For those of you who have been at this whole thing for a while- What size office did have when you started to recruit? Did you go huge in order to have room for new agents? Or was it more modest with your agents working primarily from home?

Thanks!

I'm curious too. When did you decide to get your own office? I figure I will wait until I'm up to 30 agents. Right now I have 6 agents, and 5 more in school. Until I get bigger we are using an executive suite. I plan to lease one private office for every 8 agents. Everyone home offices and just uses the private office to meet clients. By the time I am leasing 4 offices I think I might as well get our own space and hire our own receptionist. Even then I think I will continue to use the space-sharing idea. Until then we'll continue to outsource with the executive suites.

One of my favorite topics...

I designed an office space from scratch when I opened up my first office. It was previously a retail space, about 2,000 sf, that we completely gutted down to the bare walls.

I have four private offices for top-producers. These sat empty for a while as I wanted some leverage when I was recruiting talent from other companies. Now, they are all full and I plan to re-assign them at the beginning of each year to the four top-producing agents. It has become a real incentive for those individuals to keep producing, which makes me happy.

I also have an agent bullpen area which is equipped with very basic cubicles. These I got for free from Blue Cross when they were re-doing their offices, which was a savings of about $10,000 (you can ALWAYS score free office furniture from a variety of sources if you're resourceful). All newly licensed agents get assigned space here, knowing that they can "move up" to a private office if they are in the top 4. My listing input person occupies one of these cubes, also.

Aside from that, we have a front-desk area where the on-duty or "floor" agents sits. He or she is able to greet clients or customers upon entering the door. We have a lot of walk-in business here, so this area was designed around that. This area is surrounded by a resource area complete with networked color-laser printers, fax, scanner, hi-volume copier, etc. It works pretty well for us.

To round it out, we have a large conference room with a 10-foot table. We can seat 10-15 in there comfortably for meetings and such. There is also a nice waiting area / property display area up front too.

I figured my own office into the equation, too. I figured I needed a place to hang my hat and store confidential files, etc. It gets used a lot.

I wish we had more room, though. We're already 100% full. We can double up on desks, etc. if we have too, though.

Hope this helps. It you don't have walk-in business then you can get away with executive suites, etc. Here, it was critical to have a walk-in friendly office where the agents would feel comfortable spending their office time. Of course, I didn't want to make it TOO comfortable because we all want our agents out there listing and selling!

I have found good space to be hard to come by so I am thankful most of my agents choose to work from home although I can't imagine having no commercial space for them to come to. I have a VoIP phone system so my home agents are an extension off of our office system and appear to be 'in office' if any of their clients care.

We have 45 agents and are pretty maxed out in a 4000 sq ft office space, only 1/3 of those are truly in the office full time. We have private offices and a bullpen area of cubes that are open.