Are Personality Tests Needed for Real Estate Agents?

Can the liklihood of a real estate agent’s success be predicted by a personality test or bevaiorial assessment?

Some real estate companies have adopted the same screening technique as large companies hiring employees by asking prospective real estate agents to take an Activity Vector Analysis (AVA) assessment or the DISC behavior assessment, which is based on four different behavioral traits: dominance, influence, support, and conscientiousness.

Personality tests have long been up for debate in terms of their predictive effectiveness. Most candidates, even in a real estate recruiting setting, will answer subjectively as how they want to be perceived rather than their true objective habits.

However, real estate agents are a unique segement of the workforce. They are typcally more self-reliant, industrious, resourceful, and independent  than the typical model employee. After all, real estate agents are set-employed independent contractors that like to create their own job. Plus, it is reall agents that choose which real estate brokerage to join.  It is more of a case that agents are hiring a broker and not the borker is hiring an agent. Agents can go anywhere.

It would be very interesting to have a large group of successful real estate agents take a personality test and look for behavioral patterns, but again, it doesn’t guarantee that if someone scores similarly on a personality test then they will be successful in real estate agency.

There are many factors that must work in conjunction to behavior to make an agent successful. Chief among these factors is a large network. A real estate agent needs a lot of people to know what they do competently (sell property) to keep busy. A network would be like gasoline and the right personality would be the match to ignite it.

There is evidence that personality tests for real estate agents could allow a company to determine which agents are a better fit to their company culture. However,  there are too many variable and factors to suggest that having a certain result on a personality test alone would ensure success at an occupation.