How to let an agent build their own team

When one of your agents is ready to stop being only a producer and start building, you don't move them to a different kind of account. They stay an agent. You switch on a handful of permissions, and they can recruit and manage people underneath themselves.

Everything you grant is automatically limited to their own downline. They won't see the rest of your agency.

Before you start

You need to be the agency owner. Changing someone's permissions is an owner capability.

The agent needs to already be in Drivetrain, on the Agents tab. This upgrades someone who's already here rather than adding a new person.

Open their permissions

Click People in the sidebar, then the Agents tab. Find the agent, click the three dots at the end of their row, and choose Manage permissions.

A panel opens on the right called Permission overrides. Every capability is listed with three buttons, Deny, Default and Grant, and the role default printed underneath. An override wins over the default.

Grant these four

Set each of these to Grant:

• Recruit Agents. Lets them add new agents. Anyone they add is placed under them as upline automatically.
• View Agents. Turns on the My Agents page in their sidebar, so they can see their team.
• Manage Agents. Lets them edit the agents under them.
• Agent Detail. Lets them open an individual agent and see that agent's detail page.

Recruit Agents is what makes them a builder. Without the other three, they can add people and then can't see or work with them.

If they will also work the recruiting pipeline [coming soon]

Two more, and only if they'll be moving candidates through interviews on the Recruiting page:

• View Recruits. Shows them the Recruiting page and the recruits they're responsible for.
• Work recruits. Lets them move, close and reopen those recruits.

Leave these off if they're simply adding agents who have already decided to join.

What changes

The agent now appears on the Builders tab of your People page.

Their labels stay the same, Agent and Standard user, because the Builders tab shows who can recruit rather than a new kind of account.

On their side, My Agents appears in the sidebar and the Add person flow can now create agents beneath them.

Everything stays inside their own team

An agent's permissions are scoped to their downline, at any depth. Granting View Agents doesn't show them the agency roster. It shows them the people under them, their people's people, and so on down. Manage Agents, Agent Detail and Recruit Agents work the same way.

Recruits are slightly wider in one useful direction: a builder can also see someone they personally recruited or are interviewing, before that person is positioned under them.

The limit is enforced by the platform itself, not by hiding buttons.

Don't use Set access role on an agent. It sits directly above Manage permissions in the same menu, and it's meant for staff accounts. Putting an agent on Owner, Assistant or Analyst replaces the downline limit with access to your whole agency. To make a builder, always use Manage permissions.

They can promote their own builders

Once this is done, you're out of the loop for their team.

Being someone's upline is by itself enough to edit that person's permissions, so your new builder can open one of their own agents and grant the same capabilities when that agent is ready to recruit. You don't need to grant them anything extra for this, and they can't grant anything they don't already hold themselves.

That's why you switch on all four at the start. A builder with all four can pass all four down. A builder you gave only Recruit Agents can only ever pass down Recruit Agents.

Taking it back

Open the same panel and set the capability back to Default. They return to ordinary agent permissions and drop off the Builders tab. The agents already under them stay where they are.

Need help?

• Knowledge base: Browse the Drivetrain help articles
• Live chat: Click the chat icon in the bottom-right corner of any page

Updated on: 14/10/2026