes sideways — because something will.
Ask: “If I have a contract issue at 6pm on a Sunday, who exactly do I call, and what’s the realistic response time?” Then ask the brokerage for one or two of their newer agents — ideally six to twelve months in — and call them. Ask them the same question. Compare the answers. If they line up, you have a brokerage that knows what it sounds like to its own people. If they don’t, you have a brokerage that’s selling one thing to recruits and delivering another.
You’re not just picking a brokerage. You’re picking the person whose license is on the line for every mistake you make in your first two years. That person should have a name, a phone number, and a track record of actually using both.
Question #4: What Training in the First 6 Months — Specifically?
“We have a great mentor program” is not an answer to this question. It’s the answer brokerages give when they don’t have one.
Ask for the actual curriculum. Ask how many hours of training are scheduled in your first 30, 60, and 90 days. Ask whether it’s live, pre-recorded, in-person, or hybrid. Ask who teaches it — a manager who hasn’t sold a house in eight years, or a producing agent who closed 24 transactions last quarter. Ask if there are role-play sessions, contract walk-throughs, and listing presentation practice — and ask how often.
Then ask the question that separates real brokerages from recruiting brochures: “Can I sit in on one of your training sessions before I decide?”
The answer tells you everything. A confident brokerage with an actual program will say yes and put you on next Tuesday’s calendar. A brokerage with a “mentor program” that exists mainly in a PDF will say something about scheduling, or insurance, or “we don’t normally do that.” Both answers are useful. Only one of them should make you keep looking.
Continuous learning matters in any career. In real estate, where you’re handling the largest financial transaction of most clients’ lives within ninety days of getting your license, it isn’t optional. The National Association of Realtors’ own training research has consistently shown that agents who complete structured ongoing education in their first year close more transactions and stay in the business longer (NAR Research). Pre-license is the floor of what you need to know. The brokerage’s job is to build the building.
Question #5: New-Agent Retention at 12 Months — What’s the Number?
This is the question that ends most brokerage interviews early — which is exactly why it’s the most important one to ask.
A brokerage that proudly tracks new-agent retention will give you a number, an explanation, and sometimes a graph. A brokerage that doesn’t track it will tell you it’s a “complicated metric” or that “every agent’s journey is different.” A brokerage that does track it but doesn’t like the number will quietly change the subject to lifestyle, culture, or marketing tools.
All three responses are answers.
Industry-wide, only about 25 percent of newly licensed real estate agents are still active in the business a year after they’re licensed (NAR data widely cited). The 5-year failure rate is closer to 87 percent. Any brokerage that retains significantly more new agents than the industry average has built systems to do it. Any brokerage that retains significantly fewer is either burning through new licensees as a recruiting strategy or losing them to brokerages that take training more seriously.
You don’t have to find the brokerage with the highest retention. You have to find the one whose retention number is honest, explainable, and pointed in the right direction. A broker who says “we lost 30 percent of our first-year class last year and here’s what we changed about our onboarding because of it” is a broker who’s paying attention. A broker who says “our retention is great” without a number is a broker who’s selling.
Take this list to every interview. Print it if you have to. The brokerages that earn your signature are the ones that answer all five without flinching.
The Bottom Line
The brokerage you sign with in your first 90 days as a Nevada agent is the single most leverageable decision of your early career. It determines your training, your supervision, your effective income, and your odds of still being in the business in three years.
Most new agents don’t ask any of these five questions because they don’t know they can. The truth is the opposite — every brokerage worth signing with wants you to ask them. The brokerages that get nervous when you do are the ones that have been counting on new agents not knowing better.
The five questions are simple: the split and cap, every fee in writing, the broker of record’s actual availability, the specific first-six-months training, and the twelve-month retention number. That’s it. Ask them at every brokerage you interview with, in the same order, and write down the answers. By interview three, the right brokerage will be obvious — and so will the wrong ones.
Your Next Step
If you haven’t gotten your Nevada real estate license yet, that’s where the career actually starts. Our Nevada pre-license course at the Real Estate School of Nevada is self-paced, fully approved by the Nevada Real Estate Commission, and built around working adults — and our graduates walk into brokerage interviews with the vocabulary and the confidence to ask exactly the questions above. Start the course this week, and you’ll have the five questions, the answers to look for, and a clear list of red flags before you ever sit down across from a recruiter.
Already licensed and rethinking your brokerage choice? Take this list to your next three interviews. The right brokerage will appreciate the homework. The wrong one will tell on itself.
