Two behavioral instruments built inside real estate: the R2R for which sales behaviors an agent will avoid, the CDSI for how they communicate and decide under pressure. For brokers, recruiters, and team leaders.
A real estate agent assessment tells a broker, before the hire or before the next coaching dollar, which sales behaviors a given agent will avoid and how that agent communicates and decides under pressure. The two instruments on this page do that: the R2R (Reluctance to Resilience) measures the specific patterns of sales reluctance that block execution, and the CDSI (Communication and Decision Style Inventory) maps information processing, decision making, communication preference, and pressure response. Both were developed by Dr. Jeffrey Scott Stanton, DCH and the R2R Diagnostic Group inside real estate and sales organizations, and both are interpreted by a practitioner who builds the plan. This page is written for the people who buy assessments: broker-owners, recruiting directors, team leaders, and training managers.
Brokerages hire on the interview, onboard on the standard curriculum, and coach on the production report. Each of those arrives too late. The interview tells you whether a candidate is likable in a conference room, which has almost nothing to do with whether they will make forty outbound contacts a week. The standard curriculum teaches every new agent the same thing regardless of what that agent will actually avoid. And the production report tells you ninety days after the behavior stopped. By the time the broker knows there is a problem, the agent has been not prospecting for a quarter and the brokerage has paid for onboarding, desk, marketing, and management time on a pattern that was measurable on day one.
In ten years as EVP of Learning and Development at Douglas Elliman, the single most expensive thing I watched brokerages do was train for a knowledge gap when the agent had an execution gap. The agent knew the script. The agent did not make the call. More training did not help, because the barrier was not information. An assessment that finds the barrier first is the cheapest money a brokerage spends, because it decides where every subsequent dollar goes.
The R2R measures sales reluctance, the pattern of avoiding specific sales behaviors a person knows how to do and knows they should do. It names the pattern: prospecting reluctance, referral reluctance, social reluctance, closing reluctance, value-statement reluctance, and role rejection, the internal conflict with being "a salesperson" at all. Each has its own signature in the data and its own intervention. An agent with referral reluctance and no prospecting reluctance needs a completely different ninety days from an agent with the reverse, and the standard onboarding gives both of them the same ninety days.
The research behind this is not new. Dudley and Goodson's work on the behavioral forms of sales call reluctance established that the pattern is measurable and specific, and the Baylor University Keller Center's 2010 study of more than three thousand real estate agents (Dudley, Bryant and Tanner) found the pattern present across the industry at every production level. What the R2R adds is a real estate specific instrument and, more importantly, a practitioner reading it who then builds a plan. The sales reluctance reference page covers the research in detail.
The CDSI maps four dimensions: how a person takes in and organizes information (analytical or intuitive), the process they use to evaluate options and commit, the mode and pace of communication they are most receptive to, and how all of that changes when stress, conflict, or high stakes are introduced. For recruiting, the fourth dimension is the one that matters most, because every agent interviews well and the job is nothing but pressure. For team leaders, the CDSI explains most of what gets called a personality conflict: it is almost always a style mismatch, and a style mismatch is manageable once both people can see it.
In client-facing work it does the same job in the other direction. An agent who can read a buyer's processing style and decision pattern stops trying to convince and starts communicating in the language the buyer responds to, which is the practical core of the sales psychology and influence and persuasion work.
Recruiting and hiring. Assess every candidate for the role the same way, use the result to structure the interview, and build the first ninety days around what the instrument says the agent will avoid. The point is not to screen out; it is to stop discovering at day one hundred what was measurable at day one. The recruiting and retention page covers where assessment fits in the pipeline.
Onboarding and new agent training. Replace the one-size curriculum with a plan built on the pattern. New agent training that starts with a diagnosis produces agents who are prospecting in month two instead of still "getting set up."
Coaching and performance review. When a producer's numbers drop, the question is why, and the R2R and CDSI answer it faster and more honestly than a conversation about motivation. This is the diagnostic foundation of the coaching and fractional CLO work, and of the burnout conversation, where the first job is telling depletion from a reluctance pattern.
It is not a licensing exam or exam prep. It is not a generic personality profile with a real estate label on it. It is not a score that gets filed in a personnel folder; the report without the practitioner conversation is a fraction of the value. And it is not a replacement for the broker's judgment in a hiring decision. It is the information that makes that judgment better, applied the same way to every candidate.
Assessments are delivered inside coaching, training, leadership, and fractional CLO engagements, and as a standalone diagnostic for a team, an office, or a recruiting pipeline. Send the size of the group and the decision you are trying to make through the contact page, and you get a recommendation on which instrument fits and what the engagement looks like. The third instrument in the system, the Five Growth Models, is for the broker-owner's own business rather than the agents in it.
A structured measurement of how an agent or candidate behaves in the parts of the job that decide production: whether they will prospect, ask for referrals, hold a price, and close, and how they communicate and decide under pressure. It is not a licensing exam and not a personality quiz. The two instruments on this page, the R2R and the CDSI, were built for real estate and sales organizations by Dr. Stanton and the R2R Diagnostic Group.
Specific, named patterns of sales reluctance: prospecting reluctance, referral reluctance, social reluctance, closing reluctance, value-statement reluctance, and role rejection. Each has a distinct behavioral signature and a distinct intervention. It tells a broker which behaviors a given agent will avoid, which is the single most useful thing to know before hiring, onboarding, or coaching them.
Four dimensions of communication and decision style: how a person takes in information, how they decide, the mode and pace of communication they respond to, and how their behavior changes under pressure, conflict, or uncertainty. For a broker it predicts how a recruit will take coaching and how they will handle a difficult client; for a team it explains most of the friction that gets called personality conflict.
Yes, as one input among several and with the usual care: assess every candidate for the role the same way, use the results to structure the interview and the onboarding plan, and keep the decision with the human doing the hiring. The best use in recruiting is not to screen people out but to know on day one what a new agent will avoid, so the first ninety days are built around it rather than discovered at day one hundred.
Generic aptitude tests measure traits (extroversion, conscientiousness) and infer behavior. The R2R measures the avoidance behaviors directly, in the sales contexts where they occur, and the CDSI measures the communication and decision patterns that show up in client conversations. Both were developed inside real estate rather than imported into it, and both are read by a practitioner who then builds a plan, not a score that gets filed.
Dr. Stanton or a certified R2R practitioner. The report is the start of a conversation with the broker or team leader about what the pattern means for this agent in this market, and what to do about it. A number without that conversation is not worth much.
Through a consultation. Assessments are delivered inside coaching, training, leadership, and fractional CLO engagements, and as a standalone diagnostic for a team or a recruiting pipeline. Send the size of the team or the pipeline and what you are trying to decide, and you get a recommendation on which instrument and what the engagement looks like.
Dr. Jeffrey Scott Stanton, DCH is the former EVP of Learning & Development at Douglas Elliman Real Estate and the founder and Chief Learning Officer of R2R Diagnostic Group, where he helps real estate organizations and agents diagnose and fix the behavioral patterns behind inconsistent performance.
The R2R and CDSI are available for individual agents, teams, offices, and recruiting pipelines through Dr. Stanton and certified R2R practitioners. Start with a consultation about what you are trying to decide.